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Richard Whately (1 February 1787 – 8 October 1863) was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading , a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.
Whately returned to the University of Oxford, where he had seen the social impact of unemployment on the city and region.
A reformer, Whately was initially on friendly terms with John Henry Newman. They fell out over Robert Peel's candidacy for the Oxford University seat in Parliament.
In 1829, Whately was elected as Drummond Professor 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 in two editions (1831 & 1832).
In Ireland, Whately's bluntness and his lack of a conciliatory manner caused opposition from his own clergy, and from the beginning he gave offence by supporting state endowment of the Catholic Church clergy. 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. He was concerned to reform the Church of Ireland and the Irish Poor Laws. He considered tithe commutation essential for the Church.
In 1841, Catholic archbishops William Crolly and John MacHale debated whether to continue the system, with the more moderate Crolly supporting Whately's gaining papal permission to go on, given some safeguards. In 1852, the scheme broke down due to the opposition of the new ultramontanist Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, who would later become the first Irish prelate named Cardinal. Whately withdrew from the Education Board the following year.
During the famine 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. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.
An uncle, William Plumer, presented him with a living in Halesworth in Suffolk, and Whately moved there. His daughters were writer Jane Whately and missionary Mary Louisa Whately. One of his nephews was Canon William Pope.
In the summer of 1863, Whately was prostrated by an ulcer in his leg; after several months of acute suffering, he died on 8 October 1863.
In 1825 Whately 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. In 1837 he wrote his handbook of Christian Evidences, which was translated during his lifetime into more than a dozen languages. In the Irish context, the Christian Evidences was adapted to a form acceptable to Catholic beliefs, with the help of James Carlile.
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A devout Christian, Whately took a practical view of Christianity. He disagreed with the Evangelical party and generally favoured a more intellectual approach to religion. He also disagreed with the later Tractarian emphasis on ritual and church authority. Instead, he emphasised careful reading and understanding of the Bible.
His cardinal principle was that of Chillingworth —‘the Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestantism;’ and his exegesis was directed to determine the general tenor of the scriptures to the exclusion of Dogma based on isolated texts. There is no reason to question his reception of the central doctrines of the faith, though he shrank from theorising or even attempting to formulate them with precision. On election he held, broadly speaking, the Arminian view, and his antipathy to Calvinism was intense. He dwelt more on the life than on the death of Christ, the necessity of which he denied.
Whately took a view of political economy as an essentially logical subject. It proved influential in Oxford. The Noetics were reformers but largely centrist in politics, rather than strong Whigs or Tories. One of Whately's initial acts on going to Dublin was to endow a chair of political economy in Trinity College. Its first holder was Mountifort Longfield. Later, in 1846, he founded the Dublin Statistical Society with William Neilson Hancock.
Whately's view of political economy, and that common to the early holders of the Trinity college professorship, addressed it as a type of natural theology. He belonged to the group of supporters of Thomas Malthus that included Thomas Chalmers, some others of the Noetics, Richard Jones and William Whewell from Cambridge.
He saw no inconsistency between science and Christianity belief, which differed from the view of other Christian critics of Malthus. He differed also from Jones and Whewell, expressing the view that the inductive method was of less use for political economy than the deductive method, properly applied.
In periodicals, Whately addressed other public questions, including the topic of transportation and the "secondary punishments" on those who had been transported; his pamphlet on this topic influenced the politicians Lord John Russell and Henry George Grey.
Whately's view of rhetoric as essentially a method for persuasion became an orthodoxy, challenged in mid-century by Henry Noble Day. Elements of Rhetoric is still cited, for thought about presumption, burden of proof, and testimony.
Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky thought Whately’s importance and influence greater than his later historical repute would indicate, and that Whately’s unsystematic, aphoristic style of writing might explain history’s relative forgetfulness of him:
He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking a place in standard literature. He was conscious of it himself, and was accustomed to say that it was the mission of his life to make up cartridges for others to fire.William Edward Hartpole Lecky, “Formative Influences,” Historical and Political Essays, p.85, (London: Longman, 1910) (retrieved June 9, 2024).
In 1864, Jane Whately, 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 William John Fitzpatrick, was published in 1864.
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