John Mahaffys the Principles of the Art of Conversation 1888
John Pentland Mahaffy (1839-1919) died on 30 April 1919. At the fourth dimension of his passing, he was extolled as the "well-nigh learned Irishman of our 24-hour interval," and for practiced reason ("John Pentland Mahaffy,"Methodist Review 507). Mahaffy was elected a Fellow of 
Withal in 1881—at the very height of his professional success—Mahaffy was charged with heresy. He makes an obscure innuendo to this affair in a letter to George Macmillan (1855-1936), dated nineteen Nov 1881:
I sent up a reply which made them hop, and I have not heard 1 more word nigh it. I have asked to accept the correspondence printed but they wouldn't have information technology at all. So my lovely correspondence is only filed on their minutes and will no more exist seen. (qtd. in Stanford and McDowell 131)
True to this account, the details of the heresy charges remain lost to history, though William Stanford and Robert MacDowell hypothesize that it may well take originated in a sermon delivered in the Higher Chapel, in which Mahaffy drew historical comparisons between St. Paul and the Greek Stoics, hence boldly conflating Christian and pagan traditions (131). Co-ordinate to Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945), information technology was the only time Mahaffy was e'er to deliver a sermon at that venue.[2] Mahaffy's passion for classical scholarship repeatedly chafed confronting his identity every bit an avowed Christian and Protestant cleric, and information technology is certainly plausible that his penchant for juxtaposing Hellenic and Scriptural source material might have been taken equally irreverent. Without physical documentation, however, the reason for the Higher'southward allegations must remain shrouded in mystery.
What we practise know is that less than a twelvemonth later, Mahaffy published a rigorous reappraisal of the Anglican clergy: a volume-length theological treatise calledThe Disuse of Modern Preaching (1882). If the circumstances surrounding the charges of heresy remain inscrutable, it is clear that Mahaffy'southward conflict with the Anglican Church building was not simply incidental—it was a disharmonize in which he was invested and which, to some extent, he openly invited. The Decay of Mod Preaching was to become ane of the most controversial and, in subsequently years, most disregarded of Mahaffy's works. The fullest discussion of the book appears in Stanford and McDowell'due south biography, Mahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman(1971), which treats it as "anapologia besides equally a critique […] partly a justification of his ain inability to preach an effective sermon, partly an assail on hypocrisy, partly a defense force of art confronting naïve naturalism, and partly a criticism of narrow doctrinalism" (132-34). Their account, which spans a scant v pages, presents Mahaffy as an "unclerical cleric," whose faith was possibly more cultural than theological in orientation (127).
Figure 1: Portrait of John Pentland Mahaffy, Cassell's Universal Portrait Gallery (London: Cassell, 1895), p. 400.
This commodity charts the religious history of J.P. Mahaffy leading up to the publication ofThe Decay of Modern Preaching. Rather than treating Mahaffy every bit a skeptic or casual observer of Anglican do, I nowadays him equally a historian of the ancient by who insisted that faith and reason were compatible and even mutually sustaining. Indeed, it was in part Mahaffy's efforts to deploy historical narrative in the service of religion that inspired wariness and even hostility among contemporary reviewers. To some extent, Mahaffy's historical treatment of religious institutions sets him in league with German higher critics like David Strauss (1808-1874), whose 1835Das Leben Jesu—translated into English past George Eliot asThe Life of Jesus (1846)—differentiated between the mythic condition that Christian tradition conferred upon Jesus and the historical reality of his life. Different Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), or Ernest Renan (1823-1892) however, Mahaffy was less interested in advocating for Christ as a historical figure than he was in tracking the history of Christian institutions—institutions that in the nineteenth century, he maintained, tended to emphasize religious feeling at the expense of intellectual training.[three] In the eyes of his critics, Mahaffy treated preaching as a secular vocation, despite his insistence thatThe Decay of Modern Preaching constitutes a "center-searching" try to query and thereby reaffirm the value of organized religion (Decay 7). Emerging from the institutional context of Trinity College Dublin, where religious and intellectual culture maintained a close merely at times troubled human relationship,The Disuse of Modernistic Preaching illuminates how even those thinkers who identified with evangelical civilisation struggled to navigate the complex intersections of organized religion and secular thought at the finish of the nineteenth century.
The Legacy of J.P. Mahaffy
Mahaffy has ofttimes been treated as a secular or fifty-fifty pagan thinker. To some extent, this is owing to his human relationship with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who would come to correspond for many late Victorians a rejection of conventional moral codes.[iv] Wilde matriculated at Trinity College Dublin in 1871 and plant in Mahaffy a devoted tutor and mentor, famously noting that he was his "kickoff and best teacher" (Complete Messages 562). Scholars take frequently claimed that Mahaffy was the kickoff to introduce Wilde to the study of Hellenism and, by association, to its culture of hedonistic backlog.[five] Without question, Mahaffy was wary of Wilde's relationship with David Hunter-Blair (1853-1939), who had converted to Catholicism in 1875 and reportedly provided his friend with 60 pounds to defray the expenses of his travels to
All the same Wilde did non altogether abandon his interest in Catholicism after his trip to Greece; as Iain Ross points out, Wilde connected to draw comparisons betwixt Hellenic and Catholic traditions throughout his life (29-x). By the same token, even if Mahaffy attempted to illuminate for Wilde the "worst faults of Popery," it hardly seems accurate to suggest that his interest in Hellenic culture amounted to the adoption of a pagan or profane worldview (Complete Letters 44). Mahaffy took great intendance to establish that the Greeks were neither licentious nor irreligious, observing that in that location was "much sound moral feeling in Hellenic republic" (158). He refused to "assert the hard dissimilarity betwixt Greek and modernistic piety," proposing instead a controversial parity between the ii (Social Life348). The writings of the Greeks, he observes,
are the writings of men of like culture with ourselves, who argue with the same logic, who reverberate with kindred feelings. They have worked out social and moral problems like ourselves, they accept expressed them in such language every bit nosotros should desire to use. In a word, they are thoroughly modern, more modern even than the epochs quite proximate to our own. (i)
Although Mahaffy may have inspired in Wilde a passion for the Greeks, it is hardly likely that his teachings celebrated the hedonistic excesses of the aboriginal world. If anything, Mahaffy took pains to establish that the Hellenic model of moral perfection bore a hit resemblance to the evangelical spirit of the nineteenth century. While information technology is always difficult to establish the religious views of historical figures with certainty—faith is, after all, a complicated and deeply personal matter—Mahaffy'south legacy as a heathen or atheistic thinker seems, at the very to the lowest degree, worth reexamining.
There were, to be certain, other reasons his contemporaries might have accounted Mahaffy unconventional in his religious views. Mahaffy treated Christianity as a historical development that bore the traces of erstwhile periods rather than every bit a spontaneous revelation of divinity. He claimed, for instance, that Christianity had captivated certain principles of Greek philosophy, noting in particular that Stoicism had influenced St. Paul and thus laid the groundwork for the historical ascension of Christian idea (343). InSocial Life in Greece(1874), he went so far as to set up the faith of aboriginal Hellenic republic aslope Christianity and admitted that the latter did not fare well by the comparison:
But I confess that when I compare the religion of Christ with that of Zeus, and Apollo, and Aphrodite, and consider the enormous, the unspeakable contrasts, I wonder not at the greatness, simply at the smallness of the advance in public morality which has been attained. It is accordingly hither where the deviation ought to exist greatest, that we are led to wonder most at the superiority of Greek genius which, in spite of an immoral and worthless theology, worked out in its higher manifestations, a morality equal to the all-time type of modern Christianity. Socrates and Plato are far superior to the Jewish moralist [St. Paul], they are far superior to the average Christian morality; it is merely in the matchless teaching of Christ himself that nosotros discover them surpassed. (8)
Although Mahaffy insists that Christ is the supreme exemplar of civilization and virtue, his endeavour to compare Christ and the Greek philosophers would have been controversial at this time. In effect, Mahaffy's account unsaid that Christian thought did not found an unmitigated victory over the alleged excesses of the heathen world so much as an extension of its underlying spirit. Christianity was itself, past this account, a historical phenomenon—non a final truth then much as an institutional exercise subject field to change or fifty-fifty amendment over time.
To profess a belief in divinity while also treating religion as a secular institution was admittedly a delicate balancing act, as would exist pointed out by Joseph McCabe (1867-1955), a former Roman Cosmic priest who became a leading effigy in the Rationalist movement at the plough of the twentieth century. InThe Story of Religious Controversy (1929), McCabe invoked Mahaffy's scholarship to justify his claims that paganism was no more synonymous with immorality than Christianity was with virtue. He notes that as a "Protestant chaplain" and the nineteenth century's foremost authority on Greek literature, Mahaffy constitutes an especially reliable authority on the matter, but adds somewhat wryly: "Professor Mahaffy is bound to concord that Christianity is superior to paganism; simply he is singularly unfortunate in vindicating his belief" (176). McCabe goes on to detect that at certain moments inThe Social Life of Greece (including the passage cited above), Mahaffy "betrays the embarrassment which his professional person, and no incertitude personal, zeal for his religion causes" (176). McCabe was eager to leverage Mahaffy'southward remarks in the service of an explicitly Rationalist agenda, however in that location is also some truth to his claim that Mahaffy's defense of Christianity is somewhat strained. Every bit nosotros shall meet, withal, the uneasy tenor of Mahaffy'southward remarks were less a consequence of failing faith than they were the expression of a rhetorical predicament. The product of an educational activity that prized exegesis, Mahaffy believed in the close alliance of religious and intellectual study; nevertheless, information technology was precisely this focus on textual and historical scrutiny that led him to be regarded by many equally an irreligious and even secular thinker.
The Existent History
Mahaffy was deeply invested in the evangelical culture of the
His religious instruction, however, was not bars to textual written report. "All the social club that I knew or saw," Mahaffy recalls of his youth, "were observant of religion. Such a affair as going out for a Sunday's circuit without going to Church was thought scandalous" (Brief Summary 35). He routinely visited the cottages on his mother's estate in
Figure ii: Excerpt from The Holy Bible, Containing the One-time and New Testaments,
with Original Notes, Practical Observations, and Copious Marginal References
[1788-1792], ed. Thomas Scott (Boston: S.T. Armstrong, 1822).
Yet in terms of theology Mahaffy may have been more broad-minded. In the 1850s, apparently at his mother's urging, he attended sermons past William Henry Krause (1796-1852 [incumbent of
Mahaffy was proud that his mother introduced him to theological perspectives that were not, strictly speaking, her own. Withal, his exposure to these celebrated Cosmic preachers clearly did not win him over to their crusade. Years later, addressing the Royal Commission on University Didactics in Ireland, Mahaffy would write of Newman: "We delighted to hear him preach, and preach Catholic doctrine, and nosotros were not the least bit afraid that he would convert us, because nosotros had been taught our own creed properly" (Great britain 215). In keeping with tradition, Mahaffy was ordained in the Church building of Ireland when he became a fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 1864.
Although ordination was customary, in this instance it also forecasted how intertwined religion and institutional culture would get for Mahaffy in the coming decades. Mahaffy maintained a strongly Protestant-Unionist identity, and in after years he inveighed against the intrusion of Catholicism into Irish politics in pieces like "The Romanisation of Ireland" (1901). It is largely on these grounds that Mahaffy has been understood as anti-Cosmic. Although information technology is difficult to determine how securely his theological opposition to Catholicism may have been, it is worth noting that fifty-fifty Mahaffy'south most outspoken remarks on the Catholic question tend to focus on political and institutional matters. In "The Romanisation of Ireland," for instance, he opens past distancing himself from either doctrinal or party politics: "The problem is one which cannot but occupy the political leader and the theologian; only both of them may condescend to listen to what the historian has to say" (32). From this betoken forrad, Mahaffy tracks how the redistribution of power amidst the gentry, and the democratization of Republic of ireland, led more Catholics to assume positions of public influence. "No just human tin say they are to arraign," he observes, "except in mistaking the interests of Rome for the interests of Ireland" (37). Mahaffy's chief objection, here and elsewhere, is less to the Roman Catholic faith than to the increased function of Catholicism in Irish governance, the spread of Irish nationalism, and educational policy. Although Mahaffy's political and religious affiliations are unmistakable, by bold the role of historian he attempts to separate matters of moral and cultural value from what he regards as the more than applied matters of institutional governance. In curt, he seeks to elude theological controversy by occupying a footing that is, at least on the surface, neither theological nor political.
Figure three: Manuscript folio from John Pentland Mahaffy, A Brief Summary of the Primary Stages of My Life, p. 133. Used with permission, courtesy of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.
Mahaffy's relationship to religious practice and to Catholicism in particular was not only a matter of doctrinal fidelity or even of his avowed Unionism. Without question, he was wary of the Roman Cosmic presence in Republic of ireland, though he was not without sympathy for either their social condition or worship practices. Recalling how he had been warned from boyhood "not to trust the 'false papists'" (Social Life 100), Mahaffy recognized that a strictly anti-Catholic worldview occluded important cultural and historical contexts: "the long oppression of the Roman Catholics, and their enforced separation from Protestant society, has created a clan feeling, which, in times of peachy bitterness and bloodshed, has been known to outweigh fifty-fifty the closest ties of friendship toward the enemies of the clan. In this way, what one side translates as faith towards country and religion, the other call traitorous betrayal of friends and relations" (100). To this extent, Mahaffy saw himself as operating inside a very precarious political temper in which organized religion had come to be uncomfortably aligned with institutional and intellectual priorities. While Mahaffy appreciated the spirit and even certain elements of Roman Catholic practice—he favored, for instance, the "Roman Catholic police force of celibacy"—he was deeply concerned about the integration of religious and political institutions (Decay 127). Hence, 1 of the bully flaws of "those theological colleges in favour with the Roman Church and the extremest Protestants alike" was, in Mahaffy's view, a tendency to bring faith to affect a world that did not abide strictly by spiritual laws—to nowadays all lessons "with a bias and flavour of theology" (139). Unaccustomed to seeing the world through a layperson'due south optics, he argues, the student who attends such an institution might well struggle to apply the lessons of their faith to the globe at large.
The implication, of course, is that a Protestant education did not entail such risks, and this was a presumption that was widely shared at Trinity Higher Dublin at the fourth dimension. Earlier in the century, reformers had attempted to abolish denomination tests, which determined eligibility for academy scholarships. In 1868, the Board of Trinity Higher Dublin had resisted these efforts, proclaiming that the "Protestant grapheme of Trinity College should be preserved" (qtd. in Webb 106). The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871 revoked from Trinity College Dublin the right of nomination to select parishes in
Competition with the Cosmic University over resources and students—every bit well as concerns about how information technology might transform the intellectual culture of Dublin—acquired Mahaffy no pocket-size degree of worry. In 1880, just ii years before he began to writeThe Disuse of Modernistic Preaching, a charter founding the Majestic University of Ireland allowed the Catholic University to reconstitute itself as Academy College Dublin. The change was significant. Since Newman's departure in 1858, the Cosmic University had suffered from diminishing enrollments and resources.[ten] When students were permitted to take examinations and thus acquire degrees through the Royal University, the institution gained students and cultural legitimacy. In Mahaffy's view, Trinity Higher Dublin had failed to effectively maintain its intellectual clout in light of these developments. To him, the mediocre quality of instruction skillful by Fellows of Trinity College Dublin warranted reevaluating the training of the Protestant clergy, specially as the institution encountered growing opposition from "competitions, from party politics, from disappearance of our clientele, the Protestants of Ireland," many of whom even so elected to complete their educations at
If Trinity Higher Dublin was "undenominational just non formally secular" (Webb 107), then, the same might well be said of Mahaffy. Protestantism had come to represent for him not only the faith of his boyhood but a particular arroyo to civilization and social club. To be sure, he observed in Catholicism two salient comparisons to Greek organized religion: the brotherhood of art and divinity, and "the embracing of all the pleasures of homo nature within the services performed in honour of the gods" (Social Life 379). Nevertheless, he insisted that these were merely comparisons of "outward form." The "whole temper and spirit" of Catholicism, he maintained, is "thoroughly anti-Greek" in its preference for religious doctrine over spiritual inquiry (378). In Mahaffy's view, the intellectual spirit of Protestantism coincided with his own religious educational activity. With the aid of Scott'sCommentary, Mahaffy had become adept in the practice of biblical criticism, which sought to elude religious dogma by reading Scripture through a lens of historical and rhetorical speculation. If some regarded such methods equally antithetical to faith, Mahaffy insists that even the most rational, analytical works are evocations of a spirit that is essentially Protestant. In his 1880 volumeDescartes, for instance, he remarks that although the philosopher "might be a Cosmic, a Conservative in faith, a pet pupil of the Jesuits; he was nevertheless in temper a Protestant, a sceptic [sic], the spiritual father of Spinoza" (148). Here, Mahaffy suggests that the very spirit of Protestantism is embodied in the rational philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650) and in Baruch Spinoza's (1632-1677)Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677), which has argued that organized religions stand for different interpretations of Scripture, rather than embodying spiritual truth itself. The Protestant spirit was, in many ways, inseparable from a arrangement of modern research that was historical, comparative, and rationalist. For Mahaffy, this method was not only the foundation of his religious identity; it straight informed the method of intellectual scrutiny he would apply to all of his future work as a scholar.
The Decay of Modern Preaching
Based upon two lectures Mahaffy gave at the
In 1877, J. Baldwin Brown (1820-1884) observed that the "ability of the pulpit is plain on the wane" (Brown 107). In Brown'south view, the reason was transparent: a "flood of cheap and, on the whole, valuable literature has overspread the country, and has entered homes hitherto most jealously guarded from intellectual raids" (Brown 107). Although the influence might be regarded every bit salutary, he explains, the outcome is that preaching as a do has become insufficiently less vital to religious life in the second half of the century. Indeed, when Victorian preaching was taken to task it was often on the grounds of failing to adapt to expanding literacy rates, which had cultivated a keener awareness of Scriptural debates among the full general public. Equally Hughes Oliphant Sometime puts it, the "Victorian pulpit remained by and large 'precritical'," declining to answer directly to the challenges of nineteenth-century biblical criticism (350). Although the merits may non account for all preachers, some of whom were very much engaged with the challenges of the higher criticism, it is a accuse that Mahaffy would echo inThe Decay of Modern Preaching.
The religious fervor of the early nineteenth century, Mahaffy avers, was due almost entirely to the efforts of great preachers, who "manifested their eloquence in their evangelical theology" (Cursory Summary 36). This combination of religious knowledge and rhetoric, he suggests, had become less common by the 1880s, in function because preachers had failed to conform to the rapidly evolving cultural landscape of the nineteenth century. At the beginning ofThe Decay of Modern Preaching, Mahaffy laments that Christian forms of worship take remained largely unaltered since its inception, dependent upon the stability and infallibility of the cultural rituals attached to it. "Nothing is more marked in most Christian preachers," he writes,
than the firmness with which they hold and declare that their form of organized religion was established one time for all by its Founder, and that no change or modification whatever is to exist tolerated by the orthodox. This rigid adherence to the doctrines of Christianity is extended even to the veryformin which it is preached, and nada is thought better or more assisting than to echo the old watchwords of those who once stirred the earth to its depths. (Decay 13-14)
Effigy 4: Title Folio for John Pentland Mahaffy,The Decay of Modern Preaching (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1882).
The preachers of early Christianity, Mahaffy claims, were cultural revolutionaries. Advocating for a single theology in a pantheistic world, these innovators were driven to fence passionately for their ideas: "They were to hate male parent and female parent and brethren for His sake; they were to quarrel with the whole civilised globe, and gear up themselves apart as a peculiar society" (xv). If Mahaffy's prose reflects an admiration for the religious tolerance of the pagan globe, it also conveys an appreciation for the earliest Christian preachers, whom he presents equally provocative and daring.
The problem, then, was not actually doctrinal in nature. On the contrary, even the well-meaning preacher found himself faced with "a lodge which cares not to be disturbed, which hates to be alarmed, and which desires little more than from the pulpit than a confirmation of its prejudices" (33). By the 1880s, Mahaffy contends, the preacher's office was merely to reinforce the incontrovertible truth of Christian dogma through the repetition and reiteration of old ideas. His own view of the preacher'southward calling was quite dissimilar. Because theology is by its very nature "a science full of mystery," the human of the deepest faith and greatest capacity for guiding others must eschew simple answers and, on occasion, invite challenges to tradition (88). "No man will exist great as a teacher," he observes, "who is felt to be fugitive the burning topics of the mean solar day" (47). One of the chief obstacles to addressing such topics in the form of a sermon was, Mahaffy maintains, the preacher's misguided supposition that intellect is antonymous to faith. Nineteenth-century parishioners were, amidst the middle and upper classes, more than highly educated than they used to be. "They no longer want pedagogy from the pulpit," he writes, "when they tin can find it in thousands of books; nor will they be led by the opinions of men who are not superior to themselves in intellect and culture, oftentimes not even in training" (155). With the rise of literacy came an inevitable shift in the role of the preacher, who could no longer be looked upon as the bearer of specialized cognition.[12] Mahaffy's view of preaching, then, was that it must accelerate original thought, inspiring in listeners a new relationship to old ideas.
It was a popular and by no means original argument. John Henry Newman had fabricated a similar claim in a sermon preached on 1 May 1856 at the
considering the thought is there and non the burn, these preachers suppose that they are more'thoughtful' than their brethren. It would exist just every bit reasonable to suppose that a skeleton in a surgeon's cupboard has more bones than a living man. The living man has quite as many bones as the skeleton; and besides the bones he has flesh and muscle; an eye that may be filled with sunshine or with tears; a vocalisation than tin command, or entreat, or comfort; a paw that tin can help or strike. (30)
Dale shared Mahaffy's want for a reappraisal of the preacher's practical grooming and a recognition that the preacher'southward office depended as much on reason and rhetoric as it did on passion and piety. "Since we accept to preach," Dale remarks, "we ought to learn how to preach well" (93).
The difference was perchance in Mahaffy's characteristically provoking manner of presenting his claims. Whereas Dale had suggested simply that ane must strike a balance between intellectual and emotional energy—and where Newman maintained that sanctity was the more enduring value—Mahaffy claimed that piety was not a sufficient or even a necessary attribute in a preacher. On the 1 mitt, Mahaffy noted that some exceptionally gifted men might be discouraged from pursuing the curacy for fear that they lack the purity of character required of such a post: "He stands at the threshold of his ministry building with the jar of this discord inside him" (Disuse 62). On the other hand, the man who comes to the ministry with some experience of the world and its iniquities might well prove to be the improve curate. Mahaffy writes:
He who has lived, in many sense of the term, intensely, even passionately, is often a more interesting human from many aspects than he who has merely kept clear of dangers. He is interesting because he possesses a stronger, bolder nature, which is guided, sometimes, at least, by swell and noble impulses; he is interesting because he knows what suffering is as well as joy; in fact, he may exist forgiven much, because he has loved much. In any example he knows the slap-up interests and bully temptations of the earth really, and not by hearsay, and can judge the amount of good and evil in homo nature which the theoretical observer only guesses from the exterior. (132)
Mahaffy seems to suggest hither that the best preacher—the ane most capable of communicating with his parishioners—is one who has known the world and its sins. Every bit a practical suggestion it would seem to accept some value, as might his suggestion that all preachers should study rhetoric.[xiv] Yet his vision of the preacher as a man of the world—flawed, rational, and carefully translating divine revelations into modernistic parlance—was, for some readers, all likewise secular.
Mahaffy's nigh controversial merits of all was that faith was itself a product of human endeavors in this world and thus subject to historical change. Here, in one case again, his assumption of the role of historian proves problematic. He writes:
And yet in that locationhave been great reforms in religion; even since the revelation of the Gospel, at that place take been great changes in religion. But they were all justified as returns to the original purity of the Bible, which had been corrupted past men. In no case have reformers ventured to preach their gospel asnew; they have e'er insisted upon its being a render to the old and therefore to the pure. (98)
On the face of it, Mahaffy proclaims that it was precisely the novelty and flexibility of Christianity that helped to secure its influence. Yet his historical sensibility too leads him to question the nineteenth-century impulse to preserve earlier forms of worship. Non but does such an effort contravene the spirit of Christianity, Mahaffy observes, it is also grounded in historical inaccuracies:
It is not necessary to inquire here how far this merits of all religious reformers to have only returned to the primitive religion of their ancestors in its original purity can be historically maintained. It is likely enough that if a modern Protestant and a Christian of the second century met in the flesh, they would be astonished at the mutual divergence in their spiritual views, still more in their religious forms. It may, indeed, be fairly argued that an absolutely unmodified return to what existed centuries ago is perfectly impossible, and that any restoration must comprise much that is new, infused into it by the spirit of the historic period. (99-100)
In the terminate, then, the cultural attachment to outdated subjects, rhetorical forms, and faith practices was not just impractical: being "anachronistic, out of time and place, and preached to congregations who are estranged from that item dogma in their Christianity," they bore little relationship to the reality of Christian do (104).
Mahaffy's religious education had taught him that religion could assume many unlike forms and was expressed—even within the same Christian denomination—in many unlike ways. What is more, he would have learned from his shut study of Thomas Scott's exegetical writings that the languages, rituals, and popular reception of Scripture evolved over fourth dimension, and this historical sensibility was at the root of his desire to reform the modern do of preaching. Every bit an illustration of this point, he turns to the intersection of religious and political languages, noting that the God of the Old Testament approximates our modern formulation of a despot: "Our highest conception is that of a constitutional king, who establishes wise and beneficent laws, and binds himself to deed in conformity with them, fifty-fifty though he accept the ability to reverse or violate them" (110). Hence, while God's omnipotence may "afford the Absolutist in theology a strong basis for denying the analogy between modern kings and the great King of kings," Mahaffy observes that the layperson may struggle to reconcile his own political principles with the ideas existence preached from the pulpit: "this logical side of the matter will not outweigh the feeling in the minds of modern congregations, that despotism is not the highest form of government, and therefore the mod preacher will do well to study with care that ramble side of God'southward government which corresponds to the atmosphere of our order" (112).
WhenThe Disuse of Modern Preaching was published in 1882, Mahaffy occupied a position of intellectual and cultural authority. Only contemporary reviews of the volume, while oft invoking Mahaffy's intellectual prowess, largely expressed disappointment and perplexity at his central claims. Nearly all reviewers proclaim, every bit does a notice inThe New Englander, that Mahaffy "assumes the decay of modern preaching to be a fact," noting that the volume is "grossly incorrect" if taken as an appraisal of American preaching; the "defects of the book," the reviewer concludes, "are central" ("Notices" 710). Another reviewer remarks that Mahaffy "attempts a diagnosis of a disease that does not exist," observing that "much miscellaneous grumbling on the office of some restless minds" does not necessarily demonstrate a decline in the quality of the modernistic pulpit ("Decay" 264). A critic forChristian Life took a more defensive stance, suggesting that Mahaffy's insistence on the turn down of preaching was based on a ascension tide of public criticism: "There is undoubtedly more than criticism of the preacher now than ever there was before, only information technology is just because more is expected from him. The average standard of intelligence in the pew is being raised, and hence arises the demand for a higher standard of intelligence and ability in the pulpit. And the demand is gradually being met" ("Part" 327). Perhaps the almost striking response came fromThe Calendar month, a Cosmic journal that celebrated Mahaffy'due south volume chiefly because information technology rehearsed some of the most popular arguments confronting Anglican preaching circulating inside Roman Cosmic circles. If the dogmatic sermon is "a source of endless difficulty for the Anglican clergyman," the reviewer declared, it is a source of enrichment for the Catholic worshipper "considering of our unswerving, most definite, and clearly defined faith" ("Why Men Practise Not Preach Well" 295).
Overwhelmingly, critics responded to Mahaffy past suggesting that preaching wasnot in fact a declining fine art and pointing to Victorian evangelical civilization every bit evidence of this claim. Yet Mahaffy was not entirely alone in his concern for the state of Victorian preaching. Austin Phelps, for one, had fabricated very similar claims inPreaching: What to Preach, and How to Preach, published the very same year. In Phelps's view, "The complaints unremarkably made respecting the inferior quality of many of the sermons delivered from Church of England pulpits will be a sufficient justification for the appearance of this volume" (v). Indeed, endless works were published at the aforementioned fourth dimension calling for a renewed attention to the art of preaching, and many of these garnered more positive reviews than Mahaffy'due south volume, despite his elevated reputation. One reason for this is postulated past a critic forThe Church of English Pulpit and Ecclesiastical Review, in a observe that is for the about part admiring of Mahaffy's arguments:
The book should have ended with a few eloquent sentences on the nobility and glory of preaching for Christ; not because such sentences would have been strictly within the scope of the book, but rather to show that Mr. Mahaffy himself appreciates the momentous nature, and the spiritual responsibilities, and the first-class possibilities of the preacher's office. One glimpse into hisinner feelings on religion would take helped to conciliate many to his views of preaching merely as an art. The book wants a spiritual climax. ("Reviews and Notices" 156)
Given Mahaffy'southward unremitting focus on the value of intellect and rhetoric inThe Decay of Modern Preaching, this reviewer suggests, information technology is rather striking that he neglects to projection the ethos of a man who regarded organized religion every bit a matter of great personal value. Focusing largely on the outward forms of religious expression, Mahaffy led some readers to think that these were the only expressions of organized religion he understood.
The publication of Mahaffy'sThe Decay of Modern Preaching constituted a disquisitional turning signal in the public reputation of an important effigy in tardily Victorian intellectual, political, and institutional life. Seen within its proper historical context, yet, we tin begin to reassess Mahaffy's part in shaping the mural of late Victorian intellectual culture—especially the crucial intersections of spirituality and aesthetics that take been seen every bit a keynote of the menses. Moreover, we might empathise Mahaffy's work as an illustration of the challenges of navigating an intellectual landscape in which religion was not waning in influence but instead continued to play a vital political and cultural function, which did not e'er neatly align with expressions of religious feeling.
The truth or falsity of Mahaffy'due south argument regarding the quality of nineteenth-century preaching may ultimately be less important than what the larger debate regarding the power of the pulpit tells us about the challenges of navigating between political, intellectual, and religious soapbox at this fourth dimension. Mahaffy'due south capacity for relating past and present was a hallmark of his career. TheOxford and Cambridge Review hailed his "easy sympathy of approach to the modern mind" ("What Have the Greeks Done" 130). As one account puts it, "His revelation of the same human nature linking the world of two thousand years agone to the world of the present day, has earned for his Greek studies deserved popularity" ("John Pentland Mahaffy."Warner Library 9570-1). Just this historical sensibility—historic in the loonshit of scholarship—remained controversial amidst theologians, some of whom considered it heresy.[xv] For his ain part, Mahaffy seems to have dwelled very niggling upon such charges. Just a few years following The Decay of Modern Preaching, he published a book on a completely different subject field,The Principles of the Art of Chat (1887). Lamenting the tendency of chat to dwell upon such mundane topics as the weather, he made a provocative claim: "every sensible person should have some paradox or heresy" on paw in order to "make the people about him brainstorm to think as soon as possible" (Principles 161). For Mahaffy, heresy had go a necessary condition of intellectual enquiry—and, paradoxically, of faith itself.
published Jan 2019
HOW TO CITE THIS Co-operative ENTRY (MLA format)
[Stern], [Kimberley, J]. "The Publication of John Pentland Mahaffy's The Decay of Modern Preaching (1882)." Branch: Uk, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Internet. Web. [Here, add your concluding date of access to BRANCH].
WORKS CITED
Brasol, Boris.Oscar Wilde: The Man, The Artist. London: Williams and Norgate Limited, 1938. Print.
Brownish, James Baldwin. "Is the Pulpit Losing its Power?"The Nineteenth Century (March 1877): 97-112. Print.
Brown, Julia Prewitt.Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde'southward Philosophy of Art.Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997. Print.
"The Coming Crunch."The Month 68 (April 1890): 457-73. Print.
Dale, Robert William.Nine Lectures on Preaching. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1878. Print.
"The Decay of Mod Preaching."Baptist Quarterly Review 5.18 (1882): 264. Print.
Douglas, Alfred Lord.Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up.London: Duckworth, 1950. Print.
Ellison, Robert. The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1998. Print.
Ellmann, Richard.Four Dubliners.Washington: Library of Congress, 1986. Print.
———. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.
"Euripedes."The Eclectic Magazine (January 1880): 121-22. Print.
"The Office of the Pulpit." Christian Life (July 8 1882): 327. Print.
Gibson, William, ed.The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689-1901. Oxford: Oxford Upward, 2012. Print.
Great Britain. House of Commons.Report of the Commission on Irish Academy Instruction, Sessional Papers i. 31 1901. Impress.
Hunter-Blair, David.In Victorian Days and Other Papers [1939]. Freeport: Books for Libraries, 1969. Print.
Irish, Tomás. "A Man Called Mahaffy: An Irish gaelic Cosmopolitan Confronts Crunch, 1899-1919." Historical Research 89.246 (November 2016): 846-65.
"John Pentland Mahaffy." Methodist Review 79 July 1919: 507-16. Print.
"John Pentland Mahaffy."The Warner Library 16. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1917. 9569-71. Print.
Mahaffy, John Pentland.Brief Summary of the Primary Stages of My Life. Manuscript Notebook. 1919. MS 11137. Trinity College Dublin, Manuscripts Section.
———. The Decay of Modern Preaching. London: Macmillan, 1882. Print.
———.Greek Life and Thought[1887]. London: One thousand.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910. Print.
———.Principles of the Fine art of Conversation. London: 1000.P. Putnam'south Sons, 1888. Impress.
———. "The Romanisation of Ireland."The Nineteenth Century 50 (July 1901): 30-43. Impress.
———.Social Life in Greece. London: Macmillan, 1874. Print.
Judgment in the Case of the Rev. William Maturin. The Church Association Monthly Intelligencer v-six (1 October, 1872): 253-6. Print.
Mack, Burton L.Rhetoric and the New Attestation. Minneapolis: Augburg Fortress, 1990. Print.
McCabe, Joseph.The Story of Religious Controversy. Boston: The Stratford Company, 1929. Print.
Murphy, Andrew.Ireland, Reading and Cultural Nationalism, 1790-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. Print.
Newman, John Henry. "Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training."Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. London: Burn, Oates, and Company, 1874. 1-14. Print.
"Notices of New Books—The Disuse of Modernistic Preaching." The New Englander 41.5 (1882): 710. Print.
Oliphant Erstwhile, Hughes. The Modernistic Age, vol. 6 ofThe Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church. One thousand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007. Print.
"Reviews and Notices."The Church of England Pulpit and Ecclesiastical Review13 (1882): 155-six. Impress.
Robson, Julie-Ann. "The Time of Opening Manhood: Mahaffy, Wilde, and Pater." Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 10.1-2 (2004): 299-310.
Ross, Iain.Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece.Cambridge: Cambridge Up, 2012. Print.
Stanford, William Bedell, and Robert Brendan McDowell.Mahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. Print.
Trumbull, Henry Clay. "From Professor Dr. John P. Mahaffy."The Threshold Covenant or the Beginning of Religious Rites. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896. 314. Impress.
Webb, Daniel. "Religious Controversy and Harmony a Trinity College Dublin over Iv Centuries."Hermathena (1992): 95-114. Print.
"What Have the Greeks Washed for Modern Civilization?"The Oxford and Cambridge Review 7 (1909): 129-130. Print.
"Why Men practise not Preach Well."The Month 45.216 (June 1882): 295-7. Print.
Wilde, Oscar.Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt and Visitor, 2000. Print.
———. "The Ascension of Historical Criticism." Vol. Iv ofThe Consummate Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Josephine Guy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007: 3-70. Print.
ENDNOTES
[1] Given the prominent part Mahaffy played in Irish politics, educational policy, and historical scholarship of the late nineteenth century, the scarcity of modern research on his work is striking. The nigh detailed discussions of Mahaffy's work in contempo years accept appeared in scholarship on Oscar Wilde. See for instance, Julie-Ann Robson, "The Time of Opening Manhood: Mahaffy, Wilde, and Pater."Hungarian Journal of English language and American Studies 10.one-2 (2004): 299-310. Occasionally, Mahaffy's proper name is invoked in discussions of Victorian Hellenism, and Tomás Irish has explored the closing years of Mahaffy's life in "A Man Chosen Mahaffy: an Irish gaelic Cosmopolitan Confronts Crunch, 1899-1919."Historical Research 89.246 (Nov 2016): 846-65. Nevertheless, the just monograph examining his life and work remains William Bedell Stanford and Robert Brendan McDowell'sMahaffy: A Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).
[2] See Lord Alfred Douglas,Oscar Wilde: A Summing Upward(London: Duckworth, 1950), 52. Stanford and MacDowell speculate that Mahaffy's own views may be reflected in the following passage fromThe Social Life of Greece: "It was not the faith of mystics, nor an absorption of the listen in the contemplation of Divine perfections and Divine mysteries, just rather the religion of a shrewd and practical people, who [. . .] blessed God, not like Fénelon, because he was ideally perfect, but like Bossuet, because they received from him many substantial favours" (143).
[3] Ludwig Feuerbach'southward 1841 volumeThe Essence of Christianity contended that God and religion were only the outward manifestations of natural human impulses and that, therefore, any belief in spiritual powers external to man were misguided. Ernest Renan'sLife of Jesus (1863), much like Strauss's book, treated Christ equally a historical figure, notably claiming that his emergence every bit a religious icon depended upon abandoning his Jewish roots.
[4] To regard Wilde equally a champion of hedonistic excess is, of course, a gross oversimplification of his work, which engages rigorously with questions of moral import. An especially rich discussion of Wilde'south relationship to ethics can be found in Julia Prewitt Brown,Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde'due south Philosophy of Fine art (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997).
[5] This is despite the fact that Wilde surely had already encountered Hellenic culture at Portora Majestic School, as noted by Iain Ross inOscar Wilde and Aboriginal Greece(Cambridge: Cambridge Upwardly, 2012). Nevertheless, Mahaffy's role in shaping Wilde's encounters with Greek civilization was significant. The origin of Mahaffy's reputation as a pagan sympathizer likely originates in his remark to Wilde: "we cannot let you become a Catholic merely nosotros will make yous a good pagan instead" (Ellmann,Oscar Wilde 67). Richard Ellmann is careful, all the same, to have the remark with tongue in cheek, noting that Mahaffy was more "arch-Protestant" than agnostic (Ellmann,Four Dubliners 18).
[6] George Macmillan records on 28 March 1877 that "Mahaffy is quite determined" to prevent Wilde'southward seeing "all the glories of the religion which seems to him the highest and most sentimental." On 27 April, Wilde would ostend in a letter: "I never went to Rome at all! […] but Mahaffy my old tutor carried me off to Greece with him to see Mykenae and
[seven] An especially sharp response to Mahaffy'due south hostility toward the Catholic University can be found in "The Coming Crunch."The Month 68 (April 1890): 457-73.
[8] An business relationship of the trial and verdict can be viewed inThe Church Clan Monthly Intelligencer 5-6 (ane October, 1872): 253-half dozen.
[9] For an exceptionally detailed overview of Trinity College Dublin'south religious history see, Daniel Webb, "Religious Controversy and Harmony a Trinity College Dublin over Iv Centuries."Hermathena (1992): 95-114.
[x] Newman reportedly left his post at the Catholic University considering he, like Mahaffy, felt that it had been deployed every bit a political tool rather than as an educational enterprise.
[eleven] See, for case, the piece of work of Robert Ellison, who notes that the pulpit's "reject" was very much a subject for fence in Robert Ellison,The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 1998), 51.
[12] For a detailed discussion of the rising in literacy in nineteenth-century Ireland, see Andrew Murphy,Ireland, Reading and Cultural Nationalism, 1790-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018.)
[13] While it is clear that he was consuming Catholic sermons both in person and in print from the 1850s well into the latter function of the century, we cannot definitively establish that Mahaffy attended this sermon and, to my knowledge, no record of Mahaffy's having read Newman's sermons remains.
[14] In practice, the extent to which preachers were trained in rhetoric varied widely depending on their educational background, though Burton Mack observes that rhetoric as an object of study at the university was in full general decline for much of the century; encounter Burton 50. Mack,Rhetoric and the New Testament (Minneapolis, Augburg Fortress, 1990). For his own part, Mahaffy draws a distinction between the kind of rhetoric that students of Trinity College Dublin would take encountered (for example, Aristotle'sLogic) and the study ofpractical rhetoric, that is, he regarded the historical study of rhetoric as fundamentally different from an sensation of how to deploy rhetorical techniques as the author of a sermon.
[fifteen] Mahaffy's oft-repeated belief that the "Greeks were the fathers of modern thinking" directly informed the work of his most famous pupil, Oscar Wilde, who would remark in "The Rise of Historical Criticism" that the "Greek spirit is essentially modern." J.P. Mahaffy,Greek Life and Thought [1887] (London: Thousand.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 225; Oscar Wilde, "The Rise of Historical Criticism." vol. IV ofThe Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 3-70, 66.
Source: https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=kimberly-j-stern-the-publication-of-john-pentland-mahaffys-the-decay-of-modern-preaching-1882
Post a Comment for "John Mahaffys the Principles of the Art of Conversation 1888"