No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Text as Sacrament: Victorian Broad Church Philology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The description ‘Broad Church’ popularized by W.J. Conybeare in his famous article on ‘Church Parties’ in 1853, whilst claiming as distinctive the watchwords ‘Charity and Toleration’ and ‘the desire of comprehension’, made no specific reference to philology. Yet philology was not a minor fad for the Broad Church. Though its connections with theology are not obvious today, it provided a vital tool for those theologians who were seeking to defend the authority and integrity of the Bible in a context in which, as they saw it, the emergence of critical historical and scientific approaches to the natural world had the potential to undermine the sacred canon, and to relegate it to a position of relative importance only in the human story of religion. Their study of philology therefore merits renewed attention by historians, as a contribution to the reception of the Bible as book in the Victorian Church.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2002
References
1 Conybeare, W.J., ‘Church parties’, in Taylor, S., ed., From Cranmer to Davidson. A Church of England Miscellany (Woodbridge, 1999 Google Scholar), 340.
2 Gladstone, Compare’s conviction that Homer was a parallel, if inferior, ‘revelation’ to the Bible: Matthew, H.C.G., Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), 153 Google Scholar.
3 Annan, N.G., ‘The intellectual aristocracy’, in Plumb, J.H., ed., Studies in Social History (1955 Google Scholar), 241–87.
4 Maurice, F., Life and Letters of F.D. Maurice, 2 vols (1884 Google Scholar) is the standard biography; but see also McClain, F.M., Maurice, Man and Moralist (1972 Google Scholar); on Hare, see Distad, N.M., Guessing at Truth. The Life of Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) (Shcphcrdstown, WV, 1979 Google Scholar).
5 Bromley, J., The Man of Ten Talents. A Portrait of Richard Chevenix Trench (1959 Google Scholar), leans heavily on Trench, M., Letters and Memorials of Richard Chevenix Trench, Archbishop (1888 Google Scholar).
6 See Farrar, R., The Life of Frederic William Farrar (1904 Google Scholar).
7 See Jenkyns, R., Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (1991 Google Scholar).
8 Hare, J.C., in Hare, J.C. Google Scholar and Hare, A.W., Guesses at Truth, new edn (1866 Google Scholar), 68.
9 Trench, R.C., The Fitness of Holy Scripture for Unfolding the Spiritual Life of Men (Cambridge, 1845 Google Scholar), 13.
10 Brent, R., Liberal Anglican Politics (Oxford, 1987 Google Scholar), 165–6.
11 J.C Hare, in Hare and Hare, Cuesses at Truth, 149.
12 Ibid., 160.
13 Distad, Guessing at Truth, 79. To this must be added Duncan Forbes’s account of the theories of history shared by the Church, Broad, in his The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952 Google Scholar).
14 J.C. Hare, in Hare and Hare, Guesses at Truth, 525.
15 Distad, Guessing at Truth, 79.
16 For a comparison of these two ‘schools’, see Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 144–83. Brent’s account of ‘Liberal Anglicans’ ultimately leans much more heavily on the ‘Noctics’ than it docs on the Trinity’ circle.
17 H. Aarsleff, The Study of Language: England (1983), 223–43.
18 Hare and Hare, Guesses at Truth, 97–149.
19 Maurice, F.D., The Conscience. Lectures on Casuistry (1868 Google Scholar), esp. ch. 1, ‘On the word “I”’, 1–23.
20 Farrar, F.W., Chapters on Language (1865 Google Scholar), 3.
21 Ibid., 7.
22 See especially Farrar, F.W., Essay on the Origin of Language (1860 Google Scholar), ch. I, ‘The Origin of Language’. Farrar, who knew Darwin and preached his funeral sermon, may have been influenced by the application of evolutionary theory to human development. See also idem, Families of Speech (1874).
23 Trench, R.C., On the Study of Words, 6th edn (1855 Google Scholar), 17.
24 Ibid., 10.
25 Ibid., 16–17.
26 Farrar, F.W., The Inspiration of Holy Scripture. An Exercise for the Degree of B.D. (printed in London, nd; deposited with Cambridge University Library)Google Scholar, 29.
27 Trench, Fitness of Holy Scripture, 15.
28 F.W. Farrar, The History of Interpretation (1886), xiii.
29 Ibid., xix-xx.
30 Trench, Fitness of Holy Scripture, 22.
31 Coulson, J., Neivman and the Common Tradition (Oxford, 1970 Google Scholar). Ironically Maurice himself did not so regard Bacon, seeing him instead as much a Platonist as a forerunner of empiricism: see Maurice, F.D., Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 2 vols, new edn (1873 Google Scholar), 2:215. As H. Aarsleff has pointed out, the identification of Bacon as an empiricist is essentially a late nineteenth-century view: From Locke to Saussure (1982), 126.
32 Coulson, Newman, 9. More recently ‘analytical’ or ‘scientific’ language has been recognized as itself metaphorical; see especially Soskice, J.M., Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford, 1985 Google Scholar).
33 Maurice, F.D., Thoughts on the Rule of Conscientious Subscription (Oxford, 1845 Google Scholar), 12–13; see also Ramsey, I.T., On Being Sure in Religion (1963 Google Scholar), 48–90 (quotation at 67).
34 See Morris, J.N., ‘A social doctrine of the Trinity?A reappraisal of F.D. Maurice on eternal life’, Anglican and Episcopal History, 69 (2000 Google Scholar), 73–100.
35 Maurice, F.D., The Friendship of Books (1893 Google Scholar), 25–7.
36 John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, 3.2.1, quoted in Harris, R. and Taylor, T.J., Landmarks in Linguistic Thought. 1. The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure, 2nd edn (1997 Google Scholar), 126. The title of Maurice’s lecture may have been a deliberate echo of the title of the third book of Locke’s Essay, ‘Of Words’.
37 Maurice, Friendship, 26. Maurice almost certainly misunderstood Locke, failing to take account of his defence of innate capacities; see Wolterstorff, N., John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge, 1996 CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and Sell, A.P.F., John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Divines (Cardiff, 1997 Google Scholar).
38 Tooke, in his Epea pteroenta, or, The diversions of Purley (1786, 1798; modern edn, 1993) was widely assumed to have developed Locke’s ideas about language into a compact system of theoretical linguistics; see C. Bewley and D. Bewley, Cattleman Radical: a Life of John Home Tooke, 1736–1812 (1998).
39 Maurice, Friendship, 39.
40 Ibid., 40.
41 Ibid., 42–4.
42 Ibid., 44–5.
43 Ibid., 45.
44 Modern applications of the Platonic idea of a scale of ascent include Austin Farrer’s ‘doctrine of the cone’ in The Glass of Vision (Glasgow, 1948), 19–30, though Maurice would not have accepted Farrer’s implicit sharp contrast between nature and supernature.
45 Maurice, Friendship, 265.
46 Maurice, Conseience, 14.
47 For John Wolf, Maurice saw revelation as ‘self-authenticating’: Wolf, W.J., ‘Frederick Dcnison Maurice’, in Wolf, W.J., Booty, J.E., and Thomas, O.C., The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice and Temple (Edinburgh, 1982 Google Scholar), 78.
48 Maurice, F.D., The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (2nd edn, 1855 Google Scholar), 333.
49 Maurice, F.D., The Kingdom of Christ, or Hints to a Quaker respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church, 2 vols (4th edn, 1891 Google Scholar), 2:178.
50 ‘[When] our pride is taken down … then once again may He speak to us out of the Book, and make us understand that He is the centre of that unity to us which all our schemes and theories about the Bible have been seeking to dissolve’: Maurice, F.D., The Acts of the Apostles (1894 Google Scholar), 280.
51 Maurice, F.D., Sequel to the Inquiry, What is Revelation? (1860 Google Scholar), 15.
52 London, King’s College Archive, Box 5037-M4-R: F.D. Maurice to Sara Coleridge, 1 March 1844.
53 See Aarsleff, Study of Language: England.
54 Maurice, F.D., Theological Essays, 3rd edn (1881 Google Scholar), 396.
55 The pertinent text, in addition to the Theological Essays, is Maurice, F.D., The Word ‘Eternal’ and the Punishment of the Wicked (Cambridge, 1853 Google Scholar). See also Morris, ‘A social doctrine’, 80–1.
56 Aarsleff, Study of Language: England, 73.
57 Ibid., 127.
58 See Sanders, C.R., Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC, 1942 Google Scholar) and Vidler, A.R., F.D. Maurice and Company. Nineteenth-Century Studies (1966 Google Scholar).
59 Farrar, History of Interpretation, 422.
60 Proceedings of the Philological Society, 1 (1844), i.
61 Ibid., 1–5.