Oxford Movement

Of decisive importance to the religion of the English - no doubt, not to their philosophy, perhaps not so markedly to their apprehension of Christian doctrine. The mind of the Oxford Movement is not a mind which can be best studied or examined by asking for its philosophical conclusions (if any); even though at least two of its principal thinkers had the training and the makings of a philosopher. Nor can it best be studied or examined by asking for a list of its doctrinal propositions -for example, by observing that its leaders at first suspected the doctrine that saints should be invoked in prayer.

The Oxford men did not affirm, that which helps men to be saints must be true. But they had much sympathy with the proposition, and would probably have agreed that it contained more than a seed of truth. And in this modified sense, it is right to see the Oxford Movement as an impulse of the heart and the conscience, not an inquiry of the head. Certainly the principal changes which it brought in English life were changes in the mode of worship, or in the understanding of sanctity, or in the consequent methods of religious practice; and the changes of theological or philosophical thinking were by comparison less far-reaching.

Though the leaders were not so extreme in their antagonism to Reason as their opponents sometimes believed, the Oxford Movement was one part of that great swing of opinion against Reason as the Age of Reason had understood it and used it. Through Europe ran the reaction against the aridity of common sense, against the pride of rationalism. There is little in common, of religion, between Keble and Goethe, between Pusey and Victor Hugo. The scepticisms of Hume and Kant, the romantic poets or novelists, the new historians, the shock of Robespierre and the temple of reason, the evangelical or pietistic theologians, the desire to justify the past and to value tradition and history in the face of the critical cuts of rationalism - the revolt against Reason and "enlightenment" cannot rightly be seen in terms of a few simple forces.

But the Oxford Movement was part of this reaction. They wanted to find a place for the poetic or the aesthetic judgment; their hymnody shared in the feelings and evocations of the romantic poets; they wished to find a place and value for historical tradition, against the irreverent or sacrilegious hands of critical revolutionaries for whom no antiquity was sacred; they suspected the reason of common sense as shallow; they wanted to justify order and authority in Church as well as State.

But a political impetus does not create religious thought. It affords it opportunity, gives it point and purpose, establishes it as effective. The high Anglicanism of the Oxford Movement was not quite identical with the high Anglicanism which had existed for two hundred years and more. But the difference was not the result of the political crisis. The power of the Movement's religious ideas sprang from somewhere deeper in men's souls and minds than their contemporary ideas of ecclesiastical expediency.

Both these elements - an appeal to the Fathers as interpreters of Scripture, and a sacramentalism of nature and the world, into which the sacraments of the Church fitted easily - were to be fundamental to the mind of the Oxford Movement. From this background came Laud's quest for the "beauty of holiness", for altars 'in their old places, and protected by rails in a sanctuary; Andrewes' book of private prayers, wonderfully drawn from the ancient liturgies as well as from Scripture; Cosin's desire to utilize traditional ornaments in the chapel of Peterhouse or the cathedral at Durham.

When the men of the Oxford Movement claimed to be representing the "authentic" Anglican position in theology, they meant this. To them, Calvinism seemed by its history to have sacrificed any right which it might once have possessed, to be counted an authentic portion of the tradition.