Cambridge

[anglomedved]

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.  

Comments

[yakov-krotov.livejournal.com]

Dear Father,

actually, I've forgotten Your name which Your wife mentioned, and I'll be very grateful for the reminder.

I've read Your testimony with greatest interest, since Chadwick for me is a sort of Homer. Iron Curtain creates very special distortions of space and time. What really shocked me in You memoir is the smell of the class society in all its glory. Is it possible to say that "establishment" is very similar to Soviet/Neo-Soviet "nomenclature"? and that "recusant" (a new word for me) is more close to Russian "диссидент" that "dissident"?

Yours Yakov

[ursusanglicanus.livejournal.com]

Dear Fr Yakov,

The name is Michael and, as a sub-deacon, I am not 'Father'.

Your reference to nomenklatura rang an uncomfortable bell, as in a more despondent moment I recently described my going up to Cambridge in 1967 as 'being given a place at the nomenklatura's university with no chance of being taken into the nomenklatura'.
(The reason I got there at all was that as an 11-year old I won a state scholarship to an elite secondary school in London, from which the top 15% automatically went to Oxford or Cambridge.)

If I understand things right, the 'establishment' I refer to (as it was around 1970) was perhaps closer to the post-Soviet (is this what you mean by neo-Soviet?) nomenklatura, where, apart from the right connections, it is useful to have a brain. If I understand right, in the Soviet nomenklatura this was less necessary....

The situation in England has changed considerably since then, not least because since about 1980 people can again earn lots of money fairly honestly.


No, a recusant is a term for someone who remained Roman Catholic in England when Catholicism was outlawed - mainly aristocrats who were allowed to keep Catholic priests on their estates. One of these aristocratic families has the same surname as me, so in better Catholic circles they used to discreetly inquire 'Are you one of....'

I hope though that none of this destroys your love for Chadwick. That would be desecration.

Incidentally, to find the film on You Tube that I refer to, google 'You Tube Owen Chadwick' and you well get to it.


In Christo, Michael

[yakov-krotov.livejournal.com]

Дорогой отец Михаил,

как всякий литератор, Вы отец - своим текстам. В принципе, я считаю лучшим путём борьбы с чинопочитанием инфляцию. Пусть все будут отцами, включая матерей!

Вопрос об уме занозист. Как всякий интеллектуал, я не склонен называть умом то, что нужно для достижения потолка своей некомпетентности (Peters' Principle). Исследования показывают, что состав неосоветской элиты совпадает с составом элиты старой более, чем на 80 процентов. Думаю, что интеллектуальный уровень остался прежним, но всё же умудрился понизиться. Причин тому, мне кажется, самое меньшее две. (1) Отпала необходимость читать Маркса и изучать ленинизм, а это всё-таки было какое-никакое чтение, оно малость подтягивало. На смену ничего не пришло. (2) Элита закрыла европеизацию, начатую Петром I, и взяла курс на пакистанизацию. Путин - антитеза Ататюрку, с которым его часто сравнивают некоторые апологеты. На смену хозяйственной элите пришла элита контрразведки. Её интеллектуальный уровень во всех странах не превышает уровня девушки Бонда. Секретность иссушает мыслительные способности.

В Чедвике я, конечно, не разочаруюсь. Но я помню, как был шокирован, как о. Ричард Райс из Лондона, историк, мне объяснял, что, когда он беседует со своим знакомым англиканским епископом и наступает время обеда, то его посылают обедать со слугами. "Шокирован" - это, прошу заметить, understatement...

Ваш во Христе с.Я.К.