In recent years Anglican moral theology has experienced something of a revival in the work of (inter alios) Oliver O'Donovan, Nigel Biggar and Michael Banner. In contrast, the study of the discipline's past has been somewhat neglected, especially since the death in 1998 of Henry McAdoo, the preeminent scholar of Caroline moral theology. In The origins of Anglican moral theology Peter H. Sedgwick returns to the earliest years of the subject; it is a work which is perhaps the most ambitious contribution in the area since McAdoo published The structure of Caroline moral theology in 1947.
Some may regard the very title of his book as controversial or at least question-begging; many scholars prefer not to use the term ‘Anglican’ in relation to the early modern period, at least not before the Restoration. Sedgwick is aware of the debate regarding the appropriateness of the term (pp. 24, 37) but employs it nevertheless. This reviewer is not inclined to criticise him on this point; the Church of England – the post-Reformation English theologians discussed in this book all belonged to that body – was an institution which was continuous in many respects between the period before and after the Restoration. That essential continuity was liturgical and ecclesiological in character, even theological. The use of the word Anglican to denote divines of the English Church from the reign of Elizabeth onwards is therefore problematic but not unjustifiable.
Sedgwick does, however, contend that ‘there is no one, or single tradition of moral theology, in either the Anglican or the Roman Catholic Church’ (p. 1). He goes on to argue that both Catholic and Anglican moral theology possess a developing tradition or family resemblance ‘made up of contesting but ultimately reconcilable rival traditions’ (p. 1).
He is well aware of the post-Reformation Church of England's inheritance from the Fathers and the scholastic theologians, Aquinas in particular. He attributes to Abelard and, more especially, Aquinas, ‘the rational, ordered nature of Anglican moral theology’; and he sees in later theologians such as Joseph Butler, F. D. Maurice and William Temple (though he does not discuss them at length) ‘a tradition of paying respect to the ordered nature and divinely graced autonomy of the universe’ (pp. 84–5). Sedgwick discerns even in William Perkins (the first author from the years after 1559 dealt with in detail by him) the influence of Aquinas as well as a knowledge of his Jesuit contemporaries (pp. 193, 198).
It is in Hooker (perhaps unsurprisingly) that Sedgwick finds ‘the central point on which this whole history of Anglican moral theology turns’; to him the author of The lawes ‘uniquely holds together the Reformation and the previous moral theology tradition’ (p. 212). He is aware of the connections between Hooker and Reformed theology, but he also sees in him divergences from that school, especially on free will and natural law, on which latter topic he was more positive than Calvin (pp. 225–6). Furthermore Hooker perceived ‘the essentially graced nature of reason, as a means of guiding scriptural interpretation and moral choice’ (p. 235).
Sedgwick finds parallels between Hooker and his much younger contemporary Robert Sanderson. (The younger man outlived the older by over sixty years, rising to become bishop of Lincoln under Charles ii.) Sanderson, a Calvinist himself, regarded Hooker's Lawes as expressing reformed views (pp. 296, 301). But he was also in Sedgwick's opinion the ‘greatest interpreter of Aquinas of his day in England’; and his thought is ‘deeply Thomist’ (pp. 301, 308).
The last theologian considered at length in this work is Jeremy Taylor but a few others – Joseph Hall, Henry Hammond, John Sharp and George Bull among them – are dealt with in slighter detail. Sedgwick links Taylor, Hammond and Bull as all having ‘interpreted Paul and James together … These Caroline theologians argued that for a holy life to be possible then faith and good works had to be taken together as necessary for salvation’ (p. 297). Taylor was, too, ‘critical of the laxity of probabilism’ (as he regarded it); in Sedgwick's words he saw that approach as ‘quite unreasonable to his sense of moral seriousness’ (pp. 332–3). Sedgwick finds differences between Hooker and Taylor, discerning in the latter elements of voluntarism and an emphasis on divine power which put him in a different position from the writer of The lawes (pp. 342–3).
In general this is not only a very reliable book but also one that should stimulate debate, not least on the question of the origins of Anglicanism. The extensive bibliography alone will be of use to the reader. This work does not lack flaws entirely. Too much space is given to the subject's background: it is not until almost half way through (p. 177) that we reach William Perkins. Sedgwick's application of the term ‘liberal’ to Jeremy Taylor (pp. 322–3) is anachronistic; the adjective would be better kept for the like-minded contemporaries and successors of Schleiermacher. There is no evidence that Gilbert Sheldon advised that Taylor should become bishop of Down and Connor (p. 324); it is more probable that the appointment was made on the recommendation of the duke of Ormond and Archbishop Bramhall. Nor did Taylor die of a disease contracted from a sick person whom he visited (p. 324). More space might have been devoted to the connection between Taylor's moral theology and his devotional works, Holy living and holy dying in particular. In writing that the criticisms of the position on artificial birth control taken by the Lambeth Conference of 1930 contained in Pius xi's Casti Connubii (issued that same year) ‘showed how enormously different the two traditions were at that time’ (p. 5), Sedgwick suggests that he is unaware of contemporary Anglican opposition to contraception: a hostility exemplified both in Charles Gore's published criticism of the Conference on this topic and in R. C. Mortimer's discussion of the subject in his Elements of moral theology, published seventeen years later. The continuity of moral conservatism in twentieth-century Anglicanism should not be ignored.
Sedgwick argues against the view that the Caroline theologians were ‘quintessentially Anglican’. Nevertheless he sees in Sanderson, Hall, Sharp and Taylor ‘the final and greatest flowering’ of what became known as Anglican moral theology (pp. 287–8). His case is convincing, especially so when the continuing influence of the authors he expounds (Hooker and Taylor above all) in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries is recalled. Sedgwick tells us that he began his career by working on the views on moral agency of Joseph Butler and John Henry Newman. It is to be hoped that in a future work he will continue his survey of Anglican moral theology.
