Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  Hutton invoked Newman’s sermon to argue that “the volume of unreal words talked in the present age against religion, by men of genius, has been indefinitely greater than the volume of unreal words talked by men of genius in its name.” And to substantiate his point he cited some particularly notorious offenders. “Carlyle insisting on the Divine quality of reticence; Mr. Spencer preaching the awe with which we ought to regard “the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed,” and Mr. Frederic Harrison lecturing to the Positivist pilgrims on the grand continuity of the Comtist religion … are all surely warnings which we cannot afford to ignore, against the unreality of the prophets of the age.”73 In a review of Matthew Arnold’s lay sermons, he asked whether “Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman’s great Oxford sermon on ‘Unreal Words,’” before concluding that in appropriating the words of faith Arnold was guilty of “a hardened indifference to the meaning of words …” Indeed, for Hutton, “Mr. Arnold is really putting Literature—of which he is so great a master—to shame, when he travesties the language of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord Himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical superstitions.”74

  In his two-part review of the Apologia, Hutton revealed as much about his fascination with Newman as he did about the merits of the book itself. Speaking of Newman, Hutton wrote: “Far as we are severed from him in almost every principle of faith, and hope, and intellectual conviction, it would be mere dullness of nature not to recognize … the noble truthfulness and almost childlike candour of the autobiographical sketch now before us. Dr. Newman admits freely how blindly he groped his way for many years in the Anglican Church, and how slowly his eyes were opened to his real destiny; how friends often surprised him into momentary admissions that were not really his own; how he himself laid down in perfect confidence at one period of his career apparently fixed principles which turned out at a later period to be mere straws at which he had, as it were, caught vainly, in order to arrest his onward path towards a goal from which he recoiled to the last.” There is no suggestion here that Newman was a “confused schismatic,” as a confused Yale professor has claimed. Nor that he was in any way double-dealing in his long-gestating conversion. “Nothing to us seems clearer,” Hutton says, “than that all his premises of thought were Roman Catholic from the beginning, even at the very time when he was saying honestly the hardest things he ever said of the Roman Church. Even then he felt the current sucking him in, and it was this which made him protest so eagerly against the alleged Romanizing tendencies of his school of opinion.”75 Newman could not have had his self-portrait more fairly described, even if the image of the Church as a whirlpool sucking him into its irresistible current was more than a little outlandish.

  Despite his praise for Newman, Hutton was careful to assure his readers, whom one wag described as “sheltered in leafy rectories and snug villas,” that he was not entirely under the sway of the author for whom he otherwise had so much decided respect.76 “To us, we confess, he does seem the preacher of a dream:—though we admire his genius, thoroughly believe in his sincerity, and go even so far with him that we could far more easily give up the belief in ‘Liberalism’ than the belief in God. Fortunately, we believe that the deepest Liberalism re-discovers that need for God’s revelation which shallow Liberalism too often ignores.”77

  When the Apologia appeared, Hutton corresponded with Newman to tell him how deeply it appealed to him. “Your Apology has interested me very profoundly on its own account. I wish more than I can say that I could be nearer to you in faith for I feel the same fascination in all you write that I have always felt. I have struggled my way out of Unitarianism to a deep belief in the Incarnation, but not by the road of ‘authority’ which you teach as the only road to theological truth. Surely God can and does teach us His own truth without confiding it to any visible Church. I have never got so far as any really authoritative visible Church, I don’t think the apostles had.” Nonetheless, Hutton freely admitted, “I have always thought the Roman theology fuller of self-revealing truth than almost any other … but my stumbling block has always been that a true theology ought to be … self-revealing and does not need the organism of a visible institution to drive it home to the conscience and heart … . I am not denying that a Church grows naturally out of a Theology: what I cannot see is that a Theology should grow out of a Church.”78 Here was “the expression of real, earnest, and personal feeling,” of which Newman had been so appreciative, on the part of a man grappling with the most pressing aspects of faith. “When I was eighteen,” Hutton confided to Newman, “the passage in which Willis describes the mass in Loss and Gain very nearly made a Willis of me—a man I mean who dives experimentally into the Church in the hope of faith rather than one who goes into it because he sees it to be true. But since then I have got a growing conviction that faith however mysterious ought to prove itself to the mind …” As Hutton knew, Newman had insisted on similar proof himself before he converted. In his review of the Apologia, Hutton wrote, “In one remarkable passage of this apology Dr. Newman admits how little the reasoning by which he accounted for his changing intellectual positions may have really represented the influences at work within him.”79 It was only gradually that Newman came to realize that “Religious truths are reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception. Anyone can reason, only disciplined, educated, formal minds can perceive. Nothing, then, is more important … than habits of self-command.”80 Newman cited a maxim of St. Ambrose’s to describe how, in his own case, not merely the intellect but the whole man converted: ‘Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum’—the same maxim that he would use as the epigraph for the Grammar of Assent (1870).81 However unpersuaded by the claims of Rome, Hutton always confessed to a certain lingering ambivalence when it came to the Church about which Newman spoke with such powerful conviction. As he admitted to Newman, “that passage about the mass [in Loss and Gain] has a strange fascination for me which I cannot quite analyze. In this world I see no chance of ever following you. And yet there are passages in your teachings that cling to me still.”82

  Apropos those teachings, Newman was at pains to make Hutton recognize that he did not teach that “authority was the only road to truth in theology.” Nor did he hold that authority, from whatever source, was somehow at odds with “self-revealing” faith. It might be true that “The Church is the ordinary, normal Oracle … the only visible authority to which we appeal, the only authority which signs and seals a doctrine as the common property of Christians or an Article of the Faith, but still to individuals accidentally there are various instruments or organs of that Divine Authority from whom … [supernatural] truth can primarily come, and the Scriptures constitute one of those channels – nay, I will say a Greek poem or philosophical treatise may be such – nay even the Koran. And thus, though I fully believe that certain theological truths, as a future retribution, can be proved independently of revelation, still I do not think any religion, as such, in the individual is without what may be called revelation – I mean that God reveals Himself to us directly, and we believe in ‘Him’ because He says ‘I am He’ to us, whether it be through our conscience, or through Scripture or in any other way … .” Having said this, Newman was careful to stress that “mere reasonings and inferences, however true, are philosophy, not religion.” At the same time, “all religion is a revelation – an acceptance of truths conveyed to us from a Personal God …” From this it followed that “What you designate as ‘self-revealing’ is surely a truth which … commends itself intensely, manifoldly, intimately to our hearts.” Nevertheless, one “should not consider such an internal acceptance or embrace of a doctrine a sine quâ non condition of its being a truth,” and this because, “minds being very various, the subjective acquiescence in a doctrine cannot be the invariable measure and
test of its objective reality or its truth.” Newman made a similar point in his King William Street lectures, arguing that the Tractarians could not hold the via media true simply because it recommended itself to their affections.83 “If then a Revelation is made, faith, that is, assent upon pure authority, will necessarily enter into the act of acceptance when the intellect has been awakened.” But this did not diminish the vitality of the personal nature of faith, for Newman was “far from denying (just the contrary) that an externally-revealed truth may be in a certain sense, or to a certain point, self revealing …” Indeed, “an eager spontaneous appropriation of an object of faith may in some sense be called an act of love …”84 Such extraordinary letters only reinforced Hutton’s deep respect and affection for Newman, however much he failed to share his Catholic views. “The sight of your handwriting always gives me keen pleasure,” he told his distinguished correspondent in December 1867, before relating to him that he had recently met Mr. Gladstone, with whom he had a “long chat … chiefly about your Apologia and poems. He expressed as warm an admiration for both as even I could feel, and was especially full of admiration for the Dream of Gerontius, the slight notice of which by the press filled him with amazement. Probably the subject is too theological and too full of Catholic theology to attract the notice which its imaginative power deserved in so keenly Protestant a country.”85 After Hutton’s biography of Newman appeared, Gladstone told the author that he found the book not only “a most touching specimen of thoroughly disinterested admiration and affection” but “patient, conscientious, searching, delicate, and brilliant.” At the same time, he disagreed with Hutton’s estimate of Newman’s Catholic writings. “My reliance here is on the Arians and the Parochial Sermons. Is it not the fact that these sermons are his largest gift to permanent, indestructible theology?” He also accused Newman of resorting to precisely the same private judgment that he criticized the Tractarians for crediting. “He was trained (as I was) in the Evangelical School, which is beyond all others—beyond … the English Nonconformists or Scotch Presbyterians—the school of private judgment.” Moreover, Gladstone was convinced that Newman was “thoroughly unsound as a Butlerian,” which was an interesting comment in light of Newman’s correspondence with Keble, so much of which, as I show in my chapter on Keble, turned on their differences with respect to the import of Butler’s work.86

  In reply to Newman’s letter on authority, Hutton admitted that “For many years I thought nothing short of an infallible Church could prove such a mystery [as the Incarnation] though my whole soul craved for it.” Nevertheless, “the difficulty in reaching a human infallible authority was far greater to me than in receiving a great mystery, through human channels, on what I felt to be divine authority, because it laid such a hold of the whole conscience and nature.” Hutton’s resistance to the Church’s claim of infallibility—and this was written six years before the First Vatican Council defined papal infallibility—was as strong as Newman doubtless suspected it would be. “I scarcely see the advantage of accepting [the truths of the Church] on external authority,” Hutton wrote, “even if one could get over the enormous difficulty of satisfying oneself as to the actual gift of infallibility to any human organization.” He gave rather short shrift to the section in the Apologia where Newman eloquently defended the infallible claims of the Church. “Your account of how sparingly the Church actually uses this formidable power is a testimony to her sagacity and wisdom, – not a help to conceding the power itself. The Liberalism you dreaded so much I should turn away from as heartily as you if I could think it led to atheism. It seems to me to lead to free subjection of the soul to divine truths one by one, just as they penetrate the heart by God’s grace, and this I should feel higher than any formal grasp of even a larger area of truth.” 87 Here, again, one can see the footprints of Maurice.

  In a piece on Newman’s Plain and Parochial Sermons, Hutton elaborated on why he could not follow Newman in his ‘venture’ of faith in the Church of Rome. “Dr. Newman seems to us to make obedience the root, not only of moral and religious action, but of moral and religious thought.” And in order to do this, “he has to assume that we all have an intellectual authority over us as clear and articulate as the moral authority which speaks to our conscience.” Indeed, Newman “identifies the submission to Church authority with the submission to God’s voice …” And, of course, in this the good Protestant in Hutton refused to follow him. Obedience to a Church that claimed infallibility was the invariable sticking point. “All this network of assumption” struck Hutton “as having its root in the notion that obedience is even more the root of our intellectual than of our moral life …” While “Dr. Newman would not ask us to obey any moral command which does not appeal to our conscience,” he had no qualms imposing “on our intellects a ready-made ecclesiastical system of the most complex kind, which it is quite impossible for any rational being to accept as a whole without knowing that he is going on a mere probability or possibility, —and, as it seems to us, on a strong improbability.”88 This was at the heart of why Hutton could not embrace Newman’s Roman Catholicism, though Newman might have countered Hutton’s objections with something he wrote in his Apologia: “I say, that a power, possessed of infallibility in religious teaching, is happily adapted to be a working instrument in the course of human affairs for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect … .”89

  In his correspondence with Hutton, Newman never explicitly responded to Hutton’s objections to the obedience required of Roman Catholics. This might have been the result of his believing that he had already sufficiently addressed the matter in the Apologia. Nevertheless, in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk he indirectly responded to Hutton by addressing the same objections to “the absolute and entire obedience” required of Catholics, to which Gladstone had objected, in a passage full of characteristic force.90

  Is there then such a duty at all as obedience to ecclesiastical authority now? or is it one of those obsolete ideas, which are swept away, as unsightly cobwebs, by the New Civilization? Scripture says, “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God, whose faith follow.” And, “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves; for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy and not with grief; for that is unprofitable for you.” The margin in the Protestant Version reads, “those who are your guides;” and the word may also be translated “leaders.” Well, as rulers, or guides and leaders, whichever word be right, they are to be obeyed. Now Mr. Gladstone dislikes our way of fulfilling this precept, whether as regards our choice of ruler and leader, or our “Absolute Obedience” to him; but he does not give us his own. Is there any liberalistic reading of the Scripture passage? Or are the words only for the benefit of the poor and ignorant, not for the Schola (as it may be called) of political and periodical writers, not for individual members of Parliament, not for statesmen and Cabinet ministers, and people of Progress? Which party then is the more “Scriptural,” those who recognize and carry out in their conduct texts like these, or those who don’t? May not we Catholics claim some mercy from Mr. Gladstone, though we be faulty in the object and the manner of our obedience, since in a lawless day an object and a manner of obedience we have? Can we be blamed, if, arguing from those texts which say that ecclesiastical authority comes from above, we obey it in that one form in which alone we find it on earth, in that one person who, of all the notabilities of this nineteenth century into which we have been born, alone claims it of us? The Pope has no rival in his claim upon us; nor is it our doing that his claim has been made and allowed for centuries upon centuries, and that it was he who made the Vatican decrees, and not they him. If we give him up, to whom shall we go? Can we dress up any civil functionary in the vestments of divine authority? Can I, for instance, follow the faith, can I put my soul into the hands, of our gracious Sovereign? or of the Archbishop of Ca
nterbury? or of the Bishop of Lincoln, albeit he is not broad and low, but high? Catholics have “done what they could,”—all that any one could: and it should be Mr. Gladstone’s business, before telling us that we are slaves, because we obey the Pope, first of all to tear away those texts from the Bible.91

  This was a witty way to confute Protestants who claimed to obey the obedience authorized by the Bible, but Newman went on to show that even if one took the Protestant objection to Roman obedience at its own estimation, it was still exaggerated. “So little does the Pope come into this whole system of moral theology by which (as by our conscience) our lives are regulated, that the weight of his hand upon us, as private men, is absolutely unappreciable. I have had a difficulty where to find a measure or gauge of his interposition. At length I have looked through Busenbaum’s “Medulla,” to ascertain what light such a book would throw upon the question. It is a book of casuistry for the use of Confessors, running to 700 pages, and is a large repository of answers made by various theologians on points of conscience, and generally of duty. It was first published in 1645—my own edition is of 1844—and in this latter are marked those propositions, bearing on subjects treated in it, which have been condemned by Popes in the intermediate 200 years. On turning over the pages I find they are in all between fifty and sixty. This list includes matters sacramental, ritual, ecclesiastical, monastic, and disciplinarian, as well as moral, relating to the duties of ecclesiastics and regulars, of parish priests, and of professional men, as well as of private Catholics. And these condemnations relate for the most part to mere occasional details of duty, and are in reprobation of the lax or wild notions of speculative casuists, so that they are rather restraints upon theologians than upon laymen.”92 Thus Newman exposed the misconceived notions that still misrepresent the nature and reach of papal authority.