Was Newman pushed, or did he jump?
Jonathan Clark
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT IN CONTEXT: ANGLICAN HIGH CHURCHMANSHIP, 1760-1857 by Peter Benedict Nockles CUP, £40, pp. 342 Control of a national past, like general elections, is more often lost than won. Quietly, overnight, goalposts are moved. With bureaucratic smoothness or with liberal guilt, the traditional exponents of traditional positions slip away. When a new day dawns, we find the old strongholds in unfamiliar hands.
So it is with the Church of England. Yet academics, for higher reasons, display a similar realignment. Unheralded, we dis- cover that more and more English ecclesi- astical historians, those guardians of our spiritual self-images, are Roman Catholics. Of the Anglicans, Geoffrey Rowell and Edward Norman are now chiefly occupied in the cure of souls; the succession to princes of the Church like Henry and Owen Chadwick is imperiled. Catholics by conversion or inheritance now include a remarkable array of historical talent, including Eamon Duffy, Sheridan Gilley, Ian Ker, John Morrill, Aidan Nichols, Jonathan Riley-Smith and J. J. Scarisbrick. Peter Nockles now joins this distinguished band with a remarkable study which sub- stantially rewrites an important slice of Anglican history: that which explains the antecedents, and so diagnoses the essence, of the Oxford Movement.
The accepted story of what Newman and his colleagues were about was one largely devised by those Tractarians who left for Rome. In this account, the Oxford Movement was justified by the worldly torpor into which the Hanoverian church had fallen. The post-Reformation Church of England was presented as profoundly Protestant; by the 18th century it was depicted as cravenly Erastian too, living on crumbs from the tables of Whig oligarchs. Tractarians presented themselves as a tiny band of martyrs, trying to recall their church to its mediaeval origins.
It was a noble but a futile effort, implied this interpretation. Clear-sighted Tractari- ans saw the inevitable and left for Rome. Others gradually followed. The Church of England was a hopeless case. Anglo- Catholicism could never become more than a dissenting sect within a Protestant Church, doomed, like the Nonjurors, to extinction. Remarkably, this account, large- ly framed by Anglicans who converted to Rome, was in its main outlines accepted by those who did not. Evangelicals and Liber- als were happy to be told that their church was essentially Protestant and quietly relieved by the departure of Catholic Anglicans (they still are).
Nockles's scenario is markedly different. Far from the Church of England being profoundly Low Church or Protestant, he stresses the importance of its High Church element even in the darkest days of
Robert Chandler
Poem on the Underground A prayer to Hermes
Guide me safely down into Pluto's kingdom, Make the escalator run swift and smooth, and Spare me everlasting delays beside the Banks of the Northern Line. And find me, swiftly, an empty carriage, One that's just been hung with the latest poems; May I taste each word between lips and tongue as I Jolt towards Hendon.
May some bronzed and heterosexual Sappho See me mouthing sensuous rhymes — and catch my Eye — and join me whispering sonnets during Stops between stations.
May our two hearts beat to an unknown rhythm, And may gods and goddesses smile from posters, As we quietly float up the moving stairs into Brightening sunlight.
Hanoverian 'Pudding Time'. Far from the Tractarians being lonely pioneers, they took off from this powerful tradition and took it in new directions. Newman was not forced out of the Church of England by persecution: he jumped. Moreover, the Tractarians' impact was equivocal: Tractar- ianism split the Church, encouraging contempt for episcopal authority, fragmen- tation and party conflict, and left it open to a Low Church backlash. At least as many men, especially in the universities, were propelled in the other direction towards scepticism and doubt as were attracted by an overstated ritualism.
Nockles's scenario is properly and subtly qualified. All had not been well in the High Church camp before the Tractarian reaction: the late-18th-century synthesis, embracing Evangelicals and some Calvin- ists, was fractured as much by High Churchmen as by anyone in the first two decades of the 19th. Yet examined more closely, Tractarians often came from Evan- gelical backgrounds; their eventual repudi- ation of the High Church tradition is less of a surprise. 'While originally only aiming to restore to the Anglican tradition its under- stated continuity, the Tractarians eventual- ly tested that tradition to destruction.'
Nockles openly takes Anglican history out of Anglican hands. He dismisses the 'Anglo-Catholic hagiography' that has traditionally shaped our understanding of the Tractarians, and Shows how they deliberately blackened the Hanoverian Church in order to highlight their own achievements. Yet, ironically, the effect of this Roman Catholic rewriting of Anglican history is to imply that the Catholicity of the Church of England was, all along, much greater than the Tractarians allowed us to believe. The close association of Church and State in England did not necessarily break the apostolic succession or make the Church essentially Protestant. Perhaps Tractarianism did as much harm as good by encouraging Catholic-minded Anglicans to disparage their church and seek its independence from the civil power: when the balance of Church parties tilted against Anglo-Catholics in the late 20th century, the State absolved itself of its former duty to keep the show on the road.
Nockles has not written a present- minded book, but he recognises the analogy between the events that crystalised Tractarianism and the 'modern crisis in Anglicanism created by the recent decisions of the General Synod of the Church of England'. But what are the book's implications? Nocides is too courte- ous to dictate to a church not his own, but if one moral clearly emerges from this scholarly and important study it is that Anglicanism's remarkable historical resources were fully sufficient to guide its path; things could all have turned out very differently. Everyone concerned about the identity of Anglicanism should read this book.
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