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    Geoffrey Fisher: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945-1961
    Geoffrey Fisher: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945-1961
    Geoffrey Fisher: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945-1961
    Ebook208 pages2 hours

    Geoffrey Fisher: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945-1961

    By David Hein

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    About this ebook

    A major figure in twentieth-century Christianity, Geoffrey Fisher worked to modernize the Church of England and to develop the worldwide Anglican Communion. His historic meeting with Pope John XXIII, his participation in national debates on the Suez Crisis and nuclear weapons, and his role in crowning Queen Elizabeth II made him a well-known figure in postwar Britain. His neglect by professional historians is partly remedied by this new biography, the first scholarly account of Fisher's life and career.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPickwick Publications
    Release dateJan 1, 2008
    ISBN9781630878283
    Geoffrey Fisher: Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945-1961
    Author

    David Hein

    David Hein is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hood College, Maryland.

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      Book preview

      Geoffrey Fisher - David Hein

      9781597528245.kindle.jpg

      Geoffrey Fisher

      Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945–1961

      David Hein

      2008.Pickwick_logo.jpg

      GEOFFREY FISHER

      Archbishop of Canterbury, 1945–1961

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series

      Copyright ©2007 David Hein. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

      ISBN 13: 978-1-59752-824-5

      EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-828-3

      Cataloging-in-Publication data

      Hein, David

      Geoffrey Fisher : archbishop of Canterbury, 1945–1961 / David Hein.

      Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series

      xviii + 122 p. ; 23 cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 13: 978-1-59752-824-5 (alk. paper)

      1. Fisher of Lambeth, Geoffrey Francis Fisher, Baron, 1887–1972. 2. Church of England—Bishops—Biography. 3. Anglican Communion—Bishops—Biography. I. Title. II. Series.

      BX5199.F57 H45 2007

      Cover photograph of Geoffrey Fisher © 1960 Lewis Morley Archive / National Portrait Gallery, London

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      By highlighting the career of Geoffrey Fisher against the background of the dramatic times and cultural changes through which he lived, David Hein offers a judicious and insightful portrait. Fisher’s accomplishments and shortcomings stand out in this lucid biography.

      —Bishop Frederick Borsch

      Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

      David Hein’s treatment of Archbishop Fisher’s career throws a great deal of light on the Church of England, Britain in the mid-twentieth century, and the place of religion in Europe and in the developing world following World War II. His assessment of Fisher as leader of the international Anglican Communion is particularly illuminating.

      —W. Brown Patterson

      Emeritus, University of the South

      This short, accessible book is helpful to both the professional scholar and interested amateur who wish to gain a greater understanding of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion more widely during the turbulent post-war period.

      —Wendy Dackson

      Ripon College, Cuddesdon

      Princeton Theological Monograph Series

      K. C. Hanson and Charles M. Collier, Series Editors

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      To my nephew, Charlie

      Abbreviations

      Introduction

      The ninety-eighth Primate of All England, William Temple, died in 1944, and the following year Winston Churchill named Geoffrey Fisher as his successor in the Chair of St. Augustine of Canterbury. The prime minister’s choice proved controversial, however, because another man, Bishop George Bell of Chichester, looked to many the wiser appointment. What was indisputable was the severity of the challenges that the new archbishop would face. The Second World War would soon be over, and then the mammoth project of rebuilding would commence in earnest. For both the church and the nation, this effort of reconstruction would be spiritual as well as material.

      Out of the Ruins

      Few if any historians could evoke the postwar mood or depict the moral and physical ruins of civilization as effectively as the English novelist Rose Macaulay in her 1950 novel, The World My Wilderness, set in the years just following World War II.¹ In this book the author expresses in a clear and moving way her fears about the future of British society. This novel, she said, is about the ruins of the City [the business center of London], and the general wreckage of the world that they seem to stand for. And about a rather lost and strayed and derelict girl who made them her spiritual home.²

      Although only seventeen (and the daughter of a King’s Counsel), this central figure, Barbary, is already barbarous: wild, intractable, given to acts of defiance and petty theft. ‘Civilised . . .’ Barbary seemed to examine civilisation, balancing it gravely, perhaps wistfully, against something else, and to reject it, as if it were mentioned too late (33). The child of a broken home, during the war she had lived in the South of France with her beautiful, intelligent, idle, pleasure-loving mother, whose notion of parental love did not entail a heavy investment in adult supervision.

      As a member of a band of boys and girls assisting the Maquis during the Occupation, Barbary was brutally and far too rapidly transformed from a child of innocence into a child of experience. After the war, living in London, she remains somewhat of an anarchist, preferring to live amid the ruined waste lands . . . the broken walls and foundations . . . the roofless, gaping churches, the stone flights of stairs climbing high into emptiness (61). These places, she feels, are where she belongs: at the waste margins of civilisation . . . , where other outcasts lurked, and questions were not asked (110).

      In this novel, Rose Macaulay is shining the light of her torch on the spiritual wreckage of postwar Britain—on the desolate areas of both cities and souls that leaders such as Geoffrey Fisher would have to search out and tend to. In a violent and treacherous world, one that bears a growing resemblance to a moral wasteland, Macaulay is asking: How many Barbarys might we be producing? How many children may be growing up too fast, lacking adequate care and security, and hence rootless, sullen, suspicious, and defiant? This novel is full of compassion toward all of its characters, but especially toward Barbary, who, as one literary scholar wrote in summarizing the author’s attitude toward her creation, is thoroughly lost, thoroughly pathetic, and very much worth saving.³

      Toward the end of The World My Wilderness, Macaulay appears to raise a final question: Does the church have a role to play in this work of rebuilding? While Barbary’s only religious belief is in hell (174), her half-brother Richie—who fought in the war, endured three years in a German POW camp, escaped, and now desires only the beauty and refinement of aristocratic culture (150)—is drawn to the church. But the lure appears to be largely aesthetic and nostalgic: In this pursuit he was impelled sometimes beyond his reasoning self, to grasp at the rich . . . panoplies, the swinging censors, of churches from whose creeds and uses he was alien, because at least they embodied some continuance, some tradition (150).

      In the last pages of the novel, however, Richie literally takes steps toward the church, possibly reflecting a deeper quest for order and meaning in his life and in the lives of others. Fully conscious of the barbarian threat (the primeval chaos and old night), he murmurs to himself T. S. Eliot’s words from The Wasteland: We are in rats’ alleys, where the dead men lost their bones (253). Then, [s]huddering a little, he took the track across the wilderness and towards St. Paul’s [Cathedral]. Behind him, the questionable chaos of broken courts and inns lay sprawled under the October mist, and the shells of churches gaped like lost myths, and the jungle pressed in on them, seeking to cover them up (253–54).

      What the church received with the appointment of Geoffrey Fisher to the see of Canterbury was, at the very least, a man of strength, discipline, and tenacity—indeed, a former headmaster—who would not readily submit to either primeval or ecclesiastical chaos. Everything that he did was connected to the service of one overriding goal: building up the church, and thereby enlarging the clearing in the wilderness.

      A Pivotal Archiepiscopate

      Overshadowed both by his famous predecessor, the philosopher and ecumenist William Temple, and by his widely loved successor, the theologian and spiritual guide Michael Ramsey, Geoffrey Francis Fisher (1887–1972), ninety-ninth archbishop of Canterbury, has largely been ignored by professional historians. But in fact his was a pivotal archiepiscopate, one that cries out for fresh examination. The problems and initiatives of his tenure anticipated the major events in Anglican church history and theology in the decades that followed.

      Fisher’s period in office began and ended with the bridge-building work of ecumenism. Preaching at Cambridge in 1946, he urged the Church of England and the Free Churches to work toward establishing full communion: sharing the sacraments with one another but stopping short of complete union. And in 1960, at the end of his tenure in office, Fisher embarked on a tour that included stops in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome. His meeting with Pope John XXIII marked the first time that an archbishop of Canterbury had visited the Holy See since Archbishop Thomas Arundel undertook the journey in 1397.

      Fisher was also the key person in building up the modern Anglican Communion. In the 1950s his trips to West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa were major parts of his successful effort to establish new provinces within the Communion. Indeed, his work anticipated the transformation of the British Empire from a far-flung imperial domain into a commonwealth of equal states. His frequent visits to Canada and the United States, coupled with his efforts to include the American bishops and others in the deliberations of the Lambeth Conference, helped to make the Anglican Communion an experienced reality for many Anglicans and Episcopalians outside Britain.

      Of particular interest, too, is the relationship between the Church of England and the nation. The senior prelate whom millions of people around the world watched as he conducted the coronation ceremony for Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, Fisher has been referred to as the last great Establishment archbishop of Canterbury. After him, British society and the churches were forced to change, responding to increased immigration, religious pluralism, and secularization. Worthy of attention are such subjects as Fisher’s intervention in the Suez Crisis, his involvement in debates on the use of atomic weapons, and his understanding of the role of the Church of England within the larger society. It is important to discern the positive as well as the negative aspects of establishment. A key to Fisher might well be his strong sense of the pervasive responsibility of the Established Church within English society. This commitment influenced not only his responses (sometimes supportive, often critical) to government initiatives but also his understanding of the place of the Church of England in relation to the other churches.

      Fisher’s time in London, first as bishop of London (1939–45) and then as archbishop of Canterbury, was a period of war, devastation, and rebuilding in the capital city and the nation. How well did Fisher prepare the Church of England for what followed? What were the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to the task of fortifying the church—and the Anglican Communion—for the future? What were his personal strengths and weaknesses as a leader for this crucial time in the history of Christian institutions?

      This Fisher-shaped time of both reconstruction and fresh initiatives was a bridge period for the church. One aspect of his work that should attract our attention is not only what an archbishop of Canterbury can do during such a time but also what he chooses not to do. The Cambridge theologian Donald MacKinnon was one of those who regretted that George Bell, bishop of Chichester, did not succeed Temple at Canterbury in 1944–45. Certainly Fisher lacked Bell’s adventurous spirit, but it is interesting to see what an administrator of Fisher’s ability is able to accomplish. Part of that work undoubtedly has to do with working hard to bring about conditions within which other men and women, who possess different gifts, can flourish.

      This biography is intended to be a thought-provoking examination of an important figure in a transitional era. At the same time, this book will offer a balanced portrait: Fisher’s tendency as archbishop to play the rule-oriented headmaster, his emphasis on administration rather than on theology and spirituality, and his lack of personal charisma undercut his long-term impact. A fresh review of Fisher’s virtues and deficiencies as an ecclesiastical statesman is needed.

      Geoffrey Fisher’s tenure represents a distinctive approach to the office. His was not only a particularly significant archiepiscopate, one in which the central issues of his time and place are reflected. It was also a tenure that emphasized the archbishop as chief executive of a large and complex organization. Fisher personified one major way of inhabiting his role: the archbishop as administrator.

      Through his example, then, we can gain some perspective on both the positive and the negative features of this archiepiscopal modus operandi, both in his own day and for succeeding generations. Being a highly competent administrator means more than being an efficient manager. It requires thoughtful strategic planning as well as day-to-day administration. But this style of leadership may result in a loss of personal stature, influence, and memorability if the archbishop’s focus is largely on structure rather than on qualities of mind and spirit: if, in other words, the archbishop is not also known—and effective—as an intellectual force, a social prophet, or a wise spiritual teacher. The subject of this biography does suggest an irony: Geoffrey Fisher may well have been a more competent archbishop than either his successor or his predecessor, but somehow they are the ones whom later generations are more likely to remember.

      The Plan of This Book

      Unlike the two earlier, book-length treatments of Fisher’s life and career, this biography is much shorter. Especially compared with Edward Carpenter’s massive, 800-page account, the present work more closely resembles a sketch of the life or simply a long introduction. It is more likely to give the reader a sense of the forest than a detailed acquaintance with all the flora and fauna. For that reason, however, this narrative may be more useful to beginning researchers and more accessible to anyone seeking an overview of the principal contours of this archbishop’s life-story. Further details may be found not only in Carpenter’s Archbishop Fisher but also in the specialized journal literature and in the 400 boxes of Fisher Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library, in London.

      This book consists of seven brief chapters:

      Chapter 1, Formation: 1887–1932, discusses Fisher’s family background, education, early career as a schoolmaster, and his long tenure as headmaster of Repton (where he succeeded William Temple in 1914). This chapter looks at the influence of

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