The Reverend Professor Owen Chadwick
OM, KBE, FBA, FRSE
1916 – 2015
Address by The Reverend Professor John Morrill
Great St Mary’s Church
Cambridge
30th January 2016
I speak of Owen the scholar.
The University Library holds more than 90 items with Owen’s name on the cover, 26 of them
monographs, and more than 30 of them occasional lectures and papers. At a rough count this is far
more than 10,000 pages of print, and this is even before we consider the essays and articles in
collected volumes, festschriften and journals. Of course this is spread over more than half a century,
from John Cassian, a study in primitive monasticism in 1950 to Acton and History in 1998 and The Early
Reformation in Europe in 2001.
The bewildering question is: how did he do it? With many of us, our publishing careers are
hammock-shaped: high volume at either end with a big dip in the middle as we aspire to govern
small islands in the academic sea. But Owen, who ruled whole continents, as Vice Chancellor, as
President of the British Academy, as Chair of the Chadwick Commission that transformed the
governance of the Church of England, there was never a let up. In his 27 years as Master of Selwyn, he
took just two terms of sabbatical. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were just as productive as the 1950s, 1980s,
1990s. How did he do it?
Owen was a historian of religion and specifically of the churches and of individual members of
churches in complex relationships with other churches and with the states with which they were in
league or in conflict. But even that disguises a bewildering breadth in the subjects he transformed:
chronological breadth (if we overlook his first field, the patristic age which he abandoned into the safe
and revelatory hands of his beloved brother Henry), with major work in every century from the
sixteenth to the twentieth; geographical breadth, one third English, two thirds European, with
mission creep into Africa and India, and thematic breadth, from five serious biographies, through
theological explorations of the church’s teachings could and could not be semper eadem; and of how
the Churches engaged with secularisation and secularism, to profound engagement with questions of
how power and authority were exercised within the Catholic and Anglican churches, and of how
ordinary men and women, and most particularly ordinary parish priests, rolled with the blows that
came at them from all directions. We will all have favourites, for many I suspect Victorian Miniature,
described by the reviewer in The Times as ‘better than any novel’; Mackenzie’s Grave, my own
favourite, the story of a bishop vanished up the Zambesi which reveals all that was honourable and
all that was dishonourable about the imperial mind-set; and on a grander scale, the studies of the
modern papacy and the extreme dilemmas of power, or perhaps the dilemmas of extreme power.
Much of what he wrote was dictated by the requirement of the many distinguished lecture series he
graced. But it is also extraordinary that when he edited series of books, he saw it as his duty to write
the volumes no-one else was willing to write: that is why he wrote two volumes in the Oxford History
of the English Church: Popes and European Revolution; and in his mid-eighties, The Early Reformation on
the Continent. He had already written the still high-selling The Reformation in 1958 the Penguin, more
precisely the Pelican, History of the Church but this was no handicap to his writing something utterly
different in manner. In 1958, the structure was chronological and conventionally thematic. In 2001
most chapters had one-word titles – Book, Bible, Death, conversion, education, divorce, toleration,
unbelief. Here structures, timelines, places dissolve into meditations on states of mind: what it was to
believe and to witness to faith. Nearing 90, that was what mattered to him then, and he universalised
and then imagined into a specific time what he had learned in a lifetime of prayerful meditation.
Nothing he wrote ever seems obvious or misjudged. I have re-read most of his works over the past
two months. Now I must admit that ‘re-read’ is not quite right. I have glided through the pages,
following the argument, being delighted by the vignettes, the little stories which are very much
parables, the relaxed and easy style. Most pages have five or six paragraphs; sentences with sub-
clauses are hard to locate; the footnoting is, to be polite, light, and, as he got older, quixotic. There are
an awful lot of obiter dicta lacking the thicket of references others might have deployed. But he always
contextualised deeply as well as broadly. His prose is succinct and intensely flavoured, like a dish in a
2- or 3-star Michelin starred restaurant. So one can afford to glide through the pages. And in fact that
is an act of homage, for that is how Owen himself worked. To see him in a library was to see his eye
glide over the pages, with pauses only now and then to jot down a line or two which would later
trigger recall of a telling story or record a startling connection of ideas. His writing arose from an
osmotic process of reading.
His books remain a joy to read as well as demonstrations of profound learning lightly worn. But I did
not want to rely on my own beguiled judgement. So I immersed myself in reviews of his books.
Rarely can any author have so many warm and appreciative notices. It is true that a couple of
disgruntled non-conformists felt his Victorian Church to be too blithe in discussing the Church without
noticing its engagement in a struggle for souls with their co-confessionalists, and it would have been
impossible to get universal agreement for any account of Pius XII’s relations with the Fascists and
with the Holocaust, but here more than anywhere, he did not judge, he put himself in Pius’s position
and explored the impossible choices; and he persuaded most of us. And that was his way with
everything.
How could he write such persuasive and rich History on so many centuries and so many countries?
Partly because he had extraordinary abilities to multi-task. He rarely attended meetings other than
those that he chaired, without bringing with him the papers for another which he could prepare, or
(as more than once at the Faculty Board) with a file of letters and a pile of headed cards for pithy
replies. He did not speak much at meetings. But when he did, it was to the point. Partly he wrote so
much so well because of that osmotic reading habit and incredible memory. Perhaps we should rely
on one other explanation: he could only have written so much so well because God can do with time,
what he can do with loaves and fishes.
I must allow myself in the last of my allotted minutes for something more personal. His kindness to
me as a young Fellow of Selwyn arriving from Oxford via Stirling in 1975 included many one-line
postcards when our children were born, when I got promoted and more recently when my wife died.
How could six words say more than all the other letters of condolence put together? One weekend in
our first summer Owen took Frances, myself and our then only daughter, to Cley, where he sailed us
out to sea and said his office as we watched the seals. There was a reproving letter signed WOC
(never a good sign) when I deserted (his word) the ecclesia anglicana, the best of all churches (his
phrase) for the Church of Rome, but nothing further was ever said, and when I was ordained to the
permanent diaconate in 1996, I got one of those stunning life-affirming one-line postcards. When I
was with him, in 2015 as much as in 1975, I felt enveloped in warm attentiveness, made to feel he had
all the time in the world for me and only for me. He made me feel I mattered to him and to God. Isn’t
that what he did for each of us?
I began my Guardian obituary by calling him ‘one of the most remarkable men of letters of the 20th
century.’ I would wish to affirm here that he is one of the most remarkable human beings in the
lifetime of those of us who have made their way here today. Owen, may you rest in peace.
JOHN MORRILL, 30th January 2016.
