History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY

Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote, and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times. Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.

Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,—this is your state. The more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma. Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings. Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic state.

How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the reader of the Apologia. Popular impression is probably right that he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his Pensées lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human “pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of intellectual religion.

Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma. And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his Apologia, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma. The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors.