Newman and His Contemporaries
Page 12
Neither my fingers nor my eyesight allow me to express in writing the debt of gratitude which I owe to the late Principal Shairp for the kindness with which he has so many times spoken of me in his publications, nor the deep sorrow with which I heard of his death …
But passing by my personal feelings, I lament the Principal’s loss to us on a more serious account. In this day of religious indifference and unbelief it has been long my hope and comfort to think that a silent and secret process is going on in the hearts of many, which, though it may not reach its limit and scope in this generation or the next, is a definite work of Divine Providence, in prospect of a state of religion such as the world has never yet seen; issuing, not indeed in a millennium, but in a public opinion strong enough for the vigorous spread and exaltation, and thereby the influence and prosperity of Divine Truth all over the world.197
In his correspondence with Keble, Newman assiduously sought to enlist Keble in this “silent and secret process,” convinced, as Pusey was convinced, that “When all else had been said and done, people would wait and see what came from Hursley before they made up their minds as to the path of duty.”198
In his response to Newman after he had converted, after “the thunderbolt,” as he called it, had “actually fallen upon us, and you [had] actually taken the step which we greatly feared,” Keble claimed to regret not being able to dissuade Newman from his move. “Besides the deep grief of losing you for a guide and helper, and scarce knowing which way to look, (though I trust, thanks (in good part), to your kindness in many ways I am not so wretched as I was), you may guess what uncomfortable feelings haunt me, as if I, more than any one else, was answerable for whatever of distress and scandal may occur. I keep on thinking, ‘If I had been different, perhaps N. would have been guided to see things differently, and we might have been spared so many broken hearts and bewildered spirits.’”199 This is a criticism that one hears echoed even by those sympathetic to Keble, convinced as they are that at the very least he should have argued the case for the catholicity of the Church of England by pointing to the catholicity of the Orthodox Church, though the odds of such an argument cutting any ice with Newman were slim. Whether Keble himself really imagined that he had the theological wherewithal to parry the objections to Anglicanism raised by Newman is dubious. After Pusey told him that “Reassurance from you encourages people better than anything else,” Keble admitted: “I have thought a good deal whether there is anything I could say or do, painfully consciously as I am that I have all my life been going on authority in the points at issue between us and Rome, and now that authority fails me. And the persons whom you speak of as wanting to be reassured would be little helped, I fear, by being told that however they may doubt, they are to stay and work on as well as they can, and not to go until conviction quite forces them; which I am afraid is the most I could say at present.” This was nothing if not honest, though to another correspondent Keble admitted the qualms this caused him: “it keeps occurring unpleasantly to me, that this is hardly consistent with the priest’s office and especially so when, as sometimes happens, I am asked for advice; then indeed I have to think of the blind leading the blind.”200 It is more likely that he regretted not mounting a stronger case for Anglicanism—an Anglicanism which, he acknowledged, was as inconsistent and as uncatholic as Newman charged it with being—only because he knew that his co-religionists would find fault with him for not mounting such a case. In his response to Newman’s conversion he was already preparing his response to his Anglican detractors. But in a subsequent letter to Newman, Keble struck a note of pitiable helplessness, suffused with love and gratitude, which more accurately reflected his true feelings towards his lost guide.
My dearest Newman, you have been a kind and helpful friend to me in a way in which scarce any one else could have been, and you are so mixed up in my mind with old and dear and sacred thoughts, that I cannot well bear to part with you, most unworthy as I know myself to be; and yet I cannot go along with you. I must cling to the belief that we are not really parted—you have taught me so, and I scarce think you can unteach me—and having relieved my mind with this little word, I will only say God bless you and reward you a thousandfold all your help in every way to me unworthy, and to so many others. May you have peace where you are gone, and help us in some way to get peace; but somehow I scarce think it will be in the way of controversy. And so, with somewhat of a feeling as if the Spring had been taken out of my year, I am always, your affectionate and grateful J. Keble.201
Newman responded to his dear friend with one of the most moving letters he ever wrote:
Littlemore. November 14, 1845
May the Holy Trinity,
Father, Son, and Spirit,
return to you sevenfold, My dear Keble, all the good, of which you have been the instrument towards me, since I first knew you. To you I owe it, humanly speaking, that I am what and where I am. Others have helped me in various ways, but no one can I name but you, among those I ever knew, except one who is gone, who has had any part in setting my face in that special direction which has led me to my present inestimable gain.
Do not let me pain you, My dear Keble, by saying this. Let me not seem rude. Let it be your comfort, when you are troubled, to think that there is one who feels that he owes all to you, and who, though, alas, now cut off from you, is a faithful assiduous friend unseen.
Ever Yours very affectionately John H Newman202
Moving as this letter is, it is also perplexing. How Keble could have been instrumental in Newman’s conversion at the same time that he insisted that there could be no grounds for considering Roman Catholicism the one holy catholic and apostolic Church needs explaining, especially since Keble repeatedly put the claims of hearth and home before objective truth. Beyond that, he doubted whether sinful divisive man could ascertain the claims of truth. Newman’s fear that remaining within a communion hostile to true catholicity put one’s soul in peril left him untroubled. Yet by taking up the objections to Rome that Keble countenanced and subjecting them to “the burden of long probationary deliberation,” Newman demonstrated how negligible such objections were before the certainty that only the one true fold could bestow.203 In trying to convert Keble, Newman converted himself.
Chapter 2
Staying Put: John Keble After 1845
In the correspondence between Newman and Keble in the crucial period between 1841 and 1845, Newman ostensibly turned to Keble to help him resist Rome, but as events unfolded he began to share doubts about Canterbury with Keble that he knew Keble shared, to prompt his friend to consider making the same move to Rome on which he was increasingly resolved himself. This effort to convert his friend did not end with Newman’s conversion. Even after Keble effectively severed relations with his old friend, Newman continued to think kindly towards him. In 1847, when he was considering becoming an Oratorian, he wrote of St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorian Order, to his sister Jemima, “This great Saint reminds me in so many ways of Keble, that I can fancy what Keble would have been, if God’s will had been he should have been born in another place and age; he was formed on the same type of extreme hatred of humbug, playfulness, nay oddity, tender love for others, and severity, which are the lineaments of Keble.”1 Even earlier, in December of 1845, Newman wrote to his old friend Maria Giberne, who would become a Visitation nun in 1856, after living in Rome for ten years, first with the Colonna family and then the Borghese: “And now, My dear Miss G. that you have the power, pray begin your intercessions very earnestly (though I need not say it) for those dear friends of mine, or ours, who are still held back, or rather imprisoned in their old error, and that by their own good feelings and amiable affections. You have all the Saints of heaven to add [aid] you now, and especially that first and most glorious of Saints whose name you bear. First of all pray for dear Isaac Williams who is to appearance on his death bed. He has an abscess on his back, from which they augur the worst … And next do not forget the two Kebles,
to one of whom we owe so much. And lastly let me name Pusey, whose conversion (of which there are no signs) would be followed by so many.”2 In this respect, Newman would be the figure who most fulfilled the role of Samuel that Keble had extolled in his sermon “On National Apostasy”—not only praying for the apostate but remonstrating with them for continuing to repudiate their ancient constitution. In this chapter, I shall look at how Keble squared his remaining within the Anglican Church from 1845 until his death at a time when its suppositious catholicity all but vanished.
In 1846, Keble sent Newman a copy of Lyra Innocentium, in the introductory verses of which, the poet prayed that he be given the guidance to guide others:
And with no faint nor erring voice
May to the wanderer whisper, “Stay;
God chooses for thee; seal his choice,
Nor from thy Mother’s shadow stray;
For sure thy Holy Mother’s shade
Rests yet upon thine ancient home:
No voice from Heaven has clearly said
‘Let us depart;’ then fear to roam.”
Here was Keble’s accustomed argument for staying put recast in verse. In his review of the book, Newman passed over this paean to stasis and described instead the tragic impasse in which so many Tractarians found themselves after 1845.
When the opening heart and eager intellect find themselves led on by their teachers, as if by the hand, to the See of St. Peter, and then all of a sudden, without good reason assigned, are stopped in their course, bid stand still in some half position, on the middle of a steep, or in the depth of a forest, the natural reflection which such a command excites is, “This is a mockery; I have come here for nothing; if I do not go on, I must go back.”3
Here was the impasse that fueled Keble’s uncertainty, which he falsely ascribed to Joseph Butler. And Newman described it with deadly psychological precision: “A forlorn feeling comes over the mind, as if after all there was nothing real in orthodoxy—as if it were a matter of words, about which nothing is known, nothing can be proved—as if one opinion were as good as another.” This despair of certainty in dogma did indeed overtake Keble. Still, in the same review, Newman reaffirmed the hope that never left him for as long as Keble lived. “As to the author personally, we cannot help cherishing one special trust, which we hope is not too sacred to put into words. If there be one writer in the Anglican Church who has discovered a deep, tender, loyal devotion to the Blessed Mary, it is the author of the Christian Year. The image of the Virgin and Child seems to be the one vision upon which both his heart and intellect have been formed; and those who knew Oxford twenty or thirty years ago, say that, while other college rooms were ornamented with pictures of Napoleon on horseback, or Apollo and the Graces, or Heads of Houses lounging in their easy chairs, there was one man, a young and rising one, in whose rooms, instead of these, might be seen the Madonna di Sisto or Domenichino’s St. John—fit augury of him who was in the event to do so much for the revival of Catholicism. We will never give up the hope, the humble belief, that that sweet and gracious Lady will not forget her servant, but will recompense him, in royal wise, seven-fold, bringing him and his at length into the Church of the One Saviour, and into the communion of herself and all Saints whom He has redeemed.”4
In the years after 1845, Keble joined with Pusey to try to rally the “Catholic” party within the Church of England, but with little success. Their rearguard action against the proponents of liberalism and rationalism was fairly futile: the Tractarian party had lost its combative confidence. Speaking of the remaining Tractarian faithful, Dean Church recalled, “We sat glumly at our breakfast tables every morning, and then some one came in with news of something disagreeable—some one gone, some one sure to go … The only two ‘facts’ of the time were that Pusey and Keble did not move, and that James Mozley [the editor of The Christian Remembrancer and the chief publicist for Tractarianism after Newman’s departure] showed that there was one strong mind and soul still left in Oxford. All the rest were the recurring tales, each more sickening than the other, of the ‘goings over’ …”5 Keble fell prey to subjective notions of truth, remarking to his good friend, the novelist Charlotte Yonge, “No doubt we could ask Roman Catholics many questions they could not answer; and they could ask us many we could not answer; we can only each go on our own way, holding on to the truth which we know we have.”6 Newman recognized that individuals apprehended the same truths differently but, as he wrote to his friend Richard Holt Hutton in 1864, he also recognized that, “minds being very various, the subjective acquiescence in a doctrine cannot be the invariable measure and test of its objective reality or its truth.”7
The reversals suffered by the Tractarians were part and parcel of reversals suffered by religion generally after 1850. Rosemary Hill, A. W. Pugin’s lively biographer, accurately observes of this shift: “The England of Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition did not feel the romantic pull of the olden times so strongly. The dream of ‘reunion’ with Rome that had faded through the 1840s now vanished. Between the Evangelical and High Church parts of the Established Church, a Liberal, Broad Church movement was emerging anxious that England, having escaped the Continental revolutions of 1848, should now avoid the reaction to those revolutions which had seen the Catholic Church reassert itself already in Belgium and Austria, as it would soon in France.”8 The Gorham Judgment (1850), which asserted Erastian over against papal aggression, was but a foretaste of the triumphant liberalism to come. Pusey made no bones about what he and Keble were up against: “the Low Church,” he wrote, “mean a war of extermination against us. Every fresh attack hems us in, and increases our difficulties, and mows down those whom we can ill spare.”9 John Ruskin (1819–1900), so eccentric in many ways, was representative of one conventional strand within the Low Church when he wrote to a friend in May 1851: “You speak of the Flimsiness of your own faith. Mine, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms; but the only letters it can hold by at all are the very old Evangelical formulae. If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses—and on the other side, these unhappy, blinking Puseyisms; men trying to do right and losing their Humanity.”10
Clinging to the Rigging
Once the case for the catholicity of the English Church became untenable, Keble’s attempts to justify his refusal to convert were at once dogged and half-hearted. One sees this most arrestingly in his long sermon, “On Eucharistical Adoration” (1858), in which he asserted that English Churchmen “stand as orthodox Catholics upon a constant virtual appeal to the oecumenical voice of the Church, expressed by the four great Councils, and by general consent in all ages during which she continued undivided. And if that voice be disputed, is there any conceivable way of bringing the dispute to an issue, except only another true Oecumenical Council, when such by God’s grace may be had?” That this was an unpersuasive justification for an English Church continually disputing its own identity was not lost on Keble, who, to his credit, conceded that “Many a devout and loving heart, I well know, will rise up against this case. To be on this conditional, temporary footing, will strike them as something so unsatisfactory, so miserably poor and meagre, so unlike the glorious vision which they have been used to gaze on of the one Catholic Apostolic Church.” But rather than dispute with these skeptics, Keble agreed with them, admitting that the Anglican Church was “poor indeed” and “disappointing” but “not otherwise than as the aspect of Christianity itself in the world is poor and disappointing, compared with what we read of it in the Gospel.” This was another prolegomenon to the argument for staying put, which Keble duly mounted. “Men will not escape from this state of decay by going elsewhere, though they may shut their eyes to the reality of it. Rather, whatever our position be in the Church, since God Almighty has assigned it to us for our trial, shall not we accept i
t and make the best of it, in humble confidence that according to our faith it will be to us?”11 In another letter, he made the same case with a different appeal. “I do indeed feel that to turn one’s back on a Communion while such a person as Pusey remains in it, would be a great responsibility.”12
The responsibility to which Newman felt bound was to do what he could to convince Keble, however indirectly, that remaining in such an uncatholic communion would be a great irresponsibility. If, as Newman told his old friend Frederic Rogers, Lord Blachford, Keble was “the one Prophet and Preacher, as he may be called, of the spiritual miseries which now surround us,” he can also be seen as one of the greatest casualties of those miseries.13 Still, if Keble was difficult, Pusey could seem impossible. To Thomas Francis Knox, the grandson of the Earl of Ranfurly and the Earl of Kilmorey, who would later become the Superior of the London Oratory, after being received into the Church with Frederick Faber in 1845, Newman wrote in August 1846, “I was called to Pusey at Tenby the other day, as he wrote me word he was extremely ill … I am made quite melancholy at the utter impossibility (humanly speaking) which appeared of his ever changing. He does not seem to have the elements, or the capacity to change; he has no doubts, no misgivings, no difficulties—It is a simple ‘mystery’ to him still, that I have made a change.”14