Following up on the previous posting on this subject (i.e., John Henry Newman), we need to look at the specific situation in which he found himself. As was the case with all mainstream Christian churches in
the early nineteenth century, the Church of England was in serious
trouble. Nor was this situation limited
to religious society. In the wake of the
French Revolution, Church, State, and Family seemed to be dissolving in chaos
everywhere in Europe.
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| William Cobbett, "the Apostle of Distributism" |
This was deceptive in a sense, as it gave the impression
that the French Revolution was the primary, if not sole cause of the “new
things” afflicting the post-revolutionary world. As appears obvious from the argument in Enthusiasm (1950) by Monsignor Ronald
Knox (1888-1957), however, or from the contemporary writings of William Cobbett
(1763-1835), whom G.K. Chesterton called “a sort of Radical” (and then spent a
hundred pages or more in his book on Cobbett explaining why Cobbett was both
less and more radical than any Radical), the problems were rooted in
fundamental changes that had taken place long before the French Revolution, and
were themselves the result of other problems.
We can go out on a limb and risk saying that in our
opinion, if anything can be said to have been the cause of the “new things” of
the modern age it was the changing idea of what it means to be human. There was a shift from the idea that each
individual human person is important and is thus the whole reason for having
society or even the world, to the belief that the abstraction of the collective
is more important than any one person, group, or institution could ever be.
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| Fulton J. Sheen |
The idea that the collective has a greater claim to being
fully human than any actual human being strikes at the heart of a sound
understanding of civil, religious, and domestic society — at the foundation of
State, Church, and Family. It makes the
human person inferior to his or her own institutions, which (after all) are
human creations, and thereby necessarily subordinates the Creator of human
beings (God) to a creation of human beings, as Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979)
pointed out. This creates, as Sheen put
it, a “Religion Without God.”
This did not come from out of nowhere. It had been building up for centuries. As the opportunity to acquire and possess
private property in capital (primarily land) gradually disappeared and
ownership of the land became increasingly concentrated, ordinary people were
unable to produce except with their labor.
As long as labor and land were the primary inputs to
production of marketable goods and services, this was adequate — barely. With human beings able to produce more
efficiently than technology, however, the temptation was always there to
enslave people in order to get their labor at the lowest possible cost. As Rome discovered following the devastation
of small agriculture during and after the Second Punic War, concentrated
ownership of land made chattel slavery on a commercial scale very profitable.
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| The Second Punic War, the "War With Hannibal" |
Prior to the Second Punic War, most Roman families
included a couple of slaves as a matter of course and the slaves were usually
treated more or less the same as other family members, albeit with an inferior
social status. Unlike the Greek system,
in which slaves were not even considered human, Roman law gave slaves the legal
status of children under the tutelage of the pater familias; the only legal difference between a Roman and his
slave was the fact of slavery, i.e.,
the Roman had rights, while slaves (and children) had none. The situation of children and slaves prior to
the Second Punic War was similar, except that a child could expect to be freed
(“emancipated”), but it was not required, while a slave did not expect to be
freed (“manumitted”), but often was, anyway.
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| Cato the Elder, "Old Roman Virtue" |
Concentrated ownership of land changed everything. Except among those who attempted to preserve
“Old Roman Virtue” (and then usually only affecting household slaves), slaves
became viewed as mere chattels instead of family members with an inferior
social status. The new type of
latifundia agriculture that came in after the Second Punic War mandated much
more labor than the old subsistence type, and widespread slavery became very
profitable. Slave revolts, practically
unheard of prior to the Second Punic War, became a major concern of the Res Publica, as did lower class unrest
as propertyless citizens and others drifted into the cities in search of some
form of subsistence. Many people became
dependent on the State for their means of survival.
Something similar happened following the “Financial
Revolution” of the late seventeenth century.
With the invention of commercial insurance and central banking minimizing
risk and making the new labor-displacing technologies financially feasible, ordinary
people found their labor becoming relatively less valuable as an input to
production, and consequently became hard put to generate sufficient income from
labor alone to meet their needs. Many
were forced to apply for public assistance, which in England at that time was
handled by “the parish,” the local division of the Church of England charged
with taking care of the poor and indigent.
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| Society of Friends dissenter |
At the same time, as a direct result of the establishment
of religion as a branch of government, many people had simply ceased any
meaningful practice of religion. Others
had left the Church of England and joined “dissenting” sects, such as the
Methodists or the Society of Friends (Quakers).
With some notable exceptions, clergymen lived as country
gentlemen, holding several “livings” at one time, sometimes never seeing the
parishes or dioceses from which they drew their income, leaving the religious
duties to some underling when they were carried out at all. Services were often social occasions, with
the box or pew set aside for the local gentry having the appearance and
function of a parlor or sitting room.
Attendance was the exception rather than the rule, with resident clergy
seen as spies or government agents.
As far as most ordinary people were concerned, then, Church
and State were simply different aspects of the same unjust system that ruled
England. As Alexis de Tocqueville
explained,
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
As long as a religion rests only upon those sentiments which
are the consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of all
mankind. But if it be mixed up with the
bitter passions of the world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its
interests, and not the principle of love, have given to it, or to repel as
antagonists men who are still attached to it, however opposed they may be to
the powers with which it is allied. The church
cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a
portion of that animosity which the latter excites. . . . As long as a religion
is sustained by those feelings, propensities, and passions which are found to
occur under the same forms at all periods of history, it may defy the efforts
of time; or at least it can be destroyed only by another religion. But when religion clings to the interests of
the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of the earth. It is the only one of them all which can hope
for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral power, it shares
their fortunes and may fall with those transient passions which alone supported
them. The alliance which religion
contracts with political powers must needs be onerous to itself, since it does
not require their assistance to live, and by giving them its assistance it may
be exposed to decay. (Alexis de
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, xvii.6.)
In consequence, according to religious historians, in the
early nineteenth century the Church of England was faced with four serious
problems, all of which can be traced directly to the problems de Tocqueville
identified with the establishment of religion, and its downgrading from a primary
focus on spiritual matters to a concentration on material and political concerns
while paying lip service to a vague humanistic morality that supported the
government that maintained the status quo:
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| Dan O'Connell, "the Great Emancipator" |
·
The
Political Game Itself. Having been
made an integral part of the political establishment by having the head of
state as the head of the national church, the Church of England had become
increasingly identified with the “Tory” party, that is, the conservatives . . .
and the Tories had become increasingly reactionary. Opposition to change and to popular opinion
had by the 1830s become the unspoken Tory party platform, which was of course
supported by the hierarchy and beneficed clergy (i.e., clergy who received an income from church property, usually
land, were endowed by the local landlord, or some similar arrangement), whose
economic wellbeing and social status depended in large measure on maintaining
the status quo. As the established church became less and
less responsive to the needs of the people
and instead supported
the government against popular opinion, and
dissenters
(1828), Catholics (1829), and Jews (1835 et
seq.) gained civil rights, the power and influence of the Church of England
declined in proportion. Anti-Catholicism
and anti-Semitism were not, therefore, mindless bigotry in many cases, but an
understandable fear on the part of those who felt that anything threatening the
security of the established church (and their incomes) was a personal danger to
themselves. The fact that most Catholics
were Irish or of Irish descent, and after 1829 tied the “Catholic cause” to
repeal of the 1800 Act of Union with Great Britain and, eventually, the vague
demand for “Home Rule” only confirmed the papist menace in the eyes of
conservatives.
 |
| Thomas Lieber, "Erastus" |
·
“Erastianism.” This is the term applied to the belief that
the State has the ultimate power to decide matters of religious truth. It is something of a misnomer, as the
doctrine of Thomas Lieber or Liebler (1524-1583), “Erastus” being the Latinized
form of his name, was that the State should punish religious offenders, not
define or determine doctrine, policy, or practice, which actually derived from
the theology and political philosophy of Richard Hooker (cir. 1554-1600) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), respectively. For at least a century and a half by the
early nineteenth century the State had been taking an active role in the
internal affairs of the Church of England, treating it as just another branch
of government.
 |
| John Henry Newman at Oxford |
·
Religious
Identity. An unusual feature of the
Church of England is one that completely baffles outsiders. As a body that separated from the Catholic
Church during the Reformation, Catholics tend to categorize the Anglican
establishment as Protestant, but within the Church of England there were and
remain all varieties of belief from extreme Protestant, even atheist, to
orthodox. This lack of unity of belief was
of great benefit for a national church as it allowed for differences of opinion
that approached an official toleration for almost anything that called itself
Christian and subscribed to the “Thirty-Nine Articles” . . . which were made
purposely vague and open to different interpretations to avoid conflict. The problem was that, as a result, it became
impossible for anyone to say what, exactly, it meant in doctrinal terms to be a
member of the Church of England or even in any meaningful sense a Christian.
·
Liberalism. Possibly the greatest danger to Church,
State, and Family in England and elsewhere in the early nineteenth century was
the rise of liberalism. One of the main
problems with liberalism, however, was that far too many people were simply
unaware of the fact that the term was a very broad umbrella and covered a
spectrum of things many of which contradicted each other. For that reason, we will cover it in the next
posting on this subject.
#30#
