by Bart Schultz
at the bottom of all men’s trowings, that in which these trowings have their only
meeting point.
Frederick Denison Maurice, in Towards Unity
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Now, though there were different roads to this end, and though each teacher
believed himself, and induced his disciples to believe, that his was the shortest,
yet one method was common to them all; all sought to acquire power by means of
words. The mastery over words was the great art which the Athenian youth was
to cultivate; his own feelings, and an observation of what was passing every day
in his city, told him that there was a charm and fascination in these which the
physical force of an Oriental tyrant might vainly try to compete with. It seems to
have been the first observation of Socrates when he began earnestly to meditate
on the condition of his countrymen, that in this case, as in most others, the tyrants were slaves; that those who wished to rule the world by the help of words were
themselves in the most ignominious bondage to words. The wish to break this
spell seems to have taken strong possession of his mind. . . . As he reflected, he began more and more clearly to perceive that words, besides being the instruments
by which we govern others, are means by which we may become acquainted with
ourselves.
Frederick Denison Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy
Important as it surely is to understand the Benthamite and Millian influ-
ences on Sidgwick, it should be clear, by this point, that it is more important
still to understand the influence of the Apostles on him, since they were
the ones who liberated his mind in the first place, kindling his passion
for truth, for the life of thought, for mastering the “deepest problems of
human life.” But to understand the Apostles, one must begin by shedding
light on the mysterious figure of F. D. Maurice, a man who, though vir-
tually unread today, was a gigantic force during the Victorian period and
in many ways stood behind both Sidgwick and Mill, as a powerful voice
pleading the limitations of utilitarianism.
John Frederick Denison Maurice was Apostle number thirty, vetted in
. But as Arthur Hallam would write to his Oxford friend Gladstone,
the effect that Maurice “has produced on the minds of many at Cambridge
by the single creation of that society, the Apostles, (for the spirit though
not the form was created by him) is far greater than I can dare to calcu-
late, and will be felt both directly and indirectly in the age that is before
us.” Tennyson, too, admired Maurice, making him godfather of his own
son (named after Hallam), and Maurice would in turn establish the long
Apostolic tradition of worshipping the Tennyson and Arthur Hallam
relationship, at the heart of In Memoriam.
Born in , Maurice was the son of a very liberal-minded Unitarian
clergyman, and it has often been suggested that his lifelong opposition
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to doctrinaire religion and admiration of the search for unity in practical
ethical conduct was the result of witnessing his happy family life torn
apart by the conversion of his mother and older sisters to Calvinism. In
any event, his liberal Unitarian background certainly had an enduring
effect on him, even after his conversion to Anglicanism.
After an unusual undergraduate career at both Cambridge and (fol-
lowing a journalistic stint in London) Oxford, when his religious het-
erodoxy had pushed him in directions allowing him to avoid subscrip-
tion, he eventually quelled his doubts sufficiently to be ordained and
became chaplain of Guy’s Hospital and Lincoln’s Inn, and then a pro-
fessor of English literature, later theology, at King’s College, London. His
reluctance to believe that a benevolent God could decree eternal damna-
tion in any literal sense led to his dismissal from King’s in , but
he had nonetheless become one of the most influential Broad Church
theologians of the day, a founding father of Christian Socialism, and a
champion, like Mill, of higher education for women. In , after the
death of John Grote, he would return to Cambridge as the Knightbridge
Professor.
Quite prolific, Maurice published such works as The Kingdom of Christ
(), Theological Essays (), and a novel, Eustace Conway ().
It was he who would directly or indirectly lead a number of younger-
generation Apostles – including Apostle number , Sidgwick – into
involvement with such causes as the Working Men’s Colleges and women’s
higher education. Sidgwick knew Maurice personally from the annual
Apostolic dinners, which Maurice always attended, and, after the latter’s
return to Cambridge, from their joint participation in the “Grote club,” the
philosophical discussion group for dons that had originally met at the home
of the previous Knightbridge Professor, John Grote. Sidgwick in fact
drew the elder Maurice into the club, at a time when the former’s struggles
with subscription were coming to resemble those of the latter’s earlier
self. The Memoir records how he would stimulate his older colleague’s
recollections of “English social and political life in the thirties, forties, and
fifties” (M ).
But Maurice’s influence was more encompassing, vaster, than such
concrete institutional connections would suggest. His work, like Mill’s,
spanned the transition from the age of the First Reform Bill and the
bourgeois reformism of the Benthamites and Whigs against the Tories,
through the radical working-class protests of the Chartists, all the
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way into the era of the Second Reform Bill and the dominance of
Gladstone’s Liberal Party. The means by which he navigated these de-
mands for greater democracy were bound to appeal to certain kinds of
academic liberals. As Richter has observed of Sidgwick’s friend T. H.
Green, there was an
orthodox unorthodoxy about the faith he constructed, like so many others in
his age, out of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dr Arnold, Carlyle, F. D. Maurice
and Kingsley. . . . Disparate in detail, they were united in their Romantic, Broad Church, or Christian Socialist opposition to what they regarded as undesirable
characteristics of the eighteenth century which had persevered as the cardinal
errors of their own time. Among these were the previous century’s mocking
spirit,
or lack of reverence, its atheism, materialism, hedonism, its mechanical model of
the universe, its psychology based upon the association of ideas, and its egoistic
individualism.
For Maurice, by contrast with “Benthamism,” societies hold together
“through the trust of men in each other and through trust in someone
whom they could not see and could not name, but who, they felt, was
not far from any one of them.” The Christian socialists allowed that the
working class had been treated brutally by capitalism, but thought the
cure was fostering Christian fellowship rather than revolution. Maurice,
however, abjured any claim to found a theological or philosophical school;
dogma, doctrine, system, party – all were the selfish and blinding forces
working against unity, the recognition of “Christ in you.” He held that
the righteousness of God speaks “in Christ directly to that in each man
which God has created to recognize His voice. . . . the conscience with its
mysterious duplicity is the very self in each man; that which is feeling after
God haply it may find him, that which, if it does not find him, must sink
into selfishness and brutality and make gods after its own likeness.” He
even disliked the label “Broad Church.” The Anglican “Church” was not
a “System,” with an official point of view, but rather an attempt to em-
brace all warring factions: “Let us make Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians,
understand that we do not ask them to leave their churches for ours, to
accept any single English tradition which is not also theirs.” As he put
it in later life, “I was sent into the world that I might persuade men to
recognize Christ as the centre of their fellowship with each other, that so
they might be united in their families, their countries, and as men, not in
schools and factions.”
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It was this faith that led Mill to complain that
there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my
contemporaries. . . . Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety,
and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for
putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions
on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church
of England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the
ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which
he saw as clearly as any one) are not only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles,
but are better understood and expressed in those Articles than by any one who
rejects them.
Mill had gotten to know Maurice and his friend John Sterling at the
London Debating Society during the late s, at just about the time
Maurice was shaping the Apostles, and despite his exasperation with his
Anglicanism, learned a tremendous amount from him, becoming in effect
an Apostle in absentia.
Sidgwick, for the most part, did not think any too highly of Maurice’s
theology or biblical scholarship either. But it was not on such elements
that the influence depended. Maurice was a source for Sidgwick in other
ways – for example, in the fear of premature system building, and the
effect that it might have on the pursuit of truth. It is well to bear in
mind the title of Sidgwick’s masterwork, when considering Maurice’s in-
sistence that “[w]hen once a man begins to build a system the very gifts
and qualities which might serve in the investigation of truth, become the
greatest hindrances to it. He must make the different parts of the scheme
fit into each other: his dexterity is shown, not in detecting facts, but in
cutting them square.” The terms “system” and “method” are “the great-
est contraries imaginable: the one indicating that which is most opposed
to life, freedom, variety; and the other that without which they cannot
exist.”
Method, for Maurice, was truth, or the dialogical pursuit of it, anyway.
But truth, as Chadwick remarks of him, “was to be found only in hints
and shadows.” To Maurice’s mind, “direct knowledge and experience of
God was beyond language and could allow no substitute in the religious
catchwords of the sects. . . . He reached towards the indefinable while he
struggled to avoid defining it.” And thus, as Schneewind has argued,
“Maurice is a true Coleridgean in his insistence that there is something
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of value to be learned from the deepest views of any thinker on religious
matters. Each in his own way has seen a part or an aspect of the truth.
So far as each has done so, each is right: it is only their denials, Maurice
teaches, that are wrong.”
The reference here is, of course, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet
and critic whom Mill himself had set against Bentham as representing the
opposing spirit of the age. If Bentham had always inspired one to ask of
“any ancient or received opinion, Is it true?,” Coleridge inspired one to
ask “What is the meaning of it?” Thus, the
one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire
stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with
the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it was at first
suggested, and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered continually
credible – has seemed, to a succession of persons, to be a faithful interpretation
of their experience.
The Coleridgean orientation is certainly evident throughout Maurice’s
work, but, as Mill notes in another context, if Maurice was a Coleridgean,
he was “far superior” in intellect to Coleridge, who in fact had little philo-
sophical originality and merely plagiarized vast tracts of German phi-
losophy. In reality, much of the Romanticism that led Mill to qualify and
humanize the utilitarian doctrines that he had inherited from his father and
Bentham came to him via Maurice. And it was just such allegiances that de-
fined Maurice as one of the “Mystics,” when it came to his participation in
the Apostles during their early years. The Benthamites, Whigs, and Tories
might dominate such vehicles as the Cambridge Union, but when it came
to the Saturday evening discussions, the Mystics set the tone, and Maurice
chief among them. They appropriated Coleridge’s notion of a clerisy, a set
of opinion leaders who could substitute for the traditional clergy and lead
the work of spiritual regeneration. It was a regeneration to be won through
such thi
ngs as modern literature – the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, and
Keats – rather than through mere political reform. Thus, Wordsworth was
useful because his poetry could “make men look within for those things
in which they agree, instead of looking without for those in which they
differ.”
As Allen has maintained, this kind of work called for Apostles, for a set
of the spiritually awakened, or at least of the soul-searching. “This aspect
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of the Apostolic spirit encouraged the choice of new members on the basis
of their potential for spiritual growth. Once elected, a new member found
himself a part of an intimate, exclusive group which invited, expected, but
did not normally compel him to confess his deepest thoughts and to share
with others the experience of self-examination.” And this was indeed an
alternative to traditional Cambridge, of which John Sterling complained
that “God is called upon to erect his tabernacle among the crumbling and
weed-clad ruins of a wasted mind.” Thus,
Whatever one may think of Maurice’s early beliefs as a guide to political behaviour
(or for that matter as a guide to Coleridgean principles), there is no doubt of their value as educational theory, for they are based on a profound sense of the psychological needs of young men like himself. In place of the self-denying accumulation
of factual knowledge demanded by the Honours degree system, in place of the
self-indulgent idleness encouraged by the Ordinary degree system, in place of
the self-assertive rant enforced by the Union’s traditions, Maurice offered his
fellow-Apostles a justification for personal growth through contemplation, a pro-
cess based on the individual’s own assessment of his needs yet shared with others
pursuing the same ideal. The Society did not merely fill a gap in the University’s
curriculum by providing informal discussion of contemporary culture. Its more
essential educational role was to promote the individual’s sense of his identity
and personal worth through exploration and definition of his most deeply held
beliefs. Again, one notes the Society’s similarity to . . . the confessional group, in which soul-searching and public confession of belief are the group’s main
