Outspoken Essays Part 10

Philip Neri, and obtained permission to modify, in his projected establishment, the rules of the Order, which, among other things, prescribed frequent floggings in public. He visited Naples, and came back a believer in the liquefaction of the saint's blood. The amazing letter to Henry Wilberforce, writter from Santa Croce, shows that he was the most docile and credulous of converts. Even the Holy House at Loreto caused him no difficulty. 'He who floated the ark on the surges of a world-wide sea, and inclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might remove mountains ...

could do this wonder also.' It 'may have been'; 'everybody believes it in Rome'; therefore Newman 'has no doubt'!

The new Oratory was placed by Papal brief at Birmingham. The first members of it were his friends who had left the English Church with him.

Recruits soon came in, and branch houses were talked of. But for many years Newman had reason to complain of neglect and want of sympathy. He even found empty churches when he preached in London. In conjunction with Faber, he next started a series of 'Lives of the Saints,' in which the most absurd 'miracles' were accepted without question as true. The 'Old Catholics,' who had no stomach for such food, protested; and Newman, this time thoroughly irritated, had to admit another failure.

The Oratory, however, and its London offshoot under Faber were prosperous, and the churches where Newman preached were not long empty.

In 1850 we find him in better spirits. He employed his energies in a series of clever lectures on 'Anglican Difficulties,' in which he ridiculed the Church of his earlier vows with all the refined cruelty of which he was a master. But he was soon in trouble again. One Dr.

Giacinto Achilli, formerly a Dominican friar, gave lectures in London upon the scandals of the Roman Inquisition, which had imprisoned him for attacking the Catholic faith and fomenting sedition. The temper of the British public at this time made it ready to believe anything to the discredit of the Roman Church, and Achilli became a popular hero.

Wiseman published a libellous article upon him in the _Dublin Review_, which pa.s.sed unnoticed. But when Newman repeated the charges of profligacy in a public lecture, Achilli brought an action for libel, which in costs and expenses cost Newman 12,000. The money however was paid, and much more than paid, by his co-religionists. This trial was quickly followed by the inauguration of a scheme for founding a Catholic University in Ireland, the avowed object of which was to withdraw young Catholics from the liberalising influences of mixed education. This scheme was sure to appeal strongly to Newman. Liberalism had come in with a rush at Oxford, after the dissipation of the 'long nightmare' (as Mark Pattison calls it) while the University was dominated by religious medievalism. The Oxford of Newman had become the Oxford of Jowett. The ablest of Newman's young friends and disciples, such as Mark Pattison and J.A. Froude, were now in the opposite camp, full of anger and disgust at the seductive influences from which they had just escaped.

Newman, as might be expected, was anxious to protect Catholic students from similar dangers, and accepted the post of Rector of the proposed Catholic University. He intended it to provide 'philosophical defences of Catholicity and Revelation, and create a Catholic literature.' The lectures in which he expounded his ideals at Dublin were a great success, and he returned to England full of hope. With a curious inability to read the character of one who was to be his worst enemy, he offered Manning the post of Vice-Rector. Manning's refusal was followed by his failure to obtain the support of Ward, Henry Wilberforce, and others; and Catholic opinion in Ireland was much divided. For three or four years Newman was engaged in ineffectual efforts to push his scheme forward. At last, in 1855, he was installed as Rector, and began his work at Dublin. A fine church was built at St. Stephen's Green with the surplus of the Achilli subscriptions, and Newman produced some excellent literary work in the form of University lectures and sermons. But the whole movement was viewed with distrust by the Irish ecclesiastics, who, as he said in a moment of impatience, 'regard any intellectual man as being on the road to perdition.' There was a cloud over his work from first to last. He had been promised a bishopric, without which he was made to feel himself in an inferior position by the Irish prelates; but the promise was not fulfilled. The Irish objected to one or two English professors on his staff, because they were English. Dr. Cullen, the ruling spirit in the Irish hierarchy, was a narrow conservative, who wished to use Newman merely as an instrument against progressive tendencies in Church and State. In 1857 he resigned an impossible task, and returned to Birmingham.

New undertakings followed, no more successful than the abortive university scheme. There was to be a new translation of the Bible, and a new Catholic magazine called the _Rambler_. The former enterprise was already well advanced when the general indifference of the Catholic public caused it to be abandoned. The _Rambler_, the contributors to which used a freedom of discussion unpalatable to Roman ecclesiastics, struggled on amid a storm of criticism till 1859, when Newman, who was then himself editor, resigned, and one more humiliating failure was registered. The management of the magazine pa.s.sed into other hands. The Oratory School at Birmingham, a much less contentious undertaking, was successfully launched in the same year.

In 1860 came the emanc.i.p.ation of the States of the Church by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel. Newman referred to the Piedmontese as 'sacrilegious robbers,' but his advocacy of the temporal power was not strong enough to please the Vatican, while the strength of Manning's language left nothing to be desired. Newman became more unpopular than ever. His reputation suffered by his former connection with the _Rambler_ and his supposed connection with the _Home and Foreign Review_, which Acton intended to represent the views of progressive Catholics, till it also was snuffed out by the hierarchy. The five years from 1859 to 1864 are considered by Mr. Ward to have been the saddest in Newman's life. He felt, truly enough, that the dominant party had no sympathy with his aims, and that he was treated as 'some wild incomprehensible beast, a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the hunter who captured it.' 'All through my life I have been plucked,' he writes to an old Oxford friend. There was even in his mind at this time a wistful yearning after the friends and the Church that he had left--a feeling, doubtless transient, but significant, which his biographer has allowed to show itself in a few pages of his book. After reminding himself, in his diary, of the warning against those who, after putting their hand to the plough, 'look back,' he proceeds to look back, because he cannot help it.

'I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the past may revive in the future.... I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then [in his Protestant days] it was in the freshness and fervour of youth.... I say the same of my state of mind from 1834 to 1845, when I became a Catholic. It is a time past and gone--it relates to a work done and over. "Quis mihi tribuat, ut sim iuxta menses pristinos, secundum dies, quibus Deus custodiebat me? Quando splendebat lucerna eius super caput meum, et ad lumen eius ambulabam in tenebris?"

... I have no friend at Rome; I have laboured in England, to be misrepresented, backbitten and scorned. I have laboured in Ireland, with a door ever shut in my face....

Contemporaneously with this neglect on the part of those for whom I laboured, there has been a drawing towards me on the part of Protestants. Those very books and labours which Catholics did not understand, Protestants did. I am under the temptation of looking out for, if not courting, Protestant praise.... What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic works.'

Such reflections might seem to indicate a disposition to return to the Anglican fold. But a man must have vanquished pride in its most insidious form before he can leave the Church of Rome for any other. The aristocratic _hauteur_ of the _civis Roma.n.u.s_ among barbarians lives on in the sentiment of the Roman Catholic towards Protestants. When Newman was publicly charged with intending to return to Anglicanism, this spirit broke out in a disagreeable and insulting manner.

The bitterness of these five years of neglect, in which he had been eating his heart in silence, must be remembered in connexion with the famous Kingsley controversy, which in 1864 roused him to put on his armour and fight for his reputation. There had always been an element of combativeness in Newman's disposition. '_Nescio quo pacto_, my spirits most happily rise at the prospect of danger,' he wrote early in life.

And when he could persuade himself that not only his honour but that of the Church was at stake, he could feel and show the true Catholic ferocity, the cruellest spirit on earth. 'A heresiarch,' he had written even in his Anglican days, 'should meet with no mercy. He must be dealt with by the competent authority as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable towards himself'! This was the temper, soured by defeat and not mellowed by age, which Charles Kingsley in an evil moment for himself chose wantonly to provoke. At Christmas 1863 there appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ a review of Froude's 'History of England,' in which Kingsley wrote 'Truth for its own sake has never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not be, and on the whole ought not to be--that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world.' This charge was in fact based on a careless reading, or an imperfect recollection, of the twentieth discourse in 'Sermons on Subjects of the Day.' The discourse in question is a somewhat nauseous glorification of the servile temper, but it only says that the meekness of the saints is (by Divine providence) so successful that it is always mistaken for craft. The _imputation_ of cunning is therefore a note of sanct.i.ty in its victim. Kingsley ought to have read the sermon again, and withdrawn unreservedly from an untenable position. But he thought that something less than a complete apology would serve; and so gave Newman the opportunity of his life. When the withdrawal which he offered was rejected, Kingsley made matters ten times worse for himself by an ill-considered pamphlet called 'What then does Dr. Newman mean?' In this effusion he vents all his scorn and hatred for Catholicism--for its tortuous tactics, its monstrous credulity and appet.i.te for miracles, which must proceed, according to him, either from infantile folly or from deliberate imposture.

Forgetting altogether that he has to defend himself against a specific charge of slander, he offers his great opponent the choice between writing himself down a knave or a fool--a knave if he pretends to believe in the Holy Coat and the blood of St. Januarius, a fool if he does believe in them.

The coa.r.s.eness of this attack upon an elderly man of saintly character and acknowledged intellectual eminence, who had to all appearance blighted a great career by honestly obeying his conscience, offended the British public, which was now fully disposed to give a respectful and favourable hearing to whatever Newman might care to say in reply. In a Catholic country it would have been useless for a Protestant, however falsely attacked, to appeal to Catholic public opinion for justice; but Newman understood the English character, and saw his splendid chance.

The famous defence was, from every point of view except the highest, a complete triumph. And although Hort was strictly accurate in describing the treatment of Kingsley as 'horribly unchristian,' it is demanding too much of human nature to expect a master of fence, when wantonly attacked with a bludgeon, to abstain from the pleasure of p.r.i.c.king his adversary scientifically in the tender parts of his body. The bitterest pa.s.sages were excised in later editions; and the 'Apologia' remains a masterpiece of autobiography, and a powerful defence of Catholicism. To Newman this appeared to be the turning-point in his fortunes. He felt strong enough to administer a severe snub to Monsignor Talbot, his old enemy, who, hearing of the success the 'Apologia,' invited him to preach at Rome.

Then at once he threw himself into a great scheme for founding an Oratory at Oxford. Eight and a half acres were bought between Worcester College, the Clarendon Press, the Observatory, and Beaumont Street, a magnificent site, which the Oratorians acquired for only 8400. But here again he was thwarted. W.G. Ward opposed the scheme with all his might, insisting on the necessity of 'preserving the purity of a Catholic atmosphere throughout the whole course of education.' The whole tendency of the Ultramontane movement was to secure, before all other things, a body of militant young Catholics to fight the battles of the Church.

Newman was willing to support the English Church in its warfare against unbelief; to the Ultramontane a Protestant is as certainly d.a.m.ned as an atheist, and is more mischievous as being less amenable to Catholic influence. Manning and Talbot seem to have given the project its _coup de grace_ at Rome, and Newman sold the land which he had bought. He was bitterly disappointed; but the growth of public esteem had given him self-confidence, and he did not again fall into despondency, though he had a strange presentiment of approaching death, which prompted his last famous poem, 'The Dream of Gerontius.' A second attempt to go to Oxford was thwarted by enemies at Home and in England in 1866-7. The extreme party, with Manning, now Archbishop, at their head, seemed to be victorious all along the line. They were able to proceed to their supreme triumph in the Vatican Council which issued the dogma of Papal Infallibility. Newman, while others were intriguing and haranguing, was quietly engaged in preparing his subtlest and (on one side) his most characteristic work, 'The Grammar of a.s.sent,' an attempt at a Catholic apologetic on a 'personalist,' as opposed to an 'intellectualist' basis.

He declined to take an active part in the theological conferences about infallibility, being by this time well aware how little weight such arguments as he could bring were likely to have at Rome. He was disgusted at the insolent aggressiveness of the Ultramontanes, but he had no wish to combat it. The situation was hopeless, and he knew it.

The death of several friends increased the sense of isolation, and during the years 1875 to 1879 his silence and depression were very noticeable to those who lived with him. His dearest friend, Ambrose St.

John, was one of several who died about this time. But Trinity College, Oxford, made him an honorary fellow in 1877, an honour which seemed to prognosticate the far higher distinction which was soon to be conferred upon him.

The death of Pius IX in 1878 brought to an end the long reign of obscurantism at the Vatican, and with the election of Leo XIII Newman emerged from the cloud under which he had remained for more than a generation. The new Pope lost no time in making him a Cardinal, though even now the prize seemed to be on the point of slipping through his fingers. He valued the honour immensely as setting the official seal of approbation on his life's work, and the last ten years of his life were quietly happy. He was able to mingle actively in affairs of public interest, and to write long letters, till near the end. He died on August 11, 1890, in his ninetieth year, and was buried, by his own request, in the same grave with his friend Ambrose St. John.

Why is it that this sad, isolated, broken life, in which the young man renounces the creed of the boy, and the elder man pours scorn upon the loyalties of his prime; which found its last haven in a society which wished to make a tool of him but distrusted him too much for even this pitiful service, has still an absorbing interest for our generation? For it is not only in England that Newman's fame lives and grows. In France there is a cult of Newman, which has produced biographies by Bremond and Faure, as well as a history of the Catholic Revival in England by Thureau-Dangin. In England, besides Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement,' we have biographies by R.H. Hutton and W. Barry, and appreciations or depreciations by E. Abbott, Leslie Stephen, Froude, Mark Pattison, and several others.

The interest is mainly personal and psychological. Newman's writings, and his life, are a 'human doc.u.ment' in a very peculiar degree. Bremond is right in calling attention to the _autocentrism_ of Newman. 'Although (he says) the words "I" and "me" are relatively rare in Newman's writings, whether as preacher, novelist, controversialist, philosopher, or poet, he always reveals and always describes himself.' Even his historical portraits are reconstructed from his inner consciousness; hence their historical falsity--all ages are mixed in his histories--and their philosophical truth. In a sense he was the most reserved of men.

We do not know whether he had any ordinary temptations; we do not know whether he ever fell in love. But the texture of his mind and the growth of his opinions have been laid bare to us with the candour of a saint and the accuracy of a dissector or a.n.a.lyst. He reminds us of De Quincey, who also could tell the story of his own life, but no other, and whose style, like his own, was modelled on the literary traditions of the eighteenth century.

He has left us, in the 'Apologia,' a picture of his precocious and dreamy boyhood, when he lived in a world of his own, peopled by angels and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature. He was lonely and reserved, then as always. It is not for nothing that in his sermons he expatiates so often on the impenetrability of the human soul. A nature so self-centred has always something hard and inhuman about it; he was loved, but loved little in return. And yet he craved for more affection than he could reciprocate. 'I cannot ever realise to myself,' he wrote once, 'that anyone loves me.' It is a common feeling in imaginative, withdrawn characters. Deepseated in his nature was a reverence for the hidden springs of thought, action, and belief. When he spoke of 'conscience,' as he did continually, he meant, not the faculty which decides ethical problems, but the undivided soul-nature which underlies the separate activities of thought, will, and feeling. In this sense the epigrammatist was right who said that 'to Newman his own nature was a revelation which he called conscience.' He 'followed the gleam,' uncertain whither it would lead him. The poem 'Lead, kindly Light' is the most intimate self-revelation that he ever made. This mental att.i.tude, which he took early in life, became the foundation of his 'personalist' philosophy, and of the anti-intellectualism which was the negative side of it. But this reliance on the inner light, which nearly made a mystic of him, was clouded by a haunting fear of G.o.d's wrath, which imparts a gloomy tinge to his Anglican sermons, and which, while he was halting between the English Church and Rome, plied him with the very unmystical question 'Where shall I be most _safe_?' an argument which he had used repeatedly and without scruple in his parochial sermons.[82]

It is nevertheless true that this self-centred spirit was, at least in early life, impressionable and open to the influence of others. His friends.h.i.+p with Hurrell Froude and Keble affected his opinions considerably: and still more potent was the pervading intangible influence of Oxford--the academic atmosphere. It cannot indeed be said that the University was at this time in a healthy condition. Mark Pattison has described with caustic contempt the intellectual lethargy of the place, and the miserable quality of the lectures. Oxford was still _de facto_ a close clerical corporation, and in most colleges 'clubbable men' rather than scholars were chosen for the fellows.h.i.+ps.

Oriel won its unique position by breaking through this tradition, and also by making originality rather than success in the university examinations the main qualification for election. But even at Oriel, and among the ablest men, there was great ignorance of much that was being thought and written elsewhere. Knowledge of German was rare. Even the cla.s.sics were not read in a humanistic spirit. 'Of the world of wisdom and sentiment--of poetry and philosophy, of social and political experience, contained in the Latin and Greek cla.s.sics, and of the true relation of the degenerate and semi-barbarous Christian writers of the fourth century to that world--Oxford, in 1830, had never dreamt.[83]

Theological prejudice in fact distorted the whole outlook of the resident fellows, and confounded all estimation of relative values.

Newman never, all through his life, took a step towards overcoming this early prejudice. He imagined a golden age of the Church, or several golden ages, and found them in 'the first three centuries,' in the time of Alfred the Great or of Edward the Confessor, or in the seventeenth century. He was only sure that the sixteenth century was made of much baser metal. This unhistorical idealisation of the past, even of a barbarous past, was very characteristic of Newman and his friends. They bequeathed to the Anglican Church the strange legend of an age of pure doctrine and heroic practice, to which it should be our aim to 'return.'

The real strength of this legend lies in the fact that it has no historical foundation. The ideal which is presented as a return or a revival is nothing of the kind, but a creation of our own time, projected by the imagination into the past, from which it comes back with a halo of authority. Newman had his full share of these illusions.

In his youth and prime he was more of an Englishman than an Anglican. He despised foreigners, unless they were Catholic saints, could not bear the sight of the _tricolor_, and hated all the 'ideas of the Revolution.' His dictum, 'Luther is dead, but Hildebrand and Loyola are alive,' throws a flood of light upon the contents of his mind, as does the truly British prejudice which caused him to be horrified at the sight of s.h.i.+ps coaling at Malta 'on a holy day.' His range of ideas was so much restricted that Bremond, a sincere admirer, says that his imagination lived on 'une poignee de souvenirs d'enfant.' How tragic was the fate which caught this loyal Englishman and more than loyal Oxonian in the meshes of a cosmopolitan inst.i.tution in which England counted for little and Oxford for nothing at all!

The Reform of 1832 seemed to threaten the English Church with destruction. Arnold in this year wrote 'The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save.' The bishops were stunned and bewildered by the unexpected outbreak of popular hostility. Old methods of defence were plainly useless; some new plan of campaign must be devised against the double a.s.sault of political radicalism and theological liberalism. To Newman both alike were of the devil; theological liberalism especially was only specious infidelity. He never had the slightest inkling that a deep religious earnestness and love of truth underlay the revolt against orthodox tradition. His fighting instincts were aroused. When Keble attributed the scheme for suppressing some Irish bishopries to 'national apostasy,' he rushed to arms in defence of Church privileges and property. In the first Tract (1833) he says:

'A notion has gone abroad that the people can take away your power. They think they have given it and can take it away.

They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your flocks--that these and such-like are the tests of your Divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our holy fathers the Bishops, as the representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches, and magnify your office, as being ordained by them to take part in their ministry.'

That was the keynote of the whole Tractarian movement. A weapon was needed to smite liberalism. Nothing but a compact and powerful organisation could repel the foe. G.o.d must have provided such an organisation: a Divine society, certain of ultimate victory, must exist somewhere. Newman and his friends hoped to find it in the Anglican Church; and such was the power of their contagious zeal and confident enthusiasm, that the immediate danger was actually staved off, and the Establishment was allowed a new lease of life. But the national Church of England was not const.i.tuted to resist the national will, and the attempt to reorganise it on Catholic lines was fore-doomed to failure.

And so, since the a.s.sumption that a great inst.i.tutional fighting Church _must_ exist was never even questioned, when Anglicanism failed him there was no other refuge but Rome.

He was certainly more logical than his friends who remained behind.

Anglo-Catholicism has its theoretical basis in a definition of Catholicity which is repudiated by all other Catholics; its traditions are largely legendary. But it is an eclectic system well suited to the English character, and the distorted view of history which Newman bequeathed to the party has enabled it to borrow much that is good from different sides, without any sense of inconsistency. The idea of a Divine society has been and is the inspiration of thousands of ardent workers in the Anglican Church. It lifted the religion of many Englishmen from the somewhat gross and bourgeois condition in which the movement found it, to a pure and unworldly idealism. And, unlike most other religious revivals, especially in this country, it has remained remarkably free from unhealthy emotionalism and hysterics. The social atmosphere of Oxford, always alien to mawkish sentiment, penetrated the whole movement, and maintained in it for many years a certain sanity and dignity which, while they doubtless prevented it from spreading widely in the middle cla.s.s, made the Tractarians respected by men of taste and education. But these influences could not be permanent. The goodwill of the Tractarian firm (if we may so express it) has now been acquired by men with very different aims and methods. The ablest members of the party are plunging violently into social politics, while the rank and file in increasing numbers are fluttering round the Roman candle, into which many of them must ultimately fall.

The progress of the movement between 1833 and 1845 was almost entirely in the direction of teaching the clergy to 'magnify their office.' The other part of the scheme, the combat against theological liberalism, fell quite into the background. The main reason for this was that during those strange years the theologians so completely dominated Oxford that liberalism could hardly raise its head, and was despised as well as hated. Only after Newman's secession could the regeneration of the University begin. Then indeed liberalism came in like a flood, though it was a very shallow flood in some cases. This was the day of the self-satisfied young rationalist, 'ecarte par une plaisanterie des croyances dont la raison d'un Pascal ne reussit pas a se degager,' as Renan says--an orgy of facile free thought which after a generation was chastised by another clerical reaction.

If Newman could have foreseen the victory of his party in the English Church, he might perhaps have been content to remain in it. We cannot tell. But it is doubtful whether he would have taken Pusey's place as leader of the party. Newman's influence was disturbing and subtly disintegrating to every cause for which he laboured. His startling candour often seemed like treachery. He could not work with others, and broke with nearly all his friends, retaining only his disciples. He confessed himself a bad judge of character. It is doubtful, after all, whether he was much injured by the jealousy and almost instinctive fear which he inspired among the Roman Catholic hierarchy. If he had been allowed to take the place due to his abilities, his character, and his reputation, what could he have done that he was unable to do at Edgbaston? We cannot fancy him plunged in crooked ecclesiastical intrigue, like that _Inglese italianato_, Cardinal Manning. Still less can we fancy him haranguing strikers, and stealing the credit of composing a trade dispute. No doubt he suffered under the sense of injury; but probably he did what was in him to do. If the Roman Church would not use him as a tool, it was probably because he would not have been a good tool. There are some mistakes which that Church seldom makes; it knows how to choose its men.

What will be the verdict of history on the type of Catholicism which Newman represented? He was kept out in the cold by a conservative Pope, and honoured by a liberal Pope. Which was right, from the point of view of Catholic interests and policy? This is perhaps the most important question which the life of Newman raises; for it affects our antic.i.p.ations of the future even more than our judgments of the past. Is Newman a safe or a possible guide for Catholics in the twentieth century?

Newman was no metaphysician; he confesses it himself. 'My turn of mind,' he says, 'has never led me towards metaphysics; rather it has been logical, ethical, practical.'[84] For metaphysics requires an initial act of faith in human reason, and Newman had not this faith.

Even in his Anglican days he uttered many astonis.h.i.+ng things in contempt of reason. 'What is intellect itself (he asks) but a fruit of the Fall, not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the utmost but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible with the regenerate mind?... Reason is G.o.d's gift, but so are the pa.s.sions.... Eve was tempted to follow pa.s.sion and reason, and she fell.'[85] 'Faith does not regard degrees of evidence.'[86] 'Faith and humility consist, not in going about to prove, but in the outset confiding in the testimony of others.' 'The more you set yourself to argue and prove, in order to discover truth, the less likely you are to reason correctly.'[87] The amazing crudity of this avowed obscurantism is likely to make the orthodox apologist writhe, and to move the rationalist to contemptuous laughter. In this and many other cases, Newman seems to love to caricature himself, and to put his beliefs in that form in which they outrage common sense most completely. We can imagine nothing more calculated to drive a young and ingenuous mind into flippant scepticism than a course of Newman's sermons. The _reductio ad absurdum_ of his arguments is not left to the reader to make; it is innocently provided by the preacher.

And yet Newman's central position is not absurd, or only becomes absurd when it is applied to justify belief in gross superst.i.tion. He holds that what he calls 'reasoning' deals only with abstractions, and is not the faculty on which we rely in forming 'judgments.' These judgments, to which we give our 'a.s.sent,' and by which we regulate our conduct, are affirmations of the basal personality. And these have an authority far greater than can ever arise out of the logical manipulation of concepts.

'There is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony borne to the truth by the mind itself.' The 'mind itself,' the concrete personality, is concerned with realities, while the intellect, which for him corresponds very nearly with the discursive reason (dihanoia) of the Greek philosophers, is at home only in mathematics and, up to a certain point, in logic. The concepts of the intellect have no existence outside it. 'The mind has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions and generalisations which have no counterpart, no existence, out of it.'[88] Parenthetically, we may remark that pa.s.sages like this show how wide of the truth Mr. Barry is when he speaks of Newman as a 'thorough Alexandrine.' To deny the existence of universals, to regard them as mere creations of the mind, is rank blasphemy to a Platonist; and the Alexandrines were Christian Platonists. No more misleading statement could be made about Newman's philosophy than to a.s.sociate him with Platonism of any kind, whether Pagan or Christian.

Newman adopts the sensationalist (Lockian) theory of knowledge. Ideas are copies or modifications of the data presented by the senses; 'first principles are abstractions from facts, not elementary truths prior to reasoning.' This is pure nominalism, in its crudest form. It makes all arguments in favour of the great truths of religion valueless; for if there are no universals, rational theism is impossible. It follows that the famous scholastic 'proofs of G.o.d's existence' have for Newman no cogency whatever; indeed it is difficult to see how he can have escaped condemning the whole philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a juggling with bloodless concepts. Newman himself pleaded that he had no wish to oppose the official dogmatics of his Church. But protestations are of no avail where the facts are so clear. 'The natural theology of our schools,'

says a writer in the _Tablet_, quoted by Dr. Caldecott in his 'Philosophy of Religion,' 'is based frankly and wholly on the appeal to reason.' This is notoriously true; and what Newman thought of reason we have already seen. His extreme disparagement of the intellect seems to preclude what he calls 'real a.s.sent' to the creeds and dogmas of Catholicism; for these clearly consist of 'notional' propositions. But Newman would answer that the Church is a concrete fact, to which 'real a.s.sent' can be given; and the Church has guaranteed the truth of the notional propositions in question. But since reason is put out of court as a witness to truth, on what faculty, or on what evidence, does Newman rely? Feeling he distrusts; that side of mysticism, at any rate, finds no sympathy from him. Nor does he, like many Kantians and others, make the will supreme over the other faculties. Rather, as we have seen, he bases his reliance on the verdicts of the undivided personality, which he often calls conscience. This line of apologetic was at this very time being ably developed by Julius Hare. It is in itself an argument which has no necessary connexion with obscurantism. 'Personalism,' as it is technically called, reminds us that we do actually base our judgments on grounds which are n.o.b purely rational; that the intellect, in forming concepts, has to be content with an approximate resemblance to concrete reality; and that the will and feelings have their rights and claims which cannot be ignored in a philosophy of religion. But while it is compatible with a robust faith in the powers of the constructive intellect, personalism is beyond question a self-sufficient, independent, individualistic doctrine. When it is combined with a nominalist theory of knowledge, it naturally suggests that every man may and should live by the creed which bests suits his idiosyncrasies. Now there was much in Newman's temperament which made him turn in this direction. 'Lead, kindly Light' has been the favourite hymn of many an independent thinker, to whom the authority of the Church is less than nothing. But on another side Newman was all his life a fierce upholder of the principle of authority. His reason for accepting the dogmas of the Church, and for wis.h.i.+ng to destroy heresiarchs like wild beasts, was certainly not that his basal personality testified to the truth and value of all ecclesiastical dogmas. He believed them 'by confiding in the testimony of others'--in other words, on the authority of the Catholic Church. If we push back the enquiry one step further, and ask on what grounds he chooses to prefer the authority of the Catholic Church to other authorities, such as natural science or philosophy, we are driven again to lay great stress on the almost political necessity which he felt that such a Divine society should exist. In accepting the authority of the Church, he accepted the authority of all that the Church teaches, in complete independence of human reason. But the Roman Church never professes to be independent of human reason. The official scholastic philosophy claims to be a demonstrative proof of theism.

Newman, then, was only half a Catholic. He accepted with all the fervour of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church. But in place of the official intellectualist apologetic, which an Englishman may study to great advantage in the remarkably able series of manuals issued by the Jesuits of Stonyhurst, he subst.i.tuted a philosophy of experience which is certainly not Catholic. The authority claimed by the Roman Church rests on one side upon revelation, on the other upon an elaborate structure of demonstrative reasoning, which the simple folk are allowed to 'take as read,' only because they cannot be expected to understand it, but which is declared to be of irresistible cogency to any properly instructed mind. To deny the validity of reasoning upon Divine things is to withdraw one of the supports on which Catholicism rests.

Subjectivism, based on vital experience, mixes no better with this system than oil with water. Scholasticism prides itself on clear-cut definitions, on irrefragable logic, on using words always in the same sense. For Newman, as for his disciples the Modernists, theological terms are only symbols for varying values, and he holds that the moment they are treated as having any fixed connotation, error begins. It is no wonder if learned Catholics thought that Newman did not play the game.

Father Perrone, in spite of his friends.h.i.+p for the object of his criticism, declared that 'Newman miscet et confundit omnia.'

The accusation of scepticism, which was not unnaturally brought against him, was hotly resented by Newman, and with some justice. Of the intensity of his personal conviction there can be no doubt whatever.

Indeed, it was just because his faith was in no danger that he cared so little for any intellectual defence of it. He might have made his own the lines of Wordsworth:

'Here then we rest; not fearing for our creed The worst that human reasoning can achieve To unsettle or perplex it.'

Wordsworth too, it may be remembered, speaks of 'reason' with hardly more respect than Newman himself as:

'The inferior faculty that moulds With her minute and speculative pains Opinion, ever changing.'

Robert Browning also, especially in his later years, uses anti-intellectualist language equally uncompromising. 'Wholly distrust thy reason,' he says in 'La Saisiaz.' Coleridge's distinction between 'understanding' and 'reason,' or Westcott's distinction between 'reason'

and 'reasoning,' might have saved these great writers from the appearance, and perhaps more than the appearance, of blaspheming against the highest and most divine faculty of human nature. For the reason is something much higher than logic-chopping; it can provide, from its own resources, a remedy for the intellectual error which is just now miscalled intellectualism; it is the activity of the whole personality under the guidance of its highest part; and because it is a real unification of our disordered nature, it can bring us into real contact with the higher world of Spirit. Newman's scepticism was not doubtfulness about matters of faith; it was only a wholly unjustifiable contempt and distrust for the unaided activity of the human mind. This activity, as far as he could see, produced only various forms of 'liberalism,' which he strangely enough regarded as a kind of scepticism. Thus he retorted, with equal injustice, the unjust charge brought against himself.

Newman has often been suspected or accused of quibbling and intellectual dishonesty. Kingsley, whose healthy but somewhat rough English morality and common sense were revolted by Newman's whole att.i.tude to life and conduct, was unable to conceive how any educated man could believe in winking Virgins and liquefying blood, and thought that Newman must be dishonest. More recently Dr. Abbott has accused him of being a _philomythus_. Judged by ordinary standards, Newman's criteria of belief do seem incompatible with intellectual honesty. Locke, whom Newman resembles in his theory of knowledge, lays down a canon which condemns absolutely the Cardinal's doctrine of a.s.sent. 'There is one unerring mark,' he says, 'by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth in earnest, namely, the not entertaining any proposition with greater a.s.surance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.' Newman himself quotes this dictum, and argues against it that men do, as a matter of fact, form their judgments in a very different fas.h.i.+on. To most people, however, the fact that opinions _are_ so manufactured is no proof that they _ought_ to be so. To most people it seems plain that the practical necessity of making unverified a.s.sumptions, and the habit of clinging to them because we have made them, even after their falsity has been exposed, is a satisfactory explanation of the prevalence of error, but not a reason for acquiescing in it. It is useful, they hold, to point out how a.s.sumption has a perilous tendency to pa.s.s for proof, not that we may contentedly confuse a.s.sumption with proof, but that we may be on our guard against doing so. But such is Newman's dislike of 'reason'

that he rejoices to find that the majority of mankind are, in fact, not guided by it. And then, having made this discovery, he is quite ready to 'reason' himself, but not in the manner of an earnest seeker after truth. Reason, for him, is a serviceable weapon of attack or defence, but he is like a man fighting with magic impenetrable armour. He enjoys a bout of logical fence; but it will decide nothing for him: his 'cert.i.tude' is independent of it. It is easy to see that such an att.i.tude must appear profoundly dishonest to any man who accepts Locke's maxim about truth-seeking. It is equally easy to see that Newman would spurn the charge of dishonesty as hotly as the charge of scepticism. His principles made it easy for him to adopt the characteristic Catholic habit of 'believing' anything that is pleasing to the religious imagination. His sermons are full of such phrases as 'Scripture _seems_ to show us'; 'why should we not believe ...'; 'who knows whether ...,'

and the like, all introducing some fantastic superst.i.tion. He deliberately accepts the insidious and deadly doctrine that 'no man is convinced of a thing who can endure the thought of its contradictory being true.' To which we may rejoin that, on the contrary, no man has a right to be convinced of anything until he has fairly faced the hypothesis of its contradictory being true. So long as Newman's method prevailed in Europe, every branch of practical knowledge was condemned to barrenness.

For what kind of knowledge is it which is acquired, not by the exercise of the discursive intellect, or by the evidence of our senses, but by the affirmations of our basal personality? Surely the legitimate province of 'personalism' lies in the region of general ideas, or rather in the _Weltanschauung_ as a whole. Our undivided personality protests against any philosophy which makes life irrational, or base, or incurably evil. It claims that those pictures of reality which are provided by the intellect, by the aesthetic sense, and by the moral sense, shall all have justice done to them in any attempted synthesis.

It rejects materialism, metaphysical dualism, solipsism, and pessimism, on one or other of these grounds. Such a final interpretation of existence as any of these offers, leaves out some fundamental and essential factor of experience, and is therefore untenable. If no metaphysical scheme can be constructed which is at once comprehensive and inwardly consistent, personalism insists that we must acknowledge defeat for the time, rather than take refuge in a logical system which may be free from inner contradictions but which does not satisfy the whole man as a living and active spiritual being. This is a sound argument. But it is absurd to suppose that our personality, acting as an undivided whole, can decide whether the inst.i.tutional Church, or one branch of it, is the Body of Christ and the receptacle of infallible revelation; whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or Nazareth; or whether Nestorius was a heretic. We have no magical sword for cutting these knots, and no miraculous guide to tell us that authority A is to be believed implicitly, while the possibility of authority B being right is not to be entertained even in thought. Newman as usual supplies us with the best weapons against himself. It startles us to find, even in 1852, such a sentence as this: 'Revealed religion furnishes facts to other sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach.

Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without revelation.' The transition from belief on the purely internal ground of personal a.s.sent to belief on the purely external ground of Church authority is certainly abrupt and hard to explain; but Newman makes it habitually, without any consciousness of a _salto mortale_. In the 'Apologia' he even says that the argument from personality is 'one form of the argument from authority.' The argument seems to be--'There is no third alternative besides Catholicism or Rationalism. But "personality"

will not accept the dictation of reason; therefore it must accept the authority of the Church.' It is a strange argument. All through his life he enormously exaggerated the moral and intellectual weight which should be attached to Church tradition. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum' were the words which rang in his ears at the supreme moment of his great decision. His 'orbis terrarum' was the Latin empire. And when even in those countries the authority of the Pope is rejected, he condemns modern civilisation as an aberration. This however is a complete abandonment of his own test. He first says 'The judgment of the great world is final'; and then 'If the world decides against Rome, so much the worse for the world.' After all, Newman had no right to complain if his opponents found his reasoning disingenuous. To make up our minds first, and to argue in favour of the decision afterwards, is in truth to make the reason a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the irrational part of our nature.