Anglicanorum Coetibus And The Whig Interpretation Of History

Edward Feser recommended some basic books by Roger Scruton at the time of his death, among which was An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Although Scruton is identified as a conservative philosopher, he was on one hand fired by the American Enterprise Institute, and he certainly isn't Catholic -- I found a YouTube of a presentation he made in Norway in which he congratulates his audience for their Protestantism, which they share with the English. But Feser clearly respects him, so I went ahead with the Guide to Modern Culture.

And Scruton brought me back to the very frustrating time I spent studying Eng Lit in graduate school. I was exposed to views generally consistent with those outlined by Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History, which Wikipedia I think accurately summarizes as "a story of progress toward the present and specifically toward the British constitutional settlement".

Typical distortions thereby introduced are:

• Viewing the British parliamentary, constitutional monarchy as the apex of human political development;
• Assuming that the constitutional monarchy was in fact an ideal held throughout all ages of the past, despite the observed facts of British history and the several power struggles between monarchs and parliaments;
• Assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (anachronism);
• Assuming that British history was a march of progress whose inevitable outcome was the constitutional monarchy; and
• Presenting political figures of the past as heroes who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.

During this time, I was further influenced by a derivative 1972 paper by the UCLA English professor Henry Knight Miller, The "Whig Interpretation" of Literary History. After I began to discern that an academic career wasn't in my future, these impressions receded into the background, and it wasn't until I started reading Scruton that I began seriously rehabilitating them in the context of Anglicanorum coetibus.

I don't believe Scruton himself endorses the Whig Interpretation, but I do think his outline of Romantic thought and its consequences in Chapters 5 and 6 is an accurate understanding of how the Whig Interpretation plays out in contemporary culture. The view of history I was taught in college and graduate school in the 1960s and 70s was heavily infused by either Protestantism or the Old Atheism of Marx and Freud, and it was definitely Whig. This carried over to literary and cultural history as well.

Scruton deconstructs the 19th-century Romantic view as one that on one hand accepts Enlightenment a priori rationalism while simultaneously finding it unendurable.

Romanticism was less a reaction to the Enlightenment than an attitude concealed within it. Only against the background of emancipation does the poetic Weltschmerz make sense. In the lasting monumnts of Romantic art we encounter the artist-hero, for whom freeedom is both an absolute value and an intolerable burden. . . . The course of Romantic art is one of ever-deeper mourning for the life of "natural piety" which Enlightenment destroyed. And from this mourning springs the Romantic hope -- the hope of recreating in imagination the community that will never again exist in fact. Hence the importance of folk poetry, folk traditions, and 'ancestral voices'. (pp 48-49)

I've previously noted here the influence of the Reform Act of 1832 and the insecurities fostered by the industrial revolution and the social upheaval created by railways as influences on the Oxford Movement and the viral popularity of Anglo-Catholicism. But I think Scruton points out an additional cultural influence here, the Romantic and Victorian longing for the idea of a community founded on natural piety, which is clearly connected with the Anglo-Catholic fantasy of a pre-Reformation English Catholicism that can, however, now be reconciled with a bourgeois culture of parliamentary progress.

But since this is a fantasy -- the Romantics at least saw the contradiction here -- this has never been a stable movement. Observers of the current debates, intellectually anemic as they are, within the ordinariates note that a basic question is never addressed, much less answered: is Anglicanorum coetibus trying to bring post-Reformation Anglicanism into the Church? What's the point, after all, of bringing Cranmerian prayers into a mass text derived from the Latin? Or is it trying to recreate (or more accurately, conjure de novo) a pre-Reformation community of natural piety, which we very briefly saw in the utterly inauthentic "Gilbertine" revival?

The measure of a good theory is its ability to make accurate predictions. The bourgeois Whig interpretation hasn't been an accurate explainer or predictor of historical trends. By the same token, the Romantic thread in modern bourgeois culture hasn't been a productive influence for use in evangelization. The minimal response to the ordinariates is simply a reflection of that. Everyone makes mistakes, look at the Edsel, New Coke, and PC Junior. Anglicanorum coetibus is based on flawed assumptions about modern culture.