8/16/2019 Intro to Tyrrell http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/intro-to-tyrrell 1/34 FORTRESS TEXTS IN MODERN THEOLOGY BOARD OF CONSULTANTS B. A. Gerrish, Chair University of Chicago Divinity School IN THE SERIES Protestantism and Progress Ernst Troeltsch What Is Christianity? Adolf Von Harnack Faith and Understanding Rudolf Bultmann Servant of the Word: Selected Sermons of Friedrich Schleiermacher Christian Caring: Selections from Practical Theology Friedrich Schleiermacher Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit Samuel Taylor Coleridge The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ Martin KShler Romance and the Rock: Nineteenth-Century Catholics on Faith and Reason Edited by Joseph Fitzer The Christian Faith Ernst Troeltsch Tradition and the Critical Spirit: Catholic Modernist Writings George Tyrrell John Clayton University o f Lancaster, England Marilyn C. Massey Marymount Manhattan College James O. Duke Pacific School of Religion Robert P. Scharlemann University of Virginia
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his changing ideas and moods.5 His writing, he came to understand,
was a necessary act of clarifying his own mind but, even more, of
purging his soul. His essays represent—and for this they are invalu
able—a convergence of the inner life of the man and the stormyevents in the life of the Church at the turn of the century. He was
compelled to probe the facts, the truth of the case, be it Newman’s
theory of development, William James’s Varieties o f Religious Expe-
rience, or Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu von Reiche Gottes. “I do
not ‘fight down’ my doubts,” he wrote, “as I should in some cases
advise others to do. Rather, I go deliberately in search of every
difficulty in that line lest I be haunted by the thought that new reve
lations might rob me of my faith, or that those who deny have reasons for their denial that I have not felt."'6 He confessed to von Hiigel
that he could not bear the thought that he owed “his stability to any
sort of ignorance or half-view.”7
Tyrrell’s scrupulosity and ruthless honesty were not rooted in
intellectual concupiscence, and yet his public candor was, it can be
argued, reckless and imprudent. Prudence he regarded as a moral
fault. It cannot be denied that he enjoyed combat, and he plungedinto areas where others feared to tread. He was, however, indifferent
to his personal safety, and his combativeness and impetuosity were
innocent of personal vanity. Gabriel Daly rightly concludes that the
unifying principle of Tyrrell’s character was his courage,8 which he
regarded as the “very rarest of all virtues.”9 For that reason, he was
often hard on his confreres in the Modernist cause, especially those
friends who he felt were willing to straddle or evade or were hesitant
to speak out. Tyrrell admitted that his “whole life was a continual process of adjusting and readjusting.” He wrote, “I am too miserably
honest to stick my head in the sand and be comfortable.”10He had, in
fact, a puritan suspicion of comfort and ease, but, mercifully, he did
not allow his misery and isolation to descend into self-pity. His self-
deprecating humor usually broke through on such occasions. But, as
Maude Petre observed, it was “the humor of the tragic . . . tempera
5. For a perceptive account of Tyrrell’s character, on which I am here dependent,see Gabriel Daly, “Some Reflections on the Character of George Tyrrell.”
6. George Tyrrell’ s Letters, ed. Maude D. Petre, 158,7. Petre, Autobiography and Life o f George Tyrrell, 2:96.8. Daly, “Some Reflections on the Character of George Tyrrell,” 265.9. George Tyrrell’s Letters, ed. M. D. Petre, 164.10. Ibid., 159.
ment,” of the “sad clear vision of those who gauge the puny efforts of
man in comparison with the vast universe in which he moves.”11
Despite his faults, Tyrrell’s character as reflected in his writings is
attractive to us because we can see in him a man of our own times.So are his thoughts on religion.
TYRRELLS RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
Tyrrell, as noted, was no systematic theologian. His method of
communication—even when one excludes his several books of med
itations—was the essay and review. Between 1886 and 1909, he pub
lished close to two hundred reviews, articles, and introductions
—many of them long essays. Of his twenty books, only about a half-
dozen are whole works; most are edited collections. While it has
been said that Tyrrell’s vast literary outpouring lacks any scheme or
system, the reader of the books he published in the last decade of his
life will recognize that Tyrrell was preoccupied with four or five car
dinal themes that give his theological reflection a definite coherence.
He does not provide many solutions, and his essays often lack asatisfying closure which we—perhaps unconsciously and wrongly—
find satisfying in the work of a more systematic thinker. But Tyrrell’s
essays are usually probing and suggestive.
The key to Tyrrell’s religious philosophy is his acute suspicion of
“a priorism,” of rationalism and system. His sense of religion is prac
tical and experimental. Everything is to be tested by experience—
how it works. “That the religious life of the Church is the source and
criterion of doctrinal truth; that experiment is the criterion of theory
as the fruit is of the tree, is a point that I will not even discuss. It is a
truth that theological pride hates and kicks against but which it dares
not deny in the teeth of the Gospel.”12 Tyrrell continually warns
against “a certain narrow, cock-sure orthodoxy”; the religion of those
for “whom everything is clear and common-sense, and obvious; who
can define a mystery but have never felt one.”13 External religion, as
such, offers us not bread but a stone. Following Matthew Arnold,Tyrrell defined faith as necessarily “rooted in some kind of experi
ence and not merely in propositions and principles accepted on hear-
11. Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, 2:9-10.12. Tyrrell, Medievalism, 39.13. George Tyrrell, External Religion: Its Use and Abuse, 125,
Tyrrell’s “errors” were singled out specifically for censure. Tyrrell’s
answer was Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier, a passionate,
eloquent, ironic polemic in the form of an open letter. It was one of
Tyrrell’s most popular and provoking books and was immediatelytranslated into French and Italian. The book not only countered the
prevailing Vatican misconceptions regarding Modernism and its rela
tion to Protestantism but is, especially in the retrospective distance
of our own day, a compelling critique of the Ultramontanist concep
tion of the Church, its constitution, and authority.
Typically, Tyrrell closes this parting shot with an expression of his
persistent love for and allegiance to Catholicism. He writes,The very word “Catholic” is music to my ears. . . . If the RomanChurch still holds me it is because, in spite of the narrow sectarianspirit that has so long oppressed her, she cannot deny her fundamental
principles; because, as a fact, she stands for the oldest and widest bodyof corporate Christian experience; for the closest approximation, sofar attained, to the still far-distant ideal of a Catholic religion.50
Despite Tyrrell’s protestations against Cardinal Mercier’s caricature of Protestantism and Tyrrell’s own “veneration” for its “great
truths and principles,” he could not blind himself to what he consid
ered its defects, “its naked severity, its relentless rationality.” “If it
feeds one half, perhaps the better half, of the soul, it starves the
other. The religion of all men must be the religion of the whole
man—Catholic in depth as well as in extension.”51 Tyrrell’s apologia,
“Reflections on Catholicism” (1907)—included among his essays
here—is as beautiful and as persuasive a defense of the Catholicreligion as may be found. Of Tyrrell’s love and loyalty to his Church,
Dean Inge remarked, “Happy, and yet unhappy, the Church which
can afford, and endure, to trample upon such devotion.”52
Tyrrell’s reflections on Christology, God, and eschatology may
appear conventional in liberal theological circles today, but they were
advanced and even shocking at the turn of the century—not only to
traditionalists but to Protestant Liberals and many Anglican Modernists as well. Again, he offers no systematic treatment of these
themes but is original in the way that he sets out some of the issues
that have occupied the best theological minds since. These subjects
50. Tyrrell, Medievalism, 185.51. Ibid., 186.52. William R. Inge, “Tyrrell's Last Book," Hibbert Journal 8 (January 1910): 434.
God is not directly reached by our mind, or our imagination, but onlyan idea or picture of God which we ourselves have constructed out of
the fragments of our experience—a crude, childish representation atthe best. It is not God, but only this rude image of God we set beforeour mind's eye when we pray to Him or think of Him.. . . No wonder,then, that He seems so far away, so uncertain, so intangible.59
Tyrrell shared and may well have been influenced by Matthew
Arnold’s abhorrence of the brash familiarity and literalism of much
theological God-talk—as if one were describing one’s next-door
neighbor. The scholastic theologians, it appeared, had lost all sense
of God’s transcendence, of the divine otherness. “Religion dies with
the sense of mystery. . . . That is why our theologians are so irreli
gious. . . . They speak as though the inadequacy of our God-idea
were merely quantitative.” 60
Our symbols of God, though finally inadequate, nevertheless do
point to and are genuinely representational of transcendent reality.
Tyrrell believed that the old scholastic solution to the controversy
between realists and conceptualists remained applicable to our own problem of conceiving of God. Our most adequate images are not
mere poetic fictions or dreams. “They must be fundamentaliter in r e ”
founded in reality, despite the fact that they are formaliter in intel-
lectu, fashioned by the mind. “They are a fiction founded on fact.”
Tyrrell was not, as charged, an agnostic; his philosophy was a form of
symbolic realism: “To say that [our concepts] are symbolic of the
transcendent is not agnosticism; since symbols may be representa
tive. Nor is it pure pragmatism, since the degree of their practical
utility is just that of their correspondence to reality.”61
Tyrrell’s theism is essentially Christocentric. “All I dare say,” he
admitted to a friend,
is that the divine has a human aspect which alone concerns man.. . . Itis man’s privilege to think of it; to wonder; to hope; to figure it tohimself in terms of his own spirit. It is the Divine Will, because it is
human nature, that he should do so. . . . We do not know nothingabout God; but we know infinitely little. We can have no word of God,no revelation, except the ideal or eternal Man; the Christ. That is asmuch of God as we can ever see. It is only because He presents Himself to us as the Christ, with a human spirit, face, voice, and hands, thatwe can speak to Him or deal with Him at all.62
59. Tyrrell, External Religion, 158-59,60. George Tyrrell’s Letters, ed. M. D. Petre, 32,
61. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads, 104.62. Petre, Autobiography and Life o f George Tyrrell, 2:416.
In a letter to another friend in that same year (1908), Tyrrell
remarked that his “imagination [was] quite cured of the outside
God.” Tyrrell often had been charged with “Immanentism,” and thistendency in his work always had worried his friend von Htigel. In
1902, Tyrrell’s book of meditations, Oil and Wine, failed to pass the
ecclesiastical censors largely for this reason. In the preface to his
1907 published edition of Oil and Wine and after his excommunica
tion, Tyrrell acknowledged that “in avoiding the false ‘transcendence’
of Deism, I may have drifted too near the Charybdis of Pantheism in
search of the middle course of Panentheism.”63 Gabriel Daly hasshown, however, that Tyrrell maintained, with a few pantheistic
excesses here and there, the necessary tension between divine imma
nence and transcendence. This is most evidently the case in the later,
more purely Modernist writings. It is especially pronounced in the
radical Christocentrism of Christianity at the Crossroads.
Tyrrell’s most original and panentheist reflections on God appear
in a lecture delivered a few months before his death. Entitled “Divine
Fecundity,” it was published by Maude Petre with other material in Essays on Faith and Immortality. The lecture was occasioned by the
public response to an earthquake which occurred on December 28,
1908, and devastated southern Calabria and eastern Sicily, killing
about 150,000 people. It is a haunting, unflinching reflection on the
nature of divine immanence and providence in a world void of any
larger, purely future teleology. At the same time, it affirms “a tran
scendental other-world hope to oppose to this immediate and provisional pessimism.”64 Tyrrell suggests,
We have made our God in the image, not of the artist but of theartisan or the man of affairs. “What is He going to make out of it all?”Perhaps nothing; perhaps the universe is but His eternal keyboard. Hiseternal canvas. Perhaps each melody, each picture, may have a worthin itself apart from all the rest. Lost stars, lost species, lost civilizations,lost religions—lost as far as any influence on our own is concerned—
may have justified their existence, though they have led to nothingfurther.65
There is, Tyrrell suggests, no plan working itself out, no far-off
earthly paradise “into which some far-off generation is to enter.”
63. George Tyrrell, Oil and Wine, ix.
64. George Tyrrell, Essays on Faith and Immortality, 277.65. Ibid., 260-61.
Rather, “every generation, every individual life, has an absolute value
of its own, and constitutes a world apart.”66 The world
teems with aims and meanings, although it has noone
aim or meaning.It is like a great tree, that pushes out its branches, however and wherever it can, seeking to realize its whole nature, as far as possible, inevery one of them, but aiming at no collective effect. This is its play,this is its life, this is, if you will, its end.67
There is no necessary arrangement in God’s garden; it is only for us
human gardeners that the universe, conceived as a luxuriant wilder
ness, appears as a scandal.
Tyrrell also insists that we dispense with our long-accustomed“cheap eschatology” and recapture the Greek sense of the “dark
mystery, of a sad mortality o’erswaying man’s largest and loftiest
undertakings.”68 The Kingdom of God must not be identified with
“the Gospel of Progress” or “some socialist millennium.” No doubt
Tyrrell would scorn the political romanticism of some expressions of
present-day theology (what he might call “sanctified worldliness”),
but he was no advocate of ethical quietism or world-denial. “Man
must,” he concludes, “obey the life impulses of his nature, and goon building and toiling. . . . He may not sit down in oriental listless
ness and despair.” He would agree with Troeltsch that the Chris
tian ethic—like none other—keeps the proper tension between
the Dieseits and the Jenseits, between world-affirmation and world-
denial.We are reminded by Tyrrell that life has its pathos but also its
divine dignity; that we do share in a divine life and a divine sympathy.
It is not as a self-centered, self-seeking individual organism, but as theson, the infant son no doubt, of God, that he wakes to a sense of thetragedy and mystery of existence and of the nothingness and unrealityof all that is not God. God alone is the substance that gives meaning toall this shadow-play. And thus we are drawn back to Kant’s greatintuition, that there is nothing really or absolutely good, no end onwhich man may fix his whole heart, but good will. And good will is justGod’s will. To be one with that will, to enter into and cooperate withGod’s struggle in the battle of life, that alone is the inspiring motive,the justifying end, of all our endeavours.69
Tyrrell’s reference to the Creation’s “nothingness and unreality”
and “shadow-play” is disturbing, but his eschatology affirms that,
part, to the striking similarities between his ideas and the theology,
even the language, that emerged from the documents of Vatican II
and post-Vatican II theology.75 These comparisons include theircommon views on the mystery of revelation and on the need for a
more “reverent agnosticism” concerning our human, historical
apprehension of the divine mystery; their common sacramentalism
and understanding of the relation of the natural and supernatural;
their focus on the religious consciousness, its natural, intuitive
knowledge of God, which Rahner calls the “supernatural existential”;
their common assertion that all religions are—however vaguely and
feebly—searchings and glimpses of the divine truth, “anonymous” proximations of the Church’s complete truth.
The most striking convergences are to be found on the theme of
ecclesiology; on the Church as the “people of God,” not a hierarchi
cal, juridical institution; on the “pope as servant”; on priests and
bishops as “the servants of the servants of God”; on the collegiality
of pope and bishops; on the Church as a “servant” in the service of
the world; and on the apostolate of the laity. The whole tenor of theConstitution De Ecclesia appears to be the expression of Tyrrell’s
wish “to invert the hierarchical pyramid carefully balanced on the
Pope as its apex, and to set it firmly on its base again.”76
Our purpose here is not, however, to elaborate on the affinities
between Tyrrell’s portrayal of Catholicism and the new Catholic
theology of the past two or three decades but simply to call attention
to Tyrrell’s relevance to contemporary theology. The same can be
said, to a degree, of his relevance to post-Liberal Protestantism, itsongoing struggle with the God-question, especially with the question
of evolutionary process and providence; its concern with history and
demythologization; and its attention to language and the metaphori
cal character of theology. Few, if any, religious thinkers at the end of
the nineteenth century touch so many of our concerns, our questions,
as forcefully or as courageously as does George Tyrrell. He remains
for us a vital resource of theological and spiritual reflection.
75. For a discussion of this, see Michael Hurley, ‘‘George Tyrrell: Some Post-Vatican II Impressions,” Heythrop Journal 10 (July 1969): 243-55; Ellen Leonard,George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition; and David F. Wells, The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981).