Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  This refutes the undiscriminating claim that Newman, from a literary standpoint, never surpassed his Anglican writings, a view which James Joyce was fond of sharing with his European friends when he was living in Paris in the 1930s. “As usual I am in a minority of one,” he wrote his patron, the long-suffering Englishwoman, Harriet Weaver. “If I tell people that no tenor voice like Sullivan’s has been heard in the world for 50 years or that Zaporoyetz, the Russian basso, makes Chaliapin sound like a cheap whistle or that nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church they listen in silence. These names mean nothing to them. And when I have stumbled out of the room no doubt they tap their foreheads and sigh.”31 Hutton argued that at least three of the Catholic works of this “prince of the only true church” were among his very best. Of Loss and Gain (1847), that charming, gentle, witty book, which is suffused with the playful spirit of the Florentine St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratory, whom Newman would take as his patron, Hutton confessed, “the book has been a great favourite with me, almost ever since its first publication, partly for the admirable fidelity with which it sketches young men’s thought and difficulties, partly for its happy irony, partly for its perfect representation of the academical life and tone of Oxford.”32 In a prior chapter we have seen how much Hutton admired Newman’s Lectures on Anglican Difficulties (1850). Indeed, for Hutton, “In matter and style alike, these lectures were marked by all the signs of his singular literary genius … and more exquisite in form as well as more complete in substance than the Essay on Development, which was written under the heavy pressure of the dreaded and anticipated rupture between himself and the Church of his baptism.”33 Hutton was also one of the first critics to call attention to the brilliance of that exuberant book, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), noting how, “There are passages in these lectures which pass the limits of irony and approach the region of something like controversial farce”—which was indeed how Newman chose to approach the ubiquitous bigotry that Catholics suffered in Protestant England.34 Moreover, Hutton made a shrewd point about the equipoise that Newman maintains in his work: “His satire could not be as powerful as it is without his imaginative power of isolating what he wants to emphasize and contrasting it with its opposite. But it is when he exerts his flexible and vivid imagination in depicting the deepest religious passion that we are most carried away by him and feel his great genius most truly. Little as I am a Roman Catholic, I can never read without emotion, without a thrill of wonder at the power with which Dr. Newman describes what to Protestants seems most unlike the religion of Christ, his defence of the Mass in answer to the Protestant account of it as a mere muttered spell.”35

  Apropos his religious views, Hutton wrote Newman in September 1865: “Mr Martineau … first made me see that the old Unitarianism was as weak as it was unsuccessful. Maurice first taught me that a belief in the Incarnation could be held on the Protestant basis, and all your books, Loss and Gain especially, have given me gleams of light which I have not found elsewhere. But since the last step I have stood still …”36 It was James Martineau (1805–1900), the intellectual leader of the new Unitarianism, whose “name was a word of fear in quiet households,” who impressed upon Hutton that “Reason is the ultimate appeal, the supreme tribunal, to the test of which even Scripture must be brought.”37 As important as this principle became in Hutton’s religious views, it was Maurice who finally extricated him from Unitarianism. In any discussion of Newman’s influence on Hutton, it is essential to appreciate that it was always tempered by the influence of Maurice. In F.D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority, Jeremy Morris suggests what it was about Maurice’s understanding of authority that appealed to Hutton. Maurice “upheld a ‘High Church’ conception of order and doctrine, insisting, for example, on episcopacy and on an ordered liturgical life as essential features of the universal Church, at the same time as attempting to prize apart these institutional aspects of the Church, or ‘signs,’ from particular theological lines of interpretation. In … the 1830s, his blending of High Church doctrine and the ‘Broad Church’ principle of comprehensiveness came to fruition.”38 For Maurice, the Anglican Church was “most Catholic when most Protestant.”39 Here was the rather rarefied position that Hutton embraced himself, when, in 1862, he entered the Established Church, where he remained a High Churchman of the Mauricean cast for the remaining 35 years of his life.

  Newman’s view of Maurice was characteristically nuanced. As early as 1835, he wrote, “I am annoyed but not surprised about Maurice. He will hardly go the lengths you report. He has corresponded with Pusey, I believe. He is a Coleridgian and a Platonist, I believe – and so though not far from a Catholic, when contrasted with Rationalists, yet some way off too. He is of the Cambridge School – and from the little I have seen of those men, they seem to me never satisfied to take things as they find them, but to be always meddling and (as they think) improving truths which have been from the beginning – and to believe sacred doctrines, not because they have received them, but because they can prove them from philosophy. M. himself is an excellent and very deserving, as well as clever man, but I wish all those men would have something more of childlike faith.”40 Later, in 1863, after their differences had become patent, Newman wrote Maurice, “Of course we view the most important matters in very different lights; and there is no prospect, I fear, of this difference ceasing; but I ever shall rejoice at every soul whom you, or any one else who differs from me, saves from the abyss of infidelity or scepticism, and converts to a living faith in our Lord and Saviour.”41

  That Hutton’s Mauricean Anglicanism had nothing to do with Tractarianism is clear from his acute criticism of that mandarin faith. “Puseyism,” he wrote in one essay, “owns positively no living authority at all; it has no principle of development; it is averse to all principles of development; its desire is to live by the customs and observances of a past age. It talks, indeed, of the authority of the Church. But if you come to look into the meaning of what is said, you find it to mean only that clerical gentleman—especially bishops—are rather more likely to understand what was the ancient practice and the ancient creed than anyone else. But it is very far from recognising any practical and present dogmatic authority even in bishops or archbishops.”42 This shows how much Hutton agreed with the analysis of Puseyism that Newman mounted in his King William Street lectures. At the same time, Hutton’s Protestantism was entirely free of that tribal hatred of Catholics, which defined so many nineteenth-century English Protestants. In one letter to Newman, for example, Hutton observed: “Protestant as I am,—thoroughly and cordially Protestant in principle,—my heart burns at the unfairness with which Protestants so often treat their Roman Catholic opponents.”43 Another proof of his independence of mind was his siding with the North during the American Civil War—he was a decided abolitionist—at a time when most of his English contemporaries were thoroughly in favor of the South.44 But perhaps the best example of Hutton’s evenhandedness can be found in his assessment of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he asks:

  … who can fail to be grateful to the man who has insisted that a genuine “development” of revealed truth must preserve intact the original type, must keep continuously to the principles of the primitive doctrinal teaching, must show the power adequately to assimilate nutriment foreign yet subservient to it and to throw off alien material, must be able to show early indications that such a development would be likely, must be logically consistent with all that was originally taught, must be able to protect itself by “preservative additions” which secure the type instead of altering it, and, finally, must show tenacity of life? How far Dr. Newman’s instances of those tests of development make good his own position is a very different question indeed —is, indeed, a question like that whether the House of Commons can be considered a “preserv
ative addition” to the monarchy, or rather an addition which, while it has preserved it for centuries, is likely some day to supersede it. But what I hold to be the enormous value of Dr. Newman’s essay is that it puts us on the way to a true investigation of the claims of our various churches to represent the primitive revelation of Christ. Do we or do we not preserve the original type? Do we or do we not show a continuity of principle with that primitive Christianity? Do we show any power of assimilating life from without, and imposing the structural law of Christian hearts upon that life from without? Can we show the power to reject as alien to us what is poisonous to Christian habits of life? Can we show early anticipations of our modern religious developments? Can we prove our logical continuity with the old teaching? Are our “preservative additions” monstrous innovations tending to the neglect of the deepest truths, or real provisions for the security of the Christian life? And is there true buoyancy and vital tenacity in our developments, or an ever-growing languor of life? All these are questions which are no less relevant, and far more important, in regard to developments of revelation, than they are in biology in determining whether certain changes of structure cause an improvement or a marked degeneration of the stock which exhibits them. One of the great evidences of Cardinal Newman’s genius is the proof that his mind was running on the tests of genuine developments and corruptions in doctrine, long years before the mind of the day had been awakened by Darwin and his contemporaries to the true touchstone of development or degeneration in biological forms.45

  This independence of mind made Hutton an insightful judge of the pretensions of agnostics. If there is a common thread running through his criticism it is his impatience with the spurious authority that so many of the agnostics of his age were setting up in place of the authority of the Church. “Nothing is more surprising than the extravagance of Agnostics,” he wrote in an essay entitled “Agnostic Dreamers” (1884). “After taking all the pains in the world to destroy the idols, as they think them, of Christian worship, after carefully demonstrating that a living God in the Christian sense of the term is a contradiction in terms, and that the life everlasting cannot rationally be attributed to beings deprived of their bodily existence … they immediately proceed to substitute for these idols mere dolls of their own fashioning and dressing—dolls which they make no secret of having deliberately fashioned and dressed up for the occasion, and which, nevertheless, they dandle enthusiastically in their arms, and hold up as a sort of make-believe adoration, as the true and rational substitute for the old religions.” 46 The agnostics of the age were convinced that the new dolls of skepticism were supplanting the old idols of religion “because,” as Hutton wrote, they were convinced that “scientific wonder is deeper than ignorant wonder; because the geologist is capable of realising better how long it took to denude the rocks than any mere rustic, or traveller in search of the picturesque; because the astronomer who knows how big the spots on the sun are, can wonder at the energy of solar heat to better purpose than the Psalmist who talked of the heavens as declaring the glory of God and the firmament as showing His handiwork …” But Hutton was unimpressed. Speaking specifically of what Herbert Spencer, the celebrated positivist called the “Infinite and Eternal Energy,” Hutton observed: “Religion, to mean anything, must mean worship … What is it to me, to be able to realise how many thousands of years the rocks were in getting themselves denuded; how many earths would go into one solar spot; how utterly insoluble the great enigma is? Even if I could realise these things better than any geologist alive, better than the most original of the astronomers, better than Mr. Spencer himself, I should be no nearer a religion. If the ‘Infinite and Eternal Energy’ is simply beyond the reach of either vision or thought, and can hope for no more living aid from it than from the unknown quantity of an insoluble equation, the ‘sentiment’ which it must excite in me cannot but be the most barren and empty in the world. It comes very much, so far as I can see, to the old Oriental notion of ‘Om’—as absolute being and also absolute nothingness.” Here one can hear the man who relished exposing not only the credulity but the nihilism of skepticism. “So far as religion is worth a farthing,” he insisted, “it is founded on a real vision of what is far above us, and, nevertheless, more or less within our reach, and on an intense yearning to reach after it.”47 This was the conviction that made Hutton such a perceptive reader of Newman, whose own approach to the supernatural was equally practical.

  With his interest in the real and the practical, it was understandable that Hutton should have paid so much critical attention to the materialism of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Clifford, and Tyndall. In a piece called “The Various Causes of Scepticism,” he showed how skeptics could not escape the truth they denied.

  God is not less behind the consciousness of men who have no glimpse of Him through their consciousness, than He is within the heart of those who worship Him; and the only real rejection of God is the resistance to His Word, whether it be felt as His Word, or only as a mysterious claim on the human will which it is impossible adequately to define. I hold that, in a sense, God is Himself, in all probability, no infrequent cause of the blindness of men to His presence. He retires behind the veil of sense when He wishes us to explore the boundaries of sense, and to become fully aware of a life beyond. The physicists of every school are doing this great work for us now. They are explaining, mapping all the currents of physical influence, and from time to time crying out, like Professor Huxley, for “the hen-coop” of which, like shipwrecked sailors, they see no sign; like Professor Tyndall, for the elevating idealism which is conspicuous by its absence in all their investigations; like Professor Clifford, for something to replace the theism of Kingsley and Martineau. To suppose that the men who are doing this great work—who are mapping for us the quicksands and sunken rocks of physical scepticism,—are necessarily deserted by God, because they do not see Him, is to be more truly atheists than any physicist. There is a scepticism which is of God’s making, in order that we may see how many of the highest springs of human life are founded in trust,—how everything else fails, even in the highest minds, to produce order, peace, and clam. The physicists of to-day are suffering for us, as well as for themselves. It is their failure to find light, which will show where the light is not, and also where it is.48

  This preoccupation with the mystery of skepticism never left Hutton. It was also what prompted him to become one of the founding members of the Metaphysical Society (1869–1880), which was established to give literary, clerical and scientific gentlemen an opportunity to discuss new developments in the continuing debate over faith and science. For Hutton, the purpose of the Society was to establish “some basis of metaphysical science on which all metaphysicians might agree.”49 The Society met once a month in Piccadilly in the Grosvenor Hotel to listen to a pre-distributed paper. Its members included A. P. Stanley, Henry Sidgwick, Cardinal Manning, Lord Selborne, the Duke of Argyll, Dean Church, J. A. Froude, W. G. Ward, Thomas Henry Huxley, Frederic Harrison, James Fitzjames Stephen, and John Dalgairns, who succeeded F. W. Faber as Superior of the London Oratory—a rum lot, as Evelyn Waugh might have said.

  At one of the first dinners, light skirmishing broke out between Ward and Huxley. Told that there could be no moral disparagement of any member’s points of view, Ward responded that the Society could not expect that “Christian thinkers shall give no sign of the horror with which they would view the spread of such extreme opinions as those advocated by Mr. Huxley.” To which Huxley replied, “As Dr. Ward has spoken I must in fairness say that it will be very difficult for me to conceal my feeling as to the intellectual degradation which would come of the general acceptance of such views as Dr. Ward holds.”50 Afterwards, both men contrived to keep their barbs to themselves, though Huxley once referred to the Society as “our galley—that singular rudderless ship, the stalwart oarsmen of which were mostly engaged in pulling as hard as they could against one another; and which consequently performed only circular voyages
all the years it was in commission.”51 Hutton might have agreed and disagreed. While he recognized the inherent limitations of any society given over to merely speculative palaver, he also recognized that Ward often elevated its proceedings with his clarion Catholicism. “Mr. Ward had the opportunity of comparing his own deepest convictions with the convictions, or non-convictions of many of the ablest doubters of the age,” Hutton recalled. “The clearness, force, and candour of his argument made his papers welcome to all,” precisely because they stood out in a Society where “nebulousness was almost the rule, weakness chronic, and inability to understand an opponent’s position, rather than want of candour, exceedingly common.” Once Ward stopped attending, the Society “began to lose its interest, and to drop into decay. Such was the attractive power of at least one strong and definite philosophical creed.”52 It is helpful to bear this portrait in mind before looking at Hutton’s essays on Newman, because although Newman and Ward had many significant differences, they both subscribed to the same “strong and definite philosophical creed,” which Hutton always respected as a counterweight to the claims of the positivists. Moreover, one reason why Hutton wrote so perceptively about Ward is that he could enter into the bold evolution of his faith. If Ward found Catholicism after discovering the dead end of Liberalism, Hutton found High Church Anglicanism after similarly discovering the dead end of Unitarianism.