the Newman problem

Any serious reader of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and of the many controversies appertaining thereunto, will repeatedly face a certain kind of problem. I will explain by reference to one example, though I could choose dozens of others.

In late 1845, when Newman had recently swum the Tiber, “the editor of a magazine who had in former days accused me, to my indignation, of tending towards Rome, wrote to me to ask, which of the two was now right, he or I?” Newman replied at length, and, among other things, said this:

I have felt all along that Bp. Bull’s theology was the only theology on which the English Church could stand. I have felt, that opposition to the Church of Rome was part of that theology; and that he who could not protest against the Church of Rome was no true divine in the English Church. I have never said, nor attempted to say, that any one in office in the English Church, whether Bishop or incumbent, could be otherwise than in hostility to the Church of Rome.

And yet — I thought as I read those words — earlier in the Apologia he says that

I had a great and growing dislike, after the summer of 1839, to speak against the Roman Church herself or her formal doctrines. I was very averse to speak against doctrines, which might possibly turn out to be true, though at the time I had no reason for thinking they were, or against the Church, which had preserved them. I began to have misgivings, that, strong as my own feelings had been against her, yet in some things which I had said, I had taken the statements of Anglican divines for granted without weighing them for myself. I said to a friend in 1840, in a letter, which I shall use presently, “I am troubled by doubts whether as it is, I have not, in what I have published, spoken too strongly against Rome, though I think I did it in a kind of faith, being determined to put myself into the English system, and say all that our divines said, whether I had fully weighed it or not.” I was sore about the great Anglican divines, as if they had taken me in, and made me say strong things, which facts did not justify. Yet I did still hold in substance all that I had said against the Church of Rome in my Prophetical Office. I felt the force of the usual Protestant objections against her; I believed that we had the apostolical succession in the Anglican Church, and the grace of the sacraments; I was not sure that the difficulty of its isolation might not be overcome, though I was far from sure that it could. I did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth; and I was not sure that it would not revive into full apostolic purity and strength, and grow into union with Rome herself (Rome explaining her doctrines and guarding against their abuse), that is, if we were but patient and hopeful.

When I look at the overall tone of this passage, it seems obvious to me that these are not the words of someone “in hostility to the Church of Rome.” How could you be said to be hostile to an institution that you “dislike” speaking against, whose doctrines you felt “might possibly turn out to be true,” and about which you “did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth”? None of that sounds the least hostile.

But then I have to ask: what does Newman mean by “hostility”? I could imagine him saying that anyone not submitting to the authority of Rome is ipso facto hostile to that Church — and in that sense even one holding the views he held when he wrote Tract 90 would still be “in hostility to the Church of Rome.” Now, of course, that would be to use the term in a highly idiosyncratic way — in a way likely to confuse others. But this is what Newman does all the time.

Many of his disputes with his contemporaries take this form:

Opponent: You lied when you said X.

Newman: I did not lie. How dare you accuse me so?

Opponent: You certainly did lie, for elsewhere you say Z, and Z contradicts X.

Newman: Z is fully compatible with X.

Opponent: How so?

Newman: By Z I mean to affirm φ.

Opponent: But Z does not entail φ, it entails δ!

Newman: I define it so as to entail φ.

Opponent: You know perfectly well that everyone thinks that Z entails δ!

Newman: I am greatly surprised by what you say. It had never occurred to me that anyone would ever infer δ from Z.

Opponent: You deliberately misled your readers!

Newman: You have merely reiterated your former accusation in a new form. As an English gentlemen I resent this attack upon my honour.

(In his disputation with Charles Kingsley Newman often appeals to his honour as an English gentleman.) So I could easily imagine Newman saying “I never imagined that anyone would think ‘hostility to Rome’ to mean anything other than ‘disinclination to submit to Roman authority, even when full of admiration for almost everything that Rome stands for.’”

But even if we allow Newman to appeal to the authority of his own private, unstated definitions of key terms, he is still in difficulty — or rather, we his readers are. We still have questions. How can he at one and the same time think that the distinctively Roman doctrines “might possibly turn out to be true” and that he has no reason for thinking them true? Here his answer would presumably be that he has no evidence one way or the other, because he had never actually studied the matter but instead had trusted “the great Anglican divines.” Fair enough — though should not Newman be “sore” at himself for trusting without evidence, instead of resenting the people whose opinions he had trusted?

(Later in the book he says that his reliance on the Anglican divines “of course was a fault” — but he strictly constrains the scope of the fault as he sees it: “This [trust in the divines] did not imply any broad misstatements on my part, arising from reliance on their authority, but it implied carelessness in matters of detail.” That’s as far as he will go in self-criticism. But was it a “matter of detail” that they condemned in harsh and strict terms the very Church that Newman would later enter?)

Setting such issues aside, there’s a further question to be asked: If he had realized that his judgments on Rome were derived at second-hand from others and therefore had no real value, why does he say, “Yet I did still hold in substance all that I had said against the Church of Rome in my Prophetical Office”? He still holds in substance the views that he just said he had no evidence for holding? This seems impossible, for in 1833 he had written, for instance, “Rome is heretical now … Their communion is infected with heresy; we are bound to flee it as a pestilence,” whereas he says that in 1839 “I did not see any clear proof that it had committed itself to any heresy, or had taken part against the truth.” (The earlier statements were the subject of his post-conversion retractions.) These positions are quite obviously irreconcilable with one another, so how Newman could say that they were “in substance” consistent I cannot imagine.

I say that; though I suspect that if I were to challenge Newman on this point he would reply, “Ah, but when I said those things in 1933 I was not speaking in my Prophetical Office,” and then would go on to define in exhaustive detail how he distinguishes between things said in his Prophetical Office and things said in other offices, and further to explain that any inconsistencies in statements made in the different offices are not blameworthy in any sense.

This is just how Newman thinks. What almost everyone else believes to be cheese-paring, logic-chopping, evasive circumlocution he sees as perfectly normal and indeed commendable. The avalanche of accusations he gets not only from avowed enemies but also from many friends he responds to with blank incomprehension:

I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority.

Now I will say here frankly, that this sort of charge is a matter which I cannot properly meet, because I cannot duly realise it. I have never had any suspicion of my own honesty; and, when men say that I was dishonest, I cannot grasp the accusation as a distinct conception, such as it is possible to encounter.

And I don’t believe he was intentionally dishonest, at least, not more often than anyone else — though I cannot think of another writer whose absence of self-knowledge is quite so complete. That he never suspected his own honesty is something he avers in his own favor, but it’s a damning admission. All of us should sometimes ask whether we are what we habitually tell ourselves we are. Whatever the logical virtues (if any) of his natural method of thought, it had the effect of disguising from himself and from others the complex truth of his own ever-shifting responses to his Anglican inheritance and the Roman church towards which he was ever more strongly drawn. And it had the further effect of preventing him from acknowledging the influence he had over so many others.

But of course, all this concerns retrospection: accounting for something one said in the past. It is odd that Newman gets so pettifogging about these matters when, almost immediately after the passages I have been quoting, he freely confesses, in one of the more moving passages in the Apologia, how long he struggled to make logical sense of his position:

What then was I to say, when acute minds urged this or that application of [the principle of Antiquity] against the Via Media? it was impossible that, in such circumstances, any answer could be given which was not unsatisfactory, or any behaviour adopted which was not mysterious. Again, sometimes in what I wrote I went just as far as I saw, and could as little say more, as I could see what is below the horizon; and therefore, when asked as to the consequences of what I had said, had no answer to give. Again, sometimes when I was asked, whether certain conclusions did not follow from a certain principle, I might not be able to tell at the moment, especially if the matter were complicated; and for this reason, if for no other, because there is great difference between a conclusion in the abstract and a conclusion in the concrete, and because a conclusion may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle. Or it might so happen that I got simply confused, by the very clearness of the logic which was administered to me, and thus gave my sanction to conclusions which really were not mine; and when the report of those conclusions came round to me through others, I had to unsay them. And then again, perhaps I did not like to see men scared or scandalised by unfeeling logical inferences, which would not have touched them to the day of their death, had they not been made to eat them. And then I felt altogether the force of the maxim of St. Ambrose, “Non in dialecticâ complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum;” — I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; … Great acts take time. At least this is what I felt in my own case; and therefore to come to me with methods of logic, had in it the nature of a provocation, and, though I do not think I ever showed it, made me somewhat indifferent how I met them, and perhaps led me, as a means of relieving my impatience, to be mysterious or irrelevant, or to give in because I could not reply. And a greater trouble still than these logical mazes, was the introduction of logic into every subject whatever, so far, that is, as it was done. Before I was at Oriel, I recollect an acquaintance saying to me that “the Oriel Common Room stank of Logic.” One is not at all pleased when poetry, or eloquence, or devotion, is considered as if chiefly intended to feed syllogisms. Now, in saying all this, I am saying nothing against the deep piety and earnestness which were characteristics of this second phase of the Movement, in which I have taken so prominent a part. What I have been observing is, that this phase had a tendency to bewilder and to upset me, and, that instead of saying so, as I ought to have done, in a sort of easiness, for what I know, I gave answers at random, which have led to my appearing close or inconsistent.

As far as I can tell, this is as close as he comes to taking responsibility for the confusion he so often sowed in others.