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Grown from a rich seedbed of tradition
The Tractarians’ concern for truth wasborn of past thinkers, says Geoffrey Rowell
 Oxford ritual: William Holman-Hunt’s May Morning on Magdalen Tower is on the jacket of The English Chorister: A history, by Alan Mould (Hambledon Continuum, £16.99 (£15.30); 978-1-84725-058-2). It traces the involvement of boys in the daily liturgy in English churches and cathedrals for more than 1400 years. New in paperback |
| ‘Ethos’ and the Oxford Movement: At the heart of Tractarianism James Pereiro Oxford University Press £60 (978-0-19-923029-7) Church Times Bookshop £54 “WORDS ARE not feelings, nor is intellect ethos.” So Newman wrote in 1828 to Blanco White, the former Roman Catholic priest from Spain, then a member of the Oriel Common Room. But what did “ethos” mean? And why was it so central a theme of the Oxford Movement, though one strangely neglected in its historiography? In this carefully argued and meticulous book, James Pereiro, who has already provided us with a fine study of Manning (Cardinal Manning: An intellectual biography, 1998), endeavours to explore these significant questions. Recent revisionist accounts of the Oxford Movement, most notably Peter Nockles’s The Oxford Movement in Context, have rightly questioned earlier Anglo-Catholic histories that took rather too much at face value Tractarian assessments of the triumphant novelty of the Movement, leading to a Catholic Revival that owed little to the older High Churchman. Pereiro’s book seeks to delve beneath the surface into the influential, personal, and pastoral educational ideal of John Keble, and into the Tractarian concern with the nature of moral and religious truth, shaped by both Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion with its insistence on “probability as the guide of life”. This comes together with the ideal of the primitive Church of the early centuries as the true shaping context of a Catholic ethos that sought to receive and transform the Church of England. Just as personal faith grows gradually, and truths are apprehended and lived — and, as grasped, so more fully disclosed — the same is true of the development of faith in the Church. The ethos of holiness leads the believer along the path to truth. As Paul urged the Thessalonians to “hold fast to the traditions which you have learned from us by word or by letter,” and exhorted Timothy to “hold to the outline of sound teaching which you heard from me,” so the lived tradition of the Church is the fertile seedbed of a deeper apprehension of the faith. In reassessing Newman’s own theological pilgrimage, Pereiro notes that the Apologia “veils as much as it reveals”. He sets Newman’s journey, and particularly his significant theological crafting of the doctrine of development, in a new context by reference to previously unknown manuscripts of Newman’s friend and pupil Samuel Wood (the younger brother of Charles Wood, later Lord Halifax). Correspondence with Manning in 1835-36, of which Newman was also aware, adumbrates a theory of development with which Newman found himself forced to wrestle. A further paper by Wood, Revival of Primitive Doctrine, gives the earliest known historical narrative of the Oxford Movement up to 1841; and it is good to have these sources printed as substantial appendices to this book. Just as David Newsome’s Parting of Friends set the Oxford Movement in the wider personal context of the Wilberforces and Manning, so Pereiro reminds us of the importance of a significant group of London Tractarians (Wood among them). His careful analysis of the ecclesiological challenges of Anglicanism, the place of tradition, the authority of the Fathers, the moral character of religious truth, and the roots of doctrinal development contributes new insights to the historiography and theology of the Oxford Movement. They are also of perennial concern to Christian theologians, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. At a time when Anglicans are again concerned with what the Tractarians sometimes called “the terms of communion”, things here touch on the nature and character of an Anglican Covenant — how an ethos becomes embodied in theological statement. “Creeds and dogmas”, said Newman, “live only in the one idea they are intended to express,” and that is true of the covenant. No less does the Tractarian conviction that the pursuit of holiness is inseparable from affirmation of faith, and the discernment of religious truth. Newman’s wrestling with the nature and character of true doctrinal development means he could never equate it, as sadly so often seems to be the case today, with a simple endorsement of change. Whether it concerned the consecration of women to the episcopate, or a proposal that the Church should bless same-sex unions, the Oxford Movement would have asked searching questions about the Catholic authority of both. Pereiro reminds us of issues about the integrity of the faith which are still live for us today, not least in his challenge to Anglicans as to their Catholic identity. In saluting this significant theological and historical essay, I regret only that inattentive proof-reading has resulted in a number of misspelt names, and Bishop Hobart of New York’s being described as the Bishop of Hobart, Tasmania. The Rt Revd Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe. To place an order for either of these books, email details to CT Bookshop |
