Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  What have we, private Christians, to do with hopes and fears of earth, with schemes of change, the pursuit of novelties, or the dreams of reforms? The world is passing like a shadow: the day of Christ is hastening like a shadow: the day of Christ is hastening on. It is our wisdom, surely, to use what has been provided for us, instead of lusting after what we have not, asking flesh to eat, and gazing wistfully on Egypt, or on the heathen around us. Faith has no leisure to act the busy politician, to bring the world’s language into the sacred fold, or to use the world’s jealousies in a divine polity, to demand rights, to flatter the many, or to court the powerful. What is faith’s highest wish and best enjoyment? A dying saint shall answer …24

  In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), looking back on his Tractarian polemics, Newman admitted to giving vent to a good deal of “fierceness” and “sport”.25 As a Catholic, he would treat his predominantly Protestant audiences to even more barbed provocation. Flannery O’Connor once said that to drive home realities to an audience resistant to them, the Catholic novelist had to be prepared to use strong methods. “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more ordinary means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”26 In his sermon “The Religion of the Day” (1832), Newman let rip: “I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.”27 In Difficulties of Anglicans (1850), he made a distinction fundamental to his whole reading of public life: the Church “aims at realities, the world at decencies.” “Worship of comfort, decency, and social order” motivates the world, the Church “regards this world, and all that is in it, as mere shadows, as dust and ashes, compared to the value of one single soul.” It follows, then, for the Church, that “unless she can, in her own way, do good to souls, it is no use her doing anything; she holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin …”28 One can only imagine how that went down with his Anglican audience.

  Battening as it did on periodicals for which it was axiomatic that the Catholic Church was backward, repressive, superstitious and corrupt, such an audience would have found Newman unsympathetic in any case. Newman responded by charging that these periodicals flattered the Englishman’s intellectual pride, his conviction that since ‘an Englishman’s house is his castle’ … it followed that “he himself is the ultimate sanction and appellate authority of all he holds” and that those holding contrary views—namely, Roman Catholics—were “irrational and ludicrous.” In one of his sermons, Newman called attention to the routine distortion of religion even in publications favorable to religion:

  Look round upon … our periodical publications: is it not too plain to need a word of proof, that religion is in the main honoured because it tends to make this life happier, and is expedient for the preservation of our persons, property, advantages, and position in the world? … whether we will believe it or no, the truth remains, that the strength of the Church … does not lie in earthly law, or human countenance, or civil station, but in her proper gifts; in those great gifts which our Lord pronounced to be beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the thirsters after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted.29

  The idea of religion as little more than an engine of philanthropy is now widely embraced but Newman rejected it as an idolatry set up to gratify moral vanity. For him, the point of religion was not to make us happier, healthier, richer or more philanthropic but to bind us to the will of God.

  In the Apologia Newman listed propositions of the liberal faith that he had “denounced and abjured” as leader of the Oxford Movement. One of them was “Virtue is the child of knowledge, and vice of ignorance. Therefore, e.g. education, periodical literature, railroad traveling, ventilation, drainage, and the arts of life, when fully carried out, serve to make a population moral and happy.”30 In The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), Newman exposed what he thought the folly of this proposition in an attack on Sir Robert Peel’s scheme for endowing a library for the working classes from which books of divinity would be excluded. The series of letters first appeared in The Times and reaffirms his conviction that religion alone makes moral reform possible by reforming the will. “The problem for statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot give the solution … You do not get rid of vice by human expedients … If virtue be a mastery over mind, if its end be action, if its perfection be inward order, harmony, and peace, we must seek it in graver and holier places than libraries and reading rooms.”31 In The Idea of a University (1873), for which The Tamworth Reading Room can be seen as a trial run, he put the case more powerfully still: “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.”32

  Newman may have disputed the moral efficacy of education but never its utility. Too often educators dismiss Newman’s ideas on education as impracticable. On finishing reading The Idea of a University, Roy Jenkins, the former Oxford Chancellor, confessed that the book left him “dazzled but intellectually unsatisfied. Newman had mostly held me spellbound in the grip of his prose, but he had convinced me neither that he had a practical plan for an Irish university in the 1850s or that he had left guidelines of great relevance for a university of any nationality or any or no faith today.”33 Yet the Catholic gentleman that Newman wished to form is as needed today as he was in the 1850s and anything but impractical. “The man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist … but he will be placed in the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger … In this sense … mental culture is emphatically useful.”34

  All too often, Newman felt, liberal periodicals, which had another idea of utility in mind, were corrupting this mental culture. The politician and law reformer Henry Brougham, whom Newman took to task in The Tamworth Reading Room, was a frequent contributor to the liberal Edinburgh Review and one of the founders of that ‘godless place in Gower Street,’ London University. Sidney Smith, a friend of Brougham’s, was another contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and no fan of the Oxford Movement. In a letter to Lady Davy he wrote: “I have not yet discovered of what I am to die, but I rather believe I shall be burnt alive by the Puseyites. Nothing so remarkable in England as the progress of these foolish people. I have no conception what they mean, if it be not to revive every absurd ceremony, and every antiquated folly …”35 Yet Newman was himself a journalist and worked to balance both the liberal and the conservative points of view that he encountered in the public square.

  In a Rambler article on “Policy of English Catholics towards Political Parties,” published in 1859, he wrote: “It is an absurdity to talk of an alliance of Catholics with Conservatives, or Whigs, or Liberals, or Progressists; unless, and so long as, any one of these parties takes upon itself the championship of Catholic grievances, and the other parties combine to perpetuate them.” Class was another factor. “The Wesleyans, the Quakers, the Unitarians, for the most part belong t
o one class in society; it is natural that their political, social, and secular interests should be the same. It is not so with Catholics … [The Catholic Church] has specimens of every class in the community, of high and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned. The children of Whigs and Tories, the families of high-church dignitaries, the heirs of great territorial possessions, professional men, high-born ladies, agriculture, trade, manufactures, the shop-keepers of towns, mechanics, peasants, the poor, the indigent—they all meet together in our religious pale.” Nowhere is this more vividly illustrated than in Newman’s letters.

  Many of the least discriminating of Newman’s commentators continue to claim him for the liberal or the conservative camp. Ian Ker, in his many books on Newman, including his great biography, demonstrates that Newman is both liberal and conservative, and neither. In Newman and the Fullness of Christianity (1993), he remarks how “The theological office of the Church … may find itself in opposition to both the … political and pastoral offices. And Newman does not hesitate to say that at times it will have to give way … If a deference to theological inquiry is the essence of a liberal Christian, then to that extant Newman is a liberal. But where he is not a liberal is in asserting that the theological is not the only office of the Church and that at times it has to play a subordinate office. Newman eludes the usual categories of liberal and conservative.”36

  In the Apologia, Newman defined the tenets of liberalism to which he objected: “that truth and falsehood in religion are but matter of opinion; that one doctrine is as good as another; that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth; that there is no truth; that we are not more acceptable to God by believing this than by believing that; that no one is answerable for his opinions; that they are a matter of necessity or accident; that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess; that our merit lies in seeking, not in possessing; that is a duty to follow what seems to us true, without fear lest it should not be true; that it may be a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail; that we may take up and lay down opinions at pleasure; that belief belongs to the mere intellect, not to the heart also; that we may safely trust to ourselves in matters of Faith, and need no other guide …”37

  Although no Tory, Newman thought alliances between Catholics and the Conservative party a good thing if they served Catholic interests. In the Rambler in July 1859, he acknowledged the cynical incredulity that met one such alliance under Lord Derby’s administration: “Nothing is so little tolerated by the public as the pretence that any one acts on so impossible a motive as pure philanthropy.” Cardinal Wiseman canvassed Derby to provide Catholic chaplains for Catholics in workhouses and jails. When Derby agreed, Wiseman gave him his support. (Wiseman reviewed Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor when it first came out in 1851 and was well informed about the plight of London’s poor.) 38 Newman wrote a memorable poem for prisoners, which shows his characteristic sympathy for the outcast.

  Help, Lord, the souls which Thou hast made,

  The souls to Thee so dear,

  In prison for the debt unpaid

  Of sins committed here.

  Oh, by their patience of delay,

  Their hope amid their pain,

  Their sacred zeal to burn away

  Disfigurement and stain;

  Oh, by their fire of love, not less

  In keenness than the flame,

  Oh, by their very helplessness,

  Oh, by Thy own great Name,

  Good Jesu, help! Sweet Jesu, aid

  The souls to Thee most dear

  In prison, for their debt unpaid

  Of sins committed here.39

  Yet, while Newman was prepared to support the Tories when they were willing to advance the purposes of the Church, he was always leery of conservatism. While he recognized that “The Roman Pontiffs owe their exaltation to the secular power and have a great stake in its stability and prosperity … [and] cannot bear anarchy … think revolution an evil … pray for the peace of the world and the prosperity of all Christian States, and … effectively support the cause of order and good government,” he also saw that “the Pope never is, and cannot be” conservative in the party sense of the word, for that “means a man who is at the top of the tree, and knows it, and means never to come down, whatever it may cost him to keep his place there. It means a man who upholds government and society and the existing state of things … not because it is good and desirable, because it is established, because it is a benefit to the population, because it is full of promise for the future,—but rather because he himself is well off in consequence of it, and because to take care of number one is his main political principle. It means a man who defends religion, not for religion’s sake, but for the sake of its accidents and externals; and in this sense Conservative a Pope can never be, without a simple betrayal of the dispensation committed to him.”40 The Conservative politician who profited most from defending religion “for the sake of its accidents and externals” was Disraeli, whom Newman rarely supported, though he must often have preferred Disraeli’s “suet pudding legislation,” as one Conservative MP characterized it, to Gladstone’s wild liberalism—“it was flat, insipid, dull but … very wise and very wholesome.”41

  In weighing in on the Gladstone and Disraeli question that has set so many undergraduates scribbling over the years, Newman revealed his fundamental skepticism about the claims of political liberals and conservatives alike: “I confess I am much perplexed between Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone. Gladstone is a man of personal religion, and has been so from a boy; Disraeli is a man of the world, a politician, and in thought and in belief as much a Jew as he is Christian. On the other hand he is the representative of all the old traditions which Tories used to cherish and the Pope at this time represents [this was written in April 1872], while Gladstone is the leader of a mixed multitude, who profess a Babel of religions or none at all. I never can feel respect for Mr. Disraeli’s self—I never can hold fellowship with Gladstone’s tail.”42 At the same time, it was characteristic of Newman to admit to his old friend, Frederic Rogers, later Lord Blachford, “If I was brought into the House of Lords, I should have just the same hang dog look as Disraeli. It is a comfort to have discovered a point of sympathy with a man I do not like.”43 Nevertheless, in the wake of Disraeli’s triumph at the Congress of Berlin in June 1878, which countered the gains Russia made at the end of the Russo-Turkish War with the treaty of San Stefano and inspired Bismarck’s famous remark Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann, Newman applauded Disraeli’s repulse of panslavism, despite the fact that both Dean Church and Lord Blachford deplored it. “As to Disraeli’s fine work,” Newman wrote to Blachford, “I confess I am much dazzled with it, and wish it well. It is a grand idea … hugging from love the Turk to death, instead of the Russian bear, which, as a poem or romance, finds a weak part in my imagination. And then it opens such a view of England, great in the deeds of their forefathers, showing that they are not degenerate sons, but rising with the occasion in fulfilment of the ‘Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.’ And then it is so laughably clever a move, in a grave diplomatic congress – and then it opens such wonderful views of the future, that I am overcome by it. Nor do I see the hypocrisy you speak of.”44

  The Latin motto here—‘Do not give into evil but proceed ever more boldly against it’—is from Virgil (Aeneid, VI, 95). It is also the motto of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which was founded in 1982 “to undermine statism in all its forms,” a mission which would have met with Newman’s wholehearted approval. In 1834, he wrote an open letter to the British Magazine on the topic of centralization—statism in embryo—and in the letter he remarked how “It must be evident to any one who looks ever so little into the political transactions of the day, that the principle of centralization is steadily working its way into the various departments of our national system.” While Newman conceded that the principle was not entirely unwelcome in all cases, he recognized how “it seems to have be
en a characteristic of the British constitution hitherto … to view the principle with jealousy, as hostile in its tendency to the liberty of the subject …” For proof of this, Newman asked his readers to consider “the story of the foreigner’s surprise on finding Waterloo Bridge was built, not by the government, but by individuals” or the fact “that our received English dictionary is the work of an individual … or that our theatres and travelling are left to private speculation; or that our magistrates are unpaid; or that our East India empire was acquired by a mercantile company. On the other hand, the late numerous Commissions, the Education Board in Ireland, the Metropolitan Police, the Poor Law Amendment Bill, are all evidence of the growing popularity of the centralizing system.” For Newman, this new appetite for centralization “has been the means of throwing us into the strange inconsistency of advocating a principle almost of tyranny, in the management of hitherto private matters, at the very time we were exulting in the triumph of a great Reform measure, which was to supersede the necessity of a government, and to make the House of Commons, and so the people, their own rulers. But in truth the inconsistency is but apparent; the destruction of local influences which centralization involves, and the disorganization of the parliament, as the seat and instrument of the administration, alike tending to the aggrandizement of the executive, as the main-spring of all national power, and virtually identical with the government.”45 Here was a prescient response to the creeping centralization that would eventually culminate in the British nanny state.