AN AMBIGUOUS LEGACY

John Henry Newman's conversion to Rome in 1845 was part of the bifurcation of an Oxford Movement which was then a dozen years old. While many notable individuals became Catholics, a majority of the "Tractarians" remained within the Anglican Church and in time had a significant effect on its beliefs and practices. Ironically, their triumph eventually contributed to the spiritual debilitation of that communion, the very thing which the Tractarians had sought to prevent.

Anglicanism in the early nineteenth century was commonly divided into three groups, conventionally designated high, low, and broad.

High Churchmen, to whom the Tractarians initially appealed with varying degrees of success, were not, as the term would come to mean later, "ritualists," much less Anglo-Catholics. They were those who had a strong concept of the Church of England as an institution and a somewhat triumphalist attitude towards its worship and its polity, and who believed in the authority of bishops, whatever the theological basis of that authority was thought to be.

Low Churchmen were non-ritualist, and subsequently anti-ritualist, but their positive identifying characteristic was their intense evangelicalism. For them the "institutional church" was something of an accident, in the philosophical sense, and they emphasized personal religiosity over High-Church formality.

Broad Churchmen, whose roots could be traced to the Latitudinarians of the late seventeenth century, were like the High Churchmen in valuing the Anglican Church as an institution, but to them institutional cohesion was virtually an end in itself. They were prepared to tolerate an indefinite amount of doctrinal and, eventually, liturgical variety, even to the point of theological indifferentism. Broad Churchmen thus tended towards Erastianism Ñ the subordination of church to state Ñ and both of those characteristics were among the principal reasons why Newman finally decided to abandon the church which had nurtured him.

Tractarianism did not at first have much to do with liturgy but with the recovery of the theological roots of the ancient faith, not only the biblical Christianity to which evangelicals were faithful but the Church Fathers as well. It was a doctrinal movement primarily, concerned with the authentic apostolic faith and with the bases for distinguishing orthodoxy from heresy.

But, beginning in the 1850's, groups within the Tractarian movement quite logically began to restore liturgical beliefs and practices the abandonment of which over the centuries had been the natural concomitant of having lost the fullness of the apostolic faith. The sacraments were once again placed at the center of worshipping life, to be celebrated with due reverence and solemnity. The richness of Christian symbolism, including the liturgical calendar, was recovered.

Anglican "ritualists" encountered such opposition that some of them had to practice a heroism nothing short of saintly, braving both mob violence and sustained legal attacks mounted by hostile Low Churchmen. Although their ritualism had its effete elements, it also included serious and devout people Ñ sisters who nursed the sick under appalling conditions, priests who went to the heart of the urban slums and attempted to combine social conscience with a vital liturgical piety.

By the 1880's the ritualists were gaining a measure of toleration, to the point where previously forbidden practices were becoming fairly common. As even relatively Low Church parishes adopted surpliced choirs, altar candles, and priestly stoles, more "advanced" congregations began celebrating the liturgy in ways scarcely distinguishable, to the untutored eye, from those of Rome. By the turn of the century there were openly Anglo-Catholic bishops within the Anglican communion.

Indeed, so successful was the movement that by the 1920's some of its adherents were freely predicting that the entire communion would in time adopt their principles, and some were even bold enough to talk of corporate reunion with Rome. By the 1950's most Anglo-Catholic practices were no longer controversial, and even bishops not considered especially "Catholic" began to wear miters and copes.

But that was precisely the problem. Although the revised (English) Book of Common Prayer of 1928 made some significant concessions to Anglo-Catholic piety, even that book did not justify many of the "advanced" practices, and in fact for over seventy years Anglo-Catholics had, where liturgy was concerned, been openly disobedient to duly constituted ecclesiastical authority. Liturgical practices which were unauthorized, and in some cases actually forbidden, gained acceptance merely through their tenacious repetition and constant extension, to the point where opponents no longer had the stomach for the prolonged and acrimonious struggles which would have been necessary to suppress them. Ironically, although the Tractarians had rejected the indifferentism of the Broad Churchmen, it was to a great extent the latter spirit which allowed their own triumph. It was altogether a rehearsal for the liturgical disorders which now afflict the Catholic Church as well.

Without precisely saying so, Anglo-Catholics acted on the assumption that liturgical uniformity was not a positive good and that obedience to ecclesiastical authority was not required if it went against the individual's own sense of liturgical correctness. At a time when most religious groups enforced liturgical uniformity of some kind, Anglo-Catholics were carving out the position which has since been adopted by liberals in every denomination. In the words of modern liturgists, they made a path by walking on it, defying the rules in the expectation that their defiance would eventually be legitimized.

The official Anglican statement of belief was the Thirty-Nine Articles, an Elizabethan formula which modern scholars agree was heavily influenced by Calvinism. As Newman eventually came to see, the Tractarian position was tenable only through rather tendentious readings of the Articles, ingenious arguments to prove that they really did not say what they obviously did say. Here again some of the Tractarians were far ahead of their time, practicing a kind of deconstruction in which no text could be assumed to have a fixed and clear meaning.

Parallel to Anglo-Catholic ritualism there developed an ecclesiology, indeed a comprehensive theology, which was highly indebted to Catholic and Orthodox sources and greatly at odds with what most Anglicans had historically held, to the point where, when Anglo-Catholics and Low Churchmen spoke of "the Church"; they were often speaking of two quite different theological concepts.

Eventually Anglo-Catholics scarcely bothered to "interpret" the Thirty-Nine Articles but simply aligned themselves with the general drift of modern liberal theology, according to which no text, not even Scripture itself, can be finally authoritative. Anglo-Catholics came to have a vested interest in a church which was doctrinally vague and endlessly tolerant in practice, since those were the conditions which permitted them to flourish.

If for the original Tractarians doctrinal orthodoxy was the chief concern, the Anglo-Catholic movement evolved in a somewhat different direction. While it always contained strong voices for orthodoxy, it also had a modernist wing which, having long practiced liturgical nonconformity, was not inclined to see doctrinal conformity as a positive good either.

The triumphs of Anglo-Catholic ritualism were finally accompanied by a quiet abandonment of even the theological bases of that ritual, to the point where the vestments a priest wears, and the way in which he celebrates the Eucharist, is not a reliable sign of what he believes.

Arguably, had all the Tractarians followed Newman to Rome, the Church of England would have been spiritually stronger, united by the Evangelical spirit, provided the Evangelicals could have kept it on the