Peter Thonemann writes:

Pattison is an awkward and fascinating character. In the late 1830s, like many high-minded young Oxford men of his generation, he had fallen under the Tractarian spell. During a year-long residence in Newman’s monastic community on St Aldate’s, Pattison had transcribed Aquinas’s commentaries on the Gospels, displaying such ardent asceticism that Newman feared he was in danger of succumbing to Romanism. But Pattison, unlike his mentor, stepped back from the brink. Indeed, his retreat from Rome took him far into the camp of theological liberalism. In 1860 he contributed a long essay on the ‘Tendencies of Religious Thought in England’ to Essays and Reviews, a controversial book that proposed a more critical and historical approach to English theology. Towards the end of his life, Pattison seems to have resigned himself to something approaching atheism: ‘To the philosopher God means the highest conceivable value, it is the thing per se, it is intellect. Whether it belongs to an individual or is a diffused essence, we don’t know . . . All the philosopher can do in life is to bear in mind that its moral value as a possession is transcendent.’

(LRB 7 February 2008)

Cambridge | hardback 285 pp. |ISBN: 9780521876056