The Episcopal thread that leads us back to St Augustine
At this time, when we look forward to the coming visit to the parish of the Bishop Massachusetts, the Rt. Rev. Julia Whitworth, it is apposite to think about both our individual vocations as followers of Christ and the wider one of the Church themes especially fitting when we commemorate this week St Augustine of Hippo.
Ironically, it has to be said the celebrated English high churchman of the nineteenth century, Dr. Walter Farquhar Hook (who built Leeds Minster in a then heartland of non-conformity) inclined to a sadly modest view of his opposite numbers in the American Episcopal Church. While anxious by the mid-1830’s ‘to assist the Brethren in America’ both materially and spiritually, he observed sadly to Newman that, ‘though they have a Catholic church, there prevails among its members very little genuine Church principle. I have watched their progress for some years, and have seen with sorrow that there has always been an inclination even among their best men to yield to the prevailing opinions of the age’. He concluded by adding that: ‘I fear that our American Fathers and Brothers are too apt to consider that, if they maintain the one doctrine of Episcopacy,… nothing more is required’ and more specifically that, ‘the Divinity [i.e. theology] of most of our brethren and many of our Fathers in that part of the world is somewhat crude.’
The comment on episcopacy might seem egregious given the emphasise that the Tractarians came to place upon it themselves, as we see in Newman’s own “Thoughts on the Ministerial Commission”, which was the very first of the Tracts for the Times, published on 9 September 1833. There, he wrote of potential disestablishment, “Should the government and country so far forget their God as to cast off the church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks?” For Newman, the answer was clear: the real ground upon “which our authority is built [is] OUR APOSTOLICAL DESCENT.” For him, as he made clear, the church derived its authority through the episcopate and ordained clergy, when this was rightly understood, because: “We have been born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. The Lord JESUS CHRIST gave His Spirit to His Apostles; they in turn laid their hands on those who would succeed them; and these again on others and these again on others; and so the sacred gift has been handed down to our present Bishops, who have appointed us as their assistants, and in some sense representatives…” Leaving one historian to observe that that so far as the Tractariand were concerned “against such an understanding, no gates of hell (and certainly no Whig government) could ever prevail.” [i] Though one contemporary bishop in the United Kingdom has been known to assert — in a variation on this theme — that while the gates of hell would assuredly never prevail against the church as such, he was less sure about the Church of England!
Be all that historical background as it may, what merits reflection is the polarity identified between, on the one hand the temptation to adopt “the prevailing opinions of the age” and on the other, the true vocation of the church and especially its bishops and clergy to stand apart from this and uphold through time the faith of the ages of which they are charged to be custodians. Though it must always be remembered this telos is not the sole preserve of merely the religious professionals but indeed one for all Christians seeking to live out their faith and calling as the people of God and the body of Christ.
We must remember too that living within these tensions is actually a perennial reality that the church has been called to live out from the earliest times. There could be no better reminder of — and indeed guide to — all this than the Saint and bishop we commemorate this week, namely St Augustine of Hippo.
In the words of the great Canadian Anglican scholar of Augustine Robert Crouse:
For St. Augustine, the via of man’s returning to God is the way of knowledge, and that way of ascent (at once theoretical and practical) lies in the intellectus of God as Trinity: an ascent in faithful contemplation whereby the human soul (memory, knowledge and will) finds its true patria in its conformation to God—memoria Dei, intellectus Dei, amor Dei. That doctrine constitutes the very heart of Augustinian theology, and it is there that St. Augustine’s Platonism finds its conversion and fulfillment.
What this reflects is that which led Augustine — the one time pagan philosopher — to Christianity and his conversion. This was a realization that the monotheist platonic philosophical connection to God was inadequate, since it required not only a fuller understanding than mere theism could provide, but also a personal existential character wherein Augustine was enabled, “not to be more certain of you but to be more stable in you.”
In other words, Christianity Augustine came to see as, in a deep sense, a way of life, open to all and not just a profession of belief — even though particular beliefs are a prerequisite. Indeed, more than this, it is a way of life of a trinitarian personality made whole and complete in its relation to the Trinity and in the trinitarian life of God.
What all this means is that the journey inward, which is the journey of faith, is a movement that both overcomes sin and alienation (the restlessness of the heart) and, in doing so, perfects nature through the work of a transforming divine grace. Such grace makes possible the connecting and uniting of human trinitarian personality to its Divine Trinitarian ground.
This journey was later articulated by the mediaevals in terms of the acquisition and working out of the virtues of faith, hope and charity, that Paul writes of, and which come to inform these powers of the soul that constitute the trinitarian image — so perfecting that soul and raising it into the life of God.
But this approach — which reached its apogee later in Aquinas’ and Dante’s account of salvation as achieved through grace perfecting nature arguably can be seen as having run into difficulty in the late Medieval and Renaissance period.
For there then arose, on the one hand a more radical sense of Divine omnipotence, with on the other, a corresponding account of the human being as freed from the hierarchical order, which had been to Aquinas and Dante the mediating structure of salvation.
Thus the “self” here came to be understood less as a given, and less by what it “is”, (which is to say by its nature within the hierarchical order and as a soul with certain powers), but instead as defined more its subjectivity or consciousness.
This opened the door to the radical and characteristically modern notion of salvation as a matter of what this “self” subjectively intends.
Hence the temptation to adopt “the opinions of the age” that so disturbed Dr Hook.
As Dr. Crouse argued, we see in Augustine by contrast however, a sense of a self, as an experience of our own inwardness that is conscious and aware of itself, (which is to say of there being an “I”) but which is nonetheless an, “I” that is constituted and defined by its powers: memory, intellect and will, while its unity is love as an interaction of these powers. What this entails, in other words, is that there is a self-consciousness here, but that it belongs to an order of reality and is not autonomous of that reality
(A perspective that yields the complexity of human personality, which was for the medieval both something (a substance or reality called a “soul”) while also being a subject, an awareness that is conscious of itself, a “self”.)
To cut a long story short here, it is possible to argue that Anglicanism brings a unique solution to the tension that arises at this point, one that is set out by Richard Hooker.
Hooker argued that faith functions in a two-fold way.
First, through communication by the “Spirit of Adoption”, whereby faith is received as an imputed, perfect and complete justification or righteousness apart from the order of the world, attained before the creation of the world itself — which is one side of faith.
Yet, faith is also, the beginning and basis of sanctification, the working of Christ by grace in the soul of the individual.
Thus, justification and sanctification can be understood as logically distinct — they are really separate moments — but as temporally united.
Thus too, as Hooker observes, the justifying and sanctifying aspects of faith occur simultaneously, even in their distinction from one another. (Illustrating a kind of Chalcedonian logic of distinct and yet united.)
In the words of Professor Neil Robertson, “It is the unique claim of Classical Anglicanism, to have attained to this standpoint. It does this by holding the basic logic to be that the redeemed believer has received faith through the spirit of adoption (an act of sanctification) in which is communicated his or her imputed or forensic or alien justification and righteousness.
What this attains for the modern “self” is the knowledge of the overcoming of its restlessness in the only way this can be attained, namely apart from the world and apart from all striving and works: where that self or soul is saved by God’s working alone.
Faith is here the communication of this received complete justification. But what is crucial is that this completed faith is not communicated as a certain assurance.”
Hooker helpfully separates out here, the absolute divine standpoint from its psychological reception – allowing him to clarify that the absolute character of imputed righteousness is in God, but that it is communicated by faith through the Spirit of Adoption to the changeable soul, which is not thereby made absolute.
The soul is able — through various forms of mediation to come more fully to participate in this absoluteness, which is not itself affected or reduced by this mediation: we remain justified prior to all works in and by God’s eternal will.
Here then faith — that communicates justification without an absolute assurance — allows for the retention of the Augustinian account of the soul as trinitarian and as perfected in and through the theological virtues. But this work of sanctification is nonetheless liberated from, and in fact premised upon, a prior divinely willed justification. This means that this life of sanctification can be made present in ordinary life.
Thus the Anglican believer does not need to develop a sanctification from out of an otherworldly assurance and certainty — for that kind of certainty is in God’s hands; but neither is one simply trapped by the mediations and limitations of medieval spirituality in which one never has complete access to the integrity demanded for salvation when understood with its Augustinian roots. All of which brings us right back to that tension seen by Dr. Hook as peculiarly characteristic of the American Church — between the pull of the opinions of the age on the one hand — and an evidently underexamined awareness central to the concept of episcopacy on the other, which points towards the telos of upholding the faith of the ages as once given to the apostles, which John Henry Newman so clearly as the vocation to which our ecclesiology which is to say our understanding of the church itself must be adequate.
[i] Mark Chapman, “The Politics of Episcopacy” in Anglican and Episcopal History, December 2000, Vol. 69, No. 4, December 2000, pp. 474-503