Man of letters
Man of letters
In 1850 Newman admonished one of his female correspondents against taking him for a saint: ‘I have no tendency to be a saint – it is a sad thing to say, Saints are not literary men, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales.’ 120 It is a matter of interest that Newman in 1850 should think of himself as ‘a literary man’. He had of course taught classics in Oxford, and the ‘Tale’ he refers to was his semi-autobiographical novel, Loss and Gain: the story of a convert, conceived while he was living in Rome, with the memory of his own conversion still strong upon him, and which was published anonymously in 1848. He had immediately begun another ‘tale’, this time an historical novel, Callista, set in third century ProConsular Africa. Callista was remarkable both for its vivid evocation of the plague of locusts which devastates the fictional city of Sicca in chapter ten, and for his heroine Callista’s appeal, while still a pagan, to the voice of God in her conscience, ‘the echo of a person speaking to me’ that ‘carries with it its proof of its divine origin ... An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear’, a key element of Newman’s thought, which he was to explore more formally in the Grammar of Assent and the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk.121 Both novels still have life, and Loss and Gain is often very funny in a sub-Dickensian way, but Newman was by any measure only a minor novelist.
There is more to be said for him as a poet: the novels are read primarily for the light they throw on Newman, but The Pillar of the Cloud, written aboard ship during his voyage back to England from Sicily in June 1833, has become one of the small handful of hymns that everyone has heard of, as ‘Lead kindly light’. His most sustained poetic achievement, The Dream of Gerontius, written and published in 1865, is one of the best Victorian religious poems, theologically daring in its highly unconventional depiction of Purgatory as essentially the unfolding within the soul of Gerontius of his encounter with the holiness of God. The poem is metrically adventurous, and full of memorable phrasing, like Gerontius’s description of the pangs of death:
I can no more; for now it comes again,
That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain,
That masterful negation and collapse
Of all that makes me man.122
The poem is also theologically adventurous, for, unlike most Victorian Catholic evocations of Purgatory, Newman’s Purgatory is a ‘golden prison’, a place of healing and restoration. There is no fire there, and the bitterness of the ‘penal waters’ into which Gerontius’ Guardian Angel lowers him ‘softly and gently’, to be tended and ‘nursed’ by willing angels, is the pain of penitence rather than of punishment. All the same, the Dream is as much a product of late romantic sensibility as of theological penetration. In the greatest of all poetic evocations of the Christian afterlife, Dante’s Commedia, the vision of Purgatory is emphatically social, penitence and community are its twin themes, and the cleansing that takes place there involves the restoration of the justice and right order that sin destroys. By contrast, Gerontius in purgatory is ‘lone, not forlorn’, sinking far from all company into the lake of purgation, ‘deeper, deeper into the dim distance’ till the ‘lone night watches’ end, and the soul flies at last to ‘its Sole Peace’. Here, as always in Newman, there are two and two only ‘absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.123 It demanded musical setting, and Elgar’s sublime oratorio, which, as he famously declared, was ‘the best of me’ has ensured that Newman’s sombrely beautiful meditation on the death, purgation and ultimate salvation of the soul of an ordinary man is one of the best-known of all Victorian poems. Two choruses from it, ‘Praise to the Holiest’ and ‘Firmly I believe and truly’ took on a life of their own in other musical settings, and rival the status of ‘Lead kindly light’ as classics of English hymnody. Despite a disastrously bad premier in Birmingham Town Hall in 1900, Elgar’s work was soon recognized for the masterpiece that it is, though the blatantly Roman Catholic subject-matter raised Protestant hackles: to begin with it had to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival in a bowdlerized version.
But it is as the finest prose stylist of Victorian England, rivalled only by John Ruskin, that Newman’s literary claims rest. James Joyce considered him beyond rivalry, and placed in the mouth of Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount strand a ‘proud cadence’ from what he elsewhere calls Newman’s ‘cloistral, silverveined prose’.124
Newman himself in fact disliked the idea of ‘style’. Having been singled out in the Times of 10 April 1869 as one of the three great masters of English style (the others being Macaulay and de Quincy) he insisted that:
I may truly say that I have never been in the practice since I was a boy of attempting to write well, or to form an elegant style. I think I never have written for writing sake; but my one and single desire and aim has been to do what is so difficult – viz. to express clearly and exactly my meaning.125
There was of course far more to Newman’s writing than the search for clarity. He achieved fame as a stylist at first through his published Parochial Sermons, six volumes of them published between 1834 and 1842. Often treated as an undifferentiated body of perennial ‘spirituality’, divorced from the often hectic historical circumstances in which they were written and delivered, the sermons closely reflect Newman’s own dramatic theological development in those years, but always underpinned by a consistently demanding emphasis on the search for holiness of life. Despite their austerity, the sermons won him a cult following among the young, and Victorian memoirs are full of recollections of the impact of his preaching. At the height of his fame as an Anglican, Newman often had to pick his way to the pulpit of St Mary’s through hushed crowds of undergraduates, dons and visitors who came to Oxford ‘principally to hear Newman preach’.
‘Who could resist,’ Matthew Arnold wrote in 1883, ‘the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music – subtle, sweet, mournful.’
Equally impressive was the preacher’s ‘intensely tragic earnestness’, his absolute stillness, eyes turned to the page before him, hands concealed behind the lectern, the long and at first disconcerting pauses between sentences, above all Newman’s voice – calm, quiet, unemphatic, yet ‘clear’, ‘sweet’, ‘thrilling’, ‘unearthly’.126
Newman’s emphasis on communication and clarity meant that most of his sermons focussed on a single theme, signalled by their titles in the published versions – ‘Secret Faults’: ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’: ‘Promising without Doing’: ‘The Self-Wise Enquirer’. And their style often embodied Newman’s own stated preference for plain, direct, communication:
Be in earnest, and you will speak of religion where, and when, and how you should; aim at things, and your words will be right without aiming. There are ten thousand ways of looking at this world, but only one right way. … it is the way in which God looks at the world. Aim at looking at it in God’s way. Aim at seeing things as God sees them. Aim at forming judgments about persons, events, ranks, fortunes, changes, objects, such as God forms. Aim at looking at this life as God looks at it.”127
Elsewhere, however, a wavering tentativness in his words might enact the uncertain process of human struggle for self-knowledge
We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and there, perhaps, we see a little; or, in our attempts to influence and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The management of our hearts is quite above us.128
And despite his professed mistrust of conscious eloquence, his preaching often rises to the “subtle, sweet and mournful” musicality that Matthew Arnold remembered so admiringly after fifty years:
But for us, let us glory in what they disown; let us beg of our Divine Lord to take to Him His great power, and manifest Himself more and more, and reign both in our hearts and in the world. Let us beg of Him to stand by us in trouble, and guide us on our dangerous way. … May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!129
Read singly or in small groups, Newman’s sermons are deeply affecting, often inspiring. But their almost unrelenting severity, their sense of the immense distance between the holiness of God and the deviousness of the human heart, have daunted many readers. Read in bulk they can be dispiriting, as many readers have felt: for Von Hugel, who admired the mind, Newman’s religion was ‘sad and sombre’, a kind of puritanism, rooted in a temperamental defect. Looking back in 1921 on his youthful friendship with the aged Newman, ‘I used to wonder’, he wrote, ‘how one so good, and who had made so many sacrifices to God, could be so depressing.’130 As any reader of Newman’s letters will know, this is an oversimplification, but the sermons do convey a severity that Newman’s exalted theology of the divinization of human nature by the Christ’s death and resurrection does not altogether offset. Yet their theological range is in fact extraordinary: most of Newman’s abiding intellectual preoccupations found memorable expression not merely in his scholarly and argumentative writing, but in his preaching. Between the two world wars, the foremost promoter of Newman’s thought in the German-speaking world, the Polish Jesuit Erich Przywara, compiled a hugely influential anthology of Newman’s writings, the English version of which appeared in 1930 as A Newman Synthesis. The collection introduced thousands of readers in Europe, England and America to Newman’s thought, though it suffers by removing Newman’s ideas from the biographical framework which was so central to all his writing, and by extracting high moments of the prose from their argumentative context. Nevertheless, it is significant that Przywara drew by far the largest single block of his material from the ten volumes of Newman’s Anglican sermons. It is hard to imagine a major corpus of Christian thought being derived nowadays from the parish sermons of any contemporary preacher.
The Idea of a University
The line from Newman that Stephen Dedalus recalled on Sandymount strand was indeed both ‘silver-veined and cloistral’ – it was the culminating sentence of Newman’s perfervid evocation of the perpetual triumphs of the papacy, from the first of his University Discourses, Newman at his very lushest:
Lawless kings arose, sagacious as the Roman, passionate as the Hun, yet in him they found their match, and were shattered, and he lived on. The gates of the earth were opened to the east and west, and men poured out to take possession; but he went with them by his missionaries, to China, to Mexico, carried along by zeal and charity, as far as those children of men were led by enterprise, covetousness, or ambition. Has he failed in his successes up to this hour? Did he, in our fathers’ day, fail in his struggle with Joseph of Germany and his confederates, with Napoleon, a greater name, and his dependent kings, that, though in another kind of fight, he should fail in ours? What grey hairs are on the head of Judah, whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s, whose feet are like the feet of harts, and underneath the Everlasting arms?131
Newman assembled the book from which that quotation came in 1873, by amalgamating nine of the ten discourses on The Scope and Nature of a University Education he had written as rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1852, and first published in 1853, supplemented by a series of ten further Lectures and Essays on University Subjects, first published in 1859. The resulting book, The Idea of a University, became almost at once a classic, and has remained the most widely read of all his works, endlessly reprinted and cited in every discussion of the nature and purpose of higher education: Walter Pater thought it ‘the perfect handling of a theory’, G. M. Young ranked it with Aristotle’s Ethics and thought every other book on education could be pulped as redundant; Owen Chadwick thought that every University Vice-Chancellor should be made to pass an examination in it. Yet it has been often misunderstood. Because it has become the classic defence of liberal education, many of those most enthusiastic for it have had no interest in religion. Newman himself emphasized that his views on education were not derived fron theology, but from reflection on experience and ‘imply no supernatural discernment’. Yet it is often overlooked that the lectures and the book derived from them were designed as a justification and explanation of the purpose of a Catholic University, in which the Church was an essential presence, in which all the professors were Catholics, and in which the value of a Catholic ethos was assumed.
Newman was addressing a very specific set of circum-stances: the Irish hierarchy was divided over the wisdom and viability of an exclusively Catholic University, and Newman’s defence of the value of knowledge for its own sake, and his insistence that it was not the task of a university to make good Catholics or Christians, was not necessarily in any case what any of them wanted to hear. The need to satisfy sometimes incompatible expectations led to some inconsistencies in his argument, like the claim in the seventh discourse that liberal education was after all useful, because it made good citizens.
The university, Newman suggested, was a community where all learning is taught: maintenance of ‘the whole circle of the sciences’ was essential to its being, and among the sciences he gave an important but not dominant place to theology: religion and knowledge of God was a fundamental aspect of human experience and history, and so could not be excluded from the circle of the sciences. This insistence reflected of course a life-long conviction, but was specifically directed here against the educational policy of the ‘mixed education’ of the non-denominational Irish ‘Queens Colleges’, from which theology was excluded, the government solution to the problem of educational provision in a country of fierce religious divisions.
Newman famously emphasized teaching as the university’s principal function, insisting that it existed not primarily for research or training in practical skills, but a setting for the cultivation of intellect. This insistence has led to doubts about the relevance of Newman’s vision to modern universities, where practical subjects like engineering, and cutting-edge research in the sciences are crucial, but the lectures do not in fact fully reflect Newman’s vision of what was the appropriate scope of universities. As Rector, Newman built laboratories, encouraged his professors to do research, and created a research journal, The Atlantis, to publish their papers.
The fundamental role of university education, however, was not the transmission of facts, or the accumulation of mere knowledge, but to encourage ‘enlargement of mind’. Its benefit was not utilitarian, its aim was to civilize. Fundamental to this process was the interchange of ideas and friendship found in the companionship of others, an issue which had been crucial for him during his time as an Oriel tutor. Newman went so far as to say he would prefer a university without professors, but where the students lived together and shared ideas, to a university where the students never encountered each other, but learned, for example, by correspondence courses. Newman was clear, however, about the limits of education:
Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another. Good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility … Liberal education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind … these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge: they are the objects of a University.
But
Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passions and the pride of man.132
Newman was echoing here the argument of his 1841 polemic on the Tamworth Reading Room: the inculcation of virtue was the province of the priest, not the professor. This distinction lay behind the famous and much-quoted portrait of the gentleman in the eighth discourse:
It is almost the definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain … carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast – all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets every thing for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.
That has often been assumed to be Newman’s ideal: it is in fact written with a strong element of irony, and is intended as a portrait of the best that nature without grace can achieve: this was refinement, not moral virtue. The irony becomes obvious when he moves on to the gentleman’s religion:
Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the being of God, sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity itself.
Newman concluded that discourse with pen-pictures of St Basil the Great and the emperor Julian the Apostate: both were ‘gentlemen’ formed by the same education, but ‘one became a Saint and Doctor of the Church, the other her scoffing and relentless foe’.133
But he was equally insistent that the priest should not encroach on the prerogatives of the professor. No truth can contradict another truth, there was no final conflict between science and religion, even if in a given instance it is not at once apparent how they are to be reconciled. Scientific enquiry must be autonomous: the Church should learn from the Galileo affair to respect the legitimate freedom of scholars and scientists. And the Church should not seek to sanitize or censor what was studied in the university, neither in the sciences nor the arts. In the university, no area of knowledge was off bounds, and that included profane literature, for literature was by its nature profane:
From the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature of sinful man.134
The university was in the realm of ideas what an Empire was in the realm of politics, ‘the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle … of experiment and speculation.’ The ‘imperial intellect’ is therefore open to all knowledge, to the contradictions of experience and reality, accepting the complexities of life and knowledge even when they seem to involve conflict with religious truth. Unmistakeably echoing his own frustrations in the church of Pio Nono, he insisted on the need for believers – and church authorities – to avoid reaching for their revolvers every time a new idea was propounded. Pioneering thought pushes at the boundaries, ‘Great minds need elbow room’.135 So, the educated believer
is not the nervous creature who startles at every sudden sound, and is fluttered by every strange or novel appearance … He is sure, and nothing shall make him doubt, that, if anything seems to be proved by astronomer, or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out, first, not to be proved, or, secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to any thing really revealed ... . And if, at the moment, it appears to be contradictory, then he is content to wait, knowing that error is like other delinquents; give it rope enough, and it will be found to have a strong suicidal propensity.136
Newman on himself
Among Newman’s papers in the Birmingham Oratory is a scrapbook, containing some of his earliest letters and childhood memorabilia. By far the oddest item in that collection is the faded back cover of a school exercise book dating from 1812, when Newman was just eleven years old, and on which, then and at other key points over the course of his long life, he made a series of autobiographical jottings. They are terse enough to be quoted in their entirety.
John Newman wrote this just before he was going up to Greek on Tuesday June 10th 1812, when it only wanted 3 days to his going home, thinking of the time (at home) when looking at this he shall recollect when he did it.
At school now back again.
And now at Alton where he never expected to be, being lately come for the vacation from Oxford where he dared not hope to be – how quick time passes and how ignorant are we of futurity. April 8th 1819, Thursday.
And now at Oxford but with far different feelings – let the date speak – Friday February 16th 1821.
And now in my rooms at Oriel College, a Tutor, a Parish Priest and Fellow, having suffered much, slowly advancing to what is good and holy, and led on by God’s hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me. Even so, O Lord. September 7 1829. Monday morning ¼ past 10.
And now a Catholic at Maryvale and expecting soon to set out for Rome. May 29, 1846.
And now a Priest and Father of the Oratory, having just received the degree of Doctor from the Holy Father. September 23, 1850
And now a Cardinal. March 2 1884.”137
That extraordinary document bears a great deal of thinking about. Already in its first entry, at the age of eleven, Newman articulated what was to be one of the abiding characteristics of his life and psychology, the self-conscious brooding over his own past and its significance which would shape his most revealing writings. We wonder at the eleven-year-old schoolboy solemnly making the entry ‘thinking of the time (at home) when looking at this he shall recollect when he did it’, and some of Newman’s other life-long preoccupations surface in these entries too, the fragility and uncertainty of human life and of human knowledge which dominate both his preaching and his epistemology, and that sense of moving blindly forward under God’s guidance, familiar from his best known hymn, ‘Lead Kindly Light’.
Regardless of content, the mere fact of these brief entries gives pause for thought. They were made over a period of seventy-two years, and record, sometimes long after the event, key moments in Newman’s life – school days, the first Oxford vacation after his father’s bankruptcy, his election as a Fellow of Oriel, his conversion to Catholicism, his establishment of the Oratory at Birmingham, and finally the Cardinalate. We have to imagine Newman hunting out or happening across this faded relic of his childhood as he pored over his papers at ever-increasing intervals – there’s a gap of a few months between the first two entries, thirty-four years between the final two – in order to record (for whose eyes, one wonders?) yet another milestone in the fascinating unfolding of his own life. Here with a vengeance stands revealed that self-reflexive sensibility which, as he tells us in the Apologia, rested ‘in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.’
Newman was, notoriously, a man intensely preoccupied by his own history and thought-processes. Henri Bremond, who admired him and wrote a perversely great book about him, called Newman ‘one of the most self-absorbed men that has ever been known’, and he dubbed that aspect of Newman’s personality ‘autocentrism’, a word damningly though inadequately translated into English as ‘self-centredness”.138 He certainly was an incorrigible diarist, memoirist, letter-writer. Intensely and genuinely private, with a horror of glib confessional gab, he nevertheless wrote thousands of sometimes starthngly self-revealing letters to a wide circle of friends, many of them to women. More than 20,000 have survived (compared to Dickens’ score of 14,000+) and have been printed in thirty-one large volumes, making Newman easily the most copious letter-writer, and probably the principle beneficiary, of the age of the penny post. As he told his sister Jemima, he himself considered that ‘a man’s life lies in his letters’, and described them as
just that kind of literature which more than any other represents the abundance of the heart, which more than any other approaches to conversation.139
Newman’s letters allow us to eavesdrop on some of the most interesting and entertaining conversations of the nineteenth century. As even the scattering of passages from the letters quoted in this small book testify, the range of his correspondence is extraordinary: accounts of his travels (he disliked hotel food, especially continental hotel food, and hated soft beds): frenetic organization and campaigning (in the 1830s): family gossip: extended theological or philosophical reflections: analysis of church affairs: literary criticism and literary gossip: affectionate exchanges with close friends: and especially in his Catholic years, spiritual counsel and consolation, even a skittish rhyming thank you letter to a little girl who sent him cakes. He can be tender, businesslike, comical, piercingly intelligent, savagely critical. The letters are often moving, often painful, often very funny: Newman had a strong sense of the ridiculous, and was good at catching the tone of a voice to comic effect. He could be devastatingly direct, as in his letter to Archbishop Manning in November 1869 when relations between them were at their worst: ‘I do not know whether I am on my head or my heels, when I have active relations with you. In spite of my friendly feelings, this is the judgement of my intellect’, or again, in his scathing rebuke to W. G. Ward in May 1867:
You are doing your best to make a party in the Catholic Church, and …dividing Christ by exalting your opinions into dogmas, and shocking to say, by declaring to me, as you do, that those Catholics who do not accept them are of a different religion from yours. I protest then again, not against your tenets, but against what I must call your schismatical spirit and I pray God that I may never denounce, as you do, what the Church has not denounced.”140
And he could above all be profoundly touching. What is arguably his most moving letter was written in old age, soon after he became a Cardinal, to the son of his sister Jemima, who had died on Christmas Day 1879. Her family had never accepted Newman’s conversion to Catholicism, and had been upset when he wrote to say he had offered Mass for her soul, but had not expressed a conventionally Victorian hope that he would meet her in the afterlife. Newman’s explanation is as sublime as it is characteristically autocentric:
My very dear John,
Thank you for your affectionate letter, which I am glad to have, tho’ how to answer it I scarcely know, more than if it were written in a language which I could not read. From so different a standpoint do we view things. Looking beyond this life, my first prayer, aim, and hope is that I may see God. The thought of being blest with the sight of earthly friends pales before that thought. I believe that I shall never die; this awful prospect would crush me, were it not that I trusted and prayed that it would be an eternity in God’s Presence. How is eternity a boon, unless He goes with it?
And for others dear to me, my one prayer is that they may see God. It is the thought of God, His Presence, His strength which makes up, which repairs all bereavements.
‘Give what Thou wilt, without Thee we are poor,
‘And with thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.’
I prayed that it might be so, when I lost so many friends 35 years ago; what else could I look to? If then, as you rightly remind me, I said Mass for your dear Mother, it was to entreat the Lover of souls that, in His own way and in His own time, He would remove all distance which lay between the Sovereign Good and her, His creature. That is the first prayer, sine qua non, introductory to all prayers, and the most absorbing. What can I say more to you?
Yours affectly
John H. Card. Newman
P.S. Cardinals don’t wear mourning.141
The Apologia
That Newman’s greatest literary achievement should be a spiritual autobiography is a matter for remark. This is in part because he was an intensely private man, with a shuddering horror of vulgar self-display, and an innate reticence and shyness which could keep him silent for hours in company. The Apologia itself begins by invoking that reticence ‘It may easily be conceived how great a trial it is to me to write the following history of myself’ he wrote, ‘…the words “Secretum meum mihi” keep ringing in my ears: but as men draw towards their end, they care less for disclosures.’142 And yet the Apologia was full of disclosures: his childhood fears and superstitions, his awestruck admiration as a young don for his Oxford seniors, the making and the breaking of friendships, his fierce opinions and feverish campaigning in the heyday of the Oxford Movement, his hopes, his successes, his increasingly bitter disappointments, and the slow erosion of his once dominant position in the university and the wider Church of England.
But the Apologia was not primarily a narrative of events, unless we count shifts of mood, opinion and belief as events. The trigger for the book was Charles Kingsley’s gratuitously insulting aside in a review of Froude’s History of England, impugning Newman’s integrity and truthfulness, and that of the Catholic priesthood in general. It seemed a heaven-sent opening. Newman had been deeply depressed, combing back through his papers and brooding on the frustrations that had blighted every enterprise since 1845.
O how forlorn & dreary has been my course since I have been a Catholic! Here has been the contrast – as a Protestant I felt my religion dreary, but not my life – but as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion.143
Newman’s response to Kingsley, published in eight pamphlets, concluded with a distressingly brilliant response in detail to his attack, arranged in thirty-nine sections in allusion to the thirty-nine articles. In it, all Newman’s forensic and satirical powers were on display: friends and foes found it dazzling but savage, comparing it to a flaying, and Newman wisely suppressed it in later editions.144 But the main part of his response was to invite the Victorian public in to view the workings of his innermost self, in vindication of his sincerity during his journey from Anglicanism to Catholicism:
He asks what I mean: not about my words, not about my actions, … but about that living intelligence, by which I write, and argue, and act. He asks about my Mind and its Beliefs and Sentiments, and he shall be answered … I recognised what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life: I must show what I am that it may be seen what I am not … I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes..I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind”.145
But no-one was more aware than Newman of the problematic nature of any such history of a mind. The sources of belief and action are elusive, and to trace the origin of an idea or a motive is to try to cage the wind. Some of his most brilliant Anglican writing explored the quicksilver nature of motive and belief. In that sparkling and devastating attack on Victorian progressivism, Letters on the Tamworth Reading Room in 1840, he wrote that ‘man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal.’146 As we have seen, his Oxford University Sermons from the same period, developed a searching analysis of the roots of belief, and he set out there the impossibility of a complete account of the processes by which the mind arrives at its innermost convictions.
It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication, another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some onward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule.147
That sense of the elusiveness of mind and motive pervades the Apologia, especially in Newman’s account of his last years in the Church of England, when, as he wrote ‘I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership of the Anglican Church’.148 From 1843 he was confiding to friends his increasing conviction that Rome was the one true Church, and Anglicanism in heresy and schism. Yet he clung to his membership of the Church of England, and till the autumn of 1845 did all in his power to hold back from Rome the group of ardent young disciples gathered round him in his retreat at Littlemore, that group unkindly but not entirely unjustly characterized by Geoffrey Faber as Newman’s ‘coterie of hermaphrodites’.
Newman’s agonizingly prolonged intellectual and emotional journey towards Rome in those years baffled his contemporaries, who wondered why he dithered. Newman himself explained it in the Apologia in terms of his own religious epistemology. True conversion was no simple clear-cut matter of following logic, but involved a movement of heart and mind and will together, in a convergence which could neither be coerced or hurried, and which remained mysterious even to the convert himself.
I had a great dislike of paper logic. For myself, it was not logic that carried me on: as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. 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; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; as well might you say I have arrived at the end of my journey, because I see the village church before me, as venture to assert that the miles over which my soul had to pass before it got to Rome, could be annihilated … Great acts take time.149
The Apologia was an extraordinary physical and emotional feat, a sustained act of recollection and self-explanation, incorporating extracts from his letters of the time, many of them hastily begged for the purpose from their original recipients. The book was written section by section against the clock, for weekly serial publication, Newman standing at his desk for up to sixteen hours a day and once for twenty-two hours, frequently sobbing from emotion and exhaustion as he relived the climactic experiences of his Anglican career, the loss of his place in the university and with it the leadership of the movement he had helped create, and the partings with friends and family his conversion had involved. As late as 1862, Newman had been capable of writing dismissively and even savagely about his Anglican past: in a notorious letter to the Globe newspaper that year, to scotch rumours that he regretted his conversion and was planning to return to the Church of England, he had declared that ‘the thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver, and the thought of the Thirty-nine articles makes me shudder.’150
Anglican friends and former followers had unerstandably been deeply hurt by those words: the Apologia made conscious amends by the warmth of his personal remembrances, his manifest sense of indebtedness to his Anglican past. That aspect of the Apologia was at its most moving, and in the best sense most artfully nostalgic, in the account of his final departure from Oxford after his reception as a Catholic:
I left Oxford for good on Monday, February 23, 1846. I slept on Sunday night at my dear friend’s, Mr. Johnson’s, at the Observatory. Various friends came to see the last of me; Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis. Dr. Pusey too came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle, one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private Tutor, when I was an Undergraduate. In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity, which was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who had been kind to me both when I was a boy, and all through my Oxford life. Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman’s rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University.
On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.151
From the very first, most readers have felt that the Apologia succeeded in the almost impossible task of tracing Newman’s tortuous journey towards certainty, and that his account of the workings of his own mind to 1845 carried and carry still the stamp of authenticity. Hostile Protestant reviewers might deplore Newman’s Catholic opinions, but they recognized the psychological mastery with which he traced the journey by which he had arrived at them, and the literary mastery in which that journey was recounted. As one of them wrote:
As a revelation of character the Apologia stands almost alone..in the stern, judicial, unfaltering and unfearing self-analysis of it. While it reminds us of Augustine’s Confessions, it is a far deeper revelation, and a far greater moral achievement than they.152
But there have always been sceptics, not least Newman’s own brother Frank. Just one year after Newman’s death, Frank published a venomous and fratricidal little memoir in which he vented the resentments and grudges of sixty years, and in which he dismissed the Apologia in particular as a disingenuous cover-up of his over-rated elder brother’s real motives:
‘The narrative of his religious changes would have deeply interested me,’ he wrote, ‘but I suppose he was incapable of writing it.’153
Francis Newman was an angular sectarian and a sceptic, who had despised his brother’s Anglicansim even more than his later Catholicism, and he manifestly understood the inwardness of neither. But, unsurprisingly, other critics of the Apologia have been motivated by their own religious allegiances. For the Victorian broad-churchman Edwin Abbott, whose relentlessly disparaging though shrewd and well-informed two-volume study of The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman remains in some ways the most formidable attack on the Apologia, Newman’s narrative was a chronicle of self-deception, tracing the surrender of a first-class mind to irrationality and superstition.154 For the Anglo-Catholic F. L. Cross, by contrast, the Apologia misled by giving too much weight to the intellectual case against Anglicanism, and presenting Newman’s loss of faith in the theory of the Via Media as the reason for his conversion. The Tractarian experiment, Cross argued, had been in fact a success, and Newman’s abandonment of it in 1845 proceeded not from a realization of the inadequacy of its theological underpinning, but from his own temperamental shortcomings. He was, Cross argued, a prime example of the personality type characterized by Neitzsche by the term Resentiment: a slavish, submissive-aggressive personality type, backing down when confronted by strong opposition, while preserving self-respect by insisting on the possession of the high moral ground, and in the aftermath of defeat liable to wallow in self-pity and an abiding sense of grievance. According to Cross, it was his inability to cope with the hostile response to Tract 90, and the challenging of his influence within the Church of England, which forced Newman into retreat at Littlemore, and ultimately took him off in a huff to Rome.155 Cross’s critique of Newman’s reasoning was manifestly parti pris, a defense of Anglo-Catholicism by an Anglo-Catholic, but he had certainly put his finger on aspects of Newman’s character which leap from the pages of his collected correspondence. Newman was, notoriously, a man without a skin, hyper-sensitive to criticism and opposition, one slow to forgive or forget once offended.
A less existentially engaged sense than Cross’s that the Apologia might be misleading, however, surfaced among historians conscious that Newman’s book had stamped an indelible mark on the historiography of the Oxford Movement, and had thereby distorted perceptions both of the context of the Movement and of Newman’s own role within it. The classic account was Richard Church’s The Oxford Movement, first published in 1891 and still a standard point of reference.156 Church, as a junior Fellow of Oriel from 1838, had been a devoted disciple, and remained a close friend till Newman’s death. Church’s study of early Tractarianism is full of insight as well as information, but it places Newman centre-stage, at the expense both of other Tractarian leaders like Keble and Pusey, and of the movement’s spreading influence outside the university. Above all perhaps, it ends abruptly in 1845, with Newman’s secession. Church’s book closely follows the narrative framework of the Apologia, and his omissions and silences are also derived from his master. Newman had said very little, for example, about some of his major polemical preoccupations in the 1830s, in particular his running battle with early Victorian Evangelicalism, which loomed far larger in his Tractarian preaching and writing than anyone would suspect from reading the Apologia alone: Church is equally silent on this score, and on the rare occasions when he does mention Evangelicalism, it is clear that he shared Newman’s strong aversion to it.
For a generation or more, therefore, historians have been increasingly aware of the need to escape from the narrative stereotypes fixed by Newman’s masterpiece of persuasion, and to present a less idealized and less sanitized account of a movement which was both more various and more pugnacious than his account suggested. This has resulted in some bracingly revisionist work. Perhaps the most substantial was Peter Nockles’ magisterial The Oxford Movement in Context, which rehabilitated the High Church predecessors of the Oxford Movement from Tractarian disparagement. In the same vein was the 1999 essay by Simon Skinner, which uncovered Newman’s ruthless hijacking of the British Critic, the stiffly old-fashioned periodical managed by members the High Church movement known as the Hackney Phalanx. Skinner showed that, having deviously ousted the existing editor, Newman transformed the Critic into a much more pugnacious platform for advanced Tractarian views. Yet, though his work as editor absorbed a good deal of his energy and enthusiasm for three years at the height of the movement’s success, Newman devoted just seven lines to the British Critic in the Apologia, said nothing about his own ousting of his predecessor as editor, and played down the extent to which the magazine under his management became very much the Tractarian in-house journal. ‘My writers’, he claimed, ‘belonged to various schools, some to none at all’.157 In reality, Newman carefully vetted his contributors, and refused offers of copy from men like Samuel Wilberforce whom he did not trust to toe the Tractarian party line.158
Skinner’s study brought a refreshingly acerbic note to the often reverential tone of much Newman scholarship, but he was primarily concerned to set the record straight on a key episode in the history of Tractarianism, rather than to offer a sustained critique of Newman’s own subsequent presentation of the origins and character of Tractarianism. As we have seen, the Apologia was written for weekly serial publication, under extreme pressure of time. At a distance of twenty-five years, Newman’s recollection of his criteria for selection of writers for the British Critic may well have been hazy, but in any case that kind of detail was not germane to his apologetic purpose. Chapter 2 of the Apologia contained a very frank confession of the deviousness and ferocity which ‘absolute confidence in my cause’ led to in the early 1830s, and he probably felt that that admission sufficiently covered his ruthless behaviour over the editorship of the British Critic.
But it is all the same not so easy to absolve him of disingenuousness in the final chapter of the Apologia . Entitled Position of my mind since 1845, that part of the Apologia represents a significant change of style and purpose. We move from a compelling psychological analysis of Newman’s journey towards Catholicism, to a more straightforwardly apologetic defence of the Catholic Church in which that journey had ended. But ‘straightforward’ is in this case is not entirely the apt description. As we have seen, this final section of the Apologia contains some of his most compelling and eloquent writing.159 But it also contains starthng evidence that a text by Newman may not be all it purports to be. One of the central Protestant opinions Newman sets out to confute is the notion that obedience to an infallible authority ‘destroys the independence of the mind’, to which he replies that ‘the whole history of the Church … gives a negative to the accusation.’ Newman justifies this claim by describing how in the middle ages theological ideas had been freely advanced, debated and quarrelled over, so that only after years or even centuries of discussion did Rome reluctantly move to resolve the dispute with a final decision. This leisurely process by which new theological claims are aired and tested, he wrote, ‘tends not only to the liberty, but to the courage, of the individual theologian or controversialist.’ For no-one would dare to do speculate if they knew that ‘an authority, which was supreme and final, was watching every word he said, and made signs of assent or dissent to each sentence, as he uttered it. Then indeed he would be fighting, as the Persian soldiers, under the lash, and the freedom of his intellect might truly be said to be beaten out of him. But this has not been so.’160
To anyone familiar with Newman’sprivate correspondence in the 1860s, the phrasing of that denial has a disturbing familiarity: his description of the process by which theological ideas are sifted in the Church is almost word for word the mirror-image of his bitter complaints to friends like Emily Bowles about the repression threatening any theological venture under Pio Nono. He himself claimed specifically that he was writing ‘under the lash’.161 His harsh analysis of the sterility and oppression of the theological scene in contemporary Catholicism is turned on its head in the final section of the Apologia, to claim that there was unhindered intellectual freedom in the Church, a freedom whose very existence he was almost simultaneously bitterly denying in private. Newman’s motives here are of course easy enough to explain: from the publication of the Idea of a University onwards, he had been consciously promoting, to Catholics as much as to Protestants, an understanding of Catholicism as open and confident enough to absorb and make use of all that was good in contemporary culture. Hence his insistence that hyper-Catholics like Manning, Ward and Faber were ‘in no sense spokesmen’ for the Church.162 He believed (probably rather optimistically) that ‘in former times’ theological issues had been left mainly to the ‘schools’, that is, the theologians, with authority intervening only at last and when called upon.In maintaining that this was the normative situation in the Church, Newman was as much making an act of faith and hope as a description of present reality: ultramontanism would pass, and another age, another pope, another council, would ‘trim the boat’.
There was another and more personal dimension to all this. Newman consistently deferred to papal authority in all his published writings: however angrily critical he felt privately, his deference to papal authority meant his only public form of protest was silence. It was an aspect of his personality which enraged John Acton and disturbed Von Hugel who, at the height of the Modernist Crisis in 1911 told Newman’s biographer, Wilfred Ward, that Newman’s silences represented a ‘grave peculiarity and defect of the Cardinal’s temper of mind and position’. Never to allow ‘any public protestation … act or declaration contrary to current Roman policy …. would stamp Our Lord himself as a deplorable rebel … would condemn St Paul at Antioch … and censure many a great saint of God since then.’163 But whatever Newman’s motivation in refraining from direct public criticism of the papacy, whether by principle or temperament, he was well aware that what he was claiming in the final section of the Apologia about the freedom of the theologian was not a present fact: in this respect, at least, he was being less than honest with his readers.
A charge of dishonesty had triggered the Apologia in the first place, and the charge would never entirely go away. Newman’s honesty was subjected to hostile analysis from within the Catholic Church in 1969 in a pseudonymously published book, Apologia Pro Charles Kingsley by ‘G. Egner’ (German, ‘opponent’). The pseudonym concealed the identity of a formidably learned Roman Catholic priest-philosopher, Fr P. J. Fitzpatrick, who had originally adopted the name when he published a book against the encyclical Humane Vitae. The title of his fiercely entertaining book summarizes its content.164 But the most sustained modern onslaught on the integrity and accuracy of the Apologia was a massive 700 page study of Newman’s Anglican career by the Yale historian, the late Frank Turner.165 Turner argued that in the Apologia Newman had systematically created a smokescreen to obscure and distort the truth about his early life, and about the nature of the Tractarian movement in general. Newman had claimed in the Apologia that his battle in the 1830s, and ever since, had been with what he called ‘liberalism’, an elusive concept which roughly speaking meant rationalism and the use of private judgement in matters of religion, which itself was viewed as a sentiment rather than a body of truth: to this, Newman opposed the dogmatic principle and the authority of Catholic tradition. But this emphasis,Turner argued, reflected the pressing needs of the Catholic Newman in the era of the Syllabus of Errors, not the realities of the Anglican Newman of the 1830s and 40s. The battle with liberalism he believed was projected retrospectively on to the Tractarian Newman by the Catholic Newman, to deflect suspicions at Rome and among English ultramontanes like Manning that Newman was in fact guilty of excessive liberalism himself.
Newman’s real obsession in the 1830s and 1840s, according to Turner, had been the battle against Protestant evangelicalism, and the Tractarian movement as a whole was far more accurately seen as anti-evangelical than as opposed to the hazy and elusive phantom of ‘liberalism’. For Turner, therefore, the Anglican Newman was not the consistently evolving Catholic mind portrayed in the Apologia, but ‘vulnerable, confused, contradictory, disingenuous, morbidly introspective and manipulative, an aggressive religious activist by whose often dazzling rhetoric posterity should not have been fooled.’166 Turner was writing a decade before Newman’s beatification, but he was conscious of assailing a cultural and religious icon, and he was careful to insist that his work was not directed at the later Newman of the Apologia and the Dream of Gerontius, nor against the saintly Cardinal. The ‘protagonist’ of his book was the fierce Anglican Newman of the 1830s and 1840s. And this J. H. Newman he portrayed as a contemptible creature, a dishonest, self-serving bigot, driven by spite, animosity, and ‘explosive rage’. His attacks on liberal former friends and colleagues like Edward Hawkins and Richard Whately, and on the allegedly heretical Dr Renn Dickson Hamden, according to Turner had less to do with their alleged liberalism than with his enraged envy at their prosperity: ‘without exception, those whom he associated with latitudinariansim and liberalism … were those whose career advancement had blocked or gone beyond his.’167 And his ‘enormous anger and spite’ towards liberals in the Oriel Common-room ‘to no small extent’ paralleled those ‘towards his [own] family’, especially his brothers Charles and Frank.168 Turner’s Newman was sexually dysfunctional, and obsessed with celibacy. He gathered around him a group of unmarried male disciples, and it was the overwhelming need to hold on to this adoring circle of celibate younger men which provided the real motivation both for Newman’s long drawn out years at Littlemore, postponing conversion to Rome, and then precipitating his apparently sudden conversion in October 1845, Newman’s impatient disciples had one by one decided to join the Catholic Church, and Newman, according to Turner, eventually realized that if he himself didn’t bite the bullet and become a Catholic he would cease ‘to be the centre of their attention and affection’.169 The anguished self-analytical letters of those last years as an Anglican, drawn on heavily in the Apologia, were therefore not a sign of real unsettlement, for Newman ‘had taken himself to a brink over which he had no real desire to step.’ They were, rather, exercises in attention-seeking, a characteristically devious way for Newman ‘to intrude himself into the lives of a whole series of people … who might otherwise not necessarily be thinking very much about him.’170 Newman’s religion was ‘utterly joyless’, his excessive fasting and that of his disciples an eating disorder, a form of male anorexia, springing from a ‘body-hating misogyny’. 171 Even Newman’s sublimely austere Parochial and Plain Sermons, with their daunting emphasis on the moral and spiritual demands of Christian discipleship, sprang from a deep animosity towards his wayward brothers Charles and Frank, and ‘expressed a profound personal wish that within his family his own obedience might receive praise and the wilfulness of his brothers be condemned.’172 Turner consolidated this devastating picture of the Anglican Newman with a new edition of the Apologia in 2008, with a lengthy introduction recycling the main contentions of the earlier book.
Reviewers in the secular broadsheet press were delighted with what they saw as a bracing exercise in iconoclasm, enjoying the sight and sound of an historical ‘sledge-hammer’ being wielded with ‘panache’.173 Turner’s manifest distaste for many aspects of Tractarianism, his consistently disparaging portrait of the young Newman as a vindictive and spiteful narcissist, and his speculations about the submerged Freudian impact of Newman’s famiiy relationships and friendships on his actions and ideas, all evoked distressed or furious responses, and the imminence of Newman’s beatification served to raise the temperature. Turner had hedged with qualification his more outrageous speculations about the nature of Newman’s male friendships. But these fig-leaf provisos were swept aside in media debates about Newman’s sexuality, triggered by the vociferous opposition of the Gay Rights activist Peter Tatchell to the exhumation to recover Newman’s relics from the grave he shared with his friend and disciple Ambrose St John,174 and the beatification in September 2010.
One of the genuine merits of Turner’s book was his recovery of the centrality of resistance to evangelicalism as a key to Newman’s concerns in the 1830s. The relative silence about this preoccupation in the Apologia had been largely replicated in the subsequent scholarship, and Turner did a real service by his careful documentation of the Anglican Newman’s pervasive anti-evangelicalism. But he pursued this genuine insight into a denial of the significance of any other targets in Newman’s critique of Protestantism. Newman repeatedly made it clear that his detestation of evangelicalism sprang largely from his conviction that its emphasis on religious feeling, and neglect of ecclesial structures and the credal elements of Christianity, opened the door to rationalistic unbelief, what he came to characterize as liberalism. Newman made this connection repeatedly in the 1830s: as he told the evangelical layman Lord Lifford in September 1837, he hoped that the outcry against the alleged heresies of the liberal Dr Hamden would open evangelical eyes to the liberalizing tendency of their opinions: ‘that system has become rationalistic in Germany, Socinian in Geneva … it tends to Socinianism among our own evangelical party.’175 As Turner himself notes, Newman found vivid confirmation of that slide from evangelicalism to rationalism and unbelief in the career of his own brother Frank, whose journey from sectarian evangelicalism to Unitarian confirmed his worst fears about the underlying tendency of evangelical principles.176
Other Tractarian leaders also interpreted the theological conflicts of the 1830s ultimately, as John Keble remarked, as a struggle between ‘Faith and Rationalism’.177 Newman lampooned the vulgarities and superficiality of popular evangelicalism in his novel Loss and Gain, in the portraits of Mr Gabb and Mr Mackanoise – but he believed that its real danger lay in its unwitting collaboration in the headlong progress towards infidelity of which the optimistic religion of the day was another and quite different symptom. As he was to declare in the wake of the Gorham judgement in 1850, evangelicals might preen themselves in the belief that the spirit of the age was with them, but their success was only because they offered no resistance to that spirit, ‘they glide forward rapidly and proudly down the stream’, a stream flowing inevitably into a vast sea of unbelief.178
By 1864 the place of Evangelicalism within Anglicanism was of course no longer for Newman a matter of existential urgency, and he had also tempered his initial convert’s zeal for direct confrontation with what in 1850 he had called ‘that imbecile inconsistent thing called Protestantism’. The distressingly shrill ‘convertitis’ which make his polemical lectures on the Present Position of Catholics, for all their rumbustuous satire, such a painful read, gave way in the Apologia to a far warmer and more positive assessment of his Anglican years. But in 1864 he saw the same fundamental struggle going on between dogmatic religion and rank unbelief as in the 1830s, but now even more starkly defined: ‘In these latter days,’ he wrote, ‘outside the Catholic Church things are tending … to atheism in one shape or another.’179 It was perfectly natural that in reviewing his own religious journey, Newman should highlight the struggle with anti-dogmatic Liberalism rather than with its epiphenomenon, Evangelicalism, as the key to his own life’s deeper continuities. Certainly the Apologia is a product of 1864, not 1834: Newman could hardly write about the intellectual continuities in his journey towards Catholicism without taking colouring from his experience of and in that Church. His emphasis in the Apologia on his perfectly genuine life-long opposition to ‘liberalism’ undoubtedly had a strategic element, coloured by concern about the repressive ethos of Pio Nono’s papacy. But to treat the relative lack of emphasis on Evangelicalism in the Apologia as a smokescreen seems a crassly reductive characterization of one of the world’s masterpieces of confessional writing.