James Martineau
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James Martineau (21 April 1805 – 11 January 1900) was an English religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism. For 45 years he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the principal training college for British Unitarianism.
The theological and philosophical discussions which thus appeared he later described as "the tentatives which gradually prepared the way for the more systematic expositions of the Types of Ethical Theory and The Study of Religion, and, in some measure, of The Seat of Authority in Religion." These books expressed his mature thought, and may be said to contain, in what he conceived as a final form, the speculative achievements of his life. They appeared respectively in 1885, 1888 and 1890, and were without doubt remarkable feats to be performed by a man who had passed his eightieth year. Their literary and speculative qualities are indeed exceptionally brilliant; they are splendid in diction, elaborate in argument, cogent yet reverent, keen while fearless in criticism. But they have also most obvious defects: they are unquestionably the books of an old man who had thought much as well as spoken and written often on the themes he discusses, yet who had finally put his material together in haste at a time when his mind had lost, if not its dialectic vigour, yet its freshness and its sense of proportion; and who had been so accustomed to amplify the single stages of his argument that he had forgotten how much they needed to be reduced to scale and to be built into an organic whole. In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his division of ethical theories into the "unpsychological," "idiopsychological," and the "hetero-psychological," is incapable of historical justification; his exposition of single ethical systems is, though always interesting and suggestive, often arbitrary and inadequate, being governed by dialectical exigencies rather than historical order and perspective. In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he "used the word in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago," as denoting "belief in an ever-living God, a divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind." As thus used, it was a term which governed the problems of speculative theism rather than those connected with the historical origin, the evolution and the organization of religion. And these are the questions which are now to the front. These criticisms mean that his most elaborate discussions came forty years too late, for they were concerned with problems which agitated the middle rather than the end of the 19th century. But if we pass from this criticism of form to the actual contents of the two books, we are bound to confess that they constitute a wonderfully cogent and persuasive theistic argument. That argument may be described as a criticism of man and his world used as a basis for the construction of a reasoned idea of nature and being. Man and nature, thought and being, fitted each other. What was implicit in nature had become explicit in man; the problem of the individual was one with the problem of universal experience. The interpretation of man was therefore the interpretation of his universe. Emphasis was made to fall on the reason, the conscience and the will of the finite personality; and just as these were found to be native in him they were held to be immanent in the cause of his universe. What lived in time belonged to eternity; the microcosm was the epitome of the macrocosm;, the reason which reigned in man interpreted the law that was revealed in conscience and the power which governed human destiny, while the freedom which man realized was the direct negation both of necessity and of the operation of any fortuitous cause in the cosmos.
It was not possible, however, that the theistic idea could be discussed in relation to nature only. It was necessary that it should be applied to history and to the forces and personalities active within it. And of these the greatest was of course the Person that had created the Christian religion. What did Jesus signify? What authority belonged to Him and to the books that contain His history and interpret His person? This was the problem which Martineau attempted to deal with in The Seat of Authority in Religion. The workmanship of the book is unequal: historical and literary criticism had never been Martineau's strongest point, although he had almost continuously maintained an amount of New Testament study, as his note-books show. In its speculative parts the book is quite equal to those that had gone before, but in its literary and historical parts there are indications of a mind in which a long-practised logic had become a rooted habit. While a comparison of his expositions of the Pauline and Johannine Christologies with the earlier Unitarian exegesis in which he had been trained shows how wide is the interval, the work does not represent a mifid that had throughout its history lived and worked in the delicate and judicial investigations he here tried to conduct.
Martineau's theory of the religious society or church was that of an idealist rather than of a statesman or practical politician. He stood equally remote from the old Voluntary principle, that "the State had nothing to do with religion," and from the sacerdotal position that the clergy stood in an apostolic succession, and either constituted the Church or were the persons into whose hands its guidance had been committed. He hated two things intensely, a sacrosanct priesthood and an enforced uniformity. He may be said to have believed in the sanity and sanctity of the state rather than of the Church. Statesmen he could trust as he would not trust ecciesiastics. And so he even propounded a scheme, which fell still-born, that would have repealed uniformity, taken the church out of the hands of a clerical order, and allowed the coordination of sects or churches under the state. Not that he would have allowed the state to touch doctrine, to determine polity or discipline; but he would have had it to recognize historical achievement, religious character and capacity, and endow out of its ample resources those societies which had vindicated their right to be regarded as making for religion. His ideal may have been academic, but it was the dream of a mind that thought nobly both of religion and of the state.
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