Abstract

John Henry Newman was--and still is--an enigma to many. Although he insisted anti-liberalism was the continuity in his changing thought, he championed liberal ideals such as freedom of conscience, intellectual freedom, separation of church and state and the value and uniqueness of the individual. ;Newman's ambiguity about liberalism is traced from his attraction at fourteen to Enlightenment writers, which caused a skepticism about Christian revelation, and his evangelical conversion at fifteen, when dogma was "impressed" on his mind and was "never effaced or obscured." Subsequent crises in his life led him to recall this early conversion and deepen his commitment to dogma; this was the impulse behind the Oxford Movement, his doctrinal development theory and reluctant conversion to Roman Catholicism. ;Newman's opposition to liberalism was rooted in his desire to protect the supernatural nature of revelation from the epistemology, held by most religious parties, that gave primacy to reason over faith; the "rationalizing method" was considered to be the test of doctrinal "truth." As an Anglican in his Oxford University sermons and as a Roman Catholic in the Grammar of Assent Newman drew upon and argued against this epistemology in his defense of dogma and faith. He called liberalism "the anti-dogmatic principle" and the "mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are ... beyond and independent of it" and whose "external authority" was "the Divine Word." ;When he became a Roman Catholic, Newman felt he could relax his concern to protect dogma from what he called "liberalism" but became concerned to support the liberal principles of Lord Acton's small group of Catholics against the "fortress mentality" of the Ultramontanes who considered liberalism a threat to Christianity. In his effort to find a via media between these groups, Newman was denounced by the Liberal Catholics as too authoritarian and by the Ultramontanes as too liberal, even heretical