4293. Aubrey Thomas de Vere to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 307–309.
13 Via del Tritone 3d P.
[?16 December 1858] [1]
My dear Browning
Do not be frightened at the sight of the vol. I send you. The Essay I spoke to you of yesterday is bound up with several others contributed by me to the Edinburgh & Dublin Reviews, so that I cannot send it to you in a detached form. It is the Essay entitled “the Philosophy of the Rule of Faith”. [2] It was written in the desire of shewing how little true is the ordinary notion that “the Authority of the Church” is but a scheme for the suppression of individual Thought, & for the substitution of a dry External Uniformity, in place of Personal Agency & Vital Religion. The Church, on the contrary, is the great condition of all genuine Thought on the part of Individuals (Thought, I mean directed to supernatural objects) the organ through which Personal Convictions can alone reach the depths of our being, the channel through which Truth reaches us in its vital & spiritual relations as well as in its intellectual results <& through which we are made strong for the separate Work Probation and Responsibility which attach to each of us individually>. [3] The Authority of the Church is in reality the Law of Liberty; & though, among the benefits which we owe to it, is one with which Controversialists have happened especially to concern themselves, viz the Certainty of Divine Faith in Divine Things, yet the Church, with that & all its other functions, exists wholly irrespectively of matters dogmatical, & is included in the very idea of the Incarnation & of the Redeemed Humanity– This is the theme discussed .. most slightly & inadequately, I am well aware .. but yet perhaps from some points of view in which it is not always handled by theologians a thousand times more competent to write on the subject, but who, from not having been themselves brought up in Protestantism, are not acquainted with the various misconceptions relative to the nature of the Church which among Protestants have become Traditions, & which sometimes render it difficult for the most discerning to take in the Idea of the Church. Sure I am that the Idea once taken in, must recommend itself to a Philosophical mind, from the moment at least that it confronts Revelation in its Reality, & sees clearly the infinite distance between Religion itself, & a more Religious Philosophy.
The Essay that follows this one,—is called the “Plague of Controversy” [4] illustrates the subject more at large and with reference to our existing Ideas & Such– I am so much obliged to you however for promising to read the former that I must not ask you to read the latter also–
Yours ever most truly
Aubrey de Vere
I cannot say how poor & inadequate these Essays seem to me, on looking over them again, compared with the depth, greatness & vital interest of the theme– Someone better qualified will I hope set forth what may be called the interior view of the Church as distinguished from that external view of her with which Controversy (as distinguished from friendly Discussion) has been chiefly concerned. What I have written really contains but hints & suggestions, the appreciation of which requires not only a candid but a friendly intelligence on the part of the reader.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Boston Public Library.
1. Conjectural date suggested by De Vere’s mention of speaking to RB “yesterday.” De Vere was one of fifteen guests at the Brownings’ apartment on 15 December 1858 (see the fifth paragraph in letter 4295).
2. In “The Philosophy of the Rule of Faith,” which appeared in the December 1853 issue of The Dublin Review (pp. 277–336), De Vere notices seven Protestant works that cite scripture as an argument against Roman Catholicism.
3. The text in angle brackets has been inserted as an afterthought.
4. De Vere’s “The Plague of Controversy,” published in The Dublin Review of June 1854 (pp. 351–418), notices ten works of religious controversy, including: F.D. Maurice’s Theological Essays (1853) and Henry Drummond’s The Fate of Christendom (1854), both of which EBB had previously commented on (see letters 3378 and 3428).
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