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Methodism, Science and the Natural World: Some Tensions in the Thought of Herbert Butterfield*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
It is no longer a name that everyone knows. At the height of his fame as historian and broadcaster, Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) reached into homes and schools through his varied activities and established a public reputation far beyond Cambridge University, where he spent the entirety of his working life from 1923 to his retirement in 1968, and among people who knew nothing of his small and idiosyncratic college, Peterhouse, to which he had arrived as an undergraduate in 1919 and with which he would be associated for the rest of his career. The Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, which he held from 1944 to 1963, and the Regius Chair to which he was relocated for the remaining five years of his professional life, offered major platforms for one determined to communicate to a wider audience. His tenure of the Mastership of his college after 1955 offered another by lending him the possibility of hosting individuals and colloquia. Through less than a dozen major works of history — The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and Christianity and History (1949) come at once to mind as the best-regarded — Butterfield established a persona considerably more influential than a fairly modest literary production might imply. Only when one stands back from that oeuvre and examines its internal consistencies does it become clear that it engenders in the reader a certain discomfort. For if his thought does not often become mired in outright contradiction, it frequently displays moments of inner tension.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 419 - 430
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010
Footnotes
*
Some of the argument and material offered here anticipates my biography of Butterfield which it is hoped will appear in 2010.
References
1 Intimate friend Martin Wight drew attention to the Niebuhr dimension in ‘History and Judgement: Butterfield, Niebuhr and the Technical Historian’, The Frontier: A Christian Commentary on the Common Life 1 (1950), 301–14. Bultmann became part of Butterfield’s preparations for delivering the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow in 1965–66.
2 Many recollections were put on tape by C.T. Mclntire in the 1970s and used in his Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, CT, 2004).Google Scholar
3 ‘Official History’, in Butterfield, , History and Human Relations (London, 1951), 182–224, at 210–11.Google Scholar
4 ‘For since the earth holds …’, Fragment, Later Writing, Miscellany. The latter is a small collection of unpublished material currently in my care and not available for research. Most documents in it are untided, and I give their opening words instead.
5 Ibid.
6 Butterfield’s Journal, 4 February 1926. The entry was published by C.T. Mclntire in 1979: see Butterfield, Herbert, Writings on Christianity and History, ed. Mclntire, C.T. (New York, 1979), xxiv.Google Scholar
7 ‘Out in Coe Fen …’,3 pages, Later Writing, Miscellany.
8 Mclntire, , Herbert Butterfield, 16.Google Scholar
9 It is a trope with him. One example is ‘When the scientist has torn the buttercup to pieces …’ Single sheet, Later Writing, Miscellany.
10 Christianity and History (London, 1949), 6—7.Google ScholarPubMed
11 Mayer, Anna-K., ‘Setting up a Discipline: Conflicting Agendas of the Cambridge History of Science Committee 1936–1950’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2000), 665–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
12 These views are conveyed in a series of confidential letters to Joy Marc between 1935 and 1938 (Private collection).
13 Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London, 1983).Google Scholar
14 Kuhn had acknowledged the influence of Butterfield on his The Copernican Revolution (London, 1957)Google Scholar and Butterfield commented on the papers delivered in Oxford in 1961. There is no journal for the latter year and the appointment diaries do not confirm an Oxford visit; but see Sewell, Keith C., Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History (Basingstoke, 2005), at 163, 242 CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 59. Kuhn’s book quoted a ‘perceptive historian, viewing a classic case of a science’s reorientation by paradigm change’: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (London, 1962), 85.Google ScholarPubMed
15 Review by Bernal, J. D., New Scientist, 31 October 1957.Google Scholar
16 Review by Cohen, Bernard, Isis 41 (1950), 231–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Professor A. Rupert Hall was later to become one of the most distinguished historians of science of his generation and for many years a senior professor in the University of London.
18 Commonplace Book, n.d., Fragment, Later Writing, Miscellany.
19 Butterfield, Herbert, ‘The History of History and the History of Science’, Histoire de la Pensée, 12/13(1964), 13: 57–68.Google Scholar
20 Cambridge, CUL, Commonplace Book, 1952, Butterfield MSS BUTT/520.
21 Butterfield, Herbert, Man on his Past (London, 1955), 8.Google Scholar
22 Extract from an untitled and undated poem, Early Writing, Miscellany.
23 The evidence for these contentions is sensitive but I shall discuss and quote from it in my biography.