19th Century modernism - ceshe-usa

19th Century modernism
Of catholic churchmen Part I
Nicholas Cardinal wiseman
Part II
bishop john c hedley by Paula Haigh
June 2000 AD
? ? ? Part I
The wiseman Papers ...religion caused unbelief. In trying to adapt their religious
beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to
novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of
science, the defenders of God strangled Him. ...
Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in
America. By James Turner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1985, p. xiii. Nicholas Patrick Cardinal Wiseman
(1802-1865) Cardinal Wiseman is a key figure in the history of the Great Apostasy for
several reasons : 1) he was a very influential member of the hierarchy both
in Rome and his native England (though he was born in Ireland of a Spanish
mother and an Irish father); 2) he was possessed of a scholarly mind and
acquired vast learning with a great facility in languages; 3) he lived to
see the immense popularity of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) though he
was in declining health and occupied with political affairs at the time.
He studied for six years at the English College in Rome and in 1824 took
his degree of doctor of Divinity. He was then only 22 years old! Early in
1825 he was ordained to the Priesthood and two years later, he published a
work of research in Syriac antiquities which established his reputation as
an Oriental scholar of note.
While already vice-rector of the English College in Rome, he was named
Professor of Hebrew and Syro-Chaldaic in the Sapienza University by Pope
Leo XII. This position put him in direct contact with other scholars in
this immensely popular and rising field of antiquities. In 1828, still in
his twenties, he was appointed Rector of the Eng1ish College, a position he
held until l840. It was during these years, precisely during 1835, that he
delivered his Lectures "On the Connexion between Science and Revealed
Religion," the fruit of preceding years of study. He revised and updated
these Lectures through three editions of printing, and it is the 3rd
edition, of l849, that I have used as the focus of this present study.
After 1835, however, Cardinal Wisman's main interests and preoccupations
shifted from the study and research into antiquities and the rising
physical sciences to the political situation in England. As the Catholic
Encyclopedia of 1912 puts it: "While in no way slackening in the
conscientious performance of his duties, he found himself gradually more
and more drawn towards, and personally interested in, the important
religious movement developing in England." This, of course, was the Oxford
Movement and the growing desire for a Catholic hierarchy. These currents
produced a not unexpected back-lash from the old established Catholics who
rightly suspected the purity of the faith of the new and prominent
converts. They "suspected the sincerity of their Catholic leanings when
they were Protestants and the sincerity of their conversion now that they
were Catholics." From this distance of time, we can see the Oxford
Movement as an infusion of Protestantism into the Church -- an infusion of
the prevalent liberalism of the time. Newman's Tract 90, for example,
written in 1841, was an attempt to reconcile the 39 articles of Anglicanism
with the decrees of the Council of Trent, an attempt that surely
foreshadowed the ecumenical attempts at reconciliation today.
But as a result largely of Cardinal Wiseman's influence, a new hierarchy
was created for England with Wiseman (made Bishop in 1840) named as its
chief, his being elevated to the Cardinalate for that purpose in l850. It
was due also to his "tact, prudence, and firmness" that the resistance of
the old Catholics was dissolved and they were won over to his views.
On one of his visits home from Rome, Wiseman founded with Daniel O'Connell
and Michael Quinn the Dublin Review (1836) which became one of the main
organs of Catholic thought in England during the 19th and into the 20th
century. Bishop Hedley's landmark essay on "Evolution and Faith" appeared
in its pages in 1871, and Bishop Hedley himself served as its editor from
1878 to l884.1
It is certainly one of the great ironies of history that after having
posited his great work of scientific research and interpretation, a work
that both reflected and, unhappily, followed rather than took the lead in
the midst of the intellectual currents of his time, Wiseman should have
returned to an England awash in controversies over scientific opinions
radically affecting the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, only to become
oblivious to them due to his desire for an English hierarchy, the
initiation of which his influence and talents made him perfectly fit.
On a certain return to home in l853, Cardinal Wiseman began to write his
novel Fabiola about the life of the early Christians. The Catholic
Encyclopedia describes it as "the most popular book that came from his
versatile pen." It is certainly much more readable than Newman's Callista
(l856).
In 1861 Wiseman founded, mainly at the insistence of then Mgr. Henry Edward
Manning, the Academia which seems to have had a rather insecure foundation
and not to have endured. The Catholic Encyclopedia says it was founded with
the hopes of enkindling an enthusiasm for the temporal power of the Pope
which had become a target of much anti-Catholic sentiment in England and
abroad at this time. However, Wiseman's own idea, reflected in his
inaugural lecture, was rather that the new institution should encourage the
scholarly and scientific researches which so greatly interested him. That
both of these objectives were sought is made clear enough by Manning's
intense loyalty to Pope Pius IX and that Pope's struggle with the secular
powers. But Manning also had a desire to combat the current "science
falsely so-called" and he is reported to have preached against the "new
philosophy" of nature with its idea that "there is no God and the ape is
our Adam."1
I can find no confirmation of it, but I suspect, from the tenor of his
Lectures on Science, that. Cardinal Wiseman would have favored the liberal,
accommodating lines taken later by Bishop Hedley, and that Cardinal
Manning, judging from his essay on "The Four Great Evils of the Day" which
castigates rationalism but without being specific, was more inclined to a
conservative position. This is indicated, also, by his remarks reported
above.
That these were momentous times for the Church no one can deny. And it is
equally certain, especially from this distance in time, that the political
situation in Europe generally far outweighed the doctrinal issues raised by
the physical sciences.
During the 1830's, though, then Msgr. Wiseman, Rector of the English
College in Rome, was deeply immersed in the sciences of ethnology/philology
(languages), geology, anthropology, archaeology and Oriental literature.
These are the main topics of his Lectures in the order of their treatment.
In his Preface to the published Lectures (l849, 3rd edition), just ten
years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in England,
Wiseman says of his work:
The subjects of which it treats are varied, and have rather formed a
relaxation from severer pursuits, than objects of professed research.
That its numerous faults will be observed, and perhaps severely
criticised, I must naturally expect. Still I shall always feel that the
cause which I plead may well throw some of its protection over its least
worthy advocates, and conciliate the benevolence of all that revere and
love it.
He does not name or define that "cause" here but in the First Lecture, we
may gather it to be that of bringing to the fore those "evidences or
proofs" of the Scriptures that can be gleaned from the data of the
sciences.
Working squarely and enthusiastically in the tradition of "the illustrious
Bacon" and with echoes of Leibnitz, he says:
Were it given unto us to contemplate God's works in the visible and in
the moral world, not as we now see them, in shreds and little fragments,
but as woven together into the great web of universal harmony; could our
minds take in each part thereof, with its general and particular
connections, relations, and appliances, there can be no doubt but
religion, as established by Him, would appear to enter, and fit so
completely and so necessarily into the general plan, as that all would
be unraveled and destroyed, if by any means it should be withdrawn. And
such a view of its interweaving with the whole economy and fabric of
nature would doubtless be the highest order of evidence which could be
given us of its truth. But this is the great difference between nature's
and man's operation, that she fashioneth and moulds all the parts of her
works at once, while he can apply himself only to the elaboration of one
single part at a time; and hence it comes, that in all our researches,
the successive and partial attention which