Cardinal Newman In His Age: His Place In English Theology and Literature by Harold L. Weatherby (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 775 different notions of necessity, both, Hopklls claims, misapply the logic of necessary propositions and hence, in analogous ways, come up with invalid arguments. (pp. 78-89) Finally, the detailed bibliography of texts, translations, and studies is excellent, although-as is perhaps inevitable--incomplete. Modesty forbids mentioning whose article the present reviewer particularly missed. However, a check among the listings of translations for Pedrizetti's " Letters of Saint Anselm and Archbishop Lanfranc " suggests that the author has simply overlooked one important, if little-known, journal-namely, Tke American Benedictine Review. .St. Greg0'1'1J'I1 Co1lege Sha:umee, Oklahoma VxcroR W. RoBERTS, 0. S. B. Cardinal Newmatn In His Age: His Place In English Tkeology and Literature . By HARoLD L. WEATHERBY. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973. Pp. ~96. $11.50. One fascinating aspect of Cardinal Newman's thought is its seeming coincidence of opposites. This stubborn individualist and arch-defender of the primacy of conscience is the most obedient of men; this insistent proponent of the subjectivity factors active in the mind's grasp of truth, above all religious truth, dedicated his life to a defense of the authoritybased Catholic tradition. These and other intriguing polarities provide Harold Weatherby, associate professor of English literature at Vanderbilt University, with his subject matter and with a bold, clear thesis. Weatherby argues that, despite his best efforts, the epistemological principles which Newman embraced inexorably lead to the subjectivism and relativism which mark the rapid dissolution of Catholic thought since Vatican TI. In pursuit of his thesis Weatherby first strives to establish the idealistic nature of Newman's epistemology by contrasting him with the straightforward realism of Richard Hooker, the Caroline divines, and the Metaphysical poets, a realism inherited from the medieval scholastic tradition. Subsequently, he argues Newman's affinity for the platonized world-view of the Alexandrian Fathers, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Weatherby then reviews and passes a detailed, negative judgment on the various "safeguards" by which Newman sought to reconcile his premises with Catholic orthodoxy. The consistent point of contrast here is the epistemology of classical Thomism. The closing, and perhaps weakest, section of the book considers the broad socio-political and literary consequences of Newman's thought. Newman's fixation on the ,. idea," or "spirit," of an institution, and his interpert'ative view of symbols, renders his approach to any and all 776 BOOK REVIEWS traditional inherently relativistic. Weatherby concludes that Newman's attempted synthesis of Catholic orthodoxy with his epistemological premises was a predicatable, tragic failure. Clearly Weatherby has written a provocative book. He states his thesis boldly and argues it tenaciously in clear, attractive prose. Yet, I fear, the end result is more caricature than penetrating analysis. Putting aside the assumption that the epistemology of St. Thomas Aquinas provides the sole philosophical validation for " the Catholic tradition of fifteen hundred years," a large assumption indeed, Weatherby's exposition of Aquinas's epistemology leads to attributions scarcely different from the axioms of eighteenth-century rationalism as found, for example, in Paley's Evidtmees. Beginning with the premise that the only true knowledge of which the human mind is capable consists in the apprehension of the quiddity of sensible, external objects of this world, Thomism is made to assert the following. In the acquisition of all knowledge the human mind is essentially the passive recorder of intelligble species by a congenital process of abstraction universally operative in all men. The achievement of truth on any level proceeds by way of rigorous, rational scrutiny of the objective evidence, that is, evidence patently manifest to any reasonable man. The only valid religious experience of God possible to man in this life is by the way of abstract reasoning on objective evidence. The God of Christianity is plainly manifest in the objective harmony present in the laws of created nature and civil society, as well as in received moral and religious tradition. Christian faith is ultimately grounded neither on personal experience, nor on the authority of the Church, but on the rigorous exercise of autonomous reason. Other attributions might be added: man never really knows concrete, singular beings, only universals; the genuine Catholic assent of faith is necessarily " notional, " never " real " in Newman...