 |
Blackfriars, Cambridge | ||
 The Priory cat, Leo. | Cambridge modern
The English Prior Provincial Fr Bernard Delany wrote, on 20 September 1937:
| |
The BulloughsEdward Bullough was a Trinity man, though it is with Caius', the College of his fellowship and to which, in Professor Christopher Brooke's phrase, he 'brought a European culture', that his name should be associated. The son of wealthy industrialists (on his father's side Lancastrian, his mother's Swiss), he was born in the Bernese Oberland and educated in Germany, at the prestigious Leipziger Vizthum Gymnasium where he met the girl, well-connected in the world of literature and the theatre in Italy, who would be his wife. The fledgling Mediaeval and Modern Languages Faculty at Cambridge was to be his intellectual home for the future, though in keeping with the polyglot composition of the School (he was expected to lecture on not only German but also Russian and Italian language and texts), his own interests were ebulliently polymathic. Among them, aesthetics were chief. As a former pupil explains, Bullough approached aesthetics from the 'psychological and even physiological point of view', conducting experiments at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory and producing distinguished papers on such matters as the perception and appreciation of colours and the rôle of 'psychic distance' in the enjoyment of objects of art. His approach anticipated that of the art historian Ernst Gombrich; it influenced the philosopher Michael Oakeshott; it was ground-breaking in a period when aesthetics had no University base in England save the recently founded Courtauld Institute in London; and it left a lasting mark on the mind of his son, the Dominican Halley Sebastian Bullough, on whom more anon. Not till 1923 did Bullough become a Catholic - received into the Church by the celebrated Jesuit writer and preacher Cyril Martindale, but he was a 'catch' of a magnitude (he had just served as assistant secretary of a Royal Commission on the ancient universities) that his co-religionists were not slow to exploit. Joint president of the British Federation on University Catholic Societies, and subsequently president of Pax Romana, the international umbrella for such national networks, his translation into English of a major product of the Thomist renaissance, Etienne Gilson's Le Thomisme, affected Catholic intellectual life in England more substantially than did his studies of Italian literature, though the latter prepared the way for the career as Dante expositor of another pupil, and future Dominican, Francis Kenelm Foster. On him too there will shortly be something to say.Edward Bullough's unexpected death from septicaemia occurred before the fine house he had planned with his wife was completed. With both their son, and their daughter (Leonora) on their way into Religious life (the latter as Sister Mark Mark of the English Dominican Congregation of St Catherine of Siena), Mrs Bullough took steps to hand over in her lifetime a home now too large and, doubtless, lonely for her needs. The size and discreet elegance of the building made it, by contrast, perfect for a small community of friars in a city where English Dominicans certainly wanted to be. The early history of their Order, after all, was inseparable from the growth of the European Universities, and their mission of doctrinal teaching, study, writing could hardly find a more fitting environment. Unlike the mediaeval Blackfriars, however, its modern successor would not be a study house of the Province in the sense of a place where young Dominicans were trained. That slot was already filled - for philosophy by Hawkesyard Priory in Staffordshire, the gift of the Spode family of china fame; for theology by Blackfriars Oxford, the dream-come-true of the great Edwardian Provincial Fr Bede Jarrett. Some other description needed to be found for the revived house in Cambridge - and it was in the shape of domus scriptorum, a 'house of writers'. For not every one who likes to write likes to teach, while teaching at Seminary level, like that in overstretched modern Universities, can drive out research.
| ||
 The prior, Fr Aidan Nichols, at work. |
The house of writersMost, but not all, of the 'writing' Dominicans in the English Province turn out to have spent years, many or few, at Blackfriars, Cambridge - profiting by the calm of its garden, the moderation of its small regular congregation's pastoral demands, the decent library, and the proximity of University and Faculty libraries beyond. When researching for a book on the major figures of the pre- and immediately post-Conciliar Province, the author of these notes found that six out of seven of his 'just men' fitted this description. Thus we have Victor White, acute dogmatician and pioneering critical student of C. G. Jung; the spiritual theologian Gerald Vann whose books still find new publishers in the United States; the Thomist philosopher and moral theologian Thomas Gilby, who combined flair and finesse in exegesis of St Thomas's texts, with a style that made Scholastic metaphysics acceptable to the most English of Englishmen; Sebastian Bullough, who, after an early thesis on the concept of aesthetic beauty, turned his hand to almost any plant in the Catholic garden; Kenelm Foster, Reader in Italian in the University, and fastidious student of Dante and Petrarch, Catherine and Thomas; Conrad Pepler, explorer of the English mediaeval mystical tradition and continuator of that wonderful experiment in counter-cultural Catholicism that was (at its best) the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic at Ditchling, where art, craft, natural things and communal living were worked into a unity around the prayer of the Mass and the Divine Office.The vocation to be a 'house of writers' was also realized in the form of corporate projects - above all, the editing of the massive multi-volume bilingual Summa Theologiae, with copious introductions, notes, appendices, which the publishing house Eyre and Spottiswoode undertook in the shadow of the Second Vatican Council, unaware that, all unintentionally, that Council would have the effect of temporarily eclipsing St Thomas's reputation in the eyes for many Catholics who, imperfectly instructed, blamed classical Christian Scholasticism of their Communion's real or supposed ills. Again, it could manifest itself in the editing of journals - first, New Blackfriars, until that peripatetic organ of English Dominicans and friends moved back to Oxford in 1970, and then, as if to compensate, twenty years later, through the appointing of Fr David Sanders to salvage the erstwhile journal of the diocesan clergy in England, the Clergy Review, now rebaptised Priests and People, and with a wider, and more popular remit, for the stimulation of priests and active laity in the parishes. With Fr David's appointment in 1998 as master of students at Blackfriars, Oxford, this phase too passed.
Expansion and its limitsMeanwhile, the material fortunes of Blackfriars fluctuated. Thomas Gilby, during thirty years of residence, risked much on expansion, envisaging the future along the lines of the mediaeval past, when a revived studium generale, or study-house for the whole Order of Preachers worldwide, would take shape around the nucleus of St Michael's, the Bullough property. In 1955 Fr Thomas was sided and abetted by the Province's other last great builder, Fr Kenneth Wykeham-George, then superior of Blackfriars, who took the lead in acquiring Howfield, St Michael's elder neighbour, on the demise of its owner, A. S. Ramsey, president of Magdalene, and father of Arthur Michael Ramsey, the future archbishop of Canterbury. Ramsey père, a former Congregationalist, had disapproved of the Dominicans; the ecumenism of Ramsey fils, at the time bishop of Durham, was oriented more toward Constantinople than Rome. Nonetheless, a deal with another buyer was stopped so that the offer from Blackfriars might be accepted. Until such time as the two houses could be joined (Howfield now houses the Refectory and Common Room of the priory, as well as the kitchens and seven bedrooms for the community), a married fellow of Clare - Timothy Smiley, a devout Catholic and later professor of logic, came as warden of a set of student tenants of the friars. Other initiatives of conventional empire-building were not so successful. Enquiries were made about St Giles' vicarage, across Buckingham Road, for the parish of St Giles' was failing (the last incumbent left in 1968), and the building would have a chequered history until in 1982 it became the rectory of a new combined Anglican parish of St Giles with St Luke's and St Augustine's. (In 1991, however, the Church Commissioners disposed of it to New Hall.) When the wellknown Cambridge authoress Gwen Raverat died in 1957 the question was raised of entering a bid for The Granary, not realising that the owner was Sir Charles Darwin, with Mrs Ravorat as lessee. (That house too fell to New Hall, as the Darwins' gift at the new college's inception.) More successful, if only temporarily so, was the incorporation of Buckingham House, the Reddaway family home which had given its name to the street where Blackfriars stands, and, by 1964, a Magdalene College hostel superfluous to requirements. On a site much disturbed by nineteenth century archaeologists eager for coprolite (fossilised dinosaur excreta), with consequent subsidence problems of a chronic kind, it was not perhaps a good buy, but hard financial necessity alone forced the community to consider its re-sale as early as 1970 and in 1981 to part with it (to the benefit of - once again - New Hall). In compensation, Fr Thomas had at least been able to unite Howfield with St Michael's in 1961-2, by a piece of building (the architect was David Roberts, creator of the Benson and Mallory Courts at Magdalene in 1952-8) which a guide to 'Cambridge New Architecture' deemed 'admirably direct and straightforward, ... the first high quality modern religious building in Cambridge'. The aula (lecture-room, but convertible for worship, since the original oratory is small) has generally been approved, its two faces - into nature, the primordial creation, and the city, the human continuation of the creation - suggesting the twofold orientation, to contemplation and action, of the Order. The new library, too, is a good, simple design, but the proposed 'instruction rooms' are in the main more reminiscent of the supervision offered by Her Majesty's Prison Service than of anything called by that name in the University. All this, however, was but a stage in a grandiose plan, which would have produced a convent covering numerous acres and rivalling in size its mediaeval forebear. | |
 Mother and Child (Flemish, 18th Century) Upper Chapel |
Lay community, Congregation, University chaplaincyFinancial over-optimism was not the only cause for the non-happening of the one-time grandiose scheme. There was also the little point of the vocations crisis which struck the English Dominicans (as all, or almost all, Orders and communities in England) after the Second Vatican Council. The reduction of the resident brethren to four led to a decision in 1980 to accept, on an annual basis, a variety of young lay-people - nearly all members of the University, and overwhelmingly graduate students, not as tenants simply (as previously in Howfield) but as associates or oblates, with the obligation to attend the Choir offices and common meals. The friars offered in effect on a miniature-scale and in a less schoolmasterly way a formation in Christian wisdom and the liturgy of the Church previously given to larger groups (of boys) in our 'apostolic schools'. A number of vocations to the Dominican priesthood, and one to a Dominican sisterhood, have come from this experience.But if, in rational economics, buildings must be filled, an imaginatively conceived apostolate will not be confined to one's own building. The Sunday and weekday congregation at Blackfriars increased dramatically after the opening of the aula chapel (though the first, confined, chapel on the ground floor continues to house the Blessed Sacrament and be used for the majority of the Offices - its choirstalls were added to this end in 1997). This encouraged the Dominicans to provide Bible study sessions and programmes of talks, with speakers both external and internal, in the priory itself. But their apostolate had always been intended to focus on the University (which is not to say be exclusively directed thereto). Throughout the post-War years the 'Dominican Lectures' held annually in the Mill Lane lecture theatres were a high point of Catholic intellectual life in Cambridge. Unforgivably, they were permitted to lapse in 1970 - though Fr Maurice Couve de Murville, later archbishop of Birmingham, considered himself to be reviving them 'under a slightly different guise' in 1979 (he proposed to have Dominicans alternate with others as holders of a 'Fisher Lecturership'). The idea was a tribute by a diocesan priest to what he had gained from attending the Dominican lectures as an undergraduate. At Fisher House itself, the Dominicans were a more consistent presence, providing assistant chaplains with Fr Robert Ombres and Fr Aidan Nichols, and then a senior chaplain in the person of Fr Allan White who, however, retained a canonical assignation elsewhere (to the priory at Oxford, and then to its fellow at London). For fifteen years Fr David Sanders animated the (very successful) Fisher House Bible Study, drawing on his considerable New Testament expertise from teaching in the University of the West Indies and the Cambridge Divinity Faculty, while friars too numerous to mention contributed to the 'Blackfriars Theology Group' originally founded by Fr Edward Booth, and as the celebrants and preachers at College Masses.
Present and future prospectsThough the resident Dominican community at Cambridge was for many years rather small, its identity remained well-defined in terms of the mediaeval and modern story I have traced. At Easter 2000, the English Dominican Province tacitly acknowledged this in electing to make Blackfriars the common noviciate for its priories and houses. The prior, who is also the present writer, continues to produce books rather regularly on a variety of historical-theological and dogmatic topics, and is an 'affiliated lecturer' in the University as well as consultant editor to two theological journals. The sub-prior, Fr Edmund Hill, is widely recognised as an oustanding translator and scholar in Augustine studies, a major contributor to the new comprehensive 'twenty-first century' translation currently underway at the Augustinian Heritage Institute in Villanova, Pa. The procurator, Fr John Patrick Kenrick, after a unique mission as the first general superior of the Dominicans in the post Soviet Russia and Ukraine, has returned home to embark on a doctorate in moral theology. The novice-master, Fr. Robert Ombres, is much in demand as a canonist, lecturing in the Universities of London and Oxford. Fr. Edward Booth is a Cambridge University Press author, with a wide competence in the history of philosophy. Fr. Denis Geraghty represents pastoral studies and is a well-known giver of retreats. Our novices come from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds, with diverse gifts to bring to the 'contemplative apostolate' of preaching and teaching in the Order. When space permits, the priory accepts Dominicans from elsewhere for periods of a year at a time : these can range from young friars improving their English-language skills to distinguished scholars seeking a sabbatical amid the Cambridge libraries.We place all this in the care of almighty God, entrusting it to the prayers of 'our Lady of Grace', the title by which the Mother of Christ was venerated by our Dominican forebears in this place. | |