G. C. Rawlinson: the Claims of Intellect, the Authority of Experience

Rawlinson, G. C. An Anglo-Catholic’s Thoughts on Religion. ed. by W. J. Sparrow Simpson. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924.

An Anglo-Catholic’s Thoughts on Religion is hardly a title calculated to make copies fly off the shelves. Yet when I saw it on the shelf of a second-hand bookshop years ago—where it may have sat unregarded for years—I grabbed it and hurried to the cash register, for I was fascinated by all aspects of this phenomenon called Anglo-Catholicism. The book was not quite what I expected, just as Gerald Christopher Rawlinson was not quite what the good people of St. Barnabas’ Pimlico expected when he arrived as their curate in 1902. Like me, they were about to encounter one of the oddest and most original minds of the Catholic movement, and one whose forthright opinions have surprising relevance to some of the upheavals that the Anglican Communion is now undergoing.

In some ways, Rawlinson was a typical product of that high-water-mark era of Anglo-Catholicism. A lifelong Francophile, his conceptions of theology and spirituality largely formed by voluminous reading in French Roman Catholic sources, he took with alacrity to the Ultramontane Anglo-Catholic subculture of the late nineteenth century—a subculture which culminated in the Congresses of the 1920s and ’30s, which seemed to have so little to do with the mainstream C. of E., and which brashly aimed to transform that C. of E., and England itself, in its own image. Anglo-Catholics in those days not only worshipped differently from “ordinary C. of E.” people: they talked differently, read different publications, attended different colleges and formed their conceptions along quite different lines. They were a world apart. St. Barnabas’ Pimlico, where Rawlinson arrived a mere seven years after his priesting, had been one of the battleground parishes of ritualism and rioting and he was to remain there as a curate until his death twenty years later. He said Mass, heard confessions, gave spiritual direction, preached and directed the annual children’s play, all the while supplementing his modest income with writing and journalism. He made his reputation as one of the principal writers for the Church Times (an Anglo-Catholic party organ in those days), while also writing articles on mysticism for the Treasury, and publishing a book characteristically entitled Recent French Tendencies, a Study in French Religion. Many other plans for books gave way before the pressure of parish work and his need to make money through journalism. It was only after his death that his friends drew together a collection of his sermons, articles and addresses, together with a set of his unpublished journal entries—“thoughts” on various subjects, some long, some short, rather in the style of Pascal’s Pensées—and published them as An Anglo-Catholic’s Thoughts on Religion.

Rawlinson may have been a priest of the Church of England; but for him, what mattered was “the Catholic Church” and “the Catholic religion” pure and simple. One can hardly imagine him pronouncing the words “Anglican Catholic”, let alone “reformed Catholic”. As to so many clergy of the period, Catholicism seemed to him to be a perfectly integral and intelligible whole about which one could speak with conviction. As he says in his sermon on “The Contemplative”: “Moderation is not a characteristic of the Catholic religion. Possibly this is one reason why it is not very popular with Englishmen, for Englishmen generally like moderation and detest extremes.” Or later in the same sermon: “We are, then, to try to cultivate the Catholic mind” and “see life through Catholic spectacles.” Closely allied with this, and also shared with so many of his contemporaries, is his ascetic romanticism. As he writes in his essay “A Twentieth-Century Solitary (Charles de Foucauld)”: “Probably there are not a few who, like the present writer, used, when they were young, to read the stories of the old hermits with a certain wistfulness.” Later he complains that nowadays religion is “as devoid of all romance as a solicitor’s office.” That wistfulness and longing for the romance of religion haunted the nineteenth century, and still haunts some today, and it too formed part of the Anglo-Catholic mindset. Given his romantic and integral conception of Catholicism, Rawlinson could also be, by our standards, quite outrageously anti-ecumenical. The flip-side of seeing Catholicism as an intelligible whole is to see Protestantism as an utterly alien thing; and Rawlinson is not immune to this, as in his sermon on “The Ascetic”: “It might not be too much to say that the natural result of Catholic asceticism is the saint, and the natural result of Protestant asceticism is the millionaire.” Nowadays we might think this is at least a little too much to say.

But ultimately Rawlinson’s mind was too big for the integrist Anglo-Catholic mindset; he resisted it even as he embraced it, and it is here that he becomes most interesting. He belonged to a movement mainly preoccupied with church politics and ritual, but his own bent was towards mysticism and spirituality. His writings in this collection include a sermon on “The Contemplative”; a series of essays called “Studies in Mysticism” (including a peculiar essay on “Dante, the Mystic”); and his address on “Meditation and Mysticism” given at the First Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1920. At High Mass on great festivals, he would step into the pulpit of St. Barnabas’ Pimlico to preach on the life of some obscure Frenchman or some point of ascetic discipline, with hardly a reference to the feast itself. As the editor of the present volume writes: “This, not unnaturally, produced a feeling of disappointment.” But he held to Baron von Hügel’s dictum that religion had three sides—the institutional, the speculative or intellectual, and the mystical or experimental—and he thought that Anglo-Catholicism had become so preoccupied with the institutional side that it had become woefully inadequate on the mystical side.

And on the intellectual side as well. Rawlinson had a complex relationship with the various “Modernisms” of his day—Roman Catholic Modernism proper, as exemplified by Loisy, which he knew well as a voracious reader of French theology; and the more advanced forms of Liberal Protestantism (also, confusingly, known as “Modernism”) then current in the Church of England. As a member of the Catholic party, Rawlinson inevitably found himself on the anti-Modernist side, but always with a certain discomfort, a certain sense that some important nuances were being lost in the “fight” against it. He saw what so many of his fellow clergy did not see: that the various “Modernisms” were not a vicious assault on “Holy Church”, but an attempt to do, albeit inadequately, a task that needed doing. As he says in his journal note on “The Failure of Modernism”: “It started as a gallant attempt to provide the Church with a new apologetic in place of the apologetic which is no longer valid.” But (he continues) “[t]he authorities and clergy generally are so ignorant that they were not aware of the need of a new apologetic.” The clergy of his own party were, in Rawlinson’s view, certainly not exempt from this. In his note on “Modernism” he writes: “The Modernist ideas may prove perilous guests in many men’s minds. So do all good and noble ideas in minds that are not fit to receive them. . . . It is especially difficult, however, to-day, as a certain number of people are intellectually centuries ahead of the majority. All this makes a restatement of dogma very difficult.” His fellow Anglo-Catholic clergy, many of whom had gone whole-hog for the “fight”, might have been a little dismayed to find the humble curate of St. Barnabas’ describing them as intellectually delayed by several centuries; but in these informal notes Rawlinson was not writing for publication and was free to speak his mind. As he writes in a journal note on “The Future of Ritualism”: “The intellectual calibre of the Ritualists. Low. It gets the majority of the young clergy, but they are not now the best products of the University. The movement never has been intellectual, and has never cared for intellectual culture.” Again and again he expresses his discouragement that the party to which he belongs so fails to meet the intellectual challenges before it. His recurring fear is that many Anglo-Catholics would wish to suppress Modernism by some exercise of authority instead of through the freedom of debate, and this is deeply repugnant to him, for alongside his love of Catholicism he always continues to hold a certain affection for the mixed and untidy character of Anglicanism. In his note on “Religious Controversy” he writes: “I find also the Church of England more satisfactory because I can live in it a mental life more unhampered. I can’t stand the D.O.R.A. (Defence of Rome Act) of the Roman Catholics. And regret that my party in the Church of England is inclined to take the same line. Their denunciation of Modernism seems to me almost unintelligent. For it seems to me you must allow a certain laxity, if you are to defend your continuance in the Church of England.”

Underlying all this is Rawlinson’s conviction that intellectual integrity is paramount and ultimately must trump obedience where the two conflict. Rawlinson the liturgically Ultramontane and intellectually Francophile did not have a great deal in common with the quintessentially Anglican “Liberal Catholic” Charles Gore, and I am sure they could not have agreed on the proper manner of celebrating Mass. But he sounds startlingly like Gore when he writes, in his note on “Fellowship with the Church”: “Better far to be an outcast from the Church in this world than to remain in her at the cost of a lie. Better to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church than to excommunicate oneself from that other Church which consists of all who love the truth.” And he is prepared to apply this idea even if it means the destruction of the institution itself, in language applicable to our current Communion-wide controversies, when he writes (in his note on “Religious Controversy”): “If the present controversies in the Church of England tear it in twain, it will mean that in the interests of truth this ought to happen—that it could only hold together so long as nobody thought.”

As Rawlinson’s emphasis on the intellectual element in religion flows from his belief in intellectual integrity, so his emphasis on mysticism flows from his belief in the authority of lived experience. In this, he is equally uncompromising and remarkable. In an address on confession and spiritual direction, given to the Oxford Convention of the Federation of Catholic Priests in 1921, he recommends the usual study of moral and ascetic theology, but then goes on to suggest that confessors and spiritual directors should make a study of good novels—particularly those of Fielding, Balzac, Thackeray and the Russians—as a way of gaining insight into human nature. “I have often thought I would like to set an examination to priests—if some bishop would appoint me his chaplain—on novels. My paper would contain questions like these: What advice might have been helpful to Becky Sharp when she was leaving Mrs. Pinkerton’s? How could the impression made on Maggie Tulliver by reading the ‘Imitation’ have been reinforced? What methods might be adopted in dealing with the Forsyte family in Mr. Galsworthy’s novels? Such questions at least would make us think over some very real problems of direction.” In his paper “Meditation and Mysticism”, delivered to the first Anglo-Catholic Congress, he asserts that mysticism exists “not as the conclusion of an argument, but as the result of an experience,” and endorses the view of Emil Durkheim that the origin of religion is not intellectual but experiential. In his discussion of the validity of Anglican orders in his note on “The Christian Priesthood” he writes brusquely: “[T]he true test, pragmatic. If use of sacraments produced no results, looks as if ministry was invalid. But if opposite, then valid. Proof of ours:—that the increase of frequency of Sacraments has led to a great increase of devotion, holiness, and love of God. So don’t tell me that Anglican orders are invalid.” He is fully prepared to apply the experiential test to the formulation of Christian doctrine. In his note on “The Divinity of Our Lord”, he writes that the Nicene Creed is “the clothing in words of an experience,” namely the growing consciousness of Christ’s divinity in the life of the Church. He is prepared to contemplate a reformulation of the Creeds, since they are not verbally inspired and any new formulation can in principle be valid if it remains true to the experience. It is only on the last point that he finds attempted Modernist reformulations unsatisfactory.

We have heard a good deal of late about the dangers of invoking experience on doctrinal questions, as though this were some sort of peculiar modern heresy. Rawlinson would hardly have understood such a point of view, for his tendency was always to see Catholicity as a conversation about experience over space and time. As he says in his note titled “Mentalité catholique”: “What is the place of Authority? It is educational, paternal. To guide, to save wasting time in futile quests. Not to relieve from the personal search. It represents largely the wisdom of the past.” And he continues: “Of course, this implies development (not the once for all delivered to the Saints theory).” From this conversation over space and time, our own place and time can hardly be excluded, nor can we be mere passive recipients of an experience already formulated. But the triumph of the institutional element, without an appropriate counterweight, can mean that intellectual inquiry is squelched and experience is ignored. On the level of the individual believer, Rawlinson makes the point again (in “What Mysticism Is”): “Unless religion is in some way experimentally justified by a soul it is very soon abandoned.” If doctrine does not answer to experience, and continue to do so, the Church will in the end consist of no one but those in whom intellect and lived experience have been artificially suppressed—the power-hungry and the cowed, the stubborn and the silly. From this vision Rawlinson has no recourse but to “that other Church which consists of all who love the truth.” But as a lover of the Catholic Church in its Anglican embodiment, he continued to hope for better things from the institution, as many continue to do.

Jeff Creighton, Toronto