A counterfactual: what if there had been no Movement of 1833?

The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of "National Apostasy." I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833 - John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua.

In his defence of counterfactuals ('what if' scenarios of history), historian Niall Ferguson states "what actually happened was often not the outcome which the majority of informed contemporaries saw as the most likely: the counterfactual scenario was in that sense more 'real' to decision-makers at the critical moment". As such, careful and cautious exploration of counterfactuals can be justified, for they are "the many unrealised, but plausible, alternatives".

On the morning of 14th July 1833, it would have been very surprising indeed if anyone in the Church of England could have predicted the significance later attributed to the Assize Sermon preached by the Reverend John Keble, in St. Mary's, Oxford. It was a typical High Church Tory sermon from the years of the 'constitutional revolution' of 1827-32. We have no reason to believe that Keble had any intention of initiating an ecclesiastical movement by means of this sermon. 

Keble's Assize sermon was one of a number of High Church 'national apostasy' sermons preached during and following the years of the 'constitutional revolution' in the United Kingdom. There was little, if anything, which distinguished Keble's sermon from those delivered by other High Church figures. There was, in other words, no inevitability to Newman regarding Keble's sermon as the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Other contingencies also come to mind. What if Newman had died when ill in Sicily in 1833? Or what if, as a result of his illness, he had returned to England not desiring controversy, becoming parson in Littlemore in 1833? What if Keble's sermon remained just one more High Church Tory blast against the Whigs? What, in other words, if there had been no Movement of 1833?

If this had been so, however, it remains the case that the Church of England and Anglicanism would have experienced considerable change during the 19th century. Even without the Oxford Movement, the appearance and liturgy of Georgian parish church would not have gone unchanged. The cultural context would, almost certainly, have stimulated and encouraged significant changes in High Church and Orthodox circles. This was already evident in Keble's The Christian Year. As Nockles notes, Keble's poetry was a "harnessing of the force of Romanticism ... spiritually liberating for High Churchmanship". The influence of Romanticism would have continued to drive Gothic Revivalism: neo-Gothic church architecture, chancels, reredos, and stained glass would still have emerged and been popularly received. 

Likewise, the enormous popularity of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) and his other historical novels, with similar themes in Disraeli's Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847), reflected a cultural context in which Gothic, medievalism, and what Nockles describes as "moral Toryism" - with its critique of the utilitarian, commercial order - would still have been influential, leading popular Anglican opinion to embrace architectural and liturgical changes.

The fact that similar 'High Church revivals' were experienced in German, Danish, and Swedish Lutheranism, shaped by the teachings and practices of of Wilhelm Loehe and N.F.S. Grundtvig (both of whom died in 1872, shortly after Keble's death and a decade before Pusey), points to the likelihood of the emergence of a renewed expression of the High Church tradition, restating characteristic English High Church convictions on more frequent reception of the Sacrament, baptismal regeneration, the importance of the liturgy, reading the Fathers, and apostolic order. 

There were very significant resources within the pre-1833 High Church tradition which would have enabled this.  To take but one example, consider words from the Irish High Church figure John Jebb - made Bishop of Limerick in 1822, died 1833 - in 1815:

Therefore, in the judgment of our church, - next to the habitual recollection of our baptismal covenant, the devout participation of the holy eucharist, the affectionate study of the sacred volume, and that which necessarily pervades each and all of them, constant and fervent prayer, - we are called to the contemplation of the Christian cloud of witnesses, as, after those paramount means of grace, the holiest and happiest occupation in which we can be engaged.

Not only does this extract demonstrate the self-serving inaccuracy of the Tractarian critique of the 'Two Bottle Orthodox', it also clearly points to how the tradition would have been quite capable - in a manner very akin to Loehe and Grundtvig - of providing resources for a renewed sacramental vision in 19th century Anglicanism.

Alongside a renewed High Church vision of the sacramental order, an openness to liturgical and ritual change was also evident within what would become - in contrast to the Tractarians - the Old High tradition. Samuel Horsley, one of the most influential High Churchmen of the Georgian era (Bishop of St David's, Rochester, and then St Asaph, d.1806), heaped praise on the Scottish Communion Office:

With respect to the two Offices for England and Scotland, I have no scruple in declaring to you ... that I think the Scotch Office more conformable to the primitive models, and in my private judgment more edifying than that which we now use; insomuch that were I at liberty to follow my own private judgment I would myself use the Scotch Office in preference.

Here was a strain of pre-1833 High Church thought looking to 1549 eucharistic rite and, perhaps, open to the possibility of a future revision sharing characteristics with 1549 and the Scottish rite.

In 1837, Richard Mant, another Irish High Church figure and then Bishop of Down and Connor, published hymns from the Roman Breviary for devotional use. This, Mant stated, reflected that members of the United Church of England and Ireland "are blessed in being members of our part of Christ's Holy Catholick and Apostolick Church". Nockles points to significant evidence in pre-1833 High Churchmanship of a willingness to promote renewed ritual and ceremonial approaches.  George Croft's 1786 Bampton Lectures, he states, "called for the reintroduction of a richer ceremonial into Church of England worship".  In 1825, High Churchman Johnson Grant urged greater use of iconography.  It was "Hackney High Churchmen" who "strove to enforce rubrical observance as early as the 1810s and 1820s", while "the ritual controversy of the 1840s had little direct connection with Tractarianism, but was the product of the long-standing efforts of the High Church bishops, Blomfield and Phillpotts, to enforce the rubrics". It was Blomfield, Phillpotts, and Mant who were also the chief voices urging preaching in the surplice rather than the gown. 

Philip Barrett's account of the changes in worship in English cathedrals in the 19th century references more frequent celebration of the Eucharist, with Archbishop Vernon Harcourt of York - who stood very much in the tradition of Old High bishops, very far removed from Tractarian ideals - requiring weekly celebrations in York Minster from 1841. Similarly, weekly celebrations were to be found in Canterbury and Durham by 1843, considerably before Tractarian influence was felt in cathedrals. Standards of cathedral choral services significantly improved throughout the century, processions became common, and seasonal altar frontals became the norm. It was Randall Davidson - again, not standing within the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic tradition - who, when Bishop of Winchester in 1900, declared "Never, I suppose, in its long history, has the saying or singing of the public offices in our cathedral church been more reverent, more orderly, more careful, more cultured in their harmonies that it is today". The contribution of the Oxford Movement to this renewal of cathedral worship was minimal, drawing as it did on older High Church traditions, supported by a more broadly based constituency.

This is also seen in the matter of vestments. Old High, non-Tractarian Christopher Wordsworth (Bishop of Lincoln) was wearing a cope for ordinations in 1882, as was the moderate High Churchman Mandell Creighton (then Bishop of Peterborough) by 1892. Wordsworth's 1875 Inquiry on Ritual in his diocese provides evidence of a broadly-based support for moderate ritual that was numerically far more dependent on the Old High and moderate High Church traditions than on Anglo-catholics. With a majority of clergy in his diocese supporting the legality of the eastward position, and a large minority (over 40%) stating that the use of eucharistic vestments was permissible, the Old High Wordsworth set out what he regarded as "a peaceful solution of our present difficulties":

being desirous that a disruption may be averted, which would be disastrous to the State as well as to the Church, I cannot hesitate to declare my agreement with the majority of the Clergy of the Diocese, who have expressed their wish that the position of the Celebrant in saying the Prayer of Consecration might be lawfully regarded as an open question.

... the vestments are permitted by law and ought not to be prohibited, at the same time that they readily allow that the vestments ought not to be introduced by any Minister except under careful control, and with the goodwill of his flock. Now that the surplice has become not only the usual attire of the Clergy in preaching, but also is a common vestment of laymen and boys in Parish choirs, there seems to be good reason for such sentiments as these.

Perhaps most interesting result in the survey, however, was strong support - which statistically must have included the vast majority of those supporting both these developments - for a declaration from Convocation regarding the eastward position and eucharistic vestments: 

this allowance does not imply any sanction, either direct or indirect, of any doctrine at variance with the formularies of the Church of England, as settled at the Reformation, and as contained in the Book of Common Prayer; and that all doctrines repugnant to those formularies are disclaimed and rejected by those by whom such allowance is made.

Here was an Old High native pride in the reformed Church of England and the Elizabethan Settlement, contrasting with Tractarian rejection of the Reformation; Old High joy in the Book of Common Prayer, contrasting with Anglo-catholic use of the Canon of the Mass. The Old High commitment to Prayer Book and Reformation settlement, in other words, was judged to be perfectly compatible with eastward position and eucharistic vestments. Indeed, it provided a more coherent theological and historical case for such ritual as an organic development rather than a rupture which signalled a rejection of the Reformation.

What is more, as Herring points out, Keble and other leading Tractarians were "deeply suspicious" of ritual developments, while Nockles notes that the Tractarian leadership was unconcerned with ritual and ceremonial matters beyond "the Laudian ideal of uniformity and order". Architectural, ceremonial, and ritual changes emerged from Camdenite and Ecclesiologist circles, which had support from a wider High Church constituency and roots in a cultural context far broader than Tractarianism. In fact, it was the identification of later 19th century advanced Anglo-catholicism with these developments which rendered them considerably more controversial than may have otherwise been the case.

What if there had been no Movement of 1833? There is a very strong case for suggesting that the 19th century would have seen a 'High Church revival' without the Oxford Movement. Sacramental theology and practice, liturgy, ceremony, patristics, apostolic order: the combination of existing High Church sources and a cultural context shaped by Romanticism, Gothic revivalism, and 'moral Toryism' would have been fertile soil for such a High Church revival.

As already indicated, there are also grounds for proposing that this would have been considerably less divisive and controversial than Tractarianism.  Jebb's work quoted above, although first published in 1815, was republished in 1839, as the Tracts began to abandon what Froude dismissed as "Tract Protestantism". The preface to the work notes:

This treatise was printed in 1815, at the end of the author's sermons, before he was raised to the bench of bishops. The reader will observe that this was previous to the outcry which has (strange to say) been raised within the pale of the Church of England, against the reformation, and against those men, who proved in flames their sincerity in that work.

This recognition that the Tractarians had turned against the Reformation (and there is no doubt at all that by 1839 they had certainly had done so) not only compromised and weakened the High Church tradition, it also cast a long shadow over architectural and ceremonial developments that had little or no relationship to the Oxford Movement. We might recall Pusey's statement to Bishop Tait in 1860, regarding Ritualism being denounced as 'Puseyism': "I am in this strange position, that my name is made a byword for that with which I have never had any sympathy ... especially any revival of disused vestments".

Without such controversy, it is possible that a more orderly, peaceful, organic approach to ritual and ceremonial development would have been seen in 19th century Anglicanism. This would also have had important implications for the native High Church traditions outside of England because of, as Nockles states, the "Movement's negative impact on the fortunes of the native High Church traditions". Without such a negative impact, the various native High Church traditions could - like the English Old High tradition, in the absence of the Oxford Movement - have encouraged High Church revivals without any sense that they were undoing the Reformation, and therefore have provided an organic approach to ritual developments. 

We might also tentatively suggest that a path to the 1927/28 revision of the Prayer Book in England could have been much less controversial if it was seen as the product of a High Church revival at ease with and supportive of the Reformation settlement, rather than an attempt to undermine that settlement.

There would have been no entirely implausible reading of the Articles by Tract XC, but there still would have been an All Saints', Margaret Street; no English Missal, but there would have been eastward position and vestments; no Benediction (a Tridentine innovation), but there still would have been reverent and more frequent celebration and reception of the Sacrament; no Tridentine devotions, but there still would have been Harvest Thanksgiving, and Nine Lessons and Carols (popular liturgical developments that came from within the moderate High Church tradition); no use of the Roman Breviary, but there still would have been 'O come, O come Emmanuel' and other ancient seasonal hymnody. 

The Anglicanism of this counterfactual might, of course, seem rather familiar. It is the Anglicanism that many of us know: a moderately High Church, Prayer Book Catholic Anglicanism that the early Tractarians (some of whom were influential representatives of the Old High tradition) would have joyfully welcomed. This is an Anglicanism of the native High Church traditions, that casts no longing looks across the Tiber, and is firmly rooted in the Book of Common Prayer. And it is the Anglicanism that shares much in common with the High Church characteristics of Nordic Lutheranism. Like the Scandinavian Lutheran churches, it understands itself to be a reformed catholicism, as seen in the words of the Porvoo Common Statement:

The faith, worship and spirituality of all our churches are rooted in the tradition of the apostolic Church. We stand in continuity with the Church of the patristic and medieval periods both directly and through the insights of the Reformation period. We each understand our own church to be part of the One, Holy, Catholic Church of Jesus Christ and truly participating in the one apostolic mission of the whole people of God. We share in the liturgical heritage of Western Christianity and also in the Reformation emphases upon justification by faith and upon word and sacrament as means of grace. 

The counterfactual draws us to qualify and nuance the influence of the Oxford Movement, and to recognise the significance of other High Church sources and cultural trends in 19th century Anglicanism, too frequently overshadowed by Anglican accounts of that century. It emphasises Anglicanism's similarity with the Nordic Lutheran tradition, a theme known to both Laudians and the 18th century High Church tradition: this would have been an important source for 19th century High Church revival, without the patronising dismissal of such Lutheran churches by the Tractarians. And it suggests how the ordinary parish church at the end of the Georgian era would still, without the Oxford Movement, become the ordinary parish church at the end of the Victorian era, with its candles on the altar, decorative reredos, priest wearing a stole (or perhaps a chasuble), assuming the eastward position without controversy, weekly early celebrations of the Eucharist, modest ceremonial, stained glass, Choral Matins, and hymnody. 

If there had been no Movement of 1833, Anglicanism would still have had that which was positive from the 19th century, and what had been desired by the early Tracts, but without the same levels of controversy and division, without the historical and theological incoherence of denying that Anglicans belong to Churches of the Reformation, and without claims and practices that would have shocked John Keble if he had been able to glimpse them when entering the pulpit on 14th July 1833.