The Great Dissent

...Newman's archenemy Hampden did not invent liberalism, nor did he take it as far as others...

...By then Newman had named Hampden prodromos Antichristou —forerunner of Antichrist...

...To protect dogma, an authoritative institution is necessary...

...His faith rested on trust in Scripture...

...Hampden's elevation to Oxford professor of moral philosophy in 1834 and to Regius professor of divinity in 1836 were accomplished over Newman's furious opposition...

...We know about the Trinity, he said, "because we read the fact in the pages of Scripture...

...In ours, there are only liberals, including those who prefer the name conservative...

...This temptation needs to be resisted, because the author of this book defends his thesis with impressive competence...

...Pattison is even tempted to classify the Idea as irony, Newman "revenging himself upon the secular snobbery of his Oxford contemporaries...

...by 1845 Newman had found that authority in the Roman Catholic church...

...But once again he reduces a great achievement to an event in Newman's life...

...Eliot, Alasdair MacIntyre, William F. Buckley, Jr.—and concludes that Newman would find the rot of liberalism in all of them...

...Pattison's argument depends crucially on viewing Newman's life as an unbroken whole, as a sustained campaign against an error so monstrous as to threaten all that is vital to mankind...

...Pattison admits it "contains a grand and enduring vision of education...

...Pattison summarizes the propositions Newman would substitute for the errors of liberalism: "the objective existence of truth, the possibility of its dogmatic exposition, and the empirical demonstration of both from the experiences of the mind...

...His promotion to bishop in 1847 validated Newman's charge that liberalism had become powerful in the church itself...

...The Great Dissent, in toto, suggests that Newman's opposition to liberalism is in fact what makes Newman Newman...

...The Great Dissent gives us Newman whole, but the parts—the books and essays—are greater than the whole, of more lasting significance...

...But the Essay can be profitably read without knowing what role it played in Newman's life...

...Hence it is tempting to assert in advance that such an idea cannot be rationally supported, that it must be proposed out of some peculiar if not malicious desire to defame a great thinker...

...Newman found this error, or heresy, pervasive in modern thought...

...The great virtue of Newman's critique of liberalism," Pattison writes, "is that it exists at all...

...Neither understanding of The Idea of a University comes anywhere near appreciating that book for its real value—and that value, apart from the occasion that gave it birth, has proved itself far beyond its time and place...

...Indeed, Newman gives "one consistent view of the world opposed to liberalism root and branch, sharing none of its premises and despising all of its works...

...The roots of the modern heresy Newman found in the Arian heresy of the fourth century...

...Hampden gave Oxford University's Bampton lectures in 1832, which Newman regarded with horror...

...Hampden opposed scholasticism, any absolutism...

...Although resigned to the secular liberalism of the society he lived in, Newman would have preferred a social order that would protect the true church: "no one can dislike the democratic principle more than I do," he wrote in 1874...

...It is a shocking idea...

...If Newman failed so completely to stem the tide of modernism, why pay any attention to him any more...

...And although the Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism, its principles lived on to find new life in the Reformation and in nineteenthcentury England...

...Thus Hampden favored tolerance, humanism, relativism...

...On this question Pattison, who is professor of English at Southampton College of Long Island University, ends his brilliant study—but rather weakly...

...Nothing wrong here...

...in Pattison's words, he "insisted that all dogmas, creeds, and doctrines are as tentative and defective as the language in which they are stated...

...invisible to the Son himself...

...Newman's ideas on development of doctrine are important, period, irrespective of their historical origins...

...it is so full of insights into doctrine itself, whether stated in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, that the question of the "success" of this book—and hence, in part, of Newman—ought not to be submerged in Pattison's analysis of Newman's lifelong struggle against liberalism...

...We need to face the facts: "He failed in all his worldly and even intellectual objectives...

...Yet this is the disturbing thesis argued in The Great Dissent, whose primary purpose, as its author Robert Pattison writes, is "to establish Newman's impeccable credentials as a failure...

...We can forget the usual claims for Newman's greatness, Pattison says...

...they are false and, in any case, mostly kept alive by partisans and promoters of his cause for canonization...

...But to accede to this understanding is to surrender to a form of historicism, a denial that Newman's literary accomplishments can outreach their original intentions, that Newman is to be evaluated only for successes and failures in his own time...

...Newman defined liberalism in the Apologia pro Vita Sua as "the antidogmatic principle and its developments...

...Pattison fits it into Newman's personal journey, pointing out that the Essay "distinguished absolutely between orthodox Roman and heretical Anglican doctrine" and thus moved Newman toward his conversion to Catholicism...

...Anyone who has studied and been inspired by any of Newman's great books knows that Newman was no failure...

...This error Newman called "liberalism," a name for modernity, which Newman hated and struggled against—unsuccessfully...

...What Hampden saw to be the foundation of our belief in God may serve as a representative example...

...While still an Anglican, Newman found liberalism embodied in Renn Dickson Hampden, whose books and sermons offered more than adequate targets...

...That Newman gives contemporary Catholic "liberals" some of their best intellectual sustenance—see his essay, "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine," for example—is irrelevant to this discussion...

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...Even in his own time, liberalism had won...

...Newman was fighting a losing battle...

...Another example of an influential Newman work is The Idea of a University...

...But to know anything about God directly would mean human beings can know something beyond nature and revelation, and this Hampden denied...

...This approach radically undervalues Newman, many of whose ideas have again and again shown their power beyond Newman's life and times...

...Pattison makes brief reference to modern conservatives such as Friedrich Hayek, T.S...

...If Newman was indeed "the uncontaminated antagonist of everything modern," we need to know what he hated, what he meant by "liberalism...

...the "elevated thoughts" in the Idea, Pattison claims, "do not square with Newman's own most basic beliefs...

...The Arians' belief that "God must pre-exist the Son" rested on their conviction that God himself is unknowable, Commonweal 13 March 1992: 31 "invisible to all...

...Here was protoliberalism...

...Consider, for instance, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine...

...He apparently means liberalism needs a critique, and Newman's thought provides one...

...hence he set himself in opposition to Western civilization itself...

...What in Hampden's ideas could deserve such opprobrium...

...Apparently because Newman's educational ideas were not woven into the fabric of his life's quest, they must be of lesser worth...

...The Idea of a University is evidence of Newman's success, not of his failure...

...Choosing similar words on another occasion, he said liberalism is "the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion...

...John Henry Newman, the leader of the Oxford Movement, the inspiring convert to Catholicism, the author of landmark books such as An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and The Idea of a University, a cardinal, and finally a prospective saint—a failure...