A Question of Sovereignty - Christ or Crown?

Late in the 1840s a number of incidents coincided to focus Manning’s attention on the problem before him. Early in 1847 he suffered a serious decline in his health and was advised to take a rest cure on the continent. Following a brief stay at Homburg for the waters, he went to Rome and remained there until April of the following year. In Rome he met and conversed with Gioacchino Ventura di Raulica, whose political theology, although eventually leading in directions opposed to Manning’s own, initially stimulated the direction of the Archdeacon’s thought. At the same time, he received word that Renn Dixon Hampden, who from as early as 1836 was considered by members of the Oxford Movement to hold heretical views, had been appointed Bishop of Hereford, with relatively little protest on the part of the Church of England at large.

In the midst of the Hampden debate an even greater stonn was growing. In 1847 the Rev. George Cornelius Gorham, an Anglican clergyman of thirty years experience, was offered a living in the diocese of the Highchurchman, Bishop Henry Phillpots of Exeter.³⁹ Phillpots had been earlier angered when Gorham advertised for a curate “free from Tractarian error,” and he refused to endorse the appointment. Gorham was examined in November 1847 and again for three days in March 1848. At the center of the debate was Gorham’s position on baptismal regeneration, in which, the bishop held, Gorham did not believe. The bishop continued to refuse to institute Gorham, and the case was appealed to the highest ecclesiastical court, the Court of Arches, in February 1849. When that court found for the bishop, Gorham appealed to Her Majesty in Council, and the case came before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on December 11, 1849. In the decision of March 8, 1850, the committee found for Gorham, and thus on the orders of a secular court, he was instituted in his living against the protests of his bishop.

In January of 1850, Manning’s fourth volume of Anglican sermons appeared. The volume opens with a touching portrayal of Paul’s conversion in words that only a year later could be read as a description of Manning’s own turn. The description is consistent with his earlier writings. Conversion is not an act of individual will: “A power the world knew not of had fallen upon [Paul]; an attraction had fastened on his inmost will, and drew him to a world unseen.” (S4, 2) Christ’s love is the law of the Christian’s life, according to the theme of this first sermon (S4, 1-16), and in large part, of the volume as a whole: “It ‘constrains’; that is, it lays a force upon us, as a strong hand draws us whithersoever it will.” (S4, 6) Only those who have been moved by a “divine motive” will continue in the faith. That divine motive “is the only principle of an enduring perseverance.” (S4, 14)

We do Manning a great disservice if we interpret his concerns throughout the late 1840s and 1850s as those of an individual who was attempting to work out rationally which of the various available religious options he was to follow. Human rationality did not have primacy in his theological system: it followed out of faith, was an activity of faith, and in no sense an independent instrument by which one freely reached rational conclusions (deduced either logically or on the basis of probability) and then acted upon them with an equally independent will. And what was true of the individual applied to the larger group as well. Manning’s understanding of the individual Christian and the Christian corporate body was of organic entities growing and maturing over time under the direction of the divine spirit, not of mechanistic structures operating by instrumental and legalistic norms.

What is the Church but Christ’s invisible presence openly manifested by a visible organization? The Church is Christ mystical, —the presence of Christ, by the creative power of His incarnation, produced and prolonged on earth …. [S4, 93] It stands in its fullness even until now, and we are partakers of its presence and its power. Therefore the Church is one, because He is one; holy, because He is holy; catholic, because His presence is local no more; apostolic, because He still sends His own servants; indefectible, because He is the Truth. And to perfect this mystery of grace, it was needful that He should go away. (S4, 103)

In this context Manning believed that there were two primary questions before the baptized Christian: (1) “Am I wilfully indulging in my conscience any sin which He hates 1” (S4, 20) and (2) “Am I striving to be all that He loves?” (S4, 21) The questions retained their primary meaning as directed to the individual’s growth in holiness, but by 1850 Manning’s view of the life of holiness was framed more immediately by questions of his corporate activity as a priest in a branch of the church catholic. The problem of a proper standard by which to have security from self-deception now faced him directly.

Manning had taken up the issue of a standard some years earlier in his third volume of sermons. As he saw it, the difficulty was that once modern individuals had posited the primacy of the individual free will, there was nothing to constrain or direct that will, and thus nothing to protect it from what it was in its essence, namely, self-deception. “[W]e have no perception of any higher spiritual condition even by way of idea, than either our own as it is, or by advancing in degree, as it may become. The want of such a standard makes us to be a standard to ourselves,” (S3, 103) he wrote in 1848, three years before his conversion. But if the lack of a standard is as outlined, where is one to turn? “If this be so,” he asked,

If we be our own deceivers, what security shall we take against our own hearts? Out of many we can now take only two.

1. The greatest security against deceiving ourselves by trusting our own hearts, is a careful information of conscience…. (S3, 108)
   
2. The other security is the only one which remains to those who have never enjoyed the first; and that is, to take the judgment of some other person, instead of trusting in themselves. (S3, 111)

The way in which Manning puts the question and the answers he provides for it together focus the problem. If one considers them from a Purcellian modernist perspective, one must consider Manning’s solutions as trajectories—here already firmly established—that would necessarily lead him to an ultramontanist view of papal infallibility in its most rigorous form. According to this interpretation Manning was early seeking a secure foundation for both personal and institutional decisions, the first in a conscience properly and carefully informed by pure doctrine, the second in a legitimately established and authoritative priesthood transferring certitude through apostolic succession. The difficulty with this approach is that it not only mistakes Manning’s earliest reaching but forces upon him in a later day a much more rigid and brittle doctrine of infallibility.

The “careful information of conscience” with which Manning was concerned had little to do with factual material or personal choice. All the terms in the phrase he understood etymologically and as organic terms. “Conscience” was “with-knowledge” (cum-scientia), faith’s knowing with the active regenerating love of Christ infused into a person at baptism, forming itself in the believer through his or her life; the genitive was understood as both objective and subjective, that is, information as formed in the conscience, heart, and will, and as that conscience in-forming the believer thereafter. For baptized individuals who did not fully “enjoy” the devotional possibilities in a life of holiness as here proposed, there was “only one” security that remained, “and that is, to take the judgment of some other person, instead of trusting in themselves.” (S3, 111) Ultimately and finally, that other person is Christ; immediately, it is Christ’s representative, those persons fulfilling Christ’s pastoral office across the whole earth and throughout time in an organic succession from the apostles chemselves.

By March 1850 the content of Manning’s conscientious “information” included, among others, the premises (1) that a branch of the church catholic could err (as he believed in 1843 that the Roman branch had), and (2) that the Anglican branch had installed a heretic as a bishop (in the case of Hampden) and was about to accept without full corporate opposition a declared heretic (Gorham) as a priest on the insistence of a secular authority, thus ascribing greater sovereignty to the state than to God’s grace manifest in the visible body of His church. If both premises were true, it must follow that the Anglican branch erred and that Manning’s continuation as a priest in that branch was a “wilful indulg[ence in] his conscience.” The question before him was one of sovereignty.

Manning’s own position remained consistent with the direction of his earlier thought, and he clarified this in his Appellate Jurisdiction of the Crown in Matters Spiritual, the preface of which is dated July 2, 1850.⁴⁰ What was at stake for him was the location of sovereignty, a term he had used throughout his sermons and other theological writing solely with reference to divine grace.⁴¹ And when speaking of governmental authority he put forward the same position early in 1840, when he wrote to Gladstone: “The perfect idea of Government is the Sovereignty of God. He makes, preserves, governs, changes, renews all things at His will by a supreme power to create, & dispose in the material, or to persuade & control in the Spirirual world.” Sovereignty rests with God; when speaking of “[t]he primary form of human government or authority of man over man,” one speaks of supremacy, that is, “a supreme power under God & within his laws."⁴²

Thus Manning opens his Appellate Jurisdiction with a description of “the Church of Christ [as) a Divine Kingdom; … governed by its Divine Head through the Pastors whom He has lineally commissioned to feed His flock; … with full spiritual power to administer and to rule in all things pertaining to the salvation of souls, by His authority and in His Name.” (AJ, 4 )⁴³ This divine kingdom “in England” (he deliberately distinguishes this body from the Church of England, nor does he refer to it as a branch, but “as a member or province” of Christ’s Kingdom) “possesses, ‘in solidum,’ by inherence and participation in the whole church, the inheritance of the Divine Tradition of Faith, with a share in this full and supreme custody of doctrine, and power of discipline, partaking for support and perpetuity, in its measure and sphere, the same guidance as the whole church at large, of which, by our Baptism, we have been made members.” (AJ, 4)

As a result “[t]he Ecclesiastical Law is not a function of the Civil Power, but a body organized and Sovereign within its own sphere…. [It] is a living system, namely, the Church.” Indeed, over against the Royal Supremacy even “[e]very particular Church speaks to the local Sovereignty with the voice and authority of the universal Church; and no supremacy may be given to the Crown over a particular Church inconsistent with the Divine Sovereignty of the Church Universal…. The Royal Supremacy terminates where the Divine Office begins.” (AJ, 21-22)

If the Gorham decision were accepted, Manning had no doubt that the Church of England would be in schism. And if the church were in schism, it was necessary for him as a Christian in the universal church to withdraw from the schismatic body. By June 25 when he completed his draft treatise on the Appellate Jurisdiction, he expressed his conviction that “the later R[oyal] S[upremacy] is a violation of the Divine Office of the Church: and both a cause and a perpetrator of Schism.”

Holding firmly to his principles, however, he did not leave. He wrote and met regularly on the subject with Gladstone and in great anxiety and unwillingness to leave his work, continued to hope that a protest of the church as a whole could be initiated. He therefore remained active in the London and the Metropolitan Church Unions, who met on July 23.⁴⁴ At that meeting Manning proposed a vote of thanks to the chair of the meeting and used the opportunity to express his hope that the meeting would result in an action of the whole church to respond to the decision.⁴⁵

The Bishop of London then introduced a bill in the House of Lords to deal with the matter, but it did not satisfy Manning, and the discussion surrounding it only made matters worse.⁴⁶ By August 17 he felt it necessary to announce publicly, with as many others who wished, his understanding of the Oath of Subscription. Only two other members of the clergy joined with him.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, he remained concerned about those who were considering conversion and was troubled by those who did convert. If he went solely by the intellect alone, he admitted, “I should feel that the Anglican system has little it can maintain against the Roman Church. But I misgive my own spiritual discernment and fear to go by intellect alone lest truths should be hid from me which are revealed unto babes” (italics mine). The active and free rational will, after all, he had always insisted, was not to be followed in making spiritual decisions.⁴⁸