Eric Mascall and the making of an Anglican Thomist, 1937–1945

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the early career of E. L. (Eric) Mascall, Anglican Catholic priest, theologian and philosopher of religion, late of Christ Church Oxford and King’s College London. Mascall spent the years between 1937 and 1945 teaching at Lincoln Theological College, in a time of acute political and intellectual unsettlement and (in due course) world war. Mascall rebelled against the previously dominant liberalism of the 1930s while also rejecting both Barthian Protestantism and certain currents in Orthodox theology, both of which were products of the same turmoil. The article documents his turn instead to the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, and examines both its sources and its particular articulation in Mascall’s work. Even though relatively few in England followed Mascall down this particular path, his formation in the 1930s and 1940s reveals much about the temper of the moment.