The Development of Anglican Moral Theology, 1680-1950 (Anglican-episcopal Theology and History, 10) 9004688080, 9789004688087

Citation preview

The Development of Anglican Moral Theology, 1680–1950

Anglican-Episcopal Theology and History Edited by Paul Avis (University of Edinburgh, UK) Editorial Board Sarah Coakley (University of Cambridge, UK) Jeremy Morris (University of Cambridge, UK) Robert Prichard (Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA, USA) Ephraim Radner (Wycliffe College, Toronto, Canada) Rowan Strong (Murdoch University, Perth, Australia)

Volume 10

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/aeth

The Development of Anglican Moral Theology, 1680–1950 By

Peter H. Sedgwick

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Top line, left to right: Charles Gore, F.D. Maurice, Henry Scott Holland, John Henry Newman, Charles Wesley. Bottom line, left to right: Joseph Butler, Kenneth Kirk, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Law, William Temple. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sedgwick, P. H. (Peter Humphrey), 1948- author. |  Sedgwick, P. H. (Peter Humphrey), 1948- Origins of  Anglican moral theology. Title: The development of Anglican moral theology, 1680-1950 /  by Peter H. Sedgwick. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2024] | Series:  Anglican-Episcopal theology and history, 2405-7576 ; volume 10  | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023045872 (print) | LCCN 2023045873 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004688087 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004689015 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Christian ethics—Anglican authors—History. Classification: LCC BJ1201 .S435 2024 (print) | LCC BJ1201 (ebook) |  DDC 241—dc23/eng/20231116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045872 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023045873

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2405-7576 ISBN 978-90-04-68808-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-68901-5 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004689015 Copyright 2024 by Peter H. Sedgwick. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1

Part 1 1680–1830 1

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750 9 1 Introduction: The Shape of the First Two Chapters 9 2 J. C. D. Clark and the Rethinking of English Politics after 1688 10 3 Religion in English Society after 1688 12 4 Religion in the Early Enlightenment 17 5 Conclusion 20

2

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720 22 1 The End of the Reformation in Europe, and the Challenge to Christian Orthodoxy 22 2 Revelation and Scripture in the Early Enlightenment 24 3 Reason in the Early Enlightenment 26 4 Thomas Hobbes 29 5 John Locke and Empiricism 35 6 The End of the Seventeenth Century in England: Cambridge Platonism and the Latitudinarians 41 7 Shaftesbury and the Moral Sense School 55 8 The Challenge of Shaftesbury to Orthodox Christianity 61

3

Joseph Butler’s Rolls Sermons 64 1 Butler’s Early Life and Education 64 2 Butler and Samuel Clarke 66 3 Butler’s Later Life, 1721–1752 68 4 Butler’s Refutation of Hobbes 70 5 Butler on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson 74 6 Butler’s Critique of Locke: Religious Affections 79 7 Butler’s Critique of Locke: Personal Identity 82 8 Butler on ‘Superior Principles’ 83 9 Butler on Benevolence 87

vi

Contents

10 11 12 13

Butler on Self-Love 88 Butler on Conscience 90 Butler on Self-Deceit 92 The Significance of Butler 94

4

William Law 99 1 Introduction 99 2 Law’s Life 100 3 Law as a Non-Juror 102 4 Law as Controversialist: Hoadly 107 5 Law as Controversialist: Mandeville 109 6 A Serious Call: Vocation 111 7 A Serious Call: Asceticism 113 8 A Serious Call: Literary Style 115 9 A Serious Call: Celibacy and Virginity 117 10 A Serious Call: An Ecclesial Ethic 119 11 A Serious Call: The Place of Reason 120 12 A Serious Call: Sanctification 122 13 Conclusion 125

5

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800: Gay, Tucker, Paley and Wesley 128 1 Introduction 128 2 The Mid-Eighteenth Century and the Influence of Locke 129 3 John Gay and Theological Utilitarianism 132 4 Edmund Law and Richard Watson on Moral Teaching and Conscience 135 5 William Paley and Later Theological Utilitarianism 138 6 The Demise of Theological Utilitarianism 141 7 John Wesley: Context and Life 143 8 Wesley and Sanctification 147 9 Wesley and Butler 152 10 Wesley and Enthusiasm 153 11 Wesley on Emotion in Moral Judgement 156 12 Conclusion 157

6

Coleridge 160 1 Introduction 160 2 The Re-evaluation of Coleridge 161 3 Coleridge’s Life 166

vii

Contents

4 5 6 7 8 9

Coleridge on Paley and Jeremy Taylor 170 Coleridge’s Reading of Neoplatonism 174 Coleridge and Kant 176 Coleridge and Aids to Reflection 180 Coleridge’s Legacy 184 Conclusion 187

Conclusion to Part 1 189

Part 2 1830–1950 7

John Henry Newman 193 1 Introduction: The Changing Historiography on Newman 193 2 The Anglican Newman 194 3 Newman’s Life 197 4 The Break with Evangelicalism 200 5 Newman on Humility 204 6 The Parochial Sermons 206 7 The University Sermons 211 8 Newman on Moral Character 213 9 Newman on Conscience 215 10 Newman on Personal Influence and Justice 218 11 Newman on Personal Responsibility 221 12 The Influence of Anglican Theologians: The Carolines 224 13 The Influence of Anglican Theologians: Butler 228 14 The Influence of Anglican Theologians: Coleridge 232 15 Conclusion 234

8

Frederick Denison Maurice 238 1 Introduction 238 2 Maurice’s Life 242 3 Moral Philosophy at Cambridge 247 4 Coleridge’s Influence on Maurice 250 5 Maurice’s Theological Anthropology 256 6 Maurice on Conscience 258 7 Biblical Theology and Christian Ethics 262 8 Criticisms of Maurice’s Theology 264 9 Maurice’s Contribution to Anglican Moral Theology 266

viii

Contents

9 The Lux Mundi School 269 Introduction 269 1 2 The Influence of John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism 270 3 The Lux Mundi Theologians: Charles Gore, Henry Scott Holland and R. C. Moberly 272 4 Philosophical Idealism at Oxford 275 5 Green’s Moral Philosophy 276 6 Bradley on Self-Realization 278 7 Donald MacKinnon on the British Idealists 282 8 Gore on Christ’s Moral Character 286 9 Gore on Social Morality 288 10 Holland on Faith and Moral Will 291 11 Holland on Christian Moral Character 294 12 Moberly on Self-Realization 296 13 Inge’s Response to Moberly’s Idealism 299 14 Moberly on Penitence and Beauty 301 15 Conclusion 303 10

William Temple’s Christian Ethics 306 1 Introduction 306 2 Temple’s Life 308 3 Edward Caird and William Temple 313 4 The Faith and Modern Thought 317 5 The Nature of Personality 319 6 Mens Creatrix 323 7 Christus Veritas 326 8 Nature, Man and God 329 9 Reviews of Nature, Man and God 332 10 Temple’s Later Theology in the 1930s 334 11 Temple’s Aquinas Lecture, 1943 336 12 Temple’s Significance 340

11

Kenneth Kirk: History and Casuistry 343 1 Introduction 343 2 The Revival of Thomism and the First World War 344 3 Kirk’s Life 348 4 Casuistry and Conscience 350 5 How the Church Can Change Its Mind 355 6 Lambeth Conference, 1930 359

ix

Contents

7 8 9

The Vision of God 362 Contemporary Anglican Moral Theologians on Kirk 366 Conclusion 369

Conclusion: Anglican Moral Theology 1680–1950 371 Bibliography 377 Index 420

Acknowledgments There are two people who have been invaluable in writing this book. Professor Paul Avis is the series editor in which both of my books have appeared, and commissioned both of them. He has been an enormous source of inspiration, acting throughout as a critical friend. I owe him a great deal. The second person is Professor Timothy Sedgwick (no relation), who retired from teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary in the United States of America in 2019. Tim has been a great source of friendship, wisdom and advice through our email correspondence, especially in reading the draft manuscript. His comments on the nature of genealogy and his writing, especially on the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ in moral theology, have been formative for me. The book would be very different were it not for these two scholars and friends. Other comments have been given by Canon Dr Jeremy Morris, and Professor D. Stephen Long, Professor Luke Bretherton and Professor Vimal Tirimanna. I am grateful to all of them. I should also thank Hester Higton for her work in copyediting, as she did for the last book; Pierke Bosschieter for again producing an index; and Ingrid Heijckers-Velt and Carina van den Hoven as my editors at Brill. In all the writing I have enjoyed the support of my wife, Canon Jan Gould, who has been parish priest of the Church of the Resurrection, Ely, in Cardiff for seventeen years. Her embodiment of the Anglican tradition, uniting spirituality, pastoral care and moral guidance in one ministry, is remarkable. The last book was dedicated to her. This one is dedicated to the members of ARCIC (the Anglican  – Roman Catholic International Commission), with whom I have worked over the last decade, giving thanks for their witness, friendship and insight, as we consider the process of moral discernment. My hope is that in the twenty-first century the Anglican moral tradition will both develop in all its riches and continue its wonderful dialogue with fellow Christians. Peter Sedgwick 4 October, 2023 Feast of St. Francis

Introduction This book is a survey of the tradition of Anglican moral theology from the Cambridge Platonists in 1680 until 1950, six years after the death of William Temple in 1944, and four years before the death of Kenneth Kirk in 1954, since Temple and Kirk can be claimed to be the leading Anglican moral theologians in the first half of the twentieth century. It is the second of two volumes. The first was published in 2018, entitled The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology; it showed how Scripture, the patristic era, medieval theology and the Reformation all contributed to the theologies of William Perkins, Richard Hooker, Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor.1 This second volume takes the narrative up to the period just after the Second World War. I have not ventured beyond 1950 in this book, but an article commissioned by the Anglican Theological Review in 2021 entitled ‘Anglican Moral Theology Today’ is a survey of the current state of Anglican writing in moral theology over the last few decades.2 Anglican moral theology was a practical discipline, read by clergy and sometimes by laity, to guide their lives in the world after the Reformation, where the authority of the church was much less clear-cut than in medieval times. It is best described as a lived tradition within a Christian community, which is the Anglican church, which accepts certain practices and ways of life, and understands authority as important for its way of life and its beliefs and values. It is worth defending the methodological approach which this book represents at this point. Genealogy in the hands of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre describes how concepts have developed historically over time and the function they serve, but for MacIntyre this historical analysis nevertheless ends by placing these concepts and practices within a lived tradition. This suggests that the history of moral theology can also be described and analysed in a narrative manner within a living tradition, employing continuities and discontinuities as each theologian in turn responds to challenges, usually philosophical, that threaten the coherence of their discourse. Moral theology is part of the tradition of moral virtue, practised by Christians, in local communities, families and, of course, the church. The tradition stresses the need to be faithful, to

1 Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 2 Peter Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Moral Theology Today’, Anglican Theological Review, 103.4 (2021), pp. 450–467.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_002

2

Introduction

repeat actions and to grow in one’s practices. McIntyre’s work on tradition and genealogy is central to this book, as it was to its predecessor.3 However, there are two different accounts of genealogy.4 One refers to the ancient, historical account of the origins of an institution or set of ideas, and how they develop historically. The first book showed how Anglican theologians interacted with these sources (both theological, as represented by biblical, patristic, medieval and Reformation sources, and also philosophical, from pre-Christian times to the seventeenth century) and how these sources had their own history of interpretation. The second book faces a different set of challenges. The question of historical sources remains, and Charles Gore’s work on the biblical sources was to be deeply controversial in the late nineteenth century, as Chapter 9 of this book shows. So too was Cudworth’s and Coleridge’s engagement with Plato. However, genealogy can also refer to the challenges, or powers, that shape an intellectual tradition, in this case Anglican moral theology, and the responses to those challenges. The challenges were many and varied, but they include empiricism and new scientific thought; the rise of a historical account of sources and moral judgements contained in those sources; the philosophical challenge embodied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Enlightenment, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in utilitarianism, agnosticism and atheism; the powerful opportunities to place theology and Christianity in the service of class oppression or imperialism; the role of the state as a transformative power; and finally the demands for reform of the Church of England. Timothy Gouldstone’s book on Anglican Idealism around 1900 is one of many examples that see Anglican theology as seeking to find ‘a legitimate moral sanction for the expansion of the Church and Empire throughout the world … Anglican theologians became increasingly deaf to the challenges of utilitarian professionalized science and technology.’5 In his view, writing as an Anglican himself, theologians became ‘enmeshed in their own apologias, unwilling or even unable to escape’.6 Genealogical accounts of powers that transform an intellectual tradition can be regarded positively or negatively. A negative account is one that seeks to unmask the way in which reasoning conceals the powers that exercise 3 Sedgwick, Origins, pp. 1–2 and p. 20 on MacIntyre’s use of genealogy. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). 4 I am grateful to Tim Sedgwick for guidance on the different usages of the term ‘genealogy’. 5 Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone, The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 192. 6 Gouldstone, Rise and Decline, p. 175.

Introduction

3

control over those who are part of its discourse. MacIntyre describes the negative account clearly, and takes Nietzsche as the paradigm genealogist.7 For MacIntyre, rationality is defined by a tradition in a community. Authority is granted to others in that community and to the original sources which form the practices of that community. ‘However, this account is quite alien … to the genealogist, who cannot but see in such authority the exercise of a subjugating power which has to be resisted.’8 He continues: ‘The task of the genealogist more generally was to write the history of those social and psychological formations in which the will to power is distorted and concealed by the will to truth.’9 Nietzsche is the paradigm genealogist for MacIntyre and, while narrative accounts of a tradition require genealogy to understand how that tradition has developed, those who only accept genealogy as the epistemological reality will reject tradition, and any account of the objectivity of truth. This is the negative form of genealogy in his view. The negative form owes much to the hermeneutic of suspicion associated with Nietzsche and also with Foucault, and Gouldstone’s book stands in that tradition, seeing Anglican theology as seeking both to legitimate empire and to preserve ‘a plausible theological stake in all branches of knowledge’.10 There is at the present a much needed reassessment of the history of the Christian church in terms of racism, oppression and social dominance, but the current book, while acknowledging how much this is necessary, simply narrates the history of the tradition which is Anglican moral theology, as it both gives an account of the interpretation of the historical sources that shaped the tradition which is Anglicanism, and also describes the transformative powers that formed its development. Thus this book uses genealogy to defend the value of a tradition, which is Anglican thought on ethics.11 7

Andrew Cohen, ‘In Defence of Nietzschean Genealogy’, Philosophical Forum, 30.4 (1999), pp. 269–288, compares MacIntyre and Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Gollfing (New York: Doubleday, 1956). Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139–164. Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ in writing about Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Dennis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 8 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 64. 9 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, p. 39. 10 Gouldstone, Rise and Decline, p. 177. 11 For Anglican theologians who use genealogy in a negative way to uncover oppression in the past and present, see Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Moral Theology Today’, pp. 465–466, and in particular Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010). The Anglican  – Roman

4

Introduction

The positive account set out here of the powers that transform a tradition will do two things. First, it will show how a tradition developed as a response to these powers; secondly, it will show how these powers themselves are part of a greater complexity in human life. Anglican moral theology became far more sophisticated as it was shaped by the influence of empiricism, science, historicism and the global expansion of Anglicanism. The role of the state in providing education, welfare and health care also becomes increasingly important, being central to the thought of William Temple, for instance. This book ends before the engagement by Anglicanism with different cultures globally, but that engagement is prefigured in the thought of the Lux Mundi school and of Temple. The development of moral theology in all Christian traditions resulted in new confessional and pastoral practices. It was no different for Anglican moral theology, as a pastoral and intellectual tradition within Anglicanism. These confessional and pastoral practices have been much studied, as is shown (to take but two examples) by the recent studies of W. M. Jacob and Jeremy Morris on English Anglicanism in the last three centuries. Morris writes about ‘the extraordinarily complex and proactive organization of the parish’ in the nineteenth century, and Jacob writes about ‘religion, philanthropy, and social action’. Equally, participation in religious life promoted holiness of life.12 My article on Anglican moral theology today said: what matters is that this Anglican tradition is of intrinsic value, embodied in acts and in the creation of institutions. In other words, we need accounts of local church history where the church is seen in its full social context and where the tradition of moral action (the pursuit of virtue) can be studied in depth. This is not simply a focus on ecclesiastical life, but rather on the church with its religious faith interacting with a local community.13 That remains profoundly true, despite the many distortions of racism and sexism which are being uncovered as historians reveal the past history of the church. Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), of which I am a member, is currently looking at the tradition of moral discernment in both communions, including reference to slavery and racism, which is an example of genealogy. 12 Jeremy Morris, A People’s Church: A History of the Church of England (London: Profile Books, 2022), p. 316. W. M. Jacob, Religious Vitality in Victorian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 13 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Moral Theology Today’, p. 460.

Introduction

5

This book is meant to be read as a complement to the work of Morris, Jacob and others. The pastoral and liturgical practices existed to promote holiness of life and the regularization of Christian life in a moral code. In turn, these practices further shaped moral theology. At the end of the book, Kenneth Kirk’s moral theology is considered. Kirk provided an understanding of these ecclesial practices in terms of the dangers contained in them, which he named formalism, institutionalism and rigorism. These terms are explained in the final chapter, but for now it is sufficient to note that Kirk was aware that the Christian moral and spiritual life could degenerate into a stultifying concern with moral observation and oppressive rigour. This book is about the genealogy both of origins and of development. The overall claim is that its historical account reveals a tradition of thought which is complex, often polyphonic, speaking with different voices, and frequently lacking clarity both about the claims which individuals made and about the basis for differences regarding central questions. This is not, then, a triumphalist account of a monochrome Anglican tradition. Nevertheless, the very vitality of the tradition, as it wrestled with both the original sources which inspired it and the powers which shaped its development, gave something valuable to the Christian church. It is neither a tradition which is totally distinct from other Christian traditions, nor is it one unaware of the problems which it faced across these centuries. The justification for narrating this history is rather that Anglican moral theology is a living tradition which cannot, and should not, forget its history. It is also a tradition which has nourished the transformation of the individual by the power of the Holy Spirit in union with Christ, as the individual was part of the community of the parish and its environment, and the history which is told here is a witness to the belief of the theologians in the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’.

Part 1 1680–1830

∵

Chapter 1

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750 1

Introduction: The Shape of the First Two Chapters

One of the most vibrant parts of Anglican theology from 1680 to 1950 was moral theology, written as part of a conscious tradition, which can be seen as a genealogy, as the Introduction has explained. Each of the theologians, or groups of theologians, described will have a chapter devoted to them. But, before we get to them, it is necessary to put in place two chapters which will set the scene. The first chapter is primarily concerned with historiography, and with the great change between the 1960s and the present day regarding historians’ view of the church in the eighteenth century in England. It also moves into the realm of the history of ideas, showing how the earlier dismissal by historians of theological debate in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as inadequate to the flourishing of ideas after 1660 is simply a mistake. Instead, a great appreciation has developed of the richness of theological debate in the period 1680–1720, and of its Christian orthodoxy. While Chapter 1 focuses on historiography and clearing away old prejudices, Chapter 2 begins with a long section on the overall theological climate in Europe after the end of the Wars of Religion, with a brief definition of what these wars were. It then moves to the philosophical challenges mounted to Christian orthodoxy by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, before introducing the first Anglican moral theologians, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Edward Stillingfleet. It ends with a discussion of how the Earl of Shaftesbury took up Whichcote’s ideas, and turned them into his own moral philosophy, losing a great deal of Christian orthodoxy in the process. That sets the challenge for Joseph Butler, one of the greatest of Anglican moral theologians, who answered Shaftesbury in his Rolls Sermons. Butler is examined in Chapter 3. Why give such a lengthy introduction to the history of Anglican moral theology? Anglican moral theology was a practical discipline, read by clergy and sometimes by laity, to guide their lives in the rapidly changing world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is therefore important to know what the judgement of historians today on the standing of the church and of religious debate at that time actually is, before moving to describing the theologians who shaped the moral judgement of Anglicans. Equally, it is important to

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_003

10

Chapter 1

understand how theological debate had changed in the period from 1520 until 1680, in terms of an understanding of religious authority, Scripture and revelation. Finally, the alternative resource for a moral understanding of the world lay in the philosophies of Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury. Anglican moral theology is thus best described as a genealogy of ideas. Genealogy suggests that the history of moral theology can be described and analysed in a narrative manner, employing continuities and discontinuities as each theologian in turn responds to challenges, usually philosophical, that threaten the coherence of their discourse. The overall framework of the genealogy set out in this book is that of the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’, which refers to a remarkably rich article by Timothy Sedgwick that has been formative for me.1 I will not spend time outlining the claim made by Sedgwick that the nature of Anglican moral theology is constituted by its fidelity to the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’, because the article will be unpacked as the book progresses. Instead it is time to turn to the revolution in historiography on the status of the church and of theological debate in England after 1680, a discussion that will occupy the rest of this chapter. 2

J. C. D. Clark and the Rethinking of English Politics after 1688

When I was a student in Cambridge from 1967 to 1974, reading first for a history degree and then one in theology (‘Divinity’, as it was called then), there was a largely unchallenged set of assumptions in historiography: that is, the debates between historians. The received view was that in Elizabethan England the Protestant church sought a middle way, which was gradually disrupted by angry Puritans and which ended in the catastrophe of the English Civil War. This was the historiography of the later Reformation in England. Patrick Collinson’s work was beginning to shift the accepted paradigm, but it was a gradual process. Only later was there a change of mind among Tudor historians. Patrick Collinson, Peter Lake, Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, among others, were the historians from the late 1960s onwards who opened

1 Timothy Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 207–232.

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750

11

up new perspectives on the English church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 This debate is charted in my earlier book The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology.3 A similar cleansing of the Augean stables happened in the writing from the 1980s on the eighteenth century in England, much later than when Collinson, Lake and Tyacke wrote their studies on the earlier period. The accepted view in Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s was that the violence of the Civil War led into a gradual liberalization in society, and the increasing abandonment of orthodox belief. This process was said to have happened first after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, with the Latitudinarian clergy, and so on into the eighteenth century. According to this viewpoint, the Church of England was repeatedly challenged by a liberal Enlightenment, in which an increasing number of clergy and intellectuals abandoned Christian orthodoxy, while parishes subsided into torpor, broken only by an evangelical, especially Methodist, revival. Religion was therefore largely air-brushed out of the picture in eighteenth-century English historiography before 1985. The reasons for the marginalization of religion were said to be threefold: the apparent failure of religion to matter politically at the national level; the moral and pastoral weakness of the church at the local level; and the lack of intellectual rigour of religious responses to the challenges of the Enlightenment. It is salutary to see just how much of this picture has been jettisoned during the past two decades. It was not simply the reassessment of Elizabethan England, the period of the later Reformation, which caused a different understanding; there has also been an enormous change in the debate on eighteenth-century politics, religion and intellectual thought. The first assault on this dominant historiography of the eighteenth century, which presented England as a gradually liberalizing society encumbered with the weakness of the church, came in 1985 with J. C. D. Clark’s epoch-making book English Society 1688–1832.4 This work portrayed eighteenth-century English 2 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism 1530–1700 (Manchester: Uni­ versity of Manchester Press, 2001). Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 4 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Paul Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theology and its Reception (London: T&T Clark, 2023), pp. 214–215, on Clark.

12

Chapter 1

society and the state as deeply confessional. There was an Anglican monarchy, aristocracy and established church, which shaped the English world until the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century. Clark dismissed those who held the received worldview as themselves encumbered with the prejudices of late modernity.5 The status and efficacy of the church in eighteenth-century England was therefore completely reassessed at the political level by him, and at the local level by several other scholars. Clark did not merely change the prevailing historiography. He also paid attention to the interplay of Anglican theology and the social order, which no historian had done before. The doctrines of Providence and of the Trinity provided a defence for ecclesiastical authority and the English monarchy. Clark argues that by 1760 there was ‘a sophisticated, scholarly, official ideology for the English monarchical, aristocratic, and Anglican regime which so successfully fought off all ideological and most practical challenges until 1828. It was still heavily Providential, as became noticeably clear in the 1790s.’6 George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1768 until he became Bishop of Norwich in 1790, was a typical defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy, and argued strongly against Locke.7 3

Religion in English Society after 1688

The second reason for the marginalization by historians of the eighteenthcentury English church was its apparent lack of pastoral care, with the church in parishes and local communities perceived as weak to the point of being moribund. In particular, the Church of England was seen as apathetic in the zeal of its clergy, declining in attendance and lacking in pastoral care as the eighteenth century progressed. Over the last three decades, Jeremy Gregory has been one of the leading historians of the eighteenth-century Anglican church, and has done as much as anyone to challenge this picture, but he puts the case for dismissing the church very well: The ills most often flagged up for adverse comment include pluralism, which meant that clergy frequently were non-resident in their parishes; 5 J. C. D. Clark, ‘On Hitting the Buffers: The Historiography of England’s Ancien Regime. A Response’, Past & Present (1987), pp. 195–207. J. C. D. Clark, ‘The American Revolution: A War of Religion?’, History Today 39.12 (1989), pp. 10–16. 6 Clark, English Society, p. 262. 7 Clark, English Society, p. 267.

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750

13

the issue of tithes, which led to disputes between clergy and those who were not members of the church, and antagonism from parishioners who resented clergy gaining from improvements in agricultural production; the increasing gentrification of the clergy, which supposedly distanced clergy from the great majority of their parishioners; and a slothful attitude to pastoral work, which left their parishioners bereft of pastoral care.8 In the four decades since the publication of English Society, many historians have concentrated heavily on the local, vibrant life of the parish, as well as on the rather different life of dissent. Such historians include William Jacob, Jeremy Gregory and Paula Yates, with United States historians such as Robert Ingram and Brent Sirota also contributing important insights into the life of the English church at this time.9 Jacob puts it well: ‘Religion framed people’s lives and much of their personal, political, economic, and social activity. Citi­ zenship and Anglicanism were coterminous. Baptism was the evidence of one’s identity in society, as a citizen and parishioner. The Church was ever present to people.’10 Oxford and Cambridge Universities remained ‘the nurseries not merely of prospective clergy, but also of the political and social elite’.11 Yates describes the Anglican church in Wales at this time as ‘far from being alien’ and as ‘solidly indigenous’.12 Ingram agrees: ‘Eighteenth-century England remained a profoundly religious society.’13 However, there remains the most formidable obstacle to a re-evaluation of the church in this period, which was its perceived weakness intellectually against the growing strength of radical thought. It is certainly the case that after the expulsion of those who could not subscribe to the Act of Uniformity in 1662 (the ‘Great Ejection’), new forms of higher education flourished outside 8

J. Gregory, ‘The Church of England’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to EighteenthCentury Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 226. 9 Robert Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). W. M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Brent Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Paula Yates, ‘The Established Church and Rural Elementary Schooling: The Welsh Dioceses 1780–1830’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter, 2007). Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, pp. 216–221, is entitled ‘A New Historiographical Orthodoxy’. 10 W. M. Jacob, ‘England’, in J. Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume II: Establishment and Empire 1662–1829 (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 92. 11 Jacob, Lay People, p. 33. 12 Yates, ‘Wales’, in Gregory (ed.), Oxford History of Anglicanism, p. 121. 13 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity, p. 17.

14

Chapter 1

the established, and legally recognized, universities. These were the dissenting academies, which were nearly suppressed in 1714, if it had not been for the death of Queen Anne, which prevented the Act being enforced. It was repealed in 1719. Having escaped this threat to their very existence, the dissenting academies flourished, and were in dialogue with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Alan Sell has a good description of their vitality.14 There can be no doubt that education at Oxford and Cambridge was outclassed by that at Scottish universities at this time, as well as by dissenting academies, but it is quite another thing to dismiss Anglican theology as moribund or lacking any creativity. In intellectual and theological history, the work of G. R. Cragg on The Church in The Age of Reason, which was first published in 1950, meant that generations of students saw the Enlightenment (which refers to the overarching concept which described both the movement of political reform and debates in philosophy and theology in the eighteenth century) as a process of liberalism, increasing middle-class respectability and growing unbelief.15 Cragg’s views were an echo of the late nineteenth-century intellectual Sir Leslie Stephen. Stephen had been a Church of England clergyman and Cambridge don, but he abandoned his faith and became a free thinker, publishing the enormously influential History of English Thought in 1876.16 Cragg wrote on religious history, but Paul Hazard and Peter Gay published what came to be the classic works on the Enlightenment as a process of scepticism, liberalization and unbelief.17 In recent times, and constituting an enormous intellectual achievement, there has been further support for Hazard’s and Gay’s perspective. This comes with the multi-volume work of Jonathan Israel, who has presented the European Enlightenment with great erudition as increasingly radical, deist or even atheist, with a great emphasis on the diffusion of the views of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who died in 1677.18 14

Alan Sell, Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2004). Mark Burden, ‘Academical Learning in the Dissenters’ Private Academies 1660–1720’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2012). Jacob, Lay People, p. 33, on the ‘tightening up’ of teaching in Oxford University in the late 1720s. 15 Gerald R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). Gerald R. Cragg, The Church in an Age of Reason (London: Pelican, 1980). 16 Sir Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edition (New York: Harbinger, 1962; first published 1902). 17 Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715, trans. J. Lewis May (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013). Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (New York: W. J. Norton, 1966–1969). 18 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philo­ sophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750

15

However, Israel’s understanding of religious belief and intellectual life in that period has been challenged in the last twenty-five years. The predominant alternative to a view that excludes religion from the Enlightenment came with the prodigious scholarship of J. G. A. Pocock in his six-volume Barbarism and Religion, alongside many other books and articles, arguing for a Christian Enlightenment across eighteenth-century Europe. Pocock has written in particular about Edward Gibbon and the way in which history and philosophy coalesce in Gibbon’s great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.19 He believes, as does Clark, that a key to English history between 1660 and 1830 is the contested maintenance by the Church of England of its place as the religion of the state. The work of Brian Young in the 1990s brought a rethinking of the place of religion in the Enlightenment into the history of theology, by reassessing how orthodox much Anglican thought was in the eighteenth century.20 Young’s work is important, although he has been criticized for portraying the early Enlightenment as largely a ‘propositional metaphysical, conceptual or philosophical movement, when moderate, tolerant Whigs quickly and creatively assimilated Lockeanism, Newtonianism and natural theology into both pious heterodoxy and Anglican scholarship’.21 The search for a new political order, and an understanding of moral action as related to emotions and personal autonomy, was perhaps a more accurate reading of this period. Ethical humanism, a sense of historicity and a deep awareness of diversity and uncertainty characterize the early Enlightenment more than a concern with ideas and philosophy. My own view is that I greatly value Young’s pioneering work in rehabilitating Anglican theology in the eighteenth century from its detractors in the earlier part of the twentieth century, but I dissent from his assessment, Press, 2006); Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 19 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015). J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Ironist’, London Review of Books 24.22, 14 November 2002. 20 B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Young has also written a tribute to Pocock in ‘J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2 (2017), pp. 431–458. B. W. Young, ‘Theology in the Church of England’, in Gregory (ed.), Oxford History of Anglicanism, pp. 392–428. Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, p. 209, commends Young’s work as part of Avis’ presentation of the theological culture of the Church of England at this time as an ‘Anglican Enlightenment’. 21 William J. Bulman, ‘Introduction’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 8–10.

16

Chapter 1

preferring to follow Bulman, Ingram and others in their interpretation of the Enlightenment. This chapter finishes with an account of their work, which in many ways is as epoch-making as that of Clark thirty years before. One illustration of the change in the last fifty years is the interpretation of John Locke. John Dunn’s pivotal study in the 1960s did much to establish just how much Locke’s thought depended on his religious beliefs. However, Dunn is clearly uncomfortable with his findings, even if he uses them to show that Locke is not a twentieth-century liberal. He includes an extraordinary set of comments about Locke’s theological beliefs: What is made most obvious is His [i.e. God’s] tactical availability for Locke’s purposes – not the veneration He might be supposed to elicit. But it would be a mistake to sneer at the hypocrisy of such ready manipulation; for to do so supposes altogether too much of a capacity in the young man to stand outside the boundaries of his own experience. Dunn goes on to describe ‘the triviality of the constant bickering over the forms of religious worship’.22 Dunn was writing in Cambridge in the 1960s, at the height of the rejection of religious belief as a valid option for political expression, whatever might have been the case three centuries before. Sarah Mortimer’s book in 2010 on Socinianism was a far more balanced treatment, focusing especially on Henry Hammond.23 Hammond was an influential Anglican during the Civil War who died before becoming Bishop of Worcester in 1660 at the Restoration, and his theology was strongly Arminian. Mortimer discusses whether he may have combined his Arminianism, rejecting the predestination of the elect, with some of Socinus’ writings. ‘For Socinus, goodness or rectitude could only be known through reason; and he wanted to distinguish this knowledge as sharply as possible from the desires and appetites which men also perceived.’24 The main point of difference with Hammond’s theology lay in Socinus’ rejection of the doctrines of Christ’s divinity, original sin and the Trinity, and certain views 22

John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 14–15. 23 Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 5, on Hammond. Mortimer’s book is reviewed carefully by Richard Bell in History, 2011, https://reviews.his tory.ac.uk/review/1073. Bell challenges some of Mortimer’s arguments, while appreciating the overall tenor of her discussion. 24 Sarah Mortimer, ‘Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009), pp. 191–211 (quote on p. 193).

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750

17

of the atonement.25 Hammond used some of the arguments of Socinus, especially his strong emphasis on moral agency, but always maintained his belief in the Trinity and Christ’s divinity.26 However, it was not until Diego Lucci’s book in 2021 that there was a full and balanced treatment of Locke’s attitude to Christianity, which showed that Locke believed in the superiority of the Law of Faith, delivered by Christ, over the Law of Nature.27 This new law gave God’s forgiveness to the penitent faithful, promised rewards (or punishments) to his followers after this life, and reaffirmed the Law of Nature, with its emphasis on morality and moral character.28 At the same time, Locke rejected the doctrines of predestination and original sin and a penal satisfaction account of the atonement. Some of this echoed Socinianism, but Lucci shows that Locke used Hooker (and Sanderson) to accept the intrinsic rationality of the moral law.29 Lucci provides a view of Locke as a deeply religious philosopher who nevertheless rejected much of the Reformed emphasis on God’s wrath, his all-determining will and the incapacity of humanity to escape their fallenness, views which reflected a voluntarist and nominalist philosophy. With Lucci’s book, Locke stands forth as an Anglican philosopher who was highly Arminian. 4

Religion in the Early Enlightenment

The revisionist interpretation of the early Enlightenment (from 1650 to 1720) occurred only in the last twenty years, primarily in the United States, and began with William Bulman’s article in 2012, which was followed by his study Anglican Enlightenment in 2015.30 Bulman said in his article: ‘Most historians still view the early phase of the European Enlightenment as a philosophical, 25 Sarah Mortimer, ‘Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism’, in Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller and A. G. Roeber (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800 (Oxford Handbooks online, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199 937943.013.12. 26 Mortimer, Reason and Religion, pp. 119–128, especially p. 128. Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 310–314. 27 Diego Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, p. 232, evaluates Lucci’s assessment of Locke. 28 Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity, p. 77. 29 Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity, p. 87. 30 William J. Bulman, ‘Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England’, History Compass 10.10 (2012), pp. 752–764; William J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orien­talism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Gregory, ‘Introduction’, p. 20, on the rethinking of the Enlightenment debate.

18

Chapter 1

democratizing, tolerationist, and materialist project. Yet there is a growing body of more compelling research that has documented a strand of the early Enlightenment that was essentially religious, and often specifically Christian.’31 He instances the profound Christian belief of Locke and Newton. However, history and not philosophy or mathematics was the primary idiom in the early Enlightenment period. He goes on to say that the early Enlightenment (c.1650–1720) ‘was not primarily a series of tightly-coordinated philosophical and ideological propositions, but rather an ideologically-diverse series of cultural, conceptual, and narrative innovations rooted above all in the world of late humanism’. This scholarship builds on the work of Kenneth Fincham, Peter Lake and Nicholas Tyacke, and is a link with my previous volume, where their work was also central. Another scholar writing in the United States with a similar interpretation was Robert Ingram.32 The publication of the collection of essays entitled God in the Enlightenment in 2016 is central to this chapter.33 This work, edited by William Bulman and Robert Ingram, included many scholars who had been working to overthrow Cragg’s standpoint for several decades. The cumulative effect of these articles showed just how religious many eighteenth-century thinkers had been. The impact of God in the Enlightenment demonstrated several things. First, the work of Cragg was quite simplistic, ignoring much greater complexity in the reality of philosophical and theological thought. Secondly, it criticizes the work of the major contemporary historian of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel. Israel is highly productive and has pursued an account of the Enlighten­ ment as ‘secular and liberal’.34 His writings, however impressive, are challenged in this volume by several authors, as both being selective and also painting a false picture of the Enlightenment, being fixated on the late seventeenth-century thinker Spinoza. Thirdly, many of the theological concepts used in the eighteenth century continued the theological and philosophical debates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – or in other words, those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Bulman’s work also makes clear that religious scholarship and polemic were central to the early Enlightenment.35 It was a form of humanism that sought He cites Bulman and also Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 31 Bulman, ‘Enlightenment’, p. 755. 32 Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity. 33 Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment. For a more reserved view of this work, see Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, pp. 149–152. 34 Bulman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6, 12–14. 35 Bulman, ‘Enlightenment’, p. 755.

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750

19

to broaden philosophy, religious belief and moral theory beyond the narrow confines of religious polemic. What is important for the present book is that Anglican moral theology in the early seventeenth century was grounded in the humanism of the Renaissance, as is shown by the way in which Jeremy Taylor (d. 1667) combined both a high literary style, drawing constantly on classical and Renaissance sources, and a deep interest in spirituality and casuistry. The culture of which Taylor was such a distinguished part continued until the third decade of the eighteenth century. It was simultaneously Anglican and humanist and saw no contradiction between defending the central position of the Anglican church and creative intellectual thought. This approach is crucial for my narrative. Anglican moral theology was not forced on to the defensive by a new wave of Lockean metaphysics (though Chapter 5 considers how Anglican thinkers were influenced by Locke), but rather had to come to terms with two factors. One factor was a belief that moral decision-making was related to human nature, and above all to its ‘moral sense’, which rested heavily on a belief in the centrality of emotional empathy in moral understanding. The second factor was that the eighteenth century prized political and social stability above all qualities when writing about the governance of societies. This is hardly surprising when one remembers how Robert Sanderson, who featured heavily in my preceding volume, and who was both a parish priest and a (non-resident) professor at Oxford University, lost his entire library in the English Civil War when Cromwellian soldiers ransacked his rectory during a minor military skirmish outside his Lincolnshire village. Others, such as Jeremy Taylor, fared worse. Taylor was imprisoned several times in heavily guarded castles, where he was cut off from all visitors. The eighteenth century wished to put this upheaval behind it and sought stability at all costs. However, as I have hoped to make clear in this opening chapter, this was not at all the view of historians from 1945 to 1985, and some continue to write in this vein today. Much historiography of this period, even when it moved to include the religious aspect of the early Enlightenment, still portrayed Anglican apologetics as ‘wholly excluded from the terrain of intellectual innovation in the late seventeenth century  … conformist arguments were old-fashioned, rooted in the scholastic worlds of the early Reformation and late Middle Ages, and buttressed by the sayings of the Church Fathers’.36 While it was certainly true that 36 Bulman, ‘Enlightenment’, p. 755, offers this judgement on earlier historians of the early Enlightenment in England. Bulman is, like Clark, one of the most resolute historians in exposing what he sees as a Whig interpretation of this period. While an improvement on Marxist reductionism, this Whig view still casts the churches, especially Anglican

20

Chapter 1

Anglican theology after 1660 continued to venerate earlier Christian writings, especially the Fathers, Aquinas and some Reformed theology, this is a very one-sided picture. Scholars like Mark Goldie who have written extensively on Anglican apologetics in the early Enlightenment have failed to recognize that defenders of the Church of England were ‘firmly rooted in late humanist erudition, irenic appeals to “gentle” Christianity, and early Enlightenment understandings of the nature of historical processes’.37 In other words, even when religion was admitted to be part of the early Enlightenment, it was seen by Goldie as entirely backward-looking, apart from a few Latitudinarians. While space does not allow further discussion of this point, John Spurr has convincingly shown that the Latitudinarian viewpoint was widely shared across Anglican apologetics at this time. His views have, however, struggled to gain acceptance.38 5

Conclusion

Historians’ interpretation of English society after 1688 has changed enormously in the last fifty years. As I said in The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, it is important to note two things. First, the reductionist, often Marxist, view that subordinated the analysis of religious belief to an understanding of social and political conflict is no longer viable. This is true even if one holds that the social order was often fragile, containing much hidden social tension. Religious belief is still worthy of recognition and may be the key to unlocking why particular individuals or groups acted as they did, including promoting social change. theologians, and lay intellectuals as the opposition to a liberalizing culture, which is depicted as the ‘real Enlightenment’. Since Clark and Bulman, this view has been completely discredited. 37 Bulman, ‘Enlightenment’, p. 755, on Goldie, and others. Goldie is one of the most productive writers on the early Enlightenment in England. M. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 209–231. M. Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 331–368. M. Goldie, ‘The Huguenot Experience and the Problem of Toleration in Restoration England’, in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough and J.-P. Pittio (eds), The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dun Laoghaire: Irish Books and Media, 1987). 38 J. Spurr, ‘“Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988), pp. 563–585. J. Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration Church’, Historical Journal 31 (1988) pp. 61–82. Bulman, ‘Enlightenment’, p. 762.

The Changing Interpretation of English Religion, 1680–1750

21

Secondly, the scholarship of the revisionist historians cited above may be held inside a framework that shows the religious worldview to be all-important but nevertheless particular to its own period. That would be the view of the Cambridge school, so powerfully advocated by Quentin Skinner and others. But it may, on the other hand, be the case that the theological views expressed in this period have a validity that transcends their own time. When we come to Joseph Butler in Chapter 3, we will find that on the third centenary of his birth in 1992 a volume of essays was published that not only analysed him as a creature of his own time but also found continuing significance in his work. That approach is the justification for the current book. Despite the rehabilitation of the churches and of theology offered by contemporary historians in their study of the early Enlightenment in England, from 1688 to 1740, it remains the case that there were powerful factors arguing against Christianity. The next chapter looks at the influence of Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury. By 1700 it became possible to deny the truth and efficacy of the Christian revelation, and instead to argue for the validity of a rational Christianity which had little continuity with the biblical story. The fact that Cragg so overplayed the influence of critics of Christianity does not mean that they did not exist. They were immensely powerful intellectuals. The next chapter will look at these alternative portrayals of Christianity before we move to Butler’s refutation of them in Chapter 3.

Chapter 2

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720 1

The End of the Reformation in Europe, and the Challenge to Christian Orthodoxy

The first chapter of this book examined contemporary historians’ debates on the nature of religious belief and on the position of the church in the eighteenth century. This chapter will move in a much more theological direction, discussing how theologians in the Enlightenment saw the nature of religious truth, and contrasting this with the views of Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury. The end of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century form a historical period which is known to historians as the ‘early Enlightenment’. This took place across Europe, and indeed in North America, and some of the comments made below are common to all countries and societies. This book, however, studies the development of Anglican moral theology, so it is England in particular that will be the focus of the early Enlightenment in this chapter. By the 1660s there was a great weariness both about the intensity of theological debates and about the European wars of religion.1 The debates described in this book were still theological, but they took place against a background of an elite who no longer wished to employ religious argument in the same way. That was a profound change, even if Cragg and others overemphasized how this development would lead to the secular world of the late twentieth century.2 The intellectual elite at the centre of European life came to be far more sceptical of the inherited forms of Christian orthodoxy. The wars of religion, and the intensity of religious persecution, began with the peasants’ revolt in Germany in the 1520s, continued through a series of sporadic European and civil wars in the sixteenth century, followed by the Thirty Years War across Europe from 1618 to 1648, and ended with the English Civil War in the 1640s. Finally, in the 1660s, Europe became more stable and less prone to religious conflict. There were still wars, but these were between 1 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), p. 37: ‘The English Civil War was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion’. 2 William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 17.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_004

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

23

the new absolutist states such as France under Louis XIV and its neighbours. Europe began to explore the wider world, including engaging in barbaric slave trading, which formed a highly profitable trade making up the triangle of Africa, the West Indies and the Americas, and Europe. The intensity and length of the period of European religious violence, until it ended in the mid-seventeenth century, and the subsequent trade with the rest of the world, had profound consequences for Christian understandings of religious truth, revelation and Scripture. Quite apart from the rise of the new philosophical schools influenced by Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury (the French Cartesian school of Descartes is set aside here because of its lack of influence in England), the end of the Reformation had profound effects on the nature of theological scholarship and religious belief. This chapter will act as an introduction to the subsequent discussions of the eighteenth-century Anglican figures of Joseph Butler, William Law and John Wesley by setting out some of these features. It looks first at the debates on religious error and truth claims, revelation and the use of Scripture, following the arguments set out by Young, Bulman and Ingram in the previous chapter. There is then a consideration of the place of reason, which was to be so central to Locke and Shaftesbury. Next it sets out the main challenges to Christian theology and the philosophical tradition more broadly, with sections on Hobbes and John Locke. Only at this point does the discussion turn to the first of the Anglican moral theologians: Benjamin Whichcote and Ralph Cudworth, followed by the Latitudinarians. It is important that the overall theological and philosophical debate is described before the first moral theologians are introduced. Paradoxically, however, the debate does not end with this description of the Anglican moralists around 1680–1700. The reason is because Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, whom Locke had taught in his youth as a private tutor, reworked the ideas of the Cambridge Platonists, especially Whichcote, and took them in a much more deist, less Christian, direction. The chapter therefore returns to philosophy at the end, with Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy centred on the ‘moral sense’, which he held was innate. Shaftesbury was someone whom Butler felt he had to answer, and we will come to Butler in Chapter 3. Paul Avis published Theology and the Enlightenment just as this book was being prepared for publication.3 Avis similarly challenges the stereotype of Enlightenment rationalism and builds on the work of revisionist historians. His scope is much broader, however, and includes detailed studies of 3 Paul Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment: A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theology and its Reception (London: T&T Clark, 2023).

24

Chapter 2

Pierre Bayle, Denis Diderot, Gottfried Leibniz, Gottfried Lessing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benedict Spinoza and Voltaire, none of whom feature in this book. But Avis does have a chapter on ‘The Anglican Enlightenment’ and many of the contemporary historians whom he discusses also feature here, such as John Robertson. His book shows how much the received view of the Enlightenment as irreligious and critical of emotion is no longer tenable. My own account echoes many of his judgements on philosophers such as John Locke or writers such as Samuel Johnson. 2

Revelation and Scripture in the Early Enlightenment

At the end of the seventeenth century, the issue of religious pluralism could not be avoided. In each European state, the desire of the sovereign was, with very few exceptions, to enforce a ‘confessional state’, where the principle cuius regio eius religio applied. ‘The ruler chooses the religion’ would be a broad way of translating the Latin tag. By the end of the century in England it was clear that this attempt had broken down, and there was a de facto toleration of dissenters, though not of Roman Catholics. As a result, across Europe, there was a proliferation of claims to divine truth. There was also controversy between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches on the question of religious diversity and toleration. There was a huge increase in religious persecution, and a gradual fragmentation of Europe into a series of competing truth claims. Theological epistemology responded by turning back to the biblical text. Scriptural scholarship flourished in the period after 1660, with biblical hermeneutics being resourced by philology, historical investigation and antiquarian learning.4 This was not an irreligious undertaking, but rather was an attempt to overcome the uncertainty of religious error. Scholastic metaphysics in medieval Europe had been replaced for Protestants by the doctrinal systems of the Reformation, especially those of Reformed and Lutheran theologians, but by the early eighteenth century, theology generally was drawing on philology, historians, philosophers and empirical observation. Christian theology had always contained an understanding of religious error. The anathemas in the councils of the early church were a way of marking off what was not believed by the church and what was therefore in error; those holding such views were condemned. However, the intensity of competing 4 On scriptural interpretation, see Jetze Touber, ‘God’s Word in the Dutch Republic’, and Jonathan Sheehan, ‘Suffering Job: Christianity beyond Metaphysics’, both in Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment, pp. 157–181 and pp. 182–200 respectively.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

25

truth claims at the Reformation led to a huge growth in the discourse of religious error, and a belief in widespread doctrinal corruption. This was amplified by the voyages of discovery by European explorers, who discovered many indigenous peoples who knew nothing of Christianity. However, the primary focus of the denunciation of religious error was directed at those who were also inhabitants of Europe. Sometimes these were literally neighbours, sometimes they were those who lived in another land, but the proliferation of the language of ‘anti-popery’, the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and the persecution of religious minorities were all part of a widespread belief in the prevalence of religious error. One constant theme in my previous book, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, was an analysis of the understanding of revelation by the four Anglican theologians studied there: William Perkins, Richard Hooker, Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor. Revelation is both epistemological and substantive. There is the epistemological question of how we know what is being revealed, whether by means of reason or by means of the inherent authority of Scripture, tradition and the teaching authority of the church. The latter ecclesial authority was, and still is, called the magisterium by Roman Catholic theology. Secondly, there is the substantive issue in revelation, which is the question of what is being revealed, such as the divinity of Christ, the nature of the human condition and the doctrine of salvation, or the way in which God interacts with his creation. In terms of how revelation might be known, Anglican theology held an intense debate during the Reformation. While Perkins tended towards a belief in the direct inspiration of the scriptural text, as well as a belief that human reason was incapable of knowing anything about the nature of God, or divine salvation, Hooker, Sanderson and Taylor all had a much more nuanced understanding of the way in which reason, Scripture, tradition and the contemporary experience of either the individual Christian or the community were combined. These debates continued after 1680, in the ‘Early Enlightenment’. There were also continuous debates after 1680 on Christology and the nature of the atonement, and this especially was found among Calvinists.5 There were, thirdly, many debates on how the doctrine of the Trinity should be understood, especially when it was coupled with understandings of the social and political order of mid-eighteenth-century England. Finally, ecclesiology remained a frequent topic of discussion. However, none of these subjects was related to any 5 J. C. D. Clark, ‘“God” and “the Enlightenment”: The Divine Attributes and the Question of Categories in British Discourse,’ in Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment, p. 220.

26

Chapter 2

discussion of moral theology as it affected individuals as they sought to live their lives appropriately. It is, of course, paradoxical that the doctrine of the Trinity was used in political theology in the eighteenth century but not in terms of individual moral reasoning. Most of the substantial topics in Christian orthodoxy, or the content of revelation, now become detached from moral theology. This was quite different from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Furthermore, the defence of Christianity became a necessary part of the task of an eighteenth-century theologian. We shall come across this in Butler’s defence of Christianity in The Analogy of Religion. Faith no longer meant simply trust, or assurance, as in the Reformation, but also assent to propositional truth, or acceptance of the veracity of the biblical text.6 However the Protestant reliance on Scripture, which had to test all doctrine and practice, became ‘inherently unstable in its historical effects’ at the Reformation.7 Those like Richard Hooker had already guarded against this, by arguing that it was always the church which interpreted Scripture by the use of reason.8 Hooker’s reasoned exposition of how we know Christian truth was also found in other Reformation churches. Nevertheless, his dismissal of the Puritan appeal to sola scriptura (Scripture alone) was not an argument accepted by everyone, as he realized. The effect of over-reliance on Scripture would become very damaging.9 3

Reason in the Early Enlightenment

The other development in theological epistemology was the increased appeal to observation and empirical reason. The employment of reason in this sense to discover how God’s creation might be known was of course not inherently irreligious, but it placed much greater reliance on contemporary epistemology, rather than on Scripture, tradition or any other epistemology which was ‘received’, or given, rather than created. Many scientists – among them Isaac Newton – were deeply religious in their Christian faith. The failure to agree on 6 Dale K. Van Kley, ‘Conclusion’, in Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment, p. 280. 7 Bulman, ‘Introduction’, in Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment, p. 15. Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, pp. 152–153, is critical of Bulman’s handling of the debates on scripture at this time. 8 Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 269. 9 B. W. Young, ‘“The Soul-Sleeping System”: Politics and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45.1 (1994), pp. 64–81, on an appeal to sola scriptura as a way of interpreting life after death by some Cambridge ultra-Protestants as late as 1770.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

27

the authority of Scripture, tradition or ecclesiastical authority led to a reliance on the authority of empirical observation, and a renewed emphasis on ‘reason’. Reason when employed in early eighteenth-century debates meant in part a continuation of inherited Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but it also meant the development of mathematics, and the new philosophical developments of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza and others. This debate was genuinely novel, but it drew on certain metaphysical assumptions that were carried over from the Reformation. In this sense there is great continuity between the debates in the present book and the theological debates in Origins about the nature of God’s relationship to the world which arose in the medieval and Reformation periods. What was central was the debate on whether God governed the world by his will, or decree, as opposed to working through the laws of creation, which God had established, including the laws of reason. Hooker argued strongly for God’s relation to the world through his laws. Despite Hooker’s great influence, however, by 1680 there were many philosophers who accepted the reality of God’s reality and his involvement in the world but saw this through God’s relationship with humanity by his will, or moral decrees. This would be typical of Locke’s view. It has been described as ‘voluntarism’, which is the doctrine that the will is the basic factor in the relationship of God and his creation; the term comes from the Latin word voluntas, which means ‘the will’. Other philosophers and theologians disagreed strongly. The philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, was one. Shaftesbury wrote that ‘if the mere will, decree, or law of God be said to constitute right and wrong, then are these latter words of no significance at all’.10 He continued by speaking of a theist as ‘Whoever has a firm belief [in] … a God whom he does not merely call good, but of whom in reality he believes nothing but real good.’11 He therefore saw God as being ‘pure goodness’. Against Lockean voluntarism – or, in other words, Locke’s belief that God governs the world through his will – Shaftesbury argued that rewards and punishments are annexed as the necessary corollary to ‘real goodness and merit’, rather than providing the motivation to act in a good way. There was another change in how God was seen as relating to the world. This was the gradual acceptance of the principle that the concept of God and of being a creature could be spoken of in the same way without a contradiction. This assumption meant that a ‘univocal concept of being’ came to be accepted 10

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, i.3.2, cited in Terence H. Irwin, The Development of Ethics, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 363, n. 38. 11 Shaftesbury, Inquiry, i.3.3, cited in Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 367.

28

Chapter 2

as the norm, and so intellectuals and theologians increasingly rejected an ‘analogical understanding of being’. Even seventeenth-century Jesuits, such as Francisco Suárez, who wrote powerfully on analogy, still accepted some metaphysical univocity of being. The use of reason in the early eighteenth century included the belief that God and creatures belonged to a shared order of reality. Once this view was assimilated to a Newtonian mechanistic concept of nature, where matter was made up of atoms moved only by efficient causes of matter in motion, then the infinite, omniscient God became part of the universe to be investigated by science, and God governs this universe by his will, which determines human beings. Religious language thus came to be used of God as a particular, if distinct, entity within the universe. Inevitably, the corollary was the rise in the argument for a competitive relationship between natural and supernatural causality, and God’s will over against human will. Hence the rise of deism – where God was the originating cause who no longer supervened on the day-to-day lives of human beings  – became a feature of the Enlightenment. At this point God’s will ceases to be determining, and God becomes the being who created the universe but then ceased to interact with it in ways that affected humanity. Alongside this change, moral theology became far more closely related to philosophical discussions and novels, and so became associated with two developments. One was the growth of a new audience for religious discussion. The second was the flourishing of moral philosophy. Let me discuss the audience first. The discussion of theological issues was now also carried on by those who were often neither members of European universities nor ordained in the different churches of post-Reformation Europe. Some scholars certainly were ordained. Others were concerned to establish the nature of the biblical text. It is, however, a gross simplification to call them ‘inherently opposed to Christianity’.12 What did change was the audience for this enquiry. Anglican casuists had always written for lay people as well as clergy. All four theologians described in Origins produced studies of moral dilemmas, known as casuistry, and devotional literature on spirituality, both of which were read widely. What happened by the early eighteenth century was the growth of salons, scholarly journals, newspapers that carried theological discussion, and much more. Not only did the methodology of theology change, encompassing history, philology, travel journals and empirical observation, but the audience expanded enormously as well. There were new media for disseminating discussions of religious truth. 12

Simon Grote, ‘Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 75.1 (2014), pp. 137–160.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

29

Yet again, however, this was not in itself a secular, or anti-religious, movement. Moral reasoning was discussed through novels, and above all through a whole genre of new philosophical works.13 Reason rather than revelation, or the biblical moral injunctions as interpreted by the church, became the dominant methodological criterion in the discussion of moral truth. This was genuinely new in Christian Europe. There was a search for peace and a moral order that did not depend inherently on either the authority of the church or the authority of Scripture, but rather on the response of the individual, especially through their feelings of praise or blame. This development of the moral sense school is what Joseph Butler, who is one of the greatest Anglican moral theologians to be discussed in this book, saw as his principal adversary. 4

Thomas Hobbes

In the next two sections, the philosophies of Hobbes and Locke will be analysed as the new philosophical context for moral theology. Reason became the dominant epistemological factor, and Hobbes developed his philosophy entirely around the use of reason, as an instrumental means to know how human desires might be understood and realized in a world entirely made up of conflict and violence, whether potential or actual. He represents the greatest break in moral philosophy for the previous thousand years, as Terence Irwin recognizes in his extensive treatment of Hobbes in the second volume of The Development of Ethics.14 Prior to Hobbes, some form of Platonism or Aristotelian naturalism had been the norm since Augustine, both in Christian theology and in the study of moral philosophy. Hobbes did not merely set all this to one side. Richard Tuck puts it well: The fallibility of perception and therefore the impossibility of an Aristo­ telian physical science was true; the radical subjectivity of moral beliefs and the consequent impossibility of Aristotelian ethics was also true. So Hobbes concluded his account of the passions by drawing a crisply antirealist ethical conclusion: ‘every man, for his own part, calleth that which pleaseth, and is delightful to himself, GOOD; and that EVIL, which

13 Bulman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 28–29. 14 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 100–178.

30

Chapter 2

displeaseth him … Nor is there any such thing as agathon aplos, that is to say, simply good.’15 Hobbes also rejected any relationship between will and reason, holding that reason is purely instrumental in human nature, and that the will is the last of the passions. He argued that all that had ever existed was simply composed of matter, whether inorganic (such as stones) or organic. Organic matter was either human, animal or vegetable, and was subject to change, growth and eventual decay. What mattered for human beings was that their change should give them freedom from pain, as far as that lay within their power, and the pursuit of pleasure. This is a completely naturalist theory, seeing human beings as a form of animal, endowed with instrumental reason. Nor was this an argument made as though one was in a debating hall or university. Hobbes had lived through the Civil War and believed that the Greek tradition of moral philosophy, and moral theology, was not merely wrong but dangerous. It was dangerous because it gave reasons for people to fight each other, rebel against governments and believe that they were right to do so. Yet even this was not the end of the matter. The whole moral tradition was also incapable of resolution, as the history of the tradition showed: ‘What hath hitherto been written by moral philosophers hath not made any progress in the knowledge of the truth … and therefore yield never a harvest.’16 A similar argument was made by Tyndale at the start of the Reformation when he condemned Scotus and other scholastic philosophers, mocking them as disputing about an ‘ape’s tail’.17 Now, following the Reformation, Hobbes set aside all claims to scholastic philosophy, but he did not turn to Scripture as Tyndale had done. Instead, he turned to what Irwin calls ‘seeking a vindicating reduction of moral obligation to non-moral facts about motivation’.18 The only premise from which one could argue was that human beings were like animals driven by incessant desire. That argument alone could bring an end to war, violence and human destructiveness. Hobbes made a bold claim for naturalism, but it was not an account of human nature that any previous 15

Richard Tuck, ‘Optics and Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 257–258. The quotation from Hobbes is from his Elements of Law, ed. Ferdinand Toennies, 2nd edition (London: Cass, 1969; first published 1640), p. 29. 16 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender, Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), Epistle Dedicatory. 17 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 165. 18 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 178.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

31

theologian or philosopher would have recognized. He claimed justly: ‘And now, considering how different this doctrine is, from the practice of the greatest part of the world that have received their moral learning from Rome, and Athens …’19 It is important to realize that Hobbes’s claim is so crucial for the genealogy of this book. Paul Avis has sought to reclaim Hobbes as a Christian theologian, and with great skill he demonstrates how divided scholars are about whether Hobbes was an atheist and whether his voluminous theological writings are a smokescreen for his atheism.20 The argument is well made, and Hobbes may indeed have had a sincere Christian faith. Others do not accept Avis’ claim, such as Quentin Skinner.21 But that is not the point. Since Augustine, every theologian had shown the intrinsic relationship between Christian doctrine, the nature of human beings (anthropology) and moral theology. This might be in terms of human sinfulness, the human search for blessedness or some other theory. How one acted morally was dependent on an account of human nature which was anchored in a system of Christian doctrine. Hobbes simply cut the link, as the Anglican theologian and archbishop John Bramhall was quick to realize.22 Both Hobbes and Bramhall went into exile during the Civil War, and they met in Paris around 1645. While in exile, they engaged in a fierce controversy. Publication was not intended by either side. However, Hobbes saw his pamphlet Of Liberty and Necessity published without his permission, in 1654. Bramhall went into print the following year with his reply, A Vindication of True Liberty from Antecedent and Extrinsical Necessity. Hobbes decided to reply in turn with his Animadversions. Bramhall’s 19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. M. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 31.41. 20 Paul Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London: T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 175–201. Avis, Theology and the Enlighten­ ment, pp. 91–92. 21 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 22 John McCafferty, ‘Bramhall, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Geoffrey Hill, Rhetorics of Value: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Brasenose College, Oxford, 6–7 March 2000, https://tannerlectures.utah .edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/h/Hill_01.pdf, p. 261, comments on Bramhall’s view that ‘one of the more dreadful legacies of the mid-century anarchy was the publication and success of Leviathan’. We will see that Butler followed Bramhall in this judgement. Nicholas Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: Anglican Attacks on Hobbes in the Later 1660s’, History of Political Thought 34.3 (2013), pp. 421–458, has much on the Hobbes – Bramhall dispute.

32

Chapter 2

second reply was Castigations of Mr Hobbes His Last Animadversions. He added another response in 1658: The Catching of Leviathan, the Great Whale.23 Irwin correctly locates Bramhall in terms of the debate between Aquinas and Scotus on the freedom of the will, which was a debate in which Hooker also sought to place himself. Bramhall, who read Aquinas, Scotus and Hooker closely, argued that human nature was not determined in its moral choice.24 When making a choice, the good does not constrain reason, nor does reason constrain the will. Like Medea, whom Bramhall cites, human beings can reject the good. But Bramhall, as a rationalist (even if he was also an indeterminist), held that the will is separated from passion. In this he took the same position as Hooker. In his lengthy debate with Bramhall, Hobbes puts himself completely outside this tradition of moral reasoning, as Irwin shows.25 Hobbes was not like a Greek sceptic who argued that dogmatists make choices based on the wrong sort of beliefs, and thereby argued that it was best not to have beliefs at all. He argued instead that deliberation is merely a psychological matter, common to beasts and human beings.26 The relationship of the will to reason, which so concerned Hooker and Bramhall, was described by Hobbes thus: ‘In deliberation, the last appetite is that we call the will, the act, not the faculty, of willing. And beasts, that have deliberation, must necessarily also have will. The definition of the will, given commonly by the schools, that it is a rational appetite, is not good.’27 Desire is simply anticipatory pleasure or pain, and deliberation is the series of attractive or repulsive features of a situation. The strongest appetite from this process is what precedes action, and that is the will: ‘the whole sum of series, aversions, hopes and fears continued till the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call deliberation.’28 Thomist philosophers would have connected the requirements of the virtues with the provisions of the natural law, but they would have questioned 23

Samuel Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 117–118, on Bramhall’s disagreement with Hobbes on divine foreknowledge; p. 120 on Hobbes’s ethical relativism and Bramhall’s refutation of this argument. 24 Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, said that Bramhall wrote against Hobbes like a ‘Scholastick Divine’, picking up on logical inconsistencies while not focusing on Hobbes materialism, which in Cudworth’s view amounted to atheism: Minz, Hunting of Leviathan, p. 128. 25 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 111, citing John Bramhall, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, D.D., ed. A. W. Hadden (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1842–1845). 26 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 105, makes this comparison. 27 Hobbes, Leviathan, 6.53. 28 Hobbes, Leviathan, 6.53.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

33

the connection between the two concepts. Intrinsic morality is what is fitting for rational nature. Furthermore, it is the case that natural law necessarily proscribes what is fitting for rational beings, and that is why it is a science. Anglican exponents such as Sanderson and Taylor (loosely called neo-Thomists) argued that intrinsic morality was prior to natural law. What mattered was the pursuit of the virtues, with the natural law as the command of the legislator, or God’s will, being a secondary expression of this. We first grasp the end of human nature, then the virtues which tend to that end, then the principles of natural law which prescribe or forbid what are intrinsically right actions apart from divine commands, and so finally unite those principles into what may be called ‘natural law’. Hobbes argued in a quite different way. He was a psychological hedonist. However, the instability of desire can cause conflict, and even without conflict there is uncertainty. Prudence therefore is another name for experience, ‘that ability to conjecture by the present of what is past and what is to come, which men call prudence’.29 This reason was, however, to prove a crucial turning point in Hobbes. For all that he was a hedonist, and argued that will is not governed by reason, he believed that human beings can discern that peace is what human beings desire, to prevent their destruction. We have a desire for self-preservation, and prudence sees that this will only be achieved if we set aside our rights and enter a commonwealth. If we remain in a state of nature, and without a ‘common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man’.30 That insight of prudence into the destructiveness of conflict, and the desire to achieve whatever is necessary to achieve self-preservation, can be called ‘the laws of nature’. Hobbes had a very particular understanding of ‘the laws of nature’ and of moral obligation. ‘A law of nature (lex naturalis) is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason by which a man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same.’31 Furthermore, studying the laws of nature could be called a science. ‘The science of them [i.e. the laws of nature] is the true and only moral philosophy. For moral philosophy is nothing but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind.’32 These laws of nature oblige us, in the sense that we have a motivation to keep them. They may also be spoken of as divine commands, 29 30 31 32

Hobbes, Elements of Law, 27.13. Hobbes, Leviathan, 13.8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 14.3. Hobbes, Leviathan, 15.40.

34

Chapter 2

and that is an additional reason for obeying them, because of our fear of God, and his punishments, or our hope of his rewards. Bramhall objected at this point: ‘It is an absurd and dishonourable assertion, to make our obedience to God to depend upon our weakness because we cannot help it, and not upon our gratitude, because we owe our being and preservation to him.’33 Hobbes replied that he based his submission to God on his ‘irresistible power’, but that God’s power was an honourable thing.34 Hobbes could speak of deductive rationality. Avis describes him as excluding anything that could not be pressed into a mathematical model.35 History was therefore rejected as irrelevant. ‘A law of nature is  … a precept, or general rule, found out by reason.’36 Hobbes’s benchmark was ‘the comparison of magnitudes, numbers, times, and motions, and how these proportions are to one another’.37 Geometry was the science which he took as the fundamental starting point for both epistemology and language. This deductive reasoning sits uneasily with his rejection of Aquinas’ rationalism on the will, even if he agreed with Aquinas that an account of morality should relate to an account of the nature of action.38 Noel Malcolm shows that Hobbes displayed not only a fierce anti-clericalism but also a type of negative theology in which the possibility of human knowledge of God’s intentions was virtually eliminated. His moral theory was indeed unorthodox, but neither relativist nor arbitrarist: he believed that certain moral rules (the ‘laws of nature’) followed necessarily from the human condition, and his position might best be described as a naturalistic adaptation of the natural law tradition.39 Anglican theologians were deeply suspicious of Hobbes and spent much time attacking him before his death.40 Bramhall’s debate has been studied in 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Hobbes included the exchange of pamphlets in his publication. Thomas Hobbes, English Works, ed. W. Molesworth, 11 vols (London: Bohn, 1839–1845), Vol. 4, p. 291. Hobbes, Leviathan, 31.5. Avis, In Search of Authority, pp. 185–186, 198. Hobbes, Leviathan, 14.3. Hobbes, Elements of Law, 13.3. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 104, 112. Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, p. 439. Justin Champion, ‘Godless Politics: Hobbes and Public Religion’, in Bulman and Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment, p. 58: ‘Hobbes argued that religion was a fundamental part of the human condition rather than a transcendent

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

35

depth because Bramhall was one of that group closely allied to Jeremy Taylor and Anglican moral theology which drew on the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages.41 Indeed, Taylor preached at Bramhall’s enthronement as Archbishop of Armagh after the Restoration. Bramhall, Taylor and Sanderson all held a particular understanding of the world, with a theology which treasured the thought of Aquinas and Scotus. Hobbes represented a sharp and complete break with scholasticism and so with Anglican moral theology. It is not surprising that he was continually on the defensive as a suspected atheist until his death in 1679, aged ninety-one. His ideas were considered too unorthodox. Avis sets out the grounds for accepting that Hobbes actually believed in Christianity, and that may be a correct interpretation.42 What is undeniable is that he made a fundamental attack, not only on the Christian tradition of moral theology, but on the whole Greek moral philosophy tradition as well. Hobbes’s philosophy continues to be highly influential today, and there have been many recent studies by Quentin Skinner and others.43 However, there was to be a second confrontation to this tradition. Locke’s understanding of epistemology and human nature, while quite different from Hobbes’s, presented an equally fundamental challenge. 5

John Locke and Empiricism

John Locke was born in 1632 and after studying at Westminster School alongside Christopher Wren he went as an undergraduate to Christ Church, Oxford. He then became a student (Fellow) in 1652.44 It was a position tenable for life, though the government of the college was the preserve only of the dean and the canons, and Fellows were expected to be ordained. Oxford had been Charles I’s headquarters during the Civil War, and after the king’s defeat the university was purged of all royalists. Locke’s father had been an officer in one of the parliamentary armies. Locke, however, welcomed the return of Charles II, not because he was a royalist but because he wanted peace and stability, and this change of heart enabled him to survive the visitation of the university that was made after 1660.

41 42 43 44

heavenly form’. This only establishes metaphysical agnosticism, and Avis may be correct in his defence. Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 324. Avis, In Search of Authority, p. 200. Avis compares him with Edward Stillingfleet. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric. J. R. Milton, ‘Locke, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

36

Chapter 2

Locke reacted against the violence and warfare that had marked his early years.45 He later left Oxford and worked for the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, tutoring his son, who was to establish himself as a moral philosopher in his own right. Locke also became involved in government administration, especially of the new English colonies, through the support of Shaftesbury. He then travelled to France, where he began to read Descartes closely. The political turbulence in the final years of the reign of Charles II forced Locke into exile in the Netherlands, where he managed to avoid arrest, and where he remained for four years. After his return to England in 1689 he again took on government business – mainly to do with trade and the economy – until 1700, four years before his death. Locke was not especially original in moral philosophy, although one of his earliest works, in 1664, was a treatise on natural law, Essays on the Law of Nature. Natural law was a set subject for university discussions, so Locke provided eight disputations. He argued for the existence of natural law, but not because there was any innate sense within us that could discern it. He completely rejected scholastic metaphysics and gave no place to tradition or the universality of social custom.46 Rather, he held that our senses could discern significant order in the world. From this perception we could deduce the existence of a creator who was benevolent. Natural law is our response to our discovery of order, and we can infer from this the existence of a God who has a purpose for human beings. Locke’s views on morality are the subject of enormous dispute and are not clearly spelled out by him.47 There is a natural law position in his 1664 writing, but a hedonist position in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).48 They can in fact be made compatible if the later writing is seen to mean that the anticipation of future pleasure and pain, in another life, compels 45

Jacqueline Rose, ‘John Locke, “Matters Indifferent”, and the Restoration of the Church of England’, Historical Journal 48.3 (2005), pp. 601–625. 46 Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 27, on Locke’s opposition to Thomism. 47 J. B. Schneewind, ‘Locke’s Moral Philosophy’, in Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Com­ panion to John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 199–213. 48 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter XX, ‘Of Modes of Pleasure and Pain’: ‘Those who refuse to be led by reason and to own that in the matter of morals and right conduct they are subject to a superior authority may recognize that they are constrained by force and punishment to be submissive to that authority and feel the strength of him whose will they refuse to follow.’ Patricia Sheridan, ‘Locke’s Moral Philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (spring 2020 edition), https://plato.stanford .edu/archives/spr2020/entries/locke-moral/.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

37

us to obey God’s law. Equally, the pleasure of doing one’s duty can be sufficient for some people in this life, irrespective of future sanctions.49 ‘God’s justice is nothing but a branch of his goodness, which is fain by severity to restrain the irregular and destructive parts from doing harm; for to imagine God under a necessity of punishing for any other reason but this, is to make his justice a great imperfection.’50 Lucci’s study of Locke’s moral theory refers to his ‘scripture-based moralist soteriology’.51 It is an excellent and succinct way of describing what mattered to him. Morality was demonstrable by reason but, unlike the deists, Locke believed that morality also needed supernatural revelation. Natural reason and divine revelation were complementary to one another.52 Lucci criticizes John Dunn (discussed in Chapter 1) for failing to realize that for Locke the ‘state of nature’ was not a political fiction but a description of Adam’s condition before and after the Fall. For Locke, it was a factually correct description of a historical reality.53 The command of Christ in Mark 12:31 to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ was the basis for a natural law theory, and implied the existence of natural rights, which reason could furnish. All that reason was doing was filling out the content of that command. Indeed, Lucci notes the exemplarist eschatological nature of Locke’s writing in the Two Treatises on Government at this point.54 Christ is the king who restores the moral law. Locke disapproved strongly of Grotius’ defence of the validity of natural law even if God did not exist. At this point Locke drew on Hooker’s belief in God working through laws which reflect his very being.55 Christ is also the Second Adam. This biblical term is found in St Paul in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, and is a term which had been used by Jeremy Taylor before Locke. Locke accepted the Virgin Birth and the ‘immediacy’ of Jesus being the Son of God at his birth.56 49 Sheridan, ‘Locke’s Moral Philosophy’. 50 John Locke, Of God’s Justice (1680), in Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 277–278. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in 1689. Book 1 attacks the idea of innate ideas, while Book 2 offers an argument for God’s existence. These two positions were to shape Anglican followers of Locke for the next century. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 51 Diego Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 77. Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, pp. 232–233, on Lucci. 52 Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity, p. 83. 53 Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity, p. 84. 54 Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity, p. 86. 55 Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity, p. 87. 56 Lucci, Locke’s Christianity, p. 100.

38

Chapter 2

Stuart-Buttle refers to the way in which the early Enlightenment had a ‘radically attenuated’ sense of human sinfulness. This provoked Locke into an investigation of Christian apologetics, but in a particular way. He wished to show that philosophy could establish the obligatory character of the moral law without the aid of revelation.57 Locke has often been criticized for not having a fully coherent account of moral theory, unlike his epoch-making epistemology of the senses. He espoused a different form of moral voluntarism from that of the Calvinists, but it was very much a command theory of morality. ‘Locke’s voluntarism thus incorporates a distinction between the formal cause of obligation in God’s will and the manner and measure of that obligation manifested in human nature.’58 What were far more important for English philosophy and for political theory were Locke’s later writings. Three are significant for this book. First is his empiricist epistemology and ontology in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. His theory of knowledge rested entirely on sense data and the use the mind made of it. Secondly, there are his political writings, which introduced the idea of a social contract between human beings. This will only be touched on briefly as the present study is not a work of political theology. Thirdly, there is his apologia for Christianity, which as we have seen earned him fierce criticism from Stillingfleet, and his writings on toleration. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was written in exile in the Netherlands, as was the Epistola de tolerantia. An English translation of the work on toleration was published in 1689. Locke had already written on toleration but now he went much further. Complete toleration should be given to any religious body whose doctrines threaten neither political life nor the peace of civil society. There should be a complete separation of church and state, for churches are purely voluntary bodies with no legal power beyond what their members agree to accept.59 Locke returned from exile when William and Mary came to the throne and James II fled into exile. His Essay was immediately published. It caused 57 Tim Stuart-Buttle, ‘Locke’s Cicero: Between Moral Knowledge and Faith’, in Tim StuartButtle and Subha Mukherji (eds), Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 260. 58 Steven Forde, ‘Natural Law, Theology, and Morality in Locke’, American Journal of Political Science 45.2 (2001), pp. 396–409. W. Randall Ward, ‘Divine Will, Natural Law and the Voluntarism/Intellectualism Debate in Locke’, History of Political Thought 16.2 (1995), pp. 208–218 (quote on p. 212). 59 J. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

39

enormous interest because of its denial of all innate ideas. Locke argued that all ideas in the mind are the result of human experience, either external or internal, and of the subsequent reflection on these sensations by the mind. Complex ideas come from this reflection, while language and words are no more than signs to ideas. Locke was a complete nominalist. The final part on knowledge and opinion argued for self-restraint in our assent where our experience did not warrant knowledge.60 Much of what Locke said can be found in Hobbes  – the denial of innate ideas, the empiricist account of knowledge, and semantics – but Locke provided a far more worked-out theory. In particular, the discussion in Book 3 regarding real and nominal essences, arguing that the mind could not know real essences, was entirely new. Locke abandoned any metaphysical account of the place of human beings in the world, and of their well-being. All he would seek to do would be to act ‘as an under-labourer … clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge’.61 He knew very well, however, that the Essay would inaugurate a new era in philosophy and put a question mark against much Christian theology. The extent to which Christian belief was, at least in part, made up of ‘Rubbish’ was characteristically left unstated. In a second edition of the Essay, in 1692, Locke also denied that personal identity was anything more than continuity of consciousness. There was no spiritual substance. Butler was to reply at length to this four decades later, when he published The Analogy of Religion. Stillingfleet also engaged Locke at this point.62 In 1690 Locke published his major political work, Two Treatises on Govern­ ment, which he had drafted in the Netherlands. He sought anonymity in this work because of its implications for political life. Governments exist to protect the properties and powers which human beings have in the ‘state of nature’. When people enter civil society, they agree to transfer some of their powers to government. If, however, a government exceeds its powers, it breaks its trust, the government is dissolved (at least morally) and human beings as citizens can replace it with another one. As with Locke’s writing on toleration, the individual, their beliefs and their property rights are central. It is a strongly individualist view of the world, and it justifies a right of resistance to any power which threatens those beliefs and rights.63 60 Sell, John Locke, p. 17. 61 John Locke, Epistle to the Reader, cited in Milton, ‘Locke, John’. 62 R. C. Tennant, ‘The Anglican Response to Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 43.1 (1982), pp. 73–90. 63 John Dunn, The Political Theory of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

40

Chapter 2

The final work by Locke to be considered is his explicit writing on Christianity. He published The Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695, when he was sixtythree. Again, the work was published anonymously, and it caused similar controversy. Christianity for Locke was the acknowledgement of Jesus as the Messiah. The Trinity was not mentioned and the work seemed to be sympathetic to the Socinians, who were anti-Trinitarian. Locke replied – once again anonymously – to the attacks on the work in two Vindications, issued in 1695 and 1697. His private writings suggest that he doubted the divinity of Christ and the Trinity, however deep his own personal faith.64 The 1689 Toleration Act excluded anti-Trinitarian sects from its remit, thus explaining Locke’s decision to remain anonymous: he had already been into exile; he had seen his patron the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury imprisoned during the 1680s in the Tower of London; and he now wanted to live out his life in peace. However, Locke did engage in a vitriolic and sarcastic controversy, which was published under his own name, with Stillingfleet. Stillingfleet accepted the Essay, though he had reservations about it, but it was the use that John Toland made of the Essay in Christianity not Mysterious in 1696, combined with Stillingfleet’s guess that Locke was the author of The Reasonableness of Christianity, that provoked Stillingfleet to publish his attack on Locke. The controversy, with several publications on both sides, ended only with Stillingfleet’s death in 1699. Locke’s own religious faith is shown by the fact that in old age, when he had withdrawn from his many government positions and did not travel, he wrote a series of commentaries on the Pauline epistles. He intended to publish them, but they appeared posthumously. Locke is highly significant for this book, not simply because of what he said but also because he was enormously influential in the eighteenth century. It was not only educated laypeople and philosophers who read Locke and argued from his premises. We will see in Chapter 3 how Locke influenced Butler in his Sermons, and how Butler in his 1729 revision of the sermons sought to minimize some of these passages, while retaining others. Butler also attacked Locke’s account of personal identity. Much later in the eighteenth century, Locke’s thought influenced a series of Cambridge Fellows and clergy, most notably William Paley, who combined Lockean empiricism with a form of utilitarianism (discussed in Chapter 5). Hume and Bentham largely replaced Locke as the dominant philosophical influence by the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it was still the case that Newman read Locke closely as an Oxford Fellow in the 1820s. Newman’s University Sermons of the 1830s, which deal with knowledge and religious faith, show Locke’s influence on his thinking. Few English 64 Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, p. 236, evaluates Locke’s attitude to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

41

philosophers have so shaped the culture and intellectual climate of their nation for decades to come. The effect on Anglican moral theology was great. 6

The End of the Seventeenth Century in England: Cambridge Platonism and the Latitudinarians

We now move to discussing the first of the Anglican moral theologians in this book. It was not simply in philosophy that things had changed by 1680, but also in theology. The year 1683 saw the publication of the Whichcote – Tuckney debates, which were very influential. The debates themselves had taken place in the 1650s but were not published for thirty years. Before moving to examine these debates, however, it is worth spending a few paragraphs showing how the present book relates to the previous one, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, whose account ended in the 1670s. As the seventeenth century drew to its close, it left a legacy in England of a great corpus of Anglican moral theology, and also an openness to new philosophical ideas in theology. However, the death of Jeremy Taylor in 1667 at the age of fifty-four from the plague, which he had contracted while visiting a sick person, was a huge blow. Robert Sanderson had already died in 1663 as an old man. Two new developments took place theologically at this time. One was the emergence of the Cambridge Platonists, with their clear rejection of the Calvinist belief in human depravity and a consequent emphasis on the value of human reason as the ‘candle of the Lord’. The second was the rise of the Latitudinarians, a group of English theologians active from the 1660s until 1700. Though influenced by the Cambridge Platonists, they developed their own position. The debate between the Cambridge Platonists and the Calvinists in Cambridge in the mid-seventeenth century greatly weakened Calvinism intellectually after the resolution of the controversy. Cambridge Platonism was the first moral philosophy to emphasize the goodness of human nature, and the relationship between moral descriptions of goodness and an account of human nature made this moral theory ‘naturalist’, thus creating the seedbed out of which the moral sense school emerged, because goodness therefore means acting in accordance with one’s human nature. Some theologians of course remained Calvinists throughout the eighteenth century even before the evangelical revival, as Stephen Hampton has reminded us.65

65 Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

42

Chapter 2

Another theological alternative to Calvinism continued with Jeremy Taylor’s humanist casuistry, but Taylor had died in 1667 and, although he was still widely read, more attention was given to his devotional works, such as Holy Living and Holy Dying, than to his writings on casuistry and moral theory. Taylor’s death meant that Anglican theology had no one who could read Aquinas with an informed judgement, which was a huge loss. His devotional works had a wide circulation and were to have a profound effect on John Wesley, but Taylor’s whole rationale was that moral theology was made up of both spirituality and moral theory. Casuistry and Thomist moral theory were integrally connected with a catholic spirituality and devotion. There is an echo of this in contemporary Anglican works, such as Sarah Coakley’s writings on spirituality and moral judgement (though she does not write on Thomism), but the close of the seventeenth century marked the end of Thomist moral reasoning in Anglicanism until about 1900. It was an abandonment of intellectual rigour, even though Butler’s moral theology would provide an alternative to it. There is, however, one major caveat to the statement that Thomism ceased to be a mark of Anglican moral theology, and that is the existence of the work of Thomas Traherne. Thomas Traherne is a theologian and metaphysical poet who stands on his own, since his short life – he died in 1674 aged thirty-eight – meant that his Christian Ethicks was not widely discussed. It was only published the year after his death, and fell into obscurity thereafter. This was an enormous pity, because it was a deeply significant work which could have influenced Anglican moral theology enormously.66 It was the first account of the virtues in English, and uses a Thomist methodology throughout; although Traherne never cites Thomas’s work, he knew the Summa intimately.67 After the death of Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor in the 1660s, Traherne was the last Anglican theologian to stand in this scholastic tradition until Kenneth Kirk in the twentieth century. He developed the virtue ethics tradition enormously, laying stress on felicity and gratitude as hallmarks of the Christian moral life. If he had lived a full life, this development could have continued until the beginning of the eighteenth century.

66 Julia Smith ‘Traherne, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethicks: Or, Divine Morality. Opening the Way to Blessedness, by the Rules of Vertue and Reason (London: Printed for Jonathan Edwin, 1675); republished as Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethicks, ed. Carol Marks and George Guffey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). 67 G. I. Wade, ‘St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Traherne’, New Blackfriars, 12.140 (1931), pp. 666–673, shows the extent of the correspondence.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

43

In fact, Traherne’s entire corpus was lost after his death until the twentieth century. His books and manuscripts were bequeathed to his brother at his death; when his brother died, they passed to a Herefordshire family, and it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that some of them were discovered and published. Even then, many other manuscripts were not discovered until the 1960s. The Christian Ethicks was not republished in a scholarly form until 1968. Traherne’s fascination with nature, his intense spirituality and his interest in the Cambridge Platonists, especially Henry More, have led him to be classified as a Romantic poet two centuries before this movement, or as a Neoplatonist mystic. This is incorrect. Traherne was a major theologian who combined scholasticism and Aristotelianism with an interest in the Cambridge Platonists. He was above all a profoundly biblical writer, presenting a metaphysics and doctrine of salvation that drew on the Wisdom literature, the Pauline epistles and the Johannine texts. The scholars who have engaged most with his Ethicks in recent decades are Tim Sedgwick and Paul Cefalu.68 Traherne was born in Hereford, possibly to a shoemaker. After study at Brasenose College, Oxford, which then was a Puritan college, he returned to where he was brought up, becoming a parish priest in rural Herefordshire during the Commonwealth (perhaps as a moderate Puritan) and then being priested in 1660 after the Restoration.69 His sponsors to his Herefordshire parish in 1657 refused to take the Act of Uniformity in 1662, and so were ejected from the Church of England, but Traherne did assent to the Act, and was incumbent of Credenhill, a small and poor parish, for seventeen years. In February 1674, aged about thirty-eight, he became chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who had been one of the most prominent politicians of his day, and Keeper of the Great Seal, and who lived outside London at Teddington. Bridgeman wanted a reconciliation with the dissenters who had been ejected in 1662, but was unsuccessful, and he was dismissed from office in 1672. Traherne’s appointment as chaplain to an aristocrat was brief because Bridgeman died a few months after Traherne became his chaplain and Traherne himself died from an illness in late September or October (the exact date is not known).

68 Timothy F. Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 207–232. Paul Cefalu, ‘Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traherne’, Literature and Theology September 2002, 16.3 (2002), pp. 248–269. Paul Cefalu, ‘Habit, Virtue and Character: Moral Identity in Early Modern English Texts’, (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1999). Paul Cefalu, The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 69 Smith, ‘Traherne’.

44

Chapter 2

Traherne begins the Ethicks with a description of the end of human nature, which is the nature of virtue. This is not only the ultimate end of human life, but ‘man is able to contemplate his end’ through the use of reason.70 He goes on to give an account of the powers and affections of the soul. These make possible ‘the way to Felicity’, which he defines as ‘the perfect fruition of a Perfect Soul’.71 The account of the virtues is distinctively Traherne’s, beginning with love, wisdom and righteousness, then holiness, justice and mercy, then the theological virtues, the cardinal virtues, and finally patience, meekness, humility, contentment, magnanimity, modesty, liberality, magnificence, and gratitude. At the centre of Traherne’s moral theology is the virtue of love, which is desire and the pleasure that is desired. The pleasure we take in any Object is the root of that Desire, which we call Love; and the affections, whereby we pursue the pleasure that is apprehended in it, is part of the Love that we bear unto it; the end of which is the Completion of that pleasure which it first perceives.72 Love is, however, a process which is only achieved by repentance, made possible by the mercy of God. ‘It is not the Love of GOD to us, so much as our love to him, that maketh Heaven.’73 Traherne has a strongly theocentric ethic, as Sedgwick points out, arguing that the motive for action is always a matter of the love of God which is given as joy and delight in what is good beyond narrow notions of human benefit. The shape of such an ethic is kenotic, the opening and offering of the human person in love to the world beyond the self.74 Furthermore, there is a strong emphasis on gratitude, stemming from the experience of God’s love, which Traherne describes as ‘amiable and delightful’.75 Cefalu also shows that Traherne’s Ethicks is deeply indebted to a Johannine account of divine love, although he also draws on many other biblical passages. 70 Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 13. 71 Traherne, Christian Ethicks, pp. 18–19. 72 Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 44. Wade, ‘St. Thomas’, p. 669, shows the similarity with Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, i–ii. 25. 2 on love and desire; p. 670, on faith and reason, compares Summa ii–ii. 1. 3 with Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 112. 73 Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 131. 74 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 220. 75 Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 269.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

45

Traherne cites 1 John 4:16 on divine love, and then extends this Johannine love into the entire created order, which is not separated from God despite the fall.76 As Sedgwick has shown, the renovation of human will, the example of Christ and Traherne’s faith are all interconnected. Cefalu helpfully demonstrates how intensely Johannine this vision is, since God begets his own infinite essence by his eternal love as pure act, redeeming the created order and bringing the creature into relationship with him.77 The debate about Calvinist accounts of the Fall and human sinfulness on the one hand, and those who rejected this on the other, goes back to Cambridge in 1651. The chief protagonists were the ultra-Calvinist Anthony Tuckney and one of the Cambridge Platonists, Benjamin Whichcote. Tuckney, previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, later Regius Professor of Divinity, and at the time of the debate Master of St John’s College (previously Master of Emmanuel), was the epitome of the Puritan ascendancy in Cambridge during the Cromwellian Protectorate. Whichcote had been one of Tuckney’s star pupils at Emmanuel, but had now changed his views, advocating the new belief which became known as Cambridge Platonism. Whichcote had now become Vice-Chancellor himself, as well as being the Provost of King’s College. It was not a personal quarrel, for Tuckney and Whichcote got on well as friends, but it was deeply significant, for it showed how English Calvinism could be threatened, and then largely overcome, by a series of quite different philosophical beliefs. Cambridge Platonism was the first of these. Whichcote’s sermons were not intended for publication, but they survive thanks to transcripts made by members of his audience and published after his death in 1683.78 Tuckney attacked Whichcote for denying divine legislation as the basis for morals. In Tuckney’s view morality had to be voluntarist: in other words, to be justified as obedience to divine commands. If God’s will did not prescribe something, there could be no moral theory at all, since God’s will was to be found in the Scriptures, and Scripture was authoritative in moral theory. Tuckney denied the authority of reason in morality and repudiated any form of naturalism, which would lead to an understanding of goodness as independent of 76 Cefalu, Johannine Renaissance, p. 11, on Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 50, which cites 1 John 4; p. 172 on the identification of God’s love with the created order, and the vision of Revelation 5:13 and 7:12 in Traherne, Christian Ethicks, p. 54. 77 Cefalu, Johannine Renaissance, pp. 209–212; Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 227. Cefalu, Johannine Renaissance, p. 201, on God’s eternal love. 78 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000), Vol. 1, p. 42.

46

Chapter 2

revelation. The disagreement between Tuckney and Whichcote was recorded in an exchange of letters, which were also published long after the event.79 Patrick Collinson sums up the significance of the debate: Whichcote’s doctrine that Christ saves us not without us but within us was a divinity which, Tuckney said, ‘my heart riseth against’. It was a fatal departure from the ‘spiritual, plain, powerful’ tradition for which Cambridge had been famous, ‘a kind of Moral Divinitie’ with only a little tincture of Christ added, ‘nay a Platonique faith’. When Tuckney attacked Whichcote’s critical use of reason and defence of toleration and Whichcote asked what else universities were for, a curtain was drawn back on the future.80 Another Platonist, who was to have a strong influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was Ralph Cudworth, who has attracted considerable interest recently.81 His father, also called Ralph, was close to William Perkins, and brought out a new edition in 1613 of Perkins’ A Discourse of Conscience, 79 B. Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. J. Jeffery and S. Salter (London: J. Payne, 1753), Appendix, cited in Terence H. Irwin, ‘Later Christian Ethics’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 190, n. 22. 80 Patrick Collinson, ‘Tuckney, Anthony’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 81 J. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951); Robert L. Armstrong, ‘Cambridge Platonists and Locke on Innate Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30.2 (1969), pp. 187–202; Meyrick H. Carré, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, Philosophical Quarterly 3.13 (1953), pp. 342–351; Richard Haven, ‘Coleridge, Hartley and the Mystics’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20.4 (1959), pp. 477–494; Edmund Newey, ‘The Form of Reason: Participation in the work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor’, Modern Theology 18.1 (2002), pp. 1–26; Michael B. Gill, ‘Rationalism, Sentimentalism, and Ralph Cudworth’, Hume Studies 30.1 (2004), pp. 149–181; Christina Flores, ‘Contemplant Spirits: Ralph Cudworth and Contemplation in S. T. Coleridge’, in Peter Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 211–220; David Pailin, ‘Cudworth, Ralph’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Benjamin Carter, ‘Ralph Cudworth and the Theological Origins of Consciousness’, History of the Human Sciences 23.3 (2010), pp. 29–47; Benjamin Carter, ‘The little commonwealth of man’: The Trinitarian Origins of the Ethical and Political Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth (Leuven: Peeters, 2011); Sarah Hutton, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2021 edn, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/cudworth/; Douglas Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and His Ancient Theology’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25.5 (2017), pp. 932–953; Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 239–263. Coleridge is discussed in Chapter 6.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

47

previously published in 1596.82 As a rising star in the early Stuart period, Cudworth senior became a chaplain to James I and a fellow of the great Puritan seminary Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before leaving for a parish. Ralph’s mother had been a nurse to the eldest son of James I, Prince Henry, who died of typhoid in 1618. Ralph’s father himself died in 1624 aged fifty-two, when his son Ralph was only seven. His widow remarried, and Ralph’s stepfather looked after his education. Ralph therefore also went to Emmanuel College in 1630, like his father, and became a Fellow at the age of twenty-two. He introduced the study of Descartes into the university, before developing his own philosophy which was strongly indebted to Neo-Platonism. Unlike his father, however, Ralph became very critical of Puritanism and Reformed theology. Douglas Hedley sums up Cudworth’s rejection of his father’s views: ‘Cudworth came from the Puritan/Calvinist stable of Emmanuel College. However, he clearly came to question the dark Augustinianism of the Calvinist creed and turned to the liberal Christian tradition of Origen and Erasmus rather than the sombre predestinarianism of the Bishop of Hippo.’83 Cudworth also rejected the Puritan Covenant theology as inimical to a view of salvation far greater than the covenant with the Hebrews.84 Here he echoed Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr.85 Benjamin Carter writes: ‘Cudworth’s account and definition of consciousness is more than simply a reply to Hobbes or a softening of Cartesian dualism. The true impetus for Cudworth’s development of a theory of human agency was his reaction to, and rejection of, the compatibilism of Calvinism.’86 Hobbes and Calvin were both voluntarists, seeing human agency as entirely centred on the action of the will, and also determinists. There can be no free will or belief in the will as directed by a rational apprehension of the good in Calvin or Hobbes. Calvin places free will within an acceptance of the covenant, and the choice is predetermined by God’s decree anyway. Hobbes sees human choice as directed by their material nature in a world of conflict and violence. Cudworth rejected both alternatives. However, Cudworth managed to survive both the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. He is the first person in this book to spend his entire career at a university, being made Master of Clare Hall (now College) in 1645, after the parliamentary visitors ejected the previous master. 82 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 197–201, for Perkins’s work on con­science. 83 Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’, p. 943. 84 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 202–204, and pp. 290–291 on Puritan covenant theology. 85 Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’, p. 943. 86 Carter, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, p. 43, for Cudworth’s rejection of Perkins’s compatibilism, where Perkins defends predestination.

48

Chapter 2

He was also Regius Professor of Hebrew. In 1654 he moved to the wealthier post of Master of Christ’s College (where Perkins had been a Fellow), probably owing to the influence of Oliver Cromwell himself. Despite this patronage Cudworth remained in post after the Restoration, continuing as Master until his death in 1688, aged seventy-one. His writings in his lifetime were principally the enormous The True Intellectual System of the Universe, written by 1671 but not published until 1678. Despite its length, it was intended to be a tripartite work, but only the first part was ever published. From an early date his sermons made him well known, especially his 1647 sermon to Parliament, where he argued: And what ever the world thinks, there is a powerfull Spirit that moves upon these waters, the waters of the Gospel, for this new Creation, the Regeneration of souls; the very same Spirit, that once moved upon the waters of the universe at the first Creation, and spreading its mighty wings over them, did hatch the new-born World into this perfection: I say, the same Almighty spirit of Christ, still worketh in the Gospel, spreading its gentle, healing, quickening wings, over our souls.87 Sarah Hutton describes this sermon as a ‘classic for its message of peace and reconciliation’.88 Two works were published posthumously: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality in 1731 and Of Freewill in 1838. Much more has been studied recently, although not all of Cudworth’s work has been published. Cudworth argued for the grounding of moral principles in the divine goodness rather than in the divine will (‘something in its own nature, immutably and eternally just, and unjust; and not by arbitrary will, law, and command only’) and defended the moral autonomy of human beings.89 Hutton describes his thought: ‘For Cudworth the system of nature is the intelligible product of divine intellect. His system is true both in the sense that it is philosophically true, and also because its philosophical principles are compatible with religious truth.’90 87

Ralph Cudworth, The Life of Christ, The Pith and Kernel of all Religion: A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable House of Commons at Westminster (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647), available at http://www.cambridge-platonism.divinity.cam.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic /Cudworth1647. 88 Hutton, ‘Ralph Cudworth’. 89 Hutton, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, citing Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Richard Royston, 1678). Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 252–254. 90 Hutton, ‘Ralph Cudworth’.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

49

At this point the present chapter comes together, for Cudworth was strongly opposed to Hobbes’s materialism. He argued forcefully against Hobbes, accusing him of the ‘villainizing of human nature’, and followed Plato’s Euthyphro in maintaining that God wills things to be because they are good, not because God wills them per se.91 We have a free will and can desire what is good. Crucially for later readers such as Coleridge, he argued that free will must be understood as self-realization, which Cudworth called hegemonikon.92 This is a principle of action internal to ‘the whole man’, and it is the individual who decides how to activate this power, drawn on by a vision of the good in God. Hutton writes: ‘Like Plato’s Phaedran charioteer the hegemonikon acts to co-ordinate these various powers to make them work together.’93 As the unifying power of the soul (‘the soul as comprehending itself, all its concerns and interests, its abilities, and capacities’), the hegemonikon is the whole person  – ‘that which is properly we ourselves’.94 Carter helpfully shows how Cudworth’s account of free will was designed to be compatible with God’s providence.95 He was also a firm believer in innate ideas, sometimes known as epistemological nativism. Samuel Rickless notes that they are neither acquired nor constructed, and hence must be built into the mind ab initio. At the moral and religious level, nativists held that knowledge of our duties is founded on innate ‘practical’ axioms, the absence of which seemed to make room for moral disagreement or relativism profound enough to destabilize entire societies.96 Cudworth was therefore arguing against the Calvinist position held very strongly by his father and at the same time was sceptical of the new school of empiricism and sense data, although Locke developed his ideas mainly after Cudworth’s death. Locke in fact attacked the concept of innate ideas in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1689. 91 Hutton, ‘Ralph Cudworth’. Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’, p. 937, for Cudworth’s interest in refuting Hobbes. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 257–260, on Cudworth and Hobbes, esp. pp. 256–257, on ‘Cudworth and Plato’. 92 Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’, p. 946. 93 Plato, Phaedrus, 246a–254e. 94 Hutton, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, citing Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality with A Treatise of Freewill, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 178. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 243–246. 95 Carter, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, pp. 31–32. 96 Samuel Rickless, ‘Locke’s Polemic against Nativism’, in Lex Newman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 33–66.

50

Chapter 2

Cudworth was rediscovered by eighteenth-century German Idealism, after Mosheim translated his writing into Latin in 1733. Hegel and Schelling read Mosheim’s Radulphi Cudworthi, Systema intellectuale hujus universi. In Chapter 7, we shall see how Cudworth was read by Coleridge, and how this greatly influenced him. Cudworth’s Neo-Platonism continues to be discussed and has recently been much studied by Douglas Hedley.97 Into this synthesis there was then added the revelation in the Scriptures. However, it was argued that revelation did not deny the truth of knowledge of God found in the use of reason. It was a supplement and not a denial of humanity’s rational power, or reason, which was ‘the candle of the Lord’, in the motto of the Cambridge Platonists, quoting Proverbs 20:27. Benjamin Whichcote, who was close to Cudworth, popularized the use of the phrase, writing ‘“The candle of the Lord” signifies no shallow thing: it is a principle, which speaks much of God in the world; and is of great pregnancie: and, under the superintendancie of God’s spirit, is of great sufficiencie and efficiencie.’98 Butler took up the same phrase at the end of The Analogy of Religion.99 And Hedley uses the term at the end of his book on Coleridge to describe how Coleridge was a defender of the ‘mystery of reason’, where the phrase ‘the candle of the Lord’ is a ‘luminous description of the continuity between the Hellenic-Christian legacy and the Enlightenment’.100 The Cambridge Platonists held that the basic truths of natural religion and morality are self-evident.101 They made a comparison with mathematics, geometrical axioms and necessary propositions. Such truths are both able to be known and necessary. People failed to discover this owing to social disorder; given the inability of people to control themselves, they also often fail to see the divine law in themselves. But the contemplation of oneself can give rise to the discovery of objective moral good. This moral good is eternal and not subject to contingent political or social changes. ‘The profound anti-Calvinism and anti-Hobbesianism of this picture is quite apparent.’102 97 Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’, pp. 946, 950–951. 98 Benjamin Whichcote, Letters, in Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. J. Jeffery and S. Salter (London: J. Payne, 1753), pp. 20, 49, 72–73, 112–113, cited in Robert A. Greene, ‘Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52.4 (1991), pp. 617–644. 99 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, ed. Ronald Bayne (London: J. M. Dent, 1906), p. 248. 100 Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 296. 101 Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, Vol. 1, p. 77. 102 Aaron Garrett, ‘Seventeenth-Century Moral Philosophy: Self-Help, Self-Knowledge, and the Devil’s Mountain’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 229–279.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

51

The Latitudinarians were indebted to the Cambridge Platonists. They came to prominence with the Restoration in 1660, slightly after the Cambridge Platonists, and were the leading theologians in the Church of England until 1700, seeing themselves as deeply orthodox, but with an insistence on moderation, tolerance and moral theology. There was a clear rejection of Aristotle and Thomism.103 Many became bishops, such as John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, and Simon Patrick, first Bishop of Chichester and then of Ely. Once again, as was discussed in Chapter 1, there has been an overturning of the received view of an older generation of historians that the Latitudinarians were seeking to minimize Christian orthodoxy. They allied an Augustinian view of human nature and an objective view of the atonement with a desire to harness the new insights of science, which was developing rapidly, and to make the church as comprehensive as possible. They stressed an elegant prose, as part of their apologia for Anglicanism.104 John Tillotson’s father was a member of a congregational (Independent) church, and his godfather was one of the ministers ejected in 1662.105 Many of his fellow students at Clare Hall, Cambridge became Nonconformist ministers, and at the age of twenty, in 1650, he took the oath of loyalty to the Commonwealth (the Engagement Oath). Sanderson had struggled hard with 103 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 214–215. S. P., A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (London, 1662, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1840), p. 24, rejects scholastic Aristotelianism. Locke also opposed Aristotelian certainty. Sell, John Locke, p. 29. Peter De Mey, ‘A Critical Alternative to Traditional Apologetics: The Contribution of John Locke and His Theological Contemporaries in the Confrontation of Christian Faith and Rationality’ (Ph.D. thesis, K. U. Leuven, 1999), p. 45, on Locke’s rejection of Aristotle’s hylomorphism. 104 The debate on the Latitudinarians is surveyed well by James Bradley, ‘The Changing Shape of Religious Ideas in Enlightened England’, in Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (eds), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), p. 177. Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, Vol. 1, and Martin I. J. Griffin Jr, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden: Brill, 1992), put the case for seeing the Latitudinarians as minimizing Christian orthodoxy. The contrary view was put much earlier by H. R. McAdoo, The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1965), p. 158, who argued that ‘their theology was orthodox and their method liberal’. McAdoo’s view was ignored by Rivers and Griffin, but was vindicated by two recent studies, among several others: John Spurr, The Restoration Church 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992). As Bradley shows, there can be no case now for seeing the Latitudinarians as unorthodox. 105 Isabel Rivers, ‘Tillotson, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

52

Chapter 2

this as the leading moral theologian at the time, arguing that it could be taken in good conscience, but also saying that he would not do so. Henry Hammond argued against taking the oath altogether.106 Tillotson did take the oath and became a Fellow of Clare in the same year. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Tillotson was moving away from his early Calvinism and was ordained a priest in the Church of England shortly afterwards. His Christianity gave a high place to reason, sitting light to ecclesiastical ceremonies, and he retained close friendships with Nonconformists. Shaftesbury quoted from Tillotson in the defence of free thought, as did Matthew Tindal in the deist work Christianity as Old as the Creation, published in 1730. Yet Tillotson remained firmly orthodox for all his support for free thought and his friendship with John Locke. He was made archbishop by William III, somewhat reluctantly, and died aged sixty-four in 1694. His prose is elegant and beautifully crafted, and he sought the most accommodating form of religious belief. He was nothing like as original or penetrating in thought as his colleague Edward Stillingfleet. Stillingfleet was a close ally of Tillotson in seeking a reconciliation with Richard Baxter and other Nonconformists, and he attacked Locke’s epistemology, arguing that it led to Arianism.107 He is described by his biographer Barry Till as being at his death in 1699 ‘the leading theologian and apologist of the Church of England’.108 His work fell into three phases, beginning with the period up to 1688, when he wrote attempting a reconciliation with dissent and the broader forms of Continental Protestantism, while attacking Roman Catholic sacramental theology. During his episcopate he wrote on practical concerns, and in his last three years he wrote defending the Christian faith. In his first set of writings, seeking unity with the dissenters, he denied that Scripture had a single model of ecclesiology or that one could be found in apostolic practice. Episcopacy was not universal in the early church. At the time a parish priest in London, he tried to get a bill passed in Parliament to allow unity with dissent, but the bishops opposed it and the idea was dropped. 106 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 305, 313. 107 Sell, John Locke, pp. 31–32. Peter De Mey, ‘Het epistemologisch statuut van geopenbaarde waarheden: Een zeventiende-eeuws dispuut tussen Locke en Stillingfleet’, in Lieven Boeve & Jacques Haers (eds), God ondergronds. Opstellen voor een theologisch vrijdenker, aangeboden aan professor Georges De Schrijver (Averbode: Altera, 2001), pp. 177–200. Peter De Mey, ‘Critical Alternative to Traditional Apologetics’, pp. 177–188 on Locke and Stillingfleet, esp. p. 187: ‘Both regarding the scope of natural knowledge of religious matters, the role of reason in assessing the divine origin of revealed truths, and the justification of the importance of Christian revelation, the studied Latitudinarians and Locke hold similar views.’ 108 Barry Till, ‘Stillingfleet, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

53

In 1695 Stillingfleet began his major writings on epistemology. He revised his Origines Sacrae and attacked Hobbes’s thesis that ‘religion is owing to man’s ignorance and superstitious fear’.109 This work was published posthumously, because Stillingfleet decided against publication, and turned instead to defending Christianity against what he saw was the danger of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In 1697 his A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity attacked Socinians who denied that Christ offered any sacrifice on the cross and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.110 Stillingfleet was concerned that either Locke was a Socinian or he at least gave support to them.111 Locke’s epistemology had been used by the deist John Toland in his 1697 Christianity Not Mysterious to attack Christian orthodoxy, and Stillingfleet followed up his book with an exchange of letters with John Locke, all of which were published in an increasingly heated controversy.112 Stillingfleet accepted that Locke was a Christian but argued that Locke’s philosophy was ‘apt to leave men’s minds more doubtful than before’.113 He saw the danger in Locke’s epistemology resting on sensation and reflection and argued for ‘some general ideas which the mind doth form’.114 Stillingfleet focused on a problem of which Locke was well aware, which was that Locke had ‘almost discarded substance out of the reasonable part of the world’.115 Shaftesbury, as we shall see later in this chapter, was to take the same position. Stillingfleet argued for something beyond the properties known by sensation and accused Locke of nominalism, which Locke did not deny. Stillingfleet also anticipated Butler’s quarrel with Locke on the nature of personal identity. Locke argued that there were many changes in the human body 109 Edward Stillingfleet, The Works of That Eminent and Most Learned Prelate, Dr. Edw. Stilling­ fleet, Late Lord Bishop of Worcester, 6 vols (London: Printed by J. Hepstinstall, for Henry and George Mortlock, 1710), Vol. 1, p. 61. 110 Sarah Mortimer, ‘Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism’, in Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller and A. G. Roeber (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800 (Oxford Handbooks online, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199 937943.013.12. De Mey, ‘Critical Alternative to Traditional Apologetics’, Chapter 5, has a detailed account of Socinianism and of the Racovian Catechism; p. 193 is on scripture and the humanity of Christ in the catechism. 111 De Mey, ‘Epistemologisch statuut’, pp. 3–4, on ‘the moral certainty of historical truth’; pp. 9–11 on the Locke – Stillingfleet debate. Translation supplied by the author. 112 De Mey, ‘Critical Alternative to Traditional Apologetics’, p. 272, on Locke’s meeting with Toland; p. 281 on a comparison of their theological views. Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, p. 235, on Locke and Toland. 113 Stillingfleet, Works, Vol. 3, p. 530. 114 Stillingfleet, Works, Vol. 3, p. 504. 115 Sell, John Locke, p. 31, quoting. E. Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (London: J. H. for H. Mortlock, 1697), pp. 233–235.

54

Chapter 2

over a lifetime, so personal identity was something simply claimed by individuals as a key both to personal continuity and to resurrection. Resurrection was of the dead, and not of the body. Stillingfleet argued that it was the same body throughout one’s lifetime, and that Scripture spoke of the resurrection of the body, not the dead. He also argued for the immortality of the soul, a point again denied by Locke.116 Locke separated religious faith from knowledge, which Stillingfleet disagreed with. Stillingfleet feared at the end of his life that Locke’s undoubted religious faith would nevertheless lead to a weakening of Christian orthodoxy, and to a Socinian theology, because Locke’s writings were so influential. The third member of the Latitudinarians who should be mentioned is Simon Patrick. Patrick, who was deeply influenced by Henry Hammond from an earlier generation, is believed to be the author of a work published under the initials S. P., although Patrick never claimed authorship.117 Even if he did not write it, he was probably someone to whom the work referred. S. P.’s A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men, published in 1662, when the Latitudinarians were only beginning to form themselves as a party just after the Restoration, was an answer to High Church Tories attacking those like Patrick. ‘Latitude Man’ was a term of abuse, implying that they would accept any belief. Instead, S. P. defends free will, an Arminian understanding of grace, and the complementarity of Scripture, reason and the apostolic tradition of the early church, with a strong emphasis on holiness and moral behaviour. It was an echo of Hammond’s A Practical Catechism.118 Patrick combined the emphasis on devotional writing, found in Hammond and Taylor, with a prudential form of moral advice, without engaging in casuistry or moral theology, as Taylor had done. He admitted to being influenced by Augustin Baker, a Roman Catholic Benedictine, who published Sancta Sophia in 1657, itself derived from the fourteenth-century writer on spirituality Walter Hilton. In 1664 Patrick published The Parable of the Pilgrim, which was modelled on Baker’s work. Jon Parkin’s biography describes Patrick as achieving an ‘ability to transpose what was distinctive into a working model of practical churchmanship which would prove to be influential long after his death’.119 He was not a moral theologian as Sanderson and Taylor had been, but his combination of spirituality and moral guidance was very much in their tradition. 116 Stillingfleet, Works, Vol. 3, p. 513. 117 Jon Parkin, ‘Patrick, Simon’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 118 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 312, for Hammond’s A Practical Cate­chism. 119 Parkin, ‘Patrick, Simon’.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

55

His father, a prosperous merchant, had been a great admirer of Sanderson’s sermons. Nor was Patrick as philosophically skilled as Stillingfleet was, but his ability to portray Anglican spirituality in a way that gave clear moral direction was enormously influential. Paul Avis describes the Latitudinarians as having a ‘rational moral religion’.120 As such, they engaged in defending Christianity in the early Enlightenment, without being able to refute the attacks of deists convincingly, despite Stillingfleet’s undoubted skill. 7

Shaftesbury and the Moral Sense School

The Cambridge Platonists advocated the goodness of human nature and the possibility of reason being aided by God through the action of the Holy Spirit to discern moral truth. If the Spirit could assist human moral enquiry, what exactly was this reason (the ‘candle of the Lord’) and how was it to be described?121 It was this question which was taken up by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and by his creation, the moral sense school.122 Reason employed a moral sense to discern moral truth. Shaftesbury published his Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times in 1711 and continued revising it until his early death two years later.123 This was a collection of his

120 Avis, In Search of Authority, p. 171. 121 Greene, ‘Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis’. 122 The most extensive treatment of Shaftesbury is by Isobel Rivers in Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, Vol. 2: Shaftesbury to Hume. 123 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3rd edition, 1732, ed. Douglas Den Uyl, 3 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). Commentaries include an extensive treatment in Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 98–152; Jacob Bodway, ‘The Matter of the Moral Sense: Shaftesbury and the Rhetoric of Tact’, Modern Philology 111.3 (2014), pp. 533–548; Garrett, ‘SeventeenthCentury Moral Philosophy’; Michael Gill, ‘Lord Shaftesbury’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Ency­­clo­­ pedia of Philosophy, fall 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries /shaftesbury/; Irwin, ‘Later Christian Ethics’; Anti Kaupinnen, ‘Moral Sentimen­talism’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2022 edition, https://plato.stan ford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/moral-sentimentalism/; Amy Schmitter, ‘Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Theories of Emotions’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries /emotions-17th18th/; Robert B. Voitle, ‘Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense’, Studies in Philology 52.1 (1955), pp. 17–38. Full-length studies include Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Michael Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

56

Chapter 2

earlier writings.124 Although Shaftesbury had been taught by Locke as a young boy, he developed his own theory. He criticized Locke and indeed all philosophy concerned with epistemology. Instead he found the core of his philosophy in social and aesthetic experience. However, Shaftesbury waited until Locke’s death before he expressed his views clearly. He did so in what were originally private letters, later published in Characteristicks.125 Interestingly, Locke tried in private correspondence to convince Shaftesbury of the truth of Christianity, revelation and a future life. Shaftesbury was unpersuaded. The original letters have since been lost but were known in the eighteenth century.126 Shaftesbury advocated a form of Stoicism, because he believed humans to be situated in a morally ordered cosmos and, by virtue of their natural sociability, capable of ethical virtue and political solidarity.127 He was influenced by those whom he found most congenial. They included Jeremy Taylor’s writing on toleration, and his literary style; Benjamin Whichcote, whose sermons Shaftesbury edited; and the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius.128 Shaftesbury also read Cudworth, and appreciated his Platonism, but his God was not the Triune God of Cudworth.129 Shaftesbury was very critical of religious institutions and doubted that they should be accepted, but his scepticism did not preclude a strong theism, or attendance at Anglican religious services. He disliked the materialism of Hobbes, seeing it as tantamount to atheism. He defended free thinking but was sceptical of deism, claiming that it systematized what could not be known. He had a strong conception of moral beauty, which treats ethics and aesthetics as an indivisible unit  … Shaftesbury’s theory of moral beauty offers an array of embodied metaphors that feeds into the visualization of a beautiful character. In order for this visualization to occur, moral beauty is figured as bodily conduct, as a set of gestures and affections, which, according to 124 An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, in Two Discourses, 1699; A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, 1708; The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, 1709; Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, 1709; Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author, 1710. Miscellaneous Reflections was first published in the Characteristicks. 125 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 89–90. Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, p. 206. 126 Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 89. 127 Lawrence Klein, ‘Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 128 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘Preface’, in Select Sermons of Dr Whichcot. In Two Parts (London, 1698). 129 D. Stephen Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2005), p. 103, on Shaftesbury’s interpretation of Cudworth.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

57

Shaftesbury, make manifest the same harmony and proportion discoverable within nature.130 Moral theory, for Shaftesbury, was not found in revealed religion, nor was any doctrine of rewards and punishments anything more than a sophisticated form of egoism. Priestcraft was destructive of human spirituality and moral growth, as was enthusiasm. What free and open discussion could discover was the objectivity of moral truth through the moral sense, which was ‘con-natural’, or an ‘instinct’ in human nature. Shaftesbury avoided the term ‘innate’ but insisted that, for adults, ideas of order and of God spring up necessarily and inevitably in them.131 Motivation was to be considered, as well as the outcome of an action in evaluating the goodness of a person.132 Stephen Darwall’s important study The British Moralists sees Shaftesbury as having an internalist account of moral obligation.133 Obligation becomes the motive for an agent deliberating about what to do. It is because we are agents in a world of events and actions that we experience a sense of obligation. Locke and Hobbes saw such obligation, or normativity, as located within the natural order. The agent therefore undertakes empirical enquiry to discover what actions will suit the happiness, or good, of one’s self. Shaftesbury extended this line of reasoning by arguing that morality must be consistent with the autonomy of the agent, an argument that Locke had put forward in his essay ‘On Power’ in An Essay Upon Human Understanding.134 Shaftesbury held that agents must have the capacity to determine themselves in accordance with their concept of law. Secondly, he believed that the autonomous will dictates what morality demands. The autonomous agent is able to conceive of the will as normative and not simply persuasive. The moral sense is not just a passive faculty which receives condemnation and approbation, causing it pain or pleasure accordingly. Instead it is a creative faculty which approves of intelligent 130 Bodway, ‘Matter of the Moral Sense’, p. 536. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 146. 131 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regime of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (New York: Macmillan, 1900), cited in Bodway, ‘Matter of the Moral Sense’, p. 538: “Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds. Innate is a word he poorly plays upon; the right word, though less used, is connatural’ (emphasis in original). 132 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 2, pp. 21–22. Garrett, ‘Seventeenth-Century Moral Philo­ sophy’, p. 37. 133 Darwall, British Moralists, p. 176. 134 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXI, ‘On Power’.

58

Chapter 2

creation of the beauty in the world and the beauty that also exists in human beings – that is, their character. This enabled Shaftesbury to hold a belief in theism, although his belief in revelation was highly nuanced.135 Affection, or passion, joins with reason in determining human motivation. It is important to be clear about the difference at this time in eighteenth-century philosophy between ‘affections’ and ‘passions’, and a further distinction, which is the verb ‘to affect’, which Shaftesbury also used. ‘Affection’ is the equivalent of our modern emotion and was used to describe the host of different feelings aroused in the soul by sense impressions, memory or imagination. It could also be used – and this is important – to describe our emotional reaction to our reasoning about a set of events, persons or objects which we had considered in our mind. Affections could be used synonymously with ‘sentiments’, meaning calm or at least intended emotion, perhaps tempered by a period of reflection, as Shaftesbury argued.136 ‘Passions’ was another common term, influenced by Descartes’ Passions of the Soul (1649), where passions were a species of perception. By the eighteenth century passions referred to raw, uncorrected emotions which might be fleeting, although one of the Cambridge Platonists could write in 1690 that properly directed passions, which conform to a good object, are ‘not only good, but singularly needful to the perfecting of human life’.137 However, this usage was changing. Bernard Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees (1714) used the phrase ‘a compound of passions’ to describe human nature, and he meant that human beings had emotional responses to objects or events which were often quite chaotic.138 Shaftesbury, in his preface to Whichcote’s sermons, spoke of the ‘selfish, partial, and unnatural passions’. These were quite different from the ‘natural affection’ of families, relationships with neighbours or the attachment of ‘Men to their native country’.139 Shaftesbury argued that such benign affections give rise to happiness and virtue and occur without any desire for power or domination. The critique of Hobbes was deliberate, if implicit. Voitle gives a clear account of Shaftesbury’s use of the verb ‘to affect’. He writes: However, the verb to affect, which Shaftesbury uses in speaking of ‘another kind of affection’, had in his day a meaning which it has since lost. When 135 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 141. 136 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 123. 137 H. More, An Account of Virtue (London, 1690; translation of Enchiridion Ethicum, 1667), p. 41. 138 Schmitter, ‘Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theories of Emotions’. 139 Shaftesbury, ‘Preface’, p. ix.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

59

the soul is said to affect and object, none of the more complex emotions such as joy, hope, pity, or kindness is implied, but merely a simple inclination of the soul toward the object, the most elementary of emotions.140 ‘To affect’ meant either to have an emotional response to what a person has considered, or to incline towards (an alternative would be to ‘desire’) the object. Shaftesbury used the term in this sense when he wrote: ‘A creature is good if its affections promote the well-being of the system of which it is a part, and non-human animals are just as capable of possessing this type of affection as humans.’141 Emotions react to sense objects, whereas ‘another kind of affection’ refers to objects ‘brought by the mind into reflection’.142 ‘Reason’ was another term that Shaftesbury used carefully. It was not a faculty as such, but the process of reasoning, or ratiocination. Affections played a key role in reasoning. Shaftesbury held that, whereas animals can possess this sort of affection, feeling strong emotion towards an object (person, animal, event or inanimate object) which they have become aware of or desired, virtue is only possible for human beings, since virtue is tied to a second-order affection, which has as its object another affection. Only human beings have this self-reflection about their own affections: they can direct their affection to reflect upon their own affection. We feel fear at a snake poised to strike, but we can reflect that this fear is unhelpful if we need to help a group of hysterical people out of the snake’s way, so we might feel an aversion to fear. That, in itself, is not an overly complex reaction, although it could be considered as contributing to the virtue of courage. More complex analyses of why we feel the way we do, especially over a period of time, could lead to our character formation, moral judgement and much else. As we develop feelings about our affections and passions, and subsequently act in response in an appropriate manner, then we achieve a moral state that can be called virtue. Shaftesbury argued: ‘the Affections of Pity, Kindness, Gratitude, and their Contrarys, being brought into the Mind by Reflection, become Objects. So that, by means of this reflected Sense, there arises another kind of Affection towards those very Affections themselves.’143 This is the ‘moral sense’, or ‘sense of right and wrong’.144 Shaftesbury did not 140 Voitle, ‘Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense’, p. 20. 141 Gill, ‘Lord Shaftesbury’. 142 Voitle, ‘Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense’ p. 20, quoting from the Inquiry, i.27–28. 143 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 2, p. 28. 144 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 2, pp. 28–36, 40–46, 51, 53, 60.

60

Chapter 2

analyse the nature of the moral sense carefully and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Butler would criticize him for this failure. Once human beings recognize that they have these con-natural, or innate, ideas of morality, they can act upon them, thus forming their characters around these ideas. Characters make manifest what was previously hidden, and the visibility of character establishes not only moral beauty but the centrality of that beauty in philosophy. Moral feeling is the common denominator in human experience, for as we are in touch with our feelings so we become aware of what others are feeling as well.145 Shaftesbury summed up his views in the Characteristicks: ‘The real honest Man … is struck with that of inward Character, the Harmony and Numbers of the Heart, and Beauty of the Affections, which form the Manners and Conduct of a truly social Life.’146 This moral beauty is objective and there is a symmetry between natural and moral order for Shaftesbury.147 ‘Harmony is Harmony by Nature … Virtue has the same fix’d Standard. The same Numbers, Harmony, and Proportion will have place in MORALS; and are discoverable in the Characters and Affections of Mankind.’148 The order in the universe is a Newtonian harmony discovered by reason and mathematics.149 The only way of opposing this moral sense, since it is a sentiment, is by another sentiment. Reason or belief, whether religious or not, cannot ‘exclude or destroy’ our sentiments.150 This leads to a question that has long puzzled commentators on Shaftesbury. In arguing that only one affection can overthrow another, is Shaftesbury giving up on objectivity? Some commentators have held that, for Shaftesbury, morality is simply a set of emotions, or in other words is psychological.151 Others have argued that what feelings respond to represent objective moral facts independent of us. Our feelings always ‘represent’ this objective reality to us as a moral harmony. That was certainly the view of the Cambridge Platonists, who strongly influenced Shaftesbury, and it would seem to be the natural way to read Shaftesbury’s claim that the purpose of his writing was ‘To assert the Reality of a Beauty and Charm in moral as well as natural Subjects.’152

145 Bodway, ‘Matter of the Moral Sense’, p. 548. 146 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 3, pp. 22–23. 147 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 147. 148 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 1, pp. 217–218. 149 Note the earlier discussion in this chapter of Shaftesbury’s rejection of both nominalism and voluntarism. 150 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 2, p. 44. 151 Gill, ‘Lord Shaftesbury’. 152 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 3, p. 303.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

8

61

The Challenge of Shaftesbury to Orthodox Christianity

Shaftesbury left three great challenges for orthodox Christian moral theologians. He was no atheist and applying the term ‘deist’ to him must be done with care. He could enjoy the value of religious worship both aesthetically and in terms of the experience of solemn liturgy drawing a person out of themself. However, the first of the challenges which he left to moral theology was that he dismissed revelation and the New Testament as no more than illustrations of what his moral sense could discover. What was much worse was his belief that religious institutions were often pernicious, and persecuted those who sought to diminish the power of those institutions. That was the severe evil of ‘priestcraft’. In a way that Kant would develop much further, Shaftesbury believed that a future life would show the unity of real goodness and human happiness. Clerical preaching on the present, or future, judgement of an almighty God was only destructive of morality.153 Shaftesbury felt close to Benjamin Whichcote, but distinguished him from his fellow Christian theologians, since he denied the sanction of divine punishment, and valued morality for its own sake.154 He called Whichcote ‘the preacher of Good-nature’.155 In his private notes, Shaftesbury called Christianity a ‘vulgar religion’ with a ‘sordid, shameful nauseous idea of Deity’.156 A church that was established, but without a clerical caste and without social power, could be rationally defended. Shaftesbury’s Anglicanism was the cultured appreciation of the established religion, which he as an aristocrat was not only happy to affirm but even to argue that it was his duty to defend, preserve and hand on, as part of the culture of his society, so long as it was without disciplinary sanction to regulate the personal lives of men and women. There was a value in custom and convention, but that was all. In a similar way, he married two years before his death, so that his wife could have an heir to his aristocratic title, and the conventions of his social class could be preserved. His personal sexuality remains a mystery, as he would have felt quite proper. Shaftesbury’s second challenge was that he believed that human wickedness could be overcome by moral education. If that was not available, people might indeed be wicked and cruel, but the problem was the failure to give them the right education and social conditions. Moral wickedness was ultimately due 153 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. 2, p. 69. 154 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 131. 155 Shaftesbury, ‘Preface’. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 131. 156 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 140–141.

62

Chapter 2

to the failure to give people, especially in childhood, the natural affections of family life, combined with proper social care by a government. It was in many ways the ethic for a twenty-first-century liberal who holds to a belief in the enormous benefit of psychology, good social conditions and education. ‘The social affections, love of family, friends, country, the public good, are natural not artificial.’157 It is a very persuasive ethic, but of doubtful value in a world of moral and social chaos. The third challenge was that Shaftesbury saw no value in sanctity and intense spirituality. He could certainly write of the disinterested love of God, and the deep sense of awe and reverence felt at the sight of beauty, whether natural or made by human beings. His aesthetic sense was highly developed, but the order with which it presented the spectator was one which that person could (even if imperfectly) understand and respond to. Neither religious mystery nor asceticism were things that he set a value on. Doctrine, which was so central to the theologians of the Reformation, could be left behind. Summing up these varied challenges, Klein says: Shaftesbury was deeply sceptical of many claims made on behalf of the traditional Christian God and especially critical of ecclesiastical institutions. His moral thought aimed to secure the ontological reality of an ethical standard, not only against nominalism but against the position – closely related to nominalism, in his view – that ethics had to be founded in revealed religion.158 Shaftesbury did cite Jeremy Taylor as support for his unorthodox interpretation of Christianity. It is also true that in the eighteenth century there were Christian theologians who incorporated his ethics into Christian tradition by disregarding Shaftesbury’s scepticism, so that, as Rivers says, ‘his legacy was not so much a book as a language’.159 This language of moral sentiment, or feeling, became predominant in the decades after his death. But it left a large question mark against any ideas of obedience, moral governance and reward. This chapter has set the scene for the remainder of the book, for discussions of the increased use of reason, the growth of nominalism in philosophy and the univocal account of analogy, which are the central features of the early Enlightenment’s attitude to religion. This view is corroborated by the previous analysis of Hobbes and Locke. Cudworth and Stillingfleet challenged this 157 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 129. 158 Klein, ‘Cooper, Anthony Ashley’. 159 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 151–152.

Theology and the English Enlightenment, 1660–1720

63

philosophy, but it remained deeply persuasive. This is shown by the way in which Shaftesbury was able to turn Whichcote’s moral theology into a moral sense school, with a much diminished sense of the transcendent. This left a formidable challenge for Joseph Butler to refute, and it is to Butler that we turn in the next chapter. From now on Anglican moral theology will not be concerned with the debates which preoccupied the Reformation, but with establishing its own position over against an empiricist philosophy. Butler would be central in this endeavour.

Chapter 3

Joseph Butler’s Rolls Sermons 1

Butler’s Early Life and Education

Joseph Butler was born in 1692 in Wantage, Berkshire, where his father was a draper, and the family were Presbyterian. It was only thirty years since the ‘great ejection’ from the Church of England in 1662 of ministers who would not subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles and accept episcopacy. Butler was the youngest in his family and was intended by his parents to be a Presbyterian minister. Despite the memory of the ejection, and sporadic persecution, it is also worth noting, in passing, that relationships between many Nonconformist families and the Church of England were generally good, and Butler’s father rented his house from the local parish church, where his son attended the grammar school at Wantage, itself run by the church. After this, Butler went to train for ordination at the dissenting academy at Tewkesbury, which formerly had been at Gloucester, where the principal was Samuel Jones, who was himself only thirty and, despite his youth, had been very well educated, first in Wales, and then at the University of Leiden.1 The academy was exceptionally rigorous, even by the standards of the day. It is worth diverting for a moment from an account of Butler’s life and spending some time on the academies for two reasons. First, their education was deeply formative for Butler, and this explains why he was so well read, in a way that an education at Oxford and Cambridge would probably have denied him. Secondly, recent scholarship, especially the work of Colin Heydt, has moved the study of eighteenth-century moral philosophy away from a study of the texts in themselves, to looking at how these texts were taught and received.2 As well as being taught in Oxford and Cambridge, many philosophical texts were discussed intensely in the dissenting academies, which are at the centre of recent historical scholarship about how moral philosophy shaped English social behaviour. At the Tewkesbury Academy, in common with other academies, students rose at 5 am and spoke Latin all day, except when relaxing in the evening. Latin, Greek and Hebrew were expected to be translated into each other, although it was not simply a classical education which Jones provided. 1 Alan Sell, Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2004), p. 128. 2 Colin Heydt, Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: God, Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_005

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

65

Several academies rejected scholasticism and Aristotelianism altogether and sought their own curriculum; they also moved away from theology in their approach to teaching moral philosophy, although this was an extreme position, which perhaps anticipated the Arianism and Unitarianism later found in dissent in the later eighteenth century. Those who did this looked to Samuel Pufendorf, author of De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem (1673), whose theological beliefs were minimal. Pufendorf distinguished sharply between moral duties, as part of belonging to society, and moral theology, which he denied had any relevance to morality. The pursuit of virtue was subservient to the respect for moral obligation, and Cicero replaced Aristotle in any reading of classical literature, while Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as well as Spinoza, were standard works. Heydt points out that Pufendorf’s view of human nature fitted a Calvinist understanding of life after the Fall, or, in theological language, the question of post-lapsarian human nature. Pufendorf was therefore a natural bedfellow for Calvinist teaching in the academies, which wished to move away from the Reformed emphasis on predestination, while keeping a doctrine of human depravity. In both a traditional Calvinist view, and that of Pufendorf, benevolence and kindness were not natural to human beings after the Fall; instead, morality needed the inducement of rewards and punishments which would appeal to self-interest, and so reinforced social behaviour. For Pufendorf, both social custom in human relationships, and external law in civic, or juridical, obligations and duties always had to be guided by an appeal to self-interest. For the dissenting academies, mixing Calvin with Pufendorf, social morality was simultaneously an appeal to self-interest, rational and yet able to be made compatible with Scripture.3 In most academies, however, Aristotle was still widely taught, often alongside Cicero and the Stoics, and Burden writes that ‘leading Protestant dissenters considered knowledge of the “schoolmen” to be essential for understanding theological controversies’.4 Due to their Reformed heritage, the academies often used Dutch Reformed commentators on Aristotle’s ethics, such as Adrian Heereboord. In a profound irony, dissenters would also have studied the seventeenth-century Anglican moral theologian and bishop Robert Sanderson, who wrote Logicae Artis Compendium, thus keeping a knowledge of Sanderson alive when he was no longer being read in the Church of England. Sanderson had been one of the greatest Anglican moral 3 Heydt, Moral Philosophy, p. 72, on Calvin and duties. 4 Mark Burden, ‘Academical Learning in the Dissenters’ Private Academies 1660–1720’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2012), p. 167.

66

Chapter 3

theologians until his death in 1633, and his 1615 work on logic was the standard work in the seventeenth century, being read by Newton as a student.5 In a further irony, Richard Baxter, who was the greatest of the seventeenth-century theologians in England after the Civil War, was ignored, being seen to be writing on ‘practical divinity’, and not on moral philosophy. Burden makes a good point when he writes: Instead, the chief sources for the study of ethics were classical philosophy, including Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean strands, together with commentaries upon the Mosaic and Gospel laws (which were studied for their presumed rational basis, not as guides to right living), and the works of the most influential modern philosophers, including Gassendi, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Grotius and increasingly Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Cumberland, and Shaftesbury. … The focus on theory rather than practice, and classical rather than Christian authors clearly worried some tutors: Morton was not alone in advising his students of the dangers of Moral Philosophy Lectures instead of Gospel Preaching.6 2

Butler and Samuel Clarke

Butler, perhaps on his own initiative, read Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and perhaps even the earliest works of Berkeley, which was a prodigious education for someone only twenty-one, and was a breadth of knowledge unknown in Oxford and Cambridge. He brought his learning from the academy into his sermons and writing, but also took things further than simply reading a wide range of texts, since, on his own initiative, he wrote to Samuel Clarke, who was the most prominent philosophical theologian and moral philosopher of his day. Butler kept this correspondence secret; the reason is unclear, unless it was that Clarke was an Anglican clergyman, and rector of St James, Piccadilly, and so Butler may have felt that his college principal would have disapproved of the correspondence. He asked his closest friend at the academy, Thomas Secker, to post the letters in Gloucester, and described himself as ‘a gentleman of Gloucester’, keeping his identity a secret. There is a curious twist here, for both 5 Burden, ‘Academical Learning’, p. 166. Robert Sanderson, Logicae Artis Compendium (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1615). 6 Burden, ‘Academical Learning’, p. 197. See Sell, Philosophy, p. 55, on dissent and English moral philosophy. Many of the original tutors at the academies had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge or were Fellows there. Burden, ‘Academical Learning’, p. 196, on the study of Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza and Shaftesbury in the eighteenth-century academies.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

67

Butler and Secker eventually became Anglican clergy, Butler becoming Bishop of Durham, and Secker Archbishop of Canterbury, and it is quite extraordinary that, out of an academy of sixteen students, four should become prominent outside the dissenting ministry for which they were all intended. Aside from Butler and Secker, Isaac Maddox became Bishop of Worcester, and John Bowed Lord Chancellor of Ireland, all of which is a tribute to the Tewkesbury Academy’s power of education. Clarke was astounded at Butler’s letters, and not offended at Butler’s probing of his ontological argument. A correspondence ensued, which persuaded Butler not to enter the Presbyterian ministry. Initially he decided instead to read law, possibly guided by his father, and met Clarke in London, with Butler becoming an Anglican and studying law at Oriel College, Oxford. The correspondence with Clarke continued while Butler was at Oxford, and Clarke even published the correspondence up to 1716 as an appendix to one of his books.7 Butler was extremely disappointed at the intellectual standard at Oriel, but he met one of the Fellows, Edward Talbot, who like Secker became a close friend, and whose father was William Talbot, Bishop of Oxford until 1715, and then Bishop of Salisbury. By this circuitous route, Butler became an Anglican clergyman, because he decided not to practise law nor to become a Fellow of his college. This was a profound change in the intellectual history of Anglicanism, for all previous Anglican moral theologians, including Perkins, Hooker, Sanderson and Taylor, and those who would follow him such as John Henry Newman, began their careers as Fellows of Oxford colleges. Instead, patronage provided a way through for Butler, which was necessary, since many biographies refer to him as shy, lacking in confidence and solitary. T. A. Roberts, who edited the Sermons, says that after Butler’s death his friends described him as ‘calm and sober in language, deep and strong in his inner nature, unfailingly modest and pleasant in disposition, generous to a fault to the poor and unfortunate’.8 He never married, but pursued his vocation as an Anglican clergyman and was noted for his pastoral care, being ordained 7 Joseph Butler, Several Letters to the Reverend Dr Clarke from a Gentleman in Gloucestershire Relating to the ‘Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God’, in Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (Glasgow, 1823; first published 1705). J. R. Lucas, Butler’s Philosophy of Religion Vindicated, Durham Cathedral Lecture (Durham: Dean and Chapter of Durham, 1978), p. 5, on the Butler–Clarke correspondence. 8 T. A. Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph Butler, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and a Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, ed. T. A. Roberts (London: SPCK, 1970), p. xii. The best overall account of Butler’s thought is Terence Penelhum, Butler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). The most recent commentary to the Sermons is David McNaughton, Joseph Butler: Fifteen Sermons, and Other Writings on Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

68

Chapter 3

by Bishop Talbot in Clarke’s church in London. Thanks to Clarke’s influence, in 1719 he was appointed lecturer (the term was synonymous with preacher at this time) at the Rolls Chapel in Chancery Lane, when he was twenty-seven, which was very young for such an important post; in a further instance of patronage, Bishop Talbot found him a prebendal stall in Salisbury Cathedral. So, like Hooker before him, Butler found himself preaching to the elite of the legal profession. But this was also a political appointment, with close access to the Master of the Rolls, Sir Joseph Jekyll, who worshipped at the Rolls Chapel, and was a prominent Whig MP. Most Anglican clergy had been sympathetic to the Tory, and often Jacobite, party in Parliament, as the next chapter on William Law demonstrates, but Butler was content to be allied with the Whigs, possibly reflecting his dissenting upbringing.9 3

Butler’s Later Life, 1721–1752

In 1721, Bishop Talbot became Bishop of Durham and appointed Butler to a series of parishes, so Butler juggled his time between the Rolls Chapel and parish ministry. In 1726 Talbot appointed Butler, now aged thirty-four, to the parish of Stanhope, which was one of the wealthiest in England and was known as ‘the golden rectory’, thanks to the tithes from the lead mines there, but it was very remote, situated on the moors on the edge of the Pennines. Butler resigned his post at the Rolls Chapel and selected fifteen of his sermons to be published. Although their initial influence was small, they soon came to be seen as one of the greatest masterpieces of moral theology and have remained in print to this day. Butler remained in Stanhope, assiduously visiting his parishioners, and produced a revised edition of the Fifteen Sermons in 1729. In 1736 he published The Analogy of Religion, which is perhaps the greatest work of Christian apologetics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Butler was also made chaplain to the Lord Chancellor, Charles Talbot, brother of Edward Talbot, in 1733. In 1734, his friend Secker became Bishop of Bristol, and recommended Butler to Queen Caroline, who appointed him Clerk of the Closet in 1736, which was the position that had responsibility for arranging all relationships between the bishops and the crown, thus making him part of a circle of prominent theologians and church leaders. Butler gave the last rites to Queen Caroline in 1737, who as she was dying asked George II to give 9 Bob Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 40–41, on politics and church patronage in this period. Jekyll also supported Arian and deist thinkers, which made him suspect to most Anglicans.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

69

Butler preferment. In 1738 the king honoured his promise: Butler left Stanhope to become Bishop of Bristol, a poor diocese with a strange configuration, being comprised of the city of Bristol and then the county of Dorset, which was quite separate from Bristol. Butler followed his usual pattern, working assiduously, despite the shortage of money and great distances he had to travel. There was both a famous encounter with John Wesley (to which we will return later), and an unsubstantiated claim that Butler declined to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1747. Instead, he was appointed as Bishop of Durham in 1750, but his health, never strong, deteriorated rapidly, and he died in 1752 aged sixty. All that was published after the Analogy were six sermons given on special occasions. At his instruction, all his papers, including any unpublished sermons and essays, were destroyed at his death, so it is his two major works, the Fifteen Sermons (alternatively called the Rolls Sermons) and The Analogy of Religion, that we are left with. There is a great resemblance here with Richard Hooker, although little has been made of this comparison. Like Hooker, Butler preached and ministered to the legal profession in London. Like Hooker, he went on to publish his works while being a parish priest, with both being noted for their pastoral ministry and care of those in need. Like Hooker, he never published any theology after his mid-forties and, like Hooker, his works were to become of iconic stature in Anglican theology. Both had a vision of human nature and the creation as manifesting God’s presence, and both gave reason the highest standing in their theology. While one wrote closely argued volumes on Christian doctrine, and the other created works on moral and philosophical theology, both men saw their rationale as providing an apologia for a breadth of Anglican theology that was unparalleled. What had changed, however, between 1590 and 1720 was the nature of their opponents, since Hooker challenged the Puritan wing of the Church of England, while Butler attacked the deism of the early Enlightenment. Nevertheless, although deism and Puritanism were quite different opponents, both Hooker and Butler saw the strength of Anglican theology in uniting liturgy, reason, Scripture and personal self-examination, and both rejected their opponents because they did not do justice to this. Neither Puritanism nor the philosophical views of Locke and Shaftesbury wished to entertain this understanding of theology, where each part (liturgy, Scripture, reason, personal spirituality and self-examination) contributes to the others, which is the genius of Anglican moral theology. Since this is a work on the history of Anglican moral theology, the Analogy will only be mentioned insofar as it is relevant to Butler’s moral exposition. It is, then, to Butler’s refutation of Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury and others that we now turn.

70 4

Chapter 3

Butler’s Refutation of Hobbes

Butler had a series of philosophical opponents to refute when he delivered his Sermons, beginning with his criticism of Hobbes.10 In Hobbes’s view, morality is not part of any cosmology or created order, but instead is a human device which prevents the interference by others of our pursuit of our own ends, even if, as noted in Chapter 2, Hobbes can speak of the laws of nature in relation to morality. He uses the same argument to defend the idea of political order, and social convention. Human beings compete for scarce goods, struggle for superiority and find it hard to co-operate with each other. ‘Men are continually in competition for honour and dignity … and consequently, among men there ariseth on that ground envy and hatred, and finally war  … men, whose joy consisteth in comparing himself with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent.’11 Morality for Hobbes is necessary not because it is consonant with human nature but because other people’s behaviour causes us distress. Butler argued that this hedonist thesis was not only empirically false but also logically impossible. Butler rejected Hobbes’s account of psychological egoism and attacked hedonism, arguing that ‘It is not a true representation of mankind to affirm, that they are wholly governed by self-love, the love of power and sensual appetites.’ Instead, he claimed that persons are informed by ‘friendship, compassion and gratitude’.12 However, Butler was not arguing by setting his observation of human nature against that of Hobbes, because he preferred to expose logical contradictions: ‘The confusion of calling actions interested which are done in contradiction to the most manifest known interest, merely for the gratification of a known passion’. He showed that ‘the appetites of sense, resentment, compassion, curiosity, ambition and the rest’ are merely particular movements of the self to external objects, and such movements are not necessarily interested, since ‘no one can act but from a desire, or choice, or preference of his own’. Butler exposes the fallacy in Hobbes’s reasoning: if everything which we do is called interested, the term ‘interested’ becomes a tautology and is therefore meaningless. If we act out of desire, or passion, that must be distinguished from ‘self-love’, which is for our benefit, so the latter should be called ‘cool or 10

Jeremy Worthen, ‘Joseph Butler on the Enemies of Virtue’, Studies in Christian Ethics 12. (1999), pp. 48–56. Penelhum, Butler, pp. 39 ff., on Butler’s refutation of Hobbes. 11 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. M. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 17.7–8. Terence H. Irwin, The Development of Ethics, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 144, 477. 12 Joseph Butler, ‘Preface’ in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, paragraph 21.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

71

sensual selfishness’, while the former, which is action from desire, is called ‘passionate or selfish selfishness’.13 Self-love and ‘any particular passion’ may or may not be joined, and it is often difficult to distinguish them, even when reflecting on one’s own actions, although Butler adds ‘But this need create no confusion in the ideas themselves of self-love and particular passions.’14 A person’s self-love, or long-term interest, presupposes particular passions or appetites, for ‘the very idea of interest or happiness consists in this, that an appetite or affection enjoys its object’.15 Self-love can only exist if there are certain affections, which are directed through passions or appetites, and so self-love and passions are intertwined, with self-love using passions for its benefit, although one must be clear that self-love and passions are two distinct concepts, with Hobbes making a mistake in confusing the two. In Sermon 1, ‘Upon Human Nature’, Butler refers to Hobbes’s Of Human Nature and becomes critical. If ‘the appearance of benevolence or good will in men towards each other’ is described instead as ‘the love of power and delight in the exercise of it. Would not every body think here was a mistake of one word for another?’ Butler concedes that benevolence may be mixed with ambition and delight in superiority, but it is ‘specious’ to use one word in place of the other. He instances many examples of benevolence unrelated to the pursuit of power. ‘These are the absurdities which even men of capacity run into, when they have occasion to belie their nature, and will perversely disclaim that image of God which was originally stamped upon it, the traces of which, however faint, are plainly discernible upon the mind of man.’16 Sermon 5, ‘Upon Compassion’, returns to the attack. The biblical text on which Butler preached was Romans 12:15: ‘Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep’. He distinguishes here between private and social affections, or principles of actions. The biblical text refers to social affections. ‘We, as it were, substitute them for ourselves, their interest for our own.’ Butler is criticizing the fact that Hobbes defines ‘pity, imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves’ as synonymous terms, and therefore equates compassion with our fear for ourselves. Butler again concedes that in feeling compassion we may also ‘reflect upon our own liableness to the same or other calamities’. But feeling such apprehension is derivative of the original 13 14 15 16

Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 35. Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 36. Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 37. Joseph Butler, Sermon 1, ‘Upon Human Nature’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, paragraph 6, footnote. (Further sermons cited in the notes are taken from this volume.)

72

Chapter 3

feeling of compassion, and Hobbes is ‘absurdly mistaken’ in equating the two. What Hobbes speaks of is no more than a ‘phantom of danger to ourselves’ and is not part of self-love at all.17 Tennant calls this sermon part of Butler’s ‘anti-Hobbes strategy’ and his criticism of any appeal to ‘the shared sense of fear’s predominance’.18 The sermon ends with a denunciation of ‘men of speculation’ for seeking to extirpate the ‘affections of kindness and compassion’.19 Finally, in Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, Butler considers the relationship of passions and an external object. There is a ‘prior suitableness between the object and the passion’, which manifests in pleasure but this pleasure is separate from the way in which passions are directed towards external things.20 His argument when expanded is as follows. We take pleasure in achieving the object in question, but we would not get this pleasure unless we desired the object, apart from any prospect of pleasure. We take pleasure in x because we want to satisfy our desire for x; we want to satisfy our desire for x because we care about having x for its own sake; if we take pleasure in x we care about x for its own sake; and so, if we take pleasure, we also care about something other than pleasure for its own sake.21 Hobbes’s defence of hedonism and egoism is therefore logically false. Butler’s attack on Hobbes was the most profound response to his philosophy which had been made by that date. He agreed with Hobbes that actions were the object of moral philosophy: ‘Acting, conduct, behaviour, abstracted from all regard to what is, in fact and event, the consequences of it, is itself the natural object of the moral discernment.’ However, Butler went on to speak of such actions as morally good or bad, carrying with them ‘a sense of discernment of them as of good or ill desert’. Some actions carry with them the fact that the ‘doer of such actions should be made to suffer’, which might mean that actions deserve punishment, but it might also mean that a person has caught the plague and should be ‘left to perish, lest, by other people’s coming near him, the infection should spread’, although this person is innocent. Such people suffer harm, and their death is for the good of society, but they did not deserve this fate. The crucial question for Butler is whether a person who experiences ‘treatment’ which harms them deserves this response. Actions which harm people for the good of society must be justified because they deserved the consequences, and the example of the plague sufferer is the exception 17 18 19 20 21

Joseph Butler, Sermon 5, ‘Upon Compassion’, paragraph 1. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 65. Butler, Sermon 5, ‘Upon Compassion’, paragraph 15. Joseph Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 6. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 499–500.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

73

which proves the rule, for they did not deserve this treatment. ‘Ill-desert always supposes guilt.’22 The sight of a person in misery raises our compassion for their situation, but this ceases if the person is a villain who is being punished. In all this Butler is showing that humanity has a moral faculty, and that Hobbes distorts our understanding of this. Butler did not simply assert that human beings were loving, or benevolent, because he knew that Hobbes had lived through the breakdown of civil order and had endured the English Civil War, which was violent and destructive. Instead of appealing to a belief that human beings were essentially loving, which he clearly doubted, Butler places the authority of conscience, or reflection, against Hobbes’s egoism. In my earlier book I described the impact of the Civil War on moral theologians such as Sanderson and Taylor, where imprisonment, the loss of property and death were common experiences, and Sanderson and Taylor counted themselves as those who had been preserved by God’s mercy so that they had not been killed, even if they had endured violence.23 Butler lived in a more peaceful age, but he knew how deeply Hobbes had been affected by the events he had lived through. He himself wrote graphically about David’s plan to have Uriah killed, which he calls simply ‘murder’, even if David did not kill Uriah himself. The reason that Butler rejected Hobbes – not because he doubted the need for a response to violence but because of his belief in conscience – is well made in an article by H. G. Townsend: He was as much opposed to Hobbes and his idea of arbitrary and external authority as he was to those who would correct Hobbes by the mere assurance that it is natural for man to love his fellow-men. He does not propose to set altruism over against egoism, to cancel or deny self-love in any sense, but he seeks to transcend the dispute through the principle of reflection. He finds this principle implied in self-love and fully exhibited in conscience.24 Practising virtue is not simply being loving, but is rather achieving the proper balance in one’s nature, through the authority of conscience, so that one can realize the good, and follow God’s will. There was, however, a different set of issues to be dealt with, which were those of the moral sense school. Butler 22

All the quotations in this paragraph are from Joseph Butler, A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, paragraph 3. 23 Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 300, 305, 321, on the violence of the Civil Wars as it affected Sanderson and Taylor. 24 H. G. Townsend, ‘The Synthetic Principle in Butler’s Ethics’, International Journal of Ethics 37.1 (1926), p. 87.

74

Chapter 3

was much more sympathetic to this moral philosophy, but in the end he had far-reaching criticisms of Shaftesbury, and his successor Hutcheson, and to this school we now turn. 5

Butler on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson

Butler disagreed with both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, on the moral sense, or moral attitudes, sometimes known as ‘sentimentalism’.25 He argues that that school does not do justice to human nature either, although there are times when he appears sympathetic to sentimentalism’s account of moral attitudes. In Sermon 1, Butler lists the passions and benevolence of human nature in a manner similar to Hutcheson.26 He writes in Sermon 3 (also ‘Upon Human Nature’), ‘The inquiries which have been made by men of leisure, after some general rule, the conformity to, or disagreement from which, should denominate our actions good or evil, are in many respects of great service.’27 Again, in Sermon 11, Butler argues in a way similar to Shaftesbury in claiming that virtue in not contrary to private interest and self-love.28 Nevertheless, Butler sees sentimentalism as misguided, despite some similarity of reasoning. He disagrees with this position both as a moral philosopher and as a moral theologian, because philosophically it fails to present a compelling case, and because as a theologian he cannot accept its treatment of Christianity. He offers four criticisms during the Sermons. First, sentimentalism treats human nature as a collection of motives and dispositions. However, in Butler’s view, human nature has both a unity and a purpose. Butler is careful here. He uses the analogy of a watch to say that its unity as a watch derives from its purpose, which is to measure time. Human beings are also united by their purpose, which is the pursuit of virtue.29 The purpose of human nature 25

Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 478–479. James Moore, ‘Hutcheson, Francis’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hutcheson’s relationship to Christianity is complex. As Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, he rejected the Reformed doctrine of human fallenness. His inaugural lecture was entitled ‘On the Natural Sociality of Human Beings’. It was published in 1730, four years after the first edition of Butler’s Sermons. 26 Butler, Sermon 1, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraphs 6–8. 27 Joseph Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 4. 28 Roberts in Butler, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, p. 163, n. 99, citing Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3rd edition, 1732, ed. Douglas Den Uyl, 3 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), Vol. 2, p. 67. 29 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 14. Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 2, footnote.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

75

is to live a moral life: ‘our nature, that is, constitution, is adapted to virtue’.30 Butler argues from naturalism, and makes explicit reference to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, whom he calls ‘the ancients’.31 In this respect the Anglican Butler is like the Spanish Jesuit moral theologian Francisco Suárez, who was considered in The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology.32 Moral rightness, or honestas, was natural for Suárez, which is a position held by Butler and Hutcheson, against Pufendorf and Hobbes. Unlike Suárez, however, Butler did not develop his views on natural law. Butler does not argue that the example of a watch is anything more than an analogy: it shows how unity can be achieved by teleology, or the pursuit of a goal, and this is its purpose. It is not an argument from the design of the watch to the proof of a designer. Paley, who is considered in Chapter 5 as a utilitarian, was later to use the example of the world’s design to prove the existence of a God who created it. Butler does not make this move. He argues that the properties that belong to x’s nature belong to x as a whole system, and not to the individual parts. Furthermore, the properties that belong to the nature of x are only the case if the system works co-operatively and harmoniously. Harmony, as Irwin points out, means that the results of each part support each other, as does co-operation. Consistent and reliable working is necessary but insufficient for the end which Butler requires, since the nature of x may be subjected to opposition, with the inevitable corollary of stresses and strains upon the working of the system.33 Butler refers to this as ‘the disturbance and implicit dissatisfaction in vice’.34 Secondly, sentimentalism only works as a doctrine if people have strong moral motives for action. Faced with the case of the selfish, anti-social person, the argument fails. Butler’s argument is that Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue, which depends on the strength of moral affections, has no answer to the ‘sceptic not convinced of this happy tendency of virtue’.35 He claims that Shaftesbury’s philosophy is ‘without remedy’.36 Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of 30 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 14. Joseph Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraphs 4 and 10. Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, para 2. 31 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 13. 32 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 188, 240, 332, citing Christopher Shields and Daniel Schwartz, ‘Francisco Suárez’, in Edward N, Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclo­pedia of Philosophy, winter 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries /suarez/, for Suarez’ lost commentaries on Aristotle and his approach to natural law. 33 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 484. 34 Joseph Butler, Sermon 7, ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’, paragraph 16. 35 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 26. 36 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraphs 25–26. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 57, on Butler’s criticism of Shaftesbury.

76

Chapter 3

Men directly equates virtue with a good character, or a balance between the natural affections, which are desires for the public good, and self-affections, which are bodily appetites. Here there is no question of goodness and good character standing in a teleological relation to one another. As Roberts writes on Shaftesbury, A man is by nature good when his impulses are so harmonised that he becomes a perfect instrument for promoting the good of others. Here Shaftesbury uses notions such as proportion, balance, harmony of the natural desires, so that too much benevolence or too much parental love can be a bad thing.37 For Butler, a balanced constitution is only good where good is clearly used teleologically. Thirdly, Butler attacks Shaftesbury for not accepting that conscience has an inherent authority. Shaftesbury certainly accepts that we feel favourably towards virtue, and so the psychological strength of conscience makes us act in a virtuous manner. Butler says that this is not enough. Conscience has authority, and provides reasons for action, irrespective of our psychological feelings.38 ‘The natural authority of the principle of reflection is an obligation the most near and intimate, the most certain and known … in truth, the taking in this consideration totally changes the whole state of the case.’39 Furthermore, Shaftesbury confuses actions done for our own happiness, or pleasure, from actions which are directed towards another person. Of course, says Butler, both proceed from our choice, but that is not to say that all actions involve self-love. Self-love, which is the ‘general desire of our happiness’, is one thing, whereas hatred or love of another is a different part of our nature. It is the principle or inclination which distinguishes them. ‘Happiness does not consist in self-love.’40 Instead, happiness is found in the enjoyment of those objects which are suited to us. Benevolence is distinct from self-love, but that is not a reason for being suspicious of it. Self-love does not exclude love of others. Butler concludes this sermon by showing how much religious people have found deep satisfaction in charity, and this is a consideration which others should recognize.41 37 38 39 40 41

Roberts in Butler, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, p. 157. Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 26. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 542–543. Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraphs 26–27. Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 9. Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 15.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

77

Fourthly, Butler counters Shaftesbury’s argument in an implicit, and subtle, manner. He constantly refers to the fact that human beings are created by God. In Sermon 2, once again ‘Upon Human Nature’, he refers in the opening few lines to the intention of the ‘Author of that nature’ when considering the nature of the creature. Aristotle had argued in a similar teleological way, but without making a theological reference to support his case.42 Butler’s later sermons make a much more explicit case. Sermons 13 and 14 are entitled ‘Upon the Love of God’, while Sermon 15 is called ‘Upon the Ignorance of Man’. All three pursue a constant theme, which is that the purpose of God in creating us was for us to pursue virtue and to worship God: ‘Religion does not demand new affections but only claims the direction of those you already have … we only represent to you the highest, the adequate objects of those very faculties and affection.’43 Sermon 14 argues, following Augustine and Aquinas, as well as the Caroline theologians, that the true happiness of human nature is God himself.44 Our passage through this world is ‘a progress towards a state of perfection’.45 Finally, Sermon 15 argues that the proper happiness of human beings is not knowledge: Our province is virtue and religion, life and manners, the science of improving the temper and making the heart better. This is the field assigned us to cultivate: How much it has lain neglected is indeed astonishing. Virtue is demonstrably the happiness of man; it consists in good actions, proceeding from a good principle, temper or heart.46 Sermon 13 also refers to the danger of reacting too strongly against enthusiasm or superstition. Butler sees both as abuses of religion, and ‘extravagancies’, but he also deplores the reaction to them. That reaction is to be so reasonable in religious practice ‘as to have nothing to do with the heart and affections’.47 Butler here criticizes those philosophers and deists who use the dangers of religious devotion as a reason for having nothing to do with them. He argues 42 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.1.7. Roberts, in Butler, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, p. 159. 43 Joseph Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 12. 44 Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living, in Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber, rev. Charles Page Eden, 10 volumes (London: Longman, Brown and Green, 1852, reprinted Hildesheim: George Olms Verlag, 1970), Vol. 3, p. 27, Section III, ‘The Practice of the Presence of God’, on the enjoyment of God: ‘This exercise is apt also to enkindle holy desires of the enjoyment of God, because it produces joy when we do enjoy him.’ 45 Joseph Butler, Sermon 14, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 16. 46 Joseph Butler, Sermon 15, ‘Upon the Ignorance of Man’, paragraph 17. 47 Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 1.

78

Chapter 3

that there is a proper place for religious affections. If it is proper to love a good moral character, how much more should we adore and love the character of God. ‘A being who hath these attributes, who stands in this relation, and is thus sensibly present to the mind, must necessarily be the object of these affections.’48 Likewise, in Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment’, Butler makes a daring move. We react against the emotion of anger, but simply to ignore it is profoundly unwise. The emotion must be incorporated into any account of human nature and put under the control of the will. Neither religious enthusiasm nor anger, or resentment, is alien to human beings. What matters is how they are treated.49 As Roberts says, The apex of Butler’s thinking about morality lies in his notion of the love of God. He believes that God is the perfect embodiment of the moral ideals which conscience reveals to men. In God are all the qualities which men recognise ought to prevail in themselves. As such, God cannot but be an object of reverence, affection and love for all who admire his moral qualities.50 What are the moral qualities which Christian worship will inculcate? Here Butler develops his moral theology in a way which again echoes Taylor’s Holy Living and many other works of Anglican spirituality.51 ‘Resignation to the will of God is the whole of piety; it includes in it all that is good and is a source of the most settled quiet and composure of mind.’ Butler is well aware that the Anglican moral tradition saw the action of resignation to God’s will as an important moral quality. This does not mean that Butler is either passive or a fatalist. He preached the importance of actively pursuing the good of others, and doing God’s will, while also having an attitude of joy and trust that all is for the good. Both Butler and Taylor stress the importance of transforming acquiescence into joy and trust in God’s will. Furthermore, Butler argues that the believer can look forward to a life beyond death when we will fully understand

48 Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 10. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 549. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 68, shows how Butler restructured and amplified this passage in the second edition of the Sermons in 1729. 49 Joseph Butler, Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment’. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, pp. 54–59, has a lengthy analysis of this sermon and its treatment of anger. 50 Roberts, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxi–xxii. 51 Taylor, Holy Living, Section II, ‘Purity of Intention’, p. 18: ‘When we are not solicitous concerning the instruments and means of our actions but use those means which God hath laid before us, with resignation, indifferency, and thankfulness.’

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

79

what is hidden from us now.52 Adoration of God’s wisdom, power and goodness is an integral part of our moral character, producing humility, and the transcendence of ourselves.53 Kendal comments on Butler’s use of resignation that it is the key virtue ‘because it is the essence of moral realism’. It follows on from faith, hope and love as the central virtue. Kendal says that it means a recognition that God is present in the natural order of life, and our discernment of what action to take ‘arise[s] from a providential kinship between ourselves and it [the prevenient grace of God]’. This kinship is evidenced in the way conscience ‘marshals its resources out of the particular passions and affections of a human nature that is as sentient as it is prescriptive’.54 6

Butler’s Critique of Locke: Religious Affections

It is possible that Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity might be the target of Sermon 13, as well as Shaftesbury.55 Butler read Locke as a young man at the academy. He had great respect for Locke, yet he saw that Locke’s Christianity was a challenge to Christian orthodoxy. This was for several reasons. First, there was Locke’s understanding of the person of Jesus, and his refusal to regard him as divine. Secondly, there was Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. Knowledge could only come from sense perceptions, and from mental reflection upon these. We have seen earlier how Shaftesbury turned on his former tutor in asserting the validity of the moral sense, which Shaftesbury regarded as innate. Butler makes a similar move on the affections. Thirdly, there is Locke’s theory of personal identity.56 Since this is a work on moral theology, I will set aside the issue of Locke’s understanding of Christ, which is well treated by Paul Avis and others.57 Instead, I will focus on Butler’s understanding of the relationship of affections to epistemology. Butler suggests in his last three sermons that human affections may be analogous to an aspect of God’s being. Furthermore, they offer 52 Butler, Sermon 14, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraphs 8 and 12. 53 Butler, Sermon 15, ‘Upon the Ignorance of Man’, paragraphs 17 and 18. 54 Gordon Kendal, ‘A God Most Particular’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 159–160. 55 Roberts, in Butler, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, p. 164. Penelhum, Butler, pp. 132–140. 56 Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 51–52, on Butler’s relationship to Locke. 57 Paul Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London: T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 269–275, on Locke.

80

Chapter 3

the possibility of knowledge which does not come from sense perceptions and the ideas which reflect upon them, and in so doing he suggests there may be a relationship between God and ourselves. ‘As mankind have a faculty by which they discern speculative truth; so we have various affections towards external objects. Understanding and temper, reason, and affection, are as distinct ideas, as reason and hunger.’58 We get the ideas of the objects of our affections from reason, but ‘reason and affection are no more the same, than sight of a particular object and the pleasure or uneasiness consequent thereupon, are the same’.59 Reason rests in the discernment of truth, which is the object of its reason. Affection does likewise, resting in its objects. Awareness of affection both gives self-knowledge and carries us up to knowledge of God.60 ‘It is therefore not only reasonable, but also natural, to be affected with a presence, though it be not the object of our senses … it is the certainty that he is with us, and we are with him, that hath the influence.’61 Butler’s careful refutation in this sermon of a theory of knowledge that is entirely dependent on the senses is very impressive. ‘We own and feel the force of amiable and worthy qualities in our fellow creatures: and can we be insensible to the contemplation of perfect goodness?’ Butler is happy to use the term ‘knowledge’ of religious faith. The presence of a fellow creature affects our senses. Our senses give us knowledge of their presence. That creates an influence on us, and that influence is comprised of a series of affections, such as love, and reverence. That influence ‘is not immediately from our senses, but from that knowledge’. We may then not know by any of our senses, ‘but yet certainly to know, that another was with him; this knowledge might, and in many cases would, have one or more of the effects before mentioned’. It is an argument from the affections, which Butler held to be innate, and from intuition.62 Nevertheless, while Butler argues from affections, he remains an empiricist. As Donald MacKinnon writes, ‘This, then, is certainly empiricism, in the sense of an appeal to fact, to what we know of ourselves, and more generally, in the sense of a readiness always to sacrifice the nicety of theoretical construction to the actuality of human behaviour, of

58 59 60 61 62

Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 5. Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 5. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 96. Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 11. Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, paragraph 11.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

81

observed or overheard judgement and use.’63 MacKinnon’s careful description of Butler contrasts him with William Wollaston’s ‘abstract relations of things’.64 What is immensely striking is the range of emotions, or affections, which Butler covers in the Sermons. He considers resentment at length and must be one of the few moral theologians to weave a theory of punishment out of a belief that it is right to feel indignation against ‘cruelty, injustice and wrong’.65 Sermon 8 is entitled ‘Upon Resentment’ while Sermon 9 is called ‘Upon the Forgiveness of Injuries’. Paul Newberry gives a careful reading of Butler at this point, showing that he ‘did not define forgiveness as the overcoming of resentment but rather as the checking of revenge, or forbearance’.66 Butler is concerned as to how a loving God could create such emotions in human beings. He argues that there are times when resentment, or indignation (he is careful with these terms, and knows they elide into each other), becomes excessive. Forgiveness is the proper Christian response to this emotional event. Butler is using a theory of moral affections against Locke’s rationalism.67 Yet even in moving away from Locke’s moral theory Butler is cautious. He does not denounce Locke as he denounces Hobbes. Terence Penelhum shows how the influence of Locke is present in Sermon 15. Paragraph 14 sets out a vision of a person walking by twilight, and grateful for any light which can show the path ahead. This echoes closely Locke’s twilight passage in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.68 Butler, like Locke, argues that there is a difference between probability and certainty.69 He believes that our knowledge of the physical world is restricted to the observable qualities of things, but this is enough for daily living. We do not know why God withholds some knowledge from us, but we know that God has placed us in the world which he created and governs.

63 D. M. MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: A. and C. Black, 1957), p. 175. 64 MacKinnon, Study in Ethical Theory, p. 175. B. W. Young, ‘Wollaston, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1722). 65 Butler, Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment’, paragraph 13. 66 Paul A. Newberry, ‘Joseph Butler on Forgiveness: A Presupposed Theory of Emotion’, Jour­ nal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001), p. 233. 67 Newberry, ‘Joseph Butler on Forgiveness’, p. 238. 68 Terence Penelhum, ‘Butler and Human Ignorance’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, p. 120. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Book IV, Chapter XIV. 69 Sell, John Locke, pp. 51–52, for Locke and Butler on probability.

82 7

Chapter 3

Butler’s Critique of Locke: Personal Identity

Butler also provides an alternative to Locke’s theory of personal identity.70 In the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that no two things of the same kind can be in the same place at the same time, and no individual can be in two different places at the same time. A person is defined as ‘a thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’.71 He goes on, ‘consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self’. Consciousness is crucial for Locke: In this alone consists personal Identity ie the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that person; it is the same self now as it was then, and ’tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action as done.72 Tennant notes that this theory was used by Locke not only to make a point about the nature of reality, but also to intervene in debates about jurisprudence, the morality of punishment and personal responsibility.73 While Locke argues that a person is a self-reflective entity that has the idea of itself persisting over time, he adds that the term person is also ‘a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit, and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery’.74 Butler disagrees with Locke’s argument.75 His reasoning runs as follows. I am certain that there is such a mental fact as my own self, and despite the changes I go through across time this self remains constant. Furthermore, other people have the same knowledge about themselves. This is the knowledge of personal identity. ‘One should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore, cannot constitute personal identity; 70 Jessica Gordon-Roth, ‘Locke on Personal Identity’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2020 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/locke -personal-identity/. 71 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, xxvii.9. 72 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, xxvii.9. 73 R. C. Tennant, ‘The Anglican Response to Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 43.1 (1982), pp. 73–90. 74 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, xxvii.26. 75 Sell, John Locke, pp. 246–247.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

83

any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes.’76 Any attempt to define such an identity runs into perplexity, but there is no difficulty in ascertaining the idea of it. The attempt to define key terms before entering a discussion leads into an impasse.77 Language will not ‘permit these words to be laid aside’.78 Nor is Butler’s argument to be set aside on the grounds that personal identity is equivalent to our present consciousness of personal identity. It may be true that we cannot distinguish between the two, but it is meaningful to say that a person is the same person who has performed certain actions across time, even if the person in question has no memory of their past action, and so has no awareness of being the person who performed the act. ‘But though present consciousness of what we at present do and feel is necessary to our being the persons we now are; yet present consciousness of past actions or feelings is not necessary to our being the same persons who performed those actions or had those feelings.’79 Butler, as so often, has profoundly religious reasons for arguing this way: he wants to assert the truth of the Christian belief in life after death. The Dissertation opens with the question ‘whether we are to live in a future state’. Butler goes on to say that the discussion of personal identity in recent philosophy has the implication of making the inquiry on a future life ‘of no consequence at all’.80 He returns to this question at the end of the Dissertation, arguing that what matters is how we plan our life in the expectation of a further life to come.81 Penelhum notes that a religious believer will have a different conception of a person from an unbeliever, because this will be defined in relationship both to God and to a person’s future.82 8

Butler on ‘Superior Principles’

Butler argued that human nature expressed proportion and harmony when a person was virtuous. We have already mentioned his analogy of a watch, whose 76 Joseph Butler, Dissertation of Personal Identity, in The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London, 1736), paragraph 3. 77 Anders Jeffner, ‘Our Knowledge of Ourselves’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, p. 190. Butler, Dissertation of Personal Identity, paragraph 2. 78 Butler, Dissertation of Personal Identity, paragraph 7. 79 Butler, Dissertation of Personal Identity, paragraph 4. 80 Butler, Dissertation of Personal Identity, paragraph 1. 81 Butler, Dissertation of Personal Identity, paragraph 8. 82 Penelhum, Butler, p. 143. Donald L. M. Baxter, ‘Identity in the Loose and Popular Sense’, Mind 97 (1988), pp. 575–582.

84

Chapter 3

purpose is to tell the time. The system in a watch depends on the harmonious working of the parts which together tell the time. He elaborates further on his idea of proportion: The several appetites, passions, and particular affections  … are in proportion to each other. This proportion is just and perfect, when all those under principles are perfectly coincident with conscience, so far as their nature permits, and in all cases under its absolute and entire direction. The least excess or defect, the least alteration of the due proportions amongst themselves, or of their coincidence with conscience, though not proceeding into action, is some degree of disorder in the moral constitution.83 Butler is the moral theologian who is constantly aware of evil, writing on selfdeceit, anger, and selfishness. Therefore, he refers to ‘degrees of disorder’, and the breakdown of ‘the moral constitution’. Nevertheless, he is pastoral in his judgement on human nature. He continues in the same sermon: But perfection, though plainly intelligible and supposable, was never attained by any man. If the higher principle of reflection maintains its place, and as much as it can corrects that disorder, and hinders it from breaking out into action, this is all that can be expected in such a creature as man.84 The existence of the idea of proportion is the key to how human nature can be judged. The result of this judgement is that we form an opinion of someone’s character, and in particular how much they are guided by conscience: And though the appetites and passions have not their exact due proportion to each other; though they often strive for mastery with judgment and reflection: yet, since the superiority of this principle [i.e. conscience] to all others is the chief respect which forms the constitution, so far as this superiority is maintained, the character, the man, is good, worthy, virtuous.85

83 Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 2, footnote. 84 Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 2, footnote. 85 Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 2, footnote.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

85

What controls the disorder in human beings is the existence of what Butler calls ‘superior principles’. These are principles which enable human nature to step back from inflamed emotion and consider what the best action is to take. Superior principles have authority, rather than strength.86 The principle by which we survey, approve or disapprove our heart, temper and actions is not only to be considered as what is in its turn to have some influence; which may be said of every passion, of the lowest appetites: but likewise as being superior; as from its very nature manifestly claiming superiority over all others; insomuch that you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking in judgment, direction, superintendency. This is a constituent part of the idea, that is, of the faculty itself: and to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it.87 The authority of superior principles is given because they regulate our nature and allow it to be formed into proportion. As MacKinnon observes, for Butler human nature is created by God, so this is not a naturalistic, and non-theistic, ethic. However, it is also true that he does not justify his argument by appealing to divine commands directly, nor (as Locke does) to the expectation of future reward and punishment. There will be a future life where God will reward or punish, but moral authority for Butler rests in human nature. Human beings are a law to themselves, irrespective of rewards and punishments. ‘Your obligation to obey this law, is its being the law of your own nature.’88 Nor does Butler appeal directly to the sanction of Scripture, although each sermon has a text on which it is based. One such is Romans 2:15, where St Paul says that human beings are by nature a law to themselves. Butler ‘identifies guidance by law with acting on superior principles’.89 Conscience is the means of recognizing that law.90 Jeremy Worthen notes that this is a careful use of natural law: ‘The natural law according to the Sermons is a function of divinely structured human psychology.’ It is self-examination which lets us see its irreducible judgements.91 This harks back to Sanderson and Taylor, because Anglican moral theology in the previous century was based on a 86 Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 14. 87 Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 14. 88 Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 5. MacKinnon, Study in Ethical Theory, p. 195. 89 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 486. 90 Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraphs 8–9. 91 Worthen, ‘Joseph Butler on the Enemies of Virtue’, p. 50.

86

Chapter 3

careful self-examination of one’s moral character and past actions, in the light of the reading of Scripture. Without superior principles, we abandon morality and cannot decide between different actions except for our strength of feeling, ‘than which nothing can be reduced to a greater absurdity’.92 It is because of this that Butler abandons Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s moral sense school. MacKinnon describes Butler as placing himself in ‘an empiricism that is over-arched by belief in the reality of God, an acknowledgment of fact that is given a peculiar quality by being treated as an expression of a characteristically religious reverence’.93 A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue similarly argues that principles, ‘when fixed and habitual’, form human character.94 The recognition of character and responsibility, and the nature of desert, are essential to prove the nature of moral objectivity. Approval by conscience does not constitute the obligatory character of an action, but rather is the mark of an obligation. The obligation as such comes from our own nature. Christopher Cunliffe shows that a belief in God’s providential action was central to Butler: ‘His theological presuppositions – the existence of an ordered universe created by God and the existence of a future life – enable him to minimize the possibility of conflict between conscience and self-love, between duty and long-term self-interest.’95 Butler himself writes: Conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way. Duty and interest are perfectly coincident; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things.96 So, what are ‘superior principles’ for Butler? He mentions two: self-love and conscience. Butler prefers, in MacKinnon’s words, ‘a kind of tortuous thoroughness to rigour’. There is no systematic, rigorous account of human nature, but rather ‘a readiness to subordinate general principle to particular illuminations’.97 This means he returns again and again in his Sermons to elucidating the sources of authority that govern the complex reality which is human nature. 92 93 94 95 96 97

Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 17. MacKinnon, Study in Ethical Theory, p. 199. Butler, Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, paragraphs 2–4. Christopher Cunliffe, ‘Butler, Joseph’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 9. MacKinnon, Study in Ethical Theory, p. 193.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

9

87

Butler on Benevolence

What is not clear is the exact status of benevolence in Butler’s theory of moral philosophy. Benevolence can be both a ‘passion’ (emotion) and a principle. The crucial issue for him is the relationship of benevolence to the principle of self-love, the two being considered in proportion to one another. Sometimes benevolence will fulfil self-love, and sometimes self-love will need to restrain benevolence. This proportion will denominate men’s character as to virtue. Suppose then one man to have the principle of benevolence in a higher degree, than another; it will not follow from hence, that his general temper, or character, or actions, will be more benevolent than the other’s. For he may have self-love in such a degree as quite to prevail over benevolence.98 Butler therefore argues that benevolence can be pursued by human nature without it affecting one’s own good. ‘Benevolence and the pursuit of public good hath at least as great respect to self-love and the pursuit of private good, as any other particular passions, and their respective pursuits.’99 Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether benevolence is to be seen as a ‘superior principle’. Commentators are divided on this issue. Both T. A. Roberts and David McNaughton have a discussion of Butler’s lack of clarity at this point.100 Benevolence is a passion, like the other affections, concerned with the good of others for their own sake. But it is also ‘a principle in reasonable creatures and so to be directed by their reason, for reason and reflexion comes into our notion of a moral agent’.101 J. R. Lucas notes that Butler’s philosophy turns on the idea of human agency, and the imperative of decision, judgement and execution.102 On three occasions – in Sermons 5.2, 6.2, and 12.11 – he refers to benevolence in general terms. Sermon 5, ‘Upon Compassion’, refers to ‘the general affection of love and good-will, towards them [others]’. This sermon also speaks of ‘the settled and reasonable principle of benevolence’ (paragraph 10). By this Butler means that benevolence can assess other affections to reach its 98 Joseph Butler, Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 11. 99 Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 16. 100 Roberts, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii. David McNaughton, ‘Butler on Benevolence’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, pp. 269–291. Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 507–510. Penelhum, Butler, p. 80, argues for benevolence as a general principle. 101 Butler, Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 27. 102 Lucas, Butler’s Philosophy of Religion, p. 8.

88

Chapter 3

goal. Sermon 6, also entitled ‘Upon Compassion’, talks of ‘general good-will to his species’. Finally, in Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, Butler speaks of ‘the two general affections, benevolence and self-love’. Benevolence is like self-love in being a motive which only a rational being can have. Both also encourage action on desires and prohibit action on others. Furthermore, doing good to others, or benevolence, is not necessarily in conflict with self-love.103 However, in Sermon 12 Butler denies that benevolence can embrace the whole world. The ordinary person is concerned with the love of their neighbour. Furthermore, in Sermon 11, self-love is general because its object is the enjoyment of objects by affections in general, rather than the enjoyment of its object by some affections in particular. This is so because, as McNaughton points out, it is only the owner of happiness who can make this claim. Happiness is general from the point of view of its possessor. B’s happiness, sought through benevolence, is a first-order particular affection for A. So seeing benevolence as general is true neither in the sense that it embraces the whole of humanity (Butler doubts that is possible, except in a very vague manner), nor in the sense that it is part of our overall, second-order affection, as self-love clearly is. What can be maintained is that we can be concerned in general with another’s well-being.104 10

Butler on Self-Love

The conclusion of this argument is that benevolence is not a superior principle, unlike conscience and self-love, since, although it shares features with self-love, it does not have ‘authority to determine what its goals should be’. In Sermon 3, Butler explicitly says that ‘reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief or superior principles in the nature of man  … conscience and self-love if we understand our true happiness, always lead the same way’.105 He does not mention benevolence. It is certainly an important part of our nature, which will consider the well-being of others over a long period and assess how this is to be achieved. Nevertheless, benevolence can achieve this role under the guidance of conscience and paying due regard to our own self-love. We are left with self-love and conscience as superior principles. The role of self-love is to promote our true interests. This may be through various passions, but again self-love may need to restrain or prohibit the pursuit of them. Thus, 103 Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 16. 104 McNaughton, ‘Butler on Benevolence’, p. 273. 105 Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 9.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

89

self-love depends on achieving one’s aims and desires. ‘Happiness or satisfaction consists only in the enjoyment of those objects which are by nature suited to our several appetites, passions and affections.’106 In Sermon 11, self-love is the origin of the ‘general desire of his own happiness’. Butler says that this general desire ‘seems inseparable from all sensible creatures who can reflect upon themselves and their own interest or happiness’.107 Self-love has as its object something which is both internal and general, which is ‘our own happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction’. Butler contrasts this with particular affections, which are concerned with external objects. However, as McNaughton says, many particular affections or appetites can also have as their aim an internal change in their owner. For instance, the particular appetite of hunger is not simply food but the internal object of eating food, and feeling that the hunger has gone, or being in a certain state. For McNaughton, Butler’s mistake is to see desire as always having an object which is substantial and not also propositional: food is a substantial object, but to be replete can also be the object of desire, which is propositional, and Butler fails to mention this.108 Self-love, however, does not necessarily bring happiness. Happiness is the correspondence by human beings with God’s will for his creation – the conformity of human intention to teleological structure – and so it is the proper fulfilment of humankind. ‘The desire of happiness is no more the thing itself, than the desire of riches is the possession or enjoyment of them. People may love themselves with the most entire and unbounded affection, and yet be extremely miserable.’109 Conversely, ‘happiness consists in the gratification of certain affections, appetites, passions, with objects which are by nature adapted to them. Self-love may indeed set us open to work to gratify these: but happiness or enjoyment has no immediate connection with self-love but arises from such gratification alone.’110 Self-love involves not happiness but long-term self-interest, and is a proper part of the good character, unjustly maligned as selfishness. What can go wrong is misguided self-love, or unenlightened self-love.

106 Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 9. 107 Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 5. 108 McNaughton, ‘Butler on Benevolence’, p. 273. Other essays on Butler’s use of benevolence include Alan Millar, ‘Butler on God and Human Nature’, and R. G. Frey, ‘Butler, Self-Love and Benevolence’, both in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, pp. 293–316 and 243–268 respectively. 109 Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 9. 110 Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 16.

90 11

Chapter 3

Butler on Conscience

We move now to the second of Butler’s superior principles, which is that of conscience.111 Benevolence for him is not the whole of morality. Here he disagrees with Hutcheson, who made benevolence the foundation of morality, which in turn depended on the strength of the benevolent passion in different people.112 For Butler, conscience is the greatest superior principle. The authority of conscience is ‘a mark of how God intended our nature to be’, for conscience is ‘the guide assigned us by the Author of Nature’, and ‘that candle of the Lord within’.113 As Worthen puts it, in a succinct judgement, ‘God has willed us for the most part to live in blindness, but through conscience, through our sense of the demands of the good, he has allowed us a measure of sight.’114 For Butler, conscience was the link between humans and God because the authority of conscience ‘goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, which shall hereafter second and affirm its own’.115 Conscience can only be defined through the idea of direction and supremacy. Self-love may appear overwhelming, but the natural authority of the principle of reflection (which Butler uses synonymously with conscience) ‘is an obligation the most near and intimate, the most certain and known’.116 Conscience ‘plainly bears upon it marks of authority over all the rest and claims the absolute direction of them all’. The primary mistake which Shaftesbury makes, in Butler’s view, is to ignore the authority of conscience.117 Shaftesbury shows that virtue is the interest, or happiness, of human beings, but he has no answer to sceptics who put exceptions to him. Characteristicks only goes so far. There are four aspects 111 Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons’, Philosophy 27.103 (1952), pp. 329–344. 112 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, pp. 507–508, p. 522. Butler, Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, paragraph 8. Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1772; electronic reprint from the 4th edition, Thomson Gale, 2003). Amy M. Schmitter, ‘Francis Hutcheson on the Emotion’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2021 edition, https://plato.stan ford.edu/entries/emotions-17th18th/LD7Hutcheson.html. 113 Brian Hebblethwaite, ‘Butler on Conscience and Virtue’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, p. 203, citing Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraphs 5, 10, 16. 114 J. F. Worthen, ‘Joseph Butler’s Case for Virtue: Conscience as a Power of Sight in a Darkened World’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 23.2 (1995), pp. 239–265. See also Stephen Darwall, ‘Conscience as Self-Authorizing in Butler’s Ethics’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, pp. 209–242. 115 Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 8. 116 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 26. 117 Butler, ‘Preface’, paragraph 26.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

91

of conscience which Butler emphasizes. These are the supremacy of conscience; its reflective character, which he explains in Sermon 1; its relationship to the heart, and internal principles and feelings; and finally the fact that it is implanted by God.118 He takes as his text for Sermons 2 and 3 Romans 2:14, ‘For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law; these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves.’ In Sermon 2 he also comments upon the succeeding verse: ‘show the works of the law written in their hearts (καρδια), their conscience (συνειδησις) also bearing witness’.119 Reflection is not separate from sensation. Butler says in Sermon 2 that the heart refers to compassion and conscience to moral judgement. The heart receives and responds to sensations, which elicit a compassionate response. Sermon 12 also refers to the heart, when Butler speaks of affections, including rationality, constituting the heart as it is used in Scripture.120 There is therefore a close connection between affections, response to sense data and moral reflection, a connection that holds true for all the sermons. The law (the action of conscience) is indeed written in the heart: moral judgement and emotional response are for Butler inseparable, and neither takes precedence temporally, although conscience always has superiority morally, due to its oversight and final authority. Butler uses Shaftesbury’s pioneering work on moral affection but goes far beyond this moral sense theory. He avoids the term ‘moral sense’, and this is presumably deliberate. McNaughton claims that it is not the case that Butler holds that ‘moral requirements override prudential ones’. Instead he argues that, for Butler, the supremacy of conscience over self-love lies ‘in the immediacy and consequent certainty of the judgements of conscience’. This seems a strained reading of the authority of conscience, and an interpretation which allows self-love more authority than it has. McNaughton argues from the sentence ‘the certain obligation (conscience) would entirely supersede and destroy the uncertain one (the interest of happiness)’. It would seem rather than Butler is showing the advantage of the authority of conscience, which is its immediacy, rather than weighing up a set of probabilities as to how one should decide.121

118 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000), Vol. 2, pp. 217–220. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Everyman edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), Part II, Chapter 3, p. 53. 119 Butler, Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 8. 120 Butler, Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, paragraph 11. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 218–219. 121 McNaughton, ‘Butler on Benevolence’, p. 289.

92 12

Chapter 3

Butler on Self-Deceit

Yet the authority and judgements of conscience are often ignored. Butler returns to ‘that scorn which one sees rising upon the faces of people who are said to know the world, when mention is made of a disinterested, generous or public-spirited action’. Moral discipline is shunned by people, but Butler argues for a moral reformation. ‘How greatly we want it need not be proved to anyone who is acquainted with the great wickedness of mankind.’122 He knows that human beings deceive themselves on a regular basis: That which is called considering what is our duty in a particular case is very often nothing but endeavouring to explain it away. Thus those courses which, if men would fairly attend to the dictates of their own consciences, they would see to be corruption … are refined upon … and thus, every moral obligation whatever may be evaded.123 There is in a religious vision a ‘unity, even the substantial character, of that human life he must live under the guidance and authority of conscience’.124 What matters is that we do not deceive ourselves. If we do that we cease to be ‘reasonable creatures’. ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?’125 The reason given in Sermon 7, ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’, for why Balaam is corrupt is that he suppresses his conscience. It is the same argument in Sermon 10, ‘Upon Self-Deceit’, where King David seduces Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 12. It is true that in Sermon 10 Butler speaks of self-deceit as ‘a deep and calm source of delusion which  … corrupts conscience’. Brian Hebblethwaite correctly points out that for once Butler, the careful preacher, has let his rhetoric slip away from him. David himself was corrupted but his conscience was only buried, for conscience cannot be corrupted. Nathan rouses David’s conscience with his parable of the lamb. In Sermon 7, Butler is more careful. He speaks of ‘half-deceit’, ‘equivocation’ and ‘subterfuges’ as laying conscience asleep.126 The crucial point is that conscience cannot become corrupt, as the eminent 122 Butler, Analogy of Religion Part I, Chapter 5, p. 122. 123 Butler, Sermon 7, ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’, paragraph 14. 124 MacKinnon, Study in Ethical Theory, p. 197. 125 Butler, Sermon 7, ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’, paragraph 16. 126 Butler, Sermon 7, ‘Upon the Character of Balaam’, paragraph 10. Hebblethwaite, ‘Butler on Conscience and Virtue’, p. 201.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

93

moral philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argued in an influential paper.127 Butler states that virtue always has a prior claim upon us because we are God’s creatures, and we are saved by Christ.128 Conscience is ‘divine reason’, as well as moral sense.129 Once again, Butler uses theology to go beyond Shaftesbury. Butler sets aside the consequences of an action when examining moral discernment by conscience. Events may turn out well, but a corrupt person who is benevolent renders that action immoral. To take an example very familiar to me from my early working life as a curate in a parish, a well-known gangster in East London paid for a youth club as a way of helping young people in the area where he had grown up. When the gangster was convicted of murder, I remember that people were divided as to whether the action in setting up the youth club was an extenuating factor in judging his character. Butler would have had us look at his character, ‘abstracted from all consideration of the good or evil, which persons of such character have it actually in their power to do’. Such judgement implies ‘a sense of discernment of them as of good or ill desert’. The ‘nature and capacities of the agent’ are what matter.130 Lucas says that, as well as the importance of moral agency, there is the self-awareness of agency, and of intention. But there is also the search for truth. Truth engaged Butler so that he made inferential leaps in enquiry and judgement.131 Butler ends the Dissertation on Virtue by saying that ‘veracity as well as justice is to be our rule of life’.132 He quotes Ecclesiastes 12:13: ‘Fear God and keep his commandments: for this is the whole concern of man’. Worthen notes that Butler is deeply influenced not only by the theology but also by the rhetoric of Ecclesiastes: There is a sense in which Butler even recapitulates the rhetorical strategy of Ecclesiastes, at least as he understood it: the text begins by establishing the vanity of human endeavour and the limitations of the human condition; it circulates various responses to this predicament, all of which are shown to be unsatisfactory; and then it finally asserts the

127 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in Collected Papers Volume III: Ethics, Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 27. Hebblethwaite’s article engages with Anscombe. 128 Butler, Sermon 1, ‘Upon Human Nature’, paragraph 2. 129 Butler, Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, paragraph 1, uses all these terms. 130 Butler, Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, paragraphs 2–5. 131 Lucas, Butler’s Philosophy of Religion, p. 9. 132 Butler, Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, paragraph 11.

94

Chapter 3

one response that is adequate – fearing God and keeping his commandments. Ecclesiastes is not only a source, but also a model for the form of the discourse.133 13

The Significance of Butler

Butler’s significance was profound and, in many ways, he is a turning point for this book. Although I have emphasized how religious the early Enlightenment was, against those who have seen it as the inevitable precursor to secularism and the loss of religious belief, it remains true that there were many attacks during this period in England on orthodox Christianity in general, and on the Church of England in particular. This book has analysed the thought of Hobbes, Locke and Shaftesbury as three philosophers who in different ways challenged Christian orthodoxy. While Locke certainly saw himself as a devout Christian, his implicit Socinianism and his rationalism mean that he must be put with Hobbes and Shaftesbury in dissenting from traditional Christian orthodoxy. This chapter has shown how Butler carefully answered all three philosophers, while having considerable points of contact with both Locke and Shaftesbury. The result of Butler’s responses to these three philosophers was that his own work on the unity of human nature, and the intertwining of reason and emotion in making judgements, could come to the fore. So, too, did his work on probability as a method of reasoning, and his use of analogy. As in Sanderson and Taylor, the conscience becomes the central concept, and with it an ethic based on virtue, rather than deontology or consequentialism. Anglican moral theology now has an alternative to Thomism, while, as MacKinnon observes, Butler is deeply in the empiricist school even as he transcends Locke’s dependence on sense perception. Butler gave theology an account of ‘intrinsic value’ (to quote Geoffrey Hill, who is discussed below), while paying close attention to the contingencies of human life. Anglican moral theology regained the initiative and, although many continued to follow Locke, Shaftesbury and more sceptical deists, for the rest of the eighteenth century until David Hume, Butler’s intuitionism held the intellectual high ground. It is understandable, but regrettable, that he asked for all his papers to be destroyed at his death. Butler’s influence meant that until the twentieth century he was perhaps the dominant moral philosopher who was the constant yardstick for Anglican moral theology. Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement has a lengthy section on 133 Butler, Sermon 15, ‘Upon the Ignorance of Man’, paragraph 16. Worthen, ‘Joseph Butler’s Case for Virtue’, p. 255.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

95

Butler’s pre-eminence among Anglican evangelicals from the late eighteenth century until the first few decades of the nineteenth century.134 Jane Garnett’s magisterial chapter ‘Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist’ takes up the chronology from the 1850s, until the decade before the First World War, and a later article on Butler is included in a collection of essays on Newman.135 The relationship of Butler and Newman has also been analysed carefully by James Pereiro.136 What of the contemporary significance of Butler? Two theologians consider this in the tercentenary essays published in 1992. David Brown examines Butler’s use of analogy and our knowledge of God, while Basil Mitchell writes on Butler as a Christian apologist.137 Brown is striking in that he draws attention to the manner in which Butler did not simply argue from reason but included experience and feeling. Butler is part of a pattern found across the European Enlightenment, especially in France and Germany, where intuition and feeling provide alternative sources of knowledge.138 Butler’s principle of analogy allows for him a future world in which moral probation can be completed, thus paving the way for what is revealed in revelation. Furthermore, The Analogy of Religion shows that our inability to judge the pattern of revelation follows on from our lack of knowledge in predicting the pattern of the natural world.139 Brown builds on this a skilful argument for divine action which shows how Butler’s method, if not his actual arguments, can still be compelling today. Mitchell is aware of the dominance of the scientific method, including the study of the Bible. He nevertheless says that Butler can prove to be of use in treating Scripture according to authorial intention, without denying the advances in recent hermeneutics.140 134 Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Gisborne’s preference for Butler over Paley is discussed in Chapter 5. 135 Jane Garnett, ‘Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, pp. 63–96. Jane Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, in F. D. Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 135–153. 136 James Pereiro, Ethos, and the Oxford Movement: At the heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). P. H. Sedgwick, ‘The Character of Christ’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1984), is also on the relationship of Newman and Butler’s Rolls Sermons. 137 David Brown, ‘Butler and Deism’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, pp. 8–9. 138 Brown, ‘Butler and Deism’, pp. 8–9. 139 Brown, ‘Butler and Deism’, p. 18. 140 Basil Mitchell, ‘Butler as a Christian Apologist’, in Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, pp. 97–116.

96

Chapter 3

The final word on the permanent significance of Butler for Anglican moral theology lies with two lay Anglicans. One is the eminent poet and literary critic Sir Geoffrey Hill, who gave the Tanner Lectures in 2000 in Oxford, and who died in 2016.141 The other is one of the leading Anglican moral theologians in North America, Timothy Sedgwick. Both concentrate on the manner in which Butler treats of human nature, moral value and self-expression. Hill wrote of Butler, ‘His strength  – and in this he stands in the direct line: Hooker-through-Newman – is to comprehend and accept the intrinsic value of our self-realization in and through conscience as stemming directly from the implicated nature of our strength and frailty.’142 Hill continues, reflecting on Sermon 3: if I further conclude that a paradigm of ethical self-evaluation and affective acceptance is in being as Bishop Butler describes it; and that this paradigm in its bearing upon the world (as also in the world’s bearing upon it) is essentially the same today as it was in 1726: I have put myself in the position of being obligated to speak somewhat as I have spoken throughout this paper  … Butler’s argument offers more serrations and striations, more toehold and handhold for the resistant conscience of our imagination, than can be found in the arguments of any other eighteenth-century author – not excluding such a triumph of the moral imagination as Samuel Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage.143 The language is reminiscent of MacKinnon, and indeed Hill’s interlocutor at one point in these lectures is MacKinnon. Hill draws his lectures to a close with a question which he knows has no easy answer: The issue here, for Coleridge as for Butler and Leibniz and, albeit less happily, for Ruskin also, is whether the intrinsically of value can be, ought to be, made viable in and for the contingent world, the domain of worldly power and circumstance. In each case the answer – in principle – is yes; in practice the resolution is, in varying degrees and for various reasons, less than perfect.144 141 Kenneth Haynes, ‘Hill, Sir Geoffrey’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Geoffrey Hill, Rhetorics of Value: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Brasenose College, Oxford, 6–7 March 2000, https://tannerlectures .utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/h/Hill_01.pdf. 142 Hill, Rhetorics of Value, p. 267. 143 Hill, Rhetorics of Value, p. 267. 144 Hill, Rhetorics of Value, p. 281.

Joseph Butler ’ s Rolls Sermons

97

If we turn to Timothy Sedgwick, his appreciation of Butler lies in his sophisticated moral psychology: The moral life requires a theological ground, and that ground is the love of God for God’s sake and not for narrow claims of human betterment or fulfillment. Such love displaces the self from the center of the world and opens the self to God and others. Again, Christ is the exemplar and reveals the kenotic character of ethics. What is distinctive, however, about Butler’s virtue ethic is his development of a moral psychology. He offers a description of primary human emotions and how they may be addressed in terms of larger purposes, for good or ill. Such a description of Christian faith as a way of life is both an apology for Christian faith and a virtue ethic that focuses on intention and leads to specific acts and practices.145 Why then should Butler matter for the twenty-first century in presenting a moral theology that can resource Anglicanism as it deals with the increasingly secularized Western culture of the early twenty-first century? Sedgwick provides a convincing answer: ‘What is central to raising such questions and drawing these works together in terms of a unified account of the Christian moral life is continued attention to the Anglican moral traditions, and specifically to the Anglican exemplary tradition. This conversation with tradition prevents contemporary theory from narrowly defining the constructive questions and resources for Christian ethics’.146 Another approach, which would need far more space than can be given here, is how modern psychology supports Butler’s treatment of the affections.147 Arthur Dyck and Carlos Padilla discuss the phenomenon of empathy, and how this can be lost by brain injury: ‘What such individuals lack are the emotions of caring about themselves and others, emotions essential for being morally responsible. Butler clearly recognized and described these empathic emotions 145 Timothy Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), p. 223. 146 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 231. 147 Arthur J. Dyck and Carlos Padilla, ‘The Empathetic Emotions and Self-Love in Bishop Butler’s Sermons and the Neurosciences’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37.4 (2009), pp. 577–612. See also the introductory essay, Arthur Dyck, ‘Christian Ethics in the TwentyFirst Century: New Directions’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37.4 (2009), pp. 565–575, esp. pp. 568–570. There is also the article by Sarah Moses in the same edition of this journal: ‘Keeping the Heart: Natural Affection in Joseph Butler’s Approach to Virtue’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37.4 (2009), pp. 613–629.

98

Chapter 3

in his discussions of self-love, sympathy, and compassion’.148 They discuss Sermons 5 and 6, ‘Upon Compassion’, and draw attention to the careful way Butler delineates the perceptual element in feeling compassion.149 Butler uses all three terms employed by contemporary psychologists to describe empathy: empathic accuracy, sympathy and compassion. Their final observation is important: ‘what is so remarkable about Bishop Butler is that he, as an eighteenth-century Christian ethicist, had so much to say that current moral philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists would do well to study, incorporate, and expand upon his insights into the empathic emotions’.150 Newberry likewise shows how contemporary moral philosophers could learn from Butler on the nature of forgiveness as a moral action rather than an emotion.151 As we come to the chapters in this book which describe moral theology in the middle of the eighteenth century, my contention is that Butler enabled Anglican moral theology to regain a sense of its self-confidence and inner coherence after the attacks on casuistry in the late seventeenth century, the combative arguments of the early Enlightenment in England on Christian orthodoxy, and the need to provide an answer to the hedonism and wealth of English culture and society. It is true that the Thomist sophistication of moral psychology is lost in Butler’s reworking of English empiricism, as it was across English moral thought for a lengthy period. There is no trace of this method in the Anglican Newman, and it only emerged in the early twentieth century with Kenneth Kirk. Perhaps it is irreconcilable with the more inductive and intuitive moral theology espoused by Butler. Nevertheless, Butler’s achievement is of enormous value. The Sermons and the Analogy (which we have not considered) mark a turning point in the genealogy of this book. Similar crucial turning points will occur with Maurice in mid-Victorian England and the rise of Anglican Idealism at the end of the nineteenth century. For now, we turn to the quite different, morally rigorous, writing of William Law. 148 Dyck and Padilla, ‘Empathetic Emotions’, p. 578. 149 Dyck and Padilla, ‘Empathetic Emotions’, p. 581. 150 Dyck and Padilla, ‘Empathetic Emotions’, p. 610. 151 Newberry, ‘Joseph Butler on Forgiveness’, p. 241.

Chapter 4

William Law 1

Introduction

William Law is usually referred to as a writer of Anglican spirituality and not moral theology, because he wrote one of the classics of Anglican spirituality, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which sold in great numbers, and which deeply influenced John Wesley. John Keble, too, admired it, although he disapproved of Law’s austerity, and there are two famous anecdotes about Keble’s veneration for William Law. First, he kept his copy of Law’s A Serious Call in a drawer for the sake of reverence for its contents. Secondly, he had an argument with one of his colleagues in the Oxford Movement about it, after Hurrell Froude had called the book ‘ clever’, to which Keble replied that this was as if ‘you had said the Day of Judgement will be a pretty sight’.1 Law later became one of those deeply affected by the mystical pietism of the seventeenth-century German Jacob Boehme, a move which caused Wesley to repudiate him. This chapter will argue that Law is someone who should also have a prominent place in a history of Anglican moral theology. This is the case for quite other reasons than his writing on spirituality, because he stands as an example of a counter-cultural Christian ethic, both in political theology and in his own personal life, while being a brilliant prose writer and a fierce controversialist. There are studies of Law in English literature as well as theology.2 He was not someone who developed a moral theory but rather illustrated the importance of living out his severe moral ethic by many examples in his writing, as well as showing this in his own personal and communal life. In this chapter the complexity of Law will be considered, because, even as a student at Cambridge, he turned away from the dominant political orthodoxy. Nevertheless, he continued to read the latest philosophical and literary works, which contained deep challenges to orthodox Christianity, and rapidly established himself as someone who understood but strongly disagreed with the developments in moral and social philosophy after Shaftesbury, although 1 Allan Ledger, A Moment in Time: John and Thomas Keble and Their Cotswold Life (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2021). 2 John Hoyles, The Edges of Augustanism: The Aesthetics of Spirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William Law (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972). A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume IX: From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933).

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_006

100

Chapter 4

he certainly employed the ‘moral sense epistemology’ just as Butler had done. He used his understanding of ‘affections’ to argue a moral case, employing this against Bernard Mandeville, and more positively in A Serious Call. What is truly original is that he used his skill in rhetoric and literary construction to counter his opponents. What is also original is that he then advocated a withdrawal from the ecclesiastical and academic life of Georgian England and formed his own community in a small village far from London. Law knew and understood the intellectual and cultural changes of his day very well, and his response to this can be described as counter-cultural, advocating a communal life of disciplined prayer, centred on a daily liturgy, with his community dispersing the wealth of its members to those in need. He lived this vision out in a small village in England, completely removed from the vitality of the capital or the universities, where he had once been a central figure. Even in his life as someone who had withdrawn from the academic and ecclesiastical life of the eighteenth century, he continued to write and publish until his death, because he was not a recluse and enjoyed visitors throughout his life, while engaging in fierce arguments theologically and culturally. His biographer described him as ‘stout with broad shoulders and a ruddy complexion, cheerful and warm-hearted, but not remarkable for meekness’.3 There is no one else similar to Law in this study of Anglican moral theology. 2

Law’s Life

Law was born in 1686 as the son of a grocer in King’s Cliffe, a small village in Northamptonshire, in the Midlands; he returned to this village, and the house left to him by his father, in 1740, and died there in 1761.4 Law was one of eleven children, and quite poor, so when he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1705, he became a sizar – someone who had to undertake duties as a servant at the college in return for reduced fees. Emmanuel had been a strongly Puritan college since its foundation in the sixteenth century. It had, however, become broader since the 1630s, with the influence of some of its Fellows, who belonged to the Cambridge Platonists, such as Ralph Cudworth, and who gave it a different Christian ethos.5 William Sancroft, the Archbishop 3 C. Bigg, ‘Introduction’, in William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: Methuen, 1899; 1st edition 1729). 4 Isabel Rivers, ‘Law, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2004). 5 ‘Cambridge Platonists at Cambridge Colleges’, https://cprg.hypotheses.org/who-were-the -cambridge-platonists/cambridge-platonists-at-cambridge-colleges.

William Law

101

of Canterbury, who became a non-juror, had been its Master, and fostered its spiritual life. He moved the college away from its Puritan foundation to a much more High Church ethos, which deeply affected Law, who graduated in 1708 and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in the same year. Law was elected to a Fellowship in his old college in 1711, and also made assistant curate at Haslingfield (a village near Cambridge) in 1711, but in 1713 he made a speech supporting the Pretender to the English throne, James Stuart, son of the deposed James II, who had died in 1701, which caused him to be degraded from his degree, and he appeared before the Vice-Chancellor. He was pardoned after promising not to repeat the offence. Law was appointed a university lecturer in rhetoric in 1715, and was seen as a rising star in university life at the age of twenty-nine, which could easily have led him to become a dean or even a bishop. In 1716 Law’s academic career abruptly ended, because George I had become the monarch in 1714 but Law refused to take the oath of allegiance to him, which meant he had to leave Emmanuel College as a Fellow. He apologized to his brother for the impact on the family income but said his conscience would not let him act differently. His life immediately after this is not known, but he may have become an assistant curate, presumably to a non-juring congregation, in London. In 1717 he denounced in print the Bishop of Bangor, Benjamin Hoadly, for his views on church and state, which brought Law national prominence, with his writings being republished at the end of the nineteenth century by Charles Gore, who is the subject of a later chapter. By 1723 he had become a private tutor in the household of the Gibbon family, who were living in Putney (then just outside London) and who were a wealthy family, holding political views which were Tory, even Jacobite.6 The senior Gibbon, his son and the grandson were all called Edward; the grandson became the famous historian. During the time he was a private tutor, Law was also made a priest in the non-juring church. He stayed with the Gibbon family until the death of Edward Gibbon senior in 1737, when Law was fifty-one. In 1740 he moved back to his native village, and the house he had inherited from his father, where he was joined by Hester Gibbon, sister of the young man he had tutored, and Elizabeth Hutcheson, who was the wealthy widow of an MP. The joint income of this group was about £3,000, which the UK National Archives estimates as having a purchasing power today of £350,000, or over a hundred times the value in the mid-eighteenth century. Isabel Rivers writes ‘Here for the rest of his life he put his precepts into practice by living a life of charity, celibacy, prayer, study, 6 Wandsworth Historical Society, ‘William Law: A Forgotten Resident of Putney’, 1989, https:// www.wandsworthhistory.org.uk/historian/articles/Wm_Law.pdf’.

102

Chapter 4

and writing. Despite his non-juring status he was always a regular attender at church’.7 Law did not, however, lead any worship, for he was not ordained a priest in the Church of England. He founded several charities, schools and almshouses, and left strict instructions for the conduct of these charities and institutions. The community was well regarded in the small village of King’s Cliffe, although the rector preached against Law’s generosity to beggars, whom the rector called miscreants. Law kept in touch with national cultural life through his many visitors. He continued to lead his community and published constantly, remaining active until his death in 1761, aged seventy-five. From 1717, when he first attacked the Bishop of Bangor, until his death in 1761, Law was well known for his writing and his theology – a remarkable career spanning forty-four years of controversy and writing, in which he was a widely regarded exponent of High Church Anglicanism, transcending his non-juring status. 3

Law as a Non-Juror

As described above, Law was one of those who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the monarchy in 1716. The crisis of monarchical legitimacy in England began after James II left England in the political crisis of 1688, being succeeded by his daughter Mary and her husband (also her cousin), William of Orange.8 Those who were committed to the divine right of kings as part of their political but also theological views could not accept another monarch after James fled the country. Padley describes the doctrine as having theological and political dimensions. It was: a High Church Tory attachment to the Divine Right of Kings, a central and multi-faceted doctrine of the early modern Church and State. The idea that kingship was God-given rested on the twin pillars of providence and legitimacy. On the one hand God could be seen setting up rulers by his overarching will and power. On the other, kings enjoyed Divine Right because God blessed the lineal descent of their crowns. Both these strands are visible in the tradition of the Church of England; they worked alongside and reinforced one another.9 7 Rivers, ‘Law, William’. 8 W. A. Speck, ‘James II’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. W. A. Speck, ‘Mary II’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 9 Kenneth Padley, ‘Rendering unto Caesar in the Age of Revolution: William Sherlock and William of Orange’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 59.4 (2008), p. 683.

William Law

103

Clergy, and other public office-holders such as MPs, members of the two universities and the judiciary, were required to swear an oath of allegiance after the revolution of 1688 to William III and his wife, Mary II.10 Those who refused became known as ‘non-jurors’, from the Latin iuro, ‘to swear’.11 Their allegiance lay with James and his successors and so they were also known as Jacobites. It was not simply that those who would not swear the oath had objections to the monarchy of William III. They also denied the right of the state to expel bishops from the church for not taking the oath, and their denial vindicated their High Church ecclesiology.12 They were seen by the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century as the link between that movement and the Caroline theologians such as Bishops Taylor and Cosin. Indeed, Thornton describes Law’s A Serious Call as having ‘the rigour of the best Caroline moral theology’.13 All of them appealed to a patristic emphasis, Eucharistic devotion and a clear moral theology, even if the Thomism of Taylor and Sanderson did not survive the seventeenth century.14 William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had opposed the attempts by James II to advance Roman Catholicism, and who had been committed to the Tower of London by James, found himself also unable to accept the succession of James by Mary: ‘Having solemnly sworn allegiance before God to King James, on whose head he had set the crown, Sancroft did not think himself free, in conscience, to transfer his loyalty to another’.15 Sancroft was suspended with five bishops and about four hundred clergy. His biographer writes: Remaining true to his passive principles, Sancroft refused to be drawn into political conspiracy, albeit an ardent Jacobite. Believing the Williamite 10 Andrew Starkie, ‘William Law and Cambridge Jacobitism, 1713–1716’, Historical Research 75.190 (2002), p. 450, on Cambridge college Fellows and the issue of taking the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. 11 C. D. A. Leighton, ‘The Non-Jurors and Their History’, Journal of Religious History 29.3 (2005), pp. 241–257. C. D. A. Leighton, ‘The Nonjurors and the Counter Enlightenment: Some Illustration’, Journal of Religious History 22.3 (1998), pp. 270–286. 12 Leighton, ‘Non-Jurors and Their History’, p. 246, on Henry Dodwell’s De Nupero Schismate Anglicano Paranesis as a defence of their position. 13 Paul Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London: T&T Clark, 2014), p. 292, on Law’s mediation of Taylor to the Oxford Movement. Martin Thornton, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology According to the English Pastoral Tradition (London: SPCK, 1963), p. 283. 14 Robert Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic: The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglican and Non-Juror Thought (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993). 15 R. A. P. J. Beddard, ‘Sancroft, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

104

Chapter 4

church to be schismatic, he refused to communicate in its prayers and sacraments, and officiated as his own chaplain. He took great pains to continue the remnant of ‘the true Church of England’ loyal to James II and the house of Stuart. On 9 February 1691 he delegated his archiepiscopal powers to William Lloyd, the deprived bishop of Norwich, and gave his wholehearted support to the consecration of new bishops, whose names were dutifully submitted to the exiled king for approval.16 In the eighteenth century there were therefore three Anglican groups in England. First, there was the established Church of England; secondly, there were those who accepted the Anglican episcopate and were part of the Church of England, but who would not take the oath of allegiance to the monarch and so were restricted in their career; thirdly, there were those who were under an alternative episcopate and formed their own church, one of whom was William Law. Some moved between these positions over time, or indeed within a single year, as the case of William Sherlock shows, and Law himself had accepted the Anglican episcopate when he was ordained deacon, hoping that he would never have to take the oath of allegiance to the monarch.17 Equally, the nonjurors differed in their attitudes towards the Church of England. Some continued to worship within the established church, while others worshipped separately in private non-juring chapels. Samuel Johnson, who was a non-juror, defined this last group as ‘those who refused to communicate with the Church of England, or to be present at any worship where the usurper was mentioned as king’.18 Johnson was influenced by Law’s Serious Call as a student, and read the book a year after its publication.19 Law’s own position is paradoxical. He was made a deacon in the Church of England although his Jacobite sympathies were known. As described above, he nearly lost his degree because of his views. Why did it then take until 1716 for him to refuse allegiance to the new king, George I? Starkie describes the ambiguity of the period 1700–1714. Many who could not accept Mary nevertheless regarded her sister, Anne, who became queen in 1702, as a regent for James II’s son, James Francis Stuart, who was born in 1688. This group were prepared to accept the monarchy in the hope that the queen would be succeeded by

16 Beddard, ‘Sancroft, William’. 17 Padley, ‘Rendering unto Caesar’. 18 Matthew W. Davis, ‘“Ask for the old paths”: Johnson and the Nonjurors ‘, in J. C. D. Clark (ed.), The Politics of Samuel Johnson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 112. 19 Katharine C. Balderston, ‘Doctor Johnson and William Law’, PMLA 75.4 (1960), pp. 382–383.

William Law

105

James II’s son.20 This did not happen, and the succession passed to a German Protestant family in Hanover who were descended from James I. The support for a schismatic church of Jacobites was highly political, as is shown by a later non-juring bishop, Thomas Deacon, who was a close friend of Law and who had three sons who took part in the unsuccessful 1745 rebellion to place Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of James II, on the throne. One was executed, one died in prison and one was deported for life. Law, however, felt he had no choice even if politically he was seen as a potential threat. His conscience was certain on how he should act, although personally he always advocated a politically quiescent resignation to the existing government. ‘Cultivation of a scrupulous conscience was a key element in High Church Piety, particularly as it was linked to ucharistic devotion.’21 As Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and one of the original non-jurors, wrote in his hymn still sung by generations of Anglicans, Let all thy converse be sincere Thy conscience as the noonday clear, Think how all-seeing God thy ways And all thy secret thoughts surveys.22 The distinguished legal historian Sir Frederick Pollock explains what happened in the period 1714–1716: The accession of George I, in 1714, gave occasion for a full re-enactment of the oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration, in what would now be called a consolidating act.23 All persons holding civil or military office, members of foundations at the universities, schoolmasters, ‘preachers and teachers of separate congregations’, and legal practitioners, were required to take the oaths.24

20 Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 461. Edward Gregg, ‘Stuart, James Francis Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Edward Gregg, ‘Anne’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 21 Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 450. 22 The hymn was also sung by one of the characters in George Eliot’s Adam Bede: see Samuel J. Rogal, ‘Hymns in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 29.2 (1974), pp. 178–179. 23 1 Geo. i st. 2 c. 13. 24 Frederick Pollock, ‘Oath of Allegiance’, available at https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages /pollock-on-the-oath-of-allegiance-in-english-history.

106

Chapter 4

A significant number of Cambridge Fellows had managed somehow to survive until 1716, losing their parish livings, but keeping their fellowships, while avoiding taking the oath of allegiance. Now they were caught, and there was a purge of Fellows, including Law himself. Law could not accept ‘mental reservation’ in taking an oath, unlike some Tories, and this was a tribute to his view of conscience, and also an echo of the writing on oaths by Sanderson and Taylor in the previous century.25 The taking of oaths was not simply a matter of political or social philosophy for moral theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but was seen as central to moral theology, being a matter of both character and moral integrity. By 1700, in an age known for its moral laxity, ‘the non-Jurors and Jacobites [were] … the last groups to have crises of conscience about oath-swearing’.26 Law was the most theologically distinguished of this group, but it cost him his university and clerical career, which was a very heavy price to pay. By 1725 he was attending the consecration of the non-juring bishop Henry Hall.27 Law later took services as a priest in a non-juring church, although in Kings Cliffe he worshipped in the parish church of the Church of England as a layperson. This shows the complexity of his life, since Law always refused to lead a congregation in prayers for the Hanoverian monarchy, but would attend as a layperson. The non-jurors continued to have a presence in Anglican life until the early nineteenth century and were influential in many ways. It is important to show the relationship of the non-jurors’ liturgical beliefs to their moral theology. Jeremy Taylor had related the doctrine of the Spirit in the Eucharist to his moral theology in the late seventeenth century, viewing the Eucharistic sacrifice of the church as lived out in the life of the person, following Romans 12:1, and the non-jurors saw their moral theology in a similar sacramental way.28 Liturgically, they divided themselves over the restoration of previous elements of the liturgy. Those who sought such restoration, such as Bishop Deacon, were known as the usagers, from previous ‘usage’. This group wanted restoration of elements of the 1549 prayer book, with prayers for the dead, a mixed chalice and an epiclesis (invocation of the Holy Spirit on the elements of bread and wine) in the Eucharistic prayer. These elements mattered 25 Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 467. Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018), on the Anglican theologians who wrote at length on oath-taking: Perkins (pp. 191, 194), Sanderson (pp. 300–306), Hammond (pp. 313–316) and Taylor (p. 327). 26 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 351. 27 John William Klein, ‘The Mental Universe of the English Nonjurors’ (Ph.D. thesis, Auburn University, AL, 2015), p. 197. 28 Timothy Sedgwick, Sacramental Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1987), is a contemporary exponent of this view.

William Law

107

for moral theology, because prayers for the dead meant that an individual’s growth in holiness was seen to continue after their death though purgatory, while the liturgical emphasis on the Eucharist was part of a theology that saw the Eucharist as nourishing the life of faith, as in the Anglican exemplary tradition, where the invocation of the Holy Spirit over the elements was also a means of uniting the believer with the Trinity in their moral life, thus fashioning a sacramental, or liturgical, moral theology. This was an attempt to make both Anglican liturgy and moral theology more Catholic, through placing great emphasis on the writings of the patristic church, while the non-jurors’ defence both of the Fathers and of tradition as a crucial source of authority was an important influence on the Oxford Movement. ‘The Oxford Movement itself recognized the Tory Anglicans of the eighteenth century, and especially the non-jurors, as their ancestors in the faith.’29 They also sought some reconciliation with the Greek Orthodox Church, because some of them had been chaplains in the Middle East, with experience of Orthodoxy at first hand, but this strategy was unsuccessful.30 As the non-jurors died out, or were deprived of their parishes, they declined in influence. J. C. D. Clark’s English Society has extensive reference to the Jacobite movement, which was one of the components of political conservatism, or Toryism, in the eighteenth century, and its relationship to the non-jurors.31 Nevertheless, there was also a great tension, since the Church of England legitimized the monarch as God’s anointed, and so existing by the will of providence, because of hereditary descent. However, the Stuart dynasty in exile, although claiming direct lineage from James I and Charles I, was now Roman Catholic; all attempts to make the Stuart dynasty change their religion came to nothing.32 4

Law as Controversialist: Hoadly

‘The characteristic stance of the non-jurors was one of unyielding confrontation as a means of dealing with a society increasingly permeated by a preference for 29

Robert Cornwall, ‘The Search for the Primitive Church: The Use of Early Church Fathers in the High Church Anglican Tradition, 1680–1745’, Anglican and Episcopal History 59.3 (1990), p. 328. 30 Klein, ‘Mental Universe’, pp. 283–295. Judith Pinnington, Anglicans and Orthodox: Unity and Subversion, 1559–1725 (Leominster: Gracewing, 2003), p. 156. 31 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge University Press, 1985; 2nd edition 2000), pp. 84–85, 136–137, 285–286, 302–303, 347–348. 32 Clark, English Society, p. 89.

108

Chapter 4

private over ecclesiastical judgement, and in consequence lapsing into doctrinal indifferentism.’33 This description of non-juring polemic describes many of the non-jurors, including Henry Dodwell and William Law. Law was one of the finest prose writers of his time, using his literary skill to demolish the views of those he disagreed with and saw as threats to the church. Avis describes him as a ‘formidable antagonist, and no unorthodox opponent was safe from attack’.34 Law engaged in a series of intellectual debates with many opponents. In particular he attacked Bishop Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, for his views on ecclesiology, the power of the state over the church, and his very ‘Low Church’ understanding of the sacraments.35 Hoadly followed Locke’s views on tolerance and individual belief, and Law refused to accept this.36 However, Hoadly allowed the state virtually unrestricted power, as being almost of divine origin. ‘In this respect, Hoadly differed fundamentally from John Locke, for whom all State authority was human and strictly limited.’37 Hoadly wanted to include dissenters in a national church. His ‘theology was therefore firmly grounded in both scripture and the English protestant anti-Calvinist tradition. He was no deist, despite the claims of some contemporaries and later commentators.’38 Hoadly said that the state had the power to deprive non-juring bishops of their sees, as had happened in 1689, and he followed this claim with a sermon in 1717, The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ, which denied the authority of the church as a judge over the individual conscience. Law responded with Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, arguing that Hoadly’s belief that sincerity was all that mattered ‘made the truth or falsehood of belief irrelevant and placed all religions on the same level with respect to salvation’.39 33 Leighton, ‘Non-Jurors and Their History’, p. 247. 34 Avis, In Search of Authority, p. 291. 35 Andrew Starkie, The Church of England, and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 (Wood­ bridge: Boydell, 2007). Susan Rutherford, ‘Reformation Principles: The Religious and Poli­ tical Ideas of Benjamin Hoadly 1676–1761’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Northumbria, 2000). Susan Rutherford, ‘Benjamin Hoadly: Sacramental Tests and Eucharistic Thought in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Anglican and Episcopal History 71.4 (2002), pp. 473–497. 36 William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate Benjamin Hoadly, 1676–1761 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2004). Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment, p 218, on Hoadly as being ‘on the left wing of the Anglican Enlightenment’. 37 Paul Monod, ‘Review of William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate’, H-Net, 2007, https:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13524. Monod argues that Hoadly’s views resem­­ bled Pufendorf’s, discussed in Chapter 3, where moral decisions were made by the individual or the state without regard to theology. Monod argues that Gibson’s book underplays this part of Hoadly’s beliefs. 38 Stephen Taylor, ‘Hoadly, Benjamin’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 39 Taylor, ‘Hoadly, Benjamin’.

William Law

109

Law was also deeply worried about Hoadly’s belief in the power of the state over the church, and Charles Gore republished the Three Letters in 1891 because Gore felt that Law was a theologian who was brilliant in ‘convicting the Bishop of loose thought and language, inconsistency with himself, inconsistency between his civil and ecclesiastical principles in the economy of authority, inconsistency between his own opinions and the language of the Church which he is bound to use’.40 Gore argued that Law believed ‘without any hesitation the necessity of the episcopal succession and of communion with the visible Church’.41 I have already said that Law took the belief in the importance of ecclesial judgement and handed this onto the Oxford Movement. The republication of Law’s 1717–1719 letters in 1891 is a powerful example of just how much Law also influenced the late nineteenth-century High Church theologian Gore. 5

Law as Controversialist: Mandeville

In 1724 Law engaged in a second controversy in moral theology, this time attacking those who saw morality as having no final authority but only serving to promote personal satisfaction, a position known as hedonism, arguing for the beneficial effect of the pursuit of private interest. Law engaged with the well-known intellectual Bernard (de) Mandeville (1670–1733), who had published The Fable of the Bees in 1714 as a witty demonstration that vice promotes society, and virtue diminishes this. The book was based on a 1705 poem The Grumbling Hive, where a community of bees resembled human society. It was anti-clerical but also cynical, mocking social morality of any kind. The bees managed to live in prosperity because their self-interest, vanity and corruption had the effect of stimulating the economy of the hive: ‘Luxury / Employ’d a Million of the Poor, / And odious Pride a Million more.’ The various trades and professions of the bees were drolly described, along with their related vices. … At the end of the poem the bees were morally reformed by the intervention of Jove, and the economy of the hive, without the stimulus of vanity and greed, collapsed. The hive

40 Charles Gore, ‘Preface’, in J. O. Nash and Charles Gore (eds), William Law’s Defence of Church Principles: Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, 1717–1719 (London: Griffith Farran, 1891). 41 Gore, ‘Preface’.

110

Chapter 4

was unable to maintain its standard of living or defend itself against its external enemies.42 Mandeville republished his satire in 1723, but this time he enlarged it and mocked charity schools, since he had developed the contemporary interest in the passions, or emotions, arguing that human beings were intrinsically selfish. Social morality was entirely a fiction designed by politicians which appealed to pride and flattery, and moral virtue was entirely illusory, although human beings could be persuaded by those in authority into subordinating their selfinterest to social morality. Mandeville claimed that ‘the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride’.43 He argued that vice in fact created much more prosperity, advocating brothels run by the government, although it was necessary that social institutions were developed. This argument appears similar to the post-modern theory that every social institution and moral value were only human contrivances, which those in power knew to be illusory, but which served their purposes. Law’s response was to publish in the next year, 1724, Some Remarks upon a late Book, entitled, The Fable of the Bees. Starkie notes that he replied in kind to Mandeville: Any examination of Law’s work in this period must recognise that, as a controversial writer, Law was intending to occupy the public space inhabited by the ‘wits’ and men of letters such as Mandeville … he was as adept as any of his literary contemporaries at both deconstructing and employing the arts of rhetoric within the literary culture of the popular pamphlet.44 Law did not appeal to Christian theology or the judgement of the church, for his onslaught on Mandeville used rational arguments and maintained that social morality was no fiction. Mandeville’s main strategy was to use ridicule against human nature, seeing human beings as proud and fundamentally irrational, and while Law conceded that human nature could be governed by animal passions, he said that reason could restrain and guide human nature. Law argued on two fronts, saying first that reason could discern the nature of the universe as an objective reality through sense data, and secondly that reason could intuit our innate ideas and so attain objective truth, thus combining both 42 Andrew Starkie, ‘William Law and The Fable of the Bees’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.3 (2009), p. 308. 43 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London: Edmund Parker, 1723). 44 Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 309.

William Law

111

empiricism and intuition in his epistemology. ‘Were not the first Principles and Reasons of Morality Connatural to us, and essential to our Minds, there would have been nothing for the Moral Philosophers to have improv’d upon.’45 As Starkie puts it, ‘Law invoked Newtonian discoveries to demonstrate the existence of an ordered universe, both materially and morally.’46 Law also employed wit against Mandeville. He turned Mandeville’s belief that human nature was governed by passions against him. ‘Surely this Defi­ nition is too General, because it seems to suit a Wolf or a Bear, as exactly as yourself, or a Grecian Philosopher.’47 He was also frequently ironic, mocking Mandeville’s use of the imagination. For Law, our greatest happiness lies in fulfilling our rational nature as made by God. Starkie sums up the importance of his response to Mandeville in moral theology: ‘Law’s Remarks is about the function of the imagination, but it is also an imaginative work itself. It emphasises the intimate relationship between mind and body in determining moral action, and it imitates that relationship in intimately uniting reason and rhetoric.’48 Law would move on to the training of the passions, and the religious affections, in defending moral realism in A Serious Call, but the controversy with Mandeville shows that he was well aware of Shaftesbury’s moral sense epistemology, employing it to show that our feelings and imagination are a guide to understanding what the nature of reality is. Law’s central belief was that ‘a creature of such a form should exercise its instincts and passions in conformity to Reason’.49 Here there is a clear similarity with Butler’s Sermons, although what distinguished Law from Butler was his stress on training the religious affections and imagination in a rigorous Christian ethic. ‘Law was not just attacking Mandeville’s position; he was also maintaining the practical relevance of training the imagination against the charge of mere formalism.’50 6

A Serious Call: Vocation

Law wrote at length on the vocation of the Christian life, and there was precedent for this in Anglican moral theology, since at the end of the sixteenth 45 46 47 48 49 50

William Law, Remarks upon a Late Book Entitled The Fable of the Bees (London: William and John Innys, 1724, available from Gale Eighteenth Century Collection Online Print Edition, 2018), p. 19. Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 311. Law, Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees, p. 4. Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 317. Law, Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees, p. 35. Starkie, ‘William Law’, p. 317.

112

Chapter 4

century William Perkins had published A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of Men, with the Sorts and Kinds of Them, and the Right Use Thereof.51 This was a study of how the practice of the Christian life was an integral part of salvation, where Perkins argued for the centrality of vocation as the way in which God called human beings to practice their Christian life.52 ‘God hath ordained and disposed all callings, and in his providence designed the persons to bear them.’53 Perkins cited William Tyndale directly with his Exposition on Matthew, which itself was influenced strongly by Luther. The Christian vocation is to be part of a family, and to either exercise or be submissive to authority, or in some cases to do both.54 The doctrine of vocation is also found in Robert Sanderson’s moral theology, where sanctification is carried on by the exercise of daily life.55 Law was therefore standing in a long Anglican tradition when he introduced the idea of vocation in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. The book was published in 1728, and it was reprinted continuously in the eighteenth century, having great influence on Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, among others. It may justly be regarded as a masterpiece for two reasons. First, the theology and spirituality is carefully worked out and expounded chapter by chapter. Secondly, Law sets out his argument in a beautiful literary style not found since the prose of Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor, with portraits of each of the characters, who represented either devout Christians or those who had fallen away. Law was in fact working on a contemporary exposition of the parable of the sower in Mark 4 and Matthew 13. Balderston compares Law with Taylor: ‘Law’s conception of the Christian life and the exigency of his standards were something quite apart from the Christian teaching and practice of his day, and only Jeremy Taylor in the seventeenth century.’56 Law would certainly have known of Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, because Taylor had also written for a wealthy, upper-class household and his books were seen as an antidote to the excesses of the Restoration.57 They were written during the Protectorate, but they sold in 51 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 178. William Perkins, Workes, 3 vols (London: John Legatt, 1626). William Perkins, The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970). 52 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 191. Perkins, Workes, Vol. 1, p. 747. 53 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 194. Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations, in Breward (ed.), The Work of William Perkins, pp. 447–449, 461. 54 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 201. 55 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 302. 56 Balderston, ‘Doctor Johnson and William Law’, p. 384. 57 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 320–321.

William Law

113

great numbers after the Restoration, when upper-class society became hedonistic, and Law had the same audience in mind. 7

A Serious Call: Asceticism

Law addressed an audience of privilege, who were fashionable and lived a luxurious life. Although he had been one of a large family and was so poor when he studied at Cambridge that he needed financial assistance, he then entered a social life of wealth and even ostentation, since the life of Fellows at a Cambridge college was comfortable. When he resigned from that, he became a private tutor in a wealthy household, where Edward Gibbon senior was a stockbroker; ‘notwithstanding his Jacobite inclinations, as an army contractor the continental campaigns of William III had made him a wealthy man’.58 He lost a fortune in the 1720 financial crash of the South Sea Company, but rebuilt it, and by the time Law entered his employment he was on the way to recovery, so that by his death in 1736 he was again wealthy. Law constantly mixed socially with the elite of eighteenth-century England, and although employed as a tutor, and not therefore wealthy himself nor born into an upper-class family, his former life as a Cambridge Fellow would have given him great social prestige, along with the fact that he had sacrificed his career for his Jacobite principles. This would have been deeply admired in the conservative circles he knew well, and Law was therefore at ease in the wealthy, politically conservative, life of Georgian London. A Serious Call is a manifesto for the renunciation of any display of wealth, social status or luxury, and is aimed especially at the prosperous members of the eighteenth-century Anglican church. Law follows the example of patristic bishops who had come from wealthy families and had given their wealth away to lead an ascetic life. He advocates personal charity and simplicity of life, saying that there are two orders of Christians: The one that fear’d and serv’d God in the common offices and business of a secular, worldly life. The other renouncing the common business, and common enjoyments of life, as riches, marriage, honours, and pleasures, devoted themselves to voluntary poverty, virginity, devotion, and 58

David Womersley, ‘Gibbon, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The article is on the historian Edward Gibbon, but contains information on his grandfather, who employed Law. Both were called Edward. Avis, In Search of Authority, presents a view of Gibbon as a historian guided by Christian beliefs.

114

Chapter 4

retirement, that by this means they might live wholly unto God, in the daily exercise of a divine and heavenly life.59 Brian Young has an interesting comparison of Law and Gibbon the historian, because both wrote about successful societies: in Law’s case, eighteenthcentury England; in Gibbon’s case, the Roman Empire just before it began to decline. Both authors were critical of self-indulgence, corruption and luxury, with Gibbon using a civic humanism to denounce the despotism of Rome prior to its final collapse.60 He also praised Law’s attack on Mandeville, although there was irony in his approval of Law’s dismissal of the idea that private vices brought public benefits.61 Law argues that at any time a society that has become wealthy can fall into hypocrisy, while continuing to exercise religious practice such as church-going because it is the social norm: ‘Christians had nothing to fear from the heathen world, but the loss of their lives; but the world become a friend, makes it difficult for them to save their Religion.’62 Law sees such people as ‘heathens’ and spiritually dead. Gibbon was later to satirize Law’s Christian community as an example of Christian extremism, because the idea of giving charity, especially with strict conditions attached, was an example of seeking to exercise authority over others.63 Young offers this judgement on Gibbon’s repudiation of Law’s asceticism: In his analysis the realities of societal imperfection were left open to gradual worldly improvement. Salvation, or at least comfortable accommodation, was to be sought not in a life predicated on the imperatives of a contra mundum existence in the style of Law, but on one lived within the known confines of acceptable moral compromise.64 Law was the rigorous Christian, whose idea of Christian vocation included the practice of asceticism, while Gibbon advocated the humanism of the civic moralist. 59 60 61 62 63 64

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: Everyman, 1967), p. 95. All subsequent references are to this edition. Law, Serious Call, p. 10. B. W. Young, ‘William Law and the Christian Economy of Salvation’, English Historical Review 109.431 (1994), p. 309. Avis, In Search of Authority, pp. 254–263, on Gibbon. Young, ‘William Law and the Christian Economy’, p. 320. Law, Serious Call, p. 229, italics in original. Young, ‘William Law and the Christian Economy’, p. 315. Young, ‘William Law and the Christian Economy’, p. 321.

William Law

115

Law wrote A Serious Call shortly after he became a tutor in the Gibbon household, with the portraits of the wealthy being not malicious nor sarcastic, but rather sharp and penetrating. The people he met daily were sophisticated men and women, who professed Christianity but thought that their lives could be lived alongside the pursuit of social frivolity and entertainment. He denied that following a Christian vocation meant renouncing the world, but instead what mattered was the rigorous demand of the gospel and obedience to Christ within the world. 8

A Serious Call: Literary Style

A Serious Call contains highly entertaining character sketches of many of those whom Law knew, and Wormersley suggests that Gibbon’s son, the father of the historian, is represented by the character of Flatus. Law was employed to educate the son but found him very unwilling to take education seriously, and so he portrays Flatus as someone whose ‘sanguine temper and strong passions promise him so much happiness in everything, that he is always cheated, and satisfied with nothing’.65 He describes Flatus’ life as ‘ridiculous, restless’, which is certainly not flattering to his pupil.66 The historian grandson, who presents a critical attitude to Christianity in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said of Law as his father’s tutor ‘In our family he had left the reputation of a worthy and pious man, who believed all that he professed, and practiced all that he enjoined … his satire is sharp, but is drawn from the knowledge of human life.’67 Law illustrates the true Christian life with the example of the Christian gentlewoman Miranda, who is based in fact on Hester Gibbon, the sister of his pupil, who eventually brought her wealth and joined Law in setting up the Christian community back in his village, after the grandfather had died and the son had left home. Miranda renounces the world to follow Christ in exercising

65 Wormersley, ‘Gibbon, Edward’. Law, Serious Call, p. 134. 66 Law, Serious Call, p. 138. 67 H. H. Milman, The Life of Edward Gibbon (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1840), p. 17. Norman Sykes, ‘Introduction’, in William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: J. M. Dent, 1955), p. v. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015). Young, ‘William Law and the Christian Eco­ nomy’, pp. 308–309, on the relationship of Law and Gibbon the historian. B. W. Young, ‘J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2 (2017), pp. 431–458, is in turn a study of Pocock’s treatment of Gibbon.

116

Chapter 4

humility, charity, devotion, ‘abstinence and heavenly affections’.68 Her wealth is used in charity, with clear instructions to those who receive assistance as to how it should be used. ‘It is a folly and a crime in a poor man, says Miranda, to waste what is given him in foolish trifles, while he wants meat, drink and clothes.’69 A Christian life has no sincerity if it intends no ‘real mortification or self-denial, no eminent charity, no profound humility, no heavenly affection, no true contempt of the world, no Christian meekness, no sincere zeal, no eminent piety’.70 Another example of a proper Christian vocation is represented by Law’s character sketch of the clergyman Ouranius (the word means ‘heavenly’ in Latin).71 ‘When Ouranius first entered into holy orders, he had a haughtiness in his temper, a great contempt and disregard for all foolish and unreasonable people; but he has prayed away this spirit and has now the greatest tenderness for the most obstinate sinners.’ This diligent priest has a poor country village, but one which he loves, and in language reminiscent of George Herbert’s Country Parson, Law describes him as always active: ‘He goes about his parish, and visits everybody in it; but visits in the same spirit of piety that he preaches to them: he visits them to encourage their virtues, to assist them with his advice and counsel.’ Originally, he felt the parish was socially inferior to him, but through constant intercession and practical action he wishes now to be nowhere else. Ouranius sells his own estate and begins a charitable foundation with the money from this. Avis describes Law’s literary approach: ‘Law’s many characters and scenarios reflect the experimental, inductive, empirical method and to that extent his approach is characteristic of his age.’ John Wesley praised the elegance of A Serious Call, saying it is ‘a treatise which will hardly be excelled, if it be equalled, in the English tongue, either for beauty of expression, or for justness and depth of thought’. Johnson lauded it as the ‘finest piece of hortatory theology in any language’.72

68 69 70 71 72

Law, Serious Call, p. 75. Law, Serious Call, p. 76. Law, Serious Call, p. 19. Law, Serious Call, pp. 295–298. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 50, 440. Avis, In Search of Authority, pp. 292–293, quoting John Wesley, Sermon 125, in The Works of John Wesley, 28 vols to date (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984–), Vol. 4, p. 121.

William Law

9

117

A Serious Call: Celibacy and Virginity

Jeremy Taylor was the main Anglican moral theologian to write in the seventeenth century on marriage, and on virginity, defining chastity in Holy Living within the general consideration of Christian sobriety. It is ‘the circumcision of the heart … that grace which forbids and restrains’ and is either abstinence or continence. Natural virginity is better than married life, not because it is more holy but because it is a ‘freedom from cares’.73 Marriage for Taylor was a sacramental reality.74 Taylor’s careful balancing of virginity and marriage became central to the Anglican tradition, where the only purpose of virginity was to serve a life of prayer. Virgins must remember that the virginitie of the bodie is onely excellent in order to the puritie of the soul: who therefore must consider that since they are in some measure in a condition like that of angels, it is their duty to spend much of their time in Angelical imployment: for in the same degree that Virgins live more spiritually than other persons, in that same degree is their virginity a more excellent state.75 Taylor’s promotion of a life dedicated to virginity was not one that was taken up in the eighteenth-century church except by the non-jurors, although through them it would influence Newman and the Tractarians, the movement in the Anglican church in the nineteenth century that sought a recovery of Catholic spirituality and moral theology. One non-juror, Bishop Ken, did take a vow never to marry, and Ken’s influence was profound on succeeding generations, but it was Law’s writings that provided the main justification for a life of virginity.76 In A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection Law denies that he is calling anyone to the cloister, or the religious life, since the duties of a Christian are common to all. But in A Serious Call, written three years later in 1729, virginity is portrayed in a positive light. Miranda is someone who practises ‘devotion, self-denial, renunciation of the world, her chastity, virginity, and voluntary

73 Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living, in Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, ed. Reginald Heber, rev. Charles Page Eden, 10 vols (London: Longman, Brown and Green, 1852, reprinted Hilde­ sheim: George Olms Verlag, 1970). C. J. Stranks, The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK for the Church Historical Society, 1952), p. 105. 74 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 328. 75 Taylor, Holy Living. 76 B. W. Young, ‘The Anglican Origins of Newman’s Celibacy’, Church History 65.1 (1996), p. 19.

118

Chapter 4

poverty’.77 The widow Eusebia also brings up her daughters to be virgins, ‘with the same regulation as a religious house’.78 She teaches her daughters the benefits of refraining from marriage: You know, my children, the high perfection, and the great rewards of virginity; you know how it frees from worldly cares and troubles, and furnishes means and opportunities of higher advancements in a divine life; therefore love, and esteem, and honour virginity: bless God for all that glorious complacency of holy virgins, that from the beginning of Christianity have, in the several ages of the Church, renounced the cares and pleasures of matrimony, to be perpetual examples of solitude, contemplation, and prayer.79 Law does not commit himself to seeing virginity as a higher order than marriage, but he does strongly admire this commitment to celibacy, and he himself remained single all his life, with the small Christian community which he established providing him with companionship and support for his commitment to a rigorous asceticism. Law’s stance reflects the tension within the non-juring movement, which was torn between an attraction to Catholic moral rigour for clergy and the religious life, and the practice of the Church of England at the time: So that the whole of the matter is plainly this: Virginity, voluntary poverty, and such other restraints of lawful things, are not necessary to Christian perfection; but are much to be commended in those who choose them as helps and means of a more safe and speedy arrival at it.80 I know very well that the Reformation has allowed Priests and Bishops not only to look out for wives, but to have as many as they please, one after another: But this is only to be consider’d as a bare Allowance, and perhaps granted upon such a Motive, as Moses of old made one to the Jews, for the Hardness of their Hearts, tho’ from the Beginning it was not so.81

77 78 79 80 81

Law, Serious Call, p. 98. Law, Serious Call, p. 254. Law, Serious Call, p. 259. Law, Serious Call, p. 340. Law, Some Animadversions upon Dr. Trapp’s Late Reply, appended to An Appeal to All That Doubt, or Disbelieve the Truths of the Gospel, Whether They Be Deists, Arians, Socinians, or Nominal Christians, in The Works of the Reverend William Law, 9 vols (Brockenhurst:

William Law

119

Law was to remain a very influential writer, and when Newman read Law’s Serious Call as a young schoolboy, with a strong evangelical faith, he felt a ‘deep imagination … that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life’.82 10

A Serious Call: An Ecclesial Ethic

With great skill, Law combines a deeply ecclesial ethic with rationalism and the use of emotion and imagination. To begin with the ecclesial dimension, the basis for vocation for Law is baptism. ‘It is a condition of our Baptism. But the question is, when or how this world is sufficiently renounced. Is it by renouncing all worldly employments? No surely. For then human society is at an end.’ What Law seeks is that ‘pride, covetousness, self-indulgence, &c., in any calling, is to be renounced’.83 He argues that God may be served and glorified in every state of life: nevertheless some states of life improve our virtues more than others. They enable us to purify ourselves more and dedicate our life to God more fully. Those who are at liberty to choose for themselves seem to be called by God to be more eminently devoted to his service.84 A Christian ethic aims at ‘the perfection of our best endeavours, a careful labour to be as perfect as we can’.85 Secondly, Law’s ethic is an ecclesial one because it is centred on the continuous practice of worship. The underlying basis for Law’s exposition of moral theology is the worship of God, and he turns halfway through A Serious Call to relating times of prayer to moral attitudes, where early morning prayer is undertaken to increase religious devotion.86 By the third hour of the day, which is nine o’clock, the subject of prayers is humility, which is an awareness

82 83

84 85 86

G. Moreton, 1892–1893), Vol. 6, pp. 254–257. Young, ‘Anglican Origins of Newman’s Celibacy’, p. 21. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Collins, Fontana, 1959, first published 1864), p. 100. Young, ‘Anglican Origins of Newman’s Celibacy’, pp. 24–25. Law to John Walker, 24 January 1735, in John Byrom, The Private Journal and Literary Remains of John Byrom, ed. Richard Parkinson (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1854), p. 559, cited in Isabel Rivers, ‘William Law and Religious Revival: The Reception of A Serious Call’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71.4 (2008), p. 636. Law, Serious Call, p. 95. Law, Serious Call, p. 23. Law, Serious Call, p. 176.

120

Chapter 4

of our moral and spiritual weakness and a true assessment of our character.87 Midday prayers lead into intercessions and the importance of ‘universal love’ for all humanity.88 Prayer at three o’clock in the afternoon is about resignation to God’s will, while evening prayer is on confession and self-examination.89 A striking contemporary example of this is the collection of essays edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, published in 2011, where each chapter is again related to liturgy and worship, and the opening chapter, written jointly by the editors, is on ‘Christian ethics as informed prayer’.90 This is the whole rationale of Law’s approach to moral theology. A third way in which Law’s ethic is ecclesial is the invocation of the Virgin Mary, which was unusual in Protestant eighteenth-century England, although common in the Caroline divines who were so influential on Law. Mary is represented as being a figure to set against the people whom Law meets every day, saying that ‘The holy Virgin Mary could not indulge herself or conform to the vanity of the world in dress and figure.’91 It is also a deeply Christological ethic, with constant invocation to Christ: ‘For to despise one for whom Christ died, is to be as contrary to Christ, as he that despises anything that Christ has said or done.’ Furthermore, Law also refers to the Eucharist as ‘the body of Christ’.92 11

A Serious Call: The Place of Reason

Law’s theology is, however, not simply an ecclesial ethic, for he sees himself as part of the Enlightenment and uses both the authority of reason and an appeal to passions (emotions directed towards an external object) to justify his position. In this, he is always careful to balance the use of reason and an appeal to imagination: The religion of the Gospel is only the refinement and exaltation of our best faculties, as it only requires a life of the highest reason, as it only 87 88 89 90

Law, Serious Call, p. 209. Law, Serious Call, p. 290. Law, Serious Call, p. 333. Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells, ‘Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer’, in Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004), pp. 3–12. 91 Law, Serious Call, p. 86. 92 Law, Serious Call, pp. 305–306.

William Law

121

requires us to use this world as in reason it ought to be used, to live in such tempers as are the glory of intelligent beings, to walk in such wisdom as exalts our nature, and to practise such piety as will raise us to God.93 Reason is central to Law’s theology: ‘Were it not our strict duty to live by reason, to devote all the actions of our lives to God.’ This sentence is set out at the very beginning of the book as the justification for his call to ‘a serious life’.94 ‘The short of the matter is this; either reason and religion prescribe rules and ends to all the ordinary actions of our life, or they do not: if they do, then it is as necessary to govern all our actions by those rules, as it is necessary to worship God.’95 In Chapter 2 he says ‘it may be reasonably inquired’ as to why the lives ‘even of the better sort of people’ are ‘strangely contrary to the principles of Christianity?’96 Avis has a perceptive analysis of this commitment to reason: ‘Reason and nature, reason and religion, are constantly equated as what God requires.’97 Law’s deep conservatism accepted the social strata of his day but expected those who had the benefits of education and wealth to live in a Christian manner; failure to do so was a betrayal of their privileged life. Christianity is ‘the daily sacrifice of a reasonable life, wise actions, purity of heart, and heavenly affections’. On the same page, Law speaks of ‘such rules of reason and piety’ that will lead people to serve God.98 Later, he summarizes his overall message: This is the one common command of God to all mankind. If you have an employment, you are to be thus reasonable, and pious, and holy, in the exercise of it: if you have time and a fortune in your own power, you are obliged to be thus reasonable, and holy, and pious, in the use of all your time, and all your fortune.99 We must act according to ‘the reason of our nature’. Butler’s appeal to human nature, which was examined in the previous chapter, is here extended into the practice of a rigorous asceticism. Law’s doctrine of human nature is one that sees humanity as having the potential to be rational, even though he is deeply 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Law, Serious Call, p. 53. Law, Serious Call, p. 2. Law, Serious Call, p. 5. Law, Serious Call, p. 11. Avis, In Search of Authority, p. 292. Law, Serious Call, p. 34. Law, Serious Call, p. 50.

122

Chapter 4

aware of how fallen and sinful our lives are. Nevertheless, in spite of our constant failings, the command of God is to be a person who imitates God’s own wisdom and order: If it is our glory and happiness to have a rational nature, that is endued with wisdom and reason, that is capable of imitating the Divine nature, then it must be our glory and happiness to improve our reason and wisdom, to act up to the excellency of our rational nature, and to imitate God in all our actions, to the utmost of our power … It is therefore an immutable law of God, that all rational beings should act reasonably in all their actions, not at this time, or in that place, or upon this occasion, or in the use of some particular thing, but at all times, in all places, on all occasions, and in the use of all things. This is a law that is as unchangeable as God, and can no more cease to be, than God can cease to be a God of wisdom and order.100 Law is clear that God expects human beings to live according to the nature he created them with. Sin is a failure to live according to our nature: ‘all unreasonable ways are contrary to the nature of all rational beings, whether men or Angels: neither of which can be any longer agreeable to God, than so far as they act according to the reason and excellence of their nature’.101 Law denies that this is an ethic which is incapable of being followed: ‘These are not speculative flights, or imaginary notions, but are plain and undeniable laws, that are founded in the nature of rational beings, who as such are obliged to live by reason, and glorify God by a continual right use of their several talents and faculties.’102 12

A Serious Call: Sanctification

For Law, the reason why people fail to be rational and live by Christian principles is due to the failure of human nature, and the only response to this is the pursuit of sanctification in everyday life, whether at work or in the home. In a society with great wealth was possessed by those whom Law met daily, the temptation was to spend time ‘gratifying some vain and unreasonable desires, in conforming to those fashions, and pride of the world, which, as Christians 100 Law, Serious Call, pp. 52–53. 101 Law, Serious Call, p. 54. 102 Law, Serious Call, pp. 54–55.

William Law

123

and reasonable men, we are obliged to renounce’.103 Law holds to a view of salvation which is dependent on our keeping God’s commandments. ‘And now, if this scornful temper is founded upon a disregard of all these relations which every Christian bears to God, and Christ, and the Holy Trinity, can you wonder, or think it hard, that a Christian who thus allows himself to despise a brother, should be in danger of hell-fire?’104 Balderston describes Law as having ‘an extraordinary combination of cool logic, profound conviction, and moving rhetoric’.105 She writes of his great psychological skill and the urgency of his prose. Like Butler, Law depicts self-deception in a number of his characters, including Flavia, Calidus and Caecus.106 He also writes extensively on the passions, as in Chapter 16 of A Serious Call, which is on pride, and the need to cultivate humility. Another concern is the force of habit, with Law stressing mortification, although he recognizes that the monastic vocation is no longer available to those who read him. Law accepts an Arminian view of the possibility of salvation for everyone. ‘The whole truth therefore of the matter is plainly this, Christ given for us, is neither more nor less, than Christ given into us.’107 He believes that the ‘laborious volumes on God’s imputing Adam’s sin to his posterity, ought to be considered as wastepaper’.108 This is not a minimizing of his belief in the atonement but rather a belief that the full force of human sinfulness and the need for grace should be understood both experientially and in worship. Law holds that it is only by the pursuit of sanctification that the atonement can be realized in human beings. ‘Consider that all the sons of Adam are to go through a painful, sickly life, denying and mortifying their natural appetites, and crucifying the lusts of the flesh, in order to have a share in the Atonement of our Saviour’s death.’109 The Christian life finds sanctification by being obedient to God’s will: ‘The whole nature of virtue consists in conforming to, and the whole nature of vice in declining from, the will of God.’110 Klein notes:

103 Law, Serious Call, pp. 58. 104 Law, Serious Call, p. 307. 105 Balderston, ‘Doctor Johnson and William Law’, p. 384. 106 Avis, In Search of Authority, p. 292, on Law’s ‘incisive analysis of human motivation and our propensity for self-deception’. 107 William Law, The Spirit of Love, in Works, Vol. 8, p. 99, cited in Hoyles, Edges of Augustanism, p. 120. 108 William Law, The Spirit of Prayer, in Works, Vol. 7, p. 14, cited in Hoyles, Edges of Augustanism, pp. 118–119. 109 Law, Serious Call, p. 335. 110 Law, Serious Call, p. 311. Klein, ‘Mental Universe’, p. 140.

124

Chapter 4

The Fall of Man in Law’s mind had not robbed humanity of agency in acting. In fact, he suggested over and over that the real reason people fail to act as genuine Christians was their failure to intend to follow Christ. Intent was as much the key for Law as it was in The Imitation of Christ.111 This is an echo of Caroline theology, as found in Hammond and Taylor. ‘Caroline theologians argued that for a holy life to be possible then faith and good works had to be taken together as necessary for salvation. Justification merged into sanctification, with imputed and infused righteousness both being required for salvation.’112 As Rivers says, Law was ‘an important conduit through which a particular stream of seventeenth-century devotion was transmitted to the later eighteenth century and beyond’.113 Thornton groups together the moral theology from Hooker’s Lawes to Law’s own writing as having a common concern with the training of the conscience, liturgy, pastoral care and Christian tradition.114 This Caroline moral theology deeply influenced John Wesley as a young Fellow at Oxford, as we shall see in the next chapter.115 Two things, however, meant a severe rupture between Law and Wesley. From 1737 until his death, Law turned to mysticism, especially the writing of the seventeenth-century German mystic, Jacob Boehme. At the same time Wesley was moving from being influenced by Taylor and Law to a much more experiential theology, following his Aldersgate conversion. This will be explored more in the next chapter. No attention need be given to Law’s mysticism, which has been described as the final step of his move against the Enlightenment emphasis on a universal and rational ethic, since this is a study of moral theology.116 Once he had embraced mysticism, Law argued that moral theology depended on a spiritual regeneration from union with God, and pointed to

111 Klein, ‘Mental Universe’, p. 141. 112 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, p. 297. 113 Rivers, ‘Law, William’. 114 Thornton, English Spirituality, pp. 230, 247. 115 Geordan Hammond, ‘High Church Anglican Influences on John Wesley’s Conception of Primitive Christianity, 1732–1735’, Anglican and Episcopal History 78.2 (2009), pp. 174–207. Gerda J. Joling-van der Sar, ‘The Controversy between William Law and John Wesley’, English Studies 87.4 (2006), p. 447. 116 B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 123–136, on Law and Boehme. C. D. A. Leighton, ‘William Law, Behmenism, and Counter Enlightenment’, Harvard Theological Review 91.3 (1998), p. 308.

William Law

125

the distinctive nature of the moral actions of the regenerate Christian, whose goodness comes forth as a Birth of Life and is the free natural Work and Fruit of that which lives within us … an angelic Goodness … the Goodness of our first Creation … the Goodness of our Redemption.117 Law is often described simply as a mystic, as though his views after 1737 were the whole of his theology, but this chapter has shown that this view does not do justice to the breadth and originality of his thought, where there is a careful balance of an ecclesial ethic, rationality and emotion. 13

Conclusion

Law’s writing is an outstanding example of a moral theology which is rigorous, intellectually vibrant and ascetical. He is of significance both in his own right and also because he acts as a bridge between the Caroline moral theology of Jeremy Taylor and the Oxford Movement. In his own right, he is a serious controversialist against Hoadly, Tindal and Mandeville, arguing against an Erastian view of the church, against deism and above all against Mandeville’s ridicule of Christian morality. He is also remembered for exemplifying the principles of the non-juring movement, his beautiful literary style and his depiction of piety, moral asceticism and sanctification in A Serious Call. This meant that, despite his withdrawal from the mainstream of eighteenth-century cultural and intellectual life in London and the universities, he was regarded as an important figure right up to his death, because he exemplified the ‘Anglican theological method in the age of Enlightenment, appealing to the harmony of reason and revelation, but not at the expense of the Scriptures and divine revelation’.118 Law was the main person through whom Caroline moral theology reached a later audience. Newman and Maurice were quite different figures in the nineteenth century, but both expressed admiration for him. In his Apologia, Newman describes reading a series of Calvinist writers as a schoolboy, but also ‘a work of a very opposite character, Law’s Serious Call’. When Newman read this work, it showed him ‘this main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the city of God and the powers of darkness’. It is interesting that Newman saw 117 Leighton, ‘William Law, Behmenism’, p. 311, quoting William Law, The Way to Divine Knowledge: Being Several Dialogues between Humanus, Academicus, Rusticus, and Theo­ philus. As Preparatory to a New Edition of the Works of Jacob Behmen; and the Right Use of Them (London: Innys and Richardson, 1752). 118 Avis, In Search of Authority, p. 291.

126

Chapter 4

A Serious Call as a Catholic work, despite Law’s undoubted reserve towards Catholicism.119 Another study of Law draws out the metaphor of warfare, showing how much Law drew on images of martyrdom, like many non-jurors.120 One study of Newman draws out two aspects of Law’s influence on him. The first came from the practical implications of a Christian faith worked out in morality and action; the second was the close link between prayer and moral asceticism. Newman was deeply impressed by Law’s insistence on these two points.121 Maurice wrote an introduction to Law’s response to Mandeville and republished it in 1844.122 He wrote that Law was ‘a thoroughly devout man, who recognised moral principles as involved in our human constitution, and who boldly appealed to the Conscience and Reason of mankind as witnesses for them’. Maurice mentioned that ‘the struggle to overcome the bitterness of a polemic, without sacrificing his zeal for truth must have been severe’.123 Finally, there is Law’s influence on John Wesley and Samuel Johnson. As we have seen, Wesley eventually repudiated Law’s mysticism, and in recent times others have distrusted Law, such as the US Anglican theologian C. Fitzsimons Allison.124 Allison also criticized Jeremy Taylor, but reserved stronger condemnation for Law, who, although he is close to Taylor’s moral rigour, expands it in Allison’s opinion to an extent never seen before in Anglican moral theology. Thus, Allison criticizes Law for betraying the gospel and adopting what he calls ‘moralism’. Leighton describes Law’s significance well. In view of the fact that ‘faith was the moral act of one exercising virtue and the origin of further manifestations of virtue, ethical and theological or doctrinal considerations came together’.125 Law not only wrote about this position but embodied it in his entire life, and it became a remarkable expression of Anglican moral theology. In our contemporary age, criticism will certainly be offered on Law’s indifference to issues of social justice in his writings, but his ‘serious call’ to the wealthy of 119 Newman, Apologia, p. 99. 120 Klein, ‘Mental Universe’, p. 123. 121 Peter C. Wilcox, John Henry Newman, Spiritual Director, 1845–1890 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), p. 39. 122 F. D. Maurice, ‘Introduction’, in William Law, Remarks on The Fable of the Bees (Cambridge: D. and A. Macmillan, 1844). James W. Clayton, ‘Reason and Society: An Approach to F. D. Maurice’, Harvard Theological Review 65.3 (1972), p. 312, on Maurice’s ‘introduction’, stressing ‘his appeal to reason, conscience and human nature’, which Maurice saw as being in the spirit of Law’s response to Mandeville. 123 Maurice, ‘Introduction’, p. xi. 124 C. Fitzsimons Allison, Trust in an Age of Arrogance (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), p. 83. 125 Leighton, ‘Non-Jurors and Their History’, p. 256.

William Law

127

eighteenth-century England to change their behaviour if they wished to be called Christians was unprecedented. His originality and skill at this time place him in the first rank of Anglican moral theologians, because his theological and philosophical training enabled him to write a series of works whose methodology is well worked out, consistent and an answer to the deism which was increasingly prevalent as Europe moved into the later Enlightenment.

Chapter 5

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800: Gay, Tucker, Paley and Wesley 1

Introduction

Within the Anglican tradition there are many diverse strands which combine to make up the tradition, or genealogy, of Anglican moral theology, and the early Enlightenment presented less of a break with orthodox Christianity than has often been supposed, for it is the case that much of the writing from 1690 until the mid-eighteenth century was sympathetic to theism, if not to the full claims of Anglican moral theology.1 However, the period from 1740 certainly does mark a turning point in the genealogy of Anglican moral theology. The decade after 1740 was when the Anglican tradition diverged. One strand became deeply affected by the influence of Locke’s epistemology and ethics, since some Anglican theologians, especially those living and working in Cambridge, intensified their deep fascination with Locke’s account of Christianity, and argued that subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion was outdated and should be repealed. The second strand is found in Samuel Johnson and John Wesley, and recent scholarship has shown how much Wesley can be read as continuing a tradition of virtue ethics that is also found in Thomas Aquinas.2 The same can be said of Johnson, who was a non-juror and was deeply aware of an Anglican doctrine of the sacraments.3 The virtue ethics tradition in Anglicanism has also been described as the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ by Timothy Sedgwick, and it is entirely justified to place John Wesley in this genealogy, or tradition. Sedgwick

1 John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2 D. Stephen Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005). 3 J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson, Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 128, on ‘William Law’s influence on Johnson’. Owen Chadwick, ‘The Religion of Samuel Johnson’, Yale University Library Gazette 60.3–4 (1986), pp. 119–136. Jeremy Larson, ‘Samuel Johnson and Presbyterianism’, Pro Rege 40.3 (2012), pp. 18–30. Ella McElligott, ‘A Study of the Religious Life and Opinions of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.’ (M.A. thesis, Loyola University, Chicago, 1951).

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_007

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

129

writes, in a way which give the rationale for both this book and my previous one, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology: The Anglican thinkers who understand Christian faith as a matter of practical piety constitute a distinct strand of Anglican thought. … As such, the Anglican virtue ethic is an exemplary ethic in which Christ reveals the shape or form of what it is to be human and specifically that life as given in relationship to God. In this sense, Christ is the archetype, the exemplar, the model of what it is to be human. Christ is the second Adam, human life as redeemed. It may be helpful to place the exemplary tradition within Anglicanism within the larger context of moral traditioning. By moral traditioning I mean the passing down of moral reflections on the Christian life.4 This tradition saw in Christ the model for personal sanctity, both as exemplar and as source of grace in this endeavour. Joseph Butler and William Law certainly belong to this tradition, even if Butler abandons a Thomist way of reasoning, and both saw virtue ethics as central both to moral reasoning and to the practice of the individual moral life.5 Sedgwick writes: ‘In Butler’s account of the love of God, he again begins with a description of affections, in this case religious affections, and then proposes that these are central to Christian worship … In Butler’s account of virtue are the hallmarks of the exemplary tradition in Anglican thought.’6 Wesley’s sermons also stand in this way of thinking, emphasizing the importance of practical piety. 2

The Mid-Eighteenth Century and the Influence of Locke

Let me begin, however, by turning back to the first strand of Anglican theology after 1740, before returning to Wesley later in the chapter. It is too strong to call the theologians who made up this first strand a ‘school’ because they were disparate, but they certainly read each other and had a common ethos. They were a series of Anglicans deeply influenced by the search for happiness, empiricism and ‘natural science’, and none of them was convinced by either 4 Peter H. Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Timothy Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), p. 208. 5 It is important to note that two theologians called Law are discussed in this chapter, William Law and Bishop Edmund Law. ‘Law’ refers to William until Edmund is introduced. 6 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 222.

130

Chapter 5

Butler or Law. The way in which Anglican moral theology became concerned with empirically acquired knowledge – usually through direct experience and sense impressions but sometimes through novels and literary works reflecting on experience – marked a change in Anglican moral tradition. There was much less concern with holiness, as found in Butler and Law, and much more with a response to what was right and morally fitting. The close interest in uniting spirituality and moral theology, which was previously such a feature of the tradition of Anglican moral theology, becomes muted in the school which was influenced by Locke. Locke’s philosophy has been discussed in several earlier chapters, and the responses made to him by Stillingfleet, Shaftesbury and Butler have been set out. Locke’s moral philosophy and epistemology (theory of knowledge) remained enormously influential in the eighteenth century, especially in Cambridge, including those Anglican theologians who revered him.7 Those who followed Locke argued for a prudential ethics of obedience and reward for, although God was a lawgiver, his commands were reasonable, and the underlying justification was that this ethic developed human beings in the way God wished them to be. Like all knowledge, this ethic could be known by the proper use of reason (or modal ideas, as Locke put it in his empiricist epistemology). There are two aspects of this tradition to consider. One is the beginning of theological utilitarianism, discussed in the next few pages. Until late in the eighteenth century, utilitarianism was not considered a secular philosophical movement associated with Jeremy Bentham but one linked to a group of Anglican philosophers and theologians. Niall O’Flaherty writes ‘Frequently quoted in the [House of] Commons, it was Paley, and not Jeremy Bentham, whom contemporaries recognized as the chief exponent of utilitarian ethics.’8 The second aspect is epistemological and is linked with the two Cambridge theologians Edmund Law and Richard Watson. This is explored later, and is important for moral philosophy and theology, because Locke’s epistemology denied the existence of innate ideas, including the belief that conscience is innate. This group of theologians deeply influenced by Locke lasted into the nineteenth century and becomes a new strand in Anglican moral theology. Two of the followers of Locke became bishops: Richard Watson of Llandaff and 7 Niall O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment: The Moral and Political Thought of William Paley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 271; Chapter 1 of O’Flaherty’s book is entitled ‘The Development of Lockean Moral Philosophy’. 8 Niall O’Flaherty, ‘William Paley’s Moral Philosophy and the Challenge of Hume: An Enlightenment Debate?’, Modern Intellectual History 7.1 (2010), p. 2.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

131

Edmund Law of Carlisle. The issue was whether this school, some of whom called their ethics ‘theological utilitarianism’, was robust enough to stand up to the challenge of David Hume’s philosophical scepticism. Indeed, this theological school died out in the early nineteenth century, although for a few decades in the nineteenth century Paley was cited by evangelicals like John Bird Sumner.9 Few theologians in the eighteenth century wrote on moral theology. Instead there were debates on the Trinity, cosmology or ecclesiology.10 Daniel Waterland attacked Arianism in his Vindication of Christ’s Divinity in 1719 and was one of the leading defenders of the Trinity. He later wrote A Discourse of Fundamentals in 1735. Bishop William Warburton wrote on ecclesiology, advocating a close link between church and state, and also pioneered biblical research.11 The reason why moral theology was avoided is provided by a study of Edmund Law. He saw religious faith as gradually being purged of superstition by the work of the Holy Spirit in the same way as human knowledge grew in its understanding of science and philosophy; indeed, the advance of reason and the Spirit almost become synonymous in his writings. His Considerations on the State of the World with Regard to the Theory of Religion was published in Cambridge in 1745.12 It was a humane, tolerant account of religious faith, but it had little interest in sanctity. At this point the genealogy of Anglican moral theology no longer maintained its interest in virtue ethics.

9

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and J. M. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; originally published 1738–1739). Annette Baier, ‘Hume’s Place in the History of Ethics’, in Roger Crisp(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 399–420. Rachel Cohon, ‘Hume’s Moral Philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2018 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/hume-moral/. 10 B. W. Young, ‘Theology in the Church of England’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume II: Establishment and Empire, 1660–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 392–428. Many of these theologians were concerned with Newton’s cosmology and with the gradual adoption of a historical approach to Scripture. 11 Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, pp. 64–81. B. W. Young, ‘J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2 (2017), p. 450. B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 36–38, on Waterland, and pp. 167–212, on Warburton. Stephen Sykes, Unashamed Anglicanism (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995), p. 73, on Waterland. 12 Edmund Law, Considerations on the State of the World with Regard to the Theory of Religion (Cambridge: J. Bentham, 1745; reprinted Gale ECCO, 2010).

132 3

Chapter 5

John Gay and Theological Utilitarianism

Theological utilitarianism is found first of all in the writings of both John Gay and Abraham Tucker, who were strongly dependent on Locke. However, the greatest intellectual impact on European culture in this school came later, when William Paley’s writings became standard texts at Cambridge, and known across Europe. O’Flaherty writes of ‘the development after 1730 of what was to become the dominant strain of moral thought in England in the last quarter of the century, the so-called doctrine of expediency, often referred to by modern historians as theological utilitarianism’.13 All of these writers were Anglican.14 John Gay was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1724 to 1730, before taking a parish, but he died young in 1745, aged forty-six. He argued in 1731 that the will of God was the happiness of humankind, holding that the existence of conscience was only acquired as human beings grew in maturity, and was not innate. Gay was the earliest exponent of utilitarianism, where morality consisted in promoting the consequences of an action through which individuals or society gained pleasure and minimized pain. This is a broad definition of a philosophical school that came to be dominant in the nineteenth century and beyond, but the essential features are the emphasis on the consequences of an action, and the evaluation of those consequences in terms of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, although this view does not exclude an evaluation of pleasure or pain in terms of their quality rather than quantity. It was a subtle reworking of pleasure or happiness into a theological ethic. The quality of pleasure could consist in aesthetics, conformity to God’s will, moral empathy or any other way of measuring the goodness of an action’s consequences. It is far too simple to equate pleasure in this group of theologians with happiness or a state of feeling good. Edmund Law said of Gay ‘no one could rival his knowledge of the Bible and of the works of John Locke’, which is a very eighteenth-century compliment, uniting a belief in the efficacy of Scripture and of English empiricist philosophy. Gay published anonymously a work of moral philosophy as a preface to the 1731 English translation of William King’s De Origine Male, published in 1701.15 The translation was entitled An Essay on the Origin of Evil, and the 13 O’Flaherty, ‘William Paley’s Moral Philosophy’, p. 3. 14 Jonathan Harris, ‘Gay, John’, B. W. Young, ‘Tucker, Abraham’ and James Crimmins, ‘Paley, William’, all in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 15 John Gay, Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principles of Virtue or Morality, published anonymously as the introduction to William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law (Cambridge: J. Stephens, 1731). Gay’s dissertation can be read online at https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/wollaston-british-moralists-vol-2. Emma

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

133

translation was by Edmund Law. King was Archbishop of Dublin. His Latin text was an answer to the scepticism of Pierre Bayle and was read appreciatively by Leibniz. Gay’s preface was titled Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality.16 This essay, which had a huge impact, argues that human life is about the pursuit of happiness; that happiness consists in pleasure and the avoidance of pain; and that virtue is living a life which promotes the happiness of others.17 Gay opposes Francis Hutcheson’s idea of an innate moral sense or instinct as the source of moral judgement, writing sharply ‘if it is not akin to the doctrine of innate ideas, yet I think it relishes too much of that of occult qualities’.18 He claims that morality comes from the association of ideas, and argues that ‘a more probable explanation was that it [moral discernment] had originated in the self-interested desire to make others do our bidding’.19 Gay skilfully relates esteem, virtue and motivation, in a way that is a precursor of Hume: As my happiness depends on the voluntary behaviour of my fellows, approbation is a way of ‘annexing pleasure’ to their selfless behaviour as the only means of encouraging them to promote my happiness. But since I approve of my benefactor’s happiness, I also desire and take pleasure in it. And this esteem which I attach to actions that benefit me is the source of public affection, as it provides the motive for moral actions.20 He defines virtue as follows: Virtue is the conformity to a rule of life, directing the actions of all rational creatures with respect to each other’s happiness, to which conformity everyone in all cases is obliged and every one that does so conform, is or ought to be approved of, esteemed, and loved for so doing.21

16 17 18 19 20 21

Veitch, ‘Early Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophers and the Possibility of Virtue’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of St Andrews, 2017), pp. 195–197, on Law’s interpretation of King; also Chapter 6, on John Gay. S. J. Connolly, ‘King, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Getty Lustila, ‘John Gay and the Birth of Utilitarianism’, Utilitas 30.1 (2018), pp. 86–106. Colin Heydt, Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: God, Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 145. Gay, Preliminary Dissertation, p. ii. O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism, p. 39. O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism, p. 41, citing Gay, Preliminary Dissertation, p. xxiv. Gay, Preliminary Dissertation, p. xvii. Veitch, ‘Early Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophers’, pp. 203–204.

134

Chapter 5

Virtue for Gay is related to obligation, and a rule of life which created that obligation. He ‘does not discuss obligation as an act of the obliger, and hence (according to the voluntarists) as a command. He considers it as a state of the obliged, and so takes it to include motivation. The relevant motivation must be a desire to do what promotes my own happiness.’22 The fundamental concept is a belief in the ultimate authority of the will of God. He sees no conflict between reason and acting according to God’s will: that acting agreeably to nature, or reason, (when rightly understood) would perfectly coincide with the fitness of things; the fitness of things (as far as these words have any meaning) with truth; truth with the common good; and the common good with the will of God.23 Gay thus is very much a voluntarist, but also someone concerned with human flourishing. He argues that obeying God leads to our private happiness: Now it is evident from the nature of God, viz. his being infinitely happy in himself from all eternity, and from his goodness manifested in his works, that he could have no other design in creating mankind than their happiness; and therefore he wills their happiness; therefore the means of their happiness: therefore that my behaviour, as far as it may be a means of the happiness of mankind, should be such.24 The happiness of humankind is known from ‘the relations of things’. This in turn is known by reason because there is in Gay’s philosophy not only a strong reliance on the reliance of ethics on God’s will (Christianity is never mentioned, nor the Scriptures), yet also a way in which that ethic can be self-justifying. Gay offers justification in terms of hedonism and our regard by others, and denies that Hutcheson and Butler were correct in affirming that there was an innate moral sense or conscience. All morality comes from the experience of life, and our growth in maturity. This could be by having role models, or by reflecting on our own experience. It is necessary in order to solve the principle actions of human life to suppose a moral sense (or what is signified by that name) and also public 22

Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics, Vol. 2. From Suarez to Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 826. 23 Gay, Preliminary Dissertation, p. 1. 24 Gay, Preliminary Dissertation, p. xxviii. O’Flaherty, ‘William Paley’s Moral Philosophy’, p. 11.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

135

affections, but I deny that this moral sense, or these public affections, are innate or implanted in us. They are acquired either from our own observation or the imitation of others.25 It is in this sense that Gay came to be seen as a profound critic of Hutcheson, because he replaced the ideas of an innate conscience and moral sense found in Butler and Hutcheson with the notion of the association of ideas, and our regard of others. Emma Veitch doubts that Gay did influence Hume, but Getty Lustila argues that Hume probably read Gay and developed his idea of psychological associationism from reading him. Lustila’s final judgement points to ‘the indebtedness that utilitarianism has to this obscure Anglican clergyman who left us but one piece of writing: an essay, anonymously affixed to a translation of a popular work on natural religion’.26 The essay was not republished with Gay named as the author until after his death. Gay’s essay was followed by Abraham Tucker’s The Light of Nature Pursued, which was deeply influenced by Gay’s work. Tucker was a wealthy layman and Anglican, who had no need to pursue any career. Once again, his work came out under a pseudonym, in 1768, with the last section omitted, and the whole work was not published under his name until his death in 1778, when his daughter did so. It once again follows Locke’s theory of consciousness, and Locke’s understanding of morality as influenced by rewards and punishments. Belief in the afterlife is the only guarantee of good conduct in this life, while the basis of obligation rests on ‘long-term rewards’.27 Tucker, like Gay, makes a close association between virtue and the pursuit of happiness. Two quotes from him give the tenor of his argument: ‘Happiness is the aggregate of satisfactions’; and ‘Thus virtue, which we may look upon as an estate, yielding an income of happiness’.28 4

Edmund Law and Richard Watson on Moral Teaching and Conscience

Let us leave the consideration of theological utilitarianism and turn instead to those influenced by Locke’s epistemology. The first Anglican theologian and philosopher to be considered here is Edmund Law. Law had been Master 25 Gay, Preliminary Dissertation, p. xxxiii. Veitch, ‘Early Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophers’, pp. 208–209. 26 Lustila, ‘John Gay’, pp. 104–105. 27 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 843. 28 Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (London: T. Tegg, 1837), pp. 210, 223.

136

Chapter 5

of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a leading advocate of Locke’s philosophy against the moral sense school, before becoming Bishop of Carlisle.29 He also argued for as broad an interpretation of Anglican theology as possible and for the abolition of subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion for Anglican clergy. While serving as a bishop, he edited an edition of Locke’s works, which was widely read. ‘Law was the most convinced and actively engaged Lockean divine at work in the eighteenth-century church.’30 B. W. Young describes him as believing that theology could progress as it adapted itself to Locke’s version of empiricism, and certainly Law had no time for eschatology, except for speculations on life after death, or the ‘sleep of the soul’.31 Law read Locke closely, using him to critique any notion of innate ideas, which included the rejection of the innate ideas found in the moral sense school.32 ‘Law’s attack on the idea of innate moral dispositions registered his conviction that this purifying critique ought to be extended to natural as well as revealed religion.’33 He also defended Locke on personal identity, ignoring Butler’s refutation.34 Law wrote a Reflection on the Life and Character of Christ, in which he compared Christ as a moral paragon to Socrates and in the eighteenth century to Rousseau, all of whom were significant for their teaching on morality.35 Conscience was not central, and instead humility, social duty and love became central in Christ’s teaching. Law cited Micah 6:8 in a 1768 sermon, The True Nature and Intent of Religion, as ‘the substance of true religion’, with its command ‘to do justly, and to love mercy’.36 29 John Gascoigne, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History 71 (1986), pp. 22–38. 30 B. W. Young, ‘Law, Edmund’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 31 Young, ‘Theology in the Church of England’, p. 420. 32 Young, ‘Theology in the Church of England’, p. 426. 33 O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism, pp. 44, 54. 34 Edmund Law, A Defence of Mr Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1749). 35 Young, Religion and Enlightenment, p. 54. Edmund Law, A Discourse on the Life and Cha­ racter of Christ (Cambridge: J. Bentham, 1749), p. 18, on Christ’s humility; p. 68, on Socrates and Christ. Edmund Law, Reflections on the Life and Character of Christ, with a Summary and Appendix on the Gospel Morals (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, [1760?]), p. 15, on ‘love of God … charity to man’; p. 62, on the forgiveness of injuries; p. 64, on the universality of benevolence without distinction of country or religion; p. 65, on the subordination of ceremonial law to moral law; p. 66, on the condemning of spiritual pride; p. 69, on the separation of religious and civil authority; p. 70, on the supremacy of intention; on p. 59 Law prefers Christ to Rousseau for not seeking a state of nature as the condition of true morality. 36 Young, Religion and Enlightenment, p. 54. Edmund Law, The True Nature and Intent of Religion (Newcastle, 1768).

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

137

Another Cambridge academic and later bishop influenced by Locke’s thought was Richard Watson. Watson was first Professor of Chemistry and then Regius Professor of Divinity, before becoming Bishop of Llandaff for thirty-four years, from 1782 to 1816. However, he rarely visited his diocese, since he chose to live where he had grown up in the Lake District, and he constantly hoped to be translated to a much more important English see. Locke’s influence on Watson was strong enough for him to deny that conscience was implanted by God within us. Like Locke, whom he had read carefully on the matter, he held that ‘conscience’ was no more than a synonym for our moral views.37 Young describes him as an ‘advanced liberal’ and a ‘public divine’, engaged in defending the faith.38 Isabel Rivers gives the same verdict, saying that he ‘provided a liberal and Lockean account of the nature of Christianity’.39 Jesus is the Messiah, and that is the fundamental doctrine of Christianity. The allusion to Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity is clear, and Watson expected those who read him to understand this reference.40 A. M. C. Waterman shows Watson’s reliance on keeping as close to the scriptural words as possible and avoiding theological speculation.41 Watson disapproved of ‘enthusiasm’, religious or political, and strongly attacked Thomas Paine’s belief in moral rights and the inviolability of conscience. Nevertheless, he was a fierce advocate for religious toleration, with political and ecclesiastical reform. By the end of his life, he was regarded as an old-fashioned Whig rationalist. ‘Watson could be criticized for persisting in rigid Lockean concepts that were outdated both philosophically and politically.’42 He entertained Coleridge at his country house in the Lake District. While Coleridge must have regarded him as someone from another era, this shows the close-knit nature of intellectual discussion at this time, where those in the Romantic Movement such as Coleridge could meet at the end of the eighteenth century old-fashioned clerical Whigs like Watson, who were 37 Richard Watson, A Collection of Theological Tracts in Six Volumes (London: J. Nichols, 1775), Vol. 4, p. 134, which equates conscience with the judgement of a person’s reason. 38 Young, ‘Theology in the Church of England’, p. 422. 39 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000), Vol. 2, p. 341. 40 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 341, citing Richard Watson, A Collection of Theological Tracts in Six Volumes (Cambridge: J. and J. Merrill, 1785), Vol. 1, pp. x, xiv. 41 A. M. C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 78. A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1793–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 89. 42 Robert Hole, ‘Watson, Richard’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

138

Chapter 5

influenced by Locke’s moral philosophy written in 1700. It must have seemed to Coleridge the distant echo of controversies a century earlier. 5

William Paley and Later Theological Utilitarianism

Finally, in this section, we return to William Paley. Paley is placed here because he was very much a protégé of Edmund Law, so it made sense to begin with the early theological utilitarians, Gay and Tucker, and then cover Law’s empiricist epistemology, before considering Paley. Yet again, Paley was influenced by Locke’s moral theory, thus ensuring that Locke was still a powerful force in Cambridge until the end of the eighteenth century in both philosophy and Anglican moral theology.43 Paley had become ordained and taught at the University of Cambridge, where he gave a series of lectures on moral philosophy and theology in the 1770s as a Fellow of Christ’s College. Bishop Edmund Law, who by now had left Cambridge, asked Paley to turn these lectures into a book. Paley published them in 1785 as The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy.44 The book was dedicated to Law. The lectures were well received and included an appeal to abolish the slave trade. Paley had left Cambridge for the parish of Appleby in 1776, before being appointed Archdeacon of Carlisle in 1782 by Bishop Law. Although born in Peterborough, he had been brought up in the Lake District, and so by accepting the parish he was returning to his childhood. There was an attempt to bring Paley back to Cambridge as Master of Jesus College much later in his life, but he declined the offer, finding the life of an Anglican archdeacon in his native countryside far more congenial. Thus, neither Law nor Paley was teaching in Cambridge by the late 1780s. Nevertheless, Law used his influence to ensure that Paley’s Principles became one of the texts for the university examinations in 1787, and they remained set reading for decades.45 Terence Irwin describes the book as ‘an especially brief, clear and influential restatement of the combination of voluntarism, utilitarianism and egoism’.46 Paley dismisses the idea of an innate moral sense, or conscience, since human experience was so varied.47 It is custom and language that suggest any 43 Waterman, Political Economy, Chapter 5, ‘A Cambridge Via Media’, pp. 70–87. 44 William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: F. Davis, 1785). 45 O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism, p. 36. Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, pp. 333–339, on Paley. 46 Irwin, Development of Ethics, Vol. 2, p. 842. 47 O’Flaherty, Utilitarianism, pp. 85–86 and 104–105, contrasts Butler and Paley on the authority of conscience.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

139

similarity in moral judgement, but nothing more; even if such an innate sense called ‘conscience’ could be proved, its authority would be doubtful. Paley thus rejects Butler’s theology altogether and instead turns to Locke, espousing a belief that we obey because we are commanded to do so by another, while being influenced by rewards and punishments. If these do not affect us now, the will of God will ensure that they happen after our death.48 Paley writes: And then let it be asked, Why am I obliged to keep my word? and the answer will be, ‘Because I am urged to do so by a violent motive’ (namely, the expectation of being after this life rewarded, if I do, or punished for it, if I do not), ‘resulting from the command of another’ (namely, of God). This solution goes to the bottom of the subject, as no further question can reasonably be asked. Therefore, private happiness is our motive, and the will of God our rule.49 The concepts that are central for Paley are those of happiness and command. All morality is placed under the category of obedience to another’s will, whether an individual, those in authority or ultimately God. Commands are exercised with the inducement of rewards and punishments. Moral obligation is intrinsically related to pleasure and pain. Prudence is the assessment of gains or losses in this world. Duty is the assessment of gains or losses in a future world. Christianity and natural theology point to the assurance of such future distribution.50 Paley also became influential both for his ‘design’ argument on the existence of God and for his defence of utilitarianism. He accepted psychological egoism, where personal happiness is the primary concept.51 James Crimmins describes him as accepting a hedonistic account of human nature, where 48 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 337, citing Paley, Principles, Book I, Chapter 7. Paley, Principles, Book II, Chapter 2, ‘What we mean when we say a Man is obliged to do a thing’. 49 Paley, Principles, Book II, Chapter 2, italics original. 50 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 337–338. Paley, Principles, Book II, Chapter 3. 51 William Paley, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (London: R. Faulder, 1802). James E. Crimmins (ed.), Utilitarians and Religion (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998), pp. 207–248. James E. Crimmins (ed.), Religion, Secularization and Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2013), Chapter 6. James E. Crimmins, ‘Religion, Utility and Politics: Bentham versus Paley’, in Crimmins, Religion, Secularization and Political Thought, pp. 130–152. James E. Crimmins, ‘Paley, William’ and ‘Religious Utilita­ rians’, in James E. Crimmins (ed.), The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Utilitarianism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 388–393 and 475–477 respectively. Roger Crisp, Sacrifice Regained:

140

Chapter 5

actions are judged by their consequences in terms of the benefit either to the individual or to society. His ideas combined with those of Jeremy Bentham to allow him to produce an original combination of rationalism and utilitarianism. Bentham, however, believed that Paley’s use of divine action to produce happiness was impossible to prove and he found in Paley’s political conservatism a target for his desire to reform British society.52 Paley’s account of happiness includes the use of social affections, the exercise of bodily and mental faculties, and the prudent constitution of habits. He defines virtue as ‘the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness’. In some ways his arguments resemble the later ones of John Stuart Mill on well-being, but without Mill’s rejection of religion as a force for good. In his defence of utilitarianism Paley is aware of criticisms that some actions which advance the common good would not be right or just, and defends this by his theory of ‘rule-utilitarianism’. In this, he distinguishes between particular and general consequences of actions, because any just action must satisfy both criteria, and so Paley argues that it is by observing rules that we ensure that the consequences of our action always have a good outcome, whereas a moral theory that has to decide on each occasion what the best course of action would be would not have this certainty, as well as being very time-consuming. His theological version of rule-utilitarianism leads him to reject Hume’s assertion in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals that ethics and revealed theology are distinct. Paley insists, like Locke, on the necessity of religious sanctions for actions to be carried out as a moral obligation, which Hume felt was irrelevant to any theory of morality.53 Paley constantly stresses that his theology is one which can appeal to ordinary parishioners, with God being the beneficial ruler of the universe, and Christ the exemplar of how we should live. In his view, Locke had purged Morality and Self-Interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 195, on Paley’s utilitarianism. 52 J. Bentham, Church-of-Englandism and Its Catechism Examined, ed. J. Crimmins and C. Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). James E. Crimmins, ‘Jeremy Bentham’, in Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, winter 2021 edition, https://plato.stan ford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/bentham/. Crimmins (ed.), Utilitarians and Religion. Crimmins, ‘Religion, Utility and Politics’. Fred Rosen, ‘Bentham, Jeremy’, in Oxford Dictio­ nary of National Biography. 53 Aaron Garrett, ‘Reasoning about Morals from Butler to Hume’, in Ruth Savage (ed.), Philo­sophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 169–186. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; first published 1777).

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

141

theology of speculative reliance on innate intellectual or moral dispositions, so the ‘evidences of Christianity’ are to be found in the natural world. By studying empirical science one can discover evidence of God’s design at creation. This can then be joined to the revelation of Scripture, and the moral testimony of Christ’s followers, as the ‘evidences of Christianity’. Paley published a book with this title in 1794.54 He hoped that his development of the Anglican moral tradition would show how human fulfilment could be achieved while respecting Scripture.55 6

The Demise of Theological Utilitarianism

What happened to the group which espoused theological utilitarianism in the last two decades of the eighteenth century? The first development leading to their demise was the rise of evangelicalism in Anglicanism, whose proponents wrote works that were highly biblical in content. This school included Thomas Scott, whose 1792 Commentary on the Bible influenced the majority of evangelicals in their moral thinking, drawing on seventeenth-century practical divinity and expounding the Decalogue.56 Evangelicals were divided in their attitude to Paley. Thomas Gisborne was a parish priest and also a major evangelical theologian, who could have become either a Fellow at Oxford and Cambridge or a bishop, but who preferred to stay as a parish priest. He was read widely by evangelical clergy and laity, among them William Wilberforce and those laymen who formed a group wanting to reform the Church of England, known as the Clapham Sect, which Gisborne himself joined. Gisborne attacked Paley strongly, and argued for a return to Butler: As a writer, Gisborne was an astute critic of William Paley. His Principles of Moral Philosophy (1789) was the most direct and forcefully argued of evangelical assaults on Paley’s utilitarianism.  … Gisborne regarded Paley’s book as an Erastian work with a calculating, rationalist spirit. 54 William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (London: R. Faulder, 1794). 55 Niall O’Flaherty, ‘The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802): Part 1, William Paley’s Natural Theology in Context’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010) pp. 19–25. Niall O’Flaherty, ‘The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802): Part 2, William Paley’s Natural Theology and the Challenge of Atheism’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010), pp. 128–137. 56 Peter Toon, ‘Early Evangelical Ethics’, in Paul Elmen (ed.), The Anglican Moral Choice (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1983), pp. 85–106. Arthur Pollard, ‘Scott, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

142

Chapter 5

Gisborne saw morality as a categorical imperative imposed by God and revealed by him to man in the Bible, not as a human perception of what was expedient.57 However, some evangelicals praised Paley strongly, seeing his theology as capable of being united to a biblical ethic, where every moral precept was supported by a biblical text. One such was John Bird Sumner, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1848 and was a moderate evangelical, who cited Paley constantly in his books. Sumner was influenced by Richard Watson, and his moderate evangelicalism persuaded Newman out of his ‘remaining Calvinism’ in 1824.58 The second development, which in the end was fatal to theological utilitarianism, was the growth after 1780 of philosophical traditions which were hostile to any moral theory which appealed to theism for its justification, such as the arguments of David Hume. The chief opposition to Anglicanism did not lie in dissent, but rather consisted in a shift after the middle of the eighteenth century to philosophical scepticism, a utilitarianism which rejected both theism and the churches, and anti-clericalism. Anglicans who followed Locke’s epistemology did not last long in this colder climate. Paley continued to be widely read into the nineteenth century, but the intellectual hegemony had clearly passed to Hume and Bentham, as is shown by the establishment in 1824 of the Westminster Review, a journal which expressed their views.59 Long before that, however, the 1790s saw a greater crisis. As the wars with revolutionary France broke out, political radicals were highly sympathetic to the revolution in France, although the increasing bloodshed and anarchy disturbed them. Philosophical scepticism was usually also politically radical. (It is worth noting that David Hume was politically conservative and yet very much opposed to religion as a philosophical sceptic, but this was not a typical position.) However, philosophical sceptics and political radicals were repressed harshly by the government as the war with France continued. By the end of the eighteenth century, theological utilitarianism had been completely rejected by philosophical sceptics such as Jeremy Bentham, but their own position was 57

Robert Hole, ‘Gisborne, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Toon, ‘Early Evangelical Ethics’, pp. 100–101, on Gisborne’s attack on Paley. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 176, on Gisborne’s argument for Butler’s intuitionism over Paley’s utilitarianism. 58 Nigel Scotland, ‘Sumner, John Bird’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Waterman, Political Economy, pp. 85–87. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion, p. 157: ‘he comes unmistakably from the same stable’. 59 Waterman, Political Economy, p. 121.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

143

under threat due to government censorship and draconian restriction of freedom of speech, which created a harsh political climate and a sense of crisis.60 7

John Wesley: Context and Life

We return to the other development in Anglican moral theology in the mid- to late eighteenth century: the continuing interest in holiness, sanctification and virtue ethics found in the life and writing of John Wesley. Wesley is someone around whom many myths have gathered.61 These refer primarily not to his life but to the context in which he worked and ministered. There are two narratives in particular which have been reinterpreted as the historical revisionism that has been such a feature of this book took hold. Jeremy Gregory’s article on the context of Wesley’s ministry is exemplary in summarizing all the research in the last fifty years which has discredited both accounts.62 The first claim is that Wesley ministered in a society where the Church of England was a fading institution, made up of lazy, slothful clergy, out of touch with the common people. According to this account, Wesley’s indefatigable zeal and his use of lay preachers reached out to those neglected by the Church 60 Rosen, ‘Bentham, Jeremy’. 61 There is a huge literature on John Wesley and the birth of Methodism. The three most recent major studies are Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Charles Yrigoyen Jr (ed.), T&T Clark Companion to Methodism (London: T&T Clark, 2010); William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The major British biography is Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Birth of Methodism (London: Epworth Press, 1989; 3rd edition 2005). The two main studies of Wesley’s moral theology are D. Stephen Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology (Kingswood Books, Abingdon Press: Nashville, Tennessee, 2005) and Kenneth Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007). See also the sections on Wesley in Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, and Paul Avis, In Search of Authority: Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Short studies include Henry D. Rack, ‘Wesley, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Henry D. Rack, ‘A Man of Reason and Religion: John Wesley and the Enlightenment’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 1 (2009), pp. 2–17; Henry D. Rack, ‘Some Recent Trends in Wesley Scholarship’, Wesleyan Theological Journal, 41.2 (2006), pp. 182–199; Timothy Wayne Holgerson, ‘The Wesleyan Enlightenment: Closing the Gap between Heart Religion and Reason in Eighteenth Century England’ (Ph.D. thesis, Kansas State University, 2017). 62 Jeremy Gregory, ‘The Long Eighteenth Century’, in Maddox and Vickers (eds), Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, pp. 13–39. J. C. D. Clark, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Context’, in Abraham and Kirby (eds), Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies, pp. 3–29; Clark uses the term ‘myth’ on p. 3.

144

Chapter 5

of England. In fact, as Gregory and J. C. D. Clark both show, parish clergy were often diligent, and Anglicanism was itself in a process of renewal. The old account of a ‘dead Anglican church in the eighteenth century’ is a myth that served to justify Methodism’s break with the Church of England. It is true that some bishops could be hostile, or indolent, but again generalizations are dangerous. There were many active and reforming bishops.63 The second often-repeated story is that the eighteenth century was a century of progress. This included the Industrial Revolution, the growth of a consumer society among the better-off, much better communications because of paved roads, and the beginnings of a national press. Wesley is seen as responding to these changes, and his Journal is a fascinating reflection of his age. However, Gregory cites much research which shows that alongside this innovation there was also a deep conservatism which lasted until the early or even midnineteenth century. England and Wales were largely rural, agriculture was the predominant occupation for most people, and the aristocracy held enormous political, cultural and social power alongside the monarchy. The Church of England formed the third part of the hegemony of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church. Wesley himself was a great supporter of the Hanoverian monarchy and politically was quite conservative, even if he argued towards the end of his life for the abolition of the slave trade.64 John Wesley was born in 1703 into a clerical family that illustrated very well the tensions in eighteenth-century religion, since his parents were the children of dissenting ministers who had lost their livings in 1662, but his parents themselves became High Church Anglicans. His father, Samuel, was a Church of England parish priest at Epworth, Lincolnshire. The couple had many children, including John’s brother Charles, who was also to be ordained, joined John in the Methodist revival and became a famous hymn-writer. The upbringing of the children was largely done by Wesley’s mother, Susannah, who was extremely strict: ‘Tight maternal discipline applied to all the children, though with variable results. Regularity was enforced in eating, sleeping, education, and religion. This was a severe, religiously focused version of John Locke’s educational principles, and “breaking the will” was seen as the foundation of religion and morality.’65 Samuel had Jacobite sympathies, and John went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and Thomas à 63 Gregory, ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, pp. 29–33, on bishops, parish clergy, and SPCK as a charity for religious education. 64 Gregory, ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, pp. 19–20. 65 Rack, ‘Wesley, John’.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

145

Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. Some see the period 1725–1730 as his conversion, when he began to seek holiness in reading these books, while others (as discussed below) date the conversion to 24 May 1738. Henry Rack, who is one of the most distinguished scholars of John Wesley, observes that, ‘though repelled by some of their severities, Wesley was convinced by these guides of the necessity of inward as well as outward holiness and the possibility of “Christian perfection”, which became his central concern’.66 Wesley was ordained deacon in 1725 and became a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford the next year, where he could have led the life of a conventional eighteenth-century Oxford don, after being priested in 1728, through observing his religious duties and teaching students. Instead he founded the ‘Holy Club’, for prayer, study and visiting the sick and prisoners, which spread across several colleges in Oxford and by 1732 was nicknamed ‘Methodist’. With his brother Charles he went to Georgia in 1735 as a missionary to native Americans, sponsored by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. On the journey he encountered Moravian refugees, whose calm during a storm on the outward voyage deeply impressed him. In fact, John worked among the colonists rather than native Americans, and the trip was not a success, since he offended many by his austerity and became entangled in a relationship which went wrong. Wesley then excluded this woman from Holy Communion, and finally had to flee Georgia for England when he himself was indicted for ecclesiastical irregularity, with his journey home being despondent. Back in England, he continued to meet Moravians, founding a religious society in London with them, and on 24 May 1738 he had his conversion experience at Aldersgate, in London, while listening to someone reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’ This account in Wesley’s Journal also included a review of his past religious life, which he said was an attempt to gain salvation by works. He revised this entry in later editions.67 This conversion experience has been much discussed, but Wesley rarely referred to it later, emphasizing instead his 1725 search for holiness with the reading of Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which made a huge impression on him as a young Fellow in Oxford. Against the emphasis on 1725–1730 and Wesley’s 66 Rack, ‘Wesley, John’. 67 W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (eds), The Works of John Wesley, Volume 18, Journal and Diaries 1735–1738 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), pp. 248–250.

146

Chapter 5

reading of Anglican theologians being as important as the 1738 conversion, Rack suggests that when Wesley broke with the Moravians later, he downplayed Moravian influence and the experience of conversion, and this affected his view of salvation. Rack is clear that in Wesley’s writings we have a series of reflections on past events, where the reflections themselves change over time, as his views mature. So what matters is to know when Wesley was recording his view of the past. Rack writes that some have seen May 1738 as marking a temporary surrender to Moravian ideas or, at most, a psychological stimulus giving him confidence for evangelism. Rack’s overall judgement is that: The event of May 1738 seems at first to have suggested to Wesley that justification, assurance, and perhaps even perfection could be received in a single experience. During the next few years, however, he developed a view of salvation as a process moving from conviction of sin, through repentance, to justification, followed by assurance, and on to the pursuit of holiness culminating in perfection, which may be cultivated but also received in a moment, by faith.68 The interpretation is important, because from now on there would be different aspects of Wesley’s theology and belief that he could emphasize. On the one hand, there was his search for holiness in the Anglican tradition, citing Taylor and Law; on the other, he accepted the reality of a single conversion experience, emphasized the gift of the Spirit, and was accused of religious enthusiasm by his opponents. These different parts of a complex set of beliefs make it hard to give a final account of his theology. After 1738, Wesley became an itinerant preacher, as part of a great religious revival, his relationship with the Moravians cooled and he had a difficult and tense partnership with those Reformed preachers such as George Whitefield who accepted predestination. By 1741 Wesley had repudiated this belief, although years later there was a personal reconciliation with Whitefield (but not with Whitefield’s followers). In 1751 Wesley lost his Fellowship at Lincoln College when he married, although the marriage eventually broke down. The Methodist movement grew considerably every decade. Wesley continued to travel ceaselessly, and the division grew between those who followed Wesley on the one hand, and those who remained in the Church of England on the other. The main issues were to do with irregular celebration of Holy Communion and Wesley’s use of laypeople who were not authorized by the Church of England to preach or take services, because his evangelical zeal and 68 Rack, ‘Wesley, John’.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

147

thirst to see holiness take root in the laity meant that he ignored disciplinary rules about taking services and commissioning laypeople. Wesley’s decision to ordain clergy to serve in the newly independent United States of America in 1774, which was followed by further ordinations in Scotland and eventually England, caused a profound tension with the hierarchy of the Church of England. Charles Wesley died in 1788, having ceased to travel many years before this, ministering first in Bristol and then in London. He regretted the deepening schism which his brother John seemed unable or unwilling to prevent with the Anglican church, and strongly opposed the ordination of Methodist clergy for the United States. At his death he proclaimed himself an Anglican. John himself did not want a schism and its existence did not affect his love for the Church of England, nor his continuing to stand in the tradition of Anglican moral theology. He died in 1791, enormously revered as a great religious leader. 8

Wesley and Sanctification

Wesley maintained his devotion to the moral theology embodied in Jeremy Taylor and William Law, despite the increasing strain which his evangelism put on his relationship with the Church of England. As mentioned above, he was committed to virtue ethics, holiness and an emphasis on sanctification. It is no surprise that he preached repeatedly on the Beatitudes (Matthew chapters 5–7). He frequently cited those authors he had first read 1730 in Oxford, as mentioned above: Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor and William Law.69 He also read the Cambridge Platonists. Stephen Long’s book on John Wesley’s Moral Theology suggests that the Cambridge Platonists were Wesley’s bridge into not simply studying but actually appropriating Thomism as well as Platonism. In particular, Wesley read Ralph Cudworth, whose sermon ‘The Life of Christ’ was included in Wesley’s Christian Library, published in Bristol from 1749 to 1755, while Wesley’s speculative sermon ‘On Eternity’ drew on Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe.70 69 On Wesley’s moral theology, the main sources are Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology; D. Stephen Long and Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Theological Ethics’, in Abraham and Kirby (eds), Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies, pp. 635–646; Robin Lovin, ‘Moral Theology’, in Abraham and Kirby (eds), Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies, pp. 647–661; Rebekah L. Miles, ‘Happiness, Holiness and the Moral Life in John Wesley’, in Maddox and Vickers (eds), Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, pp. 207–224. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, pp. 243–253, on Wesley’s doctrine of holiness. 70 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, pp. 114–118.

148

Chapter 5

Wesley revered Law’s writings; even after he broke with Law, he continued to quote him in his sermons at the very end of his life. Both men were steeped in the Anglican tradition, both came from a High Tory background including Jacobitism, which Law never renounced but Wesley did, and both sought an intense holiness which was morally rigorous, writing extensively to make their views known. Both men felt that the renewal of the church by a disciplined prayer life and leading a life of holiness was essential, since the church was threatened by its encounter with an increasingly luxurious society, at least for those who lived in middle- and upper-class England. And both eventually joined their morally rigorous theology to a different approach: in Law’s case this was German mysticism, which angered Wesley; in Wesley’s case it was (as we shall see later) his exploration of enthusiasm. Wesley became critical of William Law for not emphasizing the theology of justification by faith, and broke altogether with Law when Law became a mystic. Wesley also mentioned the importance of emotion, feelings and pietism, although he also was critical of some leaders of the evangelical revival, in which he himself played such a central role, attacking Reformed Calvinists who accepted predestination, because it could diminish the importance of holiness as the central tenet of moral theology. By the end of his long life, he once again laid great stress in his sermons on Jeremy Taylor, William Law and others, and the emphasis on justification (while never completely lost) was held alongside a renewed appreciation of the earlier Anglican moral theologians. What this means is that Wesley sought to hold together his beliefs in the doctrine of justification by faith, the importance of emotion and evangelical conversion, and Anglican moral theology. He is fascinating because he sought to preserve Anglican moral theology but also intensify it into a search for perfection and holiness. Rivers describes this moral theology as ‘the inevitable conjunction of holiness and happiness’.71 The ‘life of perfection’ was the standard by which Christian ethics was to be measured, and it was an experiential, fervid one. Wesley was critical of Hutcheson for turning conscience into the moral sense, and his own sermon ‘On Conscience’, published in 1788 at the end of his life, reflects a life-long antipathy to the moral sense school. Conscience is described as ‘that faculty of the soul which, by the assistance of the grace of God, sees at one and the same time, (1) our own tempers and lives, the real nature and quality of our thoughts, words, and actions; (2) the rule whereby we are to be directed, and (3) the agreement or disagreement therewith’.72 Two 71 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, p. 250. 72 John Wesley, ‘On Conscience’, in The Works of John Wesley, 28 vols to date (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984–), Vol. 3, pp. 479–490.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

149

things are striking in this quotation. The emphasis on seeing shows how much Wesley stood in the empiricist tradition, because we have to describe accurately our own situation, both inwardly and externally.73 Secondly, conscience measures our conduct by a rule because it is a faculty of reason. Reason was important to Wesley, and he was concerned that the moral sense school could deny this, yet he was not a utilitarian as Paley was. Holiness and happiness were the results of keeping to these rules. Wesley also attacked ‘this great triumvirate, Rousseau, Voltaire and David Hume’, for extolling ‘humanity to the skies as the very essence of religion’. Love of God and love of neighbour went together, and to separate them was ‘neither better nor worse than atheism’.74 Wesley’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Annesley, who died in 1696, had written several treatises on practical divinity, including in 1690 his Casuistical Morning-Exercises.75 He chose ejection in 1662 from the Church of England, although his daughter became a strong Anglican and Jacobite. Wesley quoted his grandfather at length in his sermon on conscience because Annesley advocated a strict application of casuistry, working through a series of rules to discover one’s duty, which Wesley preferred to the moral sense and feeling of benevolence advocated by Hutcheson. In this regard, Wesley’s moral theology reflected the late seventeenth century, as did his citation of Jeremy Taylor. Wesley did, however, argue that the conscience required God’s grace to be effective. The divine will at creation was expressed most clearly in the moral law, and this was for Wesley ‘the face of God unveiled’.76 Human beings could choose at creation between good and evil, but the effect of the Fall undid this knowledge. So, unlike Butler, Wesley felt that the conscience was blind in ordinary human beings. Since he accepted the complete depravity of human beings, he argued that it was only with prevenient grace that they could know the difference between right and wrong. Although he made many moral appeals both to society and to government – for instance against slavery, which he considered appalling – Wesley also held that natural reason was unable to judge moral choices correctly. Nor could natural benevolence, which Hutcheson had emphasized, enable us to carry out acts of disinterested love. Wesley turned instead to the working of prevenient grace in this regard. On the 73 Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 52–54, on Wesley’s view of Locke. 74 The Works of John Wesley, 14 vols (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978), Vol. 4, p. 69, citing Hauerwas and Long, ‘Theological Ethics’, p. 639. 75 Newton E. Key, ‘Annesley, Samuel’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 76 Jason E. Vickers, ‘Wesley’s Theological Emphases’, in Maddox and Vickers (eds), Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, p. 193; John Wesley, Sermon 34, ‘The Original Nature, Properties and Use of the Law’, in Works, Vol. 2, p. 9.

150

Chapter 5

other hand, he clashed fiercely with Calvinists, among them his fellow evangelist George Whitefield, who claimed that only the elect could be saved. How far prevenient grace worked in those who were not saved was not an answer which Wesley ever really answered. Wesley held that love was not opposed to the law of God; he was no antinomian and felt that Calvinism would lead to a sitting light to the law, because they saw themselves as the elect. Yet he also opposed legalism, and in his sermon ‘The Important Question’ he defined religion as love fulfilling the law. The Ten Commandments come to an end in love, both of God and of our neighbour.77 Wesley preached many sermons on the Sermon on the Mount. In Sermon 25, he said that ‘there is no contrariety at all between the law and the gospel; that there is no need for the law to pass away in order to the establishing of the gospel. Indeed neither of them supersedes the other, but they agree perfectly well together.’78 The main emphasis in Wesley’s sermons on Matthew 5–7 is sanctification, and growth in holiness. In the same sermon, he drew attention to ‘poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, hunger and thirst after righteousness’. Wesley did not develop what a holy intention might be, but rather stressed ‘purity of heart’ and the works of charity. Long notes that Wesley almost worked retroactively. We do not do mercy because of our holy intention, but rather we do works of mercy in the hope that our intention will be made holy. The same is true of Wesley’s command to fast.79 However, this command to fast is only possible because of the beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount, and in fasting ‘we wait for his unmerited mercy’. Once the blessing is received then fasting becomes a sign of this gift. The call to perfection is one of Wesley’s most well-known requirements of his moral theology, where holiness and happiness are joined together. In Sermon 77, ‘Spiritual Worship’, he claimed that ‘None but a Christian is happy’.80 He preached on perfection many times, including Sermon 40, ‘Christian Perfection’ (1741), and Sermon 76, ‘On Perfection’ (1785); and wrote a treatise in 1766 titled A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. Wesley returned to certain New Testament sources on this theme, especially 1 Corinthians 13; Matthew 5; and 1 John. Perfection must not be set too high or it becomes unattainable, 77 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 127, citing Wesley’s Sermon 84, ‘The Important Question’, in Works, Vol. 3, p. 189. 78 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 156, citing Wesley’s Sermon 25, ‘Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, V’, in Works, Vol. 1, p. 554. 79 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 158, citing Wesley’s Sermon 27, ‘Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, VII’, in Works, Vol. 1, p. 592. 80 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, p. 250.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

151

because human beings, even if perfect, are subject to the limitations of their own human nature. Human beings cannot reach ‘sinless perfection’ or be like angels, though if sin is a ‘voluntary transgression of a known law’, which is the definition offered in A Plain Account, then the perfect do not sin. Wesley denied that he was juggling with words and he cited examples from the saints to show that the scriptural command ‘Be Ye Therefore Perfect’ (Matthew 5:48, Authorized Version) is possible.81 Furthermore, his own translation makes the command into a promise: ‘Therefore ye shall be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.’82 William Abraham makes another important point, which is that, although Wesley had a strong doctrine of the Holy Spirit (which was unusual among Anglicans at this time), he did not equate the moral good of the Christian life, or holiness, with the attainment of various gifts of the Spirit, such as prophecy. Holiness was logically and experientially distinct from the reception of spiritual gifts, and Wesley’s deep concern with sanctification did not make him a Pentecostalist.83 Wesley therefore had a distinct set of moral beliefs. He did not wish to follow Locke in his manner of making moral judgements.84 He preferred Aristotle’s syllogism and adapted it to his own understanding of the true end of humanity, arguing that happiness and holiness are our true end; happiness is obedience to God; and obedience to God is shown in frequent reception of the sacraments (‘constant communion’).85 Like his contemporary in the Roman Catholic Church St Alphonsus, Wesley believed that moral efficacy and frequent reception of the sacrament of Holy Communion were causally linked, because it was by grace from the sacrament that we could grow in holiness.86

81 William J. Abraham, ‘Christian Perfection’, in Abraham and Kirby (eds), Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies, pp. 587–601. 82 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 2, pp. 247–251, citing John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in Works, Vol. 9. 83 Abraham, ‘Christian Perfection’, pp. 591–592. See also Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 136, citing Wesley’s Sermon 19, ‘The Great Privilege of Those Who Are Born of God’, in Works, Vol. 1, p. 442. 84 Sell, John Locke, p. 53, on Wesley’s spiritual senses. 85 Long, John Wesley’s Moral Theology, p. 63, citing Wesley’s sermon ‘The Duty of Constant Communion’, in Works, Vol. 3, p. 439. 86 Alphonse de Liguori, La pratique de l’amour de Jesus-Christ (Lille, Paris and Bruges, 1910). Theodore Rey-Mermet, Moral Choices: The Moral Theology of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, trans. Paul Laverdure (Liguori, MI: Liguori Publications, 1998). Hamish Swanston, Celeb­ rating Eternity Now: A Study in the Theology of St. Alphonsus de Liguori (Alton, Hampshire: Redemptorist Publications, 1995).

152 9

Chapter 5

Wesley and Butler

At the very beginning of the start of Wesley’s preaching ministry, in 1739, there was an encounter between him and the Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Butler, which has been discussed intensively. Butler had only been a bishop for a year, and no doubt was feeling his way in exercising his jurisdiction. This meeting is often used as a way of showing how Anglican bishops were opposed to Wesley’s ministry, but the truth is far more complex than that, as R. C. Tennant shows in a careful discussion of this episode.87 Butler first encountered the Methodist revival in early 1739, when he met with George Whitefield, an Anglican clergyman, who asked permission to preach in Bristol diocese. Butler met Whitefield, and according to Whitefield treated him very well. The bishop agreed to Whitefield preaching, and Whitefield later sent him his Journals. In August 1739 Butler then met Wesley, and Wesley later made notes of the meeting.88 Wesley had already been preaching in the open air in the diocese. Butler’s concern was twofold. First, he knew that Wesley was breaking canon law in doing so as an Anglican clergyman, since Wesley was preaching without permission. Wesley did not deny that he was doing this, arguing that he had an ‘indeterminate commission to preach the word of God in any part of the Church of England’. Ingenuously, he used the fact that he had been ordained on the title of his Oxford Fellowship, and this was not restricted geographically. The legal details of Wesley’s offence under canon law are not relevant. What is central is that Butler quoted Whitefield’s Journal, and this is the second of Butler’s concerns. Wesley recorded the conversation. Butler said, ‘Mr. Whitefield says in his Journal, “There are promises still to be fulfilled in me”. Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’ Wesley replied that he often prayed with those in deep emotional distress, and his prayer was heard. However, he did not pretend to such gifts but ‘what every Christian may receive’. Whitefield could speak for himself. The conversation moved on to the nature of faith. Butler argued that ‘our faith itself is a good work, it is a virtuous temper of mind’. Wesley fell back on the claim of justification by faith alone, to which Butler replied that, if God justified some ‘without any goodness preceding’, and yet 87 R. C. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 131–141. 88 The meeting is discussed in many sources. Works, Vol. 19, pp. 471–474. John Whitehead, The Life of the Rev. John Wesley, MA, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; 1st edition 1793–1796), Vol. 2, pp. 118–121. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 135. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, p. 209. J. C. D. Clark, ‘Eighteenth-Century Context’, pp. 14–15.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

153

God did not justify others, then you ‘make God a tyrannical being’. There must be goodness in those whom God justified. Wesley said that the failure to come to faith was because some ‘would not believe’. However, Wesley was an Arminian in theology, and resisted Whitefield’s preaching of predestination. As Tennant argues, Wesley was arguing that a ‘one-off conversion experience constitutes a saving faith’. Butler disagreed profoundly, but in fact Wesley’s emphasis on the need for the human will to accept the work of the Spirit prior to conversion showed that he was much closer to Butler’s argument than he admitted.89 Wesley admired Butler’s works, as many evangelicals did, noting in his Journal (21 January 1746) that Butler had written ‘a strong and well-wrote treatise, but I am afraid far too deep or their understanding to whom it is primarily addressed’. The clash at Bristol was both the result of Wesley’s disregard of the canons of the Church of England and a clash of theologies; but, in a reflective mood, Wesley could appreciate Butler’s arguments.90 10

Wesley and Enthusiasm

One challenge to the Anglican moral tradition, as represented by Butler, was the way Wesley’s theology was combined with ‘enthusiasm’. It is important to note that Wesley could use this term as a mark of disapproval or censure. Nevertheless, the phenomenon also included the place of feeling in his spirituality and moral theology as providing an inward proof, or verification, of his claim to religious truth. The question of the doctrine of perfection, or holiness, is related to, but also separate from, enthusiasm. Throughout Wesley’s life there was a tension between his indebtedness to Jeremy Taylor and William Law on the one hand, and his deeply pietist, emotional ethics on the other. There are several aspects of enthusiasm to discuss in relation to Wesley, all three of which can be related to his moral theology. The first is the use of mysticism, and in particular some adherence to the pietism of the seventeenthcentury French school. Secondly, there is the use of emotional language and behaviour, and non-verbal expressions of faith, such as crying, screaming and groaning, which were highly typical of revivalist meetings in which Wesley certainly took a part. This sometimes caused him concern, and his sermon on enthusiasm was preached about them. Thirdly, there is the use of feelings as either a guide to conduct or a way of providing certainty in religious faith and in moral decision-making. This can be expressed more formally as the 89 Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 138. 90 Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 214.

154

Chapter 5

use of feelings and emotion in Wesley’s theology as a form of verification. The phrase ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed’ in his Journal’s account of the 1738 conversion experience is certainly there to add weight to the truth of what he was recording. The first aspect of enthusiasm is that of pietist spirituality, and especially the seventeenth-century French theologian François Fenelon’s Maxims of the Spirit. Wesley and Butler had both also read Madame Guyon, who was deeply concerned with holiness. Butler noted that the theology and practice of Fenelon and Guyon on the love of God was often condemned in his own day. He wrote about the issue of French pietism, ‘which was there called enthusiasm, as it will everywhere by the generality of the world.’ But he denied that the practice of such ascetical mysticism is properly called ‘enthusiasm’, for both moral and religious affection in their nature ‘necessarily implies resting in the object as itself’.91 Tennant argues that in Butler’s view ‘a mystical apprehension and love of God is the product of the same affection that produce social benevolence’.92 Butler accepted the validity of this mystical school of prayer, and there are occasional glimpses of it in his Sermons. Its relevance to moral theology is that Fenelon felt that mystical prayer can put aside the self and egoism, which Butler called an ‘improper’ self-love. If the self-absorption of the self can be broken by a period of ascetical prayer, then the soul can turn back to the world after resting in God with a renewed and purified vision. Butler recognized both the need to move away from the self, and the way in which mystical affection could certainly be a parallel to moral affection. Wesley’s reading of Guyon helped to shape his views on ‘pure love’ and perfection, although Rack argues that Wesley’s doctrine of perfection and holiness was much more active than passive, unlike Guyon’s French pietism.93 Nevertheless, the quote from Butler shows that the pursuit of perfection and the practice of mystical prayer was common in the eighteenth-century Anglican world, and certainly was there in Wesley. Wesley did, however, draw the line at William Law’s mysticism, feeling that this was unscriptural.94 91

Joseph Butler, ‘Preface’, in T. A. Roberts (ed.), Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, and a Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue (London: SPCK, 1970), pp. 15–16, paras 43–44. 92 Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics, p. 71. 93 Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, pp. 169, 401. 94 Geordan Hammond, ‘High Church Anglican Influences on John Wesley’s Conception of Primitive Christianity, 1732–1735’, Anglican and Episcopal History 78.2 (2009), pp. 174–207. Gerda J. Joling-van der Sar, ‘The Controversy between William Law and John Wesley’, English Studies 87.4 (2006), pp. 442–465.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

155

Meanwhile, Wesley’s teaching on perfection was one of the hallmarks of his moral theology. What of the second aspect of enthusiasm, which was the rough and tumble of open-air revival meetings? Wesley did not shrink from a deep involvement in the emotional and tumultuous world of the evangelical revival, of which Methodism was a central part. His Journal certainly interpreted for his readers the deep groaning of those who were affected by sinfulness, and the ardent praises of those who had subsequently been forgiven.95 The former Oxford academic was plunged into revivalist meetings ceaselessly, and Wesley certainly defended this behaviour as appropriate to conversion, although sometimes he condemned this behaviour as ‘enthusiasm’ when it got out of hand.96 His Sermon ‘The Nature of Enthusiasm’ warned against a disorder of the mind; and such a disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason  … those who imagine they have such gifts from God as they have not. Thus some have imagined themselves to be endued with a power of working miracles, of healing the sick by a word or a touch, of restoring sight to the blind: yea, even of raising the dead … a notorious instance of which is still fresh in our own history. Others have undertaken to prophesy, to foretell things to come, and that with the utmost certainty and exactness. But a little time usually convinces these enthusiasts. Wesley is at his most rational in this sermon.97 He denies that visions, dreams or ecstatic utterances can guide moral behaviour because, although they have their place in the Christian life, they are never to be guides for conduct, nor to be used in moral discernment, as a short cut by Christians in difficult situations. He goes on: Perhaps some may ask, ‘Ought we not then to inquire what is the will of God in all things? And ought not His will to be the rule of our practice?’ Unquestionably it ought. But how is a sober Christian to make this inquiry to know what is the will of God. Not by waiting for supernatural dreams, not by expecting God to reveal it in visions; not by looking for any particular impressions or sudden impulses on his mind: no; but by consulting 95 Charles I. Wallace Jr, ‘Wesley as Revivalist/Renewal Leader’, in Maddox and Vickers (eds), Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, pp. 90–91, citing the Journal entry for 17 April 1739. 96 Wallace, ‘Wesley as Revivalist’, p. 90. 97 Sell, John Locke, p. 101, on Wesley’s admiration for being a ‘scriptural, rational Christian’ in his letter of 24 January 1789 to Freeborn Garrettson. Works, Vol. 8, p. 112.

156

Chapter 5

the oracles of God. ‘To the law and to the testimony!’ This is the general method of knowing what is ‘the holy and acceptable will of God’.98 11

Wesley on Emotion in Moral Judgement

Finally we come to the question about the role that feelings play in Wesley’s moral theology, as shown in a letter of July 1739 to Dr Stebbing, published in the Journal in 1742, where Wesley argued that Stebbing should not contradict him until Stebbing had experienced ‘inward feelings’. Wesley wrote: when the Holy Ghost has fervently kindled your love towards God, you will know these to be very sensible operations. As you ‘hear the wind, and feel it too’, while it ‘strikes upon your bodily organs’, you will know that you are under the guidance of God’s Spirit the same way, namely, by feeling it in your soul, by the present peace and joy and love which you feel within, as well by its outward and more distant effects.99 Wesley repeated this defence many times. In Sermon 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit’, he argues that, just because some enthusiasts have mistaken ‘the voice of their own imagination’ for the witness of the spirit, ‘many reasonable men’ write off the witness of the spirit as enthusiasm. Wesley grants that the process cannot be explained but argues that the experience is as immediate as physical sensation. Nothing more can be said. To require more than this ‘is to make a demand which can never be answered’.100 Paul Avis also shows how Wesley ‘disseminated accounts of revelatory dreams and visitations by spirits’.101 Rivers has a careful discussion of Wesley’s introduction of feeling into his moral theology. Is this language figurative, literal or sometimes both? Is it a certain rule of conduct or a way of bringing about a certain source of moral or religious knowledge|? Wesley certainly realized the danger of a circular argument, although Rivers also notes that sometimes Wesley’s appeal to the ‘experimental method’ can work another way. Wesley did not always claim such feelings, 98 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, pp. 242–243. John Wesley, Sermon 37, ‘On the Nature of Enthusiasm’, in Works, Vol. 2, p. 57. 99 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, p. 237, citing F. Baker (ed.), The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 26: Letters, Volume II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 170, italics in original. 100 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, p. 238, citing John Wesley, Sermon 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit’, in Works, Vol. 1, pp. 269–270. 101 Paul Avis, Theology and the Enlightenment: A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theology and its Reception (London: T&T Clark, 2023), p. 228.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

157

or ‘the assurance of faith’, for himself, relying instead on the feelings of others as a testimony for him.102 The ‘Letter to Middleton’ makes this claim explicitly and argues that this was in fact what the early church fathers did when describing genuine Christianity.103 Here Wesley seems to be allowing emotion back into his moral discernment, although he would have argued that it was not the same as an emotional spasm or acting on violent emotion.104 He paradoxically strongly disliked the moral sense school for relativizing the authority of conscience, yet relied on the assurance of feelings in making moral judgements. 12

Conclusion

Anglicanism was heavily influenced by John Locke in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The tradition of theological utilitarianism, from Gay to Paley, was a conscious attempt to meet the deist challenge halfway, and to show that the reasonable person could lead a life which was compatible with contemporary moral philosophy, while also following Scripture. It is no surprise that Waterman calls this school ‘a Cambridge via media’.105 In the end, however, it may be charged with having given too much ground to its opponents, although Archbishop Sumner could still cite Paley in his writings and sermons into the mid-nineteenth century. Sumner sought to present a moderate, and reasonable, account of Christianity, but the danger was that religious sceptics would dismiss such apologetic as no more than pious platitudes. Within Britain, and increasingly in North America and the Continent of Europe, the scepticism and anti-clericalism of Hume and his followers pushed Anglicanism onto the defensive.106 Liberal Anglicanism, of the sort represented by Paley, was not able to hold its own intellectually against Hume’s scepticism, however much Paley thought that was the case. 102 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, pp. 239–242. 103 Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, Vol. 1, pp. 241–242, citing Thomas Jackson (ed.), The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 14 vols (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1829–1831), Vol. 10, pp. 78–79. 104 Clark, ‘Eighteenth-Century Context’, p. 15, on Samuel Johnson’s criticism of Methodists and the ‘inward light’. 105 Waterman, Political Economy, p. 70. 106 David Hume, Essay 10, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963; originally published 1741–1742). David Fergusson, ‘The Absence of God and Its Contextual Significance in Hume’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 11.1 (2013), pp. 69–85. David Fergusson, ‘Hume amongst the Theo­ logians’, in David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott (eds), The History of Scottish Theology, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), pp. 301–313.

158

Chapter 5

John Wesley is the person who is most difficult to classify, given his deep knowledge of the Anglican tradition. This chapter has shown how he struggled to hold together the Anglicanism of Jeremy Taylor and William Law with the revivalist evangelical movement. However, many have defended Wesley: ‘Wesley’s aggressive optimism of grace fits much more aptly with the witness of Scripture and the wider canonical heritage of the church than does the systematic pessimism of Luther or Calvin or the sombre moderation of Anglicanism.’107 Wesley was not alone in emphasizing sanctification. The Anglican exemplary tradition of conformity to the mind of Christ can be found in the eighteenth century in both Butler and William Law. However, Wesley’s doctrine of perfection, holiness and sanctification was a unique gift to moral theology. His theology remains close to William Law’s writings, despite all the controversy between them on mysticism, and at the end of Wesley’s life Law featured once more in his sermons. Wesley is thus presented here as a classic Anglican moral theologian, and Long’s book likewise locates Wesley in the virtue tradition of Aquinas and Anglican moral theology, although Long does not cite Law or Taylor in his excellent study of Wesley’s moral theology. Robin Lovin provides an overall judgement on the relationship of Angli­ canism to Wesley and Methodism: At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Anglican version of Aquinas’ theological unification of the moral life was still dominant in Britain, but the century that produced the Methodist movement would test the Anglican consensus in many ways. Methodism would be part of the tradition and part of the test, taking direction from John Wesley’s Anglican theology, his experiences with Moravian piety, and his political conservatism. Wesley drew upon piety, reason, and order as he needed them, without worrying too much about where he found them  … But Methodism could not easily be held to traditional patterns of moral thinking. It grew from the immediacy of personal experience.108 After Wesley’s death in 1791 at the age of eighty-eight, there were few Methodists who knew the Anglican moral theology tradition as he did. Combined with the split from the Church of England over issues of discipline and ordination, this meant that Christian ethics (as Methodists called it) in Methodism would take a different path in the nineteenth century. It is rare to find Methodists in 107 Abraham, ‘Christian Perfection’, p. 598. 108 Lovin, ‘Moral Theology’, pp. 648–649.

Anglican Moral Theology, 1730–1800

159

the early nineteenth century quoting Anglican moral theologians. Wesley was not only the founder of Methodism but also the last exponent of the great religious revival in eighteenth-century Britain who knew the Anglican moral tradition intimately. By the end of the eighteenth century, the future for Anglican moral theology seemed very uncertain. Those who had adapted it into the careful moral philosophy indebted to Locke were being challenged by Hume and Bentham, who saw no point in appealing to theism in ethical theory. Meanwhile, Wesley had left no successor in his exposition of virtue ethics. This meant that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is the subject of the next chapter, had a difficult task in reestablishing the Anglican tradition. It was his brilliance that enabled Anglican moral theology to have a fresh – and quite unexpected – start, drawing on the Idealist philosophical tradition, both in Plato and in German philosophy.

Chapter 6

Coleridge 1

Introduction

During the course of this book, a number of responses have been described to the intellectual and moral challenges to the Anglican moral tradition. Chapter 3, for instance, analysed Butler’s response to the moral philosophy of Hobbes and Shaftesbury, and more generally to the questioning of the Christian tradition by deism. However, it is clear that by the end of the eighteenth century the Anglican exemplary, or virtue ethics, tradition was in grave difficulties. As the previous chapter showed, there was a dual, or pincer, movement against the virtue ethics tradition in Anglican moral theology. On the one hand, theological utilitarianism, especially in Paley, had recast Christian ethics into a systematic account of rewards and punishments, which had no place for an exemplary spirituality that saw the renewal of the person by the work of the Holy Spirit while finding in Christ both the exemplar and the source of new life. On the other, Hume and other philosophical sceptics, especially Bentham, felt that all appeals to religion as a source of morality were not merely outdated but positively an obstacle to leading a moral life. This pincer movement threatened to reduce moral theology to being an adjunct to social utility in an age of serious unrest and revolution, if religion was believed in at all.1 This chapter describes the response to this profound crisis by the lay Anglican theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is also a major figure in English literature. Although brought up in an Anglican home in a small town in north Devon, where his father was a parish priest, at university he became a Unitarian, denying the divinity of Christ. From his early thirties he was increasingly repelled by both religious scepticism and Bentham’s rationalism; nor did 1 J. Bentham, Church-of-Englandism and Its Catechism Examined, ed. J. Crimmins and C. Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). James E. Crimmins, ‘Jeremy Bentham’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, winter 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/ben tham. James E. Crimmins (ed.), Utilitarians and Religion (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998). James E. Crimmins, ‘Religion, Utility and Politics: Bentham versus Paley’, in James E. Crimmins (ed.), Religion, Secularization and Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 130–152. Fred Rosen, ‘Bentham, Jeremy’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2004).

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_008

Coleridge

161

he wish to follow Wesley. Coleridge’s choice instead was to provide his own, deeply original, justification for religious belief and moral theology. He turned back to the seventeenth century and Cambridge Platonism, which he joined to his reading in Kant. This was a completely original position to hold. Coleridge was the first Anglican theologian to read Kant and the German Idealists who followed him. My argument is that Hume and Bentham destroyed the old, rational vision of an ordered universe in which human nature could be seen as placed by God to do his will, and so Coleridge had to provide a different metaphysics for an account of moral choice and moral action, which in a touch of genius ensured the continuation of the genealogy of Anglican moral theology. Coleridge is, however, very difficult to read, being at the same time a poet, a literary critic and someone who wrote moral theology through a series of reflections and commentaries on other philosophers and theologians. Given the complexity of his thought and literary style, it is no wonder that few twentieth-century theologians studied him at all. 2

The Re-evaluation of Coleridge

Coleridge has been re-evaluated since 1970, and his thought is of profound importance for this book. There has been a shift from him being viewed as a great poet, literary critic and publisher of literary journals to an understanding of him as someone who sought to respond to the post-Kantian world of German Idealism, having studied in depth both Fichte and Schelling. His two works Biographia Literaria and above all Aids to Reflection are now seen as having central importance not only in Coleridge’s own work but also in the development of philosophical theology in England. He rejected the dominance of Locke’s epistemology, seen so clearly in William Paley, for a philosophy that drew on Platonism and Idealism. One of the first re-evaluations of Coleridge in the second half of the twentieth century was concerned with his theory of language. The two earliest interpreters of Coleridge and language were John Coulson and Stephen Prickett. In 1970 Coulson developed the idea of a common tradition in English culture by saying that this culture was held together by having what he called ‘a fiduciary theory of language’.2 The way language develops is out of the experience of a community, as the use of words becomes a living organism. Coulson argued that Coleridge gave to Newman and Maurice (both of whom are studied later 2 John Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

162

Chapter 6

in this book) a way of understanding the church sacramentally and symbolically. Six years later, in 1976, Prickett wrote that Coleridge’s ‘continuing fascination with the possibilities and limitations of language begins with and remains centred on his interest in religious language – how it works, and in what ways it can expose and transmit the inwardness and personalness of religious belief’.3 He criticized some of Coulson’s arguments but there was also substantial agreement. Coleridge’s viewpoint has been called a ‘romantic sensibility’, and Coleridge felt that it required a theological reflection on the use of language for its interpretation.4 Coulson saw in him the beginning of a ‘common tradition’ that would include Newman, while another theologian who interpreted Coleridge in this way was David Jasper.5 Linguistic sensitivity would have profound implications for how this tradition came to see moral truth, as the expression of what it means to belong to a (Christian) community – or, in other words, the relationship of ecclesiology, especially the sacraments, to both spirituality and moral theology, which was a concern of William Law and the non-jurors. To put it another way, Coleridge had a profound belief in the power of symbols, and in words as symbolic truths. A belief in the efficacy of symbols and a reverence for the sacraments are of course intrinsically connected, and the living out of our participation in symbolic (or sacramental) reality was for Coleridge at the heart of moral truth. There remains, of course, Coleridge the poet and literary critic, because Coleridge has always been seen as one of the greatest English poets and a profound literary critic. His religious interest was equally important, but it is only recently, with Malcolm Guite’s Mariner, that there has been an interpretation of Coleridge’s poetry in terms of Christian spirituality.6 In a similar way, the eminent poet Geoffrey Hill’s Rhetorics of Value sees in Coleridge a deep meditation on intrinsic value, as he does likewise in Butler. Both Guite and Hill are

3 Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 10. See also the important review of Prickett’s study by J. Robert Barth in Wordsworth Circle 8.3 (1977), pp. 201–204. 4 Judson S. Lyon, ‘Romantic Psychology and the Inner Senses: Coleridge’, PMLA 81.3 (1966), pp. 246–260. Michael Ferber, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2010). 5 David Jasper, ‘Inspiration and Revelation: S. T. Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker. A Study in Literature and Religion’ (Ph.D. thesis, Durham University, 1983); published as David Jasper, Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (London: Macmillan, 1985). 6 Malcolm Guite, Mariner: A Theological Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2017).

Coleridge

163

also literary critics, and they find in Coleridge’s Christian faith the understanding of the relationship of language to meaning and truth.7 However, linguistic analysis or literary criticism is not the only way of looking afresh at Coleridge. As the dominance of logical positivism lessened in Western intellectual life from the 1970s, there was a return to an interest in Platonism and Idealism. It is worth noting, in passing, that this intellectual change mirrored the change in historiography described in the first chapter, where a hostility to expressions of past religious belief as having intrinsic value per se was gradually replaced by a much greater appreciation of the historical interplay of religion, culture and society. It is no surprise that this led to a renewed interest in Coleridge the metaphysician, because he was the first theologian since the Cambridge Platonists of the late seventeenth century to be fascinated by Platonism and Idealism. A number of writers have charted Coleridge’s growing interest in Kant and Idealism, including Jeffrey Barbeau and Tim Milnes. Christina Flores has written on the influence of Ralph Cudworth, whom Coleridge read closely as a means of immersing himself in Neoplatonism. One writer who stands above the rest of the commentators on Coleridge is Douglas Hedley. The publication of his first book in 2000 ensured the rehabilitation of Platonism and Idealism as a major force both in Coleridge and more generally in modern theology.8 7 Geoffrey Hill, Rhetorics of Value: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Brasenose College, Oxford, 6–7 March 2000, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/h /Hill_01.pdf, pp. 270–271, on a comparison of Butler and Coleridge. See also p. 281: ‘The issue here, for Coleridge as for Butler and Leibniz and, albeit less happily, for Ruskin also, is whether the intrinsicality of value can be, ought to be, made viable in and for the contingent world, the domain of worldly power and circumstance.’ 8 There is a very large literature on Coleridge, even when simply considering his relationship to Platonism and German philosophy. Hedley’s works are listed first, and then the journal articles on Coleridge and Idealism, followed by ones on Platonism. Douglas Hedley, ‘Was Coleridge a Romantic?’, Wordsworth Circle 22.1 (1991), pp. 71–75. Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Douglas Hedley, ‘Coleridge as a Theologian’, in Frederick Burwick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 473–497. Douglas Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and His Ancient Theology’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25.3 (2017), pp. 932–953. Douglas Hedley, ‘Cudworth, Coleridge and Schelling’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 16 (2000), pp. 63–70. Douglas Hedley, ‘Coleridge’s Contemplative Imagination’, in Peter Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 220–236. On Idealism: Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Metaphysics of Culture: Kant and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection’, Journal of the History of Ideas 31.2 (1970), pp. 199–218. Ann Loades, ‘Coleridge as Theologian: Some Comments on His Reading of Kant’, Journal of Theological Studies 29.2 (1978), pp. 410–426. Martin Roberts, ‘Coleridge’s Philosophical and Theological Thinking and Its Significance for Today’, Religious Studies 20.3 (1984), pp. 487–496. Jeffrey W. Barbeau, ‘The

164

Chapter 6

Hedley’s book shows the hostility which German theology has held to philosophical theology since the late nineteenth century. Yet the clearest study of the relationship between Coleridge and Plato is by James Vigus in his book, Platonic Coleridge.9 Hedley’s study of the relationship of Neoplatonism, especially that of Ralph Cudworth in the seventeenth century, German Idealism and Coleridge is an event of enormous significance in philosophical theology. Hedley’s own work (which also takes in René Girard) has been the centre of much attention recently.10 His foundation of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism has done much to bring back the Cambridge Platonists into the centre of intellectual debate.11 This account of intellectual history matters because the Anglican moral tradition has in recent decades encountered once more the importance of spirituality and philosophical theology. Coleridge was cited by such eminent writers as the late Dan Hardy, with his awareness of wisdom, truth and transcendentals.12 Coleridge’s use of the ‘spiritual senses’ tradition places him in the same tradition as Sarah Coakley, while his awareness of

Development of Coleridge’s Notion of Human Freedom: The Translation and Reformation of German Idealism in England’, Journal of Religion 80.4 (2000), pp. 576–594. Jeffrey Hipolito, ‘“Conscience the Ground of Consciousness”: The Moral Epistemology of Cole­ ridge’s Aids to Reflection’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65.3 (2004), pp. 455–474. Ayon Roy, ‘The Specter of Hegel in Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria”’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68.2 (2007), pp. 279–304. Tim Milnes, ‘Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy’, Comparative Literature 51.4 (1999), pp. 309–323. Tim Milnes, ‘Coleridge’s Logic’, in Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (eds), Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 4: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2008), pp. 33–74. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 9: Aids to Reflection, ed. John B. Beer (London: Routledge/Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), henceforth cited as Coleridge, Aids to Reflection. On Platonism: Cristina Flores, ‘“Contemplant Spirits”: Ralph Cudworth and Con­ templation in S. T. Coleridge’, in Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation, pp. 211–220. Cristina Flores, ‘Transatlantic Ralph Cudworth: The Coleridge  – Emerson Neoplatonic Connection’, Coleridge Bulletin 50 (2017), pp. 53–67. Laurence Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 9 James Vigus, Platonic Coleridge (Abingdon: Legenda, 2009). 10 Modern Theology 33.3 (2017) is devoted to an examination of Hedley’s work. See also Christian Hengstermann, The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism: Exploring the Philosophy of Douglas Hedley (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 11 The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism, https://www.platonism.divinity.cam .ac.uk/. 12 Daniel W. Hardy, ‘Harmony and Mutual Implication in the Opus Maximum’, in Jeffrey W. Barbeau (ed.), Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 33–52.

Coleridge

165

culture has been employed by Luke Bretherton to place him in dialogue with Michael Banner.13 Interpreting Coleridge is a task which could occupy the rest of this book. For the sake of brevity, a few points must be drawn out. His political and literary theory must be set aside, as well as his poetry. Instead, after a brief sketch of his life, the chapter will look at Coleridge’s attack on William Paley and theological utilitarianism, as well as his rejection of both Locke’s empiricism and the moral sense school. It then turns to Coleridge’s reading of Neoplatonism, especially Cudworth, followed by a study of Coleridge’s reading of Kant. Both on the Cambridge Platonists and on Kant, Hedley’s book is an invaluable guide. After examining Coleridge’s relationship to Paley, Cudworth and Kant, it is time to consider how he developed his moral theology, uniting spirituality and moral theory, paying especial attention to his work on conscience. As part of the conclusion, there is a study of Coleridge’s legacy, because he had a profound influence on nineteenth-century thought, with a recent study, The Coleridge Legacy, setting out the way nineteenth-century intellectuals read him, in terms of epistemology, idealism, moral theology, ecclesiology and society. Among theologians, the influence of Coleridge on Newman, Maurice and Temple is profound.14 However, Coleridge should not be read as correcting a set of received ideas as a particular intellectual, since he was concerned instead with how his reworking of these ideas would shape a person, and indeed the whole of society. Philip Aherne writes: ‘Much more than that, it represents the direction and purpose of the ends of these ideas … his bequest was a model that showed subsequent generations how to live … he was the prototype for the progressive Christian intellectual.’15 It is a reasonable claim to make that Coleridge is one of the most important figures in this history of the tradition of Anglican moral theology, and this is for 13 Brandon Gallaher, ‘“Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8): The Continuity and Transformation of the Spiritual Senses Tradition’, https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/han dle/10871/26293. Luke Bretherton, ‘Theology, Ethnography and the Conundrums of the Cultural Turn’, in Michael Lamb and Brian A. Williams (eds), Everyday Ethics: Moral Theo­ logy and the Practices of Ordinary Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019) pp. 171–191, esp. pp. 172–173 on Coleridge and Michael Banner. 14 C. R. Sanders, ‘Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, and the Distinction between the Reason and the Understanding’, PMLA 51.2 (1936), pp. 459–475. Philip C. Rule, S.J., Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Graham Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). David Haney, The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2010). 15 Philip Aherne, The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America 1834–1934 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 281–282.

166

Chapter 6

three reasons. First, unlike Butler, Coleridge set out to show future generations how they should live, which did not mean a focus on his own personal life, since this was tragic and marked by failure, addiction and depression. Rather he laid down guidelines for Christian living, and at the end of his life there was a greater sense of calm, and closeness to God, as the account of his death below shows clearly. Here Coleridge is much closer to William Law’s Serious Call. Secondly, Coleridge – and here he does resemble Butler – was read and deeply revered by generations of intellectuals, theologians and those who were concerned with the moral quality of their society. Thirdly – and again in this sense he resembles Butler – he set out to combat the prevailing intellectual climate of his day. Coleridge’s particular genius lay in his reading Neoplatonism and German philosophy as an antidote to British empiricism. When one also takes into consideration his poetic, literary and political work, it is clear that the intense interest given to him in the last four decades by theologians is a measure of his true greatness. Finally, in passing, one should note that Coleridge was a layman in an age when theology was almost entirely written by clergy, making the measure of his achievement clear. 3

Coleridge’s Life

Samuel Taylor Coleridge could have had a quiet and uneventful rural life. He was born in 1772, the son of John Coleridge, a Church of England parish priest and headmaster of the grammar school in the small town of Ottery St Mary, Devon. John was the son of a weaver and he did not pursue an academic career until he was twenty-eight. He then attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he should have become a Fellow and a distinguished Hebrew scholar. But Fellows had to be unmarried and by this time John was already married. Instead he became a teacher and was ordained, remaining a scholar throughout his life. He had three children by his first wife, who died in 1751; he then married Ann, who gave him ten more children, with Samuel being the youngest.16 John died aged sixty-two when Samuel was only nine, and his death caused a crisis for the boy. A former pupil of his father, who had become a judge, sponsored Samuel at Christ’s Hospital. However, despite the good quality of the teaching he was very unhappy there, because he missed his family, resented his mother sending him away even with her good intentions, and was bullied at school in an austere, spartan environment. He became a sizar at Jesus College, 16

John Beer, ‘Coleridge, Samuel Taylor’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Coleridge

167

Cambridge, but again found it difficult to settle, although he was recognized as a brilliant student, with a wide circle of friends, who read poetry and studied Neoplatonism. His life was dissolute, and his debts caused him to leave the university and enlist as a soldier; this was equally unsuccessful, so he tried a brief return to the university. By his early twenties the pattern of his life was set: a combination of continuous travel, writing, publishing, lecturing and enjoying the company of friends. One of those friends was Robert Southey, who also became a writer. Southey and Coleridge fell in love with two sisters, which was to be of central importance in Coleridge’s life. When he eventually separated from his wife, Sara, Southey looked after Coleridge’s wife and children for the rest of his life. Once both Southey and Coleridge were married, Coleridge started writing poetry as well as publishing. He was attracted by the idea of living in a rustic way in a small cottage in Somerset, although his wife had to do all the work. Coleridge was also unwell, and took laudanum to sooth the pain, as he had as a schoolboy. This was not unusual in this period but it led to addiction, as Coleridge realized.17 Another friend he met at this time was the poet William Wordsworth. Coleridge and his literary friends were politically radical and held religious views which were unorthodox. He preached in Unitarian chapels during his late twenties and considered accepting the position of minister at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury in 1797–1798. John Beer writes: ‘He was attracted by the Shrewsbury post, particularly since its doctrinal requirements would have been minimal: “it will be necessary for me, in order to my continuance, to believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah – in all other points I may play off my intellect ad libitum”.’18 However, the offer of an annuity from the Wedgwood family of £150.00 (worth £12,000 in 2020) gave him some independence. He turned down the Unitarian position and travelled with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to Germany, which gave him knowledge of German and of Kantian philosophy, which Coleridge worked very hard at mastering. At the same time, bouts of homesickness unfortunately led to him drinking heavily and taking opium on a regular basis.19 The encounter with German philosophy and literature was a turning point in his life, since he decided that he no longer wished to follow a romantic, rustic lifestyle. Beer writes: ‘He could not simply return to the provincial English society he had left and take up the threads as he had left them. 17 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Flamingo, 1999), p. 111. 18 Beer, ‘Coleridge’, quoting Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Vol. 1, p. 366. 19 Holmes, Coleridge, p. 205.

168

Chapter 6

Although he did not formally acknowledge the fact at the time, his enthusiasm for Unitarianism, also, was dying.’20 Gradually Coleridge moved back towards the Anglican faith of his childhood, but now it had become a faith in which he read deeply and held against German philosophy. It was not simply that Coleridge’s views were changing profoundly. He failed to return home after news reached him in Germany of the death of his second son, who was a few months old, which caused justifiable anger in his wife and was eventually to contribute to his marriage breakdown.21 Instead he became increasingly close friends with Wordsworth and fell in love with the sister of Wordsworth’s wife, Sara Hutchinson, although there is no evidence that the relationship was anything but chaste.22 When Coleridge did eventually return from Germany, he became a political journalist in London, still holding politically radical views, and enjoyed the friendship of William Godwin, a political agitator. In 1800 Coleridge moved to the Lake District, attracted by the friendship of Wordsworth, and intensified his study of German philosophy. His marriage now broke down for good. Southey moved to rent Coleridge’s house and take over the care of his wife and family, and yet again Coleridge escaped, this time to Malta and then to Italy. During this second period abroad he returned to believing in orthodox Christianity and laid great emphasis on the centrality of the Trinity in Christianity. ‘By 1805 he had come to believe in the centrality of the Trinity: not “the inanity of Jehovah, Christ, and the Dove” but “the adorable Tri-unity of Being, Intellect, and Spiritual Action”.’23 On 12 February that year he summed up his new position in the phrase ‘no Trinity, no God’.24 Coleridge’s return from Italy in 1806 was paradoxical, since he had for several years been a devout Anglican, but he was also addicted to opium, and his marriage was over.25 For a while he lived again in the Lake District with Wordsworth, but a quarrel provoked Coleridge’s departure; Wordsworth despaired of Coleridge’s addiction and his inability to settle to anything.26 Before the quarrel, Coleridge had produced a new journal, The Friend, in which 20 Beer, ‘Coleridge’. 21 Holmes, Coleridge, pp. 222–237, gives an account of Berkeley’s death, and Coleridge’s failure while he was in Germany to respond to his wife’s letters in a sympathetic manner. 22 Holmes, Coleridge, p. 309. 23 Beer, ‘Coleridge’. 24 Beer, ‘Coleridge’, citing The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), Vol. 2, 2444–2446. 25 J. Robert Barth, S.J., Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, 2nd edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987), is the main source for Coleridge’s doctrinal views. 26 Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, pp. 31–32, shows some of the tension with Wordsworth from 1802, even before their quarrel.

Coleridge

169

he published his new-found political views. ‘His prime object was to attack the French revolutionary thinkers and their forerunners. His arguments, which he shared with Wordsworth, helped to establish a principled conservatism in the England of the time.’27 Here is Coleridge’s first engagement with the philosophical scepticism and philosophical radicalism of the group around Bentham, and the rest of this chapter will show the way in which he felt that the scepticism of such free-thinking intellectuals was a major threat to religious faith and moral theology, and had to be tackled head-on, echoing Butler and Law’s criticism of deism in the eighteenth century. From 1810 until his death in 1834 Coleridge lived most of the time in London. He had little to do with his three children except for occasional meetings, and he had increasing ill-health combined with his long-standing addiction, which eventually saw him ask help from a physician, Dr Gillman, with whom he lived until he died.28 Despite the physical and mental distress, this period was a very productive time for Coleridge, with his major prose works being the Biographia Literaria (1817); Aids to Reflection (1825); Opus Maximum (unpublished writings from 1819–1823); and On the Constitution of the Church and State (first edition 1830, third edition 1834). The last was a substantial work of political philosophy, expressing Coleridge’s deep conservatism and love of Anglicanism, very much at variance with his Unitarianism and the politically radical views he had held in his twenties. It is primarily in Biographia Literaria and Aids to Reflection that Coleridge’s contribution to fundamental moral philosophy and theology rests, while he also gave many lectures on philosophy in London. By 1828 he had made up his quarrel with Wordsworth, and they again toured Germany, as they had done nearly thirty years before. His last few years were spent not simply living with Dr Gillman and his family, but also in Gillman’s medical care.29 Coleridge became increasingly unwell over several months during 1834, and said farewell to his friends and relatives one by one. Joseph Henry Green, who had been appointed his literary executor, was called in to hear some final words for the Opus Maximum, a declaration of the need to reaffirm God as the absolute good who is also the eternal ‘I am’, and yet to preserve a distinction, allowing for the operation of the Logos. Finally, Coleridge asked to be left alone ‘to meditate on his Redeemer’.30 He died on 25 July 1834, aged sixty-one, and was buried in Highgate churchyard. 27 Beer, ‘Coleridge’. 28 Barbeau, ‘Development of Coleridge’s Notion of Human Freedom’, p. 584, describes this episode in detail. 29 Barbeau, ‘Development of Coleridge’s Notion of Human Freedom’, p. 588, on the struggles with opium in the period around 1820. 30 Beer, ‘Coleridge’, quoting Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 6, p. 991.

170 4

Chapter 6

Coleridge on Paley and Jeremy Taylor

Coleridge launched a robust attack on William Paley, on his strong advocacy of Locke’s philosophy and on his own contribution of theological utilitarianism. Paley certainly felt that his was a theology and an ethic that could appeal to the ordinary person, and his choice of being an archdeacon in the Church of England in a northern diocese reflected his down-to-earth approach to life, although this was not just a matter of temperament. As noted in the previous chapter, Paley believed that Locke’s attack on scholasticism had purged Christianity and ethical theory of reliance on innate ideas. With his own strong doctrine of Scripture, the testimony of ordinary Christians and the evidences of design in the natural world, he believed that he had provided a defence of Christianity and moral teaching that would be proof against Hume’s scepticism. Paley argued that the reasonableness of religion depended on its ethical rationality, which for him was utilitarianism, and this rationality was his answer to Hume, because moral obligation was established by the proof of its personal and social utility. ‘Whatever is expedient is right. It is the utility of any moral rule alone, which constitutes the obligation of it.’31 Coleridge, however, believed that Paley confused morality with law, arguing that all morality is about the inward motive, and Christian morality is in particular about our inner discernment of what sort of person we should be, and how we should act, aided by the work of the Holy Spirit. Coleridge felt that Paley made two mistakes: his concentration on external action and its consequences, while ignoring intention and motivation, and making the judgement of that action one that a non-Christian could approve of, for what was a good act could be approved of by Christian and non-Christian alike. Coleridge argued that, for Paley, all that Christianity provided was the teaching of the prophets and Jesus of Nazareth, aided by rewards and punishments to aid the performance of the action, but this ‘draws away attention from the will and from inward motives and impulses which constitute the essence of morality, to the outward act’.32 As a result Paley’s ethics did more harm than good, and Coleridge was quite dismissive of his theology: ‘Where Religion is valued and patronized as a supplement of Law, or as an Aid extraordinary of Police, where MORAL SCIENCE is exploded as the mystic jargon of Dark Ages.’33 31 William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy in The Works of William Paley, 5 vols (London: Dove, 1823), Vol. 2, p. 55. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 157. 32 Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 153. 33 Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 156. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 297, capitals original.

Coleridge

171

Coleridge repeatedly attacked ‘the Paleian Principle of General Conse­ quences … the inadequacy of this Principle as a criterion of Right and Wrong, and above all its utter unfitness as a Moral Guide’.34 It was not simply Paley but the whole scheme of ‘the calculations of Self-interest’ to which he objected as not only foreign but hostile to ethics.35 In the 1831 edition of Aids to Reflection Coleridge added the pithy page heading ‘PALEY NOT A MORALIST’. He followed this up at the very end of Aids with a comment that ‘I have, I am aware, in this present work furnished occasion for a charge of having expressed myself with slight and irreverence of celebrated Names, especially of the late Dr Paley … I feel for the head and heart of PALEY!’36 His private comments were much harsher: he called Paley’s views ‘vile, cowardly, selfish, calculating’.37 Coleridge knew that there were two reasons for his antipathy: his own opposition to theological utilitarianism, and Paley’s formulation of moral theology into a divine command theory. Both sought to defend religious beliefs against Hume, without resorting to a deep conservatism, whether as applied to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, or drawn from the authority of Scripture as a proof-text set of argument, but Coleridge feared that Paley’s evidences of miracles were ‘intellectually worthless’. This was because Hume and Gibbon opposed the quality of culture in Augustan Rome or the France of the Enlightenment to religion, which they saw as barbarous and uncultured. Coleridge’s vehement opposition to this view was because religion was a providential necessity in the formation of human culture, or ‘evidences of the spirit’, while Paley misunderstood this altogether.38 Nevertheless, Paley saw his ethics as deeply scriptural, whereas Coleridge believed the indwelling spirit revealed to the moral agent how they should live, express themselves and act, which he referenced by Scripture. His moral theology is much closer to the Anglican exemplary tradition of Taylor, Butler and Law, being deeply intuitive and concerned with sanctification. Although there are times when Coleridge seems close to Kant or Neoplatonism, he is primarily concerned with the contemplation of the divine goodness as a power that can lift the human heart.39

34 35 36 37

Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 274, footnote. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 293, capitals original. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 408. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 408, and the editor’s note to this passage, citing Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2, 2627. 38 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 292. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 271. 39 Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 191–192. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 197, 360–361, on the influence of Christianity upon the heart.

172

Chapter 6

It was not only Paley with whom Coleridge disagreed. He also sometimes used the language of the moral sense school, with references to ‘the moral affections and charities of man’, ‘the moral feelings’ and ‘our Affections and moral feelings’.40 In a passage that seems almost like Hume, he argues that ‘the bounds of sensible experience; the grounds of the real truth; the life, the substance, the hope, the love, in one word, the Faith: these are Derivatives from the practical, moral, and spiritual Nature and Being of Man’.41 However, he only uses this language to move away from it. He defines sensibility in terms familiar to Hume, as a ‘constitutional quickness of Sympathy with Pain and Pleasure, and a keen sense of the gratifications that accompany social intercourse, mutual endearments, and reciprocal preferences’. But Coleridge insists that sensibility is not to ‘be mistaken or deemed a Substitute for … Prudence … [or] confounded with the Moral Principle’.42 He condemns those who ‘for Law and Light would substitute shapeless feelings, sentiments, impulses’.43 And he is clear where moral philosophy has turned away from Christianity: ‘I mean at the same time to oppose the Disciples of SHAFTESBURY’.44 Benevolence cannot provide moral ideas in a simple way for Coleridge, any more than it could for Butler. The final person with whom Coleridge disagreed was Bishop Jeremy Taylor, one of the leading Anglican moral theologians of the seventeenth century. Coleridge felt that Taylor went too far on the real presence of Christ.45 However he had a very high regard for Taylor, and Aids to Reflection shows how closely he followed Taylor’s sermons when writing on transubstantiation and spirituality. He wrote in Aids, ‘But if, notwithstanding all here offered in defence of my opinion I must still be adjudged heterodox and in error – what can I say, but malo cum Platone errare, and take refuge under the ample shield of BISHOP JEREMY TAYLOR.’46 In spite of this enormous admiration, or perhaps even because of it, Coleridge found Taylor’s views on original sin completely wrong, and a sign that error, and even heresy, had infected Anglicanism. He described Taylor’s 40 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 104, 117, and 287; cited in Hipolito, ‘Conscience the Ground of Consciousness’, p. 462. 41 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 188. 42 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 57. 43 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 159. 44 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 139, capitals original. 45 Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, pp. 175–176, citing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Literary Remains, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd, 7 vols (New York: Harper Brothers, 1856), Vol. 5, p. 222. 46 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 347, citing Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 1.17.39.

Coleridge

173

influence as a ‘Countenance that looks towards his Followers – … all weathereaten dim, noseless, a Ghost in Marble  – such as you may have seen represented in many of Piranesi’s astounding Engravings from Rome & the Campus Martius’.47 His concern was with the growth of Socinianism, and he felt that Taylor’s denial of original sin had contributed to its growth. In his letter about Aids to Reflection, he wrote to his publisher John Murray about the late alarm concerning Church Calvinism and Calvinistic Methodism (a cry of Fire! Fire! In consequence of a red glare on one or two of the windows, from a bonfire of straw and Stubble in the Church-yard, while the Dry Rot of virtual Socinianism is snugly at work in the Beams and Joists of the venerable edifice).48 Coleridge believed that even Taylor had allowed himself to be influenced by Socinianism, or some other heresy, so that he denied original sin. Taylor had set out his view in his book Unum Necessarium.49 It caused a controversy when published and it probably meant that he was not offered a bishopric in England after the Restoration in 1660. Although Taylor was well aware of the effect of sin, having a high doctrine of the atonement and Christ’s saving death which we make our own in the Eucharist, nevertheless he reacted strongly against Calvinism, and especially the doctrine of double predestination. He believed that Reformed theology had achieved its dominance in Anglicanism due to the doctrine of original sin. He therefore both accepted the gravity of sin but believed that human will was affected by external forces, which cause it to sin. Coleridge sided with Augustine, for whom original sin was internal to the will, but rejected the idea of original sin as being transmitted in a way which was biological or hereditary. Rather he was influenced by Kant. Coleridge writes: 47 Coleridge to the poet John Kenyon, 3 November 1814, cited in Jasper, Coleridge, p. 1. 48 John B. Beer, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. liii, citing Coleridge to John Murray, 18 January 1822. 49 Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 345–347, on Taylor’s rejection of the doctrine of original sin. Paul Elmen, ‘Jeremy Taylor and the Fall of Man’, Modern Language Quarterly 14.2 (1953), pp. 139–148. R Florence Brinkley, ‘Coleridge’s Criticism of Jeremy Taylor’, Huntington Library Quarterly 13.3 (1950), pp. 313–332. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, pp. 229–230, 253–263. The most extensive discussion is Andrew Harvey, ‘Original Sin, Free Will and Grace in the Works of Jeremy Taylor’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham 2010), esp. pp. 99–106, 133–136, on Coleridge’s critique of Taylor and Coleridge’s use of Kant. Barth, Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, pp. 114–117.

174

Chapter 6

the phrase Original Sin, is a Pleonasm, the epithet not adding to the thought, but only enforcing it. For if it be sin, it must be original: a State or Act, that has not its origin in the will, may be a calamity, deformity, disease or mischief; but a Sin it cannot be.50 He argues that ‘a Sin is an Evil which has its ground or origin in the Agent, and not in the compulsion of Circumstances’.51 The Kantian strain comes out in Coleridge when he states that ‘The Will is ultimately self-determined, or it is no longer a Will under the law of perfect freedom, but a nature under the mechanism of cause and effect.’52 There was also in Coleridge’s mind a link between Taylor and Paley, because, however much he admired Taylor for his Eucharistic doctrine, spirituality and literary eloquence, Taylor’s Arminianism led inexorably to Paley, whom Coleridge regarded as in some sense a Socinian.53 Coleridge summed up his belief: And this evil ground we call Original Sin. It is a Mystery, that is a Fact, which we see, but cannot explain; and the doctrine a truth, which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor communicate. And such by the quality of the Subject (viz a responsible Will) it must be, if it be truth at all.54 5

Coleridge’s Reading of Neoplatonism

It was not enough for Coleridge to dismiss Paley and the moral sense school. He turned instead to the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, especially Ralph Cudworth. Coleridge was convinced by the Neoplatonic description of a fundamental human experience, which they called nóēsis, and in this experience he found his understanding of contemplation and wisdom. Nóēsis was for Plato the highest form of epistēmē, being the knowledge of ‘Ideas’ beyond diánoia (discursive and conceptual understanding). Coleridge also read Plotinus, where the giving of the One enabled contemplation as gift, and a return to the One; this theory is also found in Plato’s Timaeus. 50 51 52 53

Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 270. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 266. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 285. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 253, spells out the argument from Taylor to Paley in detail. 54 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 288.

Coleridge

175

Cudworth placed this theory of knowledge within a Christian, Trinitarian framework. Coleridge began to read Neoplatonism even at school, and throughout his time at Cambridge, while in the mid-1790s he began a close study of Cudworth. Coleridge’s friends at the time (among them William Godwin) were both politically radical, as Coleridge was, and also atheist, which Coleridge certainly was not. It is likely he read Cudworth to strengthen his faith in God, as is shown by the lectures he gave in Bristol in 1795 on ‘Revealed Religion’, drawing on Cudworth. As Cristina Flores comments, ‘Though separated by a whole century, both Cudworth and Coleridge revolted against the predominant mechanic and materialist conceptualizations of the universe and looked for a middle ground. The Cambridge Platonists created a system in which matter and spirit, sense and reason, and natural laws and God could cohabit.’55 Nature for Cudworth was both created by God and infused with his presence, or to use his term, ‘plastic’, with God’s power being within each part and also within each human being. Our reason, λογος σπερματικος, is similarly filled with God’s Spirit, and so we are able to contemplate the sensible world and through it understand God, or the Absolute Being. As Cudworth was deeply orthodox, he insisted that this Absolute was the Trinity of the Christian faith. Reason filled with God’s Spirit was not the same as sense experience, which allowed Cudworth both to bridge humanity and nature, and to assert the possibility of knowledge of God. Coleridge referred to ‘Plastic and vast, one intellectual Breeze’, in his poem The Eolian Harp, written in 1796, which is a clear echo of Cudworth. In Frost at Midnight, which is one of the best known of his early poems, he wrote in even clearer reference to Cudworth, and the way in which humanity can know God through the work of reason: 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. Great universal Teacher! He shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.56

55 56

Flores, ‘Contemplant Spirits’, p. 214. Flores, ‘Contemplant Spirits’, p. 218. Hedley, ‘Gods and Giants’, p. 946.

176

Chapter 6

Flores summarizes Coleridge’s indebtedness to Cudworth: These poems illustrate Coleridge’s conviction at that time that the role of the ideal poet is first to discover, and then further to convey in verse, the spirit of nature – plastic nature – which is accessible to the poet only through contemplation. In this Romantic Neo-Platonic view, contemplation is a process of symbolic knowledge dependent on the reception of that same plastic nature that necessarily starts within the concrete forms of nature, and does so because, as Cudworth stated, the plastic nature is ‘art itself, acting immediately on the matter as an inward principle’.57 6

Coleridge and Kant

During his visit to Germany, Coleridge read deeply in Kant, studying the philosopher’s understanding of the knowledge of God and the noumenal world, his distinction between reason and understanding, and his account of the moral will. Coleridge also began to read the post-Kantian German philosophers, especially Schelling, who constructed a very sophisticated metaphysics in both epistemology and ontology. Coleridge wrote that Kant ‘took possession of me as with a giant’s hand’, though even in this reference he doubted Kant’s commitment to the ‘moral postulates’.58 Coleridge thought carefully about Kant’s discussion of the possibility of the knowledge of God. Ann Loades shows how he appreciated Kant greatly but drew back from Kant’s belief from the 1780s onwards that God was a regulative idea, known by practical reason. For Coleridge, the Christian revelation was not to be set aside by Kant’s later work. What was important for him were Kant’s two pre-critical works, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God of 1763 and his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, which he quoted in the Biographia. Kant abandoned this position in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), but Coleridge continued to insist on the validity of the ideas which Kant later rejected. John Milbank rebuts Donald MacKinnon’s criticism of Coleridge for failing to understand 57

Flores, ‘Contemplant Spirits’, p. 219, citing Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Richard Royston, 1678), p. 235. 58 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 154–155, cited in Hipolito, ‘Conscience the Ground of Consciousness’, pp. 456–457.

Coleridge

177

the difference between the pre-critical Kant and the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason.59 In Milbank’s view, Coleridge knew the difference well, and his ‘phenomena are not equivalent to Kantian phenomena, but are identical with natura naturata, with nature in herself, as she occupies fixed forms. When the primary imagination does its work it actually reaches outwards and operates in sympathy with natura naturans, the plastic power in nature.’60 The echo of Cudworth is clear, although not mentioned by Milbank. In his reworking of Kant, Coleridge introduces one of his most original concepts, which is the ‘Idea’. In his definition of this concept, which was also influential on Newman, ideas (or laws) are neither subjective nor objective: ‘An IDEA conceived as subsisting in an Object becomes a LAW; and a Law contemplated subjectively (in a mind) is an Idea.’61 Moral judgement educes an idea which constitutes the object and is at the same time to be understood aesthetically (because it is often expressed in symbolic language). There is a tension between productive genius and sublime reception. Coleridge therefore sees to transform Kantian ethics but not in the way that later German Idealists, such as Schelling or Fichte, were to do, although he read them carefully. Instead he uses the moral theology of the Caroline school, transforming the doctrine of the will by seeing moral judgement as both a noumenal action, outside of causation, and also an expression of our spiritual well-being. There are references to the Caroline bishops: that is, Robert Sanderson and Joseph Hall in England, Robert Leighton in Scotland, and James Ussher in Ireland, all of whom wrote on moral theology. Interestingly, in this same passage Coleridge expresses his sympathy for Jansenism against Jesuit latitudinarianism, because he was always wary of too easy an accommodation with moral broad-mindedness, fearing the end would be another form of moral laxity.62 Coleridge begins by placing his doctrine of the will in the ‘practical Reason’.63 Like Kant he defines the will negatively through the forming of negative conceptions and convictions, since the will cannot be part of nature with its closed causality; so far, he is following Kant. He also agrees that the will defines its own ends, but then Coleridge challenges Kant on his understanding of the will in two ways. First, the will is a spiritual power in humanity. He writes of the 59

60 61 62 63

John Milbank, ‘Divine Logos and Human Communication: A Recuperation of Coleridge’, in The Future of Love: Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 2009), pp. 11–13, citing Donald MacKinnon, ‘Coleridge and Kant’, in John Beer (ed.), Coleridge’s Variety: Bicentenary Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp. 183–203. Milbank, ‘Divine Logos’, p. 13. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 182, capitals original. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 164. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 217, italics and capitals original.

178

Chapter 6

will ‘as the super-natural in man and the Principle of our Personality – of that, I mean, by which we are responsible Agents, Persons, and not merely living Things’. Kant would have agreed that the will was spiritual, but his understanding of spiritual would have been that it was noumenal, or outside the phenomenal world of cause and effect. Coleridge, however, means that the soul is the mirror of the divine. Secondly, the will is determined by a spiritual power, and Coleridge is careful here. He quotes from Romans 8:16, ‘the Spirit beareth witness with our spirit’.64 This use of Romans 8 is found in current theology in the work of Sarah Coakley, and her understanding of the Trinity as both central to Christianity and the way in which morality and prayer are aided by the work of the Spirit.65 Coleridge asks: if then, the man determines the motive, what determines the Man – to a good and worthy act, we will say, or a virtuous Course of Conduct? The intelligent Will, or the self-determining Power? True, in part it is; and therefore the Will is pre-eminently the spiritual Constituent in our Being.66 He develops his argument: ‘whenever  … Man is determined (i.e., impelled and directed to act in harmony of inter-communion), must not something be attributed to this all present power as acting in the Will? And by what fitter name can we call this than the LAW, as empowering.’67 This law, in the moment of its revelation, act[s] on the Will by a predisposing influence from without, as it were, though in a spiritual manner, and without suspending or destroying its freedom … but that in regenerate souls it may act in the will; that uniting and becoming one with our will or spirit, it may make ‘intercession for us’.68 However, this determination of the will cannot be known directly by our consciousness, since consciousness has necessary limits, and can neither know ‘the first acts and movements of our own will’ or ‘all Truths, and all modes of Being 64 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 77–78. 65 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 112–115. 66 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 75. 67 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 77, capitals original. 68 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 78.

Coleridge

179

that can neither be counted, coloured or delineated’.69 The consciousness cannot interrogate such things. Here Coleridge moves away from Kant, just as he has rejected the moral sense school, Hume and Paley. There is a closely argued rejection of Kant’s efforts to place morality within a logical framework: Ideas, that derive their origin and substance from the Moral Being, and to the reception of which as true objectively (i.e., as corresponding to a reality out of the human mind) we are determined by a practical interest exclusively, may not, like theoretical or speculative Positions, be pressed onward into all their possible logical consequences. The Law of Conscience and not the Canons of discursive Reasoning must decide in such cases.70 In his letters, Coleridge writes of Kant’s ‘stoic principle, as false, unnatural, and even immoral, where in his Critik der Practischen Vernun[ f ]t he treats the affections as indifferent … in ethics’.71 Once again he shows his knowledge of Kant, and his opposition to Kant’s conclusions, since he is aware of Kant’s opposition between what the philosopher terms ‘maxims’, which are principles of subjective volition, and the ‘categorical law’, which binds objectively by practical reason. However, Coleridge prefers to see motives (his word for Kant’s maxims) as supplements for the deficiency of productive energy, and for Coleridge the will which is truly free can be defined as Christian love, or productive energy. Barbeau describes the change which Coleridge made to Kant’s doctrine of the good will: Thus, the description of the Absolute and finite Wills in Aids to Reflection highlights the final stage of the evolution of Will in Coleridge’s prose works. Clearly, there still exist strong similarities and language pointing to Kant, Schelling, and others; but the forms which he had originally embraced wholeheartedly were now transformed for a project wholly his own and far more orthodox.72 I turn to Aids to Reflection to show what Coleridge means by a ‘living principle’, and his doctrine of a will redeemed by the indwelling of Christ. 69 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 79. 70 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 166–167. 71 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4, pp. 791–792, cited in Hipolito, ‘Con­ science the Ground of Consciousness’, p. 462. 72 Barbeau, ‘Development of Coleridge’s Notion of Human Freedom’, pp. 593–594.

180 7

Chapter 6

Coleridge and Aids to Reflection

Aids to Reflection is a series of reflections by Coleridge on a seventeenth-century writer, Robert Leighton, an Anglican theologian in Scotland.73 Coleridge was fascinated by Anglican theology after his return from Germany but disenchanted with the direction it had taken in the eighteenth century under the influence of Locke. He therefore turned to seventeenth-century Anglicans, and especially read Leighton, who was Archbishop of Glasgow after the Restoration of Charles II. Coleridge also admired the spirituality and literary style of Jeremy Taylor, although in Aids he made a strong criticism of Taylor’s views on original sin, as noted above. Interspersed with Coleridge’s comments on Leighton’s writings are his use of Kant and Schelling. And there is also evidence for his fascination with the Cambridge Platonists. This means that Aids is a highly complex work. The critical edition by John Beer has done much to make it far more accessible to the modern reader, but it remains a difficult work to understand. Elinor Shaffer makes the point well: Aids to Reflection was rightly known to Coleridge’s contemporaries as his finest single work. There are good reasons why it should never have been fully recognized as an Auseinandersetzung with Kant’s Religion.74 The book is a prime example of Coleridge’s misleading use of his sources: it is strung on a series of long quotations from Archbishop Leighton; it follows the thread of the argument of Kant’s Religion through a series of Anglican controversies; it lays Schelling’s On Human Freedom (Über die menschliche Freiheit, 1809) under contribution; and it employs wherever possible traditional religious language; yet it is original. To draw out all these threads and to assign them their due place in the whole is not an easy task.75 In the middle of Aids to Reflection, Coleridge offers a definition of the work, arguing that he wishes to show how ‘Morality (including the personal being, the I AM, as its subject) is itself a Mystery, and the ground and suppositum of all other Mysteries relative to Man’.76 The definition of morality proceeds by a series of arguments which require great care to elucidate, and what is central 73 74 75 76

Hugh Ouston, ‘Leighton, Robert’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Auseinandersetzung means ‘debate’ or ‘controversy’ in English. Shaffer, ‘Metaphysics of Culture’, p. 200. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 292.

Coleridge

181

is the place of his Christian faith: ‘Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living Process’.77 Morality and religion belong together. How, then, would Coleridge develop his doctrine of the will as a spiritual power? Once again, he is very restrained in his thought, since he does not wish to be entirely dependent on the will for his doctrine of moral agency, as medieval Franciscans like Scotus or Ockham were. In the technical language of moral theology, he is not a voluntarist, despite the way in which he has been portrayed by James Boulger and many others.78 ‘The will is not a faculty within the mind or the isolated reflux of the body towards objects in its proximity, but a tending of the soul towards either its self-destruction through self-assertion, or self-realisation in the deeper selfhood revealed by conscience.’79 Coleridge juxtaposes the conscience and moral affections in a subtle manner, and moves back to the moral sense school, but now in relation to conscience, in a manner akin to Butler’s: Christianity instructs us to place small reliance on a Virtue that does not begin by bringing the Feelings to a conformity with the Commands of the Conscience. Its especial aim, its characteristic operation, is to moralize the affections. The Feelings, that oppose a right act, must be wrong feelings. The act, indeed, whatever the Agent’s feelings might be, Christianity would command: and under certain circumstances would both command and commend it.80 Coleridge works towards a set of moral principles, which are the ‘Law of Conscience’, the relationship of conscience to consciousness, and the nature of the Idea. The task of the conscience is to commend the act, where conscience is the free will ‘with its Law within itself and its motive in the Law – and thus bound to originate its own Acts’ which is the ‘perfect Law of Liberty’.81 What is crucial is the relationship of conscience to what Coleridge calls ‘consciousness’, given that the definition of the human mind must be ‘a mind capable of Conscience’.82 A properly human self-consciousness with a sense of moral responsibility ‘presupposes the Conscience, as its antecedent Condition and 77 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 202. 78 James D. Boulger, Coleridge as a Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). See the discussion of this point in Milnes, ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, p. 4. 79 Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 161. 80 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 96. 81 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 98. 82 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 125.

182

Chapter 6

Ground’.83 Consciousness is found intermediately between the head and the heart, and helps both of them to be healthy, producing ‘Christian LOVE’. It is a genius of ‘productive Energy’.84 Beer notes that consciousness is used by Coleridge as a way of appropriating the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder’s term ‘reflection’. The evolution of language for Herder is the way in which human beings are able to respond to sense data in a way animals cannot, and know this object among the sense data in distinction from another thing. Coleridge had certainly read Herder, and used Herder’s idea in formulating his idea of consciousness.85 In more symbolic or poetic language, consciousness is also like the blossoming of flowers in a tree.86 This energy is the law within us, which is a living principle. The aim of ethics is to show each person what true self-love is. The moral nature is the ‘condition of the spiritual state, in which the humanity strives after godliness, and in the name and power, and through the prevenient and assisting grace, of the Mediator, will not strive in vain’.87 The ascent of the mind is integrally related to the practice of moral theology. Aids to Reflection is a series of aphorisms, prudential, moral and religious, and as the mind’s will is purified in accordance with the divine will, the person is transformed. The ‘harmony of inter-communion’ in action is determined by ‘this allpresent power as acting in the Will. The LAW empowers, THE WORD informs, and THE SPIRIT actuates.’88 As ever, Coleridge is aware of the Trinitarian dimension of God’s action upon us.89 The first step in the moral life is ‘to take pity on thy own soul’.90 After this awareness, the life of moral endeavour is set as a pilgrimage. This is ‘the ascent from uprightness (morality, virtue, inward rectitude) to godlikeness, with all the acts, exercises, and discipline of mind, will and affection, that are requisite to the great design of our redemption’.91 How does this happen? Coleridge is aware that the Christian life is both dependent on God’s indwelling grace and 83 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 125. 84 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 96, capitals original. 85 Beer, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. xci, citing Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Berlin, 1772). Shaffer, ‘Metaphysics of Culture’, pp. 212–213, on the use of transcendental reflection in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Coleridge’s reformulation of the term theologically. 86 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 96. 87 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 52. 88 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 77, capitals original. 89 Barbeau, ‘Development of Coleridge’s Notion of Human Freedom’, p. 587, shows how much Coleridge rejected Schelling’s idea that evil could originate in God. 90 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 53. 91 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 40.

Coleridge

183

yet also highly contingent, as all our earthly life is. It is a life where utterly chance events may cause a change in the person. ‘Awakened by the cock-crow (a sermon, calamity, a sick bed or providential escape), the Christian pilgrim sets out in the morning twilight, while yet the truth (νομος τελειος ο της ελευθριας) is below the horizon.’ As Hedley says, ‘the search to see more clearly the good is akin to the life of faith’.92 This is the Anglican exemplary tradition once more regained, where the vision of Hooker, the Caroline divines and Coleridge’s eighteenth-century predecessors (chief among them Butler, William Law and Wesley) is set out in a new and compelling manner. Coleridge exemplifies the two claims which Timothy Sedgwick makes about the Anglican exemplary tradition: Tied to the Anglican exemplary tradition are two central claims: a theocentric vision of redemption and a sacramental understanding of church in relationship to society. The theocentric vision is grounded in the kenotic character of Christ, that giving up the self to God is what the love of God is all about and is the only true source for the delight in and love of neighbor.93 The second claim, of Anglicanism on ecclesiology, is set out magnificently in Coleridge’s On The Constitution of the Church and the State but is not discussed in this book since it lies outside the bounds of moral theology. The first claim, about a theocentric understanding of redemption and the giving up of the self to God, is fully expressed in Aids to Reflection. Coleridge shows this claim when he discusses being ‘in Christ’. He writes Where, if not in Christ, is the Power that can persuade a Sinner to return, that can bring home a Heart to God? … By the phrase ‘in Christ’, I mean all the supernatural Aids vouchsafed and conditionally promised in the Christian Dispensation: and among them the Spirit of Truth.94

92 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 35–36. Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 183. The Greek means ‘the perfect law of freedom’, which is a quote from James 1:25. Coleridge notes that this ‘exists where the individual finds a sufficient motive for obedience to the Law in the perception of its rightfulness’. This is a marginal note by him in Copy H of the 1825 Aids to Reflection. Cited by Beer in Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 36. 93 Timothy Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), p. 227. 94 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 157–158, italics original. Roberts, ‘Coleridge’s Philosophical and Theological Thinking’, p. 492, is critical of Coleridge’s appeal to being ‘in God’.

184

Chapter 6

He follows this up with an attack on Calvinism for destroying the doctrine of the human will and evacuating the term ‘Spirit’ of all meaning because liberty is swallowed up in necessity; Jonathan Edwards is especially criticized.95 This is a fully Anglican exposition of moral theology. Coleridge sums it all up when he says that the great theme of the Gospel ‘is the Redemption of the Will from Slavery, the restoration of the Will to perfect freedom … The entrance of the Soul into Glory, ie its union with Christ’.96 It is no surprise that his legacy was both great and long-lasting. 8

Coleridge’s Legacy

Coleridge, like Newman, who is studied in the next chapter, had an enormous influence. This impression was both upon those who came after him in the nineteenth century  – what may be called the proximate influence, even if it lasted for over one hundred years  – and upon theologians in the present day. The former make up part of what Coulson called the ‘common tradition’. Unlike Hobbes, the rational theologians, deists and Bentham, Coleridge did not believe that we should examine language analytically, setting aside poetic and metaphorical usage as meaningless. Rather, the primary response to language is to make ‘a complex act of inference and assent, and we begin by taking on trust expressions which are usually in analogical, metaphorical or symbolic form, and by acting out the claims they make’.97 Hill writes about the force of language that ‘Coleridge describes incomparably well in the sudden blaze of a sentence at the beginning of Aids to Reflection: “For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized”’.98 Coulson argued that the common tradition included Newman and F. D. Maurice. Despite some of Newman’s deep reservations about Coleridge, Cole­ ridge’s influence on Newman was certainly very great.99 Philip Aherne’s recent book is valuable because it sets Coleridge in the full breadth of British and 95 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, pp. 157–158. 96 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 160. See also p. 305, where Coleridge says that original sin and redemption are the ‘two great moments of the Christian Religion’. See Shaffer, ‘Metaphysics of Culture’, pp. 206–209, for a comparison of Kant and Coleridge on the nature of evil and the possibility of redemption. 97 Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition, p. 4. 98 Hill, Rhetorics of Value, p. 282, citing Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 10, italics original. 99 Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition, pp. 55–68. The differences between them will be explored more in the chapter on Newman.

Coleridge

185

American intellectual life until the 1930s, which spans a wide variety of individuals, intellectual disciplines and theological schools. T. S. Eliot wrote about being beckoned by ‘the sad ghost of Coleridge’ in 1933.100 Earlier, as he was making his name in 1920, Eliot had said that ‘Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last’.101 There is some justification in seeing Coleridge as a ‘public moralist’, seeking to hold those of influence in society to their professed ideals, as Aherne shows well. The comparison with Eliot is apt here, although not one that Aherne makes himself.102 Outside literary criticism, and maintaining the cultural integrity of his society, Coleridge had three major legacies. One was philosophical, since his attack on empiricism and sense data influenced many in the United States, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey and William James. In terms of idealism, T. H. Green certainly showed the persistence of Coleridge’s interest in giving religious belief a central role in legitimizing both epistemology and culture.103 This will be discussed more when Charles Gore is evaluated later in this book, since Green’s own influence on Gore was great, and Coleridge also influenced Gore directly. However, the two central influences of Coleridge as far as this book is concerned are his reflections on the nature of the church as a means for spiritual and moral regeneration – the Anglican exemplary tradition, in a nutshell – and the importance of religious belief. Here two authors are helpful. One is Philip Rule, S.J., who shows the links between Coleridge and Newman, and (to quote his book’s subtitle) ‘the centrality of conscience’.104 Graham Neville’s book Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought is useful in showing how Anglican theologians such as F. D. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort and Brook Foss Westcott all looked back continually to Coleridge. These links will be taken up in later chapters. In contemporary theology, Coleridge’s influence is found in many modern theologians: to mention only a few, they include John Milbank, D. W. Hardy, Colin Gunton and Luke Bretherton. That is an extraordinary range of theologians where he is often cited. John Milbank says:

100 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 21, citing T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 156. 101 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 89, citing T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 1. 102 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, pp. 31, 47, using the definition of ‘public moralist’ given by Stefan Collini in Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 2. 103 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, pp. 144, 182–183. 104 Rule, Coleridge and Newman.

186

Chapter 6

he stands alongside us on the margins of still unresolved problems.  … But for Coleridge the real world for human beings is first constituted and apprehended as the language of God, as the religious text in which normal, finite categories only exist in the tension with what is infinite and normative.105 Hardy uses the analogy of an operating system from the world of computers. He sees Coleridge as using the term ‘spiritual’ as ‘the active centre by which their existence is coordinated for or by human beings’. An operating system coincides with the conditions which make it possible, which are the computer code, and itself sets the conditions for other forms of life with which it is to interact, as it sets conditions for the forms of software that may be used with it. According to Hardy, God for Coleridge is ‘imaged in the human spirit (as the conditions manifested in the code) where the spirit focuses the reason (‘a direct aspect of truth, an inward beholding’) and the will (the code governing the operation of software) in the energizing of practice towards ultimate ends’.106 This is a very dense elaboration of Coleridge’s philosophy, but it shows how important he was for one of the leading Anglican theologians in the twentieth century. Gunton, a close colleague of Hardy, and someone standing in the Reformed tradition as a philosophical theologian, turns to Coleridge’s use of the Idea. Coleridge managed to escape from Locke’s critique of innate ideas, seeing them as much more to do with how the human mind interacts with reality than with fixed or static concepts. For Coleridge, according to Gunton, ideas were not static, but dynamic, and were not abstracted or generalized so much as ‘given by the knowledge of the “ultimate aim” of something’.107 Bretherton uses Coleridge in a different way, one that is more concerned directly with moral theology. In commenting on the contemporary moral theologian Michael Banner, Bretherton finds his use of ethnography as a dialogue partner with moral theology to ‘be situated in a venerable tradition of Anglican moral and political thought, one in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a vital figure’. Rather than beginning with Scripture, credal confessions, philosophy or nature, this tradition begins with culture. Scripture, doctrine, philosophy and 105 Milbank, ‘Divine Logos’, p. 23. 106 D. W. Hardy, ‘Theology and Spirituality’, in Finding the Church: The Dynamic Truth of Anglicanism (London: SCM Press, 2001), pp. 102–103, citing Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 224. 107 Colin E. Gunton, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 143, citing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume 10, ed. John Colmer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 12.

Coleridge

187

natural law are crucial in subsequent developments of a moral argument, but ‘attention to expressions of human life’ is what ‘initiates and provides the key reference points for moral’ theology, and indeed political reflection.108 Bretherton argues that Coleridge saw creation as an open, unfinished cosmos, whose value depends on our participation by symbolic processes of meaning-making.109 The more we participate by forms of observation and reasoning, rather than through abstraction, and the more we employ wonder and imagination, the more we are enriched as persons, and live in a way which Bretherton calls ‘concrete inhabiting’. Culture includes speech, material expressions, emotional involvement and co-operative action. It can be a place of great division and alienation one from another, but it can be also a means for healing. Coleridge echoed Hooker in seeing the value of custom, since it embodied established forms of practical reason, but this emphasis on permanence needed to be in tension with progression, allowing innovation and new approaches.110 This was especially the case as Coleridge lived into the beginning of the nineteenth century, with industrialization, the growth of cities and political upheavals. Much more could be said on Coleridge’s profound legacy both in nineteenthcentury thought and in contemporary theology. However, even a brief mention of some of the key figures in contemporary Anglican and Reformed theology show how his influence lingers. He is one of the most seminal thinkers in Anglican thought. 9

Conclusion

It is significant that Geoffrey Hill’s Tanner lectures place Butler and Coleridge at the centre of any enquiry into the possibility of establishing intrinsic value in our fractured culture. Coleridge and Butler have a central place in this book too, but my method is different from Hill’s. I seek to recount a genealogy, and to allow the genealogy to flow through this narrative, so why focus on Butler and Coleridge? There are three reasons. First, both saw the threat that deism (for Butler) and utilitarianism and scepticism (for Coleridge) had for the Anglican exemplary tradition. Secondly, both recast the tradition in profoundly original 108 Bretherton, ‘Theology, Ethnography and the Conundrums of the Cultural Turn’, p. 172. 109 Bretherton, ‘Theology, Ethnography and the Conundrums of the Cultural Turn’, p. 172. 110 Bretherton, ‘Theology, Ethnography and the Conundrums of the Cultural Turn’, p. 173. On Coleridge’s use of Hooker, see Peter Sedgwick, ‘On Anglican Polity’, in David Ford and Dennis Stamps (eds), Essentials of Christian Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 196–212.

188

Chapter 6

ways. Butler’s treatment of religious and moral emotions –in other words, a phenomenology of the moral agent  – remains challenging even after three centuries. Coleridge’s refusal to allow epistemology to be confined in the way Locke and even Kant viewed knowledge was ground-breaking. Above all, Coleridge’s treatment of culture, moral regeneration and divine action makes him a central figure. Thirdly, both Butler and Coleridge were enormously revered after their deaths, especially (but not only) in the Anglican tradition. For this book, the argument is actually quite simple. Coleridge grasped intuitively what the Anglican exemplary tradition was, in its focus both on the person and work of Christ, and on the revivifying work of the Spirit. He marks the end of the first part of this book. In Part 2 we turn to the list of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians (Newman, Maurice, Gore, Temple and Kirk) who maintained and deepened the Anglican exemplary tradition. That this was possible is due in no small part to Coleridge, both in his person and in his writings. It is a fitting way to end the narrative of the eighteenth century, so from 1834, when Coleridge died, well into a new century, the Anglican genealogy can be continued afresh.

Conclusion to Part 1 From 1660 to 1834, the seven chapters of Part 1 have traced the course of the Enlightenment in England, and its relationship to the genealogy of Anglican moral theology. Part 1 opened after the death of Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor in the 1660s, who were the greatest moral theologians of the Caroline period. By 1670, following the Restoration of the monarchy ten years earlier, it looked as though, even without the presence of Sanderson and Taylor, Anglican moral theology had an assured place in intellectual and cultural life. At the same time, English Reformed theology was engaged in a debate with the Cambridge Platonists (such as Ralph Cudworth), to the disadvantage of the former, with the result that Calvinism ceased to be a dominant force in the English universities. It seemed that the struggles over the character of the national religion which had marked the Reformation had finally ended. However, it was not to be, and for two reasons. First, the attacks on the practice of casuistry after 1670 caused its demise. The Caroline school of theology was greater than the practice of casuistry in moral theology, but casuistry was a central feature of it, and therefore the attacks on casuistry from Pascal were harmful to it. The ascetic and spiritual aspects of what Timothy Sedgwick has called ‘the Anglican exemplary tradition’ were seen as interwoven with the practical resolution of moral problems by means of casuistry.1 The renewal of moral vision by the focus on the person of Christ, as the exemplary moral agent, became elided into a discussion of how one should decide to act through casuistry. Secondly, the onset of the early Enlightenment with the writings of John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury inaugurated a period of challenge to the theology of the Carolines, which so underpinned their fusion of spirituality and moral theology in the exemplary tradition, and their vision of spiritual and moral renewal. Cudworth had also contributed to this tradition, with his understanding of theosis, but Shaftesbury, who was influenced by Cudworth and Whichcote, made much less of the scriptural and theological aspect of their work. Locke expressed a divine command understanding of moral reasoning, while Shaftesbury inaugurated the moral sense school. Neither approach made much sense of the Caroline language of moral renewal through sanctifying grace.

1 Timothy Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 207–231.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_009

190

Conclusion to Part 1

Both Locke and Shaftesbury were empiricists in their epistemology, and so the moral theology of the Carolines seemed to belong to a past era. The Carolines had taken for granted that conscience (in the form of a deep orientation of reason to the good, or what Aquinas and the scholastics had called synderesis) was a habit of reasoning, which was then expressed in moral judgments, as the second form of conscience. Synderesis, and moral renewal, led into casuistry and the deliberations of conscience. Neither Locke nor Shaftesbury had any time for this structure of moral reasoning. They were some of the pre-eminent philosophers of the early English Enlightenment, which was not against religion, or Christianity, but which sought to reform it drastically. Shaftesbury was probably a deist, who accepted Christianity as the expression of the English culture he loved. For a while, the debate was between the Latitudinarians, Locke and Shaftesbury, until Joseph Butler changed the argument decisively. Again, Butler’s reformulation of the moral sense school, and English empiricism, enabled the genealogy of Anglican moral theology to regain a sense of confidence. This was further expressed by William Law in his account of the moral life, which did not use the older Thomistic language but in many ways carried the Anglican exemplary tradition to a new level. The final chapter in Part 1 covered Coleridge’s rediscovery of Cambridge Platonism and his reading in German Idealism. Coleridge is clearly a person who could be seen as either ending Part 1 or inaugurating Part 2, with his influence on F. D. Maurice and others. I have chosen to place him at the end of Part 1 because of his deep association with the Romantics at the end of the eighteenth century. He drew to a close the first part of this book because it narrates the Anglican moral tradition. That genealogy was fortunate to have such a brilliant thinker as an antidote to the secular rationalism of Bentham and his anti-religious views. Part 1 therefore ends with the sense of a great change in the genealogy of the Anglican moral tradition, in much the same way as it opened with Locke’s empiricist challenge. Part 2 explores how the Anglican moral tradition fared in the nineteenth century. The Anglican period of John Henry Newman looks back in many ways to Butler, and to the Carolines, but behind his evocation of past theologians (with, of course, a deep patristic knowledge) is the challenge of what he called ‘liberalism’, and secular thought. Newman’s contemporary was Maurice; then, at the end of the nineteenth century, came the Lux Mundi school of Charles Gore. Lux Mundi (‘The light of the world’) was the title of a collection of essays which Gore edited in 1889, and the name of the book became the name of those Anglican theologians who had written them. The final two chapters cover William Temple and Kenneth Kirk.

Part 2 1830–1950

∵

Chapter 7

John Henry Newman 1

Introduction: The Changing Historiography on Newman

The literature on Newman is enormous and shows no sign of decreasing. Meanwhile, the provision of his writing online, which is still developing as a resource, makes Newman’s own material far more accessible.1 Any chapter on his Anglican period, and in particular the moral theology shown in his sermons, therefore has to be selective. Peter Nockles, one of the most prominent historians of the Oxford Movement, has recently published an assessment of current scholarship on Newman.2 He shows how much contemporary historical study has placed Newman in his context.3 It is unfortunate that the magnificent life by Ian Ker written in the 1980s before this change of scholarship gives much less attention to Newman’s Anglican period than to Newman the Catholic convert: ‘a mere backcloth for discussion of his life and thought as a Roman Catholic’.4 More recent studies have shown how much Newman shaped, and was shaped by, the world in which he thought and wrote, especially through the work of Ben King on Christology, Stephen Thomas on Newman’s approach to 1 National Institute for Newman Studies, ‘Newman Reader’, https://www.newmanreader.org/; National Institute for Newman Studies, ‘Digital Collections’, https://digitalcollections.new manstudies.org/. 2 Peter B. Nockles, ‘The Current State of Newman Scholarship’, British Catholic History 35.1 (2020), pp. 105–127. 3 Nockles, ‘Current State of Newman Scholarship’, p. 116. 4 Nockles, ‘Current State of Newman Scholarship’, p. 108. Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The more recent biography is by Frank Turner, which proved very controversial. Frank Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 138. Turner saw Newman as a polemical critic of evangelicalism and liberalism, who was determined to break the mould of Protestant England. Turner’s book was severely criticized by Ian Ker, Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 2002, which was followed by a controversy through letters in the journal. The book also provoked a fierce debate in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. Simon Skinner, ‘History versus Hagiography: The Reception of Turner’s Newman’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61.4 (2010), pp. 764–781, defended Turner against Ker. Eamon Duffy replied in ‘The Reception of Turner’s Newman: A Reply to Simon Skinner’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63.3 (2012), pp. 534–548, attacking both Skinner and Turner. Skinner replied again in ‘A Response to Eamon Duffy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63.3 (2012), pp. 549–567. Nockles ‘Current State of Newman Scholarship’, pp. 119–125, gives an excellent overview of the debate nearly twenty years later.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_010

194

Chapter 7

heresy, and Stephen Morgan on his theology of development, with all three examining the changes in his thought as an Anglican.5 King writes that ‘there is no reason to charge Newman with bad faith. But let us at least have the candour to say that rhetorical considerations of shifting controversies shaped his rewritings of history’.6 Nockles write perceptively: In short, King traces how Newman’s appropriation of patristic theology changed with the varying circumstances of his career. He characterises Newman’s method as ‘writing history in the first person’. Crucially, he concludes that it was events in Newman’s life that changed his interpretation of the Fathers, not the interpretation of the Fathers that caused Newman to change his life. … Newman’s patristic scholarship was used to shape his rhetoric in the Oxford Tractarian controversies of the 1830s. Thomas had focused on the comparisons which Newman had drawn between his contemporaries and ancient heretics. King, on the other hand, shows that Newman not only focused on the patristic age’s struggle against heresy as part of his contemporary battle against liberals but also as a positive blueprint for orthodoxy in his own day.7 2

The Anglican Newman

King’s approach is important for understanding the intense period of Newman’s astonishing development and maturity in his comprehension of moral theology, as an Anglican priest and theologian. This period lasted less than twenty years, from 13 June 1824 (the date of his ordination as a deacon in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, when he was very much an evangelical) to 25 September 1843, which was the day of his last Anglican sermon, entitled ‘The Parting of Friends’.8 5 Benjamin J. King, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in NineteenthCentury England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Benjamin J. King, ‘John Henry Newman and the Church Fathers: Writing History in the First Person’, Irish Theological Quarterly 78.2 (2013), pp. 149–161. Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Stephen Morgan, John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2021). 6 King, ‘John Henry Newman and the Church Fathers’, p. 161. 7 Nockles, ‘Current State of Newman Scholarship’, pp. 116–117. 8 Ker, Newman, p. 21, on his ordination, and p. 280, on the final sermon. Eamon Duffy, ‘The Anglican Parish Sermons’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin D. King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 238–242.

John Henry Newman

195

Newman discovered a wider intellectual and spiritual world than that of his evangelical conversion by the time he was in his late twenties. He had encountered much of the Anglican tradition by his early thirties, especially the seventeenth-century theologians known as the Carolines, and Bishop Butler. However, his reading of this new intellectual context was shaped by his struggle to be simultaneously a parish priest at the University Church in Oxford, calling his congregation to holiness, and an academic seeking to refute the scepticism of Hume and what he regarded as the mistaken strategy of Paley. He was also building a movement to create a far more Catholic ethos in the Church of England while resisting the reforming activity of the Whig government. Any of these activities could have taken up the energy and passion of one person. Newman, in a remarkable display of his prodigious talents, became one of the greatest preachers of his day; a theologian of extraordinary depth on the relationship of faith, reason and moral judgement; and the organizer and strategist of a religious campaign to change the Church of England. He was unique in the gifts he possessed, which were a far cry from those of the shy undergraduate he had been when he arrived in Oxford aged sixteen in 1817. In this chapter I am concerned with the Anglican Newman before his conversion. The particular focus is on Newman’s moral theology as an Anglican, as shown in his sermons preached between 1824 and 1843. From 2 July 1826, until the ‘morning of the Purification’ (2 February 1843, the Feast of Candlemas), Newman preached fifteen university sermons, later published, which are the most brilliant works of Anglican theology ever written. He also preached a large number of other sermons as an Anglican, from 1824 to 1843.9 In March 1834 the first volume of the Parochial Sermons was published. Ker wrote of them, ‘There is no doubt that they constitute one of the great classics of Christian spirituality.’10 They are both spiritually penetrating and also literary gems, although they are very severe and sometimes lack pastoral intuition, reflecting Newman’s intense desire to fashion his Oxford congregation into strict disciples of Christ. Newman was challenging what he perceived as the complacency of a highly educated and privileged group. Equally, his social criticism has been described as ‘medieval idealism’ and ‘clerical paternalism’. There was a radical edge to his criticism of ‘the danger of riches’, but it consisted much more in a concern of what the pursuit of wealth could do to a person’s soul than of a real

9 Ker, John Henry Newman, p. 21. 10 Ker, John Henry Newman, pp. 90–100, analyses the Parochial Sermons. Fabio Attard, S.D.B. (ed.), John Henry Newman: Words of Conscience in Parochial and Plain Sermons (Valetta, Malta: Midsea Books, 2002).

196

Chapter 7

knowledge of the poor.11 Newman hated the cities for their intense devotion to Mammon but felt that the church should carry out charity to the dispossessed on a parochial basis. Not until F. D. Maurice, considered in the next chapter, did the Tractarian deference to lawful authority and tradition begin to change. Newman always felt that ‘rebellion is a sin’.12 Newman’s University Sermons stand with Butler’s Rolls Sermons, for they are the most searching examination of faith and reason in relation to moral theology ever written, and they have influenced generations of Anglican theologians. This influence can, for instance, be seen clearly in the Anglican philosopher of religion Donald MacKinnon in the mid-twentieth century, and his introduction to the SPCK edition of the University Sermons is very illuminating.13 The Parochial and University Sermons demonstrate a central feature of this book, which is that there was a genealogy of Anglican moral theology, where the tradition consciously developed in response to different challenges and opportunities. Newman’s sermons preached before his conversion clearly show the influence of Butler, and this link been much commented on, by such writers as the poet Geoffrey Hill and the Oxford historian Jane Garnett.14 Others have made links between Newman and Coleridge.15 The influence of the seventeenth-century Anglican theologians is much more diffuse, with only a number of articles and doctoral theses tracing some links.16 11

Simon Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Colin Barr and Simon Skinner, ‘Political and Social Thought’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, p. 404, on the charge of medieval idealism and paternalism. John Henry Newman, ‘The Danger of Riches’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols (London: Rivingtons, 1868–1881), Vol. 2, Sermon 28, pp. 343–357. 12 John Henry Newman, review of F. Lamennais, Affaires de Rome, British Critic, October 1837, cited in Barr and Skinner, ‘Political and Social Thought’, p. 399. Lamennais was a contemporary French Catholic priest who advocated great economic and social change through political rebellion. 13 Donald MacKinnon, ‘Introduction’, in John Henry Newman, Newman’s University Sermons: Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford 1826–1843 (London: SPCK, 1970). Paul D. Murray, ‘Theology in the Borderlands: Donald Mackinnon and Contemporary Theology’, Modern Theology 14.3 (1998), pp. 355–376, on MacKinnon’s relationship to Newman. Murray identifies Newman and MacKinnon as both seeing theology as ‘critical reflection upon the practice of faith’ (p. 368). 14 Jane Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 135–153. Geoffrey Hill, Rhetorics of Value: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Brasenose College, Oxford, 6–7 March 2000, https://tannerlectures.utah .edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/h/Hill_01.pdf. 15 Philip C. Rule, S.J., Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 16 H. L. Weatherby, ‘The Encircling Gloom: Newman’s Departure from the Caroline Tradition’, Victorian Studies 12.1 (1968), pp. 57–82. Andrew Harvey, ‘Original Sin, Free Will

John Henry Newman

197

This chapter is concerned solely with Newman’s reflection as an Anglican on moral judgement, which he sometimes called the ‘judgement of the heart’. For reasons of brevity it focuses on his Anglican sermons and will not examine his writings on conscience and moral discernment after 1845, although many have drawn out the continuities in his reasoning over his long life. Nor will it look at his ecclesiology and writing on justification before his conversion, since the only concern is with his moral theology; however, given that moral theology, the use of reason and faith are all intricately woven together, this is not a small undertaking. After a brief account of Newman’s life up to 1845, the chapter will turn to an analysis of his developing treatment of conscience, from his ordination, when he was deeply evangelical and suspicious of putting much emphasis on conscience, until 1830, by which his views had changed greatly. This will be by a detailed study of the Parochial and University Sermons, and a section on Newman’s reading of the Caroline divines, Butler and Coleridge. 3

Newman’s Life

Newman was born in 1801 and lived until 1890, claiming to remember the celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.17 His father was a wealthy banker and the family owned two houses, one in central London and one in the country. The family were pious but not strongly religious, disapproving of enthusiasm. It was unsurprising in this household that at the age of fourteen the precocious Newman had read Thomas Paine and other free-thinkers, finding the idea of a loving God rather strange.18 In 1816, when he was at boarding school, his father’s bank collapsed, the shock making the son ill; following this trauma Newman went through an evangelical conversion while he was cared for by one of his teachers, becoming a convinced Calvinist. ‘On the personal level, the effect of his conversion was that he felt that God was calling him to the kind of sacrificial service, such as missionary work, that would involve celibacy: “it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life”.’19

and Grace in the Works of Jeremy Taylor’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010), p. 6, on Newman and Taylor. Eric Griffin, ‘Daniel Brevint and the Eucharistic Calvinism of the Caroline Church of England 1603–1674’ (D.Theol. thesis, Wycliffe College, Toronto/ University of Toronto, 2000), has an extensive study of Newman’s reading of the Carolines on eucharistic doctrine. 17 Ker, Newman, p. 1. 18 Ker, Newman, p. 4. Turner, Newman, p. 565. 19 Ian Ker, ‘Newman, John Henry’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hence ODNB.

198

Chapter 7

In 1817, aged only sixteen, Newman went to Trinity College, Oxford. Here he had another personal crisis when he did very badly in his final examinations due to overwork, although he managed to be elected to a college fellowship at Oriel College in 1822. Oriel was the pre-eminent college intellectually in the university, at the height of its fame, and the centre of a movement called the Noetics, who stressed the primacy of reason in theology. Thomas Arnold, Richard Whately and Edward Hawkins all influenced the young evangelical, so Newman decided to become ordained, succeeding Hawkins as vicar of the University Church of St Mary in 1828. By 1832 Newman no longer held his previous opinions, and he attacked evangelicalism in his preaching, even though for many years after his conversion in 1815 he had counted himself among that movement’s number.20 However, he also fell out later with the Noetics when they supported Catholic Emancipation in 1829, being distrustful of this group for their over-reliance on reason, and for their acceptance of government action in reforming the church.21 Newman began to rethink his own position, and he also began writing, publishing his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century, in 1833. He followed this with a trip to the Mediterranean, including Rome, which he saw as a city full of corrupt religiosity; yet again he became ill, caused by either gastric or typhoid fever, in Sicily. The epidemic caused many deaths, and Newman saw his recovery as providential, writing on a ship sailing back to England the poem ‘Lead, kindly light’ as an expression of his trust in God’s care for him; it later become a well-known hymn. By the time Newman returned to Oxford, the Reform Act of 1832 had been passed amid great controversy, and there was concern at what future action the Whig government might take. Newman joined John Keble in founding the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, following a sermon preached by Keble on national apostasy in July 1833, which was a protest against the Whig government’s action in suppressing ten Irish bishoprics.22 Newman and Keble saw this as unwarranted state interference in the church, and Newman began to edit a series of tracts, from which the name Tractarian came, setting out the 20

Gareth Atkins, ‘Evangelicals’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 173–195. Michael J. McClymond, ‘Continual Self-Contemplation: John Henry Newman’s Critique of Evangelicalism I and II’, Downside Review 1.127.446 (2009), pp. 1–12, and 2.127.447 (2009), pp. 79–102. 21 Geertjan Zuijdwegt, ‘Richard Whately’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 196–216. 22 Turner, Newman, p. 153. Peter Nockles, ‘The Oxford Movement’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 196–216. Perry Butler, ‘Keble, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

John Henry Newman

199

vision of the church as a divine institution, some of which were written by Newman himself anonymously. They were followed by the publication of some of Newman’s sermons, entitled Parochial Sermons, and these were indebted to patristic theology, with an emphasis on mystery, the indwelling of the Spirit and the resurrection.23 At the same time, he began to publish his sermons on epistemology, covering the relationship of faith and reason, and also treating moral theology, as his University Sermons. Over a period of ten years Newman gradually lost faith in the Church of England, and in what he claimed was its attempt to be a via media between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, although the bishops of the Church of England never made such a claim. In 1841 his Tract XC argued that the Thirty-Nine Articles were ‘patient of a Catholic interpretation’, and this was condemned publicly by the vice-chancellor of the university and by heads of colleges. Newman withdrew from Oxford to consider his position, gradually resigning more of his offices, until in 1845 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. There was both a positive and negative aspect to his conversion, because positively he had come to accept the truth claims of that church, but negatively he felt that European civilization was being eaten away by a dominant liberal culture, where only Roman Catholicism could preserve the truth of the culture which he revered.24 After his conversion Newman became the most distinguished English Catho­ lic theologian of the nineteenth century. Many of his books and articles on epistemology, doctrine and education have received great attention, and he also became a central figure in the nineteenth-century reaction to both evangelicalism and liberalism in British and European culture. The alternative to either liberalism or evangelicalism was varied: some thinkers espoused a conservative philosophy such as that written by Joseph de Maistre; some turned to romanticism; others, like Newman, converted to Roman Catholicism as a bulwark against liberalism.25 Towards the end of his long life Newman was made a cardinal, although he retained doubts about the conservatism of some aspects of the papacy, especially in relation to the gathering in Rome in 1870 known as the First Vatican Council, which defined papal infallibility. Today he is seen as one of the most significant Catholic theologians of the last two centuries, and his beatification

23 Ker, ‘John Henry Newman’, ODNB. 24 Turner, Newman, pp. 9–11, on liberalism. 25 Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 276, on de Maistre.

200

Chapter 7

in 2010 by Pope Benedict XV, and later canonization by Pope Francis on 13 October 2019, shows his enormous and continuing influence. 4

The Break with Evangelicalism

Newman changed his view of conscience greatly from 1820 to 1829.26 As a young evangelical, in an undated paper, he contrasted the work of the Holy Spirit in conversion which ‘cannot be resisted’ with the ‘transient, irregular and inefficacious’ feelings of the ‘innate conscience’.27 Luther could have said the same. In the same paper, Newman argued that conversion was utterly necessary. Without that, ‘man does only evil continually’, quoting Genesis 6:5.28 In his early sermons at St Clement’s as a curate after 1824, Newman said that conscience reveals our sin, but people lack the will to use it. In 1825, Newman sought to honour the role of conscience, while retaining his firm belief in Calvinism and the centrality of conversion. Drawing on the Apostolical Preaching of John Bird Sumner, he defined conscience as the comparison of our actions with what we believe to be our duty. ‘The more we do our duty, the clearer we shall know our duty.’29 He was beginning to see conscience as having a relationship to the good which was not negated, or darkened, by the extent of human sinfulness, but there was an inherent tension in his argument because he claimed that the way we are able to do our duty is because of our conversion in Christ, which leaves the question of what he believed about those who were not converted, the same question with which Wesley struggled. Newman began to rethink in a very cautious way the value of natural religion as pointing to the Christian faith. In his first sermons from 1824–1825, 26 Geertan Zuijdwegt and Terrence Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 434–453. S. A. Grave, Conscience in Newman’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). David M. Hammond wrote a very critical review of Grave’s book in Religion & Literature 24.3 (1992), pp. 97–104, describing it as a book which is based on hostility to any religious, or non-rational, element in philosophy. Frederick D’Aquino, ‘Epistemology’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, p. 377, offers a more positive reading. 27 Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 435, citing Birmingham Oratory Manuscripts, Comment A.9.1.e: 2. 28 Birmingham Oratory Manuscripts, Comment A.9.1. 11, cited in Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 435, emphasis in original. 29 Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 436, citing John Henry Newman, Sermons 1824–1843, ed. Placid Murray, Vincent E. Blehl and Francis J. McGrath, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991–2012), Vol. 5, pp. 237–238, emphasis in original.

John Henry Newman

201

he denied that belief in the existence of God, Providence and moral governance were known at all by those who lived without knowing God’s revelation. These were the attributes of natural religion, but the heathen did not know them, since they were in ‘spiritual darkness’.30 Reason could only prove their truth after the heathen had been converted by revelation. It was not until he read Butler’s Analogy of Religion in 1823 or 1825 that Newman changed his mind both on natural religion and on conscience.31 He had been ordained in June 1824 as a deacon and was gradually doubting the efficacy of evangelical theology in pastoral ministry.32 But how could the reality of his pastoral experiences in Oxford be reconciled with his intellectual beliefs? Butler is the key to Newman’s change of heart because Butler believed that the innate moral faculty in human beings meant that human beings ‘favour and reward virtue, and discountenance and punish vice’. This is our ‘moral nature’, and humanity is under God’s own ‘moral government’.33 Zuijdwegt and Merrigan notes that Butler emphasized the notion of desert, whereas Newman preferred to focus on the experience of moral awareness, or conscience.34 Newman concentrates on the experiential reality of moral awareness and conscience, for example in a sermon of December 1825 where he speaks of ‘the most striking evidence’ of God’s moral governance being within us in ‘the voice of conscience’. This voice reclaims its authority despite the clever reasoning of human beings. The stark declaration of the nature of sin is characteristic of the austerity of Newman at this time.35 Conscience ‘evidences the being of an unseen but accurate Judge of actions’.36 He adopts a phenomenological argument in his sermon, and the language is one of being spoken to or judged in the experience of conscience. Reason will find it difficult to efface the experience of being judged. 30

Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 436, citing Newman, Sermons 1824–1843, Vol. 5, pp. 306–315. 31 He must, however, have come across the Analogy before then, because it was among the set texts for the final examination at the University of Oxford until 1850. James Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 90. Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, pp. 135–136, gives two dates for Newman’s first reading of the Analogy, citing his ‘History of My Religious Opinions’ in the Apologia pro Vita Sua for 1823, and his diaries for June, July and October 1825. The Birmingham Oratory still has Newman’s copy of the 1813 edition of the Analogy, which is inscribed by him. 32 Ker, Newman, pp. 21–23, on his ordination and early experience of ordained ministry. 33 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), p. 42. 34 Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 437. 35 Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 436, citing Newman, Sermons 1824–1843, Vol. 2, p. 377. 36 Newman, Sermons 1824–1843, Vol. 2, p. 377.

202

Chapter 7

However, throughout 1826–1829, Newman insisted that conversion and belief in the efficacy of the atonement must always precede moral growth. One of his early sermons, from 1826, has much of the evangelical tone of this period, arguing that humanity is ‘weighed down with positive, actual evil … and is continually doing things odious in the sight of the Divine holiness’. This sermon is characteristic of his early period and his evangelical convictions.37 By 1829, however, he had begun to ‘foreground the idea of moral character as the central category to describe religious subjectivity’.38 John Keble and Richard Froude were Oxford colleagues who persuaded Newman that moral character can shape our opinions, and that obedience to conscience can enable the growth in moral character. Here, obedience, repentance, and faith, are successively mentioned as the means of obtaining God’s favour; and why all of them, but because they are all names for one and the same substantial character, only viewed on different sides of it, that one character of mind which is pleasing and acceptable to Almighty God?39 As a result of his conversations with his Oxford colleagues, Newman began to be critical of evangelicalism, which was a dramatic change for someone who for over ten years from 1816 until the late 1820s had counted himself an evangelical. In 1823 he had met E. B. Pusey, who was later to be one of his closest colleagues in the Oxford Movement, and who liked the new fellow of Oriel, but ‘regretted his lack of sympathy for Evangelicalism’.40 However, Newman’s position gave way under criticism from Edward Hawkins, who was Vicar of St Mary’s, and who said that St Paul did not divide Christians into the converted and the unconverted. From 1824 onwards, Newman began to change his mind, and this was reflected increasingly in his sermons. When a leading evangelical, Viscount Lifford, complained in 1837 to Newman about his 1835 sermon ‘Self-Contemplation’, and Newman’s treatment of evangelicalism, Newman replied that he owed much to evangelical theologians such as Joseph Milner, Charles Simeon and Thomas Scott, but that there were grave weaknesses in their theological approach. These were the theologians who had taken forward the evangelical revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth 37 Newman, University Sermons, p. 13. 38 Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 439. 39 John Henry Newman, ‘Faith and Obedience’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 3, Sermon 6, p. 83, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume3 /sermon6.html. Zuijdwegt and Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, p. 440. 40 Ker, Newman, p. 19.

John Henry Newman

203

centuries, and Newman had read Scott’s biblical commentary when he was fifteen, saying of Scott that he ‘made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul’.41 Newman was also influenced by Milner’s History of the Church of Christ, a five-volume work finished posthumously after his death in 1797, and of which it has been written: ‘Milner’s history essentially transferred the art of evangelical biography onto a large canvas’.42 Simeon, who was vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, for many decades, wrote Skeletons for Sermons, which Newman used as a curate when preaching. Nevertheless, Newman did not give ground to his critics and, writing to Viscount Lifford, he said of these theologians that ‘they were men whose moral excellence protected them from the consequences of what they espoused’.43 The grievous fault of evangelicals, and of their theology, was making ‘a certain inward experience, a certain conscious state of feeling, the evidence of justification’.44 It would end with evangelical pietism decaying into rationalism, as had happened on the Continent.45 In his sermon, Newman tore apart the evangelical emphasis on faith before works. It is worth quoting part of the sermon at length because it was so direct, and understandably it caused great offence. Describing the fate of some evangelicals as ‘the wise are taken in their own craftiness’ was a degree of invective that was almost unparalleled in an Anglican sermon: They argue, and truly, that if faith is living, works must follow; but mistaking a following in order of conception for a following in order of time, they conclude that faith ever comes first, and works afterwards; and therefore, that faith must first be secured, and that, by some means in which works have no share. Thus, instead of viewing works as the concomitant development and evidence, and instrumental cause, as well as the subsequent 41

John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Collins, 1959; first published 1864), p. 98. Ker, Newman, p. 4. Leonard Cowie, ‘Simeon, Charles’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Arthur Pollard, ‘Scott, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 42 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, ‘Milner, Joseph’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 43 Atkins, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 190. On Newman’s robust correspondence with Viscount Lifford, see John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume VI: The Via Media and Froude’s ‘Remains’. January 1837 to December 1838, ed. Gerald Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 128–133. 44 Newman, Letters and Diaries, Vol. 6, p. 131, cited in Atkins, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 190. 45 Despite this attack, and many other similar sermons, Newman continued to value the books by Scott and Milner and kept them in the Birmingham Oratory library until his death. Atkins, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 191.

204

Chapter 7

result of faith, they lay all the stress upon the direct creation, in their minds, of faith and spiritual-mindedness, which they consider consisting in certain emotions and desires, because they can form abstractedly no better or truer notion of those qualities. Then, instead of being ‘careful to maintain good works,’ they proceed to take it for granted, that since they have attained faith (as they consider), works will follow without their trouble as a matter of course. Thus the wise are taken in their own craftiness; they attempt to reason, and are overcome by sophisms.46 5

Newman on Humility

One of the issues which is central in understanding Newman is the place of obedience in fashioning his moral theology. The issue is whether obedience and humility are prerequisites in achieving a detachment from the self, so that love and the formation of conscience depend on the decision to accept the need of obedience to the judgement of others, including the judgement of God, which would be a Benedictine way of framing the question.47 Certainly the sermon ‘Profession without Ostentation’ has a profound meditation on humility. Newman argues that belonging to the church as a body prevents the ostentation which could mar the witness of an individual: ‘Thus, while we show ourselves as lights to the world far more effectively than if we glimmered separately in the lone wilderness without communication with others, at the same time we do so with far greater secrecy and humility.’48 Yet even here the subtlety of Newman’s thought, and his awareness of irony, is present. Because Christians sometimes act with humility, they are praised by the world. They are no threat to the proud: There are persons, who, though very strict and conscientious Christians, are yet praised by the world. These are such, as having great meekness and humility, are not so prominent in station or so practically connected with the world as to offend it. Men admire religion, while they can gaze

46

John Henry Newman, ‘Self-Contemplation’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2, Sermon 15, pp. 168–169, italics in original, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/paro chial/volume2/sermon15.html. 47 Private correspondence from Timothy Sedgwick, who posed this question to me. 48 Newman, ‘Profession without Ostentation’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 12, p. 154, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume1 /sermon12.html.

John Henry Newman

205

on it as a picture. They think it lovely in books: and as long as they can look upon Christians at a distance, they speak well of them.49 Humility, however, remains always the vocation of the Christian. Newman would have known Butler’s treatment of anger and resentment, and he may have decided to argue against Butler, who had written on resentment in Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment’, where he distinguished between anger that is ‘hasty and sudden’ on the one hand, echoing St Paul, who said ‘be angry and sin not’, and deliberate anger or resentment on the other hand, which is caused by injury to oneself and seeks redress for this.50 Butler defends sudden anger as a form of self-defence, which enables society and justice to be maintained and its values to be preserved, whereas deliberate anger or resentment is simply a response to being slighted, whether physically or in some other way. Newman takes a different line, refusing to reflect on how moral affection is related to the preservation of justice. In an 1836 sermon, ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, he contrasts the ‘ordinary man’, or the ‘ordinary Christian’, who ‘will think it fair to resent insults’, with those who are ‘one of God’s elect’. For the latter, there is always ‘a devoted love of God, high faith, holy hope, overflowing charity, a noble self-command, a strict conscientiousness, humility never absent’. By this time, Newman was calling all those who heard him preach to a life of sanctity, saying they needed to be ‘more than just, temperate and kind’.51 Nor is this simply a call to moral self-discipline for its own sake, although Newman constantly argues that humility is a great virtue, since in the back of his mind there is always the clever, mocking, ‘infidel or sceptic’ he found so often in the universities or in fashionable society. His answer in this situation is very clear, and in the 1825 sermon ‘Inward Witness to the Truth of the Gospel’ he reflects his deep awareness of the teaching of Scripture, because this is a sermon exegeting the scriptural qualities of the true Christian. Later sermons, from 1830, while still deeply biblical, place much more emphasis on natural religion as a prolegomena to the Christian faith:

49 Newman, ‘Profession without Ostentation’, p. 162. 50 Joseph Butler, Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and a Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, ed. T. A. Roberts (London: SPCK, 1970), quoting Ephesians 4:26. 51 John Henry Newman, ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 4, Sermon 10, p. 159, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/paro chial/volume4/sermon10.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 108.

206

Chapter 7

Consider the Bible tells us to be meek, humble, single-hearted, and teachable. Now, it is plain that humility and teachableness are qualities of mind necessary for arriving at the truth in any subject, and in religious matters as well as others … the humblest Christian, armed with sling and stone, and supported by God’s unseen might, is, as far as his own faith is concerned, a match for them [the infidel or sceptic].52 6

The Parochial Sermons

The Parochial Sermons are a selection of the weekly sermons preached from Newman’s appointment as vicar of the University Church, St Mary’s, in 1828 until 7 September 1843, when he resigned his living in a letter to the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Bagot.53 Newman was among the most famous preachers of the nineteenth century, not only because his sermons were very well attended but also because there was a sense of the dramatic when he preached. Eamon Duffy’s fine study of the Anglican parish sermons cites many examples of people’s awed response to Newman, so that when he published some of his sermons they became bestsellers.54 By the time Newman resigned, volume one of the Parochial Sermons had reached five editions, volume two had reached four, and volumes three to six had made three editions; they were simply outselling every other sermon collection in this period, in an age when many people bought and read these collections. Newman intended his sermons to be a means of creating a religious movement. In later life he republished them, with a slightly different title, and once again they sold well, being read by people from all denominations.55 Newman published two other collections of sermons in 1843. Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached before the University of Oxford are normally referred to as the University Sermons, and that is the title that will be used in this chapter.56 They are analysed in the next section. Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day consists of twenty-six sermons, most of which 52 John Henry Newman, ‘Inward Witness to the Truth of the Gospel’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 8, Sermon 8, pp. 113, 123, available at https://www.newmanreader .org/works/parochial/volume8/sermon8.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 11. 53 Ker, Newman, p. 279. 54 Eamon Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’ pp. 221–242. 55 Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, pp. 222–223, on the reception of the 1868 edition. 56 Newman’s University Sermons is the title given to them in the SPCK 1970 edition, with MacKinnon’s and Holmes’s introductory essays. For a commentary on MacKinnon’s own commentary, see Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, esp. p. 137.

John Henry Newman

207

were written and preached in the final three years of his active Anglican ministry.57 Finally, there were the sermons which Newman kept but did not publish. Many of these are very illuminating as they contain some of his most evangelical sermons in the period 1825–1829. They were finally published from the 1990s in a five-volume critical edition containing about three hundred sermons.58 As Duffy says: the sheer figures alone would establish Newman as one of the most prolific of published Victorian preachers. But they fail to convey the full extent of his pulpit activity. Newman was a constant reviewer of his own sermons, and routinely re-used them, with or without re-writing, four, five or even more times, usually allowing a couple of years between repetitions for the lapse of congregational memory or the turnover of university congregations.59 The sermons which Newman preached each week in St Mary’s were designed to promote holiness. He chose the most severe ones for publication in the Parochial Sermons.60 They were designed to preach a call to sanctity, in a way reminiscent of William Law, for, as Geoffrey Rowell points out, ‘Newman’s emphasis on the indwelling Christ within us is of a piece with William Law’s pithy phrase: “a Christ not in us is the same thing as a Christ not ours”.’61 Newman read Law as a young man, and both theologians put a strong emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit enabling our sanctification.62 However, another way of considering both sets of sermons is the relationship of conscience to holiness, and therefore in what way a disciplined natural morality is at the 57

John Henry Newman, Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London: Longmans, 1868), available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/subjects/sermon1.html. 58 Newman, Sermons 1824–1843. 59 Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, pp. 222–223. 60 ‘I selected my severe ones … Else I should have been taken for an Evangelical (so called) by the Evangelicals, or rather a “promising man” whom they had not to learn from, but could look down upon benignantly.’ John Henry Newman, Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume V: Liberalism in Oxford, January 1835–December 1836, ed. Thomas Gornall, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 247, cited in Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 228. 61 Geoffrey Rowell, review of Donald Graham, From Eastertide to Ecclesia John Henry Newman, the Holy Spirit, and the Church, Journal of Theological Studies 64.2 (2013), p. 811. William Law, The Spirit of Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 199–?; first published 1749), p. 18, Part 1, Chapter 1, para. 43. Ker, Newman, p. 91, on Newman’s doctrine of the Spirit. 62 Newman, Apologia, p. 99. The reference is to Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.

208

Chapter 7

same time both separate from, but also leads into, Christian sanctity. This is a constant theme of Newman’s Anglican sermons, and Cornwell writes that they ‘were mainly preoccupied with individual spiritual growth and were strikingly severe in tone and language’.63 Newman wrote in his sermon ‘Religious Faith Rational’, preached on 24 May 1829, that we obey God because we actually feel his presence in our consciences bidding us obey Him  … Their conscience is as much a part of themselves as their reason is; and it is placed within them by Almighty God in order to balance the influence of sight and reason; and yet they will not attend to it.64 On 31 October 1830, Newman preached in ‘Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ’ about the relationship between faith and obedience: In these words [Mark 12:34],then, we are taught, first, that the Christian’s faith and obedience are not the same religion as that of natural conscience, as being some way beyond it; secondly, that this way is ‘not far’, not far in the case of those who try to act up to their conscience; in other words, that obedience to conscience leads to obedience to the Gospel, which instead of being something different altogether, is but the completion and perfection of that religion which natural conscience teaches.65 The relationship is a subtle one, because taking up one’s cross is not the same as obeying conscience, but it is not completely different either. Newman felt that the relationship was one of ‘excellence and peculiarity’: Lastly, our Saviour’s own memorable words, ‘If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me’ [Luke 9:23]. Now it is plain that this is a very different mode of obedience

63 John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 48. 64 John Henry Newman, ‘Religious Faith Rational’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 15, p. 20, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume1 /sermon15.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 21. 65 John Henry Newman, ‘Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 8, Sermon 14, p. 202, available at https://www.newmanreader.org /works/parochial/volume8/sermon14.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 41.

John Henry Newman

209

from any which natural reason and conscience tell us of different, not in its nature, but in its excellence and peculiarity.66 The sermons varied in content across the six volumes. Volume 1 was on the need for a much greater earnestness in personal religion, and was very severe, even harsh at times, and Sermon 13, ‘Promising without Doing’, struck a characteristic note: ‘To be at ease is to be unsafe. … We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are groping in the dark. … The management of our hearts is quite above us.’67 It led into an emphasis on the importance of disciplined action in the practice of the faith. Volume 2, published in 1835, was organized around liturgical feasts and saints days, while Volume 3 was based on figures in the early history of Israel. Volume 4 had less cohesion, but Volume 5 was again structured liturgically, from Advent to Quinquagesima (the last Sunday before Lent). Volume 6, of 1842, had a more Catholic theme, including fasting, the Eucharistic presence and liturgical offering. Despite their variation, certain themes predominate in all six volumes. First, Newman was deeply polemical. Much of the devotional preaching was also practical, including a defence of weekly communion which he introduced at Easter 1837 at St Mary’s.68 His attacks on evangelicalism as doctrinally deficient did not cease, and he refers in ‘Self-Contemplation’ to the ‘utterly unevangelical character’ of evangelical emotionalism and self-introspection.69 This was the sermon which so upset Viscount Lifford. In the same volume, published in 1835, Sermon 30, ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, speaks of evangelical feeling as ‘a drain and a waste of our religious and moral strength, a general weakening of our spiritual powers (as I have already shown); and all for what? – for the pleasure of the immediate excitement’. Such people were the same as sensualists who ‘read works of fiction, frequent the public shows, are ever on the watch for novelties, and affect a pride of manners and a “mincing” [Isaiah 3:16.] deportment’. This was a vicious attack, and it caused offence.70 66 67 68 69 70

John Henry Newman, ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 6 (sermon of 25 December 1831), p. 81, italics original, available at https://www.newman reader.org/works/parochial/volume1/sermon6.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 66. Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 226. John Henry Newman, ‘Promising without Doing’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 13, p. 173, available at https://www.newman reader.org/works/parochial/volume1/sermon13.html. Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 234. Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 230. Newman, ‘Self-Contemplation’, p. 170. Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 231. John Henry Newman, ‘The Danger of Accom­ plish­ments’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2, Sermon 30, p. 377, available at https:// www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon30.html. Ker, Newman, p. 96.

210

Chapter 7

Another theme is, of course, sanctification, aided by a very carefully workedout Alexandrian Christology, where salvation is seen as deification, and participation in the Eucharist makes us ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4).71 However, there is also a psychological realism, shown in ‘The State of Innocence’, where Newman tells his congregation ‘To the end of the longest life you are still a beginner … Every day you live longer more will be required.’ Judgement is ever present. ‘We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures.’72 Sometimes this can be overpowering, as in the sermon ‘The State of Grace’, which offers little comfort: ‘He must expect to be haunted with the ghosts of past sins … misgivings about his safety, misgivings about the truth of religion, and about particular doctrines, painful doubts and difficulties, so that he is forced to grope in darkness or in cold and dreary twilight.’73 Newman’s elegiac tone could balance this harshness with astonishing rhetoric and theological acuity, because he well knew the danger of an overemphasis on human frailty, and could emphasize what he called ‘Peace in Believing’. He writes ‘Christ here says, that instead of this world’s troubles, He gives His disciples peace’.74 Another sermon, ‘Present Blessings’, declares that ‘Gloom is no Christian temper … We must live in sunshine, even when we sorrow; we must live in God’s presence.’75 Duffy speaks of ‘an urgent and hopeful expectation’ balancing the contrast between Newman’s awareness of both Christian joy and the reality of sin, but even with these caveats it remains a sobering call to transformation.76 The sermons are simultaneously severe and compassionate, and Jeremy Morris reflects on the delicate balance which they contain in words which I am glad to echo: ‘They may not be uniquely Anglican, or even distinctively so, but they do articulate a theology that, from a sacramental 71

Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, pp. 229, 231. John Henry Newman, ‘Christ, a Quickening Spirit’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2, Sermon 13 (Easter Day 1834), pp. 143–144, speaking of how the ‘divine essence streamed forth’. Available at https://www.newman reader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon13.html. 72 Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 237. John Henry Newman, ‘Shrinking from Christ’s Coming’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5, Sermon 4, p. 53, available at https:// www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume5/sermon4.html. 73 John Henry Newman, ‘The State of Grace’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 4, Sermon 9, p. 138, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume4/sermon9 .html. 74 John Henry Newman, ‘Peace in Believing’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 6, Sermon 25, p. 362, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume6 /sermon25.html. 75 John Henry Newman, ‘Present Blessings’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5, Sermon 19, p. 270, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume5 /sermon19.html. 76 Duffy, ‘Anglican Parish Sermons’, p. 236.

John Henry Newman

211

perspective, exemplifies the pastoral understanding of Anglican practice. It is, in my view, a profoundly merciful theology. And we Anglicans have much to learn from it still.’77 7

The University Sermons

The relationship of the University Sermons to the Parochial Sermons is logical, not temporal, because the two sets of sermons were preached together. The University Sermons were only fifteen in number, preached over seventeen years from 1826 to 1843, but, like the Parochial Sermons, they show a marked development in Anglican moral thought. Newman knew that the Anglican moral tradition was in crisis, damaged by Hume’s attacks and by Paley’s misguided attempt to put thing right. He had not at this time read much of Coleridge, who of course was also responding to this sense of crisis. The University Sermons follow on from the Parochial Sermons in giving a justification for the truth of Christianity, and its epistemological coherence, as an answer to the mocking of Hume. What then is Newman’s concern in the University Sermons as he seeks to provide an alternative to Hume and Paley? He focuses on two issues closely connected in his own mind: how religious faith could be justified after the scepticism of Hume and the arguments of Paley, and how personal holiness could be preached about, commended and set before his audience. I will consider the question of apologetics first. Newman argues that what is central in the justification of religious faith is the reality of conscience, and how it reveals the presence and judgement of God. Much later in his life, he wrote extensively on the epistemology of religious belief, but even in the University Sermons the theme is there in embryo.78 There is a negative and positive aspect to Newman’s argument. Negatively, and in the same way as Coleridge, he believed that Paley’s reliance on utilitarianism and the evidences of the natural world were positively harmful to the Christian faith. MacKinnon says that ‘for Newman, Paley is a Philistine’.79 Positively, Newman believed that a pure heart leads on to conversion, 77 Jeremy Morris, ‘Revisiting Anglican Classics 3: Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons’, 13 December 2021, https://jeremy-morris.com/2021/12/13/revisiting-anglican-classics-3 -newmans-parochial-and-plain-sermons/. 78 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985; first published 1870). 79 MacKinnon, ‘Introduction’, p. 16.

212

Chapter 7

justification, and sanctification. He shows this connection between faith and moral theology in Sermon 12, ‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’: What, then, is the safeguard, if Reason is not? I shall give an answer, which may seem at once common-place and paradoxical; yet I believe is the true one. The safeguard of Faith is a right state of heart. … It is holiness … which is the quickening and illuminating principle of true Faith, giving it eyes, hands and feet.80 In Sermon 10, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, Newman says ‘is this not the error, the common and fatal error of the world, to think itself a judge of Religious Truth without preparation of heart?’81 The heart is a synonym for moral discernment, and when Newman was made a cardinal in 1879, he took as his motto the Latin phrase cor ad cor loquitur (‘The heart speaks to the heart’), a phrase he had found in a letter by St Francis de Sales. Newman often wrote about feelings, as in the sermon of 8 May 1831, ‘Christian Reverence’, where he argues that ‘The bitter and the sweet, strangely tempered, thus leave upon the mind the lasting taste of Divine truth and satisfy it. Such is the feeling of conscience too. God’s original gift; how painful! Yet who would lose it?’82 However, he also had a deep distrust of feelings as a basis for knowledge, and this was the reason for his attack on evangelicalism, as in the sermon of 3 July 1831, ‘The Religious Use of Excited Feelings’, where he argues that: Passionate emotion, or fine sensibility  … will never by itself make us change our ways, and do our duty. … Conscience, and Reason in subjection to Conscience, these are those powerful instruments (under grace) which change a man. But you will observe, that though Conscience and Reason lead us to resolve on and to attempt a new life, they cannot at once make us love it. It is long practice and habit which make us love religion; and in the beginning, obedience, doubtless, is very grievous to habitual sinners. Here then is the use of those earnest, ardent feelings of which I 80 John Henry Newman, Sermon 12, ‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, in University Sermons, p. 234. J. M. Cameron, The Night Battle (London: The Catholic Book Club, 1962), pp. 203–243, Chapter 11, ‘The Logic of the Heart’, and Chapter 12, ‘Newman and Empiricism’, discusses this passage. 81 John Henry Newman, Sermon 10, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, University Sermons, p. 198. 82 John Henry Newman, ‘Christian Reverence’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 23, p. 305, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume1 /sermon23.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 50.

John Henry Newman

213

just now spoke, and which attend on the first exercise of Conscience and Reason, – to take away from the beginnings of obedience its grievousness, to give us an impulse which may carry us over the first obstacles, and send us on our way rejoicing.83 There are two ways of approaching the University Sermons. One is that adopted by Donald Mackinnon as a philosopher of religion, who traced the careful delineation of the concepts of faith and reason in the Sermons. The other approach is the one which I will adopt, focusing on the sermons most to do with moral theology, and showing how each sermon demonstrates a particular aspect of Newman’s thought. The experience of being under moral obligation is, Newman argues, the foundation of religion, and Anglican theology has always had an intense understanding of the virtue ethics tradition. 8

Newman on Moral Character

There is an echo in Newman’s Sermons of Richard Hooker’s view that ‘in reasonable and moral action another law taketh place, a law by the observation of which we glorifie God in such sort’.84 Hooker also argued that the ‘manifold workes of vertue often practiced’ made virtue perfect.85 If we pass on to the eighteenth century, Butler holds that passions are disciplined by reason, which are then conjoined with conscience, which then produce the affection of benevolence, or any other moral virtue. Newman follows this line of reasoning, arguing that all principled dispositions of the moral agent come from the use of authority, reason and conscience, as does the discipline which creates such moral dispositions, habits and virtues, and so forms a moral character which accepts the need for obedience and self-discipline, unlike Calvinism. It is a ‘philosophical temper’ when considering the interplay of character and thought. 83 John Henry Newman, ‘The Religious Use of Excited Feelings’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 9, p. 115, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/paro chial/volume1/sermon9.html. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 55. The sermon is also discussed at length in Turner, Newman, p. 138. 84 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.138.27–32. i.16.5, and 2.372.5–6. v.71.2. Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 137. Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill 2018), p. 257. 85 Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2.372.5–6. v.71.2.

214

Chapter 7

In the same way as Hooker, Newman attacks Calvinist self-justification, in its reliance on the Spirit: ‘a doctrine such as this may be perverted into contempt of authority, a neglect of the church, and an arrogant reliance on self’.86 Furthermore, Calvinism ‘miscalculates the power of the affections. … No room being left for the resistance of the will, or for self-discipline, as the medium by which faith and holiness are connected together’.87 This is a highly polemical comment to be included in a sermon.88 It is part of the tension which has so often been shown in this book between Reformed and Catholic understandings of the moral life inside Anglican moral theology. However, Newman’s main concern is not to criticize but to draw out the importance of personal character for any rational investigation. The argument is spelled out in detail in Sermon 1, ‘The Philosophical Temper First Enjoined by the Gospel’: ‘Some of those habits of mind which are throughout the Bible represented as alone pleasing in the sight of God, are the very habits which are necessary for scientific investigation, and without which it is quite impossible to extend the sphere of our knowledge.’89 Such reasoning is external and analogous in theology to science, and can be called generically scientific reasoning. The contribution of Christianity is that one must be earnest in seeking the truth, and one must be patient and cautious. Above all, one should be prepared to reason without yet having full knowledge of the facts of the case, and so, to quote Newman, ‘to be willing to be ignorant for a time … waiting for further light’, while also joining with other thinkers in searching for truth.90 It is striking that even in this opening sermon Newman turns to the portrayal of moral character and virtue, which is the beginning of his intense engagement with character, which deepened after 1829. Newman moves on to consider the character of the virtuous man in Scripture. This portrait is of ‘an original character – only the scattered traces of it being found in authors unacquainted with the Bible’. Christianity is therefore a religion which has brought both intellectual and spiritual benefit to the world through its

86

John Henry Newman, Sermon 8, ‘Human Responsibility as Independent of Circumstances’, in University Sermons, p. 149. 87 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 146. 88 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, pp. 146–147. 89 John Henry Newman, Sermon 1, ‘The Philosophical Temper First Enjoined by the Gospel’, in University Sermons, p. 7. 90 Newman, ‘The Philosophical Temper First Enjoined by the Gospel’, p. 10.

John Henry Newman

215

emphasis on the importance of character.91 Newman knew that habits form dispositions, and so faith can take root: To pray attentively is a habit. This must ever be kept in mind. No one begins with having his heart thoroughly in them; but by trying, he is enabled to attend more and more, and at length, after many trials and a long schooling of himself, to fix his mind steadily on them.92 9

Newman on Conscience

Sermon 2 of the University Sermons, ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, introduces a discussion of conscience. This is the sermon preached in 1830, four years after the first university sermon, and it reflects the much greater acceptance of the role of conscience as a witness to divine truth, whether in natural or revealed religion. Conscience is ‘the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind. Conscience implies a relation between a soul and something exterior, and that, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power.’ Obeying this ‘inward monitor’ produces ‘a moral conviction’ of ‘the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of that, whatever it is’.93 This is the foundation of a ‘religious system’. J. M. Cameron points out that this passage is not simply about moral judgement because conscience is in Hume’s sense an ‘original existence’: that is, an ineluctable fact which cannot be ignored. Passions for Hume are ‘original existences’, or ‘original facts and realities’, since they are not mental representations of other things, which is the argument in his Treatise of Human Nature.94 Hume understands representation in terms of copying one thing by another, but a passion has no ‘representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification’.95 Hence it cannot be ignored, and reason 91 Newman, ‘The Philosophical Temper First Enjoined by the Gospel’, p. 7. 92 John Henry Newman, ‘Profession without Hypocrisy’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 1, Sermon 11, p. 141, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/vol ume1/sermon11.html. 93 John Henry Newman, Sermon 2, ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Res­ pectively’, in University Sermons, pp. 18–19. 94 Cameron, Night Battle, pp. 212–213. 95 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book 2, 3.3.5, and Book 3, 1.1.9. Rachel Cohon, ‘Hume’s Moral Philosophy’,

216

Chapter 7

has to take account of the passions. Hume was very much the philosopher read by those who wanted to discredit the truth claims of revealed religion, so Newman is being especially daring in using Hume’s arguments in favour of Christianity.96 It is a very clever move by Newman because he is setting out to turn Hume’s argument against him in favour of Christianity. Hume argues that truth or falsehood consists in ‘the disagreement of ideas, consider’d as copies, with those objects, which they represent’.97 Passions, like volitions or actions, cannot be opposed by truth or reason, because they are not copies of anything, but are just there. ‘The main point is that, because passions, volitions, and actions have no content suitable for assessment by reason, reason cannot assess prospective motives or actions as rational or irrational; and therefore reason cannot, by so assessing them, create or obstruct them.’98 Newman’s brilliance is shown in taking Hume’s argument and saying that the same thing applies to conscience, because reason cannot obstruct the conscience.99 Hume had already argued that Locke’s epistemology was too narrow, saying that there was more to knowledge than demonstration and probability; now Newman echoes Hume’s criticism of Locke on the argument for certainty, whether he is aware of it or not.100 Furthermore, passions, volitions and actions have an internal reference, and point back to a moral agent. But Newman uses the whole of the Christian, and classical, tradition to say that conscience is indeed non-representational, like the passions, but unlike the passions it affirms a transcendent judge. Once we have made this move, it is inconsistent to stop and not seek to understand what or who this judge might be. It is an immensely skilful turning of the tables on Hume, where obedience to conscience is the beginning of faith. ‘Since the inward law of Conscience brings with it no proof of its truth, and commands attention to it on its own authority, all obedience to it is of the nature of Faith.’101 in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2018 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/hume-moral/. 96 Frederick D’Aquino, ‘The British Naturalist Tradition’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 154–172, discusses Newman’s use of Hume. J. M. Cameron, ‘Newman and the Empiricist Tradition’, in John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (eds), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London: Sheed and Ward, 1967), p. 85, on Hume and Newman and their understanding of sense impressions. 97 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2, 3.3.5. 98 Cohon, ‘Hume’s Moral Philosophy’. 99 Newman, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, p. 183, speaks of conscience as an ‘original principle’, or ‘a simple element in our nature’, which is close to Hume’s language. 100 D’Aquino, ‘British Naturalist Tradition’, pp. 162–164. 101 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, p. 19.

John Henry Newman

217

Moral beings all share a conscience, and the ability to make moral judgements is as much a defining feature of human beings as the capacity to receive sense experience.102 Cameron uses cautious language, because the relationship of two concepts, x and y, can vary in different ways, being either logical, contingent or even simply psychologically related. Some relationships may be logical, and Cameron says that the examination of the anatomy and behaviour of lions leads to the conclusion that they are carnivorous, which is a logical inference. He suggests that the statement that reflection upon conscience leads to a belief in God is not simply a statistical correlation, for that invites the question as to the ground of this inference. What, then, is the relationship of the belief in conscience as an original fact with belief or faith in God? The relationship is certainly a logical one, but not one of entailment in the strict sense, for it is not illogical to believe in the existence of conscience as a supreme authority and deny the existence of God, nor can it be a relationship which depends on the sort of empirical evidence which the scientist or historian discovers. Rather, conscience is evidence which points to God’s existence, and which satisfies the person who has begun on the journey of religious faith, so it is not a circular argument, but rather an insight or intuition.103 What conscience does not do is indicate anything of God’s ‘personality’ or character, but it does certainly point to ‘a Governor and Judge’, just as sense perception shows us the reality of an external world.104 Cameron observes that Newman moves back into the language of the moral sense school.105 In Sermon 4, ‘The Usurpations of Reason’, he refers to moral perception, ‘or, what is improperly called feeling – improperly, because feeling comes and goes, and, having no root in our nature, speaks with no divine authority; but the moral perception, though varying in the mass of men, is fixed in each individual, and is an original element within us’.106 It is a very 102 Cameron, Night Battle, p. 213. 103 Michael Buckley, S.J., ‘“The winter of my desolation”: Conscience and the Contradictions of Atheism According to John Henry Newman’, in Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker (eds), Newman and Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 67–109, esp. p. 81 on Newman’s later use of intuition in relation to conscience. Buckley considers the same issues of logic as Cameron, but in relation to Newman’s later works, such as The Grammar of Assent. 104 Buckley, ‘Winter of my desolation’, p. 84. Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, pp. 22–23. Newman acknowledges in a footnote that, although he had not read it at the time, this argument had been anticipated by Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. 105 Cameron, Night Battle, p. 216. 106 John Henry Newman, Sermon 4, ‘The Usurpations of Reason’, in University Sermons, pp. 59–60.

218

Chapter 7

different argument from Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, which criticized by Newman: ‘I will not say more of such a procedure than that it seems to me dangerous.’107 The sermon describes an ‘educated conscience’ detecting moral truth ‘where it lies hid’ and ‘without any intelligible reasoning process’.108 Newman here refers to explicit reasoning such as an argument from evidence. In the third edition of the University Sermons, he adds a note explaining that he refers to implicit reasoning here. Elsewhere in the sermon he speaks of ‘spiritual discernment’ and ‘cultivated moral perception’. Meanwhile, in Sermon 2, he mentions ‘quieting the murmurs of Reason, perplexed with the disorders of the present scheme of things, and subduing the appetites, clamorous for good which promises an immediate and keen gratification’.109 And in Sermon 10, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, he refers to ‘the inward need and desire, the inward experience of that Power’.110 ‘Conscience implies a difference in the nature of actions … and an obligation of acting in one particular way in preference to all others.’111 The improvement of our moral nature seems to give a ‘greater inward power of improvement’ and ‘a view is laid open to us’.112 We see both ‘the capabilities and prospects of man, and the awful importance of that work which the law of his being lays upon him’. This is a direct echo of Butler’s Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, which says that ‘Your obligation to obey this law, is its being the law of your nature’.113 Butler then mentions our duty, while Newman refers to ‘a future life, and of a judgment to be passed upon present conduct, with rewards and punishments annexed’.114 Conscience has a double meaning for Newman, being both a moral sense and a sense of duty.115 As a dictate of duty, it can speak both before and after an action, the one giving a sense of obligation, the other bringing feelings of approval or disapproval. 10

Newman on Personal Influence and Justice

Newman’s fifth University Sermon was preached in January 1832, and is entitled ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’. By this time 107 Newman, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, p. 196. 108 See the valuable discussion of this passage in D’Aquino, ‘Epistemology’, pp. 376–377. 109 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, p. 19. 110 Newman, ‘Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, pp. 194–195. 111 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, pp. 19–20. 112 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, p. 19. 113 Joseph Butler, Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, p. 37. 114 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, p. 19. 115 Buckley, ‘Winter of my desolation’, p. 82, explores this dual meaning of conscience.

John Henry Newman

219

he was fully engaged in his reflection on human character and conscience. Newman argues that ‘moral character in itself, whether good or bad, as exhibited in thought and conduct, surely cannot be duly represented in words’. The same is true of moral truth.116 In this sermon, he sees that the visible church contains much error, and lack of co-operation between individuals, and it is ‘a corrupt body as it was then as now’.117 Yet the Christian faith does persuade and convert individuals and societies: ‘Its real influence consists directly in some inherent moral power, in virtue in some shape or other, not in any evidence.’118 ‘The consistency of virtue is another gift, which gradually checks the rudeness of the world, and tames it into obedience to itself.’119 Reflecting on the University Sermons, MacKinnon notes that for Newman it is the spiritual lives of ordinary Christians which move others to belief.120 Paul Murray’s article shows the similarity between Newman and MacKinnon in arguing this way.121 ‘The natural beauty and majesty of virtue’ is Newman’s great argument for Christianity. ‘It is holiness embodied in personal form, which they cannot steadily confront and bear down.’ Newman sees human nature as deeply immoral, and duplicitous, but ‘the silent conduct of a conscientious man’ secures a feeling of conviction, which ‘mere versatile and garrulous Reason’ can never achieve.122 ‘It has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men as have already been described, who are at once the teachers and the patterns of it.’123 What matters is the exercise of personal responsibility and our awareness of the influence which we have on other people. Sermon 6 of the University Sermons is entitled ‘On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance’. Newman argues that ‘it is also natural to feel indignation when vice triumphs’, which echoes Butler’s Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment’, and Sermon 9, ‘Upon Forgiveness of Injuries’.124 Whether this sermon can be consistent with Newman’s 1836 sermon on the need for the elect to abjure 116 John Henry Newman, Sermon 5, ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in University Sermons, p. 85. Cameron, Night Battle, p. 204 discusses the relationship in Newman of language to moral truth. 117 Newman, ‘Personal Influence’, p. 78. 118 Newman, ‘Personal Influence’, p. 79. 119 Newman, ‘Personal Influence’, p. 93. 120 MacKinnon, ‘Introduction’, p. 17. 121 Murray, ‘Theology in the Borderlands’, p. 368. 122 Newman, ‘Personal Influence’, p. 92. 123 Newman, ‘Personal Influence’, pp. 91–92. 124 John Henry Newman, Sermon 6, ‘On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance’, in University Sermons, p. 106.

220

Chapter 7

resentment is a moot point.125 He continues in Sermon 6 that ‘it is surely not true that benevolence is the only, or the chief, principle of our moral nature’.126 Butler had considered this point carefully in Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, writing that ‘benevolence seems in the strictest sense to include in it all that is good and worthy; all that is good, which we have any distinct particular notion of’.127 A more cautious note is struck in his A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, where he writes that ‘Benevolence, and the want of it, singly considered, are in no sort the whole of virtue and vice.’ Butler argues that, if this were the case, then our moral understanding and moral sense would be indifferent to everything except the degree of benevolence in a person. However, we also condemn falsehood, injustice and other wrong acts, quite apart from the degree of pleasure or benevolence which they produce.128 Butler argues that it is our duty to contribute to the cheerfulness of our fellow-creatures ‘within the bounds of veracity and justice’.129 Newman follows Butler closely here, and MacKinnon argues that it is tempting to say that ‘Newman’s University Sermons are an early nineteenth-century counterpart of Butler’s sermons in the Rolls Chapel’, but then he corrects himself. Butler’s concern is with ‘fundamental problems in ethics’, while Newman focuses on epistemology. This is true even if Newman employs the moral sense in demonstrating the relationship of faith to reason.130 The attack on the reduction of virtue to benevolence earned the praise of Newman’s fellow Tractarians, and many decades later R. W. Church’s Oxford Movement expressed the Tractarians’ approval, looking back on these sermons as a watershed in moral theology.131 Church was a friend and colleague of Newman’s at Oxford but did not convert to Roman Catholicism. He wrote his account of the Oxford Movement at the end of his life, over fifty years after Newman’s first sermons, but the immediacy and strength of feeling of the book meant that it became one of the main witnesses to Newman’s conversion from one of his close friends. Church wrote that Newman’s University Sermons had reacted against ‘the poverty, softness, restlessness, worldliness, the blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in the recognised fashions of professing Christianity, the want of depth both of thought and 125 See footnote 49. 126 Newman, ‘On Justice’, p. 105. 127 Joseph Butler, Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, para. 32, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons. 128 Joseph Butler, A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, para. 8. 129 Butler, Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, para. 10. 130 MacKinnon, ‘Introduction’, pp. 15–16. 131 G Martin Murphy, ‘Church, R. W.’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

John Henry Newman

221

feeling; the strange blandness to, the real sternness, nay the austerity of the New Testament’.132 11

Newman on Personal Responsibility

In Sermon 8 of the University Sermons, ‘Human Responsibility as Independent of Circumstances’, Newman again follows Butler’s Analogy and Sermons, arguing that the supremacy of the law of conscience is morally absolute, as Butler had claimed in the first three of his Sermons. From moral action comes moral responsibility, and Newman writes that external circumstances are irrelevant ‘in the judgment which is ultimately to be made upon our conduct and character’.133 Just as Butler argues in The Analogy of Religion, Newman sees divine action as manifested in the course of nature and in human feelings of praise or guilt.134 Scripture confirms the working of nature, since there is a unity to Scripture, and the ‘stern morality’ of Leviticus and Ezekiel is repeated in the passage from Galatians declaring that ‘God is not mocked’ (Galatians 6:7). Newman, like Butler, is elaborating a natural law theory on the necessity of punishment in the formation of moral character. In this sermon, he gives a damning verdict on the potential weakness to be found in some ordinands: Or again, to take a particular instance, which will perhaps come home to some who hear me, when a young man is in prospect of ordination, he has a conceit that his mind will be more fully his own, when he is actually engaged in the sacred duties of his new calling, than at present; and, in the event he is perhaps amazed and frightened, to find how little influence the change of circumstances has had in sobering and regulating his thoughts, whatever greater decency his outward conduct may exhibit.135 Newman perceives clearly the failure to bring about moral change: ‘And much more, when the sense of guilt comes upon us, do we feel the temptation of ridding ourselves of our conviction of our own responsibility.’136 He argues that this is at least partly due to the inability of Calvinist theology (or what earlier in this chapter he called evangelicalism) to do justice to the reality of 132 R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833–1845 (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 22. 133 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 137. 134 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 137. 135 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 142. 136 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 140.

222

Chapter 7

human responsibility and the formation of conscience. He is placing the possibility of emotional and volitional change above the power of doctrine in the Christian life. ‘Fatalism is the refuge of a conscience-stricken mind, maddened at the sight of evils which it has brought upon itself, and cannot remove. … It is wretched enough to suffer, but self-reproach is the worm which destroys the inward power of resistance.’137 Newman explicitly attacks ‘the Calvinistic doctrine’ here, repudiating the Calvinism which he accepted as a young man, although he never denied the validity of the conversion, ‘which, through God’s mercy, [has] never been effaced or obscured’.138 Nevertheless, Newman argues that ‘the school of Calvin’ (as he calls it in his Apologia) is the forerunner of a similar neglect of the doctrine of human responsibility. Whatever be the fallacies of its argumentative basis, viewed as a character of mind, it miscalculates the power of the affections, as fatalism does that of the passions. Its practical error is that of supposing that certain motives and views, presented to the heart and conscience, produce certain effects as their necessary consequence, no room being left for the resistance of the will, or for self-discipline, as the medium by which faith and holiness are connected together.139 This is part of the tension between a Reformed and a more Catholic understanding of the moral life inside Anglican moral theology. Just like Hooker before him, Newman attacks Calvinist self-justification in its reliance on the Spirit: ‘a doctrine such as this may be perverted into contempt of authority, a neglect of the Church, and an arrogant reliance on self’.140 The following sermon, ‘Wilfulness, the Sin of Saul’, argues that moral scrutiny is an integral part of the spiritual life. Newman’s Saul has a ‘wilful resistance to God’s will’: He opened the door to those evil passions which till then, at the utmost, only served to make his character unamiable, without stamping it with guilt. … The wilfulness which first resisted God, next preyed upon himself, as a natural principle of disorder; his moods and changes, his

137 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 145. 138 Newman, Apologia, pp. 97–98. 139 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 146. 140 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 149.

John Henry Newman

223

compunctions and relapses, what were they but the convulsions of the spirit, when the governing power was lost?141 Newman is clear that human nature has free will and is endowed with character and gifts. He sees moral greatness as not usually coming from a person who is ‘pliant and amiable by nature’. Rather ‘those minds, which naturally most resemble the aboriginal chaos … pride and sullenness, obstinacy and impetuosity, then become transformed into the zeal, firmness and high-mindedness of religious Faith’.142 Moral and religious heroism comes through the transformation of those who are open to the work of the Holy Spirit, but if they fail to let themselves be transformed, their character will be morally destructive, both for themselves and for others. Newman compares King Saul to the Apostle Paul (originally Saul also). Again, there is ‘a furiousness and vindictiveness  … ravening like a beast of prey … he was exposed to the temptation of a wilfulness similar to that of Saul’.143 The difference between Saul who became Paul and King Saul is the willingness to become submissive to the possibility of moral change, and subsequent moral growth, which may be represented as the exercise of personal responsibility in obedience to the insight into one’s own character, whether from personal self-reflection or from the observations of others. Newman saw his ministry in Oxford as guiding his parishioners by providing such insight, as his many letters show clearly, sometimes in very incisive and sharp tones. One last sermon can be considered, which is Sermon 11, ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’. Newman argues, again following Butler, that ‘Faith is not the only exercise of Reason, which, when critically examined, would be called unreasonable, and yet is not so’.144 This sermon is striking because as late as 1839 he resists the conviction that individual religious faith can be given strength from the authority of the church. He presents faith here as the venture of an individual who is called to decide when there is no certainty. Butler would have approved of this reasoning, but it is doubtful if Newman would have preached this way after his conversion. If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards; and, whereas we are given absolute certainty in nothing, we must in all things 141 John Henry Newman, Sermon 9, ‘Wilfulness, the Sin of Saul’, in University Sermons, pp. 164–165. 142 Newman, ‘Wilfulness’, p. 166. 143 Newman, ‘Wilfulness’, p. 167. 144 John Henry Newman, Sermon 11, ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’, in University Sermons, p. 209.

224

Chapter 7

choose between doubt and inactivity, and the conviction that we are under the eye of One who, for whatever reason, exercises us with the less evidence when He might give us the greater.145 Garnett comments that ‘Daring to act – having the confidence to act on faith – was both a historically situated and an intellectually grounded move’ for Newman as an Anglican theologian in 1839.146 MacKinnon’s ‘Introduction’ to the Sermons offers a profound commentary, where Newman looks at the possibility of moral failure and the way in which human beings bind onto their backs the burdens which press them almost to the ground in later life … even fetter others in the prison formed by the consequences of a guilt in which they have no share … when a growth in self-knowledge reveals to us that consequences … have been woven into the fabric of our lives by our own choice, then the armour of conventional security is shattered, and we know our desperate need of a redemption.147 Such a redemption, says MacKinnon, is treated by Newman in a particular way, because he has a proper agnosticism about the deepest mystery of the faith that alone does justice to our religious sense that what will reach us as ‘transcendent must at once touch us intimately and yet be supremely novel and strange’.148 12

The Influence of Anglican Theologians: The Carolines

We now turn to place Newman in the genealogy of Anglican moral theology, and we begin with the Carolines. These are a group of Anglican theologians 145 Newman, ‘Nature of Faith’, p. 215. 146 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 141. In the third edition of the University Sermons, published in 1872, Newman repudiated his Anglicanism: ‘The sermons were written with no aid from Anglican, and no knowledge of Catholic theologians.’ This claim seems very unlikely. However, in 1879 Newman saw Butler as an English theologian: ‘I very much doubt whether my volumes are fit for any but English men. Without of course comparing myself with Bishop Butler, I may say that I am of his school, and see what little account he is of, how little known, on the Continent.’ (John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume XXIX: The Cardinalate, January 1879 to December 1881, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 207, cited in Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 150). 147 MacKinnon, ‘Introduction’, pp. 18–19. 148 MacKinnon, ‘Introduction’, p. 19.

John Henry Newman

225

from the seventeenth century known as the Caroline divines, who included great preachers like Lancelot Andrewes, poets such as John Donne, doctrinal theologians such as Bishop George Bull (who was a great influence on Newman in writing The Arians of the Fourth Century) and moral theologians, including Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor.149 Kenneth Parker’s article on Newman’s historiography is a good starting point.150 Parker argues that when Newman began to look for a lost doctrinal purity, he discovered the Carolines. Originally, as an evangelical, Newman studied Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ, and saw the history of Christianity as a continuous handing on of the truth. His own first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), stood in the same line of thought, although the stability of the deposit of faith in primitive Christianity depended on a secret tradition of faith, or disciplina arcani. Not until the fourth century did creeds and articles of faith replace the disciplina arcani, as the church struggled with heresy. This was a successionist account of Christian doctrine, where the truth is handed on from generation to generation. Newman’s discovery of the Carolines came after 1833.151 The Oxford Move­ ment declared the Church of England to be the true church in England, and said that corruption had occurred at the Reformation, and was spreading again with liberalism in intellectual thought and the work of the Whig government in suppressing Irish dioceses. The duty of the church was to preserve the Catholic tradition, which had been received from the apostles, defended in the fourth century, partially lost at the Reformation to Protestantism and defended by the Caroline divines, but now in the nineteenth century was in great danger of being lost again. The threat came both from within the church and from the work of Parliament, which contained newly politically emancipated Roman Catholics and dissenters. Newman argued that there had been two great periods of Catholic orthodoxy, first in the early church and secondly 149 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 287–355. 150 Kenneth L. Parker, ‘Historiography’, in D’Aquino and King (eds), Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, pp. 557–577. Kenneth L. Parker, ‘Tractarian Visions of History’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 151–165. 151 Kenneth Parker, Thomas Parker, Eric Griffin and Andrew Starkie are the scholars who have done most to scrutinize the Tractarian use of the Carolines. Thomas Parker, ‘The Rediscovery of the Fathers in the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition’, in Coulson and Allchin (eds), Rediscovery of Newman, pp. 31–49. Griffin, ‘Daniel Brevint’, pp. 43–56. Andrew Starkie, ‘The Legacy of the “Caroline Divines”, Restoration, and the Emergence of the High Church Tradition’, in Brown, Nockles and Pereiro (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, pp. 9–22 (though this article has very little on the early seventeenth century). Paul Avis, ‘Editorial’, Ecclesiology 16 (2020), pp. 293–297, on Newman and the Carolines.

226

Chapter 7

with the Carolines, because the sixteenth century had brought both papal corruption and Protestant heresy, whereas the Caroline divines had in Newman’s view created a via media, which also drew on the Vincentian canon, where the standard of truth was what had always been believed. This view was most clearly set out in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church of 1837. Owen Chadwick put well the view held by the Oxford Movement in the 1830s: The ‘Anglican tradition’ had come to be conceived as a tradition which did not include Calvinism. That tradition ran through Hooker, and Laud, and Thorndike, and Bull, and Jeremy Taylor; not through Whitaker, and Davenant, and Hall, and Baxter. When the men of the Oxford Movement claimed to be representing the ‘authentic’ Anglican position in theology, they meant this.152 The years 1834–1840 were the period when Newman was most attracted to the Carolines, and there are references in the Tracts for the Times to the Carolines, with extracts from Beveridge and Bull. Several tracts – 74, 76, 78 and 81 – are catenae (connected series of texts) from the Carolines on baptism, Eucharistic sacrifice and the apostolic succession.153 Newman borrowed many works by the Carolines from the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1836, just prior to giving his Lectures on Justification, although he hardly used their writings in these lectures, any more than he had in the Lectures in the Prophetical Office of the Church.154 Two years earlier, in 1834, he had written, ‘As far as I can make out, the great and holy men of every age have not much differed from each other – Hooker and Taylor from St. Bernard, St. Bernard from St. Chrysostom.’155 This view was not to last, and after 1840 Newman slowly came to abandon his belief in the Carolines preserving the purity of the church, instead coming to believe both that Christian doctrine developed, and that this true development was found in the Roman Catholic Church. The publication of An Essay on the 152 Owen Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960), p. 20. 153 Griffin, ‘Daniel Brevint’, pp. 45–46. 154 Griffin, ‘Daniel Brevint’, pp. 46–47, citing Kenneth Parker, ‘Newman’s Individualistic Use of the Caroline Divines in the Via Media’, in G. Magill (ed.), Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). 155 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume IV: The Oxford Movement July 1833–December 1834, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 314–315, cited in Parker, ‘Historiography’, p. 563. See also Newman’s praise of the ‘Anglican divines’ in his Apologia, by which he means the Carolines.

John Henry Newman

227

Development of Christian Doctrine in 1845 not only justified his conversion to Roman Catholicism, but also reflected the previous five years of study, where he had become disillusioned with the via media justification of Anglicanism. This meant that the Carolines were only used by Newman to defend his wish to make the Church of England more Catholic and less Protestant. By 1841, when the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology was launched, Newman had grave doubts about the soundness of Taylor.156 Taylor was excluded from the Library and, despite being revered by many Tractarians, he was seen by Newman as one of the fathers of Latitudinarianism.157 Nevertheless, in the British Critic of April 1841, a new edition of Taylor’s Sermons, Holy Living and Holy Dying are commended, though it is a restrained commendation. When Newman refers to the Carolines in the Apologia as the ‘Anglican divines’, the initial references are positive. Writing about the need in 1839 to find ‘a positive Church theory erected on a definite basis’, he notes that ‘This took me to the great Anglican divines.’158 However, later in the same chapter, his disillusionment has set in: ‘I was sore about the great Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made me say strong things, which facts did not justify.’159 In 1850 Newman published a set of lectures entitled Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered; Lecture 5 dismissed the regard for the Carolines held by the Tractarians. They claimed to give the Carolines a particular place in Anglican teaching, which was based on the authority of the Prayer Book and the fathers of the church, but they failed to persuade the authorities of the Church of England, and so Newman in mocking tones ridiculed his former Anglican colleagues in the Oxford Movement: ‘My brethren, when it was at length plain that primitive Christianity ignored the National Church, and that the National Church cared little for primitive Christianity … they had lost; henceforward they had nothing left for them but to shut up their school, and retire into the country.’160

156 Peter Nockles, ‘Oxford Movement’, p. 14. 157 See Chapter 2 on Latitudinarianism. Harvey, ‘Original Sin’, p. 202, on Newman and Taylor, and their view of reason, which was similar: ‘Newman’s idea of reason is much more like Taylor’s; it achieves certainty by accumulated probabilities, and a kind of phronesis, good judgement; as a result reasoning is not a straightforward, demonstrative process, at any rate in the “moral sciences”.’ Weatherby, ‘Encircling Gloom’, also compares Newman with Taylor. 158 Newman, Apologia, pp. 174, 176. 159 Newman, Apologia, p. 190. Drew Morgan, ‘The Rise and Fall of Newman’s Anglican School: From the Caroline Divines to the Schola Theologorum’, Newman Studies Journal 6.1 (2009), pp. 20–35. 160 John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered (London: Longmans, 1901), pp. 152–153.

228

Chapter 7

What did endure, however, was Newman’s admiration for Jeremy Taylor’s spirituality, since he mentioned Taylor repeatedly in letters from the 1830 and 1840s, with the references being to Taylor’s devotional prayers and litanies (especially the Golden Grove manual of prayers), his defence of Anglicanism and episcopacy, and his Holy Living.161 This, however, leaves a puzzle about Newman’s use of the Carolines, because Newman knew that Taylor, like Sanderson, had been one of the greatest exponents of moral theology in the seventeenth century, and yet he hardly ever mentions Taylor’s interest in casuistry, nor his use of sermons to form the moral character of his listeners and readers. Although Newman’s moral theology represents one of the high points of the Anglican tradition, his use of the Carolines is minimal, apart from their devotional writing and spirituality. He is far more influenced in his moral theology by Butler, to whom we now turn, while the Carolines have almost no influence on Newman the moral theologian. 13

The Influence of Anglican Theologians: Butler

There have been many discussions of Newman’s use of Butler recently, and he read Butler closely, being enormously influenced by him on the authority of conscience, which means that the line of development of Anglican moral theology is clear.162 As with Butler, there are key moves made by Newman in his argument, because he claims that the experience of being under moral obligation is the foundation of religion. The particular judgement in the content of any moral decision is the central issue with which moral theology is concerned. There is also an echo of the Anglican tradition, held by Hooker, Sanderson and Taylor, that the cardinal virtues are common to all humanity. Garnett in particular draws out the interaction of Butler and Newman, offering ‘fresh readings which make more porous the boundaries between the ethical and the epistemological. These readings build on scholarship in theology and philosophy of religion which has increasingly emphasized the situated nature

161 Geoffrey Rowell, ‘“Securing the day’s devotion”: The Spirituality of John Henry Newman and His Anglican Inspirers’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 16.4 (2016), pp. 305–315. 162 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’. Jane Garnett, ‘Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist: Butler and the Development of Christian Moral Philosophy in Victorian Britain’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 63–96. Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, p. 90, on the Tractarian use of Butler’s Sermons.

John Henry Newman

229

of knowledge.’163 She cites Geoffrey Hill’s Rhetorics of Value, which I have referred to frequently in the chapters on Butler and Coleridge. Garnett draws attention especially to Hill’s judgement that ‘It is in Newman’s pastoral theology that Butler’s teaching finds its nineteenth-century fulfilment.’164 Both Hill and Bob Tennant, in his study of Butler, were deeply aware of how Butler was preoccupied with ‘the expressive challenges and responsibilities of language; this too was to inflect Newman’s reflectiveness on finding ways convincingly to talk about faith and value’.165 In particular, Newman admired Butler’s emphasis on the pastoral and the relational, as opposed to the institutional and systematic, and in this vein Newman described his University Sermons as having ‘the nature of an exploring expedition into all but unknown country’.166 Both Garnett and MacKinnon see these sermons as being ‘interrogative and experimental’, close to the style of Butler’s Fifteen Sermons. Newman praised Butler for ‘the true mode of preaching the Truth without irreverence’.167 The ‘power of discernment within language, as part of a process of actively shaping reflectiveness and attentiveness’ is found in Butler’s Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue and Newman’s University Sermons, and both make extensive use of synonyms for rhetorical effect.168 The nuances of distinction manifest the complexity of the process of understanding, the commitment to self-reflection and the need for moral wisdom, as in Newman’s fifth University sermon, ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, where Butler’s works are named over against those of ‘that popular infidel writer’ Thomas Paine. Paine claimed to be the ‘harbinger of an Age of Reason’, but Newman argues that it is in fact Butler who leads his readers into the patient discrimination for understanding truth. Hill draws attention to Butler’s Dissertation for his use of synonyms.169 Since this book is not concerned with epistemology, I will leave aside the many references to the use of Butler’s Analogy of Religion, which was a favourite text not only of Newman but also of the whole Tractarian movement and the Noetics, who influenced Newman when he became a Fellow of Oriel College 163 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, pp. 137–138. 164 Hill, Rhetorics of Value, pp. 279–283. 165 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 138. R. C. Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011). 166 John Henry Newman, ‘Preface’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, between a.d. 1826 and 1843, 3rd edition (London: Rivingtons, 1872). 167 Newman, Letters and Diaries, Vol. 5, pp. 46–47, cited in Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, pp. 147–148. 168 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 149. 169 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 149. Hill, Rhetorics of Value, pp. 275–276. Newman, ‘Personal Influence’.

230

Chapter 7

in 1822.170 One of them, Renn Dickson Hampden, had written the Essay on the Philosophical Evidence of Christianity in 1827, which was an elucidation of Butler’s Analogy, and Newman became familiar with Butler from the 1820s.171 Newman read Butler’s Analogy (either in 1823 or 1825) and then borrowed the Sermons (Volume 2 of the 1820 Clarendon Press edition of Butler’s works) from Oriel College library in both 1827 and 1829.172 He referred in the Apologia to the impact which this had on him, saying that, as with so many others, it was ‘an era in their religious opinions’.173 As one example, the Oxford Movement, including Newman, agreed with Butler’s maxim in the Analogy that probability was the guide to life. However, Newman increasingly abandoned this in the great crisis of 1842–1845. In the Analogy Butler claims that the argument for the Christian revelation is one that leads to a greater or less degree of probability on its behalf, but it is neither conclusive nor does it claim any greater strength than any other human argument. By the time of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newman is no longer citing the Analogy, but accepts the claim of the Roman magisterium to hold a divinely given authority, thereby providing certitude.174 There is no doubt that he moved away from the argument from probability as he decided to leave the Church of England, however much he retained his commitment throughout his life to inferential reasoning and the illative sense. Equally, he ceased to argue that reason could judge revelation, as both Hooker and Butler had claimed, even if he found the doctrine of papal infallibility as defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870 difficult. There are many emendations in Newman’s handwriting in his 1836 copy of Butler’s Sermons, held at the Birmingham Oratory. Indeed, Newman added the words ‘So Plato, Laws’ to his underlining of the words in the preface to Butler’s sermons which run ‘In whatever sense we understand justice  … the end of Divine punishment is no other than that of civil punishment,

170 Peter Nockles, ‘Pre-Tractarian Oxford, Oriel and the Noetics’; Peter Nockles, ‘Conflicts in Oxford’; and James Pereiro, ‘The Oxford Movement’s Theory of Religious Knowledge’, all in Brown, Nockles and Pereiro (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, pp. 79–93, 123–136 and 185–199 respectively. 171 Nockles, ‘Pre-Tractarian Oxford’, p. 87. 172 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 136. See also above, note 30, for the different dates at which Newman may have first read the Analogy. 173 Newman, Apologia, pp. 102–103. 174 George E. Horr, ‘Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman on Religious Certitude’, Harvard Theological Review 1 (1908), pp. 346–361. Horr is unconvinced by Butler, but in turn is criticized by Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 150.

John Henry Newman

231

namely, to prevent further mischief’.175 He also underlined twice the words in Butler’s two sermons to the House of Lords on 30 January 1741 and 11 June 1747 on the interaction of divine and human punishment. Lastly, he underlined both the passage in the preface where Butler denies that God’s future punishment for humankind implies divine malice towards humanity and also (heavily) the passage in Sermon 15 where Butler defines religion as submission to the divine will. Another similarity between Newman and earlier Anglicans is their reading of Aristotle as arguing from particulars to the universal. The basic moral judgement is the evaluation through the use of practical reason, by a person with a mature conscience, about certain decisions which have to be made. All moral principles are summaries of individual decisions already made. Hooker, the Carolines and Butler would have agreed that moral deduction from universal principles should always be subordinate in reasoning about moral theology to induction from the particular case. The Oriel curriculum played a crucial role in re-invigorating the Anglican moral tradition, with the use of Butler as someone who emphasized the concept of practical wisdom or phronesis, where the properly formed moral character would give obedience to religious truth.176 It was John Keble, who had become a Fellow of Oriel in 1812, and a college tutor in 1817, who first saw the benefits of studying Aristotle and Butler in his Oxford tutorials in the 1820s, although he was one of the Oriel tutors who did not associate himself with the Noetics.177 Nockles writes on the Oriel curriculum in the early 1820s, when Newman became a Fellow: Aristotle’s Ethics and Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), both of which were taught in Oriel, inculcated the importance of moral habits in the formation of opinions. In short, virtue and orthodox belief were linked. Butler taught that life was a trial or probation for man, with the ascertainment of religious truth being dependent not so much on an intellectual reception of the evidences of Christianity, but on man’s spiritual and moral progress.178 175 Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London: Tegg & Son, 1836), ‘Preface’, p. xvii, copy in Birmingham Oratory. 176 Pereiro, ‘Oxford Movement’s Theory of Religious Knowledge’, p. 185. Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, pp. 89–96. Nockles, ‘Conflicts in Oxford’, p. 132. 177 Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, p. 80, for Keble’s use of Butler in tutorials. Butler, ‘Keble, John’, for Keble’s appointment to a Fellowship at Oriel. Nockles, ‘Pre-Tractarian Oxford’, p. 88, on Keble’s attitude to the Noetics. 178 Nockles, ‘Pre-Tractarian Oxford’, p. 92.

232

Chapter 7

Even after Newman’s conversion, Keble and others were to find Butler’s philosophy their main support.179 Butler’s Sermon 15, ‘Upon the Ignorance of Man’, helped Newman understand ‘the proper role of knowledge in the divine economy’.180 The end of humanity is not the acquisition of knowledge, and all advances in knowledge only reveal a greater ignorance of which we were previously unaware. Difficulties are only to be expected, and so we should seek whatever help faith can give, even if faith rests on a knowledge which is neither certain nor absolute. Likewise, Butler’s Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, influenced Newman’s twelfth University sermon, ‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’. Newman used Butler’s argument against ‘reasonable religion’ which had ‘nothing to do with the Heart and the Affections’.181 He preached on love being the test of true faith: ‘He loves the unseen company of believers, who loves those who are seen. The test of our being joined to Christ is love; the test of love towards Christ and His Church, is loving those whom we actually see.’182 14

The Influence of Anglican Theologians: Coleridge

When examining the Anglican influences upon Newman, some certainty can be gained about the Carolines and about Butler. Coleridge, however, is far harder to assess in terms of his influence. John Coulson, in his book Newman and the Common Tradition, argued for Coleridge as originating an understanding of language and religious truth which was shared, in very different ways, by Newman and F. D. Maurice.183 So too, Philip Rule, S.J. claimed that the two thinkers were united in the centrality of both consciousness and conscience and the 179 Kenneth Macnab, ‘Reconsidering the Movement after the 1845 Crisis’, in Brown, Nockles and Pereiro (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, pp. 571–584. Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 135. Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, pp. 91–96, 223, on Keble and Newman on Butler’s Analogy. Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, p. 95: ‘Following Butler, Keble considered that man’s knowledge is, for the most part, based on probable arguments.’ John Keble, ‘Preface on the Present Position of English Churchmen’, in Sermons Academical and Occasional (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847), cited in Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 135. 180 Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 142. 181 Joseph Butler, Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons. Garnett, ‘Joseph Butler’, p. 147. 182 John Henry Newman, ‘The Communion of Saints’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 4, Sermon 11, p. 184, available at https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial /volume4/sermon11.html. 183 John Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

John Henry Newman

233

relationship between these concepts. Others have placed much less emphasis on the relationship. Coleridge died in 1834, when Newman was thirty-three and had just published his The Arians of the Fourth Century. Newman would have known of Coleridge living in north London and would have valued his strong criticism of Paley and the school of ‘evidences’. Nevertheless, although Newman makes some appreciative remarks on Coleridge, he was always wary of him because of his personal life and his philosophical speculations. Perhaps Coleridge and Newman should therefore be seen as separate responses to the crisis of the late eighteenth century. In spite of their differences, by the end of the nineteenth century, theologians such as Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland could see how the different responses of Coleridge and Newman complemented each other in answering Hume and Paley. Newman quoted the poetry of Wordsworth, the novels of Walter Scott and the philosophy of Coleridge as evidence of ‘a growing tendency in that character of mind and feeling of which Catholic doctrines are the just expression’, and Keble felt the same way.184 But what of Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy? In 1835 Newman wrote ‘During this spring I for the first time read part of Coleridge’s works; and I am surprised how much I thought mine, is to be found there.’185 Newman’s quarrel with Coleridge was because he, and those influenced directly by him such as F. D. Maurice, believed spiritual truths and sacred doctrines because of philosophy, whereas Newman insisted that doctrines must be believed only on theological authority, whether of Scripture or of the church, holding this view even before his 1845 conversion. His second University sermon, ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, has a note attached to the printed edition of 1843 saying that his argument on the role of conscience as pointing to a supreme judge had been anticipated by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, although he was not aware of this work when he preached the sermon.186 There was a profound difference in moral theology between Coleridge and Newman, because for Coleridge conscience was a principle, replacing Kant’s practical reason, whereas Newman always saw it as inextricably related to the 184 John Henry Newman, ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays Critical and Historical (London, 1897), p. 268, and Newman to S. Rickland, 9 February 1835, in Newman, Letters and Diaries, Vol. 5, pp. 26–27, both cited in Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, pp. 78–79. Newman, Apologia, pp. 168–169, on Scott and Coleridge, quoting his article about them in the British Critic, April 1839. S. Prickett, ‘Tractarianism and the Lake Poets’, in Brown, Nockles and Pereiro (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, pp. 67–78. 185 Cited in Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, p. 98. Coulson, Newman, pp. 58, 254–255. Rule, Coleridge and Newman, pp. 33–36. 186 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’.

234

Chapter 7

fact of revelation. As he said in his second University sermon, ‘the philosopher aspires towards a divine principle; the Christian towards a Divine Agent’. This difference is a ‘method of personation’ which is ‘carried through the revealed system’.187 What united Coleridge and Newman was a profound belief that cognition has by nature a moral and religious dimension, in which morality grounds but also transcends our intellectual activity.188 Both saw human life as ‘one of organic growth and the development of self’, which was a deep congruence, and so in the Apologia Newman both criticizes Coleridge’s ‘liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate’, and yet praises him because in his writings he ‘instilled a higher philosophy into enquiring minds than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept’.189 Newman said that Coleridge made ‘trial of his age, and succeeded in interpreting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth’, seeing Coleridge as challenging the reductionist arguments of both Hume and Paley on the person as a moral agent, because both of them knew deeply the process of self-reflection, individuality and moral development.190 15

Conclusion

Much time has been spent on Newman because, like Butler, he represents the height of Anglican moral theology. Both men used sermons as a vehicle for expressing themselves; both were concrete in their imagery and practical in their desired outcome; and both wrote at a profound level about the phenomenology of the moral agent, and the complex and intricate nature of human consciousness when involved in both moral judgement and action. Yet in one way there was a profound difference between them. Butler converted to the Church of England, having originally been educated at a dissenting academy, and spent his life within that institution, despite his awareness of its great faults and weaknesses, with his Analogy of Religion being an attempt to present an apologetic argument for Christianity. However much Newman revered Butler – and his feelings of respect for him were intense – he sought a different path, as indicated above in his far lower reliance on the Analogy during the period of his conversion.

187 Newman, ‘Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, italics original. 188 Rule, Coleridge and Newman, p. 37. 189 Rule, Coleridge and Newman, p. 89. 190 Rule, Coleridge and Newman, pp. 91, 95. Newman, Apologia, p. 169, citing the British Critic, April 1839.

John Henry Newman

235

Up to about 1840, Newman’s sermons follow the same direction as Butler, emphasizing the nature of religious devotion and the importance yet great difficulty of moral rigour and holiness in the Christian life. From then on, questions of revelation, epistemology and ecclesiology replace his earlier themes, although it should be noted that what unites the period before and after 1840 is a search for holiness. It was because the moral life is always lived within, and as part of, a greater whole which was the body of Christ, or the church, that Newman became so concerned. This church was itself engaged in a struggle against evil, which is shown in Newman’s writing of February 1840 that ‘I begin to have serious apprehensions that any religious body is strong enough to withstand the league of evil but the Roman church.’191 Despite his returning again to the Carolines, when he translated and arranged the prayers of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, published as Tract 88, their influence was not to be enough.192 The impact of Newman’s sermons, and the moral theology which they presented, was to dominate the nineteenth century. First, he dealt with the emotions, or affections as he called them: affections were seen as dispositions of the moral agent, with the discipline which created moral dispositions, habits, and virtues lying in reason and conscience, as they shaped these affections. Without that shaping, affections were transitory and liable to lead the person into thought, speech and action which was far from moral, as Newman repeatedly found in Calvinism, which ‘miscalculates the power of the affections … No room being left for the resistance of the will, or for self-discipline, as the medium by which faith and holiness are connected together.’193 Newman felt that indulgent people in the world did not care about the control of their lives, being immoral persons, whereas by contrast evangelicals did care but ironically failed to understand the central importance of discipline as the key to moral conversion. Self-discipline for Newman was listening to our conscience and obeying it, and Newman’s great strength lay in his analysis of the phenomenon of conscience, which was placed by God within human beings to work with reason in disciplining the affections and will of the agent as a call to a moral way of life. Secondly, Newman explored how the phenomenon of hearing or listening to the conscience could be a preparation for discovering the existence of a moral governance which is not of our own making. As noted above, Coleridge 191 John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Volume VII: Editing the British Critic January 1839–December 1840, ed. Gerald Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 271. 192 Nockles, ‘Oxford Movement’, p. 19. Newman, Letters and Diaries, Vol. 7, p. 245. 193 Newman, ‘Human Responsibility’, p. 146.

236

Chapter 7

had made the same move, which Newman later recognized, because conscience leads on to a belief in the reality of God’s existence and his call upon our lives. Newman also turned Hume’s argument for the supremacy of the passions on its head, saying that the same argument showed the supremacy of conscience over reason, which was a brilliant outflanking of the leading eighteenth-century sceptic on his own terms. Newman, however, sought to do even more than provide an apologetic argument for religious belief based on the reality of a moral sense, because he was ultimately concerned with holiness in an age of great technological and scientific achievement, which he saw as becoming an era of increasing infidelity to Christian truth and of moral depravity. This led into the third of Newman’s great concerns. He explored how the call to moral seriousness, or even severity of life, could be related to the call to sanctity and holiness. What concerned him was how a strict moral code could lead on to holiness and sanctification, or simply remain a form of humanist self-control, which is certainly morally admirable but not a sign of a Christian character. Asceticism should be the sign of redemption, and not a humanist ideal. In several of the sermons, Newman gives a ‘both/yet’ reply to this relationship. Stewart Clem’s article on Newman’s ascetism develops this concern in a subtle exposition.194 Newman used the term self-denial instead of asceticism when preaching, especially in regard to fasting and the use of material possessions, using Christ as an exemplar, as we are transformed into the image of Christ, so that asceticism ‘simply means the active denial of (lawful) physical pleasures for the purpose of growing in greater love toward God’.195 The 1830 sermon ‘Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ’ (cited above) spells out the relationship of obeying conscience to the pursuit of holiness.196 What is different is the peculiarity of sanctity as shown in a sermon a year later, where Newman said: ‘Now it is plain that this is a very different mode of obedience from any which natural reason and conscience tell us of, different, not in its nature, but in its excellence and peculiarity.’197 The intellectual brilliance, psychological acuity and moral severity of these sermons meant that Newman was held in such a regard in the nineteenth century that this veneration went far beyond anyone else. It is very far from having a dialogue with those who criticized the Christian faith as being obscure 194 Stewart Clem, ‘Unlearning Ourselves: The Incarnational Ascetism of John Henry Newman’s Anglican Sermons’, Anglican Theological Review 103.1 (2021), pp. 44–59. 195 Clem, ‘Unlearning Ourselves’, pp. 50–53. 196 Newman, ‘Obedience to God’, p. 202. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 41. 197 Newman, ‘Spiritual Mind’, p. 81, italics original. Attard, Words of Conscience, p. 66.

John Henry Newman

237

and irrelevant to the issues of the industrial nineteenth century, which was the concern for increasing numbers of people. Newman simply refused to meet their concerns at all, and also continually separated the Christian faith from those who would not commit to it. There is then a paradox in his thought as an Anglican, because on the one hand he builds an apologetic argument through his moral theology on the reality of the conscience and the moral sense, but, on the other, he makes the demands of following Christ so severe that many found his demands impossible. It was left to F. D. Maurice and Charles Gore, as the nineteenth-century theologians who represented alternatives to Newman, to present an apologetic that could appeal to the many sceptics and critics of the church.

Chapter 8

Frederick Denison Maurice 1

Introduction

F. D. Maurice (1805–1872) was the leading Anglican theologian in England after Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, and he was seen as enabling the Anglican response to the ever-increasing challenges of sectarianism, agnosticism and atheism.1 He is primarily remembered for his defence of biblical theology against contemporary criticism of some traditional Christian doctrines, which led him into a controversy about the nature of eternal punishment, hell and divine retribution. He also expressed a theology of universal humanity, much indebted to S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788–1870). Meanwhile, his political and social thought is forever linked with his promotion of the Co-operative movement and, while the nature of his ‘Christian Socialism’ has been much debated, throughout all his social activism and educational initiatives he continued to write.2 After Newman’s departure from Anglicanism, the theology of the Oxford Movement was continued by John Keble, E. B. Pusey and H. P. Liddon. While they were sophisticated theologians, who have been re-evaluated recently, their theological conservatism and militant defence of traditional orthodoxy meant that they ignored the controversies of mid-Victorian Britain, and were based primarily either in Oxford or in small rural villages far from the great cities. However, they did have a deep social commitment about the duties owed to the poor by those who owned property, in a medieval or paternal manner, which Maurice was to transform in his social theology, duly acknowledging his debt to the principles of Tractarian social theology.3 What the Tractarians 1 William J Woolf, ‘Frederick Denison Maurice’, in William J. Woolf (ed.), The Spirit of Anglica­ nism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), pp. 49–98. Ellen K. Wondra (ed.), F. D. Maurice: Reconstructing Christian Ethics. Selected Writings (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). 2 There is a huge literature on Maurice’s involvement in Christian Socialism. See John Atherton (ed.), Social Christianity (London: SPCK, 1994), pp. 51–78, and the survey in Jeremy Morris, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 130–160. 3 Simon Skinner, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 143. I am grateful to Jeremy Morris for pointing out this connection. Colin Barr and Simon Skinner, ‘Political and Social Thought’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin D. King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_011

Frederick Denison Maurice

239

did not do was seek friendship with intellectuals who showed any criticism of religion, even though their literary influence was profound.4 Maurice, by contrast, was at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century literary culture, having close friendships with intellectuals such as J. S. Mill and Thomas Carlyle, even though they strongly disagreed with his writings.5 Their friendship continued despite profound differences.6 Mill was a leading nineteenth-century philosopher who transformed utilitarianism, while remaining hostile to religion; Carlyle was a widely read historian, essayist and novelist, who translated Goethe for an English audience. Both of them were leading intellectuals in their day, and both sought to revive the aesthetic and spiritual nature of British culture against rationalism and materialism, while remaining opposed to Christianity. In recent decades, Carlyle’s profound racism has led to him being no longer studied, but during his lifetime his dialogue with Maurice was very significant.7 Maurice was precisely the opposite of the theologians who became known variously as Tractarians, the Oxford Movement or the Anglo-Catholics. He was deeply influenced by Coleridge in attacking the dominant English school of philosophical empiricism and sought to develop Coleridge’s arguments further. Since John Coulson’s book of 1970, Maurice has been regarded not simply as a follower of Coleridge, but as belonging to a ‘common tradition’ which also included Newman.8 Although Coulson’s book has been criticized, it contains

4

5 6 7 8

Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 404, on Newman’s ‘medieval idealism’ and ‘clerical paternalism’. Skinner, Tractarians, p. 268, citing Archdeacon Robert Wilberforce in 1841: ‘We hold our worldly possessions, through the voluntary piety of our forefathers for the maintenance of God’s worship, and the benefit of the poor.’ Kirstie Blair, ‘The Influence of the Oxford Movement on Poetry and Fiction’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 410–426. Neither Mill nor Carlisle features in the index of this work: Mill and Carlisle, on the one hand, and the Oxford Movement on the other, represented two different cultural worlds in nineteenth-century England. Morris, Maurice, p. 1, citing J. A. Froude, Life of Carlyle: Carlyle’s Life in London (London: Longmans, 1897), p. 41, and J. S. Mill, Autobiography, ed. J. Stillinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 62. There is a famous picture of Maurice and Carlyle together – Ford Madox Brown’s Work of 1863, now in Manchester Art Gallery – in which the two men are observing the social divide between a wealthy couple on horseback and some navvies hard at work. F. D. Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice: Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, ed. Frederick Maurice, 2nd edition, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1884), Vol. 1, pp. 276–282, on the arguments between Carlyle and Maurice on Carlyle’s pantheism. John Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the language of Church and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). For a critique of Coulson, see Graham Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 84–86. Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 137–138.

240

Chapter 8

valuable insights, and reflects the optimism of the 1960s in seeing ‘liberal catholicism’ as a dominant theological concept, placing Coleridge, Newman and Maurice in this category. In the mid-twentieth century Michael Ramsey (who became the Archbishop of Canterbury after a distinguished career as a university theologian), published The Gospel and the Catholic Church (1936), which had a long section on Maurice. He followed this up in 1947 with a series of lectures which were published as F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology.9 Maurice was therefore seen as profoundly important by theologians in the period before and after the Second World War, but was attacked in the 1970s, on the basis of a misunderstanding, by another Anglican theologian, Stephen Sykes, later Bishop of Ely, for his advocacy of broad-mindedness and comprehension, which Sykes claimed was no more than muddled and woolly thinking.10 Perhaps the most important consideration is that Maurice is the first theologian in this book who ‘places his description of the Christian life in historical terms as a matter of Christian faith and culture and the practices of faith’.11 He was cited by H. Richard Niebuhr in his well-known study Christ and Culture (1951) as an example of how Christ can transform culture from within: He [Maurice] is above all a Johannine thinker, who begins with the fact that the Christ who comes into the world comes into his own, and that it is Christ himself who exercises his kingship over men, not a viceregent  – whether pope, scriptures, Christian religion, church, or inner light-separate from the incarnate Word.12 The centre of family, nation and church is always Christ, and the task of the church is to point out the spiritual condition of humanity.13 Maurice challenged the evangelical preoccupation with sin as leading to further self-preoccupation, as Newman had done before him.14 In the late twentieth century Maurice was seen as a historical figure, although the work of the church historian Jeremy Morris has done much to hand on 9

Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: SPCK, 1990; first published 1936). Arthur Michael Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology: The Maurice Lectures, 1948 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011; first published 1951). 10 Stephen Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (Oxford: Mowbray, 1978). 11 Timothy Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), p. 224. 12 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), p. 220. 13 Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p. 222. 14 Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p. 224.

Frederick Denison Maurice

241

his thought to a new audience.15 Morris shows the complexity of Maurice’s thought. First, there is the providentialism displayed in his theology of revelation, which presupposed ‘an immediacy of experience, which sidestepped the supposition of any cumulative wisdom, or mediatorial tradition, embedded in the Church’. However there is also his awareness of the church as an abiding presence in history. This is so in the Coleridgean sense of an Idea, or a prototypical model embedded in the actual history of an institution.16 Furthermore, Maurice argued that qualities such as ‘fellowship, co-operation, collaboration, co-working … are better descriptions of Christian action than competition and acquisition’.17 Morris’s concluding summary of Maurice’s thought underpins much of the approach taken in this chapter: Developing a form of apologetic in the face of secular threat, he faced the challenges of his age unapologetically. His many critics, then and now, had little difficulty pin-pointing the confusing twists and turns in his argument, the unwarranted assertions, and fragile generalizations. But for breadth of vision, imagination, and force of conviction, few could match him. These were significant theological virtues.18 Another contemporary theologian who places Maurice in the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ is Timothy Sedgwick. Sedgwick shows how Maurice developed a virtue ethic, a sacramental theology and a philosophy of culture. He argues that, for Maurice, participation and sacramentality go together: Maurice’s sacramental understanding makes the strong claim that in worship we are drawn into communion with God. In worship the end of life is given. Our ultimate intent is formed so that we are able to see and

15 Morris, Maurice. Jeremy Morris, ‘Ecclesiology and Contested Identities: The Parting of the Ways’, in The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 197–218, comparing Newman and Maurice. Jeremy Morris, ‘A Social Doctrine of the Trinity? A Reappraisal of F. D. Maurice on Eternal Life’, Anglican and Episcopal History 69.1 (2000), pp. 72–100. Jeremy Morris (ed.), To Build Christ’s Kingdom: F. D. Maurice and His Writings (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007). Jeremy Morris, ‘F. D. Maurice and the Myth of Christian Socialist Origins’, in Stephen Spencer (ed.), Theology Reforming Society: Revisiting Anglican Social Theology (London: SCM Press, 2017), pp. 1–23. 16 Morris, ‘Ecclesiology and Contested Identities’, pp. 200–201. 17 Morris, ‘Maurice and the Myth of Christian Socialist Origins’, p. 20. 18 Morris, Maurice, p. 208.

242

Chapter 8

experience the presence of God in all of our lives. Declared in baptism, in eucharist, the unity that is the foundation of all of life is given.19 All this stands very much in the Coleridgean tradition and, just as Coleridge handed on to many nineteenth-century thinkers (including, of course, Maurice) his appreciation of the Anglican tradition, so too Maurice’s influence is found in William Temple. There is a close-knit relationship between all these theologians after Coleridge because the genealogy of Anglican moral theology would be broken if it were not for Maurice’s work. In twenty-first century scholarship, Maurice continues to appear as an influence on Anglican thought, with one recent example being an article by Kelly Brown Douglas, an American Anglican theologian. While critical of several aspects of Maurice’s ministry, she nevertheless writes that ‘Maurice’s focus on the cooperative, harmonious relationality of the trinitarian godhead was his normative theological principle’.20 Another recent appeal to Maurice is by the English Anglican theologian Alison Milbank.21 She writes that ‘Maurice’s ecclesial vision comprehended the whole human race. … He made no distinction between natural and revealed religion, but believed all people are called to be brothers and sisters under their Father, God.’ Further, Milbank notes the strongly Trinitarian nature of his thought, which eschewed a ‘radical separation of the immanent from the economic Trinity’. The implication is that theology should reflect our participation in God, which Paul Dominiak has recently argued is the key to understanding Richard Hooker.22 This approach echoes Timothy Sedgwick’s argument quoted above. 2

Maurice’s Life

Maurice was the son of a Unitarian minister, Michael Maurice. Michael had trained at the dissenting academy at Hoxton but had become a Unitarian while 19 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 225. C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement: Studies in S. T. Coleridge, Dr Arnold of Rugby, J. C. Hare, Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice (Durham, NC: Duke University Publications, 1942), p. 221, on union with God in Maurice’s theology. 20 Kelly Brown Douglas, ‘Theological Methodology and the Jesus Movement through the work of F. D. Maurice and Vida Scudder’, Anglican Theological Review 102.1 (2020), p. 20. 21 Alison Milbank, ‘Maurice as a Resource for the Church Today’, in Spencer (ed.), Theology Reforming Society, pp. 27–28. 22 Paul Anthony Dominiak, Richard Hooker: The Architecture of Participation (London: T&T Clark, 2020).

Frederick Denison Maurice

243

studying for the dissenting ministry. His decision to become a Unitarian, and also be a minister in that church, caused him to be disinherited, and he remained poor for the whole of his life. For a while he worked with the famous Unitarian minister and scientist Joseph Priestley, both of them opposing the war with France and being suspected of sympathies towards the French government. Michael certainly supported the French Revolution, celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille each year, while Priestley’s house and chapel in Birmingham were destroyed in 1791 by a mob supporting ‘Church and King’.23 John Frederick Denison Maurice (better known as F. D. Maurice) was born in 1805. His father had by this time become a very moderate Unitarian, even baptizing in the name of the Trinity.24 The family worshipped with Michael at his Unitarian chapel, but when Maurice was sixteen, his mother broke away from her husband’s beliefs joining an evangelical, Calvinist church; Maurice supported his mother in this change of heart, which must have been very painful for the family. Bernard Reardon writes: ‘Unfortunately the religious persuasions which thus divided the family gave rise to vehement disagreement.’25 Maurice was only a Calvinist for a brief while, before beginning to explore Anglicanism, applying at the age of eighteen to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, despite its Anglican foundation. He did not need to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion on matriculation, as he would have had to do at Oxford, where subscription was mandatory (an impossibility in the eyes of his father). In 1825, Maurice changed colleges, to read law at Trinity Hall. He achieved a first-class degree but was not awarded it, having eventually determined that he could not take the subscription to the Articles; had he done so, he might have become a Fellow of the college.26 Maurice studied both Paley and Butler while an undergraduate, thus enabling him to understand some of the theological debate in Anglicanism in the preceding century, and was taught at Cambridge by Julius Hare, a great follower and close friend of Coleridge. (Hare supplied Coleridge with German books and attended his friend’s discussions at Hampstead.27) Maurice also met a fellow 23 Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, p. 9. 24 Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, p. 122. Morris, Maurice, p. 32. 25 Bernard Reardon, ‘Maurice, (John) Frederick Denison’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 26 Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, p. 49. Morris, Maurice, p. 34. 27 Morris, Maurice, p. 37. The standard modern account of Coleridge’s influence is Philip Aherne, The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America 1834–1934 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). The earlier, and still valuable, account is Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement.

244

Chapter 8

student, John Sterling, who had often heard Coleridge talk at Hampstead, and Sterling and Maurice became close friends, sharing a belief in philosophy as transcendental, revealing wider and universal truths, and also being strongly influenced by Romantic literature and poetry. On leaving Cambridge, Maurice felt drawn to literary journalism (as Coleridge had before him), moving to London and starting the Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine. In this short-lived periodical (it only lasted for four issues), he attacked Bentham fiercely and praised Coleridge, so the break with his father’s radical sympathies was clear. Maurice then co-edited with Sterling the recently founded Athenaeum, but that too was financially unsuccessful. C. R. Sanders notes that Maurice felt Coleridge’s cause to be extremely unpopular and in need of defence.28 Maurice was eventually baptized as an Anglican on 29 March 1831, aged twenty-six. Since his father had baptized his son at birth in the Trinitarian name despite being a Unitarian minister, Maurice’s Life makes it clear that his father regarded his son’s new, Anglican baptism as a painful re-baptism.29 It was not officially regarded in the Church of England as a re-baptism, but Morris argues that ‘at this stage of his life he [Maurice] saw baptism as a sharp dividing line between the Church and his Dissenting background’.30 Eventually, after a few years writing and editing literary journals, he was drawn to ordination in the Church of England. On 26 January 1834, Henry Ryder, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, ordained Maurice as a deacon in Eccleshall parish church. He was priested a year later, and this was a decision which further upset his father, having being made by his son in spite of the difficulties then faced by the Church of England.31 To make this decision Maurice had to re-enter university life, and Hare tried to persuade him to return to Cambridge but was unsuccessful, with Maurice going this time to Exeter College, Oxford, where he had to take the subscription to the Articles in order to matriculate. At the time, the Church of England was in crisis as an established church because of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829, made by a Conservative government led by the Duke of Wellington that was forced into action because of rising unrest. Worse was to come, since, when Wellington’s government lost power, the new Whig government, led by Lord Grey, passed the 1832 Reform Act, which heralded the 28 Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, p. 185. Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 65. 29 Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, pp. 122–123. 30 Morris, Maurice, pp. 49–50. 31 Morris, Maurice, p. 54, citing the archives of King’s College, London.

Frederick Denison Maurice

245

complete reform of the electoral system. The Act was strongly opposed by the bishops of the Church of England, leading in 1831 to the Bishop of Bristol’s palace being burnt down by a mob. It seemed like the end of an era, and symbolic of the imminent and complete collapse of the Church of England. Once again, as in the crisis of the Cromwellian Protectorate, the Church of England seemed to have no future. Morris writes: If the events of 1828–32 marked the end of one kind of political Anglicanism – the assumed, inherited superiority of a legally entrenched and privileged Church  – its death was protracted and not conclusive. To the great surprise of many, the Church of England was to avoid the destruction feared in 1832 and to recover its vitality.32 As Morris notes, Maurice expressed his new-found Anglican identity at a time when the threat to the established church was at its height, and he would be part of the process of the readjustment of the Church of England and Anglican theology to the new reality of the nineteenth century. This readjustment included accepting a much less privileged position for the Anglican church; the need for religion to respond to a strong intellectual tradition deeply hostile to Christianity expressed by the successors of Bentham, such as John Stuart Mill; some adjustment to the influence of dissent and the Nonconformist churches; and having a mission, with appropriate pastoral care, in the midst of great urbanization, industrialization and poverty. It was a very different era from the eighteenth century. Maurice studied Butler again at Oxford, beginning a life-long fascination with that theologian’s thought. However, he retained his sympathies with a theology that was questioning, reading Thomas Erskine (discussed in the next section of this chapter). While a curate he published his novel, Eustace Conway, which Coleridge read with pleasure before his death.33 Maurice used it to popularize Coleridge’s beliefs. ‘Within the space of its three volumes he found plenty of room for Coleridge’s doctrines. There is no mistaking the Coleridgean flavour of the latitudinarian tendencies in Eustace Conway’s Journal.’34 However it sold badly, and Maurice turned instead to theology, with his first theological publication, Subscription No Bondage, written in 1835 under a pseudonym. In 1836 he became chaplain of Guy’s Hospital, London. Newman and Pusey briefly supported Maurice’s candidacy to be professor of political 32 Morris, Maurice, p. 25. 33 C. R. Sanders, ‘Maurice as a Commentator on Coleridge’, PMLA 53.1 (1938), pp. 230–243. 34 Sanders, ‘Maurice’, p. 235.

246

Chapter 8

economy at Oxford but, realizing how little Maurice agreed with them, they eventually voted against him. Julius Hare had now become vicar of Herstmonceux, with Sterling as his curate. Maurice married Sterling’s sister-in-law, Anne Barton, and later Hare married Maurice’s younger sister, thus forming a closely interconnected group of friends. Again, a comparison can be made with Coleridge, because both Coleridge and Maurice were intellectuals, with a small number of individuals who were very close, who all worked with each other and married into each other’s families. By the late 1830s, Maurice was playing the role of a well-known literary and social figure in London. In 1838 his best-known work, The Kingdom of Christ, a profound apologia for Christianity and a work on ecclesiology, was published, with a second edition (greatly revised, and the edition always used today) appearing in 1842. In 1840 Maurice became Professor of English Literature and History at King’s College, London. He was still in his thirties, at the height of his powers, an accomplished and published theologian, and a friend of many literary intellectuals (by this time including Thomas Carlyle). However, things quickly changed, because both his wife and his great friend John Sterling died a few years later. Maurice’s wife died very young in 1845; four years later Maurice married Hare’s half-sister. Maurice moved from his focus on literature and history to concentrating on writing theology and preaching. He became Professor of Theology at King’s College in 1846, and chaplain to Lincoln’s Inn, resigning from his duties at Guy’s Hospital. His message was very much one of Christ as the founder of a universal humanity where individuals can realize their deep unity with Christ, and through Christ to their communion with one another – a message which had enormous political and social implications. Like Hooker centuries before, barristers attended his services and listened to his sermons, with some of them later joining Maurice in Christian Socialism. He helped found Queen’s College in London for women’s education in 1846, and in 1848, a year of revolutions across Europe, he became associated with a group who called themselves ‘Christian Socialists’, who published the briefly popular journal Politics for the People and founded co-operative societies for craftsmen. Everything once again changed dramatically in 1853, with the publication of Maurice’s Theological Essays, which he knew would prove controversial. He was dismissed from his professorship at King’s College (which, as an independent educational institution could hire or dismiss whom it wished), because the book argued against the doctrine of the eternal punishment of impenitent sinners.35 He managed to retain his chaplaincy at Lincoln’s Inn but would have no more university work teaching theology or philosophy for thirteen years. 35 F. D. Maurice, Theological Essays (London: James Clarke, 1957; first published 1853).

Frederick Denison Maurice

247

Maurice nevertheless continued his work in education, founding a working men’s college in London and becoming its principal. Further theological controversies included his criticism of Henry Mansel’s views on revelation as propounded in his Bampton Lectures.36 Maurice’s lengthy reply to Mansel in What Is Revelation? and Sequel to the Inquiry, What Is Revelation? Included a discussion of Coleridge’s definition of Reason, defined as being to do with what was permanent and revealed the truth. Maurice ‘passionately defended’ Coleridge in these writings.37 In 1860, at the age of fifty-five, Maurice was appointed incumbent of the chapel of St Peter, Vere Street, London, relinquishing his chaplaincy at Lincoln’s Inn, where he had been for fourteen years. His appointment caused a warm letter of congratulation, signed by peers, bishops and other clergy, to which Maurice replied at length, on 27 November 1860; the letter described Maurice as Not only as one of the most learned theologians of the day, but more particularly as a wise and benevolent co-operator with the working classes of the community, upon whose minds you have been eminently successful in bringing to bear the practical truths of the Gospel, and in leading them to regard the Church of our common Lord and Master Jesus Christ as the great instrument designed by Providence for the regeneration of mankind and the elevation of society.38 3

Moral Philosophy at Cambridge

Finally, in 1866, thirteen years after his dismissal from King’s College, Maurice was elected to the Knightbridge Chair of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, returning to university teaching, while combining this both with the parish in London and being principal of the working men’s college. Ever since William Whewell’s appointment to this chair in 1838, moral philosophy in Cambridge had become characterized by an emphasis on the conscience, and rational intuition, with Whewell being succeeded by John Grote and then

36 Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought, pp. 74–81. Morris, Maurice, pp. 170–172. Ramsey, Maurice, pp. 72–81. Hamish F. G. Swanston, Ideas of Order: Anglicans and the Renewal of Theological Method in the Middle Years of the Nineteenth Century (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974), p. 91; pp. 53–76 are on Mansel, pp. 88–134 on Maurice. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, pp. 217–218. 37 Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, p. 198. 38 Address of Congratulation to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, on His Nomination to St Peter’s, Vere Street; With His Reply Thereto (1860).

248

Chapter 8

Maurice.39 J. B. Schneewind discusses the Cambridge school of philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century, writing: Two themes, in particular, are of importance. They are defending a spiritual and religious, and so far as possible a specifically Christian, outlook, and they see opposition to any utilitarian view of morality as part of this defence; and they are all strongly opposed to philosophical empiricism, which they see as being, among other things, at the root of antireligious doctrine.40 Whewell attacked utilitarianism and J. S. Mill, arguing that conscience enables us to hear God speaking to us, but that ‘conscience is simply Reason exercised on moral subjects’, not a separate faculty.41 When Maurice succeeded Grote, he was therefore stepping into a philosophical school marked as hostile to utilitarianism, and one which was both religious and intuitionist. Like Coleridge, Grote contributed much to the philosophy of language, and saw virtue as embedded in social relationships and the use of language.42 To this extent Maurice benefited from Coleridge’s enduring influence in intuitionist moral philosophy.43 Cambridge was ironically an easier world to be part of than King’s College, London, because moral philosophy at Cambridge was liberal, religious and open to new ideas, unlike King’s. 39 Laura J. Snyder, ‘William Whewell’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclo­pedia of Philosophy, summer 2022 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries /whewell/. Richard Yeo, ‘Whewell, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, pp. 170–171, cites Coleridge as ‘the source of the Cambridge school of philosophy’. He identifies Whewell, Grote and Maurice as the leaders of the nineteenth-century Cambridge school of philosophy, and he cites James Martineau, ‘Personal Influences on Our Present Theology’, in Essays, Theological and Philosophical (New York: Henry Holt, 1883), pp. 329–405: ‘It will not appear fanciful if we trace the origin of the school to intellectual revolt against the academic textbooks, Locke, and Paley. Empirical psychology and utilitarian ethics were the permanent objects of Coleridge’s hostility; and their removal is with him the prior condition of any morality and religion at all.’ 40 J. B. Schneewind, ‘Sidgwick and the Cambridge Moralists’, Monist 58.3 (1974), p. 373. 41 Snyder, ‘William Whewell’. Alan Donagan, ‘Whewell’s Elements of Morality’, Journal of Philosophy 71.19 (1974), pp. 724–736. 42 J. R. Gibbins, ‘Grote, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. John Gibbins, John Grote: Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007). Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, pp. 174–175, on Grote’s moral philosophy. Philip Aherne, ‘The Way of Seeing: The Coleridgean Development of Utilitarianism in Cambridge’, in Peter Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 105–122. 43 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 171.

Frederick Denison Maurice

249

This tradition endured beyond Maurice to the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who became Knightbridge Professor in 1883. Sidgwick was a principled agnostic, who combined religious scepticism, ethical intuitionism and a very moderate utilitarianism.44 He only applied for the Knightbridge Professorship in 1883 because all religious tests had been removed as a condition of holding it. He described Maurice’s thought as being like a horse told to jump a five-barred gate; after a discussion the horse finds itself on the other side: ‘You know that you have not got over it legitimately but how you find yourself on the other side you do not know.’45 Although Grote and Maurice were Anglican clergy, the Knightbridge Chair was a secular position. Maurice was moving into a different world, and his appointment therefore marks a significant transition in this book, in terms of the location or place from which moral theology is written. Indeed, after Maurice all references to theology were removed from the title of the chair, with Maurice being the last theologian to hold office. Until Maurice, moral theologians were either Fellows of colleges in Oxford or Cambridge, such as Hooker, Wesley or Newman, or else they were parish clergy. Some eventually left their Fellowships for parishes, chaplaincies or other employment, with Hooker being a good example of this, moving from Corpus Christi College, Oxford to be Master of The Temple, still one of the Inns of Court. Those moral theologians who became professors at Oxford or Cambridge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often combined their academic duties with other roles. Robert Sanderson was a full-time parish priest in Lincolnshire, only visiting Oxford from time to time.46 Butler first preached for a stipend at the Rolls Chapel and then became a parish priest and bishop, never holding a Fellowship. But now Maurice was elected to a full-time chair at Cambridge. It is true that he sought to continue as a parish priest in London, and to retain his unpaid role as principal of the working men’s college, but his main work was as a salaried professor in a university rapidly losing its religious affiliation. As a result of its increasing detachment from religious institutions, the professionalization of academic life meant that from now on some moral theologians would be full-time university professors of theology in theology departments. Some would also hold Fellowships in colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, but the beginning of the division between church 44 Aherne, The Coleridge Legacy, pp. 176–177, on Sidgwick’s ‘covert’ links with Coleridge. Stefan Collini, ‘Sidgwick, Henry’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 45 H. R. Haweis, ‘Frederick Denison Maurice’, Contemporary Review 65 (1894), p. 880, cited in Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, pp. 179–180. 46 Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 300.

250

Chapter 8

life and academic life is evident in Maurice’s election in 1866, even if it would take decades for the division to widen into different careers and spheres of life. How that division can be bridged is a crucial part of the future of moral theology, because where one writes from makes a huge difference: whether as a layperson, such as Coleridge, or as a parish priest, chaplain, lay academic or ordained academic. Maurice responded to his election by completing the work he had been writing for years, his Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, and also by giving the lectures on Social Morality, which he also published. The remainder of this chapter will range widely. It will look at Maurice’s Epistles of St. John, the fourth volume of the Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (which was entitled Modern Philosophy), his lectures at Cambridge on The Conscience, and his sermons. Maurice resigned his parish in London after three years of trying to combine teaching in Cambridge with parochial work, and briefly had charge of St Edward’s church, Cambridge, which was in the gift of his old college, Trinity Hall. This was primarily an opportunity to preach to students, much as he had done at Lincoln’s Inn. He felt that, although he was a tenured professor at Cambridge, nevertheless as an Anglican clergyman he should also preach and lead worship. However, his health was declining, and he died after a few month’s illness, aged sixty-six, in 1872. 4

Coleridge’s Influence on Maurice

Maurice recorded that he read Coleridge even before he went to university, and he recalled defending Coleridge’s metaphysics at the Cambridge Conversazione Society, known as ‘The Apostles’, which was a debating society, with Maurice one of its leading members.47 By the late 1830s he had read all of Coleridge’s works, and he was also strongly influenced by Julius Hare at Cambridge, especially studying Plato. By the time he left Oxford, Maurice was deeply imbued with Coleridge’s thought, and he was impressed with Thomas Erskine, which was a very subtle blend of ideas for a young person, even before he began articulating his mature theology. Maurice’s position was therefore very complex at the time of his ordination, being a convert to Anglicanism, and the established Church of England, which he supported strongly, despite its political difficulties. 47 Morris, Maurice, pp. 34, 37. Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, p. 176. Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought, chapters 4–5, pp. 56–86. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, pp. 179–209, ‘Maurice on Coleridge’.

Frederick Denison Maurice

251

The second edition of The Kingdom of Christ is dedicated to Derwent Coleridge, the son of Samuel Coleridge, and here Maurice discusses his indebtedness to Samuel Coleridge.48 It is worth quoting at length his account of the effect that Aids to Reflection had upon him, as it shows that Maurice, like Coleridge, felt called to be a teacher of what was ‘fixed and eternal’: The Aids to Reflection is a book of a different character from either of these, and it is one to which I feel myself under much more deep and solemn obligations. I do not know any book which ever brought to me more clear tokens and evidences of this kind than the one of which I am speaking. I have heard it described both by admirers and objectors as one which deals with religion philosophically. In whatever sense that assertion may be true, and in a very important sense I believe it is quite true, I can testify that it was most helpful in delivering me from a number of philosophical phrases and generalizations, which I believe attach themselves to the truths of the Creed, even in the minds of many who think that they receive Christianity with a most childlike spirit – most helpful in enabling me to perceive that the deepest principles of all are those which the peasant is as capable of apprehending and entering into as the Schoolman. I value and love his philosophy mainly because it has led me to this discovery, and to the practical conclusion, that those who are called to the work of teaching must cultivate and exercise their understandings, in order that they may discriminate between that which is factitious and accidental, or belongs to our artificial habits of thought, and that which is fixed and eternal, which belongs to man as man, and which God will open the eyes of every humble man to perceive.49 Maurice again follows Coleridge in holding two views of reason. One may be described as understanding, which is the activity of the mind in dealing with sense impressions and which Maurice, like Coleridge, dismisses as accidental, while the other may be called reason proper, which seeks truth, and which is open to God’s revelation. Maurice put words from a sermon by Jeremy Taylor, the Via Intelligentiae, on the front cover of the book: ‘Must Truth be for ever in the dark, and the world for ever be divided, and societies disturbed, and 48 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 72, quoting F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ, Or Hints Respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1843), Vol. 1, p. 5: ‘Everyone who has felt his [Coleridge’s] influence must, I think, be anxious to acknowledge it.’ 49 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 10–11.

252

Chapter 8

governments weakened, and our spirits debauched with error, and the uncertain opinions and the pedantry of talking men?’50 The answer for Maurice is found in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, and Maurice says in the dedication that ‘The whole object of his [Coleridge’s] book is to draw us from the study of mere worldly and external morality to that which concerns the heart and the inner man.’51 Reason, which seeks what is fixed and eternal, is known in the heart, which is purified by God’s Spirit working within the person’s search for truth. Maurice’s concern for ‘the heart and the inner man’ is the central theme of his moral theology. This is an echo of Taylor’s statement in his sermon that ‘holiness is the only way of truth and understanding’.52 Later in the sermon Taylor speaks of ‘the measure of holiness, and the proper light of the Spirit of God’.53 Again, Maurice refers in one of his own last sermons to ‘the very light of that Spirit of God, who works by love’.54 Taylor, Coleridge and Maurice stand in a tradition of Anglican spirituality deeply imbued with Platonism, and Aherne describes Coleridge’s legacy to Maurice as a ‘blend of German transcendentalism, Platonic creeds and Christian ethics, which was essentially pedagogical, aimed at cultivating self-consciousness alongside motivating and guiding the intellectual and philosophical journey of the individual mind’. While this is correct, it underplays the strongly Christian element of Coleridge’s influence.55 Because the legacy of Coleridge to Maurice was emphatically Christian, any complete identification of Maurice with Platonism through Coleridge should be resisted. There was certainly a Platonic dimension in his theology and spirituality:

50 The Via Intelligentiae is one of the most famous Anglican sermons ever preached. It is discussed by many recent scholars. Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 212. Sedgwick’s reading of the sermon is also analysed in Matthew Kruger, ‘Jeremy Taylor and the Practice of Theology’; Anglican Theological Review 102.1 (2020), pp. 31–48, esp. pp. 32–33. There is further discussion in Peter Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 339–340, and by Ralph McMichael in Ralph McMichael (ed.), The Vocation of Anglican Theology (London: SCM Press, 2014), pp. 6–9. The sermon itself is in Jeremy Taylor, Selected Works, ed. Thomas K. Carroll (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 355–386. 51 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, p. 12. 52 Taylor, Selected Works, p. 361. 53 Taylor, Selected Works, p. 383. 54 Charles Kingsley, Frederick Denison Maurice A Sermon Preached in Aid of the Girls’ Home, 22, Charlotte Street, Portland Place (London: Macmillan, 1873), available at http://anglican history.org/maurice/kingsley1873.html. 55 Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 170.

Frederick Denison Maurice

253

his multi-layered view of reality, his sense of material things as inherently sacramental, his language of divine order, his assumption that certain forms of social organization were the outworkings of the divine order, and his constant recourse to the idea that the eternal world was ‘manifested’ in various ways in the created world.56 All this could have made Maurice a nineteenth-century Neoplatonist. But Morris points out three reasons for dissenting from this view. First, Maurice never sought to systematize these concepts into an overall idealist metaphysic; like all of his thinking, it was episodic and fragmentary. Secondly, he denied the immortality of the soul as set out in Plato’s Phaedo. Thirdly, he strongly asserted a biblical narrative of creation and redemption.57 What this meant was that Maurice stood in a Platonist tradition, where language conveyed the metaphysical nature of reality, but it was also a deeply historicist and Christian position. He argued that the Bible conveyed truth by a narrative history and language was also a product of its time and culture, which changed over generations. Maurice also read widely in the early church fathers, including Clement and Athanasius, who of course were themselves influenced by Platonism.58 Others who agree with Morris would be Wolf in his essay on Maurice, and H. Richard Niebuhr, who described Maurice’s view as ‘eschatological immediacy’ or an ‘eschatological present’.59 In his Modern Philosophy, Maurice devotes eight pages on Coleridge.60 He saw him as a Kantian (Coleridge follows on from the chapter on Kant and Herder) who used Kant’s distinction between reason and understanding ‘as of inestimable worth’.61 The value of Coleridge lay in uniting Kant with Burke, and his ‘experimental maxims’. Unlike Burke Coleridge also vindicated ‘the deep underground principles of society’. Finally, there was ‘Coleridge’s sympathy with German ontology’, with Maurice seeing Kant as proving an ‘ice-bucket’ to Coleridge’s exploration of Unitarianism and Spinoza. ‘All demonstrations 56 Morris, Maurice, p. 48. 57 Morris, Maurice, pp. 48–49. The reference to the Phaedo is in Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1862), p. 154. 58 Morris, ‘A Social Doctrine of the Trinity?’, pp. 89, 94. Ramsey, Maurice, p. 23. Ramsey, Gospel and the Catholic Church, p. 210, for a similar argument. 59 William J. Wolf, ‘F. D. Maurice’, in William J. Wolf (ed.), The Spirit of Anglicanism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), p. 77, quoting Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, pp. 227–229. 60 F. D. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, or a Treatise of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from the Fourteenth Century to the French Revolution, With a Glimpse into the Nine­teenth Century (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1862), pp. 664–672. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, p. 253, on Maurice’s summary of Coleridge in this work. 61 Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 666.

254

Chapter 8

of the being of God proved futile! The speculative reason always deceiving!’62 This was answered by Coleridge’s religious crisis: There must be union between the Father and his children; there must be a redemption from evil. … The emancipation and purification of his conscience must imply that there is a conscience to be emancipated and purified. The belief in a Spirit who awakens the human will or spirit must imply that there is a spirit or will to be awakened.63 Maurice was pleased that Coleridge did not produce a Hegelian or idealist synthesis. ‘A system of ontology must be contained in a book; the Word of Wisdom is a living teacher speaking to men.’64 Coleridge spoke through his Lay Sermons and the Aids to Reflection. ‘Coleridge in these works asks, “whether the maxims of prudence and the messages to the conscience do not proceed from Him – whether there is not a will in them which can only be free when it is obeying the motions of a higher Will”.’65 Morris identifies several main areas in which Coleridge influenced Maurice. First, there was the ‘renewed metaphysical approach to religion that located the apprehension of religious truth in the universal experience of humankind’.66 Both writers assumed the unity of knowledge and moral virtue, because only through this could the world, or material reality, be seen sacramentally, and this vision meant that the world could be understood as symbolic of the eternal, through which it was manifested. This returns us again to Coleridge’s theory of language as bearing within it truths that had to be comprehended within a living tradition. Secondly, Maurice was deeply aware of philosophical empiricism, surveying Locke, Hume and others in Modern Philosophy.67 He was not explicitly critical, understanding Locke’s hostility to innate ideas and Hume’s caution on inductivism.68 He was sympathetic to Hume’s scepticism about miracles, and found Hume more congenial than Vico, seeing Hume as exposing the corruption 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 668. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 669. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 670. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 670. Morris, Maurice, pp. 38–39. Robert T. Hall, ‘Autonomy and the Social Order: The Moral Philosophy of F. D. Maurice’, Monist 55.3 (1971), pp. 504–519, esp. p. 506. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, pp. 434–448, is on Locke; pp. 560–578 on Hume; pp. 596–606 cover Paley (the ‘Utilitarian Theologian’) and Bentham (‘The Utilitarian without Theology’). On Locke’s hostility to innate ideas, see Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 441.

Frederick Denison Maurice

255

of religion.69 However, although Maurice appreciated the critique of empiricism, he drew a line at the idea of any universal humanity that excluded belief or faith. He set out his caution in his lectures given at Cambridge that were later published as Social Morality. Guy Ranson writes that, for Maurice in these lectures, ‘Such men as Bacon, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Kant are accused of creating a fictitious humanity upon which they then established society empirically.’70 Maurice preferred a much more diffuse argument to Locke and empiricism, reasoning in an exploratory manner.71 This laid him vulnerable to the charge of vagueness or inconsistency.72 Sykes was damning in his attack on Maurice, arguing that Maurice’s epistemology had pernicious consequences for a clear account of Christian faith, especially (but not only) his doctrine of the church. ‘It is specifically with respect to the principle of the complementarity of apparently opposed truths that Maurice’s position is most questionable. Lots of contradictory things may be said to be complementary by those with a vested interest in refusing to think straight.’73 However, Morris provides a strong rebuttal to Sykes’s dismissal of Maurice: ‘It is ironic that Sykes’ criticism of F. D. Maurice in The Integrity of Anglicanism, for all that I share his perplexity at some of Maurice’s contradictory formulations, nonetheless missed something he actually shared with Maurice, namely a concern not to expound a theoretical Anglicanism from first principles, but to give a theological account of the Church as it existed in time, in other words a reflexive rather than constructive move.74 Thirdly, and perhaps most important, Maurice’s idea of a ‘universal society’ is influenced by Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State.75 69 Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 576. 70 Guy Ranson, ‘F. D. Maurice and the Social Nature of Man’, Canadian Journal of Theology 11.4 (1965), pp. 265–276, quoting F. D. Maurice, Social Morality; Twenty-One Lectures Given at the University of Cambridge (London: Macmillan, 1872), Lecture 18, p. 347. See also Maurice’s critique of Hume’s consequences and hostility to religion in Modern Philosophy, pp. 567–571. 71 Morris, Maurice, p. 41. 72 Sykes, Integrity of Anglicanism, p. 19. 73 Sykes, Integrity of Anglicanism, p. 33. 74 Jeremy Morris, ‘Unashamed Integrity: Stephen Sykes and the “Crisis” of Anglican Eccle­ siology and Identity’, Ecclesiology 15 (2019), p. 75. See also Morris, Maurice, p. 201. 75 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 47, 187, 196, 206, 230, 240 (as relating to baptism), 256, 351, 489, 520, 531.

256

Chapter 8

Coleridge never explicitly claimed that the church was a universal society, but he certainly saw the church ‘as a teleological principle that was inseparable from history and yet identifiable within it’.76 Maurice felt that Coleridge showed that the sacraments were ‘the transcendental language, bringing out truths full orbed of which in our [notions?] and systems we can but exhibit one side’, although he did feel that Coleridge’s theology had too little regard for facts.77 He used Coleridge’s On the Constitution and spoke of his interest in the book when it was published, but ‘applied Coleridge’s argument more thoroughly, yet more rigidly, than ever his intellectual mentor had done’.78 5

Maurice’s Theological Anthropology

Although The Kingdom of Christ was a work on ecclesiology, it also contained much on Maurice’s understanding of the world and Christian faith. Maurice examined the beliefs of an orthodox Protestant, a Quaker, a Unitarian and a rationalist philosopher. He emphasized what was positive in each case but argued that each had developed into error. In every case the answer was to find signs of a transcendent ‘spiritual and universal Kingdom’. Christ’s kingdom is constituted by all those who confess Christ, and the signs of this spiritual society are the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Timothy Sedgwick expresses Maurice’s argument clearly: As a matter of the reconciliation of our lives, the kingdom of Christ is a matter of our daily life, embedded in family and society and shaped by culture. However, given the particularity of the communities in which we live, love is shaped in terms of those communities. We live in a world where fulfillment is narrowly conceived and where our loves are narrowly given, whether family, tribe, or the successful triumph of our sense of the order of things. In contrast, baptism declares our true identity.79

76 Morris, Maurice, p. 42. 77 Maurice to Edmund Strachey, 1838; Maurice to Sara Coleridge, daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1 March 1844. The word in brackets is unclear in the letter. Quoted in Morris, Maurice, p. 42, citing Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, p. 251. 78 Morris, Maurice, p. 103. Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 242, quoting Maurice, Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Vol. 1, p. 178. 79 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 224.

Frederick Denison Maurice

257

This spiritual society was the result of the work of the Trinity, where Christ himself was the revelation of the ultimate will. Christ revealed the nature of true humanity and also showed us the love of the Father for his creation. While studying for ordination at Oxford, Maurice read the lay theologian Thomas Erskine of Linlathen.80 Erskine’s theology, especially in The Brazen Serpent in 1831, was highly critical of the way in which the Church of Scotland had made the doctrine of penal substitution and predestination into propositions which had to be accepted for membership of that church. ‘Christ died for every man, as the head of every man. … He did not suffer the punishment of sin … to dispense with our suffering it, but to change the character of our suffering, from an unsanctified and unsanctifying suffering, into a sanctified and sanctifying suffering.’81 In 1831 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which was a Reformed church, deposed John McLeod Campbell as minister of Rhu for preaching the doctrine of universal atonement. Erskine agreed deeply with Campbell. Morris wrote of Erskine in appreciative terms: ‘I am certain a light has fallen through him on the Scriptures, which I hope I shall never lose.’82 Because Maurice denied that human reason and will were completely damaged, or corrupted, by human sin, he therefore put emphasis on human agency as able to respond to God’s call. Maurice’s theology had a voluntarist account of human agency, where the emphasis was on our willing the good, because it was how free will was put at the service of divine agency that was all important. It must also be added, however, that Maurice followed Coleridge in seeing all language as both symbolic of a greater reality and also revelatory of ultimate truth and meaning. It would therefore be incorrect to classify Maurice as either non-realist or nominalist, despite the prominence of the will in his account of theological anthropology.83 He had a strong notion of divine providence and felt that this could be discerned in the pattern of historical events, while, in turn, human beings needed to will their co-operation with God’s purposes in the world. 80 John B. Logan, ‘Thomas Erskine of Linlathen: Lay Theologian of the Inner Light’, Scottish Journal of Theology 37 (1984), pp. 23–40. 81 Thomas Erskine, The Brazen Serpent, Or Life Coming through Death, 3rd edition (Edin­ burgh: David Douglas, 1879; first published 1831), p. 30. 82 Morris, Maurice, p. 52. 83 Morris, Maurice, p. 186. James Martineau was concerned that Maurice gave up too much of human free will in relation to God’s love, unlike his great influence, Coleridge. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, pp. 255–256, quotes Martineau saying that Maurice ‘thins away the space for free human personality’, in ‘Personal Influences on Our Present Theology’, National Review 1 (1856), pp. 478–479. This essay was later reprinted in Martineau, Essays, Theological and Philosophical. I am grateful to Tim Sedgwick for a discussion of Maurice’s anthropology.

258

Chapter 8

As described below, for Maurice, the interpretation of God’s purposes was partially done by a faith informed by reason, and partially by conscience. The crucial thing was that human beings were spiritual and could be open to God’s Spirit. What was central was the relationship of God with humanity, by our participation in God’s love.84 Maurice argued that human beings carry within them the mark of the image of God, who made humanity to be in relationship with God and with each other, through human society, which he capitalized as ‘Society’. While human beings are fallen and sinful, they are also members of the human race, which is ‘the kingdom of Christ’, and the continual danger in society is the narrowing of our loves and desires to our own tribe or family, or our own sense of how things should be carried on, which is both selfish and limited, the one implying the other. Baptism gives us our true identity as children of the one heavenly Father, ‘the sign of a spiritual and universal kingdom’.85 Equally, the Eucharist is the sign and the experience of that larger identity, and in worship we see what we really are, what we are made for and what our end will be, because Christ’s sacrifice is not simply a pattern of our sacrifices, but has a distinct character, example and power, which is always exhibited in the sacrament of the Eucharist.86 Interestingly, the presence of Christ in this sacrament is defended by a reference to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection.87 6

Maurice on Conscience

Maurice pays tribute to Butler in his Modern Philosophy. Butler’s ‘conviction that there is an order in human nature’ is where Maurice starts his account.88 He places against this, however, the need for moral and spiritual regeneration. He argues that Butler would have not disagreed with this, but Butler needs to be complemented by the spiritual regeneration preached by John Wesley. Maurice is being unfair to Butler at this point because he speaks of ‘the natural state with which Butler seemed to be content’, claiming that there is no doctrine of redemption in Butler’s sermons, which is true enough, but ignores the context in which Butler preached.89 Maurice argues that ‘the idea of human nature presented in those discourses of Butler is exactly the antagonist idea 84 85 86 87 88 89

Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 95, 311. Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, p. 244. Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 244, 318. Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, pp. 325–326 and note. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 462. Ranson, ‘F. D. Maurice and the Social Nature of Man’. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 468.

Frederick Denison Maurice

259

to that which was presented in the sermons of the Methodists’. He therefore sets up an imaginary dialogue between Butler and John Wesley on the need for regeneration. While allowing that it ‘could not have crushed a man who had meditated so long and so deeply on the subject as Butler had meditated’, Maurice still suggests that Wesley’s argument implies the need for ‘the deliverance and restoration of the conscience to its true state … a spiritual operation’.90 Maurice accepts that Butler would have allowed this but holds together arguments from natural theology alongside those of spiritual regeneration.91 Maurice thus had a complex relationship to Butler. He wanted to respect Butler’s work, but also to modify his ideas, asserting for instance that conscience was the basis for human consciousness, which was not an argument found in Butler, but does appear in Coleridge’s Essay on Faith, where Reason addresses the individual but fallen will, and issues a moral imperative through a person’s conscience, with the awareness that, in addressing the self through the conscience, Reason creates self-consciousness.92 It is human self-awareness that is inextricably linked to moral judgement for it is through conscience (in Coleridge’s definition) that the transcendental Reason addresses the individual self in the depths of their being, thus creating self-awareness and so conscious moral reflection. Maurice follows Coleridge when he says, ‘Above all, I wished to give back the word Conscience its original import, to restore the link between it and Consciousness, which is almost inevitably severed when it is treated as a faculty of Human Nature.’93 In his lectures on The Conscience, Maurice gives as the title of the first lecture ‘On the word I’, and says that human beings do not act as though the word ‘I’ had no meaning. There are two points worth noticing here. First, like Butler, he begins with human nature, and also personal self-awareness. Secondly, and in tune with Coleridge’s and Grote’s interest in human language, he considers the ‘force we give to the words which we utter most frequently and familiarly’.94 Maurice analyses the meaning of various words which he argues are related, including ‘conscious’, ‘conscientious’ and ‘self-conscious’, arguing that moral 90 Maurice, Modern Philosophy, pp. 467–468. 91 Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought, p. 65. 92 Hall, ‘Autonomy and the Social Order’, is the clearest analysis of Maurice’s position in relation to Butler and Whewell. S. T. Coleridge, Essay on Faith, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 5: Literary Remains, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper Brothers, 1853), pp. 557 ff., cited in James W. Clayton, ‘Reason and Society: An Approach to F. D. Maurice’, Harvard Theological Review 65.3 (1972), p. 312. 93 F. D. Maurice, The Conscience: Lectures on Casuistry (London: Macmillan, 1868), p. 148. Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 174. Wondra (ed.), Reconstructing Christian Ethics, p. 95, ‘On the Word “Conscience’” (extracts from The Conscience). 94 Maurice, Conscience, p. 27.

260

Chapter 8

awareness is intimately related to human self-awareness. He emphasizes this point: The moment I pass from the consideration of the things with which I have to do to the consideration of that which I am, this problem confronts me; it is this conscience which binds the different parts of my existence together, which assures me that the past still belongs to me.95 In Theological Essays, written two decades earlier, he offered a definition of conscience. ‘I mean a reality; I mean that which has to do with your inner most being; I mean something which does not proceed from you or belong to you; but which is there, searching you and judging you.’ Such a reality could be called ‘light’, which ‘comes from a Person – from the King and Lord of your heart and spirit – from the Word – the Son of God’. The conscience is the presence of God, which is always within a person, even if they are ‘unmindful of it’.96 Maurice argues that forms of self-awareness are diverse, such as the person who is conscientiousness and the one who is self-conscious. Despite different evaluations of the worth of self-awareness because some are egoistic and insincere while others are the opposite, all share a sense of obligation, with Maurice once again appealing to language and to the use of the word ‘ought’, which sense of obligation (‘the ought’) is properly called ‘conscience’.97 It leaves a permanent impression in our self-awareness, which cannot be effaced, and Maurice defends this view by quoting Coleridge and the Biographia Literaria.98 In The Conscience Maurice disagrees, however, both with Whewell and with Butler. This was not the first time he had disagreed with Butler, having done so in both the Modern Philosophy and the Theological Essays, however much he said that he revered Butler’s work. He denied that Butler had ‘any satisfactory method’ of dealing with the disease of our self-love and affections, or that Butler was able to bring about harmony in a person’s constitution, claiming that ‘The student of Butler’s doctrine on the Conscience is often forced even more painfully upon this conclusion.’99 Maurice followed Butler’s views on probability as a method of inductive arguing, as set out in The Analogy of Religion, but he denied the authority which Butler gave the conscience, and so the value of Butler lay in the ‘intense dislike which Butler felt for all schemes 95 96 97 98

Maurice, Conscience, p. 26. Maurice, Theological Essays, p. 94. Maurice, Conscience, p. 28. Maurice, Conscience, pp. 42–43. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, p. 199, discusses this passage. 99 Maurice, Theological Essays, pp. 160–161, 170–171.

Frederick Denison Maurice

261

by which an Order made out of our fancies is substituted for the one in which we are placed’.100 Maurice brought the same argument against Whewell’s use of rationality because Whewell had argued that conscience was the exercise of reason, but Maurice distrusted any appeal to human rationality in the same way that he could not believe in the innate authority of conscience, since conscience was distinct from, but related to, reason: ‘There is a real dialectic for the Reason as well as for the Conscience.’101 This echoed Coleridge in The Friend, who described conscience as having ‘the same relation to God, as an accurate Time-piece bears to the Sun’.102 Maurice also attacked Jeremy Taylor, and placed himself outside the Caroline tradition of casuistry, arguing that ‘Rules of the Conscience … are unfavourable to goodness and earnestness, and are not helpful in practice’, and that ‘the failure of such rules was inevitable’.103 He thus abandoned the Caroline (and Anglican) tradition of casuistry entirely.104 This leaves Maurice having to argue that the sense of obligation, as found in self-awareness and as expressed in our language, is derived from the conscience. What is all important is the education of this sense of obligation, leading Maurice to emphasize the importance of social relations.105 This inevitably brings him into conflict with Bentham and the utilitarians, because their understanding of social relationships was not the same as his.106 Maurice opposes the ‘superhuman powers’ of pleasure and pain erected by Bentham and governed by a social conscience which inflicts punishments on all its members.107 He praises Bentham for his honesty in rejecting a belief in a deity, unlike Paley, but finds the overall argument impossible to accept, because a doctrine of ‘Society’ must include persons and conscience, character and personal relationships, being an entity in its own right, a spiritual creation formed by God, in which human beings seek what is right and good.108 Maurice 100 Maurice, Conscience, p. 46. 101 Maurice, Sequel to the Inquiry, What Is Revelation? (London: Macmillan, 1860), p. 197. 102 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4: The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), Vol. 1, p. 151, cited in Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 173. 103 Maurice, Conscience, pp. 94, 98. 104 Maurice, Conscience, p. 105. Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought, p. 70. On the tradition of casuistry, see Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, pp. 315–355. 105 Maurice, Conscience, p. 49. F. D. Maurice, The Epistles of St. John: A Series of Lectures on Christian Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1890), p. 11, on the centrality of both human relations and affections, and their necessity for human life. 106 Maurice, Conscience, pp. 41, 46, 62–63, 66, 69, on Bentham. 107 Maurice, Conscience, p. 63. 108 Maurice, Conscience, p. 174. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 605.

262

Chapter 8

describes Bentham’s statement that ‘the community is a fictitious body’ as a ‘strange expression’ because Bentham deplored metaphor and fiction and yet used explicitly fictitious language, being caught by a belief he could not give up, which was that communities were real bodies. Maurice comments ironically of Bentham, ‘There is in his phraseology the after-glow of a sun which has set.’109 7

Biblical Theology and Christian Ethics

How, then, does Maurice’s understanding of ethical discernment interact with his view of Scripture and the authority of the Bible?110 Maurice argues for the power of Scripture to shape moral judgement, and says that the Reformation doctrine of Scripture: asserts its claim to be heard above them all and in opposition to them all, and which is able to make that claim good. They believed that its words were with power; that when it spoke, man felt that power, and either submitted to it or consciously rebelled against it.111 Morris points out that Maurice argued for Luther’s understanding of the authority of Scripture, presenting God’s will to the believer.112 Maurice felt strongly ‘the conviction that the Bible had to be interpreted from the standpoint of the world in which [he] lived and worked’, yet in spite of this Maurice was a conservative figure on biblical criticism because, as Rogerson says, he felt that ‘it turned the Bible into an object, an object that was in an inferior position to the critic’, preferring to emphasize the Bible as ‘an account of God’s dealing with ordinary human beings in the past, so that readers in the present would encounter the same God for themselves’.113 Maurice gave a series of lectures to the students at the working men’s college on the epistles of St John, which formed the basis for his view of Christin ethics. His conviction was that the epistles were ‘addressed to a Society’, and that

109 Maurice, Conscience, p. 62. Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought, p. 63, discusses the passage. 110 Ramsey, Maurice, pp. 82–97. 111 Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, Vol. 1, p. 102. 112 Morris, Maurice, p. 183. 113 J. W. Rogerson, The Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F. D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 9, 53.

Frederick Denison Maurice

263

that society needed to be ‘instructed’ in the ‘principles of Christian Morals’.114 As he argues in these lectures, Jesus Christ the Righteous is the Person in whom mankind receives its true position and glory, therefore our ethics are in the strictest sense both Christian but also in the strictest sense human. They adapt themselves to the wants of individual men. They concern societies of men. They prove that there is a fellowship for the whole race of men.115 Maurice repeatedly claims that it is God who is ‘the author and lawgiver of human society’; a strong emphasis on the social nature of human beings recurs again in these lectures.116 Just as ‘priests in ancient Israel existed to symbolize and effect the consecration of every aspect of human life’, so too clergy today have the same duty and task.117 Every family or nation is held together ‘by the might not of selfishness but of sacrifice’, and it is the same for the individual soul, for there is disorder in the world, caused by human beings ‘falling in love with this order, or with some of the things in it, and setting them up and making them into gods’.118 Maurice continues that the world, then, though altogether good to the man who refers it to a father, is the provocative of all evil in him when it becomes separated from his father, and is substituted for Him. Then it changes what is highest and noblest in man into that which is lowest and basest.119 In Lecture 14 of The Epistles of St. John, Maurice offers a powerful account of the spiritual struggle that takes place in every society, and which therefore affects every individual, commenting on the text 1 John 3:24–4.9, with the theme of the lecture being ‘Spiritual Powers in Old Times and Modern Times’.120 ‘The true centre of human life … is in the unseen world. What he [St John] says is, that there is an attractive force drawing us to that centre.’121 In every society 114 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 317. 115 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, pp. 66–67. 116 F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 218–219, cited in Rogerson, Bible and Criticism, p. 24. 117 Rogerson, Bible and Criticism, p. 24. 118 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 264. Milbank, ‘Maurice as a Resource’, pp. 33–35, uses Maurice’s reflection on family and nation as a way of discussing his relevance for our contemporary crisis in family life. Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 121. 119 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 127. 120 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 215. 121 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 217.

264

Chapter 8

there are ‘myriads of influences about us continually, which do not act upon our senses but upon our spirits, which do not proceed from things that may be seen and handled, but from the spirits of men’. Such influences in society are varied, but they include politics, the press and public opinion, all of which are deeply corrupted and show the evidence of sin.122 ‘The intercourse in modern media demands no moral purification; which has reference to the idlest topics … which keeps alive all the vanity, restlessness and folly from which we most need to be delivered’.123 The value of the chapter from the Johannine epistles which Maurice is discussing is that it shows the early Christians, and its readers today, that we have to test the spirits to see if they are ‘pernicious or healthy, wicked or charitable’.124 This is possible by God’s gift of ‘the Spirit of all truth’, which enables individuals to discern between the spirits, and the infallible test is whether Christ is confessed or not, or whether ‘there is a medium of spiritual communications between the visible and the invisible world, between earth and heaven’.125 Maurice opposes a purely consequentialist system, based on love or benevolence, which excludes the idea of God. This is a system which encourages selfishness, and the choice is ‘Hatred or Love’ as the ruling principle in our lives.126 In the following lecture, he expresses his concern that denunciation of principles leads to polarization in society, ‘embodied in acts and persons’.127 8

Criticisms of Maurice’s Theology

It is certainly the case that in the mid-twentieth century Maurice was used far too easily to justify an Anglican methodology that argued that Anglicanism was identifiable and distinctive, equating Maurice’s views with a set of qualities which included comprehensiveness, ‘a dialectic between high and low, between catholic and evangelical which they regard as conducive to a deepening knowledge of the truth’.128 This quotation from J. W. C. Wand, Bishop of London and historian, is used by Jeremy Morris to demonstrate two things: first, how Wand equated Maurice’s views with Anglicanism; and secondly, how 122 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 220. 123 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 222. 124 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 225. 125 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 226. 126 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, pp. 234–235. 127 Maurice, Epistles of St. John, p. 249. 128 Morris, Maurice, pp. 197–202, on Maurice and the Anglican tradition, quoting J. W. C. Wand, Anglicanism in History and Today (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), p. 230.

Frederick Denison Maurice

265

Wand assumed both the clear identity of Anglicanism and its superiority over other denominations because of its reasonableness. It was Wand’s theology that Stephen Sykes attacked so strongly in The Integrity of Anglicanism.129 As Morris says, Sykes’ book ‘was, first and foremost, a work of decisive destruction. He ended forever the bland and self-satisfied language of mid-century Anglican apologetic.’130 Maurice cannot be used to justify a view of Anglican comprehensiveness, especially not the complacent one of the mid-twentieth century, and Morris is correct to show the weaknesses of an attempt to create a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, but this is not where Maurice’s strength lies. His weakness was clear to many critics, since again and again he wrote in a way ‘to resist close analysis of his meaning’.131 Morris gives a comprehensive analysis of the difference between Newman and Maurice, despite their similarities on a sacramental view of the universe.132 So if Stephen Sykes attacked Maurice so strongly in the 1970s, why should one still value him as a theologian? There are certainly enduring criticisms which can be made of his theology, and Morris points to the unresolved tension between the vision of a divine order, where creation is seen as a ‘reflection of the unchanging character of God’, and Maurice the biblical theologian, where sin is seen as a human rejection of God. These two theological styles could be held together in a theological methodology where the priority was the corporate witness of the church, and where the task of the theologian was to test this witness against new situations, which would be a methodology that reflected on Christian history and the witness of the church, but Maurice unfortunately never gave any clear way of assessing the internal consistency of the church’s witness or his own thought. Nor were there any definite criteria for evaluating religious experience, which was so important for him.133 Maurice is also highly inconsistent in his treatment of the Caroline school and his evaluation of Butler, dismissing Taylor’s careful elaboration of casuistry because Taylor places too much emphasis on rules.134 Maurice does not seem 129 On the debate between Sykes and Wand, and the place of Maurice, see Morris, ‘Unashamed Integrity’, p. 64. 130 Morris, ‘Unashamed Integrity’, p. 78. 131 Morris, Maurice, p. 201. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Longmans, 1873), p. 153: ‘I have so deep a respect for Maurice’s character and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts … But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any of my contemporaries.’ 132 Morris, ‘Ecclesiology and Contested Identities’, p. 208. 133 This paragraph draws on and quotes from Morris, Maurice, pp. 191–192. 134 Neville, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought, p. 70, for Maurice’s dismissal of Taylor. Maurice, Conscience, pp. 91–100 discusses Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium. His verdict was that ‘The failure of such rules was inevitable’ (p. 98).

266

Chapter 8

to grasp the value of a rule-based ethical theory at all, and Schneewind makes the restrained comment on his analysis of Butler that Maurice ‘thinks he is disagreeing with Bishop Butler’ because he rejects the idea of conscience being an authority on its own. Butler in fact always saw conscience as working with the passions and reason in judging a person or their actions, as in Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’, where Butler gives an exegesis of Romans 2:15. In this verse, heart (which for Butler meant compassion) works with conscience, and so Butler saw conscience as having overall, or final, authority, rather than a sole authority.135 Maurice misunderstood Butler’s argument, as Schneewind sees clearly. Likewise, in his Modern Philosophy, Maurice overstates his case when he says that Butler in his Sermons and the Analogy ignores the possibility of redemption or a ‘restorative power’ in the disorder of human nature.136 Robert Hall’s article on Maurice shows that Maurice tended to separate the Sermons and the Analogy, with the former claiming ‘innate knowledge of an ideal human nature’, and the latter being committed to experiential investigation.137 He certainly juxtaposed the two methods in his reading of Butler in Modern Philosophy, and in his Theological Essays, but this division has not been recognized by later commentators on Butler. Hall describes Maurice’s interpretation charitably as ‘rather unusual’, and what he correctly identifies is that Maurice is really arguing against the ethical naturalism of utilitarianism, in favour of a moral vision, which is found in human consciousness or an awareness of a universal society, where human nature can fully realize itself.138 9

Maurice’s Contribution to Anglican Moral Theology

Maurice’s great contribution to ethics, and to moral theology, is his awareness of the centrality of having a moral and spiritual vision, united together in a single whole, and the influence of Coleridge is key here. For this reason, and because of the power of the vision which he himself held, Maurice must remain a central figure in a genealogy of Anglican moral theology. His strength did not lie in careful analysis of past moral philosophy and theology. He is central to this book not simply because he deeply influenced many later theologians such as William Temple and Michael Ramsey, nor because he continues 135 Schneewind, ‘Sidgwick’, p. 383. Maurice, Conscience, pp. 46, 63, 124–125. 136 Maurice, Modern Philosophy, pp. 467–468. Maurice, Theological Essays, pp. 166–171. 137 Hall, ‘Autonomy and the Social Order’, p. 509. 138 Hall, ‘Autonomy and the Social Order’, p. 516.

Frederick Denison Maurice

267

to be read today (as the articles by Douglas and Milbank show), but because he united a unique moral vision with a deep sacramentality. Unlike almost every other theologian studied so far, he was intensely aware of the sectarian elements in his own church and argued instead for a sacramental vision transcending particular institutions.139 Maurice’s Trinitarian theology is mentioned by Alison Milbank as prefiguring the revival of Trinitarian theology today, but with the particular caveat that it manages to avoid the dilemma that sometimes occurs in modern theology. She refers to how a model of human sociality is projected onto God, only for this Trinitarian vision to be seen as authorizing a particular way of social relationship, and she argues that Maurice is governed instead by his biblical exegesis, not by an intra-Trinitarian speculation.140 This is certainly how he worked in his exegesis of the Epistles of St. John. Kelly Brown Douglas also notes that Maurice rejected human experience as a starting point for theology, finding his authority in Scripture.141 What is surprising, however, is how little of this is rooted in the earthly ministry of Jesus, because Maurice follows the creeds, which again do not mention the earthly ministry, and instead focuses on the incarnation as the divine  – human encounter.142 The incarnation provides, and even provokes, the vision of a universal humanity. ‘He comes to arouse men, and all the thoughts and energies of men out of sleep; not to put them to sleep. All that is strongest in men hears His voice and starts into life.’143 It is the Eucharist which, in the regular celebration of the Church’s worship, embodies a moral and spiritual vision: this is the universal connection which all human beings have to God, and so to each other, and Christ’s sacrifice models and restores that relationship. The church, with its liturgies, sacraments and creeds, points to God’s truth and the universal kingdom. Much the same point was made by Michael Ramsey in The Gospel and the Catholic Church: ‘The liturgy is the proclamation of the Gospel.’144 Ramsey made this remark in the context of a discussion of Maurice, and he valued Maurice because Maurice showed that church order is ‘timeless, and symbolic of a universal family’.145 That vision is transformative, sacramental and grace-giving. Timothy Sedgwick can have the last word: 139 Wolf, ‘Maurice’, p. 97. 140 Milbank, ‘Maurice as a Resource’, pp. 25–27. 141 Douglas, ‘Theological Methodology’, pp. 18–19. 142 Douglas, ‘Theological Methodology’, pp. 17, 20. 143 F. D. Maurice, Sermons First Series, 2nd edition (London, 1860), pp. 149–154, cited in Morris (ed.), To Build Christ’s Kingdom, p. 58. 144 Ramsey, Gospel and the Catholic Church, pp. 210–216 (quotation at p. 211). 145 Ramsey, Gospel and the Catholic Church, p. 214.

268

Chapter 8

Here the understanding of Christian faith, salvation, and eternal life are given as matters of virtue, as the transformation of human persons in the love of God for God’s own sake by which persons are reconciled to the world and from which comes the love of neighbor and all of creation.146 146 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 225.

Chapter 9

The Lux Mundi School 1

Introduction

John Henry Newman became a Roman Catholic in 1845, and some of those who collaborated with him in the Oxford Movement followed him in converting to that church. Those who did not came to be known as High Churchmen, or Anglo-Catholics. This movement had many strands and shades of belief, one of which was the close association with Christian socialism, another being its relationship with the school of philosophical Idealism, promoted initially in Oxford by T. H. Green (1836–1882). Many of those influenced by Green were, in fact, also active in Christian socialism, especially through the Christian Social Union. Those who promoted such views were personal Idealists, but another version of Idealism developed into what was called absolute Idealism, associated early on with F. H. Bradley. These terms will be explored later in the chapter, as will the links between Bradley’s thought and a prominent High Church theologian, R. C. Moberly, around the concepts of self-realization and beauty. Two theologians who were certainly changed by Green’s philosophy were Charles Gore (1853–1932) and Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918), and the question of the influence of Green and Bradley on Anglican theology is much argued about. Gore is central to this chapter because he held together a group of theologians who both were close friends and shared a belief in uniting Anglican theology with modern thought. Something of the enthusiasm and vitality of this movement is captured in a wonderful description of the group in 1876 in Oxford: ‘As I turned the corner in Park Road, I saw [E. S.] 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.’1 This group went on to publish a volume of essays in 1889 entitled Lux Mundi (meaning ‘light of the world’ in Latin), edited by Gore. The book gave its name to a new theological school, which was seen as a fresh beginning because, as Jane Garnett writes, ‘The essayists formed part of the revival of Christian moral 1 Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone, The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 114, quoting G. Stephenson, Edward Stuart Talbot 1844–1934 (London: SPCK, 1936), p. 171, where the comment is ascribed to Canon Edward Bickersteth, Archdeacon of Buckingham and later Dean of Lichfield.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_012

270

Chapter 9

philosophy in Oxford particularly, but not solely, associated with T. H. Green.’2 Another scholar of this period, Alan Wilkinson, writes: ‘It represented a creative interaction between patristic theology, Anglo-Catholicism, and broad-church liberalism. Whereas the Tractarians had seen secular thought as a threat, the essays celebrated the Logos at work in evolution, art, science, other faiths, and socialism.’3 Lux Mundi was nothing if not bold, since Gore argued in the preface that the authors, who had worked together in the past at Oxford, had written the volume with the aim ‘to attempt to put the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern intellectual and moral problems’. The preface also spoke of the epoch in which the authors lived being ‘one of profound transformation, intellectual and social, abounding in new needs, new points of view, new questions’.4 Because of this, ‘theology must take a new development’, where development was defined as the process by which the church stands firm in the old truths but enters into ‘the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age’. The central ideas of religion had to be presented positively ‘in the light of contemporary thought and current problems’ – a daring claim but one that was long overdue, with one commentator observing that ‘Lux Mundi was an earthquake in English Christianity, and went through ten editions in the first year, inspiring predictable reactions from every quarter.’5 2

The Influence of John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism

Despite the influence of F. D. Maurice, and the profundity of Newman, moral theology had actually been on the defensive in English intellectual life and culture throughout the mid- and late nineteenth century. Maurice was not read 2 Jane Garnett, ‘Lux Mundi Essayists’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1889). I am using the ninth edition of Lux Mundi, printed in 1890. Jeremy Morris, The High Church Revival in the Church of England: Arguments and Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 18–19 and pp. 211–216. Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Chichester: John Wiley, 2012). There were two centenary volumes: Geoffrey Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London: SPCK, 1989); and Robert Morgan (ed.), The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989). See also Peter Hinchliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), esp. chapter 5, ‘Separate Spiritual Truth: The Essays in Lux Mundi’, pp. 99–121. 3 Alan Wilkinson, ‘Gore, Charles’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 4 Charles Gore, ‘Preface’, Lux Mundi, p. vii. 5 Dorrien, Kantian Reason, p. 385. Charles Gore, ‘Preface’, in Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi, pp. viii–ix.

The Lux Mundi School

271

by everyone, and Bentham’s successors, such as the utilitarian John Stuart Mill, came increasingly to dominate the intellectual and cultural world, as Talbot, who wrote a chapter in Lux Mundi, remembered well in his Memories. He declared that ‘The influence of John Stuart Mill swept all before it’, and discussed how Mill’s account of conscience made it seem as if it was simply the result of external influences on a person’s development, which robbed it ‘of primary authority, and which might be in some cases accidental or blind’.6 The result was that Talbot felt that while he was an Oxford student in the mid-1860s, he kept his philosophy in one pocket, as it were, and his religion in another, since any challenge to Mill’s influence (such as from Green) was ‘only just showing over the horizon’.7 Mill’s influence, even hegemony, represented the flourishing of the school of English empiricism in a form which some at the time called liberalism, and which Newman was deeply opposed to as a school hostile to religious belief. Thus, although the churches were strong numerically, very active socially and had a privileged position in education, they did not hold the intellectual high ground. The advent of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 only deepened the sense of crisis. This changed with the late 1870s, when a new school of social self-realization associated with Idealist ethics emerged and became dominant until the First World War. It remained influential until the 1920s, although by then it was strongly criticized both by a revival of empiricism and by the emergence of pragmatism in the United States. Idealist ethics were associated with a wide range of thinkers in Oxford and Glasgow, deeply influencing the Lux Mundi group of theologians, whose outlook was quite different from Newman’s followers, whose own influences came not only from Idealism but also from Coleridge and Maurice. The result was that Anglican moral theologians after 1890 found that the union of Idealism and the Anglican exemplary tradition was highly creative. This chapter will examine the writing of three theologians associated with Lux Mundi: Gore himself, who wrote on the Holy Spirit and inspiration; Henry Scott Holland, who wrote the chapter on faith in the volume; and R. C. Moberly, who wrote on the incarnation. It also consider Gore’s Bampton Lectures, published as The Incarnation of the Son of God, and Moberly’s 6 E. S. Talbot, Memories of Early Life (London: Mowbrays, 1924), pp. 42–44. Talbot was the first warden of Keble College, Oxford, and then Bishop of Rochester, Southwark and finally Winchester. Sankey, rev. Geoffrey Rowell, ‘Talbot, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 7 Talbot, Memories of Early Life, p. 45.

272

Chapter 9

sermons. (J. R. Illingworth has been omitted only for reasons of space.) It will follow the pattern of earlier chapters, by first giving a brief account of their lives, then describing the nature of philosophical Idealism, and finally discussing their writings. The chapter will be illuminated by the writings of Donald MacKinnon, as was the case in the chapters on Butler and Newman, since he was concerned to show how distinctively Christian this group was, rather than a constituting a syncretism of Idealism and theology. 3

The Lux Mundi Theologians: Charles Gore, Henry Scott Holland and R. C. Moberly

Charles Gore (1853–1932) came from an aristocratic family and was educated at Harrow School, where the theologian Brook Foss Westcott taught him. He eventually became one of the Anglican giants in the period 1880–1920 as a profound thinker, a bishop for many years (serving in three dioceses) and someone committed to changing the nature of the High Church wing of the Church of England.8 He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was influenced by the liberal theologian Benjamin Jowett and by T. H. Green, becoming first an Oxford don and then Principal of the newly founded Pusey House in 1884, which had been established in memory of Newman’s friend and colleague, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and which housed Pusey’s extensive library.9 Pusey remained an Anglican after Newman’s conversion, and became very conservative in his biblical scholarship, although recent scholarship has softened this judgement somewhat.10 Gore’s appointment may have suggested that he was 8

Wilkinson, ‘Gore, Charles’. Paul Avis, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing: Church­ man Publishing, 1988). Paul Avis, ‘Anglican Social Thought Encounters Modernity: Brooke Foss Westcott, Henry Scott Holland and Charles Gore’, in Stephen Spencer (ed.), Theology Reforming Society: Revisiting Anglican Social Theology (London: SCM Press, 2017), pp. 51–84. James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960). A. M. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939 (London: Longmans, 1960). Mark D. Chapman, ‘Charles Gore, Kenosis, and the Crisis of Power’, Journal of Anglican Studies 3.5 (2005), pp. 197–218. 9 Peter Cobb, ‘Pusey, Edward Bouverie’; Peter Hinchliff, ‘Jowett, Benjamin’; Andrew Vincent, ‘Green, T. H.’, all in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 10 Tobias A. Karlowicz, The Sacramental Vision of Edward Bouverie Pusey (London: T&T Clark, 2021). Brian Douglas, The Eucharistic Theology of Edward Bouverie Pusey: Sources, Context and Doctrine Within the Oxford Movement and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Rowan Strong and Carol Herringer (eds), Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement (London; Anthem Press, 2014). Morris, High Church Revival, p. 19.

The Lux Mundi School

273

following in Pusey’s footsteps, but the influence of Green and Jowett turned him in a different direction: ‘he was very quickly embroiled in serious controversy with the older generation of Anglo-Catholics, especially Pusey’s biographer Henry Liddon, who had been first vice-principal at Cuddesdon’.11 Gore wished to reconcile Anglican theology with modern thought, accepting biblical criticism and modern science, and this attracted great criticism from his fellow Anglo-Catholics, such as Liddon. However, he also wanted to deepen the Catholic life of the Church of England, and he was the moving spirit in founding a monastic community in 1892 in Oxford, called the Community of the Resurrection.12 Gore remained a member until his death. The community eventually moved to Mirfield, West Yorkshire, spreading overseas to southern Africa and the West Indies, with a strong influence on global Anglicanism through its commitment to holiness. It was heavily involved in social causes, espousing Christian socialism, and many of the community’s members worked as parish priests. Gore himself left Oxford, eventually becoming bishop successively of Worcester, Birmingham and Oxford from 1902 to 1919. He published widely on Christology and the church, and wrote a three-volume systematic theology. He was buried at Mirfield in the graveyard of the Community of the Resurrection.13 He remained extremely cautious in terms of Roman Catholic liturgy and ritual, and was critical of the development of Anglo-Catholicism in terms of very ‘advanced ritual’, being described by Morris as ‘quintessentially an English Anglo-Catholic’.14 Gore has been fortunate in being studied by several sympathetic scholars, and James Carpenter and Paul Avis describe the way in which he was profoundly a moralist, by which they mean that Gore not only wrote about moral theology, but also felt that moral witness and transformation was at the heart of the Christian message. He was also a strict disciplinarian, combining intellectual free thinking, a profound sense of the truth of his own views, and a belief that the church was a community which espoused strict moral standards, because when Christ founded the church he gave the apostles the power of authority and discipline. Gore’s account of moral theology sets out 11 Chapman, ‘Charles Gore’, p. 202. 12 Morris, High Church Revival, p. 213. Hinchliff, God and History, p. 105, on the hostile reaction of an older generation of Anglo-Catholics such as H. P. Liddon. 13 Moberly’s sermon at Gore’s consecration in 1902 is considered below. Morris, High Church Revival, p. 248, discusses Gore’s resignation in 1919 as Bishop of Oxford because the new Church Assembly had a baptismal, rather than a confirmation, franchise for electing members. This sacrificed the Catholic principle for Gore. 14 Morris, High Church Revival, pp. 20, 35, on Gore’s complexity in terms of theological categories.

274

Chapter 9

clearly the moral demands on the person of the Christian faith with a strong social message. It was the character of Christ that was all important for Gore, and the moral influence he had, which led in time to the recognition of him being both supernatural and the moral judge of everyone. Because of the clarity of this presentation, Gore’s Christology was original, powerful and had enormous impact. Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) had a remarkably close friendship at Balliol with Green, who was ten years older and a Fellow. In Holland’s biography there are extensive quotations from the Green  – Holland correspondence until Holland’s ordination in 1872, with Holland himself then becoming a Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford for fourteen years.15 During his time at Oxford he was also deeply involved in social activities in London, which eventually led him to leave Oxford and become a canon at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1884, founding the Christian Social Union in 1889. He returned to Oxford aged sixty-three in 1910 as Regius Professor of Divinity, and remained there until he died. Holland wrote over a dozen collections of sermons and essays, and was regarded by Michael Ramsey as one of the most outstanding the Lux Mundi school, having enormous significance through his personality, preaching and writing.16 Like Gore, Holland never married. He was known for his friendships, his influence on others and his wide correspondence, which continued over decades with those he had either taught or come into contact with in other ways. R. C. Moberly (1845–1903) is the final theologian considered. He was the son of a Tractarian bishop, and himself always remained firmly within the Anglo-Catholic world. He was first a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford for many years, then principal of two theological colleges, a parish priest and finally Professor of Pastoral Theology at Oxford.17 His writing was the most extensive of the theologians considered in this chapter, and his two systematic works, 15 John Heidt, ‘Holland, Henry Scott’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Bernard Reardon (ed.), Henry Scott Holland: A Selection from His Writings (London: SPCK, 1962). Stephen Paget, Henry Scott Holland: Memoir and Letters (London: John Murray, 1921), pp. 29–33. Alan P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 54. 16 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, p. 44: ‘This sermon is among the greatest of all time.’ 17 Andrew Clark, rev. Barbara Dennis, ‘Moberly, Robert Campbell’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. R. C. Moberly’s father, George, was Bishop of Salisbury, and his son Walter wrote an important study of punishment and the penal system. John Heidt, ‘Moberly, George’, and Matthew Grimley, ‘Moberly, Sir Walter’, both in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Walter wrote on Idealist philosophy as a help to Christian theology in an article in B. H. Streeter (ed.), Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1912). He therefore followed his father in uniting Idealism and theology after R. C. Moberly’s early death.

The Lux Mundi School

275

Atonement and Personality and Ministerial Priesthood, had enormous influence on generations of Anglicans, reflecting an Idealist philosophy allied to a strongly Catholic sensibility, as his sermons show. He is regarded as not only one of the most prolific but also one of the most original Anglican theologians at the end of the nineteenth century; had he lived longer, he would have written much more. 4

Philosophical Idealism at Oxford

British Idealism was first of all concerned with metaphysics, insisting on an essential unity with all ideas being necessarily and systematically linked, for, as Richard Haldane wrote, ‘Between the pure mathematician and the poet and the preacher there are no gulfs fixed.’18 There was a common interest in Plato, Kant and Hegel, with a unifying theme being the philosophy of religion. Another great interest was a deep concern that rapid industrialization and urbanization in Britain had been met simply with the classical liberal value of laissez-faire, which then created deplorable conditions of social life. Many people were concerned with social reform by the last third of the nineteenth century, but the Idealists held to a social theory which embedded their response to the social problem. As well as having a high view of the role of the state in enabling individuals to fulfil their true potential, the Idealists held to a societal conception of the individual. The meaning of the word ‘societal’ differs from ‘social’ because societal means that any concept can only be understood philosophically both in relationship to society and to the social relations which exist within society. Not only must individuals be seen as developing their personality within a set of social relations; so too their rights are neither natural nor absolute, but 18 W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). W. J. Mander, Idealist Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2012). Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). On the relationship of Christian theology and philosophical Idealism, see Sell, Philosophical Idealism. There is a critical review of Sell’s book by Gordon Kendal in Journal of Theological Studies 47.2 (1996), pp. 770–777. Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics, Vol. 3 From Kant to Rawls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 42–54, showing clearly how much the Idealists offered a single vision that was both political and religious. R. B. Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism (London: John Murray, 1922), p. 93, cited in Mander, British Idealism, p. 3.

276

Chapter 9

instituted by social recognition. Indeed, the very meaning of the concept of a person can only be understood in relation to social relationships, including what Bradley called ‘my station and my duties’. Finally, Idealists believed that the societal constitution of the person had to be worked out in practice, so that theory and practice merged into a seamless whole. The two great centres of British Idealism were Oxford and Glasgow. The change in Oxford philosophy began in 1860, when T. H. Green started to teach at Balliol College, Oxford, remaining there for over twenty years until his early death in 1882. He was the son of an evangelical Anglican clergyman but reacted against his evangelicalism, although he always maintained his faith as a Christian, and he was heavily involved in social reform. In 1883 Essays in Philosophical Criticism appeared, edited by Andrew Pringle-Pattison and R. B. Haldane; it was dedicated to Green’s memory and was a manifesto for the Idealist movement.19 Although F. H. Bradley did not contribute to this, he had attended Green’s lectures and also taught in Oxford.20 The other focus was Glasgow and the circle around Edward Caird. Caird had been a student at Balliol under Green, then moved to Glasgow, and finally returned to Balliol as Master in 1893, where one of his students was William Temple. As far as this book is concerned, the philosophy taught at Glasgow flowed into Oxford via Caird at Balliol. Temple is discussed in the next chapter. He was first an Oxford philosopher, then a bishop and finally Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War. John Caird was Edward’s brother and was Professor of Theology at Glasgow. 5

Green’s Moral Philosophy

In this chapter, particular attention will be paid to the idea of ‘self-realization’ in Idealist ethics, which was a concept developed by both Green and Bradley.21 Green argued that the good is whatever satisfies desire, but this was not an argument about pleasure, or utilitarianism, because he denied that pleasures could be added together, or summed, for ‘a sum of pleasures is not a pleasure’.22 Desire should be for ‘an end in which the effort of a moral agent can really find 19

Andrew Seth and Richard Burdon Haldane (eds), Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London: Longmans, Green, 1883; reprinted Elibron Classics, 2005). 20 Guy Stock, ‘Bradley, F. H.’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 21 Irwin, Development of Ethics, pp. 539–540, on the differences between Bradley and Green. 22 T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), s. 221. Mander, Idealist Ethics, pp. 140–141. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 593.

The Lux Mundi School

277

rest’, and Green speaks of ‘an abiding satisfaction of an abiding self’.23 This ideal desire will be an interest in an object conceived to be of unconditional value, one of which the value does not depend on any desire that the individual may at any time feel for it or for anything else, or on any pleasure that, either in its pursuit or in its attainment or as its result, he may experience.24 Moral action is ‘an expression at once of conscious contrast between an actual and possible self, and of an impulse to make that possible self real; or, as it is sometimes put, it is a process of self-realization’.25 Like Butler before him, Green argued that a person’s good may be conceived ‘only on account of his interest in others, and in spite of any amount of suffering on his own part incidental to its attainment’.26 A motive is ‘constituted by an act of self-consciousness which is not a natural event’, but rather an action involving moral agency, conscience and self-consciousness, as Green argued in both The Word Is Nigh Thee and the Prolegomena to Ethics.27 A complete moral action, in the sense of one involving the willing of the good, is the perfection of our desires, and the realization of eternal consciousness. For Green, this can be equated with ‘God’s desire’.28 He distinguishes between our ‘time-bound feeling consciousness’ and our ‘timeless or eternal thinking consciousness’, in which the eternal consciousness is realized, which not only realizes itself through us but also ‘constitutes reality and makes the world one’. This consciousness has a moral dimension which also realizes itself in humanity’s evolving social life, and works through ‘all the agencies of social life’.29

23 Green, Prolegomena, ss. 171, 234. Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 65. 24 Green, Prolegomena, s. 193. 25 T. H. Green, The Word Is Nigh Thee, in R. L. Nettleship (ed.), Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. 3 (London: Longmans Green, 1888), p. 224. Green used as his title a quotation from Romans 10:8, King James Version, ‘The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart, that is the word of faith which we preach’. Much of the article is a defence of his view that he is not making God a non-realist concept, to use contemporary language. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 610. 26 Green, Prolegomena, s. 92. On his account of Butler’s refutation of hedonism, see Prolegomena, s. 162. 27 Green, Prolegomena, ss. 89, 95. Green, The Word Is Nigh Thee, p. 224. 28 Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 65. 29 Green, Prolegomena, s. 51. T. H. Green, The Witness of God, in Nettleship (ed.), Works of Thomas Hill Green, p. 240. Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 160.

278

Chapter 9

Green had a deep belief in divine action, which he viewed as immanent, working through each individual and deifying the striving of human life. Philip Aherne writes of ‘Green’s Coleridgean vocation to renovate and restore the philosophical legitimacy to religion’.30 ‘God is identical with the self of every man’, and the unity with God lies in the realization of the ‘possible self’, for God is the realization of the ‘determinate possibilities’ of each individual.31 Furthermore, the common good is what each person holds in common, and only in this way can we find true fulfilment. But ‘common’ had three meanings. First, we desire the same things because we have a shared, or common, human nature. Secondly, goods such as virtue or knowledge are non-competitive, and so held ‘in common’. However, thirdly, we must all contribute to a shared enterprise, and this concept of a ‘common good’ abolishes the conflict between egoism and altruism. This may involve self-sacrifice, since it is ‘the idea of an absolute and a common good; a good common to the person conceiving it with others, and good for him and them, whether at any moment it answers their likings or no’.32 6

Bradley on Self-Realization

F. H. Bradley was also the son of an Anglican evangelical, clergyman, but in his case Bradley rejected Christianity with ‘loathing’.33 He was, however, deeply religious, although his religion was non-theistic, focusing on ‘the Absolute’. His Ethical Studies of 1876 challenged the dominant culture of empiricism decisively, being polemical, lively and bold.34 He argued that morality is not the same as moral philosophy, because morality is an undeniable fact in human society, while moral philosophy is tasked with understanding why morality exists, and what the conditions of its existence and nature are; it is therefore a 30 P. Aherne, The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America 1834–1934 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) p. 182. Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Lanham: University of America Press, 1983), pp. 175–180. 31 Green, The Word Is Nigh Thee, p. 227. 32 Green, Prolegomena, s. 202. 33 Letter from Bradley to his sister Marian, January 1922, in F. H. Bradley, Collected Works, Vol. 5, ed. W. J. Mander (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), p. 256, quoted in Mander, British Idealism, p. 170, n. 207. 34 F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876). Mander, British Idealism, pp. 181–182. Stewart Candlish and Pierfrancesco Basile, ‘Francis Herbert Bradley’, in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2023 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/bradley/.

The Lux Mundi School

279

philosophical and not sociological enquiry and its purpose is not to provide a morality.35 It is respect for common sense in a critical mode.36 Human nature seeks a sustainable self-realization, because neither Kantian ethics nor utilitarianism can give an adequate account of the nature of the good.37 Utilitarianism runs into the problem of the contingent nature of a series of pleasures, and Bradley enjoyed (and reprinted) the quote from Sir James Stephens: ‘If I wanted to make you happy, which I do not, I should do so by pampering to your vices, which I will not.’ His attack on hedonism is regarded even today as ‘a still-classic critique of hedonistic utilitarianism’.38 Kantian ethics is also hamstrung by its positing of a ‘rational but intrinsically isolated transcendental subject’.39 Kant’s transcendental Idealism, with the individual possessing a moral will, cannot be grounded on the ‘essentially contingent character’ of our inclinations if the content of the will is to be rationally binding, although Bradley did not dispute the importance of volition in moral philosophy, arguing that volition is ‘the realization of itself by an idea, an idea … with which the self here and now is identified’.40 Bradley’s fundamental argument was that selfhood is a complex category, which is constituted by the search for and embodiment of whatever is of intrinsic value, subject to morality, but including the satisfaction of the self. This is a standard part of Idealist argument after Kant, who argued that our primary knowledge of ourselves was that we exist as beings subject to the moral law, and this set the tone for Idealist philosophy thereafter. Everything else may be ‘in the mind’, but we know that we are free moral subjects, and as autonomous subjects we bind ourselves to obey the moral law.41 Although Bradley later dropped the idea of the ‘concrete universal’ in his later work Appearance and Reality, he did use it in Ethical Studies to define the concept of the self in highly metaphysical terms. An example is his claim that the self is a concrete universal and that the ethical doctrines he criticizes are damaged by their reliance upon abstract notions of the self. The self is universal in that it retains its identity over time and through many different actions, 35 Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 193. Boucher and Vincent, British Idealism, p. 55. 36 Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 41. Mander, British Idealism, pp. 183–184. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 544. 37 Mander, British Idealism, p. 187. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 548. 38 Candlish and Basile, ‘Francis Herbert Bradley’. Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 105. Boucher and Vincent, British Idealism, p. 34 and p. 161, n. 105. 39 Stock, ‘Bradley, F. H.’. 40 F. H. Bradley, Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), pp. 444–445. Boucher and Vincent, British Idealism, pp. 83–84. Stock, ‘Bradley, F. H.’. 41 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysic Of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 50.

280

Chapter 9

thus collecting together the series of abstract particulars which make up its history in a way analogous to that in which the abstract universal red collects together its scattered individual instances (now often called ‘tropes’); the self is concrete in that, unlike red, it is a real, non-abstract individual.42 Bradley would go on to reformulate the idea of ‘moral law’, but his basic datum was that self-knowledge, so far as it exists at all, is an ethical category, because the problem with Kant was not his positing of free moral will, but his separation of moral will from desire.43 We desire what we conceive as desirable, but this is neither a cliché nor a truism. Rejecting the belief of psychological hedonism that we desire only our own pleasure, Bradley argues that we conceive a given state, and so relate to it with our very identity being part of this state, which ‘belongs’ to us and so we ‘feel ourselves one with it’ – in other words, as we realize a particular state we realize our own self.44 Here is the key to Moberly’s doctrine of the ‘true self’ who desires to experience the state of being penitent, since, as Bradley wrote, ‘all we can desire is, in a word, self’.45 This desire is for ‘some concrete whole that we can realize in our acts, and carry out in our life’.46 Again the idea of ‘our life’ is deeply ethical, and we seek neither a momentary state of being, nor even a sequence of such states, but rather ‘concrete wholes’, or ‘states’, which are embodied in a person and who therefore has an underlying unity.47 The life of that person is expressed by these states, and in turn that life expresses value. Bradley rejects both the view that we desire our own pleasure per se and the view that we desire external goods that have intrinsic value, because instead we desire values that satisfy the self, which is the idealist doctrine of ‘self-realization’, being a concept which unifies what we desire. As a person’s library or clothes say something about them and their character, so even more so do a person’s desires, and we discover a person’s character through their wish to become a certain person, or self-realization.48 Bradley goes on to develop his well-known idea of ‘my station and its duties’, arguing that our self is only able to be defined societally, through its constitution by social relationships, which make up ‘my station’. Hence it follows 42 Candlish and Basile, ‘Francis Herbert Bradley’. 43 Irwin, Development of Ethics, pp. 561–565. Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 118. 44 Bradley, Ethical Studies, pp. 69, 82. Mander, British Idealism, pp. 185–186. Bradley attacked Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874) in F. H. Bradley, Mr. Sidgwick’s Hedonism (London: King and Co, 1877). 45 Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 66. 46 Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 95. 47 Bradley used ‘concrete whole’ as a synonym for ‘concrete universal’. 48 Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 157.

The Lux Mundi School

281

that all selves are social phenomena, and that self-realization must take part socially, as we perform the duties of ‘my station’, because ‘man is a social being, he is real only because he is social, and can realize himself only because it is as social that he realizes himself’. This is ‘my true being’, and it is good ‘because it answers to our real being’.49 Nevertheless, Bradley does not stop at this point. ‘You can not confine a man to his station and his duties’ because all of our life must be realized. Thus Bradley posits an ‘ideal self’ beyond the ‘social self’, which gives us our actual duty here and now, including whether our society can be made better.50 One contemporary sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, writes on Bradley’s argument: ‘For Bradley the “ideal point of view” is a “thought experiment that removes hindrances for the full realization of some desirable state of affairs” and allows one to see what has to be changed in the actual situation one is in, in order that the ideal might be realized.’51 The ideal self involves the pursuit of truth and beauty, and moves beyond morality, with the good self always seeking to overcome the bad self.52 In the end, we move beyond ourselves towards the end, which is not God but an Absolute.53 Bradley spelled out his thought in Appearance and Reality, arguing that the values we seek to realize are realized timelessly, with the ethical consciousness becoming a religious consciousness, and our quest ending not in selfhood but in a single, undivided, experience which is infinite and undivided, for there are no relationships here but only the vast whole which goes beyond the ability of thought to encompass it.54 Bradley argued in this later work that the individual ‘only exists through an intellectual construction’, and persons are only an appearance in the ultimate, metaphysical perspective, however much self-realization matters in the here and now. In this, Bradley strongly qualifies his earlier view of the self as a ‘concrete universal’.55 Such a concept attracted the young T. S. Eliot, who came to Oxford in 1914 to study the philosophy of Bradley under Harold Joachim, and there are echoes 49 Bradley, Ethical Studies, pp. 173–174, 303. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 567. 50 Bradley, Ethical Studies, pp. 66, 204, 220–222. Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 176. 51 Linda Woodhead, ‘Truth and Deceit in Institutions’, Studies in Christian Ethics 35.1 (2022), pp. 102–103, discussing Bradley’s ideal self. Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 205. 52 Bradley, Ethical Studies, pp. 220–233. Mander, British Idealism, p. 190. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 554. 53 Mander, British Idealism, pp. 191–195. Irwin, Development of Ethics, p. 579. Sell, Philosophical Idealism, p. 120. 54 F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). 55 Boucher and Vincent, British Idealism, p. 43. Sell, Philosophical Idealism, p. 217, and p. 238, n. 12, on Bradley’s tentative acceptance of some life beyond death in his later writings. Bradley, Ethical Studies, pp. 314ff.

282

Chapter 9

of the search for a complete unity beyond time in the poet’s Four Quartets.56 However, it is important to note that, as Eliot came to embrace Christianity in the 1920s, with its view that the incarnation united matter and spirit, he moved beyond Bradley, retaining merely a fascination with his literary style and the juxtaposition of time and timelessness.57 Bradley rejected both the ultimacy of persons and belief in any God, yet Green and Bradley both valued religion as the highest form of consciousness, as of course did Eliot. ‘There is nothing more real than what comes in religion’, argued Bradley, changing his father’s evangelical faith into a mystical affirmation of what was perfect, where the Absolute was conceived as divine.58 For the Anglo-Catholics in late nineteenth-century Oxford seeking a faith that expressed a sense of the holy, awe and self-surrender, it was a powerfully attractive message, but what was needed was to reconcile it with the Catholic faith, as Augustine had done with Neoplatonism. Moberly was to do just that, and the pursuit of truth and beauty in moral life was a point he took up strongly.59 7

Donald MacKinnon on the British Idealists

Donald MacKinnon has been cited several times in this book for his commentaries on Butler and Newman. His writings on the British Idealists were more personal than those on Butler and Newman because he spent his early life when he trained as a philosopher at Oxford working out his position with respect to Idealism.60 MacKinnon is worth quoting at length here because his deep Christian faith, which could be called Anglo-Catholic, gave him a unique 56

57 58 59 60

Robert Crawford, Young Eliot (London: Vintage, 2015), p. 214. Richard Shusterman, ‘Eliot as Philosopher’, in A. David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 31–47. Christopher Ricks and Jim McGee (eds), The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), p. 908, comment on lines 4–8 of Burnt Norton that it quotes from Eliot’s Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 110. This was Eliot’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard, although the doctorate was never awarded as he did not return for the viva, due to the danger of a sea voyage to the USA during the 1917 German submarine campaign. John Xiros Cooper, The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 27. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 213, 398. Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 161. Mander, British Idealism, pp. 169–179. R. C. Moberly’s collection of Holy Week addresses was entitled Sorrow, Sin and Beauty (London: John Murray, 1903), and is analysed later in this chapter. Andrew Bowyer, Donald MacKinnon’s Theology: To Perceive Tragedy without the Loss of Hope (London: T&T Clark, 2019), esp. chapter 2, on MacKinnon’s development under A. E. Taylor.

The Lux Mundi School

283

insight into the relationship between the British Idealists and the Lux Mundi school. He argued that British Idealism did not prevent the Lux Mundi school from articulating the gospel afresh. ‘We are so accustomed to the accepted superstition concerning the Lux Mundi school, that its members were in bondage to Oxford neo-Hegelianism, that we forget that perhaps one of the most important things about them was the zeal they displayed in breaking out of that prison.’61 MacKinnon includes Michael Ramsey’s study of F. D. Maurice as being at fault here, since Ramsey claimed that the Lux Mundi school had in fact succumbed to Hegelianism.62 MacKinnon disagrees, arguing instead that Green gave Holland, and others, three things. First, he showed them the importance of exposing themselves ‘to the whole manifold impact of contemporary culture’. Secondly, they learned from Green ‘to pierce the contradictions of the associationist theory of knowledge’, referring to Green’s criticism of Hume and utilitarianism. Thirdly, ‘what he gave them before all else was a sense of the world as under the providence of God and of the worth of taking seriously its problems and causes’. MacKinnon argues that Green left his pupils with a positive attitude towards the world, and ‘a sense of historical conflicts as capable of mastery’.63 In a later essay, MacKinnon delved deeper into the nature of British Idealism, based on his extensive reading of its philosophers, with a number of comments worth recording. First, he argued that for the Idealists, especially Green, the Christian account of life to death to resurrection was a movement profoundly naturalized through transcription into the earthly exchange of self-regarding existence for pursuit of a common good only to receive back (as it were) that self, whose ultimate well-being all human beings must seek, in the transformed and deeply enriched shape of a common life, renewed through the prevalence over individual self-regard, of an all-reconciling common order.64 61 D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Scott Holland and Contemporary Needs’, in Borderland of Theology (London: Lutterworth, Press, 1968), p. 113. The article was first published in Theology 55 (1952), pp. 448–453. 62 MacKinnon cites A. M. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). 63 Timothy G. Connor, The Kenotic Trajectory of the Church in Donald MacKinnon’s Theology (London: T and T Clark, 2011), pp. 49, 170, 178, on MacKinnon’s attitude to Henry Scott Holland. 64 D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Some Aspects of the Treatment of Christianity by the British Idealists’, Religious Studies 20 (1984), pp. 133–144, reprinted in D. M. MacKinnon, Themes in Theology: The Three-Fold Cord (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), pp. 50–68.

284

Chapter 9

Second, Green’s Idealism can be defined precisely, and Mackinnon writes that Green is an idealist in the basic sense of supposing that the speculative, moral, aesthetic, and religious life of the individual is something to which the individual enjoys a unique presence. We know from within what it is like to think, to choose, to create, to pray, and no reductionism however sophisticated its method, can deprive us of the understanding of these activities which is ours because we exercise them ourselves.65 Even if Green’s own religious activity was reduced by him to moral and political effort, it remains uniquely our effort, which we know from inside, with all its costs and intricacies, and we shall see later, in Holland’s account of character in one of his sermons, that this Idealist note is dominant. MacKinnon also noted the monism of Idealism. This remained a perpetually integrating focus of their dedication, a monism whose sources were logical and mystical at the same time, deepening their critical perceptions while it also ensured that self-sacrifice in conduct meant rediscovery of an authentic individuality (transcending the narrow limits of the Aristotelian tradition), and that under the sovereignty of an all-embracing unity, where differences were wonderfully elided, contradictions overcome, and contingency obliterated in a necessity far more than mere causal order, totally satisfying to the most exacting demands of thought and understanding.66 This meant that spirituality, wholeness and service of others in daily life became one metaphysical creed which could be defended by the most rigorous philosophy, which was an enticing vision for the Glasgow and Oxford university students who went on to serve in social work, politics, the empire and the church. MacKinnon sees that the straightforwardly religious vision which called young students to dedicate their lives through ordination and life as parish priests in the slums of the large cities could also be articulated in far more metaphysical terms by Idealist philosophers. For many of the Lux Mundi school, and their students, the call was both to serve Christ and to live out the Idealist vision, being one whole. They were called to a life of service in politics, 65 Mackinnon, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 54. 66 Mackinnon, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 59.

The Lux Mundi School

285

public institutions or the church, but no aspect of that service was higher than another. The very all-embracing nature of that vision – encompassing politics, social work, the civil and colonial service, and ordination – made it immensely powerful, because here was the purpose of a university education, which could redeem the squalor and materialism of daily life.67 Finally, however, MacKinnon notes what he calls the spiritual determinism of Idealism, where ‘the very notion of contingency was disbarred; for what an individual became by seeming accident of juxtaposition was essential to its being what it was’. The ‘creative role of the human spirit’ was in fact ‘the agent of a collective spiritual unity, sovereign in all its doings, and oblivious (seemingly) of the tragic destiny of the individual’.68 There is an irony here which MacKinnon brings out very well, since Benthamite utilitarianism, weighing up pleasures and seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was a mechanistic, and atomistic, doctrine, and the call of Idealism reacted against this, especially for religious people.69 But he notes that in the end Idealism was determinist, believing that history achieved self-conscious definition through the organic unity of society, to which the individual’s search for wholeness was always subordinate, and so ‘the problem of determinism remains pivotal for the idealist tradition in philosophy in general, and for its interpretation of Christianity in particular’, which was a cautionary and sober judgement.70 We must return to the study of the Lux Mundi theologians themselves. However, it is worth noting that MacKinnon is perhaps the dominant figure in British philosophy of religion in the twentieth century. Given that fact, the concentrated attention which he gave to British Idealism and its relationship to Christianity shows the ongoing importance of the subject. It is true that, as he grew older, MacKinnon turned far more to Kant, but he never repudiated his early fascination with the relationship of philosophy and theology in Oxford before the First World War.

67 Grimley, Citizenship, p. 49, on one offshoot of Idealism, which was the university settlement movement. By 1911, forty-five universities had been founded in Britain, reflecting Idealist views. William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and Stanley Baldwin, later a Conservative prime minister, both took part in this as young men and were deeply influenced by their participation. 68 Mackinnon, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 60. 69 Talbot, Memories of Early Life, p. 45. Reardon, ‘Introduction’, in Reardon (ed.), Henry Scott Holland, pp. 34–37, on Holland’s response to Mill’s empiricism and Green’s emphasis on experience. 70 Mackinnon, ‘Some Aspects’, pp. 65–66.

286 8

Chapter 9

Gore on Christ’s Moral Character

Two years after the shock to traditional Anglo-Catholics of the publication of Lux Mundi, Gore gave the Bampton Lectures in 1891, which were published as his first book, entitled The Incarnation of the Son of God, coming out in the same year as he gave the lectures.71 They contain an implicit moral theology, which runs through the whole book, itself a brilliant account of Christology that rests on Gore’s argument that in Jesus of Nazareth, later called the Christ, the world’s moral principles, character and teaching reached a new level, which can be called ‘supernatural’. Gore begins his account of the incarnation by claiming that it is first of all necessary to show that the world was a spiritual reality. The universal mind and divine righteousness which are disclosed in nature, are inseparable from the idea of personality, for mind is only conceivable as a function, and righteousness only as an attribute of a person; and personality is the highest form in which life is known in the universe. God then, or the spiritual principle in nature, is, we believe, in some real sense personal; transcending no doubt human personality in infinite degree, yet at least so truly personal as that man in virtue of his personality is liker to God than any lower form of life.72 Gore explicitly cites Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics as the justification of this statement, seeking a reason for interpreting nature spiritually. This shows how much Gore was indebted to Green’s metaphysics. Green is also quoted later both in the Incarnation against Arius and in Gore’s Eucharistic theology, The Body of Christ, where Green’s metaphysics join with the Logos doctrine of patristic theology.73 Gore, however, was not primarily a metaphysician but a moralist, with his moral sense coming partly from the influence of Newman and Pusey and partly from that of F. D. Maurice, for whom Gore had great respect, although

71 Carpenter, Gore, pp. 146–182, on The Incarnation of the Son of God. Avis, Gore, pp. 87–96, on Gore’s Christology. 72 Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for 1891 (London: John Murray, 1891), p. 35, which cites p. 262, n. 10, where he references Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Book 1, chapter 1. 73 Charles Gore, The Body of Christ (London: John Murray, 1901), pp. 150–151. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 51–52, on Gore’s Eucharistic theology. MacKinnon, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 51. Gore, Incarnation, pp. 99–100.

The Lux Mundi School

287

he always denied that Maurice had any great influence on him.74 Much more influential was the writing of Brook Foss Westcott, who had taught Gore at Harrow School, and became Bishop of Durham; here Carpenter agrees with Avis: ‘There can be little question that the moral factor in Christianity was dominant in his thought and that he placed most of his emphasis upon it.’75 In the Incarnation, Gore emphasized the likeness of humanity to God, arguing that ‘the real moral likeness of man to God is, as the Father says, the prophecy of the divine Incarnation, and the grounds of its possibility’.76 Early on in the Incarnation, Gore poses a dichotomy between explaining morality as a desire for pleasure or the avoidance of pain on the one hand, and acting on a moral law which is obligatory on the other hand, where the obligation can be explained by philosophers and theologians either as ‘the moral will of the Supreme Being’ or as the transcendental law of reason, prior to experience, expressing itself in the conscience as ‘a categorical imperative’. Gore prefers to see morality as the will of a supreme being because of the impact of Christ’s personality and as moral judge.77 Gore had read Butler holding that all individuals possessed a conscience in which the Word was at work, which could be responsive to the Christian message, and followed Butler in arguing cumulatively by placing a series of possible facts and beliefs to build his case.78 David Power suggests that Gore’s argument rests on an appeal to the religious experience of the disciples to Jesus Christ, and certainly the Incarnation argues for ‘the principle that all right theory emerges out of experience, and is the analysis of experience … a profound and sympathetic study of the facts’, with moral and spiritual facts being seen as part of experience, although these ‘should be appreciated as from within before they are criticized’. If these facts were allowed due weight, they could justify their existence ‘by their power to interpret and deal with experience as a whole’.79 Gore deprecated any abstract, a priori reasoning. In The New Theology and the Old Religion, written in 1907, he attacked what he saw as an a priori ruling-out of the miraculous and a view of Christ as a moral teacher, which was a theology verging on pantheism. He argued from the Old Testament 74 Carpenter, Gore, pp. 254–255. Morris, High Church Revival, p. 216, on Maurice’s influence on Gore. Avis, Gore, p. 49. 75 Carpenter, Gore, p. 51. Avis, ‘Anglican Social Thought’, analyses the relationship. 76 Gore, Incarnation, p. 34. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 16–21. 77 Gore, Incarnation, pp. 23–24. 78 Morris, High Church Revival, p. 214, on Gore’s ‘freedom of language about contemporary thought’. Carpenter, Gore, p. 247. 79 Gore, Incarnation, p. viii. David N. Power, ‘The Holy Spirit: Scripture, Tradition and Inter­ pretation’, in Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith, p. 152.

288

Chapter 9

prophetic belief in the moral character of God, ‘which bowed men down in utter humility, and made quite impossible any identification of themselves with God’.80 He is clear that Christian morality is strict and uncompromising, being ‘a positive and exacting moral standard’, which holds to the indissolubility of marriage, the ‘absolute sinfulness of conscious suicide’, the necessity of purity and an ‘unbending moral law’.81 Gore uses the Incarnation to appeal to those who believe in Christian morality since, if they accept these moral truths, then they must also move beyond ‘His moral lordship’, and accept that Christ is also supernatural, because he cannot simply be human, but rather is the moral judge of all ages, with Christianity’s ‘spiritual and moral functions beyond all comparison the most important’.82 The word ‘supernatural’ is carefully defined, because moral life is supernatural to physical life, using the animal organism, but has a new form of life, new laws of conscience and moral choice, and so recognizes ‘a divine law of righteousness, self-judgment, penitence, conscious fellowship with God’, which the physical world cannot explain or account for. In a similar way, Christ exhibits through human nature ‘with a new completeness and in a new intensity, His own personality and character’.83 This development is supernatural, although Christ’s physical and moral power is ‘not unnatural’, nor does the miraculous ‘reverse’ nature, but rather the moral nature of humanity finds in Christ ‘the legitimate climax of natural development’, since Christ is fully human.84 Gore also saw Christ’s moral teaching as the fulfilment of Greek moral philosophy and the Jewish law. The final Bampton Lecture is entitled ‘Christ Our Example and New Life’, highlighting Christ’s moral character, with moral principles.85 9

Gore on Social Morality

Gore’s concern was also with how the church had developed, arguing that it had been too concerned in the East with doctrinal orthodoxy and in the West 80 81 82 83 84 85

Charles Gore, The New Theology and the Old Religion (London: John Murray, 1907), p. 47. See also his attack on pantheism, in Incarnation, p. 149. Gore, Incarnation, pp. 27, 233. Gore, Incarnation, p. 28, and see p. 260, which includes John Stuart Mill’s Three Essays on Theism as recognizing the moral authority of Jesus. Gore, Incarnation, p. 39. Gore, Incarnation, p. 20. Gore, Incarnation, pp. 47, 106: Jews and Greeks are brought by different arguments to recognize Christ’s ‘moral authority and divine mission’. See also p. 192, which describes the Jewish law as ‘despotic’. and p. 219.

The Lux Mundi School

289

with preserving the power of its government. ‘When churchmanship assumes this degenerate form, Christianity is not indeed destroyed, nor does it cease to bring forth moral and spiritual fruit; but the fruit is of an inferior and less characteristic quality, it is not the spirit and temper of sonship.’86 The church had been founded by one who had such ‘moral power’ that it was the counterpart of ‘His physical power to impart life and to heal diseases’, while the apostles also had enormous ‘intellectual and moral character’, which made their witness credible. The church had to preserve this moral power in its life and mission, but sadly it had become over-concerned with doctrine or its juridical power.87 In the Incarnation Gore was quite clear that ‘Christianity began as a moral and spiritual “way of life”’. Christianity would be ‘freer’ if it lost some of the late Hellenic philosophy, since ‘Christianity can end as it began, with the Sermon on the Mount and the spirit of brotherhood, for its substance and its sum’.88 Gore felt that the church needed to develop the social and ethical meaning of Catholicism, which he called ‘a supernatural fellowship in Christ’. In an appended note to his commentary on Ephesians, he outlined ‘the ethics of Catholicism’, which involved ‘the moral discipline of catholicism’, which would purify the church and generate social righteousness, thus creating a true fellowship across the world based on fellowship with God.89 Gore developed the theme of social theology in a pamphlet titled The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, written in 1892, where again there was a stress on ‘the brotherhood’, based on God’s fatherhood.90 Two years later he published The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition, on Matthew 5, with the sermon as a moral law.91 ‘It is not a law for individual consciences only, but for a society, a law which  … is to be applied in order to establish a new social order.’92 The Beatitudes describe the character of those who belong to the new kingdom established by Christ.93 Further, the sermon shows how character is to be shaped,

86 87 88 89

Gore, Incarnation, pp. 2, 139. Gore, Incarnation, pp. 13, 83. Gore, Incarnation, p. 90. Charles Gore, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition (London: John Murray, 1898), pp. 271–274, n. F, and Charles Gore, ‘The Idea of a Catholic Church’, Church Times, 15 October 1915, both cited in Carpenter, Gore, p. 54. 90 Charles Gore, The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount (London: Percival, 1892). 91 Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition (London: John Murray, 1894). 92 Gore, Sermon on the Mount, p. 3. Gore, Social Doctrine, p. 7. 93 Gore, Sermon on the Mount, p. 19.

290

Chapter 9

with the principles and motives for its creation, and the maxims of the Sermon should be taken into the heart and conscience of the individual, to become a principle of each man’s own character and conduct, and then to reappear, retranslated into social action, according to the wisdom of the time or the wisdom of the man or the wisdom of the Church.94 When those with this character join together in ‘brotherhood’, they must remodel human society, although the call to sanctification is necessary before the remodelling of society, because social change comes ‘from small groups of sanctified men’.95 Chapman summarizes Gore’s position well: ‘Gore held that the moment had come for the church to put social morality, Christian living, in the forefront of its effort, focussing on a theology of commitment and discipleship which frequently set him apart from his more establishmentminded peers.’96 In his old age, after he had retired as a bishop, Gore spent the 1920s writing extensively, and published a trilogy, Belief in God, Belief in Christ and Belief in The Holy Spirit and the Church, between 1921 and 1924, with a reply to criticism in 1926 entitled Can We Then Believe? In the same year he also brought out a single volume, The Reconstruction of Belief, which pulled together all his arguments. This was a remarkable amount of writing for someone over seventy, and represented one of the major works of Anglican apologetics in the 1920s. Finally, in 1929 Gore gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews, entitled The Philosophy of the Good Life, published in 1930.97 In The Reconstruction of Belief Gore placed ‘the moralistic approach’ alongside science as ways of knowing reality, arguing that ‘From that point of view the moral will of God and the fact of moral freedom in man and the vast portent of universal sin become the prominent facts and the philosophy of divine redemption, and with it of miracles, become intelligible and acceptable.’98 He defended human freedom and argued that this meant there was a spontaneity and contingency in nature; one could therefore postulate an analogous 94 Gore, Sermon on the Mount, p. 104. Chapman, ‘Charles Gore’, p. 206; see also pp. 206–209 for Gore’s account of Christian character 209. 95 Gore, Social Doctrine, pp. 7–8. Gore, Sermon on the Mount, p. 104. 96 Chapman, ‘Charles Gore’, pp. 201–202, citing Gore, Social Doctrine, p. 16. 97 Charles Gore, Belief in God (London: John Murray, 1921); Charles Gore, Belief in Christ (London: John Murray, 1922); Charles Gore, The Holy Spirit and the Church (London: John Murray, 1924); Charles Gore, Can We Then Believe? (London: John Murray, 1926); Charles Gore, The Reconstruction of Belief (London: John Murray, 1926); Charles Gore, The Philosophy of the Good Life (London: John Murray, 1930). Avis, Gore, p. 51. 98 Gore, Reconstruction of Belief, p. 246. Gore, Incarnation, p. 40. It is striking that the two books were written thirty-five years apart, but use the same argument.

The Lux Mundi School

291

freedom in God, which was the rationale for God’s miraculous actions.99 However, miracles were events in physical nature that revealed God’s ‘presence and direct action … working for a moral end’, because the moral purpose of miracles could never be forgotten.100 At the end of his life Gore claimed that ‘The best definition of superstition is religion which is non-moral.’101 10

Holland on Faith and Moral Will

We turn to a close friend and ally of Gore, but one whose writing was quite different, even if in the same liberal Catholic school. Henry Scott Holland had a deep friendship with Green when at Balliol, and they corresponded a great deal, having a lengthy discussion about Holland’s decision to be ordained as an Anglican priest. Green respected that decision but felt there was a danger of Christianity becoming entirely absorbed in doctrinal and not ethical questions.102 Something of Green’s influence is shown in Holland’s collection of sermons, Creed and Character, published six years after Green’s early death in 1882 aged forty-six, where Holland argued that the ‘Personal Will’ (an echo of Green) can be shown in action in human affairs through mind and character. The mind of this personal will displays intentions, motives and ends, while its character coordinates these intentions, as the kingdom of Christ manifests this will, its mind is shown in the creeds of the church, and its character is shown in the ethical ideal of the church, its character.103 Christianity, if it is anything at all, is the Will of its King; and as a will, it necessarily appears in a double form, as a Mind that thinks, and as a Will that acts: but is one and the same Will in both, whether it thinks or whether it acts.104 Holland acknowledges his debt to Green, but presses on in his own distinctive way. After his ordination, he wrote to Green:

99 Gore, Reconstruction of Belief, p. 291. 100 Gore, Incarnation, pp. 49–51; also p. 54 for forgiveness as a ‘moral miracle’. 101 Gore, Reconstruction of Belief, p. 577. Avis, Gore, p. 52. 102 Henry Scott Holland, Memoir and Letters, ed. Stephen Paget (London: John Murray, 1921), pp. 29–33. MacKinnon, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 50. 103 Henry Scott Holland, ‘Preface’, in Creed and Character (London: Rivingtons, 1888), pp. vii–viii. 104 Holland, ‘Preface’, p. ix.

292

Chapter 9

I was ordained last Sunday [23 September 1872] … I could not see that that I was writing or doing anything inconsistent with what I learned from you. It seemed to me as if all the meaning I could put into my theology and certainly my ethics was still the old thing. Only the religious form seemed to me to cap it all, and the cap seemed to me to fit.105 Green replied, 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  … As you know, I never dreamt of philosophy doing instead of religion. My own interest in it, I believe, is entirely religious; in the sense that it is to me … the reasoned intellectual expression of the effort to get to God.106 Holland’s primary contribution to Anglican moral theology lies in his essay in Lux Mundi on the nature of faith, which was the opening chapter, and his subsequent sermons, which Reardon compares with the French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel, in his L’action, published four years after Lux Mundi, in 1893.107 Blondel developed a philosophy of action using phenomenology, and distinguished between the willing will and the willed will, asking how the two could be reconciled. He used this dichotomy to argue for the existence of the supernatural, or transcendent, which is the true end of action, and makes the willing will able to issue in the willed will, and so into action in the world. Holland argued that reason is human and personal, and orders human experience; out of the impulses and emotions within a person, reason fashions the response of the person to the external world, which is a form of action. ‘The eye of consciousness acts on behalf of the entire body of unrelated energies and functions that lie behind it.’108 Reason is the ‘living and pliable process’ whereby a person expresses their entire nature, and is ‘the power of allying

105 Holland, Memoir and Letters, p. 63. 106 Holland, Memoir and Letters, p. 65. 107 Maurice Blondel, L’action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893). The English translation is Maurice Blondel, Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Reardon, ‘Introduction’, p. 41. Holland, Blondel and Kant are discussed in one of MacKinnon’s final articles: D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, in G. MacDonald Ross and T. MacWalter (eds), Kant and His Influence (London: Continuum, 1995), pp. 348–366. 108 Henry Scott Holland, Fibres of Faith (London: Wells Gardner, 1910), p. 82.

The Lux Mundi School

293

ourselves to facts’.109 Out of this there emerges ‘a principle of consistency and control upon which is built both our personal morality and the social life’, with Holland arguing that ‘the passions of a man are themselves intelligent; they move under the motives of reason’.110 Reason is an act towards the outside world, and that movement outward is described as faith.111 Holland claimed that ‘faith, then, belongs to our entire body of activities. We live by faith. By faith, under the inspiration of faith, we put our life, we set to work, we exercise faculties.’112 He made the same argument as Blondel, since faith is the action of the whole person, and religion is ‘this hidden activity evoked by a direct appeal’. The appeal is by God, who calls faith out of the ‘dim background’, this ‘secret and innermost vitality’, and demands that ‘it should emerge into positive action’. The energies of the fatherhood of God call faith into the open, and ‘this is Religion’.113 Beyond ‘the Religion of Humanity’ we move into the Christian account of the person, where God reveals the Father through the Son, and therefore into the Christian faith, with Holland finally asserting: ‘But if, as Christianity asserts, the ultimate and elemental self be a moral will, that can believe, and love, then, though this self contains in itself reason, it also goes back behind reason.’114 Instead, what it issues in is ‘the character of the moral will, the affection, the love, of man. For these are faith’s nearest and dearest allies.’115 Moral theology is thus an expression of faith, which is the whole person (including reason) responding holistically to the world. The rest of Holland’s dense and powerful essay trace the development of faith as expressed in religion until it meets ‘the question of His own personality’ – that is, the person of Christ, with the creeds involving the self-authenticating reality of the church’s life in action, prayer and sacraments. ‘If we are asked to throw over the complications of our Creeds, we must beg those that ask us, to begin by throwing over the complications of this social and moral life.’116 Like the Catholic Modernists of this period, such as George Tyrrell, Holland develops faith into ‘an affair of personal intimacy, of will, of love’, which is faith in 109 Henry Scott Holland, Sermon 1, ‘Logic and Life’, in Logic and Life (London: Rivingtons, 1882), p. 17. 110 Henry Scott Holland, Sermon 2, ‘The Venture of Reason’, in Logic and Life, p. 23. Reardon, ‘Introduction’, p. 39. 111 Holland, ‘Venture of Reason’, p. 35. 112 Henry Scott Holland, ‘Faith’, in Lux Mundi, p. 23. 113 Holland, ‘Faith’, pp. 25–26. 114 Holland, ‘Faith’, pp. 30–31. 115 Holland, ‘Faith’, p. 32. 116 Holland, ‘Faith’, p. 45.

294

Chapter 9

‘a living character’, that is ‘the personality of Christ’.117 It is a presentation of faith that develops a whole theological anthropology, and which is entirely oriented towards the future, as recent commentators on the essay have noted.118 Moral theology for Holland is premised on a theological anthropology that is determined by a series of very sophisticated theological considerations. It is a Trinitarian imitatio Christi (following of Christ). Those who follow Christ are those created by the Father, being members of the body of Christ, and aided by the Spirit. It is future-oriented and looks to a kingdom of God both future and yet also capable of being realized today. It uses the passions, emotions and reason of a person in that person’s faith, which itself is a technical term expressing the outward drive of a person to the world around them. All of a person’s being needs redemption by the grace of the Spirit. Finally, this theology is deeply societal (able to be realized only with others in society) and it is always realized in action. This is a truly Catholic moral theology, aware of the continuity in space and time of the church as it follows its Lord. 11

Holland on Christian Moral Character

Holland developed the theme of character in his sermon ‘Character and Circumstance’, but this time he concentrated on the character of the Christian, with our character being what we will be judged on in the world to come. ‘We shall be, on the day we enter it, in character and moral type exactly what we are today.’119 Furthermore, ‘the core of character lies in individuality. Character is a moral fact: and, until life is individual, it is not moral’, while individuality is whatever causes action from the person, rather than from circumstances and general laws, because it is freedom from circumstances, family and society that marks true character.120 Character is ‘a strange presence which sits alone, unfathered by any earthly parentage, a ghostly visitant which exists by defying circumstance, designed, in its fit measure, to become organic and free, 117 Reardon, ‘Introduction’, p. 49. Holland, ‘Faith’, p. 49. Tyrrell and Holland both contributed essays to the Hibbert Journal in 1909. See also John D. Root, ‘Roman Catholic and Anglican Modernist Interaction, 1896–1914’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 49.2 (1980), pp. 149–150, referring to Holland praising Tyrrell’s work. See also William Lubenow, ‘Synthetic Society’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Holland and Tyrrell both belonged to this discussion society. N. Sagovsky, ‘On God’s side’: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 118 Stephen Sykes, ‘Faith’, in Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith, pp. 1–24, esp. p. 10. Robert Morgan, ‘Faith’, in Morgan (ed.), Religion of the Incarnation, pp. 1–32, esp. pp. 4, 6, 21. 119 Henry Scott Holland, ‘Character and Circumstance’, in Creed and Character, p. 332. 120 Holland, ‘Character and Circumstance’, pp. 333–334.

The Lux Mundi School

295

self-directing, self-identical’.121 This is very much an echo of Green’s metaphysics, as MacKinnon realized, where we alone have a privileged access to our inner being and decisions. Faith realizes that the relationship of this character to the body of Christ is ‘the key to all its power of after-growth’.122 The command of Christ plunges the character into the midst of life, with its circumstances, and to act in the midst of those circumstances, with Holland giving a lengthy exposition of the Gospel text ‘Two women shall be grinding at the mill; one shall be taken and the other left’ (Matthew 24:41). The reason why one is taken is the character of the two women, since the circumstances of poverty and bleak, monotonous, hard labour for both women are the same: in one woman there is a Christ-like character, in the other not, and so one goes to heaven, the other to hell.123 MacKinnon shows how Holland’s moral theology was deeply Trinitarian, writing that ‘The Ministry of the Church, then, arises out of the deep compassion of the Triune Godhead.’124 This brief comment in a sermon on ‘The Mind of the Church’ draws on the supreme compassion of the Father for his world; on the shape of compassion in Christ Jesus, which ‘enthrals and subdues with a touch of human kinship’; and on the work of the Spirit, whose name is ‘the Spirit of Consolation, the Comforter’.125 Holland asks what happens if the ‘poor, impoverished will’ of the Christian is united with ‘the irresistible might of a will that had not been broken, a will, new, fresh, undaunted, tough as steel, endurable as stone, firm as adamant?’126 Holland’s sermon ‘The Cost of Moral Movement’ (preached in Christ Church, Oxford in 1878) described the hard struggle of civilization to achieve moral steadiness, with reference to St Bernard, St Francis and John Bunyan. Holland challenged the ease with which a university congregation could slip into an acceptance of moral sloth and luxury, and he was well aware of how easily civilization and individuals could be overcome by ‘the horror of moral evil’, denouncing those who claimed to be in full possession of the ‘canon of truth, or of moral right’.127 He worried about falling into the danger of ‘such moral 121 Holland, ‘Character and Circumstance’, p. 335. 122 Holland, ‘Character and Circumstance’, p. 336. 123 Holland, ‘Character and Circumstance’, pp. 338–339. 124 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, p. 45, also notes this; see also pp. 2, 45, for the influence of F. D. Maurice on Holland. 125 MacKinnon, ‘Scott Holland’, p. 106. Henry Scott Holland, ‘The Mind of the Church’, in Creed and Character, p. 113. 126 Henry Scott Holland, ‘The Law of Forgiveness – II’, in Creed and Character, p. 217. 127 Henry Scott Holland, ‘The Breaking of Dreams’, in Logic and Life, p. 178. Henry Scott Holland, ‘Sheep and Shepherd’, in Logic and Life, p. 194.

296

Chapter 9

partiality, such moral heresy’ in being overzealous or too quiescent. Thus he displayed no simplistic nineteenth-century optimism but rather found in Butler’s moral realism and awareness of human limitations the possibility of discovering the working out of the divine purpose despite human frailty.128 It was also a deeply eschatological theology, which was strongly focused on suffering, judgement and the cross, as MacKinnon notes.129 Much attention has been given here to Holland’s justification of moral judgement, and he stands with a small group of theologians in this book who sought to give justification to the existence of a moral will, the spiritual renewal of the person, and above all the character of the person, as it both seeks to follow Christ and depends on Christ’s saving power, which it holds to in faith. These are the enduring aspects of the ‘Anglican exemplary tradition’ which finds in Christ both the example and the regenerative power for a person’s moral will. Holland can be compared with Butler, Coleridge and Newman in arguing for the relationship of human cognition (reason), moral discernment and religious faith.130 Holland visited Newman in 1877 at the Birmingham Oratory, although he was disappointed that the conversation was only about Oxford, and not about theology.131 He never wrote any full-length books, and when he returned to Oxford in the last decade of his life as Regius Professor of Divinity he felt unsuited to writing a major work. However, through his extensive essays and sermons he reached out beyond the limits of traditional Anglican theology to an extended dialogue with Green’s Idealism. The result was a complete recasting of moral theology, where Holland’s influence on the early MacKinnon in the 1950s is obvious, and he remains a deeply brilliant and moving theologian with enormous influence which has lasted until the present. 12

Moberly on Self-Realization

Moberly is significant because he takes the Idealist concept of self-realization in Bradley’s Ethical Studies and develops it strongly, although he makes no explicit reference to Bradley, who was living and writing in Oxford at the same 128 Henry Scott Holland, The Optimism of Butler’s Analogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), p. 10. Reardon, ‘Introduction’, pp. 54–55. Henry Scott Holland, ‘The Sword of St. Michael’, in Logic and Life, p. 258. 129 MacKinnon, ‘Scott Holland’, pp. 114–115. 130 On Coleridge and Holland, see Aherne, Coleridge Legacy, p. 177, and pp. 223–224 for a comparison of the two. 131 J. Lewis May, Cardinal Newman (New York: Dial Press, 1930), p. 180.

The Lux Mundi School

297

time. There is no evidence that they ever met, but Bradley was a recluse, and there are many accounts of how people studied his thought without meeting him, including T. S. Eliot, as we have seen. What is also significant in Moberly is that moral and spiritual judgement, and the action which follows on from that judgement, become a seamless whole. All moral action for Moberly is infused with the explicitly Christian, even Catholic, concepts of penitence and the desire for holiness. This means that every evaluative description of an action, such as placing flowers by a sick bed, always require Idealist categories for full meaning of the action to be elucidated. Moberly often used the term ‘beauty of goodness and wholeness’, such as in a flower. Beauty is a concept which was used by the twentieth-century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar extensively, but Moberly is one of the few Anglican theologians to write about it, although Hooker had certainly done so three centuries earlier.132 Significantly, Hooker praised the ‘Grecians’ for giving ‘to the active perfection of men a name expressing both beauty and goodness’, and wrote that goodness in ordinary speech is ‘applied only to that which is beneficial’; however, ‘there is also in rectitude, beauty’.133 Much comment has been made about Hooker’s indebtedness to Platonism.134 Moberly wrote extensively. His major works were Ministerial Priesthood (1897); Atonement and Personality (1901); and three collections of essays and sermons: Christ Our Life (1901), Sorrow, Sin and Beauty (1903) and Problems and Principles (1904). He preached at Gore’s consecration as Bishop of Worcester in 132 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982). Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.113.20. i.11.3: ‘We then shall love the thing that is good, only or principally for the goodness of beautie in it self.’ Charles Miller, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013), p. 203, has an extensive discussion of Hooker’s use of beauty in relation to moral goodness. 133 Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1.82.21–26. i.8.1. 134 W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker: Reformer and Platonist (London: Routledge, 2005). There are many citations which can be given of Bradley writing about beauty. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 488: ‘higher, truer, more beautiful, better, and more real – these, on the whole, count in the universe as they count for us’. Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 85: ‘Duty for duty’s sake, life for an end beyond sense, honour, and beauty, and love for the invisible’; p. 185: ‘First in the community is the individual realized. He is here the embodiment of beauty, goodness, and truth: of truth, because he corresponds to his universal conception; of beauty, because he realizes it in a single form to the senses or imagination; of goodness, because his will expresses and is the will of the universal’; p. 222: ‘The realization for myself of truth and beauty; the living for the self which in the apprehension, the knowledge, the sight, and the love of them finds its true being, is (all those who know the meaning of the words will bear me out) a moral obligation.’

298

Chapter 9

1902, and that sermon is included in Problems and Principles as ‘The Pastoral Office of the Bishop’.135 The final two volumes, on Sorrow and Principles, were published posthumously. Moberly was a very consistent, disciplined theologian, who wrote about the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, examining different dimensions of the Spirit’s work. The dimensions could be seen in the priesthood of the ordained ministry, which represents through the Spirit’s work the priesthood of the church, carrying out a pastoral ministry on behalf of the church; in the atonement, where the realization of the spirit of penitence in the believer comes from the Spirit; and finally the creation of a Christian character by the Spirit, which can be described as ‘beautiful’. Chapter 9 of Atonement and Personality is entitled ‘The Holy Spirit in Relation to Human Personality’.136 Moberly denies that selfhood is complete and unchanging, and argues that personality needs realization through the work of the Spirit, which is a clear echo of Bradley on self-realization. There are three strands, or proofs, of personality, which are reason, free will and love, and free will is not the equal power of choice, nor a cause to oneself, but rather it is to make one’s own ‘what is wholly on the lines of one’s own truest self’.137 When the Spirit of Christ possesses the self, the self is realized and becomes a mirror of human perfectness, which involves obedience to God, and the following of Christ.138 Reason involves insight into truth, and again there are echoes of Bradley, since moral truth is higher than abstract truth, and spiritual truth higher than moral. Spiritual insight is the highest possibility of reason.139 When Christ’s Spirit indwells in a person, free will and reason coalesce into one whole, and are indistinguishable, which is ‘the realization of his own inherently necessary idea’.140 Finally, the nature of love, which is certainly within our human nature, is that it must be developed by self-sacrifice by realizing the Spirit of Christ, and hence the Spirit of Christ enables true self-realization of selfhood.141 In striking language, Moberly ends this chapter with a claim that theology is congenial to contemporary philosophy: 135 R. C. Moberly, Problems and Principles: Being Papers on Subjects Theological and Ecclesias­ tical (London: John Murray, 1904), pp. 397–408. 136 R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality (London: John Murray, 1901). There is a critical response to Moberly by Paul Avis, ‘The Atonement’, in Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith, pp. 124–151. 137 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, pp. xxiv, 223. 138 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 228. 139 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 239. 140 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 245. 141 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 252.

The Lux Mundi School

299

While, then, it may be true that philosophical thought is more or less explicitly teaching us that created personality is not, and cannot be, a really distinct or self-subsistent centre of being; that all existence must be, in its ultimate reality, not multiplicity but unity; that the particular can only reach its own proper self-realization in the way of relation, as part of the universal and the absolute: it is plain that at least to Christian theology the corresponding language is not strange, but inveterately familiar and congenial. Here at least Christian theology speaks, with simplicity and confidence, of truths which have always been clear and certain to herself.142 13

Inge’s Response to Moberly’s Idealism

Moberly was no Platonist, but he was an Idealist, and there is a brilliant review of his Atonement and Personality by W. R. Inge, who certainly was a Platonist, in which Inge asks how far Moberly will go in his Idealism.143 Inge questions what Moberly means by the consciousness of Christ, claiming that Moberly is writing ‘pure Neoplatonism’. Inge writes: ‘By rational faculty we mean personal capacity of beholding wisdom and truth’ (p. 234). ‘Its [Reason’s] highest ranges are found in fact to be more and more identified with that consummation of the self by its passing beyond itself, in which we have already found the climax of human free-will’ (p. 240). Very important, as illustrating Dr. Moberly’s fearlessly monistic thought, is the following passage on the consciousness of the human Christ: ‘The centre of His life is never in Himself. There is no possibility, even for a moment, of the imagination of separateness; no such thing, we may even say, as a consciousness alone and apart’. (p. 99)144 Inge’s sharp comment is ‘Perhaps one may venture to suggest that he might have shown a little more clearly in what way his conception of personality, or of reality, differs from Idealistic Pantheism.’ He identifies that this is not a 142 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 254. 143 W. R. Inge, ‘R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality’, Journal of Theological Studies 2.8 (1901), pp. 618–622 (the quotation marks indicate quotations from Moberly’s book). W. R. Inge, The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought: The Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge, 1925–1926 (London: Longmans Green, 1926). 144 Inge, ‘R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality’, p. 620.

300

Chapter 9

philosophical game between different epistemological theories, and says that Moberly writes in a beautiful and eloquent passage that free-will is not a choice between alternatives, but man’s power to do perfectly as his own, that which is his own perfectedness, in other words that which reflects God, and is in truth God in him (p. 226). But the question remains, Is there a persistent self who is morally responsible for the greater or less distance which separates him from this ideal?145 The paradox is that Moberly was constantly at risk of eliding the self into Christ’s indwelling Spirit in his writing, yet the pastoral and spiritual care of the self was what drove him in his moral theology.146 Undoubtedly his sermons are deeply pastoral, and the sermon on the consecration of Charles Gore as Bishop of Worcester entirely focuses on the pastoral relationship between the bishop and the diocese, where the bishop’s main charge is the pastoral and spiritual guidance of those served.147 Moberly’s published sermons also concentrate on the themes of prayer, sanctification and moral choice, being reminiscent of Newman’s sermons. Sorrow, Sin and Beauty contains three sets of addresses given over a number of years during Holy Week in Liverpool, and is made up of individual sermons on different days of the week, which is typical of Holy Week addresses, with the three sets creating the book’s title, one set being on sorrow, one on sin and one on beauty. Moberly later delivered sermons on ‘The Religious View of Human Perso­ nality’ and ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Ghost’.148 These were not published when Inge wrote his review, but Moberly’s reflection on the relationship between things being spiritual and their material reality in forms and conditions using Idealist philosophy is an illustration of Inge’s awareness that Moberly was always seeking to show the importance of discerning the spiritual in the material or empirical world. He wrote in the sermon on the Holy Ghost that ‘Their whole true meaning [referring to ministry and sacraments] is on the spiritual side, as mystical possibilities, as experiences in a spiritual history.’ Moberly

145 Inge, ‘R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality’, pp. 620–621. 146 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, p. 48: ‘a wealth of pastoral experience will echo Moberly’s theme with gratitude’. 147 R. C. Moberly, ‘The Pastoral Office of the Bishop’, in Problems and Principles, esp. p. 404. 148 R. C. Moberly, ‘A Religious View of Human Personality’, in Problems and Principles, pp. 48–65. R. C. Moberly, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Ghost’, in Problems and Principles, pp. 121–122. These sermons are analysed later in this chapter.

The Lux Mundi School

301

concedes that there is a material form and condition, but says that this is only to provide the spiritual character of reality.149 14

Moberly on Penitence and Beauty

‘The Privilege of Sorrow’ explores the call to a higher and more perfect nature than we have now, which is of course a familiar Christian theme, but also echoes Bradley’s call for morality to be about perfecting the self.150 One way of refining the self is by pain, and Moberly explores this in ‘The Refining of Sorrow’, recognizing that pain can degrade, but also ennoble the person through the ‘reflecting consciousness’ of the mind, since mental states are of more value than physical ones.151 He uses this thesis in a Christocentric way, reflecting on the passion of Christ. ‘The Educating of Sorrow’ takes up another of Bradley’s themes, that of ideal morality, and suggests that this ideal can only be realized beyond the satisfaction provided by our life in relationships. There is the familiar Bradley theme that we find satisfaction in being a parent, neighbour or worker, which ‘weave[s] round a large portion of a man’s heart’, and ‘These are not at all evil, but they are false only insofar as they appear to satisfy.’ Again the Bradleyan theme emerges, because human morality is about aspiration: ‘It is from the impossible dream of being ever really filled with this life’s best fulnesses that my heart needs to be weaned.’152 Moberly argues that morality and spirituality must pass beyond the daily obligations of life: ‘But if I am spirit indeed, then no fulness which is other than spiritual can really be fulness to me. As spiritual I transcend all the things which make up the scenery of earth.’153 The ideal of ‘fulness’ must be transcended, which is done through the imitation of Christ, whose life was almost totally empty of the things that fill and satisfy, and so the ideal human perfectness is found only in Christ. ‘There is no perfect humanity that is not Divine … it is a truth of the very nature we wear.’154 Moberly argues that our nature witnesses both to the fall and to the perfectness of our being. Moberly’s treatment of beauty covers sixty pages in Sorrow, Sin and Beauty, with four Holy Week addresses: ‘Beauty of Character as a Real Phenomenon’, ‘Unconscious Training in Beauty’, ‘The Necessity of Being Beautiful’ and ‘Beauty 149 Moberly, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Ghost’, pp. 121–122. 150 R. C. Moberly, ‘The Privilege of Sorrow’, in Sorrow, Sin and Beauty, p. 11. 151 R. C. Moberly, ‘The Refining of Sorrow’, in Sorrow, Sin and Beauty, p. 24. 152 R. C. Moberly, ‘The Educating of Sorrow’, in Sorrow, Sin and Beauty, p. 36. 153 Moberly, ‘Educating of Sorrow’, p. 40. 154 Moberly, ‘Educating of Sorrow’, p. 44.

302

Chapter 9

in the Cross’. This focus echoes not only Bradley but a whole contemporary movement in fashion, art, and aesthetics.155 Moberly sets his first address alongside ‘the beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 96:9), and then then moves on to discuss the beauty of a flower, because its living beauty is not found in botany, chemistry, art or measurement, but only in our response to a presence, which cannot be analysed. In the same way, the beauty of character cannot be found in habits, dispositions or mental qualities but rather it is the presence of that beauty, drawing on ‘that whole, real inner self’, which is what is beautiful.156 ‘There is about you an individual fragrance, a character, eternal of meaning, infinite in value, unique. … Your personal gift of character, for beauty and for sweetness.’157 The beautifying of character occurs through the bearing of suffering, of which human life is so full, and through carrying out obligations, which is related to ‘love bruised and suffering’, often in unconscious hearts.158 Beauti­ fying of character ‘is a personal necessity and a duty’, because nothing can prevent this possibility, which remains ‘the proper end and meaning of all lives’. Moberly uses again the analogy of the flower, which is both God’s beauty and yet in the flower; even so, beauty of holiness is God’s alone, yet it must be in me.159 This transformation is Trinitarian, because the beauty of creation by the Father is shown again in Christ’s death and realized in us by the Spirit.160 In the final address, Moberly asserts that ‘beauty, in absolute perfectedness, is God. Beauty, in absolute perfectedness, is also the crown and goal of human life made complete’, where the cross shows ‘absolute dedication to God’ and is what we are all called to do.161 This transcends the beauty ‘of lily or violet’, because it has no outward beauty or comeliness, yet Christ’s devotion is absolutely beautiful on the cross.162 Like Holland, Moberly wrote on character,

155 R. C. Moberly, ‘Beauty of Character as a Real Phenomenon’, ‘Unconscious Training in Beauty’, ‘The Necessity of Being Beautiful’, and ‘Beauty in the Cross’, all in Sorrow, Sin and Beauty, pp. 139–153, 157–173, 177–193 and 197–212 respectively. For contemporary parallels, see ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1911  – In Pictures’, Guardian, 29 March 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2011/mar/29/cult-of -beauty-aesthetic-movement. 156 Moberly, ‘Beauty of Character’, pp. 148–149. 157 Moberly, ‘Beauty of Character’, p. 152. 158 Moberly, ‘Unconscious Training’, pp. 161, 170. 159 Moberly, ‘Necessity of Being Beautiful’, pp. 178–179, 182–183, italics original. 160 Moberly, ‘Necessity of Being Beautiful’, pp. 188–189. 161 Moberly, ‘Beauty of the Cross’, pp. 200, 204–205. 162 Moberly, ‘Beauty of the Cross’, pp. 207–208.

The Lux Mundi School

303

revealed in the Sermon on the Mount, but also revealed in Christ, into which character membership of the church is an initiation.163 In the sermon ‘A Religious View of Human Personality’, Moberly spoke of the different aspects of personality which reflect one’s inmost character, because personality is made up of the action of the will, the love and the ‘sovereign personal being’ of a person, all of which express the character of a person.164 He puts a mark down against absolute Idealism here, saying that ‘Reflective thought’ conceives of created consciousness as a mere mode or part of universal consciousness, of the particular as but a partial presentment, a rendering in detail, of the general purpose or mind, of man at his most as a mere element in God. It explains the wonder of created personality quite simply by explaining it away. It merges the individual in the absolute.165 So personality is destroyed as a concept and, while this is ‘no very unnatural result’, it destroys ‘fidelity to experience’ and there is a ‘cost to truth’.166 We have both an inherent individuality and yet ‘fundamental union with, and dependence on, God’.167 The indwelling of the Spirit is not the ‘dissolution’ but the consummation of self.168 Moberly’s Trinitarian thought also reflects the work of the Spirit, because there is the person as they are in themself, invisible and inaccessible, but also fundamentally the origin of self; there is the self as projected into the acting self, a visible expression of self; and finally there is their external effect, or works, which is the Spirit.169 15

Conclusion

The moral theology written by the Lux Mundi school was one of the high points of Anglican moral theology, and this is so for three reasons. First, there was a favourable philosophical climate, and culturally these writers had a ready audience in the many people concerned with the social and cultural challenges 163 R. C. Moberly, ‘Sin Hereditary and Sin Individual’, in Sorrow, Sin and Beauty, p. 98. 164 R. C. Moberly, ‘A Religious View of Human Personality’, in Problems and Principles, pp. 48–65 (quotation from p. 56). 165 Moberly, ‘Religious View of Human Personality’, p. 50. 166 Moberly, ‘Religious View of Human Personality’, p. 51. 167 Moberly, ‘Religious View of Human Personality’, p. 52. 168 Moberly, ‘Religious View of Human Personality’, p. 53. 169 Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 174. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 182–183.

304

Chapter 9

of the late nineteenth century. Although very few of the Idealist philosophers were orthodox Christians, they provided a good dialogue partner for theology, much as the school of Neoplatonism had done in the late Roman Empire (pace Gouldstone’s criticism), and they refuted English empiricism’s sometimes crude associationist theory of knowledge (epistemology) in a way which allowed for the possibility of religious belief.170 Philosophically, the value of Idealism can be shown in two ways: through Mander’s rehabilitation of the epistemological and ontological claims of Idealism despite the renewed empiricist attacks at the beginning of the twentieth century by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore; and through Donald MacKinnon’s respect for Idealism, despite opting himself for a Realist epistemology.171 Secondly, the Lux Mundi theologians worked as a school and had deep personal friendships, feeling and thinking in a similar way. This was partly due to Gore’s strong personality, although it was Holland who arranged the reading group called the ‘Holy Party’, which wrote the Lux Mundi collection. Moberly preached at Gore’s consecration as Bishop of Worcester. Other examples of their remarkably close relationships could be shown many times, with the Holy Party meeting until 1915, when Illingworth, who had hosted the group for the last decade at his vicarage, fell ill and died. Thirdly, the Lux Mundi school knew the theological roots from which they came. This book has argued that Anglican moral theology can be seen as a genealogy, whereby a set of ideas develops, meeting challenges and adapting, but maintaining the same overall identity, which was certainly true of these theologians. They were deeply indebted to an Anglican ethos found in the Oxford Movement. But they also looked back beyond that to the patristic period, and in particular to Greek thought, where the Logos doctrine of the Word informing and bringing to birth the creation, and the wisdom of Greek philosophy, was entirely congenial to them. They placed their deep knowledge of theological history, and of spirituality, at the service of the church they served. It is also striking how this school transcended the increasing divide between academic and church life, as universities multiplied in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth century, with a concomitant professionalization of academic study, so that theology came to be written increasingly by university staff. It is interesting, therefore, that Holland and Moberly began as Oxford Fellows, spent long periods in church employment and then returned to 170 Gouldstone, Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism, p. 190, sees the dialogue with Idealism as hastening the decline of theology. It describes Idealism as a ‘dead-end’. 171 Mander, British Idealism, pp. 2–3. D. M. MacKinnon, ‘Idealism and Realism: An Old Controversy Renewed’, in Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), pp. 138–150.

The Lux Mundi School

305

being university professors, whereas others, like Gore, followed the well-worn Anglican pattern of being a Fellow of a college in Oxford or Cambridge, but then accepted church positions. In truth, the division meant little to them, for the two guiding lights for this school were the need to be faithful to the church and the need to engage with modern thought. Finally, we can note how different the moral theologies of the various members of the school were in many ways. Gore sets out a highly austere picture of Jesus Christ, who gives a moral teaching that is embodied in the life of the church, which is his body, and he lived this out to the end, passionately arguing for the church to uphold morality and brotherhood while fighting social and personal evils. Holland, while very much an academic and preacher, lays the whole stress of moral theology on character and action, and it is the realization of the will in action which matters, which he sought, like his mentor Green, to embody in his students, having an enormous influence. For Moberly, moral theology is about integrity, sincerity, penitence and devotion, or – as he would have said – about creating a self or character which can be called beautiful. He knew that much contemporary artistic culture was about a beauty which was openly decadent, as seen in Aubrey Beardsley or Oscar Wilde, but he was a theologian of genius, taking the longing for beauty and placing it within the vision of the cross, which transforms all who are open to its redeeming power. Yet, in spite of these differences, the Lux Mundi school felt a common bond in their work, which was an extraordinary achievement, and had great influence. In the next chapter, the influence of Idealism will again be shown, through the long-lasting effect that Edward Caird, another Idealist philosopher, had on his student William Temple. Although as the twentieth century developed Temple no longer found Idealism congenial, he remained deeply affected by his early involvement in this philosophy, in ways quite different from and far more philosophical than the Lux Mundi school.

Chapter 10

William Temple’s Christian Ethics 1

Introduction

William Temple is the one theologian in this book in a class of his own, because in the last ten years of his life he became seen as an international figure who could provide the moral leadership to fashion a new path for Western democracies after the 1930s economic depression and the international conflicts which ended in the conflagration of the Second World War. He was also regarded as a theologian and church leader of extraordinary depth, with an outstanding intellect and deep piety.1 He was given this recognition partly because of his 1 Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 415, citing A. E. Baker, ‘William Temple: The Man’, in W. R. Matthews (ed.), William Temple: An Estimate and Appreciation (London: James Clarke, 1946), p. 100, quotes Canon Tapper’s estimate of Temple: ‘Here was a man in a class and on a level by himself, by far the greatest Englishman of his day.’ Tapper made the claim when Temple was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury. Owen C. Thomas, ‘William Temple’, in William J. Wolf, John E. Booty and Owen C. Thomas (eds), The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1979), p. 101. There is a large literature on William Temple, although much of it is now quite dated. The only major biography is by F. A. Iremonger, who was honorary chaplain to Temple at York: F. A. Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). The other studies of Temple are Alan Suggate, William Temple and Christian Social Ethics Today (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987); John Kent, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain 1880–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Stephen Spencer, William Temple: A Calling to Prophecy (London: SPCK, 2001); Stephen Spencer (ed.), Christ in All Things: William Temple and His Writings (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2015), with extracts from Temple’s books and articles; Stephen Spencer, Archbishop William Temple: A Study in Servant Leadership (London: SCM Press, 2022); John Marsden, ‘William Temple: Christianity and the Life of Fellowship’, Political Theology 8.2 (2007), pp. 213–233. Studies specifically on the relationship of his philosophy and theology include Michael Ramsey, From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939. The Hale Memorial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1959 (London: Longmans, 1960); Michael Ramsey, ‘The Life and Work of William Temple’, The Times, 10 October 1981, on the centenary of Temple’s birth; Jack Padgett, The Christian Philosophy of William Temple (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); Owen C. Thomas, William Temple’s Philosophy of Religion (London: SPCK, 1961); Dorothy Emmett, ‘The Philosopher’, in Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, pp. 521–539. J. W. Rogerson, ‘William Temple as Philosopher and Theologian’, Theology 84.701 (1981), pp. 324–334. Ph.D. theses include A. J. Poole, ‘The Philosophical Theology of William Temple’ (D. Theol. thesis, McGill University, 1955); J. J. LaCorte, ‘A Critical Analysis of the Dialectical Philosophy of William Temple’ (Ph.D.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_013

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

307

close friendship with many politicians and thinkers who were trying to plan a new world order, but most of all because of the enormous influence of his speeches, sermons and writing that culminated in his work as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1944, as is shown by his short book Christianity and Social Order, which had the unique position of being distributed free of charge to many serving in the British armed forces, as well as being read across the world because of its advocacy of a ‘welfare state’.2 I still have my Penguin copy, dating from 1943, a year after its initial publication, which I bought in a second-hand bookshop, with pages inside advertising Mars Bars (a toffee and chocolate sweet) but also emphasizing the importance of cutting them up so they could be shared out in wartime rationing! It is worth beginning this way because Temple’s national leadership colours the whole of his thought. He was born to privilege, as the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, and became Archbishop of Canterbury himself, the only time this has ever happened. Even from his early twenties he knew he was marked for greatness, and all his philosophy and theology was written against the backdrop of how he could become a person who could lead both his church and the nation in the ways of God. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said that ‘to a man of my generation an Archbishop of Temple’s enlightenment was a realized impossibility’.3 It is of course the case that Coleridge, Maurice, Gore and Holland all had an intense interest in social reform, and the place of the church in such reform, but this was different from Temple’s vision, which was one of expressing a national unity of church and state through his writings, speeches and personal influence. It was neither arrogant nor was it a vision he imposed on people, because Temple believed that England, the worldwide Anglican church and all who read him could be inspired by a vision of God’s ways with the world – and that is why he wrote his philosophy and theology.4 This chapter will describe Temple’s life, before moving on to the main intellectual influences thesis, University of Southern California, 1970); M. B. Wilkinson, ‘Value and Natural Order in the Philosophy of William Temple’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Surrey, 1990); C. J. Stuart, ‘The Rationale for the Incarnation and the Place of Substitutionary Atonement in the Thought of William Temple and Michael Ramsey: A Comparative Study’ (Ph.D. thesis, Durham University, 2013). 2 Confusingly, it was issued with different titles. I have two copies. The 1943 edition is called Christianity and Social Order (London: Penguin, 1942). The 1956 one, also published by Penguin Books, is entitled Christianity and the Social Order (London: Pelican, 1956). However, the latter title was certainly a mistake and is never used. 3 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, p. 475. Shaw compared him with Richard Whately, who was an Oxford theologian, a great influence on Newman and finally Archbishop of Dublin. 4 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, pp. 125–126, describes Holland’s influence on Temple’s decision to continue seeking ordination, after his initial rebuttal.

308

Chapter 10

on him; here Temple is unusual because in the 1930s he moved from an allegiance to Idealist metaphysics indebted to Edward Caird, and instead took up the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (though this did not affect his moral philosophy). By the advent of the Second World War, Temple’s theology was changing yet again, to a realism that was influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, the United States Protestant theologian. Kenneth Kirk, who is the subject of the next chapter, gave lectures in Oxford in the 1930s criticizing Temple’s rationalism, but Temple ignored this criticism. The main part of the chapter will be a description of Temple’s many books and short pamphlets between 1910 and 1944 on Christian ethics (he did not use the term ‘moral theology’, seeing it as specific to Roman Catholic thought, and unknown both to Anglicans and to the everyday person in Britain), before moving to a conclusion which will assess Temple’s influence. 2

Temple’s Life

William Temple was born in 1881 in Exeter, where his father, Frederick Temple, was bishop, being a self-made man who had risen through the Church of England; after Exeter he became Bishop of London, and finally Archbishop of Canterbury from 1897 to 1902. William’s mother ‘was closely related to many members of the upper aristocracy, and her grandfather was the second Earl of Harewood’.5 Their son William was educated at Rugby School and then Balliol College, Oxford, where Edward Caird was Master. Temple retained great loyalty to the individuals and institutions of his privileged background but was never constrained by them.6 At Balliol, he knew many of the past students and the Fellows or was deeply influenced by them. This was the college where Benjamin Jowett had been Master, and T. H. Green, Charles Gore and Henry Scott Holland had been students.7 Caird was an Idealist philosopher and Temple fell under his sway completely, being ‘drawn as by a magnet’.8 Temple 5 Adrian Hastings, ‘Temple, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). H. M. Spooner, rev. Mark D. Chapman, ‘Temple, Frederick’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–2000, 4th edition (London: SCM Press, 2001). 6 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 56, on Temple’s brief time as Canon of Westminster Abbey in 1919, before he became a bishop: ‘it provided just the right ambience for influencing the great and the powerful’. 7 Peter Hinchliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992), pp. 68–69, on the relationship of Temple to Jowett. 8 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, p. 39.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

309

became President of the Oxford Union, the university debating society. One of his closest friends at both Rugby and Balliol was the future economic historian and socialist thinker R. H. Tawney; the two remained close throughout their lives, with Tawney’s deep Christian faith and sense of vocation in reforming society reinforcing Temple’s own vocation.9 When Temple left Balliol in 1904, he was offered many positions. He could have been a politician, but chose to take a lectureship at Queen’s College, Oxford, teaching philosophy, with light duties which enabled him to read widely. By 1908, he had become the national President of the Workers’ Educational Association, and he shared active involvement in this body with Tawney, because both felt that if workers were to be given their rightful place in society they should be educated far beyond what they could afford. The association therefore provided evening lectures for working people to make up for the educational opportunities denied to them. It was a tribute to the way that Temple was seen that he should have been offered this post at the age of twenty-seven, and he was to remain President for sixteen years. Around this time Temple also decided to become ordained. His path to the priesthood was not, however, straightforward, as in 1906 the Bishop of Oxford declined to ordain him because of his views on the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. It was not until 1908, with the aid of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, that he was finally ordained. The next year he left Oxford and became headmaster of a large private school, Repton School. He did not stay long there either, moving on to a wealthy parish in London, where he also edited a national church magazine, The Challenge. After yet another brief period, he left the parish to become a canon of Westminster Abbey, while leading a movement to reform the Church of England’s system of governance in a more inclusive, synodical manner called ‘Life and Liberty’. Westminster Abbey is adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, and Temple’s brief time there provided him with a venue where he met politicians and church leaders on a daily basis. Characteristically and paradoxically, he both joined the Labour Party in 1918 and became an honorary chaplain to George V from 1915 to 1921. The juxtaposition of being simultaneously a socialist and chaplain to the king could be seen either as a fatal lack of coherence or as Temple’s unique 9 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 178, on Tawney’s drafting of the 1918 Church of England report Christianity and Industrial Problems, which advocated a living wage, unemployment benefits and state control of industry; also pp. 184–185, on Tawney’s professional career. Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 113–116, for a detailed account of how Tawney and Temple differed on the 1926 General Strike. Tawney was much closer to Gore’s radicalism.

310

Chapter 10

ability to straddle the class divide of British society, while remaining fiercely committed to social reform and the end of poverty. His abilities meant that he was recognized as a national leader before he was forty, with the reforming (and Free Church) Prime Minister David Lloyd George offering him the bishopric of Manchester in 1920. Manchester was quite different from the privileged positions which Temple had held before, being a location that would test his commitment to social reform. After he accepted yet another move, he plunged into the life of the diocese with great energy. His predecessor as bishop, E. A. Knox, was an ardent Protestant, autocratic and Conservative, and Temple’s commitment to social reform was therefore a complete change for the diocese. His energy was so great that, alongside being a highly active bishop, he found time both to write a major work of theology (Christus Veritas) and chair the Church of England commission on Christian doctrine, which met for over ten years and finally reported in 1938.10 Temple was a deeply pastoral bishop, but he saw the need to bring about economic and social change beyond the individual pastoral care which he and his clergy could give, and his method was to initiate a series of national conferences on social issues, such as COPEC, the Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship, which met in 1924.11 In 1926 he took an even more prominent role when he attempted to mediate in the General Strike, the first (and only) national strike across Britain by organized labour, although this mediation was blocked by the mine owners and the Conservative government.12 Three years later he was appointed Archbishop of York. Once more, he became deeply involved in the campaign against unemployment, poverty and poor housing, commissioning the report Men without Work, published in 1938, which described both the causes of unemployment, deprivation and poverty and their disastrous effects; interviews with the unemployed were a central feature of the report. Temple also continued to develop his theological position, giving the Gifford Lectures on theology in 1934, published as Nature, Man and God, with a dedication to Edward Caird.13 Increasingly he was seen as the Christian leader who could express a vision of social life beyond unemployment and poverty. He was close friends with some of the thinkers such as William Beveridge who were planning the political programme in Great Britain which came to be called the ‘Welfare State’, and his 10 Hastings, ‘Temple, William’. William Temple, Christus Veritas: An Essay (London: Macmillan, 1924). Doctrine in the Church of England: The Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922 (London: SPCK, 1938). 11 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 179. 12 Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 190–191. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, pp. 116–128, on Temple’s involvement in the strike. 13 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1940; 1st edition 1934).

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

311

friendship with Tawney remained central, as Tawney helped develop Temple’s ideas for the reform of the benefit system. Two large conferences on social reform where again he was one of the main players were at Oxford in 1937 (the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference) and at Malvern in 1941, where the speakers were T. S. Eliot, Richard Acland, Dorothy L. Sayers and the youthful philosopher of religion Donald MacKinnon. At the latter, Temple’s role was as a senior statesman, who did not need to speak but instead could provide a forum for others to speak.14 When the Second World War broke out, Temple gave a lead which was to become one of the most prominent in the nation, broadcasting at the outbreak of war and spelling out a Christian case for taking up arms, which was very influential, and campaigning continuously for help for Jews in Europe, while refusing to attack the government when they bombed German civilians.15 In 1942 he became Archbishop of Canterbury. He published Christianity and Social Order in the same year, and worked closely with Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes on welfare reform, also accepting the need for profound educational reform, thereby earning the Anglo-Catholic Bishop Kenneth Kirk’s anger and deep opposition.16 Temple achieved close co-operation with 14 John Carter Wood, This Is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1939–40 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), gives a clear account of the many Christian groups active in England during the period 1937–1940. Temple was involved in most of them. John Carter Wood, ‘“Going part of the way together”: Christian Intellectuals, Modernity, and the Secular in 1930s and 1940s Britain’, Contemporary British History 34.4 (2020), pp. 580–602. The guiding principles, or ‘middle axioms’, for the group were ‘responsible freedom’, ‘community’, ‘dependence’ and ‘service’, which were taken as fundamentally important Christian principles (Wood, ‘Going part of the way’, p. 584). The link with the principles in Christus Veritas is clear, although, since not all members of the 1930s groups were Christian, Temple dropped the word ‘sacrifice’. 15 Stephen E. Lammers, ‘William Temple and the Bombing of Germany: An Exploration in the Just War Tradition’, Journal of Religious Ethics 19.1 (1991), pp. 71–92, describes how Temple accepted the government’s claim that they followed just war principles. Temple was consistently deceived, unlike Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who protested often, and was restrained by Temple. Richard Overy, ‘Constructing Space for Dissent in War: The Bombing Restriction Committee, 1941–1945’, English Historical Review 131.550 (2016), pp. 596–622, shows Temple’s refusal to campaign to restrict bombing. 16 Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 397–398, on Temple’s work from 1942 to 1944 with Labour politicians such as Stafford Cripps. Kenneth Kirk was Bishop of Oxford and had previously been Professor of Theology at Oxford. His moral theology is analysed in Chapter 12. Temple regarded Kirk’s views on education as ‘largely detached from reality’ and made the withering comment in private that Kirk’s programme was ‘the right policy to adopt in the middle of the last century when the whole thing was starting’. Temple felt that Kirk and the Anglo-Catholic group which supported him were seventy-five years behind the times, since the church had co-operated with education reform in 1870, and by

312

Chapter 10

government plans to reorganize education, including church schools, whereas Kirk held out for a distinctive ethos for all Anglican church schools. If he had not died when he did, Temple would certainly have been the most important figure of the new World Council of Churches, having been elected chair of the central committee of the provisional Council in 1938. Adrian Hastings sums up his contribution to ecumenism in the 1930s: ‘He also became the unchallenged leader of the international ecumenical movement.’17 Temple’s deep commitment to ecumenism meant he was much involved in the plans for the united Church of South India, which he wished to recognize as being in full communion with the Anglican Communion. Sadly, as with church schools, the issue of church unity involved Temple in much controversy, being fiercely denounced by many Anglo-Catholics as betraying Anglican principles. Both Kirk and Gregory Dix, whose work is described in the next chapter, were bitter opponents, although Temple’s warm and generous personality allowed him to maintain relationships with both.18 Temple had always been overweight, suffering badly from gout throughout his adult life, but he became unable to work in the autumn of 1944; after spending several weeks resting, his condition worsened, and he died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism on 24 October 1944, when he was only sixty-three.19 He was seen as one of the great wartime leaders of church and nation, and the Second World War was still far from over when he died. The extent of Temple’s influence is shown by the fact that immediately after his death the US President Roosevelt sent a telegram to King George VI, writing that ‘as an ardent advocate of international co-operation based on Christian principles, he exercised profound influence throughout the world’.20 There were many such tributes, and no other theologian had remotely such significance. When I gave a lecture on the centenary of Temple’s birth in Canterbury Cathedral in 1981 about Temple the social thinker and campaigner, there were many who had known him, including some he had ordained, who spoke to me, with tears

1944 this could not be undone. Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, p. 572. Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 418–421, on the effects of the 1944 Education Act; he is more sympathetic to Kirk’s position. 17 Hastings, ‘Temple, William’. Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 302–307, on Temple’s ecumenical work from the 1927 Lausanne Faith and Order conference until his death. 18 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, chapter 31, ‘The Church of South India’, pp. 586–611, describes the fierce controversy. 19 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 399. 20 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, p. 627.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

313

in their eyes, of his loss and what it meant to them. It was the end of an era in Anglican theology, as much as in church life. 3

Edward Caird and William Temple

The greatest philosophical influence on William Temple from among his contemporaries was undoubtedly Edward Caird, whose metaphysics needs to be mentioned briefly. Edward Caird was a pupil of T. H. Green, but he was also greatly influenced by his brother John, fifteen years his senior and a minister in the Church of Scotland.21 John admired John McLeod Campbell, who has been mentioned in an earlier chapter in relation to F. D. Maurice.22 Edward studied intermittently at the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews, coming to Oxford only when he was twenty-five. He became a Fellow of Balliol, moved to Glasgow University in 1866 as Professor of Moral Philosophy where his brother was already Professor of Theology, became Principal of the University in 1873, and finally returned to Oxford as Master of Balliol in 1893.23 He had been in post for nearly a decade when Temple first met him. Caird’s impact on students was enormous, inspiring the young Temple and giving him a framework to articulate both his Christianity and his social ideals. Temple’s father died in 1902, aged eighty-one; while Caird was nearly seventy when Temple graduated in 1904, he was in some sense a father figure to him, with his philosophy creating certain parameters which deeply shaped Temple’s thought.24 What was Caird’s understanding of the relationship of Idealism to religious belief? He followed Green in positing a ‘higher self’ which is given by ‘the civil and social organization of life’, and saw this higher self as part of a greater social unity, or common life, which frees us from our selfishness and creates ‘the birth of the true self’.25 ‘The freedom that struggles against social necessity must 21

Hinchliff, God and History, chapter 6, ‘Cut Loose from History: British Idealism and the Science of Religion’, pp. 122–149, describes Edward Caird’s philosophy of religion. S. M. den Otter, ‘Caird, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Colin Tyler, ‘British Idealists’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 22 See p. 257. 23 W. J. Mander, British Idealism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 160, on Caird’s view of Green: ‘brotherly sympathy and inspiring example’. However, Caird criticized the Kantian agnosticism in Green. Edward Caird, ‘Professor Green’s Last Work’, Mind 8 (1883), pp. 544–561, cited in Mander, British Idealism, p. 127. 24 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, pp. 39–42. 25 Edward Caird, Ethical Philosophy (Glasgow: James Macelhose, 1886), p. 24. Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 2 vols (Glasgow: James Macelhose, 1893), Vol. 2, p. 155, quoted in W. J. Mander, Idealist Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 212–213. Dorrien,

314

Chapter 10

ultimately discover that it is only in the social organism that the individual can be absolutely free.’26 Temple’s whole life as a theologian was spent in working out the implications of what freedom, the individual and the individual’s relationship to society might mean. Caird’s metaphysics were not adopted entirely by Temple, but it had a strong influence on his thought, which remained until in later life he encountered the work of Alfred North Whitehead. As we shall see later in this chapter, the philosopher A. E. Taylor criticized Temple severely in a book review, arguing that Temple was insufficiently aware of the implications for Christian orthodoxy of his adoption of this neo-Hegelianism. This blend of theology and Idealism also worried Michael Ramsey, and his comments are described below. Caird was a student of Kant and believed that there was ultimately an identity of fact and value because of Idealism, arguing that his interpretation of Kant corrected the division between intellectual and moral vision (so central for Kant), thus making Kant far more Hegelian than he was.27 ‘Caird’s primary purpose was to demonstrate that, notwithstanding Kant’s reputation for promoting dualism, the Kantian system was premised on a deep organic unity. Caird interpreted Kant freely, for he was convinced that Kant did not fully understand how consistently organic his own philosophical system actually was.’28 Caird saw Hegel as grasping the truth of Christianity and felt that Hegel’s doctrine of affirmation through negation was the essential Christian message; he was far more positive about Hegel than about Kant, although he dissented from Hegel’s understanding of the natural sciences.29 This interpenetration of fact and value led on to another part of Caird’s thought: that in the individual and the species there is a process of development from finite and partial to infinite and complete, and in this process of moral and intellectual experience ‘selfhood’ is realized, which is true both for the individual Kantian Reason, p. 387, on Caird’s attitude to Hegel. Hegel gave the ‘essential meaning’ of Christ’s teaching. Edward Caird, Hegel (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883), p. 218. 26 Edward Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 2 vols (Glasgow: James Macel­ hose, 1889), Vol. 2, p. 561, quoted in Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 239. David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 7, on the religious impact of Caird; p. 105 on Caird’s belief in ‘ethical socialism’; and p. 137 on the vocation of patriotism. Caird strongly opposed the South African War of 1899–1902. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 48, on the likelihood that Temple heard Caird preach in Balliol College chapel. 27 Mander, Idealist Ethics, pp. 54–55. Mander, British Idealism, p. 68, on Caird’s dismissal of Locke’s philosophy as ending in a series of sensations that are unrelated to one another. 28 Den Otter, ‘Caird, Edward’. 29 Mander, British Idealism, pp. 45–46, on Caird’s promotion of Hegel as a Christian philo­sopher.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

315

and the world. Reflecting on this process, Caird subsumed the usual distinction of inner and outer experience into a belief that experience as a whole has a deeper coherence, which again became a theme in Temple’s writings, especially Mens Creatrix.30 With his brother John (now Principal of Glasgow University), Caird developed his interest in the history of religions, trying to find an objective basis for the study of religious ideas, with both brothers assuming that all religions expressed the same basic universal religious consciousness, although Christianity was the highest form of all religion.31 By the time of his return to Balliol as Master, Edward had established his reputation as a leading Idealist and published a two-volume work, The Evolution of Religion, in the same year that he came back to Oxford. The two brothers also helped establish the prestigious Gifford Lectures on the philosophy of religion at four Scottish universities in 1887.32 Caird’s Evolution itself started life as Gifford Lectures, addressing those who were alienated from the dogmatic system of belief but who accepted that their spiritual life rested on Christian teaching.33 He employed his theory of development, or evolution, seeing religious phenomena as ‘successive stages in one process of development’, which was not an argument for the principle of historical development in the study of religions, but rather the expansion of what he called ‘the idea of religion’.34 His understanding of religion saw religion as an imminent, spiritual organism, and the Church’s interpretation of Christ was an example of this search for truth, with Caird rejecting strongly the idea of a simple ‘return to the Gospels’.35 Peter Hinchcliff observes that it is difficult to assess just how orthodox Caird was, since he was a deeply reserved person, who believed strongly in the action of God in history and also argued for a demanding personal and social morality. How this related to the existing church was, however, unclear, since Caird united the ‘Christ of Christian tradition’ with ‘a purely metaphysical Christ’, and it likewise remained unclear how this related either to the Jesus of the New Testament or to the life of the churches in

30 31 32 33 34 35

Mander, Idealist Ethics, p. 55. Boucher and Vincent, British Idealism, p. 49. Hinchliff, God and History, pp. 134–135. These Gifford lectures continue today: see https://www.giffordlectures.org/. Hinchliff, God and History, p. 138, quoting Caird, Evolution of Religion, Vol. 1, p. viii. Hinchliff, God and History, pp. 140–141, quoting Caird, Evolution of Religion, Vol. 1, pp. 40–42. Mander, British Idealism, pp. 161–166, on Caird’s understanding of evolution. Hinchliff, God and History, pp. 143–147, on Caird’s 1896 address ‘Christianity and the Historical Christ’, given to the Oxford Society of Historical Theology. Mander, British Idealism, pp. 166–169, on the nature of time and eternity, and the problem of evil in Caird.

316

Chapter 10

Caird’s day.36 ‘He was also much interested in the resonance between Hegelian principles and Christianity, reading the Hegelian language of self-realization as essentially that of St Paul and St Augustine: the individual must relinquish an isolated life in order to live a spiritual or universal one.’37 Certainly, there was an influence here on Temple, since his entirely orthodox Christology was highly metaphysical, drawing on the Johannine portrayal of Christ as Logos. Caird never wrote a work on ethics and his views must be read indirectly through his teaching of moral philosophy and that teaching’s impact on his students, and secondly through his reviews of others.38 He began with the concept of freedom, which he denied was central to Greek philosophy since freedom in that system was simply a privilege which the law gave to some and not to others. There was no concept of universal human nature in general, which only arrived with the Christian belief that all people are created equal before God. Freedom becomes important because everyone has a moral destiny to fulfil, and this freedom today must be seen in relation to society. ‘The freedom that struggles against social necessity, must ultimately discover that it is only in the social organism that the individual can be truly free.’39 Caird also felt, unlike Kant, that reason could generate a goal which was not purely formal, because it is ‘the transition from the individual to the social self-consciousness’.40 The emphasis is on the true universality of a community to which we subordinate our individuality, which again was deeply influential on Temple, as will be shown below.41 Caird’s understanding of metaphysics lies behind Temple’s desire to relate human consciousness to the constitution of reality.42 The expression of consciousness realizes selfhood, which both unites fact and value, and achieves true freedom, in co-operation with the divine Spirit in creation. How this is then worked out in history remained a profound question for Temple, who sought to provide a Christian apologetic while remaining completely orthodox.

36 37 38 39

Hinchliff, God and History, pp. 148–149. Den Otter, ‘Caird, Edward’. Mander, British Idealism, p. 209. Caird, Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Vol. 2, p. 561, quoted in Mander, British Idealism, p. 212. 40 Caird, Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Vol. 2, p. 238. 41 Mander, British Idealism, p. 217. 42 Spencer, Archbishop William Temple, p. 50.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

4

317

The Faith and Modern Thought

Any assessment of Temple’s ethics, or moral theology, must analyse the development of his thought, which covered two periods. The first began with his early work from 1904, when he was at Queen’s, through his earliest published lectures The Faith and Modern Thought (1910), to the publication of Mens Creatrix in 1917 and Christus Veritas in 1924, both of which works are deeply Idealist. The second period includes Nature, Man and God, in 1934, and then the rather fragmented final decade of his life, which is much less unified, because the theological climate was changing dramatically in the 1930s, while Temple was weighed down with the burden of being an archbishop and had little time to respond to changes in philosophy and theology. It is important to note that Temple is unusual among those described in this book for three reasons. First, he was trained as a philosopher, especially but not entirely in Plato and Aristotle, and he used his time as a young lecturer in philosophy at Oxford to read widely in Idealism, inspired by his mentor, Edward Caird, thus representing a strand of Anglican moral theology which is uncommon in this book (aside from Joseph Butler), especially the deep knowledge of Platonism.43 The question is how much Temple’s thought was always shaped by Idealism, since most Anglican moral theologians in this book were deeply aware of the philosophical context but did not begin with philosophy, whereas Butler and Temple are the great exceptions. Secondly, Temple was again like Butler in that both saw their preaching, writing and talks as part of a ministry to the well-off and well-educated. Bob Tennant notes that Butler ‘lived in an intensely politicized, hard-line Whig environment’, mentioning the politicians whom he would have interacted with, such as Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls.44 Temple almost certainly considered a political career when he graduated from Balliol in 1904 and would have known many students from well-off families, although he was not constrained by his connections with those who, like himself, came from a privileged background, but rather saw this as part of the increasing sense which he held of having a ministry to church and nation, which came to its climax in the period 1929–1944.45 Thus, both Butler and Temple felt it was their vocation to make Christianity plausible and attractive to their milieu. 43 William D. Geoghegan, Platonism in Recent Religious Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), on Temple’s use of Plato. 44 Bob Tennant, Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 40–41. 45 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, pp. 63–64.

318

Chapter 10

Thirdly, Temple represented the last expression of Idealism among Anglican theologians, although space does not permit a consideration of the other outstanding Christian Idealist philosopher in this period, A. E. Taylor.46 Taylor spent his whole life as an academic; he was renowned for his learning, scholarship and consistent adherence to Idealism throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He never wavered from his commitment to scholarship on Plato, and his careful expression of Idealist philosophy, with one of his research assistants in the 1930s being Donald MacKinnon, who was deeply influenced by him.47 Temple, on the other hand, saw his vocation as to be ordained and to become a church leader, while writing a philosophically based theology which could appeal to the intellectual culture of his day, but the weakness of this strategy lay in him not being able to deliver fully the combination of theology and philosophy which he desired. Taylor wrote a deeply penetrating review of Temple’s first book, Mens Creatrix, which was not hostile but raised many issues, especially concerning Temple’s doctrine of the ‘social self’ in relationship to moral obligation, which was a central feature of Idealist philosophy.48 As a Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, and lecturer in philosophy, when he was in his twenties, Temple wrote about the nature of value, personality and mind, seeing all these concepts as embodied in history, which for him had an overarching purpose. His ambition was to provide a bridge between philosophy and theology, beginning with the mind and ending with its fulfilment in Christ. The Faith and Modern Thought was a small book of six lectures given to the Christian Union at London University in 1909, published the following year.49 In it, Temple appealed to religious experience, which he justified by the Idealist belief that ‘the Universe turns out to be a rational whole’, while there is ‘a kinship between the mind of man and the Universe he lives in’, where questions about the nature of goodness, and its very existence, are answered by the claim that ‘there should be a real Purpose in the world’.50 This implies ‘a real Will behind the world’, which correlates with the claim of religious experience, and here Temple appeals to Coleridge’s 1832 poem ‘Know thyself’

46

Donald MacKinnon, rev. Mark J. Schofield, ‘Taylor, Alfred Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 47 Andrew Bowyer, Donald MacKinnon’ s Theology: To Perceive Tragedy without Loss of Hope (London: T&T Clark, 2019), pp. 45–54, describes the influence of Taylor on MacKinnon, despite MacKinnon’s reservations about aspects of Taylor’s Idealism. 48 Taylor’s comments are discussed later in this chapter, when Mens Creatrix is analysed. 49 William Temple, The Faith and Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1910). 50 Temple, The Faith, pp. 11–17.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

319

(Gnôthi seauton), since religious faith is the search to ‘bring human will into harmony with the divine Will’.51 This leads on to the expression of the divine will by revelation in the person of Christ. ‘And so, both in His teaching and in His life, He is the climax of human ethics. For there is no morality beyond absolute devotion to the public good. That is the climax of morality; you cannot go further. He taught it and he practiced it.’52 Temple gives an exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, which is ‘pre-eminently the Gospel of Divine Immanence’, in which divine purpose is immanent and not God himself.53 He follows Abelard in seeing the atonement as the revelation of divine love but modifies it in a more objective fashion, ending his lectures with a discussion of the Spirit: And so, the Spirit is to be taken, not only as the guiding power of the world, but as the guiding power of the world as seen in Christ … But its full manifestation is in Christ alone; others have the Divine Spirit in their degree, but He alone is altogether God.54 Temple also contrasts those who reach ‘great moral heights’ without any conscious relation to Christ, with the love in the cross that takes away the sin of the world.55 5

The Nature of Personality

In 1915 Temple published further lectures, given at Oxford in 1910, entitled The Nature of Personality, which begins with the contemporary belief in materialism and agnosticism.56 It then argues against this belief, with Temple’s strategy being to use Idealism to establish a metaphysics which will justify both religious faith and a social morality. He begins with a series of concepts which he claims he can show are worthy of belief and respect, including: first, the social nature of a person, and ‘the nature of personality’; secondly, how this 51 Temple, The Faith, pp. 18–24. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Know Thyself’, in The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 415. 52 Temple, The Faith, p. 99. 53 Temple, The Faith, p. 107. 54 Temple, The Faith, p. 158. 55 Temple, The Faith, p. 158. 56 William Temple, The Nature of Personality (London: Macmillan, 1915). Rogerson, ‘William Temple as Philosopher’, p. 326, on Temple’s belief that eighteenth-century science contributed to seeing reality in materialistic terms.

320

Chapter 10

concept of a social personality is related intrinsically to rights and duties; and thirdly, personality’s attributes, which are freedom and the will. Temple then considers the flawed nature of personality, referring to the concept of original sin, and finally brings in the concepts of moral duty, then duty and our role and place in society, and lastly the nature of social purpose. Only then does Temple argue from ‘the nature of personality’, as a social reality in human history, up to the universe and divine personality, claiming that that divine personality must be ‘super-personal’ and Trinitarian.57 The whole argument turns around the categories of free will, moral obligation, purpose and self-realization. It is, one might say, a classic Idealist argument, but one made by a Christian philosopher who wanted to mount a Christian apologetic. It is therefore quite different from F. H. Bradley, whose religious views were not Christian, and different again from Green or Caird, whose views were (certainly in their own view) Christian but not orthodox. Temple posits the idea of a divine purpose working through a ‘multiplicity of finite personalities’ through which that almighty spirit realizes itself, over against the Idealist belief in knowledge, and a unified reality through which the absolute realizes itself.58 Temple’s argument can be given in more detail, quoting from The Nature of Personality: All the moral terms which go along with Personality depend not only upon continued existence but upon consciousness of continued existence. To hold a man morally responsible for his past actions (and this is certainly involved in Personality) is to presuppose that he can understand what is meant by saying he did them. A Person then must be conscious of continued identity and must take interest in the past and future as well as in the present.59 The immoral person is also rejected. Temple argues that he has no real self by which to guide his actions … we must say that he is not free at all; in his actions there is no real choice; there are no ‘living alternatives’; he does not review the various impulses and the suggestions they offer from the point of view of a life’s purpose and select accordingly; he acts automatically; the stimulus is given, and he responds.60 57 Padgett, Christian Philosophy, p. 103. 58 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 85; see also p. 82: ‘Many of the philosophic attempts to conceive the Absolute seem to me to fail through being based on an altogether false conception of Knowledge and its relation to Reality.’ 59 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 8. 60 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 45.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

321

Temple offers his definition of personality, which is determined by moral considerations: But taking this formal Freedom in conjunction with the interest in the past and future as well as in the present, we reach the two most prominent elements in our conception of Persons – character and purpose; or rather, we reach the conditions which make character and purpose possible.61 However, the moral self is always seen in relation to society, because ‘Duty is a term never applied strictly to the isolated individual’.62 Kantian ethics had a ‘surreptitious’ reference to the interests of society, as Temple claimed that ‘It is then our membership in society that makes us capable of morality; and it is consciousness of that membership that endows us with a moral sense.’63 He wrestles with the question of the moral character of the largest social group of which he is a part, which is the nation which is Britain. ‘What is this character? It is the product of a mass of tradition and sentiment which permeates all individual citizens.’64 He argues that personality is intrinsically social, which shows how much he was influenced by Caird and other Idealist philosophers: It is this which makes it so hard for many people to grasp the essentially social nature of human Personality; the society of which the individual is a member (a limb or organ) is not capable either of observation or definition by human faculties. But it is clear that a human being cut off from society is not fully human; that our ideals and temptations alike come largely from society; and that our significance and value are almost wholly derived from our relation to society.65 Temple concludes his argument by relating the concepts of purpose and personality. ‘Purpose is the highest and most distinctive mark of Personality; and Purpose involves morality, for we found that our social instincts would not allow real freedom or self-direction except in and through morality.’66 What

61 Temple, Nature of Personality, pp. 20–21, with reference to Moberly’s Atonement and Personality, pp. 216–223, where Moberly offers a definition of personality. Moberly focuses on the freedom of the will. Stuart, ‘Rationale for the Incarnation’, pp. 25, 144, on Temple’s understanding of the term ‘moral’. 62 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 51. 63 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 52. 64 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 55. 65 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 62. 66 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 71.

322

Chapter 10

then is the purpose of a person? ‘Moral worth is found in the will regarded in relation to society. But to will the good of other people is to love them.’67 Temple has reached the end of his argument, where love involves selfsacrifice, which is for him an act of self-realization as well.68 He moves to posit the existence of a spiritual being whose action is entirely marked by a purpose which is self-less, and this is the God of Christianity.69 Only God can be completely Personal; for only of God is it possible that He should be wholly self-determined. Other Beings might conceivably be utterly loving and care for the whole history of the world. But only the Creator can be utterly and absolutely free; for only to His Will is there no external circumstance.70 Temple refers back at this point to the opening chapter of The Faith and Modern Thought.71 He has constructed a cohesive argument about morality, personality and religious faith, which has served him as an apologetic, and proceeds in the final chapter to a more theological argument, quoting Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and other theologians on the Trinity. He argues for God’s personality being triune, and there is a revealing comment towards the end: ‘I have far more respect for the great Hegelian argument, except that it speaks too exclusively in terms of thought and knowledge, and consequently becomes Pantheistic.’72 However, Temple at this point leaves Idealist (or Hegelian) thought behind, and the final chapter is skilful in holding together patristic thought on the nature of a person with contemporary thought about personality. He is well aware that for patristic theology consciousness is not fundamental in understanding Christ’s nature, whereas in philosophical thought at the time when Temple was writing these lectures it was a central concept. His theological skill allows him to make the transition from a philosophical to a theological argument with finesse. ‘Augustine is also most emphatic that the three Persons are in no sense parts of a Godhead which is their sum total; the Deity in his conception is certainly not a society.’73

67 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 74, citing F. H. Bradley, ‘On the Ambiguity of Pragmatism’, Mind n.s. 17.66 (1908), pp. 226–237, specifically p. 230. 68 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 77. 69 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 79. 70 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 81. 71 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 88. 72 Temple, Nature of Personality, pp. 116–117. 73 Temple, Nature of Personality, p. 103.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

323

One final observation, following on from this point, is that at no time does Temple speculate, as Gore did in all his writings, on the moral influence which was achieved by Christ’s personality and character.74 He is concerned instead with whether personality and purpose are the fundamental features of reality, rather than knowledge and a cosmic unity which is monist, such as the absolute. Following on from this argument, which establishes the ontological reality of purpose and personality, he shows that Christ can be the Son of God and the second person of the Trinity, which takes him back to patristic thought on the Trinitarian concepts of ousia and hypostasis.75 If that is the case, then Temple is sure that Christ will exhibit a moral personality which is loving and redemptive in its purpose, differing from Gore in not giving instances of Christ’s character. If moral purpose is the ultimate ontological reality, and this purpose is shown in a God who is Trinity, and Christ is the second person of the Trinity, then of course his being will exhibit a moral purpose, which is Love – very much a philosopher’s argument. Instances of that purpose as shown in verses from the Gospels are not necessary, because we believe by faith that Christ was entirely loving in his will and purpose. 6

Mens Creatrix

In 1917 Temple’s first major book appeared, entitled Mens Creatrix (the English translation would be The Creative Mind). In it, he described his theology as a ‘Christocentric metaphysics’. His argument was based on epistemology, asking how the mind relates to its objects. Temple’s ‘treatment of epistemology is a basic part of his philosophy of religion’.76 It features in both his argument for theism and his understanding of religious experience, so Temple discusses imagination, judgement and mathematics, and then moves through epistemology to the heartland of Idealism, in a chapter on ‘Time, Value and the Absolute’.77 He argues for a coherence understanding of truth where ‘we have a conception of the world as a supra-temporal whole which “somehow” contains all the facts and values actualised in all history’.78 Ramsey comments that 74 Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for 1891 (London: John Murray, 1891), p. 39. 75 Temple, Nature of Personality, pp. 114–115. Temple appeals to Hastings Rashdall here. 76 Thomas, William Temple’s Philosophy of Religion, p. 40. 77 William Temple, Mens Creatrix (London: Macmillan, 1917), chapter 9, pp. 87–90. Stuart, ‘Rationale for the Incarnation’, p. 42. 78 Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 87. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England, p. 33, on the early Temple’s view of history as seeing the nation as a divine creation, with a

324

Chapter 10

Temple began with the circumference and worked towards the centre, building bridges from Idealism to Christian orthodoxy.79 Temple argues that as the universe ‘comes to focus in the various centres of consciousness it realizes its own value’.80 This is close to Caird’s reading of Kant and Hegel, and like Caird his pupil Temple posits a mind which appreciates the whole and its value, which is creative mind or will, and hence gives the book its title, Mens Creatrix. He makes his final move, saying that this mind is for philosophy ‘the adequate symbolic interpretation of this Infinite and Eternal – “the express image of His Person” – by contemplation of which the human mind may be rapt into the joy for which the world was made’.81 Temple then moves through three chapters on art and tragedy, and discusses whether the past can be redeemed. ‘The value … of any event in time is not fixed until the series of which it is a member is over, perhaps, therefore, not to all eternity.’ Thus, past events may be revalued because they ‘may become the occasions of some spiritual state of great value, which could not have been reached without them’.82 Finally, he comes to what the central concern of this book, Part iii, ‘Conduct’, which has chapters on will, purpose, moral good and moral criterion.83 ‘The isolated individual may be wise or foolish, he cannot be moral or immoral.’84 At this point Temple places this discussion in the context of ‘the Social Order’. All goodness is social. The reaction to the book was positive, although it was published while Temple was entirely immersed in his work first in a parish and then at Westminster Abbey, and the First World War was at its height, which was a quite different climate from the peaceful pre-1914 world when he had lectured at Oxford on philosophy. Two reviews will be discussed as revealing aspects of

79 80 81 82

83 84

corporate personality. Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 218: ‘the course of history will … consist in the conversion of nations, the building of the Christian state, and the incorporation of the Christian States within the fellowship of the Christian Church’. Stephen Spencer, ‘History and Society in William Temple’s Thought’, Studies in Christian Ethics 5.2 (1992), pp. 61–73, showing how Temple abandoned this view by the end of his life. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 147–148. Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 88. Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 90. Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 173. Patrick Sherry discusses the passage in ‘Redeeming the Past’, Religious Studies 34 (1998), pp. 165–175. Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 221–222, also takes up this theme, using Dante’s Paradiso xvii.43–45, where Dante’s life of misery is seen in retrospect to be a dulce armonia da organo – a ‘sweet harmony’ in the eyes of God. Stuart, ‘Rationale for the Incarnation’, p. 25. Temple, Mens Creatrix, Part iii, ‘Conduct’, pp. 165–254. Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 182. Rogerson, ‘William Temple as Philosopher’, p. 327.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

325

Temple’s thought: those by Eliot and Taylor.85 T. S. Eliot wrote one of his first reviews on Mens Creatrix, because he had been studying Bradley’s metaphysics for an Oxford D.Phil., and he focused on Temple’s relationship to Bradley: He does not demonstrate that any form of philosophy leads to Christianity; he takes a particular type, absolute idealism, and shows that the idealistic absolute is a failure unless it can be identified with a personal Deity. Influenced by Mr. Bradley, he yet rejects his Absolute as unmoral and unmeaning. Similarly, he declares that the work of art points to ‘a perfect grasp of the entire Universe in all its extent of space and time by an Eternal Mind’ to whom the whole history of the society of finite minds is present in the ‘moment eternal’ of perfect intuition.86 It was a perceptive review which showed how Idealist Temple was, in the same way as Webb had shown how Idealist Moberly was; in both cases the invitation was whether Christianity had its own integrity or would be swallowed up by this metaphysic. The second review was much longer, published in the distinguished philosophical journal Mind, and was by a well-established philosopher, A. E. Taylor. Temple’s comments on the nature of moral obligation provoked Taylor’s wrath, and his critique argued against Temple’s dependence on Idealism. ‘For Mr. Temple like all Anglo-Hegelians, is anxious to exalt the “State” at the cost of the individual and follows the usual line of insisting that all obligation is social obligation.’87 Taylor also commented that Temple further argued that, if we were the only conscious being in existence, we would have no duties to ourselves. Duty cannot apply to the isolated individual.88 Taylor rebutted this in strong terms: The one real argument is that it is only by life as members of a community that we learn to recognise obligations. This is true, and as against any one foolish enough to suggest that society has nothing to do with the moral life would be an adequate retort. But what persons like myself deny is not that society is an indispensable instrument for the acquisition of moral personality. We deny that all the obligations recognised in an 85 Emmett, ‘The Philosopher’, p. 523, describes it as ‘curiously disjointed’. 86 T. S. Eliot, ‘Mens Creatrix – A Review’, International Journal of Ethics 27.4 (1917), pp. 542–543, quoting Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 126. 87 A. E. Taylor, ‘Review of William Temple, Mens Creatrix’, Mind 27.106 (1918), pp. 208–234 (quote from p. 224). 88 Temple, Mens Creatrix, p. 182. Taylor, ‘Review’, p. 224.

326

Chapter 10

adequate morality are obligations to ‘society’ or to members of it other than ourselves. Against us, the eloquence displayed by Hegelian moralists when they dwell on social education as the great instrument in moralising the individual is simply irrelevant.89 He followed this up with even more critical comments: Mr. Temple, like the majority of the school with which he has so much sympathy, is led by his arbitrary refusal to admit any but ‘social duties’ to laying down the practical rule that one should ‘make the world a better place, even if you have to do dirty work in the process’ (p. 193). The context shows that the ‘dirty work’ means what one knows to be sin. The counsel is to make the world better by doing known wrong. … This was the advice given by that eminent divine Satan to Our Lord and comes badly from a professed Christian theologian. Do we ever make the world ‘better’ by stooping to deliberate moral degradation? Let me suppose an example of a kind discussed by casuists and by no means unknown in actual life. A decent Christian wife has to choose between making herself a partner in the lewd pleasures of her husband and breaking up the family life. If a woman placed in this distressing dilemma applied to Mr. Temple, as an authorised minister of the Church, for direction, is he sure that he would be doing right in giving the advice indicated by the formula I have quoted?90 7

Christus Veritas

Temple never replied publicly to Taylor, and indeed in 1924 a second volume appeared, Christus Veritas, which stood in exactly the same line of thinking.91 Dorothy Emmett observes that this was not an argument from natural theology because, unlike the earlier book, this one began with ‘the presupposition of faith in God as holy and righteous Will’.92 It therefore takes as its starting point an acceptance of the Christian faith, and only then in the light of this faith moves to look at the facts of experience, including the nature of value. 89 Taylor, ‘Review’, p. 225. 90 Taylor, ‘Review’, p. 226. 91 Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 232–235, on Temple’s apologetics in the period 1910–1924: ‘In the twenties Temple was trying to show that the world’s “immanent principle” was signally manifested in Jesus Christ.’ Hastings compares Mens Creatrix to G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, published in 1925; he prefers Chesterton. 92 Emmett, ‘The Philosopher’, pp. 523–525.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

327

So Temple argues that this faith is not a blind leap that is irrational, but is supported by a metaphysics drawn from Caird, Bernard Bosanquet and Josiah Royce. Secondly it is supported by religious experience and thirdly it is upheld by the ‘testimony of Christian tradition’.93 Temple also knew of Bosanquet’s belief in the ‘Commonwealth of Value’, which was a world made up of a society of finite minds each finding its purpose in realizing the different facets of value and ‘made possible by the informing order of the system as a whole’. He argued that this metaphysical absolutism led in the end to ‘an immanent and impersonal order, which is the logical ground of values realized in finite centres of experience’. Temple knew he had to go beyond this, and he extrapolated from the purposive mind found in moral and aesthetic experience within the universe, postulating instead a will which realizes good as its ultimate purpose, which he identified as the ‘Transcendent God of Religion’.94 Unlike Mens Creatrix, in Christus Veritas Temple was concerned with Christo­logy, and he worked through ‘the appearance of value’ and ‘religious experience’ to ‘the nature of man’ in relation to God. It was only after the first hundred pages that he turned to Christology, the Spirit and the implications for humanity, worship and sacraments. The pattern, however, followed Mens Creatrix, even though the theological content was far more extensive and treated in great depth. Again, he moved from matter, life and the great development of the emergence of mind, on to value and the spiritual, and so to the incarnation. Reality, for Temple, included both the spiritual as well as the material, and he argued that the spiritual was no less real than the material simply because it could not be quantified in the same way as material realities could be quantified. For Temple, this means that ‘existence’ and ‘value’ are both substantive, and value is not merely adjectival … The bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ in the sense that they were indwelt (instantiated) with a higher value (the nature of Christ) and as such were transvalued or transubstantiated without the necessity for any removal of the substance of the elements and their replacement with another substance.95 93 A. M. McBriar, ‘Bosanquet, Bernard’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 94 Emmett, ‘The Philosopher’, pp. 524–527. See also Stuart, ‘Rationale for the Incarnation’, p. 25 on Emmett’s evaluation of Temple’s apologetic. 95 Brian Douglas, ‘Transubstantiation: Rethinking by Anglicans?’, New Blackfriars 93.1046 (2012), pp. 433–435, examines Temple, Christus Veritas pp. 13–19, on the concept of value. The anonymous review of Christus Veritas in the Journal of Theological Studies 26.103 (1925), pp. 295–298, was very hostile to Temple’s account of value and religious experience.

328

Chapter 10

Ramsey explains that ‘Temple’s thought is intensely Johannine’, with much on how divine governance works in the processes of nature and history. He is, however, critical of Temple’s Hegelianism, in terms of both the suffering of God (‘patri-passianism’) and the way in which the incarnation enriched the life of God, showing yet again that Temple did not have a straightforward acceptance of his blend of Idealism and theology.96 Temple elaborated social principles in Christus Veritas that are reminiscent of F. D. Maurice’s theology, including liberty, membership, service and sacrifice, and these principles recurred throughout his remaining writings, culminating in Christianity and Social Order. Liberty is related to the ‘sacredness of personality’, and the love of God the Father for his children, which is never a coercive relationship but one that wants their flourishing. Membership (in language reminiscent of Maurice) is related to the fact that we are members of one family, which is the human race. Service is the logical implication of having freedom when one is also part of a fellowship, and the greatest way to use liberty is in service of that fellowship. Finally there is sacrifice, related to Christ’s victory of love. These principles gave theological weight to Temple’s friend Tawney’s campaign to reform economic life, so that industry could serve the interests of the whole of society. Both Tawney and Temple felt that the period 1918–1925 before the General Strike was a time when there could be both reform of church governance (the 1920 Enabling Act), allowing Christians to participate in the community of the church, and the restructuring of industry, which would end the ruthless economic struggle between capital and labour which Temple felt caused such damage to human personality. Here we see Temple using his theology to lay out a blueprint for reform in the spirit of F. D. Maurice, in alliance with friends like Tawney.97 There were also many short articles and collections of sermons at this time. All reflect the Idealist theologian Temple had become, showing that he was deeply under the sway of Edward Caird, but with his own independence of thought, and with a striking consistency during the period 1904–1924. By the time he published his last and greatest work of theology in 1934 his thinking had changed.

96 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 148–152. 97 Marsden, ‘William Temple’, p. 223, has an extensive discussion of these principles. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London George Bell, 1921). Padgett, Christian Philosophy, pp. 174–179.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

8

329

Nature, Man and God

In 1934 Temple published his Gifford Lectures, given in Glasgow from 1932 to 1934, entitled Nature, Man and God. These lectures reflected a much less Idealist approach, now influenced by Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead was the son of an Anglican clergyman. He became the leading mathematician of his generation and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, when he graduated in 1884, co-authoring Principia Mathematica with his pupil Bertrand Russell in three volumes from 1910 to 1913. After beginning this project, Whitehead left Cambridge in 1910, aged forty-nine, to become a professor of science at Imperial College, London. However, in 1924, at the age of sixty-three, he was invited to become Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, on the strength of his 1920 book, The Concept of Nature. His lectures at Harvard were published in 1929 as Process and Reality, and had a great influence on philosophy and process theology in the United States.98 It was Process and Reality which so influenced Temple and took him decisively away from Idealism. It is extraordinary that at the same time as he became Archbishop of York in 1929 he mastered Whitehead’s philosophy and presented a Christian account of it. Whitehead was a theist, with God and the world necessary to each other, and God’s primordial nature was the ‘total potentiality of all existing entities at the moment of their actualization’. He claimed that each self-actualizing entity has potentiality by participating in God’s primordial nature. God’s consequent nature is the accumulated actualization of the choices these entities have made.99 The philosophers who had influenced Temple in his twenties, including Bradley and Bosanquet, were not Christian either; Edward Caird, who was his greatest influence, could perhaps be called a Christian. Temple’s aim was to take Whitehead’s philosophy as an answer to both Cartesianism and empiricism and show that it was not only compatible with Christianity but that Whitehead’s insights were best expressed as a Christian metaphysic. In this 98

Lewis Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics 1925–1949 (Albany: State University of New York, 1985). Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929). Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 99 Thomas, William Temple’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 146–147, is critical of Nature, Man and God for a ‘confusion of purpose’ in expounding natural and revealed theology. Dorrien, Kantian Reason, pp. 430–431; pp. 428–438, on Temple and Whitehead, gives a clear account of how Whitehead influenced Temple away from Idealism; pp. 415–428 is an account of Temple’s Idealist period.

330

Chapter 10

he was following Augustine, who presented Neoplatonism as finding its fullest expression in Christianity. Temple rejected Descartes’s method of universal doubt as invalid and pernicious, because Descartes offers a psychological reassurance rather than a logical or epistemological one.100 He saw Cartesianism as the philosophical counterpart of Luther’s stand against the papacy, when he remarked Hier steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders (‘Here I stand and can do nothing else’).101 Both involve the collapse of the old tradition of epistemology in philosophy and religious authority in Christianity, and both involve a turning to the self, with a self-centredness which the old tradition had strongly denied: Luther would only accept the voice of God, or the authority of conscience, as he himself had heard it; Descartes would only accept what his mind knew.102 Furthermore, Descartes not only turned philosophy into a study of the mind on its own, but he also gave rise to a belief in the necessity of clear and distinct ideas as the only secure knowledge. Temple extended his rejection of Descartes into a wide-ranging discussion of empiricism, including Locke and Hume, since they all demanded clear and distinct ideas as the basis of their epistemology.103 He turned instead to Kant, who ‘interrogates the conditions of experience in general to ascertain the principles presupposed in its possibility’.104 This is the method Temple followed, reflecting on the experience of moral goodness, and the nature of religious experience. While he did not repudiate the Reformation period with its emphasis on ‘the autonomy of the individual conscience, the integrity of the individual mind’, he sought a resolution through a renewed understanding of authority, ‘and in the appreciation of man’s ethical problem as primarily one of conversion and vocation’.105 Temple the philosopher sought an answer to the issue of Cartesianism by claiming that ‘the restoration of unity to man’s experience depends mainly on securing at once the supremacy of Religion among human interests, and the true spirituality of Religion both in itself and in the mode of its supremacy’.106 This was no longer the Idealism of Caird, Royce, Bradley and Bosanquet, but the organic philosophy of Whitehead. Whitehead argued in a novel and distinctive manner. Temple found a series of principles congenial, which were that the fundamental units of reality were 100 Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 63–68. 101 Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 62–63. 102 Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 75–76. 103 Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 70. 104 Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 74. 105 Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 80–81. Padgett, Christian Philosophy, pp. 165–169. 106 Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 81.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

331

entities that realize value and pass out of existence, being succeeded by similar entities. These entities are experiencing subjects, which are complex, interdependent and active, and such entities grasp another entity as an object of experience by what Temple called ‘prehension’. New entities are always being created, and there are new patterns among things, so entities are therefore experiencing subjects, which feel their way into being, with reality being a constant process of change and emergence, where the actions and reactions of physical entities could be described as ‘experience’. Secondly, consciousness always presupposes experience, although it is unclear whether Temple took this as a historical or logical presupposition, or both, where consciousness is the ‘special element’ in the subjective feelings of an entity or an agent. He did not take a position on Whitehead’s view that the physical structure of reality was in some form organic, but he certainly felt that it preceded consciousness.107 Gary Dorrien comments perceptively: Consciousness, in its earliest forms, is an awareness of feeling within an environment and a responsive feeling thereby evoked. Temple marvelled at the difference between this picture and the idealism in which he was trained, which speculated about how the mind passed from its ideas to an external world. In the Whiteheadian scheme, the mind arose and moved through its apprehension of an actual world through feelings that the world evoked.108 Temple’s treatment of morality and obligation differed at this point from Whitehead, because Temple held that personality is always transcendent in relation to process, and value or good is present in absolute form only in personal relationships.109 ‘The principle of morality is that we should behave as Persons who are members of a Society of Persons – a society into which Personality is itself a valid claim of entrance.’110 If the ground of the universe in its emergent process is personal love, which both created us and maintains us in being, then this alone can give us the ability to love in a way we now lack.111 Temple thus looked to conversion and vocation as the solution to the practical problems of ethics, writing that ‘In the life of personal devotion to God, known as Righteous Love, the answer to problems of conduct otherwise 107 Dorrien, Kantian Reason, p. 432. Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 68, 112. Temple cites this phrase in Nature, Man and God, p. 490. 108 Dorrien, Kantian Reason, p. 433. 109 Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 168, 296. 110 Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 191. 111 Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 196.

332

Chapter 10

unanswerable may be found.’112 So he argued for the ‘moral and religious conditions of eternal life’, and for ‘the sacramental universe’.113 Christus Veritas was a vast book of over five hundred pages, covering philosophy, science, ethics, theology and spirituality. It undoubtedly remains Temple’s greatest achievement, ending the belief among its readers (which covered a wide section of educated Christians) that there were such things as propositional truths conveyed in revelation. Instead revelation was to be apprehended by discerning minds, in which all existence was revelatory of God, and this included the apprehension of moral goodness alongside the experience of redemption in the power of the Holy Spirit. Temple appeared ‘rounded, philosophical, self-confident, liberal in a Broad Church sense of the term, orthodox in a broad sense of the term, and quintessentially Anglican … it was a theology of manifestation and explanation, preoccupied with reconstructing a Christian worldview’.114 9

Reviews of Nature, Man and God

There were two significant responses to Nature, Man and God. One was from the personal Idealist philosopher of religion C. C. J. Webb, who had himself given the Gifford Lectures from 1918 to 1920 on God and Personality, where he sought to retain the idea of ‘personality in God’ rather than ‘the personality of God’.115 Webb was retired by 1934, but he reviewed Temple’s book in the journal Philosophy, in a lengthy and searching appraisal, for which Temple must have been grateful.116 Webb noted how much Temple had moved from his earlier Idealism, in terms which are worth quoting at length:

112 Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 407, p. 411. 113 These are the chapter headings of Lectures 18 and 19, in Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 452, 473. 114 Dorrien, Kantian Reason, p. 437. Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 151–152, on the ‘truth of revelation’, and Temple’s opposition to any concept of ‘revealed truths’. 115 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, p. 181. Webb wrote a history of theology, A Study of Religious Thought in England from 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), and a study of the Oxford Movement, Religious Thought in the Oxford Movement (London: SPCK, 1928), which introduced the idea of ‘Tractarian Moralism’, where obedience to the moral law is the preliminary condition of justification. Mark Chapman, ‘Webb, C. C. J.’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Thomas, William Temple’s Philosophy of History, pp. 8–10, on personal idealism. 116 C. C. J. Webb, review of Temple, Nature, Man and God, Philosophy 10.38 (1935), pp. 225–228.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

333

And by his readiness – which induces him even to disown the label of ‘Idealism,’ and to describe his own position as ‘dialectical realism,’ ‘closely akin to the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin’ – to insist on ‘the intimate unity of spirit and matter’ and to find in the material universe as conceived by evolutionary natural science not the consequent, effect, expression, or instrument, but (to use a phrase which is indeed Dr. Temple’s and not Bosanquet’s) the sacrament of spirit.117 Webb went on to note the opposition to Bosanquet, who had influenced Temple for so long, and noted that the two thinkers disagreed on the philosophy of history, and above all on Temple’s personalism.118 Webb felt that Temple did not do justice to Descartes’s Christian faith, and sometimes lapsed into ‘lack of thoroughness’ on the history of philosophy, but he was nevertheless deeply appreciative of Temple’s account of moral experience, and of his wrestling with the difficult problem of whether finitude entails the existence of moral evil, as Bosanquet had argued. ‘Dr. Temple’s own words are that the Fall was not “utterly necessary”, but “too probable not to happen”, so that “sin falls within the divine purpose”.’119 The question of whether evil was in any sense necessary was always an issue on which critics of Temple had questioned him, and Webb was right to emphasize how Temple responded to this charge.120 Above all, Webb was delighted in the way Temple had ‘no hesitation in affording a generous welcome to all intimations of God, from whatever source immediately derived, as, although unequally mixed with that human error from perversion whereby none is guaranteed to be immune, are yet alike in their ultimate origin divine’.121 A much more hostile response came from Kenneth Kirk, the subject of the next chapter. In 1936 Kirk, who was almost the same age as Temple but who had remained a don at Oxford until he became a bishop in 1937, published a series of lectures called The Crisis of Christian Rationalism, in which he saw Christian rationalism as a belief that was close to absolutism or monism, expressed as a doctrine of divine immanence or even pantheism, and that was anticipated

117 Webb, review of Nature, Man and God, p. 226. 118 Padgett, Christian Personality, pp. 199–239, evaluates Temple’s philosophy of history. 119 Webb, review of Nature, Man and God, p. 227. Stuart, ‘Rationale for the Incarnation’, p. 49. 120 Ramsey, From Gore to Temple, pp. 58–59, pp. 149–150, questions Temple’s understanding of finitude and evil. So do Rogerson, ‘William Temple as Philosopher’, pp. 330–332; Emmett, ‘The Philosopher’, p. 529; Padgett, Christian Philosophy, pp. 135–139. 121 Webb, review of Nature, Man and God, p. 225.

334

Chapter 10

by the Jewish wisdom school.122 The goodness of nature manifested a purpose that was evolving, and that implied a mind behind this purpose, where such a mind may be called God. Kirk wrote that Temple ‘has definite sympathies with the type of thought we are considering [and] does not shrink from inferring the personality of God by rational argument from the facts of nature’.123 He was sceptical of Temple’s arguments from natural theology to divine goodness, and suggested that Temple’s approach to the problem of evil needed to take account of the universe as a whole.124 Temple never published a reply to Kirk, letting his criticism from an Anglo-Catholic perspective stand as an alternative to his own views. 10

Temple’s Later Theology in the 1930s

Temple knew of the work of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr in the late 1930s, as war became inevitable, but he had no time to incorporate their thinking into his mature theology, so they remained voices he listened to but could not incorporate deeply into his own thought. He needed space and time to reflect on what a new apologetic might be, but there was no such possibility, even though he continued to read voraciously. His enormous workload as Archbishop of York, and then of Canterbury, gave him little time to develop his thought after he was fifty, since he was continually meeting politicians and senior clergy or chairing meetings, speaking at events which were always crowded, and writing two or three addresses and articles in a single week, incessantly travelling while trying to remain focused on his task as archbishop. He wrote an article in Theology in 1939 which reflected his changed mood, and described how The great Victorian Agnostics had thought it would be possible to retain Christian ethics while discarding Christian doctrine; and (which is more important) they wished to retain Christian ethics and took it for granted

122 Kenneth Kirk, The Crisis of Christian Rationalism: Three lectures (London: Longmans, Green, 1936). Kirk was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. 123 Kirk, Crisis of Christian Rationalism, p. 6, citing Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 261ff, 282ff. 124 Kirk, Crisis of Christian Rationalism, pp. 20–21, citing Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 196, 263, 306, 322, 514–519: ‘It seems almost as if we had been told that reason demonstrates God to be, to some extent, love; but cannot demonstrate Him to be all-loving’ (italics original). Kirk, Crisis of Christian Rationalism, pp. 42–43, citing Temple, Nature, Man and God, pp. 306, 502.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

335

that all men of goodwill wished it also. On the ethical side we could assume acceptance of Christian principles.125 The challenge for Temple’s generation before 1914 was to persuade people possessed of that outlook to believe that they needed a saviour, and that God is something more than a diffused essence of amiability.  … We had to lead as many as we could to see life in that light of the knowledge of God, which we had ourselves received. We tried, so to speak, to make a map of the world as seen from the standpoint of Christian faith.126 This was an honest account of his pre-1914 Idealism, and he discusses how Caird, Royce and Bosanquet had influenced him, although he dissented from Bosanquet’s final conclusions.127 Behind these Idealists lay Plato, especially the Republic, Phaedrus, Theaetetus and Sophist, and Temple referred to Christus Veritas as trying to show that particular revelation was possible for those who held a spiritual, theistic philosophy that nevertheless rejected Christian orthodoxy. Yet this attempt to reach a Christocentric metaphysic seemed very remote in 1939. Temple’s view was that things had changed by 1939, requiring the need to preach the possibility of redemption in a world threatened by grave evil, and he referred to his writing of the introduction to Doctrine in the Church of England. Contrasting the theology of the mid-1930s with the earlier theology of the incarnation and its Christocentric metaphysic, Temple quoted what he had said the previous year: A theology of Redemption (though, of course, Redemption has its great place in the former) tends rather to sound the prophetic note; it is more ready to admit that much in this evil world is irrational and strictly unintelligible; and it looks to the coming of the Kingdom as a necessary preliminary to the full comprehension of much that now is. If the security 125 William Temple, ‘Theology Today’, Theology 39.233 (1939), pp. 326–333, reprinted in Theology 123.4 (2020), pp. 253–259. Page references are to the reprinted version, here citing pp. 254–255. 126 Temple, ‘Theology Today’, p. 255. 127 Temple cites Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual: Nature, Man and the Moral Order (London: Macmillan, 1901); Bernard Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912); and Bernard Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan, 1913). He does not cite any specific books by Caird.

336

Chapter 10

of the nineteenth century, already shattered in Europe, finally crumbles away in our own country, we shall be pressed more and more towards a theology of Redemption. In this we shall be coming closer to the New Testament.128 He continued by arguing that ‘The world of to-day is one of which no Christian map can be made. It must be changed by Christ into something very unlike itself before a Christian map of it is possible.’ And he denied that it was possible to take human experience, illuminate it by the Gospel and bring it into a harmonious whole: Our task with this world is not to explain it but to convert it. Its need can be met, not by the discovery of its own immanent principle in signal manifestation through Jesus Christ, but only by the shattering impact upon its self-sufficiency and arrogance of the Son of God crucified, risen and ascended, pouring forth that explosive and disruptive energy which is the Holy Ghost.129 Significantly, Temple’s final books were not ones of philosophical theology but of Christian social thought, with Citizen and Churchman being published in 1941, and Christianity and Social Order in 1942.130 Both were short books, of about 120 pages. Temple poured his involvement in social concern over thirty-five years into the second book, which became a bestseller, read by thousands, and in which once again the emphasis on personality was strong. He had anticipated both books in his 1939 article, writing ‘First there is the thinking out afresh what are the standards of life to which a society must aim at conforming if it is to be in any sense a Christian society. We lack, and desperately need, an ethic of collective action.’131 11

Temple’s Aquinas Lecture, 1943

At the same time, Temple was developing a more Catholic emphasis, reflecting both Anglo-Catholics such as Bishop Charles Gore and T. S. Eliot, and Roman 128 Temple, ‘Theology Today’, p. 255, citing ‘Chairman’s Introduction’, in Doctrine in the Church of England. The Report was republished by SPCK in 1982 with an introduction by G. W. H. Lampe; Temple’s quote is on p. 17 of the 1982 edition. Temple mis-quotes the report in the 1939 article, using ‘understanding’ instead of ‘full comprehension’. 129 Temple, ‘Theology Today’, p. 257. 130 William Temple, Citizen and Churchman (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1941). 131 Temple, ‘Theology Today’, p. 257.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

337

Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, although he claimed in his 1939 article that the ‘Thomist scheme’ was not acceptable as a starting point unless it was modified to accommodate Anglican theology. He returned to this theme when he addressed the Aquinas Society in London in October 1943, in a lecture published as an article on ‘Thomism and Modern Needs’ in Blackfriars (the Dominican publication) in March 1944.132 Again he returned to the great change in cultural and intellectual life between 1914 and 1944. The great Victorian Agnostics not only believed that the Christian way of life would still claim the homage of those who discarded Christian dogma; they desired that it should and took it for granted that all well-disposed persons shared their desire. There was an accepted body of convention with regard to the way in which we should try to live.133 Temple had long read St Thomas, and cited St Thomas on transubstantiation, but this lecture was the first major engagement with Thomism as it was currently taught in the Catholic Church, and in his lecture and subsequent article Temple distinguished between contemporary Thomism and the writings of St. Thomas himself.134 Temple sided with St Thomas in defending natural theology and the principle of analogy, valuing his defence of natural law, but he criticized St Thomas for not giving enough weight to the ‘concern for individual personality’, however much an emphasis on the subject might have been perverted in Cartesianism and modern philosophy. St Thomas reflected his context in Greek and medieval philosophy because both intellectual eras lacked appreciation for personality as a mode of being.135 This emphasis on personality in the modern world had resulted in a continual debate about social progress, and an end to a view of society as unchanging, and St Thomas did not help here, although his thought could be modified. Further criticisms of contemporary Thomism were on the nature of sin, affective knowledge, and the nature of revelation as event. 132 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, pp. 476, 636. William Temple, ‘Thomism and Modern Needs’, Blackfriars 25.288 (1944), pp. 86–93. Victor White, O.P. responded to Temple in ‘Tasks for Thomists’, Blackfriars 25.288 (1944), pp. 93–117. Temple’s article was reprinted in William Temple, Religious Experience and Other Essays and Addresses (London: James Clarke, 1958), pp. 229–236. 133 Temple, ‘Thomism’, pp. 86–87. 134 G. K. A. Bell, ‘Memoir’, in A. E. Baker (ed.), William Temple and His Message (Penguin/ Pelican, 1946), p. 12, on Temple’s reading of St Thomas at Oxford. Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, p. 492 on Temple’s reference to St Thomas on transubstantiation. Suggate, William Temple, Ch. 10, pp. 110–126 is on Temple’s understanding of natural law as compared with the current Catholic understanding of it. 135 Temple, ‘Thomism’, p. 89.

338

Chapter 10

Temple recognized that any definition of sin was affected by contemporary Catholic moral theology, with its emphasis on helping confessors, and as a result of this he was critical of the concern which this moral theology had with acts, rather than persons, and with the legalism of its approach to the penitent, who was seen as an agent who had committed certain improper acts. This was not an approach that addressed the whole person, under the sway of sin, who needed deliverance by pastoral counsel: So the Moral Theologian, in his proper desire to help, is liable to be content with a perfunctory definition of sin and proceed at once to its particular manifestations. Thus he concentrates attention on objective acts of sin from which the penitent by confession dissociates himself, and thereby diverts attention from the essential sin which is the perversion of will issuing in those acts. This easily tends in practice to an unconscious Pelagianism – which I still regard, as ‘the only heresy that is intrinsically damnable’.136 Temple also argued that ‘the Thomist tradition as commonly presented does not adequately convey the awful pervasiveness and penetrating potency of sin’.137 The Dominican Victor White, O.P., made a lengthy response to Temple’s article in Blackfriars, although there is no record of whether he was actually present when Temple spoke, or made a reply at that time. In his article White conceded the weakness of Catholic moral theology, writing ‘And, unfortunately, the process of departmentalisation and consequent atomisation of the original “map” has not been limited to this tendency to separation of “moral” from “dogmatic” theology; there has been a still more lamentable tendency for “moral theology” itself to be replaced by something quite different.’ White referred to aids for confessors, or Summae Confessorum, and said that originally: the distinction of these works from works of theology properly so called was clearly understood. But gradually this kind of literature came to usurp both the name and function of moral theology itself. The results of this development in the domain of practical morals, tending to substitute methods of jurisprudence for prudence as the proximate guide of conduct need not here detain us.138 136 Temple, ‘Thomism’, pp. 90–91. Thomas, William Temple’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 67–68, on Temple’s treatment of sin. 137 Temple, ‘Thomism’, p. 91. 138 White, ‘Tasks for Thomists’, p. 108.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

339

This was an inadequate reply, because this was precisely the issue which did detain Temple, and White’s response was an attempt to avoid the issue of the need for renewal in moral theology. Temple’s death later that same year prevented this exchange from developing further, although it was not until the Second Vatican Council that ecumenical co-operation became possible in the way that Temple wanted. Hastings shows the intractable attitude of the Roman Catholic bishops in England in 1944 towards ecumenism, when the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Arthur Hinsley, launched The Sword of the Spirit in August 1940, which was a Roman Catholic initiative about the relationship of the Second World War to international and social issues. In 1941 Archbishop Lang, who was Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishop George Bell spoke at meetings of The Sword where Hinsley was present, but this brief moment of co-operation did not last. Hinsley was condemned by his fellow bishops for allowing this to happen, and died in March 1943. By August of that year, non-Catholics were excluded from membership of The Sword, and Temple was actually quite bold accepting an invitation to speak only three months after this debacle in October 1943. Hastings wrote that ‘The Catholic bishops could authorize common action on social issues just as long as this was wholly divorced from anything explicitly religious. Such a divorce seemed to non-Catholics wrong in principle and effectively impossible in practice.’139 Temple strongly wanted greater ecumenical co-operation, and his later theology was open to dialogue with Catholic thought, but there were very few like Victor White who were prepared to dialogue with Anglicans on such topics as moral theology, so the development of Anglican thought in this regard became impossible. The opportunity would not recur for several decades, and even Kirk’s strong advocacy of a form of Anglican Neo-Thomism in his moral theology did not involve quoting or being in dialogue with any living Roman Catholics. Kirk was an expert on canon law and Catholic moral theology, but his approach was entirely historical, which was a profound irony, with Kirk ignoring all signs of new Catholic moral theology. John Marsden comments on Temple’s ‘brief engagement’ with Thomism after reading Maritain before the 1941 Malvern conference: ‘Temple’s more historical conception of natural law, and his recognition of the conditioned character of moral reasoning, proved prescient of developments in Roman Catholic theology following the Second Vatican Council.’140 However, as noted above, Temple’s engagement with St Thomas went back to his reading as an Oxford don, and it was hardly a brief engagement. 139 Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 392–396. 140 Marsden, ‘William Temple’, p. 230. Suggate, William Temple, p. 115.

340 12

Chapter 10

Temple’s Significance

Temple is significant for two reasons: his assured integration of philosophy and theology in a way that no Anglican theologian had achieved since Butler; and because he was the one undoubted national leader both in church and society of all the Anglican theologians surveyed in this book. The latter point is captured well by Hastings, who describes Temple in 1920 when he became Bishop of Manchester as setting off ‘not only for Manchester, but for obvious leadership of English Christianity across a long generation’.141 Those hopes were completely fulfilled across twenty-five years, although what changed was the nature of politics. Temple’s greatest failure was probably his inability to speak out against the bombing of Germany in the Second World War, where he was in effect deceived by the government he trusted. However, his more profound significance for this book lay in his philosophical theology, and in his capacity to draw upon the ideas of many of those described earlier, as for instance the way in which he greatly valued the theology and personal standing of Charles Gore, while in no way being an Anglo-Catholic, nor always agreeing with Gore. He remained respectful and open to the theology of Kirk and Dix, but strongly disagreed with the conclusions which they drew for church life from their beliefs, and did not feel he had to reply to Kirk’s criticisms of his own theology. There were other influences as well, such as F. D. Maurice and Coleridge, with Marsden noting the interest in creation in the chapter on ‘The Sacramental Universe’ in Nature, Man and God, where the entire creation manifests the divine presence through the indwelling of the Spirit.142 Emmett says that ‘this ethical religious faith was the aspect of his philosophy with which Temple was able to inspire people’s imagination, and it was the secret of his moral leadership. It would surely stand even if a good deal of his systematic metaphysics were to be re-thought.’143 This certainly echoes Coleridge, even if not explicitly. He also published essays as a young Oxford don in a volume edited by the liberal modernist B. H. Streeter, while being in active correspondence with Hastings Rashdall, who was a theologian who adopted the description ‘liberal’.144 Most significant of all was Temple’s extraordinary ability to provide a Christian apologetic drawing on Plato, Caird and later Whitehead, in a way 141 Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 85. 142 Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 492. Marsden, ‘William Temple’, p. 231. 143 Emmett, ‘The Philosopher’, p. 537. Emmett wrote this assessment in 1948. 144 Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, p. 155, mentions ‘the close personal association with Holland and Gore’, but also Temple’s ‘intimacy’ with Streeter and his admiration for Rashdall.

William Temple ’ s Christian Ethics

341

unmatched by any of his contemporaries. The Platonic tradition in English religious thought reached its climax in the young Temple, and yet, in a quite extraordinary way, he rethought his entire philosophy when Archbishop of York and produced another masterpiece. His ability as demonstrated in his prodigious output of books, pamphlets, sermons and speeches was to synthesize many strands in nineteenth-century Anglicanism and classical and contemporary philosophy, and weave them into his own vision. Occasionally he overreached himself, as Owen Chadwick said: ‘The tendency to vast generalizations was damaging in historical illustration; yet to one who held his particular theories of development and progress, some historical illustration was a necessity.’145 This was another weakness, noticed also by Webb in his review, because even someone of Temple’s brilliance could do too much. Nevertheless, there has been a tendency to underrate Temple in the last few decades, because of the impact of Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr and other theologians. In fact, the rehabilitation of Idealism by such contemporary theologians as Douglas Hedley makes a reassessment of Temple’s theology important. By providing a detailed assessment of his writing on metaphysics this book seeks to take this process further. It is interesting that today Iain McGilchrist is in dialogue with Whitehead on the relationship of consciousness to metaphysics, showing Whitehead’s continuing relevance, nearly a century after Temple began to read him in the 1920s.146 The fact that Temple drew on many strands of thought makes him difficult to classify within the genealogy of Anglican moral theology, which consists of many different theologies woven together into an overarching unity of Anglican moral theology, although there were often many tensions and even schisms, as with Newman’s conversion to Rome in 1845. This is a synchronic unity in Anglicanism, and I would argue that this genealogy also shows a diachronic unity, where one generation picks up the thought of an earlier one and adapts it to meet the challenges of both the surrounding culture and other religious traditions. So, Anglicanism develops over time, and one feature of Anglican theologians in the period 1660–1950 was their deep knowledge of the Anglican tradition and previous theologians within it, with Temple being outstanding as someone who seemed to draw on a whole range of traditions within Anglicanism, without it seeming forced or artificial.

145 Owen Chadwick, review of W. R. Rinne, The Kingdom of God in the Thought of William Temple, Journal of Theological Studies 18.1 (1967), pp. 286–288. 146 Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2 vols (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021).

342

Chapter 10

Temple’s death was a turning point for many reasons. He was the last Anglican moral theologian strongly affected by Idealism. He was also the last British theologian and church leader of any denomination who was not only nationally well known, within the churches and across British society (he was called the people’s archbishop), but also respected and listened to across the world. As Hastings put it: ‘It would be hard to think of any other twentieth-century ecclesiastical figure whose impact on history has been comparable, certainly in England, possibly in the world.’147 Temple’s wide reading in philosophy and theology made him the last expression of nineteenth-century Anglican theology, although perhaps the breadth of knowledge of the nineteenth century of the two Archbishops Michael Ramsey and Rowan Williams might qualify this last statement somewhat. After Temple, Anglican moral theology moved to a much more consciously ecclesiastical stance, whether through Kirk’s Thomism, or through the liturgical emphasis of Dix, Gabriel Hebert and Ramsey, and this move to a much more church-centred moral theology, which is described in the final chapter, brings the history of Anglican moral theology from 1660 to 1950 to a close. 147 Hastings, ‘Temple, William’.

Chapter 11

Kenneth Kirk: History and Casuistry 1

Introduction

Kenneth Kirk is one of the few Anglican theologians who wrote self-consciously as a moral theologian between 1660 and 1945, and from the very beginning of his writing he was aware of both the history of moral theology, which he consciously sought to reclaim, and the issues in contemporary society, which often seemed to be at variance with church tradition and teaching. In terms of reclaiming the history of Anglican moral theology, he was the first since the eighteenth century to refer in any detail to the Caroline moral theologians, even though his treatment of them was highly episodic.1 Kirk was regarded worldwide as the leading twentieth-century Anglican moral theologian, until Oliver O’Donovan began to publish in 1979, with O’Donovan now filling the place which Kirk held fifty years ago. Kirk’s stature was such that he was compared with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bernhard Häring, and he is still read today, although his readership will have diminished over time.2 Kirk left academic life at the age of fifty-one and was one of the most important bishops in the Church of England for seventeen years until his death; as Bishop of Oxford, he continued ministering in the city where he had been one of the most prominent university theologians for twenty years. He was the leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England, and clashed often with Archbishop William Temple, especially on ecumenism and church schools, until Temple’s death in 1944. Because of his prominence Kirk will be considered both in terms of his revival of casuistry, his deep knowledge of Roman Catholic history, theology and canon law, and his influence on the controversial subjects of birth control and the remarriage of divorcees, and also in terms of his realization that worship has a key relationship to moral theology. Adrian Hastings describes 1 On the history of Anglican moral theology, see Peter Sedgwick, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018), for the period up to 1670. 2 Timothy Sedgwick, ‘Revising Anglican Theology’, Anglican Theological Review 43 (1981), pp. 11–20, reprinted in Paul Elmen (ed.), The Anglican Moral Choice (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Barlow, 1983), pp. 121–140; the comparison with Häring is on p. 137. David E. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Kenneth Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), pp. xii–xxxv; the comparison with Bonhoeffer is on p. xviii.

© Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_014

344

Chapter 11

Anglo-Catholicism in the 1930s in the Church of England as ‘the natural centre of Anglicanism, providing both bishops and university professors’.3 Kirk wrote four major books on moral theology, two of which were published after he had given lectures to large conferences of Anglican clergy, because the task of educating the church was a significant factor in what he wished to say.4 The four books follow a logical sequence, typical of Kirk’s well-ordered mind. Joseph Butler and John Henry Newman had worked through sermons, but Kirk saw himself as trying to create a moral theology for the Church of England, which would then influence the rest of the Anglican Communion, and he tested the content of individual chapters at these clerical conferences.5 2

The Revival of Thomism and the First World War

Kirk’s first book on moral theology, Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application, is dedicated to Armstrong Hall, Archdeacon of Richmond, and former Deputy-Assistant Chaplain-General, ‘in grateful acknowledgment of the influence which by his enthusiasm, advice and example he has had upon the lives of the clergy who have known him’. The book consisted of talks and lectures that were designed to show clergy two things. First, Kirk wanted to show them how to think morally, using principles, case studies and mitigating factors. Secondly, he wanted to show that Neo-Thomism was not a foreign, or Roman Catholic, set of beliefs, but could be used to illuminate what it meant to be an Anglican in the early twentieth century. Armstrong arranged the lectures which Kirk gave to chaplains before they went to serve at the front line 3 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–2000 (London: SCM Press, 2001) p. 298. 4 Kenneth E. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application (London: Long­ mans, 1920). Kenneth E. Kirk, Ignorance, Faith and Conformity (London: Longmans, 1925). Kenneth E. Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry (London: Longmans, 1927). Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (London: Longmans, 1931). The main full-length study is George Garnsey, ‘The Moral Theo­ logy of Kenneth Kirk, Bishop of Oxford: Studies in Its Development, Application and Influence’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, 2012). Kirk set out his aims in the ‘Introduction’ to Conscience, p. xi: ‘Some Principles of Moral Theology had borrowed its ground-plan (if that expression may be allowed) from two sources – the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas and that adaptation of Thomist principles to the needs of the Church of England which underlies the writings of Bishops Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor.’ 5 The conferences or places at which the chapters of his books were given first as lectures are listed in ‘Preface’, in Some Principles of Moral Theology, p. xviii; ‘Introduction’, in Conscience, p. xxiii; and ‘Preface’, in Vision of God, p. xv. Kirk also gave his manuscript to fellow clergy for comment, and reworked each chapter in the light of their judgement.

Kenneth Kirk

345

in France during the First World War, with all the difficult moral issues they would encounter there in harrowing pastoral circumstances. Kirk’s dedication served as a succinct manifesto for what he hoped to achieve – influencing the ministry of his fellow clergy – and this was a deeply personal engagement for him since he also became a military chaplain himself. Two other points are worth noting. First, Kirk knew Roman Catholic moral theology in depth, both in its contemporary formulation and in its history, citing it constantly. He always thought as someone who was an Anglican, but who needed to justify why the Anglican position was different from the Catholic one, especially in such areas as penance, personal morality and ecclesiology. (He does not, however, mention the Catholic moral theologians who were to be the precursors of Vatican II, such as Odin Lottin and Fritz Tillmann, as they began writing in the 1930s.6) Kirk sought to fashion an Anglican version of Thomist moral theology, as expressed in the manuals of the day, otherwise known as Neo-Thomism. Several Catholic commentators, including James Keenan and Christopher Jones, have compared him with the Roman Catholic moral theologians of the time, known as the manualists, showing how much more progressive Kirk was, because his casuistry was inductive whereas their approach was deductive, and he was far more sensitive to both virtue ethics and biblical theology.7 Jones’s judgement is apposite: ‘Kirk develops a historicist, biblical, charity-centered, and casuistic virtue ethic.’8 Kirk criticized the manualist, deductive approach as a betrayal of Aquinas, feeling that at best they were translations of the imitators of St Alphonsus, and at worst they were legalist and ‘almost fatal’. However, he showed no familiarity with European Catholic critics of the manualists, which was regrettable.9 Secondly  – and in this regard Kirk was different from most of his predecessors  – he read widely in French and German theology, and in contemporary psychology, to understand better how human beings might act, especially in situations of conflict, suffering and crisis. Like Karl Barth, he felt that the First World War was of profound importance for theology, and he 6 Dom Odon Lottin, Principes de morale (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1946). Dom Odon Lottin, Morale fondamentale (Belgium: Tournai, 1954). Fritz Tillmann, The Master Calls: A Handbook of Morals for the Layman (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961; first published 1937). 7 Thomas Slater, A Manual of Moral Theology for English-Speaking Countries (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1906). Henry Davis, Moral and Pastoral Theology, 4 vols (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935). 8 Christopher D. Jones, ‘The Historical and Ecumenical Value of Kenneth Kirk’s Anglican Moral Theology’, Theological Studies 79.4 (2018), pp. 801–817. James F. Keenan, S.J., A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 36, 46, 159. 9 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, pp. x–xi.

346

Chapter 11

encountered trench warfare at first hand as a military chaplain. The bibliography in Some Principles of Moral Theology included twelve works on psychology from the previous thirty years, among them publications by William James. Kirk was a deeply thoughtful moralist who sought to place Anglican moral theology in the lives of parish priests, where it could be a guide for making moral judgements; in the life of the church seen in the broadest ecumenical terms across both time and space; and in the life of contemporary intellectual debate. This was a highly impressive way of fashioning moral theology, seldom equalled by any Anglican theologian since he wrote. In terms of the issues raised for the church, Kirk was deeply conscious of the way in which modern society was no longer imbued with a Christian ethic, which presented difficult problems for the moral theologian, and so in 1920 he sought to develop a moral psychology in Some Principles of Moral Theology. Using contemporary literature, he tried to make concrete the classical Christian tradition of virtue by reworking this as a movement toward God, which was a journey from repentance to a way of life given in worship. He called this ‘the education of the soul’, and it depended on seeing the Christian life as applying ‘the laws of spiritual progress’.10 The theological virtue of hope is close to repentance, because both bear upon our passions and desires, and seek the beatific vision, with the gifts and graces which would help us attain this. Fear is the necessary counterpart of hope, being the consideration of our shortcomings.11 ‘It is the promise of a better future.’ Faith is the consecration of the mind to the service of God, following Jeremy Taylor’s definition, while zeal is the dedication of the will to God by means of love.12 The education of the soul and spiritual progress are two sides of one whole, and the soul also needs healing by a spiritual director, who can both deal with sin and also be aware of contemporary psychology and its insights on human instincts (Kirk, like the Lux Mundi school, rejected a view of the Christian tradition as unchanging).13 Nevertheless, in one way Kirk’s Some Principles of Moral Theology drew back from his own experiences in France during the First World War, because he became an Oxford University chaplain after the war, and revised the lectures 10 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, pp. 48–54, on the ‘laws of spiritual progress’; chapters 6 and 7 are on the education of the soul. 11 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, pp. 44–45. Kirk quotes Augustine (p. 45), Jeremy Taylor (p. 42), Hooker (p. 43) and William Law (p. 73). 12 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, pp. 80, 114. Kirk does not give the reference to Taylor. Jones, ‘Historical and Ecumenical Value’, p. 810. 13 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, chapter 9, on the healing of the soul; pp. 233–242, 264–271, on psychology and the origin of sinful acts and habits.

Kenneth Kirk

347

into a book, drawing on Neo-Thomism, which made the book far less direct than his first, A Study of Silent Minds, which was on the experience of wartime.14 This book was closer to works by other wartime chaplains, such as the famous Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy. However, the more Kirk stayed at Oxford the more his mind ran on deeply philosophical lines. He published further books which were beautifully crafted theologically, and of great moral insight, but quite detached from personal experience, even though he had pastoral responsibility in the college where he was a chaplain.15 In the ‘Author’s Note to the 1948 Edition’ of Conscience and Its Problems, Kirk made a striking admission. When he published the original edition in 1927, he was an academic at Oxford and, although he saw himself writing for the needs of the church, he wrote within the ‘mould’ of ‘classical ethical discussion’, despite his pastoral involvement with students. When he became a bishop in 1937, and therefore deeply involved pastorally with his diocesan clergy (Oxford Diocese was one of the largest in terms of clergy in England), Kirk’s mind began to change, as he indicated in a brief article he wrote in 1939 called ‘Moral Theology’.16 When Conscience was reprinted in 1948 (because the entire stock had been destroyed in the London Blitz), he admitted that ‘my mind had moved on to a new plane’ and the book seemed ‘dated’. He wondered whether to rewrite the entire text. Time and the pressures of a bishop’s life made that impossible, and so he decided that the principles in the original book were still ‘sound and adequately stated’.17 It can only be a matter of speculation as to how Kirk might have revised the entire book in a more pastoral, less classical way, and how he resolved what seems an apparent contradiction between saying that the book seemed dated, but the principles were still sound. In this chapter, after a brief description of Kirk’s life, there will be an analysis of his revival of the Anglican moral theology tradition, and the way he put this to use in considering the nature of casuistry. Discussion of the 1930 Lambeth Conference will be followed by an account of The Vision of God. Kirk knew that he represented a paradox, because in many ways he was traditional, seeking 14 15

Kenneth Kirk, A Study of Silent Minds: War Studies in Education (London: SCM, 1918). Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, The Hardest Part (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918). Geoffrey Rowell, ‘Studdert-Kennedy, Geoffrey’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). A. Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SCM, 1978). 16 Kenneth Kirk, ‘Moral Theology’, in Kenneth Kirk (ed.), The Study of Theology (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939), pp. 363–408. 17 Kenneth Kirk, ‘Author’s Note’, in Kenneth Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems: An Intro­ duction to Casuistry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1948).

348

Chapter 11

to revive a past way of reasoning and present it afresh, but he also knew that the Anglican moral tradition was on the defensive culturally after the end of the First World War, and needed rethinking. This meant that some saw him as a conservative figure, because of his revival of past schools of moral theology; his Life, written by his son-in-law Bishop Eric Kemp, certainly presents him in those terms. Kemp, who was first chaplain and Fellow of an Oxford college, and then Bishop of Chichester, was personally deeply conservative, and his Life presents Kirk as the leader of the Anglo-Catholics, both among his fellow bishops and as a theologian in the period 1920–1950. Kirk was certainly that, and his position on indissolubility was rigorous, but he also displayed an acute awareness of the questioning and dissenting person in the modern world. It is significant that Kemp never mentions this, nor Kirk’s rethinking of the issue of birth control, and it is certainly true that Kirk’s moral theology anticipated the renewal of Roman Catholic theology around Vatican II. The chapter ends with a consideration of Kirk’s influence throughout the twentieth century as one of the greatest modern moral theologians in the Anglican tradition. 3

Kirk’s Life

Kenneth Kirk was born in 1886, the son of a prominent Sheffield businessman in the steel industry.18 The family were Methodist but became Anglicans when Kirk was twelve, and one aunt was professed as an Anglican religious. He went to Oxford, and briefly served as a curate before the First World War, before volunteering as an army chaplain in France.19 After the war he returned to academic life, but spoke often at clergy gatherings, with the 1920s seeing the publication of three of his books, culminating in 1928 with the Bampton Lectures, which were published a few years later in expanded form as The Vision of God. Kirk was both a Fellow and chaplain at his college, and also ‘controller’, chairing the committee overseeing Oxford University accommodation, which he reorganized. This wide range of gifts as a pastoral and academic university chaplain who was also highly efficient (inheriting great administrative gifts from his father) meant that he was singled out for high office, being 18

Eric Kemp, ‘Kirk, Kenneth Escott’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Eric Kemp (ed.), The Life and Letters of Kenneth Escott Kirk, Bishop of Oxford 1937–1954 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959). Kirk’s diocesan addresses and monthly letter to the Diocese of Oxford were reprinted in Eric Kemp (ed.), Kenneth Kirk: Beauty and Bands (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). 19 Jones, ‘Historical and Ecumenical Value’, p. 804. Kemp, Life and Letters, p. 29.

Kenneth Kirk

349

appointed Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford in 1933, and then in 1937 being consecrated as Bishop of Oxford, aged fifty-one. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and urged the appointment of a good theologian as Bishop of Oxford, naming Kirk as the person who could fit that role.20 He died in office in 1954, aged sixty-eight, having been unwell for some time. Kemp says: So that permanent episcopal care might be provided for each of the three counties Kirk secured the revival of the suffragan bishopric of Reading for Berkshire and the creation of a new suffragan see of Dorchester for Oxfordshire. Kirk had inherited to the full his father’s business ability, and he gave particular attention to the finances of the diocese. He transferred the whole administration of the diocese to Oxford from Cuddesdon and never himself took up residence there.21 Oxford Diocese was very large, and Kirk gave much energy to it. In the Church of England as a whole, he spent much time overseeing the place of religious communities in the church, being visitor to many of them, and was also heavily involved with church schools.22 All this meant that he wrote no major works of moral theology after his Bampton Lectures, which he gave aged forty-two, and published as The Vision of God three years later. What he did publish while a bishop was a defence of episcopacy, in The Apostolic Ministry of 1946, which was designed to reassert the importance of a Catholic view of the threefold order of ministry. This publication was prompted by his strong opposition to the reunion of the churches in South India, and he led the opposition in the Church of England both among the bishops and in the Church Assembly against this scheme, being seen in the period after 1940 as the unchallenged leader of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England until his death. Had he not become a bishop, Kirk would have published many more works of moral theology, and this was a great loss. But Kirk himself would never have seen it like this, because he saw himself as a priest and then a bishop in the service of his church. The years from 1920 to 1928 saw three major books and the Bampton Lectures, making it a hugely productive time for someone also involved in teaching, being a college chaplain and chairing the university accommodation committee. His activity recalls the energy shown by Newman 20 Jeremy Hurst, ‘Bishop Kirk of Oxford, Church Schooling and Anglo-Catholic Principle’, Theology 102.809 (1999), pp. 354–362. 21 Kemp, ‘Kirk, Kenneth Escott’. 22 Hurst, ‘Bishop Kirk’, pp. 359–361.

350

Chapter 11

a century before, who combined being vicar of the University Church with preaching and writing, and organizing the Oxford Movement. Kirk wrote his books to help the Church of England  – and beyond that the Anglican Communion  – find its way again in moral theology, at a time when moral issues seemed both difficult and challenging to the accepted view held by the Anglican Communion. 4

Casuistry and Conscience

Kirk’s work in casuistry, which he developed in Conscience and Its Problems and a second volume, Ignorance, Faith and Conformity, sought to answer a simple question. The Catholicism of St Thomas in the thirteenth century, and the Carolines in the Church of England in the seventeenth century, envisaged a ‘Church clear in definition, authoritative in command, highly organized in administration and strict in discipline’.23 In the 1920s, by contrast, the Church of England had both a freedom of thought and a tolerance of that freedom, which would have ‘startled’ Kirk’s sources. Thus the simple question was whether the loose-knit association of the 1920s Church of England made such borrowing from the sources neither ‘fair, wise or profitable’.24 Kirk defended his position, because he felt that the Church of England had not abandoned any of the ‘fundamental truths’ of the moral theology and canon law of the past.25 What existed in the 1920s was ‘an experiment it has initiated within the legitimate bounds of true Catholicism’.26 The Church of England was not ‘a mere disorganized chaos’, since its moral code was continuous with church tradition, and amenable to interpretation by methods whose ‘reliability had been endorsed in history’.27 ‘The Church of England has not deserted her children in their journey from this world to the world to come.’28 What had happened was that the Anglican church had either ‘chosen, or had forced upon her  – it matters little which  – modes of dealing with their problems so baffling that at first they seem to be nebulous and even non-existent’.29 Kirk denied that this was the case, because patient enquiry would show the value of these methods under God’s providence in producing 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Kirk, Conscience, p. xi. Kirk, Conscience, p. xii. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, p. 25. Kirk, Ignorance, p. 162. Kirk, Conscience, p. xiii. Kirk, Conscience, p. xiv. Kirk, Conscience, p. xiv.

Kenneth Kirk

351

a true Christian character. What was needed was an acceptance of a greater unanimity, not in terms of a rabbinic code and complete uniformity, but in terms of a ‘sane casuistry’ which could guide Anglicanism ‘along disciplined and well-tested lines’.30 A positive account of Kirk’s work on casuistry is offered by David H. Smith in a couple of articles, and his introduction to the 1999 re-issue of Kirk’s Conscience.31 Smith has written much on casuistry, and his interpretation of Kirk is a helpful guide. Kirk divided the issues which casuistry dealt with into three, which were error, doubt and perplexity.32 In the first, that of error, either the individual or the community was wrong; Kirk felt that this situation applied to divorce legislation (and admission to Communion of the remarried after divorce), because either the individual or the community must give way. In the second, that of doubt, doubt arose because the community’s expectations were unclear; such cases included birth control, clerical celibacy and abstinence from either gambling or alcohol (or both). In the third, that of perplexity, the relevant moral principles were in conflict; such issues included not telling the truth and the vexed topic of industrial relations, including strikes. The General Strike had happened in 1926, two years before Conscience was published. The country came to a standstill for a week and the army eventually broke the strike and restored order after Temple and other bishops had tried to mediate in vain. Casuistry for Kirk was thus not concerned with the conceptual or doctrinal field in which the case arose, but only with issues of error, doubt or perplexity in the moral realm.33 Following on from the Caroline theologians Robert Sanderson, Joseph Hall and Jeremy Taylor, and others in the seventeenth century, Kirk sought to resolve each case in question by identifying the case and the moral presumptions which made it a problem, and then arguing about the priorities in those moral presuppositions, rather than appealing to general concepts such as love or justice. He argued that the casuist should think in terms of responsibility or accountability, identifying what is obligatory, permissible or forbidden (in 30 Kirk, Conscience, p. xvi. 31 David H. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Kenneth Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999; reissue of 1948 edition), pp. xii–xxxv. David H. Smith, ‘Kenneth Kirk’s The Vision of God’, in G. Meilander and W. Werpehowski (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 449–465. David H. Smith, ‘The Moral Theology or Casuistic Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 595–613. 32 Kirk, Conscience, ‘Error’, pp. 214–254; ‘Doubt’, pp. 255–319 (which included birth control and gambling); ‘Perplexity’ pp. 320–377 (which included lying and strikes). 33 Smith, ‘Introduction’.

352

Chapter 11

terms of moral principles) for x to do in order to avoid (or bring about) the situation y, since there is always an answer to any moral dilemma, however complex the reasoning involved, and this reasoning can be carefully articulated. Kirk argued that the primary focus in this moral theology is the agent and their responsibility: whether the moral agent (who could be a person or a community) is accountable to God, to someone (because there is a prior relationship) or to something (an ideal or a moral principle or value).34 In teasing out the issues of responsibility the casuist considers two things: the set of distinctions between what is intended or unintended, between negligence and carelessness, between lying and ambiguity; and similar cases, either setting a precedent or bearing an analogy. For Kirk, the aim of casuistry was to aid in the life of discipleship because the Christian is not only tempted but also faces uncertainty as to what is the right action to pursue. Resolving such questions assists in the moral life, so one can more fully imitate Christ and seek a holy and loving life of service. Kirk was also a well-regarded biblical scholar, writing a commentary on the epistle to the Romans and lecturing on the New Testament for years at Oxford. He argued that a biblically shaped ethics was premised on discipleship and not simply on the analysis of particular actions, even if casuistry (what actions should be done or avoided) was necessary to clear the way for discipleship. Here he followed Taylor closely.35 Some Principles of Moral Theology has a detailed account of the Christian life in the Pauline epistles, moving from the imitation of Christ, through suffering with Christ, then others seeing Christ in the believer, and finally ‘I in Christ’, with these pages showing a mastery of Pauline exegesis.36 Kirk stands entirely in the Anglican exemplarist tradition, seeing Jesus as the great exemplar, and founding a tradition which lives out the Beatitudes and the fruit of the Spirit.37 Furthermore, the cardinal virtues are presented anew in Christian terms, since prudence is the discovery of God’s will, and fortitude is lived out in the trials of the Christian life.38 The task of the church is to embody that Spirit-led life in a living tradition, which is demonstrated in its institution, through the work of the ordained ministry and the lives of laypeople in the world, and in the church’s teaching and its authoritative documents. Casuistry is placed 34 Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv. 35 Kenneth E. Kirk, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). 36 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, pp. 127–129. Jones, ‘Historical and Ecumenical Value’, p. 806. 37 Timothy F. Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 207–231. 38 Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, pp. 34–35.

Kenneth Kirk

353

within that understanding as the resolution of error, doubt or perplexity about the implications of the teaching of the church, through past documents or present authority. It is always the case that the casuist works within a particular moral tradition, where certain documents, decisions and individuals carry authority, and so Kirk referred to the writings of both Thomas Aquinas (because he felt very much part of the Catholic tradition) and the Carolines (as an Anglican). The decisions made in the Roman Catholic Church were treated by him as having great moral weight but not ones that bound Anglicans, and he explained carefully why Roman Catholic decisions on the issue of birth control were not binding.39 He also spent much time showing why he had difficulties with some previous Anglican documents; an example is the three pages in Conscience on the 1920 Lambeth Conference Resolution 68 on birth control.40 Kirk always felt that he was an Anglican casuist in the Catholic tradition, not an academic without a church tradition, and he wrote for the Anglican church to guide it in the difficult issues of the twentieth century. Furthermore, he looked to the confessional as the context in which many decisions would be made, knowing that the practice of confession was by no means universal in Anglicanism, except in the Anglo-Catholic (or High Church) tradition, although the church’s view on the practice of penance was the openly held view of a ‘social institution’ with ‘a publicly acknowledged processes of decision making’, and penance was not the secret practice of a sect. Kirk’s vision of the church was of a community nourished by its tradition, open to reason and faithful to Scripture; he therefore called himself a ‘Catholic Anglican’. It is significant that loyalty was a virtue Kirk valued highly and he was, above all, loyal to this Anglican, Catholic tradition. As Smith says, the pathos of Conscience depends on Kirk’s assumption that loyalty and identification with a tradition on the part of the moral agent is central to their moral reasoning.41 Kirk assumed that such a Christian would feel uncomfortable abandoning the discipline of their church, and would in some sense see it as a betrayal. The second chapter of Conscience is headed ‘loyalty’ and the word appears in an article from 1934.42 Furthermore, Kirk often expressed his dislike of the state’s influence upon the Church of England, because it was the church, and especially the Catholic tradition in the church, which evinced loyalty. Yet he did not want 39 40 41 42

Kirk, Conscience, pp. 291, 295. Kirk, Conscience, pp. 291–294. Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. xix. Kenneth Kirk, ‘Loyalty to the Church’, in E. L. Mascall (ed.), The Church of God: An Anglo-Russian Symposium (London: SPCK, 1934).

354

Chapter 11

loyalty enforced juridically, which he felt was the fault of Roman Catholicism; he preferred a more pluralistic and pragmatic approach, and always held that a conscience binds a person to act, even if others regarded it as an erring conscience. The pathos was that conscience must override loyalty, and Kirk’s reasoning in Conscience and Ignorance sees the conflict between conscience and loyalty as no ‘ivory-tower’ matter, feeling that conflict very deeply. On the other hand, Kirk’s conception of the freedom and reliability of conscience differs sharply from the manualist view that the lay conscience is pathologically sinful and totally dependent upon the priest for guidance. He stresses the freedom and goodness of conscience, and reworks the priest – penitent relationship. Conscience is defined in the first chapter of Conscience by a series of discussions of the concept, having to do with moral judgements.43 Moral judgements primarily concern ‘voluntary or responsible action’, even if they can also include judgement on motives or intentions, as they make a moral claim upon us, even if talk of an ‘absolute obligation’ must be treated with care. In cases of moral discernment where deep emotions or feelings are involved, Kirk argues that, while emotions must be listened to carefully and respected, they are never the final word without reasoned reflection upon them – just as Butler had argued against Shaftesbury.44 He also discusses Newman’s use of conscience, being very cautious, however, about personifying conscience as Newman had done, preferring to define conscience as ‘the mind of man passing moral judgments’.45 While Kirk showed great insight in his discussion of conscience, it is nevertheless true that he held to a penitential theology and there is severe criticism of him by the influential Protestant ethicist Paul Lehmann, who was writing in the 1960s. Lehmann welcomes the emphasis in Kirk on Scripture, a biblical account of the virtues rather than a pagan one, and the insights of modern psychology.46 However, he complains that Kirk remains within a ‘penitential theological climate of purification, illumination and union’, arguing further that ‘the Bishop of Oxford seems almost to outdo Father Davis in the detailed schematization with which he proposes a program for the progress of the soul’.47 Father Davis was one of the English moral theologians in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s; his approach was very different from Kirk’s in

43 Kirk, Conscience, p. 4. 44 Kirk, Conscience, pp. 5, 8–9, 19; Kirk quotes Butler at this point. 45 Kirk, Conscience, pp. 24–25, on Newman; pp. 52–57, on personification; p. 58 for definition of conscience. 46 Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 303–304. 47 Lehmann, Ethics, p. 305.

Kenneth Kirk

355

that he wrote detailed manuals for every dilemma in the confessional, so Lehmann was being harsh in his criticism.48 It is all the more telling a criticism because Lehmann correctly points out that the Caroline theologians were themselves ‘concerned about a less formal and schematic program of moral guidance, derived from a more faithful adherence to Holy Scripture. They laboured for an ideal of Christian discipleship in terms of a renewed human being. … The Carolines were dedicated to a spirituality of holy living and holy dying.’49 He shows that Kirk claimed to be standing in the Caroline tradition, but fell back into a penitential theology they would never have espoused, whereas Hooker, Sanderson and Taylor represented a genuine attempt to hold together the Reformed tradition and Catholic moral theology. Kirk claimed to be inspired by this tradition but could not make the breakthrough required. Lehmann shows the variety of the Catholic tradition – Aquinas and the medieval scholastics, the Anglican Carolines and the Roman Catholic manualists writing in the 1920s and 1930s – and argues convincingly that Kirk tried to combine elements from each of them, but in the end failed to create a new strategy for rethinking moral theology. Kirk was quite convinced, however, that he had been successful in combining the elements of the Caroline tradition with Thomism, and further that the church could in principle change and evolve its views. The critical issue was where to resist change and where to allow it.50 ‘It is the privilege of man to attempt to formulate the law progressively in terms nearer to the mind of God.’51 The church was a community of moral deliberation, and Kirk saw his writing, preaching and leading of conferences across the Church of England as bringing back to people’s attention past Anglican and Roman Catholic arguments, discussions and debates. 5

How the Church Can Change Its Mind

Kirk believed that previous debates in moral theology could and should guide Christians today, and once again the problem with Roman Catholicism was 48 Keenan, History of Catholic Moral Theology, chapter 2, ‘The Moral Manualists’, pp. 9–34. 49 Lehmann, Ethics, p. 305. 50 Kirk, Conscience, p. 81. On Kirk’s discussion of the changes made by the church on particular issues, see Kirk, Conscience, pp. 240–54 (refusal of Communion), 275–286 (fasting before Communion, and clerical celibacy), 290–306 (birth control), 306–319 (gambling), 337–354 (lying), 354–362 (strikes), 383–290 (marriage with a deceased wife’s sister). 51 Kirk, Conscience, p. 130; see also p. 124: ‘the only proper procedure is to labour towards the understanding of the law until we are able to state it in a form which will exclude whatever merits exclusion, without emphasizing the device of ethical exemption’.

356

Chapter 11

an appeal to an autocratic authority of the magisterium which stifled debate. Nevertheless, he was ambiguous here, because he valued both the Roman Catholic sense of having an inherent authority in moral teaching and its ecclesial integrity, stemming from its autonomy, and worried that Anglicanism lacked this autonomy. He saw the drive by many theologians, clergy and laity to make the Church of England more Catholic in its theology and practice as a move to reclaim its Catholic heritage and win a greater sense of integrity.52 Even so, Kirk criticized much contemporary Roman Catholic casuistry as deductive and legalist, and there is an echo of Taylor’s seventeenth-century criticism of Roman Catholic theologians here. Kirk knew Sanderson and Taylor well and cited them often. Whatever Lehmann felt, Kirk himself was critical of the ‘manualists’, although perhaps the issue can be resolved by pointing out that Lehmann’s critique was written in the 1960s, whereas in the 1930s Kirk felt he was putting distance between himself and ‘the manualists’. Catholic critics of the manualists in the period 1937–1954 included the biblical scholars Lottin and Tillmann in Europe. It is a mystery why Kirk did not engage with them, although by the time they were writing he was a busy diocesan bishop and had left academic life. Both of these Catholic moral theologians, and after Kirk’s death another Jesuit moralist, Gerard Gilleman, focused on Scripture and the virtues, rejecting casuistry altogether as belonging to the style of the manualists and being always employed in a deductive manner, whereas Kirk uniquely tried to combine casuistry with a virtue-based moral theology.53 He was to be rediscovered by Roman Catholics like Keenan in the 1990s.54 What was the process by which the church changed its mind? Here Kirk looked not only to debates but to custom, because it was reflection upon custom and social habit that produced change, or at least a deeper awareness of why these patterns of behaviour really mattered. The Christian community’s ecclesial standards could be local and regional, or written and enshrined in canon law, and Kirk’s awareness of this foreshadowed the debates about provincial autonomy and ethical divergence that were to wrack the Anglican Communion after the 1998 Lambeth Conference on same-sex relationships and gender. Kirk wrote: ‘there are practically no limits to the action of custom or desuetude in the introduction and abrogation of claims upon loyalty, provided always that that the tacit consent of authority can be assumed. Custom has 52 One by-product was conversations with the Roman Catholic Church at Malines. R. Williams, The Malines Conversations (New York: Paulist Press, 2021), esp. pp. 22–23, on Romanizing in the Church of England in the 1920s. 53 Jones, ‘Historical and Ecumenical Value’, p. 803. Gerard Gilleman, S.J., The Primacy of Charity in Moral Theology (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1959). 54 Keenan, History of Catholic Moral Theology, pp. 36, 159.

Kenneth Kirk

357

the same rights and privileges as official legislative action.’55 As noted above, he laid great stress on authority and loyalty, and dissent might be a duty, but only when one’s conscience called for it. As he wrote, ‘where no sin is involved, but only inconvenience or discomfort of greater or less degree, conformity will often be a duty demanded by loyalty’.56 Given how little the Church of England enforced its moral standards, rules of moral behaviour tended in reality to operate by social habit. While Kirk was happy with this, he also felt that as a moral theologian he should encourage ordinary Christians to reflect upon the social habits of church membership, and make a conscious decision about them. Above all, the priest hearing confessions should be the one who should reflect on the customs and social behaviour of those who came to him for confession, and he should always think deeply about what he should he say to penitents in a changing world, what he could allow and what he could not. Kirk knew that many bishops looked to him for guidance, as was shown in the 1930 Lambeth Conference. But it was by no means the case that he always convinced people. Two examples show how he worked on particular issues. Kirk’s own view of the issue of birth control (the term used in the 1920s) was conservative, but he felt that for every moral issue revisiting the casuistry of Sanderson and Taylor offered a solution. Birth control was the predominant social issue in the decade after the First World War, because it expressed the desire of women to decide on something fundamental to their own lives without the authority of the church; at the same time, contraception posed a threat to one of the traditional ‘goods’ of marriage, which was that of children. This was not an issue of error, because it was not the case that either the church or the individual couple were wrong and one must give way. Rather, it was an issue of doubt where, even allowing for the 1920 Lambeth Conference resolution of the Anglican Communion on the subject, the church’s views were unclear. Kirk’s reasoning is set out in great detail in Conscience.57 In the 1927 edition he refers to ‘official penitentiary advisors’ in the Roman Catholic Church, who are above ordinary parish priests who offer confession, with their role being to collaborate with the bishops as experts in confession and deal with difficult cases. Bishops could delegate ‘reserved cases’ to them, and Kirk pleads for 55 Kirk, Conscience, p. 82. See Smith’s discussion of this passage in ‘Introduction’, pp. xix–xx. 56 Kirk, Conscience, p. 65. 57 To avoid repetition, Kirk’s consideration of this issue is set out below under the heading of the Lambeth Conference, 1930. Kirk was a profound influence upon the conference’s thinking on contraception.

358

Chapter 11

such machinery in the Church of England to be used to determine who should be allowed to use birth control, and to give detailed guidance to confessors. Significantly, after the 1930 Lambeth Resolution Kirk downplayed both these official advisers and the role of the confessor on issues of birth control, arguing instead that what mattered was that ‘responsible authority’ should be listened to. In 1933 this addition, and others, were made to the text of Conscience, reflecting the changed situation. Further editions were printed in 1936 and 1948, arguing that the resolution of doubt should now be done by the laity, listening to authority.58 In terms of divorce, Kirk published Marriage and Divorce in 1933, and revised it extensively in 1948. He believed that marriage was indissoluble, but also that the church should not, and could not, force the state to maintain that position. Although it was true that Jesus never ‘ordained temporal penalties for those who disregarded or disobeyed his maxims’, nevertheless he set out a firm principle that marriage was indissoluble, and Kirk strongly denied that Jesus was only putting forward an ideal in his teaching on divorce. So, for a Christian, divorce remained a sin. Jesus’ teaching in Mark 10:2–12 on divorce was completely convincing for Kirk.59 However, the reality of divorce in society was clear, with the state allowing remarriage after divorce, so the issue was what the church should say to divorced persons. Equally, while the Anglican Communion had been moving in the period 1888–1930 to a stricter policy in its resolutions, it had neither established a principle for those policies nor set in place machinery to enforce its views. This Kirk regretted, continuing to maintain a belief in the indissolubility of marriage in the 1948 revised edition of his book.60 He refused to give Communion to divorcees, following the Roman Catholic position, although he preferred an outcome where divorced and remarried people did not present themselves for Communion, accepting the teaching of the church. 58 Kirk, Conscience, pp. 247, 302; the latter suggests strongly that Kirk wanted the 1930 Lambeth Resolution on birth control to include the creation of such expert advisers, and felt it failed in not recommending this option. 59 Kenneth Kirk, Marriage and Divorce (London: Centenary Press, 1933; 2nd edition, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), p. 32. T. S. Eliot, who was a devout Anglo-Catholic and listened carefully to the teaching of the church, refused to divorce his wife, Vivien, in the 1930s and marry Emily Hale, despite her requests, even though Eliot’s wife had been sectioned in a mental hospital, and the marriage had broken down for years after much acrimony. Robert Crawford, Eliot after The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2022), p. 205. 60 Ann Sumner Holmes, The Church of England and Divorce in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 62. Hurst, ‘Bishop Kirk’, p. 361, quoting Kenneth Kirk, ‘When the Church Says No’, Oxford Diocesan Magazine, April 1949.

Kenneth Kirk

6

359

Lambeth Conference, 1930

The issue of birth control came to a head in 1930, when bishops from across the global Anglican Communion gathered in the Lambeth Conference.61 Over the years the decision of the Conference has been commented on in many articles and books, since it was seen as the beginning of a change in Anglican moral teaching.62 It also produced a fierce reaction from those opposed to the change, led by Bishop Charles Gore, now in retirement, as a fierce critic, followed by the Mothers’ Union, which promoted motherhood in the Anglican Communion; outside Anglicanism, the Roman Catholic Church condemned the decision.63 The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, put as cautious an approach after the event on the decision of the Conference as possible, saying that the Conference was ‘unable to condemn the use of artificial methods [of birth control] as in themselves sinful’, with real change deferred until the 1958 Lambeth Conference.64 The 1930 Conference was asked whether it wished to repeat the condemnation of contraception made at the previous Conference of 1920. Kirk had written on the topic, and was regarded as the leading Anglican moral theologian in the world, although he was not yet a bishop. His views deeply influenced the 61 The Lambeth Conferences 1867–1948 (London: SPCK, 1948). ‘Birth-Control’, in The Lambeth Conference, 1930: Encyclical Letter from the Bishops, with Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1930), pp. 89–92. 62 On the Lambeth Conference 1930, marriage and contraception, see Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Lambeth Conferences on Contraception, 1908–68’, Theology 123.2 (2020), pp. 95–103. Charlotte Methuen, ‘The Lambeth Conference, Gender and Sexuality’, Theology 123.2 (2020), pp. 84–94. Harmon L. Smith, ‘Contraception and Natural Law: A Half-Century of Anglican Moral Reflection’, in Paul Elmen (ed.), The Anglican Moral Choice (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1983), pp. 181–182. Matthew S. C. Olver, ‘Contraception’s Autho­ rity: An Anglican’s Liturgical and Synodical Thought Experiment in light of ARCUSA’s “Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment”’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 50.3 (2015), pp. 417–451. John Morgan, ‘Anglicanism, Family Planning and Contraception: The Develop­ ment of a Moral Teaching and Its Ecumenical Implications’, Journal of Anglican Studies 16.2 (2018), pp. 147–169. 63 Charles Gore, Lambeth on Contraceptives (London: Mowbray, 1930). Cordelia Moyse, A History of the Mothers’ Union (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 194–195. Pius XII, Casti Connubii, encyclical, 31 December 1930, in Anne Fremantle (ed.), The Papal Encyclicals in Historical Context (New York: New American Library, 1956). 64 Chronicle of Canterbury Convocation, 13 November 1930, pp. 153–155, cited in Morgan, ‘Anglicanism’, p. 155. The Family in Contemporary Society: The Report of a Group Convened at the Behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With Appended Reports from the U.S.A., Canada, and India (London: SPCK, 1958). The Lambeth Conference of 1958 (London: SPCK, 1958).

360

Chapter 11

Conference.65 He also consciously put a distance between the Anglican position and that of the Roman Catholic Church. Kirk had written in Conscience: On the other hand it is to be remembered that where any principle of morality is actually doubted by Christians of maturity, earnestness and intelligence, this in itself makes it to some extent ‘doubtful’. And most certainly there is an important – perhaps also a growing – body of Christian opinion which refuses to regard the condemnation of ‘birth-control’ in any and every case as legitimate.66 Kirk spent several pages in Conscience exegeting the 1920 Lambeth Conference, referring to Resolution 68 of the Lambeth Report. This resolution stated that the Conference declined to lay down rules for every abnormal case.67 However, it warned against ‘the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of contraception’. Kirk raised many doubts, asking what the phrase ‘declining to lay down rules for every abnormal case’ meant in practice? The phrase ‘we desire solemnly to commend’ was not an ecclesiastical ruling, which is absolute. ‘Unnatural means’ raised the difficulty of deciding what is ‘natural’ and what ‘unnatural’. He also wrote that no distinction was made between the ‘dangers and evils’ attaching to contraception for the avoidance of childbirth altogether on the one hand, and its use after the birth of several children on the other.68 Kirk did not want to leave the decision to the individual, and rather patronizingly referred to ‘the vast majority of immature lads and girls among their parishioners who rush into matrimony so light-heartedly’.69 He also said it was ‘frankly inconceivable’ that the bishops would accept ‘any half-instructed, luke-warm, comfort-loving pair of Anglicans deciding the matter for themselves’.70 He argued that ‘no one is free to employ methods of birth-control in matrimony until he has received the authority of the Church, speaking through the accredited channel of the priesthood’.71 In the next line, he referred to ‘a priest and

65 On birth control, see Kirk, Conscience, pp. 290–306. On casuistry, see Kirk, Conscience, pp. xvi, xxii. 66 Kirk, Conscience, p. 292 (wrongly quoted in Morgan, ‘Anglicanism’, p. 153). 67 Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, Holden at Lambeth Palace July 5 to August 7, 1920: Encyclical Letter from the Bishops with the Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK, 1920), p. 44. 68 Kirk, Conscience, p. 293. 69 Kirk, Conscience, p. 304. 70 Kirk, Conscience, p. 301. 71 Kirk, Conscience, p. 303.

Kenneth Kirk

361

confessor’ and his use of the term ‘authority’ almost certainly means the authority of the penitential. Resolution 15 of the 1930 Conference allowed greater freedom on the matter. However, it was the only resolution in the Conference where voting figures were published. Of the attending bishops, 193 voted for the resolution and 67 against; 48 did not record a vote. As Matthew Olver points out, the decision to publish voting figures is probably because it was the only resolution where votes were actually counted, demonstrating the controversial nature of the resolution.72 Where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles. The primary and obvious method is complete abstinence from intercourse (as far as may be necessary) in a life of discipline and self-control lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless in those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, the Conference agrees that other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles.73 Kirk found the 1930 Conference’s acceptance of contraception in cases of great necessity was as far as he could go. The 1933 edition of Conscience reflected his acceptance of the 1930 decision, and argued that an a priori condemnation of contraception was fallacious since it identified unnatural with artificial. Kirk wished for authoritative guidance from the church lest ‘gross laxity’ arise.74 He allowed that individuals could use contraception in two cases. The first was that, if they genuinely felt that they could act in conscience and use contraception they could not be condemned, which was the defence of invincible ignorance where a person believes what they are doing is correct. Kirk cited Jeremy Taylor: ‘Invincible ignorance … is of things which we cannot know because we have never heard of them, and are not taught sufficiently’.75 Invincible ignorance is involuntary: if one does not know what the Christian duty is, there is no intention of not following the right course of action; this does not excuse 72 Olver, ‘Contraception’s Authority’, p. 441. 73 Roger Coleman (ed.), Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences, 1867–1988 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992), p. 72. 74 Kirk, Conscience (3rd edition, 1949), p. 300. Smith, ‘Contraception’, pp. 190–191. Sedgwick, ‘Lambeth Conferences’, p. 98. 75 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, book 4, chapter 1, rule 5(12), quoted in Kirk, Ignorance, p. 61 (italics original in Taylor).

362

Chapter 11

ignorance of natural law, written on human hearts, nor of what a person should be expected to know from their circumstances.76 As an illustration of natural law, Kirk appeals to outrageous, inhuman and intentional cruelty to children which the ‘conscience of society’ will always condemn.77 In the second case, if individuals were unsure how to act, they could appeal to the 1930 resolution, which was a very carefully crafted move away from the traditional Anglican (and Roman Catholic) position on contraception. It reflected a solution by the use of casuistry, and an illustration of how a case of doubt (in the technical meaning of the community’s expectations of its members being unclear, and so an individual agent being left in ‘doubt’) could be resolved properly. Kirk accepted this resolution as a genuine example of the ‘progressive’ clarification of the law of God. More simply, it showed how and why the church could change its mind. There is a study of Kirk’s views on consensus fidelium, or the consensus of the church, by a Roman Catholic moral theologian, Michael Prieur. Prieur shows that Kirk was concerned that if the church did not reiterate its principles then its commitment to those principles might be doubted. He refers to a 1925 article by Kirk, published before Conscience was written, which says that consensus fidelium is related to the actions of the church, so that if the church lets its principles become ignored, that implies something about its moral stance. It is a significant issue which Kirk reflected much upon.78 7

The Vision of God

Kirk, however, was not simply concerned about casuistry. He also sought to present afresh the Anglican exemplary tradition with his 1928 Bampton Lectures, later published in 1931 in expanded form as The Vision of God. The book was so large that in 1934 he produced an abridged version, which was closer to the original 1928 lectures, although not identical. It was the greatest work of moral theology in the first half of the twentieth century, and can be 76 Kirk, Ignorance, p. 34, quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, i–ii. 75–76. 77 Kirk, Ignorance, pp. 36–37. Garnsey, ‘Moral Theology’, pp. 64, 193–194, summarizing Kirk’s views on invincible ignorance in relation to custom as embodying moral principles. Kirk applied this to polygamy in ‘primitive’ tribes, who were ‘backward or uninstructed people’: Garnsey, ‘Moral Theology’, p. 206, quoting Kirk, Marriage and Divorce, p. 14. 78 Kenneth Kirk, ‘Four Cases of Conscience’, Theology 11.62 (1925), pp. 81–83. Michael Prieur, ‘The Use of consensus fidelium as a Source of Moral Judgment: A Study in Anglican Moral Theology with Special Reference to Kenneth Kirk 1886–1954’ (Ph.D. thesis, Athenaeum San Anselmo, Rome, 1969), p. 268.

Kenneth Kirk

363

compared to the sermons of Butler and Newman. Like both these men, Kirk had an enormous influence long after the publication of this book, and it is still cited as a classic. The Vision of God addressed ‘the question of Christian practice and formation as a matter of action and intent, and the corrupting power of actions that narrowly focus on right actions’.79 Kirk began by arguing that perfection, or happiness, is the goal of the moral life, where the ideal character is disinterested and does not seek happiness for themselves; if one does so, it is a form of selfishness, even in a sophisticated manner, seeking moral benefit for oneself. The resolution of this paradox lies in the activity of worship, because this lifts the soul out of itself and centres it on God.80 ‘The doctrine that the “end of man is the vision of God”, as a practical maxim for life, implies that the Christian should set himself first of all to focus his thought upon God in the spirit of worship.’81 Worship leads on to service in the spirit of humility, whereas service as an ideal can lead to a ‘spirit of patronage’.82 Smith compares Kirk’s theory with that of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, where the person moves beyond their ego and centres themself on Christ.83 Such an object of worship can also be held by a community, and this in turn will require some communal morality, not to exclude others but to assist the group’s members as they seek to maintain loyalty both to the group (the church) and to the external object of devotion or worship (God or, for Bonhoeffer, Jesus Christ). As Smith says, for both theologians the test of a good rule is not its formal clarity or consistency but its effectiveness in sustaining a Christian life.84 This is a direct link back to Kirk’s casuistry because, as times changed, and new moral doubts and perplexities arose, casuistry was there to help the community understand what demands might be made upon its members. As said above, Kirk was cautious, often deeply conservative, and seen as maintaining the Anglo-Catholic position in Anglicanism, but his intellectual belief was always that the moral theologian had to be alive to new demands and challenges, so that the community could be sustained and guided in its loyalty to God. Kirk never wavered in this, nor thought that withdrawal from the world was necessary in the Christian life.

79 80 81 82 83

Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 228. Kirk, Vision of God, p. xii. Kirk, Vision of God, p. 444. Kirk, Vision of God, pp. 447–449. D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1955), p. 61: ‘It is Christ who shapes men in conformity with Himself.’ 84 Smith, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii.

364

Chapter 11

In The Vision of God Kirk identified three contemporary problems in the church’s approach to moral theology: the dangers of institutionalism, the difficulties of formalism and being over-rigorous (rigorism). In terms of institutionalism, the church has always struggled with creating forms of discipline that reflect the distinctive way of life which is Christianity and which shapes the individual in the Christian faith. The problem identified by Kirk is that of imposing corporate discipline upon the individual, where so often rigidity is the result. Relaxing the discipline of the church in the name of tolerance can, however, lead to ‘the danger of eviscerating Christianity’. The second weakness across the centuries has been formalism. This is because for the individual formalism becomes the legal expression of Christianity, where the Christian faith is identified with detailed duties and obligations and the faith becomes reduced to a series of religious observances and moral restraint. Thirdly, and again as part of a whole, rigorism is related to formalism. Temperance is essential to the Christian faith, but ‘self-discipline can become world-denying so that asceticism becomes rigorist to the point of self-mortification and self-abnegation’. Kirk’s great insight was to see that the question of Christian discipline can only be resolved in terms of its relationship to worship. The three issues of institutionalism, formalism and rigorism must be seen in relation to the life of corporate and individual prayer. This means that the greatest strength of The Vision of God was its treatment of worship and moral formation. Kirk argued that there is an interplay between worship, ecclesiology and moral theology. Moral action is carried out by the individual person as someone who is part of a community, the church. The principal action of the church is worship, and this service of God makes possible the service of the world in love and moral action. Kirk inspired in ‘that outstanding generation of Anglo-Catholic theologians and scholars which included Gregory Dix, Austin Farrer, Eric Mascall and Kenneth Kirk’ the importance of relating worship to systematic theology, historical study and moral theology.85 Others included Gabriel Hebert and Michael Ramsey. Kirk noted in the preface to the abridged edition of The Vision of God: It is suggested in the chapters which follow that the doctrine ‘the end of life is the vision of God’ has throughout been interpreted by Christian thought at its best as implying in practice that the highest prerogative of the Christian, in this life as well as the hereafter, is the activity of worship;

85 Jeremy Morris, review of Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall (eds), Michael Ramsey as Theo­ logian, Anglican and Episcopal History 66. 2 (1997), pp. 244–246.

Kenneth Kirk

365

and that nowhere except in this activity will he find the key to his ethical problems.86 The attitude of worship is rooted in pureness of heart, as expressed in the Matthean Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, and in Romans 12. The virtues which are cultivated by the Christian are made possible by a study of the nature of God as revealed in Jesus in the Gospels, which will direct our hearts aright.87 Kirk developed this theme throughout The Vision of God: ‘The only achievement man has the right to hope for is that of greater Christian saintliness – greater zeal for service – coming from this direction of the heart and mind to God.’88 His book studies how this vision has been lived out throughout the Jewish Scriptures, the New Testament and finally the history of Christianity. Jane Shaw notes that Kirk was not alone in this position. Temple gave addresses to Oxford students in 1931, and made the same point: ‘People are always thinking that conduct is supremely important, and that because prayer helps it, therefore prayer is good. That is true as far as it goes; still truer is it to say that worship is of supreme importance and conduct tests it.’89 The greatest development of Kirk’s appeal to worship came in the work of A. G. Hebert, Gregory Dix and Michael Ramsey.90 The first two were liturgical scholars from the Catholic tradition in the Church of England. Ramsey in the 1930s was a young theologian who made his name with The Gospel and the Catholic Church.91 This book argued that sacramental worship was implicit in the New Testament and that ‘the Liturgy is not an example of piety divorced from common life; it is rather the bringing of all common life into the sacrifice of Christ’.92 Hebert and Dix both belonged to religious orders (itself something 86 87 88 89

90 91 92

Kenneth Kirk, ‘Preface’, in The Vision of God, abridged edition (London: Longmans Green, 1934; reprinted Cambridge: James Clarke, 1977), p. 1. Stephen Platten, ‘The Vision of God: Kenneth Kirk, A Critical Appreciation’, Theology 124.1 (2021), p. 11. Kirk, Vision of God, p. 445. William Temple, Christian Faith and Life: Being Eight Addresses Delivered in the University Church at Oxford, February 8th–15th 1931 (London: Mowbray, 1931), p. 19, cited in Jane Shaw, ‘Ethics and Mysticism: The Work of Kenneth E. Kirk and Some Other Modern Anglicans’, Journal of Anglican Studies 16.1 (2018), pp. 43–44. H. Benedict Green, ‘Dix, George Eglinton Alston [name in religion Gregory Dix]’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945). A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: SPCK, 1936; reprinted 1990). Ramsey, Gospel, p. 119. Christopher Irvine, Worship, Church and Society (Norwich: Canter­ bury Press, 1993), pp. 72–73, on Ramsey’s work; the whole book expounds Hebert’s theology.

366

Chapter 11

that had only arisen in Anglicanism in the last century), and Kirk was a close friend of Dix. Dix argued that by participating in the Eucharist Christians are transformed so that they can live out their lives in a new way.93 His central concept is that of sacrifice, or self-sacrifice, which is made to an external body outside the self. This understanding is also the key to Dix’s approach to the Eucharist, where the members of the church sacrifice themselves in Christ, and the sacrifice is made to God the Father.94 He saw his whole life not as self-realization, as Moberly had defined it, but as self-sacrifice. Hebert became involved in the Continental liturgical movement. He published Liturgy and Society in 1935, which introduced that movement’s ideas to an English audience.95 In 1937 he edited a collection of essays called The Parish Communion.96 Again personal friendship was important. Hebert and Ramsey were close friends and in the 1930s they met often.97 Liturgy and Society argued that ‘the task of the Church in the future will be to re-create a social life’.98 That is made possible by participation in worship, above all the Eucharist, and Kirk strongly affirmed this in The Vision of God.99 Hebert’s work later influenced the contemporary Anglican ethicist Timothy Sedgwick.100 8

Contemporary Anglican Moral Theologians on Kirk

Kirk’s work has been commented upon by many contemporary Anglican moral theologians. It is easiest to divide those who have written about him into those who are negative, those who are affirming but critical, and those who are positive. The most critical comments come from Oliver O’Donovan. He has been for decades the leading Anglican moral theologian in the world, but in one 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Simon Jones (ed.), The Sacramental Life: Gregory Dix and His Writings (Norwich: Canter­ bury Press, 2007), p. xix. David Fuller, A Latter-Day Tractarian: Dom Gregory Dix (Lulu Press, 2013). David Fuller, A Very Anglican Monk: A Study of the Life and Works of Dom Gregory Dix (Lulu Press, 2014). Jones, Sacramental Life, p. xxi. A. G. Hebert, Liturgy and Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1961; first published 1935). A. G. Hebert (ed.), The Parish Communion (London: SPCK, 1937). Christopher Irvine, Worship, on the relationship of Ramsey and Hebert. The 1936 edition of Ramsey, Gospel, thanks Hebert for his encouragement and criticism. Hebert, Liturgy, p. 193. Hebert, Liturgy, p. 209, recommending Kirk’s Conscience and Its Problems as a way of extending participation in the Eucharist to applying Christianity to ‘problems of daily life’. Timothy F. Sedgwick, The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety (New York: Seabury Books, 1999), p. viii. Timothy F. Sedgwick, Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987).

Kenneth Kirk

367

of his first books he rejected Kirk’s theology. He charged Kirk with dissolving Christ’s moral teaching into legislation by the community in a purely historicist manner, and equating the vision of God with the ‘project of self-oblivion’.101 David Smith is critical of O’Donovan’s comments, arguing that his wish for the church not merely to offer counsel but actually to command offers a different conception of the role of the church from that of Kirk. O’Donovan, and indeed Stanley Hauerwas, presents a far more evangelical vision of the church than Kirk’s. If the church is a ‘social ethic’, in Hauerwas’s phrase, it can command its members to live according to its wishes.102 Kirk was far more aware of the complexity of the issues than O’Donovan allows, and far more involved with custom, practice and individual conscience. It is because these are such difficult issues that loyalty is such a challenging requirement: both vital for the institution to survive and yet very hard to sort out in practice. Kirk was far more pastoral than O’Donovan, and more aware of the difficulty of identifying moral practices in social custom.103 Although writing sixty years before O’Donovan, Kirk sounds to a modern reader much more conscious of contemporary social life, with its hesitancy, ambiguity and unwritten social practices, even if he assumes that the Christian will always seek to put loyalty to the church above everything else, which is not a view which has worn well, given the questioning of the authority of the church after the abuse scandals in recent decades.104 Others are questioning but affirmative. The late Daniel Westberg, writing just before his early death, said that Kirk’s books remained of great value, but he ‘was not able to make a break with the prevailing structure of action constituted by conscience and obedience to law’.105 He saw Some Principles of Moral Theology as being imaginative in making links with contemporary psychology, but described Conscience as a regression. According to Westberg, Kirk, and his 101 Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), pp. 165–167, 250–252. Oliver O’Donovan, ‘How Can Theology Be Moral?’, Journal of Reli­ gious Ethics 17.2 (1989), pp. 81–94, esp. pp. 87–88, where Kirk is charged with Catholic historicism and voluntarism. 102 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 96–115. 103 Smith, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxi–xxii, on O’Donovan and Hauerwas. 104 Hans Zollner, ‘The Child at the Center: What Can Theology Say in the Face of the Scandals of Abuse?’, Theological Studies 80.3 (2019), pp. 692–710. Fiona Gardner, ‘Defensive Processes and Deception: An Analysis of the Response of the Institutional Churches to Disclosures of Child Sexual Abuse’, British Journal of Psychotherapy 28.1 (2012), pp. 98–109. 105 Daniel Westberg, Renewing Moral Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), p. 17. Daniel Westberg, ‘The Influence of Aquinas on Protestant Ethics’, pp. 267–285, in Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen (eds), Aquinas Among the Protestants (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2018).

368

Chapter 11

successor Robert Mortimer, ‘wrote with a certain blinkered vision’.106 Westberg used Kirk’s writings as a foil for his own elaboration of the virtues.107 Many Anglicans have written positively on Kirk in the last few years: Ronald Preston, Brian Hebblethwaite, Timothy Sedgwick, Jane Shaw and Stephen Platten, to name a few.108 Platten says: It could be argued that Kirk’s Vision of God is the single most significant essay on moral theology written by an Anglican in the twentieth century. At the heart of this claim would be its determination to reverse the trend towards codification through any one of the different rule-based ethics on the market.109 Preston is also deeply appreciative but regrets the dismissal of Protestant piety, which is a constant theme in his work: ‘This has been a common Catholic travesty of Protestant piety at its best. Kirk was incapable of giving the same critical attention to it as he had given to the Catholic tradition.’110 Shaw gives a detailed account of Kirk’s theology, concluding that Kirk emphasized character formation and spiritual self-discipline through worship and prayer – that is, through activity that points us beyond ourselves, to God and others. This takes us away from an individualistic piety. For Kirk, seeking the vision of God was not selfishness, but the way to overcome selfishness. The knot of egotism could only be untied by the discovery of something more important than oneself.111 However, the most important response to Kirk has been that made by Timothy Sedgwick.112 This leads into a consideration of moral theology after 1950. Sedgwick both criticizes Kirk and yet sees his contribution as essential. He 106 Westberg, ‘Influence of Aquinas’, pp. 278, 282. 107 Westberg, Renewing Moral Theology. 108 Ronald Preston, ‘Re-Review: Kenneth Kirk’s The Vision of God’, Modern Churchman 22 (1980), pp. 36–39. Brian Hebblethwaite, The Adequacy of Christian Ethics (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1981), pp. 62–66. Timothy F. Sedgwick, ‘The New Shape of Anglican Identity’, Anglican Theological Review 77.2 (1995), pp. 187–197. Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exem­ plary Tradition’. Stephen Platten, ‘Making Good People  … Rather than Making People Good?’, Journal of Anglican Studies 13.2 (2015), pp. 156–171. Platten, ‘The Vision of God’, pp. 4–14. Shaw, ‘Ethics and Mysticism’. 109 Platten, ‘The Vision of God’, p. 12. 110 Preston, ‘Re-Review’, p. 39. 111 Shaw, ‘Ethics and Mysticism’. 112 Sedgwick, ‘Revising Anglican Theology’.

Kenneth Kirk

369

criticizes Kirk for holding to a deeply classical understanding of how the self discovers in an intellectualist framework moral truth and minimal standards. His criticism of Kirk is in fact twofold. First, he is critical of those like Henry McAdoo who place the Caroline theologians and Kirk himself in the context of an Anglican via media, since all traditions struggle with the problem of discipline, and Anglicanism is not a via media between Roman Catholic legalism and Protestant antinomianism.113 It is inadequate historically to resolve identity by means of a simple polarity between these two expressions of Christianity and the search for a middle way. Rather, Anglicanism must face particular challenges and identify the sources which will enable it to deal with these challenges in the modern world. What Sedgwick leaves us with is the question of how Christian identity can be construed across traditions. Secondly, Sedgwick criticizes Kirk’s intellectualist account of moral judgement because Kirk remained a deeply traditional moral theologian, even if also versed in much contemporary psychology.114 If one accepts a much more historicist account of the origin of moral values, seeing them as human symbols which express the evaluative judgements of particular communities, at a particular time, then worship will contribute to this new understanding.115 Many theologians after Kirk, such as H. Richard Niebuhr, Stephen Sykes, George Lindbeck and Rowan Williams, have all investigated the nature of Christian identity in a modern world which is shaped by a historical understanding of meaning and truth.116 Confessional and sacramental traditions interpenetrate each other here, and the nature of Anglican identity has also been a contested field. Stephen Sykes, Mark Chapman and Paul Avis are some of those who have engaged in this discussion in the last four decades. 9

Conclusion

Kirk nevertheless provided two enormous contributions to moral theology, which mark him as one of the greatest Anglican moral theologians in the twentieth century. First, he recognized the challenge of the modern world to the individual, and the need for a way through this problem. Sedgwick’s 113 Sedgwick, ‘Revising Anglican Theology’, pp. 132–133. Sedgwick, ‘New Shape of Anglican Identity’, p. 194. 114 Sedgwick, ‘Revising Anglican Theology’, p. 128. 115 Sedgwick, ‘Revising Anglican Theology’, p. 137. Sedgwick instances B. Häring, The Law of Christ, 3 vols (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1961–1966), as an example of moral life seen as responsibility in a historical understanding of the self. He contrasts this with Kirk. 116 Sedgwick, ‘New Shape of Anglican Identity’, p. 195.

370

Chapter 11

articles compare Kirk and Hooker, arguing that both Hooker and Kirk ‘mediate between a received tradition and the formation of a people’.117 Kirk was faced with the breakdown of traditional authority and the emphasis on religious freedom, where religious authority can only prescribe and not compel personal discipline that will express and deepen the faith of individuals. Equally, individuals will follow other individuals insofar as their faith and practices make sense to them. ‘Religious authority is dependent upon the judgment of individuals.’118 This is why Kirk wrestled so much with both loyalty and casuistry, and, unlike Catholic moral theologians such as Lottin, he revived casuistry alongside his emphasis on the Christian life as a growth in virtue.119 Secondly, Kirk claimed that worship lies at the heart of Christian identity, and so moral theology would no longer be seen in terms of the context of moral philosophy as practised in the British empiricist and Idealist traditions, but instead it would be seen within the life of the church itself. This was his great contribution to moral theology, even if he remained within a deeply intellectual and Catholic framework himself. 117 Sedgwick, ‘New Shape of Anglican Identity’, pp. 193–194. 118 Sedgwick, ‘New Shape of Anglican Identity’, p. 194. 119 Sedgwick, Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, has a detailed account of Anglican casuistry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Conclusion

Anglican Moral Theology 1680–1950 From 1660 to 1834, the seven chapters of Part 1 traced the course of the Enlightenment in England, and its relationship to the genealogy of Anglican moral theology. Part 1 opened after the death of Robert Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor in the 1660s, who were the greatest moral theologians of the Caroline period. By 1670, following the Restoration of the monarchy ten years earlier, it looked as though, even without the presence of Sanderson and Taylor, Anglican moral theology had an assured place in intellectual and cultural life. At the same time, English Reformed theology was engaged in a debate with the Cambridge Platonists, to the disadvantage of the former, with the result that Calvinism ceased to be a dominant force in the English universities. It seemed that the struggles over the character of the national religion which had marked the Reformation had finally ended, but new challenges emerged. This survey of the tradition of Anglican moral theology covers nearly three centuries. Several factors indicate its continuity. There is primarily an emphasis on the Anglican exemplary tradition, as shown in Joseph Butler, Samuel Coleridge, John Henry Newman and F. D. Maurice. This is a turn to the subject, not in the sense of subjectivism, but as an appeal to the experience of the Christian faith, and its effects. Moral theology reflects on the saving truth of the encounter between God and the human person, as the grace of the Holy Spirit transforms the character of the believing subject, enabling the person so renewed to follow the example of Jesus Christ, the truly human person. Again and again, these four theologians show how divine truth is active, bringing moral conversion, fresh vision and strengthened actions in the life of pilgrimage. Coleridge, as ever, is the master of the striking phrase: ‘Awakened by the cock-crow (a sermon, calamity, a sick bed or providential escape), the Christian pilgrim sets out in the morning twilight, while yet the truth (νομος τελειος ο της ελευθριας) is below the horizon’.1 Secondly, Anglican moral theology combines pastoral care and moral rigour. There are many examples of this tradition showing a deep interest in the welfare of others, or, in Butler’s words, ‘the love of our neighbour’.2 Another term is 1 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 9: Aids to Reflection, ed. John B. Beer (London: Routledge/Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 35–36, quoting James 1:25. 2 Joseph Butler, Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and a Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, ed. T. A. Roberts (London: SPCK, 1970). © Peter H. Sedgwick, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689015_015

372

Conclusion

compassion, found in both Butler and Henry Scott Holland.3 Such examples of pastoral care could be repeated many times. The rigorous nature of this tradition is held alongside the pastoral aspect, but it must not be misunderstood. It is not a tradition which appeals to moral absolutes, or strict legal expressions of morality, as Catholic moral theology did in this period. Rather its moral rigour is shown in two things. First, there is the psychological insight shown by many theologians in this tradition. Butler, William Law and Newman all exemplify this.4 Butler wrote of self-deceit as a ‘deep and calm source of delusion which  … corrupts conscience’.5 Newman could be harsh in his evaluation of the congregations he preached to: ‘To the end of the longest life you are still a beginner … Every day you live longer more will be required.’6 Secondly, there is the concern for sanctification and holiness, found above all in Law and John Wesley. Wesley’s concern for spiritual perfection runs through all his sermons, especially those on the Sermon on the Mount.7 Law wrote of the two orders of Christians: The one that fear’d and serv’d God in the common offices and business of a secular, worldly life. The other renouncing the common business, and common enjoyments of life, as riches, marriage, honours, and pleasures, devoted themselves to voluntary poverty, virginity, devotion, and retirement, that by this means they might live wholly unto God, in the daily exercise of a divine and heavenly life.8 Charles Gore is also very clear that Christian morality is strict and uncompromising. It is ‘a positive and exacting moral standard’.9 The call to sanctification 3 Butler, Sermon 5, ‘Upon Compassion’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons. Henry Scott Holland, ‘Character and Circumstance’, in Creed and Character (London: Rivingtons, 1888), p. 332. 4 Timothy F. Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), p. 223: ‘What is distinctive, however, about Butler’s virtue ethic is his development of a moral psychology.’ 5 Butler, Sermon 10, ‘Upon Self-Deceit’, in Butler’s Fifteen Sermons. 6 John Henry Newman, ‘Shrinking from Christ’s Coming’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols (London: Rivingtons, 1868–1881), Vol. 5, Sermon 4, p. 53. 7 John Wesley, Sermon 19, ‘The Great Privilege of Those Who Are Born of God’, in The Works of John Wesley, 28 vols to date (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984–), Vol. 1, p. 442; John Wesley, Sermon 27, ‘Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, VII’, in Works, Vol. 1, p. 592. 8 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: Methuen, 1899; 1st edition 1729), p. 95. 9 Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for 1891 (London: John Murray, 1891), p. 233.

Anglican Moral Theology 1680–1950

373

is necessary before the remodelling of society.10 Finally, William Temple wrote, ‘In the life of personal devotion to God, known as Righteous Love, the answer to problems of conduct otherwise unanswerable may be found.’11 The third factor is that Anglican moral theology became deeply aware of the way the Christian life is lived as a member of the church, surrounded by fellow Christians and aided by the constant receiving of the Eucharist. It would be fair to say that this is much more a nineteenth-century development than an eighteenth-century one, although Law is the great exception here. For Law, moral theology rests on our baptism, times of prayer during the day are related to the development of moral attitudes, and the Eucharist is central to his discipline.12 Newman, F. D. Maurice and those who wrote Anglican moral theology after 1880 all stress the relationship of moral practice to the Eucharist.13 Gore saw the social and ethical meaning of Christianity as ‘a supernatural fellowship in Christ’.14 Timothy Sedgwick describes Kenneth Kirk as envisioning ‘the pastoral character of church discipline as the cure of souls’.15 Worship, including participation in the sacraments, fosters love of God and love of neighbour.16 Kirk above all wished to commend the practice of confession as an aid to moral guidance, which was a novel approach in this tradition, but again shows how much the ecclesial context was central in his moral theology.17 Both Gore and Kirk became bishops and tried to embody their writing in the pastoral care of their dioceses. The final aspect of Anglican moral theology during the entire period from 1680 to 1950 is the intellectual rigour of the tradition. This is shown in many 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

Charles Gore, The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount (London: Percival, 1892), p. 7. William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1940; 1st edition 1934), p. 411. Law, Serious Call, pp. 209, 305. John Henry Newman, ‘Christ, a Quickening Spirit’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2, Sermon 13, pp. 143–144 (Easter Day 1834); F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ, Or Hints Respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1843), Vol. 2, chapter 4, ss. iii and iv, pp. 34–36, 59–64. Charles Gore, ‘The Idea of a Catholic Church’, Church Times, 15 October 1915, cited in James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960), p. 54. Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, p. 228. Kenneth E. Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry (London: Longmans, 1927), pp. 240–390, on many pastoral issues, such as birth control, divorce, participation of the individual in strikes, and gambling. Kenneth E. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application (London: Longmans, 1920), p. 165. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology, p. 23.

374

Conclusion

different theologians. Butler was critical of the ‘moral sense’ school, while also using it for his purposes. Coleridge was well aware of German Idealism and incorporated it into his theology in original and creative ways. Newman above all stands out for his intellectual brilliance, and his reworking of the empiricist tradition is displayed in many of his sermons, drawing on John Locke and David Hume. Finally there is the extensive dialogue of Anglican moral theology with British Idealism, which is the central theme of the chapters on the Lux Mundi school and William Temple. Temple’s later turn to Whitehead’s organic philosophy, when he was deeply preoccupied with being an archbishop, shows extraordinary intellectual creativity. My argument, then, is that Anglican moral theology from 1680 to 1950 has all the hallmarks of an intellectual and practical tradition, being shaped as a genealogy by those who inhabited it. There is both deep continuity and at the same time diversity of views. The four central aspects of this tradition can be repeated to sum up the continuity and creativity of this genealogy. First, there is a strong adherence to the Anglican exemplary tradition, where moral action is renewed by the work of the Holy Spirit to enable the person to follow Christ as exemplar. This is above all a virtue tradition concerned with fashioning the moral character of the individual person. Secondly, the tradition is not only pastoral but also morally rigorous. Thirdly, it is an ecclesial ethic, where the person is formed in the Christian community and nourished by the sacraments. Fourthly, it is intellectually robust, seeking to be in dialogue with contemporary moral philosophy. There is one more point to be made about the continuity in Anglican moral thought. The earlier book in this series, The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology, covered the period from the Reformation until 1670, while showing the roots of this theology in biblical, patristic and medieval theology. Two of the central concepts in that book were conscience and casuistry. Timothy Sedgwick has shown how much Jeremy Taylor originated the Anglican exemplary tradition, while also being concerned with both conscience and casuistry. These concepts were also of great concern to William Perkins and Robert Sanderson, as was the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was likewise central to Richard Hooker. The question therefore arises as to whether the genealogy shown in the earlier book carries over to the present one. The answer must be that it does so. There was constant reference to Hooker and Taylor, although not to Perkins, in all the moral theologians in the present book. Taylor was central to Wesley’s search for holiness, while Coleridge argued with him on his covert Socinianism.18 Newman also doubted Taylor’s 18 John B. Beer, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. liii, citing Coleridge to John Murray, 18 January 1822.

Anglican Moral Theology 1680–1950

375

orthodoxy while admiring his spirituality; and Newman venerated Butler’s writings. The theologian who most used Taylor and Sanderson was Kirk. All the theologians discussed in this book read Hooker, and felt they stood in his line of thought. However, continuity is not to be proved by simply citing which theologian read one of the earlier Anglican writers. Instead, three claims must be made. First, the Anglican exemplary tradition is the great thread which runs through both books, as Timothy Sedgwick has shown in his article.19 Secondly, the treatment of conscience is central to the Anglican tradition in both the Reformation period and the present one.20 Thirdly, casuistry is highly important in Perkins, Sanderson and Taylor. It then dies away, with Butler paying no attention to it at all, but Kirk revives it to the degree that he could be called a ‘theologian of casuistry’. He cites Sanderson and Taylor constantly. So the claim that there is a deep, underlying, consistency and continuity from the Reformation until 1950 can be substantiated in detail. Here is the coherence of Anglican moral theology. It is, however, a tradition which is neither single in its message (there were often conflicting views) nor one that always carried agreement among its practitioners. It is a tradition that is polyphonic, varied and disputatious, which is best conveyed by a narrative style rather than a conceptual one. Nevertheless, I would resist the claim that it lacked unity overall, because again and again we see individuals and groups seeking to persuade others within the tradition, sharing in a common liturgy and church life, and appealing back to the same sources. This is the complex, but ultimately unified, history of this tradition in the period 1680–1950. What about the period after that? This book ends in 1950. Temple died in 1944 and Kirk in 1954, and with their death two of the greatest moral theologians in this tradition left their work as a resource for future generations. Some theologians, such as Robert Mortimer, carried on Kirk’s legacy for a while, but it was fading by the 1960s.21 Society and culture were to change dramatically after 1960, and Anglicanism itself became global in both its ecclesiastical structure and its intellectual tradition. Meanwhile, new challenges in the understanding of what personal relationships meant, especially in sexuality and marriage, dominated the 1960s and beyond. Intellectually the climate has become far more hostile to claims of transcendence, and the enormous development of scientific knowledge left the humanities often feeling marginalized. 19 Sedgwick, ‘Anglican Exemplary Tradition’. 20 Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Anglican Moral Tradition, and the Formation of Conscience’, Sewa­ nee Theological Review 62.3 (2019), pp. 479–509. 21 J. R. Porter, ‘Robert Mortimer’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Jeremy Morris, ‘Enemy Within? The Appeal of the Discipline of Sociology to Religious Professionals in Post-War Britain’, Journal of Religion in Europe 9 (2016), p. 180: ‘the response of church leaders to the perception of institutional decline’.

376

Conclusion

For a few decades after 1960 Anglican moral theology went heavily on the defensive, and endured great controversy, until a recovery of morale in the twenty-first century. The very intensity of the moral and intellectual debates in the period 1960–2020 has often meant that the earlier period of 1680–1950 is seen as having nothing to say to the present day. This book seeks to answer that objection, and to show that within the Anglican moral tradition in that period there remain enormous riches which can be harvested again to the benefit of current debates. Anglicanism has always sought to explore the search for holiness, and the love of neighbour, as both a moral and ascetic practice, and the theologians described in this book are a great resource for the Anglican tradition, for moral theology at the present time and for Christianity more generally. I hope that the book encourages others to read again in that tradition, and to reclaim its moral insight for the life of the contemporary church.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Anonymous, Review of William Temple, Christus Veritas, Journal of Theological Studies 26.103 (1925), pp. 295–298. Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982). Bentham, Jeremy, Church-of-Englandism and Its Catechism Examined, ed. J. Crimmins and C. Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). Bentham, Jeremy, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Blondel, Maurice, L’action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893). Translated as Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Olivia Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1955). Bosanquet, Bernard, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912). Bosanquet, Bernard, The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan, 1912). Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), Bradley, F. H., Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). Bradley, F. H., Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). Bradley, F. H., Collected Works, Vol. 5, ed. W. J. Mander (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999). Bradley F. H., Ethical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876). Bradley, F. H., Mr. Sidgwick’s Hedonism (London: King and Co, 1877). Bramhall, John, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, D.D., ed. A. W. Hadden (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1842–1845). Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion, ed. Ronald Bayne (London: J. M. Dent, 1906). Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion, Everyman edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1927). Butler, Joseph, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, and a Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, ed. T. A. Roberts (London: SPCK, 1970). Butler, Joseph, Fifteen Sermons, and Other Writings on Ethics, ed. David McNaughton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Butler, Joseph, Several Letters to the Reverend Dr Clarke from a Gentleman in Glouces­ tershire Relating to the ‘Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God’, in Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (Glasgow, 1823; first published 1705), pp. 415–443.

378

Bibliography

Byrom, John, The Private Journal and Literary Remains of John Byrom, ed. Richard Parkinson (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1854). Caird, Edward, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 2 vols (Glasgow: James Macelhose, 1889). Caird, Edward, Ethical Philosophy (Glasgow: James Macelhose, 1886). Caird, Edward, The Evolution of Religion, 2 vols (Glasgow: James Macelhose, 1893). Caird, Edward, Hegel (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1883). Caird, Edward, ‘Professor Green’s Last Work’, Mind 8 (1883), pp. 544–561. Church, R. W., The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years 1833–1845 (London: Macmillan, 1894). Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1927). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 7: Biogra­ phia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 9: Aids to Reflection, ed. John B. Beer (London: Routledge/Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 10: On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1997). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 5: Literary Remains, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper Brothers, 1856). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002). Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3rd edition, 1732, ed. Douglas Den Uyl, 3 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). Cudworth, Ralph, The Life of Christ, The Pith and Kernel of All Religion (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647). Cudworth, Ralph, The Life of Christ, The Pith and Kernel of All Religion: A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable House of Commons at Westminster, available at http://www.cambridge-platonism.divinity.cam.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/Cudworth 1647 (accessed 5 April 2023). Cudworth, Ralph, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London: Richard Royston, 1678).

Bibliography

379

Cudworth, Ralph, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality with A Treatise of Freewill, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Davis, Henry, Moral and Pastoral Theology, 4 vols (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935). Dix, Gregory, God’s Ways with Man (London: Dacre Press, 1954), Dix, Gregory, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945). Eliot T. S., Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). Eliot, T. S., ‘Mens Creatrix: A Review’, International Journal of Ethics 27.4 (1917), pp. 542–543. Eliot T. S., The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920). Eliot, T. S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933). Gay, John, Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principles of Virtue or Morality, published anonymously as the introduction to William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law’ (Cambridge, 1731), available at https://oll.liber tyfund.org/title/wollaston-british-moralists-vol-2 (accessed 5 April 2023). Gore, Charles, Belief in Christ (London: John Murray, 1922). Gore, Charles, Belief in God (London: John Murray, 1921). Gore, Charles, Can We Then Believe? (London: John Murray, 1926). Gore, Charles, The Holy Spirit and the Church (London: John Murray, 1924). Gore, Charles, ‘The Idea of a Catholic Church’, Church Times, 15 October 1915. Gore, Charles, The Incarnation of the Son of God: Being the Bampton Lectures for 1891 (London: John Murray, 1891). Gore, Charles, Lambeth on Contraceptives (London: Mowbray, 1930). Gore, Charles, ed., Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1889). Gore, Charles, The New Theology and the Old Religion (London: John Murray, 1907). Gore, Charles, The Philosophy of the Good Life (London: John Murray, 1930). Gore, Charles, ‘Preface’, in J. O. Nash and Charles Gore (eds), William Law’s Defence of Church Principles: Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, 1717–1719 (London: Griffith Farran, 1891). Gore, Charles, The Reconstruction of Belief (London: John Murray, 1926). Gore, Charles, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition (London: John Murray, 1898). Gore, Charles, The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition (London: John Murray, 1894). Gore, Charles, The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount (London: Percival, 1892). Green, T. H., Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883). Green, T. H., The Witness of God, in R. L. Nettleship (ed.), Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. 3 (London: Longmans Green, 1888).

380

Bibliography

Green, T. H., The Word is Nigh Thee, in R. L. Nettleship (ed.), Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. 3 (London: Longmans Green, 1888). Haldane, R. B., The Philosophy of Humanism (London: John Murray, 1922). Häring, Bernhard, The Law of Christ, 3 vols (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1961–1966). Hauerwas, Stanley, The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). Haweis, H. R., ‘Frederick Denison Maurice’, Contemporary Review 65 (1894), pp. 873–886. Hobbes, Thomas, Elements of Law, ed. Ferdinand Toennies, 2nd edition (London: Cass, 1969; first published 1640). Hobbes, Thomas, English Works, ed. W. Molesworth, 11 volumes (London: Bohn, 1839–1845). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. E. M. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994). Holland, Henry Scott, Creed and Character (London: Rivingtons, 1888). Holland, Henry Scott, ‘Faith’, in Charles Gore (ed.), Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1889), pp. 3–54. Holland, Henry Scott, Fibres of Faith (London: Wells Gardner, 1910). Holland, Henry Scott, Logic and Life (London: Rivingtons, 1882). Holland, Henry Scott, Memoir and Letters, ed. Stephen Paget (London: John Murray, 1921). Holland, Henry Scott, The Optimism of Butler’s Analogy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1977). Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. J. V. Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Prin­ ciples of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; first published 1777). Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Hume, David, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004; facsimile of 1783 edition). Hume, David, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). Hume, David, New Letters of David Hume, ed. R. Klibansky and E. C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). Hume, David, ‘The Sceptic’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963; first published 1741–1742). Hume, David, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963; first published 1741–1742).

Bibliography

381

Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and J. M. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; first published 1738–1739). Hutcheson, Francis, Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1772; electronic reprint from the 4th edition, Thomson Gale, 2003). Hutcheson, Francis, ‘On the Natural Sociality of Human Beings’, in Philosophical Writings, ed. R. S. Downie (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1994; first published 1730). Inge, W. R., The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought: The Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge, 1925–1926 (London: Longmans Green, 1926). Inge, W. R., Review of R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, Journal of Theological Studies 2.8 (1901), pp. 618–622. Jackson, Thomas (ed)., The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, 14 vols, 3rd edition (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, 1829–1831). Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysic Of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Kemp, Eric, ed., The Life and Letters of Kenneth Escott Kirk, Bishop of Oxford 1937–1954 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959). King, William, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law (Cambridge: J. Stephens, 1731). Kingsley, Charles, Frederick Denison Maurice: A Sermon Preached in Aid of the Girls’ Home, 22, Charlotte Street, Portland Place (London: Macmillan, 1873), available at http://anglicanhistory.org/maurice/kingsley1873.html (accessed 5 April 2023). Kingsley, Charles, What Then Does Mr Newman Mean? A Reply to a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Newman, 3rd edition (London: Macmillan, 1864). Kirk, Kenneth E., ‘Author’s Note’, in Conscience and Its Problems (New York: Longmans, Green, 1948). Kirk, Kenneth E., Beauty and Bands, ed. Eric Kemp (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). Kirk, Kenneth E., A Study of Silent Minds: War Studies in Education (London: SCM, 1918). Kirk, Kenneth E., Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application (London: Longmans, 1920). Kirk, Kenneth E., Ignorance, Faith and Conformity (London: Longmans, 1925). Kirk, Kenneth E., Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry (London: Longmans, 1927). Kirk, Kenneth E., The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (London: Longmans, 1931). Kirk. Kenneth E., The Crisis of Christian Rationalism: Three lectures (London: Longmans, Green, 1936). Kirk, Kenneth E., The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937).

382

Bibliography

Kirk, Kenneth E., Marriage and Divorce (London: Centenary Press, 1933; 2nd edition London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1948). Kirk, Kenneth E., ‘Moral Theology’ in Kenneth E. Kirk (ed.), The Study of Theology (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939). Kirk, Kenneth E., ‘When the Church Says No’, Oxford Diocesan Magazine, April 1949. Law, William, Remarks upon a Late Book Entitled The Fable of the Bees (Cambridge: D. and A. Macmillan, 1844). Law, William, Remarks upon a Late Book Entitled The Fable of the Bees (London: William and John Innys, 1724; available from Gale Eighteenth Century Collection Online Print Edition, 2018). Law, William, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: Everyman, 1967). Law, William, The Spirit of Prayer (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1997; first published 1749). Law, William, The Way to Divine Knowledge: Being Several Dialogues between Humanus, Academicus, Rusticus, and Theophilus. As Preparatory to a New Edition of the Works of Jacob Behmen; and the Right Use of Them (London: Innys and Richardson, 1752). Law, William, The Works of the Reverend William Law, 9 vols (Brockenhurst: G. Moreton, 1892–1893). Liguori, Alphonse de, Conscience, ed. and trans. Raphael Gallagher (Liguori, MI: Liguori Publications, 2019). Liguori, Alphonse de, La pratique de l’amour de Jesus-Christ (Lille, Paris, and Bruges, 1910). Liguori, Alphonse de, Theologia Moralis, ed. Dominic Le Noir (Paris, 1872). Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Locke, John, Of God’s Justice (1680), in Mark Goldie (ed.), John Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 277–278. Lottin, Odon, Morale Fondamentale (Belgium: Tournai, 1954). Lottin, Odon, Principes de morale (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1946). Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees (London: Edmund Parker, 1723). Martineau, James, ‘Personal Influences on Our Present Theology’, in Essays, Theological and Philosophical (New York: Henry Holt, 1883), pp. 329–405. Maurice, F., ed., The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice: Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, 2 vols, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1884). Maurice, F. D., The Conscience: Lectures on Casuistry (London: Macmillan, 1868). Maurice, F. D., The Epistles of St. John: A Series of Lectures on Christian Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1890; furst published 1857). Maurice, F. D., ‘Introduction’, in William Law, Remarks Remarks upon a Late Book Entitled The Fable of the Bees (Cambridge: D. and A. Macmillan, 1844), pp. 7–79.

Bibliography

383

Maurice, F. D., The Kingdom of Christ, Or Hints Respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1843). Maurice, F. D., Modern Philosophy, or a Treatise of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy from the Fourteenth Century to the French Revolution, With a Glimpse into the Nineteenth Century (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1862). Maurice, F. D., Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings, ed. Ellen K. Wondra (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995). Maurice, F. D., Sequel to the Inquiry, What Is Revelation? (London: Macmillan, 1860). Maurice, F. D., Sermons First Series, 2nd edition (London, 1860). Maurice, F. D., Social Morality: Twenty One Lectures Given at the University of Cambridge (London: Macmillan, 1872). Maurice, F. D., Theological Essays (London: James Clarke, 1957; first published 1853). Morris, Jeremy, ed., To Build Christ’s Kingdom: F. D. Maurice and His Writings (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007). Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography (London: Longmans, 1873). Milman, H. H., The Life of Edward Gibbon (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1840). Moberly, R. C., Atonement and Personality (London: John Murray, 1901). Moberly, R. C., Christ Our Life (London: John Murray, 1902). Moberly, R. C., Ministerial Priesthood (London: John Murray, 1897). Moberly, R. C., Problems and Principles: Being Papers on Subjects Theological and Eccle­ siastical (London: John Murray, 1904). Moberly, R. C., Sorrow, Sin and Beauty (London: John Murray, 1903). Moberly, Walter, ‘The Atonement’, in B. H. Streeter (ed.), Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 265–335. Moberly, Walter, ‘God and the Absolute’, in B. H. Streeter (ed.), Foundations: A State­ ment of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 423–524. More, Hannah, An Account of Virtue (London, 1690; translation of Enchiridion Ethicum, 1667). Newman, John Henry, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Collins, Fontana, 1959; first published 1864). Newman, John Henry, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. Ian Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. 4: The Oxford Movement July 1833–December 1834, ed. Ian Ker and Thomas Gornall, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. 5: Liberalism in Oxford, January 1835–December 1836, ed. Thomas Gornall, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

384

Bibliography

Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. 6: The Via Media and Froude’s ‘Remains’, January 1837–December 1838, ed. Gerald Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. 7: Editing the British Critic, January 1839–December 1840, ed. Gerald Tracey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Newman, John Henry, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. 29: The Cardinalate, January 1879 to December 1881, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Newman, John Henry, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols (London: Rivingtons, 1868–1881). Newman, John Henry, ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays Critical and Historical (London, Longmans, 1868), pp. 262–307. Newman, John Henry, Sermons 1824–1843, ed. Placid Murray, Vincent E. Blehl and Francis J. McGrath, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991–2012). Newman, John Henry, Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London: Longmans, 1868). Newman, John Henry, Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached before the University of Oxford, with introductory essays by D. M. MacKinnon and J. D. Holmes (London: SPCK, 1970). Newman, John Henry, Words of Conscience in Parochial and Plain Sermons, ed. Fabio Attard, S.D.B. (Valetta, Malta: Midsea Books, 2002). Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1956). Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Gollfing (New York: Doubleday, 1956). Paley, William, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (London: R. Faulder, 1802). Paley, William, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: F. Davis, 1785). Paley, William, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (London: R. Faulder, 1794). (Patrick, Simon), S. P., A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (London, 1662; reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1840). Ramsey, Arthur Michael, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology. The Maurice Lectures, 1948 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011; first published 1951). Ramsey, Arthur Michael, From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War, 1889–1939 (London: Longmans, 1960). Ramsey, Arthur Michael, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: SPCK, 1990; first published 1936). Ramsey, Arthur Michael, ‘The Life and Work of William Temple’, The Times, 10 October 1981.

Bibliography

385

Rand, Benjamin, ed., The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regime of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (New York: Macmillan, 1900). Reardon, Bernard, ed., Henry Scott Holland: A Selection from His Writings (London: SPCK, 1962). Royce, Josiah, The World and the Individual: Nature, Man and the Moral Order (London: Macmillan, 1901). Sanderson, Robert, Logicae Artis Compendium (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1615). Seth, Andrew, and Richard Burdon Haldane, eds, Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London: Longmans, Green, 1883; reprinted Elibron Classics, 2005). Slater, Thomas, A Manual of Moral Theology for English-Speaking Countries (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1906). Stillingfleet, Edward, A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (London: J. H. for H. Mortlock, 1697). Stillingfleet, Edward, The Works of That Eminent and Most Learned Prelate, Dr. Edw. Stillingfleet, Late Lord Bishop of Worcester (London: Printed by J. Hepstinstall, for Henry and George Mortlock, 1710). Streeter, B. H., (ed.), Foundations: A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1912). Talbot, E. S., Memories of Early Life (London: Mowbrays, 1924). Tawney, R. H., The Acquisitive Society (London George Bell, 1921). Taylor, A. E., Review of William Temple, Mens Creatrix, Mind 27.106 (1918), pp. 208–234. Taylor, Jeremy, Selected Works, ed. Thomas K. Carroll (New York: Paulist Press, 1990). Temple, William, ‘Chairman’s Introduction’, in Doctrine in the Church of England: The Report of the Commission on Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922 (London: SPCK, 1938), pp. 1–18. Temple, William, Christ in All Things: William Temple and His Writings, ed. Stephen Spencer (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2015). Temple, William, Christus Veritas (London: Macmillan, 1924). Temple, William, Christianity and Social Order (London: Penguin, 1942). Temple, William, Christianity and the Social Order (London: Pelican, 1956). Temple, William, Citizen and Churchman (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1941). Temple, William, The Faith and Modern Thought (London: Macmillan, 1914). Temple, William, Mens Creatrix (London: Macmillan, 1917). Temple, William, Nature, Man and God (London Macmillan, 1940; first published 1934). Temple, William, The Nature of Personality (London: Macmillan, 1915). Temple, William, Religious Experience and Other Essays and Addresses (London: James Clarke, 1958). Temple, William, ‘Theology Today’, Theology 39.233 (1939), pp. 326–333; reprinted in Theology 123.4 (2020), pp. 253–259. Temple, William, ‘Thomism and Modern Needs’, Blackfriars 25.288 (1944), pp. 86–93.

386

Bibliography

Tillmann, Fritz, The Master Calls: A Handbook of Morals for the Layman (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961; first published 1937). Traherne, Thomas, Christian Ethicks: Or, Divine Morality. Opening the Way to Blessedness, by the Rules of Vertue and Reason (London: printed for Jonathan Edwin, 1675). Traherne, Thomas, Christian Ethicks, ed. Carol Marks and George Guffey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). Tucker, Abraham, The Light of Nature Pursued (London: T. Tegg, 1837). Vico, Giambattista, Scienza nuova seconda: The New Science, ed. and trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948; first published 1730, 3rd edition 1744). Wand, J. W. C., Anglicanism in History and Today (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). Webb, C. C. J., Religious Thought in the Oxford Movement (London: SPCK, 1928). Webb, C. C. J., Review of William Temple, Nature, Man and God, Philosophy 10.38 (1935), pp. 225–228. Webb, C. C. J., A Study of Religious Thought in England from 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). Wesley, John, The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A. M., ed. John Telford (London: Epworth Press, 1931). Wesley, John, The Works of John Wesley, 14 vols (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978). Wesley, John, The Works of John Wesley, 28 vols to date (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988–). Whichcote, B., Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. J. Jeffery and S. Salter (London: J. Payne, 1753). Whichcote, B., Select Sermons of Dr Whichcote. In Two Parts (London: Awnsham, 1698). White, Victor, O.P., ‘Tasks for Thomists’, Blackfriars 25.288 (1944), pp. 93–117. Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929). Wollaston, William, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London: J. Knapton, 1750; first published 1722).



Official Church Records

Anglican – Roman Catholic International Commission, Life in Christ: Morals, Commu­ nion, and the Church (London: Church House/Catholic Truth Society, 1994). Chronicle of Canterbury Convocation, 13 November 1930. Coleman, Roger, ed., Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences, 1867–1988 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1992). Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, Holden at Lambeth Palace July 5 to August 7, 1920: Encyclical Letter from the Bishops with the Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK, 1920).

Bibliography

387

The Family in Contemporary Society: The Report of a Group Convened at the Behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With Appended Reports from the U.S.A., Canada, and India (London: SPCK, 1958). Fremantle, Anne, ed., The Papal Encyclicals in Historical Context (New York: New American Library, 1956). Lambeth Conference, 1930: Encyclical Letter from the Bishops, with Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1930). The Lambeth Conference of 1958 (London: SPCK, 1958). The Lambeth Conferences 1867–1948 (London: SPCK, 1948).



Secondary Sources

Abraham, William J., ‘Christian Perfection’, in William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 587–601. Abraham, William J., and James E. Kirby, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Aherne, Philip, The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America 1834–1934 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Aherne, Philip, ‘The Way of Seeing: The Coleridgean Development of Utilitarianism in Cambridge’, in Peter Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 105–122. Allison, C. Fitzsimons, Trust in an Age of Arrogance (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010). Altholz, Josef L., ‘Truth and Equivocation: Alphonsus’s Moral Theology and Newman’s Apologia’, Church History 44.1 (1975), pp. 73–84. Anderson, E. Byron, and Bruce T. Morrill, eds, Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch before God: Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998). Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33.124 (1958), pp. 1–19. Armitage, David, ‘Globalizing Jeremy Bentham’, History of Political Thought 32.1 (2011), pp. 63–82. Armstrong, Robert L., ‘Cambridge Platonists and Locke on Innate Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30.2 (1969), pp. 187–202. Atherton, John, Social Christianity: A Reader (London: SPCK, 1994). Atkins, Gareth, ‘Evangelicals’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 73–95. Avis, Paul, ‘Anglican Social Thought Encounters Modernity: Brooke Foss Westcott, Henry Scott Holland and Charles Gore’ in Stephen Spencer (ed.), Theology Reforming Society: Revisiting Anglican Social Theology (London: SCM Press, 2017), pp. 51–84.

388

Bibliography

Avis, Paul, ‘The Atonement’, in Geoffrey Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 124–151. Avis, Paul, ‘Editorial’, Ecclesiology 6 (2020), pp. 293–297. Avis, Paul, Foundations of Modern Historical Thought: From Machiavelli to Vico (London: Croom Helm, 1986). Avis, Paul, Gore: Construction and Conflict (Worthing: Churchman Publishing, 1988). Avis, Paul, In Search of Authority. Anglican Theological Method from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (London: T and T Clark, 2014). Avis, Paul, Theology and the Enlightenment. A Critical Enquiry into Enlightenment Theo­ logy and its Reception (London: T&T Clark, 2023). Baier, Annette, ‘Hume’s Place in the History of Ethics’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 399–420. Bailey, Simon, A Tactful God: Gregory Dix (Leominster: Gracewing, 1995). Baker, A. E., ‘William Temple: The Man’, in W. R. Matthews (ed.), William Temple: An Estimate and Appreciation (London: James Clarke, 1946). Baker, A. E. (ed.), William Temple and His Message (Penguin/Pelican, 1946). Balderston, Katharine C., ‘Doctor Johnson and William Law’, PMLA 75.4 (1960), pp. 382–394. Barr, Colin, and Simon Skinner, ‘Political and Social Thought’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 395–415. Barth, J. Robert, S.J., Coleridge and Christian Doctrine, 2nd edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 1987). Barth, J. Robert, S.J., Review of Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church, Wordsworth Circle 8.3 (1977), pp. 201–204. Barbeau, Jeffrey W., ‘The Development of Coleridge’s Notion of Human Freedom: The Translation and Reformation of German Idealism in England’, Journal of Religion 80.4 (2000), pp. 576–594. Baxter, Donald L. M., ‘Identity in the Loose and Popular Sense’, Mind 97 (1988), pp. 575–582. Bayer, Oswald, and Alan Suggate, eds, Worship and Ethics: Lutherans and Anglicans in Dialogue (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). Beaty, Frederick L., Review of Laurence S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, Wordsworth Circle 9.3 (1978), pp. 246–249. Beddard, R. A. P. J., ‘Sancroft, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Beer, John, ‘Coleridge, Samuel Taylor’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Bibliography

389

Bell, G. K. A., ‘Memoir’, in A. E. Baker (ed.), William Temple and His Message (Penguin/ Pelican, 1946), Bell, Richard, Review of Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism, History 2011, https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1073 (accessed 5 April 2023). Billy, Dennis, C.S.S.R., ‘The Vocation of the Catholic Moral Theologian Formed in the Alphonsian Tradition’, Studia Moralis 46.1 (2008), pp. 105–114. Blair, Kirstie, ‘The Influence of the Oxford Movement on Poetry and Fiction’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter B. Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 410–426. Brinkley, R. Florence, ‘Coleridge’s Criticism of Jeremy Taylor’, Huntington Library Quarterly 13.3 (1950), pp. 313–332. Bodway, Jacob, ‘The Matter of the Moral Sense: Shaftesbury and the Rhetoric of Tact’, Modern Philology 111.3 (2014), pp. 533–548. Boucher, David, and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2012). Boulger, James D., Coleridge as a Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Bowlin, John R., ‘Sieges, Shipwrecks, and Sensible Knaves: Justice and Utility in Butler and Hume’, Journal of Religious Ethics 28.2 (2000), pp. 253–280. Bowyer, Andrew, Donald MacKinnon’s Theology: To Perceive Tragedy without Loss of Hope (London: T&T Clark, 2019). Bradley, James, ‘The Changing Shape of Religious Ideas in Enlightened England’, in Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (eds), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 175–201. Bretherton, Luke, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possi­ bilities of Faithful Witness (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010). Bretherton, Luke, ‘Theology, Ethnography and the Conundrums of the Cultural Turn’, in Michael Lamb and Brian A. Williams (eds), Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019), pp. 171–191. Brown, David, ‘Butler and Deism’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 7–28. Buckley, Michael, S.J., ‘“The winter of my desolation”: Conscience and the Contradictions of Atheism According to John Henry Newman’, in Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker (eds), Newman and Truth (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans, 2008), pp. 67–109. Bulman, William J., Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

390

Bibliography

Bulman, William J., ‘Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England’, History Compass 10.10 (2012), pp. 752–764. Bulman, William J., and Robert G. Ingram, eds, God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Burson, Jeffrey, ‘The Crystallization of Counter-Enlightenment and Philosophe Identi­ ties: Theological Controversy and Catholic Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary France’, Church History 77.4 (2008), pp. 955–1002. Butler, Perry, ‘Keble, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cameron, J. M., ‘Newman and the Empiricist Tradition’, in John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (eds), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London: Sheed and Ward/SPCK, 1967). Cameron, J. M., The Night Battle (London: Catholic Book Club, 1962). Candlish, Stewart, and Pierfrancesco Basile, ‘Francis Herbert Bradley’, in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2023 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/bradley/ (accessed 5 April 2023). Carpenter, James, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960). Carré, Meyrick H., ‘Ralph Cudworth’, Philosophical Quarterly 3.13 (1953), pp. 342–351. Carter, Benjamin, ‘The little commonwealth of man’. The Trinitarian Origins of the Ethical and Political Philosophy of Ralph Cudworth (Leuven: Peeters, 2011). Carter, Benjamin, ‘Ralph Cudworth and the Theological Origins of Consciousness’, History of the Human Sciences 23.3 (2010), pp. 29–47. Cefalu, Paul, The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theo­ logy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Cefalu, Paul, ‘Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traherne’, Literature and Theology 16.3 (2002), pp. 248–269. Chadwick, Owen, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960). Chadwick, Owen, ‘The Religion of Samuel Johnson’, Yale University Library Gazette 60.3–4 (1986), pp. 119–136. Chadwick, Owen, Review of W. R. Rinne, The Kingdom of God in the Thought of William Temple, Journal of Theological Studies 18.1 (1967), pp. 286–288. Chapman, Mark D., ‘Charles Gore, Kenosis, and the Crisis of Power’, Journal of Anglican Studies 3.5 (2005), pp. 197–218. Chapman, Mark D., ‘Webb, C. C. J.’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Champion, Justin, ‘Godless Politics: Hobbes and Public Religion’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 42–62.

Bibliography

391

Clark, Andrew, rev. Barbara Dennis, ‘Moberly, Robert Campbell’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Clark, J. C. D., ‘The American Revolution: A War of Religion?’, History Today 39.12 (1989), pp. 10–16. Clark, J. C. D., English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; 2nd edition 2000). Clark, J. C. D., ‘“God” and “the Enlightenment”: The Divine Attributes and the Question of Categories in British Discourse’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 215–235. Clark, J. C. D., ‘On Hitting the Buffers: The Historiography of England’s Ancien Regime. A Response’, Past and Present 117 (1987), pp. 195–207. Clark, J. C. D., ed., The Politics of Samuel Johnson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Clark, J. C. D., Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Clark, J. C. D., Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Claydon, Tony, ‘William III’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Clayton, James W., ‘Reason and Society: An Approach to F. D. Maurice’, Harvard Theological Review 65.3 (1972), pp. 305–335. Clem, Stewart, ‘Unlearning Ourselves: The Incarnational Ascetism of John Henry Newman’s Anglican Sermons’, Anglican Theological Review 103.1 (2021), pp. 44–59. Coakley, Sarah, God, Sexuality and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Cobb, Peter, ‘Pusey, Edward Bouverie’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cohen, Andrew, ‘In Defence of Nietzschean Genealogy’, Philosophical Forum 30.4 (1999), pp. 269–288. Cohon, Rachel, ‘Hume’s Moral Philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2018 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives /fall2018/entries/hume-moral/ (accessed 5 April 2023). Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Collini, Stefan, ‘Sidgwick, Henry’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Collins, Kenneth, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007). Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).

392

Bibliography

Collinson, Patrick, ‘Tuckney, Anthony’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004). Colmer, John, Review of Laurence S. Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, Modern Language Review 75.2 (1980), pp. 370–371. Connolly, S. J., ‘King, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Connor, Timothy G., The Kenotic Trajectory of the Church in Donald MacKinnon’s Theology (London: T and T Clark, 2011). Cooper, John Xiros, The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Cornwall, Robert, ‘The Search for the Primitive Church: The Use of Early Church Fathers in the High Church Anglican Tradition, 1680–1745’, Anglican and Episcopal History 59.3 (1990), pp. 303–329. Cornwall, Robert, Visible and Apostolic: The Constitution of the Church in High Church Anglican and Non-Juror Thought (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993). Cornwell, John, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (London: Continuum, 2010). Costelloe, Timothy, ‘Giambattista Vico’, in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2022 edition, https://plato.stanford .edu/archives/fall2022/entries/vico/ (accessed 5 April 2023). Coulson, John, Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Cowie, Leonard, ‘Simeon, Charles’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cragg, Gerald R., The Church in an Age of Reason (London: Pelican, 1980). Cragg, Gerald R., From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1950). Crawford, Robert, Eliot after The Waste Land (London: Jonathan Cape, 2022). Crawford, Robert, Young Eliot (London: Vintage, 2015). Crimmins, James E., ‘Jeremy Bentham’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclo­pedia of Philosophy, winter 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries /bentham (accessed 5 April 2023). Crimmins, James E., ‘John Brown and the Theological Tradition of Utilitarian Ethics’, History of Political Thought 4.3 (1983), pp. 523–550. Crimmins, James E., ‘Paley, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Crimmins, James E., ed., Religion, Secularization and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill (London: Routledge, 2013). Crimmins, James E., ‘Religion, Utility and Politics: Bentham versus Paley’, in James E. Crimmins (ed.), Religion, Secularization and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 130–152.

Bibliography

393

Crimmins, James E., ‘Religious Utilitarians’, in James E. Crimmins (ed.), The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Utilitarianism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 475–477. Crimmins, James E., ed., Utilitarians and Religion (Bristol, Thoemmes, 1998). Crimmins, James E., ‘William Paley’, in James E. Crimmins (ed.), The Bloomsbury Encyclo­paedia of Utilitarianism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 388–393. Crisp, Roger, Sacrifice Regained: Morality and Self-Interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1911  – In Pictures’, Guardian, 29 March 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2011/mar/29 /cult-of-beauty-aesthetic-movement (accessed 5 April 2023). Cunliffe, Christopher, ‘Butler, Joseph’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cunliffe, Christopher, ed., Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Cunliffe, Christopher, ‘The Spiritual Sovereign: Butler’s Episcopate’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 37–62. Cunliffe-Jones, Hubert, A History of Christian Doctrine (London: T and T Clark, 2006). Curran, Charles, Catholic Moral Theology in the United States: A History (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008). Curran, Charles, Diverse Voices in Modern U.S. Moral Theology (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018). D’Aquino, Frederick, ‘The British Naturalist Tradition’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 54–72. D’Aquino, Frederick, ‘Epistemology’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 375–394. D’Aquino, Frederick, and Benjamin King, eds, The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Darwall, Stephen, The British Moralists, and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Darwall, Stephen, ‘Conscience as Self-Authorizing in Butler’s Ethics’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 209–242. Davis, Matthew W., ‘“Ask for the old paths”: Johnson and the Nonjurors’, in J. C. D. Clark (ed.), The Politics of Samuel Johnson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Dominiak, Paul Anthony, Richard Hooker: The Architecture of Participation (London: T&T Clark, 2020). Donagan, Alan, ‘Whewell’s Elements of Morality’, Journal of Philosophy 71.19 (1974), pp. 724–736.

394

Bibliography

Dooley, Brendan, Review of Alfonso M. de Alphonsus e la civiltà letteraria del Settecento, Catholic Historical Review 88.4 (2002), pp. 780–782. Dorrien, Gary, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theo­ logy (Chichester: John Wiley, 2012). Douglas, Brian, The Eucharistic Theology of Edward Bouverie Pusey: Sources, Context and Doctrine Within the Oxford Movement and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Douglas, Brian, ‘Transubstantiation: Rethinking by Anglicans?’, New Blackfriars 93.1046 (2012), pp. 426–445. Douglas, Kelly Brown, ‘Theological Methodology and the Jesus Movement through the Work of F. D. Maurice and Vida Scudder’, Anglican Theological Review 102.1 (2020), pp. 7–30. Duffy, Eamon, ‘The Anglican Parish Sermons’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 238–242. Duffy, Eamon, ‘The Reception of Turner’s Newman: A Reply to Simon Skinner’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63.3 (2012), pp. 534–548. Duffy, Eamon, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; 3rd edition 2006). Dunn, John, The Political Theory of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Dyck, Arthur J., ‘Christian Ethics in the Twenty-First Century: New Directions’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37.4 (2009), pp. 565–575. Dyck, Arthur J., and Carlos Padilla, ‘The Empathetic Emotions and Self-Love in Bishop Butler’s Sermons and the Neurosciences’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37.4 (2009), pp. 577–612. Elmen, Paul, ed., The Anglican Moral Choice (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Barlow, 1983). Elmen, Paul, ‘Jeremy Taylor and the Fall of Man’, Modern Language Quarterly 14.2 (1953), pp. 139–148. Emmett, Dorothy, ‘The Philosopher’, in F. A. Iremonger (ed.), William Temple, Arch­ bishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 521–539. Fergusson, David, ‘The Absence of God and Its Contextual Significance in Hume’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 11.1 (2013), pp. 69–85. Fergusson, David, ‘Hume amongst the Theologians’, in David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott (eds), The History of Scottish Theology, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), pp. 301–313. Fincham, Kenneth, and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of Angli­ can Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Fleming, Julia, Defending Probabilism: The Moral Theology of Juan Caramuel (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006).

Bibliography

395

Flores, Cristina, ‘“Contemplant Spirits”: Ralph Cudworth and Contemplation in S. T. Coleridge’, in Peter Cheyne (ed.), Coleridge and Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 211–220. Flores, Cristina, ‘Transatlantic Ralph Cudworth: The Coleridge – Emerson Neoplatonic Connection’, Coleridge Bulletin 50 (2017), pp. 53–56. Ford, Lewis, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1925–1949 (Albany: State Uni­ versity of New York, 1985). Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in D. F. B0uchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139–164. Forde, Steven, ‘Natural Law, Theology, and Morality in Locke’, American Journal of Political Science 45.2 (2001), pp. 396–409. Frey, R. G., ‘Butler on Self-Love and Benevolence’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 243–268. Fuller, David, A Latter-Day Tractarian: Dom Gregory Dix (Lulu Press, 2013). Fuller, David, A Very Anglican Monk: A Study of the Life and Works of Dom Gregory Dix (Lulu Press, 2014). Gallagher, John A., Time Past, Time Future: An Historical Study of Catholic Moral Theo­ logy (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1990). Gallagher, Raphael, C.S.S.R., ‘L’actualité de la théologie morale de saint Alphonse de Alphonsus’, Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale 268 (2012/1), pp. 35–57. Gallagher, Raphael, C.S.S.R., ‘Where Moral Theology Begins’, in Robert C. Koerpel and Raphael Gallagher, C.S.S.R. (eds), Contemplating the Future of Moral Theology (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2017), pp. 21–37. Gallaher, Brandon, ‘“Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8): The Continuity and Transformation of the Spiritual Senses Tradition’, https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/reposi tory/handle/10871/26293 (accessed 5 April 2023). Garnett, Jane, ‘Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist: Butler and the Development of Christian Moral Philosophy in Victorian Britain’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 63–96. Garnett, Jane, ‘Joseph Butler’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 135–153. Garnett, Jane, ‘Lux Mundi Essayists’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Garrett, Aaron, ‘Reasoning about Morals from Butler to Hume’, in Ruth Savage (ed.), Philosophy and Religion in Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 169–186.

396

Bibliography

Garrett, Aaron, ‘Seventeenth-Century Moral Philosophy: Self-Help, Self-Knowledge, and the Devil’s Mountain’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 229–279. Gascoigne, John, ‘Anglican Latitudinarianism and Political Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century’, History 71 (1986), pp. 22–38. Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: W. J. Norton, 1969). Geoghegan, William D., Platonism in Recent Religious Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Gibbons, J. R., ‘Grote, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Gibson, William, Enlightenment Prelate Benjamin Hoadly, 1676–1761 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2004). Gill, Michael, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Gill, Michael, ‘Lord Shaftesbury’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries /shaftesbury/ (accessed 5 April 2023). Goldie, M., ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 209–231. Goldie, M., ‘The Huguenot Experience and the Problem of Toleration in Restoration England’, in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough and J.-P. Pittio (eds), The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dun Laoghaire: Irish Books and Media, 1987), pp. 175–203. Goldie, M., ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in O. P. Grell, J. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 331–368. Gouldstone, Timothy Maxwell, The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nine­ teenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Grave, S. A., Conscience in Newman’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Green, H. Benedict, ‘Dix, George Eglinton Alston [name in religion Gregory Dix]’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Greene, Robert A., ‘Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52.4 (1991), pp. 617–644. Gregg, Edward, ‘Anne’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Gregg, Edward, ‘Stuart, James Francis Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Bio­ graphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Gregory, Brad, ‘The Reformation Origins of the Enlightenment’s God’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 201–214.

Bibliography

397

Gregory, Jeremy, ‘The Church of England’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 225–240. Gregory, Jeremy, ‘Introduction: Transforming “the Age of Reason” into “an Age of Faiths”: or Putting Religions and Beliefs (Back) into the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.3 (2009), pp. 287–305. Gregory, Jeremy, ‘Introduction’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Angli­ canism, Vol. 2: Establishment and Empire, 1660–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1–21. Gregory, Jeremy, ‘The Long Eighteenth Century’, in Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 13–39. Griffin, Martin I. J., Jr, Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). Grimley, Matthew, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2004). Grimley, Matthew, ‘Moberly, Sir Walter’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Grote, Simon, ‘Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 75.1 (2014), pp. 137–160. Guite, Malcolm, Mariner: A Theological Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2017). Gunton, Colin E., The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Hall, Robert T., ‘Autonomy and the Social Order: The Moral Philosophy of F. D. Maurice’, Monist 55.3 (1971), pp. 504–519. Hammond, David M., Review of S. A. Grave, Conscience in Newman’s Thought, Religion & Literature 24.3 (1992), pp. 97–104. Hammond, Geordan, ‘High Church Anglican Influences on John Wesley’s Conception of Primitive Christianity, 1732–1735’, Anglican and Episcopal History 78.2 (2009), pp. 174–207. Hampton, Stephen, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Haney, David, The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy (Philadelphia; Penn State University Press, 2010). Hardy, Daniel W., ‘Harmony and Mutual Implication in the Opus Maximum’, in Jeffrey W. Barbeau (ed.), Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 33–52. Hardy, Daniel W., ‘Theology and Spirituality’, in Finding the Church. The Dynamic Truth of Anglicanism (London: SCM Press, 2001), pp. 102–103. Hardy, Daniel W., and David F. Ford, Jubilate: Theology in Praise (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1984).

398

Bibliography

Harris, Jonathan, ‘Gay, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Harrison, Peter, ‘Prophecy, Early Modern Apologetics, and Hume’s Argument against Miracles’, Journal of the History of Ideas 60.2 (1999), pp. 241–256. Hastings, Adrian, A History of English Christianity 1920–2000 (London: SCM Press, 2001). Hastings, Adrian, ‘Temple, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Havens, Michael, Review of Laurence Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, Christianity and Literature 28.3 (1979), pp. 67–69. Hauerwas, Stanley, and Sam Wells (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004). Haven, Richard, ‘Coleridge, Hartley and the Mystics’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20.4 (1959), pp. 477–494. Haynes, Kenneth, ‘Hill, Sir Geoffrey’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Hazard, Paul, The Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715, trans. J. Lewis May (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013). Hebblethwaite, Brian, The Adequacy of Christian Ethics (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1981). Hebblethwaite, Brian, ‘Butler on Conscience and Virtue’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 197–208. Hedley, Douglas, ‘Coleridge as a Theologian’, in Frederick Burwick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 473–497. Hedley, Douglas, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hedley, Douglas, ‘Coleridge’s Contemplative Imagination’, in Peter Cheyne (ed.), Cole­ ridge and Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 220–236. Hedley, Douglas, ‘Cudworth, Coleridge and Schelling’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 16 (2000), pp. 63–70. Hedley, Douglas, ‘Gods and Giants: Cudworth’s Platonic Metaphysics and His Ancient Theology’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25.3 (2017), pp. 932–953. Hedley, Douglas, ‘Was Coleridge a Romantic?’, Wordsworth Circle 22.1 (1991), pp. 71–75. Heidt, John, ‘Holland, Henry Scott’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Heidt, John, ‘Moberly, George’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Heitzenrater, Richard, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Context’, in William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 3–29.

Bibliography

399

Hendrix, Cheryl, ‘William Law’s Character, Works and Influence’, Asbury Semi­narian 1982, https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1614&context =asburyjournal (accessed 6 April 2023). Hengstermann, Christian, The History of Religious Imagination in Christian Platonism: Exploring the Philosophy of Douglas Hedley (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Heydt, Colin, Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: God, Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hill, Geoffrey, Rhetorics of Value: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Brasenose College, Oxford, 6–7 March 2000, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/docu ments/a-to-z/h/Hill_01.pdf (accessed 2 March 2023). Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Hinchliff, Peter, God and History: Aspects of British Theology 1875–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Hinchliff, Peter, ‘Jowett, Benjamin’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hindmarsh, Bruce, ‘Milner, Joseph’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hipolito, Jeffrey, ‘“Conscience the ground of consciousness”: The Moral Epistemology of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65.3 (2004), pp. 455–474. Hole, Robert, ‘Gisborne, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hole, Robert, ‘Watson, Richard’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Holmes, Ann Sumner, The Church of England and Divorce in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Flamingo, 1999). Hoyles, John, The Edges of Augustanism: The Aesthetics of Spirituality in Thomas Ken, John Byrom and William Law (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972). Hurst, Jeremy, ‘Bishop Kirk of Oxford, Church Schooling and Anglo-Catholic Principle’, Theology 102.809 (1999), pp. 354–362. Hutton, Sarah, ‘Ralph Cudworth’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021 /entries/cudworth/ (accessed 6 April 2023). Ingram, Robert, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). Iremonger, F. A., ed., William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). Irwin, Terence H., The Development of Ethics, Vol. 2 From Suarez to Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

400

Bibliography

Irwin, Terence H., The Development of Ethics, Vol. 3 From Kant to Rawls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Irwin, Terence H., ‘Later Christian Ethics’, in Roger Crisp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 184–205. Israel, Jonathan, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Israel, Jonathan, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Moder­nity 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Israel, Jonathan, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Jacob, W. M., ‘England’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Vol. 2: Establishment and Empire, 1660–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 91–119. Jacob, W. M., Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Jacob, W. M. Religious Vitality in Victorian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Jasper, David, Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (London: Macmillan, 1985). Jackson, Nicholas, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jeffner, Anders, ‘Our Knowledge of Ourselves’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 189–195. Joling-van der Sar, Gerda J., ‘The Controversy between William Law and John Wesley’, English Studies 87.4 (2006), pp. 442–465. Jones, Christopher D., ‘The Historical and Ecumenical Value of Kenneth Kirk’s Anglican Moral Theology’, Theological Studies 79.4 (2018), pp. 801–817. Jones, Simon (ed.), The Sacramental Life: Gregory Dix and His Writings (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007). Jonsen, Albert, and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Karlowicz, Tobias A., The Sacramental Vision of Edward Bouverie Pusey (London: T&T Clark, 2021). Kaupinnen, Anti, ‘Moral Sentimentalism’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclo­ pedia of Philosophy, spring 2022 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022 /entries/moral-sentimentalism/ (accessed 6 April 2023). Keblusek, Marika, ‘Mary, Princess Royal’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Bibliography

401

Keenan, James F., S.J., ‘Bernard Häring’s Influence on American Catholic Moral Theo­ logy’, Journal of Moral Theology 1.1 (2012), pp. 23–42. Keenan, James F., S.J., A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century (London: Continuum, 2010). Kemp, Eric, ‘Kirk, Kenneth Escott’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Kendal, Gordon, ‘A God Most Particular: Aspects of Incarnation in Butler’s Morality’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 141–168. Kendal, Gordon, Review of Alan P. F. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, Journal of Theological Studies 47.2 (1996), pp. 770–777. Kent, John, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain 1880–1950. British Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Ker, Ian, John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Ker, Ian, ‘John Henry Newman’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ker, Ian, Review of Frank Turner, John Henry Newman, Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 2002. Key, Newton E., ‘Annesley, Samuel’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). King, Benjamin J., Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). King, Benjamin J., ‘John Henry Newman and the Church Fathers: Writing History in the First Person’, Irish Theological Quarterly 78.2 (2013), pp. 149–161. Kirby, W. J. Torrance, Richard Hooker: Reformer and Platonist (London: Routledge, 2005). Kishlansky, Mark A., and John Morrill, ‘Charles I’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Klein, Lawrence, ‘Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, in Oxford Dictio­ nary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Kruger, Matthew, ‘Jeremy Taylor and the Practice of Theology’, Anglican Theological Review 102.1 (2020), pp. 31–48. Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Lammers, Stephen E. ‘William Temple and the Bombing of Germany: An Exploration in the Just War Tradition’, Journal of Religious Ethics 19.1 (1991), pp. 71–92. Langston, Douglas C., Conscience and Other Virtues (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). Larson, Jeremy, ‘Samuel Johnson and Presbyterianism’, Pro Rege 40.3 (2012), pp. 18–30.

402

Bibliography

Lasnoski, Kent, ‘Alphonsus Liguori’s Moral Theology of Marriage’, Nova et Vetera 9.4 (2011), pp. 1003–1028. Lehmann, Paul, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Lehner, Ulrich, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Lehner, Ulrich, ‘Catholic Theology and the Enlightenment’, in Lewis Ayres and Medi Ann Volpe (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2015), pp. 595–611. Leighton, C. D. A., ‘The Nonjurors and the Counter Enlightenment: Some Illustration’, Journal of Religious History 22.3 (1998), pp. 270–286. Leighton, C. D. A., ‘The Non-Jurors and Their History’, Journal of Religious History 29.3 (2005), pp. 241–257. Leighton, C. D. A., ‘William Law, Behmenism, and Counter Enlightenment’, Harvard Theological Review 91.3 (1998), pp. 301–320. Levering, Matthew, ‘Pinckaers and Häring on Conscience’, Journal of Moral Theology 8.2 (2019), pp. 134–165. Loades, Ann, ‘Coleridge as Theologian: Some Comments on His Reading of Kant’, Journal of Theological Studies 29.2 (1978), pp. 410–426. Lockridge, Laurence, Coleridge the Moralist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). Long, D. Stephen, John Wesley’s Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005). Long, D. Stephen, and Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Theological Ethics’, in William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 635–646. Lovin, Robin, ‘Moral Theology’, in William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 647–661. Lowe, Victor, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Lowry, Charles Wesley, Jr, ‘Spiritual Antecedents of Anglican Evangelicalism’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 12.2 (1943), pp. 117–156. Lubenow, William, ‘Synthetic Society’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Lucas, J. R., Butler’s Philosophy of Religion Vindicated (Durham: Dean and Chapter of Durham, 1978). Lucci, Diego, John Locke’s Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Lustila, Getty, ‘John Gay and the Birth of Utilitarianism’, Utilitas 30.1 (2018), pp. 86–106. McAdoo, H. R., The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1965).

Bibliography

403

McBriar, A. M., ‘Bosanquet, Bernard’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). McCafferty, John, ‘Bramhall, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). McClymond, Michael J., ‘Continual Self-Contemplation: John Henry Newman’s Critique of Evangelicalism I and II’, Downside Review 27.446 (2009), pp. 1–12, and 27.447 (2009), pp. 79–102. McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2 vols (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021). MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Scott Holland and Contemporary Needs’, in Borderlands of Theology (London: Lutterworth, Press, 1968), pp. 105–120; first published in Theology 55 (1952), pp. 448–453. MacKinnon, D. M., A Study in Ethical Theory (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1957). MacKinnon, D. M., The Stripping of the Altars (London: Fontana, 1969). MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Aspects of Kant’s Influence on British Theology’, in G. MacDonald Ross and T. MacWalter (eds), Kant and His Influence (London: Continuum, 1995), pp. 348–366. MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Coleridge and Kant’, in John Beer (ed.), Coleridge’s Variety: Bicen­ tenary Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp. 183–203. MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Idealism and Realism: An Old Controversy Renewed’, in Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), pp. 138–150. MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Introduction’, in John Henry Newman, Newman’s University Sermons: Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford 1826–1843 (London: SPCK, 1970). MacKinnon, D. M., ‘Some Aspects of the Treatment of Christianity by the British Idealists’, Religious Studies 20 (1984), pp. 133–144; reprinted in Themes in Theology: The Three-Fold Cord (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), pp. 50–68. MacKinnon, D. M., rev. Mark J. Schofield, ‘Taylor, Alfred Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). McMichael, Ralph, ed., The Vocation of Anglican Theology (London: SCM Press, 2014). Macnab, Kenneth, ‘Reconsidering the Movement after the 1845 Crisis’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 571–584. McNaughton, David, ‘Butler on Benevolence’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 269–292. Maddox, Randy L., and Jason E. Vickers, eds, The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

404

Bibliography

Mahoney, John, The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Malcolm, Noel, ‘Hobbes, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Mander, W. J., British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Mander, W. J., Idealist Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Marsden, John, ‘William Temple: Christianity and the Life of Fellowship’, Political Theology 8.2 (2007), pp. 213–233. Marshall, J., John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and ‘Early Enlightenment’ Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). May, J. Lewis, Cardinal Newman (New York: Dial Press, 1930). Methuen, Charlotte, ‘The Lambeth Conference, Gender and Sexuality’, Theology 123.2 (2020), pp. 84–94. Milbank, John, ‘Divine Logos and Human Communication: A Recuperation of Coleridge’, in The Future of Love: Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 2009), pp. 11–13. Milbank, Alison, ‘Maurice as a Resource for the Church Today’, in Stephen Spencer (ed.), Theology Reforming Society: Revisiting Anglican Social Theology (London: SCM Press, 2017), pp. 24–40. Miles, Rebekah L., ‘Happiness, Holiness and the Moral Life in John Wesley’, in Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 207–224. Millar, Alan, ‘Butler on God and Human Nature’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 293–316. Miller, Charles, Richard Hooker and the Vision of God (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013). Milnes, Tim, ‘Coleridge’s Logic’, in Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (eds), Handbook of the History of Logic, Vol. 4: British Logic in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2008), pp. 33–74. Milnes, Tim, ‘Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy’, Comparative Literature 51.4 (1999), pp. 309–323. Milton, J. R., ‘Lock, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Mitchell, Basil, ‘Butler as a Christian Apologist’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 97–116. Mintz, Samuel, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materia­ lism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

Bibliography

405

Monod, Paul, Review of William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, H-Net, 2007, https:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13524 (accessed 6 April 2023). Moore, James, ‘Hutcheson, Francis’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Morgan, John, ‘Anglicanism, Family Planning and Contraception: The Development of a Moral Teaching and Its Ecumenical Implications’, Journal of Anglican Studies 16.2 (2018), pp. 147–169. Morgan, Robert, ‘Faith’, in Robert Morgan (ed.), The Religion of the Incarnation: Angli­ can Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), pp. 1–32. Morgan, Robert, ed., The Religion of the Incarnation: Anglican Essays in Commemoration of Lux Mundi (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989). Morgan, Stephen, John Henry Newman and the Development of Doctrine: Encountering Change, Looking for Continuity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2021). Morris, Jeremy, ‘Enemy Within? The Appeal of the Discipline of Sociology to Religious Professionals in Post-War Britain’, Journal of Religion in Europe 9 (2016), pp. 177–200. Morris, Jeremy, F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Morris, Jeremy, ‘F. D. Maurice and the Myth of Christian Socialist Origins’, in Stephen Spencer (ed.), Theology Reforming Society Revisiting Anglican Social Theology (London: SCM Press, 2017), pp. 1–23. Morris, Jeremy, The High Church Revival in the Church of England. Arguments and Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Morris, Jeremy, A People’s Church: A History of the Church of England (London: Profile Books, 2022). Morris, Jeremy, Review of Robin Gill and Lorna Kendall (eds), Michael Ramsey as Theologian, Anglican and Episcopal History 66.2 (1997), pp. 244–246. Morris, Jeremy, ‘A Social Doctrine of the Trinity? A Reappraisal of F. D. Maurice on Eternal Life’, Anglican and Episcopal History 69.1 (2000), pp. 72–100. Mortimer, Sarah, ‘Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009), pp. 191–211. Mortimer, Sarah, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Mortimer, Sarah, ‘Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism’, in Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller and A. G. Roeber (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 361–372. Moses, Sarah, ‘Keeping the Heart: Natural Affection in Joseph Butler’s Approach to Virtue’, Journal of Religious Ethics 37.4 (2009), pp. 613–629.

406

Bibliography

Moyse, Cordelia, A History of the Mothers’ Union: Women, Anglicanism and Globali­ zation 1876–2008 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009). Murphy, G. Martin, ‘Church, R. W.’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Murray, Paul D., ‘Theology in the Borderlands: Donald MacKinnon and Contemporary Theology’, Modern Theology 4.3 (1998), pp. 355–376. Namier, Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1965; first published 1929). Newberry, Paul A., ‘Joseph Butler on Forgiveness: A Presupposed Theory of Emotion’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001), pp. 233–244. Neville, Graham, Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). Newey, Edmund, ‘The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Jeremy Taylor’, Modern Theology 18.1 (2002), pp. 1–26. Nieli, Russell, ‘Commercial Society and Christian Virtue: The Mandeville  – Law dispute’, Review of Politics 51.4 (1989), pp. 581–610. Nockles, Peter B., ‘Conflicts in Oxford’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2017), pp. 23–36. Nockles, Peter B., ‘The Current State of Newman Scholarship’, British Catholic History 35 (2020), pp. 15–27. Nockles, Peter B., ‘The Oxford Movement’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 96–26. Nockles, Peter B., ‘Pre-Tractarian Oxford, Oriel and the Noetics’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 79–93. O’Donovan, Oliver, ‘How Can Theology Be Moral?’, Journal of Religious Ethics 17.2 (1989), pp. 81–94. O’Donovan, Oliver, Resurrection and Moral Order (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986). O’Flaherty, Niall, ‘The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802): Part 1, William Paley’s Natural Theology in Context’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010), pp. 19–25. O’Flaherty, Niall, ‘The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802): Part 2, William Paley’s Natural Theology and the Challenge of Atheism’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010), pp. 128–137. O’Flaherty, Niall, Utilitarianism in the Age of Enlightenment: The Moral and Political Thought of William Paley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). O’Flaherty, Niall, ‘William Paley’s Moral Philosophy and the Challenge of Hume: An Enlightenment Debate?’, Modern Intellectual History 7.1 (2010), pp. 1–31.

Bibliography

407

Ojakangas, Mika, The Voice of Conscience: A Political Genealogy of Western Ethical Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Olver, Matthew S. C., ‘Contraception’s Authority: An Anglican’s Liturgical and Synodical Thought Experiment in light of ARCUSA’s Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 50.3 (2015), pp. 417–451. Otter, S. M. den, ‘Caird, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ouston, Hugh, ‘Leighton, Robert’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Overy, Richard, ‘Constructing Space for Dissent in War: The Bombing Restriction Committee, 1941–1945’, English Historical Review 131.550 (2016), pp. 596–622. Padgett, Jack, The Christian Philosophy of William Temple (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). Padley, Kenneth, ‘Rendering unto Caesar in the Age of Revolution: William Sherlock and William of Orange’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 59.4 (2008), pp. 680–696. Pailin, David, ‘Cudworth, Ralph’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Parkin, Jon, ‘Baiting the Bear: Anglican Attacks on Hobbes in the Later 1660s’, History of Political Thought 34.3 (2013), pp. 421–458. Parkin, Jon, ‘Patrick, Simon’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Parker, Kenneth L., ‘Historiography’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 557–577. Parker, Kenneth L., ‘Newman’s Individualistic Use of the Caroline Divines in the Via Media’, in G. Magill (ed.), Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Parker, Kenneth L., ‘Tractarian Visions of History’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 151–165. Parker, Thomas, ‘The Rediscovery of the Fathers in the Seventeenth-Century Anglican Tradition’, in John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (eds), The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London: Sheed and Ward/SPCK, 1967), pp. 3–49. Paschall, Douglas, Review of Laurence Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, Sewanee Review, 86.3 (1978), pp. 435–439. Passmore, J., Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). Penelhum, Terence, ‘Butler and Human Ignorance’, in Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 117–140.

408

Bibliography

Penelhum, Terence, Butler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). Pereiro, James, Ethos, and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Pereiro, James, ‘The Oxford Movement’s Theory of Religious Knowledge’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 185–199. Pinnington, Judith, Anglicans and Orthodox: Unity and Subversion, 1559–1725 (Leo­ minster: Gracewing, 2003). Platten, Stephen, ‘Making Good People … Rather than Making People Good?’ Journal of Anglican Studies 13.2 (2015), pp. 156–171. Platten, Stephen, ‘The Vision of God: Kenneth Kirk: A Critical Appreciation’, Theology 124.1 (2021), pp. 4–14. Plumb, J. H., England in the Eighteenth Century (London: Pelican, 1955). Plumb, J. H., Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London: Cresset Press, 1956). Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015). Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Ironist’, London Review of Books 24.4, 14 November 2002. Pollard, Arthur, ‘Scott, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Power, David N., ‘The Holy Spirit: Scripture, Tradition and Interpretation’, in Geoffrey Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 152–178. Preston, Ronald, ‘Re-Review: Kenneth Kirk’s The Vision of God’, Modern Churchman 22 (1980), pp. 36–39. Price, Peter, ‘Liberty, Poverty and Charity in the Political Economy of Josiah Tucker and Joseph Butler’, Modern Intellectual History 16.3 (2019), pp. 741–770. Prickett, Stephen, Review of Laurence Lockridge, Coleridge the Moralist, Studies in Romanticism 17.4 (1978), pp. 501–502. Prickett, Stephen, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Prickett, Stephen, ‘Tractarianism and the Lake Poets’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 67–78. Printy, Michael, ‘The Intellectual Origins of Popular Catholicism: Catholic Moral Theology in the Age of Enlightenment’, Catholic Historical Review 91.3 (2005), pp. 438–461. Rack, Henry D., ‘A Man of Reason and Religion: John Wesley and the Enlightenment’, Wesley and Methodist Studies 1 (2009), pp. 2–17.

Bibliography

409

Rack, Henry D., Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Birth of Methodism (London: Epworth Press, 1989; 3rd edition 2005). Rack, Henry D., ‘Some Recent Trends in Wesley Scholarship’, Wesleyan Theological Journal 41.2 (2006), pp. 182–199. Rack, Henry D., ‘Wesley, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Ramsey, Paul, ‘Liturgy and Ethics’, Journal of Religious Ethics 7.2 (1979), pp. 139–171. Ranson, Guy, ‘F. D. Maurice and the Social Nature of Man’, Canadian Journal of Theology 11.4 (1965), pp. 265–276. Reardon, Bernard, ‘Maurice, (John) Frederick Denison’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Reichlin, Massimo, ‘Hume and Utilitarianism’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14.1 (2016), pp. 1–20. Rey-Mermet, Theodore, C.S.S.R., Moral Choices: The Moral Theology of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, trans. Paul Laverdure (Liguori, MI: Liguori Publications 1998). Rickless, Samuel, ‘Locke’s Polemic against Nativism’, in Lex Newman (ed.), The Cam­ bridge Companion to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 33–66. Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Dennis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Ricks, Christopher, and Jim McGee (eds), The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 2015). Richter, Melvin, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 1983). Rivers, Isabel, ‘Law, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rivers, Isabel, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2000). Rivers, Isabel, ‘Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52.4 (2001), pp. 675–695. Rivers, Isabel, ‘Tillotson, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rivers, Isabel, ‘William Law and Religious Revival: The Reception of A Serious Call’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71.4 (2008), pp. 633–649. Roberts, Martin, ‘Coleridge’s Philosophical and Theological Thinking and Its Signi­ ficance for Today’, Religious Studies 20.3 (1984), pp. 487–496. Robertson, John, The Case for the Enlightenment: Naples and Scotland 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

410

Bibliography

Robertson, John, ‘Hume, David’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rogal, Samuel J., ‘Hymns in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 29.2 (1974), pp. 173–184. Rogerson, J. W., The Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F. D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). Rogerson, J. W., ‘William Temple as Philosopher and Theologian’, Theology 84.701 (1981), pp. 324–334. Root, John D., ‘Roman Catholic and Anglican Modernist Interaction, 1896–1914’, Histo­ rical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 49.2 (1980), pp. 133–156. Rose, Jacqueline, ‘John Locke, “Matters Indifferent”, and the Restoration of the Church of England’, Historical Journal 48.3 (2005), pp. 601–625. Rosen, Fred, ‘Bentham, Jeremy’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rowell, Geoffrey, Review of Donald Graham, From Eastertide to Ecclesia: John Henry Newman, the Holy Spirit, and the Church, Journal of Theological Studies 64.2 (2013), p. 8. Rowell, Geoffrey, ‘“Securing the day’s devotion”: The Spirituality of John Henry New­ man and His Anglican Inspirers’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 6.4 (2016), pp. 305–335. Rowell, Geoffrey, ‘Studdert-Kennedy. Geoffrey’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Bio­ graphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Roy, Ayon, ‘The Specter of Hegel in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68.2, (2007), pp. 279–304. Rule, Philip C., S.J., Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Rutherford, Susan, ‘Benjamin Hoadly: Sacramental Tests and Eucharistic Thought in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Anglican and Episcopal History 71.4 (2002), pp. 473–497. Sagovsky, Nicholas, ‘On God’s side’: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Saliers, Don E., ‘Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings’, Journal of Religious Ethics 7.2 (1979), pp. 173–189. Saliers, Don E., Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Divine Glory (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994). Sanders, C. Richard, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement: Studies in S. T. Coleridge, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, J. C. Hare, Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice (Durham, NC: Duke University Publications, 1942). Sanders, C. Richard, ‘Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, and the Distinction between the Reason and the Understanding’, PMLA 51.2 (1936), pp. 459–475.

Bibliography

411

Sanders, C. Richard, ‘Maurice as a Commentator on Coleridge’, PMLA 53.1 (1938), pp. 230–243. Sankey, rev. Geoffrey Rowell, ‘Talbot, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Bio­ graphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Schneewind, J. B., ‘Locke’s Moral Philosophy’, in Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 199–225. Schneewind, J. B., ‘Sidgwick and the Cambridge Moralists’, Monist 58.3 (1974), pp. 371–404. Schneewind, J. B., Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Schmitter, Amy, ‘Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theories of Emotions’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2021 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotions-17th18th/ (accessed 6 April 2023). Scotland, Nigel, ‘Sumner, John Bird’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Seaward, Paul, ‘Charles II’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Sedgwick, Peter H., ‘Anglican Moral Theology Today’, Anglican Theological Review, 103.4 (2021), pp. 450–467. Sedgwick, Peter H., ‘The Anglican Moral Tradition and the Formation of Conscience’, Sewanee Theological Review 62.3 (2019), pp. 479–509. Sedgwick, Peter H., ‘On Anglican Polity’, in David Ford and Dennis Stamps (eds), Essentials of Christian Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 196–212. Sedgwick, Peter H., ‘The Lambeth Conferences on Contraception, 1908–68’, Theo­logy 123.2 (2020), pp. 95–103. Sedgwick, Peter H., The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Sedgwick, Timothy F., ‘The Anglican Exemplary Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 207–232. Sedgwick, Timothy F., The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety (New York: Seabury Books, 1999). Sedgwick, Timothy F., ‘The New Shape of Anglican Identity’, Anglican Theological Review 77.2 (1995), pp. 187–197. Sedgwick, Timothy F., ‘Revising Anglican Theology’, Anglican Theological Review 63 (1981), pp. 11–20. Sedgwick, Timothy F., Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). Sell, Alan P. F., John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997). Sell, Alan P. F., Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995).

412

Bibliography

Sell, Alan P. F., Philosophy, Dissent and Nonconformity (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2004). Shaffer, Elinor S., ‘Metaphysics of Culture: Kant and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection’, Journal of the History of Ideas 31.2 (1970), pp. 199–218. Shaw, Jane, ‘Ethics and Mysticism: The Work of Kenneth E. Kirk and Some Other Modern Anglicans’, Journal of Anglican Studies 16.1 (2018), pp. 33–49. Shaw, Jane, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Sheehan, Jonathan, ‘Suffering Job: Christianity beyond Metaphysics’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 182–201. Sheridan, Patricia, ‘Locke’s Moral Philosophy’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, (spring 2020 edition), https://plato.stanford.edu /archives/spr2020/entries/locke-moral/ (accessed 6 April 2023). Sherry, Patrick, ‘Redeeming the Past’, Religious Studies 34 (1998), pp. 165–175. Shields, Christopher, and Daniel Schwartz, ‘Francisco Suárez’, in Edward N, Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, winter 2021 edition, https://plato.stan ford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/suarez/ (accessed 6 April 2023). Shusterman, Richard, ‘Eliot as Philosopher’, in A. David Moody (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 31–47. Sirota, Brent, The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Skinner, Simon, ‘History versus Hagiography: The Reception of Turner’s Newman’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61.4 (2010), pp. 764–778. Skinner, Simon, ‘A Response to Eamon Duffy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 63.3 (2012), pp. 549–567. Skinner, Simon, Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Smith, David H., ‘Introduction’, in Kenneth E. Kirk, Conscience and Its Problems (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999). Smith, David H., ‘Kenneth Kirk’s The Vision of God’, in G. Meilander and W. Werpehowski (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 449–465. Smith, David H., ‘The Moral Theology or Casuistic Tradition’, Anglican Theological Review 94.2 (2012), pp. 595–613. Smith, Harmon L., ‘Contraception and Natural Law: A Half-Century of Anglican Moral Reflection’, in Paul Elmen (ed.), The Anglican Moral Choice (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 1983), pp. 181–200.

Bibliography

413

Smith, Julia, ‘Traherne, Thomas’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Snyder, Laura J., ‘William Whewell’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclo­ pedia of Philosophy, summer 2022 edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum 2022/entries/whewell/ (accessed 6 April 2023). Sorabji, Richard, Moral Conscience through the Ages. Fifth Century BCE to the Present (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014). Speck, W. A., ‘James II’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Speck, W. A., ‘Mary II’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Spellman, W. M., The Latitudinarians, and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992). Spencer, Stephen, ‘History and Society in William Temple’s Thought’, Studies in Christian Ethics 5.2 (1992), pp. 61–73. Spencer, Stephen, William Temple: A Calling to Prophecy (London: SPCK, 2001). Spencer, Stephen, Archbishop William Temple: A Study in Servant Leadership (London: SCM Press, 2022). Spooner, H. M., rev. Mark D. Chapman, ‘Temple, Frederick’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Spurr, J., ‘Latitudinarianism and the Restoration Church’, Historical Journal 31.1 (1988), pp. 61–82. Spurr, J., ‘Rational Religion in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49.4 (1988), pp. 563–585. Spurr, J., The Restoration Church 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Starkie, Andrew, The Church of England, and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). Starkie, Andrew, ‘The Legacy of the “Caroline Divines”: Restoration and the Emergence of the High Church Tradition’, in Stuart J. Brown, Peter Nockles and James Pereiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 9–22. Starkie, Andrew, ‘William Law and Cambridge Jacobitism, 1713–1716’, Historical Research 75.190 (2002), pp. 448–467. Starkie, Andrew, ‘William Law and The Fable of the Bees’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.3 (2009), pp. 307–319. Stephen, Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edition (New York: Harbinger, 1962; first published 1902). Stock, Guy, ‘Bradley, F. H.’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Stone, Harold, Vico’s Cultural History (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

414

Bibliography

Strong, Rowan, and Carol Herringer, eds, Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement (London: Anthem Press, 2014). Stuart-Buttle, Tim, From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Stuart-Buttle, Tim, ‘Locke’s Cicero: Between Moral Knowledge and Faith’, in Tim StuartButtle and Subha Mukherji (eds), Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 259–279. Stuart-Buttle, Tim, and Subha Mukherji, eds, Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Suggate, Alan, William Temple and Christian Social Ethics Today (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987). Swanston, Hamish F. G., Celebrating Eternity Now: A Study in the Theology of St. Alphonsus de Liguori (Alton, Hampshire: Redemptorist Publications, 1995). Swanston, Hamish F. G., Ideas of Order: Anglicans and the Renewal of Theological Method in the Middle Years of the Nineteenth Century (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1974). Sykes, S. W., ‘Faith’, in Geoffrey Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 1–24. Sykes, S. W., The Integrity of Anglicanism (Oxford: Mowbray, 1978). Sykes, S. W., Unashamed Anglicanism (London: D.L.T., 1995). Tasset, Jose, ‘Bentham on Hume’s Virtues’, in Georgios Varouxakis and Mark Philip (eds), Happiness and Utility (London: UCL Press, 2019), pp. 81–97. Taylor, Stephen, ‘Hoadly, Benjamin’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Tennant, R. C., ‘The Anglican Response to Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 43.1 (1982), pp. 73–90. Tennant, R. C., Conscience, Consciousness and Ethics in Joseph Butler’s Philosophy and Ministry (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011). Thomas, Owan C., ‘William Temple’, in William J. Wolf, John E. Booty and Owen C. Thomas (eds), The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1979), pp. 101–134. Thomas, Owan C., William Temple’s Philosophy of Religion (London: SPCK, 1961). Thomas, Stephen, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Thornton, Martin, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology According to the English Pastoral Tradition (London: SPCK, 1963). Till, Barry, ‘Stillingfleet, Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Toon, Peter, ‘Early Evangelical Ethics’, in Paul Elmen (ed.), The Anglican Moral Choice (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1983), pp. 85–106.

Bibliography

415

Touber, Jetze, ‘God’s Word in the Dutch Republic’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 157–181. Townsend, H. G., ‘The Synthetic Principle in Butler’s Ethics’, International Journal of Ethics 37.1 (1926), pp. 81–87. Tuck, Richard, ‘Optics and Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 235–263. Turner, Frank, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (London: Yale University Press, 2002). Tutino, Stefania, Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism: A History of Probabilism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Tyacke, Nicholas, Aspects of English Protestantism 1530–1700 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2001). Tyler, Colin, ‘British Idealists’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Van Kley, Dale K., ‘Conclusion’, in William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (eds), God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 278–316. Vereecke, Louis, De Guillaume d’Ockham à saint Alphonse de Alphonsus: études d’histoire de la théologie morale moderne, 1300–1787 (Rome: Collegium S. Alfonsi de Urbe, 1986). Vickers, Jason E., ‘Wesley’s Theological Emphases’, in Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 190–206. Vigus, James, Platonic Coleridge (Abingdon: Legenda, 2009). Vilbig, Ryan, ‘John Henry Newman and Empiricism’, Newman Studies Journal 9.2 (2012), pp. 13–25. Voak, Nigel, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology; A Study of Reason, Will and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Vincent, Andrew, ‘Green, T. H.’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Vincent, Andrew, and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Voitle, Robert B., ‘Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense’, Studies in Philology 52.1 (1955), pp. 17–38. Vos, Peter, ed., Liturgy and Ethics: New Contributions from Reformed Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Wade, G. I., ‘St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Traherne’, New Blackfriars, 12.140 (1931), pp. 666–673. Wainwright, Geoffrey, ed., Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (London: SPCK, 1989).

416

Bibliography

Wallace, Charles I., Jr, ‘Wesley as Revivalist/Renewal Leader’, in Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (eds), The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 81–97. Ward, A. R., and A. R. Waller, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. 9: From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). Ward, W. Randall, ‘Divine Will, Natural Law and the Voluntarism/Intellectualism Debate in Locke’, History of Political Thought 16.2 (1995), pp. 208–218. Waterman, A. M. C., Political Economy and Christian Theology since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Waterman, A. M. C., Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1793–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Weatherby, H. L., ‘The Encircling Gloom: Newman’s Departure from the Caroline Tradition’, Victorian Studies 2.1 (1968), pp. 57–82. Westberg, Daniel, ‘The Influence of Aquinas on Protestant Ethics’, in Manfred Svensson and David Van Drunen (eds), Aquinas among the Protestants (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2018), pp. 267–285. Westberg, Daniel, Renewing Moral Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015). White, Alan R., ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons’, Philosophy 27.103 (1952), pp. 329–344. Wilcox, Peter C., John Henry Newman, Spiritual Director, 1845–1890 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013). Wilkinson, Alan, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SCM Press, 1978). Wilkinson, Alan, ‘Gore, Charles’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Williams, Rowan, The Malines Conversations (New York: Paulist Press, 2021). Wolf, William J., ‘F. D. Maurice’, in William J. Wolf (ed.), The Spirit of Anglicanism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), pp. 49–100. Wood, John Carter, ‘“Going part of the way together”: Christian Intellectuals, Modernity, and the Secular in 1930s and 1940s Britain’, Contemporary British History 34.4 (2020), pp. 580–602. Wood, John Carter, This Is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1939–40 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Woodhead, Linda, ‘Truth and Deceit in Institutions’, Studies in Christian Ethics 35.1 (2022), pp. 87–103. Woolf, William J., ‘Frederick Denison Maurice’, in William J. Woolf, (ed.), The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), pp. 49–98.

Bibliography

417

Worthen, Jeremy, ‘Joseph Butler’s Case for Virtue: Conscience as a Power of Sight in a Darkened World’, Journal of Religious Ethics 23.2 (1995), pp. 239–265. Worthen, Jeremy, ‘Joseph Butler on the Enemies of Virtue’, Studies in Christian Ethics 12.1 (1999), pp. 48–56. Yates, Paula, ‘Wales’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Vol. 2: Establishment and Empire, 1660–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 120–135. Yeo, Richard, ‘Whewell, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Young, B. W., ‘The Anglican Origins of Newman’s Celibacy’, Church History 65.1 (1996), pp. 15–27. Young, B. W., ‘Law, Edmund’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Young, B. W., Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Young, B. W., ‘Religious History and the Eighteenth-Century Historian’, Historical Journal 43.3 (2000), pp. 849–868. Young, B. W., Review of J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Erudition and the Republic of Letters Volume 2 (2017), pp. 431–458. Young, B. W., ‘“The soul-sleeping system”: Politics and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45.1 (1994), pp. 64–81. Young, B. W., ‘Theology in the Church of England’, in Jeremy Gregory (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Vol. 2: Establishment and Empire, 1660–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 392–428. Young, B. W., ‘Tucker, Abraham’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Young, B. W., ‘William Law and the Christian Economy of Salvation’, English Historical Review 109.431 (1994), pp. 308–322. Young, B. W., ‘Wollaston, William’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Yrigoyen, Charles, Jr, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Methodism (London: T&T Clark, 2010). Zuijdwegt, Geertjan, ‘Richard Whately’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 196–220. Zuijdwegt, Geertjan, and Terrence Merrigan, ‘Conscience’, in Frederick D’Aquino and Benjamin King (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 434–453.

418

Bibliography

Masters and Doctoral Theses

Baker, Eric, ‘The Relation of William Law to John Wesley and the Beginning of Methodism’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1941). Burden, Mark, ‘Academical Learning in the Dissenters’ Private Academies 1660–1720’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2012). Cefalu, Paul, ‘Habit, Virtue and Character: Moral Identity in Early Modern English Texts’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1999). Garnsey, George, ‘The Moral Theology of Kenneth Kirk, Bishop of Oxford: Studies in Its Development, Application and Influence’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, 2012). Griffin, Eric, ‘Daniel Brevint and the Eucharistic Calvinism of the Caroline Church of England, 1603–1674’ (D. Th. thesis, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, 2000). Harvey, Andrew, ‘Original Sin, Free Will and Grace in the Works of Jeremy Taylor’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010). Holgerson, Timothy Wayne, ‘The Wesleyan Enlightenment: Closing the Gap between Heart Religion and Reason in Eighteenth Century England’ (Ph.D. thesis, Kansas State University, 2017). Jasper, David, ‘Inspiration and Revelation: S. T. Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker. A Study in Literature and Religion’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1983). Klein, John William, ‘The Mental Universe of the English Nonjurors’ (Ph.D. thesis, Auburn University, 2015). LaCorte, J. J., ‘A Critical Analysis of the Dialectical Philosophy of William Temple’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Southern California, 1970). McElligott, Ella, ‘A Study of the Religious Life and Opinions of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.’ (M.Th. thesis, Loyola University, Chicago, 1951). Poole, A. J., ‘The Philosophical Theology of William Temple’ (Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 1955). Price, Peter, ‘Providence and Political Economy: Josiah Tucker’s Providential Argument for Free Trade’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, 2016). Prieur, Michael, ‘The Use of consensus fidelium as a Source of Moral Judgment: A Study in Anglican Moral Theology with Special Reference to Kenneth Kirk 1886–1954’ (Ph.D. thesis, Athenaeum San Anselmo, Rome, 1969). Rutherford, Susan, ‘Reformation Principles: The Religious and Political Ideas of Benja­ min Hoadly 1676–1761’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Northumbria, 2000). Sedgwick, Peter H., ‘The Character of Christ: The Correlation of Moral Philosophy and Christology in Anglican Theology, 1830–1870’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1982). Stuart, C. J., ‘The Rationale for the Incarnation and the Place of Substitutionary Atonement in the Thought of William Temple and Michael Ramsey: A Comparative Study’ (Ph.D. thesis, Durham University, 2013).

Bibliography

419

Wilkinson, M. B., ‘Value and Natural Order in the Philosophy of William Temple’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Surrey, 1990). Veitch, Emma, ‘Early Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophers and the Possibility of Virtue’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of St Andrews, 2017). Yates, Paula, ‘The Established Church and Rural Elementary Schooling: The Welsh Dioceses 1780–1830’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter, 2007).

Index Abraham, William 151 Acland, Richard 311 Act of Uniformity (1662) 13–14, 43 L’action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Blondel) 292 actions Butler on 72–73, 76, 221 consciousness of past 83, 86 Hobbes on 72 Hooker on 213 Law, William on 121–122 Moberly on 297 Newman on 216 Paley on 140, 170 Shaftesbury on 76 and virtues 133 See also casuistry; consequences; obligations affections Butler on 77–78, 79–81, 87–88, 89, 91, 154 Coleridge on 181 Law, William on 111 Newman on 235 Shaftesbury on 58–60, 75–76 Traherne on 44 use of term 58–59 The Age of Atonement (Hilton) 94 Aherne, Philip 165, 184–185, 252, 278 aids for confessors (Summae Confessorum) 338 Aids to Reflection (Coleridge) in general 180–184 Barbeau on 179 Beer on 182 Hill on 184 importance of 161, 169 influences on 172 letter about 173 Maurice on 251–252, 254 Maurice’s use of 258 Paley in 171 Shaffer on 180 Allison, C. Fitzsimons 126 Alphonsus, Saint 151, 345 American philosophers 186

The Analogy of Religion (Butler) Brown on 95 A Dissertation of Personal Identity in 82–83, 86, 93 importance of 68, 69 influence of 201, 221, 229–230, 260 Maurice on 266 taught at Oxford 231 mention of 26, 39, 50, 234 Andrewes, Lancelot 225, 234 Anglican Enlightenment (Bulman) 17–18 Anglican exemplary ethics tradition. See Anglican virtue ethics tradition Anglican moral theology in general 9–10, 128–129, 189–190, 371–372 casuistry in. See casuistry consistency and continuity in 375 ecclesiastical stance of 342 empiricism in 130 at end of 17th century 41–42 genealogy of 1–5, 9–10, 128, 190, 224, 242, 341, 371 influences on of Anglicanism 3–4 of Butler 94–98 of Law, William 125–127 of Locke 130–131 of Maurice 266–268 of Thomism 42 See also under specific authors intellectual rigour of 373–375 moral rigour of 372–373 after 1950 375–376 and revisionist ideas 19–20 and Scripture 141 1740 turning point in 128–129 See also Anglican virtue ethics tradition Anglican virtue ethics tradition in general 42, 158, 374 and Butler 97 and casuistry 189 and Coleridge 185 and Kirk 345 and Maurice 241 recasting of 187–188

421

Index Anglican virtue ethics tradition (cont.) Sedgwick on 10, 128, 183 threats to 160, 187 and Traherne 42 and Wesley 128–129 Anglicanism in general 376 change in moral teachings of 359–362 development of 341 ecclesiology in 183 Eucharist/Holy Communion in 358, 373 evangelical vision of 367 and evangelicalism 141 globalization of 375 influence of, on moral theology 3–4 liturgical practices in 4–5 and Maurice 264–265 and Methodism 158–159 moral theology in. See Anglican moral theology and Neo-Thomism 344 and non-jurors 104 pastoral care in 4–5, 371–372 process of renewal of 144 revelation in 25 Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion 64, 128, 136, 199, 243 via media justification of 199, 226–227, 369 views on, of Oxford Movement 226 virtue ethics tradition in. See Anglican virtue ethics tradition Anglo-Catholicism (High Churchmen) in general 269, 343–344 and Gore 273 and Temple 336–337 See also Kirk, Kenneth; Oxford Movement; Roman Catholicism Animadversions (Hobbes) 31 Anne, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland 14, 104 Annesley, Samuel 149 Anscombe, Elizabeth 93 anthropology, theological 256–258, 294 anti-Trinitarian sects 40 Apologia pro Vita Sua (Newman) 125, 227, 230 ‘The Apostles’ (Cambridge Conversazione Society) 250

The Apostolic Ministry (Kirk) 348 Apostolical Preaching (Sumner) 200 Appearance and Reality (Bradley) 279, 281 Aquinas, Thomas deductive approach to 345 influence of 32, 34, 35, 77, 158, 322, 353, 374 Aquinas Society (London) 337 Arianism 52, 65, 131 The Arians of the Fourth Century (Newman) 198, 225 Aristotle/Aristotelianism 43, 51, 65, 77, 151, 231 Arminianism 16, 17, 123, 153, 174 asceticism Kirk on 364 Law, William on 113–115, 118, 121, 125 Newman on 236 atheism 31, 32n24, 56 Athenaeum (magazine) 244 atonement 123 Atonement and Personality (Moberly) 275, 297, 298, 299–301 audiences of Butler 317 of Law, William 113 of moral theology 28 of Taylor, Jeremy 112–113 of Temple 317 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 77, 173, 282, 322, 330 authority of conscience 73, 76, 90–92, 139, 217, 261, 266, 330 of God 36n48, 134, 139, 217 religious 1, 3, 25, 27, 29, 108, 171, 262, 330, 356–357, 358, 360–361, 370 religious vs. civil 108–109, 136n35 of superior principles 85 Avis, Paul on Gore 273 on Hobbes 31, 34, 35 on Latitudinarians 55 on Law, William 108, 116, 121 on Wesley 156 works of 23–24 Bagot, Richard 206 Baker, Augustin 54

422 Balderston, Katharine C. 112, 123 Balliol College (Oxford) 272, 274, 276, 308–309, 313 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 297 Bampton Lectures (Gore) 286, 288 Bampton Lectures (Kirk) 348, 349, 362 Bampton Lectures (Mansel) 247 Banner, Michael 165, 186 baptism 13, 119, 244, 256, 258, 373 Barbarism and Religion (Pocock) 15 Barbeau, Jeffrey W. 179 Barth, Karl 334, 345 Barton, Anne 246 Baxter, Richard 52, 66 Bayle, Pierre 133 Beatitudes 147, 289, 352, 365 See also Sermon on the Mount beauty Bradley on 297n134 Hooker on 297 Moberly on 297, 301–303 Shaftesbury on 56–57, 60 See also goodness “Beauty and the Cross” (Moberly) 301–302 “Beauty of Character as a Real Phenomenon” (Moberly) 301–302 Beer, John 167, 180, 182 behaviour/conduct 133, 155, 219, 221, 324, 365, 373 being, univocal concept of 27–28 Belief in God, Belief in Christ and Belief in The Holy Spirit and the Church (Gore) 290 Bell, George 339, 349 Benedict xv, Pope 200 benevolence Butler on 71, 76, 87–88, 220 Coleridge on 172 and immorality 93 Newman on 220 and self-love 87–88 as superior principles 87, 88 and virtues 219–220 Wesley on 149 Bentham, Jeremy 130, 140, 142, 261–262 Beveridge, William 310, 311 Biblical references Genesis, 6:5 200 2 Samuel, 12 92

Index 1 Corinthians 13 150 15 37 Proverbs, 20:27 50 Ecclesiastes, 12:13 93–94 Micah, 6:8 136 Matthew 5 150, 289 5–7 147, 150, 365 5:48 151 23:41 295 Mark 10:2–12 358 12:31 37 Romans 2:14 91 2:15 85, 266 5 37 8:16 178 12 365 12:1 106 12:15 71 Galatians, 6:7 221 2 Peter, 1:14 210 1 John 150 3:24–4.9 263 4:16 44–45 See also Scripture Biographia Literaria (Coleridge) 161, 169, 260 birth control 353, 357–358, 359–361 ‘Bishop Butler and the Zeitgeist’ (Garnett) 95 Blackfriars (Dominican publication) 337, 338 The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (eds. Hauerwas & Wells) 119–120 Blondel, Maurice 292 The Body of Christ (Gore) 286 Boehme, Jacob 99, 124 bombing, of Germany 311, 340 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 343, 363 Bosanquet, Bernard 327, 333 Boulger, James 181 Bowed, John 67 Bradley, F. H. influence of, on Moberly 296, 301 life of 278, 296–297

Index Bradley, F. H. (cont.) views of on beauty 297n134 on hedonism 280 on morality 278–279 on selfhood 279–282 on self-knowledge 280 on self-realization 279–281 on social relationships 276, 280–281, 301 on volition 279 works of 278, 279, 281, 296 Bramhall, John, relationships/friendships of 31–32, 35 views of 32, 34, 35 works of 31, 32 Brasenose College (Oxford) 43 The Brazen Serpent (Erskine) 257 Bretherton, Luke 165, 186–187 Bridgeman, Orlando 43 A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men (S. P.) 54 The British Moralists (Darwall) 57 brotherhood, spirit of 289–290 Brown, David 95 Bull, George 225 Bulman, William 17–18 Burden, Mark 65, 66 Burke, Edmund 253 Butler, Joseph in general 190, 234 comparisons with 69, 317 criticism of on Hobbes 70–74 on Hutcheson 74–75 on Locke 79–83 on Shaftesbury 74–79, 90–91 criticism on of Gay 134, 135 of Maurice 260–261 of Paley 139 influence of in general 94–98 on Kirk 354 on Maurice 245, 258–259, 260 on Newman 196, 201, 228–232 influences on 40, 81, 93–94

423 life of career Anglican clergyman 67–68 Bishop of Bristol 69 Bishop of Durham 69 chaplain to the Lord Chancellor 68 parish of Stanhope 68 patronage in career of 67–68 Presbyterian background 64 Rolls Chapel 68, 249 and the Whigs 68 works. See works (below) death of 69 education 64, 66, 67 family 64 relationships/friendships with Clarke 66–68 with Wesley 69, 152–153 with Whitefield 152 views of in general 69 on actions 72–73, 76, 221 on affections 77–78, 87–88, 89, 91, 154 on benevolence 71, 76, 87–88, 220 on charity 76 on compassion 70, 71–72, 91, 98 on conscience 73, 76, 84, 86, 88–89, 90–91, 96, 134, 135, 218, 266 on consequences 72–73, 92 on duty 86, 92 on egoism and hedonism 70 on empathy 97–98 on enthusiasm 77–78 on forgiveness 81 on God’s love 78 on God’s purpose 77 on God’s will 78 on happiness 77, 88, 89 on human agency 87 on humility 79 on knowledge 80, 81, 232 on the love of God 97 on love of neighbour 88 on moral rightness 75 on moral sense school 73–74, 86, 374 on natural law 85

424 Butler, Joseph (cont.) on notion of desert 72–73, 86, 93, 201 on obligations 86 on passions 72, 213 on perfection 77, 84 on personal identity 82–83 on pietism 154 on probability 81, 230, 260 on proportion/harmony 75–76, 84 on redemption 266 on religious affections 79–81 on religious devotion 77–78 on resentment 78, 81, 205 on self-consciousness 82–83 on self-deceit 92–94, 372 on self-love 71, 76, 86, 88–89, 260 on sensations/response to sense data 91 on sentimentalism 74–77 on superior principles 83–86 on virtues 75–76, 129 views on, of contemporary authors 94–96 works of The Analogy of Religion. See The Analogy of Religion audience of 317 A Dissertation of Personal Identity 82–83, 86, 93 A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue 220, 229 Fifteen Sermons. See Fifteen Sermons Rolls Sermons. See Fifteen Sermons mention of 9, 21, 23 Caird, Edward 276, 308, 310, 313–316, 321 Caird, John (brother of Edward) 276, 313, 315 Calvin, Henry 47 Calvinism criticism on of Cambridge Platonists 41, 45, 50 of Coleridge 173, 184 of Cudworth 47, 49 of Newman 214, 221–222 of Wesley 150 and dissenting academies 65 on the Fall and human sinfulness 45, 65

Index Newman’s conversion to 197, 222 reliance on Spirit in 214, 222 self-justification in 214, 222 Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism 164 Cambridge Conversazione Society (‘The Apostles’) 250 Cambridge Platonists and Calvinism 41, 45, 50 influence of 60, 147, 174–176, 180 views of 50, 58, 147 mention of 100, 161, 164 See also Cudworth, Ralph; Whichcote, Benjamin Cambridge University debating society of 250 division between church and academic life 249–250 moral philosophy at 247–249 See also under specific Colleges Cameron, J. M. 215, 216 Campbell, John McLeod 257, 313 Can We Then Believe? (Gore) 290 “the candle of the Lord” 50, 55, 90 canon law, breaking of 152–153 cardinal virtues 44, 228, 352 See also fortitude; justice; prudence; temperance; virtues Carlyle, Thomas 239, 350, 356 Caroline divines in general 224–225 on conscience 190 influence of 225–228, 235, 343 on moral guidance 355 on salvation 124 See also Andrewes, Lancelot; Ken, Thomas; Sanderson, Robert; Taylor, Jeremy Caroline of Ansbach, Queen consort of Great Britain and Ireland 68 Carpenter, James 273, 287 Carter, Benjamin 47, 49 Cartesianism 329–330, 337 See also Descartes, René Castigations of Mr Hobbes His Last Animadversions (Bramhall) 32 Casuistical Morning-Exercises (Annesley) 149

Index casuistry in general 28, 363, 375 aim of 352 demise of 189 doubt in 351, 357–358, 362 error in 351, 357 Kirk’s revival of 350–353, 370, 375 Maurice on 261 perplexity in 351, 353 of Taylor 42, 265, 374 Wesley on 149 The Catching of Leviathan, the Great Whale (Bramhall) 32 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) 244 Catholic Modernists 293 Cefalu, Paul 44–45 celibacy 118–119, 197 Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered (Newman) 227 Chadwick, Owen 226, 341 The Challenge (church magazine) 309 Chapman, Mark D. 290 “Character and Circumstance” (Holland) 294–295 Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times (Shaftesbury) 55–56, 60, 75–76, 90 charity Butler on 76 Kirk on 345 Law, William on 101, 113, 116 Newman on 205 Wesley on 150 chastity 117 Christ and Culture (Niebuhr) 240 Christ Church (Oxford) 35, 144–145 Christian Ethicks (Traherne) 42–43, 44 Christian faith. See religious faith Christian identity 369 Christian Library (Wesley) 147 Christian life in general 373 Coleridge on 182–183 Kirk on 352, 363 Law, William on 111–112, 115–116 “Christian Perfection” (Wesley) 150 Christian Social Union 269

425 Christianity marginalization of 10–11 orthodoxy in 22–24 dissenters from. See Hobbes, Thomas; Locke, John; Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of place in society 12–17 and reason 26–29 re-evalution of 17–20 and revelation and Scripture 24–26, 27 Shaftesbury on 62 as Will 291 Christianity and Social Order (Temple) 307, 311, 326–327, 328, 336 Christianity as Old as the Creation (Tindal) 52 Christianity not Mysterious (Toland) 40, 53 Christology. See Jesus Christ Christus Veritas (Temple) 317, 326–328 Church, R. W. 220 church fathers 157, 253 The Church in The Age of Reason (Cragg) 14 Church of England attempts to make it more Catholic 195, 227, 356 See also Anglo-Catholicism Butler’s conversion to 234 crisis in 244–245 as fading institution 12–13, 143–144 freedom and tolerance in 350 and God’s anointed monarch 107 and Methodism 144, 146–147 and non-jurors 104 rules of moral behaviour 357 views on, of Oxford Movement 225 See also Anglicanism; Anglo-Catholicism Church of Scotland 257 Church of South India 312, 349 Cicero 65 Citizen and Churchman (Temple) 336 Clapham Sect 141 Clare Hall (Cambridge) 47, 51–52 Clark, J. C. D. 11–12, 107, 144 Clarke, Samuel 66–68 Clem, Stewart 236 Coakley, Sarah 42, 164, 178 Coleridge, Ann (mother of Samuel) 166

426 Coleridge, Derwent (son of Samuel) 251 Coleridge, John (father of Samuel) 166 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor in general 160–161, 187–188, 190, 371 compared to Maurice 246 criticism of on Calvinism 173, 184 on Edwards 184 on Kant 179 on moral sense school 172 on Paley 170–171, 174 on Taylor 172–173 on utilitarianism 171 importance of 165–166 influence of on American philosophers 186 on contemporary theologians 185–187 on Eliot 185 on Gore 185 on Green 185 on Maurice 161–162, 239, 243–244, 245, 250–256, 258, 259, 260, 261 on Newman 161–162, 177, 184, 196, 232–234 on Prickett 161–162 on proximate theologians 184–185 on Temple 340 influences on of Cambridge Platonists 174–176, 180 of Cudworth 46, 50, 163, 175–176 of German Idealism 190, 374 of Kant 176–179, 180, 253 of Leighton 180 of Neoplatonism 174–176 of Schelling 180 life of career 167, 168 change in religious beliefs 167–168 death 169 education 166–167, 175 family 166, 168 ill-health 167, 169 relationships/friendships with Godwin 168 with Watson 137–138 with the Wordsworths 167, 168–169

Index substance addictions 167, 168, 169 travels 167–168, 169 works. See works (below) re-evaluation of interest in Platonism and Idealism 163–165 religious interest 162–163 theory of language 161 views of on affections 181 on benevolence 172 on Christian life 182–183 on conscience 171, 179, 181, 254 on culture and religion 186–187 on God 186 on ideas 186 on ideas and laws 177 on language 161, 184 on morality 170 on motives 179 on nature 177 on original sin 173–174 on redemption 183–184 on religion as supplement to law 170 on self-consciousness 178–179, 181–182 on sensibility 172 on Trinity 168 on will 177–179, 181 works of Aids to Reflection. See Aids to Reflection Biographia Literaria 161, 169, 260 On the Constitution of the Church and State 169, 183, 255–256 The Eolian Harp (poem) 175 Essay on Faith 259 The Friend (journal) 168–169, 261 Frost at Midnight (poem) 175 “Know Tyself” (poem) 318 Lay Sermons 254 Opus Maximum 169 “Revealed Religion” (lecture) 175 Coleridge and Liberal Religious Thought (Neville) 185 Coleridge-Fricker, Sara (1st wife of Samuel) 167

Index Collinson, Patrick 46 commands/divine commands 33, 45, 85, 139 Commentary on the Bible (Scott) 141 common good 278 ‘Commonwealth of Value’ 327 Community of the Resurrection 272–273 compassion in general 372 Butler on 70, 71–72, 91, 98 Hobbes on 70, 71–72 Holland on 295 competition 70, 241 The Concept of Nature (Whitehead) 329 conduct. See behaviour/conduct Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship (copec) 310 confession 4, 353, 357 conscience Butler on 73, 76, 84, 86, 88–89, 90–91, 96, 134, 135, 218, 266 Cameron on 215, 217 Caroline divines on 190 as central concept 94 Coleridge on 171, 179, 181, 254 and duty 200, 218 and faith 215–218 Kirk on 354 Locke on 137 Maurice on 258–262 Mill on 271 Newman on 200–201, 207–208, 212–213, 215–218, 235–237, 354 rejection of 139 and self-consciousness 259 Shaftesbury on 76 as superior principles 88–89, 90–91 Wesley on 148–149 Whewell on 261 See also reason/reasoning; reflection The Conscience (Maurice) 259, 260 Conscience and Its Problems (Kirk) 347, 350–351, 353–354, 360, 361, 367 consciousness of past actions 83, 86, 320 Temple on 331 See also self-consciousness consensus fidelium 362

427 consequences Butler on 72–73, 92 Coleridge on 171 Gay on 132 Paley on 140 See also utilitarianism conservatism 144, 169, 238 Considerations on the State of the World with Regard to the Theory of Religion (Law, Edmund) 131 contraception 353, 357–358, 359–361 conversions of Butler 234 of Newman 195, 197, 199, 200, 222, 227, 269 Newman on 200, 202 of Wesley 145–146 Wesley on 153 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. See Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Co-operative movement 238 Cornwell, John 208 Corporation Act (1661) 244 “The Cost of Moral Movement” (Holland) 295 Coulson, John 161, 184, 239–340 Country Parson (Herbert) 116 courage 59 See also fortitude Cragg, G. R. 14, 18, 21, 22 creation 27, 75, 149, 340 The Creative Mind (Mens Creatrix; Temple) 315, 317, 318, 323–326 Creed and Character (Holland) 291, 294 Crimmins, James 139 The Crisis of Christian Rationalism (Kirk) 333–334 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant) 176, 179 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 176–177 Cromwell, Oliver 48 Cudworth, Ralph (junior) career of 46–48 criticism of, on Hobbes 49 influence of on Coleridge 46, 50, 163, 175–176 on Wesley 147

428 Cudworth, Ralph (junior) (cont.) views of on free will 49 on human agency 47 on innate ideas 49 on knowledge 175 on morality 48 on nature 175 rejection of Calvinism/Puritanism by 47 on Trinity 175 works of Of Freewill 48 “The Life of Christ” (sermon) 147 “sermon to Parliament” 48 translations of 50 A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality 48 The True Intellectual System of the Universe 48, 147 mention of 9, 189 Cudworth, Ralph (senior) 46–47 culture, and religion 171, 186–187 Cunliffe, Christopher 86 Darwall, Stephen 57 Darwin, Charles 271 David, Father 354–355 Davidson, Randall 309 De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem (Pufendorf) 65 De Origine Male (King) 132 Deacon, Thomas 105, 106 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon) 15 deductive rationality 34 deism 28, 56, 69, 108, 187, 190 Descartes, René 329–330, 333 See also Cartesianism desert, notion of 72–73, 86, 93, 201 determinism 47, 285 The Development of Ethics (Irwin) 29 disciplina arcani 225 A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Stillingfleet) 53 A Discourse of Conscience (Perkins) 46

Index A Discourse of Fundamentals (Waterland) 131 dissenting academies 64–66 A Dissertation of Personal Identity (Butler) 82–83, 86, 93 A Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue (Butler) 220, 229 divine commands/commands 33, 45, 85, 139 divine goodness 27, 37, 48, 171 divine will Butler on 78 Cudworth on 48 Gay on 134 Locke on 27, 37–38 Paley on 139 Temple on 319 Whichcote – Tuckney debates on 45 divorce 358 Dix, George 312, 340, 365–366 Doctrine in the Church of England (report of spck) 335 “The Doctrine of the Holy Ghost” (Moberly) 300 Dominiak, Paul 242 Dorrien, Gary 331 doubt 330, 351, 357–358, 362 Douglas, Brian 272, 327 Douglas, Kelly Brown 242, 267 Duffy, Eamon 206, 207, 210 Duke of Wellington 244 Dunn, John 16, 37 duty in general 139 Butler on 86, 92 and conscience 200, 218 and isolated individual 321, 325–326 Kirk on 357 Locke on 37 Newman on 200, 218 Temple on 325 Dyck, Arthur 97 ecclesial ethic 119–120 ecumenism 312, 339 “The Educating of Sorrow” (Moberly) 301

Index education in general 13–14 of Butler 64, 66, 67 of Coleridge 166–167, 175 of Gore 272 Kirk on 311–312, 346 of Law, William 100–101 Locke on 144 of Maurice 243–244 of Newman 197–198 of Temple 308–309 of Wesley 144–145 See also under specific institutions Edwards, Jonathan 184 egoism Butler on 70 Hobbes on 70, 72, 73 and mystical prayer 154 Paley on 139 Shaftesbury on 57 See also hedonism Eliot, T. S. 185, 281–282, 311, 325 Emmanuel College (Cambridge) 47, 100 Emmett, Dorothy 326, 340 emotions/feelings in expression of faith 155–156 Kirk on 354 Newman on 212, 217 Wesley on 155–157 See also affections; enthusiasm empathy 97–98 empiricism in general 26–27 in Anglican moral theology 130 of Butler 80–81, 86, 94, 98, 190 and Locke 35–41, 190 Maurice on 254–255 and Mill 271 and Newman 374 opposition to 248, 304 of Shaftesbury 190 of Temple 330 of Wesley 149 Enabling Act (1920) 328 Engagement Oath 51–52 English Civil War 10–11, 73

429 English politics 10–12 English Society 1688–1832 (Clark) 11–12, 107 Enlightenment humanism during 15, 18–19 religion during and Christian orthodoxy 22–24 marginalization of 10–11 place in society 12–17 pluralism in 24 and reason 26–29 re-evaluation of 17–20 and religious error 24–25 and revelation and Scripture 24–26, 27 Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume) 140 enthusiasm Butler on 77–78 Watson on 137 Wesley on 153–156 The Eolian Harp (Coleridge) 175 episcopacy 52, 64, 349 epistemology in general 304, 330 and God’s creation 26–27 Locke on 38, 52, 53, 56, 130 Newman on 199, 220 Stillingfleet on 53 Temple on 323 See also knowledge The Epistles of St. John (Maurice) 262–264, 267 Epistola de tolerantia (Locke) 38 error issue in casuistry 351, 357 religious 24–25 and truth 210, 212 Erskine, Thomas 245, 250, 257 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 36, 38–39, 49, 53, 57, 65, 81, 82 Essay on Faith (Coleridge) 259 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Newman) 226–227 An Essay on the Origin of Evil (King) 132 Essay on the Philosophical Evidence of Christianity (Hampden) 230

430 Essays in Philosophical Criticism (Green) 276 Essays on the Law of Nature (Locke) 36 esteem 133 Ethical Studies (Bradley) 278, 279, 296 Ethics (Bonhoeffer) 363 Eucharist/Holy Communion in Anglicanism 358, 373 Dix on 366 Law, William on 120 Maurice on 258, 267 Newman on 210 in non-juror liturgy 106–107 Taylor on 106, 173 and Wesley 145, 146 Wesley on 151 Eustace Conway (Maurice) 245 evangelicalism and Anglicanism 141 Newman on 198, 200–204, 209, 212 Evidences of Christianity (Paley) 218 The Evolution of Religion (Caird) 315 Exeter College (Oxford) 244 Exposition on Matthew (Tyndale) 112 F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology (Ramsey) 240 The Fable of the Bees (Mandeville) 58, 109 faith 346 See also religious faith The Faith and Modern Thought (Temple) 317, 318–319, 322 fasting 150 fatalism 222 fear 71–72 feelings. See emotions/feelings Fenelon, François 154 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 161, 177 Fifteen Sermons (Butler) in general 68, 69 compared to, University Sermons (Newman) 229 Newman’s reading of 230 Sermon 1, ‘Upon Human Nature’ 71, 74, 91 Sermon 2, ‘Upon Human Nature’ 77, 91, 266 Sermon 3, ‘Upon Human Nature’ 74, 84, 88, 218

Index Sermon 5, ‘Upon Compassion’ 71–72, 87 Sermon 6, ‘Upon Compassion 87–88 Sermon 7, ‘Upon the Character of Balaam 92 Sermon 8, ‘Upon Resentment 78, 81, 205, 219 Sermon 9, ‘Upon the Forgiveness of Injuries’ 81, 219 Sermon 10, ‘Upon Self-Deceit’ 92 Sermon 11, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’ 72, 74, 88, 89 Sermon 12, ‘Upon the Love of Our Neighbour’ 87–88, 91, 220 Sermon 13, ‘Upon the Love of God’ 77–78, 79, 232 Sermon 14, ‘Upon the Love of God’ 77 Sermon 15, ‘Upon the Ignorance of Man’ 77, 81, 93–94, 232 mention of 196 First World War 344, 345–346 Flores, Cristina 163, 175, 176 forgiveness 81 formalism 364 fortitude 352 See also courage Four Quartets (Eliot) 282 Francis, Pope 200 Francis de Sales, Saint 212 free will. See under will freedom 316, 328 French Revolution 142, 243 The Friend (Coleridge) 168–169, 261 Frost at Midnight (Coleridge) 175 Froude, Hurrell 99 Froude, Richard 202 Garnett, Jane 95, 224, 228–229, 269–270 Gay, John 132–135 genealogy, of Anglican moral theology 1–5, 9–10, 128, 190, 224, 242, 341, 371 General Strike (1926) 310, 351 George i, King of Great Britain and Ireland 104, 105 George ii, King of Great Britain and Ireland 68 George v, King of Great Britain and Ireland 309 George vi, King of Great Britain and Ireland 312

431

Index German Idealism in general 50, 161, 177 and Coleridge 190, 374 See also Idealism Germany, bombing of 311, 340 Gibbon, Edward (father, d. 1737) 101, 113 Gibbon, Edward (son, d. 1770) 101, 115 Gibbon, Edward (grandson, d. 1794; historian) 15, 101, 114, 115, 171 Gibbon, Hester (daughter) 101, 115 Gifford Lectures 290, 310, 315, 329, 332 Gilleman, Gerard 356 Gillman, Dr. 169 Gisborne, Thomas 141 Glasgow 276 Glasgow University 313 God being of 253–254 and beings 27–28 desire of 277 goodness of 27, 37, 48, 171 love of. See under love as part of the universe 28 power of 27, 34 purpose of 77 as regulative idea 176–177 Temple on 322 will of. See divine will See also deism God in the Enlightenment (eds. Bulman & Ingram) 18 Godwin, William 168 Golden Grove (Taylor) 228 Goldie, Mark 20 goodness of God. See divine goodness of human nature 41, 55, 125 See also beauty Gore, Charles career 272–273, 290, 298, 300 criticism of 359 criticism on 273 family and education 272 influence of 340 influences on 109, 185, 269, 286–287 views of 274, 287–290, 372–373 works of 269–271, 286–290 The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Ramsey) 240, 267, 365

Gouldstone, Timothy 2 governments, Locke on 39 Great War 344, 345–346 Green, Joseph Henry 169 Green, T. H. influence of 185, 269, 272, 283, 286, 291–292 influences on 185 life of 276 relationships/friendships of 291 views of 276–278 views on 283–284 works of 276, 286 Gregory, Jeremy 12–13, 144 Grote, John 247–249, 259 Grotius 37 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 176 Guite, Malcolm 162–163 Gunton, Colin E. 186 Guyon, Madame 154 Guy’s Hospital (London) 245, 246 Haldane, Richard (R. B.) 275, 276 Hall, Armstrong 344 Hall, Henry 106 Hall, Robert 266 Hammond, Henry 16–17, 52, 54 Hampden, Renn Dickson 230 happiness Butler on 77, 88, 89 Gay on 133–134 Kirk on 363 Paley on 139–140 and self-love 89 Tucker on 135 Wesley on 148–149, 150–151 Hardy, Daniel W. 164, 186 Hare, Julius 243, 246, 250 Häring, Bernhard 343 harmony. See proportion/harmony Harvard University 329 Hastings, Adrian 312, 339, 340, 342, 343–344 Hauerwas, Stanley 120, 366–367 Hawkins, Edward 202 Hazard, Paul 14 Hebblethwaite, Brian 92 Hebert, A. G. 365–366 Hedley, Douglas 47, 50, 163–164, 183, 341

432 hedonism 33, 70, 72, 134, 139, 280 Heereboord, Adrian 65 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 314 Hegelianism 283, 316, 322 See also Idealism hegemonikon (self-realization) 49 Herbert, George 116 Herder, Johann Gottfried 182 Heydt, Colin 64, 65 High Churchmen. See Anglo-Catholicism higher education 13–14 Hill, Geoffrey views of 96, 184, 187, 229 works of 96, 162–163, 229 Hilton, Boyd 94–95 Hinchcliff, Peter 315 Hinsley, Arthur 339 History of English Thought (Stephen) 14 History of the Church of Christ (Milner) 203, 225 Hoadly, Benjamin 101, 108–109 Hobbes, Thomas criticism on 34, 49, 53, 70–74 influences of 39 life of English Civil War 73 relationships/friendships 31–32 religious beliefs 31, 32n24, 35, 56 views of on actions 72 on compassion 70, 71–72 on competition 70 on deductive rationality 34 on egoism and hedonism 33, 70, 72, 73 on fear 71–72 on free will 47 on God’s power 34 on law of nature 33–34, 70 on materialism 30, 32n24, 49, 56 on moral philosophy 29–35 on morality 70 on naturalism 30–31 on passions 29–30 on prudence 33 on will vs. reason 32 works of 31, 71 mention of 9, 10, 22, 23

Index holiness in general 372 Moberly on 297 Newman on 211–212, 236 and spiritual gifts 151 Taylor on 252 Wesley on 147–149, 150–151 Wesley’s search for 146–147 Holland, Henry Scott influences on 269, 291–292 life of 274, 296 relationships/friendships of 291, 296 views of 291–296 works of 291, 292, 294 ‘Holy Club’ (of Wesley) 145 Holy Dying (Taylor) 42, 112, 144, 145, 227 Holy Living (Taylor) 42, 78, 112, 117, 144, 145, 227, 228 Holy Spirit 106–107, 151, 200, 298, 374 See also Eucharist/Holy Communion Hooker, Richard comparisons with 69, 124, 370 influence of 374 influences of 37 influences on 374 views of in general 69 on actions 213 on beauty 297 on God’s power 27 on revelation 25 on Scripture 26 on will vs. reason 32 works of 124 hope 79, 346 Horne, George 12 human agency 47, 87, 257 human experience 39, 134–135, 174, 267, 292, 336 human nature goodness of 41, 55, 125 Maurice on 258–260 and moral choice 32 and natural law 33, 122 and rationality 121–122 and sinfulness 45, 122 See also naturalism human understanding, Locke on 38–39

Index humanism 15, 18–19, 114 Hume, David criticism on 141, 149, 216 influence of 254–255 influences on 135 intellectual hegemony of 142 political conservatism of 142 views of 171, 215–216 works of 140, 215 humility Butler on 79 Gore on 288 Kirk on 363 Law, William on 116, 119, 123, 136 Newman on 204–206 Hutcheson, Elizabeth 101 Hutcheson, Francis criticism on 74–75, 133, 134, 135, 148–149 views of 75, 133, 134, 135 Hutchinson, Sara 168 Hutton, Sarah 48, 49 Idealism absolute 269 determinism of 285 influence on Lux Mundi school 271 of Kant 279 MacKinnon on 282–285 monism of 284–285 rehabilitation of 341 self-realization in 271, 276–282, 296–299 social relationships in 275–276 spiritual determinism of 285 See also Bradley, F. H.; Caird, Edward; German Idealism; Green, T. H.; Lux Mundi School; Moberly, R. C.; Taylor, A. E.; Temple, William ideas, Coleridge on 177, 186 identity. See Christian identity; personal identity ignorance 66, 214, 323, 361–362 Ignorance, Faith and Conformity (Kirk) 350 Illingworth, J. R. 269 imagination 111, 120–121 The Imitation of Christ (Kempis) 145 immorality 93, 320 Imperial College (London) 329 “The Important Question” (Wesley) 150

433 Inaugural Dissertation (Kant) 176 The Incarnation of the Son of God (Gore) 271, 286–289 Industrial Revolution 144 Inge, W. R. 299–301 Ingram, Robert 13, 18 innate ideas/moral sense (instinct) Cudworth on 49 Hutcheson on 133, 134, 135 Law, William on 136 Locke on 49 Paley on 138–139, 141 rejection of 133, 134, 135, 136, 138–139, 141 Inquiry Concerning Virtue (Shaftesbury) 75 institutionalism 364 The Integrity of Anglicanism (Sykes) 255, 265 ‘interested,’ use of term 70 intrinsic morality, vs. natural law 32–33 invincible ignorance 361–362 Irwin, Terence 29, 75, 138 Israel, Jonathan 14–15, 18 Jacob, William 4, 13 Jacobite Rising (1745) 105 Jacobitism 101, 104, 144, 148 James, William 346 James vii & ii, King of England, Scotland and Ireland 102–103 Jansenism 177 Jasper, David 162 Jekyll, Joseph 68 Jesus Christ on divorce 358 Gore on 287–289 as the great exemplar 352 Holland on 293–294, 295, 296 invocations of 120 kingdom of 256, 258 Kirk on 352 Locke on 37, 40, 79 love of 232 as model for personal sanctity 129 moral character of 136, 286–288, 323 Spirit of 298 Temple on 323, 327–328 Whichcote on 46

434 Jesus College (Cambridge) 166–167 Joachim, Harold 281 John Wesley’s Moral Theology (Long) 147 Johnson, Samuel influences on 104, 112, 126 views of 116 works of 96 mention of 24, 128 Jones, Christopher 345 Jones, Samuel 64 Journal (Wesley) 153, 154, 155, 156 Journals (Whitefield) 152 Jowett, Benjamin 272 just war principles 311n15 justice 37, 44, 93, 205, 219–220 justification by faith 148, 152–153 Kant, Immanuel criticism on 179 Idealism of 279 influence of 176–179, 253 views of 176–179, 279, 280 views on 314 works of 176 Keble, John 99, 198–199, 202, 231–232, 238 Kemp, Eric 347, 349 Kempis, Thomas à 144–145 Ken, Thomas 105, 117 Kendal, Gordon 78 Ker, Ian 193, 195 Keynes, John Maynard 311 King, Ben 193, 194 King, William 132 The Kingdom of Christ (Maurice) 246, 251–252 King’s College (London) 246, 248 Kirk, Kenneth in general 343–344, 369–370 comparisons with 363, 370 criticism of 333–334, 345, 356 criticism on of Lehmann 354–355 of O’Donovan 366–367 of Sedgwick 368–369 of Temple 311n16 of Westberg 367–368 influence of 340, 363 influences on 343, 354, 375

Index life of broad learning of 345 career bishop of Oxford 347, 349 chaplain Oxford University 346–347 Church of South India 349 military chaplain 346, 348 professor at Oxford 348–349 conservatism of 347–348 death 375 family 348 relationships/friendships 312, 340, 365 views of on Anglican Neo-Thomism 339 on asceticism 364 on birth control 353, 357–358, 359–361 on casuistry 350–353, 370 on charity 345 on Christ 352 on Christian life 352, 363 on confession 353, 357 on conscience 354 on consensus fidelium 362 on divorce 358 on duty 357 on education 311–312 on education of the soul 346 on emotions 354 on episcopacy 348 on formalism 364 on happiness 363 on humility 363 on institutionalism 364 on invincible ignorance 361–362 on loyalty 353–354, 367 on moral judgements 354, 369 on natural law 361–362 on penitence 353 penitential theology in 354–355 on prudence 352 on rationalism 333–334 on religous faith 346 on responsibility 351–352 on rigorism 364 on self-discipline 364, 368 on social habits 357

Index Kirk, Kenneth (cont.) on virtues 352, 365 on worship 364–365, 370, 373 views on 368 works of The Apostolic Ministry 348 Conscience and Its Problems 347, 350–351, 353–354, 360, 361, 367 The Crisis of Christian Rationalism 333–334 Ignorance, Faith and Conformity 350 Marriage and Divorce 358 “Moral Theology” (article) 347 Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application 344, 346–347, 352, 367 A Study of Silent Minds 347 The Vision of God 347, 348, 362–366, 368 on worship 370 mention of 5, 98, 308 Klein, Lawrence 62, 123–124 Knightbridge Chair of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge) 247–249 “Know Tyself” (Coleridge) 318 knowledge Butler on 80, 81, 232 Cudworth on 175 Plato on 174 and sense perception 79–80 theory of. See epistemology and virtue 254 See also reason/reasoning Knox, E. A. 310 Lambeth Conference (1920) 353, 359, 360 Lambeth Conference (1930) 347, 358, 359–362 Lambeth Conference (1998) 356 Lang, Cosmo Gordon 339, 359 language Coleridge on 161, 184 Grote on 248, 259 Latitudinarianism 20, 51–55, 177, 227 Law, Edmund 130, 132, 135–136, 138 Law, William in general 99–100, 190 comparisons with 112, 114, 124, 207–208

435 criticism of on Hoadly 101, 108–109 on Mandeville 110–111 criticism on 114, 126, 148 influence of in general 125–127 on Gore 109 on Johnson 104, 112, 126 on Keble 99 on Maurice 125 on Newman 119, 125–126 on Wesley 99, 112, 126, 145 influences on 99 life of career 101 education 100–101 family 100 Jacobite leanings 101, 104 King’s Cliffe community 100, 101–102 as non-juror 104–107 turn to mysticism 99, 124–125, 148, 154 works. See works (below) views of on actions 121–122 on affections 111 on asceticism 113–115, 118, 121, 125 on atonement 123 on baptism 119, 373 on celibacy 118–119 on charity 101, 113, 116 on Christian life 111–112, 115–116 on ecclesial ethic 119–120 on Eucharist 120 on humility 116, 119, 123, 136 on imagination 111, 120–121 on innate ideas/moral sense 136 on mysticism 124–125 on natural law 122 on passions 123 on practice of worship 119–120 on reason 110–111, 120–122 on salvation 123–124 on sanctification 122–125 on self-deception 123 on spiritual regeneration 124–125 on Trinity 107, 123 on two orders of Christians 372 on virginity 117–119 on vocation 112–113, 114–115, 116, 119

436 Law, William (cont.) views on 115, 126 works of audience of 113 A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection 117 A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. See A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life Some Remarks upon a late Book, entitled, The Fable of the Bees 110–111 Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor 108–109 mention of 23, 105, 129 Law of Conscience 179, 181, 216, 221 law of faith 17 law of nature. See natural law law of nature (lex naturalis) 33–34, 70 Lawes (Hooker) 124 Lay Sermons (Coleridge) 254 laypeople, commissioning of 147 “Lead, kindly light” (Newman) 198 Lectures on Justification (Newman) 226 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (Newman) 226 legalism 150 Lehmann, Paul 354–355 Leighton, Robert 126, 180 “Letter to Middleton” (Wesley) 157 liberalism, Newman on 190, 193n4, 199, 271 Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology 227 Liddon, Henry 238, 273 Life (Kemp) 347 Life and Liberty (church reform movement) 309 “The Life of Christ” (Cudworth) 147 Life of Richard Savage (Johnson) 96 Lifford, Viscount 202–203, 209 The Light of Nature Pursued (Tucker) 135 Lincoln College (Oxford) 145, 146 Lincoln’s Inn (London) 246, 247 liturgical practices 4–5, 106–107 Liturgy and Society (Hebert) 366 Lloyd, William 104 Lloyd George, David 310 Loades, Ann 176 Locke, John in general 190 career of 35–36

Index criticism on of Butler 79–83 of Shaftesbury 56 of Stillingfleet 39, 40, 52, 53–54 influence of on Anglican theologians 130–131 on Butler 40, 81 on Gay 132–135 on Law, Edmund 135–136 on Newman 40 on Paley 40, 138–139, 140–141 on Tucker 135 on Watson 137 influences on 37, 39 relationships/friendships of 52 religious faith 16, 17, 18, 37 views of on Christ 37, 40, 79 on conscience 137 on consciousness 82 on divine will 27 on duty 37 on educational principles 144 on epistemology 38, 52, 53, 56, 130 on God’s will 37–38 on governments 39 on human understanding 38–39 on innate ideas 49 on morality 36–38 on natural law 36 on obligations 38 on personal identity 54, 82 on reflection 39 on revelation 37–38 on toleration 38 on Trinity 40 works of Epistola de tolerantia 38 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 36, 38–39, 49, 53, 57, 65, 81, 82 Essays on the Law of Nature 36 The Reasonableness of Christianity 40, 79, 137 Two Treatises on Government 37, 39 Vindications 40 mention of 9, 10, 22, 23, 189 Logicae Artis Compendium (Sanderson) 65–66 Long, Stephen 147, 150, 158

Index love in general Holland on 293 Moberly on 298, 302 Newman on 204 of Christ, Newman on 232 of God in Anglican virtue ethics tradition 183 Butler on 78, 97 Maurice on 258 Temple on 319, 323, 328, 331 Traherne on 44–45 Wesley on 149, 150 of neighbour in general 37 Butler on 88 Wesley on 149, 150 of self. See self-love Lovin, Robin 158 loyalty, Kirk on 353–354, 367 Lucas, J. R. 87, 93 Lucci, Diego 17, 37 Lustila, Getty 135 Luther, Martin 145, 262, 330 Lux Mundi (ed. Gore) 269–271, 292 Lux Mundi school in general 269–270, 303–305 and Hegelianism 283 influences on 270–272 theologians of 272–275 See also Gore, Charles; Holland, Henry Scott; Moberly, R. C. views on 283 See also Idealism MacIntyre, Alasdair 1–3 MacKinnon, Donald Anglo-Catholic faith of 282–283 comparisons with 219 criticism of 283 influences on 196, 318 Malvern conference (1941) 311 views of on Butler 80–81, 85, 86, 94 on Coleridge 176–177 on Green 283–284 on Holland 295 on Idealism 282–285 on Lux Mundi school 283 on Newman 211, 213, 219, 224 on Newman and Butler 220, 229

437 Maddox, Isaac 67 Magdalen College (Oxford) 12 magisterium 25, 230, 356 Malcolm, Noel 34 Malvern conference (1941) 339 Mandeville, Bernard 58, 109–111 Mansel, Henry 247 manualists 345, 355, 356 Marcus Aurelius 56 Mariner (Guite) 162–163 marriage, Taylor on 117 Marriage and Divorce (Kirk) 358 Marsden, John 339, 340 Mary, Virgin 120 Mary ii, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland 102–103 materialism 30, 32n24, 49, 56, 333 Maurice, Frederick Denison in general 238–242 comparisons with 246 criticism of 260–262 criticism on 255, 264–266, 267 influence of on Anglican moral theology 266–268 on Gore 286–287 on Temple 242, 340 influences on of Butler 245, 258–259 of Coleridge 161–162, 239, 243–244, 245, 250–256, 258, 259, 260, 261 of Erskine 250 of Hare 250 of Hume 254–255 of Law, William 125 of Platonism 252–253 of Taylor 251–252 of Wesley 258–259 life of Anglican baptism of 244 career 244, 246–248, 249–250 death 250 dissenting background 242–243 education 243–244 family 242–243, 246 ordination 244 relationships/friendships 239, 246 social commitment 238, 246 working men’s college 246, 249, 262 works. See works (below)

438 Maurice, Frederick Denison (cont.) views of on Aids to Reflection (Coleridge) 251–252 on baptism 256, 258 on Christian ethics 262–264 on Christ’s kingdom 256, 258 on the church 255–256 on conscience 258–262 on empiricism 254–255 equated with Anglicanism 264–265 on Eucharist 258, 267 on God’s love 258 on human agency 257 on human nature 258–260 inconsistencies in 255, 265–266 on Law, William 126 on obligations 261 on probability 260 on prudence 254 on reason 251–252 on Scripture 262 on self-consciousness 259–260 on social relationships 248, 261 on spiritual regeneration 258–259 theological anthropology in 256–258 on Trinity 257 on universal society 255–256, 267 views on 239–342 works of The Conscience 259, 260 The Epistles of St. John 262–264, 267 Eustace Conway 245 The Kingdom of Christ 246, 251–252 Modern Philosophy 253, 254, 258, 260, 266 Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy 250 Sequel to the Inquiry, What Is Revelation? 247 Social Morality 255 Social Morality (lectures) 250 Subscription No Bondage 245 Theological Essays 246, 260, 266 What Is Revelation? 247 mention of 196, 328

Index Maxims of the Spirit (Fenelon) 154 McGilchrist, Iain 341 McNaughton, David 87, 88, 89, 91 membership, Temple on 328 Men without Work (report) 310 Mens Creatrix (The Creative Mind; Temple) 315, 317, 318, 323–326 Merrigan, Terence 201 Methodism in general 11, 152, 155 and Anglicanism 158–159 birth of 145 and Church of England 144, 146–147 growth of 146 Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine 244 Milbank, Alison 242, 267 Milbank, John 176–177, 185–186 Mill, John Stuart 140, 239, 248, 271 Milner, Joseph 203, 225 Mind (philosophical journal) 325 “The Mind of the Church” (Holland) 295 Ministerial Priesthood (Moberly) 275 missionary work, of Wesley 145 Mitchell, Basil 95 Moberly, R. C. influences on 296, 301 life of 274–275 views of on actions 297 on beauty 297, 301–303 on free will 300 on holiness 297 on Holy Spirit 298 on love 298, 302 pastoralism in 300 on penitence 301 on personality 303 on reality 299–301 on reason 298 on self-realization 296–299 views on 299–301 works of in general 297–298 Atonement and Personality 275, 297, 298, 299–301 “Beauty and the Cross” (address) 301–302

Index Moberly, R. C. (cont.) “Beauty of Character as a Real Phenomenon” (address)  301–302 “The Doctrine of the Holy Ghost” (sermon) 300 “The Educating of Sorrow” (address) 301 Ministerial Priesthood 275 “The Necessity of Being Beautiful” (address) 301–302 “The Pastoral Office of the Bishop” (Moberly) 298, 300 “The Privilege of Sorrow” (address) 301 Problems and Principles 297–298 “The Refining of Sorrow” (address) 301 “A Religious View of Human Personality” (sermon) 300, 303 review of 299–301 Sorrow, Sin and Beauty 297–298, 300, 301–302 “Unconscious Training in Beauty” (address) 301–302 mention of 269 Modern Philosophy (Maurice) 253, 254, 258, 260, 266 monism, of Idealism 284–285 Moore, Aubrey 269 Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (Maurice) 250 moral attitudes. See sentimentalism moral character of Christ 136, 286–289, 323 Holland on 294–295 Newman on 202, 213–215, 219 moral evil. See sin/original sin moral guidance Caroline divines on 355 See also casuistry moral judgements Kirk on 354, 369 Wesley on 156–157 moral perception 217–218 moral realism 111 moral rightness (honestas) 75

439 moral sense school in general 55, 59–60 Butler on 73–74, 86, 374 Coleridge on 172 Law, William on 136 Wesley on 148–149, 157 mention of 189 See also Hutcheson, Francis; Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of moral theology Anglican. See Anglican moral theology Catholic 334, 338 “Moral Theology” (Kirk) 347 morality Bradley on 278–279 Cambridge Platonists on 50 Coleridge on 170 Cudworth on 48 and experience of life 134 Gore on 287–291 Hobbes on 70 and the Holy Spirit 50, 55 Locke on 36–38 Pufendorf on 65 Shaftesbury on 57, 59–60 Temple on 331–332 Tuckney on 45 Moravian Church 145–146, 158 Morgan, Stephen 194 Morris, Jeremy on Anglicanism 4 on Erskine 257 on Maurice 240–241, 244, 245, 253, 254, 255, 262 on Newman 210 on Newman and Maurice 265 on Sykes 265 on Wand 264–265 Mortimer, Robert 368, 375 Mortimer, Sarah 16–17 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von 50 Mothers’ Union 359 motives/maxims 179 Murray, John 173, 219 mystical prayer 154 mysticism 99, 124–125, 148, 154 See also pietism

440 natura naturata 177 natural law Butler on 85 vs. intrinsic morality 32–33 Kirk on 361–362 Law, William on 122 Locke on 36 Newman on 221 Temple on 337 See also law of nature natural religion 200–201, 205–206 naturalism 29, 30–31 nature 175, 177 Nature, Man and God (Temple) 310, 317, 329–332, 340 “The Nature of Enthusiasm” (Wesley) 155 The Nature of Personality (Temple) 319–323 The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ (Hoadly) 108 “The Necessity of Being Beautiful” (Moberly) 301–302 neighbour, love of 37, 88, 149, 150 neo-Heglianism 283 Neoplatonism and Coleridge 163–165, 174–176 and Maurice 252–253 as sounding board 303 See also Plato/Platonism Neo-Thomism 33, 344–345 See also Thomism Newman, John Henry in general 193–194, 234–237 comparisons with 207–208, 219 criticism of on Anglican divines 227 on Calvinism 214 Calvinism 222 on evangelicalism 198, 202–204, 209, 212 on Hume 216 on the Oriel Noetics 198 on Paley 211, 218 on Taylor 227 criticism on 202 influence of 196, 235, 286, 354 influences on of Butler 196, 201, 228–232 of Caroline divines 225–228, 235 of Coleridge 161–162, 177, 184, 196, 232–234

Index of evangelical theologians 203 of Froude, Richard 202 of Keble 202 of Law, William 119, 125–126 of Locke 40 of the Oriel Noetics 198 of Sumner 142 of Taylor 228 life of and Anglicanism 194–197 and Calvinism 197, 200, 222 career Anglican priest 194–195 Anglican theologian 195–196 beautification/ canonization 199–200 cardinal 199 Catholic theologian 199 and Church of England 195 and Oxford Movement 198–199 sermons. See Parochial Sermons; University Sermons works. See works (below) and Catholicism 199, 227 and Church of England 199, 227 conversions. See conversions education 197–198 and evangelicalism 200–204 family 197 relationships/friendships 296 travels 198 scholarship on 193 views of on actions 216 on affections 235 on asceticism 236 on benevolence 220 Catholic orthodoxy 225–226 on charity 205 on conscience 200–201, 207–208, 212–213, 215–218, 235–237, 354 on conversion 200, 202 on danger of riches 195–196 on duty 200, 218 on epistemology 199, 220 on Eucharist 210 on fatalism 222 on feelings 212, 217 on free will 223 on holiness 211–212, 236

441

Index Newman, John Henry (cont.) on humility 204–206 on justice 205, 219–220 on King Saul 222–223 on liberalism 190, 193n4, 199, 271 on love 204 on love of Christ 232 on moral character 213–215, 219 on moral perception 217–218 on natural law 221 on natural religion 200–201, 205–206 on obedience 204, 208–209 on personal influence 219 on personal responsibility 221–224 on probability 216, 230 on punishment 230–231 on reason 212–213, 218 on redemption 224 on religious faith 211, 223–224 on sanctification 210, 236 on secular thought 190 on self-discipline 213–214, 235 on Serious Call 125–126 on virtues 213, 228, 235 on volitions 216 on wilfulness 222–223 views on 211, 213, 219 works of Apologia pro Vita Sua 125, 227, 230 The Arians of the Fourth Century 198, 225 Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered 227 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine 226–227 “Lead, kindly light” (poem; hymn) 198 Lectures on Justification 226 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church 226 Parochial Sermons. See Parochial Sermons “The Parting of Friends”(sermon) 194 Sermons 1824–1843 207 Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day 206 Tracts for the Times 226 University Sermons. See University Sermons mention of 98

Newton, Isaac 26, 28 Niebuhr, H. Richard 240, 253 Niebuhr, Reinhold 308, 334 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3 Nockles, Peter 193, 194, 231 nóēsis (human experience) 174 nominalism 53, 62 Nonconformism 51–52 non-jurors in general 102–104 characteristic stance of 107–108 Eucharist in liturgy of 106–107 Law as 104–106 oaths, taking of 106 obedience Keble and Froude on 202 Newman on 204, 208–209 and personal responsibility 223 obligations Butler on 86 Gay on 134 Locke on 38 Maurice on 261 Shaftesbury on 57 O’Donovan, Oliver 343, 366–367 Of Freewill (Cudworth) 48 Of Human Nature (Hobbes) 71 Of Liberty and Necessity (Hobbes) 31 ‘official penitentiary advisors’ 357–358 O’Flaherty, Niall 130, 132 Olver, Matthew 361 “On Conscience” (Wesley) 148 “On Eternity” (Wesley) 147 “On Perfection” (Wesley) 150 On the Constitution of the Church and State (Coleridge) 169, 183, 255–256 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 271 The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Kant) 176 open-air revival meetings 155–156 Opus Maximum (Coleridge) 169 Oriel College (Oxford) 67, 198, 229–230, 231 Oriel Noetics 198, 229–230 original sin. See sin/original sin Origines Sacrae (Stillingfleet) 52–53 The Origins of Anglican Moral Theology (Sedgwick, P.) 1, 20, 25, 27, 41, 75, 129, 374

442 Oxford as centre of British Idealism 276 See also Oxford University; Oxford/ Tractarian Movement Oxford Movement (Church) 220 Oxford Union (debating society) 309 Oxford University debating society of 309 division between church and academic life 249–250 moral philosophy at 249 See also under specific Colleges Oxford/Tractarian Movement in general 107 after Newman’s departure 238 and Anglican tradition 226 and Church of England 225 and conversions to Catholicism 269 founding of 198–199 influences on 117 social commitment of 238 and virtue vs. benevolence 220 mention of 99 See also Anglo-Catholicism Padilla, Carlos 97 Padley, Willliam 102 pain, in utilitarianism 132 Paine, Thomas 137, 229 Paley, William career of 138 criticism of 138–139, 140, 141 criticism on of Bentham 140 of Coleridge 170–171, 174 of Gisborne 141–142 of Newman 211, 218 influences on of Bentham 140 of Locke 40, 138–139, 140–141 relationships/friendships of 138 views of on actions 140, 170 on commands 139 on creation 75 on God’s will 139 on happiness 139–140 on prudence 139, 172

Index on utilitarian ethics 130, 139–140, 157, 160, 170 on virtues 140 works of 132, 138, 218 papal infallibility 199, 230 The Parable of the Pilgrim (Patrick) 54 Parker, Kenneth 225 Parochial and Plain Sermons (Newman) in general 195, 199, 206, 207 balance in tone of sermons 210 relation with University Sermons 211 sermons in “The Danger of Accomplishments” 209 “Inward Witness to the Truth of the Gospel” 205–206 “Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ” 208, 236 “Present Blessing” 210 “Profession without Hypocrisy” 215 “Profession without Ostentation” 204 “Promising without Doing” 209 “Religious Faith Rational” 208 “Self-Contemplation” 202, 209 “The Spiritual Mind” 208–209 “The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect” 205 severity of tone of sermons in 208 themes in 209 variation in sermons in 209 “The Parting of Friends” (Newman) 194 Pascal, Blaise 189 passions Butler on 72, 213 Cambridge Platonists on 147 Hobbes on 29–30 Hume on 215–216 Law, William on 123 use of term 58 pastoral care 4–5, 12–13, 371–372, 373 “The Pastoral Office of the Bishop” (Moberly) 298, 300 pastoralism 300 Patrick, Simon 54–55 patristic theology 194, 199, 270, 286, 322–323 Pelagianism 338

443

Index penal substitution/satisfaction 17, 257 Penelhum, Terence 81, 83 penitence Kirk on 353 in Kirk’s theology 354–355 Moberly on 301 Pereiro, James 95 perfection Butler on 77, 84 Law, William on 118, 119 Wesley on 145, 146, 148, 150–151, 372 Perkins, William 25, 46, 112, 374 perplexity, issue in casuistry 351, 353 persecution, religious 24, 25 personal identity Butler on 82–83 Locke on 54, 82 See also personality personal influence, Newman on 219 personal responsibilities Kirk on 351–352 Newman on 221–224 personality Moberly on 303 Temple on 319–321, 337 See also personal identity Philosophy (journal) 332 The Philosophy of the Good Life (Gore) 290 phronesis 231 pietism 154 A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Wesley) 150 Platonic Coleridge (Vigus) 164 Plato/Platonism in general 29 and Maurice 252–253 study of 250, 318, 335, 340–341 views of 174 and Wesley 147 works of 49, 174, 253, 335 See also Neoplatonism Platten, Stephen 368 pleasure, in utilitarianism 132 Plotinus 174 Pocock, J. G. A. 15 politics, English 10–12 Politics for the People (journal) 246 Pollock, Frederick 105

Power, David 287 A Practical Catechism (Hammond) 54 A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (Law, William) 117 predestination 146, 148, 257 Preface to the Epistle to the Romans (Luther) 145 Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality (Gay) 133 Presbyterianism 64 Preston, Ronald 368 prevenient grace 149–150 Prickett, Stephen 161 Priestley, Joseph 243 Prieur, Michael 362 Principia Mathematica (Whitehead & Russell) 329 The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Paley) 138 Principles of Moral Philosophy (Gisborne) 141 Pringle-Pattison, Andrew 276 “The Privilege of Sorrow” (Moberly) 301 probability 81, 216, 230, 260 Problems and Principles (Moberly) 297–298 Process and Reality (Whitehead) 329 Prolegomena to Ethics (Green) 286 proportion/harmony 75–76, 84 Protestant churches 24 Providence 12, 257 prudence 33, 139 Hobbes on 33 Kirk on 352 Paley on 139, 172 White on 352 Pufendorf, Samuel 65 punishment 17, 27, 57, 61, 81, 85, 221, 230–231, 246, 257, 261 Puritanism 10, 43, 47, 69 purpose, and personality 321–322 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 202, 238, 272, 286 Queen’s College (London) 246 Queen’s College (Oxford) 309, 318 racism 239 Rack, Henry 145, 146, 154

444 Ramsey, Michael criticism on 283 friendship with Hebert 366 on Holland 274 on Maurice 267 on Temple 314, 323–324, 328 works of 240, 365 mention of 342 Ranson, Guy 255 Rashdall, Hastings 340 rationalism 34, 333–334 rationality 121–122, 261 reality Moberly on 299–301 Temple on 320, 323, 327, 330–331 Reardon, Bernard 243, 292 The Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke) 40, 79, 137 reason/reasoning in general 26–29 and affections 80 and Hobbes philosophy 29 Holland on 292–293 implicit vs. explicit 218 Law, William on 110–111, 120–122 Maurice on 251–252 Moberly on 298 Neotics on 198 Newman on 212–213, 218 Wesley on 149 See also conscience; knowledge The Reconstruction of Belief (Gore) 290 redemption Butler on 266 Coleridge on 183–184 Newman on 224 Temple on 335–336 “The Refining of Sorrow” (Moberly) 301 reflection Locke on 39 use of term 182 See also conscience; self-reflection Reflection on the Life and Character of Christ (Law, Edmund) 136 Reform Act (1832) 198, 244 Reformed Calvinism 148 religion Caird on 315 and culture 171, 186–187

Index during Enlightenment and Christian orthodoxy 22–24 marginalization of 10–11 place in society 12–17 and reason 26–29 re-evaluation of 17–20 and revelation and Scripture 24–26 state interference with 198–199 wars of 22–23 See also religious faith religious devotion 77–78 religious experience 318–319 religious faith 297 and conscience 215–218 Holland on 292–294, 295, 296 justification by 148, 152–153 Kirk on 346 Locke on 16, 17, 18, 37 and natural religion 200–201, 205–206 Newman on 211, 223–224 non-verbal expressions of 155–156 struggles with 263–264 Temple on 326–327, 340 See also faith; religion religious institutions 61 religious pluralism 24 “A Religious View of Human Personality” (Moberly) 300, 303 Renaissance 18–19 Repton School 309 resentment, Butler on 78, 81, 205 resurrection 54, 283 “Revealed Religion” (Coleridge) 175 revelation in Anglicanism 25 Hooker on 25 Locke on 37–38 Taylor on 25 Temple on 319, 332, 335 revival meetings, open-air 155–156 Rhetorics of Value (Hill) 96, 162–163, 229 Rickless, Samuel 49 rigorism 364 Rivers, Isabel 62, 101, 124, 137, 148, 156 Roberts, T. A. 67, 76, 78, 87 Robertson, John 24 Rogerson, J. W. 262 Rolls Sermons (Butler). See Fifteen Sermons Roman Catholic moral theology 338, 344

Index Roman Catholicism casuistry in 356 conversions to 199, 227, 269 and ecumenism 339 Gore on 289 liberal 240 magisterium’s authority in 25, 230, 356 moral theology in 338, 344 ‘official penitentiary advisors’ in 357–358 orthodoxy in 225–226 and religious diversity 24 and religious error 24–25 See also manualists Roosevelt, Franklin D. 312 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 136, 149 Rowell, Geoffrey 207 Rule, Philip C. 185 rule-utilitarianism 140 Russell, Bertrand 329 Ryder, Henry 244 sacrifice, Temple on 328 salvation 123–124 Sancroft, William 100–101, 103–104 Sancta Sophia (Baker) 54 sanctification Gore on 372–373 Law, William on 122–125 Newman on 210, 236 Wesley on 147–151, 158 Sanders, C. R. 244 Sanderson, Robert career of 249 death of 41 on Engagement Oath 51–52 and English Civil War 19, 73 influence of 374, 375 views of 25, 35, 112 works of 65–66 Saul, King of Israel 222–223 Sayers, Dorothy L. 311 scepticism 131, 142, 157, 169, 187, 254 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 50, 161, 176, 177, 179, 180 Schneewind, J. B. 248, 266 scholasticism 30, 35, 43, 65, 170 Scott, Thomas 141, 203 Scripture and Anglican moral theology 141 Cambridge Platonists on 50

445 in early Enlightenment 25–26, 27 Hooker on 26 Maurice on 262 See also Biblical references Secker, Thomas 66–67 Second Vatican Council 339, 345 Second World War 311, 340 secular thought, Newman on 190 Sedgwick, Timothy on Anglican virtue ethics tradition 10, 128, 183 on Butler 96 influences on 366 on Kirk 368–369, 373 on Kirk and Hooker 370 on Maurice 241–242, 256, 267–268 on Taylor 374 on Traherne 44–45 self-awareness. See self-consciousness self-consciousness Butler on 82–83 Coleridge on 178–179, 181–182 and conscience 259 Green on 277 Locke on 82 Maurice on 259–260 self-deceit/self-deception 92–94, 123, 372 self-denial. See asceticism self-discipline 213–214, 235, 364, 368 selfhood Bradley on 279–282 Caird on 314–315 as concrete universal 279–280, 281 self-justification 214, 222 self-knowledge 80, 224, 280 self-love and benevolence 87–88 Butler on 71, 76, 86, 88–89, 260 and happiness 89 as superior principles 88–89 self-realization Bradley on 279–281 Cudworth on 49 Green on 276–278 in Idealism 271, 276–282, 296–299 Moberly on 296–299 Temple on 322 self-reflection 59, 73 See also reflection self-sacrifice 322, 366

446 Sell, Alan 14 sensations 91 sense perception 79–80 sensibility, Coleridge on 172 sentimentalism 74–77 Sequel to the Inquiry, What Is Revelation? (Maurice) 247 A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (Law, William) in general 99, 104, 145 asceticism in 113–115 celibacy and virginity in 117–119 ecclesial ethic in 119–120 literary style of 115–116 reason in 120–122 sanctification in 122–125 views on of Newman 125–126 of Thornton 103 of Wesley 116 of Wormersley 115 vocation in 111–113 Sermon on the Mount 150, 365 See also Beatitudes The Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Exposition (Gore) 289 “sermon to Parliament” (Cudworth) 48 Sermons 1824–1843 (Newman) 207 Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (Newman) 206–207 service, Temple on 328 Shaffer, Elinor 180 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of in general 23, 190 criticism of 56, 61 criticism on 74–79, 90–91 influences on of Cambridge Platonists 60 of Marcus Aurelius 56 of Taylor 56, 62 of Tillotson 52 of Whichcote 56, 61 moral sense school of 55, 59–60 religious beliefs of 61 views of on actions 76 on affections 58–60, 75–76

Index on beauty 56–57, 60 on Christianity 62 on conscience 76 on egoism 57 on free will 57–58 on God’s goodness 27 on moral sense 59–60 on morality 57, 59–60 on obligations 57 on sin 61–62 on virtues 75–76 works of Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times 55–56, 60, 75–76, 90 Inquiry Concerning Virtue 75 Whichcote’s sermons 58 mention of 9, 10, 22, 189 Shaw, George Bernard 307 Shaw, Jane 365 Sherlock, William 104 Sidgwick, Henry 249 Sidney Sussex College (Cambridge) 166 Simeon, Charles 203 sin/original sin Coleridge on 173–174 Shaftesbury on 61–62 Taylor on 172–173 Temple on 333, 338 Whichcote – Tuckney debates on 45 See also divorce Skeletons for Sermons (Simeon) 203 Skinner, Quentin 31 slave trade, abolition of 144 Smith, David H. 351, 363, 367 social commitment 238, 246 social criticism 195–196 The Social Doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount (Gore) 289 social habits/customs 357 Social Morality (Maurice) 250, 255 social relationships Bradley on 276, 280–281, 301 Caird on 313–314 in Idealism 275–276 Maurice on 248, 261 Temple on 314, 319–321

447

Index Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 145 Socinianism 16–17, 40, 53, 173 Socrates 136 Some Principles of Moral Theology and Their Application (Kirk) 344, 346–347, 352, 367 Some Remarks upon a late Book, entitled, The Fable of the Bees (Law, William) 110–111 Sorrow, Sin and Beauty (Moberly) 297–298, 300, 301–302 soul, education of the 346 Spinoza, Baruch 14, 18, 65 spiritual regeneration Law, William on 124–125 Maurice on 258–259 “Spiritual Worship” (Wesley) 150 Spurr, John 20 Stanhope (County Durham) 68 Starkie, Andrew 104, 110, 111 Stebbing, Dr 156 Stephen, Leslie 14 Stephens, James 279 Sterling, John 244, 246 Stillingfleet, Edward in general 52–53 criticism of on Hobbes 53 on Locke 39, 40, 52, 53–54 views of 53, 54 works of 52–53 mention of 9 Stoicism 56, 65 Streeter, B. H. 340 struggles, with religious faith 263–264, 295–296 Stuart, Charles Edward (Young Pretender) 105 Stuart, James Francis Edward (Old Pretender) 104–105 Stuart-Buttle, Tim 38 A Study of Silent Minds (Kirk) 347 Suárez, Francisco 28, 75 Subscription No Bondage (Maurice) 245 suffering 257, 302 Summae Confessorum (aids for confessors) 338

Sumner, John Bird 130–131, 142, 157, 200 superior principles benevolence as 87, 88 Butler on 85–86 conscience as 88–89, 90–91 self-love as 88–89 supernatural, use of term 288 superstition 77 The Sword of the Spirit (Catholic movement) 339 Sykes, Stephen 240, 255, 265, 369 synderesis. See conscience Talbot, Charles 68 Talbot, Edward 67 Talbot, William 67, 68, 271 Tanner Lectures (Hill) 96, 187 Tawney, R. H. 309, 311, 328 Taylor, A. E. 314, 318, 325 Taylor, Jeremy comparisons with 112 criticism on 126, 172–173, 227, 261 influence of 374–375 on Maurice 251–252 on Newman 228 on Shaftesbury 56, 62 on Wesley 144, 145 life of 19, 35, 41, 73 views of in general 35 on Eucharist 106, 173 on holiness 252 on invincible ignorance 361 on marriage, virginity and chastity 117 on original sin 172–173 on revelation 25 works of audience of 112–113 Golden Grove 228 Holy Dying 42, 112, 144, 145, 227 Holy Living 42, 78, 112, 117, 144, 145, 227, 228 Sermons 227 Unum Necessarium 173 Via Intelligentiae 251–252 temperance 364 Temple, Frederick (father of William) 308

448 Temple, William in general 306–308 comparisons with 317 criticism of 311n16, 330 criticism on of Chadwick 341 of Kirk 333–334 of Ramsay 314, 323–324, 328 of Taylor, A. E. 314, 325–326 of Webb 333, 341 influence of 307 influences on of Anglo-Catholicism 336–337 of Bosanquet 327, 333 of Caird 308, 313–316, 321 of Coleridge 340 of Gore 340 of Kirk 340 of Maurice 242, 340 of non-Christian philosophers 329 of Whitehead 329–330 life of in general 307 career Archbishop of Canterbury 311 Archbishop of York 310 canon at Westminster Abbey 309 The Challenge editor 309 chaplain to George v 309–310 Church of South India 312 Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship 310 enormous workload 334 Labour party 309–310 ordination 309 Repton School 309 significance 340–342 death 312–313, 339, 342, 375 education 308–309 family 308 privileged background of 308, 317 relationships/friendships with Beveridge 310 with Dix 312, 340 with Kirk 312, 340 with Tawney 311, 328 social engagement 309–311, 336 and World War II 311

Index views of on Christ 323, 327–328 on conduct 324, 373 on consciousness 331 on divine goodness 334 on divine will 319 on duty 325 empiricism in 330 on epistemology 323 on freedom 328 generalizations in 341 on God 322 Hegelianism in 322 on his pre-1914 Idealism 334–335 and Idealism 317, 322, 329, 330, 332–333 on liberty, membership, service and sacrifice 328 on love of God 319, 323, 328, 331 on morality 331–332 on natural law 337 on the past 324 on personality 319–321 Platonism in 341 on purpose 321–322 on reality 320, 323, 327, 330–331 on redemption 335–336 on religious experience 318–319 on religous faith 326–327, 340 on revelation 319, 332, 335 on self-realization 322 on service 328 on sin 333, 338 on social relationships 314, 319–321 on Thomism 337–339 on Trinity 322–323 two periods in development of 317 on worship 365 views on 307 works of audience of 317 Christianity and Social Order 307, 311, 326–327, 328, 336 Christus Veritas 317, 326–328 Citizen and Churchman 336 The Faith and Modern Thought 317, 318–319, 322

449

Index Temple, William (cont.) Mens Creatrix 315, 317, 318, 323–326 review by Eliot 325 review by Taylor, A. E. 325–326 Nature, Man and God 310, 317, 326–328, 329–332, 340 review by Kirk 333–334 review by Webb 332–333 The Nature of Personality 319–323 reviews of 318 “Theology Today” (article) 334–335 “Thomism and Modern Needs” (article) 336–339 mention of 276 Ten Commandments 150 Tennant, R. C. on Butler 72, 152–153, 154, 229, 317 on Locke 82 Test Act (1673) 244 Tewkesbury Academy 64, 66–67 The Parish Communion (Hebert) 366 theism 56, 58, 128, 142 theological anthropology 256–258, 294 Theological Essays (Maurice) 246, 260, 266 theological virtues 44 See also charity; faith; hope; love; religious faith Theology (journal) 334–335 Theology and the Enlightenment (Avis) 23–24 “Theology Today” (Temple) 334–335 Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion 64, 128, 136, 199, 243 Thomas, Saint 337 Thomas, Stephen 193 Thomism in general 32–33 moral theory of 42, 98 rejection of 51, 129 Temple on 337–339 and Wesley 147 See also Aquinas, Thomas; neo-Thomism “Thomism and Modern Needs” (Temple) 336–339 Thornton, Martin 103, 124 Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor (Law, William) 108–109

Till, Barry 52 Tillotson, John 51–52 Tindal, Matthew 52 Toland, John 40, 53 toleration 29, 38, 137 Townsend, H. G. 73 Tractarianism. See Anglo-Catholicism; Oxford/Tractarian Movement Tracts for the Times (Newman) 226 Traherne, Thomas 42–45 A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (Cudworth) 48 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 215 A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of Men, with the Sorts and Kinds of Them, and the Right Use Thereof (Perkins) 112 Trinity College (Cambridge) 243, 329 Trinity College (Oxford) 198 Trinity Hall (Cambridge) 243 Trinity/Trinitarianism in general 12, 25–26, 267, 323 Coakley on 178 Coleridge on 168 Cudworth on 175 Law, William on 107, 123 Locke on 40 Maurice on 257 Temple on 322–323 The True Intellectual System of the Universe (Cudworth) 48, 147 The True Nature and Intent of Religion (Law, Edmund) 136 truth, seeking of 214 Tuck, Richard 29 Tucker, Abraham 132, 135 Tuckney, Anthony 41, 45 Turner, Frank 193n4 Two Treatises on Government (Locke) 37, 39 Tyndale, William 30, 112 “Unconscious Training in Beauty” (Moberly) 301–302 Unitarianism 65, 160, 167–168, 242–243 universal atonement 257 Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference 311 universal society 255–256, 267

450 universities 13–14 see also under specific universities and Colleges University of St Andrews 290 University Sermons (Newman) in general 195, 196, 199 as alternative to Hume and Paley 211 Church on 220–221 compared to Fifteen Sermons (Butler) 229 language use in 229 relation with Parochial Sermons 211 sermons in “Christian Reverence” 212 “Faith and Reason Contrasted as Habits of Mind” 212, 218 “Human Responsibility as Independent of Circumstances” 214, 221 “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively” 215 “On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance” 219 “Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition” 211, 232 “The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason” 223 “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth” 218–219, 229 “The Philosophical Temper First Enjoined by the Gospel” 214 “The Religious Use of Excited Feelings” 212 “The Usurpations of Reason” 215–218 “Wilfulness, the Sin of Saul” 222–223 themes in 211 mention of 40, 206 Unum Necessarium (Taylor) 173 utilitarianism Bentham on 142 criticism on 171 demise of 141–143 development of 130–131 of Gay 132–135 hedonistic 279 of Paley 130, 139–140, 157, 160, 170 as threat to virtue ethics 187 Whewell on 248

Index Vatican Council ii 339, 345 Veitch, Emma 135 Via Intelligentiae (Taylor) 251–252 vice, Mandeville on 109–110 Vigus, James 164 Vindication of Christ’s Divinity (Waterland) 131 A Vindication of True Liberty from Antecedent and Extrinsical Necessity (Bramhall) 31 Vindications (Locke) 40 virginity 117–119 virtue ethics tradition. See Anglican virtue ethics tradition virtues and actions 133 and benevolence 219–220 Butler on 75–76, 129 and esteem 133 Gay on 133–134 Grote on 248 Kirk on 352, 365 and knowledge 254 Mandeville on 109–110 Newman on 213, 228, 235 Paley on 140 Shaftesbury on 75–76 Traherne on 44 Tucker on 135 See also cardinal virtues; theological virtues The Vision of God (Kirk) 347, 348, 349, 362–366, 368 vocation 112–113, 114–115, 116, 119 Voitle, Robert B. 58–59 volitions 216, 279 Voltaire 149 voluntarism 27, 38, 47, 134, 181, 367n101 Wand, J. W. C. 264–265 Warburton, William 131 wars of religion 22–23 Waterland, Daniel 131 Waterman, A. M. C. 137, 157 Watson, Richard 130, 137–138, 142 Webb, C. C. J. 332–333, 341 Wedgwood family 167 Wells, Sam 120 Wesley, Charles (brother of John) 144, 145, 147

Index Wesley, John criticism of 148–149, 150 influence of 258–259 influences on of Cambridge Platonists 147 of Cudworth 147 of Guyon 154 of Law, William 99, 112, 126, 145 of Moravian Church 145–146 of Taylor 144, 145 life of breaking of canon law 152–153 career 145–146 context of his ministry 143–144 conversion experience of 145 death 147 education 144–145 family 144 founding of the ‘Holy Club’ 145 and gift of the Spirit 146 Jacobite leanings 148 political conservatism of 144 relationships/friendships 69, 146, 152–153 search for holiness 146–147 works. See works (below) views of on benevolence 149 on casuistry 28 on charity 150 on conscience 148–149 on conversions 153 on emotions 156–157 on enthusiasm 153–156 on fasting 150 on happiness 148–149, 150–151 on holiness 147–149, 150–151 on Holy Communion 151 on justification by faith 148, 152–153 on love of God and neighbour 149, 150 on moral judgements 156–157 on moral sense school 148–149, 157 on perfection 145, 146, 148, 150–151, 372 on predestination 148 on prevenient grace 149–150 on reason 149 on revivalist meetings 155–156 on sanctification 147–151, 158 on Serious Call 116

451 works of Christian Library 147 “Christian Perfection” (sermon) 150 “On Conscience” (sermon) 148 “On Eternity” (sermon) 147 “The Important Question” (sermon) 150 Journal 153, 154, 155, 156 “Letter to Middleton” 157 “The Nature of Enthusiasm” (sermon) 155 “On Perfection” (sermon) 150 A Plain Account of Christian Perfection 150 “Spiritual Worship” (sermon) 150 “The Witness of the Spirit” (sermon) 156 mention of 23, 128 Wesley, Samuel (father of John) 144 Westberg, Daniel 367–368 Westcott, Brook Foss 272, 287 Westminster Abbey 309 Westminster Review (journal) 142 What Is Revelation? (Maurice) 247 Whewell, William 247, 248, 261 Whichcote, Benjamin 9, 41, 45, 46, 50, 56, 61 White, Victor, O.P. 338–339 Whitefield, George 146, 150, 152 Whitehead, Alfred North 308, 314, 329–330, 341 wilfulness 222–223 Wilkinson, Alan 270 will Blondel on 292 Christianity as 291 Coleridge on 177–179, 181 freedom of Bramhall on 32 Calvin on 47 Cudworth on 49 Hobbes on 47 Kant on 177–179, 279, 280 Moberly on 300 Newman on 223 Shaftesbury on 57–58 of God. See divine will Holland on 291–294, 295, 296 as spiritual power 177–178, 181 William iii, King of England, Scotland and Ireland 102–103

452 Williams, Rowan 342 “The Witness of the Spirit” (Wesley) 156 Wolf, William J. 253 Wollaston, William 81 Woodhead, Linda 281 Wordsworth, Dorothy 167 Wordsworth, William 167, 168–169 Workers’ Educational Association 309 working men’s college 246, 249, 262 World Council of Churches 312 World War i 344, 345–346 World War ii 311, 340

Index Wormersley, David P. 115 worship Hebert on 366 Kirk on 364–365, 370, 373 Temple on 365 Worthen, Jeremy 85, 90, 93–94 Yates, Paula 13 Young, B. W. 136 Young, Brian 15–16, 114 Zuijdwegt, Geerjan 201