Occasional Papers by R.W. Church

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XXVI

NEWMAN'S "APOLOGIA"[30]

[30]
_Apologia pro Vita Sua_. By John Henry Newman, D.D. _Guardian_, 22nd
June 1864.

We have not noticed before Dr. Newman's _Apologia_, which has been
coming out lately in weekly numbers, because we wished, when we spoke
of it, to speak of it as a whole. The special circumstances out of
which it arose may have prescribed the mode of publication. It may have
been thought more suitable, in point of form, to answer a pamphlet by a
series of pamphlets rather than at once by a set octavo of several
hundred pages. But the real subject which Dr. Newman has been led to
handle is one which will continue to be of the deepest interest long
after the controversy which suggested it is forgotten. The real subject
is the part played in the great Church movement by him who was the
leading mind in it; and it was unsatisfactory to speak of this till all
was said, and we could look on the whole course described. Such a
subject might have well excused a deliberate and leisurely volume to
itself; perhaps in this way we should have gained, in the laying out
and concentration of the narrative, and in what helps to bring it as a
whole before our thoughts. But a man's account of himself is never so
fresh and natural as when it is called out by the spur and pressure of
an accidental and instant necessity, and is directed to a purpose and
quickened by feelings which belong to immediate and passing
circumstances. The traces of hurried work are of light account when
they are the guarantees that a man is not sitting down to draw a
picture of himself, but stating his case in sad and deep earnest out of
the very fulness of his heart.

The aim of the book is to give a minute and open account of the steps
and changes by which Dr. Newman passed from the English Church to the
Roman. The history of a change of opinion has often been written from
the most opposite points of view; but in one respect this book seems to
stand alone. Let it be remembered what it is, the narrative and the
justification of a great conversion; of a change involving an entire
reversal of views, judgments, approvals, and condemnations; a change
which, with all ordinary men, involves a reversal, at least as great,
of their sympathies and aversions, of what they tolerate and speak
kindly of. Let it be considered what changes of feeling most changes of
religion compel and consecrate; how men, commonly and very naturally,
look back on what they have left and think they have escaped from, with
the aversion of a captive to his prison; how they usually exaggerate
and make absolute their divergence from what they think has betrayed,
fooled, and degraded them; how easily they are tempted to visit on it
and on those who still cling to it their own mistakes and faults. Let
it be remembered that there was here to be told not only the history of
a change, but the history of a deep disappointment, of the failure of a
great design, of the breakdown of hopes the most promising and the most
absorbing; and this, not in the silence of a man's study, but in the
fever and contention of a great struggle wrought up to the highest
pitch of passion and fierceness, bringing with it on all sides and
leaving behind it, when over, the deep sense of wrong. It is no history
of a mere intellectual movement, or of a passage from strong belief to
a weakened and impaired one, to uncertainty, or vagueness, or
indifference; it is not the account of a change by a man who is half
sorry for his change, and speaks less hostilely of what he has left
because he feels less friendly towards what he has joined. There is no
reserved thought to be discerned in the background of disappointment or
a wish to go back again to where he once was. It is a book which
describes how a man, zealous and impatient for truth, thought he had
found it in one Church, then thought that his finding was a delusion,
and sought for it and believed he had gained it in another. What it
shows us is no serene readjustment of abstract doctrines, but the wreck
and overturning of trust and conviction and the practical grounds of
life, accompanied with everything to provoke, embitter, and exasperate.
It need not be said that what Dr. Newman holds he is ready to carry out
to the end, or that he can speak severely of men and systems.

Let all this be remembered, and also that there is an opposition
between what he was and what he is, which is usually viewed as
irreconcilable, and which, on the ordinary assumptions about it, is so;
and we venture to say that there is not another instance to be quoted,
of the history of a conversion, in which he who tells his conversion
has so retained his self-possession, his temper, his mastery over his
own real judgment and thoughts, his ancient and legitimate sympathies,
his superiority to the natural and inevitable temptations of so altered
a position; which is so generous to what he feels to be strong and good
in what he has nevertheless abandoned, so fearless about letting his
whole case come out, so careless about putting himself in the right in
detail; which is so calm, and kindly, and measured, with such a quiet
effortless freedom from the stings of old conflicts, which bears so few
traces of that bitterness and antipathy which generally--and we need
hardly wonder at it--follows the decisive breaking with that on which a
man's heart was stayed, and for which he would once have died.

There is another thing to be said, and we venture to say it out
plainly, because Dr. Newman himself has shown that he knows quite well
what he has been doing. While he has written what will command the
sympathy and the reverence of every one, however irreconcilably opposed
to him, to whom a great and noble aim and the trials of a desperate and
self-sacrificing struggle to compass it are objects of admiration and
honour, it is undeniable that ill-nature or vindictiveness or stupidity
will find ample materials of his own providing to turn against him.
Those who know Dr. Newman's powers and are acquainted with his career,
and know to what it led him, and yet persist in the charge of
insincerity and dishonesty against one who probably has made the
greatest sacrifice of our generation to his convictions of truth, will
be able to pick up from his own narrative much that they would not
otherwise have known, to confirm and point the old familiar views
cherished by dislike or narrowness. This is inevitable when a man takes
the resolution of laying himself open so unreservedly, and with so
little care as to what his readers think of what he tells them, so that
they will be persuaded that he was ever, even from his boyhood, deeply
conscious of the part which he was performing in the sight of his
Maker. Those who smile at the belief of a deep and religious mind in
the mysterious interventions and indications of Providence in the
guidance of human life, will open their eyes at the feeling which leads
him to tell the story of his earliest recollections of Roman Catholic
peculiarities, and of the cross imprinted on his exercise-book. Those
who think that everything about religion and their own view of religion
is such plain sailing, so palpable and manifest, that all who are not
fools or knaves must be of their own opinion, will find plenty to
wonder at in the confessions of awful perplexity which equally before
and after his change Dr. Newman makes. Those who have never doubted,
who can no more imagine the practical difficulties accompanying a great
change of belief than they can imagine a change of belief itself, will
meet with much that to them will seem beyond pardon, in the actual
events of a change, involving such issues and such interests, made so
deliberately and cautiously, with such hesitation and reluctance, and
in so long a time; they will be able to point to many moments in it
when it will be easy to say that more or less ought to have been said,
more or less ought to have been done. Much more will those who are on
the side of doubt, who acquiesce in, or who desire the overthrow of
existing hopes and beliefs, rejoice in such a frank avowal of the
difficulties of religion and the perplexities of so earnest a believer,
and make much of their having driven such a man to an alternative so
obnoxious and so monstrous to most Englishmen. It is a book full of
minor premisses, to which many opposite majors will be fitted. But
whatever may be thought of many details, the effect and lesson of the
whole will not be lost on minds of any generosity, on whatever side
they may be; they will be touched with the confiding nobleness which
has kept back nothing, which has stated its case with its weak points
and its strong, and with full consciousness of what was weak as well as
of what was strong, which has surrendered its whole course of conduct,
just as it has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we
carry away from following such a history is something far higher and
more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like
a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere
argument, to confirm a theory, or to damage an opponent.

The truth, in fact, is, that the interest is personal much more than
controversial. Those who read it as a whole, and try to grasp the
effect of all its portions compared together and gathered into one,
will, it seems to us, find it hard to bend into a decisive triumph for
any of the great antagonist systems which appear in collision. There
can be no doubt of the perfect conviction with which Dr. Newman has
taken his side for good. But while he states the effect of arguments on
his own mind, he leaves the arguments in themselves as they were, and
touches on them, not for the sake of what they are worth, but to
explain the movements and events of his own course. Not from any
studied impartiality, which is foreign to his character, but from his
strong and keen sense of what is real and his determined efforts to
bring it out, he avoids the temptation--as it seems to us, who still
believe that he was more right once than he is now--to do injustice to
his former self and his former position. At any rate, the arguments to
be drawn from this narrative, for or against England, or for or against
Rome, seem to us very evenly balanced. Of course, such a history has
its moral. But the moral is not the ordinary vulgar one of the history
of a religious change. It is not the supplement or disguise of a
polemical argument. It is the deep want and necessity in our age of the
Church, even to the most intensely religious and devoted minds, of a
sound and secure intellectual basis for the faith which they value more
than life and all things. We hope that we are strong enough to afford
to judge fairly of such a spectacle, and to lay to heart its warnings,
even though the particular results seem to go against what we think
most right. It is a mortification and a trial to the English Church to
have seen her finest mind carried away and lost to her, but it is a
mortification which more confident and peremptory systems than hers
have had to undergo; the parting was not without its compensations if
only that it brought home so keenly to many the awfulness and the
seriousness of truth; and surely never did any man break so utterly
with a Church, who left so many sympathies behind him and took so many
with him, who continued to feel so kindly and with such large-hearted
justice to those from whom his changed position separated him in this
world for ever.

The _Apologia_ is the history of a great battle against Liberalism,
understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy
the basis of revealed religion, and ultimately of all that can be
called religion at all. The question which he professedly addresses
himself to set at rest, that of his honesty, is comparatively of slight
concern to those who knew him, except so far that they must be
interested that others, who did not know him, should not be led to do a
revolting injustice. The real interest is to see how one who felt so
keenly the claims both of what is new and what is old, who, with such
deep and unusual love and trust for antiquity, took in with quick
sympathy, and in its most subtle and most redoubtable shapes, the
intellectual movement of modern times, could continue to feel the force
of both, and how he would attempt to harmonise them. Two things are
prominent in the whole history. One is the fact of religion, early and
deeply implanted in the writer's mind, absorbing and governing it
without rival throughout. He speaks of an "inward conversion" at the
age of fifteen, "of which I was conscious, and of which I am still more
certain than that I have hands and feet." It was the religion of dogma
and of a definite creed which made him "rest in the thought of two, and
two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my
Creator"--which completed itself with the idea of a visible Church and
its sacramental system. Religion, in this aspect of it, runs unchanged
from end to end of the scene of change:--

I have changed in many things; in this I have not. From the age of
fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I
know no other religion. I cannot enter into the idea of any other
sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream
and a mockery. As well can there be filial love without the fact
of a father, as devotion without the fact of a Supreme Being. What
I held in 1816 I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God I
shall hold it to the end. Even when I was under Dr. Whately's
influence I had no temptation to be less zealous for the dogmas of
the faith.

The other thing is the haunting necessity, in an age of thought and
innovation, of a philosophy of religion, equally deep, equally
comprehensive and thorough, with the invading powers which it was
wanted to counteract; a philosophy, not on paper or in theory, but
answering to and vouched for by the facts of real life. In the English
Church he found, we think that we may venture to say, the religion
which to him was life, but not the philosophy which he wanted. The
_Apologia_ is the narrative of his search for it. Two strongly marked
lines of thought are traceable all through, one modern in its scope and
sphere, the other ancient. The leading subject of his modern thought is
the contest with liberal unbelief; contrasted with this was his strong
interest in Christian antiquity, his deep attachment to the creed, the
history, and the moral temper of the early Church. The one line of
thought made him, and even now makes him, sympathise with Anglicanism,
which is in the same boat with him, holds the same principle of the
unity and continuity of revealed truth, and is doing the same work,
though, as he came to think in the end, feebly and hopelessly. The
other, more and more, carried him away from Anglicanism; and the
contrast and opposition between it and the ancient Church, in
organisation, in usage, and in that general tone of feeling which
quickens and gives significance and expression to forms, overpowered
more and more the sense of affinity, derived from the identity of
creeds and sacraments and leading points of Church polity, and from the
success with which the best and greatest Anglican writers had
appropriated and assimilated the theology of the Fathers. But though he
urges the force of ecclesiastical precedents in a startling way, as in
the account which he gives of the effect of the history of the
Monophysites on his view of the tenableness of the Anglican theory,
absolutely putting out of consideration the enormous difference of
circumstances between the cases which are compared, and giving the
instance in question a force and importance which seem to be in
singular contrast with the general breadth and largeness of his
reasoning, it was not the halting of an ecclesiastical theory which
dissatisfied him with the English Church.

Anglicanism was not daring enough for him. With his ideas of the coming
dangers and conflicts, he wanted something bold and thoroughgoing,
wide-reaching in its aims, resolute in its language, claiming and
venturing much. Anglicanism was not that. It had given up as
impracticable much that the Church had once attempted. It did not
pretend to rise so high, to answer such great questions, to lay down
such precise definitions. Wisely modest, or timidly uncertain--mindful
of the unalterable limits of our human condition, _we_ say; forgetful,
_he_ thought, or doubting, or distrustful, of the gifts and promises of
a supernatural dispensation--it certainly gave no such complete and
decisive account of the condition and difficulties of religion and the
world, as had been done once, and as there were some who did still.
There were problems which it did not profess to solve; there were
assertions which others boldly risked, and which it shrunk from making;
there were demands which it ventured not to put forward. Again, it was
not refined enough for him; it had little taste for the higher forms of
the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung-virtues; it
was contented, for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence,
in which goodness merged itself in the interests and business of the
common world, and, working in them, took no care to disengage itself or
mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them. Above
all, Anglicanism was too limited; it was local, insular, national; its
theory was made for its special circumstances; and he describes in a
remarkable passage how, in contrast with this, there rung in his ears
continually the proud self-assertion of the other side, _Securus
judicat orbis terrarum_. What he wanted, what it was the aim of his
life to find, was a great and effective engine against Liberalism; for
years he tried, with eager but failing hope, to find it in the theology
and working of the English Church; when he made up his mind that
Anglicanism was not strong enough for the task, he left it for a system
which had one strong power; which claimed to be able to shut up
dangerous thought.

Very sorrowful, indeed, is the history, told so openly, so simply, so
touchingly, of the once promising advance, of the great breakdown. And
yet, to those who still cling to what he left, regret is not the only
feeling. For he has the nobleness and the generosity to say what he
_did_ find in the English Church, as well as what he did not find. He
has given her up for good, but he tells and he shows, with no grudging
frankness, what are the fruits of her discipline. "So I went on for
years, up to 1841. It was, in a human point of view, the happiest time
of my life.... I did not suppose that such sunshine would last, though I
knew not what would be its termination. It was the time of plenty, and
during its seven years I tried to lay up as much as I could for the
dearth which was to follow it." He explains and defends what to us seem
the fatal marks against Rome; but he lets us see with what force, and
for how long, they kept alive his own resistance to an attraction which
to him was so overwhelming. And he is at no pains to conceal--it seems
even to console him to show--what a pang and wrench it cost him to
break from that home under whose shadow his spiritual growth had
increased. He has condemned us unreservedly; but there must, at any
rate, be some wonderful power and charm about that which he loved with
a love which is not yet extinguished; else how could he write of the
past as he does? He has shown that he can understand, though he is
unable to approve, that others should feel that power still.

Dr. Newman has stated, with his accustomed force and philosophical
refinement, what he considers the true idea of that infallibility,
which he looks upon as the only power in the world which can make head
against and balance Liberalism--which "can withstand and baffle the
fierce energy of passion, and the all-corroding, all-dissolving
scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries;" which he considers
"as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve
religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought which is
one of the greatest of our natural gifts, from its own suicidal
excesses." He says, as indeed is true, that it is "a tremendous power,"
though he argues that, in fact, its use is most wisely and beneficially
limited. And doubtless, whatever the difficulty of its proof may be,
and to us this proof seems simply beyond possibility, it is no mere
power upon paper. It acts and leaves its mark; it binds fast and
overthrows for good. But when, put at its highest, it is confronted
with the "giant evil" which it is supposed to be sent into the world to
repel, we can only say that, to a looker-on, its failure seems as
manifest as the existence of the claim to use it. It no more does its
work, in the sense of _succeeding_ and triumphing, than the less
magnificent "Establishments" do. It keeps _some_ check--it fails on a
large scale and against the real strain and pinch of the mischief; and
they, too, keep _some_ check, and are not more fairly beaten than it
is, in "making a stand against the wild living intellect of man."

Without infallibility, it is said, men will turn freethinkers and
heretics; but don't they, _with_ it? and what is the good of the engine
if it will not do its work? And if it is said that this is the fault of
human nature, which resists what provokes and checks it, still that
very thing, which infallibility was intended to counteract, goes on
equally, whether it comes into play or not. Meanwhile, truth does stay
in the world, the truth that there has been among us a Divine Person,
of whom the Church throughout Christendom is the representative,
memorial, and the repeater of His message; doubtless, the means of
knowledge are really guarded; yet we seem to receive that message as we
receive the witness of moral truth; and it would not be contrary to the
analogy of things here if we had often got to it at last through
mistakes. But when it is reached, there it is, strong in its own power;
and it is difficult to think that if it is not strong enough in itself
to stand, it can be protected by a claim of infallibility. A future, of
which infallibility is the only hope and safeguard, seems to us indeed
a prospect of the deepest gloom.

Dr. Newman, in a very remarkable passage, describes the look and
attitude of invading Liberalism, and tells us why he is not forward in
the conflict. "It seemed to be a time of all others in which Christians
had a call to be patient, in which they had no other way of helping
those who were alarmed than that of exhorting them to have a little
faith and fortitude, and 'to beware,' as the poet says, 'of dangerous
steps.'" And he interprets "recent acts of the highest Catholic
authority" as meaning that there is nothing to do just now but to sit
still and trust. Well; but the _Christian Year_ will do that much for
us, just as well.

People who talk glibly of the fearless pursuit of truth may here see a
real example of a life given to it--an example all the more solemn and
impressive if they think that the pursuit was in vain. It is easy to
declaim about it, and to be eloquent about lies and sophistries; but it
is shallow to forget that truth has its difficulties. To hear some
people talk, it might be thought that truth was a thing to be made out
and expressed at will, under any circumstances, at any time, amid any
complexities of facts or principles, by half an hour's choosing to be
attentive, candid, logical, and resolute; as if there was not a chance
of losing what perhaps you have, as well as of gaining what you think
you need. If they would look about them, if they would look into
themselves, they would recognise that Truth is an awful and formidable
goddess to all men and to all systems; that all have their weak points
where virtually, more or less consciously, more or less dexterously,
they shrink from meeting her eye; that even when we make sacrifice of
everything for her sake, we find that she still encounters us with
claims, seemingly inconsistent with all that she has forced us to
embrace--with appearances which not only convict us of mistake, but
seem to oblige us to be tolerant of what we cannot really assent to.

She gives herself freely to the earnest and true-hearted inquirer; but
to those who presume on the easiness of her service, she has a side of
strong irony. You common-sense men, she seems to say, who see no
difficulties in the world, you little know on what shaky ground you
stand, and how easily you might be reduced to absurdity. You critical
and logical intellects, who silence all comers and cannot be answered,
and can show everybody to be in the wrong--into what monstrous and
manifest paradoxes are you not betrayed, blind to the humble facts
which upset your generalisations, not even seeing that dulness itself
can pronounce you mistaken!

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