The Antagonist Principle

John Henry Newman and the Paradox of Personality

Lawrence Poston

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813936345
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

The Antagonist Principle is a critical examination of the works and sometimes controversial public career of John Henry Newman (1801–1890), first as an Anglican and then as Victorian England's most famous convert to Roman Catholicism at a time when such a conversion was not only a minority choice but in some quarters a deeply offensive one. Lawrence Poston adopts the idea of personality as his theme, not only in the modern sense of warring elements in one's own temperament and relationships with others but also in a theological sense as a central premise of orthodox Trinitarian Christian doctrine. The principle of "antagonism, " in the sense of opposition, Poston argues, activated Newman's imagination while simultaneously setting limits to his achievement, both as a spiritual leader and as a writer. The author draws on a wide variety of biographical, historical, literary, and theological scholarship to provide an "ethical" reading of Newman's texts that seeks to offer a humane and complex portrait.

Neither a biography nor a revelation of a life, this textual study of Newman's development as a theologian in his published works and private correspondence attempts to resituate him as one of the most combative of the Victorian seekers. Though his spiritual quest took place on the far right of the religious spectrum in Victorian England, it nonetheless allied him with a number of other prominent figures of his generation as distinct from each other as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Walter Pater. Avoiding both hagiography and iconoclasm, Poston aims to "see Newman whole."

CHAPTER 1

Self and Others

ONE OF THE most memorable sections of Newman’s Apologia is the passage opening with the strangely ominous words “The Long Vacation of 1839 began early” and culminating in his study of the Monophysite heresy.¹ Well before 1839, Newman, despite his own disavowals, was the acknowledged leader of the Tractarian movement in the Church of England, concerned to reinfuse the Establishment with the primitive Catholicity of which it had lost sight since the Elizabethan settlement. Thus when Newman claims his reading evoked his first doubts of the “tenableness of Anglicanism” and, by the end of August, had left him “seriously alarmed,” it was not only Anglicanism but his own identity that was at stake. “My stronghold was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in the mirror, and I was a Monophysite” (A 108).

A second passage often juxtaposed with this first comes from the magnificent concluding section of the Apologia, in which the certainty of God’s existence seems threatened by the visible evidences of the “world of men.” Newman sees in that world “a sight which fills one with unspeakable distress. The world seems simply to give the lie to that great truth, of which my whole being is so full, and the effect upon me is, in consequence[,] … as confusing as if it denied that I am in existence myself. 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 reflexion of its Creator” (216). To see nothing in the mirror is to lack evidence not only for personal reality but for Divine Being. A world devoid of the divine imprint would be a world that offered no grounding for human personality. As Newman had written a few pages earlier, “I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God; and if I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I find it impossible to believe in my own existence (and of that fact I am quite sure) without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience” (180).

In the first of the mirror passages, Newman imagines himself alienated from the true faith. In the second he fears that God has become alienated from him and indeed from His whole creation. At the heart of the recurring mirror metaphor in Newman are the Pauline texts “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12) and “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed from the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). The mirror offers the promise of self-perception, but if it reflects God’s image, it may also record His absence. Newman reads himself in the mirror held up to him by other people whose lives offer an alternative narrative of himself, whether as a pattern to be emulated or an alter ego to be feared. The coeditorship of Hurrell Froude’s Remains (chapter 3) was an instance of the first possibility; the publication of Blanco White’s Memoirs (chapter 5) was a striking example of the latter.

The first section of this chapter lays the foundation for a discussion of Newman’s orthodoxy—Roman Catholic/Anglican, Trinitarian, creedal—and his difficulty in translating that orthodoxy into an ethic for dealing with other persons. He found guidance in the concept of ethos, derived from Aristotle but developed somewhat idiosyncratically by the Tractarians. The Monophysite in the mirror needed company. Newman, for all his powers of rejection, desired close friends, and perhaps the very strength of his social impulses accounts for the vehemence with which he sometimes rejected other people. In persons he might find an echo of the relationship with the Divine. In his relationship with the Divine, he might find a Person who cared for him more than any human being could. The primary site of this encounter was in the Eucharist. But as he himself realized, one direction of his thought could have led him to religious despair. The concept of ethos offered him a way to deal with that tendency in himself.

From the inner Newman we move outward in this chapter—his effect on his contemporaries at Oxford and thence his place on the larger Victorian stage. Here we discuss two other Victorians, Thomas Carlyle and Walter Pater, quite unlike Newman (and each other) in their respective religious orientations, but resembling him in some of their responses to the broader cultural scene. The possibilities and the limitations of the human personality were important in an age that Carlyle famously described as destitute of faith but terrified of skepticism. Does the self have any reality beyond itself, or does it exist as an isolate in a world emptied of traditional religious meaning? Believers and unbelievers alike confronted this question. Robert Browning, reared in an Evangelical household, expressed these puzzles of personhood in his dramatic monologues, and John Stuart Mill affirmed a value in the liberty of the individual as a necessary precondition to self-awareness as a citizen. Such contemporaries offer a reminder of what is Victorian about Newman, a point of view that too often escapes a narrowly theological or purely inspirational reading of his career. Nonetheless, it is important first of all to understand the nature of Newman’s theology and its orthodox underpinnings.

Doctrine and the Difficulty of Knowing

The concept of personality and “persons” in this study operates on three levels: human, institutional, and doctrinal. Much of this study dwells on the oscillation between the first and third levels, while the second affords a locus for their engagement. The human level involves human beings themselves and their relationship to others. The third, capitalized, is a central term in Christian doctrine: the three Persons of the Trinity, the divine Personality as it is manifested in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and as defined in the formularies of the Church (n. 1 above). For Newman there is a constant and mutually validating relationship between the human and divine levels in which personality can be understood. The “paradox” of which I speak in my subtitle alludes first of all to paradoxes of Newman’s own personality as an individuating fact about him, his way of dealing with other people and with his own warring impulses. But doctrinal affirmations also involve a paradox, which in religion becomes a mystery: how can Jesus be both man and God without in any way compromising or diminishing either attribute? In Christian doctrine, human beings participate in this divine nature but imperfectly and partially.

The second, or institutional, application of “personality,” for Newman, is the Church itself, which not only is composed of human being but also bears traits of collective personality. For Newman, as for Carlyle, institutions may have their own life—or, in some cases, no life at all, or a stunted one. But it is such bodies—as spiritual and human entities, not as bureaucracies—that support the daily life of human beings in Christ. That is why Newman’s ecclesiology is so central a part of his structure of faith, and it is perhaps what most decisively separates him from those Evangelicals who, depending on whether they stood inside the Establishment or outside it, tended either to downplay the role of the Visible Church in favor of personal experience or wholly to reject it in their commitment to an Invisible Church of all believers.

But it also needs to be said at the outset that the use of the term “personality,” though convenient and indeed essential for our purposes here, is not reliably transparent. Tom Mozley, who married Newman’s sister Harriett, registered his own reservations in later life, as Newman’s secession to Rome was passing into history:

A thousand times have I wished, and then resolved never again to let myself be plagued with the wish, that the word “Person” could be banished from our Symbols and Formularies…. If the object be to bring a stupendous mystery as much as possible within the reach of a mathematical intelligence, the word, for aught I know, may be as good as any other. But for any practical purpose, it must defeat its own object. We should set down any one as either a madman or a very vulgar jester who should address either Father, Son, or Spirit by the name of Person, or should so refer to him. (2:346–47)

And the contemporary theologian John Macquarrie cautions, “Everyone knows that the word ‘person’ at that time when these formulations were being made in the early Church did not bear the meaning that it has nowadays, of a conscious center of experience. It had in fact a much more shadowy meaning, and perhaps the wisest course is to leave the meaning shadowy…. Perhaps we would do better to think of ‘movements’ of Being, or ‘modes’ of Being (provided it is not in the sense of temporary modes), but these two would be symbols” (192–93). Nonetheless, he elsewhere concedes that “symbols and images drawn from personal life have the highest degree of adequacy accessible to us” (143). Newman would claim no more, but he would have disavowed Mozley’s consigning of the use of such a metaphor to “mathematical intelligence.” There was nothing mathematical about Newman’s personalism; it belonged to a different world of discourse.

The term “personality” is thus a complex one, evoking different possibilities, and as an adjective, “personal” is equally evocative and hence perhaps equally unreliable.² Yet it is still the most readily available way to describe the divine in terms apprehensible by human understanding.³

In Trinitarian doctrine, “Personality” and “Persons” are metaphysical and ontological rather than psychological concepts. One of Newman’s earliest Trinity sermons (May 1825), preached when he was curate of St. Clement’s, explores the doctrine in its “practical and devotional” dimension (S 3:286). The practical consequence of adherence to the Trinity, Newman suggests, is not to understand the three Persons by each one’s individual nature, but rather in their interactions. “The Father graciously consents to pardon—the Son to atone—the Spirit to purify…. They work a beautiful and wondrous work—and though each has taken a particular province, yet where one works, these work all” (3:284). They illustrate the variety of gifts existing in one spirit that Paul demonstrates in 1 Corinthians: one God but represented in three Persons. To the extent that Jesus is fully human, we may attempt to glimpse his “inner theater,” as Newman does in his well-known sermon “Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus.” But to the extent that Christ as the Son is fully one and the same with the Divine Word, we can only draw inferences from the record of the biblical narratives showing His (human) ministry from the outside.

Newman returned to the question repeatedly. In August 1832 he asserted to Hugh James Rose that “we cannot form an idea of Personality except as viewed in action, passion, relation etc.—ideas inconsistent with the true notion of the Supreme Being—An infinite immutable Mind cannot be realized as a Person” (L&D 3:78). More than two decades later in late 1858, he wrote with some impatience to a restless Catholic convert, J. M. Capes, “I cannot understand the state of mind which can love our Lord really with the feeling upon it, ‘After all, perhaps there is no such person.’ It is loving a mere vision or picture, and is so unreal as to be degrading. I cannot fancy … this existence of devotion without certainty. I could not throw myself upon any one here below, of whom I had the suspicion, ‘Perhaps he is not trustworthy’ ” (L&D 18:472). And yet at times Newman seems to have been more at ease with these doctrinal formulations than with their translation into an ethical and interpersonal context.

When Newman opposed personality as the “antagonist principle” to the older High Church preference for boards and committees, or when, as in an Oxford University sermon preached in 1832, he spoke on “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth” (OUS 62–77), he was not using the related terms in their full psychological and existential sense. Rather, he seems to have meant a partial disclosure of one person’s character to another. Nor does Newman get much closer to the “insidedness” that we expect from the term “personality” when he responds to Kingsley’s famous attack by referring to the “living intelligence” or “concrete being” that he proposes to exhibit. Personality on the human level, for Newman, is expressed in actions, agency, and fleeting unveilings of the inner self in face-to-face encounters; “personality” in this sense only approximates the idea of an inner theater of the mind, for in Newman’s theater the curtains are only partially drawn. Even in human relationships, like those between priest and parishioner, or tutor and pupil, in which a pastoral or moral influence is exerted, personality cannot be fully disclosed, if by that we mean the private details that may account for a particular hue in that personality. From all this we may infer the need to understand the term both doctrinally and ethically. For Newman the latter usage is more emotionally fraught and less securely held. Theology can be tidy, even if the tidiness is sometimes itself a form of mystification. Human relationships are seldom tidy, though at their best, for the believer, they may be indices to a greater reality.

Newman’s description of St. Peter is at the heart of these questions: “If Christ were not to be trusted, there was nothing in the world to be trusted” (D&A 250). From this flows our obligation not only to other human beings but also to the Church as the visible representative of Christ. “Faith is reliance on the word of another; the word of another is in itself a faint evidence compared with that of sight or reason. It is influential only when we cannot do without it … when it is our informant about things which we cannot do without.” Thus “love of God led St. Peter to follow Christ, and love of Christ leads men to love and follow the Church as his representative and voice” (252).

In its purely ethical sense, the core of Newman’s personalism is expressed aphoristically in the letters to the Times first printed in February 1841 and later published as “The Tamworth Reading Room”: “The heart is commonly reached,” he wrote, “not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion” (D&A 293). Man is not merely a reasoning animal, but one who sees, feels, contemplates, and acts. Newman caps this with the Carlylean assertion, “Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith” (295).

For Newman, Personalism in both human affairs and matters of faith has the capacity to move us to belief and action. Of the Divine Mystery we have the security, such as it is, of knowing that we do not know. In the fifteenth of his Oxford University Sermons, “The Theory of Development in Religious Doctrine” (1843), a preliminary sketch for his treatise, Newman stated, “As God is one, so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one; it is not a thing of parts; it is not a system; nor is it any thing imperfect, and needing a counterpart. It is the vision of an object. When we pray, we pray, not to an assemblage of notions, or to a creed, but to One Individual Being; and when we speak of Him we speak of a Person, not of a Law or a Manifestation” (OUS 222). But though that well-known passage just quoted from “The Tamworth Reading Room” leaves no doubt about the superiority of personal influence to dry logic, nonetheless personality in the context of human relationships is more problematic. Only God knows any of us fully, and if we ever do know others as we know ourselves, it will by His mercy be in the next world, not this one. For Newman, again, the epistemological paradox is generated by the demand of knowing others and our inability ever to know them. If others can be at least partially grasped, it is not, in Newman’s view, through an intellectual apprehension but through a complicated sensory awareness of the ethos of another being.

Like other undergraduates of his day and place, Newman read Aristotle—one of his earliest published essays was “Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics” in the London Review (1829)—and he would have understood the term ethos as Aristotle used it in the Rhetoric to denote how persuasion may be achieved through the orator’s manifestation of his personal character as his claim to credibility.⁴ But though this root meaning is certainly present in Tractarian use, it is more than a province of rhetoric, of the spoken or written word. It has to do with the entire conviction conveyed by a person’s actions as well as language, indeed even by the quality of his or her reticence. The Apologia conveys its author’s method through its very refusal at critical junctures to cross the line from reticence to revelation. The ethical appeal of that work lies as much in its silences as in its declarations.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is especially relevant to understanding Newman’s engagement with these issues. In books 8 and 9, Aristotle discusses the offices of friendship and argues that sound friendship is a feature of our relationship with ourselves: “The good person should be a self-lover, since by doing what is fine, he will both be better off and benefit others” (9.8.235). Read in the context of Newman’s contentious relationships, Aristotle’s remark is striking. The power of ethos is problematized in the fracturing of Newman’s relationships, whether caused by ideological disagreement or a change of personal circumstances like marriage or departure from the work of the Movement. Such severances suggest a lack of Aristotelian self-love on Newman’s part. Given the underlying uncertainty at the heart of his own ethos, it is not surprising that the perception of another person had the potential to be either a steadying or a disturbingly evanescent phenomenon.⁵

James Pereiro’s study of the Tractarian adoption of the term ethos suggests that it is expressed through the whole being of the person whose influence over others is promoted and quickened by it. If it is soundly based on moral premises, it becomes a potential healing force both for the person who possesses it and those whom he influences. When Matthew Arnold writes in “The Buried Life” of intimate moments of mutual disclosure, he is undoubtedly expressing not only a concept of romantic love but also the Oxford idea of friendship:

Only—but this is rare—

When a beloved hand is laid in ours,

When, jaded with the rush and glare

Of the interminable hours,

Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,

...