Bishop Gore, Dean Rashdall, and St. Thomas Aquinas

Extract

The dogmatic duel between the two intellectual leaders of Anglo-Catholicism and Modernism within the Church of England is a struggle of giants made homely by irrepressible sallies of the ‘average man.’ Neither the Bishop nor the Dean can lay aside that human nature which feels and even repays a hurt.

We should have no joy in recording one of these sallies if strangely enough it did not bind into a single sheaf of words what it elsewhere scattered over the field of controversy. In the August number of The Modern Churchman Dean Rashdall has an article entitled ‘Bishop Gore and St. Thomas Aquinas,’ in which he writes :

’ Bishop Gore, in his criticisms of myself, has refused to accept my statements as to what I believe. He has claimed to look down into my thoughts and pronounce that, when I say that Christ is God and man, I really think of Him as man only. Such an attitude seems to me an unwarrantable presumption. I will not, therefore, be guilty of the same presumption towards him, and will refrain from saying that I suspect that, if I could look into his mind as he believes himself able to look into mine, I should find that he practically envisages the Holy Trinity to himself as three minds, Le. three Gods, not less distinct but only more unanimous and harmonious in their thoughts and plans than any three pagan deities.

I will not say this; I will content myself with observing that, though he escapes formal Tritheism by using the correct theological phrases, his thought is difficult to distinguish from Tritheism ‘(p. 208).

‘Bishop Gore (so far as I have been able to understand him) contends that no one can honestly accept the Creed of Nicea without regarding Father and Son as two separate personalities in the modern English sense of the word. At all events he uses the terms person and personality without a word to distinguish their theological meaning from that which they bear in common life or modem philosophy’ (p. 201).