Reserve and Physical Imagery in the Tractarian Poetry of Isaac Williams (1802–65)

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 246-258
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
Established Relationship ◽  
Apostolic Succession ◽  
The Church

The Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement began as a conservative reaction to the reforming measures of the 1820s and 1830s and in particular to the Whig government’s passing of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill in 1832. For the Tractarians, the cumulative effect of such legislation was that the authority of the Church was being seriously compromised by interference from the secular government, which could now include those who were not necessarily Anglicans or even Christians. While it was these overtly political concerns that moved John Keble to preach his ‘Assize Sermon’ which has. traditionally been seen as marking the beginning of the movement in July 1833, the Oxford Movement was to develop into a spiritual revival whose concerns went far beyond politics. In rejecting the established relationship between Church and state the Tractarians came to emphasize the Church’s innate spiritual autonomy and appealed increasingly to the authority of tradition as reflected in the writings of the church fathers of the third and fourth centuries. In doing so their emphasis on certain beliefs and practices of the primitive Church, such as baptismal regeneration, the real presence and the apostolic succession, was seen as betraying sympathy for Roman Catholicism and disloyalty towards the Church of England.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Right To Privacy ◽  
The Right ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
The Church

In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain was relatively uniform in terms of race and religion. The majority of Britons adhered to the Church of England, although Anglo-Catholic leanings—the last gasp of the Oxford Movement—prompted some people to convert to Roman Catholicism. Although the secularization thesis has had a tenacious grip on twentieth-century literary studies, it does not account for the flare-up of interest in religion in mid-century Britain. The ecumenical movement, which began in the 1930s in Europe, went into suspension during the war, and returned with vigour after 1945, advocated international collaboration among Christian denominations and consequently overlapped with the promotion of human rights, especially the defence of freedom of worship, the right to privacy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression.

Protestant Reactions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Atherstone
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

Protestantism was a major rallying cry during the Tractarian controversies. It was anathematized by some Oxford Movement radicals as a ‘heresy’, and held tenaciously by evangelical campaigners as ‘the pure Gospel of Christ’. Protestant polemicists decried Tractarianism as a revival of Roman Catholicism in an Anglican disguise and called their brothers-in-arms to fight the theological battles of the Reformation over again. Focusing on the events in Oxford itself between 1838 and 1846, this chapter surveys the rhetoric which surrounded three overlapping themes—Protestant Reformers, Protestant Formularies, and Protestant Truth. It shows how these loomed large in the speeches and writings of those who wanted to defend the Protestant hegemony of the Church of England and the University of Oxford.

Some Architectural Aspects of the Role of Manuals in Changes to Anglican Liturgical Practice in the Nineteenth Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 324-338
Author(s):  
James Bettley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Last Supper ◽  
The People ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Apostolic Succession

The evangelical Francis Close, rector of Cheltenham and Dean of Carlisle, pithily observed in 1844 that ‘Romanism is taught Analytically at Oxford [and] Artistically at Cambridge … it is inculcated theoretically, in tracts, at one University, and it is sculptured, painted, and graven at the other’. The two forces to which he was referring – the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Camden Society – emerged within a few years of each other, in 1833 and 1839 respectively. Although they were very different in the ways in which they achieved their ends, they were essentially products of the same Zeitgeist, and their influence combined to bring about radical changes to the conduct of church services and church affairs generally within the Church of England. The most significant and fundamental change was the reinstatement of the celebration of Holy Communion as the central act of Christian worship. Like the crucial doctrine of apostolic succession, which was the keystone of Tractarian philosophy, this sacrament provided a direct link with Christ, being a re-enactment of the ceremony which he instituted at the Last Supper. For the service was not simply, as it was for Protestants, a commemoration of that event; it was a renewal of Christ’s sacrifice and was accompanied by a belief in the Real Presence. This is reflected in the terminology used. The Book of Common Prayer calls the service ‘Holy Communion’, which emphasises that part of the service where the people take part and share ‘the Lord’s Supper’. High Churchmen invariably referred to ‘the Holy Eucharist’, ‘Eucharist’ meaning ‘thanksgiving’, thus stressing the sacrificial aspect of the service which might be, in the more advanced ritualist churches, celebrated without the active participation of the congregation, as it had been before the Reformation. Further evidence of this attitude is the use of the word ‘altar’, with its sacrificial overtones, rather than the more domestic ‘Lord’s table’.

Keble, Froude, Newman, and Pusey

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
High Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Tradition ◽  
The Way

The Oxford Movement, influenced by Romanticism, was rooted in the inheritance both of an older High Church tradition and of the Evangelical Revival. The Movement was characterized by an effort to recover the Catholic character of the Church of England. Its genius was John Henry Newman, who redefined Anglicanism as a via media between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. John Keble had earlier opened the way to a new Anglican sensibility through his poetry in The Christian Year. The Oxford Professor of Hebrew, Edward Bouverie Pusey, brought to the Tracts his massive scholarship. Newman’s dearest friend, Hurrell Froude, gave the Movement a radical edge, which continued despite his premature death in 1836.

The Oxford Movement, Marriage and Domestic Life: John Keble, Isaac Williams and Edward King

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 366-377
Author(s):  
John Boneham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Social Importance ◽  
The Church

While a number of studies have highlighted the theological and social importance of the household in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain, the significance of domestic life for the leaders of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement remains almost completely unexplored. In a sense this is unsurprising, since the movement, which began in the 1830s, emphasized the importance of recalling the Church of England to its pre-Reformation heritage and consequently tended to stress the spiritual value of celibacy and asceticism. Whilst B.W. Young has highlighted the importance of celibacy for John Henry Newman, the movement’s main figurehead until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and other works have reflected upon the Tractarian emphasis on celibacy and tried to explain its origins, historians of the Oxford Movement have paid very little attention to the Tractarian attitude towards marriage and domestic life.

Apostolic Succession

1958 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-133
Author(s):  
Noel Hall
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Dialectical Materialism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Government ◽  
Apostolic Succession ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church

The renewed emphasis on the doctrine of apostolic succession which was the outcome of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England is an example of the power inherent in dogmas to recover their vitality. This is no isolated phenomenon confined exclusively to the dogmas of the Christian faith; in our own times we have witnessed the far-reaching results of the revival of the Marxian dogma of dialectical materialism in the sphere of international politics. That bishops are the successors of the Apostles was a belief held without question by the majority of Anglican Churchmen at the dawn of the nineteenth century, but it cannot be contended that they were fully alive to its implications. The awakening came through the publication of the Tracts for the Times. The challenge was sounded with unambiguous clarity in the very first of them to issue from the press. ‘Now then, ’ wrote John Henry Newman, ‘let me come at once to the subject which leads me to address you. Should the Government and the country so far forget their God as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must Christ's ministers depend?… I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built: our Apostolic Descent.

Reconsidering the Movement after the 1845 Crisis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Macnab
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Parish Ministry ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
The Church

The conversions to Roman Catholicism of Newman and others close to the heart of the Oxford Movement in the 1840s required responses at many levels from those Tractarians who remained in the Church of England. This coincided with rapid changes in Tractarian forms of parish ministry and the earliest days of a restored Religious Life. From their prominent positions among the remaining Tractarians, E. B. Pusey, John Keble, and Charles Marriott gave spiritual counsel through their private correspondence, and offered philosophical and ecclesiological arguments in their published sermons and writings. They defended the theological basis of the Movement in general, and of Tract 90 in particular, against both Anglican and Roman Catholic critics.

Decadent Rituals

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Anglo-Catholicism, the nineteenth-century movement within the Church of England that sought to reassert many of the forms and rituals of Roman Catholicism, exerted a significant shaping influence upon the religious aesthetics of English decadent writing. While the space that Anglo-Catholicism offered for a decadent performance of sexual difference has been examined before, this article offers a complementary argument, emphasizing a strand within decadence arising from the role of personality in reconceptualizing, and possibly distorting, religious orthodoxy. The first part provides a history of the discourse of degeneracy around the early Oxford Movement and the mediation of Anglo-Catholic ideas into English decadence through the writings of Walter Pater. It then discusses the ways in which decadent writing in England explored a distorting excess of personality through the aesthetics of religious ritual and asceticism.

“To See Thee I Must [See] Thee, to Love, Love”

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-445
Author(s):  
Maria Lichtmann
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
Immediate Experience ◽  
The Church

Abstract In early poems from his years at Oxford, before his conversion to Roman Catholicism and reception into the church by John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote several poems, “The Half-way House,” “Nondum,” “Let me to Thee,” and “My prayers must meet a brazen heaven,” where the absence of God—of the direct, immediate experience of God—is the theme. The poet seems to long for an ontological moment of being in his words, “inscaped” by God. In his childhood faith of the established religion of the Church of England, he has known only a God who is “above.” When he prays the paradox, “To see Thee, I must see Thee, to love, love,” Hopkins is setting out a major theme of his poetic and personal endeavors. This note of longing for an immanent God will be both fulfilled and frustrated in his life and in his art. Duns Scotus’s two incarnations of Christ, into the Eucharist and into human nature, will bring much of that fulfillment philosophically, as his acceptance of the Real Presence brought it spiritually.

Grace and Nation: Coleridge's On the Constitution of Church and State

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-208
Author(s):  
Alan Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
National Life ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTUnderstanding Coleridge's classic work On the Constitution of Church and State requires paying close attention to the system of distinctions and relations he sets up between the state, the ‘national church’, and the ‘Christian church’. The intelligibility of these relations depends finally on Coleridge's Trinitarianism, his doctrine of ‘divine ideas’, and the subtle analogy he draws between the Church of England as both an ‘established’ church of the nation and as a Christian church and the distinction and union of divinity and humanity in Christ. Church and State opens up, in these ‘saving’ distinctions and connections, important considerations for the integrity and role of the Christian church within a religiously plural national life.

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