Outspoken Essays

by William Ralph Inge

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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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'Évolution Créatrice.' 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.