`Ethos' and the Oxford Movement

Abstract

Abstract This book is a study of a fundamental and neglected aspect of the Oxford Movement. The term ethos appears often in the writings of the Oxford men, especially in their correspondence, and the concept makes its presence felt in every aspect of the Tractarians' intellectual life and religious or social activity. The present study fills a gap in the research about the Oxford Movement and it revises commonly held assumptions about it; the scholarly overlook of the topic has prevented a proper understanding of significant aspects of the intellectual and social history of the Movement. Ethos, for the Oxford men, was more than just a general ‘tone of peculiar gentleness and grace’. It represented a complex theory of religious knowledge which deeply influenced the genesis and development of the Movement. The Tractarians were conscious from the first of how far their ethos distinguished them from the High Church party, with whom they shared much common doctrinal ground. Recent historiography's overstressing of the High Church dimension of the Oxford Movement has tended to obscure Tractarian intellectual originality and the motivation behind many of their actions. The Oxford men were radical religious reformers inspired by an uncompromising principle which urged them forward towards the full restoration of early Christian doctrinal orthodoxy and the recovery of the Catholic ethos. They considered that this Catholic ethos, long lost in the Church of England, was the only ground where a real revival could take root and grow up. The book studies the pre-Tractarian formation of the concept of ethos, and its later development; it explores the intellectual and practical consequences of the notion for the religious and social revival the Oxford Movement tried to promote; it also offers a study of the formation of Newman's theory of doctrinal development and of the defining and definitive role ethos played in its conception.