The Immanence of the Divine:

Religion in the Thought of T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Michael Oakeshott

Paper prepared for the biennial conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association

Waco, Texas November 2009

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He lets the world have its way; not from the hopelessness of the sceptic or the indifference of the epicurean, but because he know that his own way, however lamely and blindly he pursues it, is yet that to which all the world’s ways converge, and that it is the way that leadeth unto eternal life.

T.H. Green “Fragment on Immortality” (1888, 160)

Thus, in everyday life we need the belief that the good is a reality. If we hold this belief more distinctly and more intensely, it amounts to this, that nothing but good is reality. This faith is what people mean by religion. Bernard Bosanquet “The Kingdom of God on Earth” (1891, 124)

Some secrets may the poet tell, For the world loves new ways; To tell too deep ones is not well – It knows not what he says.

Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’”

I.

It is fair to say that for most of the British Idealists religion was a central concern.

Despite the amount of writing they each devoted to the subject, religion was certainly an

important issue for the three thinkers addressed in this paper. And, this should be no wonder

given the general viewpoint of British idealism. Its emphasis on unity and the absolute - that

reality is a unified and coherent whole accessible to us in thought - treats all experiences, much

less penultimate experiences like religious ones, as having some place and meaning in the larger

whole.

Despite their relatively similar view about the nature of religion and the relationship

between religion and morality, T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Michael Oakeshott have

differing views on the nature of the Christianity. Though, it might be added, none of their views

of Christianity was an orthodox view. These idealists were religious modernists. Their Hegelian

historicism, acquaintance with history, carefully reading of the Bible, insistence on practical

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relevance, among other factors, made it difficult for them take the statements in the Bible

literally. They were more deeply modernist in that their approach went beyond the mere

overlooking of blunders and inconsistencies in the text. Like other modernists, they maintained

that the Bible, “does not teach a single, harmonious system of doctrine, but contains various

theologies of unequal value” (Vanderlann 1925, 6). But even this generalization does not

capture the depth each of these thinkers’ views is infused with a modernist sensibility.

Oakeshott, a self identified modernist1, puts the matter quite well in a very terse review of Percy

Gardner’s book Modernism in the Church of England. Oakeshott notes in this review,

modernism is not a school or philosophy but a tendency – a tendency that may have “always

existed and must always exist” if in fact it means insisting “theology give some answer to ‘the

force and patience of the present time’” (1927b, 316). Green, Bosanquet, and Oakeshott, would

have little difficulty fully embracing Newman’s general approach to scripture:

It may be objected that inspired documents, such as the Holy Scriptures, at once determine its doctrine without further trouble. But they were intended to create an idea, and that idea is not in the sacred text, but in the mind of the reader; and the question is, whether that idea is communicated to him, in its completeness and minute accuracy, on its first apprehension, or expands in his heart and intellect, and comes to perfection in the course of time. Nor could it be maintained without extravagance that the letter of the New Testament, or of any assignable number of books, comprises a delineation of all possible forms which divine message will assume when submitted to a multitude of minds (1845: 95). It is the manifest aim of these Idealists to make religion and Christianity more meaningful

today. Green, Bosanquet, and Oakeshott were in the familiar position of seeing the importance

of religion, but, as Bosanquet put it in his essay What is Religion, were disappointed and

“perplexed by the shape in which it comes before them” (1920, v). Religion and Christianity has

to be, so to speak, whipped into shape, not necessarily by bringing it into conformity with

1 See Fuller (1993, 4n1), for a description of the theological discussion group, the D Society, of which the young Oakeshott was a member.

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contemporary sensibilities, but by rethinking and re-conceptualizing them. Each thinker, as we

shall see, returns to an earlier experience of Christianity, not merely to revive but to extend and

improve the view of religion and Christianity.

In order to fully appreciate the Idealists’ reflections on religion it is necessary to

understand the broad outlines of their idealism. Their view of, what each at one time or another

refers to as, the Absolute is critical to their views on religion. The following section deals with

this idealism. The next section reviews each thinkers understanding of the nature of religion at a

broad level. Despite the seeming difference in definition, their views of religion are remarkably

congruent. Where they differ, however, is critical, and these differences carry over in more

pronounced form in their respective conceptions of Christianity. Green’s view is that the

religious life is a faithful living according to the “highest principle of goodness (God) working

within us.” For Bosanquet religion is the living according to the belief that “nothing but good is

reality.” And, for Oakeshott, religion is the “evocation of a sentiment” that is the penultimate

motive that moves us to faithfully enact ourselves in world, in the recognition of the value of the

present.

Each of these views of religion has a corresponding view of Christianity itself. Each

highlights the essential immediacy of the religious experience. Each thinker shares this

commitment to the immanence of the divine in one’s life as the primary character of the religious

and of the Christian experience. Though each is fully modern and at times quite radical in their

doctrinal views, Green’s view is oddly the most orthodox when it comes to the approach to

traditional Christian doctrine. He makes note of the universalism, the charity and love, and the

refusal of mere “worldliness” in Christianity. Bosanquet too finds a universalism, and, what a

first glance sound like Christian charity and brotherhood/the unselfish will. However, the

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meaning of these values are deeply refracted through the prism of his work on Ancient Greece

and Plato. Oakeshott, while not denying the importance of doctrinal elements to Christianity,

nevertheless, sees the distinguishing characteristics of Christianity to be its more intensely

personal and spiritual nature and the comprehensiveness of its viewpoint, both of which issue

from the historical element in Christianity.

II.

The British idealists all share a rather particular kind of monistic outlook. They believe that

reality is a single whole. But it is a whole whose singularity comes from a unity or cohesiveness

in experience. That is to say, reality is, and must be, always a meaningful, experienced reality.

Nothing outside of experience is real, or, to put it the other way around, in order to be real it

must be capable of being a part of human experience. The British idealists also hold this

experiential reality to have some kind of internal coherence or unity, often referring to this

unified whole as the Absolute.

T.H. Green formulates the matter in terms of self-consciousness or reason, the latter of

which he uses in such a broad way as to mean something like reflective self-consciousness.

“The world, which alone we know or can know, consists of relations of consciousness and in

relations of those relations. Space, time, matter, motion, force, are not indeed modes of

consciousness, but apart from consciousness they would not be” (1888, 228). Or, again in his

essay “Faith,” Green makes the following point while conflating reason and self-consciousness

in arguing reason is the source of a more adequate faith: “Reason is self-consciousness. It is only

as taken into our self-consciousness, and so presented to us as an object, that anything is known

to us. Thus everything that we know is known to us as a constituent of one world” (1888, 267).

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It is appropriate to make mention of F. H. Bradley’s views as well, for Bradley was a

student of Green and a thinker Oakeshott and Bosanquet both greatly admired. He puts the

matter this way: “We perceive on reflection, that to be real, or even barely to exist, must be to

fall within sentience. Sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real”

(1897, 144). This reality is also a single whole. “Reality is one in the sense that it has a positive

nature exclusive of discord, a nature which must hold throughout everything that is to be real,”

including appearances. It is individual or one in the sense that “it embraces all differences in an

inclusive harmony” (1897, 140). And, that single whole is internally related, coherent, or

harmonious: “it is individuality, the harmonious or consistent existence of our contents” the

contents being the totality of our experience (1897, 149). The larger reality, beyond my own

particular experience, Bradley calls the Absolute, the “identity of idea and reality,” where the

larger nature of the world is grasped, however, imperfectly in thought (1897, 182).

Oakeshott, who explicitly acknowledges his debt to Bradley in his introduction to

Experience and Its Modes (1933, 6), came to a similar position on the nature of reality. “No

separation is possible between reality and experience; reality is experience and is nothing but

experience” (1933, 154). And this experience is a unified whole. “And the view I propose to

maintain it that experience is a single whole, within which modifications may be distinguished,

but which admits of no final or absolute division; and that experience everywhere, not merely is

inseparable from thought, but is itself a form of thought” (10, 1933).

Green, a teacher of both Bradley and Bosanquet, reflects a similar view in his

Prolegomena to Ethics: “The terms ‘real’ and ‘objective,’ then, have no meaning except for a

consciousness which presents its experiences to itself as determined by relations, and at the same

time conceives a single unalterable order of relations determining them, with which its temporary

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presentation, as each experience occurs, of the relations determining it may be contrasted” (1969,

17).

In an essay titled “on the True Conception of Another World,” which originally was an

introduction to a translation of a fragment of Hegel’s Aesthetic, Bernard Bosanquet takes up this

very question of reality and experience. Bosanquet contrasts what he takes to be the popular

conception of a supra-sensuous world (often referred to as Heaven or the Kingdom of God); a

world that is imperceptible to our senses, peopled with immortals, and/or something to look

forward to, with the reality that makes up our sensuous experience. He insists that we see all

distinctions, such as those between worldly and spiritual, temporal and eternal, immanent and

transcendent, and phenomenal and noumenal as distinctions within this sensuous world and not

as distinctions between this world and another world (1891, 94). Great thinkers, like Plato, Kant,

and St. Paul, Bosanquet continues, must be seen in light of the former rather than the latter

position, despite their imaginations being led at times into a fatal separation between the worlds.

These distinctions are still meaningful for Bosanquet, as we shall see they are for Green

and Oakehsott, as distinctions within the world we know through experience. And, the

distinctions show Bosanquet’s broad and inclusive view of religion, boarding on a general, if not

to say hollowed-out, spiritualism. “There is, however, a genuine distinction between ‘this’ world

and the ‘other’ world, which is merely parodied by the vulgar antithesis between natural and

supernatural, finite and infinite, phenomenal and noumenal” (1891, 96). Bosanquet has a

definite view of how these distinctions should be drawn in the reality of our experience. He

likens the distinction between our understanding before and after some influential event or set of

events in our lives. “We sometimes hear it said, ‘The world is quite changed to me since I knew

such a person,’ or ‘studied such a subject,’ or ‘had suggested to me such an idea’” (1891, 96).

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He captures here the more generally held belief of the idealists that there are no ‘brute facts’ of

nature but reality is always a matter of thought and thus holds no position outside of thought; that

knowledge is always a coming to know better, more fully, and more coherently what is in some

measure already known. As he says in a more formal way “The actual facts of this world do

directly arise out of and are causally sustained by conscious intelligence; and these facts form the

world above the senses” and some facts even exist “in the medium of thought only” (1891, 97).

Here we see (and we shall see again) the pronounced influence of Plato on Bosanquet. The

distinction seems to be similar to that which Plato makes in his presentation of the divided line,2

and Bosanquet tends, like Hegel and Plato, to over-intellectualize the matter in relegating

sensuous experience to secondary status.

Now the import of this viewpoint for one’s understanding of religion should be clear, for

the central words and ideas we use to make sense of the Christian religion (God, the Kingdom of

God, faith, incarnation, redemption, reconciliation, and resurrection) are influence by this central

understanding. In general, the view makes unintelligible the positing of some reality or thing

that is not accessible to our thought, for example a God so transcendent as to be incapable of

knowing, experiencing, thinking, or talking about, or the view of another future reality that

cannot find a place in our understanding of the world as we human beings have experienced it.

Again, the British Idealists insisted that all ideas and thoughts, in order to make sense, must

somehow fit into a larger coherent picture of the world. What this does is not to completely

dissolve dualisms and distinctions, but to insist on seeing the truth in each element of the

distinction and finding the larger harmony and explanation of which they are constituent parts.

2 Bosanquet wrote a lengthy commentary on Plato’s Republic (1906) which is very interesting and which made some impact on the young Oakeshott. Oakeshott drew heavily on this work when making his notes on the Republic. Plato’s distinction at the end of Book VI of the Republic (509d) between the visible and intelligible is unmistakably similar to the one Bosanquet is drawing here.

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In doing so a distinction may still exist but it must exist in a way that the elements in the

distinction are capable of being understood and given a sensible place in a larger context. Kant’s

distinction between noumenal and phenomenal for example, may, for an idealist, capture

something real, but could not possibly mean experience with our sensual and thinking selves, on

the one hand, and a truer reality that lies beneath or behind our sensuous experience, on the

other.

III.

This idealist perspective almost necessitates that religion be a far more practical and a far less

mystical experience. For Green, Bosanquet, and Oakeshott religion is a supremely practical

thing. For each, religion is the culminating point of the moral life and as such is a far more

immanent experience of the divine. Each, however, develops a unique understanding of religion.

Religion is faithfulness to the highest principle of goodness or God working in us, for Green. He

eschews dogma, as Bosanquet and Oakeshott do, as the distinguishing mark of religion. But,

Green finds a larger and more critical role for dogma, texts, sacraments, and ritual in his

understanding of religion. For Bosanquet, in Platonic fashion, religion is the belief that nothing

but the good is a reality. And, so Bosanquet would seem happy giving up churches altogether or

so transforming them that they become almost unrecognizable. Sprigg notes that Bosanquet

worried church buildings would fall into disuse in the near future and urged using them to

educate the young to be good citizens, and to use them on Sundays (a day on which commerce

should prohibited) for “superior occupations of the mind” (2006, 286-7). For Oakeshott, religion

is the evocation of a sentiment that motivates us to see the ultimate value in present experience

and the enactment of and fidelity to our character or self. Oakeshott does not deny the

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importance of ritual, dogma, worship, sacrament, etc. to religion, but the fundamental nature of

religion is something larger than the particulars.

It may not come as a surprise, given Green’s experientialist perspective, that the source of

religion (what he calls the divine principle) is to be found in human beings themselves. The

beginnings of true religion are in the moral capacity of man himself. It is in the ability to desire

and imagine some good, not yet present for us, and the consciousness of the capacity to choose

and aim at some good, that our spirituality is manifest.3 “Yet, because the essence of man’s

spiritual endowment is the consciousness of having it, the idea of his having such capabilities,

and of a possible better state of himself consisting in their further realization, is a moving

influence on him” (1969, 189).

The divine is not something outside, apart, or above us for Green, but is more like a

capacity within us. In actualizing the divine within, the self is actualized. Reflecting the more

broad influence of Hegel’s insight, that we are in ourselves what we are for ourselves, Green puts

the matter in the following way:

The idea of the absolute desirable, as we have seen, arises out of, or rather is identical with, man’s consciousness of himself as an end to himself. It is the forecast, proper to a subject consciousness at once of himself as an absolute end, and of a life of becoming, of constant transition from possibility to realization, and from this again to a new possibility – a forecast of a wellbeing that shall consist in the complete fulfillment of himself (1969, 210)4.

Now this view deeply colors Green’s conception of God, one’s relation to God, and the

moral life. While not explicitly denying the creator God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Green

3 Green shows a certain affinity with Rousseau on a number of points regarding religion. He does not endorse Rousseau’s civil religion with anything approaching the enthusiasm Bosanquet seems to, but he does seem to agree here with the Rousseau of the Discourse on Inequality that for a man “it is in the consciousness of this liberty [to choose to ignore our animal instincts] that the spirituality of his soul is displayed” (1988, 16). There is a distinction running through all of Green’s writing between natural/animal and the spiritual. 4 See also 1888, 224ff, an unfortunately unfinished manuscript titled “Fragment of an Address on the Text ‘The Word is Nigh Thee,’” where Green starts to work out more thoroughly the direct and immediate experiential nature of God and the moral life.

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so identifies God with this spiritual/moral capacity in human beings that this immanent God of

the self becomes, at times indistinguishable, from the human will.

But when that which is being developed is itself a self-conscious subject [and not, say, an acorn], the end of its becoming must really exist not merely for, but in or as, a self-conscious subject. There must be eternally such a subject which is all that the self-conscious subject, as developed in time, has the possibility of becoming; in which the idea of the human spirit, or all that it has in itself to become, is completely realized. This consideration may suggest the true notion of the spiritual relation in which we stand to God; that He is not merely a Being who has made us, in the sense that we exist as an object of the divine consciousness in the same way in which we must suppose the system of nature so to exist, that the He is a Being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the human spirit is identical, in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of becoming (1969, 197-98).

Green is well aware of the difficulty of this position for the more orthodox believer and sees how

one might imagine the denial of God altogether as a necessary byproduct of adopting this

position. It is not his aim, however, to deny God so much as to recognize, as others have

recognized, a closer and more meaningful relationship to the divine than the one developed in the

traditional theological conceptions. “To say then that God is the final cause of the moral life, the

ideal self which no one, as a moral agent, is, but which everyone, as such an agent, is however

blindly seeking to become, is not to make him unreal. It is however . . . in a certain sense to

identify him with man; and that not with an abstract or collective humanity but with the

individual man” (1888, 225). Green seems unwilling to fully endorse the Hegelian God over a

more personalized one. In one essay, “The Witness of God,” he does say that “God is forever

reason; and his communication, has revelation is reason” (1888, 239). However, he means

reason in the larger sense of reflective experience, consciousness, or cognition and not abstract

reasoning. His larger point, however, is that “God is not something outside or beyond the

consciousness of him, anymore than duty is outside or beyond the consciousness of it” (1888,

273). This is the source of his affinity to the Gospel of John on this point. John, because he

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blended the meaning of “seeing” as both a sensuous seeing and as a spiritual cognition, presents

the “highest thought of God in language” and is the source of the highest thought of religion

because he gives us a “belief in a person now spiritually present to and in us” (1888, 219-20).

This notion of the immanence, if not the identity, of God in the human spirit is, importantly, a

distinguishing characteristic of Christianity for Green (as a result we shall return to this topic

below).

Faith, for Green, is obviously an essential element in the religious life, but in his hands it

equally undergoes a transformation. In his illuminating “Essay on Christian Dogma,” Green

gives us a view of faith, not at odds with, but quite different from, the popular and traditional

notion. Green traces the development of the early Christian experience and finds there,

unsurprisingly, the non-doctrinal elements to be the essential parts. In order to refocus the

question of the origin and authority of Christianity, he begins with a stunningly simple question

that might give even the most committed fundamentalist pause. He asks whether Paul was a

Christian given his lack of acquaintance with the bulk of the written texts that make up the New

Testament.5

For early Christians, including Paul, Christianity was a lived experience. “Christ was an

object of direct apprehension to the first disciples” (1888, 175). As such, he was the objective

and immediate expression of the highest or best spiritual life. So too for Paul, on Green’s

reading, for what was presented to Paul in his conversion on the road to Damascus was not the

written accounts of the disciples but “the presentation to the inmost consciousness of a living

person, the second Adam in whom all humanity was embodied, in whose death all men died to

be all made alive in his resurrection” (1888, 166). For Paul and these early Christians,

Christianity was a way of life, a way of being and acting in the world that was immediate and 5 St. Paul assumes a large role in the thinking of Green, Bosanquet, and Oakeshott on religion and Christianity.

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perhaps not altogether articulated and formulated. It was “a work, a life, an experience;” a

consciousness of Jesus through revelation and intuition, before it was ever a system of thought

(1888, 164, 167).

Once Christianity ceased to be a way of life in those small groups of early Christians and

confronted the larger world, it could not help but to be transformed. “Coming into the world in

the fullness of time, it found on every hand points of contact with the facts and ideas of the age”

(1888, 169). Individuals absorbed, interpreted, and hence modified Christianity (which they

must inevitably do) according to their own experiences. In this transformation Christianity

became a “theory or rule of action” and no longer an “immediate intuition” (1888, 169).

The confrontation with the inevitable contradictions and heresies that arise in every

generation (some of the earliest being Gnosticism and Arianism) forced the hand of this lived,

experiential Christianity into formulating dogma and an authoritative tradition, and Tertullian is

recognized as the father of this development (1888, 162). Finally, the authoritative tradition and

infallibility of the Church is replaced by creeds, doctrines, and written texts (1888, 162).

Christianity becomes completely intellectualized and theorized. The council of Chalcedon marks

a moment, for Green, in this history when “Reflection has triumphed over intuition, theology had

devoured its parent” (1888, 175). Green goes so far as to equate the formalization of Christianity

into a creed or doctrine with “heresy” (1888, 171).

Green understands the relationship between this early lived experience and the Christian

dogma that developed in a strikingly parallel way to how Oakeshott sees the relationship of any

practice with its formulation in thought and theory. In a series of revealing metaphors, Green

describes the relationship in the following way: “it is as the abstractions of the Aristotelian

metaphysic are, or are not, to be found in the concrete philosophic life of Socrates, and the

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British constitution according to De Lolme in Magna Charta” (1888, 164). Green sees in

Christian dogma a characteristic of all dogma: it is a distillation and an abstraction of an actual

experience (1888, 171, 175). Put another way, experience comes first. Only later, and

insufficiently, is this experience articulated and made into a system of thought.6 “Theory never

keeps pace with experience; not is a new principle of inner life at once able to give a sufficient

speculative account of itself” (1888, 179-80).

Despite these misgivings, Green does see some value in dogma. Dogma is a way,

perhaps the only sure way, short of the immediate experience itself, of preserving the experience

and transmitting it to future generations. Creeds might also be necessary to orient most people to

this original Christian experience. Nevertheless, dogma is no substitute for the lived, intuitive,

immediate experience. Further, dogma has deformed the meaning of “faith.”

This development of Christianity in to a system of thought has been paralleled by a

bifurcation in the meaning of Faith. Faith has come to mean faith in creeds or dogmas, or faith

in some external authority (tradition, a text, a Church). So, what could faith have meant to an

early Christian? Green turns again to St. Paul to help fill in the picture and investigates the

multiple meanings of faith in the Bible. The faith choice of the early Christian was one between

“faithfulness to the law” or to act “by faith” (1888, 191). Faithfulness to the law would be

faithfulness to God’s commands and the Torah, but what can “by faith” mean? For Green, this

kind of faith is the “simple receptivity to God to live through us;” to be the spirit in the law rather

than mere faithfulness in living under the law; to have “the mind of God as an inward principle”

(1888, 196, 201). And, as we have seen, if God is that highest principle of goodness working

6 Compare Oakeshott introductory remark in an essay on education: “It is a favourite theory of mine that what people call ‘ideals’ and ‘purposes’ are never themselves the source of human activity; they are shorthand expressions for the real spring of conduct, which is a disposition to do certain things and a knowledge of how to do them” (1989, 95). Oakehsott is making the point that abstract distillations of an activity are partial and disembodied expressions of the concrete and immediate experience.

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through and in us, then faith is that adherence or belief in that true principle. It is a kind of

faithfulness to oneself and one’s highest conception of the good. So, Green concludes, “‘Faith’

is a certain condition of the spiritual consciousness” (1888, 181).

The choice today, according to Green, is between acting “by faith” and what might be

seen as a reformulation of “faithfulness to the law” in the form of putting faith in creeds, texts,

dogmas, doctrines, external authority, etc. Faith in the latter sense necessarily, for Green,

becomes mystified: the texts come to be seen as holy and the uncorrupted word of God, or the

church or Pope are viewed as having unique spiritual insight, or events of the past are mystified

and miracles themselves are viewed as the objects of faith. Again, this is contrasted with the

lived faith of St. Paul. “St. Paul’s theology, founded on personal experience in the light of which

he interpreted the relations of man to God, inevitably changed its character in becoming a

popular creed. Such terms as forgiveness, reconciliation, and salvation, instead of representing

experiences of the believer, came to represent certain divine transactions, in which the believer

had no personal part” outside merely faith that they exist (1888, 256). The most miraculous

event believed to sit at the center of the Christianity (even by those as theologically eccentric as

Hobbes), the resurrection, is seen by Green in this Pauline light. Faith comes by the spirit, and

so, to Paul, not even the resurrection is “evidence of a revelation, but the thing revealed” (1888,

256). The role of faith is thus transposed in modern times from being that which is the condition

of belief to that which is believed in. It is the former view that is critical for Green and an

essential element of religion that has been obscured. This condition for Green is “a prevailing

conviction of our presence to God and his to us, of his gracious mind towards us, working in and

with and through us, of our duty to our fellow-men as our brethren in him, has been the source of

whatever has been best in us and in our deeds” (1888, 258).

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Green understands modern Christians are asked to have both this inward faith and also

the faith in actual, often miraculous, events. However, he adds, “the more strongly we insist that

faith is a personal and conscious relation of man to God, forming the principle of a new life, not

perhaps observable by others, but which the man’s own conscience recognizes, the more

awkward becomes its dependence on events believed to have happened in the past” (1888, 259).

It is not as if this question of past events is insignificant to Christians, but living the Christian life

is the priority. He asks how much sense it makes if our holiness depended on whether there was

enough evidence to support a particular view of events in the past or to depend on an external

authority for belief. This is very often the way the questions of religion are popularly formulated

today. We argue over the accuracy of the carbon dating of the shroud of Turin or the relative

likelihood of disposing of Jesus’ body in some way other than the resurrection. To Green this

misses the point. It is not being able to verify some event in the past or believing some

propositional statement that necessarily makes a person better or worse in their actions.

Green recognizes his view of faith also avoids the conflict between science and religion,

a topic he says that “nowadays is on the tongues of all men and in the hearts of many” (1888,

266). The conflict in his time was increasingly centering on evolution, as Darwin’s ideas

became more accessible to and captured the imagination of the educated public (Boucher 2000,

7).7 Science, according to Green, cannot conceive of something having no previous antecedents

or consequents. It has boundaries. It does not deal with what cannot be understood under the

category of what is natural, and it oversteps this boundary when it speculates at all on what is not

natural: “It is another matter when it goes on to assume that there is nothing not natural,” for

7 It is striking just how may British Idealist had something to say about evolution at the time. F.H. Bradley (1894), Edward Caird (1904) and T.H. Green (1888, Essay on Christian Dogma) all address the issue, and David G. Ritchie thought it so important he wrote a whole book on the matter Darwin and Hegel (1893). For insightful treatments of how Oakeshott addressed the matter of science and religion and how Oakeshott’s thinking helps us better understand the nature of the current debate over the teaching of evolution in schools see Fuller (2009) and Abel (2009).

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science has no authority in the spiritual, except to teach us the lesson that “God is not to be

sought in nature, nor in the beginning or end of nature, but in man himself” (1888, 264-65).

It is not surprising, being a student of Green, that Bosanquet had similar views on

religion. His differences are important, however, for they ultimately affect the differing view of

Christianity.

Bosanquet makes clear in an introduction he wrote for the publication of a fragment of

Hegel’s Aesthetic that he wants to explain “the conception of a spiritual world which is present

and actual” not one that is some future state or takes place in some transcendent place (1891, 93).

He makes these views more forcefully in his essay “The Kingdom of God on Earth” (1891, 108-

130). Here Bosanquet acknowledges that popular ideas of heaven give comfort to those who

find the world miserable and unjust, but insists that religion is about the present state and not

some future state, and that the popular view has a number of pernicious effects. First, it distracts

from the value of our current experience and from the work that must be done in the world.

“Injustice must be redressed, beauty enjoyed, knowledge won, and goodness attained, here on

this earth of ours” (1891, 109). But, second, this view of heaven as a place in the future that we

may enter after our earthly lives involves a view of religion and morality that Bosanquet finds

useful but ultimately untenable. This view is that there is a “moral government of the world by

rewards and punishments” (1891, 109). Though the stories of rewards and punishments either

now or in some future state are not without practical value for Bosanquet in pointing us toward

the strength of the “good,” and in reinforcing an appeal to conscience, nevertheless, what makes

one good or bad is the quality of the will, and not necessarily the success or failure of the

external actions. In the view that there is a current or ultimate system of rewards and

punishments that provide incentive to our actions, one need not act out of a good will. In fact, it

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may often be the case that the primary motive of an action is a selfish will to gain the reward or

avoid the punishment.8

As an added issue, Bosanquet notes, this puts God in the position of a king or master

outside of this world which, though not necessarily a problem on its face, implies moral action is

something like following the command God laid down in the Bible. Not only would this make

the most important people in the world (if indeed religion is the supreme element in one’s life as

Bosanquet acknowledges) those who study and pronounce the meaning of the Bible (i.e., the

clergy), but this also puts individuals in the position of merely following something akin to

parental authority. Echoing Plato’s Euthyphro,9 Bosanquet asks if God’s commands right

because they are in the Bible or are they in the Bible because they are right? (1891, 114). That

religion and morality, and the Bible, must be reasonable, is insisted upon here, and elsewhere, by

Bosanquet. We must believe it to be right, and that is the ultimate source of authority. It must

bind in foro interno.

Bosanquet, in characteristic fashion of an idealist, asks us to re-conceptualize the

Kingdom of God, not as some place to visit in the future, but as the Kingdom of God “within you

(or perhaps ‘among you’)” (1891, 114). Bosanquet has in mind at least two things. First, he is

taking a familiar modernist position vis-à-vis the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven or the

Kingdom of God. He argue that the Kingdom of God was believed by the early believers to

supplant this order here on earth and was not some supernatural, other-worldly, or transcendent

8 F.H. Bradley had already worked this out much more fully and carefully in his Ethical Studies, first published in 1876 – a work to which Bosanquet acknowledged a great debt. Oakeshott was well acquainted with Ethical Studies and, as we shall see below, equally emphasizes the motivational element in conduct over the practical success in conduct. 9 See especially 10d-11b.

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place as it is often held. He relies on Biblical passages to support this claim and on a plain

reading of the Lord’s Prayer: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth.”10

More significantly for Bosanquet is the Kingdom of God within you in the form of the

will. Returning to the point that ultimate authority is not to be found in the Church or some other

authoritative interpreter of the Bible, Bosanquet addresses the questions of how we know God’s

will and why we should do God’s will when we know it. His answers to these questions are that

“We must know what is right, what we call God’s will, by finding it in our own will. And we

must do what is right, what we call God’s will, because we find it is our own will” (1891, 116).

Bosanquet turns to Bradley again and his essay “My Station and Its Duties” to fill in the picture

here. One knows a good will; our will; God’s will; by recognizing our various roles in life and

the requirements of those roles. As father/mother, husband/wife, employee, citizen, etc. we

come to be defined. To act well is to recognize what is required of us in those roles and perform

them. Bosanquet invokes Plato in addressing the objection that there might be something higher

in morality and religion than merely doing one’s duties. He notes that Plato makes duty the key

to establishing his just city. By each “minding his own business” the city is just. Bosanquet

finds it rather peculiar that this very point has been turned into the paradigm case of what is

believed to be Plato’s imaginary impossibilities (1891, 119).

He does go on to say that our station and its duties gives us the “reason” for doing right,

but religious life is more than that. One must do one’s duties with spirit; with an eye toward the

larger good. Like a family, each contributes to the whole and this spirited contribution brings

happiness to the whole. Like a family, one’s own will becomes synonymous with “the common

aim and spirit of society and of mankind” (1891, 121). And Bosanquet, perhaps not

10 One cannot help but think of another Englishman, also the son of a clergyman, Thomas Hobbes, who argued quite strongly that the Kingdom of Heaven was imaged by early Christians to be a transformation of this current, earthly order in historical time, and masterfully garners the scriptural evidence to support this view.

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intentionally, drives home the social aspect of this view and reinforces its Hegelian and Platonic

origins by reconfiguring a memorable passage from the Gospel of Matthew (18:20): “When two

or three are gathered together, cooperating for a social good, there is the Divine spirit in the mist

of them” (1891, 121). This is the religious life for Bosanquet and religion itself is the belief not

only that the good is a reality, but that “nothing but good is a reality” (1892, 124). Again we see,

as we did with Green, an intensely personal and immanent view of the experience of the divine.

There are times when Bosanquet seems to prioritize the individual in this picture of

religious experience. For example he argues in a little book simply titled “What is Religion?”

what would appear to be a view of spirituality that leaves a good deal to each individual: “You

must work out and let him work out his own unique kind of health and his unique spiritual

development in view of each other and of what he has to do and be” (1920, 55). However, the

social element is never far from the surface in his thinking.

What Bosanquet seems to adhere to a neo-Platonism, universalized by Christianity,

where behind the truth is the Good. It is this Good that is genuinely real, individual, and

concrete. Once we gaze upon the Good itself we cannot help but to orient ourselves in this

direction, for anything outside it (including evil) is not real. While it is the moral capacity of

man that sits at the foundation of religion for Bosanquet, true religion must be in accord with

reason, and the Kingdom of God comes into being when the universal religion of reason takes

root, for it provides the force for a “continual approach to perfection” (1891, 129). There will be

more to say about the social aspect of religion that arises out of Bosanquet’s Platonic orientation

when Bosanquet’s particular view of Christianity is taken up below.

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It is a bit more difficult to study Oakeshott’s views on religion, for, aside from some early

essays, he addresses the matter only briefly in his major published works.11 Oakeshott was well

acquainted with Green’s and Bosanquet’s writings and, interestingly, followed Bosanquet’s

commentary on Plato’s Republic quite closely in his own notes on Plato. He was reading the

Republic and Bosanquet’s Commentary around the same time he was thinking and writing more

directly on religion in the 1920s and 1930s. It is no surprise then that Oakeshott has some very

similar thoughts on religion, and/or that Green’s and Bosanquet’s thinking can help illuminate

many of Oakeshott’s writings on the subject.

To Oakeshott, religion was above all a practical matter. In Oakeshott’s earliest

book, Experience and Its Modes (1933), he worked out a view of the different ways (modes) we

have developed as human beings of explaining and moving in the world. In this work he

identifies the three distinctive modes of history, science, and practice, each rooted in a set of

assumptions. Each attempts to explain the whole of experience from a particular vantage point.

The Historical mode attempts to explain the present wholly in terms of the past, the mode of

Science attempts to explain and describe all of experience under the category of quantity, and the

Practical mode understands the world in terms of power and will – employing notions of ought,

good, desire, choice, etc. Put slightly differently, the practical mode is the realm of morality:

morality in the sense of being the realm of valuation, choice, and will; of involving standards of

good and bad, and not moral in the sense of always acting well. At first glance, it might be fairly

obvious religion fits into this practical mode of understanding most easily. For Oakeshott,

however, the implications of religion being fundamentally a practical matter are far reaching and

necessitate the abandonment of particular conceptions of the religious life.

11 The most substantive of Oakeshott’s writings on religion have been gathered in one place, thanks to Timothy Fuller, in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life (1993). Other significant treatments are in Oakeshott early work, Experience and its Modes (1933) and in his most mature work on theorizing the state, On Human Conduct (1975).

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Religion falls into this practical, moral realm as a part to a whole. Its relationship

to this whole is very particular. Religion is the most “concrete mood” of the practical life; the

carrying to its extreme “what ought to be;” the “consummation of practice” (1933, 292). What

Oakeshott has in mind by this is put succinctly in an early book review. “It [religion] stands in

its own right, resting upon the sense of the Holy, which is stirred only by what is valued as

‘sacred’ – the ‘sacred’ meaning a valuation of absolute worth which cannot be expressed in, or

reduced to, any less absolute terms” (1926, 319).

Like Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet (the latter of whom Oakeshott makes specific

mention of), religion is the completion of morality, in the sense that it is the highest view we

have of life and so all of our particular contingent actions aim at being consonant with that

higher view. Morality is never complete, Oakeshott says in his essay “Religion and the Moral

Life” because morality is an endless chain of “oughts” that spring up like hydra-heads once each

is slain. Later, Oakeshott would memorably call this the “deadliness of doing” (1975, 74). It is

the larger vision that motivates moral behavior that one could call religion for these idealists. “In

religious consciousness there is a belief in an object other than myself; an object, moreover,

which is real,” Oakeshott says, so religion is not becoming good, but losing oneself in God

(1993, 42).

This larger vision that has no higher valuation is purely a spiritual matter; purely a matter

of thought. Like Green and to a greater extent Bosanquet, Oakeshott makes note of the role of

reason here. In his essay “Some Remarks on the Nature and Meaning of Sociality,” he lays out

the spiritual connection that is necessary for society.

All unity in human minds depends upon a devotion to the highest end which we know . . . Men are united; society is society, only in so far as they live after the guidance of reason. The good is the child of reason . . . And God is the life of reason . . . Just as to Plato it was clear that the measure or depth of the unity of a band of pirates is in exact proportion

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to their justice, so to us it appears that the depth of our sociality is proportionate to the highest good we know, which we call religion (1993, 60).

He goes on to liken the attachment to this highest conception of the good to the intellectual love

that undergirds the highest of patriotism (1993, 60). This is unusual language for Oakeshott,

who might have still been recovering from the intoxicating vapors of the Republic when he wrote

this passage. The language is startling not only because it is unusual for Oakeshott to use the

vocabulary of Plato, but also because it points away from his more developed thought on

religion: a view of religion that significantly separates him from Green and Bosanquet but which

is already in his earliest of writings.

Oakeshott works out this alternative view of religion in a 1929 essay “Religion and the

World” (1993) and most fully in On Human Conduct (1975). Reiterating the view that religion

is that motivating view of the greatest good, Oakeshott says that all religion has the character of

being “set over and against the world” (1993, 27). What define particular religions is how the

world is conceptualized and how that world is believed to be transcended. Oakeshott follows

Green’s and Bosanquet’s example in turning to the early Christian experience to illustrate the

distinction between this world and another world. It was the hope of early Christians that the

current, darkly unstable order would give way to the blessings of a new order (1993, 28). In

light of the delayed second coming of Christ that would usher in this new age, the view

developed, and superseded this early historical dualism, that the world was divided between

material and spiritual realms, where the aim was to abandon the body and its pleasures in favor

of the care for the soul (1993, 29). Oakeshott finds, as we have seen Green and Bosanquet

found, the germ of a better conception of religion in “the primitive Christian of the world” (1993,

29). He finds alongside this rejection of the current age and the hope in a blessed age to come,

the rejection of the current scale of values for a different set of values (1993, 30). What

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Oakeshott sees of importance here is that this dualism roots the matter firmly in the here and

now, not the now and then, or the human and divine world. Like the Augustinian two cities,

each dominated by a particular kind of love, this distinction for Oakeshott is a distinction

between two different ways of being in the world.12

Drawing on this current dualism, Oakeshott develops a notion of the religious life that

places, as we have seen Green and Bosanquet have done, great store in the fidelity to one’s self

and the attempt to avoid falling prey to the false satisfactions of the worldly individual. One’s

religious calling is the development of a sensibility disclosed in a character faithfully enacted in

the present. What distinguishes the worldly man is not merely his belief in material pleasure and

success, but, unlike those early Christians anticipating the speedy approach of a new age, but

also “his belief in the reality and permanence of the present order of things” over and against the

fleeting nature of our selves (1993, 30). External success (reputation, career, making a

contribution or leaving a lasting mark) is the standard of worldliness, versus the personal

standard of the “realization of a self” (1993, 31-32). It is the development and fidelity to one’s

character that is most valued by the religious man, so much so that external success is treated

with a “candid detachment” (1993, 33).

Religion, for Oakeshott, becomes “simply life itself, life dominated by the belief that its

value is in the present, not merely in the past or the future, that if we lose ourselves we lose all”

(1993, 14). Oakeshott refines this view in On Human Conduct, and in the process moves much

more towards a view where personal fidelity to one’s individual character is the mark of the

religious life than either Bosanquet or Green are willing to do. He distinguishes the two

elements of self-disclosure and self-enactment in human conduct. Self-disclosure involves our

external performances where we aim to achieve our imagined and wished for outcomes. Our 12 See Augustine’s City of God, especially Book XIV, Chapter 28.

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action here, as we all know, is immersed in contingency and hazardous (not least because we

often have to rely on others); constantly “liable to frustration, disappointment, and defeat” (1975,

73). Self-enactment involves the motives of action, the action “considered in terms of the

sentiment or sentiments in which it is chosen and performed” (1975, 72). In this aspect of our

conduct, Oakeshott remarks, one’s conduct can be relatively free from the contingency and

hazard that permeates self-disclosure. It is in one’s self-enactment that “doing is delivered, at

least in part, from the deadliness of doing, a deliverance gracefully enjoyed in the quite of a

religious faith” (1975, 74).

Oakeshott continues, however, in some of the most hauntingly existentialist passages in

his work, to argue that religion is also a reconciliation to nothingness (1975, 84). When we give

up the false gods and illusions in the moral life we see that most, if not all, is transitory. The

world, as Oakeshott indicated earlier, is the fleeting thing. In the face of the sincere

confrontation with the evanescent nature of our actions in the world and the world itself one may

have the gift of faith. This is not where Oakeshott shutters at the horror of staring into the heart

of darkness, or where he argues for a leap of faith. Rather, in a less extravagant, but perhaps

more directly meaningful way, he urges one envision what is best and valuable in human

experience, and, with the fidelity of a saint, to press on to act in the world with the sentiments

appropriate to that vision.

Religious faith is the evocation of a sentiment (the love, the glory, or the honour of God, for example, or even a humble caritas), to be added to all others as the motive of all motives in terms of which the fugitive adventures of human conduct, without being released from their mortal and their moral conditions, are graced with an intimation of immortality: the sharpness of death and the deadliness of doing overcome, and the transitory sweetness of the mortal affection, the tumult of grief and the passing of beauty of a May morning recognized neither as merely evanescent adventures or emblems of better things to come, but as adventures, themselves encounters with eternity (1975, 85).

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Despite the similarities, how different Oakeshott’s picture of religion is to Bosanquet’s and

Green’s is best explore in their respective conceptions of Christianity. Suffice it to say here that

Oakeshott’s view is more profoundly individualistic, focusing on faithfully enacting one’s own

character.

IV.

We have seen that Green’s view of religion insists on a lived experience and not the mere

adoption of a creed; not a mere obedience to law, but faith in the highest principle of goodness

(God) working within us. What then is unique to the Christian religion for Green? In many

ways, it is just this immediacy of God in our lives that is the central Christian insight for Green.

Ancient thought developed the notion that the world was a system of thought and the expression

of God. The Christian insight is that truth and love should reside in men (1888, 242-43). The

death of Christ meant “death ‘unto the law’; that is, deliverance of man from the attitude in

which he stood to God as a servant to a taskmaster, and the substitution for this of the

consciousness of the community with God” (1888, 188). This is the meaning of the incarnation

and resurrection. It is through the incarnation that the divinity was made present to each as an

inward spirit. The resurrection is the dying to sin, namely, worldliness and selfishness. But,

under the sway of church doctors, “the death and resurrection of Christ ceased to be looked upon

as perpetually reenacted in the surrender of the fleshly self and the substitution for it of a new

man in the moral life,” which is what they were for Paul and should be again. Instead these have

become merely viewed as past events and have been unnecessarily mystified. Green goes so far

as to argue that it was Paul’s moral and personal experience of dying and rising again with Christ

daily, that “gave reality to the supposed historical events” (1888, 257-58). We shall see

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movement from the lived experience to the doctrine again with Green, but for now what makes

this Christian is its immediacy.

Christianity is also marked by its universality. Plato and Aristotle laid the groundwork

for morals but applied them to too narrow a slice of society, whereas Christianity and Roman

conquest made progress toward the idea of “human brotherhood and a universal society” (1969,

305-6). What this opened up was twofold. On the one hand, as we have seen, the divinity might

be a living presence in each and everyone. And, on the other hand, the dignity and the

responsibility of each individual implied in this universalism is equally a Christian characteristic

for Green. As a lived experience, the Christian faith is demonstrated in charity and Christian

love; in the expression of Christian character, regardless of rank and however meagerly one

might be able to express it in their particular station in life (1888, 245-46).

Finally, Christianity also issues in a distinctively “unworldly” life. In a view similar to

Oakeshott’s, that imagines the choice is between the worldly and the religious orientation in this

world, Green says,

‘Moral life’ is process in which we become less and less parts of the world, determined by natural influences, but not thereby less related to the world. That relation to it which in understanding, and love determined by understanding, gradually takes the place of that which consists in animal affection. The ‘glorified life’ must be thought of as the completion of this process. A renewed ‘embodiment,’ if that means anything, would be but a return to that condition in which we are but parts of nature, a condition from which the moral life is already a partial deliverance (1888, 205).

Again, this is the meaning Green attaches to the resurrection and what it opened up. There is

more content for Green in these “natural influences.” Green has in mind by the natural, the

selfish will, but also the seeking of power, looseness, impurity, luxury, indolence, self-conceit,

and intellectual pride (1888, 218, 248-50). He ends up creating a creed of his own, more

generalized than many, that he believes captures the essential character of Christianity: “The

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conscious of a degradation no acquired but inherent, of its removal by the assumption of the

degraded nature into the Godhead itself, of the consequent reconciliation between the alienated

man and God, and a free efflux of divine grace in the elevation of the individual’s life, these are

the vital elements of the christian’s experience” (1888, 181). Despite its generality, Green

envisions this elevation also as an adherence to the virtues that correspond to the vices identified

above.

In an odd way, Green returns to a more orthodox Christian perspective than Bosanquet,

and certainly Oakeshott, in his attitude toward dogma. Green ends up endorsing Christian

dogma even more specific than his creed. “The christian ordinances are at hand for our

refreshment, and if we are wise we shall not neglect them” (1888, 251). We must see them for

what they are, however. Just as Paul’s faith in the historical events of Jesus’ life are seen

through the lived experience of the faith, and as the Gospels are fragmented distillations and

abridgments that have come after a full, rich, lived experience, so too, the Christian experience

must be first experiential and only then dogmatic.13

Green is critical of “inward light” notions of religious experience, and attempts to

distance his view form them. He argues that in these notions the inward experiences are left

merely inward without expressing themselves in thought and definite ideas, let alone in an active

way of life. Green is skeptical of an individual’s ability to give meaning to these immediate

experiences on their own. However profound and genuinely religious an inward experience is,

left to himself he will formulate the Christian experience “inadequately” (1888, 182). If the

Christian experience had been left merely as a personal experience, it was “liable to indefinite

modification and mutilation according to personal tendencies of different times and situation”

13 One might recognize here a close approximation to Oakeshott’s views on rationalism and the relationship between practical/experiential knowledge and technical/ideological knowledge. The former precedes the latter, for Oakeshott, and the latter is a mere abridgement of the formal aspects of the former (1991, 12).

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(1888, 184). As a result, Green argues, “Christian dogma must be retained in its completeness,

but it must be transformed into a philosophy” (1888, 182). We have a progressive story of

Christianity then, for Green. We have an initial intuitive experience, however partially embodied

in a church and creed (which may have been necessary to retain transmit its essential identity),

and now an opportunity to examine both and articulate a fuller view of the Christian experience:

“with the gradual development of the thinking spirit it rises to a more adequate conception of

itself” (1888, 184-85). And, we have for Green a Christianity that is practical in at least two

senses. First, it is practical in its immediacy. The essence of Christianity is faithfulness to a way

of life and not merely a set of doctrines. Second, Christianity (and this may be in tension with

this first element) offers broad injunctions for how to live. There is the universal injunction to

act charitably and forsake the “worldly” aspect in life.

It is hard to know who to characterize Bosanquet’s view of Christianity. Perhaps it could

be called a Platonized Christianity, or even better, a Hellenized spiritualism, for aside from the

universalizing element in Christianity and the charity and benevolence that we saw in Green, it is

not clear what makes his view distinctively Christian. Even his view of charity is altered into a

more social charity. In fact, Bosanquet’s view is far more focused on each contributing to the

good of the whole than Green’s or Oakeshott’s. Even though Green relies on the vocabulary of

the “Good,” he still imagines the religious journey and the charity that is required of a Christian

to be guided by the lights of the individual. There is a faithfulness to one’s own conception of

the good that would seem to outweigh a collective notion of the good. As the passage that opens

this paper says: “it is his own way” that “leadeth unto eternal life” (1888, 160). The contrast

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with Bosanquet is evident in Bosanquet’s general approach to the Bible. In his essay, “How to

Read the New Testament,” we can see clearly his more collective view of the Good.14

Like Green, Bosanquet wishes us to think through the early production of the books of

the Bible and what they meant at the time in order to approach them in a more relevant and less

superstitious manner. He does so less to turn our attention away from doctrine as to turn it

toward a more experiential Christianity and to turn our attention toward what he believes is the

core of the Christian experience.

He first directs our attention away from the popular belief that these are inspired texts by

first the reader to attempt to enter thoroughly into spirit of the time of the writing’s origin. We

are to be fearless in probing the meaning of these texts and in setting aside the theological veneer

that has developed historically over these texts. While he acknowledges that a Church needs a

theology and perhaps needs to treat the books of the New Testament as “inspired writings,”

nevertheless, neither the writers themselves nor the early Christian communities that developed

in the first centuries after Christ’s death thought these were “inspired” or “infallible” writings. It

was the Old Testament writings (its law and the prophets) that were viewed as inspired (1891,

36). Nearly all of the books (save the Letter to the Hebrews, Luke, and John, according to

Bosanquet) were written for special occasions and so were not even for “the benefit of posterity”

(1891, 140).

Bosanquet wants us to gain, first, a sense of the dates at which and order in which the

various writings of the New Testament were written and, second, to put together “the general

movement of ideas and sentiments which they share, in spite of the very different purposes with

which they were severally written” (1891, 136). The dates of the writings seems less important:

14 This essay, like his essay “The Kingdom of God on Earth,” was originally given as a lecture to the Ethical Society in London, which characterizes as being as based on the ethical societies in the United States for “spreading moral ideas and strengthening moral influences on a non-dogmatic basis” (1891, iii).

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The “genuine” Pauline writings came first (54-55 AD) and provide the “earliest and most certain

records about Christianity;” following the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans and the lost of

belief a timely restored Davidic monarchy (64-70 AD) came Hebrews and the Revelation of St.

John; then (around 100-150) came the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, followed by Acts,

and then John, sometime toward the end of this period; finally, under the persecution of Trajan

(beginning around 100AD) came Peter and Timothy beginning the organization of the church.

The implication of this chronology, for Bosanquet, would seem to be that it reinforces the fact

that Paul’s writings are the most historically accurate depiction of Jesus and Christianity, though,

we have also seen with Green and John’s Gospel, not necessarily the most developed idea of

Christianity. The more significant part of Bosanquet’s treatment is devoted to the system of

ideas that develops.

Bosanquet divides the development of early Christianity into four epochs: the first is

when the fundamental principles of Christianity are laid out (from 33 AD), then a period of their

application (from 40 AD), then the period where the Divine Ideal is developed (around 130 AD

he speculates), and finally, the worldly reality of Christianity solidifies (from 150 AD on).

Partly reiterating what he had said in his essay “The Kingdom of God on Earth,” and

relying on what he believes are the most historically accurate works of Paul, Bosanquet argues

we must rethink those principles that have come down to us in the Christian religion. “Salvation,

eternal life, the world to come, forgiveness of sins, must all be interpreted in the same way as the

kingdom of heaven; partly meaning a state of mind which begins at once and is the essential

change, and partly certain consequences, such as being fit for the miraculous community of the

saints on earth” (1891, 143). Again here we see the two central principles are the moral vision

that develops and the progress of society. The Christian life “on the one hand, is to consist of

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righteousness of heart and life, in genuine human morality, in putting away the selfish will. And,

it is to consist, for this very reason, on the other hand, in a purification of human society and the

formation of a righteous community not restricted to any nation, rank or creed” (1891, 144).

In the closest he comes to stating specifically what he thinks is the morality of Christ’s

gospel he says: “one great sentiment of Jesus runs very near to sentimentalism. I mean the

warnings of worldliness. Nothing, indeed, was more brilliantly true than the saying about the

cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches, which choke the word, so that men’s lives

become barren” (1891, 146). As we have seen, however, this moral life that puts aside the

selfish is most fully realized in the larger community. Bosanquet continues, there is “nothing

nobler than a life of thoughtful and dutiful citizenship” and he then goes on to quote Pericles’

Oration where Pericles calls those Athenians who do not take part in the public affairs of the city

not apolitical but useless (1891, 146). What seems to emerge here is an injunction against

elevating commerce in one’s life and perhaps the entire oikos, or Greek private sphere. This is as

specific as it gets in the description of the distinctive and essential identity of Christianity.

Having laid out what he considers to be the core principles of Christianity, Bosanquet

goes on to the application, which is significant in being a genuinely world or trans-national

religion. Paul’s conversion was second in importance in the history of the world only to Jesus’

ministry and what resulted was a Gospel of Humanity (1891, 149-50). Paul’s doctrine preached

being one in and with Christ: In, in the sense of being united in a society of believers as “wide as

the world;” and with, in the sense that the believer has “put away his base will, is dead to sin”

(1891, 150). Bosanquet compares Paul’s view to Plato’s view of a unified state, but whereas

Plato was thinking of a visible and limited state, Paul had and invisible commonwealth of

believers (1891, 152). This is how Bosanquet interprets the injunction “by faith alone.” The

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faith here is faith in the good of the whole and not a set of doctrines or a set of historical facts.

Whenever a person is carried beyond himself (in seeing the good of the whole or the good of the

nation) we find the universal basis of the religious experience, for Bosanquet: “whatever practice

or doctrine enables us to realize this in our life is so far a religion, for it does the essential work

of a religion” (1920, 5-7). Religion is when you surrender yourself to the good; when you

transcend your individual finitude for the social good. “‘You cannot be a whole unless you join

a whole.’ This, I believe, is religion” (1920, 12).

Following Green, it is in John’s Gospel that Bosanquet finds both the most rational

account of religion and the seeds of superstition. In John, “Paul’s idea of spiritual oneness is

carried out in the notion of the Holy Spirit” and this new position “stands complete as the

absolute truth and freedom” (1891, 154). But, there is also the beginning of theological

superstition in the John, by which Bosanquet seems to mean doctrines like the trinity, in which

the simplicity of Jesus’ life is lost. He spends sometime outlining aspects of the synoptic

problem, no doubt to reiterate the relative historical accuracy of the various Gospels.

Finally, in Timothy I and II Bosanquet finds signs of the organization of the Church

(references to anxieties about “the faith;” the distinction between clergy and laity; early notions

of canonizing writings all make their appearance), and he laments that “nothing could be more

significant than the loss of faith in the second coming, combined with turning to a written

record” (1891, 156). In the end, however, he acknowledges the value of these texts but the value

seems to be merely instrumental. “The Church has preserved in its books the principle of truth

and freedom, and it has at times and in some degree borne witness to this principle” (1891, 158).

It was invaluable that the core, however obscured, was preserved. Again, however, one must

treat these texts in the proper manner in order to gain the insight they have. Ending on a rather

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Hegelian note, Bosanquet says we are only now seeing the true meaning of the texts and

Christianity. “The ideas of great men are apprehended very slowly, and a free and rational

society must in part exist before the dream of such a society can be rightly interpreted” (1891,

158). Bosanquet expressed a similar sentiment in his essay “On the True Conception of Another

World,” where he remarked “as society develops he lives, on the whole, more in a civilized and

spiritual world, and less in the savage or purely natural world. His will, which is himself,

expands with the institutions and ideas that form its purpose, and the history of this expansion is

the history of human freedom” (1891, 105). And, just after this passage he reminds us (is he

endorsing this view completely?) that God is spirit or mind for Hegel and then comments that

Hegel’s philosophic insight has done the great service to the history of religion by “grasping the

essence of Christianity as the unity (not merely the union) of the Divine and human nature”

(1891, 107). The value of these texts is that the essence was preserved for current, more

developed generations to understand and supersede.

Now if one were to assess in this admittedly brief treatment of Bosanquet’s thinking on

Christianity, it consists of a kind of anti-selfishness that is cosmopolitan. This universal element

my indeed be a Christian addition, but it is not clear in Bosanquet that the benevolence is a

Christian caritas or an ancient Greek citizenship. It is clear that for Bosanquet, the divinity is in

each of us, perhaps in each of us at our best moments, and is manifest most fully in the working

toward a community of goodness in the here and now. The benevolence required of us,

however, seems to have a less identifiable form. Bosanquet seems blurs the line, as perhaps

Plato does, between religious, aesthetic, and philosophic experience.

We must not let go our main grasp of the values which, whenever brought into being in a world, so far make heave of that place and time, and which all religion teaches us to cherish here and now as everywhere and always – love, beauty, truth. In these our unity is solid and plain – our unity with God and with the whole of being. We must not do

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anything to throw these into the background, and place our unity in remote events (1920, 28).

This easy movement between these different activities would seem to indicate that one’s

contribution to the whole can take place across a much greater expanse of human activities than

certainly Green might imagine. Bosanquet even seems to regard the particularity of a religion as

far less important than that it bring us to value of love, truth, and beauty. It is also not clear

whether Bosanquet means to conflate these different experiences or he means to say religion is

the absolute commitment to the value of these “higher” things. “To be one with the supreme

good in the faith which is also will – that is religion; and to be thus wholly and unquestionably is

the religious temper” (1920, 79). But, is this a Christian temperament or is the supreme good a

belief in the value of these broader cultural goods? Reason and faith thus find a harmony, in the

sense that one could, along with Plato, rationally come to see love, truth, and beauty are of

greater, or the greatest, value. But if this is the view, it is hard to see what Christianity added

save making the appreciation of these higher things available to more individuals. This has led

one commentator to ask whether Bosanquet is abandoning religion for culture (Sprigg 2006,

288). Bosanquet’s view, save the cosmopolitan element, is more akin to a broadly defined civil

religion.

We have seen that Oakeshott’s view of religion has an immediacy and lived aspect to it

that is very similar to his predecessors’ views, Green and Bosanquet. The individualism is more

marked in Oakeshott as the analysis of his conception of Christianity reveals. Unlike Green and

Bosanquet, Oakeshott is very reticent to identify any particular aspect of Christianity as essential

to its character (though has we have seen the identify of Christianity gets exceptionally blurry in

Bosanquet’s thought). Oakeshott seems to have a keen awareness of the difficulty of writing and

thinking about Christianity which may account for this reticence. In a review of a collection of

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essays on Christianity, Oakeshott is critical of the lack of sensitivity to the nature of Christianity

in the essays. They lack “a clear consciousness that Christianity is a difficult thing to

understand, and a still more difficult thing to explain at once ambiguously and coherently”

(1927a, 315).

We have seen that religion, for Oakeshott, is the evocation of a sentiment, a sentiment

inspired by a view of what is sacred in life amongst all that is profane; a view so lively and

powerful that it could be said to coerce us to enact ourselves in the world consistently and

faithfully. Are there specific elements in Oakeshott’s thinking, as we have seen there are in

Bosanquet’s and Green’s view, that are identifiably Christian elements of the sacred?

The closest he comes to indentifying any core elements in Christianity is in his essay

“The Importance of the Historical Element in Christianity.” Oakeshott’s fundamental questions

in this essay are: What is the nature of the historical events believed to have taken place in the

past that are believed to have unalterably changed the world and its history? And, Is this

historical element essential to Christianity? Oakeshott’s, perhaps surprising, answer is that these

early events are not necessary; that we can neither identify Christianity with the original,

supposedly more authentic, experience of early Christians, for we have no knowledge of this

original experience. All we have is a “record of change and development” (1993, 63). Nor is

there an unchanged core or essence that can be distilled out of this history of Christianity.

There is a need in religious experience, Oakeshott notes, “for an almost sensible

perception of the reality of the object of belief” (1993, 71), and so it is understandable we human

beings have developed images of God, rituals, ways of worship, sacred objects, to make the

divine more sensuously present. More recently this need is met through an historical sensitivity

(a current hangover from the historical drunkenness of the nineteenth century). What has

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resulted is the insistence on the prima facie historical as the essential element in Christianity.

Oakeshott’s argument is that this is relatively recent. The implication is both that previous

historical iterations of Christianity have lacked or not found essential this element (the prima

facie historical), and that there is hope that we shall recover from this malady and find for

ourselves a richer more meaningful Christianity. The former point we saw Green make in his

treatment of Paul’s view of the historical events of Jesus’ life and death. The insistence of the

prima facie historical element in Christianity, one might say, is our modern idolatry, directing

our attention away from the true object of adoration.

Interestingly, this takes us to what Oakeshott identifies as unique in Christianity.

Christianity “proposed a religion more purely spiritual, yet one which should given an intensity

of awareness of the object of belief so far denied to those who clung too closely to sensible

actuality” (1993, 71). However odd this may at first sound, Christianity is more purely spiritual

precisely because of its historical element. “By the emphasis it placed upon history, upon the

actual happenings of the life of its founder, it removed from sense to memory and mind some at

least of its power to give actuality to the thing believed” (1993, 72). Oakeshott has at least two

points in mind here. First, the fact that the divinity in Christianity walked the earth forces a kind

of practical reflection in this religion. Instead of having a set of sacred objects to worship or a

intermediaries through which one might worship as an immediate response to the religious

impulse, Christianity insists that one remember the divinity which, having walked the earth, can

be made an easier, a more vivid, a more sympathetic, and a more palpable object of the divine

than other depictions. Second, by being historical we must rehearse, reconstruct, and rethink the

meaning of these events of so long ago. How could this life, lived over 2000 years ago in a far

of land, both geographically and culturally, have any significance to me? This is the question

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that Christianity poses by having this historical element. In the attempt to answer the question,

however, the religion becomes more a matter of mind; more a matter of internalized meaning

rather than external worship and sacrament. Christianity insists more than other religions that

the history be told and retold each generation. This interpretative process has given Christianity

a vitality that allows it to be meaningful for each new generation. Put another way, because

historical, Christianity, invites us, like other historical events, “in an engagement to infer, to

understand discursively and to imagine the character” of the historical events that sit at the

beginning of the Christian experience (1983, 95). This is a personal experience of finding or

making meaning, and an experience that gives these events a meaningful place in one’s life

today. This is what Oakeshott means in saying that “religion demands not a consciousness of the

necessity of the individuality of past events, but a consciousness of the individuality of present

experience” (1993, 72)15. It is not the prima facie fact of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but

the continued ability to evoke a more spiritual and personally meaningful response for each

generation as a result of its historical element, that both distinguishes Christianity and makes it

valuable today.

Perhaps because of this historical element, Christianity is also a more concrete and

rational religion in the sense of providing “a whole view of life, a definite civilization,”

according to Oakeshott (1993, 45). Its vision has been so rich as to have able to not only survive

but to give practical and meaningful guidance, inspiration, and repose over generations. The

historical element, then, and the breadth and depth of its vision are what seem to be the

identifying marks of Christianity for Oakeshott.

15 See Corey (2006) for a nice discussion of what she calls “presentness” as a running concern in Oakeshott’s writings.

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V.

We find in these British Idealists some provocative and challenging views on religion and

Christianity. Their idealism issues in a modernist approach to religion and scripture that has the

intention of making the divine more immanent and religion more practically meaningful and

significant.

In his understanding of Christianity, Green offers a view that universally requires a

charity most would find familiar and a list of sins (worldliness) that is recognizably a part of the

tradition. There is an individualism in Green that is distinctive. Each of us must come to our

own understanding of the highest principles in life, and, with St. Paul, die to our failures and rise

to live up to this highest ideal. Some of us need a bit more guidance than others at this, however.

Though Bosanquet gives us a Christianity that is universal in nature, that is a denial of the selfish

will, and that embodies brotherly love, it is a view more reminiscent of the ancient Greek ethic of

contributing to a rationally determined good of the whole. Oakeshott offers a vision of

Christianity far more individualistic than even Green’s, for it lacks even the doctrinal elements

and prima facie historical elements that even Green seems to insist upon as a necessary practical

guide. Christianity is a whole way of life for Oakeshott and its historical element requires

individuals to find meaning to the history and this way of life for themselves. The religious life

is the enacting of oneself in the world with a consistent character, motivated by one’s conception

of what is most valuable in human experience.

These are clearly not the traditional views of religion or Christianity. They have the clear

advantage of conceiving the divine element as more accessible and far less remote and

mysterious. There may be a tension, however, between the immediacy offered by these views

and the grandeur that inspires awe and perhaps comfort found in more medieval conceptions.

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The more personalized view of Christianity also increases the risk (as Green noticed) of crossing

a line into purely internal inspiration and personal construction so as to be unrecognizably

Christian. One could imagine a view of the highest good and motivation in a person’s life, and

faithfulness to that view, being altogether inconsistent with the best of the past and the present in

the Christian tradition. This risk is heightened because of the practical nature of religion. Green

attempts to avoid this risk by reasserting a role for doctrine. Bosanquet avoids this risk by

replacing a collective view of the Good for traditional Christianity. Oakeshott speaks of a break

in the identity of Christianity, but one is left to puzzle over what the contours even of a break

might look like.

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