Flight from orthodoxy
Raymond Carr
BLANCO WHITE: SELF-BANISHED SPANIARD by Martin Murphy Yale, £19.95, pp.270 ho on earth, you may ask, was Blanco White? And why should you read this splendidly researched and sensitively written biography? The answer is that Blanco White's intellectual and spiritual odyssey, from Catholic priest in Seville to Unitarian theologian in Liverpool, from Jacobin radical in Cadiz to High Tory in Oxford, is of absorbing interest. Gladstone wrote of him:
His spirit was a battlefield upon which, with fluctuating fortune and a singular intensity, the powers of belief and scepticism waged, from first to last, their unceasing war; and within the compass of his experience are presented to our view most of the great moral and spiritual problems that attach to the condition of our race.
Born in Seville in 1775 of a pious Irish refugee family, Blanco was ordained in his early twenties. Apart from a distaste for 'that cloying, that mawkish devotion' char- acteristic of southern Catholicism, as a son of the Enlightenment he writhed under dis- tortions imposed by dogma on the instincts natural to man — he fathered an illegiti- mate son who became an officer in the Indian Army. A consuming hatred of orthodoxy in all its forms became the leitmotiv of his life until his death in 1841.
Between 1808 and 1810 he was caught up in the liberal revolution set off by Napo- leon's invasion of Spain. His initial radical enthusiasms cooled under the influence of Lord Holland, a busybody whose stay in Spain was a trial to British ambassadors and Spaniards alike with his Whig notions that the latter 'should acquire a flavour of the way constitutional matters are handled in England' and set up a House of Lords. Out'of place in Spain, in 1810 Blanco came to England, where he published the periodical El Espanol which castigated the Spanish liberals as self-important rhetori- cians whose only knowledge of the world was derived from books and who sought to impose their nostrums on a nation that rejected them, by persecution if necessary. Liberalism, Spanish style, was yet another dogma, another orthodoxy.
He arrived in England execrated by both liberals and reactionaries in his own coun- try. Once his journalistic career with El Espanol collapsed, he had to endure the patrician whims of Lady Holland, as tutor to her son. In England, however, he discovered Anglican latitudinarianism, which he espoused as the reasonable faith he had failed to find in Catholicism. Smothering his doubts about the Thirty Nine Articles, he became an Anglican clergyman; but doubts there were. What- ever was revealed by God in the Bible as necessary for salvation must be clearly revealed; but the Bible was open to oppos- ing interpretations. It would not be God's intention to deny salvation to those Christ- ians who could not solve theological rid- dles. Christ's moral precepts were clear in the Bible, but for Blanco the doctrines of the Trinity and the Atonement were neith- er revealed nor reasonable.
Under the influence of Southey, another Jacobin who had seen the light, Blanco's Evidence Against Catholicism (1825) attacked Catholic Emancipation on the grounds that no true Catholic could 'con- scientiously be tolerant'. Rather than a genuine conversion to High Toryism the book reflected his own moral ruin as a Catholic priest who had suffered, as Martin Murphy puts it, 'the destructive effects of institutionalised intolerance on the life of one individual'. This Protestant polemic was the work of a man whose first publica- tion had been a poem to the Immaculate Conception.
In 1826 he was granted an MA by Oxford for exposing the 'errors and cor- ruptions of the Church of Rome'. He became a member of Oriel Common Room at a time when Oriel was the intellectual powerhouse of the University. There he met Newman; both violinists, they and their friends played Beethoven quartets. But Richard Whately, an Oriel don who became the Whig choice as Archbishop of Dublin, was closest to Blan- co White. Revelation, Whately held, was intended to provide moral guidance rather than theological speculation.
The harmony of 'Dear Oriel' was to be disrupted by what to Blanco White was the 'mysticism' of the Oxford Movement that revived memories of the emotional exces- ses of the Catholicism he had deserted in Seville. He followed Whately to Dublin. Both witnessed the full rage of Protestant intolerance.
We parade Orange flags and decorate King William's statue and play the tunes of insult- ing songs under the noses of the vanquished, till they are goaded to madness. . . they [the Orangemen] are like sportsmen who pre- serve foxes on purpose to hunt them.
Blanco White was now reading German theologians: Christianity must be a religion free of institutional shackles, including those of the Established Church of Eng- land. 'Christ came to liberate man from all religion, that great source of the worst human evils', He left Dublin and Whately's Anglican liberalism for Liverpool and Un- itarianism. It was the final stage of his struggle against othodoxy. His public change of faith distressed Whately as an act of 'indecent exposure'. Newman noted 'a great deal of morbid restlessness' in Blanco's obsessive concern to justify his religious revolutions as an agonising pursuit of truth, as a relentless pursuit of logical consistency. His conver- sion to Unitarianism was crucial in New- man's own conversion to Rome. Blanco had proved that 'there is no medium between Pantheism and the Church of Rome'. An emotional man, his excited outbursts in Oxford Common Rooms were embarrassing. With all the hangups of a self-imposed exile who had accepted pay- ment from the British Secret Service, he remained an exotic curiosity to convention- al dons and came to consider his adopted country as vulgar and philistine. The asto- nishing thing is that his English friends, disapprove as they might of theological progressions, never ceased to hold him in their affection.
Although Blanco White was a fine liter- ary critic, and his 'Letters from Spain' describing the Spain he had left were a popular success, it was his critique of revealed religion that made him notorious in the 1840s. But his attacks on dogmatic Christianity, as Martin Murphy observes, were to be overtaken by the challenge of Darwin. Yet, a century and a half later, his agonised life story fascinated the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo. In Franco's Spain, Blanco's analysis of the evils of spiritual power used to achieve social and political ends, and his loathing of a hypocritical Catholic society once more became re- levant. Blanco's experience was that of thousands of young Spaniards.
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