Liberalism, a Wrong Path to Take

I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion.. . the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.. . It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion.

St. John Henry Newman

Newman

The above quote leaves nothing to be desired in terms of clarity. All religions are equal and subject to everyone's opinion. This is what liberalism, which is of British origin, teaches. John Henry Newman's transition from the Church of England to the Church of Rome in 1845 had as its trigger the increased liberalism within Anglicanism. Open questioning of the revealed truth of the Bible had taken root among professors at Oxford University, where Newman enjoyed a reputation as a guide with special concern for the University Church. In 1833, his assault on liberal error began through the Oxford Movement, in which his influence was decisive. In the so-called Tracts for the Times, Newman and his supporters published articles examining the extent to which the English Church could still be reconciled with the original church of the apostles. That investigation led to a break with Protestantism in 1841.

The Anglican Church had gone its own, national way three hundred years earlier with King Henry VIII. By that ‘Brexit’, the British Isles had distanced themselves from the Catholic body on the European continent. During the first two centuries that followed, Newman writes, there had still been great Anglican theologians who hammered away at the purity of Christian doctrine, albeit outside Rome, but without exaggerating disputes with the Mother Church on points of fundamental truths of faith. But with the Romantic Movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, liberalism came into vogue among poets who dreamed of freedom for peoples and sympathised with the French Revolution. Freemasonry, founded in London in the early eighteenth century, had already promoted liberalism among Crown ministers, top officials and figures in key positions. Newman had no objection to freedom of thought but there was also a false freedom of thought. From the German-speaking world, pietism had gained a foothold in high circles. This involved an undogmatic Christianity of mere feeling. For British freethinkers, the Bible passed for a mere form of literature, as Spinoza had proclaimed a century earlier. For them, Faith was incompatible with Reason. Science and religion belonged to separate paths.

Newman considered the liberals' attack on the truths of Christianity disastrous. He reproached them for both their methodical doubtfulness, à la Descartes, and for their assimilation of all religions to one another. For him, there were only two options: either return to Catholicism or become atheist. Anything in between only created confusion. His books leave nothing to be desired in this regard, starting with an essay on the Development of Dogma. His famous works are the Apologia Pro Vita Sua - retranslated as The Story of My Life - and The Grammar of Assent, which advocates considering, agreeing with and then affirming the binding articles of faith. Newman's letters, sermons, poems, novels and plays are intended for reflective Christians. From his hand also appeared the blueprint for a Catholic university, The Idea Of A University, published in the same year 1864 in which liberalism was condemned as heresy in Pope Pius IX's Syllabus errorum. That list of aberrations naturally included freedom of speech.

Newman believed that Catholic academics should master the classics. Besides the Bible and the Church Fathers, he recommended that students delve into Enlightenment philosophers to counter their arguments. To support this, he referred to the Counter-Enlightenment, to the work of reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre and François de Chateaubriand. He preferred Protestant English poets, such as John Milton (Paradise Lost) and John Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress), to, for example, the writings of a then notorious French priest, Catholic admittedly, but who was indulgent towards liberalism and socialism. Reading, apology and the refutation of heterodox ideas had to foster resistance aginst the progressive Zeitgeist. People should not be intimidated by sages posing as scientists who undermined true religion. Newman had no problem with the pure natural sciences, since they excluded issues of theological nature.

Newman also opposed the connection of Church and State in England because of the behaviour of clerical dignitaries. As conservatives, although they were allowed to challenge liberalism, and pass for allies on the basis of their doctrinal orthodoxy, Newman saw that within the Anglican High Church, enjoying their prestige among the church people - just like the high clergy in pre-Revolutionary France - they did not take the teachings of Christ very seriously on the moral and social level.

The Idea of a University is, as mentioned, a draft. It consists of a number of speeches on theology and how other sciences are related to it; on knowledge in relation to learning, profession, religion and Church; on literature, philosophy, language, history; on physics in relation to Christianity; on free thought, medicine, the origins and development of universities through the ages. Starting with the latter, Newman's vision unfolds naturally.

Older than the university are the liberal arts, practised by gentlemen who could free themselves from the cares of everyday existence. Those ‘arts’ - grammar, dialectics (logic), rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy - grew into what in time came to be called the humanities , or what today passes for ‘the humanities’. In medieval universities, all knowing revolved around theology, but from the seventeenth century onwards, the idea emerged that knowledge brings progress. Physical discoveries were the trigger. Knowledge of the physical universe increased steadily; but what happened in the meantime to the liberal arts, i.e. to literature, philosophy, history? For Newman, what we now call ‘humanities’ are not sciences in the pure sense. They are important, though. They shape the mind. Reading and studying the ‘classics’ - both pagan and Christian - help with thinking and writing. The arts belong in the university, alongside the study of law, medicine and anything belonging to the STEM department, or what is understood as ‘pure science’.

In the seventeenth century, as a result of the ‘progress of knowing’ (Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning), philosophy (which belonged to the liberal arts) detached itself from theology (which for Newman is a science.) Knowledge which had been passed down concerning the ‘revealed God’ - for five hundred years pivotal to the university - gave way to a philosophy which postulated a new ‘concept of God’ based on progressive physical findings. The philosophers spoke of the ‘ordering principle’, the ‘real being’, the ‘supreme being’ and other abstractions. They also spoke of the ‘god of Reason’, and the followers of that god were the ‘deists’. The eighteenth century, or Enlightenment, needed an ordered society and an orderly universe for the time being. The new thing was that the God of Revelation, Providence - who was responsible for order and clarity - henceforth no longer enjoyed primacy, but had to share his place with the god of Science. One could also say that the believer in the scientist and the scientist in the believer took order for granted and desirable, while scientists and believers henceforth began to operate separately from each other. A kind of schizophrenia, in other words.

A century later, with the Romantic Movement, Reason came off its pedestal. Theology had already been dethroned; now philosophy was too.  The former must tolerate that there are other and equally valuable religions or cultures besides Christianity; the latter must recognise that there is no order. Order exists at most in our minds, as an ideal, but not in reality. If there is no order, then there is no centre. The university which once revolved around theology, and later philosophy, hit a crisis. If the God of Revelation, or the primacy of Reason, is not the starting point for any branch of science, what is still the starting point? In other words, what connects different fields of knowledge to one another?

Theology had not only been dethroned, but also placed outside Science, and the same thing was now happening to Philosophy, Literature and History. Where religion from now on was considered subjective, a similar fate awaited the Classics, Philosophy and History. Did they still belong at the university? After all, they were not ‘sciences’. And so what were the practitioners of the ‘humanities’ going to do? In the long run, to justify their academic status, they started imitating the methods of the natural sciences; they fitted themselves with a jargon, a theoretical apparatus, an abstract scaffolding in order to give the prestige of their field academic lustre, i.e. with a right to state support. That trend set in with positivism and continued through the 20th century. Newman did not experience the latter phase (theoretical literary science and similar constructions). His position - and that is the point here - is that ‘subjectivity’ regarding the artes liberales is no less valuable than ‘objectivity’ regarding the sciences. The artes are necessary for our mental growth and belong at the university. However, they should not want to apply the methods of the ‘beta disciplines’.

Newman's observation that the university has no centre is fundamental. Without theology, the various disciplines start competing with each other for the central position. Curricula become increasingly sensitive to fashion, and there is a proliferation of chairs for details whose existence is questionable. New fields of knowledge overwhelm the place of ancient theology and later philosophy. Economics, for example, may start dictating from the centre what space the other disciplines will still be given. Furthermore, the applied sciences claim the throne by virtue of their social usefulness.

What loses out anyway is general intellectual development, familiarity with the canon of classical authorities. The coherent and speculative take a back seat and are considered useless.  They lose their raison d'être.