Hugh James Rose’s Anglican Critique of Cambridge: Science, Antirationalism, and Coleridgean Idealism in Late Georgian England

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (02) ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
David A. Valone
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Mathematical Work ◽  
Undergraduate Instruction ◽  
John Herschel ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
Georgian England ◽  
The University

On Commencement Sunday in the summer of 1826, Hugh James Rose ascended the pulpit of the University Church at Cambridge to deliver a sermon. As Rose surveyed the assembled crowd, he would have been well aware that before him sat the future of English political, religious, and intellectual life—present and future members of Parliament, the leaders and local prelates of the Church of England, and the next generation of Cambridge scholars. While commencement addresses today are rather formulaic in their celebratory character, the sermon Rose had prepared for that day was far from uplifting. Rose had chosen to preach on Ecclesiastes chapter eleven, verse five: “No man can find out the work, which God maketh, from the beginning to the end.” Using this passage as a decree upon the limits of human knowledge, Rose launched into a blistering attack on the University and the educational philosophy that he believed it espoused. Far from praising the University and its graduates, Rose called into question much of what Cambridge had been doing to educate its students. The essence of Rose’s critique was that the University had lost its way as a religious institution and had become dominated by the search for “knowledge of the material Universe.” Pursuing this end, Rose warned, was a tremendous danger, because in so doing Cambridge was failing to provide a proper moral and religious foundation for those who would guide the nation. Naturally, Rose’s sermon came as a shock to many of those gathered before him, especially since it not only took the University to task but also implicitly seemed to indict some of Rose’s closest friends. His sermon battered one of the girders of Cambridge intellectual and religious life, and of Anglican theology more generally: the notion that natural philosophy was an appropriate handmaiden to religion. The tradition of reasoning up from nature to the Creator had long flourished at Cambridge in the hands of both men of science and theologians. Most at Cambridge took for granted the compatibility between the study of God’s creation and religious faith. For the previous three decades Cambridge had made the works of alumnus William Paley, replete with the ways nature manifested the wisdom and goodness of God, a cornerstone of undergraduate instruction. Ironically, many of Rose’s acquaintances from his own undergraduate days at Cambridge were themselves involved in scientific and mathematical pursuits and were generally sympathetic to Natural Theology. His dearest friend at the University was William Whewell, an intellectual polymath who excelled in mathematics, physics, and mineralogy, as well as moral philosophy, history, and theology. Rose also was a close associate of John Herschel and Charles Babbage, men who were renowned for their astronomical and mathematical work. Himself a fairly accomplished mathematician a decade earlier, Rose even had considered publishing some work to support Herschel and Babbage’s efforts to revitalize Cambridge mathematics during his undergraduate days.

scholarly journals OXFORD HOUSE HEADS AND THEIR PERFORMANCE OF RELIGIOUS FAITH IN EAST LONDON, 1884–1900

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 721-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUCINDA MATTHEWS-JONES
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Oxford House ◽  
Early Settlement ◽  
Open Discussion ◽  
East End ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis article considers how lecturing in Victoria Park in the East End of London allowed three early heads of the university settlement Oxford House to engage local communities in a discussion about the place of religion in the modern world. It demonstrates how park lecturing enabled James Adderley, Hebert Hensley Henson, and Arthur Winnington-Ingram, all of whom also held positions in the Church of England, to perform and test out their religious identities. Open-air lecturing was a performance of religious faith for these settlement leaders. It allowed them to move beyond the institutional spaces of the church and the settlement house in order to mediate their faith in the context of open discussion and debate about religion and modern life. The narratives they constructed in and about their park sermons reveal a good deal about how these early settlement leaders imagined themselves as well as their relationship with the working-class men they hoped to reach through settlement work. A vivid picture of Victorian religious and philanthropic life emerges in their accounts of lecturing in Victoria Park.

‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church

1988 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Spurr
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Central Force ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Rational Argumentation

Modern historians have been more confident than Restoration Englishmen in stating who the ‘latitudinarians’ were, what they held and where they dwelt. The ‘latitudinarians’ have been described as ‘the central force in the movement toward toleration which came from within the Restoration Church of England’ and as a clerical third force, neither anglican nor puritan, but united in an advocacy of ‘natural theology and rational Christianity’. Their ‘basic convictions’, as summarized by Professor Margaret Jacob, were thatrational argumentation and not faith is the final arbiter of Christian belief and dogma; scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are the most reliable means of explaining creation; and political and ecclesiastical moderation are the only realistic means by which the Reformation will be accomplished.

Hearing, Speaking, Writing: Religious Discourse from the Pulpit, among the Congregations, and from the Prophets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Jeremy Taylor ◽  
The University ◽  
Anna Trapnel ◽  
Second Coming

During the Commonwealth period, Parliament ejected over 2000 Church of England clerics from their livings, and multiple new Protestant congregations were formed, bringing new styles of discourses of religion and spirituality. Ministers ejected from their parishes, such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Fuller, published ecclesiastical histories, books of devotion and meditation, and advice for enduring hardship. Protestant sectarians preached informed by the spirit rather than the university or ordination; such ‘mechanic preachers’ included John Bunyan and women such as Katherine Chidley, who led a London congregation. More radical sects such as the Fifth Monarchists preached the second coming of Christ, and prophets such as Anna Trapnel urged England to become a godly country for his return and judgment. The Quaker movement, begun by George Fox, gathered believers who challenged both social and religious hierarchies and customs, leading to their persecution and imprisonment.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

Twelfth-century Cosmography, theDe secretis philosophie, and Māshā'allāh (Attr. to),Liber de Orbe

Traditio ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 235-276
Author(s):  
Barbara Obrist
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Lunar Eclipse ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Central Section ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester ◽  
The Universe

TheLiber de orbe, attributed to Māshā'allāh (fl. 762–ca. 815) in the list of Gerard of Cremona's translations, stands out as one of the few identifiable sources for the indirect knowledge of Peripatetic physics and cosmology at the very time Aristotle's works on natural philosophy themselves were translated into Latin, from the 1130s onward. This physics is expounded in an opening series of chapters on the bodily constitution of the universe, while the central section of the treatise covers astronomical subjects, and the remaining parts deal with meteorology and the vegetal realm. Assuming that Gerard of Cremona's translation of theLiber de orbecorresponds to the twenty-seven chapter version that circulated especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was, however, not this version, but a forty-chapter expansion thereof that became influential as early as the 1140s. It may have originated in Spain, as indicated, among others, by a reference to the difference of visibility of a lunar eclipse between Spain and Mecca. Unlike the twenty-seven chapterLiber de orbe, this expanded and also partly modified text remains in manuscript, and none of the three copies known so far gives a title or mentions Māshā'allāh as an author. Instead, the thirteenth-century witness that is now in New York attributes the work to an Alcantarus:Explicit liber Alcantari Caldeorum philosophi. While no Arabic original of the twenty-seven chapterLiber de orbehas come to light yet, Taro Mimura of the University of Manchester recently identified a manuscript that partly corresponds to the forty-chapter Latin text, as well as a shorter version thereof.

scholarly journals The Meteorological Observations in Coimbra and the Portuguese Participation in Weather Forecasting in Europe

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
António Leonardo ◽  
Décio Martins ◽  
Carlos Fiolhais
Keyword(s):  
Weather Forecasting ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Meteorological Station ◽  
Scientific Investigation ◽  
Magnetic Observatory ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Meteorological Observatory ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Meteorological Observations ◽  
The University

In the early nineteenth century, regular meteorological observations started at the Faculty of Natural Philosophy of the University of Coimbra (FPUC). From 1854 to 1856 these observations were published in O Instituto, a journal of an academic society of the same name, founded in Coimbra in 1852. This new area of science aroused great interest, offering itself as unexplored territory waiting for scientific investigation. In reaction to the pioneering work at the Polytechnic School of Lisbon of Guilherme Pegado, who founded the first meteorological observatory in Portugal in 1854, the FPUC established a Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory in Coimbra. The main actor was, from 1863, the physicist Jacinto António de Sousa. In the twentieth century, the increasing need for weather forecasting, especially at sea, led to the creation of the Meteorological Services of the Navy in which Carvalho Brandão played a pivotal role. It was the beginning of an international cooperation that brought Jacob Bjerknes to Portugal. He addressed a conference at Coimbra recommending the creation of a meteorological station in the Azores, to relay observational data from vessels travelling in the Atlantic. The Portuguese meteorological services were scattered in various institutions until 1946, when the National Meteorological Services (NMS) were created. Based on articles published in O Instituto and on the activities of the academy with the same name, we provide an overview of the evolution of meteorology in Portugal until the establishment of the NMS, with particular emphasis on the work of the Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory at the University of Coimbra.

Charles Francis Digby Moule 1908–2007

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Horbury
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Church ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church ◽  
Regius Professor ◽  
And Training

Charles Francis Digby Moule (1908–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was probably the most influential British New Testament scholar of his time. The youngest of their three children, he was born in the same house as his father, and spent a happy if often solitary childhood in China. Moule spent three years studying theology and training for Holy Orders in the Church of England at Ridley Hall. He soon had to take on leadership of New Testament teaching at the University of Cambridge for the Regius Professor, A. M. Ramsey. Moule was also fascinated, without losing his head as a critic, by the associated question of interaction between liturgy and literature in the early church, posed by such cultic interpreters of the gospels as G. Bertram. He joined the Evangelical Fellowship for Theological Literature, founded in 1942, an impressive body of younger authors that came to include Henry Chadwick, G. W. H. Lampe, S. L. Greenslade, and F. W. Dillistone; the moving spirit was Max Warren.

Brunner, Emil (1889–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Loup Seban
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Human Essence ◽  
Single Dimension ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Usa ◽  
University Of Zurich ◽  
The University

Emil Brunner was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. He was a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church, a professor at the University of Zurich, and held distinguished lectureships in England, the USA and Japan. He joined the ‘dialectical school’ early in his career, but tried to rehabilitate natural theology, which led to a rift with Barth. His works were widely read and often served as basic texts in Reformed and Presbyterian seminaries. He rejected the historicist reduction of Christ to a wise teacher figure that was characteristic of neo-Protestantism. He was also critical of modern philosophical anthropologies – as propounded by Marx or Nietzsche, for example – because he felt that they reduced human essence to a single dimension. Only theological anthropology can fully interpret human essence; and of central importance here is the ‘I–Thou encounter’, whereby the fulfilment of the human ‘I’ is achieved through a relationship with the divine ‘Thou’. Brunner also unfolded an original view on the relation of theology to philosophy. Reason, he argued, is essential for the elucidation and communication of faith. Philosophy, in so far as it indicates the limitations of reason, can serve to prepare us for the revelation of the Absolute.

Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

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