I gradually came to see, on the one hand, that the Anglican Church was formally in error, and on the other hand, that the Roman Church was formally in the truth.
Then I came to understand that there was no valid reason to remain in the Anglican Church, no serious objection to prevent me from going to Rome. At that point, I had nothing more to learn. What I still needed to achieve my conversion was not simply to change my opinion, but for my opinion itself to transform into a clear and firm intellectual conviction.
I now come to detail the actions to which I committed myself during this final period of my search for truth. In 1843, I undertook two very important and significant steps:
1° In February, I drafted a formal retraction of all I had said that was defamatory against the Church of Rome;
2° In September, I resigned from my position at St. Mary's, including Littlemore. I will speak of these two acts separately.
1° — The terms of my retraction have been the subject of much criticism. After citing a number of passages from my writings against the Church of Rome, passages which I retracted, it concluded thus:
"And if you ask me how an individual could venture, not simply to believe, but to publish such judgments concerning a Communion so ancient, so widespread, so fruitful in saints, I will answer that I said to myself:
I am not speaking my own language; I am, so to speak, merely following the unanimous opinion of the theologians of my own Church. All have constantly used the harshest language against Rome, even the most capable, the most learned among them. I desire to throw myself into their system.
As long as I say what they say, I am safe. Furthermore, such opinions are necessary for our position. I have, however, some reason to fear that this language must be, in large part, attributed to my impetuous temperament, to the hope of obtaining the approval of people I respect, and to the desire to repel the accusation of Romanism."
These words have been and are constantly quoted against me, as if they contained the admission that, while in the Anglican Church, I said things against Rome which I did not truly believe. For my part, I cannot understand how an impartial man can interpret them thus; and I have published several explanations on this matter. I am confident that the evident meaning of these words...
In the passage in question, I apologize for having formulated accusations against the Church of Rome which I nevertheless affirm I believed to be perfectly true at the time I made them. What is strange about such apologies? A man can, assuredly, believe many things which he yet feels he has no right to say publicly and which he may regret having said.
The law recognizes this principle. In our day, people have been imprisoned and fined for saying true things about a bad king. This maxim has been advanced:
"The greater the truth, the greater the libel."
Thus, in the judgment of society, a just indignation would arise against the frivolous writer who came to reveal the weaknesses of a great man, even when the whole world knew them beforehand. No one has the liberty to speak ill of another without a justifiable reason, even when telling the truth and even when the public knows it too. Therefore, although I was convinced of what I said against the Roman Church, I could not religiously say it unless I was truly authorized, not only to think ill, but to make it known.
I certainly believed what I said, and I supported my conviction with reasons I believed to be good. But did I also have a justified motive for proclaiming this conviction? I assumed so, and here is the reason: it was that, in controversy, saying all I believed was positively necessary for our personal defense. I judged that the Anglican position could not be defended without formulating accusations against the Church of Rome. In this case, as in almost all cases of war, one of the two parties was right, both could not be, and attack was the best means of defense.
Is this not an almost too obvious truth in controversy with Rome? Is this not what everyone says, provided they are concerned with this subject? Does a serious man insult the Church of Rome for the pleasure of insulting it, or because, by insulting it, he justifies his own religious situation? What does the very word "Protestantism" mean, if not that we are called to express ourselves? This, then, is what I was saying:
"I know I have spoken forcefully against the Church of Rome, but it was not gratuitous insult, for I had a serious reason for doing so."
Not only did I believe such language necessary for the religious position of our Church, but all the great Anglican theologians had thought the same before me. They had thought the same, and they had acted accordingly. This is why I was perfectly justified in saying, in the passage in question, that if I had permitted myself harsh language, I had not done so simply on my own initiative, but that I had followed or rather reproduced the teachings of those who preceded me.
I admitted guilt for violence in my language, but I also pleaded mitigating circumstances. We all know the story of the condemned man who, on the scaffold, bit his mother's ear. By this act of fury, he was not denying his crime for which he was about to be hanged, but he was showing that his mother's indulgence towards him when he was a child had greatly contributed to it. Similarly, I had made an accusation, and I had made it with conviction, but I reproached others for having led me by their example to believe it and to publish it.
And, certainly, I was in a mood to bite all their ears. I will confess it frankly, I even said it a few pages earlier, I was irritated with the Anglican theologians. I thought they had deceived me; I had read the Fathers through their eyes; sometimes I had trusted their quotations or their reasonings; and, in trusting them, I had used terms or made assertions which, to act justly, I should have, above all, rigorously examined myself. I had believed myself safe when I had their guarantee for what I advanced. I had brought to the matter more trust than sound criticism. This admission does not imply that, in relying on their authority, I had fallen into grave errors, but it implies negligence in matters of detail. Now this negligence was a fault.
But, to motivate what I said on this question, there was a much deeper reason, which I have not yet addressed; this reason is as follows:
— The thought that weighed most heavily on me throughout my change of opinions was a clear premonition, verified by the event, that all this would culminate in the triumph of Liberalism. I had used all my faculties to struggle against the anti-dogmatic principle; yet, more than any other, I was now contributing to its success.
I was among those who had, for so many years, held it at bay at Oxford; my retreat was therefore its triumph. The people who had driven me from Oxford were manifestly the Liberals; it was they who had opened the attack against Tract 90; if I took one more step and withdrew from the Anglican Church, they would gain a new success. But that was not all. As I have already said, there are only two alternatives: the road to Rome, or the road to Atheism: Anglicanism is the halfway stage on one side, and Liberalism on the other.
How many people, I knew only too well, would cease to follow me now that I was going to pass from Anglicanism to Rome, and would soon leave both Anglicanism and me for the camp of the Liberals! It was by no means an easy thing (humanly speaking) to raise an Englishman to a dogmatic level. I had succeeded often with young men, and also with laymen, for the Via Media represented dogma. The dogmatic principle and the Anglican principle were one, I had told them; but here I was destroying the Via Media and leaving only ruins; would not dogmatic faith be annihilated in the minds of a great many by the destruction of the Via Media?
Oh! How unhappy this made me! One day, I heard an eyewitness recount the story of a poor sailor who, having his legs shattered by a cannonball during the 1816 affair at Algiers, was taken below deck to undergo an operation. The surgeon and the chaplain persuaded him to have one leg amputated; it was indeed cut off, and a tourniquet was applied to the wound.
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Then, they announced to him that the other leg must also be cut off. The poor man replied:
"You should have told me that, Gentlemen."
Then, calmly unscrewing the instrument, he let his life escape with his blood. Would it not be thus for many of my friends? How to hope to bring them to believe in a second theology after having deceived them with the first? How dare publish a new edition of a dogmatic creed and ask them to welcome it as an absolute truth? Would it not be evident to them that certainty can be found nowhere?
For my defense, I could offer only a lame apology; yet, it was the truth, namely that I had not studied the Fathers with enough critical sense, that I had committed important errors of judgment on delicate questions, such as those which determine the divergences between the two Churches. How could this have happened?
Well, the fact, very unpleasant to admit, is that I had placed excessive trust in the statements of Ussher, Jeremy Taylor, or Barrow, and they had deceived me. That is all that could be said. Thus the terms of my retraction were dictated imperiously, and they were considered a grave offense, for the profound sadness with which they were written was not understood.
Source: My Religious Opinions – Saint John Henry Newman – 1866