Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (review)

Catholic history has recently become a topic of interest among historians and in secular universities; the academic world will have a better understanding of the past because of the inclusion of those who have been ignored for so long. This book is an attempt to look at the contribution of a group of English Catholics to the development of science, politics, and religion in seventeenth-century England. The author examines the work of Thomas White, Kenelm Digby, and Henry Holden, who became known as Blackloists after the alias assumed by White during a 1652 controversy when the English Chapter split into two groups.

The work of the Blackloists is interesting because it is a way into sixteenth-and seventeenth-century physics and the threat that physics posed to religious belief, be it Catholic or Protestant. The author does point out that English Protestant philosophers were open to the work of their Catholic peers. They were both faced by what they saw as a threat to belief; both groups wished to ground that belief rationally. The Blackloists also dealt with ecclesiastical questions such as the sources of religious truth, papal infallibility (which, until 1870, was a theological opinion and not a dogma), and parliamentary control of the appointment of Catholic bishops. Finally, in the context of the Civil War and the Interregnum, they dealt with the question of political loyalty that had plagued the English Catholic community since Regnans in Excelsis (1570). The author's analysis of White's The Grounds of Obedience and Government (London, 1655) is very good. She argues that White's political philosophy is in its essence Catholic because it is grounded in both natural law and free will. She also demonstrates the relationship between White's philosophy and that of Hobbes.

The book has, however, some weaknesses. On page 22 the author makes reference to Descartes and his interest in alchemy. The reference is to secondary works. To support a statement like that one needs a reference to a text of Descartes. On pages 25 and 26 she explains Digby's interest in Aristotle by saying that Digby wanted "to prove that the soul was immortal." She states that Aristotle proved the immortality of the individual soul. Digby may have believed that Aristotle proved that, but Aristotle did not prove that the individual human soul was immortal. If he had, then there would have been no controversy over Aristotle in the thirteenth century. In dealing with the Church of England on page 9 she mentions the Arminian establishment. There was no Arminian establishment until the reign of Charles I. In dealing with Catholics at the court of Charles I she makes no reference to the work of Caroline Hibbard. The author also claims that the administration of the seminary at Douai was transferred to the Society of Jesus in 1579 "and that the Jesuits and their allies transformed it to a 'training camp' for English priests to go back to England as missionaries" (p. 5). Jesuits never ran or controlled the seminary at Douai; at one point they were the confessors at the seminary, but that is a long way from running a seminary founded by William Allen, who wanted priests to go back to England. That was not a Jesuit project. Cuthbert Mayne, a graduate of the seminary at Douai, returned to England in 1576 and was executed in 1577. That was three years before the foundation of the English Jesuit Mission.

The author seems to ignore the division in English Catholicism between the Jesuits and the Appellants, which went back to the last years of Elizabeth's reign and which was really a debate over whether Catholics could accept minority status in England or whether the realm needed to be reconverted to help Protestants save their immortal souls from hellfire that was the...