Liberalism and Newman:
The Anglican Vision and Response
A Doctoral Dissertation by Father John McCloskey
Chapter 5: Verba (continued)
B. Poetry
Upon finishing his work on the Arians, Newman's next written work which gives us an idea of his early response to Liberalism is the Lyra Apostolica, a collection of poems written in conjunction with Hurrell Froude and other members of the soon to be Oxford Movement. The majority of the poems were written during the long Mediterranean voyage of 1832-33. Writing to Isaac Williams on January 16, 1833 regarding the Lyra Apostolica:
I perceive he (Froude) takes a different view of the object of the work than I do - he wishes to make it far more political. I by no means exclude what I consider an ecclesiastical view but do not go so far as he does in measure or strength of opinion. Again, he takes a far different practical view of the Church of Rome from what I do. 82
Froude was, by far, the more aggressive of the two both in his views towards the organization of a movement and his strong early sympathy for the Roman Church as a result of his studies of the Middle Ages. Newman was heavily and increasingly influenced by Froude's views during the course of the voyage and the newly energized and purposeful Newman's with his "mission" was the result.
In one of his poems written during the trip he give us a glimpse of this newly found sense of duty and vocation to the active fight against Liberalism whatever the cost. The poem is entitled Sensitiveness:
So when my Saviour calls, I rise And promptly do my best, Leaving to Him with silent eyes of hope and fear the Rest I step, I mount where he has led, Men count my halting o'er; I know them, But tho self I dread I love his precept more. 83
Newman is often pictured as the calm, self-assured leader of the Oxford Movement, which to some extent he was. Yet the poem reveals a hesitant and fearful Newman but with complete faith in the will of God. Thus he reveals in his poetry the sense of divine vocation in the struggle against spirit of the day that would be revealed in his writing and actions.
C. The Tracts
Already he was preparing himself for the imminent foundation of the Oxford Movement and its house organ The Tracts for the Times, which will be more fully examined later. The idea of Newman and his followers was "to meet the onset of Liberal principles of which all are in immediate anticipation, whether in the Church or in the University." 84 The Tracts for the Times met this purpose admirably. In their publication, beginning in 1833 and continuing until the thunderclap of Tract 90, the Tracts were the best means of spreading the ideas of the Movement to the clergy and the university intellectuals from which it could filter down to the greater mass of the English people. They were varied in their audience, some directed only to clergy, and others only to the laity. They also ranged widely in theme, dealing with the Liturgy and its importance in the Church and at other times entering into the most abstruse theological questions. Newman was undoubtedly the enlivening spirit although assisted and at times even overshadowed in the public mind by E.B. Pusey. However his leadership of the Movement was unquestioned especially after the premature death of the young Hurrell Froude. The influence of the Tracts throughout England was tremendous and their discussion an everyday topic among the upper classes and thus Oxford dons such as Keble, Pusey, and Newman became household names.
Newman deals directly with the problem of Liberalism in Tract 59 in which he examines in detail how liberal ideas infiltrated in religion and how they can be extirpated. He focuses in on the principal question early on in the Tract i.e. the proper attitude of the Christian facing of dogmatic truth.
The practical inference to be drawn from this view is first, that we should be very reverent in dealing with revealed truth, next we should avoid all theorizing and systematizing as relates to it, which is pretty much what looking into the Ark was under the Law. Further, that we should be zealous and pertinacious in guarding it, and lastly, which is implied in all these that we should religiously adhere to the form of the words, and the ordinances under which it comes to us, through which it is revealed to us, and apart from which the revelation does not exist, there being nothing else given by us by which to ascertain or enter into it. 85
This attitude applies for all men whether intellectual or manual workers, theologians or the simple faithful, laymen or cleric. During this period, Newman was witness to the travesty and near sacrilege of the rough examination of the most sacred truths, by precisely the people least prepared to deal with them. This attitude contrasted very sharply with his own research on the first centuries of the Church when dogmatic truth was not the subject of idle journalistic speculation but rather the object of battle, trial, persecution and martyrdom. Doctrinal statements are not merely words that serve to safeguard the faith but rather truths which must both be cherished and acted upon, He also places emphasis on the actual wording of the doctrines realizing that the Holy Spirit through the Church has used these expressions to delineate a great mystery. If these terms are manipulated or changed the very dogma itself becomes emptied of meaning to the faithful. Lack of attention to his advice was to result in incidents such as the Gorham Case of 1850 when an Anglican minister was pardoned for having denied the regenerative power of Baptism. This decision resulted in a further group of conversions from the Anglicans to Rome, among them the future Henry Cardinal Manning. Many if not all of these were former members of the Oxford Movement who had resisted conversion even after the move of their leaders Newman and W.G. Ward.
Later he continues his insistence upon the immutability of dogma and our relation to it. He makes it clear that man has to be subject to dogma and not vice-versa.
Accordingly the Church Catholic has ever taught (as in her creed) that there are facts revealed to us not of this world, not of time, but of eternity, and that absolutely and independently; not merely embodied and indirectly conveyed in a certain historical course, not revealed merely relative to us, not subordinated to the display of the divine character but primary objects of our faith, and essential in themselves whatever dependence or influence they may have upon other doctrines or upon the course of the dispensation. 86
Newman, here speaking to almost the entire population of the English clergy, forewarns them of the attack being made and to be made against the basic truths of the Church. By explaining what dogma is and is not, he warns against the different lines of assault that will be used against the depositum fidei. Renan, Strauss, and Darwin were still to be heard from although their time was rapidly approaching and Modernism was even further away yet Newman was already responding to their challenges with cogent pieces of apologetic and fundamental theology on the most basic truths of religion. He realized full well that his was a great task, above all, of education and that "Christianity and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education." 87 But this Christianity must be unadulterated, the Christianity of the primitive Christians and the Apostolic Fathers and he would not tolerate any deviation from the divine truth.
Soon afterwards in what was perhaps his most valiant attempt to salvage catholicity in the Anglican Church, he wrote his Via Media. In 1837 and 1838, he delivered a series of lectures in the Adam de Brome chapel of St. Mary's, which were later published in Tracts and then combined into the Via Media. Newman's work was by no means easy. He attempted to build a theory that would show that the Anglican Church could serve as a virtuous halfway house between the extreme tendencies of Roman Catholicism and heretical Protestantism. Thus he could avoid the doctrinal errors of Calvin and Luther while escaping the "corruptions" of the medieval Roman Church. It was a theory doomed to fail and only have a short life on paper. It was a futile response to the encroaching Liberalism only in that Newman tried to uphold as an apostolically constituted Church what in fact was built largely upon the adulterous propensities of the Tudor king.
Years later Newman wrote a long introduction to this work trying to correct the errors and anti-Roman statements that still found in the book and its theory as a justification of the validity of Anglican belief, a validity belied by the absence of both doctrine and congregation in the present Anglican Church. The book also served as a preparation for a later widely popular theory by which there was one Church with three legitimate branches, Roman, Anglican, and Orthodox. Once again this was a flawed attempt at unity through a false ecumenicism. In the introduction Newman places great importance on the attractiveness of truth; that the most effective response to the liberal threat was the preaching of the truth, be it of tradition, the Scripture, or of discipline.
In making the truth known through all the means available it will inevitably prevail against the false doctrine, however cleverly constructed it may be. Newman took the words of Christ literally, "Veritas liberabit vos." 88 At the same time one must not misunderstand the Christian virtues of meekness and humility. "Truth has the gift of overcoming the human heart, whether by persuasion or compulsion and if what we preach be truth, it must be natural, it must be popular, it will make itself popular." 89
Newman believed that the great inroads that Liberalism was making upon the Anglican clergy was due in great part to their lack of conviction regarding the essentials of the Christian faith. We have already seen how a lack of true moral life was a factor in the debility of the Anglican Church and now we can add this lack of faith on the part of the clergy as another.
He stresses that the sureness or fortitude in the faith rests on the belief in the infallibility, albeit relative to God, of the Church. "And by promising her infallibility in her formal teaching, he indirectly protected her from serious error in worship and political action also." 90 The Church asks for loyalty not only in adherence to the basic truths of the faith but also in its role as teacher; both Mater et Magistra. Newman saw that the Church had to be loved as a mother with a divinely-given mission, the mission of the salvation of men. Thus he asked for total loyalty to the Church, not only in its occasional doctrinal or dogmatic pronouncements, but in its total role as Ecclesia docens, regens, legens.
One of the facets of the Catholic Church that most attracted him was precisely the discipline of the clergy as he saw them in his stay in Sicily. He believed that if disobedience became wide spread among the clergy it would soon spread to the rest of the faithful. And that if the disobedience began in disciplinary matters it would finish with dogmatic disbelief, the questioning of the Incarnation, the Holy Trinity, etc. Naturally, Newman would point out that obedience must be loving to be true. When that love expressed in belief and action is missing, the Church, seen humanly, becomes a decrepit shell, a whitened sepulcher, and not the House of God. True belief in the Anglican Church had suffered a steady descent since its foundation in the mid-sixteenth century and even a religious genius like John Henry Newman could not stem the tide.
As the time drew nearer to his withdrawal from Oxford life upon the reaction to Tract 90, Newman wrestled with the idea that if he in fact converted to Roman Church, his life-long role as the primary battler for Anglican orthodoxy through his writings and action would be lost.
The most oppressive thought, in the whole process of my change in opinion was the clear anticipation, verified by the event, that it would issue in the triumph of liberalism. Against the anti-dogmatic principle I had thrown my whole mind, yet now I was doing more than anyone else could to promote it. I was one of those who had kept it at bay in Oxford for so many years and thus my very retirement was its triumph. 91
We can see here how clearly Newman saw himself as the pre-eminent battler against Liberalism. Not only had he picked up the cudgel and acted upon his convictions, but he acted virtually alone. There were other members of the Oxford Movement but they either quickly vanished from the scene, as in the case of the unfortunate Froude, or gradually retired to a life of country or university ease, as in the case of Keble and Pusey. Certainly there was only one person who was quite willing to be a martyr for the cause. It was he who had "thrown my whole mind," that is, had used all his vast talents during many years with the goal of ejecting the moneychangers of Liberalism from the temple.
The key to understanding Newman's reaction to Liberalism is explained in the following, "I have said already that through the object of the Movement was to withstand the Liberalism of the day, I found and felt this could not be done by mere negatives." 92 Newman the Anglican was attempting to construct a Christian apologetic that would answer directly the needs of the modern nineteenth century man. As I have already said in the first section Newman diagnosed Liberalism accurately and foresaw the consequences both for his day and in the future society. Yet he realized that unless an effective intellectual counterattack expressed in modern terms was made, or at least begun, the intellectual Dark Ages that he foresaw, with the loss of the concept of objective truth, could last many years.
The modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also were aware of this need but made the grievous error of using the very same modern philosophy as a defense against the dechristianization of modern society and thus fell into an even worse predicament. Newman sought, instead, to accentuate the positive, drawing on his deep studies of the Fathers and his own practical pastoral experience to forge an apologetic that would successfully withstand the errors of modernity. This Catholic apologetical tradition was to be carried on in England right up to our own time through the gifted hands of a former student of Newman's, Hilaire Belloc, his close friend G.K. Chesterton, another famous Anglican convert, Msgr. Ronald Knox, and by the founders of the great Catholic publishing house, Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. Newman realized very soon that the attack was not against the heresies of Protestantism; he saw it dissolving before his very eyes. The object rather was to construct a system of apologetics in his writings that could more than hold its ground against the growing universal skepticism of his epoch. For this skepticism, in Europe, at least was also accompanied by a growth in scientific discovery and a gradual raising of the standard of living which tended to draw the minds and hearts of man away from God and towards themselves. As he puts it so aptly in the words of a character of one of his novels, "Well, I honor the man who builds up and I despise the man who breaks down." 93
