Cambridge

I am reading Professor Owen Chadwick’s ‘Securalization of the European Mind’, first published in 1975. He makes a good job of tackling the interplay of ideas, politics and general movements of religion and sentiment. He chronicles particularly well that layer of late 19th century churchgoing that hovers somewhere between belief and respectability.

Chadwick was master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, when I was an undergraduate there in 1967-71. He is still alive, at 94 the last surviving fellow (= member of the permanent teaching staff) of my time. Last night I watched a couple of You Tube interviews with him two years back.  

 

Owen Chadwick at 92

Very much a man of the establishment. He is a priest – he returned to Christianity as a moral answer to the rise of Hitlerism – but this always seemed slightly incidental. He was a historian, not a theologian, even if religious movements loomed large in his specialties. I never quite got the measure of his faith: certainly a deep moral sense was one of his major bridges to the divine. His sermons in chapel I remember only for their shortness.  

 He was a man of the establishment, not terribly consciously so I think. From an upper middle class background he slipped into the establishment, stayed in it, and ended up chronicling it.

 

Selwyn College – where I was an undergraduate

I never felt at ease with Chadwick’s Cambridge. I was about half a social class too low and not a good enough sportsman to be at home in it. Nor have I ever been quite at ease morally with people being able to spend their lives in academia, with a secure social position, income and the attendant outlook on life, funded basically by other people's money, either the taxpayers’ or that of tenants paying rent on property owned by a college since the 15th century. 

I did not find the Cambridge teaching staff a humanly particularly inspiring bunch. Which is part of the reason – and this is probably my biggest regret looking back – why I failed to find there the challenge to an integrated, adult Christianity that I needed. The choice of menu in my day was evangelical (the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, miserably Protestant), Anglo-Catholic (reeking of homosexuality), Roman Catholic (either Irish or recusant) or college chapel (establishment). Orthodoxy was just not on the horizon.