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

James Pereiro, the author of a fine intellectual biography of Henry Manning, seeks in his second book to reexamine the origins and religious temperament of the Oxford Movement by close attention to the notion of a distinct Tractarian "ethos." The idea derives from a neglected source for the first-generation movement, Samuel Wood's "Revival of Primitive Doctrine," a short but important manuscript written in 1840 and therefore effectively our earliest Tractarian memoir, now held at the Borthwick Institute for Historical Research in York and very usefully reproduced here in an edited appendix. In recovering Wood's organisational endeavours in London and his correspondence with leading Tractarians such as John Henry Newman, Pereiro seeks not only to rehabilitate a conventionally secondary figure within the early movement, but to isolate Tractarianism's "theory of religious knowledge" (2)—not the same thing, he insists, as its theology, which has of course been the subject of extensive scholarly attention.

This is an exercise not without its difficulties. Firstly, as Pereiro acknowledges, "the Tractarians never described clearly and systematically what they understood for ethos in any of their published works" (5), which can make his analytical quarry sometimes seem elusive. "Wood considered the formation of the Tractarian ethos," Pereiro writes, "as central to any account of the Movement" but, he is compelled to add parenthetically, "did not refer to it under this name" (82). In a similar vein, Pereiro argues that "it is particularly in his 1839 University Sermons … that Newman described in detail the essence of the Christian ethos, even though he barely used this term" (105). Though Pereiro vindicates his identification of a historically distinct Tractarian ethos, there are moments when its evidential basis seems necessarily permissive. A second issue is linguistic as opposed to semantic. Pereiro opens with the observation that "the student of the Oxford Movement soon becomes familiar with the word ethos; it appears frequently in the writings and correspondence of the Oxford Tractarians" (1). But this is not literally true: Tractarians rarely if ever used the word "ethos" itself. Rather, they used the Greek word "ἦθος." "Ethos" is, of course, the accepted transliteration or rendering of that word, so Pereiro is absolutely warranted in his claims for it as a common concept in Tractarian writing. But it does seem odd that there is no acknowledgement anywhere in the book that its titular and analytical motif was not one which (to resort again to classical language) Tractarians used ipsissimum verbum. That Tractarians didn't all or always use the term, and that when they did they typically employed its classical Greek etymon, do seem necessary caveats, given how pivotal the word "ethos" is to the book.

Tractarian scholarship remains largely written within a self-referential—and often apologetic—canon, detached from the wider cultural and intellectual historiography of the nineteenth century. There are points where this detachment tells, as when Pereiro speculates on why Anglican secessions to Dissent were thought less objectionable than those to Rome, without reference to the excellent and extensive literature on Victorian anti-Catholicism or to the wider literature spawned by Linda Colley's famous insistence on the primacy of Protestantism in British national identity. It is also striking that, in the course of his long reflection on Newman's religious development, there is no engagement with Frank Turner's major recent study of the Anglican Newman. And while Pereiro is far too rigorous a scholar to indulge in the polemic which compromises so much Tractariana, there are moments when authorial sympathy colours the book. "Most European countries," Pereiro writes, "experienced a post-Revolution rejection of the barren and dry religion of the Enlightenment, and of the corrosive rationalism of its intellectual presuppositions" (61); there were plenty who found its rationalism anything but. These judgments sometimes extend to individuals, with the great Noetic thinker and later archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, for example, dismissed on more than one occasion. "The...