Content area
Full text
Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism. By James Pereiro. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. viii, 271. $150.00. ISBN 978-0-199-23029-7.)
This book is in effect a study of the Oxford Movement with special reference to the Tractarian concept of ethos, which originated with John Keble, who derived the idea from the Nicomachean Ethics and Butler's Analogy. It raises two controversial points.
First, Pereira rightly disagrees with Peter Nockles and other revisionist historians that the Tractarians played down the High Church tradition that they inherited and exaggerated their own claims, but rather argues, "The Oxford Movement helped create a new image of High Churchmanship, one which involved a more complete and coherent doctrinal structure than it ever had before" (p. 45). Moreover, he questions whether such vitality and revival as the historical revisionism of Nockles and others points to were "weighty and widespread enough to counterbalance the negative" aspects of Anglicanism in the decades before the Oxford Movement (p. 60).
Second, according to Pereiro, the allegedly pioneering theory of development propounded in 1835 by Samuel Wood, a leading London Tractarian and former pupil of John Henry Newman, was rejected by his former Oriel tutor: "It is obvious from the correspondence that Newman did not accept Wood's theory that progress and development of doctrine were intended in the Divine Plan, or that it should have continued after the Primitive Church" (p. 12). Newman's letter of...