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“I Am Sadly Theoretical”: “It is The Effect of Being at Oxford”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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- Copyright © 2021 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
Copyright Mary C Gormally. Edited by John Berkman. This article originally appeared in The Catholic Herald, July 8th, 1938.
References
2 [Ed. Anscombe reveals here (and nowhere else in her writings) that she considered herself to have already been Catholic for three years when she was received into the Catholic Church.]
3 [Ed. In British English ‘bathing’ refers to swimming, not to taking a bath.]
4 [Ed. Anscombe is referring to Fr. Leo O’Hea, the Director of the Catholic Social Guild and Principal of the Catholic Worker’s College, both located in Oxford. The Catholic Social Guild (CSG) was both the main educator of working-class Catholics on the social teachings of the Catholic Church (e.g. its teachings on work and labour, and on economics and politics more generally), and the main publisher of such teachings. Since O’Hea published very little, Anscombe is almost surely recalling something she heard O’Hea say. Conversation between O’Hea and Anscombe was manageable, because the CatholicWorkers College was located at 3 Walton Well Road, Oxford, a few blocks from Anscombe’s college. The Catholic Workers College had opened in 1922, and in 1954 would move just outside Oxford to Boars Hill, and in 1965 be renamed Plater College. For details, see J. M. Cleary, Catholic social action in Britain 1909-1959 : a history of the Catholic Social Guild. (Oxford: Catholic Social Guild, 1961); Fr. C. Pridgeon, Fr. Leo O’Hea, S. J.: A Memoir (Glasgow, 1976).]
5 [Ed. Sweating: “To employ in hard or excessive work at very low wages, esp. under a system of subcontract.” (OED – 1887 19th Cent. Oct. 489 “They declared that they were being ‘sweated’—that the hunger for work induced men to accept starvation rates.”)]
6 [Ed. Here Anscombe alludes to the second stanza of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ As Kingfishers Catch Fire.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst —for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Thanks to Professor Benjamin Lipscomb for alerting me to this allusion.]
7 [Ed. Here we see Anscombe is already keenly aware of the need for thick description when articulating the demands and ideals of a moral life. What would not do was some “vaguely theorizing benevolence.” The originality of Anscombe’s moral philosophy lay in part in its emphasis on the centrality of careful moral description. Even recovering the language of justice and the other virtues was insufficient. Justice could only be adequately understood if it included a series of particular pronouncements that functioned as a series of exemplifications of a rich conception of justice.]
8 [Ed. Anscombe is using ‘secular’ as a synonym for ‘lay Catholic’ as opposed to someone who is a cleric or in religious life.]
9 [Ed. According to the OED, a ‘sop’ is “something given to appease or pacify the recipient; a bribe.” It is an allusion to the honeycake (a sop) which Prince Aeneas uses to distract (the three-headed dog) Cerberus, who was guarding the entrance to the underworld.]