Anglo-Catholic Philosophy
Anglo-Catholic Philosophy
Anglo-Catholicism is the name frequently used to describe the Church of England and her sister communions, including the Episcopal Church in America. As a religious system, it may be described as the maintenance of the traditional credal, ethical and sacramental position of Catholic Christianity, with insistence on the incorporation into that general position of the new truth of philosophy, science and other fields of study and experience. Historically, the Anglo-Catholic divines (as in Hooker and the Caroline writers) took over the general Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy of the schools; their stress, however, was more on the Platonic than the Aristotelian side”Platonism”, Dr. Inge has said, “is the loving mother-nurse of Anglicanism.” Statements of this position, modified by a significant agnosticism concerning areas into which reason (it is said) cannot penetrate, may be found collected in Anglicanism (edited by More and Cross). A certain empiricism has always marked Anglo-Catholic theological and philosophical speculation; this is brought out in recent writing by Taylor (Faith of a Moralist), the writers in Lux Mundi (edited by Gore) and its modern successor Essays Catholic and Critical.
In genera, Anglo-Catholic philosophy has been an incarnational or sacramental one, finding God in the Biblical revelation culminating in Christ, but unwilling to limit his self-disclosure to that series of events. Incarnationalism provides, it is said, the setting for the historic Incarnation; general revelation is on sacramental lines, giving meaning to the particular sacraments. For Anglo-Catholic philosophical theology, in its central stream, the key to dogma is the cumulative experience of Christian people, tested by the Biblical revelation as source and standard of that experience and hence “classical” in its value. Revelation is the ultimate authority; the Church possesses a trustworthiness about her central beliefs, but statement of these may change from age to age. Sometimes this main tendency of Anglo-Catholic thought has been sharply criticized by thinkers, themselves Anglicans (cf. Tennant’s Philosophical Theology); but these have, in general, served as useful warnings rather than as normal expressions of the Anglican mind.
In very recent years, a new stress has been laid upon the dogmatic side of Christianity as expressed in liturgy. This has been coupled with a revived interest in Thomism, found both in older philosophers such as A. E. Taylor and in younger men like A. G. Hebert (cf. his Grace and Nature, etc.). — W.N.P.