Catholicism in Anglican culture and theology : responses to crisis in England (1937-1949)

Abstract

This thesis views the Catholic tendency in English Anglicanism within the context of its wider theological and cultural environment, exploring its responses to the crises of 1937 to 1949. A preliminary chapter discusses the wartime writings of neo-orthodox writers D.R. Davies and Melville Chaning-Pearce, and the Evangelical Bishop Christopher Chavasse, as non-Catholic Anglicans who dissociated themselves from liberal Protestantism. These groups emphasised original sin and redemption, and younger exponents of Catholicism sought a synthesis which would accept these emphases without abandoning Catholic ecclesiology. A discussion of the Signposts series of 1940 and of the Malvern Conference of 1941 focuses on Donald MacKinnon's appropriation of earlier Catholic representations of the Church as an extension of the Incarnation, in response to the Phoney War, the Blitz and the Fall of France. The Church, he argued must prophetically criticise the actions of the State and the banalities of modem culture. He advanced a model of the Christian priest as embodying the paradox of a Church simultaneously composed of sinful individuals, and yet showing forth the divine Christ

MacKinnon's wartime writings had their practical counterpart in the ministry of Bishop George Bell of Chichester. Bell's Incarnational theology motivated his patronage of artists, long-standing opposition to Nazism, and protests against war policies which implicitly accepted the notion of total war. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets are interpreted in the context of his involvement in the Christendom Group. Eliot emphasised an Incarnational Catholic mysticism which confronts suffering rather than opting for the indifference of the "Yogi". Catholic Incarnational dogma, and its implications for liberty, morality and cultural integrity, also inspired Dorothy L. Sayers's unsuccessful attempt to produce an "Oecumenical Penguin" which would expound Christian doctrine to a lay readership, as part of her wider wartime campaign to popularise Catholic Christology through speeches and radio presentations such as The Man Born to Be King. Catholic Anglicans also contributed to a confidential ecumenical discussion group, the Moot, airing their concerns about the role of an established Church in the light of totalitarian threats to civilisation., and advocating a dissenting witness, combined with a reassessment of Christian language, in the face of repressive forms of collectivism. A final case-study explores the commissioning by Walter Hussey of Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion for St Matthew's Parish Church in Northampton, a response to the Nazi concentration camps, and the Anglican Catholic contributions to the British Council of Churches Commission on The Era of Atomic Power, in which MacKinnon and Bell reiterated their plea for the Church to maintain a critical aloofness from the mechanisms of total war. The thesis argues that Catholics sought the ''middle way", not merely in liturgy, but under "the conditions of actual life", where the problems of casuistry were fraught with awful dilemmas, and the conflicting claims of Yogi and Commissar, active and contemplative, Incarnationalist and Redemptionist, "Catholic" and "Protestant", assailed them from either side.