Richard Whately

Richard Whately

Richard Whately (1 February 1787 – 8 October 1863) was an English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.

Life and times

He was born in London, the son of the Rev. Dr. Joseph Whately (17 March 1730 - 13 March 1797). He was educated at a private school near Bristol, and at Oriel College, Oxford. Richard Whately obtained double second-class honours and the prize for the English essay; in 1811 he was elected Fellow of Oriel, and in 1814 took holy orders. During his residence at Oxford he wrote his tract, Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, a clever jeu d'ésprit directed against excessive scepticism as applied to the Gospel history. After his marriage in 1821 he settled in Oxford, and in 1822 was appointed Bampton lecturer. The lectures, On the Use and Abuse of Party Spirit in Matters of Religion, were published in the same year.

In August 1823 he moved to Halesworth in Suffolk, but in 1825, having been appointed principal of St. Alban Hall, he returned to Oxford. He found much to reform there, and left it a different place.

In 1825 he published a series of Essays on Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion, followed in 1828 by a second series On some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul, and in 1830 by a third On the Errors of Romanism traced to their Origin in Human Nature. While he was at St Alban Hall (1826) the work appeared which is perhaps most closely associated with his name—a treatise on logic entitled Elements of Logic. In the preface to the Elements of Logic, Whately wrote that the substance of the treatise was drawn from an article written by himself, entitled Logic, which had already been published in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.^[1] The Elements of Logic gave a great impetus to the study of logic throughout Britain and the United States of America. Indeed, the highly original and influential American logician, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), wrote that his life-long fascination with logic began when he read Whately's Elements of Logic as a 12 year old boy.^[2] Whately also contributed an article to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana entitled Rhetoric. This article was also adapted into a book, called Elements of Rhetoric, which was published in 1828.

He was initially on friendly terms with John Henry Newman, but they fell out as the divergence in their views became apparent; Newman later spoke of his Catholic University as continuing in Dublin the struggle against Whately which he had commenced at Oxford.

In 1829 Whately was elected to the professorship of political economy at Oxford in succession to Nassau William Senior. His tenure of office was cut short by his appointment to the archbishopric of Dublin in 1831. He published only one course of Introductory Lectures (1832), but one of his first acts on going to Dublin was to endow a chair of political economy in Trinity College.

Archbishop of Dublin

Whately's appointment by Lord Grey to the see of Dublin came as a great surprise to everybody, for though a decided Liberal Whately had stood aloof from political parties, and ecclesiastically his position was that of an Ishmaelite fighting for his own hand. The Evangelicals regarded him as a dangerous latitudinarian on the ground of his views on Catholic emancipation, the Sabbath question, the doctrine of election, and certain quasi-Sabellian opinions he was supposed to hold about the character and attributes of Christ, while his view of the church was diametrically opposed to that of the High Church party, and from the beginning he was the determined opponent of what was afterwards called the Tractarian movement. The appointment was challenged in the House of Lords, but without success.

In Ireland it was unpopular among the Protestants, for the reasons mentioned and as being the appointment of an Englishman and a Whig. Whately's bluntness and his lack of a conciliatory manner prevented him from eradicating these prejudices. At the same time he met with determined opposition from his clergy. He attempted to establish a national and non-sectarian system of education. He enforced strict discipline in his diocese; and he published a statement of his views on Sabbath (Thoughts on the Sabbath, 1832). He lived in Redesdale House in Kilmacud, just outside Dublin, where he could garden. Questions of tithes, reform of the Irish church and of the Irish Poor Laws, and, in particular, the organization of national education occupied much of his time. He discussed other public questions, for example, the subject of transportation and the general question of secondary punishments.

In 1837 he wrote his well-known handbook of Christian Evidences, which was translated during his lifetime into more than a dozen languages. At a later period he also wrote, in a similar form, Easy Lessons on Reasoning, on Morals, on Mind and on the British Constitution. Among his other works may be mentioned Charges and Tracts (1836), Essays on Some of the Dangers to Christian Faith (1839), The Kingdom of Christ (1841). He also edited Bacon's Essays, Paley's Evidences and Paley's Moral Philosophy. His scheme of religious instruction for Protestants and Catholics alike was carried out for a number of years, but in 1852 it broke down owing to the opposition of the new Catholic archbishop of Dublin, and Whately felt himself constrained to withdraw from the Education Board.

From the beginning Whately was a keen-sighted observer of the condition of Ireland question, and gave offence by supporting state endowment of the Catholic clergy. During the terrible years of 1846 and 1847 the archbishop and his family tried to alleviate the miseries of the people.

On 27 March 1848, Whately became a member of the Canterbury Association.^[3]

Death

From 1856 onwards symptoms of decline began to manifest themselves in a paralytic affection of the left side. Still he continued the active discharge of his public duties till the summer of 1863, when he was prostrated by an ulcer in the leg, and after several months of acute suffering he died on 8 October 1863.

Works

• 1826 Elements of Logic
• 1828 Elements of Rhetoric
• 1832 A view of the Scripture revelations concerning a future state - lectures advancing belief in Christian mortalism.
• 1825 "Essays on Some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion"
• 1826 "Elements of Logic"
• 1828 "Elements of Rhetoric"
• "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte"
• "On the Use and Abuse of Party Spirit in Matters of Religion" (lectures)
• 1828 "On some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul"
• 1830 "On the Errors of Romanism traced to their Origin in Human Nature"
• 1832 "Introductory Lectures"
• 1832 "A view of the Scripture revelations concerning a future state - lectures advancing belief in Christian mortalism"
• 1832 "Thoughts on the Sabbath"
• 1836 "Charges and Tracts"
• 1837 "Christian Evidences"
• Easy "Lessons on Reasoning, on Morals, on Mind and on the British Constitution"
• 1839 "Essays on Some of the Dangers to Christian Faith"
• 1841 "The Kingdom of Christ"

Legacy

Whately was a great talker, much addicted in early life to argument, in which he used others as instruments on which to hammer out his own views, and as he advanced in life much given to didactic monologue. He had a keen wit, whose sharp edge often inflicted wounds never deliberately intended by the speaker, a healthy appetite and a wholly uncontrollable love of punning. Whately often offended people by the extreme unconventionality of his manners. When at Oxford his white hat, rough white coat, and huge white dog earned for him the sobriquet of the White Bear, and he outraged the conventions of the place by exhibiting the exploits of his climbing dog in Christchurch Meadow. With a fair and lucid mind, his sympathies were narrow, and by his outspokenness on points of difference he alienated many. With no mystical fibre in his own constitution, the Tractarian movement was incomprehensible to him, and was an object of dislike and contempt. The doctrines of the Low Church party also seemed to him tinged with superstition.

He took a practical, almost business-like view of Christianity, which seemed to High Churchmen and Evangelicals alike little better than Rationalism. In this they did Whately less than justice, for his religion was very real and genuine. But he may be said to have continued the typical Christianity of the 18th century—that of the theologians who went out to fight the Rationalists with their own weapons. It was to Whately essentially a belief in certain matters of fact, to be accepted or rejected after an examination of "evidences." Hence his endeavour always is to convince the logical faculty, and his Christianity inevitably appears as a thing of the intellect rather than of the heart. Whately's qualities are exhibited at their best in his Logic. He wrote nothing better than the luminous Appendix to this work on Ambiguous Terms.

In 1864 his daughter published Miscellaneous Remains from his commonplace book and in 1866 his Life and Correspondence in two volumes. The Anecdotal Memoirs of Archbishop Whately, by WJ Fitzpatrick (1864), enliven the picture.

A programme in the BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are?, broadcast on 2 March 2009, uncovered that Richard Whately was an ancestor of British actor Kevin Whately.

References

Wikisource has the text of A Compendium of Irish Biography article Richard Whately

A modern biography is Richard Whately: A Man for All Seasons by Craig Parton ISBN 1-896363-07-5 See also Donald Harman Akenson "A Protestant in Purgatory: Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin" (South Bend, Indiana 1981)

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Whately

• Works by Richard Whately at Project Gutenberg
• Introductory Lectures on Political Economy

For Whately the economist and for further links see:

• New School: Richard Whately
• Many works of Richard Whately @ Google Books.