John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence. Through study especially, of Romaine On Faith he became the subject of an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: 'I am still more certain of it than that I have hands and feet.' Thomas Scott, the evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton On the Prophecies he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ—a doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year 1843. In his Apologia, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen, dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of twenty-one, two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different influences. He passed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be satisfied with Whately's position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley says: 'Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he would go. It is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman, Newman's brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was profoundly uncongenial to him.
The year 1827, in which Keble's Christian Year was published, saw another change in Newman's views. Illness and bereavement came to him with awakening effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude. Froude brought Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more traces either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony Froude, the historian, author of the Nemesis of Faith, 1848, says that he was gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of him with almost boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation. Newman says: 'Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of Rome.' Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had passed. Cradled as the Church of England had been in Puritanism, the latter was to him simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not simply mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth outside the Church of England. In the Christian Year one perceives an influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of the sacramental significance of all natural objects or events. Pusey became professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement academic standing, which the others could not give. He had been in Germany, and had published an Inquiry into the Rationalist Character of German Theology, 1825. He hardly did more than expose the ignorance of Rose. He was himself denounced as a German rationalist who dared to speak of a new era in theology. Pusey, mourning the defection of Newman, whom he deeply loved, gathered in 1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and continued in some sense a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.
The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape. Sir Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent commotion in Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power. Newman's mind was excited in the last degree. 'The vital question,' he says, 'is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being liberalised?' At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together. On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he wrote his immortal hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that he had a work to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the National Apostasy, preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to Oxford, kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman conceived the idea of the Tracts for the Times as a means of expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with liberalism. By liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.' Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St. Mary's exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the question. Pusey began the Library of the Fathers, the most elaborate literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the Tracts. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course which was still open to it.
Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from without.
According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement, this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority, if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely, religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute. The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him. The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.
His whole book, The Grammar of Assent, 1870, is pervaded by the intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives, determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor, only in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a different thing.
Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. 'The Church's infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist, able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my belief in God. If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These passages are mainly taken from the Apologia, written long after Newman had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the attitude of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the via media so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the Tracts, Tract Ninety, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles. This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is, in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.
It is a strange thing that in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious, because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic history. Similar is the case with the argument of the Grammar of Assent. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite, the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality. One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty. Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day. Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead, ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days—Newman lived to his ninetieth year—and wonders if he found in the infallible Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.
Footnote 8:[(return)]
Fairbairn, Catholicism, Roman and Anglican, p. 157.