Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (39 page)

His discovery of the
Via Media’s
heretical position in 1839, for example, starts with the promise that he will now relate the ‘course of that great revolution of mind’. But he repeatedly delays the promised delivery for eight thousand words as he teases the reader with stratagems of suspense. He asks how he is to ‘gird’ himself for the tale he has volunteered (‘gird’ suggesting the Israelites preparing for their great wilderness journey) while deprived of ‘calm leisure’, ‘calm contemplation’. Yet these irenic references only serve to emphasise the anticipation of the ‘extreme trial’ to come. It is, he tells us, the ‘
infandum dolorum
’ (unutterable suffering) – a phrase plucked without explanation or citation from Virgil’s
Aeneid
Book Two.

It is no mere flourish of a classicist. Aeneas is speaking to Queen Dido in Carthage. She has asked him to tell the story of the fall of Troy, and he declares that the obligation to relive the terrible events would be unbearable. The original line in Virgil – ‘
Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolerem
’ – might be translated: ‘Beyond all words, O Queen, is the grief you ask me to recount.’ The allusion might not have been at all obscure to a literate Victorian readership. The phrase is often repeated by the Sancho Panza figure, Partridge, in Fielding’s
Tom Jones
, a best-seller in the 1860s. It also featured in a popular anecdote told in
Punch
in April 1860, about Good Queen Bess asking a schoolboy to give an account of being flogged: upon which the clever lad responded with that famous line ‘
Infandum
…’ The phrase suggests the Church of England, as Troy, sacrificed in the interests of the flourishing of Rome. Between the lines, moreover, one detects the calm before the tragic break between Aeneas and Dido, followed by Dido’s suicide, and her haunting ghostly presence. (The ‘
infandum
’ phrase is also employed by Dante as he meets Dido’s ghost in the
Inferno
). And Newman is about to make skilful use of the ghostly images.

The terrible, ‘unutterable’, trial ahead is Newman’s recognition of the Church of England as a heretical Church, and the row that would follow. The trial, New-man tells us, was akin to a ‘cruel operation’, involving the ‘ripping up of old griefs’, images that anticipate two subsequent mutilation and death anecdotes. While arguing in the post-1841 section that attack is the best form of defence (he means the battles he had over
Tract 90
), he proclaims: ‘We all know the story of the convict who on the scaffold bit off his mother’s ear.’
²⁸
He rams the point home by confessing that he had been in a ‘humour, certainly to bite off the ears [of Anglican divines]’. Then, a page on, he makes manifest the ‘cruel operation’, with the story of an injured sailor persuaded to have his leg amputated at sea:

Then, they broke it to him that he must have the other off too. The poor fellow said, ‘You should have told me that, gentlemen’, and deliberately unscrewed the instrument and bled to death.
29

The gruesome story, told in the final stage of his conversion, illustrates a degree of mordant humour in his sympathy for Anglican friends who had followed him into the
Via Media
, cutting themselves off from their many ties and associations, only to be devastated by the news of a further severance: his reception into the Catholic Church. ‘How could I ever hope to make them believe in a second theology, when I had cheated them in the first?’
³⁰
The word ‘cheat’ is, again, disturbingly ironic: for cheating is the accusation levelled by Dido against Aeneas, and by Kingsley against Newman. Severed love, execu-tions, ear-bitings, amputations, blood letting, suicides, connect with the arresting image of Newman on his ‘death bed’. He found himself, he writes, on his ‘death bed’ as far as the Anglican Church was concerned, an image that recalls the death bed scenes of his father, his sister Mary, his mother, and his beloved Hurrell Froude.

The critical moment of his shift towards Catholicism had occurred in the long vacation of 1839 when, as we have seen, he read the history of the Monophysite heresy, recognising that the Church of England was similarly heretical. ‘The shadow of the fifth century was on the sixteenth’, he writes: in other words the early Christian heresy anticipated the heresy of the Reformation Church. The ‘shadow’, however, now becomes ‘a spirit rising from the troubled waters of the old world, with the shape and lineaments of the new’,
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culminating in the recognition of a second parallel heresy, that of the Donatists. Then there came the ‘shadow of a hand upon the wall’. The shadow is a precursor to the shadow as ‘shade’ or ghost. ‘He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had never seen it’,
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2
he writes. The ghost points back to his original introduction, and his intention to dismiss the ‘ghost that gibbers’ instead of the real ‘me’. The shadow as mirror image, moreover, connects with two further moments in Newman’s story: ‘I saw my face in that mirror and I was a Monophysite’, and the stunning line that follows his reception into the Catholic Church: ‘If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator.’
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The significance is far from Freud’s ‘blindness of the seeing eye’ or D. W. Winnicott’s patient: ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if the child looked into the mirror and saw nothing.’
³⁴
But the image captures dynamically, and with a hint even of gothic horror (vampires traditionally do not reflect in mirrors), the potent shock of the image shared by psychoanalysts a century on. Certain of the personal presence of a Creator in the inner depths of conscience, the darkness of the world – already alluded to in the ‘
infandum
’, is an extension to another Virgilian reference: that ‘the stars of the heaven were one by one going out’ – the sense that God has withdrawn from his creation: and that nature is ‘out of joint with the purposes of its Creator’. Hence were it not for the voice of God ‘speak-

ing so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pan-theist, or a polytheist when I looked into the world’.
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Towards the climax of this summation of the annihilation which ‘fills me with unspeakable distress’, he comes to an impression of the wholesale suffering, evil and darkness of the world:

the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, ‘having no hope and without God in the world’, all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.
36

FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY

Such is his conviction of the absence of God that standard rational arguments and proofs for His existence, through nature and history, leave him cold. He sees humanity as a tree in winter waiting for spring time. Attempts to find God through the exercise of reason, such as the presence of design in the world, he writes, ‘do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice’.
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His sense of the world’s futility, vanity, evil and darkness, matches and exceeds the vision of many of the great poets of the age: Wordsworth’s ‘still, sad music of humanity’, Matthew Arnold’s ‘turbid ebb and flow of human misery’, Thomas Hardy’s procession following the dead God, as ‘darkling and languid-lipped, we creep and grope’. With chilling foresight Newman proceeds to declare that ‘things are tending, – with far greater rapidity than in that old time from the circumstance of the age, – to atheism in one shape or other … not only Europe, but every government and every civilization through the world, which is under the influence of the European mind!’
³⁸
For Newman ‘the sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of “lamentations, and mourning, and woe” ’.
39

Like an orphan child, ‘of good make and mind’, and a ‘refined nature’, thrown into the world without provision, family connexions, or birth-place, the human race appears, writes Newman, a ‘heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact’. Hence: ‘Either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense dis-carded from His presence.’

And so I argue about the world,
if
there be a God,
since
there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.
40

From original sin, Newman moves rapidly, not by proof, but by imaginative intuition, to a conviction of a divine ‘interposition’ that is both extraordinary and necessary. Given that reason moves ‘towards a simple unbelief in matters of religion’, he ‘supposes’ it to be ‘the Will of the Creator to interfere in human affairs, and to make provisions for retaining in the world a knowledge of himself, so definite and distinct as to be proof against the energy of human scepticism’. In other words, ‘there is nothing to surprise the mind, if He should think fit to introduce a power into the world invested with the prerogative of infallibility in religious matters’.

Such a provision would be a direct, immediate, active, and prompt means of withstanding the difficulty; it would be an instrument suited to the need; and, when I find that this is the very claim of the Catholic Church, not only do I feel no difficulty in admitting the idea, but there is a fitness in it, which recommends it to my mind. And thus I am brought to speak of the Church’s infallibility, as a provision, adapted by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain that freedom of thought, which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses.
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But is the individual to submit to the Church’s version of redemption uncritically and unthinkingly? Individual liberty of conscience and reason, he insists in the final section of the
Apologia
, is protected by the infallibility of the Catholic Church, for it saves them from those inevitable self-destructive tendencies. The ‘energy of the human intellect … 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.’ In Newman’s view the tension between the Church’s authority and private judgment creates a dynamic, imaginative energy in which dogma and freedom of intellect are mutually kept in check.

… it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both com-batants in that awful, never-dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a reaction of Reason against it; and, 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 …
42

THE RECEPTION

The
Apologia
was enthusiastically reviewed, and Kingsley was widely deemed to have been trounced. Among the book’s many keen admirers was Newman’s old friend, now Bishop of Winchester, who wrote in the
Quarterly Review
that Kingsley would go down in history as ‘the embedded fly in the clear amber of his antagonist’s Apology’.
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Dean Church wrote in the
Guardian
: