In Our Time - The Oxford Movement

Episode Date: April 13, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Oxford Movement in the Church of England in the 19th century. Cardinal John Henry Newman is perhaps the most significant Christian theologian of the nineteenth century. He began as an evangelical, becoming a High Anglican before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845. His is the story of the diversity of Victorian religious life. But his path also marks the waning of the ideas of Protestant nationhood at the close of the eighteenth century and the reaffirmation of the Catholic tradition at the turn of the twentieth century. For over a decade, between 1833 and 1845, Newman and his fellow travellers, the Oxford Movement, argued that the Church of England was a holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. They sought to assert the Catholic nature of their Church just as secularism, liberalism, non-conformism, and even Roman Catholicism, seemed to threaten her. They published tracts, preached and brought their social mission to some of the poorest urban parishes. Why between 1833 and 1845 was the voice of reaction such a loud one? What was the Oxford Movement and what motivated them? How did they present their ideas to the Anglican clergy at large and what did the clergy make of them? And why did they leave such a powerful legacy for the Church of England, its character and its churches? With Sheridan Gilley, Emeritus Reader in Theology at the University of Durham; Frances Knight, Senior Lecturer in Church History at the University of Wales, Lampeter; Simon Skinner, Fellow and Tutor in History at Balliol College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Cardinal John Henry Newman is the most significant Christian theologian of the 19th century. He began as an evangelical, became a high Anglican, before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845.

His is the story of the diversity of Victorian religious life, but his path also marks the waning of the ideas of Protestant nationhood at the close of the 18th century and the reaffirmation of the Catholic tradition and the new non-conformist traditions at the turn of the 20th century. For over a decade between 1833 and 1845, Newman and the Oxford movement argued that the Church of England was a holy Catholic and apostolic church.

They sought to assert the Catholic nature of their church, just as secularism, liberalism, non-conformism, and even Roman Catholicism, seemed to threaten it. They published tracts, preached, and brought their social mission to some of the poorest urban parishes. Poetic, apostolic thinking and lowly parish church work were the twin prongs of their attack. Why between 1833 and 1845 was the voice of reaction such a loud one? What was the Oxford movement and what motivated it? How did they present their ideas to the Anglican clergy at large, and what did the clergy make of them? and how did they leave such a powerful legacy for the Church of England,

its character and its churches? With me to discuss the Oxford Movement, Sheridan Gilly, Emeritus Reader in Theology at the University of Durham, Francis Knight, senior lecturer in church history at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and Simon Skinner, fellow in tutor in history at Balliol College, Oxford. Sheridan Gilly, the Church of England was both a Protestant and a Catholic church. But can you describe what kind of church it was at the beginning of the 19th century?

Well, if you'd asked a member of the Church of England in 1800 what he was, he would have said that he was a Protestant member of the Church of England. And in fact, the Church of England was overwhelmingly Protestant at that date. And indeed, it had within it a strong evangelical tradition, which was actually reinforced by the revival in the 18th century. However, the church had a slightly more complex character in that while the Reformation in England was Protestant and undoubtedly Protestant, there was also a high church tradition in the church,

which essentially arose from three things. One was that the Church of England at the Reformation preserved the ancient order of bishops, priests and deacons, the order under which the great majority of Christians had always lived. And this had given rise to the notion, that the church was in possession of an apostolic succession, a succession of bishops from the time of the apostles. The second thing was that the Church of England, the Reformation preserved the cathedrals and the attendant worship of matins and evensong into which its creators had condensed

the ancient monastic offices. And the third point was the Book of Common Prayer. Now again, the book of common prayer is a Protestant text, but it was, in the words, of a radical Protestant or Puritan critic of the English Reformation, picked out of that dunghill, the mass book, full of all abominations. In other words, it actually preserved enough of the medieval Catholic character of worship to be open to Catholic reinterpretation, as it was in the 17th century by the supporters of the high church movement which took form under Archbishop Lord and Charles I.

And this tradition especially saw in the possession of the Church of England of this apostolic order of bishops as something special, as something which actually differentiated the Church of England from the other churches of Protestant Christendom. Well, that's a brilliant summary. Can you take us or bring us up to near our subject

with my next question, which is to do with Catholic emancipation and attempts to reform the Church of Ireland, which had been united with the Church of England in 1800 under the active Union. Both of these seem to unsettle Anglicans. Can you explain how that happened? Well, the other great characteristic, of course,

of the Church of England was the relationship between church and state in England, in which the state was essentially the supreme power in the church. Now, in the decades before 18 and 30, the Church of England had enjoyed an especially privileged relationship to the state. It was a long period of Tory ascendancy in the state, which meant a long period of the ascendancy of the High Church party in the church. And all of that was suddenly threatened when in 1829,

under the third Catholic Relief Act, Catholics could have membership of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Now, as the Parliament was effectively the Supreme Voice in the Church of England, this actually threatened the whole principle of establishment, at least in theory, because the particular enemies of the Church of England, the Irish Catholics, were now members of the Parliament, which had the supreme authority over the Church of England. Francis Knight in the 18th century also saw the beginnings of a profusion of non-conformist groups, like the Methodists, which were to be very powerful,

and the evangelicals. Did the Anglicans feel rocked by that as well? They did. I mean, this is the beginning of the period where non-conformist numbers really increase dramatically so that we get to the point in 1851 when about one in four of the population of England identify themselves as non-conformists and will be attending non-conformist worship on a given Sunday.

This is obviously extremely disconcerting for an Anglican establishment. In a sense, the non-conformists, when we're talking about the repeal of Tests and Corporation Act, increasing their rights, they too are attacking this church-state nexus that Sheridan was talking about. It's not just the church and worship, it's the state and authority and power over religion, isn't it? Yes, it is. Obviously, the Test and Cooperation Act and Catholic Emancipation Act and the Reform Act of 1832 have an immense impact when it comes to how the state is perceived.

This is really the end of the period when it is appropriate. to, or the beginning of the end of the period, when it is appropriate to be discriminating against people on the basis of their religious views. So can you give us some idea of the way the state was threatened? Would you say that when, in 1835, when the Prime Minister Robert Peel set up an ecclesiastical commission, was he being aware of this, trying to contain it? What was he doing there? Was he saying, look, this is getting out of hand?

I want the ruling of the church back in my hands. In fact, very much in his hands. He had the meetings in his own dining. room and I'm not letting this get too much to disturb the status quo. He was essentially wanting to make the church the instrument of its own regeneration. He was a loyal churchman himself and he realised that what was needed was a kind of utilitarian reform and that was what the ecclesiastical commission in a sense was concerned with doing. As you say, he had the meetings in his own house.

The initial membership of the ecclesiastical commission was I think five bishops and seven politicians. So it was quite an intimate gathering. It was an attempt for church and state to work very, very closely on making a reformed church that would be more acceptable to people generally and that would actually ensure that legislation could be passed through Parliament much faster than would have been the case because Parliament wasn't willing to take up the time with ecclesiastical matters

that it had previously done. So there was a need to act more swiftly. Those 12 dinner party guests, five bishops and seven politicians, they're presumably all Anglicans still? They were, yes, they were senior politicians and, of course, Anglican bishops. So is there an attempt to contain what's going on to say we must keep the church and state together, we must have them ruled from the same table, and this is the table, and it's still Anglican politicians and Anglican bishops? Very much so, and that would have remained the case for most of the 19th century, actually, for much further. Despite the welling up of non-conformism, as you've said, by 851, 1 in 4 non-conformism,

and the release of the Catholic rights that had come in, as Sharon pointed out at the end of the 1820s. Simon Skinner, can you tell us about the ideas that were unsettling the church? Why was this happening? And how did the ideas unsettle the Anglican Church, the ideas that were coming in from both sides? Let's call it both sides. I know it's a bit simplistic. Let's assume the Anglicans are the sort of central establishment, which certainly were, governing which we certainly were body, and we have the Catholics on one side and the non-conformists and the other crowding in.

I think it makes sense to see it perhaps in both political and intellectual terms. I mean, Sheridan's already rooted the origins of the Oxford movement and the political circumstances at the end of the 1820s, and that's self-evident, as he put it. It's a theoretical blow to the confession. state. Can you tell you, I like that phrase confessional state, but if it keeps cropping up, people I want to know precisely what you mean by it.

The confessional state, the confessional ideal, is really a convenient shorthand for centuries of Anglican apologetic, which has justified Parliament's supremacy over the Church of England, which has justified parliaments determining matters of doctrine, tampering with a prayer book, which has justified a Prime Minister nominating bishops on the grounds that since the tests

exclude dissenters. These are churchmen. And it's Hooker, the Elizabethan divine at the end of the 16th century, who really sets up this notion as Parliament as the lay synod of the Church of England. And that's how you justify the role of supremacy and the crown in Parliament's hegemony over the church's councils. And that's the Confessional Ideal which is plainly torpedoed by the measures of 1828 and 1829. Moreover, once you have a Whig administration in office, this theoretical threat becomes actual. and it's the Irish church bill which we've already mentioned in 1833, which really realises all the anxieties which churchmen would have

about the consequences which arise from 1828-9. So can you feed in some of the ideas? We've been talking about acts, and we've been talking about the state of the Angina Church. What about the ideas that are coming? Because these ideas are part of the 19th century more broader than just the church. But the church being so interlinked, so part of the state, is taking, perhaps for the last time in our history,

a massive part in the political process. Newman famously and rather irresistibly says in the Apologia Provita Sua is later as it were, explanatory autobiography of 1864. He says famously, my battle was with liberalism. And he has a very useful appendix, a sort of 14 point note defining liberalism, and he defines it as the anti-dogmatic principle.

And what it really illuminates, I think, is the sense in which tractarianism is a reaction against the Enlightenment legacy, put simply, the ascendancy of reason over faith, seen politically in the ascent of liberalism with a weak ministry, seen economically in the hegemony of political economy, of laissez-faire ideals. And there is therefore a clear perception that Tractarianism needs, that church needs to provide a sort of dogmatic counterpoint to this Enlightenment, inheritance. And I think dwelling in these political and intellectual categories

helps us to identify tractarian antagonists within the church, respectively high church and evangelical. I'm going to try to keep broadening this out across society as we go through. We were talking about the Oxford movement and we'll come to that in one moment. But still, we're talking about something that interested writers such as Dickens, Carlisle and Cobbett at this time as well, didn't it? Yes, well, I think there was a very important legacy from the Romantics. Newman himself described Sir Walter Scott as the poet of the church. There was a sense that there was something in the world

which the Enlightenment hadn't seen in its notion of the supremacy of reason, that there was the awe, the mystery, the wonder of God. And this kind of appealed to the imagination, which is especially to be seen in the whole tractarian revival of traditional. Catholic spirituality and worship. It's that particular dimension of romanticism, which actually enters so importantly into the Oxford movement, and which actually makes it part of the intellectual reforming movement

of the 19th century and not simply a counter to it. So the reaction against the Enlightenment is actually a broader thing than the Oxford movement. The Oxford movement is actually a part of that. You find obviously you go along with that. Could you develop that in terms of the right, the fiction writers and the poets at the time. Yeah, one aspect of this romantic cross-fertilization, romantic inheritance is a medievalism.

Plainly there is a reverence within Tractarian tradition for the medieval, i.e., the pre-Reformation church. And it's not just its catholicity before much of the abhorrence of the Protestant Reformation. It's also an idealization of the social and the pastoral role, which the Pre-Reformation Church is held to have performed. And what Tractarians share with many other paternalistic commentators, and I think that's the cue for writers such as Dickens and Carlisle, indeed Cobbitt, Pugin, a convert,

is this ideal of the Pre-Reformation Church as a sort of proto-welfarest institution with whose cathedrals, in particular whose monasteries, which of course suppressed in the 1530s, are doling out education, and broth to the needy. And that the problem with the Reformation is that it represents a translation

of this ecclesiastical property to lay hands and that these obligations, these paternalistic obligations of Nebless Oblesege, are not discharged with anything like the same conscientiousness by lay impropriators. So we've broadened down a little bit. We'll come back to the Oxford Movement Francis Knight, sometimes unknown as the Tractarians,

90 tracts epistles essays, tracts were produced by them, as we said between 1833 and 1845. What sort of church were they promoting? I think to a great extent they were trying to promote traditional high churchmanship. I think it would be a mistake to see them as trying to promote something that was entirely new. A lot of the tracks are actually devoted to saying all we are doing is rediscovering the Christian tradition which already exists. A lot of the tracks consisted of summaries of the teachings of the Carol divine divines. Where they were different, I think, is the extent to which they were trying to promote a church which was a distinctively Eucharistic community. And that is certainly seen as they

begin to have an impact at parish level, that they want to make a distinction between those of their parishioners who are members of the Eucharistic community, regular recipients. Regular recipients of the Eucharist on, not just occasional recipients, but taking the thing seriously. Precisely, receiving on a monthly or possibly even a weekly basis. And the other difference would be the fact that they were generally quite hostile to the Reformation. And that is something which the wider High Church tradition was not. It wasn't acceptable really for a high churchman to repudiate the Reformation. and this is something that we see in the writings of Richard Hurl Frued and Newman himself.

I mean, arguably, they knew a lot less about the Reformation than they did about the early church or the Caroline Devines, but they did tend to be negative about the Reformation. And so they would refuse to support the Martyrs Memorial that was erected in Oxford in memory of Cranmer and Latimer and Ridley. I mean, that was a particular moment when they separated themselves from that tradition. A figure around whom he'd cohered most was John Henry Newman. Can you, when he went up to Oxford, he was an evangelical,

what drew him into the Catholic wing of the Church of England? Well, in the 1820s, of course, he was a young evangelical who thought that you were a Christian essentially because you had some kind of conversion experience, as Newman had done. But he came increasingly to think that one was a Christian, for another reason, that one had been baptized. other words, you might be an appalling Christian,

but you had still received the privilege of baptism. If you like even in hell, the baptised will be recognised as having received this tremendous sacrament. And that then moves him into the high church tradition. In other words, it's membership of the church which makes the Christian and not simply the fact that God has specially chosen and converted you in some kind of immediate experience. Simon's Kinnege, I use the word tractarians, we've talked about, we've mentioned what tracts mean and so on, but what issues were that did the tractarians tackle?

I mean, track one starts with notions of priesthood in a way, it's entitled thoughts on the ministerial commission. And if tractarians are criticising high churchmen for what they feel is sort of institutionally rather too cosier relationship with the state in the years up to 1830, they feel that high churchmen have become rather sort of socially utilitarian, rather have a rather contractual view of their relationship. with the church establishment, and that that means that they simply don't have the premises with which to deal with the state when it's an unfriendly hands. Similarly, evangelicalism, which in a sense, going back to our intellectual categories, is the application of reason, of individual interpretation of the Bible, of individual atonement for sin, which plays down the church's hierarchy, the church's sacraments, the church's traditions. On the Tractarian view, this leaves other groups, leaves the old high church, and it leaves evangelicals lacking really the political and the theological premises to deal with these threats. That's what are the theological premises, and that's where Track 1 comes in. And that's where Newman asserts that clergymen derive their authority not from the state,

not from the state's commission, not from parliament, not from there being an established church, but from apostolic succession. And that takes us straight back to the Catholic idea that in fact the British English bishops, the Angan bishops are as clearly descended from, by the laying on of hands, from St Peter, as the bishops in the Catholic church itself. The tract evolve quite significantly. As Francis has already said, first of when Pusey comes on board, they turn from really three or four page polemical leaflets to quite weighty theological treatise. and Pusey's writing 80 page plus theological treatises, doctrinal treatises on baptism. And later still, they contain vast cut and paste chunks

from the writings of the Caroline Divines in an attempt by tractarians to demonstrate their continuity that they are recalling an older high church tradition and that they're not solely innovators. The slight problem, I think historian's preoccupation with the tracts is inevitable given that it gives the movement its scholarly name. But the danger is that it obscures the fact that tractarians are actually active on a much broader polemical front. There's a tractarian journalism and the British magazine and then successive with British critic,

which is really the Tractarian House magazine under Newman and then Thomas Mosley's editiships. Voluminous Library of the Anglo-Catholic Fathers, Library of the Fathers, poetry, even forays into novels with minor tractarian figures, but nonetheless prodigious in their production of these sort of Anglican morality fables. Can you tell us, Francis Knight, how effective were the tracts for the times? How effective were they disseminating these ideas?

I mean, who did they reach? And how many people, have we any idea of how many people they reach and what effect it had on those people? I think the question of dissemination is a very interesting one. I mean, early tract hair in history is full of accounts of, you know, Newman are riding around on his horse with a satchel full of tracts and handing them out to people. And one hears about them kind of pressing tracts on booksellers and giving them away at meetings. I think a lot of this may have been slightly embroidered in the telling. My sense would be that the early tracts were key because they were short.

I mean, tract one essentially was four pages folded. It was the kind of thing that could be read quickly over breakfast. And it was the kind of thing that a clerical reader would respond to quite immediately, because, as Simon has said, it was about the whole issue of ministerial commission. Bearing in mind that ordination was something of a default setting for young men who were leaving Oxford and Cambridge, to be told that there was actually much more to it than simply being an English gentleman. For some, perhaps, was a little bit of a wake-up call. Can you just unravel that a bit?

More to it in an English gentleman. We can take some of the vickers in Jane Austen as an example of English gentleman who happened to be a vicar because of their fourth son or the third son or whatever it is. That idea is being challenged in the tracts, was it? It's certainly, very much so. Can you develop that a little?

Yes. Well, the notion, of course, is that the key to being a priest is the fact that one has been ordained and is part of the apostolic succession, and you have a particular spiritual function. I mean, it's a supernatural vision. They're being more rigorous. They're going back and saying, as it were, under pressure from outside, it would seem, we have to be more rigorous about what we're doing.

We have to have a vacation. We have to have proper ideas of priesthood. We have to know that the taking of bread and wine, the Eucharistic notion, is at the centre of the church, and what you do and we do. And so in that sense, it's a call to arms, is it? Yes, well, I think that the Oxford setting of all this is incredibly important. The Oxford movement really takes form in Oxford

as an attempt by the Tractarians to seize the leadership of the Church of England through the University of Oxford. And the main incidents in any history of the Oxford movement between 1833 and 1845 are actually the kind of rows you get in universities when academics are attacking one another. But through Oxford they did actually have access to the flower of the nation's youth. In other words, they could actually influence the coming makers and controllers of the British Empire, which was taking form. And they had enormous influence in that respect. Can we develop this effect? Because it's very important. Can we just say a little more, Simon, about the effect? Sheridan's brought in the idea of training up the sort of moral underpinning

of the British Empire, even the model underpinners themselves. Well, I think it has two obvious purposes, really, from the Trapturing's perspective. It differentiates the clergy from the ruling classes and from the state in a way that they clearly feel has been insufficiently differentiated in the previous generation and Richard Horrell-Frued in particular is really most lacerating in his denunciation of the squarsons in other words the squire parsons of the previous generation it serves the ministry to differentiate itself from the ruling classes because clearly tractarians think that they're popular purchase their hold over the poor who increasingly lie beyond the institutional horizons of the church is going to be

enormously enhanced if clergymen aren't seen to be simply part of the ruling fabric, if they are not, for example, serving as clerical magistrates who are therefore responsible for harsh poor laws, responsible for transportations under the game laws and so forth, reading the riot act. And there is therefore a precipitate decline, actually, in the incidents of clerical magistrate in the course of the 19th century. And it's also about the clergy, really adopting habits, even habits of dress, but also personal habits. Many tractarians are keen on celibacy, for example,

to differentiate themselves from gentry values. Can we go back to Newman for a moment, Sheridan Gillian? How successful was he in offering Catholic interpretation of a Protestant 39 articles to which... Because the theology is at the heart of this as well, isn't it? Well, the track 90, which was the last of the tracks, Newman was forced by the bishops to bring them to an end in 1841, is a very puzzling document because on the one hand it seems to be simply attempting to reconcile the 39 articles, which were a moderate 16th century statement of Protestant doctrine, with Catholicism as broadly defined. That is to say with the Catholicism of the early church and not the Catholicism of Roman Catholicism. But there are some clauses in which Newman steers very close to the wind.

For example, he suggests that the article which condemns the sacrifices of masses is not intended to condemn the Roman Catholic doctrine that the Eucharist, the masses, a sacrifice, but instead is simply intended to condemn the abusers among ill-educated papists who don't really understand the teaching of their own church. In other words, there's a sort of an implication there that he is attempting to reconcile the 39 articles with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Now, what Newman did in my view is really rather paradoxical. The articles were the great protection of the position of the Church of England, especially in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. And Newman had been a defender of the articles as a way of maintaining the Anglican monopoly in the university,

because if you were an undergraduate, you actually had to subscribe to them. But by showing that the articles might mean even Roman Catholicism, Newman was doing a kind of liberal thing. He was showing that under interpretation, the articles might be held to mean anything. And if that was the case, then it would be impossible to maintain what it proved impossible to maintain in the long term, the Church of England's privileged position in the University of Oxford.

How did this move towards Anglo-Catholicism, Francis Knight, how did that affect the attitudes of the non-conformists and of others in the Protestant Church in the Anglican Church? Were they outraged by that? Were they persuaded? What was it, has there any sense of the number that were persuaded, the number that were opposed? Well, I think universally non-conformists and also evangelical Anglicans looked upon what was going on in Oxford with a considerable degree of alarm, particularly of course the repudiation of the reference which was seen as contrary to the ethos of Anglicanism. Perhaps the tract which best illustrates the predicament in which they found themselves would be,

well, in fact there were two tracts on reserve in communicating religious knowledge. This in some ways was illustrative of what the tractarians really thought they were about. The notion of reserve in communicating religious knowledge was really the idea that one needs a certain degree of moral maturity to understand religious truth. A simple analogy perhaps would be the idea that you start a baby off on milk and then you feed it stronger food. And the tractarians also thought that in keeping certain pieces of religious knowledge back until they felt people were sufficiently spiritually mature to understand them,

they thought it was actually going back to the way in which the early church behaved. Now, of course, from an evangelical point of view, this was seen as anathema. There was a lot of anxiety about what these... religious truths that were being held back were. What kind of secret teaching was going on here? And it was seen as very much opposed to the kind of evangelistic missionary feature that they would have naturally embraced. Can we move now to the social dimension of the Oxford movement?

The social issues they were interested in, the parish works that they proposed. Can you bring that into play with the Oxford Movement, Simon? Because we've been talking about theology. Sheridan has been told us that the same. it's the same class that the privilege, the elite, went to Oxford at the time. It was very much Oxford, Cambridge, which was in a different case, really, and so on. But what about the way that they pushed out into parishes? Is this because they are going pre-Reformation to do the work that the monasteries had done?

Yes, there's a lot of that. I mean, I think we can make a connection from the theology to the social thought. I mean, if one might perhaps crudely distinguish between an evangelical level of us on atonement back to individual, The atoning for personal sin. The evangelical worldview, evangelical theology constantly emphasizes the individual relationship with God. Tractarian theology emphasizes the doctrine of incarnation, the doctrine of the presence of God, the imminence of God in all men, and therefore the redemptive potential of everybody. And this kind of incarnational theology informs a collective sense of worship. It goes back to some of the points Francis was making earlier about Eucharistic communities.

And it puts the parish church as, as they put at the centre of our operations. The tractarians see the parish church and assert the parish church, both for political and for social purposes. Politically, it's a means of resisting the encroachment of secular agencies. If you don't like the new poor law, then you simply attempt to circumvent it by having a parish church and an offatory and dispensing our. with the clergyman in his parish as the hub of local philanthropy. Socially, it asserts the church's horizons. So you're getting away from Parliament and confessional ideals. You're asserting the church's physical edifice in communities with the parish church.

And in the parish churches, they have had a continuing, they had an influence which continues, didn't they, in actual formation of the churches themselves, what they did with the pews and so on. Pues are a very telling feature of the movement's social outlook, and I think there's a vast amount of literature on the tractarian sort of pastoral legacy. And certainly I think the preeminent physical change within parish churches in the 19th century is the sweeping away of old box pews to open sittings.

We now speak of pews, we think of lines. Before the early 19th century, the great majority of parish churches would have box pews, many of them with armorial insignia, even locks, high walls so that you could sleep without the preacher seeing you. And what the Tractarians object to about that is that it imports into the church secular distinctions of rank, which ought to properly to be left in the porch. And what appeals to Tractarians about open sittings

is that it presents a spectacle of Christian fellowship to which the secular world can look to evolve. Can we turn to the big point, I sherdin, well, a big point, but that in 1845 Newman became the first Tractarian to convert. to Roman Catholicism and set a very important trend. What drove him or took him or what led him, probably the best word, to that? Well, I would say that he thought that the fullness of truth was to be found in Roman Catholic, and so he felt himself compelled to become a Roman Catholic,

that it wasn't a strategic decision, though, of course there is still violent controversy about this. But he was one of the first of more than 500 Anglican clergy who actually become Roman. Roman Catholics in the second half of the 19th century. So there is quite a big movement out of the Church of England into the Roman Catholic Church by Anglican clergy, influenced by Tractarianism. And this whole notion that the fullness of Catholic truth is to be found in the Roman Church is something which Newman justified in a very important book called an essay on the development of Christian doctrine in which he argued that the ideas of Christianity don't fall full blown from the new text.

Testament, but they took some centuries to reach their full formulation, so that, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity is really only defined in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era by the great councils of the church. And therefore, you wouldn't expect Roman Catholicism in the modern period precisely to be the image of the Christianity of the New Testament. What you would expect to find is the evidences of 19 centuries of life and life. growth upon it from that New Testament beginning. As Newman put it, to live as to change and to be perfect as to have changed often.

And he went on to say, well, growth is the only evidence of life. To show that Catholic Christianity is the true form of Christianity, you have to see the principle of change and growth within it and not simply appeal to the Christianity of the New Testament. Something fixed and unchanging. Francis, were the tractarian's the... are the most influential group in the Church of England. We would be better to see more appropriate

to see them as part of an increasing religious pluralism that grew in the 19th century. I would say so. I think one of the problems has been to see them as so important because in the end they were the victors. And history, of course, tends to be written by the victors. I mean, I would see their legacy as being the fact that they were very much responsible

for making the church what it became. But that really didn't happen until the early years of the 20th. century. Can you give a listener some idea what do you mean by making the Anglican Church what it became? Are you talking about dress and can you do, well you are? Yes, I'm talking about, give us a few concrete examples. I'm talking about the things which Simon has mentioned, what the church actually looks like when you go inside it, what the priest is wearing when you see him officiating, the general kind of tenor of worship, the use of

candles, incense, those sorts of things. They begin to move into the Anglican mainstream. that today you could say that mainstream Anglican churchmanship, central churchmanship, is actually very much akin to liberal Catholicism. So although W.J. Conibier said their noise was great in their numbers, their noise has proved to be quite compelling over the centuries. The noise has proved to be quite compelling, but Coni Beer was actually right. I mean, he says in 1853 that there were about 1,000 tractarian clergy within 18,000. That was the total number of Angerian.

the conclurgy at that point. Can we talk now about the bringing the Irish, the Irish immigration and the Irish bill? What effect that had on the movement of Catholicism in the 19th century and the movement towards it? Sheridan Gilly. Well, there were always about, there were already about 300,000 Irish immigrants in England by 1841. And then there was the Irish famine in which more than a million Irish people died and more than a million migrated mostly to North America, but some of them came to England. And so by 1851 there were over half a million of these Irish people. And the great majority of them lived in London or Lancashire or other industrial towns

in northern England. And they were, for the most part, the poorest of the poor. They were crowded into the new urban industrial slums. And the English Roman Catholic Church had this enormous task of actually ministering to them and in 1850 the Pope restored the English Roman Catholic hierarchy under a Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster with a dozen dioces and bishops primarily to care for these native Irish Catholics. On the other hand, the growth of the Tractarian movement in Oxford opened up to the Roman Catholic Church, the distant prospect of the conversion of England.

Every Anglican cleric who became a Roman Catholic was rejoiced over as a sign that the conversion of England was around the corner and so there was always an element of ambiguity in the English Roman Catholic Church's understanding of itself was it essentially ministering to and reclaiming Irish Catholics or was it actually attempting to convert English Protestants especially through this Pinser movement or Trojan horse with its Catholicizing tendencies within the Church of England.

The mention of the Archbishop of Westminster being brought back or brought into the country, Simon Skinner, brings us to William Gladson, who had been a tractarian. He was a friend of Henry Manning who became Archbishop of Westminster. So we're back. How did it affect his politics and his view of the state church, Gladstons? Glatins is an almost literally singular and very dramatic response. I think you can really conceive of the high church responses to the crisis in church and state in three ways. And in a sense, we've covered two of them.

And the third is Gladstone. The first for all the fireworks surrounding conversion is to stay put. The number of the converts is small compared to those tractarians who simply go on raging against the dying of the light. And as nail after nail is hammered into the lead of the confessional coffin, Jerusalem, bishopric, educational pluralism, divorce, reform, Jewish relief, up to it including the admission of an atheist, Bradlaugh, into Parliament in 1880s. The majority of the Tractarian rank and file simply go on contending, nourished as they are by centuries of Anglican apologetic, which emphasises forbearance, suffering, obedience, resignation, trial and so forth. The second response is conversion,

which we've discussed. That's an obvious way out of what some Tractarians perceive indissolubly to be the church's judicial captivity. The third, though, is someone like Gladstons. And what Gladstone comes to feel by the mid-1840s, and he in the 1830s is really a sort of down-the-line exponent of the old confessional ideal, is that to secure freedom of religious practice for oneself, to secure your own confessional faith against what a state in the wrong hands might do,

you first have to extend freedom of religious practice to others. And that becomes absolute crucible towards the political liberalism of which he has, of course, the principal architect in the later 19th century. And so the idea of the closed shop, as it were, or the

monopoly, or the Parliament being the true sign-out of the Church of England, is broken up very dramatically under him, as he well. That's true. And of course he lives in the heart of non-conformist North Wales as well. So he is an unusual

figure, of course, and that he is intensely interested in ecclesiastical matters, takes a huge interest in Episcopal appointments, and yet is leading a party, which is increasingly relying on non-conformist support, and he, in many ways, embodies the non-conformist conscience as well. Can we finally come back to Cardinal Newman, who is considered to be a very important and influential theologian? How significant do his writings now seem to be to you, Chowdun? Well, it seems to me that he left a tremendous problem to the Church of England in declaring that Protestantism was no essential part of the Anglican tradition because there are great many Anglicans who still actually believe that.

But it seems to me that his main legacy is actually within Roman Catholicism. And it could even be described as a liberal legacy in the sense that he stressed as a Roman Catholic, the need for looking to conscience in religious matters, He said he would toast the Pope, yes, but he would toast conscience first. Second, he argued that the theologian has an important place within the church, as well as church authority and what he called the worshipping office of the laity. That is to say that the thinkers of the church have their rightful place in the discussion of the doctrine of the church. And that, of course, means a measure of academic freedom.

And finally, Simon's going to? You started the programme by referring to Newman's importance. as a theologian, and I think that's irreducibly true. I think, however, its attention to the movement in its cultural, social, literary context, also Newman's importance as a controversialist goes wider than simply as theological deposit. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thanks to Francis Knight, Sheridan Gilly, and Simon Skinner. Our next week on, we'll be talking about the development of immunisation

and the successful battle against smokebox. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 Podger. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio four.