Abbot Aelred Carlyle, Caldey Island, and the Anglo-Catholic Revival in England by Rene Kollar, O.S.B. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 277 jection of papal infallibility. Rather, and here the result of Zorzi coincides much with the estimate of the work of Peter Neuner, von Hügel's Liberal Catholicism is not only aware ofthe complexity, dynamism, and social dimensions of the historical situation but also grounds human knowledge and action not in a purely intellectual universe but places special value on the growth process by which an individual integrates the scientific and human tensions in an active religious life. The ideals and driving forces of such a life are those manifested throughout the Church's history: love and sanctity. Should the reader object that such an analysis ofModernism leaves the realm of historical movement for a theological ideal, the lives and correspondence of Baron Friedrich von Hügel and his priestly friend Giovanni Semeria are powerful witnesses pleading this very case in the outgoing nineteenth and beginning twentieth century. Volume II presents von Hügel's letters in their French original, placed within the appropriate biographical and historical context and annotated with a detailed historical apparatus, which at times becomes somewhat excessive, but is never irrelevant. Unfortunately, only the fifty-nine letters of von Hügel but none of Semeria have survived. They span a period from 1895 to 1921, the heart of the Modernist crisis. Much of the editing and commentary to the letters had been prepared and made available to Zorzi by the Barnabite academic Antonio Gentili. The edition as well as Zorzi's study are in the judgment of this reviewer a valuable scholarly contribution not only to Modernist research and church history but also to historical theology, modern intellectual history, and the continuing discussion on what Catholicism should be like in the modern world. Hans Rollmann Memorial University ofNewfoundland AbbotAelred Carlyle, Caldey Island, and the Anglo-Catholic Revival in England . By Rene Kollar. O.S.B. [American University Studies, SeriesVII:Theology and Religion, Vol. 177.] (New York: Peter Lang. 1995. Pp. xv, 363. $56.95.) What are we to make of a man who, while pioneering the restoration of Benedictine life for men in the Church of England, emphasized contemplation and poverty, yet built the most sumptuous abbey in England, with a two-story abbatial dwelling and chapel, maintained a yacht for the sole use ofhimself and his guests, and had at his disposal a chauffeur-driven Daimler to take him on his begging tours in support of this opulent lifestyle? Peter Anson, an erstwhile member of Carlyle's community, portrayed him in two books of personal recollections as a rogue who stumbled into a position offame and influence. Anson's "Abbot Extraordinary" was something of a rogue. But in these carefully researched and well written pages Rene Kollar shows that he was more. Born into a middle-class family in Sheffield in 1874,Carlyle briefly studied medicine , but soon became fascinated by the hothouse world ofAnglo-Catholicism. 278 BOOK REVIEWS Possessed, in the words of so keen an observer as Ronald Knox, of "the hypnotic gaze of a mystic," Carlyle gathered around him a community of monks who settled inYorkshire in 1902, in quarters supplied by the Anglo-Catholic enthusiast Charles Lindley Wood, Second Viscount Halifax. In 1906 the community moved to the Welsh island of Caldey, Carlyle himself having managed meanwhile to get himself ordained deacon and priest by the Episcopalian Bishop of Fond du Lac,Wisconsin, during a flamboyant American tour in 1904. Ronald Knox, who as the brilliant son of an Anglican bishop had intellectual gifts and establishment connections never enjoyed by Carlyle, wrote later that "there was a faint air ofmake-believe about Caldey's Anglicanism . . . something of fairyland about it." Given the abbot's mediocre intellectual gifts and lack of theological training, combined with his flagrant disregard for sound business practices and his propensity to borrow and build without capital, it is remarkable that the enterprise which he erected on the slenderest of foundations, and maintained with a breath-taking combination of fantasy and bravado, lasted as long as it did. In 1913 Carlyle and twenty of his monks entered the Roman Catholic Church. Six who remained Anglicans formed the nucleus of the Benedictine community later established at...