Conclusion

Manning was ever one to apply directives that he offered to others to himself first, and his Anglican sermons therefore serve an autobiographical function. This is especially true with the fourth volume in which his comments often take on the appearance of inner dialogue and at times an apologia for present struggle and future action. Once having recognized this it may be useful to take up again the Manning-Newman contrast. We have grown accustomed to thinking of Newman’s works as intensely personal, “heart speaking to heart,” and therefore providing us with objective data for a biography of his inner life. But Newman chose the autobiographical voice and his life so developed that he was increasingly able to strengthen it. Manning had ever before him the duties of a pastor and archbishop, and was actively engaged throughout his life in the cure of souls, with whose care that of his own was inextricably bound. He had little time to indulge in Oxford or Birmingham “self-reflection,” and, thus, when he does consciously take up autobiography, his work is strikingly inept.⁶¹

Like Newman’s, Manning’s was a life lived as both Anglican and Roman Catholic, and like Newman’s, Manning’s life has been read backwards, the Roman Catholic period being used to interpret the Anglican. For Newman this has tended to mean that his early, more rigorist and dogmatic character is revisioned in light of a later “liberal” Catholic period. Manning has not been so fortunate, necessarily committed as he was to the intense debates over ecclesiastical structures and infallibility in a period of major political and ideological upheaval. Unlike Newman, Manning is primarily remembered through the screen of his later conservative period and interpreted in light of intense modern debates over the heritage of that conservativism. As a result, the underlying spiritual dynamic that formed his Anglican career, required his departure from it in 1851 and continued to shape him thereafter is all but forgotten. In his case, therefore, it may be useful to read his life “forward” and to focus on the integrating spirit that motivated him during his whole life. Perhaps only in this way can the accomplishments of his later period be evaluated properly and their relevance for present debates be realized.

This is not to deny any aspect of his personality. He himself regularly admitted his own ambition and willfulness. He knew within himself the tendencies so simply caricatured as those of an austere ascetic who judges and acts decisively, a doctrinaire patriarch who sets decrees before less formidable wills to accept or reject at their eternal peril, and an authoritarian bureaucrat who inflexibly defends his institution as that in which alone incontrovertible truth can be known. That such tendencies existed in him, no one need deny. But personal tendencies are not determinations, nor are they intentions, and we do Manning an injustice if we interpret his actions aside from the foundational principles of his theology and life, principles that might well provide novel insights for us, as we struggle with theological and ecclesiological formulae, perhaps too literally and simplistically received by modern minds as remnants of a pre-modern era.

“I have troubled you too long, and added little,” Manning once wrote to Gladstone, “But it is hard to write as well as to leap in the dark."⁶² In the dark, Manning’s character, like his episcopal portrait preserved in Pitts Theology Library, waits to meet us. In the shadow of that portrait (as reproduced on the title page above) there are few contrasts; here are marked no changes. Sovereign light strikes from above on open forehead and gentle hands, in part hiding his gaze. He sits too rigidly, knowing perhaps his vulnerability. His head is slightly bowed. The eye is not assured. He looks out upon the London poor as he once did prior to his elevation as archbishop.⁶³ This is not the portrayal of a man who was described in 1870 as “a little grey man, looking as if encompassed by cobwebs."⁶⁴ Here his eyelid droops, and if one looks carefully, compassion is seen upon his cheek and sadness in his sight, these together turning down the corner of his lips, set firm against injustice and determined that it shall not last.