by Edward Short
If the assent to Catholic truth that he found in Catherine was a source of deep joy to Newman, the impediments he encountered in trying to share his faith with William were a source of continual frustration. “It quite put me out, when William was here, to think how little I could explain myself to him,” he wrote to Catherine in 1843. “In truth, it is hardly possible to do so in a little while. Every thing I said seemed to be shot out like bullets, round and hard and sudden—Arguments grow out of the mind, but when you see friends but seldom, there is a necessary abuse of a certain medium of communication which is the very life of conversation and discussion—I could only lament it …” Later, in his sermon, “Faith and Doubt,” preached in September 1849, Newman doubtless recalled his exchanges with William when he observed how “conviction is a state of mind, and it is something beyond and distinct from the mere arguments of which it is the result; it does not vary with their strength or their number.” Requiring ever more arguments might simply be a kind of spiritual procrastination. And here he might have been indirectly addressing not only William but Catherine as well. “As regards the Catholic Church: men are convinced in very various ways,—what convinces one, does not convince another; but this is an accident; the time comes anyhow, sooner or later, when a man ought to be convinced, and is convinced, and then he is bound not to wait for any more arguments, though more arguments be producible.” For Newman this was not the counsel of precipitancy. “Knowing the temptations which the evil one ever throws in our way,” he recognized that the “point of conversion” might pass and the would-be convert lose “his chance of conversion.” And once past, the chance might never return, for “God has not chosen every one to salvation: it is a rare gift to be a Catholic; it may be offered to us once in our lives and never again …” Here was a summons to seize the day which one would not find in Lovelace or Herrick. “If we have not seized on the ‘accepted time,’ nor know ‘in our day the things which are for our peace,’ oh the misery for us! What shall we be able to say when death comes, and we are not converted, and it is directly and immediately our own doing that we are not?” 47 The keeper of anniversaries in Newman could never forget this grave hazard. In 1854, while he was staying in Harcourt Street in Dublin, Newman wrote to Catherine, “I did not forget you and William on the 28th [Hurrell Foude had died on 28 February 1836], when my intention at Mass was the repose of the souls of Hurrell, Mr S. [Samuel] Wood, and my dear friend John Bowden, who, all three (humanly speaking) would have been Catholics, had they lived till now.”48
At the same time, Newman could never discount the revulsion Catholicism inspired in the English. “I grieve to hear you confirm,” he wrote to Catherine in the same letter, “what I have long felt the mysterious antipathy of our population to Catholicism … I don’t suppose that Hurrell or I had ever any real idea of the English population being influenced by Church principles … but certainly every event since 1833 has gone to show those, who would be Catholics, that they must come out of their own people as Abraham or St Paul.”49 Newman’s failure to gain fair consideration for the Catholic Faith from his siblings, from Keble and Pusey, and from so many others within the Anglo-Catholic camp, also contributed to this realization. And that he once shared this “mysterious antipathy” sharpened it still more. In 1844, in attempting to explain to Catherine what held him back from embracing what Vincent of Lérin called the “high gifts and the strong claims of the Church of Rome,” Newman confessed that, “Nothing … but a strong positive difficulty or repulsion has kept me from surrendering my heart to the authority of the Church of Rome; a repulsive principle, not growing out of Catholic, Anglican, or Primitive doctrine, in the way in which I viewed that doctrine, but something antagonistic … To be violent against Rome was to be dutiful to England, as well as a measure of necessity for the English theory”—that is to say, the via media, in which Newman invested so much theoretical ingenuity.50
That Newman managed to come out of his own people and embrace Catholicism, despite his prejudices against Rome, would always impress upon him the force of grace. This is why he never gave up trying to help Pusey and Keble resolve their difficulties in submitting to the Catholic faith, and why he devoted so much careful thought and attention to Catherine and William. If he could disabuse himself of such prejudices, so could they. Moreover, the transformative power of grace always reminded him of what he might have been had he not co-operated with the grace that came his way. In 1840, he furnished a preface to a life of the Anglican divine George Bull (1634–1710), in writing which he might have said to himself, “There for the grace of God go I …” Of Bull, the bishop of St. David’s, whose learned defense of Nicene Anglicanism won his works a prominent place in Pusey’s Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, Newman wrote: “He is the firm uncompromising disciple of the ancient Fathers, yet the inveterate enemy of Rome: the champion of the faith both against Unitarian error and the licentiousness of Luther … Such a mould of mind and character, whether in every point we adopt it for ourselves or not, we must confess to be eminently national; and to assimilate itself, more than any other, to the historical and doctrinal vicissitudes, and the complicated conditions of the Anglican Church.”51 Then, again, Newman could not resist wondering what might have happened if Keble had succeeded Edward Copleston as Provost of Oriel in January 1828. “I for one should probably be Tutor of Oriel to this day,” he told Catherine in 1844. “I should have gone on with Mathematics which I was bent on doing … I should have gone on with Niebuhr and Aristotle.”52 Considering how easily he might have been deflected from his own true course, Newman could not but rejoice in the guidance of grace. Here was the joy of the man who had not let “the point of conversion” pass him by.
O my dear brethren, what joy and what thankfulness should be ours, that God has brought us into the Church of His Son! What gift is equal to it in the whole world in its preciousness and in its rarity? In this country in particular, where heresy ranges far and wide, where uncultivated nature has so undisputed a field all her own, where grace is given to great numbers only to be profaned and quenched, where baptisms only remain in their impress and character, and faith is ridiculed for its very firmness, for us to find ourselves here in the region of light, in the home of peace, in the presence of Saints, to find ourselves where we can use every faculty of the mind and affection of the heart in its perfection, because in its appointed place and office, to find ourselves in the possession of certainty, consistency, stability, on the highest and holiest subjects of human thought, to have hope here and heaven hereafter, to be on the Mount with Christ, while the poor world is guessing and quarrelling at its foot, who among us shall not wonder at his own blessedness? who shall not be awe-struck at the inscrutable grace of God, which has brought himself, not others where he stands? …”53
This recalls the experience of St. Augustine, whose reading finally transported him beyond reading: “I had no wish to read more, nor was there need. At once a light of serenity flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”54
Some have unfavorably compared Newman’s Catholic sermons, which he preached in Alcester Street in Birmingham in 1849 in what he described as “a gloomy gin distillery” and later collected in Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849), with those he preached as an Anglican in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–1843).55 Ian Ker speaks of them as “Italianate.”56 Yet Richard Holt Hutton, the discriminating editor of The Spectator, rightly perceived that “though they have not … the delicate charm … I might almost say the shy passion of the Oxford sermons, they represent the full-blown blossom of his genius, while the former show it only in bud.”57 They also contain rehearsals of positions he would later take up more fully in A Grammar of Assent, as here, in the sermon, “Faith and Private Judgment:” “In the ordinary course of this world we account things true either because we see them, or because we can perceive that they follow and are deducible from what we do see; that is, we gain truth by sight or by reason, not
by faith. You will say indeed, that we accept a number of things which we cannot prove or see, on the word of others; certainly, but then we accept what they say only as the word of man; and we have not commonly that absolute and unreserved confidence in them, which nothing can shake. We know that man is open to mistake, and we are always glad to find some confirmation of what he says, from other quarters, in any important matter; or we receive his information with negligence and unconcern, as something of little consequence, as a matter of opinion; or, if we act upon it, it is as a matter of prudence, thinking it best and safest to do so. We take his word for what it is worth, and we use it either according to our necessity, or its probability … This is very different from Divine faith; he who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. He is as certain that the doctrine taught is true, as that God is true; and he is certain, because God is true, because God has spoken, not because he sees its truth or can prove its truth. That is, faith has two peculiarities;—it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with eye, or sees with the reason, but because it receives the tidings from one who comes from God.”58 Here is another passage from a Catholic sermon, “Faith and Doubt,” which would also find its way into the Grammar, which makes the point above from a different angle. Throughout his life, Newman listened to Protestants disparaging Catholics for adhering to an infallible faith; but Newman followed St. Augustine in recognizing that one could not have light that was still dark.
When, then, Protestants quarrel with us for saying that those who join us must give up all ideas of ever doubting the Church in time to come, they do nothing else but quarrel with us for insisting on the necessity of faith in her. Let them speak plainly; our offence is that of demanding faith in the Holy Catholic Church; it is this, and nothing else. I must insist upon this: faith implies a confidence in a man’s mind, that the thing believed is really true; but, if it is once true, it never can be false. If it is true that God became man, what is the meaning of my anticipating a time when perhaps I shall not believe that God became man? this is nothing short of anticipating a time when I shall disbelieve a truth. And if I bargain to be allowed in time to come not to believe, or to doubt, that God became man, I am but asking to be allowed to doubt or disbelieve what I hold to be an eternal truth. I do not see the privilege of such a permission at all, or the meaning of wishing to secure it:—if at present I have no doubt whatever about it, then I am but asking leave to fall into error; if at present I have doubts about it, then I do not believe it at present, that is, I have not faith. But I cannot both really believe it now, and yet look forward to a time when perhaps I shall not believe it; to make provision for future doubt, is to doubt at present. It proves I am not in a fit state to become a Catholic now. I may love by halves, I may obey by halves; I cannot believe by halves: either I have faith, or I have it not.59
In coming out from his own people and embracing the Catholic Faith Newman recognized that he might be responsible for unsettling those whom he had formerly led. “The pain I suffer from the thought of the distress I am causing,” he confided in Mrs. Froude, “cannot be described—and the loss of kind opinion on the part of those I desire to be well with. The unsettling of so many peaceable, innocent minds is a most overpowering thought, and at this moment my heart literally aches and has for days. I am conscious of no motive but that of obeying some urgent imperative call of duty …”60 Again, it was vocation that drove him. And yet, as we have seen, he saw such unsettling, in some respects, as not only unavoidable but salutary. As he wrote to Mrs. Froude in April 1844, “So far from my change of opinion having any fair tendency to unsettle persons as to truth and falsehood as objective realities, it should be considered whether such change is not necessary, should truth be a real objective thing, and made to confront a person who has been brought up in a system short of truth. Surely the continuance of a person who wishes to go right in a wrong system, and not his giving it up, would be that which militated against the objectiveness of Truth—leading to the suspicion that one thing and another were equally pleasing to our Maker, where men were sincere.” Speaking of his change of allegiance, Newman admitted to Mrs. Froude that he had been unsettled himself, unsure whether, in what he described as his “long continued inward secret ordeal,” he was in possession of the truth or doubt, or, worse, delusion.61 But what finally convinced him that he was indeed in possession of the truth was a renewal of vocation, for “if the doubt comes from Him, He will repeat the suggestion. He will call us again as He called Samuel; He will make our way clear to us. Fancies, excitements, feelings go and never return—truth comes again and is importunate.”62
In “Faith in Private Judgment,” he also described another kind of doubt, which he regarded as characteristically Protestant. To describe this doubt he asked: “What is faith?” And he defined it as an “assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God.” Now, for Newman, “Such is the only rational, consistent account of faith; but … Protestants … laugh at the very notion of it. They laugh at the notion itself of men pinning their faith … upon Pope or Council; they think it simply superstitious and narrow-minded, to profess to believe just what the Church believes, and to assent to whatever she will say in time to come on matters of doctrine. That is, they laugh at the bare notion of doing what Christians undeniably did in the time of the Apostles. Observe, they do not merely ask whether the Catholic Church has a claim to teach, has authority, has the gifts;—this is a reasonable question;—no, they think that the very state of mind which such a claim involves in those who admit it, namely, the disposition to accept without reserve or question, that this is slavish. They call it priestcraft to insist on this surrender of the reason, and superstition to make it. That is, they quarrel with the very state of mind which all Christians had in the age of the Apostles …” Here Newman rejected the Protestant claim that it was Protestants who upheld the faith of the primitive Church by showing that they had no faith in the sense in which the Apostles understood the term. On the contrary, they reserved the right to judge for themselves; they recognized no authority; they prided themselves on their private judgment. And if Protestants were transported back into the primitive Church, their prejudices would not have credited what the Apostles had to say. For Newman, “those who thus boast of not being led blindfold, of judging for themselves, of believing just as much and just as little as they please, of hating dictation, and so forth, would have found it an extreme difficulty to hang on the lips of the Apostles …” They “would have simply resisted the sacrifice of their own liberty of thought, would have thought life eternal too dearly purchased at such a price, and would have died in their unbelief. And they would have defended themselves on the plea that it was absurd and childish to ask them to believe without proof, to bid them give up their education, and their intelligence, and their science …” And this, as Newman argued, in spite of “those difficulties which reason and sense find in the Christian doctrine, in spite of its mysteriousness, its obscurity, its strangeness, its unacceptableness, its severity …” Protestants, with their skeptical principles, would never “surrender themselves to the teaching of a few unlettered Galilæans, or a learned indeed but fanatical Pharisee.” They would have insisted on their Protestant prerogatives and shown Paul and the Apostles the door. And, for Newman, if “This is what they would have said then; … is it wonderful they do not become Catholics now? The simple account of their remaining as they are, is, that they lack one thing,—they have not faith; it is a state of mind, it is a virtue, which they do not recognise to be praiseworthy, which they do not aim at possessing.”63
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bsp; Newman would make a similar point to Mrs. Froude: “holding as I do, that there is really no medium between scepticism and Catholicism, the very fact that so few of those who had before been influenced by me, have become Catholic, is almost a proof, after all allowances for deference to individual Anglicans, for attachment to what they have been brought up in, for confusion of mind, for desire to act deliberately and other operating causes, that a number of so called Anglo Catholics who still profess to believe secretly doubt.”64 At the same time, Newman told Mrs. Froude, “If you saw more of me, you would not fancy I entertain such hard thoughts about people out of the Church, as you seem to do.” Moreover, he hastened to assure his friend, Catholics distinguished “between formal and material error.”65 Still, that there was no medium between skepticism and Catholicism was one of Newman’s long-standing convictions, to which he gave memorable expression in a wonderfully inspired passage from The Tamworth Reading Room (1841): “Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences,” he wrote; “we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our first principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking farther and farther, and finding ‘in the lowest depth a lower deep,’ till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism. I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for every thing, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.”66