Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2002

[page 29]

William Davies King

Performing the Holy Ghost:
Revelations of the Reverend Edward Irving in 1830-31

Edward Irving was a British Presbyterian minister who died in 1834 at the age of 43. He was a powerful orator, a prolific writer, and a devout believer in Christian deliverance from worldly concerns. He faced his own day as a critical moment when all souls must be brought to Christ before the imminent arrival of the end-time, and he sought to carry out his role as evangelist to the last degree. He was not so strongly opinionated about theatres as his more strongly Calvinistic brethren, who believed that theatres were instruments of Satan, but he would surely resist any analogy between his church services and theatrical performances. Nevertheless, what happened in his church pressed the limits of performance in a way that deserves analysis as theatre, as well as comparison to public demonstrations of scientific phenomena. Seeking the larger context in which these episodes should be understood involves asking how something performed can undermine the power structure of the institution which sponsors the performance, and particularly how a "dark" phenomenon, such as an act which is thought to be driven by Satan, can expose the insubstantiality of the enlightened institution which is aimed at eliminating the possibility of such an act.

Around 1830, at just about the same time as the controversial Reform Bill of 1832 was being debated in Parliament, a parallel controversy was raging in the Established Church of Scotland. The Reform Bill would greatly increase the electorate and lessen the power of the nobility over the state, thus taking a significant step in the direction of re-centering the state's authority over the rights and duties of its citizens. Certain elements within the Scottish Presbyterian church had been seeking for nearly two centuries to reaffirm the church as the state religion by reconciling differences with the Episcopal Church of England. The Church of Scotland operated under the jurisdiction of the national courts until 1834, and the assignment of ministers to parishes was still done by noble patronage. Dissenting elements within the Presbyterian church agitated for Spiritual Independence, by which they meant a church that [page 30] would have Christ alone as its sovereign and judge. The area of sharpest controversy was ministerial appointment.

The Presbyterian Church operates by means of the Presbytery, the assemblies and councils of elders who come from among the laity (the parishioners) as well as the clergy and who represent the body at regional and national meetings of the church. In contrast, the Catholic Church and the Church of England operate with a prelacy, an ecclesiastical hierarchy headed by the Pope (for Catholics) or the archbishop and a set of bishops for the Anglicans. The Presbytery ordains the minister of the Presbyterian Church. The bishops ordain the minister of the Episcopal Church. The bishops are considered the nobility, whether they were born noble, (which was still usually the case in this period,) or not, and who usually answers the "call" of the parish. That is, when a position becomes vacant, the presbyters seek a suitable minister, often from within the parish.

However, the heritage of most parish churches is that the sitting, i.e. manse (or parish house), the glebe (the parish land, which might be revenue-producing), and all the emoluments, might have been endowed by the local nobility who at one time had authority to appoint a minister. That authority was still reserved by the bishops of the Church of England and by the House of Lords, i.e. central state authority and ministerial authority. In some notable cases during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the choice of the parish (the laity) conflicted with the choice that came from the system of patronage. This led to considerable internal tension within the church.

Church and state were still deeply intertwined through this same period, and it is impossible to separate disagreements about the order of the Presbyterian Church from the political controversies of the day. Generally speaking, the Presbyterian Church administered its affairs by means of its ministers and presbyters, thus generally resembling the structure of government that had emerged in England in the eighteenth century, a structure of ministers and elected representatives. A modern scholar, Mehl, has characterized the presbyterian synodal system as

Many of the political reforms of the period following the French Revolution were aimed at diffusing the remnants of noble patronage and royal prerogative within the government, and the Reform Bill of 1834 was a culminating moment in this trend. The Presbyterian Church was moderate among the Protestant sects in its understanding of the principle of the universal priesthood of the faithful – that is, the initially Catholic idea that personal devotion to Christ was the sole requirement for church membership and incorporation in its body. Martin Luther had adopted this idea from medieval Catholic doctrine and extended it to suggest that equal authority should be vested in all believers. Priesthood among Lutherans was often little more than an organizational convenience and principally conceived as the ministering of the word of God by someone who was well-informed of the Scriptures but of no special grace.

Among Presbyterians in the eighteenth century, the ministerial office was for many a similar convenience, the practical designation of one among the devout who could preach, baptize, administer the sacraments, and so on. For some the choice was a matter of the skills and moral character of the designated one, who, after all, might be a choice imposed upon the church by the patronage system. Given that the Biblical sense of the word which is translated as "ministry," the diakonia, meant "service," the association of the ministry with nobility and privilege might have seemed especially paradoxical.(2) For a growing segment of Presbyterians toward the end of the eighteenth century, and even more so in the early nineteenth century, the indispensable requirement for a minister was that he be a servant solely of Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit.

The ministry in the episcopal church derived its authority from the apostolic succession, that is, the unbroken chain of discipleship linking a present-day bishop to the original apostles. The image was of an inherited holiness, and ordination was the passing on of that tradition. The Evangelical Presbyterian minister, by contrast, derived his authority from the experience of [page 32] being filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and demonstrated that power by his words and deeds, in accordance with the words and deeds of the original apostles. Ordination was a certification of that power.

The Presbyterian Evangelicals were largely inspired by the Great Awakening and the revivalist movements of the eighteenth century, but even the more extreme among them sought to retain the institutional strength of the church. David Bebbington has made a persuasive case that the values of the revivalists in the eighteenth century need not be seen as antithetical to the values of the ideologues of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Though there were some among the latter who disparaged the role of religion in an enlightened society and who questioned the very existence of God, the Evangelicals themselves promoted their new perspectives on religious experience in terms that were perfectly consistent with Enlightenment values. For them, attaining faith was akin to acquiring a new sense by which the world could be known. They framed this new experience in terms of empiricism, an experiment in the workings of God, and often directly in terms of light, progress, and liberation from superstition. The goal was to bring order and balance out of chaos, knowledge out of ignorance. In all these ways, the discourse of revivalism is consistent with the Enlightenment.(3) The Scottish Presbyterian version of this Evangelical impulse, during the eighteenth century, was still more in line with the values of the Enlightenment than the Methodists and Independents. For the Presbyterians, the minister ought to be a man who had received a "call," who had personally experienced a conversion to true faith, who took Christ as the essential agent of salvation, who upheld the Bible as an absolute authority, and who sought to spread the gospel throughout the earth. But the minister was also an administrator, an officer of the church, and an upholder of its authority, which included the subservient role of the laity. It is in this context that Edward Irving came into the ministry.

Irving took strong interest in the role of the minister from his childhood years in Annan, Scotland. As a boy he read Richard Hooker's formidable classic of Anglican theology and apostolic practice, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. A sixteenth scholar, Hooker argues for the reasonableness of the episcopacy based on apostolic succession, but maintains that the church of [page 33] the present day must respond to the needs and situation of the polity. Shaw, a modern scholar, summarizes Hooker's opinion:

The Presbyterian Church was born in dissent against the Established Church of England, and so these ideas posed a challenge to the young Edward Irving. He proposed that the Presbyterian Church was itself an adaptation of the ancient order to the fresh circumstances of the present. He took to heart Hooker's declaration that the priest is the person who receives God's power, which "translateth out of darkness into glory".(5) Thus, by means of the evangelical experience, the Presbyterian minister receives the apostolic succession and by the power of his ministry passes it along. Irving, too, like Hooker, maintains the political authority of the church, in this case the Presbyterian Church, and its power to maintain order by means of laws. The apostolic succession which gave rise to the Episcopal Church was, in his view, a corruption of the tradition. What was needed to maintain the holiness of the church was not bishops but ministers of God, which Irving took to mean men who had been filled with the Holy Spirit as the original apostles had been on the day of Pentecost.

Irving studied the role of minister as a young man, rehearsed it in a country parish, understudied with the time's eminent Dr. Chalmers in Glasgow, then played it in full in London, until controversy and then death brought his performance to an end. He applied himself with ferocious energy, executing his parish duties with unfailing diligence, and preaching and writing with passion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle both considered him one of the remarkable men of the age, a genius, a hero, and (without using the term) a romantic actor. [page 34] Carlyle, whose wife, Jane, had once been the object of Irving's passion, (although Irving ultimately married another woman,) addressed the theatricality of Irving's performance:

Coleridge considered Irving more of an embodiment of the spirit of Luther and the Reformers than any man living, "yea, than any man of this and the last century. I see in Edward Irving, a minister of Christ after the order of Paul".(7) Chalmers observed that between Irving and Coleridge lay a "secret and, to me, unintelligible communion of spirit . . . on the ground of a certain German mystical and transcendental poetry".(8) These unusual powers brought Irving in from the provinces at an early age, and his influence came to a climax in a new church in Regent Square in 1827. His performance as a preacher was frequently compared to that of a leading player, such as in the following excerpt from a satirical poem from 1823, initially published in the Times:

During these years he was devoting himself to exposition of the prophetic literature in the Bible and adopting the prophetic voice in his preaching. An attorney named Robert Baxter, who will figure large in this essay, described Irving's preaching in terms that echo the conservative reaction to romantic acting:

These quotations show that a minister's performance was evaluated in terms of truth or authenticity, based on degrees of effectiveness which could be analyzed in material terms – gesture, voice, carriage – exactly like a stage actor, except that in the minister's case the performer stands in for the word of God. The tension between the material and the spiritual was heightened in Irving's case because his performance carried (for most) such authority, held such power, that audiences at time lost sight of his merely human quality. The theological substance of his preaching only increased this stress.

Two issues came to dominate Irving's preaching during his sudden rise to fame in the early 1820s. First, he sought to resolve some of the questions surrounding Christ's incarnation. [page 36] To what degree had He taken on the reality of human nature? In particular, to what degree had he known or incorporated the original sin to which humans are subject? To this question he would return repeatedly over the next decade. Second, he became convinced that the world had already experienced virtually all that the Bible foretold in its prophetic literature, and that therefore the apocalypse must be imminent. The lack of faith in the modern world necessitated its doom as a second Babylon. Since the world was facing its end, the "signs and wonders" foretold by the Bible must also be nigh, all manifestations of the "outpouring of the Holy Spirit." Many had interpreted the rise of Napoleon in terms of the appearance of the Antichrist, and millennial predictions were frequently voiced, though less commonly among the Presbyterian clergy. Many religious leaders, including Irving, felt a sense of urgency at this moment (a time of surging imperialism) to spread the Gospel to as many people as possible throughout the world and bring them to salvation before the end-time.

In 1828, Irving went on a speaking tour of Scotland and there sparked controversy by his preaching on the subject of Christ's incarnation, at once expressing an opinion more Calvinistic than most Presbyterians of the day in its emphasis on sin, but also more hopeful than most Calvinists in that he suggested that one could become purified in the flesh by the power of God. Certain theologians, including officers of the Church of Scotland declared heretical Irving's opinions about the presence of sin in the incarnated Christ, and Irving replied in the pulpit and in print. Over the next few years this controversy would lead to trial and conviction. In the meanwhile, however, Irving found himself fascinated by the case of a beautiful but sickly young Scottish woman, Mary Campbell, the sister of a saintly woman who had died recently of tuberculosis. Irving visited the Campbell house and found young Mary to be an inspiring, ecstatic figure, deeply enthusiastic about communicating the word of God to the heathen. Irving himself had just a few years earlier lost a child and had become convinced that disease signified the presence of Satan, and only by faith could health be restored. By the force of her own holy determination, Mary Campbell became convinced that she herself could be healed and would soon receive the apostolic gifts, including the gifts of prophecy and speaking in tongues. It seemed obvious to the young woman that the gift of tongues would resolve the problem faced by the would-be missionaries, namely how to communicate with the heathen. Early in 1830, when Irving was back in London, Mary Campbell did feel the Holy Ghost come upon her and compel her to speak in a foreign language, which she subsequently declared was the language of the [page 37] Pelew Islanders. Later she claimed to have added Turkish and Chinese. Irving's first comprehensive biographer, Mrs. Oliphant, analyzes the "dubious cradle" of circumstances from which came this astonishing event:

Mrs. Oliphant cannot help but admire this humble young woman's seizure of the rare opportunity to become the focal point of discussion, a figure of wonderful power. Word spread of this remarkable event, and soon there were other cases of healing and speaking in tongues. The very report of one of these incidents led Mary Campbell to rise up from her sickbed and declare herself healed.

William Davies King is Professor of Dramatic Art and department chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Henry Irving's "Waterloo": Theatrical Engagements with Late-Victorian Culture (winner of the 1993 Callaway Prize), Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn, and "A Wind Is Rising": The Correspondence of Eugene O'Neill and Agnes Boulton. This essay is part of an ongoing investigation of the portrayal of darkness and sixth sense on the 19th century English stage.