Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

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The coarseness of this attack upon an elderly man of saintly character
and acknowledged intellectual eminence, who had to all appearance
blighted a great career by honestly obeying his conscience, offended the
British public, which was now fully disposed to give a respectful and
favourable hearing to whatever Newman might care to say in reply. In a
Catholic country it would have been useless for a Protestant, however
falsely attacked, to appeal to Catholic public opinion for justice; but
Newman understood the English character, and saw his splendid chance.

The famous defence was, from every point of view except the highest, a
complete triumph. And although Hort was strictly accurate in describing
the treatment of Kingsley as 'horribly unchristian,' it is demanding too
much of human nature to expect a master of fence, when wantonly attacked
with a bludgeon, to abstain from the pleasure of pricking his adversary
scientifically in the tender parts of his body. The bitterest passages
were excised in later editions; and the 'Apologia' remains a masterpiece
of autobiography, and a powerful defence of Catholicism. To Newman this
appeared to be the turning-point in his fortunes. He felt strong enough
to administer a severe snub to Monsignor Talbot, his old enemy, who,
hearing of the success the 'Apologia,' invited him to preach at Rome.
Then at once he threw himself into a great scheme for founding an
Oratory at Oxford. Eight and a half acres were bought between Worcester
College, the Clarendon Press, the Observatory, and Beaumont Street, a
magnificent site, which the Oratorians acquired for only L8400. But here
again he was thwarted. W.G. Ward opposed the scheme with all his might,
insisting on the necessity of 'preserving the purity of a Catholic
atmosphere throughout the whole course of education.' The whole tendency
of the Ultramontane movement was to secure, before all other things, a
body of militant young Catholics to fight the battles of the Church.
Newman was willing to support the English Church in its warfare against
unbelief; to the Ultramontane a Protestant is as certainly damned as an
atheist, and is more mischievous as being less amenable to Catholic
influence. Manning and Talbot seem to have given the project its _coup
de grace_ at Rome, and Newman sold the land which he had bought. He was
bitterly disappointed; but the growth of public esteem had given him
self-confidence, and he did not again fall into despondency, though he
had a strange presentiment of approaching death, which prompted his last
famous poem, 'The Dream of Gerontius.' A second attempt to go to Oxford
was thwarted by enemies at Home and in England in 1866-7. The extreme
party, with Manning, now Archbishop, at their head, seemed to be
victorious all along the line. They were able to proceed to their
supreme triumph in the Vatican Council which issued the dogma of Papal
Infallibility. Newman, while others were intriguing and haranguing, was
quietly engaged in preparing his subtlest and (on one side) his most
characteristic work, 'The Grammar of Assent,' an attempt at a Catholic
apologetic on a 'personalist,' as opposed to an 'intellectualist' basis.
He declined to take an active part in the theological conferences about
infallibility, being by this time well aware how little weight such
arguments as he could bring were likely to have at Rome. He was
disgusted at the insolent aggressiveness of the Ultramontanes, but he
had no wish to combat it. The situation was hopeless, and he knew it.
The death of several friends increased the sense of isolation, and
during the years 1875 to 1879 his silence and depression were very
noticeable to those who lived with him. His dearest friend, Ambrose St.
John, was one of several who died about this time. But Trinity College,
Oxford, made him an honorary fellow in 1877, an honour which seemed to
prognosticate the far higher distinction which was soon to be conferred
upon him.

The death of Pius IX in 1878 brought to an end the long reign of
obscurantism at the Vatican, and with the election of Leo XIII Newman
emerged from the cloud under which he had remained for more than a
generation. The new Pope lost no time in making him a Cardinal, though
even now the prize seemed to be on the point of slipping through his
fingers. He valued the honour immensely as setting the official seal of
approbation on his life's work, and the last ten years of his life were
quietly happy. He was able to mingle actively in affairs of public
interest, and to write long letters, till near the end. He died on
August 11, 1890, in his ninetieth year, and was buried, by his own
request, in the same grave with his friend Ambrose St. John.

Why is it that this sad, isolated, broken life, in which the young man
renounces the creed of the boy, and the elder man pours scorn upon the
loyalties of his prime; which found its last haven in a society which
wished to make a tool of him but distrusted him too much for even this
pitiful service, has still an absorbing interest for our generation? For
it is not only in England that Newman's fame lives and grows. In France
there is a cult of Newman, which has produced biographies by Bremond and
Faure, as well as a history of the Catholic Revival in England by
Thureau-Dangin. In England, besides Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement,' we
have biographies by R.H. Hutton and W. Barry, and appreciations or
depreciations by E. Abbott, Leslie Stephen, Froude, Mark Pattison, and
several others.

The interest is mainly personal and psychological. Newman's writings,
and his life, are a 'human document' in a very peculiar degree. Bremond
is right in calling attention to the _autocentrism_ of Newman. 'Although
(he says) the words "I" and "me" are relatively rare in Newman's
writings, whether as preacher, novelist, controversialist, philosopher,
or poet, he always reveals and always describes himself.' Even his
historical portraits are reconstructed from his inner consciousness;
hence their historical falsity--all ages are mixed in his histories--and
their philosophical truth. In a sense he was the most reserved of men.
We do not know whether he had any ordinary temptations; we do not know
whether he ever fell in love. But the texture of his mind and the growth
of his opinions have been laid bare to us with the candour of a saint
and the accuracy of a dissector or analyst. He reminds us of De Quincey,
who also could tell the story of his own life, but no other, and whose
style, like his own, was modelled on the literary traditions of the
eighteenth century.

He has left us, in the 'Apologia,' a picture of his precocious and
dreamy boyhood, when he lived in a world of his own, peopled by angels
and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature. He
was lonely and reserved, then as always. It is not for nothing that in
his sermons he expatiates so often on the impenetrability of the human
soul. A nature so self-centred has always something hard and inhuman
about it; he was loved, but loved little in return. And yet he craved
for more affection than he could reciprocate. 'I cannot ever realise to
myself,' he wrote once, 'that anyone loves me.' It is a common feeling
in imaginative, withdrawn characters. Deepseated in his nature was a
reverence for the hidden springs of thought, action, and belief. When he
spoke of 'conscience,' as he did continually, he meant, not the faculty
which decides ethical problems, but the undivided soul-nature which
underlies the separate activities of thought, will, and feeling. In this
sense the epigrammatist was right who said that 'to Newman his own
nature was a revelation which he called conscience.' He 'followed the
gleam,' uncertain whither it would lead him. The poem 'Lead, kindly
Light' is the most intimate self-revelation that he ever made. This
mental attitude, which he took early in life, became the foundation of
his 'personalist' philosophy, and of the anti-intellectualism which was
the negative side of it. But this reliance on the inner light, which
nearly made a mystic of him, was clouded by a haunting fear of God's
wrath, which imparts a gloomy tinge to his Anglican sermons, and which,
while he was halting between the English Church and Rome, plied him with
the very unmystical question 'Where shall I be most _safe_?' an argument
which he had used repeatedly and without scruple in his parochial
sermons.[82]

It is nevertheless true that this self-centred spirit was, at least in
early life, impressionable and open to the influence of others. His
friendship with Hurrell Froude and Keble affected his opinions
considerably: and still more potent was the pervading intangible
influence of Oxford--the academic atmosphere. It cannot indeed be said
that the University was at this time in a healthy condition. Mark
Pattison has described with caustic contempt the intellectual lethargy
of the place, and the miserable quality of the lectures. Oxford was
still _de facto_ a close clerical corporation, and in most colleges
'clubbable men' rather than scholars were chosen for the fellowships.
Oriel won its unique position by breaking through this tradition, and
also by making originality rather than success in the university
examinations the main qualification for election. But even at Oriel, and
among the ablest men, there was great ignorance of much that was being
thought and written elsewhere. Knowledge of German was rare. Even the
classics were not read in a humanistic spirit. 'Of the world of wisdom
and sentiment--of poetry and philosophy, of social and political
experience, contained in the Latin and Greek classics, and of the true
relation of the degenerate and semi-barbarous Christian writers of the
fourth century to that world--Oxford, in 1830, had never dreamt.[83]
Theological prejudice in fact distorted the whole outlook of the
resident fellows, and confounded all estimation of relative values.
Newman never, all through his life, took a step towards overcoming this
early prejudice. He imagined a golden age of the Church, or several
golden ages, and found them in 'the first three centuries,' in the time
of Alfred the Great or of Edward the Confessor, or in the seventeenth
century. He was only sure that the sixteenth century was made of much
baser metal. This unhistorical idealisation of the past, even of a
barbarous past, was very characteristic of Newman and his friends. They
bequeathed to the Anglican Church the strange legend of an age of pure
doctrine and heroic practice, to which it should be our aim to 'return.'
The real strength of this legend lies in the fact that it has no
historical foundation. The ideal which is presented as a return or a
revival is nothing of the kind, but a creation of our own time,
projected by the imagination into the past, from which it comes back
with a halo of authority. Newman had his full share of these illusions.
In his youth and prime he was more of an Englishman than an Anglican. He
despised foreigners, unless they were Catholic saints, could not bear
the sight of the _tricolor_, and hated all the 'ideas of the
Revolution.' His dictum, 'Luther is dead, but Hildebrand and Loyola are
alive,' throws a flood of light upon the contents of his mind, as does
the truly British prejudice which caused him to be horrified at the
sight of ships coaling at Malta 'on a holy day.' His range of ideas was
so much restricted that Bremond, a sincere admirer, says that his
imagination lived on 'une poignee de souvenirs d'enfant.' How tragic was
the fate which caught this loyal Englishman and more than loyal Oxonian
in the meshes of a cosmopolitan institution in which England counted for
little and Oxford for nothing at all!

The Reform of 1832 seemed to threaten the English Church with
destruction. Arnold in this year wrote 'The Church, as it now stands, no
human power can save.' The bishops were stunned and bewildered by the
unexpected outbreak of popular hostility. Old methods of defence were
plainly useless; some new plan of campaign must be devised against the
double assault of political radicalism and theological liberalism. To
Newman both alike were of the devil; theological liberalism especially
was only specious infidelity. He never had the slightest inkling that a
deep religious earnestness and love of truth underlay the revolt against
orthodox tradition. His fighting instincts were aroused. When Keble
attributed the scheme for suppressing some Irish bishopries to 'national
apostasy,' he rushed to arms in defence of Church privileges and
property. In the first Tract (1833) he says:

'A notion has gone abroad that the people can take away your
power. They think they have given it and can take it away.
They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable
usefulness, produceable results, acceptableness to your
flocks--that these and such-like are the tests of your
Divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our
holy fathers the Bishops, as the representatives of the
Apostles, and the Angels of the Churches, and magnify your
office, as being ordained by them to take part in their
ministry.'

That was the keynote of the whole Tractarian movement. A weapon was
needed to smite liberalism. Nothing but a compact and powerful
organisation could repel the foe. God must have provided such an
organisation: a Divine society, certain of ultimate victory, must exist
somewhere. Newman and his friends hoped to find it in the Anglican
Church; and such was the power of their contagious zeal and confident
enthusiasm, that the immediate danger was actually staved off, and the
Establishment was allowed a new lease of life. But the national Church
of England was not constituted to resist the national will, and the
attempt to reorganise it on Catholic lines was fore-doomed to failure.
And so, since the assumption that a great institutional fighting Church
_must_ exist was never even questioned, when Anglicanism failed him
there was no other refuge but Rome.

He was certainly more logical than his friends who remained behind.
Anglo-Catholicism has its theoretical basis in a definition of
Catholicity which is repudiated by all other Catholics; its traditions
are largely legendary. But it is an eclectic system well suited to the
English character, and the distorted view of history which Newman
bequeathed to the party has enabled it to borrow much that is good from
different sides, without any sense of inconsistency. The idea of a
Divine society has been and is the inspiration of thousands of ardent
workers in the Anglican Church. It lifted the religion of many
Englishmen from the somewhat gross and bourgeois condition in which the
movement found it, to a pure and unworldly idealism. And, unlike most
other religious revivals, especially in this country, it has remained
remarkably free from unhealthy emotionalism and hysterics. The social
atmosphere of Oxford, always alien to mawkish sentiment, penetrated the
whole movement, and maintained in it for many years a certain sanity and
dignity which, while they doubtless prevented it from spreading widely
in the middle class, made the Tractarians respected by men of taste and
education. But these influences could not be permanent. The goodwill of
the Tractarian firm (if we may so express it) has now been acquired by
men with very different aims and methods. The ablest members of the
party are plunging violently into social politics, while the rank and
file in increasing numbers are fluttering round the Roman candle, into
which many of them must ultimately fall.

The progress of the movement between 1833 and 1845 was almost entirely
in the direction of teaching the clergy to 'magnify their office.' The
other part of the scheme, the combat against theological liberalism,
fell quite into the background. The main reason for this was that during
those strange years the theologians so completely dominated Oxford that
liberalism could hardly raise its head, and was despised as well as
hated. Only after Newman's secession could the regeneration of the
University begin. Then indeed liberalism came in like a flood, though it
was a very shallow flood in some cases. This was the day of the
self-satisfied young rationalist, 'ecarte par une plaisanterie des
croyances dont la raison d'un Pascal ne reussit pas a se degager,' as
Renan says--an orgy of facile free thought which after a generation was
chastised by another clerical reaction.

If Newman could have foreseen the victory of his party in the English
Church, he might perhaps have been content to remain in it. We cannot
tell. But it is doubtful whether he would have taken Pusey's place as
leader of the party. Newman's influence was disturbing and subtly
disintegrating to every cause for which he laboured. His startling
candour often seemed like treachery. He could not work with others, and
broke with nearly all his friends, retaining only his disciples. He
confessed himself a bad judge of character. It is doubtful, after all,
whether he was much injured by the jealousy and almost instinctive fear
which he inspired among the Roman Catholic hierarchy. If he had been
allowed to take the place due to his abilities, his character, and his
reputation, what could he have done that he was unable to do at
Edgbaston? We cannot fancy him plunged in crooked ecclesiastical
intrigue, like that _Inglese italianato_, Cardinal Manning. Still less
can we fancy him haranguing strikers, and stealing the credit of
composing a trade dispute. No doubt he suffered under the sense of
injury; but probably he did what was in him to do. If the Roman Church
would not use him as a tool, it was probably because he would not have
been a good tool. There are some mistakes which that Church seldom
makes; it knows how to choose its men.

What will be the verdict of history on the type of Catholicism which
Newman represented? He was kept out in the cold by a conservative Pope,
and honoured by a liberal Pope. Which was right, from the point of view
of Catholic interests and policy? This is perhaps the most important
question which the life of Newman raises; for it affects our
anticipations of the future even more than our judgments of the past. Is
Newman a safe or a possible guide for Catholics in the twentieth
century?

Newman was no metaphysician; he confesses it himself. 'My turn of
mind,' he says, 'has never led me towards metaphysics; rather it has
been logical, ethical, practical.'[84] For metaphysics requires an
initial act of faith in human reason, and Newman had not this faith.
Even in his Anglican days he uttered many astonishing things in contempt
of reason. 'What is intellect itself (he asks) but a fruit of the Fall,
not found in paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at
the utmost but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible with
the regenerate mind?... Reason is God's gift, but so are the
passions.... Eve was tempted to follow passion and reason, and she
fell.'[85] 'Faith does not regard degrees of evidence.'[86] 'Faith and
humility consist, not in going about to prove, but in the outset
confiding in the testimony of others.' 'The more you set yourself to
argue and prove, in order to discover truth, the less likely you are to
reason correctly.'[87] The amazing crudity of this avowed obscurantism
is likely to make the orthodox apologist writhe, and to move the
rationalist to contemptuous laughter. In this and many other cases,
Newman seems to love to caricature himself, and to put his beliefs in
that form in which they outrage common sense most completely. We can
imagine nothing more calculated to drive a young and ingenuous mind into
flippant scepticism than a course of Newman's sermons. The _reductio ad
absurdum_ of his arguments is not left to the reader to make; it is
innocently provided by the preacher.

And yet Newman's central position is not absurd, or only becomes absurd
when it is applied to justify belief in gross superstition. He holds
that what he calls 'reasoning' deals only with abstractions, and is not
the faculty on which we rely in forming 'judgments.' These judgments, to
which we give our 'assent,' and by which we regulate our conduct, are
affirmations of the basal personality. And these have an authority far
greater than can ever arise out of the logical manipulation of concepts.
'There is no ultimate test of truth besides the testimony borne to the
truth by the mind itself.' The 'mind itself,' the concrete personality,
is concerned with realities, while the intellect, which for him
corresponds very nearly with the discursive reason (dihanoia) of the
Greek philosophers, is at home only in mathematics and, up to a certain
point, in logic. The concepts of the intellect have no existence outside
it. 'The mind has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it
abstractions and generalisations which have no counterpart, no
existence, out of it.'[88] Parenthetically, we may remark that passages
like this show how wide of the truth Mr. Barry is when he speaks of
Newman as a 'thorough Alexandrine.' To deny the existence of universals,
to regard them as mere creations of the mind, is rank blasphemy to a
Platonist; and the Alexandrines were Christian Platonists. No more
misleading statement could be made about Newman's philosophy than to
associate him with Platonism of any kind, whether Pagan or Christian.
Newman adopts the sensationalist (Lockian) theory of knowledge. Ideas
are copies or modifications of the data presented by the senses; 'first
principles are abstractions from facts, not elementary truths prior to
reasoning.' This is pure nominalism, in its crudest form. It makes all
arguments in favour of the great truths of religion valueless; for if
there are no universals, rational theism is impossible. It follows that
the famous scholastic 'proofs of God's existence' have for Newman no
cogency whatever; indeed it is difficult to see how he can have escaped
condemning the whole philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a juggling with
bloodless concepts. Newman himself pleaded that he had no wish to oppose
the official dogmatics of his Church. But protestations are of no avail
where the facts are so clear. 'The natural theology of our schools,'
says a writer in the _Tablet_, quoted by Dr. Caldecott in his
'Philosophy of Religion,' 'is based frankly and wholly on the appeal to
reason.' This is notoriously true; and what Newman thought of reason we
have already seen. His extreme disparagement of the intellect seems to
preclude what he calls 'real assent' to the creeds and dogmas of
Catholicism; for these clearly consist of 'notional' propositions. But
Newman would answer that the Church is a concrete fact, to which 'real
assent' can be given; and the Church has guaranteed the truth of the
notional propositions in question. But since reason is put out of court
as a witness to truth, on what faculty, or on what evidence, does Newman
rely? Feeling he distrusts; that side of mysticism, at any rate, finds
no sympathy from him. Nor does he, like many Kantians and others, make
the will supreme over the other faculties. Rather, as we have seen, he
bases his reliance on the verdicts of the undivided personality, which
he often calls conscience. This line of apologetic was at this very time
being ably developed by Julius Hare. It is in itself an argument which
has no necessary connexion with obscurantism. 'Personalism,' as it is
technically called, reminds us that we do actually base our judgments on
grounds which are nob purely rational; that the intellect, in forming
concepts, has to be content with an approximate resemblance to concrete
reality; and that the will and feelings have their rights and claims
which cannot be ignored in a philosophy of religion. But while it is
compatible with a robust faith in the powers of the constructive
intellect, personalism is beyond question a self-sufficient,
independent, individualistic doctrine. When it is combined with a
nominalist theory of knowledge, it naturally suggests that every man may
and should live by the creed which bests suits his idiosyncrasies. Now
there was much in Newman's temperament which made him turn in this
direction. 'Lead, kindly Light' has been the favourite hymn of many an
independent thinker, to whom the authority of the Church is less than
nothing. But on another side Newman was all his life a fierce upholder
of the principle of authority. His reason for accepting the dogmas of
the Church, and for wishing to destroy heresiarchs like wild beasts, was
certainly not that his basal personality testified to the truth and
value of all ecclesiastical dogmas. He believed them 'by confiding in
the testimony of others'--in other words, on the authority of the
Catholic Church. If we push back the enquiry one step further, and ask
on what grounds he chooses to prefer the authority of the Catholic
Church to other authorities, such as natural science or philosophy, we
are driven again to lay great stress on the almost political necessity
which he felt that such a Divine society should exist. In accepting the
authority of the Church, he accepted the authority of all that the
Church teaches, in complete independence of human reason. But the Roman
Church never professes to be independent of human reason. The official
scholastic philosophy claims to be a demonstrative proof of theism.

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