The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought

The numerous histories of the English Church since the Reformation give us a picture of a sustained conflict between the Catholic and Protestant elements in a Church which, because it was national, had to be comprehensive and yet insular, embracing all except irreconcilables, but stiff against those who owned either a foreign allegiance or no allegiance at all. The whole narrative is inextricably entwined with secular politics. The Church is carried along by the rising consciousness of nationality and independence under Henry VIII and Elizabeth. It allies itself with the monarchical principle under the Stuarts, triumphing after a short defeat. It accepts the aristocratic regime while the ship of State floats on calm waters through the eighteenth century. It responds too feebly to the pietistic middle class revolt which led to the Methodist secession. It is in warm sympathy with the reaction against ‘ the ideas of 1789’ and with the struggle against Napoleon. It revives the Laudian ecclesiasticism to meet the threatened Liberal attack upon its privileges at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, and in so doing drives the Protestant dissenters from occasional conformity into complete separation. And lastly, we see how the epigoni of the Laudians and Tractarians are not only forsaking the ideal of a National Church, which for three hundred years had kindled the loyalty and exalted the pride of High Churchmen, but by a volte-face more apparent than real are bidding for the support of the new party of privilege — organised Labour. It is part of the ingrained -politicism of English thought that Church history should be written in this way. The method and the centre of interest are much the same if, as in some church histories, the relation of the Church to political and social movements is ignored, and if the narrative deals with Church politics, with the struggles of one faction after another to secure its position in the Church, and then if possible to oust its rivals or reduce them to impotence: with attempts to suppress Puritanism, or 1 Enthusiasm,’ or Liberalism, or Ritualism: with appointments to bishoprics and debates in Convocation and Lambeth Conferences. These are the subjects which make ecclesiastical history interesting to a nation which interprets nearly all human activities on the analogy, and often in the language, of a cricket match or a prize fight. The Englishman is, as Aristotle would say, by nature a political animal.