History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

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.

II

How these attitudes are implied in the Apologia I can only suggest through the surprises that a reading brought. The contention had always been that Newman’s apostasy was due to feebleness of will, to a fatigue in the search for certitude that let him slip into the arms of Mother Church. My Protestant training had persistently represented every going over to Rome as a surrender of individual integrity. For the sake of intellectual peace, one became content to stultify the intellect and leave all thinking to the infallible Church. There is nothing of intellectual fatigue, however, in Newman. His course did not spring from weariness of thinking. He had a most fluent and flexible mind, and if he seemed to accept beliefs at which Protestants thrilled with frightened incredulity, it was because such an acceptance satisfied some deeper need, some surer craving. Read to-day, Newman interests not because of the beliefs but because of this deeper desire. He had a sure intuition of the uses of infallibility and intellectual authority, and of their place in the scheme of things. This is his significance for the modern mind. And he is the only one of the great religious writers who seems to reach out to us and make contact with our modern attitude.

Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice. His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the Apologia. But this craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One of the best things in the Apologia is the appendix on Liberalism, where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is precious to him, yet his intuition—he wrote it not many years after the Reform Bill—has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to self-prostration.

Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church. She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems. Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that arise out of them.

Newman’s position was one of sublime common-sense. He saw that the Protestant Church would be engaged for decades in the doleful task of reconciling the broadening science with the old religious dogma. He knew that this was ludicrous. He saw that liberalism was incompatible with dogma. But mostly he saw that the new social and scientific turn of men’s thinking was incompatible with the mellowed mystical and personal life where lay his true genius. So, with a luminous sincerity, following the appeal of his talents, he passed into the infallible Church which should be a casket for the riches of his personal life. He was saved thus from the sin of schism, and from the sin of adding to that hopeless confusion of intellectual tongues which embroiled the English world for the rest of the century. The Church guaranteed the established order beneath him, blotted out the sociological worries around him, and removed the incubus of dogma above him. Legitimacy and infallibility did not imprison his person or his mind. On the contrary, they freed him, because they abolished futilities from his life. Nothing is clearer from the Apologia than Newman’s sense of the hideous vulgarity of theological discussion. He uses infallibility to purge himself of that vulgarity. He uses it in exactly the way that it should rightly be employed. The common view is that dogma is entrusted to the Church because its truth is of such momentous import as to make fatal the risk of error through private judgment. The Church is the mother who suckles us with the precious milk of doctrine without which we should die. Through ecclesiastical infallibility dogma becomes the letter and spirit of religion, bony structure and life-blood.

But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win, not certitude—for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault than they are in your pocket—but assurance that you will not have to see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God? On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about.

And nothing could be more seductive than his belief in Transubstantiation. Science, of course, declares this transmutation of matter impossible. But science deals only with phenomena. Transubstantiation has to do not with phenomena but with things-in-themselves. And what has science to say about the inner reality of things? Science itself would be the first to disclaim any such competence. Why, therefore, should not the Church know as much as anybody about the nature of this thing-in-itself? Why is it not as easy to believe the Church’s testimony as to the nature of things as it is to believe any testimony? Such dogma is therefore unassailable by science. And if it cannot be criticized it might just as well be infallible. The papal guarantee does not invade science. It merely prëempts an uncharted region. It infringes no intellectual rights. It steps in merely to withdraw from discussion ideas which would otherwise be misused. Infallibility Newman uses as a shelf upon which to store away his glowing but pragmatically sterile theological ideas, while down below in the arena are left for discussion the interesting aspects of life. He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the human world about him. That is why we are apt to find in the Catholic the acute psychologist, while the Protestant remains embroiled in weary dialectics.

Such a use of infallibility as Newman implies exposes the fallacy of the Protestant position. For as soon as you have removed this healthy check to theological embroilment you have opened the way to intellectual corruption. As soon as you admit the right of individual judgment in theological matters you have upset the balance between dogma and life. The Catholic consigns his dogmas to the infallible Church and speculates about the pragmatic issues of the dynamic moral life. The Protestant on the other hand, encases himself in an iron-bound morality and gives free rein to his fancy about the eternal verities. The Catholic is empirical in ethics and dogmatic in theology. The Protestant is dogmatic in ethics and more and more empirical in theology. He speculates where it is futile to speculate, because in supernatural matters you can never come by evidence to any final, all-convincing truth. But he refuses to speculate where a decent skepticism and a changing adjustment to human nature would work out attitudes towards conduct that make for flowering and growth. The Protestant infallibility of morals is the cruellest and least defensible of all infallibilities. Protestantism passes most easily into that fierce puritan form which constrains both conduct and belief.