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Outspoken Essays by William Ralph Inge

W >> William Ralph Inge >> Outspoken Essays




Newman, then, was only half a Catholic. He accepted with all the fervour
of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church. But in place
of the official intellectualist apologetic, which an Englishman may
study to great advantage in the remarkably able series of manuals issued
by the Jesuits of Stonyhurst, he substituted a philosophy of experience
which is certainly not Catholic. The authority claimed by the Roman
Church rests on one side upon revelation, on the other upon an elaborate
structure of demonstrative reasoning, which the simple folk are allowed
to 'take as read,' only because they cannot be expected to understand
it, but which is declared to be of irresistible cogency to any properly
instructed mind. To deny the validity of reasoning upon Divine things is
to withdraw one of the supports on which Catholicism rests.
Subjectivism, based on vital experience, mixes no better with this
system than oil with water. Scholasticism prides itself on clear-cut
definitions, on irrefragable logic, on using words always in the same
sense. For Newman, as for his disciples the Modernists, theological
terms are only symbols for varying values, and he holds that the moment
they are treated as having any fixed connotation, error begins. It is no
wonder if learned Catholics thought that Newman did not play the game.
Father Perrone, in spite of his friendship for the object of his
criticism, declared that 'Newman miscet et confundit omnia.'

The accusation of scepticism, which was not unnaturally brought against
him, was hotly resented by Newman, and with some justice. Of the
intensity of his personal conviction there can be no doubt whatever.
Indeed, it was just because his faith was in no danger that he cared so
little for any intellectual defence of it. He might have made his own
the lines of Wordsworth:

'Here then we rest; not fearing for our creed
The worst that human reasoning can achieve
To unsettle or perplex it.'

Wordsworth too, it may be remembered, speaks of 'reason' with hardly
more respect than Newman himself as:

'The inferior faculty that moulds
With her minute and speculative pains
Opinion, ever changing.'

Robert Browning also, especially in his later years, uses
anti-intellectualist language equally uncompromising. 'Wholly distrust
thy reason,' he says in 'La Saisiaz.' Coleridge's distinction between
'understanding' and 'reason,' or Westcott's distinction between 'reason'
and 'reasoning,' might have saved these great writers from the
appearance, and perhaps more than the appearance, of blaspheming against
the highest and most divine faculty of human nature. For the reason is
something much higher than logic-chopping; it can provide, from its own
resources, a remedy for the intellectual error which is just now
miscalled intellectualism; it is the activity of the whole personality
under the guidance of its highest part; and because it is a real
unification of our disordered nature, it can bring us into real contact
with the higher world of Spirit. Newman's scepticism was not
doubtfulness about matters of faith; it was only a wholly unjustifiable
contempt and distrust for the unaided activity of the human mind. This
activity, as far as he could see, produced only various forms of
'liberalism,' which he strangely enough regarded as a kind of
scepticism. Thus he retorted, with equal injustice, the unjust charge
brought against himself.

Newman has often been suspected or accused of quibbling and intellectual
dishonesty. Kingsley, whose healthy but somewhat rough English morality
and common sense were revolted by Newman's whole attitude to life and
conduct, was unable to conceive how any educated man could believe in
winking Virgins and liquefying blood, and thought that Newman must be
dishonest. More recently Dr. Abbott has accused him of being a
_philomythus_. Judged by ordinary standards, Newman's criteria of belief
do seem incompatible with intellectual honesty. Locke, whom Newman
resembles in his theory of knowledge, lays down a canon which condemns
absolutely the Cardinal's doctrine of assent. 'There is one unerring
mark,' he says, 'by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth
in earnest, namely, the not entertaining any proposition with greater
assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.' Newman himself
quotes this dictum, and argues against it that men do, as a matter of
fact, form their judgments in a very different fashion. To most people,
however, the fact that opinions _are_ so manufactured is no proof that
they _ought_ to be so. To most people it seems plain that the practical
necessity of making unverified assumptions, and the habit of clinging to
them because we have made them, even after their falsity has been
exposed, is a satisfactory explanation of the prevalence of error, but
not a reason for acquiescing in it. It is useful, they hold, to point
out how assumption has a perilous tendency to pass for proof, not that
we may contentedly confuse assumption with proof, but that we may be on
our guard against doing so. But such is Newman's dislike of 'reason'
that he rejoices to find that the majority of mankind are, in fact, not
guided by it. And then, having made this discovery, he is quite ready to
'reason' himself, but not in the manner of an earnest seeker after
truth. Reason, for him, is a serviceable weapon of attack or defence,
but he is like a man fighting with magic impenetrable armour. He enjoys
a bout of logical fence; but it will decide nothing for him: his
'certitude' is independent of it. It is easy to see that such an
attitude must appear profoundly dishonest to any man who accepts Locke's
maxim about truth-seeking. It is equally easy to see that Newman would
spurn the charge of dishonesty as hotly as the charge of scepticism. His
principles made it easy for him to adopt the characteristic Catholic
habit of 'believing' anything that is pleasing to the religious
imagination. His sermons are full of such phrases as 'Scripture _seems_
to show us'; 'why should we not believe ...'; 'who knows whether ...,'
and the like, all introducing some fantastic superstition. He
deliberately accepts the insidious and deadly doctrine that 'no man is
convinced of a thing who can endure the thought of its contradictory
being true.' To which we may rejoin that, on the contrary, no man has a
right to be convinced of anything until he has fairly faced the
hypothesis of its contradictory being true. So long as Newman's method
prevailed in Europe, every branch of practical knowledge was condemned
to barrenness.

For what kind of knowledge is it which is acquired, not by the exercise
of the discursive intellect, or by the evidence of our senses, but by
the affirmations of our basal personality? Surely the legitimate
province of 'personalism' lies in the region of general ideas, or rather
in the _Weltanschauung_ as a whole. Our undivided personality protests
against any philosophy which makes life irrational, or base, or
incurably evil. It claims that those pictures of reality which are
provided by the intellect, by the aesthetic sense, and by the moral
sense, shall all have justice done to them in any attempted synthesis.
It rejects materialism, metaphysical dualism, solipsism, and pessimism,
on one or other of these grounds. Such a final interpretation of
existence as any of these offers, leaves out some fundamental and
essential factor of experience, and is therefore untenable. If no
metaphysical scheme can be constructed which is at once comprehensive
and inwardly consistent, personalism insists that we must acknowledge
defeat for the time, rather than take refuge in a logical system which
may be free from inner contradictions but which does not satisfy the
whole man as a living and active spiritual being. This is a sound
argument. But it is absurd to suppose that our personality, acting as an
undivided whole, can decide whether the institutional Church, or one
branch of it, is the Body of Christ and the receptacle of infallible
revelation; whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or Nazareth; or whether
Nestorius was a heretic. We have no magical sword for cutting these
knots, and no miraculous guide to tell us that authority A is to be
believed implicitly, while the possibility of authority B being right is
not to be entertained even in thought. Newman as usual supplies us with
the best weapons against himself. It startles us to find, even in 1852,
such a sentence as this: 'Revealed religion furnishes facts to other
sciences, which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach.
Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's
ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without
revelation.' The transition from belief on the purely internal ground of
personal assent to belief on the purely external ground of Church
authority is certainly abrupt and hard to explain; but Newman makes it
habitually, without any consciousness of a _salto mortale_. In the
'Apologia' he even says that the argument from personality is 'one form
of the argument from authority.' The argument seems to be--'There is no
third alternative besides Catholicism or Rationalism. But "personality"
will not accept the dictation of reason; therefore it must accept the
authority of the Church.' It is a strange argument. All through his life
he enormously exaggerated the moral and intellectual weight which should
be attached to Church tradition. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum' were
the words which rang in his ears at the supreme moment of his great
decision. His 'orbis terrarum' was the Latin empire. And when even in
those countries the authority of the Pope is rejected, he condemns
modern civilisation as an aberration. This however is a complete
abandonment of his own test. He first says 'The judgment of the great
world is final'; and then 'If the world decides against Rome, so much
the worse for the world.' After all, Newman had no right to complain if
his opponents found his reasoning disingenuous. To make up our minds
first, and to argue in favour of the decision afterwards, is in truth to
make the reason a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the irrational
part of our nature.

It is precisely his sympathy with Catholicism on the religious side, and
his alienation from its intellectual method, which makes Newman's
apologetic such a two-edged weapon. In attempting to defend Catholicism,
he has gone far to explain it. To the historian, there is no great
mystery about the growth and success of the Western Catholic Church.
Christianity was already a syncretistic religion in the second century.
Like the other forms of worship with which it competed for the popular
favour, it contained the necessary elements of mystery-cult, of ethical
rule, of social brotherhood, and of personal devotion. But besides many
genuine points of superiority, it had a decisive advantage over the
religions of Isis and Mithra in the exclusiveness and intolerance which
it derived from the Jewish tradition. When the failure of the last
persecution forced the Empire to make a concordat with the Church, the
transformation of the federated but autonomous Christian communities
into a centralised theocratic despotism, claiming secular as well as
spiritual sovereignty, was only a matter of time. It was inevitable,
just as the principate of Augustus and the sultanate of Diocletian were
inevitable; but there is nothing specially divine or glorious about any
of these phases of human evolution. The revolt of Northern Europe in the
sixteenth century was equally inevitable; and so is the alienation of
enlightened minds from the Roman Church at the present day. Newman shows
with great force and ingenuity that all the developments in the Roman
system which Protestantism rejects as later accretions were natural and
necessary. But this only means that the Catholic Church, in order to
live, was compelled to adapt itself to the prevailing conditions of
human culture in the countries where it desired to be supreme. The
argument, so far as it goes, tells against rather than in favour of any
special supernatural character belonging to that institution. And if the
'orbis terrarum,' which once gave its verdict in favour of Latin
Catholicism, is now disposed to reverse its decision, how, on Newman's
principle, can its right to do so be denied? The true reasons for the
strength and vitality which the Roman Church still retains are not
difficult to find. Its system possesses an inner consistency, which is
dearly purchased by neglecting much that should enter into a large and
true view of the world, but which guarantees to those who have once
accepted it an untroubled calm and assurance very acceptable to those
who have been tossed upon a sea of doubt. It surrounds itself with an
impenetrable armour by persuading its adherents that all moral and
intellectual scruples, in matters where Holy Church has pronounced its
verdict, are suggestions of the Evil One, to be spurned like the
prickings of sensuality. It has succeeded, by long experience, in
providing satisfaction for nearly all the needs of the average man, and
for all the needs of the average woman. In particular, the aesthetic
tastes which, in Southern Europe at any rate, are closely connected with
religious feeling, are fully catered for; and those superstitions which
the majority of mankind still love in their hearts, though they are
somewhat ashamed of them, are allowed to luxuriate unchecked. Further,
Catholicism encourages and blesses that _esprit de corps_ which has
produced the brightest triumphs of self-abnegation as well as the
darkest crimes of cruel bigotry in human history. A Church which unites
these advantages is in no danger of falling into insignificance, even if
the best intellect and morality of the age are estranged from it. It may
even have a great future as the nucleus of a conservative resistance to
the social revolution. It is doubtful whether those who wish to preserve
the traditions and civilisation of the past will be able to find
anywhere, except in the Latin Church, an organisation sufficiently
coherent and universal to provide a rallying ground for defence against
the new barbarian invasion--proceeding this time not from the rude
nations of the North, but from the crowded alleys of our great
towns--which threatens to plunge us into a new Dark Age. The menace of
the Red Peril will secure, for a long time to come, the survival of the
Black.

But the Roman Catholicism which has a future is probably that of
Manning, and not that of Newman. A Church which depends for its strength
and prestige on the iron discipline of a centralised autocracy, and on
the fanatical devotion of soldiers who know no duty except obedience, no
cause except the interests of their society, can make no terms with the
disintegrating nominalism, the uncertain subjectivism, of a mind like
Newman's. It has been the strange fate of this great man, after driving
a wedge deep into the Anglican Church, which at this day is threatened
with disruption through the movement which he helped to originate, to
have nearly succeeded in doing the same to the far more compact
structure of Roman Catholicism. The Modernist movement has from the
first appealed to Newman as its founder, and has sought to protect
itself under his authority. It is necessary to consider, as the last
topic of this article, whether this affiliation can be allowed to be
true. No one who has read any of Newman's works can doubt that he would
have recoiled with horror from the destructive criticism of Loisy, the
contempt for scholastic authority of Tyrrell, and the defiance hurled at
the Papacy in the manifesto of the Italian Modernists. Newman's doctrine
of Development was far removed from that of Bergson's 'L'Evolution
Creatrice.' He defended the fact of development against the staticism of
contemporary Anglicanism; but his notion of development was more like
the unrolling of a scroll than the growth of a tree or the expansion and
change of a human character. 'Every Catholic holds,' he says, 'that the
Christian dogmas were in the Church from the time of the Apostles; that
they were ever in their substance what they are now.' Compare this with
the following words from the Italian manifesto: 'The supernatural life
of Christ in the faithful and in the Church has been clothed in an
historical form, which has given birth to what we might somewhat loosely
call the Christ of legend.... Such a criticism does away with the
possibility of finding in Christ's ministry even the embryonic form of
the Church's later theological teaching.' 'A dogma,' says Le Roy, one of
the ablest philosophers of the school, 'proclaims, above all, a
prescription of practical order; it is the formula of a rule of
practical conduct. Why then should we not bring theory into harmony with
practice?'

These extracts mark a much later phase of the revolt against Catholic
dogma and scholastic theology than can be found in Newman's writings.
They are contemporary with the Pragmatism of James and Schiller, and the
Activism of Bergson. So bold a defiance of tradition would have been
impossible thirty years earlier. And yet, when Newman pours scorn upon
human reason, and when he enthrones the 'conscience' as the supreme
arbiter of truth, is he not, in fact, preparing the way for these
startling declarations, which imply a complete rupture with Catholic
authority? Dogmas are indisputably 'notional' propositions; that is to
say, they belong to that class of truths to which Newman ascribes only a
very subordinate importance. We cannot, in his sense,'assent' to an
historical proposition as such, but only to the authority which has
ordered us to believe it. And is there any justification for Newman's
confidence that this authority may make apparent innovations, such as he
admits to have been made throughout the history of the Church, but no
real changes? If he had been able to think out the implications of his
doctrine of development with the help of such arguments as those of
Bergson, would he not have seen that without change and real innovation
there can be no true evolution? Do not the fluidity and pragmatic
character of dogma, so much insisted on by Sabatier and Le Roy, follow
from the anti-intellectualist personalism which we have seen to be the
foundation of Newman's philosophy of religion? The Modernist might argue
that he is only extending to the history of the Church the doctrine of
education by experience which Newman found to be true in the
life-history of the individual. Life itself, with its experiences and
its needs, is the revealer of truth. We cannot anticipate the wisdom of
the future.

'I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.'

The kindly light leads a man on step by step; it conducts him from
experience to experience, not without lapses into error; it reproves him
if he desires to 'choose and see his path.' If this is true in the
history of the individual, is it not probably also true in the history
of the Church? And if it is true in the history of the Church, are not
the dogmatists wrong who have tried to legislate not only for the
present but the future, and to bind the Church for all time to the
formulations which appeared satisfactory to themselves? If Providence is
leading the Church through varied experiences in order to teach it
greater wisdom, is it not clear that we must not rashly preclude the
possibility of future revelation by stereotyping the results of some
earlier stage of experience? Thus the empiricism of Newman leads
logically to consequences which he would have been among the first to
reject.

Some rather shallow thinkers in this country have expressed their
surprise and regret that the Vatican has refused to make any terms with
Modernism. They have supposed that the fault lies with an ignorant and
reactionary Pope. But there are many reasons why this dangerous and
disintegrating tendency must be rigorously excluded from Roman
Catholicism. In the first place, Modernism destroys the historical basis
of Christianity, and converts the Incarnation and Atonement into myths
like those of other dying and rising saviour-gods, which hardly pretend
to be historical. But it was this foundation in history which helped
largely to secure the triumph of Christianity over its rivals. In the
place of the historical God-Man, Modernism gives us the history of the
Church as an object of reverence. We are bidden to contemplate an
institution of amazingly tough vitality but great adaptability, which in
its determination to survive has not only changed colour like a
chameleon but has from time to time put forth new organs and discovered
new weapons of offence and defence. We ask for evidence that the Church
has regenerated the world; and we are shown how, by hook or by crook, it
has succeeded in safeguarding its own interests. Ecclesiastical
historians are ingenious and unscrupulous; but it is impossible even for
them to exhibit Church history as the record of a continuous
intervention of the Spirit of Christ in human affairs. If any Spirit has
presided over the councils of popes, cardinals, and inquisitors it is
not that of the Founder of Christianity.

Further, the religious philosophy of Modernism is bad, much worse than
the scholasticism which it derides. It is in essentials a revival of the
sophistry of Protagoras. And if it were metaphysically more respectable
than it is, it is so widely opposed to the whole system of Catholic
apologetics, that if it were accepted, it would necessitate a complete
reconstruction of Catholic dogma. Let any man read the Stonyhurst
manuals, and say whether the radical empiricism of the Modernists could
find a lodgment anywhere in such a system without disturbing the
stability of the whole. Catholicism is one of the most compact
structures in the world, and it rests on presuppositions which are far
removed from those of Modernism. It is one thing to admit that dogmas in
many cases have a pragmatic origin, and quite another to say that they
may be invented or rejected with a pragmatic purpose. The healthy human
intellect will never believe that the same proposition may be true for
faith and untrue in fact; but this is the Modernist contention.

Lastly, the subjectivism of Newman and the Modernists is fatal to that
exclusiveness which is the corner-stone of Catholic policy. The analogy
between the individual and the Church suggests that God may 'fulfil
Himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' As
there are many individuals, each of whom is being guided separately by
the 'kindly light,' so there may be many churches. The pragmatic proof
of the truth of a religion, from the fact of its survival and successful
working, does not justify the Roman claim to monopoly. The Protestant
churches also display vitality, and their members seem to exhibit the
fruits of the Spirit. The condemnations of Modernism published by the
Vatican show that the Papal court is quite alive to this danger. To the
outsider, indeed, it might seem a happy solution of a long controversy
if the Roman Church would be content to claim the gifts of grace which
are really hers, without denying the validity of the Orders and
Sacraments of other bodies, and the genuineness of the Christian graces
which they exhibit. It would then be admitted on all hands that some
temperaments are more suited to Catholicism, others to Protestantism,
and that the character of each man develops most satisfactorily under
the discipline which suits his nature. But we must not expect any such
concession from Rome; and in truth such an admission would be the
beginning of the end for Catholicism in its present form.

Our conclusion then is that although Newman was not a Modernist, but an
exceedingly stiff conservative, he did introduce into the Roman Church a
very dangerous and essentially alien habit of thought, which has since
developed into Modernism. Perhaps Monsignor Talbot was not far wrong,
from his own point of view, when he called him 'the most dangerous man
in England.' One side of his religion was based on principles which,
when logically drawn out, must lead away from Catholicism in the
direction of an individualistic religion of experience, and a
substitution of history for dogma which makes all truth relative and all
values fluid. Newman's writings have always made genuine Catholics
uneasy, though they hardly know why. It is probable that here is the
solution.

The character of Newman--for with this we must end--may seem to have
been more admirable than lovable. He was more apt to make disciples than
friends. Yet he was loved and honoured by men whose love is an honour,
and he is admired by all who can appreciate a consistently unworldly
life. The Roman Church has been less unpopular in England since Newman
received from it the highest honour which it can bestow. Throughout his
career he was a steadfast witness against tepid and insincere
professions of religion, and against any compromise with the shifting
currents of popular opinion. All cultivated readers, who have formed
their tastes on the masterpieces of good literature, are attracted,
sometimes against their will, by the dignity and reserve of his style,
qualities which belong to the man, and not only to the writer. Like
Goethe, he disdains the facile arts which make the commonplace reader
laugh and weep. 'Ach die zaertlichen Herzen! ein Pfuscher vermag sie zu
ruehren!' Like Wordsworth, he might say 'To stir the blood I have no
cunning art.' There are no cheap effects in any of Newman's writings. He
is the most undemocratic of teachers. Such men do what can be done to
save a nation from itself, its natural enemy. They are not indifferent
to fame, because they desire influence; but they will do nothing to
advertise themselves. The public must come to them; they will not go to
the public. There have been other great men who have been as indifferent
as Newman to the applause of the vulgar. But they have been generally
either pure intellectualists or pure artists, in whom

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We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

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