The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy by Robert Pattison (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 297 secrecy. (This is described in chapter 8 of the first volume.) It rapidly gained adherents among influential members of the nobility. It incited resistance to Napoleon, prepared the return of Louis XVIII, and influenced events during the ministries ofVillèle and Polignac. After 1830, against his better judgment, Bertier joined remnants of the now-disbanded secret knighthood in a disastrous attempt to overthrow Louis Philippe and restore the Bourbon dynasty. Bertier held various posts including prefect in two departments, counselor of state, deputy, and minister of state, but never a top-level one. A good administrator, skilled at operating behind the scenes, he lacked confidence in himself as a leader. More royalist than the king, he had difficulty in compromising . As memoirist, Bertier has an engaging style, a good narrative sense, and a historian's concern for accuracy. But his opinions of adversaries are hardly dispassionate. Bertier de Sauvigny, a direct descendant of Bertier, has done a superb job of editing Bertier's memoirs. The notes constitute a veritable who's who of the period. The editor mentions their "superabundance," for which historians will be generally grateful. A minor defect is a sprinkling of typographic errors. What is the value of Souvenirs d'un ultra-royaliste to scholars? Besides an insider's view of Restoration politics, it provides a unique insight into the workings of the secret knighthood, which some historians have either ignored or lumped together with the Congrégation. Bertier de Sauvigny's dissertation argues persuasively for the autonomy of the Chevalerie de la Foi. Souvenirs sheds light also on the religious history of the period, for example, on the origins of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which Bertier headed in the Paris region. In short, this work, which is indexed, will be useful to anyone studying the political or religious history of the Restoration period and the beginning of the July monarchy. Martin J. Bergin, Jr. Washington, D.C. The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy. By Robert Pattison. (NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1991. Pp. xiv, 231. $29.95.) Not every valuable book is a good one, and this book is both valuable and irritating. Its merits include wide reading in both ancient and modern sources and a lively sense of the unity of Christian thought, as it treats John Henry Newman as the great scourge of modern liberalism, which it discerns as he did in the heresies of the fourth-century Christian heresiarch Arius. For Newman , Arius had his liberal descendants in the Socinians ofthe sixteenth century and in the Unitarians of the eighteenth, who had led in Newman's day to the 298 BOOK REVIEWS downfall ofChristian orthodoxy and ofreligious conformity, and to the victory of "the anti-dogmatic principle." Professor Pattison gives an excellent account of Newman's conflict with his 'liberal' Oriel common room colleague Renn Dickson Hampden, who declared the facts of Scripture revealed but the doctrines built upon them mere verbal constructions; and no one who knows, say, of the Anglican Liberal Professor Maurice Wiles's triple enthusiasm for Arius, the English Arian William Whiston, and Dr. Hampden himself, can doubt that here is a "liberal descent," against which Newman and his hero Athanasius stand as the great apologists for orthodox believing. Unfortunately, Professor Pattison's work lacks the scholarly reservations which would turn a good book into a better one. He sees Arius's insistence on the ineffability of God as one step away from atheism, because Arius distinguished God, who is beyond intelligibility, from both Jesus Christ, who is not of the substance of God, and a Godless and intelligible world. But like Newman himself, Professor Pattison is too ready to read the nineteenth-century into the fourth, and the context in which the strict Arians "maintained that the only true statements about God are statements about what we cannot know" is not that of the modern liberal who uses it to assert that Christ is only a man. The views of Arius are admittedly obscure, as they survive only in the fragments cited by his enemies; but his world was a good deal more than a step away from...