Newman and His Contemporaries
Page 21
Considering the beauty of Newman’s voice, to which so many attested, it must have been moving hearing him deliver these powerful words.176
Under no circumstances, Newman urged, should the Tractarians consider themselves a party within the National Church and attempt to proceed as they had proceeded in the past. “No, my brethren, it is impossible, you cannot recall the past; you cannot surround yourselves with circumstances which have simply ceased to be. In the beginning of the movement you disowned private judgment, but now, if you would remain a party, you must, with whatever inconsistency, profess it.”177 Here, Newman was directing his comments squarely at Pusey, who, again and again, after Newman’s conversion, sought to re-establish the Movement on its old footing, the footing it had enjoyed before the storm over Tract 90, before the Jerusalem Bishopric, before the Gorham Judgment.
If Newman advised the Tractarians against trying to present themselves as a party within the National Church, he was even more adamant about dissuading them from trying to present themselves as a branch of the Catholic Church, which, then as now, was a term fraught with contradiction.178 This was an important passage of the lectures because, 15 years later, when Pusey wrote his Eirenicon, he would again urge that the Anglican Church be considered a branch of what he called “Christ’s One Holy Catholic Church.”179 Addressing the Tractarians directly, Newman pointed out:
By a Branch Church is meant, I suppose, if we interpret the metaphor, a Church which is separate from its stem; and if we ask what is meant by the stem, I suppose it means the ‘Universal Church,’ as you are accustomed to call it. The Catholic Church, indeed, as understood by Catholics, is one kingdom or society, divisible into parts, each of which is in inter-communion with each other and with the whole, as the members of a human body. This Catholic Church, as I suppose you would maintain, has ceased to exist, or at least is in deliquium, for you will not give the name to us, nor do you take it yourselves, and scarcely ever use the phrase at all, except in the Creed; but a ‘Universal Church’ you think there really is, and you mean by it the whole body of professing Christians all over the world, whatever their faith, origin, and traditions, provided they lay claim to an Apostolical Succession, and this whole is divisible into portions or branches, each of them independent of the whole, discordant one with another in doctrine and in ritual, destitute of mutual intercommunion, and more frequently in actual warfare, portion with portion, than in a state of neutrality. Such is pretty nearly what you mean by a Branch …180
Having defined the term, Newman proceeded to show how “a Branch Church … is virtually synonymous with a National; for though it may be in fact and at present but one out of many communions in a nation, it is intended, by its very mission, as preacher and evangelist, to spread through the nation; nor has it done its duty till it has so spread, for it must be supposed to have the promise of success as well as the mission.”181 In other words, the Tractarians could not have a Branch Church and, at the same time, imagine that they had any genuine autonomy. As a National Church, subservient to the State, their Branch Church could never be anything but an Erastian Church. In an ideal world Newman recognized that the Church, if allowed autonomy, might actually support and complement the State. “I repeat,” Newman argued, “the great principles of the State are those of the Church, and, if the State would but keep within its own province, it would find the Church its truest ally and best benefactor. She upholds obedience to the magistrate; she recognises his office as from God; she is the preacher of peace, the sanction of law, the first element of order, and the safeguard of morality, and that without possible vacillation or failure; she may be fully trusted; she is a sure friend, for she is indefectible and undying.” But Newman appreciated that in practice the State always wielded the upper hand because “it is not enough for the State that things should be done, unless it has the doing of them itself; it abhors a double jurisdiction, and what it calls a divided allegiance; aut Cæsar aut nullus, is its motto, nor does it willingly accept of any compromise. All power is founded, as it is often said, on public opinion; for the State to allow the existence of a collateral and rival authority, is to weaken its own …”182 For the Tractarians to imagine that they could maintain some anti-Erastian autonomy as a branch church was delusive.
Having described the Erastian perils that confront the branch church, Newman was careful to describe what would result if the Anglo-Catholics ever made peace with the Established Church, a warning as timely today as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. They would end up instructing their faithful that “one man’s opinion is as good as another’s; that Fathers and Schoolmen, and the greater number of Anglican divines, are puzzled-headed or dishonest; that heretics have at least this good about them, that they are in earnest, and do not take doctrines for granted; that religion is simple, and theologians have made it hard; that controversy is on the whole a logomachy; that we must worship in spirit and in truth; that we ought to love truth; that few people love truth for its own sake; that we ought to be candid and dispassionate, to avoid extremes, to eschew party spirit, to take a rational satisfaction in contemplating the works of nature, and not to speculate about ‘secret things;’ that our Lord came to teach us all this, and to gain us immortality by His death, and the promise of spiritual assistance, and that this is pretty nearly the whole of theology; and that at least all is in the Bible, where every one may read it for himself …”183
Here was precisely the easy-going, undogmatical, liberal faith of the Established Church, in which Pusey and Keble sought to insinuate their Anglo-Catholic party. But what this had to do with the true Church mystified Newman. “I cannot believe that Bishops, and clergymen, and councils, and convocations have been divinely sent into the world, simply or mainly to broach opinions, to discuss theories, to talk literature, to display the results of their own speculations on the text of Scripture, to create a brilliant, ephemeral, ever-varying theology, to say in one generation what the next will unsay; else, why were not our debating clubs and our scientific societies ennobled with a divine charter also? God surely did not create the visible Church for the protection of private judgment: private judgment is quite able to take care of itself.”184
Here, one might say, the Roman Catholic Newman, and not Pusey, was acting as the Tractarians’ true leader, by urging them to look more critically at their piecemeal, idiosyncratic, contentious Christianity. In essence, Newman was encouraging the Tractarians to apprehend their predicament with the same clear-sighted seriousness with which he apprehended his own predicament when he was Vicar of St. Mary’s and faced with the same crisis of Tractarianism.
In this respect, what inspired the lectures was not score-settling or polemical one-upmanship but love. “The time is coming, or is come, when you must act in some way or other for yourselves, unless you would drift to some form of infidelity, or give up principle altogether, or believe or not believe by accident. The onus probandi will be on your side then. Now you are content to be negative and fragmentary in doctrine; you aim at nothing higher than smart articles in newspapers and magazines, at clever hits, spirited attacks, raillery, satire, skirmishing on posts of your own selecting; fastening on weak points, or what you think so, in Dissenters or Catholics; inventing ingenious retorts, evading dangerous questions; parading this or that isolated doctrine as essential, and praising this or that Catholic practice or Catholic saint, to make up for abuse, and to show your impartiality; and taking all along a high, eclectic, patronising, indifferent tone; this has been for some time past your line, and it will not suffice; it excites no respect, it creates no confidence, it inspires no hope.”185 This was an unsparing portrait of precisely the religious no-man’s-land that Newman himself had inhabited after he recognized the fundamental defects of the National Church and before he embraced “the one and only fold of the Redeemer.”186
The final advice he gave his old comrades-in-arms could not have been more momentous. They had a choice to make but it was a choice they could only
make after they had defined what they truly believed. The response to the crisis of Tractarianism that Pusey had given in The English Churchman was glib and evasive. In Anglican Difficulties, Newman was forcing him and his Tractarian colleagues to come down to brass tacks and make a decision. “And when, at length, you have one and all agreed upon your creed, and developed it doctrinally, morally, and polemically, then find for it some safe foundation, deeper and firmer than private judgment, which may ensure its transmission and continuance to generations to come. And, when you have done all this, then, last of all, persuade others and yourselves, that the foundation you have formed is surer and more trustworthy than that of Erastianism, on the one hand, and of immemorial and uninterrupted tradition, that is, of Catholicism, on the other.”187
Richard Hutton considered Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans “the first book of Newman’s generally read amongst Protestants, in which the measure of his literary power was adequately taken.”188 The Unitarian Christian Reformer saw the piece less as a work of literary art than as a warning. Corroborating what Newman had to say about the Erastian cast of the Anglican Church, the paper observed that “the head of the English Church has lately avowed his rejection of the doctrine of apostolic succession; and Arnold, following therein Hooker, Burke, and other high authorities, affirms the identity of Church and State. The Anti-State-Church Association are little aware that they are opposing the only body which can effectually repel a Church of mere priests, and that the abolition of the State Church would be the triumph of priestcraft; that the doctrines of Newman, could they ever prevail, would lead to the most frightful spiritual tyranny that the world was ever cursed by … There are statements in this volume concerning Catholicism which we should have rejected as calumnious and grossly exaggerating from the pen of a Protestant.”189 The Tory Quarterly Review agreed that “Romanism is essentially despotic;” indeed, the independence that Newman was proposing from Erastianism would logically prove this.190 Of course, dissenters were also opposed to the Established Church and as independents they “should see nothing to censure, but rather much with which to sympathize” in Newman’s “bold assertion of ecclesiastical freedom,” if only they could be sure “that the spiritual corporations, which lay such stern claim to this freedom, should cede to others what they thus demand for themselves.” But on this score they were skeptical. “The power, which not only claims independence, but which claims that independence on the ground of its being the one infallible authority on all matters of religion, carries in its very nature all the seeds of the worst tyranny.”191 On Newman’s relationship to his Tractarian audience, the reviewer was a good deal more perceptive. “The measure of failure, which has … driven him elsewhere in search of greater liberty and a more genial home, has taught his old companions in arms some lessons of caution, and without producing much change in their opinions, has reconciled them to a change of policy. The resolve of not a few among them is to be less bold, less obtrusive, to work, and wait, and hope.”192
Indeed, in this regard, they might very well have concurred with G.K. Chesterton, who once observed of Newman: “The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap.”193 Yet as Newman wrote to Mrs. Froude, it was clear that the challenges had caused others to reconsider their allegiance to an Erastian, Protestant, and increasingly undogmatical Church. “Now as to Keble and Pusey, perhaps it is more wonderful that a person of my age (when I left them) should have embraced a new religion, than that they should not have done the same … Yet my anticipation, as W.F. [William Froude] has recorded it, has been remarkably fulfilled. One after another, moving not as a party, but one by one, unwillingly, because they could not help it, men of mature age, from 40 to past 50, in all professions and states, numbers have done what I have done … such as Manning, R. Wilberforce, H. Wilberforce, Allies, Dodsworth, Hope Scott, Badeley, Bellasis, Bowyer, Monsell, Sir John Simeon, Dr Duke, Biddulph Phillips, Dean Madavori, Bishop Ives, the de Veres, H. Bowden, Mrs Bowden, Lady Lothian, Lady G. Fullerton, Lord H. Kerr, etc … . It is surely much easier to account for Keble and Pusey not moving, Catholicism being true, than for all these persons moving, Catholicism being not true.”194
In the wake of Newman’s secession, Pusey committed himself to the same enterprise as Keble, trying to divest the National Church of its inalienably Protestant pedigree. In a letter to Mrs. Froude in March 1863, Newman observed: Pusey “has been pledging himself to all people deeply, that the Church of England has a vital power in it, able to cast out all disease from its system.” Yet, as Newman reminded his correspondent, “for the last 12 years there has been a determinate action, going on within [the English Church], towards the destruction of what it retains of the Catholic Creed.” And yet, despite these undeniable signs of the Protestant cast of the National Church, Newman realized that there were other factors keeping Pusey within the Anglican pale. More than theological considerations contributed to Pusey’s decision to stay put. “Twenty years ago I used to say that, if Pusey once despaired of the English Church, he would die. He was near death (apparently) about the year 1832, and his weakness of body showed itself in a deep despondency about the state of religion. The Tract movement set him up again, as if a new life were breathed into him. When he was condemned by the 5 Doctors in 1843, I feared the life would go out of him – but he was too sanguine to be touched by it – and the same dream of hope has sustained him on till now. The chance is that, in spite of the annoyance of the moment, hope will still tell a flattering tale – but my fear is, that, if he did get disgusted with the Church of England, it would end, not in his looking towards Rome, but in his death.”195
In November 1864, Newman wrote to tell Pusey that there was a possibility that he might set up an Oratory in Oxford. “Two or three things have combined – first, our youths are beginning to go to Oxford, and the Colleges are admitting them – secondly the late Mr A Smith suddenly offers me land – thirdly my diocesan puts, to my surprise, the Oxford Mission into my hands.” Having explained to Pusey the factors that prompted his considering the Oxford Oratory, Newman hastened to assure his friend that his object was in no way polemical. “My late declaration of principles is a sufficient pledge, to all who are anxious on the point, that I have no hostile feeling towards the Anglican Communion – and nothing but love for Oxford. Nor would I be a party to any measures different from those which follow from those principles. I have no plans, nor, I may say, expectations. I am too old to be able to speculate on the future – and, if I found an Oratory at Oxford, it may be as much as Providence means me to do.” Then, again, he was frank with Pusey about the reluctance with which he regarded the project. Indeed, for Newman, merely “to see Oxford, would be to me inexpressibly painful, as the coming to life again of men who have been apparently drowned”—not a choice of metaphor likely to flatter his old friend.196 The proposed Oratory alarmed Pusey. “The establishment of a mission of yours … must in its own nature be aggressive, even against your will (for there are so few of your own young men here) … We should have all the anti-Roman controversy, which, as you said, strikes at you through sides, and the ultra Protestant spirits awakened. At least, this seems to me the necessary consequence, its further consequences none can tell; but … any weakening of the so-called High Church would be very fatal to the English Church, and, if corrupted, the English Church would be a terrible instrument for evil. You, I know, are alive to all the struggles which have been going on, especially as to our Prayer-book. While that remains the High Church party must exist. If it should be changed, I do not see what would resist rationalism. I suppose many have thought so before, but I have long thought this the final struggle in the Church of England.”197 Newman was indeed alive to these struggles and he sympathized with Pusey and the Tractarians. In 1863, he had written to a correspondent, “As to Pusey, I have little opportunity in the case of any of my Oxford friends of showing my affection for them in word or i
n deed—but of them, and especially of him, I should have only kind words, personally, to utter, whenever I spoke at all. And I feel for them very much now, facing, as they do, so terrible a billow of laxity and scepticism in faith.”198 Matthew Arnold had seen something of this billow in 1854 at Balliol, where he had been an undergraduate 13 years before: “I am much struck with the apathy and poorness of the people here, as they now strike me, and their petty pottering habits … Animation and interest and the power of work seem so sadly wanting in them … the place, in losing Newman and his followers, has lost its religious movement, which after all kept it from stagnating, and has not yet as far as I see, got anything better.”199 Yet, at the same time, Newman could not help but notice that Pusey and the Tractarians continued to throw their lot in with an Established Church that had no place for them, which was a danger against which he had warned them in his King William Street lectures over ten years before.
Pusey, for his part, after he learned that Newman had been dissuaded from establishing his proposed Oxford Oratory, commiserated with him in language that is still echoed by some who are intent on distorting Newman’s Catholic career. “It is a strange lot, but a great token of God’s love, that you should be hidden and misunderstood now, as you were when here.” Since historians estimate that after Newman became a Catholic he personally converted at least a thousand people, it is hard to imagine how he could have managed this if at the same time he was either hidden or misunderstood.