Jowett lived at a cataclysmic time in the history of the Church of England. The intense inter-party disputes between Tractarians, Evangelicals and the old High and Dry and Low and Slow parties in the Church were as nothing to the more menacing developments in Germany. Scholars there began to apply to the Bible methods of criticising sources that were used in historical research. Clever dons were not perturbed that William Buckland and the geologists had disproved the literal truth of Genesis; but what of the thousands who went to church each Sunday and believed every tale in the Bible to be true? Clever dons, however, were appalled when they appreciated what the ‘higher criticism’, as it was called, was doing in Germany, where professors in the classroom mocked the miraculous doings in the Old Testament; and thus anyone suspected of being influenced by German scholarship was assumed to be unorthodox. The years of Jowett’s maturity were years marked by a series of rows, disputes, accusations of treachery and reproaches for bigotry. It was the age of the row over The Origin of Species and of the colonial bishop, John Colenso, who admitted that the questions of the simple natives to whom he ministered had shown him that the literal truth of the Bible was unsustainable. They were years when those who, however tentatively, tried to reinterpret Scripture were bound to be attacked by, for example, Henry Liddon, who became the leader of the Tractarian party. Liddon declared that if Jesus believed Moses to be the author of the first five books of the Bible, anyone who doubted this – or that Jonah lived in the belly of the whale – called Christ a liar and could not be a Christian.
Before he failed to be elected Master of Balliol Jowett had been among those reinterpreting Scripture. He and his friend Arthur Stanley published commentaries on several of St Paul’s Epistles. The leading biblical scholar of the day, Lightfoot, at Cambridge, dismissed Stanley’s work as readable, inaccurate and superficial. He thought better of Jowett. Jowett was more skilful, said Lightfoot, at destroying accepted interpretations than at forming a new one, but he praised Jowett for challenging received opinions. Jowett had set himself to reinterpret the doctrine of the Atonement. Sunday after Sunday in Evangelical and Low Church pulpits the congregation was told why Christ died for all mankind on the Cross. He died to atone for their sins. But there was a proviso. He made this bargain with God the Father provided that the sinner ‘closed with the offer’ – who must proclaim his faith that he was saved. Jowett found this offensive. Was the redemption of mankind to be compared to a huge commercial transaction? Jowett determined to sanitise this version of the central Christian dogma. He had visited Germany and consulted the renowned biblical critic Lachmann. That was enough for the traditionalists. Having humiliated Newman over the Martyrs Memorial, ‘Golly’ Go lightly now determined to humiliate Jowett.
The year after Jowett’s defeat for the mastership Dean Gaisford died and Palmerston appointed Jowett to the Regius professorship of Greek. Golightly dug up an old statute and forced Jowett to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles in front of the Vice-Chancellor. Jowett did so with contempt. He interrupted the Vice-Chancellor, who began a sententious speech to remind him what an awesome occasion this was, and stalked from the room. He met with further injustice, this time at the hands of the Tractarians. The Regius chair was worth only £40 a year and Jowett lost money by accepting it. The stipend was paid by Christ Church. Why should Christ Church, asked Pusey as a canon of Christ Church, finance a university professorship held by a man whose orthodoxy was suspect? Such was the legacy of Tractarian zeal.
To do Pusey justice he tried various devices to increase Jowett’s salary but every attempt was foiled by Jowett’s foes – and sometimes by his friends. It became more difficult when in 1860 Essays and Reviews was published. This was a book of contributions by churchmen, some of whom were trying to come to grips with the critical analysis of the Bible by German theologians. They were a distinguished lot: Temple and Pattison among them, but also four, including Jowett, who had become notorious for their unorthodox views. The book created yet another scandal. Two of the contributors were prosecuted and found guilty in the ecclesiastical courts. One of them was condemned for doubting whether the wicked would suffer Eternal Punishment in hell. In the end the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council acquitted. But the judgement had a more serious consequence. It meant that the State, not the Church, would decide whether individual clergymen were unorthodox. The rows continued to the end of the century. Good, earnest dons brought up to see themselves as defenders of the faith believed that it was their duty to protest at deviations from what had until yesterday been regarded as true; and equally good but enquiring dons believed it was their duty to show how it was possible to reconcile Christian belief with the most recent discoveries of scientists and of historical and textual research. The Privy Council’s judgement stopped dozens of priests from being ejected from their livings and the Church from being torn apart by faction.
Jowett did not escape censure. Pusey launched proceedings in the Vice-Chancellor’s court to convict Jowett of having published doctrines contrary to those of the Church. The prosecution failed but never again was Jowett to express his theological opinions in public. What exactly did he believe? Pusey was not the only one to ask that question. As the years passed the rationalists looked at him with suspicion. Frederic Harrison, the Positivist follower of Auguste Comte, and Leslie Stephen the agnostic, both considered that the only course open to Jowett was to become a layman. Certainly there are passages in the official biography of Jowett which suggest that he believed neither in a personal God nor in a corporeal resurrection. The best that can be said for him, Stephen suggested, was that Jowett was only following Mill’s advice to liberal clergymen, which was to stay in the Church and throw their weight in favour of tolerance in order to prevent the Church falling into the hands of fanatics. Shortly after Essays and Reviews appeared Stephen gave up his fellowship at Cambridge because he could no longer believe in the truth of Christianity; and so, a few years later, did Henry Sidgwick, whose reputation as a scholar was far higher than that of Jowett. Stephen thought Jowett should have followed his example. Should he have done so?
A don ought to revere the intellect and believe in the power of reason. Jowett didn’t. His perplexity about Christian dogma seems to have affected his attitude to the whole of knowledge. He was interested in Hegel – indeed was among the first in England ever to study him. That was as far as it went. ‘Logic,’ he used to say, ‘is neither a science nor an art but a dodge.’ Maybe: but the aphorism showed that he did not think anyone could write anything valuable. ‘How I hate learning!’ he once exclaimed. He disliked ‘useless learning’, yes – but this grew into contempt for research. To say as Jowett did, ‘One man is as good as another until he has written a book,’ was a typical piece of dreary donnish irony. Leslie Stephen’s most biting sentence on Jowett runs: ‘“He stood,” said one of his pupils, “at the parting of the ways,” and he wrote, one must add, “No thoroughfare” upon them all.’
Yet no one who reads his letters or his works can doubt that he believed himself to be a Christian, and many sincere Anglicans believed far less than he did. He was less concerned with the truth or the all-importance of Christianity than with the inadequacy of the forms and the words in which to express it. It is not fair to brand him with moral cowardice and infer that he would not stand up for what he believed to be true. In his wisdom Jowett realised that he himself had not the genius to redefine Christian doctrine; and this being so it would be better to remain silent rather than add to the din raised by Tractarians. He thought little of the best liberal theologian, F. D. Maurice: what had he done but substitute one form of mysticism for another? But the Church owed more to Maurice than to Jowett’s attempts to strip Christianity of its eschatology, its mysteries, its paradoxes and perplexities. He knew that his reputation did not rest on his published work: ‘What I do is by sparks and flashes and not by steady thought.’ His lectures were called ‘Glimpses of the Obvious’. He left his pupil T. H. Green to pursue Hegel and become the most influential philosopher in Oxford in the seventies (Jowett admired and deplored Green and was buried next to him). Augustine Birrell* put forward a worldly apologia: ‘Why should men sell out of a still-going and dividend-paying concern when they have not the faintest idea where to look for another investment for their money? Where was Jowett to go if he gave up Balliol? … So he stayed where he was and Balliol … turned out a number of excellent young fellows warranted to come and go anywhere except to the gallows and the stake.’ It was not an explanation that