THE USES OF INFALLIBILITY
Few people read Newman to-day. The old anxious issues have been drowned in a flood of social problems, and that world of liberal progress which to him was the enemy at the gates has long ago broken in and carried everything before it. Newman’s persuasive voice sounds thin and remote, and his ideas smell of a musty age. Yet that title of his, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, always intrigues one with its modern and subjective sound. It is so much what all of us are itching to write. Its egotism brushes with a faint irony that absorption in the righteousness most emphatically not ourselves with which Newman’s life was mingled. In that call upon him to interpret his life, one feels an unquenchable ego which carries him over to these shameless and self-centred times. Fortunately placed for a week in a theological household, I plunged into the slightly forbidding pages of the wistful cardinal. What I found in him must be very different from what he found in himself or what anybody else found in him at the time. Newman in 1917 suggests less a reactionary theology than subtle and secret sympathy with certain veins of our modern intellectual radicalism. The voice was faint, but what I heard made Newman significant for me. For it implied that if faith is eternal, so is skepticism, and that even in the most pious mind may be found the healthy poison of doubt.
Superficially seen, Newman appeared to have abolished doubt. His faith was more conservative than that of the orthodox. He surrendered all that Victorian life for the narrowest of obscurantisms. The reasons he found for his course only riveted him impregnably to the rock of unreason. What my mind fastened on, however, was the emotional impulse that led him to his tortuous way. One detected there in him that same sinister note one feels in Pascal. It is a reasonableness that eats away at belief until it finally destroys either it or you. It is an uncanny honesty of soul which, struggling utterly for faith, saves it only by unconsciously losing it. For if you win your way through to belief by sheer intellectual force, you run the risk of over-reaching your belief. You do not know that you have passed it, but you have really dispensed with its use. If you are honest in mind and religious in temperament, you find yourself reduced to the naked reality of religion. You are left with only the most primitive mysticism of feeling. You are one with the primitive savage group. Ineffable feeling, ecstatic union with the universe,—this is your state. The more religious you become, the more you tear the fabric of your dogma. Belief is only for the irreligious. Intellectuality in religion, under the guise of fortifying faith, only destroys its foundations. Newman’s approach towards the certitude of dogma was really only an approach towards the certitude of mysticism. When he thought he was satisfying his intellectual doubts, he was satisfying his emotional cravings. Intending to buttress dogma, he only assured for himself the mystic state.
How far he really attained mysticism is a fascinating problem for the reader of the Apologia. Popular impression is probably right that he bore to his incredibly lengthened age a pathos of uneasiness and sadness. But popular impression is probably wrong in ascribing this to lingering remorse or regret. If there was any uncertainty, it was not for having left his Anglican position, but for not having seen the thing wholly through. Intellectuality still clung around him like a cold swathing garment. He probably never attained that pure mysticism which his soul craved. One has the impression that Newman’s pathos lay in the fact that he never quite became a saint. The official world seemed to hang about him hamperingly. One wonders sometimes if he could not almost as easily have become a wan sweet pagan as a saint. The tragedy of Pascal was that intrinsically he was a pagan. The kind of Christianity to which he drove himself was for him the most virulent form of moral suicide. The terrible fascination of his Pensées lies in that relentless closing in of the divine enemy on his human “pride,” which might have been, with his intellectual genius, so lusty an organ of creativeness and adventure. It was not disease that killed him but Christianity. Pascal is an eternal warning from the perils of intellectual religion.
Dogma did not kill Newman, but it did not save him. He was not a pagan, but he never became a saint. He never quite got rid of dogma. And that is what so fascinates us in his religious technique. For his Apologia, is really a subtle exposure of infallibility. It shows us what the acute intellectuality of a mystic finds to do with dogma. The goal towards which he tends is the utter bankruptcy of articulate religion. And involved in it is the bankruptcy of institutional religion. It is a religious bankruptcy that acts like modern commercial bankruptcy. All material assets are relinquished, and you start again in business on the old footing. You throw over your dogma but keep the mystic experience, which can never be taken away from you. In this way the Catholic Church becomes, or could become, eternal. Newman shows a way just short of relinquishment. He uses infallibility to liquidate his intellectual debts, and then becomes free of his creditors.
II
How these attitudes are implied in the Apologia I can only suggest through the surprises that a reading brought. The contention had always been that Newman’s apostasy was due to feebleness of will, to a fatigue in the search for certitude that let him slip into the arms of Mother Church. My Protestant training had persistently represented every going over to Rome as a surrender of individual integrity. For the sake of intellectual peace, one became content to stultify the intellect and leave all thinking to the infallible Church. There is nothing of intellectual fatigue, however, in Newman. His course did not spring from weariness of thinking. He had a most fluent and flexible mind, and if he seemed to accept beliefs at which Protestants thrilled with frightened incredulity, it was because such an acceptance satisfied some deeper need, some surer craving. Read to-day, Newman interests not because of the beliefs but because of this deeper desire. He had a sure intuition of the uses of infallibility and intellectual authority, and of their place in the scheme of things. This is his significance for the modern mind. And he is the only one of the great religious writers who seems to reach out to us and make contact with our modern attitude.
Newman loved dogma, but it was not dogma that he loved most. It was not to quiet a heart that ached with doubt that he passed from the Anglican to the Roman Church. As an Anglican Catholic he was quite as sure of his doctrine as he was as a Roman Catholic. His most primitive craving was not so much for infallibility as for legitimacy. It was because the Roman Church was primitive, legitimate, authorized, and the Anglican Church yawned in spots, that he made his reluctant choice. His Anglican brothers would not let him show them the catholicity of the Articles. They began to act schismatically, and there was nothing to do but join the legitimate order and leave them to their vulgar insufficiencies. This one gets from the Apologia. But this craving, one feels, sprang not from cowardice but from a sense of proportion. Newman was frankly a conservative. Here was a mind that lived in the most exciting of all intellectual eras, when all the acuteness of England was passing from orthodoxy to liberalism. Newman deliberately went in the other direction. But he went because he valued certain personal and spiritual things to which he saw the new issues would be either wholly irrelevant or fatally confusing. One of the best things in the Apologia is the appendix on Liberalism, where Newman, with the clarity of the perfect enemy, sums up the new faith. Each proposition outrages some aspect of legitimacy which is precious to him, yet his intuition—he wrote it not many years after the Reform Bill—has put in classic form what is the Nicene Creed of liberal religion. No liberal ever expressed liberalism so justly and concisely. Newman understands this modern creed as perfectly as he flouts it. So Pascal’s uncanny analysis of human pride led him only to self-prostration.
Why did Newman disdain liberalism? He understood it, and he did not like it. His deathless virtue lies in his disconcerting honesty. The air was full of strange new cries that he saw would arrest the Church. She would have to explain, defend, interpret, on a scale far larger than had been done for centuries. She would have to make adjustment to a new era. Theology would be mingled with sociology. The church of the spirit would be challenged with social problems, would be called down into a battling arena of life. Newman’s intuition saw that the challenge of liberalism meant a worried and harassed Church. He was not interested in social and political questions. The old order had a fixed charm for him. It soothed and sustained his life, and it was in his own life that he was supremely interested. He loved dogma, but he loved it as a priceless jewel that one does not wear. His emotion was not really any more entangled in it than it was in social problems. Given an established order that made his personal life possible, what he was interested in was mystical meditation, the subtle and difficult art of personal relations, and the exquisite ethical problems that arise out of them.
Newman’s position was one of sublime common-sense. He saw that the Protestant Church would be engaged for decades in the doleful task of reconciling the broadening science with the old religious dogma. He knew that this was ludicrous. He saw that liberalism was incompatible with dogma. But mostly he saw that the new social and scientific turn of men’s thinking was incompatible with the mellowed mystical and personal life where lay his true genius. So, with a luminous sincerity, following the appeal of his talents, he passed into the infallible Church which should be a casket for the riches of his personal life. He was saved thus from the sin of schism, and from the sin of adding to that hopeless confusion of intellectual tongues which embroiled the English world for the rest of the century. The Church guaranteed the established order beneath him, blotted out the sociological worries around him, and removed the incubus of dogma above him. Legitimacy and infallibility did not imprison his person or his mind. On the contrary, they freed him, because they abolished futilities from his life. Nothing is clearer from the Apologia than Newman’s sense of the hideous vulgarity of theological discussion. He uses infallibility to purge himself of that vulgarity. He uses it in exactly the way that it should rightly be employed. The common view is that dogma is entrusted to the Church because its truth is of such momentous import as to make fatal the risk of error through private judgment. The Church is the mother who suckles us with the precious milk of doctrine without which we should die. Through ecclesiastical infallibility dogma becomes the letter and spirit of religion, bony structure and life-blood.
But Newman’s use of infallibility was as a storage vault in which one puts priceless securities. They are there for service when one wishes to realize on their value. But in the business of daily living one need not look at them from one year to another. Infallibility is the strong lock of the safety-vault. It is a guarantee not of the value of the wealth but of its protection. The wealth must have other grounds for its valuableness, but one is assured that it will not be tampered with. By surrendering all your dogmas to the keeper-Church, you win, not certitude—for your treasures are no more certain inside the vault than they are in your pocket—but assurance that you will not have to see your life constantly interrupted by the need of defending them against burglars, or of proving their genuineness for the benefit of inquisitive and incredulous neighbors. The suspicion is irresistible that Newman craved infallibility not because dogma was so supremely significant to him, but because it was so supremely irrelevant. Nothing could be more revealing than his acceptance of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He has no trouble whatever in believing this belated and hotly-disdained dogma. Because it is essential to his understanding of heaven and hell, eternity and the ineffable God? On the contrary, because it is so quintessentially irrelevant to anything that really entangles his emotions. His tone in acknowledging his belief is airy, almost gay. He seems to feel no implications in the belief. It merely rounds off a logical point in his theology. It merely expresses in happy metaphor a poetical truth. To him there is no tyranny in the promulgation of this new dogma. Infallibility, he seems to suggest, removes from discussion ideas that otherwise one might be weakly tempted to spend unprofitable hours arguing about.
And nothing could be more seductive than his belief in Transubstantiation. Science, of course, declares this transmutation of matter impossible. But science deals only with phenomena. Transubstantiation has to do not with phenomena but with things-in-themselves. And what has science to say about the inner reality of things? Science itself would be the first to disclaim any such competence. Why, therefore, should not the Church know as much as anybody about the nature of this thing-in-itself? Why is it not as easy to believe the Church’s testimony as to the nature of things as it is to believe any testimony? Such dogma is therefore unassailable by science. And if it cannot be criticized it might just as well be infallible. The papal guarantee does not invade science. It merely prëempts an uncharted region. It infringes no intellectual rights. It steps in merely to withdraw from discussion ideas which would otherwise be misused. Infallibility Newman uses as a shelf upon which to store away his glowing but pragmatically sterile theological ideas, while down below in the arena are left for discussion the interesting aspects of life. He is at great pains to tell us that the Church is infallible only in her expressly declared doctrine. It is only over a few and definite dogmas that she presides infallibly. You surrender to infallibility only those cosmic ideas it would do you no good to talk of anyway. In the vast overflowing world of urgent practical life you are free to speculate as you will. Underneath the eternal serene of dogma is the darting vivid web of casuistry. Relieved of the inanity of theological discussion, the Catholic may use his intellect on the human world about him. That is why we are apt to find in the Catholic the acute psychologist, while the Protestant remains embroiled in weary dialectics.
Such a use of infallibility as Newman implies exposes the fallacy of the Protestant position. For as soon as you have removed this healthy check to theological embroilment you have opened the way to intellectual corruption. As soon as you admit the right of individual judgment in theological matters you have upset the balance between dogma and life. The Catholic consigns his dogmas to the infallible Church and speculates about the pragmatic issues of the dynamic moral life. The Protestant on the other hand, encases himself in an iron-bound morality and gives free rein to his fancy about the eternal verities. The Catholic is empirical in ethics and dogmatic in theology. The Protestant is dogmatic in ethics and more and more empirical in theology. He speculates where it is futile to speculate, because in supernatural matters you can never come by evidence to any final, all-convincing truth. But he refuses to speculate where a decent skepticism and a changing adjustment to human nature would work out attitudes towards conduct that make for flowering and growth. The Protestant infallibility of morals is the cruellest and least defensible of all infallibilities. Protestantism passes most easily into that fierce puritan form which constrains both conduct and belief.
The Protestant inevitably gravitates either towards puritanism or towards unitarianism. The one petrifies in a harsh and narrow moral code, the ordering of conduct by the most elderly, least aesthetic, dullest and gloomiest elements in the community. The other mingles in endless controversy over the attributes of deity, the history of its workings in the world, and the power of the supernatural. Religion becomes a village sewing-society, in which each member’s life is lived in the fearful sight of all the others, while the tongues clack endlessly about rumors that can never be proved and that no one outside will ever find the slightest interest in having proved.
If the Catholic Church had used infallibility in the way that Newman did, its influence could never have been accused of oppression. There need never have been any warfare between theology and science. Infallibility affords the Church an adroit way of continuing its spiritual existence while it permits free speculation in science and ethics to go on. Suppose the Church in its infallibility had not stuck to dogma. Suppose the reformers had been successful, and the Church had accepted early scientific truth. Suppose it had refused any longer to insist on correctness in theological belief but had insisted on correctness in scientific belief. Suppose the dogmas of the Resurrection had made way for the first crude imperfect generalizations in physics. Imagine the hideousness of a world where scientific theories had been declared infallible by an all-powerful Church! Our world’s safety lay exactly in the Church’s rejection of science. If the Church had accepted science, scientific progress would have been impossible. Progress was possible only by ignoring the Church. Knowledge about the world could only advance through accepting gratefully the freedom which the Church tacitly offered in all that fallible field of the technique of earthly living. What progress we have we owe not to any overcoming or converting of the Church but to a scrupulous ignoring of her.
In punishing heresy the Church worked with a sound intuition. For a heretic is not a man who ignores the Church. He is one who tries to mix his theology and science. He could not be a heretic unless he were a victim of muddy thinking, and as a muddy thinker he is as much a nuisance to secular society as he is to the Church against which he rebels. He is the officious citizen who tries to break into the storage-vault with the benevolent intention of showing that the jewels are paste. But all he usually accomplishes is to set the whole town by the ears. The constructive daily life of the citizens is interrupted in a flood of idle gossip. It is as much to the interest of the intelligent authorities, who have important communal projects on hand, to suppress him as it is to the interest of the owner of the jewels. Heresy is fundamentally the error of trying to reconcile new knowledge with old dogma. The would-be heretic could far more wisely ignore theology altogether and pursue his realistic knowledge in the aloofness which it requires. If there is still any theological taint in him, he should not dabble in science at all. If there is none, the Church will scarcely feel itself threatened and he will not appear as a heretic. On the pestiferousness of the heretic both the Church and the most modern realist can agree. Let theology deal with its world of dogma. Let science deal with its world of analysable and measurable fact. Let them never touch hands or recognize even each other’s existence.
The intellectual and spiritual chaos of the nineteenth century was due to the prevalence of heresy which raged like an epidemic through Europe. Minds which tried to test their new indubitable knowledge by the presuppositions of faith were bound to be disordered and to spread disorder around them. Faith and science tap different planes of the soul, elicit different emotional currents. It is when the Church has acted from full realization of this fact that it has remained strong. Protestantism, trying to live in two worlds at the same time, has swept thousands of excellent minds into a spiritual limbo where, in their vague twilight realm of a modernity which has not quite sacrificed theology, they have ceased to count for intellectual or spiritual light.
Perhaps the most pathetic of heresies is the “modernism” which is spreading through the French and Italian Church. For this effort to bring unitarian criticism into Catholic theology, to make over the dogmas from within, to apply reason to the unreasonable, is really the least “modern” of enterprises. It is only a belated Protestant reformation, and if it succeeds it could do little more than add another Protestant sect to the existing multitude. It would not in the least have modernized Catholicism, for the most modern attitude which one can take towards the Church is to ignore it entirely, to cease to feel its validity in the new humane, democratic world that is our vision. In other words, to take towards it exactly the attitude which it takes towards itself. This is its strength. It has never hesitated to accept pragmatic truth that was discovered by others. The Catholic makes use of whatever scientific, industrial, political, sociological development works, and adjusts himself without discomfort to a dynamic world. He makes no attempt at reconciliation with the supernatural. A Catholic hospital uses all the latest medical science without exhibiting the least concern over its infallible “truth.” It is doubtful whether the Church ever attempted to prevent Catholics from adopting anything as long as they did not bother whether it was “true” or not. This is the real mischief, to get your infallible divine truth confused with your pragmatic human truth. The “modernist” in setting about this confusion simply courts that expulsion which is his.
All this seemed to me implicit in the Apologia. But if the use Newman made of infallibility destroys the Protestant position, it no less destroys the Catholic. For if you use infallibility as a technique for getting dogmas into a form in which they are easy to forget, you reduce the Church from a repository of truth to a mere political institution. When dogma is removed from discussion, religious truth becomes irrelevant to life as it is commonly lived. The Church, therefore, can touch life only through its political and organizing power, just as any human institution touches life. It no longer touches it through the divinely inspiring quality of its thought. Intellectually the Church will only appeal to those cowed minds which have no critical power and demand absolutism in thought. Spiritually it will appeal only to temperaments like Newman’s which crave a guarantor for their mystic life. Politically it will appeal to the subtle who want power through the devious control over human souls. To few other types will it appeal.
Newman unveils the true paradox of dogma. If, on the one hand, you throw it open to individual judgment, you destroy it through the futile wranglings of faith which can never be objectively solved. If, on the other hand, you declare it infallible, you destroy it by slowly sending it to oblivion. Infallibility gets rid of dogma just as surely as does private judgment. Under the pretense of consolidating the Church in its cosmic rôle, Newman, therefore, has really put it in its proper parochial place as a pleasant grouping of souls who are similarly affected by a collection of beautiful and vigorous poetic ideas. Fundamentally, however, this grouping has no more universal significance than any other, than a secret society or any religious sect.
Thus Newman unconsciously anticipates the most modern realist agnostic. For the latter would agree that to relegate dogma to the storage-vault of infallibility is exactly what ought to be done with dogma. At such an infallible as Newman pictures no modern radical need balk. Newman’s argument means little more than that infallibility is merely the politest way of sending an idea to Nirvana. What more can the liberal ask who is finished with theology and all its works? He can accept this infallible in even another sense. For there is not a single Christian doctrine in which he does not feel a kind of wild accuracy. Every Christian dogma has a poetic vigor about it which might just as well be called “true” because to deny its metaphorical power would certainly be to utter an untruth. Indeed is not poetry the only “truth” that can be called infallible? For scientific truth is constantly being developed, revised, re-applied. It is only poetry that can think in terms of absolutes. Science cannot because it is experimental. But poetry may, because each soul draws its own meaning from the words. And dogma is poetry.
To render dogma infallible is to make it something that no longer has to be fought for. This attitude ultimately undermines the whole structure for belief. If it is only infallible ideas that we are to believe, then belief loses all its moral force. It is no longer a fierce struggle to maintain one’s intellectual position. Nothing is at stake. One is not braced in faith with the hosts of hell assailing one’s citadel. To the puritan, belief meant something to be gloweringly and tenaciously held against the world, the flesh and the devil. But Catholic belief, in the Newman atmosphere, is too sheltered, too safely insured, to count excitingly. One only yawns over it, as his own deep soul must have secretly yawned over it, and turns aside to the genuine issues of life. But this is just what we should do with belief. We are passing out of the faith era, and belief, as an intellectual attitude, has almost ceased to play an active part in our life. In the scientific attitude there is no place whatever for belief. We have no right to “believe” anything unless it has been experimentally proved. But if it has been proved, then we do not say we “believe” it, because this would imply that an alternative was possible. All we do is to register our common assent to the new truth’s incontrovertibility. Nor has belief any place in the loose, indecisive issues of ordinary living. We have to act constantly on insufficient evidence, on the best “opinion” we can get. But opinion is not belief, and we are lost if we treat it so. Belief is dogmatic, but opinion has value only when it is tentative, questioning. The fact is that in modern thinking the attitude of belief has given place to what may be called the higher plausibility. Stern, rugged conviction which has no scientific background behind it is coming to be dealt with rather impatiently by the modern mind. We have difficulty in distinguishing it from prejudice. There is no hostility to faith, if by “faith” we only mean an emotional core of desire driving towards some ideal. But idealism is a very different thing from belief. Belief is impelled from behind; it is sterile, fixed. Belief has no seeds of progress, no constructive impulse. An ideal, on the other hand, is an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors converge. It looks forward and pulls us along with it. It is ideals and not beliefs that motivate the modern mind. It is meaningless to say that we “believe” in our ideals. This separates our ideals from us. But what they are is just the push of our temperaments towards perfection. They are what is most inseparably and intrinsically ourselves. The place of a belief which put truth outside of us and made virtue a hard clinging to it has been taken by the idealism which merges us with the growing end we wish to achieve.
Newman illustrates the perpetual paradox of ecclesiasticism, that the more devoutly you accept the Church the less important you make it. As you press closer and closer to its mystic heart, its walls and forms and ideas crumble and fade. The better Catholic you are, the more insidious your vitiation of Catholicism. So that the Church has remained strong only through its stout politicians and not through its saints. As a casket for the precious jewel of mysticism, it cannot die. But shorn of its political power it shrinks to a poetical society of mystics, held together by the strong and earthy bond of men who enjoy the easy expression of power over the least intelligent and intellectually assertive masses in Western society. The Church declines towards its natural limits. No attack on it, no undermining of it from within, can destroy religious feeling, for that is an organization of sentiments that are incarnate in man. Newman’s emotion, whatever his mind may have done, reached through to this eternal heart. Implicit in his intellect, however, is that demolition of religious intellectuality which has freed our minds for the work of the future. He was an unconscious pioneer. Ostensibly reactionary, he reveals in his own Apologia an anticipation of our modern outlook. His use of infallibility insidiously destroys the foundations of belief.