Part 14 (1/2)

I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed of Catholics; or to a.s.sume, as you do, that because they are thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their time is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain the value and authority of the ”Schola,” as one of the _loci theologici_; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its ”contentious and subtle theology” that ”more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity.”

The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.

Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon? He is, it seems to us, and he is not. No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fas.h.i.+onable theories of the hour. A stand made for independence and good sense against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing to do. He goes far enough, indeed, as it is. Still, it is something that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent what is the n.o.bler and more elevated side of the system to which he has attached himself. But it seems to us much more difficult for him to release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes and fears. We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen, extravagant enough in themselves. But the question is whether he or the innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their religious system. It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere tolerance means much. Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes thus:--

This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them; or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and range, and be content, instead of antic.i.p.ating their excesses, to expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much, wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when abused.

But that has never been the principle of his Church. At least, the liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty. It has been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as to other ideas, not so congenial, ”great” ones and little ones too, the lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which took alarm even at remote danger. And those whose pride it is that they are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially when it coincides with what they wish and like.

But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance. They stoutly and boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official contradiction meets them. There may be a disapproving opinion in their own body, but it does not show itself. The disclaimer of even such a man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified. They are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it be an adverse one. They have the power to make themselves the most prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its future form. Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr.

Newman's ”chief authors,” but to the world outside most of these will be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most strongly about the Pope's infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has this to say for itself. Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in England shelters and sanctions it. Nothing can be more clearly and forcibly stated than the following a.s.sertions of the unimpeachable claim of ”dominant opinions” in the Roman Catholic system by the highest Roman Catholic authority in England. ”It is an ill-advised overture of peace,” writes Archbishop Manning,

to a.s.sail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions, devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile criticism.... The presence and a.s.sistance of the Holy Ghost, which secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its wors.h.i.+p and doctrines, its practices and customs. We may be sure that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to morals. Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root of heresy. But if it be ill-advised to a.s.sail the mind of the Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head. There can be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he believes in his own infallibility. If these things be our reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They are not our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of those who come after him.--Archbishop Manning's _Pastoral_, pp.

64-66, 1866.

To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of Dr. Newman's objects in writing his letter; the other is to state distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the subject on which Dr. Pusey's appeal has naturally made so deep an impression:--

I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years, that ”That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us has been the special _crux_ of the Roman system” (p. 101). Here, I say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me. I do not wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know, will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.

We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine myself here. Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have not been used by others,--by great divines, as Petavius, by living writers, nay, by myself on other occasions. I write afresh, nevertheless, and that for three reasons--first, because I wish to contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself; lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my circ.u.mstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be bound to hold concerning her.

If this ”vast system” is a _crux_ to any one, we cannot think that even Dr. Newman's explanation will make it easier. He himself recoils, as any Englishman of sense and common feeling must, at the wild extravagances into which this devotion has run. But he accepts and defends, on the most precarious grounds, the whole system of thought out of which they have sprung by no very violent process of growth. He cannot, of course, stop short of accepting the definition of the Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, and, though he emphatically condemns, with a warmth and energy of which no one can doubt the sincerity, a number of revolting consequences drawn from the theology of which that dogma is the expression, he is obliged to defend everything up to that. For a professed disciple of the Fathers this is not easy. If anything is certain, it is that the place which the Blessed Virgin occupies in the Roman Catholic system--popular or authoritative, if it is possible fairly to urge such a distinction in a system which boasts of all-embracing authority--is something perfectly different from anything known in the first four centuries. In all the voluminous writings on theology which remain from them we may look in vain for any traces of that feeling which finds words in the common hymn, ”_Ave, marls Stella_” and which makes her fill so large a s.p.a.ce in the teaching and devotion of the Roman Church. Dr. Newman attempts to meet this difficulty by a distinction. The doctrine, he says, was there, the same then as now; it is only the feelings, behaviour, and usages, the practical consequences naturally springing from the doctrine, which have varied or grown:--

I fully grant that the _devotion_ towards the Blessed Virgin has increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries. I do not allow that the _doctrine_ concerning her has undergone a growth, for I believe it has been in substance one and the same from the beginning.

There is, doubtless, such a distinction, though whether available for Dr. Newman's purpose is another matter. But when we recollect that modern ”doctrine,” besides defining the Immaculate Conception, places her next in glory to the Throne of G.o.d, and makes her the Queen of Heaven, and the all-prevailing intercessor with her Son, the a.s.sertion as to ”doctrine” is a bold one. It rests, as it seems to us, simply on Dr. Newman identifying his own inferences from the language of the ancient writers whom he quotes with the language itself. They say a certain thing--that Mary is the ”second Eve.” Dr. Newman, with all the theology and all the controversies of eighteen centuries in his mind, deduces from this statement a number of refined consequences as to her sinlessness, and greatness, and reward, which seem to him to flow from it, and says that it means all these consequences. Mr. Ruskin somewhere quotes the language of an ”eminent Academician,” who remarks, in answer to some criticism on a picture, ”that if you look for curves, you will see curves; and if you look for angles, you will see angles.” So it is here. The very dogma of the Immaculate Conception itself Dr. Newman sees indissolubly involved in the ”rudimentary teaching” which insists on the parallelism between Eve and Mary:--

Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve?... If Eve was (as Bishop Bull and others maintain) raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had a greater grace?... And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary, too, had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:--well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of grace), and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.

It seems obvious to remark that the Fathers are not even alleged to have themselves drawn this irresistible inference; and next, that even if it be drawn, there is a long interval between it and the elevation of the Mother of Jesus Christ to the place to which modern Roman doctrine raises her. Possibly, the Fathers might have said, as many people will say now, that, in a matter of this kind, it is idle to draw inferences when we are, in reality, utterly without the knowledge to make them worth anything. At any rate, if they had drawn them, we should have found some traces of it in their writings, and we find none. We find abundance of poetical addresses and rhetorical amplification, which makes it all the more remarkable that the plain dogmatic view of her position, which is accepted by the Roman Church, does not appear in them. We only find a ”rudimentary doctrine,” which, naturally enough, gives the Blessed Virgin a very high and sacred place in the economy of the Incarnation. But how does the doctrine, as it is found in even their rhetorical pa.s.sages, go a step beyond what would be accepted by any sober reader of the New Testament? They speak of what she was; they do not presume to say what she is. What Protestant could have the slightest difficulty in saying not only what Justin says, and Tertullian copies from him, and Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr.

Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting the groundless a.s.sumption which, from her office in this world takes for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr.

Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and it is impossible to compare a mere incidental point of rhetorical, or, if it be so, argumentative ill.u.s.tration, occurring once or twice in a long treatise, with a doctrine, such as that of the Incarnation itself, on which the whole treatise is built, and of which it is full. The wonder is, indeed, that the Fathers, considering how much they wrote, said so little of her; scarcely less is it a wonder, then, that the New Testament says so little, but from this little the only reason which would prevent a Protestant reader of the New Testament from accepting the highest statement of her historical dignity is the reaction from the development of them into the consequences which have been notorious for centuries in the unreformed Churches. Protestants, left to themselves, are certainly not p.r.o.ne to undervalue the saints of Scripture; it has been the presence of the great system of popular wors.h.i.+p confronting them which has tied their tongues in this matter.

Yet Anglican theologians like Mr. Keble, popular poets like Wordsworth, broad Churchmen like Mr. Robertson, have said things which even Roman Catholics might quote as expressions of their feeling. But Dr. Newman must know that many things may be put, and put most truly, into the form of poetical expression which will not bear hardening into a dogma.

A Protestant may accept and even amplify the ideas suggested by Scripture about the Blessed Virgin; but he may feel that he cannot tell how the Redeemer was preserved from sinful taint; what was the grace bestowed on His mother; or what was the reward and prerogative which ensued to her. But it is just these questions which the Roman doctrine undertakes to answer without a shadow of doubt, and which Dr. Newman implies that the theology of the Fathers answered as unambiguously.

But from what has happened in the history of religion, we do not think that Protestants in general who do not shrink from high language about Abraham, Moses, or David, would find anything unnatural or objectionable in the language of the early Christian writers about the Mother of our Lord, though possibly it might not be their own; but the interval from this language to that certain knowledge of her present office in the economy of grace which is implied in what Dr. Newman considers the ”doctrine” about her is a very long one. The step to the modern ”devotion” in its most chastened form is longer still. We cannot follow the subtle train of argument which says that because the ”doctrine” of the second century called her the ”second Eve,” therefore the devotion which sets her upon the altars of Christendom in the nineteenth is a right development of the doctrine. What is wanted is not the internal thread of the process, but the proof and confirmation from without that it was the right process; and this link is just what is wanting, except on a supposition which begs the question. It is conceivable that this step from ”doctrine” to ”devotion” may have been a mistake. It is conceivable that the ”doctrine” may have been held in the highest form without leading to the devotion; for Dr. Newman, of course, thinks that Athanasius and Augustine held ”the doctrine,” yet, as he says, ”we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special devotion to the Blessed Virgin,” and in another place he repeats his doubts whether St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius invoked her; ”nay,” he adds, ”I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his voluminous writings, invokes her once.” What has to be shown is, that this step was not a mistake; that it was inevitable and legitimate.

”This being the faith of the Fathers about the Blessed Virgin,” says Dr. Newman, ”we need not wonder that it should in no long time be trans.m.u.ted into devotion.” The Fathers expressed a historical fact about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_ of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--

Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and Butler recognises it as such in his _a.n.a.logy_, when speaking of the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--”The internal wors.h.i.+p,” he says, ”to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the obligations to such internal wors.h.i.+p are _obligations of reason arising out of those relations themselves_.”

We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that ”the relations being known,” the obligations of wors.h.i.+p arise of themselves from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.

Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman's remarkable ill.u.s.tration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her, it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not, indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole question is about the fact of the ”relations” themselves. If we believe that the Second and Third Persons are G.o.d, we do not want to be told to wors.h.i.+p them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature wors.h.i.+p, what _are_ the ”religious regards,” which, not flowing from the nature of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and binding.

The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system. We most fully admit that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son. We readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the charm of that moral beauty. But here we have a doctrine as definite and precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion, giving a character to a great religious communion. Dr. Newman is not merely developing and ill.u.s.trating an idea: he is a.s.serting a definite revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in a very concrete and practical shape. And the real point is what proof has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that we have the means of knowing it? He has given us certain language of the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible. But between that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which his Church maintains, there is a great gap. The ”Second Eve,” the [Greek: Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as we may, there is between them and the modern ”Regina Coeli” an interval which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the doctrine. So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding proof. In Dr. Newman's eloquent pages we have much collateral thought on the subject--sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn. The one thing which is missing in them is direct proof.

He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the manifold development of devotion in his communion. What he tells us reveals two things. By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted, and he is deeply shocked. No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most intense element in his religious convictions. Nor do we feel ent.i.tled to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it. It leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any ground to say them at all. It forces him into a champions.h.i.+p for statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort. It tempts him at times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of the Son fails. It would have been better not to have reprinted the following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out for approval by the late Cardinal. The italics are his own:--

I have spoken more on this subject in my _Essay on Development_, p. 438, ”Nor does it avail to object that, in this contrast of devotional exercises, the human is sure to supplant the Divine, from the infirmity of our nature; for, I repeat, the question is one of fact, whether it has done so. And next, it must be asked, _whether the character of Protestant devotion towards Our Lord has been that of wors.h.i.+p at all_; and not rather such as we pay to an excellent human being.... Carnal minds will ever create a carnal wors.h.i.+p for themselves, and to forbid them the service of the saints will have no tendency to teach them the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d.

Moreover, ... great and constant as is the devotion which the Catholic pays to St. Mary, it has a special province, and _has far more connection with the public services and the festive aspect of Christianity_, and with certain extraordinary offices which she holds, _than with what is strictly personal and primary in religion_”.