Nicholas Sagovsky is a distinguished member of the Church of England. Since 1992, he has been a member of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). I recently read his biography of George Tyrrell (1861-1909), ‘On God’s Side’, Clarendon Press, Oxford. It is impressively well-written and, so far as I could tell, equally well researched. He is rather more sympathetic to Tyrrell than I can profess myself to be. However, I find Tyrrell’s tone so hard to take that, in order to obtain some understanding of the issues raised by his life and work, I thought it advisable not to abstain altogether, but to see if a biographical study might not answer my questions. And it did.
There is no need to delve into the personal issues of Tyrrell’s life, his sometimes turbulent inter-personal relationships, or many of his ideas. Neither do I need to consider the mutual suspicion which soon grew up between himself and the Jesuits, and soon enough with the Vatican. However, I could not help but wonder: how could a convert to the Church, who worked hard to become a Jesuit, take it upon himself to tell both the Society and the Church that he understood their nature and mission better than they did? As I read the extracts from Tyrrell’s writings, I was struck by their adversarial tone, at times approaching ferocity. I wondered: did he not think this made a mockery of his stated belief that he was presenting them with a better Christianity, one which actually led to a more fully Christian life? In fact, I have found very little evidence of what I would call spirituality in Tyrrell’s life and work. To me, he was first and foremost an academic theologian.
I am also persuaded that Tyrrell was given to lying when it suited his purposes (an aspect of his life which Sagovsky briefly concedes but which he underplays). I wonder if deception, and self-deception, are not actually fundamental to the Modernist spirit? They wish to “progressively refine” traditional “ideas and sentiments about God” but yet to assert continuity with the traditions (142). But what happens when they contradict traditional teachings? Since that cannot on any fair interpretation be merely “refining” and “spiritualising” they are forced to deceive others and, often enough, themselves too (even if as a Chinese Communist Party member said to an Australian who protested that they CCP had lied to them: “You wanted to be lied to.”)
I will now work through some of what I see as the salient insights from this volume. Sagovsky made a comment at 56 which arrested me: “Within the scholastic framework, the historical, critical study of the Bible was not important, but now that scholasticism was breaking down, it was essential for the Church to face the historicity of the biblical record, whatever the cost might be.” It seems to me that Sagovsky is not summarising Tyrrell’s thought, but rather is presenting his own conception as an objective truth of which Tyrrell was aware. But I think that his point is fair: scholasticism as practised by its greatest practitioners, those of the thirteenth century, not only did not need modern biblical criticism, but is actually inimical to it for a reason Sagovsky does not state: for the scholastics, Scripture speaks with one voice, and any apparent contradiction is to be reconciled through scholastic method.
The next striking comment was Tyrrell’s that: “God is apprehended (as every personality is apprehended) rather by a certain sense or gustus, than by an reasoning process” (58) I cannot see why we need to say that we apprehend God (to the extent that we can) this way but not that way. Why can a moment of intellectual illumination not be considered to lead to a partial apprehension of God? I am sure that sometimes I have understood something about God intellectually, and then felt that it has brought me closer to Him. To draw rigid but false dichotomies seems to me rather characteristic of Tyrrell’s manner of procedure, which is analytic, in a rather dry and pedestrian way. But what adds a flavour of the absurd to this is Tyrrells’ addition that our “whole moral and spiritual being” by which we apprehend God “depends on the purification of the heart and affections whereby they are brought into sympathy with God; and this again is the chief end of life and experience and education of every kind.” Whether one agrees, disagrees, or would need to ponder it, to read a biography of Tyrrell is to see how far he was from any form of purification of heart and affections, let alone of sympathy. One need only consider what Sagovsky has to say about his “friendship” with Maud Petre.
Likewise, Tyrrell wrote: “If love be mysticism, then we have the key to all mysticism within ourselves” (59). I must confess, I see little evidence of mysticism in Tyrrell, and to the extent he was given to love, he did not – so far as the available evidence shows – place the key in the lock. But is it worthwhile to speculate “if love be mysticism”? What do the words mean in this context? And so far as it makes sense, is the omnipresence of God Himself not the true ground of mysticism? What then, I wonder, is Tyrrell doing but indulging in a platitude? If he felt something of this, fair enough. I am not concerned to dismiss everything he said or did, but I find little reason to think that this was more than a play with words.
As I come to the end of the first part of this reflection on Sagovsky’s biography, I find myself with a passage from Tyrrell which is, I think, rather good. He made the point that the language of scholasticism is that of neither the New Testament nor or of devotion (72-73). The language of theology, Tyrrell said, is “inferior to devotional language in its ability to promote charity, to move rather than to inform” (73). Overall, this is right: it what the majority of people find, but it is not the whole of and all of the truth.
to be continued
