Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned
in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which
to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried
everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote,
and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, _Apologia
Pro Vita Sua_, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective
sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism
brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most
emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In
that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable
ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times.
Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged
into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I
found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or
what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests
less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with
certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was
faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied
that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most
pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.
Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith
was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all
that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons
he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of
unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse
that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same
sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats
away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an
uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it
only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to
belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching
your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have
really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious
in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of
religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of
feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable
feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,--this is your state. The
more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma.
Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under
the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s
approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach
towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying
his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings.
Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic
state.
How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the
reader of the _Apologia_. Popular impression is probably right that
he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and
sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this
to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was
not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the
thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a
cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism
which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay
in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world
seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could
not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The
tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of
Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent
form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his _Pensées_
lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human
“pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty
an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed
him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of
intellectual religion.
Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a
pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma.
And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his
_Apologia_, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us
what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma.
The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate
religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional
religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial
bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again
in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the
mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way
the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a
way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate
his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors.