Liberalism and Newman:
The Anglican Vision and Response
A Doctoral Dissertation by Father John McCloskey
Chapter 1: First Impressions
Oxford, home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties. 3
To understand the first part of Newman's life, it helps to have an idea of the environment in which he lived and worked. Until 1845 his life is inextricably bound up in the University of Oxford, excepting his childhood up to the age of sixteen. He himself tells us that the permanent incorporation into the University upon his election as a fellow of Oriel College was perhaps the most important day of his life.
The educational realities of Oxford in the early nineteenth century, perhaps presaging the rapid political changes to come, were undergoing reform. A true liberal education, as later described by Newman in his Catholic work The Idea of a University, was gradually becoming the ideal of the various undergraduate colleges. Newman's own, Trinity College, was no exception. Rather than endless rounds of parties, hunting and desultory readings, true study under the tutorial system followed by rigid examination became the norm. Oxford evolved from its role as a four-year boarding house for the dissipated rich into a center of intellectual and religious ferment.
The problem, unbeknownst to the young Mr. Newman was that the vigorous reform then being undertaken in various parts of the University was bringing with it the powerful seeds of rationalism and unbelief from which hitherto it had been largely sheltered. These seeds were destined to flower and gradually choke off the "high and dry" weeds of traditional Anglicanism. "Mark Pattison claimed that during the previous one hundred and fifty years reason has first been offered as the basis of faith before gradually becoming its substitute. Between 1688 and 1750 men had eliminated religious experience and since 1750 they had also lost the power of using the speculative reason." 4
Newman, emerging from an Evangelical secondary education whose ideas lingered for some years with him, was thrust upon his election to Oriel into contact with scholars of high character and intellect who were already sliding, in some cases almost imperceptibly, in to a comfortable skepticism regarding the claims of religion and belief. The contempt of Thomas Arnold, the former Oxonian and celebrated headmaster of the Rugby School, for dogmatism and formal religion was already producing fruit not only in Oxford, but in all of educated England.
The Oxford of Newman's time by no means was exempt from continental influences. "The first half of the nineteenth century bore the impress, in the words of Dean Stanley, of the deeper seriousness breathed into the mind of men not only in England but in Europe by the great convulsion of the French Revolution." 5 The French Revolution and its ideas indeed had a strong impact in England. These enlightened ideas would become the basis for the Liberal Party, which evolved out of the Whigs, the parties of the great reforms. The tide was very strong and the Tories of Conservatives found themselves cast as the party of reaction, which is to say they gradually ceded territory until they themselves had embraced the same liberal ideology.
Many of the men who were Newman's contemporaries at Oxford in the better colleges such as Oriel and Balliol later became the leading Churchmen and politicians of their day, spreading their latitudinarianism through out England and its empire.
When Newman was elected on the twelfth of April in 1822 as a fellow of Oriel he was introduced into a group in the common room widely known as the Noetics. "This knot of Oriel men was distinctly the product of the French Revolution, they called everything into question, they appealed to first principles, and disallowed authority as a judge in intellectual matters." 6 These were the colleagues with whom Newman was to dine, take tea and exchange ideas in the coming years. Here he would form himself for the coming battle although not without danger of succumbing to the same temptation of pure reliance on reason. Fortunately Newman was of an independent frame of mind and, as we shall observe later, the first impressions of the importance of dogma received early on in his youth never left him. He describes the atmosphere well in the following passage:
In the present day mistiness is the mother of wisdom. A man who never enunciates a truth without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude its contradictory, who hold that Scripture is the only authority, yet that the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend on the sacraments, yet it is not given without them, that Bishops are a divine ordinance, yet those that have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have, this is your safe man and the hope of the Church, this is what the Church is said to want, not party men but sensible, temperate, sober, well judging persons to guide it through the channel of no meaning between the Charybdis of Aye or No. 7
At the same time as these first Liberal ideas were entering strongly in the British world, few people suspected the far reaching effect they would have on the touchstone of the Anglican religion in England, the relations between Church and State. "The relation between Church and State was in the high Anglican tradition, an almost sacramental bond which molded the inner life and spiritual ethos of the community." 8 But it was here precisely that the first serious cracks began to appear that were later to push Newman along with others to form Oxford movement and to the publication of the first Tracts of the Times. The event was the suppression of the supposedly inviolable Irish Bishoprics occasioned by the Reform Bill of 1832, for as Newman says in a letter to Frederick Rogers, former pupil and close friend, "I am against all measures that tend to the separation of Church and State." 9
Now that I have placed Newman somewhat in the philosophical and historical contest of his day I will proceed to a character sketch of the young Oxonian and the history of his early religious ideas. This can be examined in detail in the Apologia and Autobiographical Writings along with the Ward and Trevor biographies.
Newman was brought up in the comfortable religious atmosphere of a typical upper middle class family during the Georgian era. The advice of Newman's father is quite symptomatic: "religion when taken too far produces weakness of character." 10 This would be a sentiment not at all uncommon in this era where religious dedication as an Anglican priest would mean wife, family, and a comfortable income. The thought that his son would one day become the greatest spokesman for Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century would have no doubt shocked him greatly. The living of the moral law of the ten commandments and weekly attendance at services were in his mind the height of the religious spirit.
Soon after his conversion, Newman wrote a novel on the stay of a young Anglican at Oxford who is studying for holy orders and searching for religious truth. Although Newman warns us in a preface to the book that we should not identify the fictional character Charles Reding with himself, the resemblance is too exact to lead to any other conclusion. Anyone who has closely read the works of Newman can see the many parallels. Newman describes the young Reding in this way "gentle and affectionate and cheerful, and easily lead by others, except when duty clearly interfered (underlining mine)" (L.G., 2). This description fits in very well with testimony given of Newman by close friends in later life.
The first notice we have of his strong religious leaning comes to us at the early age of fifteen, precisely when often times the development of body and mind make strong demands on a youth developing into manhood. In his Apologia he recounts that, "When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought took place in me, I felt under the influence of a definite creed and received in to my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured." 11 His description of the event clearly makes it a landmark in the formation of his religious character.
Soon afterwards Newman went up to Trinity College as a young commoner, and it is there that his first perception of the destructive forces of Liberalism begins. Before continuing, I want to note that during young Newman's school years 1808-1816 he had gradually fallen under the influence of one of the masters, Dr. Walter Mayers, an Anglican clergyman of Evangelical persuasion. The Evangelicals were a group within the Anglican community that tended strongly to emotionalism in religion with strong links to the Methodism of Wesley and Whitfield. They placed a strong emphasis on the relationship of God and the sinner unencumbered by Church structure and the importance of individual holiness. Above all this type of thought held sway in the lower classes in as much as they shied away from intellectual thought and put the emphasis on personal interpretation of the Bible. As such they never were the dominant group for long in Cambridge or Oxford. In later years Newman considered them as lineal descendents of the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Newman gradually discarded his Evangelical ideas as he immersed himself deeper in the study of the Anglican divines and the Fathers of the Church. A continuing relationship in the 1820's with Richard Whately and Edward Hawkins, both strong logicians and Fellows of Oriel, was not at all conducive to the not so latent emotionalism of Evangelicalism. He realized that "the future lay between the parties which had yet to emerge in clear and definite lines and colour from the background of moderate churchmen - the Liberals and the Catholics." 12
Mayers' great contribution to Newman's development was his nurturing a thirst for holiness in his young pupil that was to endure unto death. He also introduced him to some of his first religious texts whose principles and maxims were to remain with him as instruments in the great events ahead. But that first conversion was permanent and even as early as 1817 we find him asking Mayers in a letter "For indeed how could it be that baptized infants dying in their infancy could be saved, unless the spirit of God was given them, which seems to contradict the opinion that Baptism is not accompanied by the Holy Ghost?." 13
Later in the same month, however, we see that Newman still has not yet discovered the concept of an authority that speaks through the established Church, although the need is clearly felt. "For indeed I find I have a great need of some monitor to direct me and I sincerely trust that my conscience, enlightened by the Bible, through the influence of the Holy Spirit may prove a vigilant and faithful guardian of the principle of religion." 14 Amidst the controversies of his years at Oxford he soon discovered that the aids cited above were not sufficient; he was to see many well-intentioned men fall by the wayside following just those same principles. So we see as early as 1817 he was already embarked on that search for a "monitor to direct," the search that only ended in 1845 in Littlemore.
