This elegant and civilized study is perfect reading for ecumenical sceptics – and a worthwhile contribution to the Church history (European and, up to a point, North American) of the nineteenth century.
The opening chapter insists on the resolutely un-ecumenical character of the Oxford Movement, which in its origins was as opposed to Rome as it was to Protestant Dissent. The Tractarian concept of catholicity was ‘temporal’, which meant, in effect, identical with that of apostolicity. The claim that the contemporary Church of England was catholic turned on two premises. First, the patristic Church – at any rate before the deviation represented by the Seventh Council, Nicaea II, which counter-evangelically licensed the worship of images – was the Church of the apostles expressing itself in creeds and liturgies. Secondly, the Church of England was in her ministry in lineal descent from the patristic Church in the island of Britain, and thus carried an apostolic mandate to the inhabitants of its southern portion. Chapman's presentation of the Tractarian Newman makes telling use, accordingly, of his 1840 essay ‘The Catholicity of the English Church’ for which all that is necessary in order to share in the essence of the Church is descent from a common origin – not relations of communion, much less ties of governance, with christians elsewhere. This coheres with Pusey's 1839 open Letter to Bishop Bagot of Oxford, for which explicit – and exclusive – adherence to the teachings of the undivided Church of the ecumenical Councils of the patristic epoch is the sine qua non of catholicity. Here what Pusey termed the ‘first deeds’ are, so to say, the epistemological equivalent of Newman's more ontological expression ‘descent from one original’. These claims are not unproblematic. Which Councils among the possible maximum of six are ecumenical? The answer to this question, if it be ‘more than simply the first’, inevitably undermines the validity of the adjective ‘undivided’ as a qualifier of the noun ‘Church’. There is also the question of how adequately, by the historical method, even in the hands of a believing historian, the ‘first deeds’ can be reconstituted from the fragmentary textual remains. Chapman writes as though this weighed far more with Newman – who, as a consequence was obliged to look for a centre of interpretative authority among the bodies descended from the common origin – than did the issue of ‘the whole earth is a safe judge’ brought to his attention by Wiseman.
Chapter two looks at ‘Romantic Ecumenism’, a fitting term for the attempt of neo-mediaevalists in both Communions to find common ground in a return – liturgical, spiritual, and even social – to the pre-Reformation English situation. If the Ecclesia anglicana of the early Tudor epoch finds itself today in both the Church of England and the English Catholic Church then this is by no means an unreasonable strategy. The difficulty lay in persuading the bulk of the Establishment that emergent Anglo-Catholicism was true Anglicanism, and mainstream Roman Catholics that the Reformation had not swept the late mediaeval faith-community away (except for Recusants). Chapman re-tells in an admirably detailed manner the story of the ill-fated Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, chief bearer of these fond hopes.
Chapters three and four are more theologically demanding, for they concern Dr Pusey's Eirenica, which the by now Roman Catholic Newman famously described as olive branches fired from a catapult. In a highly circumstantial reading of the texts, utilizing both correspondence and the wider controversial literature they provoked, Chapman shows how little likelihood there was that Pusey and Newman could reach agreement. For the former, patristic proof ‘remained the functional equivalent of the sola scriptura of the Reformation’ while Newman's theory of development (‘baldly stated’) meant that ‘all the popular practices and undefined traditions of the Church, however distant from the letter of Conciliar teaching, might at some point prove to be part of dogma’ (p. 99).
For Pusey, and his disciple Alexander Forbes, the Scots Episcopal bishop of Brechin (here we reach chapters 5 to 7), the definition of papal infallibility put an end to Unionist hopes based on a neo-patristic reading of both the decrees of Trent and the Thirty-Nine Articles, all in the cause of a common front against secular rationalism in European culture. The infallibility now ascribed to the Pope, as Pusey pointed out, ‘goes backwards as well as forwards’. It not only meant carte blanche for the future. It also required the drawing up (and by whom?) of a short-list of probable ex cathedra papal teachings from the past.
Hence the turning of Anglican High Churchmen (a broader category than Anglo-Catholics, of course) to the Old Catholic churches which disaffection with the ‘Vatican Decrees’ brought into existence in West-Central Europe, and to the Byzantine Orthodox, for both of these groups constituted national churches of a catholic type. Chapters 8 to 10 show the rise and decline of this alternative ecumenism of which the Bonn Conferences of 1875–6, bringing together Anglicans, Orthodox and Old Catholics, were the climactic high. The key doctrinal issue at the Conferences, the abandonment of the Filioque, was their Achilles’ heel for Anglo-Catholics since their undisputed leader, Pusey, would not accept Monopatrism as the consensus of the Fathers. Chapman suggests, plausibly, that the failure of the Old Catholic bodies to grow into churches large enough to claim the moral right to speak for their nationalities undermined Church of England interest in them in a way that was not the case for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (itself a non-Established and obviously minoritarian entity).
At the close of this thoroughly researched book Chapman concludes that the contrast between a patriotically conceived and temporally defined catholicity is now, for English Anglicans, the principal obstacle to reunion with an international, spatially catholic Roman Catholic Church. It looks as if, for future ecumenical advance in this context, the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ of Pope Benedict XVI, which reassured patristically-minded christians that papalism does not mean disruptive innovation, needs to be combined with a going back to the sources of specifically English pre-Reformation catholicity.
