A revisitation.

A REVISITATION

WHILE VISITING Oxford in the summer of 1983, and browsing in Blackwell's, I realized --a stack of new books announced-- that it was not just the eightieth anniversary of the Rhodes Scholarships but the 150th of a less worldly event: the beginning of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement.

It was embarrassing not to have remembered. But then, while some were obviously marking the anniversary in print, few seemed to be talking about it, or even aware of it. Indeed, in a Spectator sent to me by a friend a few weeks later, I learned that the formal commemorative gathering in the University Parks on the date of Keble's "Assize Sermon' (Bastille Day, oddly, from which the beginnings of the movement are conventionally dated) had been little attended or noticed.

Having made my discovery, I did wander one afternoon into St. Mary's, the university church, where the movement began, and where the young Matthew Arnold had listened, spellbound, to John Henry Newman's four o'clock sermons. Years later, Arnold recalled "the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's . . . and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words which were a religious music--subtle, sweet, mournful.' No ghosts of that era seem now to haunt St. Mary's. One heard only the late-afternoon bustle in the brass-rubbing shop. And outside on High Street, trucks and buses labor along with an endless growling of motors and grinding of gears. Only a great effort of imagination today might recapture the quiet of the still rural Oxford of 1833, and Newman's sermonic music.

It is more than a year later; but I am still thinking about this anniversary, and thinking what a shame it is that we let it slip by all but unnoticed.

Newman, by then Cardinal Newman, recalled in his later years that the Oxford Movement had intrigued even "the backwoodsmen of America.' It seems a remarkable claim. We know from Dr. Freeman's biography that Robert E. Lee once expressed curiosity about "Puseyism,' as it was usually called in America. But he was hardly a back-woodsman. The bishop of North Carolina, who was no backwoodsman either, nearly shattered the Episcopal Church in his diocese by joining Newman in the famous "defection' to Rome in 1845.

STILL, EVEN with 150 years of perspective and a rich controversial literature, it is not easy to see today how this rather parochial controversy within the English church stirred so many, far and near. Perhaps the answer, or one answer, is that in the heyday of the Victorian empire what happened there echoed to so many remote places on the earth.

In one sense, the Oxford Movement was only an episode in the larger drama of a successful political movement, Whig reformism, which gave England the great Reform Bill of 1832 and, if you believe Macaulay and others, saved the country from violent revolution. Indeed, it was a parliamentary bill, a typical piece of Whig legislation, that set the Tractarians off. The bill suppressed ten Anglican bishoprics in Ireland. Anglicanism was not the faith of the people of Ireland, only of the Ascendancy; and in London the reformers saw a clear and plausible case for making better use of church resources, while removing an irritant.

The suppression of the Anglican sees was not viewed in that constructive light by Newman, Keble, and their friends in Oxford. It happened that John Keble, a young fellow of Oriel College, of Tory and High Church connections, had been designated to preach the yearly "Assize Sermon' before the assembled judges of the land. He chose as his theme "national apostasy.' He said it was a sin against the Holy Ghost for a civil government to lay rude hands upon the church in such a manner. English governments had been doing such things since at least the time of Henry II. Yet, strangely, Keble had struck a nerve. England, he said, was a Christian society. To tamper with the church, the divinely inspired source of all secular authority, was impiety.

But why now, and not before? Well, other recent Whig reforms had opened Parliament to "dissenters,' and even nonbelievers. They could now join in decisions about the future of the church. The Erastian settlement had been tolerable so long as all voting members of Parliament were of the church. But now the destiny of the church was subject to the arbitrament of outsiders; and if even unbelievers could determine its forms and doctrines, where might "reform' stop? Was the Church of England a mere civil institution, a loose assemblage of pious volunteers to be buffeted by the winds of secular fashion? Or was it divinely ordained, the Body of Christ, the creation of the Apostles?

These were hardly new questions in 1833, but no one had posed them so fervently for a long time. And once asked they demanded answers. Soon, with Newman now taking the lead, the Oxford party was writing and issuing its "Tracts for the Times.' There would be ninety of them in all, spanning eight years. Hence, "Tractarians.'

It is a label, like many another known to history, that originated in a sneer but soon subsided to a neutral descriptiveness. The Tractarians were soon deep into theological and historical issues. Saints, the writings of the Church Fathers, the murky channels of the apostolic succession--all were meat for pamphleteering and debate.

To the Whig-minded, as we might call them for convenience, and even for quite a few good old Tory country gentlemen, it all seemed distinctly alarming: a dangerous and unsettling business. After so many blood-sealed compromises, the Church of England was not so structured as to satisfy a strictly logical mind. If anomaly was not its middle name, it was central to its character. Historically "Protestant' (as the term was understood early in the reign of Elizabeth I), its liturgical forms were "Catholic,' while the 39 Articles of Religion were . . . what? Calvinist, it had been assumed. Newman, struggling to braid these disparate strands of tradition and to reconcile the Calvinist tenor of some of the Articles with his claim that the Church was truly Catholic and apostolic, launched the famous, explosive Tract 90. The Articles, he argued, are not so Genevan as they seem. He was in earnest, incapable of being otherwise, but it was from this ingenious and intricate argument that he gained a certain reputation for being sly and sophistical. He was neither; but the canard was to have explosive consequences.

Ultimately, this eloquent summons to renew the Catholic and apostolic spirit of the Church of England seemed to falter and fail. Anglicanism parted uneasily and slowly with a tradition so deeply woven into the web of law. Yet the Tractarians clearly had a compelling point. If the Whigs prevailed, if Parliament could do almost anything short of declaring the national faith to be Muslim (and maybe even that), could the church think of itself as anything other than a branch of the Home Office? This great question was, in a way, left hanging by the events of 1845. In that climactic year, the massed powers of Oxford, the heads of colleges, seemed determined to suppress or silence the Tractarian movement; it was the year of Newman's withdrawal to his retreat at Littlemore, and subsequently, in spirit, to Rome. The battle seemed lost, but in fact the war (at least for a renewal of Catholicity) had been won.

THE TRACTARIANS were priests and poets of exceptional literary power; and it is remarkable how few Victorian writers of note escaped the touch of the Oxford controversy. From Arnold to George Eliot, from Clough ("Say not the struggle naught availeth') to the Rossettis, from Pater to Macaulay and Froude among historians: all felt its spell. It was a formative force in the sensibility of the age, secular no less than religious.

Its monument is Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, his sublime account of the evolution of his religious views, written under sore provocation twenty years after his famous "defection' to Rome. I noted earlier that Tract 90 had unfairly gained for Father Newman the reputation of a sophist. Charles Kingsley, a noted popular writer (and clergyman), accused Newman of sanctioning deceit as a weapon of controversy. O felix culpa! The charge was false, of course, but it stirred Newman to write the Apologia, an English classic.

Yet the highly allusive Apologia demands some preliminary grasp of the controversy. And the best, the clearest and fairest, source of background is R. W. Church's History of the Oxford Movement. Church, dean of St. Paul's, had been in Oxford as a student and fellow when the crisis came in the 1840s. He had observed and regretted the blindness (as he saw it) of some of the university authorities to the virtues of Newman, Pusey, and their followers. He saw the treatment of the Tractarians as a dark day in the university's history. His book, written in old age and published only after his death, is a great historical classic, blending sympathy with vivid portraits of the principal figures.

The most vital of the eyewitness chroniclers, however, was James Anthony Froude, the historian. As a young man at Oxford he had followed Newman, as had Matthew Arnold. ("Credo in Newmanum' was an Oxford saying of the time.) Later he had become a skeptic and freethinker. His brother, Hurrell, had been among the original leaders of the movement, a great friend of and influence on Newman before his early death in 1836. Hurrell Froude's Remains, diaries and letters published posthumously, had fueled and fanned the scare that the Tractarians were "Popish' in tendency if not in intention. This was an alarmist prophecy, yet in some cases, notably Newman's, self-fulfilling. Among other indiscretions, Hurrell Froude had mused that the English Reformation was "a broken limb, badly set,' which would require rebreaking and resetting. Ironically, but perhaps inevitably, his younger brother would survive to write an amiable skeptic's account of The Oxford Counter-Reformation. Froude's account is witty, mellow, engaging, notable for its view that both the Tractarians and their foes were "extremists' who failed to grasp the inward genius of Anglicanism. It is not the view of a believer, but its underlying tone of gentle skepticism does not cheapen it.

The centenary of the Oxford Movement, in 1933, begot some interesting histories, none more readable than Geoffrey Faber's Oxford Apostles. It was widely read when I was a student in Oxford in the mid-1950s, less out of eagerness to understand the mind of the Tractarians than out of a fascination with its Freudian slant, which renders it in places facile. It is very good; but not to be taken without antidote.

When I made my brief, hurried pilgrimage to St. Mary's on the eve of the observances, I couldn't help asking myself what it all came to in the end, if so few seemed any longer interested. "Wherever two or three are gathered together . . .'? Yes, to be sure. But was it really a turbulence of frightened ecclesiastical reactionaries, a flourishing of romantics weaving a storybook tradition from thin air? Romanticism and nostalgia, or indeed reaction, are not reliable guides to the Oxford Movement --or to the related growth of ritualism and Gothic Revival architecture that came after. Its leaders were men of an austere piety and spirituality, a lofty if cloistered idealism, passionate to rescue the national church from a smothering and demeaning political control. The light they kindled burns low, perhaps, in a secular age; but still it burns.