Classical and Christian Revival
Chapter 2
THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY:
CLASSICAL AND CHRISTIAN REVIVAL
IN JOHN WESLEY'S AGE
John Wesley's life spanned the eighteenth century, from 1703 to 1791. Born in a Lincolnshire rectory to staunch Anglican parents— both of them converted from the Dissenting faith of their own parents—Wesley attended Charterhouse, a prominent "public" school in London, and Oxford University, where he became a fellow of Lincoln
College in 1726. He spent nearly two years (1736 and 1737) in North America as an agent of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
After a vivid religious experience shortly after his return to England in 1738, he entered a career of itinerant preaching (1739) which characterized the remainder of his life. Working from bases in London, Bristol, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he taught, organized, and preached among the working-class people who came to be known as "Methodists."
Wesley was in no sense isolated from the cultural currents of his time, and his vision of Christian antiquity reflects the very broad curva rent of éighteenth century culture that found inthe distant past a _vision for shaping the present.' To understand his conceptions of Christian antiquity in their own context, then, it is important to know how "antiquity" in general, and "Christian antiquity" in particular, had become critical cultural themes in his age.
Classical Revival If the architecture of Augustan England serves as the most impressive reminder of the emphasis that Wesley's age placed on the restoration of ancient culture," the literature of the age reflects a similar vision, a vision shared by a wide spectrum of eighteenth-century
JOHN WESLEY AND CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITY
authors, from the most conservative to the most progressive. Cultural conservatives of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tended to regard the writings of Greece and Rome as the only proper models for literature. The so-called "struggle of ancients and moderns" (querelle des anciens et des modernes) of seventeenth-century
France had pitted conservatives against more progressive writers and educators who wanted to use Romance legends as literary models.
This "struggle" had an English parallel in which Sir William Tem represented the "classical" position. His "Essay upon the Ancient an Modern Learning" (1672) argued that the French, Italian, and Spanish; languages were barbaric corruptions of their pure Latin original
Young persons, Temple insisted, should be instructed in the Latin an Greek paradigms, not in their latter-day corruptions.' His essay concluded with the staunch observation,
That among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued, in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.4
Since the study of ancient Greek had been introduced into the English universities in the early sixteenth century, studies in classical literature had replaced a good deal of their medieval, scholastic regimen. The literature that flowed from these sources, including the poetry of Alexander Pope, has been called "Augustan," a term that itself the height of ancient Roman literary accomplishment.
The appreciation of classical languages and literature had come to | be shared by nearly all educated persons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conservatives and progressives alike. The progressive nkers who contributed to the rise of Enlightenment culture tended to see history as oscillating between ages of faith and superstition and ages of science and reason. Many had come to regard ancient Greece and Rome as scientific and rational societies whose accomplishments had been lost in the Middle Ages and reappropriated since the European Renaissance. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and Cicero's De Natura
were especially valued by Enlightenment philosophes (such as Hume and Voltaire) as casting off the superstitions of the past and striving toward a scientific view of the world. Thus "history became not past, but present politics" in what one scholar has termed "the rise of modern paganism."® If John Wesley (and his brother Charles) did not use classical authors to the same ends as Hume and Voltaire, the point should not be lost that, like their_Enlightenment counterparts, their educations stressed the purity of classical models, and their love for classical literature was not abated after decades of the Evangelical revival. John