The decline & fall of the Anglican regime.

MAURICE COWLING HAS NOW brought to a close his monumental Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, delivering after fifteen years a weighty final volume in his trilogy--a 700-page description of the changing character since the early nineteenth century of English public doctrine and its religious underpinnings. By "public doctrine," Cowling means the views of a society's elites concerning "the direction which the public mind ought to take," including their attempts "to define and justify the authority they claim" for so directing the public mind. A public doctrine thus "adumbrates the assumptions that constitute the framework within which teaching, writing and public action" should be conducted. By "religion," Cowling means "the attribution of sanctity to existence and a duty to maximize sanctity into practice." Religion, in other words, includes not merely "the internal dialogue of consciousness with itself," nor simply matters of "the private personality" combined with liturgical ritual, theological dogma, and ecclesiastical organization, but includes also, and necessarily, "a structure of public action."

The nearly two centuries encompassed by this book trace the "deliquescence" of the "Anglican regime" created in England at the Reformation, a regime marked by two "inseparable" forms of "pre-eminence": one ecclesiastical, the other aristocratic; one religious, the other political. Cowling shows us the dying of both, the slow, "irregular" but definite "erosion" of English Christianity and the English gentry, the "fundamental deteriorization" of their "power and influence"--the transformation of England into a secular, pluralistic State guided by a new public doctrine, one expressing an egalitarian "post-Christian consensus."

His way of showing this change is not to spin a historical narrative about what happened. Instead, he offers us "representative individuals," a total of 128 of them, who "exemplify" the process. Each receives a careful exposition, redolent with substantiating quoted phrases, in the manner this review is attempting to echo. A citation apparatus is consigned to a section of "Notes" at the end of the book so as not to detract from the contour of the exposition. These exemplifications are not even arranged chronologically, because, says Cowling, during this period opinions would typically "jostle together," achieving their influence "in the blur and fog of an undiscriminating contemporaneity." The result is a mosaic, ten dozen tiles each with its own integrity, each a portrait of an individual's published thought in the context of his public actions: separate portraits that together create an additional one, a dynamic portrait of England's public doctrine since 1820.

A careful exposition is just what we would expect from this distinguished Cambridge historian, perusing an enormous number of books and tracts, figuring out their central claims and arguments, then modestly standing aside so that these facts might speak for themselves. But wait! Cowling says that one of the fundamental assumptions of his book is that "academic impartiality is an illusion," that scholarly level-playing fields are "chimeras," that "the bias against bias" is at best "a tired conventionality," or more likely "an agenda which conceals its purpose." He calls for "a conservative deconstruction" of the "ideological correctness" that glorifies supposedly disinterested objectivity, insisting instead that "all historical writing is subjective" and that "venom and polemic can disclose the historical process as readily as modesty and analysis."

Is Cowling a conservative version of Foucault, incoherently embracing a postmodern relativism while simultaneously railing against moral and spiritual relativists? By no means. His explicit and sharp-tongued biases are deployed in the service of historical disclosure. They usually come at the end of a portrait, a summative assessment of the quality of the author's mind and the plausibility of his claims. Some of these comments are silly dismissals of the author's views as "silly," or are curmudgeonly gestures like failing to deal with C.S. Lewis's fiction because it is "an acquired taste which the present writer has not acquired." Such comments, to be sure, are great fun and sufficient on their own to justify the price of the book. But Cowling's assessments are more typically insightful thrusts that skewer "muddled" or "nebulous" ideas. A book by Jan Christiaan Smuts is said to display not only the "mistily political aspect" of his thought but also its "mistily mystical aspect." Tawney's "extraordinary naivetes" are remarked, as are Isaiah Berlin's "windy vapourings about liberal virtues." I. A. Richards's message, "once filleted for inspection," is found to be nothing more than "brilliant, distinguished, earnest prattle."

Cowling's deeper bias is his preference for the Anglican consensus--and his dismay at the emergence of its post-Christian replacement. He is not angry about what has happened, however. He has written his book "in sadness rather than condemnation," unhappy at the "carelessness" of the English elite about its "manifest vocation"--its failure over the past two centuries to sustain the public doctrine it had inherited. Cowling thinks he can "repay some part of the debt which carelessness has incurred" by fashioning his book's mosaic of changing views. His purpose is certainly a biased one: to show that the changes mark a decline. But in order to do so, it is important that the individual tiles be as accurately painted as possible.

So this volume is not an exercise in "polemical Conservatism." despite the delightful venom scattered about. Those who prefer their poisons undiluted should turn to Cowling's Conservative Essays of 1978. His ambitions here are more long-headed and so more serious, even if he is always complaining about authors--those as disparate, for example, as Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton--for taking "thought far too seriously." Cowling creates a mosaic rather than a linear narrative, a complex description rather than a polemical argument, because although "argument is a way of proceeding," it is "not the only way." Especially with respect to the foundational beliefs of a public doctrine, arguments are "indecisive for assent." What is needed for assent, and what religion provides, is a "predisposition," those "prejudications" or "directions of the mind and will which precede and transcend all activities and subjects of study."

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Thus Cowling's aim is to reawaken the "religious instinct" not by churning out polemical arguments for the restoration of the Anglican consensus but by showing its melting, displaying its vagaries and contingencies, and exhibiting the "mindless vacuity" of the result. The facts, fairly presented, may assist in altering the direction of our minds and wills, predisposing us to be less accepting of the post-Christian consensus that dominates current public doctrine in England--and, with appropriate adaptations, which is regnant in America as well.

Over half of Cowling's book profiles "latitudinarians" of various sorts: those who share "the conviction that, without a reduction or rearrangement, Christianity will not deserve to survive" in the modern world. Some, like Stanley or Jowett, Matthew Arnold or Sidgwick, sought a "reanimation" of faith, which easily degenerated into "absorptive accommodation"--arguments that Protestantism, rightly understood, is compatible with experimental science and cultural pluralism, even compatible with other religions. A few, such as Fitzjames Stephen or Dean Inge, accommodated not gladly but in desperation, searching for a fallback position able to preserve what they thought most important in their faith. Others, such as Whewell or Cunningham, gladly saw accommodation as a golden opportunity for divesting belief of the blinders of ancient prejudice and ignorance, finding proof that "the progress of civilization" and the "spread of democracy" were realizing the "full meaning of Christian faith." F. D. Maurice, for instance, defended the Thirty-Nine Articles not as a confession of faith but as providing the "conditions of thought" that everyone needs as a "safety-lamp" in their journey from ignorance to knowledge, from political repression to freedom.

In one way or another, says Cowling, latitudinarianism ended up producing "undemanding versions of duty, liberation, natural sentiment, moral responsibility, and liberal good-will," versions "making God indistinguishable from nature" and turning Christianity into "a very rough form of ethical earnestness." It was "perfectly willing to accommodate away its own grandmother" if necessary. When accommodation had run out of salable ancestors, when the slippery slope bottomed out, religious belief had become indistinguishable from secular comity, and aristocratic polity had been dissipated in the roil of popular culture. The "Christian intellect" had "trickled away into mystical secularity, secular indifference, or 'the liberalism of all reasonable men.'" The post-Christian consensus was triumphant.

The trick was not to abolish religion, of course, since that is impossible, but rather to find a secular substitute. Cowling describes those who gave their allegiance to Darwin, Freud, Marx, or Socialism--all of them offering utopian visions of the development of "new mentalities out of which a new society might emerge," all of these visions "earthly" religions--or in Julian Huxley's phrase, religions "without revelation." In this regard, Cowling sees no difference between Keynes and Hayek. Keynes envisioned an "aesthete's paradise" in which the "freedom from economic necessity" achieved by implementing his policies would "transform character"--with the State given an enlarged role in "the fostering of culture." Hayek agreed, says Cowling, except for the role of the State: his proposals were "designed to achieve Socialism's ethical objectives without resorting to Socialist methods," to fashion "a post-Christian politics" in which religion was "a private matter," and people were free to pursue their own interests, needing only to "consult their own consciences" while doing so.

What Cowling finds insidious about the drift into a post-Christian public doctrine is that it was nothing more than a drift, a death by a thousand qualifications. The public doctrine of the Anglican consensus was not refuted, but simply "abandoned." "The edifice of belief" was dismantled "brick by brick," the "deterioration" measured by a growing "indifference," the "unself-conscious acceptance" of secular and egalitarian values, whether expressed in a Liberal, Labour, or Conservative modality.

Cowling obviously prefers the eightyodd thinkers he profiled in the second volume of his trilogy, subtitled Assaults, because they were explicit in their rejection or defense of the Anglican regime. The resulting "tension" at least meant that both contending sides assumed "that religion is ultimate and ubiquitous" and that "the search for a right religion was a matter of the greatest consequence." Cowling's first volume, profiling "thinkers to whom the author is related intellectually," was also a bracing occasion because it personalized "the damage suffered by Christian images and aspirations." It infused an examination of doctrines and practices with the vitality of a specific individual's struggle to affirm his own identity.

Here in the Accommodations that comprise the third volume's mosaic, the bracing conflicts have been transmuted into a dolorous portrait depicting a war lost without any genuine battles being fought. Cowling's response is resolute. The "Christian phase of European civilization" may be at an end, but it would be "absurd" to presume that this state of affairs need be permanent. There is an "instinct for religion" lurking beneath secular indifference. Religion is an "indestructible" dimension of human life and so "will still be found in the crevices of thought whenever investigation looks for it."

Cowling's aim in this volume is to show the "continuity" that exists in English public doctrine between its Christian foundations and the efforts to deny that continuity, efforts to insist that the changes that have occurred are "irreversible" and progressive. The post-Christian consensus, according to Cowling, has occluded but can never eradicate faith. There is always the possibility of its retrieval, the resurgence of a "dominating Christian intelligence" able to rebuild a public doctrine in England that is explicitly Christian and legitimately hierarchical.

Cowling's ideal of England as a "Christian state" is not romantic recidivism. He thinks features of the old Anglican consensus, such as an established Church and a confessional university, are merely "matters of mechanism, opportunity, and organization." What is essential is that a "habitual sensibility" be achieved in which orthodoxy in Christian belief is once more taken for granted, no longer contested but assumed, and in which "dignified public behaviour" and "dignified public institutions" are once more "normal." Which is, of course, precisely what Cowling has said a public doctrine must be--something that "adumbrates" the assumptions constituting the "framework" within which a people carry on their public practices.

This book is worth reading for many reasons. Along with the earlier volumes, it offers an extremely useful collection of portraits of the primary voices in the English conversation of the past two centuries concerning religion and public doctrine. The portraits are brief but accurate, fair even to Cowling's worst enemies, and hence trustworthy introductions to or reminders about an author's central ideas and actions--a Cliff's Notes for the intelligentsia. Cowling's skills as a historian are no-where better evidenced than in the learnedness needed to achieve such an encyclopedic compendium of modern English intellectual biography.

And of course, there is the fun of Cowling's sneers and patronizing dismissals--including, however, his sneers at those who sneer. For his unspoken admonition is that we had better know deeply and thoughtfully what of we sneer, lest our sneering disclose more about our own foibles than the foibles of those we would ridicule. We should take to heart what Cowling says about Charles Kingsley: his "mind was clogged with rubbish. But not more than the minds he was attacking." Good Christian and good historian that Cowling is, he sympathizes with his enemies, for even when he thinks their ideas were misbegotten, he sees the best of them wrestling valiantly with the ambiguities and tensions of a changing world. Thus he remarks that "intellectual complication" is a "leading feature of the religion of the modern English intelligentsia": the admirable effort of thinkers to confront the problems of the day without succumbing to the temptation offered by reductionistic frameworks and simplistic solutions.

Appropriately, therefore, Cowling says that the "delicate questions" which "echo" throughout his work are about complication and tension: "Is there really a connection between Christianity and any of the forms of cultural and academic endeavor?" What, in the end, is the link, if indeed there be one, between religion and public doctrine? He finds no definitive answer, just wrestlings with the questions, "dialectical" interactions that have established "no secure resting-places." Indeed, "in the face of the diffusion of intellectual authority and the dilapidation of the religious instinct," believers and unbelievers alike have had to abandon definitive arguments and authoritative policies for "rhetoric" and "assertion."

With these insecurities, we too must be content--but actively so. For we too can wrestle with similar questions about how religion should be related to American public doctrine. Indeed, we are called to do so. And if we do as we ought, as Cowling does in his concluding paragraphs, then we will be likely to venture a rhetorical assertion or two of our own. His, as we might expect, is that the religious instinct, even though occluded, is not dead nor even dying. The current "indifference of the public mind" to public doctrine "may yet surprise by its willingness to be led astray by Christianity."

RELATED ARTICLE: BOOK DISCUSSED in this ARTICLE

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Volume III: Accommodations, by Maurice Cowling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

GEORGE ALLAN is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Dickinson College. He has published three books on the metaphysical foundations of social value and two on the philosophy of education, including most recently Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon.