Clerical marriage and pastoral character: Old High Church v. Tractarians

Article 32 - Of the Marriage of Priests - may appear to be a rather unusual place to detect a rupture between Tractarianism and the Old High Church tradition.  Most Tractarian parish clergy, after all, were married.  That said, Tract XC did suggest a rather strained interpretation of the Article, suggesting that the Church "has power did she choose, to take from [clergy] this discretion, and to oblige them ... to celibacy": the very thing, of course, that Article 32 denied.

The influence within Ritualist circles of a Roman model of a celibate priesthood is seen in the account given in In This Sign Conquer, a history of the Anglo-Catholic priestly fraternity, the SSC.  While the SSC, despite debates on making celibacy necessary for membership, did not take this path, a preference for celibacy is seen in the 'White Rule' (for celibate members) established by the fraternity at its outset.

In his 1871 An Explanation of the Thirty-Nine Articles,  Alexander Forbes, influential Tractarian and Scottish Episcopalian bishop, pushed matters somewhat further than Tract XC:

The Church of England has, as yet, left this, as well as other matters relating to the soul, purely to the consciences of individuals.  It leans to the celibate; it does not enjoin it.  But as men's souls are stirred more and more by the Spirit of God, it must be, that celibacy, among men too, and especially whom those whom God calls to the priesthood, will become a recognized religious vocation.  Wise will be her course, if she follows the Apostle's advice, and, without limiting the freedom he admitted, directs her sons, as the more excellent way, to that which he chose.

Just how significant a break this was with the Old High Church tradition is seen in Browne's conclusion to his commentary on Article 32:

the charities of wedded life have been as profitable to the married as the asceticism of single life can have been to the unmarried priesthood.

Browne here stands within a long and noble Anglican tradition of receiving clerical marriage as gift to be celebrate, rather than a grudging concession from "the more excellent way".  In Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700, Diarmaid MacCulloch notes how the clergy of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana "cheerfully celebrated their family lives".  The example he particularly points to is Jeremy Taylor:

[he] spoke from enjoyable experience of marriage when he spoke of children in one of his many marriage sermons: 'no man can tell', he said, 'but he that loves children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so may litle emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society'.  In what was surely a conscious refutation of Cardinal Bellarmine's catechism ..., Bishop Taylor commented in another of his sermons that 'Single life makes men in one instance to be like angels, but marriage in very many things make the chaste pair to be like Christ' ... One cannot imagine a bishop of the Counter-Reformation entertaining his flock with such rhapsodies.

What Taylor celebrated in his preaching, Wordsworth would later celebrate in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets.  In the significantly named 'Pastoral Character', Wordsworth points to the parsonage:

A Genial hearth, a hospitable board,
And a refined rusticity, belong
To the neat mansion, where, his flock among,
The learned Pastor dwells.

Yes, Wordsworth does not explicitly mention wife and family here, but it is very difficult indeed to imagine that he was not envisaging the married Parson at that "genial hearth" and "hospitable board", in that "neat mansion".  There is something of it too in the emphasis of the Parson dwelling "his flock among": not set apart from the laity as a different caste, but sharing in the same domestic obligations and joys.

Clerical marriage and clerical families had become a celebrated, and much loved part of Anglicanism's native piety.  Not grudgingly tolerated, not regarded as an inferior state to clerical celibacy, but a joyful experience for priest and parishioners alike, part of the "refined rusticity" of a distinctly Anglican Pastoralism.

Amongst the successors to the Oxford Movement, however, this native piety was abandoned.  Rather than celebrating clerical marriage with Taylor and Wordsworth, Forbes looked to a very different ecclesial landscape, embodying a very different piety:

Since the Reformation, a more careful training of the future clergy has guarded those who would be guarded from that knowledge of sin, which increases tenfold the difficultie of continence when the trial-time comes.  "They are as pure as angels," said a French bishop of his seminarists.

In his praise for the Tridentine seminary system, the Tractarian Forbes demonstrated the rupture which occurred post-1833, a rejection of an abiding characteristic of Anglicanism's native piety and pastoral character. It was a rejection, however, inevitably doomed to never take root in the native soil of Anglicanism. The successors to Forbes are, perhaps, the best examples of this.  Contrary to his insistence about clerical celibacy being "the more excellent way", the numerous married Anglo-Catholic bishops, priests, and deacons suggests otherwise.  Notwithstanding birettas and chasubles, on this matter they are much more the traditional High Church parson than the Ritualist priest.

(The painting is 'Somerset Parsonage' by contemporary artist Francis Farmar.  The cartoon is taken from - forgive the irony - The Catholic Herald.)