This book investigates the philosophy and theology of the nineteenth-century Anglican priest, Oxford professor, and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, Henry Longueville Mansel (1820–1871). Why choose Mansel? To start with, it must be said that some of the most critically sensitive readers of Victorian Anglican theology have found Mansel’s thought enduringly insightful and profound. For Owen Chadwick, Mansel’s The Limits of Religious Thought (1858) was ‘the most important and clear-headed volume written by an English philosopher of religion’ in that period.1 Likewise, for Bernard Reardon, Mansel stood out as ‘one of the most original religious thinkers of the century’.2 As will be shown in the chapters that follow, some see in Mansel’s work a spur and inspiration for John Henry Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Others have described Mansel as an English Kierkegaard or an Anglican Karl Barth. These are large claims indeed. And they are ones made about a name which has, to be fair, been overshadowed in many histories of Anglican theology. Clearly, Mansel presents a puzzle that needs to be solved. This book offers a reassessment which affirms that Mansel remains an Anglican theologian whose work deserves wider attention and use. I intend to show that Mansel has something to say which remains important.
Why is Mansel important? Chiefly, it is his critical analysis and defence of what is today called ‘negative theology’. He consistently argued that we cannot comprehend what God is; the Christian believer knows with certitude only what God is not. Christianity is not a form of Gnosticism, but a faith in and relationship with the God who infinitely exceeds human ways of knowing. Although this insight perplexed many of his Victorian contemporaries, it has more recently become a dominant theme for contemporary theology, familiar to anyone working in the discipline today. Many twenty-first century Christian thinkers have been drawn to earlier notions of divine incomprehensibility and ineffability, finding in older traditions compelling and convincing insights into the nature of theology and the deepest mysteries of Christianity. It is as a philosophically astute negative theologian that Mansel continues to have something to say to contemporary Christian thinkers. Whereas some elements of Victorian Anglicanism can now seem quite forbidding and alien (not least in their claims to certitude and knowledge of God), Mansel’s theology remains intriguingly relevant.
Mansel’s basic temperament was religious: he sensed a final mysteriousness of life in relation to God. In retrospect, it is clear that his own thought hinged on the Christian experience of prayer – a seeking after God through the mysterious longings of what Richard Hooker once called the ‘hidden exultation’ of ‘intentive desire’.3 Mansel conceived of this relation of desiring-love as that between a person and a person: he was, indeed, what later theologians would label a ‘personalist’ thinker. Yet God remained for him an insuperably mysterious person who stretched the meaning of the word somewhere beyond its usual limits. Today, we do not often think that Victorian Christians possessed a fully developed ‘vertical’ sense of theological analogy, but Mansel certainly did, and he deserves to be read as a keen analyst of analogical predication. He was, in many ways, a very traditional theologian; he was certainly closer to classical Christian orthodoxy than many of his contemporaries. I am also convinced there is something to be said about his spirituality and humility. He sought to apply his understanding of divine mystery to some of the deepest and most challenging paradoxes of Christian life, allowing it to illuminate the uncertainties and tragedies of human moral experience. My hope is that I have successfully brought some of this out in my discussion of mystery and evil at the end of the final chapter of this book. I have to say I find Mansel to be a more farsighted guide on this intractable problem than John Stuart Mill. Given the choice, not to hell, but to heaven, I will go.
One of the things that sets quite a lot of Victorian thought apart from the traditions which both proceeded and followed it was its apparent presumptuous confidence. In part this was due to the dauntless optimism of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. When combined with commercialism and colonialism, scientific discovery and technological innovation, this attitude created a dominant mind-set of Victorian superiority: the ‘belief in progress’ which instilled many Victorian men with a sense of self-belief and entitlement. Mansel’s negative theology was at odds with this intellectual culture. He tried to remind Victorians of the wisdom to be found in humility. With hindsight, it is striking just how quick – too quick – many of Mansel’s contemporaries were to dismiss his thought. Too many of them believed Mansel to be an easy target; often they were attacking a straw man of their own making. Much of the literature on Mansel by his opponents does not seem to have really tried to understand him. Misrepresentations abound: Mansel the Kantian; Mansel the agnostic; even Mansel the atheist. None of these labels is fair. Few of his critics noted the continuities between what Mansel was saying and what had previously been said by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker and Bishop Joseph Butler, Thomas Reid and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Too many of his critics were either social Darwinians (on the one hand) or British Idealists (on the other). Too few of them had any space in their thought for the transcendent unknown God, whether encountered as ‘absence’, ‘otherness’, ‘difference’ or, indeed, as ‘person’. Too few had enough sense of their own limits.
The distortions and misrepresentations of Mansel are so significant that I have been compelled to make them a major theme of this book. I have found that too much of the secondary literature on Mansel reproduces earlier caricatures of his intellectual position. In order to restore a clear picture of Mansel, it has proved necessary to remove layers of opinion originally formed by his opponents. This has necessitated much work mapping and describing what needed to be cleared away. I have made it my task to help readers coming to Mansel’s work understand the ways in which much of the literature on him can be legitimately questioned. To do this, I have had to do two things: first, to devote chapters to those misrepresentations of Mansel forged in the major literary controversies of his life; second, to include as an appendix an extensive survey of scholarship on Mansel. In design, this book is intended to be about these controversies and the misreadings and misunderstandings which arose from them. This explains why the chapters on Mansel’s thought, described and analysed constructively, are followed by chapters on how his thought was received and manipulated by his contemporaries, not least in his major public controversies with Frederick Denison Maurice and John Stuart Mill. As the objective of this book has been to engage with intellectual history and theological analysis, it has not been designed and arranged as a biographical narrative. I judge that I have included enough biographical information to satisfy most readers, while remaining focused on the task of outlining the theological and philosophical questions which ultimately make Mansel’s work valuable, showing what he did, and what he definitely did not, say.
This book, then, is primarily concerned with providing a clear understanding of Mansel’s thinking, which was always, in root and leaf, theological. My chief objective has been to give a coherent account of his philosophical theology and its consequences for Christian faith. To be sure, as a work of historical theology and intellectual biography, this is a study of the thought of a person who concerned himself with ideas. Once again, my intention has not been to write a life of Mansel. Rather, my hope is that I have written something that allows today’s reader to turn to Mansel’s The Limits of Religious Thought Examined (1858) and other works with fresh eyes, and to recognise there a Christian philosophical theology of enduring value. This has, nevertheless, inevitably necessitated the analysis of Mansel’s context, including discussions of his religious, social and political setting. After all, Mansel’s thinking extended to questions of Anglican polity and expressed a vision of Victorian religious, social and political thought. To do this I have had to undertake something which has not been attempted before: a historical account of Mansel’s intellectual development taking account of his philosophical theology together with his sermons, journalism, reviews, private correspondence, political activities and satirical writing. In other words, I have tried to ‘pull it all together’ and provide a three-dimensional account of his thought. As a consequence, this book also provides a new perspective on Victorian political theology and provides a theological analysis of intellectual Toryism (and its critique of intellectual Liberalism) in the 1850s and 1860s. In some respects, therefore, the present study may also be read as a chapter in the longer story of Tory thought.
My main concern has always been to examine the chief sources and main elements of Mansel’s theological thought, tracing the roots of his ideas in Anglican theology and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. The evidence I have examined has led me to one very clear conclusion: contrary to much received opinion, Mansel owed more to native British traditions of thought than he did to German ones. Although scholarship has all too often – and it seems to me, very confusingly – claimed that Mansel was a Kantian, he was really nothing of the sort. He actually said as much in print. Mansel stated that his ideas had grown in his mind with reference to ‘theological doctrines, which … existed centuries before Kant was born’. He was emphatic that any claim that the pedigree of his work was Kantian was ‘erroneous’.4 Mansel’s unambiguous remark is borne out by his own footnotes and endnotes. Much like Sir William Hamilton, his philosophy owed more to Reid and Jacobi than to Kant. Theologically, Bishop Joseph Butler provided much inspiration. But it was not Butler alone: the works of the Anglo-Irish Anglican theologian, Bishop Peter Browne (and to a lesser extent, those of two Archbishops of Dublin, William King and Richard Whatley), provided considerable intellectual stimulation. Mansel said that his Bampton Lectures for 1858 were written when he was ‘fresh from the study’ of Browne’s and King’s criticism of Bishop Berkeley.5 The obvious conclusion to draw is that Mansel’s The Limits of Religious Thought Examined derived its title from Browne’s The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1723), not from Kant’s later Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793). In his Bampton Lectures, Mansel refers to Browne just as frequently as he does to Butler or Kant. Tellingly, Kant does not pass without negative censure. As a point of fact, Mansel made more references to Jacobi than to Kant – including Jacobi’s criticisms of Kant.
Readers coming to this book for philosophical reasons may at this point be asking where Mansel fits in to the history of philosophy. If not a Kantian, what was Mansel? How does it all fit together? As already intimated, he is best viewed as a type of Christian personalist. In retrospect, it is noticeable just how many of Mansel’s works were concerned with the philosophical concept of the personal self in relation to God. Working within a native tradition of British philosophy, this approach necessitated engagement with Scottish Common Sense responses to David Hume. Famously, Hume had questioned the very existence of the self: could it be nothing more than a mere bundle of perceptions? In reply, Thomas Reid had answered Hume through the development of an intuitionist and realist philosophy. In turn, Reid’s works inspired Sir William Hamilton’s Metaphysics, which provided much of the immediate philosophical background to Mansel’s own thought. Mansel’s own work as the editor of Victorian editions of both Reid and Hamilton may be seen as an extension and promotion of this concern with the personal self. So, too, Mansel’s book Metaphysics included his own extensive rejection of Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental self, arguing that the personal self is part of human experience and is therefore something known. The self, then, was a persistent theme in Mansel’s publications. But there was more to it than that. Mansel’s theological personalism regarded Christians as persons related to a divine, absolute Person.6 This relationship was conceived through a form of analogical reasoning which stretched the concept of person to infinity. As I have already noted, Mansel’s form of analogical reasoning should be understood as a Victorian retrieval of Bishop Peter Browne’s theological response to Bishop Berkeley. This means that Mansel was attempting simultaneous retrievals of Reid’s response to Hume, and Browne’s response to Berkeley. This allowed him to develop an early form of I-Thou theology, hinging on personal encounter with God. Mansel was always less concerned with knowing God than he was with meeting God, as a person to a Person. But he always viewed this doctrine as representative of earlier traditions of Christian thought, reaching back to the teaching of the early Church.
This position means that Mansel presents the reader with a theology that is still worth thinking about. But there is another reason for reading Mansel. It also has to be said that he changed the way that Anglicans do theology. Attention needs to be drawn to Mansel’s professionalization of theology and philosophy in nineteenth-century Oxford. Anthony Quinton once observed that, as far as the history of English philosophy is concerned, it is with Mansel that a ‘recognizably professorial professionalism’ first begins to emerge.7 As much should be said of Mansel’s theology. His The Limits of Religious Thought Examined deserves to be recognised as the first Anglican example of rigorous, modern, professional academic theology. In other words, Mansel brought about a change in Anglican theological method and style. He made a difference to the way Anglicans set about doing theology, particularly in university contexts. Before Mansel, Oxford philosophers and theologians were gentlemen and scholars; after Mansel, they had to become professional academics. As will be seen in the chapters which follow, there was a rigour and precision to his writing that sets his work apart from those of his contemporaries. He makes them appear amateurish in comparison. Nothing shows this more than his remarkable knowledge of theological and philosophical literature. In many ways one cannot claim to have really read Mansel’s The Limits of Religious Thought Examined until one has worked through the painstakingly precise endnotes that make up well over a third of the first edition. In the notes one discovers exactly how he positioned himself in relation to Christian tradition (whether it be to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker or Ralph Cudworth) as well as in reaction to philosophical Idealism (whether it be that of Plotinus, Bishop Berkeley, Immanuel Kant or G. W. F Hegel). Mansel was what Victorians called a ‘hard reader’. His knowledge was exhaustive. It is arguable that Mansel would be better appreciated if the detailed endnotes were relocated within the main body of the The Limits of Religious Thought Examined, rather like the smaller-font-sized sections of Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Like the prefaces to the different editions of the Limits, the notes make a big difference to the way that one reads the text.
Finally, this book has much to say about Mansel’s contemporaries. It contributes a new picture of theologically-literate Disraelian Toryism, and suggests how Lord Salisbury’s religious views should best be understood. I trust I have added something to the scholarship on Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. I also think that this book adds further dimensions to our knowledge of F. D. Maurice, Herbert Spencer and Sir Leslie Stephen, as well as showing something of the limits of J. S. Mill’s reflections on evil. No doubt Maurice and Mill developed their misreadings of Mansel as controversialists. There are two sides to every story, and Mansel’s side has too often been neglected. If it does anything, this book should make it much harder for scholars working today to claim that Mansel was a Kantian or an agnostic. More than that, I only hope it inspires others to read Mansel with fresh eyes.
W. O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, I, p. 556.
B. M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, p. 223.
R. Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I. xi, cited in H. L. Mansel, A Letter to Professor Goldwin Smith, pp. 21–22.
H. L. Mansel, A Second Letter to Professor Goldwin Smith, pp. 47–48.
Mansel, A Letter to Professor Goldwin Smith, p. 9.
H. L. Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought Examined, 5th edition, pp. 82, 59.
A. Quinton, ‘English Philosophy’, pp. 247–252, at p. 251.