William John Butler and the revival of the Ascetic Tradition

1985 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 365-376
Author(s):  
Ann Frances
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Church

William John Butler, sometime vicar of Wantage in Berkshire and founder of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, gave a concrete and contemporary expression to an aspect of the ascetic idea current among followers of the Oxford Movement, which was revealed in their desire to restore monastic life in the Church in England. The Community founded by Butler was one of the earliest of the indigenous Anglican communities for women. In no way could the desert ideal or the later pre-Reformation models of religious life be reconstructed, nor would they have been appropriate in the climate of the time. However Butler believed, as had Newman, Pusey and others, that the basic principles of monastic life remained valid and they could and should find their place in the contemporary Church of England. It was believed that the Church had the grace and the resources of devotion within itself to give birth to the religious life anew, to continue its nurture and promote its development. Certainly the enhanced spirituality resulting from the example of deep devotion of the Tractarians themselves and that of their followers engendered a religious atmosphere in which new spiritual adventures were made possible.

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.

SHAKESPEARE ON MONASTIC LIFE: NUNS AND FRIARS IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE

2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-272
Author(s):  
David Beauregard
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Church

AbstractAgainst recent claims that Shakespeare satirizes and demystifies religious life in Measure for Measure, this article maintains that Shakespeare is generally sympathetic to Franciscan nuns and friars, particularly so in this play. Indeed, Shakespeare works against the anti-fraternal tradition by reversing its conventions. Nuns and friars are represented as virtue figures, not vice figures. The secular characters are guilty of sexual irregularities, whereas the religious are chaste and work to regularize the marriages of the lay figures. The usual exposure of the sexual corruption and hypocrisy of the friar backfires on Lucio, the chief vice figure in the play. The virginal and temperate Isabella, a secular figure in Shakespeare's sources, is portrayed as a prospective novice of the Poor Clares over against the puritanical Angelo, whose hypocritical asceticism turns into lust. Angelo conducts a public shaming English Protestant style, whereas the Duke in Catholic fashion conducts a sympathetic auricular confession. Finally Isabella does not sacrifice her virginity or accept the Duke's offer of marriage, two things her counterparts in the sources invariably do. Shakespeare's reversal of anti-Catholic conventions requires us to reposition him as a Catholic rather than a conforming member of 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.

Tract 90

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. G. Pahls ◽  
Kenneth Parker
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Best Effort ◽  
The Church

In 1864, John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua characterized Tract 90 as his last best effort to remain in the Church of England. While Newman always celebrated his reliance on Anglican Caroline divines, this chapter demonstrates his unacknowledged debt to a notable Oxford convert of the Caroline period, Christopher Davenport (1598–1680), known in Franciscan religious life as Franciscus à Sancta Clara. Davenport served as Catholic chaplain to Queen Henrietta Maria and penned his irenic Paraphrastica Expositio Articulorum Confessionis Anglicanae (1634) to promote the reunion of the churches of England and Rome. The chapter demonstrates Newman’s use and close reading of Davenport’s work, analysing numerous paraphrases that Newman employed to build his arguments.

Eucharistic Ecclesiology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Handschy
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Constitutional Reforms ◽  
The Church

As the constitutional reforms of the 1820s and 1830s called into question the nature of the establishment of the Church of England, leaders of the Oxford Movement looked to the American Episcopal Church as an example of a Church not dependent on state establishment. Bishops Samuel Seabury and John Henry Hobart had constructed a constitution for the American Episcopal Church based on a ‘purely spiritual’ episcopacy and a doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. Their example influenced Hugh James Rose, John Henry Newman, E. B. Pusey, and John Keble in the course of the Oxford Movement, and this in turn influenced the course of the Ritualist movement within the American Episcopal Church.

The Oxford Movement in Europe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Geck
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Western European ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Church

During the period between 1833 and 1845 the Oxford Movement was widely discussed in Western European countries. The via media, as Newman understood it, was received with great suspicion. Roman Catholics continued to consider Anglicanism as a heresy, but hailed the Oxford Movement as a means to lead the Church of England back to the mother Church in Rome. Continental Protestants feared that the Oxford Movement might destroy the essence of the Protestant churches. Although the criticism was not universal, it was brought forward by a variety of schools and the nature of the debate served as a mirror of the theological pluralism of the time.

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.

The Making of a Convert: John Henry Newman's Oriel and Littlemore Experience

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-483
Author(s):  
Peter Nockles
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Church

‘The flood is round thee, but thy towers as yetAre safe, and clear as by a summer’s sea…Lo! On the top of each aerial spireWhat seems a star by day, so high and brightIt quivers from afar in golden light.But ‘tis a form of earth, though touched with fireCelestial, raised in other days, to tellHow, when they tired of prayer, Apostles fell’.John Henry Newman's poem ‘On Oxford’ published within a section called ‘Champions of the Truth’ in the verse collection, Lyra Apostolica, which he edited in 1836, encapsulates Newman's vision of Oxford and its colleges. Oxford was portrayed in the poem as an embattled but triumphant ‘city on a hill’ (in spite of its valley location surrounded by hills); a bulwark against contemporary forces, religious, and political, which for Newman, seemed to threaten it in the 1830s. The poem reminds us that the Oxford Movement, the great movement of religious revival within the Church of England commonly dated from 1833, the movement which Newman famously led and inspired, was rooted in Newman's keen and abiding sense of place (genius loci, as he put it), of memory, tradition, ethos, and association.

Richard Hooker: Invention and Re-invention

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.

‘The Difficulties of Protestantism’: Bishop Milner, John Fletcher and Catholic Apologetic against the Church of England in the era from the First Relief Act to Emancipation, 1778–1830

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-236
Author(s):  
Peter B. Nockles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Fletcher ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Catholic Religion ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church

‘It is an old theory of ours, that there are very few of the positions assumed by the antagonists of the Catholic church, which may not be turned against each other, with far more effect than they carry against the common adversary whom they all seek to assail. A skilful use of the weapons employed against each other by various sects of Protestantism, in their internecine warfare, would supply one of the most curious, and we will venture to say, one of the most solid and convincing arguments of the truth of the Catholic religion to be found in the whole range of polemical literature’.(Dublin Review, 1855).Anti-Catholicism, represented in the era of the eve of Emancipation by a rich genre of polemical literature focusing on the supposed ‘difficulties of Romanism’, has been the subject of much recent study; notably for the eighteenth century by Colin Haydon, and for the nineteenth, by Walter Amstein, Edward Norman, D. G. Paz, Walter Ralls, F. M. Wallis and John Wolffe. In contrast, English Catholic controversial writing against the Church of England, focusing on what one Catholic writer (in a conscious reversal of the stock Anglican polemical title) called the ‘difficulties of Protestantism’, with notable exceptions such as Sheridan Gilley, Leo Gooch and Brian Carter, 5 has been comparatively neglected for the half century prior to the dawn of the Oxford Movement in 1833.

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