Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (45 page)

An iron rod represents logical, linear, mathematical demonstration; a cable represents an assemblage of probabilities, separately insufficient for certitude, irrefragable when put together. A man who said ‘I cannot trust a cable, I must have an iron bar’, would, in certain given cases, be irrational and unreasonable:

– so too is a man who says I must have a rigid demonstration, not a moral demonstration, of religious truth.
23

Invoking another metaphor, he writes:

I liken it to the mechanism of some triumph of skill, tower or spire, geometrical staircase, or vaulted roof, where the ‘
Ars est celare artem
’ where all display of strength is carefully avoided, and the weight is ingeniously thrown in a variety of directions, upon supports which are distinct from, or independent of each other.
24

The unspoken assumption is that the imagination has a ‘coadunating’ capacity, as Coleridge called it, to create a whole that is greater than its parts. ‘Such a living organon is a personal gift’, Newman writes in the
Grammar
, ‘and not mere method of calculus.’
²⁵
Attainment of certitude, then, is ‘an action more subtle and more comprehensive than the mere appreciation of syllogistic logic’. Religious faith, religious certitude, is not a consequence of a blind leap into the dark, leaving reason behind. But unlike scientific knowledge religious knowledge is an assimilation of, and a participation in, the living, organic life of a community, involving its culture, language, symbols, and sacramentals, encountered and assented to with the heart.

OBJECTIONS, COMMUNITY AND GIFT

Although Newman’s conviction of the presence of God in conscience is not intended as an unquestioned axiom, but a probability to be pondered, it nevertheless raises objections. For example, it has failed to persuade the agnostic philosopher Anthony Kenny. Kenny objects that the feelings Newman describes of ‘inward experience of the divine power’, may be ‘appropriate only if there is a Father in heaven’, but cannot be taken as any kind of guarantee of their own appropriateness. He goes on: ‘If the existence of God is intended simply as a hypothesis to explain the nature of such sentiments, then other hypotheses must also be taken into consideration. One such is that of Sigmund Freud …’
26

Kenny has a second, parallel objection to Newman’s central argument. He writes that the notion of cumulative probabilities on encountering Christianity ‘may be equally available for what is true and what merely pretends to be true, for counterfeit revelation as well as a genuine one. They supply no intelligible rule to determine what is to be believed and what not.’ Certitude is no guarantee, after all, of truth. Newman was aware of such difficulties. In chapter six of the
Grammar
he writes of ‘the all important question, what is truth, and what apparent truth? what is genuine knowledge, and what is its counterfeit? What are the tests for discriminating certitude from mere persuasion or delusion?’
²⁷
Newman’s answer lies within the realms of imagination rather than philosophy. In his
Essay on Development
Newman had applied the test of ‘life’ to distinguish between ‘genuine development’ and ‘corruption’. The capacity to distinguish true revelation from counterfeit, Newman believed, is owed not

alone to the ‘gift’ of individual imagination on the part of each member of the Church, but the ‘gift’ of imagination inherent and bestowed by the entire Catholic Church on the faithful and on those who approach her. The answer to the question, then – how does the Catholic church itself avoid error in its organic life? – is contained in the essay Newman wrote on Keble in 1846: ‘The church herself is the most sacred and august of poets …’
²⁸
That statement invokes the notion of the Church as a dynamic living idea or symbol, and the imaginative capacity of its members to apprehend its self-authenticating truth. The Church seen as poet and living work of art is the generator and guarantor of truths, recognised and endorsed by the religious imaginations of its members.

Yet even as figures such as Coleridge and Newman appealed to the power of imagination in their justification of belief, the marriage of poetry and religion, literature and theology, as exemplified by George Herbert, were shearing apart. Some scholars identify that fragmentation, as mentioned in the previous chapter, with the application of literary criticism to the Bible in the work of the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Robert Lowth, in the 1740s. Others argue that the Romantic imagination, with its egoism and neglect of social and political ills of the nineteenth century contained the seeds of its own downfall: the divine spark in Coleridge’s definition of imagination could be appropriated as easily by those Promethean poets bound for self-idolatry.

The legacy of the
Grammar
, then, may well be its potential to restore, with necessary distinctions, the self-authenticating power of religious imagination. It may well be its potential to reverse the neglect and disillusionment with imagination which reached final eclipse in the so-called ‘death of imagination’ of Jacques Derrida. The challenge for contemporary theologians is to demonstrate how the
Grammar’s
insights answer the charge that faith involves blind leaps and abandonment of reason. Equally important, the
Grammar
attempts to demonstrate the fallacy of drawing an equivalence between religion and artistic imagination. In his recent
History of Christianity
(2009), Oxford’s Professor of Church History, Diarmaid MacCulloch, states that, for him, Christianity is true in the sense that
Hamlet
is true; in an essay in
Philosophers without God
(2007) the Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn, argues that ‘onto-theology’ (the idea that God is ‘real’) should give way to ‘expressive theology’ (the idea that God is a figment of ‘uplifting fiction’). The popular apotheosis of religion as make-believe, however, is crudely summed up by Richard Dawkins’s comment in
The God Delusion
that: ‘the only difference between
The Da Vinci Code
and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while
The Da Vinci Code
is modern fiction.’

Newman’s central idea in the Grammar of Assent is today subject to a daunting challenge within the Church, rather than outside it; not so much because of the weakness of his arguments, but its authenticity. He argues that real assent to

the Catholic faith emerges, as we have seen, from the ‘popular, practical, personal evidence on which a given individual believes in it’. The past two decades have witnessed an unrelenting series of images, stories, ‘evidences’, of the paedophile priest scandal. In the light of such ‘evidences and contents’, the ‘accumulated probabilities’ have been potentially destructive of the Catholic clergy’s reputation for moral integrity despite the fact that the perpetrators were a small minority. The insidious irony is that Newman summoned all the brilliant satire at his command to dismiss fictitious claims of clerical abuse in the mid-nineteenth century, promoted in books such as
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
. He successfully turned the allegations back against the accusers because they were untrue and prompted by malice. In view of the appalling truth of Catholic clerical abuse, Newman’s insights into the power of religious imagination, as justifying faith, are all the more significant, since they demonstrate the profound and far reaching impact of the scandal and the difficult task of reversing it.

CHAPTER 16
‌‌

Papal infallibility

‘… I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please, – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’

J. H. NEWMAN, A LETTER TO THE DUKE OF NORFOLK

Through the 1850s, following Pio Nono’s return from exile in Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples, his papacy experienced a period of uneasy peace. The trauma of being ousted from Rome at the risk of his life disabused Pio of any further ideas of promoting a liberal regime within the Papal States. As the process of secularization spread across Europe, and the unification of Italy continued apace, his rule over the papal territories – from Terracina in the South West to Ravenna in the North East – became increasingly shaky and repressive.

The impetus for a united Italy under the monarchical leadership of Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Piedmont-Sardinia, found support throughout the peninsula in preference to the republican ambitions of Mazzini and Garibaldi, or the federalist dreams of Balbo and Gioberti. Should not Pio for the sake of peace, unity, and an end to foreign military occupations, negotiate with Vittorio and surrender at last his temporal possessions which severed the peninsula in two? Count Cavour, Vittorio’s Prime Minister, devised a compromise. A devout Catholic and related, it was said, through forebears to the family of St Francis de Sales, Cavour pressed for a treaty that would free the remaining papal states from papal rule, allowing Pio just the city of Rome – the best that could be hoped for in the long run. By way of compensation the papacy would be given the honorary title of president of the Italian Confederation, a theoretical entity that did not, in the event, come to pass. Pio, however, was opposed not only to surrendering an inch of papal soil, but even lived in hope of retrieving lands and property already lost. His oft repeated view was that ‘the States of the Holy See belong to no royal dynasty, but to all Catholics … We cannot give up what is not Ours.’
¹
His intransigence earned him severe public criticism across Europe. Within the Catholic Church opinion was sharply divided. Newman had already declared himself to be against papal temporal power. He could see no case for arguing that such authority was an authentic development of Christian doctrine.

Manning, who appealed to no such theory of development, would come out vehemently for the Pope in his
The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Christ
(1862).

He held that Pio’s right to rule over his territories was comparable to his spiritual authority: it had a theological basis, he insisted, in that Christ’s sway over heaven and earth had been inherited by the Holy Father as the Vicar of Christ. He cited the Archbishop of Canterbury as an enfeebled example of pretensions to authority lacking essential freedom from British rule. Indeed he urged the Pope to define the temporal authority as a dogma.

By the end of the 1850s Pio Nono, who had once so impressed all who met him for his angelic charisma, became a target of widespread hostility. The catalyst was a scandal that reverberates to this day. In 1858 a six-year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, was kidnapped by papal police in Bologna on the pre-text that he had been baptized
in extremis
by a servant girl six years earlier.
²
Placed in the House of Catechumens (a Roman institution for converts, closed on Pio’s accession, but now reopened), the child was forcibly instructed in the Catholic faith. Despite the pleas of Edgardo’s parents, Pio adopted the child and liked to play with him, hiding him under his soutane and calling out, ‘Where’s the boy?’ Pio kept Edgardo cloistered in a monastery, where he was eventually ordained priest. It is difficult to exonerate Pio entirely on the principle of anachronism, for his predecessor Benedict XIV had criticised such treatment of Jewish children and their parents. No less than twenty editorials on the subject were published in the
New York Times
, and both Emperor Franz Josef of Austria and Napoleon III of France begged the Pope to return the child to his rightful parents, to no avail. The affair had the effect of uniting Jews in America to lobby for Jewish rights and campaign against anti-Semitism at home and abroad; which became the principal aim of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites founded in New York in 1859. Newman remained silent on the Mortara affair, as did Manning, yet it is likely that Newman’s view of Pio’s papacy, characterised in 1870 as ‘a climax of tyranny’, had begun to take shape at the time of the scandal.