Theological Studies 46 (1985)

NEWMAN: THE VICTORIAN INTELLECTUAL AS PASTOR

"Il mio cardinale," Leo XIII called Newman some years after the latter's elevation to the sacred college. Resistance to the appointment had been formidable. "It was not easy," the pope remembered, "it was not easy. They said he was too liberal."1 "They" referred not to the Italians within the Roman Curia, among whom Newman's person was held in high esteem even if his writings were scarcely understood, but to English ultramontanes like Cardinal Manning and the philosopher W. G. Ward, converts from Anglicanism as Newman himself had been, contemporaries of his at Oxford and participants with him in the Move­ment which had borne the university's name. Another Englishman, also a convert and an intimate of Pius IX, described Newman on the eve of the Vatican Council as "the most dangerous man in England,"2 and Manning, a decade later, thus berated one of those promoting Newman's cause in Rome: "You do not know Newman as I do. He simply twists you round his little finger; and bamboozles you with his carefully selected words and plays so subtly with his logic that your simplicity is taken in. You are no match for him."3

But Newman's friends prevailed with the pope, and his opponents had to accept the decision with what grace they could. It fell to Manning to convey to Newman the official communiqué. "I forward it to you with great joy," he wrote from Rome March 15, 1879. "I hope you may yet have many years to serve the Church in this most intimate relation to the Holy See. From the expressions used by many of the Sacred College to me I can assure you of the joy with which they will receive you Yours affectionately."4 During succeeding weeks Manning, ever at his best when dealing with practical affairs, sent Newman good advice about robes to be purchased, fees to be paid, and other matters of protocol. He had discreetly departed for England by the time Newman arrived for his Roman triumph on April 24.5

The cardinalate had fallen upon Newman like a thunderbolt out of a

1 Meriol Trevor, Newman: Light in Winter (London: Macmillan, 1962) 552. 2 Talbot to Manning, Rome, April 25,1867, quoted in Edmund S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal

Manning 2 (London: Macmillan, 1896) 318. 3 Cuthbert Butler, The Life and Times of Bishop Ullathorne 2 (London: Longmans, 1926)

159. 4 See Charles Stephen Dessain et al., eds., The Letters and Diaries of John Henry

Newman 29 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 84. δ Much has been written about the antipathy between Newman and Manning. Most

entertaining perhaps is Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (New York: Garden City, n.d. [1918]) 27 ff.

329

330 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

clear sky, unsought, undreamed of even, after all the failures and snubs and disappointments, long after, as he had confided to his journal, "the iron . . . entered my soul. I mean that confidence in any superiors whatever never can blossom again within me. I shall never feel easy with them. I shall . . . always think they will be taking some advantage of me After the supreme judgment of God, I have desired, though in a different order, their praise. But not only have I not got it, but I have been treated, in various ways, only with slight and unkindness." As he had grown older he had sifted and resifted almost obsessively through the heaps of personal papers of a lifetime—thousands of letters and notes and memoranda, the dreary record of frustrated expectations relieved only by "my scholarship at Trinity [1818] and my fellowship at Oriel [1822],"6 and the record also, as he knew full well, out of which posterity would draw its judgment between him and his adversaries.7 The villains of the piece had not been only Manning and Ward and Cardinal Barnabò, the jovial, vulgar perfect of Propaganda—"And who is Propaganda? virtually, one sharp man of business, . . . little more than a clerk . . . and two or three clerks under him"8—but they stretched back to his earliest active days and included Provost Hawkins of Oriel, Bishop Bagot of Oxford, and the other potentates of the Anglican establishment who had ceaselessly harassed him and finally hounded him out of the Church of England. Newman no doubt forgave his enemies in the strictly theological sense of the word, but he never forgot a single hurt they had done him. This festering resentment may not have been his most attractive char­acteristic, but it does help to explain his own assessment of the dignity conferred upon him at the end of his life: "The cloud is lifted from me forever."

Yet the happy, fulfilling time was not without its distressful moments. "It has all come too late," Newman told a friend before his departure for Rome and the ceremonial investiture. "I am unused to public speeches. I am old and broken. It is too late to begin. I fear I shall break down." Crowds and high social occasions had always made him ill at ease, "because I am sure to make a fool of myself, being so shy, and go away gnawing at my heart at the thought of the many gaucheries and absurd­ities I have committed."9 All his life he had disliked travel, especially

6 Henry Tristram, ed., Newman's Autobiographical Writings (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1957) 262, 251, 255. The entries are of October 30, 1867, January 8, 1860, and January 21, 1863.

7 See my "Newman: The Limits of Certitude," Review of Politics 35 (1973) 147-60. 8 Newman to Monsell, January 13, 1863, Letters and Diaries 20 (London: Nelson, 1970)

3£1. 9 Newman to Church, June 7, 1872, Letters and Diaries 26 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974)

108.

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 331

foreign travel, since he spoke no modern language but his own and since he possessed in full measure a Victorian gentleman's fastidious disdain for living arrangements which were not entirely English. He was, besides, constantly apprehensive that interruption of familiar routine and changes in climate and diet would adversely affect his health. In the spring of 1879 the fear proved father to the fact; he had scarcely got to Rome when he caught a heavy cold and cough which pestered him throughout his six-weeks stay there.

Even so, the festivities went off splendidly. Leo XIII received Newman with special marks of honor and affection. Italian ladies who saw him at the various functions connected with the consistory squealed with delight at the frail and venerable figure. "Che bel vecchio!" they exclaimed, "che figura! Pallido si, ma bellissimo." Newman was indeed an old man now. Seventy-eight years had stooped him, had turned his hair all white, had left his narrow face with its great hooked nose pale, as the ladies said, as alabaster. But not a whit of his natural dignity had deserted him, nor his shy warmth. The eyes were as brilliant as ever, the hands as expressive, and the high-pitched voice was as musical as the one which, from the pulpit of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, had on Sunday afternoons a half century before bewitched a generation of Oxford undergraduates.10

Late in the morning of May 12, 1879, the crème de la creme of the British and American communities in Rome crowded into the drawing room of the Palazzo della Pigna to hear Newman, with his magic altered perhaps by age but not diminished, deliver his biglietto speech. Shortly after noon a monsignore arrived from the papal Secretariate of State with the formal notification that in a secret consistory just concluded the pope had named John Henry Newman of the Oratory cardinal-deacon of the Holy Roman Church, under the title of Saint George in Velabro.11 He handed the document (il biglietto) to Newman, who, after breaking the seal, passed it to an English bishop standing nearby. The bishop solemnly read out its contents. Then a hush fell over the vast room, and the old man began to speak.

He described first "the wonder and profound gratitude which came upon me, and which is on me still, at the condescension and love towards me of the Holy Father in singling me out for so immense an honor. It was a great surprise," a shock indeed which was relieved only when the

10 The best known of the many descriptions of Newman as preacher is that of Matthew Arnold, quoted in R. D. Middleton, Newman and Bloxam (Oxford: Oxford University, 1947) 9f.

11 Every cardinal is nominal pastor of a parish church in Rome. San Giorgio in Velabro, an especially appropriate titular church for an Englishman, dates from the fifth or sixth century, though many times rebuilt. It lies at the foot of the Palatine, a block or two from the Tiber.

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pope assured him that the cardinalate "was a recognition of my zeal and good service in the Catholic cause This is what he had the kindness to say to me, and what could I want more?" Abruptly, the tone and the matter shifted.

In a long course of years I have made many mistakes. I have nothing of that high perfection which belongs to the writings of saints, viz., that error cannot be found in them; but what I trust that I may claim all through what I have written is this: an honest intention, an absence of private ends, a temper of obedience, a willingness to be corrected, a dread of error, a desire to serve Holy Church, and, through divine mercy, a fair measure of success. [This last with a sardonic nod at Manning, Ward, and the shade of Barnabò.]

And I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy Religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man's religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society The general nature of this great apostasia is one and the same everywhere.

But Newman, the devote of distinctions, could not quite let the subject go at that.12

It must be borne in mind that there is much in the liberalistic theory which is good and true; for example, not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self-command, benevolence It is not till we find that this array of principles is intended to supercede, to block out, religion that we pronounce it to be evil.

The biglietto speech was in a sense Newman's last testament, and he ended it on a note of high and serene confidence.

12 John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 254. Here and on succeeding pages, in a Note written for the second edition of the Apologia (1865), is perhaps Newman's closest and most illuminating analysis of the tortured term "liberalism."

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 333

It must not be supposed for a moment that I am afraid [of the present state of things]. I lament it deeply, because I foresee that it may be the ruin of many souls; but I have no fear at all that it really can do aught of serious harm to the Word of God, to Holy Church, to our almighty King, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, faithful and true, or to his vicar on earth. Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril that we should fear for it any new trial now. So far is certain; on the other hand, what is uncertain, and in these great contests commonly is uncertain, and what is commonly a great surprise, when it is witnessed, is the particular mode by which, in the event, Providence rescues and saves his elect inheritance. Sometimes our enemy is turned into a friend; some­times he is despoiled of that special virulence of evil which was so threatening; sometimes he falls to pieces of himself; sometimes he does just so much as is beneficial, and then is removed. Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God.

Mansueti hereditabunt terrain Et delectabuntur in multitudine pads.13

The festive events of May 12 and those of the days which followed took their physical toll on Newman. An infection in the lungs complicated his cold and put him to bed. To a friend at home he wrote:

Think of this fact, that as cardinal elect and actual I have an altar in this house, yet in five weeks I have only said Mass once. However, today [Pentecost] I said Mass, but the doctor won't let me say Mass tomorrow. He says I am not safe from a relapse I see the Pope tomorrow for the second and last time. Alas, how my time, humanly speaking, has been lost here I think I shall return to Birmingham, as you will find, an older man than I went.14

Newman had hoped to return to England by way of Munich so that he could visit Döllinger and, from his new eminence, urge the great histo­rian—excommunicated since the Vatican Council—to make peace with the Church. His doctors, however, forbade this project, and instead he traveled slowly by the less strenuous southern route. His train was met at the New Street station in Birmingham at 10:45 a.m. on July 1 "by all the principal gentlemen of the congregation, many priests and a large crowd of people." The old cardinal, as he now was, raised a hand in blessing and said: "It is such a happiness to get home."

Home had been since 1852 the Oratory on Hagley Road, in the Edgbaston section of Birmingham. Here Newman had come—after ad­ministering for three years a mission in an inner-city slum where he

i3 « Ί ^ meek shall inherit the earth and delight in the fulness of peace." Text in Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman 2 (London: Longmans, 1913) 459-62.

14 Newman to Hutton, Rome, June 1,1879, Letters and Diaries 29,136.

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served the poorest of the Irish poor and where his chapel, a converted gin shop, "smelt like one of the Tor Gentlemen' on the railroad sta­tion"15—and had built a church, a house, and a school. He had brought with him young convert-disciples from Oxford, and together they formed the English Oratory, of which Newman, by appointment of Pius IX, was the superior. Founded by St. Philip Neri in the 16th century, the Oratory was intended to be not another religious order but a group of secular priests who lived in common without, however, taking vows. They were to staff an urban parish and, besides performing ordinary parochial duties, were to devote part of their energies to study and scholarship.16

When Newman became a Catholic in 1845, he had begun immediately to look round him for the kind of priestly activity in which he could make the greatest contribution to his new communion. The monastic vocation had no appeal for him, nor did he, after some reflection, judge himself fitted to be a friar or a Jesuit. The Oratorian ideal, on the other hand, attracted him from the first, because it combined the pastoral ministry with the intellectual and therefore could be, as he said, "a continuation, as it were, of my former self."17 Newman was a man deeply committed to the principle of continuity. His conversion to Catholicism represented for him no break with the past but a fulfilment of it, not a creation ex nihilo or a new beginning but an organic growth out of the soil of his first religious experience as an adolescent and of his leadership of the Oxford Movement. "What I held in 1816," he wrote in the Apologia, "I held in 1833, and I hold in 1864. Please God, I shall hold it to the end."18

On the level of day-to-day activity, Newman the Oratorian adopted a life-style which by 1845 had become habitual with him. At Oxford he had been indeed fellow of Oriel, the most distinguished college in the univer­sity at that time, and the quality and quantity of his publications during those years testified to his credentials as a savant. But from 1828 he had also been vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, the university parish with its mission in the nearby village of Littlemore, and before that curate of St. Clement's, Oxford. The routine at Edgbaston, with its mingling of the pastoral and the intellectual, did not differ essentially from that of Oxford. Of course, the people-in-the-pew in the latter place were much more genteel. But on that score Newman, amid the poor and uneducated

15 Newman to Dalgairns, August 15,1849, Letters and Diaries 13 (London: Nelson, 1963) 254.

16 See Placid Murray, Newman the Oratorian (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1969) 88 ff., and Charles Stephen Dessain, John Henry Newman (London: Nelson, 1966) 91 ff.

17 Newman to Dalgairns, December 31, 1846, Letters and Diaries 11 (London: Nelson, 1961) 306.

18 Svaglic, ed., Apologia 54.

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 335

in Birmingham, must have recalled how he and Hurrell Froude, when they were young dons together at Oriel, had daydreamed about establish­ing "colleges" of celibate Anglican clerics—university dons were still celibates in those days—to serve the masses in the booming Midlands factory towns.19 In Edgbaston the dream had come true.

The importance of the pastoral dimension in Newman's career cannot be overestimated. That he spent much of his waking time conducting liturgies, preaching, hearing confessions, catechizing children, visiting the sick, consoling the bereaved, even, when need be, playing the organ for Benediction, and, at one level of his mind, always worrying that there might not be enough money to keep the parish and its good works afloat—these humdrum parochial concerns determined the kind of man he was and, more to the point here, the kind of books he wrote. A pastor presides at rites of passage, he witnesses crucial moments of birth and death and love experienced by in-the-flesh men and women. A pastor deals not with abstractions but with practical, concrete situations, with real people in all their individuality, not with belief as a speculative phenomenon but with the particular parishioner who has trouble believ­ing—and to whom it might be said, as Newman once did, "Ten thousand objections as little make one doubt as ten thousand ponies make one horse"20—not with sin as privation within the context of the cosmic problem of evil but with the sinner who murmurs through the confes­sional grill that he has lied or stolen or fornicated.

To preach regularly to the same Sunday congregation is a world away from lecturing in a university hall to fellow or aspiring intellectuals. Newman could do both, of course—did both at Oxford and Dublin—but for him the pastoral had always enjoyed special primacy. Few of the great ecclesiastical personages of the 19th century possessed Newman's pas­toral instincts and, perhaps more significantly, his pastoral experience. None of them had had the care of a jail, an orphanage, and two poor schools, all within the confines of the Edgbaston parish and all with a disproportionately high Catholic clientele. None of them had sat, as Newman did, holding the hand of a parishioner going black with cholera. None of them had bearded, as Newman had, the mighty provost of Oriel by insisting that, as college tutor to undergraduates, "It is my wish to consider myself as the minister of Christ."21

This desire, and the attempts to fulfil it, became second nature to Newman and profoundly affected his intellectual work. Changing com­munions did not alter it, nor did passing years. He always saw events in

19 See my The Oxford Conspirators (New York: Macmillan, 1969) 244 ff. 20 Newman to Wilberforce, July 27, 1868, Letters and Diaries 24 (Oxford: Clarendon,

1973) 106. 21 A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect (New Haven: Yale University, 1955) 52.

336 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

the light of their impact upon people, considered not en masse but as individuals, as, so to speak, parishioners. Early in 1870 he protested against the impending definition of papal infallibility, not because of doctrinal objections of his own but because such a definition was unnec­essary, frivolous, perhaps inspired by the personality cult of Pius IX, perhaps politically motivated to shore up the faltering temporal power, and in any case needlessly upsetting to many Catholics of the best will. He cried:

I cannot help suffering with the various souls that are suffering. Where we are all at rest and have no doubts, and at least practically, not to say doctrinally, hold the Holy Father to be infallible, suddenly there is thunder in the clear sky. What have we done to be treated as the Faithful never were treated before? When has definition of doctrine de fide been a luxury of devotion and not a stern painful necessity?22

Newman's formal writings, no less than his vast correspondence, reflected the same concern. The 30 or so books he published in his lifetime—to say nothing of the many articles, pamphlets and tracts and the occasional poetry—were "for the most part what may be called official, works done in some office I held or engagement I had made/' or were "from some special call, or invitation, or necessity, or emergency."23

He wrote almost always for some specific reason, to serve some deter­mined need or in behalf of some particular group of persons. Tract Ninety (1841) was meant to hold to their Anglican allegiance those among his disciples who threatened to bolt prematurely to Rome. The Essay on Development (1845), in contrast, justified those same Tractarians in their contention that the Church of Rome, despite the tangled growth of its doctrines, did not differ essentially from the primitive Church of the Fathers. The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851) defended Catholics against centuries-old Protestant prejudices, newly roused by Pius IX's institution of an English hierarchy, while the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1874) defended them against Gladstone's charge that their allegiance to the pope prevented them from being good citizens.

But it should not be supposed that Newman's pastoral sense made of him a natural egalitarian or a democrat. No one distrusted the masses more than he. He was an elitist to his fingertips, so that in the political sphere he never wavered in his conviction that the Reform Act of 1832 had been an unmitigated evil; and when in 1885 Gladstone (whom he admired personally) proposed to enlarge the franchise still further, the old cardinal exclaimed to a friend: "What a dreadful thing this democracy

22 Newman to Ullathorne, January 28, 1870, Letters and Diaries 25 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) 18-19.

23 Autobiographical Writings 272 f.

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 337

is! How I wish Gladstone had retired into private life, as he seems to have contemplated some ten years ago."24 He had no doubt that a pastor's mandate came from God, through the apostolical succession of Christian bishops, and not from the flock he guided.

Yet the sheep of the flock did not all have the same needs or capacities. Newman distinguished sharply between the educated minority—mem­bers of his own class—for whom he wrote and the mass of ordinary believers. Because he knew both groups, ministered to both sacramen-tally, he did not hesitate to treat them differently when intellectual matters were at issue. How should a pastor deal with one who had doubts about, say, the eternity of God? "To a half educated man I should say, strangle the doubt, don't read the book which so affects you." But such a response would not do for those equipped to investigate the question with their reason rather than, as was the case for most of humankind, merely with their imagination. "The rule 'strangle doubts' is a rule of the confessional,"25 and something more was needed by the educated men and women of the 19th century, Newman's own contemporaries and peers, who were peculiarly susceptible to the religious liberalism defined in the biglietto speech. For them Newman, whether at Oriel or Edgbaston, heard an added pastoral call.

The gorgeous, serpentine prose, filled, as Manning complained, with all its subleties, was not for everybody. But even so, Newman's pastoral sense lent it a note of solidity and immediacy. That same sense led him, moreover, to shy away from the kind of abstract reasoning favored by the scholastics. It is no doubt true, as Etienne Gilson and others have maintained, that Newman's "insistence on the intensity proper to em­pirical experience and to our cognition of singulars, as contrasted with the weakness of all impressions caused on our minds by merely abstract notions, seems a heritage from British empiricism."26 Newman himself might have replied that such insistence was plain common sense, verified by every reflective person a hundred times a day. And so it may be just as true that Newman adopted the methodology he did because he believed himself to be, before all else, "a minister of Christ," with a pastoral responsibility for people to whom the concrete was more real that the notional. This appears to have been the case, in any event, with his last27

and, in the short term at least, most influential book. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent was an exception to the rule, 24 Ward, Newman 2, 513. 25 Newman to Wilberforce, July 27,1868, Letters and Diaries 24,107. 26 In the Introduction to the Image Books edition of John Henry Newman, An Essay in

Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955) 10 f. 27 The Letter to the Duke of Norfolk was published later, but one could argue that this

was a long and elaborate pamphlet rather than a book.

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in that it was not written "under the lash" of an emergency (like the Apologia) or of an obligation of office (like the Idea of a University). Indeed, Newman confessed, shortly after its publication, that the book "is on a subject which has teased me for these twenty or thirty years. I felt I had something to say upon [the problem of faith and reason], yet, whenever I attempted, the sight I saw vanished into a thicket, curled itself up like a hedgehog, or changed colors like a chameleon."28 From the start the twofold purpose of what he wanted to do had been clear to him: to show "that you can believe what you cannot understand, [and to show] you can believe what you cannot absolutely prove."29 He had begun the project a dozen times, only to set it aside uncertain as to how to proceed.

Then, in the summer of 1866, the thought struck him that all his early versions had failed because he had approached his problem from the wrong angle. "You are wrong," he told himself, "in beginning with certitude. Certitude is only a kind of assent. You should begin with contrasting assent and inference."30 With this idea leading the way, he set doggedly to work, writing and rewriting some sections as many as six or seven times. When he finished three and a half years later, he gave the result its tentative title and observed to a friend: "It is always most difficult to be exact in one's language, nor is it necessary to be exactissi-mus in a work which is a conversational essay, not a didactic treatise. It is like a military reconnaissance, or a party in undress, or a house in Committee; it is in English, not in Latin; it is a preliminary opening of the ground, which must be done at one's ease, if it is done at all."31

Newman was careful to insist that the Grammar of Assent was no theological or philosophical treatise but an inquiry into how the mind responds to evidence, or, more specifically, how the Christian believer can be sure the creed he accepts is true. He was not concerned "to set forth the arguments which issue in behalf of [any] doctrines, but what it is to believe in them, what the mind does, what it contemplates, when it makes an act of faith." In a word, "my subject is assent, not inference," not, that is, theology, the abstract and logical science, the truth of whose conclusions derives from the harmony of their premises. He was inter­ested in real assent, not simply notional assent. "A dogma is a proposition; it stands for a notion or for a thing; and to believe it is to give the assent of the mind to it, as it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real assent to it is an act of religion; to give a notional is a theological act."

28 Newman to De Vere, August 31, 1870, Letters and Diaries, 25, 199. 29 Edward Caswall, one of Newman's colleagues at Edgbaston, quoting Newman. See

Dessain, Newman 148 ff. for this and for the best synopsis of the Grammar. 30 Autobiographical Writings 270. 31 Newman to Walford, May 21, 1870, Letters and Diaries 25,131.

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 339

Newman protested that he did not disdain scientific theology, "as if there were in fact, or could be, any line of demarcation or party wall between these two modes of assent Every religious man is to a certain extent a theologian, and no theology can start or thrive without the initiative and abiding presence of religion." But clearly, with all due respect to the theology which undergirds and protects genuine devotion, Newman the pastor put greater stock in the real assent of the real person for whom "paper logic" does not suffice. Accumulate "the acts of inference and other purely intellectual exercises" which lead to notional assent, "and still the question follows: can I attain to any more vivid assent to [e.g.] the Being of God than that which is given merely to notions of the intellect? Can I enter with a personal knowledge into the circle of truths which make up that great thought?"32 Newman argued that he (and by inplication any believer, no matter his education) could. He thought so because of what he called the "illative sense"—"a grand name for a common thing."

Certitude is a mental state; certainty is a quality of propositions. Those propositions I call certain, which are such that I am certain of them. Certitude is not a passive impression made upon the mind from without by argumentative compulsion, but in all concrete questions . . . it is an active recognition of propositions as true, such as it is the duty of each individual himself to exercise at the bidding of reason, and, when reason forbids, to withhold. And reason never bids us be certain except on an absolute proof; and such proof can never be furnished to us by the logic of words, for as certitude is of the mind, so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every one who reasons is his own center; and no expedient for attaining a common measure of minds can reverse this truth.

But then the question follows, is there any criterion of the accuracy of an inference, such as may be our warrant that certitude is rightly elicited in favor of the proposition inferred, since our warrant cannot, as I have said, be scientific? I have already said that the sole and final judgment on the validity of an inference in concrete matter is committed to the personal action of the ratiocinative faculty, the perfection or virtue of which I have called the Illative Sense, a use of the word 'sense* parallel to our use of it in 'good sense,' 'common sense,' a 'sense of beauty,' and the like. And I own I do not see any way to go farther than this in answer to the question.33

He could go no farther, because "we are in a world of facts, and we use them; for there is nothing else to use." And in fact our minds are so constituted that certitude—an act of assent, not of inference—results more readily from an accumulation of probabilities than from syllogistic demonstration. "We must take the constitution of the human mind as

32 Grammar 93 ff. 33 Grammar 271. See also Newman to Meynell, November 17, 1869, Letters and Diaries

24, 375.

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we find it, and not as we judge it ought to be." The piling up of probabilities—pieces and snatches of evidence, no one of them conclusive in itself, yet each persuasive in conjunction with the others—is what brings certitude to the mind: real assent given by a real person. The basic objection to this position—that a thousand probabilities can add up to only a probable, not a certain, conclusion—Newman had mused over years earlier and had addressed with a metaphor.

The best illustration of what I hold is that of a cable, which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron rod represents a mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probabilities, separately insuf­ficient for certainty, but, when put together, irrefragable. A man who said Ί cannot trust a cable, I must have an iron bar,' would in certain given cases be irrational and unreasonable; so too is a man who says I must have a rigid demonstration, not a moral demonstration, of religious truth.34

As the threads in a cable merge and blend until they cease to be themselves, so in a moral demonstration there takes place "at a certain point a qualitative change. The indications corroborate each other and produce something greater than themselves."35

Many people found this kind of psychological analysis a hard saying, particularly those of a scholastic bent. Of one such Newman commented a year after the book first appeared.

She confuses the conclusion from evidence, with the act of assent which depends on the will. No one on earth can have evidence strictly sufficient for an absolute conclusion, but I may have evidence so strong that I may see it is my duty to give my absolute assent to it. I have not absolute demonstration that my father was not a murderer, or my intimate friend a sharper, but it would not only be heartless, but irrational, not to disbelieve these hypotheses or possibilities ut­terly She says there are persons who are certain of the Christian religion because they have strictly proved it. No one is certain for this reason. Every one believes by an act of the will, more or less ruling his intellect (as a matter of duty) to believe absolutely beyond the evidence If you say there is more evidence [for the existence of the United States] than for heaven, that is intelligible. But it is not a question of more or less. Since the utmost evidence only leads to probability and yet you believe absolutely in the United States, it is no reason against believing in heaven absolutely, though you have not experience of it.36

The Grammar of Assent received generally a favorable reception. Its style and ingenuity were widely praised even by those who cared nothing

34 Newman to Walker, July 6,1864, Letters and Diaries 21 (London: Nelson, 1971) 146. 36 Dessain, Newman 158. 3 6 Newman to Brownlow, April 29, 1871, Letters and Diaries 25, 323 ff.

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 341

about its argument. A few Protestant commentators thought they dis­cerned in it proof that Newman was really, as they had suspected all along, a sceptic. In Catholic circles the sheer difficulty of the book put some people off, but only one or two hard-line scholastics took severe exception to it. Even W. G. Ward liked it and wrote of it enthusiastically in the Dublin Review, of which he was editor.

Newman had placed on the title page a favorite aphorism, taken from St. Ambrose: "Not in the art of dialectic has it pleased God to save his people." Such indeed was the thesis of the Grammar of Assent, and it summed up the subtle, complex, yet always pastoral view from Edgbaston. A still better expression of it was the motto Newman chose to adorn his cardinal's coat of arms: Cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart.

Once settled back on Hagley Road after his Roman triumph, Newman lived pretty much as he had before. Simplicity had always been his personal style and, though he basked now in the glow of almost universal admiration, he did not take that as a reason to change his habits. Aside from the red skullcap and biretta, he seldom wore any insignia of his princely rank as he went about the daily business of governing his Oratory and his parish. Schoolboys remembered the old cardinal watching with enthusiasm their cricket matches, his large head seemingly made larger by the "pink" biretta. He was seen unaffectedly poking about bookstalls in Birmingham, and once a cartoonist spied him drinking a bowl of soup at the refreshment stand in Paddington station. The caricature the cartoonist drew and published was a friendly one.37

Newman's last years coincided with the golden twilight of the Victorian era, and for the most part they passed calm and peaceful, with former controversies over with and former enmities, if not forgotten, assuredly forgiven. He was not without moments of distress, to be sure. One of his young Oratorian priests ran off with a schoolmarm. An Oriel old boy, now a retired statesman, alleged in his Memoirs that 60 years before Newman had been a weak and ineffectual tutor, to which said tutor responded in the public press with a verbal fire reminiscent of his scorching of Charles Kingsley: "I, like a new broom, began sweeping very vigorously [through the Oriel of the 1820s], . . . and this aroused the indignation of certain high and mighty youths, who, relying on the claims of family and fortune, did their best to oppose me and to spread tales about me." He also suffered the infirmities of his years, not so much illness as a gradual enfeeblement and the special curse of those who live to a great age, the loss to death of friends and contemporaries.

But only at the very end did Newman's powers fail him. Meanwhile, he moved comfortably among the eminent Victorians, corresponding

Trevor, Light in Winter 591.

342 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

pleasantly with Tennyson and suggesting through a mutual friend a remedy for Anthony Trollope's asthma. The novelist wrote his thanks and took the opportunity to tell "your eminence how great has been the pleasure which I have received from understanding that you have occa­sionally read and been amused by my novels There is no man as to whom I can say that his good opinion would give me such intense gratification as your own."38 Lord Chief Justice Coleridge visited him in Edgbaston. Gladstone sent him a reading lamp and exchanged cordial letters with him, though Newman continued to deplore the Grand Old Man's policies and joined much of the rest of the country in blaming the prime minister for General Gordon's defeat and death in the Sudan—a disaster made the more poignant for Newman when he learned that Gordon, shortly before the fall of Khartoum, had been meditating from Newman's poem on Christian death, The Dream of Gerontius. Hardly less poignant must have been the last meeting with Manning, at the funeral of the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, the two withered old men, wrapped in cardinals' scarlet, on separate thrones in the sanctuary. "What do you think Manning did?" Newman said afterward. "He kissed me!"39

With what strength he had left to him, Newman turned back also to those intellectual tasks which he had always considered central to his pastoral duty. His correspondence continued as before to address lucidly and gently the problems of faith brought to him by friends and strangers alike, though his letters were shorter now and concluded often with sentences like "I am very tired" or "It pains my hand to write." He finished the project, begun in 1871, of revising all of his writings, including those of his Anglican years, to which he added lengthy notes and appendices, sometimes highly important ones, as he thought appro­priate. He proposed as well to translate into Latin key sections of his books so that his arguments might be better understood by Catholic savants around the world, and particularly in Rome; but this undertaking, congenial as it was to him, he proved to have neither the energy nor the time to complete.40

Newman fretted much during these last years of his life at the increase of agnosticism among the educated classes, to whom he felt a special pastoral responsibility as part of his Oratorian vocation. The triumph of "liberalism," in the sense of the biglietto speech, was a phenomenon he had prophesied in his first university sermon, preached at Oxford in 1826. Musing on what he said as a young don, the old cardinal wrote a memorandum in 1881 or 1882: "This grave apprehension led me [then]

38 See Letters and Diaries 30 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 423,154 f. 39 Trevor, Light in Winter 613. 40 Ward, Newman 2, 478 f.

NEWMAN AS PASTOR 343

to consider the evidences, as they are called, of Religion generally, and the intellectual theory on which they are based. This I attempted with the purpose . . . of testing and perfecting the proofs in its behalf. In literal warfare, weapons are tested before they are brought into use, and the men are not called traitors who test them."41 He had already satisfied himself as to the specific causes of the intellectual crisis among Christians as it unfolded during the last quarter of the 19th century: "The two main instruments of infidelity just now are physical science and history; physical science is used against Scripture, and history against dogma."42

And now he determined to test one last weapon. He did so diffidently for two reasons. He still maintained that most

people should simply "strangle doubt" by staying away from "the preach­ers of infidel science and our infidel literati and philosophers Were I deliberately to frequent the society, the parties of clever infidels I should expect all sorts of imaginations contrary to revealed truth, not based on reason, but fascinating or distressing, unsettling visions, to take posses­sion of me."43 But to the elite who were necessarily confronted with such intellectual problems Newman felt some obligation to speak, even if he could not claim the credentials of a full-fledged Scripture scholar.

"Essay on the Inspiration of Scripture" appeared in the Nineteenth Century for February 1884.44 Its author wrote with caution and consulted leading theologians before he published it. His great fear was that thoughtful Catholics might perceive themselves as faced, like fundamen­talist Protestants, with the impossible choice between the literal truth of the Bible and the indubitable facts unearthed by the new generation of critics. Once again pastoral concern was at the top of his mind.

I am indeed desirous of investigating for its own sake the limit of free thought consistently [sic] with the claims upon us of Holy Scripture; still, my especial interest in the inquiry is from my desire to assist those religious sons of the Church who are engaged in Biblical criticism and its attendant studies, and have a conscientious fear of transgressing the rule of faith; men who wish to ascertain how far their religion puts them under obligations and restrictions in their reasonings and inferences on such subjects—what conclusions may, and what may not, be held without interfering with that internal assent which, if they would be Catholics, they are bound to give to the written Word of God. I do but contemplate the inward peace of religious Catholics in their own person.

41 Ibid. 475. See J. H. Newman, Oxford University Sermons (London: Rivingtons, 1871) 12 ff. The title of the 1826 sermon is worth noting: "The Philosophical Temper First Enjoined by the Gospel."

42 Newman to Northcote, April 7,1872, Letters and Diaries 26, 59. 43 Newman to Bowles, January 5,1882, Letters and Diaries 30, 48. 44 Text edited by J. Derek Holmes and Robert Murray (Washington, D.C.: Corpus, 1967)

101-31. A second essay, which Newman wrote as a rejoinder to a critic, occupies pp. 132-53. See the perceptive remarks of James T. Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1969) esp. 74 ff.

344 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

The basic distinction Newman drew was between inspiration as it applied to faith and morals and to secular facts. "It seems unworthy of Divine Greatness," he wrote, "that the Almighty should, in his revelation of himself to us, undertake mere secular duties and assume the office of a narrator . . . or an historian or geographer, except so far as the secular matters bear directly upon divine truth." The Councils of Trent and the Vatican, he argued, had made this distinction their own. Not that the history "from Genesis to Esdras and thence to the end of the Acts of the Apostles" was to be despised, because it remained a "manifestation of Divine Providence, on the one hand interpretative . . . of universal history, and on the other preparatory . . . of the Evangelical Dispensa­tion [From] this point of view, [Scripture] has God for its author, even though the finger of God traced no words but the Decalogue."45

The article on inspiration was a slight piece, yet, because of its source, it evoked a good deal of reaction. Friedrich von Hügel wrote ecstatically from France and described how "the repeated reading of your article" elicited in him "profound interest" and gave him "subtle help" in his own scriptural research. "I was much interested the other day in Paris," he went on in his fractured English, "to hear myself (at a soirée given by the Rector of the Institut Catholique as such), the Rector (Mgr. d'Hulst), the Professor of Apologetics (the Abbé de Broglie), and the Professor of Ecclesiastical History (the Abbé L. Duchesne), all three, while discussing your papers, agree to their conclusions and maintain that their subject was the burning religious question of the hour."

"My dear Baron," Newman replied, "it pleased me to think that my Article in the xixth century [sic] had been acceptable to you. Of course it is an anxious subject. It is easy to begin a controversy—and difficult to end it."46 Clearly, the old man had little interest in the kind of controversy which stimulated von Hügel and his friends. In this, the late autumn of his life, it was the pastoral concern which still took precedence. During the months he had wrestled with the problem, his thoughts had been on the well-being of the people whom he thought it his duty to serve. He wanted not so much to argue as to promote virtue and even serenity. He lamented "the ignorance of our people in the Scriptures. It [sic] is to them a terra incognita. The Old Testament especially excites no sentiment of love, reverence, devotion or trust." Among English Catholics "there is no reference to Scripture as a book given to us by God, inspired, a guide—and a comfort."47 He was pastor to the end.

University of Notre Dame MARVIN R. O'CONNELL 45 "Inspiration" 106, 108 ff. 46 See Letters and Diaries 30, 382 ff. 47 Newman to Lord Emly, April 9, 1883, Letters and Diaries 30, 201.

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