F. D. Maurice’s Concept of Catholicity

In the midst of one of the “pea soup” fogs that afflicted London in the nineteenth century, the Anglican Divine,  Henry Liddon was heard to suggest that Brooke Foss Wescott must have left his windows open in Westminster (where he was at the time a Canon of the Abbey). 

The jest neatly conveyed Liddon’s view that any thoughts that espoused from Westcott (the great New Testament scholar and later Bishop of Durham) left behind more clouds of confusion than clarity — a sin of which he also accused that other great London theologian of the time, Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), whom the Church Calendar has had us commemorate this last week. However, in this latter case, Canon Liddon’s flight of rhetorical fancy about theological fog was quite misplaced.

Maurice’s academic career was certainly complicated and his views at points were sadly misunderstood, as was clearly the case when he was forced to resign his Professorship at King’s College London  on account of alleged heresy in his Kingdom of Christ and Theological Essays of 1853, and the suspicions occasioned by his formative role in the short-lived original Christian Socialist Movement that arose briefly in England  after the failure of Chartism in 1848.

Nonetheless, he went on next to be elected to the Knightsbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. It was indeed in this role that he was able to set out a basis that was both philosophical and theological for his Tractarian views. It was in accord with that perspective that he discerned his age — like our own, still — was in need of “some-thing catholic,” but he insisted that true catholicity is grounded upon a knowledge accessible to humanity as such, and not as merely delivered only to a certain few. This was an approach that is hard quite to capture. 

Maurice’s huge body of work ultimately rests on such key affirmations as: I) that religious certainty is possible, and 2) that this certainty is grounded in the awareness of a social bond which unites all of humanity as such, and 3) the primary status of reason as the power shared by all human beings to know that which is indubitably the truth.* 

What is fundamental and noteworthy to the understanding of Maurice is that he had come “from Unitarianism to the Church of England because the authority of Bible, Creed, and Prayer-book (not excluding the Articles) appeared to him to afford a protection from the tyranny of opinions less catholic and more exclusive than any to which they committed those who subscribed to them.”

While ‘vagueness’ from the point of view of the dogmatic theologian might be alleged against some of his pupils, it cannot rightly be claimed of Maurice himself. He was rather a theologian who  “assented with his whole heart to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation in their traditional form. The ‘Name into which we were baptised,’ being “for him the one foundation of all true conduct, religious and political. For him Jesus Christ was the living, personal Head of the human race, long expected, come in the flesh, and hereafter to return as Judge.” (To quote an anonymous reviewer of Alec Vidler’s Theology of F. D. Maurice in the Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 50, 1949.) 

In the England of the mid-nineteenth century, theology was very much alive and central to public life and discourse — but few could rival Maurice in terms of personal engagement with the most prominent intellectuals of his day, ranging from Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Lord Tennyson through to sometime Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone. While among theologians his connections included Richard Chenevix Trench, Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Dublin; Henry Edward Cardinal Manning; Samuel Wilberforce, Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Oxford; Charles Marriott, Fellow of Oriel and Editor of that great Anglo-Catholic project that was the Library of the Fathers; Charles Kingsley, broad churchman, Professor of Modern History and founder of Christian Socialism; Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Regis Professor of Divinity and Dean of Westminster; and Professor F. J. A. Hort, who edited with Westcott the famous critical edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek. 

And that last reference makes it fitting to cite also a very Anglican perspective that well stands in relation to Maurice. As Westcott once very sagely observed: 

“The student of Christian doctrine, because he strives after exactness of phrase, because he is conscious of the inadequacy of any one human formula to exhaust the truth, will be filled with sympathy for every genuine endeavour towards the embodiment of right opinion. Partial views attract and exist in virtue of the fragment of truth—be it great or small—which they include; and it is the work of the theologian to seize this no less than to detect the first spring of error. It is easier and, in one sense, it is more impressive to make a peremptory and exclusive statement, and to refuse to allow any place beside it to divergent expositions; but this show of clearness and power is dearly purchased at the cost of the ennobling conviction that the whole truth is far greater than our individual minds. He who believes that every judgement on the highest matters different from his own is simply a heresy must have a mean idea of the faith; and while the qualifications, the reserve, the lingering sympathies of the real student make him in many cases a poor controversialist, it may be said that a mere controversialist cannot be a real theologian.” Lessons from Work. pp. 84–85.

But of F.D. Maurice himself, no one was more eloquent than Gladstone when he said of him after his death, the phrase used by Dante in the Paradiso of St. Dominic, as one possessed of a ‘spiritual splendour’ we do well to honour.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector

* To sketch matters perhaps a little more fully, on the one hand, reason is the mind’s power to synthesize and generalize, to apprehend universal wholes — a perspective which then ties consciousness closely to the conscience. Hence, Maurice is acutely interested in man’s self-awareness as “man” but he brings to this also the perspective of Kant, according to whom the whole range of forms and concepts in terms of which man organizes his experience relate to (and must therefore in important ways be limited by) the structure of the mind itself.

Thus for Maurice, a quintessential feature of reason is its capacity to confront reality as standing beyond, though not contradicting, the mind’s concepts alone. In other words, human reason is receptive: it opens itself to receive the truth and facts, which is to say reality, which is understood by Maurice as actively presenting itself to reason. Hence he associates it with life, which is to say with will. Will is thus the ultimate metaphysical principle together with reason as the “organ” by which will is confronted. Through reason, the individual person knows him or herself as belonging to mankind. 

Nonetheless, Maurice is equally insistent upon the importance of the individual as such, because it is only as a concrete personality that the reasoning being, or person, confronts ultimate reality as itself a will asserting itself upon him or herself. Maurice’s entire theology, and his interpretation of the “universal society for man as man,” is tied to his way of holding these two ideas as a unity.