Philip Howard remains an enigmatic character — clearly influential in Church and State in his time — but a shadowy figure in the history of English Recusancy. Yet his career opens a window on all the major problems which dogged the English Catholics in the 17th century — episcopal government, relations between religious and secular clergy, loyalty to the Stuarts, the ramifications of the Oates plot and, of course, finance. He played a crucial role in the most turbulent period of Recusancy between the Restoration and the Revolution Settlement, yet because he spent the last six months of his life destroying papers his influence is not easy to assess. Howard was the subject of a lengthy unpublished biography by his later confrere Father Godfrey Anstruther OP. This was a project which began in 1955 when Anstruther was living at Santa Sabina in Rome and was Spiritual Director at the Venerable English College. He wrote to a friend, “... I have been rereading Palmer’s Life of Howard, and I never realised before how uninspired it is. It has all the matter but no literary merit and, alas, no references. Shall we do a new one?” His new one occupied much of the rest of his life and it was a source of frustration that he was never able to get it published. This paper draws heavily upon it and I am grateful for the late Father Anstruther’s exhaustive research and to Father Bede Bailey OP for access to his files at the Dominican Archives in Edinburgh.

The Scottish Episcopal Church emerged in 1689-90 when the Catholic King James VII of Scotland and II of England was ousted in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Calvinist husband William of Orange. Although he preferred episcopacy to presbytery as an ecclesiastical system, no doubt for supposed ease of political control and rather against his theological judgment, William allowed the reformed Church of Scotland finally to rid itself of its episcopalian element. He had very little option, since the bishops felt that they could not break their oath to the deposed and exiled monarch. For that matter, it was only a small minority among the ministers who had presbyterian convictions. At the time, furthermore, it must have seemed that a fresh turn in political events might soon lead to a restoration of episcopacy. Anyway, led by a General Assembly drawn entirely from the south of Scotland, the convinced presbyterians succeeded in forcing out hundreds of ministers in ‘the most drastic purge the Church [of Scotland] has ever known’ (Rosalind Mitchison). It took years to establish Presbyterianism in Aberdeen and the northeast. In and around Edinburgh, however, a fairly fanatical Presbyterian party rapidly prevailed. The grim measure of their fanaticism may be estimated by their success in 1697 in having Thomas Aikenhead, an Edinburgh University student, aged about eighteen, hanged for blasphemy.

No description quite captures the fragmentation through which our culture is passing. Post modem, new age, deconstruction, immanentism, emotivism, all are usefully employed — none quite turns the key. In general we may say not that there are no narratives, but that the received narrative, the foundational cosmology, the consensus about ultimate reality upon which our societies formerly concurred have receded. Moreover, at least in affluent cultures, the mourning about dwindling consensus is past. Rather than writhe in anxiety before religious fragmentation, people simply accept as the one “luminously self evident reality” that they are alone in the universe making their own meaning. Confusion exists as to what theology is, and what real theologians are. Walter Kasper writes, “It is unfortunately not a redundancy to say that, especially today, a theological theology is the need of the hour.”

Do It Yourself Culture

Perhaps our present phase can be fairly described as a spiritual do it yourself culture in which God, faith, morality and the future are for each and every person what each decides they are. Appreciation of expertise, theological training, the religious wisdom of the centuries, is suspended. Religion, says Cambridge’s Don Cupitt, is “wholly of the world, wholly human, wholly our own responsibility”. Eclecticism, picking and choosing from traditional religions and from new constructs, is increasingly common. The “spiritual” remains important. But the wholly transcendent is questioned. Far from being without spiritual narratives, ours is an age in which there are almost as many stories as there are tellers.

John Milbank, in his important and magisterial study Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), advances the claim that ‘secular reason’ is but a form of Christian deviancy. By secular reason Milbank intends ‘secular social theory’ or sociology. Milbank offers an ‘archaeology’ of secular social theory which is also an archaeology of the secular, since for him ‘the genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of a new practice’. His genetic account of the construction of secular reason traces it first in ‘the discourses of liberalism— “scientific politics” and political economy’, where the human construction of the cultural world is discovered, and where human making is thought to ‘mark out an autonomous human space’, as in Hobbes. The secular is not that which is discovered when the sacred is removed, but that which is first constructed within the space of the sacred.

It is Milbank’s contention that, as he puts it, ‘secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand ... but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Thus for Milbank ‘“scientific” social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’. The Hobbesian construction of man as the maker of society, the myth, as Milbank puts it, of the ‘self-present and self-sufficiently initiating “person” who echoes the pure will of a creator God’, is not, as the idea of ‘voluntarist sovereignty’, simply a notion transferred from the divine to the human, from the sacred to the secular.