Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism.

A BYSTANDER observing the tumult within the Anglican Communion these days might be forgiven for coming away with the impression that everything had gone along serenely (if the people he is listening to are traditionalists) or stultifyingly (if they are modernists) from 1662 to about 1960.

In fact, the calm that (mostly) prevailed from the mid 1930s to the late 1950s was something of an aberration. Leaving aside various battles over ecclesiastical polity, there had been two major upheavals since 1662, both of them beginning in Oxford: the Wesleyan revival (soon dubbed Methodism by its opponents) in the 1730s, and the Anglo-Catholic revival (the Oxford Movement) in the 1830s. These two revivals are commonly regarded as being at opposite ends of the spectrum, since the Methodists evolved toward a de-emphasis of ritual and a Protestant view of the sacraments and the clergy, while the Oxford Movement took a Catholic view and evolved toward high ritual. Yet both were at bottom evangelizing reactions to a church that seemed to have forgotten what it was there for.

When the nineteenth-century revival is thought of today, it is likely to be in Trollopean terms: There was a brief, intense flurry at Oxford, led by John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey; Newman and some of his followers went so high, in the shocking image used in Barchester Towers, that "they toppled over into the cesspool of Rome," while others, like that novel's hero, Francis Arabin, settled gratefully back into the Church of England, bringing fresh air, theologically and liturgically, into the musty world of Victorian churchmanship.

In fact, the combative phase of the story, so far from ending when Newman went to Rome, lasted more than sixty years, and included acts of Parliament, lawsuits, and riots. In England, priests were imprisoned for infractions of the Public Worship Regulation Act such as using unleavened bread and facing liturgical East (i.e., with their backs to the congregation) while celebrating Mass; in our country James De Koven, twice duly elected bishop, was twice denied consecration because he affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

But as John Shelton Reed rightly says in Glorious Battle, "the history of the movement after Newman's secession has been much less thoroughly described. In serious histories of Victorian Britain, even in most serious histories of Victorian religion, the heroes and mock-heroes of the second, 'Ritualist' phase of the Anglo-Catholic revival are usually relegated to becoming obscurity." For the battle was not always glorious. Very real things were being fought over --nothing less than the way God works in the world and the health of His people's souls -- and yet Catholics sometimes seemed more concerned to epater the rising commercial classes than to proclaim God's truth, and their opponents sometimes seemed more concerned with the Englishman's position as head of his family than with Jesus' position as Head of His Church.

But the seriousness of the points at issue does not stop the details of the disputes from being funny -- indeed, often hilarious. Mr. Reed is a story-teller in the great Southern tradition; and as for his subjects -- well, as a friend once wrote to me, "One thing I forgot to tell you about Episcopalians --they're contentious." The same goes for our English cousins. Here is a Sunday morning in 1859 at St. George's-in-the-East:

[The Rev. Harry Jones] discovered that the sight of the red edge on his hymn book would produce "a deep inarticulate growl from all parts of the building." He tested this experimentally several times: "When I lifted it up, apropos to nothing in the service, the growl came as surely as sound following the laying of the hand on the keys of an organ in full wind." While the surpliced choir and their sympathizers chanted the psalms at the top of their lungs, "the bulk of the congregation preferred reading them, which they did in a sort of quarter-deck voice." Another observer reported that when the choir turned to the east at the Creed, most of the congregation turned to the west.

Choosing such matters as one's battleground may sound rather quaint from the perspective of the 1990s; and yet it is scarcely thirty years since Archbishop Ramsey had to take up the cudgels in Parliament to get the wearing of alb and chasuble legalized in Britain.

Glorious Battle is not primarily a theological work. Instead, it examines the Anglo-Catholic movement sociologically (much as David Martin has done for present-day evangelicalism); it proceeds, that is, "by asking the ordinary questions that sociologists ask about any social movement. Most obviously: What kinds of people made it up, who opposed it, and why?" The short answer, in this case, is: Ritualism was championed by those who rejected, or felt rejected by, the commercial middle class; it was vigorously opposed by that class, and especially by the "muscular Christian" side of it; and it was supported, though not uncritically, by adherents of the old "High and Dry" school of churchmanship and by many of the original Oxford Movement figures, including Keble and Pusey themselves.

That is the short answer. The long answer takes up the bulk of the book. It includes statistical analysis, but by far the greater part of it consists of stories drawn from contemporary sources, full of wonderful, knobbly detail. There is Father Mackonochie, who "when he was ordered to stop kneeling 'excessively' at the Eucharist . . . began genuflecting instead; when he was ordered to stop genuflecting, he began bowing -- and his bishop lost his patience and removed him from his church for a time." Or this letter from Lord Halifax to the Archbishop of York: "'I cannot conceive of anything more splendid than that your Grace should be executed on Tower Hill. . . . Nothing but the mar-tyrdom of an Archbishop can save the Church of England."' Or the time a consecrated Host was stolen from an altar and entered into evidence in a police court; eventually It was rescued and was reverently consumed by Archbishop Tait, with a solemn Te Deum.

Many Ritualist priests believed they were called to minister to the slum-dwellers; their theory was that the beauty of the liturgy and vestments would speak to those who could not respond to a more intellectual appeal. Mr. Reed weighs the evidence, and concludes that while many of the poor did respond to ritual, a more important factor was the tendency of the men who ran these parishes to be especially hard-working, generous, and loving priests.

Mr. Reed's concluding chapter is called "The Irony of Anglo-Catholicism" -- the irony being that in persevering and, in important respects, triumphing, it lost some of its "outlaw charm." One might add that its becoming part of the mainstream paved the way for a new age of Anglican compromise in which, in many parishes, much was lost. In our own day, while many High Church Episcopalians rejoice that the new Prayer Book is essentially a Catholic document, there are others who believe they gave up too much and would happily go back to their never-officially-countenanced Missals. And there are still others who, over this or another of the roiling issues, have left the Anglican Communion, settling in one of the "Continuing Anglican" groupings or turning to Rome or Constantinople.

As a work of historical scholarship, Glorious Battle does not involve itself in these current controversies. But most of the ones Mr. Reed does chronicle foreshadow those of our own time. The question of liturgical forms and practices, now as then, has the power to arouse emotions to as high a pitch as more substantive matters, probably because they are what congregants experience every time they go to church, whereas one can put out of one's head for weeks at a time the problem of bishops who deny whole paragraphs of the Creed. The issue of women was a blazing one then too, although the point being argued was not the possibility of ordination but the propriety of conventual life (not to mention the Victorian paterfamilias's horror at the thought of his wife or daughter engaging in sacramental confession). And while the term "homosexual" was not coined until the very end of this period, some of the young men attracted to Ritualism were heartily despised by the muscular Christians as "unmanly, unnatural, un-English."

But finally, there was then, and is now, comfort, as Mr. Reed puts it, for "Anglo-Catholics, who knew enough history to realize that the Church had suffered such trials before."