SOURCE: “Last Things: The Greatness of Newman,” in The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 188-217.

[In the following essay, Pattison contrasts Newman's thought on the subjects of truth and belief with that of his fellow Victorians, and explores the thinker's attack on liberalism.]

Is Newman still a great Victorian? His claim to be anything more than a religious curiosity must rest on his theory of belief and his dissent from liberalism. One is an abstruse series of philosophical speculations, the other a detailed indictment of the modern spirit. Do either of these arguments deserve our attention? Is either true? Is either useful?

VICTORIAN TRUTHS

Newman asserted the existence of divine truth and undertook to explain human life as the relation of belief to this truth. It is notoriously problematic to establish the truth of claims about truth. “This is the true method of apprehending truth” is circular, just as “The truth is that there is no truth” is paradoxical. And the utility of Newman's theory seems almost as difficult to establish as its validity. Aside from its role as a stimulant to a dwindling number of devout intellectuals, it does not seem to serve any useful purpose. And yet the theory of belief deserves respect both for its potential utility and its possible validity. Why this is so emerges from an examination of its unique place in nineteenth-century thought.

It will at first seem bizarre to claim that because he venerated truth and defended belief, Newman was unique in his own century. After all, every Victorian was pious about truth. “My only desire,” the young George Eliot wrote, “is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error.”¹ Her sentiment would have been endorsed by Spencer and Swinburne, Huxley and Hopkins. But the apparent solidarity of Victorian reverence for truth was in reality an illusion fostered by the ambiguous use of the word. The Victorians were not devotees of truth but of competing truths, no one of which was quite like the others. In a general way, however, most Victorians would have found the truth proclaimed by Hampden familiar and comfortable and the truth espoused by Newman alien and grotesque.

Newman's theory of truth and belief rested on four interlocking principles that few Victorians and fewer moderns could accept together: first, that some abstract ideas are correlated with objective realities; second, that the instincts and reflections of the mind offer sufficient evidence to distinguish these true ideas from false ones; third, that with the assistance of reason the mind can state truth; and fourth, that human life can and should be understood by examining ideas and beliefs.

Few Victorians could join him in any three, let alone all four of these propositions. Curiously, it was John Stuart Mill who came closest, a proximity that helps explain Newman's fascination with his work. But the similarity of Mill's to Newman's position only emphasizes the chasm that separated them.

Mill's On Liberty is a hymn to belief and one that agrees with Newman in three of his cardinal principles—the objectivity of truth, the intelligibility of belief, and the primacy of ideas. Mill spoke of truth as some definite, attainable objective toward which civilization moves. What is more, Mill's truth is not the relative and evanescent verbal construct of Hampden's philosophy. It is absolute and abiding. Truth is reached by the mind forming beliefs and testing them. “The well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested,” he wrote.² Truths come to be uncontested not simply because everyone agrees to them, but because they are objective, real, and fully known. And in Mill as in Newman, the battle for progress is primarily a contest of beliefs. To understand this contest is to know history. So Mill can be made to sound very much like Newman.

But Mill and Newman were worlds apart, because Mill excluded from his definition of truth the subjective or instinctive element so essential to Newman's thought. Mill's truths are the hypotheses of the sciences as proved by the method set forth in his System of Logic. All the rest is untruth: “If a person assents undoubtingly to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion … this is not knowing the truth. Truth thus held, is but one superstition more.”³ With modifications, Mill's version of truth leads to the positivist doctrine that “a sentence says nothing unless it is empirically verifiable.”⁴ Mill would not allow that Newman's subjective knowledge of his instincts provided valid grounds for an opinion, and so he would classify Newman's truth as credulity.

Mill's colleague and biographer Alexander Bain wrote “that belief has no meaning, except in reference to our actions.” At first glance, this looks like another coincidence of opinion between Newman and his liberal adversaries. But again the similarity is an illusion. Bain claimed that no belief should be accepted “without good positive evidence,” that belief is inherently unstable “due to the ascendancy of emotion,” and that ultimately belief is nothing but an expedient of the will by which the mind protects itself from the terror of uncertainty.⁵ Each of these arguments found fuller expression later in the liberal era in the philosophy of pragmatism, in the theory of cognitive dissonance, or in the psychology of the unconscious, and each of them contradicts some essential aspect of Newman's philosophy. Newman thought valid belief might do without “positive” or empirical evidence. He was convinced that belief might rise above emotion. And he would hardly have entertained the notion that his mind had invented the idea of God as a cerebral narcotic. How could that be true when, as he knew too well, right belief was so painful to hold?

If Newman's notions of truth and belief bore some tenuous similarities to Mill's or Bain's, they were more clearly rejected by other Victorians. Protestants of all descriptions raged against Newman precisely because they believed he had betrayed the truth. “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy,” was Kingsley's famous charge that provoked Newman's Apologia. “Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be.”⁶ The young James Anthony Froude, once a Tractarian disciple, cited Newman's equivocation as his reason for abandoning his Christian faith.⁷ What did these Protestant champions have to offer in place of Newman's duplicitous Catholic truth? In his maturity, Froude decided that “a true religion, it cannot be too often repeated, is not a history, but a declaration of the present relation which exists at all times between God and man.” This “present relation” is variable to an infinite extent and relative to historical conditions. “Truth is thus of more kinds than one,” he said.⁸ The truth of religion can never be reduced to formulas, because it is utterly unlike the truth of science. Religious truth is best understood as we understand the truth of a poem or a play—sentimentally and indefinitely. In the end, Froude came down about where Arius and Hampden had landed.

Newman's great critic Leslie Stephen combined the relativism of Froude with the rationalism of Mill in formulating the great Victorian definition of truth. Stephen admitted with Newman that creeds may dictate social events: “it is, however, as clear as it is more important, to remark that the social development reacts upon creeds.” In time, the material facts of life compel all men to become empiricists:

The ultimate victory of truth is a consoling, we may hope that it is a sound, doctrine. If the race gradually accommodates itself to its environment, it should follow that the beliefs of the race gravitate towards that form in which the mind becomes an accurate reflection of the external universe. The closer the correspondence between facts and our mental representation of facts, the more vigorous and permanent should be the creed which emerges.⁹

In this “accurate reflection” theory, material and historical forces guide the evolution of belief, and truth is an empirically verifiable correspondence between human terminology and “the external universe.” Here truth is certainly not, as Newman insisted, something the mind obtains by inspecting its instincts, nor does it express itself in religious dogmas.

It is no surprise that liberals like Stephen, whose life exemplified the progression of Protestantism into unbelief, could not agree with Newman's interlocking theses on truth. But even Anglicans and Catholics who considered that they followed in Newman's footsteps found themselves restating Hampden's heresy and rejecting Newman's belief. Henry Mansel's Bampton lectures of 1858, The Limits of Religious Thought, were orthodox enough to be called “loathsome” by Mill, and the reviewer for the Catholic Rambler paid them the compliment of alleging that they had been lifted from the thoughts of Newman himself.¹⁰ But if Mansel was borrowing from anyone, it was from Hampden, not Newman, since Mansel argued that human minds could never apprehend, nor human language express, the divine. He asked for “a recognition of the separable provinces of reason and faith,”¹¹ and by so doing, relegated belief to the realm of mystical abstractions, while for him morality became merely regulative. Mansel restated Hampden's opinion that theology can never state divine truths, though he did not have the intellectual courage that compelled Hampden to the conclusion that theology was therefore defunct. Mansel maintained a kind of mystical status for theology as the study “not of what is, but only of what is not.”¹² When Hampden had expressed the same thoughts twenty-five years earlier in language considerably more arcane, he was threatened with the stake. Mansel on the other hand became the choice of a conservative government to fill the deanery of Saint Paul's. In the quarter century between Hampden's and Mansel's Bampton lectures, Oxford opinion had evolved so far that Mansel's liberal effusions were treated as almost passé.

The one Victorian who seemed to have been faithful to the rigors of Newman's doctrine of belief was Lord Acton. If anything, Acton was more Newmanesque than Newman. He ranked himself with those who assert “that the world is governed ultimately by ideas.” History “must be studied as the history of the mind.”¹³ Here, as in Newman, the abstractions of belief took precedence over the accidents of matter. As in Newman, the ideas that compose Acton's history are not relative. History is the struggle for the victory of true ideas, ideas that are absolutely and enduringly real. Like Newman, Acton admitted that the ideas that constitute civilization are likely to be erroneous, “for History is often made by energetic men, steadfastly following ideas, mostly wrong, that determine events.”¹⁴ However, the truth is eternal and ever available to those who make history, and Acton thought he recognized in the spirit of liberalism the evolution of the enduring truth behind Catholicism. Christianity had nurtured the ideas of individual freedom and social decency. The age of revolution had begun to convert these beliefs into realities. Newman had little sympathy with Acton's politics, but Acton's theory of truth and ideas seems a duplicate of Newman's own.

And yet even this most faithful of his followers fell far short of fidelity to Newman's principles. For Newman truth was real, absolute, present to the human mind, and determinative of all action worthy of the name. So far Acton could agree. But for Newman the truth was also verbal and personal, the standard of individual salvation, while for Acton truth was realized not in individual intuitions but in mass movements. Universal civilization, not individual justification, is its goal. Asked to exemplify truth in action, Acton would have pointed to the French or the American revolution, while Newman would have pointed to Athanasius alone in his desert exile.

Acton summed up his difference with Newman in a letter of 1890 memorializing the recently deceased cardinal. Newman was a man “who was always looking for a view, for something tenable logically, whether tenable historically or not.”¹⁵ Newman's truth was private, personal, logical. If it differed from the opinions of civilization and found no echo in society, Newman was content to dismiss civilization and society. But for Acton the truth was public and political. A belief that did not express itself in the great events of history or in the institutions of society was for him no truth at all. While Acton flattered himself that he agreed with none of his contemporaries,¹⁶ his devotion to the liberal ideal of progressive civilization places him closer to Mill, Arnold, or Marx than to Newman.

And then there is Darwin. It was Mark Pattison who observed that Newman first “started the idea—and the word—Development” that found its scientific expression in the Origin of Species. Ever since, there have been those who have argued that Newman was not only in the mainstream of nineteenth-century thought but had in fact inaugurated the study of evolution.¹⁷

Newman himself was indifferent to Darwin's theory. He was willing either to “go the whole hog with Darwin, or, dispensing with time and history altogether, hold, not only the theory of distinct species, but that also of the creation of fossil-bearing rocks.”¹⁸ He may have been the only Victorian who could have accepted either the science of Darwin's Origin or the creationism of Philip Gosse's Omphalos. This lack of interest in the details of science is characteristic of Newman. He did not care if science proved that he was a monkey's uncle so long as he was a monkey's uncle who believed correctly. The discoveries of twentieth-century science would not have shaken his faith in the least. His interest was in the first principles of belief that govern scientific as well as all other human inquiry. So long as the sciences limited their inquiries to the facts of material existence and refrained from metaphysical speculations, he was prepared to accept their conclusions. But if the sciences should try to intrude on the world of metaphysical speculation, “they exceed their proper bounds, and intrude where they have no right.”¹⁹

If Darwin had claimed metaphysical status for his biological theories, he would have met with a stiff rebuff from Newman. If, for instance, Darwin's theory of development were applied to intellectual history, Newman's idea of truth would collapse. If belief obeyed the same laws of evolution as Darwin described for species, today's dogma might be well adapted to the present intellectual climate, but any random fluctuation in the Zeitgeist might assure its extinction and promote some obscure heresy to the status of truth merely because it was better suited to the random circumstances of material life. Darwinism as applied to belief would hold that all doctrines are relative, that “not one living species” of belief—not even Catholicism—“will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distance futurity,” and that even the terms law and nature contain no truth higher than the human mind that thinks them.²⁰ Hampden could have asked for no apter pupil than Darwin. The whole tenor of Newman's thought opposes any application of the Darwinian theory outside the narrow boundaries that Newman assigned the sciences. No Victorian shared Newman's idea of truth or belief.

But do Newman's opinions on truth and belief really exist in such splendid isolation? Does not every intellectual tacitly accept Newman's theory of belief? Surely every liberal who has not yet declined into imbecility or cynicism professes that belief can topple empires and that the truth shall make us free. Did not even the Bloomsbury atheists cling to the doctrine “that belief could affect action, so that it was in the power of mankind to decide rationally to follow a certain course of action”?²¹ The most hardened Marxist has to believe in his own belief and the most fickle pantheist in the truth of his relativism.

Yes, but—everything depends on what is meant by truth and belief. In the mouths of liberals, Newman would argue, these orthodox expressions invariably assume heretical meanings. The liberals' truth is merely relative to man's fallible reason, and the empirical facts of nature were for Newman merely ideas, not truths at all. The belief that can do no more than acknowledge its own subjugation to the forces of history or to the laws of nature is no belief, and the rational choice that only selects various relative and material options is no choice. Truth must be the handmaiden of God, not the daughter of time. Belief must have an enduring object above nature. Choice must be free to select between what is absolutely true and what is absolutely false. Whoever among modern intellectuals can agree with these definitions can agree with Newman, but the rigor of his system almost certainly leaves Newman undisturbed in his dogmatic isolation.

Newman's views stand out among those of his contemporaries as singular and antagonistic to the whole intellectual spirit of the time—a remarkable accomplishment in itself, supposing the liberal hypothesis according to which time and place ought to dictate a similarity of ideas to be correct. And it is precisely because of its intellectual isolation that Newman's philosophy is useful. It offers a point of departure not provided anywhere else for those who would question the pervasive orthodoxy of liberalism. In performing this service it does not matter whether Newman is correct so much as that he offers a perspective from which the received opinions of the modern era can be questioned. This is a necessary and valuable service.

BELIEF AMONG THE LIBERALS

Until very recent times, liberal scholarship did not much concern itself with the question of belief, much less with the refutation of Newman's theories. The Socinian views of Hampden or of Alexander Bain held the field. Belief was an inner state inexplicable except by reference to its causes or its effects. It made sense to study the material forces that shaped belief, and it made sense to study the concrete behaviors that expressed belief, but it made no sense to study intangible belief as an independent force. “Belief itself has received surprisingly cursory treatment,” Anthony Quinton wrote in the 1960s, and as late as 1982 the distinguished neurologist Peter Nathan could survey language, learning, behavior, and the other fundamental expressions of human life that arise in the nervous system without once alluding to belief.²²

No longer. The further liberal scholarship has progressed on its antidogmatic assumptions, the more frequently it has run up against the question of belief. Under names like functionalism, identity theory, and homunctionalism, the cognitive sciences have revived Newman's interest in providing an anatomy of belief. Nor would Newman have objected that the scientists and philosophers now debate whether belief is localized in the left hemisphere of the brain or whether it can be modeled on a computer. He would have been as indifferent to these scientific details as he had been to the biological evidences of Darwinism. He cared only to establish that belief is a reality that defines human life, and in this the sciences have moved an inch or two toward his position.

For instance, Michael Gazzaniga, the neurosurgeon whose split-brain experiments have helped put the study of mentality on an empirical footing, takes belief very seriously. While he describes belief as a complex interaction between various modules of the brain, he is at least willing to admit that as a result of these interactions, “we are free, by having beliefs, to overide responses to immediate gains and losses offered up by the environment.” “Our species must have belief,” he argues.

It guides, it controls, it dictates the rules of behavior. We all demonstrably develop one about ourselves. It is a short jump to imagine how we must also have one about extrapersonal events as well. Call it Christ, Muhammad, or quantum mechanics, these are all beliefs that allow for human action.²³

This statement from the frontiers of neuroscience is a virtual paraphrase of Newman's sentiments in the Tamworth Reading Room. Here, as in Newman, “life is for action,” and belief, apparently free and independent, guides action. Unfortunately, what neuroscience concedes with one hand it takes away with the other. Gazzaniga concludes that our perception of free belief is “largely illusionary.” In fact, he says, beliefs are shaped “in response to a variety of social forces.”²⁴

But even such concessions as Gazzaniga does make moves science nearer to Newman's position than Mill or Leslie Stephen could have believed possible. Still, if the cognitive sciences have made the study of belief once again respectable, modern thought has yet to reach Newman's conclusion that belief takes precedence over action. The Marxist continues to maintain that mind limps after reality, the behaviorist that belief is indistinguishable from action, and the cognitive scientist at most admits that where action contradicts belief, belief yields to the overpowering logic of phenomena. The most idealistic modern commentator is liable to place belief somewhere below genetic traits, social compulsions, historical necessities, economic imperatives, and unconscious drives in the hierarchy of explanations offered for human behavior. In any of these views, belief seems rather trivial. Belief may exist for study, it may rationalize experience after the fact, it may even influence action, but finally it is determined by material and external events, and there is no sense in which my freedom to believe is anything more than a very limited choice within a narrow range of necessities.

Newman held not only that the mind ought to act believingly, but that it does act believingly. Action is only intelligible by reference to belief, and belief is ultimately free and superior to all other categories of explanation. On this proposition Newman's claim on the attention of the modern world rests. If Newman was right, then the edifice of modern thought is built upon a false premise. And how much grander the world would be if belief, the intellectual's stock-in-trade, determined the course of history! The priest and his successor, the professor, would, contrary to all appearances, be the masters of destiny. Some such conviction must have consoled Newman in his failure. But while Newman's opinions may be suspect because self-serving, they are not necessarily false, and the primacy Newman accorded belief in human affairs is not self-evidently wrong merely because it consoled him.

Newman's view that the modern world is a realization of Socinian beliefs makes as much sense as the liberal argument that Socinian beliefs are a rationalization of the modern world. If it is difficult to believe that the complex of contemporary civilization originated in the distorted beliefs of Arius, it is also difficult to see how Newman can be honestly refuted. Shall we say that he is merely absurd? This is not argument. Shall we say with Wittgenstein that belief in metaphysical doctrines is inane because “how things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world”?²⁵ This is only to adopt Arius's argument against Athanasius, not to prove its truth. Shall we say that the evidence points to material causes shaping ideological effects? This is contradicted by history itself, as in Newman's example of the Arians, in which belief preceded the social structures to which it corresponded. Shall we say that some individuals and cultures do not believe, or that, believing, they do not make action correspond to belief? This does not prove that they could not act believingly nor does it refute Newman's contention that their existence is determined by their very lack of belief. Newman's thought has continuing value as posing to his liberal opponents a fundamental question that they have not yet been able to answer. The assertion that human life is determined by its belief or lack of belief may be unfashionable, but it is at least a challenging hypothesis.

THE APOLOGIA

Newman, of course, went beyond hypothesis. One set of beliefs was right, all others wrong. Catholicism alone was “destined to last unto the end.”²⁶ In the Apologia, Newman offered himself as a proof of his ideas. The Apologia was called into being by Kingsley's slur on Newman's truthfulness, and Newman used the occasion to give the world a portrait of his theories about belief and truth as they operate in human life—and more precisely, in his life.

The Apologia is sometimes called Newman's autobiography, but to the modern sensibility it must seem a very odd example of the genre. Of his parents Newman has nothing to say—we learn that he was “brought up,” but not by whom.²⁷ Of his family there is hardly a mention. Nor does Newman make any concession to the Romantic interest in nature and locality. Where Ruskin in his Praeterita devotes a chapter to the formative influence on him of the Herne Hill almond blossoms, Newman in the Apologia does not even bother to inform the reader where he was born, or if he had ever noticed a tree. The evolution of the sentiments, which since Rousseau's Confessions has been a staple subject of autobiography, is ruthlessly excluded from the Apologia so thoroughly that the death of Hurrell Froude, the most crushing personal loss of Newman's young manhood, is reduced to a bloodless sentence.²⁸ True, Newman records that when his friend Bowden died in 1844, he “sobbed bitterly over his coffin,” but he is quick to absolve this moment of any hint of mere animal feeling—he wept because he had expected Bowden's illness to bring “light to my mind, as to what I ought to do” about leaving the Anglican Church. “It brought none,” and so Newman wept over his own intellectual confusion.²⁹

Gone, too, from Newman's narrative is the creative dialogue between imagination and memory that has inspired autobiographers from Chateaubriand to Nabokov. “I cannot rely on memory,” says Newman, and, true to his word, he fills the pages of the Apologia with written documentation from his letters and diaries. The liberals and their Romantic allies had substituted the distortions of recollected sentiment for the precision of truth. Newman avoided their error. When he wrote at the start of his second chapter, “I have no romantic tale to tell,” he was engaging in a profound form of understatement.³⁰ In defending his own reputation for truthfulness, Newman was defending the existence of truth itself against the skepticism indissoluably bound up with relative memory and egocentric sentimentality.

Since the Apologia refuses to conform to the modern idea of autobiography, it is tempting to classify it in some other way. Its title, after all, places it with Socrates' Apology and Athanasius' Apologia pro fuga sua. The Apologia is arguably not the history of Newman's life, but merely what is claimed in its subtitle, the history “of his Religious Opinions.” And yet Newman himself calls it the “history of myself.”³¹ The Apologia truly is an autobiography—that is, a history of self as Newman understood self. What makes it so peculiar is his very unmodern idea of selfhood.

For Newman, there was no distinction between “a history of his religious opinions” and the “history of myself.” The self is not developed by parental or social nurture, not defined by place or nation; it is not an amalgam of feelings or events. These facts are accidental, in the same way that the physical properties of the consecrated communion bread are accidental to its spiritual essence. Underneath the accidents of selfhood is its real presence: belief. We are what we believe.

Like everything else Newman wrote, the Apologia is uniquely antagonistic to the whole current of modern thought. From its first page, it asks us to accept that the only important characteristic of selfhood is the believing mind in its search for absolute truth. What Newman tells us about his childhood is that he read the Bible, “but I had formed no religious conviction till I was fifteen.” There is therefore no sense in dwelling on anything prior to this birthday. When he was fifteen, he had a great revelation, similar in intensity to the second births of Augustine or Bunyan—and yet utterly unlike them. When Augustine took up the book and read, “the light of confidence,” he says, “flooded my heart.” Newman's “great change,” on the other hand, touched the mind, not the heart. He writes that he “received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.”³² Here belief is not merely a part of life, but life itself, and the faculties that support belief—views, reason, logic, and the grammar of assent—are not merely adjuncts of the human personality, but the limbs and organs with which humans must fight for eternity. The Apologia is meant to demonstrate in the person of John Henry Newman the living reality of the theory of belief.

The modern world expects its autobiographies to move toward moments of oceanic self-revelation like Wordsworth's spots of time or Joyce's epiphanies. In these oceanic moments, individuals know themselves by experiencing some deep emotional or spiritual connection with the larger universe. Newman too has moments of revelation, but they are not like these. In fact they must strike the modern reader as absurd because they are so far removed from our Romantic expectations. Here is Newman in the summer of 1839, studying the history of the early Church as he tries to decide whether he can remain an Anglican: “It was during this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the tenableness of Anglicanism. … My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite.”³³ We expect our autobiographers to classify themselves according to some preference or some passion. For us, people are what they do or what they feel. Within these limits, we are even prepared to accept self-classification on religious grounds. But by modern definitions, Newman is not really classifying himself religiously here. What William James calls the “enthusiastic temper of espousal” that characterizes our modern idea of religious experience is willfully excluded from this passage, and in its place we are given the man as idea.³⁴ Because of our liberal indoctrination, we are torn between laughter and amazement when confronted by a human who defines himself in terms of doctrines, but Newman's hope was to make us see in his example that it is infinitely more important to believe rightly than to feel right.

The Apologia is a clinical demonstration of the primacy of belief. But Newman's narrative has another aim as well: to explain the proper object of belief. Belief is life, but only right belief is good life, and the Apologia means to show in Newman's example what the good life is. And here again, in its structure, the Apologia purposely confounds our modern expectations of what we should find in an autobiography. Modern autobiographies begin with their subjects' nebulous absorption in family, in class, in nation, or in their own undifferentiated ids. From this point of departure, the autobiography describes the process of self-realization and self-definition. For us, autobiography is nothing but the unfolding of individuality.

As usual, Newman took this procedure and reversed it. He began as an individual and ended by being absorbed into the body of Catholicism. So long as he was an Evangelical, or an Anglican, or a Monophysite, he was unique—a condition he regretted. The climax of his life came with the conversion of 1845, after which “of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate,” because those opinions were identical in all respects to Catholic teaching.³⁵ The goal of belief, and therefore of life, is to bring selfhood within the narrow compass of truth. After his conversion, Newman wrote another chapter, but now it was no longer the voice of Newman the distinct individual speaking, but Newman the Catholic, whose personal opinions have imperceptively merged into the larger truth of dogma.

Newman was well aware of what he was doing. He knew that his readers, brought up in the liberal sensibility, would equate his progress from individuality into Catholicism as a negation of freedom and of selfhood. He took pains in Chapter 5 to address what he considered to be their error. After announcing his absolute submission to Catholic teaching, he wrote,

All this being considered as the profession which I make ex animo, as for myself, so also on the part of the Catholic body, as far as I know it, it will at first sight be said that the restless intellect of our common humanity is utterly weighed down to the repression of all independent effort and action whatever, so that, if this is to be the mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be destroyed. But this is far from the result, far from what I conceive to be the intention of that high Providence who has provided a great remedy for a great evil,—far from borne out by the history of the conflict between Infallibility and Reason in the past, and the prospect of it in the future. The energy of the human intellect “does from opposition grow”; it thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon, and is never so much itself as when it has lately been overthrown … ; as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;—it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power,—into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.³⁶

In this passage belief and style, personality and dogma have all come together. Newman spoke for himself, but because he believed rightly, this self spoke “on behalf of the Catholic body,” there having ceased to be a distinction between the two. Newman next considered whether one who submits to the Catholic body can be said to speak for himself, and here style as much as logic carried the message. The liberal's objection to Newman's view is phrased in the balanced syntax of eighteenth-century rationalism: “if this is to be the mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be destroyed.” Newman moved away from this fearful symmetry by a soaring use of anaphora. The loss of freedom is “far from the result, far from what I conceive, … far from borne out.” Inside the narrow compass of truth, individuality lives in dynamic tension with dogma, and now Newman's style demonstrated this tension through antithesis—not the symmetrical antitheses of Dr. Johnson's prose, but the erratic antitheses of Beethoven's music, antitheses that express individuality within the framework of a larger order. The energy of the human intellect “thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon.” The purposeful failure to achieve parallelism between the verb forms “thrive” and “is joyous” and the jarring placement of the prepositional phrases heighten the sense of individual conflict, which is then resolved into the larger rhythm of a controlling paradox: individual energy “is never so much itself as when it has lately been overthrown.”

The believer who subsists within Catholicism never loses his individuality, and Newman proved his own freedom by switching metaphors, calling the reader's attention to his eccentric independence even as he professes his absolute subordination. He himself had begun as “the raw material of human nature”—a distinct individual. Within the moral factory of the Church, he had been refashioned into something better—a believing Catholic. So Newman's inimitable style becomes not only the vehicle, but also the proof, of his contention that individuality, which is belief, can exist only within the framework of Catholic truth. The Apologia contains Newman's fundamental argument couched in the form of an anti-liberal autobiography.

THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

What of Newman's other claim to greatness? Like the theory of belief, his critique of liberalism can lay claim to historical significance if for no other reason than its singularity.

Swinburne yoked Newman and Carlyle as twin Furies visiting primordial curses on an age that had struggled from darkness into light. Then as now, Newman sounded like only a more eloquent member of that guild of culture critics of whom Carlyle is the chief. With Carlyle and his progeny, Newman denounced the spiritual desolation, the political expediency, and the psychic vulgarity of modernism. But Newman's dissent from liberalism is different in kind from that of the usual culture critic, as a moment's reflection on Swinburne's comparison with Carlyle demonstrates.

Carlyle looked for human fulfillment in the social sphere. It is our destiny, it is God's will (there is for Carlyle no distinction) to recreate ourselves and our world. “The mandate of God to His creature man is: Work!” cried Carlyle,³⁷ and he admonished the world to obey the divine commands of time and civilization. If he had used Newman's sense of the word, Carlyle would have said that the modern world is not too liberal but not liberal enough. We must subordinate our wills to the energy of the liberal Zeitgeist that impels us to our greater fate.

Newman thought it more likely to be Satan's than God's voice that spoke through the spirit of the times. Arius and Socinus had been perfectly attuned to the temper of their ages, as Hampden and Mill were to the mood of Newman's society. “Each is, in his turn, the man of his age, the type of a generation, or the interpreter of a crisis,” Newman said of the great thinkers who characterize their times. But being characteristic of their times in no way assures that great writers will produce a single thought worthy of belief. The literature they produce is “the exponent, not of truth, but of nature,”³⁸ and nature, far from being the model of belief, is a wilderness in which the believing mind finds itself lost. Carlyle thought that nature, time, and civilization were starry messengers fit to be obeyed. Newman rejected them all and looked for truth in eternity.

For Carlyle, the thought was in the work, for Newman, the work in the thought. Carlyle conjured up a prophetic vision of Captains of Industry who would lead the world into the new age of creativity. Newman summoned the shade of Athanasius to exorcise these troubling phantoms of liberalism. Newman and Carlyle's opposed views on contemporary culture only coincide in their disgust with the present state of affairs.

The only critic in the English-speaking world who approaches Newman's thorough rejection of the modern spirit is T. S. Eliot:

The Universal Church is today, it seems to me, more definitely set against the World than at any time since pagan Rome. … The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.

This peroration from Eliot's essay on the Lambeth Conference of 1930 might have been lifted entire from the pages of Newman's sermons on the Antichrist, just as Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society takes the substance of its argument as well as the style of its title from Newman. And Eliot was one of the few critics willing to accept the totalitarian implications of Newman's Christian civilization. Would a return to Christian mentality entail the restoration of ecclesiastical tribunals of censorship? Eliot was ready to accede to this necessity as a means of “redeeming the time” in the age of the Waste Land.³⁹ But severe as Eliot's appraisal of Western civilization was, it fell short of Newman's pristine Christian dissent. Eliot was seduced from the path of perfect fidelity to Newman's ideal by the allures of culture, and he ended by making that compromise with liberalism that Newman had anathematized.

Eliot is the twentieth-century's spokesman for the Anglican via media. He would save Christian dogma, but he could not relinquish liberal humanism. “Humanism,” he wrote, “makes for breadth, tolerance, equilibrium and sanity. … There is no opposition between the religious and the pure humanistic attitude.”⁴⁰ Newman abandoned the Anglican communion precisely because he felt there was such an opposition. He accepted what Eliot could not—that believing in dogma, it is impossible to strike a deal with even the purest variety of humanism, whose breadth and tolerance threaten the exclusive rigor of the dogmatic principle. If being a good Christian meant giving up Donne, Milton, and Wordsworth, Newman was willing to make the sacrifice gladly, willingly, without a second thought. He did make it. Eliot could not, and Newman would have classed him with the weak-willed churchmen of the nineteenth century who allowed their love of civilization to subvert their duty to religion.

To whom then will we liken Newman? Among the laity, William F. Buckley seems a good candidate. Catholic, dogmatic, and conservative, he has tirelessly crusaded against the liberalism of the age. But even Buckley cannot measure up to the rigorous standards of Newmanism. His lingering affection for the American constitution and his wistful evocation of the principles of On Liberty expose his true nature. In modern parlance, Buckley is called a conservative, but his ideology is a species of nineteenth-century liberalism.

The connection between the modern thought of the right and the liberalism of Newman's age is clearer still in the case of Friedrich Hayek and his followers, whose notion of truth is adapted from the theories of Jefferson, Mill, and Stephen—the very thinkers whom Newman spent a lifetime refuting. Hayek's truth is “something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief.”⁴¹ Here, thinly veiled as twentieth-century political theory, is the dissolving spirit of Protestant relativism that scoffed at Newman's Catholic authority and Newman's Christian tradition. Newman is the devout opponent of the so-called conservatism of a Buckley or a Hayek.

Nor would Newman feel any kinship with the latest wave of critics who have come forward to denounce the prevailing liberalism of the modern world. He might applaud the insight of writers like Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, or John Gray, who have exposed the fallacies on which the liberal thought of Mill and Hayek rests. But Newman would find their alternative to liberalism only another species of the thing they purport to reject. They too are liberals in Newman's sense.

In his essays on liberalism, the political philosopher John Gray almost equals Newman in the vigor with which he attacks the intellectual and emotional bankruptcy of liberalism. Gray dismisses the claims of Mill and others to have discovered universal rights or to have measured human happiness. He looks forward to a post-liberal society that will abandon the rationalistic pretense to knowledge of absolutes and return instead to the study of customs rooted in the practical traditions of local history. Gray's sense of tradition might seem to place him in the orbit of Newman's thought—Newman the champion of the West's Christian legacy—and a similar intellectual debt seems owed by Alasdair MacIntyre, another advocate of tradition who within philosophy has analyzed and discarded the dominant liberalism of the modern era. MacIntyre venerates the memory of Newman and urges a return to the virtues of scholasticism. Here if nowhere else the heart of Newmanism seems to be preserved.

But if Newman's thought bears a superficial resemblance to anti-liberal philosophies like those of Gray or MacIntyre, his Catholicism is at bottom the opposite of their traditionalism. They love tradition because they can find no other ground for order and decency. Gray, for instance, proposes a “post-liberal form of theorizing” that “in abandoning the search for universal principles of justice or rights … also relinquishes the liberal illusion that theory can ever govern, or even substantially illuminate practice.”⁴² Following Oakeshott, Gray would abandon liberal ideology for traditional practice, not because tradition contains truth, but because there is no truth, and tradition alone provides a guide to experience in a world devoid of absolute values. MacIntyre's traditionalism likewise surrenders the central premise it seems to defend. “There are no tradition-independent standards of argument,” he writes, a concession that leaves Newman's theory of belief in ruins.⁴³ For Newman, the instincts are separable from tradition, and the dogmatic principles of Catholicism, though expressed in the heritage of Western thought, are independent of it. Gray and MacIntyre say that we should preserve tradition because we have nothing more serviceable to replace it. Newman would have recoiled from this argument from expediency. He insisted that Christianity be preserved not because it is useful as culture or inescapable as tradition, but because it is absolutely true. For Newman, theory can and does govern practice, and the post-liberalism of Oakeshott, Gray, or MacIntyre would seem to him only another liberal assault on truth.

Another school of critics, disciples of Leo Strauss, the favored philosopher of America's so-called neo-conservatives, has followed Newman in excoriating the crimes and follies of modernism. Newman would have dismissed them too as crypto-liberals. What does a Straussian diatribe like Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind have to do with Newman's dogmatic principle? Bloom and his fellow neoconservatives sing the praises of humanistic education, the very evil Newman so passionately resisted. The tradition they would impose on culture is not that of Aristotle's logic and Athanasius' doctrine but of Plato's dialectic and Locke's empiricism—Plato who made semi-Arians and Locke who festered in Socinianism!

In his lifetime Newman exposed the impossible position of high churchmen who revered Catholicism but loved England more. Anglicans, he thought, would eventually have to abandon the via media, choosing between Rome's dogmatic truth and England's heretical civilization. Today, Newman continues to be a reproach to so-called conservatives of Eliot's or Buckley's or Bloom's stripe who believe in similarly irreconcilable ideals. He would scorn the refurbished via media of the contemporary traditionalist who wants to enjoy the fruits of pluralism while denouncing its excesses. Newman considered these posturings a low species of dishonesty. The honest conservative ought either to embrace the dogmatic principle with all its implications for hierarchy, censorship, and totalitarianism, or else avow his own self-centered liberalism. It was the essence of Newmanism that no compromise is possible between these positions. You cannot be a heretic by halves. You cannot be a little bit liberal. There is for him “no medium between Atheism and Catholicity.”⁴⁴ That is why he left the Anglican communion. Those who are not for Newmanism are against it, and properly understood, Newman's is not a view of life that will win many friends among those who now pass for Western conservatives.

Among the clergy, perhaps Pope John Paul II has most fully adhered to Newman's Catholicism. He has fought to defend the ancient truths of the church in the face of incomprehension or even insubordination on the part of progressives within his own fold, and he, much more than the accommodating John XXIII, is the pope whom Newman would recognize as a worthy successor to Peter, Leo, and Gregory. And yet the pontificate of John Paul II has been a succession of struggles with a modernism that has rendered European and American Catholicism indistinguishable from anti-dogmatic Protestantism. The declining congregations of the Roman communion repeat the formulas of the schoolmen but perform the deeds of liberalism, espousing Socinian doctrine in practice if not in words. The nun who dreams of the ordination of women, the priest who campaigns for economic justice, the congregation that joins hands during the folk mass—what are these but manifestations of liberal pluralism, liberal politics, and liberal sentimentality, now ensconced within the Church itself? How many Western Catholics believe rightly about the Trinity—or care whether they believe rightly?

THE VIRTUES OF NEWMAN'S DISSENT

Is Newman's dissent from modernism anything more than a freak of intellectual history? Just because it is extreme and radical, Newman's indictment of liberalism commends itself to contemporary civilization both for its beauty and its utility.

Newman's scornful detachment from modern life provides two sorts of aesthetic satisfaction independent of its moral outrage. First, there is the pleasure evoked by any sweeping hypothesis that is simple, consistent, and comprehensive. Those of us inside the dynamo of liberalism see only accident, chaos, and confrontation. From his celestial perch Newman sees pattern, order, and cohesion. Newman is not usually given credit for his objectivity, but his pious invective should not prevent him from being recognized for the clinical grandeur of his vision. Newman's theory explains everything modern, and though its very comprehensiveness leaves it open to Karl Popper's objection that a “theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific,”⁴⁵ Newman would have argued that he was not creating anything so ordinary as falsifiable scientific theory. He was advancing truths which he could only do by rising to a lofty eminence beyond the suspect protocols of the liberals' version of knowledge.

The difficulty of achieving this lucid detachment can be gauged by the small number of those who have attained it compared to the multitudes who have tried. Perhaps only Nietzsche stood so far away from the culture about which he wrote. Another aesthetic reward of Newman's great dissent is the lucid purity of its irony, a quality Newman's writing shares with Nietzsche's.

Both Newman and Nietzsche were sublime satirists whose comedy the world has been slow to appreciate. The ordinary satirist writes from within the system he ridicules. He is a reformer, chastising what he would improve and subscribing to the same principles his victims profess but do not practice. But the sublime satirist mocks the principles as well as the hypocrisy of his contemporaries. Instinctively his readers sense that he is not one of them, and they do not easily laugh with their enemy. Nietzsche knew this well enough and addressed his revolutionary comedies to “the Hyperboreans,” his “predestined readers” of the future. The same readers who have learned to laugh with Nietzsche ought to derive a similar pleasure from the often hilarious pages of Newman's Idea of a University or the Lectures on Justification, and even a novice Hyperborean should howl with mirth when reading The Tamworth Reading Room. “One must be accustomed to living on mountains,” Nietzsche said.⁴⁶ His mountain was located in a future beyond liberalism, while Newman's was situated in the past before liberalism. But both achieved a rare detachment that has in the highest measure whatever value we accord to the objective study of human belief. In Nietzsche's case this objectivity was paid for in madness and alienation. The price of Newman's detachment from modernism was personal failure and eclipsed reputation. The Apologia is a testament defending this detachment very much in the spirit of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.

But Newman's critique has utilitarian as well as aesthetic value. It is arguably the most searching rebuke available to liberalism's cosmic pretensions, and it stands as an unanswered challenge to liberalism's most cherished principles.

Western culture presents itself in the guise of a fluid dialectic in which opposed beliefs contend for mastery. It revels in its illusions of difference, distinction, and division. Socialism vies with capitalism, popular with elite culture, the bourgeoisie with the proletariat. Left confronts right, and the dynamic of political opposition appears so strong that traditional parties collapse because there are as many ideologies as there are voters. Catholics, Protestants, and Jews are divided by internal contests between fundamentalists, moderates, and progressives, and all sects contend with the ever-bolder challenge of atheism or infidelity. Meanwhile, in the schools perpetual war seems to rage between myriad competing and irreconcilable creeds of science and interpretation.

In Newman's view, these clashes are only squabbles within a larger ideology that is universally shared and virtually unchallenged. For Newman all the heat of modern civilization is generated by one dark star of heresy. Newman invites us to examine our culture as a unified phenomenon. He had nothing but contempt for this phenomenon, but we can adopt his vantage without concurring in his prejudice. What we see from Newman's perspective is not a dynamic civilization in dialectical evolution but a static culture paralyzed by its universal acquiescence in a single stultifying doctrine. Newman called this doctrine liberalism, the anti-dogmatic principle.

“All heresies run together,” Newman said. Newman's definition of liberalism certainly embraces those who now go by the name liberal. They are steeped in Socinianism. But so-called conservatives are also liberals by Newman's definition. In our day, Newman's definition of liberal would embrace both the deconstructionist critic and the television evangelist, each of whom subscribes to the self-centered relativism of private judgment. It would include the Marxist revolutionary and the country-club Republican, who concur in a doctrine “made to consist in contemplating ourselves instead of Christ.” It would take in the abandoned hedonist and the Catholic modernist, the one seeking self-gratification in material pleasures, the other titillating himself by the manipulation of his religious feelings, and both believing in nothing beyond “the prison of our own sensations, the province of self.”⁴⁷ By Newman's standards, the triumph of liberalism has been so complete that the world looks in vain for somewhere to stand and assess its victory. For a moment Leninism seemed to offer a dogmatic alternative to liberalism, but now Leninism itself has succumbed to the pluralistic tendencies of glasnost and is vanishing into perestroika. The liberal philosopher Richard Rorty wants to believe that he belongs to a beleaguered minority of relativists.⁴⁸ Newman would have laughed at such self-aggrandizing delusion. Liberalism reigns supreme, he would say, and has invented the myth of its minority status as an excuse for the incessant republication of its now trite and aging slogans.

For fifteen hundred years and more what Newman described as liberalism was a heresy. The forces of virtue combined to suppress the opinions of Arius and Socinus, and as late as 1683 John Locke found it prudent to avoid the official censure of the English establishment by fleeing to Holland. Today, after a millennium and more in opposition, liberalism finds itself in uncontested command of the ideological field. Flush with a victory unparalleled except in the rise of Christendom, some liberals, in spite of Rorty's false modesty, have grown bolder in proclaiming liberalism's universal sovereignty. Forty years ago one group of liberals dared to speak of the death of ideology. More recently another school has triumphantly announced what the American policy-maker Francis Fukuyama calls “the end of history.” The end of history, which we are said to have now reached, is described as an absolute Hegelian moment, “a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.” Newman would agree with Fukuyama's assessment once it was rephrased in theological terms: the end of history is the worldwide victory of Antichrist in the Arian and pantheistic rationalism of liberal philosophy. Over a hundred years ago, Newman saw liberalism as “an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth.” Fukuyama has only translated Newman's observation into geopolitical language describing the collapse of communism and “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”⁴⁹

Newman considered the triumph of liberalism apocalyptic. Fukuyama finds it merely tedious:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.⁵⁰

This mournful elegy for the world we have lost to liberalism sounds like the invective of Newman's Tamworth Reading Room transposed into a minor key. But even though diagnosticians of the modern situation are unable to rise to his level of irony or anguish, Newman might find some solace in the fact that they have at least begun to glimpse what he understood so clearly—that liberalism promises individual freedom and social progress but delivers a new kind of ideological absolutism and cultural inertia. More and more, critics—even critics like Fukuyama or Gray, who are themselves what Newman would call liberals—are distressed that the victory of liberalism has been too complete.

For those who find the idea of post-historical liberalism terrifying or boring, Newman ought to be something of a prophet and martyr. Perhaps he will come to occupy in post-liberalism the place Thomas More occupied in liberalism itself. More, who died defending the dogmatic supremacy of the medieval papacy, was later hailed as a proto-liberal champion of toleration against the absolutism of the Tudor revolution.⁵¹ By defending the medieval order, More kept alive the possibility of fundamental opposition to the principles on which the new regime had constructed itself. Newman is in a similar position as regards our future. He would have no more stomach for the post-liberal world to come than More would have had for the godless Enlightenment, and yet each in his own way made a different future thinkable.

THE MASTER OF THOSE WHO DISSENT

With the anti-dogmatic principle entrenched even in the Kremlin, the liberal can now crow, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” but Newman is there to reply, “Still, you are not the universe. You do not contain me. I offer you a vantage from which you can examine yourself. I do not think you will like what you see.”

In our day, a consistently anti-liberal critique, in the sense in which Newman meant liberal, can be found hardly anywhere but in the pages of Newman. The usual critic of contemporary society is an intellectual contortionist driven by bad faith. He is the product and the secret devotee of the narcissism and vulgarity he denounces. He would not for a minute consider surrendering the liberal privileges and indulgences he pretends to attack. How refreshing, then, to read in Newman's account of the modern world one of the few critiques of modernism that can claim to mean what it says. The great virtue of Newman's critique of liberalism is that it exists at all. That there should be one consistent view of the world opposed to liberalism root and branch, sharing none of its premises and despising all of its works is an inestimable benefit, for no one more than the liberal himself. Without some honest and unforgiving voice such as Newman's, the liberal would be lost in the labyrinth of his own ideology. He would smugly assume that the paradoxical tenets of his creed are what Jefferson assured him they were, self-evident truths.

Newman challenges this complacency. The poverty of feeling without belief, the politics that is expediency, and the humanism that denies truth all fall within the scope of Newman's invective and receive from him no quarter. He treats the ugliest manifestations of liberalism with the contempt they deserve but rarely provoke. Newman is the master of those who dissent.

Unfortunately, the price Newman would exact for acquiescence in his critique is submission to his theory of belief. There is no middle way for him, no via media that will preserve the holy truths of orthodoxy without sacrificing the benefits of liberal progress. Newman's logic is compelling. His argument that so-called moderates and conservatives are trapped in an indefensible paradox is persuasive, and he is entirely convincing when he contends that the modern world must choose between truth and heresy. He believed that an honest recognition of this stark choice would make the decision easy, and here too we may agree with him. As he presents them, heresy is in every way superior to truth.

Newman's great dissent is a timely reminder to liberalism that its vitality lies in its heterodoxy. As the twentieth century draws to a close, liberalism no longer seems much like a heresy or even an ideology. But for all its protestations, liberalism cannot escape the consequences of its own relativism. It can never take its first principles for granted but must always be proving their strength and their utility. And this relativity is the heretical virtue of liberalism. Without violating its own anti-dogmatism, it cannot assert the existence of its own absolute truth, and it remains humane only so long as it refrains from assuming the mantle of dogma and imposing those mental and social repressions implied by Newman's theory of belief. As long as liberalism remembers that it is a heresy and fights against the truth, the possibilities of relative decency and tolerant forbearance remain alive.

Newman hoped that liberalism would forget its heretical origins and be undone by its own success. “To denounce ideologies in general is to set up an ideology of one's own,” is a law enunciated by E. H. Carr.⁵² Newman thought that liberalism would forget this law. Once liberalism had mistaken itself for truth, he assumed that it would choke on its own doctrines. It would no longer be able to control its own excesses because it could not challenge the principles from which they arose. As a heresy believing in no truth, liberalism might still be able to question and alter its doctrines, since even its most cherished presuppositions would not be beyond the reproach of its Arian skepticism. But as a self-proclaimed truth, liberalism was sure to fail. It could no more renounce egoism and materialism than a Catholic could repudiate faith and reverence—both would be unimpeachable expressions of unquestioned doctrines, except that one was the expression of false beliefs fated to ruin and the other of imperishable truths destined to last forever.

True to half of Newman's prediction, liberalism seems determined to become what John Gray calls “an expression on intolerance.”⁵³ It remains to be seen if it will fulfill the second part of Newman's prophecy and sink under the weight of its hypocritical dogmatism. Newman was sure that it would. He thought that the inevitable collapse of liberalism might be hastened by exploiting its internal inconsistencies. If, on the one hand, modern society was truly tolerant, then the Catholic could avail himself of this heretical forbearance to nurture his faith and plan for that “restoration in the moral world” which will be the second spring of true belief.⁵⁴ In due course, liberalism would destroy itself, and in the general disorder of ruined pluralism there would be time enough to restore the Inquisition, the hierarchy, and the other dogmatic institutions necessary to crush liberalism forever. If, on the other hand, modern society sought to suppress the dogmatists, it would reveal its hypocrisy while simultaneously invigorating the cause of orthodoxy, as persecution is wont to do. This double bind is the implicit challenge that Newman offered liberal society in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. In our day, Leninism and Islam have articulated the logic of Newman's strategy in action, and if liberalism knew how to reply to Newman, it would also know how to deal with the true believers who continue to challenge its humanistic premises. Newman was among the first to demonstrate how terrorism might subvert liberal society.

Andrew Marvell said that the liberal principles that inspired the English Revolution of the 1640s constituted a cause “too good to have been fought for.”⁵⁵ The virtues of a free and tolerant society are so self-evident to liberals like Marvell that they invest their principles with inevitability. But Newman reminds the liberal that his beliefs are not universally accepted, that his ideology is a frail coalition of heresies, that in the fourth century ascendant liberalism was crushed by an outnumbered orthodoxy, and that for a thousand years it struggled in dissent. In opposition, liberalism was precarious, and in victory it threatens to become the one good custom that corrupts the world. Anyone who believes in the principles of liberalism—that is, in the anti-dogmatic principle—must come away from the pages of Newman humbled by the knowledge that liberalism is not a truth but a heresy, and a heresy too good not to be fought for by being fought against.

Notes

1. George Eliot, Letters (New Haven, 1954-78), 1: 120-21; and see Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1986), p. 217. Chapter 7 of Annan's biography is an invaluable survey of the Victorians “Rhetoric of Truth.”

2. On Liberty (New York, 1975; Norton Critical ed.), p. 42.

3. On Liberty, p. 35.

4. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2d ed. (New York, 1952), p. 73. To turn Mill into a logical positivist it is necessary to discard his contention “that the propositions of logic and mathematics have the same status as empirical hypotheses.” Mill had conceded too much to scholastic reasoning by this admission, Ayer alleged. “The truths of logic and mathematics are analytical propositions or tautologies,” says Ayer. They are true “because we never allow them to be anything else” (p. 77). In his inelegant way Hampden had attempted to express the same thought.

5. The Emotions and the Will (London, 1859), pp. 568, 47: “The temper of belief, confidence, or assurance in coming good is, in the first place, the total exclusion of all this misery; in so far the influence is simply preventive or remedial” (p. 575). Here is the beginning of a psychological theory that would treat Newman's Catholicism as an exercise in pathology.

6. See Apo., p. 341.

7. A sentence from the University Sermons shattered Froude's faith in Newman's capacity for truth: “Scripture, for instance, says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary; and science, that the earth moves, and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth, till we know what motion is?” (U.S., p. 348). To Froude, this analysis meant that “Scripture tells us nothing except what may be a metaphysical unattainable truth”—a conclusion neither he nor any other serious Victorian could accept (Nemesis of Faith, 2d ed. [London, 1849], p. 158).

8. “Origen and Celsus,” Short Studies: Fourth Series (London, 1883), pp. 280-81.

9. History of English Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, 3d ed. (1902; reprinted, New York, 1949), 1: 12, 17.

10. See the introduction to Mansel's Limits of Religious Thought, 3d ed. (London, 1859), p. xxv.

11. Limits of Religious Thought, p. 61.

12. Limits of Religious Thought, p. xxi.

13. Essays on Church and State (London, 1952), pp. 465, 421.

14. Lectures on Modern History (New York, 1961), p. 77.

15. Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton (London, 1917), 1: 67.

16. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York, 1968), p. 155.

17. See Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (Cambridge, 1957), p. x. Chadwick rightly notes that “Newman never believed in progress,” and therefore is an unlikely candidate to be placed among the Darwinists (p. 97), but the notion that the Essay on Development is “the theological counterpart of the Origin of Species” still persists; see Ker, p. 300.

18. Phil. N., 2: 158.

19. Idea, p. 74.

20. “I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us” (Origin of Species, 6th ed. [1872; New York, 1958], p. 88 [ch. 4]).

21. Paul Levi, describing the shared ideology of Bloomsbury intellectuals and Cambridge Apostles, in G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (New York, 1979), p. 62.

22. See Quinton's article on knowledge and belief in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967), 4: 345. H. H. Price, Belief (London, 1969), is one of a handful of books devoted to belief since Newman's day, but in the liberal spirit of the age, Price comes down in favor of “an empiricist view of religion” by which theistic belief can be scientifically verified (pp. 487-88). Nathan is an ardent exponent of the anti-dogmatic principle and excludes the study of belief as a remnant of medieval superstition: “When Christianity took over, human behaviour ceased to be based on a real thing, the brain, and was considered to arise from a wisp of nothingness, the soul” (The Nervous System, 2d ed. [Oxford, 1982], p. 168).

23. Michael Gazzaniga, The Social Brain (New York, 1985), pp. 197, 180. Perhaps a liberal explanation can be found for the coincidence of Newman's and Gazzaniga's rhetoric. Gazzaniga was raised a devout Catholic for whom “absolution followed by receiving Holy Communion gave rise to the most intense feelings of worth,” p. 203. Does this mean that Gazzaniga's science is suspect because it might be the product of his Catholic belief or is this a confirmation of Newman's thesis that correct belief is the foundation of valid science?

24. The Social Brain, p. 7.

25. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1961), p. 73.

26. H.S., 2: 141.

27. Apo., p. 15

28. “Dying prematurely, as he did, and in the conflict and transition-state of opinion, his religious views never reached their ultimate conclusion, by the very reason of their multitude and their depth” (Apo., p. 34).

29. Apo., p. 204.

30. Apo., pp. 137, 44.

31. Apo., p. 15.

32. Apo., pp. 15, 17; Confessions, 8. 12.

33. Apo., p. 108.

34. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; (1902; New York, 1982), p. 48.

35. Apo., p. 214.

36. Apo., pp. 225-26.

37. Carlyle, Past and Present (Boston, 1965; Riverside ed.), pp. 271-72.

38. Idea, pp. 256-57.

39. “Thoughts After Lambeth,” Selected Essays (New York, 1964), p. 342. Eliot paid Newman the compliment of citing him as the legitimate successor of the metaphysical poets, whose legacy had been destroyed in the eighteenth century. He wrote to Richard Aldington, “I am not sure that the greatest nineteenth-century poets (in your sense!) are not Ruskin and Newman. Do you know them well?” (Letters [New York, 1988], 1:470). Eliot did know them well and shared Newman's fondness for ecclesiastical tribunals: “Some time ago, during the consulship of Lord Brentford, I suggested that if we were to have a Censorship at all, it ought to be at Lambeth Palace; but I suppose that the few persons who read my work thought that I was trying to be witty” (Selected Essays, p. 323). Like Newman, Eliot affected to believe in an ideal English past when Church and state had collaborated in the defence of Christian civilization. Newman idolized the dogmatic Stuarts. Eliot's nostalgia looked further back to the Plantagenets. He wore a white rose and attended mass every August 22 to commemorate the death on Bosworth Field of England's last rightful monarch, Richard III. See Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (New York, 1984), p. 166.

40. “Second Thoughts about Humanism,” Selected Essays, pp. 436, 438.

41. The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944), p. 163.

42. Gray, Liberalisms (New York, 1989), p. 236.

43. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN, 1988), p. 403. MacIntyre concedes that his Newmanism is laden with so much “qualification and addition … that it seems better to proceed independently, having first acknowledged a massive debt” (p. 354).

44. Apo., p. 179.

45. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York, 1965), p. 36.

46. The Anti-Christ (New York, 1968), pp. 114-15.

47. Jfc., pp. 325, 330.

48. Rorty classes himself with the “ironist intellectuals” who do not believe in “an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.” Supposedly, the ironists “are far outnumbered” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Cambridge, 1989], p. xv).

49. Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer, 1989), pp. 4, 13.

50. Fukuyama, p. 18.

51. Where Cardinal Wolsey as chancellor assumed a benign and secular indifference in matters of heresy, More in the same office permitted the Church a much freer hand in dogmatic persecutions. “More's record in the matter is rather that of convinced and high-minded sixteenth-century believer that he was, than that of the nineteenth-century moderate liberal he is so often made out to be” (G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors [London, 1962], p. 111).

52. The New Society (Boston, 1957), p. 16. And see also the discussion of “the death of ideology” in Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Liberalism (Oxford, 1984). Arblaster concludes that “the best of liberalism is too good to be left to the liberals” (p. 348), another way of saying what Newman prophesied, that in our age liberal values are the shared property of all creeds.

53. Liberalisms, p. 239.

54. “The Second Spring,” O.S., p. 169.

55. The Rehearsal Transpros'd (Oxford, 1971), p. 135.