Introduction
Introduction
A prophet to two Churches
John Henry Newman’s intellectual journey was one of the most remarkable of the nineteenth century. As Vicar of the University Church in Oxford and a university teacher, between 1833 and 1843 he was the key theorist and the most vigorous propagandist of ‘Tractarianism’, the Oxford-based movement to re-Catholicize the Protestant Church of England. This ‘Oxford Movement’ would transform Anglicanism in Newman’s own lifetime. His influence within the Roman Catholic Church, which he entered in October 1845, took much longer to make its impact. He was, by nineteenth century Catholic standards, a deeply unconventional thinker. His first intellectual influences had come from the radical figures of the English and Scottish enlightenment – Hume, Gibbon, Thomas Paine. They in turn gave way to the powerful religious impact of Anglican Evangelicalism, and he acknowledged a life-long debt to Evangelical classics like the Church History of Joseph and Isaac Milner,1 and the conversion narrative and biblical commentaries of Thomas Scott. But though he was convinced that his own teenage evangelical conversion in 1816 was the beginning of his serious religious life, Newman outgrew both his childish drift towards unbelief and his adolescent evangelicalism. From 1828 onwards he immersed himself in the writings of the Greek Fathers, and reacted against both the anti-dogmatic liberalism and the emotional subjectivity which he saw as the twin evils of modern Protestantism. In due course, after his conversion to Catholicism, he would be equally resistant to the scholastic mindset and insistence on a centralized papal autocracy which between them cramped the Catholicism of his day.
Newman was one of the first Christian theologians to grasp the historical contingency of all theological formulations, even the Creeds, which he characterized as ‘the truth as far as they go, and under the conditions of thought which human feebleness imposes’. So as a Catholic, he rejected doctrinaire demands for unquestioning obedience to contemporary church formulae as if they were timeless truths. In an authoritarian church he was an ardent defender of the legitimate autonomy of the theologian, and, in a clericalist age, insisted on the role of the laity as custodians and not mere recipients of the faith of the Church. He was scathingly and increasingly critical of the ethos of the Church under Pope Pius IX, and he opposed the definition of Papal Infallibility in 1870, as an unnecessary and inappropriate burden on consciences. ‘We have come to a climax of tyranny’, he wrote, ‘It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years… he becomes a God and has no-one to contradict him.’2 The appetite of the pro-papal ‘Ultramontane’ party for new dogmatic definitions seemed to Newman the sign of a lack of intellectual integrity, ‘the act of a man who will believe anything because he believes nothing, and is ready to profess whatever his ecclesiastical, that is his political, party requires of him…’3
The First Vatican Council was the climax of much that Newman deplored in the Catholicism of his day. By contrast, it has become a theological truism that the Second Vatican Council, with its reforming impulses, its outreach to other churches and faith traditions, its emphasis on the role of the laity, and its move away from papal and clerical authoritarianism, was ‘Newman’s Council’, the moment when many of the ideas which he first championed became the basis for a radical re-imagining of what it was to be Catholic. Although he was surprisingly seldom quoted in the Conciliar debates at Vatican II, his ideas had undoubtedly been absorbed by some of its key protagonists, and the Council endorsed his central theological idea, the development of doctrine.
Born in 1801, and living till 1890, Newman’s career spanned almost the whole nineteenth century, and what were then two different worlds, Protestant and Catholic. In both, he was a force for unsettlement. We think of him as a Victorian, but, like his younger contemporary Dickens, he was in fact a product of Regency England: he was 36 years old when the teenage Victoria came to the throne, and by then already a famous man. He could remember candles placed in windows to celebrate Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, he read the novels of Austen and Scott and the poems of Byron as they first appeared, he was twenty years old when Schleiermacher published his magnum opus The Christian Faith (though Newman almost certainly never read a word of it) and he had reached the pinnacle of his pre-eminence within the Church of England before the young Victoria’s accession in 1837. A remarkably consistent thinker, to the end of his life Newman looked back on his evangelical conversion in 1816 as the saving of his soul. Yet as a Fellow of Oriel, the most intellectually prestigious of the Oxford Colleges which he joined in 1822, he rejected Calvinism and came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the reformation doctrine of Justification by Faith alone, as opening the way to an undogmatic religious individualism which ignored the Church’s role in the transmission of revealed truth, and which he believed must lead inexorably to subjectivism and unbelief. Much of his writing as an Anglican was directed at undermining what he came to see as the undue influence of the ‘Peculiars’, as he dubbed evangelicals, within the Church of England.
Yet despite his suspicion of Evangelical emphasis on the religion of the heart as opposed to the head, Newman himself was a child of the Romantic era. Notoriously, he believed that his evangelical conversion had had a life-long effect on him, in ‘making me rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.’ As a Cardinal he chose as the motto on his coat of arms a phrase from St Francois de Sales – Cor ad cor loquitur (Heart speaks to heart). In his early twenties, partly as an antidote to his own instinctively sceptical cast of mind, he sought objective religious truth initially in a romanticized version of the Anglican High Church tradition, emphasising the mystery of God, the beauty and necessity of personal holiness, and the centrality of the Church’s sacraments and teaching for salvation. Eloquent, learned, widely read, combining a beautiful voice with an unmatched mastery of words, by the early 1830s Newman’s preaching had acquired a cult following in Oxford. Credo in Newmanum became an undergraduate slogan, and admiring undergraduates imitated even his eccentricities, like his habit of kneeling down abruptly as if his knees had given way. The University authorities became alarmed, and changed College timetables so that undergraduates had to choose between hearing Newman preach and eating their dinners. In their hundreds, they chose the preaching. This was all the more remarkable since Newman’s message was both uncompromisingly austere, and often deliberately provocative, as in his 1832 Sermon on The Religion of the Day:
Here I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind herein implied desirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I think them infinitely more desirable and more promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, self-sufficient, self-wise tranquillity … The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; till you see Him to be a consuming fire, and approach Him with reverence and godly fear, as being sinners, you are not even in sight of the strait gate. I do not wish you to be able to point to any particular time when you renounced the world (as it is called), and were converted; this is a deceit. Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.4
It could be argued quite plausibly that his Anglican sermons were Newman’s greatest achievement. Professor Owen Chadwick called the parochial and plain sermons ‘the most important publication not only of Newman’s Protestant days but of his life’ and thought that taken as a body of reflection on the Christian life and the quest for “reality in religion”, the sermons stood comparison with the greatest devotional classics in the language.5 Preached over a period of fifteen years, they trace Newman’s own religious development as he moved decisively away from his early Evangelicalism, under the influence in particular of the Alexandrian Fathers, whom he was studying intensively in Greek in these years. The Christology and ecclesiology of the sermons was heavily indebted to Greek thought, and in particular the Alexandrian insistence, exotic to the nineteenth century English religious imagination, that human nature had been divinized by Christ’s incarnation, redemptive death and resurrection.
Yet alongside this theologically rich and often sublime preaching, Newman was also a ferocious, and sometimes unscrupulous pamphleteer and polemicist. The role of provocateur came naturally to him, and he quickly established himself as the fieriest spirit of a determined group of like-minded High-Church clergy in Oxford, which included his Oriel colleague John Keble, Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1831–1841 and the Regius Professor of Hebrew, Edward Bouverie Pusey. Disgusted by the weakening of the National Church by political concessions to Dissenters and Roman Catholics, they claimed the religious loyalty of the nation, not as earlier high-churchmen had done, on the basis of the Church of England’s legal Establishment, but on a new awareness of the Church’s ‘Apostolical descent’.
Newman’s sacramentalism was deepened by the sanctified Wordsworthian romanticism of Keble’s Christian Year, organized round the calendar and contents of the Book of Common Prayer, and Victorian England’s best-selling book of verse. He was egged on in a more radically populist direction by another Oriel colleague, Richard Hurrell Froude, son of a west-country archdeacon, and a flamboyant agitator who practised extreme asceticism, prayed the Roman Breviary in Latin every day, despised the Protestant reformers, denounced the Church of England’s reformation as ‘a limb badly set’ which ‘must be broken again before it can be righted’, and ridiculed the staid establishmentarianism of the older ‘High and Dry’ churchmen, whom he labelled ‘the Zs’. Newman revered Pusey’s learning and Keble’s sanctity: but he loved and idolized Froude, after whose death from TB in 1836, aged only 33, Newman would never again have a friend or colleague to whom he would look for leadership: from now on, he would suffer that worst of isolations, to have no equals, only disciples. But in 1833 Froude was at his most ebullient, and under his influence Newman and his associates stole a populist device from their evangelical opponents. They launched a series of short polemical ‘Tracts for the Times’, designed to re-educate clergy and laity about the value of Catholic doctrines, sacraments and rituals which, till then, most Protestants had associated with superstition and popery. Newman soon came to reject the label ‘Protestant’ for the C of E, and that rejection was to increase suspicion that he and his friends were fifth columnists for popery within the established church.
A single-minded campaigner, Newman was far from fastidious about his methods in promoting this ‘Tractarian’ agenda. He ruthlessly ousted the editor of a genteel high-church periodical, the British Critic, and transformed a hitherto staid and respectable magazine into a pugnacious mouthpiece of the new movement. He orchestrated an anonymous campaign of denigration and protest against the ‘heretical’ liberal theologian Renn Dickson Hamden, in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent his appointment as Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford in 1836. Such manoeuvrings showed Newman at his unattractive worst, and disgusted religious liberals like Thomas Arnold, the famous reforming headmaster of Rugby School, who branded Newman and his followers as ‘the Oxford Malignants’. Ironically, Arnold’s own sons were to fall under Newman’s spell, and two of them would eventually follow him into the Catholic Church.
Newman’s conviction that human nature needed redemption and divinization by incorporation into Christ put him utterly at odds with the utilitarian spirit that underlay much Victorian progressivism. Though himself a dedicated teacher, who spent his life promoting lay education in one form or another, he rejected entirely the idea that the increase of knowledge in itself brought moral improvement. In 1841 he wrote a brilliant series of satirical letters to the Times under the pseudonym Catholicus, attacking a speech Sir Robert Peel had made at the opening of a Library in Tamworth, in which Peel had said that as people improved their general knowledge by reading they ‘rise at once in the scale of intellectual and moral existence, and feel the moral dignity of his nature exalted.’ The pleasures of knowledge would overcome ‘the indulgence of sensual appetite,’ and help bring about ‘the intellectual and moral improvement of the community.’
About all this Newman was magnificently scathing.
… It does not require many words, … to determine that, taking human nature as it is actually found, and assuming that there is an Art of life, to say that it consists, or in any essential manner is placed, in the cultivation of Knowledge, that the mind is changed by a discovery, or saved by a diversion, and can thus be amused into immortality – that grief, anger, cowardice, self-conceit, pride, or passion, can be subdued by an examination of shells or grasses, or inhaling of gases, or chipping of rocks, or calculating the longitude, is the veriest of pretences which sophist or mountebank ever professed to a gaping auditory. If virtue be a mastery over the mind, if its end be action, if its perfection be inward order, harmony, and peace, we must seek it in graver and holier places than in Libraries and Reading-rooms.6
The Oxford Movement succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. In little over a generation it was to transform the theology, preaching, worship and even the architectural style of the Anglican Church: over the next century even conventionally middle-of-the-road parish churches were transformed from the preaching boxes of the eighteenth century into numinous settings for the celebration of ceremonial liturgy: village orchestras in the gallery gave way to surpliced choirs in the chancel, coloured stoles replaced black scarves, and Holy communion, once an occasional service happening four or five times a year, became a monthly or weekly event. Tractarianism was to be the single most important influence in the shaping of the character of the modern Anglican communion.
But by the early 1840s, Newman himself had lost confidence in it. He believed that the substantial teaching of the early church, and a ‘Via Media’ between the modern corruptions of the Church of Rome and the doctrinal and sacramental impoverishment of European Protestantism, were both to be found in the writings of Anglican high-churchmen like Lancelot Andrews or William Laud. But he rapidly came to recognize that this ‘Via Media’ had never been absorbed into main-stream Anglicanism: it was ‘a paper theory’, at odds with the visceral Protestantism and subjection to secular government of a national church. As he told the Irish high-churchman, Hugh James Rose, ‘I cannot love the “Church of England” commonly so designated – its very title is an offence … for it implies that it holds, not of the Church Catholic but of the State.’7
Newman’s increasingly subtle attempts to interpret the foundation documents of the Church of England in ways open to Roman Catholic teaching culminated in 1841 in the publication of Tract 90, which argued that subscription to the 39 Articles was compatible with holding Roman Catholic doctrines like the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the eucharist, or prayer for the dead. Tract 90 provoked a hostile backlash both from the bishops, and from older and more cautious high-churchmen. Frustrated by the apparently impregnable Protestantism of their contemporaries, one by one Newman’s more headstrong disciples became Roman Catholics. Newman did what he could to stem the leakage, but the entirely predictable reaction to his Tract had deeply unsettled him, and he was himself in an agony of indecision, increasingly convinced that Rome possessed the fulness of truth, yet unable to bring his loyalties and emotions into accord with his intellect. ‘Paper logic’ was merely the trace of deeper and more mysterious movements of heart and mind. As he wrote later, recalling this long slow ‘death-bed’ as an Anglican, ‘It is the concrete being that reasons: pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? The whole man moves…Great acts take time.’8 He retreated to Littlemore, part of St Mary’s parish extending to the village near Oxford where he had built a church. There he and a dwindling band of followers lived a quasi-monastic life of prayer, fasting and reflection. In October 1845 Newman at last recognized where his own logic had long since led him, and he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.
Both Newman’s attraction to Catholicism and his hesitation in embracing it sprang from a radical historicism. Historical criticism – of the Bible, of Christian institutions, of the evolution and transformations of Christian ideas – was a major force for religious unsettlement in the nineteenth century. Newman was the first great theologian not merely to grasp the importance of the questions posed for faith by the fact of historical flux, but to insist that an acknowledgement of the historical contingency of much of Christian teaching and institutions was compatible with firmly held orthodox belief, with the acceptance of dogma. As an Anglican, he had begun by assuming that religious truth was unchanging. Christianity was a revealed religion, its doctrines descended to the present in an unbroken tradition from the Apostles. So nothing could count as Christian truth, unless the primitive church had believed and taught it. The modern Church of Rome, therefore, could not claim to be the true church, since so much about it – its elaborate ritualistic worship, the dominant place of the Virgin Mary in its piety, the overweening authority of the pope – all these seemed alien to or absent from the earliest Christianity: there were no rosary beads in third century Carthage. Yet Newman’s reading in early Christian sources convinced him that to condemn Rome on these grounds would be to outlaw much of the rest of mainstream Christianity. The doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity, accepted as fundamental by both Catholics and Protestants, were not to be found in their mature form in the early church. And if the central tenets of the faith could develop legitimately beyond their New Testament foundations, why not everything else? As a Tractarian he dealt with this problem in part through the notion of a disciplina arcana, a secret tradition of doctrinal reticence – by which the early church had concealed or not spoken of fundamental beliefs in case they were profaned by scepticism or shallow belief: so there was an inner core of ancient beliefs not in scripture, but passed on to the initiated, and these doctrines in the course of time were openly articulated: they had always been there, just not in the written record.
Newman came to see the inadequacy of this essentially static and also highly speculative explanation. As Rowan Williams has pointed out, already in Newman’s first book, his history of the Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) he had grasped that Christian doctrine evolved and changed, and to understand it we had to grasp the nature of that change.9 To resolve the apparent contradiction between a religion of objectively revealed truth, and the manifest historical flux of Christian doctrines and practices, Newman wrote in his last years at Littlemore a theological masterpiece, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Its central claim is that the concepts and intuitions which shape human history are dynamic, not inert. Great ideas interact with changing times and cultures, retaining their distinctive thrust and direction, yet adapting so as to preserve and develop that energy in different circumstances. Truth is a plant, evolving from a seed into the mature tree, not a baton passed inertly from hand to hand. Ideas must unfold in the historical process before we can appropriate all that they contain. So beliefs evolve and change, but they do so to preserve their essence in the flux of history: they change, that is, in order to remain the same. ‘In another world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’10
Other nineteenth century thinkers had anticipated aspects of this fundamentally dynamic understanding of religious truth. But no-one confronted its difficulties or explored its implications so fully as Newman, whose Essay offered a remarkable series of seven diagnostic tests by which to distinguish legitimate developments from corruptions of the truth. By no means everything in his analysis looks convincing now, but the Essay was a major intellectual landmark, and it legitimized the notion of doctrinal development, up till that point perceived as a weapon in the armoury of the unbeliever. Over the next century or so, it was to prove seminal for Catholic theology, as the Catholic Church increasingly sought to come to terms with its own historical contingency, and Newman’s thinking has been equally influential in Protestant reflection on doctrinal development.
In the Catholic Church of the 1840s, however, Newman’s brainwave was viewed with considerable suspicion. As the most famous clergyman in England, his was a prestigious scalp on the Pope’s tentpole or, as he himself later complained, ‘some wild incomprehensible beast caught by the hunter, and a spectacle for Dr Wiseman to exhibit to strangers...’11. For a while after his reordination as a Catholic priest, Rome treated him as a celebrity. But the nineteenth century Papacy was a beleaguered institution, its financial and political independence under threat from the movement for Italian unification, its ideological monopoly in European society everywhere challenged by the rise of often hostile modern nation states. Pope Pius IX reacted by denouncing modernity and emphasizing the Church’s unchanging authority. In this atmosphere, Newman’s nuanced historicism came to look half-hearted at best, treacherous at worst. He settled with a small group of devoted followers in Birmingham, as the founder and head of an English house of the Oratory of St Philip Neri, whom he adopted as his patron saint and model. But for almost twenty years after his conversion, frustration attended all he attempted, and his position within the Catholic Church became increasingly uncomfortable. An invitation to head a new Catholic University in Dublin elicited a sublime series of lectures on the nature of liberal education, published as The Idea of a University, hailed as a classic then, and a benchmark for liberal educational theorists ever since. Yet the project itself foundered amidst considerable bitterness, the casualty in part of Newman’s own difficult personality, his competing projects and preoccupations, and of the mismatch between his desire to create a blueprint for Christian education for anglophone Catholics, and the hard-headed pragmatism of the Irish bishops, intent on rebuilding a nation decimated by Famine. They were not looking for an idealized Catholic Oxford, but an institute of practical education for an aspiring Catholic Irish middle class.
Back in England, Newman yearned for an Oratorian mission to Oxford itself, and a return to the university which he loved and in which he had once thrived. He bought land for a church and house there, but the Catholic bishops feared that exposure to the flesh-pots of the establishment would lure Catholic undergraduates into apostasy. The Vatican too, beleaguered in secularizing Italy and fighting a rearguard action to defend the Church’s traditional monopoly on education, was increasingly jumpy about Catholic attendance at non-Catholic schools and universities. So Newman’s Oxford project was blocked, not least by his erstwhile friend, Henry Edward Manning, future cardinal, and now an implacably papalist Catholic zealot. Newman’s own orthodoxy became suspect. In an essay in the liberal Catholic journal The Rambler, whose editorship he had reluctantly accepted in order to prevent its closure by the bishops, he defended the notion that the laity were not passive recipients of clerical teaching, the ecclesia discens, the learning or listening church, subordinate to the ecclesia docens, the hierarchical teaching church, but were themselves witnesses to and transmitters of Catholic truth. Yet in Pio Nono’s (Pope Pius IX) church, the only role expected of the laity was to listen, obey and cough up for collections. To suggest otherwise was a charter for insubordination. Newman was delated to Rome for heresy, and there were abortive attempts to extract a recantation from the man whom Mgr George Talbot, a hugely influential Papal adviser and once an admirer, now called ‘the most dangerous man in England.’
Unsurprisingly, Newman, always prone to self-pity, felt increasingly isolated and abandoned, conscious that the influence he had exerted as an Anglican had melted away from the moment he had converted, aware of the haggard lines which disappointment had etched into his face, bitter that all his endeavours seemed to ‘crumble under my hands, as if one were making ropes of sand.’12 He was rescued at the end of 1863 by a casually anti-Catholic journal article by the novelist Charles Kingsley, who remarked in passing that truth had never been considered a virtue by Catholic clergy, and that Newman in particular had proposed ‘cunning’ as the weapon given to the Church ‘to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world.’ This unprovoked attack on his integrity, not to mention its snide insinuation about his manhood, was the trigger for Newman’s best-known and most beautiful book, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, written for serial publication at breakneck speed, in just ten weeks. Years of unhappy brooding over his own religious journey, and of sorting and annotating his correspondence, proved ideal preparation for the writing of a religious autobiography which is also a triumphant self-vindication, one of the most persuasive portrayals of a mind and heart in movement in English or any other language. Overnight, Newman’s embrace of what to many had seemed an exotic and alien religion was made intelligible to Victorian readers. Catholics hailed him as a brilliant apologist who presented their unpopular religion in a new and sympathetic light: Anglicans remembered that this man had once transformed the established church for the better. Newman had become an Eminent Victorian.
It’s worth emphasizing that the Apologia was both more and less than an autobiography: it was a highly selective account of his intellectual journey towards Catholicism, not a general history of his life as an Anglican, though recent attempts to interpret it as a brilliant confidence trick concealing his true opinions, seem crassly wrong-headed. Its final part was also a manifesto not only for his kind of Catholicism, but also for his understanding of the nature of Christianity itself, which extended the austere vision of the Parochial and Plain sermons in an analysis of the human condition as sombre and as profound as that of Dostoyevsky.
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken[,] of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world – all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.13
His fame gave him leverage – and a degree of immunity – within Pio Nono’s church, but it didn’t reconcile him to the direction that church was taking. Manning, who succeeded Nicholas Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, was deeply distrustful of what he saw as the compromised and compromising minimalism of Newman’s Catholicism, which he criticized as ‘always on the lower side… the old, Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church.’14 And the tide of events was with Manning. Newman watched with dismay the progress of an exaggerated papalism which he thought distorted and undermined the Church’s credibility. In January 1870 he wrote an angry letter to his bishop, which was later sensationally leaked to the press, in which he denounced the pressure for the definition of papal infallibility
When we are all at rest, and have no doubts, and at least practically, not to say doctrinally, hold the Holy Father to be infallible, suddenly there is thunder in the clear sky, and we are told to prepare for something we know not what to try our faith we know not how. No impending danger is to be averted, but a great difficulty is to be created. Is this the proper work for an Ecumenical Council? As to myself personally, please God, I do not expect any trial at all; but I cannot help suffering with the various souls which are suffering, and I look with anxiety at the prospect of having to defend decisions, which may be not difficult to my private judgment, but may be most difficult to maintain logically in the face of historical facts. What have we done to be treated, as the faithful never were treated before? When has definition of doctrine de fide been a luxury of devotion, and not a stern painful necessity? Why should an agressive insolent faction be allowed to ‘make the heart of the just to mourn, whom the Lord hath not made sorrowful?’ Why can’t we be let alone, when we have pursued peace, and thought no evil?15
This kind of utterance did nothing to gain Newman friends at Rome, but he was not deterred. He had in fact mounted his own single-handed campaign to sabotage the new ultramontanism, by presenting an alternative face of Catholicism. In a series of works ostensibly designed to defend the Church against its external critics, he undermined the authoritarian and clericalist Catholicism being promoted by Manning and his associates. In the process, he subtly redrew the lines of contemporary religious debate, and sketched what was to prove to be the future of Catholic theology. A reply in 1866 to his old Anglican colleague Edward Bouverie Pusey, defending the Catholic veneration of the Virgin, recentred Marian doctrine by insisting that all that was essential in it was already present in the teaching of the Greek and Latin Fathers: this at once sidelined the baroque elaborations of modern Italian mariology which the head of the ‘breakaway’ London Oratory, Fr Frederick William Faber, was ardently promoting. In a reply to Gladstone’s hysterical denunciations of the likely effects of the Vatican Council on Catholic allegiance to secular rulers, Newman set clear limits to Papal authority, disparaged by contrast the extremism of Ultramontanes like Manning and Newman’s former disciple W. G. Ward, and (famously) pledged a toast to ‘conscience first, and the Pope afterwards.’ A new Preface to his own Anglican writing on ecclesiology subverted the authoritarianism of Pio Nono’s pontificate by arguing that critical theology, spiritual life or piety, and hierarchical (especially papal) authority, were each indispensable functions or ‘offices’ of the Church, but were permanently in dialectical tension. Catholic truth, he argued, was distorted whenever any one of these three offices gained the upper hand over the others, as, by implication, hierarchy had in his own day.
Newman’s Preface to the 1877 reissue of the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church was his last great original theological work. Throughout the 1860s and 70s he was engaged in a systematic reissue of his Anglican writings, a self-conscious assertion of the integrity and consistency of his own intellectual and spiritual journey. What eventually became a uniform edition of all his writings was designed to establish the essential Catholicity of ideas gestated during his Anglican years, many of which, unsurprisingly, were viewed with suspicion by hyper-Catholics like Manning and Ward. This was a tricky venture in the Church of Pio Nono, and it’s typical of Newman that his highly original final exercise in ecclesiology should present itself as something ostensibly quite different, an apologetic defence of the Catholic Church of the 1870s against the accusations of the fierce young Anglican high-churchman he had been in the 1840s.
Newman’s later writings were not confined to the internal affairs of the Church. In 1870, in the midst of the furore over papal infallibility, he published his most sustained philosophical work, the Grammar of Assent. It’s an austere and difficult book, taking up and developing ideas which had been first aired in his Oxford University Sermons, published in 1843. The Grammar was a searching exploration of the nature and motives of religious belief: some of its central themes were already familiar in (and quoted from) his Anglican writings: in The Tamworth Reading Room he had insisted on the personal nature of our apprehension of truth, and the inadequacy of logic as a basis for life-changing beliefs.
Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism. Few men have that power of mind which may hold fast and firmly a variety of thoughts. … To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. …
Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever be laying our foundations... Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding “in the lowest depth a lower deep,” till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism. I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.16
The Grammar of Assent teases out in detail the implications of that view of faith as a venture: it took him twenty years to write, and the Oxford philosopher, Sir Anthony Kenny, has described it as the most significant contribution to epistemology between Descartes and Wittgenstein.17 In it, Newman’s hostility to ‘liberalism’, the rationalist reduction to mere ‘paper logic’ of the processes by which we make life and death decisions, finds its most powerful expression. His subtle analysis of the sometimes untraceable routes by which we arrive at conviction, the ‘personal conquest of truth’, anticipates some of the later Wittgenstein’s characteristic positions, though it is not clear that Wittgenstein ever read The Grammar of Assent.
The frustrations and disappointments of Newman’s Catholic career had not ended with the publication of the Apologia: Archbishop Manning saw to it that he was never permitted to re-establish himself at Oxford. But the renewal of Anglican friendships which the Apologia enabled, the national celebrity it revived, and the Catholic gratitude which it elicited help explain the renewal of energy and purpose which underlay his last writings. With the death of Pio Nono in February 1878, his standing as the leading English exponent of Catholic faith would be vindicated. Early in 1879, at the prompting of the Duke of Norfolk, Newman’s friend and former pupil at Newman’s Oratory School, the new pope, Leo XIII, agreed to offer Newman the red hat of a cardinal. Newman, afraid that he would be required to leave Birmingham and live in the Curia at Rome, wrote an uncharacteristically tortuous letter pleading not to be removed from ‘my little nest’. Manning, who privately believed Newman to be a heretic, chose to interpret this letter as a refusal, informed the Pope accordingly, and spread word that Newman had declined the Pope’s offer. Only urgent interventions by the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham resolved the misunderstanding, if such it was. Manning backtracked, loudly protested a genuine mistake, and Dr Newman became Cardinal Newman. He told his Oratorians, ‘The cloud is lifted from me forever’, and to his Anglican friend Richard Church he wrote
all the stories which have gone about of my being a half Catholic, a liberal Catholic, under a cloud, not to be trusted, are now at an end. Poor Ward can no longer call me a heretic …18.
Newman combined a life-long insistence on the reliability of revealed truth – of dogma – with a vivid awareness of the contingency of all Christian understanding and utterance, even the most solemn creeds. In his consequent exploration of the legitimacy of the development of doctrine: in his rejection of a narrow enlightenment understanding of rationality: in his recognition of the puzzle and difficulty of belief in God while simultaneously defending the reasonableness of religious commitment; in his understanding of the dynamic nature of the institutional church, the impossibility of neat and tidy harmonizations of the competing demands of truth, power and intuition, and our consequent need and ability to live with the inevitable tensions between them; in his rejection of exaggerated claims for religious authority and his insistence on the role and dignity of the laity even in the sphere of faith, Newman identified and explored many of the issues which would most preoccupy theology in the twentiethcentury. Every other Victorian theologian has become of mainly historical interest. Newman’s writings are still worth reading for their continuing relevance and vitality. He is still our contemporary.