Liberalism and Newman:
The Anglican Vision and Response
A Doctoral Dissertation by Father John McCloskey
Chapter 1: First Impressions (continued)
Newman's early life can be marked off as a series of four conversions, that of 1816 as an adolescent, that of 1827 as a fellow at Oriel, that of 1833 during his long illness in Sicily, and finally in middle age with his conversion in 1845 to the Roman Catholic Church. Of great importance is the conversion of 1827 in which he tells us that he was awakened violently from his slumber by the two great blows of illness and the interior desolation caused by the death of his younger favorite sister Mary. According to his own account he was drifting dangerously in the direction of intellectual Liberalism due to a strong desire for intellectual excellence stemming from pride. Newman has a well-deserved reputation for being at times over sensitive. Nevertheless this sensitiveness produced that overriding desire for personal holiness that was the motivation of his life. Judging from the writings that he has left: sermons, letters and diaries, articles, etc... I have not been able to find any evidence for this supposed drift towards the spirit of the day. However Newman mentions it repeatedly in later writings and we must rely on his word.
At this point he still had not completely settled his own religious opinion, being pulled in opposite directions by the Evangelical and Liberal currents around him. This uncertainty together with the events of his everyday university life produced a crisis that was resolved in a manner that was to give him direction for the rest of his life. As early as May 1825 he had planned a systematic reading of the Fathers of the Church but it is only in July 1828 that he finally begins the project with the reading of the most primitive Fathers, the Apologetics. He testifies to the importance of these reading in both his autobiographical writings. "The ancient Fathers saved him from the danger that threatened him" 29 and "in proportion as I moved out of the shadows of Liberalism which had hung over my course, my early devotion to the Fathers returned and in the long vacation of 1828 I set about to read them chronologically, beginning with St. Ignatius and St. Justin." 30 The impact of the sanctity and genius of the fathers is immeasurable, certainly no other modern religious figure has delved so deeply in their spirituality. With this patristic orientation his writings become increasingly stylistic and his two important theological works are laden with history and doctrinal information on the first centuries of the Church.
We see Newman gradually turning away from the influence of Hawkins, Whately and Blanco White, an apostate Spanish priest in residence in Oxford, and taking up with the most traditional Anglican elements of Oxford, John Keble, Hurrell Froude, and Edward B. Pusey. These are the men who will begin with him the Oxford Movement. They will remain his fast friends and supporters up to the day of his conversion. They "were beginning the process of turning a Liberal into a Catholic." 31
In the later part of the decade of the 1820's John Keble's Christian Year, a book of devotional poetry, became very popular among the "higher" elements in the Anglican Church and Newman was not immune from its influence. Keble helped to add another part to the foundation that Newman was building for his conception of a true Catholic Church. "The first of these was what may be called in a large sense of the word, the Sacramental system, that is the doctrine that material phenomena are both the type and instrument of real thing unseen." 32
Hurrell Froude was to influence Newman in a different manner. Froude, the son of an Anglican clergyman himself, was intensely taken up with the history of the Church in the Middle Ages, with the greatness of Hildebrand and Innocent III and the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury. He was much more rapid than Newman in his appreciation of Catholic truth and served as a constant prod for Newman in taking action on the great religious questions of the day.
As Newman gradually finished his formation regarding the true nature of the Church, the liberal inroads in both Church and Society became even greater. "Liberalism began to reveal its chief principle, hatred of dogma and hatred of mystery." 33 With the more open revelation of liberal principles Newman's recognitions of its possible effects both in the present and in the future became more perceptive.
In 1829 he wrote to his sister Jemima, "I think there is a grand attack on the Church in progress from the utilitarians and schismatics." 34 He saw the progress that the utilitarians' philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and the Mills, father and son, was making in the political philosophy of England and consequently on its state established Church. He identified the Catholic Emancipation of 1829 as one of the first blows towards a disastrous separation of Church and State. Soon afterwards comes the most succinct analysis of Liberalism in the first period of his Anglican life. In a letter written to his mother:
We live in a novel era one in which there is an advance towards universal education. Men have hitherto depended on others, and especially the Clergy for religious truth; now each man attempts to judge for himself. Christianity is of faith, modesty, lowliness, subordination but the spirit of work against it is one of latitudinarianism, indifferentism, republicanism, and schism, a spirit which tends to overthrow doctrine as if the fruit of bigotry... The Church party is poor in mental endowments. It has not activity, shrewdness, dexterity, eloquence or practical Powers. On what then does it depend? On prejudice and bigotry. 35
Newman already sees himself in the minority facing a tidal wave of unbelief. At the same time he recognizes that the Anglican Church as then constituted was utterly unable to wage effective battles against such apparently insurmountable odds. The formation of the Oxford Movement was still some years away but Newman was already steeling himself for the battles to come within the heart of the Anglican Church. Only the conviction that he possessed the truth and that he would continue to have divine aid enabled him to carry out his ministry.
He saw the Church besieged from all directions. At this point he had little real knowledge of the Roman Church, just the normal prejudices of an Anglican clergyman mixed with some more bitter sentiments as a result of his Evangelical youth. Thus in his own words "But here again in Emancipation (of Irish Catholics) is the symptom of a systematic hatred to our Church, borne by Romanists, Sectaries, Liberals, and Infidels. If it were not for the Revolution which one would think attend it, I should say the Church must fall." 36 Nevertheless it is rare to find attacks against the Catholic Church in the corpus of his work, rather he constantly excoriates the Liberals, "pas d'ennemis a droite." Thus when in 1843 he formally retracted all his criticism of the Roman Church in fact there was not all that much to retract.
In the year 1830, as in 1820 and 1848, there were revolutions throughout Europe. France suffered yet another convulsion and Newman who shared the common British disdain for the continent was not slow to comment on the occurrences in France. "They seem the most wicked nation on earth and King Charles and his ministers are a set of poltroons for not staying to be shot or guillotined." The more mature and theological Newman in later life was to comment in his Apologia: "shortly before there had been a Revolution in France, the Bourbons had been dismissed and I believe that it was unchristian for nations to cast off their governor, and much more, sovereigns who had the divine right of inheritance." 37 He shared the common tenet of High Anglicanism of the divine right of kings that would lead him to refer to the "martyrdom" of King Charles I. It was an opinion that he would modify as time went on.
By the middle of 1830 Newman has clearly rid himself of any vestiges of Evangelism. His attention now is focused on the various ways the Liberals are infiltrating the society and what would be its ultimate impact on the Church. By no means is he a disinterested observer; it is simply that he has not yet encountered the influence nor the means to counteract the Liberalism in an organized manner.
The tendency of the age is towards Liberalism i.e. a thinking established notions worth nothing. In this system of opinions a disregard of religions is included. No religion will stand deprived of its forms. It is nothing to say it is truth- moral truth is not acceptable to man's heart, it must be enforced by authority of some kind or other... A system of Church government was actually established by the Apostles, and is thus the legitimate enforcement of Christian truth. The Liberals know this - and are in every possible manner trying to break it up. (ref. Bible Society) On the contrary I believe it makes Church men Liberal... I think it is preparing the downfall of the Church. 38
Newman still firmly believed that the Anglican Church was apostolic in its origin. He only wanted it to exercise its rightful powers. In this he was to be constantly disappointed.
In another of the University Sermons preached in 1830 he warns his congregation, "It is even now the way of the world to look upon the religious principles as a mere peculiarity of temper, a weakness, or an enthusiasm, or refined feeling, characteristic of a timid and narrow or a heated or highly gifted mind." 39 He insists even more stubbornly on the importance of the dogmatic principle, that there are truths given to our assent on the authority of the one giving them. One notes a reflection of personal experience in private controversy of the Oriel Common Room kind with Blanco White and Richard Whately when he refers to the "timid and narrow," or "heated and highly gifted."
By 1830, he affirms that "the Children of evangelical parents, if they see the world, will generally turn liberals...
Give them education, they will turn scoffers, having already the evil heart of unbelief in them." 40 Quite strong words for a former Evangelical but by this point he is so firmly convinced that dogmatic belief is the touchstone of Christianity that he could make such a statement. The history of religious belief in this century has certainly proved his prophecy out.
The gradual disappearance of the sense of sin or the need of repentance and the gradual disappearance of religious influence in everyday life were all foreseen by Newman as early as 1831. "It is the sign of the day to put religious considerations out of sight, and, forgetting there is any power above man's to think that what he can do, he may do with impunity." 41 The gradual self-defecation of man by rationalism and the utter self-righteousness expressed in the mores of the day were to form part of the principal characteristics of the long Victorian era that was to begin in 1837. Newman diagnosed the disease from the onset of its first symptoms.
In 1831 late in the year Newman preached the most important of his University Sermons in dealing with the root of his understanding of the meaning of Liberalism for his day. The sermon is entitled "Usurpations of Reason." The harmony between faith and reason was one of the major themes to which he would return time and time again throughout his life in books and sermons. He felt that most intellectuals misunderstood the range and applications of reason to revealed truth. The use of the word "usurpation" in the title of the sermon is revealing when we considers its then frequent use in relation to the unlawful rebellion against the throne. In the same way he considered that reason when used wrongfully usurped the divine truth. He recognized and encouraged the use of reason in its proper sphere but not for the purposes of doubting where it has no proper role, for who can doubt God and expect to be saved. "It appears that exercises of reason are either external, or at least only ministrative, to religious inquiry and knowledge: accidental to them, not of the essence; useful in their place, but not necessary... In this day, then, we see a very extensive development of an usurpation which has been preparing, with more or less open avowal, for some centuries, the usurpation of Reason in morals and religion." 42
Newman had a keen sense of the importance of history, a result of his classical education and a profound reading of the Fathers and the Anglican divines. From this study he developed a fine sense of the historical roots of heresy and the modern ideologies. Thus "the usurpation of the reason may be dated from the Reformation... Accordingly, Revealed Religion was in a great measure stripped of its proof; for the existence of the Church had been its external evidence, and its internal had been supplied by the moral sense." 43 Here we see Newman consciously affirming the need for a universal Catholic Church as the authority to which the faithful should submit. By now, in part due to the influence and friendship of Keble, the Protestants were clearly the culprits for the corruption of the Anglican Church.
Newman then points out the great danger for the Church, a danger that sounds so familiar to Roman Catholics that have lived through the Post-Vatican II era, of the misinterpretation of the role of the Church in the modern world. "Our great danger is, lest we should not understand our own principles, and should weakly surrender customs and institutions, which go far to constitute the Church what she is - the pillar and ground of moral truth - lest from a wish to make religion acceptable to the world in general we betray it to its enemies." 44 Newman rejects finally any false concessions, insisting on the need for a sound doctrinal and theological knowledge in the Church to better prepare its defense and propagation in the modern world. He continues, "However, what are the essentials of any system, both in doctrine and discipline, what we may safely give up and what we must finally uphold, such practical points are to be determined by a more mature wisdom." 45
We have now completed the first part of our examination of the vision of Liberalism in Newman. From this time on Newman would become more intimately concerned in the religious questions involving both the Church and the nation. His thought will thus reflect more of a commitment and less sober reflection. He has recently begun his first book The Arians of the Fourth Century, a direct result of his readings of the Fathers. We have seen that his theological formation as an Anglican is now complete and now remains the question of finding that "mature wisdom" to which he and the English people must look for safety against the onslaught of disbelief.
