II

How these attitudes are implied in the _Apologia_ I can only suggest

through the surprises that a reading brought. The contention had

always been that Newman’s apostasy was due to feebleness of will, to

a fatigue in the search for certitude that let him slip into the arms

of Mother Church. My Protestant training had persistently represented

every going over to Rome as a surrender of individual integrity. For

the sake of intellectual peace, one became content to stultify the

intellect and leave all thinking to the infallible Church. There

is nothing of intellectual fatigue, however, in Newman. His course

did not spring from weariness of thinking. He had a most fluent and

flexible mind, and if he seemed to accept beliefs at which Protestants

thrilled with frightened incredulity, it was because such an acceptance

satisfied some deeper need, some surer craving. Read to-day, Newman

interests not because of the beliefs but because of this deeper desire.

He had a sure intuition of the uses of infallibility and intellectual

authority, and of their place in the scheme of things. This is his

significance for the modern mind. And he is the only one of the great

religious writers who seems to reach out to us and make contact with

our modern attitude.

Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was

not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the

Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as

sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive

craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was

because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the

Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice.

His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity

of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was

nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their

vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the _Apologia_. But this

craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of

proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that

lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the

acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman

deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he

valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new

issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One

of the best things in the _Apologia_ is the appendix on Liberalism,

where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new

faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is

precious to him, yet his intuition--he wrote it not many years after

the Reform Bill--has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of

liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and

concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he

flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to

self-prostration.

Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not

like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The

air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church.

She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger

than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment

to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of

the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called

down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the

challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was

not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a

fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in

his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he

loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was

not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems.

Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what

he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult

art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that

arise out of them.

Newman’s position was one of sublime common-sense. He saw that the

Protestant Church would be engaged for decades in the doleful task of

reconciling the broadening science with the old religious dogma. He

knew that this was ludicrous. He saw that liberalism was incompatible

with dogma. But mostly he saw that the new social and scientific turn

of men’s thinking was incompatible with the mellowed mystical and

personal life where lay his true genius. So, with a luminous sincerity,

following the appeal of his talents, he passed into the infallible

Church which should be a casket for the riches of his personal life.

He was saved thus from the sin of schism, and from the sin of adding

to that hopeless confusion of intellectual tongues which embroiled the

English world for the rest of the century. The Church guaranteed the

established order beneath him, blotted out the sociological worries

around him, and removed the incubus of dogma above him. Legitimacy

and infallibility did not imprison his person or his mind. On the

contrary, they freed him, because they abolished futilities from his

life. Nothing is clearer from the _Apologia_ than Newman’s sense of the

hideous vulgarity of theological discussion. He uses infallibility to

purge himself of that vulgarity. He uses it in exactly the way that it

should rightly be employed. The common view is that dogma is entrusted

to the Church because its truth is of such momentous import as to make

fatal the risk of error through private judgment. The Church is the

mother who suckles us with the precious milk of doctrine without which

we should die. Through ecclesiastical infallibility dogma becomes the

letter and spirit of religion, bony structure and life-blood.

But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one

puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes

to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one

need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the

strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of

the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds

for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered

with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win,

not certitude--for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault

than they are in your pocket--but assurance that you will not have to

see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them

against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of

inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible

that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely

significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing

could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the

Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this

belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his

understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God?

On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to

anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging

his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in

the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It

merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no

tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems

to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be

weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about.

And nothing could be more seductive than his belief in

Transubstantiation. Science, of course, declares this transmutation

of matter impossible. But science deals only with phenomena.

Transubstantiation has to do not with phenomena but with

things-in-themselves. And what has science to say about the inner

reality of things? Science itself would be the first to disclaim any

such competence. Why, therefore, should not the Church know as much

as anybody about the nature of this thing-in-itself? Why is it not as

easy to believe the Church’s testimony as to the nature of things as

it is to believe any testimony? Such dogma is therefore unassailable

by science. And if it cannot be criticized it might just as well be

infallible. The papal guarantee does not invade science. It merely

prëempts an uncharted region. It infringes no intellectual rights.

It steps in merely to withdraw from discussion ideas which would

otherwise be misused. Infallibility Newman uses as a shelf upon which

to store away his glowing but pragmatically sterile theological ideas,

while down below in the arena are left for discussion the interesting

aspects of life. He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is

infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a

few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to

infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk

of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you

are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of

dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity

of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the

human world about him. That is why we are apt to find in the Catholic

the acute psychologist, while the Protestant remains embroiled in weary

dialectics.

Such a use of infallibility as Newman implies exposes the fallacy

of the Protestant position. For as soon as you have removed this

healthy check to theological embroilment you have opened the way to

intellectual corruption. As soon as you admit the right of individual

judgment in theological matters you have upset the balance between

dogma and life. The Catholic consigns his dogmas to the infallible

Church and speculates about the pragmatic issues of the dynamic

moral life. The Protestant on the other hand, encases himself in

an iron-bound morality and gives free rein to his fancy about the

eternal verities. The Catholic is empirical in ethics and dogmatic

in theology. The Protestant is dogmatic in ethics and more and more

empirical in theology. He speculates where it is futile to speculate,

because in supernatural matters you can never come by evidence to

any final, all-convincing truth. But he refuses to speculate where

a decent skepticism and a changing adjustment to human nature would

work out attitudes towards conduct that make for flowering and growth.

The Protestant infallibility of morals is the cruellest and least

defensible of all infallibilities. Protestantism passes most easily

into that fierce puritan form which constrains both conduct and belief.

The Protestant inevitably gravitates either towards puritanism or

towards unitarianism. The one petrifies in a harsh and narrow moral

code, the ordering of conduct by the most elderly, least aesthetic,

dullest and gloomiest elements in the community. The other mingles in

endless controversy over the attributes of deity, the history of its

workings in the world, and the power of the supernatural. Religion

becomes a village sewing-society, in which each member’s life is

lived in the fearful sight of all the others, while the tongues clack

endlessly about rumors that can never be proved and that no one outside

will ever find the slightest interest in having proved.

If the Catholic Church had used infallibility in the way that Newman

did, its influence could never have been accused of oppression.

There need never have been any warfare between theology and science.

Infallibility affords the Church an adroit way of continuing its

spiritual existence while it permits free speculation in science and

ethics to go on. Suppose the Church in its infallibility had not

stuck to dogma. Suppose the reformers had been successful, and the

Church had accepted early scientific truth. Suppose it had refused

any longer to insist on correctness in theological belief but had

insisted on correctness in scientific belief. Suppose the dogmas

of the Resurrection had made way for the first crude imperfect

generalizations in physics. Imagine the hideousness of a world where

scientific theories had been declared infallible by an all-powerful

Church! Our world’s safety lay exactly in the Church’s rejection of

science. If the Church had accepted science, scientific progress would

have been impossible. Progress was possible only by ignoring the

Church. Knowledge about the world could only advance through accepting

gratefully the freedom which the Church tacitly offered in all that

fallible field of the technique of earthly living. What progress we

have we owe not to any overcoming or converting of the Church but to a

scrupulous ignoring of her.

In punishing heresy the Church worked with a sound intuition. For a

heretic is not a man who ignores the Church. He is one who tries to

mix his theology and science. He could not be a heretic unless he

were a victim of muddy thinking, and as a muddy thinker he is as much

a nuisance to secular society as he is to the Church against which

he rebels. He is the officious citizen who tries to break into the

storage-vault with the benevolent intention of showing that the jewels

are paste. But all he usually accomplishes is to set the whole town by

the ears. The constructive daily life of the citizens is interrupted

in a flood of idle gossip. It is as much to the interest of the

intelligent authorities, who have important communal projects on hand,

to suppress him as it is to the interest of the owner of the jewels.

Heresy is fundamentally the error of trying to reconcile new knowledge

with old dogma. The would-be heretic could far more wisely ignore

theology altogether and pursue his realistic knowledge in the aloofness

which it requires. If there is still any theological taint in him, he

should not dabble in science at all. If there is none, the Church will

scarcely feel itself threatened and he will not appear as a heretic.

On the pestiferousness of the heretic both the Church and the most

modern realist can agree. Let theology deal with its world of dogma.

Let science deal with its world of analysable and measurable fact. Let

them never touch hands or recognize even each other’s existence.

The intellectual and spiritual chaos of the nineteenth century was

due to the prevalence of heresy which raged like an epidemic through

Europe. Minds which tried to test their new indubitable knowledge by

the presuppositions of faith were bound to be disordered and to spread

disorder around them. Faith and science tap different planes of the

soul, elicit different emotional currents. It is when the Church has

acted from full realization of this fact that it has remained strong.

Protestantism, trying to live in two worlds at the same time, has swept

thousands of excellent minds into a spiritual limbo where, in their

vague twilight realm of a modernity which has not quite sacrificed

theology, they have ceased to count for intellectual or spiritual light.

Perhaps the most pathetic of heresies is the “modernism” which is

spreading through the French and Italian Church. For this effort to

bring unitarian criticism into Catholic theology, to make over the

dogmas from within, to apply reason to the unreasonable, is really

the least “modern” of enterprises. It is only a belated Protestant

reformation, and if it succeeds it could do little more than add

another Protestant sect to the existing multitude. It would not in

the least have modernized Catholicism, for the most modern attitude

which one can take towards the Church is to ignore it entirely, to

cease to feel its validity in the new humane, democratic world that is

our vision. In other words, to take towards it exactly the attitude

which it takes towards itself. This is its strength. It has never

hesitated to accept pragmatic truth that was discovered by others.

The Catholic makes use of whatever scientific, industrial, political,

sociological development works, and adjusts himself without discomfort

to a dynamic world. He makes no attempt at reconciliation with the

supernatural. A Catholic hospital uses all the latest medical science

without exhibiting the least concern over its infallible “truth.” It is

doubtful whether the Church ever attempted to prevent Catholics from

adopting anything as long as they did not bother whether it was “true”

or not. This is the real mischief, to get your infallible divine truth

confused with your pragmatic human truth. The “modernist” in setting

about this confusion simply courts that expulsion which is his.

All this seemed to me implicit in the _Apologia_. But if the use Newman

made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less

destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for

getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce

the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution.

When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes

irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can

touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any

human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the

divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church

will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power

and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to

temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic

life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through

the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal.

Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you

throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the

futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved.

If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by

slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as

surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating

the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it

in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are

similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic

ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal

significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious

sect.

Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic.

For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault

of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such

an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s

argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the

politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal

ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept

this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single

Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy.

Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as

well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would

certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth”

that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being

developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in

terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But

poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And

dogma is poetry.

To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer

has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole

structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to

believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a

fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is

at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing

one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly

and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But

Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely

insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep

soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine

issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are

passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude,

has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific

attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to

“believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it

has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would

imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our

common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief

any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have

to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we

can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so.

Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative,

questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief

has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern,

rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is

coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have

difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility

to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire

driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from

belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief

has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the

other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors

converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and

not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say

that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But

what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection.

They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The

place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard

clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the

growing end we wish to achieve.

Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the

more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it.

As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and

forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the

more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has

remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through

its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it

cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical

society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of

men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent

and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church

declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining

of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an

organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion,

whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart.

Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious

intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future.

He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in

his own _Apologia_ an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of

infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief.