Newman and His Contemporaries
Page 55
In February 1869, Newman declined Hutton’s invitation to join the Metaphysical Society, writing his friend: “Of course I am greatly flattered by the invitation conveyed to me from such eminent men; but I have a bad conscience mixed with the gratification as I really have no pretensions to receive such an honour. It has been my misfortune through life to have dabbled in many things, and to have mastered nothing …” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: “As to metaphysics, though it is so wide and so deep a subject, I dare say if I published anything more … it would be on some metaphysical point.”53 As good as his word, within a year, he published his Grammar of Assent, which mapped anew the topography of metaphysics. Nevertheless, Hutton was persistent. “Is it impossible you should reconsider your determination not to join our metaphysical society? Now and then we have papers and discussions of the first order of interest, and we really stand in the deepest need of a mind of your order of power on the positive side of metaphysical and ethical questions. The physicists are almost too many for us.”54 Newman, however, was not interested. Later, in 1876, he wrote to Dean Church apropos the Society: “I hear that you and the Archbishop of York (to say nothing of Cardinal Manning etc) are going to let Professor Huxley read in your presence an argument in refutation of our Lord’s Resurrection. How can this possibly come under the scope of a Metaphysical Society. I thank my stars that, when asked to accept the honour of belonging to it, I declined.”55
Hutton’s interest in Newman, which spanned over forty years, began, as we have seen, when he read Loss and Gain (1847) in his youth. He first personally encountered Newman at his King William Street lectures, which would later be published as Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church (1850), about which he wrote:
I shall never forget the impression which his voice and manner, which opened upon me for the first time in these lectures, made on me. Never did a voice seem better adapted to persuade without irritating … its simplicity, and frankness, and freedom from half-smothered notes which express indirect purpose, was as remarkable as its sweetness, its freshness and its gentle distinctness.56
Throughout the letters that passed between Hutton and Newman from the 1860s to the 1880s there is a predominant note of mutual affection, but also of candid disagreement. In February 1864, after their initial exchange regarding Hutton’s notice of the Kingsley–Newman correspondence, Newman wrote back, “Though I contrive to endure my chronic unpopularity, and though I believe it to be salutary yet it is a great relief to me to have from time to time such letters as yours, which serve to shew, that under the surface of things, there is a kinder feeling towards me than the surface presents.”57 Newman went on to say that when he initially responded to Hutton’s notice, he had only seen an abstract of the article in a local Birmingham paper; when he saw the full article, he saw that Hutton had not been unqualifiedly favorable in his notice. Apropos Newman’s response to Kingsley, Hutton observed how “Kingsley’s little weaknesses, his inaccuracy of thought, his reluctance to admit that he had been guilty of making rather an important accusation on the strength of a very loose general impression, are all gauged, probed, and condemned by a mind perfectly imperturbable … though vividly sensitive to the little superficial ripples of motive and emotion it scorns …” In this, Hutton saw an “undue scorn” in Newman, “which the habit of his mind in judging all human weakness by inflexible dogma has made part of the very essence of his marvelous insight into human frailty.” Elaborating on this, Hutton proceeded to note how “This little discussion brings clearly home to us that one of the greatest secrets of Dr. Newman’s wonderful power is … that peculiar hardness tending to cruelty which most easily allies itself with a keen intellectual sense of the supernatural. The finest balances … are rested on a knife-edge, and so the finest intellectual sense of the valuelessness of things transient, often seems to be rested on a knife-edge so keen that it would cut through all human feelings, rather than on that charity which St. Paul says is the highest and rarest of supernatural gifts. Father Newman’s views of life, with all their delicate insights, wonderful shading, and beautiful perspective, have veins of mockery running through them in every direction,—mockery such as a man who has conceived a view of life resting, as he thinks, on the Spiritual Rock, and who has learnt to triumph over the superficial softness of temporary phenomena, would, if more intellectual than sympathetic, be likely to cherish.”58 Newman’s response showed that he had absorbed more of what St. Paul had to teach than Hutton may have imagined. “I thanked you for your Article, when I saw only part of it, on the ground of its being so much more generous, than the ordinary feeling of the day allows reviewers commonly to behave towards me. I thank you still more for it, as I now read it with its complement; first, because it is evidently written, not at random, but critically; and secondly it is evidently the expression of real, earnest, and personal feeling. How far what you say about me is correct can perhaps be determined neither by you nor by me, but by the Searcher of hearts alone; but, even where I cannot follow you in your criticism, I am sure to get a lesson from it for my serious consideration.”59
Hutton’s response was somewhat abashed. “I know I express myself badly, but, I should be sorry if my use of the word ‘cruel’ should be taken in any sense except that in which a very keen sense of the inflexible dogma of Christianity shivering to atoms all human entreaties or fears with which it may come into collision, would convey the same meaning.” His letter also identified what would become a fundamental stumbling block to his entering the Roman Church, despite his considerable respect for it: “Underlying the wide and delicately sympathetic imagination which your writings show, there seems to me always to be a deep attachment to a dogmatic and systematic theological view of the universe, resting less on what I should call personal inspiration than on the connected view of a coherent body of theological truth.”60 Despite all of Newman’s attempts to disabuse him of the notion, Hutton insisted on seeing the authority of the Church as hostile to personal belief.61 At the root of the difference between the two men, according to Malcolm Woodfield, was “Hutton’s defense of the authority of common men in opposition to Newman’s reliance on an infallible ecclesiastical institution”—something Hutton may have felt but Newman would have rejected.62 Certainly, in the passage from Loss and Gain of which Hutton was so fond, Newman exploded such false distinctions by describing the individual faithful at Mass: “Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;—not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and scope of it.”63
That Hutton never acknowledged how this passage addresses the relation between personal belief and authority seems puzzling, especially since he returned to the passage again and again. Perhaps he recognized what he could not fully articulate, or only recognized it dimly. Nevertheless, on the issue of religious certainty, he was fond of invoking Maurice—“the only other living theologian who has impressed me deeply,” as he said, whose “deep and insulated insights into God’s purposes … he cares little to weave together and believes the human intellect … unable to weave together.”64 And yet it is clear that he was ambivalent about Maurice’s theological diffidence. To some extent, he recognized it as disabling. “The more Maurice believed in Christ, the less he confounded himself with the object of his belief, and the more pathetic was his distrust of his own power to see aright,
or say aright what he saw.”65 Hutton could see this so clearly in Maurice because he suffered from the same distrust himself. One thing that drew him to Newman was precisely his confidence in the certainty of faith. And yet Hutton could never shake the suspicion that such certainty was unwarrantable. As far as he was concerned, Maurice was right: we could hunger for truth, but not know it, certainly not with the infallibility that the Roman Church claimed.
Newman could not have more pointedly disagreed: “I think, in answer to what you say, I may most confidently say, that I have never had a doubt, it has never occurred to me to have a doubt, I could not, without a cruel effort which would be as painful to me as a sin of impurity … to get myself to doubt in the divinity of the Catholic Roman Church and the truth of its doctrines.” In an interpolation, he clarified his thinking on this matter still more by saying, “it is difficult to analyse what I feel, but I mean something like Joseph’s words ‘how can I commit so great a wickedness and sin against God?’” Here one is given a glimpse into the devout character of Newman’s sense of religious certainty, which one of his most spirited critics, A. M. Fairbairn failed to take into consideration.66 For Newman, certainty inhered in practice, in devoutness, as much as in profession.
Then, again, in the Apologia, Newman addressed the beneficent tension between authority and private judgment in a passage that might have been expressly written with Hutton’s objections in mind:
… on the part of the Catholic body, as far as I know it, it will at first sight be said that the restless intellect of our common humanity is utterly weighed down, to the repression of all independent effort and action whatever, so that, if this is to be the mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be destroyed. But this is far from the result, far from what I conceive to be the intention of that high Providence who has provided a great remedy for a great evil,—far from borne out by the history of the conflict between Infallibility and Reason in the past, and the prospect of it in the future. The energy of the human intellect “does from opposition grow;” it thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon, and is never so much itself as when it has lately been overthrown. It is the custom with Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private Judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;—it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power,—into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.67
Notwithstanding this passage, Hutton never acknowledged Newman’s appreciation of how the Catholic faith resolves the tensions between authority and private judgment.
Despite their differences, Newman recognized how fortunate he was to have someone as fair as Hutton reviewing his work: “I should be well off, if I never had a severer or more ill-natured critic …” At the same time, he stressed that he welcomed candid, well-considered criticism. “Every reader has a right to his own impressions as to what I have written; and it would really be a kind act in any one, were he well disposed towards me or not, to bring against me formal charges, argued out fairly, about certain tendencies in my writings or about definite statements of mine which I had to defend, explain, or withdraw. If even a St Augustine published his Retractations, surely I could turn to good account an opportunity, if given me, of making mine …”68 Responding to a Spectator piece entitled “Roman Catholic Casuistry and Protestant Prejudice,” which Newman rightly attributed to Hutton, he wrote: “I hope I shall be never slow to confess my faults, and if I have, while becoming a Catholic, palliated things really wrong among Catholics, in order to make my theory of religion and my consequent duty clearer, I am very sorry for it … but Mr. Kingsley’s charges are simply monstrous.” By the same token, he appreciated Hutton’s objective criticism: “You have uttered on the whole what I should say of myself …” 69 In Newman Hutton saw an example of “that over-regulated mind which marshals every thought of his mind, every feeling of his heart, every word of his lips, in a definite place, to serve a definite end of life,” which, as a critic in the Saturday Review noted, tended to “craftiness of statement.” Nevertheless, for Hutton, “this very power of minute foresight makes [Newman] … always candid to an opponent’s real arguments, and induces him to state the case against himself with even unnecessary ability and strength.” We saw this in the Letter to Pusey, where Newman mounted the case against the excesses of Roman devotion even more compellingly than Pusey. But in Kingsley, Hutton saw “a healthy and genuine scorn for intellectual tactics, a man who blurts out honestly enough the first thought of his heart, whether it be wise or unwise, but yet one who exhibits what we must call the grossest want of candour towards an opponent on the mere strength of his own personal impressions—one who does not deign to quote anything in support of his charges, and when attacked for such contemptuous indifference to his opponent’s good name replies by a pamphlet which simply drags, from all possible sources, specimens of everything which Dr. Newman has ever said calculated to affect an English reading public unpleasantly; and, worse, still, conveys an impression that Dr. Newman always did despise truth, and does so now more than ever. We say this is unfair. Even if we ought not to take too much counsel about our ordinary words, yet when those words are challenged and cannot be sustained, Protestant candour would require a simple and hearty admission that there had been nothing to justify them …”70
This concern for words was one of the best aspects of Hutton’s own critical approach. Apropos this, Woodfield perceptively observes that “Hutton is deeply moved as a literary man by the notion of words which have the status of acts,” and to exemplify his point he cites Hutton’s great admiration for the passage in Loss and Gain on the Mass. Woodfield might also have cited an essay by Hutton on the nature of paradox, the force of which will strike anyone who admires Chesterton. Here, Hutton saw how it was the misuse of words that called out for startling correctives:
The need for paradox is no doubt rooted deep in the very nature of the use that we make of language. Just as everything that we do habitually, we come to do automatically, without being in any real sense conscious of what we do, or even of the purpose in the execution of which we first did it, so language is no sooner employed habitually than it comes to be used as mere algebra—to the meaning of which we pay no more attention than we pay to the particular sounds that go to make up the ringing of a bell which reminds us that certain daily duties have to be done. And there is no harm in this when the only object of the language is to remind us of the mechanical duties which we have to discharge; but, unfortunately, there is harm in it, when the use to which we ought to turn our words is to remind us of the great r
ealities of life, and when they fail to do so simply from the narcotic influence of habitual use. Then we need awakening anew to the old significance which lay beneath the words which have ceased to exert any magic over us; and nothing awakens the true meaning of language like paradox, which, while it appears to contradict the superficial sense attaching to the formulas of our daily life, really points to the hidden depth beneath them and the unseen height above, and restores us to the freshness and the wonder of the thoughts which had shriveled with our constant manipulation of them till they seemed to have lost their sap. This function of paradox is the same which is ascribed to that divine life itself which makes all things new …71
Not surprisingly, Hutton was a keen admirer of “Unreal Words” (1839), Newman’s sermon describing the various ways profession can become an evasion not only of practice but of truth. In the sermon that Newman wrote just months before he would begin to have his serious doubts about the reality of the Church of England, he reminded his readers that “Words have a meaning, whether we mean that meaning or not; and they are imputed to us in their meaning, when our not meaning it is our own fault. He, who takes God’s name in vain, is not counted guiltless because he means nothing by it,—he cannot frame a language for himself; and they who make professions, of whatever kind, are heard in the sense of those professions, and are not excused because they themselves attach no sense to them.” He then enjoined his readers “to learn that new language which Christ has brought us. He has interpreted all things for us in a new way; He has brought us a religion which sheds a new light on all that happens. Try to learn this language. Do not get it by rote, or speak of it as a thing of course. Try to understand what you say. Time is short, eternity is long; God is great, man is weak; he stands between heaven and hell; Christ is his Saviour; Christ has suffered for him …” Since these “solemn truths” required more practice than profession, Newman concluded by enjoining his auditors to act on them. “Let us guard against frivolity, love of display, love of being talked about, love of singularity, love of seeming original. Let us aim at what we say, and saying what we mean; let us aim at knowing when we understand a truth, and when we do not … Let us receive the truth in reverence, and pray God to give us a good will, and divine light, and spiritual strength, that it may bear fruit within us.”72