Oxford movement: An Overview

 

Oxford movement: An Overview

 

Oxford movement was a religious and literary movement during the Victorian Age. It was centered at the University of Oxford. This movement sought rebirth of Roman Catholic thoughts and practice within the Church of England. Changes that took place in the relationship between the state and the Church of England were the immediate cause of this Movement.

     The major factor was the proposal of the Whig government to suppress half the Anglican bishoprics and to pre-dispose their incomes, without first consulting the Church. This created a wave of opposition, headed by John Keble, John Henry Newman and several others.

     John Henry Newman dated the beginning of the Oxford movement to Keble’s Assize Sermon of July 1833, on National Apostasy. Other major figures associated with this movement were Richard Hurrell Froude, Frederick Faber, Isaac Williams, Charles Marriott, Bernard Dalgairns, William Ward, and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Although these all writers and intellectuals were associated with this movement yet John Henry Newman and John Keble played an important in the emergence of this movement.

      Although it was a religious movement, its main connection with literature was the series of doctrinal papers setting forth the aims and teachings of the movement. These were known as the ‘Tracts for the Times’. They were a series of 90 theological publications produced by the members of the Oxford movement and edited by John Newman. John Newman himself contributed twenty-four tracts. Writer WH Hutton says in this context-“The Oxford movement certainly belongs to the history of English religion more definitely than to the history of English literature; but it had great influence, outside its own definite members on the literary taste of its age.”

Some followers of this movement moved closer to the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church and their ideas developed controversies. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and subsequently, several others also joined the Catholic Church. Keble and Pusey were active leaders of this movement which gradually spread its influence throughout the Church of England. Its result came in the form of increased use of ceremony and ritual in Church worship, the establishment of Anglican monastic communities for men and for women, and better-educated clergy who were more concerned with the pastoral care of their Church members.

    Different groups were present in the Church of England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many people saw themselves as latitudinarian or liberal in an attempt to broaden the Church’s appeal. These people were related to high office. Conversely, many clergies in the parishes were Evangelicals, as a result of the revival led by John Wesley. During this, the universities became the breeding ground for a movement to restore liturgical and devotional customs which borrowed majorly from traditions before the English Reformation as well as contemporary Roman Catholic traditions.

    The immediate cause for this movement was a perceived attack by the reforming Whig administration on the structure and revenues of the Church of Ireland, with the Irish Church Temporalities Bill (1833). This Bill not only legalized administrative changes of the hierarchy of the church but also made changes to the leasing of Church lands, which some feared would result in a secular appropriation of ecclesiastical property. John Keble criticized these proposals as National Apostasy in his Assize Sermon in Oxford in 1833. The Tractarians criticized this concept of theological liberalism.

The Tractarians contended the Branch Theory, which says that Anglicanism along with Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism form three branches of the historic Church. Tractarians debated for the inclusion of traditional aspects of liturgy from medieval religious practice, as they believed the church had become too plain. Newman argued in the final tract ‘tract 90’ that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, as defined by the Council of Trent, were compatible with the thirty-nine articles of the 16th-century church of England.

     This movement was criticized for being a ‘Romanising’ tendency, but it began to influence the theory and practice of Anglicanism more broadly. The Oxford Movement was also criticized for being both secretive and collusive.

 

     The Oxford movement established the Anglican religious orders, both of men and of women. It unified ideas and practices related to the practice of liturgy and ceremony to unite more powerful emotional symbolism in the Church. It brought the insight of the liturgical movement into the life of the church. The effects of this movement were so widespread that the Eucharist gradually became more central to worship, vestments became common, and numerous Roman Catholic practices were re-introduced into worship. This caused to controversies within churches that resulted in court cases, as in the dispute about ritualism.

   Many Tractarian priests began working in slums because bishops refused to give livings to them. From their new ministries, they developed a critique of British social policy, both local and national. One of the results was the establishment of the Christian Social Union, of which several bishops were members, where issues such as the just wage, the system of property renting, infant mortality and industrial conditions were debated. The more radical Catholic Crusade was a much smaller organization than the Oxford movement. Anglo-Catholicism, as this complex of ideas, styles and organizations became known, had a significant influence on global Anglicanism.

     One of the major writers and proponents of Tractarianism was John Henry Newman, a famous Oxford priest who, after writing his final tract ‘Tract 90’, became convinced that the Branch Theory was inadequate. Thinks that Tractarianism was a distinguished Roman Catholic movement were not unfounded; Newman believed that the Roman and Anglican churches were wholly compatible. He was entered into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and was ordained a priest of the Church the same year. He later became a cardinal.

 

      Writing on the end of Tractarianism as a movement, Newman stated:

I saw indeed clearly that my place in the Movement was lost; public confidence was at an end; my occupation was gone. It was simply an impossibility that I could say anything henceforth to good effect, when I had been posted up by the marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College of my University, after the manner of discommend pastry-cooks, and when in every part of the country and every class of society, through every organ and opportunity of opinion, in newspapers, in periodicals, at meetings, in pulpits, at dinner-tables, in coffee-rooms, in railway carriages, I was denounced as a traitor who had laid his train and was detected in the very act of firing it against the time-honored Establishment.