Liberalism and Newman:
The Anglican Vision and Response
A Doctoral Dissertation by Father John McCloskey
Chapter 2: A Vision Formed (continued)
With the start of the Oxford Movement upon the preaching of the sermon "National Apostasy" by John Keble, Newman enters a new phase of his Anglican life. Now he will have an opportunity to test his conception of the Church in active combat against the Liberals. His comments on the normal Broad Church doctrine will become more strident and open. He will become identified in the public mind with the Movement and thus bear a heavier responsibility to search even more deeply for the root causes of the illness afflicting the Anglicans. The difference also lies in that now Newman is a member of a group of like-minded faithful of the Anglican Church, Froude, Pusey, Keble, Williams. "They all stood for Authority and Tradition against Liberalism, for supernaturalism against Rationalism and Naturalism. The fundamental note of the Oxford Movement was its Anti-Modernism." 80 This judgment is correct for the Movement was fighting the same enemy that afflicts the modern world in our age, the faith in reason, scientific progress, and narcissistic self-fulfillment. This was to be the basis for the Modernists at the beginning of the century and whose doctrines, or lack thereof, still afflict us in the present day.
Newman conceived the Oxford Movement as a latter day corollary to the work of the Church Fathers. "We were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church," and even further on "I was confident in the truth of a certain definite religious teaching, based upon this definition of dogma viz. That there was a visible Church with sacraments and rites which are the channels of invisible grace." 81 Newman already possesses a completely Catholic notion of the fundamental dogmas of the Church. He would have to undergo much persecution and internal suffering during the coming years in order to come to the realization that what he held as dogma was not the dogma of the Anglican Church, neither hierarchy nor faithful. The liberal response to the dogmatism of the Oxford Movement would not be to deny the dogmas but only to deny their relevance to modern man and hence claim that they could be discarded as articles of belief. 82
In 1834 in a letter to Richard Whately, his former friend and mentor, he sketches the dangers of the Liberal opinion that Whately holds and spreads, and at the same time reveals an exquisite sense of charity in not imputing bad will to the Archbishop. "I can feel not reluctance to confess that, when I was first noticed by your Grace, gratitude to you and admiration of your powers weighed strongly upon me and had not something from within resisted, I should certainly have adopted views on religious and social duty, which seem to my judgment to be based upon pride and reason and to tend towards infidelity, and which in your own case nothing but your Grace's high religious temper and the unclouded faith of your mind have been able to withstand." 83
We see that Newman was not attacking individuals but their ideas. He rather had interest in persuading some of his former Anglican friends to denounce their incipient Liberalism and return to the straight path. In the Apologia, Newman clearly identifies the enemy which is an ideology. "My battle was with Liberalism. By Liberalism I meant the anti-dogmatic principle and its development... Dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion... Religion as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery." 84
Soon, afterwards, a professor of Moral Philosophy, R.D. Hampden, with whom Newman had already engaged in some heated battles, published a pamphlet urging the abolition of all religious tests for entering the Universities. Newman saw this attempt as another example of religious indifferentism spreading directly into the heart of his beloved Oxford. "While I respect the tone of piety which the pamphlet displays, I do not trust myself to put on paper my feelings about the principles contained in it, tending as they do in my opinion altogether to make shipwreck of Christian faith." 85 It was very rare that Newman would reach such a state of anger that he would not reasonably explain his views in a controversy. But the progress of Liberalism was so rapid and evidently unstoppable that in this case he was at a loss for words lest he offend in charity.
I will close this period of Newman's Anglican life with an examination of the most significant of the Tracts for the Times for an understanding of his vision of Liberalism as a consequence of rationalism. It was published in 1836 with the title "On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles in Religion." In starting he gives us a brief definition of what he conceives to be rationalism. "It is characterized by two peculiarities: its love of systematizing, and its basing its system upon personal experience, on the evidence of sense. In both respects, it stands opposed to what is commonly understood by the word Faith, belief on testimony, for which it deliberately replaces System (or what is properly called Reason) and sight... Rationalism then in fact is a forgetfulness of God's powers, disbelief of the existence of a First Cause sufficient to account for any events or acts, however marvelous or extraordinary, and a consequent measuring of the credibility of things not by the power and other attributes of God but by our own knowledge, a limiting the possible to the actual, and defying the infinite range of God's operations beyond our means of apprehending them." 86 Newman was familiar through his writings with the rationalism of the Enlightenment and with the philosophical ideas of Hume his countryman. He realized that once the divine authority was rejected as insufficient or unprovable, then the recourse to human reason individualized in a thousand opinions was the inevitable result.
The so-called right of private judgment becomes the norm for belief. "Our private judgment is made everything to us - is contemplated, recognized and referred to as the arbiter of all questions and as independent of everything external to us." 87 Faith is no longer a supernatural virtue bestowed upon us freely by a loving God, it becomes the simple rational assent to a series of evidences as seen by the believer. "In short he owns that faith, viewed with reference to its objects, is never more than an opinion, and is as pleasing to God, not as an active principle apprehending difficult doctrines, but as a result and fruit, and therefore an evidence of past diligence, independent inquiry, dispassionateness and the like. Rationalism takes the words of Scripture as Ideas, Faith as things or realities." 88
He later reveals the logical construction used by the rationalistic Liberal mind to invent a tautological system seemingly foolproof.
And the dispensation thus being hewned and chiseled into an intelligible human system is represented when thus mutilated as affording a remarkable evidence of the truths of the Bible, as evidence level to the Reason, and superseding the testimony of the Apostles. That is according to the above observation that Rationalism's want of faith, which has first invented a spurious gospel next looks complacently on its own offspring and pronounces it to be the very image of that notion of Divine Providence, according to which it was originally modeled. 89
What precisely proves so irritating to Newman is the mask of religiosity with which the enemies of the Church cover their corruption of true doctrine. He could withstand the open skeptics and agnostics who were at least above board in their attack on Christian belief but this type of camouflaged guerrilla warfare smacked of treacherous cowardice to him.
In a subsequent passage he refers to one of the main proponents of the Broad Church in the following scathing terms. "We need only consider him as the organ (involuntary if you will or unwitting), but still the organ of the spirit of the age, the voice of that scornful, arrogant, and self-trusting spirit which has been enchained during latter ages and waxes stronger in power day by day till it is fain to stamp under foot all the host of heaven." 90
In conclusion, Newman reveals both his analytical and prophetical powers at their highest. He lays out for view both the reason for the success of these doctrines and their eventual destination if they are not stopped.
The reason (I believe) why many pious persons tolerate such a writer as this is, that they have so fully identified spirituality of mind with the use of certain phrases and professions, that they cannot
believe that a person who uses them freely, naturally can but be taught of the Holy Spirit: to believe it otherwise would be unsettling their mind from the very foundations which indeed must take place sooner or later whether they will or not. 91
Newman witnessed a sharp drop in supernatural belief during the remainder of his life. He saw it replaced with weak sentimentalism and an ever-increasing pursuit of the material goods of life which so characterizes the modern world of today. That his warnings were not heeded is one of the great tragedies not only for the Anglican Church but for the whole world.
There is a widely, though irregularly spread school of doctrine among us, within and without the Church, which intends and professes the peculiar piety as directing its attention to the heart itself, not to anything external to us whether creeds, actions, or rituals. I do not hesitate to assent that their doctrine is based upon the error, that it is, really a specious form of trusting man rather than God,
that it is in its nature Rationalistic and that it tends to Socianism. How the individual supporters of it will act as they go on is another matter. The Good will be separated from the Bad, but the School, as such will pass through Sabellianism to that "God- denying apostasy" - to use the ancient phrase, to which in the beginning of his career: it professed to be especially opposed. 92
Newman was now ready to begin the agonizing rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church.
