Frederick Maurice

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Frederick Dension Maurice

John Frederick Denison Maurice (August 29, 1805 - April 1, 1872) was an English theologian and socialist recognized as one of the most important thinkers in the Anglican tradition. Influenced by Samuel Colleridge and a close friend of the popular clergyman and novelist, Charles Kingsley he in turn influenced the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. His interests were not limited to theoretical issues but extended to the education and welfare of the working class, helping to establish Queen’s College, London as the first women’s higher education institute in England and founding the Working Men’s College (1854). He was one of the best known clergy in Victorian England. He has been described as a prophetic voice on behalf of the poor. He is also considered a founder of the co-operative movement. His stress on Christian social responsibility was a major influence on, among others, William Temple.

Biography

Maurice (right) depicted with Thomas Carlyle in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work

John Frederick Denision Maurice (known almost universally as Frederick Denison) was born at Normanston, Suffolk, the son of a Unitarian minister, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1823, though only members of the Established Church were eligible to obtain a degree. Together with John Sterling (with whom he founded the Apostles' Club) he migrated to Trinity Hall, and obtained a first class in civil law in 1827. although his refusal to sign the Thirty Nine Articles prevented him from taking his degree. He then went to London, and gave himself to literary work, writing a novel, Eustace Conway, and editing the London Literary Chronicle until 1830, and also for a short time the Athenaeum. His literary interest had found expression at Cambridge when, as editor of the Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine, he expressed admiration for Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Walter Scott. In 1828, he joined a debating circle led by the Utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill.

At this time he was still undecided about his religious opinions but by March 1831 he decided that he could embrace Anglicanism, which opened up the possibility of returning to University and taking his degree. This time he chose Oxford, entering Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a second class in classics in 1831. Then he prepared himself for ordination as an Anglican priest, he was received in 1834, and after a short curacy at Bubbenhall in Warwickshire was appointed chaplain of Guy's Hospital, and became a leading figure in the intellectual and social life of London. Although he never totally left his Unitarian roots behind, for him there was something quintessentially English, almost in a cultual sense, about the Church of England. This may have influences his attitude towards other religions, which he tended to see as cultural appropriate in their traditional contetxts just as Englisg culture was intertwined with the Book of Common Prayer and the worship of the Anglican church. On the one hand, his experiences as a Hospital Chaplain resulted in an enduring commitment to aleviating suffering, on the other he kept company with some of the leading intellectuals of his time. In 1840 he was appointed professor of English history and literature at King's College London, and to this post in 1846 was added the chair of divinity. In 1845 he was Boyle lecturer and Warburton lecturer. He remained at King's until 1853.

In that year he published Theological Essays; the opinions it expressed were viewed by the principal, Dr R. W. Jelf, and by the council, as being of unsound theology relating to the doctrine of hell – he questioned whether a loving God would consign people to permanent torture. He had previously been called on to clear himself from charges of heterodoxy brought against him in the Quarterly Review (1851), and had been acquitted by a committee of inquiry. Now he maintained with great conviction that his views were in accord with Scripture and the Anglican standards, but the council, declining to submit the case to the judgment of competent theologians, ruled otherwise, and he was deprived of his professorships. He held the chaplaincy of Lincoln's Inn, for which he had resigned Guy's (1846-1860), but when he offered to resign this the benchers refused. The same happened with the incumbency of St. Peter's, Vere Street, which he held for nine years (1860—1869), becoming the centre of a sympathetic circle. During the early years of this period he was engaged in a hot and bitter controversy with Henry Longueville Mansel (afterwards dean of St Paul's), arising out of the latter's 1858 Bampton lecture on reason and revelation.

Achievements

During his residence in London, Maurice was identified with two important educational initiatives. He helped to found Queen's College for the education of women (1848) where he also lectured, and chaired the council until 1853. This was the first such institution in England. In 1854 he founded the Working Men's College (1854), of which he was the first principal. He also founded the Worker’s Education Association, which pioneered adult education. Maurice edited the Educational Magazine from 1839 to 41, and admired the ideas of Robert Owen. He strongly advocated the abolition of university tests (1853 which prevented Dissenters from graduating), and threw himself with great energy into all that affected the social life of the people. Attempts at co-operation among working men, and the movement known as Christian Socialism, were the immediate outcome of his teaching. Together with Kinsgley, who did much to popularize his ideas and Thomas Hughes Maurice established the Christian Socialists in 1848, publishing the journals Politics of the People (1848-49) and The Christian Socialist (1850-51) and a series of tracts, Tracts on Christian Socialism. The Co-operative movement, with its farms, shops, Bank and other associational activities, stemmed from this initiative. In 1866 Maurice was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Cambridge which now conferred his degree on him, and from 1870 to 1872 was incumbent of St Edward's in Cambridge. In 1870, he was also appointed Cambrudge Universsity preacher at Whitehall. In 1870, he also served on the government Commission on Contageous Diseases.

Personal Life

He was twice married, first to Anna Barton, a sister of John Sterling's wife, secondly to a half-sister of his friend Archdeacon Hare. His son Major-General Sir John Frederick Maurice (b. 1841), became a distinguished soldier and one of the most prominent military writers of his time. His grandson, Frederick Barton Maurice was also a British General and writer.

Those who knew Maurice best were deeply impressed with the spirituality of his character. "Whenever he woke in the night," says his wife, "he was always praying." Charles Kingsley called him "the most beautiful human soul whom God has ever allowed me to meet with." . Commenting on his intellectual attainments we may set Julius Hare's verdict "the greatest mind since Plato" over against John Ruskin's "by nature puzzle-headed and indeed wrong-headed." Such contradictory impressions reveal a life made up of contradictory elements. His friend, the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson dedicated a poem to him, “come, when no graver cares emplpy’

Theology

While many "Broad Churchmen" were influenced by ethical and emotional considerations in their repudiation of the dogma of everlasting torment, Maurice was swayed by intellectual and theological arguments, and in questions of a more general liberty he often opposed the Liberal theologians. He had a wide metaphysical and philosophical knowledge which he applied to the history of theology. He was a strenuous advocate of ecclesiastical control in elementary education, and an opponent of the new school of higher biblical criticism, though so far an evolutionist as to believe in growth and development as applied to the history of nations.

As a preacher, his message was apparently simple; his two great convictions were the fatherhood of God, and that all religious systems which had any stability lasted because of a portion of truth which had to be disentangled from the error differentiating them from the doctrines of the Church of England as understood by himself. The prophetic, even apocalyptic, note of his preaching was particularly impressive. He prophesied "often with dark foreboding, but seeing through all unrest and convulsion the working out of a sure divine purpose." Both at King's College and at Cambridge Maurice gathered a following of earnest students. He encouraged the habit of inquiry and research, more valuable than his direct teaching.

As a social reformer, Maurice was before his time, and gave his eager support to schemes for which the world was not ready. The condition of the city's poor troubled him; the magnitude of the social questions involved was a burden he could hardly bear. Working men of all opinions seemed to trust him even if their faith in other religious men and all religious systems had faded, and he had a power of attracting both the zealot and the outcast.

A major influence on his thinking was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had praised Eustace Conway. Maurice never met Coleridge but he did correspond with his daughter, Sara. For Maurice, religion could not be divorced from politics. The Church's stress on personal salvation neglected Christan social responsibility. He argued for a mid-position between a capitalism that over-stressed individualism, which he saw as competative and selfish. His alternative, which saw some practical application in the Ccoperative movement, was a modified form of socialism. He strongly suppoted extension of the franchise and the view of the Chartists. Underneath all his teaching and social and educational initiatives was the conviction that the Christian calling is not only about preparing to meet God after death, but about creating a Christian society –God’s kingdom – in the here and now. He thought that the Church of England should put worship and sacraments before dogma, since the former connect people with God while dogmas represent human opinions which can stand between people and God. The incarnation places social justice and redeeming the world center-stage for any Christian concerned with doing God's will 'on earth, as it is done in heaven'.

On Other Religions

Maurice also pioneered a re-thinking of the Christian attitude towards other faiths in his Boyce Lectures, published as The Religions of the World (1846). He began his lectures with the premise, itself shocking to many Christians at the time, that all religions have their origin in the divine. They stem, he argued, from some something that is better than their human followers, which sustains them despite human weakness. This ‘inner strength’ was not due to man’s own spiritual nature or faculties but to what he called ‘the higher ground’, or, anticipating Paul Tillich, ‘the ground of our being.’ . Each religion, he suggested, stressed a vital aspect of divine truth while only Christianity holds all aspects together in absolute harmony. Christianity, in contact with other religions, can therefore supply the wholeness they need to become effectual. Christianity, though, like all systems, suffers decay and stands itself in need of the revitalization that contact with other faiths can supply. Therefore, if other faiths need Christianity, Christianity also needs them; thus theology of religions becomes a universal concern. Maurice reacted against Thomas Carlyle’s pantheism, although Carlyle’s psychological portrait of Muhammad was his principal source.

Maurice’s main contribution was the placing of a theology of religions that positively valued other faiths within a wider theological framework. Briefly, this centered on his profound conviction that God had both created and redeemed mankind. All are therefore ‘in Christ’ whether they know it or nor, anticipating Karl Rahner and his concept of anonymous Christians. Hindus and Muslims as well as Christians stand in a relationship with him. ‘Unity’, says biographer Florance Higham, ‘whether in a person or a people, was of the essence’ of Maurice’s understanding of the Gospel. Islam’s value, Maurice suggested, was its clear proclamation that God is and that he seeks men out. Islam emphasises the fact of God’s being and is most vital when proclaiming that fact. It degenerates, said Maurice, when it attempts to substitute ‘visions of His nature’ for that fact. This becomes fruitless speculation and results in Muslims becoming worshippers of a ‘dead necessity’ instead of witnesses of a ‘Living Being.’ Maurice found little comfort in beliefs about God. Instead, he demanded belief in God, ‘unobstructed intercourse with the Deity.’

However, the Gospel’s picture of God’s nature as incarnate in Christ, if ‘grounded’ in a Muslim’s ‘original faith’ and not presented as a substitute for it, can ‘preserve the precious fragments of truth’ in Islam and, ‘forming them into a whole’, make it ‘effectual for the blessing of all lands over which it reigns.’ For Maurice, Islam possessed spiritual values and occupied a place in God’s providence. Christians need not, said Maurice, ‘regard its continuance wholly as a calamity.’

Works and Writings

The following are his most important works—some of these appeared in revised editions at later dates.

• Eustace Conway, or the Brother and Sister, a novel (1834)
• The Kingdom of Christ (1842)
• Christmas Day and Other Sermons (1843)
• The Unity of the New Testament (1844)
• The Epistle to the Hebrews (1846)
• The Religions of the World (1846)
• Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (at first an article in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 1848)
• The Church a Family (1850)
• The Old Testament (1851)
• Theological Essays (1853)
• The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament (1853)
• Lectures on Ecclesiastical History (1854)
• The Doctrine of Sacrifice (1854)
• The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament (1855)
• The Epistles of St John (1857)
• The Commandments as Instruments of National Reformation (1866)
• On the Gospel of St Luke (1868)
• The Conscience: Lectures on Casuistry (1868)
• The Lord's Prayer, a Manual (1870).

The greater part of these works were first delivered as sermons or lectures. Maurice also contributed many prefaces and introductions to the works of friends, as to Archdeacon Hare's Charges, Kingsley's Saint's Tragedy, etc. See Life by his son (2 vols., London, 1884), and a monograph by C. F. G. Masterman (1907) in “Leader of the Church” series; W. E. Collins in Typical English Churchmen, pp. 327-360 (1902), and T. Hughes in The Friendship of Books (1873).

Legacy

In the Anglican communion, Maurice is remembered on April 1st, the anniversary of his death with the collect:

Almighty God, who restored our human nature to heavenly glory through the perfect obedience of our Savior Jesus Christ: Keep alive in your Church, we pray, a passion for justice and truth; that, like your servant Federick Denison Maurice, we may work and pray for the triumph of the kingdom of your Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. .

The F D Maurice Professorship of Moral and Social Theology) at King's College, London, and many streets in London are named in his honor, including a street in the south part of Hampstead Garden Suburb. The type of robust, socially engaged Christianity that Maurice espoused represented for many of his contemporaries and also for later generations the only Christianity that could carry conviction. Many of his Some saw his attitudes as dangerous and as expressing too much confidence in human ability to make the world a better place. Evangelical Christianity has emphasized human depravity and the need for an inner, spiritual renewal or rebirth and has often regarded social engagement as a diversion. Anticipating the end of the present order when Jesus returns, Christians often assume that only the spiritual will survive and has eternal value. God's love was so real for Maurice that he wanted to incarnate this as loving action. His vision was never narrow but always universal so much so that he could not deny that non-Christians could also stand in a relationship with God, which most Christians of his time thought quite presposterous.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Higham, Florence Frederick Denison Maurice, London: SCM, 1947
• Maurice, F. D The Religions of the World, London: Macmillan, 1846
• Morris, Jeremy. F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority. Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN 9780199263165
• Morris, Jermey To Build Christ’s kingdom: F D Maurice and His Writings. London: Canterbury Press, 2007 ISBN 9781853117770

Sanders, C. K (1942) Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement, Durham, N.C. Duke University Press.

• Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol.1, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953 (Volume I).
• Vidler, Alexander Roper. 1948. Witness to the light F.D. Maurice's message for to-day. New York: Scribner's.
• ———. The theology of F.D. Maurice. London: SCM Press, 1948
• ———. F.D. Maurice and company. London: S.C.M. Press, 1966
• Young, David. F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism. Oxford: Clarendoan Press, 1992 ISBN 9780198263395

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

External links

• King's College: Frederick Maurice - Retrieved October 18, 2007.
• Selected works of F.D. Maurice online Retrieved November 2, 2007.

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