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 extraordi- nary 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