J.B. Mozley on Tolerating Augustinian Predestinarianism in the Church as a Valid Catholic Theologoumenon

Mozley was Newman's brother-in-law, a Tractarian who later left the movement over the Gorham incident and  who in 1855 published a work entitled, A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination.  I've quoted Mozley in this blog entry to the effect that if one has to err, it is better to err in the direction of the Augustinian predestinarianism, which he personally rejects (along with Pelgianism, of course).   While Mozley’s analysis of his subject is worth reading, his conclusions are less useful, as they are largely a recourse to mystery and the limits of the human intellect,  a long but erudite throwing up of the hands.   Nevertheless, in the book's conclusion, he makes a pitch for tolerance of Augustinian/Calvinist predestinarianism in the Church.  I would direct Anglo-Catholic anti-Calvinists to what he has to say.  This long quotation is taken from pages 332–342. (Note my emphases in underlined bold type and asterisks.)

In this state of the case the Church has made a wise and just distinction, in its treatment of the respective errors of the Pelagian and the predestinarian; and while it has cast Pelagianism out of its communion, as a system fundamentally opposed to Christian belief, it has tolerated predestinarianism; regarding it as a system which only carries some religious ideas to an excess, and does not err in principle, or offend against piety or morals.  The seventeenth article of our Church has accordingly allowed a place for a predestinarian school among ourselves; and such a school has long existed, and still exists among us.  This article indeed admits of two interpretations, and may be held and subscribed to in two ways, one suiting the believer in freewill, the other the predestinarian.  It may be held as containing one side of the whole truth respecting grace and freewill the side, viz.  of grace or the Divine Power; but not at all as interfering with any one's belief in a counter truth of man's freewill and originality as an agent.  And in this sense it only excludes a Pelagian, and not such as are content to hold a mystery on this subject, and maintain the Divine Power in conjunction with man's freewill.  Or, again, this article may be held as containing a complete and whole truth; i.e.  in a definitely predestinarian sense.  But as it would be unfair in the predestinarian to prohibit the qualified, so it would be unfair in the advocate of freewill not to allow the extreme mode of holding this article, or to disallow it as permitting and giving room for a pure predestinarian school within our Church.  This wise and just liberty has indeed at times offended those whom the excesses of this school have roused to hostility, or whom insufficient reflection and the philosophical bias of the day have made too exclusive and dogmatic in their opinions concerning freewill; and at the close of the last century a proposal was made by a Divine who became afterwards a distinguished prelate of our Church, to ecclesiastical authority, that the terms of the seventeenth article should be altered and so framed as to give no further licence to predestinarianism.    But a wise caution, if not a profound theology, in the rulers of the Church at that time rejected it.  And this liberty still remains a great advantage to the Church, and a signal proof at once of judgment and discretion, and of a correct and enlarged theology.   It would indeed have been a fatal mistake to have excluded from our pale an aspect of Christian truth,which simply erred in a pardonable obliquity, such as is incident to minds of the highest order, to the strongest intellect, to the deepest devotion.   Such an exclusion would have shown also great ignorance of antiquity and the history of Christian doctrine; for, without attaching more than undue importance to a single name, it will be allowed perhaps that what S.Augustine held is at any rate a tolerable opinion, and no sufficient ground for separation either from the communion or the ministry of the Church.  He is, however, only the first of a succession of authorities that from his own age to the present have maintained and taught predestinarianism within the Church.   Such a proposal with respect to the seventeenth article, from the person who made it, only shows how apt minds are to be confined to the prevailing notions of their day, and to suppose that there is no room for any other truth than what happens to have been familiar to themselves.  And it should operate as a warning against similar attempts, showing, as it does, what great mistakes may be made when we trust too confidently one apparent truth; forgetting how much it might be modified, were we in possession of the whole system to which it belongs; and how easily we may be ignorant and uninformed upon those further points upon which this modification would follow.   

The formularies of our own Church, **following Catholic precedent**, accordingly allow predestinarianism; and this is the decision of common sense and common reason on this subject.  For, so long as a man thinks nothing which is inconsistent with piety, what great difference can it make, provided his actions are good, on what particular rationale of causation he supposes them to be done? . . . . 

Such is the imperfection even of the human mind, that, under Providence, a certain narrowness of judgment often works for good, and seems to favour practical energy and zeal. . . . Nor is this propensity to over-estimate particular truths or supposed truths confined to any one communion: the Roman Catholic and the Protestant shows it alike; most sects and divisions of the Christian world have their favourite tenets, which individuals identify with religion as a whole, and associate intimately and fundamentally with their whole Christian prospects, as if their spiritual life and sanctification were essentially bound up with them.  They seem to see in such special tenets the source of all their strength, their stay, encouragement, and consolation. . . .

But whatever be the reasons for this disposition, all sects and communions more or less exhibit it; and men, and serious and earnest men, come forward and tell us, that they could not conduct their spiritual progress without the aid of one or other special tenet, which they assert, and really imagine to be, the spring of their energies, and the mainstay of their hopes.  And among the rest, the predestinarian comes forward and says this.  He says that he could not, as a spiritual being, go on without this doctrine; that he finds it essential to him; that without it the universe would be a chaos, and the Divine dispensations a delusion; that he reposes in it as the only true mode of asserting the Divine Love and Power; and, therefore, his only support in this life, his only security for a better life to come.  He says all this; he says it from his heart; he feels it; he believes it.  Then what are we to say? What, but that, however such a result may be owing to an imperfection in his mind, this doctrine is certainly to him, under this imperfection, a strength and a consolation; and that an error and an obliquity is overruled by Providence for good? 1

Whether the time, indeed, will ever come when men in general will see that on this and some other questions truth is twofold, and is not confined to either side singly, that our perceptions are indistinct and contradictory, and therefore, do not justify any one definite position, remains to be seen.  Philosophers have from time to time prophesied a day, when a better understanding would commence of man with himself, and of man with man.  They have risen up from the survey of the past with the idea that it is impossible that mankind can go on for ever repeating the same mistakes; that they must one day see the limits of human reason, distinguish what they know from what they do not know, and draw the necessary conclusion, that on some questions they cannot insist on any one absolute truth, and condemn each other accordingly.  But the vision does not approach at present any very clear fulfilment.  The limits of human reason are perhaps better understood in the world now than they ever were before; and such a knowledge has evidently an effect upon controversy, to a certain extent modifying and chastening it.  Those who remind men of their ignorance use an argument which, however it may fall short of striking its full philosophical strength, and producing its due effect, appeals to an undeniable truth, before which all human souls must bow.  And the most ardent minds, in the very heat of controversy, have an indistinct suspicion that a strong ground has been established in this quarter.  On the other hand, this knowledge of the limits of human reason is not, and perhaps never will be, for reasons which I- have given, very acute or accurate in the minds of the mass; while the tendency to one-sided views and to hasty assumption is strong, and is aided by passion and self-love, as well as by better feeling misapplied.  On the whole, therefore, while improved philosophy has perhaps entirely destroyed some great false assumptions which have reigned in the world, so that these will never rise up again, it cannot subdue the temper and spirit which makes such assumptions.  It is able occasionally to check and qualify, but it cannot be expected that it will ever habitually regulate, theological thought and controversy.  It will from time to time step in as a monitor, and take advantage of a pause and quiet interval to impress its lesson upon mankind, to bring them back to reflection when they have been carried too far, and convert for the time a sense of error into a more cautious view of truth; but it will never perhaps do more than this.  Unable to balance and settle, it will give a useful oscillation to the human mind, an alternation of enthusiasm and judgment, of excitement and repose. 

In the meantime it only remains that those who differ from each other on points which can never be settled absolutely, in the present state of our capacities, should remember that they may differ, not in holding truth and error, but only in holding different sides of the same truth.  And with this reflection I will conclude the present treatise.  After long consideration of the subject, I must profess myself unable to see on what strictly argumentative ground the two great parties in the English Church can, on the question which has occupied this treatise viz.  the operation of Divine grace, and on other questions connected with it imagine themselves to be so fundamentally opposed to each other.  All differences of opinion, indeed, even those which are obviously of a secondary and not a fundamental kind, tend to create division and separation; for all difference in its degree is apt to be a sign of some general difference of mental mould and religious temper, and men naturally consort together according to their general sympathies and turn of mind: and for men to consort with some as distinct from others, is in itself a sort of division in the body; a division, too, which, when once begun, is apt to deepen.  Such an existence of preference is suggestive of positive controversy; and men once brought together upon such an understanding, and formed into groups by special sympathies, are liable to become by this very position antagonistic parties, schools, and sides.  Yet the differences of opinion in our Church, on the question of grace, and on some further questions connected with it, do not appear to be sufficient to justify either party in supposing that if differs from the other fundamentally, or so as to interfere with Christian fellowship.  If the question of grace is one which, depending on irreconcilable but equally true tendencies of thought in man, cannot be settled absolutely either way, it seems to follow that a difference upon it should not occasion a distance or separation.  And this remark will apply to such further and more particular questions as are connected with this general question, and are necessarily affected by the view we take upon, and the mode in which we decide the general question.  Such, for example, is the doctrine of baptismal regeneration.  A slight consideration will be enough to show how intimately this doctrine is connected with the general doctrine of grace; and that one who holds an extreme, and one who holds a modified doctrine of grace in general, cannot hold the doctrine of baptismal regeneration in the same sense.  If a latitude of opinion, then, may be allowed on the general question, it seems to follow that an equal latitude may be allowed on this further and more particular one; and that if an extreme predestinarian, and a maintainer of freewill can maintain and teach their respective doctrines within the same communion, they need not exclude each other when they come to give to their respective doctrines their necessary and legitimate application in a particular case.  I cannot, therefore, but think, that further reflection will, on this and other questions, modify the opposition of the two parties in our Church to each other, and show that their disagreement is not so great as in the heat of controversy they supposed it to be.  Differences of opinion there will always be in every religious communion, so long as the human mind is as variously constituted as it is, and so long as proper liberty is allowed it to express and unfold this variety.  But it depends on the discretion and temper of religious men to what extent they will allow these differences to carry them; whether they will retain them upon a common basis of Christian communion and fellowship, or raise them into an occasion of separation and mutual exclusion. 

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1 As the workings of the heart of I general the same in all who are the man, and of the Spirit of God, are in I subjects of grace, I hope most of these with hymns, being the fruit and expression of my own experience, will coincide with the views of real Christians of all denominations.  But I cannot expect that every sentiment I have advanced will be universally approved.  However, I am not conscious of having written a single line with an intention either to flatter or offend any party or person upon earth.  I have simply declared my own views and feelings.  .  .  .  I am a friend of peace; and being deeply convinced that no one can profitably understand the great truths and doctrines of the Gospel any further than he is taught by God, I have not a wish to obtrude my own tenets upon others in a way of controversy; yet I do not think myself bound to conceal them.  Many gracious persons (for many such I am persuaded there are) who differ from me more or less in those points which are called Calvinistic, appear desirous that the Calvinists should for their sakes, studiously avoid every expression which they cannot approve.  Yet few of them, I believe, impose a like restraint upon themselves, but think the importance of what they deem to be truth justifies them in speaking their sentiments plainly and strongly.  May I not plead for an equal liberty? The views I have received of the doctrines of grace are essential to my peace : I could not live comfortably a day or an hour without them.  I likewise believe, yea, as far as my poor attainments warrant me to speak, I know them to be friendly to holiness, and to have a direct influence in producing and maintaining a Gospel conversation; and therefore I must not be ashamed of them." (Newton's Preface to the Olney Hymns.)

Sage advice from James Mozley and John Newton, I would say, unless one is more concerned with keeping things tidy.