Book Review: "The Great Dissent" by Robert Pattison

This book, published in 1991, is still in the catalog of Oxford University Press! I read a couple of years after it was published when I worked at Eighth Day Books the first time after a reorganization at the advertising agency I worked for eliminated my position. 

Robert Pattison, then Professor of English at Southampton College at Long Island University, first attacks Newman's claims to fame as a great Victorian writer and religious figure, building the case that he failed as an Anglican and as a Catholic to influence either community, and then builds him back up at the great critic of the "anti-dogmatic spirit" aka Progressive Liberalism. Pattison does so, not because he supports Newman's arguments against Progressive Liberalism, but because he thinks that Newman's arguments should remind Progressives that their strength precisely is their anti-dogmatic spirit, their refusal to adopt one orthodoxy and enforce that orthodoxy, thus becoming just like Newman. 

Pattison admits rather than admires Newman's absolute consistency, his total lack of compromise with the spirit of his age, the Victorian compromise with Christian truth for the sake of progress and reform. He traces this consistency through Newman's opposition to Renn Dickson Hampden (1793-1868) at Oxford and to the heretical priest Arius (250 or 256–336 A.D.), noting that Newman was a formidable opponent to both past and present enemies, presenting their errors and descrying the danger of those errors as moral and doctrinal attacks against the Truth and our ability to find and assent to the Truth.

As Pattison also demonstrates, Newman sought and found the Truth, assenting to Jesus and the Church He founded, the Catholic Church, as Pattison explores Newman's "Theory of Belief" which could better be called Newman's "Theory of Assent".

The Great Dissent can be a frustrating book to read in 2021; as I read the Preface and first chapter ("Failure: Newman's Vanquished Reputation") I remonstrated with Pattison that in 1991 he did not (could not?) anticipate Newman's enduring legacy and of course, his beatification and canonization in the 21st century. It may still be true that Newman's influence and achievements are mostly the interest of partisans--for and against--as Pattison insists, but Newman certainly has more partisans on his side today than he did even at the end of the 20th century. His works are still being published and still being analysed and discussed, with even greater emphasis on his devotion to Truth and his energetic action to defend and promote Truth. 

Perhaps one reason Pattison missed this: he relies almost exclusively on Newman's controversial works (his attacks on Hampden, on The Arians of the Fourth Century, The Grammar of Assent, the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, and the Apologia pro Vita Sua); he seldom consults Newman's sermons, Parochial and Plain or Catholic, nor his spiritual, devotional writings. Thus, Pattison does not have the fullest view of John Henry Newman. 

The Great Dissent is also an intriguing book: Pattison's publications seem to have focused on "Rock and Roll" and different aspects of Victorian literature (The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism; On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock; Tennyson and Tradition; The Child Figure in English Literature). Why did he write such a complex book about Newman, defending his greatness in such a controversial way? Pattison seems to admire Newman for all the wrong reasons, to a favorable partisan like me.

Perhaps an answer to that question comes in the fifth chapter, "Last Things: the Greatness of Newman". Pattison there presents Newman as the great prophet of the doom of Progressive Liberalism. If Progressive Liberalism asserts its own orthodoxy, its own dogmatic "anti-dogmatic principle", it will open up an opportunity for Newman's--for the Catholic Church's--orthodoxy and Truth to prevail again, as St. Athanasius and others did in the fourth and fifth centuries:

Newman's great dissent is a timely reminder to liberalism that its vitality lies in heterodoxy. As the twentieth century draws to a close, liberalism no longer seems much like a heresy or even an ideology. But for all its protestations, liberalism cannot escape the consequences of its own relativism. It can never take its first principles for granted but must always be proving their strength and their utility. And this relativity is the heretical virtue of liberalism. Without violating its own anti-dogmatism, it cannot assert the existence of its own absolute truth, and it remains humane only so long as it refrains from assuming the mantle of dogma and imposing those mental and social repressions implied by Newman's theory of belief. As long as liberalism remembers that it is a heresy and fights against truth, the possibilities of relative decency and tolerant forbearance remains alive.

Newman hoped that liberalism would forget its heretical origins and be undone by its own success. . . . as a self-proclaimed truth, liberalism was sure to fail. . . . liberalism seems [in 1991] determined to be what John Gray* calls "an expression on (sic?) [of] intolerance" . . . (p. 216)

*in Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (1989)

So, for Pattison, Newman's greatness--in spite of all his failures--is that he warns liberals (whom Pattison supports for their tolerance and humaneness) not to become like him. If liberals do become like Newman, asserting Truth and Orthodoxy, especially if they try to suppress those who are like Newman, they will reveal their "hypocrisy while simultaneously invigorating the cause of orthodoxy, as persecution is wont to do." (p. 217) 

As was just proved when Facebook seems to have censored promotion of a book by Carrie Gress on the Blessed Virgin Mary as a model against "toxic femininity" -- and the book sold out!

The most subversive twist of all comes in the last paragraph on page 217:

. . . Newman reminds the liberal that his beliefs are not universally accepted, that his ideology is a frail coalition of heresies, that in the fourth century ascendant liberalism was crushed by an outnumbered orthodoxy [Athanasius contra mundum!], and that for a thousand years it struggled in dissent. In opposition, liberalism was precarious, and in victory it threatens to become the one good custom that corrupts the world. Anyone who believes in the principles of liberalism--that is, in the anti-dogmatic principle--must come away from the pages of Newman humbled by the knowledge that liberalism is not a truth but a heresy, and a heresy too good not to be fought for by being fought against.

I trust he makes himself obscure!! The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy is a book to contend with and meditate upon, perhaps every twenty or so years. Would that some progressive liberals would read at those pages and rethink censorious efforts of cancel culture and suppression of free speech when they disagree with its content or condemn the person who speaks it. Or maybe not. 

Contents:

Preface

1. Failure: Newman's Vanquished Reputation

2. Odium Theologium: The Liberal as Antichrist

3. Heresy and Liberalism: Cicero, Arius, Socinus

4. What is Truth? Newman's Theory of Belief

5. Last Things: The Greatness of Newman