The very Christian roots of Oxford radicalism
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
To travel to Oxford is to visit one of the great wellsprings of European radicalism. This may seem an odd description of a city notoriously described by Matthew Arnold as the “home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs”. A university that even well into the 19th century was still excluding students from taking degrees unless they had signed up to the doctrines of the Church of England was hardly an obvious hotbed of dissent. Even reform, when it finally did come, often had a nostalgic air about it. In 1893, when all-women’s college St Hilda’s was founded, it was named after a 7th-century Northumbrian abbess.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, in a university where the drag-anchors on progress have so often borne a Christian stamp, that Christianity itself should have come to be seen by many as irredeemably reactionary. Back in 2020, when St Hilda’s became the first college in Oxford to abolish its chapel, the news was greeted by humanists with ill-disguised glee. Here, they trumpeted, was a timely victory for secularism over superstition. What place in a 21st-century university, after all, for chapels and saints?
Yet it is the great paradox of secularism and the contemporary value of progress that the roots of both lie in the seedbed of a Christian past. When Richard Dawkins, a decade ago, tweeted with his customary relish for provocation that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge”, he was not raising quite the battle-cry against religion that he had intended. It was Christian theology that originally inspired the very founding of the university system, an innovation that was itself the expression of something even more momentous: Europe’s first experience of revolution.
At the end of the 11th century, when enterprising young men began flocking to the Italian city of Bologna to study law, and forming guilds — universitates — they were at the cutting edge of a great process of reform. Over previous decades, radicals had seized control of the papacy and begun forcing through an unprecedented agenda. That the Church, guardian of the “religio” (the “bond”) that joined fallen humanity to the eternity of heaven, should be separated permanently from the dimension of the “saeculum” (the flux of earthly things), was a conviction potent enough to turn Europe upside down.
The greatest pope of his age, Gregory VII, had obliged an emperor to kneel before him in snow. That sins should be washed away and the entire world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had proven wildly successful. Gregory and his fellow reformers, by weaponising the distinction long drawn by Latin theologians between religio and saeculum, rendered it fundamental to the future of the west. They fashioned an institution never before seen in history: one that had willed itself into becoming sovereign.
The order defined by the Roman Church was one that set itself against primordial customs, codes drawn up on the whims of kings, mildewed charters. Only one law could maintain the ties of justice and charity that bound together a properly Christian society: “the eternal law”, as Bernard of Clairvaux put it, “that creates and rules the universe.” This was not an order that could be administered by priests alone. It needed lawyers too. And this was why, by the end of the 11th century, Bologna had become the prototype of something unprecedented: a university town.
Oxford, where evidence of teaching dates from 1096, was not far behind. By 1214 it had won an independence not just from the king but from the city’s bishop. Scholars were granted a licence to push against the limits of knowledge — even when doing so might seem to challenge the tenets of Christian belief. The intellectual elites of the Church had come to believe that, by applying reason, a scholar could aspire to behold Christian truth in its proper perspective: clear, whole and logically ordered.
Although theology reigned in Oxford as the queen of sciences, there were plenty of other fields of study in which God’s laws were to be distinguished. The workings of nature all bore witness to their existence. To identify the laws that governed the universe was to honour the God who had formulated them. This conviction, far from perturbing the gatekeepers of the new universities, was precisely what animated them. Philosophy, which a century earlier had been regarded by many in the Church as a dirty word, increasingly became the heart of the curriculum. The study of animals and plants, of astronomy, even of mathematics: these all came to be categorised as natural philosophy. The truest miracle was not the miraculous, but the ordered running of heaven and earth.
“Any custom, no matter how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to truth — and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.” So Gregory VII had written, back in the heyday of the revolution that he had done so much to unleash. Today, a millennium on, it is easy to miss just how much of what we take for granted was contingent on a specific combination of circumstances. Secularism, science, the very ideal of progress: the origins of these distinctive concepts can be traced back, by a paradox typical of Christian history, to a period that is habitually dismissed as a sump of superstition. The impact of Christianity on the development of western civilisation is so profound that it has come to be hidden from view.
This is in part because, increasingly, all that has been most transformative and revolutionary in Christianity has come to cannibalise itself. The notion of a Middle Age — a period of darkness separating twin periods of enlightenment — originated not in the 18th century with Voltaire and Gibbon, but with the Reformation. In turn, the convictions that led humanists to crow over the abolition of St Hilda’s chapel — that superstition should be routed and idols toppled — have their origins in scriptures older than Christianity itself.
Only amid the great convulsions of the 11th and 12th centuries, however, were these same convictions endowed with the specific configuration that, for the past millennium, has fuelled the emergence of the ever restless, self-questioning civilisation known as the west. Today, when students demand the decolonisation of their curriculum, the toppling of statues or the abolition of chapels, they are not merely rejecting the legacy of Oxford’s past, but demonstrating themselves to be its heirs. “To pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant”: this was how Gregory VII had defined his mission. It is a mission still very much evident in Oxford today.
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