Oriel Noetics
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The Oriel Noetics is a term now applied to a group of early 19th-century dons of the University of Oxford closely associated with Oriel College. John Tulloch in 1885 wrote about them as the "early Oriel school" of theologians, the contrast being with the Tractarians, also strongly based in Oriel.[1]
The Noetics were moderate freethinkers and reformers within the Church of England. In terms of Anglican religious parties, the Noetics were High Church opponents of evangelicalism, but adhered also to a rationalism from the previous century.[2] They advocated for a "national religion" or national church,[3] and in their own view stood for orthodoxy rather than liberalism.[4] In politics, they were associated with the Whigs, and influenced prominent statesmen such as Lord John Russell, Viscount Morpeth, and Thomas Spring Rice.[5]
Distinctively, the Noetics combined natural theology with political economy. Their approach had something in common with that of Thomas Chalmers, and had much support at the time outside the college in Oxford, and more widely.[6]