In 1943 British citizens had other things on their mind than philosophies of freedom. Church bells were ringing to celebrate El Alamein but soon citizens were to be dodging doodle-bugs. In France people were reading Sartre’s ‘Huis Clos’. And by 1947 that notable book was followed by another on a similar theme: ‘La Peste’, by Camus.
Meanwhile, back in England the Archbishop of Canterbury for a couple of years in the 1940s was one William Temple. Fortunate in being the son of an archbishop, he was a philosopher, deeply interested in the question of human freedom. In 1931 he came out with the one-liner: ‘I know the stars are there …they do not know I am here. I beat the stars.’
Temple had a first-class mind. He also had broad sympathies. (The two do not always go together.) He saw the national Church (the C of E) as ‘the whole people of England in a religious capacity.’ Such a precise understanding is now indefensible; we English have lost interest in our traditional identity and the C of E has become marginalised into an episcopal sect with its own government and its commensurate financial problems. The law of unintended consequences gave the C of E its synods and a large helping of introversion.
In 1942 Temple published ‘Christianity and Social Order’ in which he declared priorities. ‘If we have to choose between making men Christian and making the social order more Christian, we must choose the former.’
Historian Edward Carpenter said of him: ‘By sheer force of character and brilliance of gift he made the ABC a figure to be reckoned with in the seats of power, at a time when the general drift of public secular life was moving the other way.’
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