High Church Anglicanism: Practice and Poetry

In his essay in this forum, Timothy Larsen cites from W.J. Conybeare's 1853 Edinburgh Review article in which he describes the three stands of the Church of England: High, Low, and Broad. By "High," Larsen explains, Conybeare "meant an emphasis on the Catholic nature of the Church" (146). This emphasis on the continuity of pre-Reformation Catholicism in the Anglican Church led to the reinstatement of six practices by the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement (the movement that dominated the High Church in the Victorian period). As Emma Mason and Mark Knight explain, these included:

the use of sacraments within the Church; episcopacy, or the governing of the Church by bishops; the notion of the Church as a "body" in which all believers were linked to Christ; the observance of daily prayers and fasting; visible devotion, that is, church decoration; and the promotion of medieval ritual.

(91)

The impetus to reinstate these practices and to emphasize the historical continuity of Catholicism was initiated by John Keble's assize sermon on national apostasy in 1833. The Oxford Movement then went through a period of crises in the years leading up to John Henry Newman's secession to Roman Catholicism in 1845 before it matured and was shaped by wider social and cultural currents in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The rationale for the reinstatement of the six practices outlined above was expressed at length in a series of ninety theological pamphlets named The Tracts for the Times (1833–41), written by High Church clergy, including Richard Hurrell Froude, John Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and Isaac Williams. The Tracts advocated a recognition of the Catholic heritage of the Anglican Communion and repeatedly looked to the Primitive Church as a model; they took various forms, including exegesis, storytelling, conversation, and edited selections from the work of the Church Fathers and the Caroline Divines. A concern with lived experience runs through them as the authors debate fasting, the sacrament of the Eucharist, private prayer, and Bible reading. The Tracts came to an end with Newman's controversial examination of the difficulties of the Thirty-Nine Articles in Tract 90 (an examination that was to lead to his condemnation by fellow Anglicans and his subsequent conversion), but the effects of the Oxford Movement endured throughout the era and are still felt in Anglo-Catholicism today.

As Nicholas Lossky explains, the Tractarians received from the Fathers "a specific sense of the very nature of theology," the main characteristic of which involves a recognition that it is "practical" rather than speculative (77–78). Although scholars of the Oxford Movement have continued to stress the Tractarian emphasis on social outreach as a central and organic element of its development and have explored the ways leaders of the Oxford Movement saw the interconnectedness between theory and practice, the longevity of the (largely twentieth-century) perception that the movement was concerned primarily with the theoretical and ornamental and that the "Tractarians forgot the world" (qtd. in Skinner 334) has been hard to shift. While Simon Skinner has highlighted the significance of marginalized sources "especially rich in social commentary," including "quarterly journalism and the early Tractarian fiction of the late 1830s and early 1840s" (334), I want to draw attention here to the central place of poetry in disseminating doctrine and articulating the lived experience of High Church Anglicans.

Tractarian poetry reached a far wider audience than The Tracts for the Times and, as G.B. Tennyson has argued, was as much "cause and symptom" as it was a "result of the Movement" (8). The significance of John Keble's The Christian Year (1827), which contains poems reflecting on Sundays and feast days of the liturgical year, cannot be overestimated. With his Lyras, collections of ancient and modern poetry and hymnody, Orby Shipley responded to what he perceived as the "literary craving" for religious poetry that The Christian Year had engendered (iv). Kirstie Blair describes how the first of these Lyras, Newman's Lyra Apostolica (1836), "set in motion a tradition whereby poetic anthologies were understood as weapons in a religious cause...