A Century of Catholic Intellectual Life

Extract

Obviously enough a short article on the history of Catholic thought in England in the last hundred years can only suggest a few thoughts of a general nature, for a mere date list without detailed historical interpretation would be useless, and several volumes would be needed for the latter task. A hundred years ago Catholic thought in England was broadening under the influence of Wiseman and Newman. It is, however, a mistake to think that they created it, for behind them lies the solid historical and spiritual interests of the priests of the penal days: strong controversialists, such as Milner, historians of the type of Lingard, and writers like Butler and Challoner, were all massively English in their virtues and prejudices. Their thought was unspeculative, concrete, and strongly, though not deeply, based on the Latin Fathers.

With Wiseman and Newman, new influences were brought to bear which served to constitute the pattern of Catholic thought for the next fifty years. Wiseman with his generous, though somewhat undisciplined, imagination brought Catholic England into contact with the thought of the Munich circle and of the French Liberal school. For Wiseman these movements involved a vision of the restoration of the faith, but a glance at Ward’s Life makes it clear that his hopes rested on an inadequate intellectual synthesis, in that it was too strongly influenced by theological Traditionalism and implied a naive view of Liberalism. It was, in short, a Catholic variety of the early nineteenth century theologies of feeling. This statement serves to stress the interesting, though often forgotten, fact that the thinkers of the Catholic Restoration knew little of the intellectual heritage of the Middle Ages, and what they did see they tended to misunderstand as they saw it reflected in the blurred mirror of Romanticism.