James Martineau
Encyclopedia
James Martineau was an English
religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism
. For 45 years he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the principal training college for British Unitarianism.
, the writer and pioneer sociologist. They were descended from Gaston Martineau, a Huguenot
surgeon and refugee, who married Marie Pierre in 1693, and settled in Norwich. His son and grandson--respectively the great-grandfather and grandfather of James Martineau--were surgeons in the same city, while his father was a manufacturer and merchant. Many of the family were active in Unitarian
causes, so much so that a room in Essex Hall, the headquarters of British Unitarianism, was eventually named after them. (The building also held a statue of him. )
under Edward Valpy
, as good a scholar as his better-known brother Richard
, but proved too sensitive for state school. He was sent to Bristol
to the private academy of Dr. Lant Carpenter
, under whom he studied for two years. On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer
at Derby, where he acquired "a store of exclusively scientific conceptions," but also began to look to religion for mental stimulation.
Martineau's conversion
followed, and in 1822 he entered the dissenting academy Manchester College
, then at York
. Here he "woke up to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations." Of his teachers, one, the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved
, was, Martineau said, "a master of the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth." The other, the Rev. John Kenrick
, he described as a man so learned as to be placed by Dean Stanley "in the same line with Blomfield
and Thirlwall
," and as "so far above the level of either vanity or dogmatism, that cynicism itself could not think of them in his presence." On leaving the college in 1827 Martineau returned to Bristol
to teach in the school of Lant Carpenter; but in the following year he was ordained for a Unitarian church in Dublin, whose senior minister was a relative of his.
Martineau's ministerial career was suddenly cut short in 1832 by difficulties growing out of the "regium donum
", which had on the death of the senior minister fallen to him. He conceived it as "a religious monopoly" to which "the nation at large contributes," while "Presbyterians alone receive," and which placed him in "a relation to the state" so "seriously objectionable" as to be "impossible to hold." The invidious distinction it drew between Presbyterians on the one hand, and Catholic
s, members of the Religious Society of Friends
(Quakers), other nonconformists, unbelievers, and Jews on the other, who were compelled to support a ministry they conscientiously disapproved, offended his conscience.
. He lodged in a house owned by Joseph Williamson
. It was during his 25 years in Liverpool that he published his first work, Rationale of Religious Enquiry, which caught the attention of many religious and philosophical figures.
In 1840 Martineau was appointed Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the seminary in which he had been educated, and which had now moved from York back to Manchester
. This position he held for forty-five years. In 1853 the college moved to London, and four years later he followed it there. In 1858 he combined this work with preaching at the pulpit of Little Portland Street Chapel in London, which for the first two years he shared with the Rev. J.J. Tayler (who was also his colleague in the college), and then for twelve years as its only minister.
In 1866, the Chair of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, fell vacant when the liberal nonconformist Dr John Hoppus
retired. Martineau became a candidate, and despite strong support from some quarters, potent opposition was organised by the anti-clerical George Grote
, whose refusal to endorse Martineau resulted in the appointment of George Croom Robertson
, then an untried man. Martineau, however, sidestepped Grote's opposition, much as Hoppus had learnt to do during his Professorship, and developed a cordial friendship with Robertson, who retired in 1885, full of years and honours, from the principalship of the college he had so long served and adorned.
Martineau, who in his youth had been denied the benefit of a university education, in his later years found famous universities eager to confer upon him their highest distinctions. He was awarded LL.D. of Harvard in 1872, S.T.D. of Leiden in 1874, D.D. of Edinburgh
in 1884, D.C.L. of Oxford
in 1888 and D. Litt. of Dublin
in 1891.
for the purposes of invective against these things, though he could be very outspoken. He was fundamentally a man of strong convictions; the root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial change in his philosophy, was the feeling for God
. He described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had "carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room "interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature"; how he served in willing captivity "the 'empirical' and 'necessarian' mode of thought," even though "shocked" by the dogma
tism and acrid humours "of certain distinguished representatives" and how in a period of "second education" at Humboldt University in Berlin
, "mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg," he experienced" a new intellectual birth" which " was essentially the gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant
and even Hegel
." Although this momentous change of view illuminated his old beliefs and helped him to re-interpret and re-articulate them, it made him no more of a theist than he had been before. And as his theism
was, so was his religion and his philosophy. He developed Transcendentalist
views, which became a significant current within Unitarianism.
prophets so potent and sublime. But he did more than interpret to his age the significance of man's ultimate theistic beliefs; he gave them vitality by reading them through the consciousness of Jesus
. His religion was what he conceived the personal religion of Jesus to have been; and He was to him more a person to be imitated than an authority to be obeyed, rather an ideal to be revered than a being to be worshipped.
Martineau had the imagination that invested with personal being and ethical qualities the most abstruse notions. Although he did not believe in the Incarnation, he held deity to be manifest in humanity; its saints and heroes became, in spite of innumerable frailties, after a sort divine; man underwent an apotheosis
, and all life was touched with the dignity and the grace which it owed to its source. The 19th century had no more reverent thinker than Martineau; the awe of the Eternal was the very atmosphere that he breathed, and he looked at man with the compassion of one whose thoughts were full of God.
To his function as a preacher we owe some of his most characteristic and stimulating works, especially the discourses by which it may be said he won his way to wide and influential recognition--Endeavours after the Christian Life, 1st series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847; Hours of Thought, 1st series, 1876; 2nd series, 1879; the various hymn-books he issued at Dublin in 1831, at Liverpool in 1840, in London in 1873; and the Home Prayers in 1891.
For the most part, Martineau escaped the active and, on the whole, belittling period of orthodox Trinitarian churches against Unitarians
, the "Socinian" controversy. When his ministry began its fires were slowly dying down, though the embers still glowed. However, in 1839 he sprang to the defence of Unitarian doctrine, which had been assailed by certain Liverpool clergymen, of whom Fielding Ould was the most active and Hugh McNeile
the most famous. As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed "the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection," " the Deity of Christ," " Vicarious Redemption," "Evil," and "Christianity without Priest and without Ritual." He remained to the end a keen and vigilant apologist of the school in which he had been nursed. But the questions proper to the new day came swiftly upon his quick and susceptible mind--enlarged, deepened and developed it.
Besides the vocation he had chosen and strove to fulfill, two more external influences helped shape Martineau's mind and define his problem and his work; the awakening of English thought to the problems which underlie both philosophy and religion, and the new and higher opportunities offered for their discussion in the periodical press. The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the idea of the church, the historical interpretation of the documents which described the persons who had created the Christian religion, especially the person and work of its founder; but those most alive in his later and maturer time chiefly related to the philosophy of religion and ethics.
In Martineau's earliest book, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry, published in 1836, he places the authority of reason above that of Scripture. He assesses the New Testament as "uninspired, but truthful; sincere, able, vigorous, but fallible." The book marked him among older British Unitarians as a dangerous radical, and his ideas were the catalyst for a pamphlet war in America between George Ripley
(who favored Martineau's questioning of the historical accuracy of scripture) and the more conservative Andrews Norton
.
Despite his belief that the Bible was fallible, Martineau continued to hold the view, which was not so much characteristic of the man as of the school in which he had been trained, that "in no intelligible sense can any one who denies the supernatural origin of the religion of Christ be termed a Christian," which term, he explained, was used not as "a name of praise," but simply as " a designation of belief." He censured the German rationalists "for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other." The echoes of the dying controversy are thus distinct and not very distant in this book, though it also offers in its larger outlook, in the author's evident uneasiness under the burden of inherited beliefs, and his inability to reconcile them with his new standpoint and accepted principles, a curious forecast of his later development, while in its positive premisses it presents a still more instructive contrast to the conclusions of his later dialectic. Nor did the sound of the ancient controversy ever cease to be audible to him.
, whom Martineau had called "the inspirer of his youth," Theodore Parker
had succeeded, introducing more radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic criticism of sacred history. Joseph Blanco White
, "the rationalist A'Kempis," who had dared to appear as "a religious sceptic in God's presence," had found a biographer and interpreter in Martineau's friend and colleague, John Hamilton Thom
. Within the English Church men with whom he had both personal and religious sympathy rose--Whately
, of whom he said, "We know no living writer who has proved so little and disproved so much"; and Thomas Arnold
, "a man who could be a hero without romance"; F. D. Maurice, whose character, marked by "religious realism," sought in the past "the witness to eternal truths, the manifestation by time-samples of infinite realities and unchanging relations"; and Charles Kingsley
, "a great teacher," though one "certain to go astray the moment he becomes didactic."
Beside these may be placed men like Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman, whose mind Martineau said was "critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision," and whose faith is "an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives the veto not of his reason but of his will," as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy. The philosophic principles and religious deductions of dean Mansel
he disliked as much as those of Newman, but he respected his arguments more. Apart from the Churches, men like Carlyle and Matthew Arnold
--with whom he had much in common--influenced him; while Herbert Spencer
in England and Auguste Comte
in France afforded the antithesis needful to the dialectical development of his own views. He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Baur
and the Tübingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of Ernest Renan
and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of evolution, and the new scientific way of looking at nature and her creative methods, compelled him to rethink and reformulate his theistic principles and conclusions, especially as to the forms under which the relation of God to the world and His action within it could be conceived. Under the impulses which came from these various sides Martineau's mind lived and moved, and as they successively rose he promptly, by appreciation or criticism, responded to the dialectical issues which they raised.
In the discussion of these questions the periodical press supplied him with the opportunity of taking an effective part. At first his literary activity was limited to sectional publications, and he addressed his public, now as editor and now as leading contributor, in the Monthly Repository
, the Christian Reformer
, the Prospective Review, the Westminster Review
and the National Review
. Later, especially when scientific speculation had made the theistic problem urgent, he was a frequent contributor to the literary monthlies. And when in 1890 he began to gather together the miscellaneous essays and papers written during a period of sixty years, he expressed the hope that, though "they could lay no claim to logical consistency," they might yet show "beneath the varying complexion of their thought some intelligible moral continuity," "leading in the end to a view of life more coherent and less defective than was presented at the beginning." And though it is a proud as well as a modest hope,' no one could call it unjustified. For his essays are fine examples of permanent literature appearing in an ephemeral medium, and represent work which has solid worth for later thought as well as for the speculation of their own time. There is hardly a name or a movement in the religious history of the century which he did not touch and illuminate. It was in this form that he criticized the "atheistic mesmerism " to which his sister Harriet had committed herself, and she never forgave his criticism. But his course was always singularly independent, and, though one of the most affectionate and most sensitive of men, yet it was his fortune to be so fastidious in thought and so conscientious in judgment as often to give offence or create alarm in those he deeply respected or tenderly loved.
The theological and philosophical discussions which thus appeared he later described as "the tentatives which gradually prepared the way for the more systematic expositions of the Types of Ethical Theory and The Study of Religion, and, in some measure, of The Seat of Authority in Religion." These books expressed his mature thought, and may be said to contain, in what he conceived as a final form, the speculative achievements of his life. They appeared respectively in 1885, 1888 and 1890, and were without doubt remarkable feats to be performed by a man who had passed his eightieth year. Their literary and speculative qualities are indeed exceptionally brilliant; they are splendid in diction, elaborate in argument, cogent yet reverent, keen while fearless in criticism. But they have also most obvious defects: they are unquestionably the books of an old man who had thought much as well as spoken and written often on the themes he discusses, yet who had finally put his material together in haste at a time when his mind had lost, if not its dialectic vigour, yet its freshness and its sense of proportion; and who had been so accustomed to amplify the single stages of his argument that he had forgotten how much they needed to be reduced to scale and to be built into an organic whole. In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his division of ethical theories into the "unpsychological," "idiopsychological," and the "hetero-psychological," is incapable of historical justification; his exposition of single ethical systems is, though always interesting and suggestive, often arbitrary and inadequate, being governed by dialectical exigencies rather than historical order and perspective. In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he "used the word in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago," as denoting "belief in an ever-living God, a divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind." As thus used, it was a term which governed the problems of speculative theism rather than those connected with the historical origin, the evolution and the organization of religion. And these are the questions which are now to the front. These criticisms mean that his most elaborate discussions came forty years too late, for they were concerned with problems which agitated the middle rather than the end of the 19th century. But if we pass from this criticism of form to the actual contents of the two books, we are bound to confess that they constitute a wonderfully cogent and persuasive theistic argument. That argument may be described as a criticism of man and his world used as a basis for the construction of a reasoned idea of nature and being. Man and nature, thought and being, fitted each other. What was implicit in nature had become explicit in man; the problem of the individual was one with the problem of universal experience. The interpretation of man was therefore the interpretation of his universe. Emphasis was made to fall on the reason, the conscience and the will of the finite personality; and just as these were found to be native in him they were held to be immanent in the cause of his universe. What lived in time belonged to eternity; the microcosm was the epitome of the macrocosm;, the reason which reigned in man interpreted the law that was revealed in conscience and the power which governed human destiny, while the freedom which man realized was the direct negation both of necessity and of the operation of any fortuitous cause in the cosmos.
It was not possible, however, that the theistic idea could be discussed in relation to nature only. It was necessary that it should be applied to history and to the forces and personalities active within it. And of these the greatest was of course the Person that had created the Christian religion. What did Jesus signify? What authority belonged to Him and to the books that contain His history and interpret His person? This was the problem which Martineau attempted to deal with in The Seat of Authority in Religion. The workmanship of the book is unequal: historical and literary criticism had never been Martineau's strongest point, although he had almost continuously maintained an amount of New Testament study, as his note-books show. In its speculative parts the book is quite equal to those that had gone before, but in its literary and historical parts there are indications of a mind in which a long-practised logic had become a rooted habit. While a comparison of his expositions of the Pauline and Johannine Christologies with the earlier Unitarian exegesis in which he had been trained shows how wide is the interval, the work does not represent a mifid that had throughout its history lived and worked in the delicate and judicial investigations he here tried to conduct.
Martineau's theory of the religious society or church was that of an idealist rather than of a statesman or practical politician. He stood equally remote from the old Voluntary principle, that "the State had nothing to do with religion," and from the sacerdotal position that the clergy stood in an apostolic succession, and either constituted the Church or were the persons into whose hands its guidance had been committed. He hated two things intensely, a sacrosanct priesthood and an enforced uniformity. He may be said to have believed in the sanity and sanctity of the state rather than of the Church. Statesmen he could trust as he would not trust ecciesiastics. And so he even propounded a scheme, which fell still-born, that would have repealed uniformity, taken the church out of the hands of a clerical order, and allowed the coordination of sects or churches under the state. Not that he would have allowed the state to touch doctrine, to determine polity or discipline; but he would have had it to recognize historical achievement, religious character and capacity, and endow out of its ample resources those societies which had vindicated their right to be regarded as making for religion. His ideal may have been academic, but it was the dream of a mind that thought nobly both of religion and of the state.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism
History of Unitarianism
Unitarianism, both as a theology and as a denominational family of churches, was first defined and developed in England and America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, although theological ancestors are to be found in the Protestant Reformation and even as far back as the early days of...
. For 45 years he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the principal training college for British Unitarianism.
Early life
He was born in Norwich, the seventh child of Thomas Martineau and Elizabeth Rankin, the sixth, his senior by almost three years, being his sister HarrietHarriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and Whig writer, often cited as the first female sociologist....
, the writer and pioneer sociologist. They were descended from Gaston Martineau, a Huguenot
Huguenot
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...
surgeon and refugee, who married Marie Pierre in 1693, and settled in Norwich. His son and grandson--respectively the great-grandfather and grandfather of James Martineau--were surgeons in the same city, while his father was a manufacturer and merchant. Many of the family were active in Unitarian
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
causes, so much so that a room in Essex Hall, the headquarters of British Unitarianism, was eventually named after them. (The building also held a statue of him. )
Education & early years
James was educated at Norwich Grammar SchoolGrammar school
A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching classical languages but more recently an academically-oriented secondary school.The original purpose of mediaeval...
under Edward Valpy
Edward Valpy
Edward Valpy , was a classical scholar.Valpy, fourth son of Richard Valpy of St. John's, Jersey, by his wife Catherine, daughter of John Chevalier, was born at Reading in 1764. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.D. in 1810. After leaving college he acted for many years as a...
, as good a scholar as his better-known brother Richard
Richard Valpy
-Biography:He was born the eldest son of Richard and Catherine Valpy in Jersey. He was sent to schools in Normandy and Southampton, and completed his education at Pembroke College, Oxford. In 1777 he took orders. After holding a mastership at Bury, in 1781 he became head master of Reading grammar...
, but proved too sensitive for state school. He was sent to Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
to the private academy of Dr. Lant Carpenter
Lant Carpenter
Lant Carpenter, Dr. was an English educator and Unitarian minister.Lant Carpenter was born in Kidderminster, the third son of George Carpenter and his wife Mary ....
, under whom he studied for two years. On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer
Civil engineer
A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering; the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructures while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing infrastructures that have been neglected.Originally, a...
at Derby, where he acquired "a store of exclusively scientific conceptions," but also began to look to religion for mental stimulation.
Martineau's conversion
Religious conversion
Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religion that differs from the convert's previous religion. Changing from one denomination to another within the same religion is usually described as reaffiliation rather than conversion.People convert to a different religion for various reasons,...
followed, and in 1822 he entered the dissenting academy Manchester College
Harris Manchester College, Oxford
Harris Manchester College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Formerly known as Manchester College, it is listed in the University Statutes as Manchester Academy and Harris College, and at University ceremonies it is called Collegium de Harris et...
, then at York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
. Here he "woke up to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations." Of his teachers, one, the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved
Charles Wellbeloved
Charles Wellbeloved was a unitarian divine and archaeologist.-Life:Charles Wellbeloved, only child of John Wellbeloved , by his wife Elizabeth , was born in Denmark Street, St Giles, London, on 6 April 1769, and baptised on 25 April at St. Giles-in-the-Fields...
, was, Martineau said, "a master of the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth." The other, the Rev. John Kenrick
John Kenrick
John Kenrick was an English classical historian.-Life:He was born on 4 February 1788 at Exeter, the eldest son of Timothy Kenrick, Unitarian minister, and his first wife, Mary, daughter of John Waymouth of Exeter. He was educated at the local grammar school run by the Rev. Charles Lloyd and later...
, he described as a man so learned as to be placed by Dean Stanley "in the same line with Blomfield
Blomfield
Blomfield is the last name of:* Arthur Blomfield, English architect* Charles James Blomfield, English bishop* Derek Blomfield, English actor* Lady Blomfield, English writer* Edward Valentine Blomfield, classical scholar and the brother of Peter Blomfield...
and Thirlwall
Connop Thirlwall
Connop Thirlwall was an English bishop and historian.-Early life:Thirlwall was born at Stepney, London, of a Northumbrian family. He was a prodigy, learning Latin at three, Greek at four, and writing sermons at seven.He went to Charterhouse School, where George Grote and Julius Hare were among...
," and as "so far above the level of either vanity or dogmatism, that cynicism itself could not think of them in his presence." On leaving the college in 1827 Martineau returned to Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
to teach in the school of Lant Carpenter; but in the following year he was ordained for a Unitarian church in Dublin, whose senior minister was a relative of his.
Regium Donum
The Regium Donum was an annual grant formerly voted by Parliament to augment the stipends of the Presbyterian clergy in Ireland. The Regium Donum originally began in 1673 during the reign of Charles II. The grant was then renewed and increased by King William III in 1690 as a reward for the loyalty...
", which had on the death of the senior minister fallen to him. He conceived it as "a religious monopoly" to which "the nation at large contributes," while "Presbyterians alone receive," and which placed him in "a relation to the state" so "seriously objectionable" as to be "impossible to hold." The invidious distinction it drew between Presbyterians on the one hand, and Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
s, members of the Religious Society of Friends
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
(Quakers), other nonconformists, unbelievers, and Jews on the other, who were compelled to support a ministry they conscientiously disapproved, offended his conscience.
Work & writings
From Dublin, Martineau was called to LiverpoolLiverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
. He lodged in a house owned by Joseph Williamson
Joseph Williamson (philanthropist)
Joseph Williamson was an eccentric, businessman, property owner, and a philanthropist who is best known for the tunnels which were constructed under his direction in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool, England...
. It was during his 25 years in Liverpool that he published his first work, Rationale of Religious Enquiry, which caught the attention of many religious and philosophical figures.
In 1840 Martineau was appointed Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the seminary in which he had been educated, and which had now moved from York back to Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
. This position he held for forty-five years. In 1853 the college moved to London, and four years later he followed it there. In 1858 he combined this work with preaching at the pulpit of Little Portland Street Chapel in London, which for the first two years he shared with the Rev. J.J. Tayler (who was also his colleague in the college), and then for twelve years as its only minister.
In 1866, the Chair of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, fell vacant when the liberal nonconformist Dr John Hoppus
John Hoppus
Rev. John Hoppus LL.D., PH.D., F.R.S. , English Congregational minister, author, Fellow of the Royal Society, abolitionist and educational reformer, was appointed the first Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Mind at the newly formed London University , a position he secured and held against his...
retired. Martineau became a candidate, and despite strong support from some quarters, potent opposition was organised by the anti-clerical George Grote
George Grote
George Grote was an English classical historian, best known in the field for a major work, the voluminous History of Greece, still read.-Early life:He was born at Clay Hill near Beckenham in Kent...
, whose refusal to endorse Martineau resulted in the appointment of George Croom Robertson
George Croom Robertson
George Croom Robertson was a Scottish philosopher.He was born in Aberdeen. In 1857 he gained a bursary at Marischal College, and graduated MA in 1861, with the highest honours in classics and philosophy. In the same year he won a Fergusson scholarship of £100 a year for two years, which enabled...
, then an untried man. Martineau, however, sidestepped Grote's opposition, much as Hoppus had learnt to do during his Professorship, and developed a cordial friendship with Robertson, who retired in 1885, full of years and honours, from the principalship of the college he had so long served and adorned.
Martineau, who in his youth had been denied the benefit of a university education, in his later years found famous universities eager to confer upon him their highest distinctions. He was awarded LL.D. of Harvard in 1872, S.T.D. of Leiden in 1874, D.D. of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
in 1884, D.C.L. of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
in 1888 and D. Litt. of Dublin
University of Dublin
The University of Dublin , corporately designated the Chancellor, Doctors and Masters of the University of Dublin , located in Dublin, Ireland, was effectively founded when in 1592 Queen Elizabeth I issued a charter for Trinity College, Dublin, as "the mother of a university" – this date making it...
in 1891.
Life and thought
The life of Martineau was essentially that of a thinker, and was typical of the century in which he lived and the society within which he moved. He was good-tempered and unembittered by persecution; he rarely used his splendid rhetoricRhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
for the purposes of invective against these things, though he could be very outspoken. He was fundamentally a man of strong convictions; the root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial change in his philosophy, was the feeling for God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
. He described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had "carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room "interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature"; how he served in willing captivity "the 'empirical' and 'necessarian' mode of thought," even though "shocked" by the dogma
Dogma
Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...
tism and acrid humours "of certain distinguished representatives" and how in a period of "second education" at Humboldt University in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, "mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg," he experienced" a new intellectual birth" which " was essentially the gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
and even Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
." Although this momentous change of view illuminated his old beliefs and helped him to re-interpret and re-articulate them, it made him no more of a theist than he had been before. And as his theism
Theism
Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists.In a more specific sense, theism refers to a doctrine concerning the nature of a monotheistic God and God's relationship to the universe....
was, so was his religion and his philosophy. He developed Transcendentalist
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the New England region of the United States as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian...
views, which became a significant current within Unitarianism.
Early years
Martineau was in his early life a preacher even more emphatically than a teacher. In all he said and thought he had the preacher's end in view. He was no mere orator, but addressed a comparatively small and select circle. The beliefs he preached were never to him mere speculative ideas, but the ultimate realities of being and thought, the final truths as to the character and ways of God interpreted into a law for the government of conscience and the regulation of life. He became a positive religious teacher by virtue of the very ideas that made the words of the HebrewHebrews
Hebrews is an ethnonym used in the Hebrew Bible...
prophets so potent and sublime. But he did more than interpret to his age the significance of man's ultimate theistic beliefs; he gave them vitality by reading them through the consciousness of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
. His religion was what he conceived the personal religion of Jesus to have been; and He was to him more a person to be imitated than an authority to be obeyed, rather an ideal to be revered than a being to be worshipped.
Apotheosis
Apotheosis is the glorification of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre.In theology, the term apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature...
, and all life was touched with the dignity and the grace which it owed to its source. The 19th century had no more reverent thinker than Martineau; the awe of the Eternal was the very atmosphere that he breathed, and he looked at man with the compassion of one whose thoughts were full of God.
To his function as a preacher we owe some of his most characteristic and stimulating works, especially the discourses by which it may be said he won his way to wide and influential recognition--Endeavours after the Christian Life, 1st series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847; Hours of Thought, 1st series, 1876; 2nd series, 1879; the various hymn-books he issued at Dublin in 1831, at Liverpool in 1840, in London in 1873; and the Home Prayers in 1891.
For the most part, Martineau escaped the active and, on the whole, belittling period of orthodox Trinitarian churches against Unitarians
Unitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
, the "Socinian" controversy. When his ministry began its fires were slowly dying down, though the embers still glowed. However, in 1839 he sprang to the defence of Unitarian doctrine, which had been assailed by certain Liverpool clergymen, of whom Fielding Ould was the most active and Hugh McNeile
Hugh McNeile
Hugh McNeile , was an Anglican churchman in Ireland.The younger son of Alexander McNeile , he was born at Ballycastle, County Antrim. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1810...
the most famous. As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed "the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection," " the Deity of Christ," " Vicarious Redemption," "Evil," and "Christianity without Priest and without Ritual." He remained to the end a keen and vigilant apologist of the school in which he had been nursed. But the questions proper to the new day came swiftly upon his quick and susceptible mind--enlarged, deepened and developed it.
Besides the vocation he had chosen and strove to fulfill, two more external influences helped shape Martineau's mind and define his problem and his work; the awakening of English thought to the problems which underlie both philosophy and religion, and the new and higher opportunities offered for their discussion in the periodical press. The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the idea of the church, the historical interpretation of the documents which described the persons who had created the Christian religion, especially the person and work of its founder; but those most alive in his later and maturer time chiefly related to the philosophy of religion and ethics.
In Martineau's earliest book, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry, published in 1836, he places the authority of reason above that of Scripture. He assesses the New Testament as "uninspired, but truthful; sincere, able, vigorous, but fallible." The book marked him among older British Unitarians as a dangerous radical, and his ideas were the catalyst for a pamphlet war in America between George Ripley
George Ripley
George Ripley was an American social reformer, Unitarian minister, and journalist associated with Transcendentalism. He was the founder of the short-lived Utopian community Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts....
(who favored Martineau's questioning of the historical accuracy of scripture) and the more conservative Andrews Norton
Andrews Norton
Andrews Norton was an American preacher and theologian. Along with William Ellery Channing, he was the leader of mainstream Unitarianism of the early and middle 19th century....
.
Despite his belief that the Bible was fallible, Martineau continued to hold the view, which was not so much characteristic of the man as of the school in which he had been trained, that "in no intelligible sense can any one who denies the supernatural origin of the religion of Christ be termed a Christian," which term, he explained, was used not as "a name of praise," but simply as " a designation of belief." He censured the German rationalists "for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other." The echoes of the dying controversy are thus distinct and not very distant in this book, though it also offers in its larger outlook, in the author's evident uneasiness under the burden of inherited beliefs, and his inability to reconcile them with his new standpoint and accepted principles, a curious forecast of his later development, while in its positive premisses it presents a still more instructive contrast to the conclusions of his later dialectic. Nor did the sound of the ancient controversy ever cease to be audible to him.
Transcendentalism
Within his own fold new light was breaking. To William Ellery ChanningWilliam Ellery Channing
Dr. William Ellery Channing was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton, one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. He was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker...
, whom Martineau had called "the inspirer of his youth," Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker
Theodore Parker was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church...
had succeeded, introducing more radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic criticism of sacred history. Joseph Blanco White
Joseph Blanco White
Joseph Blanco White, born José María Blanco Crespo , was a Spanish theologian and poet....
, "the rationalist A'Kempis," who had dared to appear as "a religious sceptic in God's presence," had found a biographer and interpreter in Martineau's friend and colleague, John Hamilton Thom
John Hamilton Thom
-Life:He was a younger son of John Thom , born on 10 January 1808 at Newry, County Down, where his father, a native of Lanarkshire, was presbyterian minister from 1800. His mother was Martha Anne , daughter of Isaac Glenny. In 1823 he was admitted at the Belfast Academical Institution as a student...
. Within the English Church men with whom he had both personal and religious sympathy rose--Whately
Richard Whately
Richard Whately was an English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.-Life and times:...
, of whom he said, "We know no living writer who has proved so little and disproved so much"; and Thomas Arnold
Thomas Arnold
Dr Thomas Arnold was a British educator and historian. Arnold was an early supporter of the Broad Church Anglican movement...
, "a man who could be a hero without romance"; F. D. Maurice, whose character, marked by "religious realism," sought in the past "the witness to eternal truths, the manifestation by time-samples of infinite realities and unchanging relations"; and Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
, "a great teacher," though one "certain to go astray the moment he becomes didactic."
Beside these may be placed men like Edward Pusey and John Henry Newman, whose mind Martineau said was "critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision," and whose faith is "an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives the veto not of his reason but of his will," as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy. The philosophic principles and religious deductions of dean Mansel
Henry Longueville Mansel
The Very Reverend Henry Longueville Mansel, D.D. was an English philosopher and ecclesiastic.He was born at Cosgrove, Northamptonshire .He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London and St John's College, Oxford...
he disliked as much as those of Newman, but he respected his arguments more. Apart from the Churches, men like Carlyle and Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...
--with whom he had much in common--influenced him; while Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
in England and Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
in France afforded the antithesis needful to the dialectical development of his own views. He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Baur
Ferdinand Christian Baur
Ferdinand Christian Baur was a German theologian and leader of the Tübingen school of theology...
and the Tübingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan was a French expert of Middle East ancient languages and civilizations, philosopher and writer, devoted to his native province of Brittany...
and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of evolution, and the new scientific way of looking at nature and her creative methods, compelled him to rethink and reformulate his theistic principles and conclusions, especially as to the forms under which the relation of God to the world and His action within it could be conceived. Under the impulses which came from these various sides Martineau's mind lived and moved, and as they successively rose he promptly, by appreciation or criticism, responded to the dialectical issues which they raised.
In the discussion of these questions the periodical press supplied him with the opportunity of taking an effective part. At first his literary activity was limited to sectional publications, and he addressed his public, now as editor and now as leading contributor, in the Monthly Repository
Monthly Repository
The Monthly Repository was a British monthly Unitarian periodical which ran between 1806 and 1838.The Monthly Repository was established when Robert Aspland bought William Vidler's Universal Theological Magazine and changed the name to the Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature...
, the Christian Reformer
Christian Reformer
The Christian Reformer was a British Unitarian magazine edited by Robert Aspland....
, the Prospective Review, the Westminster Review
Westminster Review
The Westminster Review was a quarterly British publication. Established in 1823 as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, it was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828....
and the National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
. Later, especially when scientific speculation had made the theistic problem urgent, he was a frequent contributor to the literary monthlies. And when in 1890 he began to gather together the miscellaneous essays and papers written during a period of sixty years, he expressed the hope that, though "they could lay no claim to logical consistency," they might yet show "beneath the varying complexion of their thought some intelligible moral continuity," "leading in the end to a view of life more coherent and less defective than was presented at the beginning." And though it is a proud as well as a modest hope,' no one could call it unjustified. For his essays are fine examples of permanent literature appearing in an ephemeral medium, and represent work which has solid worth for later thought as well as for the speculation of their own time. There is hardly a name or a movement in the religious history of the century which he did not touch and illuminate. It was in this form that he criticized the "atheistic mesmerism " to which his sister Harriet had committed herself, and she never forgave his criticism. But his course was always singularly independent, and, though one of the most affectionate and most sensitive of men, yet it was his fortune to be so fastidious in thought and so conscientious in judgment as often to give offence or create alarm in those he deeply respected or tenderly loved.
The theological and philosophical discussions which thus appeared he later described as "the tentatives which gradually prepared the way for the more systematic expositions of the Types of Ethical Theory and The Study of Religion, and, in some measure, of The Seat of Authority in Religion." These books expressed his mature thought, and may be said to contain, in what he conceived as a final form, the speculative achievements of his life. They appeared respectively in 1885, 1888 and 1890, and were without doubt remarkable feats to be performed by a man who had passed his eightieth year. Their literary and speculative qualities are indeed exceptionally brilliant; they are splendid in diction, elaborate in argument, cogent yet reverent, keen while fearless in criticism. But they have also most obvious defects: they are unquestionably the books of an old man who had thought much as well as spoken and written often on the themes he discusses, yet who had finally put his material together in haste at a time when his mind had lost, if not its dialectic vigour, yet its freshness and its sense of proportion; and who had been so accustomed to amplify the single stages of his argument that he had forgotten how much they needed to be reduced to scale and to be built into an organic whole. In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his division of ethical theories into the "unpsychological," "idiopsychological," and the "hetero-psychological," is incapable of historical justification; his exposition of single ethical systems is, though always interesting and suggestive, often arbitrary and inadequate, being governed by dialectical exigencies rather than historical order and perspective. In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he "used the word in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago," as denoting "belief in an ever-living God, a divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind." As thus used, it was a term which governed the problems of speculative theism rather than those connected with the historical origin, the evolution and the organization of religion. And these are the questions which are now to the front. These criticisms mean that his most elaborate discussions came forty years too late, for they were concerned with problems which agitated the middle rather than the end of the 19th century. But if we pass from this criticism of form to the actual contents of the two books, we are bound to confess that they constitute a wonderfully cogent and persuasive theistic argument. That argument may be described as a criticism of man and his world used as a basis for the construction of a reasoned idea of nature and being. Man and nature, thought and being, fitted each other. What was implicit in nature had become explicit in man; the problem of the individual was one with the problem of universal experience. The interpretation of man was therefore the interpretation of his universe. Emphasis was made to fall on the reason, the conscience and the will of the finite personality; and just as these were found to be native in him they were held to be immanent in the cause of his universe. What lived in time belonged to eternity; the microcosm was the epitome of the macrocosm;, the reason which reigned in man interpreted the law that was revealed in conscience and the power which governed human destiny, while the freedom which man realized was the direct negation both of necessity and of the operation of any fortuitous cause in the cosmos.
It was not possible, however, that the theistic idea could be discussed in relation to nature only. It was necessary that it should be applied to history and to the forces and personalities active within it. And of these the greatest was of course the Person that had created the Christian religion. What did Jesus signify? What authority belonged to Him and to the books that contain His history and interpret His person? This was the problem which Martineau attempted to deal with in The Seat of Authority in Religion. The workmanship of the book is unequal: historical and literary criticism had never been Martineau's strongest point, although he had almost continuously maintained an amount of New Testament study, as his note-books show. In its speculative parts the book is quite equal to those that had gone before, but in its literary and historical parts there are indications of a mind in which a long-practised logic had become a rooted habit. While a comparison of his expositions of the Pauline and Johannine Christologies with the earlier Unitarian exegesis in which he had been trained shows how wide is the interval, the work does not represent a mifid that had throughout its history lived and worked in the delicate and judicial investigations he here tried to conduct.
Martineau's theory of the religious society or church was that of an idealist rather than of a statesman or practical politician. He stood equally remote from the old Voluntary principle, that "the State had nothing to do with religion," and from the sacerdotal position that the clergy stood in an apostolic succession, and either constituted the Church or were the persons into whose hands its guidance had been committed. He hated two things intensely, a sacrosanct priesthood and an enforced uniformity. He may be said to have believed in the sanity and sanctity of the state rather than of the Church. Statesmen he could trust as he would not trust ecciesiastics. And so he even propounded a scheme, which fell still-born, that would have repealed uniformity, taken the church out of the hands of a clerical order, and allowed the coordination of sects or churches under the state. Not that he would have allowed the state to touch doctrine, to determine polity or discipline; but he would have had it to recognize historical achievement, religious character and capacity, and endow out of its ample resources those societies which had vindicated their right to be regarded as making for religion. His ideal may have been academic, but it was the dream of a mind that thought nobly both of religion and of the state.
See also
- Free ChristianityFree ChristianThe term Free Christian refers specifically to individual members and whole congregations within the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches....
- General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian ChurchesGeneral Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian ChurchesThe General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches is the umbrella organisation for Unitarian, Free Christian and other liberal religious congregations in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1928, with denominational roots going back to the Great Ejection of 1662...
- UnitarianismUnitarianismUnitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
External links
- Works by & about James Martineau at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(scanned books original editions color illustrated)