{"id":93,"date":"2019-11-18T14:30:07","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T14:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/?page_id=93"},"modified":"2019-11-18T14:34:43","modified_gmt":"2019-11-18T14:34:43","slug":"discussion-following-andrew-chandler","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/discussion-following-andrew-chandler\/","title":{"rendered":"Discussion following Andrew Chandler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\nTHE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very\nmuch, Andrew. We do have time for clarification questions to Andrew\nabout this. Whilst you think of your own questions, can I just ask\none that occurred to me on re-reading this Report? It relates to the\nsocial context of the time. I felt that Catholicity<\/em>\ncould possibly have been written in 1910 as much as in 1947, but I\ncould not imagine it being written in 1990 or 2000. You are a\nhistorian. Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDR ANDREW CHANDLER: One of\nthe dangers of being even a bad historian is that one is in danger\nsometimes of facing unhistorical questions! I think that if there is\na crucial element within the intellectual fabric of Catholicity<\/em>,\nit is a response to particular contexts. I agree that in many ways\nthe superstructure of the thing could belong to 1910, though I\nsuspect it would have been more vigorously written, and there would\nhave been greater opportunities for a slightly high-flown prose in\nparticular ways, but I think that the significance of\nCatholicity<\/em>\nis not confined within the immediate context, although it does owe a\ngreat deal to it \u2013 and the context had shown specific signs that\nwere very much those of the late 1940s. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nI think Dix himself, who may\nhave been dogmatic in all kinds of ways, but whose correspondence\nreads very attractively, was a figure who found the discussion over\nthe Church of South India wounding, and I think Fisher found the\ndebate over South India actually drew out of Anglo-Catholic opinion\nsomething that needed to be faced, and needed at that particular\npoint to be converted into something creative. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nSo whilst the contours of the\nargument may belong to quite a broad chronology, the specific phrases\nand the specific priorities that emerge within it \u2013 and\nsome of the perspectives too \u2013 are undoubtedly\ncontextual. That dense chronological pattern between 1945 and 1950\nis, I think, very present, and you can sense it in almost all the\ndocuments produced at that time. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nFROM THE FLOOR: You spoke a\nlittle about the composition of the group. Was it Fisher who chose\nthem? Who chose them and on what basis were they chosen? Also, can\nyou put a little bit of colour into what you said about the diversity\nof the group? Which traditions do we see represented here and who\nrepresents them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDR ANDREW CHANDLER: Thank you\nvery much. It is an important question, but a really firm answer is\nvery difficult. It does not emerge with any clarity in Ramsey\u2019s\npapers, or in Fisher\u2019s papers. Dix is more problematic in archival\nterms altogether. There is no question that the essential agent is\nDix, not Fisher at all. It is very difficult to bury entirely a\nsense that Fisher felt that, if he gave these people something like\nthis to get on with, they would perhaps keep out of trouble in other\nways. He was perfectly content for them to recruit each other. But\nbeyond that, the intricacies of selection are, to my mind at least,\nunknown, at least at the moment. So I am afraid that my answer to\nyour question \u2013 which is an important one, of course \u2013 is\nunsatisfactory. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nTHE REVD DR ANDREW DAVISON: I\nam Andrew Davison. I will be speaking later on, when I will say\nsomething about that sense of Protestant\/Renaissance split the Report\nsuggests, which is perhaps too clever for its own good; but points\nlike that make me wonder what sorts of documentary evidence there\nmight be that we could turn to, to work out where various ideas like\nthis came from. Are there working papers? Can we tell from\ncorrespondence? Especially where there is a sense that something is\na sort of \u2018pet idea\u2019, someone must have been very pleased with\nthemselves! Can we work out what the sources were? \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDR ANDREW CHANDLER: Yes,\nthere are working papers. There are working papers preserved in the\nRamsey archive, for example. If one takes the example of a\ncorrelation between the Renaissance and Liberalism, we can attribute\nthat very firmly, not least because of Dix\u2019s correspondence, to V.\nA. Demant: that is the point of origination as far as we can judge. \nThe listing of names is always rather a problem because, whilst\nresponsibility is a shared thing, of course you never really get a\nvery strong sense of who directly produced which particular idea \u2013\noften not even in working papers \u2013 so I think it is one of those\ncases that answers to the following generalisation. If you appoint a\ncommittee or a body of any kind, the people who go onto it will\nautomatically define what is written. There is no question of that\nat all. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThe Free Church leaders, in\ntheir response, benefit from exactly the same. I have often asked\nthe same questions about their report. There, the rules of the game\nare a little bit clearer because there is a great deal of discussion\nabout Luther, and you can see which members of the group are\nproducing it. Incidentally, I have a sense that the consultancy role\nclaimed by Franz Hildebrandt, for example, in that particular\ncase managed to suggest not only a greater precision in Luther\u2019s\nscholarship, but also a sense that maybe the Liberalism of the\nnineteenth century owed far more to the Enlightenment than anything\nthat went further back. The Enlightenment altogether is very obscure\nin all three reports. It is very odd. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nBut I am beginning to distract\nfrom your main point. I think the chances of deconstruction, if\nI can use a horrible word like that, do exist, but on a modest\nand partial scale. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nFROM THE FLOOR: So, in a\nbroad brush way, would it be fair to say that Anglican\u2011Catholicism\nwas reasonably united at the time of this report in a way that it was\nnot by 1990?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nDR ANDREW CHANDLER: There are\nmany people here better qualified than I am to answer that, but there\nis of course no doubt that it was not in any sense coherent and\nunited. Fisher was vulnerable to criticism for thinking too easily\nthat there was something coherent that could be called\n\u2018Anglo-Catholic\u2019 without any further definition at all. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nWhat I would say is that\nAnglo\u2011Catholicism, and those who were sympathetic to it within\nthe Church of England, were to be found in greater number in 1947,\nand with greater numbers comes diversity. It was part of a state of\nnear prosperity that a wider range of opinions could be summoned to\nthe feast. But it would be quite wrong to try to suggest that the\nCatholicity<\/em>\nReport was expressive of a mind that was from the first unified and\nrepresented the coherent understandings of a movement at large within\nthe Church. It is much more a meeting of individual minds within a\nbroad spectrum and with a shared set of concerns and loyalties than\nanything that represents what we may now identify as a narrow,\npurposefully party document. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt is important also to\nrecognise that this is an intellectual essay. It is not a \u2018report\u2019.\n Such a distinction, I think, should be observed with seriousness in\nthe context of a meeting like ours. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nFROM THE FLOOR: I hope this\nis a historical question, Andrew, but one cannot help but notice that\nthe make-up of the group of 1947 was male, and only one of them was\nlay. Does this reflect the make-up at that time of the appropriate\nthinkers in Anglo\u2011Catholicism? One thinks of people like\nDorothy L. Sayers, who might have been invited. Could you say just a\nword about that? Thank you. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DR ANDREW CHANDLER: I think there is no doubt that in the case of all three reports they are entirely male preserves. It would be an utter mistake to suggest that that necessarily produces arguments that there were not women capable of participating, or interested in participating. To some extent, if one really wanted to get under the skin of that, one would need a kind of archive which has yet to occur in my thinking and working, which relates to our earlier point about selection of people. In that sense, because we do not have that material, it is all too easy to relax into the obvious generalisations which are clearly available to us. What we have, I think, is an expression of a particular world which is largely consistent, not only with schools\u00a0of\u00a0thought that might be put together by other parts of other churches, or the Church\u00a0of\u00a0England itself, but really pretty much everything in British political, civic and administrative life in the same period. We cannot deny that these people \u2013 all of them\u00a0\u2013\u00a0are resting on certain assumptions which produce realities of that kind. Beyond that, I think I\u00a0can be no more specific and, I am afraid, no more satisfactory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next paper: Two theological college principals<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much, Andrew. We do have time for clarification questions to Andrew about this. Whilst you think of your own questions, can I just ask one that occurred to me on re-reading this Report? It relates to the social context of the time. I felt that Catholicity could possibly have been written … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-93","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catholicity.societyofthefaith.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}