by Edward Short
Keble’s understanding of the predicament into which liberal reform threw the Church of England can be seen in his assize sermon “On National Apostasy” (1833), which for Newman marked the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Dean Church captured the embattled climate out of which the sermon arose. “It became more and more plain that great changes were at hand, though not so plain what they would be. It seemed likely that power had come into the hands of men and parties hostile to the Church in their principles, and ready to use to its prejudice the advantages which its position as an establishment gave them; and the anticipation grew in Keble’s mind, that in the struggles which seemed likely, not only for the legal rights but for the faith of the Church, the Church might have both to claim more, and to suffer more, at the hands of Government.”90 The questions and concerns Keble raised in the sermon would exercise the Tractarians from 1833 to 1845 and beyond. “What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ?” Keble asked at the beginning of the sermon. “And what are the particular duties of sincere Christians, whose lot is cast by Divine Providence in a time of such dire calamity?”91 Here was the clarion call that unified the Tractarians.
Tract 90 and the Crisis of Tractarianism
The “glorious clamor,” as Maria Giberne called it, that broke over Tract 90 forced Keble to recognize that the rift in the Anglican Church between those who read her articles in a Protestant and those who read them in a Catholic light could not widen indefinitely.92 Sooner or later, Anglicans would have to decide whether they wished to subscribe to a Protestant or to a ‘catholic’ church, and if they chose the latter, they would have to decide whether the English Church truly met the criteria for catholicity. This was the crisis of Tractarianism. Newman wrote the Tract to convince Rome-leaning Tractarians like George Ward and Frederick Oakeley that the 39 Articles “Though the offspring of an uncatholic age … are, through God’s providence, to say the least, not uncatholic, and may be subscribed by those who aim at being Catholic in heart and doctrine.” Newman stressed that “the Articles are evidently framed on the principle of leaving open large questions … They state extremely broad truths, and are silent about their adjustment.” Where Newman drew the Protestant ire of his Anglican compatriots was in contending that, “it is a duty which we owe both to the Catholic Church and to our own, to take our reformed confessions in the most Catholic sense which they will admit; we have no duty towards their framers.”93 To sidestep this duty would be to concede the definition of Anglican dogma to the Broad Church party, which, of course, was only interested in dissolving, not defining dogma. What baffled so many of Newman’s contemporaries was his insistence on treating the 39 Articles as a living document, not as one buried in the past. And this was why it was so ironic of critics like F. D. Maurice to characterize Newman’s interpretation of the Articles as “non-natural” because, on the contrary, Newman’s interpretation was profoundly natural.94 His understanding of how history plays out in the world of the present animates the Tract’s entire argument. “The Protestant confession was drawn up with the purpose of including Catholics,” he reminds his readers, “and Catholics now will not be excluded. What was an economy in the Reformers, is a protection to us. What would have been a perplexity to us then is a perplexity to Protestants now. We could not then have found fault with their words; they cannot now repudiate our meaning.”95
In the most memorably acid passage of Tract 90, Newman wrote: “let the Church, our Mother, sit still; let her be content to be in bondage; let her work in chains; let her submit to her imperfections as a punishment; let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies, and inconsistent precedents, and principles but partially developed. We are not better than our fathers; let us bear to be what Hammond was, or Andrews, or Hooker; let us not faint under that body of death, which they bore about in patience; nor shrink from the penalty of sins, which they inherited from the age before them.”96 One reader of the Tract, Robert Belaney, a Cambridge M.A. who resigned his Anglican living in 1852 and later became a Catholic priest at Glasgow, wrote to Newman to assure him that his warning was welcome in at least one quarter. “I began to read the Tract with some alarm when I heard of the sensation it had made at Cambridge,” Belaney wrote, “hardly believing that so much noise could have arisen without any cause …” But he was surprised by how thoroughly he agreed with Newman. “I am rejoiced with the Tract. Its notoriety will give notoriety to others that have preceded it, and they will together, turn men to religious inquiry who had hitherto thought only of the subject as if it concerned them less than the state of the funds. You have, I think, broken the chain which bound the Christian community to a deadly and deadening system—a system as remote from that which has been preserved to us in the Liturgy, as truth is from its counterfeit.”97
In 1841, Keble privately printed a letter to his friend John Coleridge setting out his view of the controversy, which was later published as “The Case of Catholic Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles Considered with Especial Reference to the Duties and Difficulties of English Catholics in the Present Crisis.” Keble “saw nothing in the sense of what was said, which had not been taught at large long ago, without a shadow of scandal …”98 He was as surprised as Newman that the Tract should have caused such an uproar. For men like Keble and Newman (and for that matter, Gladstone), all steeped in history, the idea that the Articles could be given a Catholic reading was a commonplace.
In the national debate over Tract 90, Pusey and Keble stood by their beleaguered friend.99 To the Bishop of London, apropos the suppression of Tract 90, Pusey pointed out on Newman’s behalf: “Books have appeared, and are appearing continually, denying the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, terming the doctrine which our Church teaches a heresy, but no one interferes with or censures them.”100 Later, in 1865, Pusey after publishing his first Eirenicon, suggesting grounds for some rapprochement between the English and the Roman Church, reprinted Tract 90, convinced, as he told Keble, that “People are now prepared for it … my historical preface will remove a good deal of prejudice … Liddon [Pusey’s biographer] agrees with me, that the … slur on Tract XC is a great hindrance to the Catholic interpretation of the Articles.”101 At the time of the Tract’s original publication, however, Keble, for all his attempts to remain upbeat, saw the storm over Tract 90 as an ominous sign of things to come. “My feeling about it is that if we are right in the main, their censure [that of the Heads of Houses] if carried will cause more good than harm, and the annoyance of it to oneself be no more than one deserves in many ways. But I hardly know how to reconcile to the notion of Oxford falling off from Catholicism so expressly. It will make one’s life, what remains of it, much less poetical.”102 From this point on, as Church observed in his history of the Oxford Movement, and indeed as Newman so accurately predicted in his King William Street lectures, later published as Lecturers on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Submitting to the Catholic Church (1850), the Tractarian clergy were discredited men. “Oxford repudiated them. Their theories, their controversial successes, their learned arguments, their appeals to the imagination, all seemed to go down, and to be swept away like chaff, before the breath of straightforward common sense and honesty. Henceforth there was a badge affixed to them and all who belonged to them, a badge of suspicion and discredit, and even shame, which bade men beware of them, an overthrow under which it seemed wonderful that they could raise their heads or expect a hearing.”103
Via Media
Since so much of the crucial correspondence between Newman and Keble from 1841 to 1845 turned on the via media, we should examine how both men regarded that elusive property.104
Newman’s conversion to Rome cast a fair amount of what he did within the Oxford Movement in an ironic light but there were few more ironic things in that career than the letter he sent off to Charles Russell, an Irish Catholic priest and professor of Church History at Maynoo
th, in response to a letter in which the professor admitted: “Every day, every new event, increases the confidence with which I put up my humble prayers that I may be permitted to see it fully accomplished—to see your Church once again in her ancient and honourable position, to have the happiness of knowing that you and your devoted friends are ministering to the same altar to which my own life is vowed.”105 In response to Russell’s moving letter, Newman defended the Anglican Church with arguments that he would later use to repudiate her.
I do not look so despairingly at our Church as you do. While I think (of course) that she is a branch of the Church Catholic, I also have lately had my hopes increased as to the prospect of her improvement in doctrinal exactness, by the very events which seem to you to show that Catholic truth is but barely tolerated within her pale. I have every reason to be made sanguine by the disturbance which has followed Tract 90, which I never have been before … . My only anxiety is lest your branch of the Church should not meet us by those reforms which surely are necessary—It never could be, that so large a portion of Christendom should have split off from the communion of Rome, and kept up a protest for 300 years for nothing. I think I never shall believe that so much piety and earnestness would be found among Protestants, if there were not some very grave errors on the side of Rome. To suppose the contrary is most unreal, and violates all one’s notions of moral probabilities. All aberrations are founded on, and have their life in, some truth or other—and Protestantism, so widely spread and so long enduring, must have in it, and must be witness for, a great truth or much truth. That I am an advocate for Protestantism, you cannot suppose—but I am forced into a Via Media, short of Rome, as it is at present.106
In describing himself as “forced into a Via Media” Newman was only telling the abject truth. More than twenty years later, in his Apologia, he would recall the faltering progress of the theory that promised a happy medium “between the extremes of Romanism and popular Protestantism as preserved in the English Church.” There, he cited his article, “The State of Religious Parties,” from the April 1839 number of the British Critic, in which he had written that all who did not wish to be “democratic, or pantheistic, or popish,” must “look out for some Via Media which will preserve us from what threatens, though it cannot restore the dead.” These were typical of the terms in which Newman recommended his mediatorial theory—never as a perfect solution to his doubts about the catholicity of the English Church but as a pis aller. “The spirit of Luther is dead; but Hildebrand and Loyola are alive. Is it sensible, sober, judicious, to be so very angry with those writers of the day, who point to the fact, that our divines of the seventeenth century have occupied a ground which is the true and intelligible mean between extremes? Is it wise to quarrel with this ground, because it is not exactly what we should choose, had we the power of choice? Is it true moderation, instead of trying to fortify a middle doctrine, to fling stones at those who do? … Would you rather have your sons and daughters members of the Church of England or of the Church of Rome?”107
Later, in a letter to Henry Wilberforce, written in January 1846, after he had converted, Newman admitted that his doubts about the via media had been fairly persistent. Responding to an article questioning his belief in the Anglican Church when still a Tractarian, Newman told Wilberforce that “in truth the writer confuses faith in the English Church, with faith in the particular theory on which it is to be supported and the particular body of evidence which forms its credentials. This theory is familiarly called the Via Media. Now in the year 1834 or 35 my belief even in this theory was so strong, that I recollect feeling an anxiety about the Abbé Jager, with whom I was controverting, lest my arguments were unsettling him and making him miserable. Those arguments were not mine, but the evolution of Laud’s theory, Stillingfleet’s etc which seemed to me clear, complete, and unanswerable. I do not think I had that unhesitating belief in it in 1836–7 when I published my Prophetical Office, or rather I should say that zeal for it – for I believed it fully or at least was not conscious I did not. It is difficult to say whether or not a flagging zeal involves an incipient doubt… . I thought the theory true, but that all theories were doubtful and difficult, and all reasoning a weariness to the flesh.”108 Yet, in familiarizing himself with the patristic history on which the via media theory was largely based, Newman began to have more serious doubts. “As time went on and I read the Fathers more attentively, I found the Via Media less and less satisfactory. It broke down with me in 1839. So much on the theory of the Anglican Church – but as to the Church itself I implicitly believed in her divinity till a late date. I cannot tell when – I suppose till I gave up St Mary’s”109
Even in 1834, in “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” a dialogue between three friends about the nature of the Anglican Church and its relation to Rome, Newman had already given expression to a view of the acceptability of the via media that was highly skeptical.
What is the ground of Andrewes and Laud, Stillingfleet and the rest, but a theory which has never been realized? I grant that the position they take in argument is most admirable, nearer much than the Romanist’s to that of the primitive Church, and that they defend and develop their peculiar view most originally and satisfactorily; still, after all, it is a theory,—a fine-drawn theory, which has never been owned by any body of churchmen, never witnessed in operation in any system. The question is not, how to draw it out, but how to do it. Laud’s attempt was so unsuccessful as to prove he was working upon a mere theory. The actual English Church has never adopted it: in spite of the learning of her divines, she has ranked herself among the Protestants, and the doctrine of the Via Media has slept in libraries …110
This did not stop Newman from expounding the via media in 1837 in a book of the same title which he dedicated to Martin Routh (1755–1854), the legendary Magdalen don, who was as fond of his eighteenth-century wig as he was of all the traditions of his college. Once he became President of Magdalen, he married a woman 35 years younger, though she aged more rapidly than her long-lived husband. Tuckwell recalled this unique woman vividly: “With strongly marked features, a large mustache and a profusion of grey hair, she became a familiar sight, driven about Oxford by a hunchback named Cox in a little chaise drawn by a donkey. ‘Woman,’ the president would call to her as soon as he saw the chaise arriving, ‘Woman, the ass is at the door.’”111 In a letter to Routh, Newman reiterated his doubts about the soundness of the via media: “I cannot venture to hope that there is nothing in my volume of private and questionable opinion – but I have tried, as far as may be, to follow the line of doctrine marked out by our great divines, of whom perhaps I have chiefly followed Bramhall, then Laud, Hammond, Field, Stillingfleet, Beveridge and others of the same school.”112 To Manning he was even more candidly diffident. “My book, I expect, will be out next Wednesday. It is an anxious thing. I have to deal with facts so much more than in writing Sermons – and facts which touch people to the quick. With all my care I may have made some floors – and I am aware that I deserve no mercy from your Protestants – and if they read me, shall find none. Then again the Via Media is ever between the cross fires of Papists and Protestants.” 113
This enduring doubt about the only theory that enabled Newman to cling to some belief in the catholicity of the Anglican Church must be kept in mind when one revisits the series of letters that Newman wrote to Keble about whether he should retain St. Mary’s because it refutes Church’s suggestion that if the Heads of Houses had been less intemperate in their response to Tract 90 Newman might have remained faithful to the via media. All the evidence we have prior to 1841 shows that Newman would probably have repudiated the via media in any case, regardless of how the Heads of Houses responded. Church, however, was right about the fallout of Tract 90: “It was a favorite boast of Dean Stanley’s in after-times that the intervention of the Liberals saved the Tractarians from complete disaster. It is quite true that the younger Liberals disapproved the continuance of harsh measures … But t
he debt of the Tractarians to their Liberal friends in 1845 was not so great as Dean Stanley … supposed to be the case … . The Tractarians were saved by what they were and what they had done, and could do, themselves. But it is also true, that out of these feuds and discords, the Liberal party which was to be dominant in Oxford took its rise, soon to astonish old-fashioned Heads of Houses with new and deep forms of doubt more audacious than Tractarianism, and ultimately to overthrow not only the victorious authorities, but the ancient position of the Church, and to recast from top to bottom the institutions of the University.”114
Keble’s uneasiness with the via media of the Anglican Church was at once more guarded and less decisive. In a revelatory sermon entitled, “Endurance of Church Imperfections,” preached before Oxford on the Feast of St. Andrew, 1841, he wrote, “When God seems to be breaking down what He hath built, and plucking up what He hath planted; when we know not how soon our house may be left unto us desolate; let us not then, of all times, be seeking great things for ourselves; neither in the way of temporal safety and ease, nor even in the way of spiritual assurance and comfort; but let us turn our thoughts more dutifully than ever to the plain straightforward keeping of the Commandments of God … accounting it a great thing, if we do but probably see our way in the very next step we are to take, and if we have but a reasonable chance of being in God’s Church now, and of pardon and peace when we come to the eternal world.”115 There is a distinct note of diffidence in this, as well as the suggestion that accepting uncertainty might be an exercise of humility, of spiritual mortification. “For surely to serve God loyally in doubt and anguish and perplexity concerning the faith, it is as great a trial of disinterestedness as to serve Him in the midst of outward and bodily discomforts.”116 And comparing the English to the Roman Church, with respect to what he calls “the great foundations of the faith,” he writes of how “we are met in one place by startling indecision, in another by no less startling positiveness …”117 Speaking first of the Anglican Church, he remarks how “the discipline of the Church … has vanished from among ourselves,” and wonders “how much of grace and perfection is lost by the Church submitting for any length of time to this absence of discipline …”118 Making every allowance for the indecisiveness of the Anglican Church, Keble expressly warns his auditors not to seek any certainty elsewhere, which he regards as “a temptation which may and ought to be met practically by the like exercise of self-control as any other indulgence of natural feeling.”119 And, again, he counsels against succumbing to this temptation on the grounds that there is something pleasing to God in our abiding uncertainty. “Bear a part in the overwhelming trials of the Household of God, now seeming to be forsaken,” Keble exhorts the faithful, elaborating on God’s words to Baruch. “Teach yourself to acquiesce in what befalls you, by considering how strange it would seem, how unaccountable in the sight of Angels, were you to be exempt from fear and anguish, now when the windows from on high are opened and the foundations of the earth do shake. Rather learn to take with thankfulness your share of the perplexity, as a token of hope that you are yet in God’s Household, since you are accounted worthy to be afflicted in her affliction.” From this Keble derived guidance for the perplexed Anglican faithful that he would recommend in the years leading up to and after Newman’s conversion. “If the whole Kingdom of God be indeed in the decayed condition, which so many appearances indicate; how dare any individual among us seek great things for himself, either in the way of certainty or sensible comfort … ?” For Keble, certainty in religious matters had become tantamount to presumptuousness. “Who among us have led such lives, that we may safely trust our own impressions of having received full satisfaction, either in the judgment or in our feelings?”120 Those who allow themselves to hunger for certainty are culpable of vainglory. “They have too much of a seeming Paradise in them, too little of the Cross.” This is the “startling positiveness” that Keble sees in those impressed by the claims of Rome, while “a rightly disposed and considerate person … would rather be startled and rendered suspicious by arguments and statements which sound entirely satisfactory …” Moreover, this same “rightly disposed person” should “greatly mistrust the probable effect of any change, which is made not out of simple obedience and from a longing after abstract perfection.”121 This laid the ground for the argument for staying put, which Keble gamely mounted, though not without strenuous special pleading.