Newman and Heresy

In the midst of Newman's struggle against Hampden, Blanco White became a Unitarian: Newman heard the news on 20 March 1835. Newman and Blanco White had, before 1833, been close friends and, although they had drawn away from each other, and Blanco White had thrown in his lot with the liberals under the patronage of Whately, Newman retained a warm and lasting affection for him. It was with genuine personal anguish that he contemplated Blanco's embracing of what he was coming to see as ‘a deadly heresy, full of lasting evil to its wilful professors, and influential moreover on their moral character. He wrote to try to dissuade his friend ‘in great pain and much affection’. Blanco's reply reflects the poignancy of the situation, ‘I must follow the light that is in me. If that light be darkness, it is so without my being aware of it: without the slightest ground for suspecting that it is wilfully so … I would give anything to have it in my power to relieve the pain you suffer on my account.’ This apostasy was for Newman a horrible aberration in a friend he loved – he even came to see it as mental derangement. The trauma of Blanco's loss effected a change in Newman's perspective: he saw in Blanco a heretic acting in good faith, falling through delusion into involuntary error. Accordingly, Newman's treatment of heresy in terms of ‘consequences’ – to use Hampden's vocabulary – took on a sympathy, even a tenderness, in the face of a tragic concept of the heretic's course.