The Sovereign Word Incarnate - Manning on the Visible Church

Manning’s teaching as set forth in the first volume of his sermons in 1842 was continued in his sermons over the next several years, although in them he developed more explicitly his doctrines of the visible and invisible church, the unity of the church, and the church as the mystical body of Christ. All these he linked directly with his reflections on the human will. A concern with ecclesiology had been with him from the beginning of his career. In 1835, two years after moving to Lavington, he preached and published his sermon, The English Church, Its Succession and Witness for Christ.²⁹ In 1837 his Catena pairum appeared,³⁰ and shortly after the death of his wife on July 24 of that year, Manning was busily engaged opposing the proposals of the previous year’s Ecclesiastical Commissioners for Church Refonn and the Cathedral Act, which (as Manning and his High Church colleagues interpreted them) subordinated the sovereignty of Christ’s body, the church, to the secular political expedients. In 1838 he published The Rule of Faith.³¹ Practical and theoretical questions concerning the nature of the church would remain foremost in his mind from then until his conversion in 1851. By 1837 he had taken up regular correspondence with Gladstone, the bulk of which treated ecclesiastical and ecclesiological matters and was the catalyse for Gladstone’s The State in Its Relations with the Church (the first edition of which was composed in 1838, the fourth, a two-volume expansion of the first, in 1841 [London: John Murray]), Gladstone’s Church Principles Considered in Their Results (London: John Murray, 1840), and Manning’s own The Unity of the Church (London: John Murray, 1842)

It is not surprising then that already in the second volume of his sermons, published in 1844, Manning should have expanded on the ecclesiological themes he initiated earlier³² and that these were developed in the university sermons he preached from 1842 through 1844. In a sermon, “The Probation of the Church, November 20, 1842,” for example, he emphasizes the visible church’s role in regenerating the sinful will and thus allowing the newborn, regenerated will to act freely. (SU, 24 )³³ The process is not mechanical; it is enacted in the visible church without doubt, but through its living Spirit. In its regeneration the will is passive; as regenerate it is responsible and acts freely.³⁴ And by baptismal grace it is present in each member of Christ’s body:

There is in every living soul, born again of the Holy Ghost, a gift of enlightening. The great truths and laws of God’s kingdom are as a germ implanted in the conscience; latent, indeed, and undeveloped, but there in virtue and in power. For this cause, baptism is called our illumination. (Heb. x.32) It is impossible to say what it may bestow upon the spiritual capacities of the soul; what faculties and perceptions, what passive and subtil [sic] qualities may be infused into us by our regeneration. (S3, 23)

The problem of such passivity is worked out in detail in the last of Manning’s university sermons, his “Gift of Illumination,” preached on Trinity Sunday, 1844. (SU, 151-81)

[T]he most perfect knowledge of Divine truth is that which we receive by the passive perceptions of the reason. By the reason, I mean that power of intellectual sight whereby we see or perceive the ideas and relations of truth. By passive perception, is not intended a lifeless and inert condition of the mind, which is contradictory to the plain meaning of the word: for to perceive presupposes life, and the activity of living powers in the subject. The words passive perception may be used to express the act of perceiving such truths as discover themselves to us by their own light, as opposed to those perceptions which are the consequence and conclusions of reasoning and investigation. It is not necessary to raise any question as to the kind or degree of light which may be in us by nature, in respect to particular truths. Whatsoever it be, it is still a gift passively received, to which we bring nothing but the simple capacity and consciousness of perceiving. (SU, 157-58)

“[T)he deepest insights into Divine truth are obtained not by controversy,” then, “but by contemplation,” Manning states, again using mystical language to support his approach.³⁵ Contemplation he defines as “the act of the reason, consciously and of our own will, with faith and love, dwelling upon truth received by the gift of God.” (SU, 162) There is never a suggestion, however, that such contemplation is bequeathed to the isolated individual. It comes solely within the church. Citing St. Thomas, Manning makes the link explicit. Contemplation of truth is a communal act, pursued primarily in the worship and adoration of the church as a whole. In no way is the ground here being laid for sterile scholastic rationalism which simplistically set down “truths” to be accepted in humble obediential piety and which Manning is sometimes later in his life accused of supporting:

The contemplation of truth is so nearly allied to worship, that they continually blend. In meditating upon it, the Church adores the presence of her Lord; and from it she gains insights into the Divine will, mind, wisdom, and love, which issue not in definition and speech, but in affections and emotions; they can find no vent in figures and arguments, but in silence and sanctity, in love, obedience, adoration…. It is by this devout reflection of the mind on the objects of faith, that the reason pierces into the causes and relation of truth, and finds the perfect harmony of its own light with the lights of nature and of faith. (S. Thomas Aquinas, [Summa] contra Gentiles, lib. i.c.vii.) (SU, 166-67)

By the “reconstituting of a new order in the creation of God, … by gathering from the ages of the world the fellowship of His elect; and bringing them, through probation, to perfection of holiness, and to eternal life,” the visible church, enlivened by the Holy Spirit, serves that “the mediatorial office of Christ shall be fulfilled.” (SU, 68-69) The church is thus “the ordained means of effectuating and fulfilling the ultimate design and aim of His kingdom in the gathering and salvation of the elect.” (SU, 69)

It was with the church’s high calling firmly in mind that Manning preached perhaps his most controversial Anglican sermon, “Christ’s Kingdom Is Not of this World.” Manning took up the theme on Guy Fawkes Day, 1843 in St. Mary’s at Oxford, and because of his open criticism of the Roman Catholic Church in the sermon, he offended many of his High Church colleagues. Nevertheless, the sermon set forth a central principle that would eventually lead Manning into visible unity with the Roman Church. Because of the importance of the church’s “ultimate design” in “supporting the powers of a regenerate will,” it has an “absolute spiritual commission from its unseen Head,” which “admitted no principles of secularity when its canons were embodied with the public laws” (SU, 74) in the Constantinian era and later. The absolute nature of the calling must be maintained:

[I]t is an act of the highest unfaithfulness, and a direct contradiction of the first laws of its own existence, for the Church, as such, to admit into itself the principles, or to assume the temporal powers, of the world. In proportion as it becomes conformed to the kingdoms of the earth, it loses the stamp of its heavenly origin: it ceases to testify for Christ, and to rule in His name: it thereby abdicates its commission, and denies in act that Christ has upon earth any kingdom at all. (SU, 75)

Manning was convinced that the church as a whole, both in its invisible and visible forms, could not abdicate its commission. But branches of it certainly could. As he would insist four years later, the Good Shepherd “has provided, first of all, in the external foundation and visible perpetuity of His Church” for “the perpetual exercise of His unseen pastoral care to give us all that is needed for our salvation.” (S3, 8) This he has “secured” by visible means: the apostolic succession, the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit, “the revelation of all truth, … the universal tradition of the faith in all the world, … [and] the universal delivery of the holy Sacraments to the Church planted in all lands. “Therefore,” Manning continues, “as the Church is indefectible, though particular members of it may fail of life eternal, so it can never lose the truth, though particular branches of it may err.” (S3, 9)

With this statement the scene was set for Manning’s eventual decision on April 6, 1851. Because a branch of the church could err, Christians must be ever on guard personally and politically, against self-deception,³⁶ a form of deceit “very much aggravated by the growth of religious knowledge and religious practices,” (S3, 104) and self-flattery. “[E]ven where there is outward obedience, there may yet be no true inward participation in the life and freedom of the heavenly city,” but by 1848 Manning’s words are no longer directed against the Roman Church or an interpretation of that “branch’s” fall from grace. He now looks homeward: “This is a warning specially needed in these latter times for there is much seeming and false Christianity in the world.” (S3, 192)

At the heart of Christian civilization Manning saw those patterns of thought and life, summarized by Newman twenty years later in his Apologia pro Vita Sua as “liberalism,"³⁷ and reflecting for both men the corrupting core principles of post-Enlightenment modernity:

The powers of the world, though professing to be Christian, have grown weary of Christ’s yoke, and are divorcing themselves, one by one, from Him. We have new ideas, new theories, new forces at work. Education now is the regenerator of individuals; and civilisation is the modern city of God. We hear of individual and social development; individual and social progress; of the destiny of mankind, and of the golden age yet to come, when all shall be loyal, moral, intellectual; Christian, but not sectarian; religious, though unable to unite; one with God, though divided from each other.

Here was everything he opposed: the triumph of voluntarism in private and public will, a reduction of all transcendent ideals into the essential rights of individual liberty, the secularization of Christian eschatology into a myth of progress, the remaking of religion into the culture of the day. And the danger, as he saw it now, resided not in foreign rationalism nor in continental “Romish” corruptions, but in the English nation itself, where the sovereignty of divine, gracious love was moulded into activities of a supreme human will, concerns with the common good considered merely as the possibilities of political compromise, and “the Crown” read as a cipher for “We the People.” The nation at large had apparently forgotten “that, for the development of individual perfection, there is needed a principle above nature; and for the development of society, an unity above national institutions.” (S3, 193)³⁸