In every age there are certain writers who, while not historians themselves, do nevertheless exhibit historical imagination of an insight, subtlety, and prescience rarely possessed by professional historians. Edmund Burke certainly exemplified this in the eighteenth century in his anatomy of the confiscatory rapine of the French Revolution, a rapine which would become the blueprint for all future revolutionary undertakings. T. S. Eliot did the same in the twentieth century in his critical inquest into the sustainability of secular humanism. In the nineteenth century, no professional historian understood the import of the rise of unbelief as prophetically as did John Henry Newman. Yet in his own time Newman was roundly denounced by professional historians.
Throughout his letters, Lord Acton took swipes at Newman that were at once condescending and dismissive. “Newman’s way of getting out of scrapes is worse than his occasional habit of getting into them,” he told Frederick Meyrick. Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, who broke with the Roman Church over papal infallibility, had made similar criticisms of the author of A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. “Whole stretches of Church history and the history of European culture are unknown to him, as the darkest Africa,” he wrote. “There is no way of explaining his naïve and daring assertions.” Newman, in other words, for all of his insights into the development of doctrine, was not sufficiently appreciative of how doctrine, like ideas, was the product of historical time and space, an appreciation which only a mastery of “the history of European culture” could bestow. Here, in Döllinger’s undue trust in history, we can see something of the fons et origo of the historicism so beloved of Newman’s detractors.
Another attack on Newman was mounted by the Anglo-Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky, whose histories of European morals and rationalism enjoyed an immense vogue in the late nineteenth century and beyond. “In an age remarkable for brilliancy of style he was one of the greatest masters of English prose,” Lecky wrote, joining the many detractors of Newman, from Kingsley to Turner, who attempt to appear evenhanded by praising the English style of the man they otherwise traduce:
His power of drawing subtle distinctions and pursuing long trains of subtle reasoning made him one of the most skilful of controversialists, and he had a great insight into spiritual cravings and an admirable gift of interpreting and appealing to many forms of religious emotion. But though he was a man of rare, delicate, and most seductive genius, we have sometimes doubted whether any of his books are destined to take a permanent and considerable place in English literature. He was not a great scholar, or an original and independent thinker. Dealing with questions inseparably connected with historical evidence, he had neither the judicial spirit nor the firm grasp of a real historian, and he had very little skill in measuring probabilities and degrees of evidence. He had a manifest incapacity, which was quite as much moral as intellectual, for looking facts in the face and pursuing trains of thought to unwelcome conclusions.
Connop Thirwall, the historian of Greece, personified the historical guild’s contempt for the convert. “It is necessary to be cautious in speculating on the character of another man’s mind, especially for those who know nothing of him from personal acquaintance, which is my case as to Newman,” he wrote in April of 1867, four years after Newman had published his great intellectual autobiography. Nevertheless, this admirable scruple hardly prevented Thirwall from speculating very freely indeed on Newman’s mind: “My view of his character and internal history is, that his mind was essentially sceptical and sophistical, endowed with various talents in an eminent degree, but not with the power of taking firm hold on either speculative or historical truth.” Among Newman’s contemporary critics the charge of skepticism and sophistry became something of a defamatory commonplace. Yet to this widespread charge Thirwall added another: that of the very unbelief that Newman spent his entire life opposing. “I own I should be very loth to believe Newman capable of any conscious untruthfulness, or of any that is not implied in the sceptical and sophistical character which I ascribe to his mind,” he confessed, not altogether ingenuously. “But I believe the extravagant credulity with which he accepts the wildest Popish legends is, as it appears to me, only another side of his bottomless unbelief.”
Of course, in addition to being a historian, Thirwall was an Anglican clergyman, and this colored his opposition to Newman. Made bishop of Saint David’s after Lord Melbourne read and enjoyed his translation of Schleiermacher, Thirwall advocated for the admission of Dissenters to Cambridge, and zealously supported the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, with which Lord John Russell hoped to parry Pope Pius IX’s restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in what became known as “papal aggression.” In accordance with the act, it was a criminal offense for anyone other than a minister of the Church of England to lay claim to any episcopal title of any city, town, or place. Although never enforced, the act did rouse Newman to write Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, which, together with Lingard and Cobbett, was one of the first books to expose the Whig misinterpretation of the Reformation. No contribution that Thirwall made to the study of history was of greater heft than the one Newman made in this book alone.
Another contemporary historian who found fault with Newman’s work was James Anthony Froude, whose reading of the Reformation could not have been more exuberantly Protestant. For Froude, Henry VIII was not a serial murderer, a heretic, nor even a tyrant, but a liberator, freeing England not only of the usurpatory papacy but all the papacy’s theological obscurantism. “The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up,” he wrote. “Old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return.” Froude’s complaint with Newman was that the convert was attempting to revive what Henry VIII and the Reformation gentry had exploded. He was also guilty of torching Henry’s National Church. For Froude, Newman and the Tractarians’ attitudes towards that church were hopelessly retrograde:
With no historical insight into the causes which had left these peculiar forms in the stratification of the Church like fossils of an earlier age, they conceived that the secret of the Church’s strength lay in the priesthood and the sacraments; and that the neglect of them was the explanation of its weakness. The Church of England so renovated would rise, they thought, like Achilles from his tent: clad in celestial armor, it would put to flight the armies of infidelity, and bring back in a modern shape, adapted to modern needs, the era of Hildebrand and Becket.
Yet for Froude the practical consequences were otherwise. The Tractarians most loyal to their Anglo-Catholic colors seceded from the Established Church: “They submitted; they were received; they and the many who have followed them have been the most energetic knights of the holy war; they have been the most accomplished libellers of the institution in which they were born. The Anglican regiment, which pretended to be the most effective against the enemy in the whole Protestant army, is precisely the one which has furnished and still furnishes to that enemy the most venomous foes of the English Church and the largest supply of deserters.” Here Froude had a point. Newman, for all his solicitude for the church of his youth and early adulthood while still an Anglican, did accelerate its shipwreck. Before his conversion, his career can be seen as a kind of undermining of Anglicanism, though it is obviously arguable whether he did so with malice aforethought. Newman’s historical account of these proceedings, captured in his Anglican Difficulties, may be brilliant; it certainly remains the best history of the Oxford Movement we possess; but it hardly refutes Froude’s charge.
James Fitzjames Stephen, the historian of the criminal law, was also contemptuous of Newman for trying to revive belief in a dogmatic Christianity that he believed Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had sought to consign to oblivion. Stephen, who had no faith of his own to revive, embodied the agnosticism so characteristic of the Victorian professional classes. “I did give the system as well as I understood it a thoroughly fair trial,” he wrote. “I prayed and lived a good life according to my lights and threw my mind into it all as well as I could but I did not find it answer at all. One bit broke away and then another bit, and by degrees when I had reached middle age I gave it up and now that I am on the verge of old age I feel altogether estranged from it and convinced in a quiet way without any conscious indirect motive that it is not true at all.” Newman’s sin, for Stephen, especially after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, was to claim that he was entirely immune to agnosticism, which, as far as his unsparing critic was concerned, was proof of the convert’s cynical skepticism. In effect, Stephen echoed Thirwall’s charges against Newman. Moreover, the judge’s brother, Leslie Stephen, saw matters accurately when he observed how “Newman represented claims which [James Fitzjames] absolutely rejected, but which he desired fully to understand.” Like so many agnostic rationalists, Stephen might not have been able to bring himself to assent to Christian belief, but he couldn’t entirely discount it, either. What became his obsession with Newman was an obsession with his own uneasy agnosticism.
Chesterton was perceptive about the nature of the professional classes’ ersatz religion. “There was nothing new or odd about not having a religion,” he wrote. “Socialism, mostly upon the rather wallpaper pattern of Morris, was a relatively new thing. Socialism, in the style of Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, was a rising thing. But agnosticism was an established thing. We might almost say that agnosticism was an established church. There was a uniformity of unbelief, like the Elizabethan demand for uniformity of belief; not among eccentric people, but simply among educated people.”
Newman’s current detractors look to the historicism of Tübingen to discredit him and his dogmatic principle, despite the fact that the greatest product of Tübingen, Johann Adam Möhler, entirely confirmed Newman’s reading of the Church’s dogmatic core. In his Symbolik, which set out the doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants, Möhler, unlike so many reared in the Tübingen ethos, re-affirmed the magisterial teachings of the Roman Church: “The Catholic understands the secret spring whence flows that unction—that sacred charm—that awe and majesty in his worship, which rivet the senses and win the hearts of all beholders. He knows that it is the great dogma of the Eucharistic sacrifice that gives life, and significancy, and importance, to all, even the minutest forms of his public liturgy.” As a legatee of the Church’s great tradition of faith and reason, Möhler agreed with Newman—and, indeed, with all faithful Catholics—that history can never supplant revelation. Unlike the misguided Protestant historians of Tübingen in the nineteenth and their Modernist friends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Newman never subscribed to historicism. “History,” as he wrote in The Idea of a University, “is invaluable in its place; but, if it assumes to be the sole means of gaining Religious Truth, it goes beyond its place. We are putting it to a larger office than it can undertake.” For Newman, as for the Schoolmen, to “countenance” such a “usurpation” would be “turning a true guide and blessing into a source of inexplicable difficulty and interminable doubt.”
Here Froude also agreed with Newman. For all his Whiggish prejudices, Froude would never allow himself to be hornswoggled by the fallacy of the soi-disant “science of history.” In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution in 1864, he confirmed that there was “something incongruous in the very connection of such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to me as if History was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.”
One nineteenth-century historian who broke ranks with his fellow historians was Richard William Church, whose history of Tractarian Oxford is one of the best books ever written about Newman. Although content to regard his friend’s defection from the National Church as a “catastrophe” and the Roman Church’s claims to infallibility as deluded, Church acknowledged the accuracy of Newman’s own account of what he called the “Movement of 1833” both in Anglican Difficulties and the Apologia. He also understood Newman’s true genius. Few who write of Newman do justice to his style, the peculiar beauty of which arises naturally from his entering into the actual richness of his Christian themes. Church, however, perhaps because of his childhood in Italy, had an aesthete in him, and he revels in the style’s beauty, without ever falling into the error of imagining—as James Joyce imagined—that the beauty of its manner is somehow detachable from its matter. Speaking of the sermons, Church writes:
The contrast of Mr. Newman’s preaching was not obvious at first. The outside form and look was very much that of the regular best Oxford type—calm, clear, and lucid in expression, strong in its grasp, measured in statement, and far too serious to think of rhetorical ornament. But by degrees much more opened. The range of experience from which the preacher drew his materials, and to which he appealed, was something wider, subtler, and more delicate than had been commonly dealt with in sermons. With his strong, easy, exact, elastic language, the instrument of a powerful and argumentative mind, he plunged into the deep realities of the inmost spiritual life, of which cultivated preachers had been shy. He preached so that he made you feel without doubt that it was the most real of worlds to him; he made you feel in time, in spite of yourself, that it was a real world with which you too had concern. He made you feel that he knew what he was speaking about; that his reasonings and appeals, whether you agreed with them or not, were not the language of that heated enthusiasm with which the world is so familiar; that he was speaking words which were the result of intellectual scrutiny, balancings, and decisions, as well as of moral trials, of conflicts and suffering within; words of the utmost soberness belonging to deeply gauged and earnestly formed purposes.
Most of the historians who took issue with Newman did so not so much because of his own historical work but because they could not enter into what he regarded as “the most real of worlds.” Unlike Church, they could not see that it was a real world with which they too had concern. Yet it is precisely because Newman had such a profound understanding of belief that he could speak so prophetically of the consequences of the rise of unbelief. This is his historical distinction, and none of the professional historians who sought to discredit his work will ever diminish it by so much as an iota. To borrow a phrase from Thucydides, it is κτη̃μα ές άεὶ, a possession for all time.
