Austin Farrer, Warden of Keble
Until I was in my twenties I had never met any Anglican clergy. In my Catholic youth I thought of them, collectively, as imitation priests. They were not very good imitations: their suits were not black enough and their clerical collars were too narrow. And, of course, Pope Leo XIII had determined in 1896 that ‘ordinations enacted according to the Anglican rite have hitherto been and are invalid and entirely void.’ Hence, Anglican ministers could not bring about the sacramental transformations which real – Catholic – priests could effect.
It was only while studying in Rome that I made any personal contact with Anglicans. One day in the English College I was told, ‘The boss is giving a party for some Anglican bag.’ Decoded, this meant that the rector was entertaining the Archbishop of York. ‘Bag’ was short for ‘bagarozzo’, an abusive Italian word for a priest: its polite meaning is ‘black beetle’, and children often hissed the word at us seminarians as we paraded the streets in our cassocks. Referring to the archbishop as a ‘bag’ might, I suppose, be taken as an initial step towards acknowledging the validity of Anglican orders.
Visits by Anglican prelates to the English College were, in those days, rare and chilly events, and it was not through Rome but through Oxford that I first became acquainted with a priest of the Church of England. A student who came to the seminary a year after me, Richard Incledon, was a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford. Something of a dandy, Richard stood out from the other seminarians because he always kept his black beaver hat polished to a resplendent sheen. He was a great source of gossip about Oxford, and especially Trinity, and it became clear to me that he was a great admirer of the then chaplain of Trinity, Austin Farrer, who was then in his late forties.
In the third year of philosophy at the Gregorian University, the student had to write a short dissertation as a condition of obtaining the licentiate degree. Influenced by Richard, I decided to choose as my dissertation topic a work of Farrer’s on natural theology, Finite and Infinite, that had been published a decade earlier. It was unusual for a student to choose to research a work by a non-Catholic, and it may be that I needed some special permission to do so. I did, while in Rome, eventually secure permission to read books on the index, but I cannot now remember whether Farrer’s book fell into one of the forbidden categories.
Whether forbidden or not, it was a formidable volume, and to this day I find it difficult to read. It developed a highly personal metaphysical system, and concluded with a ‘Dialectic of Rational Theology’, which listed and analysed 13 different proofs of the existence of God. Every such argument, Farrer argued, must proceed from a distinction within the finite world and show that the coexistence of the elements distinguished is intelligible only if God exists as the ground of such a coexistence.
The book ends with a striking paragraph:
As I wrote this, the German armies were occupying Paris after a campaign prodigal of blood and human distress . . . Rational theology knows only that whether Paris stands or falls, whether men die or live, God is God, and so long as any spiritual creature survives, God is to be adored.
My copy is certified to have been produced ‘in complete conformity with the authorized economy standards’, and its crinkly paper and stark binding are a reminder of the difficulties of academic publishing during the war.
My dissertation was well received by the university authorities, and Incledon wrote to tell his old tutor about it. Farrer said that he was rather flattered to be the subject of a dissertation in a pontifical university, and invited me to Oxford to discuss his book with him. So during the summer of 1952, between the Roman philosophy and theology course, I visited him in Trinity, taking with me a list of questions, and we sat for several hours in the garden discussing finitude and infinity. It was my first experience of an Oxford tutorial, and my questions must have struck him as rather continental in style (‘What, Dr Farrer, are the sources of your philosophy?’).
I went to Oxford as a graduate student in 1957, just before Farrer published Freedom of the Will. I admired the book, but found it little help in writing my own doctoral thesis on the will, because of its unwillingness to engage with mainstream analytic philosophy. I believed that Farrer was intellectually quite the equal of Ryle, Austin and Ayer, but because of its idiosyncratic vocabulary and conceptual structure it failed to have the influence it deserved.
By the time I returned to Oxford as a layman, Farrer had become Warden of Keble. He welcomed me as a fellow don, and sympathized with my troubles with the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, he was anxious to enrol me as a member of the Church of England, and offered to perform the appropriate ceremonies. Disappointed when I declined, he decided after a while that I was too much of an unbeliever to attend his philosophical discussion club, The Metaphysicals.
He remained friendly, however, and when he learned of my marriage he and his wife laid on a celebratory dinner in the lodgings at Keble. It was conducted in the old style grand manner, with the new wife sitting on the right of the host, and all the guests instructed not to depart until the bride and groom had taken their leave.
My last memory of Austin was of a quite different kind. In 1964, Denis Nineham was appointed to the Regius Chair of Divinity at Cambridge. To take up the post he needed a doctorate of divinity, and so he submitted his recently published Penguin commentary on St Mark’s Gospel to be examined by the Oxford Faculty of Theology. Austin Farrer and Henry Chadwick were appointed examiners. Viva voce – oral – examinations in Oxford, though open to the public, rarely attract an audience, but on this occasion the lecture hall was full of senior and junior members anxious to watch a tournament between three of the senior theologians of the Church of England. Chadwick questioned Nineham in a gently urbane manner – but some of Farrer’s questioning could only be described as savage. Though himself a venturesome interpreter of St Mark, he made it clear that he thought the commentary conceded too much to higher criticism of the Gospel. However, the examiners awarded the degree, and the occasion was remembered as the nearest thing to a medieval theological disputation to have occurred in the twentieth century. In 1968, Nineham succeeded to the wardenship of Keble on Farrer’s untimely death.
Henry Chadwick, Dean of Christ Church and Master of Peterhouse
In my early days as a don, I was much in awe of Henry Chadwick. He was nine years my senior, and his stature, his stately pace and his patrician voice made him a central figure in the ecclesiastical and academic establishment of Oxford. He was Regius Professor of Divinity, and had a formidable reputation as a patristic scholar, having produced a masterly edition of one of the most daunting texts of the Church fathers, Origen’s Contra Celsum. In 1969, he became Dean of Christ Church, one of the most august posts in the diocese and the university.
When, in 1978, I became Master of Balliol, I was surprised to receive from Henry a warm and eloquent letter welcoming me into the fraternity of heads of house. I responded with enthusiasm, pointing out that the great Liddell and Scott dictionary of classical Greek showed that great things could be achieved if the heads of Christ Church and Balliol worked in collaboration with each other.
Henry and I did not in fact go on to collaborate in any great venture, and we were colleagues only for one year because he left to become Regius Professor at Cambridge in 1971. We did, however, share some philosophical and theological interests. A hero we had in common was the early Christian philosopher Boethius, the author of The Consolations of Philosophy. I had a special interest in Boethius’ logic, and Henry in his music. When, in 1971, he published his splendid monograph on all aspects of Boethius, he went out of his way, at the launch party, to pay me undeserved compliments as a fellow researcher.
During the seventies and eighties, Henry was a leading member of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) that discussed the doctrinal issues separating the two communions. His wide historical learning, his negotiating skills, and his emollient manner made him a perfect member of the commission, and it was he who drafted crucial parts of the surprisingly conciliatory report on the Eucharist published in 1971. During this period he became friendly with my old friend, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who was one of his Catholic opposite numbers. He also played an important part in arranging for Pope John Paul II’s visit to Britain in 1982. Later, he loved to show friends the stole that the pope had given him on that occasion. Given that the stole is the most sacerdotal of all vestments, it was hard not to see the gift as a tacit repeal of the condemnation of Leo XIII.
The work of ARCIC effectively came to a halt when the Church of England accepted the priesthood of women and the papacy remained unblinkingly opposed to any comparable step within its jurisdiction. Romans felt that the step showed that Anglicans placed fashion above ecumenism. Anglicans felt that Romans failed to adapt to the contemporary world. In particular, they found it hard to accept the argument, ‘The first priests were the Apostles; the Apostles were all men; therefore only men can be priests.’ I shared their scepticism: to me it seems no better than the argument, ‘The first pope was St Peter; St Peter was married; therefore only a married man can be pope.’
In 1987, to the considerable surprise of his friends, Henry accepted the mastership of Peterhouse. The college was notorious for the degree of ill will among its fellows. The previous Master was Hugh Trevor-Roper, alias Lord Dacre. I had had dealings with Hugh over the production of The History of the University of Oxford, a project of which, for a time, I had oversight. Hugh was due to edit the volume concerned with the Tudor and Stuart periods, but years went by without any copy being delivered. Eventually, I was commissioned to deliver an ultimatum: if the next deadline was missed, his volume would be handed over to another editor. When I telephoned him with this message his response was, ‘You have no idea how I am positioned. I am sure at Balliol you have some fellows who are bad, and some who are mad. But here at Peterhouse every single fellow is both bad and mad.’
Once again, Henry’s gifts as a peacemaker were put to the test. But the most devastating event during his time at Peterhouse was not caused by the fellows. Henry was still in demand from time to time at the Vatican, and on one occasion he was asked to fly to Rome for a few days to offer advice. While he was away, the lift failed in the isolated Master’s lodgings, and Peggy Chadwick was trapped inside it for 24 hours. She came out of the event psychologically unscathed, having exhibited the indomitable willpower for which she was famous among all who knew her.
Henry and Peggy had married in 1945, having been brought together by a common love of music. According to Rowan Williams’ British Academy obituary of Henry, Peggy, a talented singer, liked to tell people that she had married her accompanist. But as an accompanist Henry was not at all monogamous. He used often to visit Rhodes House to accompany my wife singing Schubert lieder.
Henry took a benevolent interest in our younger son Charles, who read history at Peterhouse while he was Master. Charles founded a society called Peterhouse Left, but that did not prevent him from being on good terms with some ferociously right-wing tutors. One of the prized photographs in our study is of Henry, as acting Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, clasping Charles’ hands as he conferred a BA on him.
Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford
Like many nostalgic secular people, my wife and I commonly attend church on the great Christian feasts. For many years, we used to go to an Easter Sunday morning service in Oxford cathedral. There, one is offered the choice of attending matins, with a sermon by the Dean of Christ Church, or Eucharist, with a sermon by the Bishop of Oxford. During the period when Richard Harries was bishop, and Eric Heaton was dean, the two preachers offered quite a different perspective on the feast of the resurrection. Harries would forthrightly state his belief in the narrative truth of the Gospel accounts, including that of the empty tomb. Heaton, on the other hand, delivered an ambiguous message, leaving one in doubt as to what he believed actually happened on the first Easter day.
Among the canons of Christ Church at that period were Oliver O’Donovan, an evangelical former Balliol student of mine, and Rowan Williams, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. After one particularly ambivalent sermon by the dean they looked at each other with puzzlement as they processed down the nave. Greek Christians are accustomed to greet each other during paschal time with the exchange, ‘Christos aneste, Alethos aneste!’ – ‘Christ is risen, truly he is risen.’ On this occasion, the two canons substituted, ‘Christos aneste, Isos aneste!’ – ‘Christ is risen, perhaps he is risen.’
A few weeks after this Easter sermon, I found myself sitting at dinner next to Eric Heaton. ‘Tell me Eric’, I said. ‘Do you really believe that the tomb was empty?’ He turned to face me: ‘What kind of person do you think I am?’, he asked. It was a perfectly crafted response – well adapted to silence both questioners who would think him a fool if he answered yes, and those who would think him a knave if he answered no.
Over the years, Nancy and I became friends with Bishop Harries and his wife, and they were regularly invited to the January brunch with which we let in the New Year. The bishop would share star billing with the chancellor, and in my mind’s eye I have a vivid picture of Richard and Roy, in our attic library, in vigorous argument about the pros and cons of Turkish membership of the EU.
Richard and I used to read each other’s books, and occasionally review them. Though I was an agnostic and he a believer, our views on most ethical issues were very close to each other. I used to tease him by saying that he got them not from the Bible or the Church, but from the Enlightenment. In his most recent book, The Beauty and the Horror, he responds to this criticism by outlining lucid discussion of the competing claims that tradition and modernity make upon the religious believer. The merit of a tradition, he says, is that it gives us a distance from contemporary culture and a point of vantage from which to discriminate between genuinely new truths and mere passing fashions. Thus, the Anglican tradition has come to terms with new cultural norms – from biblical criticism in the nineteenth century, to female bishops in the twenty-first.
I find it hard to discover exactly what Richard believes about a personal afterlife and a general resurrection. But I find him, among my friends who are believers, the most rewarding person to discuss such issues with. It is now over 50 years since I left the Church, and while I am agnostic about the existence of God, I am not agnostic about life after death: I am sure that belief in it is an illusion. However, if – which God forbid – I should undergo a deathbed conversion, there is no Christian priest I would sooner have at my bedside than Richard Harries.
In the meantime, I am honoured to have been invited to join – as a part-time member, because of my age – an august group of walkers in the Chiltern Hills, of which Richard is the presiding spirit.