Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (review)

This book is in effect a study of the Oxford Movement with special reference to the Tractarian concept of ethos, which originated with John Keble, who derived the idea from the Nicomachean Ethics and Butler’s Analogy. It raises two controversial points.

First, Pereiro rightly disagrees with Peter Nockles and other revisionist historians that the Tractarians played down the High Church tradition that they inherited and exaggerated their own claims, but rather argues, “The Oxford Movement helped create a new image of High Churchmanship, one which involved a more complete and coherent doctrinal structure than it ever had before” (p. 45). Moreover, he questions whether such vitality and revival as the historical revisionism of Nockles and others points to were “weighty and widespread enough to counterbalance the negative” aspects of Anglicanism in the decades before the Oxford Movement (p. 60).

Second, according to Pereiro, the allegedly pioneering theory of development propounded in 1835 by Samuel Wood, a leading London Tractarian and former pupil of John Henry Newman, was rejected by his former Oriel tutor: “It is obvious from the correspondence that Newman did not accept Wood’s theory that progress and development of doctrine were intended in the Divine Plan, or that it should have continued after the Primitive Church” (p. 12). Newman’s letter of objection was destroyed after Wood’s death, but Wood’s reply of January 1, 1836, printed in an appendix, merely denies that his “notion can disparage the early Church” (p. 246). Wood’s letter to Manning of January 29, the other text cited by Pereiro, makes it clear that Newman had certainly not denied development in the early Church, but that “from the time the Church ceased to be One, the right of any part of it to propound Articles of faith . . . is suspended” (p. 248).

This was simply in accordance with the Tractarian “branch theory,” which held that developments in doctrine were no longer possible as the Church was no longer “One” and therefore unable through General Councils to authenticate doctrinal developments. Pereiro admits, “There seems to be a certain contradiction between these words, as reported by Wood,” and what Pereiro describes as “Newman’s strict interpretation of the Vincentian Rule, given that a future reunited Church would presumably be in a position to propound articles of faith beyond what had been included under the rule” (p. 158). Whether or not there is a contradiction, the fact, which Pereiro tries to brush aside, is that certainly by 1836 Newman fully accepted the concept of doctrinal development—even if, according to the Tractarian “branch theory,” developments were pro tempore impossible because the Church was no longer “One” and able to validate developments, as in the early Church, through General Councils.

According to Pereiro, Newman held a theory of doctrinal development only from 1840. The author belongs to that school of thought that is determined, regardless of the evidence, to prove that Newman falsified his own account of his own doctrinal development, whether through simply lying (Stephen Thomas, Frank Turner) or, more subtly, in Pereiro’s case, through “interpreting previous steps of development by later ones” (p. 165). The truth is that Newman was keenly interested in his own theological development, and the onus of proof is on those who, in this case, reject Newman’s clear statement in the Apologia that he had “introduced” the “principle of development” as early as 1832 in the Arians.⁵ Newman also there cites an article of his published in 1836, consisting of a dialogue between two Anglo-Catholics, one of whom, representing Newman, speaks explicitly of “those necessary developments of the elements of Gospel truth, which could not be introduced throughout the Church except gradually.”⁶ The introduction of the principle had been more implicit in the Arians, where Newman merely refers to the “symbols and articles” and “confessions of faith” that were eventually “imperatively required” to...