A CHURCHLY ROOSEVELT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 12

A CHURCHLY ROOSEVELT

WILLIAM TEMPLE, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. His Life and Letters. By F. A. Iremonger. Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxtord University Press. BIOGRAPHIES that are worth reading are of two main sorts. They may be great books, or merely books about great men. Lord Charnwood’s Lincoln, and in the ecclesiastical sphere Carnegie Simpson’s Life of Principal Rainy, might be taken as examples of biographies that are great books. Mr. Iremongér’s Temple, though it is unquestionably among the "biographies that are worth reading," is not much more than a book about a great man. And this is a pity, for Temple’s life offers the opportunity for the writing of a great book. What is wrong with this one, perhaps, is that Mr. Iremonger never dares to leave his immediate subject for long enough. For the story of Temple is worth writing and worth reading precisely because it is not Temple’s story only, but the story of our time-the story of the world’s movement out of the late 19th Century into the mid-Twentieth. There is not much of it in which the Socialist Archbishop did not have a finger-in ecclesiastical movements in the first place, naturally; the movement to bring greater learning. and intelligence to the presentation of the Church’s faith, to give to the Church of England greater freedom in relation to the State, to bring together the warring Christian denominations; but he played his part in other things too-in adult education, for example, and in the rise of Labour. He was something of a’Churchly Roose-velt-voicing the 20th Century Church’s demand for a "new deal" and the 20th Century world’s demand for one too. Mr. Iremonger gives us enough of the background to the Archbishop’s sayings and writings for us to see the point of them; but not enough to make Temple’s time really come alive, and so not enough to make Temple really come alive either. It is, in short, though competent, a somewhat pedestrian piece of work; though it is better to have it done that way-the usual way, it must be said-than not at all. Temple had his own weaknesses, too, of course. He was a tutor in philosophy for a while, and continued through his life to dabble in the subject, but none of his work in that field was ever more than second-rate. He modified but never quite outgrew his early Hegelianism, with its tendency to produce well-rounded but unplausible "syntheses" of opposing views on all subjects. This is not always such an amiable weakness as one might think; it has a conciliatory look, but is sometimes in reality a form of stubbornness.

To claim to have absorbed an opponent’s view in one’s own is one way of refusing to let the opposition be clearly heard. I doubt whether Temple ever let himself fully understand, for example, the standpoint of the non-epis-copal versions of Christianity (such as the Church of Scotland, and English Nonconformity), though his courtesy and tact towards them was always immense and always appreciated, and his skill in formulating pronouncements to which he and they could jointly subscribe was astonishing.

Arthur N.

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