Chapter 3: 1816: First Conversion
CHAPTER 3
1816: FIRST CONVERSION
THE end of the Napoleonic Wars brought ruin to many private banks and businesses in England. In March 1816, Mr. Newman’s bank failed. The family blamed his father’s partner and insisted that all the depositors were paid. The family moved to Alton in Hampshire, where Mr. Newman tried to manage a brewery. Newman was summoned home to be told the bad news and was sent back to Ealing for the summer. At school he fell sick and remained ill and confined to the sickroom throughout the summer holidays. During this illness he had a spiritual conversion from what he later recalled as the sins of intellectual pride and self-sufficiency.
Before this John Henry had grown up in a conventional Anglican family that attended Sunday services in church and held morning and evening prayers at home. As a boy, he prayed and read Sacred Scripture with his grandmother, Elizabeth Good, and his aunt, Elizabeth Newman, to whom he would always remain grateful. These religiously minded women established early spiritual foundations of devotion and biblical reading that would be of utmost importance in Newman’s life.
At school, however, Newman was led astray by his readings and the influence of other boys. He became skeptical about religion and fell away from religious practice. In one of his verses addressed to his Guardian Angel, he wrote: “And when, ere boyhood yet was gone, / My rebel spirit fell, / Ah! thou didst see, and shudder too, / Yet bear each deed of Hell.”1 Out of rebelliousness and intellectual curiosity, Newman read Thomas Paine’s Tracts against the Old Testament, some verses by Voltaire against the immortality of the soul, and Hume’s treatise on Miracles at the age of fourteen.2 These texts raised serious religious doubts in the youth. Thus it is no wonder that Newman later spoke of having lived in mortal sin during this time and, in another verse, of having scoffed at sacred things and even of having struck the face of God.
While convalescing at school during the summer months, he came under the religious influence of Walter Mayers, a devout young Calvinist clergyman who had studied at Pembroke College, Oxford. Newman admired Mayers and began to read the Calvinist books recommended by him. As a result he had a decisive religious conversion, of which he later wrote: “When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816,) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which through God’s mercy have never been effaced or obscured.”3 Newman described Mayers as the one “who was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me.”4
A religious conversion is the experience of an overwhelming power outside of a person that leads him to discover a new or deeper worldview that re-directs the purpose of his existence. As a result of his conversion Newman perceived God as a personal Being, not an abstract truth. He came to the belief in God as an all-powerful Being who not only had created the world, but who is present in the world. As he later asserted when explaining the nature of belief, intellectual knowledge of God is more than a summation of truths and logical inference. Belief in God is the result of the coming together of many things in a person’s mind. Many years later, in A Grammar of Assent, Newman coined the expression “illative sense” to describe the mind’s assent to belief in God. Although the word illative derives from illatum, the Latin term for inference or logical conclusion, Newman explained that the assent of faith was an unconscious and implicit process rather than a logical, step-by-step, process.
Belief or the illative sense may be compared to seeing a painting. With one look, the viewer takes in what would require many words to describe. The mind brings together all the parts of the painting with one simple glance. In a person’s act of faith, childhood experiences, psychological dispositions, and intellectual knowledge coalesce into one act. These elements of faith may only be separated for the sake of analysis, because faith is like that one simple look at the painting. It is the assent of a person as a unified whole to what God has revealed of Himself. This is what happened to John Henry.
Under the light of the Holy Spirit, Newman overcame doubts of earlier years and made religious dogma the foundation of his life. He understood that religious truth, or dogma, must be based on God’s self-revelation to mankind. Newman conceived that it was natural that God would communicate Himself to men through the medium of Sacred Scripture. In addition, he concluded that God would make the Church the authoritative interpreter of that Revelation.
This first conversion set Newman on a course of religious devotion and study of Scripture. It also marked the beginning of an Evangelical period of his life. He embraced a sincere religious piety with high moral standards that would have a significant influence in his university years. Charles Dessain describes the year 1816 as a turning point which gave unity to Newman’s life: “His unfolding mind was captured by the Christian Revelation, and his heart by the Christian ideal of holiness.”5
The Evangelical Movement, which influenced Newman, was a religious movement founded on the strong belief in the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming that gave impulse to a determined propagation of the Gospel through missionary work, both home and abroad. It was characterized by a renewal in biblical preaching and Christian fervor. In England, a spiritual revival dating back to the mid-eighteenth century gave rise in the 1830s to an Evangelical party within the Established Church. This revival was begun by leaders such as George Whitefield, John Wesley, Thomas Scott, Joseph Milner, John Newton, and Henry Venn. The last-named became the leader of a small group of highly influential families in Clapham, London, known as the Clapham Sect, which became a strong force for moral and social reforms in English society.
In the ensuing Evangelical period of his youth, John Henry adopted a series of Calvinist practices and beliefs. One of the beliefs that he accepted, a belief that was later among the first that he rejected, was the Calvinist doctrine on justification and predestination.6 Calvin taught that there is a double predestination. People are predestined either to glory or to eternal damnation. According to this doctrine, a person who is justified cannot fall away, while another who is predestined to damnation will be so regardless of the good moral actions that he performs. This doctrine espoused the belief in the total corruption of man’s nature owing to original sin and undermined the belief in man’s freedom in accepting grace.
At the same time, Newman began to express belief in God’s omnipresence. This presence was not that of an impersonal power in creation, but that of an all-powerful and merciful God. Newman later described this belief as the luminously self-evident idea that there are only two beings in the world, himself and the Creator.7 The human person can be sure of this reality and make it the framework for his beliefs and actions. This vivid realization remained with him as an adult and served as a truth upon which his knowledge of Sacred Scripture and Christian doctrine were built.
In a sermon on the immortality of the soul delivered in July 1833, he described the person’s awareness of being distinct and independent of the material world and of having an immortal soul.8 He wrote that misfortunes and the contingency of earthly things lead the human being to be weaned from love for material goods. A person then catches a glimpse of independence from temporal things and of immortality. By degrees, he perceives that there are two beings in the whole universe, one’s own soul and God who made it. Along with these realizations, there were further influences on Newman during his adolescence.
Thomas Scott, a famous Evangelical and a biblical commentator, made an even deeper impression on the young man than Mayers had. Newman referred to Scott as the man “to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul.”9 Newman read Scott’s autobiography, The Force of Truth, which described his spiritual journey from Unitarianism to belief in the Holy Trinity. Newman embraced the truths of the Incarnation and Redemption as well as the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul, a teaching emphasized by Scott.
With these mentors, the young student became an Evangelical, yet he did not go through a conventional Evangelical conversion, which is typically marked by a sudden and emotional change. His conversion already had an intellectual bent: Newman was reading and searching for the truth about God and religion. He was concerned with the meaning and content of divine Revelation and the truths contained in the Creeds, and not merely an emotional experience. Inspired by Scott’s Essays and Jones of Nayland’s comments on Scripture, he drew up a collection of texts to support each verse of the Athanasian Creed.10
Newman also adopted the Gospel ideal of holiness explained in William Law’s Serious Call to Holiness and Devotion.11 This well-known book on Christian devotion, written in 1728, transmitted the Christian ideal of giving glory to God through one’s occupations by practicing prayer and humility throughout the day and by having the proper detachment from material goods. This work had a tone that was different from the Calvinist books that Newman had been reading; its emphasis was on human correspondence to grace and practice of the Christian virtues.
Law’s book also convinced Newman of the reality of a spiritual warfare between the city of God and the powers of darkness. The young man accepted Christ’s teaching about eternal punishment and eternal reward. He made two of Scott’s phrases his own: “Holiness rather than peace” and “Growth the only evidence of life.”12 These maxims would guide Newman’s moral and ascetical practices and play a significant role in his sermons. He realized that Christ calls all men to eternal life and that this calling does not allow for moral complacency. Like Scott, Newman had never really accepted the doctrine of predestination to eternal death.
Other important influences on the fifteen-year-old Newman were two contradictory works, namely Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ and Thomas Newton’s Observations on the Prophecies.13 The first enamored him with the Church Fathers, like St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, while the second rooted in him the conviction that the Pope was the Antichrist, a belief that he held for a long time. Newton’s work had a more immediate effect on Newman, whose prejudice against the Pope and the Catholic Church would repeatedly appear in his early writings.
Another influence was William Beveridge’s Private Thoughts Upon Religion, a gift sent to Newman by Mayers. This book stirred Newman to a greater devotion to God, the practice of daily prayer, reading of Scripture, and self-examination. Its exhortation to a life of self-denial and a vision of Christian life as spiritual warfare also inspired Newman. For some time, Newman even imitated Beveridge’s writing style.
In the autumn of the same year, he was gripped by the desire to devote his life to the service of God as an ordained minister in the Anglican Church.14 He would refer to this as the “deep imagination” of God calling him to a celibate life.15 This idea that “took possession of him” was associated with the desire of becoming a missionary, which he seriously considered once at Oxford. The young man had the remarkable sense that celibacy was a special grace in the church tied to greater responsibility and demand for holiness. Although some clergymen at Oxford and Cambridge remained celibate, most of the rectors of English parishes married. Newman was later happy to discover through his Anglican friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, that this ideal of celibacy had long been held by Roman Catholic tradition.
Newman’s spiritual conversion from skepticism to Evangelical Christianity at the age of fifteen and his desire for a complete dedication to God prepared him to face the worldly environment he was to find at Oxford University. Though he had started as a Low Church Anglican, Newman had become a fervent Evangelical Anglican. He had acquired some important basic beliefs, such as that of God’s omnipresence and the soul’s immortality, and a desire to live a life of piety. At Oxford he would wrestle with the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and the Antichrist.
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1“Guardian Angel,” in VV (The Oratory, 1853), 300-302.
2See John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1865 edition, available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/apologia65/index.html., 3. After this it will be cited Apo.
3Apo., 4.
4Apo., 4.
5Charles Dessain, John Henry Newman (Oxford: A. and C. Black Ltd., 1966), 5.
6Apo., 6.
7Apo., 4.
8John Henry Newman, Plain and Parochial Sermons, Vol. I, 14-21; 16-17, available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume1/index.html After this it will be cited PPS.
9Apo., 5.
10Apo., 5.
11Apo., 6.
12Apo., 5.
13Apo., 7.
14Historically the Anglican Church has been called the “Church of England,” the “Established Church” and the “Anglican Church.” In this biography we refer to her thus as a “Church.” Over time Newman came to realize that she had separated from the Catholic Church. In recent times Pope Benedict XVI explained that there is only one Bride of Christ, the Catholic Church. Furthermore, he explained that “the ecclesial communities which have not preserved the valid Episcopate and the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery, are not Churches in the proper sense.” See Declaration Dominus Iesus, Vatican, July 16, 2000, n. 17.
15Apo., 7.