ON THE CLAUSE “AND THE SON,” IN REGARD TO THE EASTERN CHURCH AND THE BONN CONFERENCE. A LETTER TO THE REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D. IRELAND PROFESSOR OF EXEGESIS, CANON OF S. PAUL’S. BY THE REV. E. B. PUSEY, D.D. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF HEBREW, AND CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH. SOLD BY JAMES PARKER & CO., OXFORD, AND 377, STRAND, LONDON; RIVINGTONS, LONDON, OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE; AND POTT, YOUNG & CO., NEW YORK. 1876. Project Canterbury edition AD 2002 On the Clause “And the Son,” by Edward Bouverie Pusey. (1876) MY DEAREST FRIEND, YOU wish me to state briefly my thoughts, as to the restoration of intercommunion with the Greek Church, and, as bearing on this, what I desiderate in the propositions adopted at the Bonn Conference, and how they could be modified, so that I could myself accept them. This I do the more readily, because it was partly at my instance that you undertook that journey to Bonn, at much inconvenience, I believe, to yourself, and because I know that we are substantially of one mind on this subject, as on others. I hope that I may do this less unsatisfactorily, if I embody in it, what I wrote, two years ago on this, the saddest of all our sad controversies. For it is, in the end, a controversy as to the Being of God, among those who really believe in God, who prize right and true belief in God above all things, who, each, doubt not that they have the right belief, and who do believe the same one with the other, if they could but look calmly at each other’s mode of speech. It would be a happy employment of closing years of one's Me here, in any degree to help our brethren in the Eastern Church to understand our Western language, and to induce some (especially our brethren in the United States) to pause in their eagerness to sacrifice our old expression of belief, under a mistaken idea that so they will promote unity. 1st. Plainly it is a duty to do what we can by way of explanation, which may any how tend to the healing of any of the breaches in the mystical Body of Christ. We know that we are all members of His great Family, although unhappily there is disunion among the members of that One Family. But the cause of this disunion does not lie with us. There is actually nothing on our side, to prevent any Greek Catholic from communicating with us, if the authorities of his own Church would permit it, nor are the members of the English Church in any way hindered from communicating in either a Greek or Roman Church, if the authorities of those Churches (or, in any case, of the latter) did not insist upon the renunciation of our Communion as a necessary condition thereto. I think that, if this had been attended to, some of those painful statements as to one aspect of the Greek Church, which we have heard of late, would perhaps have been spared. Those who made them, not knowing of the great work which the Russian Church has done of late years for the conversion of the heathen (far more than ourselves), have thought of the amount of the cultus of the B. V. among them. They have paralleled them with the Roman devotions, to which we have objected. But they have overlooked that, in regard to the Roman devotions, we stood on the defensive. Few probably would have thought it their business to question, what devotions were used in Spain or Italy. Our concern was, that they should not be forced upon us, as they would be, were our Bishops chosen for us by the Bishops of Rome. In the event of restored intercommunion with the East, there would be no interference with our self-government; and however we may and must deplore what is practically a system unknown to the Ancient Church, it is not our business to bring them back to their own earlier devotions, before they were interpolated by Peter [2] On the Clause “And the Son,” by Edward Bouverie Pusey. (1876) Gnapheus,1 the heretical Patriarch of Antioch. Love and prayer are our only offices towards them. What is aimed at, is no change in either, except as, through increased love and intercourse, God the Holy Ghost may work any. The only primary effect would be, that the Orientals would admit to Communion such of our people as might be in the East, away from all other means of Communion; and their members would be allowed by their authorities to communicate with us, if they should be in the West, or in India or any other country where God has spread us abroad and their Church is not. Slight as this is, it would end the schism. On this subject, perhaps, I may repeat what I said eleven years ago, embodying, in a book which has now seen its day, the thoughts of many past years. “The authorities of the great Russian Church (we hear, as sounds floating on the breeze) look favourably on the wish for restored communion. Our position gives us an advantage towards her also; because, while we are wide-spread enough to be no object of contempt, there can be no dread on either side of any interference with the self- government of each, in the portion of God’s heritage which, in His Providence, each occupies. We have no ground to fear in regard to her, lest she should force back upon us that vast practical system, still prevalent in the Western Church, which was one occasion, and is the justification, of our isolated condition. We had nothing to do with the great schism of the East and West. Convinced that (as the Council of Florence states,) the Greek and Latin fathers, though using different language, meant the same as to the Procession of God the Holy Ghost, we should have nothing to ask her,—except Communion. With regard to her too, we may have a Providential Office, that we too have received the Filioque, not by any act of our own, but as circulated insensibly throughout the Latin Church; and while we could not part with what, through so many centuries, has been the expression of our common faith, we might still reject with Anathema the heresy which, since Photius, has been imputed to it, and which the Greek Church now seems, by an inveterate prejudice, to think to be involved in it. Yet it is plain that, long after the schism, her great writers and Bishops did not think so. Else they could not have proposed to the Latin Church, only to remove the word from the Creed, while continuing to teach or sing it elsewhere as they pleased. For had they thought the formula to contain heresy, this would have involved connivance in, and assent to, heresy. But if the objection lies only to the informality or mistake of altering the common Creed, this, it seems, was unintentional on the part of the Western Church; and we clearly had nothing to do with it. ... We only ask to continue to use the formula, which without any act of our own, has been the expression of our faith immemorially. The Greeks, who value so much an inherited faith, could not, we trust, be insensible to the claim. If, on such terms and on such explanations of our belief as she may require and we could give, communion should be restored between us, a great step would have been gained towards the reunion of all Christendom.”2 It is not then on account of our recent disappointment at the decision of the Vatican Council, that our eyes have turned towards the East. We were taught by our public Prayers to pray for the whole Church; our good and devout Bishop Andrewes 1 Niceph. Callist. H. E. xv. 28. fin. T. ii. 634. See Rev. G. Williams on interpolation in Greek liturgies in my Eirenicon P. II. pp. 425-427. 2 Eirenicon P. I. pp. 263-266. [3] On the Clause “And the Son,” by Edward Bouverie Pusey. (1876) taught some of us to pray in his form for the Church, “Œcumenical, Eastern, Western, our own,” and “we hoped that the time was drawing on, when ‘Eastern, Western, our own,’ would melt, in visible communion too, into the one Œcumenical.”3 I wish, then, that the Bonn Conference had prepared for the restoration of intercommunion in a somewhat different way; but with its object I have entire sympathy. I have watched for many years for every crack in the ice which might be a symptom, that God would “send forth His word and melt them:” would “blow with His wind, and the waters flow.”4 ii. I much regret that your own proposal was not laid before the Orientals, that we, Westerns, while retaining for ourselves that form of expression, which we have had for 1000 years, rejected with abhorrence the imputation that we imagined that there could be “two Principles or Causes” within the Godhead. It is so monstrous, so opposed to the belief in the Unity of God, that I marvel how Photius could have mispersuaded any, that the Latins held it, However, the denial does meet the heresy, imputed by Photius to our Western confession: it was the explanation made by S. Maximus, when the same objection was made by the Monothelites;5 that explanation of S. Maximus, together with passages of S. Cyril and S.