The Idea of Greater Britain by Bell Duncan;

Author:Bell, Duncan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

THE LOVE OF HUMANITY: TOWARD A NEW “POLITICAL RELIGION”

In a letter written during the 1850s to the distinguished classical scholar J. B. Mayor, Seeley voiced his concern about the “new orthodoxy” of Comtean positivism. This creed, he argued, had gained its foothold not as a consequence of any intrinsic merits, but rather due to the lack of convincing alternatives. Hegel “will simply not do,” he declared firmly, and without substantive argument, but he could not yet provide any substitute. Two decades later he outlined a potential response in his “naturalreligion,” attempting to draw what he saw as the best features of positivism within the orbit of a more conventional Anglican theology.7 In Seeley’s attempt to reformulate religion—and in particular to re-establish the foundations necessary for a prescriptive ethical code—in terms absorbable by the modern, post-Darwin mind, we witness an instance of Nietzsche’s characteristically insightful proclamation: “In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one’s position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic.”8

Seeley followed a trajectory typical of the son of “extreme” evangelicals. 9 Bypassing the early crisis of faith so common among his contemporaries, he glided from a youthful immersion in evangelicalism to a less unforgiving incarnationalism, from a harsh and apocryphal vision of the cosmos to a milder one in which the life of Jesus served as a noble example for human behavior. In particular, Seeley drew inspiration from the “broad church” theologians, A. P. Stanley, F. W. Robertson, and especially Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice.10 The term “broad church” had been coined earlier in the century to encompass, albeit not with great accuracy, those sharing a more liberal theological sensibility in the face of the supernaturalism and biblical literalism that united the otherwise conflicting High (Anglo-Catholic, Tractarian-influenced) and Low (Evangel-ical) churches.11 In the background hovered Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose ideas on the relationship between Church and State influenced thebroad church theologians, and whose notion of a “clerisy” Seeley also adopted, though, as we shall see, in a modified form.12 Seeley’s latitudinarianism seems to have been reinforced by the time he spent in London, where he mixed in liberal intellectual and political circles, although his religious views were never as radical as they might at first have appeared.13 Indeed he can be seen as a fairly conventional follower of the broad church theologians, with their focus on the interrelationship between (the usually capitalized) Church and State, their quest to reconcile modernity and tradition and to cultivate the spiritual qualities of the people, and their concomitant desire for securing national unity through the eradication of interdenominational and class strife.14 Seeley believed that the Church of England was failing in its appointed task of educating the nation morally, of providing a sense of concord and purpose for society.15 In the last two decades of the century, he began to shift the burden of this task away from traditional religious institutions and onto the shoulders of what he hoped would become a reconfigured historical discipline, a new clerisy.

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