Arthur Christopher Benson's John Henry Cardinal Newman

What was his purpose in writing The Upton Letters (pub. 1905)anonymously? The new English Literature fellow at Magdalen College Cambridge since 1904 had a prose style which was unmistakeable. His educational theories were well known and the persona of a teacher in a public school adopted for the letters fitted his own history. Plausible deniability is useful when you wish to controvert certain long established educational practices such as the teaching of the Classics to all boys regardless of their interest and ability.

When the Upton Letters were published, more than a year ago, I meant them to be anonymous, it was a perfectly honest device. I did not want to mystify any one, or to excite any one’s curiosity. I had a number of things I wanted to say, or rather I wished said, because I had no wish to promulgate them as my own opinions. I wanted the book to speak for itself, to be judged on its own merits. I disguised rather carefully I thought, the writing of the book, and my publishers will bear witness to the careful precautions which were taken that the authorship should be kept concealed.

( from the Preface to the Seventh Edition)

Irony I believe this is known as when even the reviewer in the Times spotted his form in the light fog. There are things that he might have uttered sua cuique persona . One letter in particular on the subject of John Henry Cardinal Newman would strike me as a transparent emanation from a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can’t remember the term in rhetoric for the device of initially uttering an encomium and then by gradual declension taking away its force. Is there such?

He begins:

DEAR HERBERT,—You ask what I have been reading. Well, I have been going through Newman's Apologia for the twentieth time, and as usual have fallen completely under the magical spell of that incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a spirit so innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with a sweet naive egotism as of a child. It was written, as Newman himself said, IN TEARS; but I do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses, viewed from a quiet haven.

In the same paragraph without a break the defeating parenthesis:

I have no sympathy whatever with the intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable associations of the great Church which drew him quietly in, while all the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he is following. And what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses.

Benson continues :

One cannot help feeling that had  Newman been a Pharisee, he would have been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is rather pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to be the very voice of God.

Go on Benson, give ‘im one!

He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think, his own egotism from himself.
Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational inquiry.

find at :
The Upton Letters

Coleridge and Newman on Conscience

Of course it was not Voltaire’s intention to sneer at God as an invention that was required to frighten miscreants with the prospect of eternal punishment. That was a useful side effect of God’s actual existence. Coleridge finds his way to the moral order via man’s actual existence.

In The Friend cf: coleridge on metaphysics
he by what Ramana Maharshi would have called atma vichara self-inquiry turned his attention to the nature of consciousness itself:

But what are my metaphysics ? merely the referring of the mind to its own consciousness for truths indispensable to its own happiness! To what purpose do I, or am I about to, employ them? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts ? To deaden the feelings of will and free power, to extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to make myself and others worthless, soulless, God-less ?

He finds in the immediacy of consciousness the clarity of its truth seeking nature. As the upanishad tag has it : satyam vada, dharmam chara Speak the truth, follow dharma.

In the concluding section of Essay XV Coleridge declares:

God created man in his own image. To be the image of his own eternity created he man! Of eternity and self-existence what other likeness is possible, but immortality and moral self-determination ? In addition to sensation, perception, and practical judgment — instinctive or acquirable — concerning the notices furnished by the organs of perception, all which in kind at least, the dog possesses in common with his master; in addition to these, God gave us REASON, and with reason he gave us reflective SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS; gave us PRINCIPLES, distinguished from the maxims and generalizations of outward experience by their absolute and essential universality and necessity; and above all, by superadding to reason the mysterious faculty of free-will and consequent personal amenability, he gave us CONSCIENCE—that law of conscience, which in the power, and as the indwelling WORD, of a holy and omnipotent legislator commands us —from among the numerous ideas mathematical and philosophical, which the reason by the necessity of its own excellence creates for itself,—unconditionally commands us to attribute reality, and actual existence, to those ideas and to those only, without which the conscience itself would be baseless and contradictory, to the ideas of soul, of free-will, of immortality, and of God.

In contrast to the rolling thunder and fulminations of S.T.C. we have the quiet wisdom of Cardinal Newman:

An ethical system may supply laws, general rules, guiding principles, a number of examples, suggestions, landmarks, limitations, cautions, distinctions, solutions of critical or anxious difficulties; but who is to apply them to a particular case? whither can we go, except to the living intellect, our own, or another's? What is written is too vague, too negative for our need. It bids us avoid extremes; but it cannot ascertain for us, according to our personal need, the golden mean. The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them. It is seated in the mind of the individual, who is thus his own law, his own teacher, and his own judge in those special cases of duty which are personal to him.

(from An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Chapter 9)

Hamlet and Private Judgment (A Protestant to be or not to be)

Stripped of its euphony:

Non existence is a hard one. Some suss really. Some people have very bad luck and you wouldn’t blame them for doing away with themselves. It’s like being asleep only you won’t wake up. But the dreams might not be good. So we stick it out and put up with the boss and legal hassles and all the rest of it in our miserable lives. We just don’t know what’s after life if there is. Thinking and second thoughts paralyze us.

But hey, Ophelia will pray for me.
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I think you will agree, that is philosophically trite but there may be a reason for it. In the month of the 500th. anniversary of the nailing of the Articles to the Church Door in Wittenberg where Hamlet went to University I suggest that he in that famous soliloquy is suffering from a bad case of private judgment. Why did old Catholic Hamlet send young Hamlet to that center of Lutheran thought? To become a new man with a new subjectively informed conscience, to get with the program.
((Have a look at, I prithee:
Newman on Private Judgment
Disagree with it but enjoy his ‘supple, periodic prose (Joyce) and his high toned ironic vivacities))

Not far away in time or place Rene Descartes was retiring into an airing room to consult his personal certainty and get it all quite clear. ‘I doubt said the Carpenter and shed a bitter tear’.

Shakespeare had recusant sympathies, that is clear but within the rules of what was permitted on the stage had to hold back on religious controversy. Magic, witchcraft, the Ides of March, love potions and the like were the nearest he could come to discussing spiritual matters. Yet it comes out In Hamlet with mentions of purgatory, auricular confession, remission of sins, the intercession of the dead and the life of the world to come. Above all it is the violent chaos that issues from the Wittenbergerish private judgment that is the central theme. Shakespeare’s father was involved in the Talibanism of the destruction of rood screens and statues, the painting over of murals, and the smashing of stained glass windows of the churches that were under new management. That such atrocity would never surface in the myriad minded man Shakespeare is not credible. At the end of it all the stage of Europe is littered with bodies and Tyburn is ‘a place of much commerce’.