293 Benjamin Gordon-Taylor & Nicolas Stebbing CR

Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 9 (2013) 263–300 293 Benjamin Gordon-Taylor & Nicolas Stebbing CR (eds), Walter Frere: Scholar, Monk, Bishop (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2011) xiv + 255 pp. £18.99. ISBN 978-1-85311-5 (pbk). It is more than sixty years since C. S. Phillips and others published in 1947 Walter Frere, Bishop of Truro: A Memoir. His name is now less well-known, but the editors of this affectionate but astringent set of essays have rightly judged that the time has come to recall and to review his extraordinary contribution to liturgical scholarship, ordination training, the episcopate, ecumenism and, above all, the Community of the Resurrection (CR) over a long life of service to the Church of England. Although immensely diligent and even adventurous (he visited Russia in 1914), Frere never sought the limelight but constantly retreated into studious solitude and concealed his innermost person behind social graciousness and entertaining affability. Several contributors, notably Alan Wilkinson in his useful biographical sketch and John Davies on his spirituality, try to penetrate the mystery of this curiously enigmatic personality and admit themselves baffled. John le Carré might have succeeded. Frere had been born into the high noon of Victorian confidence and upper-class privilege, but after brilliant academic success at Cambridge he found himself drawn towards both socialism and the monastic life. In 1892 he joined the embryonic Community of the Resurrection under the leader- ship of Charles Gore, whom he succeeded as Superior ten years later at the age of 38. Loyalty to that community had been and was to be the constant warp of his life until the very end. Successive chapters of this symposium supply the varied weft threads, all of them characterised by his extraordinary prescience and ability to be ahead of his time. So, for example, Benjamin Gordon-Taylor in ‘The Educator’, shows how his commitment to making ordination available to working-class men led to the breaking of the de facto Oxbridge monopoly and to the trail-blazing combination of the Hostel at Leeds University and the Theological College at Mirfield. Moreover, Frere was the first to insist that there should be among the clergy men trained in the science of historical criticism and (my italics) in the various branches of physical science. John Livesley’s chapter ‘Bishop of Truro 1923-1935’ is also marked by a sense of a man out of due time and, perhaps, even out of due place, for Frere himself had agonised over the incompatibility of life in community and detached service in the episcopate. On the point of principle the jury is still out. At first the church refused to have monastic bishops. Before long © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/17455316-00902017 <UN> 294 Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 9 (2013) 263–300 celibacy was compulsory for all clergy in the West and only monks could become bishops in the Eastern Church. (As the editors themselves say, there should have been a chapter on Frere’s work with the Orthodox.) He defended the distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ clergy, but to this day it drastically reduces the pool of suitable candidates. In the event, Frere was of most use to Archbishop Davidson and to the wider Church of England as a liturgist and ecumenist; but it was not only the people of Cornwall who came to appreciate the fact that there had been a saint and a scholar, as well as a shepherd of souls, at Lis Escop. ‘A Son of the Reformation? Walter Frere’s historical scholarship reviewed’ is an accomplished historiographical paper by the young Mirfield trained scholar Alex Faludy. It contains a masterly overview of revisionist and post- revisionist treatments of the Reformation and disposes en passant of several widespread myths. In his detailed scrutiny of primary sources such as episcopal registers (to establish the fact that Marian deprivations of Edwardine clergy had been for marriage not invalidity) Frere was decades ahead of partisan authors on all sides. The same methods and meticulous- ness were to serve him well in both liturgical and musicological studies, deftly handled here by Peter Allan CR under the engaging title ‘Like an ele- phant waltzing’. There is an element of tragedy in Frere’s ultimate inability to embrace the 1928 Prayer Book, which he had done so much to facilitate. Liturgical revision opens up ecclesiological cracks, and the tortuous path to 1928 revealed the hidden tensions between the gentle High Church Anglo- Catholicism of Frere, Dearmer and the Alcuin Club on the one hand and the Anglo-Papalism of the advanced Ritualists on the other. The latter looked back to medieval and baroque models and sideways to the rites and ceremonies of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, not knowing, of course, that a Second Vatican Council would soon sweep away this house built on sand. The former looked to scripture, to the early church and to patristic sources, a study in which Frere excelled. His views have been largely vindicated by the shape, if not the language, of the eucharistic rites in much of the Anglican Communion, in the Church of England’s Common Worship and in the Missa Normativa. Philip Corbett deals well with this aspect of Frere’s liturgical work and John Livesley (again) with ‘The intel- lectual content of Walter Frere’s contribution to Anglican liturgical reform’. Alas, it was precisely that liturgical expertise which became increasingly irrelevant in the later stages of Prayer Book revision. <UN>.

Load more