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, 'ecarté par une plaisanterie des croyances dont la raison d'un Pascal ne réussit pas à se dégager,' 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 (διἁνοια) 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.
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.'