The English Victorian clergyman John Frederick Denison Maurice, in whose writings I had a keen (but unfortunately all-too-shallow) interest during and after college, is celebrated today in the Anglican Communion. A man who is primarily remembered for his social activism today, Maurice did indeed appeal to me – a young leftist of a philosophical bent – on the Social Gospel level. But coming as I do from a Mennonite background and having evinced in the years after college a great interest in my Quaker family roots, it was more Maurice’s interest in (and disputes with) Quakerism that drew me his way – and, not coincidentally, in the direction of High Church Anglo-Catholicism.
Frederick Denison Maurice did not start off in the Church of England. His father was a minister, rather, in the Unitarian Church in Gloucester, and held to some fairly strong opinions against not only the English Church but also against its educational institutions at Oxford and Cambridge. Death in the family caused a fracture. His mother and his siblings eventually abandoned Unitarianism for various forms of evangelical Christianity; however, Frederick leaned instead toward the established church (which irked his father deeply). It’s difficult not to see a little bit of teenage rebellion in the fact that Maurice ultimately chose to attend school at Cambridge, even though he would not join the established church during his school-years. He studied law there, apparently did well on his exams, and co-founded a student debate society called the Apostles – but left the school for conscientious reasons. He wrote quite a bit at this time as well; his writings were praised by none other than Coleridge. His teaching, however, was not well-received; he came off in the classroom as standoffish, rigid, remote and humourless. However, for those students who attended carefully to what he was saying, he proved to be a deep well of knowledge.
He eventually did join the established church – just before he met (and married three months later) a young woman named Anna Barton, who bore him two sons. (Anna Maurice died in 1845; and Maurice would eventually remarry Georgiana Hare-Naylor in 1849.) It was at this time that he wrote The Kingdom of Christ, which I remember reading enthusiastically as a youngster in the peace church tradition, and which I found to be a bridge (along with the works of Charles Gore) into a more liturgical tradition that I would come to feel better accorded with my social views and understanding of who Christ is.
That latter question, the question of who Christ is, was the burning and central one for Maurice, who embraced with both arms and all the enthusiasm of the convert the theology of the Incarnation preached in England by Lancelot Andrewes. He was driven by two overriding convictions: by Christ as Incarnate God – as God made flesh; and by the love of God which no barrier, whether legal or metaphysical or conceptual or even physical, could possibly hope to override or thwart. Intriguingly and paradoxically, these same convictions which led him to embrace the most liturgically ‘high’ expression of English Christendom save one, also led him to a profound respect for the distinctly anti-liturgical old-school, radical Quakers: both their spiritual convictions and their political engagements.
Maurice understood the Incarnation, and indeed the Crucifixion, as God Himself standing among (and for) what we would now call the precarious, the non-integrated, the marginalised people of the earth. In his own context and time, understanding this meant embracing the cause of the English working class – which had been uprooted violently from its traditional peasant moorings and forced into the cities – and women, who had been largely excluded from institutions of higher learning. To the second end, Maurice co-founded, with his friend, fellow-clergyman and fellow-novelist Charles Kingsley, Queen’s College for young ladies in 1848; however, Maurice’s increasingly-radical views courted controversy, and he was obliged to dissociate himself from Queen’s College. To the first, the two scholarly churchmen founded the Working Men’s College in London in 1854 (where also taught John Ruskin) for young men of working-class backgrounds.
Maurice’s socialism – a non-violent, Tory, Owenite variety characterised by what Rowan Williams calls ‘benevolent paternalism’ – arose out of a distaste for the entire ethic of competition and disruption that pervaded contemporary capitalism. It was not æsthetic so much as spiritual: again, rooted in that core question of who Christ is, and what sort of community He built around himself. Maurice called himself – significantly, particularly in light of his Friendly sympathies – a ‘Digger’ and, as he wrote in The Kingdom of Christ: ‘The true law of the universe is that man is made to live in community.’ In his view, the same sacramental ties that bind the body of Christ on earth to the kingdom of heaven, also must bind the members of that body of Christ to each other. If those members are at war, or preying upon and exploiting one another, then their membership in the body of Christ is a lie, a fiction which must and can be exposed only through the reality of the Cross. For Maurice (as for certain saintly Orthodox churchmen in Russia who came to similar conclusions), the only proper answer to the cutthroat depredations of capitalism was Christian brotherhood as realised in the Sacraments.
Maurice was both firm and forthright in his defences, both of the working class and of women. A champion of the œconomic demands of the Revolutions of 1848 on the Continent, he attempted to bring the Church of England itself and its teachings to bear as a voice for the exploited and abused labourers. He supported the nascent coöperatives movement in England, particularly among the workers in the industrially-dominant textile industry. Later in life, Maurice sat on a commission responsible for overturning the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, which had legalised prostitution. Rather than arguing (as one might expect) from a position of hectoring Victorian moralism and appeals to modesty and chastity, Maurice instead highlights that the abuses women of the profession suffered at the hands of their legal military ‘clients’, the police and the medical examiners under the ‘legal’ regime of prostitution were as bad if not worse than they would have been otherwise.
Again, all of this activism on Maurice’s part stemmed from a theology which places the Incarnation of Christ in a central rôle. The flesh – however bruised, however starved, however exploited – has been healed and been made holy by the sheer fact that the Most High, the Being beyond being, has become for our sake a common τέκτων, a woodworker with callused hands Who broke bread among the worst and most pitiful of humankind. And more than that: He has been beaten, mocked, scourged, pierced with a spear, made to carry the instrument of His own torture, nailed to it, bled upon it, died upon it. And He lived again. Those who would condemn the ‘materialism’ of the socialists must reckon first with this spiritual conviction which by no means ignores matter. Though (being Orthodox) I am no advocate of ‘branch theory’, the bearers of this conviction, whether they are Orthodox or Catholic or – like Maurice – Anglican, must indeed be read with grave respect and attention by the faithful, if the growing tide of heresy and nihilism is to be effectively resisted.
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