Dr Timothy Graham is a medical doctor specialising in Gastroenterology at St George’s Hospital in London. He obtained an MPhil in Philosophy in 2011 with a dissertation on the thought of Austin Farrer from Queen’s University Belfast where he had previously completed his medical training. He is a deacon in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, lives in Surrey with his charming Italian wife and a young family of eight children, and keeps up his interests in Scripture, Romantic philosophy and books generally when he has the time.

He is a personal friend of mine, and he originally wrote this article in 2018 for a *.pdf review that I did not continue beyond its first edition. He has authorised me to publish it in this blog. He and I are convinced that without Romanticism, from its roots in Germany to France and Britain, Christianity would have faded away in the nineteenth century, superseded by scientific materialism.

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The First Signs of Freedom: William Morris’s Romantic medievalism and the Oxford Movement.

Dr Timothy Graham

In his socialist essay Art and Labour (1884) William Morris argues that given the right conditions – a pleasant place to live, education according to capacity, and “unanxious leisure” – men who were masters of their work, who owned their materials, tools and time would produce things of beauty. Instead of producing products or mere parts of products as machine-operating wage-earners for an employer who pockets the profit, a task alienating themselves from their own productions, they would produce useful things rather, for their own enjoyment. Artistry and therefore beauty would penetrate even their simplest productions of everyday things. Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), a utopia where such a society is realised, is at first disconcerting for the narrator who has wandered into it: “you are not yet used to our life of repose amidst energy”, says the character Ellen, “of work which is pleasure and pleasure which is work.”

Leaving to one side Morris’s social claims, viz. the necessary conditions for craftmanship to flourish, the main weight of his essay’s argument is supported by his claim that such social conditions did exist for a period in the Middle Ages, and that the works of this period reveal the kind of beauty in craftmanship which he is setting up as an exemplar and goal. The backdrop to his picture are the hopeless faces seen through the smog of an industrial town, and while his essay is prompted by his broad manly sympathies with the poor, the lineaments of the nineteenth century Romantic reaction arguably define the main features of Art and Labour. I would like to explore firstly the role of medievalism in the Romantic movement in the light of Morris’s essay, and in the wider setting of Morris’s life and work. Secondly, Morris had significant contact with the Oxford Movement at Exeter College, therefore can Morris be placed somewhere within the stream of the Oxford Movement and its sequelae, especially the medieval aesthetic which issued from it?

 

1. Romanticism and the Middle Ages.

Firstly, Morris’s turn to the Middle Ages in this essay is unsurprising for those have read his work or seen his craftmanship: but why did the Romantics and those influenced by Romanticism turn to the medieval period for imaginative nutriment? The argument in Art and Labour presents a brief epoch of the Western medieval social structure as worthy of imitation, but as a mere temporary and externally driven accident of social history, as something detachable from Christian belief and spiritual effect. Such an unsympathetic and extrinsic analysis is belied by Morris’s persistent return to the social structure and artistic forms of medieval Europe in his works of imagination or artistic output. What are the Middle Ages “doing” for Morris and the Romantics more generally?

A brief note on Romanticism before proceeding: because the word has so many potential meanings some limits are needed. For convenience, I will follow M.H. Abrahms’ classification[1]. He divides the historical movement into (1) seminal early Romantics such as Schiller and Hölderlin in Germany, and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake in England, and (2) the later “post-Romantics”. The early Romantics came to literary maturity at the time of the French Revolution, experienced as an “intellectual, moral and aesthetic as well as political crisis”. They assumed a prophetic identity and aimed to awaken their contemporaries to the need for redemption of civilisation through visionary works embodying “life, love, liberty, hope and joy”. Typically, following a common crisis engendered by the failure of their revolutionary hopes, the Romantics conceived of the redemption of Western civilisation as being brought about through an inner transformation of our perception of the world – and the following points are crucial for understanding the form of their thought – in which we return to the unifying vision of a child or primitive golden age for whom the world is not the dead object of our post-Enlightenment science and sensibility, and in which the traditional Christian ideas of regeneration are realised in a secular, internal new birth of the one who now sees and feels truly. Abrahms speaks of later writers and artists within this broad tradition as post-Romantic: I will simply call them Romantics, but my use of the term will assume his genealogy of the movement, and set of common features.

The idea of the return to a golden age or the paradise of Eden is a recurrent and constitutive image in early Romantic thought. Schiller’s essay Concerning the First Human Society, according to the Guidance of the Mosaic Records (1790) was his early attempt at a secular Universalgeschichte, in which the Biblical narrative of the fall was presented as a mythical representation of mankind’s history, as a loss of something akin to Rousseau’s childlike primitive freedom. His work however was preceded by several influential treatments which established the genre. G.E. Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race (1780) and J.G. Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1785) were taken up by Immanuel Kant in his Conjectural Origin of the History of Man (1786). Common to these works of Universalgeschichte was the idea that primitive man, represented by Adam, fell from an instinctively childlike state of unity with nature into a state of reason where the burden of free choice was opened up, inevitably ejecting him from his primal innocence and simplicity into a world of foresight of death and possibility of evil, and – like the cherub with the flaming sword – barring hope of return to his aboriginal crude simplicity. There is departure from the traditional biblical framework of interpretation not only in the interpretation of Genesis as a myth, accommodated to a childish stage of human development, but also in that the fall, so interpreted, is seen as an inevitable development of man’s moral existence. According to Schiller the fall tears mankind “loose from the leading strings of nature” and sets him on “the dangerous road to moral freedom”.

As a result of this secularising of the story of the fall into a history of Everyman and the human race in general, their evaluation of the results of the fall are drastically altered from the traditional Christian position. The fall is now both simultaneously gain and loss: loss to the individual certainly, because (in Kant’s words) it led to “evils, and – what is even worse, in association with the refined reason – vices”. The fracturing effects damaged not only man’s relation to nature, but also his inner psychological unity and society as a whole. However the fall for mankind as a whole, as opposed to the individual, is beneficial: the goal of re-integration remains, and, says Schiller, “our culture shall lead us, by the road of reason and freedom, back to nature again”, led by the prophetic Romantic poet, who reveals the Ideal and opens the way. The overall structure of the Romantic philosophy of history and nature is a modified version of Plotinus’s exitus and reditus to the One. The Neoplatonic circle becomes an upward spiral. We will take all the scientific knowledge gained from our divorce from nature, all the self-knowledge gained from our psychological fracturing, and all the wisdom achieved through social discord back into a new unity which (Schiller again) is “infinitely higher than that which he reaches by means of nature”, because it is freely willed, consciously participated in, and self-won. Although one can arguably find precedent for a similar justification of the fall in terms of an ultimately greater benefit for mankind in the Christian understanding of history – the felix culpa of the Exsultet and of Ambrose – the Christian theodicy has a radically different saving power. We are rescued by divine grace and the Incarnation, rather than by the immanent regenerative power of creative imagination within human culture: there is perhaps no pithier summation of the Romantic doctrine and its point of contact with and departure from a traditional Christian understanding than William Blake’s “Imagination/ Which is the divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever”[2].

The reason for this detour into the Romantic idea of Universalgeschichte, and the longing for the golden age and Eden, is to grasp one of the most significant imaginative and conceptual nodes of the movement, a vantage point from which to repeat the question: what is the significance of the apparently instinctive turn to the Middle Ages for the Romantic movement? The main lines of the answer, and how the medieval period is related to the Romantic longing for Eden, can be gained from Novalis’s[3] Christendom or Europe, written in 1799. It was written – as were the other early Romantic works – under the pressure of the perceived failure of the French Revolution to enact the ideal which Novalis and others had espoused, and also the evils of the fragmentation of human knowledge and the perceived disintegration of nature beneath the lens of the Enlightenment. The response of Novalis, however, is (so far as I am aware) the first and earliest example of a “medieval turn” in early Romanticism. Novalis incorporates the main features of the Romantic dialectic of history, but in place of Eden is set a golden age of medieval love, faith, harmony and flourishing under the benign spiritual rule of Rome, the new Jerusalem; and in place of the fall the ecclesiastical corruption, increasing social complication and the cultural advance of the laity, so that even before the violent overthrow of the Reformation, “the actual mastery of Rome had… silently ceased to be”. The inevitable result of rebellion against the medieval order and progressive obliteration of the sacred was the Enlightenment. In an especially purple patch in this uniformly purple essay Novalis writes that the priests of the new philosophy “made imagination and emotion heretical… reduced the infinite creative music of the universe to the monotonous clatter of a monstrous mill”, worse, a “mill in the abstract… a mill that milled of itself”, and were happily engaged in “tirelessly cleaning the poetry off Nature, the earth, the human soul, and the branches of learning”.

How seriously Novalis takes his opening description of the medieval golden age is I think made clear towards the close of his essay. “We now stand high enough”, he says, “to smile amicably at those previous ages mentioned above”, at both the ages of religion and the age of science, although both have been necessary stages in the dialectic of history. His account can therefore be read as a typically Romantic mythical rendering of the golden age which we can aspire to rebuild, not on the bases of paternalistic authority and instinct, but “awakened from the morning dream of helpless childhood” a science yoked to imagination and creative will is about to give birth to “an Age of reconciliation”. Wordsworth’s apocalyptic marriage of Mind and Nature is given expression in Novalis as the association of “both the external and the internal worlds”. The renewed Christendom he envisages as freedom from both old religious and new secular oppression, uniting the ancient faith in Christ with “joy”, religion’s creative element, and – a profoundly Romantic idea – “faith in the universal capacity of all earthly things to be the bread and wine of eternal life”. The mystic and apocalyptic marriage is accompanied by the mystic banquet: in Wordsworth’s rendering, it will be the consummation of a union with the common earth that will require of us “nothing more than what we are”.

William Morris’s vision of the degradation of work in Art and Labour and his invocation of a happier medieval past can therefore be seen to have profound Romantic undertones. Leaving aside the chasm in style and aim of the two writers, a series of common themes emerge when comparing his essay and Novalis’s prototype of Romantic medievalism.

(1) They both subscribe to a dialectical view of the historical process. In his analysis of the fall of medieval social structure, Novalis asks “is not an oscillation, an alternation of opposing movements, essential?” Decline and fall – but also, happily, rejuvenation are inevitable. The obedience and faith of the Middle Ages gave way to complacency and corruption, resulting in the corrosive rationalism of the Enlightenment, is about to be replaced by a new age rooted in the supernatural possibilities inherent in human nature. “Progressive, ever augmenting evolutions are the stuff of history.” Morris similarly identifies a crucial point of new synthesis. The exclusive, rational, aristocratic art of Greece founded on a thirst for beauty died in “the academical pedantry of Roman art”, yet art is mysteriously and obscurely reborn in the days of the Byzantine emperors, breathing a life that it never had before, that makes us “forgive it all its rudeness, timidity, and unreason”. The quality that it now breathes is “its wide sympathy”, born as it is from a free people, rather than slaves or an aristocratic elite. The art of this period displays “the first signs of freedom”.

(2) Both present the historical process as an immanent and (in a sense) inevitable development. For Novalis it is obvious that peace will lead to complacency will lead to corruption will lead to violent reaction, and so on; and the overweening rationalism of the Enlightenment will lead to a self-defeating fragmentation that is inevitably on its way to being overcome by poetic reintegration of the internal and external experience, the objective and subjective. Morris’s immanent historical engine (as an index of the beauty of art) is popular freedom and the contrary will of the master to dominate. The tensions to which Greece and then the Roman Empire were subject, and to which they succumbed; the gradual liberation from serfdom, and the glory of the medieval guilds and their art; the gradual birth of capitalism and the subjection of the people as wage-slaves – these are explicable by the oscillation from servitude to freedom back to servitude, a struggle of people and master.

(3) It is however the identification of the Middle Ages as a high point of social organisation that is the most obvious thematic parallel, despite their divergence. Novalis deliberately idealises the Middle Ages as a social Garden of Eden in which God’s authority is mediated by the Pope and the Church, and the beasts of the warring secular states are named and tamed. The people’s unquestioning obedience parallels the Romantic picture of a mythical golden age of instinctive human innocence. Morris, on the other hand, presents a more realistic picture – a picture of serfs liberated from their feudal lords, combining together in democratic guilds for mutual protection and authority. The structure of the craft-guilds, when they had finally gained hard-won freedom from the merchant-guilds or corporations, was such that “every worker apprenticed to a craft was sure if he could satisfy the due standard of excellence to become a master”. For a brief period of history “the worker had but one master, the public, and he had full control over his own material, tools, and time; in other words he was an artist”. As a result, in the Middle Ages, says Morris, everything that man made was beautiful, because things were made primarily for use and not to be bought and sold, with beauty an adjunct that carries an extra cost. There is one telling addition to Morris’s account that slides into his otherwise rather severely social theory of the necessary (and apparently also sufficient) cause of the production of beautiful art and craftmanship. Free medieval man made beautiful everyday things, “just as everything that nature makes is always beautiful”: a phrase that could have come from Rousseau. Perhaps unconsciously Morris the social campaigner, bent on stirring the consciences of his middle-class audience, lets his Romanticism slip into the open.

(4) The remedy for present ills is a return to the dominant social conditions of the Middle Ages, but without (for both Morris and Novalis) the Church’s hegemony, and (most definitely as far as Morris is concerned) without the motive of religious faith that accidentally brought about the medieval social structure. Novalis invokes the myth of the high Middle Ages in his Romantic longing for a restored golden age, but as the culmination of hard-won freedom and the work of creative imagination. He does not wish for a return to an era of unthinking obedience. Morris most definitely does not suggest that a return to Christianity or the spirit of the Middle Ages more generally would bring about the revolution in society that he seeks: it is the merely accidental freedom of the medieval craftsmen that made them so “amazingly different from ourselves, far more so than any religion, and spirit of chivalry, romance, or what not could have made them”.

Do Morris’s professed opinions on the Middle Ages in Art and Labour sit uneasily beside the rest of his artistic output – the books of the Kelmscott Press, the productions of Morris & Co., his prose romances and poetry? I think that they do, and a cursory examination of his work and biography reveals that the near-Marxism of his socialist theory gives way to a more thorough-going expression of a Romantic aesthetic which turns to the Middle Ages for a vocabulary of symbol and beauty.

But before turning to a consideration of Morris in the wider movement of English Romanticism, it is worth pointing out that the fact that Morris’s socialism shares features with Marx’s dialectical materialism does not necessarily distance him from Romanticism. Marx’s dialectic in his early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) is Romantic and Hegelian, history being an inevitable upward spiral from primitive communism through various modes of production dependent on class-struggle, the final turn of the spiral being the violent destruction of the evils of capitalism and egoism. Marx’s idea of the alienation of man from his work in capitalism also has a Romantic derivation. Man’s production in servitude divorces him from his primitive natural unity with nature: the objects produced by force for another dominate and alienate him. Man’s innate drive is to humanise nature, to transform nature into humanity and integrate humanity into nature: “society is the accomplished union of man with nature”. Marx’s theory, and by extension the theory of the necessary social conditions for art that Morris describes, is one turn that Romanticism can take. Marx extends the Romantic idea of reconciling a divorced man and a fragmented social order to all the work of human hands, and not only to the imaginative work of the prophetic poet or artist. (It is by no means the only possible development of Romanticism. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, did not make much of this “optimistic glorification of man” on which socialist movements rested their “paradisiacal prospects”, and emphasised the elite and individual nature of art[4].) I will return later to the fact that Morris was not alone in his Romantic-inspired social theory and action in Victorian England.

 

2. Morris’s medievalism and the Oxford Movement

One does not need to dig very far into Morris’s biography[5] to find evidence of the formative role played in his youth by the Oxford Movement and the contemporary Gothic revival in church architecture. Raised in a well-to-do mercantile family with (by his account) a rather stuffy and conventional piety, the young William’s escape was to his fruit-laden gardens, to the idyllic woods around his childhood home Woodford Hall in Essex, and significantly to Sir Walter Scott. He is said to have read everything by Scott that he could get his hands on by the age of nine, and to have taken his boisterous love of the Middle Ages so far as to have had a suit of armour made for him to ride on his pony. The love of the forest seems to have permeated Morris’s work, and what C.S. Lewis was to describe in The Discarded Image (1964) as the shadowy medieval hinterland of faery and daemon bordering on the transparent classical hierarchy of medieval cosmology was of enduring imaginative force in Morris. There are other hints of the medieval influence on young Morris, the love of buildings and picture that saturate his later work: his awe at his first childhood visit to Canterbury cathedral, his rapture at the first sight of an illuminated manuscript, the wall paintings of the Essex churches within wandering distance of home. His schooldays would see him introduced to Anglo-Catholicism: he found himself at home in Blore’s English Gothic revival chapel at Marlborough with its choir (“better than Salisbury”) where he was confirmed in 1849, and the assumption was formed at school that he was destined for the Church. The family as a whole were caught up in the movement of that period: one sister was received into the Catholic church in Rome; another went to work in an Anglo-Catholic mission in the Battersea slums. There is circumstantial evidence that Morris cherished a latent anger to his late father’s complacent religion and stingy attitude to the local poor, and what Morris perceived as an unmanly life in the City, concerned with exchange and mercantile pursuit rather than a life of imaginative creation; ironically Morris would go on to become a very successful entrepreneur through own productions. Thus there may well have been a reaction of conscience drawing him to a socially active Anglo-Catholicism as well as the pull of an aesthetic that answered to the Romantic Sehnsucht of his childhood.

It was at Exeter College in the immediate aftermath of the Tractarian controversies and Newman’s defection that Morris met Edward Burne-Jones, also destined for the Holy Orders, still a fierce partisan of the austere Newman who had taught him to “venture all on the unseen” in an “age of materialism”. A glance at the evening reading material of the pair is instructive: The Tracts for the Times, J.M. Neale’s History of the Eastern Church, the Acta Sanctorum. They found Tractarian emphasis on ceremonial and the sacraments congenial, and there was a point when they hesitated on whether to follow Archdeacon Wilberforce to Rome in 1854. At the same time they were immersing themselves in medievalism and Arthurian legend through Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, but as embodying a chivalric mode of life to be imitated rather than merely as an aesthetic pleasure. The shared passions with Burne-Jones and others led to plans to set up an artistic monastic community, the “Brotherhood”, its patron Sir Galahad, for a “Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age”. Against the age meant a life of chastity, a pure aesthetic ideal, of anti-mercantile art united with religious devotion. Such an ideal was in fact attempted at S. Isodoro’s, a disused convent in Rome, by the St Luke’s Brotherhood, a group of Catholic and German artists who were similar to the pre-Raphaelites in that they believed that the moral purpose of art had degenerated. But it was Ruskin’s appreciation of the Gothic in his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s tour of the cathedrals of northern France (among them Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres and Rouen) that were to bring about a dual movement in Morris which he describes as a kind of epiphany. After the walking tour of 1855, his vocation was to Art, and by extension to his fellow man. From henceforward, his enthusiasm for the Tractarians and their dogmas died.

Morris himself gives a clue as to what brought about this obscure but momentous change. His vocation to art with a socialist foundation seems to have been under the influence of Ruskin, who taught him to see the social and artistic freedom that underlay Gothic art: “the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone”. This is not the only note of Ruskin’s Seven Lamps to re-echo in Art and Labour – compare Ruskin’s attack on the monotony of labour in the Victorian industrial system, the alienating divorce of work from leisure, the disintegration of intellect and work. But some kind of inner alteration towards a loss of Christian faith was underway for which the tour of northern France was a catalyst. MacCarthy notes in her biography that the following year Morris wrote a short story “A Night in the Cathedral” for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. In the story the narrator (on a walking tour of cathedrals, no less) finds himself accidentally locked in a cathedral. It is the spiritual crisis that this precipitates in the narrator, rather than his vision of ghosts of “knights and sad priests” that give a hint that we are reading autobiography. He sees in the soaring stone “awful, cold beauty – inexpressibly lovely, but with no love for me… I could see the beauty, but could not feel it – at least not as I had felt it of old, when it was almost unmixed delight to me”. Morris, already suspected of heterodoxy at Oxford, had crossed the English Channel, after viewing Ely with its typically English higgledy-piggledy style and comfortable juxtaposition of centuries, by which his childhood faith is untroubled, and had come to the vertiginous and terrible beauty of Beauvais and of Chartres: to find (in MacCarthy’s words) “that the heart of God had gone from it”.

Curiously, although his vocation to art is through the works of Ruskin, the churches of northern France, and the Middle Ages, yet this vocation is accompanied by a loss of faith and a distancing from the Tractarians. It is typical of most of the early Romantics, with their stress on the inner transformation of creative imagination, to react against a lifeless, externalised form of Christianity, of which the arch-typical expression was Paley’s divine watchmaker, all divine transcendence and no immanence. In this context one might argue that the early Romantics’ secularisation and psychologising of Christian ideas of history into ideas of immanent process were a healthy reaction against a Christianity that was lifeless under the influence of the Enlightenment. But Morris as an Anglo-Catholic in Oxford was not a party to that kind of Christianity. I would suggest that the conflict in Morris is a result of very personal reaction of which we are given a glimpse in “A Night in the Cathedral”, and that it should not lead us to wrong conclusions about the relations between Romanticism, the turn to the Middle Ages, and the Oxford Movement. In beginning an exploration of the relation between Morris’s medievalism and the Oxford Movement, I would note the following two points. (1) The overall theme of Morris’s artistic biography is of a childhood and youth exposed to medieval models mediated through a Romantic lens, from Scott to the pre-Raphaelites, and the ideals and aesthetic of the Oxford Movement were at least a part of this. Morris’s art and craftsmanship develops in a vein that is best expressed as Romantic medievalism, even though his understanding of the Middle Ages has been criticised, but aesthetically at least his work is barely touched by his loss of interest in religion sometime around 1855. (2) The Oxford Movement was not antithetical to Romantic medievalism; in fact, considerable scholarly work has demonstrated that at the theological and philosophical core of the Tractarians’ thought is a synthesis through which one can arrive at a deeper understanding of the role of medievalism in Romanticism than the early Romantics achieved.

I do not intend to attempt a demonstration at any length of (1) Morris’s Romantic medievalism. There are certainly currents of disenchantment with the Church and religion in his fiction (such as the somewhat cynical and worldly picture of a Pope who has little more profound to offer than simplistic moralising in The Hill of Venus[6]). But overall, although his imaginative works are set in some indefinable point and place in the Middle Ages, religion is simply left out. In his later richly suggestive fantasies such as The Well at the World’s End (1896) or The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) a kind of natural good magic or faery replace the aid of divine grace for the hero or heroine. In the latter book the good use of nature magic counters the witchery of evil magic that aims at enslavement and frustration of love and life. The magic itself is not evil, it is simply a natural mechanism in Morris’s fantasies. The solitary female Witch is darkly possessive and wants to use magic for domination. Freedom for the Virgin under her domination comes through the power of transcendent longing taking the form of Eros, called out by the irresistible yet chaste beauty of the virginal Birdalone in the The Water of the Wondrous Isles. Magic is used only by the lovers for loving purposes, never as an end in itself or for domination. There are abundant themes in Morris’s poems and later fantasies especially that touch very nearly Romantic concerns for freedom and Enlightenment domination over nature. Morris deals with arcane knowledge (magic or “science”), power and longing, embodied in the symbols of the Woman, the Quest or Voyage prompted by desire, and the Forest as a place of uncultivated Nature and freedom.

The absence of overt religious reference does not make him (aesthetically) less of a medievalist in form: the medieval paradigm of courtly love was to substitute Eros for mystical experience, and the advances of love for religious offices; and the list of classical subjects chosen for the stories of The Earthly Paradise would not have shocked the devout Chaucer. As with his formative influences, so with his art: the typical concerns of his literature – transcendent longing expressed through symbols of erotic love, liberty and the power inherent in nature – are Romantic, but are given a medieval dress as his preferred vehicle. In his architecture and designs, Morris, as a follower of Ruskin, drew deliberately on medieval buildings and illustration for his architecture and designs that throng with ordered life, imparting a domesticity to his artistic form, echoing his appreciation of the “measured, mingled, varied” and “serious” English landscape, “abundant of meaning for those who choose to seek it”, which is “neither a prison nor a palace, but a decent home”.

What of the claim (2) that there are resources in the Oxford Movement for making sense of the attraction of the Middle Ages for the Romantics, and can give shape to a Romantic philosophy that organically integrates the various conflicting movements, artistic and social, to which Romanticism gave birth, and of which Morris’s life and work is an example? The conceptual groundwork for such an attempt has been laid by (among others) Owen Chadwick in his study The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (1990), in a thematic study of the catholic revival in Anglicanism, The Vision Glorious (1983) by the late Bp. Geoffrey Rowell, and in David Haney’s William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation (1993). These works have been brilliantly drawn together in an unpublished but frequently cited 2001 MA thesis on Romanticism and the Oxford Movement[7] by Christopher Snook. I am indebted to Snook’s thesis for much of what follows.

Hurrell Froude was possibly the only full-blooded Romantic medievalist among the Tractarians, and his sonnet Farewell to Toryism (1833) could stand beside the opening of Novalis’s Christendom or Europe for naivety: “The Feudal court, the Patriarchal sway / Of kings, the cheerful homage of a land / Unskill’d in treason, every social band / That taught to rule with sweetness, and obey”. The influence of literary Romanticism within the mainly (at least at its beginnings) theological movement, however, was profound, though not usually so overtly expressed. Rowell in The Vision Glorious rightly notes that the context of the Oxford Movement was the – like Romanticism – a “reaction against the aridity of eighteenth-century rationalist discourse”, and that attention to the neglected sermons of the Tractarian leaders reveal an exploration of the “the subjective and the place of imagination and deep feeling in relation to both faith and reason”. Owen Chadwick concurs. It was more “a Movement of the heart than the head”, for although it was “earnestly dogmatic” it “always saw dogma in relation to worship, to the numinous, to the movement of the heart…. to the immediate experience of the hidden hand of God”. It was English Romanticism, typified by Wordsworth and Coleridge, that would influence the Tractarians most directly, although it is also worth noting that E.B. Pusey (like Coleridge thirty years earlier) studied in Germany under Johann Eichorn in both 1825 and 1826, and had been influenced by the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Pusey found in Schleiermacher the notion of a distinct faculty which was neither aroused religious emotion, nor discursive reason, but an Empfingdung or “feeling intellect” that was analogous to Coleridge’s concept of the mediating Imagination[8].

Snook argues that although the Tractarians were reserved about Coleridge’s philosophy – J.H. Newman talks of his indulgence in a “liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate” – he provided them, Pusey in particular, with “a language and a theory of knowledge in which to articulate” an “increasingly sacramental vision of the world, and the one which corresponded closely with its notion of God’s “reserved” manifestation of Himself in nature, the Sacraments, and the Church”. Coleridge’s precise significance here lies in his re-moulding of German idealism and Romanticism, departing from “their man-centred subjective individualism” in his theory of knowledge which “accounts for the formation of self-consciousness as dependent upon the prior existence of a Supreme Being”. In articulating this theory, Coleridge was – as a Romantic – trying to overcome the divorce of matter and spirit, subject and object, into a more “dynamic vision”. His (Coleridge’s) experience of having a consciousness at all, and of having a unity of consciousness implies a God prior to and implicated in “all particular modes of being”[9] Thus God’s priority is internal; He does not stand related to us as an external object, but rather the Divine Mind is constitutive of consciousness. Thus there is no incontestable certainty of the existence of God achievable through discursive reason alone; but “Nature excites” our belief “as by a perpetual revelation”[10]. Greater objective intellectual certainty would reduce moral effectiveness, as we would be compelled to a cold and worthless assent. God is present to us, in the evidence of our feelings and the prompting of conscience, but assent to Him still requires an act of will. Whilst Coleridge’s account of faith reverberates in Pusey’s thought, it is perhaps Coleridge’s philosophy of Imagination that had the most profound impact on Tractarian thought.

The Imagination for Coleridge is a mediating power, the repetition of the divine I AM in the human soul, by which the circular energy of Reason and the “flux of the Senses” are married, giving “birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors“[11]. Just as Christ’s work in Creation, and in a higher key the Incarnation, reconciled the divine Spirit and matter, we too participate in the divine Act in our perception of the world through Imagination, and we behold in the symbols their divine Author. The perceiving mind does not create. Snook again: “the perceiving mind is a necessary aspect of noting the Divine, what it traces inheres in the object it identifies.” The Imagination perceives the world symbolically. Symbol is not mere allegory, denoting another object, but speaks of the Reality as a whole, of which it abides as a living part. Symbol is characterised by “the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal”[12]. For the Tractarians, the archetypal symbols are the sacraments and the visible Church. However Brittain rightly points out that in Tractarian thought the symbolical nature of reality spills over into nature: the “perichoresis (coinherence) between God and Creation is not limited to the bread and wine laid upon the altar”, but the world is also a sacrament, an epiphany, such that “comprehending that beauty was a reception of Grace”[13]. To recapitulate, then: Coleridge gave the Oxford Movement a philosophy that translated Romanticism not merely into a Christian idiom, but that moved the Incarnation to a central position and grounded their theological conceptions of belief in God, symbol and sacrament, and resonated with their idea of an approach to God by the feeling intellect, rather than either naked reason or sentiment.

If Coleridge’s freedom of theological speculation made the Tractarians wary, ironically Wordsworth – much more pantheistic in his underlying philosophy – met with a warm reception. Wordsworth’s preference for the humble and the outcast as well as his love of nature may well have had something to do with this: Keble’s dedication to his Lectures commend the “Inspired Poet” who never ceased to “champion the cause of the poor and simple”. But more than this, Wordsworth’s theory of poetic (linguistic) expression was incarnational: Nature, argues R.E. Brantley, is for Wordsworth a “textual site”[14], material language. The work of the poet who translates thought to word is not just akin to, it is a participation in the Divine mystery of the Word made Flesh in the Incarnation. Snook notes that Wordsworth’s incarnational theory of poetics (and therefore language) gave the Tractarians a “central dogmatic principle around which to organise their theories of language and nature”. Inspired by Wordsworth’s intimations of the divine in poems such as Tintern Abbey, Keble argues in his Lectures on Poetry (given 1832-41) that the “poetical interpretation of natural phenomena in which all things are invested with higher associations” could lead to the moral “‘healing’ of the soul” and ultimately “to the acceptance of the mystical or prophetical interpretation, in which all visible objects are regarded as ‘shadows of the good and true things to come'”[15]. Keble argues that “Poetry lends Religion her wealth of symbols and similes: Religion restores these again to Poetry, clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer merely symbols, but to partake (I might almost say) of the nature of sacraments”. The reference to the sacraments is an emphasis – again borrowed from Wordsworth – on the materiality of poetic language: note Wordsworth’s statement, “if words be not an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift.” They are also a statement of the effectiveness of language – language, like the sacraments, communicates to us that which it symbolises. The Tractarians saw no radical division between poetic and theological or Scriptural language in this regard. Newman writes “every word of Revelation… is the outward form of a heavenly truth, and in this sense a mystery or Sacrament… which we can only” – to a greater or lesser extent “enter in to.” The confession of the Articles of the Creed, for example, joins us to something “incomprehensible in its depth”. Words are the mediate term between Coleridge’s Imagination and its activity within us and the world.

A note of warning is sounded by Wordsworth on the potential of language to be mere dress of thoughts rather than an incarnation of thought: by its incomplete nature and vagueness, its subjection to misuse and decay in meaning. Even at best our attempts to express the nature of God are stammering, though in language “God condescends to our finitude”.[16] Wordsworth’s sober assessment is that “Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.” Snook argues that the Tractarian’s use of symbolic language, embodied in their sermons, accepts and overcomes this inherent weakness of language: of which more shortly.

Pusey’s unpublished Lectures on Types and Prophecies[17] draws together the two strands outlined above (1) Coleridge’s making of aesthetics, or the act of creative Imagination, both contingent on and participating in the divine Act by which our consciousness is constituted, and (2) the alignment of poetical and spiritual perception and life, so that we are (by Newman) “bid to colour all things with hues of faith” as a response to the divine creativity by which God has invested all material things with holy meanings (Keble)[18]. The Tractarians famously articulated the principle of reserve: God’s revelation of Himself is simultaneously a veil. The mysteriousness of His presence in nature “corresponds to the way He reveals Himself in sacred Scripture and in the Incarnation: in the one, he appears as a pillar of fire… in the other, He appears with His divine glory veiled by human flesh”[19]. If reserve is God’s method of revelation, then analogy grounds our recognition of the eternal truths to which nature witnesses. Pusey in his Lectures notes that when a poet such as Wordsworth or Keble tries out such correspondences between nature and the divine, we recognise these as true and not merely beautiful: our imagination traces out a correspondence that is inherent in the objects through their divine author. Pusey’s Lectures on typology move analogy into the realm of Scriptural hermeneutic. The “type” in the Old Testament – such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac – prefigures the New Testament anti-type – in this case, Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. The Tractarians revived the patristic practice of typology and allowed a type to prefigure multiple anti-types, including the Church and the sacraments as well as Christ, on the basis that what refers to Christ primarily refers also to His mystical body and its sacramental acts. In a reversal of the order of types, Pusey reads typology backwards: the ultimate anti-type (the Incarnate Christ) is the complete meaning of Scripture, but also the symbols of nature and nature as a whole. In Snook’s phrase, “what we read through Christ is Christ”, or to quote Pusey himself, the most “insignificant detail” of the word of Scripture and creation are “penetrated with Him”. For Pusey, so to read Scripture and by extension nature sanctifies our imagination and so provides a gracious stimulus to our will. Thus – through the Tractarian concepts of reserve, analogy and typology – Pusey achieves in the Lectures a synthesis of Scriptural interpretation, aesthetics, the nature of language, consciousness and the life of faith.

One final step needs to be taken to gain a point from which to survey the ground and see where William Morris, the medievalism of the Romantic movement more generally, and the Oxford Movement are situated in relation to each other. Snook advances the thesis that the Tractarian sermons grapple in a practical way with Wordsworth’s fear that language can be misused, that it will mislead, shift its meaning, or even dissolve and destroy it. The language of science or the dissection of philosophical analysis will fix language as a dead sign of a mechanised nature or abstract concept, rather than letting it “feed and uphold” as an incarnate and living vehicle of Imagination. However theology faces a difficulty, and more so than science: how (within creedal Christianity) is one to limit and define the meaning of symbols whose meanings are unstable, capable of misappropriation, and potentially misleading, without stripping them of their power to symbolise and therefore taking away their efficacy for the believer? There is both a moral and an intellectual dimension to this difficulty: the words of the Christian faith may be rejected, and also the theologian must reject our intellectual grasp of each successive symbol of the faith as a complete grasp of the divine. On the moral side, Snook places Pusey sermons in the context of the believer’s repentance and new life of faith, as a saving participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. Our spiritual lack is our failure to respond in heart to the words that we receive as merely representative, or our misunderstanding, or rejection of the symbols spoken to us – both are a failure of the word that (in an incarnational theory of the language) corresponds to the crucifixion of Christ. Our repentance is an acknowledgment of this lack, awakened by the central symbol of Christ’s passion and death, and gives us back the symbols of Christian faith in a renewed and vivified realisation of their power. In the faith that follows repentance we partake in the life of the resurrected Christ by uniting ourselves again to the symbols of His life. On the intellectual side, Pusey’s sermons pile symbol upon successive symbol, our grasp of each symbol being set aside in turn as inadequate, and thus each image undergoes a kind of death. Our need and fulfilment in Christ parallels the simultaneous lack and plenitude of theological language: Christ’s actual death and resurrection and the words of the Gospel interpenetrate each other because of the sacramental power of language.

The Tractarian synthesis, with Pusey its most fulsome exponent, recalls the Neoplatonic and  Romantic motif of the upward spiral of Universalgeschichte. The Romantic motif is the re-integration of our social fragmentation and alienation from ourselves and Nature in a higher key than our primitive and instinctive unity. The structure of the return to unity achieved by the synthesis of aesthetic, linguistic and theological theory in the Oxford Movement leads to a radical alteration in this movement. Instead of being a self-moved and immanent process, the Incarnation, and the Cross and Resurrection, are the fulcrum and influx of divine grace that turns the circle back to God. Man participates in the movement, but is not its initiator; the Spirit is immanent within Nature, history and consciousness, but is also emphatically transcendent, hovering above the waters into which the Word will utter the divine speech of Imagination. The early Romantics reacted against the mechanistic and extrinsic deity of the eighteenth century, but kept its ideas of human self-perfectibility; via Coleridge, the Tractarians restored the traditional Christian ideas of divine transcendence and human helplessness, without rejecting the healthy spirit in the Romantic reaction. The upward spiral from Eden to the New Jerusalem can (in the Tractarians’ terms) accommodate the downward fall, social disintegration and alienation of Romanticism, but the upward movement must also include repentance, the Gospel, inner transformation issuing in a holy life, a restored vision of created nature as sacrament, and yearning for the infinite through the finite.

 

Conclusion

In the new light shed by Snook’s claims about the Tractarian achievement can we uncover any deeper reasons for the medievalism of the Romantic movement beyond Novalis’s deliberate naivety about the golden Middle Ages, as a stand-in for a child-like state of innocence, and obedient social harmony from which Western society has fallen? By excavating the substructure of Romantic aesthetic, I think that several of the main pillars that uphold its edifice can be seen to be medieval in form, and I would like to make several suggestions in conclusion.

(1) I would suggest that the link (in the Tractarian synthesis) to the patristic interpretation of Scripture is one such pillar. The literal words of Scripture (or the material symbols of nature) are a type providing a sacramental participation in their originating anti-type (Christ, the divine Word of God) when they are so read through the divinely given faculty of Imagination, bringing about moral transformation and eventually leading one to the fullness of the divine life. This rich typological approach to Scripture – and also created nature – in the Church Fathers was defining schema that underpinned medieval philosophy and aesthetic. The medieval aesthetic expresses the sense that each created thing is a distinct symbol of the divine, that each thing has the dignity of being individuated and is yet related to all the others, and that the relation of each thing to the whole is within a hierarchically ordered movement of upward aspiration to its Maker. The elements of both downward Incarnation and upward Neoplatonic ascent are both incorporated, driven from within by divine Life, and turning crucially upon the insufficiency of each individual symbol. When the Romantics searched for a congenial aesthetic, the Middle Ages seemed to answer most clearly to their need for a Nature indwelt by Imagination and Life, and in which things were integral and organic symbols and not machines – mainly (on this reading) because the Romantic philosophy was simultaneously an internalisation and a secularised expression of Christian ideas of creation and history. This is the aesthetic that William Morris found thronging with life in the cathedrals of Chartres and Beauvais, and is the aesthetic that informs his own works of art. If we are fortunate enough to see the “first signs of life”, however rude and simple, re-emerge in a movement of art or literature or architecture in our lifetime, I suspect that the same actuating and energising philosophy will be, consciously or unconsciously, at its root.

(2) The idea of the social structure of medieval society reproduces the conception of individual created dignity (Man was the completed Imago Dei in the paradise of Eden) and hierarchical ordering, and is correlative to the aesthetic vision[20]. As Morris intuited in his throwaway remark about free man creating beautiful things just as nature does, the aesthetic vision (the craftsman in the Middle Ages producing art with the unconscious beauty of nature) and the social structure indwell each other. In one sense it is irrelevant as to whether or not the particular freedom of the medieval craftsman achieved through his slow release from serfdom was a mere accident of social evolution, or whether it was achieved in part through the dogmas of the dignity of every human as an Image of God. What matters is that the social freedom that Morris saw as essential for real art allowed the craftsmen of the Middle Ages the free agency to express an aesthetic which was the immanent ideal of “nature”, because the idea of the medieval social order and the medieval idea of nature were made of the same vision. Morris is right in Art and Labour to say that the art of the Middle Ages is “natural”, but it seems to me that he is completely wrong-headed to exclude the medieval man’s religion from his definition of nature. This particular failure of Morris’s aesthetic theory in the essay is most likely intrinsic to his obscure reaction against Christian dogma and practice, and his adoption of socialism as his new religion in his laudable concern for the dignity and freedom of his countrymen, whilst inconsistently maintaining a medieval Romanticism in his art which had Christianity as its foundation. What seems particularly Christian about Morris is his insistence that every humble craft – the transforming work of human hands on nature for pleasure – is truly art. However, it does not seem in retrospect to have been necessary for Morris to abandon the Tractarian cause to work for the causes he espoused, though perhaps as an artist rather than as a priest. The Tractarian vision and aesthetic included within in it a richly incarnational understanding of the Church as a visible sacrament, an organic life spreading its boughs and branches into every facet of daily human life, of which the interpenetrated church and society of the Middle Ages was an ideal symbol. The intellectual theology of the Oxford Movement, as is well documented, overflowed therefore into hard work in the slum mission churches and parishes, in the areas and social strata most blackened and disenchanted by the industrial age, while Morris became a entrepreneur patronised by the middle classes. This is not a jibe at Morris, but a simple statement of fact that while Morris could not escape from participating in the social evils of his era – none of us ever can – his ideal was put into practice in an exemplary way by the religion that he left behind.

(3) Finally, I would like to suggest that a third medieval pillar of Romanticism is the image of erotic desire for a burning love for God, translated by the early Romantics into a desire for Plotinus’s “fire for which all thirst”, a longing that brings in its wake true self-knowledge. This recurrent image in the work of early and later Romantics is a veil through which the medieval and Christian lineaments can be clearly discerned. It is present in an early work of William Morris, his short story The Hollow Land (1856), that emerged from his period of personal crisis and artistic vocation. It tells the story of divine vengeance on a blood-soaked feudal house who ask fearfully, as the simulacra of their enemies pursue them over the edge of a chasm: “Had our house been the devil’s servants all along? I thought we were God’s servants.” But it is in the loveliness of the Hollow Land into which the narrator falls that the purgatorial power of love is known, forgiveness is realised, true art is achieved, and the beloved and (through the beloved) the self is rediscovered in Joy. In the Hollow Land the beauty of nature is experienced as a thing remembered when found, but somehow inexplicably forgotten among the cares and violence of a feudal life. The progressive stages of the narrator’s return could easily stand for the Romantic idea of a return to Eden, but with gains: and for the fundamentally Christian idea of the final return to an Eden that is also a New Jerusalem, in which stands the tree of life laden with healing fruit. The ending of William Morris’s The Hollow Land plays on the Romantic trope repeated memorably in T.S. Eliot’s Little Giddings: “the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time”, but with the addition of love to the moment of recognition. In Morris the lovers realise that they have been here before long ago, as they stand trembling before the gates in the golden “hollow city” in the hollow land; but there is the recognition of a prior moment they have seen each other this way, reflected in each other’s eyes, long and long ago. Prior to this consummation, on his return to the Hollow Land in old age and death, the narrator meets and forgives his enemy, whom he realises is very like his murdered brother. These two old enemies are deeply reconciled through painting together of God’s judgments, and by a common vision of grief and death; there are deeply Christian undertones here of a passage back to paradise that comes about through a chivalric fellowship that is united in its forgiveness, and through a cleansing vision of sin and death. One might say that the prophetic power of the story lies in its introduction of this intervening narrative of forgiveness and death as a necessary prelude to the final return to the Hollow Land; just as the Tractarians saw the need for passion and death within the Romantic imaginative vision, in their configuration of the Romantic idea to the One who said that without dying, life cannot be had.

[1] M.H. Abrahms, Natural Supernaturalism 1971, cf. part 3, ch. 8, “The Poet’s Vision”. My subsequent analysis of the over-arching Neoplatonic conceptual structure of Romanticism is indebted to Abrahm’s superb treatment.

[2] From Jerusalem, Plate 71.

[3] The pseudonym and pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801).

[4] The Birth of Tragedy 1872. cf. part 6, ch. 5 of Abrahms’ Natural Supernaturalism for a resume of the diverse directions taken by the post-Romantics.

[5] I rely in my biographical detail on the definitive biography of Morris, William Morris: A Life for Our Time, 1995 by Fiona MacCarthy.

[6] From The Earthly Paradise, published 1868-1870.

[7] “Thy Word is all, if we could spell”: Romanticism, Tractarian Aesthetics and E.B. Pusey’s Sermons on Solemn Subjects: to read this thesis in full.

[8] See Leighton Frappel’s ”’Science’ in the Service of Orthodoxy: The Early Intellectual Development of E.B. Pusey”, in Pusey Rediscovered (1993) SPCK.

[9] Biographia Literaria, 1817.

[10] Ibid.

[11] On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, 1830.

[12] From On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, 1830.

[13] M.C. Brittain, “God’s Better Beauty: Hopkins, Pusey and Tractarian Aesthetics.” Christianity and Literature 40.1 (1990): 7-22. Cited in Snook.

[14] In Wordsworth’s Natural Methodism, 1975. Cited in Snook.

[15] This statement of Keble seems to rely heavily on the traditional four senses of Scriptural interpretation – he moves from nature (the “literal” interpretation) to the poetical (or “allegorical” in general) to the moral (allegory tailored to the individual soul) to the mystical (the “anagogical” or properly symbolic interpretation which points prophetically to the Age to Come).

[16] From Rowell’s The Vision Glorious.

[17] These are in the archive at Pusey House: I have been able to obtain only excerpts and a digest of the Lectures via a doctoral thesis. See G.D. Westhaver’s The Living Body of the Lord: E.B. Pusey’s `Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament’, 2012 at the following address: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/6373/

[18] See Tract 89 of Tracts for the Times.

[19] Snook.

[20] I stress that I refer here to the idea of medieval social structure rather than its reality. Its actual existence in anything like the ideal in the thirteenth century for example is partly irrelevant. A controlling social ideal can exert an imaginative hold over the society in which it is poorly put into practice: witness our own ideal of “democracy” which most people would agree is not sufficiently incarnated in our political institutions, but which most people would point to as a system of government which they are proud to have.