Sovereignty and Visible Unity

By September 5 Manning was reconsidering the importance of another theological element, raised for him in his reflections on the unity of the church. According to his reading of Ephesians 4, he was convinced “that indivisibleness of communion was held to be by a Divine necessity, so that any person or portion falling off, or being in fact separate ceased to be of the Church; & yet the indivisible remainder was the Church as fully as before.” If this is the case, “indivisibleness is of the essence of indefectibility —except so far as a living body may lose members.” Once any members are lost, however, they “are no longer of the body. They were, but are not.” The body is one, a whole and outside of its unity they have no life; “indivisible unity is essential to the functions of life, intelligence, & love,” a point better made, Manning states, in the work of the German theologian, Johann Adam Möhler, on the unity of the church.⁴⁹

That Manning was “lost” by this time was evident to Samuel Wilberforce, who was visiting his brother-in-law at Lavington in the late summer,⁵⁰ and it is apparent from a letter of Gladstone’s shortly afterwards that he too was well aware of Manning’s position. What is striking in Gladstone’s comments is the clarity with which he understood his friend’s situation. After the Gorham Judgment, Gladstone states, Manning “might have been kept, had the Church of England, had her Bishops as a body, declared themselves plainly and manfully for the faith.” Even since that time, Manning has been consistent in his argument, Gladstone insists. Manning’s was not a “Romeward” journey; it was that of a man open to his state in the world as providentially ordained. As Gladstone saw it, the crisis was clearly one of faith and not the result of an individual struggling with intellectual or social options, a sort of consumer in a religious supermarket:

I grant that even some time ago he saw in the Church of Rome many things holier and more Catholic than with us: but that I think he was willing to accept as the dispensation of Providence: I do not think he had allowed his affections to become estranged. I do not think he was in the state, or anything like it, in which Newman passed his last years of Anglican profession. He had a firm faith in the mission & authority of the Church of England, because in her law she taught the faith, taught it as the faith.

For Manning, according to Gladstone, the Gorham Judgment “has not simply made practical what was in Manning’s mind before, but it has thrown his convictions on the side where a larger part of his sympathies stood indeed already, but were effectually neutralized by a sense of duty, not abstract and cold, but strong, commanding, & warm with life and action."⁵¹

By December 6 Manning had clearly decided to turn to Rome when he wrote to Gladstone in Italy,⁵² and in a letter to Hope on December 11 he indicates that he will take the step, one that he designates “as an act of the Will,” although he proceeds immediately to point out that he is “helped by the fact that to remain under our changed or revealed circumstances would also be an act of the Will.” He is not acting on his own. The man of will, as modern interpreters so delight in describing him, is not the Manning of December 1850. He is one who is turning to the will of God and is formed passively by it:

And that not in conformity with but in opposition to intellectual convictions: and the intellect is God’s gift, & our instrument in attaining to knowledge of His Will.
It would be a great solace if any event were to give the momentum. And so it may be, as it was with my resignation. I seem to have been passively carried through it.

Passive, Manning will remain throughout the process. Gladstone is in Italy and out of a concern for the latter’s well-being, he has “a sort of desire to see Gladstone once more before any final act.” Not surprisingly he refers to Ephesians 4 on the indivisibility of the church and to Johann Adam Möhler, the irenical apologist for the Catholic faith whose great Symbolik influenced Gladstone many years earlier.⁵³ Anything other than Rome now is “licence of thought & will,"⁵⁴ a sin against truth chat is no longer invincible for him, albeit, he is willing to accept, in Gladstone’s and others' cases there may exist prejudices so deep and rooted so closely to the central truths of faith itself that they bind the will to them in such a way that sin cannot be ascribed to it.⁵⁵

But this is not the case for Manning. For him truth demands self-denial. To leave home and occupation is not in any way simple. As he writes to Gladstone on January 3, 1851: “This day eighteen years I went to Lavington. You have never seen it, and if you had seen it you could not know what the consciousness of chose eighteen years sustains like the consciousness of the present hour. It has been my only home, flock, & altar.” Finally on Sunday, March 30, after a final attempt on the part of the bishops came to nothing, he met for a last time with Gladstone. Shortly before his death, in a recollection to Purcell, Manning described the meeting as follows:

Shall I tell you where I performed my last act of worship in the Church of England? It was in that little chapel off the Buckingham Palace Road. I was kneeling by the side of Mr. Gladstone. Just before the Communion Service commenced, I said to him, “I can no longer take the Communion in the Church of England.” I rose up— “St. Paul is standing by his side”—and laying my hand on Mr. Gladstone’s shoulder, said, “Come.” It was the parting of the ways. Mr. Gladstone remained; and I went my way. Mr. Gladstone still remains where I left him.⁵⁶

There is no venom or triumphalism in Manning’s late recollection. The statement, “Mr. Gladstone remains where I left him,” was not sarcastic in intention: Mr. Gladstone remains where Manning left him, that is, Mr. Gladstone remains in prayer. Should Manning have remained he recognizes he would have been lost; yet he makes no such judgment regarding his friend Gladstone. After all, the decision was not made by Gladstone; it was not an isolated act of will on his part. Some two years after the meeting, on April 5, 1853, Manning wrote to Gladstone from Rome, reflecting on the time:

When the Will of God required of me to withdraw from that which I had through sin and error believed to be a part of His Church & to submit myself to that which I had never intended to obey and to serve, I felt that the change in my relations to others was made not by him but by me, or more truly by Him who required so great a cost from me.

Often not noted is Manning’s recognition that the same principle is operative in his friend Gladstone, and others, who, albeit perhaps invincibly ignorant, are turned to the mysterious operations of divine love in their lives:

My meaning in saying that I make no advance to anyone is this. Both you & I feel that we have some duties which arise from great laws & truths over which we have no authority. They govern us, not we them: & cost what it may of public or private gain they must be obeyed.⁵⁷

In an important sense nothing has changed. As Manning reminds his friend, the position now held regarding the human will is the same one as he held when he walked in Rome with Gladstone in the winter of 1838.

It would need another walk from the Vatican to say all I would about the certainty & reality to be found only in the Catholic Church. And I believe that if your duties required of you verify Theology among the people of England we should not be far apart. My meaning is fully contained in two old Sermons you may remember in the IV vol. One on [Chris]t preached every way—& the other the Analogy of Nature.⁵⁸ God in His mercy has shewn me where they alone are verified.⁵⁹

Central to both these sermons were themes he held consistently throughout his life.⁶⁰ The conclusion on which Manning acted in April of 1851 was not one at which he arrived by his own rational processes, but which “God in His mercy … alone” had shown him. Thus, in the first of these sermons, he insisted on the priority of divine action in the human pursuit of holiness: “As knowledge rises towards the perfect faith, every such advance is so much more of union between the spirit of man and the character and will of God. I am now speaking of knowledge only as a means of illumination and obedience, not as imposing the responsibility of attaining the perfect truth.” (S4, 67-68) What is operative in the process are not sterile dogmatic principles, but the living, unifying love of God, and “[e]very light which reveals God’s love leads on towards conversion.” (S4, 68) To an external eye, the path along which that love leads may appear erratic, perhaps wilful, but underlying it all is “[t]he knowledge of God’s love and of Christ’s passion work[ing] mightily in softening or breaking the hearts of men, be they who they may…. The powers of truth are not bound.” (S4, 70) They are not constrained by the decisions of individual wills nor in finely honed dogmas or mighty institutions. The powers of truth are at one with divine love, itself a sovereign life working passionately in the individual and corporate body.