It has been said by many people well placed to know, that Austin Farrer (1904-1968) was probably the finest Anglican theologian of the twentieth century. I find it very hard to disagree with that. He has even been called ‘the one true genius’ of the Church of England in that century. But recognition of his stature has built slowly since his death. He was always recognised as a unique voice, a philosopher and theologian who wrote little by way of classic systematic theology apart from a scattering of essays and lectures only drawn together after his death, a metaphysician who clung obstinately to the Anselmian ideal of ‘faith seeking understanding’ when the whole of Oxford had apparently succumbed to the materialism of logical positivism, an astute scholar of the New Testament whose Biblical scholarship was thought eccentric in his lifetime, and above all a compelling preacher whose sermons were perhaps the primary expression of his intellectual brilliance. A Baptist by birth but Anglo-Catholic by conviction, he was a humble, softly-spoken man, whose defence of orthodox Christian belief probably looked dated in the Church of England of the 1960s and 1970s, adjusting as it was to a rapidly-changing society and culture. There was nothing ‘trendy’ about Farrer. He worked almost all of his life in Oxford. It would be easy to think that he never looked out of the ivory tower.
But that would be a fatal misreading of his life and work. He was always alive to the developments around him, and somehow always a step ahead. A book like A Rebirth of Images (1949), his study of the book of Revelation, managed to be both traditional, alert to contemporary challenges, and prophetic, all at the same time. Here, he responded to the seemingly desiccated nature of historical criticism of the Bible by adopting a radically different approach, emphasizing the key role in the book of images which he connected with recurrent, permanent features of religious belief. In hands, the book of Revelation became like a kind of painting which opened up Scripture to a fresh way of looking, or rather, in his words, “the one great poem which the first Christian age produced”. His immediate contemporaries were perplexed by this – it was far off the beaten track of Biblical scholarship. But the influence of the book has grown and grown, and it has resonated with much more recent trends in Biblical scholarship. His great book of metaphysics, Finite and Infinite (1943), a fearsomely challenging read, defended traditional Christian metaphysics, and by extension the rational theology of the medieval schools. But it ends with a thoroughly contemporary application: “As I wrote this, the German armies were occupying Paris, after a campaign prodigal of blood and human distress…But rational theology knows only that whether Paris stands or falls, whether men die or live, God is God, and so long as any spiritual creature survives, God is to be adored.” The philosophy of religion, you might say, subserves, promotes and ends in the worship of God.
That is a clue to the extraordinary internal coherence of Farrer’s seemingly disparate intellectual work, a fusion of faith, logic, scholarship, reason and imagination which – in my view – is unequalled in modern Anglican theology. Many of his books could be called ‘classics’. But to me one of the simplest stands out. The Crown of the Year (1952) is a collection of one-paragraph (they were nicknamed ‘Farrergraphs’) homilies following the Prayer Book year. It is a short, simple, entirely unacademic and accessible book, designed to be read in preparation for Holy Communion, by way of – he hoped – prompting people to prayer. What is characteristic about his approach is summed up in the short Preface, where he speaks about the necessity to “express the central truths touching the sacrament”, Sunday by Sunday. The homilies originated in homilies preached in Trinity College Chapel, Oxford, where he was Chaplain. Their theology is, then, sacramental, but also incarnational, and integrative in the best sense, connecting as simply as he could the central truths of faith. I have sometimes used his homilies in place of anything I could say, if I needed to say something simply and briefly. The language still holds up. They are very concentrated paragraphs nonetheless – they move quickly, and that’s why it is good to have them to read.
Inevitably, for anyone unaware of Farrer and particularly of this book, the only way to illustrate their quality is to quote them. And I’ll quote in full just one, to end this blog. In an almost poetic way, his homily for Ascensiontide binds together a wonderful range of thoughts and images, around the central theme of ascending flame:
“We are told in an Old Testament tale, how an angel of God having appeared to man disappeared again by going up in the flame from the altar. And in the same way Elijah, when he could no more be found, was believed to have gone up on the crests of flaming horses. The flame which carried Christ to heaven was the flame of his own sacrifice. Flame tends always upwards. All his life long Christ’s love burnt towards the heart of heaven in a bright fire, until he was wholly consumed in it, and went up in that fire to God. The fire is kindled on our alters, here Christ ascends in fire; the fire is kindled in the Christian heart, and we ascend. He says to us, Lift up your hearts; and we reply, We lift them up unto the Lord.”
Ad fontes 