The Tractarians
This is the tenth of a series of articles describing formative movements and ideas in the history of the church. These were the crises of thought and conviction which brought us to where we are.
What has been referred to as the Oxford Movement or Tractarianism - the main nucleus of support was within the University of Oxford and its ideas were published between 1833 and 1841 in the ninety volumes of The Tracts for the Times - was, together with Evangelicalism, one of the main catalysts for theological change within the Church of England, and other Anglican churches, during the nineteenth century. Tractarianism began as a response to the concerns of some of the younger Anglican high churchmen in the 1820s that political and religious reform was threatening the stability of the church-state relationship as it had been conceived in the seventeenth century and had largely operated since that date. The British Isles had never had complete religious uniformity since the Reformation and a degree of toleration of religious minorities had always existed. During the eighteenth century religious minorities obtained even greater freedom of worship but they did not have full political rights. Public office could only be held by those that were prepared to communicate in the established churches. Successive governments had maintained close relationships with these established churches and used them to promote public morality, education and social welfare. The decision to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts in 1828, thus admitting Protestant dissenters to political office, and the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, were seen to be undermining the traditional relationship between church and state and the role that the established churches had performed in sharing to some extent in the government of the nation. The aim of the Tractarians was to remind the United Church of England and Ireland that it was not just a creature of the state but that it had rights and privileges that governments needed to respect. Tractarians were therefore keen to promote ideas that emphasised the links between the contemporary church and its predecessors, and that made clear the divine institution of its ministry. They moved on from this to argue that the independence of the church had been, to an extent, compromised by the nature of the Protestant Reformation and that it was the duty of the church to seek to recover some of the attributes of the pre-Reformation church. In doing so they were joining other pressure groups that saw in the Middle Ages a society that was very different from, and somewhat preferable to, their own.
The leaders of the Oxford Movement were very diverse in their backgrounds. Tractarianism attracted some traditional high churchmen such as John Keble, author of a popular collection of religious poems, The Christian Year, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. It also attracted a number of distinguished Oxford scholars such as the Regius Professor of Hebrew, Edward Bouverie Pusey. Pusey was one of the first people in England to be interested in the liberal ideas of the German biblical critics but he abandoned these to promote Tractarian views. Several former Evangelicals, dissatisfied with what they felt were the limitations of Evangelical theology, also became Tractarians. Chief among them, and the acknowledged leader of the Tractarian party before he became a Roman Catholic in 1845, was John Henry Newman, a Canon of the University Church in Oxford.
Although the early Tractarians were keen to demonstrate their continuity with high churchmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and republished their works in The Library of Anglo Catholic Theology, they quickly departed from traditional high church orthodoxy in a number of key areas. Whereas older generations of Anglican high churchmen had always regarded themselves as Protestants and had maintained good relations with other Protestant churches, Tractarians emphasised the importance of episcopal succession and were not willing to collaborate with non-episcopal Protestants. They therefore objected to the proposal to create a joint Anglican Lutheran bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841. Anglican high churchmen had always emphasised the doctrine of the real presence in the eucharist but preferred not to define it too closely. Tractarians promoted a doctrine of the real presence which was much closer to that held by Roman Catholics. They also laid much more emphasis on the value of private confession to a priest. There had always been provision for this in The Book of Common Prayer but it was seen as an exceptional practice, before death or when someone was in spiritual turmoil. Tractarians saw private confession as a regular part of a disciplined spiritual life, which might also involve fasting and other physical mortifications of the body.
By the end of the 1830s many Tractarians were forming alliances with groups known as ecclesiologists. They were people who wanted to build new churches, and restore existing ones, in a manner which replicated the Gothic art and architecture of the Middle Ages. This alliance between Tractarian theology and ecclesiology had produced by the 1840s the phenomenon known as ritualism. This began...
very modestly with the placing of a cross and candlesticks on the altar, vesting choirs in surplices and placing them in stalls in the chancel, preaching in a surplice rather than a black gown, and celebrating Holy Communion in front of the altar. In due course, during the 1850s and 1860s, some churches began to introduce even more ceremonial into the services, including the use of lighted candles, vestments and incense. Many Anglicans, not just Evangelicals and liberals but some high churchmen as well, opposed these innovations. In 1874 the Public Worship Regulation Act was passed to prevent the growth of ritualism but it proved ineffective. The number of ritualist churches increased considerably during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and practices, such as the introduction of surpliced choirs, once regarded as extreme, became normal in Anglican churches.
Kent was one of those parts of England that was deeply influenced by Tractarianism from the earliest days of the Oxford Movement. There were early Tractarian ministries at Basted, Chislehurst, East Farleigh and Gravesend, all of which were the focus of much correspondence in the local press. By the 1860s Folkestone was beginning to rival Brighton as a centre of ritualist activity on the south coast and the vicar of St Peter’s, C J Ridsdale, was the first clergyman to be prosecuted under the Public Worship Regulation Act. Another, Arthur Tooth of St James’, Hatcham, went to prison rather than obey the directions of the court to abandon his ceremonial practices. Several churches in the county, such as Bicknor and Kildown, were early examples of Anglican churches designed to implement the ideas of the ecclesiologists. By the end of the nineteenth century the diocese of Canterbury, which covered the eastern half of Kent, was, after those of Truro and London, the English diocese in which the largest number of churches had adopted the use of the eastward position at Holy Communion, lighted candles on the altar, the mixing of water with wine in the chalice, and eucharistic vestments. Churches in the Rochester diocese, covering the western half of Kent, had been less willing to adopt these ceremonial innovations but the statistics for the diocese still exceeded the diocesan average for England and Wales as a whole.
There is no doubt that, substantially as a result of Tractarianism, Anglicanism was very different at the end of the nineteenth century from what it had been at the beginning. The principal changes and developments can be summarised as follows:
1. The Anglican churches saw themselves no longer as just one of the branches of Protestantism but as churches with a distinct theology that provided the bridge between Catholicism and Protestantism. This had a clear impact on ecumenical relations. It reinforced the Anglican contempt for Protestant dissent, which had been growing throughout the eighteenth century, and led to an unseemly rivalry which lasted until well into the twentieth century. Anglicans became less interested in other foreign Protestant churches and more interested in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Lack of a positive response from both led to a reassessment of these attitudes and by the early twentieth century Anglicans had established close relations with non-Roman Catholic churches that had preserved episcopacy such as the Dutch Old Catholics and the Swedish Lutherans. However, the desire of many Anglicans to distance themselves from their Protestant past made them pursue limited ecumenical initiatives with non-Protestant churches at the expense of potentially more successful ones with other Protestants.
2. The theological unity of Anglicanism, still apparent in the early nineteenth century, was shattered and fragmented by the combined impact of Evangelicalism and Tractarianism on Anglican theology. Most Anglican churches became institutions prone to party bickering between different theological pressure groups. This is a situation that still exists today and looks unlikely to be resolved. In the last twenty years divisions between church parties which had their roots in the nineteenth century have resulted in major disputes within the world-wide Anglican Communion over the ordination of women to the priesthood and attitudes to homosexuality.
3. On the positive side, Tractarianism brought a richness to Anglican worship very different from the long and tedious services which had characterised the pre-Tractarian church. However, ceremonial changes were, in other respects, as divisive as theological developments and they have made Anglicanism very much more congregational than it used to be. Nevertheless these changes in worship allowed Anglicanism to develop a liturgical authority which has made a positive contribution to the modern liturgical movement and encouraged churches of very different traditions to borrow liturgical ideas from one another.
4. The concerns that Tractarians raised about the nature of the church-state relationship in the British Isles led to a gradual separation between the two institutions which has given the church a much greater degree of control over its doctrine, its worship and the way in which it operates within society. The gradualist nature of these changes, despite pressure for more radical change at various points of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has enabled them to happen in a way in which Christianity has not been totally marginalized in a growingly secularist society, in stark contrast to the way that it has to a much greater extent in parts of Europe where anti-clericalist movements were much stronger. Tractarians helped to promote a new image of a more confident and independent church, less reliant on the protection of the state, but one which still recognised that it was worth maintaining the benefits of partnership.
Nigel Yates