Newman and His Contemporaries
Page 15
Whether or not Charlotte’s last illness was penitential, Newman realized that for both Charlotte and her husband the end was imminent. “I was prepared for dear Mr Keble’s death,” he told one correspondent, “from knowing how frail he was and how his wife’s illness tried him. I last heard from him about two months ago – He then said she was slowly (using a word of George Herbert’s) ‘undressing–’ she had been obliged to give up first her music, then her drawing, then her books – and so, she was stripping herself of every thing but her body – which God would take off from her in His own time. It was a sort of race between them which should die first.”56 Here was more matter-of-factness, which might very well offend some sensibilities. Keble, however, preferred having a spade called a spade. After all, the poem to which he alluded was Herbert’s “Repentance,” which opens with the lines:
Lord, I confesse my sinne is great;
Great is my sinne. Oh! gently treat
With thy quick flow’r, thy momentarie bloom;
Whose life still pressing
Is one undressing,
A steadie aiming at a tombe.
Keble prepared himself for his own tombe with fitting humility. “He had borne up, in spite of his infirmities, longer than I had supposed possible,” Newman told Emily Bowles. “He was seized with fainting fits. His friends took him from [Charlotte’s] room. When he got into his own, he fancied it a Church. He knelt down, and said the Lord’s Prayer. Then he began a Latin Hymn—they could not make out what. Those were his last words. Thus he ended with the prayer which he first said on his knees as a little child.”57
Now that Pope Benedict XVI has offered Anglicans disaffected with the Church of England, including married Anglican priests, the opportunity to join the Catholic Church through the auspices of his Apostolic Constitution, the predicament that John Keble faced seems all the more poignant. It was with the case of Keble in mind that Newman wrote to Ambrose Phillipps De Lisle, who had written a pamphlet suggesting that some means be found of admitting Anglo-Catholic priests into Roman Catholic communion: “Nothing will rejoice me more than to find that the Holy See considers it safe and promising to sanction some such plan as the Pamphlet suggests. I give my best prayers, such as they are, that some means of drawing to us so many good people, who are now shivering at our gates, may be discovered.”58 Apropos these prayers, William Oddie speculates that, “Now, 140 years later, the Holy See has decided that such a scheme is indeed ‘safe and promising;’ and I do not think … that it is entirely fanciful to believe that Newman’s ‘best prayers’ may have had something to do with this result.”59
The Mystery of Stasis
Nevertheless, Keble’s case also calls to mind the mystery of stasis. In September of 1873, Newman wrote an extraordinary letter to a Miss Rowe, who had courageously but somewhat diffidently converted. “It is quite clear you have a great deal to learn about the Catholic Faith,” he wrote to her, “or you would never have asked me the questions which I answered in my former letter. The prime, I may say the only reason for becoming a Catholic, is that the Roman Communion is the only True Church, the Ark of Salvation. This does not mean that no one is saved who is not within that Church, but that there is no other Communion or Polity which has the promises, and that those who are saved, though not in the One Church, are saved, not by virtue of ‘the Law or Sect which they profess’, as the 39 Articles say, but because they do not know better, and earnestly desire to know the truth, and in consequence are visited by a superabundant mercy of God which He has not promised and covenanted.” Did this apply to Keble? For the purposes of his letter, Newman was prepared to suggest that it might. “I think I have heard the late Mr. Keble say, ‘If the Roman Church is the True Church, really, I do not know it – really I do not see it.’ There are numbers, I joyfully believe, in the Church of England,” Newman reckoned, who were similarly situated—“aided by God’s grace, and I trust in the event justified and saved, not, however, by virtue of the Church of England, which is a human work and a political institution, but by grace extending beyond the True Church, to ‘the children of God who are scattered abroad.’” But no sooner did he allow for this superabundant grace than he reaffirmed distinctions that he might very well have put to Keble.
You will see then that no Catholic can hold the Anglican Church to be a branch of the Catholic Church. If it is, a man may safely remain in it – if it is, ours is not the Catholic Church. You have left it, because you wished to pass from what was not the Church to what was.
The Church is a visible body – and a one body. It is not two bodies – to be a visible body, there must be a visible unity between its portions. Where is the visible unity between the Church of Rome and the Church of England? If indeed a man says there is an invisible unity between them, I deny it … but if he tells me there is a visible unity between the two, (and a visible unity is necessary for a visible body, such as St. Paul speaks of) he is uttering the greatest paradox that ingenuity can invent and he refutes himself.60
Did Keble, in his heart of hearts, truly embrace this paradox? It is impossible to say. In 1873, in commending Miss Rowe for her heroic move, Newman called attention to the mystery of those who are not led forward, who choose stasis. “From what you tell me you have long meditated on the step you have taken, and have gradually been led forward. God has not failed to answer your prayers and efforts, and in His own way has made you a Catholic. It is strange and sad to think how many converts like you are solitary, – Doubtless it is intended to throw their thoughts directly on their Lord and Saviour, to increase their faith, and to try their constancy.” No one would have brought home the strange sadness of this more than his dear friend John Keble. Still, Newman told Miss Rowe, “You have gained the ‘Pearl of great price’. You must thank God, and pray and resolve that you never will let it go.”61
Making sense of the relationship between Newman and Keble, or indeed the Tractarian Movement as a whole, without reference to that “pearl of great price” is not possible. In July of 1846, in a letter to Manuel Johnson, the genial Radcliffe Observer, at whose house he spent his last night at Oxford, Newman gave expression to the hope that animated all of his love for his former Tractarian friends—but for Keble most of all.
Mrs Bowden was received into the Church this morning. Alas, that what is such a source of joy to myself, should not be so to many I love! Yet I will not abandon the hope that one by one, if in no other way, we shall have that joy repeated in their case. And then the lingering, prolonged, repeated, wearing distress which they undergo in their successive losses, will be recompensed to themselves and to us by their regaining all at once all that has gone from them. And thus, my dear Johnson, the Catholic Church will be the true type of heaven to us all – for it will bring together in one all those who die off from the world, and you and I and all of us shall have that great delight of being, what we once were, brethren together in the house of prayer and praise, and one beyond separation – Oh might it be – …62
For all his hope that he and his Tractarian friends and relations might some day be reunited, Newman nevertheless was adamant that searching for the one holy catholic and apostolic Church could not substitute for the Church itself. “We have found the Christ, we are not seeking,” he insisted in one of his great Oxford sermons.63 Keble argued that since searching for the true Church was necessarily an uncertain business, one should be content with the actual, if imperfect church in which one had been born. Here their differences culminated. And yet, in a letter to Father Coleridge, written in 1864, Newman saw his relationship with his old friend from one of those removes that only charity makes possible. Keble, he wrote, “considered that religious truth came to us as from the mouth of Our Lord—and what would be called doubt was an imperfect hearing as if one heard from a distance. And, as we were at this time of the world at a distance from Him, of course we heard indistinctly—and faith was not a clear and confident knowledge or certainty, but a sort of loving guess.”64 Newman could
not have put a kinder construction on the irresolution that kept his friend from embracing “the truth and beauty and majesty,” as Keble called them, of the Roman Church.65 This was the indecision with which he responded to the crisis of Tractarianism and it haunts the Anglican church still.
Chapter 3
The Anglican Difficulties of Edward Pusey
“The course of everything is onwards, not backwards.”
John Henry Newman to Isaac Williams1
Nearly two years after his secession from the English Church, Newman wrote to his good friend Mrs. Bowden from Rome, where he and Ambrose St. John were studying at the College of Propaganda: “The interest felt here about Dr Pusey has been very great … People fancied he certainly was to come over … and they were unwilling to think … that so many prayers should be unavailing. He is indeed more extensively prayed for than any one man out of the Church … Indeed it is very difficult to believe they will be in vain – yet humanly speaking, there is no hope.”2 Seventeen years later, in his Apologia, Newman would confirm the accuracy of his earlier assessment. “People are apt to say that he was once nearer to the Catholic Church than he is now; I pray God that he may be one day far nearer to the Catholic Church than he was then; for I believe that, in his reason and judgment, all the time I knew him, he never was near to it at all.”3 Nonetheless, throughout his Catholic career, Newman never gave up trying to help Pusey resolve his Anglican difficulties and always treated his conversion as though it were a distinct possibility. By revisiting their correspondence, we can see how their private exchanges complemented their public exchanges, including the lectures Newman delivered in Birmingham and later published as Anglican Difficulties (1850), Pusey’s three volumes of Eirenicon (1866–1869), and Newman’s Letter to Pusey (1866). Their letters also show how Newman’s plans to establish an Oratory in Oxford complicated their differences, which reached an impasse in the First Vatican Council, though Pusey, like many others, misread the import of the Council. Finally, in the abiding solicitude that Newman showed Pusey, we can see not only his personal affection for a friend of over sixty years but his concern for the difficulties of all Anglicans stalled between disenchantment with Canterbury and distrust of Rome.
Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882) was born at Pusey House in Berkshire on Friday, the 22nd of August, in the same year that Lewis Carroll was born, another Christ Church divine. Pusey’s father was the Honorable Philip Bouverie, the youngest son of Jacob, first Viscount of Folkestone, who exchanged the name of Bouverie for Pusey when he succeeded to the Pusey estate in the historical Vale of the White Horse, near Faringdon in Berkshire. His mother was Lady Lucy, daughter of Robert, 4th Earl of Harborough and widow of Sir Thomas Cave, who died at the age of 26 after just two years of marriage. Before his sudden demise, Sir Thomas would often exclaim to his pretty young wife, with unearthly prescience, “This is too much happiness to last.” Six years after he expired, Lady Lucy married Philip Pusey, who, at 51, was 24 years older than his bride. Pusey’s father was an exacting, solemn, imperious man, whom Liddon describes as so set in his ways, after his exorbitant bachelorhood, that he would brook no opposition either from his wife or his children. By all accounts, he was a thoroughgoing martinet. He was also an ardent Tory who adorned the walls of his study with portraits of Pitt. He initially forbade his elder son Philip from marrying Lady Emily Herbert, because her father, Lord Carnarvon, was not only a Whig but fond of Queen Caroline. Nevertheless, Pusey’s father was a dutiful landlord. He munificently subscribed to many London charities, reprobated atheists and scorned the undogmatical zeal of Evangelicals. He lavished alms not only on poor clergymen, poor cottagers and poor tradesmen but others only masquerading as poor. “His own simple integrity,” Liddon observed, “made it difficult for him to suspect others of deception.”4 After the old man’s death, Edward and Philip paid tribute to their father’s openhandedness by inscribing on a window of Pusey parish church: “To the memory of Philip Pusey, Pious and Bounteous, A.D. 1828.”5 What no memorial could record was the long crippling shadow he would cast on his younger son.
“All that I know about religious truth,” Pusey told Liddon, “I learned, at least in principle, from my mother, but then, behind my mother, though I did not know it at the time, was the Catholic Church,” which is reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty telling Alice, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”6 If Pusey had ever told his Hanoverian mother that the religion he had learned at her knee had anything to do with the Catholic Church she would not have known what he was talking about. Nevertheless, it is true that Lady Lucy drilled Pusey in his catechism and set him a useful example of charity, self-sacrifice and duty. She was also remarkably keen on putting others first, even going so far as to insist that guests take her own room when they visited her in Grosvenor Square. In his God-fearing mother, Pusey saw another St. Monica.7
Together with piety and generosity, there was a strong strain of self-abnegation in Lady Lucy and a concomitant contempt for the comforts of life, which also informed Pusey’s character. In old age, Newman recalled dining with his friend on Easter Day in 1837 “and bitterly complaining that we had only roast veal without a drop of melted butter or other sauce …”8 In such ostentatious austerity Lady Lucy reveled. As Liddon recalled, “She rarely or never would lean back in her chair, and she used to say that to stoop was the mark of a degenerate age.”9 That her son had a most pronounced stoop must have grieved the old woman.
The dour formality of both parents deepened Pusey’s melancholy shyness. His best modern biographer David Forrester quotes something Pusey wrote after his father died to argue that the despotic rule of the father nearly broke the son. “What indeed the natural character was, I scarcely myself know, yet I feel myself now, as a branch which has been so long bowed down, that even when the weight which depressed it, has been removed, though it can partly, cannot wholly recover its original direction.”10 The sense of thwarted growth that Pusey suffered under his father’s roof followed him to Mitcham in Surrey, where he prepared for Eton with, among other young aristocrats, the future Tory Prime Minister, Edward Stanley, the Earl of Derby. Throughout his education, whether at Mitcham, Eton or Christ Church, Pusey found himself surrounded by young aristocrats, who would later assume positions of power in the England emerging from the Napoleonic wars. When Newman nicknamed Pusey ό μέγας (‘the great one’), it was with these connexions in mind. At Eton, the corporal punishment to which Pusey had been introduced at Mitcham was practiced with even greater ferocity by the notorious Dr. Keate. Lytton Strachey gives a vivid sketch of the sort of life Pusey encountered in the Eton of that day. “It was a system of anarchy tempered by despotism. Hundreds of boys, herded together in miscellaneous boarding-houses, or in that grim ‘Long Chamber’ at whose name in after years aged statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived, badgered and over-awed by the furious incursions of an irascible little old man carrying a bundle of birch-twigs, a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with a daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse. It was a life of freedom and terror, of prosody and rebellion, of interminable floggings …”11 Whether this regimen compounded the shyness that he had acquired at home is impossible to say; it certainly laid the groundwork for what would become his prodigious scholarship.
Before entering Oxford, Pusey spent 15 months under the instruction of Dr. Edward Maltby, Vicar of Buckden, near Huntingdon, where he prepared for Classical Honours at Oxford. It was Maltby, later appointed Bishop of Chichester and Bishop of Durham, who wrote to his close friend Lord John Russell in 1850 to denounce the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy, which inspired Russell’s vitriolic “Durham Letter.” In that last paroxysm of No Popery the Prime Minister fulminated against the Tractarians for attempting to Romanize Great Britain. “There is a danger … which alarms me more than the aggression of a foreign sovereign,” Russell wrote.
Clergymen of our Church who have subscribed
the Thirty-nine Articles and have acknowledged inexplicit terms the Queen’s supremacy have been the most forward in leading their flocks, step by step, to the verge of a precipice. The honour paid to saints, the claim of infallibility for the Church, the superstitious use of the sign of the Cross, the muttering of the Liturgy so as to disguise the language in which it was written, the recommendation of auricular confession, and the administration of penance and absolution—all these things are pointed out by clergymen as worthy of adoption, and are now openly reprehended by the Bishop of London in his Charge of the clergy of his diocese … I have but little hope that the propounders of these innovations will desist from their insidious course; but I rely with confidence on the people of England, and I will not bate a jot of heart or life so long as the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence by the great mass of the nation, which look with contempt on the mummeries of superstition, and with scorn at the laborious endeavors which are now being made to confine the intellect and enslave the soul.12
Pusey could never be accused of promulgating papal infallibility, though he was in favor of auricular confession, which did not endear him to his Victorian contemporaries. William Tuckwell, the famous memoirist of Tractarian Oxford, recalled how Pusey was fond “of groping into the spiritual interiors of those with whom he found himself alone …” Indeed, for Tuckwell, Pusey’s “habit of acting towards others as a confessor seemed to have generated a scientific pleasure in religious vivisection.”13 In his Memoirs of an Oxford Don, Mark Pattison complained that when he went to Pusey to confession, out of what he described as a “morbid state of conscience,” Pusey “told a fact about myself, which he got from me on that occasion, to a friend of his, who employed it to annoy me.”14 This charge notwithstanding, the advice that Pusey gave Pattison about his religious doubts was sound. “I am persuaded that yours is only a temptation not uncommon in which everything of this world comes before the mind as real, everything spiritual as unreal … What I wished to say to this is (1) that it is a known fact that Satan has power to vest doubts with the mind (2) that faith, being the gift of God, was upheld by him and so … was not a question at all of argument, but of a moral probation.”15 The force and clarity of this may explain why so many Anglicans sought Pusey out for spiritual advice. Nonetheless, in 1873, when Pusey sought signatories for a Declaration on Confession, Dean Church turned him down. “I am most thankful,” Church wrote to his friend, “to those, who, like yourself, have turned our attention to this great and once neglected remedy and medicine for many sinful souls. But, however inconsistent I may be called, I cannot go beyond liberty. I cannot seem to be on the side of those who, if not in formal statement, yet practically press for more.”16