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Benjamin Jowett

British cleric and classics scholar (1817–1893)

Benjamin Jowett (15 April 1817 – 1 October 1893) was a theologian and classical scholar who became one of the great public figures of Victorian England. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1855, Master of Balliol College, Oxford from 1870, and Vice-Chancellor of the university from 1882.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

Quotes

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Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at the door.
  • Research! Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value.
  • We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?
    • As quoted in Notebooks (1984) by Geoffrey Madan, p. 61
  • Learn just enough of the subject [metaphysics] to enable your mind to get rid of it.
    • As quoted in Notebooks (1984) by Geoffrey Madan, p. 61

On the Interpretation of Scripture (1860)

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First published in the miscellany Essays and Reviews (1860)
  • Doubt comes in at the window, when Inquiry is denied at the door.
  • [The office of the interpreter] is to read Scripture like any other book.

Letters

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The Letters of Benjamin Jowett (1899) edited by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell
  • Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard (p. 244).
  • I hope our young men will not grow into such dodgers as these old men are. I believe everything that a young man says to me (p. 250).
  • One man is as good as another until he has written a book.
  • Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.


Misattributed

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  • We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.
    • Actually from one of John Dewey's lectures, reprinted in his Reconstruction in Philosophy (2004), p. 96

Quotes about Jowett

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  • In philosophy he was content to be critical; he saw that one philosophy had always been succeeded by another, and the leader of to-day was forgotten tomorrow; each therefore, he concluded, had grasped part of the truth, but not the whole truth. His speculations ended in compromise, and thus, here also, he was unfitted to be a leader. For himself he had almost a horror of falling under one set of ideas to the exclusion of others... Jowett only went a step beyond the philosopher who condemns all systems but his own. Yet indirectly he left his mark even on philosophy. By him his pupil T. H. Green was stimulated to the study of Hegel, and no influence has been greater in Oxford for the last thirty years than Green's. But the chief traces of Jowett's influence will be found in other spheres. His essays and translations must secure him a high place among the writers of his time, and in every history of English education in the second half of the nineteenth century he will occupy a prominent place.
  • Jowett, in his day, did probably more than any other single man to let some fresh air into the exhausted atmosphere of the [Oxford] common rooms, and to widen the intellectual horizons of the place.
  • First come I. My name is J–W–TT.
    There's no knowledge but I know it.
    I am the Master of this College,
    What I don't know isn't knowledge.
  • I have been very fortunate in this latter respect (Greek and Latin Composition), having got for my tutor the very best man in the University—Jowett, to whom it is pleasant in every way to be attached, both in regard of studies and of general intercourse.
    • Edward Caird to friend during his first term at Balliol College, Oxford (1860), quoted in Henry Jones and John Henry Muirhead, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird (1921), p. 28
  • He was a keen and formidable controversialist, and was usually found on what was, for the time, the unpopular side. His contribution (an essay on The Interpretation of Scripture) to the famous Essays and Reviews, which appeared in 1860, brought him into strong collision with powerful sections of theological opinion, to which he had already given offence by his commentaries on the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans. His views were, indeed, generally considered to be extremely latitudinarian. Latterly he exercised an extraordinary influence in the Univ., and was held in reverence by his pupils, many of whom have risen to eminence.
  • Jowler [Jowett] preached yesterday in Chapel amidst intense excitement, no people in Chapel. He looked so fatherly and beautiful and brought out the best bell-like silvern voice with quite rich tones that he had hitherto hidden in the depth of his stomach, and preached the most lovely little practical sermon in a quite perfect style with the most wonderful grace. I have only said all this laud in anticipation of having to confess that though I felt how beautiful it was in its way, it was most unsatisfying to me. It was just Platonism flavoured with a little Christian charity: Christianity is gutted by him: it becomes perfectly meaningless, if it is only an attempt to take some useful moral hints from just what happens to strike you in a very good, "perhaps I may be excused in saying" a Divine life. He is perfectly self-sufficient; self-dependent, without any consciousness of anything beyond a certain human weakness in carrying out his ideal; there is not an atom of the feeling of prayer, of communication with God, of reliance on any one but self. He even begs pardon for using as vague an expression as "sharing in the Spirit of God." I admire the Symposium with all my heart and soul; but I must have something more to have brought God down to death to procure for me.
    • Henry Scott Holland to A. G. Legard (1 January 1869), quoted in Henry Scott Holland: Memoir and Letters, ed Stephen Paget (1921), pp. 33-34
  • Mr Jowett's forte is mental philosophy. How has this or that metaphysical question presented itself to different minds, or to the same mind at different times? Under what contradictory aspects may a particular religious sentiment or moral truth be viewed? What phenomena does an individual mind exhibit at different stages in its growth? What contrasts do we find in the ancient and modern world of thought? This is the class of questions Mr Jowett delights to ask and to answer. He is strongly negative. He is fond of dwelling on contradictions rather than resemblances. He is content with stating a difficulty without attempting a solution of it.
    • John Prideaux Lightfoot, 'Recent Editions of St Paul's Epistles', The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Vol. III (1857). pp. 117-118
  • The young Housman wrote home that he had absented himself from Jowett's lectures in disgust at the Professor's gross ignorance of Greeek. Here we must make allowance for a juvenile excess of rigour; but any page of the original edition of Jowett's famous translation of Plato will supply some evidence in favour of Housman's stern judgment. Even if one could forgive Jowett's deficiencies as a scholar and his reluctance to take action to amend them, what can we say of his openly expressed aversion to research, of his opposition to every scheme calculated to advance sound learning in the University, of his not only failing to perform what are usually held to be the duties of a Professor, but actually coming forward as the main adversary of the interests he might have been expected to protect? Yet it is impossible to ignore the distinctive contribution to the traditions of the Chair made by this remarkable man. The Plato and the Thucydides are defective in point of scholarship; but as literature they have great merits, and they reached, and still reach, a wide public.
    • Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood For the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982), p. 16
  • Mr Jowett was always intent on improving his own character for the sake of his undergraduates. This is very rare in middle aged men and still more so in elderly and old men... [Jowett possessed] more character than any body I ever knew... He mastered life, life did not master him: that was what the spirit of life was in him. He was master even when most depressed.
    • Florence Nightingale, quoted in Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett's Letters to Florence Nightingale 1860–1893, eds. Vincent Quinn and John Prest (1987), pp. xxxiv-xxxv
  • He seemed to have taken the measure not merely of all opinions, but of all possible ones, and to have put the last refinements on literary expression. The charm of that was enhanced by a certain mystery about his own philosophic and other opinions. You know at that time his writings were thought by some to be obscure. These impressions of him had been derived from his Essays on St. Paul's Epistles, which at that time were much read and pondered by the more intellectual sort of undergraduates.
    • Walter Pater to Campbell (6 May 1894), quoted in Evelyn Abbott, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A. Master of Balliol College, Oxford, Vol. I (1897), pp. 329-330
  • A disciple of Socrates, he valued speech more highly than any other gift; yet he was always hampered by a conscious imperfection and by a difficulty in sustaining and developing his thoughts in society. Such was my diagnosis of his manner.
    • J. D. Rogers to Evelyn Abbott, quoted in Evelyn Abbott, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A. Master of Balliol College, Oxford, Vol. II (1897), p. 157
  • His edition of St. Paul's Epistles made him an arch-heretic in the eyes of the High Church party, and his simultaneous appointment to the Greek Professorship gave the chance, of which its members were foolish enough to avail themselves, of putting him in the position of a martyr of free thought. His share in the Essays and Reviews (1860) made him a representative man in a wider sphere. Though we have now got to the stage of affecting astonishment at the sensation produced by the avowal of admitted truths in that work, nobody who remembers the time can doubt that it marked the appearance of a very important development of religious and philosophical thought. The controversy raised by Essays and Reviews even distracted men for a time from the far more important issues raised by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.
  • Divines have lately discovered how to accept the critical results which shocked readers of Essays and Reviews, and yet to accept the whole theory of priestly magic. The compromise may result in the enslavement of reason instead of the neutralising of superstition. I know not what may be the result to the Church of England, but the enterprise attempted in the best possible faith by Jowett and his friends, seems to be injurious to the higher interests of intellectual honesty. It was a hopeless endeavour to hide irreconcilable contrasts and pretend that they did not exist
  • Young men, as a rule, like a leader who has some distinct aim, good or bad, and if Jowett were to be judged by that test one would say that no one of his time was less qualified to be a leader. To a distinct view of the importance of some solution he seems to have joined the profound conviction that no conceivable solution would hold water. "He stood," says one of his pupils, in a rather different sense, "at the parting of many ways," and he wrote, one must add, "No thoroughfare" upon them all.
  • The [Oxford tourist] guide would begin: "This, ladies and gentlemen, is Balliol College, one of the very holdest in the huniversity, and famous for the herudition of its scholars. The 'ead of Balliol College is called the Master. The present Master of Balliol is the celebrated Professor Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek. Those are Professor Jowett's study-windows, and there" (here the ruffian would stoop down, take up a handful of gravel and throw it against the panes, bringing poor Jowett, livid with fury, to the window) "ladies and gentlemen, is Professor Benjamin Jowett himself."
    • W. S. Walsh, A Handy-book of Literary Curiosities (1893), pp. 640-641
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