Jeffrey Steenson On Levi Silliman Ives, With A Detour Into William James

I continue to admire the brothers William and Henry James as engaging figures in US intellectual history, though neither was remotely Catholic. William's religion was probably just Harvard, while it's fairly easy to derive from Henry's writing that their father, Henry Sr, was a Swedenborgian apologist. I bring this up here because I've always been drawn to William's description of the "sick soul" in The Varieties of Religious Experience , which is a necessary precondition for genuine religious conversion, as opposed to "healthy mindedness", which essentially avoids religious impulse.

My regular correspondent brought to my attention a strange letter from Jeffrey Steenson at Christmas 2014, published on the old Ordinariate News blog. It begins,

In Rome on Christmas Day, 1852, Pope Pius IX received into the Catholic Church Dr. Levi Silliman Ives, the second Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina. It is a fascinating, little-known story about a courageous soul involved in the Oxford Movement that re-introduced Catholic teaching to Anglican life.

Immediately below it, he publishes a representation of Ives, still an Episcopalian bishop, surrounded by young beauties of Raleigh, NC in prayerfully kneeling positions, although even the 1840s-50s were not exempt from double entendre, here hopefully not intentional. I simply have no idea what Msgr Steenson had in mind in reproducing this. But there's more in the letter that's puzzling. He outlines Ives's struggles with his diocese, presumably unrelated to any activities in the illustration, and his consequent suffering:

His episcopal career was a difficult one. The diocese did not welcome his high church ways. . . . Bishop Ives was forced to backtrack and assure the diocese that he was unreservedly Anglican.

But it didn't work. . . . Perhaps we in the Ordinariate have some sense of his struggles and the relief that came when the decision was finally made.

. . . To leave the Episcopal Church back then was regarded as an act of apostasy. Such converts (turning around) were then called perverts (turning in a bad way). He was said to be suffering from a form of mental illness: “the bishop had been in a state of mental illness that impaired his judgment.” Thankfully today we are in a (mostly) different place!

This reminds me of the accounts I've noted here from Fr Phillips and Fr Bartus of their suffering as they asserted their own apostasy -- which in the cases of Phillips and Steenson (and for that matter Ives) it most assuredly was, a violation of canons covering abandonment of communion. Msgr Steenson's successor as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande, Michael Vono, made the entirely valid points that in resigning as bishop to become Catholic, Steenson had violated his consecration vows, and Vono rightly questioned Steenson's sincerity, insofar as he would concelebrate with women priests as bishop.

In fact, an issue I would raise as well (and Vono in 2007 was unaware of Steenson's plans to be ordained a Catholic priest), holy orders in Catholicism are viewed as equivalent to matrimony, and remarriage in this view is problematic. The Church acknowledges the need at times for divorce, but remarriage is a more intricate issue. I've got to wonder whether this underlay Frederick Kinsman's decision not to pursue ordination as a Catholic priest, although Ives's marriage would have precluded this in any case.

The problem I see in the context of William James here is that conversion is the cure for the "sick soul". I've begun a reading of Ives's apologia, The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism, and the title, as well as what I find in it, reflect a sincere account of a "sick soul":

In the outset, let me recall the fact, that for years a mysterious influence,, which I could neither fully comprehend nor entirely throw off, visited my mind, unsettling its peace, and filling it with yearnings for something in religion more real than I had hitherto experienced. (p 13)

Well, if nothing else, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable being portrayed the way Ives was in the illustration that went with Steenson's letter. The problem I see is that Phillips, Bartus, Steenson, and others see the resolution of their mental trials as leading to suffering -- I made my decision, but then that awful bishop fired me! I made my decision, but when I told those vestries about it, they didn't want to hire me! And for Steenson, it seems as though he made his decision, but then people like Bp Vono questioned his sincerity! Ah, the humanity!

Isn't this at vairance with Philippians 3:8?

More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ

Msgr Steenson seems like an unhappy guy, even years after his conversion. It's a shame.