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Powys Society Publication List Powys titles currently in print A Visit to The National Library of Wales Supplement to Powys Checklist & Readers’ Guide 2010 TFP The Voice of God by Michael Kowalewski JCP OWEN GLENDOWER The Seen and the Unseen by P.J. Kavanagh First Powys Lecture in Ireland
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Cardinal Newman by Llewelyn Powys
The centenary of the Oxford Movement may well have suggested to us a re-reading of Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. We owe this beautiful and noble book to the honest rudeness of Charles Kingsley, and we are told that while Newman was writing it he was "constantly in tears, and constantly crying out with distress." The book was finished in seven weeks, and every page of it gives evidence of an imaginative style, an intellectual excellence, entirely beyond the reach of the two celebrated confederates of his Oxford years.
Our attitude to conventional religion is so altered from what it was in the nineteenth century that it has become difficult to interest ourselves in these far-off canonical wrangles. Indeed, for many of us it is only possible to approach them through Newman's transparent art. There is, however, something besides the high literary standard of his writing to reward us. Newman's mind resembles a sharpened willow wand in the hand of a religious diviner which is for ever revealing living water under the holy ground of his cloistered garth. He seems to have no professional prudence, and at a moment's notice his errant intellect will be occupied with those primary speculations of philosophy that have a relevance for all men and for all women.
It was perhaps the extreme sensibility of his nature that drove him, when confronted by the facts of strong life, to take refuge in medieval dreams. His upbringing and education encouraged him to accept the fundamental beliefs upon which Christianity is based, and with these beliefs left unquestioned he was able to allow his sincere casuistries to play freely upon the intricate fabric of book-theology. Two quotations should suffice to indicate the kind of premisses upon which he erected the fair Vatican of his mind :--
Revealed religion furnishes facts to other sciences, which these sciences left to themselves would never reach. Thus, in the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's ark is an historical fact, which history never would arrive at without revelation. That there had been already great miracles, as those of Scripture, as the Resurrection, was a fact establishing the principle that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by the Divine Author.
When due allowance has been made for such large claims, we are at liberty to take unqualified delight in his swift perceptions, in his dangerous thoughts that do not hesitate when occasion offers to glance backwards and forwards over the abyss as swallows might dart over a no-bottom pond filled with slippery vital eels. As Thomas Aquinas did, as Pascal did, Newman exercised his faculties to find credible justifications for the superstitions of the Faith. In undertaking such a task it was inevitable that a mind as keen and as sincere as his should constantly be aware of "the dreadful plausibility of scepticism." It was his comprehension of this that rendered him, even after Father Dominic had received him into the Catholic Church, uncomfortable to conventional orthodoxy. He was a man of genius who could never be relied upon to comb or curb his damaging speculations. For Newman there were "two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator." His soul belonged to God, but his mind, though dedicated to the cause of his adoption, was in some indefinable way free until the day of his death, the mind of an atheist, the mind of an angel!
Newman continually forgot his obligation to ecclesiastical discretion, and with terrifying loops swooped from the gates of heaven to the gates of hell. An inner conviction led him to be more certain of the existence of God "than that I have hands or feet," though to his reason the accredited assumption remained unapparent.
Of all points of faith, the being of God is to my apprehension encompassed with most difficulty. ... I try to put grounds for certainty into logical shape. I find a difficulty in doing so in mood and figure to my satisfaction.
and again :--
Were it not for His voice speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheist.
When the theologic soundness of one of his essays was impugned at Rome he is said to have remarked, " Hannibal's elephants could never learn the goose-step." Again and again he broke bounds, relying on his inspiration rather than upon dogma. There is often something prophetic about his conception of the human case, though it remained beyond the power of his vision to take away the winter of his desolation.
If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which already comes to me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its creator. . . . The greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration; the curtain hung over his futurity . . . the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design ... 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.
Newman's own response to the mystery was to see each manifestation of the visible world in the form of a parable. He was a man in love with the invisible, and to him the whispers of mystical feeling were far more audible than were the cries of a jay.
Natural phenomena are both types and the instruments of real things unseen. . . . Certitude is a reflex action; it is to know that one knows.
But he was not content to let the matter rest there. Throughout his life he applied his edged mind to presenting his personal spiritual realizations in forms of persuasive and exact argument.
To him the presence of pain and cruelty, the mystery of evil, could be explained in only one way. The human race " is out of joint with the purposes of its creator ... is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity." The existence of the Catholic Church is God's method of retaining in the world "a knowledge of Himself," and its infallibility is happily adapted as a working instrument for the throwing back of "the immense energy of the aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy intellect." The caprice and energy of Newman's own thought were certainly rash and thorough enough. In an early sermon he wrote :
I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more IJ gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.
As a kind of preamble of the formal credentials of the Catholic Church he pronounced:
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
Would it be possible to illustrate better the peril of sacerdotal thought when even a man like Newman feels in no way abashed by such "extremities"? What frenzy is this to endeavour to superimpose upon life, upon life intractable as a thick-necked zebra, the bit and bridle of dogmas ? What has religion, that state of wonder and gratitude, to do with these inhibitory provisions of civilization? Surely there is some justice in the exclamation of Lucretius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
For two thousand years the Christian Churches have had at their service the best minds of each age, and yet even so it is not easy to give credence to their anthropocentric explanation of life. The riot of the universe, with its star streams and star clouds, with its unpredictable electrons and quivering wave-groups capable of aggregating into forms of vegetable life, animal life, bird life, fish life, insect life, microbe life, as conspicuous for ferocity as for brevity : life living upon life, the cow destroyed by the lion, the grass by the cow—and this tumultuous torrent of sap and blood under the spell of hate and desire existing apparently at hazard, disorder rising out of order, discipline out of rebellion; heartlessness here, compassion there, intermixed at random, all at odds, all rushing forward into an unknown future pell-mell, does not suggest that a cosmogony too closely identified with man's wishes is likely to approximate to the real metaphysical solution. Newman's mind, obsessed by his preconception as to the truth of Catholic philosophy, nervously relucted from the notion of a world unprotected by Christian revelation, unprotected by the "pre-eminent and prodigious power " of Catholicism. We do not wonder that as a young man holding such views he could not bear to look at the tricolour on the poop of a French vessel in the harbour of Algiers. It was the past that he loved. He wished antiquity to be constituted as the final arbiter, and it was perhaps because he appreciated the weakness of such an attitude that he came to have "fierce thoughts against liberals." "Bees, by the instinct of nature, do love their hives, and birds their nests," and even monastery doves, for all their pink feet, will show aggression. It never seemed to have occurred to him that it might well be through the very " pride of reason " he so much hated that society might be adjusted more equably, sickness to a large measure eliminated, the barbarous iniquity of war ended, and happiness be brought to the earth. It is impossible not to regret his bias. He manfully tilted against the forces of evil, but he was shackled from the first with holy fetters. He endeavoured desperately to find logical cogency for his faith, never suspecting that viewed from a wider angle there was, under the shadow of eternity, small difference between his painful solutions; the real contest between cruelty and generosity, between good and evil, lying far below his doctrinal conundrums.
Perhaps to Englishmen it is his repudiation of the Anglican Communion that rouses most interest. He describes how he was first haunted by the suspicion that the Anglican Order was a mere "national institution," and that the Church of Rome, with all its "dominant errors," was, in fact, the "One Fold of Christ." " He who has seen a ghost cannot be as if he had never seen it. "The results of the publication of Tract 90, when his name
had been posted up by the Marshal on the buttery-hatch of every College of my University, after the manner of discontinued pastry-cooks
sent him into retirement at Littlemore, where for several years he reconsidered his position.
Anyhow, no harm could come of bending the crooked stick the other way; in the process of straightening it, it was impossible to break it.
Alas ! the Anglican crozier snapped.
I cannot tell how soon there came on me but very soon—an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. . . . When I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me the veriest nonentities . . . it may be a great creation, though it be not divine, and this is how I judge it ... and as to its possession of an Episcopal succession from the time of the Apostles, well, it may have it, and, if the Holy See so decide, I will believe it, as being the decision of a higher judgment than my own.
Cardinal Newman takes his place in literature as the last lucid defender of the romantic obscurantism of the Middle Ages. To the end of his life he used his genius to bring into subjection the "wild living thought of man." A Christian, he once declared, must always remain "a mystery" to the world. I know of few figures in history who warrant this utterance more than does he himself, "this creature of emotion and memory" who so eminently united in his lovable and luminous being the attributes of the subtle Schoolman with the simplicity and the passionate sincerity of the true saint.
from Damnable Opinions (London, Watts & Co., 1935. First published in Congregational Quarterly, January 1934.) From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 71, Nov 2010
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