Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  In their uneasy relationship after Newman’s conversion, Pusey, as we have seen, in the long letter that he submitted to the English Churchman, attributed Newman’s conversion to “over-sensitiveness.” Newman’s riposte appeared five years later in the lectures he gave at the Oratory Church in King William Street in May and June 1850, which he later published as Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church. Owen Chadwick claimed that Newman had made a hash of the lectures by “writing long hours and too late at night” and that publishing them was “to his discredit.” Moreover, “It was the only book by Newman which many Anglicans found it impossible to forgive.” That Liddon made no mention of Pusey’s response to the book in his exhaustively documented biography might say something about the silent fury it inspired. In the course of the lectures Newman reintroduced all the arguments that he had once advanced so ingeniously to defend the via media, and demolished them one by one. Pusey and the remaining Tractarian faithful, who had latterly looked to Newman as their most eloquent champion, now watched aghast as he swung the wrecking ball. For Chadwick, unseemly vindictiveness was to blame: Newman, “suffering … from the disease of being a new convert,” delivered his lectures with one object in mind: “burning what once he had adored,” though as John Griffin persuasively shows, Newman was a good deal more sparing in his critique than he might have been.151 In composing the lectures, he was motivated not by mockery or polemical advantage but concern for the well-being of his former companions.

  The lectures, which are still too little known, are divided into two parts. In the first five lectures Newman showed how the Rome-leaning principles of the Movement of 1833 did not spring from nor could remake the Established Church. The Movement and the Establishment, Newman argued, “were in simple antagonism from the first, although neither party knew it; they were logical contradictories … what was the life of the one was the death of the other.”152 For Richard Hutton, the literary critic and editor of the Spectator, who was a good friend of Walter Bagehot and Arthur Hugh Clough, “here was a great subject with which Newman was perfectly intimate, giving the fullest scope to his powers of orderly and beautiful exposition, and opening a far greater range to his singular genius for gentle and delicate irony than anything which he had previously written.”153 In the remaining five lectures, Newman defended the Roman Church against its Protestant critics. Thus, in the first group he showed why the Tractarians could not flourish in the Established Church, and in the second, why their logical home was the Catholic Church. What is striking about the lectures is their infectious exuberance. Written at white heat in a matter of weeks, they have something of the same effervescence as Loss and Gain, Newman’s charming Tractarian novel. Still, he was anxious about their reception. “I am perplexed,” he wrote to Faber, “either some of them will be most impressively dull—or they will be too much on the other tack; and I am frightened at the chance of being satirical etc. before the Blessed Sacrament.”154 As it happened, Newman delivered the lectures in the lower chapel, where, as he proceeded, “The Fathers of the Oratory were heard to titter, the Romish ladies to giggle, while a scarcely suppressed laughter arose from the heretical Protestants.” Eye-witness accounts verify the accustomed directness of Newman’s speaking style. “His delivery is simple, earnest, untheatrical and devoid of impassioned gesture or exciting declamation,” wrote one listener.155 Hutton was also in attendance and noted the power of Newman’s voice, despite its simplicity. “Never did a voice seem better adapted to persuade without irritating. Singularly sweet, perfectly free from any dictatorial tone, and yet rich in all the cadences proper to the expressions of pathos, of wonder, and of ridicule, there was still nothing in it that anyone could properly describe as insinuating, for its simplicity, and frankness, and freedom from the half-smothered notes which express indirect purpose, was as remarkable as its sweetness …”156 Since many of Newman’s jokes were at his own expense—having written himself most of the Tractarian writing from which he quoted —he could hardly be accused of mean-spiritedness. Like Fielding, he meant to laugh the Tractarians out of their follies and in this high-spirited, satirical exercise he did not spare himself.

  The first issue he took up was whether the Fathers could be legitimately cited as an authority for Tractarianism. Speaking of the early Christians whose writings had successively established Catholic orthodoxy against the challenges of various heresies, Newman wrote: “There was no mistaking that the principles professed, and doctrines taught by those holy men, were utterly anti-Protestant …” As for the Tractarians, “being satisfied of this, which was their principal consideration, it did not occur to them accurately to determine the range and bounds of the teaching of the early Church, or to reflect that, perhaps, they had as yet a clearer view of what it did not sanction, than of what it did.”157 Nonetheless, Pusey founded the Library of the Fathers with the express purpose of showing that the patristic authority for Tractarianism was self-evident, “rescuing the faith,” as Newman put it, “from private teaching on the one hand and private judgment on the other.”158 But then the true import of the Fathers began to dawn on them—or, at least some of them. And here Newman could not resist a certain schadenfreude. “Judge then of their dismay, when, according to the Arabian tale, on their striking their anchors into the supposed soil, lighting their fires on it, and fixing in it the poles of their tents, suddenly their island began to move, to heave, to splash, to frisk to and fro, to dive and at last to swim away, spouting out inhospitable jets of water upon the credulous mariners who had made it their home.”159 Once they turned their minds “to the doctrinal controversies of the early Church, they saw distinctly that in the reasonings of the Fathers, elicited by means of them, and in the decisions of authority, in which they issued … at least the rudiments, the anticipation, the justification of what they had been accustomed to consider the corruptions of Rome. And if only one, or a few of them, were visited with this conviction, still even one was sufficient, of course, to destroy that cardinal point of their whole system, the objective perspicuity and distinctness of the teaching of the Fathers.”160 To make matters worse, the Anglican episcopacy proceeded to turn on the Tractarians—the same Tractarians who had never wavered in their support of the ungainsayable authority of the episcopate. As Newman remarked, “the authorities in question gladly availed themselves of the power conferred on them by the movement against the movement itself. They fearlessly handselled their Apostolic weapons upon the Apostolical party. One after another, in long succession, they took up their song and their parable against it. It was a solemn war-dance, which they executed round victims, who by their very principles were bound hand and foot, and could only eye with disgust and perplexity this most unaccountable movement, on the part of their ‘holy Fathers, the representatives of the Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches.’ It was the beginning of the end.”161

  That Pusey had been one of the most celebrated victims of this “solemn war-dance,” having been suspended from preaching for two years because he dared to suggest that the Eucharist might have something to do with the Real Presence, makes Liddon’s silence on the matter all the more remarkable. But the testimony of the Fathers and the betrayal of the Anglican hierarchy left the Tractarians in an increasingly difficult position. “Their initial principle, their basis, external authority, was cut from under them; they had ‘set their fortunes on a cast;’ they had lost; henceforward they had nothing left for them but to shut up their school, and retire into the country. Nothing else was left for them, unless, indeed, they took up some other theory, unless they changed their ground, unless they ceased to be what they were, and became what they were not; unless they belied their own principles, and strangely forgot their own luminous and most keen convictions; unless they vindicated the right of private judgment, took up some fancy-religion, retailed the Fathers, and jobbed theology. They had but a choice between doing nothing at all, and looking out for truth and peace elsewhere.”162 Th
is was calling a spade a spade, though for Liddon the lesson of the Fathers vis-à-vis the Tractarians could not have been more different. “The Fathers are to be studied,” he wrote in the first volume of his biography, “not with the object of discovering in them some new truth, but in order the better to appreciate the treasures of doctrine and devotion which are offered us by the Church of England.”163 Like his hero, Liddon simply ignored whatever he was unprepared to acknowledge.

  Newman’s critique of Tractarianism was made all the more persuasive by his willingness to criticize his own Tractarian writings, especially his sermon “Grounds for Steadfastness in our Religious Profession (1841),” about which he wrote: “No one can read the series of arguments [set forth in the sermon] … without being struck by the author’s clear avowal of doubt, in spite of his own reasonings, on the serious subject which is engaging his attention. He longed to have faith in the National Church and he could not.”164 Pusey had explicitly claimed in his letter to the English Churchman that Newman had left the National Church because, as he wrote, “his keen sensitiveness to ill was not fitted for these troubled times. What, to such dulled minds as my own, seemed as a matter of course, to be gone through and endured, was to his … ‘like the piercing of a sword.’”165 Sensitiveness, Newman demonstrated, had nothing to do with the matter. Speaking again of his sermon, Newman wrote: “one inward evidence at least Catholics have, which [he himself] had not,—certainty. I do not say, of course, that what seems like certainty is a sufficient evidence to an individual that he has found the truth, for he may mistake obstinacy or blindness for certainty; but, at any rate, the absence of certainty is a proof that a person has not yet found it, and at least a Catholic knows well, even if he cannot urge it in argument, that the Church is able to communicate to him that gift.”166

  Newman appreciated that the Tractarians could counter by arguing that they had “clear evidence of the influences of grace” in their hearts. “More than this,” he wrote, “you tell me of the peace, and joy, and strength which you have experienced in your own ordinances. You tell me, that when you began to go weekly to communion, you found yourselves wonderfully advanced in purity. You tell me that you went to confession, and you never will believe that the hand of God was not over you at the moment when you received absolution. You were ordained, and a fragrance breathed around you; you hung over the dead and you all but saw the happy spirit of the departed.”167 Newman could readily concede all of this because he had vivid memories of experiencing the same Tractarian graces himself. “Can I wipe out from my memory, or wish to wipe out, those happy Sunday mornings, light or dark, year after year, when I celebrated your communion-rite, in my own church of St. Mary’s; and in the pleasantness and joy of it heard nothing of the strife of tongues which surrounded its walls? When, too, shall I not feel the soothing recollection of those dear years which I spent in retirement, in preparation for my deliverance from Egypt, asking for light, and by degrees gaining it, with less of temptation in my heart, and sin on my conscience, than ever before? O my dear brethren, my Anglican friends! I easily give you credit for what I have experienced myself.”168 But Newman was careful to show that if the subjective experience of grace was to be considered the test of religious truth, “I must allow to others what I allow to you … Are you willing to place yourselves on the same footing with Wesleyans? yet what is the difference? or rather, have they not more remarkable phenomena in their history, symptomatic of the presence of grace among them, than you can show in yours? Which, then, is the right explanation of your feelings and your experience,—mine, which I have extracted from received Catholic teaching; or yours, which is an expedient for the occasion, and cannot be made to tell for your own Apostolical authority without telling for those who are rebels against it?”169

  This was a nice question, which the Tractarians never answered. “I give you credit for what you are, grave, serious, earnest, modest, steady, self-denying, consistent; you have the praise of such virtues,” Newman wrote, “and you have a clear perception of many of the truths, or of portions of the truths, of Revelation. In these points you surpass the Wesleyans; but if I wished to find what was striking, extraordinary, suggestive of Catholic heroism—of St. Martin, St. Francis, or St. Ignatius—I should betake myself far sooner to them than to you.”170 If some were concerned that such reasoning would unsettle the faith of the Tractarians—as so many did fear—Newman insisted that his intentions were entirely constructive. “I wish to deprive you of your undue confidence in self; I wish to dislodge you from that centre in which you sit so self-possessed and self-satisfied. Your fault has been to be satisfied with but a half evidence of your safety; you have been too well contented with remaining where you found yourselves … Learn to fear for your souls. It is something, indeed, to be peaceful within, but it is not everything.”171

  Still, Newman assured them that the gains they had achieved as Tractarians should encourage them to follow the logic of those gains. “It is scarcely possible to fancy that an event so distinctive in its character as the rise of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in the course of the last twenty years, should have no scope in the designs of Divine Providence. From beginnings so small, from elements of thought so fortuitous, with prospects so unpromising, that in its germ it was looked upon with contempt, if it was ever thought of at all, it suddenly became a power in the National Church, and an object of alarm to her rulers and friends.”172 Newman had no interest in denying the extent of the work that he had helped to accomplish. “In a very few years a school of opinion was formed … and it extended into every part of the country. If, turning from the contemplation of it from within, we inquire what the world thought of it, we have still more to raise our wonder; for not to mention the excitement it caused in England, the movement and its party-names were known to the police of Italy and the back-woodsmen of America.” The many Americans who followed the progress of the Oxford Movement might have bristled at being referred to as “back-woodsmen” but they could hardly dispute the accuracy of Newman’s point: the Movement had extended far beyond Oxford. “And so it proceeded, getting stronger and stronger every year, till it has come into collision with the Nation, and that Church of the Nation, which it began by professing especially to serve; and now its upholders and disciples have to look about, and ask themselves where they are, and which way they are to go, and whither they are bound.”173 Newman’s solicitude for the Anglo-Catholic party of the nineteenth century prefigures Benedict XVI’s offer of reunification to Anglo-Catholics in the twenty-first century. This also gives the lie to the contention that Newman’s intent in the lectures was merely destructive. On the contrary, he was always prepared to recognize what was good about the Movement of 1833: he only meant to stress that its good was unfinished. “Providence does nothing in vain; so much earnestness, zeal, toil, thought, religiousness, success, as has a place in the history of that movement, must surely have a place also in His scheme, and in His dealings towards His Church in this country, if we could discern what that place was. He has excited aspirations, matured good thoughts, and prospered pious undertakings arising out of them: not for nothing surely—then for what? Wherefore?”174 Not, Newman was convinced, to have the Tractarians delude themselves into imagining that they could find a home within the National Church.

  If, however, as I trust is the case, God has not in vain unrolled the pages of antiquity before your eyes, but has stamped them upon your hearts; if He has put into your minds the perception of the truth which, once given, can scarcely be lost, once possessed, will ever be recognized; if you have by His grace been favoured in any measure with the supernatural gift of faith, then, my brethren, I think too well of you, I hope too much of you, to fancy that you can be untrue to convictions so special and so commanding. No; you are under a destiny, the destiny of truth—truth is your master, not you the master of truth—you must go whither it leads. You can have no trust in the Establishment or its Sacraments and ordinances. You must leave it, you must
secede; you must turn your back upon, you must renounce, what has—not suddenly become, but has now been proved to you to have ever been—an imposture. You must take up your cross and you must go hence.175