As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, back in
the middle of the nineteenth century a man named Charles Kingsley, a successful
and well-known Anglican clergyman, seemingly out of the blue attacked a
semi-retired Catholic clergyman by the name of John Henry Newman, a convert to
Catholicism who was regarded even by himself as a failure.
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| John Henry Newman |
As far as Newman and others were concerned, everything had
gone right for Newman when he was an Anglican clergyman and had gone horribly
wrong when he became a Catholic clergyman.
Kingsley’s attack came across to many people, even many of Kingsley’s
friends, as kicking a man when he was down.
Newman made the matter public in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua after Kingsley published additional calumnies
and heaped abuse on him and the Catholic Church. At that point, virtually everyone except
those who were extreme bigots realized how unfairly Kingsley had treated Newman. Newman’s reputation soared, and public
opinion of Catholicism reached a point that the old prejudices, if not
eliminated, were at least seen as being in extremely poor taste.
The puzzle remains, however. Why
did Kingsley attack Newman? Mere
anti-Catholic bigotry might explain the initial sneering jibe in Kingsley’s review
of James Anthony Froude’s History of
England, but not the near-hysteria that followed. As Wilfred Philip Ward (father of Mary
Josephine “Maisie” Ward, noted biographer of G.K. Chesterton and John Henry
Newman) related,
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| Wilfred Philip Ward |
How deep and habitual Kingsley’s feeling of animosity was, we
see from some words written while his pamphlet [What Then Does Dr. Newman
Mean?] was in preparation, to a correspondent who had called his attention
to a passage in W.G. Ward’s “Ideal of a Christian Church” which appeared to justify
Kingsley’s charge against Newman and his friends. “Candour,” Mr. Ward had written, “is an
intellectual rather than a moral virtue, and by no means either universally or
distinctively characteristic of the saintly mind.” If “candour” meant “truthfulness,” such an
admission was surely significant. (Wilfred P. Ward, The Life of John Henry
Cardinal Newman, Vol. II. London:
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912, 7.)
It is interesting to note that the “W.G. Ward” (William George Ward) named was
the father of Wilfred Ward and the subject of a biography by his son. Surprising many people, the circle of participants
in the “Oxford Movement” and those directly interacting with it was, relatively
speaking, very small, but of enormous influence.
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| William George Ward |
For
example, a politician’s “No comment” is often a more or less polite way of
saying “None of your business” to people who have no right to know something or
who will use knowledge of something to cause harm. That, of course, is not permission to lie,
even by misdirection or mental reservation, but if relating a truth in a
truthful yet indirect or more diplomatic manner will not result in harm or
cause less harm, then prudence and charity may dictate doing so, just as
remaining silent instead of volunteering information may be prudent or
charitable. After all, if the Gestapo
did not come to your door and ask if you are hiding Jews in your cellar, you
are not obliged to run after them and inform them of the fact.
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| Charles Kingsley |
It
is thus preferable in some instances to phrase things differently yet still
tell the truth, or even remain completely silent out of charity and not express
one’s self at all if it is not essential and the truth is not thereby
endangered. Candor should be guided by
prudence, while truthfulness should be guided by justice and charity. In any event,
Kingsley replied that he was using the passage from Ward’s
book in his forthcoming pamphlet, and added: “I am answering Newman now, and
though of course I give up the charge of conscious dishonesty, I trust to make
him and his admirers sorry that they did not leave me alone. I have a score of more than twenty years to
pay, and this is an installment of it. (Ibid., 8.)
In other words, Kingsley admitted that his original
accusation against Newman was false; the concept of “conscious dishonesty” is
interesting, if not entirely meaningful in ethics, as it implies unconscious dishonesty. Are you really lying if you think you are
telling the truth?
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| James Anthony Froude |
It is possible to be mistaken, certainly, but lying?
In any event, Kingsley had failed to condemn Newman with a demonstrably
false accusation. He therefore compounded
his original injustice by stating his intention to keep on slinging mud at Newman
and at the Catholic Church until something finally stuck.
At first glance this sounds like the whining of some kind
of paranoid or psychotic. “Leave [him]
alone”? The entire situation from start
to finish had been instigated by Kingsley, whom Newman had never met and with
whom he had never communicated!
Matters become a little clearer when we discover that James
Froude, the author of the book Kingsley reviewed in Macmillan’s Magazine, was the youngest brother of Richard Hurrell
Froude (1803-1836), and Hurrell was one of Newman’s best friends during his
tenure at Oxford University, but who died young. Paradoxically, James Froude greatly admired
Newman, even after Newman converted to Catholicism and Froude abandoned
Christianity in any meaningful sense. As
he said of Newman,
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| Richard Hurrell Froude |
When I entered at Oxford, John Henry Newman was beginning to
be famous. The responsible authorities
were watching him with anxiety; clever men were looking with interest and
curiosity on the apparition among them of one of those persons of indisputable
genius who was likely to make a mark upon his time. . . . Both [Newman and
Julius Caesar] were formed by nature to command others, both had the faculty of
attracting to themselves the passionate devotion of friends and followers. (Quoted in John Moody, John Henry Newman. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1945, 58.)
(John Moody, 1868-1958, by the way, was the founder of
Moody’s Investor’s Service, and like Newman, with whom he seems to have felt
some affinity, a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism. He pioneered the rating of bonds so that
investors could judge the soundness of their investments more easily.)
As a historian, Froude was more than a little slapdash. Rather ironically in light of Kingsley’s
accusation against Newman, Froude’s habit of deviating from strict truth in his
works led serious scholars to label his sort of fictionalized history “Froude’s
Disease.”
And yet, as we shall see, Froude did not hate Newman —
just the opposite, in fact.
#30#