by Edward Short
In the same letter objecting to the proposed Oxford Oratory, Pusey also confessed to Newman, apropos his Apologia, which had recently been published, “I began a letter to you when I had read the early part of the Apologia. I could not read on, for it seemed like parting over again.” This was in sharp contrast to Keble’s response to the book, which he lost no time in sharing with Newman: “The more intently I look at this self drawn photograph (what a cruel strain it must have been to you), the more I love and admire the Artist—Whatever comes of controversial points, I see no end to the good which the whole Church, we may reasonably hope, may derive from such an example of love and candour …”200 Pusey only read the bits about himself. “One thing I wished to ask you,” he wrote Newman with the unabashed egotism that was so much a part of his make-up: “what was the exact meaning of your prayer, that I might be ‘nearer the Catholic Church before I die.’ Does it mean that I should not only be nearer but in the Roman Communion? My confession of faith in 1848 when you so lovingly came to me at Tenby, had it pleased God that I should die, would have been, ‘I believe explicitly all which I know God to have revealed to his Church, and implicitly any thing which He has revealed, though I do not know it.’”201
This letter suggested to Newman that Pusey was not as settled in his religious views as he might imagine, and, in response, Newman showed the extent to which he still hoped his Tractarian friend might reconsider those views: “As to my meaning in the passage to which you allude, I think that the only body, which has promises attached to it, is the Catholic Church – and if I think the Anglican Communion, as such, is not included in the Catholic Church, I think it has not any divine promise or power. Then I believe too Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, and, as I think the head and heart of that Ecclesia is Rome, I think that to be in communion with Rome is to be united to the Church of the promises, of grace and of salvation.”202
Here, again, despite the unlikelihood of Pusey’s converting, Newman never ceased sharing with him the promise of the Roman Church. And here, too, one can see the characteristic tact that Newman brought to addressing Pusey’s Anglican difficulties. The manner in which he chose to proselytize was always disarmingly direct. “As to individual proselytism,” he wrote his friend, “you must recollect that we only feel and do what you feel and do towards Dissenters. By what right have you converted from Dissent, as you say, 32 out of 40 Bishops of the Anglo-American Church? By the same right we have converted a number of men who are now among our Priests – You write to the Wesleyans and try to co-operate with them; but I am sure you would make a Wesleyan, whom you met with, a good Anglican, if you could. I am not aware that Manning and Ward convert individuals, any more than I should, in order to weaken the Anglican Church, but from love to the soul of the individual converted, as you would feel love for the Wesleyan.”203
Manning, being Manning, was blunter. In The Workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church of England: A Letter to E.B. Pusey (1864), he rejected Pusey’s claim that the English Church was “the great bulwark against infidelity in this land” by arguing that, far from being a part of the Catholic Church, the English Church was no Church at all “in any divine and true sense,” though he did allow that this did not nullify “the workings of the Spirit of God or the operations of grace in it.”204 At the same time, he conceded that most of the English were not culpable for their ignorance of the truth “because in these three hundred years the Catholic Church has been so swept off the face of England that nine or ten generations of men have lived and died without the Faith being so much as proposed to them, or the Church ever visible to them.” In this category, Manning placed “children, the poor, and the unlearned,” all of whom “were born into a state of privation. They knew no better. No choice was before them. They made no perverse act of the will in remaining where they were born.” But it was different, Manning insisted, for the educated—“I cannot class them under the above enumeration of those who are inculpably out of the truth. I leave them, therefore, to the only judge of all men.” Nonetheless, whether learned or unlearned, Anglicans must recognize that the English Church was tottering, a fact which inspired no gloating from Manning. For him, “the troubles of the Anglican Church” only inspired “a sincere desire that God may use these things to open the eyes of men to see the untenableness of their position; coupled with a very sincere sorrow at the havoc which the advance of unbelief is making among the truths which yet linger in the Church of England.”205 Moreover, he confessed, “I regard the present downward course of the Church of England and Christianity of England with great sorrow and fear. And I am all the more alarmed because, of those who are involved in it, so many not only refuse to acknowledge the fact, but treat us who give warning of the danger as enemies and accusers.”206 In denying that the Anglican Church was a “bulwark against unbelief,” Manning gave precisely the concrete reasons for his beliefs that Newman had encouraged his former Tractarian friends to give for theirs, which, alas, they never gave. Nevertheless, it is clear that in taking issue with Pusey’s claim, Manning was also taking issue with Newman, who had recently characterized the Anglican Church as “a serviceable breakwater against doctrinal errors more fundamental than its own.”207 Accordingly, Manning argued that the National Church could not be regarded as any bulwark against unbelief because the Reformation out of which it was created was the “true and original source of the present spiritual anarchy of England.” He showed how “all forms of Christianity lying round about” the Catholic Church “were but fragments more or less mutilated,” which placed Anglicans on the same par as Dissenters. He argued that if the Anglican Church “sustains a belief in two Sacraments, it formally propagates unbelief in five; if it recognises an undefined presence of Christ in the Sacrament, it formally imposes on its people a disbelief in Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the altar; if it teaches that there is a Church on earth, it formally denies its indissoluble unity, its visible Head, and its perpetual Divine voice.” He put a very fundamental question: “What is the ultimate guarantee of the Divine revelation but the Divine authority of the Church? Deny this, and we descend at once to human teachers.” And here the Ultramontane in Manning could not resist observing that “The perpetual and ever-present assistance of the Holy Ghost, whereby the Church in every age is not only preserved from error, but enabled at all times to declare the truth, that is, the infallibility of the living Church at this hour—this truth the Anglican Church … denies. But this is the formal antagonist of infidelity, because it is the evidence on which God wills that we should believe all that His veracity reveals.” There were no emollients in any of that, nor in this: “If the Catholic faith be the perfect revelation of Christianity, the Anglican Reformation is a cloud of heresies; if the Catholic Church be the organ of the Holy Ghost, the Anglican Church is not only no part of the Church, but no Church of Divine foundation. It is a human institution, sustained, as it was founded, by a human authority; without priesthood, without sacraments, without absolution, without the Real Presence of Jesus upon its altars. I know these truths are hard. It seems heartless, cruel, unfilial, unbrotherly, ungrateful so to speak of all beautiful fragments of Christianity which mark the face of England, from its thousand towns to its village greens, so dear even to us who believe it be both in heresy and in schism.”208 This was indeed hard, but, as Manning admitted, he only brought himself to write it because “in these late years” he was “on the frontier which divides us;” and “people have come to me with their anxieties and their doubts. What would you have done in my place?”209 Although frequently faulted for advocating a gratuitously bellicose Catholicism, Manning, for all his tactlessness, was nonetheless a truth teller. If Pusey saw Tractarianism as a means of improving the esprit de corps of the Anglican clergy, Manning was intent on showing him that that clergy, from its corrupt Erastian inception, was not valid. Nothing that Newman ever said to Pusey was quite as hard-hitting as this.
Now, for three hundred years the Anglican clergy have been tr
ained, ordained, and bound by subscriptions to deny not only many Christian truths, but the Divine authority of the ή άεί έκκλησία, the living Church of every age. The barrier against infidelity is the Divine voice which generates faith. But this the Anglican clergy are bound to deny. And this denial opens a flood-gate in the bulwark, through which the whole stream of unbelief at once finds way. Seventeen or eighteen thousand men, educated with all the advantages of the English schools and Universities, endowed with large corporate revenues, and distributed all over England, maintain a perpetual protest, not only against the Catholic Church, but against the belief that there is any Divine voice immutably and infallibly guiding the Church at this hour in its declaration of the Christian revelation to man. How can this regarded as “the great bulwark in God’s hand against infidelity”?210
Pusey’s initial response to Manning’s letter was one of weary resignation. “They tell me that I should in some way write an answer to Manning’s letter, because he has addressed it to me. I wish that I could have been left quiet to what is my work.” In his formal response, which he published as his Eirenicon, Pusey sought to accomplish three things: to defend himself against Manning; to find a means of reconciling the 39 Articles to the Canons of Trent; and to establish which practices the Roman Church considered de fide, or, in effect, a finite list of Catholic doctrines. “Our difficulties are mostly in the practical system rather than in the letter of the Council of Trent. If Rome could authenticate all which she allows individuals to say in explanation—I mean, if a Council of the Roman Church would say, ‘Such and such things are not de fide,’ as well as what is de fide—the greatest difficulty in the way of the reunion of the two churches would, I think, be gone … My letter is, in fact, a reawakening of Tract XC, which, though its principles have sunk deep, is not much known by the rising generation.”211
That Pusey chose to respond to Manning with what he called a “reawakening of Tract XC” showed the extent to which he was stranded in the Tractarian past, a no-man’s-land between Canterbury and Rome—acquiescence in the Gorham Judgment had left him no alternative. Still, he had to respond to Manning with something and so he chose to “rehabilitate Tract XC, because,” as he told William Copeland “an exposition of this sort, as being true, is essential to our position. The beginning is only the old story which has been told so often:—Tract XC over again, which made me ask dearest N. to let me republish Tract XC.”212 For years Copeland had been planning to write a history of the Tractarians, but towards the end of his life he had only dictated a few chapters before paralysis overtook him.213 Nevertheless, Pusey expected great things from their collaboration. “What a mass of facts you have, of which I know nothing! I shall be so glad to see your History. What I am doing is very simple, like an old world, long hid by a cloud, and the cloud parting …” What is striking is that Copeland—a scholar of considerable attainments—fully entered into Pusey’s project. “Great care and accuracy indeed will be needed in touching the old vexata quaestio,” he told Pusey. “Now more than ever, [Keble’s] lines are realised …”
Round about the battle lowers
And mines are hid beneath our towers.214
As far as Newman was concerned, if Pusey wished to rehash Tract 90, he would willy-nilly have to rehash the untenability of the via media. For Newman, the Tract’s purpose “was simply that of justifying myself and others in subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, while professing many tenets which had popularly been considered distinctive of the Roman faith.” But Pusey now wished to use the Tract to justify his own subscription to the Articles. In response to Pusey’s request for a list of what the Church considered de fide, Newman wrote back: “You indeed want the Church to decide what is de fide and what is not – but, pace tuâ, this seems unreasonable. It is to determine the work of all Councils till the end of time … No one on earth can draw the line between what is de fide or what is not, for it would be prophesying of questions which have [not] yet turned up.”215
In his long review of the book, Richard Church noted the same tendency that surfaced in so many of Pusey’s undertakings—the tendency to ignore embarrassing realities. “Where a man’s main basis is charitable hope and presumed goodwill,” Church wrote, “he is apt to take the things which he sees for more than they are worth, and to shut his eyes to those which stand in the way of what he knows to be desirable and right … The test of a practical issue being far off, there is the temptation to go on arranging things as we think best, without fairly asking ourselves—what am I really aiming at? What is it that I expect or ask for? What am I coming to? When Dr. Pusey talks seriously of the Roman Church ‘giving explanations,’ or of the Thirty-nine Articles and the Decrees of Trent passing away and being merged in the decisions of an English General Council, we are tempted to ask—Is he talking of the world as we know it?”216 Then, again, Church recognized that there was something else about Pusey that aggravated the air of unreality that permeates so much of the Eirenicon. “If Dr. Pusey had more sense of the ludicrous he would see that most people on all sides require an effort to keep their gravity when they are asked to think of the Roman Church ‘making explanations.’ The instinctive and only natural attitude of the Roman mind is to expect unconditional submission from those who are clearly wrong to those who are clearly right.”217 Quite so, one can imagine Manning responding.
Of Pusey’s bellicose ecumenism Newman wrote to Keble: “I really marvel that he should have dreamed of calling it an Irenicon … If Pusey is writing to hinder his own people from joining us, well and good, he has a right to write as he has done – but how can he fancy that to exaggerate, instead of smoothing contrarieties, is the way to make us listen to him?” Pusey had made extravagant devotions to the Blessed Virgin a central part of his objections to Roman Catholicism, but Newman recognized the bad faith in such charges. “I never can deny my belief that the Blessed Virgin prays efficaciously for the Church,” Newman confessed, “and for individual souls in and out of it. Nor can I deny that to be devout to her is a duty following on this doctrine – but I never will say, even though St Bernardine said it, that no one is saved who is not devout to her.” Pusey confused devotion with doctrine. “Suarez teaches dogma, and dogma is fixed. St. Bernadine is devotional, and devotion is free.”218 Simply because effusive Catholics made extravagant claims about the Blessed Virgin did not invalidate the Church’s doctrines pertaining to the Mother of God. In an incisive essay on the controversy between Pusey and Newman, Roderick Strange remarks that, in response to Pusey’s Eirenicon, Newman was “appealing for a higher standard of scholarship,” which is true, but he was also appealing for a higher standard of honesty. Nevertheless, Father Strange is certainly right to remind readers that there is a cautionary tale in the controversy between Newman and Pusey: “It warns us that Agreed Statements … will count for nothing, even combined with love, sympathy, and friendship, unless there exists among us deeply-felt, unequivocal trust.”219
That Pusey never responded to the King William Street lectures, never read the Apologia, never read Bishop Ullathorne’s response to the Eirenicon, and only responded to bits and pieces of Newman’s response in his Letter to Pusey, demonstrates how heedless he could be of the views of others, a trait which, as we have seen, he shared with his father. If a certain high-handedness and self-absorption prevented Pusey from condescending to win the trust of those with whose points of view he differed, this was not the case with Newman. One can read Letter to Pusey and get a perfectly reliable sense of Pusey’s point of view. Indeed, Newman mounts Pusey’s case better than Pusey. Speaking of the claims made by the devotional writers quoted by Pusey, Newman wrote: “Sentiments such as these I freely surrender to your animadversion; I never knew of them till I read your book, nor, as I think, do the vast majority of English Catholics know them. They seem to me like a bad dream. I could not have conceived them to be said … but I will say plainly that I had rather believe (which is impossible) that there is no God at all, than that
Mary is greater than God. I will have nothing to do with statements, which can only be explained, by being explained away. I should not repeat them myself; but I am looking at them, not as spoken by the tongues of Angels, but according to that literal sense which they bear in the mouths of English men and English women. And, as spoken by man to man, in England, in the nineteenth century, I consider them calculated to prejudice inquirers, to frighten the unlearned, to unsettle consciences, to provoke blasphemy, and to work the loss of souls.”220 Nothing in Pusey’s tract puts the case against rogue devotion more succinctly than that.
Dean Church gave Newman high marks for taking Pusey’s point. “It is something that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent what is the nobler and more elevated side of the system to which he has attached himself.”221 However, for Newman, Pusey was not so much objecting to the real Church, as to a caricature of his own polemical manufacture. “Certain I am,” he told Keble, “that, as an Irenicum, it can only raise a smile – and I wish that were all it would raise. The first duty of charity is to try to enter into the mind and feelings of others. This is what I love so much in you, my dear Keble; but I much desiderate it in this new book of Pusey’s – and I deplore the absence of it there …”222 Nonetheless, Keble took Pusey’s part. As he told Newman, Pusey was “just amplifying and carrying out the idea in Number 90, on which his whole book is grounded … God forbid that you, my dear N. should be the person to cut away the ground from under our feet, and that with such very severe words and thoughts towards one whom you know and love so well.”223 Here, not for the first time, Newman saw the force of Tractarian solidarity.