Liberalism and Newman:
The Anglican Vision and Response
A Doctoral Dissertation by Father John McCloskey
Chapter 3: Towards the Truth (continued)
In 1843, Newman delivered the last of his University Sermons, which reads like a synthesis of the book he was about to write on the development of doctrine. At this point Newman surely already realized that his conversion to the Roman Church was not too many days away. He now openly refers to the Roman Church as Catholic and to the Protestants, including the Anglicans, as heretics. "The badge of heresy, its dogmas are unfruitful, it has no theology... Deduct its remnants of Catholic theology and what remains? Polemics, protests, Biblical criticism... Heresy denies to the Church what is wanting in itself." 114 One senses a certain bitterness in his rejection after so many years of loyalty to the Anglicans, only to find that he had been deceived. The Anglican theology had become "words without meaning, and deductions which come to nothing... private opinions which if individuals will hold for themselves, at least they have no right to impose on others." 115
In February of 1845, Newman begins the writing of his great work the Development of Dogma. At its finish he will call for a Catholic priest to hear his general confession and receive him in to the Catholic Church. The book is important from our standpoint in that it combines both a theological and more importantly a historical attack on Protestantism and its legitimate offspring Liberalism. At the same time he develops a theory to reconcile the gradual evolving of Catholic dogma with its role as the guaranteed truth of God. Right from the beginning he argues with those that hold "Christianity does not fall within the province of history - that it is to each man what each man thinks it to be, and nothing else." 116 Newman contends instead that "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." 117 As a result of the readings of the Fathers and the heretical character of the Anglican Church, Newman ceased to be a Protestant and became Catholic.
He now accused Liberalism, a philosophy already espoused by the majority of the educated world, of deliberate distortion of philosophy and history in order to "prove" its principles. "The assailants of dogmatic truth have got the start of the adherents of whatever creed, philosophy is completing what criticism has begun. Already infidelity has its views and conjectures to which it arranges the facts of ecclesiastical history." 118 Newman here foresees the coming of Comtian positivism, the evolutionism of Darwin and many other philosophies that will encourage the spread of unbelief.
There remains no middle ground for Newman. He would have agreed wholeheartedly with the Chesterton dictum that there are no new ideas, "the doctrines of heresy are accidental and soon run to an end, its principles are everlasting." 119 His study of the Fathers and later of Medieval Church history encouraged by Froude show clearly that the same principles appear again and again only to be repeatedly condemned, if necessary, by the Church. The unique problem of our age is that the errors have become so wide spread through the means of communication, universal education etc... that simple condemnation, although necessary, is not enough to snuff out the pernicious heresies. We have reached a point where, to quote a Father of the Church, many "speak Scripture without a sense of Scripture and profess a faith without faith." 120
He concludes the book and his Anglican life with a statement of the Liberal Philosophy that he denounces as irredeemable, seeing that it is the very Anglican Church once so loved that nourishes it.
That truth and falsehood in religion are but matters of opinion, that one doctrine is as good as another, that the Governor of the world does not intend that we should gain the truth, that there is no truth, that we are no more acceptable to God, by believing this than by believing that, that no one is answerable for his opinions, that they are matters of necessity or accident, that it is enough if we sincerely hold what we profess, that our merit lies in seeking not possessing, that it is a duty to follow what seems to be true, without a fear lest it not be true, that it may be a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail, that we may take up and lay down opinion at pleasure, that belief belongs to the mere intellect and not to the heart, that we may safely trust to ourselves in matters of faith, and need no other guide - this is the principle of philosophies and heresies, which is its very weakness. 121
These false opinions sound so familiar to us of the twentieth century that they are not at all shocking. But Newman foresaw and analyzed all this long before these ideas were to capture the greater part of the western world. Indifferentism was to triumph and Newman saw the Rock upon which Christ built his Church as the only refuge where he could find salvation - and the only safe place from which to continue the struggle, not to end until his death.
I will conclude this chapter with an examination of several of Newman's statements concerning his adversaries and the cause of his fall as the head of the Oxford Movement. In September of 1843 he resigned the living of St. Mary's and began the process of throwing off the accoutrements of an Anglican clergyman. Commenting on his resignation he says, "I found no fault with the Liberals, they have beaten me in a fair field... the men who had driven me from Oxford were distinctly the Liberals. It was they who had opened the attack on Tract Ninety, and it was they who would gain a second benefit if I went on to retire from the Anglican Church. As I have already said, there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism: Anglicanism is the halfway house on one side, and Liberalism is the halfway house on the other." 122 So, at the end of his Anglican life he had deduced that Liberalism leads almost inevitably to Atheism. And what is the ultimate cause of this Atheism? Newman tells us that "three centuries ago the establishment of religion material, legal, and social was generally adopted as the best expedient for the purpose in those countries which separated from the Catholic Church and for a long time it was successful, but now the crevices of these establishments are admitting the enemy, the "wild, living intellect of man." 123 Thus Liberalism ultimately arises from pride, the resistance of man to the authority of God.
Finally, Newman writing many years later in his Apologia looking back on his battles as an Anglican points out the development of Liberalism since those days.
The Liberalism which gives a colour to society now is very different from that character of thought which bore the name thirty or forty years ago. It is scarcely now a party, it is the educated world. When I was young I knew the word first as giving name to a periodical set up by Lord Byron and others. Afterwards, Liberalism is the badge of a theological school, of a dry and repulsive character, not very dangerous in itself, though dangerous in opening the door to evil which it did not itself anticipate or comprehend. Now it is nothing else than that deep plausible skepticism of which I spoke above, as being the development of human reason, as practically exercised by the natural man. 124
