Peter CostelloThe passing of the Rev. Prof. Sir Owen Chadwick at the great age of 99 has brought a remarkable career to a close. Owen Chadwick was one of the most distinguished historians of Christianity in the last 60 years or so, whose works have left a permanent impression on historians, theologians and general readers.
His literary career began with John Cassian: A Study in Primitive Monasticism (1950), about the monk and theologian who brought the ideas of Egyptian monasticism to the West in the 5th Century, a book which brought an almost forgotten figure once again before a general audience. This was the first of a long series of histories, remarkable, according to one critic, for their variety, authority and engaging style.
Born in May 1916, the son of a barrister in a London suburb, his early years were more devoted to sport than to study. However, in 1938 his life was changed. Indifferent to religion till then, in that year he was shaken by the imprisonment of the German theologian Martin Niemöllar.
“In that moment Niemöller looked from England like the European conscience standing on moral principle against tyranny: the freest man in Germany despite his confinement.”
Influence
This epiphany and the added influence of Martin Charlesworth, who taught history in Cambridge, led Chadwick into the serious study of history, but also awakened his vocation as an Anglican priest. These two vocations, of historian and priest, were intertwined for the rest of his life. He was ordained in 1941 and filled a series of posts within the Church of England, at the same time as his academic career advanced.
His most distinctive work in some ways was his Victorian Miniature (1961), about life in a small village based on the diaries of two characters who hated each other bitterly. This study of religious life at the basic level led on to the Victorian Church (1966 and 1971) which was dominated, some critics thought, by rural Anglicanism, even though Chadwick dealt even-handedly with all the competing religious
movements of that era in Britain.
To many outside the Anglican fold his most interesting book was The Secularisation of the European Mind in the 19th Century (1975). Here he dealt with the response of society to Christianity, and the emergence of such trends as Marxism and of opposing elements that gave rise to fascism. But unlike many others, he saw the future of religion in a positive light.
“Christian conscience,” he wrote,” was the force which began to make Europe ‘secular’, that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state, and repudiate any kind of pressure upon the man who rejected the accepted and inherited axioms of society. My conscience is my own.”
This is a view which might still be more widely absorbed. Yet he never pursued the theme further with a study of secularism in the 20th Century. He was the author of an account of the life and thought of Newman, a man of conscience who straddled the Anglican and Catholic communities, for the popular
series from Oxford University Press, “Past Masters”, in 1983.
He contributed to the widely-read Pelican History of the Church (1964), dealing with the reformation, and in another volume The Christian Church in the Cold War (1993). He and his brother Henry, also an
historian and clergyman, were engaged to edit The Oxford History of the Christian Church, which ran to 16 volumes, three of which he wrote himself, dealing again with the reformation, and with the transition of the Church through the era of revolutions, and a history of the papacy from 1830 to the Great War.
Among his other significant titles were Catholicism and History: The Opening of the Vatican Archives (1978) and Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War (1988). As one of his obituarists noted, “his works on religious matters will continue to be read for their religious insight, intelligence and generosity of mind”.