Eric Mascall and the rise, fall and rise of ‘Christian sociology’, c.1935 – 1985

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the social thought of E.L. Mascall, Anglican theologian and philosopher. The bewilderment of the 1930s and 1940s, Mascall believed, was at root a loss of a proper sense of the human person: dependent on the action of God for very existence, simultaneously bodily and spiritual, a worker on earth yet a pilgrim towards glory. Human fulfilment was contingent on a right relation of humankind to God, and the subservience of society, economy and politics to human need. Mascall was rare among his contemporaries in continuing to write into the mid-1980s, and thus being able to reflect on the eclipse in the 1950s and 1960s of much of what he had advocated. I suggest that the waxing and waning of Mascall’s interventions mirrors the rise, eclipse and (finally) partial revival of a catholic understanding of society and the human person, often given the name of ‘Christian sociology’.