Honest Doubt: The History Of An Epic Struggle by Holloway Richard

Author:Holloway, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ladbroke Productions (Radio) Ltd
Published: 2013-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Episode 12 Believer’s Doubt

RICHARD: In our history of doubt this week we're cruising towards the nervous breakdown that hit Victorian Christianity in the 19th Century. So far our story’s had a double focus, distinguishing between doubt about God and doubt about religion, which is not the same thing. God, supposing he exists, is the creator and sustainer of the universe, while religion is our creation, our response to the possibility of God. One way to grasp the distinction is to think of the difference between what the Prayer Book calls ‘the holy estate of matrimony’ and an actual marriage between two people. You can believe in matrimony but be unhappy with the marriage you are in, just as you can believe in God but be unhappy with the religion you are in. To stick to the marriage analogy for a minute, what we begin to see in the Victorian era is not just an intensification of marital unhappiness but a move towards the rejection of matrimony as such: in other words, doubts about religion morph into doubts about God. That was the new element in the 19th Century that brought on the Victorian crisis. And today, I want to look at the work of four figures who struggled with that crisis - Cardinal Newman, Robert Browning, Arthur Clough and Matthew Arnold.

MUSIC STING

RICHARD: One of the great men of the 19th Century was John Henry Newman. In fact, he was beatified by the Pope when he visited Britain in 2010. Born in 1801, Newman was one of the great doubters of his era. He once wrote, "to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often", and he lived up to his own maxim, changing churches and perspectives throughout his life, and in old age, challenging the Pope's infallibility. The author and philosopher, Sir Anthony Kenny describes Newman's tortuous route.

ANTHONY KENNY

Newman never doubted God’s existence but this is the point where it becomes doubly important to make the distinction between doubt of the orthodoxy of one’s community and doubt of God’s existence. He went through life doubting whatever he was being taught at that time by his religious superiors. He began as an evangelical and then he began to doubt the overriding authority of the Bible. He was constantly getting into trouble with Bishops while he was an Anglican. And then when he became a Roman Catholic he was very unhappy about the papal claims to infallibility.

RICHARD: Newman wrote prolifically on both certitude and doubt. In his book Grammar of Assent, he suggests that “Without certitude in religious faith, there can be no habit of prayer, no directness of devotion, no intercourse with the unseen, no generosity with self sacrifice.” He was well aware of the difficulties religion posed for rationalist thinkers, but he believed faith had the integrity of its own complex grammar, even if it was a language rationalists could not understand. Though he was one of the great religious philosophers of the 19th Century,

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