We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
This article seeks to reappraise the scholarly work of Bede Jarrett OP by drawing out his debt to Sir Ernest Barker. A shared interest in medieval political and social institutions, and in the constitution of the Dominican Order as a model of voluntary association, infused Jarrett's thinking with the tenets of English political pluralism and enabled him to produce a body of work that paid as much attention to concrete political form as to social ethics. As such his work establishes links with nineteenth and early twentieth-century Christian Socialism, as well as echoing certain current preoccupations within political theology.
1 Barker, E., The Dominican Order and Convocation: A Study of the Growth of Representation in the Church during the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1913).Google Scholar
2 Barker, E., Introduction, Jarrett, Bede, The Emperor Charles IV (London, 1935), p. xviGoogle Scholar.
3 Barker, E., Age and Youth: Memories of Three Universities and Father of the Man (Oxford, 1953), p. 54Google Scholar.
4 Nichols, A. OP, ‘The English Dominican Social Tradition’, in Compagnoni, F. OP and Alford, H. OP (eds.), Preaching Justice: Dominican Contributions to Social Ethics in the Twentieth Century (Dublin, 2007), p. 399Google Scholar.
5 Wykeham-George, K. OP and OP, G. Mathew, Bede Jarrett of the Order of Preachers (London, 1952)Google Scholar.
6 White, A. OP, ‘Father Bede Jarrett OP and the Renewal of the English Dominican Province’, in Bellenger, D. A. (ed.), Opening the Scrolls: Essays in Honour of Godfrey Anstruther (Bath, 1987), p. 221Google Scholar.
7 See Collini, S., Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), ch. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 A. L. Smith published Notes on Stubbs’ Charters in 1906. His Ford lectures on the Church and State in the Middle Ages were published in 1913, in part delayed by his agreeing to compile a bibliography of Maitland's work following his death in 1906 and to deliver two lectures on Maitland as Oxford's public memorial to him. Smith also associated himself with ‘progressive politics’, promoting women's education in the university, tutoring students at Lady Margaret Hall, representing the university in its dealings with the Workers’ Educational Association from 1907, and encouraging the African and Asian students who gravitated towards Balliol. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Of Smith, Barker remarked in his memoir, ‘Who that knew him and had been quickened and encouraged by his alert and darting spirit, could ever forget A.L. Smith, once my tutor, then my colleague, and always my inspiration?’ Smith in turn Barker recognised as a profound admirer of Stubbs, Vinogradoff and especially Maitland. See E. Barker, Age and Youth, pp. 20 and 328.
9 A.J. Carlyle, in addition to serving as a lecturer in politics and economics, was from 1895 to 1919 the rector of the Oxford city church of St Martin and All Saints. In that capacity he earned a reputation as a liberal thinker and Christian socialist, and became an associate of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the high-Church Anglican, Charles Gore. In 1912 he published two short works on The Influence of Christianity upon Social and Political Ideas, and Wages. His chief scholarly work, upon which he worked from 1895 until the publication of the sixth and final volume in 1936, was his History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West. It is significant that the main theme of this work has been described as ‘the rule of law, firmly rooted in the nature of things, as the basis of the search for and maintenance of justice and liberty’. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
10 Jarrett's surviving notebooks indicate that he attended A.L. Smith's lectures at Balliol on Stubbs’ Select Charters, on his Notes on Political and Social Questions, and on Aristotle's Politics. A.J. Carlyle lectured at University College in Jarrett's time on The Theory of Natural Law and Social Contract. Jarrett's notebooks contain carefully arranged notes on the Laws of Nature and Justice, Natural Law and Law of Nations, the Early Christian Fathers' distinction between the primitive and actual state, Their Justification of Government, Slavery and Property, Their Idea of the Nature of the State and of the Law, and the Political Theories of the 7th–12th centuries. He also attended four lectures delivered by Vinogradoff in 1906. See the English Dominican Archive, Blackfriars, Edinburgh.
11 Tugwell, S. OP, Introduction, in Bailey, B., Bellenger, A. and Tugwell, S. (eds.) Letters of Bede Jarrett (Bath and Oxford, 1989), p. xxxiGoogle Scholar.
12 White, 229, citing Wykeham-George and Mathew, p. 88.
13 G. Mathew OP, ‘The English Dominicans’, Appendix 1, in Mathew, D., Catholicism in England 1535–1935 – Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition (London, 1937), p. 269Google Scholar.
14 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
15 Nichols, p. 400.
16 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
17 Stapleton, J., Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994) pp. 79–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also, Stapleton, J., ‘Pluralism as English cultural definition: the social and political thought of George Unwin’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991) pp. 665–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stapleton, J., ‘The National Character of Ernest Barker's Political Science’, Political Studies 37 (1989) 171–187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Barker, E., The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (London, 1906), p. 162Google Scholar.
19 Stapleton, Englishness, pp. 90–91.
20 Ibid. p. 62.
21 Ibid. p. 64.
22 Ibid.
23 E. Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation, pp. 3–4, and footnote 13 on p. 14.
24 Ibid. pp. 4 and 9.
25 E. Barker, ‘The Discredited State’, a Paper delivered before The Philosophical Society in the University of Oxford in May 1914, Political Quarterly 1915, pp. 101–21, reprinted in Barker, E., Church, State and Study (London, 1930), pp. 151–170Google Scholar.
26 Barker, The Dominican Order and Convocation, p. 7.
27 Ibid. p. 9.
28 Ibid. p. 11.
29 Ibid. p. 17.
30 Ibid. p. 18.
31 Ibid. p. 27.
32 Ibid. p. 27.
33 Ibid. p. 72.
34 Ibid. pp. 75–6. For Figgis’ observations, see Figgis, J.N., ‘Respublica Christiana’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. V, 1911, pp. 63–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Jarrett, B., The English Dominicans (London, 1923), p. 215Google Scholar.
36 Ibid. pp. 106–126.
37 Ibid. pp. 126–28.
38 Ibid. p. 171.
39 Ibid. p. 128.
40 B. Jarrett, St Dominic p. 115.
41 Ibid. p. 120.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid. p. 121.
44 Ibid. p. 122.
45 Ibid. p. 126.
46 Ibid. p. 127.
47 Ibid. p. 128.
48 B. Jarrett, The Emperor Charles IV (London, 1935), p. 163.
49 Ibid. p. 170.
50 Ibid. p. 178.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid. p. 217.
53 Ibid.
54 Barker, Introduction to Jarrett, The Life of Charles IV, p. xiv, citing Jarrett, The Life of Charles IV, p. 237.
55 Jarrett, The Life of Charles IV, p. 218.
56 Jarrett, B., S. Antonino and Medieval Economics (Roehampton, 1914), p. xviGoogle Scholar.
57 Ibid. p. 53.
58 Ibid. p. 78.
59 Ibid. pp. 75ff.
60 Nichols, Preaching Justice.
61 White, Opening the Scrolls.
62 John Orme Mills OP, Editorial, New Blackfriars, March 1984.
63 Nichols, in Preaching Justice, p. 401. Cf. Wykeham-George and Mathew, p. 145.
64 See in particular, J. Milbank, ‘Were the Christian Socialists Socialist?’, in J. Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (London, 2009), pp. 63–74; ‘On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism’, in ibid. pp. 112–129;‘Socialism of the Gift, Socialism of Grace’, New Blackfriars 77 (1996) pp. 532–548CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority’, New Blackfriars 85 (2004) 212–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 Jarrett, B., Medieval Socialism (London, 1913), pp. 79–80Google Scholar.
66 Ibid. pp. 7–8.
67 Ibid. p. 80.
68 Ibid. p. 90.
69 Ibid. p. 79.
70 Ibid.
71 On his editorship, see Wykeham-George and Mathew, pp. 144–45.
72 Cavanaugh, W. T., Torture and the Eucharist (Oxford, 1998), pp. 137ffGoogle Scholar.
