What did modern theology look like in the Sixties ?

What did modern theology look like ? An odd question perhaps; but I’d like to look at some of the cover designs of books of theology aimed at a popular readership between 1963 and 1970. This is no exhaustive study (being based mostly on the books on my own shelves), but it would seem that at least some of those responsible for publicising the ‘Death of God’ theology thought there was a connection between it and modern art.

Undoubtedly the most famous such book of the period was John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God, published by the SCM Press in 1963, in its series of cheap pocket paperbacks. Its cover is a minor masterpiece of cover design, showing a young man deep in thought, wrestling perhaps with precisely the kind of radical rethinking of his religion that Robinson was proposing. Image and message seem to be in perfect interplay. Interestingly, the image is of a rather older work, and from a different context. ‘Seated Youth’ (1918) is by the German sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, and Lehmbruck’s experience of working in a wartime field hospital is translated between nations and over time to become a symbol of a more spiritual crisis.

After Honest to God, ‘Seated Youth’ seems to have become iconic of Robinson’s book, such that it appears again on a follow-up book from Roger Lloyd, The Ferment in the Church, published in 1964, also by SCM. This time the sculpture is overlaid on a background of Winchester Cathedral, signifying the clash of old and new.

I must stress again that this post captures an impression, and is not based on a systematic study. As such, there isn’t much in the way of a control group – of works of more mainstream theology published for a mass market, for which the economics of a cover design with an image added up. But there were some, such as Michael Ramsey’s The Resurrection of Christ, first published in 1945 but reissued by Collins in the Fontana imprint. The impression here is the fourth, from 1966, and whilst it too uses a work of art, Collins’ designer opted for an unidentified work in a much older style. This perhaps matched Ramsey’s work, which was by no means conservative in the broader scheme of things, but looked to be so when set against Robinson.

There was one artist who seemed to appear often, and that was Jacob Epstein. Lesslie Newbigin’s Honest Religion for Secular Man (SCM, 1966) featured ‘Risen Christ’, a work made between 1917-19 and, like ‘Seated Youth’, an imaginative product of the First World War. A sepulchral Christ shows the viewer his wounds, against the backdrop of the type of multi-storey office building in vogue at the time, although the particular building is not identified. Modern Man needed to work out the appropriate response to the call of God in a secular, “technological” environment.

All three SCM titles I’ve discussed so far were in the same series; but other publishers were not slow to see the connection, and at about the same time. In the same year as Honest to God, the Lutterworth Press published Layman’s Church, a collection of essays introduced by Timothy (later Lord) Beaumont, and including essays from several of the figures associated with ‘South Bank religion’, including Robinson. Its cover features Epstein’s ‘Christ in Majesty’, made for Llandaff cathedral in 1954-5. The new Coventry cathedral has on the exterior of its porch Epstein’s ‘St Michael and the Devil’ (1956-8), featured on Stephen Verney’s Fire in Coventry (Hodder, 1963).

So it would seem that publishers of popular theology in the early Sixties thought there was a connection between the kind of modern theology that seemed to be leading the market and the kind of modern sculpture (and it is mostly sculpture) that was finding its way into churches. Or, at the very least, those publishers thought that their likely readers would find the designs meaningful. I doubt I will have the time to pursue this idea any more systematically; but there’s a great Ph.D. subject in here for someone.

Walter Hussey, patron of art

[I first starting investigating the career of Walter Hussey some nine years ago. He has appeared in several of my articles so far, but the book I always intended has been put back. Now, though, a proposal is currently under consideration by a publisher for that book. Here’s what it is about.]

Walter Hussey is known for an extraordinary sequence of commissions of contemporary art and music, for the church of St Matthew Northampton from 1943 and, from 1955 to 1977, for Chichester Cathedral. The names read as a roll-call of post-war artistic and musical life: Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Marc Chagall in the visual arts; Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Gerald Finzi, Michael Tippett, William Walton in music.

Hussey became something of a grandee: an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an honorary Doctor of Letters of the young University of Sussex. Kenneth Lord Clark, critic, broadcaster, and sometime director of the National Gallery, described Hussey as ‘aesthete, impressario and indomitable persuader’. As interest in the relations between theology and the arts has grown, so has Hussey’s reputation as the most significant patron of art for the English church of the twentieth century. Countless recording sleeve notes and exhibition catalogues record Hussey’s role in glowing terms, and the art historical literature has accorded him a corner niche in the pantheon of the great individual patrons. For one commentator, Hussey single-handedly ‘turned the tide against Anglican neglect of modern art’.

Missing in all this is any extended critical study of Hussey’s life and work as a whole. The musicological and art-historical literature confines him to a walk-on part, while church historians have paid greater attention to the other major figure in Anglican artistic patronage, George Bell, bishop of Chichester.

Why, then, study Walter Hussey ? Most obviously, the Hussey Papers are a rich source for studying the commissioning of the contemporary arts, giving a vivid picture of the relationship between one exceptional clergyman and his commissionees. Almost none of this material has ever been integrated into the existing literature.

Within the contemporary Church of England with its cathedrals now crammed with contemporary art, Hussey has been seen as a voice in the wilderness, preparing the way for a rediscovery of a contemporary language for the Church’s message. This story of dogged effort in the face of philistinism and ignorance is the nearest we have to a meta-narrative of the churches and the arts. But it is a story established by dint of omission, since the integration of the religious arts into the study of recent British religious history is in its infancy. To document Hussey’s patronage is to provide key signposts in this terra incognita.

Hussey is also a case-study in the unspoken assumptions of catholic Anglicans about the arts, the church, and the place of creativity in national life.  The social and economic crises of the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s prompted intense debate over the nature of ‘national religion’, and its connection with the mainstream in national culture. The church could not hope to regain the attention of ‘Modern Man’ without speaking through the art in which he was already expressing himself. Hussey stands as one of the most active and well self-documented case studies of this theological current in action.

Hussey’s career saw revolutionary change between the churches and the people. Church attendance and affiliation collapsed dramatically, as did the church’s confidence in its own ability to communicate and minister effectively. Part of the crisis was of religious language, and its ability to communicate in a manner meaningful to Modern Man.  Some sought new means of mission, and the contemporary arts were seized upon as a means to that end. If words were no longer securely meaningful, then perhaps the arts provided an alternative language. If the 1960s saw the discursive death of Christian Britain, as Callum Brown has suggested, then Hussey made an attempt at resuscitation.

The means by which taste was shaped and determined also changed in the ‘long 1960s’. The vision of a beneficent establishment raising the horizons of the people through the BBC and other channels was overturned by a quite new emphasis on the entitlement to ‘do one’s own thing’. Hussey’s mode of patronage depended on a discerning patron, authoritative critic and notable artist working in tandem, disseminating new art downwards to a grateful if uncomprehending public. This way of working, successful in the 1940s, was by the 1970s no longer fit for purpose.

The period was also one of general cultural fracture, during which the classical in all the arts was shifted further and further from the centre of artistic life; a movement which posed difficulties for those in the churches and outside who wished to place Anglican patronage in the centre of the mainstream of national cultural life. By the end of Hussey’s career it was less than clear where that centre might be.

The career of Walter Hussey thus affords the historian a unique opportunity to examine one sphere in which the church met, resisted, negotiated with or capitulated to forces of change in the society in which it was located.

Ruth Etchells and ‘Unafraid to Be’

I note the recent passing of Ruth Etchells, theologian, teacher and ‘the best female bishop we never had’ (in the words of the Guardian). There have been various obituaries, including that in the Guardian, and from John Pritchard on Anglican Mainstream. From Durham, of which city she was a stalwart, comes a tribute from the Dean, Michael Sadgrove, and a funeral sermon from the Sub-Dean, Michael Kennedy. Also of interest is Margaret Masson’s oration at the presentation of the University of Durham Chancellor’s Medal in 2010.

Of most interest here is a little book of which I was only dimly aware, but when viewed in its context is most unusual. Michael Sadgrove found her 1969 study Unafraid to Be a profoundly influential book as an undergraduate in Oxford: ‘an important catalyst in developing cross disciplinary engagement, not least in the emerging field of theology and literature.. ’ What is most interesting about the book is the milieu from which it emerged. Evangelicals at that time were not known for their positive engagement with the contemporary arts, and so for the Inter-Varsity Press to publish such a book at that time is significant.

Writing the history of the modern cathedrals. Part One

I recently had occasion to think about cathedral histories; and in particular, the clutch of volumes that appeared over the last few years for the major medieval foundations. There is a prevailing model: a large general volume, with multiple authors under the general editorship of a senior scholar, with often some sort of relationship with the cathedral chapter itself. York Minster blazed the trail (Gerald Aylmer and Reginald Cant, 1977) and since then Chichester, Canterbury, St Paul’s, Norwich, Rochester and Winchester have all their own histories. (See the list at the foot of this post if you’re interested; I doubt it is complete.)

It struck me then how very thin the coverage for the more recent foundations is in comparison; and some recent work I’ve been doing on Newcastle cathedral (St Nicholas) has confirmed the impression. Coventry is a unique case, as are the other newly built cathedrals (Guildford and Liverpool). For those medieval parish churches given cathedral status to serve a new diocese, there seems to be almost no scholarly historical writing. None of the cathedrals of Blackburn, Birmingham, Bradford, Chelmsford, Leicester, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield or Southwark  has (as far as I know) its own single-volume history, nor indeed very much in the way of shorter pieces of work. They all, of course, have their guidebooks, which by and large include a potted history, but little more. (I should say that I am primarily interested in these buildings as cathedrals; and so I’m setting aside work done on their previous history as parish churches.)

Why this neglect ? There is, of course, simply less history – a little over a century, if that, as set against 900 or more years for Chichester or Canterbury. But it may be to do with the comparative neglect of modern religious history (as opposed to medieval), and to a sense that the Church of England got the timing wrong, creating a host of new cathedrals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, just as its own significance was beginning to wane and they became less and less relevant. There may also be less of a readership to buy such books (fewer tourists), and they lack a 900-year anniversary on which to hang the publication.

Whatever the reason, there is some very interesting work to be done on these churches, individually and as a group. How did the growing self-confidence of cities such as Manchester or Newcastle shape the formation of new dioceses and their cathedrals ? If they were expanded and/or newly decorated, who paid ? How significant was the presence of an older Roman Catholic cathedral (as in Newcastle or Portsmouth) ? How did cathedral ministry in the urban environment differ from life in Ely or Salisbury ? Were these buildings of local symbolic importance during the Blitz, as St Paul’s was for London ?  I should be delighted to receive any references that bear on these and related questions.

In Part Two:  writing the history of the Roman Catholic cathedrals (Arundel), and of a new building (Guildford).

Recent cathedral histories (additions welcome)

Atherton, I., Fernie, E. Harper-Bill C. and Smith, H. (eds)	Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096-1996	(London, Hambledon, 1996)
Aylmer, G., Cant, R. (eds)	A History of York Minster	(Oxford, Clarendon, 1977)
Burns, A., Keene, D., Saint, A.	St Paul’s. The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004	(New Haven, Yale, 2004)
Bussby, Frederick	Winchester Cathedral, 1079-1979	(Southampton, Bussby and Cave, 1979, 1987 reprint)
Collinson, P, Ramsey, N., Sparkes, M. (eds)	A History of Canterbury Cathedral	(Oxford, OUP, 1995)
Welander, David	The History , Art and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral	(Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1991)
Yates, N.,  Welsby, Paul A. (eds)	Faith and Fabric; A History of Rochester Cathedral, 604 – 1994	(Woodbridge, Boydell, 1996)
Mary Hobbs (ed)	Chichester Cathedral. An Historical Survey	(Chichester, Phillimore,1994)

The Church of England and theatre censorship

I was delighted yesterday to find on my doormat Studies in Church History 48 (2012), in which there is my own article on the archbishops of Canterbury and theatre censorship between 1909-49. It is available direct from Boydell and Brewer or from the Ecclesiastical History Society, or at an academic library near you. It will not be available on Open Access for a while yet, but for now, here is an edited extract which gives a flavour of the whole.

[from the Introduction]

“The position of the archbishop of Canterbury at the heart of the Establishment engendered requests to be patron, advocate or opponent of almost every conceivable development in national life. One such entanglement was his role as unofficial advisor to the Lord Chamberlain in the matter of the licensing of stage plays.  According to the report of the 1909 Joint Select Committee on the system, the Lord Chamberlain was able to refuse to a licence to any play that was likely ‘to do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence’, to be indecent, or ‘to be calculated to conduce to crime or vice’. It was on matters such as these that from time to time the Lord Chamberlain’s office would consult the archbishop.

“Despite the apparent oddity of a senior churchman being asked to adjudicate on artistic matters such as this, the matter has hitherto received little attention from religious historians to match that given to the censorship of the cinema and to the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960. It receives scant attention also from successive archiepiscopal biographers, due perhaps to its apparently epiphenomenal nature. The role of the archbishops is treated in passing in general accounts of the censorship, but by its very nature this scholarship has not treated the theme directly.

“Taking as its period the forty years from the Joint Select Committee report in 1909 to the unsuccessful attempt in Parliament to reform the system in 1949, this article details the curious unofficial position of the archbishops within the system of censorship. The various grounds on which Archbishops Randall Davidson (1903–28) and Cosmo Gordon Lang (1928–42) in particular offered their advice to the Lord Chamberlain are then examined. The article thus provides a case study of the singular and often anomalous position of the archbishop at the heart of the Establishment in Britain, and the extent to which the secular and ecclesiastical powers combined in the regulation of the life of the nation, both moral and aesthetic. In addition, it examines a unique nodal point in the interaction between the Church and the arts.

[from the Conclusion]

“In 1940 Colin Gordon of the Lord Chamberlain’s office solicited Lang’s opinion on the play Family Portrait by the American playwrights Lenore and William Joyce Cowen. A.C. Don, Lang’s chaplain, accepted the ‘obvious reverence and restraint’ of the script but raised some fundamental concerns. The first issue was the portrayal of the brothers and sisters of Christ, the very non-existence of whom was a matter of some importance to Roman Catholics and to some within the Church of England. The second was the downplaying of the incarnation to the extent that Christ appeared as solely an ethical teacher, although a great one. Don concluded that the play ought not to be licensed in the usual way.

“Here was the archbishop’s representative advising in accustomed fashion. When called upon, Davidson and Lang had advised on the licensing of plays on a number of different grounds: the likelihood of incitement to vice; of gratuitous offence to religious people; and, more controversially, of theological or artistic defect. They helped shape the formulation of guiding principles, and advised in cases where there was doubt.

“It is, however, an indication of the degree to which the situation had changed by 1940 that Family Portrait had in fact already been licensed the previous year, without reference to Lambeth at all; and the exchange was one of the last of its kind. After a peak in the 1920s and early 1930s, there had been a marked decline in the number of plays referred to Lambeth. Lang’s successors William Temple (1942–44) and Geoffrey Fisher were seldom consulted, although Fisher was kept informed of major changes in policy, such as the relaxation of restrictions on the portrayal of homosexuality in 1958. One of Fisher’s few interventions was to reinforce the longstanding ban on the representation of God in The Green Pastures in 1951, a decision reinforced by Michael Ramsey ten years later. So it was that the single stipulation relating to the impersonation of the persons of the Trinity was by 1949 the only remaining matter on which the archbishops advised the Lord Chamberlain.

“I hope elsewhere to continue the story beyond 1949, and to treat of the attitude of Anglicans to the final abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. Anglican support for abolition was in part fostered by the manifest anachronism of the remaining rule and its stultifying effect on religious drama within the Church. That aside, the operation of the system to 1949 is demonstrative of some governing assumptions concerning the joint operation of church and state in the regulation of morals; of understandings of the appropriate modes of representing the national faith; and of some of the tensions in the relationship between the church and the arts.

The Church and Humanity: the life and work of George Bell

There is no pleasure quite like receiving a pristine copy of a new book through one’s door; and it is doubled when the book includes some of one’s own work. So I was delighted to find a couple of weeks ago my copy of this new collection, edited by Andrew Chandler, which includes my own article on the making of John Masefield’s play The Coming of Christ, for Canterbury Cathedral in 1928. It is not every day that one’s work appears between the same covers as that of the archbishop of Canterbury; something to tell the grandchildren perhaps.

As it happens, the artistic element of Bell’s work is a relatively minor feature of this volume. There is much here as well for scholars of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century. Charlotte Methuen writes on Bell’s early ecumenical work to 1929;  Jaakko Rusama on his efforts in promoting Anglican-Lutheran relations; and Gerhard Besier on the friendship with Willem Visser t’Hooft and on the World Council of Churches.

There is also much here for scholars interested in the politics of the period and the Anglican church’s reactions to and interventions in them. Charmian Brinson writes on internment in 1940; Tom Lawson provides a ‘moral history’ of the trial of German war criminals; Dianne Kirby reflects on Bell and the Cold War;  and Andrew Chandler on Bell and the politics of resistance in Nazi Germany. Philip Coupland also provides a chapter on Bell and the cause of European unity.

It is published by Ashgate in a handsome hardback; and is available to order online. My paper, as first published in Humanitas in 2009, is available online.

The Church and literature

I’ve just finished correcting the proofs of my article on the archbishops of Canterbury and the censorship of the theatre between 1909 and 1949, which is destined to appear in Studies in Church History vol. 48 this summer. It can be pre-ordered on the Boydell and Brewer site, which has a list of the contents. Re-reading it after 18 months, I’m still pleased with it, although the re-reading has suggested some new questions to pursue, about which I’ll blog another time. There’s a brief summary of the article here.

It isn’t always that themed volumes such as these that the Ecclesiastical History Society produce are so squarely in one of my areas of interest, but this one certainly is. It can be read as a companion to SCH 28 (1992), which was on ‘The Church and the Arts’ and contains several articles which remain the most recent word on their subjects. I was at the St Andrews conference that spawned the forthcoming volume, and as one of the session chairs was involved in the EHS’s normal peer review process, and am looking forward to reading the final versions of several of the papers I heard. Judith Maltby writes on Rose Macaulay, Stuart Mews on the Lady Chatterley trial, and Crawford Gribben on rapture fiction. There are also several pieces on twentieth century representations of the medieval past, by Sarah Foot and Stella Fletcher amongst others.

The visual arts in the Church of England, 1935-56

I’m very pleased to be able to say that my article for Studies in Church History 44 (2008) on this topic is now available online in SAS-Space. It tried to catch some of the energy of a small group of critics, artists and clergy who saw a need for renewal in religous art, and thought they knew how to make it happen. Reading it again, five years after first beginning to write it, I’m still quite pleased with it (which one doesn’t always find.) As well as my regular subjects George Bell and Walter Hussey, there are appearances for Henry Moore, John Betjeman and Kenneth Clark, amongst others.

A new life of Pevsner

This blog can’t really ignore a new biography of Pevsner by Susie Harries: a figure both peripheral to its central concern, but to be found everywhere in the background. Reviews have appeared in most of the papers, including the Guardian and by Frances Spalding in the Independent. There is also an extended piece in the TLS by Stefan Collini which doesn’t seem to be online as yet.

Puritanism and the ethics of representation

A happy juxtaposition of two reviews in the same day. Roger Scruton reviews Martin Kemp’s From Christ to Coke in Prospect. Not available online is David Hawkes’ review article ‘Signs of Grace’, looking at four new books on the Puritans (TLS, Sept 2).
They are both interesting in different ways on the nature of the 20th century’s relationship with the visual image, and both engage with the idea of iconoclasm. For Hawkes, Puritanism is at base an ‘ethics of representation’, opposing an idolatrous fixation on appearances and a spiritually fatal neglect of underlying essences. The Puritans are worth studying for the critique they would likely have made of contemporary culture on these grounds; and there are overtones of such a critique in Scruton’s piece.