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Visible and Invisible: George Tyrrell and Christ's Bodies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Starting with the laying to rest of George Tyrrell's body in an Anglican grave, outside the bounds of the Catholic Church, this article considers how Tyrrell could yet understand himself to be within the Church, within the body of Christ. Tyrrell developed a distinction between the visible and invisible Church in such a way that a person like himself could be included within the latter. In this, Tyrrell's theology anticipated later ideas of the anonymous Christian and the Church as sacrament, his thinking incorporated within the body of more orthodox, conciliar theology.
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- Copyright © 2018 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
*
This article was first given as a paper at a colloquium held to celebrate the life and work of Professor Nicholas Lash on the occasion of his receiving an honorary doctorate in divinity from Durham University in 2011.
References
1 Tyrrell, George, “The Mystical Church” in Hard Sayings: A Selection of Meditations and Studies (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910 [1898]), 397‐448 (p. 433)Google Scholar.
2 Tyrrell's criticisms appeared in the Giornale d'Italia (25 September 1907) and in The Times of London (30 September and 1 October 1907). For a full account of the events leading to Tyrrell's “minor” excommunication (he could hear Mass but not receive the sacrament) see Sagovsky, Nicholas, “On God's Side”: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), ch. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 George Tyrrell, “A Perverted Devotion”, Weekly Register 100 (16 December 1899), 797‐800; reprinted in Tyrrell, George, Essays on Faith and Immortality, arranged by Petre, M.D. (London: Edward Arnold, 1914), pp. 158‐71Google Scholar.
4 For a full account of this incident see Sagovsky, “On God's Side”, ch. 8.
5 For the complexities of Tyrrell's leaving see Sagovsky, “On God's Side”, chs 12 and 13. For the full text of the letter see Tyrrell, George, A Much‐Abused Letter (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906)Google Scholar. See Tyrrell's own account in his letter to Ward (21 March 1906) in George Tyrrell's Letters, edited by Petre, M.D. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), pp. 103‐4Google Scholar.
6 Tyrrell was received into the Catholic Church on the 18 May 1879 at Farm Street, London.
7 When this paper was presented at the colloquium in his honour, Nicholas Lash confided that he had been confirmed by Bishop Amigo.
8 “Christ surely was explicit enough on this point, to take away all surprise at the weakness or wickedness of the members of the visible Church of whatever degree or dignity. He came as a friend of publicans and sinners, to call, not the just, but sinners to repentance. We are not shocked to find the inmates of a hospital ailing and weakly; and the Church is little better than a hospital for sick and wounded souls, in whose midst Christ sits down daily to meat.” Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, pp. 444‐45. See further Karl Rahner, “The Church of Sinners” (1947) in Theological Investigations VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, translated by Karl‐H. and Boniface Kruger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1969), pp. 253‐69. The second part of this essay may now seem shockingly complacent about the sins of the Church, and it should be read in conjunction with Rahner's later essay, “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II”, published in the same volume (pp. 270‐94).
9 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 410.
10 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 410.
11 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 431.
12 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 432.
13 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 416.
14 George Tyrrell to A.M.L.C. (about 1908) in George Tyrrell's Letters, p. 30. The dust‐heap as source of wealth is of course the theme of Charles Dickens last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865). The dust heap of the nineteenth century was comprised of “[c]oal‐dust, vegetable‐dust, bone‐dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust, — all manner of Dust”, Mortimer Lightwood tells his fellow diners, and to his list we could also add human dust, both the night soil (excrement) collected by the nightmen and the dust to which we all return. See Dickens, Charles, Our Mutual Friend, edited by Poole, Adrian (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 24Google Scholar.
15 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 432.
16 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 418.
17 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, pp. 432‐33.
18 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 416.
19 Lumen Gentium, II.16.
20 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 417.
21 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 417.
22 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 423.
23 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 424.
24 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 424.
25 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 425.
26 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 426.
27 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 427.
28 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 428.
29 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, pp. 428‐29.
30 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 429.
31 Newman, John Henry, “Christianity and Medical Science” (1858) in Lectures and Essays on University Subjects (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859), 366‐87 (p. 381)Google Scholar; and cited in Ward, Wilfrid, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 2 volumes (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), vol. I, p. 415Google Scholar. For Newman's influence on Tyrrell see Pierce, Andrew, “Crossbows, Bludgeons and Long‐Range Rifles: Tyrrell and Newman and ‘the Intimate Connection Between Methods and Their Results’” in George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism, edited by Rafferty, Oliver P. (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 56‐75Google Scholar.
32 Rahner, Karl, “Anonymous Christians” in Theological Investigations VI, 390‐98 (p. 394)Google Scholar.
33 The text cited is Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, 14, 11, ad primum, incorrectly given by Tyrrell as 14, 2, ad primum; see Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 429.
34 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 430.
35 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 435.
36 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 431.
37 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 436.
38 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 436.
39 Tyrrell to W.R.H. (1908) in George Tyrrell's Letters, 35‐37 (p. 37).
40 Tyrrell, A Much‐Abused Letter, p. 55.
41 Tyrrell, A Much‐Abused Letter, p. 72.
42 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 430.
43 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 445.
44 Tyrrell, A Much‐Abused Letter, p. 72.
45 George Tyrrell to A.M.L.C. (about 1908) in George Tyrrell's Letters, p. 30.
46 George Tyrrell to A.M.L.C., p. 31.
47 Gregory Baum, “Introduction” to Ellen Leonard, George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1982), xv‐xviii (pp. xvii‐xviii). Baum argued that “a hierarchical structure that excludes the vast number of the faithful from decision‐making and excludes on principle all women from the ordained priesthood” is unjustifiable in a Church viewed as the “sign and sacrament of redeemed humanity” (pp. xvii‐xviii). But thirty years on, it may be the claim that the Church is such a sign and sacrament that seems unjustifiable.
48 Kirwan, Michael, “George Tyrrell and the Theology of Vatican II” in George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism, edited by Rafferty, Oliver P. (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), 131‐152 (p. 141)Google Scholar.
49 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 433.
50 Lumen Gentium, I.8.
51 Kirwan agrees with Michael Hurley and David Wells that with regard to his teaching on the Church, Tyrrell's theology “now appears ‘prophetic’ and even seminal”. Kirwan, “George Tyrrell”, p. 141. See Hurley, Michael, “George Tyrrell: Some Post‐Vatican II Impressions”, Heythrop Journal 10 (1969), 243‐55 (p. 246)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurley, Michael, “George Tyrrell: Some Post‐ARCIC Impressions”, One in Christ 19 (1983), 250‐54Google Scholar; Wells, David, The Prophetic Theology of George Tyrrell (California: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 80‐1Google Scholar.
52 See Benedict, XVI, “A Proper Hermeneutic for the Second Vatican Council” in Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, edited by Lamb, M. L. and Levering, M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. ix‐xvGoogle Scholar.
53 Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini (1888‐1967) was one of these. See further O'Malley, John W., What Happened at Vatican II (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 178Google Scholar.
54 Tyrrell himself wondered if the “new Catholicism” could “without a complete rupture, enter into its heritage.” He thought that “Rome cares nothing for religion—only for power; and for religion as a source of power.” George Tyrrell to Emil Wolff (20 November 1907); cited in Petre, M.D., Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), vol. 2, p. 355Google Scholar.
55 George Tyrrell to A.M.L.C., p. 31.