Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England: Volume 1 (Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics)

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England

Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics EDITORS

Maurice Cowling G. R. Elton E. Kedourie J. G. A. Pocock J. R. Pole Walter UUmann

Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England MAURICE COWLING Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London

Cambridge New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http ://www. Cambridge. org © Cambridge University Press 1980 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1980 First paperback edition 2003 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 521 23289 9 hardback ISBN 0 521 54516 1 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2003

Foreword For help in checking references and in proof-reading, the author is indebted to Mr James Gale, Mr John Gale, Mr John Plowright and Mr John Parry. He is indebted to Mrs E. D. Beebe and Mrs J. G. W. Davies for typing, to the Cambridge History Faculty for a grant from its Political Science Fund, to Dr P. Hunter Blair, Mr W. A. Camps, Mr D. J. V. Fisher, Professor Michael Oakeshott, Mr Graeme Rennie, Mr E. Ray and Mr Hywel Williams for items of information, and to librarians in the Peterhouse and Cambridge University libraries (especially Mr G. W. Stannard) for help in tracing articles and books. He is indebted to Mrs A. J. Toynbee for permission to examine some of the Toynbee papers in the Bodleian Library and to Mrs R. G. Collingwood for permission to use, and to quote from, the papers of her late husband, also in the Bodleian. He is indebted to Mrs H. M. Dunn, the Fellows' Secretary at Peterhouse, and to Mrs Elizabeth Wetton and Mr Francis Brooke of the Cambridge University Press for their assistance in preparing the book for publication. For the index he is indebted to Mrs Ann Hall. Above all, he is indebted to the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse for continuing to provide conditions in which work can be done. For reading and commenting on parts of the book during the process of composition between 1976 and 1979, the author is grateful to Dr David Cannadine, Mr J. C. D. Clark, Professor Timothy Fuller, Mr Martin Golding, Dr Peter Linehan, Dr Roger Lovatt, Dr David Newsome, Sir Charles Pickthorn, the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell MP, Mr Geoffrey Scammell, Dr Roger Scruton, the Reverend Canon Charles Smyth, the Reverend John Sweet, Professor Walter Ullmann, Professor John Vincent and Mr Ian Willison. For reading and commenting on the whole book he is grateful to the Reverend Professor W. O. Chadwick, Professor G. R. Elton, Professor E. Kedourie, Mrs John Vincent and Mr B. H. G. Wormald. Some of those who have read parts or the whole of the book are themselves discussed in it. Such correction as they have suggested, however, has been about factual detail; they have not offered, and the

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author did not invite, criticism of his view of their significance. It is also the case that Dr Norman, whose writings are discussed in chapter 14, had no knowledge of the contents of chapter 14 until the book had gone to press and, in spite of being a friend and colleague, bears no responsibility for them. MAURICE COWLING

Peterhouse, Cambridge February 1980

Footnotes have been kept to a minimum, being normally biographies of persons mentioned in the text. The notes at the back of the book indicate the locations of all the quotations contained in the sections of the text to which they refer, as well as the sources from which the book has been constructed.

NOTE.

Contents Foreword Preface

page v xi I. PRELUDE

1 Whitehead 2 Toynbee

3 19 II. RECEPTIONS

3 Three Anglican Reactionaries 4 Eliot 5 Knowles

47 97 129

III. RECESSIONS

6 Collingwood 7 Butterfield 8 Oakeshott 9 Churchill

159 191 251 283

IV. RECOGNITIONS

10 11 12 13 14

Kedourie Waugh Salisbury Some Contemporary Doctrines I Some Contemporary Doctrines II

315 339 361 389 429

Epilogue

453

Notes Bibliography Index of main names

455 469 471

'The writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the working effective Church of a modern country.' Carlyle The Hero as Man of Letters 19 May 1840 in Lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship, Collins ed. p. 210. 'Renan . . . illustrates a problem which we have met in another context; whether the advance of learning outside the natural sciences . . . was identified so necessarily with the suspension of belief in anything (not merely belief in religion) that lack of commitment began itself to resemble a moral quality; or, to put it thus, that the detachment of mind, without which no historian could hope to come near to impartial treatment of the past, was elevated into a principle which might look as though it contained detachment from commitments necessary to the full life of a man, whether in politics, society, or ethics. Renan's mind showed how the ethical basis of scholarship in that age engendered vacillation, nostalgia, wish-fulfilment and then suspicion of wishfulfilment, perpetual questioning of the self and its judgement, at times (if he had worn his heart less frequently upon his sleeve) near to self-torment.' The Reverend Professor W. O. Chadwick The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century 1975 p. 218. *People are fully alive to the danger of superstition in priests - in course of time they will find out that . . . professors may be just as bad.' Robert, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury to Sir L. Mallet December 26 1876 in Smith (ed.) Lord Salisbury on Politics 1972 p. 19.

Preface The subject of this work is doctrine, and the doctrines it will discuss are the public doctrines which have been propagated in England in the last century and a half. A public doctrine adumbrates the assumptions that constitute the framework within which teaching, writing and public action are conducted. In England all participants in the public realm have had a doctrine, whether they have known it or not. Almost all of them have had a doctrine about England, whether the subjects they have written or talked about have been English or not. They have all had a message, whether they have wished to or not, and they have all implied views about the direction which the public mind ought to take. In England, public doctrine has emerged from a national consciousness, and the intention is to write its history since 1840. Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England will be an extensive work of which only one volume is being published at present. Volume I is a preliminary, an examination of the author's relation to the events of which the main work will provide a history, and a discussion of thinkers who have helped him to understand the significance of that history. This will not be either reminiscence or autobiography. On the one hand, it will describe the contours of a narrow mind. On the other, it will celebrate the enmities of some Christian Conservatives who have written in England in the twentieth century. From both angles, it will suggest a need to examine the role of religion in English public thought. The intellectual history of modern England has not of late been studied very adequately. There have been important studies of small subjects, but there have been few synthetic essays and there has been hardly any incandescence. It may be that incandescence has been missing because historians have forgotten, or have not yet understood, that the subject could be made to yield significant difficulties if it were approached properly. It is much more likely to be the case that incandescence is missing because the difficulties are too significant and too xi

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close for safety, and demand too embarrassing an invigilation of historians' assumptions, especially about religion. It is from religion that modern English intellectual history should begin. That it does not so begin - that it begins rather with the history of political, philosophical, literary, critical, aesthetic, economic or educational activity, or with religion considered as the history of theology or ecclesiastical history - registers historians' reluctance to give critical consideration to the culture to which they belong. In particular, it registers reluctance to consider the complicated connection between its professional academic character on the one hand and its secular, liberal character on the other. Secular and liberal may be used of learning which avoids Christian commitment; they may be used of learning which aims to replace Christian commitments by non-Christian ones. The division between the two uses is thin, and not all writers have understood it. Some of the most influential who have written in England in the last century and a half have failed signally to understand it - have failed to see that secularization, so far from involving liberation from religion, has involved merely liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand that it is a religion to which they are committed. It would be glib to say that in modern culture universities have replaced churches as repositories of Truth. But it is not glib to say that modern university education makes claims to Truth which historic Christianity made for itself, and that the academic university is a fragment from a larger culture in which learning was inseparable from religion. It is the liberation and professionalization of this fragment, and the development of a corporate interest among its guardians, that makes even the most sensitive insensitive to the arbitrariness of their foundations. What may be said of historical writing and of academic culture may be said more generally. In the modern world a mainly Christian culture has been replaced by a mainly post-Christian one. This is a momentous transformation. In approaching it, these volumes will dissolve the abstractions that mark subjects, professions or activities off from one another. They will treat monarchy, government, politics, art, science, medicine, philosophy, literature, technology, criticism, architecture, education, music, engineering, economics and so on, not as demonstrations of what their practitioners have claimed to be doing, but as

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evidence of what they think the English can be persuaded to believe. Whether attention is turned to Elgar or to Eddington, to Galsworthy or to Gladstone, to Pugin, to Patmore or to Plumb, and even when the works involved seem least religious in their content, they will be considered as answering the questions, what should the English believe? should they believe in Christianity? what role should religion play in the public realm? This may be judged an arbitrary undertaking, a rack on which to extract answers which the practitioners of public utterance did not wish to give. In fact more practitioners have given answers than it is normal to suppose, and many more have made gestures which leave their answers unmistakable. Some of the practitioners discussed in this work would have denied that their intention was doctrinal. Even when this is so, however, even when a practitioner assumes rather than states, assumes because he prefers not to state, or conceals a subversive or traitorous intention in stating, he may still be judged to have contributed to doctrine. Doctrine ought to mean a teaching that is formal, authorized and explicit. But in England such teaching can scarcely be said to exist. In England there is a sea of voices with a plurality of doctrines which are joined together by the liberal doctrine that plurality is desirable. In these circumstances even thinkers who avoid doctrine have a more doctrinal effect than they intend, and the history of doctrine must be nothing less than the whole history of the intelligentsia. In England the emergence of an extended intelligentsia has been a twentieth-century phenomenon. England, however, has not really had an alienated intelligentsia. The salient feature of the twentieth-century expansion has been not impotence or resentment, but a successful self-expression, which has been achieved through parliament, the civil service, the law, the media, the citizen army, the professions, science, literature and the universities. It is this that has led the way, providing an entry into every part of the nation's life and turning the nation's mind into a subject for experiment - an atom to be bombarded with whatever charges seem suitable. The ultimate aim must be to estimate the bombardment's effect. But it is necessary in the first place to consider its content. In this work the content is being considered as religion. A religion includes not only belief and liturgy but also a structure of public action. In English Christianity, all three have been established over so many centuries and at levels so deep that a sudden replacement

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would have been impossible. The facing may flake or be chipped away while the building remains. The time may come, however, when the building will crumble. Many modern thinkers are Christians in modern dress, but many more are not, and it seems likely that many more will not be in the future. If it cannot yet be said that Christianity has crumbled, it must certainly be judged to have suffered severe challenges as a public doctrine. To consider Christianity as a public doctrine is to pre-empt discussion of its character. Many of the writers who will be discussed in this volume have emphasized that Christianity ministers to the private personality; even when it has been ecclesiastical Christianity that they have had in mind, they have insisted that 'the gospel and the action of the Church is to individuals'. In this they have been right. It is an important Christian truth that this is so. But there is another truth which most of these writers have also understood - that the gospel and the Church will not be heard if the visible panoply of public power is directed towards Christianity's subversion. The present volume will discuss thinkers to whom the author is related intellectually. Some of these have had followings and reputations throughout the world: a few were scarcely known outside Cambridge. This is not, however, as incongruous as it may seem. Every thinker has his own narrowness. Behind every world-thinker there is a locality, and, since few thinkers address themselves at first to any locality but their own, few will be properly intelligible outside it. In this volume the universal messages that have been contributed to thought about the public function of religion by Whitehead, Toynbee, Eliot, Knowles, Collingwood, Butterfield, Oakeshott, Churchill, Waugh and Salisbury are made intelligible by appearing in the context from which they emerged: the context in which they and innumerable other thinkers around them were considering the fate and future of English Christianity. As an approach to these questions, volume I has been divided into four main parts. Prelude discusses Whitehead and Toynbee as exponents of a complicated type of modern, liberal latitudinarianism. Receptions describes three sorts of anti-liberal Christianity as they are to be found in the writings of some inter-war Cambridge thinkers, of T. S. Eliot, and of David Knowles when young. Recessions deals with Collingwood, Oakeshott, Butterfield and Churchill as subverters of

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the attitudes described in Receptions. Recognitions contains accounts of one Victorian (Salisbury), of Evelyn Waugh, of Edward Norman and Enoch Powell, and of a number of other writers who have contributed to Christian, or to religious, thought in the last two decades. The four-part division represents phases in the author's opinions. Whitehead and Toynbee describe the main items of furniture that he took to Cambridge with him as an undergraduate in 1943 along with the reactionary spiritual amoralism that he had derived, eclectically, from Belloc, Bergson, Shaw, Wordsworth, Macaulay and Carlyle. Three Anglican Reactionaries describes the polemical Anglicanism that cured him of Whitehead and Toynbee, and dismissed liberalism in general, in a year spent in Cambridge before the three and a half years of military service that were begun at the time of his eighteenth birthday. Eliot describes an influential variant of this type of Anglicanism, and Knowles a Christian doctrine that was important both in a second period as an undergraduate after military service, and in a period as a young don in the early 1950s. In certain negative respects Knowles provided a Roman Catholic version of the doctrine of Three Anglican Reactionaries: in other respects he acted as a Roman Catholic dissolvent. The doctrine was further dissolved in this period by the influences described in Butterfield, Oakeshott, Collingwood and Churchill. Butterfield had some points of contact with the Anglicanism of Three Anglican Reactionaries and other points of contact with Knowles. But he had a sect-type mind which, though illuminating about power, was residually suspicious of both power and ecclesiasticism, and, despite important negativities, broad Christian sympathies, and a virtual Anglicanism in later life, taught a revitalized Liberalism which gave little explicit encouragement either to Toryism or to the Church of England. Collingwood was as much the liberal embodiment of Oxford Greats as Toynbee had been, and presented, as fluently as Toynhee had done, an amalgamation of politics, history, theology and philosophy which carried with it many of the more questionable assumptions that had characterized Oxford Idealism from the 1870s onwards, Oakeshott had fought his own version of the battles which are described in Three Anglican Reactionaries but, by 1948, had developed a rational political Conservatism which showed little interest in religion and, so far as it did so, was attuned much more to latitudinarian, modernist or liberal Anglicanism than to the Anglicanism of the second half of that chapter. Churchill, whose intellectual importance derived

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from his role as a towering public figure, was a pessimist with roots in Darwinism, Science and the rationalistic enlightenment of Gibbon, Lecky and Winwood Reade. If the author had gone to Cambridge before 1939 or before the 1939 war had got under way, or if he had gone first at any time after 1945, he might have approached adult thinking through teachers who had been pre-war undergraduates. Going there in 1943 was significant for two reasons. First, because many younger dons having left for the war, he had no contact with dons who had been undergraduates in the 1930s. Second, because, that being so, he was blown by the last gust of a reactionary wind which, having been blowing on the intellectual young in the 1920s, had been blown back in the decade following by the progressive, psychoanalytical, para-marxist egalitarianism which had constituted the undergraduate movement of the thirties and which, when emasculated into average wisdom by association with victory over Hitler, was to exercise predominant influence on English public thought until the late 1960s. Having missed the fashion which was followed by the young in the 1930s, the author has always despised the anti-marxism which succeeded it. Marxism is not so much untrue as, for certain purposes and in limited respects, true and unimportant. The same may be said of Weberianism. Weber was an enemy of religion who concealed his enmity by considering religion as ideology. Religion can certainly be considered as ideology, and also as Freudian illusion, but it is emptied in the process and lost in a brutal reductionism. It is also the case that many of the defences of thought against reductionism that were made in England in the 1950s and 1960s were contaminated by effluent from Continental secularism. In the dominant English writers of that period and in their successors there have been moralism, social concern and a concern for human freedom. But there has been little irony (except, vulgarly, in Snow), and none of the subtlety that is essential to an intelligent religion. When Williams1 succeeded Leach2 in a symbolic stronghold, a crafty enmity 1. Bernard Williams (1929- ). Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge 196779, Provost of King's College 1979- . Author of Morality 1972, Problems of the Self 1973, (with J. J. C. Smart) Utilarianism; for and against 1973, and Descartes: The Agent of Pure Enquiry 1978. 2. Sir Edmund Leach (1910- ). Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge 1972-77. Provost of King's College 1966-79. Author of Rethinking Anthropology 1961, A Runaway World 1968, Genesis as Myth 1970, and Levi-Strauss 1970, etc.

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3

replaced a naive one. As Thomas, Skinner and Runciman experience middle-age, a cunning religious acerbity is as essential an antidote to them as anything that Bradbury4 and Sharpe5 can supply to the imperviousness, solemnity and ultimate triviality of the secular, professional academic intelligence. For as long as he can remember the author has hated these modes of thinking. He hated them when they were in the ascendant in the 1950s and is no nearer to liking them in the forms that they are taking now. He is more grateful than he can say to the Anglican apologists who enabled him to deduce from the doctrine that they presented in 1943 the conclusion that resentment is a duty. In 1943, Church-State Anglicanism was presented as political belief and religious observance, and as an instrument of intellectual correction. It also supplied an academic version of the temptation Waugh claimed to have been saved from by Roman Catholicism - the temptation to fall for the Church of England's mediaeval cathedrals and churches, the rich ceremonies that surround the monarchy, the historic titles of Canterbury and York, the social organization of the country parishes, the traditional culture of Oxford and Cambridge and the liturgy composed in the heyday of English prose style. Since 1953 this has receded. The author has experienced no recession in certainty about Christianity. But there has been a gap between assent and observance. There has been pain, or shame, and a pervasive embarrassment in recollection. There has been a sad sorrow about the condition of the Church of England and there has been a determination to avoid the enthusiasms of the past, including the confusing of 1. Keith Thomas (1933- ). Fellow of All Souls College Oxford 1955-57, and of St John's College Oxford 1957- . Reader in Modern History at Oxford 1978- . Author of Religion and the Decline of Magic 1971 etc. 2. Quentin Skinner (1940- ). Fellow of Christ's College Cambridge 1962- . Lecturer in History 1968-78 and Professor of Political Science 1978- . Author of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 2 vols. 1978. 3. The Hon. W. G. Runciman (1934- ). Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge 1959-63 and 1971- . Author of Plato's later Epistemology 1962, Social Science and Political Theory 1963, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice 1966, Sociology in its Place 1972 and A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science 1976. 4. For Malcolm Bradbury (1932- ) as secular enemy of the secular academic intelligence, see Eating People is Wrong 1959 and The History Man 1975. 5. For Tom Sharpe (1928- ) in the same role, see especially Sir Godber Evans in Porterhouse Blue 1974, and Dr Louth, the Oxford Leavisite, in The Great Pursuit 1977.

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Christianity with the enmities through which it had been approached in thefirstplace. Why Christianity should not include enmities, how in the modern world it could exist without them, has not been the primary consideration. The primary consideration has been disappointment on discovering that the Christianity which had supplied a stimulus to thought was a polemical flag masking a religious void which no amount of excitement could conceal. Polemical excitement produced two books in the 1960s, Mill and Liberalism and The Nature and limits of Political Science, which were hangovers from the excitements of the 1940s. As polemical excitement gave way to cynical deflation, it came to be a problem to know what could be said about Christianity in a modern context. In Inge, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky it seemed that something important had been said. But Dostoievsky wrote out of disorder; Kierkegaard's Christianity was a call to privacy; Hegel's Philosophy of Religion absorbed Christianity into philosophy; and Inge, who was a brilliant publicist and had a sensible doctrine about the Church of England, had wrapped it in a mysticism that was as woolly as Toynbee's. If the two writers who are discussed first in Recognitions seemed more relevant, this was because, though neither was an Anglican and one was not even a Christian, both had found ways of writing without woolliness or embarrassment about the fate of religion in face of modernity; while the challenge which Salisbury had presented to latitudinarianism in the 1860s not only made him a better embodiment than Eliot of what two out of the Three Anglican Reactionaries would have meant if they had understood his significance, but had also produced the most articulate, disillusioned and eloquent delineation of a public doctrine that modern Anglicanism has yet had. As a child, the author was not really introduced to Anglicanism. His mother went to church occasionally, but she did not go often when he was young and he did not often go with her. His father believed in God but not in organized religion. He believed in education as both social ladder and cultural enrichment. He was also a pessimist and an admirer of Winwood Reade's book, The Martyrdom of Man. His piety was of a rational, socially uneasy, politically Conservative antichurch type which was very common amongst thoughtful people in the lower-middle-class London suburbs. At school - a surburban day school which was evacuated from

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London in 1939 - there were daily assemblies and Cadet Corps church parades, but there were no clergymen and there was no suggestion that any church was significant. The most significant master claimed to be a mystic, but his mysticism was a romantic mysticism about Nature. The author, too, was a romantic, about Laud and the Stuarts, about rural society, and about the silent devotion with which recusant families had preserved the faith from Waugh's Campion onwards. These were fantasies. The only religion he encountered was as an evacuated schoolboy in the home of a Salvation Army mother and spinster daughter and in a bank manager's house in the middle of Hertford from which he went to the parish church. Being ready for both reaction and religion, he found them in Cambridge through the process described in chapter 3. During military service, he was an Anglican and considered ordination. On returning to Cambridge, he encountered teachers whom he respected,1 but whose intellectual formation, though in some ways reactionary and at all points contemptuous of academic self-importance, found no room for religion; he also encountered a reactionary atheistic intelligence whose interest in religion was close and satirical and whose contempt for Christianity was limitless.2 On drifting away from ordination, thereafter he made a number of false starts. While friends and contemporaries3 were beginning professional careers, he failed to complete an anti-liberal book about Lord Acton which, much later, 1. i.e. D. J. V. Fisher (1916- ). Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge 1943and University Lecturer in History 1946— . Author of The Anglo-Saxon Age 1973. C. H. Wilson (1914- ). Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge 1938- . Professor of Modern History at Cambridge 1963-79. Author of Anglo-Dutch Commerce and Finance 1940, History of Unilever 3 vols. 1954-68, Profit and Power 1957, England's Apprenticeship 1967, Economic History and the Historians 1969, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands 1970 etc. 2. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1922- ). Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge 1948-54 and of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 1954-60. Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and Student of Christ Church 1960- . Author of Menandri Dyscolus 1960, Greek Studies in Modern Oxford 1961, The Greeks 1962, The Justice of Zeus 1971, (ed.) Maurice Bowra 1974, Blood for the Ghosts 1980 etc. etc. 3. J. R. Jones (1925- ). Lecturer in History at King's College Newcastle 1952-63 and at the University of East Anglia 1963-66. Professor of History at East Anglia 1966- . Author of The First Whigs 1961 (written in Cambridge in the early 1950s), Britain and Europe in the Seventeenth Century 1966, The Glorious Revolution of 1688 1972 etc. etc. and H. J. Hanham (1928- ) author of Elections and Party Management 1959, Scottish Nationalism 1969, The Nineteenth Century Constitution 1969, Bibliography of British History 1851*1914 1976.

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became an anti-liberal book about John Stuart Mill. Where others spent a post-graduate year in the United States, he went to India, where recollection of service in the Indian Army, archival study of the nineteenth-century Indian Empire and conversation with secularized Indians orchestrated by a highly articulate secularized Jew,1 led to the realization that modernity had impinged on Islam, Hinduism and Judaism as well as on Christianity, and that politics could be understood as an elitist activity in which the 61ite is autonomous in relation to pressures from below, even when it is fearful for its continued existence. A brief period on the outer fringes of the English polity,2 though insignificant and unsuccessful in itself and over by 1959, drew attention to differences between political society and society at large, and between average opinion and the opinions of the intelligentsia, which sowed the seed of the conceptions of high politics and public doctrine around which books were published from 1963 onwards. Why these conceptions had not been turned into books a decade earlier is a question about temperament and capability. It is also a question about climate. Many of the ingredients had been present in the education of 1943. But by the time at which books ought to have been published ten years later, the most important of those who had been teachers then had left academic life, and the intellectual climate was as inimical to a Conservative-Christian standpoint as it was to a Marxist one. The Lib-Lab positivism and anti-totalitarian complacency which infected English thinking in the 1950s ought to have provided something to attack. But, since it treated most questions as closed, it was difficult to attack it. Kedourie attacked it on a specialized front.3 Maclntyre4 and Mackinnon5 looked like attackers from a mistaken 1. Maurice Zinkin (1915- ). Member of the Indian Civil Service 1938-47 and of Unilever Ltd in India and England 1948-77. Author of Asia and the West 1951, Development for Free Asia 1956 and (with Taya Zinkin) Requiem for Empire 1964. 2. In the Foreign Office, as a parliamentary candidate, as a leader-writer on The Times and on the staff of the Daily Express after an agreeable holiday month writing leading articles for A. P. Wadsworth on the Manchester Guardian. 3. See below, chapter 10. 4. For the flirtations of Alasdair Maclntyre (1929- ) with sometimes Marxism and sometimes Christianity, see especially Marxism 1953, (with A. C. Flew) New Essays in Philosophical Theology 1955, (with S. Toulmin and R. W. Hepburn) Metaphysical Beliefs 1957, Difficulties in Christian Belief 1959, in E. P. Thompson and others, Out of Apathy 1960, Secularization and Moral Change 1967, A Short History of Ethics 1967, Against the Self-Images of the Age 1971. 5. For Donald Mackinnon (1913- ), Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at

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1

angle. Gellner's attack, in Words and Things in 1959, in addition to being infected, was confused. Confusion was increased by the fact, which Recessions will make clear, that those to whom the author attached importance intellectually in his second period as an undergraduate were also infected. At this time, therefore, while retaining a sense that something significant would be found in Burke after 1789, Newman before 1845 and Salisbury before 1867, as well as in Mallock between 1877 and 1905,~ the author lacked support and guidance to give it precision. Lady Gwendolen Cecil's biography of Salisbury, and Salisbury's letters as India Secretary in the 1870s, suggested that Salisbury had a central intelligence. But recession from Anglicanism had destroyed one conception of centrality without putting any similar conception in its place, and the dismissal of the politics of principle, which had been acquired in Cambridge (and developed by misunderstanding, of Hegel certainly and probably of Nietzsche as well), had to be transcended by a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between principle and practice3 before Salisbury or any other central intelligence could be given sympathetic consideration. The Marxism that was adopted by the young in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by opening up the closed minds of the 1950s, or by showing how closed they were, suggested that sympathetic consideration was now a possibility. In the 1950s, in spite of Trevor-Roper, Taylor, Oakeshott, Butterfield and Namier, English public thought had seemed so uniformly flat that Waugh alone amongst living writers had seemed to have

Cambridge 1960-78, see especially (ed.) Christian Faith and Communist Faith 1953 and A Study in Ethical Theory 1957. 1. Ernest Andre Gellner (1925- ). Lecturer at the London School of Economics 1949-62 and Professor of Philosophy 1962- . Author of Words and Things 1959, Thought and Change 1964, Saints of the Atlas 1969, Legitimation of Belief 1975 etc. etc. 2. William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923). Author of The New Republic 1877, The New Paul and Virginia 1878, Lucretius 1878, Is Life Worth Living? 1879, A Romance of the nineteenth century 1881, Social Equality 1882, Atheism and the Value of Life 1884, The old order changes 1886, Studies of Contemporary Superstition 1895, Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption 1900, Religion As a Credible Doctrine 1903, The Reconstruction of Belief 1905 etc. etc. 3. In Disraeli Gladstone and Revolution 1967 and The Impact of Labour 1971 especially, but also in The Impact of Hitler 1975.

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features. This was not, however, the tedious Waugh who was writing at the time, but the Waugh whose career had ended with The Loved One in 1948, and whose pinnacles of achievement had been A Handful of Dust, Robbery Under Law and Brideshead Revisited. It was in the 1950s also that Kedourie was encountered, with his hatred of liberalism, and his conviction that English government was conducted in so innocent a fashion that a day of reckoning was unavoidable. At this time, like Kedourie, the author was knitting without a guillotine and, although he could see that something odious was going on, he could not explain what it was. The attack made in The Nature and Limits of Political Science was not only crudely Oakeshottian: in the emphasis that it placed on the possibility of valuefree explanation it was mistaken. Lloyd-Jones,1 Shackleton Bailey2 and others demonstrated the possibilities of the short-tempered reactionary sensibility. But they did so in so self-consciously perverse a fashion and with so little expectation of recognition or acclaim for doing so, that their positions seemed almost deliberately eccentric. It was not until the beginning of academic associations which were formed in the late 1960s and 1970s - with Vincent,3 Jones4 and Bentley5 on the one hand with Watkin,6 Scruton7 and their collaborators on the other and through the transformation in the tone of Conservative expression

1. See above, p. xix 2. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (1917- ). Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge 1944-55 and 1964-68. Fellow of Jesus College 1955-64. University Lecturer in Tibetan at Cambridge 1948-68. Professor of Latin at Michigan 1968-74 and of Greek and Latin at Harvard 1975- . Author of Propertiana 1956, Cicero's Letters to Atticus 7 vols. 1965-70, Cicero 191 \ etc. 3. J. R. Vincent (1937- ). Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge 1962-70 and University Lecturer in History 1967-70. Professor of Modern History at Bristol 1970- , radical author of The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857-68 1966, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted 1967, (with A. B. Cooke) The Governing Passion 1974 etc. 4. Andrew Jones (1944- ). Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge 1969-71. Lecturer in History 1971- . Author of The Politics of Reform 1884 1972. 5. Michael Bentley (1948- ). Lecturer in History at Sheffield 1971- . Author of The Liberal Mind 1914-29 1977. 6. David Watkin (1941- ). Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1970- . Author of Thomas Hope and the Neo-Classical Idea 1968, The Life and Work of C. R. Cockerell 1974, Morality and Architecture 1977. 7. Roger Scruton (1944- ). Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge 1969-71. Lecturer and then Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London 1971- . Author of Art and Imagination 1974, The Aesthetics of Architecture 1979, The Meaning of Conservatism 1980.

Preface 1

xxiii 2

3

4

which was effected by Powell, Welch, Utley, Wharton, Norman,5 Ingrams6 and the younger Waugh7 that the political aspect of these long-standing resentments seemed to have transcended eccentricity. The transition from an obsession with religion to an obsession with politics was as common amongst Victorian Liberals as it has been amongst twentieth-century Marxists. The author's transition was not, however, a transition of this kind. He did not claim for political causes the categorical sanctions of religion, and he was at pains to establish that politics is a broken-backed activity which cannot supply religious satisfactions. Throughout the period in which he wrote about politics, he was clear that writing about politics was not a substitute for, but merely a prelude to, writing about religion. Up to 1953, so far as religion was concerned, the author had in some sense been a participant. On ceasing to be a participant he had become a voyeur who wrote about politics because he did not know what to write about religion and drifted into becoming a professional historian despite an intense conviction, acquired early and never lost, that professional history is an illusion and historical writing an instrument of doctrine, whatever historians may imagine. It is in this spirit that chapter 13 begins by describing the assumptions made in a professional institution, the Cambridge History Faculty, since the author joined it in 1961. It is in this spirit also that Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England will not only emphasize the fragility of the structure by which all professional learning is sustained but will also supplement 1. See below, pp. 432 et seq. 2. Colin Welch (1924- ). Editorial staff of Daily Telegraph 1950- , deputy editor 1964- . 3. T. E. Utley (1921- ). Editorial staff of The Times 1944-45 and 1948-54, of The Sunday Times 1945-47, and of The Observer 1947-48. Associate editor of The Spectator 1954-55. Parliamentary candidate (U) for North Antrim 1974. Daily Telegraph leader-writer 1964- . Author of Edmund Burke 1957, Enoch Powell 1968, Lessons of Ulster 1975 etc. etc. 4. Michael Wharton (1913- ). Writer and producer with BBC 1946-56, first on staff of and then editor of Peter Simple Column, Daily Telegraph 1957- . Author of Sheldrake 1958. 5. See below, pp. 441 et seq. 6. Richard Ingrams (1937- ). Editor of Private Eye 1963- . Author of Private Eye's Romantic England 1963, (with J. Wells) Mrs Wilson*s Diary 1965-66, ed. Beachcomber: the works of J. B. Morton 1974, God's Apology 1977 etc. 7. Auberon Waugh (1939- ). Editorial staff Daily Telegraph 1960-63, Mirror Group 1964-67, Political Correspondent The Spectator 1970^73, and Chief Fiction Reviewer, Columnist Private Eye 1970- . Author of The Foxglove Saga I960, Consider the Lilies 1968, Biafra 1969, In the Lion's Den 1978 etc.

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its own account of the history of public doctrine with a self-conscious contribution to its development. Some of the judgments made of individual thinkers in the present volume may seem distorting. Whitehead is not always thought of as a latitudinarian, nor Toynbee as a spoilt Roman Catholic; nor is despondency the best-known characteristic of Salisbury, Churchill, or even Eliot. The emphases that are given to Collingwood's liberalism, to Butterfield's antinomianism and to Oakeshott's rationality, may be thought unusual. So may the emphases on Powell's Anglicanism, Knowles's enmities, the uncertainty of Waugh's Catholicism, the religious character of Kedourie's Conservatism, and the conception of Ullmann as a prophet of modernity. In this connection three assumptions are important. First, that any thinker who is discussed in his own terms and at length will display, more systematically than it will be possible to do in an historical work, the deep structure of the doctrines that he assumes. Second, that chronological consideration of the full range of a thinker's writing will reveal structures which are concealed by reading single works, or even a number of works, from a standpoint and chronology other than the thinker's own. Third, that to discover structures in the work of a thinker whose writings the author read fragmentarily when young, is to systematize what he absorbed unsystematically in looking for something else, and that the account that he gives of a thinker now, though often different from the account he would have given after a fragmentary reading then, suggests the nature of the impact he experienced, even when the experience was unconscious. This applies to all of these thinkers to some degree. It applies particularly to Whitehead, Toynbee, Collingwood, Butterfield, Oakeshott and Churchill, who were confused with one another and absorbed into a reactionary Conservative Christianity which none of them would have accepted. In one direction, therefore, the argument is disjunctive; it shows how little these thinkers had in common. But the main argument is synthetic; it is by fusing the development of the author's opinions with the opinions of these thinkers severally that the damage suffered by Christian images and aspirations and the pervasive character of the conflict between Christianity and its enemies, is perceived as the problem which the main work will pursue historically through all its ramifications in the life of modern England. MAURICE COWLING

Peterhouse, Cambridge February 1980

PRELUDE

Whitehead 'Expression is the one fundamental sacrament. It is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.' A. N. Whitehead Religion in the Making 1926 pp. 131-32. 'If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: and the spiritual precedes the material. Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions.' A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World 1926 p. x. 'Shakespeare wrote his plays for English people reared in the beauty of the country, amid the pageant of life as the Middle Ages merged into the Renaissance, and with a new world across the ocean to make vivid the call of romance. Today we deal with herded town populations, reared in a scientific age. I have no doubt that unless we can meet the new age with new methods, to sustain for our populations the life of the spirit, sooner or later, amid some savage outbreak of defeated longings, the fate of Russia will be the fate of England. Historians will write as her epitaph that her fall issued from the spiritual blindness of her governing classes, from their dull materialism, and from their Pharisaic attachment to petty formulae of statesmanship/ A. N. Whitehead, The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline 1922, reprinted in The Aims of Education 1929 p. 65.

When Whitehead1 wrote an autobiographical memoir in 1936, the person he singled out for highest praise, apart from his father, was his father's friend, Archbishop Tait. Tait, as Whitehead presented him, was the successor of Lanfranc and Becket, the last in the line of English ecclesiastical statesmen who had 'acted on the policy that the church was the national organ to foster the intimate, ultimate values which enter into human life'. Tait was the last, and the whole line had failed, because the 'civilising influence of the church' had been replaced by 'secular schools, colleges and universities' and 'English ecclesiastical policy' since his death had been directed at 'organising the Anglican church as a special group within the nation'. Whitehead did not think that the process could be reversed. 'Modern universities' covered 'all civilised lands'; the 'members of their faculties' controlled 'knowledge and its sources'. Much of his writing was designed to ensure that their 'mission of civilisation' would remain 'triumphant' throughout the world. Whitehead's father had been an Anglican clergyman with a large rural parish in Kent. Whitehead himself had been at school at Sherborne and was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1880s, when Sidgwick's writ ran, when Pollock's Spinoza was being published and when Maitland was developing as history ideas which Sidgwick had expressed as philosophy. 1. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). Ed. Sherborne School and Trinity College Cambridge. Fellow of Trinity College 1884-1911. Professor of Applied Mathematics Imperial College of Science 1914-24. Professor of Philosophy at Harvard 1924-37. Author of A Treatise on Universal Algebra 1898, (with Russell) Principia Mathematica 3 vols. 1910-13, The Organisation of Thought 1917, An Enquiry Concerning Principles of Natural Knowledge 1919, The Concept of Nature 1920, The Principle of Relativity 1922, Science and the Modern World 1926, Religion in the Making 1926, Symbolism 1928, The Aims of Education 1929, The Function of Reason 1929, Process and Reality 1929, Adventures of Ideas 1933, Nature and Life 1934, Modes of Thought 1938, Essays in Science and Philosophy (posthumous) 1948.

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In Whitehead's academic life there were three periods - the period as a mathematical Fellow of Trinity from 1884 to 1911, the period at University College and Imperial College, London, from 1911 to 1924, and the period from his appointment to the Chair of Philosophy at Harvard in 1924 until he more or less stopped writing at the age of 77 in 1938. There were also transitions in thought, from mathematical logic in the years before Principia Mathematica, through criticism of the presuppositions prevalent in contemporary scientific thinking, to the assumption of a dual role as speculative philosopher and higher prophet whose central concern was the relationship between the secularized university, knowledge, truth, existence and the education of the world. The high point of Whitehead's achievement in speculative philosophy was the Gifford Lectures of 1927-28, which, when published as Process and Reality, provided the only systematic account that he gave of the Philosophy of Organism. The Philosophy of Organism, however, was not the main - certainly it was not the most intelligible - contribution that Whitehead made to public discussion. By 1927 he had been addressing himself to problems of public policy for fifteen years. When Whitehead began formulating a public doctrine - after Principia Mathematica volume I - it dealt with the place of mathematics in education, and with the methods by which a scientific education could replace the classical one that had been dominant in England since the Renaissance. Whitehead did not advocate an educational revolution; he merely observed that the twentieth-century revolution in science and technology had made it inevitable. In his Home University Library Introduction to Mathematics in 1911 and in the addresses he gave to mathematical teachers in the following decade, he explained what methods should be used if knowledge of mathematics was to be 'broadly spread throughout cultivated society'. He sketched the outlines of a liberal education which would not be an 'aimless accretion of special mathematical theorems' or a prelude to advanced work by professional mathematicians, but would connect 'abstract thought' with 'concrete circumstances' and lead, through particular, to general demonstrations of the fundamental relations of number, quantity and space. At the same time that he was laying down principles for the scientific education of the 'cultured classes', Whitehead was also laying down principles for the technical education of skilled workmen. Just as schoolboys and undergraduates needed to be rescued from the routine pedantry of the text-book theorem, so the 'toiling millions' needed

6

Prelude

to be rescued from boredom and indifference. In discussing the part to be played by mathematics and poetry in technological training, he attributed to imaginative teaching an immense range of consequences, discerning in the hands of those who conducted it the power to suffuse the weariness of work with the Benedictine ideal of 'knowledge, labour and moral energy', and anticipating in the future not only a 'large supply of skilled workmen' who would find 'joy' in what they were doing but also a dedicated body of enterprising employers who would no longer regard their businesses as 'indifferent means for acquiring other disconnected opportunities of life'. 'Alike for master and . . . men', went the conclusion, a technical or technological education, to have any chance of satisfying 'the practical needs of the nation', would have to be conducted 'in a liberal spirit', to bring practice and theory into an 'intimate union', and to provide every student with a connected conjunction of technique, science, general ideas and aesthetic appreciation. In his wartime homilies, Whitehead argued that English teachers and educationalists were out of touch with the modern world. They had not grasped the fact that the growth of knowledge in the previous century had made possible a 'foresight' which had not existed beforehand. They had not understood that 'foresight' depended on 'special knowledge' and that this was quite different from the 'mastery of a given routine' which he identified as the characteristic of the amateur. The English had not yet decided whether to produce amateurs or experts. It was Whitehead's aim to produce experts who had the amateur's cultural breadth. Culture was activity of thought, and the enemy of all intellectual culture was the dominance of 'inert ideas'. Inert ideas were ideas which were received without being 'utilised . . . tested or thrown into fresh combination' by the mind that received them. They were ideas which were taught as true instead of being examined and connected with the 'joy of discovery'. It was with a view to encouraging this joy that the subjects and ideas that were to be taught in an education designed for experts would be 'few and important' and designed to prove truths. It was for this reason that the most valuable intellectual development was said to be 'self-development' between the ages of sixteen and thirty. Experts, in other words, would not be hide-bound by routine. They would have been shown how to think by thinking on a limited front.

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By thinking on a limited front, they would have acquired style - that economy of expression which 'attains the end without side issues'. By thinking for themselves, they would have learnt that 'youth is the creative impulse to make something', that logic sustains it, and that the real dividing line in thought is between those who are and those who are not willing to make a mistake. Whitehead's assumptions can be made to sound silly, as silly as Mill's. But they were consistent - a continual warning against useless learning, an affirmation of the connection between practice and theory, a proclamation of the claim that education must be designed for Life. Whitehead was a modern thinker; he 'did not believe' that 'machinery and commerce were driving beauty out of the modern world'. He believed that 'a new beauty was being added' and that there was a duty to consider it, in its aesthetic and intellectual aspects. He was free of nostalgia, historic pathos, or any tendency to devalue the present. He rejected middle-class pessimism and anticipated for the English a brighter future than they had had in the past. Whitehead identified obstacles to improvement - intellectual atrophy on the one hand, industrial conflict 'leading to savage upheaval' of the Bolshevik variety on the other. But he expressed a patriotic confidence. He expected the equality of England's 'democratic age' to be realized on a 'high level' rather than a low one. He hoped that scientific and technical education would turn industrial work into a 'communal' enterprise that would lock masters and men in 'sympathetic cooperation'. From 1912 onwards, Whitehead not only contributed to intellectual activity as a mathematical logician, philosopher of science, and metaphysical cosmologist; he also reflected upon the position of intellectual activity in life. This latter concern reached its culmination in the final chapter of Science and the Modern World - Requisites for Social Progress - which was published in 1926, and in the first two and last sections of Adventures of Ideas which were published seven years later. Adventures of Ideas was scarcely an original book. Except in discussing 'peace' (in an unusual sense), it said little that Whitehead had not said, and said more precisely, already. But its account of the social function of intellectual life, if read in conjunction with Requisites for R.P,D.—B

8

Prelude

Social Progress, celebrated the qualities that he attributed to liberal civilization. In Requisites for Social Progress Whitehead had made his first attempt to apply the Philosophy of Organism to 'some of the problems confronted by civilized societies'. In three particular respects, he contrasted its intuitions with the intuitions generated by the philosophies it was replacing. In the first place, he asserted a connection between Cartesian dualism and the chaos that had followed the Industrial Revolution, imputing to Descartes' separation of mind and body two different sets of consequences in practice. On the one hand, it had led through a Protestant 'recoil' from 'aesthetic effects' to a 'limited moral outlook' which regarded aesthetic judgment as irrelevant to the development of the material environment. On the other it had led 'through private worlds of experience' to 'private worlds of morals' where 'self-respect' and pursuit of 'individual opportunities' had become the 'efficient morality' of leading industrialists. One of the more important truths that the Philosophy understood was that a factory was 'an organism exhibiting a variety of vivid values' which, if apprehended in 'completeness', would humanize the abstractions of political economy. Another was that political economy had preferred 'material things' to 'ultimate values' and, by turning competition, class conflict, international antagonism and military warfare into the 'watchwords of the nineteenth century', had made a 'gospel of hate' out of the 'struggle for existence'. A third of the Philosophy of Organism's social intuitions was that the 'philosophy of evolution', properly understood, taught that those 'organisms are successful which modify their environments so as to assist each other'. Requisites for Social Progress directed attention to the fact that, in the modern world, 'effective knowledge' was 'professional knowledge', the result of 'specialization in particular regions of thought'. This was described as a 'celibacy of the intellect', thinking in a 'groove of abstractions' which, though necessary for progress, was inadequate for the 'comprehension of life'. It was said to be particularly dangerous 'in our democratic societies' where the 'specialised functions of the community', though performed 'better and more progressively' than in the past, were 'divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts'. Whitehead regarded the professional corporations as 'guarantors of rationality'. But he also regarded them as enemies of 'intellectual

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balance'. It was to Art that he looked for ways of humanizing not only them but also the 'book learning' and 'abstract formulations' that disfigured contemporary education in general. By Art, Whitehead meant something between the 'gross specialised values of practical men' and the 'thin specialised values of the mere scholar'. He meant 'intuition': 'immediate apprehension with the minimum of eviscerating analysis . . . appreciation of . . . individual facts in their full interplay of emergent value . . . and . . . the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment'. He meant a 'fertilization of the soul' and a recognition that 'the life of the spirit' needs to be fed by contact with the world about it. The 'secret of art' was said to lie in its 'freedom'. 'Great Art' was said to be 'the arrangement of the environment', so as to provide 'values' for the soul. 'The soul cries aloud for release into change' went an extraordinary passage. 'It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and - above all of art are necessary for it.' These were truths that everybody had to understand. Requisites for Social Progress was designed to persuade 'the prosperous middle classes' to rise to the level of their responsibilities, to reject both the gospel of Force and the gospel of Uniformity, and to recognize in diversity and cooperation prerequisites to a 'golden age of beneficent creativeness'. The future that was anticipated was not expected to be a stable one. The 'great ages' had been 'unstable ages'. Civilization was not to be equated with stability. The 'art' of 'free society' consisted in the maintenance of its 'symbolic code', but societies which could not combine 'reverence to their symbols' with 'freedom of revision' would either decay from atrophy or live lives 'stifled by useless shadows'. In Requisites, in Symbolism, in Process and Reality and in Adventures of Ideas, it seemed as though uncertainty and change, and adventurousness in responding to them, were necessary to all serious intellectual achievement. Adventures of Ideas was primarily an historical work - an attempt to show how 'civilized beings arise'. It was methodologically explicit, dismissing 'pure history . . . according to the faith of the school of history prevalent in the latter part of the nineteenth century', and making it clear that the historian's descriptions of the past depended upon 'his own judgment as to what constitutes the importance of human life'.

10

Prelude

Adventures of Ideas also arose from a desire to show how the development of civilization in the past led to an understanding of the role which civilization would play in the future. It saw every age of transition as a 'pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion' being challenged by the 'senseless agencies and formulated aspirations' which between them drove men from their 'old anchorages'. The object in general was to examine the formulated aspirations involved in these transitions. In the case of the modern world, it was to 'discern the status of the impulses' by which it was being moved. These impulses were described in terms of general ideas and critical discontent which were more fundamental than morality, truth or religion. In European thought they had been produced by the Jews and the Greeks (especially Plato), by the 'sceptical humanitarianism' of the 'Age of Reason and the Rights of Man', and by the 'fierce enthusiasm' of the early Christians, who had constructed an 'unrivalled programme for reform' which the mediaeval and Reformation churches had turned into an 'idolatrous' instrument of 'conservatism'. Whitehead's account of European ideals centred initially on the process which had replaced slavery by the 'sociological conception of freedom'. But it was intended to apply more generally - to present the victory of the humanitarian ideal as a special example of the victory of persuasion over force that constituted human progress. II By the time Whitehead became a prophet in the middle 1920s, he had spent at least a decade reconstructing the view which mathematical physics took of the world with which it dealt. In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, in The Concept of Nature and in The Principle of Relativity, he had drawn out the implications of relativity and quantum mechanics for existing conceptions of time and space. This was a technical discussion, and explicitly not metaphysical. Though philosophical discussion could not be avoided, it was intended very strictly to be philosophy of science, the determination of the 'most general conceptions which apply to things observed by the senses'. It was not until Science and the Modern World that Whitehead undertook an argument that was explicitly metaphysical. When he did so, he did so in two different directions. On the one hand, he claimed that mechanistic materialism needed to be directed by intuitions from religion and culture if an adequate metaphysic was

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to be unfolded. On the other, he made religion and culture the object both of descriptive and of legislative philosophy. This combination of discussions, stimulated by American demand after his appointment to the Harvard Chair, made Whitehead an important figure in English thought from about the middle of the 1920s until some time in the early 1950s. In some respects Science and the Modern World looked like a justification of spirituality - an alignment on the side of religion against the materialism by which it had been assaulted. It argued that religion had intuitions which were compatible with relativity and quantum mechanics, and that literature, art, religion and philosophy had a part to play not only in constructing a cosmology and metaphysics but also, through scientists' cosmological and metaphysical assumptions, in the development of science itself. Religion and culture were said to be central, and mechanistic materialism to have got into a rut in the nineteenth century because it had been unresponsive to them. In this respect the most important chapter in Science and the Modern World was The Romantic Reaction. It was here that Whitehead made his first major cultural statement, freed himself from the philosophy of science, and moved decisively towards what he called 'concrete educated thought' - the 'concrete outlook of humanity'. This meant in the first place 'literature'. It was through literature, and especially through 'its more concrete forms . . . poetry and drama', that the 'inmost thoughts of a generation' were said to be expressed. It was to elucidation of the inmost thoughts of the modern world that Science and the Modern World was dedicated. In the early chapters 'modern' meant the historical revolution of the sixteenth century and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth, of which the historical revolution had been the progenitor. It also meant the principles that the seventeenth century had established the 'accumulated capital of ideas' on which Europe had been living ever since. In chapter III Whitehead listed these ideas, arguing that The Century of Genius was not only the one century that had risen to the greatness of its occasion but also that it had established its ideas so impregnably that 'scientific realism based on mechanism' had survived Berkeley's and Hume's criticisms, and the 'unwavering belief manifested in the individualistic enterprise of the European peoples that men were 'self-determining'. This radical inconsistency was said to have 'enfeebled thought' and to have produced 'much' that was 'halfhearted and wavering in our civilization'. It was to the eradication of

12

Prelude

feebleness that the remainder of Whitehead's writing was directed. In undertaking eradication, Whitehead criticized modern science for being 'blandly indifferent' to philosophy. On the other hand he claimed that any philosophy worth the name must take account of 'aesthetic intuition'. Though it was science that had broken up the 'stable foundations of physics' and made mincemeat of 'mechanical' explanation, it was to Tennyson, Newman, Wordsworth, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and the doctrines that the poets had been promulgating since the seventeenth century that were imputed the discovery that the 'philosophy of nature must concern itself with 'change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism and interfusion' if it was to provide the requisite reinterpretation of the 'riddle of the universe'. Science and the Modern World was an attempt to persuade the narrow rigidity of mechanistic materialism to emulate the broader 'rationalism' of the Middle Ages. In The Making of Religion a similar attempt was made to break down 'narrow dogmatisms' in religion. When Science and the Modern World was delivered as a course of lectures at Harvard in 1925, it was shorter than the book of the same title which was published a year later. Though there was a lot about Christianity, the lectures not only did not include chapters II, X, XI, and XII of the book, they also contained virtually no discussion of God. In chapter XI (God) and chapter XII (Religion and Science) as in Religion in the Making - all of which were written at about the time at which Eliot was becoming an Anglican - God was in the forefront. In understanding his God, it is necessary to understand first what Whitehead thought about religion. About the importance of religion, Whitehead was never in doubt. A religion might be a good or evil one; it might even be 'very evil'. But even an evil religion was important, and religion itself was said to be 'of transcendent importance'. This did not mean that all religions were equally important or that there was not an order of importance. In fact there was such an order. It had emerged progressively through the course of time, beginning with ritual and emotion and reaching its culmination in belief and rationalization. The phase of ritual and emotion entailed an 'habitual performance of definite actions' which had 'no direct relevance to the preservation of the physical organism of the actors', but repeated the 'joy of exercise' associated with actions that had aided its preservation in the first place. Ritual was the repetition of these actions 'for the sake of

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the attendant emotions'. It was from the excitement of emotion for its own sake that mankind was said to have 'started upon its adventures of curiosity and feeling'. It was also, however, at this stage - where ritual was stabilized and beliefs uncriticized, and where religion was communal, sociable, and a matter of tribal custom - that the 'mass of semi-civilized humanity' had got stuck. The first thing that Whitehead emphasized was that communal religion (the religion of ritual and emotion), though it had 'served humanity well' by creating a sense of 'social unity and responsibility', had in the end ceased to be an 'engine of progress' because the religions it had produced, being 'religions of the average', 'had been at war with the ideal'. Whitehead not only did not advocate this sort of religion, he advocated a religion of belief and rationalization in preference to it. This was said to have emerged 'amongst all the civilised races of Asia and Europe' in the last six thousand years, and after an intensive struggle in the thousand years before Christ, to have established a 'new synthesis which, in the forms of the great religions, had lasted to the present day'. Apart from remarks in praise of Roman and in dismissal of Judaic religion, Whitehead was concerned primarily with Buddhism and Christianity - Buddhism as a 'metaphysic generating a religion', Christianity as a 'religion seeking a metaphysic', both bearing in their separate ways the marks of what he called a 'rationalistic religion'. What a rationalistic religion did - what they had all done since they were established - was to 'transform character'. A rationalistic religion was not a matter of 'collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches . . . bibles' and so on. It was 'what the individual did with his own solitariness', and this was not only moral but also metaphysical, so far as metaphysics, when 'sincerely held and apprehended', had the effect of 'cleansing' man's 'inward parts' by developing individual prayer, insight and intuition and the cultivation of the internal life. At first sight this seems simple and obvious. But it was far from being either. In the first place, because rationalistic religion recognized the value of the 'diverse individuals of the world for each other' and of the 'objective world' which was 'derivative from the interrelating of its component individuals'. Second, because, absolute solitariness being an impossibility, men wanted to spread the good news and needed therefore not only to promulgate dogma but also to promulgate a dogma that they believed to be true.

14

Prelude

Whitehead's interest in religion was complicated. He wanted to connect it with those 'permanent elements' through which there was a 'stable order in the world'. But he did not fall for the 'simplicity of religious truth' which had been 'the favourite axiom of liberalising theologians'. He argued that dogma could 'never be final' and had to be 'relative to the sphere of thought from which it had arisen'. It would require a Hellenistic degree of complexity, he argued, if it was to be made consonant with the knowledge that had been acquired in the modern world. In Religion in the Making, in the chapter on God in Science and the Modern World and in Process and Reality he showed how complicated dogma would have to be made if it was to regain the importance it had lost. In Religion in the Making Whitehead drew a parallel between the dogmas of science and the dogmas of religion. Where the former aimed to formulate 'in precise terms' the truths disclosed in the 'sense perception of mankind', the dogmas of religion aimed to formulate 'in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind'. Religious dogmas were not to be understood as being in any simple sense 'God's Word'. They varied with external conditions and human experience, and should be subjected to the same sort of treatment as scientific dogmas had received in the course of being made relevant to modern minds. The main aim of Whitehead's religious writing was to show how a religion which was expressed in modern terms could cohere as readily as post-Newtonian science with the Organic philosophy that he had invented. The Philosophy of Organism considered all aspects of being. Before the Gifford Lectures laid it out in full, fertilizing detail, it had been approached in God, in Religion and Science, in Science and the Modern World and in Religion in the Making. In aiming, as he did in these works, to drag theology into the full glare of philosophical publicity, Whitehead played a self-consciously Erasmian role, criticizing the narrowness of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and, in particular, the 'curious' Victorian 'delusion' that 'our beliefs' can be founded on an 'historical investigation' (as though the past could be interpreted otherwise than in terms of the present, or metaphysical dogmas be extracted from an interpretation of the past except through 'prior metaphysical interpretation of the present'). These works covered an immense amount of ground. They provided a prolegomenon to a systematic theology, which a school of American theologians has taken for its signposts. What was significant in England

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when they were published was their emphasis on the intellectual importance of Christianity. About the intellectual potentialities of Christianity, Whitehead was flattering. Though it had suffered from having no 'clearcut separation from the crude fancies of the older tribal religions', it had one overwhelming advantage: that it was capable of enormous flexibility in development. It began with a 'tremendous fact', the fact of Christ. But, since this fact was not, according to Whitehead, a metaphysical doctrine, Christianity had been far more open to metaphysical and philosophical suggestion than Buddhism had been. It was, therefore, if properly developed, well able to meet the philosophical needs of the twentieth century. Whitehead did not leave the impression of supposing that the Christian churches left to themselves would develop Christian theology properly. But he aimed to show that they could do so if they would recognize that theology could no more be sheltered from metaphysics than metaphysics could be from religion. In Religion in the Making the contribution of religion was laid out. It turned out to be much the same as that of literature in Science and the Modern World: the assertion that there is a 'quality of life . . . beyond the mere fact of life' and that this has no direct connection with 'obvious happiness or obvious pleasure'. It was when these intuitions were combined with the postulates of relativity and quantum mechanics that Whitehead's philosophy began to be formed. The works we are discussing dealt with the main questions that had arisen out of the philosophical history of the modern world. To one question - the question of God - they attributed fundamental importance. What Whitehead's God was, was closely connected with what He was not. He was neither Aristotle's God nor Anselm's. He was not an immanent 'impersonal order to which the world conformed'. Nor was He the pantheistic total reality of which the 'actual world' was a manifestation. What He was not most of all was the 'aboriginal . . . transcendent creator' - the Aristotelian/Hebrew/Roman conjunction of 'unmoved mover', 'ruthless moralist' and 'divine Caesar' which had brought both 'idolatry' and 'tragedy' to Islam and Christianity. Islam's tragedy was not specified. Christianity's was that, in spite of its metaphysical openness, it had forgotten its 'galileean origin', and had replaced Christ's 'vision of humility' by terror, bigotry and social conservatism. Its theism having been disposed of in Hume's Dialogues

16

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Concerning Natural Religion, Whitehead aimed to see what could be done with humility, love, providence and other conceptions of which its theology was alleged to have lost sight. Whitehead's God was a God to whom worship was due. But the 'intuition of a personal being substrate to the universe' was merely psychological, and, though mothers could 'ponder many things in their hearts which their lips could not express', it was obvious that psychological intuition had very little place in Whitehead's scale of knowledge. What Whitehead wanted was a metaphysical conception to supersede the conceptions that Christianity had created in the past - a conception which was available in the form of a loving God in every man's heart which had made 'the unequivocal personal unity of the Semitic God' into a heresy. It was through the logos, and through the circumscribed immanentism which could be deduced from Christ, Plato and St John (but not St Paul), that God came into His own metaphysically. A metaphysical conception of God was needed as part of Whitehead's rationalistic religion. It was also needed as a resolution of problems in his philosophy. These were approached through religion's 'direct apprehension' of the 'completed ideal harmony' which informed the world. This 'ideal harmony', God, was the 'Principle of Concretion', the agency by which 'every actual occasion' imposed its 'limitation' on 'possibility' and gave 'togetherness' both to occasions and to 'otherwise isolated eternal objects'. God was necessary if 'the reality of actual occasions' was to be preserved, if the modalities were to be distinguished, and if value was to be gained through limitation. He was the 'ultimate limitation' and His existence the 'ultimate irrationality', and He also met the 'physical need for a principle of determination' which metaphysical reason was unable to supply by itself. The Principle of Concretion showed God having a dual relationship with the world. His primordial nature was a conceptualizing which was intimate, devoid of negative prehension and 'limited by no actuality'. His consequent nature was the 'weaving' of his 'physical feelings upon his primordial conceptions': the 'conscious realisation of the actual world in the unity of nature'. This unity was not static, as traditional theism had made it. It combined both 'actuality with permanence, requiring fluency as its completion'. It performed an 'efficacious role', the 'multiple unification of the universe' in which

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17

'each actuality' had its 'present life' but did not die 'in its passage into novelty'. In Whitehead's philosophy, Evil was the fact that 'the past fades' and that 'time is a "perpetual perishing" '. The future was born by a process of selection which, as the imposition of Value upon the world, was at once 'the measure of evil and the process of its evasion'. Men had 'the Kingdom of Heaven' within them, but the Kingdom of Heaven was also God who in His turn was the 'overcoming of Evil by good'. 'Every event on its finer side' was said to 'introduce God into the world' which 'lived by its incarnation of Him in itself and was sustained by His power as 'the ideal'. God's Nature was, indeed, 'ever enlarging itself. Its 'end' was 'the final end of creation': 'existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of self-existence' where 'being a means was not disjoined from . . . being an end' and the 'immediacy of sorrow and pain was transformed into an element of triumph'. Whitehead was admirable because of his determination to abuse the entrenched complacencies of professional scholarship. Few writers have had so acute a sense of the arbitrariness and fragility of the assumptions upon which professional careers are built. No writer provides so multifarious an antiseptic to that rigidity about assumptions which professional scholarship so easily induces. Even if the doctrine of inventive adventure was a dogma itself (excluding the adventurous conclusion that minds should be closed in some directions a good deal more than in others), it was valuable to have from the inside an extended application to professional Academe of the destructive dictum that 'all argument must rest upon premises more fundamental than the conclusions'. More than anyone else in this book, more even than Toynbee, Whitehead embodied liberal scholarship: its learning, its hopes and its consciousness of the public duties of the intelligentsia. Where others (Collingwood, for example) were resentful and fearful about the future, or fled, like Eliot, into Orthodoxy, Whitehead combined the performance of inherited Anglican, or Episcopalian, duties with the widest range of speculative freedom and a deep optimism which seems to have deepened after his arrival in America. No one was happier about the changes that occurred in England between 1914 and 1945. No one had greater confidence in the future of modern universities. No one was more relentless or rhetorically fluent in perpetuating Erasmian uplift. In the twenties and thirties Whitehead was sometimes praised by

18

Prelude

Christian apologists who were pleased to find a collaborator of Russell available for use against him. Whitehead's respect for religion was spoken of with respect. As we have seen, Whitehead favoured religion. But the religion he favoured, though 'spiritual' and in a Platonic sense mystical, and sustained by Anglican observance, was designed to be enmeshed in humanitarian idealism. It may be that if I had not been cured of Whitehead in Cambridge, this would not have struck me as a difficulty. Certainly the difficulty had not struck me in reading Toynbee.

2 Toynbee 'Who are "we"? . . . What is this company of men, women and children that has come out of the "Middle Ages" into the "Modern World" and is now coming out of that into a new world again? . . . Certainly we are the British people, but we are a larger company than that. We are the French people and the German people too. We are the people of Western Europe and the people of all the new communities which Western Europeans have founded overseas in Latin America, in the United States, and in the self-governing Dominions of the British Commonwealth of Nations. But we cannot really draw a limit even here; for Western society, in flinging its net round the world, has drawn the whole of mankind into its meshes. The ship on which we are sailing - to destruction or to the next port - has a Western rig but it has become the ship of humanity.' A. J. Toynbee World Order or Downfall 1930 pp. 7-8. 'If our first precept should be to study our own history, not on its own account but for the part which the West has played in the unification of mankind, our second precept, in studying History as a whole, should be to relegate economic and political history to a subordinate place and give religious history the primacy. For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race.' A. J. Toynbee The Unification of the World (1948) in Civilization on Trial 1948 p. 94. 'The American Revolution . . . made a declaration of the spiritual rights of Man. But this American shot would not have been heard round the World if the charge of powder had not been a mighty one. What is this mighty force that has sent that sound rolling round and round the circumference of the planet? The impetus behind the American Revolution is the spirit of Christianity; the sound is the voice of God which speaks not only through Christianity but through all the historic religions which have preached their gospels to all the World and which, between them, have reached almost the whole of mankind. In the future, as in the past, the common spiritual essence of the historic religions will, I believe, be mankind's guiding light. When the ideologies have evaporated, and when Man's long unsatisfied hunger for material possessions has been appeased, and when Man has also been cured of his temporary gluttony by satiety, then, I believe, the ideals and the precepts that are embodied in the historic religions will come into their own at last. 'What, then, is America's relation to the World Revolution? It is her revolution, it was she who launched it by firing that shot heard round the World. What about America's recently acquired affluence? It is a handicap, and a formidable one, but it is a handicap that can be overcome. Can America rejoin her own revolution? In my belief this is still within her power. America's destiny is, I believe, still in America's own hands.' A. J. Toynbee America and the World Revolution 1961 p. 77.

19

By the time I began to read Toynbee1 in 1942, religion had come to be the most important thing in his writing. It was not, however, the most important thing in the only parts that I read: volumes i-iii of A Study of History. There the most important thing was History: what men had done and how what they had done should be understood, and in both respects there was a demonstration of the prophetic possibilities of historical thinking. In A Study of History Toynbee claimed to be writing empirically, but his empirical method was a sham, as in practice he showed that he very well knew. He wrote as though history was a free invention and the historian a creative thinker. He left the liberating impression that historians need not confine themselves to the constricting positivism of professional historical truth. A Study of History taught that human history was the immanent development of a life-force which had been made specific first by contact with the physical environment and then by relations between 1. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975). Ed. Winchester and Balliol College Oxford. Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College 1912-15. Government Service, mainly in British Foreign Office 1915-19. Koraes Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature and History in University of London 1919-24. Director of Research in the Royal Institute of International Affairs and Stevenson Professor of International Relations in University of London 1925-55. Director of Research Department of British Foreign Office 1943-45. Member of British Delegation to Peace Conference at Paris 1946. Author of Nationality and the War 1915, The New Europe 1915, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey 1922, Greek Historical Thought 1924, The World After the Peace Conference 1925, Surveys of International Affairs 1920-38, A Journey to China 1931, A Study of History 12 volumes 1934-61, Civilization on Trial 1948, The World and the West (Reith Lectures for 1952) 1953, An Historian's Approach to Religion 1956, Christianity among the Religions of the World 1958, East to West 1958, Hellenism 1959, Between Oxus and Jumna 1961, (with Philip Toynbee) Comparing Notes 1963, Between Niger and Nile 1965, HannibaYs Legacy 1965, Change and Habitat 1966, (with others) Man's Concern with Death 1968, Cities of Destiny 1969, Cities on the Move 1970, (with Wakaizumi) Surviving the Future 1971 etc. etc.

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the individuals and societies into which such contact had developed. The life-force transcended individual men, made inter-personal and historical knowledge possible, and ensured that everything that men had done in all the places in which they had done it could be made the subject of 'empirically testable' propositions. These were summarized in well-known passages about Yin and Yang, the Golden Mean, and the various sorts of challenge and response, withdrawal and return, and factors leading to the growth or disintegration of civilizations. These aspects of volumes i to iii were boring. But they gave equal importance to spiritual as to material considerations and presented civilization as the outcome of a struggle between man's attempt to free himself from nature and nature's attempt to strangle him. Within the limits of physical necessity, they showed men neither as natural nor as continuous with nature but as autonomous actors whose capacity for making their own wills was a manifestation of Toynbee's curious conception of the relationship between action and thought. Toynbee took a high view of thought. He attributed changes in civilization to 'creative minorities' or 'individual geniuses' who conceived the possibilities by a process of 'withdrawal and return', which was what the gifted few had to do if they were to rise to occasions of 'social crisis' and provide commanding resolutions for the future. In dealing with withdrawal and return, Toynbee came near to saying what he meant about the relationship between the thinking classes and the world and between moral leadership and reality. He assumed that the leaders of civilization are those who, absorbing in their persons and reflecting in their minds the vital forces out of which it has been made, withdraw from it for a time in order to contemplate it. The outcome of contemplation in withdrawal was return in order to give effect to the truth which contemplation had revealed. Contemplation involved an 'inward self-articulation' or mental 'self-determination' which was also called theory. This was not 'philosophy', which was explicitly distinguished from it. Bergson, Plato, Wordsworth and unidentified Christian mystics were called in to identify it as something between 'speculation' and 'ecstasy': a 'mystic path' along which the 'soul' disengaged itself from its 'social milieu' and produced the 'creative moment' of the 'transfigured personality'. On this understanding of the matter, historical development resulted from a relationship between two agencies. On the one hand, there was creative genius, or the creative minority, constantly rethinking the

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Prelude

content of the life-force which had made civilization what it was. On the other, there was the 'great majority' of 'ordinary human beings' who had not had the 'transfiguring' experience and who, even in the most 'advanced and progressive civilizations', were 'virtually primitive'. The relationship was one of leadership and deference - of leadership on the part of the creative genius or minority, of deference on the part of 'ordinary human beings' - which was sustained by imitation and a 'wholesale social drill' in the service of social progress. This was a description of authority. Toynbee claimed it for the geniuses he listed and for the experience they had undergone. Their experience was perennial, transcended the civilization in which it occurred and was common to all. So far as it was religious, it was eclectic, and it was religious in the same sense as Mill's religion was, or Aldous Huxley's - so far as the highest human achievement lay in a constant wrestling with 'the creative effort that is manifested by Life'. In this respect, A Study of History was an extended criticism; it was designed to judge Western civilization and Western historical writing by some 'absolute object of thought'. This was written about initially as an 'intelligiblefieldof study'. But it implied something much more fundamental. By asserting the existence of ways of organizing society different from those which had obtained in Western Europe, it emphasized the relative status of these and an equality of status between these and others. The chapter on The Field of Historical Study was conducted through a 'shimmer of relativity'. The most important aspect of Western civilization, on this account, was that its growth over the previous 150 years had constituted a 'titanic social revolution'. Though this had created a 'new world order', the objection was to the lack of order, the failure to subject 'driving power' to moral control. Western civilization was 'promethean' or 'Faustian', its expansion the expansion of a technique, a development of men's relations with physical nature rather than with each other and even in that respect was much less original than the earliest human inventions. Despite a long history of spiritual achievement its only active forces were 'mechanically-minded barbarism' on the one hand and a 'parasitic urban proletariat' which was 'sapping the strength' of society on the other. In some of the later volumes of A Study of History, Toynbee took a more optimistic view of the proletariat, claiming for it at times the prospect of a creative role rather like that played by the proletariat in creating the Catholic Church out of the Roman Empire. In the earliest

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volumes, the 'masses' were a 'malignant evil' obstructing or ignoring the 'spiritual influence' which 'the creative minority' could have upon them. Since he did not regard the proletariat as self-motivating, Toynbee can scarcely be said to have blamed it. He blamed its defects on the 'Yellow Press' which was 'Western Industrialism' keeping the 'mass of Western humanity culturally depressed' by giving new life to 'War, Tribalism, Slavery and Property': 'ancient anti-social institutions' which promised to be 'veritable juggernaut-cars of destruction' in the future. He left no doubt that 'the stagnation of the masses' (i.e. their failure to respond to the creative minority) was 'the fundamental cause of the crisis with which our Western civilization was confronted'. The phase in Toynbee's writing during which the future seemed to lie with the 'masses' was a short one. If one reads all his writings, and especially from 1939 onwards, the predominant problem is to know what religion the masses should be taught. Until his middle forties Toynbee showed no more inclination to believe any particular religion than when he had 'drifted away' from Christianity as an undergraduate. Between 1931 and 1940, he may well have thought of himself as a Christian, and was in sight of following his first wife into becoming a Roman Catholic. During the Second World War, while he was a civil servant and was also changing wives, Roman Catholicism seems to have receded. On resuming writing after the war, Toynbee adopted for a time the stance of a Christian wellwisher, but committed himself thereafter to the sort of synthesis of all the world's religions which is to be found in Comparing Notes, An Historian's Approach to Religion, and innumerable other works that he wrote for primarily American audiences in the last twenty years of his life. By 1942, Toynbee had already attached himself to Christianity, by implication in volumes iv to vi of A Study of History which were published in 1939, and explicitly in an address delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford as France was falling in May 1940. The impression left by volumes i-iii of A Study of History was, however, that they were the work of a spiritual or religious rather than a Christian mind which believed not the Christianity of volumes iv to vi or the Sheldonian address, but the syncretistic religion of the writings of the 1950s and 1960s. Toynbee's writing after 1946 divides itself into two compartments.

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Prelude

From the middle 1960s onwards, when he was approaching his eighties, his new works on the whole avoided commitment to any particular religion. They described his life, recorded visits to Africa, Asia, and America, and attacked American policy in Vietnam. They dealt with urban living, with art, and with death, and they brought into published form some of the Greek history he had started writing fifty years before. They discussed the prospects for civilization and for relations between the world's religions. But they sustained neither the Christian urgency of 1938-40 nor the eclectic urgency of 1946-65. While recognizing that they were continuous with the writings of the second phase, we may ignore them. The Christian affirmations of the late 1930s recorded a self-conscious reaction to adversity, a reluctant recognition that secular liberalism was not enough. Secular liberalism, of course, was never absent. If toleration without faith had failed, Toynbee did not therefore conclude that toleration was wrong. Toleration, or gentleness, on the contrary was right, even when it was the ideology of an elite; it was just that Christ seemed uniquely to embody it and the Roman Catholic Church to be uniquely able to defend it. The argument of the 1950s, on the contrary, was that this was not so, that all the higher religions were right, and that the imperative for the future was that there should be both conflict and collaboration between them. Viewed retrospectively, Toynbee's Catholicizing period looks like an aberration. But much was retained that was worked out then. After the Second World War he was more explicit about religion than it is likely that he would have been without it, and this was so even though the dominant characteristics of the religion of the fifties and sixties were those of the liberal idealist of the twenties - the conception of a free trade in religions and the unbreakable, parochial conviction that every sort of parochiality must be destroyed. In his explicitly syncretistic phase, Toynbee gave two sets of reasons for mistrusting Christianity. On the one hand, he could not take the exclusive nature of Christian claims. On the other he could not take dogma, immortality, original sin, or unkindness towards animals. The use of religion, as he understood it in this phase, was to give spiritual instruction to the unified world which Western civilization had created. Though this was the same as the use attributed to religion when it had become a pressing concern in the early thirties, it was different in three respects: first, because the earlier use was, where the later obviously

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was not, intended to be descriptive; secondly because, in the later phase, religion was what civilization had been in the earlier - the fundamental human activity;finallybecause, from about 1947 onwards, Toynbee was addressing, not the English liberal intelligentsia from which he had emerged and to which he had been speaking up to about 1939, but the United States as his most profitable and enthusiastic audience and a World Power. II The subject of Toynbee's earliest books was Greece - not the Greece of Plato and Socrates but an under-developed nation of a kind that was 'only too common in the Nearer East', which, until 1912, could not begin to 'order' its 'life' because it had 'not yet emerged from the struggle for existence'. Greek history since 1882 was seen as a conflict between the politics of the present and the future, in which Dalyannis and chauvinism had ensured that the finishing touches were never put to the 'wheel-roads, railways and mines' that Trikoupis had encouraged European capital to provide. The Turkish and Cretan problems were shown obstructing this necessary work of expansion until 'political genius' had emerged in the person of Venizelos to give the nation the impetus that it needed. The message was that the internal politics of Greece could not be insulated from the politics of her neighbours, that Greece by herself was an unintelligible field of activity, and that a certain accumulation of capital was needed before a nation could be self-determining. No doubts were expressed about European civilization or the American influences which had been brought to all levels of Greek society by the personal and financial traffic that had grown up between Greece and the United States. The position throughout was a progressive one, with American energy and Western European capital as the agents of progress in the face of the village schoolmaster who, despite having 'Homer' and 'a little French' - to say nothing of the principles of 1789 - still tended to believe that 'the ikon in the neighbouring monastery was made by St Luke and the Bulgar beyond the Mountains by the Devil'. In 1915 Toynbee's policy for Greece was the construction of a zollverein leading to a Balkan federation. He was certain that 'the faith' which had created 'national' unity would 'suffice' neither the Greeks 'nor any other Balkan people' for the 'new era' that had

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Prelude

'dawned upon them', and he found in 'Americanism' alone an experience strong enough to shake them out of the mental rut into which they had been pushed both by life under the Turks and by the effort to expel them. The emigrant [he wrote at the end of Greece] will give Greece all Trikoupis dreamed of, but his greatest gift to his country will be his American point of view. In the West he has learnt that men of every language and religion can live in the same city and work at the same shops and sheds and mills and switch-yards without desecrating each other's churches or even suppressing each other's newspapers, not to speak of cutting each other's throats; and when next he meets Albanian or Bulgar on Balkan ground, he may remember that he has once dwelt with him in fraternity at Omaha or St Louis or Chicago. This is the gospel of Americanism, and unlike Hellenism, which spread downwards from the patriarch's residence and the merchant's counting-house, it is being preached in all the villages of the land by the least prejudiced and most enterprising of their sons (for it is these who answer America's call); and spreading upward from the peasant towards the professor in the university and the politician in parliament. At the outset, then, Toynbee was interested in superseding nationalism. In its most objectionable forms - jingoism or chauvinism - force had to be applied (which was why Britain had gone to war in 1914). In dealing with all other forms, it was assumed that good-will and ingenuity would be sufficient. By nationalism, in its tolerable form, Toynbee meant 'co-operation'. A nation was a 'concrete aggregate of people habitually in touch with one another' and bound together by the 'immanence' in each individual person of a 'will to co-operate'. It was not only the will of its 'living members', however, that made a nation 'organic' or gave it a 'momentum'. The 'cloud of unseen witnesses' bequeathed to it 'by the past' were also necessary concomitants of what was said to be Europe's supreme political achievement - 'freely constituted human groups' working out 'their own salvation'. The difficulty therefore was not that nationalism was wrong or dangerous in itself, but that it conflicted with another force which required freedom of action for its operation. This force was called 'Economics' or the 'Industrial Revolution'. The problem was to find a form of political organization that would meet its requirements. This did not at first involve a negative attitude since nationalism was a 'phase of social evolution' that 'every people may sometime attain', and should be helped to attain in a case like that of the Poles

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whose development had been retarded. What it did involve, however, was an effort to root out the 'evil element' in its nature and by a 'change of heart' to make it compatible with 'Internationalism'. When the need was first laid out in 1915 it was put cautiously as part of a plan for a 'liberal' non-punitive peace treaty in which, after granting Home Rule all round in Russia, disintegrating the AustroHungarian Empire, and establishing real self-government in Persia, attention could be given to such long-term devices as a formal understanding between a Balkan zollverein and a commercial Germany. With the collapse of the empires in Russia, Austria, Germany and Turkey and with the formation of the League of Nations in 1920, the problem became more fundamental. In the early 1920s, Toynbee's writing was League propaganda, arguing the League case with moderation and precision, and repeating the reasons for believing that total national independence was obsolete in a world that was economically interdependent. From some time after 1925 his tone became more demanding. What he began to say then and especially after 1929 - was that at the same time that 'revolutionary modern improvements in transport and communications' were effecting a 'world-wide extension of the Western economic system', GreatPower predominance had been so weakened by the war that the 'complicated' and 'delicate' machinery through which the Industrial Revolution had 'linked up' the world was 'being played tricks with . . . by a host of little boys' in 'sixty or seventy sovereign governments'. The outcome was a riddle - whether the abolition of war would come about 'later or sooner', 'after the annihilation of all the warring states but one', or 'through a world agreement'. The conception of 'agreement' was not filled in. To some extent it was to be federal, like the United States of America. To some extent it was to be modelled on the British Commonwealth which was an 'improvement' on the 'Empire out of which it had evolved'. In either case it involved what Toynbee had rejected in 1915 - withdrawal under League auspices of the 'local sovereign state's' power to make war. The expectations entertained about the consequences were limitless, extending far beyond the avoidance of political conflict to the establishment of a spiritual bridge as the basis for reconciliation between civilizations. Although the First World War had induced in Toynbee a sense both of 'psychological devastation' and of 'uncertainty' about the future, he had not at first conceived of the problem in terms of civilization's

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Prelude

inmost qualities. Nationality and the War had predicted a 'liberation of energy for higher ends' if European nation-states acted as they ought to. But it had been an open question whether they were not doomed to the 'same destruction' as the 'Cities of Greece'. There was no discussion of the content of their civilization except so far as words like bureaucracy, militarism, industrialism and democracy implied a discussion. In Toynbee's post-war writings, civilization slowly became the theme. It was through consideration of Greece - Ancient and Modern, and the differences between them - and by linking them with the political assumptions of Nationality and the War, that Toynbee began to identify himself first with Western civilization and then with all the civilizations of the world. In an Inaugural Lecture as Koraes Professor in London University in 1919, Toynbee made two disillusioning points - that the modern Greeks were the heirs, not of Hellenic civilization, but of Slav barbarians, and that Byzantium, so far from being the 'life in death of the Roman Empire', had been the 'ruthless' agent by which Hellenic culture, transformed by Christianity, had been transmitted to them. Having borrowed the methods of a 'Middle Eastern monarchy' in the sixth century and having been influenced by the Middle Eastern civilization they had resisted - having, moreover, been part of the Ottoman Empire - the Greeks had taken the decision to 'throw in their lot' with Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and, as a 'land-bridge' with the Middle East, had become a contact-point between civilizations. In discussing civilization, the Inaugural Lecture made two suggestions. It suggested the need for careful description and a listing of extant examples. And it suggested an assessment of relations between Western civilization and the rest, which for Toynbee consisted of the Byzantine, Islamic, Hindu and Far Eastern. In his wartime writings (including Armenian Atrocities), Toynbee had avoided criticism of Western civilization as such. By and large these works had been propaganda - reminders rather of Prussian than of European shortcomings, the erasure of the Armenian nation being not, as it was to be in the post-war writings, a manifestation of a 'European vice', but a Turkish crime which the Prussians had done nothing to prevent. Moreover, in advocating national self-government, Toynbee had envisaged ordered progress under British leadership and dynastic rule, and had not anticipated the explosion which had occurred

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by 1920. It was in explaining the fact that the dynasties had been destroyed, that Greece had behaved chauvinistically, and that liberal Russia had turned out to be a chimera, that Western civilization came to be seen as destructive. In The League and the East - a pamphlet published in 1920 - Toynbee sketched the 'penetration of the East' by the 'nations of modern Europe' from thefifteenthcentury onwards. He described the weakness shown by 'Oriental reconstruction' in face of Western action and claimed that European influence would be found 'at the bottom of almost any modern Oriental movement we examine'. On the one hand it had produced 'reactionary' movements of 'negation and revolt'. On the other, it had stimulated a borrowing of techniques and institutions. Among the first, only Pan-Islamism was mentioned, and that in an unfriendly way. Among the second, only Japan was treated respectfully, Egypt, Persia and Turkey being examples of indigenous corruption and external pressure deflecting 'liberal' intentions in chauvinistic directions. Up to 1922 Toynbee had been a partisan of Greece: in that year he was alienated by the experience he had of Greek atrocities while acting as Manchester Guardian correspondent to the Greco-Turkish war. His reporting, and two books on the subject, created so much resentment against him as the holder of a Greek-endowed chair at whose Inaugural Venizelos himself had been present, that he was more or less compelled to resign before being appointed to a post at Chatham House. In The Western Question in Turkey and Greece the position which had been put tentatively in The League and the East was given doctrinal stiffening. The 'Western factor' became a 'destructive . . . force' which had worked 'havoc' with the lives of those people in the 'Near and Middle East' who had experienced it. A 'Western formula' - nationhood based on community of language - was said to have 'resulted in massacre', the blame for which was attributed not to the Greeks or the Turks but to 'the West' which had 'unscrupulously' taken advantage of the Turks after the 1908 revolution and had destroyed Turkish selfconfidence and self-respect since. It was 'the West' which had made the Greeks 'conceited and pharisaical' by contrast with the Russians who had preserved their 'spiritual individuality' while embracing Western conceptions in the nineteenth century, and whose 'revolutionary Bolshevism' involved only 'enthusiastic acceptance' of the 'condemnation passed by the Western conscience itself upon the structure

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of Western Society'. The reader of the two editions of The Western Question was left in no doubt that Western influence was being cast as a scapegoat for evils from which Toynbee had not originally expected that the post-war world would be suffering. In making the change that he made in the 1920s from seeing the world problem as a problem about Nationalism to seeing it as a problem about civilization, Toynbee was within sight of A Study of History which was conceived in 1916 and sketched in 1927-28. At the same time he was taking his first look at the 'religion of the future'. In The League and the East Toynbee had claimed for the League a role not only as a curb on the nation-state but also as the reconciler between civilizations. Just as the 'establishment of genuine self-government in the East' had made it possible to treat 'Oriental peoples' as proper members of the League, so a 'public-spirited . . . inspectorate' recruited under League auspices from all civilizations through an 'international university' might be expected to unite 'East and West' in a 'larger society'. This 'larger society' - 'The Great Society' - was to be the society of the future. As described in Toynbee's BBC talks World Order or Downfall in 1930, it was the society that could be brought into being once the League solution of the political problem had made it possible to take up the larger problem of 'collision and interaction' between 'civilizations'. In this respect two sorts of institution were expected to be vital - the 'international association of private businessmen' and a 'supra-national church' - both of which had the virtue that they conducted their battles without arms and had an 'imponderable prestige' as great as that of the mediaeval papacy. The importance of 'international businessmen' needs no elaboration. From his earliest writings Toynbee had taken a Cobdenite view of economic activity, consecrating its independence and treating it as a power that deserved to override political limitations. A world in which Fords, Standard Oil, J. P. Morgan and Co., and General Motors took the lead in unifying mankind was perfectly compatible with everything he had conceived of before. What needs careful examination is his conception of religion.

in Though Toynbee's doctrine after the Second World War was unquestionably 'liberal', it had been reached after a rambling odyssey. He may

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well have begun by identifying 'the modern Western' and the 'Hellenic' genius with the 'liberal spirit'. He had almost certainly thought of Greek Literature as 'exciting contemporary work' with 'immediate significance for the present day'. But he had been critical of the Greek polis as an undergraduate and, if he ever accepted Hellenism in Gilbert Murray's sense, effected a complete disengagement from it. There is not much evidence about Toynbee's religion before the 1914 war, which began when he was twenty-five. Such evidence as there is suggests that he would not have called himself a Christian. He might have agreed that Christ did in a popular way what Socrates had done for an elitist society in Greece. But that is as far as he would have gone, either then or in the ten or fifteen years after the war. At this time he considered Christianity primarily as an historical influence in a relativistic analysis rather than as a 'contemporary community of ideas'. He emphasized that 'Christian' did not mean 'Western', that Near-Eastern Orthodox Christianity had created a separate 'civilization', and that Middle Eastern Monophysitism had far more in common with Islam - both as a 'monotheistic' reaction against 'trinitarianism' and as a Middle Eastern reaction against 'Hellenism'. In discussing the civilization's loss of initiative in the seventeenth century, he drew attention to its 'breakdown' six centuries before, which he explained in terms of a 'premature' development of the 'state' and the consequent subordination of the Church to the various states concerned. The significance of Western Christianity on this analysis and the point of contrast with Eastern Orthodoxy, was that, having 'struggled into autonomy' and 'transcended states' in the Middle Ages, the Western Church had contrived to 'bind civilization together'. Though in no way dependent on a 'territorial basis', it had been a 'Great Power', and had embodied 'moral forces . . . co-extensive with . . . the entire body of Western Christendom'. It was only when the Reformation had subverted it that its supremacy had been contested by 'national states', the worship of which by 1930 had become the 'most widespread form of genuine religion in the Western world'. In the twenties and thirties Toynbee left the impression of admiring the mediaeval church for laying up its 'treasure in heaven', as the 'new religion of the future' would do, and of preferring it both to Hellenism whose 'kingdom had been a kingdom of this world' and to the 'world of today' which also laid up its 'treasure where moth and rust doth corrupt'. He pointed out that the 'spiritual disease' that Hellenism

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had died of, was 'State-worship' - an idolatrous sin against the higher nature of man which would kill modern civilization unless something was done to stop it doing so in the future. In his later writings Toynbee was less dogmatic about the future than in the broadcasts of 1930. Then he talked with Comtean certainty about the struggle that would occur between Islam, Hinduism, Communism and Christianity as the Great Powers of the Great Society of the future, a struggle which would be conducted in 'mother tongues' and 'world languages' through 'books, newspapers and broadcasting installations', and which would be resolved not by guns, tanks and bombs but by the realization, consequent upon an 'inward change of heart', that 'the spirit of the New Testament' (represented among others by Tolstoy and Dostoievsky) demanded a rejection of the 'spirit of violence' wherever it might be found. In describing the Christian contribution, Toynbee made it clear that Erastian Churches would be excluded from the struggle: 'certainly not any churches that remain on the establishment of local sovereign states' could hope to matter, he wrote. Protestant and Orthodox churches would matter only if they disestablished themselves first and created a 'worldwide federation' of 'free churches' on the North American model. Apart from them, only the Roman Catholic church would be in a position to act as a 'Great Power' in the New Age. The 'spirit of the New Testament', the 'inward change of heart' and oecumenical Christianity did not carry Toynbee very far, even when they were connected by implication (in volumes i to iii of A Study of History) with withdrawal and return and the dark night of the soul. It was not until the end of the thirties that his doctrine became systematically Christian. By 1939 Toynbee had absorbed a number of disillusioning experiences. He had witnessed the destruction of the English Liberal party by alliance between Labour and protectionist Conservatism, and the destruction by Bolshevism of the liberal Russia that his earliest works had looked forward to when the First World War was over. He had been an advocate of the rights of nationality and had seen how disastrous the outcome had been. He had spent fifteen years pushing a League position and had then found it falling away underneath him. He had come to believe that a second world war was on the way and had experienced an acute pessimism about its outcome. He may without exaggeration be said to have got everything wrong politically. His

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reaction was to claim that religion could do more than politics had done to save the eggs from civilization's broken basket. The explanatory basis was a reversal of roles as between civilization and religion. Instead of religions being the chrysalises out of which civilizations emerged, as the Western civilization had emerged out of the Church of the Dark Ages, it was now civilizations that were the chrysalises and a universal church the emergent consequence. It would be 'melancholy and indeed almost heart-breaking', Toynbee wrote, if this were not the case, since if civilization was the 'highest form of social life open to us', then, given present conditions, 'humanity might be coming to a dead end'. It was in order to avoid this conclusion that 'religion' was brought into play as the higher form of social existence which would emerge out of 'suffering'. The 'suffering' Toynbee described was partly the suffering experienced as secular civilization failed, and partly a junction of the 'mythical passions' of Tammuz, Adonis, Attis and Osiris with 'the Passion of Christ'. He assumed that earthly suffering made it possible for religion to make a 'single, continuous, upward' movement towards Heaven. This was a complacent assumption and, in view of his account of the process by which a religion emerged from a civilization, a rather odd one. For it was not exactly civilization that produced religion but the supersession of the dominant elite in the course of the 'social schism' that arose when a 'creative minority' degenerated into a 'dominant' one and the proletariat, ceasing to be 'led by attraction', refused to be controlled by force. This was what Toynbee supposed had happened in the Roman Empire and may have supposed had been happening in England in his lifetime. In hoping that social schism, or suffering, would help religion to repair the damage, Toynbee was expecting the threat of proletarian violence to be overcome by Christian gentleness. If the 'meek' were going to inherit the earth, that would certainly prevent violence and might mitigate expropriation. In either event - whether the new religion was to come up from the proletariat or to be instilled into it from above - the world's hope was conceived of as consisting in the perception that, since Civilization was a 'vain repetition' of what the Greeks and Romans had done before, 'the greatest new event' in the future would be 'the Crucifixion and its spiritual consequences'. This was an arbitrary conclusion which had, nevertheless, three sorts of rationale. It completed the apotheosis of the League expectations

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of the early twenties. It envisaged not only European civilization as being in danger, but the whole of the civilization with which 'the West' had ringed the world. It suggested that Western civilization's encircling movement had provided a 'world-wide repetition of the Roman Empire' in which Christianity could become the 'spiritual heir of all the other higher religions' and the Christian Church the 'social heir of all the other churches a n d . . . civilizations'. In the writings of 1939 and 1940 Christianity meant primarily 'the life of the Church in her traditional Catholic form'. This included the 'sacrifice of the Mass' as the mature version of the 'ancient rite' through which early man had worshipped 'the fertility of the Earth', and the Church hierarchy as the embodiment of the permanence, panoply and toughness of the 'mundane, institutional' element which Protestantism had mistakenly rejected. It also included a Hildebrandine recognition that an 'outburst of sainthood' in the very 'strongholds' of secularism had stimulated Papal resistance to the Italian state in 1870, to the German state since 1871 and to the French state since 1904, and seemed likely to reach its culmination in resistance to Nazism in the immediate future. At this hour of decision [Toynbee wrote of the Munich crisis in 1938] it looked as though the victor in those preliminary skirmishes was now going into action in a pitched battle in which it was meet and right that all men and women in the Western World who 'had been baptised into Christ'. . . and all the Gentiles who had become 'partakers of the 'promise' . . . through the adoption of our Western way of life . . . should call upon the Vicar of Christ to vindicate the tremendous title which Pope Innocent III had bequeathed to subsequent successors of St. Peter. In discussing the content of religion, Toynbee did not confine himself to externality and sacrificial rite, or to the political power which had been the subject of discussion in the 1920s. He drew a distinction between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Church Militant on Earth and was careful to explain that 'sin and sorrow' would still accompany the latter, however oecumenical its authority might become. Religious progress meant 'spiritual progress' in the individual personality and there was no reason to expect 'any change in unredeemed human nature while human life on Earth goes on'. Even if the spread of Christianity brought a measure of social progress, real progress 'under a truly Christian dispensation' would be the spiritual progress of the soul which would be available not just to those who had been subject to

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the special irradiation of Christ's grace but to 'all men of good will . . . who make the most of their spiritual opportunities on Earth'. The conception of a development in religion independent of the development of civilization dominated volumes iv to vi of A Study of History which described the 'rhythm' that operates when the process of growth described in volumes i-iii comes to an end. Extensive attention was given to the breakdown of civilizations, the resulting failures - all sixteen of them - demonstrating the moral problem that arises when creative minorities, having lost their creativity, turn into dominant minorities and are resisted by proletariats for that reason. In asserting that Christianity alone could provide the remedy, Toynbee affirmed Christ's superiority to all other agents of salvation. Christ was not, like some of them, 'a man with a sword'. Unlike the philosophers, he had had - what was foolishness to them - the courage to be sacrificed. He was superior to other gods because he had been sacrificed by choice and in a way that had helped men to receive God's 'pity' and 'love'. In Toynbee's presentation in the late 1930s, Christianity offered gentleness and redemption from sin as specifics against the idolatry that hampers creative responses to the problems of life. It was in these respects that Western man was said to be defective, his intellectual leaders having abandoned belief in sin while the internal proletariat had failed to be interested in gentleness. In practical terms, there was little optimism. Tolstoy, Gandhi, Lansbury and Dick Sheppard were praised. So was Protestant revivalism in the form of the Oxford Group. But the future was treated as open. It was stated that the toleration without 'roots in faith' which had characterized Western society since the wars of religion had lost its hold and that 'philosophy' would have to give way to 'religion' if advances were to be made beyond the Intellect of the elite to the 'souls' of the 'mass of Mankind'. The full explanation of this was not laid out until volume vii of A Study of History was published in 1954. In the 1930s, when the prospects of civilization were in doubt, it was far from clear that Christianity had to triumph through the reconstruction of civilization. All that was clear was that the 'cramping bounds' of national 'prisonhouses' and 'single civilizations' had to be broken, and that the 'meaning' of the 'mystery' was a 'universal church'.

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IV In the Reconsiderations that he gave in 1961 to the accounts of religion that he had given earlier in his life, Toynbee was at pains to establish that he no longer saw religion as valuable chiefly for its use in giving birth to, or propping up, civilizations. 'The service of secular purposes', so far from being a 'fulfilment', was now a 'diversion' and the 'higher religions' were bound to regard disengagement from 'secular, social and cultural trammels' as 'indispensable . . . for the fulfilment of their... mission'. This was a summary statement of Toynbee's view of religion in the 1960s. It masked a considerable complication in his account of the effect which a religion can have, and of the proper relationship that should obtain between religion, civilization, and political power. When Toynbee resumed writing after the Second World War he was concerned primarily with the future of the world. But he also addressed the English situation, regretting the damage that had been done to middle-class power by the Labour party and the trades union movement. He claimed that the middle classes had been the 'leaven in the lump' and had had a 'zest for work' which the working classes lacked, and he went so far as to regard the regimentation of private industry and the bureaucratization of business as threats to the industrial economy. On the other hand, he reminded the middle classes that they too had been thought destructive before they had acquired power, and suggested that it would be 'the same with the working class' - that they were 'rather mature politically' and would 'take the responsibility for keeping the economic machine going . . . if they came into a share, or even won a plenitude, of economic power'. 'In England', he announced in 1948, 'we are . . . fumbling and feeling our way towards a mixture of private enterprise and socialism', and it was clear that he wished to be regarded as the apologist of its possibilities as a World Ideology. In this phase of Toynbee's thinking there were two major problems war and poverty. But war, though vital to his argument, may be discussed briefly as an introduction to the question of poverty. For the important point about war was that it was now an impossibility. Though by no means as optimistic about the United Nations as he had been about the League of Nations, Toynbee was as clear as he had

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been in the early twenties that the world was moving towards political unification. In the brief period of American nuclear monopoly after 1945, he attacked the idea that unification might be achieved by force. With the establishment of Russian nuclear power in 1949, an investigation of the American ideology began as a discussion of world poverty but very soon became a discussion of the role which religion would play in the world's future. When Toynbee came to understand that the next phase of world history would be conflict between Russia and the United States, he asked whether a third power existed that could act as mediator. In principle his answer was that there was not - that the raison d'etre of the British Commonwealth was decentralization and that a European power would be ineffective without German predominance and insupportable with it. So far as military, industrial or technological power was concerned, the struggle would be between Russia and the United States with the United States, or the West, having a marked initial superiority. Western technology, however, was what Toynbee had made the object of criticism in the 1930s; he made it the object of criticism again now, so far as it was not under moral control in the United States. It was not under moral control, he alleged, because of the intolerable disparity between the standard of living enjoyed by most Americans, and the poverty experienced by hundreds of millions of the underprivileged in India and China. Criticism of capitalism, individualism and economic inequality was not Toynbee's primary theme in the fifties. It became primary in the sixties when concentration on consumer goods was said to distinguish the United States from Russia to Russia's advantage, and to present insuperable obstacles to the United States's conduct of the Cold War. It was the demand to eradicate Madison Avenue's celebrations of affluence which justified the praise that was showered on President Kennedy's Peace Corps - a body of American lay-missionaries dedicated to 'embracing poverty in the spirit . . . of St Francis of Assisi' who was 'the greatest soul that has appeared in our Western World . .. since our Western Civilization came up out of the Dark Ages'. America and the World Revolution was delivered as lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961; The Economy of the Western Hemisphere was delivered as lectures at the University of Puerto Rico in the same year. Where the first claimed that affluence divided the

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United States from the rest of the world, the second pointed to the revolutionary potentialities of the Latin-American situation. It demanded the replacement of Dulles's negativity by a revivified Jeffersonianism, and it saw in Kennedy's 'Alliance for Progress between the United States and the Latin American republics' an authentic continuation of the American Revolution. It quoted with evident radical zeal Kennedy's claim to be making the first American attempt to break up the latifundia - the 'agrarian road-block' which enabled 'a privileged few' to 'reap the benefits of a rising abundance'. Toynbee had little knowledge of Latin America and not much more of China and India; his remarks were the travellers' tales of a wellinformed repository of average opinion. The egalitarian message, like the egalitarian message of the late 1940s, supplied a liberal combination of virtue and calculation, and expediency and moral indignation, together with the idea that American youth should begin slumming all over the world, as Toynbee's Oxford contemporaries had slummed at Toynbee Hall. As a statement about the under-developed world, this was unimportant. It was important because it constituted the sumtotal of Toynbee's religion. In the Pennsylvania lectures in 1961 Toynbee declared that 'the posting of a new kind of representative abroad' - the new lay-missionary type of representative - carried with it a 'commitment on the home front'. A representative would be useless if he was not a 'fair sample' of the people he represented. The inadequacy of existing representation to deal with the Cold War had brought up the 'very searching' questions, what is the purpose of life in America? what is the purpose of life in the Western World? or rather, and as a yardstick by which to measure both American and Western life, what is the true end of man? The true end of man was not the possession of the 'maximum amount of consumer goods per head'. Men had material requirements without which their true end could not be achieved, but these were extremely limited and were not the end for which life was lived. The end was not a material end. It was 'spiritual potentiality' that distinguished Man from the animals, and made 'excessive indulgence in the satisfaction of material wants' an obstacle to his development. The point of this catechism was two-fold: to show up the 'artificial stimuli of advertising agencies' as enemies to man's true nature; and to encourage the American young to understand that the 'religious

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virtue of self-denial' and giving to the poor in under-developed countries would enable them at the same time to fulfil their natures, to emulate the Russians, and to rejoin the American Revolution. The idea that man's end was spiritual, and that the Western World had lost sight of this at the same time that the Russians had begun to see it, was recurrent in Toynbee's writing at this time. It was the theme of The World and the West - the BBC Reith Lectures in 1952 - and of innumerable other public statements from 1947 onwards. Toynbee's feelings about the Soviet Union may be easier to explain when his correspondence is available (unless, of course, his reasons were not what they seem to have been). In the absence of evidence to the contrary, they may be taken at their face value as a detailed application of the repeated demand that he made in these years for the restoration of religion to a place of primacy in Western life. Toynbee had argued in the thirties, and argued again now, that the Western World had allowed technology to supersede religion. In the thirties he had wanted technology to be controlled by religion - first by the eclecticism of volumes i-iii, then by the Christianity of volumes iv to vi. After 1945 he wanted it to be dominated by whatever religion could be extracted from all the higher religions. By the end of the 1940s, Toynbee's attitude to European religion was more aggressive than it had been when he began discussing it in the early thirties. By this time he had connected technology with scepticism and secularization with both, and had come to see in secularization an attempt to suppress religion. He saw the Western mind since 1650 as riddled with pelagianism and false toleration, and basking in the assumption that perfection could be achieved. He showed it waking up suddenly in 1914 to the realization that perfection had not been achieved, and that Original Sin had not gone away merely because it had been discarded doctrinally. In the spiritual crisis which the West had suffered since then, he saw a proof that religion could not be 'ignored or repressed for very long'. Because religion was 'an essential element in human life' the crisis of his lifetime had been implicit when toleration had been established in the seventeenth century. Because the West was disillusioned with the 'idols' which the seventeenth century had set up, it had been brought face to face with its 'ancestral Christianity'. But because the agents and advocates of Westernization outside the West had adopted Western secularism in order to get the technology that they wanted, the spiritual crisis of the R.P.D.—c

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twentieth-century West was a crisis which the West could not resolve by itself. In taking this line, Toynbee was part of a fashion, the Christianizing fashion of the 1940s to which Waugh, Butterfield and Eliot had already responded while Toynbee was in the Civil Service, and to which many other writers were to respond before the forties were over. He was also responding to a fact, the liberation of Asia, and the challenge he saw this presenting to the West, which needed to abandon its 'smug and slovenly' self-envelopment as it suffered the 'shock' that other societies had suffered in the course of acquiring a 'synoptic view of history as a whole'. A synoptic view would show that there was a 'unity' between the 'history of all known civilizations', culminating in the emergence of higher religions. It was within the higher religions which had appeared in the last four thousand years that mankind was going to be living in the future. It was in the conditions created by Western technology that these would be 'brewed together in a single crucible' so secure that, when the Western scaffolding fell away, as Toynbee was certain that it would, an 'oecumenical house of many mansions' would remain. This was a demand for an assertion of religion, not a demand for the assertion of any particular religion. It assumed that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism had the same aims and, severally or together, should assert themselves against scepticism and technology in the Western World, and against the ideologies that had hindered the spread of true religion elsewhere. In evaluating the higher religions, Toynbee dismissed the religion of the modern West. He was as hostile as ever to Nationalism; he became as hostile to Imperialism and Liberalism, treating both as variations on 'man's self-centred worship of himself. He was, however, neither especially hostile to Communism nor sympathetic to Roman Catholicism; the religion he supported was as much a criticism of Catholicism as of any other form of Christianity. He still claimed to be a Christian but was concerned chiefly to show how Christianity could cooperate with other religions in discarding the idolizations which they all embodied. From one point of view the Christianity of thefiftiesand sixties was merely English radicalism transposed into a religious key, with nationalism and imperialism dismissed as idolizations of human power and the higher religions pursuing social justice and the creation of an international community as the necessary conclusions of Christ's gospel.

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Comparing Notes, the broadcast discussions Toynbee had with his son, Philip, in 1963, underlined the parochial nature of his sympathies. Through discussion of the United Nations, Rhodesia, and the British invasion of Egypt in 1956, they showed how exactly he reflected the frame of mind of the Observer newspaper for which his son wrote, and which Toynbee admired, under David Astor's editorship in these decades. It is easy, and right, to sneer at all this, while realizing that there is something more to be said. In The Prospects of Western Civilization Toynbee described a new, unique factor which was hampering the maintenance of religion in the modern world. This was described as 'creed'. Where primitive religion was liturgical, the higher religions included propositions which were expressed in the intellectual language characteristic of the civilizations in which they arose, and it was the crux of the religious problem in the modern world that the 'trained and enlightened' intelligence which had subjected province after province of thought to scientific treatment since 1650 could not swallow the 'silt-laden water' of the 'higher religions' in the 'historical forms' in which they 'intransigently' offered themselves 'to be taken or left'. It was because religion was 'an essential faculty of human nature' and with a view to enabling modern men to return to it without abandoning their modernity, that Toynbee aimed to separate religion from other activities that had been confused with it in the past - not only philosophy and science but also theology, which was described in the Gifford Lectures of 1952-53 as resting on a 'poetic' use of words and as obfuscating religion whenever it mistook a 'poetic intuition' for a scientific fact. Toynbee recognized the centrality of churches to religion. He spent a great deal of time explaining why they were central, and what they had to do in the future to the claims that they had made in the past. In particular they had not to exaggerate their own importance. They had to understand that all existing religions were riddled with the idolatry of self-centredness, and that the irony about earthly concerns, which is the beginning of religion, had to be applied to them as well as to everything else. Toynbee did not exactly deny that God could have commissioned churches to go out and preach His Word. But he was clear that none of the existing higher religions had an exclusive commission, and that they should all be understood as variations on a single theme which, when played properly, could be played 'in harmony, not discord'.

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As to the best way of making them do this Toynbee was vague, except where he was negative. He was negative in the sense that man's religious needs could not be met by pursuing a religion which was merely 'the tribal religion of a particular civilization'. In indicating the positive nature of those needs, he made a universal application of the modernist latitudinarianism - purging Christianity of historical accessions - which had been so important a feature of English thought in the nineteenth century. This was summarized in four words. It was summarized as Choice because the world was changing from a place in which a man's religion was decided for him by the accident of birth into one in which he would decide for himself 'between alternative religions'. It was summarized as Suffering because Suffering was inseparable from selfhood, humbled the complacency of secular self-centredness, and demanded an exhausting attempt to understand God's purpose in permitting it. It was summarized as Sub-Conscious so far as Reason missed religion's 'undisciplined inconsequence', and so far as the subconscious was the fount of Poetry and Music, and the channel of the Soul's communion with God. It was also summarized in the word Love. By Love, Toynbee meant a human attempt to reproduce God's condescension. He meant realizing that the human race is a 'single family', that those who have should not look down on those who have not, and that the world movement for 'the emancipation of individual souls' should put an end to the cranky self-insulation practised by Afrikaners, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and high-caste Hindus in their relations with foreign peoples. In these, the most successful years of his life, Toynbee's message was that the experiment of the previous two and a half centuries had been a failure - that Western rationalism was parochial, half a civilization masquerading as a whole one. But he also argued that Christianity was parochial, that it was as Pharisaical as all the other religions of Judaic stock had been, and that it must learn to treat Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism not as rivals but as natural allies in the fight against the modern mind. In Reconsiderations, Toynbee denied that he had ever thought that all the higher religions were identical, or were likely to 'make a merger of their . . . doctrines, practices and institutions'. In this he may have been right: he certainly regarded them as psychological types which would appeal to the psychological types of mankind. This, however,

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was a position adopted under criticism and attack. More characteristic was the sense he left that the only thing which could unite mankind's spiritual forces against the forces of secular nationalism or materialism - the only religion that could take a stand against the 'modern sceptical movement' - was one that lacked, or avoided, the conceptions of orthodoxy and truth. I . . . believe [he wrote in Reconsiderations in 1961] that there never has been and never will be, a 'chosen' people or sangha or church invested with a monopoly of truth and salvation. Any such monopoly, if it were conceivable (and it is not conceivable to me), would be invidious both for the recipient and for the donor of the privilege. It would not be consonant either with Man's nature or with God's nature as I see them. And, as long as I continue to see them as I do, I shall also continue, as far as I can foretell, to remain in the theological position in which I now find myself. This stand of mine may put me out of communion with the orthodox adherents of each of the higher religions (at any rate, each of those in the Judaic group). It lies with the orthodox, not with me, to decide whether, in their eyes, I am within their pale or am beyond it. But it lies with me, not with them, to feel the feelings that I, too, feel toward those sublime figures that are revered and adored by me as well as by their orthodox followers or worshippers. No human writ of excommunication can come between those saviours and me. My knee bows, like every Christian knee, at the deed of self-sacrifice, done for love of us men and for our salvation, that is recited by Saint Paul to the Philippians. For me, the doer of this deed is one presence in more than one epiphany. It is Christ, and, because it is Christ, it is also the Buddha and the bodhisattvas. There are many passages of this sort in Toynbee's writings. Most of them leave the impression of having been squeezed out of anguish. Yet it is difficult to take them seriously. The spirituality is flat, providing a sort of pious cement to save civilization, or a post-liberal mysticism to safeguard the higher thinking, where what is needed is the realization that relativism subverts eclecticism, that irony protects religion, and that reactionary bloodiness is needed for survival. If, then, one asks why Toynbee deserves attention, the answer must be that he was a liberal enemy of optimism and complacency. Those who despise him have good reason. But they should recognize that he remains, even now, through all his solemnity, eclecticism and elitism, one of the most significant monuments to that resentful, self-destructive, post-Christian Liberalism which, though designed to absorb the idolatry of parochial religion into a properly constituted oecumenicity, succeeded only in replacing the one sort of religion that is possible in

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a disordered world by the oecumenical requirements of social justice. This advance towards greater social justice through an increase in human kindness [went a sad piece of self-examination] has been taking place in two fields simultaneously: as between different classes in a single country and also as between different countries in a world that is now in process of being unified morally and socially as well as technologically and militarily. The relatively rich minority of the human race has now recognized that it has an obligation to make material sacrifices in order to assist the relatively poor majority to raise its standard of living on both the material and the spiritual plane. Peoples that are still exercising political control over other peoples have now come, thanks to an American lead, to expect to pay for this political privilege instead of any longer expecting to draw the traditional profits of empire. These practical steps towards the vindication of fundamental and universal human rights leave us still far away from the achievement of a communion of saints.

II

RECEPTIONS

Three Anglican Reactionaries ' "You are a Liberal" I persisted. A shade of annoyance passed over his face. "No. I am not a Liberal" he said. "A Liberal is a person who believes that the great thing is kindness and that all religions have a lot of good in them . . . I can't tell you how much I don't believe in that."' Christopher Hollis Fossetfs Memory 1944 p. 128. 'He had far too deep a heart to be a Humanitarian and far too free a mind to be a Liberal.' Kenneth Pickthorn on Rev. Sir E. C. Hoskyns in Sir E. C. Hoskyns Cambridge Sermons 1938 p. xxiv. The claim that wisdom is a Christian virtue grounded upon Christian faith and worship — and upon Christian theology — is now scarcely ever seriously considered, and men and women are brought up in an environment in which truth is a priori assumed to be discoverable most surely by those who have discarded the discipline of the Church. Dislike of the clergy, even by the clergy themselves, and the desire to appear as laymen, are often the concrete signs of this subtle revolt against the ecclesiastical foundation of wisdom.' Rev. Sir E. C. Hoskyns Studying the Bible in We are the Pharisees, A Course of Sermons entitled 'Contemporary Judaism1 (delivered in 1935) 1960 p. 70.

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Church-State Anglicanism in the forms in which it will be described in this chapter was a protest against the intellectual assumptions dominant amongst the thinking classes in early-twentieth-century England. It had many elements of strength, including a dedication to work and thought, a hatred of secular self-righteousness, and a conviction that there is a unity of sentiment between those who work at all levels of the nation's life. Though it was doomed - by its modesty and by a self-defeating determination to be on the losing side - this was not its most obvious feature in Cambridge in 1943. Then it seemed that its advocates spoke with authority, that the future was assured, and that it was assured by the respects in which they were distinguished from Whitehead and Toynbee. Like Toynbee in his middle phase these advocates believed in original sin. They recognized that man 'has a rough road to tread' and that the 'defiant egotism' of human wills 'gets in the way of universality'. But they were not worried by this unduly. They were reasonably happy with the 'sovereign parochial state' and they did not see that it had caused 'the breakdown of civilization'. They were not sure that civilization had broken down or that the claim that it had was more than a liberal trick for driving nails into the coffin of the Church of England. They did not share Toynbee's revulsion at the spectacle of the 'Cross and the national flag . . . being carried in church . . . in the same procession', and they would not have thought it important to put an end to the cranky self-insulation practised by Afrikaners, Germans, AngloSaxons, and high-caste Hindus in their relations with foreign peoples. Nor did they care for many of Whitehead's specialities. They shared his objection to intellectual idolatry but, despite much talk about the 'variety of approaches to sacred truth' that were to be found in the Church of England, they not only did not believe that idolatry was the result of static dogma but were inclined to believe the opposite. They agreed with Whitehead that 'liberal theology' had provided only 'vapid reasons why people should continue to go to church in the traditional fashion'. But they did not accept Whitehead's theology. 48

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They would have dismissed his intellectual mission as an example of intelligentsia delusion. They would have thought little better of the claim that 'Protestant Christianity, so far as it concerns the institutional and dogmatic forms . . . which i t . . . derived from Luther, Calvin and the Anglican Settlement' was showing 'all the signs of a steady decay'. They were against macro-history, whether of Whitehead's or of Toynbee's variety, and made much of the need for contingency and detail as antidotes to it. Theirs was a culture, as much as Adorno's or Habermas's was. It broached all questions and answered some of them. It answered with mannerism as much as with explicit statement. It answered in context and in consciousness of context, and it assumed that the consciousness it embodied was continuous with the consciousness that had saturated the Church of England since it had been set on a permanent course in the 1580s. It aimed more than it aimed at anything else to establish the relevance of this consciousness to the modern world. The modern world meant a world in which dissent and infidelity had arrived and in which Anglicanism had to argue its existence. It meant a world in which there were more souls than could be known. It meant a world in which education imposed burdens, and especially the burden of not assuming that education made its possessors better than those who were without it. For this, there were three main sources, all of them lecturers in the Cambridge History Faculty and all deploying a manifest distaste for middle-class guilt, elitist liberalism, and everything that Toynbee stood for. They were the Conservative MP for the University, Kenneth Pickthorn,1 the Senior Tutor of Emmanuel College, Edward Welbourne,2 and the Dean of Corpus Christi College, Charles Smyth.5 1. Sir Kenneth Pickthorn (1892-1975). Ed. Aldenham School and Trinity College Cambridge. Fellow of Corpus Christi College Cambridge 1914-75. Served in British Army and Royal Air Force 1914-18. MP (Cons.) Cambridge University 1935-50 and Carlton, Notts. 1950-66. Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education 1951-54. Author of The German Revolution and the Conditions which produced it in History of the Peace Conference vol. i 1920, History of the British People 1914-24 1924, Some Historical Principles of the Constitution 1925, Early Tudor Government two vols. 1934 etc. 2. Edward Welbourne (1894-1966). Ed. De Aston School Market Rasen and Emmanuel College Cambridge. Fellow of Emmanuel College 1921-66 (Senior Tutor 1938-51). Master of Emmanuel College 1951-64. Lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge. Author of Modern Times 1921 and The Miners* Unions of Northumberland and Durham 1923. 3. Rev. Canon Charles Smyth (1903- ). Ed. Repton and Corpus Christi

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Receptions

In parliamentary and party terms, Pickthorn was a Conservative. He had been a regular supporter of the National Government from his election as MP for the University in 1935 right up to Chamberlain's removal from the premiership in May 1940. By 1943-44 he had begun to acquire the reputation of a cantankerous reactionary which he owed to the objection he raised to the Churchill government's abandonment of Mihailovitch in Jugoslavia and betrayal of Poland and the Baltic States at Yalta. There were aspects of Churchill that Pickthorn liked - his masculinity, sybaritic booziness and sense of fun. He paid tribute to him as a symbol of the nation's determination to resist Hitler. He gave him credit for reinforcing the army in Egypt in 1940, for putting off the Second Front in 1942-43 and for saving Greece from the worst consequences of his Balkan policy in 1944. But he thought him irresponsible, even frivolous, something of a cad, and inordinately anxious for office and the limelight. He thought him wrong about or uninterested in most domestic questions and far too willing to leave things to R. A. Butler (who, to say the least, was also wrong). He doubted whether Churchill understood the real problem that British statesmen had to face in frustrating not only the 'wickedness of Moscow' but also the 'malignant lunacies of the Americans'. In the 1940s, Pickthorn was at a point of transition. He was no longer the laureate of the existing constitution, as he had been in his second book, Some Historical Principles of the Constitution, which had been published in 1925. By 1943 he was a prophet of the doom that would follow, or was following, its abandonment. Though all that he said or College Cambridge. Fellow of Corpus Christi College 1925-32 and 1937- ; Lecturer in History at Harvard 1926—27. Lecturer in History at Cambridge 192^-32 and 1944-46. Curate of St Clement's Barnsbury 1933-34, of St Saviour's, Upper Chelsea 1934-36 and of St Giles, Cambridge 1936-37. Dean of Corpus Christi College 1937-46. Canon of Westminster and Rector of St Margaret's Westminster 1946-56. Honorary Canon of Lincoln 1965- . Editor of Cambridge Review 1925 and 1940-41. Author of Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI 1926, The Art of Preaching 1940, Simeon and Church Order 1940, The Friendship of Christ 1945, Church and Parish 1955, Cyril Forster Garbett 1959 etc.

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wrote was implicit in Some Historical Principles, and much of it was explicit, he seemed, much more than he had been on paper in the 1920s, to be defending something that was being destroyed. It was being destroyed, it seemed, by Churchill, who treated parliament as a rubber stamp and was too ill to survive the war, and by the high-principled propagation of error - not only the self-righteous errors of the idealists of the League of Nations Union but also the high-principled errors that were embodied in the socialism of the thirties. Pickthorn claimed that politics did not matter 'quite so much as is generally assumed in public discussion', that they mattered 'to most men and probably to still more women' less than 'immediate personal relations', and that they mattered still less to 'everyone who believes that there are . . . any realities beyond this world and this life'. To any of the latter sort, moreover, 'the experiment of a state which is not interested in the various religions of its subjects' was not, as 'our immediate fathers' were apt to regard it, 'the natural normal basis of state membership' but was 'a novel and difficult experiment' which there was no reason to think would succeed. Pickthorn nowhere said that it ought to succeed. He might well have liked an Anglican state if that had been possible. But having, perforce, to accept State neutrality in religion, he pushed the liberal argument to the tactical conclusion that the 'organized force of the State' should be denied the power to offer 'transcendental excuses for employing excessive force' in pursuit of what could only be thought of as 'ideal aims', socialist or liberal aims which had something of a religious quality about them, however reluctant their exponents were to admit this. Pickthorn used this argument not only against continental totalitarianism but also against the Left in England which believed that the 'perfect universal equilibrium' could be achieved if only their ideals were pursued, and while being 'prudishly' unwilling to treat force as unavoidable, insisted on proposing changes so radical and fundamental as to involve 'excessive force' if they were to be carried into effect. Pickthorn did not, in 1943, see how far the Left would get in the next thirty years without either using force or having force used against it. The rhetoric he used can be used retrospectively to support the Labour position he was attacking. But there was much to be said for the contrasts he drew, before Oakeshott or the post-war engineers had drawn it, between 'the power to adapt means to long-desired ends' on the one hand and 'notions or fashions' as applied to politics on the other.

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Pickthorn's first published work was an essay on The German Revolution of 1919. This displayed a method and conveyed a message. The message was that it was military defeat that had brought down the German monarchy, not a 'breakdown at home which caused a breakdown in the field'. The method deflated revolutionary history, the events of 1919 being presented as neither a revolutionary achievement nor the outcome of sympathy between the revolutionaries and 'the mass of the people' but as the consequence of discontents which had been 'bred by the government's failures and rendered powerful only by its collapse'. The German people had 'borne an "authority" state' so long as it was successful. They did not halt the revolution because they were 'conscious of defeat, anxious for peace and food, and convinced that the government had failed and ought to be replaced'. The importance of established power was a recurrent feature of Pickthorn's thought. So was the tendency to explain large-scale change in terms of practical responses to situations. Both were prominent in his major achievement, two volumes on Tudor Government where there was the same emphasis on the action of the political power and the same interest in the nature of politics and political authority. There was the same belief that political history should begin at the top, though in Tudor Government, as in Some Historical Principles, there was an even greater emphasis on law, legality and legal regularity as the bases for understanding the working of the constitution. Pickthorn's 'constitutionalism' - his emphasis on legality and legal rules - did not blind him to the broken-backed character of political events or to the self-interested nature of politicians' motives. Though an articulate propagator of political ideas, he seldom lost sight of the gap between ideas and action or the difficulty involved in distinguishing prejudice from principle. His distaste for the language of principle and preference for the language of prejudice was laid out best in a pamphlet which he published in 1944. The subtlety of his conception of the connection between practice and theory was displayed throughout the first volume of Tudor Government, and nowhere better than in the discussion of Henry VII's title to the throne: If Henry VII had not an indubitable hereditary right [went a passage on page 4] neither had any one else, and the kingdom he won by the sword did not possess and could not provide itself with any constitutional means of deciding in such a situation who ought to be king: nor was it supposed, least of all by Henry, that it was for any earthly power to

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make rules for the descent of kingship. Deus facit haeredem, and the divine control is especially exclusive and essential in the case of kings. So, though Elizabeth should have been crowned if the crown descended to heirs-general, and Warwick if it descended to heirs-male, yet it was possible for Henry to maintain that as the nearest kinsman to Henry VI on the side of Henry IV he was entitled to the throne, and that is what he did maintain. Henry did not go into any detail about his hereditary claim, perhaps on the sound general principle that the less a man bases himself on argument the less he can be proved wrong, perhaps from his consciousness that one of the first results of any technical argumentation on the point must be to bring to public notice the clause excepta dignitate regali in Henry IV's confirmation of the Beauforts' legitimacy. Nevertheless, Henry could assume without absurdity, and did assume with success, that he was king by right of inheritance, and that the God of battles had made his right plain at Bosworth. Henry knew very well that one of the instruments employed by the God of battles was his promise to marry Elizabeth of York, and he knew also that his right, however divine, could not be too firmly certified. When Richard III was slain and Stanley picked the crown out of a bush and put it on Henry's head, Henry was king of a kingdom where there was so little public law, so little constitutional definition, that the very succession to the kingship had never been fixed. He did not intend that defect to be supplied by act of parliament or by archiepiscopal unction or by papal bull or by dynastic treaty; but he was very willing that any or all of these agencies should register and affirm the just title of inheritance and true judgment of God by which he had come to the throne.

Pickthorn's legal constitutionalism was crossed by strong strands of belief in the strength and continuity of government and by an antirevolutionary instinct for the unpredictability of the future. It was Pickthorn, in the course of an attack on evolutionism, six years before the publication of Butterfield's Whig Interpretation of History, who wrote that the metaphors of evolution and growth are particularly dangerous, because in practice, whether necessarily or not, they tend towards fatalism, and that is sad, or even towards a fatalism in which the fatalist himself settles what the end is to be, and that is silly. Along with these expressions there are commonly found adjectives like inevitable, and the people who have this complacency for the mere event often achieve their cheerfulness by assuming that there has been an intention throughout the process, and that the intention is what they would wish it to be; in other words, that, as Providence has moved mysteriously to evolve political thinkers out of the primaeval slime, so the genius of the Constitution has proceeded at a varying pace, but without much deviation, from the barbarism of Hengist and Horsa, through the feudal darkness of William the Conqueror and Edward I, and the crass stupidity of James II and George III, to our

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present enlightenment, and that it will go on irresistibly to perfect parliamentary democracy, or to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, or to submit all human life to the direction of an enlightened bureaucracy, or whatever else. Pickthorn was a pupil of Winstanley and an admirer of Dicey. Like Butterfield, he probably absorbed more from pre First World War Oxford philosophers than he was willing to admit. So far as he learnt from dons, he seems to have learnt most from G. T. Lapsley,1 his tutor at Trinity, a Henry James-style American High Anglican who was fully seized of the assault which free-thinking was making on Christianity and whose interpretation of the mediaeval English constitution, itself marked by Maitland's interpretation, left a deep mark on Pickthorn's conception of political action, however unimpressed he may have been by Lapsley personally. It is unlikely that Pickthorn was ever tempted to believe in liberal progress; to that extent, the First World War confirmed opinions he would have had without it. But the war also stretched his mind, made him conceptualize suffering and enabled him to see the practical significance of the nation-state in this 'vale of tears'. In 1914 Pickthorn was twenty-two. Thereafter, as a survivor, he could not but be aware of war and fearful of it. The form his fear took was fear of the ignorance that could so easily produce it. He equated ignorance with 'idealism' and drew the conclusion that a large part of whatever war-guilt was attributable should be attributed to it. Idealism was linked in his mind with force - not the necessary force on which Law rested but limitless force in pursuit of ideal objectives. This was a persistent theme both between the wars and during the Second World War. It received its clearest definition in an article in November 1940 when the 'only good reason' for 'accepting war' was said to be preventive self-defence and when it was added that war should not be accepted as a way of furthering objectives like 'Christianity', the 'equalization of wealth', or 'raising the standard of life', all 1. G. T. Lapsley (1871-1949). Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1904-49. Author of many articles about the mediaeval constitution of which a selection was edited by Cam and Barraclough in Crown, Community and Parliament in the later Middle Ages 1951. Lapsley wrote an introduction to Laffan's translation of D. Pasquet An essay on the origins of the House of Commons 1925. Other works include Religious Difficulties and Doubts of the Present Generation 1907, The America of Today 1919 and (ed.) (with E. Wharton and R. Norton) Eternal passion in English poetry 1939.

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of which had had dangerous consequences when advocated as guiding principles in the conduct of foreign policy. It was [Pickthorn wrote of 1914-18] the pacifists and semi-pacifists . . . those who had been most opposed to war who, during it, clamoured most about what should be done with victory . . . It was on the whole the materialists and atheists and agnostics who talked most of moral aims and spiritual conflicts . . . It was not the Jingoes or the Imperialists who started the talk about the war to end war or about hanging the Kaiser or about the necessity of making Germany pay and pay heavily . . . It was not . . . simple men . . . who thought king and country sufficient cause to fight for . . . who insisted on Germany's moral guilt, to give her reason to fight again, or who attributed her defeat to propaganda to make it easier for her to fight again.

Although, in Pickthorn's description, as against the 'innocent' descriptions of 'the Left', it had to be understood that 'there were no politics without force', it was also the case that 'the less force' there was 'the better'. 'Nobody' liked 'having force used against him'. 'Constraint' was 'every man's enemy'. In England force had been limited while the strength and continuity of government were maintained. What English history showed, on this view, was a 'large, spirited and active population' being governed 'with the maximum of consent, the minimum of violence and a quite unprecedented increase in wealth'. This had not been the achievement of 'democracy . . . a very difficult Greek word which in England until lately was a term of abuse'. Far less had it been achieved by 'Liberalism' ('a word which came from Spain and a thing which in England was largely sectarian and pharisaicaF). On the contrary it had been achieved by 'tradition and discussion, by the cherishing of liberties, even sometimes beyond the point where they were clearly founded in reason or respectable for their utility . . . and by the keeping of administration subordinate to rule of thumb about what is practical and tolerable'. English government, indeed, had extended the freedom of the family (where there was less 'compulsion' than in any other society) and had created a 'tolerant and receptive nationality': a 'sense of community all the more difficult to break or divert' because of its 'ancient and continuous kindliness and co-operation, its unbroken and unended chain of linked kinships and its universally shared community of language, literature, law, manners and principles'. These assumptions had been deployed to considerable effect in the

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first of Pickthorn's long works: a volume in Cassell's History of the British People published in 1925. It is so central to everything he meant that it deserves special consideration. The History of the British People was a popular work, extensively illustrated and designed to be read by a large audience. It described the reaction to war and the threat of war from the end of isolation in the 1890s to the fall of Lloyd George in 1922. It treated war, or the threat of war, as the central fact in British history in these years, and made the central theme relations between government and people in reacting to it. The volume was in no sense jingoistic. It showed how reluctantly the British had entered the war. It described their acceptance of the losses and bereavements they had suffered once it had started and their determination to go on in spite of the fears which politicians expressed among themselves after the defeats of April 1918. There were passages of praise for the fighting man. There were extended accounts of Pickthorn's distaste for the blatant propaganda of journalists and publicists and ironical comments on the contrast between politicians' words and reality. Pickthorn recognized the importance of the war. But he ridiculed the prophets who had had an interest in exaggerating its effects because of the predictions they had made before it began. Whatever they had said, war had not destroyed industrial civilization. It had not ended 'party and social strife', and nor had it made England a 'Christian but non-sectarian home for heroes'. It had demonstrated, on the contrary, the uncataclysmic character of historical effects and the 'elasticity' of 'modern complexities'. The damage that it had done had not stopped it being waged. States had not been 'fatally shattered' nor peoples 'intolerably distressed'. The 'nerves of twentieth-century men' had turned out to be as 'strong as those of their forefathers'. Despite the immense proportion of manpower that had been 'exclusively devoted to inflicting and avoiding death', no nations 'with such dreadful preoccupations' had ever 'suffered so little in their clothing, feeding and housing'. Pickthorn was not, it is necessary to repeat, minimizing the dreadfulness of war. But he was making it clear that liberal publicists neither understood morale nor realized the extent to which their assumptions had been demolished by the ordeal through which the nations had passed. This was so in two senses. It was so in the sense that the 'economic machine' was 'less delicate' and could stand a great deal

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more battering than they had suggested. It was so in the sense that the British people were not only more robust than they had believed but were also more robust than a great many of their leaders had believed. Pickthorn's subject, indicated by the series in which he was writing, was 'the history of the people'. In practice, this turned out to be a history of politics spiced and strengthened by accounts of munitions factories, the conscript army and the arrival of women in public life. It did not arrive at the sort of history which regards politics as epiphenomenal in relation to the people's history. On the other hand, a sociological history was desiderated at the same time that it was also alleged to be both impossible in normal conditions and possible only for a time like the middle of the war when there was a common experience - an experience, in this case, of 'by far the majority of those British citizens who were adult and male and whole' of fighting, or expecting to fight, in France. Pickthorn was aware that he was describing a 'people's war'. The question that arises is, what moral did he teach? for moral there most certainly was, sprawling unmistakably across three hundred or so pages. The moral was that liberal hopefulness was an illusion, and improving liberalism a sham. The people were better than their rulers and deserved greater trust than their rulers had given them. They had neither believed in the higher thinking nor been bamboozled by the 'methods of controversy' with which pre-war politicians had propagated class hatred in place of 'love of community', and a 'love of mankind which began with dislike for England'. Nor, on the other hand, had they shared the contempt and hatred which 'some newspapers and some politicians' had shown towards the Germans. They believed, it is true, that Germany and Austria were more responsible for the war than France and Russia and that 'German soldiers and sailors were more inclined to cruelty than any others'. They saw 'dimly' a contradiction between English political practice and the German subordination of 'the people to the state'. But they were neither fanatics nor ideologues; they neither despised the enemy nor took 'insolent pleasure in his sufferings'. They did not respond to Lansdowne's letter or to the 'bourgeois clamourers for peace'. Their 'weariness and sadness' brought no 'weakening' of their 'conviction that victory . . . must be won'. Moreover, they were unimpressed by promises. They neither anticipated the millennium nor paid attention to publicists who did.

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Their frame of mind was different from that of the leaders of progressive thought' who were 'making the world safe for democracy'. It was different from that of the Liberal and Labour MPs who had debated the declaration of war in the light of vague ineffabilities like European socialism, 'international morality', or 'the ideals of civilization', very few of them showing 'any care for the lives which war would cost . . . the Foreign Secretary himself [Grey] evidently envisaging risk rather to ships and commerce than to lives and limbs'. In these respects, Pickthorn was saying, there were divergences between 'ordinary citizens' on the one hand, and politicians and publicists on the other, and it was obvious, in his view, where divergences existed, that ordinary citizens were right. When envisaged as civilians they were said to be 'suspicious' of 'dialectical resources'. When envisaged asfightingmen, they were heroes. The History of the British People described two armies: the 'old army' for which Ypres was the 'crowning feat' and the citizen army that was blooded at the Somme. The two were not entirely separate since the 'old army' was always 'the heart of the new' which could not have done what it did without it. But, high as was the regard in which he held the first ('what could be done it had done to perfection'), it was to the second that Pickthorn brought creative understanding. Pickthorn's view can be treated as sentimentality or as sociology. He may have thought it sentimental since he is said to have been ashamed of the whole book. It is better to treat it as sociology - a Tory sociology - in which the chief theme was the heroism of the people, or rather those temperamental qualities which avoided both the romantic heroism of Wagner and the vulgar heroism of the Northcliffe newspapers, and achieved a decency and understatement as manifestly admirable in Pickthorn's presentation as the performance of the higher thinkers had been deplorable. This sociology embodied a value - the nation at unity with itself. Many things were assumed to have been obstructing it in the decades under discussion, but its source was clear - that combination of kindliness and self-parody which was regarded as the leading attribute of the English character, and which had bound the English together through all the sufferings they had undergone and all the meannesses with which they had been tempted by the publicists who had assailed them. Pickthorn believed that fighting men had been cynical about war aims and embarrassed by patriotic self-advertisement, and had

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not needed to be told that fighting was a 'loathsome business'. He claimed that Grenfell and Rupert Brooke reflected their feelings better than Sassoon and Robert Graves, and that the soldiers of the Somme did not believe that 'English squires' took 'fewer risks than their gardeners'. He explained 'post-war discontent' in terms of the exhaustion' which the 'steadier element' had suffered by comparison with the 'smaller number' who wanted to 'direct the labour and control the motives of their fellows', and he expressed the opinion that those who wanted to do this were deviant, eccentric and undesirable, and in no way to be encouraged. The History of the British People contained only a few explicit statements of value. But the value was manifest; in no passage more manifest than in the summing-up of the army of the Somme. In all the history of the British people [it went] there is nothing which it would be more valuable to know than what the men who fought in the ranks at the Somme were like. One thing that is capable of clear proof is that they were extraordinarily well-behaved: not merely in a military sense, that they stood the test of battle, though they did that nobly, for that would not suffice to distinguish them from the French or the Germans: but also that they were singularly little prone to the crimes that beset the fighting-man - looting, drunkenness, rape, sodomy, desertion. Not that single men (or even married men) in billets or huts grew into plaster saints, but that their respect for the corporation to which they belonged was high, and that the kindliness which was their commonest quality made almost all of them almost all the time incapable of crimes of violence. A good deal, too, of their freedom from passionate extravagances was due to their lack of solemnity, their refusal to take themselves very seriously; and it was this scepticism about themselves, combined with a very deep confidence in each other, which enabled them to sing those songs which to the Germans seemed evidence of depressed morale . . . There were many . . . songs like these, and among them all . . . We are Fred Karno's army . . . is almost unique in its very ambiguous hint at triumph. There can have been few other occasions when a whole army fought a long, doubtful, and finally victorious war in a spirit of irony. The target Pickthorn was attacking was free-thinking, or higher thinking, or taking one's thinking too seriously. The equation he made was between strong government and limited government. This was connected with the claim that 'in England resistance to change had always been the general view' until 'change' had 'made her case', that 'order can be maintained most easily . . . among men who have most in common, not necessarily in common property . . . but in common

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memories, sentiments, aversions, hopes and principles', and that a nation so constituted - in England, the nation-state - was the legitimate authority against which no principle or affirmation of conscience could be allowed to stand. Pickthorn wished to rub in the point that perfection was unachievable, that in practice argument had to be resolved and that the conventional resolutions of the legal process must be given higher authority than the arbitrary determinations of conscientious judgment. He felt Hobbes's hatred for anyone who wished to avoid the unavoidable or put the claims of conscience above those of duty. No passage better conveys the contempt he felt for those who claimed transcendental sanction than the following paragraph from Principles or Prejudices: A man will be something of a prig or something of a crook or really too much of a fool (or most commonly all three at once) if he very readily argues that higher authority forbids him to obey the commands of his country's legitimate government, orders him to resist that society, of which he is an organic member, of which he is a little the creator and very largely the creature. To such argument an honest and sensible man may, very rarely, be driven. Having been driven so far under such tragic compulsion, he will be persuaded by his sense and his honesty alike that his appeal to eternal values cuts him off from paying or claiming attention to temporal penalties or damages. A man who has it in command from God to light for all humanity a candle that shall never be put out cannot pay to so trivial a matter as his own incineration so much attention as would be involved in complaining about it. Pickthorn would have been repelled by being called a Tory Democrat; he had little of that kind of insincerity. Exposed in Cambridge, as he believed, to liberal flatulence and insincerity, he assumed that his type of ironic, deflationary bitterness stood proxy for the feelings of most Englishmen. This explains the verbal bloodiness with which he treated the Left or Liberal Left - the sense he conveyed that there was not only error but vice, the feeling he expressed in language of sometimes lurid obscenity that these were vile, unspeakable, and beneath consideration, and really were concealing truth and corrupting morals. Pickthorn had one manner - contorted, complicated, hard, rude and brutal - Welbourne another. But they admired one another and meant the same thing.

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n Welbourne wrote little - two books, both published before he was thirty, and a couple of articles. They do not convey his bitterness. If they are to be used as illustrations of what he meant, it is important to remember that the essence of the persuasion lay less in the doctrine than in the manner, which was resigned, arch, knowing, allusive, and satirical, and embodied, in a way which linked him to Pickthorn, the baffled resentment which servicemen in the trenches might feel for the headquarters whether of war or of thought. Welbourne had wanted to be a farmer when young but had had too little capital to start. After reading History at Emmanuel College, he had read for the Bar but had found, after being badly wounded in the war, that his health was not good enough for the strains and uncertainties of legal life. He had had a period of intellectual restlessness at this time, having, like Pickthorn, found the war a transforming experience. Once uncertainty was ended, he settled down to educating generations of Emmanuel undergraduates to resist the temptations which university education presents to the uninstructed. Welbourne did not much believe in dons; if he believed in some less than in others, it was the professoriate that he diminished: a mutual admiration society whose members' chief object was to 'prevent their pupils' . . . minds . . . being contaminated by the pestilential heresies of other professors'. He made few claims for university education and none which attributed to it a manifest intellectual superiority. He believed in colleges and college teaching, which he did not believe should follow fashion but which he did believe should be conducted by 'educated men'. He worked happily for the whole of his teaching life in harness with a widely-read, if socially intimidating, Tory High Churchman - Bertram Goulding-Brown - who wrote nothing, had no university post, and continued to teach at Emmanuel College, despite having no fellowship, until his death at the age of 83 in 1964. Welbourne's conception of Emmanuel was of a 'poor man's college' where it was a 'fair charge . . . that . . . men kept too much to their isolated world' because they had insufficient money to 'cut a figure' in the 'wider world' of the university. Though a place for work and friendship it was 'unashamed of games'. It was a college in which old members took a pride and where 'the same man' could both 'work and play'. It was also a college where future civil servants, doctors, clergy-

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men, schoolmasters and scientists could get to know one another and where they were allowed to 'turn into themselves and admit to themselves their abilities and limitations'. We hope they leave us with some understanding of the nature of knowledge [he wrote in reply to a questionnaire in 1965] and of the difference between knowledge and memorised verbal formulae, with some experience of the nature of understanding and its difference from acceptance of authority, and, still more, from rejection of authority . . . We hope that they will be able to resist the stream of propaganda of a world deluged in propaganda, even though the channels of that propaganda seem always too narrow. We hope that they will have been encouraged in honesty and stoutness of heart, and that some will have come to see how far they need to believe, and that some will have acquired a better command both of the spoken and of the written word than is common. Welbourne was larger than his writings and considerably more complicated. But his complication was designed to protect a manner of thinking and a mode of living which were simple. He was protecting the educated man against the pretensions of university teachers and real skill against the self-delusions of the intelligentsia. He was ignorant of the suburbs and despised them, and also the 'clerks' who lived in them. He propagated what he thought of as the standards of 'the market town and countryside', of the Church of England 'where not too influenced by popery' and of 'all groups of men whose lives are unpretentious, decent and hard'. One of his pupils was right to remark, with more sentimentality than power, that he offered these things to 'all the young men who came up to Cambridge to study and play and argue, who spend their lives in scantily rewarded effort, who die too often on the battlefield and whose sons apply for entry in their turn'. Welbourne's first book, The Miners9 Unions of Durham and Northumberland was written in his late twenties after he had been awarded the MC while serving with the Durham Light Infantry in the trenches and had had a period as second-in-command of his battalion. With the help of newspapers, printed books and the records of the Durham Miners' Association, it traced the history of organized union activity in the northern coalfields from their beginning in the 1820s to the point at which both sets of unions formed the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. It presented an idyllic picture of the pride, prosperity, and community which had characterized the pit villages in the early nineteenth century before external pressures had compelled a conservative community with a 'traditional high standard of life' and a

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'hereditary claim to steady employment' to engage in political agitation. These pressures were from 'political economy', Methodist owners, and immigration; they were connected in so far as a new generation of coal-owners in the 1840s, some of them Methodists, had learnt from 'the school of Manchester Manufacturers' to 'treat labour as a commodity in a market subject to unalterable laws of supply and demand' and had responded to miners' strikes by evicting miners from their cottages, while importing migrant blacklegs - men with 'no pride in their calling' - who then compounded the possibility of agitation by eroding the unity of the communities into which they had been inserted. Welbourne's story was not as simple as this, but the assumptions that constituted his explanations were, and so was the moral that he seemed to be implying. The moral was that the genuine pitmen were not revolutionary, that it was a middle-class illusion to suppose they were, and that the chief occasions on which they had been violent were when they were evicted from their homes by the imported scourings of the neighbouring towns. The nigger, so to speak, in the woodpile in this picture was neither the local pitman nor the hereditary grandee. Lord Londonderry came out well as an enlightened landowner, as did Lord Derby and Bishop Westcott as industrial conciliators. The meanness of Methodists was prominent and so was the ignorance of inspectors. Scots blacklegs were given unfriendly treatment, while the great horror by which the native pitmen were said to have been overwhelmed was the spawning Irish, who were 'ignorant, violent, improvident, drunken [and] priest-attended' with a religion which denied them any zeal for education and personal habits which made them the cholera's natural victims and who acted so completely as the owners' weapon in any wage dispute that it was perfectly easy to understand 'the common saying that prosperity would not return . . . until every Scotsman went home, bearing two Irishmen on his back'. Welbourne wrote of 'zeal for education' as not only 'the merit' but also the 'danger' of Methodism. He described the difference between agitation in coal matters and in party politics, and emphasized that 'not every miner in the 1870s was captured by "Peace, Retrenchment and Reform" '. He touched on the replacement of religion by socialism in the north of England and on the contrast between the Bible reading which Methodism had encouraged and the infidelity which was encouraged by newspapers. He praised Burt, Crawford and Wilson, the union leaders, and applauded the fact that, at Crawford's death 'the confidence that existed . . . between owners and men' was shown by

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the fact that the trustee of the fund to keep his widow from poverty was the secretary of the owners' association. A great deal of what he wished to convey was contained in the following passage: In every account of labour troubles it is plain that the centres of unrest were the new pits. The men had lately come, they were as ready to go. There was a high proportion of the young and adventurous. The good workmen, steady and fairly content, were loathe to leave their employment, the timid ones afraid. In a new pit village were congregated the enterprising, the dissatisfied, often, even, the idle and dissolute who found work the more easily where their character was unknown. Most of the problems of the pit had yet to be settled. Where there was no memory of fair treatment on past occasions isolated misunderstanding was soon magnified into deliberate injustice. Where no established body of precedent existed there was natural fear among both men and officials that submission in any point would be quoted against them in later dispute. And naturally the men who rose to influence in a new colliery, destitute of social life, were men marked out for distinction by activity rather than by character, men who won support rather by words than by wisdom. And as naturally, words which won support in a new colliery were those of violence and decision. The Miners' Unions of Durham and Northumberland was a critically conservative book, though Welbourne claimed to be politically 'nothing'. Social and Industrial History of England: Modern Times was consecratory, celebrating the escape the English had had from poverty by their industrial achievement, and describing with a high measure of justificatory approval the way in which they had reacted to the Industrial Revolution. The theme of Modern Times was the transformation the English had undergone since 1750. Then England had been a Protestant, colonizing sea-power, the 'daring' of whose merchants and 'lives' of whose sailors had made her wealth 'the envy of the world'. Thereafter, there had been an 'examination' of her 'institutions' and a search for 'improvement' of the kind which in France had led to the 'Revolution and to the Republic'. It was 'financial skill', 'spare money' and the 'will to use it' which had made possible the gearing of inventive genius that constituted this English equivalent of 1789. Welbourne was an admirer of the Industrial Revolution, which had transformed English life and 'dragged the whole world into the circle of civilization'. He was also its prophet. The body of his book described with poetic hardness the mechanical contrivances and the innovations in food-supply, banking and transport that had made it possible.

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Modern Times was a volume in a series edited by B. L. Manning1 and had an introduction by W. J. Ashley2 to whose Chamberlainite opinions, especially against free trade, its doctrine bore a marked resemblance. Throughout, there was denigration of Political Economy - the 'dismal science' which was 'hated by every philanthropist and cursed by every working man' - and sustained criticism of the hypocrisy with which Evangelical wealth had been made out of child labour in England while subsidizing the agitation to free slaves in the West Indies. Modern Times was both a success and a horror story. The success was the increase in material wealth, the revolution that had happened in the range of human power. The horror was the socio-demographic change that had accompanied it; in the countryside the replacement of the yeoman by the tenant farmer, the conversion of the free villager into the wage-dependent labourer and a general impoverishment, starvation and denudation which produced on the one hand agrarian rebellion, suppression, and deportation, and, on the other, the strictness and harshness of the Game Laws and the 1834 Poor Law; in the new towns the creation of a population of semi-skilled 'machine tenders' who had 'no wealth but the wages of their labour', no relation to their employer but 'obedience to his factory bell', and who 'worked under the eye of a foreman and drew their pay from a clerk'. It was this 'new class' which inhabited 'the ugly mean towns of the north' where the institutions of village life, adequate for a village population, were 'ridiculous' when a village became a town, and where for a long time only Methodist Sunday Schools did anything to provide a sense of social and political position. Of the early effects of industrial expansion - the 'terrible story of the mills and the mines' - Welbourne was highly critical. He spelt out the price in degradation of life and the need to restore the self-respect of those who had been degraded. He explained what had been done since 1850 and concluded that it was consonant with the requirements. From a political point of view his work was an essay on the progress 1. See below pp. 200 et seq. 2. Sir W. J. Ashley (1860-1927). Fellow of Lincoln College Oxford 1885-88. Professor of Political Economy at Toronto 1888-92, and Professor of Economic History at Harvard 1892-1901, Professor of Commerce at Birmingham 1901-25, Member of Government Committees. Author of Introduction to English Economic History and Theory 1888-93, The Tariff Problem 1903, Progress of the German Working Classes 1904, The Economic Organisation of England 1914, The Christian Outlook 1925 etc.

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which had been made in incorporating the town-dwelling artisan as a recognizable citizen in the sixty years before he was writing. The message was that by 1850 the worst was over and that since then the wage-earning artisan had been both depauperized and increasingly identified in a social role. This had been achieved by a mixed bag of agencies: by wage rises; by compulsory education; by state regulation of working conditions; by old age, sickness and unemployment schemes; and by the accumulation of small savings in Friendly Societies, Building Associations, Trade Unions and Co-operative Stores. It had also been helped by the experience and power which Methodism, the 'Radical Party' and the trade union and co-operative movements had acquired through parish and district councils,, boards of guardians, and eventually parliament with results that constituted not a narrowly political form of self-expression but the development of a workingclass culture - a phrase Welbourne did not use - which was free from the taint of middle-class patronage and improvement. Welbourne denied that the factory system was inherently oppressive. But he was clear that in large measure it had been in England because of the blinkers which Political Economy had imposed and the moral certainty with which it had been surrounded. He celebrated the changes that had been made in economic thinking in the previous fifty years, not least on the ground that they had destroyed the hypocritical elevation with which middle-class improvers had tried to reconcile the poor to their degradation. Let any boy read the kind of book which his parents received as a prize for attendance at school [he wrote towards the end of Modern Times in 1921] and he will see at once that such teaching would be rejected by himself with scorn. The days when a mistress could dismiss her maid for adorning her bonnet with cherry ribbons have disappeared. The steady working man, who was encouraged in a patronising way to add to his education, and exhorted to regularity in his attendance at public worship, is not the man who openly keeps his whippet, his pigeons, attends his social club, and reads his sporting paper. Not only would the wage-earner resent the interference of 'his betters' for his moral improvement, but the class of people who did so interfere has ceased to exist. Welbourne welcomed this process because he had a high regard for wage-earning and as high a distaste for middle-class improvers as he had for the atmosphere of liberal improvement he found in Cambridge. He regarded the changes that had taken place as a demonstration of our 'national method' of avoiding 'violent revolutions'. To him

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Fabianism and Guild Socialism were only theoretical demands for what the system was providing already. To that extent, while hating the liberal mind, he was a social leveller, a property-owning democrat and a follower of Ruskin, Carlyle and Joseph Chamberlain. In any case there was no mistaking the drift of his answer to those who thought that 'the demands of the newly-educated democracy' were 'hastening a social revolution'. They should remember [he wrote] that there is no gulf now comparable to that which lay between the gentleman who alone could read, who alone had travelled, who alone lived in decent comfort, and the almost animal rustic . . . The demand for equality is based on an existing fact of society and . . . many of the wage-earning classes have a right to consider that they should never have taken the place of the uneducated labourers with whom began the tradition of the social inequality between workman and employer. His view of the future was as follows: We have so long had a rising standard of life, a steady increase in leisure and comfort, that we have grown to expect continued improvement as a right. To satisfy this expectation we must contrive to give to the mass of the people even greater material wealth. There are two methods by which this is possible. There is the method by which our fathers brought us to our present condition, that of adding to the total stock. There is the method, often suggested, of more equal division of the existing wealth. It may be that these methods are so opposed that the adoption of the one alone is possible. But it may be that the two can exist together; that at once we can add to our total stock and divide it more fairly. The Welbourne of 1921 was fully seized of the importance of Socialism which, since 1880, had been 'the only system of economics known to the ordinary man'. He had served in a regiment that had been raised by Socialists and thought he had seen more Bolshevism in the army of 1919 than others imagined had existed. Even so, it was the consolidation of influence over the decent working classes achieved by objectionable people like Tawney, Keynes, Cole, and Laski in the following twenty years that made him bitter where at first he had been merely explanatory. By the 1940s he was as much embarrassed by the idealism of Modern Times as Pickthorn by The History of the British People. The explanatory tools of his early thought had been turned into accusatory ejaculations as rogues and liars, sociologists and journalists, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Jews were shown fabricating a

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bogus working-class history and pretending that things were bad where they were not. Welbourne was critical of political history and the history of thought, treating both as specialized occupations unrelated to the real world. His interest was in the motivations of communal, racial and religious groups. He assumed a sort of group-determinism as the explanation of opinion and was dismissive of any attempt at high-principled deviation. He attached meaning to the conceptions of Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Catholic and Jewish thinking. His intellectual enthusiasms were confined to prejudices that Anglican, agrarian or working-class men were supposed to share. Welbourne's politics did not fit into any party category. He idealized what he knew and disliked what he did not know: the plutocracy and the suburban middle classes. If the Left consisted of 'a shabby lot . . . prancing in boots too big for them', the Right consisted of 'businessmen disguised as gentlemen' who could not begin to match the 'skill' which earlier generations had shown 'in throwing . . . the other fellow . . . to the wolves so that the sledge could keep in front of the wolves'. Welbourne believed that the English governing classes had lost their grip. He had little respect for their ways of proceeding and considerable contempt for their intelligence. There were influential men he admired: Sir Richard Hopkins 1 was one, Sir James Grigg2 another, Sam Watson,3 the Durham miners' leader, a third. But the overriding impression was one of mourning for a real world that had been lost, of hatred for a sham world that had been gained and of contempt for the 'worlds of fancy' built up by those whose thought was dominated by the newspapers and the political parties. It was the period of Liberal triumph [he wrote in 1963, of his arrival in Cambridge in 1912] and young men saw themselves overthrowing at last the tyranny of the Church (a tyranny which I had not encountered), or the horror of English rule (which seemed a serious matter to some of the Celtic Fringe), or the scandal of the House of Lords - I found some of the 1. Sir Richard Hopkins (1880-1955). Undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Treasury Civil Servant. Permanent Secretary to the Treasury 1942-45. 2. Sir James Grigg (1890-1964). Treasury civil servant 1913-34. Finance Member of Government of India 1934-39. Permanent Under Secretary for War 1939-42. Secretary of State for War 1942-45. Author of Prejudice and Judgment 1948. 3. Samuel Watson (1898-1967). Miner until 1936. Secretary of the Durham Miners' Association 1936-63.

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men who felt it most as a scandal were incredulous of my story that I had met Lords. But I had; we had some in the country where I was brought up, some of families whom everyone liked and respected, some of families whom no one liked or respected; and they were not Lords because they went to Eton; they went to Eton because they were Lords. And if they hunted the fox, so did a good many folk who were little richer than I, and indeed following hounds on foot cost nothing. But on the whole I held my peace, marvelling at the worlds of fancy which were built up by those whose world was of their newspaper and their inherited party.

In some respects Welbourne was a reversed version of Tawney, whose writing 'made him vomit', with Tawney's regard for the industrious working classes, but with a positive aversion to Tractarian elevation and an overriding desire to debunk. The range of debunking was limitless. Barker1 was unintelligible and Toynbee 'madness', and so, he must have supposed, were Ullmann2 and Knowles.3 Brogan4 was a Scottish interloper who did not understand the English, Sir Hubert Henderson5 was another: he did not understand war. The judgment on Postan6 cannot be reported. The judgment on Keynes was an intellectual version of Pickthom's judgment that Keynes had done very well out of not being in the trenches. Contemptuous or despairing noises were made about Peterhouse, the London School of Economics, the history of historiography, and the 'mystery' which Cambridge mediaevalists had made of their subject. Philosophers were said to be worth studying 'only in order to see the extent to which intelligent people can be taken in'. Marxism was 'yet another kind of Primitive Methodism', which 'gained men promotion in the social sciences' and 1. Sir Ernest Barker (1874-1960). Fellow of Merton College Oxford 1898-1905. Fellow of St John's College Oxford 1909-13 and Fellow and Tutor of New College Oxford 1913-20. Principal of King's College London 1920-27, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse 1928-39. Author of numerous works of history and political theory. 2. See below pp. 401 et seq. 3. See below pp. 130 et seq. 4. See below pp. 194 et seq. 5. Sir Hubert Henderson (1890-1952). Undergraduate at Emmanuel College Cambridge. Fellow of Clare College and University Lecturer in Economics 1919-23. Editor of The Nation and Athenaeum 1923-30. Joint Secretary to Economic Advisory Council 1930-34. Economic adviser to HM Treasury 1939_44. Professor of Political Economy at Oxford 1945-51. Elected Warden of All Souls College in 1951 but died before taking up appointment. 6. Sir Michael Moissy Postan (1899- ). Lecturer in History at University College London 1927—31, at the London School of Economics 1931-35 and at Cambridge 1935-38. Professor of Economic History at Cambridge 193865 and Fellow of Peterhouse 1935- .

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suffered the failure inherent in all attempts to make men work for the general good by ignoring their 'jealousy, dishonesty and laziness'. The prevailing level of economic argument in public discussion was described in an entirely contemptuous way. There is no better training in contemporary economics [Weibourne is reported to have said] than the examination of the evidence heard by the Macmillan Commission; evidence given by the men who rule the big banks and by junior and unimportant economics lecturers at provincial universities. These men I do not feel to be my intellectual superiors; nor is their body of knowledge greater than mine. In fact, it is hardly greater than yours. If the sum total of knowledge is one bucket full, they possess a half while you possess a quarter bucket. But the difference is better realised thus: the total sum is like the Atlantic Ocean. They still have their half bucket and you still have half that - which means that the difference between you is comparatively small. In the forties and fifties Welbourne's world was full of enemies, often called 'They\ who had done many things to England, one of which, once they had stopped believing in religion, was that they had begun to believe in sociology, which, in important respects, as Manning, his oldest Cambridge friend, knew, had been anticipated by 'mediaeval moralists', but which, like Viennese flats in Vienna, and architecture in Tel Aviv, was said to have been a Jewish invention, though certainly no-one did better historical sociology than Welbourne himself. Welbourne had many pupils, most of whom were devoted to his nihilism, his sarcasm and the persistent implication that things are never what they seem. Some had the opinions he loathed burnt out of them, without any guarantee that he would have approved of what was left. Others got no further than the contempt, with or without the distinctive tone. If two passages are quoted in which Welbourne's voice can be heard, it should not he supposed that Northcote Parkinson 1 took over the Welbourne line lock-stock-and-barrel. But one embodies a particular Welbourne hatred - those improving liberal-minded Cambridge families whom Annan, 2 a Welbourne target, celebrated in a famous essay. The other is the opening paragraph of Parkinson's Law. 1. C. Northcote Parkinson (1909- ). Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge 1935-38. Professor of History at Raffles College Singapore 1950-58. Author of Trade in the Eastern Seas 1937, The Trade Winds 1948, The Rise of the Port of Liverpool 1952, War in the Eastern Seas 1954, The Evolution of Political Thought 1958, Parkinson's Law 1958, The Law and the Profits 1960, Mrs Parkinson's Law 1968, The Law of Delay 1970 etc. etc. 2, Noel Annan, Lord Annan (1916- ). Fellow of King's College Cambridge

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The first passage contains Welbourne's opinion of what used in the 1920s to be called University Extension and is now (in a very different context) called Extra-Mural Teaching. The thing is an imposture [he told Parkinson]. Pupils of mine have done it; and they all tell me the same thing. If you make your lectures anything like work, nobody will come. So you can do one of two things. You can fake the register or you can make your lectures rival the cinema by turning them into a cinema show. The whole thing is a waste of money which ought to be spent in encouraging real students. The origin of it was the desire, probably, to keep the working classes quiet; the desire to educate them just so long as that didn't mean sitting down to dinner with them at Trinity; the desire, above all, to keep them out of Cambridge. The beginning of Parkinson's Law is as follows: To the very young, to schoolteachers, and also to those who compile textbooks about constitutional history, politics, and current affairs, the world is a more or less rational place. They visualise the election of representatives, freely chosen from among those the people trust. They picture the process by which the wisest and best of these become ministers of state. They imagine how captains of industry, freely elected by shareholders, choose for managerial responsibility those who have proved their ability in a humbler role. Books exist in which assumptions such as these are boldly stated or tacitly implied. To those, on the other hand, with any experience of affairs [or, one may add, to anyone who had been Welbourne's pupil], these assumptions are merely ludicrous. Solemn conclaves of the wise and good are mere figments of the teacher's mind. It is salutary, therefore, if an occasional warning is uttered on this subject. Heaven forbid that students should cease to read books on the science of public or business administration - provided only that these works are classified as fiction. Placed between the novels of Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells, intermingled with volumes about ape-men and spaceships, these textbooks could harm no-one. Placed elsewhere, among works of reference, they can do more damage than might at first sight seem possible. Pickthorn had been to school at Aldenham, Welbourne at a grammar school in Lincolnshire, but the one was the son of a master mariner, the other the son of a police inspector - which is very much the same

1948-56. Provost of King's College Cambridge 1956-66. Life Peer 1965. Provost of University College London 1966-78. Author of Leslie Stephen 1951, The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought 1959, Roxburgh of Stowe 1965 etc. R.P.D.—D

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thing. Neither was smooth. Neither was aristocratic. Neither embodied aristocratic Conservatism. Both had been 'brought up' (Welbourne's phrase) in the Church of England and had affection for a lowkeyed Anglicanism (so low-keyed, indeed, in Welbourne's case that his church-going was occasional). Both had fought in the war and been badly wounded. Both were proud to have been satisfactory soldiers and prouder still that millions of others had been too. Pickthorn, who spent his early years in Ilford, was, what Welbourne was not, a frequenter of the East End Music-Hall: both knew, what the East End Music-Hall was supposed to have made clear, that the working classes despised self-pity and middle-class patronage. Either could have said what Pickthorn said about the London territorial battalion in which he served: that 'the men were a bloody sight better than the officers'. Both despised the higher thinking of any generation but their own whose higher thinking, as they understood it, consisted essentially in the denial that higher thinking was desirable. Perhaps their opinions do not sound convincing. If so, one can only say that myths affect clever undergraduates as much as anyone else, perhaps more than anyone else, and that these were clever men from exposure to whom one learnt that there was something rotten in English intellectual life which it was the duty of all good men to root out, and that the intellectual instinct which led them to the positions they occupied was identical with the frame of mind of what they conceived of as ordinary decent Englishmen. I did not understand the blunting of power they suffered from believing this, the uneasiness of the mistrust they expressed of liberal soft-headedness among the ruling classes. Nor did I see how odd it was that these tortured, complicated figures should have been under the impression that they were 'ordinary, decent Englishmen'. Moreover, I did not understand, what I came to understand much later, that what they really were, were enemies of the 'New Liberalism' of the Liberal party between 1906 and 1914 and the philosophical positions on which it depended: that elevated fantasy which distinguished liberal scholarship from Essays and Reviews onwards and the party protagonists of the higher Liberalism from the retirement of Gladstone until the Liberal party's effective death in the middle 1920s. So little did I understand the nature of their target, indeed, that I spent the next twenty years trying to find a target for myself. In any case I only read their works or heard them at a distance. I was not taught by them. I was taught by Smyth.

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III Charles Smyth was an Anglo-Irishman, the grandson of a small farmer in Killarney, the nephew of successful railway administrators in Ireland and South Africa, and the son of a missionary doctor in China. He was a boy at Repton during the headmastership of Geoffrey Fisher, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was next an undergraduate at the Corpus of Will Spens. The most important features of inter-war Corpus were that it was a small college and that it was a Conservative-Anglican plot. There were Fellows who were not Anglicans or Conservatives, but most were both. Most were comparatively young; a number had served in the war; the conversation of some was frank and irreverent. In general it seems that most of them, though Conservative and Anglican, were restrainedly so, that the tone was public school, man-of-the-world and middle class, and that the distinguishing intellectual characteristic was that, in a university where high-minded rationalism had been advancing, in Corpus it was thought desirable to push it back. Pickthorn has been discussed already, but Pickthorn was not the whole of inter-war Corpus, which included Hoskyns, the Dean,1 together with Hoskyns's brother-in-law, E. G. Selwyn.2 It included the Canadian, J. T. McCurdy, a lapsed Presbyterian who wrote many books about psychology and morale, and whom Hoskyns converted to Anglicanism. It included Geoffrey Butler, the Conservative MP for the University until his early death in 1928, and R. A. Butler, his nephew, until he became an MP in 1929. It included Desmond Lee, the Senior Tutor, who became Headmaster of Winchester. It also included the young Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns (1884-1937). Curate 1908-12. Warden of Stephenson Hall Sheffield 1912-15. Chaplain to Forces (M.C.) 1915-19. Dean of Corpus 1919-37. Author of (with F. N. Davey) The Riddle of the New Testament 1931, (ed. Smyth) Cambridge Sermons 1938, (with Davey) The Fourth Gospel 1940, We Are The Pharisees 1960. Very Rev. Edward Gordon Selwyn (1885-1959). Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 1909-13. Warden of Radley College 1913-18. Rector of Redhill, Havant 1919-30. Dean of Winchester 1931-58. Editor of Theology 1920-33. Author of Tradition and Reason 1911, Teaching of Christ 1915, The approach to Christianity 1925, (ed.) Essays Catholic and Critical 1926, Thoughts on Worship and Prayer 1936 etc.

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Bury1 and the young Charvet.2 Above all, it included Spens. Spens was a Scottish Episcopalian who had been a boy at Rugby and an undergraduate at King's College.5 After reading the Natural Sciences Tripos, he had become a Fellow of Corpus and then a Tutor in the period when Caldwell, the Master, was converting it from a Whig into a Conservative College. He was Senior Tutor from 1912 until elected to the Mastership on the appointment of his predecessor (Pearce) to the bishopric of Derby in 1927. Spens taught his subject right up to the beginning of his Mastership but he did not contribute much to its development. He spent a great deal of time running Corpus; he was prominent in the lay government of the Church of England and was well-known in Whitehall where he had acquired good contacts while working there in the First World War. Throughout the Second World War he was Regional Commissioner for East Anglia and at times a sharp critic of Churchill. Though he made a large number of speeches about school (especially public-school) education, his significant writing was almost all contained in a single theological book - Belief and Practice - and a handful of theological articles, including one on birth control in Theology in 1930 and another on the Eucharist in Essays Catholic and Critical. When Dean Selwyn was described (by Streeter) as having invented a new school of theology, it was the magazine Theology and Essays Catholic and Critical that were meant. Selwyn was the first editor of Theology and gave it the tone it had until very recently. He conceived of Essays Catholic and Critical and edited it. In addition to Spens's essay, it had an important essay by Hoskyns. It also had essays from Rawlinson,4 the converted Congregationalist who succeeded Pearce as 1. J. P. T. Bury (1908- ) author of Gambetta and the National Defence 1936, France 1814-1940 1949, The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary: A History from 1822-1952 1952, and Napoleon and the Second Empire 1964. 2. P. E. Charvet (1903— ) author of introduction to Renan, La Re forme lntellectuelle et Morale 1950, France 1954, A Literary History of France vols iv and v 1967, and introduction to Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists 1972. 3. Sir Will Spens (1882-1962). Ed. Rugby and King's College Cambridge. Fellow of Corpus Christi College Cambridge 1907-62. Master of Corpus 1927-52. Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University 1931-33. Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence, East Anglia 1939-45. Author of Belief and Practice 1915. 4. Right Rev. A. E. J. Rawlinson (1884-1960). Tutor of Keble College Oxford 1909-13, Student of Christ Church Oxford 1914-29. Canon of Durham 1929-36, Bishop of Derby 1936-59. Author of Dogma Fact and Experience

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2

Bishop of Derby; Taylor and Kirk, the converted Methodists who became Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh and Bishop of Oxford respectively; and Spencer Thornton3 of the Community of the Resurrection - a pupil of Figgis4 who had himself been the son of a well-known minister in the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion. The School, if one may speak in these terms, had three bases. It assumed that the 'truths of Christianity' were true and did not need to be explained away in order to be made comprehensible. It insisted that their truth included the supernatural character of God's word and the divine character of Christ's nature. And it assumed that they could be preached in a way which was intelligible to modern men without being corrupted by their modernity. In the 'repudiation of Christian dogma' that had occurred in modern thought from Kant to Nietzsche, and the Philosophical Idealists to Shaw and Wells, a series of challenges was discerned to which it was necessary for Christians to respond. This was what Essays Catholic and Critical did. In doing it, it drew a distinction between Modernism, in its Roman Catholic form, with which its authors were willing to be associated, and Liberal Protestantism, which involved too willing an abandonment of Christian truth and too ready a jettisoning of Christian experience, and too easily became,

1.

2.

3.

4.

1915, Religious Reality 1918, Authority and Freedom 1924, The New Testament Doctrine of Christ 1926, The Church of England and the Church of Christ 1930, The Church of South India 1951 etc. etc. A. E. Taylor (1869-1945). Fellow of Merton College Oxford 1891-98. Lecturer at Manchester 1896-1903. Professor of Philosophy at McGill University 1903-08. Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews 1908-24 and at Edinburgh 1924-41. Author of The Problem of Conduct 1901, Elements of Metaphysics 1903, Plato 1927, The Faith of a Moralist 1930 etc. Right Rev. Kenneth Kirk (1886-1954). Assistant at University College London 1909-12, Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford 1919-22 and of Trinity College Oxford 1922-33. Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford 1933-37. Bishop of Oxford 1937-54. Author of A Study of Silent Minds 1918, Ignorance Faith and Conformity 1925, The Vision of God 1931, The Crisis of Christian Rationalism 1936 etc. Rev. Lionel Spencer Thornton (1884-1960). Member of the Community of the Resurrection 1915-60. Author of Conduct and the Supernatural 1915, Richard Hooker 1924, The Incarnate Lord 1928, The Doctrine of the Atonement 1937, Revelation and the Modern World 1950 etc. Rev. J. N. Figgis (1866-1919). Chaplain of Pembroke College Cambridge 1896-1902. Rector of Marnhull, Dorset 1902-07. Member of the Community of the Resurrection 1907-19. Author of The Divine Right of Kings 1896, Christianity and History 1904, From Gerson to Grotius 1907, The Gospel and Human Needs 1909, Religion and English Society 1910, Churches in the Modern State 1913, The Will to Freedom 1917 etc.

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as Modernism had become in England, a creed which 'shades off imperceptibly into Unitarianism'. In presenting 'critical' as well as 'Catholic' credentials, Selwyn claimed for 'the Anglican Communion' a character which was distinguished from Roman Catholicism by its freedom from the cramping fetters of 'legalism' and from 'Protestantism' by Protestant backsliding about dogma, the sacraments and the creeds. The position of Essays Catholic and Critical was described as 'non-Roman Catholicism' and was said to permeate not only the Anglican but also the Roman and Orthodox churches, and to have given to each an emphasis which separated them from 'all those bodies which call themselves Protestant'. This emphasis was credal, because the creeds safeguarded the worship of Christ in a way that Liberal Protestantism did not. It was 'liturgical' because the liturgy was the 'symbol of a genuine element of religious experience' which Liberal Protestantism had failed to protect. And it perpetuated the Erasmian tradition in which not only Westcott and Lux Mundi but also Aquinas and Athanasius could be thought of as seeking ' "a real reconciliation between religious faith and advancing secular knowledge" '. Reconciliation did not mean capitulation. There was no minimizing of the 'supernatural element in religion'. 'Tolerance' was said to be desirable but 'toleration' was subversive, replacing 'faith by suspense of judgment' and leading 'sooner or later' to 'scepticism'. It was explicitly stated that the 'essence of truth' was to be 'intolerant' and that no-one who believed in God could have 'room in his mind for the belief that its opposite, atheism, may be equally true'. This principle was said to be of universal application. It was given special application to the Bible where 'the critical movement' had been 'governed' by a 'search for uniformity' which, though 'fruitful' in advancing a 'strictly historical enquiry' about origins, had become 'dangerous' when expanded into a dogma 'covering the whole field of religious knowledge', and where, since 1860, scientific concepts had been applied with so little discrimination that 'evolutionary immanentism' was in process of reducing Christianity to a 'natural religion'. This was what Essays Catholic and Critical was designed to combat. It appealed to the 'facts of religious experience' which it presented as irrefutable and made the basis for treating theology as a 'science'. It emphasized freedom and accountability, the 'otherness of God', and the indefeasibility of the Christian experience of 'redemption . . . from above . . . centred in Christ'. It claimed to be seeking a 'synthesis'

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between historic Catholicism and the critical movement which, through Lux Mundi, had made a 'significant lodgement in the citadel of faith'. The combination was treated as the particular contribution of the Anglican Communion which was in a position to play a special role since any 'presentment of Christianity' which was to claim the allegiance of the modern world had to blend together '.everything in us which acknowledges and adores . . . God, believes in Jesus . . . and . . . recognises His Spirit . . . in the Church' with that 'divinely imparted gift of reason' by which we 'measure, sift, examine and judge whatever is proposed for our belief. The presentation of this theology varied according to the character of the exponent. By all a sharp division was observed between the Liberal Protestantism of the previous fifty years and what was sometimes called Liberal Catholicism. No doubt was left that Liberal Protestantism and most types of English Modernism were to be rejected. Among the Fellows of Corpus, Smyth was a pupil of Pickthorn as an historian, of Spens as a tutor, and of Hoskyns as a priest. He had arrived in the college in 1921, had done well in the Historical Tripos and, together with R. A. Butler who was his exact contemporary, was elected to a Fellowship in 1925. His first book Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI (1926) was published before he was 23. Like Butler, Smyth had been an undergraduate Conservative politician at the same time as Kitson Clark1 and Geoffrey Lloyd.2 After editing the Cambridge Review for a term in 1925 he had spent a year at Harvard where he thought of writing a book about the Teapot Dome scandal. He had then been a lecturer in the Cambridge History Faculty, had been ordained, and had served curacies in London and Cambridge before returning to Corpus as Dean on Hoskyns's death in 1937. In the following eight years he established himself as a focus of hostility to the progressive positions of the age, creating the sort of following among undergraduates which Butterfield and Oakeshott had in some of the same causes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Smyth's lectures on the History of Political Thought from Plato to Burke were a signal success. During the war, when many dons were 1. See below, pp. 197 et seq. 2. Geoffrey Lloyd, Baron Geoffrey-Lloyd (1902- ). Conservative MP 1931-45 and 1950-74. Minister of Information 1945. Minister of Fuel and Power 1951-55 and Minister of Education 1955-57.

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away, he undertook a large burden of undergraduate supervision, including the direction of historical studies in Jesus College after B. L. Manning's death in 1941. By 1943 he had written the Cranmer book, a history of English preaching and the Birkbeck lectures on Simeon and Church Order. He had contributed regularly to T. S. Eliot's magazine The Criterion, had written a large number of polemical articles on political and church history, and had edited the Cambridge Review with considerable success for a second time during the academic year from October 1940 to June 1941. As a writer, Smyth was elegant, witty and contemptuous; his public persona included a positively Irish trailing of the coat. As a teacher his manner was knowing, bland, and insinuating, with a slow entry into the framework of the mind. There were prepared jokes, which were good, and both prepared and impromptu comments which were better. Opinions were not pressed, nor morals pointed. But both were made clear and both were made attractive. Some of his pupils were able to resist; some felt only contempt. A few were overwhelmed. Smyth's life-work, consciously or unconsciously, was the conversion of England. In a situation in which 'institutional Christianity . . . had lost its hold upon the manhood of the nation' and in which 'the secularised western civilization in which we live' had lost its understanding of the 'nature and necessity of the Church', he had spent the first twenty years of his public life conducting a one-man propaganda of energy, brilliance and rebarbativeness which burnt itself out and moved into slow motion only when he failed to get the academic preferment that he deserved in Cambridge, when the conditions of the post-war world seemed to have moved against him and when, like Waugh in the 1950s, he was overwhelmed by the unbearable burden that follows the incomparable achievement. As with Waugh, who was the same age and had had the same sort of post First World War historical education and whose period of brilliance began and ended at the same time, so with Smyth the sharpness and power which he had begun to deploy in 1925 were so softened and blurred by the end of the 1940s that Cyril Forster Garbett (1959), of which any ordinary clerical biographer could be proud, stands in the same relation to his talent and promise as almost everything Waugh wrote after The Loved One and Scott-King's Modern Europe to everything he had written before. Before he was ordained and in the afterglow of undergraduate politics, Smyth had looked back to 'Young England' as embodying a

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creed which, generated 'in the darkest hour of Manchester's triumph', would appeal to an epoch 'as heartily sick of materialism as our own' and, as a genuine movement of the young, would show up the bogus and pietistic 'Cant of Comradeship': the loathsome rhetoric adopted by liberal frauds (like Bryce, Barrie and Sir Oliver Lodge) when Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and C. E. Montague had created that war-based post-war bitterness which had marked the end of the era of liberal good feelings. It was Disraeli and his friends whom Smyth saw offering the basis for a movement which 'Youth' could fight for against the 'Old Men' and which could 'ultimately . . . make England once more a Christian country'. At some point in his middle twenties, Smyth shed the mantle of the secular politician with a Tory/Christian message and found in the service of the Church of England a more satisfactory role than he would have found if he had become an MP. Not that the politician disappeared in the priest or the secular function in the priestly. No clerical inhibition prevented him seeing himself as both clergyman and intellectual, even when he adopted the rather spurious role of being only an 'average clergyman'. His writing after the twenties was littered with continuations of the purely political positions of the years before. They were one of the two chief characteristics of his second period as editor of the Cambridge Review. Smyth became editor at a point at which it was by no means certain that Hitler would be defeated and when Britain was suffering the opportunity the Left saw in war to get the 'social revolution' it would not have got so readily in peacetime. In attempting to take the leftwing position apart, Smyth did what no conventional politician was in a position to do during the wartime truce. In doing it, he gave the Cambridge Review a brief moment of national reputation. His attack had three aspects. He attacked public institutions; he attacked objectionable publicists; and he attacked positions. The first included the 'pink record' of the BBC Overseas Service and the National Union of Students, including insulting contrasts between the latter's belief that 'Youth' had rights, not duties, and the belief, expressed by a German Youth Leader, that 'Youth knows no rights but only duties.' There was searching criticism of the Ministry of Information for presenting the war in terms of 'high-sounding rhetoric about the New Social Order for which we are alleged (by Left-Wing publicists) to be fighting' when all this had 'gone completely over the heads' of the 'civilian population' who still needed to have it 'explained . . . why

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it is to us (as it is not to Germany) a matter of life and death that we should not be defeated'. The second category covered a wide range of persons, beginning with A. A. Milne for being a pacifist, Priestley for his BBC postscripts, and Wells, Crossman and Noel-Baker for their views about the future of Europe. It included Vansittart for Black Record, Laski for assaulting 'privilege', and Herbert Read for proclaiming that the 'only justification' for the war was that it had made 'a social revolution inevitable'. Needham was criticized for conniving at the suppression of Action - the Fascist magazine - while protesting at the suppression of the Daily Worker. The third included the 'conventional Left-wing culture of the past two decades': the 'dominant orthodoxy' which had ensured that 'the thought-habits of most Englishmen and women under forty' who had received, or were receiving, what was called a 'higher education' were perhaps more 'standardised, than at any previous epoch of our history' and were perpetuating the objectionable 'myth' that 'if you are Leftwing, you are intelligent and . . . if you are intelligent, you must be Left-wing'. Smyth claimed that this 'culture' was in 'liquidation'. He exposed its 'moral and intellectual bankruptcy' and the sensitivity its exponents displayed under criticism. He pointed out that it was only 'timidity . . . the natural vice of dons' that had made so many of his readers think between the wars that 'the Safe Thing for a Don (and particularly for a young don) was to be "mildly Left" '. If timidity [he wrote in the Cambridge Review of 6 June 1941] is the characteristic weakness of the don, that of the undergraduate is lack of imagination: and much of the attraction of being Red (or Pink) lay in the fact that it enabled you to float down with the tide while enjoying the illusion of battling stubbornly against it. It is always nice (especially when you are under 21) to feel that you belong to a Persecuted Minority, and it is also nice to feel that you are the Voice of Youth: but to enjoy both these sensations simultaneously . . . gives you a sense of moral and intellectual superiority to all who differ from you and entitles you to treat them with that confident derision which comes easily to those who are not accustomed to have their received opinions challenged on equal terms. In the course of editing the Cambridge Review, Smyth presented the mood in which Britain had entered the war as one of 'resignation rather than anger'. He drew attention to the contrast between the financial condition of soldiers and the financial condition of munition

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workers, as well as to the 'unfortunate' way in which the latter were being 'flattered . . . in order to induce them to remain working at their benches during air-raid warnings'. He criticized the 'trick' indulged in by political minorities, especially on the Left, of regarding themselves as 'the People', adding that 'if the besetting sin of the Left . . . is moral arrogance, the besetting sin of the Right is intellectual sloth', while the Liberal - in the 'wider sense . . . suffered habitually from a sense of moral inferiority towards the Left . . . and moral superiority towards the Right' and felt that 'Left-wing opinions ("whether you agree with them or not") are intrinsically Moral and Altruistic and Progressive whereas Right-wing ones are intrinsically Unfair and Interested and Reactionary'. He identified intellectual positions as 'interests' at least as much as he identified them as 'principles', and he turned that knife in whatever wounds he found available. He was critical of 'bureaucracy'. He defended the profit motive, and declined to assume that it was commoner among industrialists than among civil servants and intellectuals. He wondered how the abolition of privilege would affect that 'privileged class to which both . . . Professor Laski for example . . . and I belong, namely the class of intellectuals' who lived lives which were far more 'snug and sheltered than the great majority of those whom Professor Laski called the privileged' and who, if they are 'tolerantly fluent and hold Left-wing opinions (but not too far to the Left) may enjoy the perquisites' of a 'privileged order' - the financial prizes that come from having the chance to 'become public figures and write for Picture Post and . . . be invited by the BBC to lecture, to debate and even to interpret the Mind of Britain to our fellow citizens in the British Commonwealth of Nations and the world at large'. Smyth's position was not simply Conservative. But part at least of what he wrote was political in the most secular sense. It was certainly the priest who pointed out that 'sins are not sectional' and that 'the sin of Avarice' is not a 'product of the capitalist system'. It was as certainly the politician who wrote that 'the real trouble with Leftwing intellectuals in every generation is self-righteousness and the claim to a monopoly of principle: which explains not only the moral recklessness with which they inflict criticism and the moral indignation with which they suffer it, but also their curious trick of demanding that other people shall make sacrifices in order to demonstrate their sincerity'. As a political theorist and as a priest, Smyth emphasized the need

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for tolerance without broadmindedness. In religion as much as in politics, his method was attack. The attack was made in many directions at once. It was made against the liberal clergy, against 'oldfashioned rationalism' with its 'high seriousness . . . transparent altruism and . . . lack of any sense of humour or proportion', and against the 'Romanizing faction' in the Church of England whose liturgical innovations were catching up with post-Tridentine 'corruptions' just at the point at which the liturgical movement in the Roman church had turned against them. It was made against 'the mass of modern novelists' who had 'nothing to say' except when they belonged to the 'small but negligible school' which was 'boosting the idea that adultery among peasants is somehow more "virile" than adultery in any other order of society and possibly has some obscure connection with the Parousia'. The 'mass and the maypole' school of history was dismissed, as was behaviourist psychology, for being the 'pale and tortuous remnant of materialism'. The Dean of Arches was criticised for believing that the Anglican theory of the royal supremacy was Erastian, the lay leader of Anglican Evangelicalism for believing that the 'function of the National Church' was 'to bring the doctrines of the Church of England into accord with the doctrines of the people'. Galsworthy was 'the perfect beta-alpha novelist'. Bertrand Russell was expected to achieve immortality only through H. G. Wood's (justly forgotten) book against him. Newman was criticized to Pusey's advantage for his egotism, for being 'an evangelical gone to the bad', and for his failure to see that Anglicanism was more than 'a set of intellectual propositions'. Dean Stanley's 'broadmindedness' was said to be 'almost unbearable'. 'Trumpery romanticism' was the judgment on Chateaubriand. Bolingbroke was ejected from the Conservative tradition on the ground that he was a 'false prophet' who could not be a 'good Tory' since he was an enemy of Christianity. The Roman Catholic church was criticized for withdrawing the priesthood from the people and for encouraging eccentric individual pieties in the absence of a properly coordinated corporate worship. Calvin and Foxes Book of Martyrs, however, were also criticized, as was Wesley who had 'claimed the world for his parish because he had never had a parish'. Bishop Hooper, the 'father of English Nonconformity', came badly out of his alliance with Northumberland and the New Nobility: 'the vilest gang of political adventurers in the history of the country' whose policy under Edward VI was to let the Puritans 'rule' the Church while they themselves 'despoiled' it.

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Smyth was constructing an historical version of an Anglican apologetic, differentiating it from clericalism and Erastianism, from dissent and Roman Catholicism, and from the secular-idealist and totalitarian protagonists of the 'age of creeds' who, setting out to 'establish the Kingdom of God on earth', had ended by establishing the rule of force. His aim was the destruction of the 'anti-intellectual . . . drift of the modern world, its futile cynicism, so infinitely credulous regarding religion and politics' and its failure to understand that both needed a taut, acute, intellectual invigilation. His sharpest shafts were directed at 'indifference to theology' and the belief that dogma and 'all that sort of thing' had no place in religion. In this very fashionable respect, the negativity was continuous through the attack on the 'barren fig-trees of Public School religion' to the assertion that the failure of the post-war officer class was a direct result of the 'rot' that ran through 'the whole system of Public School education'. 'The average Public Schoolboy,' Smyth wrote in 1940, 'has far less idea of what the Christian religion is about, and why it matters, than an intelligent Bantu catechumen', and this was because of the false doctrines of the Dearmer-Norwood period amongst Public School headmasters with its 'pious whimsies', 'abuse of dogma', and manifest determination to suppress the 'intellectual case for Christianity'. The 'slops of natural ethics', Smyth was saying, were no good. It was no use offering 'solid service and no more'. Christianity was not designed to be a 'social cement'. Nor was it 'just another religion'. It was as ridiculous to think that 'elementary schoolchildren' could be given 'an objective exposition of all the great religions of the world' as it was to speak, like the Chief Scout, of that 'practical Christianity which (although they are Buddhists in theory) distinguishes the Burmese in their daily life'. 'When theology ceases to be creative,' he wrote in 1934, 'not only the spiritual but the whole intellectual life of a community decays.' Decay was symbolized, on the one hand, by the University Vice-Chancellor who, thanking a clergyman for a lecture, explained that 'my only difference from the lecturer is that his dogmas are his and my dogmas are mine' but 'we both agree about a necessity of dogma'. It was symbolized, on the other, by the heresy that since 'religion is only a department of life', the church had no right to 'interfere with politics . . . or secular affairs'. Smyth ridiculed the positions he disliked, but he did not deny that they were effective. Tillotson's 'prudential morality' had established

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itself in the 'consciences of English men and women' and, as the 'Gospel of Moral Rectitude', had been so brilliantly developed in eighteenthcentury apologetics that pelagianism had become the national religion and the 'popular preacher' in England had for long 'almost invariably' been, and was now, a 'preacher of ethics'. Smyth claimed to be living in a post-Christian climate where the 'moral blight' from which his generation was suffering was an 'inverted Pharisaism' which, finding it respectable to be ' "a good sort" * and not respectable to do 'the kind of things which the Pharisees did in their meticulous observance of their religious duties', had lost sight of the fact that 'our Lord told us not to eschew the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees but to exceed it'. The form [he wrote in 1937] is valueless without the spirit' . . . but 'the spirit without the form' may be equally . . . disastrous. When one realises that there are thousands of people in this country at the present moment for whom the tremendous and triumphant verities of the Faith of Christ Crucified and Risen are represented only by the slobber of the religious journalists in the Sunday papers and Abide with Me at a football final, it becomes apparent that there is a good deal to think about in Mr Eliot's classic paradox: 'the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life.' Smyth embodied an alliance between the Evangelical and Tractarian movements which, though they had been in conflict in the past, were now complementary. He saw no necessary antagonism between the religion of the home and the Bible on the one hand and the religion of the Church on the other. Both were necessary and both had been present in the Church of England as Cranmer had left it. Both had been present under Laud; neither had died completely in the eighteenth century. Both had been present in Simeon, Pusey, Maurice, Gore, Henson and Temple. Both were needed if the Church of England was to carry forward into the future all the sections into which it had been divided between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. There was here, besides much else, a political conception of Anglicanism, a history in which Cranmer's martyrdom was suffered in the cause of 'Centre-party' religion, in which Charles I had died for the 'liberties of his people', and in which Lord Liverpool and Sir Robert Peel, the reorganizers of its structure, had done as much 'humanly speaking' as the Tractarians to save the Church of England in the nineteenth century. This was not, however, merely political; or rather,

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so far as it was, it was so in the widest and grandest sense in which a political party stands out by bringing together into comprehensive alliance all those who are agreed on the beliefs and practices to which it is committed. Smyth's history of the English Church, though not itself a doctrine, pointed to a doctrine. This began with the assertion that Natural Religion was not Christianity and should not be confused with it. Natural Religion was not a religion, because a religion involves cultus or practice - the worship of God. It was not Christian because it did not perceive the significance of the Bible, the uniqueness of Christ, and Christ's foundation of the church - did not see both Bible and Church as not only the words and works of God but also as the instruments God uses to stand over against and redeem the words and works of men. It was idle, moreover, to talk of 'institutional Christianity' as though there was some other kind with which it could be contrasted. There was no 'other' kind. Christianity was inseparable from the Church, whose message was not a set of intellectual propositions, invented by men and embellished with their cleverness, but God's Word as declared in the Bible. That was what the clergy proclaimed. That was all they proclaimed. We were not ordained to have views about God or to wallow in the slough of subjective pietism . . . We are, God help us, the stewards of Divine Revelation, the ministers of the doctrine and sacraments, and the discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded and as this Church and Realm hath received the same according to the commandments of God. In relation to politics, Smyth's argument was that Biblical theology, alone of contemporary doctrines, transcended immanentism. It alone explained man's nature and history neither by reference to 'general causes' which had been 'the staple of scientific thinking' since the Renaissance, nor in terms of the self-validatory norms that emerged from man's conception of himself as self-created. It explained them, on the contrary, as facets of the contrast between the finitude of earthly existence and the infinity of God. Marxism and Liberalism (and also, it seemed, Aristotelianism and Hegelianism) affirmed, 'as the issue of the earth's Great business', that there would eventually be an 'earthly paradise' or 'condition of general happiness', variously called 'Fraternity, International Co-operation, Peaceful Anarchy, the Classless Society, the Super-State or the Federation of the World', as 'an indefinite projection of the present or of ideals imperfectly realized in the present'.

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And this was 'a philosophical absurdity' because it made the 'end of history . . . an event in history', sought 'finality' within the 'sphere of becoming', and posited 'a strangely arbitrary conception of moral values operating in their own right within a space continuum as indeterminate as limbo'. Smyth was an historian, as accomplished and clever as anyone to be found in the Cambridge History Faculty today, but, so far from thinking of history as a professional activity, he thought of it as the record of the whole of man's action under Judgment. If he had been educated as a philosopher or as a psychologist, he would doubtless have said the same about philosophy or psychology. He said it in fact about history, which he thought should be written in full consciousness of this fact of which Liberalism and Marxism were ignorant and to which only Biblical theology held the clue. The clue was that, although 'history possesses meaning and significance', these 'do not lie upon the plane of history itself; that 'the whole course of history, as yet incomplete, may be regarded in its entirety as no more than a fragment of time enclosed within the boundless measure of eternity'; and that this 'history', which 'issued from eternity by the divine fiat of Creation' and would 'return to eternity at the Final Judgement', was an area in which out of His 'infinite condescension', God summons men, 'for all their nothingness, to be fellow-labourers with him'. This summoning - 'the mystery of the Incarnation' - was 'an event in history' which was also 'eternal and universal' and, having this double character, was an offence to those whose conceptions were limited by considerations of terrestrial salvation. The offence was a scandal, the 'Scandal of Particularity' as he had heard Kittel explain at Tubingen - the claim so confidently uttered in the New Testament and so destructive of the narrow categories of modern minds, that this 'particular happening, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus' was not only 'unique and peculiar', but also 'eternal and universal', 'the ground of Salvation and . . . the Revelation of God to man'. On this view, it was the Incarnation that was 'the central fact of human history'. It was in this sense that Christianity could be said to have 'a philosophy at its heart' and why, intellectually speaking, the 'Christian revelation . . . must be at the heart of any adequate philosophy of history'. It was for this reason that it was 'difficult' to be a 'competent historian without being a Christian', why the possibility of meaningful history depended on there having been a Resurrection, and why 'all history can be, and is, Church history', which is 'primarily prophetic,

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revealing and interpreting the ways of God to Christ's Church and . . . man's soul'. If Christ be not risen [Smyth wrote in 1934] there can be no such thing as history . . . History . . . is ultimately unintelligible except in the light of the Crucifixion-Resurrection . . . something that cuts right across our whole conception of the time-process. The moment that you say 'Jesus crucified', history visibly breaks down, passes to death: but the New Testament presses on - 'nay, rather risen'. That is, it presses on into that which lies beyond history and gives history its meaning. The present moment is significant (and, therefore, the historian is a useful person) only because it bears the pressure of Eternity.

The point of the Resurrection was that it gave ground for believing not only that God's providence had operated but that his 'holiness' had 'conquered' and would go on conquering in the future. History was an 'unfurling scroll' on which God's 'purposes', though 'inscribed', were 'inscribed inscrutably', from which man had to read what they could and cooperate so far as they were able, and where there was no 'discovered system' or 'revealed plan' but only the 'effected' redemption made manifest in the 'Empty Tomb'. There was no earthly paradise, nor any realization of the secular millennium. Life was a 'spiritual pilgrimage', men were free, and God took them 'one by one' and worked on them 'as individuals' so that 'His loving purpose for them might be accomplished'. In attempting to fulfil God's purposes, men naturally used knowledge and developed it according to their own criteria. But since their truths, no less than their falsehoods, were 'relative' in relation to God's, they had, where salvation was concerned, perforce to accept what they had been given. What they had been given was Truth (or Dogma). It had been given by Christ and had been handed on by His Church. The focus of Smyth's conception of the Church was the Tractarian insistence that it stood over against the world, while also playing a part in it. That was why Christian Truth had to be distinguished from Liberal, Marxist or Progressive delusion and why one of its requirements was that it should be taught as effectively as they were. What had to be taught was not, as some apologists thought, 'religion in general'. Smyth rejected the conception of 'religion in general' as certainly as he bypassed the conception of Christianity in general. He made, however, the Anglican assumption that the Eastern Orthodox and Methodist Churches were preferable to the Roman Catholic, and

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that Anglican piety was neither 'a form of Roman Catholicism with certain Protestant omissions' nor 'a form of Protestantism with certain Roman Catholic additions', but was a 'middle way' which went back through 'Pusey, Laud and Cranmer' to the great tradition of antiquity and was 'Catholic', not in the sense of being 'worldwide', universal or preoccupied with numbers (as though the clergy were 'commercial travellers, travelling in religion and touting for custom for their shops') but in the original sense which the Eastern Church had never lost that it held the 'divine truth in all its wholeness . . . fullness and . . . purity'. The characteristics of the Anglican mind were said to be 'adventurousness', 'comprehensiveness', 'caution', 'moral earnestness', 'sobriety', 'moderation' and 'distrust of . . . fanaticism and arbitrary experiment'. The Church of England combined uniformity of worship with 'wide latitude of theological speculation' within the framework of the 'Biblical discipline'. It had a 'passion for truth' which was connected with the fact that many of its leaders had been dons and a 'stubborn intellectual integrity' which had made it conscious of the fact that 'ecclesiastical authority' was as capable of error in interpreting God's word as the dissentient individual. Above all, it was not only the Catholic Church in England but also the Church of the English nation which had therefore, as its main responsibility - the responsibility which the Church had accepted throughout the ages - to proclaim Christ's truth so that men might be enabled to come to Him. This raised two questions: in what way should the truth be proclaimed, and how did it relate to established law and opinion? The first involved consideration of the parish clergy, the second the character of the Anglican polity. About the latter, Smyth's doctrine was not really Erastian. He recognized the Erastian character of the English Reformation, but was anti-Erastian for the period after 1688. He shared the Tractarian objection to subordinating the Church to a parliament which had begun by including latitudinarians and had ended by including atheists, freethinkers, dissenters and Jews. He appeared to associate the Erastian establishment with the mindless spirituality of Public-School belief. He was spared the need to be socially revolutionary by the assumption that the liberal establishment could be attacked without the social structure being destroyed. So far as Smyth's doctrine was Erastian, it assumed that subordination of the Church to the secular power was tolerable only so long as

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the secular power was not secular, so long, that is to say, as it was not parliament but the king in his role as sacerdos or priest who exercised supreme power. This had been the 'basis of philosophic Toryism' down to 1688. 1688, however, had destroyed it by establishing that parliament was supreme, was not sacerdos and could not make it its chief function to maintain Christ's truth. The proclamation of Christ's truth was, of course, the Church's task, not parliament's. Smyth was a defender of the Establishment, on the ground that a national commission to be 'the national symbol . . . of Christian faith' and 'in some sort the keeper of the public conscience' was the surest guarantee that Britain would avoid the cynicism and secular idealism of the United States. This did not mean, however, that the Church must support the secular establishment, or necessarily approve of its politics. On the contrary, it meant something more fundamental; that, since Christ's Truth applied to the whole of life, the Church needed a political doctrine from which the secular arm could learn and by which it could be judged. Smyth opposed Church participation in party politics. In relation not only to Cripps but also to Archbishop Temple, whom he otherwise admired, he stressed the danger that would come from failing to anchor Christian politics in Biblical theology. He was clear also that a political doctrine was present in Cranmer, who appeared in his writings as a sort of Tory democrat, as much as in Laud who had had his head cut off for resisting the financial power's determination to 'emancipate itself from ecclesiastical shackles'. He wrote admiringly of Lowder, Dolling and the post-Newman generation of Tractarian priests who had 'discerned in the slums . . . a new apostolate to the disinherited of the industrial system'. It was said to be one of the great events of his own adult life that the Church of England had recovered the sense that it ought to have a political mission. This required a learned clergy, but in that connection Smyth did not recognize the difficulty the Church of England has in speaking ex cathedra. What he emphasized chiefly was the ordinary parson and the 'pastoral' nature of the Anglican ministry, which was contrasted not only with the 'priestly' nature of the Roman ministry, and the 'preaching' nature of the protestant ministry, but also with the authority claimed by the secular intelligentsia. What Smyth claimed was that the Anglican clergy were bearers of Truth, agents of redemption, the instruments by which God offered salvation to Englishmen, and that their message was no mere extension

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of the intellectual or scholarly achievements of the English mind, but the outcome of a deep, if low-keyed, spirituality which was as different from Puritan intolerance on the one hand as from secular complacency on the other. Look at the history of the English parson, and of the particular temptations by which he has been particularly assailed in particular centuries: in the sixteenth century, by ignorance; in the seventeenth century, intolerance; in the eighteenth, lethargy; in the nineteenth, social worldliness; in the twentieth, despondency. Now the cure for despondency is not scholarship. It is not even theology. Spiritual integrity is a higher thing than intellectual integrity, because it comprehends it; and no great harm will befall the priest who has been well and truly taught to shepherd his flock, to study his Bible and to say his prayers. A line from a forgotten work of fiction about clergymen haunts me still: 'He is what the grace of God and his own sustained endeavour have made him - a diligent pastor and a faithful priest, a good friend and a very competent fisher of men. He is what he has desired to be since he first set his face to the furrow.'

IV Smyth challenged nearly everyone and nearly everyone responded. As a consequence he received no substantial advancement in the Church of England after ten exhausting and fruitful years as Rector of St Margaret's Westminster, and wrote neither a systematic book on The Victorian Church (which Chadwick, his junior, wrote instead) nor the intellectually crucial account of Church-State Anglicanism between 1580 and 1850 for which he was better prepared than anyone in his generation. Whether this failure was the result of defects or contradictions in the position itself, whether a book like Ullmann's Mediaeval Papalism could, or should, have been written on the subject - whether, indeed, the certainty of faith and doctrine that Smyth shared with his schoolfellow, Ramsey,1 before Ramsey's archbishopric, would have stood the test of systematic historical writing any better than Ramsey's 1. Rt Rev. A. M. Ramsey (1904- ). President of Cambridge Union 1926. Curate 1928-30. Sub-Warden of Lincoln Theological College 1930-36. Vicar of St Bene't's Cambridge 1939-40. Professor of Divinity at Durham 1940-50. Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and Fellow of Magdalene College 1952^56. Archbishop of York 1956-61 and of Canterbury 1961-74. Author of The Gospel and the Catholic Church 1936, The Resurrection of Christ 1945, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology 1951, From Gore to Temple 1960, (with Cardinal Suenens) The Future of the Christian Church 1971 etc.

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stood the test of public exposure at Canterbury - are difficult questions. Smyth's failure may have been personal, or it may not have been. For the purposes of the present volume it does not much matter whether it was or not. What matters here is that, pedagogically, he did three things. He implied first that academic detachment is nonsense and that all academic statements are shot through with prejudice, partiality and persuasive intention. He established, secondly, that intelligentsia life should be harnessed to practice, and that the proper practice for the English intelligentsia is the service of the Established Church and the English State. Finally, he suggested that an important doctrine was to be found in the writings of Hoskyns who, with G. K. Chesterton, was the 'outstanding' man in the history of 'Christian thought in England in the twentieth century' and God's instrument in rescuing men from the 'tyranny of superstition'. In Smyth's vocabulary the 'tyranny of superstition' meant the 'hoary superstitions' of the Rationalist. He claimed that it was Chesterton and Hoskyns between them who had made it possible to see how these could be destroyed. Where Hoskyns, by his 'pure scholarship', had shown up the 'Liberal Humanitarianism in which oldfashioned agnosticism had tended to take refuge', Chesterton's 'lobs and yorkers and full pitchers' had shown up 'the procession of religions and philosophies that claimed to be superior' to Christianity - with the result that Smyth's generation had effected 'something between a mutiny and a war of liberation' in the course of which ethical rationalism had been made to look 'stuffy . . . pedantic . . . obsolete . . . obscurantist. . . dreary . . . and second-rate' as well as absolutely 'on the defensive', while Hoskyns had done so much to familiarize the Church of England with the latest developments in German thinking that 'when Barth broke like a bombshell on the sleeping tents of Anglicanism, only those who had attended his lectures in the old lecture-room at Corpus found little of novelty either in the idiom or in the theme'. Smyth might or might not have been an accurate representation of Hoskyns who had died six years before I arrived in Cambridge. But I knew, whether rightly or wrongly, that Smyth meant what Hoskyns meant, that Hoskyns purveyed the message of Barth (because there was no Anglican with a message worth purveying), and that the message of Barth was that 'Liberalism' was dead. In fact, Hoskyns was not just a Barthian. He had been a friend of Schweitzer, had studied in pre-war Germany under Harnack, and had been much influenced by Loisy; until sometime in the twenties he

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regarded himself as a liberal Catholic in the manner of Spens and Selwyn. It was not until he read Barth's Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans in 1924 or 1925 that he de-liberalized himself. Thereafter what I supposed was true. The 'truth' I received was that one should be a 'severe antagonist of Liberalism in all its forms'. Hoskyns's doctrine was contained in a comparatively small number of works, all of which established the existence of errors which it was desirable to demolish. These centred around the emphasis which biblical scholarship had given to Jesus's character as a man and the conclusion it had reached that he was a great moral teacher, made no claim to a divine mission and, when speaking eschatologically, did so so incidentally that a reasonable modern doctrine could be extracted from his statements. These errors were encapsulated in the claims that the Christs whom St Paul and St John presented were conditioned by their knowledge of Greek philosophy, that their Christs were different from the Jesus who really lived, and that the great achievement of 'liberal historical criticism' had been to establish that this was so. Hoskyns attacked these conceptions, and especially the conception of Jesus as a moral teacher whose language was free alike of 'dogmas . . . the miraculous . . . sacramental and sacrificial worship . . . and the Church' and which, once it had been put into its context, would not only be perfectly comprehensible to modern men but would provide the basis for 'a new reformation of the Christian religion capable of ensuring its survival in the modern world'. The great weakness of much modern critical work on the Fourth Gospel [he wrote in his introduction to The Fourth Gospel] is due to the continual assumption that the text would finally yield to historical or psychological investigation, that it would deliver up its secret in an almost tangible form. Criticism has proceeded on the supposition that somewhere or other in human experience . . . the Fourth Gospel could come to rest; that is to say, its obscurities would vanish before the progressive march of critical knowledge. The Fourth Gospel has, however, not come to rest; and this is not because, owing to some lack of knowledge, which further patient study . . . will rectify, the critic has just failed to reach an adequate solution of the problem, but because the theme of the book is beyond human knowledge, and because, if it did come to rest, it would have denied the theme which, in fact, it never denies. The primary object of The Fourth Gospel - the culmination of Hoskyns's contribution to English Christian thinking - was to establish that St John's Gospel was not a product of its author's 'imagination'

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but had as its 'theme' the 'non-historical that makes sense of history'. Jesus, Hoskyns claimed, both spoke and acted as St John said he did. His teaching was neither 'simple' nor 'merely moral', He made 'supernatural claims' not only 'for his own person' but also for the Church, which he 'consciously brought into being' and through which he disclosed 'the characteristic notes of Catholic Christianity'. There were two reasons why this involved an attack. First, because, though initially a minority invention, the opinions Hoskyns was criticizing had been accepted by 'a large number of scholars', had extended themselves into 'quite popular literature', and were to be found 'exercising considerable influence outside strictly academic circles'. Secondly, because they not only obstructed understanding of Jesus's meaning by humanizing his nature but were connected with misconceptions which were grave and gross. There was, in Hoskyns, no mere undergraduate reversal (as there was in Chesterton). He was not saying that humanistic interpretations of Jesus's life were just ridiculous or wrong. They were in fact, he was saying, a form of 'idolatry' and as such were not only sinful but embodied 'the sin from which all other sins proceed'. Pride [he said, in a sermon preached on these matters in 1927] is the capital sin . . . It belongs to us when we become the centre of the Universe, when everything revolves about us, and everything is judged as it affects us . . . And . . . Pride is not merely jealousy of other men: it is inevitably jealousy of God. It is intolerable to us that God should stand at the centre of the universe and not man, that we should be His creation, and depend upon Him, or that He should control our destiny. So we protect ourselves . . . and fight against that utter humiliation before Him which He demands . . . Or more . . . diabolically, we persuade ourselves that religion, the Christian religion, is humanitarianism. For Pride is not merely individual; Pride rears its head when human achievement, human knowledge, human love and affection are identified with the Christian religion, and when 'God' becomes another word for 'man'. This is naked atheism, and it is atheism proceeding from Pride - the ultimate blasphemy . . . Pride is so inevitably so much a part of our common humanity, that it escapes us, and we fail to recognise it. It invades the Church, interprets the Scriptures, and dethrones God. It is the sin from which all other sins proceed.

This sounds like Evangelical rant. But, in Hoskyns's formulation, an evangelical insight had become an intellectual position, connecting pride with 'arrogance' and arrogance with 'that scepticism which stands aloof, and leading to the claim that 'liberalism' in its widest sense

94 Receptions had not only denied God but had arrogated to necessarily penultimate men the powers that properly belong to Him. It is clear to me now that I took two of these ideas - the transcendence of God and the insignificance of men's judgment - and made something out of them. But what I made was not so much the belief that sin and redemption are ever-present as the conclusion, which is the beginning of cynicism and one that Hoskyns rejected - that, in face of the transcendence of God, no moral or political system has any authority, and more or less anything will do. This was the position of the wife in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock who 'knew by tests as clear as mathematics' that her husband was 'evil' but, when challenged to hand him over to the police by a woman who prided herself on 'knowing the difference between right and wrong', knew in return that, by the side of 'Good and Evil', neither 'right nor wrong' mattered very much. Hoskyns believed in God's impenetrability only in a negative sense. What he believed positively was a combination of evangelical truth and Anglican Catholicism. His life and work were an attempt to establish their compatibility, and to show that the Bible was not the work of human reflection or experience or an anticipation of modern, liberal, or commonsense philosophy and radical politics, but was God's word, the record of His redemption of the world through the historic Church which Christ had established. Hoskyns had a comprehensive theology which asserted that sin was inseparable from humanity, that it was insuperable without God, and that God's love alone had made redemption possible through the historic Church. But, though the positive theology was manifest, it was easy to be involved only in its destructive aspect - the odium theologicum, so to speak, without the theology the argument which established that, since Liberalism had lost the initiative, there was no need for Christians, or anyone else, to capitulate to its requirements. I absorbed this as an intellectual assumption. I joined vicariously in the chase against those who disagreed, with the result that I knew, before reading them, that C. E. Raven's works were not worth reading. But I do not think, in terms of emotional engagement so far as religion was concerned (let alone in terms of religious practice), that I grasped the connection that Hoskyns was making between the religion he was protecting and the relativism he was using to demolish the Liberalism he thought was eroding it. For this there were three reasons. First, that I approached Hoskyns through Toynbee, even when I thought I was doing the opposite, and

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allowed Hoskyns's Christian relativism to he absorbed by the liberal relativism of volumes i—iii of A Study of History. Second, that I approached Hoskyns through Smyth who was a destructive intellectual, which Hoskyns was not, and taught chiefly a negative hostility rather than, despite his efforts and mine, which I recall with embarrassment, the practice of religion. Third, and most important, that I had little experience of religion and that my primary commitment, which absorbed and stifled the religion, was to thought or criticism or feeling or instinct or scholarship or whatever secular word seems suitable to describe the intelligentsia activity in which I was engaging, even when I thought I was disengaging from it, and it is odd that it should have been evangelical relativism that had this effect, for there can have been few would-be Christian intellectuals with a smaller sense of sin or a more obviously paradoxical combination of practical pelagianism on the one hand with intellectual belief in original sin in its secular form as inherent human imperfection on the other. All Barth had meant was that identification between Biblical Christianity and any moral, political or religious system was mistaken, and it is certain that, given his politics, contemporary radicals have better reason to call on him than had the inter-war Fellows of Corpus. But establishing a relativistic and negative position towards 'Liberalism' involved so strenuous an effort that they left the impression of replacing it by an equally improper identification between Biblical Christianity and Toryism. In fact th^y were Tories, and also party Conservatives, and they assumed, and hoped, that 'the people' would be as quiescent in face of socialism as they had been instinctively mistrustful of liberalism. But though they may have sometimes supposed that Toryism was, it was not in fact necessary to their theology. It was because they provided the excitement of polemical ferocity and contemporary relevance, even when relevance was an unfashionable conception, that they transmitted a sympathy for the whole of the position - Tory in politics, Anglican in religion, and deeply resistant to liberal erosion. If I had known him better than I did, I might have understood how rebarbative Smyth's intensity was and how antipathetic to any purpose that I was capable of conceiving. I had neither a proselytizing nor an evangelical instinct nor any developed sense of the practice of religion, and I retained instinctively, long after rejecting it intellectually, the assumption that Wordsworthian, Shavian and Toynbeean spiritualism were affirmations of religion against materialism rather than attempts

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to suffocate Christianity with pagan romanticism. Nevertheless, by the time I left Cambridge in June 1944 I had reached two conclusions that Church-State Anglicanism was a good thing and that Liberalism was positively antagonistic to it. This was as far as I had got by the time I joined the army in September of that year. In the last thirtyfive years I have gone chiefly backwards.

4 Eliot 'Some sort of opium . . . the people . . . must have, until you can give them either religion, or to each man a job in which he can be passionately interested, or both. For the present, no doubt, commercial literature will continue to flourish and to pander, more and more severed from real literature. The latter will be produced by those who will not merely be content not to make a living by it, not merely content to have no career; but who will be resigned to a very small audience - for we all should like to think that our poetry might be read and declaimed in the public-house, the forecastle and the shipyard.' T. S. Eliot The Criterion, July 1932 pp. 682-3. 'I assume that we are all . . . aware that if Christendom were re-united tomorrow it would be far from co-extensive with even the European world. Against it would be not only that considerable body of influence which is positively anti-Christian, but all the forces which we denominate Liberal, embracing all people who believe that the public affairs of this world and those of the next have nothing to do with each other; who believe that in a perfect world those who like golf could play golf, and those who like religion could go to church. We, on the other hand, feel convinced, however darkly, that our spiritual faith should give us some guidance in temporal matters; that if it does not, the fault is our own, that morality rests upon religious sanction, and that the social organisation of the world rests upon moral sanction; that we can only judge of temporal values in the light of eternal values; we are committed to what in the eyes of the world must be a desperate belief, that a Christian world-order, the Christian world-order, is ultimately the only one which, from any point of view, will work.' T. S. Eliot Catholicism and the International Order in Christendom September 1933. 'The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine, remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death.' T. S. Eliot The Social Function of Poetry (1945) in On Poetry and Poets 1957 p. 24.

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Readers who came to Eliot 1 in the 1940s or 1950s were likely to be struck by his intellectual religion, his political Anglicanism and the historically orientated character of his culture. They might have been confused by the vague hints at Christian socialism and by his addiction, despite criticism, to Pater and Arnold. But they would have treated him as a continuation of the resistance to Rationalistic humanism which was described in chapter 3. If they had been conscious of the body of opinion described there, they would have thought it appropriate that The Idea of a Christian Society was delivered as the Boutwood lectures in Corpus in 1939. They would have been right. But they would have neglected not only Eliot's eclectic education but also the framework it left, and would have ignored the fact that he was a contemporary of Toynbee and Collingwood, did his first writing in Oxford at the same time as they did theirs, and felt the same difficulties as they felt about relations between religion, university education, culture, and intelligentsia life in the democratic age. Eliot has had greater influence as a poet than as the promulgator of a doctrine. His achievement, however, lay less in the quality of his poetry than in its effect and, indeed, very little of it will be durable once the generations that have learnt to follow it have passed away. Eliot will not speak directly to the future. His power will depend on 1. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965). Ed. Harvard University, University of Paris and Merton College Oxford. Editor of The Criterion (and other titles) 1922-39. Director of Faber and Faber. Author of The Sacred Wood 1920, Homage to John Dry den 1924, Poems 1909-25 1925, For Lancelot Andrewes 1928, Selected Essays 1917-32 1932, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 1933, After Strange Gods 1934, The Rock 1934, Murder in the Cathedral 1935, The Family Reunion 1939, The Idea of a Christian Society 1939, Practical Cats 1939, Four Quartets 1944, What is a Classic? 1945, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 1948, The Cocktail Party 1950, Selected Essays 1951, The Confidential Clerk 1954, On Poetry and Poets 1957, The Elder Statesman 1959, Collected Poems 1909-62 1963, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley 1964.

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the interest which future interpreters will have in enlisting his example in the movements of poetic opinion characteristic of their own ages or generations. To his prose this has already happened; the doctrinal discussions that he undertook between 1916 and 1950 no longer speak immediately or directly, as they did to the generations that were born between 1890 and 1930. Nevertheless, it is his public doctrine that has to be understood. Of all the writers discussed in this book, only Toynbee and Collingwood made so early, so prolonged, and so continuous an effort to say something of general significance about English life. Eliot began as a Unitarian, a philosophical idealist, and an American, and was obsessed by religion for a long time before he became an Anglican. Though he had little instinctive sense of the mentalities that prevailed amongst illiterate, non-literary, and average Englishmen, his doctrine was a doctrine about England. In its developed form it was also a Christian doctrine. From the middle twenties onwards, it aimed to make the English conscious of the demands of dogma and revelation. The Eliot of the 1950s, however, was resigned and eclectic. Though there were passages of critical hostility towards the illusions of the post-war age, he did not leave the impression of being constructive. For constructive indoctrination one must see what he did between 1924 and 1945 to the doctrine he had begun to promulgate between 1916 and 1924. The first serious writing that Eliot published in England was published in the middle of the First World War, more or less contemporaneously with Prufrock. Neither Prufrock nor the prose writing, however, was sensitive to the war. So far as the war made an appearance, it was in the form of the romantic sentimentality in which the loss of the lost generation had come to be enveloped: there was no sign, except in the dedication to Prufrock and in a brief discussion of Peguy, that Eliot had any sense of the people's struggle that was being waged around him. Nor was the account that he gave of English society in any way powerful. There were only hints about capitalism and aristocracy, and there was little more about the defective sensibility characteristic of dwellers in 'semi-detached villas'. Beyond that, there was merely rejection of the insularity, amateurishness and undisciplined thinking characteristic of 'public-school morality', a desire to disturb the public's reliance on Shakespeare, Nelson, Wellington, and Newton, and a determination to establish that 'worship of inspiration' and belief in

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the Great Man, together with a liking for 'exhortation and edification' and 'dislike of the specialist', lay behind 'all of British slackness for a hundred years and more'. In early Eliot this tone was continual. He wrote disparagingly about the John Bull myth and attacked the tastelessness of the 'decent middleclass mob' who were 'morally dependent upon the aristocracy' at the same time as they were succeeding in destroying it. He wrote of them as hating the 'whole of English literature' before Cowper's Task and as having debased Shakespeare so that his plays could be made acceptable to them. 'Middle-class art' was described as having sham ideas, emotions and sensations while aristocratic and proletarian art were 'in essence' the same, a 'real aristocracy' being 'essentially of the same blood as the people over whom it rules' and fine art being the refinement, not the antithesis of popular art. There was much snobbish, or fashionable, nonsense about the 'state of amorphous protoplasm' that would overtake the 'entire civilised world' once the cinema, gramophone, wireless and motor-car had superseded existing institutions of cultural transmission. Between 1916 and 1924 the message was that English life was rotten and needed renovation, and that renovation in literature was needed as a by-product of the need for renovation in general. Eliot did not make suggestions about general renovation. At this time he was concerned solely to rescue literary, critical and poetic sensibility from the rottenness of the dominant literary intelligentsia. The main target for attack was 'romanticism' in the forms in which it had left its mark on English letters. Eliot repeated what Arnold had said in Essays in Criticism about the failure to criticize it in the nineteenth century. He showed Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley developing 'decadence' and 'immaturity' to a point of 'great genius' and succeeding in the process in 'punishing us from the grave' not just with the sentimentality of Carlyle and Meredith but also with the 'annual scourge of the Georgian anthology'. The objection to the Georgian poets was that they suffered from 'pleasantness' and 'charm'. They were 'inbred', borrowed 'little from foreign sources' and were 'almost political' in their patriotism about the English countryside. The emotion expressed in their poetry was 'of the object, not of human life', and was largely concerned with 'birds, fields and villages'. Though their 'love of Nature' was 'less vague' than Wordsworth's and had 'less philosophy behind it', its defects were obvious once they stopped 'tramping with a knapsack'.

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The Georgian poets received special attention. But they were only examples of a rot that was alleged to run through contemporary literature. We need not dwell on the dismissals of Mrs Meynell, Clive Bell, Oscar Wilde, and Rupert Brooke or do more than notice the view that Wells had 'laid literature aside' in order to set the nation's house in order. Nor need the criticisms of Chesterton be thought significant except that Chesterton was later to be praised. The attacks on Gosse, Squire and Colvin, however, were attacks on influential critics. The celebrated account of the insignificance of Gilbert Murray was deliberate and offensive. A great deal was packed into the judgment that, though Tennyson was to be distinguished from Siegfried Sassoon by the possession of a brain, his brain was in fact 'like a farmhouse clock' and 'almost wholly encrusted with parasitic opinion'. This was the negative aspect of 1916-24. The positive aspect was an attempt to establish poetry's autonomy, to identify its characteristics, and to establish a canon from the past which would consecrate a certain type of poetry, including Eliot's and Pound's poetry, in the present. Eliot's subjects included in passing a number of prose works, but there was little systematic discussion of any prose except criticism. The body of his work was about the proper relationship between criticism, poetry, poetic drama and the poetic sensibility. Poetry, here, was not the expression of emotion but 'truth seen in passion' and made part of the poet's personality by a sensibility which had a 'sense of values' without puritanism, and 'wisdom' without being 'didactic', and which, as Donne, for example, had shown, was able to 'see the thing as it is'. By 'seeing the thing as it is', Eliot meant taking account of the 'terrifying' nature of poetry and of the total character of its demands on both poet and reader. Poetry was not meant to be reassuring: it was not to be a substitute for either philosophy or religion. Nor was its differentiating characteristic to be 'intensity of emotion'. Poetry on this view was not to be 'subjective' or the expression of 'personality'. Its differentiating characteristic was to be 'intensity of expression' rather than 'intensity of emotion'. So far as personality entered into it, it was to involve an 'escape from personality', which was to be made, as the intensity was to be achieved, by means of the 'objective correlative' - the 'set of objects' which was the 'formula' of an emotion and which, by producing 'sensory experience', evoked the emotion in a way that seemed artistically inevitable so long as the object was adequate to it.

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The creation of a work of art, we will say, the creation of a character in a drama [Eliot wrote more generally in Ben Jonson] is a very different matter from the orthodox creation in one's own image . . . The creation of a character in a drama consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life of the author into the character . . . in . . . ways which are ... complex and devious. In inculcating deviousness, Eliot made it clear that the English needed to be drawn out of their parochiality, and to be made to understand that England had a tradition of poetic expression whose existence had been obscured by the romantic critical canon. A poet had to be conscious of more than 'his own generation' and the critic had to disclose the significance of the poet not only in himself but also in relation to poets who had gone before him. The poet who was conscious of this would be conscious of 'great difficulty and responsibility' but, difficult as this might make his task and extensive as it made the critic's, he had to concern himself with the 'whole literature of Europe from Homer onwards'. Although Eliot said often at this time that the English had to be dragged out of themselves, he did not go as far in establishing a European canon as in establishing an English one. It was only in establishing a canon for English literature that he got behind England's muddled romanticism, drew attention to contemporary writers who were doing the same, and showed that at various points in the past English writing had been free from the 'dissociation of sensibility'. The phrase 'dissociation of sensibility' appeared first in Eliot's anonymous review of Grierson's Metaphysical Poets in the Times Literary Supplement in October 1921. The idea, however, was endemic from 1917 onwards, producing a number of ways of affirming the importance to poetry of a 'refined . . . nervous system', and attributing to the failure of English poets to think through their senses after the mid seventeenth century a consequential running down both of poetic diction and of the English language. If there is such a thing, Eliot did not in his poetry overcome the 'dissociation of sensibility'; its manifestations there were largely negative - in making him unable to adopt a wide range of romantic mannerism. Nor, by and large, was it either central to the best of his detailed criticism after 1924, or relevant at all, except negatively, to the ideological positions he began to adopt after 1926. Its importance was confined almost exclusively to the reconstitution of the canon of acceptable literature where, however, its importance was great.

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Eliot's earliest critical statements, in Ezra Pound and in Reflections on Vers Libre, were concerned not with imagery or sensibility but with metre, with metrical innovation, and with the importance of matching metre to mood. Though Prufrock's novelty in England consisted in image at least as much as in metre, it was not until 1919 that its negative rejections turned into a positive affirmation. This came as a formalization of hints that Eliot had given earlier about the importance of metaphor in thinking, about the intimacy of the relationship between thought, language and physical movement, and about the interrelated ideas that Swinburne and Kipling were writing 'the poetry of oratory' and that the Elizabethans could only be understood by understanding 'the pathology of rhetoric'. Though Eliot had no doubt about the 'minds' of the Elizabethans, he began by arguing that their 'expression' had been as much vitiated by their rhetoric as Victorian expression had been vitiated by 'sentiment'. This, however, was merely a preliminary to the important considerations - that blank verse 'within Shakespeare's lifetime' had been the vehicle of 'more varied and more intense art-emotions than it had ever conveyed since', that it had produced a 'network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires', and that the 'abundance and vitality' of Elizabethan writing had predated the deterioration that had occurred in the use of the English language since the Metaphysicals. The merit of the Metaphysicals was three-fold: that they thought with their senses, reflected the 'tangled' nature of human feelings (as psychology did), and showed how sensibility could be unified once the false unities of romanticism had been destroyed. It was not only the 'tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace' nor its success in 'digesting into its art all the experience of the human mind' that had distinguished the seventeenth century from all those that followed it. It was also the 'firm grasp on human values', the 'wisdom - cynical perhaps but untired' and leading towards 'religious comprehension' that was present in literature in the period before the 'English mind changed'. The nature of the change was never really explained: it was simply affirmed. Miltonian, Gibbonian and eighteenth-century prose were said to be manifestly inferior; there was said to have been as sad a decline in subtlety of feeling between the Metaphysicals, and Gray and Collins as in 'elegance and dignity' between them and the Romantics. Stress was laid on the Victorians' lack of technique and on the intrusive R.P.D.—E

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presence in their poetry of 'public . . . political and emotional' ideas. It was stated as truth that feeling had been 'corrupted', sensation 'evaded' and their contemporary successors inhibited from 'thinking with their feelings'. Eliot left it uncertain whether it was puritanism that had caused the dissociation of sensibility through the 'empty chambers' of Milton's mind. He made it clear, however, that romanticism had completed the process, and that the Metaphysicals were important for modern poets not only because sensibility had decayed between them and Tennyson and Browning, but because they alone could give 'instruction and encouragement' in arresting the decay. What they could do was put in two ways, and is so irrelevant to anything that Eliot did thereafter that it needs to be noticed. On the one hand they could face the 'chaos' that would follow a 'break up of the dogmatic slumbers of the last hundred years'. On the other hand, they were 'in the direct current of the English tradition' not because they 'looked into their hearts and wrote' as a romantic critic might imagine, but because they looked deeper than that - 'into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system and the digestive tracts'. Chaos Eliot created by his poetry - a poetry of 'odds and ends' of images - but it is reasonable to suggest, in view of what he failed to do with his physiological insights, that they were passing fads, with no great significance for the development of his thought or poetry. The metaphysicals and the Elizabethan dramatists remained important, and continued to provide the chief poets in his canon for a long time to come. A matter of far greater importance for the future was the view he took of the scope and function of criticism. In early Eliot the role of criticism was to order aesthetic works from the past in order to assist creative activity in the future. Creative activity might take shape in an interest as much in 'morals' as in art; it was an essential assumption that critics ought in one way or another to have an interest in either art or morals, and to be creating the taste to which they wished to be able to respond. This was assumed to be necessary of all criticism. It was said to be particularly necessary in England where the 'periodical public' did not want its critics to 'go deep' and where the 'creative artist' alone could break down the resistance with which favoured critics perpetuated the public's corrupted taste. The idea that critics should 'go deep' was connected with the idea

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that art was in some sense 'unpleasant' and that critics should have a 'point of view' to supplement the 'analysis, comparison, sensitiveness, intelligence, curiosity, intensity of passion and infinite knowledge' that went towards the making of a 'great critic'. Eliot claimed for himself, potentially at least, from a very early stage, the capacity to effect the creative reordering which was the great critic's prerogative. In his early reviews and in The Sacred Wood Eliot insisted on the professional character of poetry and the importance of evaluating the form of expression rather than the emotion or philosophy that poetry embodies. In aiming to destroy the subjective pantheistic romanticism which had become the norm in English literature by the time he began writing, he felt obliged, however, not only to drive a wedge between poetry on the one hand and emotion and philosophy on the other, but also to prohibit significant commerce between them. This is something that it is difficult to believe that he meant to do. It is more reasonable to impute to him at this time - what he asserted later - the assumption that technical and professional as criticism and poetry should be, they were closely connected with philosophy and morality and had religious implications. The doctrine that Eliot promulgated between 1916 and 1924, so far as it had a religious content, was a pagan one. If it was religious - and it affected not to be - it was not Christian. It was an attempt to make critical discrimination or sensibility an end in itself, regardless of its content. 'Sensibility' was said in The Sacred Wood to be not only 'desirable' but also 'rare and unpopular'. If Eliot had died in 1923, it would have been reasonable to see in his writing a demonstration of the view that poetry and criticism, properly or professionally conducted, would not only display a purifying sensibility but would wage war on the corrupted sensibility in which English life had become enveloped. From some time after 1923 this phase seems to have passed. By 1928 the doctrine was that literature should be guided by conceptions that lay outside itself - and, in particular, by conceptions of its connection with Christianity. In Eliot's earliest writing there were few signs of an interest in the propagation of literature. Despite scattered asides about the relationship between esoteric and popular audiences, his main interest was in content, quality and truth. Nor was there to be any point in the future at which he was concerned exclusively with literature's social function. From about 1923, however, he began to examine the relations between minority and popular culture and to point out that the romantic-

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liberal and humanist culture he had been attacking for defects of sensibility was also defective socially - that humanism, to quote the crucial formulation of The Humanism of Irving Babbit, had 'nothing to offer to the mob'. Eliot did not exactly claim, as Toynbee more or less did, that Christianity was an instrument of mob-control. But he was exercised by the problem of sensibility in a mass civilization and was as obviously worried as Collingwood was at the same time by the establishment of mass literacy through universal education. The arrival of the Labour party as a major force at the 1922 election probably frightened him less than the proof that the mass-circulation newspapers were giving of the illusory nature of liberal optimism. There is little doubt that the slaughter of the Liberal party in the early twenties helped him to see that Liberalism, having been responsible for releasing a dangerous proletarian power, deserved to be destroyed. Eliot had a sentimental Tory regard for working-class culture, treating the working classes as blameless victims of the capitalist press, in exactly the way that Toynbee had. In this respect the high point of his criticism was a contrast between the 'moral corruption' that ran through middle-class life and the exuberance of the working-class music hall which expressed 'the soul of a people'. After 1923 he gave extended attention to the problem that the more elevated of the Oxford Idealists had been anxious to deal with - the problem of making culture and religion popular without either vulgarizing the one or destroying the other. In the Idealist view as it had been formulated in England in the fifty years before Eliot's arrival, the problem concerned the relationship between 'university men' and learning on the one hand and the education of the poor on the other. Eliot showed little interest in the poor or in education, even as a publisher, until comparatively late in life; he saw the problem originally as a problem for the man of letters who played an important part in the circulation of ideas and who, from the middle 1920s onwards, was being persuaded to take up Toryism and Christianity. In the essay The Function of Criticism in 1923, Eliot had given a political twist to the attack on subjectivism, accepting Middleton Murry's claim that 'English statesmen' depended too heavily upon the 'inner voice' and not only resembled English divines and writers in inheriting 'no rules from their forbears' but also resembled those other 'possessors of the inner voice' who 'ride ten in a compartment to a

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football match in Swansea . . . listening to [its] eternal message of vanity, fear and lust'. The point of the 'Inner Voice' in The Function of Criticism was aesthetic. It reaffirmed the existence of a defect in English criticism. It was also, however, political, affirming the existence of a defect in English politics - a defect which was attributed to Lloyd George only by way of example and which was characterized generally as 'Whiggery'. Eliot implied that it was possible to replace the 'Whiggery' of the 'Inner Voice' which led to 'vanity, fear and lust' by a politics of 'Outside Authority' which did not. This was 'classicism' - the antidote to that 'egotism of motive' characteristic of 'the soul of man under democracy' which began to operate when 'the governors of the people' had 'lost conviction of their right to govern'. At the same time Eliot announced his admiration for 'empires, especially the AustroHungarian Empire', his distaste for the nationalities that had been 'constituted like artificial genealogies for millionaires all over the world' since the war, and his belief that cooperation between genuine but separate nationalities was the only proper basis for 'internationalism' in the modern world. Eliot believed in the English nation on the ground that England had a national literature to sustain its identity, and need not be in conflict with other similar nations like France or Germany. His conception of Europe included a Gaullist union of nations just as it included a Gallican or Anglican union of churches in which Britain, the Church of England, and the British Empire would always find a place. In the early twenties he did not write much about the Russian revolution. When he did, he tended to see it as 'more Russian than revolutionary'. It was as much in reaction against Bolshevism, however, as against the 'spirit of Locarno' or the 'humanitarian sentimentalities' of the League of Nations that he followed Valery in anticipating a 'new European consciousness' based on Western Europe's position as a 'small isolated cape on the western side of the Asiatic Continent'. This idea remained with Eliot for the rest of his life. But it was not of first consequence between the wars, and it did not stand up to Hitler. In this period Eliot's rather thin political discussions were about Maurras, Action Frangaise, and English Conservatism. What Eliot admired in Maurras was a shared boredom with liberal virtue which did not, in reaction, wish to extend the range of state power. Maurras was a nationalist and a patriot, but he was not, Eliot

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thought, a fascist. He was opposed to centralization, and he avoided the Napoleonic ethos of Mussolini. Despite his Enlightenment pedigree, he had helped Eliot towards Christianity. He was a more convincing monarchist than the prudential monarchists like Petrie who were to be found in England, and he supplied a more coherent basis than any English thinker could provide for an intellectual toryism. Eliot first used the phrase 'tory' to describe himself in public in a letter to Ford Madox Ford just after the General Election of 1923, some considerable time before he became an Anglican. He added that he was an 'old-fashioned tory', by which he implied a contrast with being a liberal which was not really a political position at all. He also implied a demand for articulateness, and a rejection of any attempt to hide behind prejudice, habit, or unargued custom. The 'problem of Toryism', as he soon began to say, was to recover its intellectuality. This was what he supposed himself to be encouraging both in editing The Criterion and its successors and through his occasional journalism. He repeatedly emphasized that politics had become 'too serious a matter to be left to the politicians', and that his object was to provide dispassionate examination of the 'philosophies' implicit or explicit in 'tendencies of thought'. Eliot believed in 'permeation'. He wanted to do for the twenties and thirties what had been done by the Fabians twenty or thirty years before. He was not very successful. There were recurrent, and threadbare, dismissals of the rhetorical inadequacy of contemporary politics, along with suggestions that a more adequate rhetoric would guarantee a more adequate politics. There were commonplace criticisms of the 'waste of time, money and energy' involved in British general elections. In relation to the possibility of a coalition in April 1931, there was a good deal about a 'combination of old gangsters' being no better than 'the old gangsters separately'. In general, behind a heartfelt reaction against the 'eclectic and tolerant' mind of the nineteenth century, Eliot's political criticism was dismissive of compromise, dyspeptic about the power-struggle, and insensitive to the difficulties that statesmen face. If one asks what Eliot alleged by way of principle, the answer must be, not very much. He recognized that the Smith-Ricardo and CarlyleRuskin phases were over, and that Fabianism and the Labour party were intellectually inert. He approved of marxism and fascism so far as they constituted a 'revolt against capitalism'. In July 1929 he 'confessed' to a preference for 'fascism in practice', in view of its insistence

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on 'order, loyalty and realisation of the individual in the state'. His real preference, however, was for an idea which was not 'a doctrine of success' and repudiated materialism altogether. This was the idea of monarchism - not the 'conventional modern .. . Napoleonism' from which Russia and Italy were suffering or the 'feeling towards a dictator' which was 'merely a consummation of the feeling the newspapers teach us to have towards . . . any . . . big business man'; but 'loyalty to a king who incarnated the idea of a nation' and provided an 'alternative to nationalism'. Though Eliot never said so very clearly, his monarchism was a facet of his Anglicanism - a consequence of the claim that Toryism without an 'uncompromising theory of Church and State' was 'merely a fasces of expedients'. The identification of Toryism with Anglicanism and Royalism explains his detachment from party politics, his lack of enthusiasm for the National Government of 1931, and his lack of interest in Bolingbroke, Burke or the 'daring innovations of Disraeli'. It also explains his reservations about the League of Nations which had a 'Christian mission only in the mind of Viscount Cecil', and about Franco whose victory in the Spanish Civil War would be the victory of a 'secular . . . not of a spiritual Right'. In the thirties Eliot responded to and reacted against the slide towards the Left. He was explicit both about the 'economic serfdom' that was prevalent under Capitalism and about the extent to which 'a man who is in terror of losing his job because he will not get another' is 'not a free man'. If he was careful to avoid identification with Capitalism, he was careful to avoid identification with any form of organization that might replace it. Like Gladstone's and Salisbury's his position was simple, uncompromising and obscure - that the political problem was to make the 'Church of Laud survive in an age of universal suffrage'. In the development of Eliot's thinking after his reception into the Church of England, there were two poles of commitment. On the one hand there was a commitment to literature, and especially the autonomy of criticism and poetry, in relation to which he reaffirmed the doctrines he had promulgated during the first eight years of his literary life. On the other there was the need to affirm the truth of Christianity not only in itself and in an autonomous way detached from the corruptions and accommodations of eclectic liberalism, but also in a way that would produce standards by which to judge all activities, including the activity of literature. It is unnecessary to reconcile these poles; Eliot

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manifestly did not do so. But in discussing them it is desirable to remember that each had implications for the other, and that the cumulative intention was to lead through literature to religion. To say this is to be insensitive to distinctions that Eliot accepted: between the didactic statement of a philosophical or religious position and the use that a poet might make of it, or, as Richards had put it, between an 'intuition of an emotion' and an 'intuition by it'. Eliot agreed that philosophy was not poetry and that the poetic use that a poet made of philosophical ideas would, from poetry's point of view, be the only one that mattered. But the suspicion remains, even when he wrote the opposite, that he connected intensity of expression with right belief, and considered Dante, for example, a better poet than Shakespeare because Dante's poetry illustrated 'a saner attitude towards the mystery of life'. Eliot's own poetry, even at its most religious, avoids the didactic or theoretical, and at no point treats poetic expression as subordinate to theological. If occasionally the Four Quartets seem to be mystical in their disjunctions (and mystical by contrast with systematically theological), they are to be understood not as vehicles of mystical expression but as demonstrations of the poet's capacity to make poetry out of any experience that he encounters. If Eliot's rules are to be regarded as justifications of his practice, the position he described on pages 98-9 of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism is consistent with it. Yet, if one takes Eliot's writing as a whole, it will be clear that he thought it neither possible nor desirable to 'put out of mind all our convictions and . . . beliefs about life when we sit down to read poetry'. It was not just that some beliefs - Shelley's for example were so untenable as to make his poetry unreadable, but that to insulate poetry in this way would be to reduce it to 'an unrelated heap' and 'cheat' the reader 'out of a great deal that it had to give to his development'. In applying this principle, Eliot was cautious. He did not approve of Hopkins as a poet, for example, merely because Hopkins was a Christian. He remained clear that poetry was no substitute for anything else and that, if men wanted to have a religion, they had to get it in religious terms, just as, if they found that they had to do without it, they should not expect to put poetry in its place. One of his criticisms of Arnold as a critic was that Arnold 'wrote about poets when they provided a pretext for his sermon to the British public', and he gave many reminders of the impropriety of 'cramping poetry' by legislation

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derived from a 'religious or a social scheme of things'. Certainly, if Eliot wanted to enlist literature in the service of religion, he must be judged to have acted with a high degree of tactical deviousness. That is exactly what should be attributed - a tactical desire to leave open the possibility of formulating a Christian view of the relationship between religion and poetry while obstructing the romantic-liberal reassertion of their identity which he had wished to destroy in the first place because of the damage it was doing to poetry but which, by the end of the twenties, he wished to destroy because of the damage it had done to Christianity. In other words he found it necessary to insist on poetry being allowed to get as far as it could with its own resources both in order to save it from spiritual intrusion by romantic liberalism and in order to show that its own resources could only carry it a certain way. In the fifteen years after his conversion, one of Eliot's main objects was to set poetry and criticism, as well as politics and philosophy, into a setting in which they would minister to the restoration of Christian belief. How he put this objective varied; it was not always as explicit as in the essay Religion and Literature, which he published in 1935. But even at his most cautious, he was never far from the connected claims that the 'business of Christians' as 'readers of literature' was to know what they 'ought to like', and that their ultimate aim should be a literature which would be 'unconsciously' Christian rather than 'deliberately and defiantly' so. In After Strange Gods (1933) Eliot claimed to have illustrated the crippling effect upon men of letters of not having been 'born and brought up in the environment of a living and central tradition'. These scrappy and distempered lectures hardly succeeded in doing this, but there could be no mistaking the claim that Christianity provided 'the central and living tradition' and that failure to respond to it explained the deficiencies of all modern thinking. The doctrine of After Strange Gods was a curious combination of sociology and religion. It was heavy with borrowings from Tate and the neo-agrarians, from Thomson and the Scottish Nationalists, and from Demant, Reckitt, Chesterton, and Christopher Dawson. It emphasized the importance of 'local patriotism', homogeneity of culture and 'unity of religious background', along with the absence of 'any large number of free-thinking Jews'. Tradition' and its variant, 'orthodoxy' - which was offered as an improvement on 'classicism' were described as including 'more than traditional religious belief.

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But 'for us . . . a right tradition must always be a Christian tradition' since 'orthodoxy in general implies Christian orthodoxy', and there was as strong a connection in the twentieth century as there had been at the time of the Oxford Movement between 'the Liberalism which attacks the Church and the Liberalism which appears in polities'. In subtitling his lectures 'a primer of modern heresy' and in applying the standard of orthodoxy to contemporary literature, Eliot claimed to be neither legislating for the writer nor denying that 'most writers' were 'heretical in one way or another'. But this was an almost complete misrepresentation. The lectures were punctuated by criticisms of the obsession with 'originality', 'individuality', and 'genius' which so many writers were alleged to have fallen for in the modern world, and they made it perfectly clear that writers and readers should be more conscious than they had been of modern deviations from the orthodoxy of which they ought to feel themselves a part. After Strange Gods moved uneasily through the heresies that Eliot had decided to pinpoint without putting together the nature of the orthodoxy from which they had pulled themselves apart. But the deviations were obvious - from the 'cruelty' and amorality of relations between D. H. Lawrence's men and women, through the absence in Pound of 'intense moral struggle', to the attempt in Yeats's early poetry to 'fabricate an individual religion' made up of 'folklore, occultism, mythology, symbolism, crystal-gazing and hermetic writing'. In each case the root of the trouble was 'aggrandisement of personality' - the demand that 'a man should "be himself" ' and the assumption that 'sincerity' was 'more important than that the self in question should . . . be a good one'. All this was described in Lecture III as an 'intrusion of the diabolic' into 'modern literature' which had not only been carried out by 'men of the most excellent character' but had become a 'commonplace assumption of modern minds'. The sources of evil were comparatively unimportant - George Eliot's 'individualistic morals', for example, and the 'decadence' with which Hardy displayed 'violent emotion as something admirable for its own sake', or the clue that led to the 'Inner Light' through the rejection of Protestantism, the decay of Protestant agnosticism and the type of Protestant sentiment that had surrounded contemporary Anglo-Saxon writers in their infancy. What mattered were the positive claims - that this 'view of personality' was 'merely an assumption on the part of the modern world'; that 'the personality thus expressed . . . tended naturally to be the unregenerate personality'; and that without an 'external test

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of the validity of a writer's work' readers might 'fail to distinguish the truth of his view of life' from the 'personality which makes it plausible'. It was the absence of external tests that made readers of modern literature susceptible to 'one seductive personality after another'. It was because 'standards of criticism' were available, even if not 'ordinarily in use', that 'whatever was offered as a work of philosophy or of art' could be rendered 'safer and more profitable' in the future than it could have been in the past. Eliot did not describe these standards in After Strange Gods. But he gave two hints - that the evil he was describing would be visible only to readers for whom 'the doctrine of Original Sin' was a 'very real and tremendous thing', and that the best obstacle to the 'aggrandisement of personality' was provided when 'morals' were 'a matter of tradition and orthodoxy' and emerged from the 'habits of the community, formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church'. Though an unsatisfactory work, After Strange Gods was important as an abandonment of 'pure literary criticism' and in dissociating Eliot from 'most' of his 'contemporaries'. But it was unsatisfactory so far as it failed to explain the sort of Christianity he thought it important to establish, and why it was that 'theology . . . was the one fundamental science'. How Eliot reached a Christian, or Anglican, position does not matter for present purposes, and is unlikely to become clear until his correspondence has been made available. Nor need one ask how far the sacraments and confession provided for him personally that 'discipline of the emotions' which he specified as a glaring defect in the equipment of modernity. In this chapter his advocacy of Christianity will be treated independently of his own experience as embodying truths which spoke to the intellect and demanded assent as a public doctrine. In considering Christianity in this way, Eliot did not always distinguish between the reasons for accepting it and the reasons for rejecting other doctrines. The doctrines that were to be rejected were described at various times by various names. The descriptions did not convey a consistent impression. The most positive reason that was given for accepting Christianity was that English and American society were 'worm-eaten with Liberalism' - not only the Liberalism (or Whiggism) of the Inner Voice that had been attacked in 1923 or the literary Liberalism (or Individualism) that was attacked in After Strange Gods, but the reverse sides of both these coins - the misunderstanding of

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religion that arose from the liberal-romantic failure to separate it from everything else.1 Throughout the apologetic of the late twenties and thirties, Eliot treated religion as a natural human activity. He insisted that neither the mechanistic view of existence historically associated with 'science', nor the 'humanism' that had been screwed out of literature, had the power to 'destroy religious belief - that, indeed, it was neither science nor literature that had made religion into a 'mere extra' in the curriculum of modern life but a 'preference for unbelief, a determination of the will which had made 'illegitimate' use of science and had converted the critical faculty characteristic of literary humanism into a doctrinal humanism which attacked Christianity. In thus emphasizing the self-determining character of religion, Eliot was aiming to show that it dealt with 'maladies of thought and will' which could not be cured by anything except itself. He implied the existence of a religious consciousness which was older than modern thought, which modern thought had shown itself incompetent to develop, and which the modern belief in progress had made modern men incapable of understanding that they had lost. His conclusion was that religion must be 'supernatural', that 'the Church' was vital, and that it was the Church's business to provide sacraments 'for the benefit of men' and worship 'to the glory of God'. At this time Eliot did not describe the deterioration which religion was said to have suffered in the modern world. He did, however, describe its enemies, who were numerous. There was Hobbes - a 'Renaissance . . . upstart' who was 'undoubtedly an atheist'. There was Spinoza - 'a Saint of Deists' and, along with Rousseau, one of the sources of 'liberal theology'. There were Gide and Anatole France, and there was von Hiigel - or rather von Hiigel's 'chatter about I. It is true that Eliot's first Anglican statement (anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement in 1926 and reprinted in For Lancelot Andrewes) was a celebration of the 'intellectual achievement and prose style* with which Hooker and Andrewes had done for the 'English Catholic Church' what Thomism had done for the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century and, through their 'European' culture and 'ease with humanism and renaissance learning', had helped to distinguish it from the 'mere protestantism' of the Church under Henry VTII. It is true also, therefore, in one sense, that he was celebrating a point in history at which Christianity was so closely integrated with general culture that it had contributed to the arrival of the 'age of Shakespeare and Jonson'. It is still the case, however, that in general at this time his emphasis was on separating religion out in order to pinpoint the differences between Christianity and other things that had got mixed up with it.

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mysticism' which was merely a 'spattering indulgence of emotion'. There were Arnold and Pater who had absorbed religion into culture and, since culture was something that 'each man interpreted as he pleased', had allowed religion to be 'laid waste by an anarchy of feeling'; and there were the aesthetes of the nineties who had played at religion as children play at being grown-ups without any understanding of Evil, Vice and Sin. Above all there were Shaw, Wells, Russell, Julian Huxley and Jeans who were far less formidable and far more out-of-date than the erstwhile friends from whom Eliot had dissociated himself in After Strange Gods. The idea that the heroes of The Thinkers' Library were out of date did not mean that Eliot did not take atheism seriously. On the contrary, he took Marx's atheism very seriously, presenting it as a real enemy which responded to contemporary needs and aimed, like his own doctrine, to fill the void created by the subjective emptiness of Liberalism. He did not suppose that it could be said of Marxism what could be said of liberal humanism - that it was a hangover from Christian belief and would 'collapse like a pack of cards' if Christianity collapsed. Eliot gave many accounts of Communism in the early thirties, all of them disconnected from Russian practice. He knew 'very little about Russia' and was not sure whether 'the experiment being made there would turn out to be in the worldly sense a failure or a success'. But he knew that 'Russian communism' was 'a religion' with a faith that 'animated' its ruling class and could not be fought with the weapons available to Conservatives, Liberals or Socialists in Britain. The only way to fight a religion was to fight it with 'another religion' and that religion had to be Christianity. Eliot's social criticism is often treated, and was influential in the fifties, as a form of Christian Conservatism. It can only be so treated by mistaking his rejection of Marxism for support of the established social structure - an identification which he not only did not make but was careful to avoid making. His view was that religion transcended all social structures and that, in relation to them, Christianity was 'frightening, frightful and scandalous'. By 'frightening' was meant the 'terrible concentration' of the 'real mystics' who had 'looked into the Abyss'. 'Frightfulness' meant Baudelaire's 'blasphemy' as a way of affirming belief, as well as Eliot's connected affirmations that it is better to do evil than to do nothing and 'nearer the truth' to have an evil religion than to have none. The

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'scandal of Christianity' was that it rejected decency and conventional respectability, the combination of work, money-making and external observance that 'used . . . in English-speaking countries . . . to represent . . . the whole duty of a Christian' being described as 'only a mutilated part of true Christianity'. Nor were these negativities directed at the social structure alone; they applied to intellectual structures as well. Through all his attempts to wring Christian hints out of secular science (especially psychology), Eliot's overriding principle was that Christian truth should never yield to the secular truths it was considering. There was, in other words, between the 'Christian mind' and 'secular habits of thought' a 'gulf which Christians should not attempt to bridge. Apologetic which attempted to bridge it was 'making a concession' which was a 'preparation for defeat'. Between belief in revelation on the one hand and denial of revelation on the other, there could be no compromise. One must 'either take the whole of revealed religion or none of it'. It was the uniqueness and exclusiveness of the Incarnation - the 'only full revelation' that men had ever received and the opportunity it provided to develop an intellectual system independent of secular knowledge, that made it possible for Christianity to liberate 'religious sentiment' from the 'suppression' it had suffered at the hands of secular thought. Though this was a declaration that an intellectual Christianity was a possibility, its content was not laid out at length, and the writers who were called on to display it were not in the main systematic thinkers. Aquinas and Hooker were mentioned, but closer attention was given to Dante and Shakespeare. Even Baudelaire's 'Satanism' as an 'intuition' of a 'part of Christianity' was not explained very clearly. The nearest Eliot came to saying what he meant was in Religion Without Humanism and the Everyman introduction to Pascal's Pensees. Religion Without Humanism - a, contribution to a volume entitled Humanism and America - was the complement to an essay Eliot had written the year before on the familiar theme that 'humanism is in the end futile without religion'. Religion Without Humanism explained why religion would be dangerous 'without humanism', and why 'religious beliefs, when unquestioned and uncriticised', were liable to 'degenerate' into the 'superstitions', 'vulgarities' and 'compromises' of Roman Catholicism on the one hand, and into the 'narrowness' and 'bigotry', or 'liberal, sloppy hypocritical' humanitarianism, which Protestantism tended to degenerate into on the other. It was because

Eliot 117 'culture', 'humanism', 'criticism', 'infidelity', and 'agnosticism' could help save Christianity from 'petrified ecclesiasticism' that it had to be made consonant with them. Humanism, criticism and so on, then, were essential if Christianity was to remain intellectually alive. But they were not, as self-conscious humanists claimed, a religion: they were a method. They were - though Eliot did not say so - what Collingwood had described (without using the word) in Speculum Mentis, what Oakeshott described in Experience and its Modes, and what Bradleyan Idealism had claimed to be in all the endeavours it had made to understand all human activities in relation to one another - not 'the part pretending to be the whole' but the attempt to 'reconcile and unite all the parts into a whole'. It was humanism that had stopped 'science' being merely a 'progress of technical research' just as it had also stopped scientists 'bursting out... into sentimental monstrosities like . . . Professor Whitehead's God'. It was humanism alone that could 'reconcile the mystic and the ecclesiastic in one church' and point out to the theologian absurdities in his treatment of science at the same time as it pointed out to the scientist absurdities in his treatment of religion. Humanism v/as the 'full realisation of the disciplined intellectual and emotional life of man' - the governing intellection that made sense alike of the 'emotional discipline of religion' and the 'intellectual discipline of science' and allowed each to be itself while allowing neither to be, what without it they would become, something they were not intended to be. These were large claims to be making for a method, but they were made with Bradleyan deliberation. They were made at least in part in order to establish that 'humanism' had to operate in ways different from the ways in which 'criticism' had operated in the recent past. It had, the dictum was, if it was to be 'of value', to be 'original, and not inherited', and since it was only in the context of 'dogmatic faith' that heterodoxy could be original, it was said to be necessary to have 'more orthodoxy' before there could be 'another Voltaire to destroy it'. Religion Without Humanism was a demand for thought, the assertion that without thought religion becomes inert. It was made in the shadow of the claim that the dogmas and disciplines of religion were as real as the truths of science or philosophy, and that the writings of the 'forest sages', the 'desert sages', the Victorines and St John of the Cross must be taken to 'mean what they say'.

118 Receptions Religion Without Humanism showed Eliot trying to find a religious way of embracing 'criticism'. The introduction to Pascal showed him doing the same about 'doubt', in discussing which he emphasized Montaigne's significance as a sceptic who had succeeded in giving expression to 'the scepticism of every human being'. He described the ambivalence of Pascal's attitude: his desire to refute Montaigne and the infection he acquired from him, the 'affinity' between their ways of thinking which compelled him to face the 'demon of doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief. Pascal was a 'passionate and ardent believer', but his significance for modern minds was that he had produced a 'disillusioned analysis of human bondage' which 'corresponded exactly to the facts'. It was because his 'powerful and regulated intellect' spoke to 'those who have the mind to conceive and the sensibility to feel' the 'meaninglessness, . . . suffering and mystery of life' that he was to be commended more, Eliot thought, than any other Christian writer - more even than Newman. It was because meaninglessness, suffering and mystery were essential moments in the progress of the individual soul that Pascal's doubt was an 'analogue of the . . . dark night which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic'. The introduction to Pascal and the other works of 1928-33 were attempts to show why Christianity could make intellectual claims on modern minds. They provided little more than incantations. In developing the implications of his leading ideas, Eliot responded at all periods in his life to the climate of opinion and to the latest works that he read In attacking Romanticism, Liberalism, Humanism, and Modernism, and in affirming that Christianity had to stand out against secular thinking, he was not without allies. After parting company from Murry, Lawrence, Pound, Richards, Russell, and Yeats, he did not take long to pick up A. E. Taylor, Spens, Collingwood, and Hoskyns. In the twenties - before he had become a Christian - he had begun to pick up Maurras. In the thirties he picked up Christopher Dawson,1 1. Christopher Dawson (1889-1970). Author of The Age of the Gods 1928, Progress and Religion 1929, The Making of Europe 1932, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement 1933, Enquiries into Religion and Culture 1933, Mediaeval Religion 1934, Religion and the Modern State 1935, Beyond Politics 1939, The Judgment of the Nations 1943, and a number of post Second World War works on religious, cultural and educational subjects.

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Demant, Mairet, Maurice Reckitt and Karl Mannheim who all helped him to the rather feeble intuitions that liberalism, industrialism, and meritocratic mobility, between them had replaced the 'traditional social habits of the people' by a mass society which was ready for the 'mechanised . . . brutalised, control' that was the desperate remedy for its thoughtlessness. Eliot did not doubt that literacy had come to stay: what he doubted was its spiritual usefulness. He was clear that literacy was not enough by itself and that thought which was not 'a training of the mind and of the sensibility' would merely compound the damage that liberalism, industrialism and meritocratic mobility had done already. A mob would not be less a mob for being as 'well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed and well-disciplined' as men in industrial society often were, and it was difficult to be sure that he expected confession, penance or the sacraments to affect those 'possessors of the inner voice who travelled ten in a compartment to Swansea'. Eliot emphasized that, since the Church had its own system of morals, it could not compromise with the world, and must struggle for a condition which would give the maximum opportunity for Christians or would-be Christians to lead Christian lives. But at the point at which he might have explained how this was to happen - how the Church was to 'interfere in the World' - he was endlessly indecisive. The Church could not support capitalism; it ought to dislike the liberation of economic activity from moral control, and should feel uneasy about the traditional public-school and the secularized university. There were doubts about democracy and vague hints that Eliot had had hankerings 2. Rev. V. A. Demant (1893- ). Director of Research to Christian Social Council 1929-33. Vicar of St John the Divine Richmond 1933-42. Canon of St Paul's 1942-49. Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford 1949-71. Author of This Unemployment 1931, God, Man and Society 1933, Christian Polity 1936, The Religious Prospect 1939, Theology of Society 1947, Religion and the Decline of Capitalism 1952 etc. 3. Philip Mairet. Author of Aristocracy and the Meaning of Class Rule 1931, A. R. Orage 1936, Christian Essays in Psychiatry 1956 etc. Translator of Mousnier, Eliade and Sartre. 4. Rev. Maurice Reckitt. Author (with Bechofer) of The Meaning of national guilds 1918, Faith and Society 1932, A Christian Sociology for Today 1934, Religion in Social Action 1937, (with Casserley) The vocation of England 1941, (ed.) Prospect for Christendom 1945, Maurice to Temple 1947 etc etc. 5. Karl Mannheim (1893-1947). Author of Das Conservative Denken 1927, Rational and Irrational Elements in Contemporary Society 1934, Ideology and Utopia (tr.) 1936, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction 1940, Diagnosis of Our Time 1943, editor of International Library of Society and Reconstruction 1942r-47.

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after distributism, and there were flattering references to Tawney. But between discerning monstrosities and removing them there were assumed to be obstacles. On the one hand there was the claim that Christians were less prone to political action and expected less from it than secular reformers or revolutionaries, who only saw the evil outside themselves and did not understand the evil within. On the other, there was the sense that action had to be considered in the light of the fact that whatever was done would suffer from having to be adapted to the 'mediocrity' of the 'mass'. The most that can be said is that Eliot posed problems. He stressed the importance of education but feared the effect of popular education in attenuating culture. So far as the ends and content of education were discussed at length, it was the education of the elite with which he was concerned - the preservation of Latin and Greek as an aid to the preservation of Christianity and a revival of 'monastic teaching orders' to preserve education 'within the cloister uncontaminated by . . . barbarism without'. He left the impression of being concerned primarily with educating the 'Community of Christians', by which he meant Christians with 'superior intellectual or spiritual gifts' as distinct from the 'great mass of humanity' who would always be occupied by their 'direct relation to the s o i l . . . the sea or the machine' and whose religion, if they had one, would be a 'sanctification of the domestic and social emotions' to be accepted 'as a matter of behaviour and habit'. Perhaps this was all that could be said by a man-of-letters in three hour-long lectures. Perhaps it was more than was feasible within the confines of post-Protestant mentalities. Or it may be that a direction of mentalities was the only thing that mattered, and that Eliot was right to want what he had said he wanted, not so much a world in which Christianity could be 'believed' as a world in which it would operate as 'something deeper than belief, a kind of 'behaviourism' in which men would act in an 'unconsciously Christian fashion' at the 'substratum of collective temperament'. If this is so - if the making of 'pious Christians' or church attenders would have been 'obscurantist' then it may be that he was right to confine himself in the way that he did. All that is certain is that The Idea of a Christian Society involved a pessimistic renunciation. At the end of The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot confessed to having experienced a 'feeling of humiliation' during the Munich crisis of September 1938 - a sense that something had happened in which 'one was deeply implicated and responsible' and which demanded 'an

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act of personal contrition . . . humility . . . repentance and amendment'. This he described as a 'doubt of the validity of a civilization', a recognition that 'we had no ideas' with which either to 'meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us'. 'Was our society,' he asked, 'which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premisses, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?' The lectures gave Eliot's answer. The postscript, written after the declaration of war in 1939, discerned an 'alignment of forces' which could 'bring more clearly to our consciousness the alternative of Christianity and paganism'. It also discerned a duty to use the opportunity which war had provided to pursue the constructive implications of the choice. In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot had expressed the opinion that England was a neutral society, pagan and materialistic in many of its assumptions yet preferring, if given the chance, to be Christian. The basis for Christian thinking was said, in August 1940, to be 'obscure' but it was also said to exist. The nation-at-war did not want 'energy, ability and efficiency' by themselves, or the 'values of a class... or party' to which its citizens did not belong. It wanted a 'right sense of values', and it wanted this from leaders who would remind it that it was 'a great community'. King George V, Churchill, and Bevin were adduced as representative figures, Churchill's faintly secular character and Bevin's atheism being absorbed in the claim that no statesman could command popular success in England whose 'mind and feelings' were 'wholly detached' from Christianity. In thus making use of the opportunity presented by the patriotic struggle, Eliot wrote the works which preceded Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture was published as a book in 1948. But it brought together articles which had been written earlier, initially in 1943 in the form of contributions to The New English Weekly, and then as a chapter in a volume, Prospect for Christendom, which Reckitt edited in 1945. In these and other wartime works Eliot's tone was permeative, as the Fabian tone had been, but there was no plan, no plot to put the right ideas into powerful minds or the right people into powerful places. That state power would expand after the war was accepted, however unwillingly. But there was little about policy.

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There was only too much about the internal consciousness requiring transformation in its deepest layers if the mass of the people who were incapable of living self-consciously Christian lives were to live unconscious ones within a framework of 'sanctity, chastity and holy living... and dying'. This diffidence about power (very much like Toynbee's), this mistrust of political action, had Christian antecedents. But there was a kind of despair which was apparent throughout, and especially so in the interest which Eliot expressed in the Vichy regime, both because it 'professed the ideal of a Christian France . . . and because . . . we have the same ideal for Britain and can surely profit by studying the success or failure of other methods than our own'. We may deplore the French Revolution [he wrote in the Christian Newsletter in September 1941] but we must accept it as a fact. In no European country [as in France] is the gulf between the Christian and the nonChristian more acute; a large part of the population is the product of four generations of apostasy, and is therefore not to be Christianized overnight or made to conform to behaviour the principles of which it denies. What four generations have destroyed cannot in one generation be re-created; and the unity which France so sorely needs will not be achieved by oppression. The words which I have used will, I hope, come with more force from one who has never been an admirer of Republican government in France. The device Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite is only the memorial of the time of revolution: Famille, Travail, Patrie has more permanent value. But to substitute the second for the first is to go further than merely to call attention to equal, or even to higher values: it is by implication the denial and repudiation of the first. It suggests the danger of a reaction which might be as bad, or worse than that from which it reacts. To have affirmed Liberty, Equality, Fraternity in that way was, I think, unfortunate: but to repudiate them in this way is at least an equal error. Every country needs a strong government; it is probable that France in her present condition can only be ruled by an autocratic government; but at no time can an autocratic government be good for France unless it has the wisdom and prescience to recognise limits to autocracy. No one who knows and loves France can wish to see her revert to the condition of the twenty years between the wars: but reactionary excesses might foment a counterreaction to a condition equally deplorable. By the time Notes Towards the Definition of Culture was published in 1948, Eliot claimed to be concerned primarily to define culture. But the initial context was the context of 1940-43 and the discussions which preceded the Education Act of 1944. Eliot's discussions of culture were

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a contribution to that discussion, and the affirmation of a crucial belief; that 'natural virtue', 'character' and 'culture', as objects of education, were 'atrophied vestiges of wisdom and holiness'. Like Collingwood's Speculum Mentis, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture discussed the cultural specialization that had developed alongside the complexity of the modern world. It described the Renaissance separation of the 61ite from the people and the 'sense of injustice' through which this had 'stirred the forces of revolution'. In 'industrial civilization' it saw a continuation of the process which had separated work from play and replaced native culture with 'education and enlightenment'. Its remedy was a conception that was achieved in the third article of the 1943 version and developed in the Reckitt volume, and which was to dominate Eliot's thought in the following decade, that 'civility in general' needed 'a total culture' which could not exist 'without a religion', and that 'the culture and the religion of a people were different aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation, so to speak, of a religion in a particular people'. In a talk delivered in December 1944 Eliot anticipated the consequences of post-war educational expansion, predicting an increase in the size of the clerisy and a growing pressure towards a 'low-grade culture' quite different from the 'total culture' of which the 'lower orders' were said to be the 'proper guardians'. He connected this with doubts about equality of educational opportunity, about the effect of isolating the gifted child from its parents and milieu, and about the prospect of creating a race of 'spiritual nomads', 'unemployed clerical small fry' who would join 'subversive movements' or express their discontent by 'overturning trams', as the Egyptian small fry had done in Cairo and elsewhere. This in its turn was connected with a conception of the social duty of writers, and an account of the conflicting tendencies, said to be apparent in England in the previous hundred years, to write on the one hand for a larger and larger public, and on the other for a smaller and smaller one which was not a class but a 'kind of 61ite': a 'heterogeneous number of individuals of various classes'. It was for a body of 'men of letters . . . (using that term as loosely as possible) . . . writing for and . . . in criticism of a lower middle class society' that Eliot professed to be planning. The educational implications of the need to stop the public getting what it wanted had already been laid out in Classics and the Man of

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Letters. Without a classical basis for literary criticism, Eliot had argued, writers would find it only too easy to satisfy public taste, and thus to contribute to the submerging of 'civilization' by 'barbarism'. In discussing alike the education of the writer and of the writer's public, he emphasized the 'spiritual' dimension: the need to grow a 'pattern of values' by creating a unity between the 'non-professional scholarship' of theologians, historians, clergymen, teachers of modern languages and literature and literary critics, and the 'very much larger number of people' whom translation would introduce to the 'literature' and 'wisdom' of Greece and Rome. Between 1945 and 1950, Eliot began to see positive merit in the extension of state power, recognizing in a sort of Church-State pluralism a guarantee of liberty in the future. He wrote, far more than in the 1930s, of poetry as a 'national' art which affected the life of the whole people whether they read it or not, and when it deteriorated left them incapable of expressing, or feeling, the 'emotions of civilized beings'. The last paragraph of the lecture on The Social Function of Poetry connected the deterioration that was occurring in all of Europe's national cultures with a decline in religious sensibility which would be halted only by attention to the sources which Europeans had in common: the literature of Rome, Greece and Israel on the one hand, and the common tradition of Christianity on the other. The most explicit statement of this position was given in three lectures delivered in Germany in 1946 when, to the accompaniment of tactful remarks about Goethe, it was presented as a continuation of the position Eliot had adopted in The Criterion before the mental frontiers had closed in the thirties: a position which was anti-political, sceptical about 'world government' and insistent on the distinction between political 'machinery' (which belonged to the 'plane of engineering') and the 'spiritual growth' with which his educational writing had been concerned since 1942. What Eliot expected by way of consequences was seldom clear, except that he hoped to lead through literature to religion. If the prominence accorded to the Bible was perfunctory, and if he did not always take account of the pagan significance of Greece and Rome; if, moreover, he confined his attention to poetry and literature in a rather narrow sense, it may still be agreed that he hoped to use them, however flabbily, to build up a body of critical resistance to modern optimism and inconsequence. What it is necessary to understand about Eliot's writings after his

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conversion is therefore that they merely affirmed the need for a Christian sensibility without establishing that it could be effective on the body of the people as a whole. It is possible that Eliot did not expect it to be effective in this way: it is possible that his emphasis on a change of mentalities was a way of deferring change indefinitely. In neither respect is it easy to discern motive or psychological disposition. What is not difficult to discern is the resigned pessimism with which his serious consideration of the educational problem closed in 1950. If The Aims of Education is treated as Eliot's last words about English religion, they will seem to be as contentless as everything else that he wrote about its future. They will, indeed, be seen to be little more than continuations of the question-marks that he put against anything positive that the prevailing orthodoxy might assert. While agreeing that education had to equip children to 'play their part as citizens of a democracy', he emphasized that this should include criticizing the democracy. He made it clear, even when education was conceived of as inducing development of 'the latent powers and faculties of our natures', that it needed to be guided by external 'standards of goodness'. There were warnings about the danger of state power imposing beliefs and destroying 'individual freedom' if religion lost its family and social dimension. It was stated, as on so many occasions in the past, that the real question that had to be decided was not 'the place of religious teaching in education' but the 'place of education in religion'. But if one asks what this meant, the answer is that it meant very little - certainly little more than an assertion of the need to 'maintain the continuity of our culture' by making Arnold's 'knowledge of the best that has been thought and said in the world' into the 'common possession of those who have passed through the higher grades of non-specialised education'. In mentioning Arnold, Eliot neither abandoned the long-term pursuit of a Christian society nor concealed the incompatibility between a Christian education and the post-war orthodoxy that he was attacking. But his last words were depressed. They sound very much like the belief that minds need to be unsettled, as Mill had said in his discussions of Comte, and that the only hope of amelioration in the long run, as Mill had also said, is self-criticism or critical self-examination now. One should not expect too much from anyone writing in the climate of the 1950s when the conflict of creeds, so actualfifteenor thirty years before, had been lost in the blurred haze of the post-war consensus. Had Eliot been as young then as he had been in 1918, had his feelings

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been as strong as they had been in 1933, he would doubtless have confronted the new orthodoxy more squarely. That he confronted it as a moderate Conservative is not a matter that needs emphasis. That he had few expectations in religion is one that does. It is likely that Christianity spoke to Eliot both subjectively (after an appalling marriage) and with objective power and authority. What it is difficult to know is whether the infinitely deferred hope which a Christian society almost always was in the 1930s, and always was thereafter, was anything more than a posture, an available reaction to the odiousness of Squire, Gosse, Colvin and Gilbert Murray. Two quotations may suggest the melancholy and inwardness, the privateness and pessimism of Eliot's post-war expectations. The first comes from The Aims of Education in which, towards the end of Lecture III, he declared that the more clear and distinct we make our ideas on the subject [of education] the less is the likelihood of agreement on what these aims or purposes are. The more definite your views, the fewer people will be found to accept them. Most people will accept the assertion that education involves some kind of moral training; fewer will accept the assertion that it involves religious training; and of those who accept the principle of religious training, fewer still will agree on how far it should go and how dogmatic it should be. We may agree that the educational question can be satisfactorily answered 'when we get our metaphysics, ethics, psychology, theology and politics straight enough to think straight about it.' But this is a date, I suspect, at the other end of infinity. The prospect of the sages of any one of these disciplines agreeing amongst themselves seems remote; the prospect of the practitioners of these several disciplines agreeing with each other, and upon the relative contributions of their sciences to the perfecting of education, seems remoter still. The second quotation is from a sermon he preached in the Chapel of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1948. Christians are still persecuted [he said towards the end of the Sermon] but nowadays not usually overtly on the ground that they are Christians . . . They are persecuted because they do not hold the approved political views; or one Church is recognised and controlled, and those Christians, are persecuted who belong to the wrong Church; or being Christians, they are denounced for having collaborated with the Germans during the war, or perhaps with the British or the Americans after it. In the West these things do not yet happen. But persecution is only the extreme limit of discrimination. People prefer to associate with the like-minded to themselves; those who rise to power tend to favour and to promote those who

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resemble themselves; and when a man, who is not a Christian, has an appointment to make, or a favour to bestow, he may genuinely believe that the candidate who is of his own kidney is more worthy than another candidate who is a Christian. Thus the profession of Christianity might become, if not exactly dangerous, at least disadvantageous; and it is sometimes harder to endure disadvantage than to face danger, harder to live meanly than to die as a martyr. Already, we say, we are a minority. We cannot impose our standards upon that majority when it explicitly rejects them; too often, mingling with that majority, we fail to observe them ourselves. Like every minority, we compound with necessity, learning to speak the language of the dominant culture because those whose language it is will not speak ours; and in speaking their language, we are always in danger of thinking their thoughts and behaving according to their code. In this perpetual compromise, we are seldom in a position to pass judgment upon other Christians, in their peculiar individual temptations: it is hard enough, reviewing our own behaviour, to be sure when we have done the right or the wrong thing. But we can and should be severe in our judgment of ourselves. For most of us the occasion of the great betrayal on the clear issue will never come: what I fear for myself is the constant, daily, petty pusillanimity. I shall no doubt do and say the wrong thing again and again; but the important thing is to be conscious of the error or weakness and of its nature, and then to be sorry for it. For penitence and humility, as is suitable to remember at Mid-Lent, are the foundation of the Christian life.

5 Knowles 'A Rule, given by a founder with an acknowledged fullness of spiritual wisdom, approved by the Church and tested by the experience of saints, is a safe path, and it is for the religious the only safe path. It comes to him not as a rigid, mechanical code of works, but as a sure guide to one who seeks God, and who seeks that he may indeed find . . . When once a religious house or a religious order ceases to direct its sons to the abandonment of all that is not God, and ceases to show them the rigours of the narrow way that leads to the imitation of Christ in His Love, it sinks to the level of a purely human institution, and whatever its works may be, they are the works of time and not of eternity. The true monk, in whatever century he is found, looks not to the changing ways around him or to his own mean condition, but to the unchanging everlasting God, and his trust is in the everlasting arms that hold him.' David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England 1959 iii p. 468. 'While never denying what had been defined, or flouting what had been ordained, by the supreme authority of the Church, [Erasmus] remained as it were agnostic to the thesis that a religious truth could be contained within a theological formula, or a virtuous life regulated by a disciplinary code . . . It is impossible to feel satisfied that [his] theology and ascetical teaching . . . adequately recognize the wholly supernatural plane on which the life of Christ moved, and to which the life of the Christian is potentially elevated by baptism, and joined in fullness by the Holy Eucharist - a life which implies depths of love and wisdom and of redemptive suffering of which the unaided human mind could not dream and to which the unaided human will could not attempt to attain . . . His religious ideal . . . is a kind of "low-tension" Christianity, a de-spiritualized religion, that has been well called by a sensitive modern critic the "modernism" of Erasmus, and it was this that spread far and wide in all the cultivated circles of north-western Europe in the two decades that immediately preceded the papal condemnation of Luther. The extent of the influence of Erasmus in creating a critical, untraditional climate of mind can scarcely be exaggerated. Perhaps Voltaire is the only writer and thinker in the modern world whose influence on his generation during his lifetime has been so widespread.' David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 1959, iii, pp. 146-7. 'I felt that, having arrived most unexpectedly in a Chair, and being a Catholic priest, it was right to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, not with apologetics but with history in which Christianity was taken for granted as true . . . I have felt all my life - and it was corroborated by no less a person than Pius XI - that scholarship is a real apostolate . . . I am sure in our condition in England a scholar (whether historical, biblical or theological) has a penetration and real influence above a dozen T.V. apologists/ David Knowles to J.H.C.A. April 14 1964 in Stacpoole, The Making of a Monastic Historian in Ampleforth Journal Summer 1975 p. 19.

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Between the mid 1940s and the early 1960s, David Knowles1 was a permanent presence in Cambridge history. He had been a monk, and was still a priest, and he was a Roman Catholic. Though not the first Roman Catholic to hold a post in the Cambridge History Faculty, he was the first Roman Catholic priest to have done so, and also, apart from Figgis, the first monk. Knowles's achievement in Cambridge was to establish mediaeval thought and religion as a regular part of the curriculum. Where earlier Cambridge mediaevalists had dealt with the constitution, the economy and law (including papal law), or had been concerned, like Coulton, to display the corruptions of mediaeval ecclesiasticism, Knowles made it his aim to treat mediaeval thought and religion as normal, natural manifestations of a Christian consciousness which had not yet been hampered, or inhibited, by the Reformation and the Enlightenment. That Knowles taught in Cambridge rather than at Downside and as a professor in the History Faculty rather than as an extra-mural propagandist was the outcome of a series of events which had dominated his middle life. There is no need to dwell more than is necessary, but it is necessary to dwell on the fact that, after being a boy at Downside, he had become not only a monk and schoolmaster but also by 1930 an important monk with a following among younger monks, and that he 1. Rev. Michael Clive (Dom David) Knowles (1896-1974). Ed. Downside and Christ's College Cambridge. Entered Downside novitiate 1914. Priest and Monk of Downside 1924-33, and at St Benedict's Ealing 1933-40. Editor of Downside Review 1930-34. Fellow of Peterhouse Cambridge 1944—75. University Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1946-47. Professor of Mediaeval History 1947-54 and Regius Professor of Modern History 1954-63. Author of The American Civil War 1926, The English Mystics 1927, The Benedictines 1929, The Monastic Order in England 1940, The Religious Orders in England 3 vols. 1948-59, The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket 1951, The English Mystical Tradition 1961, The Evolution of Mediaeval Thought 1962, The Historian and Character 1963, Great Historical Enterprises 1963, What is Mysticism? 1967, Christian Monasticism 1969, (with Obolensky) The Middle Ages 1969, (with C. N. L. Brooke) Heads of Religious Houses 1972 etc.

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had then been at the centre of a prolonged conflict when he and his followers failed to persuade the Downside Governing body that the next phase of Downside's expansion should consist of a dependent house dedicated to study, prayer and contemplation. The argument about the Milton Abbey plan in the early 1930s was an argument about the proper object of monastic life: it followed earlier decisions taken under Abbots Gasquet, Ford and Butler that Downside should stop being primarily a training institution for the monks of the English mission. It also followed from earlier attempts that Knowles had made to develop apostolic activity in Australia, and seems to have originated in a desire rather to intensify activity in any form in which this could be achieved than to intensify it in one form rather than another. Defeat and Knowles's reaction to defeat led to his removal first from authority and then from Downside. Removal was followed by five years of work and isolation at St Benedict's, Ealing culminating in breakdown and withdrawal from the Order, and then, with the publication of The Monastic Order in 1940, by academic acclamation which resulted in election first, through Grierson's and Butterfield's agency, to a teaching Fellowship at Peterhouse when Butterfield was appointed to the Chair of Modern History in 1944, next to the Chair of Mediaeval History in the University in 1947, and finally to the Regius Chair of Modern History in 1954, all of which provided opportunities for effecting a far wider propagation of the faith than had been contemplated previously. Knowles's family on both sides were well-to-do Midland manufacturers who lived in the country. Until his father's conversion to Roman Catholicism, they had almost all been Congregationalists or Baptists. His father's conversion, however, was followed by his mother's, and Knowles was baptized and brought up a Roman Catholic. Knowles was born in 1896; he was, in the most literal sense, part of the missing generation. His life in other respects was an extraordinary combination of accident and resolve, enabling him to succeed against the odds and his own intentions in making Catholic monasticism a subject for major study and in giving Roman Catholicism a more massive role in the mainstream of English academic life than anyone else had given it in this century. It is reasonably clear that he intended to do the first without the second and only did the second because he was not allowed to do what he wanted to do within the confines of a monastery. In doing it he took a place among men of letters, happening to propagate a religious doctrine but propagating it in a

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secular way through a secular post and residing, throughout his Cambridge years, away from Cambridge at weekends and in vacations, and living regularly both then and after his retirement in the company of his Swedish doctor whom he had met during the period of breakdown, who looked after him right up to his death, and who died herself within a year of him. Knowles was obsessed by Elizabeth Kornerup. He came increasingly to depend on her at Ealing, planned his departure from the Priory with her and was nursed by her during his subsequent breakdown. For the remainder of his life, he was inseparable from her. Dr Kornerup was a converted Lutheran who had an intense spiritual life. She spent many hours at prayer, confessed daily and usually carried a consecrated Host with her. Her spiritual life has been described as being on occasion 'so intense' that her body 'could not stand the strain'. Knowles believed her to be 'a perfect soul and a saint'. At the time at which he left St Benedict's, Ealing, Knowles was suspended from his priestly functions. His mode of living did not prevent them being restored in the 1950s. Those who treat his life as a denial of his vows recognize the tolerance and liberality of the treatment accorded to his self-assertion, even when they take the view that self-assertion is inappropriate in a monk and difficult to distinguish from the emancipated self-assertion of the modern man of letters. That Knowles became a man of letters was unexpected: that he was able to aim at the 'general reader' was not. He had never been a professional historian and his historical writing had never been dominated by professional conceptions. He had read the Cambridge Classical Tripos, including ancient philosophy, in the years in which Smyth, Oakeshott and Butterfield had read the Historical. Though he had for a time been a pupil of Z. N. Brooke, the Cambridge mediaevalist, he had been a professed religious for twelve years before he published anything substantial. From the point at which he began writing in the middle 1920s, he had a range of subject which left no suggestion that he would become a professional historian. Between 1924 - the date of his first serious review - and his departure from Downside nine years later, his range had been wide. In addition to performing monastic functions as a schoolmaster, as an Abbot's Counsellor and as editor of the Downside Review, he had written The American Civil War, The English Mystics and The Benedictines, as well as articles about Greek religion, mediaeval monasticism, public

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school education, the nature of poetry, and Hardy's moral and ethical beliefs. If the works of this period are read together, a pattern emerges that will be familiar to the readers of this book, and will become even more familiar later on. There was the same rejection as elsewhere of the bases of ethical rationalism and the same criticism of the secular half-truths of public-school religion. There was the same emphasis on the 'historicity' of Christianity. There was the same demand for 'theology' and the same belief that, once its 'realities' are abandoned, the faith will be lost. There was the same concern to safeguard Christian truth from contamination by literature, romanticism, reductionism, or carnal interests and the same conviction of the need to find ways of giving effect to the religious practice which the Christian revelation had made possible. Knowles's message was that the religious condition of England was anomalous and peculiar and could not be dealt with by 'minimising' the 'truths of Christianity'. He recognized that the English had produced 'profoundly religious men' who moulded their lives, more than they knew, on the 'Christ of the Christian centuries'. But he took the same view as Smyth of the dilapidation of English life. It was not only public school religion he was discussing when he wrote that 'only an Englishman, reared in the deeply religious, if narrow, surroundings of sixty years ago', could hold and preach such 'a queer mixture of rationalism, higher criticism, Nietzsche, pantheism, optimism and modernism' and yet 'remain' as 'religious' as Sanderson, the great headmaster of Oundle, undoubtedly had been. The hint that something was wrong with the opinions of the daybefore-yesterday was not confined to religion. It was also applied to both politics and literature. In neither area was Knowles either lengthy or systematic, and in politics he was slightly confused. But in both there was a distinctive direction. One need not attach too much importance to the passing sneer at Bryce - one of the 'brilliant group of political thinkers' who regarded the American Civil War as one of the 'many happy steps towards Freedom and Rationality which the world was making at the time'. One should observe, however, that The Benedictines and The American Civil War contained decisive remarks about the English preference for a hierarchical society and that The American Civil War made systematic assumptions about political power within a framework of universal sin. The standard of judgment in The American Civil War was not

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partisan, except in condemnation of Reconstruction in the South. It presented the war as the outcome of a conflict between beliefs, neither of which could be said to be right. Slavery, it is true, was presented as an evil which had been abolished by Christianity in the Roman and mediaeval worlds. But it was implied that there were grounds on which it could be defended, as well as better grounds for condemning it than had normally been given by Evangelical apologists who were said to have had a lot less to do with the nineteenth-century abolition than the 'spirit of the age' and whose laureates were asked to 'consider' whether in treating it as 'one of the most signal triumphs of Christianity', they did not run the risk of condemning 'multitudes of Christians in other centuries'. This sense of conflicting rights - this relativism - permeated the analysis. There were encomiums not only of Robert E. Lee, 'the best of the Southern aristocracy' with the 'eye of his mind fixed on God' but also of Lincoln, 'the greatest statesman that the world had seen since Waterloo' who 'went far to bridge the space that lies between strength and sympathy'. The Southern planters were described as including, like the English peerage, 'many whose lineage was not worth tracing' but the Southern aristocracy 'at its best' was a thing of 'great beauty' which 'inspired in others the desire to follow in the hour of danger' and whose fate it was that gave such 'sadness' to the story of the war. In explaining the degradation of the South's landless whites, 'in other countries the backbone of the nation', and in regretting the South's lack of 'intellectuality', Knowles evaluated the positive qualities of which these were the negative. The conclusion was that the confrontation between 'the chivalry of the South and the ideals of the North' was terrible and tragic not only because both had the truth 'partially with them' but also because they were 'ridden by a nightmare older than themselves' - as old as the introduction of African slaves into America - in which, beyond the 'rash counsels and cruel deeds' for which they had been responsible themselves, they were 'bearing' the 'sins' and 'iniquities' of their fathers. What emerged from this work was a view of politics which desiderated, in a egalitarian community like the United States, a reproduction of the leadership which the Southern aristocracy had given in the South and the 'wise moderation' which the ruling classes had given in Europe. It was because the Southern aristocracy could not give this after the Civil War and because American wealth had even now (in 1926) not yet produced its own aristocracy, that it had had to be given

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by Lincoln who, though not 'educated' to 'statecraft' or moulded like European statesmen by contact with the refinement of an 'old civilization', was said to have worked, nevertheless, for his fellowmen 'in love', to have been able to 'sympathise and yet act' and to have provided an 'abiding assurance that the good is, and always must remain, above the evil'. Knowles claimed to have written The American Civil War in the manner of an ancient historian, but the context was rather English or European and the characterization of Lincoln - the hero as embodiment of common virtue - was suggestive of Carlyle or even in places of a democratic version of Young England. Certainly Lincoln was credited with some of the qualities with which the ideal Benedictine abbot was to be credited in 1929, with which Shakespeare and Plato were to be credited in The Greek Witness to the Immortality of the Soul, and with which Butterfield was to credit Churchill after 1940. Alone of modern statesmen [Lincoln was described as] realising] in some measure the dim familiar ideal of all modern peoples, and especially of our own in all its branches. Alone he approaches nearly to the ruler for whom the nations of the earth have yearned, as for a Messiah, since the days of the French Revolution; one who should govern, not in virtue of his difference from others or of his origin in a class born to rule, with a hundred gifts of education and influence and blood, nor because, with none of these gifts, he should wish to shatter the whole existing order of the world, but in virtue of his sympathy for all men, his belief in them and his unwillingness to treat any man as his inferior. It is likely that Knowles misunderstood Lincoln or was wrong, if he meant to see him as a Christian statesman. Less contentious was the demand to subject literature to Christian judgment. In the course of writing about literature, he criticized among other things Hardy's and Galsworthy's treatment of marriage and Squire's claim that Hardy had an arnma naturaliter Christiana, He also highlighted the contradiction between the 'melancholy' of Tess and Jude and the loveliness of Nature and 'absolute value' that Hardy claimed for human actions, attributing the unresolved duality to a conflict between the poet discerning 'mysteries' and 'viewing life from a tragic point of view', and the novelist 'interpreting life . . . through the eyes of one uncertain of any ultimate sanction or basis for virtue or love'. He stated generally, as a justification for intruding moral criticism into literature, that there was a fundamental contradiction between Hamlet, the Oresteia, the Aeneid, Othello, Phedre, In Memoriam and Faust which were repreR.P.D,—F

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sented, somewhat eclectically, as embodying the belief that 'man's action is ruled by himself . . . and stretches beyond our vision to something beyond death', and 'the intense intellectual conviction' attributed to Hardy and others that 'there is no life after death . . . that virtue is mere selfishness . . . that love is . . . an animal passion . . . and that man is without free-will'. Knowles was not making a religion out of literature. He was clear not only that literature was not religion but that it needed to be emphasized that it was not. He used spiritualism and materialism, naturalism and supernaturalism, as poles of contrast but left no doubt about the undesirability of capitulating to hellenism or romanticism. In The Greek Witness to the Immortality of the Soul the 'legacy' of Greece was described as something which 'all western nations of advanced civilization had l e a r n t . . . in their schools "at the same time that they had learnt from Christianity" in their cradles'. But Orphism was mentioned as proof that it included elements far removed from the 'unclouded serenity' which had been seen by romantic interpreters, and it was emphasized, as Gladstone had done, that 'the fathers and doctors of the church' had not treated Greek thought as though it was true but as something 'sent by God to prepare the world for the revelation of His Son'. The political, historical and critical discussions, however, were subordinate to the main theme: the connections between mysticism and monasticism. It was this that formed the centre of Knowles's work in these years. If one were examining Knowles's life for its own sake, one would have to explain the change of mind he appears to have undergone in 1930 after reading R. Garrigou-Lagrange's book, Perfection Chretienne et Contemplation (1923). This seems to have transformed his view of monastic life and to have been the proximate cause of the argument which led to his departure from Downside. If his biographer is right, the book stimulated a crucial experience, demanding a response to a European phenomenon, elevating the Carthusian ideal above the Benedictine, and transforming monasticism from seeming 'a superior calling for ordinary men' into seeming 'an ordinary calling for superior men'. Without knowing more about Downside in the 1930s, it is difficult to know what demands this view would have made on ordinary monks. Nor is it easy to be sure that it was the source of that severity of judgment which was to be present in all of Knowles's assessments of

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monastic activity in the future. But there can be no doubt that it affected his view of mystical prayer about which he had already written a sizeable book and now wrote the equivalent of another in The Clergy Review in 1932. With Knowles, as with few academic historians, one has the feeling that his meaning had been expressed long before his major writing had been written, perhaps even before it had been conceived, in works which were not in any ordinary sense history. In exploring this feeling, all his earliest works are relevant, the religious ones most of all. All of them lead continuously into The Monastic Order which, from that point of view, was little more than the promulgation in systematic historical form of views that had been generated at least ten years earlier. Up to 1934 Knowles's religious writings had faced three ways. They had criticized substitutes for Christianity or false forms of it. They had described the true features of Christian, and especially of monastic, religion. And they had discussed the scope and nature of mystical experience. So far as the first was concerned, the criticisms and rejections were far-reaching. There were rejections of the 'mystical' romanticism of Wordsworth and of the visual romanticism which had marred English thinking about monasticism since Scott. Knowles did not deny the attractiveness of natural beauty or the romantic melancholy of 'ruined choirs'. But the romantic image was not religion; poetry was not mysticism; and monasticism, so far from being tied either to mediaeval society or to mediaeval ruins, had 'positive aims and ideas' which had survived both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and were now being pursued with self-confident vigour throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. The Benedictines was a polemical book in which monks were not portrayed as being dominated by the 'flux and novelty' of the modern world or discovering 'new ways of salvation' to replace the old. There was no question in its pages of a monk being sunk in 'individualism, the subjective, the analytic, the self-conscious, the sub-conscious or the desire for self-expression or self-realisation'. The monastery was neither a refuge for rakes nor a place for special suffering and repentance. Benedictinism, on the contrary, consisted in adhesion to the Rule. It was an 'objective' form of activity, free from the 'secret', the 'doctrinaire', the 'esoteric' and the 'experimental', a 'sane, strong, unchanging' commitment to an 'ordered form of ordinary life' where the over-

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riding principles were to 'work, obey, keep silent, praise God in common, and, if you wish to pray to Him alone, enter the church and pray'. Moreover, the Rule was not only objective, it was also 'original'. It was original in the sense in which the 'third scene of Macbeth . . . the development of the action in King Lear\ or the Sermon on the Mount was original; in the sense that it was the work of a mind which had 'made its own all that was good in the past'. The life it suggested was a life 'passed in the presence of God', dedicated to 'the growth of supernatural motives' and operating through 'liturgical prayer, reading and work'. It was designed neither as an aid to altruistic virtue nor to be an economic, social or intellectual force. Its sole purpose was 'the benefit of the monk's soul', the renunciation of the monk's will and 'the service of God in the light of the Gospel'. At numerous points in The Benedictines Knowles gave idealized sketches of monastic organization, of abbatial rule and of the Benedictine character. Benedictine monasteries were said to be 'of the soil', to be 'almost biological growths' and to have had the chance, because they had been built in the country, to 'grow untrammelled' like 'great oaks'. Within, the abbot stood 'in the place of God' and could be relied on as Christ could. He was a 'wise father'. He could not 'exploit his monks' and he was, in a real sense, their 'servant'. He had to 'lead them to God, not in his way or at his pace, but in the way God wishes for each'. It was the restoration and desecularization of abbatial authority, and the absolute obedience which went with it, that had made contemporary Benedictine monasteries more like those envisaged by St Benedict than 'at any time since the days of Charlemagne'. The Benedictine character was said to combine 'energy' with 'simplicity of life'. It had 'firmness' and 'sanctity' but it also had 'tolerance and ease' which reflected the realization that it was a 'family' of which the monk was a part and that others of its members had their own 'ideas and limitations'. A 'long and unbroken tradition' had made it conscious of the difference between the best and the best possible, and it had carried these qualities into its writing where intellectual independence, avoidance of theological controversy and intellectual receptivity had impressed non-Catholics of education and intelligence with the Benedictine ability to produce literary works which were 'more positive, more objective and less tendentious than equally meritorious work done elsewhere'. These were descriptions of 'ordinary human monks' (Smyth's

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'average clergyman'), 'the man in the street, at once beneath and above the schools of thought' who, by reflecting the difference between the 'more perfect and less perfect in Christian life', had developed the patient, stable, sociable, restful and contented personality which had been intended from the beginning and had been so constantly supported by the reading of the Rule that 'true Benedictine life and ideals' had shown 'little change in the centuries' and 'Benedictine abbeys' had all been 'united in spirit'. Ordinarily speaking [Knowles observed] there should be . . . no active work on which monks, as a body, can be called upon to spend themselves, nor was it the Founder's idea that the life within its walls should be such as to take a direct toll from all except the most robust . . . In fact . . . the monk who in ordinary circumstances takes to any work with a zeal which absorbs all his time and energies and which burns out his fire of strength and health is departing from what is for him the way of salvation. Throughout The Benedictines Knowles was concerned with the relationship between monastic religion and the world, and with the encroachments which the world could be represented as making on it. The educational, political and social roles which the monasteries had acquired in the Dark Ages, their dependence on lay rulers, even monastic success in reclaiming waste, had all broken in upon the initial purity of the conception which St Benedict had left. Priestly functions had been added to monkish ones, political ones to priestly, and landowning ones to both, with the result that, by the end of the tenth century, the monasteries had become part of society in a full secular sense which Cluny did not succeed in removing. In The Benedictines the position was categorical. Monastic religion had nothing to do with reclaiming waste, educating barbarians or writing works of scholarship. Monks might do these things as a means of exercise and occupation. But their proper vocation was growth in supernatural knowledge as it was laid down in the Rule. The tension between these objectives had been present for many centuries and it was not to be expected that it would be stilled now. Nor, in the complexities of modern life, was it being suggested that it should be. Monasteries would continue to be, as they had been in the past, both 'nurseries' for 'bishops and evangelists' and an influence upon the world. But the only influence they should hope to have was through what they were 'in the widest, most spiritual sense', and this was true not only of them but of the Church in general which, though it had

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'presented mankind with a more impressive pageant of external activity than any civilization or empire', had her 'deepest life . . . always hid with Christ in God'. The Benedictines was a routine book, an attempt in a popular series to present the Order in a way that the world would admire. Its emphasis on the separateness of the Church, or religion, from civilization deserves attention not only because it was a recurrent theme in Knowles's writing but also because it coloured his view of learning, scholarship and education. Like Smyth, Knowles distinguished between reading in the modern sense as part of secular education and reading in the practical form in which it had been envisaged by St Benedict as an aid to 'spiritual study'. This was the form of reading that was binding on modern monks who distinguished the monastic function from the function of the artist or student and had no obligation to sink into that 'resentful coma' which was called 'research'. In The English Mystics there was a similar discussion of mysticism. The English Mystics dealt primarily with half a dozen fourteenthand fifteenth-century English writers, but it had long preliminary essays on The Nature of Mysticism and The Mystical Experience whose burden was the same as the burden of The Benedictines, that mysticism must be distinguished from the abortions that had confused thinking about it in the modern world. The occult, symbolism, theosophy, pantheism, Boehme and Swedenborg were all put under the chopper. So, in the politest way possible, were Inge, von Hiigel, Underhill and William James. So were Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley, Tennyson, Richard Jeffries and Rupert Brooke. So too were Donne, George Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, George Fox and the Cambridge Platonists, on the ground that their language was that of 'poetry or philosophy or revolt' and said 'nothing' about the mystical way 'as understood by the Church'. It was also denied that 'the romantic in literature' was 'a department of the mystical', that the mystical included 'vast territories of philosophical thought', or that poetry, music and human affection were vehicles of mystical experience. Materialism and rationalism were treated as enemies, but so were the romantic and modern reactions against them. So were 'the subliminal, self- . . . hypnotists, alienists and experimental psychologists' together with 'spiritualism, enthusiasm, insanity and revivalism (whether white or negro)'. Mysticism as a 'deeper realization of the . . . universe' or 'a particular way of receiving and interpreting religious truth' were both played down. In the first thirty-nine pages there were two separate statements of the claim that

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the word mysticism should be used only of the certainty that the contemplative has 'seen, felt and known . . . in a way . . . no less unerring than [his] sense perceptions', a 'quite extraordinary state of union with God in prayer'. Knowles recognized that some Catholics shared the puritanical view of God as a 'ruler or stern father' who did not reveal himself as a 'dear friend or lover'. But the 'strand of love' was alleged to be 'the hallmark of Christianity'. Mysticism was part of that strand, and what distinguished it from the general run of sanctity or spirituality - 'the unfailing negative tests' which showed when the mystical experience was absent - were the 'technical language' in which it was expressed, its incomprehensibility to 'ordinary persons', and its 'distastefulness' to those whose religious experience was more conventional. Mystical experience was not separable, Knowles asserted, from 'the Great Desolation' or 'Dark Night' - the 'terrible suffering' that occurs when the soul, 'cut off from the world of the senses and the imagination', 'stripped of the last vestiges of self-love' and blinded by an 'excess of unconventional light', begins to find 'God speaking directly to it'. This was the parallel to the professional differentiation of monasticism, the assertion of an area of special knowledge quite different from the cosmic blur of romantic and post-romantic thinking about religion. It was not something a man could achieve by himself. Self-generated mysticism could not produce experience of God, which, like eternal life, was dependent on the 'supernatural help' that had been earned by Christ's Passion. Nor, in 1927, was the mystical vision something towards which every monk should aspire. Though it grew out of the 'normal supernatural present in every soul in a state of Grace' and was in some sense 'the crown of spiritual life' which 'purified the soul more than years of mortification', the impression was left, without being laid out very clearly, that it did not happen very often, was arcane in character, and was by no means the chief way to salvation. The underlying assumption of The English Mystics, in spite of occasional hints to the contrary, was that pursuit of mystical experience was an esoteric activity, linked to prayer but discontinuous from it, and having only a marginal place in Benedictine piety. The change that took place between 1930 and 1934 involved a shift about discontinuity, an enhanced enthusiasm for St John of the Cross who had previously been played down as a 'son of thunder', and a radical rethinking both of the Benedictine character in general and of the Downside character in particular. It began with articles in which St

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John of the Cross's view of contemplation was not only expounded with approval but was also said to resemble that of Aquinas whose doctrines the Pope had 'proposed as the doctrine of the Church' and the English Benedictines had adopted as their 'norm'. In thus trailing his coat, Knowles was drawing the attention of English priests to important advances that had been made on the Continent in the previous ten years towards a 'full theological synthesis' of the problems connected with 'contemplative prayer'. He stated as a fact that there had been a 'growth in the number of contemplative vocations throughout the Church' and quoted a favourable comparison between 'our own times' and that 'marvellous epoch' in Spain and France when 'the rise of the Jesuits, the reform of the Carmelites . . . and the teaching of the great Oratorians combined to bring about an unexampled flowering of the life of grace and prayer'. He repeated what he had said before about the difficulty of contemplation and the random nature of its incidence. He was conscious that the subject might cause 'repulsion or discouragement'. He was not suggesting that contemplation should be urged on those to whom God had not given the capability. But the contemplative capability was given more commonly than was supposed, could be guided more adequately than it was at present, and unless guided by confessors and advisers, might be retarded or arrested in a way which God could not approve of. In urging the need to provide for England the sort of 'authorised teaching' that was available to every priest who had the charge of souls in France, Knowles quoted Aquinas's belief that the zeal for souls most acceptable to God is that through which a man 'devotes his own soul or that of another' to 'contemplation' rather than to 'action'. Knowles drew a sharp distinction between the ordinary life of sanctifying grace and the transformation that occurs when God acts on the soul 'immediately'. Where, without God's action, given 'good will . . . tolerable judgment... the sacraments . . . prayer and . . . good reading', the soul could grow 'into the spiritual life', it now had a 'supernatural manner of acting' and inevitably saw everything - 'the doctrines of the church, the events of our Lord's life, the workings of God's providence' - in so new a light that the intellect could understand 'without precedent discursive activity', and the will move 'without the clash of motives'. This was described as a condition in which everything 'looked like God'. In describing it, Knowles took the view that it was God's 'free gift' which could not be acquired by petition or effort. But he also took

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the view that, once it had been acquired, its development depended on the extent to which 'fellow-creatures', like priests or confessors, could help it. In addition he claimed that, though human action could not acquire it, effort could usefully be said to precede it, and that a 'leaving of self' and 'refusal to rest in any creature, however good' was a relevant preparation, even though it could not 'cause' grace to come, because, at a certain stage, God could begin 'burning and scouring the soul with the very light and warmth and knowledge' that were 'ultimately to be its joy'. The significance of this for priests was that a 'rigid form of prayer' was antipathetic, that 'the birth of contemplation' was always accompanied by 'inability to pray discursively and with satisfaction', and that the confessor or adviser had therefore to show tact and judgment in deciding whether it should be encouraged. This was a liberating doctrine, despite the reservations with which it was surrounded. One can imagine that the 'juniorate' at Downside were 'not yet ready to weigh it'. One can see why they had to be 'protected' - Stacpoole's word - from its 'force'. One can see this with especial clarity when one reads towards the end of the third article that though in different cases one 'method' of prayer may profit as well as another, and though few mistakes are more fatal than that of forcing on simplicity . . . yet it is clear that certain forms of prayer are logically and schematically nearer to contemplation than others . . . Thus the formal, set meditation, including a prolonged discursive employment of intellect and affections, is the furthest removed; affective prayer, which dispenses with discursive activity of the reason and imagination, is nearer; bare, repeated acts of the will which take the form of resignation or acceptance or faith are nearer still, but even these are not of themselves contemplation. Finally, there is that prayer which is called 'of simplicity' or 'simple regard' or 'loving attention' . . . A case of this prayer in the concrete may be either not contemplative, or a mixture of contemplation and ordinary prayer, or wholly contemplative. That is to say, those who practise it may either still be making formal acts of an extremely simple nature, or they may be in the phase when contemplation has begun but is not yet a habit, or they may be habitual (though perhaps unconscious) contemplatives, for in these last the will is in action, but divorced from all reflection and feeling . . . In practice, then, it may be suggested that those souls who are called to contemplation outside the strictly secluded 'contemplative' orders approach contemplative prayer after a course of years, during which their prayer simplifies itself sensim sine sensu under the guidance of the Holy Spirit . . . But it is of importance to remember that . . . there is a definite and crucial period of transition between essentially contemplative and essentially non-contemplative prayer, and that, without of necessity

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any phenomena of rapture or suspension of the faculties, the contemplative, when fully past the transition, is aware at least from time to time, that his prayer is made 'in' him rather than 'by' him. There was not a great deal of difference - there was almost certainly less than Stacpoole suggests - between the doctrine of these articles and the doctrine of The English Mystics, The difference was practical in relation to souls, and therefore treacherous, though even the promulgation of a code of free-reined advice for directors was not in itself unduly controversial. What became controversial was the demand that monks should be prepared to see God face to face. When Knowles began his change of direction in 1930, he had been working hard for ten years. He had deployed a position which was generally orthodox in Benedictine terms and bore the marks of the education he had received since he arrived at Downside twenty years before. It also bore some of the special marks of the anti-liberalism of the twenties, though in so bland a fashion that they looked neither deliberately offensive nor incontinently distempered. He now began a searching criticism of the laxity and parochiality that he discerned at Downside and in his own conception of monastic duty, which may be seen most clearly in an article on The Cloud of Unknowing in The Downside Review in 1934 and in the memoir of Cuthbert Butler which was written at Ealing shortly after Butler's death there in the same year. The article on The Cloud of Unknowing was short. But it was emphatic. It praised The Cloud for combining contemplative experience, theological knowledge and anticipations of St John of the Cross, and made it clear that it met both Benedictine requirements as to Thomist doctrine and Knowles's requirements in relation to mystical theology. It was significant because Knowles made it clear at almost exactly the same time that these were the respects in which Butler had been unsatisfactory. Knowles's relationship with Butler was more intimate than Butterfield's with Ward, Temperley or Trevelyan. But by 1934 Butler had come to perform the same function in Knowles's thinking as they had in Butterfield's: he represented yesterday's assumptions which had to be got out of the way. In his memoir of Butler, Knowles said good-bye not just to Downside but to a phase of thought of which he used Butler as a symbol. For the historian of Benedictinism in England Edward Cuthbert

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Butler will be interesting chiefly for the account it gives of the leading figures in the early twentieth-century transformation at Downside. For the student of Knowles's writings, it will be interesting for the way in which its subject was presented as a natural scholar rather than a mystic and as a man who lacked that 'capacity for giving which is of the essence of deep friendship'. Butler was said, in its grateful but devastating pages, to have preferred books and ideas to human contact and to have regarded the eight years he spent at Bene't House in Cambridge as 'the happiest of his life' (and happier than the 60 or so he had spent at Downside?). He was said to have had a 'naivete of outlook' which made him think his election as abbot 'inevitable and fitting' and 'even in his "honeymoon period" ' immediately after the election to have been 'not without serious difficulties of one kind or another'. The enormous size of his handwriting, the nervous shaking of his hands, his semi-limp and ungainly gait were recorded in zealous and dispassionate detail. His 'irresolution in action' was said to have produced conditions in which 'there was scarcely a member of the community' who did not welcome his resignation. He was judged to have missed sanctity; the impression was left that he had missed a great many things besides. The memoir contained many pages of praise and some of deep admiration. Its severity would doubtless have been applied to Knowles himself if he had been the subject. But it is reasonable to say that it was both more and less than confessional, that it embodied the judgment that a reactionary religious of the 1920s had to make of his Victorian mentor who was nearly forty years older than he was. It was not just Butler's lack of style, ignorance of art, architecture and music and his virtual ignorance of 'the most vital periods of English history', nor his humourlessness, awkwardness, musical tonelessness and insensitivity in conversation that were at issue. Neither was it his lack of mystical experience personally, his insistence on approaching mysticism through an 'eclectic almost empirical' method, nor his advocacy of a 'healthy agnosticism' on the 'deepest questions' of philosophy and theology. Rather it was the impression he left that 'there was something too 'sensible' about him, too natural in him', that he lacked that 'folly of the saints' or taste for the 'supernatural' which, 'rare though it be', was the 'only hallmark of sanctity'. It was uncertain, Knowles thought, whether Butler had grasped the 'just distinction' between 'the exterior and material, and the interior and the spiritual; between nature and grace; between a human, ethical ideal and a fully supernatural one -

146 Receptions whether, in short, he always appreciated the real meaning of the words he used'. Alike spiritually and intellectually [went the judgment] we may perhaps think that . . . he compromised. Intellectually he remained unsympathetic to scientific theology; he loved to say that he belonged to no school and could therefore choose for himself without parti pris between opposing opinions. In the event this could not but result - and did in fact result in a failure to share in the new life that was springing up, and in a blurring of the outlines of his own thought. In particular, the theology of grace and of the infused virtues and gifts, and the distinction between natural and supernatural, interested him not at all. Yet here, if anywhere, were to be found the answers - so far as the human mind can attain to them and express them in words - to the profound questions round which so much of his thought turned.

Knowles's assessment must be seen as a criticism of the influence Butler had had on his own life and writings. Even when Butler was criticized for being insufficiently like the ideal Benedictine of The Benedictines, Knowles was contrasting the new ideal he had acquired by 1934 with the ideal that had been held up for admiration by this absent-minded professor who, though he was the most important writer on mysticism and monasticism that twentieth-century English Catholicism had produced, was neither suited to the more strenuous forms of spiritual activity nor powerful enough morally to separate the monastic and mystical from other more general affirmations of spirit's primacy over the material. In the 1920s, Knowles's interests had been broad. He had ventured confidently into discussion of secular life and authors. He had judged authors by their religion, while also responding to the secular world and permitting himself a relaxed, if religious, attitude towards it. In the 1930s, his range of sympathy contracted in the course of demanding an English response to a European phenomenon. He not only developed an intense interest in mystical prayer which, on any understanding, would be within the range of very few even of the religious for whom it was intended: he also converted himself from being a wide-ranging secular historian into being the celebrator and judge of the mediaeval religious intelligentsia. It was this process of contraction that produced The Monastic Order in 1940. Whether he would have recognized this or not, Knowles's historical writing was an extension of his religious persona: the demonstration of

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an essentially spiritual life which was hampered, perhaps, in its dedication to God by the accidental self-interestedness of its materiality but which bore the same relationship towards Him throughout the ages. In Knowles there was no conception of progress. There was only God on the one hand, the equidistance of those who had been favoured by Him on the other, and at the centre of the historical process, a continuing 'stream of praise' which 'in the oldest abbeys of Europe' was still being sung in 1929 'to the same melodies' as those which had been sung when 'the yews were young that made the bows for Agincourt, when the Armada was sighting the English coast, when Napoleon was sending forward the Guard at Waterloo, when the Battle of the Marne was hanging doubtful'. There is no reason to suppose that Knowles ever doubted these truths or changed his mind about their significance. But there is much reason to suggest a recession in intensity as he settled into a new life in Cambridge in 1944. In Peterhouse the earliest years were difficult. He had been elected when Vellacott, the Master,1 was on war service in Egypt, and was the object of a vendetta on Vellacott's return. On his election to the University's Chair of Mediaeval History in 1947, he was offered to other colleges for election to a Fellowship not, it seems certain, because Butterfield wanted to get rid of him but because relations with Vellacott made it a kindness to remove him when the Regius Professor pointed out that Peterhouse would have four historical professors if he stayed where he was. The colleges that were approached, however, all declined. Trinity Hall resisted a proposal from its history Fellows (including Chadwick2). Christ's, Knowles's own college, decided that it did not wish to destroy its forty-year-old relations with Downside. Jesus College, having expected J. G. Edwards of Jesus College, Oxford, to be elected to the Chair and having intended to elect him to a Professorial Fellowship, was somewhat put out and became resistant to Roman Catholicism when Knowles was elected in his place. It was not until it began to be said in Jesus that Peterhouse was willing to get rid of Knowles that Butterfield was in a position to persuade Vellacott that Peterhouse had a duty to keep him. Thereafter, little by little, the spring unwound. There were disagreeable letters to Downside, and there was an as yet unpublished autobiography. But, except in relation to Downside, warmth came to 1. For Vellacott see below pp. 219-20. 2. See below chapter 13.

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predominate over austerity and also over anger. The will was as strong as before and could be applied ruthlessly. But it was directed in general towards historical writing, internal religion, and fitting into the new surroundings. By 1954 Knowles had taken a natural lead among the Russian, Scottish, Irish, German, Austrian, Methodist, Catholic, Agnostic, Atheistic, Secular and Jewish intellectuals who by then provided so much more of the Cambridge History Faculty's steam than did the Anglicans of the post-war generation. The result was a lowering of tension. Where in 1940 Knowles had been doctrinal and demanding, by the time of The Religious Orders Volume I (1948) he had become explanatory. By the second of these volumes, so far from being either taut or tense in advocating blandness and relaxation, he had slipped involuntarily into a condition of blandness and relaxation. After the trauma of the 1930s, indeed, it was really the same as before. The judgments had become mellower, the insistence less powerful; there was clarity, Englishness and political complacency even at the same time that old truths were repeated about marriage, religion, grace and the Rule. About the writings of the 1950s and 1960s there is a great elegance. But the impression they leave is faintly unpleasant. The machine purrs and moves forward. There are passages of eloquence and power. There are irresistible judgments, and there is an extraordinary range of learning. But some of the judgments are trivial and their premisses, once stated, leave little room for development. If this seems a harsh judgment to make on an astonishing output, it should be remembered that The Historian and Character with its homespun analyses, the Inaugural Lecture of 1947 with its consecration of the 1939 war, and five articles in The Tablet consecrating the post-war English political consensus, provide at least as good a sense of Knowles's later tone as do the hungover austerities presented by Authority, Peter Has Spoken and Grace in face of the post-conciliar relaxations effected by Pope John XXIII. The Knowles of 1939-40, then, made large claims which ran into difficulty with the decent, natural sensibleness of Benedictine piety. Thereafter, the claim to religious leadership was transformed into a literary personality which, despite its content, reflected the secular normality of life in London, Wimbledon, Peterhouse and Hampshire where one opinion is as good as another and anything goes, provided it is recognized to be an aid to culture, scholarship or self-expression.

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It is difficult not to prefer the early Knowles: the self-willed Napoleonic monk whose living doctrine permeated everything he wrote in the build-up to The Monastic Order. The leading feature of Knowles's early historical writing was a demand for the opening up of the English historical consciousness. It was necessary, he claimed, to get behind the belief that the Reformation was a matter of overriding importance, to see that the Renaissance did not do as much as was claimed for it, and to understand that the 'wisdom and achievements of the Middle Ages' were those of a civilization not 'totally different from that of modern Europe and ancient Rome'. This, of course, was part of the plan to rescue mysticism and monasticism from suffocation by liberal romanticism. It required an erosion of the 'great classical tradition of the public schools and universities' and the insertion into it of the idea that it was no longer 'permissible' for 'English scholars and philosophers of the first rank' to lack 'even the most passing acquaintance with scholasticism'. It demanded a breaking of the framework imposed by Froude, Macaulay, Carlyle, Acton, Ranke and Gregorovius on the one hand and by Symonds, Pater, Browning and Swinburne on the other. It dismissed the scholastic apologists, gild socialists and Gothic Ruskinians who, by insisting on the superiority of the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, had 'obscured the unity that lies behind European history'. It made mincemeat of Bury's 'crude' claim that the millennium between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries was one in which ' "reason was enchained, thought was enslaved, and knowledge made no progress" '. In the 1920s the level of explanation was low. There were 'stirrings of life' and 'fresh springs' and an 'intellectual coming of age among the new peoples of the north'. But a clear point was being made - that the Renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was 'more than a merely literary or scientific rebirth' and was far more important than the later Renaissance because it was not vitiated by 'so many elements of disorder and decay'. The 'first religious genius of the modern world' (St Bernard), the 'first European romanticist' (St Francis) and a continuous stream of achievements in theology provided the first signs that the Barbarian Invaders could be made articulate. The position became generally incandescent when Rashdall's 'brilliant and stimulating' chapters on thought in The Universities of Europe were said to have been marred by 'fundamental inhibitions' which prevented

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'a true appreciation' not only of dogmatic theology and scholastic philosophy but also of the proto-renaissance itself. With all his deep recognition of spiritual values and his admiration for medieval thought [Knowles wrote of Rashdall] he was also deeply tinged by his early environment and mental training. His home had been the parsonage, his philosophy was with difficulty reconciled with his beliefs, and in the Weltanschauung of his generation which he had made in part his own, whether put crudely by a Bury or more subtly by others, all intellectual growth was regarded, not as the comprehending and co-ordinating of the truth of God, manifested in diverse ways to the various faculties of man, but as the assertion of the autonomy of the human reason as against the claims of 'authority'. Consequently, by a curious transference of prejudice to the reading of history, the renaissance of the eleventh century, to become the object of praise, was of necessity regarded as a first struggle of the European mind against superstition and the tyranny of dogma and obscurantist authority. These criticisms were put in very much the same language as Smyth had put some of his. They were followed by a positive statement. The rebirth of the eleventh century was not the shaking off of fetters imposed by tradition or authority . . . but the first emergence of a culture capable of using its rational, critical faculties in every sphere of intellectual life... The Dark Ages were the childhood of the new Europe - a childhood illuminated, not darkened, by the Christian revelation . . . but yet, when of itself it attempted to understand and to speak, understanding as a child, speaking as a child. And during those centuries of childhood there was an almost complete absence not only of religious persecution and all repressive activities of 'Bishops and theologians' but of dogmatic pronouncements or condemnations of any kind. The danger was rather that the whole scheme of logical thought, the whole fabric of organization built up by the great Fathers and Popes and bishops of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, would melt into thin air or sink into the soil. When the Renaissance came it was not a rebellion, but a universal stirring, which, like that in Greece before Socrates, was reflected in every type of mind. This not only made Renaissance and Reformation into 'mere incidents in a gradual coming of age'. It also destroyed the distinction between ancient history, mediaeval history and modern history. There was, in Knowles's view, a 'greater gulf between the thirteenth century and the ninth than between the thirteenth and the sixteenth and 'it would be better, if large divisions must be made . . . to set a boundary at the moment c. 1050 when Europe, secular and religious, took up the

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threads of the distant past and became a conscious whole, alike in culture and in ecclesiastical government'. Throughout these writings, together with stern warnings against sentimental romanticism, there were strong statements of belief in England and the English and a continuing emphasis on the extent to which being English was compatible with being Catholic. Ben Jonson, Donne, George Herbert, Crashaw, Browne, Evelyn, Walton, Laud and even Milton were adduced as proof of the essentially Catholic form in which the Renaissance had come to England from 1600 onwards. There were poetical celebrations of the beauty of the English landscape and a cool, calm gratitude for the beauties of shrub and grass. If there was little about cities and virtually nothing about the seamier or more secular sides of towns, a modern message was being conveyed which insisted that the links that bound modern England to the past cut below Protestant Erastianism, went deeper than Church-State Anglicanism and were a continuation of the regular life of the Middle Ages. What Knowles meant by mediaeval life was not what Coulton meant, or Cunningham, Maitland, Postan or Power. He meant primarily, at times it seemed almost exclusively, the practice of religion. In The English Mystics, The Benedictines, Wulfstan of Worcester and the introductions to The Cloud of Unknowing and Mathew's life of Mary Lady Knatchbull, he posited the existence of a continuous religious life from the conversion of England past the 'sapless bough' that the Church had become by the reign of Henry VIII to the amazing intensity of the monasteries of the Reformation exile where the devoted daughters of Catholic families were described as meriting 'next to the martyrs and perhaps not even next to them . . . whatever grace of faith has since come to England'. In Gilbert of Sempringham, Saint William of York and the Downside Review's Essay in Monastic History, it slowly became clear that Knowles's interest in mystical prayer was paralleled by an historical interest in the mediaeval predecessors of the modern English intelligentsia. Englishness needs emphasizing because this is what Knowles emphasized. The emphasis was as strong as in Stubbs and was expressed in as many ways as Stubbs had expressed it. It was expressed most eloquently in relation to Wulfstan of Worcester who was not only a 'great Englishman' in the sense in which Chaucer, More and Johnson were great but was also the last great one for many years after the Norman Conquest. It was expressed as strikingly through the praise

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that was showered on R. W. Chambers for establishing,1 however distastefully to 'the academic historian of today', the crucial importance of Rolle, The Cloud of Unknowing and Hilton's Scale of Perfection in the development of English literature. Knowles was concerned with monks and saints. He would not have cared for intelligentsia as a generic description. But we may properly suggest a continuity between a modern and a mediaeval function and, from a modern point of view, may reasonably decline to distinguish a monk's function as custodian and transmitter of civilization from his religious function as worshipper of God. We may properly ask whether Knowles's discussions of proprietary Churches, monastic exemptions and abbatial elections did not suggest a belief that professional autonomy is as necessary if monks are to worship as if professors are to teach properly. In The Monastic Order all the themes that have been discussed so far were brought together. The Church was again contrasted with the world and the 'natural perfection of a life in human society' with the supernatural perfection of a life dedicated to 'abnegation of self and imitation of Christ'. The Renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was shown 'framing new systems of religious life' as regularly as the American and French Revolutions had stimulated the framing of 'civil constitutions . . . at the close of the eighteenth century' and as enabling 'the western mind . . . to replace custom .. . tradition and . . . personal dependence' by 'law' and 'articulated government'. It was the introduction of this culture into England by the Normans that supplied the occasion for the moral of the work. Anglo-Saxon monasticism, as it was described in The Monastic Order, was the achievement of St Dunstan, who between 943 and his death had worked closely with the Saxon Kings and had himself been one of the 'welders of national unity'. His monasteries had been 'the soul of the country', 'the very core and kernel of the nation', 'the vital informing principle of life and unity'. They had 'naturally' expected to give leaders to the 'country's councils and to the rule of bishops' sees'. But, as Wulfstan of Worcester had shown and The Monastic Order repeated, they had also been 'the work of saints' and, despite the great growth in monastic wealth, had 'made no compromise with interests that were not spiritual'. 1. In On the continuity of English prose from Alfred to More and his school 1932.

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With the Conquest, all this had changed. The Norman monks had brought a 'literary culture' and 'enthusiasm for . . . learning' which had not existed in England before. They had come from 'the fatherland' of a 'race' that was 'born to conquer . . . and organise'. In France they had had contact with 'some of the most powerful beginnings of the new intellectual life' and they had made England 'a province of the commonwealth of Latin Europe'. In William they had had a king for whom religion was a 'paramount interest' and who, when Cluny declined to assist, summoned Lanfranc to organize the Church on the model he had known in Normandy. Knowles's admiration for Bee needs no emphasis. Its life was more 'complex' and 'sophisticated' than that of Monte Cassino under St Benedict, but it combined 'fervent spirituality' with achievement in thought and literature. It was 'one of the most majestic peaks in the long range of monastic history'. It showed how monastic life could be lived 'in a perfection and purity as nearly ideal as is possible in things human' and it succeeded, in the person of Lanfranc, in superimposing its aims and ideals on the monastic organisation that St Dunstan had left. One need only glance at Knowles's account of Lanfranc whose 'loving kindness', 'delicacy', 'generosity', 'religious convictions and . . . nobility of soul' fell short of sanctity only because he remained 'an ecclesiastic . . . moved by the changing temporary circumstances of the time'. Nor need one prod unduly at the assumption implied in the contrast between his role as 'essentially a man of his age' with Anselm's role as 'a man for all time'. The important consideration is the reasoning Knowles deployed in explaining monasticism's decay. In accounting for the destruction of Catholicism in England in the late sixteenth century, Knowles had already implied a connection between the desiccation of belief before persecution and the loss of faith in face of it. Explanatory connections of this sort were used in The Monastic Order to explain the diminution of monastic influence from the middle of the twelfth century onwards. Knowles was not exactly regretting the diminution. In a way he could but repeat the message of The Benedictines that it was not the business of monks to save civilization or be 'the very core and kernel of the nation's life'. At the same time the Benedictine centuries were celebrated, despite their distance from the Rule, and it was far from clear that their ending was being welcomed as much as it might have been. The elegaic tone may not have borne the meaning that it implied, or it may be

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that it was merely descriptive. But the description that was given of the submergence of monastic culture by a 'reforming papacy', a 'lettered hierarchy' and the 'reawakened mind of Europe' was meant to be significant. It showed the 'initiative of government and teaching' being wrested from 'the monks' and restored for ever to the hands in which they had been held 'in the last centuries of the ancient civilization', and it seemed to connect this not only with external developments but also with the expansion of monastic wealth. In The Monastic Order, far more than in The Benedictines, wealth was presented as the enemy of spirituality. The increase in monastic wealth in the century after the Conquest was presented as coinciding at the very least with the loss of 'directive or formative influence over the spiritual and intellectual life of the church and nation', and it was stated that 'the most striking . . . element of weakness and danger' was not only 'wealth' but 'still more, the source from which this was chiefly drawn, property in land'. The monks - Cistercian and Benedictine alike - were described as 'country gentlemen' and 'great capitalists' whose possessions were a 'direct cause of corporate avarice' and whose 'initial fervour' had already begun to deteriorate 'before all the original novices had passed away'. Message, description and explanation fused in the affirmation that 'wealth... if not only used but enjoyed by its possessor . . . prevents the perfect observance of [Christ's] commandments and . . . whatever shape or form it may take, has always been and will always remain a most formidable enemy of the religious spirit'. With the publication of The Monastic Order in 1940 Knowles's future achievement had been sketched. The negation and intolerance of the 1930s had produced a structure which remained unbroken thereafter through all the expansions of subject-matter that it suffered and all the softenings of tone that accompanied its development. It may be sensible to ask at this point exactly what it was that Knowles had done. Perhaps the most powerful thing that had been done was to give scholarly expression, at a point at which that had no longer seemed possible, to a Christian conception which took seriously the intersection of time with eternity and the subjection of life to supernatural judgment. Knowles did not concern himself either with Christ as the agent of intersection or with the early development of the Church. His emphasis was as individual as Butterfield's. But he came nearer than any twentieth-century English historian had come to finding a language through which to insert into the srucure of a major work of scholar-

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ship conceptions of the reality of God, religion and eternal life, and this seems the more considerable an achievement once it is recognized that hardly anyone else has succeeded in doing it at all. Knowles could do this because of the restraint and discipline of his prose and because of the sweep and grandeur of his subject. But he could do it also because of the life he had led and the struggle he had had in affirming 'the possibility of a real, intimate and conscious union of the soul with its Creator on this side of the grave'. In many ways Knowles was a romanic, but his romanticism was vibrant because he knew that he ought not to be one, and felt a primary obligation not to the external world of light and colour but to the interior darkness of the soul. It was the repeated assertion of a continuing spiritual life - the same in every age and as close to God as ever in the past - that makes his historical writing one of the most compelling Christian productions to have been published in England in this century.

RECESSIONS

Collingwood 'While fully agreeing that there is a difference between the work of a statesman and that of a philosopher . . . we should not admit that this difference is of such a kind that the former can be correctly described as a man of action and the latter as a man of thought. And in the same way, we should not wish to deny the difference between a priest and a layman: but we should deny that the life of the one was religious and the life of the other secular. As every life includes, and indeed is, both thought and action, so every life is essentially religious; and the secular life, if that means a life negatively defined by the mere absence of religion, does not exist at all.' R. G. Collingwood Religion and Philosophy 1916 p. 35. 'Ours is an age when people pride themselves on having abolished magic and pretend that they have no superstitions. But they have as many as ever. The difference is that they have lost the art, which must always be a magical art, of conquering them. So it is a special characteristic of Modern European civilization that metaphysics is habitually frowned upon and the existence of absolute presuppositions denied. This habit is neurotic. It is an attempt to overcome a superstitious dread by denying that there is any cause for it. If this neurosis ever achieves its ostensible object, the eradication of metaphysics from the European mind, the eradication of science and civilization will be accomplished at the same time.' R. G. Collingwood An Essay on Metaphysics 1940 p. 46. 'The vital warmth at the heart of a civilization is what we call a religion. Religion is the passion which inspires a society to persevere in a certain way of life and to obey the rules which define it. Without a conviction that this way of life is a thing of absolute value, and that its rules must be obeyed at all costs, the rules become dead letters and the way of life a thing of the past. The civilization dies because the people to whom it belonged have lost faith in it. They have lost heart to keep it going. They no longer feel it as a thing of absolute value. They no longer have a religious sense of its rules as things which at all costs must be obeyed.' R. G. Collingwood, Fascism and Nazism in Philosophy 1940 p. 168.

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In 1949 it looked as though CoUingwood's1 life-work had been to justify historical thinking by establishing its validity vis-a-vis scientific thinking. This was the view that was suggested by those of his writings that were read most widely and by the use to which CoUingwood's readers put them. Professional philosophers tended to ignore them, at any rate in England where the mode and manner of post-war philosophical teaching were inimical. But they were used extensively by large numbers of undergraduates in English, History, and Divinity faculties who got from them, as from Butterfield, Oakeshott, Leavis and Whitehead, a justification of non-scientific study based on the view that human action and thought, being free and self-determining, could be grasped, discussed or recreated by critical, philosophical or historical thinking. This was adequate so far as it went; but it did not go far enough. It did not see that Collingwood had started, or written, a moral philosophy, a philosophy of art, a philosophy of science, a philosophy of religion, and an account of the nature of anthropology, and that there were more intimate connections than many of his admirers noticed between An Autobiography, The Idea of Nature and The Idea of History which they did read and Religion and Philosophy, Speculum Mentis, the Essay on Metaphysics, The New Leviathan and the unpublished Fairy-Tales which by and large they did not. It is in these respects that Collingwood appears in this volume as an aid to recession, and for this reason that his historical writing will be examined as a preliminary to examination of the civilizing mission which he associated with his philosophy. 1. Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943). Ed. Rugby and University College Oxford. Fellow of Pembroke College Oxford. Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford 1935-41. Author of Religion and Philosophy 1916, Ruskin's Philosophy 1920, Speculum Mentis 1924, Outlines of a Philosophy of Art 1925, Essay on Philosophical Method 1933, (with Myers) Roman Britain and the English Settlements 1936, The Principles of Art 1938, Autobiography 1939, Essay on Metaphysics 1940, The New Leviathan 1942 etc. etc.

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Readers may need to be reminded that Recessions involved a recession from the type of Anglicanism which was described in Three Anglican Reactionaries. They may also need to be reminded what it was a recession to. The four writers discussed in this section all believed in the historic English polity; they all confronted socialism with a complacent facticity which implied either that things had been better ordered in the past than they were now, or that they were better ordered now than they had been in the past. Like Salisbury, they celebrated liberty (or, in Collingwood's case, Liberalism) but, unlike Salisbury, they allowed this to obscure the fact that the central problem in the English polity in the three centuries that followed the Reformation had not been liberty, but the Church of England on the one hand and the powers and privileges of landowners on the other. Politically they were all incurably Whig, and either ignored religion (Churchill), made an improper identification between religion and civilization (Collingwood and Oakeshott), or emphasized, as Butterfield did, the internal nature of Christianity. These four did not share uniform sympathies. Oakeshott admired the mediaeval English constitution, Collingwood the mid-Victorian polity, and Butterfield and Churchill the Churchillian consensus (unless, as chapter 9 will show, Churchill disliked everything that happened in England after 1914). Moreover, though Butterfield and Oakeshott admired one another very greatly until Butterfield published Christianity and History in 1949, there is no reason to suppose that Oakeshott admired Collingwood politically, that Butterfield had any sympathy for Collingwood historically, or that Churchill had any sense of the existence of any of the others. All that is clear is that, in their separate ways, they represented a recession from the Anglicanism of 1943^44, and, while operating as symbols more than as influences, had effects which will be approached initially in this chapter through the distorted doctrine which Collingwood promulgated under the umbrella of historical philosophy.

Collingwood's historical writings were of three sorts. There were books and articles about Roman Britain, culminating in his share of the Oxford History of England volume, Roman Britain and the English Settlements. There were accounts of the development of historical writing in the past of which the first half of The Idea of History was

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the chief. And there were philosophical accounts of the nature of historical thinking which ranged from a translation of Croce's book on Vico in 1913, past Section VI of Speculum Mentis in 1924, to the posthumously printed second half of the Idea of History which said from the standpoint of history what the Essay On Metaphysics had said about the primacy of historical thinking from the standpoint of philosophy. In these books Collingwood embodied a conviction of the importance of Christianity as the philosophy underlying all European thinking since the fall of Rome; gave a weight to the history of thought that serious undergraduate historians gave in Cambridge in the late 1940s; and presented a complicated type of relativism which might well have been compatible with the Barthian form in which it appeared in Hoskyns or with the historical form in which it appeared in Toynbee. How Collingwood stumbled on the problem of history is not clear. But it was present early, in the translation of Croce's Vico, in Religion and Philosophy, which was written at about the same time, and in a lecture on Ruskin which he delivered in 1919. By 1924, when he was 35, history was established as one of the main subjects about which he intended to write. In announcing this, Collingwood proclaimed three primary aims: to establish that history was a distinctive form of knowledge, to free it from domination by positivism and the natural sciences, and to show that philosophical idealism could, where philosophical realism could not, account for its autonomy. These aims were interdependent and were connected with two situational compulsions. On the one hand, there was a need to find a new role for philosophy now that Classics and Greats had been dethroned from pre-eminence in English education. On the other, there was a need to destroy 'scientific realism' the 'popular philosophy of today' - and to repair the damage which Prichard, Cook Wilson, Russell, and Moore had done to the tradition which Green and his followers had established in Oxford. Of the roles envisaged for philosophy - to retire into isolation like Forestry or Geography or to 'force herself into the company of Modern History' - Collingwood preferred the latter. He singled out political theory and the history of political thought as junctions which might preserve for philosophy in the future the importance it had acquired through Greats in the past. In these early writings, there was an obsessive rejection of any aspect of thinking which limited history's autonomy. At first, this involved a

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rigorous assault on the naturalism which Croce was alleged to have held inconsistently with his general doctrine. It was soon extended to Greek philosophy, mediaeval scholasticism, and modern philosophy so far as these had been dominated by reflection on mathematics, theology, and the natural sciences respectively. There were points in Collingwood's early writings at which he seemed to want to present history as the primary science. Fortunately, he never quite got there. Even when philosophy was thought of as having an historical method, the position of primacy was almost always reserved for philosophy. By the time Speculum Mentis was published in 1924, however, claims had been made for history which required only detailed elaboration in the two decades that elapsed before Collingwood's death. In providing a justification of history, Collingwood attacked contrasts which philosophy had invented - between the dependence of historical knowledge on authority and the dependence of science on critical thought, and between history as knowledge of particulars and science as 'knowledge of universals'. This was paralleled by an argument that he used in addressing the Aristotelian Society in 1925, when philosophy of history was described as meaning neither the discovery of 'general laws which govern the course of history' nor the 'working out' of a 'concrete plan' which gave 'every historical incident' a 'unique place' in the framework of the whole, and where no differentiation was admitted between a 'superstructure of generalisations' on the one hand and 'historical facts' which had already been settled by historians on the other. There were, the Aristotelian address alleged, no settled facts on which 'a superstructure of generalization' could be 'based'. The plot or plan was not something that philosophers could superimpose on the history that historians had established. 'History' and 'the plot of history' were not 'two things but one'. The 'real plot of history' was 'coincidental with universal history in all its extent and with all its profusion of detail', and once the historian had discovered it, in however small a fragment, there was nothing for the philosopher of history to say about it. All he could say was that, though he could add nothing to the facts, he could conceptualize the historian's relationship to them by adopting a 'critical' attitude which enquires into the 'presuppositions and implications' of historical thought itself. In the Aristotelian Society address, as in Speculum Mentis the year before, Collingwood denied the possibility of total historical knowledge, while also denying that his doctrine was sceptical. He was able

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to do this because of the use he made of Hegel's conception of the concrete universal. Collingwood was as critical of Hegel as he had been of Croce in 1920, discerning in the one as much as he had discerned in the other an uncritical naturalism confusing an ostensible idealism. In discussing Hegel, he pointed idealism at its leader, extracting a purity of implication which Hegel's writings, and followers, were alleged to lack. It was German idealism's 'hatred of all formalism', refutation of 'scientific realism' and 'truceless war against all abstractions' that he was admiring. It was this that had 'initiated in the minds of men like Hegel, Darwin or Mommsen' an unparalleled 'attention to facts in all their detail' and had been responsible for one of the 'supreme events in the history of thought'. The 'concrete universal' was not mentioned in The Idea of History, though it was in Speculum Mentis. But it was assumed. It permeated the argument, which was unintelligible without it, and which needed it to provide an object for historical knowledge: an 'infinite world', in which every fact was included and the outcome of which was a history that was 'universal', not in the sense that it could either be known by an individual historian or ever be achieved in fact, but in the sense that it was 'knowledge of an infinite whole whose parts, repeating the plan of the whole in their structure, are only known by reference to their context'. The claim that universal history was essential in theory and impossible in practice raised important difficulties. If historians could only understand the particular parts they dealt with in the context of the whole, and if the whole was in practice unknowable, it followed that they could never know a single part as it actually was. If, moreover, universal history was an object which both 'satisfied the mind' and was 'perfectly unknowable', it followed that history was both 'the crown' and the 'reductio ad absurdum' of knowledge as realists understood it, i.e. as something that was independent of the knowing mind. Realism, in fact, Collingwood suggested, was wrong, since it unified the world as 'object' only by separating it from the mind with a gulf which 'no thought could traverse'. It was with a view to traversing this gulf that he propounded the adage that 'the world of fact which is explicitly studied in history is implicitly nothing but the knowing mind as such'. This was as far as Collingwood got in Speculum Mentis. Descartes' insistence on seeing the 'objective' as the 'inseparable correlative of the subject's thought' was not pursued, except in relation to philosophy;

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nor was the conception of history as the mind knowing itself. In chapter VII (on Philosophy) as in the preceding chapter (on History), the assumption was that history, as objective realism understood it, was a 'dogmatism' to which knowledge could not be attributed and that to envisage historical thinking as an activity which affects its own object, as Collingwood insisted that one should, entailed an 'historical scepticism' to which there was 'no answer'. In the period immediately after Speculum Mentis, there were three developments: a tendency, first, to take the practice of historians as a guarantee of knowledge; a tendency, then, to divert scepticism away from history itself to denying that history can disclose the past; leading, finally, to investigation of the fact that historians can perceive and write from a variety of different angles. These points were put most clearly in an article The Limits of Historical Knowledge in The Journal of Philosophical Studies in 1928. Like the Aristotelian Society address, this article took up the positive aspect of Speculum Mentis, pursuing the implications of the historian's autonomy and justifying the ignorance historians had to show towards 'philosophy of history'. Historians were presented as being 'too much absorbed' in the attempt to 'apprehend facts' to be able to 'reflect upon the attempt'. It was implied that they knew as much as they needed to of what they were doing, and that what they were doing could be described as 'perception*. To say this was to make a philosophical statement, not an historical one, as Collingwood was at pains to explain. But in the unavoidable fusion that he implied between history and philosophy, the conception had practical implications. For if 'perception' was always 'thought. . . interpreting . . . the "data of sensation"' and if history was only an 'intense and sustained attempt' to show 'what it was that we perceive'; if, moreover, a 'past event which had left no trace on the historian's perceptible world' was to him 'unknowable', then it followed that it was 'by his thought' that the historian brought 'past events' to light. And if it was indeed 'his thought' through which he did this, then, even though his eyes were on 'the past' and not on his own 'thought', it mattered a very great deal what his 'thought' was like. 'Historical thought', therefore, was conceived of as being 'critical'. It compared and evaluated its 'sources' in order to discover whether they 'told the truth'. In approaching the 'truth' they told, it made no distinction between 'sources' and 'conclusions'. An historian's 'conclusions', as soon as he reached them, were his 'sources', all his 'sources

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were conclusions which he had reached'; and the conclusions reached at any particular point indicated the direction in which 'sources' for further 'conclusions' would be found. Since this process could go on indefinitely, it followed that there was no 'finite number of facts' that constituted the 'sources' for any 'given' historical 'period'. 'The historian's data', it was said, 'consist of what he is able to perceive' and 'the infinite whole of fact which it is the historian's business to determine is . . . a world whose centre is the historian's "immediate" perception, and whose radius is measured by the depth to which he can see into the significance of that perception.' This did not mean that an historian's perception was arbitrary. But it was offered as a 'necessary implication of the historical consciousness' that 'each historian' had a 'number of problems' which for others were 'wholly non-existent', and that the 'circumferences' of historians' worlds must always 'fail to coincide'. It followed that since 'each historian saw history from his own centre, at an angle of his own . . . no one historian could see more than one aspect of the truth, and even an infinity of historians must always leave an infinity of aspects unseen'. CoUingwood recognized that historians had to make it their aim to discover the past. He not only did not argue that they should stop having this aim, he also argued that this was an aim they had to have if they were to write history. At the same time he argued that the aim was illusory, and that anyone, like himself, who had had experience of first-hand historical research, would confirm that historical knowledge was not ' "discovering" what really happened', since 'what really happened' was 'dead beyond recall'. Until [the historian] feels . . . firmly and habitually that . . . the past is . . . non-existent [he added] his historical technique is precarious . . . He does not want a real past, or rather, he only wants that in his moments of crude realism . . . What the historian wants is a real present . . . and he wants to be able to see this world as the living successor of an unreal, a dead and perished past . . . He is trying to know . . . the past as it appears from its traces in this present: the past of his world, or his past, the past which is the proper object of his historical researches, specialised as all historical researches must be and arising directly out of the world he perceives around him, as all historical researches must. II Whether CoUingwood intended history or philosophy to be fundamental is a matter of obvious importance. It is not, however, a problem

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that needs to be resolved here. Here it will be assumed that he thought of the fundamental activity in thought as something that may be called either history or philosophy or even historical philosophy, and that the important relationship was the relationship between it on the one hand and religion, art, and science on the other. With art and science it is possible to deal briefly, since they were 'arrests' in experience, shortfalls in relation to truth which suffered from a bar-sinister by the side of philosophy or metaphysics. The same was said of religion. But other things were said that were rather different. In many respects, Collingwood's view of religion was positive. He criticized its enemies, vindicated its existence and protected an area of autonomy which the religious could enjoy without regard to criticism from without. Through repeated affirmation of religion's importance and idiosyncracy in his early writings and through the identity that was asserted in his later ones between religion and metaphysics, he left his distinctive mark on the belief that religion lies at the root of all the thoughts and works of men. If it is true, as he suggested in Speculum Mentis, that his first book, Religion and Philosophy (1916), had been over-intellectualized, it is still the case that the continuity between the two books was considerable. Both were designed to be vindications of religion against positivism and materialism; both separated religion from other human activities and experiences; both claimed for it special characteristics which CoUingwood would not permit to be explained away in terms other than its own. If the rather different relationship envisaged in Fcdth and Reason, the Essay on Metaphysics, and Fascism and Nazism is to be understood, this early conception of the relationship must be understood first. The question CoUingwood asked in Religion and Philosophy was the same as the question in Speculum Mentis. It was not only about the relationship between religion on the one hand and art or science on the other, but also about the extent to which religion could claim a higher reality in relation to truth. The answer did not attribute truth to religion except obliquely, but the obliqueness of the attribution did not conceal a determination to protect it against the intellectual enemies by which it was surrounded. In Religion and Philosophy these enemies were identified in the two chief forms in which they had R.P.D.—o

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appeared in the previous fifty years - as reductionism on the one hand and as positivism on the other. Reductionism was the reduction of religion to 'ritual' by 'anthropologists', to 'conduct' by 'moralists', and to 'emotion' by those who wished to protect religion from atheistic materialism. Chapter 1 argued that emotion was not a 'separate function of the mind', that the higher religions were not to be judged by the practice of primitive religions, and that conduct without belief was not a description of religion but a proposal to 'reconstitute' it without the creeds. To go with these negative statements, there were positive assertions that religion had an 'intellectual element' which was both 'theology' and a 'cosmology or philosophical theory of the world'. The vindication of religion's intellectual characteristics did not mean that religion had no other characteristics besides. But the need to establish intellectual possibilities dominated the book, which presented 'the Christian Creed . . . as the critical solution of a philosophical problem'. In explaining the nature of this solution, Collingwood considered religion in its widest intellectual ramifications - as theology, in relation to art and science cursorily, and in relation to history and philosophy at length. Having established in chapter 1 that religion depended on creed and that all knowledge was 'in essence religious', chapter 2 established that it issued in conduct and that 'all morality' was 'religious'. Mind did not have two manifestations - 'consciousness and volition'. 'All consciousness' was 'volition' and all 'volition' was 'conscious', so there was no distinction between 'a life of thought' and 'a life of action'. It was because Mind was not distinguishable from its activities that 'the real unity of the religious life' could be vindicated. It was because there was 'only one kind of activity' - religion - which was 'at the same time' both 'thought and will, knowledge and action', that 'all true life was religious'. 'So far as anybody thinks' the adage was, 'he wills to think, and is so far already in possession of the complete or religious life, and the same is true of anyone who wills'. In the course of thus establishing the ubiquity of religion, Collingwood attacked views which denied it. In particular he attacked the ideal of objectivity. Chapter 3 of Religion and Philosophy attacked Comparative Religion and Historical Theology, not because in principle, if properly conducted, they provided an inadequate 'representation of religion' but because, as actually conducted, their representation has been 'unphilosophicaP.

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They had assumed that the Vexed questions of theology' were insoluble by 'the method of speculation' and that historical or anti-metaphysical methods could provide 'all the truth that can ever be known'. In discussing Comparative Religion, Collingwood rejected the assumption that classification and comparison of different forms of religion (whether anthropologically between peoples or psychologically between types) could disclose anything of consequence about them. They could not, he argued, unless attempts were made to 'determine the relation' between the 'mental events' that were discussed and the reality which the mind 'apprehended' through them. Psychology, in particular, was criticized for treating religious judgment as a 'mere event', and failing to ask whether there was a correspondence between beliefs about the 'nature of God' and the nature of God as it actually was. For the same reason the search for 'the historical Jesus' as 'a mere fact in history' instead of 'an idea in theology' produced knowledge of only the 'outward aspect of reality', and made it impossible to study the mind of Jesus 'from within'. In positive terms the core of the argument of chapter 2 concerned the connection between history and philosophy. Each was said there to be 'knowledge' and to 'presuppose the other', and to be likely to become 'abstract' or 'meaningless' if pursued in isolation. Each was said to depend on the fact that there was no 'dualism' between an 'unchanging, self-identical' world 'known by philosophy', and a world of 'change and development... known by history'. The last three pages of the chapter applied these views to theology, establishing that there was in fact 'only one theology' which was historical and philosophical at the same time. The main chapters of Religion and Philosophy applied biblical theology to philosophical problems about Matter and Mind, Personality and Evil, and the relationship between Time and Eternity. This in a way was illuminating. But if one asks what Collingwood believed about the 'truth of the Christian history', it is extremely difficult to be sure. He accepted the 'simple religious mind's' refusal to believe that as much could be learnt from the story of Christ if it was myth as if it was true. But he did not make it clear whether the homily on the need for 'objective history' - the parable of Christ's crucifixion - was more than a description of the arrested intellectuality that all men suffered in face of God's omniscience. It is in the shadow of this doubt that one may leave this crucial chapter by quoting the following paragraph.

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If a doctrine is simple and easy, containing nothing very new or paradoxical, a fiction is enough to drive it home. But if it is difficult to grasp and conflicts with our preconceived notions, our first impulse is to challenge the reality of the fact which serves as an instance . . . No doubt to an absolutely perfect mind a fiction would be as illuminating as a fact, because ex hypothesi such a mind would have no special difficulty in grasping any truth, however subtle, and would stand in no need of, so to speak, forcible conviction. A person who was the equal or superior of Jesus Christ in spiritual insight could give up his historicity and not lose by it. But such a description only applies to God. And in God, we can no longer distinguish between the historical and the imaginary. If, speaking in a Platonic myth, we describe the course of history as a story told to himself by God, it makes no difference whether we say the story is imaginary or true. But for us objective fact, history, is necessary. We all have something of the spirit of Thomas, and must know a thing has happened before we can believe its teaching. Is this, perhaps, one reason for the difference between the parables that Jesus spoke and the parable he acted? He knew the limitations of his audience; he saw what they could understand and what they could not. Some things about God he could tell them in words, and they would believe his words; but one last thing - how could he tell that? and if he could find words to tell it, who would not mock him for a visionary or shrink from him as blasphemer? There was only one way; to act the parable he could not speak: We are accustomed to think of the death of Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins. Was it not also, perhaps, a sacrifice for our stupidity? There is no reason to suppose that Collingwood ever receded from the vindicatory aspects of Religion and Philosophy, Religion and Philosophy, however, was a Green or Rashdall-like mish-mash, an attempt to marry Christianity to Philosophy and Philosophy to Christianity by arguing an identity between them. It was in this respect that Collingwood's opinions were to develop along two different routes, as the Speculum Mentis view of religion as an arrest in relation to philosophy and history was transformed into the identification between religion and civilization which is to be found in Faith and Reason and the Essay on Metaphysics. These developments did not tear the tissue which bound philosophy, theology, and history together. By 1913, when Religion and Philosophy was drafted, Collingwood had already become what he was to remain the protagonist of a view which denied to ecclesiastical religion the priority it claimed for itself, while feeling no obligation to make it clear, in his most widely read books, that this was what he was doing. In many respects Speculum Mentis recognized the uniqueness of

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religion; it contained more, and far weightier, statements than Religion and Philosophy of the view that religion reveals 'the secret of the universe' and that the higher religions had produced 'for the first time' an 'explicit logical structure' which sustained 'a single supreme God worshipped by a single universal church'. The fact that the higher religions had an object - God - and 'an explicitly rational character' did not mean, however, that religion was to be identified with theology. More clearly than in Religion and Philosophy, Speculum Mentis emphasized that religion was not to be identified with theology 'prematurely', and that it was the sense of God's 'holiness' and the obligation to worship him that supplied the 'specific differentia of the religious experience'. In distinguishing religion from theology, Collingwood was distinguishing worship from the eliciting of meaning. Religion certainly had a meaning which had to be elicited. But eliciting was not the centre of religion, which always supposed that it had expressed its meaning before the eliciting had begun, and was justified both in 'claiming truth' and 'refusing to argue' so far as the 'formulae of worship and prayer' reflected its 'self-abasement' before God. These 'formulae' were 'symbols'; they were different both from feeling on the one hand and from understanding on the other. In the hands of mystics, they were demolished by direct discovery of God. For the ordinary religious, they were 'fused' with 'the truth'. Collingwood wrote of religious truths being 'occulted by their own symbolism' in the idea of 'a universal Church' worshipping a 'universal God' to love, fear and adore whom in their hearts 'broke down' the 'mud-wall of partition' and led 'from the things that are seen and temporal to the things that are unseen and eternal'. Chapter IV of Speculum Mentis recorded an acute sense of men's 'powerlessness' in relation to God, and of the 'supreme blasphemy' committed when they claimed 'equality' with Him. They also registered regard for the Incarnation and Atonement - the 'high-water mark of religious development' which it was difficult to believe that religion would improve on as a solution to the problem created by consciousness of 'alienation' between Man and God. This solution [went a curious passage on p. 143] was actually achieved . . . by and within religion itself . . . But the very religion which had produced it repudiated i t . . . as blasphemy or irreligion. The solution of the religious problem came to its own, and its own received it not. And this . . . had to be. It was as necessary that Christ should be rejected as that he should

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rise again on the third day. For his message was the death-warrant of the religious consciousness . . . and all that was strongest . . . in the religious consciousness rose up against it to destroy it . . . The Christian gospel announced the ending . . . once for all . . . of the opposition . . . between Man and God . . . not by the repetition of acts of worship, by the blood of bulls and goats, but by the very act of God which was at the same time the death of God. The one atoning sacrifice of Christ swept away temple and priests, ritual and oblation, and prayer and praise, and left nothing but a sense that the end of all things was at hand and a new world about to appear in which the first things should have passed away . . . If the reader is tempted to reply that the view here set forth makes Christianity not a religion at a l l . . . he must be reminded that Christianity has here been defined . . . as the solution of the problem whose existence constitutes religion in general. To find this solution is the work of the religious consciousness, not of any other form of consciousness; and the solution being correlative to its own problem, only continues to exist as long as the problem continues to exist. The very existence of the religious problem in any phase, however primitive, implies some kind of dim and instinctive solution of it. Hence even the darkest heathenism is, as Christians have always said, an implicit, blind or caricatured Christianity. On the other hand, the origin of explicit Christianity marked, not the disappearance of religion, but the discovery by religion of the answer to its own questions. Now a question whose answer is given logically ceases to be asked; and that implies the end of religion on the coming of Christianity, and that in its turn implies the end of Christianity also. But what is true in the logic of explicit reason is not true in the logic of implicit reason . . . Here the problem and its solution present themselves, not in the form of logical question and answer but in the imaginative form of an enacted drama or sacred story. Logically analysed, the whole point of this drama is the overcoming of its own initial error; but in religion logical analysis is only implicit: it solves problems, it gives knowledge, it reveals truth, but without knowing what it is doing. Hence religion can only satisfy itself that its problem is really solved by restating both it and its solution in their imaginative form: the cosmic mystery-play of the fall and the atonement. Thus Christianity, which is implicitly the death of religion, is explicitly the one true and perfect religion, the only religion which gives the soul peace and satisfaction by solving the specifically religious problem. These statements went far beyond Religion and Philosophy in asserting the autonomy of the religious consciousness and differentiating it from historical, philosophical and theological thinking. In these respects they seemed to imply that religion was invulnerable. Nevertheless, the argument of Speculum Mentis was that religion was vulnerable so far as, being a continuation of art, it suffered the defects that art suffered. Religion 'believed', it is true, in the 'figments of its imagination' and

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'asserted its own object' where art was merely an 'imagining'. But religion could no more 'justify itself to reason' than art could, nor 'rise wholly above the level of superstition'. As an experience, it was 'intermittent and unstable'. It fell back on 'feeling and emotion' and postulated a division of life between 'sacred and secular'. The objects it gave itself were 'metaphorical' or 'mythological' and asserted the reality of an 'image', not the reality of the truth which the image meant. The God of religion was 'adored' not 'known', spoke to the 'heart' rather than to the 'intellect', and was quite different from the 'absolute', 'demonstrated', or 'ultimate reality' of theological and philosophical analysis. In differentiating religion from theology, as he did throughout Speculum Mentis, Collingwood was reacting against the blurring he had effected in Religion and Philosophy. In the process he succeeded only in establishing the intellectual superiority of philosophy. We do not sufficiently realize [he wrote at the end of chapter IV] that all religion up to its very highest manifestations is mythological . . . and that mythology is finally extruded from religion only when religion itself perishes and gives place to philosophy. God as such is the mythological symbol under which religion cognizes the absolute: he is not a concept but the symbol of a concept. However hard we try to purify our idea of God from mythological elements, the very intuitiveness of our attitude towards that idea mythologises it once more. 'I believe in God' is . . . a religious statement, never a philosophical statement. It is a statement which challenges the philosophical reply 'What do you mean by God?' and when that question is asked, nothing but a deliberate stopping of the wheels of thought will arrest the conversion of theology into philosophy. No attempt to save theology, under the name of philosophical theism, can resist this process. In point of fact, we have long ago left religion behind. Theology is a manifestation not of the religious spirit but of the scientific spirit . . . In . . . this . . . we leave the world of imagination and enter upon the world of thought. The world of imagination is thought implicit; the world of thought, so called, is thought explicit. In art and religion, thought is present, but it is deceived as to its own nature. In art it is so far deceived as to be ignorant of its very existence and to suppose itself mere imagination: yet even in that error, it is thought, for nothing but thought can err. Thus art is the last possible degree of the implicitness of thought. In religion thought knows that it exists; religion asserts and knows that it asserts. But though here thought knows that it exists, it is so far ignorant of its own nature that it mistakes imagining for thinking, and asserts the reality of what is really only a symbol. Hence the truth is in religion only intuitively known, not logically known, and its real nature as truth - as concept, as object of

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thought - is concealed. Religion, like art, is a philosophical error. It is specifically the error of mythologizing reality, of taking language literally instead of metaphorically.

in In Speculum Mentis religion was perceived as an arrest, and it seems at first sight entirely consistent not only that this should have been the last full-scale work that Collingwood wrote about religion but also that his later works should deal primarily with philosophy or metaphysics. To say this, however, is to make the contrast too sharp. Though a great silence seemed to have descended on 'religion' in Collingwood's writings after 1930, the reality was that it disappeared in one form in order to reappear in another. In Religion and Philosophy'Collingwood had virtually amalgamated religion, theology, philosophy and history. Speculum Mentis distinguished religion as a form of experience which, like art or science, fell short of philosophy in almost all the respects that mattered. Faith and Reason was an attempt to understand the conflict between religion and science and provide a form of words that would point to a reconciliation. What it pointed to in fact, though this was not quite reached in the article itself, was a reconciliation between religion and philosophy. In Faith and Reason the distinction between the two main subjects was put as follows. On the one hand faith was a 'habit of mind' which 'accepts without criticizing, pronounces without proving and acts without arguing' and, having no use for the 'machinery of thought', finds its 'proper expression' in religion. On the other there was reason a 'habit of mind' which 'criticizes before it accepts, proves before it pronounces and argues before it acts', and which finds its proper expression in 'what we call science'. Faith and Reason, or Religion and Science, each represented a 'value' whose 'enrichment of human life was not to be measured in terms of comfort, whether of body or . . . mind'. But, though each was necessary to the other, there had been an apparently irreconcilable conflict between them. Where 'logical scientific thought' had taken its rise amongst the Greeks, faith owed its importance to Christianity, which had proposed the revolutionary view that 'God' was the 'supreme reality and . . . organ of knowledge' and that faith was as manifestly superior to 'reason' as 'reason' to 'sense'.

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The Christian disjunction was said to be workable in principle. But it had not worked in the Middle Ages, because faith and reason had been given 'two distinct spheres each lying outside the other'. From the Renaissance onwards this had created endless difficulties until Descartes and Kant had shown the way towards resolving them. The role assigned to religion in Faith and Reason was more general than in Speculum Mentis and more closely connected with 'knowledge'. Little remained of the idea that religion involved an arrest and it was no longer described as speaking in symbols or mistaking symbols for truth. Now religion was truth - or rather these underground assumptions about reality which the Essay on Metaphysics showed that it was the business of metaphysics to disclose. If the essays of 1933 and 1940, An Autobiography and the article on Fascism and Nazism, are read in the light of Collingwood's apparent abandonment of religion as a subject for discussion, it will become clear that religion had been abandoned only in the sense that it had become the 'vital warmth at the heart of a civilization'. Religion was now the 'passion which inspired a society to persevere in a certain way of life', and the important point was that this was what metaphysics was too. The theme of the Essay on Philosophical Method was that the aim of philosophy is to 'formulate its thought categorically'. Philosophy was a form of thought whose subject-matter was 'something actually existing' and whose content consisted of 'categorical propositions'. These, however, were neither merely normative nor merely descriptive; they gave accounts of how people thought they should think and behave in full awareness of the fact that the fact that they thought involved the possibility of giving effect to their thinking. Philosophy, as thus conceived, was checked by an 'appeal to experience' but in a way that was neither inductive nor deductive, and was quite different from the appeal to experience characteristic of the 'exact sciences'. Philosophy took an existing body of experience which thought had had and had put to itself as 'rational', and then explained it. Explaining involved 'refutation' of the 'principles' which had been promulgated so far, and this was true so universally that 'whatever positive doctrine had been propounded, the next step for philosophy' was to replace it by 'new principles implied in the critical process itself. In the Essay on Philosophical Method Collingwood did not say much about the historical or relativistic nature of philosophical think-

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ing. There his aim was to affirm the existence of an object for philosophy to study, and the importance of method and system in studying it. On the other hand, the Essay on Philosophical Method did not reach the position of the Essay on Metaphysics - the claim that a philosophical system gave coherent expression to the assumptions that a philosopher's contemporaries make about 'science'. In the Essay on Philosophical Method a philosophical system arose 'by objective necessity' out of a philosopher's 'situation in the history of thought'. It was not, however, the situation that was emphasized so much as the fact that no one philosopher's system could be acceptable to another. Each system involved supersession of the others by absorbing them into itself, and each had to 'sum up' the whole scale on which it was working at each point at which systematization occurred. 'As one form in a scale, an individual philosophy was said to be 'a single moment in the history of thought' which, by 'reinterpreting and reaffirming' previous philosophies as 'elements within itself, summarized 'the whole previous course of that history'. The Essay on Philosophical Method linked the individual philosopher as much to the tradition of philosophical thinking as to his own situation: it also presented a philosophy as a record of whatever the philosopher had lived through, conceiving it as being addressed primarily to the philosopher himself, and being 'confessional' in so far as it represented his mind's 'search . . . for its own failings'. Philosophical writing was conceived of as a branch of literature, rather in the way that poetry was, except that philosophy claimed to pursue truth. Where historical writing was didactic and self-critical, philosophy was a 'poem of the intellect' which expressed not 'emotions, desires, feelings as such but those which a thinking mind experiences in its search for knowledge'. The corollary was put as follows: The reader . . . must approach his philosophical author precisely as if he were a poet . . . He must seek in his work the expression of an individual experience, something which the writer has actually lived through, and something which the reader must live through in his turn by entering into the writer's mind with his own. To this basic and ultimate task of following or understanding his author, coming to see what he means by sharing his experience, the task of criticising his doctrine, or determining how far it is true and how far false, is altogether secondary. A good reader . . . must be quiet in order to be attentive; able to refrain from obtruding his own thoughts, the better to apprehend those of the writer; not passive, but using his activity to follow where he is led, not to find a path of his own.

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By 1933 the demand for empathy and receptiveness was a distinctive feature of Collingwood's metaphysical position. It was to be the most important feature of the Essay on Metaphysics. The argument of the Essay on Metaphysics was that metaphysics was not to be thought of in the terms in which Aristotle had thought of it along one line of his thinking - as a pure science of being. It was not to be thought of in this way, and ontology was a mistake, because a science must not only issue in 'orderly and systematic thinking' but must also have a 'definite subject-matter'. Ontology had no such subject-matter since 'pure being' contained no 'peculiarities for science to examine' and metaphysics had, therefore, to be understood along the other line of Aristotle's definition - as the study of presuppositions. The main part of this argument was contained in chapters IV-VII where metaphysics confined itself to studying absolute presuppositions in the forms in which they had been made 'by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking'. This was the sense in which metaphysics was an historical study. 'All metaphysical questions' were said to be 'historical questions' about 'what absolute presuppositions were made on a certain occasion'. It was likely that the same presuppositions would be made by people who had the same 'cultural equipment' - 'social and political habits, religion, education and so forth'. But it was not the case that 'an absolute presupposition' could be 'ascribed to all human beings everywhere and always'. It was also the case that metaphysical writing should not be discussed in terms of 'doctrines' and 'schools' since metaphysics was merely the attempt to discover 'what absolute presuppositions were made by scientists in [their] own time'. Metaphysics, therefore, was analytical. It showed what absolute presuppositions were held. It recognized that their force depended on their being 'presupposed' not on their being 'true', and that, since they were 'not verifiable', there was no point in trying to 'judge' them. Their 'logical efficacy' being 'independent' of their 'truth', such phrases as 'inquiring into the truth of an absolute presupposition' were said flatly to be 'nonsense'. From all this, three important conclusions were drawn. First, that there are no 'eternal' or 'crucial' or 'central' problems in metaphysics, only successive problems which 'correspond . . . with differences in the entire fabric of civilization'. Secondly, that, since 'any given constellation of absolute presuppositions' made at any particular time and place

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would have a certain 'intricacy and restlessness in its structure', it followed that the conception of metaphysics as a 'deductive science' producing a 'strainless structure like a body of properties in mathematics' was a 'pernicious error'. Finally, that presuppositions were ubiquitous - present in all thought, and not least in metaphysics, from which it was the 'greatest nonsense' to suppose that they could be removed. In the Essay on Metaphysics, Collingwood was thinking chiefly about mathematical physics - 'what absolute presuppositions are or were made by . . . Newtonians, Kantians, Einsteinians and so forth'. In The Permanent Problems of Metaphysics he was thinking about Freud. In doing so, however, he made it clear that the metaphysical exposure of presuppositions could be applied to all systematic subjects, and that 'metaphysics' was historical criticism - as fundamental as the assertions which 'faith' made in Faith and Reason - of the foundations of civilization. IV At the end of the Essay on Metaphysics Collingwood gave as his reason for offering to the public what might seem to be an academic essay, the fact that the questions he had been discussing involved 'the fate of European science and . . . civilization'. The gravity of the peril [he went on] lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and gown and fed at a college table; but cackling is my job and cackle I will. Collingwood wrote many paragraphs of this sort, particularly in the anti-Nazi atmosphere of the thirties and forties. But these were not just the result of absorption in that peculiarly unpleasant climate. There was also a psychological pressure to make thought issue in action, as Collingwood himself reported in An Autobiography - which was his Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. In addition there was a doctrinal pressure which permeated all his writings and may best be approached by examining the unpublished book on Fazry-Tales, the earlier chapters of Speculum Mentis and the centenary lecture on Ruskin that he delivered at Coniston in the Lake District in 1919. Collingwood's father had been Ruskin's secretary and biographer:

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Collingwood himself was kept at home until he was thirteen and educated in Ruskin's shadow. The range of Collingwood's interests was Ruskinian before it was Hegelian or Crocean, and was moralistic in Ruskin's rather obvious fashion before it was refined by Greats at Oxford. There is every reason to attribute to his 'first and best teacher of Art, Religion, Science, History, and Philosophy' - his father - that consciousness of the social responsibility of thought which is apparent throughout his writing, and nowhere more apparent than in this early lecture. Section IV of Ruskin's Philosophy contained a crude announcement of Collingwood's views about the history of thought. In identifying Ruskin as a natural Hegelian and an unconscious agent of the historical thinking which Hegel had invented, it drew a contrast with the logicism which had been 'universally in fashion' in the 'age of rationalism . . . during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries'. Unlike Popper twenty years later, Collingwood did not use 'historicism' as a term of abuse. For him, it was a mentality which took time seriously, preferred 'facts to theories', and attached as much importance to instances as to general laws. Where logicism produced an 'unquestioning obedience to precept and precedent', historicism aimed at 'freedom and variety' in art and thought and a 'scepticism with regard to the permanence of political structures' which had made it an integral feature of the 'age of revolutions'. Recognizing the many-sidedness of truth and the value of 'self-contradiction', it found it inconceivable that 'anything could have existed unless it had something to say for itself. It was historicism's mixture of love, tolerance, and sympathy which had linked Ruskin to Hegel, made Ruskin unique in his age, and given him his significance for the twentieth century. For he alone, among Victorians, had avoided priggishness and philistinism. He alone apart from a few Hegelian idealists, had been free of the combination of 'intellectual scepticism and moral dogmatism' which had eaten 'like a canker' into the 'whole life of the nineteenth century'. During the whole of the central and later Victorian period [went a passage on pp. 26-7] it was usual for educated and thoughtful Englishmen to believe as a matter of course that the mind has two faculties, the theoretical and the practical, and that the theoretical was fundamentally unreliable, while the practical was always trustworthy. Thus, they held, you could never settle questions of ultimate, absolute truth, and it was no good trying: but moral questions you could and must settle. So it became the fashion to despair of solving difficult intellectual problems, while moral

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problems of at least equal difficulty were held to be soluble without hesitation, by the employment of the faculty called conscience, which you had only to obey and all would be well. This combination of intellectual scepticism with moral dogmatism is so characteristic of the Victorian age t h a t . . . you will find it to be the leading feature of the philosophy of that period, taken as a whole. Its effect on the general temper of the age was nothing short of disastrous. It inculcated moral narrowness combined with intellectual apathy, and made the Victorian Englishman appear in the eyes of the world as a prig and a Philistine, religious in it, proud of his ignorance, confident in his monopoly of a sense of justice and 'fair play', and boasting of an educational system which did not stuff a boy's head with facts, still less with ideas, but taught him to behave like a gentleman. It was the same fallacy that underlay the typically Victorian suggestion that the doctrines of Christian belief should be given up as being incapable of proof, while the Christian ethics should be preserved, as the best ethical system in existence.

The lecture on Ruskin, though doubtless heartfelt, was an occasional piece, and also an unsystematic one. It did not take history at its widest range, or impute to historical thinking as fundamental a role as was to be imputed in Fairy-Tales. Fairy-Tales has not entered into the Collingwood canon because he did not publish it while he was alive, and it was not thought worthy of publication after his death. Yet it is an extensive and characteristic document which conceptualized anthropology as an historical study and used an historical approach to magic and primitive religion as a way of explaining, evaluating, and criticizing rationalistic or logicist misunderstandings of civilization. A substantial part of Fairy-Tales consisted of an account of the erroneous views of magic and primitive religion which had been given by earlier thinkers, not only by Grimm and Max-Miiller, but also by Tylor, Frazer, Freud, and Jung. Collingwood criticized Tylor's animism and his comparative method. But he described his functionalism as rendering a 'great service' by establishing that savage or primitive religion should not be identified with depravity, that any religion when understood in its context was 'logical' to a high degree, and that 'any . . . myth' that was found in a 'primitive country' stood 'in the closest relation with the customs of the people among whom it had originated'. In The Golden Bough he saw an execution of this insight which, however, had been defective because it had been written in an age when 'natural science' was regarded as the 'only genuine form of knowledge', and had treated

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primitive religions as external to itself and the civilization of which it was a part. It was because Frazer's methodological assumption had been naturalism, logicism or Cartesianism that he had failed to 'recreate in his own mind' the 'experience' whose outward expression he was studying. It was because Frazer's assumption was endemic in European civilization that the reformation of anthropology had implications for the reformation of life. The connections that Collingwood made between anthropology and civilization were put best in the course of discussing Totem and Taboo and The Psychology of the Unconscious, These too were said to have adopted a naturalistic method. Freud had substituted a 'long tragedy of mental derangement' for Frazer's 'long tragedy of human folly', Jung had equated 'myth' with 'dream'; both had failed to understand that 'our own civilization has come to be what it is by development out of a more primitive one', and that a naturalistic anthropology which viewed primitive man 'from the outside' made it impossible to bridge the gap between 'savagery' and the 'scientific point of view achieved by the educated elite'. The remedy - historical sympathy - was described at length. It included the idea that modern men had the savage inside them and that their attitude to him indicated their judgment of themselves. Savagery, projected as naturalism had projected it, had been a 'fantasy' in which their 'repressed wishes' had been given 'licence for imaginary gratification'. As historical sympathy would project it, it would be an assumption that field-workers would understand better than those, like Frazer, who had worked from books - that savages were not to be treated with 'contempt . . . ridicule . . . disparagement . . . and superciliousness' but as 'men and women, living their own lives in their own way, and . . . living them as decently and rationally as ourselves'. Chapter IV of Fairy-Tales contained an embarrassing discussion of the extent to which primitive magic was to be found among civilized peoples. Its removal from 'European-American life' since the seventeenth century - the replacement, for example, of witch-burning by ridicule - was described in terms of a utilitarian or rationalistic frame of mind treating emotion as a thing to be 'repressed'. It was suggested that emotion ought not to be repressed, that a 'moral discipline' was involved in the attempt not to repress it, and that the use of historical anthropology was to point out that magic, like savagery, was a 'spontaneous expression of emotion': a 'permanent form of human experience' which lay at the 'heart and root of our civilization'.

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It is not known why Collingwood did not publish Fairy-Tales or whether he would have persisted with its analysis of civilization if he had. Had he done so, he would have made it clear that he was making the same claims for historical anthropology that he had made for philosophy in Speculum Mentis. It is sometimes alleged that Speculum Mentis was an early work which Collingwood later abandoned. In quite a number of respects it was, just as Religion and Philosophy was. In other respects it was not especially so far as Speculum Mentis claimed for philosophy a central role in the future. By 1938 Collingwood had altered his view of the situation to which relevant thinking responded, and the situation had changed. But the role claimed for philosophy between 1938 and 1942, though claimed shrilly and in The New Leviathan hysterically in relation to Nazi and Realist Irrationality, was a continuation of the systematic criticism of Renaissance civilization which had been announced in Speculum Mentis. In Speculum Mentis the 'depth and seriousness' of Renaissance thinking was held up for admiration, as was 'the quality of its laughter . . . the way in which for Shakespeare, for example, the dreadfulness of life lurks among the rose leaves of the lightest comedy'. But it was repeatedly stated that the Renaissance had done two sorts of damage. In the first place, by fragmenting the functions performed by the intelligentsia, it had compelled individuals to choose one function to the exclusion of the others and had made it impossible for 'priests, artists, and scientists' to combine 'without friction in a single social organism'. 'Art for art's sake, truth for truth's sake, religion for religion's sake' were thus manifestations of a 'freedom' which had turned their practitioners into 'wrecks and fragments of men', producing Reformation religion on the one hand and aesthetic paganism on the other. Secondly, and as a consequence of specialization, each activity had become 'unsatisfying' to the specialists who dominated it and 'useless to the rest of mankind'. Academicism in art and philosophy, and churches that were 'out of touch with the people', showed how little specialization could 'solve the problems of the spirit' which were felt acutely in 'every street and village in the country'. This was the 'special problem' which distinguished 'modern life' from the unified religious life of the Middle Ages - that an 'unsatisfied demand for art, religion and

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philosophy' coexisted with a crowd of 'artists, philosophers and ministers of religion' who could 'find no market for their wares'. Collingwood recognized that there was 'spiritual energy' in the modern world, especially in pursuit of sport, money and politics. He did not even say that modern men ought to be interested in art, religion and philosophy. His claim was simply that since the demand for these things existed, Speculum Mentis would 'explore the avenues' that would enable the intelligentsia to meet it. The remedy he proposed was the book itself, the philosophical argument that 'built up the conception of an activity' which was 'at once art, religion, science and the rest' and which, through historical philosophy, traditional Christianity or a new interpretation of Christianity, would get back behind the Renaissance in order to establish 'a single corporate mind' as truly unified as ever was that of the middle ages. There is nothing new about this answer [he declared towards the end of the Prologue]. It is the fundamental principle of Christianity that the only life worth living is the life of the whole man . . . Incarnation, redemption, resurrection of the body only repeat this cardinal idea from different angles. Again, it is the outer aspect of this same principle on which Christianity insists when it teaches that the individual man . . . is nothing without his fellow men: that the holy spirit lives not in this man or that but in the church as the unity of all faithful people... Our solution, then, can only be in principle the Christian solution . . . not . . . the naive Christianity of the middle ages or the self-mutilated Christianity of the Renaissance but something in which the good of both these is preserved . . . Ever since the negative aspect of the Renaissance culminated in the eighteenth century, it has been clear that some kind of renewed mediaevalism . . . was the only hope for the world's future . . . We . . . claim no more than to be following and working out the tradition founded over a century ago by the great men of the Romantic movement; purifying it, perhaps, of some things that are worthless today but . . . anxious above a l l . . . to say once more, in words suited to our generation, something that everybody has always known. When Speculum Mentis was published in 1924, these were the practical tasks that Collingwood attributed to it. It is possible that he assumed the argument of the Prologue in his subsequent writing and was both defending Christianity and reunifying thought in the process of writing The Principles of Art and the essays of 1933 and 1940. It is possible, on the other hand, that he was not. We have already noticed the absence of Christianity from his writing after 1930, except as an

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example of presuppositions in the Essay on Metaphysics Part III, in the creation of modern science in The Idea of Nature, and as the origin of modern politics in Nazism and Fascism. 1930 was the year from which he dated his real commitment to historical metaphysics and it must be an open question whether these two facts were coincidental. Whether a Christian reunification was the unstated assumption or not, the odium theologicum which was apparent in nearly all of CoUingwood's political writings after about 1938 was directed, at least ostensibly, to purposes rather different from those which had been laid out in 1924. In An Autobiography, Collingwood described his political attitudes as 'democratic' or 'liberal'. He announced his belief in a 'wide franchise, a free press . . . and free speech' which, so long as voters had been 'well enough informed and public-spirited', had ensured that 'fools and knaves would be outvoted'. This he believed had been achieved by the mid-Victorian polity. But he believed that it had been threatened by the 1884 Reform Act, the Boer War and Northcliffe's creation of a non-thinking popular press, and had been irretrievably damaged by the 1906 government's debasing of the language of social legislation which had led through Lloyd George's '9d for 4d' to the prospect of class war destroying parliamentary government - on the one side because socialists believed that parliamentary institutions were obstacles to socialism, on the other because the agents of capitalism saw them as threats to capitalism. It is not surprising that an analysis of this sort, supported in some cases by reference to Marx but displaying more usually the soured resentment of defeated Liberalism, identified Chamberlain with Fascism, 'irrationalism', and 'the new barbarism'. By 1942 the 'new barbarism' meant primarily the Germans, as The New Leviathan made clear. But it also meant the doctrines the Germans had embraced - the things that 'our soldiers and sailors and airmen have to fight' and which therefore our 'philosophers' should 'understand'. To the man of destiny which Collingwood had become by 1939, this included any failure to recognize the significance of metaphysics as the science of absolute presuppositions. This had not been CoUingwood's position even a few years earlier. Then the dominant political fact had been the 'breakdown of Liberalism'. As an 'ethical political theory', Liberalism, otherwise called democracy, was described as the refutation of another 'theory' - the theory that 'ethical and political divergences' can be resolved only by warfare

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or compromise. The liberal idea was that, in addition to the good which each citizen pursued for himself, there was a 'common or general good . . . of society' which was more important to each citizen than his own good because it was the presupposition without which his own good could not be pursued. The common good which Liberalism conceptualized was not, however, simply imposed. It was part of a dialectical process which was distinguished from despotism by the recognition that being ruled is as much an activity as ruling, and that freedom consists in both sides of a 'bipolar act'. This act constituted the political action of a state, and it was necessary, Collingwood argued, if politics was to be a category of ethics, that obedience to command should be 'given by a mind to itself'. Political command was not the same as 'pure force'; nor was obedience a matter of 'passivity' in the face of force. In a modern political relationship, a man did what he was told to do but did it 'of his own volition'. 'It takes two to command', went an adage, and ruling involves a 'genuine cooperation between the commander and the obeyer'. These were fragmentary insights, but they were given contemporary applications not only in the thirties, when they were probably written, but also from the point immediately after the First World War at which Collingwood had begun to speak about public policy. Collingwood's political opinions were not especially original; in many respects they were the commonplaces of inter-war Liberalism, reflecting its gloom and pessimism and its belief that civilization was dying. The First World War was explained as the outcome of 'deepseated spiritual evils' arising from the claim that 'the State is . . . God' which had been made first by Hegel (though he had not really believed it) and had issued in two doctrines that were to dominate the twentieth century: the 'dictatorship of the conquering race' in Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and monarchical absolutism, and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in Marxist-Leninism. This was a 'disease' which threatened to become fatal. The remedy, as for so many in 1919, was a League of Nations that would subject national power to 'international morality' and, through a 'spirit of mutual. . . trust', prevent both 'national war' and 'class war'. 'We must realise' went an unfortunate passage in an address to a Belgian Students Conference in that year 'each one of us individually - that there is no evil in this country or in the world that is not in some degree our personal concern and that it is our positive and urgent duty to help in the realization of every good not only for ourselves, our class and our race, but for everyone.'

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Beginning as he did with this range of expectations, it was not surprising that Collingwood succumbed, as he accused Schopenhauer and von Hartmann of doing, to a pessimism born of misunderstanding. Pessimism and misunderstanding impregnated The New Leviathan, and it would be easy to take The New Leviathan apart. But, since Collingwood was dying when he wrote it, it may be best to ignore it, and to examine instead an unpublished paper which records better than anything else he wrote the significance he attached to the 'breakdown of liberalism' as a prelude to the 'death of civilization'. Man Goes Mad was written in August 1936 after Neville Chamberlain had announced that the League of Nations was in disarray and that League-based sanctions against Italy had been the 'very midsummer of madness'. It was written in a climate in which Conservative publicists were moving in to kill the League, its rhetoric, and the expectations that its protagonists had encouraged. Collingwood's paper was a warning against that 'resolution of the nation into a fighting machine' which, though it had for long been 'manifest on the Continent', had 'hitherto hardly dawned upon the English consciousness'. It claimed that English statesmen were lending themselves to 'modern war' with its imprecision of objective and 'quasi-religious character', and were doing so in a way that would turn 'parliamentary' into 'authoritarian government' by removing the essential characteristic of a liberal state, 'the dialectical solution' - 'free discussion' of all political problems leading to the establishment of 'common grounds on which to act'. Collingwood did not blame English statesmen; he blamed 'our grandfathers' for failing to reform international relations when they could have done so. Liberal democracy had been 'one of the greatest achievements of our civilization', but it was because of the 'crimes' that had been committed in its name 'in the period of its greatness' that it was now being punished by its death. Collingwood was depressed by the death of Liberalism and tried to provide a philosophical resuscitation. This was not really proceeded with, unless The New Leviathan is regarded as its completion. There can be no doubt, however, that he connected the death of Civilization with the death of Liberalism and explained both in terms of the predominance of Realism. Realism, as Collingwood understood it, was not only an explanatory philosophy but was also a socio-political practice which led on from the assertion that 'nothing is affected by being known' to the conclusion

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that philosophy could not 'make any difference to action' and should not provide 'ideals' or 'principles' for men to live by. As a philosophy, Realism was not dismissed out of hand. Bradley, paradoxically, was praised for inventing it, Alexander, Russell and Whitehead for some of their developments of it. But the outcome was said to have been three-fold. It had made philosophy so 'scientific' that 'no-one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it'; it had demoralized many of the philosophers who had taught it; and in the absence of guidance from them about the problems of life, it had opened the way for guidance to be given, as it had been in England for the last fifty years, by 'adventurers in morals, politics, commerce and religion'. In Part II of the Essay on Metaphysics Collingwood answered three types of anti-metaphysical criticism of the philosophical position he had sketched in Part I. These were answers of principle. His real objection was to the corrupting consequences of the assumptions from which the critics argued and indeed, when animus was strongest, as in An Autobiography, to the corrupting intentions which he imputed to them. There were blanket assaults on positivism, on psychology as an attempt to put ethics and metaphysics out of business, and on Ayer's attempt, in Language, Truth and Logic, to get rid of presuppositions altogether. In these works the message was that any attempt to free thought of absolute presuppositions would destroy both science and civilization. Collingwood did not suggest that there had been a 'conspiracy'. But there had been an 'epidemic disease' producing a 'withering of belief in the importance of truth' and a recession from the 'obligation to think and act in a systematic and methodical way'. This had already produced irrational emphases on 'intuition' in science and 'emotion' in religion, and was now producing an equally odious emphasis on 'terror' and the leadership principle in politics. Has the political tradition of our civilization [went a long rhetorical question on p. 138, which would have made Wei bourne weep] been based on the idea of a political life lived according to a plan whose chief recommendation has been its claim to reasonableness? Have political leaders been chosen in the past for their supposed intelligence, far-sightedness, grasp on principles, and skill in devising means to ends that accorded with these principles? Have their followers been persons whose intellect, inferior to theirs in power, nevertheless agreed with it as one intellect does agree with another, by thinking in the same way? Have the methods by which leaders carried their points against opponents and secured their hold over their followers been the methods of reason; that is, public

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discussion of principles, public statement of facts and public debate as to the relation between principles and policies? . . . And has there been a tendency of late years to become impatient with the work of politically educating an entire people: to chose leaders not for their intellectual powers but for their ability to excite mass emotions; to induce in followers not an ability to think . . . but certain emotions which . . . will explode into action with no questions asked as to where such action will lead; and to suppress discussion and information in favour of what is called propaganda . . . And have these changes gone so far that even the characteristic facial expression of a political leader has changed from the expression of a thinker (the mathematician-thinker's face of a Napoleon, the humanist-thinker's face of a Gladstone) to the expression of a hypnotist, with scowling forehead and glaring eye? If all these things had happened 'of late' , and it was obvious that CoUingwood thought they had - then he could not conceal a suspicion that the true explanation m i g h t . . . be that psychology in its capacity as the pseudo-science of thought, teaching by precept that what is called thought is only feeling, and by example that what is called science is nothing more, is no mere addition to the long list of pseudosciences [but] an attempt to discredit the very idea of science [in furtherance of] the propaganda of irrationalism.

In reading Collingwood's later political ravings, one is reminded of Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies which was written at much the same time as The New Leviathan, and was subject to the same sort of hysteria. Even if realism was mistaken or psychology a misconception, it was absurd to imagine that thought-fashions could destroy civilization so simply, or, assuming that they could, that the way in which CoUingwood put the matter showed any better sense than Popper of the relationship between thought and practice. On balance, what is one to make of CoUingwood? Both more, and less, than some of his present-day admirers suppose. The doctrines of absolute presuppositions and total contextualization were brilliant conceptions which deserved better than to be reduced to a memory which is little more than a caricature as a classic statement of the importance of understanding the context in understanding any artefact from the past. CoUingwood of course made it clear that the whole of a civilization is the only adequate context to consider in using artefacts as material for creating an historical past. But he applied this conception not only to artefacts from the past, but also to historians in the present. He understood, even when he did not explain, that

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historical writing is wrenched out of a present totality which determines the direction of historical thinking, is vital to the creation of 'the past', and demands self-consciousness about assumptions as an essential facet of historical thinking. Consequently, he transcended the critical Rankean's interest in being critical about sources, and would have inscribed on the critical historian's mind not so much the motto that every artefact from the past must be understood in the context of the civilization of which it is a part as the warning that there is no past waiting to be discovered, only material in the present, waiting to be organized, waiting to be told what the past must have been like, and told in terms which the historian's doctrine indicates. Collingwood's empathy precluded judgment; it treated all human actions as worthy of equal consideration. Even in Fairy-Tales he did not achieve the conception of history as the creation of the past that the historian would like his present to have had, by way of contrast or contradiction. But he came close to it. It is impossible to read him comprehensively without sensing his implied philosophical contempt for those who do not understand the unavoidable character of their narrowness and parochiality. If they had been properly handled, these doctrines would have overridden all the doubts that were raised by Collingwood's mediaevalism, his liberalism, his internationalism and his idiotic commitment to the countryside. But Collingwood did not handle them properly. In his hands they were an invitation to self-righteousness, leading through Eliot's 'suspension of disbelief (an admirable description of the attitude Collingwood ostensibly took to all presuppositions) to the promulgation of a politico-moral doctrine which retained all the edges that the science of presuppositions might have been expected to smooth away. If the debt which many historians owed to Collingwood in the forties and fifties was great; if he confirmed by his route what others showed by theirs - that European civilization was Christian and European thinking until the eighteenth century set in the mould which Christianity had imposed on Greek thought; if he provided yet another valuable reminder of the temporary nature of enlightenment and postenlightenment thinking; if, above all, he implied that religion was integral to life, it is still the case that he subordinated it to philosophy, failed to turn his relativism against himself, and allowed philosophy and history a quasi-religious authority which no sensible man will allow, except inadvertently, to any academic subject.

Butterfield There is much talk today of a religious attitude which is Christian, but has no use for the Church. Every newspaper and magazine is full of it. Even those who ought to know better play with such talk. We rise from the contemplation of Christian experience throughout the centuries with no uncertain conviction about the matter. There is written in the great creeds of Christendom besides the most sacred assertions concerning the nature of God and the redemption of man this confession "I believe in one Catholick and Apostolick Church". It was Christian experience which showed that that article could not be separated from the rest of the faith/ B. L. Manning Christian Experience through the Centuries (1927) in Essays in Orthodox Dissent 1939 p. 25. 'I have nothing to say at the finish except that if one wants a permanent rock in life and goes deep enough for it, it is difficult for historical events to shake it. There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity of mind, especially if we are locked in contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds; the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.* H. Butterfield Christianity and History 1949 pp. 145-6. 'Christian experience is an ecclesiastical experience . . . Yet the centuries are strewn with dead relics of experiences which began as genuine but which, because men failed to discern the Lord's body and despised the communion of saints, ended in mere eccentricity and heresy, barren, unprofitable, flickering out.' B. L. Manning op. cit. p. 24.

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In a review of Rupp's Birkbeck lectures in the Cambridge Review in 1947, Butterfield1 wrote of his fellow-Methodist that 'Rupp loves sometimes to follow Canon Smyth, skating to the very edge of good taste in his desire to add to the sayings of the week'. In the 1960s, when Master of Peterhouse, he gave wholehearted approval of the plan, which was aborted only by Smyth himself, to ask the Governing Body to make Smyth Dean of Peterhouse. Throughout his academic life, Butterfield was impressed by the success Smyth had had, a decade before himself, in providing an aggressive version of something very like the formulation that Butterfield was to give of the relationship between Christian belief and technical history, and of the role which both should play in consideration of England's, and the world's future. In addition to being a contemporary of Smyth and Oakeshott, Butterfield was a contemporary of Brogan, Nock, Willey and Kitson Clark. In the course of time his pupil, Wormald, became his closest contemporary. In the last thirty-five years of his life Butterfield lacked close intellectual allies. By the early 1950s, Smyth had virtually retired. Oakeshott2 did not share Butterfield's Christian sympathies. For one reason or another neither Knowles nor Brogan was as close personally 1. Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-79). Ed. Trade and Grammar School, Keighley and Peterhouse, Cambridge. Fellow of Peterhouse 1923-79. Professor of Modern History at Cambridge 1944-63 and Regius Professor of Modern History 1963-68. Master of Peterhouse 1955-68. Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University 1959-61. Author of The Historical Novel 1924, The Peace Tactics of Napoleon 1929, The Whig Interpretation of History 1931, Napoleon 1939, The Statecraft of Machiavelli 1940, The Englishman and his History 1944, George 111, Lord North and the People 1949, The Origins of Modern Science 1949, Christianity and History 1949, Christianity and Human Relations 1951, Christianity in European History 1951, Christianity, Diplomacy and War 1953, Man on his Past 1955, George 111 and the Historians 1957 etc. etc. 2. For Oakeshott, see below chapter 8.

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as both were sympathetic intellectually. Elliot and Koenigsberger, the editors of the first Butterfield festschrift,1 were pupils rather than labourers in the vineyard. There were associates in religion and history in the United States, where a second festschrift2 was put together in the year of Butterfield's death, just after a Canadian, C. T. Mclntire, had edited a volume of his writings.3 But it is reasonable to say that Wormald alone stood in a properly intellectual relationship and alone was privy to the whole range of Butterfield's interests. Wormald was a boy at Harrow, an undergraduate at Peterhouse, and a Research Student at St John's College, Cambridge. He was an active Fellow of Peterhouse from 1938 to 1979 and, as Chaplain, acting Dean, Senior Tutor and Director of Studies in History, was an important influence in the teaching of undergraduates in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Until his retirement, he spent thirty years lecturing in the University History Faculty - on seventeenth-century English history and on the history of European historiography, transforming Butterfield's conceptions and extracting from them a view of the nature of historical thinking which Butterfield may not have realized was available. Wormald's lectures, prepared as though they were sermons, displayed continuous enmity to the narrow sympathies characteristic of contemporary historical writing. On the one hand he demanded attention to European thinkers - Montaigne, Pascal, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hegel, Ranke and Marx. On the other, he established that all historical assumptions should be opened to reinterpretation, that reinterpretation proceeds by paradox, and that historical thinking is so continuous with thinking about religion, philosophy, politics and science that no insulated orthodoxy deserves to survive. In one major respect Wormald differed from Butterfield. He was brought up an Anglican, and for a decade and a half was an AngloCatholic priest. He was then converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1950s, and has been a Roman Catholic layman since. His conversion a revolt against Anglican Liberalism and the absence of authority in the Church of England - was a direct response to Pope Pius XIFs authoritative definition of the Bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary. 1. J. H. Elliot and H. G. Koenigsberger (eds.) The Diversity of History. Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield 1970. 2. K. Thompson (ed.) Herbert Butterfield. The Ethics of History and Politics 1980. 3. C. T. Mclntire (ed.) Herbert Butterfield. Writings on Christianity and History 1979.

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Clarendon - Wormald's one book - was written in ButterfiekTs shadow. In its subtlety and suggestiveness, in its consciousness of the ubiquity of interpretation, and in its concealed patriotic libertarianism, it embodied some of Butterfield's most characteristic ideas. Wormald has travelled a long way since he wrote it in the 1930s and 1940s. He would find it more difficult now, after the Second Vatican Council, than he did then to write enthusiastically about the Erasmianism and Arminianism of the Tew circle, or to want to discover the liberal Clarendon of the 1640s behind the High Church Clarendon of the 1670s. Wormald's significance for the present work is his insistence, against the restored positivism of the 1960s and 1970s, that sensitivity to the arbitrariness and contestability of assumptions is an essential prerequisite to historical understanding and in present conditions, though a negative, is the only guarantee that a Christian historiography may be possible. From the late 1930s until the early 1960s, Butterfield, Wormald, Knowles and Brogan were active Fellows of Peterhouse. Though there were tensions between them, there were similarities of assumption and disposition which gave a Christian twist to the work not only of the first three but also of Brogan as well. Brogan1 was a lapsed Roman Catholic, a Glasgow-Irish polymath from Balliol who had extraordinarily high natural talents. He was as emphatic a believer as Butterfield in the independence of universities vis-a-vis the political power, and from the point at which he became a Fellow of Peterhouse, on his election to the University Chair of Political Science in 1939, saw eye to eye with Butterfield about many important questions. Brogan also had a natural feeling for religion, though this could not be deduced from his writings, which consisted of continuous discussion in books, pamphlets, lectures, broadcasts and newspaper-articles of the workings of the French and American political systems. Brogan was a compulsive broadcaster and brilliant journalist, whose writings were syndicated throughout the world. Academically, he eschewed research in the modern sense, while achieving a distinctive combination of cynicism and principle which was displayed best in 1. Sir Denis William Brogan (1900-74). Professor of Political Science at Cambridge 1939-68 and Fellow of Peterhouse 1939-74. Author of The American Political System 1933, Proudhon 1934, Abraham Lincoln 1935, The Development of Modern France 1870-1939 1940, Is Innocence Enough? 1941, The English People 1943, The American Problem 1944, The Free State, 1945, The Price of Revolution 1951, etc. etc.

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the account of the nature of foreign policy that he published during the Second World War under the title Is Innocence Enough? Brogan was dismissive of liberal virtue in the manner of the 1920s. He regarded J. S. Mill as a prig, and emphasized human selfishness and imperfection. He praised Lincoln and Proudhon as frontiersmen and peasants, and wrote of Maurras and Daudet as better guides to the twentieth century than RoUand or Anatole France. But throughout his life he remained an Asquithean Liberal. He disliked the dryness and stuffiness of the English - especially the upper-class Conservative English. He defended the French and American revolutions against German authoritarianism. In The Free State he gave an eloquent account of the political culture of the liberal West. He admired Roosevelt and the New Deal, contributed regularly to the Manchester Guardian, and hated what had happened to English politics since the Liberal party had fallen apart. In the late forties and fifties he was both an advocate of European unity and a protagonist of the Cold War against the Russians. As in Butterfield's, so in Brogan's life, the central political experiences were the collapse of the Liberal party in the 1920s and the collapse of France in 1940. Between Dunkirk and the turning of the tide in 1942, no other non-Jewish intellectual can have felt as personally as Brogan the horror that threatened. Brogan was sensitive, tough-minded, emotional and deeply sympathetic. He drank a great deal, and gave drinking an ideological significance. He had a cant of his own - the cant which tough-mindedness becomes when it is merely a posture. But in general this was overlaid by a vigorous outpouring of contemptuous wit which disposed of Virtue in any ordinary liberal sense. Like Brogan, Willey1 was slightly older than Butterfield, had served in the First World War, and, as an ex-serviceman, had been slightly junior to him in reading history at Peterhouse. After writing a prize essay about Renaissance literary criticism, he became a lecturer in English during the expansion of the Cambridge English Faculty that 1. Basil Willey (1897-1978). University Lecturer in English at Cambridge 1923-46. Professor of English Literature at Cambridge 1946-64. Author of The Seventeenth-Century Background 1934, The Eighteenth-Century Background 1940, (in E. Barker (ed.) The Character of England) English Thought 1947, Christianity Past and Present 1952, More Nineteenth-Century Studies 1956, Darwin and Butler 1964, Religion Today 1969, and two volumes of autobiography, etc.

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occurred in the 1920s. He then went to Pembroke College where he remained until retiring from his University Chair in the 1960s. Like Butterfield, Willey was a Methodist and was concerned with religion not only as practice but also as an intellectual system. His main literary interest from The Seventeenth-Century Background onwards was in relations between Christianity and secular thinking. His writings dealt in the 1930s with the subjects Butterfield was to deal with in the second half of the 1940s and Butterfield, though doubtless conscious of intellectual superiority, felt a respect for Willey which seems to have persisted where his respect for Nock did not. At Trinity College in the early 1920s, Nock1 was an undergraduate classical scholar. At the time at which Butterfield knew him well, he was a Fellow of Clare College and a youthful prodigy. By the time he was thirty, he had so impregnable a reputation as an historian of early Christianity that he was able to leave Clare, which he disliked, to become - what he remained until he died thirty years later - Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard. He was a remarkable scholar whose later agnosticism and eccentricity should not obscure the Christian cast of his early thought or the Anglican frame of mind in which he published Conversion in 1933 out of the long essay he had contributed four years earlier to Rawlinson's Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation. Of religion in general Nock had a broad and fruitful understanding. Whether as social solidarity or as individual subjectivity, it was, as he understood it, an essential concomitant to human existence. In discussing Christianity he reflected many of the preoccupations that were common in the 1920s and are reflected elsewhere in this volume. He was conscious of the 'threats to traditional theology' which were presented by psychoanalysis on the one hand and by the history of religion on the other. He expressed no great confidence in Protestantism, but had no doubt about Catholicism's future as the religion of 'ordinary humanity'. He was conscious of an obligation to avoid humanitarian idealism, and explained Christianity's success in the Hellenistic world by reference rather to miracle, resurrection and its sacrificial and philosophical character than to the emphasis that had been given in 1. Arthur Darby Nock (1902-63). Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge 1923-30, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard 1930-63, Author of Conversion 1933, St Paul 1938 etc.

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the recent past on Christ's 'winning humanity'. He described Christianity as the 'most impressive version' of a salvation religion that had emerged so far. How Nock would have understood his academic role if he had stayed in England and remained a Christian after 1933 it is difficult to guess. It is likely that he would have remained what he was before he went - a great scholar, as Burkitt had been before him. Though he was capable of making general statements, there is no reason to believe that he would have made the sorts of public statement of Christian belief that were made in Cambridge in the late 1940s by, among others, Butterfield, Willey and Kitson Clark. In spite of an apparent monotony, Kitson Clark's career1 was irregular. From being a schoolboy at Shrewsbury, he had gone to Trinity College as an undergraduate in 1919. Thereafter he was a Fellow and lived in college rooms continuously as a bachelor until his death in 1975. After disappointments in the Historical Tripos he regained his wind with a large work on Peel and the Conservative Party 1830-41, which was published in the year in which Butterfield published The Peace Tactics of Napoleon. By then Kitson Clark had acquired a Trinity tutorship which, when combined with conscientious lecturing and the exercise of influence in the History faculty, reduced him to academic silence for what would normally have been a decisive and productive middle period. It was not until his early fifties that he regained a place amongst productive historians. Kitson Clark's work was in three parts. There was an account of English history from 1820 onwards.2 There were statements about historical writing and teaching.3 And there were two books - The English Inheritance and The Kingdom of Free Men - which followed Smyth (who was a close friend) in sketching a Christian-Conservative politics. Kitson Clark's writings about historical writing may be neglected, and on so many occasional writings about teaching. They were insuffici1. G. S. R. Kitson Clark (1900-75). Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge 192275. University Lecturer in History 1929-54 and Reader in Constitutional History 1954-67. Tutor of Trinity College 1933-45. 2. i.e. Peel and the Conservative Party 1929, Peel 1936, The Making of Victorian England 1965, An Expanding Society 1967 and Churchmen and the Condition of England 1973. 3. i.e. The Art of Lecturing 1957, A guide to research students 1958 and The Critical Historian 1967.

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ently sensitive to difficulty and insufficiently trenchant in areas where trenchancy is vital. They did not take seriously the arbitrary nature of the historian's consciousness; nor, for all their modesty, did they avoid the assumption that Truth is the object of historical enquiry. Kitson Clark expressed an instinct for what the past must have been like. A great deal of the defensiveness of his tone arose from a feeling, of which the climate of the 1930s had made him conscious, that a powerful interest wanted the past to be something very different. He was not sufficiently sprightly or self-confident to ignore the climate or turn it to advantage, so the positions he advocated made no great impact on the intelligentsia to whom they were addressed. Kitson Clark's message was that English history had not been an oppressive racket. He wanted to make it clear that Victorian society had contained much virtue and a good deal of social conscience, and that a properly historical treatment would give, together with condemnation in certain respects, a far cleaner bill of health than radical or socialist history had been willing to give it. In this respect he was an apologist of the liberal Conservatism which had been constructed by alliance between the gentry and the entrepreneurial families of the Industrial Revolution (like his own), and had grown into the Conservative party which he supported throughout his life. Like Smyth, and unlike Butterfield, Kitson Clark was an Anglican. His chief aim was to present a belief in freedom, personal responsibility, the rule of law and religious toleration as common to Anglicanism and Dissent, and to connect them all with England's Christian Inheritance. Having explained this historically in The English Inheritance, which discussed 'urgently important' subjects when it appeared in 1950, he explained its theoretical and European implications in The Kingdom of Free Men which was published seven years later. Both there and in Churchmen and the Condition of England - his best book - he gave a deliberate, if slightly confused, emphasis to Christianity's public, political character. The trouble with Kitson Clark, if it can be put thus crudely, was that he was untouched by relativism. Instead of irony and complication, he left an impression of simplicity and solid worth. He appears in this book because he and Butterfield wrote about some of the same subjects at the same time in the same faculty, and because between them there was a prolonged tension - between a lower-middle-class Asquithean Yorkshire Methodist and an upper-middle-class Anglican Leeds Liberal-Conservative - in which Butterfield, who was undoubtedly

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cleverer, was rewarded with public recognition and academic acclamation, except in the management of the Cambridge History Faculty where for a long time Kitson Clark was very powerful. Butterfield was never a figure of the Right and he had before him the example, and warning, which Smyth had left, and the damage which religion could suffer from imprudent identification with political or polemical causes. In approaching his career, therefore, it is necessary to remember not only that he was a contemporary of Nock, Brogan, Oakeshott, Willey, Smyth, and Knowles but also that some of his earlier works were written in the decade in which Eliot became an Anglican and Hoskyns made Barthianism a living force in Cambridge thinking. He was part, in other words, of the anti-liberal theological movement of the twenties - that rejection of rationalism, humanitarianism, and liberal innocence of which Forsyth,1 T. E. Hulme,2 Chesterton,3 and Figgis4 had been the English initiators, of which Waugh,5 Greene,6 Eliot,7 and Muggeridge,8 were literary exponents and 1. P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921). Congregationalist Minister. Principal of Hackney Theological College 1901-21. Author of Christian Perfection 1899, Religion in Recent Art 1901, The Cruciality of the Cross 1909, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ 1909, The Work of Christ 1910, The Principle of Authority in Relation to Certainty, Sanctity and Society 1913, The Justification of God 1916 etc. etc. 2. T. E. Hulme (1883-1917). Author of Poetical Works in Ezra Pound Ripostes 1912, tr. of Bergson An Introduction to Metaphysics 1913, introduction to Sorel Reflexions on Violence 1916, H. Read (ed.) Speculations 1924, S. Hynes (ed.) Further Speculations 1955. 3. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), especially in Orthodoxy 1908, The superstition of divorce 1920, Eugenics and other Essays 1922, The everlasting man 1925, St Francis of Assist 1926, The Catholic Church and Conversion 1926, Catholic Essays 1929. 4. See above, p. 75. 5. See below, chapter 11. 6. Graham Greene (1904- ). Author of Babbling April 1925, The Man Within 1929, Stamboul Train 1932, It's a Battlefield 1934, (ed.) The Old School 1934, England Made Me 1935, Journey without Maps 1935, Brighton Rock 1938, The Power and the Glory 1940, The Heart of the Matter 1948, The Lost Childhood 1951, Essais Catholiques 1953, The Quiet American 1955 etc. etc. etc. 7. See above chapter 4. 8. Malcolm Muggeridge (1903- ). Lecturer at Cairo 1927-30, Manchester Guardian 1930-33, Deputy Editor Daily Telegraph 1950^52, Editor of Punch 1953-57, Author of The Earnest Atheist 1936, In a Valley of this Restless Mind 1938, The Thirties 1940, Jesus Rediscovered 1969, Something Beautiful for God 1971, (with A. R. Vidler) Paul: Envoy Extraordinary 1972, Chronicles of Wasted Time 1972- , Jesus the Man Who Lives 1975, etc. R.P.D.—IJ

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of which Butterfield, Knowles, Smyth, and (from a slightly earlier generation) Hoskyns and Manning were academic exponents. As both Bursar and Senior Tutor, Manning1 had played a large part in the running of Jesus College between the wars and had had considerable responsibility for the distinctive and well-managed combination of work, learning, philistinism, rowing, decency, silliness and religion which were its salient characteristics at this period. Since, in addition, his opinions provided a precedent for Butterfield's which Butterfield recognized, and also a contrast with them, it may be desirable to explain what they were. Manning shared Knowles's and Smyth's dislike of subjective selfassertion. He had as high a doctrine of the Church and was as hostile as they were to the 'slovenly' nature of Victorian religion. He was as disagreeable about Dearmer and Songs of Prcdse as Knowles was about Inge and Underhill. He was as sharp about the 'resurrection of Paganism', the anti-Christian presumptuousness of the popular newspapers and the 'superstitions' that were fostered by The Thinkers Library. To him it seemed that the Huxleys, Webbs, Haldanes, Hogbens, Joads, Shaws, Russells, and Arnold Bennetts were secularizing 'sin' and replacing it with a nauseating sense of 'social responsibility'. Manning's father was a Methodist who had become a Congregationalist minister. Manning himself was a regular preacher and talked towards the end of his rather short life of taking over his father's Lake District church. He was not only a Calvinist: he claimed for the Congregational Church a historical validity as great as any that could be claimed by any of the other churches. As a don, Manning was close to undergraduates - closer, perhaps, than some might like; but there was not much that was smart, improving or fashionable about him, except, perhaps, his mode of dressing. Like Welbourne, with whom he had arrived from Lincolnshire in 1912, he regarded country grammar schools as the best source of undergraduates, and while a soft touch for toughs or rowing-men, made no 1. Bernard Lord Manning (1892-1941). Ed. Caistor Grammar School and Jesus College Cambridge. Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge 1916-18 and of Jesus College 1919-41. Author of The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif 1919, The making of Modern English Religion 1929, Essays in Orthodox Dissent 1939, Why Not Abandon the Church? 1939, The Hymns of Wesley and Watts 1942, A Layman in the Ministry 1943, More Sermons of a Layman 1944, O. Greenwood (ed.) The Protestant Dissenting Deputies 1952.

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fetish of clever scholars from public schools. He feared for the 'generous enthusiasm of youth' and taught a realistic antidote as a way of anticipating disillusionment. He disliked 'humbug' and 'priggishness' but was less cynical than seems appropriate. His chapter What the Boat Club owes to the College in a history of the Jesus College Boat Club was a strange statement of a corporate ethos. Like C. H. Dodd, who was also a Jesus Congregationalist and like Butterfield in Peterhouse Chapel, Manning was a College Chapel Anglican. At his death Manning was described (by Smyth) as a 'loss not only to Congregationalism but also to the Church of England' of which he was said to be both 'a friend' and 'a valued critic'. It is certainly the case that he touched the Church of England at many points through his doctor in Caistor, through the Anglican aspect of the evangelical experience he had had at school, and through the Anglican teachers by whom he was taught in Cambridge. He had many Anglican friends (including A. C. Benson): his biography was written by a socialist Anglo-Catholic who was his closest friend in Jesus, and he was specially invited to make a submission, as a Free Churchman, to the Archbishops' Commission on Church and State in 1931. Yet, much as he admired the Book of Common Prayer, Hooker, and the Caroline divines, and great as was the importance he attached to the physical presence of the Church of England in English life, he was divided from it by three connected objections. The first was that the Church of England was a social church as much as a religious one and had not sufficiently protected itself from the temptations to which social churches succumb. The second was that it was an Erastian church in which state control - 'to a Calvinist... the mark of the beast' - was so obvious that its members suffered the continual humiliation of seeing 'Christ's Crown Rights in His Kingdom' being exercised by 'those who were not members of it'. The third was that, having failed, in spite of the Non-Jurors, to resist the Arian, Socinian, Latitudinarian and rationalistic Deism with which all thought had been infected in the eighteenth century, it did not leave the impression of being in a position to resist the 'amiable generalities' of 'natural religion' in the twentieth. Manning acknowledged the Evangelical and Tractarian desire to have a free Church guided solely by its obligation to Christ's truth. But he was clear that the Church of England was not free, that it was not what a church ought to be and what the Congregational church was - a 'gathered church', an 'assembly of the faithful elect' housing

202 Recessions an intenser religious life than could be housed by legalistically canalized Episcopalianism. The Congregational Church, therefore, was not a 'poor relation' of the Church of England. It had its own truths which showed Anglican* ism up for what it was. It was also more like the 'free church' that the mediaeval church had been than the Roman Catholic Church had been since the Reformation. The mediaeval church had not, of course, been congregational; it had been a priestly church which had been hampered by the lethal corruptions of ecclesiasticism. But Hildebrand had asserted its autonomy, which Calvin, Knox, and the English Independents had reasserted after the loss of autonomy in the late middle ages. Manning's first book, The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif, published in his late twenties, had been highly polemical, demolishing romantic, Merrie-England, and Anglo-Catholic conceptions, playing down the mystical and magical aspects of mediaeval religion, and claiming for the mediaeval church a close similarity to modern dissent. It emphasized its puritan as much as its William Morris aspects, its hostility to superstition as well as its capitulations to it. It described fourteenth-century Christianity as 'theological' rather than 'human', as showing reverence from 'duty' more than from 'emotion', and as being devoid of the 'sentimental affection . . . characteristic of much modern religion'. It asserted that charity to the poor had been determined neither by 'humanitarian sentiment' nor by social guilt but by a theological recognition that Lazarus was 'a new incarnation of God'. It showed the Mass, the Sermon, the Confessional, and the Parish Church, in the absence of family religion, as the practical agencies through which Christianity was brought to laymen. Manning's view of the Reformation was that all the emergent Churches had had their origins in the mediaeval church and that there was no reason to claim priority in continuity for the Anglican or the Roman Catholic. Not only the Protestant Churches but they too had separated from the church of the middle ages. The mediaeval church in fact was the 'mother of us all'. All were to be seen equally as its successors, though what distinguished each from the rest, and made some better than the others, was the way in which they had severally developed the assumptions from which they had started. At the heart of Manning's religion was a demand for autonomy in relation to the political power, and for recognition of the political consequences of the demand. This was spelt out historically in discus-

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sion of 'secularisation' from the sixteenth century onwards. In contemporary terms, it was spelt out in relation to Nazism, Marxism and Fascism, which showed 'to perfection' what 'materialism meant' when it was carried out 'not by highbrow amateurs . . . but by people seriously, conscientiously, enthusiastically meaning what they say' and demonstrating the relevance of the dictum that 'the machinery of civil society cannot fall into irreligious hands without the gravest consequences for religion'. Like others among the writers whom we are considering, Manning was building a place for Christianity in an increasingly un-Christian world. To him the situation seemed 'apostolic'. The world had to be challenged, and the Puritan inheritance provided the best basis for challenging it. His writing celebrated a tradition whose chief heroes were Calvin, Cromwell, Blake, Wesley, and Dale, whose turning-points were the Interregnum and the defeat of Jacobitism in 1745, and whose political history was sketched in The Protestant Dissenting Deputies which he was writing when he died. This tradition offered a challenge to triviality - a demand to recognize that eternity was as significant as time, that lives had to be planned for it, and that it was not 'good fellow but Christ' who held the key. The Church was not like a 'golf club', bridge club' or 'brass band'. It was a society whose chief member was God and which affirmed the reality of 'sin and death', even when 'dwellers on desirable building estates' did not recognize their existence. Manning's criticisms were socially universal. But they were directed with Welbournian force at villa-dwellers and villadom, and at the 'golf, cars, tennis and charabancs' which, like Eliot, he singled out as the special pleasures of the 'surburban Sunday'. Politically he was a supporter of the Liberal party. But he agreed that it had been 'too good for the wicked world', seems not to have been surprised by its death, and probably did not vote in general elections after the 1920s. He was an important public critic of non-conformist pacifism. Theologically, Manning was a follower of Figgis and Forsyth, accepting their destruction of 'liberal theology' and proclaiming the truth, objectivity, and divine institution of Christianity. In the climate they had created and with the proof that the First World War had provided, he wished to dissociate Christianity from all forms of secular progress or accomplishment, and to show that it was no more a matter of 'sincerity' and 'self-expression' than the Bible was a record of 'human' experience. Christianity was to be confused neither with

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patriotism and 'legal conservatism' on the one hand nor with a 'dynamic for social justice' on the other, and it had nothing to do with 'niceness', 'good form', or the holding of 'sound opinions' about political, social, and moral questions. Christianity was the filling of the heart with 'Grace'; it was through this that Christians discovered that 'immediate contact' with God which made the altar rather than the tabernacle their focus, and gave them - what could not be explained by human explanation or acquired by human ingenuity - 'Christian liberty . . . the glorious liberty of the children of God'. Manning was neither a fanatic nor a doctrinaire; he was sensible of difficulty and perceived the sceptical implications of a transcendent God. He was not alone in thinking that, if offered a choice between clerical Christianity and 'no church at all', many people would choose the latter. Manning's position deserves consideration for its own sake. It has also been considered by reason of the contrast it offers to Butterfield's. For, though there were many points at which they coincided, there were others at which Butterfield's position involved a recession. There was no reason why Butterfield should not have had as high a doctrine of the Church as Manning. Unlike Manning, however, Butterfield had established himself as an historical writer before he had begun to establish himself as an apologist, and became an apologist, not in the course of destroying the liberal consensus in the 1920s but in the course of inserting a religious dimension into the new consensus which began in 1940. Butterfield was one of the earliest apologists of that consensus which was largely oblivious of ecclesiastical divisions. It was entirely consistent that one of its major prophets should have remained a Methodist, as Butterfield did until his death in 1979, while becoming an unconfirmed Anglican communicant, first in Peterhouse Chapel while he was Master of Peterhouse in the 1950s, and then in the Parish Church at Sawston after his retirement in 1968. It is uncertain when Butterfield saw that prophecy was a possibility. He had wanted from an early age to be a writer, but in this may merely have reflected the interest his father had taken in books and the encouragement which both had received from the chairman of the company for which his father worked. There is no reason to suppose that wanting to write meant anything especially prophetic or that Butterfield was anything but modest and hesitant in the early years of adult activity. It is nevertheless the case that from the age of 23 his Fellowship at

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Peterhouse provided a freehold which could be used in a way in which a parson could use his and a newspaper editor could not use his, in the reasonable certainty that he could write whatever he liked without fear of removal so long as basic duties were carried out with a reasonable degree of efficiency. This was important: it left him with opinions about the corporate independence of colleges within universities and of universities within the state which, though more difficult to maintain once the academic body had become a state salariat, remained strong throughout the period in the 1950s and 1960s when he was at various times Professor, Master of Peterhouse and Vice-Chancellor of the University. Butterfield's mother was a member of the Plymouth Brethren. His father was a Methodist who had been prevented from studying for ordination by his own father's premature death* Where Butterfield's father had had to leave school at the age of ten and had worked his way up to become chief clerk in a wool firm in Keighley, Butterfield himself had stayed at the local grammar school until he went to Peterhouse as a history scholar in 1919. II In 1919 Peterhouse history had been under way for just over a decade. It was, however, the creation of A. W. Ward and H. W. V. Temperley and should be seen as beginning not with Ward's apointment of Temperley to a History Fellowship in 1905, but with Ward's arrival in the College as a Classics Scholar in 1855. Ward was English - he was a relative of Matthew Arnold - but his father was a consular official in Germany for most of Ward's childhood and Ward was educated at schools in Saxony before being sent in his middle teens to Bury St Edmunds Grammar School where he received high-powered instruction in Latin and Greek from the headmaster, J. W. Donaldson. By the time Ward came to Peterhouse, he had escaped an English public-school education while being as good a classical scholar as scholars from Eton and Winchester. He also had the appearance, manner and outlook of a liberal-minded German student. After reading the Classical Tripos at Peterhouse, Ward was elected to a Fellowship, which he retained from 1861 until his marriage to a clergyman's daughter in 1879. By then, however, he had for thirteen years been Professor of History and English at Owen's College, Man-

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Chester, where he was to remain first in that role and then as Principal of the College and for a time first Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University. He retired from Manchester at the age of sixty in 1897. It was not until 1900, when he had already been in retirement in London for three years, that he began his period as Master of Peterhouse. During his Mastership, which lasted up to his death at the age of eighty-six in 1924, Ward was a figure of considerable consequence. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1901. He was one of the founders of the British Academy. As a Syndic, and then for fourteen years Chairman of the Syndics, of the University Press, he took over Acton's Cambridge Modern History when Acton died and was responsible for completing it, and for planning or instituting The Cambridge History of English Literature and The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy. By the time Butterfield encountered him, Ward was no longer at his best either physically or intellectually. Butterfield regarded Acton (whom he did not know) as Ward's superior; he was dismissive of the Cambridge Histories. It is likely that Ward was being criticized among others in The Whig Interpretation of History. By the time he died, Ward's Liberalism was rightly described as 'old-fashioned'. But it had not been at earlier stages in his life; in the thirty years he spent in Manchester, it was very contemporary indeed. He and his wife had a salon in Fallowfield. For many years he was dramatic critic of the Manchester Guardian. The creator of Manchester University was an honorary freeman of the City before he left in 1897. As a literary critic, Ward used an eclectic historical method which would not have survived the attacks made on historical criticism in the 1920s. As an historian, his contribution was scarcely more lasting. While advocating research as the basis for historical thinking, he did as little archival research as Brogan. Almost the whole of his large output in both genres was the work of a general intelligence expressing a distinctive view through historical reflection which displayed an acute awareness of the connection between literature, politics, theology, scholarship and morality. Ward was still a Fellow of Peterhouse when the Cambridge Historical Tripos was set up. But he was already in Manchester and had little direct influence on its character. His pamphlet and Saturday Review article on the subject in 1872, however, made a statement of the aims of historical education which, apart from their emphasis on applica-

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bility, could easily have been made by Butterfield fifty years later. In their emphasis on universal history, on the 'power of historical thinking' and on the study of primary material, they demanded a critical intellectual exercise of the sort through which Ranke and others had 'trained generations of historical students' and Moltke 'staffs of military officers' on the continent. Unlike Butterfield in his best periods, Ward claimed for historical information a direct relevance to decision-making about matters of public concern. His Inaugural Lecture at Owen's College exuded a 'grave responsibility' to educate citizens into the 'great lessons of [the nation's] history and into the tasks of the present and the future to which these lessons point'. As a user of primarily printed sources, Ward was a survivor into the age that was symbolized by the English Historical Review. For this reason among others he did not appear in Butterfield's writings, where the modern critical historian, when he was not Ranke, was always Acton, who had done a great deal of archival research and had thought critically and in detail about its significance. Nevertheless, Butterfield saw Ward quite often when he was an undergraduate and was made aware of an historian whose advocacy of the special archival study characteristic of historical research in the 1920s did not blind him to the importance of the undifferentiated history out of which it had been formed. Ward reviewed regularly over many years in the Saturday Review, he wrote authoritatively and for an educated audience about Dickens, Chaucer, the Habsburgs, Renaissance humanism, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years War and Britain's relations with Hanover. His History of English Dramatic Writing examined the development of national drama at the period of its highest achievement and, in discussing its mediaeval origins, gave an account of the relationship between religion and general culture. If his works missed greatness, and if his perspicacity at no point equalled that of Lecky, Seely, Creighton, Bryce, Freeman, or Acton, he held a respectable place among historians of that genre and generation. Ward's writing had a content. He made history the vehicle of a doctrine. As a responsible Anglican who avoided party politics, he had an assured certainty about a wide range of Liberal principles, not only at home but also abroad. In writing about the Reformation, Ward was explicitly Erasmian. He failed to maintain a Rankean fairness towards the Counter-Reform-

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ation Papacy only because he thought of the reformers as liberal political reformers in nineteenth-century England. He made it as obvious in discussing Reuchlin, Melanchthon, Mutianus and the Brethren of the Common Life as in elaborating the purposes of a nineteenth-century university, that he had a conception of learning being cooperative, and of cooperative learning pressing religion into the service of enlightenment and toleration. He described 'Science' and 'Tolerance' as causes 'dearer to the consciousness of our own times than any movement of religious reform'. As the bearer of an intimate German experience, Ward celebrated German national liberation. His mentality was the mentality of 1813. He was an enemy of Austria. He attacked Charles V for challenging 'the spirit of the German nation', and for turning the national movement for religious reform into the Protestant revolution. He blamed Habsburg dynasticism and French intervention for the pietism and mysticism which had dominated German life from the Thirty Years War until the 'dawn broke on the battlefields of Silesia and in the chamber where Lessing sat and wrote'. As against France, Ward supported Stein's creation of a modern state, Stein's and Hardenberg's defeat of Napoleonic tyranny, and the war of 1870. His Germany was not, however, the Germany of iron and blood but the liberated Germany which poetry and drama had made possible before 1813 had made it real. This was the Germany of civilization - the continuation of the Reformation in which 'the nation itself completed the work that Luther had begun. In the 'solidarity' which the War of Liberation had forged, and which Prussian hegemony had commanded after 1848, Ward saw the proof that German liberals wanted 'unity' more than they wanted a 'Constitutional liberty'. In the new German Empire of 1871 he celebrated an 'historical growth deeply rooted in the national soil'. Politically Ward was an Anglo-German Liberal. He was much put out by Treitschke's hostility to Britain, and hoped for closer relations than successive British governments had been willing to permit. The political argument, however, was never dominant. His main interest was in the cultural relationship which had been established in the 'classic age' of German literature when love of England went 'hand in hand with the desire for rational freedom', and Shakespeare had replaced Corneille as surely as Rossbach had destroyed the superiority of French arms. Ward did not write at length about Shakespeare's influence in

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Germany. But he knew of 'no similar example of the domestication of a great writer [of one nation] in the very heart and mind of another'. He attached immense importance to the influence Shakespeare had had upon the 'entire school of the Sturm und Drang" and in particular to the influence he had had upon Goethe. Goethe's attitude to 1813 was an inconvenience, as was his sexual irregularity. But he 'soared beyond human weakness', took his place beside Dante and Shakespeare, and at earlier periods in his life had been 'the ready champion' of German youth. His life-work - a legacy to all mankind - was the 'sustained endeavour to find the key to the mystery of existence'. In his years at Manchester, Ward assumed that a united Germany would not threaten peace. Thereafter he was not so certain. He did not carry his three-volume Germany beyond 1890 and he made it clear, when it was published in the First World War, that twentieth-century Germany had ignored 'the international laws which bind the community of States . . . and the moral laws which are imposed upon humanity at large'. Ward described Britain's involvement in the First World War as 'righteous'. It was also cataclysmic. The conclusion he drew about the future was that there would have to be a 'federation of peace and goodwill' which would be 'stronger and more enduring than any of the empires of the past'. For this reason he was an advocate of a League of Nations. He chose Gooch, who was another, as joint editor of the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy and himself wrote four SPCK pamphlets on the subject in 1919. Throughout his Manchester period, Ward had been much concerned with the consolidation of the national consciousness. At the same time that he was celebrating the national consciousnesses of Poland, Germany and Greece, he celebrated the development of the British consciousness between Chaucer and Dickens. The patriotism that Ward discerned in English men-of-letters was not exactly a religious one. Though the Reformation was important (and Chaucer significant, among other reasons, because he in some sense anticipated it), Ward did not achieve the conception of ChurchState Anglicanism. The History of English Dramatic Literature explained English drama 'as the offspring . . . of Christian religious worship', but the religious element was otherwise rather weak. Chaucer, for example, was credited mainly with a 'manliness of mind' and a 'free

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and critical spirit' which had created a 'goodly procession of figures' who had been 'life-long friends' of 'generations of Englishmen', while it was through his poetry, pathos, eloquence, tenderness, kindliness, cheerfulness, humour, merriment, goodwill and charity that Dickens was said to have deepened the English sensibility. Ward did not accept Dickens without reservation. He was conscious of mannerism. He was stuffy about Dickens's relations with his wife. He criticized his dislike of ecclesiasticism and detected a failure to realize the inherent nature of human imperfection. He rejected his satires on Political Economy and the Manchester School, and claimed that his criticisms of contemporary society were exaggerated. But he admired his thoroughness and inventiveness, the reality of his characterizations and his 'supreme felicity of phrase'. He praised his patriotism, radicalism and Englishness, as well as his dogma-less religion and his moving descriptions of the 'loathsome' reality of the poor. He found it fitting that the unfailing power of his sympathy had ministered to the 'sanctity of the home' and the cult of the English Christmas. Chaucer and Dickens were important occupants of Ward's 'national House of Fame'; so were Spenser, Sidney and Milton. But it was to Shakespeare that he devoted his most respectful attention. 'To many of our countrymen' it was Shakespeare who had provided, along with the Bible, the only worthwhile poetical literature which they possessed and the only way of transcending 'conventional systems of ethical and aesthetical rules'. His 'honeyed sweetness', his 'passion and pathos', and the 'rapidity, variety and penetration' of his analysis, had made out of material available to all his contemporaries works which displayed the 'serenity of . . . genius' and had 'struck . . . roots into the people's hearts' by making a 'secular literature' into the 'possession of the nation'. 'On no man', the conclusion was, 'has a higher task ever been imposed than on Shakespeare; and no man has ever responded to the summons of inspiration more readily, more devotedly, more gloriously than he.' As a teacher Ward breathed a liberal patriotism based on English literature, the study of history and the role he claimed for universities in the development of British national culture. He implied that there was a path along which the 'national genius' wanted to go, that Shakespeare had been on it, and that Restoration drama, with its neglect of the 'laws of morality', was not. He discerned a 'growing demand' for 'academical instruction', 'university training' and 'new schools of

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learning and research' which he was clear should be met. 'Nearly all eminent Englishmen had been fellows of colleges from Newton down to Macaulay and Mr Gladstone', and university-educated politicians should bring informed opinion to bear on the aspirations of the democracy in the future. It was for this reason that Oxford and Cambridge needed to be brought up to date by removing pass men, by developing philosophy, history and science, and by making modern knowledge available to far wider sections of the population than could be approached by the existing system. At Manchester, Ward was in effect what T. H. Green thought university men ought to be: a missionary. He wanted Manchester University to become, what new universities in other industrial cities could also become, 'centres of intellectual life' which would 'determine the tone and temper, so to speak, of the nation's youth' by 'fostering the public spirit which is the salt of the life of a community and of a nation'. Ward believed in 'the spirit of scholarship'. He wrote of learning and science as alone being capable of 'bringing tranquillity' and a 'sense of freedom' to him in whom there was 'harmony' between the 'worker' and 'his work'. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he believed about religious conflict what he wrote about international conflict in the volume of essays which the Professors of Owen's College had published in 1873. Nothing [he had written there] can operate more potently for the preservation of peace than the advance of instruction which, while it strengthens the ties of national life, reveals the inadequacy of mere ties of position, descent, or speech in themselves. Fantastic notions as to the paramount significance of mere linguistic or even ethnographical unity will vanish before the progress of Science which, by exhibiting the multiplicity of such relations, establishes the consequent absurdity of regarding any of them as absolute . . . Least of all will the war of classes - the new and most dire international danger of Europe - be effectively prevented by any other means than the spread of the truth that classes, like nations, are interdependent, and that the noble ends of life which education alone reveals are common to a l l . . . For it is with nations as with individuals. The cultivated, and by culture enlightened mind is and must be on the side of progress and peace against that of darkness and conflict. The 'obscure men' like the unformed nationalities, are at once materials and causes of that which disturbs, unsettles and retards personal and national and international life. When the education, and more especially the higher education, of a country is fostered, there lies the best promise of progress and of peace.

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In Ward an indubitably Christian mind was overlaid by the optimistic liberalism which he shared with his contemporaries. In Temperley there was no Christianity, and something of a contraction in range of interests. Temperley had strong Liberal preferences which he displayed at the beginning of his career and neither renounced nor obscured later. But he was not only a responsible Liberal, like Ward; he was also conscious, as Ward was, that historical understanding would only be obstructed by dividing the sheep from the goats or the good causes from the bad ones by which they had been defeated. His history was Liberal history and there were many touches of Liberal verbosity about it. But it was the more persuasive for being associated with a Rankean sense of the complication that surrounds the transition from theory to practise. Temperley's grandfather had been a clergyman of the Scottish Episcopalian Church. Temperley himself wrote eloquently about Wesley, Sacheverell, the religious feelings of 'the masses' in 1688, the 'inmost thoughts and convictions' of Canning's soul, and the role of the Orthodox Church in Serbian nationalism. He did so, however, out of historical duty, not because he believed in Christianity or had any personal interest in religion. Temperley's interests in fact were political. His early writings were doctrinally explicit. They were full of themselves, stuffed up with liberal principle and unyieldingly congratulatory about the main lines of the course that English history had taken since the Revolution of 1688. The Life of Canning in particular was a manifesto, describing Canning as a Whig who retained a great deal of his initial Liberalism after he had become a Tory, and presenting his 'high-souled' and 'great-hearted' Conservatism as really a Liberalism which had been perverted by circumstances. In Temperley's view, Canning was a man of talent who had overcome the obstacles which talent had had to face in an aristocratic society. If he had failed to see what Temperley would have wished him to see - that talent could have found better allies in 'the people' than in the Patriot King - that merely demonstrated the 'reactionary influence' which Jacobinism had had upon the 'liberal-minded'. Canning, in any case, had redered the nation two services: he had provided an alternative to Eldon and Sidmouth, and he had affected a significant advance in the 'education of the Tory party'. 'Of all our English party leaders' he had had 'the soundest grasp of principles' and 'at least a sufficient knowledge of their application'.

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The Life of Canning was the preliminary statement of a view which discerned a continuity in the development of the British Constitution, This was a continuity of liberal thought and action. It was present in the Lockean and Harringtonian ideas through which Somers, Halifax and William III had created 'a just balance in the state' in 1688. It was present in Marlborough and Godolphin who, though 'Tories in name', were 'moderate in both principle and action'. It was present in the 'spirit of compromise' with which, from the Durham Report onwards, Whig/Liberal governments had made 'the British Empire unlike any other political organization in the world'. Temperley recognized that 1832 had had revolutionary ramifications, but he celebrated the solidarity which the public schools had created between commercial and landed wealth and between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. He was troubled by the presence in Parliament after 1867 of men who 'had never been to public schools or known peers' and who 'did not want to know them', and he wrote critically of the contempt for economy, disregard for law and order, and intensification of popular passion, that had been engendered by 'democratic equality' after 1884. In Senates and Upper Chambers he was concerned to protect middle-class values and interests against the Si6yes type of revolutionary politician, arguing that a 'bourgeois Senate based on a relatively large electorate' would be more effective than a 'plutocratic Senate based on an absolutely small electorate' and that, though democracy could not be 'absolutely dammed back' in the twentieth century, it was possible, by reforming the House of Lords, to curb, as Acton had said, 'not only the majority but the power of the whole people'. In attacking 'plutocracy' and 'pure capitalism' and in affirming the need to stop the House of Lords being the 'haunt of caste and privilege', he advocated an alliance between the bourgeoisie, the people and the natural aristocracy of birth in face of the tyranny of mere wealth. In the Life of Canning Temperley had discussed domestic politics as a preliminary to a discussion of foreign policy. It was Canning's foreign policy that he had wanted to discuss, with its assertion of the 'right' of every nation to 'manage its own internal affairs' and the identification it made between national liberty on the one hand and British naval and military power on the other. Canning was presented as a man of principle whose principles had made the world a freer place than it would have been without them. Through his contribution to the defeat alike of Napoleon and of Metternich, he had displayed a feeling for

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liberty and peaceful amelioration which was outside the range of both. As an enemy of despots and a supporter of Liberty, he had identified 'the people in every country' as 'the origin of power'. Where Palmerston had been 'something of a huckster' and Gladstone really a visionary where foreign policy was concerned, the effect of Canning's policies from the seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807 down to the establishment of Greek independence twenty years later was said to have been such that wherever there was 'oppression or misery or injustice in the world, men remembered his name and were filled with hope'. 'His speeches were the text-book of all Liberals, his portraits hung in the huts of peasants.' When he died 'every nation struggling for independence or existence . . . from Lima to Athens . . . was filled with sorrow and dismay'. Chateaubriand described him as the Englishman whose international influence in politics had been equal to that of Newton and Shakespeare in science and letters. Heine said that the eighth of August, the day on which Canning died a martyr's death, should be consecrated to his memory as a holy day in the Calendar of Freedom. The extravagance of contemporaries passes by, posterity adjusts the balance and history exchanges advocacy for judgment. It will say of Canning that he first introduced a liberal tone into continental diplomacy, and advocated that doctrine of nationalism which has dominated the whole of subsequent European history, and that he effected this revolution in the face of immense difficulties but without the necessity of war. He was the guardian and statesman of Liberty in its truest and noblest sense. Englishmen will remember his great name, and reverence it the more when they think that he, who yielded to none in his love of country, was yet able to claim the regard of the world. As in discussing domestic, so in discussing foreign policy, Temperley emphasized the complicated nature of political practicalities. In both areas his early writing was vigorous and full, with a Swinburnian overtone but with a positively Rankean eclecticism of method. In the one case as in the other, the message was obvious - that Canning's principles went back to William III - the 'champion of threatened liberties' who had worked 'for the good of . . . Europe as a whole'. It was in the names of Pitt, Canning and Chatham that isolationist imperialism was rejected and continental involvements encouraged as the 'guide and pole-star' of British policy in the future. Temperley's earliest writings were primarily about England, in a period

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when dynastic considerations had been replaced by national ones. It was by examining the history of the 'nation' in the Balkans and SouthEastern Europe that he edged himself into the second of his major interests - the development of nationalism throughout the world. In thefirstdecade of his adult life - before the Hungarians had fought on the wrong side in the First World War - Temperley's main interest had been in Hungarian nationalism. He wrote an article on Jokai, the Hungarian novelist, in 1904 and paid high compliments to the Magyars in a Westminster Review article in 1908. After persuading Cambridge University Press to publish a translation of Marczali's Hungary in the XVIII century, he provided a long introduction which was published in 1910. There can be no doubt that, despite visits to Slovakia and a Slovak-inspired section in the Westminster Review article it was through Hungary that he first examined the history of a country other than his own. So far as he had explained the nature of nationalism, Temperley had confined himself in the Life of Canning to rather vague contrasts between the heroic cunning shown by Bolivar, Kolocotrones and Ali Pasha as tyrannical adventurers, and the sentimentalities of European philhellenism. This was not convincing: it left merely a romantic impression of 'herd-boys' and 'brigand chiefs' playing the parts 'both of Robin Hood and Warwick the Kingmaker'. Nor, at first, did the Hungarian writings achieve anything more convincing. Jokai was proposed as the equal of Scott, Dumas and Victor Hugo and was said to have been 'a great patriot' and 'elemental force' whose writings had 'stirred the passions of living men'. But the discussion was still conducted in the tone of 'Robin Hood and Warwick the Kingmaker'. It was not until the introduction to Marczali that this was transcended. The essay on Marczali was an academic as much as a political manifesto. Its starting-point was Joseph II's attempt to subject Hungary to the 'hard reason and doctrinaire theories of an eighteencentury philosophy'. It recorded the 'unique good fortune' which made Joseph's bureaucrats conduct a survey of Hungary's political and social institutions at a point at which 'the whole mediaeval society was . . . still crystallized', and it made it the merit of Marczali's work that it showed how that 'strange mediaeval society' had been able to resist them. The point of the introduction was threefold - to follow Marczali in his emancipation from 'history that is merely political', to admire his success in writing the history of 'society . . . beliefs . . . and the culture

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and thought of the past', and to understand that, though knowledge of the eighteenth century was necessary if Hungary was to be understood in the twentieth, it was necessary also to understand that in the meantime there had been a 'spiritual revolution' of which Jokai had been the exemplar. The crux of the introduction was the claim that the national liberties of 1848 had had their roots in the middle ages. In the existence of the National Assembly from the eleventh century, in the 'principle of ministerial responsibility' of the thirteenth and in the 'moral force' of the 'idea of equality' which had protected gentry privileges against the magnates thereafter, evidence was adduced of a continuity which linked the 'free nobles' of Hungary to the 'free men of Tacitus' and made the 'wild Hungarian riders who thronged in the Rakos in the Middle Ages' the heirs of the 'armed gatherings of warriors who assembled in the ayopa in Homer'. These assertions were not made in any naive fashion. Temperley reported, while regretting, the denial of representative institutions to the towns (on the ground that they were German). He regretted even more the isolation of the gentry, who had no contact with the bourgeoisie, and, in company with the magnates (whom they disliked), had constituted the nation 'in the technical sense', with 'every privilege and liberty' afforded to them and a 'vast body of the underprivileged' - bourgeois and serf - beneath them. This was his history of Hungary up to the middle of the sixteenth century, when the battle of Mohacs transformed the situation by putting two thirds of the nation under Turkish rule, creating a virtually autonomous Transylvania under Turkish suzerainity, and making a Hapsburg ruler essential if the rest of Hungary was to be defended. In tracing the story after Mohacs, Temperley showed Hungarian patriotism and Magyar Calvinism being turned against Habsburg Catholicism even more than against the Turks. The toleration established in Transylvania - 'the Holland of the Balkans' - was contrasted with the intolerance of the Jesuits, and Transylvanian toleration shown extending itself into Hungary proper until the restored Habsburg autocracy checked it in the middle of the seventeenth century. Subsequent Hungarian resistance was described in terms of peasantry, gentry, and nobility breaking the class barrier, being 'ready to die for faith and freedom', and creating a nationalism that was as truly national as nationalism had been in England. This commitment to nationalism - this spiritual and sociological

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justification of its depth and integrity - was next applied to Serbia in a book which Temperley published while he was in the Army in 1917. In History of Serbia he described the 'spiritual forces' that had preserved Serbian nationhood through all the setbacks it had suffered since its period of greatness in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Through Phonariot and Turkish persecution in the Ottoman Empire, MagyarCatholic persecution in Hungary, and Habsburg-Uniate persecution in the military districts of the Habsburg Empire, Serbian national sentiment was described as being 'fostered by the Serbian Church' and diffused in an indestructible way in 'hundreds of self-governing villages' where 'thousands of peasants' were willing to follow their 'fierce chieftains . . . to the death'. Much of the rhetoric which Temperley used about the 'Serbian people' in 1917 resembled the rhetoric he had used about the Magyars in 1910. Even if the Serbian social structure was simpler, with few magnates and not much of a settled gentry, it was still the case that Serbian independence embodied a 'moral unity of feeling' felt by 'a nation of villagers' who were poor, turbulent and warlike and 'ready to oppose any established government' which was 'alien to their conception of democracy'. Temperley did not pretend that Serbia had been well governed since it had achieved its independence. He claimed that Serbs were difficult to govern because of thefiercenessof their temperaments, their hatred of bureaucratic control and their resistance to the taxation of land. But he described the work of Obradovitch and Karadjitch - the Serbian equivalents of Koraes - who had invented 'the modern Serbian tongue' and, through folk-songs, grammars and dictionaries, had established a unity of sympathy and culture between 'the individual fragments of the Yugo-Slav race'. What Temperley attributed to the Obrenovitch dynasty and to the restored Kara Georgovitches was the creation of a modern state. Writing of Britain's ally during the First World War, he whitewashed the Kara Georgovitch regime in spite of the atrocious assassinations which had accompanied its restoration in 1903. He praised King Peter for his modesty and bravery and for translating Mill On Liberty into Serbian. He praised his 'liberal regime', which had won 'the love and admiration of the peasants' who in war had rallied gloriously 'at the summons of their . . . king'. He attributed Serbia's success in the Second Balkan war to the 'intellectual standards' of the 'educated classes' and to the alliance that had been effected between its 'intellec-

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tual and democratic forces'. In both Serbia and Montenegro, 'for all his wild patriotism and savage ardour', the Serb was said to have a spirit which has something of true nobility in it . . . Routine politics are dull, and he is apt to curse or rebel against the politician rather than to force him to amend his ways. But once he is convinced of the greatness of an issue, of the importance to his country of political achievement or success, he is likely to work hard, to see deep and to go far. The Serbian has imagination enough to realise the great political dangers and the supreme political opportunity which peace is likely to offer him. Once the strength and ardour of the peasant is directed in the right channels by the intellectual leaders of Serbia there is no doubt as to the result. If the Serbian puts half the energy into the works of peace that he has expended on those of war, there is no fear as to the future of his race. During the First World War Temperley was engaged in intelligence and political warfare. He was present as an expert at the Peace Conference and helped in the drafting of the Peace Treaties. He was decorated by the Serbian, Rumanian, Yugaslav, and Polish governments, as well as by the British. It was from the body of experts that had been brought together in Paris that the Royal Institute of International Affairs was founded by G. L. Beer, Lionel Curtis and Lord Eustace Percy. It was by reason of his close involvement with them that Temperley was asked to edit the Institute's History of the Peace Conference. It was in doing this, and in writing The Second Year of the League in 1922, that he resumed the account of international diplomacy that he had given in the book he published in 1912 under the title Frederic the Great and Kaiser Joseph. By 1914, Temperley had cast himself in three roles. He was a romantic supporter of the nations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including the Magyar, against Habsburg dynasticism; he was a romantic supporter of the nationalities that were oppressed by the Magyars against them; and he was a radical critic of power politics, whether conducted by princes or by peoples. In the conditions created by the dissolution of the Habsburg, Russian and Turkish Empires and in pursuit of the intimations embodied in President Wilson's principles, he found an unexpected opportunity to give practical effect to his opinions. The exact nature of Temperley's war work and of his editorship of The History of the Peace Conference is not important for present purposes. It is clear, however, from his contributions to The History,

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that he supported Yugoslavia against Italy, was a critic of Horthy's Hungary and, though a moderate, was a zealous, advocate of both the Little Entente and the League of Nations. In the first respect, no doubt, he was more sensible than Seton-Watson or Brailsford, in the second more practical than Cecil, Hammond or Norman Angell. But he shared their assumption - that the League was the hope for the world and the remedy for folly, and that its defence of the 'individual sovereignty' of separate states would make it difficult for any state to resist the 'subtle, gradual. . . cumulative and . . . irresistible . . . moral pressure' by which it, and it alone, could make its members act in conformity with 'the facts of today'. We need give no special consideration to Temperley's later writings in which some loss of vigour and imagination was matched by gains in judiciousness and weight. The Foreign Policy of Canning, The Crimea, Europe in the Nineteenth Century (which he wrote with A. J. Grant) and The British Documents on the Origins of the War (which he edited with Gooch) were important events in inter-war British historiography. But they were also tombstones on the grave of the romantic liberal of 1905 who, like so many other Liberals of his generation, was left high-and-dry by the death of the Liberal party in the 1920s. In reading them, one has the impression of historical realism straining at the Liberal framework but failing so completely to break it that there was a discontinuity between argument on the one hand and detailed analyses on the other. Temperley was a frondeur, a bourgeois-radical intellectual whose natural home was the Liberal party and the liberal university. Butterfield was also a Liberal, though not a bourgeois-radical intellectual. There were many reasons why he should have resisted Temperley intellectually. It is doubtful whether he would have known how to do so, while making his life and career in Peterhouse, if he had not been a pupil of Vellacott as well. Though he was an appealing teacher of undergraduates, a first-rate Senior Tutor, an efficient headmaster of Harrow and a powerful Master of Peterhouse, Vellacott wrote virtually nothing. He had been gassed and badly wounded in the First World War and was almost an invalid. But he worked hard and was an arresting personality who had an enormous influence on his pupils. Vellacott achieved his effect by manner and character rather than by argument. He deployed an unspoken practical conservatism which

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disapproved of outsiders and people who dressed eccentrically. Until very late in his life, like many educated men of his generation, he was a non-believing Anglican who was neither against religion nor very much in favour of it, and believed in the Church of England because it was the Established Church of the State. Vellacott both taught Butterfield and was his tutor. He was the man to whom The Whig Interpretation of History was dedicated. Though himself an undergraduate pupil of Temperley, he helped Butterfield to entertain doubts about Temperley's outlook. His Conservatism, though it did not make Butterfield a Conservative, helped him to see that there was something to be said, politically, historically and personally, for not being a frondeur.

Ill As a Fellow of Peterhouse from 1923, Butterfield examined in the Entrance Examination and taught in supervision for six hours a week in about twenty weeks of the year for twenty years before being appointed to the University Chair of Modern History in 1944. By this time he had been lecturing and examining for the University History Faculty for about fifteen years and had written books, lectures, and articles about The Historical Novel, The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, History and the Marxian Method, Bolingbroke, The Englishman and his History, Napoleon and The Statecraft of Machiavelli. In the twenties and thirties Butterfield's writings were confined to historical subjects. There were few statements of wider relevance and little sense of public doctrine. At a time when Smyth was promulgating a general position about religion and politics, Butterfield confined himself to transforming history, demanding shifts in the attitude that historians and historical thinking should take towards the 'historical material' or 'the past'. Although in these years he wrote only about history, he was, until 1937, as he had been from the age of seventeen in Yorkshire, a lay preacher in Methodist churches in Cambridge and the surrounding villages. None of his sermons have been reprinted. Very little preaching material appears directly in the historical writings. But there must have been, inside the historical thinking that he did in these years, a submerged Dissenting Christianity which was fused with it and blew up

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with immense trails of light between 1944 and 1963, inserting into the centre of a major non-theological subject in an erstwhile Anglican university a more manifest body of doctrine than had been inserted by any other of the innumerable nonconformist scholars of the enfranchisement of 1871. It is difficult to know how it was that Butterfield allowed his mind to develop in separate compartments before suddenly creating the Christian demonstration of the late 1940s. It may be that this happened as a delayed reaction to withdrawal from preaching in 1936, which he claimed to have made for insignificant reasons. It may be, though he denied this, that it was a delayed reaction to the end of everything that was threatened after Dunkirk in 1940. Or there may have been social inhibitions or personal strains at which it is impossible to guess. What is certain is that the power and productiveness of the subsequent years provided one of the most remarkable public performances in twentiethcentury England, establishing for the intelligentsia a set of signposts different from those they had been accustomed to before and achieving for Butterfield a reputation among English-speaking historians at least as great as that he records Temperley as having enjoyed when he first knew him. In the seventeen years between The Historical Novel and The Statecraft of Machiavelli Butterfield had been moving along four roads at once. He had developed views about the nature of historical writing, about the relationship between man and society, about the history of English politics, and about the development of European civilization. He had done this in such a way that each could be interpreted as in some way hanging together with the rest. Since, however, he did not draw them together until they were overlaid with the Christian doctrine of the late forties, they may be considered in thefirstplace separately. About 'technical history' Butterfield's pre-war view was that the past should be studied for its own sake, that often it was not so studied, and that it had fallen too much into the hands of political historians. He was saying both that total history was desirable and that it was impossible, and he urged the need to recognize that political and diplomatic history had been wrenched out of an immense sociological totality. He emphasized the difficulties historians face in freeing themselves from 'the tyranny of [their] own present' and made innumerable statements of the fact that to 'the men of 1807', for example, 'the year 1808' was 'a mighty and unexplained fact'. It was repeatedly stated

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that each age was distinct from other ages and from the present, and that no age should be dismissed from consideration. The message throughout was that abridgement involved assumptions and evaluations which were made before detailed historical investigation could begin, and that scientific history required absolute transparency in relation to them. Emphasizing as he did the active part played by the historian's assumptions, it is not surprising that Butterfield should have been so greatly concerned with discussing their character. He believed both that scientific history aimed to transcend the assumptions of the present and yet could not do so, and that the choice of assumptions was a highly significant activity. He was self-consciously transforming them in writing both The Whig Interpretation of History and History and the Marxian Method. The Whig Interpretation of History followed on from The Historical Novel. It gave the same emphasis to the primacy of the whole past, the difficulty historians have in knowing it and the technical and internal reasons, not mentioned in the earlier work, why no part of it should be given priority merely because it can be shown leading into the present. A book of this sort, once established in the academic eye, performs a function in the lives of its readers which may be different from the functions it performed at the time at which it was written. The vast expansion of history faculties in the last fifty years and the increasing secularization of their tone in the last twenty have made possible a reading which is certainly in the text, which is in fact the obvious meaning of the text, but which it may be legitimate to think is not its sole meaning. The Whig Interpretation is the only one of Butterfield's pre-1944 books in which there is a significant seepage of theological ideas into the technical historical doctrine. One need not suggest that the technical doctrine was not there, or was not dominant, or that the work was not primarily an argument about the writing of technical history. It was, however, something else besides. In understanding the development of Butterfield's opinions, it is necessary to understand the dialogue he conducted with Acton. He did not know Acton, who had died fifteen years before Butterfield arrived in Cambridge. But Acton was part of both Ward's and Temperley's intellectual equipment, and it was as true of Butterfield as it was of Oakeshott that some of his first teeth were cut historically in considering the range and universality of Acton's historical thinking.

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Acton, however, in spite of Butterfield's own belief, was not the sole object of attack in The Whig Interpretation of History. There were aspects of his thought that Butterfield did attack - the low-level discussion of moral judgments and the gallery of blood-stained villains that Acton discerned in modern Europe, together with the liberal myth that he had perpetuated in The History of Freedom in Antiquity and The History of Freedom in Christianity. But a great many of the criticisms that Butterfield made in The Whig Interpretation of History were continuations of criticisms that Acton had made himself, and this was not less the case there than elsewhere. The most that can be said about targets is that Acton should be added to Hallam, Ward, Temperley, Bury, Trevelyan and Trevelyan's Northumberland country gentlemen, Grey of the Reform Bill and Grey of Falloden. The object of The Whig Interpretation of History was to provide warnings against the abridged history of 'the textbook historian'. But the objection to him was not so much that his opinions were 'Protestant, progressive and Whig' as that, unless he was an American (like Motley?), he tended to be 'the very model of the nineteenth-century country gentleman'. There was, in other words, a social identification, a hint that the 'country gentleman' about whom Butterfield was writing was in imperfect sympathy with the popular feeling of his time. It was implied that there had been insincerity in the progressive front which this sort of writer maintained, and a wilful determination not only to despise people from the wrong side in the past but also to have narrow views about the proper government of the present. This 'Whig', however, was not identified as an exclusively social type: he was identified much more by his intellectual characteristics, as the kind of man who 'sits on his mountain top' taking 'short cuts' through the complexity of the past and by 'subtle . . . sleight of hand', insisting, often in ignorance that he was doing this, on 'organising history on an assumption' - itself an 'optical illusion' - that the past could not only be understood in the categories of the present but should also be judged by its standards. The demand for judgment - the 'passionate desire to come to a judgment of values' - was an illusion, not just because the judgments that were likely to be entered would be premature and partial but because they were delivered with certainty and bias, especially against Tories and Catholics. The position from which they were delivered was described as that of 'God the avenger' and this was said to be objectionable in exactly the same way as that in which Hoskyns had found

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'Liberalism' objectionable, because it was man arrogating God's powers to himself. This theme did not dominate the book, whose argument was mainly technical - a set of maxims for the proper conduct of historical study. But it was present as overtone and through the implication that historians were Whig not merely because of defects in sympathy and understanding but because a defective theology had bred a defective range of historical techniques. This theme was carried further in the article History and the Marxian Method which was published in Scrutiny in 1933. History and the Marxian Method should be seen as the outcome of an unconscious compact which Butterfield had made with those of his pupils who were sympathetic to Marxism - a diplomatic arrangement which would keep them on the rails of orthodox historical study by widening 'bourgeois history' to include the sort of history that they wanted. It picked up the impossibility The Historical Novel had pinpointed in getting history 'close to the lives of humble men who trod silently in the past' and it developed its demand to see the history of individuals in the shadow of 'the surge of historic movement, the pulse of life underneath all lives'. It accepted as the 'clue' to a great deal of bourgeois thinking the assumption that 'in the last analysis ideas . . . determine the course of history', and it accepted the Marxist allegation that this sort of analysis lay 'in the centre of our bourgeois system'. It asserted that 'the Marxian formula' had 'diagnosed the very evils which bourgeois historians often deplored in their own history', had 'put its fingers on the fundamental fallacies of that history which the average Englishman holds in his head' and 'represented the direction in which bourgeois history was moving - though neither we nor the Marxists like to admit the fact'. It approved the Marxian rejection of the 'individualist heresy' and presented Marxism as a valuable ally in the fight against Liberalism and Whiggery. When one person argues [he wrote in the middle of the article] that in the Renaissance, we are dealing only with a handful of privileged people that the majority of Italians, for example, were superstitiously religious at that very time, when another person criticises the common view that the eighteenth century was the 'age of reason', these people are only pulling us towards the position of the Marxists who demand that we study the whole society as a unit and condemn us for keeping our eyes upon the privileged class, when people attack the common habit of 'tracing ideas back into history' - watching the Reformation grow through Abelard,

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Wycliffe, Erasmus and the Renaissance, or working towards the League of Nations through the Crusades, the Grand Design and the Holy Alliance, they are joining hands with the Marxists in a protest against one form of the heresy that history is a logical development, or they are attacking the bourgeois assumption that history can be regarded as the story of ideas. How far the demand for an historical sociology was a professional translation of Methodist arminianism or a conscious rejection of lapsed liberal Calvinism, and to what extent it registered a social criticism of the complacency of public-school humanism and elevation, it is impossible to judge. What can be said is that the overarching conception of the twenties and thirties was a refined form of historical thinking in which the crude conceptions of 'first knowledge' were transcended by the realization that 'the process of learning history is always the process of unlearning the history that we knew before . . . that an interpretation of history is a thing that we start with and then proceed for ever in a certain sense to unlearn' and that 'the habits of these constant reshufflings gives our minds that elasticity which is the first condition of historical mindedness'. If it is true [he wrote, in post-Liberal fashion] that we come to history as though the nineteenth century were still our present, and if it is true that the Marxist takes his start from a later present and a less traditional analysis of it, then the Marxian theories under discussion may provide the very rejuvenation of history. And though there is no subject on which we ought to move with greater humility of mind, we should be wrong to overlook the truth that, if history may or must be allowed to have reference to the present, then, in so far as issues change and events demand a new shaping of our minds, each generation must re-write or at least mentally re-organize history for itself. This process of reorganization, involving a frontal assault on Liberalism and Whiggery, was continued in two different directions in Butterfield's treatment of both English and European history. Butterfield's unpublished Cambridge lectures on European history a great success when they were delivered in the 1930s - were lectures about civilization, constructed in execution of the demand made in The Whig Interpretation of History and repeated in The Statecraft of Machiavelli, to break up the political structure in which liberal historical scholarship had entrenched itself. His two books about Napoleon saw their subject less as an embodiment of the liberalism of the French Revolution - which was presented as issuing directly in

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despotism - than as a terrible force which had blown up the ancien regime. It is impossible to read either of these books, and especially the later one, without sensing Butterfield's admiration for the 'imperial range' of Napoleon's genius, the comparative contempt he felt for the principles that Napoleon was supposed to be advancing, and the manifest fact that the judgment on Napoleon's disintegration ('spoiled by power') was made from a high point of admiration. Admiration for power was not, of course, either a Christian or a liberal viewpoint. But even if the assumption was in some ultimate way liberal, it was a very long way from elitist liberalism. It was even further from the Renaissance-humanist liberalism which Butterfield belittled in The Statecraft of Machiavelli, where the chapter on 'The Rise of the Inductive Method' supplied the germ of The Origins of Modern Science - the doubt whether the 'men of the Renaissance' with their 'cult of antiquity' could have been as 'revolutionary' as had been imagined, whether modern thinking was as free of dependence on 'authority' as liberal scholarship had supposed and 'whether indeed the whole transition from mediaeval to modern in the region in question [was] not more banal, less magical and portentous than it seemed to be atfirstview'. So far as Butterfield offered a positive public doctrine in the twenties and thirties, he did so in passing; the relativism he pointed at all positions in teaching his Peterhouse pupils was pointed in public only at the targets which he, Smyth, Hoskyns and others all identified together - the humanistic whiggism and elevated liberalism of the generation before his own, the lapsed protestant virtue of which Trevelyan and Bury were exemplary embodiments. What he did thereafter was in part a reversal of this and in part a transformation in which he allowed Christianity to impregnate all the ideas with which he had been playing so far, turning them in the process into the sort of public doctrine that Smyth had been seeking at precisely the point at which Smyth renounced the attempt to express it. The first evidence of the new manner was the article he wrote in criticism of Archbishop Temple's Christianity and Social Order for neglecting the part which Capitalism had played in 'ushering in the age of plenty' and for making ' "demands" on behalf of "every child of today" ' which 'in all previous centuries . . . would have seemed . . . a . . . bold requisition against providence'. This was published in May 1942; when followed by The Englishman and his History, it made it obvious that a retraction was being effected and a new theme being

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proposed in which theology and history were linked together in joint celebration of the national unity that had been forged in the eighteen months after Dunkirk. IV In one respect The Englishman and his History1 was an avowedly 'Whig' book. It celebrated the 'song of liberty', identified 'our liberties' with 'our national genius for compromise' and showed this at work in the English passion for preserving 'the silt of bygone ages in the fabric of the present'. It concerned itself 'not with the conservatism that resists any changes' but with 'the methods by which continuity has been reconciled with change'. It described the modern monarchy in these terms. It showed 'our greatest innovators' from the seventeenth century onwards trying to pretend that they were 'restorers of ancient ways' and it pictured the English, when great rifts had occurred, like the Reformation or the Civil War, doing their best 'to play providence upon the tears and rents' and 'seeking by a thousand little stitches to join the present with the past'. This attitude was identified as a 'Whig' one which gave a 'tug at the heartstrings of every Englishman'. It was 'part of the landscape of English life, like our country lanes, our November mists or our historic inns' and had never been more vivid than in 'the great speeches of 1940'. Butterfield did not deny that Whig history, especially in its formative period in the seventeenth century, had been false history - a 'controlling abridgement' which had 'erupted upon the world as propaganda'. He agreed that it had been 'qualified' by 'controversy, discipline and tradition' and had developed, as a consequence, an enormous 'elasticity'. But elasticity was seen as issuing in a point at which it had not only 'bent history . . . so to speak . . . but had made it more bendable for the future'. To that extent there was no retraction. But the attitude was very 1. The last third of The Englishman and his History was certainly written in 1943 or 1944 as probably were the introductory passages. The body of the text, however, and all the historiographical material was prepared for lectures which the Cultural Attache at the German Embassy in London persuaded Butterfield to give in German universities in 1938. 'We don't,' Butterfield reports the Attach6 as saying, 'want to hear any more from you about the dangers of the Whig Interpretation of which by now we are all well seized. What we want you to tell us is how it came about.' That, in Butterfield's version, was how he came to be interested in the history of historiography.

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different from what it had been before. The bending of history, so far from being regretted, was treated as a virtue, bent history having now become a specific against vice. Bent history, in other words, had its use in bending the present to the past. It had been used with special skill by Whig statesmen who had been 'much greater' and 'less partisan' than the 'Whig historians' and had evolved so effective a way of 'cooperating with Providence' that their services, 'like the influence of Shakespeare on English life', had been absorbed into a tradition that was 'nationwide'. And there was nothing, it was added, that was worth considering on the other side; there was nothing worth the name of 'the Tory interpretation of history'. The real alternative to Whig history in recent times - the real Tory alternative to the organisation of English history on the basis of the growth of liberty - was the story of British expansion overseas. Attempts were made to give currency to this organisation of the story of England, but the Whiggism that is in all Englishmen declined to take the imperialistic version to its heart. Now, however, even this structure of the history of England is a Tory alternative no more; and only in recent times have we come to see how this epic of British expansion has been swallowed into the original system of the Whigs. Perhaps only in the shock of 1940 did we realise to what degree the British Empire had become an organisation for the purpose of liberty. The playing of Whig statesmen against Whig historians got Butterfield off the hook so far as The Whig Interpretation was concerned: it enabled him to make a shift from the technical historical points he had been making in 1931 to the explicitly political points he was making now. The shift may not have been large, since the points of 1931 had had a political and theological base: in that sense there was not much difference between expressing them in the form of technical historical maxims and expressing them in the manner of The Englishman and his History. The difference, nevertheless, was important and was to have greater importance when the new manner was developed in the future. The positive reason that was given for 'rejoicing' in the whig interpretation was that, in its absence, the door would be opened for something very much worse, by which was meant politically worse, since the historical inaccuracy of the seventeenth-century exponents of Whig history was said to have spared England a revolution in 1688 when a more accurate understanding of the middle ages had contributed to revolution in France, and it was the Whig myth - a word that was not

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used - which had made it possible in England to 'preserve continuity while making the nineteenth century transition to democracy'. The Englishman and his History was an attempt to bring Asquitheanism to the aid of the Churchill/Atlee coalition. In describing the content of English politics in the past, it gave instructions about the way in which 'moderate' politics would have to be conducted if 'presumption', 'recklessness' and 'revolutionary overthrow' were to be avoided in the future. It made it clear that English politics from the early eighteenth century had consisted of 'a certain kind of political mechanics' which revealed both 'the right feeling for events' and a 'tempered faith in the course of history'. This view was said to be 'at a discount among academic students of political affairs' who were also perhaps being classified as 'armchair politicians'. But, so far from being 'innate' or the result of geographical 'insularity', this was said to be the result of 'a deliberate process of reflection upon past mistakes . . . the testament of a repentant Englishman who had so early achieved and so soon regretted the horrors of a revolutionary mode of procedure'. This type of politics - 'non-doctrinaire' politics - consisted in a flexible commitment to 'a cautious progress to whatever end may be desired'. It did not say what end was to be desired, except perhaps the avoidance of conflict: it did not say exactly whom the end was to be chosen by, though it wrote of the 'solid body of Englishmen . . . waiting to steal for the whole nation what they could appropriate from the traditions of monarchy, aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and church'. It quoted with apparent approval Rapin's view that 'the ballast in the English system was provided by the moderate . .. rank-and-file of both parties . . . who repudiated desperate politics or fanatical doctrinairism of the right wing or of the left'. So far as it committed itself to anything specific, it wanted abuses to be reformed before they 'provoked the injured or oppressed to . . . revolutionary action' and it wanted a 'curious critical operation', to be performed upon the programme of the 'progressive parties' which might result in bodily movement towards conservative positions (as had happened towards the Pittite position in 1792). This was said to be 'co-operation with history'. It was made possible by 'tradition and instinct' and issued in the search, not for the 'highest good' but for the 'highest practical good'. It assumed that there was a 'Providence in the historical process', that men could cooperate with it, and that 'sometimes (and indeed often in the long run) it was on the side of the mediocrities'. Its achievements were said to have been

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that 'reform . . . had been able to come by a more easy and natural route, even when it had come later than it might have done', and that in England there had been few 'irreconcilable hatreds within the state'. In The Englishman and his History the past was made to confirm or justify the present. It was suffused with a feeling of relief and gratitude for the deliverance of 1940-42. In a way which only Rowse among historians did so early, it made a systematic consecration of what may be called the Churchillian myth, and it did this with a passion which seems not to have diminished with the years. Amongst contemporary English politicians only Wilson and Powell met with a similar measure of Butterfield's approval and that for the reason that, like Churchill, they had a distinctive mentality which transcended the rancour of the average party politician. It was no merely formal piety that produced the eulogy in Great St Mary's Church, Cambridge on Churchill's death in 1965 when Churchill was seen as the man who, out of the 'richness' of his 'internal resources' and a 'magnificent assertion of the human will', had brought rulers and people together in 1940 and made 'all differences about politics and policies seem . . . irrelevant'. In offering 'thanks to that Providence which moves through the course of ages and is in the rising of the sun', the vital points to establish for 'those who would come afterwards' were how 'sad' those days were when 'the end of the tunnel' was 'invisible', and how much the education of the democracy had owed to the 'sense of humour' which enabled a 'hard-hitting politician' to 'set an example of the sort of tolerances and urbanities . . . necessary for the conduct of democracy - that respect for the other man's personality without which democracy will crumble into a chaos of egotisms'. The Englishman and his History led in three directions. The third, and most important - the direction which led through its closing pages to The Origins of Modern Science and Christianity and History - will be considered in a moment. Of the first, and most obvious - the history of historiography - what needs to be said has been said already. Though taken up by Forbes, Pocock, Ben-Israel and others and brought to a climax in Butterfield's Man on His Past, it has suffered the same defect as the history of political thought - that it must either become a history of the whole of thought, or present a misleading abridgment which can only be enlivened when a propagandist, like the Butterfield of The Englishman and his History, the missing Buterfield of the abortive

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Acton or the Wormald of the unpublished history of European historiography, proves something through its agency. For present purposes it is much less important than the lead which The Englishman and his History gave towards the reconstruction of English history. From this point of view The Englishman and his History looks like the designation of an area of study, a high-level indication of the way in which English history should be developed in the future. The emphasis was developed in an article on The Teaching of English History in the Cambridge Journal in 1948 with its criticisms of insulated constitutional history, its celebration of the importance of economic history and its demand for an 'organic' history which would absorb both constitutional history and 'the old amorphous social history' into a 'profounder' analysis of the 'story of England' as a 'developing structure'. Butterfield had no practical interest in social or economic history. His interests were ideological. Just as the history of religion and politics had been transformed in the 1920s as part of a demolition-job on the human narrowness of Whig liberalism, so now conventional constitutional history was criticized for ignoring the deep layers of social structure, even though Butterfield not only showed little interest in them, but also interested himself almost exclusively in the exercise of established power. The maxims of the 1948 article were logical extensions - in some cases even mechanical repetitions - of the maxims which had been laid down in The Historical Novel, History and the Marxian Method and elsewhere. They then more or less came to a halt, demonstrated so far as they could be in the framework of George 111, Lord North and the People and in a way receded from in George III and the Historians. George III, Lord North and the People was a test - the acid test of the revisionary maxims with which Butterfield had decorated his academic life so far. It was the first full-scale book since The Peace Tactics of Napoleon. In a way it is the only other book in which historical material was presented not argumentatively or analytically but as though it was providing an account of the past as it was. The questions it raises are, did it succeed in meeting Butterfield's requirements? If it did not, was this because the requirements could not be met? In one respect the book gave an important demonstration of what Butterfield had been meaning in the past. By showing 'vested interests' as well as 'high purposes' operating in all parts of the political spectrum, R.P.D.—i

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it expanded an already established modification of the general interpretation of late eighteenth-century politics. But its requirements were so demanding that the negative, post-liberal rejection of insulated constitutional history could not have been turned into total English history unless Butterfield had broken the political backbone - which the absence of economic knowledge and his manifest obsession with political power made him unable to do. The choice of 1779-80 as the point at which to write about George III and the People was deliberate. It highlighted a 'remarkable period of transition' when the aristocratic polity of The Englishman and his History had begun to move into a 'new world and a new era'. It made it possible to study 'our French Revolution' - the 'revolution' that the English 'escaped' - and it emphasized two points about it. First, that the transition to modern politics had been more complicated than was often imagined. Second, that 'the intervention of the people' in the form of the Wilkite movement, the Yorkshire Association and the Gordon riots reflected the first outcrop of the 'long, slow, deep tide' which throughout the century had been 'bringing wide classes of Englishmen to intellectual awareness and a realisation of the part they might play in polities'. The book not only dealt with 'popular movements'; its central theme was the intersection between the king's government and 'the people'. It also described the 'deep fissure' that had been visible in English society since Defoe and explained it in terms of a cleavage between 'two forms of civilization', one originating in Anglicanism and one in dissent, and each contributing to a situation in which the apologists of the 'disinherited' had taken over from the dissenting academies a hostility to 'the mysteries of tradition' and a determination to subject the 'complexities and anomalies which existed in the eighteen-century scheme of things' to the standards and judgments of 'common sense'. This was put, as it were, structurally, but it was not so evident in detail. In detail what was chiefly evident was an account of George Ill's dealings with North and the Whigs, and of the gentry character of the Yorkshire Association. There was a certain amount about the government's reaction to the popular movement, but it was not very adequate, and it was obvious that Butterfield's real interest was in what was described, nevertheless, as a 'surface drama' - the battle between George III and the aristocracy in which 'liberty' was preserved because neither side won. The book has a number of characteristic touches and could not have

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been written by anyone but its author. But it neither focused on the intersection it was supposed to be dealing with nor demonstrated the complication of the politics it was discussing. George III, Lord North and the People was the last serious statement that Butterfield made about the history of England. There were a few subsequent articles and lectures, and there were asides in most of the later works. But the book on the transition from 'aristocratic' to 'democratic' government, if it was ever conceived, was not written, nor was the book, for which much work was done, on Charles James Fox. Even if George HI and the Historians (1957) showed Butterfield at his best, using the historiography of the subject in order to criticize Namier's methods by showing that other historians had reached his conclusions without committing themselves to a Namierite straitjacket, it was so much concerned with deploying a special view of the nature of politics and reploughing old ground about George Ill's early intentions that it can hardly be said to have pushed thought in any of the directions in which pushing had been said to be necessary. Enough has been said to show that, after 1944, a positive doctrine was being promulgated about English politics, the effect of which was to consecrate the Churchillian consensus, while virtually ignoring the socialist Danegeld aspect of Churchill's reign. It was accompanied by the fully-fledged assertion of a Christian doctrine of which the preliminary announcement had been made in The Englishman and his History.

In accounting for the differing developments of English and French liberty in the first hundred or so pages of The Englishman and his History, Butterfield had stressed the importance of the contrasting ways in which seventeenth-century English and French thinkers had talked about the Middle Ages. In the last chapter of the book he so widened the range of explanation as to convert the historical question for the first time into an explicit question about the connection between Christianity and political behaviour. He did this by pinpointing the 'massive breach' which had been produced in France when the 'scientific' movement of the seventeenth century had been transformed into the 'philosophe' movement of the eighteenth, and the 'national tradition' had been 'split from top to bottom' between secular Liberalism on the one hand and Roman Catholicism on the other which, since

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1789, had stood 'howling at one another from different universes' in a way that had never been allowed to happen in England. In accounting for the starkness of the conflict, very little was said about Roman Catholic politics. The initiative in destruction was attributed to secular liberals who had not only 'played too high a game', producing Napoleonic tyranny by the way, but, when resisted, had tended to equate resistance with evil and to treat the 'political enemy' as 'sub-human' and 'irredeemable'. That the English had avoided this sort of breach was attributed in part to the traditions of aristocratic government. 'When the aristocracy was sent to the laundry' the adage was, 'the dye ran out into the rest of the washing', with the result that English democracy had grow up in the shadow of the assumption that, since parliamentary politics was a struggle 'between members of a governing class... all conflicts could be resolved into... "conflicts between allies" '. This was important. But it was regarded as a subordinate instance of a main thesis which attributed the moderation of English political life to the 'influence' 'a thousand years of Christianity must have had' in the absence of any 'flood of militant anti-Christian tendencies' to counteract it. In England, the argument was, there had been no breach with the 'Christian tradition'. For this reason both 'individualism' and 'love of country' had been less dangerous than elsewhere. England had not been torn from top to bottom by secular liberalism, the Whigs had not turned into an anti-ecclesiastical party and the Churches had not locked themselves away in 'political diehardism'. The line, therefore between Christian and non-Christian positions had been blurred, 'Christian sentiments' had lingered on 'as a cement to the body politic' and 'even those who would have claimed to have jettisoned Christian dogma . . . remained tinged with it'. 'The skirts of a Christian tradition', went one metaphor, 'rich with wonderful pleats and folds, still trailed and rustled across the floor.' 'So the new and the old were allowed to mingle,' went another, 'producing another piece of that English history which, like a weed, grows over the fences, chokes and smothers the boundaries - luxurious and wanton as life itself - to drive the geometers and the heavy logicians [and, doubtless, also the biblical theologians] to despair.' The argument was that the relics of Christianity had made an important contribution to the stability and unity of English life, not because England had been a fully Christian country since the eighteenth century but because, even though it had ceased to be, the English had

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retained a hangover from the time when it had been. This Christian residue was conceived of as operating over the whole of English life. It was conceived of as operating with special effect in making Englishmen sceptical both of the 'promises of politicians' and of the 'degree to which the ills of the world' could be 'rapidly cured by political action'. The closing pages of the third section of The Englishman and his History developed an argument about Christian belief and the incompatibility between the doctrine of the Fall and an 'optimistic' view of the 'reasonableness and righteousness of the natural man'. Secular liberals, having rejected the 'doctrine of the Fall', were pictured as succumbing to moral indignation and pagan hatred precisely because they did not see that not only their enemies but all men were sinners and that it was God's business not man's to do any avenging that might be needed. This, it seemed to be implied, was the inevitable consequence of the rejection of Christianity. The retention of Christian assumptions, even after belief had disappeared, was regarded as a guarantee that men would neither be treated as subordinate to some 'super-person' like 'the Volk, New Order' or 'deified State' nor tear themselves to pieces in subordination to that 'super-Manichean heresy which regards live human beings as . . . mere bodies to ride over on the way to Utopia'. In some respects this was a prudential doctrine, a claim that Christian belief, or its residues, puts a curb on the darker side of human nature and provides a better guarantee of liberty than secular liberals could supply. It entailed an attempt, even when only by implication, to demonstrate the inferiority of modern secular beliefs to mediaeval Christianity, which had assumed that men were not 'a mere part of nature' but had eternal souls which were God's creation and bore his image, and were, severally and individually, 'precious jewels' or 'separate poems which were never outside the range of His Providence'. There is no need to expect systematic theology from a work as theologically occasional as The Englishman and his History. It is important only to notice that, in its last section, Butterfield was making his first explicit attempt - four years after Toynbee had made his - to infuse into the technical historical doctrine of the pre-war works the openly Christian doctrine which he had been preaching for the first twenty years of his adult life. In the years which followed his election to the Chair of Modern History in 1944 Butterfield wrote three major books - George III,

236 Recessions Lord North and the People, The Origins of Modern Science and Christianity and History, all of which were published in the same month in 1949. Christianity and History and The Origins of Modern Science were originally Cambridge lectures delivered in response to special invitations - the first from the University's History of Science Committee, the other from the Divine Faculty. The Origins had been anticipated not only by remarks in The Statecraft of Machiavelli but also by a BBC talk in the summer of 1948. It bore the marks of its occasions, being both an explanation of the way in which modern science had begun and a testimonial to the possibility of restoring the pristine mediaeval unity between the arts and the sciences - 'those estranged halves of our fractured civilization' the fragmentation of which Butterfield identified as one of the causes of 'modern barbarism'. There is no need to recount the stages of explanation by which Galileo's and Newton's discoveries were said to have been made, nor the emphasis Butterfield gave to the mediaeval origins of the scientific revolution. The important thing to notice is the identification of 'modern science' as a new civilization which in company with the agrarian and industrial revolutions had destroyed the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages as it had survived through all the 'internal displacements' which the Renaissance and Reformation had made in it. This formulation was significant in two respects. In the first place, because it provided an authoritative statement of the belief which many of Butterfield's contemporaries shared, that the humanism of the Renaissance was less important than earlier generations of historians had imagined. Secondly, because it rested on a plank that was to be found in many other platforms in Anglo-Saxon universities in the late forties - the claim that Christianity is not to be identified with modern civilization. The implications of this disjunction were not investigated at length in The Origins of Modern Science, which considered the genesis of modern science rather than the consequences of its generation. Nor was the content of the new civilization subjected to serious examination in subsequent works, except where it had degenerated into the various forms of secular impiety. To that extent one may say that the ideals of Christian civilization were not compared on an equal footing with the ideals of its successors. It is nevertheless the case that the nature of the Christian response was one of the chief questions to which Christianity and History provided an answer.

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In Christianity and History Butterfield gave a moderate version of the attacks which Smyth had made when ten years younger and in less favourable conditions ten years earlier. There were the same objections to the 'stiffnecked' who 'goad' man to 'greater wickedness' than they would otherwise commit. There was the same objection to the 'superficiality' of the 'idealists' and the 'spiritual impoverishment' of the 'self-styled prophets' of the last generation together with the same claim that 'we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves' if we adopt the 'lazy, unexamined doctrine of man' which rests on the 'recent' and 'very disastrous heresy' that one should 'have faith in human nature'. There was the same belief that the 'blindest of all the blind . . . amongst historians . . . are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions' because they 'blithely imagine that they do not possess any'. There was the same dismissal of those who in 1919 had thought that, 'since the world had become more liberal and democratic for a century, it could now only become more liberal and democratic still'. There were restatements of the Manning view about 'unimaginative barbarism' and the 'decline of civilization over much of Europe' which Butterfield attributed sometimes to the after effects of War, sometimes to a half educated technological materialism and sometimes to the hard-shelled arrogance of the inelastic. Above all, there was a succession of restatements of the Hoskyns/Smyth doctrine about pride, passing from the 'presumptuousness' of statesmen promising the world 'freedom from fear' through war being caused by 'idealists' being 'too egotistical concerning their own plans for salvation' to Hitler as a man who, by 'aping Providence blasphemed God' and brought more rapid tragedy on the world than the people who give 'half their lives to wine, women and song'. Instead, however, of historical explanation of the tendency of ideals to turn against themselves as the ideals of 1789 had done, it was now asserted as a general truth that it was 'cupidity' that tied 'events' into 'knots', 'musical presumption and self-rifihteousness' that made 'situations move frantic and deadlocks more hopeless' and 'one sin' that 'locked people up in all other sins' and 'fastened men and nations more tightly than ever in their predicaments - . . . namely, the sin of self-righteousness'. This applied not merely to men as objects of historical study but also to historians themselves. It meant that the past should not be seen as a fight of the 'pure and righteous' against the 'diabolically wicked' but must be described on the assumption that 'human nature is imperfect

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generally'. It meant that the historian must 'join hands with the theologian' in 'tearing the mask from human nature' and bringing out 'truths' which Marxists had been allowed to appropriate (ridiculously in view of 'what Christians had been preaching . . . for so many centuries') truths about class structure and vested interests which would be 'dangerous in the hands of everybody except a Christian' but which were the necessary remedy for the distortion that occurs 'both in statemanship and in . . . reflection on life' if you 'begin by assuming a world of normally wise and righteous men'. The purpose in 'tearing the mask from human nature' was not, however, the Marxist purpose, but to show that all human actions, souls and systems were under judgment. Judgment was presented sometimes as inhering in events and sometimes as the special action of God. In either case it was assumed that, human nature being free and sinful and men being capable of perverting any ideals they might be moved by, all systems were doomed to decay - humanism, liberalism and democracy no less than any others - that none could provide secure standing-points either for action or comprehension and that their transitoriness was something which God had embedded 'in the fabric of history'. It followed that, since 'man himself goes on' even when systems have crumbled, he should not regard 'supra-personal edifices like State, culture, capitalism, liberalism . . . which are associated with the idea of progress' as 'the actual aim of life' or 'the ultimate purpose of history', but should recognize on the contrary that since 'each generation - indeed, each individual - exists for the glory of God', it was 'one of the most dangerous things in life' to subordinate human personality to anything else. Throughout Christianity and History Butterfield wrote as though systems were collapsing and cataclysm occurring in the late 1940s. But it was never quite clear which cataclysm it was: whether the 'day of reckoning' for democratic liberalism, the British crisis of 1940-42, the division of the world into the post-war power blocs or the atomic reminder of that 'fundamental human experience' against which science had cushioned the twentieth century - the insecurity and uncertainty of earthly life. Butterfield's public doctrine had three positive aspects. It gave an account of politics and political power; it gave an account of religion; and it gave an account of the relationship between each of these on the one hand and intellectual cogitation on the other. It offered 'bearings in the drama of human history' and issued in homely homilies on the

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principles of conduct which seem to follow from the very process of history. In this respect it was explicit. It reaffirmed the historical pyrrhonism of the thirties, showing a great deal of historical attention necessarily being given to 'the kind of history-making which goes on . . . over our heads', and it translated the historian's ignorance into an ignorance which all men should feel about the possibility of controlling the future. It did not deny that a future could be created or that progress could occur. But it explained them in terms of a providential order which 'took [men's] purposes out of their hands and . . . turned their endeavours to ends not realised'. The practical conclusion, for Christians and non-Christians alike, was that men should think of themselves 'not as sovereign makers of history' prepared 'arrogantly . . . to impose an ideal of their own . . . upon the future' but as 'born to co-operate with Providence' and to trust it, even when it allowed the wicked to prosper. Co-operating with Providence - or leaving the future flexible entailed negative rather than positive advice. It excluded Napoleonic and Hitlerian prometheanism. It lined up behind Metternich for expecting 'presumption' to cause tragedy in the twentieth century and behind Bismarck's religious realization that statesmen could only 'navigate' upon the 'stream of time'. It gave no support to the claim that God was concerned with the indefinite continuation of terrestrial progress. If atomic research should by some accident splinter and destroy this whole globe tomorrow [he wrote in chapter three of Christianity and History] I imagine that it would hurt us no more than that 'death on the road* under the menace of which we pass every day of our lives. It will only put an end to a globe which we always knew was doomed to a bad end in any case. But, supposing all this were to happen, it would be an optical illusion to imagine that God's purposes in creation would thereby be cut off unfulfilled and the meaning of life uprooted as though the year AD 2000 or 40,000 had a closer relation to eternity than 1949. Supposing the time is to come - as I always understood that it would - when the world in any case will be no more than a whiff of smoke drifting in desolate skies, then those who rest their ultimate beliefs in progress are climbing a ladder which may be as vertical as they claim it to be but which in reality is resting on nothing at all. If there is a meaning in history, therefore, it lies not in the systems and organisations that are built over long periods, but in something more essentially human, something in each personality considered for mundane purposes as an end in itself.

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This 'something' - man's relation to God - was not spelt out. It was implied that God judged souls eternally in much the same way that he allowed his judgment to operate terrestrially on systems considered as embodiments of sin. This was not discussed explicitly, however: all that was discussed explicitly was the relationship between salvation and the religions of the world. One difficulty about Butterfield's presentation of religion was in relation to Christianity. How did he conceive of Christianity operating in the world? Did he take the Church seriously as a Christian institution? It is clear that Butterfield accepted the view that the clergy - the dominant European intelligentsia for more than a thousand years had a record black enough to justify dark hints about 'the unbeliever' having 'fought the Churchman for what we today would regard as the . . . end which most corresponds with the deeper influences of Christianity'. But it was clear also, especially in Christianity in European History, that, until 1650, Christianity, though encumbered with much secular thinking, had been the cement of European civilization and the lens through which Europeans had seen. Butterfield's writing was saturated with the Barthian belief in the penultimate nature of religion and religious organisation. It lacked Hoskyns's or Manning's belief in the divinity and continuity of Church existence. It conceived of religion as depending on a direct relationship to Christ, but provided no investigation of the ways in which Christ could be known. After 106 pages of Christianity and History in which an intimate relationship was assumed between Christianity and technical history, for example, it was suddenly admitted that God's relationship to Christ would not seem true 'to the external observer who puts on the thinking cap of the ordinary historical student'. It was added that the 'hand of God' was unlikely to be found 'in secular history' unless it had first been found in 'personal experience' and that 'in this sense our interpretation of the human drama throughout the ages rests finally on our interpretation of our most private experiences of life and stands as merely an extension of it'. Butterfield presented his view of Christianity as an 'ancient' one one that had been 'available to anyone in our part of the world for 1500 years'. But he was critical of the course that Christian history had taken, offering as the basis for criticism a series of anti-ecclesiastical paradoxes - that the Church had been allied with power for 1500 years, was not now, and would be better for its detachment; that,

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though ecclesiastical power had been bad, many of the worst manipulators of ecclesiastical power turned out, on intimate acquaintance, to be moving examples of Christian piety; and that, whatever intolerances and arrogances the Churches had been responsible for, the core of Christianity had been internal piety - 'a religion of the spirit, otherworldly if you like, preaching charity and humility, trusting Providence, and submitting to it, and setting its heart and its treasure in heaven'. In a number of striking pages of Christianity in European History, Butterfield indicated that the first five centuries had been the vital period of Christian formation. He laid out the difference Christianity had made to the thought of the world in which it had spread, listing 'Providence', divine grace, the 'law of love' and God (in the role of 'preliminary to intellectual enquiry') as the chief consequences of its arrival. In attributing to it an influence so deep as to be operative even when 'sinister forces' operated against it, he emphasized that it had worked in favour of 'a softening of manners', a 'higher estimate of personality' and an emphasis on 'love, gentleness, humility, joy and peace'. He was clear, much clearer than in Christianity and History, that the 'ascendency of ecclesiastics in the Middle Ages had been an authentic thing' and that it was the Church which had taken the most definite steps towards converting 'the formal Christianity of the mass conversion' into a 'genuine faith of the profounder, New Testament kind'. At many points in Christianity in European History, Butterfield gave his own statement of the view that mediaeval civilization was Christian, that its art, thought and manners were impregnated with Christian influences, and that the mediaeval church, even in absorbing Aristotle, had 'controlled those predispositions', those 'affections of the soul' - Collingwood's presuppositions? - which lay behind men's speculative activity and were 'anterior to any philosophising'. Mediaeval Christendom, then, as 'civilization permeated with religion', was a better civilization than it would have been without it. It was also, however, a religion permeating a civilization, and what Butterfield was wondering was whether that had been good for the religion. By this he meant that, increasingly after Constantine's conversion and systematically from the barbarian invasions onwards, Christianity, whether as 'suffering colleague' or as 'passive accomplice', had operated as an 'agent or secular authority' in a way which was pagan, independent of truth, and crucial for its subsequent history. Butterfield was not

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denying the magnitude of the opportunity the Churches had had or the grandeur of the function they had performed in the Middle Ages. But he drew a distinction between Christianity and Civilization and pointed out that the Christian character of mediaeval civilization was the result of a coincidence of factors which was unlikely to be repeated. He claimed that mediaeval civilization had fallen apart with the scientific movement and the development of religious toleration in the seventeenth century, that the Churches, weakened by the Reformation and the wars of religion, had mishandled both, and that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the rich, broad, unified fabric of mediaeval Christendom had disintegrated into 'secular ideals' like 'Humanism', 'Humanitarianism', 'Liberalism', 'Individualism' and 'Internationalism' which, 'forgetting' their Christian 'origin', had begun to 'turn their backs' on the parent-religion. He drew the conclusion that a breakdown of modern civilization alone would be likely to recreate conditions in which the Church - as transmitter of culture - regained that public authority which it had been given by the combination of monarchical control and the 'herd spirit' in the barbarian kingdoms. The breakdown of secular idealism was where Butterfield had come in, so to speak, in the early twenties, but he was not saying that the clock could be put back. Modern men should not resent the mediaeval achievement, but they could not restore it. Christianity could not regain its 'monopoly in society'. It had to fight on equal terms in explicit acceptance of the fact that 'freedom of conscience' was the 'first requisite for a Christian order'. In the future, he implied, it would be 'harder to be a Christian' because Christians would no longer be connected with power. But their motives would be more spiritual and could make the same sort of difference to the world that Christians had made in the three centuries A.D. as their 'inner life' connected them with 'an other-worldly system', as the impregnation of their lives with love enabled them to 'press against the frontiers' of the accepted moral order, and as the intermingling of their religion with the events of the world constantly generated 'new things' - 'now a kind of art, now a form of science, now humanism, now liberty, now a theory of egalitarianism'. This, as Butterfield had been at pains to emphasize, would throw Christians back on their own numbers, which would be small. But, so far from being a matter for despondency, that was not even a matter for regret. It was making the twentieth century 'the most exhilarating period in Christian history for 1500 years' as the truth to which a res-

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ponse was required was seen to be a truth which the poor and uneducated could grasp at least as easily as the rich and sophisticated the truth that belief in God rescues man from subservience to 'secular idolatries', 'intermediate principles', 'demoniac forces' and 'pervading systems' and that Christianity consists simply in 'holding to Christ' and for the rest being 'totally uncommitted'. The objection to this was that Butterfield did not make it clear how a spiritual religion could leaven the lump except by working through it, i.e. through the carnal interests of the world. His judgment of ecclesiastical religion took insufficient account of the difficulty Christians would face in perpetuating Christianity once they had ceased to exercise educational authority in a secular state. Though there was no reason why a providential waiting on God should not enable men to come to Him, persuasive reasons were given why the Church should not be regarded as His instrument. A similarly ingrained antinomianism operated in Butterfield's politics. In the course of Christianity and History, Butterfield had made it clear that he was aiming not only to show what Christianity was but also to show how Christians might 'mount their' picture of the twentieth century by envisaging the 'ordinary events of secular history'. In discussing foreign policy and international relations in his later writings, this is exactly what he did, taking as his base the conception he had developed from The Peace Tactics of Napoleon onwards of a connection between eighteenth-century diplomacy, Christian conceptions of human nature, the continuity of cupidity between Tsarist and Marxist versions of Russian policy, and the conduct of foreign policy in the nuclear age. In examining this instance of the general thesis, it is important to notice the narrow range of its application. It was not applied to financial or economic policy. Far less was it applied to domestic policy in Britain, to the British bureaucracy or to British political parties. It may be argued that it did not need to be applied in these directions since The Englishman and Ms History and Christianity and History had already given a more than Burkean emphasis to the need to control the passions. On the other hand, it may equally well be said that the doctrine of The Englishman and his History claimed only to support a higher reconciliation of the Whig/Tory positions which were its subject and ignored the existence of a politically active working-class

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movement in Britain. In discussing the Christian attitude to 'modern barbarism' for example, there was a certain amount about the 'overthrow of a customary order of things', the 'sudden rise to power of men and classes not yet trained and disciplined to the task', and the 'emergence in so many places of a younger generation under conditions that give them no chance to grow up into the values of a civilized world in the way that we grew up into therri. But it was not stated that this could be said of England and, by silence, there was an implication that it could not be. It is not clear whether one should imply a deliberate gap, an unconscious one because of defective understanding, or the extension of a sort of radical relief at the new dissociation between the churches and the status quo. Butterfield's criticism of non-lapsarian liberalism involved, of course, direct rejection of the anthropological assumptions of the new socialism of the thirties and a contrast, which he had not drawn in 1933, between Marxism and Christianity. At the same time, there was something deliberately uncontroversial about the way in which he accepted the post-war British consensus (except about foreign policy), and, like Popper and Berlin, from whom he differed in other respects, directed his criticisms at Marxist, Nazi or Fascist messianism - perhaps because they seemed important in 1949 but presumably also on the assumption, which Popper and Berlin probably made too, that anything that the English seemed likely to do by way of further egalitarianism would operate pragmatically and empirically through those continuities and kindlinesses about which Pickthorn had written so eloquently. The later writings did nothing to soften these views; if anything, they strengthened them. On the one hand, in Christianity, Diplomacy and War, equality was accepted as a proper object of political action, provided it was not produced so quickly as to provoke conflict and so long always as it did not encourage revolution. On the other hand there was a 'Christian' recognition that external conditions played a part in developing human frailty and a concomitant willingness to encourage 'scientific' treatment of juvenile crime and those 'psychoanalytical cases which former ages would have dismissed as diabolically evil'. In general, however, the silence was eloquent except when the question was dodged, or was answered without being spelt out in such blatant affirmations as that offered about post-war England which was 'indeed' in 1953 the 'happiest of all the illustrations of the fact that civilization itself requires the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins'.

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The bulk of Butterfield's political writing after 1949 was an attempt to break up rigidities of mind in the conduct of international relations, In this respect he was once more defining his own conception of an identification between Christian belief and historical thinking. In doing so, he criticized Cold-War diplomacy, wars of righteousness, excessive addition to the status quo and the failure to understand the diplomatic and political possibilities suggested by the Christian conception of universal sin. The situation to which Butterfield addressed himself during the Korean War in 1953 was very different from the situation of the 1920s. But the argument derived from doubts which applied as much to the Versailles settlement as to Dulles's foreign policy, and hinged on the belief which had been expressed in passing on many occasions in the past: that the conceptions of eighteenth-century diplomacy represented both a Christian and a practical way of controlling conflict not only in its own context but in the context of the atomic age. Until 1950, Butterfield's view was that historical thinking could play a part in removing the intellectual blinkers that hampered international amicability. It was not until the essay The Tragic Element in Human Conflict that there was said to be a 'duty' incumbent on those who studied history in universities to 'seize upon the problem . . . where the difficulties are most challenging'. In Christianity and Human Relations, the top seemed to have blown as political implications were extracted from the Christian principle that 'there are things which men do for love which they are unable to do . . . by the external pressure or the tedious insistencies of mere ethical command'. In the following years caution was swept aside as the Christian position was made positive. The Christian tradition was said to have 'condensed the experience' and to have accumulated the wisdom of European civilization. It had cherished the 'long-term precepts, the truths that span the ages'. Though the form of wisdom, so far as it applied to international relations, had been 'secularised' in the early eighteenth century and had 'come down to us . . . rather as traditions of European diplomacy', it was still the case that Christians were especially competent to ask whether anything valuable was being thrown away when breaches were made with it. In some respects it was recognized that the breaches which League of Nations apologists had tried to make had been repaired. The United Nations Organization was said to have paid close attention to the real distribution of power; there was a distinct suggestion that it had so

246 Recessions effectively rid itself of the blinkers with which pre-war liberals had approached international relations that the only existing danger was the mentality which had been created by the Cold War - the assumption that, in the division of the world between the non-communist and the communist powers, one side was demonstrably righteous and the other demonstrably wicked. This, though in fact a continuation of the liberal arrogance that Smyth had so much disliked, was described as 'an unprecedented problem', requiring not only knowledge but also imagination and a certain 'giving of ourselves' if thinking was to get out of the preCopernican stage it was in now. It demanded a breaking down of 'barriers to international understanding', and a recognition of the fact that the Christian had principles which called him to carry his thinking 'outside the framework . . . provided . . . by . . . party . . . regime or ideology'. The question this raised was, if a Christian had principles of this sort, what should he do about applying them? The first answer was that he should 'cut through the traditions of historic Christianity', rest solely on Christ, and 'confront the twentieth century with the original simplicities of the faith'. The next was that he should be 'flexible' in respect of 'subordinate matters', should 'clear away all intermediate systems', and should 'hold fast to spiritual truths'. Two thousand years of Christian influence had not removed the divergence between the Christian message and the world's assumptions, but, so long as Christians respected their commitment to give effect to their religion, they would be in a position to 'increase' man's 'stature' and mutual understanding by 'turning into communicable knowledge' those forms of 'intellectual exploration' which were accessible only to men who were both 'in love' and 'willing to make fools of themselves for love'. This was a demand for a Christian international science, a recognition of the 'power which gentleness can have in the long run'. It did not question the need for military defence in the short run. But its main hope was that Christians could precipitate a 'starting-point of historical change', as the communists had done in 1917, and get a 'purchase' on history so as to move the mountains of prejudice and cupidity in which the international system had got locked. Butterfield did not blame one side or the other alone; indeed, one of his targets was the self-righteousness which attributed to the liberal west a priority in virtue and to the marxist east a priority in vice. He was clear that both had emerged from the same world - the world that

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had been created since 1650 - and that Christianity should stand out against its 'terrible heresies' concerning the nature of man which had 'opened the gates' to Evil, made men into 'victims of diabolical agencies', and obscured the 'ancient view' that 'the establishment of peace is the primary function and supreme blessing of the body politic'. There is no need to spell out the plan of campaign, not least because in a political sense Butterfield did not have one. There was an analysis - that 'the very aspect of the international difficulty' which had not been comprehended was the fact that it arose from 'a conflict of wills'. There was an objective - the establishment between the great power blocs of the sort of urbanity that had operated between political parties in England. But the means was little more than the book itself, the eloquent conjunction of allegation and appeal, the reiterated warning to all sinful wills that 'the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness'. 'If the world ever drops the notion of sin as a crime against God and replaces it by the notion of sin as a crime against man', it was stated, it would be 'turning its back' not only on Christ but on 'humanising ideas about the nature of sin' which could be found in 'great religious movements in Asia' hundreds of years before Christ. 'If man arrogates to himself, it was added, 'the right which he is not fitted to possess - to adjudicate on sinners and punish the sin . . . then there can be no end to the atrocities'. It is a paradox [went one of the most heart-felt of passages] that the highest and most spiritual view of life which is available to man and the one which carries human beings to the most elevated and rarefied realms of experience - is one which starts with the assertion of universal human sinfulness. The very ladder which has carried men to those exalted spheres and regions of light has an end which rests in the mundane realm on the primary recognition of this fact. The finest examples of human sainthood and the finest blossomings of human personality seem to emerge out of an initial abasement of the human being before this very truth. They seem indeed to be inseparable from a continuous confession of sin, and the very power which works with such efficacy in holy people is the knowledge of the forgiveness of sins. It is hardly necessary to say that the recognition of all men as sinners is calculated to have momentous effects upon the whole world of human relations. It would be the Christian assertion, I feel sure, that human relations can never be properly envisaged - nor, of course, could any science of them be possible - except after this situation has been squarely faced. Even if we pictured Christians as set against the rest of the world, we should say that the Christians were the confessed

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sinners, not that they were the righteous arrayed against the wicked. In any case, we should not take the line that ours was a warfare against the rest, but rather that it was warfare on their behalf. From the time of the Gospels, indeed, it is precisely the self-righteous who are the enemies of the spirit of Christ. And it is a pity that the modern world has lost so much of the moral teaching which is to be drawn from Christ's controversies with the Pharisees. It is unnecessary to give detailed consideration to International Conflict in the Twentieth Century since that carried to a higher degree of self-evident indefeasibility the arguments about universal cupidity, selfrighteousness and so on which had been effectively heuristic when they had had to be argued for - as in The Englishman and his History, Christianity and History, and History and Human Relations - but which became less persuasive and more routine when this was no longer necessary. Where meaning had previously been sharp, there was now only extended meditation on phrases whose twenty-year life debarred them from serious use as the fear of self-righteousness (heuristically conceived) created a new form of self-righteousness once the heuristic aspect had disappeared. It is easy, for example, to agree that 'we must not imagine that all is well if our armaments make the enemy afraid', and that in the hydrogen age it is ' u r g e n t . . . to solve the problem of human relations for external affairs as we have solved it for internal affairs'. But the riddle was not being solved, and Christianity had become pietistic, fatalistic and hysterical - and had moved a very long way from conventional diplomacy - when it was added that 'the destructiveness which people are now prepared to contemplate is not to be justified for the sake of any mundane object', that 'there is so great a risk in having the hydrogen bomb that there can hardly be greater risk if we unplug the whole system' and that 'when the world is in extremities, the doctrine of love becomes the ultimate measure of our conduct'. When all allowance is made for the imponderables involved in calculating the effects of ultimate terror, it remains remarkable that one should have been asked to believe that 'Communism is a benevolent thing gone wrong', that 'we should take the devil by the rear and surprise him with a dose of those gentler virtues that will be poison to him', and that since 'we seem unable to subdue the demon of frightfulness in a head-on fight, we must play a trick on fatality by introducing a new factor into the case'.

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We cannot say that we will not receive the bomb [Butterfield wrote on page 96] we can only say that we will not be responsible for the sin and the crime of delivering it. Supposing we do have to receive it, the one thing we can do is to choose the end for which we will consent to be sacrificed. We can choose the cause on behalf of which we will die if we are going to have to die. We can do this instead of being the blind victims of historical processes which will end by making us more and more like the thing that we are opposing.

By the time International Conflict in the Twentieth Century was published, Butterfield's positions were no longer persuasive: his conclusions could as easily have been reached through the methods of interested calculation without the attribution of a Christian overtone to arguments which did not need it. Even when it was possible to agree theologically that the world might end or that hydrogenous destruction might be ordained, it seemed a sentimental perversity rather than an act of Christian initiative to suppose that the devil or the Russians would be likely to be affected by announcements of the sort that Butterfield was demanding. In reading Butterfield's writings in the 1960s, one becomes conscious, far more than when they were first published, that the writings of the 1940s were the work of a liberal, dissenting mind persuading itself, and its fellow dissenters, that diplomacy and power-politics could be understood in Christian terms and justified according to Christian categories. In the writings that were published between 1944 and 1953, there was a balance between the positive doctrine and the attempt to educate dissent in the broadest English sense. But at the same time that Christianity, Diplomacy and War was being written in response to the threat of atomic power, Butterfield was overtaken by the arrival of nuclear fusion, and a doctrine which was realistically conservative in relation to power politics and international diplomacy was transformed into an emotionally-taut commitment to a form of nuclear renunciation which involved a massive capitulation to the dissent that Butterfield had been educating. A position of this sort, when presented in terms of Christian love, was not one that it seemed sensible to be enthusiastic about. It was shallow, Toynbeean and thin. It may be that readers of this chapter will have received the impression that Butterfield's work was insubstantial. This is not what is intended. It is certainly the case that his fundamental attitude was negative and

250 Recessions confused; a sort of entrenched, self-liquidating antinomianism which was reconciled only partially and reluctantly to the necessities involved in the exercise of power and the public propagation of Christianity. But many of his technical maxims were of great importance, and in three major respects showed the way to breaking the hold which Rankean dispassionateness has had on English historical thinking. These were, his emphasis on assumptions, on the intimacy of the connection between assumption, research and the structure of historical interpretation, and on the essential contestability of any claim to achieve objective, authoritative finality in historical writing. Even if he was unable to escape from Rankeanism himself, he showed that escape was a possibility, and might have effected his own escape if he had been more ruthless philosophically, more coherent theologically and less scrupulously modest than he was. He needed only a ruthless relativism, a coherent conception of God's transcendence, and an abandonment of scruple to free himself from disabling inhibitions. Unfortunately, none of these things turned out to be possible, and the ultimate judgment must be that, for all their intelligence, fertility and gaminesque hostility to 'technical historical study', his writings registered a capitulation to it. Butterfield, we may conclude, having discerned the type of 'single new fact' to which he attached so much importance in historical interpretation, neglected its implications in terms of 'total reconstruction', neglected to observe that, if the argument of chapter one of Christianity and History was right - and it was - his conclusion should have been not that 'technical historical study has its place' but that 'technical historical study' insulated from religion, is an impossibility.

8 Oakeshott The religious bearing of the theistic philosophies of thinkers such as James Ward and W. R. Sorley was obvious, and though it may be fairly questioned how far the philosophies of Bradley and Bosanquet or their disciple Mr Oakeshott succeed in doing justice to the demands of the religious consciousness, no one can mistake their high valuation of the religious side of life and their determination to make room for it in their thought.' J. M. Creed The Divinity of Jesus Christ 1938 (1964 edition) p. 18. 'Christianity is a religion, and while it is not a characteristic of religion to remain unchanged throughout human history, it is one of its characteristics continually both to conform to and to lead what may be called the civilization or culture of its adherents.' M. Oakeshott The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity in The Modern Churchman 1928-29 p. 364. 'A religion is what I have called a practice; it is a consideration in selfenactment. A man may enact himself religiously, but there are no religious actions. Every religion, each with its own image of deity and of self, has its own idiom of faith which reflects the civilization of the believer. It may be terrible, it may sink to the prose of a merely anticipated release . . . or it may rise to a serene acquiescence in mortality and a graceful acceptance of the rerum mortalia. . . . But the dignity of a religion lies in the intrepidity of its acknowledgement of this human condition, in the cogency of the reconciliation it intimates and in the poetic quality, humble or magnificent, of the images, the rites, the observances, and the offerings . . . in which it recalls to us that "eternity is in love with the productions of time" and invites us to live "so far as is possible as an immortal"/ M. Oakeshott On Human Conduct 1975 p. 86.

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In Oakeshott's1 doctrine, when it was encountered in 1948, there was no Word of God to disturb, command or redeem mankind; there was nothing that stood over against human conduct and there was no consideration of wickedness or depravity. Instead there was an account of the rationality of human action in which the need for divine activity was negligible or diffused, since it had either been made manifest in the history of the world or was present so generally as to have no relevance in particular. And this was supported by the fact that, containing no account of sin, though there was a certain amount about human imperfection, it hovered between implying that there was no way of overcoming imperfection and that the only way of overcoming it was to accept it and work rationally, or habitually, within its confines. In the late 1940s religion played little part in Oakeshott's writing, though many of his readers sensed a religious dimension and mistook it for a contribution to the Christian apologetic that was flourishing in England (and especially in Cambridge) at the time. This chapter will show that it was unreasonable to make this assumption. It will establish that the hostility to liberalism, positivism and high-mindedness which Oakeshott shared with Smyth and Butterfield when they were all young did not carry their affirmative opinions with it. Even those of Oakeshott's writings which were in circulation in the 1940s Experience and Its Modes and the articles he wrote in The Cambridge Journal - left no suggestion of evangelism. When read in the light of his earliest writings, they suggest an aversion to evangelism, and a 1. Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901- ). Ed. St George's School Harpenden and Gonville and Caius College Cambridge. Fellow of Gonville and Caius College 1925- , and of Nuffield College Oxford 1949-50. Served in the British Army 1940-45. Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics 1951-69. Author of Experience and Its Modes 1933, (with Guy Griffith) A Guide to the Classics 1936, Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe 1939, Hobbes' Leviathan 1946, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversations of Mankind 1959, Rationalism in Politics 1962, Hobbes on Civil Association 1975, On Human Conduct 1975 etc.

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positive distaste for any religion that demands belief, disrupts conduct, or claims to stand over against civilization. As founder and editor of The Cambridge Journal between 1948 and 1954, Oakeshott adopted a character as general reviewer of politics, learning, letters and life. His own articles provided something approaching a philosophical account of moral and political activity, together with less systematic accounts of philosophy and science. They also contained his first, almost his only explicit, account of the content of a Conservative politics, along with his first public announcement of a connected system of judgments about the history of thought. In these articles Oakeshott assumed as an historical fact the emergence since the seventeenth century of a 'gnostic' mentality which displayed a 'mistrust of time' and an 'irritable nervousness in the face of everything topical and transitory'. He also assumed, as a legacy from Bacon and Descartes, a complicated process which had issued in a 'crude replacement of Providence' and a 'beneficient and infallible God' by belief in a 'beneficient and infallible technique': a technique which reduced the 'tangle and variety of experience to a set of principles', and had no power to accept the 'mysteries and uncertainty' by which life was surrounded. This was Rationalism, and Rationalism had operated in three areas. It had operated in the moral life (to which we shall return later). It had operated in religion. And it had operated in politics. Oakeshott did not examine religious rationalism at length. But he identified it and described its origin in the late Graeco-Roman world where the 'old habits of moral behaviour had lost their vitality' and where, 'morality being identified with the practice of philosophy', the 'self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals' had become pre-eminent. It was this that had converted a 'Christian habit of moral behaviour' arising from the circumstances of the earliest Christian communities into 'a Christian moral ideology' which had not only imposed its impress on all subsequent European morality but had also created a 'corrupt consciousness' to reconcile Europeans to the misfortunes it had brought. About religion, Oakeshott had nothing to suggest. He seemed merely to be making a Nietzschean comment. In relation to political rationalism, his suggestions were detailed and extensive. In The Cambridge Journal, Oakeshott wrote not only as an historian and analyst, but also as a publicist. It was part of the JournaTs

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character that his learned and subtle provocations were deployed over a wide range of public issues, expressing, together with negative objections to modern cant, a more positive politics than he had expressed before or has expressed publicly since. This was a Conservative politics, not exactly on a party line and not quite geared to electoral practice, but heavily committed to leading the English public out of the fog in which all parties were alleged to be conducting their political business. Political rationalism - sometimes called liberalism - was the replacement of 'tradition' by.'ideology'. Ideology was not totally disconnected from tradition since it was the 'formalised abridgement of the supposed substratum of rational truth' contained in it. But ideology was bookknowledge rather than 'practical knowledge' and implied the corrupting belief that knowledge imparted or acquired by apprenticeship to a master was not knowledge at all. It assumed that politics could be learnt from a book, could be expressed in the form of incontestable rules, and could usher in a 'society better ordered, more just and more prosperous than any that had yet existed'. This was described variously as 'scientism', 'neo-Pelagianism', 'social engineering', the 'politics of the crib' and the guide that the man who had not been educated to politics needed in order to understand them. It was also the politics of ignorance: the demand that everything should be rejected except present needs on the one hand and the conclusions of reason or political science after all preconceptions had been rejected on the other. It was credited with many dubious aspirations. Federalism, Nationalism, Open Diplomacy, the American Constitution, the Beveridge Report, the 1944 Education Act, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the United Nations Organization were its embodiments in practice; Machiavelli, Grotius, Locke, Bentham, Godwin, Marx and the 'intellectual dandies of the Fabian Society' were its embodiments in thought. Rationalism was a scapegoat. It was used to explain why European politics had been disturbed. Its absence from England until very recently was used to explain why English politics had not been disturbed. Oakeshott's account of the English tradition made nothing of authority and inequality and was implicitly negative about a confessional state. It asserted that in England 'democracy' was not 'an abstract idea' and that a pluralism of powers was the English way of entrenching it. It assumed that political education had been 'more widely spread' in

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England than in some other countries, and that a 'political habit and tradition' - the 'common possession of even extreme opponents' - had been so continuous from the Middle Ages onwards that English society had had a form of government that embodied 'genuine concrete knowledge' of its 'permanent interests' and 'direction of movement'. The 'concrete rights of Englishmen', in other words, had nothing to do with rationalistic optimism about the 'perfectibility of human society' and a great deal to do with 'scepticism about the possibility of such perfection'. They were embodied to some extent in Parliament, which differed from most Continental parliaments in dating from the Middle Ages - 'the least rationalistic period of our polities'. They were embodied much more in 'common law rights and duties', a 'coherence of mutually supporting liberties' none of which was decisive by itself but all of which together ensured the absence of 'overwhelming concentrations of power'. Whatever might be the case elsewhere and however much the opposite was argued by 'misguided journalists and cunning tyrants', it followed that it was not freedom of speech that ranked highest but 'freedom of association' (including freedom not to associate) on the one hand, and the 'freedom enjoyed in the right to own private property' on the other. Oakeshott did not pretend that English property laws had always been conducive to freedom. But the principles he laid down were unambiguous: that competition should be maintained and that every adult member of a society should have 'an equal right to enjoy the ownership of his personal capacities and of anything else obtained by the . . . recognized . . . methods of acquisition'. It was said to be the 'experience of our society' that freedom depended on a wide distribution of property, and that the 'greatest threats to freedom' had come from the 'acquisition of extraordinary property rights by the government, by great business and industrial corporations, and by trade unions'. Freedom in this sense was of the essence of the English tradition. It had been eroded by the 1939 war and was being further eroded by 'the legend of war'. Its fundamental enemy, however, was not syndicalism or collectivism - the irresponsible power of the trade unions on the one hand and the 'planned economy' leading to a 'planned society' on the other - but an alien intellectuality which dominated the Left, and was present also in Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a 'rationalistic disposition of mind' which, having established itself in Europe, was now endeavouring to establish itself in England.

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What went abroad as the concrete rights of an Englishman [went a characteristic passage] have returned home as the abstract Rights of Man, and they have returned to confound our politics and corrupt our minds. Our need now is to recover the lost sense of a society whose freedom and organization spring, not from a superimposed plan, but from the integrating power of a vast and subtle body of rights and duties enjoyed between individuals (whose individuality, in fact, comes into being by their enjoyment), not the gift of nature but the product of our own experience and inventiveness; and to recover also the perception of our law, not merely as an achieved body of rights and duties, the body of a freedom in which mere political rights have a comparatively insignificant place, but as a living method of social integration, the most civilized and the most effective method ever invented by mankind. Oakeshott's politics, as they were expressed in The Cambridge Journal, were heavy with commitment, including party commitment. On the whole, however, his writing has aimed to avoid commitment, especially party commitment, and has been the more effective for having aimed to do so. Whether it has done so is a matter for debate. So is its status as history. Although Oakeshott read History as an undergraduate, he displayed from the earliest stages that 'nostalgia for the infinite' which, in an undergraduate article, he attributed to Acton, Amiel and Matthew Arnold. Moreover, in spite of the connection between his politics and the view he takes of English history he has written little history. He is primarily a philosopher for whom the history of thought is an antidote to the narrowness which he has for fifty years now associated with contemporary English philosophy. Oakeshott began as an Idealist who happened to write, as Collingwood had, at a time at which English Idealism was no longer in the ascendant. His work is unintelligible except in that context. But classification by school was of little importance to him then and has become irrelevant since. He had learnt from Hegel, Bradley and Bosanquet, but, by the time Experience and Its Modes was published in 1933, had absorbed them into an insistent literary personality which moved freely and suggestively in many types of literature and was independent of mentors and authorities. Philosophy, indeed, as he explained it in Experience and Its Modes, implied as comprehensive a function as critical discrimination in Arnold. It supplied as extensive a licence to say what he thought about anything he 'felt obliged' to say it about, and he increasingly said it in a manner which, though fed on historic Idealism, had grown into the subtle, bloody, apodeictic relentlessness

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that has given him his place amongst English men of letters. Oakeshott began to write Experience and Its Modes in 1925 at a point at which there had been extensive proliferation of areas of academic study and of undergraduate examinations-subjects in Cambridge during the previous fifty years. In discussing the status of subjects that were being taught, Experience and Its Modes provided a felicitous conjunction of moment and man. It was written from inside a new subject. Its combination of explicit philosophy and polemical enmity made it a characteristic manifestation of the climate in which it was conceived. I The aim of Experience and Its Modes was to define philosophy and to examine other modes of experience in the light of it. But what philosophy was, was a function of what it was not, and what it was not was a function of the situation to which Oakeshott was contributing: that conglomerate of rejections to which this book shows Collingwood, Eliot, Smyth, Waugh, Pickthorn, Manning, Butterfield, Welbourne, Knowles and others contributing in their differing ways in the 1920s. Experience and Its Modes cleared away lumber. If we are to understand what it was doing, we must understand what it was against. In particular we must understand what it meant by being against ignoratio elenchi. Ignoratio elenchi was ignorance of the fact that knowledge is experience organised according to the postulates of a 'world' which the mind has established. Philosophy was superior to other 'worlds' because it alone pursued 'what was finally satisfactory in experience' and alone, therefore, was able to define and differentiate between the worlds of experience which did not pursue this satisfaction. It was its function both to define the 'arrests' entailed in worlds of experience and to separate the modes of experience one from another. Separation of the modes of experience was the foundation of the book. It was important not just because Hegel and Bradley had found it important in the past but because it had special reference to errors in England in the present. These errors were explained in Oakeshott's articles between 1925 and 1933, in Experience and Its Modes itself, and in many of his subsequent writings. It was not until the middle fifties - and in a sense not even then - that Oakeshott outgrew the need

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to emphasize his rejection of that combination of naturalism, positivism, rationalism and liberalism of which Experience and Its Modes provided a more systematic criticism than is to be found anywhere else among the non-Marxists of the generation to which he belonged. Experience and Its Modes was not in form a polemical book. At first sight it looks like a straightforward attempt at categorial definition. Read in the context of the 1920s and of its own rebarbativeness about theoretical innocence, it will be seen to be very polemical indeed. What theoretical innocence had done was forget that worlds of experience were abstractions, and to claim for particular abstractions a power either to disclose reality or to deploy authority in relation to worlds other than their own. Philosophy exposed these claims and showed that all worlds of experience were arrests - defective and unsatisfactory abstractions by the side of philosophy itself. This diminution of particular worlds of experience set question-marks against their finality and universality. But it also defined their impregnability, asserted their autonomy, and protected them against intrusions from outside. A large part of Experience and Its Modes was an affirmation of the need for abstraction, and of the impossibility of conducting life without it. It contained a fully Hegelian recognition of the unsatisfactory but unavoidable nature of partial experiences and understandings. It was polemical only where abstractions were seen intruding on each other. The impression was left that ignoratio elenchi was rotting the fabric of intellectual activity. The errors that Oakeshott discussed varied in importance, but he obviously attached importance to all of them. They were errors about historical, scientific, and practical experience, about relations between them, and about relations between them severally on the one hand and philosophy on the other. In relation to history, Oakeshott's rejections were catholic. He rejected objectivity, 'unbiased history' and the idea that the historian 'begins' by collecting material. He denied that the facts of history were independent of historians' judgments. He asserted that history knew nothing and cared less about a 'natural or logical development' and had nothing to learn either from 'cause and effect' or from Bury's 'conflux of coincidences'. The 'science of history' was said to be an 'absurd notion', the 'assimilation of history to science' to be 'impossible', and evolution, so far from having the historical authority it had been given, to be a biological theory which had scientific authority only so far as it was 'statistically generaliseable'.

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Oakeshott shared Collingwood's attitude to the past-as-it-was and Butterfield's attitude to the practical past and he denied that either was the historian's past. In denying that history taught lessons and passed verdicts, or that a philosophy could be extracted from it over and above historians' history, he made it clear that a vast semi-historical culture - the culture of naturalism, positivism and social Darwinism, as expressed by historians and others from Bury downwards - was bogus. Many of the misunderstandings by which history was said to be threatened were also threats to practice. Practice was threatened by the claim that there could be a 'science of life'. It was threatened by the claim that there could be a 'philosophy of life'. Both claims had produced a large literature. Both were examples of ignoratio elenchi. Science did not, in fact, provide a 'guide to life' and practice did not need to submit to criticism from it. Philosophy was irrelevant to practice and produced 'error and falsehood' whenever it entered it. If a 'science of life' was an impossibility, a 'philosophy of life' was a 'meaningless contradiction' producing hybrids like ethics and moral and political philosophy which, in some of the forms they had taken recently, were pseudo value-bridges between philosophy and practice. In relation to history and practice (as also in relation to philosophy), Oakeshott's assertions of autonomy looked reasonably guileless. In relation to science, they were bristlingly legislative, flattering to science's ability to look after itself but ruthlessly destructive of its universality. In presenting science as the 'assertion of reality under the category of quantity', he was demolishing the claim that a 'mere abstract' imperceptible world of 'quantitative conceptions' could provide the sole description of reality or be translated into the language of 'ordinary practical experience'. In denying that scientists had 'special authority' to speak about the 'character of scientific experience' or that the results of scientific enquiry had any authority in philosophy, his contempt was expressed in many powerful passages. It seems [went one such passage] that there was a time when the scientist supposed that he put nothing (mentally) into the world. The real world was there, awaiting discovery; and the only valid means of apprehending it was the scientific method, because this alone could lead to 'objective' knowledge, knowledge independent of personal predilections and subjective fancies. But fortunately we are no longer required to take seriously the absurdities of nineteenth-century speculation about scientific knowledge. But a new, and

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even more strange, apology for scientific experience has now appeared to take their place. What is called (oddly enough) the 'subjective element' in scientific knowledge is admitted, and the world is again partitioned between the 'objective things' that are real, and the 'subjective ideas' that correspond more or less with them. A part of scientific knowledge is spoken of as 'a contribution of the mind', and the rest is just the universe as God made it and as it really is. In short, scientists have come to regard science as a form of thought, as the construction of a world of ideas, and they conclude that it is consequently debarred from a true knowledge of the world of reality. Naturalism has given place to a mild and unintelligent scepticism. I have, however, indicated already the line of argument which forces me to place this explanation of scientific experience among the regrettable curiosities of philosophy; and we shall see later that what debars science from full knowledge of the real world is its character of a defective and abstract mode of thought, and not the mere fact that it is a form of thought. This distinction between the 'subjective element' and the 'objective element' in scientific experience can be compared only with the worn-out fantasy of the primary and secondary qualities of matter. Indeed, it is almost the prerogative of the scientist to attach himself to worn-out philosophical ideas; and he does this because his preoccupation with other things leads him to adopt those philosophical ideas which appear plausible without making any attempt to think them out for himself. He takes over (for example) what he can understand of Kant, not because his thought has followed Kant's mind to Kant's conclusions, but because the general point of view to be found in Kant's philosophy is congenial to his preconceptions. His philosophy is essentially uncritical; that is, it is not a philosophy but a jargon. Naturalism was the result of an abortive attempt of scientific experience to achieve self-consciousness, to conquer both itself and its world, based upon the ignorant prejudice that 'there is no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of the scientific method'. And the dualism which this new, psychological apology for science involves is merely the importation of another of the postulates of scientific experience into a consideration of the character of science itself. The idea that science should look after itself and observe its own limits was not made in a vacuum. It was accompanied by the corollary that subjects which wanted to be sciences had to purify themselves if they were to do so. Psychology's development as a science was said to have been hampered by 'philosophism', biology's by a 'moral interest' ('vitalism'), and sociology by a 'radical confusion between the scientific and the historical mode of thinking'. Economics was said to be 'more intimately connected with attempts to apply its conclusions to the world of practice' than it should be. It was added that economics had become a science so far as it organized its world 'independently of philosophical assumptions', and that there was nothing to prevent sociology, or psy-

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chology, also being organized, as sciences had to be, on the principle of quantity. The permission which Oakeshott granted to these subjects to become sciences if they would organize themselves appropriately was not as permissive as it seemed, since a world of experience organized according to the category of quantity would be an abstraction like any other, and as defective from the viewpoint of the whole of experience. The claim one may attribute to Oakeshott generally, though he made it explicitly only about psychology, was that frank recognition that the sciences which deal with man deal with him only under the category of quantity would destroy some of the claims which some of their protagonists had been making to provide 'synthetic knowledge of human personality' or a special understanding of human natureOakeshott's interest in scientific experience was negative. Science has not really appeared in his writing since 1933, except in a few appreciative pages in The Voice of Poetry in the Conversations of Mankind. It has become clear that the section on Scientific Experience in Experience and Its Modes was designed to free other worlds of experience from domination by it. In all important respects the real interest there was in relations between history, practice and philosophy. Of these, philosophy was the most important. For it alone followed thought wherever it led and, when properly conducted, provided the only complete satisfaction that experience could provide. It was not only a world of experience, as these others were, but was also the supersession of all partial worlds of experience. Where history and practice were 'arrests', philosophy alone was experience 'without arrest', and alone could show that, though every arrest was an obstacle to satisfaction, every arrest was also necessary, so far as it was arrests - abstractions from reality - which organized experience and did the world's work. It was because Science, Practice and History were the only arrests that Mankind had yet made that Scientific, Practical and Historical experience formed the subjects of the central sections of the book. Historical experience was reality organized under the category of past. It was, of course, present reality that was organized, and since present reality was not in fact past, history could provide only a partial comprehension. But the organization that resulted was a unitary thing not the past plus the historian's judgment but judgment manifesting itself as past. The historian was concerned neither with 'isolated . . . data . . . a universal doubt nor . . . an empty consciousness' but

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with 'a homogeneous world of ideas' which, even if it was given 'only in order that it may be superseded', was only to be superseded by reconstruction of his experience. History was the historian's experience. There was 'no fact in history which was not a judgment', and the 'world of historical fact', though a 'mistake' from the standpoint of philosophy, was 'certainly true' and 'history' was 'certainly reality so far as it went'. This led to three important conclusions. First, that the historian's business was not to 'discover, to recapture or even to interpret', but 'to create and construct'. Second, that the postulates on which history depended - postulates which the historian brought to it - were the mark of its autonomy and the measure of its satisfactoriness. Third, that the proper object of historical thinking was not generalization but the 'narration of a course of events which . . . explains itself and approaches greater coherence by means of 'greater and more complete detail'. This was the first thing that philosophy showed: that history, though an abstraction, had its own autonomy and procedures, and needed no assistance from elsewhere. Having shown the same thing about science, Experience and Its Modes then showed it about practice. About practice the first half of the argument was that it was not a 'tissue of mere conjunctions', but was a form of knowledge in the same way as science and history were. The second was that practice was concerned less with what was attempted than with what was 'explicitly achieved'. It was concerned with change. Its differentiating characteristic was that it was concerned with 'the alteration of existence' through the exercise of the will. The will 'required and presupposed', however, not 'an external or finite world' into which an idea could be translated, but a 'world of ideas' in which change was 'possible and significant'. This presupposed 'two worlds': the world of 'what is' and a world that is 'to be' together with an attempt to reduce them to one. It presupposed that in practice 'there is never the assertion of a reality merely discrepant from an existing world of ideas', and that the 'notion of a "to be" discrepant from "what is" is never in practice discrepant from "the whole of what is"'. 'The differentia of practice' was said to be 'not simply the alteration of existence' but the modification of a 'world of practical ideas' in order to make it 'more coherent'. Practical truth, in other words, conformed to the general character of truth: it was 'the world of practical experience as a coherent whole',

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But since it was from one standpoint a conclusion, 'the result of practice', and from another was a datum, 'a world of ideas given in order to be changed', it followed that what distinguished it from all other worlds was change, 'mutable reality', even 'mortality', the fact that 'what was true yesterday can be false today'. In explaining this, Oakeshott made three points. First, that in the world of practice the 'explicit criterion' by which the individual was determined was that of 'separateness' rather than 'completeness', and where persons were concerned, entailed conceptions of personality or the self as 'inherently free and self-determining'. Secondly, that practice was not governed by 'general rules', was incapable of finality, and undertook not a 'general resolution' of the discrepancy between 'what is' and 'what ought to be' but particular, partial and inadequate resolutions of all its instances. Finally, that practice was not only the most familiar of the worlds of experience, and the one that most men mistook for total reality, but was also the one from which men departed most rarely and uneasily. It included the attempt to 'alter existence or to maintain it unaltered', a man's determination to do away with his life as much as his determination to enjoy it, the life of imagination as well as lives lived in contempt of the world's works. It was through its 'fog' that men 'led the world' and did great things. It was its 'truth' that gave them 'freedom'. It included the moral life and the life of beauty. Indeed, practice included 'everything which belonged to the conduct of life', including the 'the life of religion'. II Religion had formed the subject of almost all of Oakeshott's earliest published writings. He had helped Needham edit Science, Religion and Reality and had also reviewed it. He had written substantial papers on Religion and the Moral Life and The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity, had reviewed about a dozen, chiefly theological books, and in 1929 had addressed a conference of the Modern Churchmen's Union on The Problem of Authority. Though a paper on the concept of sociality in the early 1920s had foreshadowed the interests that were to be displayed in On Human Conduct, it was not until he began lecturing in the Cambridge History Faculty in the 1930s that Oakeshott gave them public expression, and then in an historical rather than a philosophical form in the course of expounding texts in the history of political thought. R.P.D.—K

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Oakeshott's account of religion, as it was given at this time, was given in the shadow of the conception of philosophy which was eventually presented in Experience and Its Modes. But this conception, though developing while the religious articles were being written, was confined in print to such anodyne observations as that philosophy had to be freed from the dominance of the natural sciences, should not be presented in an abridged textbook form, and provided no guarantee of wisdom in the conduct of life. In the 1920s, though a relationship was implied which presented religion as being in some way 'arrested', that relationship was given less attention than the relationship between religion on the one hand and history, morality, and civilization on the other. Religion and the Moral Life - a paper read in Cambridge in 1927 began by rejecting the Calvinistic conception of the world as a veil between man and God and between religion and the moral life. It then examined three conceptions of the possible connection, rejecting two of them - the conception of religion as morality or as the sanction of morality - in favour of the view that religion was the completion of morality. It questioned the contrast1 between 'naturalism' and 'morality' and the conception of 'religion . . . stepping in' to show 'morality . . . as something revealed to us as the Will of God'. It rejected the idea of morality as a 'revealed' expression of 'God's will' on the ground that morality as something that God 'commands' men to 'obey' is 'immoral and unchristian' and the basis for a 'false religion'; and it asserted that any proper account must start from the view that 'morality consists in the autonomous moral personality choosing and understanding for itself. The body of the paper developed this contrast. Morality was seen as self-contradictory in the sense that every imperative, once obeyed, was superseded by another; and as incomplete in the sense that, though 'built up in the moral sense of a community', it was 'changing, growing, purifying itself . . . with no hope of a final end wherein it rests'. Religion, on the one hand - the 'belief in a real . . . object other than [one]self - was conceived of as 'the completion of morality' where 'we achieve goodness not by becoming better, but by losing ourselves in God'. From this point of view, and in relation to 'morality', religion was the 'completion of all the abstractions that analysis may discover in 1. In the form expressed by L. S. Thornton - a contributor to Essays Catholic and Critical - in Religion and the Supernatural 1916.

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it'. It was the 'motive power and growing-point' and also 'the completed whole of merely moral ideas'. Religion was the 'completion or "ideality" of mere morality' and showed the 'whole' from which the 'endless "ought to be" ' of morality was an 'abstraction'. What Oakeshott claimed to have offered in this paper was a fuller consideration of morality than was normally given in these connections. The account he gave, while insisting on the autonomy of moral action, insisted also on the importance of 'adequacy' and 'wisdom' if moral action was to be achieved. 'Autonomy' was merely 'the form of moral personality' and required 'some definite content'. 'Free action' was not 'moral action' unless it was also 'wise', and a 'concrete moral action' had to be not only 'autonomous and free' but also the 'adequate reaction of a personality to a situation'. Wisdom and adequacy were not discussed at length, but they were thought of as being embodied in a developed morality which was manifested in that 'continuous battle' for the 'perfect good' in which there was 'no hope of victory' and where a 'formal victory' was the 'only irretrievable defeat'. This battle constituted civilization. The final paragraph of the article stated that there was not the gap between Christian moral ideas and civilization that some writers had discerned, and that, though 'Christian morality' was not 'the whole of Christianity', it had produced a 'whole view of life' in the sense that 'our moral ideas' are inspired to a large extent by what we understand 'the Christian view of life to be'. This position formed the starting-point for the second chief article of the twenties, The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity. This was an attempt to show that Christianity could exist without 'the historical element' and could be rescued from the historical obsessions of the day-before-yesterday, including the Victorian obsession with the historical Jesus. In identifying the form that Christianity would take thereafter, its definition was simple: Christianity could include 'any doctrine or practice which, no matter whence it came, has been or can be drawn into the general body of Christian tradition without altogether disturbing its unity or breaking down its consistency'. Like the rejected position, this equated Christianity with its historical manifestations, while leaving open to judgment the points at which 'unity' should be thought to have been 'disturbed' or 'consistency . . . broken down'. But the object of the equation was not to tie Christianity to any particular manifestation from the past. Its object, indeed, was to establish that there was no need to be overwhelmed by the past, that there should be flexibility and fluidity in relation to it, and that

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Christianity should be free to take whatever form it might need to take in the face of whatever cultural eventualities might arise in the future. The significance of this was two-fold. First, it assumed (in a way that had already been laid out in Religion and the Moral Life) that 'religious ideas . . . do not depend entirely for their value upon a demonstration of their ultimate truth'. Secondly, it assumed that, since the 'value of a religious ideal or belief was to be 'judged pragmatically', and men's 'felt wants' were, 'of necessity, the starting point of their religion', it followed that Christianity could perfectly well survive the change if belief in the necessity of the prima facie historical ceased to meet the demands of 'the ordinary life of ordinary people'. Oakeshott was not denying that there 'had been and there seems now to be a very general need in the religious consciousness of Christianity for . . . some kind of religious belief in the necessity of the prima facie historical'. But he was also saying that this was not necessarily historical in the strict sense, that it had become part of Christianity because it had become 'part of our mentality' since the eighteenth century, and that 'its counterpart in Christianity' would be 'seriously lacking in any real contact with the normal outlook of our civilization' once it disappeared. The assumption was that it was the business of religion to have 'contact with the normal outlook of our civilization' in order to meet 'the simple needs inseparable from an active and practical life'. It had 'to give life and to give it abundantly' and to * "turn its necessities to glorious gain" ', and it had to do so in such a way as to 'represent to its believers the highest they can believe, the best they can desire'. But since it could only do this by addressing itself to present requirements, failure in this respect - 'a failure to meet the demands put upon it by present requirements' - would be 'more certain evidence of [the] demise [of Christianity] than almost any alleged break in the Christian tradition'. The last five pages of the essay explained what these requirements were, and that they were essentially the same as they had always been. Men had never been able to 'love or live upon the knowledge of a mere necessity'. Their religious wants had never been met by 'philosophic proof. They needed to be made 'intensely aware' through 'an almost sensible perception' of the 'reality of the object of belief. For this reason religious wants could not only not be satisfied by philosophy : they could not be satisfied by history. Religion was 'nothing if not contemporary'. It could only face the 'irrepressible New' by

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achieving a measure of 'freedom from the past', and Christianity, if it was to survive into the future, had to become 'not for the first time, a religion in which no servile archaeology inhibited vitality or chilled imagination'. These articles did not achieve the explicitness of Experience and Its Modes. But they implied - what it made explicit - that there was no special activity called religion. In the few pages that were devoted to religion in Experience and Its Modes, religion was not only a type of practical experience but was also its 'consummation'. It was not just 'inseparable' from the 'conduct of life'; it was the conduct of life. It was 'the alteration of practical experience so as to agree with an idea', and it differed from other forms of practical activity only in the intensity, devotion and 'singleness of purpose' with which it was pursued. From the standpoint of religion, in one respect Experience and Its Modes was pacificatory: it 'made room for religion' and explained why conflicts with history and science should be ended. In another respect it diminished religion, recognizing that it provided truth but defining its truth as truth of practice: an abstraction or arrest which, from the standpoint of philosophy, was necessarily unsatisfactory. 'Ultimate, concrete truth', indeed, was not only beyond religion, it was also 'inimical' to it, and, since 'an idea which serves this world can serve no other', it was also the case not only that ideas like deity, salvation and immortality belonged 'indelibly' to the world of practice but also that theology, so far as it did not recognize this, failed, as ethics and moral and political philosophy had failed, to achieve philosophical transparency. Oakeshott was no more dismissing religion within its own framework than he was dismissing practice. It was 'wiser men' who sought a gospel. But from whatever angle the question was asked, the answers were the same: that philosophy eschews gospels, that the philosopher is not a preacher, and that the philosophical equivalent of preaching the gospel is 'escape, perhaps the only complete escape open to us'. It is sometimes supposed that Experience and Its Modes provided a philosophical justification of a Conservative politics or of a conservative moral manner. In fact, it did no such thing. If the account of volition looked like an assertion of the impossibility of discontinuity (or revolution) in moral or political practice, the overriding claim was that philosophy had no practical message to give. Politics was either a

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matter of practice and therefore autonomous in relation to philosophical accounts of it (in which case anything that was effectively political was politics), or it was philosophy and, like ethics, had to avoid the pseudo-arrests in which, from philosophy's standpoint, both had become involved. There is no doubt about the politics of Experience and Its Modes. It did not have any. Moreover, although it validated or consecrated morality or practice, it also validated philosophy as the subversion of morality or practice. The subversion issued eventually, it is true, in their reinstatement. But the claim that philosophy was truth and, as such, both unnecessary and 'depraved', seemed not so much conservative as bohemian, reactionary and nihilistic. It was antipathetic to ethical earnestness and provided complicated reasons why one should dislike it. Its paradoxes - its affirmation of the necessity of error if life is to be conducted justified irritation at liberal solemnity. But this could as easily have been turned against illiberal or conservative solemnity. It left it far from clear what was meant by the claim that 'law is the enemy of the moral life' and 'casuistry . . . the grave of moral sensibility'. Above all, it was deeply ambiguous about religion. It is obvious, once the matter is raised, that the religion of Experience and Its Modes was not the religion of Hoskyns and Smyth. Oakeshott not only wrote a critical review of Essays Catholic and Critical in 1927 and dismissed Barth as merely a 'return to Kant', he also virtually ignored religion after 1933. And, though he returned to it in On Human Conduct in 1975, it had by then become a 'consideration in selfenactment' which wore its own emblems, had no concern for the responses of those who did not wear them, and in that sense was selfregarding. The description of religion which was given on pages 81-5 had beauty and power, and contained some of Oakeshott'sfinestwriting. But, as a comprehensive statement, it was mistaken, a destructive misunderstanding: a systematized statement of Oakeshott's aversion to evangelization, and a continuation of his early belief that religion, having nothing to do with truth and a great deal to do with 'historical contingency', is either an intense form of personal morality or an attitude towards civilization. For Oakeshott's silence after Experience and Its Modes, there may have been biographical reasons. Whatever the reasons personally, and whatever he may have written in his notebooks, the silence was as deafening as in Collingwood, and for the same reason philosophically, that religion had become everything men do.

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III Over the years Oakeshott has extended the interests that he pursued in Experience and Its Modes. In a small work in 1949 he ate words he had written in 1933 about poetry. At other points he has provided further accounts of history, and extended statements about Hobbes and Moral and Ethical Philosophy. The body of his writing, however, has been concerned with one conception which was present in Experience and Its Modes and with two which were not. It has been to explaining how morality, law and politics should be talked or written about, that most of the rest of his work has been dedicated. Experience and Its Modes had asserted in general that human activity has more modes than one. This was the argument of The Voice of Poetry, where the predominance of 'practice' in European culture was said, like the predominance of 'science' in Experience and Its Modes, to have become 'boring', and to have made poetry seem both eccentric and incomprehensible. The same argument was implied in articles in the Cambridge Journal, which doubted whether it was desirable, and denied that it was inevitable, that a public corporation should take as elevated, and monotonous, a view as Reith's BBC had taken of its public responsibilities, and which presented the ethical earnestness of Sir Walter Moberly's The Crisis in the University as issuing almost necessarily in a narrowly ideological conception of university education. Similar intuitions have been operative since. If Oakeshott's moral and political writing is considered from its beginning in the 1920s up to On Human Conduct in 1975, it will be seen that it has three major aspects: it makes historical judgments about the character of modern English and European law, morals, and politics; it makes criticisms of the manner in which they have been thought and written about; and it makes philosophical statements about the nature of these three things both in themselves and in relation to 'civil society'. As in Experience and Its Modes, so in these respects Oakeshott's positions have been defined by what they have excluded. Between 1930 and 1940 these exclusions were extensive. In addition to AngloCatholic authoritarianism, many other positions were dismissed. Bentham was dismissed for being a philosophe, for being intellectually a 'native of France', and for naturally hating the English Common Law; Marxism was dismissed for philosophical naivete, for being an

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'official philosophy', and for turning a 'gospel into a dogma'. 'Not a little' of the 'revolt against . . . Victorianism' was said to be a revolt against Locke as the filter by which Puritanism had become Whiggism and as the apostle of a liberalism which laid its 'paralysing hand of respectability upon whatever was dangerous or revolutionary'. Liberalism was described in 1932 as displaying a 'boundless but capricious moderation' and as making democracy, parliamentary government, and the ethic of productivity seem 'absurd, exploded and uninteresting'. In 1939 it was said to have lost touch with the contemporary world after exercising an 'intellectual dominance' that was 'hardly short of a despotism', and to have been the main reason why fascism had had to provide 'self-assertion of elements in our civilization' which Liberalism had never tried to express. Fascism's attack on the 'moral ideal' of Liberalism was said to be well-timed, Durbin's 'old claptrap about government by consent and the greatest happiness of the governed' in The Politics of Democratic Socialism being particularly disappointing to anyone who had expected him to provide a 'sound analysis of democracy'. This phase of thinking was brought to a head when the introduction to Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe described Western Europe as not only dissatisfied with the Liberalism by which it had been 'fascinated' since 1789, but also as balkanized intellectually into five competing doctrines: 'five separate ways of conceiving the fundamental character of society and the nature and earthly destiny of man'. From his earliest appearances as a writer Oakeshott had been at pains to insist that choice was a characteristic of moral action, that that alone had power to compel action which was a 'world of ideas', and that 'state' should be thought of as 'correlative to individuals' and as satisfying the needs of 'concrete persons'. This did not immediately produce anything very systematic. But it produced two statements that deserve attention - The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence (1938) and an article in Scrutiny on The Claims of Politics (1939-40). The Concept of A Philosophical Jurisprudence surveyed the 'confusion and ambiguity' of existing legal and jurisprudential philosophy and dismissed historical, sociological and other misunderstandings of their nature. It alleged the existence of a tradition of 'Western European philosophical jurisprudence' which consisted of 'great texts' and supplied the 'universal context' of every text in its history. In this connection it repeated what Experience and Its Modes had said in

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others - that a philosophical concept of law 'must be different' from the 'concept in which the enquiry starts', though it can scarcely be said to have explained in what sense this was so since it was so much concerned with applying Experience and Its Modes that it contained hardly any substantive discussion of the subject. The Claims of Politics, on the other hand, though a short article, was of greater consequence. It denied that 'public activity' was the 'sole genuine . . . expression of public spirit' and it dismissed the 'delusion' that everyone was obliged to take part in 'immediate political activity'. Not only was this not the case, the opposite was the case. Everything men did was connected with the life of their society - the 'activity of a music-hall artist' as much as that of a prime minister - and no man who felt it his duty to 'take part in the promotion of the communal interests of his society need consider himself to have failed merely because he had not entered the world of polities'. This was a reaction against 'politicization', whether in an improving liberal form, or in the form taken by the class struggle. It produced a limiting definition of politics, and a minimizing conception of its importance. In asserting that politics was 'specialised and abstracted', it implied the counterview that its 'end and meaning' was the protection of civilization. The protection of civilization was important. But it was parasitic not only because of the 'spiritual callousness' involved in making politics acceptable to the 'mentally vulgar', but also because the 'values' of society were not to be found primarily in political activity. In the politically active citizen, it is true, society became conscious of its 'political self', but it was in the poet, the artist and 'to a lesser extent' the philosopher, that it achieved a 'deeper consciousness', and it was only so far as the artist, the poet and the philosopher were separated from the society in which they lived that they could help it to do so. 'It is not their business to com# out of a retreat' went a passage reminiscent of Experience and Its Modes, 'bringing with them some superior wisdom and enter the world of political activity'. Their business - the condition of their contributing to the communal life - was to 'stay where they remain, true to their genius and lead . . . society from behind'. By the time Oakeshott began five years' military service in 1940, he had defined the 'fundamental cleavage' in contemporary political doctrines as between 'those which hand over to the arbitrary will of a

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society's self-appointed leaders the planning of its entire life, and those which . . . consider the whole notion of planning the destiny of a society to be both stupid and immoral'. Neither Marxism nor Fascism had been dismissed completely, and even Nazism had not been dismissed out of hand. But two strong preferences had been established - for Catholic social and political doctrine in the form taken by Natural Law theory as an embodiment of the 'historic doctrine of Conservatism', and for an element in representative democracy which embodied the 'spirit of our laws' and gave a 'comprehensive expression of our civilization'. What the Cambridge Journal did with these insights was explained at the beginning of this chapter. The Cambridge Journal, however, was an attempt to change the tone and assumptions of public discussion. The deposit it left, though highly reflective, was not philosophical, or at least was not philosophy in the meaning of Experience and Its Modes. A large part of On Human Conduct, on the other hand, was philosophy in both form and content. In the thirities Oakeshott had not got very far in bringing politics and law under philosophical consideration. With Experience and Its Modes he seemed to have shot his bolt and to be unable to find a fresh structure and language with which to approach them. Though the writings of the immediately post-war period went some way towards doing this, their concern with practice made it difficult to do it systematically. The Cambridge Journal articles and the celebrated Inaugural at the London School of Economics in 1951 were, nevertheless, an advance. They strengthened the structure and used arguments that Oakeshott had not used about politics before. In doing this they emphasized that human behaviour is a matter of art, not nature; that human conduct is rational when it exhibits intelligence appropriate to the idiom of the activity it is concerned with; and that concrete activity - knowledge of how to act - is 'practical' or 'traditional' knowledge, the 'sort of knowledge without . . . which . . . the pursuit of any concrete activity is impossible'. Oakeshott did not suggest that this sort of knowledge was omnicompetent; he agreed that technical knowledge was as necessary. Nor, while criticizing them, did he reject 'ideology' or the 'self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals'. The defence of tradition was the real point of the argument, but it was only in rejecting the rationalist's denial that traditional knowledge was knowledge at all that he reduced tech-

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nical knowledge to being only one amongst the types of knowledge which were relevant to moral and political action. Nevertheless, the intimacy of the connection between practice and philosophy in these works - the virtual absorption of the one into the other - was disabling, making them together the most distinguished Conservative statement that England had heard for a very long time, but doing so by achieving the sort of philosophical confusion that Experience and Its Modes had condemned. The question that arises is, did On Human Conduct succeed where these articles did not? In the third part of On Human Conduct, Oakeshott isolated two traditions in European politics, described their coherences, and made judgments of their value. These were not the same as the traditions described in the Cambridge Journal, but they were, like them, principles for understanding the 'unresolved tension' that had 'polarised' modern European states and the 'modern European political consciousness'. These poles were societas on the one hand and universitas on the other. They were poles of practice as much as of explanation, and Oakeshott made it clear which he preferred. He did not prefer the conception of state as universitas, an 'enterprise association' pursuing a 'specified enduring interest' or 'identified common purpose'. He did not prefer its 'seigneurial management', 'inspectors and overseers' and 'administrative engagements' or the forms it had taken in colonial states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little time for the 'association in terms of a substantive purpose' that had been induced by European wars, or for the 'adventures in teleocracy' made possible when the papal auctoritas docendi was converted into churches, schools and universities that were subject to 'regalian supervision'. He criticized the bene vivere of Aquinas, the 'righteousness' of the Calvinist, the 'goodlife' of the Stoic, Baconian 'well-being', the 'holy' community of the Puritan, the moral 'verite' of Bossuet and other precedents for the philosophe's and the Enlightenment's conception of 'corporate' and 'substantive' purpose. Most of all he criticized the 'loss, debility, ignorance, timidity, poverty, loneliness, displacement, persecution, misfortune . . . and moral defeat' which, from the sixteenth century onwards, had produced men who were unable to sustain 'an individual life' and longed for the 'shelter of a community', the 'in the broadest sense' poor who had not only invited governments to a 'more general engagement' in their lives but had also required guidance from 'leaders' who began by persuading them that they had 'rights' and ended by

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exploited by the libertine, Pascal recognised it as an abyss of loneliness, and it was naively claimed by Buffcoat as the 'right' of every 'poorest he'. It was reflected in family relationships, in manners of living which gave precedence to privacy, and in domestic architecture: it displayed itself in religious belief, in industry and trade, in art and literature; it was portrayed in ballad, in drama and in novels, and for the better part of two centuries it was the undisputed starting place of most reflexion on moral relationships. And although, later, it was almost buried under a mountain of rubbish, confused with trivial liberations, romanticised, mistaken for the exercise of 'subjective will', confounded with a 'sacred inner light' and with a banal individualism, and finally corrupted in being confused with 'sentience' (a capacity for feeling pleasure and pain) or with a socalled 'libidinal instinct', it has remained the strongest strand in the moral convictions of the inhabitants of modern Europe. This was life conceived of as an adventure and reflected in the conception of a state as an 'association of . . . adventurers'. It conceived of citizens as 'responding to . . . the ordeal of consciousness', as heirs to the imaginative achievements of their predecessors, and as joined in a 'practice of civility'. It denied that civility had anything to do with substantive wants or symbiotic obligations. Oakeshott has not explained whether there are contemporary exponents of the state as societas. Almost all the expositions that he has mentioned were made before 1900. Some of these, given his earlier attitudes, were unexpected - Fichte, Kant, Locke, Mill and the young von Humboldt, for example. It was even more unexpected to find not only the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers, but also the 'Declaration des droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen' (different doubtless from the Declaration of the Rights of Man of which the anti-rationalist had been so mistrustful in 1947). One may very well wonder what to make of the eclectic pedigree described in the following passage on p. 245. It is the common assumption of such otherwise divergent writings as The Trew Law of a Free Monarchy, Locke's Treatises on government, and Algernon Sidney's Discourses: it is what joined the otherwise discordant writings of Burke, Paine, and Lord Salisbury; and it informed Ireton's argument with Buffcoat about civil rights. It was what the Old Whigs (while thinking of something else), and also some of their constitutional opponents, dreamed England might be; and what Montesquieu, de Lolme, and other continentals of the time thought England was. It hovered equivocally in the background of the thoughts of the early proponents of the so-called Rechsstaat and was abandoned by the later. And, confused with the ambiguous principle of 'the Rule of Law' and with the sanctity of 'con-

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science', it remained for a short while lodged in the interstices of English and continental 'liberal' constitutional doctrine. With Ranke it was a historic European experience; with de Tocqueville a political faith; and it was what Lord Acton referred to when (somewhat optimistically) he thought of modern European history as the 'history of freedom'.

These imputed similarities need not detain us. They confused types of freedom because they were too much concerned to sustain freedom, and they were unsophisticated about the demand that freedom should be understood as an assertion of power over others. They were interesting in so far as they showed Oakeshott reversing his opinions. But they provided a less adequate guide to his culminating position than the persuasive philosophical statements, unencumbered by confusing historical lumber, that are to be found in the second Essay On Human Conduct. Essay II conceptualized societas and explained the 'civil condition'. It dealt with ruling, with adjudication and with politics. But its main subject was law (lex), the distinguishing characteristic of the civil condition of which adjudicating, ruling and politics were offshoots. In discussing the civil condition, Oakeshott identified a 'practice' as he had identified it in Essay I. It was an 'expression of humane intelligence', 'conditions' which were 'subscribed to by agents in choosing and acting'. It was a relationship of equals and an association 'in respect of a common language'. But it was not an association for making the same utterances or having the same beliefs, purposes and interests. Though it included recognition of 'conditions', these conditions only 'qualified' performances, they did not 'determine' them. A practice was indicative only adverbially. As a practice, the civil condition was an 'enactment of human beings'. It was a continuous enactment which could not be ended and it enacted a 'vernacular language', a conversation in which agents recognized and disclosed themselves as cives and explored their relations with one another in the terms of civil understanding. This was differentiated from some other practices by being a language of rules, the civil condition being distinguished from other conditions by being 'rule-articulated association'. In Essay II the judicial function was described as custody of the 'norms of lex* and resolution of uncertainties about the relation of lex to 'contingent situations'. Ruling was an 'injunctive' activity, an utterance which commanded or prohibited a specific performance. It was

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attached to 'office' and governed by 'procedures', and a ruler was a 'master of ceremonies' rather than an 'arbiter of fashion'. The violence used in ruling was not the 'residuum of the violence which civil association purported to abate' but the guarantee that the conditions of a practice would be 'generally and adequately subscribed to'. These definitions, deliberately self-limiting, were designed to puncture more ambitious definitions. They also had a more intimate purpose: to present the civil condition as one in which Authority was neither 'remote' nor 'cold', and was insulated neither from 'consent' nor 'dissent'. 'Consent' and 'dissent' were given special meanings, as was the claim that Authority is 'incurious of the beliefs and . . . substantive engagements of its subjects'. But the guide-lines were clear: that the prescriptions of the civil condition were not 'orders to be obeyed', that the counterpart to Authority was not obedience but obligation, and that the 'conditions of even the least ambiguous duty could be fulfilled only by a "free" agent choosing what he shall do'. It was with the idea of freeing it from the burden of command that lex was given its definition. The key conceptions in Oakeshott's understanding of lex were that it was an intelligent relationship, that it was constituted by rules, and that it made only adverbial qualifications in respect of conduct It was an intelligent relationship because the civil condition postulated human beings who were free agents. Its qualifications qualified adverbially because they had not to be injunctive. Lex was the conditions of a practice, a 'formal' relationship, and unrelated to the pursuit or achievement of any 'extrinsic' or substantive purpose or satisfaction. It was, indeed, merely 'conditions to be subscribed to', and these conditions were the 'sole terms in which cives were related'. In this view the civil condition was a relation of 'somewhat "watery" fidelity' in which cives were related to one another in recognition of a 'manifold of rules and rule-like prescriptions' which, because it resulted from beliefs, understandings and sentiments, lacked a 'ready and indispensable criterion of desirability'. It was a matter for debate and deliberation in which 'there must always be more than one opinion', and politics was the process of debate and deliberation about the conditions of the practice or, in other words, the rules that constitute lex. As in discussing everything else, so in discussing politics, Oakeshott defined what he meant as much by exclusion as by positive affirmation. A civil prescription was not a 'product of "social forces" '; nor could

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it be shown to be desirable by being connected with a 'superior norm . . . moral rule . . . Law of Reason or of Nature, a principle of utility, a categorical imperative' or a theorem about the 'natural conditions of human life' and the 'dispositions . . . of human character'. Similarly, a political engagement could not be one in which 'interests clamoured for benefit or advantage', 'alleged facts, theorems or moral convictions were proposed for recognition', or 'an orthodoxy or belief was made 'the substantive good in pursuit of which associates are related'. Politics was none of these things. Politics was deliberation, argument about 'the conditions cives should be authoritatively required to subscribe to and be constrained to observe'. This was all politics was, and it was important that it was not a 'demonstrative undertaking'. In Essay II Oakeshott was at pains to observe that the obligation to subscribe to the terms of legislative enactments lay in the 'authority of the procedure in which they were enacted'. 'Having an obligation' was sui generis. It was different from 'fearing a penalty', having a preference, or participating in legislation. It involved neither obsequiousness, nor an 'affront to human dignity'. In civil association there was nothing to 'threaten the link between belief and conduct which constituted "free agency"'. Essay II was the culmination of Oakeshott's achievement as a political philosopher, the expression of a position which had emerged from continuous reflection on the character and history of English law, a translation into a philosophical idiom of ideas that were derived from Maitland's understanding of mediaeval England. Essay II, however, depended on Essay I. It was because the civil condition was a practice, indeed a moral practice, and through Essay I's conception of relations between a practice and a person, that the libertarian politics of Essay II had become a philosophical possibility. Oakeshott's account of a 'practice' has already been discussed in relation to lex; we need not repeat what he wrote in Essay I about practices in general. But it is important to remember that adverbiality - the announcement of conditions to be prescribed in making choices, an announcement, moreover, which was not a command - fitted the personality which, though not mentioned, lies at the centre of Oakeshott's undertaking. In considering 'persons', Oakeshott has been under two sorts of compulsion. He has wished to free them from arbitrary authority, and from the explanatory diminutions of sociological, psychological and neuro-

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physiological reductionism. His negations, extensive in 1933 and vastly expanded by the product of the printing presses since, have involved a continuous attack on error. It was his consciousness of the ubiquity of error that made On Human Conduct coherent. In On Human Conduct Oakeshott was against anything that obscured the understanding that men are free agents. By free he did not mean able to alter situations by acts of unconstrained will: he meant able to understand situations and to have 'intelligent engagements' with them. His understanding of moral and political practice followed from the assumption that conduct is the work of intelligence - that a man is 'what he understands himself to be', that his 'contingent situations are what he understands them to be', and that the history of what he becomes is 'the unceasing articulation of understood responses to endlessly emergent understood situations' which continues until he dies. In relation to action this view took three forms. It argued first that action is always specific, that it is an agent 'casting off a mooring' in seeking an 'understood' satisfaction, and that it requires 'courage' to do this. It argued, secondly, that the 'meaning of an action' is a 'wished-for response from other agents', that other agents 'cannot be depended upon to respond in the wished-for manner', and that acting, therefore, is a bargain with 'an imperfectly imagined future'. Finally, it argued that deliberating, so far from being a failed form of demonstration, is an essential concomitant of action which involves not merely reflecting 'in order to choose' but 'imagining alternatives' to choose from, and that, since the 'eligible alternatives' are 'almost unlimited', there are no 'final solutions'. In practice, therefore, there was neither compulsion nor finality, neither bars nor chains and, except in infancy, when a child was a 'helpless subject', there was no need for constraint. A practice was an 'historic achievement', not a natural one. But men came to consciousness in a world 'illuminated by a moral procedure', and the education through which they acquired the 'prudential aptitudes of agency' was 'indistinguishable from that in which . . . they came to understand the conditions of a moral practice . . . as conditions to which they ought to subscribe in making their choices'. The felicities of Essay I are innumerable. But the overriding impression is simple - that moral conduct is not special, that its vernacular is spoken 'on every occasion of human intercourse', and that, though the 'stylist, the hero, the saint, the aristocrat and the vagabond' produce

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the high peaks of accomplishment, it is through the 'balance, sobriety and exactness' of its 'unprofessional guardians' (ordinary people who sustain it as a 'vulgar and living language') that these peaks become scaleable. This was a continuation of the attempt to consider morality as something that does not constrict, as the outcome of an acquired comprehension which does not compel the individual personality. But morality often is constricting and has frequently to be compulsory, just as law has to be. Morality is objective; it is naive to expect it not to be, and idle to suppose that there can be a form of morality, or of law, from which compulsion and arbitrariness have been removed. Oakeshott may deny that this is what he wishes to establish. But his words imply it; the general tendency of his thought suggests it- The conclusion must be that, in ridding thought of the arbitrariness of liberal, virtuous or high-minded procrusteanism, he has failed to notice that arbitrary procrusteanism is unavoidable, a consequence of the fact that moral, legal and social norms are manifestations not only of power or of the power which all men wish to exercise over other men, but of the power which external authority alone can claim to exercise over them. It may be disagreeable that this should be so, but nothing will be altered by pretending that it is not, or by imagining a form of society (or of morality) from which compulsion and arbitrariness have been removed. One may disagree with Oakeshott's formulations. Whether one agrees with them or not, it is difficult to withhold admiration for the relentlessness with which over fifty years he has sought to 'tease the monistic yearnings of the muddled theorist' by explaining that there are many moral languages, not one, and that a practice is neither tyrannical nor procrustean, but is, on the contrary, a civil condition emerging through the 'transactions between the generations' which are called 'education'. Moral rules [we may leave him declaring] are abridgements. But what they abridge is not prudential deliberation about the fitness of actions to procure their circumstantially wished-for outcomes; indeed, moral rules do not even specify actions in terms of their likely consequences. Nor do they abridge alleged calculations of the tendency of actions to promote a suppositious 'happiness' for ourselves or for mankind in general: conduct is not susceptible of such calculations because it has no such universal substantive 'end*. What they do is to concentrate into specific precepts considerations of adverbial desirability which lie dispersed in a moral language and thus transform invitations into prescriptions, allegiances to fellow-practitioners into precise obligations, bona into facienda. Moral

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rules specify performances in terms of obligations to subscribe to injunctions. What a moral practice intimates as, in general, proper to be said or done, a moral rule makes more explicit in declaring what it is right to do. Where the relationships of a moral practice are articulated in rules they lose some of their characteristic expansiveness . . . and this strictness is magnified where rules become duties . . . Rules, duties, and their like (moral principles and dogmas) are . . . passages of stringency in a moral practice. But they should not be thought of as strands of some exceptionally tough material woven into the otherwise somewhat flimsy fabric of moral association . . . Rather, they are to be recognised as densities obtruded by the tensions of a spoken language of moral intercourse, nodal points at which a practice turns upon itself in a vortiginous movement and becomes steadier in ceasing to be adventurous. They may help to keep a practice in shape, but they do not give it its shape. They are abstractions which derive their authority from the practice itself as a spoken language in which they appear as passages of somewhat exaggerated emphasis. This chapter has taken Oakeshott at his face value, colouring his writings, it is true, in order to set them in the polemical context of the 1920s, but recognizing their relevance to both practice and philosophical truth. This in a way is how they should be left. Yet it is impossible to leave them, impossible to identify Oakeshott simply, or to avoid asking whether he means what he has written in the form in which he has written it. This may seem an impertinence, even an absurdity, as though any writer could write as carefully as he has written without meaning what he has said. But the question has still to be asked. Oakeshott is a stylist, his writing is inseparable from himself, and, though we cannot give proper consideration to the self, we may make a suggestion without proper consideration. Oakeshott seems to be saying that the life of practice is the only life, that men unavoidably involve themselves in it, and that moral and political behaviour in the forms in which he understands them are ways of living which are tolerable to the self with which conduct is concerned. And those who see him as a conservative moralist or political philosopher are right to believe that what they attribute to him is to be found in his writings. There is, however, another theme: not one that predominates, not one, perhaps, that solemnity can cope with; but one that needs, nevertheless, to be considered - an a-moralism which he associates with philosophy and which has a distinguished pedigree as a philosophical method. Experience and Its Modes was an example of this method, a pre-

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paration for the task of validating the life of practice- But Experience and Its Modes was also something else. It showed that philosophy was both a 'mere refuge from life' and a 'denial of life', and that 'he who regards life as other than an illusion that annihilates itself, is still entangled in life'. It may be that this was the most important thing about philosophy, and that philosophy - an 'outcast, useless to men of business and troublesome to men of pleasure' - really was supposed to provide the only 'unlimited satisfaction in experience', unless, indeed, this was provided by poetry, not only as one out of a number of types of human conversation but also an attempt to give expression to religious conceptions of existence which had been freed from the constricting moralism of practice. What one asks therefore - and what we leave Oakeshott in asking - is, on which of these poles should he be placed? Does he mean that the only complete satisfaction is that imagined a-morality which philosophy alone can achieve? Or does he mean that practice, conducted according to the political and moral manners that he has indicated, provides the only tolerable reconciliation between persons, and the only possible way of conducting a world which, though the best of all possible worlds, is impregnated with necessary evils? Either view leads to, as it has been stimulated by, heartfelt rejection of the procrustean virtue of rationalistic liberalism. Whether the conception of a practice is intended to liberate from any duty which is not self-imposed, whether a practice is not a tautological definition of something that education has made tolerable, whether, in reaction from what he rejects, Oakeshott does not rebound into Nietzschean or Hobbesian a-morality are questions to which the answer is obscure. The obscurity of the answer did not make the conception less subversive of the solemnities I had encountered before I encountered Oakeshott's.

9 Churchill 'The security of property depends upon its wide diffusion among great numbers and all classes of the population, and it becomes more secure year by year because it is gradually being more widely distributed. In distributing new burdens, a Government should have regard first of all to ability to pay and, secondly . . . should make a sensible difference between wealth which is the fruit of productive enterprise and industry or of individual skill, and wealth which represents the capture by individuals of socially created values.' W. S. Churchill Liberalism and the Social Problem 1909 pp. 395-6. 'During the forty-two years he was Duke of Marlborough the organism of English society underwent a complete revolution. The three or four hundred families which had for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation from a small, struggling community to the headship of a vast and still unconquered Empire lost their authority and control. They became merged peacefully, insensibly, without bloodshed or strife, in a much more powerful but less coherent form of national consciousness; and the class to which the late Duke belonged were not only almost entirely relieved of their political responsibilities, but they were to a very large extent stripped of their property and in many cases driven from their homes. This process may well be judged inevitable and by some people salutary. But it cast a depressing shadow upon the Duke of Marlborough's life. He was always conscious that he belonged to a system which had been destroyed, to a society which had passed away . . . He resigned himself to this. He acquiesced in and even aided the process. He grasped the hope that it meant a greater England, and that to broaden the foundations was to strengthen them.' W. S. Churchill Charles, IXth Duke of Marlborough 1934 p. 8. 'It is established that henceforward whole populations will take part in war, all doing their utmost, all subjected to the fury of the enemy. It is established that nations who believe their life is at stake will not be restrained from using any means to secure their existence. It is probable — nay, certain - that among the means which will next time be at their disposal will be agencies and processes of destruction wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched, uncontrollable. Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now - for one occasion only - his Master.' W. S. Churchill The World Crisis: The Aftermath 1929 pp. 454-5. 283

Churchill1 was not in any obvious sense an intellectual; he was antiacademic and he confounded priestly pretensions and the pretensions of intelligentsias in a common condemnation. Yet he was the dominant English politician between 1940 and 1955 and a continuous public presence. And he had a public doctrine. In the 1940s and 1950s Churchill embodied resistance to Hitler. He had warned Britain against him and had led her when she 'stood alone' in 1940. He was supposed to embody what were imagined to be the characteristic qualities of the British: phlegm, perseverance, and a fighting touch, on the one hand; humour, modesty, and self-deprecating self-confidence on the other. The 'standing alone' was not very impressive, nor were phlegm, perseverance and the fighting touch. What was admirable was the egotistical demonstration of power, the grandeur of the treatment of war, and the assumption that the lights had gone out sociologically in England in 1914 and had never been relit. This, perhaps, was an illusion, and Churchill, the pre-war radical, had no right to complain even if it was not. But it suggested doubts, and the need to consider not just a transition but the possibility of deterioration. In his own life Churchill made the transition, even at the same time that he regretted it; his unmistakeable combination of modesty, irony, egotism and detachment provided a universally avail1. Sir Winston L. S. Churchill (1874-1965). Ed. Harrow and Sandhurst. British Army 1895-98 and 1916. MP (Cons.) 1900-04, MP (Lib.) 1904-22, MP (Constitutional, then Cons.) 1931-64. Junior Minister 1906-08. Cabinet Minister 1908-15, 1917-22, 1924-29, and 1939-40. Prime Minister 1940-45 and 1951-55. Author of The Story of the Malakand Field Force 1898, The River War 1899, Savrola 1900, London to Lady smith via Pretoria 1900, Sir Ian Hamilton's March 1900, Lord Randolph Churchill 2 vols. 1906, My African Journey 1908, Liberalism and the Social Problem 1909, The World Crisis 5 vols. 1923-31, My Early Life 1930, Thoughts and Adventures 1932, Marlborough 4 vols. 1933-38, Great Contemporaries 1937, The Second World War 6 vols. 1948-54, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples 4 vols. 1956-58 etc. etc. 284

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able mythology for the much-reduced nation of which he was the leading ornament after 1940. Between 1940 and about 1960 Churchill supplied as impregnable a confirmation as Nelson or Wellington of things the English wished to believe about themselves. He did this to some extent by his public presence, to a far greater extent through his books which continued to be bought in large numbers even after his active life was over. Whether the intellectual doctrine out of which they were written was the same as the responses they induced in their readers is too extensive a question for this chapter, where the aim is to sketch the experience with which the doctrine was linked.

Until he was twenty, Churchill was an average example of aristocratic boyhood. He had a weak mother, a talented father and a devoted nurse. He was neither a scholar nor much of an athlete; he was half-American; he may well have been aggressive and socially nasty. At Harrow he had had an ordinary education which had been lightened by special attention from the headmaster and by devoted study of his father's speeches. Towards the end of his father's life and with his father's encouragement, he began to read. With the death of his father and his nurse within months of each other, he began to read widely. Both before he went to the Cuban war in 1895, and during the three years he spent in India, he read voraciously. When his reading began, its direction was significant. Besides Kipling he read Lecky and Winwood Reade, Macaulay, Hallam, and Adam Smith, and Hardy, Schopenhauer, Darwin and Malthus. He also read Gibbon. It was to Gibbon that he owed most. There is no reason to doubt that he had lost all Christian faith, if he had any, by the time he was twenty-three and had acquired in its place a Gibbonian deism which, as he said himself, would have been troublesome politically if he had insisted on it in the Conservative party later on. There was next a phase in which the professional knowledge he had acquired at Sandhurst was used to provide the subject-matter for the deployment of the literary personality he had constructed out of his reading. This issued in newspaper reports from Cuba, the Sudan, Afghanistan and South Africa which became four war books,1 in the 1. The Story of the Malakand Field Force, The River War, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton*s March.

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novel which he published under the title Savrola, and in the lectures and articles he wrote or delivered in the five years before he was elected to parliament in 1900. In understanding Churchill's later frame of mind, it is important to understand his frame of mind in these years. It was then that he laid the bases of his public doctrine and passed through the formative period of expansion and reflection which turned the ordinary Sandhurst cadet into a striking public figure. The earliest stages were not striking. Though he wrote reports for the Daily Graphic about the Cuban rebellion they conveyed no sense of power and little of the grandeur and reflectiveness that were to be achieved two years later. The prose of the reports wasflowingand the judgments weighty. There were Gibbonian, and Cobdenesque flourishes. But these had little to do with the matter in hand, which was considered almost entirely from a tactical point of view. There were hints in the Cuban writing of sympathy for freedom and liberation, and especially for 'national' sentiment and the 'unanimous demand for independence' which had drawn the island's 'best blood' into the 'insurgent forces'. In an unpublished discussion of the United States, which followed a brief visit there en route for Cuba, there was a good deal about the 'secular' and 'unfusty' character of the American system, its lack of 'reverence' and 'tradition', and the 'great and utilitarian' framework of the American mind. There was, however, no large view of events, nor any considered conception of their causes; neither had self-conscious identification been achieved with literature. It was only with the concentrated reading that he began on his arrival in India in 1896 and continued in the intervals between the Malakand, Sudanese and South African campaigns, that Churchill achieved a distinctive tone about literature, politics, religion and war. At this time Churchill was primarily a journalist or war correspondent. He was, however, also concerned, explicitly and self-consciously from a very early stage, with fame, with power and with literature as a step towards them. He had as highly-developed a sense as Burke or Disraeli of the 'glittering prizes of literary appreciation'. He was well aware of his lack of university polish, and regretted his failure to match the normal achievements of the fully educated man of his age and generation. But he had 'faith in his pen' and as acute a sense as any of his university contemporaries of the requirements of the half-educated public that had been created by elementary education, large-scale enfranchisement, and large-circulation newspapers.

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Churchill in fact was a journalist far more than he was a soldier. He wrote in a political tone rather than a military one; he wrote in a public tone rather than in a bureaucratic one; and he wrote as though he was providing not only an account of events but also a persuasion to his public to adopt the assumptions of his doctrine. He displayed at the earliest stages in his public performance a firm grasp of the political possibilities inherent in the personalized journalism that was to be the characteristic of English politics in the twentieth century. Churchill did not write as the 'voice of the people'. He wrote on the contrary 'by the light of reason'. But the strength and self-confidence of his writing was fortified by consciousness of a vast body of opinion which, with the extended franchise of the 1890s, could not be neglected. He may not have welcomed it. But he was clear that it was necessary to address, educate, and use it if fame and power were to be acquired in the government of the greatest empire that the world had ever known. Churchill had not wanted to go to India. When he got there he felt excluded from the circles of power and reacted accordingly. He was fascinated by the Indian Army, and by the control which British officers exercised over Indian troops. But he affected distaste for the wives of Indian officials, the obsequiousness of Indian servants, and the 'barbarous squalor of the country'. He was highly critical of the closed bureaucracy and unrepresentative polity which constituted the Government of India. In writing about the North-West Frontier, Churchill wrote as the embodiment of civilization, identifying British rule with it and picturing Islam as its enemy. If his chief attacks were on obvious targets like the Pathan priesthood - from the Mad Mullah downwards - there is no need to doubt that he felt as deep a dislike for sacerdotalism as he did for the activities of missionaries, and claimed for British arms an evolutionary role in attacking the 'credulity and superstition' and 'cruelty and immorality' by which progress was confronted everywhere else. Year after year [he wrote to the Daily Telegraph] and stretching back to an indefinite horizon, we see the figures of the odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms continually are turned. They pass in a long procession. The Akhund of Swat, Cetawayo brandishing an assegai as naked as himself, Kruger singing a Psalm of Victory, Osman Digna, the Immortal and the Irrepressible, Theebaw with his umbrella, the Mahdi

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with his banner, Lobengula gazing fondly at the pages of Truth, Prompeh abasing himself in the dust, the Mad Mullah on his white ass and, latest of all, the Khalifa in his Coach of State. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane. These extraordinary foreign figures, each with his complete set of crimes, horrible customs and 'minor peculiarities' march one by one from the dark wings of Barbarism up to the bright footlights of Civilization. These were negative statements - delineations of obstacles to progress. For an account of the religion of civilization, it is necessary to

examine Savrola. Savrola was written in India in 1898, but it was not addressed to the Indian situation. Except in so far as it was based on the history of Venezuela, it was a transposition into an imaginary revolution of the political principles of Tory Democracy, Liberal Imperialism, Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, and Lord Randolph Churchill. Savrola contained no discussion of policy: it included none of the programmatic claims that were to be made later on behalf first of the Conservative party and then of the Liberal party as alleviators of working-class poverty. It gave an extended account of the role of rhetoric in politics and of the effect of an adequate rhetoric in uniting rulers to their subjects. We have Churchill's contemporary avowal that Savrola himself was a pin-up or ideal of what Churchill supposed a democratic politician should think. Though Churchill felt the lack of a university education, he had as little time for university politicians as he had for the military mind or for the minds of young men who worked in the City of London. He dismissed Balfour and Curzon as 'cynical' and 'lackadaisical'. After reading Jude the Obscure he wrote of Oxford as the home of 'bigotry and intolerance'. He thought of writing books about Garibaldi and Lincoln, and evidently believed in a sort of open-hearted unity of sentiment that bound the good hearts of good leaders to the good hearts of their subjects. Savrola had a love theme which was worked out rather excruciatingly; the main subject was the collapse of the 'tyrannical' regime of President Molara that had for five years been subverting the 'ancient constitution' to which the people were 'so strongly attached'. It was the description of the attack on Molara by the 'rising forces of Democracy' and the attempt to remove the 'insult of autocratic rule' that enabled Churchill to show his preference for ordered liberty and consensus over the methods of violence with which Molara's troops were shown breaking the people's spirit in the opening chapter.

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Savrola was the main leader of the popular movement - the man whose aim it was to break down despotism, even if that involved killing on the way. He was pictured, however, as being 'studiously moderate', as reproaching a colleague whose oratory had provoked violence, and as encouraging the killing of a socialist who had murdered Molara. He was pictured as a powerful orator, as the manipulator of a great party and a great conspiracy, and as the 'greatest force' in Lauranian politics. He was also shown wondering whether he created or reflected public feeling, whether he was anything more than 'the political wave of a social tide' whose direction he could not predict; whether, indeed, he was not merely a puppet in the hands of Fate. Savrola was a political novel but its politics was suffused with a philosophy. The philosophy was as deliberate as the politics. It embodied Churchill's opinions as much as the politics did, stiffening the politics and adding a religious aura which accurately reflected the views Churchill had acquired since he began reading seriously in 1895. This aura may best be characterized as pagan mish-mash. It was important in the novel because Savrola was a 'great soul' whose greatness enabled him to speak to the people's soul. It was important to Churchill because Churchill himself believed the 'sad cynical evolutionary philosophy' that Savrola was made to believe. In discussing religion and philosophy, Churchill wrote virtually nothing about religion in England. As we know from unpublished notes, he held virtually presbyterian opinions about Church Order, was a minimizer where creeds and formularies were concerned and believed in the desirability of providing for state schools a body of unsectarian Christian teaching which would be conducted by government-appointed instructors. He took the erastian line that if there was to be an established church, it had to have an unvarying doctrine which the Government had to establish (since in matters of this kind whoever pays the piper should call the tune). Churchill recognized that the young benefited by religious teaching, but he was as indifferent to the content of Anglican belief as he was to the 'chains and cobwebs' of Catholicism. He believed in the 'free spirit', rejected 'Christian or any other form of religious belief and looked forward to a time when 'reason' would replace the 'religious toys' that had accompanied the development of mankind so far. Though uncertain whether he was a materialist or a believer in senti-

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ment against materialism, he was clear that there was no life after death and that evangelism produced merely a deluge of blood and theology. He wrote with Gibbonian contempt of the obstacles which priests had presented to the advance of civilization. Savrola was the embodiment of liberal civilization. He was a philosopher. He had read widely and had thought about what he had read. He combined a philosophic vision with the practical capability of the democratic leader. He enjoyed life's pleasures and also despised them. He understood both the barrenness and unreality of life and its infinite satisfaction. He 'gazed on the world as from afar', conscious of transience and doubtful about the 'shallow ends of human ambition'. Yet he made his effort, played his game and took his chance, and was able the better to take it because he did not fix his thoughts on the 'struggles and hopes of the world'. Savrola was an evolutionist: a believer in the merciless, inexorable, slow, steady march through which Nature had brought men out of subservience to the tyranny of physical forces. He did not doubt that recessions occurred, that society had been dragged down from the ladder of progress as well as upwards and would degenerate eventually as the planet became 'unfitted to support life on its surface'. But he was clear also that, for the moment, civilization had 'climbed beyond the reaches of barbarism' and that Europe's moral and scientific superiority would 'sweep from the earth the valiant savages who assailed it'. Savrola did not confuse human achievement with transcendental right. He left it uncertain whether transcendental right existed. He believed that fitness triumphed over unfitness and that superiority over relative unfitness was one of the laws of life. Moral activity was neither man's response to a Supreme Being nor the external dictate of God. Conscience was derived from experience. The 'survival of the fittest' was the interplay of the will to live with the eternal ideal, and 'the more the expression of the will to live approximated to the eternal standard offitness,the better it succeeded'. This evolutionary positivism was said to be the work of reason. It did not exclude eventual reconciliation with religion. But it affirmed that Life was cheap, that the Supreme Power was not interested in Man, and that men were insignificant microbes whom Nature did not treat as individuals. To the question, why in these circumstances was life worthwhile or human effort worth making, the answer was detached and introspective:

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What was the good of it all [Savrola was reported thinking]. He thought of the silent streets: in a few hours they would echo with the crackle of musketry. Poor broken creatures would be carried bleeding to the houses, whose doors terrified women would close in the uncharitable haste of fear. Others, flicked out of human ken from solid concrete earth to unknown, unformulated abstractions, would lie limp and reproachful on the pavingstones. And for what? He could not find an answer to the question. The apology for his own actions was merged in the much greater apology nature would have to make for the existence of the human species. Well, he might be killed himself; and as the thought occurred to him he looked forward with a strange curiosity to that sudden change, with perhaps its great revelation. The reflection made him less dissatisfied with the shallow ends of human ambition. When the notes of life ring false, men should correct them by referring to the tuning-fork of death. It is when that clear menacing tone is heard that the love of life grows keenest in the human heart. In these early works, Churchill wrote a good deal about death, recording the horrible nature of its manifestations on the battlefield and evaluating the threat it presented, assuming that there was nothing to come after it. He imagined the sensation of dying violently and deployed two lines of reaction to the prospect. On the one hand, there was an affectation of light-heartedness, waving one's hat in the face of fate or being willing to kill oneself in order to satisfy curiosity about the outcome. On the other, there was public solemnity, the sense death gave of the 'dignity of unconquerable manhood' when the soldier of a civilized power had his iimbs . . . composed and his body . . . borne . . . to the grave' to 'the wail of the fifes, the roll of the drums and the triumphant words of the Funeral Service'. Churchill was neither a war-monger nor ignorant of the suffering that war caused. He did not conceal the fear which battlefields induce in those who are on them. But his writing celebrated war, the contribution it made to the progress of civilization, and the qualities that were needed in order to fight it. Not only the Dervishes and the Boers but even the Pathans, who had been 'vermin' on first encounter, became embodiments of social solidarity who, however unintelligible to rational minds, deserved praise for having a 'spirit of chivalry' and a 'code of honour not less punctilious than that of Spain'. At this time Churchill had no occasion to discuss the effect of war on modern societies. He compared the moral solidarity of backward societies with the solidarity of modern armies. But citizen armies arose only incidentally. There was no question, even in relation to the Boer

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War, of mobilization of the national life. The argument was about the unavoidability of conflict and violence, given man's nature, and the positive merit of the consequent experience. This did not change very much as the limited wars of professional soldiers were turned into the democratic wars of twentieth-century peoples. II By 1900, Churchill had left his card for a future in literature or politics and had marked it with the evolutionary a-morality which he regarded as his philosophy. The tone of his thinking as it had developed by then did not change radically in the years following his entry into parliament in 1900. There was a shift of emphasis as the condition of the people replaced war in the central role. But even this was an extension of the Savrola-type conception of the relationship between wise rulers and the amorphous masses who were not really treated as though they had determinate political individuality. Churchill neither wrote nor spoke as though he despised 'the masses'. On the contrary, he was a creature of the 1884 Reform Act and a beneficiary of the newspaper audience which had been carved out of elementary education. He had absorbed its requirements and, until television threw him late in life, was never in the future to feel embarrassment at addressing it. All this, once said, is obvious, as was the urgency of the need to 'appease the democracy'. Yet the Savrola frame of mind was more interested in the opinions of leaders than in the opinions of their followers, and a great deal of Churchill's interest in social reform, whether in the Conservative party before 1904 or in the Liberal party afterwards, was a condescension from above, designed to prove that the working classes could be given enough to keep them satisfied with the existing structure of society. When Churchill began to offer himself as an active politician, he attested to the Conservative character of his opinions by commonplace statements of support for regular party positions like the Empire, the Constitution, the Navy, Ireland, and the part which eleven years of Tory rule had played in creating a prosperous Britain. By the time he first addressed a Conservative meeting, when he was 22, he regarded himself as a Liberal, attached importance to a Liberal Unionist presence in the Conservative party, and was afraid only that the Liberal Unionists would return to the Liberal party if it ever got rid of the

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sectionalism which had plagued it since 1886. Even at this time, he believed in Tory democracy, by which he meant the view taken by his father, Rosebery and Joseph Chamberlain of the proper relationship between the ruling and the working classes. Throughout his seven years as a Conservative he made a point of establishing that 'a great multitude' of working men voted Tory, and that all working men had far more to hope for from Conservative measures like Workmen's Dwelling, Workmen's Compensation, Truck and Conciliation Acts than from the 'dried-up drainpipe of Radicalism'. About the Empire, Churchill's position was a continuation of the position he had adopted as a journalist. In encouraging the interests which 'the proud and imperial democracy' was beginning to take in its 'great estates beyond the seas', he emphasized the 'higher destinies of the race' and the duty which Empire imposed on all classes and 'every man of British birth'. He contrasted the servile imperialism of modern Russia with the democratic imperialism of Tory England which depended on the existence of a 'free . . . educated and well-fed people'. There was nothing surprising about Churchill's early speeches. They put in a literary form the conventional opinions of modern Conservatism, many of which were subsequently presented as the opinions of modern Liberalism. Though Churchill stood as a Liberal at the 1906 election, his credentials were those of a Liberal-Unionist whose constituency had given him a wide latitude in relation to Liberal policy, and whose main emphasis was on Protection as his breaking-point with the Conservative party. It was not until after the election that he began to assist in the construction of the 'New Liberalism' with which he was associated between 1908 and 1914. As a Conservative, Churchill had postulated the need to involve the new, working-class electorate in the Imperial Constitution. He had implied that this could be done by combining an Imperial rhetoric with a practical measure of social reform which would relieve the poor of some part of their poverty. This continued to be the basis of his politics both in the Unionist Free Food League and Liberal-Unionist interludes, and in his period as a member of the 1906 Liberal government, when his central claim was that Liberalism alone could do what democratic Toryism had done previously to ease relations between rich and poor, and to reconcile the poor to the inequality inherent in the exist-* ing structure of society. This was a tactical Liberalism - the recognition of the need for

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Danegeld if property was to be preserved. It affirmed the importance of property and the need to recognize its integrity, and it argued that, so far from being threatened by liberal innovation, it would be in much greater danger if innovation was resisted. The 'secret of the security of life and property' was said to arise not only from its wide diffusion but also from the existence of a 'class-struggle' which went on 'ceaselessly . . . tirelessly, with perpetual friction . . . [never] sinking into lethargy [nor] breaking into violence but making possible . . . a steady advance from year to year'. The claim that the class-struggle made for stability was a whig paradox. It was accompanied by praise of the 'men of power and position' who had diminished class hatred by 'sacrificing . . . themselves in the popular cause', and by attacks on the wealthy classes for their 'weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth' at being asked to 'pay their share' in the 1909 budget when they had 'more to gain than any other class . . . from dwelling amid a healthy and contented people . . , in a safely guarded land'. In relation to English politics, the set pieces of this period were the Life of Lord Randolph Churchill (1906) and the collections of speeches which were published under the titles Liberalism and the Social Problem and The People s Rights in 1909. The positions that were sketched there were shown emerging in the 1880s, when the 'dominion of the middle classes' and with it 'the reign of Liberalism' had come to a close. It was in the situation in which Liberals had been demoralized and divided by the reactionary measures they had had to take in Ireland and Egypt, and Conservatives had despaired of transcending surburban villadom, small property owners and the 'genial and seductive publican', that working men were described 'hanging upon the words of a young aristocrat'. His father's achievement, as Churchill presented it, had been to 'preach Liberalism from Tory platforms' and to achieve two things in the process. He had saved the Tory party from itself, until it lost itself again in 1904. By giving it a foothold of support 'among the masses' which could never have been gained by Salisbury on his own, he had prevented the class cleavage which High Church Toryism might so easily have produced. The moral was that it was only through Liberalism that the 'enfranchised multitudes' could be persuaded to go on being the buttresses of privilege, property and the Constitution in the future as Lord Randolph Churchill had made them in the recent past. What Churchill meant by this was not always obvious, except that

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Protection had made the Conservative party 'the washpot of the plutocracy', and that the taxation, pensions, and House of Lords policies of the Asquith government should be supported. At times it was not clear whether he thought that the whole working class wanted these policies, or only the ieft-out millions' for whom the Liberal party claimed to speak. In either case the message was that society was, and ought to be, moving on to a 'more even and a more equal foundation', and that Liberalism could supply at once 'the higher impulse and the practicable path' that would free men from snobbishness and subservience, and stop 'the extreme of poverty' co-existing with 'the extreme of luxury'. There are today [Churchill said in 1906] unlike in former ages, actually millions of people who possess not merely inert property, but who possess rent-earning, profit-bearing property; and the danger with which we are confronted now is not at all whether we shall go too fast. No, the danger is that about three-fourths of the people of this country should move on in a comfortable manner into an easy life, which, with all its ups and downs, is not uncheered by fortune, while the remainder of the people shall be left to rot and fester in the slums of our cities, or wither in the deserted and abandoned hamlets of our rural districts. In these years Churchill's position was an optimistic one. The English people had preferred 'progress' to 'reaction' in 1906 and had swept away the 'whisperings of despair': they had also preferred 'international civilization' to 'insular prejudice'. The 'dull grey clouds' under which they had been 'toiling' were about to 'melt and vanish' into the 'sunshine of a new . . . age'. The Great Powers were not 'cut-throats and assassins', and the community of interest between peoples would ensure that 'generous influences' would suppress the half-civilized influences that made for war. Parliament was being imitated throughout the world, and representative and popular movements manifesting themselves in Egypt, Russia, Turkey and Persia. In Africa there was to be an era of science and improvement as Boer and Briton settled down 'in true brotherhood with one another' and supplied a 'model' for the 'larger brotherhood' which the world would one day become. During his period as a Conservative MP, Churchill had played down his evolutionary materialism. To some extent, perhaps, as he claimed, because he had seen men die, to some extent because the Conservative party was a Church party and he was under the influence of Lord Hugh Cecil, he had not only professed himself an Anglican with R.P.D.—L

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'affection for a good plain service . . . and the union between Church and State' but had also provided protestant criticism of ritualistic lawlessness. In the Liberal period, though the basic position remained the same, he was a good deal more explicit than before about the desirability of secular education and a good deal more flattering about the secular work performed by missionaries in Africa and elsewhere. He emphasized a parent's right to choose a child's religious teaching but denied that the teaching should necessarily be free. He was neutral about the amendment of the 1902 Education Act, hoping that it would be amended by agreement, and suggesting, if it could not be, that it might be better to secularize teaching in schools in order to leave to the parent and the church full responsibility for religious education. This point of view was compatible with a low-keyed Anglicanism, which in effect was what Churchill taught. Even when he taught it most explicitly, however, as in discussing his father's religion, he gave primary weight not to its content or to any theologically-defined belief but to the service which it rendered the community. Just as Bismarck's insurance schemes were discussed in terms of practical Christianity, so the Church of England was thought of as a 'guide of charitable effort', an aid to national education and a machine for lifting both rich and poor from the 'dead and dreary level of the lowest and most material cares of life up to the comfortable contemplation of higher and serener forms of existence and destiny'. There was nothing about truth, no suggestion that the Church of England was its guardian, and no difficulty about seeing it as 'essentially the Church of religious liberty'. It was continually possessed [Churchill quoted his father writing] by the ambition of . . . including all shades of religious thought, all sorts and conditions of men [and he could not allow himself to believe that the English people would ever] consent . . . to deprive themselves of so abundant a fountain of aid and consolation or acquiesce in the demolition of an institution which elevates the life of the nation and consecrates the acts of the State. Ill From about 1911, Churchill changed his tune, or rather he reverted to the tune he had been playing as a soldier-journalist before 1900. Social reform was not abandoned, but it was slowly enveloped and by 1915 was swallowed up by the war.

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In the years immediately before the war, Churchill acquired a reputation as an enemy of syndicalism and direct action. He also hankered after a transformation of domestic politics and a social-reforming imperialist coalition. At the same time he was accused, together with other members of the Asquith government, of being revolutionary and dictatorial about Ireland. From both points of view he was under the necessity of maintaining a moderate front and of seeming to be a central figure, even if he was not. He pictured strikes as threats to the industrial poor rather than to the rich, and spoke in favour of 'equality of rights' as between individuals of all classes and the assignment to the workman of the 'noble status of citizenship in all our legislation'. Liberalism, in Churchill's hands before 1914, was a continuation of the liberal Conservatism he had inherited from his father. It was turned more vigorously than when he was a Conservative against the rich, against hereditary power, and against vested interests; but it was also turned against socialism and the tyranny exercised over the individual workman by organized trades unions. If it was hostile to the Labour movement so far as that threatened the Liberal party, it made it clear that the spirit of the age demanded, and would inevitably achieve, a far greater social levelling than had been achieved so far. Little of this was lost in thefiresof Armageddon. Just as he had imposed his tone on the social reform question after he joined the Liberal party, and on the African question while Colonial Under-Secretary after 1905, so Churchill signalled his arrival at the Admiralty in 1911 with a public conceptualization of the 'fleets and armies which impressed and oppressed the civilization of [his] time'. He pictured the 'polite peoples of the world . . . devoting every year an immense . . . proportion of their wealth . . . manhood and . . . scientific knowledge' to the construction of 'gigantic military machines' which were 'grinding against each other' and, if not controlled, would 'plunge us back into the desolation and barbarism of the Middle Ages' These were commonplaces of Liberal rhetoric, the arguments of those who were against armaments. Churchill used them to persuade Liberals that a naval building programme was unavoidable, that naval superiority over the Germans was essential, and that the Royal Navy was vital to the peace of the world. He achieved a certain gloomy grandeur in leaving it uncertain whether 'naval and military rivalry'

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would be 'substitutes for actual wars' and whether 'the tenacious network of... commercial transactions' that bound nations together would be strong enough to prevent the cataclysm. His usual conclusion was that the cataclysm would be avoided, and that 'the time would come . . . without long delay . .. when the present extraordinary competition in armaments' would be 'a thing of the past'. Between 1911 and 1914 Churchill connected the German problem with his social reform position, using complaints about the taxation necessitated by increased naval expenditure as a way of attacking the rich. After 1914, radical snideness was replaced by two phases of reaction to the people's war. So long as a volunteer army could cope, there was celebration of the 'superiority of free-thinking active citizens over the docile sheep' who served the bureaucratic, monarchical militarism by which they were confronted. Once the volunteer army had been destroyed, there was the view that compulsory mobilization ('socialization if you like') of the national resources needed the promise of a 'broader, better-organised society' in the future than there had been in Britain in the past. Churchill's wartime rhetoric was as liberal and optimistic as the rhetoric of 1904-11. It considered the nation at large, spoke of a nobility in suffering that transcended the classes, and expressed the conviction that 'this island' contained forces 'appointed from the dawn of history . . . to shield the world from military despotism'. It equated the progress and success of British arms with the maintenance of civilization and treated the Prussians in much the same way that the Mad Mullah had been treated, as enemies of the civilized life that existed in France, the British Empire and the United States. In explaining the reasons for British involvement, Churchill described the war as a war of self-preservation (since the Prussians 'would not hesitate to obliterate every single soul in this great country . . . if it could be done by pressing a button'). But it was also part of an ideological conflict 'between Christian civilization and scientific barbarism', to which there could be no tolerable outcome except total victory for the forces of good and total defeat for the forces of evil. Churchill was not alone in talking in this way. Like everyone else, especially after the Russian collapse in 1917, he felt compelled to present the war in a way to which Americans would respond. It is likely, nevertheless, that he believed what he said, and really supposed that there was so intimate a connection between French, British and American democracy and the constitution of the Empire that these

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could be differentiated not only from the German but also from all other non-democratic forms of polity. A great harmony [he declared in 1918] exists between the spirit and language of the Declaration of Independence and all we are fighting for now. A similar harmony exists between the principles of that Declaration and all that the British people have wished to stand for, and have in fact achieved at last both here at home and in the self-governing Dominions of the Crown . . . The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded. By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire. By applying its principles and learning its lesson we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas. The political conceptions embodied in the Declaration of Independence are the same as those expressed at that time by Lord Chatham and Mr. Burke and handed down to them by John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. They spring from the same source; they come from the same well of practical truth, and that well is here by the banks of the Thames, in this island which is the birthplace and origin of the British and American race . . . Wherever men seek to frame politics or constitutions which safeguard the citizen, be he rich or poor, on the one hand from the shame of despotism, on the other from the miseries of anarchy, which combine personal freedom with respect for law and love of country, it is to the inspiration which originally sprang from the English soil and from the Anglo-Saxon mind that they will inevitably recur. This was a conviction of irrefragable right. It was sustained by the claim that Anglo-American democracy was in some particular sense under the protection of God. It is a prodigy [Churchill wrote of the arrival of the millionth American soldier in Europe]. It is almost a miraculous event . . . Amid the carnage, the confusion, the measureless grief and desolation which the war has caused, the conviction must be borne in upon the most secularly-minded of us that the world is being guided through all this chaos towards something much better, much finer, than we have ever known. One feels in the presence of a great Design, of which we can only see a small portion, but which is developing and unfolding swiftly, and of which we are the necessary instruments. No event since the beginning of the Christian era is more likely to strengthen and restore man's faith in the moral governance of the universe. It is unnecessary to dwell on this or to underline the absurdity of the magniloquence. It is sufficient to draw attention to the extent to which

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this bundle of assumptions was present in consideration of the Russian revolution. In presenting the 1914 war as an ideological confrontation, Churchill had necessarily to play down Russia. In his strategic thinking, on the other hand, until the United States became central in 1917, Russia was central, not only because of her immense man-power but because the sustaining of the Russian war effort had been the object of the Dardanelles campaign. Churchill did not expect the Dardanelles campaign to put an early end to the war. He expected victory there to 'dominate the Balkan situation . . . and resound throughout Asia'. But, after initial optimism in 1914, he did not pretend that there was any alternative to 'wearing down the armies of the Central Powers'. He was clear that Russia alone had the 'numerical preponderance' to do this, and that the most valuable consequence of the capture of Constantinople would be the influence it would enable Britain and France to have, and the help it would enable them to give to the Russian armies. After 1917, Churchill expressed two separate views about the Russian revolution. On the one hand, he expressed the practical view that the White Russians and the Czechs could drive a wedge between Bolshevik Russia and revolutionary Germany. On the other, he argued that Bolshevism was a 'disease . . . a foul combination of criminality and animalism' which would free the poor to plunder the houses of their betters and produce a 'despotic oligarchy' resting on a brutal discipline and repressive state which would present threats more dangerous than the Czars had presented to its European neighbours, to the peace of Europe and Asia, and to British predominance throughout the world. The scale of British operations in Russia was small. Churchill was not a member of the War Cabinet when they started. His main speeches about the problem were made as War Minister in 1919, when the government's policy was to withdraw. In the Russian context, moreover, he was neither a monarchist nor a Conservative. Though later he took a more favourable view of the Czarist regime, he took at this time the Liberal view that it had been defective. He accepted Koltchak and Denikin as the heirs of Kerensky, and agreed that Denikin should restore democratic, representative institutions if ever he became the effective ruler of Russia. Churchill did not advocate British military intervention in order to eradicate Bolshevism. The only increase in direct intervention during

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his main period of ministerial responsibility was designed to reduce the size of the British contingent. Nevertheless, he came to be as closely identified with an ideological crusade as Burke had in the 1790s, with the same sense of the connection between foreign and domestic policies, the same belief that revolutionary contagion subverts frontiers, and the same insistence on the impossibility of remaining 'neutral' between 'right and wrong, health and disease, progress and anarchy', or 'Bolshevism and civilization'. In the years that followed the destruction of the Liberal party at the general election of 1918, the precariousness of Churchill's party position was reflected in his rhetoric. This, however, had always been so ambiguous where party was concerned that his eventual decision to become a Conservative, and his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the second Baldwin government, involved little more than a shift of emphasis within the new climate which all politicians recognized had been created by Labour's arrival between 1920 and 1924. If he had thereafter to renounce 'Liberalism', as he had renounced 'Conservatism' in 1904, it can hardly be said that the second renunciation was more striking than thefirst.Through all the differences that distinguished the Conservative rhetoric of 1924-29 from the Liberal rhetoric of 1918-23 and through all the attacks that Churchill made as Chancellor of the Exchequer on the alien arrogance and Bolshevik propensity of English Socialism, an overriding truth was alleged: that the divisions which divided Britain were not class ones, that aristocratic politics had gone for good, and that the class struggle had 'no relevance with anything existing at the present time'.

IV At the same time that he was changing parties between 1918 and 1924, Churchill began his second phase of engagement with the First World War. Where in the first phase his speeches and memoranda had contributed to its conduct, the writings of the second phase consisted of reflection on its character. In Thoughts and Adventures, My Early Life, and Marlborough, and in many of his speeches and articles in the twenties and thirties, the war played an important part. In The World Crisis it was central. The fact that Churchill was able in The World Crisis to give ex-

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pression to a universal experience should not make us suppose that he had intended to from the start. From the beginning of his literary career war had been his main subject. He had been elegant and compelling both about the wars which 'civilization' had fought at its fringes and about the imperial war which had been fought against the Boers in South Africa. What he had not envisaged during these wars of cavalry charges and armoured trains, however, was the scale and power with which war was to be waged in the twentieth century, and the immensity of death that it was to produce. The World Crisis was first of all a statement of this: an assessment of the point at which evolution had arrived, a prolonged meditation on the fact that war now was a matter of organizing 'gigantic agencies for the slaughter of men by machinery'. It reported this dispassionately and impersonally, as a fact to be considered. It reported it without optimism or hope, in due recognition of the self-inflicted nature of the wound. It saw in the whole daunting catastrophe which Science had produced only one glimmer of light, that the 'nervous system' and 'valiant heart' of twentieth-century man, 'freed in the main by his intelligence from mediaeval fears', had preserved a 'reasonable and compassionate mind' through 'torments' which would have destroyed the 'simpler natures of primaeval times'. This praise of modern man was continual. The World Crisis celebrated the valour not only of professional soldiers but of the citizen armies that had succeeded them. In reading it, one has the sense of almost all the men in almost all the states of Europe thrust unexpectedly into 'the most frightful' misfortune which mankind had faced since the collapse of the Roman Empire, emerging - dead, individually, or alive - with their honour unstained by the experience. If victory was credited to the superiority of democratic institutions, endurance was credited to both sides and all nations, as 'peaceful peasants and workers' experienced the organized death which was the culmination of European civilization. Such [Churchill wrote after describing the mobilization arrangements made by the Great Powers in 1914] were the plans and compacts which underlay the civilization of Europe. All had been worked out to the minutest detail. They involved the marshalling for immediate battle of nearly twelve million men. For each of these there was a place reserved. For each there was a summons by name. The depots from which he would draw his uniform and weapons, the time-tables of the railways by which he would travel, the roads by which he would march, the proclamations which would

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inflame or inspire him, the food and munitions he would require, the hospitals which would receive his torn or shattered body - all were ready. Only his grave was lacking; but graves do not take long to dig. We know no spectacle in human history more instinct with pathos than that of these twelve million men, busy with the cares, hopes and joys of daily life, working in their fields or mills, or seated these summer evenings by their cottage doors with their wives and children about them, making their simple plans for thrift or festival, unconscious of the fate which now drew near, and which would exact from them their all. Only a signal is needed to transform these multitudes of peaceful peasants and workmen into the mighty hosts which will tear each other to pieces year after year with all the machinery of science, with all the passions of races, and with all the loyalties of man.

This was a description of 'heroism', the heroism of millions 'pitted against each other in mutual extermination'. The heroes of modern wars were not warriors, commanders or great captains like Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander who could 'rule the storm' by the 'mysterious harmonies* of their natures, but the victims of mass sacrifice and mass suffering who found their graves in 'cratered fields' upon 'immense scenes of carnage'. What Churchill wrote about Kitchener's army had a British, Imperial and libertarian flavour which he would not have applied to the armies of other nations. But the passage that ends his account of the battle of the Somme was the celebration of a citizen army which, though better than other citizen armies because fighting in a more righteous cause, reacted in the same way that other citizen armies had to what had been suffered elsewhere. A young army [he wrote on page 195 of volume iii] but the finest we have ever marshalled; improvised at the sound of the cannonade, every man a volunteer, inspired not only by love of country but by a widespread conviction that human freedom was challenged by military and Imperial tyranny, they grudged no sacrifices however unfruitful and shrank from no ordeal however destructive. Struggling forward through the mire and filth of the trenches, across the corpse-strewn crater fields, amid the flaring, crashing, blasting barrages and murderous machine-gun fire, conscious of their race, proud of their cause, they seized the most formidable soldiery in Europe by the throat, slew them and hurled them unceasingly backward. If two lives or ten lives were required by their commanders to kill one German, no word of complaint ever rose from the fighting troops. No attack however forlorn, however fatal, found them without ardour. No slaughter however desolating prevented them from returning to the charge. No physical conditions however severe deprived their commanders of their obedience and loyalty. Martyrs not less than soldiers, they fulfilled the high purpose of duty with which they were imbued. The battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener's Army. The flower of that

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generous manhood which quitted peaceful civilian life in every kind of workaday occupation, which came at the call of Britain, and as we may still hope, at the call of humanity, and came from the most remote parts of her Empire, was shorn away for ever in 1916. Unconquerable except by death, which they had conquered, they have set up a monument of native virtue which will command the wonder, the reverence and the gratitude of our island people as long as we endure as a nation among men.

In describing the endurance of modern peoples, Churchill was writing, no doubt, from the heart. In contrasting their endurance with the failings of their leaders, he was adopting a more complicated position. Churchill was a war casualty, as certainly as if he had been wounded in the trenches. Antwerp and the Dardanelles had set back his career and done immense damage to his reputation. Having involved himself in a prolonged act of self-defence before the Dardanelles Commission, he then made the Eastern strategy the hinge of The World Crisis, using the policy he had advocated in 1915 as a way of exculpating himself from the slaughter which all peoples had had to suffer, and which most had come to resent by the time he began writing. Slaughter had been suffered not only in France and Britain where Joffre and Haig were singled out as incarnations of unimaginativeness, but also in Germany, where Falkenheyn's attack on Verdun and Ludendorf's attack in the West in 1918 were said to have done more to ensure Germany's defeat than any of the Franco-British attacks had done from 1914 onwards. Indeed, the explanation of the Allied victory was given almost entirely in terms of German mistakes - the attack through Belgium in 1914, the failure to invade Rumania in 1916, and the beginning of unlimited U-boat warfare in 1917 - which saved France and Britain from the otherwise inevitable consequences of their failure to adopt a strategy of movement. The claims made on behalf of Churchill's strategic conceptions were not made in terms of strategy alone. They were also made in the name of humanity, and in the tone of radical discontent with which post-war English opinion discussed the High Command in wartime. In making these claims Churchill was tapping this public mood, and trying to persuade it that the war could have been won without a 'butcher's bill' if only the generals had been as good as their soldiers. Churchill no more disparaged all generals than he disparaged all admirals in the course of criticizing Jellicoe's handling of the Grand

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Fleet. Amongst both groups he had heroes: Foch, Michel, Gallieni, and Sir Henry Wilson among soldiers; Fisher, Tyrrwhit, Keyes, Beatty and Sir Arthur Wilson among sailors. But he left the impression of disliking the naval and military mind, and of blaming it for the 'blood test' to which soldiers and sailors had been subjected. He denied that professional commanders were uniquely qualified to decide about the 'broad issues of the war', and he attributed to many of them by implication what he attributed explicitly to Ludendorf: fascination with the 'scale and mechanism' of offensive operations and a desire to let loose the 'mighty energy' of modern armies as ends in themselves, regardless of the human and political consequences. In these discussions, Churchill was contributing to a familiar controversy about the respective responsibilities of politicians and soldiers for the scale of slaughter in France and Flanders in the First World War. While anxious to establish that soldiers rather than politicians bore the chief responsibility, so far as responsibility could be attributed, he also left an impression that both were pygmies, operating in the new, terrifying world that had been created by the political application of industrial power. Churchill's view of war strategy was that, at some level or other, it was explicable in terms of the 'chain of causation' and the 'sublime responsibility of men'. But there were two respects in which he questioned responsibility and the chain of causation - so far as Chance played a part and so far as Science had got out of control. It was from the second that he drew his most pessimistic conclusions. In the fifteen years that followed the first volume of The World Crisis, Churchill had two attitudes to war, power, and Britain's position in the world. On the one hand he celebrated the Royal Navy, the eighteenth-century balance of power, and the predominance which Britain had achieved by winning in 1918. On the other he expressed a deep sadness about Man's present dilemmas and an even deeper sadness about his prospects. The first is to be found at its strongest in volumes i, ii, and v of The World Crisis and in Marlborough. The second is to be found in The World Crisis, Thoughts and Adventures, and My Early Life, which were bound together not just by consideration of war and science but by the contrast which Churchill drew between the life he had known before 1914 and life as it was lived in Britain after the deluge.

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So far as the celebration of power was concerned, The World Crisis was merely a prelude to Marlborough, which had British armies tramping across Europe, fighting battles more decisive than any that had been fought on the western front before 1918, and putting into the hands of Churchill's ancestor an amount of power which no European commander was to wield until the advent of Napoleon. It was emphasized in both works that the proper object of power was to defend freedom against tyranny. But it is also the case that power was celebrated for its own sake, Marlborough's ability to make or break regimes and im • pose constitutional freedom where it had not been developed beforehand, providing a satisfaction which seemed able to stand by itself, whatever its consequences. Marlborough was a committed book - justificatory, rambling and uneven: a defence of Marlborough against his critics. In volumes i and ii of The World Crisis Churchill defended himself against his own critics. These volumes were Churchill's apology not only for the Dardanelles but also for his work as First Lord of the Admiralty. The naval preparations of 1911-14, the naval war of 1914-15 and the Battle of Jutland (after Churchill had resigned), were all made the occasion for lyrical and in no way exaggerated descriptions of the British and German fleets which, when they put to sea before Jutland, 'constituted the culminating manifestation of naval force in the history of the world'. What emerges across the decades that have elapsed since these volumes were published is the physical excitement Churchill wished to record at the movement of great fleets across the seas, at the decisions made in battle by great commanders, and at the speed and efficiency with which the British fleet had 'vanished' in 1914 in 'the mists' amid the 'enormous waste of waters to the north of our islands'. We may . . . picture this great Fleet [he wrote in his first volume] with itsflotillasand cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs. In these two earliest volumes of The World Crisis, the tone was powerful and energetic. They described the opening stages of what might

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have become a war of movement. With the withdrawal from Gallipoli and Churchill's resignation from the government in 1915, and with the need to discuss the Somme and Verdun in volume iii, the tone changed. In the last two volumes, published in 1929 and 1931, in My Early Life and Thoughts and Adventures and in much of Churchill's occasional journalism in the decade after he joined the Conservative party, he was distinctly sobering about the effect which science and machinery had had upon life. In discussing science, Churchill was not just considering it as an instrument: he considered it more as a master. He considered it not only as creating changes which had differentiated the last hundred years 'from all other ages in human annals' but also as a proselytizing force which demanded conformity to its requirements. It had 'laid hold of us, conscripted us into its regiments' and was now a Vast, organized, united, class-conscious army' which cared nothing for . . . 'men's laws... customs . . . belief or instincts' and was forcing on them, whether they wanted them or not, powers so 'awful and tremendous' and dangers so ghastly and great that 'a fortunate collision with some wandering star . . . might be a merciful deliverance' from them. Churchill was not merely a Cassandra. In My Early Life particularly, he deployed a sentimentality, gratitude, and human fallibility, and an attractive and reassuring capacity for humane, self-deprecatory selfrevelation which became important ingredients in his public personality. Yet, on the whole, in the major writings of this phase, he was not only a Cassandra but a particular sort of Cassandra, who attributed the evils of the world - and in particular the evils that Science had brought to the destruction of the politico-social system that he had known before the lights had gone out in 1914. Of the international polity that was destroyed then, it is unnecessary to say much except that the hope of reconciliation between France and Germany with which the fourth volume of The World Crisis ended in 1927 was overtaken, on the publication of the cheap edition of the whole work in 1933, by a deep gloom about the future of the international economy. Even when the future seemed brightest and the opportunity for healing most promising, the overriding fact was the collapse of the system which had sustained all the great Empires before 1914. It was Churchill's reiterated view that there was no guarantee of world peace more effective than military and naval power, and no reason to proclaim the superiority of Locarno and the League of

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Nations. There were unfriendly assessments of President Wilson's innocence and arrogance, a running assault on the criticisms made of conventional diplomacy by his official biographer, and as despairing a judgment of the new international system as the judgment he made of the new system that he saw emerging in post-war Britain. In this connection criticism encompassed two separate processes. There was the process by which the ruling classes had been deprived of power, and there was the process by which those who had come to power in their place were exercising it. The two were complementary, but they may be considered in the first place separately. The first process was described in a variety of ways according to the context in which it was discussed. It was described as the 'shivering into fragments . . . of the structure of the nineteenth century', and as an 'English revolution more profound and searching than the French' which had replaced 'an aristocracy' by a 'modern galaxy . . . of millionaires . . . pugilists and film stars' and the conversion of an oligarchic polity into the politics of the wirepuller, the soap-box, and the democratic politician. In removing the 'leadership of the privileged' and in closing the 'gulf between rulers and ruled, it had removed from politics a 'gay and splendid circle in close relation to the business of parliament, the hierarchies of the army and navy and the policy of the state' together with the intellectuality, personal address, learning, courtesy, dignity and consistency that were needed for outsiders to break into it. In a bitter passage at his cousin's funeral in 1934, Churchill described this as the process by which the 'three or four hundred families' who had 'guided the fortunes of the nation' from a 'small struggling community' to the 'leadership of . . . Europe' had been 'almost entirely relieved of their political responsibilities', had 'to a very large extent' been 'stripped of their property', and had in many cases been 'driven from their homes'. In this there were two points of substance: that the politics of privilege had gone and that the politics of intellect had gone with them. Churchill was an enemy of cleverness (Curzon's for example). But he claimed to lament not only the death of oligarchy or aristocracy but also the elimination of Liberal statesman like Morley, who had given Victorian Liberalism a high distinctive tone. Even if the 'leadership of the privileged had passed', he argued, 'it had not been succeeded by the leadership of the eminent'. From one point of view this was tactical scorn: a universal application of the resentment felt by the 'first-class brains' who had been

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defeated by Baldwin's nonentities in 1922. From another it was an expression of the defeated sourness with which not only inter-war Liberal politicians but also inter-war Liberal thinkers were infected when they considered universal suffrage and the popular press. Churchill did not criticize, indeed he welcomed, the fact that England was no longer for 'the few'. He celebrated its success in providing for 'many millions' a 'larger, safer and more varied' existence than their grandfathers had had before them. But he disliked the difficulty of matching felicities with cultivation and the failure to instil into mass society the sort of discrimination that would enable science to be controlled. In some respects he thought of this as a failure among the thinking classes: the recession from leadership and distinction in 'Philosophy, History, Economics, Oratory, Statecraft, Poetry, Literature, Painting, Sculpture and Music' which he followed Morley in discerning in the post-war world. To a far larger extent he thought of it as inherent in mass society itself. He left no doubt about the degradation he discerned as the 'decline in the number of independent people' with 'standing of their own' was matched by the reductions in 'forethought . . . initiative . . . contrivance . . . freedom, variety . . . beauty . . . grace and dignity' of life which he associated with the levelling and bureaucratic tendencies of modern democracy. This was a description of 'collectivisation'. It was said to be occurring 'in almost every sphere of modern industrial life' and to be occurring through no agency more rapidly than the agency of the popular press which did 'an immense amount of thinking for the average man and woman', supplying them with such a 'continuous stream of standardized opinion . . . that there was neither the need nor the leisure for personal reflection'. All this [he declared] is but a part of a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial. It produces enormous numbers of standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party. It may eventually lead to a reasonable, urbane and highly-serviceable society. It may draw in its wake a mass culture enjoyed by countless millions, to whom such pleasures were formerly unknown. We must not forget the enormous circulations at cheap prices of the greatest books of the world, which is a feature of modern life in civilized countries, and nowhere more than in the United States. But this great diffusion of knowledge, information and light reading of all kinds may, while it opens new pleasures to humanity and appreciably raises the general level of intelligence, be destructive of

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those conditions of personal stress and mental effort to which the masterpieces of the human mind are due. Modern society, especially in Great Britain, Germany, France and the United States, then, was in the throes of cultural deterioration. It was wending its way 'surely and irreversibly' yet 'ponderously, unthinkingly, blindly', to ends which it did not understand. It was achieving 'material progress' and opening secrets which had hitherto been 'forbidden to mankind', and it was doing this with a speed and on a scale with which this had never been done before. The speed and scale of acquisition had outstripped the march of intelligence as much as the march of intelligence had outstripped the growth of nobility, and it had become an open question whether Science would not destroy 'all that makes human life majestic or tolerable'. Churchill thought apocalyptically. He felt the death of culture as strongly as Toynbee, Collingwood, or Eliot, but he did not suggest remedies. His suggestion was that remedies were not available, that material progress could not satisfy human needs, and that the strength of civilization could not survive without its mercy. If one asks what this meant, his answer will be found in two passages from the article Mass Effects in Modern Life, which was reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures. Their hearts will ache [he wrote in one passage of 'our immediate descendants'] . . . their lives will be barren if they have not a vision above material things . . . There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life: there was never a time when the hope of immortality and the disdain of earthly power and achievement were more necessary for the safety of the children of men Modern conditions [was the judgment of another passage] do not lend themselves to the production of the heroic or super-dominant type . . . Sovereigns are admired for their free and easy manners, their readiness to mingle with all classes, their matter-of-fact work-a-day air, their dislike of pomp and ritual. The Minister or President at the head of some immense sphere of business, whose practical decisions from hour to hour settle so many important things, is no longer a figure of mystery and awe. On the contrary he is looked upon, and what is more important for our present purpose, looks upon himself, as quite an ordinary fellow, who happens to be charged for the time being with a peculiar kind of largescale work. He hustles along with the crowd in the public conveyances, or attired in 'plus fours' waits his turn upon the links. All this is very jolly, and a refreshing contrast to the ridiculous airs and graces of the periwigged potentates of other generations. The question is whether the sense

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of leadership, and the commanding attitude towards men and affairs, are likely to arise from such simple and unpretentious customs and habits of mind: and further whether our public affairs will now for the future run on quite happily without leaders who by their training and situation, no less than by their abilities, feel themselves to be uplifted above the general mass. The peak of Churchill's career was reached between 1940 and 1955 when he embodied, more grandly and exactly than anyone else, the experience through which the English had passed between 1940 and 1942, and spoke, even when his party position was inconsistent with this, as the voice of a very large part of the nation. The benignity, majesty and humour with which he expressed a dramatic dilemma, and the rhetorical ease with which he blurred differences of aim and aspiration, have given his speeches and writings in these years a place above those of all other British statesmen. It is unnecessary to examine the rhetoric of the Second World War in detail. In outline it was much the same as the rhetoric of the First World War, with the same call to heroism, the same celebration of national solidarity, the same acceptance of the need to put all life at the disposal of the state. There was the same consciousness of the narrowness of the line that divided defeat from victory, the same consciousness of dependence on Russian man-power and American machinery, and, from a far weaker basic position, the same realization of the need to involve both if Germany was to be defeated. There was the same selective ideology, the same flatulence about the United States, the same belief that it was Britain's and the British Empire's destiny to free the world from tyranny and evil. The rhetoric of 1940-45 depended for its power on the events of 1933-40 and, in particular, on the belief that Churchill had understood Hitler better than anyone else. This was not true, except so far as he perceived Hitler as a symptom of social decay, like the Labour party in England: it would be truer to say that Churchill picked on Hitler, just as he had picked on Gandhi, and treated the problem in one way because he was out of office where, if he had been in office, he might have treated it in another. All this is well understood and needs no emphasis. What needs to be emphasized is that the peak of Churchill's intellectual life was reached not in his sixties, seventies or eighties but in his fifties, when he reorganized a broken career around the unexpected and disagreeable changes he had observed in England as a result of the First World War.

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It was in these years that he developed the tone in which he was to approach the last fifteen years of his public life, and it is important to understand how pessimistic this tone was. This may seem paradoxical. No less in The Second World War than in The World Crisis, Churchill celebrated the heroism of modern man, and deepened the pride and complacency with which the English viewed their history. But the heroism was secular or pagan. Though he was a conforming Anglican, Churchill did little to suggest that Christianity was of any special significance. It is more than likely that he regarded the society that acclaimed him as the disintegrated remnant of the society he had known. It is certain that Christian reactions to him should be as mixed as his were to the English version of Mass Civilization.

IV

RECOGNITIONS

10 Kedourie 'Wilson had said Govern or Evacuate: but these blunt alternatives did not please reasonable men. A way could surely be found of managing neither to govern nor to evacuate. Sir Percy Cox was summoned from Tehran to London and the dilemma was put to him. He pronounced it capable of solution: an arrangement could be reached by which the British neither governed nor yet abandoned the country/ E. Kedourie England and the Middle East 19141921 1956 pp. 197-8. 'A curse the west has indeed brought to the east, but . . . not intentionally; indeed the curse was considered — and still is by many - a precious boon, the most precious that the west could confer on the east in expiation of its supposed sins; and the curse itself is as potent in its maleficence in the west as it is in the east. A rash, a malady, an infection spreading from western Europe through the Balkans, the Ottoman empire, India, the far east and Africa, eating up the fabric of settled society to leave it weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers, for further horror and atrocity: such are the terms to describe what the west has done to the rest of the world, not wilfully, not knowingly, but mostly out of excellent intentions and by example of its prestige and prosperity.' Antiochus (i.e. E. Kedourie) Europe and the Middle East in Cambridge Journal 1953 reprinted in The Chatham House Version 1970 p. 286. 'In societies suddenly exposed to the new learning and the new philosophies of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism, orthodox settled ways began to seem ridiculous and useless. The attack was powerful and left the old generation bewildered and speechless; or, if it attempted to speak, it merely gave voice to irritated admonition, obstinate opposition or horror-stricken rejection which only served to widen the rift . . . The sons rejected the fathers and their ways: but the rejection extended also to the very practices, traditions and beliefs which had over the centuries moulded and fashioned these societies . . . Nationalist . . . movements are ostensibly directed against the foreigner. But they are also the manifestations of a species of civil strife between the generations: nationalist movements are children's crusades: their very names are manifestoes against old age: Young Italy, Young Egypt, the Young Turks, the Young Arab party. When . . . stripped of their metaphysics and their slogans . . . such movements are seen to satisfy a need . . . the need to belong together in a coherent and stable community. Such a need is normally satisfied by the family, the neighbourhood, the religious community. In the last century and a half such institutions all over the world have had to bear the brunt of violent social and intellectual change.' E. Kedourie Nationalism 1960 pp. 99-101.

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Like Oakeshott, Kedourie1 is conservative; uncynical, philosophical, and without Oakeshott's strand of bohemian nihilism. He is also an observing Jew who practises a belief in decency, decorum and the family. He was born and had his early education in Baghdad where he was accustomed at home to hearing politics discussed in an intimate and informed fashion by those who had participated in them. In 1947 he came to the London School of Economics in response to an advertisement in the New Statesman. Apart from a couple of years as a research student under Wheeler-Bennett at St Anthony's College, Oxford, he has been a lecturer or professor at the London School of Economics ever since. His wife who, under her maiden name, Sylvia Haim, is herself a distinguished Arabist, is co-editor with him of the journal Middle Eastern Studies. Apart from Nationalism, Nationalism in Asia and Africa and occasional articles about British politics, most of Kedourie's writing is about the Middle East. But his interest arises from investigation of the impact of European ideas and involves evaluation, not so much of Arab as of European politics, morals and religion. He is well aware of the European implications of his position, and has written with withering dismissal about Lukacs, about the 'intellectual confusion' involved in George Steiner's conception of a European Right, and about the parochial enthusiasm with which a school of English historians has mistaken afifty-year-oldfashion - the fashion of Annales - for the latest discovery of historical science. He is important here because of the contempt he has expressed for most of the dominant doctrines of the modern world whether in the course of considering English liberalism, 1. Elie Kedourie (1926- ). Educated at College A. D.Sasson and Shamash School, Baghdad, London School of Economics and St Anthony's College, Oxford. Lecturer at London School of Economics 1953-65. Professor of Politics in the University of London 1965— . Author of England and the Middle East 1956, Nationalism 1960, Afghani and Abduh 1966, The Chatham House Version 1970, Nationalism in Asia and Africa 1971, Arabic Political Memoirs 1974, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth 1976 etc. etc.

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Arab and European nationalism, or the interactions between liberalism, nationalism and religion. It may be desirable to remind the reader once more that it is modernity that we are examining, and that the essential pre-requisite to a proper examination is not a determination to reject, but an antiseptic attitude of comprehension towards it. This is why Kedourie, Waugh, Salisbury, Powell and Norman are the chief actors in Recognitions, and why they are linked to Pickthorn, Welbourne, Smyth, Knowles and Eliot: because they are all modern men with minds attuned to the achievements of modernity who have nevertheless expressed a pungent pessimism about it. Of Kedourie's subjects of study the earliest was British policy towards the Ottoman Empire and its successor states. Beginning with an article in the Cambridge Journal in 1951, an indictment was developed not only of the effects of British policy but also of the assumptions on which it was based. Throughout, the argument was that the progressive perceptions entertained by British officials and the official classes in Britain had prevented them understanding the Ottoman Empire before it fell and made it impossible for them to act as a governing power after it had fallen. In all the criticisms that Kedourie directed at those who formulated British attitudes towards the problem, the common factors were contempt for their 'guilt' and 'shame' and for the 'arid moralism' that had dominated their understanding of political power. In condemning British policy, Kedourie was no mere observer. His family had been leading figures in Baghdad whose Jewish community, secure as it seemed under the unreformed Ottoman Empire, had been disrupted, as the Armenian community had been destroyed, by intrusion from the agents of progress. In the Armenian case Kedourie took the unusual view that the Armenians were the authors of their own misfortunes. In upsetting the settled life of Iraq, British support for 'Arab nationalism' was held to be paramount. Kedourie's earliest article was an attack on British policy towards 'Arab nationalism' and British complacency about the condition of Middle Eastern society in the 1950s. It criticized informed opinion in London for supposing that Arab nationalists were reliable allies, and it rejected the view that they should be either encouraged or appeased. In doing this, Kedourie was criticizing neither the British presence in the Middle East nor Britain's pursuit of 'imperial interests'. 'There

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was,' he wrote at a time at which both were under attack, 'nothing improper' about such interests and 'indeed, without an overlord, the Middle East was unthinkable'. His objection was a matter of analysis, that, in encouraging nationalist demands for 'independent sovereign states on the Western model', the British had forgotten, or had never understood, that in Middle Eastern countries there was a 'lack of public morality' and 'loyalties' were 'familial, tribal, communal and .. . local'. Without a 'public morality' and 'national loyalties', he asserted, 'independence' was a prelude to 'corruption' and 'oppression', and, since nationalism was a revolutionary principle, it was idle to imagine that Britain could have lent it support without causing damage to the society into which it had been inserted. It was the limitation both of London publicists and of British officials that they thought of nationalism as a natural characteristic of the Arab mind, and of the Middle East as a region 'seething with downtrodden nations struggling with their oppressors'. It was because they understood neither the nature of Middle Eastern societies nor the impact that nationalism was having on them that they had been able to imagine that the area was under control when it had in fact since 1918 been in a state of 'profound disorder' for which the British refusal to 'rely on their own might' had borne a heavy responsibility. Except in an article in the Cambridge Journal in 1953, Kedourie did not elaborate his view of Arab nationalism until the Anglo-Egyptian war of 1956 had taken the lid off. But it was implicit in his occasional writings before that, as it had been in the situation from at least the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 onwards. It played a large part in his overriding assumption that British officials lived in a cloud-cuckoo land where, having helped to create a disease, they were much to be pitied for treating it as a sign of health. Of these early criticisms, the most extended was given in England and the Middle East 1914 to 1921. There the argument was deployed not just in relation to contemporary policy towards nationalism but in relation to the whole course of British policy towards the Ottoman Empire from the point at which its preservation had become a British objective in the 1840s. In this work, the main target was what was called 'Liberalism'. By 'Liberalism', Kedourie did not mean principles that belonged to a political party; he meant principles that had come to be 'accepted as axioms by men of all parties' in England. He meant the principles bequeathed by Palmerston and Stratford Canning and accepted by

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nearly everyone who had conducted British foreign policy since - that 'Reform was necessary and desirable in the East' and that it was the 'duty of England to see that Reform was carried out properly'. Whatever intellectual fashion this had been expressed through at any particular time, it had remained the central assumption of British policy, he claimed, that the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire would only be maintained by 'a recasting of society and state in a European mould'. This was objectionable, in Kedourie's view, for two different sorts of reason. On the one hand, because it ignored the nature of society in the Ottoman Empire: on the other, because it had damaged the bonds of stability which that society had succeeded in establishing. Because, he suggested, the Middle East was not like Western Europe, it should not have been supposed that it had not achieved a 'delicate balance'; the fact that this had been supposed had meant that aspirations had been encouraged which were 'incompatible with Ottoman fact'. In the wake of unfamiliar principles like equality of individual rights, responsible self-government and 'honest and efficient government under the law', 'turmoil, agitation and disruption' had been introduced with a result - the death of the Empire - which was attributed to a peculiarly objectionable frame of mind prevalent amongst nineteenth- and twentieth-century Englishmen. This frame of mind had taken a variety of forms. In Stratford Canning it had taken the form of 'evangelical precept and utilitarian dogma'. For Cromer it had meant leading Egypt towards 'the civilization of the west' and 'the principles of the Christian moral code'. To others it had meant 'self-realization in the self-determining nation'. To all those who had kept to the 'high road of doctrine' on the subject, it had meant both an 'optimism' and a 'sense of responsibility' characteristic of the Liberalism of the age and a refusal to recognize that the objectives that were recommended were related less to conditions in the Middle East than to the intellectual climate in England. These points were established in the first twenty-five pages. The rest of the book examined another example of English hallucination - the idealization of the Arabs at the expense of the Turks which had begun with Scawen Blunt and had ended in the pan-Arabism of British policy between the wars. The centre-piece of England and the Middle East was an account of the process by which the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1915 had been subverted in the years that followed. The agreement supplied the argu-

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ment of the book, embodying as it did the Franco-British commitment to control the chaos that would follow the destruction of Ottoman authority and opening the way, had the will been present, for the imposition of an 'order' which would have saved the Middle East from disaster. The purpose of the book was to show how English officials and their advisers had fallen for the 'disaffected Ottoman Officers' who had 'gravitated towards' the British-inspired revolt in the Hijaz and had 'eventually' been 'enabled' to get 'political control' of Mesopotamia. This was Kedourie's description of the regime that had 'set up' as the 'kingdom of Iraq' in 1921, about which his judgment was that those who controlled it were 'discontented and ambitious men' who had as little stake in Iraq and as little power to exercise authority anywhere else in the Middle East as Lawrence of Arabia himself. The Lawrence whom Kedourie described in the Cambridge Journal in 1954, in England and the Middle East in 1956 and in The Real T. E. Lawrence in 1977, had all the characteristics that an Oakeshottian of the fifties would have discouraged in a man who was to exercise power. He was a 'doctrinaire'; he 'burnt' with an 'abstract metaphysical fever'; and he had no interest in the 'cautiously struck' bargains or 'prudent agreements' of diplomatists. He was dedicated to the 'triumph of an idea' - which was bad enough - but the idea to which he was dedicated was not what he said it was. He believed 'neither in the Sharif, nor in Feisal, nor in the Arab national movement', and was as 'oblivious' of 'right and wrong' or 'truth and falsehood' as he was of the effects of his actions on others. To some extent he was just a 'liberal . . . unconscious of the gulf that 'yawns' between 'thought and action'; to some extent he was a 'romantic', believing that 'political action' provides a 'passport to eternal salvation'. But what essentially was wrong with him was that he was interested only in 'his own sensations' and in finding out 'what the power of one will could accomplish'. So far from being the guarantor of Arab integrity that he had been made by three decades of newspaper adulation, he was in fact a symbol of the 'constant eruption into history of the uncontrollable force of a daemonic will exerting itself to the limit of endurance'. Kedourie needed to destroy Lawrence as a credible symbol if his own view of the Middle East was to make way against the massed ranks of English Arabophiles. Chapter IV of England and the Middle East made a devastating assault - so devastating, indeed, that, though the rest of the book contained manyfinepassages and a deeply historical

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irony about British confidence in the bona fides of the 'men of violence', it was, by the side of the attack on Lawrence, an anticlimax. The moral of England and the Middle East was the same as the moral of a famous contemporary article, The Imperialism of Free Trade - that Liberalism is not as innocent as it seems. Whether it was the cause of Middle Eastern instability, as Kedourie seemed sometimes to imply, or was irrelevant to the Middle Eastern problem, as he implied at other times, it had blinded British officials to the fact that the Middle East was in the middle of a 'social and intellectual crisis' in which it was absurd to 'proclaim' each 'latest revolution' as the 'prelude to an epoch of orderliness and justice'. Since 1956 Kedourie's writings about British policy have not fundamentally altered the view he had asserted by then. In the articles that made up The Chatham House Version, in two or three chapters of Arabic Political Memoirs and in In the Anglo—Arab Labyrinth, the theme has continued to be the ignorant character of the commitment to pan-Arabism and the Arab League, the absence of any real affinity between the various regimes which have ruled in the Arab capitals, and the damage Britain suffered when the Baghdad Pact of 1955 involved her in 'quarrels and complications' which were not envisaged in the text of the treaty. In all these writings, amazement at the gullibility of British policy has been equalled only by amazement at the naivete with which American policy was designed to establish democratic regimes in Syria and Egypt after 1945. In the course of a prolonged philippic Kedourie has criticized not only officials and politicians but also the publicists, journalists and professors who have supported them. In the fifties and sixties his axe fell with special severity on Antonius and Sir Hamilton Gibb. The culmination of this sort of criticism was his dissection of Toynbee in the title-essay of the collection The Chatham House Version in 1970. Kedourie's suspicion of Toynbee began with the discovery, even after he had been given what Kedourie thought adequate evidence, that Toynbee persisted in denying both that the Armenians had been responsible for atrocities against each other and that they had to a large extent been responsible for their own fate. It is probable that this specified a mistrust which had more general origins. It produced a prolonged period of brooding which was made systematic in the 1970 volume and carried further in chapter VII of In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth.

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In 1970, Toynbee was attacked from two directions. He was attacked from one direction as the 'dominant intellectual influence' in Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which was the 'only centre in the English-speaking world' to devote steady and systematic attention to the Middle East between the wars. He was attacked from another in his role as philosophic historian - for the way in which he had propagated 'eternal and inflexible rules of conduct to break which must lead to unhappiness and catastrophe'. From the first direction the attack examined Toynbee's dislike of 'universal states' of which the Ottoman Empire was an example. It noted that the disintegration of the 'Arabic society' which he had dated from 1517, was unique in his historical scheme in being attributed not to suicide but to assassination as a result of the Ottoman occupation of Cairo. It described his 'populist and romantic picture' of an 'autonomous Arabic society .. . carrying on an existence separate from that of its . . . overlords' throughout the Ottoman occupation, and it showed how this had predisposed him to believe that the whole of British policy from the occupation of Egypt in 1882 down to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 had been a disreputable betrayal of the 'Arab nation'. This 'guilt-sodden' moralism was ridiculous in Kedourie's view because the 'Arab nation' had not really been conceived of until 1918 and, when it had been then - by Feisal's lieutenants - had produced only the 'sanguinary intrigues and ruthless ambitions' of Iraqi politics under the Mandate. It was ridiculous of Toynbee not to know that 'representative institutions' in the Middle East were not 'representative of the people' but were the preserve of a westernized minority whose control had merely widened the gap that divided it from those who did not share their 'universe of discourse'. It was ridiculous also to swallow, as Toynbee evidently had, the 'pan-Arab' line that, because Israel was an affront to 'Arab unity', the Palestinian question was the most important in Middle Eastern politics. These criticisms led to criticisms first of Toynbee's tone, which was said to be shrill with the 'self-accusatory lamentation' of 'English radicalism', and then of the 'anti-imperialism' of 'liberals of his generation' who had supported nationalism before 1918 and had feared it afterwards. In both respects the criticism was that Toynbee's interest in 'civilization' was a way of not being interested in politics. Politics, for him, were 'superficial', 'trivial' and 'demonic'. 'Institutions', he was said to believe, 'oblivious of Freud and Dostoevsky', were 'slums'

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by the side of personal relations, and could be avoided by living a life of 'ethereal culture'. It was the 'categorical separation of the ethereal from the material' and the 'uncompromising demand' for 'love' to replace 'politics' that had led to that 'rigid and narrow moralism' which was 'so striking a feature of his system'. It was this 'impatience of politics' which had led him to consider all 'political arrangements and devices' as 'tainted with cynicism' and any political act as 'morally equivalent' to any other. This was 'relativism' gone mad; it offended Kedourie by permitting the judgment that everyone (including Zionists and Nazis, for example) was 'morally equal'. It was also inconsistent with the positive positions Toynbee had adopted, the admiration he felt for ineffectual dogmatists like Gandhi, Tolstoy, Lansbury and Sheppard and the guilt he had expressed about the damage that the World had been done by the West. Kedourie's view of British policy in the Middle East included, no less than Toynbee's, the indictment of a failure, in Kedourie's case the failure to safeguard the lives of the peoples over whom the victory of 1918 had brought a governing responsibility. This was the basis of his criticisms both of Toynbee himself and of the English official classes; that, because of the intellectual blinkers which they had worn since the middle of the nineteenth century, they had been unable to see what their duty was. So far, therefore, as they ought to feel guilt and he seemed to be implying that they should - the guilt they should feel was the opposite of Toynbee's. The guilt that Kedourie wished them to feel was guilt at feeling the guilt Toynbee wished them to feel; its function was to help them see that governing is an unavoidable facet of human existence and force its necessary concomitant. In some ways Kedourie was on thin ice. He was saying that AngloFrench force should have been used more freely after 1918 because force was a recognized authority in the Middle East, but he was also saying that it should not have been used to support the Sharifians because they were socially insignificant. At the same time he was criticizing Toynbee for depicting Western society as aggressive when he was himself critical of the subversive impact of 'the West' not only on the Middle East but on the whole of the rest of the world. How thin the ice was, and how self-contradictory the positions, must be left to the reader to decide. What needs to be understood is the 'Western problem' about which he was in dispute. Kedourie was right to remark that Toynbee had not always been

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accusatory about the West; there was certainly a change of emphasis as A Study of History was being written. What Kedourie disliked was the accusation which started with the Hobsonian belief that the European empires had been acquired for the sake of economic profit and ended with the idea that the West had been the aggressor because of an 'arrogance' that could be traced back to the 'Jewish notion of a "Chosen People" '. For a long time Kedourie was hostile to Zionism. Later he reconciled himself, on the ground that Israel was reasonably civilized and was not more intrusive than the unrepresentative regimes that ruled from other Middle Eastern capitals. Eventually he came to be a regular visitor. Throughout these changes, he has been a Jew, observant of the Law, and highly conscious of the living faith that has been preserved by rabbinical Judaism since the destruction of the Temple. He found it peculiarly displeasing, therefore, that Toynbee imputed a Judaic origin to 'Western arrogance' and even more displeasing that Toynbee's 'traditional Christian anti-Judaism' - 'incongruous' enough in someone so 'religiously eclectic' - was 'laced with the even more offensive suggestion' that Judaism was a 'fossil' operating in the disintegrating society of the West to make it 'murderously aggressive'. How [Toynbee] came to this judgment [Kedourie commented] provides yet another instance of his tendency progressively to build up initially simple and perhaps useful metaphors into doctrinal edifices, neo-Gothic in the luxuriance of their complicated fancies. Originally, it was only a specific community of Jews whom Toynbee considered to be a fossil. This was the community of the Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem whom he coupled with the Samaritans, the Druzes, the Maronites and the Alawis as 'fossils of ancient faiths'. His meaning here is quite clear. To the progressive liberal that he was, these traditional communities out of touch with modern realities were, so to speak, fossils surviving from another age. With A Study of History this analogy became petrified into a rigid theory. The needs of his system required Toynbee to postulate the existence of a 'Syriac Civilization' in which the Jews willy-nilly had to accommodate themselves, the Bible, for instance, becoming an example of Syriac mythology. Since the system further required that Syriac Society should be dead, the Jews, who were manifestly still alive, had to be 'the "fossil" remnant of a society that is extinct.' Of Judaism as a living faith practised by successive generations of Jews since the Roman destruction of the Temple Toynbee was utterly ignorant. Pharisee, for instance, remained for him a term of abuse, and it is only very late in his career that he seems to have discovered such authorities on rabbinical Judaism as G. F. Moore and R. T. Herford. The epithet Judaic has thus served, throughout A Study of History, to denote all that was most evil in the modern world. 'Fanatic-

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ism and race-feeling' among Protestants derives from the Old Testament; Marxism *has caught its spirit of violence from an archaic strain in Judaism'; 'post-Christian western rationalism' has inherited from Christianity 'a Judaic fanaticism and intolerance'; Christianity took the wrong turning when it refused to heed 'Marcion's prophetically warning voice [that the God of Abraham was really a maleficent demiurge]'; the west since the seventeenth century has been trying to purge itself of 'its ancestral Judaic fanaticism and intolerance', but this has erupted again 'in such ideologies as Communism, Fascism and National Socialism'. Kedourie's discussion of British attitudes towards the Middle East has always had implications of the most far-reaching kind. It has been grounded in politico-religious assumptions which will now be approached by way of the view he has taken first of Arab, and then of European, nationalism. II Perhaps the most powerful account of Kedourie's view of nationalism was the article he published pseudonymously in the Cambridge Journal under the title Europe and the Middle East in 1953. This contained an account of Armenian nationalism in relation to the Armenian atrocities of the 1890s and the First World War, and of the destruction of the Jewish community in Baghdad in the late 1940s by 'connivance' between the Iraqi government and police on the one hand and Israeli Zionists on the other. In all three cases - Armenian, Iraqi and Zionist - the doctrines of nationalism were identified as West European in origin and as destroying the settled order which the Ottoman Empire had embodied. In discussing the Armenian atrocities, Kedourie emphasized that the Armenian experience was the reverse of the Jewish experience in Baghdad. In Baghdad the Jews were the victims, as innocent as the Assyrians, of the Iraqi regime's need to make up for the rootless insignificance of its leaders by the bloody manufacture of a nation. In Iraq the Jews were to blame only for underestimating British willingness to support the men of blood. In the Armenian case, it was the Armenians themselves who had provoked Ottoman persecution. Where Toynbee had presented the Armenian atrocities as an example first of Prussian and then of Europeanizing brutality, in the persons of the Young Turks of 1908, Kedourie's view was that the Armenians had committed suicide under the influence of American Protestant missionaries who had made many converts and created a body of

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progressive feeling which insisted on interesting the Great Powers in territorial autonomy in Kurdistan, first by political negotiation at the Congress of Berlin and then by insurrectionary activity designed to compel them to intervene. In a passage replete with sadistic irony he implied that this had made the Armenians so provocative that Abdul Hamid's reaction had been perfectly intelligible. The Armenians wanted autonomy, did they? [Abdul Hamid was imagined saying] They created incidents? They threatened the intervention of the Powers? He would show them what his loyal Kurdish tribes would have to say to Armenian autonomy in their Kurdistan, and what their way was of dealing with incidents. A massacre or two would show the Armenians what he meant. And as for the Powers, he could easily settle them. Did Russia propose intervention? He would whisper in her ear that Britain wanted a foothold on the Caucasus. Did Lord Salisbury threaten action? He would threaten Lord Salisbury with placing the Ottoman empire in the hands of Russia . . . The Armenians were rebelling against their lord: punishment should be meted out to them. They wanted reforms and constitution and such-like Frankish abominations . . . They threatened to diminish the Ottoman estate and to introduce into it the meddlesome foreigner . . . As for the indignation of the Europeans and their outcries, all that was part of a hypocritical conspiracy to defraud him and the house of Osman of another province. He would not give way, he would resist, he would massacre. Kedourie was not defending the 'primitive cunning' and 'massive brutality' of Abdul Hamid's 'traditional oriental statecraft'. He was not even admiring this 'last powerful manifestation of the pride of family and of religion as the motive for the policy of an empire'. But he used Abdul Hamid to point his moral: that the Armenians were no better than the Young Turks, that the atrocities were a proper reward for modern innocence, and that the process of modernizing the Armenian mind had replicated the process which in Europe had converted the Reformation into the French Revolution. What the missionaries had taught - and all, Kedourie implied, that they had taught - was salvation by grace alone without the deeds of the law - an 'exhilarating' and 'dangerous' doctrine which in Europe had stimulated 'prolonged upheaval' and which, if it was not to do so everywhere else, demanded a 'severe mystical discipline' of which 'only a few, after preparation, are capable'. It seems inevitable [his conclusion was] that the general introduction of such a doctrine into a society should act as a solvent of the long-standing restraints which more pedestrian rules had enjoined . . . if only because the

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doctrine presupposes the independence of individual judgment and the primacy of individual will.. . The individual is set free, and his judgment is declared, under God, supreme. Suppose then the individual takes a further step and affirms that he is indeed free and that his judgment is, without any qualification, supreme. The inevitable happens: Secularism and Protestantism merge . . . and the doctrine of salvation by grace, which was a means of attaining the Life Eternal, becomes an alluring instrument for the building of Heaven on Earth . . . Thus a later American missionary, in his horror at the Armenian massacres of 1895 and at the responsibility of Armenians for them, tries to explain the situation to himself by ascribing the disaster to those Armenians who 'having imbibed the free-thought ideas developed in the French Revolution, and fired by the experience of 1848, were utterly impatient of the slower process of education.' He is right, but he does not consider that there is a path which may lead from salvation by grace to 'the free-thought ideas developed in the French Revolution.' The analysis of the Armenian problem was the first statement of positions which were to reappear in all Kedourie's subsequent discussions of nationalism. A great deal more was to be heard about the conflict between 'reactionary' or 'old-fashioned' notables on the one hand and the 'Enlightened' who 'read books and believed what they found in them' on the other. Nationalists were to be criticized on many occasions in the future for offering a 'fanaticism' which ignored the real problems that governments faced and for being 'impatient, querulous and ready at all costs to pursue their principles wherever they lead'. There were to be many variations on the theme that nationalistinspired discontent was an extended version of the demand for 'individual liberation' that linked Luther and Kant to Robespierre and his successors. If one puts together the accounts of the Young Turks and the Iraqis in England and the Middle East, of Christian-Arab nationalism in The Diaries of Khalil Sakakini, of Egyptian nationalism in Saad Zaghlul and the British and Afghani and Abduh and of innumerable other nationalisms in the anthology Nationalism in Asia and Africa, one is conscious of an attitude very different from that adopted by the liberal British historians who acclaimed the rise of nationalism in the Balkans and India in the early part of the century. Not only in the Middle East but also in the Balkans, Africa and Asia, nationalism was now seen as an 'infection' which had destroyed religion, 'eaten up the fabric of settled society' and left it 'weakened and defenceless before ignorant and unscrupulous adventurers' who had as little standing in R.P.D.—M

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the societies they had terrorized as the lieutenants-turned-MajorGenerals had had in Iraq in 1921. In his condemnations Kedourie has become, if anything, more vigorous and exhilarated as events and the world's printing presses have provided new material in confirmation of his analyses. Some of the abortions he has described since 1951 have made the Iraqis fade into moderation beside the 'dark gods and bloody rites' characteristic of the manifestations he has discussed in Africa and Asia. Almost without exception in these works, Kedourie makes an unargued identification between religion on the one hand and the traditional government of society on the other. Alike in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, he has seen traditional societies being destroyed by the application of European conceptions which are hostile to religion. What 'traditional societies' were like is not a matter to which he has devoted much attention. While assuming that they provided a stability and wisdom which the modern world has failed to preserve, he has seldom been explicit about the connection between stability and wisdom on the one hand and religion on the other. One feels at times that he has been concerned less about religion than about the nastiness of a liberated life, and wishes more than anything else to show that the forces of progress which English liberals have been accustomed to admire are capable of creating Dachaus or Auschwitzes out of their fantasies as surely as Hitler or Himmler had created them out of theirs. These fantasies were objectionable because they implied that men could be emancipated from the divine law without raising unrealizable expectations. They could not: it was because of the built-in gap between action and thought and between fulfilment and wish that they had been so incompetent in making their wishes effective. The gap was politics, of which the Western world had seen a destructive invasion by secularized religion. This was not the original point that Kedourie had made about the Ottomanism of the Young Turks which, whether in their version or in the pan-Arab version borrowed from them by the Iraqis, had been criticized for converting a legal entity - the Ottoman Empire - into a rootless doctrine. It was not until 1957 that a religious dimension was introduced as pan-Arabism was shown replacing religion in the thinking of the Palestinian Christian schoolmaster-administrator, Khalil Sakakini. The Diaries of Khalil Sakakini was in many ways a breakthrough. The diaries proved what Kedourie obviously wanted them to prove.

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They proved it, moreover, in relation to an Orthodox Christian who had convinced himself that he was part of the 'Arab nation' and, in doing so, had had, like many others, to 'reject' the 'social assumptions' that for 'countless generations' had given the Orthodox community a 'sense of identity with their fathers and their fathers' fathers'. It showed what could happen in the vacuum left by the destruction of religious authority and what had happened in fact as the Russian government had stirred up class war in the second half of the nineteenth century between a Christian-Arab laity and lower clergy on the one hand and a higher Greek clergy on the other. Kedourie did not condemn the revolutionaries; he wrote of the 'unbending obscurantism' of the higher clergy and of their 'foolish contempt' for their pastoral charges. But his conclusion was the same as his conclusion about the Armenians - that a generation had grown up that was 'resentful' of the 'hierarchy that ruled them, contemptuous of their spiritual directors and convinced that only a radical parting with tradition would ameliorate their condition. In the past they had been members of a religious community [he wrote] and this membership at once defined their status and set the bounds of their public as of their private activity. Loyalty did not extend beyond the community, and traffic between communities was confined to an inescapable minimum of externals. But now this religion suddenly seemed a badge of servitude. Membership of the Arab nation had a price - which Muslims, being the majority and the rulers, did not have to pay. It meant the abandonment of communal organisation and the defiant assertion that religion was a strictly private affair.

These sentiments had existed in Palestine before the Young Turks but it was the restoration of the Ottoman constitution that had made it possible to supersede the patriarchate; it was the 'deliverance' which the revolution of 1908 offered from a 'mean, contracted world' that had enabled Sakakini and his friends to repudiate the Church's manner of life, acquire an eclectic religion which played down the differences between religions, and think of politics not, as the patriarchate had thought of them, as an 'unprofitable evil' made necessary by the precariousness of its situation under Ottoman rule, but as an 'exciting game' involving 'secret societies', 'melodramatic ceremonies, masked men and revolvers' and issuing in a belief that since 'religion' was 'reactionary and divisive', 'pan-Arabism' based on 'Muslim-Christian Union' was the only tolerable policy for the Orthodox community.

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It is obvious that Kedourie felt contempt for the Christian Arabs who had introduced anti-semitism into Islamic life and had gone running in an unprincipled way after what they imagined would be the ideology of the future. But his main objection was that the new political style - a style 'as devoid of charity as of principle' - had brought 'fanaticism into the classroom' and bred a 'frenzy', 'assurance' and 'dogmatism' that had not existed before it had been thought of. Jews, Armenians and Orthodox nationalists all provided Kedourie with illustrations of the process by which the Ottoman organization of society had been disrupted. They all showed religious communities being dissolved by a political doctrine. What they did not enable him to do, and what he had not done in writing about Iraq, was to discuss Islam. In an article published in 1958 Kedourie had written of a cult of youth which, from the Young Turks onwards, had destroyed the 'gravitas* characteristic of the Muslim ruling classes of past centuries and made revolution a 'necessary part of the political process'. The connections between these judgments have been assumed more than demonstrated; nor has Kedourie given serious attention to the Muslim ruling classes. It was only in discussing Egypt in the 1960s that he began to ask whether the same absorption of religion into politics had occurred amongst Muslims that had occurred amongst Jews and Christians and what significance should be attached to the contrast between the hostility to pan-Islamism that had accompanied the panArab rebellion against the Ottoman power in Iraq, and the 'Islamic sentiment and solidarity' that had given 'body and passion' to the struggle against the British in Egypt. The importance of Islamic sentiment in Egypt was underlined in passing in Sa'ad Zaghlul and the British. It received extended treatment in the account that was given in 1963 of the politics of Mustafa alMaraghi. al-Maraghi was rector of el-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s. As a political leader, he had aimed to strengthen the royal power, to make Faruq Caliph and to establish the 'primacy of Islam' in Egyptian politics. He was also the enemy of the Wafd, an articulate neutralist in the Second World War and the spearhead of Islamic resistance to 'Arab unity' until stopped short in his tracks by the British decision to support it from 1941 onwards. For Kedourie, al-Maraghi had two sorts of significance; he pin-

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pointed the diversity of opinions that lay behind the illusory unity of the Arab League, and he illustrated the fact that, in Egypt at least, militant Islam had not invariably fallen for secular pan-Arabism. If he implied that al-Maraghi's tactics had at times subverted his theology, the general impression was left that, on the whole, in Muslim terms, his theology had been sound and provided a striking contrast to the theological rot that Afghani and Abduh uncovered amongst the mentors and predecessors of Zaghlul, Nahas and the Wafd. At the end of Afghani and Abduh, Kedourie wrote of the 'remarkable dearth in modern Islam of that systematic . . . criticism of secularist claims' with which the Enlightenment had been opposed by 'Catholic and Jewish divines'. In Islam, he alleged, the opposite had happened: there the 'Enlightenment modernists' had been 'welcomed into the citadel of orthodoxy' and permitted to spread their rot from within. In his two subjects he found archetypal examples of theological subversion. As Mufti of Egypt from 1899 onwards Shaikh Muhammed Abduh had been an important figure in Egyptian religion and since Afghani had been his teacher, both deserved attention in their own right. They received attention from Kedourie also by reason of the support they gave to the claim that English officials in Egypt had had a weakness for liberal subversives. Cromer, indeed, it was who had given the Muftiship to Abduh whom he had found particularly acceptable because of their shared preference for a 'less rigid Islam'; Cromer, too, who had made Zaghlul Minister of Education in 1906 because of his association with Abduh. It was al-Maraghi's opposition to Zaghlul's Wafd and to British-style pan-Arabism that enabled Kedourie to show by contrast what Abduh (and, by association, Cromer) had been up to. What Abduh had been up to, and what was objectionable in one so centrally placed, was being a pupil of Afghani. What Afghani had been doing was what some Egyptians said he had been doing: destroying religion and replacing it by a 'secular apocalypse'. Afghani's career from his birth in 1839 was described in as much detail as the record permitted, including accounts of the journalistic, political and undercover activities that had attracted attention from intelligence and security departments in Europe and Asia. Particular attention was given to the influence he had acquired over Abduh while teaching him in the 1870s. Among the opinions accepted or expressed at various times by one

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or other of these two were said to be scepticism, Spinozism and pantheistic mysticism, and the belief that religion is important chiefly because of its 'social utility'. It was also suggested that they had tried to reduce Islam, Judaism, and Christianity to a common denominator by rejecting the positive dogmas of each and by using the similarities between them as a disguised plea for a new rationalist religion. It was established that Afghani had not only been a freemason but had also been expelled from his masonic lodge. An interview with Renan, who had met Afghani, was quoted to establish the latter's condemnation of 'not only Islam but all other revealed religions' as being 'intolerant. . reactionary and obscurantist'. Afghani and Abduh, then, were objectionable because they were heterodox in relation to Muslim truth, but this was only half the problem. It was the other half that provided the real objection - that they had made their heterodoxy the basis for a style of politics which had transformed 'Islam' into a 'political ideology'. This transformation was crucial to Kedourie's understanding of the modern world, but in Afghani and Abduh, as everywhere else, it was simply alleged. It was alleged that misrepresentation of traditional Muslim teaching had produced rebellion and assassination, Afghani's demand for a Muslim uprising in India being attributed to a deliberate misrepresentation of the role of the Mahdi in Shi'ite theology and to a failure to notice that the Mahdi's call was to religion, not political action. It is clear [went the accusation] that Afghani's view of the mahdi owes a great deal to the Shi'ite expectation of a superhuman saviour at the end of time. It is equally clear that the original Shi'ite idea has, in his case, left its religious moorings and become the plaything of a romantic imagination intoxicated by a glimpse of the immense power which anyone might capture who knew how to evoke the blind obedience of the masses and tend the fires of their devotion. In Afghani and Abduh, Kedourie found an important outlet for expression of his most important feelings. In showing up both Cromer's Mufti and the 'Sage of the East' (i.e. Afghani) as associates of conspirators, 'seedy intellectuals' and 'religious rebels', he was making yet another approach to his central theme - the 'type of revolutionary activist so well known in Europe in modern times'.

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III At various points, especially in his long introduction to Nationalism in Asia and Africa, Kedourie has been uncertain about the connections between nationalism in Europe and nationalistic barbarism outside. In Western Europe, he has agreed that nationalism has often consecrated pre-existing fact, and has not had to be imposed by force to anything like the same extent that it has been in the rest of the world. To that extent, and especially in his earlier works, there has been a contrast. Nevertheless, and not only in the later works, there has also been an attribution of similarity, with a 'progressive African' like Malinowski's pupil, Kenyatta, celebrating the 'mystery of clitoridectomy' or an 'educated Hindu' like Bipin Chandra Pal 'promoting the worship of Kali with her necklace of human heads, being imitations of the European intellectual tradition as much as revulsions from it. In this respect the argument of Nationalism in Asia and Africa continued the argument of the fifties and sixties. But the material it discussed was so diverse and unpleasant that the impression it left was of an irrational destructiveness that was different in kind from the destructiveness that had formed the subject of Nationalism. In sketching the pedigree of nationalism in 1960, Kedourie's main subject was the cluster of presuppositions which Kant had promulgated, and Fichte and Herder extended - the twin conceptions of the autonomy of the moral will and of the state as its necessary embodiment. To this his attitude was patronizing and dismissive. The claim that individual freedom depended on the state and the demand to abolish alienation by merging the individual into the state, were described as the pipe-dream of 'famished writers', 'indigent curates' or low-class tutors for whose knowledge German society had found no use, and who saw in the state as the vehicle of self-realization the chance for scholars to become 'guides of the human race'. In these cases contempt for absurdity went without saying. It was in Kant, the fount and origin of error, that the real enemy was found. In chapters two, three and four of Nationalism, Kant was shown dealing with a real problem - the difficulty that the Enlightenment had faced in justifying natural rights through sensationalist psychology. Where Plato, Aristotle and the Bible had propagated a 'principle of order to . . . make bearable the coherence of the world', sensationalism had shown how 'obscure' and 'uncertain' the principle was. Since, more-

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over, it had done this at a time at which 'orators' were preaching the 'reign of justice and right', the difficulty had been acute. It was Kant's achievement to have removed the difficulty. 'It was useless,' Kant had decided, 'to seek to prove matters of morality by the methods used for the understanding of nature.' Morality was not only 'independent of the laws which govern appearances'; it was also the outcome of 'obedience to a universal law which is to be found within ourselves'. This internal imperative embodied 'virtue', and it was because of its independence of consequences and imperviousness to rewards that 'nothing', to quote Kant's words, could be 'conceived in the world, or even out of it, which would be called good without qualification, except a Good Will'. This was described as a 'brilliant account of the moral life', which had affinities with stoicism, the Judaeo-Christian tradition and Luther, and was designed to be 'as much against sin' as any other morality. Good reasons, however, were given for describing it also as 'dogmatic' and 'annihilatory', and as being far more 'revolutionary' and much more objectionable than anything that Robespierre had said. It had dethroned God, made Man the master of morality and made him more and more like God. This was objectionable in itself; it was objectionable because it undermined religion. For religion, on this understanding, was not a matter of 'dogmas and beliefs'; nor did it depend on an external morality or metaphysic. On the contrary, it was a matter of 'intuition and feeling', the 'spontaneous expression of the free will' which answered men's needs and entailed a 'perpetual quest for perfection'. It did not stop short, as Luther had done, at a 'specific faith' in the Crucifixion. What 'counted' was the 'quest', man's search for a 'direct relationship with the infinite'. For Schleiermacher, Kedourie's conclusion was, 'everything in the end must contribute to the self-determining activity of the autonomous individual and the universe itself is there only to minister to his self-cultivation'. The line of analysis which connected Kant's autonomous will with the brutalities of modern nationalism was complicated; it was not suggested that Kant would have approved of all the conclusions that were drawn by his successors. But he was not only excited by the French Revolution, he also had a 'republican doctrine' which made 'laws' an expression of the citizens' wills and, by upsetting the traditional order, had opened the way to meliorism and millenarianism. As meliorism this combination of opinions had been discussed in Nationalism. As millenarianism it was not discussed until Nationalism

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in Asia and Africa eleven years later. There, however, it was discussed at length not as a nineteenth-century invention but as an idea which, after a 'long . . . underground existence' in Europe, had been made respectable by Lessing'c Education of the Human Race, and, as 'progress' or 'perfectability', had been 'incorporated' since Lessing wrote 'into the very fabric of our attitudes and ways of thought'. Kedourie's point was that, though it seemed 'natural and harmless' to modern minds, 'perfectibility' was a secularized form of an heretical belief which had its origin in the visionary millenarianism of the Middle Ages, and in both Islam and Christianity had received the 'curse pronounced by the rabbis upon those who calculate the end'. The respectable and rational doctrine of progress and human perfectibility in other words had a 'disreputable origin' and, in the forms taken by the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, the Taiping rebellion of the 1850s and modern Negro movements in Africa, had been associated with a 'technique of political activism . . . inseperable from millennial prophecy'. The millennial hope [went the sneer at modern progress] is of the inauguration and institution of a totally new order where love reigns and all men are brothers, where all distinctions and divisions, all selfishness and selfregard are abolished. But a society in which the distinction between public and private is annihilated, in which ranks, orders, classes, associations and family are dissolved into one big family, a society in which all articulations and complexities have disappeared - such a society becomes helpless in the hands of those who prophesy the good tidings of the coming salvation. The smear by association was completed in the description of the reign of the Saints in Munster in 1534, when Bockelson's short-lived kingdom [was said to display] almost to perfection the techniques of political activism which seem inseparable from millennial prophecy - techniques designed to upset and destroy traditional and customary social arrangements and to render men, in their shock, bewilderment and distress, plastic and malleable material, out of which the seer will create tomorrow's world of perfect love and selfless brotherhood. Bockelson's career also illustrates a particularly important distinction . . . the distinction on the one hand between the mundane and ordinary discontents which move the bulk of human beings and which are amenable to ordinary alleviations and remedies, and on the other the obsessive, apocalyptic fantasies of the revolutionaries who harness to their vision the social conflicts of the moment and promise their fellows a new world 'totally transformed and redeemed'.

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It will have become apparent that Kedourie's historical writing contains a strong set of assumptions about the role of thought in relation to politics and religion. In these respects he is to be understood, and, it seems, wishes to be understood, to be an enemy of the modern world. It may be proper to end this chapter by stating more starkly than he has normally done exactly why this is so. He seems, first of all, to assume that modern politics is not only self-evidently defective but is also different from the politics that it replaced. It cannot be said that this has been established, nor, really, has it been explained in depth. But he has certainly implied that Ottoman politics before the Young Turks, European politics before 1789, and English politics before some unspecified point in the past were different in kind because they had not been invaded by the principles which have been described in the first three sections of this chapter. Kedourie does not assume that all modern politics have been conducted in a modern way or that there have been no politicians in the Middle East, in Europe since 1789, or in modern England who have escaped the infections of modernity. Since, however, it can hardly be said that the discussions of tribal, monarchical and Austro-Hungarian politics and the friendly references to Burke, Salisbury, Churchill, Linlithgow, and Sir Arnold Wilson constitute a systematic statement of a countervailing doctrine, one must press the question, what was this other sort of politics alleged to be like? The answer seems to be that it was like the millet politics of the Ottoman Empire. Millet politics were real, Kedourie implies, so far as they displayed a readiness to 'deal with the world' as millet politicians found it. They were run 'mostly' by men who were 'well known in their communities', and who had regard for the 'weaknesses and ambitions of human beings'. They were 'impervious to ideology and doctrinaire adventure 'and they did not try to effect the 'triumph of an idea'. They came to politics through 'consideration of concrete difficulties', and were willing to leave the people they ruled in the 'fissiparous heterogeneity they had always lived in'. In practice they provided what modern methods could only announce and then make impossible states in which differing communities could 'live in harmony'. Politics on this understanding were neither 'populist' nor 'romantic'.

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They were a 'practical' matter, the prevention of 'present evils' and the securing of 'existing interests', where 'force and violence were occasionally decisive', where the wicked were 'quite often' successful, and where 'love and gentleness' could easily be 'productive of evil'. They needed 'resource, cunning, patience and steadfastness', were conducted in the light of 'accident, circumstance, intuition and character', and recognized only one sort of class-distinction - between those 'who are at the centre and those who are at the margins of power'. This was described as 'the political tradition of the East'. It entailed passive obedience on the part of the governed, from whose point of view its merit was that politics was an 'evil' and that 'public responsibility' cloaked 'unusually sinister private ends'. Deference to power as such, dissociation of power from principle, and recognition de facto of any overlordship that happened to arise was not only ' "an immemorial custom of the Eastern world" ' but was also capable of providing an 'order' under which government could be carried on. Kedourie was not saying that traditional politics were better than modern politics. All he was saying was that they were a possible politics. He has used them very largely as reproaches against the modern world and especially against the 'activism' and optimism of liberal political science. Kedourie's positive politics are not particularly striking: they are described neither at length nor in depth. The same can be said about his treatment of religion: though he despises the insensitivity to catastrophe which he finds in modern religion, it is far from clear what religion he wants to replace the religion of perfectibility with. He has described briefly on a number of occasions the sorts of religion that stand farthest from it, and has been at pains to emphasize that the 'gospel of social service . . . is not the same as the gospel of salvation'. He has written respectfully about Christian and Judaic orthodoxy, and about Roman Catholicism (especially in its Maronite form), and has seemed to imply that Lutheranism and Evangelicalism would have done less damage if they had remained part of a disciplined Catholic Christianity. But in all these cases the position recedes as soon as it is examined, and all that remains is a sense of the contestability of the conceptions that are held dearest by modern intelligentsias and a conviction that almost anything would be better than modern arrogance and impiety. From this point of view, Kedourie's writing is a reminder that a selfconscious intelligentsia is a modern invention. And, though there is no

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reason to suppose that he wishes to restore a feudal or imperial form of government, or to re-establish the hierocratic society of Ullmann's invention, he is never at a loss to provide metaphors with which to diminish 'intellectuals'. He began by diminishing the English liberal intellectuals' misunderstanding of the Middle East. His pages purr with satisfaction at the diminutions demonstrated by the sad lives that intellectuals lead and the political compensations they have sought for their sadness. Above all, ignoring Ullmann, they resound with the claim that modern intelligentsias have destroyed the distinction between theory and practice that was integral to European civilization from the start. The significance of this has not been spelt out; it has not been explained how grasp of the distinction has been integral to civilization in the past. Nevertheless, the distinction is vital to Kedourie's conception of his own activity in a modern university. Behind the demand for religious orthodoxy, which must, of course, be Jewish, there lies a more powerful demand, that the intelligentsia should not only leave politics alone but should leave religion alone as well. A quotation may complete the picture. It contains Kedourie's considered opinion of Wilfred Scawen Blunt who, of all the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic English intellectuals, is the one he has disliked most. His 'last word' on the subject was as follows: In 1897 . . . Scawen Blunt . . . went on a journey to the Sanussi oases in the Western Desert, and there apparently came to realise what Islam was like when it was practised by people who studied their eternal salvation, rather than by those who, like his friends, sought to use it . . . in a campaign against the British Empire. 'My experience of the Senussi at Siwah', he wrote in his diary in March > . . 'has convinced me that there is no hope anywhere to be found in Islam. I had made myself a romance about these reformers, but I see that it has no substantial basis, and I shall never go further now than I am in the Mohammedan direction. The less religion in the world, perhaps, after all, the better.' And a year later, more sweepingly and more trenchantly: The Moslems of today who believe are mere wild beasts like the men of Siwah, the rest have lost their faith.' Since his day, of course [Kedourie added], a large proportion of the wild beasts, thanks no doubt to the modernists, has been civilised and domesticated. The few survivors are firmly confined to their reservations.

11 Waugh 'Only once was there anything like a Fascist movement in England: that was in 1926 when the middle class took over the public services: it now does not exist at all except as a form of anti-semitism in the slums. Those of us who can afford to think without proclaiming ourselves "intellectual" do not want or expect a Fascist rdgime. But there is a highly nervous and highly vocal party who are busily creating a bogey: if they persist in throwing the epithet about, . . . they may one day find that there is a Fascist party which they have provoked. They will, of course, be the chief losers but it is because I believe that we shall all lose by such a development that I am addressing this through your columns.5 Evelyn Waugh to the New Statesman 5 March 1938 pp. 365-6. 'I believe that man is . . . an exile, and . . . that his chances of happiness and virtue [on earth] are not much affected by the . . . conditions in which he lives . . . I believe . . . that there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other . . . I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination . . . I believe in nationality . . . I believe that war and conquest are inevitable . . . I believe that Art is a natural function of man . . . but I do not think it has a connection with any particular system, least of all with representative government, as nowadays in England, America and France it seems popular to believe; artists have always spent some of their spare time in flattering the governments under whom they live, so it is natural that, at the moment, English, American and French artists should be volubly democratic' Evelyn Waugh Robbery Under Law 1939 pp. 16-17. 'When I wrote my first novel sixteen years ago, my publisher advised me . . . to prefix the warning that it was "meant to be funny" . . . Now, in a more sombre decade, I must . . . state that Bride she ad Revisited is not meant to be funny. There are passages of buffoonery but the general theme is at once romantic and eschatological. It is . . . an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half paganised themselves, in the world of 1923-39. The story will be uncongenial alike to those who look back on that pagan world with unalloyed affection and to those who see it as transitory, insignificant and, already, hopefully passed. Whom then can I hope to please? Perhaps those who have the leisure to read a book word by word for the interest of the writer's use of language; perhaps those who look to the future with black forebodings and need more solid comfort than cosy memories. For the latter I have given my hero, and them, if they will allow me, a hope, not, indeed, that anything but disaster lies ahead but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters.' Evelyn Waugh Warning on dustjacket of Brideshead Revisited 1945.

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Two aspects of Waugh's1 writing deserve attention. It is desirable to consider his religion not only by itself but also in conjunction with his politics. In Waugh's mature writing religion was central; there was a continuous argument, which began with Edmund Campion and Robbery Under Law and culminated in Brideshead Revisited. About politics, on the other hand, there was a difficulty. In the 1920s and 1930s they had been explicit. They were then overtaken by the 1939 war and, having been swamped by the post-war climate, did not really reappear. The pre-war political writings were not reprinted. The political analyses were removed from the republished travel books. The post-war political observations were confined to The Month, The Tablet and The Spectator, or given expression through eccentric asides during Waugh's infrequent public appearances. This may have been tactical; it may have been inadvertent. It may have registered boredom at political discussion in general, a sense that the pre-war political discussion had dated, or relief that comparative affluence had put an end to the drudgery of journalism. It may also have registered hopelessness, or anachronism, in face of the consensual relationship which the war had established between Churchill, whom Waugh had admired, and the post-war liberal Socialism which he ostentatiously detested. The outcome was a recession from explicitness and a blurring of the fact that most of the pre-war writings had been more explicit politically than they had been theologically. As a public indoctrinator, Waugh had first attracted attention when 1. Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903-66). Ed. Lancing and Hertford College Oxford. Served in the British Army 1939-45. Author of Rossetti 1928, Decline and Fall 1928, Vile Bodies 1930, Labels 1930, Remote People 1932, Black Mischief 1932, Ninety-Two Days 1934, A Handful of Dust 1934, Edmund Campion 1935, Waugh in Abyssinia 1936, Scoop 1938, Put Out More Flags 1942, Work Suspended 1943, Brideshead Revisited 1945, Scott-King's Modern Europe 1946, The Loved One 1948, Helena 1950, Men at Arms 1952, Love Among the Ruins 1953, Officers and Gentlemen 1955, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold 1951, The Life of Ronald Knox 1959, Unconditional Surrender 1961, A Little Learning 1964 etc. 340

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he was an Oxford undergraduate in the early 1920s. At this time he was making three points - that the young were frustrated, that the returning war-hero was a 'modern' bore and that another war might brighten life up. He ridiculed the people's war, doubted whether the lives of most people were worth living, and abused the public pieties of post-war improvement in a way that was both raw and self-assertive. He was an anti-political Tory and manifestly concerned to destroy the solemnity of bereavement and self-sacrifice with which schoolmasters, politicians, and the parents and friends of the dead had confronted the post-war undergraduate generation during their period as wartime schoolboys. After Oxford, Waugh had a period of unsettlement in which doctrinal development did not get very far. He shared a fashionable anti-Victorianism while protesting lucidly against the indiscipline of modern thinking and the relaxations of modern progress. He shared the common rejection of prudery but attacked the reasons that were given for rejecting it, and he was at once sexually (and homosexually) promiscuous and critical of those who provided theoretical justifications of promiscuity. He was conscious of Art as both necessary and neglected and left it uncertain whether English Art, which had been 'crushed out' by the transition from 'aristocracy to industrialism', would survive the 'transition . . . to democracy'. He wrote sympathetically of Rossetti's attempt to bring 'delicacy of feeling' into the minds of workmen who had been 'cramped' and 'warped by the industrial system' while also recording the modern dislike of 'gratuitous uplift' and the criticism Rossetti had attracted from his contemporaries. In an article and in his book on Rossetti, both published in 1928, these positions appeared in a more or less unified way. There was no undue praise of the subject whose family, however, were praised for treating art as a 'normal activity of man'. Rossetti was credited with 'vanity' in exhuming his poems from his wife's grave and with credulity for becoming a spiritualist. He was classed as a 'mediocrity' for lacking both a sense of organization and that 'essential rectitude' which 'underlies' the 'sincerity of all really great art'. Both article and book attacked the 'Victorian' conception of the artist as 'melancholy' or 'deranged' and the 'mischievous' conception of the nineties that he should be 'consumptive, perverted or epileptic'. They insisted that Rossetti's work had been done in spite of the lifestyle he had inherited from his free-thinking father and the Rousseauvian pre-Raphaelite belief that painting should aim chiefly at the 'conscientious transcription of nature'.

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The doctrine of Rossetti was a doctrine about Art. It defended the Renaissance and claimed that aesthetics had been purified since Ruskin. But it did not make it clear what the 'modern critical attitude' was, except that there was a mistaken emphasis on the 'reality' and 'necessary relations of forms' and a mistaken resistance to the idea that one could be frightened as legitimately by a painting as by The Ancient Mariner. It would be painful to assess Waugh's positive aesthetic. His statement of it was brief and unintelligible and was never repeated. It marked the farthest limit of his journey into theory from the solemnities of which he disengaged himself completely once he began to write novels. The most important of his unstated doctrines seems to have been that artists ought not to have aesthetic theories. So far as Rossetti disclosed a commitment, it was to Art against its enemies. In Decline and Fall, though there was no commitment, there was a message - that diligence, virtue and liberal idealism do not deserve to be, and usually are not, rewarded. Decline and Fall was funny because of the contrasts it created between the dull energy of educated endeavour and the chance, wealth and wickedness that made things happen. There were caricatures of official stupidity in the form of judges, warders, prison doctors and Anglican clergymen, and caricatures of modern types like the pansy, the radical, the soulful nigger, the inhuman architect, and the sociological prison-reformer. There were important symbols in the persons of Lady Circumference, who was an Alice-in-Wonderland incarnation of upper-class bigotry, and Margot Beste-Chetwynd, who had driven a horse and cart through the Englishman's 'ready-made code of honour' and the 'raw exertions of nineteenth-century radicals'. There was a backcloth of instructive contrast between the Bundles, Pottses, and Pennyfeathers with their doubts, cocoa, pipes, brass-rubbings and League of Nations Union on the one hand, and the Pastmasters and Digby-Vane-Trumpingtons with their Bollinger, coloured coats and the roaring, bottle-breaking, baying of the landed classes at play on the other. Decline and Fall was not a religious novel. But it noted religious targets like The Golden Bough and Havelock Ellis on the way, and made of Prendergast's doubts and fate a symbol of Anglican absurdity. It was also a cruel novel. It had two deaths from gloom and despair after lives which seemed to be without significance. The dismemberment of Prendergast, like the cannibalization of Prudence Courtney in

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Black Mischief, was a gratuitous, sadistic underlining of the themes that the body does not matter and that virtue should not expect to be rewarded. By the end of the twenties, Waugh had established his intellectual intention. He was a- or anti-political, that is to say, he was against the 'old bores'. He was against ossified optimisms. He had satirized English travellers and modern dons - along with cromlechs, barrows, fosses, folk-dancing and vicars who spent their time 'scratching up flint arrow-heads' when they ought to have been saying their prayers. He had criticized Spenglerian solemnity and 'Kemalist nonsense' and had contrasted 'southern warmth' with the 'wrangling', 'resentment' and 'hysteria' characteristic of slums in 'northern' countries. There had been many passages of contempt for the American want of established culture and extensive praise of the joviality, inquisitiveness, courtesy, dignity, fecundity and 'unembarrassed religious observance' to be found in the Arab town at Port Said. In all this there was historical romanticism along with a belief, acquired entirely by observation from without, that alien or picturesque societies were better than his own, which was a Dead Land where the tone and tricks of Eliot, Wodehouse and Lewis Carroll were employed in order to pull down the building which contained liberal idealism and public-school religion. What Waugh wished to convey in the 1920s was that the thinking classes were stiff with rot and were encouraging their rot to spread everywhere. There were many expressions of this thought. One of the more extended may stand proxy for the rest. They returned [he wrote in 1929 of the 'young schoolmasters' who had come back from the war in 1918] with a jolly tolerance of everything that seemed 'modern'. Every effort was made to encourage the children at the public schools to 'think for themselves'; when they should have been whipped and taught Greek paradigms, they were set arguing about birth control and nationalisation. Their crude little opinions were treated with respect. Preachers in the school chapel week after week entrusted the future to their hands. It is hardly surprising that they were Bolshevik at eighteen and bored at twenty. The muscles which encounter the most resistance in daily routine are those which became most highly developed and adapted. It is thus that the restraint of a traditional culture tempers and directs creative impulses. Freedom produces sterility. There was nothing left for the younger generation to rebel against, except the widest conceptions of mere decency. Accordingly it was against these that it turned... What young man today, for example, in choosing a career, ever con-

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siders for one moment whether, by its nature, any job is better worth doing than any other? There was once a prevailing opinion that 'the professions' which performed beneficial services to the community, were more becoming to a man of culture than 'trade' in which he simply sold things for more than he gave. Today that prejudice is suppressed and shopkeeping has become a polite hobby. There seem signs, however, that a small group of young men and women are breaking away from their generation and striving to regain the sense of values that should have been instinctive to them. If this is so, there may yet be something done by this crazy and sterile generation. But it is too early at present to discern more than the vaguest hope. Some of this was self-hatred. Some of it was a genuine response which Waugh shared with others who, like himself, both were, and were ashamed to be, industrious prigs. All of it was put to good use when he become a Roman Catholic. Throughout the twenties, Waugh had written respectfully of religion so long as it was not the natural religion of modern churchmen or the resentful hopelessness of Anglican vicars. In Labels there was both appreciation of, and exasperation at, the practice of religion in the Middle East. From his reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930, and especially from Edmund Campion onwards, his writings had both a religious and a political intention. Modern readers do not always understand this, and it is easy to see why. The novels of the thirties and forties were masterly in themselves and needed no doctrinal direction to make them attractive. Indeed, their doctrinal attractiveness was obviously distressing to the editors of Penguin Books, who gutted them of doctrinal significance, creating the impression that Vile Bodies was a work of 'sardonic observation', that Brideshead Revisited was 'the story of a family' and that Waugh was 'too subtle a moralist' to take sides over Last's broken marriage in A Handful of Dust In fact, all these novels were part of a considered statement which was inseparable from its mode of expression and may easily be solemnized or misunderstood if the mode of expression is neglected, but which may nevertheless be considered for the attitude it enjoined towards politics, religion and society. The most obvious way in which this was expressed was through a sentiment of commitment to a social structure. This was not the existing social structure. Nor was it one that had existed in the past. In some respects it had a rural, feudal or landowning top, whether in England or Africa, but often the commitment was merely to the opin-

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ions expressed by characters who lived at the top. The significance of Lady Circumference and the Earl of Ngomo, for example, was their self-confident dismissal of the opinions of progressive modernity. Moreover, approval was not confined to those who lived at the top. On the contrary it was given to those who ignored or undercut the agitations of the modern world. The Arabs of Matodi, the Courtneys and Colonel Blunt, and the Boots of Boot Magna, were stock figures and not meant to be very interesting. But they were doing no harm and, like Youkoumian, Scott-King and others, were living within the interstices of the nastiness created by others. Unlike Father Rothschild, who knew all about the modern world, they were absent-minded replicas of Lady Circumference's robust refusal to be browbeaten by its nastiness. There was, in other words, alongside the social structure, another structure of moral or functional worth which grew in importance as time went on and was threatened in all the novels by forces which Waugh made it evident that his readers were to dislike or despise. They were obviously to dislike suburban pretentiousness - 'making things hum at the Bois\ for example, or in the forms presented through the Reppingtons and Brethertons of Matodi. They were to dislike commercial acumen and wealth where these were divorced from good birth, bigotry, humanity or sophistication. They were to despise radical politicians, and also democratic ones. Most of all they were to dislike the misuse of privilege by those who ought to have known better. Among these Seth of Azania was the prime example, with the nemesis that overtook his attempt to make Azania a 'modern' nation. But Seth was a black man, and Waugh was sympathetic to black men only when, like Ngomo or cannibal tribesmen, they were indifferent to, or destroyed, modern virtue. To Waugh, most black men were joke-figures who were not paid the compliment of serious treatment. For positive statements through significant figures it is necessary to look at Last, Lyne, Seal, and their friends. In the late twenties Waugh had offered himself, rather vulgarly, as a symbol not only of the younger generation but also of retreat from its aimlessness. That this was his message was not obvious in Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies, or, so far as it was a question there, in Black Mischief, which might all be interpreted as a laugh with, rather than against, the younger characters. It had, however, been stated explicitly in The Spectator in 1929, and formed the central theme of A Handful of Dust five years later. From then onwards, through Edmund

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Recognitions

Campion, Waugh in Abyssinia and Robbery under Law, there was both a development in opinion and a reaction against the climate that had developed in England. A Handful of Dust was about marital fidelity; it showed a good man with a good role and a good son being destroyed, malignantly, as it seemed, by a dull inept man with a commercial mother. There was no religion in the novel (except for some inept Anglicanism), but Last's fate was meant to he tragic and a demonstration of the belief that marriage should not be dissolved just because love had died. The tone of A Handful of Dust was subfuse - Hard Cheese on Tony and It was Nobody's Fault marked the limits of tragic expression. But the hero was heroic, however low-keyed, and was destroyed not only by accident (the accident that brought Beaver to Hetton and the vicar's useless daughter near the backfiring car) but also by various types of malignant modernity. Modernity was the operative acid and it was made clear that modern feelings were evil or defective. In Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Black Mischief, then, the attitude was ambivalent. It recognized that the young were aimless and worthless, but it also recognized that their aimlessness had a point. Father Rothschild made the point positively two-thirds of the way through chapter eight of Vile Bodies', the Duchess of Stayle made it unconsciously in a comic passage at the end of the same chapter the point that the elderly and the middle-aged did not understand their children. At first the Lasts, Lynes, Seals, and their friends were good figures, contrasts to Pennyfeathers and Cocoa and a welcome relief from the League of Nations Union. They went on being so for quite a long time. Eventually, however, and with increasing certainty, they were made sad and inadequate, repositories of an anarchy of feeling that Waugh deplored even when he credited it with a discriminating sensitivity for which, if one is to judge by the preface to Brideshead, he felt a special sympathy. If by 1934 Waugh had turned against the looseness of Youth, it was still the case that his general attitude was negative. Edmund Campion held up its subject for regard and admiration and expressed the debt that modern Catholics owed to him and his fellow-martyrs. But it assumed, rather than argued, the justification of Campion's refusal to remain an Anglican, and was circumscribed by a polemical need to prove that the sixteenth-century Church of England had been a corrupt backwater.

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In Campion, Waugh made much both of the Elizabethan Church's abandonment of international learning and of its isolation from the 'great surge of vitality' that had flowed from Trent. He drew striking contrasts between Campion's 'love of holiness' and 'need for sacrifice' and the 'neat parsonic witticisms' of Tobie Mathew - his Oxford contemporary who, as a reward for conformity, was given the Archbishopric of York which 'but for the Grace of God' Campion might have had instead. Though moving in many ways, and deploying a careful respect for Elizabeth's natural Catholicism, the book provided little more than a romantic persuasion to believe that Campion had anticipated, and shown how to avoid, what Waugh was later to describe as the 'particularly English loneliness' of the 'religiously-minded man suddenly made alive to the fact that he is outside Christendom'. Nor was anything especially striking said about the content of religion in Ninety-Two Days or Waugh in Abyssinia. Ninety-Two Days contained a good deal of descriptive writing about religion in Guiana together with a few pages of contentious dismissal of the conclusions drawn from Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages by anthropologists 'flushed' with the 'agnosticism of the provincial universities'. But, though religion was said to be important, what was chiefly described was its difficulty, including, for example, the difficulty which led to the failure of a Benedictine canning-factory at Boa Vista. So far as the positive propagation of religion was concerned, the only serious passage concerned a Jesuit, Father Maher, in the 'lonely outpost of religion' that he was responsible for a long way even from Boa Vista. In Waugh in Abyssinia and Robbery Under Law there was a change of tone, if not about the content of Catholicism, then about the politics that were needed if it was to be enabled to survive. In both works, and in other occasional writings in the three years before the war, Waugh sketched out a political position which extended the undergraduate politics of the twenties into a reaction against the progressive intelligentsia positions of the thirties. Waugh's dismissal of the intelligentsia was unequivocal. It was also continuous, from the embryo dons of Decline and Fall, past Silk, Pimpernell and Parsnip in Put Out More Flags to the peculiarly dreadful Samgrass - an intellectual on the make who was dreadful because he trafficked in human feelings. It was not only in relation to fictional figures, however, that pillorying went on. It also went on in relation to Isherwood, Orwell, Connolly, Aldous Huxley, Laski, Spender,

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Auden and D. H. Lawrence (the body of whose Plumed Serpent was said to resemble 'something out of Beachcomber'). Some part of Waugh's objection to the movement of the thirties was to the looseness of its prose and the solemnity of its judgments. Some of it was to its attempt to introduce ideological considerations into literature and its organization of a massed band of critics to do this. Some of it was a judgment of tone - of Connolly's lack of 'boisterousness' and 'masculinity', of the mediocrity of Auden's verse, and of the bore he had been made into by his admirers. But a great deal of the objection was political - the outcome of a simple instinct that the 'new humanism' of the Common Man would bring on the 'great flat earth that the Levellers were planning for us' after the war was over. About the 1939 war Waugh was in no doubt. He was tempted neither by Marxism, which he treated as a rival to Christianity, nor by Hitler whom he put in much the same bracket as Stalin. Even from the Spanish Civil War he seems, like Eliot, to have retained a measure of detachment. Waugh neither visited Spain during the war nor expressed any systematic view about it. He preferred Franco to the Republicans and wrote, in Robbery Under Law, of Franco's soldiersfightingto prevent 'Spain becoming like Central America'. But he was lukewarm; so far as he expressed the Catholic politics which he might have expressed in that connection, he expressed them about Abyssinia on the one hand and in criticism of Cardenas, the dictator of Mexico, on the other. About Mussolini, though Waugh was sympathetic, it cannot be said that he was enthusiastic. Indeed, he was largely negative. He accused the Socialists of Europe' of using the League of Nations to precipitate 'world war in defence of an archaic . . . despotism' in Abyssinia in 1935, and argued that the British government had converted what Mussolini had intended to be a show of strength leading to peaceful annexation into a real war involving the 'honour' of Italy. He was contemptuous of the Haile-Selassie regime and made a point of establishing, for the benefit of League-lovers in England, that it had imposed itself with wanton brutality on its subject peoples. He was particularly contemptuous of the 'jeunesse d'Ethiopie\ the 'society of "progressive" Abyssinians' whose 'programme of reform . . . affected the nation as little as might a committee of women welfare workers in Europe passing a resolution deploring the use of tobacco' and which, if it had been

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effective at all, would have done what 'native progressive parties' had done in Persia and Turkey - destroy 'native piety' (whether Christian or Muslim) and establish irreligion as the basis of public teaching. So far as Waugh praised Mussolini he did so as a tribute to pioneering virtue, the occupation of Abyssinia being neither really a 'military' act like the French occupation of Morocco, a 'capitalistic' act like the British involvement in South Africa, nor 'primarily a humane movement, like the British occupation of Uganda'. On the contrary, it was the 'expansion of a race' and what it resembled most 'in recent history' was the 'great western drive of the American peoples, the dispossession of the Indian tribes and the establishment in a barren land of new pastures and cities'. Whether Waugh believed this or was looking for a subject on which to deploy his prejudices is not clear. What is clear is his distaste for the 'liberals who in the preceding months had emerged, so swollen with indignation as to become a bogey to their peaceable fellow citizens'. What was also clear was his anxiety to establish that Abyssinians would not yield to 'liberal reform', that in all their dealings with the League they had tricked it, and that the Emperor had been the victim - as victim there must always be - of the 'nonconformist conscience'. Although Waugh in Abyssinia contained a few passages about religion, they were not central except so far as the attack on the jeunesse d'Ethiopie and the League had a religious overtone. If Waugh had written at length about Spain, the overtone would doubtless have become a theme. That he wrote about Mexico and not Spain does not mean either that he had not absorbed the Spanish problem into the Mexican, or that he did not feel the same contempt for the 'credulous pilgrims' who sought the 'promised land' in Mexico as he felt for those who sought it in Moscow or Barcelona. Robbery Under Law was really two books in one. On the one hand, it was a propaganda exercise, written at the request of British oil interests and aiming to inform the British public that a 'rich and essential British industry' had been 'openly stolen in time of peace' by the Mexican government. On the other, it was a statement of the view that the modern world was 'plague-stricken by politics' in exactly the same way that the sixteenth-century world had been plague-stricken by theology, and that the events Waugh had witnessed in Mexico, where politics had 'dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it and powdered it to dust', were only one instance of 'a universal deliberately fostered

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anarchy of public relations and private opinions' which were 'making the world uninhabitable'. The oil aspect of the book was a monument to what would now be thought of as Hayekean thinking - with its emphasis on the legality of the concession, the entrepreneurial risks and the benefits that had been brought to the country. Expropriation was shown to be as corrupt as it was evilly idealistic, and as damaging to those for whose benefit it was ostensibly intended as earlier expropriations of church property had been. It was alleged that Mexican politicians took a looter's view of politics and did not understand that 'a nation becomes rich through the thrift and enterprise of its people'; that nationalization of the oil company had failed to produce indignation meetings in the Albert Hall only because the Cardenas government had a 'Left Book Club vocabulary' which assumed that the proletariat was always right. Though Robbery Under Law was a commissioned book, it was so continuous and compatible with everything that Waugh had said politically in the twenties that it was neither remarkable in itself nor surprising in the manner of its composition. All it lacked was intellectual strength sufficient to establish a connection between Oil and Religion. Robbery Under Law was an explicit statement about the connection between politics, religion, and civilization. While focusing on the incompatibility between Catholic Mexico on the one hand and the socialist /Marxist regime which the liberal/masonic army had established on the other, it used the Mexican experience both as an instance of the factors which determine the collapse of civilizations and as a moral for those who did not understand that there was nothing 'except ourselves' to stop 'our own country' becoming as corrupt, despotic and run-down as Mexico. Robbery Under Law did not specify England: 'our own country' might well have meant Western Europe or Latin Christendom. But the book had an English orientation when it criticized the 'air of . . . moral . . . and . . . intellectual superiority' with which 'aristocratic and autocratic government' and the Church of Rome had been dismissed in the past by the protagonists of the secular, debt-ridden, superstitious society of the Western world. The polemic of Robbery Under Law was conservative; it saw the Mexican consciousness as saturated by a Spanish influence so deep and rich that the moral undersoil had remained Spanish even when the Spaniards had left. It analysed Mexican religion in these terms, treating Catholicism as the core of consciousness and the basis of national iden-

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tity. It described the attacks made by the liberal-agnostic military masonic lodges of the nineteenth century and the communist, proletarian-revolutionary, atheistic ones of the twentieth which, as virtual masters of successive presidents, had insisted on the 'extinction of the Church' as the price of their support. It attributed the Church's durability to the fact that the popular mind was indelibly Catholic. The message of this part of the book was embodied in the claim, whether true or false, that, when the Cardenas government despatched from Mexico City an army of 'enthusiastic teachers' dedicated to 'make children critical of their homes' by propagating a 'supercilious attitude of brand-new city-made enlightenment' many of them 'suffered acutely, losing noses, ears, and occasionally their lives at the hands of the ungrateful parents'. At one level Waugh's analysis imputed impurity of motive to all socialist expropriation. At another it treated the attack on the Church as an Enlightenment attack, spearheaded by a masonic army of halfcaste officers and sustained in their wickedness by an informal American imperialism which assumed that the Church did nothing useful, that landowners oppressed their peasants, and that Mexico could make a sensible addition to the Union if the country was 'cleaned up a bit'. Mexico, Waugh's message was, was an object-lesson in how not to do it. Almost 'every unhappy figure' who had ruled it from Iturbide onwards had 'spoken in the phrases of contemporary advanced thought'. Yet Mexican civilization had decayed. 'Every marked step in decline' had corresponded with 'experiments towards the Left' which had all assumed that 'the only good of which man is capable is the enjoyment of consumable goods' and that rulers should make materialistic assumptions not only about their subjects but also about themselves. Altruism [the conclusion was] does not flourish long without religion [or civilization without either]. If Mexico were a small, new country, just emerging from barbarism, houseproud of its little achievements, pardonably anxious to conceal the evidence where zeal had outrun capacity, then, indeed, it would be ungenerous to wound the national pride and abuse hospitality by uncovering its failures. But it is nothing of the kind. It is a huge country with a long and proud history, taking precedence in its national unity of half the states of Europe: it has been rich and cultured and orderly and has given birth to sons illustrious in every walk of life; now, every year, it is becoming hungrier, wickeder and more hopeless; the great buildings of the past are falling in ruins; the jungle is closing in and the graves of the pioneers are lost in the undergrowth; the people are shrinking

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back to the river banks and railheads; they are being starved in the mountains and shot in backyards, dying without God. And General Cardenas and his gang stand on their balcony smirking at the applause of communist delegations; the tourists tramp round the exhibition of his work marvelling at hammers and sickles in cross-stitch and clenched fists in plaster of paris and the plans of monstrous public offices that no-one is ever going to build. What Waugh meant was what Burke had meant after Reflections on the Revolution in France - that it is disgusting to assault the prejudices of a nation and that the effect of doing so would be a violent anarchy of conceptions. Like Burke's, Waugh's history was sympathetic to the Church; much more than Burke, he wrote as its son. But, though the Church position was put with a positively Polish insistence, the political position was independent of it and would have stood whether the Church had mattered in Mexico or not. Whether Waugh would have advanced these considerations if he had not been able by doing so to put a Church point of view, it is difficult to decide; since the problem did not arise in the circumstances he was discussing, it may be irrelevant to mention it. It may, however, be relevant to suggest that, beyond his view of the Church, he was sketching a self-consciously conservative doctrine about civilization. Civilization, the doctrine was, is manifested in 'style', 'dignity' and 'grace', which have nothing to do with wealth or 'consumable goods' but have a great deal to do with peoples' interior consciousnesses, with 'the way they move and talk' and with their inmost conception of the 'identity' between a 'common human nature and individual souls'. This was what a 'conservative' understood. A conservative position was not merely an 'obstructive rope' to 'frivolous experiment', but entailed a 'positive' task - to keep closed 'the prisons of the mind' and to shut out the self-indulgent illusions of systematic dissidence which encouraged the 'barbarism, anarchy and atrocity that is latent in every human being'. It was said to be of the utmost importance to understand that a civilization was the outcome of continuous effort and could decay as easily from internal inanition as from any external disaster to which it might be subjected. It is unnecessary to say more about this type of pessimism except that, though presented as existing in its own right with or without its Christian core, the core was meant in practice to be Christian. It was easier for Waugh to write about the Christian core in Mexico, where the Catholic Church, having been the national consciousness,

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had taken to the Catacombs, than it would have been to write about it in England, where the Church of England had long since ceased to be the one and had not for a very long time had to think of doing the other. To that extent his conservatism was at odds with his Catholicism, since there could easily be situations in which Catholicism would be as radical in relation to the existing consciousness as Marxism was in Mexico. While perfectly well able to discuss the Church of the Catacombs, as he had done in Edmund Campion, Waugh chose to dwell in Robbery Under Law in a grateful and very Anglican way on the benefits, both romantic, one might say, and eschatological, that accrue when the Church is the consciousness of a nation. There is no doubt that he wanted the Church to be the consciousness of every nation, not just because 'without God' civilization would die but because the Church was 'a society of divine institution, holding a unique commission for her work, privileged on occasions by special revelation, glorified continually by members of supernatural sanctity and [supplying] in her doctrine . . . a way of life which makes the earth habitable during [man's] existence there and, after that, according to his merits, the hope of heaven or the fear of Hell'. This was Christianity - a faith which 'within its structure allowed a measureless diversity' but which necessarily embodied itself in the form of a Church. It was Church that Waugh emphasized, not Faith, since a religion which treated itself 'as a purely private business' would die. A man could not 'sit at home and be religious by himself; nor could a philosophical system provide a proper substitute. Faith could not exist without tangible expression; it needed property, priests, schools and the sacraments. It was because the Church made claims and imposed restraints which many had found 'onerous' that it had been assaulted by as many varieties of wickedness as men were capable of devising. The claim that anticlericalism was wicked - the assertion that it was cupidity that had produced expropriation of church property - was systematic. Waugh discerned, as clearly as Hoskyns, the presence of sin not just in the 'merciless' fanaticism he had been describing in Mexico, but also in the atheism which underpinned it - the 'atheism' which, though 'at the moment' it used 'Marxist language' as readily as it had used 'liberal language' in 'earlier generations', was in fact not only far older than either but was as old as the 'impenitent thief at the Crucifixion'. Waugh not only emphasized the truth of Catholicism; he also emphasized that Mexicans believed it to be true. Mexican religion was

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not a 'quaint local custom or . . . mildly deleterious survival'. Nor would 'gentle discouragement' convert it into a 'more rational ethical outlook'. Mexicans might or might not be 'deluded' in their beliefs; it was easy to 'make fun' of the profusion of idols, statues and competitive cults with which they surrounded their worship. But what they believed was the belief on which all Christianity depended - that God had become Man, that 'Word' had become 'tangible Flesh' and that it is through 'material symbols' and in virtue of his 'material nature' that Man can recognize the 'truth by which he lives' and the 'glimpses' he has been allowed of 'divinity in material form'. Robbery Under Law was, as Waugh remarked, not 'the place to argue the truth of Christianity'. The result was, nevertheless, the most explicitly Christian statement he had yet made and, in a way, a more explicit statement than he was to make in the future. One of the problems that confronts the student of Waugh's writing is to know how far and at what point his religion was absorbed into his novels. It had been absorbed into his writing by the time he wrote Robbery Under Law, But it had not yet happened that the religion he deployed didactically had supplied a framework for fiction. The novels, indeed, were still being constructed on assumptions that excluded religious affirmation. Brideshead was such an affirmation - selfconsciously and explicitly so - and we may reasonably wonder both why it had not been made before and how coherent it was when Waugh made it in 1945. Of the earlier novels only A Handful of Dust and Work Suspended had as wide a variety of mood, as elegiac a melancholy and as serious an approach as Brideshead; these seem to have been the predecessors. Yet A Handful of Dust said nothing that was really eschatological, while Work Suspended was a false start which could not be completed. Work Suspended was an autobiographical novel. In this it was no different, in a way, from Waugh's other novels. Its distinguishing characteristic was that the material was unprocessed and too little transmuted by satirical, romantic, or religious detachment and imagination. The quality of the prose served only to highlight the fact that it dealt with raw life, sordid problems, low-level people - the depressing apparatus of liberated urban existence from which Waugh's religion had been an emancipation. Yet the religion did not appear, provided no emancipation, and in no way relieved the deflationary boredom which dominated the work. There was only a description of

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modern life which Waugh was conscious of having escaped from but which he had not yet found a way of writing about dispassionately. The difference between Work Suspended and Brideshead Revisited was not a difference of viewpoint or position but a renewal of imagination, a triumphant demonstration that the satirical cunning of the twenties and thirties could be matched by a seriousness which put urban misery in its place, and judged it by the real life concealed behind the 'door in the wall' through which Flyte had led Ryder at Oxford. The 'door in the wall' had led out of middle-class virtue, industry, and respectability. It had not led, as it had in Galsworthy's case, to cynical denigration - to a willingness to see the worst in conventional behaviour. But it embodied as vicarious a rejection of earnest respectability, as well as a determined commitment to turn aestheticism into art and virtue into true religion. In Brideshead religion was more complicated than in Robbery Under Law; it was less public, more problematical, truer in some way than it could be in a work of propaganda. In Brideshead religion was part of the structure; it was no longer flung at the reader; it festered and mouldered throughout the book and only justified itself in the final pages when the gloom and despondency of a secular pagan life were transformed or transfigured by it. It is evident that, at some time between his second marriage in 1937 and the army leave he was given in order to write Brideshead in 1944, Waugh experienced a measure of mental resettlement. This was referred to at the beginning of Brideshead as a disillusionment with the army, but it was almost certainly a more fundamental disillusionment with the position of Youth - an irreversible entrance into middle-aged acceptance and positivity. The positivity did not get very far. It got as far as the writing of Brideshead and then stopped, being replaced by a perverse eccentricity of public manner and by the bland plain that contained the army trilogy and the unsuccessful restatements which constituted Waugh's literary output in the fifties and sixties. The period of transition reflected itself chiefly in Brideshead; it can be understood best by considering Brideshead in the light of Put Out More Flags. Put Out More Flags is often regarded as simply another funny book - a continuation of the early farces - and this aspect needs no emphasis. Its effectiveness depended, as elsewhere in Waugh's writing, on the contrast between virtue, respectability, and dullness on the one hand and the modern world in the shape of Basil Seal (in the billeting sequence) and Alice-in-Wonderland characters like Colonel Plum or the

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Bulgarian Archimandrite (in the War Office sequence) on the other. But it was also political propaganda - a satire on the flippancy with which the war had been conducted under Chamberlain, and a description of the iron seriousness which the Churchillian renaissance had brought to the lives of 'the bright young people'. Put Out More Flags was funny up to a point but eventually lost itself in ineffectual fantasy after serious interludes of v/hich some did, and others did not, succeed. The least successful of these dealt with Ambrose Silk. It is true that Silk's portentousness was subjected to Seal's amoral interventions (the altering of the end of Silk's short story) and that to that extent Silk's musings, about his Jewishness, his homosexuality and his Nazi boyfriend, were given the sadistic treatment that Waugh felt appropriate for all bleeding hearts. But the musings, even when used as pastiches, leave the impression of having been written genuinely, while the portrait of Silk was meant to be, and in places was, a compassionate dissection in which the Malpractice type of satire - which could easily have been used - was replaced by a balanced mixture of gratefulness for what Waugh had avoided and melancholy at the thought that he might not have avoided it. The same doubts may be expressed about Waugh's treatment of the rest of the Bright Young People. The discovery that Digby-VaneTrumpington was 'a much more peculiar man' than had been supposed was not very adequately embodied in his decisions to decline a commission because he did not want to meet wartime officers socially after volunteering for military service, despite being over age, because he had had too good a time before the war and felt responsible for the failure to resist Hitler. This also applies to Seal whose decision to marry was a comic-opera effect, though intended to be more, and whose eventual finding of himself in a Special Unit alongside Digby-Vane-Trumpington and Pastmaster would have been significant only if it had been more effectively detached from the Noel Coward atmosphere which suffused the whole of the novel's public aspect. If, then, Digby-Vane-Trumpington and Seal were unconvincing in their abandonment of frivolity, they nevertheless effected the abandonment. So did Angela Lyne; it was through her desperation in drink, and temporary rescue from desperation through marriage to Seal, that Waugh finally released the chief subjects of his early satire from their satirical condition. It was also through release, i.e. through the realization that a way was open between satire on the one hand and celebration of failings on the other, that he moved towards Brideshead.

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In Brideshead there was far more compassion for the emancipated people of Waugh's youth than in any other of the novels since Vile Bodies, and there was a pronounced Christian resignation at the fragility of the line that divided the Catholic from the pagan. If Brideshead was a proselytizing novel - as it was - its proselytizing manners were very gentle indeed. It contained, like all of Waugh's novels, a number of butts whose function was to highlight the reasonableness of the tone he was deploying. But these were merely incidental to the central theme - the sacred and profane character of Charles Ryder, who had been saved from liberalism and virtue at Oxford, had paid a flying visit to amorality, and had suffered depression and desperation at the advance of the world represented by Mottram, Samgrass and Hooper. Brideshead was the first Waugh novel with an explicitly Christian framework and the only one whose Christian framework does not jangle and jar with its motion. It was exemplary, not only because the Flytes lived as Waugh thought people ought to live (with parks and mansions and lakes) but also because a landed background was used to exemplify the difficulties connected with living as men ought to live in the other sense, i.e. religiously in a pagan world. Waugh distinguished exemplification on the one hand from identification between Christianity and architectural spaciousness on the other. But inequality was a fact of life about which he either felt, or had decided to express, no guilt; in the absence of guilt there was no reason why he should question the identification. The spaciousness which landed wealth made possible had produced a form of life about whose superiority no question arose and which, therefore, was especially suitable for exemplifying the problems raised by attempts to allow Catholicism to penetrate its fabric. The Flytes were a long way from being beautiful people: Sebastian denied his vocation, Cordelia grew up plain, Julia had the instincts of a modern woman and Brideshead the mind of a troglodyte; Lady Marchmain's religion was the cause of Sebastian's disintegration. Even when they exemplified rather in the Alice-in-Wonderland than in the Burkean sense, there can be no doubt that the Flytes were offered as idyllic examples of the condition of a fallen world, disclosing in the 'fierce little human tragedy' in which Ryder had played the miseries as well as the grandeurs entailed in the preservation of the Hope which the Faith gives to those who might otherwise have been 'living without God'. Brideshead was not really a political novel. So far as it was, it caricatured the small-talk of the only politicians it considered, hearing their

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voices, as Ryder heard Mottram's in the cafe in Paris, unintelligibly at a great distance, 'like a dog barking miles away on a still night', and discerning in its owner something that 'wasn't a complete human being after all' but only 'a tiny bit of one . . . pretending he was whole' in an 'absolutely modern' way that 'only this ghastly age could produce'. Towards art also - the 'succulent pie of creation' from which Ryder made his name - it adopted an attitude of distance, being careful to suggest that religion was more important and fundamental. Architecture was described as 'the highest achievement of man', but the plan of the book, and the point of Part II, was that Brideshead itself was less important than the 'beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design' that had been 'relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle' and was 'burning anew' when Ryder arrived with his regiment at the beginning and the end of the book. The book's message was that England was pagan and should be encouraged not to be, but that its paganism, as embodied in Ryder and some of the Flytes, was not something that could be either deplored or written off. There were the customary sneers at Anglican virtue, at educated Asiatics, and at any attempt to project the 'language of Reason and Brotherhood' upon the world. But Waugh's sympathies in general were as broad as they had been in Put Out More Flags, and far more intelligent. There was neither the doctrinal rant of Robbery Under Law nor the dismissive identifications that had been so questionable in A Handful of Dust. The hero was a modern man with secular pleasures. His first love had been for a man. He was also an adulterer, as were his wife and his mistress. If the book's 'purpose' was revealed when Julia declined to marry him for preferring her father alive to her father saved and because their joint adultery would 'set up a rival good to God's', it was still the case that the adultery was treated sympathetically and that it was the redeemable aspect of Ryder's personality that enabled him to know that Julia could not be with him again once her duty to God had been brought to her attention. The growth in Ryder's knowledge of religion was the centre of the book. He had begun with nothing except school-chapel observance and had retreated even from that by the time he reached Oxford. His flirtations with liberalism had been followed by love for Sebastian, entanglement in his family and an exasperated agnosticism towards all religion. Throughout he was pitied - by Sebastian, by Cordelia, by Brideshead and eventually by Julia - not just for his lack of belief but also for his inability to understand it; he was described as being in

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a condition in which, whenever he had to consider religion, he was 'brought up short, like a horse in full stride suddenly refusing an obstacle, backing against the spurs, too shy even to put his nose at it and look at the thing'. It was the dawning of comprehension after Lord Marchmain's death that made possible the eventual acceptance with which the novel ended. It is easy to diminish Waugh's religion - to treat it as an instrument of literature, as, in an obvious sense, it was. It is easy also to regard the reflections on 'holiness' as 'convent chatter'. That, from one point of view, is exactly what they were. But they were at the same time far more than that, not least because of the restraint with which the practice of religion was described. Like Eliot's and Salisbury's religion, the religion of Brideshead was a protest against the complacent hopelessness of modernity and the sanctimoniousness of the higher liberalism. It was also a hope, the expression of a belief that sanctity, or holiness, is a burden that cannot be denied, and that God's love will be given to those who will accept it. This was a moderate account, containing a weak affirmation and permeated with so strong a sense of uncertainty that one can see why it has been mistaken for the celebration of a social register. Yet it has about it and was written around the essential religious truth - perhaps the only religious truth that can be given shape in a modern novel that death, judgment, heaven and hell are unavoidable, even in the modern world. It was the continual depiction of the Flytes as naturally obsessed by religion, even when they were confused, contorted and inconsistent about its relevance and implications, that made the framework of Brideshead as different from all the other books that Waugh had written in the previous twenty years as Butterfield's writings from 1944 onwards were from everything he had written in the same period. After Brideshead Waugh made few advances. Scott-King's Modern Europe was a repetition of some aspects of Robbery Under Law. But it was emasculated by the easy post-war feeling that the real problem the religious problem of Robbery Under Law - could be hidden under a common front of anti-totalitarian libertarianism. The Loved One was a demolition of pretence, the exposure of an eschatological shallowness which characterized not only a certain sort of American religion but also, as Waugh understood them, most kinds of suburban life. It was, however, an application to religion of the satirical scorn to which liberal politics had been subjected before the war. It did nothing to R.P.D.—N

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deepen or strengthen the intimations out of which Brideshead had been made. For the rest, Waugh's work seems as deserted as Knowles's or Eliot's in the same period. In the occasional writings there were polemical statements and celebrations of Catholicism. But the novels - Helena, Love Among the Ruins, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and the Officers and Gentlemen trilogy - bore the same relation to the young Waugh as Smyth's work in the 1950s and 1960s bore to the work of the young Smyth. It would be unreasonable to complain about this, to demand a continuation of power beyond a certain point in a writer's life. Perhaps Waugh would have had to stop being a Christian if he was to write another book that was as strong as Brideshead. Perhaps it is a criticism of his religion that he had nothing more interesting to say about it after Brideshead than he was able to say through the Crouchbacks. In any case, the climate of the fifties and sixties were too complacent and assured, and too successful in the development of opinions Waugh disliked, to give serious encouragement to work of the theological breadth that was implied in Robbery Under Law and Brideshead. By the fifties a sort of eclectic liberal-conservatism had so completely absorbed, and become absorbed into, the egalitarian consensus that a radical reactionary position was not easily open, except in self-parody, to a writer who wished to carry any post-war intellectual audience with him. Waugh may not have known that he was accommodating himself in his writing, he did the opposite in many of his public appearances. But it is more than likely that, having a naturally religious mind, unlike Snow, Plumb, Koestler, Spender, Ayer and Berlin - the unbearably satisfied authors of thefiftiesand sixties - he did in practice what he would not have done if he had been conscious that he was doing it.

12 Salisbury 'The classes that represent civilization, the holders of accumulated capital and accumulated thought, have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the commonwealth to control them.' Lord Robert Cecil (i.e. Salisbury) English Politics and Parties in Bentley's Quarterly Review March 1859 p. 29. 'These men who preach freedom to us have no real desire for it in its literal sense. The protection of each individual human being from more interference than is indispensably necessary to protect the freedom of his neighbours, is what we used to understand as the meaning of freedom. But it is not the object which is prominent in the wishes of the Radicals of the present day. Their political ideal more nearly resembles one which is usually spoken of as antiquated, but which is antiquated only in the particular form that it assumed. They believe in a divine right; they uphold a legitimacy; they teach an unquestioning obedience; they look upon force as a legitimate weapon for the propagation of the faith. But their divine right is the right of the multitude; their legitimacy enthrones the majority; the unquestioning obedience which they require is to the decree of the ballot-box; the faith which they do not shrink from propagating by force, is the sentimental pseudo-religion which, in this nineteenth century, has so widely usurped the place of faith.' Lord Robert Cecil (i.e. Salisbury) The United States as an Example in Quarterly Review January 1865 p. 283. 'The new enemy has not delayed his coming. The signs are already showing themselves of the third and greatest of the dangers which the Church of England has had to meet within the last century. This time it is no open opponent that challenges Churchmen to defend the cause they love. Their adversaries are gentlemen who preface every subversive proposition with the assurance that they are "attached members of the Church of England," and that they only "desire to extend her usefulness." In other words, they desire not to spoil the Church, but to use her: not to shatter the gigantic influence they have learnt to admire and to dread, but to master it and to make it obedient to themselves. A Church purged of dogma, disembarrassed of belief, embracing every error and every crotchet within its fold, but retaining its influence for purposes of high police, and devoting all its energies to the foundation of mechanics' institutes that is the ideal towards which they struggle, the Utopia of which they dream.' Lord Robert Cecil (i.e. Salisbury) Report of debate on the Oxford Tests Bill June 14 1865 (i.e. The Church in its Relations to Political Parties) in Quarterly Review July 1865 pp. 195-6.

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Salisbury1 appears in this volume at a point at which it might have discussed either Burke or Newman. Burke was so explicit and Newman's understanding of religion was so strong, that these omissions may seem to be a mistake. The reason for thinking that they are not a mistake is that Burke in the 1790s had the venom of a convert, and that Newman did not understand the political problem of the nineteenth century. In the 1790s Burke made an historic statement about the incompatibility between Christianity and the principles of 1789. This, however, has been overtaken by the reorganization of classes that has occurred since he wrote, and can only with great subtlety be made relevant to present conditions. Unlike Burke, Newman identified 1688 as the source of error: like all the Tractarians, he knew that Whiggism, Liberalism and Rationalism had subverted Christianity. But his conversion, however significant in the long run, removed him from the mainstream of Victorian religion; he was little exercised, in the main parts of his life, by the social and political content of Anglican difficulties. It may be that Salisbury misunderstood the effects of literacy, democracy and the swamping of the rich and educated by those who were neither, or that his proximity to power after 1867 made him as acquiescent as Newman had been renunciatory after 1845. Nevertheless Salisbury provided as necessary an antidote to liberal-democratic complacency in politics as the Tractarians had provided to complacency in religion and, since his perception of the political implications of religion was more acute than Newman's, he is, for present purposes, the more significant thinker. That we have access to Salisbury's opinions in his late twenties and thirties is accidental. Salisbury might have written, he might even have 1. Robert Third Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903). Ed. Eton and Christ Church Oxford. MP (Cons.) 1853-68. Succeeded Father as Marquess in 1868. Cabinet Minister 1866-67, 1874-80. Leader of Conservative Party in House of Lords 1881-85. Prime Minister 1885, 1886-92 and 1895-1902. For publications see endnotes.

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written quite a lot, if he had not had to write in order to support his family. But he felt no obligation to write: he took no pleasure in writing; he wrote as much as he did because he needed money from his father's refusal to support him financially on his marriage in 1857 until the death of his elder brother made him the heir to Hatfield in 1865. If there are abundant indications in his letters and speeches during the thirty-seven years that followed of a distinctive tone and manner in discussing public matters, it remains true that the reviews and review articles he wrote between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-six have a range and depth that is more impressive than anything he wrote afterwards. They show that he could, had he chosen, have been as prolific a writer as Gladstone, and that, if he had persisted or written in book-form or at book-length, he would have been one of the small number of writers to come out of Oxford in the immediately post-Tractarian period who combined relentless bitterness, firsthand political experience, and a broad-based conception of the religious dimension of a public doctrine. In doctrine, if not in tone, he may properly be compared to Stubbs, who was his contemporary, or to Haddan, who was his senior, and who both shared his scholarly Anglican hostility to latitudinarianism and 'neology'. In these years of major productivity, Salisbury wrote as a critic, using the critical function to sketch a positive position and turning the positive position against many kinds of public nonsense. If one must not mistake his irony, or impute seriousness where there was meant to be entertainment, neither should one imagine that the enforced discussions of three-decker novels and episcopal biographies were not intended as serious comments on middle-class habits and conventions. Though expressed in the course of reviewing the books he was given to review - which were not necessarily the most interesting or suggestive - his writing displayed as powerful and reasoned a protest against modern thinking as Burke had made in the 1790s.

At the time when he first appeared as a writer Salisbury was already an MP. He wrote as a Tory, as an Anglican and as an anonymous contributor to the small-circulation reviews which thinking Conservatives read in colleges, country houses, clubs, cathedral closes, and vicarages throughout the country. He is not the only writer in this book to have formulated an intellectual version of Church-State Anglican-

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ism. But he formulated it with an acuter understanding of political realities than anyone else and with a more direct sense both of the Church of England's socio-political importance in the past and of the exact nature of the threats by which it was confronted in the present. Where Eliot, Welbourne or the inter-war fellows of Corpus celebrated a role that events had already made unplayable, Salisbury's bitterness was directed at the events themselves as they unfolded in the first twenty years of his adult life before entrenched authority had descended on the apostles of modern Liberalism. In these years, Salisbury identified democracy with free-thinking and the defence of property with the defence of religion: he treated attacks on property as tantamount to attacks on religion and advocated a political position that aim^d to preserve both. His Conservatism, in other words, was a political religion. In examining Salisbury's political doctrine in the 1850s and 1860s, one is struck by its hatred. This was to some extent a facet of the party configuration to which it conformed. To a far greater extent it was the outcome of a demand to make party configurations conform to the real opinions which he believed united the upper reaches of British society. These opinions were partly religious. It was the first axiom of Salisbury's politics that the landed classes were all really Anglican at heart, and were also anti-democratic. It was his second axiom that the working classes could not be given a predominant role in the electoral system without damaging property, religion and civilization. About this Salisbury wrote with a manifest directness. He neither avoided the issue nor softened the impact of his conclusions. He asserted that the poor were jealous of the rich and would use the franchise to expropriate their wealth. He singled out the graduated income tax as the form of 'confiscation' that would be used most malignantly by a 'mob-parliament'. He presented it as an 'injustice' that the 'number of noses' should matter more than the 'magnitude of interests' and he proclaimed it his objective to stop the poor getting equality in voting strength with 'colossal capitalists whose word was law to the bourses of Europe'. An 'appeal to the stomach' he wrote in 1860 'is the only appeal which will rally the sluggish apathy of the great mass of the "proletariat" ' and 'if you give to the poor the power of taxing the rich at will, the rich will soon find the whole expenditure of the country saddled upon them'.

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This crude class-warfare analysis admitted of no modification. The working classes would respect neither political economy nor the existing constitution. Working-class predominance would mean the rule of the 'ignorant and hungry' who would curtail freedom and drive out from the 'citadel of power' both the 'best men' and the 'better classes' who would not 'stoop' to the 'odious necessity' of making themselves agreeable to people they 'utterly despised'. Salisbury's language was coloured by the need to frighten Whigs and Liberals. But it leaves the impression of having a personal twist - of aiming to arouse antagonism to the urban poor. He was not just saying that working-class predominance would damage the constitution or threaten the beneficiaries of inequality. He was saying also that there was a personal gap between rich and poor, which there was no point in trying to bridge since nothing would be gained by 'pumping learning into louts'. In making these attacks, Salisbury was aiming at conventional targets within the English party system. In discussing France and America he generalized the assault, demolishing the idols of his enemies and providing a positive interpretation of European history in which Lincoln was the logical outcome of the delusions of 1776 and Louis Napoleon of the delusions of 1789, and both were exemplifications of the principles which English and European liberals had extracted from the history of the nineteenth century. In criticizing post-revolutionary France, Salisbury no more supported the Ancien Regime than he did slavery in the Southern states of America. But he was clear not only that Napoleon had engulfed the world in blood but that the good intentions of 1789 had produced the 'undisguised slavery' that was visible across the English Channel in the late 1850s. Salisbury's reason for discussing Louis Napoleon was the Radical insistence on regarding France as the home of liberty. His point was that France was not as free or peaceful as Radicals imagined. Louis Napoleon used war as an instrument of policy, and it was by no means the case that he acted either in France or abroad according to the principles enjoined by his Quaker or Manchester admirers. His interest in nationalism was cynical and opportunistic. He represented that 'unscrupulous worship Of military glory' which had characterized the French 'in every period of their history'. Since 1848 he had succeeded in turning universal suffrage, vote by ballot, trial by jury, a newspaper

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press, and public education - 'the commonplaces of liberal eulogy on this side of the Channel' - into 'as faithful ministers' of his will as 'the sword and halter... in other days'. Of the United States - as another object of Radical affection - Salisbury felt obliged for that reason to be critical: he pointed out that the Americans alone among great peoples had provided legislative guarantees of the purity of their blood; he alleged that the North was as closely involved in moral contagion as the South; and that neither would do anything to suppress slavery. Until the Civil War began, he was dominated by the beliefs that the North thought the health of the dollar more important than the eradication of evil and that Kansas had 'a Draconian code of laws which would startle even the police of Naples'. With the outbreak of the war in 1861 and the initial successes achieved by the South, Salisbury began a wholesale assault on the American system, discerning in the destruction of the Union the illusory nature of the expectations that the English had entertained about it in the previous twenty years. In innumerable short statements in the Saturday Review and in three long Quarterly Review articles in the following four years, he presented the history of the United States as disclosing two practical defects in the line of argument which had run from the theorists of the Puritan church polity through Locke, Milton, and Sidney to the American Constitution's belief that 'the mob in the street, starving, violent and unwashed, were exempt from human weakness'. On the one hand, the checks and safeguards established by Jefferson and Madison had failed and had left the United States at the mercy of the democratic majority. On the other, the majority had subjected politics to the attentions of 'wire-pullers and caucus-mongers' and had made the Yankee as belligerent as the Cossack and as criminally willing as 'Mohamet, Jenghis Khan, Tamerlaine and Catherine of Russia' to undertake 'whole-scale extermination . . . for an idea'. In drawing these morals, Salisbury was not firing in the dark. The lesson he was teaching was that Lincoln was an illiterate tyrant, that liberal America did not exist, and that 'worship of America' should cease. In discussing France and America, Salisbury was dissecting an ideological position. But he was also dissecting a foreign-policy one. In considering foreign policy, he aimed to be as dismissive of 'sentimental' views as he was of sentimental views of education, punishment, and poor relief.

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In discussing foreign policy, Salisbury's chief assumption was that it was a matter between governments which should not be affected by the structures of the states they ruled. He combined three ideas common to most effective contemporary statesmen: that governments should avoid commercial activity; that their dealings with other governments should display mutual respect; and that the chief function of the British government internationally was to pursue British interests. As an exponent of realpolitik, Salisbury treated the Vienna settlement as the foundation of European peace and the reason for European stability. In an age in which steam had 'infinitely multiplied Britain's intercourse with Europe', he celebrated Castlereagh's role in carrying out the duties which Pitt had taught the British to owe towards 'the European commonwealth', and he attacked the illusions which had produced not only Manchester isolationism and Quaker pacifism but also the liberal admiration for nationalism. Salisbury's reason for attacking nationalism's English admirers was the principle they were pointing at the structure that Castlereagh had left. He argued that it was the 'agglomerating . . . of states' which civilization needed. He discerned in the identification between polity and language both 'tyranny's last plot against freedom' and democracy's 'lawless lust of territory'. It was because Radicals were mercilessly chauvinistic about the Danish duchies and because Hellenism, Panslavism, Panteutonism and Italian nationalism had been 'originated by despotisms' that he made rather obvious noises of dismissal. About the complicated nature of nationalism's operations in practice he was more interesting. Of all Salisbury's writings, Poland was the most subtle, cynical and suggestive. It took the liberal enthusiasm for Polish independence, played with it, approved of it and then showed how absurd it was if considered in the light of adequate historical knowledge. It gave a masterly statement of the view that the Polish nation at the time of Partition consisted of 150,000 persecuting Catholic noblemen who had made immense inroads on civil and religious liberty since the Reformation. It asked why liberal writers who deplored the events of 1772 did not equally deplore the partition of Russia by Sweden and Poland in the seventeenth century. It established that, though it was by the sword that the Poles had been deprived in 1815 of the independence they had attempted to win, it was by the sword that they had attempted to win it. The conclusion was that, though Russia should pay closer attention to the demands of Polish nationality, an independent Poland

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was a 'chimera' which would be the plaything of the powers and the 'nursling of domineering embassies'. The merit of Poland was that it showed all sides acting badly and denied the urgency of the call for action that the liberal position demanded. It established a relativism of judgment in relation to contemporary enthusiasms and dismissed in advance the understanding of British foreign policy that was to be developed in the Liberal party in the future. In elaborating his position, Salisbury offered not only argument but also heroes. He praised his heroes - Castlereagh; Wellington (with reservations); the younger Pitt who had combined in his 'lofty and elevated character' a degree of 'stainless purity', practical tact and 'forgetfulness of self which had not been equalled by any of his successors. By way of contrast he attacked Gladstone and Bright. Of the two, Bright - 'one of the ablest demagogues of the century' was the earlier and more obvious target. It was Bright in thefiftieswho was described as aiming to invert the 'distribution of power' on which the Constitution had rested and who, by 'buying the assistance of the mob' in order to 'exalt the factory and depress the land', would end by swamping the influence of factory and land alike. Salisbury did not care whether the mob on which Bright depended was a rural or an urban one; he was clear that any attempt to use either mob to effect significant political changes would make the working classes - especially the urban working classes - the 'heirs apparent of political power' in Britain. In the sixties, the accusation against Bright was that he was a 'Yankee by nature', owed his primary allegiance to the 'government that rules in Washington' and did not understand that American democracy was repulsive. He ignored the limitlessness of American land and, in inciting the working classes to believe that it would be as easy to obtain it in England as in the United States 'if only the political institutions were the same', raised expectations which would either have to be disappointed or would be violent and revolutionary in their consequences. There were many passages of concentrated irony at the expense of Bright's willingness to condone violence in America when he had attacked it in the Crimea, and of his innocent approval not only of Lincoln but also of Louis Napoleon's 'democratic Caesarism'. Bright was an obvious target; Gladstone became one. But where Bright was an external figure in Salisbury's body politic, Gladstone's

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intellectual background was the same as his own. Both were Anglicans; both were Tractarian fellow-travellers; and both assumed that Christianity was the crucial issue of the age. Where they differed, and why Gladstone had to be attacked, was that he left the impression of wishing to replace the property-based Anglicanism of his youth with the eclectic, free-thinking democracy that had to be avoided in the future. Gladstone was not as crude as this; his Liberalism was an attempt to retain moral control by abandoning an untenable political religion. Salisbury either believed that the religious position could be held or wished to establish political credentials by asserting that it should be. From either standpoint, Gladstone looked like a traitor not just because he was abandoning the ramparts but because he was opening the gate to democracy. Salisbury did not suggest that Gladstone understood the implications of his actions. But, at a time when he could perfectly well have done otherwise, he had shifted taxation from the class that lived by manual labour to the classes above them, and had used his position as a minister to bid for Radical support in the struggle for the succession to Palmerston. The 'sweeping' nature of his 'pale of the constitution speech' in 1864 was said to have cleared 'at a single bound . . . the whole space that separates the existing English constitution from a system of universal suffrage'. From 1864 onwards, Gladstone replaced Bright as the real enemy. For this role he had many qualifications. He had used Odger as a direct link with the 'terrible organizations of the working men'. He had treated the radicals in the 1865 parliament with a 'consideration, almost . . . an awe' that no minister had shown before, and had shown towards the body of the Liberal party an 'imperviousness' and 'affectation of humbleness' which were both false and extravagant. He had left no doubt that, if returned to office 'upon the shoulders of the politicians who hold their debates in Trafalgar Square', he would give the existing political classes the 'leisure' of 'absolute political annihilation'. In Bright, Gladstone and their trades union allies Salisbury saw harbingers of doom, prognostications of a bleak future. He saw them, however, not just as a party politician, though he was one. If his colours were black because politicians needed to be frightened, that is not to say that his pessimism was feigned, any more than Tocqueville's, Acton's or Burckhardt's was. On the contrary, it was a genuine expression of Christian pessimism. It was in pursuit of coherently

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Christian intuitions that he posited two connected but distinct types of positive politics in these years. Of Salisbury's tactical positions, little needs to be said. His reasons for disliking Disraeli may have had personal, racial or class origins. They produced recurrent attacks - during Palmerston's lifetime on Disraeli's refusal to see that Palmerston's Liberalism should have been supported against Blight's Radicalism, after Palmerston's death for extending the Tory/Radical co-operation that had been so offensive beforehand; and in both periods because Disraeli's determination to embarrass Palmerston and the Whigs had given the Radical groups far greater influence in the Liberal party than their numbers entitled them to. In the early sixties, Salisbury's view was that Bright had so much offended the satisfied classes that a position of resistance was a possibility and he blamed Disraeli for failing to construct it. His explanation - a 'high political' one - was that Bright, Gladstone and Disraeli between them had subverted the will not just of the House of Commons but of the wealthier classes outside it, and had been able to do this because the forces of resistance were divided and hostile to one another. Salisbury wore his Conservatism loosely; he made a point of not being, as he thought Liverpool had been, a Tadpole and Taper* politician. He argued, however, that the Conservative party had a duty to protect property. His most positive aim was to persuade the Conservative party to resume its 'organic relationship to great issues' by adopting the 'anti-Radical, anti-revolutionary' platform that was natural to it. In Salisbury's politics the primary problem was to curb passion and selfishness in a way that would avoid unnecessary restraints on freedom. For him freedom was a central conception, not because men were naturally good but because the only reason why they should restrain one another was for mutual advantage. His negative aim was to remind the optimism of the age that the 'crust' which civilization drew over 'the boiling lava of human passion' was so thin that failure to maintain a just relationship between freedom and restraint would produce the odious consequences that had been produced in France and America. By freedom Salisbury meant, in the most personal sense, being left alone. By a free state, he meant one in which 'a man may go where he likes and do what he likes so long as he does not injure his neighbours'. He meant a state in which no more restraint was imposed than was

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necessary to meet this requirement. He rejected the idea that a free state was one which produced self-fulfilment for its members. In his view freedom was what a man did with himself, and it was self-evidently desirable that he should have as much of it as possible. In taking this view, Salisbury was neither random nor naive. He was well aware of its implications, and did not hesitate to explain them. He explained that social structures existed independently of 'the state', and imputed a priority in worth to the arrangements which they had developed. He wrote of property as though it existed independently of the actions of governments, and he treated as tantamount to theft any attempt by government to tax property for purposes more extensive than the ones described above. That he said so without inhibition was the result of his connected beliefs that Political Economy was right, and that the independently generated structure of property was both prior to the determination of governments, and something that governments had a duty to protect. He believed that, unless an independently generated structure of property was preserved in England, freedom was likely to be as much restricted as it had been in France and the United States. Salisbury was not arguing in favour of 'aristocracy', which in England, he agreed, had ceased to be a viable conception in 1832. He argued, on the contrary, in defence of the inequality of property which the independent structure had produced. He saw property as sustaining the classes which 'represented civilization', and as producing men of reason to perform the functions of the state. He found in their activity the only guarantee that a state could mediate between 'opposing interests and clashing sentiments', and he emphasized that 'free institutions carried beyond the point at which the culture of a nation justifies them, cease to produce freedom'. It was because the propertied classes alone could provide a 'tenacious organization' which embodied whatever culture a society was capable of that the legislature ought to represent their point of view. Political equality, on this view, was not only a folly but also a chimera. The 'true guarantee of freedom' lay more in the 'equilibrium of classes than in the equality of individuals'. It was to freedom in this sense that Salisbury attributed an indispensable role in the 'moral, material and intellectual progress of mankind'. In these years Salisbury made general statements of the sort which have been quoted in the preceding pages. He made a point, however, of not wishing to be understood generally, and of avoiding the tempta-

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tion to reduce political wisdom to the 'scientific formulae of an abstract polities'. 'When great men get drunk with a theory', went an early dictum, 'it is the little men who have the headache': he went to great lengths to establish that he was thinking historically, expressing his general sentiments through consideration of the benefits which their historic constitution had brought to Englishmen. The claims Salisbury made on behalf of the British Constitution were extensive. He praised the 'feebleness and pliancy' of the Executive, the 'equilibrium' between local and national government, and the principle that 'its rulers are the chief enemy a nation has to fear'. He defended the freedom of the press as an antidote to the caucus politician and attached the highest importance to English statesmen's ability to represent 'the whole of England'. By 'the whole of England', Salisbury meant the million and a quarter electors. He claimed that the existing cohesion between rulers and ruled depended on the House of Commons being 'the organ of an educated minority'. But he regretted the Conservative party's identification with landed wealth and its predominance in the House of Lords. He wanted it to do what Pitt had done in the 1790s - rally the middle and upper classes against Jacobinism so that the owners of manufacturing and commercial wealth would join the landed interest as 'natural friends of order' in the 'great struggle' to decide who should govern the world's 'greatest commercial and industrial empire' in the future. Salisbury's ideal was a tone and manner which reflected the tone and manner of refined and educated men. He was as critical of the British Army for allowing its manners to deteriorate in India as he was of trades unionists for the deterioration in public manners for which they had been responsible in England. He shared Burke's regard for established institutions in exotic countries and repeated Burke's identification between ideological Jacobinism and the uneducated Jacobinism of Warren Hastings. He found it absurd to imagine that there could be responsible government in New Zealand when an important party aimed to use governmental power to goad the Maoris into rebellion in order to confiscate their land after they had been defeated. In all the respects which we have discussed so far, Salisbury claimed that a socially secure upper-class parliament was essential for a free state. He claimed that most Whig, Liberal and Conservative politicians and all reasonable members of 'private society' agreed, and should not only make it clear that they did so but should also give public expression to their solidarity.

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Salisbury did not do much to generalize his position. Certainly he paid little attention to the post-Anglican implications of the 'natural identity' of duty and interest which he discerned between the holders of 'accumulated capital' and the holders of 'accumulated thought'. In the 1860s, when a handful of votes could be decisive in a gentrydominated parliament, his position, where not simply Anglican, was a class one in which, as he wrote at the beginning of The Reform Bill in April 1866, the votes of some half-dozen Whig members will probably decide whether the aristocratic constitution upon which their historic party has been built up, is or is not to be sacrificed to the tactics or the blunders of the hour. If, moved by the importunity with which they have been beset, or by some paltry personal fear, they are false to their real belief, the step they take can never be retraced. We shall only have the melancholy consolation of reflecting that if the classes who now hold political power have not courage enough to uphold their own convictions, at a juncture so momentous, against the threat of demagogues or the entreaties of placemen, they have lost the moral title to rule and are fit only to be cast aside.

II The denunciation of the 'age of principle' quoted in the first passage at the head of this chapter was written in the course of a discussion of foreign policy. It could as easily have been applied more generally. One of Salisbury's chief objects in asserting a positive politics was to show up the politics of principle for what they were, to free legislators from capitulation to them and to put sentimental, liberal, Manchester and Quaker principles into a proper perspective. He was not a cynic, but he used cynicism and irony against principles he disliked, and was able to do this not only because he disliked them but because he had a theological conception of their status. Salisbury's conception of Christianity was not simple because Christians were surrounded by enemies, because their enemies were influential and because polemic was needed if the enemies were to be defeated. The enemies were numerous and effective. In exposing them, Salisbury was as critical of Christians as he was of those who were attacking them. Salisbury had made a world tour when young, read widely in foreign languages, especially German, and in later life spent an annual holiday at a villa he had bought in France. But his thinking was about England. While recognizing that the religious position in England was different

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from the religious position on the Continent, he recognized that it was similar in one important respect - that it showed Christianity contracting. In his religious journalism, as in everything else, Salisbury was a party politician who used Anglicanism as a political weapon - to convert Whigs from their Whiggery and Liberals from the Liberal party, and to destroy the anti-Conservative influence exercised over Anglican opinion by Gladstone and the Peelites. To some extent, therefore, he needed to make his account a frightening one. But he also shared the fears he wished others to feel about the threats from Dissent and Infidelity. In relation to the former, Salisbury both confirmed the Anglican position and pointed out contradictions in the Dissenting one. He sketched its pedigree from the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, and drew attention to incompatibilities between dissenters who wanted to replace Anglican formularies with other Establishment formularies and those who followed the Civil War Independents in wanting to get rid of Establishment formularies altogether. He left no doubt that organized Nonconformity aimed to humiliate the Church of England, to filch her endowments, and to reduce her to the status of a sect. In discussing Dissent, Salisbury combined irony, relativism, and historical knowledge. He pointed out that the victims of the Clarendon Code (the objects of bicentenary celebrations in 1862) had been the persecutors of the 1650s. He discerned a disagreeable connection between puritan violence, seventeenth-century puritan divines and nineteenthcentury democratic theory, and he associated the modern advocates of the Puritan Sunday with the New England settlers who had suppressed religious liberty, infringed the terms of their charter and killed the Indians instead of Christianizing them. He asserted that the gains made by Nonconformity at the expense of the Church of England would end by strengthening Infidelity. By Infidelity, Salisbury meant neither the atheism of the Enlightenment (which he no longer thought effective) nor the Cobdenite belief that commerce could make men peaceful where Christianity had failed to do so. On the contrary, he meant German Romanticism. This was not Salisbury's only target. He also attacked Renan, Comte and the 'cesspools of filth and adultery' through which French novelists had reflected the revolutionary experience. But he felt a special aversion to German theology and a special desire to diminish the solemnity with which it was received in England. He gave particular attention to

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Schleiermacher, Schelling, Schlegel and Hegel, and to the 'sentimental metaphysics' which 'the mere mention of Goethe's name tended to inspire in German critics'. 'Sentimental metaphysics' was a key conception. Salisbury connected it with 'subjectivity', the 'internal consciousness', and the claim that the greatest truths are 'felt, not proved'. He saw it issuing in an improper emphasis on the inner feelings and the inner life, leading through Strauss's and Feuerbach's replacement of God by man's 'moral nature', to the establishing of 'Pure Reason . . . Intuition and Spiritual Insight' both as short cuts through Logic and scientific investigation, and as guarantees that Christian, or indeed any other, morality would be subverted. Salisbury was not above a certain sly misrepresentation; nor did he miss the chance to sneer. He sneered at F. C. Baur, he sneered when Bismarck's arrival in office made it intolerable that the money raised by Strauss's lectures on Lessing - lectures designed to encourage public subscription for a German navy - should be given to the Prussian government. He connected Goethe's 'flirtations' with his 'metaphysics', showed Schlegel's mistress owing it to 'her inner life' that she should have a divorce, and described Schleiermacher's 'righteous teaching of the necessity of inward marriage' as merely an 'instinct for coveting another man's wife'. Salisbury was hostile to neology and wished to halt its progress. At first he affected not to regard it as a threat. Even when it became one - in the early sixties - he still refused to believe that it would make an impact on popular religion or survive theological investigation. In respect of the first, he was willing to allow time to show. About the second he was much less optimistic - not least because of the doubts he entertained about the Church of England's theological capability. Salisbury had the mind of a High Churchman and shared most High Church sentiments, including a sentiment of distaste for Evangelical unction. He did not object to the Evangelical Movement and he wrote approvingly of the simplicity and zeal it had shown earlier in the century. But he was critical of its performance as an ecclesiastical party, and of the damage it was doing to the intellectual standing of the episcopate. He wrote of the 'incubus of narrow-mindedness' which was 'brooding over English Society'. Salisbury's journalism included a large number of attacks on the bishops. He attacked them for their 'sanctimonious greed' and for using the Ecclesiastical Commission to improve their own finances

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instead of the finances of the lower clergy. He attacked them for their mediocrity, for their ignorance, and for establishing a 'reign of rant' in which 'the narrowest theology' was expressed in the 'nasal accents of devout ejaculation'. Above all, he attacked them for a proclivity to tyranny, whether in proscribing Sunday Excursion Trains for the working classes or in using legal powers to secure 'uniformity of religious thought among the clergy'. He was particularly critical of Palmerston's episcopal appointments, in which he rightly saw the hand of Shaftesbury. Salisbury was as suspicious of bishops as he was of schoolmasters and judges, deploying a journalistic vigilance towards them and treating a free press as a necessary brake upon their power. This was an application of his libertarian principle - an extension of the belief that the professional classes needed watching. In the case of bishops, it was subsidiary to the desire to make them argue, and win the argument, against the intellectual enemies by which the Church of England was surrounded. He wanted them to argue with neology, to show up neology's fellow-travellers and to prevent ethnology subverting religion. He did not believe that they could do this and he believed that they would do the opposite if they persisted with evangelical theology and the baring of the soul. Where episcopal thinking reflected merely 'the lower average mind in the clerical body', the 'rising intellect of the nation' was said to be 'frightened' at the shackles in which the church's work had to be done and 'naturally shrank' from ordination in a situation in which a bishop had the power at any moment to compel either 'hypocrisy or ruin'. The idea that the Church of England had become a Nature Reserve, isolated from the nation's life and alienated from the thinking classes, was one that exercised Salisbury deeply. He wrote frankly about the effeminacy of the younger clergy, about the vent they supplied for the 'sentimentalism of maudlin emotions', and about the gulf between 'this form of the clerical mind' and 'the ordinary male mind' which was 'deep and daily deepening'. He was well aware that the High Church party was at least as vulnerable as the Evangelical. Salisbury had been an undergraduate at Christ Church in the period after Newman's conversion. On Derby's death in 1869, he was elected Chancellor of the University. He thought of Oxford as a seminary for the education of the ruling classes from which Catholics, Dissenters, Jews, and atheists should be excluded, and which should present

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Anglicanism in an effective and compelling form. In the previous decade he had been much exercised by the ineffectual bigotry of Pusey's treatment of Jowett. Salisbury did not defend Jowett's theology: he found it as misty and indistinct as he found F. D. Maurice and his German originals. But he gave two reasons for disliking the proposal to deny Jowett a proper salary for his Greek Chair when other professors were given proper salaries for theirs. First, that unlike other actions that had been taken against Essays and Reviews, it was designed to punish, not refute; secondly, that punishment would not only not be a prelude to effective persecution but would offend the deepest susceptibilities of the best minds amongst the young. Salisbury rejected the 'optimist philosophers'' belief that 'force cannot quench faith or check the current of opinion'. He wrote admiringly of the 'efficacy of the secular arm' in securing 'Spain, Italy and half of Germany to the persecuting church'. But he was clear that the persecution-phase was over and that clergymen who went through the motions of reviving it with only the powers that the Church of England had in the nineteenth century were guilty of a 'pious imbecility'. What he wrote about the persecutors of Colenso might well have been written about the persecutors of Jowett: that 'the suspensions and deprivations . . . of nineteenth century orthodoxy' were 'miserable' when compared with the 'drastic prescriptions' which had worked such 'magnificent results in the able hands of Torquemada and Alva'. Salisbury was exempt from Eliotesque pathos; he was not advocating persecution, merely sneering at Liberals and diminishing Tractarian pretension. His real objection to all the persecutions he discussed was that, in the existing condition of the world, where the persecutors had no power and no one had much authority, the only effect would be an immense retreat from Christianity. The Bishops cannot make a descent upon university undergraduates and shut them up in theological colleges [he wrote]. If Dr Pusey desires that all the young men who leave Oxford for a professional or Parliamentary career should belong to the extreme neological school, he will persist in the course which he has been recently pursuing. It is a sign of the times which ought not to be neglected, that the two men who were the chief supporters of Mr Buxton's motion in the House of Commons, for revising the law of clerical subscriptions, were men who, as undergraduates, had seen clerical subscription used as an implement of religious oppression against Professor Jowett. Dr Pusey appears to be unable to wean himself from the idea that University sanctions and censures really have a

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practical influence upon the convictions of men. The time is past when the belief of any one, young or old, could be influenced by the decision of any authoritative body. Not only have men ceased to be influenced by authority, but even argument appears to have lost its weight. The din of controversy, and the distinguished ability which the most conflicting schools have brought to bear upon theological disputes, seem to have left upon the minds of the young the impression that a good case may be made for everything. They appear to have cast themselves wholly upon the Scriptural test by results. 'By their fruits ye shall know them', is the touchstone with which they try the merits of the teachers who compete for their attention. Where they see a large-minded charity, a tender regard for scruples, an anxiety to elicit from the chaos of controversy arguments for peace, rather than incentives to discord, there they believe themselves to have found the genuine Gospel of Christ. There is probably much exaggeration in their view. They are too ready to despatch religious perplexities with the ready and easy test of sentiment, and to flinch from more laborious and more scientific investigations. But their present temper, though there may be much in it that is blameworthy and dangerous, is a fact which persons of influence have no right to overlook. Those who hold positions which identify them with the traditional belief of Christians are bound not to ignore the public opinion in the midst of which they live. If, with the mental phenomena of their age full in view, they persist in associating that taste for mean and teasing persecution which their generation casts out as contemptible and vile, with a profession of zeal for the holiest truths of religion, upon them and them alone must rest the responsibility for the wide-spread unbelief that will surely follow.

Salisbury's judgments were often tactical - suggestions that the battle against backsliding and unbelief should be fought on one ground rather than another and with one set of weapons rather than another. He was cautious about the legal weapon on the ground that 'the mode in which lawyers must needs handle sacred doctrine' was 'repulsive to men of reverential feeling'. He was even more cautious about the use of episcopal powers in relation to heresy, on the ground that few existing bishops understood theology. In the 1860s, Salisbury believed that the intellectual case for Christianity was being passed by. Where the Papacy preferred the allegiance of 'women and peasants' to that of intellect, he wanted to ensure that the Church of England deployed argument and learning, as well as rhetoric and ridicule, in confuting its enemies. He had no illusion about the difficulties it would encounter in face of the latitudinarian revolution which had occurred in the 'religious views of an influential part of the community'. This revolution - a 'speculative revolution of some magnitude' -

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was said to have had two characteristics. On the one hand it had involved a flight from 'traditional' religion by a large part of the educated classes, on the other it had involved a parallel flight from dogma and dogmatic formularies among both Churchmen and politicians. The two processes were connected and, though Salisbury tended to think that the first might go away, he believed that it would only do so if there was effective resistance to the second. The first was the 'dreamy sentimental delight in the vague' which the neologians had acquired from their German teachers. This Salisbury despised, while recognizing that it existed. He agreed that the desire to 'construct a creed out of gushing phrases' had 'spread like wildfire' among the 'clever men' who would become the 'leading men' in the universities and the lay professions in the future. At times, he affected to regard it as a passing phase - an elitist fad that would not survive, rather than a 'masculine' religion that would appeal to the mass of mankind. He did not deny, however, that it had allies and counterparts in parliament, and threatened the 'older forms of Anglicanism' that had 'hitherto monopolised the field'. He used it as a target for the ToryAnglican resistance that he sketched in a Quarterly Review article in July 1865. The Church in Its Relation to Political Parties was a show-piece. It asked at length whether the Church could exist without financial support and, given the fact that it could not, whether state or voluntary endowment was the better way of providing it. It warned both the clergy and Anglican laymen that they had to 'descend, if need be, upon the political arena' if the church was to be defended not only against the spoliation of her endowments but also against the erosion of her doctrines. The situation Salisbury was addressing was one in which the Church of England's formularies were determined by parliament. He did not suggest that parliament would alter the formularies or that the Church would fail to resist if it did. What he anticipated was an attempt to repeal the obligations by which the formularies were enforced - on the one hand by Anglicans who hoped to achieve reunion with Dissent, on the other by latitudinarians planning to uphold the Establishment by broadening its bases in other directions as well. This led him to predict that the abolition of Tests would be an 'invitation to unbelief, would drive believers out of the Church and, by effacing the Church's 'character as an exponent of revealed truth', would make it an instrument of a 'godless philanthropy'.

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Salisbury did not accuse the latitudinarians of being 'godless philanthropists', though he came near to saying that about Goschen, who was a converted Jew from Rugby. But he accused them of having a secular conception of education and argued that, once the creeds that touched 'the cardinal doctrines of our Faith' were tampered with, there would be no stopping short of the principle that the National Church should be 'co-extensive with the national belief. His main objects in the central part of the article were to establish that 'undogmatic religion' was new in Christianity and that, without dogma, neither Christianity nor morality would survive. Ill The discussion of Salisbury's religion has so far been confined to understanding the enemies that he was attacking. This has carried us a long way not only because political journalism of the sort that he was writing demanded enemies but also because he displayed a beleaguered mentality - a sense that the political power in England could no longer be relied on to enforce Christian Truth as it had done in the past. Salisbury was not a systematic writer; it is easier to see what he was against than what he was for. He was as conscious as Eliot of the contrast, and lack of contact, between the rich and educated and the Philistinism of the middle classes. Though he imputed a measure of passive religion to the rural poor, he gave it no positive emphasis. His fear of the political militancy of the urban poor did not blind him to their status as souls, but he was exercised by their imperviousness, their inability, so much at variance with the poor of the Roman Empire, to be creative in religion. He did not expect them to be creative now. He was concerned chiefly to safeguard Christianity's future by preserving it in the forms it had taken in the recent past. In this respect he distinguished between 'inwardness' on the one hand and the institutions which made inwardness possible on the other. So much of his writing was about endowment, establishment, and Anglican institutions that it is easy to suppose that these were his main preoccupations. Yet it is obvious that they were not - that in discussing the institutions of the Christian life he was interested chiefly in their use in ministering to the individual soul's relationship with God. In discussing these questions it is best to revert to Salisbury's conception of freedom - not only the freedom which he associated with

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381

property and the British Constitution but also freedom from the attempts of schoolmasters and sociological improvers to assault souls, whether of working men or of the schoolboys and undergraduates whom they had in their charge. Salisbury was as hostile to using the poor as 'spiritual plate-powder' for 'polishing up' the consciences of their betters as to the Arnoldian doctrine that a schoolboy's character was 'an article of manufacture' to be 'put together by . . . cunning artificers . . . called schoolmasters'. As much in encouraging schoolboys to reject by force the 'priggish insolence' involved in flogging at Thring's Uppingham as in affirming the obligation to leave the working classes to themselves, he asserted the importance of that spiritual capability or Christian liberty through which men make up their own minds (or decide not to make them up) about the matters that concern them most. By this, Salisbury did not mean that public schools ought not to have a Christian framework. From the fifties onwards he belonged to the committee of the Woodard schools in which he took the closest interest and on which he probably spent as much money as he could afford. He supported Woodard partly because Britain needed minds 'disciplined by the study of mechanics and chemistry', partly because Woodard had revived the Church of England's 'right' to 'educate the people of this country'. Salisbury recognized that the parish clergy were doing their best to 'obtain control over the lower classes'. He hoped that the Woodard system would bring an Anglican influence to bear on the 'future history and the current of political thought in the middle and upper classes of society'. About Establishment, Salisbury had no doubts. He thought of the clergy as a class of men separated from the world and 'living solely for the Gospel', but claimed that the voluntary system de-spiritualized them, imposed objectionable pressures on them, and made them overresponsive to the passions of their congregations. He presented endowment as more likely to maintain the 'grand imagination of the minister of Heaven disdaining to stoop to the lower cares of life or to mingle in the struggle for existence'. The affirmation of state endowment as the theoretical prerequisite to clerical autonomy was accompanied by embarrassment about its consequences in practice - and in particular about the need to argue the case for clerical subvention in view of the impossibility of assuming it in the nineteenth century. It was the embarrassment involved in arguing the case continuously that made him willing to go a long way to get

382

Recognitions

a settlement of the Church Rates question that would be acceptable to effective opinion for a considerable time to come. In discussing Church Rates, as in defending Establishment, Salisbury was aiming to stir up the Anglican clergy - to persuade them to act as agents of the Conservative party. We need not attach too much importance, therefore, to the flattering character he drew of them - their 'high class', the 'refinement of their education', their devotion to their 'lofty calling' or their consequent reluctance to 'mingle in political conflict'. What was important was the desire to prove that a clergy could be part of an Establishment and allied with the political power, and yet remain autonomous spiritually. The belief that this was impossible in the Church of England had been the breaking point between Newman on the one hand and the Tractarians who remained Anglicans after his defection on the other. Salisbury's position was not only unequivocally Anglican but provided a sensitive statement of the Anglican position. He recognized that problems arose when a Reformation church survived into a latitudinarian age; he laid out the price that had to be paid by a church that leant heavily on 'the arm of the flesh' once the 'arm of the flesh' had ceased to share its beliefs. On the other hand, he described the intimacy of the connections between autonomy, property and the provision of a Christian education, and pointed out that even sect-type churches had property to defend and rights to preserve and 'of all religionists' were 'commonly the foremost to seek the alliances of politicians and give in barter for it the popular influence acquired in the pulpit and the school'. Salisbury did not question the ideal of a Church that was independent of the State. But churches could not exist in a vacuum, and proclamation of Christ's Truth to the world entailed so elaborate a complexity of imperfections that dissenting indignation at the spectacle of the Anglican Establishment was irrelevant and degrading. This was a tactical position - a claim that Anglicans were not inferior to dissenters and in a sense had the same aims. It was also defensive a casuistical reaction to attack involving a weak, almost bursarial, view of the Church whose claims were carefully delimited. If the heart of the matter was preserved, the overriding argument was about the problematical nature of its social embodiments. One must not misunderstand Salisbury's tactic. He was turning dissenting assumptions against voluntaryism and in doing so was insinuating a dissenting argument into his apologetic. There was a similar

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complexity about his discussion of the Church of England's relations with learning, science and university education. Salisbury did not mince words about the cultural incapacity of the 'toiling masses'. But he was as dismissive of the literature of the literate; it was pathetic, he implied, that the chief evidence of the 'march of intellect' amongst the middle classes was the sensationalism, coarseness and crudity of the three-decker novel in the 'sea-side library'. Salisbury recognized that education was desirable. But he was suspicious of educationalists. He emphasized the difficulty of education and felt a deep mistrust of the intellectual 'short-cuts' embodied in popular educational practice. He felt no confidence in education as an agent of mass civilization. Like Eliot's, his educational writings were almost all about the education of the ruling classes. It is easy to see why he was cautious. He was conscious of the Anglican significance of Oxford and Cambridge in the past, and was not sure that they would remain Anglican in the future. He was exercised by the fact that Anglicanism no longer had an intellectual monopoly and could not rest its case on authority, and he feared that Tractarian or Evangelical intrepidity would alienate the 'intellect of the nation'. Feeling perfectly competent himself to argue neology out of court, he was opposed to coercion of neologists. He was even more opposed tofightingafixedbattle against science. In face of Darwin, Salisbury pointed out that Genesis was not central to Christianity, and should not be made an issue in defending it. He was as critical of attempts to subordinate scientific investigation to Old Testament cosmogonies as he was of attempts to reconcile it with them. He believed that reconciliation would be possible in the long run but was premature in the existing state of knowledge, and that the best way of protecting Christianity against aggressive attempts to subordinate it to Science was to let Science and Christianity develop independently of each other for the moment. In some respects this was another tactical reaction - the expression of a desire to avoid confrontation, so far as rejection of authority and advance in physical science were characteristic of the age, and so long as it was understood that the precision characteristic of scientific investigation, properly conducted, was as subversive of neology as Salisbury was himself. While rejecting neology, Renan and Straussianism as necessarily subversive of historic Christianity, he denied that there was any incompatibility between the religion of the Nicene and

384

Recognitions

Apostles' creeds autonomously developing itself on the one hand, and astronomical, geological and physical science autonomously developing themselves on the other. He repeatedly stated that Christianity had nothing to fear from 'the keenest logic' or the most searching scientific investigation. Salisbury assumed that Anglicanism had produced a type of religious character that was distinctively English. This had none of the grandeurs, or miseries, of Continental Catholicism. It touched neither the heights nor the depths of mystical experience. Yet it had admirable characteristics. It was 'sturdy, thickset and . . . phlegmatic' and had suffered few of the more blatant corruptions that religion had suffered elsewhere. It had struck deep roots outside the cities, had elevated lives at all social levels, and was closely connected with the social structure which Salisbury's politics were defending. The question that needs to be asked in conclusion is, did he believe that it would survive into the future? IV In the fifties and sixties, Salisbury had a Burkean conception of the rich, powerful, educated and civilized providing exemplifications of Christian truth for the benefit of the rest of the community. They did not do this, he implied, by indoctrination, discrimination, or the determination of taste alone. A community's faith was not mainly a matter of 'intellectual development', and the mass of men were a lot less interested in thought than in conduct. Religion, therefore, tended to wax or wane 'in almost exact proportion to the piety of its more conspicuous teachers', and it was the change in the location of power and influence and the threat to refinement made effective in 1867 that produced the first reason for pessimism about Christian prospects. This did not disappear in the years immediately after the Reform Act, when the main argument was about the 'absolute control' which would fall into the hands of the 'poorest classes in the towns' as soon as they learnt the lesson - the 'most dangerous which it is possible to teach the possessors of physical force' - that, in face of mob violence, the 'great conservative force opposed to them' consisted of 'painted wood'. At the same time there were hints that English workers were not fanatical, even when they wanted to have more money and do less work, and did not share the 'visionary ideas which had produced

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so much disaster on the Continent'. It became increasingly uncertain how far Salisbury applied to them the dictum that he applied to the working classes elsewhere, that the growth of large cities was an 'obstacle' to 'peaceable government'. Whether he had changed his mind or was handling the new ruling power carefully, he was more cautious after 1867 than he had been before. Once the deluge had occurred, he fought the battle for property and education without being so certain that the enemy was in sight, and in the secure certainty only that he was in sight on the Continent. Where previously civilization had been threatened by the urban working classes - with optimistic radicalism as their agent - he now implied that the working classes might respond if the political parties made it clear that socialism was a minority position held by alien intellectuals who had no roots among the English poor. The instrument of resistance was to be the Conservative party, which in the 1870s and 1880s was said to have an even greater opportunity than it had had twenty years before to show up the extreme wing of the Liberal party, to hammer at its similarity to the International and to establish that, if active politicians were not vigilant, extreme opinions would win as Bright's had won - by parliamentary manipulation. In these circumstances the middle classes were mistaken in 'belabouring' their old adversaries 'the squire and the parson'. The French Commune was the 'preface to a controversy which would transform politics into a social conflict the most critical and . . . embittered that has yet shaken the fabric of civilization', and a time would come when Conservatives and moderate Liberals would act out their class solidarity in defending institutions which were 'dear to both' against the 'vast overshadowing power' that was threatening them from below. In all this Salisbury was on the winning side, the reorganization of parties that occurred between 1884 and 1887 being little more than a confirmation of what he had predicted and worked for. The difficulty is to know whether the creation of a Unionist party of property, education and respectability did not diminish Church-State Anglicanism. It would be wrong to imply that Salisbury failed as an ecclesiastical politician, or to forget that Anglicanism has been the religion of many Conservative politicians in the twentieth century and that the predominance established by Salisbury and his family in the Unionist party gave Anglicanism a lease of life as a governing ideology which it would probably not have been given under any other leader. Nor is it unimpor-

386

Recognitions

tant that among the children of erstwhile Whigs, Chamberlainites, and philosophic Liberals who became Unionists or Conservatives in the following twenty years, many were conforming Anglicans, and that between the two World Wars, though nonconformity made few advances, there was a significant flow of intellectual conversions to Conservative Anglicanism even when, politically, they tended to be identified with Disraeli. These are considerations which the critic of Salisbury does well to remember. Nevertheless, the opposite point is the decisive one - the gradual elimination of Anglican teaching from schools (except public schools), the secularization of Oxford and Cambridge and the proliferation of secular universities, and the creeping advance of the intellectual fashions that Salisbury detested most. If one asks what Salisbury wanted or expected the future of Anglicanism to be like, the answer is obscure. He did not expect it to be operating in a confessional state, and he seems to have been more or less reconciled to this fact. He wanted it to operate as a state church so far as it could. But the church aspect was argued in a half-hearted way. He emphasized that the ultimate end of the religious life was an internal condition which was free from coercion and control, and allowed the religious to respond freely to God's Truths and Commands. In this respect he meant by freedom 'letting people do as they like', and he argued that religious freedom was threatened in the modern world less by the despotism of monarchs than by the despotism of peoples that it was from 'those among whom education had done little to control the natural tyranny of the human heart' that restraints would come most prominently in the future. It is difficult to know what it was that Salisbury wished to be defended once the Anglican monopoly had been breached. If, as he insisted, most men are unaffected by doctrine or theory and if the Church form of organization is only a convenience, then it may be that it is only conduct that needs to be protected. This, of course, was what Salisbury denied. He insisted on formularies and tests, and on the importance of dogma in the maintenance of belief. Yet sometimes this was merely anti-Liberal bravado: a determination to sneer at Liberalism rather than the statement of a systematic position. It is difficult not to intuit in all this the truncated Anglicanism of 1688, 1828 or 1854 - the reluctant acceptance of the fact that, if one cannot have an Alva- or Torquemada-like Church, or even a Laudian one dominating and directing the mind of the age, then the only ultimate alternative is simple, unreflecting piety: decency and devoutness of

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conduct, the soul holding to itself in the hope that God is listening, whatever the infidel world may be doing around it. In his period of political predominance between 1880 and 1902, Salisbury did not act out the part he had rehearsed between 1857 and 1866. He cooperated, as fallen men must, in the fallen world with which he was presented, meeting it in practice on its own terms, finding it, perhaps, less objectionable than he had expected and succeeding, through his public persona, in mitigating some part of its nastiness. He seems, however, to have had no doubt that nastiness was one of its leading characteristics. In his intellectual distaste for the world which had been created by popular literacy, Salisbury resembled Collingwood and Toynbee. In the privateness and detachment of his religion, he was closer to Eliot and Tolkien whose poetical worlds were more real to themselves than the world of politics sometimes was to him. In both respects, his pessimism was unrelieved. It is easy to find passages from his own pen which record these feelings. No passage of his records it better than a paragraph from the biography that his daughter wrote of him after his death. He was on his holiday on the Riviera [Lady Gwendoline Cecil wrote in volume II] and, walking along the mountain side, was discussing some recent action of the French Government, supported apparently by popular opinion, which suggested the opening of a frankly hostile attack upon Christianity as such. He quoted Professor Clifford's accusation against that religion that it had destroyed two civilisations and had only just failed in destroying a third - and he quoted it with agreement . . . We had been warned that Christianity could know no neutrality and history had verified the warning. It was incapable of co-existing permanently with a civilisation which it did not inspire and any such as came into contact with it withered. How much more must this be so with one that had been formed under its auspices and had subsequently rejected it. Such a society must inevitably perish. His voice and manner, as these reflections developed, grew heavily oppressed, and his eyes - looking out upon the sunlit sea beneath him - seemed to be filled with a vision of gloom as he dwelt with unforgettable emphasis upon the tragedy which would be involved in such a catastrophe.

13 Some Contemporary Doctrines I 'The old past is dying, its force weakening, and so it should. Indeed, the historian should speed it on its way, for it was compounded of bigotry, of national vanity, of class domination. It was as absurd as that narrow Christian interpretation which Gibbon rightly scorned. May history step into its shoes, help to sustain man's confidence in his destiny, and create for us a new past as true, as exact, as we can make it, that will help us achieve our identity, not as Americans or Russians, Chinese or Britons, black or white, rich or poor, but as men.' J. H. Plumb The Death of the Past 1969 p. 145. 'This notion of historians, of history devoid of aesthetic prejudice, of history devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations, is a figment of the imagination. The belief in it can only occur to minds steeped in provinciality - the provinciality of an epoch, of a race, of a school of learning, of a trend of interest - minds unable to divine their own unspoken limitations.' A. N. Whitehead Adventures of Ideas 1933 (1961 edition) P. 4. 'It is a strange land in which God's people live. I must retain my ideals among people who do not share them. I must demand moral principle where voices question the axioms on which my principle rests . . . I must sing though some tell me that it is the song of a dreamer. I must pursue a Christian policy though I know that any or every practicable policy means compromise with nonChristian m e n . . . I know that I am a stranger in the land. 'History has this utility; the student knows that however bad things seem at the moment, there were times when they were worse.' The Reverend Professor W. O. Chadwick How Shall We Sing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land, Sermon printed at the request of those who attended the 1966 Festival at which a new lecture room of [Cuddesdon] College to be called The Graham Room was opened 1966 pp. 1-2.

389

To write the history of a university faculty is in the most favourable circumstances a precarious undertaking. To write the history of a faculty in Oxford or Cambridge is more precarious still. In literary faculties, and especially in History, the connection between college and faculty teaching has always been complicated. Stubbs, who regretted the tutorial resistance that he encountered as a Professor in Oxford, was only the first of many who have registered concern from one side or the other at the dual nature of the teaching authority in the two universities. It is certainly the case that a formal knowledge of what faculties teach or examine, and of the appointments that they make, will provide no adequate indication of the ethos in which the teaching of these subjects has been enveloped. Whether through faculty or through college agency or through a mixture of both, however, the teaching of university subjects has been important. Faculties and colleges teach with authority, and they do this at a level which establishes assumptions. As promulgators of doctrine, faculties of the size and range of the History faculties in these two universities have had an influence which has been little studied, and is of as great a significance as the influence of publishers, of newspapers and of weekly, monthly, and quarterly magazines. In Volume II the problem will be discussed in detail. Here it is enough to state that in both Oxford and Cambridge the christianizing element in the teaching of History has been weak. In Oxford Christian teaching and writing have, of course, existed, as Stubbs,1 Oman,2 1. Rt Rev. William Stubbs (1825-1901). Fellow of Trinity College Oxford 1848-50. Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Fellow of Oriel College 1866-84. Bishop of Chester 1884-87 and of Oxford 1888-1901. Author of The Early Plantagenets 1876, The Constitutional History of England 3 vols. 1874-78, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediaeval and Modern History 1886, Ordination Addresses 1901, Biblical Criticism 1906. 2. Sir C. W. C. Oman (1860-1946). Fellow of All Souls College Oxford 18831946, Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1905-46, MP (Cons.) Oxford University 1919-35. Author of A History of Greece 1888, Warwick the Kingmaker 1891, A Short History of the Byzantine Empire 1892, A

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Some Contemporary Doctrines I 1

2

391

3

Feiling, Marriott, Blake and others have shown in the course of developing a primarily political conservatism. Cobb's4 Christianity is probably unique, but in all decades there have been equivalents of Walsh,5 Bennett6 and McManners7 and an attention to the Christian structure of European and of mediaeval history. Moreover, there have been extensive discussions of religion from a non-Christian point of

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

History of England 476-918 1893, A Short History of England 1895, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages 1898, Seven Roman Statesmen 1902, Things I Have Seen 1933, On the Writing of History 1939, Memories of Victorian Oxford 1941 etc. Sir Keith Feiling (1884-1977). Fellow of All Souls College Oxford 1906-11, Student and Tutor of Christ Church Oxford 1911-46. Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1946-50. Author of History of the Tory Party 1640-1714 1924, England Under the Tudors and Stuarts 1926, British Foreign Policy 1660-1702 1930, Sketches in Seventeenth Century Biography 1930, The Second Tory Party 1938, The Life of Neville Chamberlain 1946, A History of England 1950, Warren Hastings 1954 etc. Sir J. A. R. Marriott (1859-1945). Fellow of New College and then of Worcester College Oxford. Secretary to Oxford University Extension Delegacy 1895-1920. MP (Cons.) for Oxford City 1917-22 and for York 1922-29. Author of Makers of Modern Italy 1889, George Canning and His Times 1903, The Life and Times of Lucius Cory, Viscount Falkland 1907, The Evolution of Prussia (with C. G. Robertson) 1915, The Eastern Question 1917, England Under the Tudors 1922, Economics and Ethics 1923, The Crisis of English Liberty 1930, The Life of John Colet 1933, Memories of Four Score Years 1946 etc. Robert Blake, Lord Blake (1916- ). Student of Christ Church Oxford 194768. Provost of The Queen's College Oxford 1968- . Life Peer 1971. Author of (ed.) The Private Papers of Douglas Haig 1952, The Unknown Prime Minister 1955, Disraeli 1966, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill 1970 etc. Richard Cobb (1917- ). Lecturer in History at Aberystwyth 1955-61. Fellow of Balliol College Oxford 1962-72. Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College Oxford 1973- . Author of Des Armies Revolutionnaires 1961-63, Terreur et Subsistence 1965, A Second Identity 1969, The Police and the People 1970, Reactions to the French Revolution 1972, A Sense of Place 1975 etc. John Walsh (1927- ). Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge 1952-58 and of Jesus College Oxford 1958- . Author of (ed. with G. V. Bennett) Essays in Modern Church History 1966, and of Enthusiasm and Experience 1980. Rev. G. V. Bennett (1929- ). Lecturer in History, King's College London 1954-59. Fellow, Dean of Divinity and Lecturer in Modern History at New College Oxford 1959- . Author of White Kennett 1957, (ed. with John Walsh) Essays in Modern Church History, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688-1730 1975. Rev. J. McManners (1916- ). Professor of History at Tasmania 1956-59, at Sydney 1959-67, at Leicester 1967-72, and of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford 1972- . Author of French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien R.P.D.—O

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Recognitions 1

view, Trevor-Roper (in a Whig-Anglican way) and Hill2 and Thomas3 (in other ways) providing examples. On the whole, however, among Oxford historians, almost the only important, serious and explicit academic defences of Christianity have come from Freeman,4 Powicke5 and Southern.6 In Cambridge, in addition to those who are discussed elsewhere in

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Regime 1960, The French Revolution and the Church 1969, Church and State in France 1870-1914 1972 etc. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton (1914- ). Fellow of Merton College Oxford 1937-39. Student of Christ Church Oxford 1946-57. Regius Professor of Modern History and Fellow of Oriel College Oxford 1957-80. Master of Peterhouse Cambridge 1980- . Author of Archbishop Laud 1940, The Last Days of Hitler 1947, The Gentry 1540-1640 1953, Historical Esrays 1957, The Rise of Christian Europe 1965, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change 1967, The Philby Affair 1968, The European Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 1970, The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century 1970, Princes and Artists 1976, A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse 1976. Christopher Hill (1912- ). Fellow of All Souls College Oxford 1934-38. Fellow of Balliol College Oxford 1938-65. Master of Balliol College Oxford 1965-78. Author of The English Revolution 1640 1940, Lenin and the Russian Revolution 1947, Economic Problems of the Church 1956, Puritanism and Revolution 1958, The Century of Revolution 1961, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution 1965, Anti-Christ in Seventeenth Century England 1971, The World Turned Upside-Down 1972 etc. etc. See above p. xvii. E. A Freeman (1823-92) Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1884-92. Author of Principles of Church Restoration 1846, History of Architecture 1849, Poems (with G. W. Cox) 1850, The History and Conquests of the Saracens 1856, History of Federal Government 1863, The History of the Norman Conquest 6 vols. 1867-79, Historical Essays 1871-79, The Growth of the English Constitution 1872, The Unity of History 1872, Comparative Politics 1873, The Ottoman Power in Europe 1877, The Historical Geography of Europe 1881, The Office of the Historical Professor 1884, Disestablishment and Disendowment 1885, The Chief Periods of European History 1886, The Methods of Historical Study 1886, William the Conqueror 1888, Fifty Years of European History 1888 etc. Sir F. M. Powicke (1879-1963). Professor of Modern History at Queen's University Belfast 1909-19. Professor of Mediaeval History at Manchester 1919-28. Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1928-47. Author of The Loss of Normandy 1913, Ailred of Rievaulx 1922, Mediaeval England 1931, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages 1935, History, Freedom and Religion 1938 etc etc. Sir Richard Southern (1912- ). Fellow of Exeter College Oxford 1933-37 and of Balliol College 1937-61. Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1961-69. President of St John's College Oxford 1969- . Author of The Making of the Middle Ages 1953, Mediaeval Humanism and Other Studies 1970, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages 1970 etc.

Some Contemporary Doctrines I 1

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2

this book, there have been Creighton, Acton, Figgis, Cunningham,3 Gwatkin,4 Sykes5 and Whitney.6 Few of the most influential Cambridge historians since the foundation of the Cambridge History faculty in the 1870s, however, have been more than culturally or nominally Christian, Some who have been (Clapham, for example) wrote about subjects which either had, or were treated in a way that ensured that they had, no Christian content, while some of the most obviously Christian 1. Rt. Rev. Mandell Creighton (1843-1901). Fellow of Merton College Oxford 1867-75. Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge 1884-91. Bishop of Peterborough 1891-97 and of London 1897-1901. Author of Life of Simon de Montfort 1876, The Tudors and the Reformation 1876, History of the Papacy during the Reformation 1882^-94, Persecution and Tolerance 1894, The English National Character 1896 etc. 2. J. E. E. D. Lord Acton (1834-1902). MP (Lib.) for Carlow 1859-65 and for Bridgnorth 1865-66. Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria 1892-95. Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge 1895-1902. Author of Lectures on Modern History 1906, Historical Essays and Studies 1907, The History of Freedom and Other Essays 1907, Lectures on the French Revolution 1910 etc. etc. 3. Ven. William Cunningham (1849-1919). Professor of Economics at King's College London 1891-97. Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge 1891-1919. Archdeacon of Ely 1907-19. Author of The Influence of Descartes on Metaphysical Speculation in England 1876, Christian Civilization 1880, The Churches of Asia 1880, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce 1882-1903, St. Austin and his place in the History of Christian Thought 1886, The Path Towards Knowledge 1891, Alien Immigrants to England 1897, An Essay on Western Civilization in its Economic Aspects 1898, The Gospel of Work 1902, The Rise and Decline of the Free Trade Movement 1904, The Meaning of Religious Education 1907, The Cure of Souls 1908, The Causes of Labour Unrest 1912, British Citizens and their responsibility to God 1916, The Increase of Religion 1917, The Common Weal 1917, etc. 4. Rev. H. M. Gwatkin (1844-1916). Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge 1891-1916. Author of Studies of Arianism 1882, The Arian Controversy 1889, The Gospel and Society 1893, in R. Archbold (ed.) Essays on the Teaching of History 1901, The Eye for Spiritual Things 1906, The Knowledge of God 2 vols. 1906, Early Church History 1909, (with others) Early Ideals of Righteousness 1910, The Bishop of Oxford's Open Letter 1914, England's Case Against Germany 1916, Church and State in England to the Death of Queen Anne 1917, The Sacrifice of Thankfulness 1917. 5. Very Rev. Norman Sykes (1897-1961). Professor of History at Exeter 193133 and at Westfield College London 1933-44. Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge 1944-58. Dean of Winchester 1958-61. Author of Edmund Gibson 1926, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century 1934, Old Priest and New Presbyter 1956, William Wake 1957, From Sheldon to Seeker 1959, Man as Churchman 1960 etc. 6. Rev. J. P. Whitney (1857-1939). Lecturer in History at Owen's College Manchester. Parish Priest 1890-1900 and 1906-09. Principal of Bishop's College Lennoxville, Canada 1900-05. Professor of Ecclesiastical History at

394

Recognitions

Cambridge historians (Coulton,1 for example, Glover2 and Needham3) were not lecturers in the History Faculty. In the 1960s and 1970s the position has been much the same as it has always been. If one were asked to name the most influential Cambridge historians in the last two decades, one's answer would vary according to the sort of question one thought this was. If it was a question about teaching - whether by lecturing or by college supervision - the answer would be something like Plumb4 and McKendrick5 in the latter case and Gallagher,8 Elton7 King's College London 1908-18. Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge 1919-39. Author of The Reformation 1907, The Episcopate and the Reformation 1917, The Council of Nicea 1928, Hildebrandine Essays 1932, Reformation Essays 1939. 1. G. G. Coulton (1858-1947). Fellow of St John's College Cambridge. Author of innumerable historical, religious and polemical writings on mediaeval and reformation life and religion and against Roman Catholicism, including Public Schools and the Public Needs 1901, Chaucer and his England 1908, The main illusions of pacifism 1916, Christ, St Francis and Today 1919, The Roman Catholic Church and the Bible 1921, Five Centuries of Religion 192350, Art and the Reformation 1928, In defence of the Reformation 1931, Inquisition and Liberty 1938 etc. etc. 2. T. R. Glover (1869-1943). Fellow of St John's College Cambridge 1892-98 and 1901-39. Professor of Latin in Canada 1896-1901. Author of Life and Letters in the Fourth Century 1901, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire 1909, The Jesus of History 1917, Progress in Religion 1922, The Influence of Christ in the Ancient World 1929, The Challenge of the Greek 1942, Cambridge Retrospect 1943 etc. 3. Joseph Needham (1900- ). Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge 1924-66. Master of Gonville and Caius College 1966-76. 1933-66 University Reader in Biochemistry. Author of (ed.) Science, Religion and Reality 1925, Man A Machine 1921, The Sceptical Biologist 1929, Chemical Embryology 3 vols. 1931, The Great Amphibium 1932, A History of Embryology 1934, Time the Refreshing River 1943, Chinese Science 1946, Science and Civilization in China 1954- etc. etc. etc. 4. J. H. Plumb (1911- ). Fellow of King's College Cambridge 1939-46 and of Christ's College 1946-78. Master of Christ's College 1978- . Professor of Modern English History at Cambridge 1966-74. Author of England in the Eighteenth Century 1950, Chatham 1953, Sir Robert Walpole 2 vols. 1956-60, Men and Places 1962, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675-1725 1967, The Death of the Past 1969 etc. 5. Neil McKendrick (1935- ). Fellow of Christ's College Cambridge 1958 and of Gonville and Caius College 1958— . University Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1961- . 6. J. A. Gallagher (1919-80). Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge 1948-63 and 1971-80. Beit Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth at Oxford 1963-70. Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge 1971-80. Author with R. E. Robinson of Africa and the Victorians 1961 etc. 7. G. R. Elton (1921- ). Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1949-63. Reader

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1

and Skinner in the former. If it was a question about the direction of research or about a written contribution to academic thinking, then Gallagher, Elton, Wilson,2 Pelling,3 Norman,4 Hinsley,5 Chadwick,6 Ullmann,7 and Skinner are names that would come to mind. A third answer would be to list those Cambridge historians who, by their writings, have contributed to public thinking and discussion. In this category, until Norman broke in in 1978, Plumb, Finley8 and Elton were pre-eminent. Finley has a marxist element in his thought. Elton is almost a professional anti-marxist. They share with Plumb a tough-minded anxiety to erode virtuous explanations of historical events. Though Finley has written about religion and Plumb's writing has become heavily cultural, all three are most at ease in discussing politics. All three combine a Rankean assumption of objectivity with the political realism or faintly cynical Machiavellianism that has been a staple of Cambridge political thinking in the last three decades. This has been illuminating and intelligent and, in spite of recessions, has superseded the older liberalism. No-one who has absorbed the assumptions that are embedded in the writings of the most important

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

in Tudor Studies at Cambridge 1963-67 and Professor of Constitutional History 1967- . Fellow of Clare College Cambridge 1954- . Author of The Tudor Revolution in Government 1953, England Under the Tudors 1955, Reformation Europe 1963, The Practice of History 1967, Political History, Principles and Practice 1970, Modern Historians on British History 1970, Policy and Police 1972, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Government and Politics 2 vols. 1974, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 1977 etc. See above p. xvii. See above p. xix. Henry Pelling (1920- ). Fellow of The Queen's College Oxford 1949-65 and of St John's College Cambridge 1966- . Assistant Director of Research in History at Cambridge 1966-76 and Reader in Recent British History 1976-80. Author of Origins of the Labour Party 1954, America and the British Left 1956, Modern British Politics 1885-1955 1960, History of British Trade Unionism 1963, Social Geography of British Elections 1967, Popular Politics and Society in Later Victorian Britain 1968, Winston Churchill 1974 etc. See above, p. xix. F. H. Hinsley (1918- ). Fellow of St John's College Cambridge 1944-79 and Master of St John's College Cambridge 1979- . Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1949-69 and Professor of the History or International Relations 1969- . Author of Hitler's Strategy 1951, Power and the Pursuit of Peace 1963, Sovereignty 1966, Nationalism and the International System 1973 etc. See below, chapter 13. See below, chapter 13. Sir Moses Finley (1912- ). Fellow in History at Columbia University 193435. Lecturer in Classics at Cambridge 1955-64. Reader in Ancient Social and

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Cambridge historians of this period will doubt that, whether from a semi-marxist, a hedonistic, or a pragmatic viewpoint, the tendency has been to establish the primacy of earthiness over elevation of motive in the political process. In Gallagher these assumptions were masked by irony, wit, learning, and theflashyphrase. By Elton they have been extended in an imperial fashion. Others have obscured them by concentrated attention on the subjects in hand. At a certain point, however, detachment and concentration - and even the flashy phrase - can become something else. In this phase of thinking, it has been assumed that religion perverts truth. This assumption has pervaded thought. It has, however, never been explained, and has rarely been made explicit. The only place in which it has been made explicit is Plumb's book The Death of the Past. The body of Plumb's writing is about eighteenth-century English politics, the Italian Renaissance, Georgian manners, the Industrial Revolution and the history of leisure. There are short discussions of Victorian hypocrisy and evangelical exploration, a brief chapter on Wesley - 'a man in some ways comparable to Luther, Lenin, Gandhi or even Napoleon' - and an assessment of the secular heretics of the American student revolution in relation to whom Plumb, like other transatlantic purveyors of English liberalism, was hard put to it to combine sympathy with resistance to assaults on everything that he stood for. It is only in The Death of the Past that he has made a systematic statement about religion. The Death of the Past might have been written for The Thinkers* Library. Three-quarters of it was devoted to establishing that critical historical writing is a modern invention which emerged in Western Europe out of the relativistic duality perceived during the Renaissance and Enlightenment between the ancient paganism that had fallen in the fourthe century A.D. and the Christianity that succeeded it, and has become a professional occupation by freeing itself from the 'pasts' created by protagonists of Elites, regimes, aristocracies and priesthoods. The book affirmed that the pasts which are dead are pasts which had Economic History 1964—70 and Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge 1970-79. Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge 1957- and Master of Darwin College 1976- . Author of Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens 1952, The World of Odysseus 1954, The Ancient Greeks 1963, Aspects of Antiquity 1968, Ancient Sicily 1968, Democracy Ancient and Modern 1973, The Use and Abuse of History 1975 etc.

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ideological purposes, and that 'the future of history and historians' is to 'cleanse the story of mankind from those deceiving visions' by destroying all the attempts which western men have yet made to invent a 'purposeful Past' that would confer significance on Life. At the same time that Plumb was advocating professional history in this sense, he was also criticizing its exponents' refusal to provide universal syntheses of the sort that have been provided for the wider reading public in the past. He recognized that there are reputable reasons why 'trained historians' should find universal syntheses either useless or impossible. He argued that they are right to react against the ideological crudeness embodied in marxist, nationalist, conservative, liberal, religious, agnostic, providential, progressive, cyclical and linear interpretations. But, though these were a 'violation' of the historian's discipline, and an 'offence to his knowledge', he drew attention to the 'popular success' of Wells, Spengler and Toynbee in providing general illumination for earlier generations, and presented the social sciences as rivals in providing illumination for contemporaries. He was clear that the historical profession has an interest in showing that professional history can exercise a social influence and is not, as it has sometimes seemed to be, 'antiquarianism transmuted into scholarship'. As to the 'triumph of antiquarianism transmuted into scholarship', it may be permissible to remark,first,that it is an illusion, and, secondly, that it leads into the more serious illusion which lies at the heart of Plumb's position. The fact is that no-one is an antiquarian scholar. There may be historians, as there are certainly archivists, whose history is unrelated to their opinions, whose mental structure is not disclosed in their writings, and from whom nothing can be expected that is either intellectually illuminating or morally prophetic. There may be such historians, just as there are assuredly such archivists, but they are rare. It is rare indeed to find an historian who does not bear on his lips, his pen or his manner, the marks of his time and place, the impress of his education, the evidence of the truths he is trying to express or the power that he has to will by words the creation of a world that is as it should be. That is the first illusion - the first reason why Plumb's formulation is defective - because professional history is not dead to those who understand its life, because it has a more profoundly normative life than he suggests and because beneath its placid malice, conflict is continual, in magazines, lectures, supervisions, appointments committees and books, between four or five world-views which are not compatible

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with one another. And, of course, though The Death of the Past, supremely amongst Plumb's works, is a contribution to this conflict, the whole of the rest of his work is as well. In trying to find something for the historian to say which will give the public something significant to understand, Plumb implies the primacy of three conceptions - complexity, ingenuity and the human condition - by which he means that historical explanation must see the past as the outcome of human effort, intelligence and endeavour - a complicated process which Plumb summarizes in the word 'rationalism'. It is 'rationalism' that changes men's lives, carries them out of their pristine condition and makes possible the gains they have made in the course of their history. It is 'rationalism' too that has shown its worth through these achievements, and has brought to the multitude the benefits that had previously been confined to the few. We need not make too heavy weather of 'rationalism', except to point out that the position would look different if 'rationality' had been used instead. Put as Plumb puts it, it is simply an ideological affirmation. To claim that the past should be 'neither pagan nor Christian' is to close a position by simple assertion; so are the claims that 'the Christian myth dies hard', that 'the past' which the historian should preach 'belongs' to 'no nation and no class', and that it should not be used to 'stifle' men with a sense of their own 'helplessness'. The purpose becomes clear when it is added that 'any historian who is not blindly prejudiced' will admit that 'the ordinary man and woman, unless . . . caught up in a murderous field of war, are capable of securing a richer life than their ancestors' and that 'this has been achieved not by clinging to conservative tradition or by relying on instinct or emotion' but through 'a great extension of rationalism' which 'still has vast areas to conquer in politics and social organisation'. The Death of the Past is a short book. But it is long enough for Plumb to have taken a different direction if he had chosen to. And we may properly point out not only that ingenuity, complexity and common humanity are crudely ideological but also that the activities of the historical 'profession' are free inventions to which we bring what we will, into which we insert what we have to, and where ingenuity, complexity, common humanity, Marxist, nationalist, conservative, liberal, agnostic, providential, progressive, cyclical and linear interpretations, and the service of 'religion, morality, national destiny or the sanctity of institutions', may confer significance on subject-matters which have to be commanded if they are to provide illumination.

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In the divided contemporary situation nobody can expect any one of these directions to prevail to the exclusion of the others, however much it may be desirable that any one should. Plumb provides useful reminders of the negative destructiveness of professional history, its insistence on the rhetoric of truth and its objection to any ostensible commitment to causes in the past. But The Death of the Past is only The Whig Interpretation of History on a slow wicket, and there is no reason why it should persuade us to accept as truth Plumb's own interpretation over and above other interpretations which may make equal claims to consideration. The fact is that interpretative principles do not necessarily arise from professional history, even when they underpin it. History does still as a matter of fact provide 'sanctions for authority', even when it is most insistent that it does not do so. The 'old past' is not 'dying'; its 'force' is 'not weakening' and there is no reason why it should. For if it was 'compounded', as no doubt it was, of 'bigotry . . . national vanity and class domination' or was 'narrowed' by the 'Christian interpretation which Gibbon . . . scorned', it is obvious that The Death of the Past itself provides only a liberal-humanitarian demand that men should use history to 'achieve' an 'identity', 'not as Americans or Russians, Chinese or Britons, black or white, rich or poor, but as men'. Plumb puts his points crudely. But the points have been taken more generally and the assumption made very widely that, in professional history, commitment is subsidiary. In some cases this assumption is irresponsible; in others it is a result of embarrassment at the prospect of disclosing assumptions as painful as Plumb's. There can be little doubt that these assumptions exist in many places where taste, discretion or indolence prevent them being expressed. It would be wrong to leave the impression that the Cambridge History Faculty in the last twenty years has been militantly secular. Few of its members have been hostile either to religion or to Christianity. Some - Stokes1 and Lonsdale,2 for example - have been Anglicans who reflect a Christian standpoint even when it is not always apparent in their writings. As exponents of a more deliberately Christian historiography, 1. Eric Stokes (1924- ). Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth at Cambridge since 1970. Author of The English Utilitarians and India 1959, The Political Ideas of English Imperialism 1960; (ed., with R. Brown) The Zambesian Past 1966, The Peasant and the Raj 1978 etc. 2. John Lonsdale (1937- ). Fellow of Trinity College 1967. University Lecturer in History 1971- .

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2

3

Wormald, Fenlon, Lovatt, Riley-Smith4 and Pullan5 amongst lecturers have been paralleled by Linehan6 amongst Fellows of Colleges. Despite one masterpiece - Wormald's Clarendon -and the making of an oeuvre from Pullan and Riley-Smith, none of these has had a major influence, however. Rupp,7 the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History, who is a Methodist, might have had if he had been appointed twenty years before he was. His successor, Christopher Brooke,8 who has written a lot, was away from Cambridge from 1956 until returning to Rupp's Chair in 1977. In this period the only major Christian oeuvres have been those of Ullmann, Chadwick and Norman.

1. See above pp. 193-4. 4. Dermot Fenlon (1941- ). University Lecturer in History 1970-78. Fellow of Gonville and Caius College 1968-78. Elected to a teaching Fellowship of Peterhouse in 1977 but resigned before taking up the appointment in order to train for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Author of Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy 1972. 3. Roger Lovatt (1937- ). Fellow of Peterhouse 1962- . Senior Tutor of Peterhouse 1968-78. University Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1965- . 4. Jonathan Riley-Smith (1938- ). Fellow of Queens' College Cambridge and Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1972-78. Author of The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus 1967, The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem 1973 etc. etc. 5. Brian Sebastian Pullan (1935- ). Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1964-72 and Fellow of Queens' College. Author of Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice \91\,A History of Early Renaissance Italy 1973 etc. 6. Peter Linehan (1943- ). Fellow of St John's College Cambridge 1966- . Author of The Spanish Church and the Papacy 1971. 7. Rev. E. G. Rupp (1910- ). Methodist minister at Chislehurst 1938-46. Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Manchester 1956-67. Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge 1968-77. Author of Martin Luther, Hitler*s Cause or Cure 1945, Studies in the English Protestant Tradition 1947, Luther's Progress to the Diet of Worms 1951, The Righteousness of Man 1953, Some Makers of English Religion 1957, The Old Reformation and the New 1967, Patterns of Reformation 1969, Just Man 1979 etc. 8. C. N. L. Brooke (1927- ). Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge 1949-56 and 1977- . Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1953-56. Professor of Mediaeval History at Liverpool 1956-67. Professor of History at Westfield College, London 1967-77. Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge 1977- . Author of The Dullness of the Past 1957, From Alfred to Henry HI 1961, The Saxon and Norman Kings 1963, Europe in the Central Middle Ages 1964, Mediaeval Church and Society 1971 etc. etc.

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Like Elton and Finley, Ullmann1 is an exile, an Austrian who came to England after the Anschluss. Unlike them, however, he is a Roman Catholic by birth and by continuous subsequent conviction. His mother came of farming stock, his father was a country doctor. Ullmann himself was an undergraduate at Vienna and Innsbruck universities. After graduating in law, he became a member of the Austrian Judicial Service from which he fled in 1938, in part because he had been involved in prosecuting Nazis, in part because he was discovered to have had a Jewish grandmother. On arrival in England he lived first in Bath and then in Cambridge, until becoming a History teacher at Ratcliffe College in Leicestershire. From 1940 until 1943, when he returned to Ratcliffe College, he was a private in the Pioneer Corps, where he wrote some of his earliest articles. It was not until 1947 that he was appointed to his first university post in England (at Leeds at the age of 37). By the time he left Leeds to become a lecturer in Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, he had published three books and nearly twenty articles. During most of his period as a teaching Fellow of Trinity from 1949 to 1966, he had as history teaching colleagues not only Kitson Clark and Laslett but also Evenett, who was a Downside Catholic, and Gallagher who, having been brought up a working-class Irish Catholic in Birkenhead, retained as hangover a secularized pessimism about the human heart and condition. As an undergraduate, Ullmann had taken a sociological view of law, 1. Walter Ullmann (1910- ). Ed. Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck and Munich. Assistant Lecturer at University of Vienna 1935-38. War Service in British Army 1940-43. History and Modern Languages Master at Ratcliffe College Leicester 1943-47. Lecturer in Mediaeval History at Leeds 1947-49. University Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1949-57. Reader in Mediaeval Ecclesiastical History 1957-65. Professor of Mediaeval Ecclesiastical History 1965-72. Professor of Mediaeval History 1972-78. Fellow of Trinity College 1959- . Author of The Mediaeval Idea of Law 1946, The Origins of the Great Schism 1948, Mediaeval Papalism 1949, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages 1955, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages 1961, A History of Political Thought in the Middle Ages 1965, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages 1967, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship 1969, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages 1972, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages 1975, The Church and the Law in the Middle Ages 1975, The Papacy and Political Ideas in the Middle Ages 1976, Mediaeval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism 19111 Scholarship and Politics in the Middle Ages 1978 etc.

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so far as he had not merely learnt it as a technique. His first interest in law in anything more than a routine manner was in criminal law, in the course of preparing indictments in the Courts he worked in in Austria. This led him through the problem of metis rea to Freud, Jung and psychoanalysis, and by that route, to the history of the conception of intentionality. By the time he left Austria, he had not only practised law as an official and taught it in the evenings in Vienna University, but had also begun to develop an academic interest in its theory. When he arrived in England, Ullmann thought of himself as a jurisprudentialist or historian of law. He was concerned especially to define the connection between law and morality, and to show that it was not as distant as Austin and the English utilitarians had imagined. His main method was historical and with one important exception almost all his writing up to 1955 consisted of historical exposition of legal theories from the past. It was in the course of expounding Alanus, Bartolus, Baldus, John of Salisbury and Lucas de Penna, and in discussing the papal and canonistical writings which formed the subject-matter of Mediaeval Papalism and The Growth of Papal Government, that he showed how intimate the connection had been in the Middle Ages. About the defects of the Austinian theory of law, Ullmann was explicit. In the Decalogue and the teachings of Christ, he found support for the view that law and morals are 'mingled together'. Morals, historically, had aimed at 'making human beings ideal' and, indeed, had the power of 'inwardly refining, inspiring, elevating and ennobling the human race' by appealing to the individual's spiritual life. In that sense morals were 'dynamic' (where law was 'static and conservative'), the 'criterion of morals' being 'the good as such . . . that which is dictated and approved by the conscience, regardless of actual conditions and possibilities'. Care had to be taken not to translate moral principle into law before the ground had been prepared for its enactment, but it was also the case that justice was an ethical virtue, that it was the law that transformed it into a 'workable social reality', and that 'the fulfilment of moral principles' was 'essential to the development of the social life in a community'. These theorems - laid out in the first page and a half of an article on Baldus and in a rather ill-conceived article in the Juridical Review in 1942-43 - contained the seed of everything Ullmann wrote up to 1955. Through all the works that he wrote in these years, his main point was that mediaeval canonism was a 'gigantic attempt to translate scrip-

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tural and quite especially Pauline doctrine into terms of government', and that, alike in considering it and in considering the fourteenthcentury Italian jurists, it was necessary to understand that, in the Middle Ages, 'Christian moral philosophy . . . dominated all spheres of intellectual activity and fertilised all intellectual exercises'. About this Ullmann was as explicit as he had been about Austin. It was what he meant by the demand to rescue historical writing from antiquarianism. He wanted historians of mediaeval law to see the boundless ocean which lay before them, and he wanted them to understand that, however much had been owed to Roman law, mediaeval jurists had been 'sacerdotes', and 'legal science' the 'sacred science' of European civilization. In demonstrating this truth, Ullmann aimed to get behind nationalistic history to what he thought of as the central streams of European life and thought. In doing this, he worked initially on three subjects the jurisprudence of the Italian universities in the fourteenth century, canonistic and papal jurisprudence from the mid twelfth to the mid fourteenth century (including The Origins of the Great Schism), and canonistic papalism from the seventh century to the middle of the twelfth. Throughout he repeated that law was a 'function of the civilization in which it was articulated and a product of the factors determining the social life in an advanced and organised community', and that it was, in addition, or as a facet of this, the 'ideological resultant of the ideological component parts'. It should not be supposed that this ideological obsession, manifest in Ullmann's later writings, precluded other types of historical thinking. The Origins of the Great Schism contained a brilliant fusion of jurisprudential doctrine and situational political history in which the characters of the popes, the susceptibilities of the cardinals and the inadequacy of existing theory to deal with a practical dilemma were all presented as the pre-existing facts which had made Conciliar Theory possible. Despite lip-service to the importance of pre-existing fact in the development of theory, however, it remains true that the centre of interest lay in the theories themselves as manifestations of Christian truth. In The Mediaeval Idea of Law, the manifestations were by no means perfect since there were indications in fourteenth-century Italy that 'the modern state' with its 'secular criterion of public utility' was on the way. The discussion of Lucas de Penna, like the earlier discussions of Baldus and John of Salisbury, emphasized, nevertheless, the con-

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nections between Lucas's Christianity and the fact that, together with the rest of the post-Glossators, he had extended the sphere of legal science from the mere interpretation of individual legal rules into the investigation and presentation of the fundamental principles of law. Law, in other words, as Ullmann's account of the post-Glossators understood it, was no longer simply a regurgitation of Roman precepts. In their view - and also clearly in Ullmann's - it was 'the guide for human actions towards the goal destined for man as part of the universe', and there was, he wrote in 1946, no better exemplification than that given by the Italian jurists of the fact that society was organic and existence teleological, and that law was 'the . . . most symptomatic expression ... of civilisation'. One does not have the impression that Lucas de Penna was especially interesting in himself. Rather The Mediaeval Idea of Law must be regarded as the statement of a position - a proclamation of the need to understand that legal positivism made law, to misuse Eliot's phrase, into a 'fasces of expedients'. In the next ten years, there were variations and restatements, and there was a vast development in Ullmann's range of knowledge. But the most important feature of Mediaeval Papalism and The Growth of Papal Government was that they dealt with a literature which provided a purer exemplification of a Christian system than could be found amongst the late mediaeval Italian jurists, presented the canonists and the popes as exponents of a total ideology which embraced every conceivable branch of law in its 'divine' and 'human' aspects, and claimed authority to dispose of all the crowns and sceptres in the world. In explaining this, Ullmann's tone was dogmatic. Papal theory within its limits was said to be correct and imperial theorists to be inadequate in the terms of their own pre-suppositions. There were not two sides to the question; far less was there conflict between Church and State. What there was until the middle of the twelfth century, on the contrary, was an attempt to make God's Kingdom exist on earth - an attempt about which, moreover, neither the popes and canonists nor the priesthood over which they presided, had feelings of diffidence, or experienced that apologetic uncertainty characteristic of modern Anglicanism. The popes and canonists were not apologizing. They were clear that they alone had the power of God and that 'faith and religion', so far from being 'matters of private opinion', were 'issues of public law ... concern and interest'. The popes and canonists, in other words, were not just publicists or

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political theorists; nor were they merely theologians. They did not have at their disposal the 'usual paraphernalia of governments', but neither were they limited, as modern intelligentsias were, by their specializations. In this part of the Middle Ages, there was no specialization; knowledge was a unity; and papal canonism was superior to theology because it provided for concrete externalization. The canonists, indeed, despised theology, putting 'civil knowledge on the lowest step of the ladder whose intermediate position was taken by theology and whose august top was reached only by canonistic scholarship'. Canonism, then, though an academic, was also a practical activity the elaboration of the laws God had given for ruling the world and preparing for eternity. The Church was the repository of God's law, and authority in the Church depended on ordination, just as membership depended on baptism. Canonism, therefore, was hierocratic because it was the Pope - God's vicar - who 'commanded the world . . . as if it were . . . his property to be disposed of according to His will', and who acted in relation to secular rulers as spirit or soul directing body or matter. In this picture of the world, governmental authority was distinguished according to 'function'; it was the clerical function (sometimes thought of as an intelligentsia function) to indicate the relationship between social ends, or teleology, and the life of society. This relationship was not determined by those 'verbose personalities [i.e. theorists] who make their entry into our current textbooks'. Nor was it merely a matter of ideology. Law had been substituted for ideology and was determined by jurists who, beginning by equating biblical law with natural law, had ended by equating canon law with divine law. This was the papal, or hierocratic, theme - the conception of the Pope as 'truly God on earth' - the 'world monarch' who was capable of changing both the natural law and the law of the gospels, and who was authorized to direct all the actions that men might take, whether they agreed with his judgments or not. This, though Ullmann had not quite made the point in these terms before 1955, was the descending theme in mediaeval life and thought. At various points in the writings we have been discussing Ullmann insisted that he was neither defending nor attacking the system he was describing, merely showing that it was fundamentally 'different from ours'. It was not only his literary failure to display distance or detachment in exposition, however, in what was still a second language that

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made him seem like a contributor to the Christianizing historiography which operated in Cambridge in the period of Butterfield's and Knowles's intellectual predominance. From the late 1950s onwards the scene changed, or rather Ullmann changed his scenery. Not only was the Christian impregnation of mediaeval law no longer the central theme: the central theme was now the erosion of the papal and hierocratic theme through which the impregnation had been most perfectly accomplished in the first place. Ullmann's change in the 1950s may be looked at in either of two ways. It may be seen as a sign that the phase of Christian assertiveness into which he had stepped, and to which Mediaeval Papatism looked like a contribution in 1949, had been overtaken, both objectively and in his own mind, by the atmosphere of the fifties and sixties. Or it may be looked at as a natural development of an early interest in Roman law and of assumptions which he had made in his early writing but had lost sight of until reminded of them by the reading that he did for the opening chapters of The Growth of Papal Government. For Ullmann it may be that there was no change, merely an expansion in his range of knowledge. Reading his writings in the 1970s, it is difficult to see how his earlier work could have left the impression that the descending theme was the Christian doctrine. In the last twenty years he has made it plain that the populist theme had roots as firmly fixed as the monarchical one in Roman law and that Renaissance humanism itself was an outcome of the new life that Christendom had generated from the twelfth century onwards. Up to the middle 1950s, Ullmann's subject had been the undemocratic world-view which enabled papal canonists to claim that all governmental authority derived from God. From The Growth of Papal Government onwards, but not at all fully in that work, the theme was the development in the Middle Ages of the popular, lay, democratic ideal characteristic of the modern world. From 1961 onwards, the message has been continuous: that the end of the thirteenth century saw the beginning of a period that 'in more than one respect... we like to call modern', and that 'the present-day manner of thinking and practice' was the result of 'fierce and bloody conflicts which were wholly conducted by the ideological forces set up in the Middle Ages'. Ullmann recognizes, no doubt, that some aspects of the modern world are not Christian, or are less Christian than they might be. That seems to be the negative corollary of the remark that the * "paganism" or animosity of the humanist renaissance towards religious issues is a figment

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of imagination'. His main argument is that many of the political ideas that are the stock-in-trade of popular modernity are extracts from a more comprehensive Christian politics of which they are the remnants. Whether he is saying more than this - whether there is a suggestion that modernity is defective without a Christian framework - is left obscure. We need not be too sure in his later writing that this sort of suggestion is being made. In this second phase of extraordinary productivity, Ullmann has not neglected the theme that he established before 1955. In addition to restatements of the hierocratic doctrine, there have been many articles about papal or canonistic thinking or policy. The bulk of his work in this phase, however, and almost all the new thinking, has been concerned with mediaeval kingship on the one hand and with the new orientation that followed the rediscovery of Aristotelianism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the other. The accounts of kingship in Germany, France and England between Charlemagne and Philip IV of France were developed versions of accounts that had been given in the course of discussing papal canonism. Though they formed one of the subjects of the Birkbeck Lectures in 1968-69 and a substantial part of three other works, they were presented, except in relation to England, in the framework of the descending theme and did not fundamentally break it. There were instructive contrasts between the feudal nature of English kingship and the theocratic nature of French, but it was only in the discussions of populism, humanism and secularism1 that the framework was properly shattered. Ullmann's account of the breaking of the descending theme assumed that the ideology which replaced it, though it was originated by the intelligentsia, could not have prevailed if it had not responded to preexisting conditions at levels below those at which ideological conceptions are normally effective. It cannot be said that this was more than an assumption, or assertion; an Oakeshottian insight about ideology as an abridgement of traditional practice; perhaps, even, a response to criticism, in which the theme Ullmann had been expounding since 1940 was made consonant with an interest in relations between practice and theory on the one hand and between the 'upper crust' and the 'less privileged' on the other. Whether, for example, we are to regard the 1. In, respectively, Principles Part III and Mediaeval Political Thought, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, and Mediaeval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism.

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mental gymnastics of the beginning of Lecture Two of The Individual and Society as an historical or a personal statement, it is certainly the case that chapter I, part III, of Principles of Government and Politics marked the introduction into Ullmann's work not only of political feudalism but also of the guilds, communes, sects and friars that had supplied many English mediaevalists with reasons for studying, or admiring, the free life of the Middle Ages in the past. For Ullmann the 'lower regions' - the 'reaches of society' where the 'tentacles of theocratic government' had been felt 'so very much less than "farther up" ' - were not really the point. They had to be looked at if he was to look plausible, and he clearly had a genuine regard for both feudal law and Dominican religion. But what he was really interested in was doctrine or ideology: the theory which had not only reflected the realities that already existed but had also made them coherent agents for the intelligentsia to operate upon. If one were to summarize the new position by saying that for Ullmann after about 1955 modern history began with Aquinas who was also the first Whig, one would be caricaturing him. But one would not be caricaturing him very much. In arguing this position in the past two decades, he has advanced in both range and sensitivity. But he has not fundamentally modified his initial assertion that the thirteenth century saw a major revolution in thought, and that the modern world was born then rather than at the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the scientific and industrial revolutions. If one asks what the thirteenth-century revolution consisted of, the answer is that it was, in the first place, a revolution in political thinking. It has been one of Ullmann's main arguments that the Renaissance humanism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was an offshoot of the movement of political reconstruction which had begun with the eleventh-century attempt to provide a ratification of secular governments independently of the Christian sub-structure, and had issued in the re-introduction of Roman law and in other developments which occurred during and after the life of Aquinas. His other main argument, however, has been that this was not a political revolution in any ordinary sense but an Aristotelian reconstruction of life, which had freed thought from subjection to the supra-natural, had resuscitated the natural man whom papal canonism had been anxious to suppress, and had shown the way towards an impressivefloweringof man's natural capabilities. It had had effects or parallels in literature, painting and science indeed throughout the whole of life, but it had had its first and most

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crucial ones in government and law where, in the thirteenth century, for the first time since the fall of Rome, the citizen replaced the subject, consent replaced obedience, and politics became a meaningful conception as the ascending theme replaced the descending theme. The structure of UUmann's argument was religious. It was no longer assumed after Aquinas, he was saying, that political authority was the work of grace - the grace through which God had instituted the unchangeable priesthood. Now it was understood that political society was natural and did not need special channels or divine grace to operate in, and that natural reason not only evolved and varied according to time and place but was sufficient in itself to discover the rules for political living. These rules were a form of knowledge - political science; they considered the state as a 'human association . . . resulting from the working of the natural instinct', and it was Aquinas's achievement to have shown that the state was 'that union of men in which man's natural reason has its instrumental habitation'. Aquinas was not, of course, represented as throwing grace out of the window; nor did he deny that natural society was part of the divine order. But he distinguished between homo and Christianus, the citizen and the faithful Christian, and the state as the congregation of men from the Church as the congregation of the faithful. He was significant in UUmann's structure because he drew a distinction between the state as a natural, evolving entity and the Church as a permanent, supranatural and 'more and more' a mystical entity. Above all, through his emphasis on 'the individual conscience', he began to 'set aside the traditional mediaeval doctrine'. Examination of the consequences of these positions, as they appeared in the writings of Dante, John of Paris, Marsilius of Padua and innumerable other theorists, have made up the greater part of UUmann's work in these years. The descriptions that he has given of the conception of personality, and of the atomization of humanity that accompanied the separation and relativization of religious, economic and political norms, need not be detailed here. They were significant in three important respects. They were significant in the first place because they gave coherent shape to the pre-existing fact that political authority in practice resided in the people. Thomist Aristotelianism, in this view, expressed in theory what feudalism and political association had already expressed in practice - that authority ascended from below. This issued on the one hand in conceptions like citizens, citizenship and consent which em-

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phasized both the secular and the conditional nature of political authority, and on the other in conceptions like nation which recognized the relativity and variability of the forms that political society had to take. These descriptions were significant, secondly, because they opened the way to an account of the laicization of thought - the extinction of the temporal authority of priests, pope and Church in face of the natural and rational authority of the whole people. This was not said in general to have involved the rejection of Christianity, least of all, of course, in Aquinas. Not only in its political manifestations but also in its cultural and philosophical ones, the thirteenth-century revolution and the humanism of the Renaissance were shown merely to have liberated men's lives, including their religious lives, from the authoritarian dominance established by hierocratic Christianity. Ullmann's descriptions are significant, finally, because he has made it clear that he is a protagonist of the Thomist revolution: he has increasingly presented the hierocratic period as an unnatural interlude between the Roman and modern ages, and has seen liberalization and laicization as not only natural but also justifiable reactions to papal provocation. To papal resistance to Naturalism, to the failure of Conciliarism and to thefifteenth-centuryConcordats between popes and theocratic rulers 'against the rising tide' of the laity and the multitude, he has attributed the papacy's ideological emptiness in face of Luther and the 'tidal advance of new ideologies' in the sixteenth century. In the perpetuation of theocratic kingship thereafter, he has seen provocative obstacles to the natural development of the popular will. He has alleged, on more occasions than unsubstantiated assertion can justify, that failure to liberalize theocratic authority was responsible for the violence and upheaval that occurred in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917, in exactly the same way that the development of the mediaeval German empire was responsible for the 'arrested development' of Germany in the modern world. These positions continued the already operative diminution of the Reformation which was now merely Luther and others cashing in on the papacy's failure to see that hierocratic Christianity was dead by 1250. They dismissed the elitist Bohemianism of the grammatical, or rhetorical, Renaissance so much admired by the generations before Butterfield. Above all they established that modernity had begun in the Middle Ages and that Thomism, or Christian Aristotelianism, was not just an historical phenomenon but a basis for historical interpretation. In reading Ullmann in the last twenty years, it has been as difficult

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to resist the ascending theme as it was to resist the descending one in the 1940s, and this not only is the case, but seems also intended to be the case. Ullmann recognizes the importance of the descending theme in establishing the modern respect for law, but he has made such heavy use of 'teamwork', 'earthiness' and 'practicality' in describing individualistic society and of 'natural', 'realistic', 'elastic', 'flexible', 'rational' and 'empiricist' in describing Aristotelian naturalism that there can be little doubt about his sympathy for the 'the ineradicable human urge to form one's own judgement and act upon it' which 'the establishment' had 'stigmatised since the fifth century as a sign of intellectual arrogance'. The 'bonfire which Luther made of the law books of the Papacy' was not just a 'symbolic protest' on Luther's part; it was also a symbolic image of Ullmann's vision of the death of mediaeval papalism. Ullmann's basic political conceptions are not complicated. He believes, as he has from the start, that ideology determines law and directs social action towards its ends. He believes, on the other hand, that ideology cannot direct law towards society's ends unless conditions are ripe, mentalities prepared and the 'historic soil' embodies an 'historical evolution'. As his fulminations against canonistic reactionaries suggest, he also implies that it is stupid to fight for causes once conditions have made them irrelevant. He attributes a great deal of modern violence to attempts to translate speculation into practice without preparation. He is conscious of 'weary and protracted conflicts' in the past between the individual and society and does more than report in describing the universal acceptance since the eighteenth century of the principle that 'man as an individual has certain inalienable rights which no power of government can take away'. He has come to disapprove of any sort of unipolarity, whether in hierocratic or more modern forms, and, despite disavowals, means something normative when he uses the word 'totalitarian' about it. He uses the word 'Lockean' as a term of recognition, connects Thomist politics with the politics of Blackstone and the American Revolution, and acclaims the United States the 'rightful heir of the Middle Ages'. What Ullmann's politics are, he has not disclosed in his writings. He belonged to the Schushnigg-DoUfuss Patriotic Front in Austria (as officials had to) but had no strong political commitment; in English terms his chief feeling, even now, is of hostility to the Men of Munich. He has no hankerings after hierocracy and makes none of the reactionary demands which converted Catholics so often make in England.

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He is faintly anti-clerical and treats Catholicism as a true and natural aspect of life. He celebrates Aquinas's addition of the natural man to the fidelis and has no hang-ups derived from Barthian, Calvinistic or Augustinian Augustinianism. He has little sympathy for Church-State Anglicanism; there is no reason to suppose that he has much more for the British Conservative Party. He feels no inhibition in identifying Christianity with enlightenment, or in praising Voltaire and Beccaria for the part they played in mitigating the excesses of modern torture. He has an anti-totalitarian suspicion of the unrestricted power of the sovereign state. There is no reason to doubt that he fitted easily into the Churchillian climate, however little importance he may have attached either to it in 1940 or to its development subsequently. Ullmann's influence is difficult to estimate. He has never been an academic politician in either Trinity College or the Cambridge History Faculty, though he has served for a very long time on the University's Board of Graduate Studies and on its Library Syndicate. He has had a number of devoted and effective pupils who have produced intelligent expansions of his conceptions, many of which have been published in Cambridge Studies in Mediaeval Life and Thought which he has edited since 1969. If anybody had understood its possibilities, his earlier work could have provided a spiritual basis for a more persuasive sort of Christian Socialism - or a modern Conservatism - than has been developed by English thinkers indigenously. Since, however, this has not occurred to anyone, he has been spared that sort of attention. Ullmann might not have welcomed attention if he had been given it, but it may be that it would have made him think more seriously than he has done about the modern world. For it is a limitation of almost all his later writing that, obsessed as he has been with proving that the Catholic centuries generated liberal modernity, he does not see how questionable a conception liberal modernity is. Like all serious historical writing, Ullmann's is a morality-play in which the author controls the players. His players are ideas, ideological conceptions which lack many of the characteristics of real humanity and speak a language which no man of sense would wish to speak. But they describe a conflict and express a meaning. For all their ugliness and awkwardness, they offer a persuasion, a repetition, in a situation less complicated than Acton's, of Acton's belief that a Catholic humanism is a possibility, that secular activity can be conducted without denying religion, and that vulgar hedonism is not the only foundation for the conduct of life. They do this nowhere more typically than in the fol-

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lowing paragraph from The Mediaeval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism. The rigid monopolistic ecclesiological system was broken [this passage explained of the humanistic renaissance] and was replaced by an elastic, flexible, bipolarity system resting on natural as well as supra-natural bases, epitomised by humanitas and christianitas. The simplicity of the former unipolarity yielded to a structurally more complicated but more realistic system that appeared to take account of the infinite variety of the strands which constituted natural human personality. Seen from yet another angle, the one renaissance ushered in the mediaeval period, characterised by unipolarity, universality and totality or indivisibility of thought and outlook whereas the humanist renaissance signified the dawn of the modern age, characterised by bipolarity of ends and aims, in course of time giving way to multipolarity (and eventually to pluralism), national state sovereignty and the atomisation and fragmentation of all thought processes. What was common to both forms of the Renaissance was their essential social relationship, with all the attendant consequences in regard to rulership, the creation of the law, its contents, scope, jurisdictional extent, and so on and so forth. Empiricism and pragmatism replaced doctrinairism and dogmatism. The former was focussed on the natural, mundane-human concerns, the latter still continued to refer to the supra-natural, otherworldly, eternal values and items. The humanist renaissance was a reaction to the ecclesiologically conditioned unipolarity, totality and universality. By creating, for the first time, an elastic balance where previously there had been an inelastic imbalance, renaissance humanism accomplished in the widest possible sense a synthesis of nature and grace, of humanitas and christianitas, of the present and the future life, of mundane secularity and transcendent eternity.

II Ullmann is a fine example of a recurrent English phenomenon - the European scholar who takes the English out of themselves. In this he is much to be preferred to some of those whose speciality is the modern world. Whether the English need to be taken out of themselves, it might be untactful to enquire. If the enquiry is to be made, consideration of Chadwick may help to supply an answer. Ullmann and Chadwick both came from professional homes. Both were introduced to religion by their families though not, in Chadwick's case, to the religion that he eventually adopted. There the similarities end. Ullmann is a Roman Catholic, Chadwick an Anglican. Ullmann, even now, is obviously foreign, Chadwick as obviously English. Ullmann has administered nothing, at least since he came to England.

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Chadwick has been administering continuously since 1956: if he had so chosen, he could undoubtedly have been a Bishop. His weakness is an excessive regard for average opinion. His strength, like that of his brother, Henry,1 is that combination of blandness, dignity and learning which have been a special characteristic of the Anglican clergy. Chadwick was an undergraduate at St John's College, Cambridge where he read Classics, History and Church History and played in the university rugby team. He was ordained from Cuddesdon Theological College during the Second World War and was a public school chaplain until returning to Cambridge, where he spent a number of years as Dean of Trinity Hall before being elected Master of Selwyn College at the age of forty in 1956. Behind Chadwick stand Gore and the Gore tradition (including its political tradition) as a way of life rather than a theology. If he owed his religion to one person more than another, it was to Charlesworth,2 who had been ordained in middle age after a period of agnosticism and whose Christianity had been formed before the sharp winds blew in from Switzerland. In discussing the life of a clergyman, it is important to remember that much of it is hidden and defies intellectual classification. For different reasons, it is difficult to discuss Chadwick's period as ViceChancellor of Cambridge University and the part he has played generally in the university's affairs. In understanding his significance, however, it is necessary to remember that the Anglican autocracy he has operated as Master of Selwyn and the influence he has exercised as ViceChancellor have been as important as his writings, that his writings can best be approached as meditations on the fate of a low-keyed, morally conventional High Church Anglicanism in face of the erosions that have occurred throughout English society in the last twenty years, and that, in his strengths as in his weaknesses, and allowing for a small, significant difference in age, character and experience, he is very close to being an academic equivalent of Archbishop Runcie.3 1. Rev. Prof. Henry Chadwick (1920- ). Dean of Christ Church Oxford 196979. Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge 1979- . Author of Origen, Contra Celsum 1953, Lessing's Theological Writings 1956, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition 1966, The Early Church 1967 etc. etc. 2. M. P. Charlesworth (1895-1950). Son of an Anglican clergyman. Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge 1921-23 and St John's College 1923-50. Laurence Reader in Classics 1931-50. Author of Trade-Routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire 1924, Five Men 1936, The Roman Empire 1951 etc. 3. Rt Rev. R. A. K. Runcie M.C. (1921- ). Chaplain of Westcott College Cambridge 1953-54 and Vice-Principal 1954-56. Fellow, Dean and Assistant

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Chadwick's writing is of three sorts. There are narratives of incidents in the nineteenth-century Church of England and a two-volume work entitled The Victorian Church. There are works about the devotional life of Christendom - John Cassian, an introduction to Western Asceticism, and an article on Indifference and Morality. And there are strategic statements about the history of Christian thought and doctrine including From Bossuet to Newman, The Mind of the Oxford Movement, The Reformation and The Secularisation of the European Mind. Throughout, there has been a combination of sound scholarship, easy prose and good judgment, and a bland sense of the relationship between public religion and private. Chadwick's first work was about monasticism. In this he described the development of the coenobitic movement in the early church as a preliminary to discussing Cassian's work in giving Latin Christianity the idea that spiritual life is a 'science in which prayer reigns'. He described Cassian's Egyptian roots, his connection with Chrysostom and the discipline that he imposed on the Gallic monasteries. He analysed his insistence on 'tradition', his distaste for the assertion of personality and his success in establishing that 'methods of prayer and mortification' should be ordered 'according to established experience'. He praised his 'Roman sobriety' for transforming the 'exotic fanaticism' of Egypt into a 'constructive' movement which became 'a part of mediaeval social life instead of standing outside it'. If the learning of John Cassian was more obvious than its power, it was learning deployed by a modern mind which believed in the reality of the ascetic aspiration and dwelt naturally and gracefully on the 'inner compulsion' of ascetic needs. In John Cassian as in Western Asceticism, Chadwick seemed to be involved, and to write out of his involvement. He was involved in the emphasis on private prayer, in the conceptualizings of asceticism that the Desert Fathers had extracted out of Alexandrian theology, and in affirming the possibility of an ascetic life that was free of bias and eccentricity and did not regard the body as evil. In comparing Cassian with Augustine he insisted that, though the former was to be praised if the latter had 'stultified moral responsibility', Augustine was nevertheless right, and Cassian wrong, so far as 'Christianity demands that Tutor of Trinity Hall Cambridge 1956-60. Bishop of St Albans 1970-80. Archbishop of Canterbury 1980- . Author of (ed.) Cathedral and City, St Albans Ancient and Modern 1978.

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the human personality shall be wholly surrendered into the hands of God'. In addition to discussing the ascetic and monastic life, these early works also discussed relations with the world as 'the presence of crowds' changed the Church from being the 'eschatological society of the sanctified' into being a 'sanctifying and educating society' which had lost some of the 'corporate sense' that it had had originally. Many of Chadwick's preoccupations were present in a passage towards the end of John Cassian where the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. were described as witnessing not only the political disintegration of the western Roman Empire, but the doctrinal disintegration of the primitive notions of the Church. In Cassian's generation the doctrine of the Body was maintained with haunting beauty in the Augustinian exegesis of 'the whole Christ'; but even in Augustine we see the shadow of that distinction between the visible and invisible Church which the influx of converts during the fourth century and the consequent assimilation of 'Christian' to 'citizen' had perhaps rendered inevitable. In the west, when Church and State had become co-extensive, the corporate sense, which had in part depended upon the naked opposition between Church and society and the protest of the Church against society, begins to fade, perhaps never fully to be recovered until the recognition of the modern age that Christian and citizen are no longer synonymous terms. The expanding wedge driven by a swollen hierarchy between bishop and congregation, the steady clericalization of the Church which in the west advanced as lay education regressed, the transformation of the bishop from pastor of the town into administrator of the extended western diocese, combined to hasten the end of the primitive idea of a Christian congregation. The antagonism of the early Church to secular society was replaced by the protest of the ascetics against a society coextensive with the Church. The monks furthered the disappearance of the early notion of a congregation inseparable from its bishop. They were in the Catholic Church, the elite of the Church, yet associated in no local community. John Cassian was written in a mixed tone which probably reflected its origin in post-graduate study. It was followed by the The Founding of Cuddesdon which described the early stages of Cuddesdon's existence from its foundation by Samuel Wilberforce onwards. The Founding of Cuddesdon, however, was not just the conventional history of a theological college. The tensions it discussed were Tractarian tensions; there was something more than innocent narrative in the chapters in which Liddon's 'burning sincerity' and disabling 'burden of responsibility' were shown leading to his resignation, while praise was showered by

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contrast on the taste, style, gentleness, self-discipline, humanity, breadth, naturalness, insight, saintliness, pastoral genius and 'moral and spiritual beauty' of Edward King, the Principal. In The Founding of Cuddesdon Chadwick discovered a style - a quiet irony which was well suited to dissection of the clerical temperament. In Victorian Miniature and Mackenzie's Grave, he brought this talent to a high pitch of accomplishment. Victorian Miniature was based on diaries which had been kept by the Squire and the Vicar of Ketteringham in Norfolk during the middle of the nineteenth century. These enabled Chadwick to reconstruct both sides of a difficult relationship which lasted for thirty-one years. The portraits of Boileau, the Whig Squire, and his wife, were on the whole sympathetic, Boileau being praised for his pastoral sense, his concern for the villagers' religion and his dislike of the Vicar's egotistical Calvinism. The portrait of Andrew, the vicar, was unsympathetic in much the way that the portrait of Liddon had been, by reason of Andrew's passion, solemnity and enthusiasm as these were displayed in the length of his sermons, the 'strange emphases' he gave in the pulpit, and his capacity for preaching the Gospel so ubiquitously and unendingly that he did not think there could be any occasion on which it ought not to he preached. Andrew 'held a high doctrine of the ministry', was conscious of being 'sent of God', and 'did not conceal this doctrine from his flock'. 'He was never tired, and never shy, of declaring what mighty works God had done through him' and his diary was 'a series of ejaculations of praise for these works'. Though this was a 'harmless vanity', it was a vanity nevertheless, and Chadwick evidently shared Boileau's distaste for it. Where Victorian Miniature described the 'lords, secular and spiritual, of the manor', Mackenzie's Grave described the difficulties encountered in getting missionary Christians of diverse temperaments and denominations to work together in harmony and love. Diaries and letters were used to describe a majorfigure- Livingstone - from a number of angles, none of which was unduly flattering. There was extended irony, and there was also eloquence. The real problems of civilizing and christianizing activity - mechanical, spiritual and pedagogic - were described with historical precision. It was made clear that even missionaries inhabit a fallen world and that it is through the conflicts, resentments and disappointments which men and women experience in relations with one another that Christianity has to he preserved in Norfolk or propagated in Africa. fcHe hacked his way through the gaunt rushes,

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the long grass and the bindweed' went Chadwick's description of the last sight that the book gave of Bishop Mackenzie's grave and only after an exhausting search was able to discover the right cross of bamboo and, some distance away, the cross of board which Livingstone had erected. He came wretchedly to the overgrown mound - a wasted life - wasted because his successor was abandoning everything which he had achieved. The death of Mackenzie had suddenly become so useless, so foolish, so extravagant, a magnificent venture of devotion and self-sacrifice which had ended in nothing but dust and soil vanishing among the bindweed. But, as he stood by the grave, he imagined the presence of Mackenzie's spirit; and then he remembered - pictured - saw more than remembered - his cheerful, patient, trusting hopefulness. For thefirsttime in more than a month Rowley felt his heart lifting out of despair and into hope. He had wanted to see results, he had wanted visible signs that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church and now even the faintly visible signs were being wiped off. And yet, he reflected, the wisdom of God has ever been foolishness with men. Kneeling by the grave, he was content at last to make an act of faith that the wisdom of God was wisdom indeed. Apart from John Cassian, these works were all miniatures. They approached missionary activity, the parochial system and clerical education through detailed treatment of small-scale episodes in the history of Victorian Christianity. After 1960 they were followed by the conspectual statements of The Mind of the Oxford Movement and The Victorian Church. In these works Chadwick gave accounts of parish religion, of relations between Church and State, and of the difficulties encountered in dealing with the industrial city. He described the evangelical and Oxford movements, and gave detailed accounts of Methodism and Roman Catholicism. As in occasional pieces like Christian Unity and From Uniformity to Unity, so here he represented Anglicanism as a via media which left more room for the 'traditionally minded' than was possible in any Protestant church outside Lutheranism, and which had been strengthened in its conservatism by advances in Patristic Scholarship and Platonic Philosophy, and by the struggle against puritanism, in the seventeenth century. Though the Restoration Settlement had weakened the Church by 'excluding men like Baxter', seventeenth-century Anglicanism was described as producing 'remarkable thinkers' who had Veered away' from justification by faith, 'minimised the doctrine of original sin', and adopted a virtually Catholic form of worship. Even after it had been battered by 1688 and in some respects made archaic by

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Lockean Latitudinarianism, the 'High Church tradition' was described as producing, between 1715 and 1830, a 'sober, earnest, dutiful and austere' piety which was hampered by its suspicion of emotion and isolation from continental thought but needed only the Evangelical and Tractarian revivals to develop that 'sense of awe and mystery . . . profundity of reverence and concern with the conscience . . . by way of growth towards holiness' that was characteristic of the Victorian High Churchman. In The Victorian Church Chadwick displayed the variety of forms taken by Anglican piety and organization, and the difficulties that the Church of England had encountered as an Establishment. In Church Unity, From Uniformity to Unity and in the Chadwick Report on Church and State, he made cautious defences of Establishment on the one hand and of ecumenical reunion on the other, emphasizing not only the prospect of reunion but also the obstacles to it - the incompatibility between the aspiration to unity, loyalty to the New Testament, and the 'absolute' nature of the obligation to truth. These were matters of internal re-arrangement. What was not a matter of internal re-arrangement was Chadwick's understanding of relations between Christianity and secular thinking. The places in which Chadwick has discussed this most extensively are From Bossuet to Newman, Westcott and the University,fivechapters of The Victorian Church, and his Gifford lectures The Secularisation of the European Mind. The Secularisation of the European Mind in particular considered European thinking about religion, morality and politics between 1859 and 1914. In one sense it is the only one of Chadwick's books that has been devoted to discussion of non-Christian thinking. In another sense it had been anticipated by recurrent discussions of historical thinking in the previous fifteen years. As a professional historian, Chadwick was heir to two and a half centuries of self-conscious reflection on the development of Christian dogma and the relationship between historical and religious truth. From Bossuet to Newman described the views taken of these questions by theologians and historians from Bossuet onwards. It left little doubt that Bossuet's doctrine of the immutability of dogma not only had been superseded in Spain, by the time Bossuet wrote, but had also deserved to be. Chadwick did not argue this; he assumed it, just as he assumed that 'conservative thinkers' in late seventeenth-century France had been wrong to confront Cartesian immanentism by 'simple faith'. He denied

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that Christian doctrines should be exempted from historical investigation, and showed how readily philosophical theories could be changed while Christianity remained intact. He made it clear that the 'uniqueness and arbitrariness' of Christianity should not be preserved 'at the expense of its rationality', and that Kierkegaard and his followers were wrong to treat a 'critic' as one who is 'potentially dangerous to the faith'. Chadwick looked back to Mabillon and the Maurists as the initiators of historical research detached from 'theological or controversial effect'. He showed Newman insisting that historical enquiry was relevant to faith and that a theory of development was desirable because 'impartial historical enquiry, in its measure, could find truth'. He presented Newman as an enemy of obscurantism, despite his loyalty to the Pope, and described the difficulties this brought him once he had become a Roman Catholic. A chapter in Volume II of The Victorian Church showed that 'devotion' and 'obscurantism' were not necessarily connected, and that the 'weak government . . . tangled jurisdictions, crossfire of law courts and elastic articles' which distinguished the Church of England from the Roman Catholic and non-conformist churches had done 'more good' to 'Catholic Christianity' than would have been done by more authoritative ways of defining dogma. From Bossuet to Newman was an elegant and intelligent book which treated Newman both as a person and as the embodiment of an idea. It also presented him as the victim of an idea - by attempting to showhow much, without knowing it, he had owed to thinkers who had been influenced by the 'liberal German philosophy' which he ostentatiously detested. The point of importance was that, though unwittingly influenced by liberal thinkers, Newman had provided a unique combination of hostility to 'liberal philosophies of development' with belief in 'historical development itself and, by extracting from historical thinking as much as Christianity could extract safely, had shown the way in the Essay on Development to a sane attitude which avoided the pitfalls of obscurantism. In The Victorian Church, Chadwick had summarized a well-worn discussion about the impact of science from Vestiges of Creation onwards. He had argued that there had been no theoretical incompatibility between science and religion, and that scientists had been much less hostile to Christianity than public discussion had suggested. He had also described the progress of Biblical criticism, and had shown the critical movement being absorbed into Anglican thought by the time of

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God. But always he revealed through his humanity. Though we must not exaggerate the change, for Christian doctrine had always insisted upon the humanity, later Victorian churchmen understood the childhood, the temptations, the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, even the suffering on Calvary, better than generations of their Christian predecessors. In The Victorian Church, Chadwick had emphasized the fact of Christian resilience in face of disturbance from within. He recognized the genuineness of the 'restatements of Christianity' which he described at various points in both volumes, and obviously believed that many of them were desirable. While agreeing that 'more educated Englishmen doubted the truth of the Christian religion in 1885 than thirty years before', he did not doubt that, so far as Christians themselves were concerned, belief and practice had been improved, or at least had not manifestly deteriorated. Similar assumptions have appeared when he has discussed secularization, not because he doubts that contemporary Christians have become 'voyagers in a strange land', but because his historical writing has stopped short at the point at which secularization has become widespread. The Victorian Church and his Gifford Lectures both end by 1914; Chadwick has written virtually nothing about the twentieth century. Yet it is the twentieth century which has seen the culmination of secularization, both through the political operation of secular creeds and through that positive indifference to Christianity that has distinguished this from all other centuries of West European history. Whatever may be happening in Asia, Africa and South America, it is in Europe that a secular revolution has occurred. Though Chadwick recognizes the challenges it has presented to Christianity, especially in Hitler's Germany, he seems to be happier with the earlier period which, if not an age of faith exactly, retained enough faith to permit him to describe mentalities which straddled faith and secularity. The Gifford Lectures contained many suggestions of this sort, particularly in describing the failure of the secular movement in the late nineteenth century, a failure which was attributed not only to the reaction against positivism as it appeared in de Vogu6, Brunetiere and the Russian novelists, but also to a pertinacity of Christian practice which 'rational education' had been unable to suppress, and which had left the churches exercising a continuing influence 'far beyond the edges of their congregations'. Chadwick regrets religious 'anti-intellectualism' in the forms displayed by the Roman Catholic Church in particular. He has des-

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cribed the suppression of the Modernists in 1907 as obstructing the 'most promising and courageous ways by which Catholics of that generation might aim to meet the intellectual challenges of the age'. He leaves the impression, all this notwithstanding, that, alike at large and among the thinking classes, Christianity did not suffer as much as it might have done in the new situation which all the Christian churches faced after 1850. The Gifford Lectures described the changes of role which Christianity had undergone in these years. They argued that anti-clericalism was to be attributed to the strength rather than the weakness of Catholicism in democratic countries, and that universal suffrage, freedom of speech and the popular newspapers had not had destructive effects on religion. They reflected on relations between the religion of the thinking classes and the religion of the mass of the people, and on the division between The Social Problem and the Intellectual one. They discussed relations between sociological explanation and explanation in terms of autonomous thought, concluding that 'the social enquiry' was 'fated to crash' without an intellectual enquiry. Like Ullmann, Chadwick is conscious of objections to writing history in terms of the opinions of the articulate; and he is conscious of the existence of the inarticulate; even of their articulateness. He does not engage with them, however, or leave the impression of wanting to investigate them. He leaves the impression of responding to fashion in doing so, and of failing to see the significance of the fact that the Durkheimian fashion in the study of religion and the sociological link between 'ideas and the belly' are fashions which there is no obligation to follow. Chadwick is not unmindful of the importance of doctrine. But he takes it for granted and assumes that men grow more readily through worship. His later writings contain few Christian affirmations except the idea of Christianity's presence and centrality to history, however difficult it may be to think it central in the modern world. The tone of the Gifford Lectures was consistent, the range of expectation characteristic. It was not assumed that Christianity could not recover, but it was assumed that there would be a continuation of that 'true competition' between religion and irreligion which had begun in the nineteenth century. Odium theologicum was absent. Religious men were enjoined not to impute evil and to recognize that secularization must have included some 'clearer apprehension' of 'the world and its independence' since, as had been explained in The Victorian Church, R.P.D.—P

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'by a merciful providence . . . the innermost soul of Christianity knew that all truth is of God'. These principles permeated the Lectures. They argued that MarxistChristian dialogue would be feasible if it could be established that the 'metaphysical doctrine' of atheism had no necessary connection with socialism as the focus for 'the aspirations of the working classes in nineteenth-century Germany'. In arguing that Christianity and Liberalism share the desire to protect freedom against the State, they gave a political twist to the praise of academic freedom that had appeared in Chadwick's second Inaugural. Chadwick has delivered two Inaugural Lectures at Cambridge, one as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1959, another as Regius Professor of Modern History ten years later. The Dixie Inaugural (Creighton on Luther) was a dissertation on Creighton, the Regius Inaugural a dissertation on Trevelyan. The first celebrated Creighton's imperturbability, impartiality and distaste for zeal. The second praised the love of liberty which had joined Trevelyan, Acton, Seeley and Bury - Chadwick's predecessors in the Regius Chair - to Chadwick himself who expressed his 'strong faith in the importance of the individual', his belief in the connection between scholarship and liberality, and his conviction that a scholar must be free to 'follow his argument to the end'. In his efforts at absorption, Chadwick has been skilful. He has somehow suggested that secular criticisms have been directed not at Christianity but at the failure of Christians to live up to the demands of the Christian consciousness. Though it was written over a decade earlier and in another context, he has seemed almost to impute to secular criticism the same sort of role in relation to Christianity that the last paragraph of his Lecture Westcott and the University imputed to ordinands in relation to a modern university. Christianity [went the last paragraph of the Westcott Lecture] is a way of life and a philosophy about the world. It is intrinsic to Christianity that though there is no way of life without a measure of the philosophy, the philosophy becomes useless or meaningless if it is taken out of relation to a way of life. It is often said that theological colleges need the intellectual stimulus and background of a university, and that nothing is more urgent for the churches than that the training for their ministries should be associated with the universities. Without wishing to question this common proposition, I should like to put before you the reverse, and declare that a university, within certain limits which at present there is no danger of

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crossing, is helped by an association, however loose, with the ordinands on its perimeter. For their presence, and the association of their members with the work of the faculties, reminds the academics, the students of religion and philosophy, that in the last resort they are concerned not only with a problem of logic, of language and of history, but with humanity in the deepest of its needs. Chadwick, then, has made strategic statements about the history of Christianity, about the Church of England and about prospects for the future. It remains true, however, that his pace quickens and his penetration deepens, and he seems relieved, as soon as he gets past the situation to the person. From his earliest work right up to The Secularization of the European Mind he has produced an endless flow of Christian biographies, visiting in the process and declaring himself about important occasions in Christian history but using the necessarily specific character of biography to display the uniqueness of each exemplification. Cassian, Liddon, Newman, Westcott, King, Armstrong, Wilberforce, Keble, Pusey, Bossuet, Ward, St Benedict, Kirk, Scudamore, Boileau, Andrew, Mackenzie, Luther, Calvin, Caraffa, Zwingli, Erasmus, Rowley, Stewart, Hawkins, Procter, Tozer, Waller, Creighton, Kingsley, Acton, Gladstone, Borromeo, Las Casas, Ghislieri, Strauss, Jowett, Baden-Powell, Mansel, Darwin, Abbot, Michelet, Quinet, Marx, Engels, Voltaire, Vogt, Buchner, Haeckel, Taine, Renan, Brunetiere, Comte, de Vogue and Dr and Mrs Livingstone have been described in their own terms and for their own sakes and, where diaries and letters have been available, have demonstrated the variety of ways in which Christian, and indeed non-Christian, lives can be lived. If few of the lives seem saintly, and hardly any escape an irony which is unfriendly to exaggerated emphases, there can be no doubt that Chadwick has succeeded, as Knowles succeeded, in using historical writing to emphasize not the prospect of an elevated spirituality but the historical fact that lives, both male and female, have been lived in a Christian fashion. Chadwick has a wide range chronologically, but little variation in tone and manner. He writes respectfully about devotion but dislikes zeal; he assumes that zeal - particularly intellectual zeal - can be debilitating to Christian living. He is sympathetic to both sides in the Reformation. While emphasizing that reunion will be difficult, he has tended to play down, by explaining, both differences between Christians and differences between Christians on the one hand and non-Christians on the other. He somehow implies that all the thought that he deals with (except the

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thought of the Nazis) has had some at least of its roots in Christian (or religious) thinking. Though Chadwick is a priest, he writes as a clergyman and as an historian rather than a theologian. He is interested in persons more than in positions, and implies something of the relativistic assumption that conflict between doctrines can be dissolved. He does not put this assumption clearly; perhaps, if asked to, he would deny that he makes it. But he seems to make a connection between historical explanation on the one hand and a diminution of doctrinal rigidity on the other, and he expresses an irremoveable sense of the 'impotence of words', the inadequacy of apologetic, and the 'silence' which should underpin 'the worship of God'. In his brief history of Selwyn College, Chadwick wrote of its founders' conception of it as a place where religion, sane and tolerant but not luke-warm, was practised: where men respected simplicity of life and of character more than their opposites; where those who did not all come from well-to-do homes could receive what a university has to offer and . . . [which] should be a community of people who think, and study, and seek to diminish the ignorance of themselves and of the world. This is his position. There is learning, decency and adult niceness, and a faint touch of middle-class patronage. Above all, there is the impression that decency, simplicity and religion can prevail. Chadwick is not a polemicist; nor in public is he a positive evangelist. On paper he sometimes lacks edge. When he was made Regius Professor of Modern History - a Crown appointment - in 1968, his appointment was treated with incredulity by some of his colleagues. Yet it is as obvious now as it was then that the choice was more than merely defensible, that he was dealing with important questions, and that he could, if he had commanded the occasion, have done far more than he has to preserve what Knowles and Butterfield had left. Chadwick is not without histrionic capability; but, on the whole, he does not obtrude. He has a retreating literary personality which despite passages of eloquence, achieves its effects by stealth. Consequently, it is easy to underestimate him, to overlook the presence in his thinking of qualities he attributed to Edward King - a considered distaste for 'haste, rashness and over-pressure', and an overwhelming dread of the 'unnatural, forced, cramped ecclesiastical holiness which is so . . quickly produced, but is so human and poor'. Patience is not always

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heroic; it does not seem heroic in Chadwick. At times it seems inadequate or capitulatory. In a secular context, however, it is not necessarily less appropriate than more agitated illocutions. It has not been less effective than Smyth's; it remains to be seen whether it will be more effective than Norman's.

R.P.D.—P*

14 Some Contemporary Doctrines II 'You said that Christ's mission was directed to the poor . . . You instanced various healing actions: the opening of the eyes of the blind, the unstopping of the ears of the deaf, etc. Having noticed that, you omitted something else which Jesus did but which is not within the scope of the National Health Service . . . the raising of the dead. What I am saying is that Christ's mission to the blind, the poor, the deaf and all the rest is only another part of his mission to raise the dead; that, as the raising of the dead is supernatural - is religious, if you like - so also is the rest of the healing mission of Christ, and that we are not imitating Christ, or fulfilling his commandments, when we are engaged in healing anymore than when we are engaged in banking.' Enoch Powell Christianity and Social Activity 1973 in Wrestling With The Angel 1977, p. 32. 'To those who are sceptical of all versions of Christian politics, including conservative ones - and this is my own position - the present identification of Christianity with western bourgeois liberalism seems an unnecessary consecration of a highly relative and unstable set of values, the more unsatisfactory because it is generally done unconsciously. Liberalism actually occupies a very narrow band in the possible spectrum of political theories. To regard it as the distillation of Christian wisdom, . . . is, to say the least, a short-term view. But related by class and cultural preference to the educated elites whose endorsement of liberal values they so faithfully reproduce, the leaders of the western churches seem completely unaware of how partial their political vision actually is. It may well be, of course, that liberalism is perfectly acceptable for all kinds of political and moral reasons: my contention is simply that there are no distinctly Christian reasons for regarding its principles as more compatible with the teachings of Christ than other and rival political outlooks.' Rev. Edward Norman Christianity and the World Order 1979 pp. 7-8. 'Though many of the strands in modern thought about individual freedom and liberty since the seventeenth century are deist, it seems to me that none is Christian nor contains any room for Christianity. For example, it would be hard to imagine a more non-Christian assertion than the famous formulation of individualism in the second section of the American Declaration of Independence. If men are created equal with equal and inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and people make or unmake governments to secure the enjoyment of these rights, the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection are supremely irrelevant. The universe of Christianity and man's place in it have no meeting-point with the Whiggish worlds of Locke or Bentham, libertarian or utilitarian. . . . From beginning to end the message of the Gospel is that we cannot have both; it has to be one or the other.' Enoch Powell The Paradox of Personal Liberty in Wrestling with the Angel 1977 pp. 25-6.

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Chadwick tends to be conciliatory, to avoid rocking the boat and to provide justification for both Christian-Liberal and Christian-Marxist dialogue. Norman1 has tended to do the opposite. He highlights divisions inside the Church of England and is a critic of both ChristianLiberal and Christian-Marxist dialogue with those who are outside it. Though Chadwick and Norman both come from suburban London, the differences between them are considerable. Where Chadwick's father was a barrister whose four sons went to leading public schools, Norman's father was a stockbroker's clerk, and Norman himself was at grammar schools in Ramsgate and Walthamstow. He went to Selwyn just after Chadwick had become Master, and there abandoned the intention he had had at school of being ordained in the Church of England. At Selwyn he did well in the Historical Tripos and was elected to a Research Fellowship. In 1964 he became a Fellow of Jesus College where he was a College Lecturer in History, a Tutor and from the middle sixties a University Lecturer. For a good part of the period until he left Jesus to become Dean of Peterhouse in 1971, he was first of all rather heavily secularized and uncertain about ordination, and then, once he had been ordained in 1965, slightly flip and emancipated in his general attitudes. In addition to social and temperamental differences, and a difference of nearly a quarter of a century in age, there is the further difference between Chadwick and Norman that Norman began writing early and has been writing continuously in a variety of genres since. Where Chad1. Rev. Edward Robert Norman (1938- ). Ed. Chatham House School, Monoux School and Selwyn College Cambridge. Fellow of Selwyn College 1962-64 and of Jesus College 1964-71. Fellow and Dean of Peterhouse 1971- . Lecturer in History at Cambridge 1965- . Assistant Chaplain Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge 1971-78. Author of The Catholic Church and Ireland 1965, The Conscience of the State in North America 1968, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England 1968, The Early Development of Irish Society 1969, A History of Modern Ireland 1971, Church and Society in Modern England 1770-1970 1976, Christianity and the World Order (Reith Lectures of 1978) 1979 etc. 430

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wick's first book was not published until he was thirty-five, Norman had already by that point in his life published five books and, through his contributions to The Spectator, had established himself as a polemicist. He had not, it is true, served in a parish and he spent only six weeks at a theological college before he was ordained. This may have saved him from some current cant. It also enabled him to devote his life, in a way that parish work might have made difficult, and the atmosphere of a modern theological college might have made impossible, to defining the national role of the Church of England in the discouraging circumstances of the late twentieth century. He has done more than any clergyman of his generation to attack the hold which insipid Liberalism has had on the Churches' leaders. With Norman it may seem that the wheel has come full circle - that Smyth's Anglicanism is re-creating itself, in preparation for a powerful ride into the eighties and nineties. Whether it will have such a ride is a personal question as much as it is an intellectual one. In estimating probabilities, we should not make too much of the attention which Norman's Reith Lectures commanded in England in 1978, and in the rest of the English-speaking world thereafter. It will be more to the point to remember the fate of another Church-State Anglican who spent the decade before Norman began in similar attempts to free the Conservative party and the Church of England from politico-theological confusion. In approaching Norman, it is necessary to approach Powell.1 Norman is an admirer of Heath but, however little he may affect to approve of Powell (or Mrs Thatcher), must know that his own demonstration would probably not have been noticed if the way had not been prepared by Powell's demonstration in the 1960s and by the Powell-based transformation effected by Joseph, Mrs Thatcher and others in many 1. Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell (1912- ). Fellow of Trinity College 1934-38. Professor of Greek at Sydney New South Wales 1937-39. Served in British Army 1940-45 (Brigadier General Staff 1944). MP (Cons.) for Wolverhampton South West 1950-74. Minister of Health 1960-63. MP (UU) South Down 1974- . Author of The Rendel Harris Papyri 1936, First Poems 1937, A Lexicon to Herodotus 1938, The History of Herodotus 1939, Casting Off 1939, Thucydidis Historia 1942, (with I. Macleod) One Nation 1950, The Dancer's End and Wedding Gift 1951, The Social Services 1952, (with A. Maude) Change Is Our Ally 1954, (with A. Maude) Biography of a Nation 1955, Saving in a Free Society 1960, A Nation Not Afraid 1965, (with K. Wallis) The House of Lords in the Middle Ages 1968, Freedom and Reality 1969, The Common Market: the case against 1971, Still to Decide 1972, No Easy Answers 1973, Wrestling with the Angel 1977, Joseph Chamberlain 1977 etc.

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areas of public thinking in the 1970s. Powell, moreover, in spite of holding no Front Bench post since 1968, has been so effective a contributor to public doctrine that he would demand attention in the second volume of this book, even if he did not also demand it in thefirst.Some of his warmest admirers, particularly amongst journalists on the Daily and Sunday Telegraphy had been pupils or admirers of Butterfield, Oakeshott, Smyth or Pickthorn, and, while perfectly capable of reaching their own conclusions, needed Powell to persuade them of what they had only half-believed, that the conclusions of a pessimistic sub-section of the intelligentsia were in many ways the opinions of the people. There can be no doubt that the demonstration that Powell has provided in the last fifteen years is part of the line of thinking described in this book and that its bases are Anglican, whatever other confusing ingredients it may also happen to include.

Powell's parents were schoolteachers. His paternal grandfather was a Primitive Methodist lay-preacher who agreed to Powell's father joining the Church of England when he wanted to do so because it would enable him to gain admission to a diocesan teacher-training college. Powell's father, however, was a lukewarm Anglican, almost an agnostic. His mother - the eldest of eight daughters of an alcoholic Liverpool policeman - lived from an early age in Shropshire with her father's parents who, though dissenters themselves, brought her up as an Anglican in an attempt to do their best for her in humble circumstances. Until she had doubts in her middle thirties, when Powell was ten, she was devout Low Church. She taught Powell to read Greek - her own Greek primer having been the New Testament - and, in spite of the loss of her own faith, brought him up in his turn as an Anglican. At King Edward's School, Birmingham, and as a Scholar and Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Powell was an industrious, talented but reclusive scholar, whose earliest writings consisted of poetic compositions, textual emendations and studies of the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. His mentor in classical studies was Housman; he learnt much in general from Carlyle, Nietzsche and Sir James Frazer. By the time he left Trinity for the Chair of Greek at Sydney, New South Wales in 1937 he was a proselytizing atheist. Powell's pre-war poetry was restrained and pessimistic, and written

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out of a high sense of human destiny. It expressed the position of youth and had an eschatological overtone characteristic of Housman's repressed tombstone emotion. It registered the resigned, masculine gloom of the Trinity ethos into which he had been inducted. Powell's pre-war classical writings were very strictly about matters in hand. Even his book, The History of Herodotus, confined itself to problems connected with the process of composition, and was remarkable chiefly for its impersonality and close-grained textuality. This phase of activity included a lexicon to Herodotus, a critical apparatus to Thucydides and a translation of Herodotus' History which was eventually published in 1949. On arriving in Sydney at the age of twenty-six, Powell delivered an Inaugural lecture. This was his first statement to a public audience: it also contained, as his first statement of public doctrine, a two-pronged defence of the claim of Greek studies to be the education par excellence of the 'cultured man'. On the one hand, it claimed that the discussion of authenticity necessary to understanding the texts of Greek authors demanded a taste and judgment which developed in anyone who attempted it a sensitivity to the vulgarity of modern life. On the other, it argued that translation, especially into Greek, stimulated observation of style, and induced awareness of its absence from the 'shoddy stuff we are obliged to absorb month in, month out from newspapers, novels, textbooks' and from what Carlyle had described as that' "mighty frothocean which we call literature" '. The 'independent and critical judgment' that resulted - the disposition to treat statements 'on their own merits and not on those of the authorities from whom they emanate' was said to be particularly valuable at a time when newspapers and political parties were presenting 'falsehood as truth' and making promises which 'dispassionate reflection' would show to be 'impossible or disadvantageous'. Stranger still [it was added] the world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre a outranee which could be neither averted nor escaped. The war transformed Powell's life. From being an unusually youthful professor who had been elected to the Chair of Greek at Durham in 1940 and had hopes of succeeding to the Regius Chair of Greek in

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Cambridge, he now became a functionary, spending over five years in army staff appointments, including a long period at GHQ India, and another three years in staff appointments with the Conservative Party in London. By the time he became an MP in 1950, at the age of thirtyeight, he had had nearly ten years' varied experience of the despatch of military and official business. As an MP and as a junior minister, Powell was part of the Butskellite attempt to modernize the Conservative party by arguing the inevitability of policies that Conservatives instinctively disliked. It was as part of the governing element in the party that he belonged to the One Nation Group, drafted its manifesto (with Iain Macleod) and, with Angus Maude, wrote the modern-Conservative Biography of a Nation. Though there had been rebellions in the early fifties, over Suez and the Sudan, and against the Schuman Plan, there was not a great deal to distinguish him, except his literateness, his sense of principle, and his academic background, from the Macleods, Maudlings, Heaths and so on who constituted the official wing amongst back-benchers who were on their way to the top. His resignation from the Macmillan government in 1958 was a step on a professional ladder. His return to the government and later the Cabinet as Minister of Health, and his widely publicized interventions on behalf of Butler in the struggle for the leadership in 1963, merely confirmed that he was an important public figure. Even before 1964, Powell had associated himself more closely than most Conservative politicians with the economic rethinking associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs. It was not, however, until after the Conservative defeats in 1964 and 1966 that he began to command extensive attention as the bearer of a message which, even if it was not as distinctive as his manner made it seem, was recognized as distinctively Towellite'. What Powellism meant between 1964 and 1968 was a combination of three things. It meant first a recognition that the imperial phase of British history had ended with the withdrawal from India and that, in the new phase which had begun with the Suez crisis of 1956, there should be further withdrawals east of Suez. It meant, secondly, that the area of state power should contract and that an immense effort was needed to destroy the conventional wisdom left over from the wartime consensus about the impossibility of contracting it very much. Thirdly, it meant an intensive analysis of the assumptions of Keynesian economics, leading to a demand to halt inflation by controlling the

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money supply. These aspects of the platform were joined together by the claim that the pound should float and that there should be extensive reductions in taxation. At the same time that the economic platform was being developed, Powell was also developing a platform about nationality, though this was no more unique to him than the economic platform was. In the three years that followed his defeat when he stood for election to the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1965, he was a powerful publicist, but it was not until his immigration speech of 20 April 1968 and subsequent dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet that he moved out of a primarily party-political argument into a larger dissection of the prevailing consensus not only about immigration but about a great many other questions besides. Powell, he has told us, did not anticipate or intend the consequence of the Birmingham speech. If so, we may say that his most extensive expeditions, including his theological expeditions, were forced upon him. Once they had begun, once Heath had made it clear that he would not have Powell back on the front benches, Powell set out on a campaign which, operating within a Conservative party framework, was pointed as much at the Conservative leaders' conceptions of what a Conservative could say as it was at Labour conceptions of what Labour leaders could say. In discussing immigration, Powell was careful not to express hostility to immigrants. In demanding a reduction in their numbers, he claimed to be defending their interests. He did not propose forcible repatriation, nor was his position a 'racial' one. He claimed simply that the national identity was in danger, that the number of immigrants was the crux, and that immigration on the existing scale projected into the future, would make assimilation impossible and turn over substantial numbers of towns and cities to groups of people whose roots and loyalties lay outside the United Kingdom. In discussing immigration, Powell claimed not only to be speaking on behalf of the nation but also to be speaking a language which most of the nation understood. He claimed that the only people who did not understand it were a 'small minority' who had no sense of the 'staggering and dangerous gap' that divided them from everyone else. On some occasions this 'small minority' consisted of people who 'relished the occasions to indulge the luxuries of pharisaism and self-righteousness so long as it was at the expense of others'. On other occasions it consisted of people who seized 'with delight' on such a 'rich material for

436 Recognitions social and moral engineering as what they were pleased to call a "multiracial society" '. Throughout it was associated with 'conventional wisdom', 'fashion' - the line which all the "best people"' or 'polite society' took while fashion lasted, regardless of the damage that fashion could do before it disappeared. This conflict between the minority on the one hand and the majority of the population on the other was exemplified at first in the 'writers and speakers' who controlled the view taken of immigration by newspapers and by wireless and television broadcasting. It came to be applied more widely as the Ulster and University disorders of the late 1960s disclosed the existence of a threat to 'society as we know it'. This was the Maoist, Marxist and Trotskyite movement that achieved prominence between 1969 and 1972. It was the obvious enemy, the enemy within, the source of 'organised disorder'. Powell's attacks were made against the backcloth provided by its presence. The use he made of it, however, was not so much as a target for attack, though he did attack it, as the occasion for a further attempt to mobilize the opinion of the majority against 'minority opinions' in general. At the same time that he advocated economic freedom, restrictions on immigration, the defence of Ulster and resistance to the EEC in the early 1970s, he also mounted a campaign to stir up the Anglican clergy. Whether the defence of Ulster and economic liberty were ever popular positions, is open to doubt. What is not open to doubt is the popularity of Powell's immigration positions, and the self-confidence with which, fortified by the letters he received whenever he spoke and by the innumerable other evidences of anti-liberal working-class feeling that had been accumulating from the Smethwick election of 1964 onwards, he defended the 'opinions which the majority of people quite naturally held' from the 'violence' and 'venom' with which they were assaulted whenever they were expressed publicly. It was in the course of exposing the 'brainwashing' with which the minority, and especially minority newspapers like the Sunday Times, and minority journalists like Levin and Rees-Mogg, had tried to make 'ordinary people' mistrust their instincts, that he began to turn his attention to the clergy. Powell had talked about immigration both in Parliament and outside before the middle 1960s. He had also preached sermons. But the sermons had not been controversial and had not discussed immigration. In the face of extensive criticism from Christian quarters after the Birmingham speech of 20 April and other immigration speeches which followed it, he mounted a theological counter-attack which, beginning

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by rejecting clerical criticism of his position about immigration, ended in a full-scale assault on a whole phase of Anglican teaching about politics. In defending himself against Christian criticism, Powell asserted three main principles - that Christ's Kingdom was not of this world, that Christ's pronouncements called men to salvation, and that church leaders had authority only to prepare men for the Kingdom of God. Since Christ had provided no guidance for an earthly kingdom, the modern clergy had no authority to do so either. They might do so as citizens, so to speak, allowing their opinions to stand alongside other opinions in the free interchange that constituted democratic politics. But in that case their opinions would not be Christ's opinions, and would be no more authoritative than those they might take it upon themselves to criticize or condemn. Powell was careful to agree that a politician who had thought about Christ might well have better judgment than one who had not. He was also at pains to assert that the absence of logical or demonstrable connections between earthly existence and the Kingdom of God did not mean that God's truth was irrelevant to the conduct of life. But his position in general was simple and unequivocal - that there are no 'logical bridges . . . across the gulf between the assertions of Christianity and the conduct of the world's business'. This assertion was used in a variety of directions. It was used against the 'shallow silliness' of clerical attempts to make Christianity relevant economically. It was used against the 'amateur economics' and 'selfrighteous nonsense' with which the clergy approached World Poverty. It was used against the assumption that Christianity was a 'cultural badge', that one religion was as good as another, and that the right answer to the 'mosques, temples and gurudwaras' of Wolverhampton and Bradford was the assurance of tolerance and the establishment of 'parity' between religions. The Archbishops were pictured 'living in palaces' with the bedclothes 'pulled right up over their heads' while parts of Britain were undergoing a 'total transformation to which there had been no parallel for a thousand years'. At all levels, from the Wolverhampton Council of Christian Churches to the 'errors' of Archbishop Coggan, the leaders of the clergy were shown integrated with the Pharisaical minority, sold up to the 'aid', 'concern', 'race relations' and 'anti-pollution' industries, and unable to recognize the contestability of their conceptions. This was negative knockabout, an act of self-defence, and an attempt

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to break in on the Christian-Liberal or Christian-Labour consensus in much the same way as the Keynesian consensus had been broken in on in the early sixties. It was also, however, the expression of a reasoned conception which ejected from Christianity everything that Nietzsche had disliked about it, while developing a traditional coherence out of what remained. What was ejected was liberal virtue. What remained was an eschatological Anglicanism which did not obscure the contradiction between the Christian gospel and the modern world by which it was confronted. This sense of contradiction had been present in the earliest of Powell's statements about Christianity. Before there was any question of dissecting the errors of contemporary churchmen, he had preached uncompromising sermons about inconvenient subjects. In a sermon about The Resurrection of the Body in 1957, for example, he had affirmed his belief in a physical resurrection, and had blocked off the escape-route provided by an immortal soul abstracted from the body. Whosoever Will (1965) was a defence of the Athanasian Creed. In arguing that the generations which had believed in 'everlasting damnation' were not 'fools' and 'bigots' but had faced 'fearlessly' what modern men were afraid to face at all, it had made three points to which the 'sugary . . . mentality' of our 'own age and society' rendered men 'particularly allergic'. These were that Christianity is an 'intellectual religion', that it is not a religion in which 'every story has a happy ending', and that Christ asserted that men who do not 'entertain the essential propositions' will 'fail, die or be damned' in a 'final . . . and irrevocable' way. Christianity was said to recognize not only that 'failure exists' but that 'this life' and preeminently the 'nature of a man's belief and disbelief in this life' will 'determine once for all what he is to all eternity'. From these conceptions others followed as Powell defended his own understanding of political policy against the conceptions favoured by the Anglican leaders. In the process, he made even more emphatic assertions of the autonomous nature of political judgment and the otherworldly nature of Christ and God. Throughout his religious writings since 1968, Powell has insisted that the messages Christ left were 'impractical . . . paradoxes'. They were not injunctions that might be realized in some cases or to some degree; they were of their nature 'unrealisable', 'humanly unattainable' and 'in deliberate conflict with human reality and experience'. They were reminders that men inhabit two worlds and find it difficult not

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to confuse the one with the other. The one was the world of earthly existence where hatred, envy, selfishness and malice were unavoidable. The other was a world of 'impossibilities' where 'bread was flesh and wine blood', where human progress could never evolve into God's Kingdom, and where Christ's commandments were so 'absolute' that no earthly society could comply with them and survive. These assertions were supported by biblical commentary which showed how a careful reading of the New Testament would remove modern misconceptions of its meaning. After misconceptions had been examined in No Easy Answers, the conclusion was reached that Christ was not a moral teacher and was so far from wishing to change the world that when, as God's Son, he might easily have chosen to do so, he insisted on being sacrificed instead. When he did utter imperatives, his hearers looked in vain for specific content: Take up thy cross, follow me' (Matt. 16.24); 'Love one another as I have loved you' (John 15.12). When he pointed the path of life, he clothed his direction in terms of the unthinkable: T am the resurrection and the life, and he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live' (John 11.25). The refusal to answer the question, 'what shall we do?' is essential to Christianity. In the face of its doctrines - incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, redemption, judgment - the question, 'what then shall we do?' is not so much superfluous as uncomprehending. Yet the refusal to answer is almost intolerable to men and women, in the way that looking straight into the light of the sun is intolerable. Right from the beginning people set to work to fill what they mistook for a void or an omission. We have seen how in Luke the narrative of the baptist was supplied with a few handy questions and answers; and the Gospels, as they have reached us, bear traces of the determination to satisfy the natural demand for some good plain rules of conduct. Much more often, however, it is we ourselves who, by dint of refusing to read what the Gospels actually say, have obtained the answers which Jesus refused to give but which we were set upon finding.

The thread that ran through Powell's biblical homilies was that Jesus was not a 'cosy person who went around doing corny acts'. He was capable of 'biting irony' even when his irony was compassionate, and he demanded a revolution or inversion - a revaluation of all values. He did so 'as a traveller from an unknown country' in the 'shadow of a mystery' and with no 'easy answers' with which to save mankind. He was an absolutist, demanding total commitment and leaving no room for the compromises and decencies inherent in ordinary human development.

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As there was in Salisbury, so in Powell there is an unbreakable emphasis on the fact that the 'Gospel and the action of the Church is to individuals'. Powell praises the 'goodly inheritance' embodied in the Church of England which is not only the nation's church but also a branch of the Church Universal, and he stresses the fact - however 'indigestible to our time' - that Britain is unique in Christendom in having temporal and spiritual authority united in the monarch. On the other hand, he is no ordinary Anglican. He reads the Bible and can read it in Greek. He is conscious of affinity with Newman through an overlap of personality rather than through Tractarian principle. He claims to have absorbed Nietzsche and Frazer, not rejected them, and, by seeing Christ as the revaluer of values and the sacrificial victim, to have moved on to seeing him also as the creator of a post-Darwinian religion which has nothing to do with progress and improvement. If this seems faintly old-fashioned, it is neither irrelevant nor absurd. It is sometimes supposed that Powell diminished the impact of his economic campaigns and committed suicide politically by hooking himself first onto immigration, and then onto opposition to the EEC and the defence of Ulster Unionism. In the short run this may have been so, though the uncertainties involved were extensive. Strategically there are grounds for believing that his instinct was right, and that a revolution was needed in religious as much as it was needed in economic and political rhetoric in the 1960s. II It is unlikely that Powell ever decided that public doctrine matters more than office. It is possible, even, that he has assumed that virtue would be rewarded. Virtue has not been rewarded in his case, and it may be that the destruction of consensus has always to be its own reward. It is to be hoped that it will not have to be its own reward in Norman's case as well. Like Powell, Norman was a grammar-school boy, and an academically brilliant undergraduate who succeeded, soon after taking his degree, in making his presence felt in adult academic writing. His first three books were written during his emancipated period in the 1960s. But all three contained serious discussion of relations between churches and states and implied something resembling a message. The first - The Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of Rebellion -

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discussed the role of the Irish clergy in the mid-Victorian situation in which much political activity was directed from the Sanctuary. While emphasizing that the Bishops 'did not desire to enter politics' - that their concern was with matters which were by their nature 'religious' - it showed how central they were, and the Church was, to Irish life between 1859 and 1873, and how they performed in their relations with the Imperial Power. It was written, however, before Norman had acquired a style, and matters here only because its focus of attention was the politics of a church in a period in which it was assumed that the Roman Catholic Bishops had a free, frank and open relationship with the Anglican State. In The Conscience of the State in North America the angle of vision was rather different. Where The Catholic Church in Ireland had dealt with the politics of a church, The Conscience of the State described the development of State neutrality in religion in Britain, Canada and the United States. It showed that the American experience was more like the British and Canadian than historians had imagined, and that State neutrality in these countries was quite different from the State neutrality which had developed in Europe, where it had resulted from the State's determination to 'destroy the power of ecclesiastical interests'. In Britain, Canada and the United States, the movement for disestablishment had come from Christian rather than secular sources and had produced a State which, having abandoned confessionalism, had not swung over to a position in which 'belief and unbelief were equally allowed a protected existence'. As in Australia and New Zealand, so in these three countries, law and custom were still 'shot through with support for religious belief and the State in effect supported a 'non-sectarian' or 'common' Christianity which had been 'gradually broadened' to include Judaism. Most of the book described the development of State neutrality in Canada and the United States. It referred to the 'withering away of the ecclesiastical parts of the Constitution' in Britain, and the similarity it discerned between conditions there, where the 'vestiges of confessionalism' were extensive, and conditions in the United States where the 'Christian perceptions' that underpinned 'popular ethical valuejudgments' had been left 'vaguely defined' lest definition should vitiate the State's neutrality or compel it to propagate secular values of its own. There was said to be a 'transcendent providence' at work in all this, though in what way was not explained. One part of Norman's explanation of neutralization in Britain was

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a conventional account in terms of religious dissent and constitutional radicalism imposing the logical conclusion once the power and extent of non-conformity had become apparent. The more important part was the Church's failure to produce a 'corporate response to social problems', and its entrenchment behind parochial boundaries, cathedral closes and the House of Lords as industrial and rural changes occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. It was the State's success in providing a response of its own, and the 'sheer immensity' of the work it had undertaken once its social competence had been proved, that had disestablished the Church from many of its traditional, social and administrative functions and had reduced its significance in those areas in which they had continued. The Conscience of the State in North America, then, dealt with an aspect of the history of states which had grown out of the eighteenthcentury British state on both sides of the Atlantic. A History of Modern Ireland discussed modern Irish politics in the light of this common pedigree. A History of Modern Ireland is worth dwelling on not so much because of its attempt to see Irish history as a part of British history, as because of the clarity with which it exposed Norman's political position. When all the cackle is cut about clerical disengagement from party politics, his politics are obvious and simple: he is a modern conservative. He is not a reactionary, nor is he inhibited by feelings of respect for wealth and aristocracy. Almost all his political writing has been a demolition of rubbish, and this has misled both critics and admirers to attribute to him a more positive role than he accepts. Though his lectures on nineteenth-century English history were a send-up of Whig-Liberal naivete, and he has made positive statements in his occasional writings, it v/as only in discussing Ireland that he identified himself systematically as the laureate of 'social improvement', 'modern government' and the welfare state. A History of Modern Ireland argued that the idea of a 'native Irish political tradition' going back to the eighteenth century or beyond was an illusion. It argued that some of the heroes and many of the ideas that Irish Nationalist historiography looked back to had been English. It argued that O'Connell was a 'very great man' who had given the Catholic Church 'national existence for the first time' but that the Nationalist Movement from Young Ireland onwards had been led by 'schoolboy philosophers' who disliked industrial society and had allowed Gaelic absurdity and Fascist violence to disconnect them from

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all sympathy with the aspirations which were entertained by the real inhabitants of the Ireland they wished to lead. In portraying nationalist politicians, Norman had a field day. The impression was left that almost all of them had 'something wrong with them': Davis was a valetudinarian, Dillon a hypochrondriac and Lalor and Biggar seriously deformed. Mitchell was an asthmatic, Davitt had only one arm and Arthur Griffith had misshapen feet. Stephen was a coward, Michael Collins a homosexual and Patrick Pearse, when young, a transvestite. Kickham was deaf, almost blind and the user of an enormous ear trumpet. Parnell was superstitious and had a 'compulsive aversion to the colour green'; his 'hanky-panky' at Eltham had been matched by Butt's illegitimate family. Constance Gore-Booth was said to have 'smoked heavily, chewed gum, carried a revolver and kept a pet snake which she wore in her hair'. This was slapstick with a deterministic point, that nationalism was trivial, and the nationalist leaders irrelevant to the most important fact in modern Irish history - the incorporation through the Act of Union of 1801 of a 'society of retarded development' into 'the most advanced country in the world' and the creation of a 'new Ireland' through the 'natural' growth of state power to 'tackle the huge problems of an under-developed country'. A History of Modern Ireland put the Irish problem in its place. It set it in its British context, in the context of the Roman Catholic Church, and in the context established by the Welfare State. It established that, while Eire and Ulster were both 'indelibly English' in their institutions, Eire was slightly 'old-fashioned', lacking most of the components of a welfare society and lagging behind economically. Religion seemed to be almost irrelevant. No doubt was left that Ulster was to be defended chiefly from the accusation of having a 'right-wing government', and was to be admired for being a 'small liberal democracy' which had 'avoided the descent into fascism'. A History of Modern Ireland was Norman's first step onto a public stage. Though not written as a Pelican, it became one the year after publication. It achieved a very wide circulation, stimulating in Ireland the sort of abusive reaction which showed how admirably equipped Norman was for getting under the skin of entrenched interpretations. After writing it, he moved into a decade of polemic. From the beginning of his association with The Spectator in 1969, the polemic that had been apparent in Norman's Cambridge lectures and in his teaching and conversation was made available to a wider

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public. Once under way, this developed a momentum of its own. By the time the Reith Lectures were delivered in the autumn of 1978, he had provided as pungent an examination as Salisbury had given in the 1860s or Smyth in the 1930s of the points at which Anglican thinkers were subverting Christianity. In his occasional journalism since he began writing it in 1969, Norman has hit many attractive targets. So far from having to set up Aunt Sallies in order to knock them down, he has found innumerable Aunt Sallies waiting to be sneered at: Miss Pitt, Mr De La Noy, the Reverend Paul Oestreicher, Canon David Jenkins, the Reverend Michael Scott, Dean Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, Mr and Mrs Bob Whyte, Canon Trevor Beeson, Sir Alistair Hardy, Dr Una Kroll, Miss Barbara Ward and the Reverend George Balls, together with Bishops Huddleston, Reeves, Sheppard, I. T. Ramsey, Montefiore and Robinson, have provided pegs on which to hang a continuous denunciation of the threats to the Christian religion that are presented by Anglican guilt, sociological chic and Christian capitulations to the humanistic liberalism of the prevailing establishment. Norman's writings in the 1970s are best understood as a message to the leaders of the Church of England. His message is that they have allowed a faction to take them over, and have identified themselves with middle-class concerns about censorship, permissiveness, penal reform, anti-pollution, racial equality, self-authenticating morality, Third World development, Shelter, Oxfam, Amnesty International and the Marriage Guidance Council which they have innocently imagined would identify them with the working classes. This message has been extended into three central allegations. First that the Anglican leaders have lost touch with the 'ordinary assumptions' both of working-class people and of most of the laity whom they are supposed to be leading. Secondly, that they are moving towards the assumption that it is illiberal to give Christianity the preference in education and essential to encourage children to 'shop around and think for themselves'. Third, that what may have begun as a tactic of accommodation has become a pernicious capitulation to the inflated system of social workers, psychologists, sociologists, educationalists, 'liberal wind bags', and 'chattering clergymen stuffed full of bourgeois values', which Norman identifies as symbols of the era of Synodical government that was instituted in 1970. While being respectful of Archbishop Ramsey, Norman was also critical; he did not take long to modify the respectful tone he used

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about Coggan when Coggan succeeded Ramsey in 1974. The point that Norman evidently wishes to be understood, however, is that he is not part of the management of the Church of England. He writes in the role of an outsider and, so far he has a politico-ecclesiastical position, claims to speak in a Cobbett-like fashion for the lower clergy and laity against the 'luxury radicalism', 'humanist moralizings' and 'cardboard social models' that he hangs around the necks of the 'guilty public school boys' who have been set up over them. Norman agrees with Archbishop Ramsey that 'no truth is to be feared'. But 'What,' he has asked, 'about the intellectual rubbish that is "truth" only in the eye of the beholder?' 'Feed people a line,' went a judgment, 'and, if conditions are favourable, they will go for it.' Is it not true that men cannot pursue truth 'for its own sake' and that they assimilate knowledge according to a 'scale of value determined by their initial expectations?' and is it not also true that the attempt to find 'truth in liberal humanism' had produced an outright capitulation in which Christianity, with its optimistic view of the love of God and pessimistic view of human motives, was being 'swallowed up by a set of values' which was 'infinitely smaller than itself and led to an un-Christian belief in 'emancipated humanity'? If the world of secular humanism is explored by minds soaked in secular humanism [the judgment continued] the result will not be a revelation of the greatness of God's love. Knowledge is not neutral. There is no body of objective reality just waiting to be discovered by men of unclouded vision and unprejudiced outlook. But Christianity has a prior knowledge of God, transmitted in a mysterious tradition in the lives of those in whom Christ has been present. And while it is certainly right to ensure that the faith is not attached by some accident to a false cosmology, or a wrong ethical code, nothing but disaster will follow the attempt - now widely being made - to show that the Christian view of human life is not unique and sufficient. It is not 'traditional' spirituality, but contemporary radical theology, which is the agent whereby Christianity is being identified with cultural accidents and false explanations of the world. Christianity is not - emphatically not - an 'open' system of values, 'an adventure of freedom' (to use an unfortunate expression of Dr Ramsey's): an agenda still relatively blank awaiting the hand of 'modern knowledge' to write down the items.

These points were made throughout the 1970s. Most of all, in Church and Society in England 1770 to 1970 and in the Reith Lectures, they were made in relation to the Church of England's moral and political teaching during the last two centuries, both at home and abroad.

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Church and Society is a long book - nearly 200,000 words - but its thesis is simple: that, from the eighteenth century onwards, 'most of the social attitudes and ideas' adopted by the Anglican clergy have been 'a reflection of class consciousness', and that 'receptivity to new influences' has been strictly limited to ideas promoted by sections within the intelligentsia of which the clergy themselves were a part. The book describes in chronological order the host of substitutes with which, in the absence of a 'sure source of social teaching', Anglican leaders, while deliberately avoiding party-political identifications, have sought to respond to a 'central tension in the relationship of Christianity to the world' - a tension between 'seeking to regenerate men individually to render them fit to change society' and 'first changing society by immediate political means in order to create the conditions necessary for educating men into regeneration'. This was the question Norman had been asking in The Spectator whether, in responding to contemporary non-Christian influences, Anglicans had succeeded in exerting a Christian influence; whether, in fact, they had insinuated Christian conceptions into humanist culture as thoroughly as they had absorbed the assumptions which humanist culture had insinuated into them. The concluding chapter of the book showed Anglican thinking in the 1960s capitulating to humanist culture in a way that made the capitulations described in earlier chapters trivial by comparison. Exactly how he conceived a proper relationship between a theologically-based Church teaching about social and political questions and a national Church which was 'interwoven with the fabric of public life', Norman did not explain. In Church and Society he did not need to, since the book was historical in form and critical rather than constructive in intention. So far as it was constructive, it made it clear that correct conceptions had been promulgated by Inge and Hensley Henson. Norman makes a point of being an ecclesiastical historian: his focus of attention is church teaching, not the development of opinion outside the Church. Therefore, it is inappropriate to complain that the book was not about the development of non-Church opinion. It was a limitation, nevertheless, that, insistent as he was, and as Henson had been, on the intimacy of the connection between the Church of England and the nation at large, he did not consider the problems that arise when the nation at large ceases to be Christian, or when the operative intellectual influences at all social levels are indifferent to Christianity. For

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him this question did not arise since he asserted, with more certainty than seems appropriate, that the non-Churchgoing majority was Christian at heart. It is true that the monarchy is Christian, makes a greater public impact than the Church, and embodies, far more than the more prominent clergy, Henson's ideal of Anglicanism as the practical religion of a morally conservative nation. Whether, however, it is not decency and respectability that the monarchy embodies in the public mind, whether, indeed, decency and respectability are not the real religion of the English people, are questions to which Norman has not given as much attention as he should have done. Church and Society is the best type of academic book; it takes a number of ideas and runs them ruthlessly through a large body of historical material. Christiardty and the World Order is a non-academic book; it takes a number of ideas and applies them unexpectedly to the views taken of a number of contemporary problems not only by Anglican leaders but also by the leaders of many other Christian churches. Of the six lectures which constitute its six chapters, the first five were polemical warnings against the confusion between the sacralization of politics and the politicization of the sacred, and against the connected failure to understand that politicization is a symptom of Christianity's 'decay as an authentic religion'. None of this was unexpected, given the continuous attacks which Norman had been making on the 'gaseous mixtures emitted by the World Council of Churches' in its 'elitist-radical' support of marxist-guerilla and liberation movements throughout the world. What was new was the application of redpclitik to ecclesiastical policy, the suggestion that the Church of England's and the World Council of Churches' attitude towards any regime that it considered should be determined, not by its conformity to liberal-egalitarian social models or the liberal idealism so much in evidence at the 1978 Lambeth Conference, but by what might be called raison d'eglise - the extent to which a r6gime permitted God to be worshipped according to His rule and Church requirements. The Lectures dealt with three instances of this problem, in two of which, however, the argument was the negative one that 'modern Christian leaders' who had been 'all tolerance' where departures from traditional religious doctrine were concerned, had been 'ferocious when it comes to departures from the canons of liberalism' in South Africa or South America. It was in relation to the Soviet Union that the position was most distinctive. R.P.D.—Q

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In discussing South Africa, Norman had pointed out that, whatever its liberal critics might imagine, the Dutch Reformed Church did not teach 'white racial superiority' and that 'separate development' was not an attempt to institutionalize 'racial discrimination'. In discussing the Soviet Union, he took a similar view of official claims, taking at its face value the separation of Church from State that is embodied in the Soviet Constitution and observing that this guaranteed freedom, 'either to profess or not to profess religious faith'. He pointed out that the right of public worship was guaranteed, and that this was more important than Western observers tended to suppose since the Orthodox Church regarded the performance of the Sacred Liturgy not just as 'a corporate expression of belief but as the 'disclosure of celestial truth', the 'eesence of the unchanging mysteries of transcendence' and the 'very nature of Christianity itself. Norman's conclusion was that the Western concern about the practice of religion in the Soviet Union was not only misplaced but was misplaced because it was expressed in the language of Human Rights and exaggerated the importance of the Russian dissidents, some of whom rejected the principle of state registration of ecclesiastical bodies (which the official Orthodox, Baptist and Catholic church leaders accepted), and others of whom were motivated by anti-Russian nationalism, ethical opposition to the socialist state or other antiSoviet activities any one of which, he claimed, would have attracted prosecution in almost any country in the world. With a positively Shavian or Webb-like insistence, and with a Toynbeean energy appropriate in a Reith lecturer, he rammed home the claims that, in spite of the socialist atheism of the Soviet Communist party, Christians in Russia were probably not persecuted for their Christianity, that the decline of religion in the Soviet Union might as easily be the result of secularization consequent upon urbanization, and that the Orthodox Church in particular, strengthened as it had been during the German war by a revival of its historic links with Russian patriotism, was 'satisfied with the mere performance of worship' and found a 'satisfactory enough space for the exercise of its faith'. These first five lectures, like the rest of the polemical writings of 1970-78, provided a formidable indictment, but left it to the imagination to guess what it was that Norman meant positively. He dissociated himself from reaction in Latin America and from apartheid in South Africa, just as he had associated himself with the welfare state in A History of Modern Ireland. While making it clear, as he had

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already done in another context, that the Church 'as a corporate entity' could properly identify 'general principles for the ordering of human society', he also explained how difficult it was to relate 'general principles' to 'particular applications'. The overwhelming sense one receives from Norman's writing is of the enormous contrast between the higher Anglican clergy and radical, liberal establishment of social workers - men who would have been clergymen a hundred years ago - on the one hand, and the body of decent Englishmen on the other. One wonders in reading this, as much as in reading Pickthorn and Welbourne, whether this is not an illusion, but, assuming that it is not, assuming - what it is more difficult to do that decency1 includes a desire for religion, what is it that Norman wants the Church of England to teach? He wants it to point out that the 'new creeds' established in justification of social medicine, race-relations legislation and state-controlled social research in the last few decades are not self-evidently right, and should not be thought to have superseded the morality of Capitalism. He wants Capitalism to be seen - more questionably - as incorporating the Christian assumption that men are inherently defective and in need of moral incentive', and as having the 'moral merit' of inducing 'productive use of personal resources in the creation of wealth'. He wants the Church of England to understand, and to teach, that the past was more complicated than contemporary critics of Capitalism have imagined, and that it is difficult to relate the 'simple values of Christ' to political situations. He wants to break the tyranny of assumption embodied in the Marxist identification of Capitalism with reaction. He does not say that 'Christians who became Marxists are wrong', since Christianity as a 'universal religion' should be 'rendered in all the experiences that men have of righteousness'. But he wishes it to be understood that Marxism is replacing Christianity throughout the world as the intelligentsia's 'vehicle of moral seriousness' and that one of the most important tasks that Christians face is to 'stop all the nonsense about respecting secular values' in order to proclaim that a 'serious race is on between the competing ideologies for the possession of men's souls'. The Church, therefore, has to differentiate itself both from Marxism and from liberal humanism. It has not only to offer its own answers to the questions which they raise, it has also to subvert the questions. It has to do this. Norman suggests, in language that will be familiar to 1. See above p. 72.

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readers of this book, by subjecting them to a strong dose of historical relativism. Norman wishes to affirm that Christian truth is God's truth and, as God's truth, undercuts all the truths that men have invented for themselves. Man's inventiveness, his reason, his freedom, are all to be understood as transient exercises breeding 'passing enthusiasms' which seem 'permanently true' when they appear but which, as time passes, become part of a world of 'perpetual. . . change and mutating values'. Because they are part of a world of this kind, they must all be seen to be marred by it, and must all be seen to be inadequate embodiments of that instinct for eternity which all men nevertheless have. Norman's version of historical relativism suggests that, though men want a 'bridge to eternity', they should not be encouraged to suppose that they can find one in any of their own works. He credits Man with an 'ancient sense' that the God of the Bible is 'objectively separate from the world of human values' and is not to be perceived in the 'shifting structure of human idealism'. It is only in Christ, he argues, that the 'supervening force of the divine flowed down upon the earth'. Christ alone is 'unchanging'. His incarnation is the 'one event in history that stands outside the cultural values of men'. He alone had the eschatological sense that the materials of eternity, though they lie 'thick upon the ground', are ambiguous in relation to time and 'lucid' only as 'pointers to celestial realities'. This is the first facet of Norman's historical relativism; it leads into the second - the claim that, when men talk about rights and principles and connect them with the 'higher laws of human development', they are in fact reflecting not a reasoned appreciation of moral law but 'each man's unreasonable claim to significance and reward'. The language of rights and principles, like the language of altruism and the higher idealism, is rooted, that is to say, in 'moral ambiguity and flawed intention'. It is Christianity's teaching that this is so, that human ideals and aspirations are corrupted and partial, and that Christians who are wise will return from the 'fading enthusiasms of unfulfilled improvement' to 'the inward nature of spirituality'. Why the disappointment of social aspirations should lead to concentration upon 'inward spirituality' is not exactly explained; nor, really, is the relationship between the 'indwelling Christ' and the external action of the Church. But there is no ambiguity about the claim that 'individual Christian action' has to be separated from the corporate witness of the Church and that 'only the Christian who has induced his own soul into a sense of the immanence

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of the celestial realities may properly begin to help his brothers in the present world'. What Norman really means is uncertain, not least because his position changes, sometimes without observable development. He wants the Church of England to behave as a Church, and he wants it to lay down principles according to which moral and political action should be conducted. On the other hand, he does not want Anglicans, or anyone else, idolatrously to identify their own teaching with permanent truth, even though there has to be an intersection of time with eternity. He is critical of the intellectualization of religion, at least when it reaches the wrong conclusions, and evidently agrees with Chadwick that academic research is not essential to salvation. He is concerned to remind the clergy that they are 'under orders' and have the duties of Christians to perform; and he is scathing about their priorities. 'Many', he wrote in 1976, 'are clearly bored to death.' Some 'recover a sense of significance and purpose' only when they return from the 'parish realities of diminished congregations' to the 'esteem of enlightened opinion'. The duties of clergymen, however, as he understands them, are unmistakable - to be 'set apart' from 'worldly activity', to act as links with the 'unseen world', and to provide 'an oasis in this life where the soul may somehow experience refreshment which is at once both unearthly yet compassionate'. In Norman's work from time to time false notes intrude - about 'people being rubbish' for example, in the way he puts the primacy of internal over public religion, and in the wavering and inadequate expression that he gives to his conception of the Church of England. There are also important uncertainties - about the role of the Vatican and of the Roman Catholic Church generally. Norman has been much exercised against the ordination of women and claims to admire the Greek Orthodox Church. Doubtless, as time goes on, he will understand that one does not cease to be an intellectual by attacking the intelligentsia, that the modern intelligentsia has bitten deeper into the English mind than he imagines, and that, like many of the Anglicans he attacks, he is in danger of abandoning - perhaps wishes deliberately to abandon the only claims that make it possible to believe that the Church of England is a Church. In his defence it should be stated that, like the present author, he thinks theologians comparatively unimportant as exponents of Christianity in contemporary England and despises the ignorance which makes Anglicans imagine that they are liberating

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Recognitions

Christianity from secularism in the course of capitulating to it. It should be added that throughout his work, Norman has been doing what intellectuals are obliged to do and, though only just forty, has been doing it since the Reith Lectures to an audience that is at least as large as the audiences reached by Inge, Gore, Henson and Temple. In these circumstances, he may be excused the illusion that his is the popular cause, and may be seen as part of the procession of thinkers described in this volume whose strengths have been negative and whose negativities, with all their difficulty, are not less appealing now than when they were promulgated by Salisbury in the wake of the Oxford Movement nearly a century and a quarter ago.

Epilogue The purpose of this volume has been to establish the existence, and importance, of a field of study. But the volume has also had a hero a way of thinking which has been pursued with high distinction in England since the third decade of this century and will have many opportunities for displaying a similar distinction in the future. In spite of Salisbury and other Victorians, this way of thinking is a product of the twentieth century: a reaction to the realization that a post- or anti-Christian doctrine not only exists but has gained the ascendancy at the same time that universal suffrage and universal education have transformed the area of its operation. In mounting a counter-revolution in religion, it has produced a large literature which has left many marks on the public mind. In some respects these marks have been deep, and will probably be permanent. In others, they have been cosmetic, put on to enable modern men to live modern lives, while avoiding the odium of responsibility for modernity. To one type of mind, cosmetic is repugnant. To others it is essential. We need not judge between them. For it is still the case, whether disguised by cosmetic or not, that modernity is the practice we have and the life we lead, and that we have all to accept it and live as it commands us, even when we despise it. In what sense, then, can there be a Christian Conservatism? Certainly as self-enactment, in Oakeshott's sense: a self-regarding creation of the self as Christian Conservatives imagine it. Certainly also as the hope that a dominating Christian intelligence can be reconstituted, however unlikely it seems that it will be reconstituted in England in the immediate future. Primarily, however, for the moment, most certainly in England, as dissent, a Jacobitism of the mind which can do little more than protest its conviction that the modern mind is corrupt. The allegation of corruption is not new. It is an historic crux which began when the enemies of Christianity first thought that their battle had been won. It is in establishing that the battle has not been won, that modern truth is contested, and that conflict between Christianity 453

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and its enemies is ubiquitous, that Christian Conservatism is most persuasive. Much could be said about its toughness, subtlety and illusionlessness, about its defence, and irony about the defence, of inequality, and about its use of, and detachment from, obstructiveness and obscurantism. These things are for others to say, or will be if reconstitution is to occur. All that can he said here is that Christian Conservatism is also an instrument of investigation, a tool with which to approach the foundations of modern thought and the limitations of modern thinking. In this volume it has been out of its mouth that some English versions of modernity have been judged. In Volume II they will be judged more directly.

Notes Where a work is mentioned in these endnotes without the name of its author, it is the work of the subject of the section in which the endnote occurs. In order to keep tenses consistent or sentences in shape, I have occasionally, without, I hope, altering the meaning, made minor alterations within quotations. p. xvii Evelyn Waugh, Come Inside in John A. O'Brien (ed.), The Road to Damascus 1941 vol. I pp. 13-14. pp. 3-17 (Whitehead) Memories (1936) in Essays in Science and Philosophy 1948 pp. 2Q-3; The Mathematical Curriculum (1912), A Polytechnic in Wartime (1917), The Organization of Thought (1916), The Aims of Education (1916), and Technical Education and Its Relation to Science and Literature (1917), all in The Organization of Thought 1917 pp. 4-8,25,30-57,67,70-3 and 133; The Place of Classics in Education (1923) in The Aims of Education 1929 p. 107; Science and the Modern World 1926 pp. 20-1, 49, 9 3 ^ , 216-17, 220-2, 241-56, 259 and generally in chapter V; Mathematics and Liberal Education (1912) in Essays in Science and Philosophy 1948 pp. 130-3; Symbolism 1928 p. 104; Adventures of Ideas 1933 pp. 4,6-8,11-25,97-8,272,279 and 294; The Principle ofRelativity 1922 pp. 4-6; The Concept of Nature 1920 pp. 17 et seq.; Religion in the Making 1926 pp. 15-50, 58-9, 71, 76, 80, 84, 120 and 154-6; Process and Reality (1927-28) 1929 pp. 482-8 and 491-5. pp. 21-24 (Toynbee) A Study of History 1934 i p. 16, ii p. 20, iii pp. 22, 90,133-4,158-60,172, 204, 212, 231-48, 252-6, 263, 279 and 385-8; Comparing Notes 1963 pp. 8,11 and 16-40. pp. 25-27 (Toynbee) Greek Policy since 1882 1914 pp. 2-9; Greece in Forbes, Toynbee, Mitrany and Hogarth The Balkans 1915 pp. 244-5 and 249; Nationality and the War 1915 chs. i and xii and pp. 4, 30-1 and 272; The New Europe 1916 pp. 18-20 and 63-7; Economics and Politics in International Affairs 1930 pp. 8-9; see also The World after the Peace Conference 1925 and two series of BBC talks, World Order or Downfall 1930 and The Disintegration of the Modern World Order in A. J. Toynbee and J. L. Hammond (ed.), Britain and the World Order 1932. 455

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Notes

pp. 28-32 (Toynbee) The Place of Mediaeval and Modern Greece in History 1919 pp. 8-19, and 24-7; The New Europe p. 5; Armenian Atrocities 1916 pp. 107-8; The League and the East 1920 pp. 6-21; The Western Question in Turkey and Greece 1922 pp. 6-21, 322, 328-31 and 349-51; The Unity of Gilbert Murray's Life and Work in J. Smith and A. J. Toynbee (ed.), Gilbert Murray: an unfinished autobiography 1960 pp. 212-13; The World after the Peace Conference 1925 pp. 4-6; World Order or Downfall, pp. 15, 25 and 38-41; Greek Historical Thought 1924 p. vii; The Greek Door to the Study of History in Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray 1936 pp. 307-8; Russia in H. Brown and others Our New Neighbours Today and Yesterday 1933 pp. 175-6 and 189-228. pp. 32-35 (Toynbee) The Downfalls of Civilizations (1939) 1947 pp. 10-11; Christianity and Civilization 1940 pp. 20-2, 25-30, 32-4 and 38-43; A Study of History 1939 iv pp. 580-3, v pp. 374, 375, 394-9, 439, and 557-8, vi pp. 13-14, 150-1, 167-8, 243, 259-61, 277-8, 316-17 and 325-6. pp. 36-39 (Toynbee) A Study of History xii 1961, pp. 95-7; Does History Repeat Itself (1947), The International Outlook (1947), The Present Point in History (1947) all in Civilization on Trial 1948 pp. 2, 25-7, 40-1, 127-8, 138-47; The Prospects of Western Civilization (1948) 1949 pp. 20 and 63-77; America and the World Revolution 1962 pp. 65-8 and 75-8; The Economy of the Western Hemisphere 1962 pp. 63-7. pp. 39-44 (Toynbee) An Historian Looks at Religion (1952-53) 1956 pp. 2-3,74-5,132,148, 202-3, 261, 273, 280-3, and 288-91; Civilization on Trial (1947) and The Unification of the World (1948) in Civilization on Trial 1948 pp. 79-91, and 158-9; Christianity among the Religions of the World 1958 pp. vii, 7, 81, 85 92-4; Comparing Notes, pp. 129-33; The Prospects of Western Civilization pp. 85-7 and 90-3; America and the World Revolution pp. 53-70; A Study of History vii pp. 420-33, 490-1, 500-2 and 513, xii pp. 100-2, 518-36 and 571-2. pp. 48-49 (Toynbee) Toynbee A Study of History vii pp. 509-10; Christianity among the Religions of the Worldpp. 80-1; Smyth Simeon and Church Order (1937-8) 1940 p. xiii; Whitehead Adventures of Ideas pp. 160 and 170. pp. 49-61 (Pickthorn) Principles or Prejudices 1944 pp. 2-11 and 18-19; The German Revolution and the Conditions which Prepared It in H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference 1920 p. 114; review of Edmund Burke by Bertram Newman in The Criterion 1927 p. 558; Early Tudor Government: Henry VII 1934 pp. 4-5; Some Historical Principles of the Constitution 1925 pp. 9-10; Aims in Cambridge Review 1 November 1940; A History of the British People in CasseWs History of the British People vii 1925 pp. 2257-8,2286-7,2304,23226, 2336, 2395, 2404-5, 2449-54, 2460, 2472 and 2509; for Lapsley and free-

Notes

457

thinking, see his pamphlet Religious Difficulties and Doubts of the Present Generation. A Paper . . . before the Annual Meeting of Schoolmasters and College Tutors Cambridge, 12 January 1907. pp. 61-72 (Welbourne) C. N. Parkinson A Law Unto Themselves 1966 pp. 39, 45 and 48 and Parkinson's Law or the Pursuit of Progress 1958 p. 1; Welbourne in Hugh Burnaby, A Memoir 1961 p. 8; in Emmanuel College Magazine 1950-51, 1955-66, 1959-60 and 1963-64; in The Miners* Unions of Durham and Northumberland 1923 pp. 27, 46-50, 55-9, 72-81, 87-9, 100, 192-3, 200, 256, 283-4 and 301, and in A Social and Industrial History of England: Modern Times 1921 pp. 12-14, 21-5, 33-6, 92-7, 105-7, 144, 152 and 209; D. H. Newsome in Emmanuel College Magazine 1965-66; B. L. Manning The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif1919 p. 153; Noel Annan The Intellectual Aristocracy in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan 1955. pp. 73-77 Essays Catholic and Critical 1926 p. v, and 1929 (3rd edition) pp. vii-xxvi. pp. 77-91 (Smyth) The Friendship of Christ 1945 pp. ix 3-5,6-9 and 92; H. S. Box (ed.) The Priest as Student 1939 pp. 240-3, 263-5, 271 and passim; Cambridge Review, 22 May and 29 May 1925, pp. 416 and 441-2, and also the large number of reviews, review articles and editorials that Smyth wrote in the Cambridge Review between October 1940 and May 1941; Religion and Politics (1942) 1943 pp. 1-13 and 15; The Art of Preaching 1940 pp. 221-3; Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI1926 pp. 45-7 and 270; The Catholic Revival 1933 pp. 15-17; The Appeal of Rome 1946 pp. 3 and 6; The Criterion 1928-29 pp. 333-7 and 649-60, 1932-33 pp. 139-41 and 686-7, 1934-35 pp. 151-2, 654, 716-17 and 797, 1935-36 pp. 116-18 and 552, 1937-38, pp. 326-7 and 1938-39, p. 106; The Genius of the Church of England 1947 pp. 25, 28, 40, 42 and 46; The Recall to Religion by various writers 1937 pp. 141-5; The Evangelical Movement in Perspective in Cambridge Historical Journal 1943 p. 160; University Sermon of 14 February 1941 in Cambridge Review 21 February 1941 pp. 285-7; for Puritan intolerance see University Sermon of 26 January 1947 in Cambridge Review 1 February 1947. pp. 91-94 (Hoskyns) Smyth Edwyn Clement Hoskyns in Hoskyns Cambridge Sermons 1938 pp. viiix and xv-xvii; Graham Greene Brighton Rock (1938) 1943 p. 201; Cambridge Sermons (preached by Hoskyns when Dean of Corpus between 1919 and 1937 and published posthumously) 1938 pp. 49-50 and 64; The Fourth Gospel 1940 (edited by F. N. Davey, after Hoskyns's death) vol. I pp. 7 and 120-3; The Christ of the Synoptic Gospels in Essays Catholic and Critical 1926 pp. 154-61; Christ and Catholicism 1924 pp. 3 and 19-20; see also We Are The Pharisees (more sermons as Dean of Corpus and an essay on studying the Bible) (posthumously) 1960, Hoskyns's translation of Karl Barth Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans 1933, (with F. N. Davey) The Riddle of the New Testa-

458

Notes

ment 1931 and Jesus the Messiah in G. K. A. Bell and A. Deissmann (ed.), Mysterium Christi 1930. pp. 98-99 (Eliot) International Journal of Ethics October 1916 pp. 111-12 and 115-16, July 1917 pp. 542-4 etc. See also L. Gordon Eliot's early years 1977 for Eliot's obsession with religion. pp. 99-105 (Eliot) The Athenaeum July 1918, April, May and June 1919; New Statesman October 1916; The Egoist July 1917, September 1917, January, March to July and September 1918; The Dial March and July 1921, April and November 1922 and 1923; The Tyro Spring 1921; Art and Letters 1920; The Nation and Athenaeum 9 June 1923; The Metaphysical Poets in Times Literary Supplement 20 October 1921; Euripides and Professor Murray (1920), Blake (1920), Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Hamlet and His Problems (1919), Ben Jonson (1919), Philip Massinger (1920), Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe (1919), Rhetoric and Poetic Drama (1919) and The Local Flavour (1919), all in The Sacred Wood 1920 pp. xiv, 16, 33-8, 49-51, 55, 75-7, 100-1, 118, 129-36 and 152-4; MarvelI (1921) in Selected Essays 1951 pp. 292-3 and 297. pp. 105-127 (Eliot) F. H Bradley (1927), John Bramhal I (1927) and The Humanism ofIrving Babbit (1928) all in For Lancelot Andrewes 1928 pp. 29-32, 59 and 104; The Function of Criticism (1923), Arnold and Pater (1930), Baudelaire (1930), Modern Education and the Classics (1932) and Religion and Literature (1935), all in Selected Essays 1951 pp. 27-9,388,398-400,422,427-9,436 and 514-16; The Criterion (and successors) April 1924 pp. 231-3, April 1927 p. 71, August 1927 pp. 978, November 1927 p. 386, March 1928 pp. 195-202 and 281, June 1928 p. 3, December 1928 p. 281, 287-90, April 1929 pp. 377-8, July 1929 pp. 579, 6813, 685 and 690, July 1930 p. 590, April 1931, pp. 482-3 October 1931 p. 69, April 1933 p. 472, July 1934 p. 628, January 1936 p. 336 and January 1937 p. 290; Transatlantic Review 1924 pp. 95-6; Church Times (letter) 24 February 1928; Time and Tide 5 January and 19 January 1935; The Sacred Wood p. x; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1932-33) 1933, pp. 97-9, 110, 113, 116 and 139; Introduction to G. Wilson Knight The Wheel of Fire 1930; After Strange Gods (1933) 1934 Preface, pp. 20-36 and 39-68; The Listener 16 March 1932 pp. 382-3, 23 March 1932 p. 429, 30 March 1932 pp. 496-7, 6 April 1932 p. 501,16 March 1933 p. 383 and 10 April 1941 p. 525; letters of 1934 in R. Kojecky T. S. ElioVs Social Criticism 1971 pp. 77-8 and On the Place and Function of the Clerisy (1944) in loc. cit., pp. 242-8; review of A. Wolf The Oldest Biography of Spinoza in Times Literary Supplement April 1927; Religion without Humanism in N. Foerster (ed.), Humanism and America 1930 pp. 105-11; The Dial 1928 p. 112; The Spectator 30 October 1934; J. Baillie andD. M. Martin (ed.), Revelation 1937 pp. 1-2 and 32-4; Introduction to Pascal's Pensees 1931, pp. xv to xvi and xix; The Idea of a Christian Society 1939 pp. 6-13, 16-21, 28, 30-5, 59-60, 64 and 96; Christian Newsletter 13

Notes

459

March and 14 August 1940 and 3 September 1941; Cultural Forces in the Human Order in M. Reckitt (ed.), Prospect for Christendom 1945 pp. 63 and 65-9; The Social Function of Poetry (1945) in On Poetry and Poets 1957 p. 25; Notes Towards The Definition of Culture in New English Weekly 21 January 1943 pp. 117-18, 28 January 1943 p. 129 and 11 February 1943 p. 146; The Unity of European Culture (1946) in Notes Towards The Definition of Culture 1948 pp. 111-24; The Aims of Education (1950) and Classics and the Man of Letters (1942) in To Criticise the Critic 1965 pp. 71-5,114-23 and 151-60; A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel 7 March 1948 pp. 7-8. pp. 130-136 (Knowles) A. Morey, David Knowles 1979 pp. 13 and 61-99; Sanderson of Oundle in Downside Review 1926 pp. 66-7; The American Civil War 1926 pp. 11, 35-9, 48-9, 92-3, 202-7, 210 and 217; The Thought and Art of Thomas Hardy in The Dublin Review 1928 pp. 208-11, 214 and 217-18; The Greek Witness to the Immortality of the Soul in Downside Review 1927 pp. 180, 185 and 188. pp. 136-140 (Knowles) A. Stacpoole Ampleforth Journal 1975 pp. 20 and 34; The Benedictines 1929 pp. 11-15, 18, 20-7, 47-9, 55-7, 84-9, 98-9 and 106-12; The English Mystics 1927 pp. 1-39, 43-6 and 178; The Birth of Contemplative Prayer and Contemplative Prayer in Clergy Review 1932 pp. 2, 178-82, 183-8 and 379-80; Edward Cuthbert Butler (1934) in The Historian and Character 1963 pp. 298341 and 356-62. For Smyth on the 'resentful coma which is called research' see An Apology for Scholarship, a sermon preached in Westminster Abbey on 5 May 1948 in Cambridge Journal 1948 p. 715. pp. 140-155 (Knowles) The Prospects of Mediaeval Studies (Inaugural Lecture 29 October 1947) pp. 22-3; three pamphlets Peter Has Spoken 1968, Authority 1969 and Grace 1971; five articles, This Century of Change in The Tablet 17 November-15 December 1973; Review of Powicke and Emden edition of Rashdall The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages in The Dublin Review 1936 pp. 304-5 and 310-12; Introduction to Mathew's Life of Mary, Lady Knatchbull 1931 pp. x-xii and xv; The English Mystics pp. 43-6; Wulfstan of Worcester in M. Ward (ed.), The English Way 1933 pp. 77-8; review of Harpsfield's Life of Sir Thomas More in Downside Review 1933 pp. 174-5; The Religion of the Pas tons in Downside Review 1924 pp. 162-3; The Monastic Order 1940 generally but especially pp. 20, 36-7, 98-9,106-11,142-3, 218-19, 680-5, 688-9 and 692-3. pp. 162-166 (Collingwood) Croce's Philosophy of History in Hibbert Journal 1920-21 pp. 262-4 and 266-7; Speculum Mentis 1924 pp. 220-1, 231-46 and 286-7; Are History and Science Different Kinds of Knowledge in Mind 1922 p. 443 and 448-51; The Nature and Aims of A Philosophy of History in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1924-25 pp. 151, 154-6, 160-2 and 164-74; The Limits of Historical Knowledge in Journal of Philosophical Studies 1928 pp. 218-22.

460

Notes

pp. 166-174 (Collingwood)

Religion and Philosophy 1916 pp. xiii-xv, 3-19, 21, 29, 31, 34-5, 38-9, 42-4 and 49-55; Speculum Mentis pp. 108, 111, 115-21, 128-31, 133, 138-9 and 142-54. pp. 174-178 (Collingwood) Faith and Reason 1928 pp. 3, 12-13 and 16-19; Fascism and Nazism in Philosophy 1940 pp. 168 and 176; An Essay on Philosophical Method 1933

pp. 5-7, 127-33, 170-5, 191-4, 209-12 and 215; Essay on Metaphysics 1940 pp. 11-20, 33, 40, 42-70, and 72-6. For Bradley as a Realist into whose philosophy both Relativity and Freudianism could be said to 'fit like a glove', see The Permanent Problems of Metaphysics. Two Lectures given in Oxford in

1934 Collingwood MSS. pp. 178-183 (Collingwood) Essay on Metaphysics p. 343; the dedication to Speculum Mentis; Ruskin's Philosophy, Address at Ruskin Centenary Conference 1919 pp. 10,12-13,16-17,

21 and 26-9; Speculum Mentis pp. 19-21, 24^5, 27, 30, 32-3, 35-8 and 46; Fairy-Tales Collingwood MSS passim. pp. 183-188 (Collingwood)

An Autobiography 1939 pp. 148-51, 153-6, 167 and chapter vi generlaly; Man Goes Mad 30 August 1936 in Collingwood MSS; Fascism and Nazism p. 176; The Breakdown of Liberalism, Outlines of A Concept of the State, The Spiritual Basis of Reconstruction (1919) and The Permanent Problems of Metaphysics,

all in Collingwood MSS; Essay on Metaphysics pp. 134-9 and 142. p. 189 (Collingwood)

For the love of the countryside as 'in the deepest sense religious' and the 'worship of our God as terra mater, Demeter, our divine mother' and the connection between this, and the invasion of the countryside by the 'petroldriven hordes from the towns' see the second half of Man Goes Mad. There are hints both in Man Goes Mad and in a paper on Jane Austen (both Collingwood MSS) that Collingwood had rather vague hankerings after a ChurchState Anglican model of society in which country houses were designed, between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, 'with an instinctive sympathy for their surroundings' and Anglican Oxford was an 'integral part of a social system - a kind of heart which circulated intellectual life through the whole country'. The hints, however, are too vague to be pursued and are not compatible with anything more precise than the very Eliotesque role Collingwood adopted as laudator temporis acti. pp. 196-204 (Nock, Kitson Clark and Manning) Cambridge Review 24 May 1947. For Nock see The Resurrection and Early Gentile Christianity And Its Hellenistic Background in A. E. J. Rawlinson (ed.), Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation by Members of the Anglican Communion 1928 pp. 47-156; The Study of the History of Religion (1933) in Z.

Stewart (ed.), Arthur Darby Nock 1972 pp. 331,335-6 and 341; and Conversion

Notes

461

1933 pp. 210 and 215. For Kitson Clark see especially The Kingdom of Free Men 1957'; and The English Inheritance 1950 particularly pp. 9-10. For Manning see The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif 1919 pp. 2-3, 83, 102, 113-15, 121-3, 128, 136-7 and 148; The Hymns of Wesley and Watts 1942 pp. 27 and 143; The Making of Modern English Religion 1929 pp. 82-3, 86-8, 114 and 392; A Layman in the Ministry 1942 pp. 126-7 and 138-9; More Sermons of a Layman 1944 pp. 4, 21-35, 43, 64-7, 70, 97, 104-12, 121, 234-5; Essays in Orthodox Dissent 1939 pp. 15, 20, 42, 50, 74-5, SS9 93, 97-8, 100, 108,142,154,161 and 186; Why Not Abandon The Church 1939 pp. 34, 39 and 55-6; also O. Greenwood (ed.), The Protestant Dissenting Deputies 1952; Smyth in The Guardian 26 December 1941; F. Brittain Bernard Lord Manning 1942 pp. 56, 69-70 and 87; and F. Brittain and H. B. Playford The Jesus College Boat Club 1928 pp. 108-11. pp. 205-211 (Ward) T. F. Tout in Proceedings of the British Academy XI (1924-25) pp. 429-30; In Memoriam Adolphus William Ward Master of Peterhouse 1900-1924 1924; tr. (by Ward) of Treitschke What We Demandfrom France 1870; The House of Austria and the Thirty Years War 1869 pp. 1-9, 38 and 58; The CounterReformation 1889 passim', The History of Dramatic Literature in England 1875 vol. i pp. xix, 272, 316-17, 511-13 and vol. ii p. 620; article with J. D. Nichol on Goethe in Imperial Dictionary of National Biography p. 663; Germany 181590 vol. iii pp. 400-1; Founder's Day in Wartime: address at a memorial service for the fallen at Manchester University 23 March 1917; Chaucer 1879 pp. 46, 113 and 135; Dickens 1882 pp. 30, 58-61,112,114-15,128-9, 205, 219-20 and 224; review of Matthew Arnold Schools and Universities on the Continent in Manchester Guardian 19 March 1868 and review of Goldwin Smith The Reorganisation of the University of Oxford in Manchester Guardian 9 April 1868; leading article in Manchester Guardian of 5 November 1868 (on E. A. Freeman's parliamentary candidature in mid-Somerset) in favour of professors in politics; Suggestions Towards the Establishment of A History Tripos 1872; The Peace of Europe (1873) in Collected Papers of Sir A. W. Ward 1921 vol. i pp. 52-3; Lord Bryce and the New German Empire (1873) in Collected Papers vol. ii pp. 364-8; Reuchlin (1871), Abraham de Sancta Clara (1867), Some Academical Experiences of the German Renaissance (1878), The Brethren ofDeventer (1882), Ludwig Borne (1867), Hillebrand on Modern German Thought (1880) and Swift's Love-Story in German Literature (1877) in Collected Papers vol. iv pp. 72, 378 et seq., 392-7, 204-5, 149, 74-9 and 168-77; The Study of History at Cambridge (1872), National SelfKnowledge (1866), Songs of the Thirty Years War (1863), The Empire under Frederick III (1865), Cracow and Warsaw (1868), The University of Athens (1876) and Is It Expedient to Increase the Number of Universities in England? (1878) in Collected Papers vol. v pp. 248-55, 126, 147, 159, 223, 102 et seq. and 153 et seq. pp. 212-219 (Temperley) The Revolution and the Revolution Settlement in Great Britain and Party Government Under Queen Anne, both in Cambridge Modern History vol. v

462

Notes

1908 pp. 252-3, 256-7, 462-3 and 468; Great Britain 1815-1832 in Cambridge Modern History vol. x 1907 pp. 573-85; The Life of Canning 1905 pp. 9-10, 12, 32-3, 96-9, 108, 204-6, 236-7, 259, 266, 274-6 and especially chapters II and VI; History of Serbia 1917, pp. 68 et seq., 167,174-5, 211-13, 249-52, 255 and 282-5; Senates and Upper Chambers 1910 pp. 19, 139, 142, 145-6, 148, 153-6,197-9 and 205-7; Great Britain and Her Colonies in Cambridge Modern History vol. xi 1909 p. 754; The Age of Walpole and The Pelhams in Cambridge Modern History 1909 vol. vi p. 76; Maurus Jokai and the Historical Novel in Contemporary Review 1904 pp. 107 et seq.; Racial Strife in Hungary in Westminster Review January 1908; introduction to H. Marczali Hungary in the Eighteenth Century 1910 pp. xviii-xix, xxx-xxxii and xxxix-lxiv; Frederick the Great and the Kaiser Joseph 1915 pp. 2-8 and 210-12; The Second Year of the League 1922 pp. 180-4; The Congress and the Congress System 1923 p. 7. pp. 220-230 (Butterfield) The Whig Interpretation of History 1931 especially pp. 1-4, 13-14, 18-25, 29-31,65-6 and 108; History and the Marxian Methodin Scrutiny March 1933 pp. 346-50 and 353-5; The Historical Novel 1924 pp. 15 and 82-3; The Peace Tactics of Napoleon 1929 pp. 136-7; Napoleon 1939 pp. 56-101; The Statecraft of Machiavelli 1940 pp. 59-63; Cambridge Review 23 May 1942 p. 325; see also W. O. Chadwick, Freedom and the Historian p. 38 and Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays 1907 pp. 1-60. pp. 230-235 (Butterfield) The Englishman and His History 1944 pp. v-vii, 2-7, 34-7,72-5, 81-2,94-100, 120-9, 133 and 138-9; In Memoriam Winston Churchill, Address preached in Great St Mary's Church Cambridge at the memorial service of 31 January 1965, Cambridge Review 6 February 1965; The Teaching of English History in Cambridge Journal 1948 p. 8; George III Lord North and The People 1949 pp. vii-ix, 8-9, 13 and 181-3. pp. 236-243 (Butterfield) The Listener 15 July 1948 p. 95; The Origins ofModern Science 1949 especially Introduction and Chapter x; Christianity and History 1949 pp. 30-5, 40-7, 57-8, 60-70, 79-80, 88, 92-6, 99-107, 109, 130, 135, 145-6; Christianity in European History 1951 pp. 14, 19-20, 31-5, 40 and 52-5. pp. 244-250 (Butterfield) Christianity and History pp. 14-15,25 and 139; The Tragic Element in Modern Conflict (1950) and Christianity and Human Relationships (1951), both in History and Human Relations 1951 pp. 36 and 43; Christianity, Diplomacy and War 1953 pp. 1-9, 11-14, 22, 42-3, 49-51, 57, 67, 75-7 and 122-5; Human Nature and the Dominion of Fear in International Conflict in the Twentieth Century 1960 (reprinted in 1964 as a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Pamphlet) pp. 92 and 95; see also International Conflict in the Twentieth Century pp. 14 and 25.

Notes

463

pp. 251-256 (Oakeshott) For early criticism of Feiling's complacency about the degree of equality that had been achieved in England see Oakeshott's review of What is Conservatism by Keith Feiling in Cambridge Review 13 June 1930. For Oakeshott's reluctance to identify a Conservative disposition with Royalism or Anglicanism see On Being Conservative (1956) in Rationalism in Politics 1962 p. 183; The Political Economy of Freedom (1949), The Tower ofBabel (1948), and Rationalism in Politics (1947) all in Rationalism in Politics 1962 pp. 2-4, 6, 10-12, 14-19,20-1,23-5,28,30-2,38,40,43-6, 50,55-8, and 1'6-9•; Scientific Politics in Cambridge Journal 1947-8, pp. 349-54 and 357; Contemporary British Politics in Cambridge Journal 1947-48, pp. 477, 481-3 and 488-90. pp. 256-261 (Oakeshott) Lord Acton in The Caian 1922 pp. 17-19; Experience and Its Modes 1933 pp. 3, 92-4, 97, 139-40, 158-9, 171-5, 192-3, 312, 319-20, 331-46, and 354. pp. 261-263 (Oakeshott) The Voice of Poetry in the Conversations of Mankind 1959 pp. 14 and 26-31; Experience and Its Modes pp. 93-101, 142-9, 178-80, 228-41, 250-73, 290-308 and 350. pp. 263-269 (Oakeshott) Reviews of Perry A General Theory of Value and Sellars The Principles and Problems of Philosophy in Cambridge Review 13 May and 20 May 1927; Religion and the Moral Life 1927 pp. 6-10 and 11-13; Journal of Theological Studies 1927 pp. 314-15 and 1931 p. 435; The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity in The Modern Churchman 1928-29 pp. 364-71; Experience and Its Modes pp. 1-3, 90, 1 0 3 ^ , 126-7, 292-5, 301, 309-10, 315-16, 346 and 356. pp. 269-273 (Oakeshott) The Concept of A Philosophical Jurisprudence in Politica 1938 pp. 221-2 and 348-60; The Claims of Politics in Scrutiny 1939-40 pp. 146-51; Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe 1939 pp. xii, xiv-xxiii; The Authority of the State in The Modern Churchman 1929 pp. 318, 323 and 327; Rationalism in Politics loc. cit. pp. 8-12; The Tower of Babelloc. cit. pp. 68-9; The Universities in Cambridge Journal 1947-48 pp. 515-41; The B.B.C. in Cambridge Journal 1950-51 pp. 543-54; Thomas Hobbes in Scrutiny 1935-36 pp. 264-5; The New Bentham in Scrutiny 1932-33 pp. 119-22; Official Philosophy in Cambridge Review 16 November 1934 p. 108; John Locke in Cambridge Review 4 November 1932 pp. 72-4; Review of Evan Durbin The politics of democratic socialism in Cambridge Review 19 April 1940 p. 348. pp. 273-276 (Oakeshott) On Human Conduct 1975 pp. 203, 239-45, 268-70, 272-9, 280-1, 286, 297 and 309-12.

464

Notes

pp. 276-278 (Oakeshott) On Human Conduct pp. 119-22, 124, 132-3, 140-7, 156 et seq., 171-7 and 201-2. pp. 278-281 (Oakeshott) On Human Conduct pp. 37-46, 59-68 and 80-6. pp. 280-282 (Oakeshott) Experience and Its Modes pp. 354-5. pp. 285-291 (Churchill) The Story of the Malakand Field Force 1898 pp. 5 and 9; Randolph S. Churchill Winston Churchill Companion Volume I 1967 pp. 585, 599, 608, 617-18, 680, 696-8, 704, 711-14, 723-5, 753-4, 757-60, 779, 814-19, 858, 862, 908, 913, 922, 958 and 969; Daily Telegraph 7, 8, 9 and 15 October and 9 November 1897, and 6 and 8 October 1898 in F. Woods Young Winston's Wars 1972 pp. 42-4, 49, 51, 76-8, 99, 178 and 195; Savrola 1900 pp. 4, 33-8, 41-2, 64, 84-8, 103, 113-17, 122-3, 176, 183, 302 and 312-13. pp. 292-296 (Churchill) Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Sir Winston Churchill, His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 1974 pp. 32, 37, 41-5, 86, 220-4, 283, 624, 1262-3 and 1286-9; Companion Volume I pp. 698, 750-1 and 770-2; Lord Randolph Churchill 1906 i pp. 269-74 and 297-301 and chapter vi generally and ii pp. 485-8; Liberalism and the Social Problem 1909 pp. 78, 144-5, 155, 167-8, 291, 319, 361-2, 375, 390-1 and 395-7; John Morley, The Issues at Stake 1904 p. 20. pp. 296-298 (Churchill) Speeches pp. 1823, 1877, 2035, 2175-6, 2326-7, 2492-3, 2575, 2581, 2585 and 2614-15. pp. 298-301 (Churchill) Companion Volume I p. 1037, Speeches pp. 2642-3, 2771-3, 2799, 2918-21, 2937, 3395, 3433, 3436, 3455-8, 3484, 3736, 3765, 3785, 3809, 3821, 4135-6, 4213 and 4407; The World Crisis 1916-18 Part 11927 pp. 224-5. pp. 301-305 (Churchill) The World Crisis 1916-18 Part I pp. 195-6; The World Crisis 1911-14 1923 p. 11; The World Crisis The Eastern Front 1931 pp. 82 and 98; My Early Life 1930 p. 79; Thoughts and Adventures 1932 p. 263. pp. 305-308 (Churchill) My Early Life p. 79; The World Crisis 1911-14 pp. 190 and 212-13; The World Crisis 1916-18 Partly. 120 and 243-4 and The World Crisis 1916-18 Part II p. 405; Thoughts and Adventures pp. 105-6 and 155-6; Marlborough; His Life and Times 1933 vol. i p. 3; The World Crisis 1915 1923 p. 18; for Jellicoe see The World Crisis 1911-14 and The World Crisis 1915.

Notes

465

pp. 308-311 (Churchill) Thoughts and Adventures pp. 256-9, 260, 261, 266, 269-70 and 278-80; The World Crisis 1916-18 Part II p. 544; The World Crisis The Aftermath 1929 p. 31; My Early Life pp. 104-5 and 383-4; Parliamentary Government and the Economic Problem 1930 pp. 6-8 and 17; Marlborough vol. i p. 37; Great Contemporaries 1937 pp. 18-22 and 101; The IXth Duke of Marlborough 1934 p. 8. pp. 316-325 (Kedourie) New Histories for Old in Times Literary Supplement 1 March 1975 and From One Clerk to Another in The American Scholar Autumn 1979 for Annales, The Spectator 12 December 1970 for Steiner series Roots of the Right and 20 February 1971 for Lukacs; Antiochus Europe and the Middle East (1953) ('Minorities) Pan-Arabism and British Policy (1957) (with variations), The Chatham House Version (1970) and The Middle East and the Powers (1958), all in The Chatham House Version 1970 pp. 1-2, 8, 148, 286-316, 355, 358, 360, 364-6, 372-7, 381 and 391; Antiochus Anglo-French Rivalry in the Levant in Cambridge Journal October 1951 p. 57; Review of Kirk, The Middle East at War in Cambridge Journal 1952 pp. 308-9; Review of Bullard, Britain and the Middle East in Cambridge Journal 1952 p. 568; England and the Middle East 1956 pp. 13-14,18-19,24-6,159-64,212-13 and chapter vii generally; Colonel Lawrence in Cambridge Journal 1954 pp. 515, 524 and 530; J. A. Gallagher and R. E. Robinson The Imperialism of Free Trade in Economic History Review 1953; The Apprentice Sorcerers (1973) in Arabic Political Memoirs 1974 pp. 170-6. pp. 325-332 (Kedourie) Sa'ad Zaghlul and the British in A. Hourani (ed.) St Anthony's Papers 1961 p. 56; Europe and the Middle East, The Middle East and the Powers, PanArabism and British Policy, The Diaries of Khalil Sakakini (1958) and Egypt and the Caliphate (1963) all in The Chatham House Version pp. 10, 200-6, 219, 286, 289-90, 297-8, 319 and 329-42; Afghani and Abduh 1966 pp. 2-3, 11-13, 15-23, 37-8, 41-3, 49-51 and 64-5. pp. 333-338 (Kedourie) Nationalism 1960 pp. 20-31 and 42-51; Nationalism in Asia and Africa 1970 pp. 76-7 and 92-9; Colonel Lawrence loc. cit. p. 524; The American University of Beirut in Middle Eastern Studies 1966 pp. 76-7 and 180; Afghani and Abduh p. 65; England and the Middle East pp. 14 and 66; Europe and the Middle East, The Middle East and the Powers, The Diaries of Khalil Sakakini and The Chatham House Version, all in The Chatham House Version pp. 1-2, 293, 315-16, 338, 360 and 384. pp. 340-360 (Waugh) his reports of Union debates 1923-4 and Waugh, Oxford and the Next War in his 12 March 1924. Rossetti 1928 pp. 22, 78, 126-7, 152 and 221-7; Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Fortnightly Review May 1928 pp. 598-604; review of T. Greenidge, Degenerate Oxford in Fortnightly Review 1 March 1930; Labels

466

Notes

1930 pp. 41-51, 85-6, 107 and 187; War and the Younger Generation in The Spectator 13 April 1929; Vile Bodies 1930 chapter 5; Black Mischief 1932 chapter 8; J. Henslowe (ed.), Things Have Changed 1930 pp. 70-1; Edmund Campion 1935 pp. 18-19 and 26-7; The Spectator 27 May 1938, 8 May 1942 and 24 March 1939; Ninety-Two Days 1934 pp. 102-5, 127-30 and 174-5; The Tablet 3 December 1938; The Spectator 21 April 1939; Waugh in Abyssinia 1936 pp. 24-32, 44-6, 65-6, 155-6, 215, 248-50 and the chapter on Guide to the Ethiopian Question generally; Robbery Under Law 1939 pp. 2-3,11,14-15, 33-4, 66-72, 76-81, 104-5, 192, 204-8, 222-37, 244 and 276-9; Brideshead Revisited 1945 1962 edn pp. 171,193,213,247,295,324 and 331; D. Gallagher (ed.), Evelyn Waugh, A Little Order 1977 p. 123. pp. 365-387 (Salisbury) Lady Gwendolen Cecil Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury vols. I and II1921 especially vol. I chapter 4; M. Pinto-Duschinsky The Political Thought of Lord Salisbury 1967; Sir John Otter Nathaniel Woodard 1925 pp. 110, 137, 176 and 232; for Salisbury's speech at the opening of Lancing Chapel in 1858, see Otter, pp. 201-2; The Theories of Parliamentary Reform in Oxford Essays 1858 pp. 70 and 72-9; Poland in Quarterly Review April 1863 reprinted in Essays by Robert Marquis of Salisbury 1861-1864 1905 pp. 20, 39, 47 and 55-8; Quarterly Review April 1860, July 1864, July 1866 and October 1867 in P. Smith (ed.) Lord Salisbury on Politics 1972 pp. 123-7, 131, 175-6, 231-2, 251-2, 268 and 282; Bentley's Quarterly Review and Quarterly Review (for attributions see Pinto-Duschinsky op. cit. pp. 162 et seq.) March 1859 pp. 22-9, July 1859 pp. 371-4, October 1859 pp. 6-21, January 1860 pp. 304, 307, 325 and 329, July 1860 p. 271, July 1861 pp. 249-51, 257, 260, 265-6 and 281, October 1861 pp. 554-7 and 565, October 1862 pp. 547, 549 and 556, January 1864 p. 260, January 1865 p. 269, July 1865 (two articles) pp. 195-211, and 279-81, January 1866 pp. 263 and 277-80, April 1866 pp. 541-3 and 558-9, October 1869 p. 554 and October 1871 pp. 550, 556, 566, 568, 576 and 580. Saturday Review (for attributions see Pinto-Duschinsky loc. cit.) 17 January, 14 and 21 February, 14 and 28 March, 25 April, 9 and 16 May, 27 June and 14 November, all 1857; 20 February 1858; 12 February, 12 and 19 November 1859; 7,14, 21 and 28 January and 8 December 1860; 2 February, 16 March, 19 April, 8 June, 17 August, 21 September, 23 and 30 November, all 1861; 8 February, 19 July, 13 and 20 September 1862; 3 and 10 January, 7 February, 25 April, 30 May, 13 June, 11 and 18 July, 28 November, 19 December, all 1863; 13 and 30 January, 2 April, 3 and 24 September, 1 October and 24 December, all 1864; 24 June and 16 December 1865. See also G. A. Jones and M. Bentley, Salisbury and Baldwin in M. Cowling (ed.), Conservative Essays 1978 pp. 25-32. pp. 396-399 (Plumb) England in the Eighteenth Century 1950 p. 90; The Death of the Past 1969 pp. 13-14, 17, 62, 72, 76, 100-14 and 134-45. pp. 401-413 (Ullmaiin) The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages 1955 pp. v and 448;

Notes

467

Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages 1961 pp. 15, 29, 21011, 250-4 and 304-5; Mediaeval Papalism 1949 pp. 16-17, 27-8, 114-15, 167-8 and 197-8; Reflections on the Mediaeval Empire in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1964 p. 108; Mediaeval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism 1977 pp. 114-17; A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages 1972 pp. 329-31; The Mediaeval Papacy 1960 pp. 3-4; The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages 1967 pp. 3, 49-55, 61-9, 108-13, 126 and 149-51; Mediaeval Political Thought (1965) 1970 pp. 12-15, 162-3, 174-80, 213 and 224; Reflections on Mediaeval Torture in Juridical Review 1944-45 p. 137; for a wartime example of Ullmann's preference for a moderate social reform position see The Justification of Punishment in Juridical Review 1941 p. 327; Morals and Law in Juridical Review 1942-43 pp. 41-4 and 48-9; The Mediaeval Idea of Law 1946 pp. 2-3, 17, 36 and 204; Baldus's Conception of Law in Law Quarterly Review 1942 pp. 386-7; see also The Origins of the Great Schism 1948. pp. 413-427 (Chadwick) The Victorian Church I 1966 pp. 569 and 572, II1970 pp. 1, 59-61, 82-5 and 110-11; John Cassian 1950 pp. 4^-6, 15, 45, 78, 109, 124, 137 and 180-6; Westcott and the University 1962 pp. 37-8; The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1973-74) 1975 pp. 14, 73-4, 239-52 and 264; Christian Unity 1963 pp. 12-13 and 23-4; Western Asceticism 1958 p. 15; Freedom and the Historian 1969 pp. 1-5 and 12; From Bossuet to Newman 1957 pp. x-xi, 12, 44-8, 54-7, 61-3, 73,138 and 194-5; The Founding ofCuddesdon 1954 pp. 42-3, 110-12 and 115-28; The Mind of the Oxford Movement 1960 pp. 11-12 and 16-30; Victorian Miniature 1960 pp. 90-3; Mackenzie's Grave 1959 p. 212; Selwyn College 1882-1973 1973 p. 29; Creighton on Luther 1959 passim; Catholicism (Gore Memorial Lecture of October 10 1972) in Theology vol. 76 pp. 171 and 179. pp. 431-441 (Powell) The Resurrection of the Body (1957), Whosoever Will (1965), Unto This Last (1967), Christianity and Immigration (broadcast discussion) (1968), Action for Development (1969), Meat Offered to Idols (1970), The Church and the Work of the World(1971), What Shall We Do? (1972), Doubting Thomas (1972) and Introduction (1973) in No Easy Answers 1973 pp. 4, 7-11, 14-15, 19, 36-9, 49-51, 55, 84, 89-90, 113-16, 122 and 130; Speeches of 6 June 1969 and 11 June 1970, and Huddleston challenges Powell (1969) in T. Stacey Immigration and Enoch Powell 1970 pp. 70, 132 and 199-201; for the text of the speech of 20 April 1968 see T. E. Utley Enoch Powell The Man and His Thinking 1968 pp. 177-90; Greek in the University 1938 pp. 5, 7-10 and 13; First Poems 1937 and Casting O#1939; for 1964 to 1968 generally see J. Wood (ed.), Freedom and Reality 1969 and A. Lejeune (ed.) Income Tax at 4/3d in the £ 1970; for the early classical works see A Lexicon to Herodotus 1938, The History of Herodotus 1939, Thucydidis Historiae 1942 and the large number of entries under Powell's name in L'Annee Philologique from 1932 onwards; Then Shall the End Come (1973), God Save the Queen (1974), My Country Right or Wrong (1975), The Woman Taken in Adultery (1975) and Introduction (1977) all in Wrestling with the Angel 1977 pp. ix, 20-3, 60-3, 75-8, 99 and 102-3.

468

Notes

pp. 441-453 (Norman) The Catholic Church in Ireland in the Age of Rebellion 1965 p. 32; Church and Society in England 1770-1970 1976 pp. 3, 6, 8 and 14; The Conscience of the State in North America 1968 pp. 13, 16-19 and 184-6; A History of Modern Ireland 1971 pp. 44-7, 70-1, 107, 120, 124, 160-1, 164, 186-7, 197, 218, 244, 255 and 309-10; Christianity and the World Order (Reith Lectures for 1978) 1979 pp. 3-7, 13, 35-40, 43-50, 56-9, 63, 77-80 and 82-5; The Spectator 26 February, 3 June, 16 September, 28 October and 23 December, all 1972, 10 March and 15 September 1973, 26 October 1974 and 15 March 1975; Capitalism as a Moral Defence against the State Daily Telegraph 21 and 22 March 1978; book review in Sunday Telegraph 11 November 1979; The Reverend Edward Norman in conversation with Derek Robinson BBC Radio 4,25 October 1978; The Call to Materialism 26 November 1976 and Sermon on the Sovereign's Jubilee 10 June 1977, both in Cambridge Review, Contact April 1976; Christianity or Politics in M. Cowling (ed.) Conservative Essays 1978, pp. 80-1; there is a great deal more of Norman's passing commentary on the Church of England's life (from which quotations have not been drawn) in The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and the Cambridge Review between 1970 and 1980.

Bibliography Almost all the works of the authors discussed in this book have been either read or inspected. Many of these authors, however, were so prolific that a full bibliography would be impracticable. The notes contain the titles and dates of publication of all the works that have been quoted. The bibliography contains a list of works in which are to be found such bibliographies as have been used (with dates of relevant editions). It seems unlikely that there are bibliographies of the works of Chadwick, Hoskyns, Kedourie, Kitson Clark, Manning, Norman, Pickthorn, Powell, Smyth, Spens, Watkin or Welbourne. J. H. Elliott and H. G. Koenigsberger (ed.), The diversity of history: essays in honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield 1970. C. T. Mclntire (ed.), H Butterfield Writings on Christianity and History 1979. F. Woods A bibliography of the works of Sir Winston Churchill 1975. Proceedings of the British Academy volume xxix 1943 pp. 474-5 (for Collingwood). T. M. Knox, (ed.), R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History 1946 p. vii. D. Gallup T. S. Eliot: a bibliography 1969. M. D. Knowles The Historian and Character 1963. A. Stacpoole The Making of a Monastic Historian III in Ampleforth Journal 1975 (for Knowles). Z. Stewart (ed.), Essays on religion and the ancient world by A. D. Nock 2 vols. 1972. P. King and B. C. Parekh (ed.), Politics and Experience: Essays presented to Michael Oakeshott on the occasion of his retirement 1968. N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in honour ofJ. H. Plumb 1974. M. Pinto-Duschinsky, The Political Thought of Lord Salisbury 1854-1868 1967. MonicafPopper A Bibliography of the works in English of A. Toynbee 1910-54 1955. B. Tierney and P. Linehan (ed.), Authority and Power, Studies in Mediaeval Law and Government presented to Walter Ullmann on his seventieth birthday 1980. T. A. Bartholomew A bibliography of Sir A. W. Ward 1837-1924 1926. R. M. Davis (and others) Evelyn Waugh: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material, 1972. P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead 1951.

469

Index of main names This index contains the names of people only Abduh, Shaikh Muhammed, 331-2 Abdul-Hamid II, Sultan of Turkey, 326 Acton, John E., Lord, xix, 149 206-7, 213, 222-3, 256, 276, 369, 393, 412, 424-5 Afghani, Jamal al-Din al-, 331-2 Alexander, Samuel, 187 al-Maraghi, Mustafa, 330-1 Annan, Noel, Lord, 70-1 Anselm, St, 153 Antonius, George, 321 Aquinas, St Thomas, 116, 142, 273, 408-10, 412

Aristotle, 177, 333, 409-10 Arnold, Matthew, 12, 98, 100, 110, 115,205,256,381 Ashley, Sir W. J., 65 Asquith, Herbert H., 1st earl of Oxford and, 195, 229, 297 Augustine, St, 415 Austin, John, 402-3 Ayer, Alfred J., 187 Bacon, Francis, 253, 273 Baden-Powell, Robert, Baron, 425 Barker, Sir Ernest, 69 Barth, Karl, 91, 95, 240, 268 Beer, G. L., 218 Benedict, St, 138-9, 425 Bennett, Rev. G. V., 391 Bentham, Jeremy, 254, 269, 429 Bentley, Michael, xxii Bergson, Henri, xv, 21 Bernard, St, 149 Bismarck, Otto von, 239, 296, 375 Blake, Robert, Lord, 391 Blake, William, 203 Blunt, W. Scawen, 319, 338 Bosanquet, Bernard, 251, 256 Bossuet, Jacques B., 273, 419, 425 Bradbury, Malcolm, xvii Bradley, Francis H., 117, 187, 251,256 Bright, John, 368-70, 385

Brogan, Sir Denis W., 69, 192, 194-5, 199, 206 Brooke, C. N. L., 400 Brooke, Rupert, 59, 101, 140 Browning, Robert, 104, 140, 149 Burckhardt, Jacob, 369 Burke, Edmund, xxi, 109, 275, 286, 299, 301, 336, 352, 362, 372, 384 Bury, J. P. T., 74, 149-50, 223, 226, 258-9, 424 Butler, Rev. Cuthbert, 144-6 Butler, Geoffrey, 73 Butler, R. A., 50, 73, 77, 434 Butterfield, Sir Hubert, xiv-xv, xxi, xxiv, 40, 53, 77, 135, 144, 147, 154, 160-1, 252, 257, 259, 406, 410, 432; see also ch. 7 Calvin, John, 49, 82, 202-3, 264, 273, 425 Canning, George, 212-14 Carlyle, Thomas, xv, 67, 100, 108, 135, 149, 432-3 Cassian, St John, 415-16, 425 Castlereagh, Robert, Viscount, 367-8 Cecil, Gwendolen, Lady, xxi Cecil, Hugh, Lord, 295 Cecil, Robert, Lord see Salisbury Chadwick, Very Rev. Henry, 414 Chadwick, Rev. Prof. W. O., 90, 147, 389, 395, 413-27, 430-1, 451 Chamberlain, Joseph, 67, 288, 293 Chamberlain, Neville, 184, 186 Chambers, R. W., 152 Chandra Pal, Bipin, 333 Charlesworth, Rev. M. P., 414 Charvet, P. E., 74 Chateaubriand, Francois R. de, 82, 214 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 151, 207, 209-10, 274 Chesterton, Gilbert K., 91, 101, 111, 199 Churchill, Randolph, Lord, 288, 294

471

472

Index

Churchill, Sir Winston, xiv-xv, xxiv, 50-1, 74, 121, 135, 161, 229-30, 233, 336, 340; see also ch. 9 Cobb, Richard, 391 Coggan, Donald, Archb., 437, 445 Collingwood, Robin G., xiv-xv, xxiv, 16, 98-9, 106, 117-18, 123, 256-7, 259, 268, 310, 387; see also ch. 6 Comte, Auguste, 274, 425 Coulton, G. G., 130,151, 394 Cranmer, Thomas, Archb., 84, 88-9 Creighton, Rt. Rev. Mandell, 207, 393, 424-5 Croce, Benedetto, 162-3, 179 Cromer, Evelyn, 1st Earl of, 319, 331 Cunningham, Ven. William, 151, 393 Curtis, Lionel, 218 Dante Alighieri, 110, 116, 209 Darwin, Charles, xvi, 164, 259, 383, 425 Dawson, Christopher, 111, 118 Defoe, Daniel, 232 Demant, Rev. V. A., Ill, 119 Descartes, Ren6, 8,164, 175, 181, 253 Dicey, Albert Venn, 54 Dickens, Charles, 207, 209-10 Disraeli, Benjamin, 79, 109, 286, 370 Dodd, C. H., 201 Donne, John, 101, 140, 151 Dostoievsky, Feodor, xviii, 32 Dulles, John Foster, 38, 245 Dunstan, St, 152-3 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 199, 203, 257, 310, 317, 348, 359, 364, 377, 383, 387; see also ch. 4 Elton, G. R., 394-6, 401 Erasmus, Desiderius, 129, 207, 225, 274, 425 Feiling, Sir Keith, 391 Fenlon, Dermot, 400 Figgis, Rev. J. N., 75, 130, 199, 203, 264 n Finley, Sir Moses, 395-6, 401 Fisher, D. J. V., xix Fisher, Geoffrey, Archb., 73 Forsyth, P. T., 199, 203 Francis, St, 37, 149, 274 Franco, Gen. Francisco, 109, 348 Frazer, Sir James, 180-1, 432, 440 Freeman, Edward A., 207, 392

Freud, Sigmund, 178, 180-1, 402 Gallagher, J. A., 394-6, 401 Galsworthy, John, 82, 135 Gandhi, Mohandas, 35, 311, 323 Garrigou-Lagrange, R., 136 Gellner, Ernest A., xxi Geoffrey-Lloyd, Geoffrey, Baron, 77 George III, king of England, 53, 231-3 George V, king of England, 121 Gibb, Sir Hamilton, 321 Gibbon, Edward, xvi, 103, 285-6, 290, 399 Gide, Andre, 114 Gladstone, William Ewart, 109, 136, 188, 211, 214, 363, 368-70, 425 Glover, T. R., 394 Goethe, Johann W. von, 209, 375 Gooch, George P., 209, 219 Gore-Booth, Constance, 443 Goschen, George J., Viscount, 380 Gosse, Sir Edmund, 101 Graves, Robert, 59 Green, T.H., 162, 170,211 Greene, Graham, 94, 199 Grierson, Philip, 131 Grigg, Sir James, 68 Gwatkin, Rev. H. M., 393 Haddan, Rev. A. W., 363 Haile Selassie, Emperor, 348 Hallam, Henry, 223, 285 Hamid, see Abdul Hardy, Thomas, 112, 135-6, 285 Heath, Edward G., 431, 435 Hegel, George W. F., xviii, xxi, 164, 179, 185, 193, 256, 375 Henderson, Sir Hubert, 69 Henry VII, king of England, 52-3 Henry VIII, king of England, 114n, 151 Henson, Herbert Hensley, bishop, 84, 446-7 Hill, Christopher, 392 Hinsley, F. H., 395 Hitler, Adolf, xvi, 50, 79, 107, 237, 239, 284, 311, 328, 348, 356, 422 Hobbes, Thomas, 114, 269 Hollis, Christopher, 47 Hooker, Richard, 114n, 116, 201 Hopkins, Sir Richard, 68 Hoskyns, Rev. Sir E. C , 47, 73-4, 77, 91-5, 118, 162, 199-200, 223, 226, 237, 240, 268, 353

Index Housman, Alfred E., 432-3 Hiigel, Friedrich von, 114, 140 Hulme, T. E., 199 Huxley, Aldous, 22, 347 Inge, Very Rev. William Ralph, dean, xviii, 140, 200 Ingrams, Richard, xxiii Innocent III, Pope, 34 James II, king of England, 53 Jefferson, Thomas, 38, 366 John of Paris, 409 John of Salisbury, 402-3 John of the Cross, St, 117, 141-2, 144, 274 John XXIII, Pope, 148 Jokai, Maurus, 215-16 Jones, G. Andrew, xxii Jones, J. R., xix Jowett, Benjamin, 377, 425 Jung, Carl Gustav, 180-1, 402 Kant, Immanuel, 75, 175, 178, 260, 268, 275, 327, 333-* Keble, Rev. John, 425 Kedourie, Elie, xx, xxii, xxiv; see also ch. 10 Kennedy, John F., 37-8 Kenyatta, Jomo, 333 Keynes, John Maynard, 87, 434 Kierkegaard, Soren, xviii King, Rev. Edward, bishop, 417, 425-6 Kipling, Rudyard, 103, 285 Kirk, Right Rev. Kenneth, 75, 425 Kitson Clark, G. S. R., 77, 192, 197-9, 401 Knowles, Rev. Michael C. (Dom David), xiv-xv, xxiv, 69, 194, 199-200, 257, 317, 406; see also ch. 5 Knox, John, 202 Lanfranc, Archb., 4, 153 Lansbury, George, 35, 323 Lapsley, G. T., 54 Laski, Harold, 67, 80-1, 347 Laud, William, Archb., xix, 84, 88, 151 Lawrence, David H., 112, 118, 348 Lawrence, T. E., 320-1 Leach, Sir Edmund, xvi Lecky, William Hartpole, xvi, 207, 285 Lee, Sir Desmond, 73 Lee, Robert E., 134

473

Lenin, V. I., 185, 274 Lessing, Gotthold E., 208, 335, 375 Liddon, Rev. H. P., 416, 425 Lincoln, Abraham, 134-5, 195, 288, 365-6, 368 Livingstone, David, 417, 425 Lloyd-George, David, 56, 107, 184 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, xix Locke, John, 213, 254, 275, 366, 429 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 79 Loisy, Alfred, 91 Lonsdale, John, 399 Louis Napoleon, 365, 368 Lovatt, Roger, 400 Lucas de Penna, 402-4 Luther, Martin, 49, 129, 208, 274, 327, 334,410-11,425 Mabillon, Jean, 420 Macaulay, Thomas B., xv, 149, 211, 285 McCurdy, J. T., 73 Maclntyre, Alasdair, xx McKendrick, Neil, 394 Mackinnon, Donald, xx-xxi McManners, Rev. J., 391 Mairet, Philip, 119 Maitland, Frederick William, 4, 151, 278 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 347 Mallock, William Hurrell, xxi Mannheim, Karl, 119 Manning, Bernard Lord, 65, 70, 78, 191,200-4,237,240 Marlborough, Charles, 9th Duke of, 283, 306 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of, 213 Marriott, Sir J. A. R., 391 Marsilius of Padua, 409 Marx, Karl, 115, 184-5, 193, 254, 274, 425 Maude, Angus, 434 Maurice, Rev. Frederick Denison, 84, 377 Maurras, Charles, 107-8, 118, 195 Max-Miiller, Friedrich, 180 Melanchthon, Philip, 208 Metternich, Clemens, Prince, 213, 239 Michelet, Jules. 425 Mill, John Stuart, xx, 7, 22, 195, 217, 275 Milne, A. A., 80

474

Index

Milton, John, 103-4, 151, 210, 366 Montague, C. E., 79 Montaigne, Michel E. de, 118, 193, 274 Montesquieu, Charles de, 193, 275 Moore, George Edward, 162 Moore, G. R, 324 Morley, John, Viscount, 309 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 199 Muhammed Abduh see Abduh Murray, Gilbert, 31, 101 Murry, John Middleton, 106,118 Mussolini, Benito, 108, 348-9 Namier, Sir Lewis, xxi, 233 Napoleon I, 213, 225-6, 234, 239, 303 Napoleon III see Louis Napoleon Needham, Joseph, 80,263, 394 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, xxi, 12, 82, 118, 362, 376, 382,420,425, 440 Newton, Sir Isaac, 99, 178, 211, 214, 236 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxi, 75, 185, 253, 432, 440 Nock, Arthur Darby, 192, 196^-7, 199 Norman, Rev. Edward, xv, xxiii, 317, 395,429-31,440-52 Oakeshott, Michael J., xiv-xv, xxi, xxiv, 51, 77, 117, 160-1, 192,199, 222,316,320,407,432,453; see also ch. 8 O'Connell, Daniel, 442 Oman, Sir C. W. C , 390 Owen, Wilfred, 79 Palmerston, Henry, Viscount, 214, 318, 370 Parkinson, C. Northcote, 70-1 Pascal, Blaise, 118,193, 275 Pater, Walter, 98, 115, 149 Peguy, Charles, 99 Pelling, Henry, 395 Percy, Lord Eustace, 218 Peter, king of Yugoslavia, 217 Petrie, Sir Charles, 108 Pickthorn, Sir Kenneth William Murray, 47-60, 67, 71-3, 77, 257, 317, 432, 449 Pius XII, Pope, 193 Plato, 16, 21, 135, 333 Plumb, J. H., 389, 394-9 Popper, Karl, 179, 188, 244

Postan, Sir Michael Mofesy, 69, 151 Pound, Ezra, 101-2, 112, 118 Powell, J. Enoch, xv, xxiii, 230, 317, 429, 431-40 Powicke, Sir F. M., 392 Priestley, John B., 80 Pullan, Brian Sebastian, 400 Pusey, Rev. Edward, 84, 88, 377, 425 Ramsey, Rt. Rev. A. M., archbishop, 90,444-5 Ranke, Leopold von, 149, 193, 207, 212, 250, 276 Rapin du Thoyras, Paul de, 229 Rashdall, Very Rev. Hastings, 149-50, 170 Rawlinson, Rt. Rev. A. E. J., 74, 196 Reade, Winwood, xvi, xviii, 285 Reckitt, Rev. Maurice, 111, 119, 121, 123 Renan, Ernest, 332, 383, 425 Richards, Ivor Armstrong, 110,118 Riley-Smith, Jonathan, 400 Robespierre, Maximilien, 327, 334 Rosebery, Archibald P., Earl, 288, 293 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 341-2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 114 Rowse, Arthur Leslie, 230 Runcie, Rt. Rev. R. A. K., 414-15 Runciman, Hon. W. G., xvii Rupp, Rev. E. G., 192, 400 Ruskin, John, 67, 108, 149, 162, 178-80 Russell, Bertrand, 18, 82, 115, 118, 162, 187, 200 Sakakini, Khalil, 328-9 Salisbury, Robert, 3rd Marquess of, xv xxi, xxiv, 109, 160, 274-5, 317, 326, 336, 359, 440, 444, 452; see also ch. 12 Sassoon, Siegfried, 59, 79, 101 Scruton, Roger, xxii Seeley, Sir John, 207, 424 Selwyn, Very Rev. Edward G., 73-6, 92 Shackleton Bailey, D. R., xxii Shakespeare, William, 99-100,110, 116,135,182,208-10,214,228 Sharpe, Tom, xvii Shaw, George Bernard, xv, 75, 95, 115, 200 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 12, 100, 110, 140 Sidgwick, Henry, 4

Index Sidney, Algernon, 275, 299, 366 Skinner, Quentin, xvii, 395 Smith, Adam, 108, 285 Smyth, Rev. Canon Charles, 49-50, 12-95 passim, 138, 140, 150, 192, 197-201, 220, 226, 237, 246, 252, 257, 268, 317, 431-2 Sorley, W. R., 251 Southern, Sir Richard, 392 Spengler, Oswald, 343, 397 Spens, Sir Will, 74, 77, 92, 118 Squire, Sir John, 101, 135 Stacpoole, Rev. Alberic, 143-4 Stokes, Eric, 399 Strauss, David R, 375, 383, 425 Stubbs, Rt Rev. William, 151, 363, 390 Swinburne, Algernon, 103, 149 Sykes, Very Rev. Norman, 393 Tait, Archibald, Archb., 4, 421 Tawney, Richard H., 67, 69, 120 Taylor, A. E., xxi, 75, 118 Temperley, H. W. V., 144, 205, 212-19, 222-3 Temple, William, Archb., 84, 89, 226 Tennyson, Alfred, Baron, 12, 101, 104, 140

Thomas, Keith, xvii Thornton, Rev. Lionel S., 75, 264n Tocqueville, Alexis de, 276, 369 Tolkien, John R., 387 Tolstoy, Leo, Count, 32, 35, 323 Toynbee, Arnold J., xiv-xv, xxiv, 48-9, 94-5, 98-9, 106, 162, 249, 310, 321-5, 387, 397; see also ch. 2 Toynbee, Philip, 41 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 208 Trevelyan, George M., 144, 223, 226, 424 Trevor-Roper, H. R., Lord Dacre of Glanton, xxi, 392 Tylor, Sir Edward, 180

475

Ullmann, Walter, xxiv, 69, 90, 338, 395,401-13 Underhill, Evelyn, 140, 200 Utley, T. E., xxiii Vellacott, Paul, 147, 219-20 Vico, Giambattista, 162 Vincent, J. R., xxii Voltaire, 129, 193, 412, 425 Walsh, John, 391 Ward, Sir Adolphus William, 205-12, 222-3, 251 Watkin, David, xxii Watson, Samuel, 68 Waugh, Auberon, xxiii Waugh, Evelyn, xv, xix, xxi-xxii, xiv, 40, 78, 257, 317; see also ch. 11 Webb, Beatrice and Sydney, 200, 274 Welbourne, Edward, 49, 6O-72, 200, 257, 317, 364, 449 Welch, Colin, xxiii Wells, Herbert George, 75, 80, 115, 285, 397 Wesley, Rev. John, 82, 203, 212 Wharton, Michael, xxiii Whitehead, Alfred North, xiv-xv, xxiv, 48, 117, 160, 187, 389; see also ch. 1 Whitney, Rev. J. P., 393-4Wilberforce, Samuel, 416, 421, 425 Willey, Basil, 192, 195-7, 199 Williams, Bernard, xvi Wilson, Sir Arnold, 315, 336 Wilson, Harold, 230 Winstanley, D. A., 54 Wodehouse, Sir Pelham G., 343 Wordsworth, William, xv, 12, 21, 95, 100,137, 140 Wormald, B. H. G., 192-4, 231, 400 Yeats, William Butler, 112, 118 Zinkin, Maurice, xx

Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics Editors: Maurice Cowling, G. R. Elton, E. Kedourie, J. R. Pole, J. G. A. Pocock and Walter Ullman. A series in two parts, studies and original texts. The studies are original works on political history and political philosophy while the texts are modern, critical editions of major texts in political thought. The titles include: TEXTS Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, by James Fitzjames Stephen, edited with an introduction and notes by R. J. White. Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism 1895-1903, an English edition of 'A Short History of the Social Democratic Movement in Russia' and 'The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party', with an introduction and notes by Jonathan Frankel. / . G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, translated, edited and with an introduction by F. M. Barnard. The Limits of State Action, by Wilhelm von Humboldt, edited with an introduction and notes by J. W. Burrow. Kant's Political Writings, edited with an introduction and notes by Hans Reiss; translated by H. B. Nisbet. Karl Marx's Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', edited with an introduction and notes by Joseph O'Malley; translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley. Lord Salisbury on Politics. A Selection from His Articles in 'The Quarterly Review' 1860-1883, edited by Paul Smith. Francogallia, by Francois Hotman. Latin text edited by Ralph E. Giesey. English translation by J. H. M. Salmon. The Political Writings of Leibniz, edited and translated by Patrick Riley. Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics: A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind on Universal History. Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth, edited, translated and introduced by Ronald L. Meek. Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands, edited with an introduction by E. H. Kossmann and A. F. Mellink. Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, edited with an introduction by Michael Walzer; translated by Marian Rothstein. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Reason in History, translated from the German edition of Johannes Hoffmeister by H. B. Nisbet and with an introduction by Duncan Forbes. A Machiavellian Treatise by Stephen Gardiner, edited and translated by Peter S. Donaldson. The Political Works of James Harrington, edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Selected Writings of August Cieszkowski, edited and translated with an introductory essay by Andre Liebich.

STUDIES 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill, by Maurice Cowling. The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, by Shlomo Avineri. Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory, by Judith Shklar. Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought, by George Armstrong Kelly. The Impact of Labour 1920-1924: The Beginnings of Modern British Politics, by Maurice Cowling. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, by Bertell Oilman. The Politics of Reform 1884, by Andrew Jones. Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, by Shlomo Avineri. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory, by Julian H. Franklin. The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau, by John Charvet. The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940, by Maurice Cowling. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, by Ronald L. Meek. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind', by Judith Shklar. In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and Its Interpretations 1914-1939, by Elie Kedourie. The Liberal Mind 1914-1929, by Michael Bentley. Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the Origins of American Party Politics, by John Zvesper. Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1689-1720, by J. P. Kenyon. John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance in the Political Thought of the English Revolution, by Julian H. Franklin. Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision, by Donald Winch. Lloyd George's Secretariat, by John Turner. The Tragedy ofEnlightenment: An Essay on Critical Theory, by Paul Connerton.