A Balance of the Tractarians – Learned Yet Not Over-trusting Learning

I’ve recently discovered a jewel of a book in my personal library – The Vision Glorious by the late, great Geoffrey Rowell.

Oh I have been aware of that prominent book on the Oxford Movement.  But I was unaware I already possessed a copy.  You see, about a third to half of my library was purchased from an Anglican priest a few years ago who was moving to England and realized moving his library was not practical.  And now and then, I discover things both new and old.

Anyway, I am reading The Vision Glorious now and have noticed an interesting paradox of the Tractarian leaders, particularly Pusey and Keble.   They were profoundly learned and had prestigious positions at Oxford that acknowledged and reflected that.  And, of course, their voluminous writings and lectures very well reflect that.  Yet at the same time they profoundly distrusted modes of thinking that placed too much trust in human reason, logic, and even learning itself as ways to comprehend the things of God.

Not that they did not value learning. Their production, including The Library of the Fathers and much more, showed they did greatly.  But they had the humility to realize learning and the human intellect had its limits.  And they were not shy in pointing out the errors that come from trying to dissect and explain the mysteries of God too much.

Keble felt that both prominent errant views of the Eucharist, transubstantiation and denial of the Real Presence, came from such over-trust in human reason and logic:

Transubstantiation on the one hand . . . the denial of Christ’s real presence on the other. . . .  The two errors in the original are perhaps but rationalism in two different forms: endeavors to explain away, and bring nearer to the human intellect, that which had been left thoroughly mysterious both by Scripture and tradition.

And he urged to avoid “slighting divine mysteries because we cannot comprehend and explain them.”

As for Pusey, Rowell finds he also admonishes, particularly in the unpublished Lectures on Types and Prophecies, that overreliance on human comprehension and reason impoverishes faith.  Pusey:

By striving over-much at clearness, and practically admitting only what they could make, as they thought, intelligible to themselves, men have narrowed [the Creed]far below that of the ancient Church, or of our own in former days.

For it is “not the things which we know clearly, but the things which we know unclearly [which] are our highest birth-right.”

Many of us from different churchmanships would do well to take these admonitions to heart.  I’ve seen a kind of very Reformed Bible Church mindset which rightly exalts study of scripture, but then falls into a pitfall of an inflated sense of one’s knowledge and a weakened respect of mystery. Thereby conceit oft gets inflated and faith constricted.  And, of course, those from liberal theological backgrounds tend to put human intellect as a judge over the things of God.  Such pretentious presumption becomes putrid.

Better is the approach of Pusey and Keble, to strive for the learning God allows to us while having respect and awe for the mysteries He has revealed yet veiled.