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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
I say, that a power, possessed of infallibility in religious teaching, is happily adapted to be a working instrument, in the course of human affairs, for smiting hard and throwing back the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect …
1 Newman, John Henry, Apologia pro vita sua, edited by DeLaura, David J. (New York, 1968), p. 189Google Scholar. All further citations to this work are taken from the text of the ‘Norton Critical Edition’ series, as here noted.
2 Ibid., p. 218. Newman elaborates this definition by arguing that ‘liberalism … is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word’. The emphasis which, as we shall see, is crucial for Newman's argument contra Mivart's position is that there exists an authority external to reason, which he here refers to the ‘Divine Word’, and elsewhere to the medium through which that ‘word’ is carried — namely, the Church. By the time he wrote these lines (1864), Newman concluded that ‘liberalism’ had become a much more severe threat to the Church, since it was no longer a ‘party’, but rather constituted ‘the educated lay world’ as a whole. Ibid., p. 200. This theme of the intensified conflict between the Church, as the carrier of the ‘divine Word’, and the ‘world’, as the vehicle of naked reason, will emerge with acute force in Newman's final published treatise; cf. below, pp. 417f.
3 Ibid., p. 199. Newman goes on to state that the current age, experiencing what he called ‘the enlargement of the circle of secular knowledge [which] is simply a bewilderment’, faced the demanding question of how ‘the respective claims of revelation and of natural science [are] to be adjusted’. This is precisely the issue to which Newman and Mivart increasingly devoted their attention during the 1880s; the question indeed united their efforts, though their distinctive manners of solving it became the issue finally driving a wedge between them.
4 Cf., for example, The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium, edited by Coulson, John, Allchin, A. M. (London, 1967)Google Scholar. The thrust of the articles emerging from this symposium captures the point explicitly, though it is by no means the only contribution to this interpretation of Newman. Here we might also cite Sykes', Stephen recent work, The Identity of Christianity: Theologians and the Essence of Christianity from Schleiermacher to Barth (London, 1984)Google Scholar. In this provocative study of the ‘modern’ theological appropriation of the ‘essence’ of Christianity, Sykes asserts that despite the ‘important and far-reaching’ differences separating Newman from Schleiermacher, there nonetheless exists ‘a fundamental similarity of pattern’ in their work. The difficulty with Sykes' interpretation of Newman is not in what he says, which is otherwise quite suggestive, but in what he omits: namely, any discussion of the role of the Church's infallible authority, which for Newman was the ‘absolute need’ of a religion resting upon revelation. Thus, for example, when Sykes asks how Newman's notion of the ‘essential idea’ of Christianity is to be ‘protected from the charge of being arbitrarily conceived’, he turns to Newman on doctrinal development, but ignores any mention of Newman's explicit safeguard of development — namely, his conviction that the objectively given ‘Revelation’ must have a source of ‘continual governance’, an authority which he calls ‘objective’, since ‘… the very idea of revelation implies a present informant and guide, and that an infallible one’. Newman did not understand revelation in terms of subjectivity, as did Schleiermacher; indeed, he relegated religion which had only a ‘subjective authority’ to the status of ‘natural’ as contrasted with revealed religion. Cf. Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Edition of 1845 edited by Cameron, J. M. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1974), pp. 173–177Google Scholar. By overlooking Newman's understanding of the necessity of an external authority, Sykes disregards the ‘doctrine of mediation’ standing at the very heart of Newman's Catholic thought; in the shadow of such an omission, one wonders whether any suggested proximity between Schleiermacher and Newman is tenable. A more balanced and accurate discussion of Newman's at times ambivalent attitude toward liberal religion can be found in Yearley, Lee H., The Ideas of Newman. Christianity and Human Religiosity (University Park, PA, 1978), pp. 95ff.Google Scholar
5 Holmes, J. Derek, ‘Newman and Modernism’, Baptist Quarterly 27 (1972): 337.Google Scholar
6 Butler, B. C. O.S.B., ‘Newman and the Second Vatican Council’, The Rediscovery of Newman, p. 235.Google Scholar
7 For an extended discussion of Mivart's life and works, cf. Gruber, Jacob W., A Conscience in Conflict. The Life of St George Jackson Mivart (New York, 1960)Google Scholar. Also J. D. Root has recently discussed Mivart's gradual alienation from the Roman Catholic communion; cf. ‘The Final Apostasy of St George Jackson Mivart’, The Catholic Historical Review, 71 (January, 1985): 1–25.Google Scholar
8 de Archaval, Hugo M., ‘Newman und Mivart’, translated by Schrader, Inge, Newman Studien, Vol. VI (Nürnberg, 1964): 227–249.Google Scholar
9 Holmes, J. Derek, ‘Newman and Mivart — Two Attitudes to a Nineteenth Century Problem’, Clergy Review, 50 (1965): 852–867.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., p. 852.
11 Yearley, The Ideas of Newman, cf. esp. Ch. 3, ‘Christianity: The Authority Model’. In distinguishing what he calls ‘the fulfilment model’ from ‘the authority model’, Yearley overlooks the crucial point that Newman's characteristic ‘need/supply’ argument of The Essay on Development requires us to say that for Newman the argument or model of authority is itself the fulfilment (or ‘supply’) of a need. Cf. Essay on Development, Edition of 1845 edited by J. M. Cameron (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1974), esp. pp. 174–78. This criticism should not, however, overshadow the great strength of Yearley's work, which is his conviction that authority was ‘a crucial element in Newman's conversion, religious life, and general reflections on religion’, and that it was this fundamental facet of his thought which vexed or perplexed his own contemporaries (Mivart included, we might add). Ibid., p. 57. Newman himself often spoke to this issue, claiming without any hesitation in his ‘Biglietto speech’ of 1879 that ‘for thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion’.
12 John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, Third revised edition of 1878 (London, 1911), pp. Ivi–Ivii. Here he goes on to say that ‘…much is said in this day by men of science about the duty of honesty in what is called the pursuit of truth, — by “pursuing truth” being meant the pursuit of facts. It is just now reckoned a great moral virtue to be fearless and thorough in inquiry into facts….’ From the context of this citation we can see that Newman fully intended this irony.
13 Newman is here pointing to what he considered the ‘unprovable’ character of the ‘first principles’ of every branch of knowledge, including science. In introducing a modern edition of Newman's Grammar of Assent (1870), Nicholas Lash suggests that ‘the contrast between faith and reason is not, for Newman, a contrast between belief and unbelief, or between irrationality and rationality, but between two modes of rationality. Thus, although “‘faith may be viewed as opposed to Reason … it must not be overlooked that Unbelief is opposed to Reason also”. Or, as he put it in one of his Parochial Sermons: “When faith is said to be a religious principle, it is … the things believed, not the act of believing them, which is peculiar to religion.”’ ‘Introduction’, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1979), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar
14 Mivart, , ‘Modern Catholics and Scientific Freedom’, The Nineteenth Century, Vol. XVIII (1885): 32.Google Scholar
15 Cited in Gruber, p. 216.
16 It seems reasonable to conclude that this inquiry of Mivart's, for which we have no extant evidence save what can be inferred from Newman's apparent response, came at the time that he had begun to formulate his ideas eventually published in the article ‘Modern Catholics and Scientific Freedom’; cf. above, n. 14. If this is true, we must conclude that Mivart incorporated precious little of Newman's suggestions in his eventual essay.
17 Letter dated 11 May, 1884; Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. XXX, p. 361.
18 Newman, , The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (London, 1912), p. 73.Google Scholar
19 Newman, Apologia, p. 218; cf. also n. 2 above.
20 Newman, , ‘The Development of Religious Error’, Contemporary Review, Vol. 48 (October, 1885): 463.Google Scholar
21 Letters and Diaries, Vol. XXX, p. 359; the emphasis is mine. The significant point of this (unsent) draft is that Newman continues to hold his earlier conviction that scientific and biblical ‘facts’ stand firm as ‘first principles’, and as such are invulnerable to critical (empirical) attack. In the same draft, Newman went further in defining the audience to which he felt obligated — and, presumably, that which he wished Mivart to address: namely, those ‘priests and confessors’ whom he spoke of as standing ‘… in the front of a battle with unbelief’. Again the Cardinal's pastoral concern emerges; his driving interest at this juncture was not in legitimizing Christianity in the eyes of the scientific community, which he considered a misdirected effort, but in defending the Church's faith from the challenges raised by scientific inquiry. In a second draft of the same date, also not sent, Newman goes on to advise Mivart that any article addressing the relationship of science and Christianity must be both ‘really Catholic’ and ‘really scientific’, presumably in that order given his convictions regarding the ‘first principles’ which must be accepted ‘de fide’.
22 Mivart, , ‘The Catholic Church and Biblical Criticism’, Nineteenth Century, Vol. XXII, No. 125 (July, 1887): 35.Google Scholar
23 Ibid.
24 Cf. here Kingsley's article in Macmillan's Magazine (January, 1864), printed in Newman's subsequent pamphlet on the controversy; the pamphlet is reprinted in the Norton edition of Apologia; cf. esp. pp. 297–98 for the relevant extract which prompted the exchange. As we subsequently argue, Kingsley seems to have understood what we here call Newman's ‘pastoral’ argument rightly; truth was not, according to this argument, to be proclaimed ‘for its own sake’, but rather ‘for the sake of the household of God’, and as such tempered by what Newman later called ‘the principle of popular edification’ (The Via Media, pp. Ii–Iii). Newman's spirited and sustained reaction to Kingsley's attack, however, can be attributed to the point that Kingsley confused the matter by disregarding the epistemological issue, and reading the ‘pastoral’ argument as if it were Newman's only approach. Cf. esp. n. 30 below.
25 Mivart, , ‘Modern Catholics and Scientific Freedom’, p. 47.Google Scholar
26 Newman, , Apologia, pp. 198–199.Google Scholar
27 Newman, The Via Media, pp. Ivi–Ivii.
28 Newman, , Apologia, p. 201.Google Scholar
29 Ibid., p. 202.
30 Newman, The Via Media, pp. Iiv–Iv. Newman's ‘pastoral’ argument is not meant to disregard or abolish scientific inquiry altogether, nor did he intend it to eclipse the legitimacy of his epistemological concerns, as noted above (pace Kingsley); indeed, he acknowledges that the Church may have been wrong in condemning Galileo in terms of scientific (or even doctrinal) grounds, though it was right in ‘censuring’ him because such views — at that particular historical juncture — threatened to erode the piety of the laity altogether. Thus, his concern is not to silence science, but to ensure that its contributions, particularly insofar as such inquiry revised established convictions of the Church's reading of scripture, must be ‘delayed’ until ‘… their imagination [i.e., of the laity] should gradually get accustomed to it’. Ibid., pp. Iv–Ivi. That is, his concern in overseeing scientific inquiry had to do strictly with areas in which science raised questions which, to Newman's mind at least, intruded upon matters of scriptural exegesis; ibid., pp. Ii–Iv. We can only here that this ‘pastoral’ argument, which he sometimes called the ‘duty of silence’ (cf. The Via Media, p. Ivi), stands in a fascinating correlation with his earlier Tractarian convictions regarding doctrine: namely, his argument on the principle of ‘reserve’ in the history of doctrine. This argument emerges in the first edition of the Essay on Development as well, when Newman speaks of the ‘mystery’ of scripture by which the biblical text ‘implies a partial manifestation, or a representation by economy’. Ibid., p. 151. In such matters, his thought was guided by a conviction of the force of history upon the emergence of ideas, or of the necessary ‘unfolding’ of ideas in space and time; indeed, his view of the Galileo case points to his conviction regarding the ‘opportuneness’ of an idea which, though arising within the scientific community, had direct and drastic consequences in the community of the Church.
31 Mivart, , ‘Modern Catholics and Scientific Freedom’, pp. 39, 41.Google Scholar
32 Ibid., p. 47.
33 Mivart, , ‘Liberty of Conscience’, The Dublin Review, Vol. XXVII, pp. 563–564.Google Scholar
34 Newman, , On the Inspiration of Scripture, edited by Holmes, J. Derek, Murray, Robert (London, 1967), p. 102.Google Scholar
35 Fairbairn's article, entitled ‘Catholicism and Modern Thought’, consumed Newman's attention during these months; cf. for example his letter of 19 August, 1885, to ‘Miss M. R. Giberne’: ‘A matter is upon me quite [sic] requires a great deal of writing which does not allow of dictating …’ Letters and Diaries, Vol. XXXI, p. 78.
36 Cf. letters dated 15, 16, 20, 23 May, 1885, etc. Newman seems to have thought that he was in his last days of life, as reflected in his cryptic comment to Lord Blachford, May 23, 1885; Letters and Diaries, Vol. XXXI, p. 69.
37 Letters and Diaries, Vol. XXXI, p. 222.
38 Yearley, p. 93.
39 Newman, , ‘The Development of Religious Error’, p. 460.Google Scholar
40 Tyrrell, , ‘Introduction’ to Bremond, Henri, The Mystery of Newman, tr. by Corrance, H. C. (London, 1907), p. xvii.Google Scholar