Contrasts, Changes, and Manning's Conversion

On the eve of Passion Sunday in 1851, Manning posted a brief note to a friend, William Gladstone. It was the shortest of all the near-450 letters that had passed between them in the previous decade and a half. “Bear me in mind in your prayers tomorrow,” he wrote. “And may God be with you always."¹¹ Manning’s request stands with the force of a command; for friends as close as these, any rhetorical entreaty, a “Please” or “I beg you,” would be disingenuous and overshadow their very real accord. Nevertheless, the accord is over. Manning’s benediction marks its end, and so well is he aware of this that he shifts his customary closing of the previous fifteen years— “Believe me, Always yours affectionately”—to a simple statement of loyalty: “Ever your attached Friend.” On the following day, April 6, Manning was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Farm Street in London. “(A)fter Sacramental Confession, Profession of Faith, conditional Baptism, and absolution,” Manning wrote shortly after the event, “I went to High Mass. [James] Hope was received about 3 o’clock the same afternoon.” One week later, on Palin Sunday, both were “confirmed, and communicated in the Cardinal’s [Wiseman’s] private chapel.” Anxious as always to indicate that significant turns in his career were directed by powers other than his own, he continued: “[B]y his desire I received the tonsure. He has expressed his wish and intention to proceed without delay, and at Whitsuntide to admit me to the Priesthood. He said that it was his decision and act on his own responsibility, not at mine or my seeking."¹²

How Gladstone prayed on April 6 we do not know. He wrote Manning immediately “in answer to his note showing that the blow was to fall tomorrow,"¹³ but on the blow itself, he could only comment: “A day of pain! Manning & Hope!” and on Monday, April 7: “Hope too is gone. They were my two props. Their going may be to me a sign that my work is gone with them. God give us daily light with daily bread. One blessing I have: total freedom from doubts. These dismal events have smitten but not shaken.” The following day, Tuesday, April 8, before leaving for Paris, Gladstone “[e]xecuted a codicil to my will striking out Hope as Ex[ecuto]r."¹⁴

There is something in Gladstone’s reactions and in the melancholy of Manning’s note that strikes a modern reader as melodramatic. “Surely,” an average citizen of the 1990s might comment, “this was far too extreme a response to what was, after all, even in the nineteenth century a private decision. No one was really any worse off: Gladstone could continue as a Member of Parliament, and Hope as a legal consultant. Manning no longer carried the prestige of an Anglican Archdeacon and had to give up an assured income, but even in his case the results were not calamitous: only a week after his conversion he was pressed by the reigning English Cardinal to become a Catholic priest, and with such encouragement he could not have despaired over his future. Indeed,” our contemporary reporter might add, “there has always been much to attract one in Catholicism. In Great Britain today, for example, it is a fashionable option. In the past two years alone, the Dutchess of Kent has ‘gone over’¹⁵ and after her, Princess Diana’s mother,¹⁶ amidst rumors that the Princess herself is receiving instruction.¹⁷ Could one not imagine that the same excitement swirled about Manning in the ‘second spring’ conversions of 1851 and that the same psychological and social-political pressures drew him in."¹⁸

One could, indeed, so imagine—and many have. Post-modern we may be, but our explanations of conversion and religious experience generally remain dependent on modern presuppositions such as those of our hypothetical commentator. Particularly is this the case with those central and self-contradictory contemporary commitments to the primacy and sovereignty of the free individual will and to a therapeutic model of that will, as shaped by its socioeconomic and political environment. Not surprisingly, as a result, models chosen for understanding conversion are in large part appropriated from the social sciences, which in turn direct our attention to individual personality traits, developmental psychology, and family and social systems theories.¹⁹ However kindly intended, the results of such a program are not unexpected: religious behavior is described as but another social activity, and spirituality a stylish descriptive term for a group’s or individual’s willed idiosyncrasies.

Manning himself pointed out the danger of interpreting religious change by external character traits and within a modern framework of the sovereign will. In his sermons²⁰ published the year before his conversion, he spoke at some length about “late conversions,” and his comments provide ample warnings for those treating his own. Some conversions are “begun too late, and with greater obstructions.” (S4, 9) From the external world, these receive special attention, since that world marks in them the “contrasts” between what was earlier and what came after. What the external world misses, however, are “changes”: “changes are objects of faith alone” according to “the power of … constraining love which bends the will of those who, after baptism, fall, and yet repent.” (S4, 11; italics mine)

By his distinction between “contrasts” and “changes,” Manning is able to oppose interpretations of conversion according to the methods of objective history. Social, or even intellectual, history can describe only the most obvious “objective” turn and is incapable of distinguishing between those conversions formed by the power of love and those that are the result of an individual’s private judgment.²¹ Indeed, as Manning describes self-willed conversions, one can almost sense him defending his later actions, insisting that whatever the appearance, his is not a life that can be so described: “There is always a glare, heat, and noise about such characters, a restless, eager sharpness in their tone and way, which betrays the source of the fire from which they are kindled to be not in heaven but earth.” (S4, 12) What counts for Manning is the heavenly kindling.

An initial and ongoing process, conversion marks “not only the change which comes in afterlife upon the sinful and the careless, … but also the whole life-long penetrating change of heart which must pass on every regenerate soul.” It makes little difference “whether [or not) it begin with our earliest consciousness[;] as dawn lightens into noon, it is all one. Time is nothing.” What does count, however, is the motive, and that is not the free act of the isolated individual. The motive power lies elsewhere: “[T]he only true motive of this change is a sense of the love of Christ.” (S4, 9) Throughout his life, Manning opposed any understanding of conversion as the result of human will, acting primarily and solely on its own initiative and power. “The soul in man was so created,” he wrote, “that no other power could satisfy or sway it altogether; no other can touch its life to the very quick, and awaken all its affections. The love of Christ felt in the heart is the only principle of perfect conversion to God.” (S4, 8)²²

Such a state is not open to the external eye of a twentieth century historian attempting to grasp a nineteenth-century writer’s thought or personality. Manning’s implied reader is the individual Christian working out salvation with “fear and trembling.” To this individual he directs his call, knowing that the mystery of divine love in each human soul is operative in so secret a manner that it is not for anyone other than that soul to make judgments upon it. A contemporary historian or theologian may listen to the conversation, but “changes,” worked by this love in such a soul, are found in the register of God, not in the record of humankind.

According to Manning, then, in assessing such matters as an individual’s conversion, the human voice finally must be silent. In Manning’s own case, however, the possibility of reaching an intermediate judgment may be possible. Although a fine theologian, Manning published his sermons with pastoral concerns primarily in mind. As such he intended them as aids in spiritual guidance, composed on the basis of his personal growth in holiness, a growth that he understood as initiared by the Divine and changing his moral nature daily. In this way Manning’s sermons provide pointers to his own religious changes as he understood them, and allow one, if attending not to the external contrasts of his life alone but to his pastoral voice, insights into the nature of his conversion and the dynamic of his life as a whole.