by Edward Short
But what is also striking about this essay, from the standpoint of Newman’s own religious development, is that it was written in September 1839, a month after he experienced his first serious doubts about the legitimacy of the Anglican Church while reading about the Monophysites.53 Following what he described in the Apologia as “that great revolution of mind,” he resolved to test his doubts before acting on them—a period which consumed six long years of his life and involved him in sedulous deliberation.54 In his review of Caswall’s book, we can see Newman extolling the putative vitality of the American church with strenuous resolve, even as he calls it sharply into question. Here is a passage in point.
All systems, then, which live and are substantive, depend on some or other inward principle or doctrine, of which they are the development. They are not a fortuitous assemblage of atoms from without, but the expansion of a moral element from within … While their inward life remains, they repair their losses; if existing portions are cut off, they put out fresh branches. But when that life goes, they are no more; they have no being, they dissolve … . Such a creature of time and chance many men have thought and think our own Church to be; and such she is proved not to be, as in ten thousand other ways … by her vigorous offshoots growing up in the West. She scattered some of her seeds in the wilderness; and, while for a time they seemed to die, a spirit at length was found within them, which rose, throve, and at length took outward shape like her own. Thus she proved herself to be a living principle …
Reading that last sentence, after the skeptical preamble, one wonders whether Newman truly believed what he was saying. Later, in July 1840, he would write to a Scotch Episcopalian, who eventually converted with his wife and children, that “A great experiment is going on, whether Anglocatholicism has a root, a foundation, a consistency, as well as Roman Catholicism, or whether (in the language of the day) it be ‘a sham.’ I hold it to be quite impossible, unless it be real, that it can maintain its ground—it must fall to pieces … If it be a mere theory, it will not work … The internal consistence of the whole is being severely tested. I securely leave it to this issue—I will not defend if it if will not stand it.”55
Still, despite the sanguine assessment of the American Episcopal Church that he gave in his article for the British Critic, Newman was candid enough when it came to expressing his reservations about the corrupting influence that a proud, self-satisfied, commercial people naturally exerted on a church that could never afford to offend the popular pleasure. “Nor in this respect are we better circumstanced than they,” he pointedly reminded his English readers; “we too in the time of the third William and the first Georges had certain impressions of the same kind made on us, which chilled, attenuated, and shrivelled up our faith and spirit. What, indeed, is that desire of Evidences, that delight in objection and spontaneous incredulity, that pursuit of secular comfort, that contentment with mere decency and morality, which in its degree exist still among us all, but remains of the Socinian temper inflicted on us during that calamitous period? Nor have those malign influences ceased. They have worked their way unseen …”56 In returning to this “Socinian temper,” Newman got at a fundamental feature of the American Episcopal Church, and indeed of its parent church in England.
A trading country is the habitat of Socinianism … Not to the poor, the forlorn, the dejected, the afflicted, can the Unitarian doctrine be alluring, but to those who are rich and have need of nothing, and know not that they are “miserable and blind and naked;”—to such men Unitarianism so-called is just fitted, suited to their need, fulfilling their anticipations of religion, counterpart to their inward temper and their modes of viewing things. Those who have nothing of this world to rely upon need a firm hold of the next, they need a deep religion; they are as if stripped of the body while here,—as if in the unseen state between death and judgment; and as they are even now in one sense what they then shall be, so they need to view God such as they then will view Him; they endure, or rather eagerly desire, the bare vision of Him stripped of disguise, as they are stripped of disguises too; they desire to know that He is eternal, since they feel that they are mortal.57
Notwithstanding Newman’s deep sympathy with the immigrants whose material wants would soon transform America, he also recognized that the typical Episcopalian did not suffer these wants, and he asked himself how the comparative and the peculiar type of wealth enjoyed by the Episcopalian influenced his religion. The Episcopalian tended to be a self-made tradesman, without the responsibilities of the landed gentry, and this, as Newman recognized, colored his religion. “He has rank without tangible responsibilities; he has made himself what he is, and becomes self-dependent; he has laboured hard or gone through anxieties, and indulgence is his reward. In many cases he has had little leisure for cultivation of mind, accordingly luxury and splendour will be his beau ideal of refinement. If he thinks of religion at all, he will not like from being a great man to become a little one; he bargains for some or other compensation to his self-importance, some little power of judging or managing, some small permission to have his own way.
Commerce is free as air; it knows no distinctions; mutual intercourse is its medium of operation. Exclusiveness, separations, rules of life, observance of days, nice scruples of conscience, are odious to it. We are speaking of the general character of a trading community, not of individuals; and, so speaking, we shall hardly be contradicted. A religion which neither irritates their reason nor interferes with their comfort, will be all in all in such a society. Severity whether of creed or precept, high mysteries, corrective practices, subjection of whatever kind, whether to a doctrine or to a priest, will be offensive to them. They need nothing to fill the heart, to feed upon, or to live in; they despise enthusiasm, they abhor fanaticism, they persecute bigotry. They want only so much religion as will satisfy their natural perception of the propriety of being religious. Reason teaches them that utter disregard of their Maker is unbecoming, and they determine to be religious, not from love and fear, but from good sense.58
No better description of nominal Christianity has ever been penned. And yet what is no less remarkable about this scathing critique of private judgment is that it was written by the son of a banker, who, by all accounts, eschewed religion for precisely the same prudential reasons as Newman’s trader.59 So there is something of an autobiographical cast to this passage. What is also striking about the passage is that, for Catholics in the twenty-first century, it captures the ethos not only of Protestant but Catholic Christianity. While it is true that America’s immigrants were mostly poor Catholics, who had no difficulty recognizing that they were “blind and miserable and naked,” their descendants put poverty behind them and now many are indistinguishable from their erstwhile Episcopalian betters. They, too, preen themselves on their private judgment and cleave to a worldly, self-congratulatory, nominal faith.
One notably heroic American who had the God-given grace to differentiate the true Faith from private judgment was Levi Silliman Ives, the only Episcopal bishop to convert to Catholicism, who visited Newman at the Oratory for a week after he converted. Before converting, Ives was the Episcopalian Bishop of North Carolina. In 1848, he formed the religious Brotherhood of the Holy Cross, the Tractarian character of which caused it to be shut down. In 1852 he resigned his see and submitted to Pope Pius IX at Rome. His wife, a daughter of Bishop Hobart, converted with her husband. Ives returned to the United States in 1854, where he became a Professor at St Joseph’s Seminary and St John’s College, Fordham. His secession from the Episcopal Church inspired jubilant crowing from the Paris L’Univers, which, after alluding to “the conversion of so considerable a personage,” remarked: “now neither rage nor falsehood can lessen the effect of the blow which heresy has received from this brilliant defection.”60 The New York Times saw the conversion in a surprisingly sympathetic light. “Bishop Ives,” the paper reported, “must not only relinquish his episcopal connection with old friends and a large diocese filled wi
th those who have been taught to reverence him for the most amiable of personal traits; but he must abandon the clerical profession entirely, because he possesses that unlucky appendage, a wife.” Still, the paper observed, “Temporal considerations were ineffectual to prevent what he was led to regard as an act of conscientious necessity and the vast sacrifice he has made, in consequence, attests his sincerity. There is no position in the Catholic Church prepared for him, half so gratifying to ambition as the one he has forsaken. Whatever pious or personal regrets we may entertain about it, it is impossible not to admire a man, thus true to his convictions. It is his honesty, and not his creed, that we applaud.”61 Here was a man who might have reminded Newman of John Keble, another Rome-leaning Anglican whose wife made conversion inexpedient.
Like Newman, Ives was finally converted by the early Church Fathers. Newman’s letters are full of eloquent testimony to the impact that the Greek Fathers had on him. In one, he wrote William Joseph O’Neill Daunt (1807–94), an Irish convert from Tullamore, who was secretary to Daniel O’Connell, the author of a popular novel called The Wife Hunter (1838) and later Mayor of Dublin: “You speak of feeling drawn to the religion of Ireland by your love of Ireland; I felt something like this as regards the Fathers. After my conversion I had a sensible pleasure in taking down the Volumes of St Athanasius, St Ambrose etc in my Library—The words rose in my mind ‘I am at one with you now.’”62 Ives was similarly drawn to the Fathers. In his spiritual auto-biography, The Trials of a Mind in its Progress to Catholicism (1853), he showed how the Fathers forcefully disabused him of the Protestant fallacy that there was something called the “Primitive Church” different from the Catholic Church. He brilliantly brought the witness of the Fathers to bear to reaffirm the early Church’s subscription not only to transubstantiation and baptismal regeneration but to papal primacy, which Pusey could never bring himself to acknowledge. “In short,” Ives concluded, “the first five centuries taught as distinctly, though not as formally as did the Fathers of the Council of Trent, the various dogmas set forth by that Council as necessary to the faith and practice of the Christian man.”63 Still another admirable aspect of Ives was his respect for the unprevaricating voice of conscience. In his autobiography, Ives recounts how, before finally converting, “I had actually flattered myself into the belief that my doubts had left me, and that I could henceforward act with a quiet conscience on Protestant ground. But, on recovering from the stupefaction of overmuch sorrow, I found myself fearfully deceived; found that what I had taken for permanent relief of mind was only the momentary insensibility of opiates or exhaustion. When I came again to myself, however, I was visited with reflections which no man need envy. The concessions I made, in good faith, at the time, for the peace of the Church, and, as I had falsely supposed, for my own peace, rose up before me as so many concessions, and cowardly ones too, to the god of this world. So that I can say with the deepest truth that the friendliness which greeted me on my subsequent visitation through my diocese was most unwelcome to my heart. Every kind word of those who had spoken against the truth seemed a rebuke to me, every warm shake of the hand to fall like ice upon my soul. I felt that I had shrunk publicly from the consequences of that truth which God had taught me—felt that I had denied that blessed Master who had grievously revealed Himself to me. But blessed be His name for that grace which moved me to ‘weep bitterly.’ Persecution for Christ’s sake would have been balm to my wounded conscience …”64 Here was an affirmation of the primacy of conscience formed by the authority of what Newman called the “One True Fold.”65
In speaking of the competition that the Episcopal Church faced from other denominations, Newman could not but acknowledge that “the Church of Rome … by means of its numerous and well-conducted schools and colleges … is daily acquiring a more powerful hold upon the public mind …”66 Alexis de Tocqueville, on his first visit to America in 1831, wrote a childhood friend back in Paris of the “prodigious” growth of Catholicism in America. “Forty years ago there were thirty Catholics in New York. The chapel of the Spanish consulate could accommodate all of them. Today there are thirty thousand, and they have built six churches at their own expense. The same is true in all the large cities, even Boston, the heartland of Puritanism, which has two Catholic churches and a convent … We found it almost universal in Canada. Today there are seven or eight hundred thousand Catholics in the United States, ten seminaries and a great many establishments of various kinds.”67 The historian who had so brilliantly uncovered the causes of the French Revolution also wished to identify the causes of Catholicism’s rapid rise. His analysis was highly Newmanian. Of course, immigration from Catholic Europe, particularly Ireland, France, and Germany was a significant factor. But there were other reasons. “It is said,” De Tocqueville wrote, “that there are numerous conversions, especially in frontier settlements. I can’t prove it, but I can easily believe it; Protestantism has always struck me as being to the Christian religion what the constitutional monarchy is to politics—a kind of compromise between opposite principles, a way station between two different states, a system, in short, unequal to its own consequences and unable completely to satisfy the human spirit. As you know, I’ve always believed that constitutional monarchies would end up as republics; and I am likewise convinced that Protestantism, once it has run its course, will become natural religion. What I am telling you here is very keenly felt by many religious souls; they recoil from the prospect of their doctrines having this outcome, and fly to Catholicism, whose principles may be highly debatable, but where everything coheres.”68 Antebellum America might have been rife with every conceivable species of dissident Protestantism but it was the rise of this robust Catholicism, as De Tocqueville saw, which was most characteristic of religion in the rapidly expanding new republic. And, again, as Tocqueville confirms, the Church of Rome could boast of the allegiance of more than Europe’s struggling immigrants. Disaffected Episcopalians, Methodists, even Transcendentalists, made their way to what St. Jeremiah called its “ancient paths.”
Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), an autodidact from Vermont who edited his own Brownson’s Quarterly Review, came to those paths by a rather circuitous route. Before converting, he was not only a Transcendentalist but, by turns, a Presbyterian, an atheist, a Unitarian, and a Saint-Simonian. Newman first learned of this brash convert after Brownson attacked what he contrived to imagine the heterodoxy of Newman’s Essay on Development, which prompted a memorable response from Newman: Brownson, he told his good friend Henry Wilberforce, “has acted like an uncharitable vulgar half converted Yankee …”69 Nevertheless, after Brownson admitted that he had misunderstood Newman’s argument, Newman graciously offered him a teaching position with his newly established Catholic University, though he was careful to limit the offer to a position teaching geography. Newman would not let Brownson instruct his suggestible charges in theology.70
Another American who would have an indirect connection with Newman was James Aloysius McMaster (1820–1886), a fiery, impetuous, wayward man, who seems to have been something of an American William George Ward without the charm. The Catholic Encyclopedia summed him up nicely: “He spared no one, high or low, who differed from him, and his invective was as bitter as an unlimited vocabulary could make it.” Coincidentally enough, he had been very close to Arthur Carey in the General Theological Seminary. Clarence Walworth, in his account of the Oxford Movement in America, recalled how Carey and McMaster “walked together, talked together, and read together, eagerly discussing every new publication that issued from Oxford …”71 At the Seminary, McMaster also became friendly with the eventual converts Isaac Hecker and Walworth himself. After becoming a Catholic in 1845, McMaster accompanied Hecker and Walworth to the Redemptorist novitiate at Louvain. On the way, they also called on Newman at Littlemore in August 1845, two months before his own conversion. The impetuous McMaster made a strong impression on Newman. Afterwards, whenever he spoke of Rome-leaning Americans, ready to convert, he ca
lled them “McMasters.” When the friend of Faber and future Oratorian Thomas Francis Knox visited Newman in 1846, he noted in his journal, “Knox is here for the morning. He is not to join us, but to travel for 2 years in America. I hope he will convert all the Mac Masters.”72 After McMaster discovered that he had no vocation, he returned to New York and set himself up as a Catholic editor. In July 1848 he purchased Bishop Hughes’s share in the New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, and became sole proprietor and editor. When Brownson attacked his theory of development, McMaster came to his defense: “I feel very sorry for the brutal attack of Brownson,” he wrote Newman. “We had to join hands … for a time and to work together, but he then said he would write no more on the development question … I know that many of the most influential Bishops here are displeased at his uncalled for attack on you; and I have reason to think that very few approve of it.”73 In 1862 President Lincoln barred McMaster’s paper from circulation, and for a brief period he was imprisoned. At the time of the First Vatican Council, he was extravagantly ultramontane and a great champion of Pius IX. Newman must have been at once amused and gratified to receive, after the appearance of his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), this warm letter from James Baptist Purcell, the Archbishop of Cincinnati: