July 6th, 2013
I
am sure that I am not the only one in this church to have been charmed and
engaged by Father John Salter’s biography of the former rector of this church
and co-founder of the Catholic League, Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton. Partly I think because Fynes-Clinton’s rather
mannered eccentricity in old age was so amusingly captured by Colin Stephenson
in his facetious accounts of the Anglo-Catholic Movement in its most tinselly
days of glory, he has been remembered as a sort of odd totem or fetish of
Papalism in the Church of England, an ecclesiastical coelacanth inhabiting a
Tridentine zareba by the unpropitious Thames.
But
how fascinating to read about him as a young man: tutor in an Old Believer
family in Moscow, consulted by the Archbishop of Canterbury while still a
curate about relations with the Eastern Churches, instrumental in bringing to
study in Oxford at St Stephen’s House students from the Serbian Orthodox
Church, among who was St Justin Popovich.
Both then and now people found it difficult to reconcile his evident
sympathy with the Orthodox churches and intimate knowledge of their culture and
rites with his overt and systematic theological Papalism. Fantasy about the character of belief and
practice in the Orthodox churches as a sort of oriental Anglicanism is at least
as old as Bishop Compton’s abortive relations with the church in what is still
called Greek Street, established in 1677, from which he requested the removal
of all the icons. Fynes-Clinton
particularly suffered in his work from this sort of political ecumenism, which assumed
that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend, and that because the enemy was and always
would be the Pope, the difference between the religion of George V and Nicholas
II was simply one of detail and culture.
The
degree to which this myth was and is a theological and spiritual dead end has
become ever more apparent as scholarship, common sense and ease of travel
demolish its tenets one after the other.
Only this year the Cambridge theologian Marcus Plested has published a
work of outstanding originality and insight, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, in which he demonstrates with real
learning how important Thomas Aquinas was in the Greek theological tradition,
not simply to those who wanted reunion with Rome or who opposed the doctrine of
S. Gregory Palamas, but also to divines such as George Scholarios who became
the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the Ottoman conquest, and Peter of
Mogila, whose Kievan scholasticism was by no means the alien growth subsequent
patristic fundamentalism has sought to portray.
And this should come as no surprise really: any reader of the Summa Theologiae soon encounters lavish
quotation from the Greek fathers, and the Angelic Doctor’s regard for S. John
Damascene as the crowning doctor and synthesizer of the Greek tradition is
obvious.
Among
Plested’s most engaging discoveries is a liturgical canon in honour of S.
Thomas Aquinas written by Bishop Joseph of Methone: As a star out of the West he has illumined/ the Church of Christ/ the
musical swan and subtle teacher/ Thomas the all-blessed,/ Aquinas by name,/ to
whom we gathered together cry:/ Hail, universal teacher!
This
intellectual catharsis of the tradition we have received is particularly
important as we seek to make such sense as we can of the current doctrinal and
cultural decadence so characteristic of the contemporary theological scene in
Anglicanism. For we can see that in both
Anglicanism and Orthodoxy the vitality of the nineteenth century revival became
strangely distorted by an insularity and a nationalism that sought to exclude
from the tradition influences perceived to be in some way undesirably foreign,
an impulse at best wedded to myth and at worst to overt racism.
And
here the root of the problem goes back inexorably to the reception in England
and in Russia of the philosophy of Hegel: Hegel taught by Jowett and Green at
Balliol to Charles Gore and his friends; Hegel as he inspired the principal
architects of Slav orthodox particularism from Dostoievsky to Bulgakov. As that perceptive cultural critic and old
member of St Stephen’s House A N Wilson points out in his astute work on the
intellectual history of this period in England, God’s Funeral, given the choice between Hegel and the Thirty-Nine
Articles it is not surprising what the intelligent young found most inspiring, but
the consequences for theology have been curious and unsatisfying.
For
the Russians, Slavophil insularity and a rejection of scholastic method has led
some of their most original minds into the speculative obscurities of
sophiology and the erection of doctrinal differences on issues like the
Filioque and the Immaculate Conception into epochal fissures. For the Anglicans, what looked to be the key
of release from obscurantism and anti-intellectualism turned out to be in fact
the liberty to pursue theology in characteristic splendid isolation, the long
Hegelian summer that begins with Lux
Mundi and ends with Christus Veritas.
It
is worth looking at this a little more closely.
The first generation of Tractarians were badly educated in philosophy
but were by no means insular in their theological culture, albeit within the
bounds of a tradition that was somewhat inadequately resourced to counter the
virulence of contemporary critiques of Christianity. The second generation thought they had found
the answer to the problems posed by biblical criticism and scientific
evolutionism in the Idealist philosophy handed down from Hegel, in a way that
also enabled them to assert their pristine Catholicity without having to worry
too much about the unpromising hinterland the Church of England provided for
this endeavor.
If
Darwin and the Germans were demolishing English Biblicism, then a free and
frank acceptance of the higher criticism was a good way to make Anglican
Catholicism both intellectually chic and doctrinally distinctive; if a
Christology of kenosis meant that Jesus didn’t really know who he was during
his earthly ministry, then neither should we be surprised if the Church which
is his body on earth appears not to have a definitive sense of her own mission
and teaching either. With Gore and his
disciples this is a sophisticated and brave attempt to make durable bricks with
not much straw; with their less able successors, we arrive at the abject
embarrassment of N P Williams’ Northern
Catholicism, a characteristic product of the sinister 1930s in which we are
asked to believe in the essential
religious genius of the Northern peoples … of a mystical and soaring quality,
appropriate to dwellers amidst the less genial aspects of Nature and beneath ‘grey
and weeping skies’.
Truthfulness
about all this is fundamentally important when we come to think about what
Anglican patrimony is. True ecumenism
cannot be built on crypto-racist assumptions that God in some way reveals
himself more aptly to favoured nations because of the sort of weather they have
or soil they till. George Weigel in his
recent Evangelical Catholicism has
identified the key moment for modern Catholicism to be the agenda set by Pope
Leo XIII in reviving the Thomist synthesis.
The most perceptive Anglican theologians in the Catholic tradition in
the last century – Dix, Mascall, Farrer - all understood this, just as
Plested’s work is beginning to unearth the same for the Orthodox. We need to
have the humility to realize that fantasies of Anglican doctrinal particularity
have cut us off from the much-needed irrigation this revival brings in
doctrine, in apologetic and in social thought.
Henry
Fynes-Clinton warned his contemporaries about this in his Oxford Movement
Centenary Manifesto of 1933: On such
supreme and vital matters as: the person of Our Lord, the union of the two
natures in Him, the interpretation of Holy Scripture, the authority and
infallibility of the Church, and the moral standards of historic Christianity,
much of the teaching openly propagated within the modern Movement is in sad
contrast with the orthodoxy of the original Oxford Fathers, and with the
Catholic standards to which ex professo the
Anglo-Catholic Movement makes appeal.
Our patrimony in liturgy and theology is only worth having and nurturing
insofar as it is faithful to this deposit of faith. The Catholic League since its foundation one
hundred years ago – in Corringham where I learned the faith - has been
unremittingly faithful to a two-fold loyalty: loyalty to the Oxford Revival as
authentically Catholic in its content and orientation; loyalty to an ecclesial
vision that has refused to embrace myth and fantasy about Anglicanism as a
special dispensation of revelation. This ascesis is all the more necessary in
our current strife. May the universal
doctor and teacher pray for us, that the Church of Christ may be united in one
faith and one sheepfold.
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