Chapter 28: Debate on How to Make Men Moral
CHAPTER 28
DEBATE ON HOW TO
MAKE MEN MORAL
DURING the crisis of Tract 90, Newman wished to remain quiet, hoping that the storm would blow over. For such a prolific writer, his silence could only be but a relative one. He was silent to the public at large about Tract 90, but otherwise he wrote a considerable amount during 1841. His primary focus was the translation of treatises by St. Athanasius, but he wrote seven articles for The Times, several articles for the British Critic, and prepared another volume of sermons for publication.
In January, at the opening of a new library and reading room at Tamworth, Sir Robert Peel delivered an address on education, which soon drew a lot of attention. Peel was a Member of Parliament for this town in Staffordshire, Northeast of Birmingham. Peel argued that natural sciences would improve the lot of farmers and industrial workers and would lead to an elevation of moral character. He stipulated that the library would not have books with controversial religious views, and although its board would include two clergymen, no discussions on religious differences would be permitted.
John Walter II, son of the owner of The Times, and his father convinced Newman to reply. The result was seven letters published during the month of February in The Times under the name “CATHOLICUS.” The letters anticipated parts of Newman’s Idea of a University written twenty years later. The letters were a sharp criticism of Lord Henry Brougham’s educational and religious philosophy. Brougham, a major proponent of the Reform Bill, had been one of the leaders promoting the so-called Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the establishment of the University of London in 1827. One of his main ideas, typical of the enlightened deist, was the exclusion of religion from higher education.
Newman criticized Peel, who despite his sincere adherence to the Anglican Church, followed Brougham’s notions that learning in physical sciences makes persons moral individuals:
[T]hat the mind is changed by a discovery, or saved by a diversion, and can thus be amused into immortality,—that grief, anger, cowardice, self-conceit, pride, or passion, can be subdued by an examination of shells or grasses, or inhaling of gases, or chipping of rocks, or calculating the longitude, is the veriest of pretences which sophist or mountebank ever professed to a gaping auditory. If virtue be a mastery over the mind, if its end be action, if its perfection be inward order, harmony, and peace, we must seek it in graver and holier places than in Libraries and Reading-rooms.1
Newman focused on the deist’s underlying idea that religion is superfluous and that man is either in no need of salvation or that he is saved by the awe produced by nature and the knowledge of its order and complexity. Newman ridiculed the assertion made by Peel of the power of scientific knowledge to someone on a deathbed. In contrast to Brougham’s deistic ideas, Newman asserted that only grace could heal and cleanse man of his moral diseases. Vice cannot be removed by human methods. He wrote that “Christianity, and nothing short of it, must be made the element and principle of all education.”2 Newman was far from dismissing the benefits of poetry, metaphysics, history, physics, or mathematics. He was pointing to the experience that Christianity, not literature or philosophy, converts men.
In the fourth letter to the The Times, Newman addressed Brougham’s view of study of the New Testament as opinion, and Peel’s notion of doctrine as “controversial divinity.” Unlike Brougham, Peel thought that science leads to religion, albeit through a long and unsafe road that most cannot travel. Wishing to avoid controversy, however, he ended up putting religion aside. Newman took offense at Peel’s caricature of doctrine and his belief that secular knowledge is the principle of social unity. For Peel, religion and political parties were synonymous; religious controversy was divisive and should be put aside for the sake of the State. According to Newman, Peel, inspired by Brougham, rejected faith as the fulcrum of society, and substituted it for secular knowledge. The old bond that united men was faith; the new one is knowledge. Faith was the source of division. Displaying great mastery in his command of satire, Newman described Brougham’s new pantheon of saints whose members were characterized for their “pursuit of knowledge,” including the likes of Julian the Apostate and Cromwell.
In another letter, Newman insinuated the proper relationship between faith and reason. Religion suggests to science the conclusions that science reaches after its own study. “Science gives us the grounds or premises from which religious truths are to be inferred; but it does not set about inferring, much less does it reach the inference—that is not its province.”3 It is up to Christianity to take facts, give them meaning and draw conclusions from them, but people live and die upon a dogma; no one will die a martyr for a conclusion.4 Newman asserted that for the majority of people, logical syllogisms are not the way to know God, and that “Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences: we shall never have done beginning if we determine to begin with proof.”5
Newman refuted the idea that secular knowledge is the moral foundation for people’s lives. “Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.”6 Faith comes to us in many ways, including Revelation, the influence of others, the effect of events and history. With his capacity for irony Newman wrote: “But if we commence with scientific knowledge and argumentative proof, or lay any great stress upon it as the basis of personal Christianity, or attempt to make man moral and religious by Libraries and Museums, let us in consistency take chemists for our cooks, and mineralogists for our masons.”7
In his last letter to the The Times, in reply to Peel’s Address at the Tamworth Reading Room, Newman repeated the idea that physical science does not lead necessarily to religious thoughts or practice. It only does so in the person who is already religious. The reason that science cannot make men religious is that it does not seek the final causes as philosophy does.8 The created world can be read as a work or as a machine. If it is considered a creation, then it is studied with awe; if it is considered a machine, then it is studied with mere curiosity.9 But this awe in itself is no substitute for religion. In fact, for Peel, awe makes man feel the “the moral dignity of his exalted nature” as if man were fine without religion.10
Brougham had gone further, expressing that knowledge of the marvelous works of the Great Architect of Nature was reason for gratification of man’s natural strength and the powers of his mind. Newman commented that this self-worship of man was deplorable. He agreed that nature is more wonderful than any manmade object, such as a watch, “but wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads. What the physical creation presents to us in itself is a piece of machinery, and when men speak of a Divine Intelligence as its Author, this god of theirs is not the Living and True, unless the spring is the god of a watch, or steam the creator of the engine.”11
At Trinity College Newman became interested in mathematics and the physical sciences like astronomy. He realized though that in the empirical sciences one deals with tangible realities, and that these can actually lead to a desire to explain all of reality from material principles. He wrote: “To those who are conscious of matter, but not conscious of mind, it seems more rational to refer all things to one origin, such as they know, than to assume the existence of a second origin such as they know not. It is Religion, then, which suggests to Science its true conclusions; the facts come from Knowledge, but the principles come of Faith.”12
Far from discarding the physical sciences he wished to establish that faith points the way to science, and that the reverse is not always true. He would expound on this relationship between science and theology in The Idea of a University.
Although an attempt was made to keep the authorship of the Letters secret, Newman worried that his attack on Peel would jeopardize Pusey’s chance of becoming bishop. The keenness of his accusations and the severe tone of the Letters are somewhat surprising. They conjure the image of a ferocious lion springing upon his prey, but the tone was characteristic of Newman when he thought something serious was at stake. More than an attack on Peel’s belief about the place of religion and theology in education, the Letters were an attack on deistic principles concerning not only useful knowledge acquired through physical science, but also the underlying premises of the power of knowledge to procure man’s moral excellence without religion.
NEW EDITORSHIP FOR THE BRITISH CRITIC
In April, Newman gave advice to Thomas, the new editor: “Do begin and write some articles yourself at once—there’s a good fellow, and get a stock. Your present articles are MAGNIFICENT.”13 He warned him to be careful in personal comments on people: “You will get horsewhipped if you do so often.”14 In the transition period, he spent a lot of time teaching the new editor his work and suggesting topics for articles as well as writers. Newman helped Thomas prepare his first issue as editor, which came out in July, and also wrote for the July issue an article titled “Private Judgment.”
The new editor got off to a bad start with an article on Godfrey Faussett titled “The Oxford Margaret Professor.” Faussett had come out with a pamphlet against Tract 90 and the Tractarians. Newman thought it was a good idea to write about Faussett, whom he called “a fat dog who comes out to bark once to two years [sic],” and told Thomas: “I think you can be strong and yet be bland and temperate.”15 Newman, however, did not see the article before it came out and later regretted its un-Christian tone. A few days later he composed a prayer asking God’s forgiveness for any judgmental and critical spirit toward Faussett.16
Mozley’s first issue raised complaints from readers, and Keble asked Newman to do something about Mozley, but Newman stuck by him. Pusey raised a larger issue with Newman: would the British Critic represent all or some in the Movement? He was quite upset at Oakeley’s article on the English Reformers in which he had accused the Reformers of being at first a political movement lacking in doctrine.17 Pusey thought the journal should express all views or say nothing about the Reformers. Newman replied that he had tried to make the journal literary and scientific instead of theological but had failed.18
In September of 1841, the Archbishop of Canterbury summoned Pusey to Lambeth Palace, asking him to keep Newman from controversy in the British Critic. A few months later in December, Newman voiced the idea of stopping the British Critic. He asked Mozley for his opinion and told him, “I think our course is to be quiet … The strength of our opponents is in there being something to attack. It is truly Protestant. If we are silent, they are a rope of sand.”19 After the second issue of the British Critic under Mozley, attacks upon the Tractarians had increased. Newman only wrote one more article for the British Critic. The end of Newman’s editorship of the British Critic was the close of another rich chapter in Newman’s life and writing. In 1842 he moved definitively to Littlemore with the hope of living in a more peaceful setting and dedicating more time to prayer.
LITTLEMORE AND ATHANASIUS
Newman had already spent Lent in 1841 at Littlemore. In July he again stayed at Littlemore. He rented a second-story bedroom and a study on the ground floor from a Miss Sarah Burford. Here Newman worked with intensity on a translation of Athanasius for the Library of the Church Fathers. For a few weeks during the winter of that year, he even worked ten to twelve hours per day on the translation.20 He had the help of Christie, and consulted Dr. Routh on certain passages.21 In July, Newman bought some stables and a barn that formed the shape of an L adjacent to the property that he had bought in May of the previous year. Newman made plans to turn the stables into one room “cottages” that would serve as cells for him and other men who might join him later on. In February 1842, Newman moved to Littlemore for the season of Lent. In addition to dedicating more time to prayer, he supervised the construction of bookcases and turned the barn into a library. When the bookcases were ready, Newman transferred his library to Littlemore. The previous year Newman had spent £858 acquiring books. He wrote to his sister Jemima that these books were an investment.22 Dalgairns said that Newman’s library was enviable and that men without a Fellowship could come and read under Newman. At this time Newman had a new resident curate at St. Mary’s in Oxford, David Lewis from Jesus College. Copeland continued as Newman’s curate at Littlemore.
Onlookers considered the “monastic life” as a sign of his future conversion to Rome. Richard Jelf, a Tutor at Oriel, was alarmed by Newman’s monastic plans, and when the bishop of Oxford heard similar rumors he wrote to Newman asking for an explanation.23 Newman replied that he was not starting a monastery. He had withdrawn from all public discussions of Church matters and wished to devote himself to theological studies, the concerns of his parish, and practical works. He sought a place for a “life of greater religious regularity”24 and to have some guests spend time with him. He did not intend to establish a monastery; the house would not have a chapel or refectory. Newspapers misrepresented Newman’s intentions, and Newman told the bishop that he was hurt that sacred matters of his conscience were made public talk.25
The leader of the Oxford Movement sought peace and quiet to pray and to study. As the attacks on Tract 90 continued, he needed to be out of Oxford. In some sense Newman was pushed out of Oxford; he had been silenced and almost “exiled” by his bishop and other bishops. Surely Newman felt inspired by St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who in the fourth century had been exiled from his See by the emperor for preaching the truth. Newman considered Athanasius a great champion of the Catholic faith.
Newman never intended a formal monastery, but writing to intimate friends he called the home at Littlemore their μονε, or monastery. When his friend H. A. Woodgate hinted that Newman could be named bishop, Newman made the humorous retort:
You forget that I am an incipient Monk, in my noviciate at the least. I am preparing a Monastery at Littlemore and shall shortly retire from the world—so if the great prospects are destined for me you speak of, I shall be the first Bishop from the Cloister for the last three hundred years—and while I am about it, think (since Sir R.W. said that everyone had his price) that I will not come out of it except for the Papacy.26
At Littlemore during July 1841, Newman reflected on the state of the English Church. In the article “Private Judgments,” he advocated that when a person looks at two religious bodies that profess to be Catholic and are bearing good fruits, a person should remain in the one in which Providence has placed him, instead of risking making an unwarranted mistake. Newman now believed the English Church suffered the note of schism, but he argued that the Roman Church suffered the practical error of idolatry by superstitious veneration of Mary and the saints. He concluded a long discussion of instances of “private judgment” in the Bible as follows:
It is then a Note of the Christian Church, as decisive as any, that she is not idolatrous; and any semblance of idolatrous worship in the Church of Rome as plainly dissuades a man of Catholic feelings from her communion, as the taint of a Protestant or schismatical spirit in our communion may tempt him to depart from us. This is the Via Media which we would maintain; and thus without judging Rome on the one hand, or acquiescing in our own state on the other, we may use what we see, as a providential intimation to us, not to quit what is bad for what may be worse, but to learn resignation to what we inherit, nor seek to escape into a happier state by suicide.27
It was in this same month, however, that Newman was visited a second time by the “ghost of antiquity.” Some years before, he had seen how in the fourth century, the voice of Rome had decided Trinitarian controversies with the Arians. Now studying Athanasius’s writings on the Arians he realized that the modern day Anglicans resembled the semi-Arians of the 5th century, while the Church of Rome was the center of orthodoxy. Newman was left in a state of perplexity regarding the Anglican Church’s claim to catholicity. His doubts only grew as attacks on Tract 90 increased and the plans to establish the joint Anglican–Lutheran Jerusalem Bishopric were drawn up.
Newman decided to divide the publication of Select Treatises of St. Athanasius in Controversy with the Arians into two volumes. The first volume appeared in 1842 and the second one in 1844. The translation was a literal one because Newman knew that a non-literal translation would fan fears about the Catholic principles of the Tractarians. At the end of his life Newman undertook a freer translation of some of Athanasius’s works, which would remain faithful to the bishop’s teaching. It would be the last book that Newman published in his life. The study of St. Athanasius had been both Newman’s first and last “passion.”28
During this “exile” at Littlemore, Newman said the translation of Athanasius had led him to understand the state of schism of the Anglican Church. Even so, Newman endeavored to find reasons to remain in the Anglican Church and to speak of the duty to do so. The result of these thoughts on the subject was expressed in his article “Private Judgment” in the British Critic and the four sermons on the Notes of the Church.
The year 1841 following the publication of Tract 90 had been a painful one. Newman had acquiesced to his bishop’s desire that the Tracts be stopped, and at the middle of the year had relinquished the editorship of the British Critic. It was a painful time for him because many bishops fired their charges against him and the Tractarians, and out of obedience to his bishop he was unable to respond. The bishops had not done the same to the extreme Evangelicals, who ignored the Articles concerning Baptism and Justification, or to the Liberals such as Arnold and Hampden, who held a rationalist interpretation of Scripture and theology.29
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1John Henry Newman, Discussion and Arguments, “Tamworth Reading Room,” Letter II, 268; available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/arguments/tamworth/section2.html.
2John Henry Newman, Discussion and Arguments, DA Letter III, 274, available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/arguments/index.html.
3DA, Letter VI, 292-93.
4Ibid., 293.
5Ibid., 295.
6Ibid., 295.
7Ibid., 295-96.
8DA, Letter VII, 299.
9Ibid., 300.
10Ibid., 301.
11DA, Letter VII, 302.
12Ibid., 300.
13LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to Thomas Mozley (April 1, 1841), 150-51; 151.
14Ibid.
15LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to T. Mozley (June 12, 1841), 204.
16AW, 216-17.
17LD, Vol. VIII, E.B. Pusey to JHN (July 27, 1841), 232-34; 233.
18LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to E. B. Pusey (July 30, 1841), 234-35; 234.
19LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to Thomas Mozley (December 13, 1841), 373-74; 373.
20LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to H. A. Woodgate (November 12, 1841), 326-27; 327.
21LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to M. J. Routh (November 15, 1841), 333-34.
22LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to Mrs. John Mozley (February 12, 1841), 34, and footnote n. 4.
23LD, Vol. VIII, Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford to JHN (April 12, 1842), 504.
24LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford (April 14, 1842), 504-07; 505.
25Ibid.
26LD, Vol. VIII, JHN to H. A. Woodgate (September 22, 1841), 276-78; 277-78. R.W. was Robert Walpole, the British Statesman (1667-1745).
27“Private Judgment” in Ess. II, 370. First published in British Critic, July 1841.
28LD, Vol. XXVII, JHN to Edward B. Pusey (April 20, 1874), 56-7; Ian Ker, 714.
29Trevor, Newman, Pillar of the Cloud, 258.