ONE of the gifts of the Oxford Movement to Anglicans was the
revival of religious communities. Since the Dissolution of the
Monasteries under Henry VIII, there had been only occasional
isolated instances of community life in the Church of England, the
most notable being that of the Little Gidding Community under
Nicholas Ferrar, in the 17th century. It was not just that monastic
communities had disappeared. They were also suspect - particularly
convents - as places in which, anti-Roman Catholic Protestant
polemic alleged, nefarious practices went on, aided and abetted by
sacerdotal tyranny.
Narratives such as The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
(1836) reinforced these prejudices, and made titillating reading
for upright Victorians. Others, however, began to see religious
communities as valuable parts of pastoral and social outreach,
particularly among women, besides providing oppor-tunities for
women's ministry.
Church of England bishops shared much of the contemporary
prejudice, and when the High Church Bishop of Exeter Henry
Philpotts challenged Priscilla Sellon that in her Plymouth
community she was running a nunnery, and was imitating convents in
Roman Catholic countries, she was outraged: "No, no, my Lord. Oh
dear, no!"
Vows, in particular, were suspect. They were perceived as
leading to the tyranny of Mothers Superior or of priestly Wardens,
and of subverting authority, whether of bishops or of Victorian
fathers; and yet vows are what the total commitment of love
demands.
Samuel Wilberforce, one of the bishops who most supported
communities, could nevertheless write in 1854 of his concern about
sisterhoods' developing an unhealthy "self-consciousness and morbid
religious affections" in their exaltation of the contemplative
life, and their encouragement of "perpetual confession" -
altogether, he said, "an un-English tone".
Yet the pastoral work of Sisters in parishes, and such things as
the presence of Anglican Sisters among those who accompanied
Florence Nightingale to nurse injured soldiers at Scutari during
the Crimean War, contributed to a growing acceptance of religious
communities.
OF THE Oxford Movement leaders, it was Edward Bouverie Pusey
(1800-82) who contributed most to the revival of the religious
life. Indeed, the beginning of the Anglican revival of the
religious life for women can be dated to Trinity Sunday, 1841, when
Marian Rebecca Hughes made her three vows of religion before
Pusey.
And it was Pusey who had a significant influence on Richard Meux
Benson, the founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist
(SSJE), the first Anglican religious community for men, though it
had precursors in associations of clergy living under a common
devotional rule, of which the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC),
founded in 1855, still has a significant witness today.
Wednesday this week was the centenary of Benson's death, and his
remarkable ministry, teaching, and witness has a continuing
importance for Anglicans. Born in 1824 into a wealthy Evangelical
family - his mother belonged to the Meux family of brewers (hence
Benson's second name) - he was educated at home, and by tutors, and
then, unusually, spent six months in Rome, where he met many
ecclesiastics. This included making contact with the Jesuits, and
visiting the Benedictines of Monte Cassino.
Benson went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1844, the year
before John Henry Newman was received into the Roman Catholic
Church. Here he encountered Pusey, who was a Canon of Christ Church
and Regius Professor of Hebrew. From Pusey, he gained a proficiency
in Hebrew; a love of both scripture and the Church Fathers; a
powerful sense of the reality of God's grace, in which lex
credendi and lex orandi - belief and prayer -
belonged inseparably together; and, above all, what Pusey called
"the Great Mystery" of the transfiguring, indwelling life of
Christ, which changes us by the Spirit from glory to glory, that we
may at the last be partakers of the Divine nature.
As Donald Allchin once put it, what Benson gained from Pusey was
"the passion for holiness, for the experience of the knowledge and
the love of God".
ORDAINED in 1848, Benson served a brief curacy at Surbiton, and
then returned to Oxford as Vicar of Cowley, then a small village
outside the city, where he had time for study, reading, and prayer,
as well as the pastoral duties of a parish priest.
During this time, he forged links with those concerned with the
beginnings of parochial missions, and with the inauguration of
retreats in the Church of England. A strong call to missionary work
in India also began to develop, and, when his mother died in 1859,
he would have gone to start a missionary college there, had not
Bishop Wilberforce, conscious of the new housing being built that
would join Oxford with Cowley, persuaded him that it was his duty
to stay.
On the feast of St John the Evangelist, 1866, with two others -
an American, Charles Grafton, later to be Bishop of Fond du Lac, in
Wisconsin, and Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill, formerly a master at
Eton, and subsequently to fulfil Benson's dream as a missionary in
India - the Society of St John the Evangelist came into being.
It was to be a company of mission priests, and the dedication to
St John, the beloved disciple, was no accident. As we see from
Benson's massive devotional commentary on the Passion narrative,
The Final Passover, the divine life promised in the great
high-priestly prayer of John 17 was at the centre of the life of
the community: "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
The life of what was to become known as the Cowley Fathers was
enabled by the full round of monastic worship, a daily celebration
of the eucharist, a seven-fold office, and long times of private
prayer. Benson's discipline led some to describe him as made of
catgut and iron. And all of this went hand in hand with a deep
commitment to his growing parish.
AMONG others who came to join him were another American, Oliver
Prescott, George Congreve, and Bernard Maturin. Maturin wrote of
Benson as "thin, wiry, and ascetic, though full of energy"; "the
modulations of his voice were like music, and his language and
dic-tion were perfect . . . heightened by the curious sense of
detach- ment which always impressed his hearers."
It was what led an elderly woman who, on being asked whether she
understood Benson's sermons, to reply: "That gentleman just opens
heaven to me, and I can look right in." He had a strong sense of
spiritual warfare, and the reality of evil. It was not for nothing
that he called his commentary on the Psalms The War-Songs of
the Prince of Peace.
Benson's theology was profoundly Trinitarian. He told Fr O'Neill
that "the practical neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity has been
the great cause of the decay of Christendom," and the theology of
the Trinity, like all truths of divine revelation, was not "ab-
stract considerations, but active energies with which we must co-
operate".
Benson had no use for abstract or intellectualised theology. For
him, as Charles Gore noted, Christianity was a life that embodied a
doctrine. The created universe testified to the essentially
self-giving character of God, who could not but "burst the bonds of
his own existence", as Benson powerfully put it.
Like another Anglican student of St John, Brooke Foss Westcott,
Benson saw the incarnation predicated in creation: "It is the
eternally predestined glory of the Incarnation which (so to speak)
saves the act of Creation from being unworthy of God."
The outreaching of God's love in creation, he believed, is
fulfilled in the incarnation, and ultimately in humanity made in
the image of God's being fitted by grace to share in the divine
nature, because it is the divine love that is the source of
creation: the costly self-giving and self-emptying is the reality
of God which we encounter.
It is equally that sacrificial love that is known in the cross,
and in the salvation that changes us in the discipline of prayer
and sacrament to share in the glory of the ascended Christ. Christ
is taken up into glory, and, "like an elec- tric flash, the glory
of the Spirit shines out in the fires of Pente-cost."
In the most profound sense, Benson's is a charismatic theology,
drawing more from the East than from the juridical idioms of much
Western theology. As Michael Ramsey (who rated Benson alongside
Westcott as one of the great theologians of the 19th century)
noted, Benson was a mystic and a theologian at the same time. His
vision still has an importance for the Church in our own time.
Today, the SSJE house in Oxford, with its fine Bodley church, is
home to St Stephen's House theological college; and St Edward's
House, Westminster, has become part of Westminster School; but the
society continues to flourish in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the former Bishop of Gibraltar in
Europe.
www.ssje.org
NEW RESEARCH
THE Trustees of the Fellowship of St John the
Evangelist have launched an international research project into the
history of the SSJE. It is led by Dr Serenhedd James, of St
Stephen's House.
Dr James would like to hear from correspondents in
possession of historical material relating to the Cowley
Fathers,
or from anyone who wishes to share their memories of the Society's
work. Email serenhedd.james@ssho.ox.ac.uk, or write to The Cowley
Project, 5 St Andrew Street, London EC4A 3AB.
thecowleyproject.wordpress.com
facebook.com/cowleyproject