Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  Throughout Pusey’s eirenical enterprises, Newman was adamant that Pusey must not be given the impression that the Roman Church would retreat from its doctrines regarding papal primacy or the Blessed Virgin, though, even in this regard, he was remarkably conciliatory. As Newman told Father Coleridge, a Jesuit convert disinclined to conciliate Pusey at all, “Of course I take a different view of Pusey from what you do – but for argument’s sake I will allow that, as you say, he shuffles desperately – also, I take the very ground that you do, viz that his word is taken as law by numbers, when it should not be. Also, of course I think and desire, that for the sake of those numbers, and moreover (which it strikes me you do not so much consider) for the sake of himself, what he says incorrectly, should be set right, and brought home to him as requiring such right-setting.”224 This was characteristic of the personal concern that Newman showed Pusey, despite his often scabrous peace-making.

  In preparing to compose his response to the Eirenicon, which would be published as Letter to Pusey, Newman recognized that if he was to win a sympathetic hearing, he would need to marshal his own controversial armory with tact and care. “I do not call exposing a man’s mistakes ‘speaking against him’ – nor do I suppose any one would. But if, instead of exposing those errors in detail, and as matters of fact, in simple grave language, a controversialist began by saying ‘This man is absurd – he shuffles – he misrepresents – he is keeping men from the truth’ – every word of it might be true, but I should say he was calling names, and indulging in abuse. For by abuse I mean accusation without proof – or condemnation before proof – and such a process of putting the cart before the horse defeats itself, and has no tendency to convince and persuade those whom it concerns.” That Newman had been treated so unfairly by other controversialists made him doubly aware of what fair controversy required. “If there is one thing more than another likely to shock and alienate those whom we wish to convert,” Newman told his good friend Father Coleridge, “it is to ridicule their objects of worship. It is wounding them in their most sacred point.” Here, Newman was clearly moving away from the exuberant raillery that was so much a part of his King William Street lectures. “They may have a false conscience, but, if they are obeying it, it is laughing at them for being religious.” Then, again, Newman was especially intent on treating the Tractarians indulgently because he could enter into their Tractarian convictions. “I can recollect myself firmly believing that what your friend calls a piece of a quartern loaf, was, not only that, but the body of Christ – and, to my own consciousness, I as truly believed it and as simply adored it, as I do now the Blessed Sacrament on Catholic Altars. And what I did then, I know many Anglicans do now.”225 For himself, Newman wrote to Anne Mozley: “I never have minded my friends writing against me – what I have complained of is their imputing motives, or bringing in other personalities … Pusey pained me, for in print he attributed my conversion to ‘oversensitiveness –’ this is what in another connexion I have called ‘poisoning the wells.’”226 By contrast, Newman showed how criticisms could be leveled and disagreements articulated without ad hominem vitriol.227 In this, he always exemplified his own definition of a gentleman: “He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust; he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.”228 Newman’s public and private responses to Pusey and his Anglican difficulties are distinguished not only by fairness and clarity but by generosity. At the same time, Newman was forthright about the import of Pusey’s reckless misrepresentations. “Bear with me, my dear Friend, if I end with an expostulation,” he wrote, referring to Pusey’s treatment of the Blessed Virgin, but “is it not the effect of what you have said to expose her to scorn and obloquy, who is dearer to us than any other creature? Have you even hinted that our love for her is anything else than an abuse? Have you thrown her one kind word yourself all through your book? I trust so, but I have not lighted upon one.”229 As he observed in the introductory remarks of the book, “There was one of old time who wreathed his sword in myrtle; excuse me—you discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult.”230

  One of the governing convictions of Newman’s response to the Eirenicon was that neither Pusey nor the Anglo-Catholic party as a whole could begin to reconcile Anglicans to the Roman Church until they appreciated that the Universal Church was a living Church, with all that life connotes. This was an important principle to share with Pusey precisely because of his tendency to involve the Faith in an alien “stationariness.” But Newman wished to share the same principle with his ultramontane friends, who were, in their way, just as inclined as Pusey to embrace delusive fixity. Speaking of the devotion to the Blessed Mother, Newman wrote:

  It is impossible, I say, in a doctrine like this, to draw the line cleanly between truth and error, right and wrong. This is ever the case in concrete matters, which have life. Life in this world is motion, and involves a continual process of change. Living things grow into their perfection, into their decline, into their death. No rule of art will suffice to stop the operation of this natural law, whether in the material world or in the human mind. We can indeed encounter disorders, when they occur, by external antagonism and remedies; but we cannot eradicate the process itself, out of which they arise. Life has the same right to decay, as it has to wax strong.231

  For Dean Church, “the substance of Dr. Pusey’s charges remains after all unanswered, and there is no getting over them while they remain. They are of that broad, palpable kind against which refinements of argumentative apology play in vain.”232 Whether, in meeting Pusey’s objections, Newman was engaged in vain “argumentative apology,” readers can judge for themselves. Certainly, he did not limit himself to dry discussions of what was de fide and what de jure. In delving into the springs of religious devotion, Newman spoke from the heart. “Religion acts on the affections,” he reminded his readers. “And of all passions love is the most unmanageable; nay more, I would not give much for that love which is never extravagant, which always observes the proprieties, and can move about in perfect good taste, under all emergencies. What mother, what husband or wife, what youth or maiden in love, but says a thousand foolish things, in the way of endearment, which the speaker would be sorry for strangers to hear; yet they are not on that account unwelcome to the parties to whom they are addressed … . So it is with devotional feelings … What is abstractedly extravagant may in particular persons be becoming and beautiful … When it is formalized into meditations or exercises, it is as repulsive as love-letters in a police report. Moreover, even holy minds readily adopt and become familiar with language which they would never have originated themselves, when it proceeds from a writer who has the same objects of devotion as they have …”233

  Here, again, Newman was directing his comments as much to Manning, Ward, and the Ultramontanes of The Dublin Review as to Pusey and the Tractarians. Perhaps predictably, the “bumptious Romans,” as Edward Caswall nicely referred to Manning and his friends, rose to the bait.234 “Whether he likes it or not,” Manning wrote of Newman in reply, “he has become the centre of those who hold low views of the Holy See, are anti-Roman, cold and silent, to say no more, about the Temporal Power, national, English, critical of Catholic devotions, and always on the lower side. I see danger of a Cisalpine Club rising again, but I see much danger of an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church. It takes the line of deprecating exaggerations, foreign devotions, Ultramontanism, anti-national sympathies. In one word, it is worldly Catholicism, and it will have the worldly on its side, and will deceive many.” To defend the Church against these literary dangers, Manning looked to a quarter that tended to be overlooked: “The thing which will save us from low views about the Mother of God and the Vicar of our Lord is the million Irish in England …”235

  Apropos Manning’s letter, David Newsome, in his lively dual biography, The Convert Cardinals: Ne
wman and Manning (1993) makes an important, if arguable point.

  This is an uncomfortable letter to read, but it expresses precisely the difference of stance between the two men. The one word that jars is ‘worldly.’ If Manning meant by that ‘unspiritual,’ he could hardly have been wider of the mark. But this was not his meaning. On the many occasions on which he used this word, the meaning consistently attached to it is a readiness to tone down the doctrine of the Church for pragmatic reasons, a disposition to compromise or dilute what the Church actually teaches in order to render it more serviceable in its ministering to the world … Manning never doubted Newman’s spirituality; what he disliked was his disposition to pander to the English anti-Roman spirit. This did not, however, deter him from making reconciliatory gestures. He refused to show offence over Newman’s riposte to Pusey. In fact, he wrote to thank him for ‘doing, so much more fully, that, which I was going to attempt.236

  While this might be an accurate account of what Manning meant by charging Newman with being ‘worldly,’ it underestimates the extent to which Newman’s tact served his apostolate to the Tractarians. Moreover, such tact did not require Newman to dilute or compromise Church doctrine. Many of the works Newman wrote as a Catholic were written, directly or indirectly, to appeal to the Tractarians and certainly there is no dilution or compromise of doctrine in Loss and Gain, the different volumes of Catholic sermons, the Catholic essays, Anglican Difficulties, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, the Idea of a University, the Apologia, the Letter to Pusey, the Grammar of Assent or the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. For Manning to have suggested otherwise was mischievous.

  What is most striking about the Letter to Pusey is how much of it is a reaffirmation of principles first enunciated in Newman’s King William Street lectures. In both compositions, Newman grounded his case for Catholicism in the Fathers and urged Pusey and the Tractarians against trying to imagine themselves a branch church. “The difference between the passages in … Anglican Difficulties and Letter to Dr. Pusey is not greater than that which strikes a stranger between photographs of the full face and the side face of the same person,” Newman himself noted in a memorandum.237

  They are different aspects of the same object. The grace of God is good without mixture of evil; but it operates upon an imperfect and corrupt subject matter, the human heart; and, while its manifestations are one and the same in every people, at the same time those manifestations are not simply good, but good and bad mixed, good viewed as coming from divine grace, not simply good, but partly extravagant and perverse as being distorted and, as it were refracted, by the human medium, in which that grace is received.

  Although both Anglican Difficulties and the Letter to Pusey are full of good things, no one can entirely appreciate the solicitude Newman showed Pusey without reading his correspondence. In response to Pusey’s objections to indulgences, which he shared with Protestants on the Continent, who were deeply, indeed barbarously mistaken about the practice, Newman posed a useful question: “are there any grounds, theological, of historical fact, or in reason, of sufficient strength to hinder men from giving credit to the word of the Church which is ‘the pillar and ground of the Truth?’ I know of none.”238 Apropos Mary, the Queen of Purgatory, regarding which Pusey was deeply undecided, Newman wrote: “I believe this is the whole of it. The Blessed Virgin is the great pattern of prayers, especially intercessory. And in this age especially she (and the Saints too and the Church too) is the witness against the prevailing theories, such as Mr. Buckle’s that all things go on by fixed laws which cannot be broken; thus introducing a practical atheism. If she is the Intercessor, and the effectual intercessor, she is so as regards earth, as regards Purgatory, as regards the whole created Universe.”239 In another letter, in response to a query from Pusey about transubstantiation, Newman was happy to rely on Trent, which, he recognized, guards the mystery of the Eucharist: “to tell the truth, I cannot get beyond the words of the Tridentine Canon, that the substance of the bread is changed into the Substance of the Body of Christ, and that the species remain – and I do not think we know any thing more, nor can answer any questions safely.”240

  When the First Vatican Council (1870) declared the doctrine of papal infallibility, Pusey’s eirenical enterprises, such as they were, closed shop. Despite his usually robust appetite for theological discussion—his correspondence with Newman is full of long queries on transubstantiation—he would not dispute the infallible, even though it is clear that he misunderstood the import of the definition of the doctrine, which was not as sweeping as so many feared. Newman thought the defining of the doctrine inopportune not only because it might appear to favor Manning and the Ultramontanes but also because it might alienate the Anglo-Catholic party. At the same time, he opposed the timing of the definition because, as he told the Ultramontane Herbert Vaughan, “I am not partial to what you call ‘movements’— In the Catholic Church I consider rest to be the better thing”241 Definitions of papal infallibility, he feared, even if doctrinally sound, might cause confusion and, inadvertently, unsettle the faithful. Newman was also annoyed to find that Ultramontanes were citing his Essay on Development to defend their own radical definition. In his excellent exposition of Newman’s inopportunism, Ian Ker quotes something Newman said before the infallibility issue arose to show how opponents often cited his work to misrepresent his thinking, which dogged Newman in his own time and continues to dog his legacy in ours.242 In 1862, to his dear, if volatile friend Mary Holmes, the governess, Newman confided: “through my life, those persons who have done me harm by their tongues, have been by me myself put into those very positions and situations from which they have been able to use their tongues against me.”243 Nonetheless, when the infallibility definition was finally settled, it was more astringent than the Ultramontanes would have wished and was hardly calculated to alarm fair-minded Tractarians. The Council merely declared that “it is to be a divine revelation that when the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra—that is, when he using his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his apostolic authority, defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church—he, by the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, possesses that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer was pleased to invest his Church in the definition of doctrine on faith and morals, and that, therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are irreformable in their own nature and not because of the consent of the Church.” Still, the definition was too much for Pusey. Early in his eirenical endeavors, he had been surprised to hear from Newman how indeterminable the living faith was. Now, he was given proof of that reality in terms that his prejudices against the very notion of infallibility were calculated to reject.

  Nevertheless, if Pusey’s efforts at reconciling himself and his co-religionists to Rome were unsuccessful, they were far from futile. As Church recognized, they did result in Anglicans seeing how willing Catholics were to address their objections. And for Church this meant that “though there is always risk in dwelling on what is impracticable, we should not like to say that the consideration of this great question was useless, even when for the present it seems to lead to nothing. In our narrow grooves of sect and party and communion, it is wholesome to be taken out into a larger range of thought, a wider view of possibilities, a more extended circle of sympathies. A more disheartening subject of contemplation than that of Christian unity it is not easy to conceive; but a man can hardly think about it seriously without learning to be more forbearing, more distrustful of loud assertions and narrow claims, more capable of entering into the ideas of others …” And here Church paid an indirect compliment to Newman and his measured approach to Edward Pusey and his Anglican difficulties, “for though we cannot believe that there is anything to be done or hoped for at the present moment, it is well to notice that discontent with the narrow views inherited from ancient quarrels and a disposition to take a larger and more generous view of the divisions of Christen
dom are not only found among Protestants. In spite of the general and tyrannous pressure of opinion, there are Roman Catholics writers both in England and in Germany who can discuss the great question with a frankness, a modesty, a boldness, which would do honour to any controversialist … Where there is manifestly moderation, self-restraint, honesty, and a desire to be accurate and to be fair, it is injurious to our own character as candid men not to see in them a promising sign for the future. These things take a long time to produce their effects in making people understand one another; but they will do so in the end.”244 No one now can read these words without hearing in them an augury of the generous offer Pope Benedict XVI has made to our own Anglo-Catholics avid for unity.

  The night before Pusey died, Newman wrote to a correspondent: “Today is the anniversary of the death of two most intimate friends of mine, very dear ones, John Bowden and Charles Marriott; it will be strange if I have to add to them Edward Pusey. I said Mass for him this morning. I have known him for sixty years; and he has ever been the same, subduing me by his many high virtues, and, amid severe trials of friendship, the most faithful of friends.”245 Dean Church similarly observed of the old Tractarian leader, that “no man was more variously judged, more sternly condemned, more tenderly loved.”246 No sterner judgment was made than that of Frederick York Powell, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, who wrote a friend after Pusey’s death, “I dare say he has done some good but I feel to him as I do towards those poor Jesuit fathers that suffered in Elizabeth’s reign. They are to be respected, pitied, and condemned, as fighters against the light. When a man can’t be at ease without a priest to bolster up his debility or nullity of conscience, it is time he went into a convent and stayed there. He isn’t fit for the wholesome workaday life, and his influence can’t be good. It is a pity to see Liddon and such fine fellows warped by this miserable little man’s teachings.”247 This “wholesome workaday” understanding of the “light” would loom large in the life of another significant contemporary of Newman’s: William Froude.