The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century by Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone

Abstract

BOOK REVIEW 113 Przywara and Edith Stein began their translations.While one can get the impression that Newman sprang into German consciousness in the twentieth century, in fact, there was interest in him in the nineteenth century. German speakers were accustomed to their geniuses writing fiction and for their readers to take the fiction seriously. Therefore, Callista was among the first works of Newman to be presented to German readers. Gerhard Schündelen was a diocesan priest and a chaplain with light duties and enough freedom to pursue what must have seemed like odd interests in contemporary English speaking Catholicism:Newman,Lady Georgiana Fullerton,and Orestes Brownson. If Schündelen had been interested in something European and old, no matter how obscure, he would have been in the mainstream of German culture. But it was matters English and contemporary that helped him understand issues that were emerging in what would become modern Germany:the Church and culture, the Church and education, and relationships between Protestants and Catholics. Sobotta introduces us to these themes and the subsequent arrival of Newman as a factor in German theology. British and American readers of Newman have a different use for Newman than do German speakers in Europe. The mammoth presence of the Church of England did not have a parallel in European politics and theology or,should one say,that when it did, it was a smothering impact that might produce a Kierkegaard in reaction, but no one like a Newman. The American experience of pluralism was also something new to Europe, which seems to have gone from state churches to indifference without a healthy pluralism intervening. Sobotta’s interest is not only in Newman,but in how Newman was received. The European interest in Newman was a search for a non-European model that was nevertheless scholarly—Catholic and engaged in confronting Protestantism and the modern state. This volume has a Catholic and a Protestant foreword and these issues are also the issues of the Second Vatican Council. For German speakers, there is no doubt Newman heavily influenced that council and prepared their theologians for its options. The bibliography provides a good introduction to Newman postVatican II among German speakers. Halbert Weidner, CO Holy Trinity Church, Honolulu, HI The territory surveyed in this book, now several steps removed from a doctoral thesis, is vast and complex. In general, Gouldstone’s subject is the interaction of modern knowledge,historical and scientific,with Christian verities. In particular,it is The Rise and Decline of Anglican Idealism in the Nineteenth Century. Timothy Maxwell Gouldstone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pages xvi + 235. Cloth, $85.00. ISBN 1–4039–3828–8. THE RISE AND DECLINE OF ANGLICAN IDEALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY TIMOTHY MAXWELL GOULDSTONE NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 114 one way of responding to modernity that emerged in England, at post-Tractarian Oxford, and was espoused for a time by a number of influential figures in England’s established church. Others have explored the same territory,notably Michael Ramsey in An Era in Anglican Theology (London: Longmans, 1960) and P.T. Marsh in The Victorian Church in Decline (University of Pittsburgh Press,1969). Like these books, Gouldstone’s is in some sense an account of waning and marginalization. “Idealism,” he writes, “appeared a godsend to an Anglican Church increasingly aware of the diminishing influence of clerical leadership in the rapidly changing educational and social world of late Victorian culture”(184). By the end of the century, however, and certainly by the end of the First World War,what had been seen as godsend was taken seriously by very few. Its power to inspire and enlighten had dissipated. This is not to say that Gouldstone’s investigation, its title notwithstanding, lays out a“grand narrative.” Without adopting the jargon of postmodernism,he does adopt some of its characteristic tenets,all of which are opposed to just the sort of“modern” philosophy he is investigating and among which suspicion of seamless historical constructs is central. By idealism, however, he means not only an articulate metaphysical or epistemological doctrine,but also and more importantly the outlook and attitudes onto which idealism in this more technical sense can and did...