ABSTRACT
The Society of St John the Evangelist (SSJE) was the first Anglican monastic community established in Britain after the Reformation. Begun in Oxford in 1866, it grew rapidly to include houses in India and America. Their founder, Richard Meux Benson, wrote strongly of the need to return to sacramental theology and total self-offering to the service of God and the poor. His theological addresses underpin this chapter’s analysis of St John the Evangelist, the SSJE church in Oxford, designed for the community by George Frederick Bodley in the 1890s. These fin-de-siècle Gothic Revival cloistered spaces focused on high Anglican worship and Eucharistic theology offered a vital symbolic language to express the counter-cultural and controversial values of modern monasticism within the Church of England. This architectural project also reflected not only SSJE’s priorities but also Bodley’s, as revealed in his contemporary poetry on history and sacred space. This study demonstrates that Bodley’s design engages deliberate tensions between sumptuous ornament and rigid austerity, directing the worshipper – whether lay or ordained – towards a distinctive heavenly vision that amplified the beauty of high Anglican asceticism.
