Chapter 5: 1822 to 1845: Fellow at Oriel College
CHAPTER 5
1822 TO 1845:
FELLOW AT ORIEL COLLEGE
ORIEL College, originally called “House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford,” had been founded in 1326, by Adam de Brome, a functionary at the Court of Edward II. At the end of the eighteenth century, Oriel was a leading college distinguished for its Fellows and Tutors and its academic reforms that gave new intellectual life to Oxford. Fellows were members of the teaching staff of colleges and the governing bodies who elected the Provost or Master governing each college or house. Oriel prided itself in choosing as Fellows men who were original thinkers. One of the reforms introduced was the method in which Newman was elected Fellow: a competition open to graduates from other colleges and one that placed more importance on capacity to reason over erudition. Thus, Newman, as a Trinity graduate, competed for a Fellowship at Oriel and beat candidates who had read more extensively than he had.
When Newman entered the contest for a Fellowship at Oriel College, he vied with ten candidates for two vacancies. This Fellowship was among the most coveted at the university and the examination to obtain it was very difficult. On the first day of the examination Newman almost repeated the collapse of earlier exams at Trinity, but his Tutor Mr. Short helped him to regain his composure. Newman expected to have to stand for the Fellowship examination on repeated years, but he was elected on April 12, after his first attempt. The messenger who brought him the news found him playing the violin. Newman replied, “very well” in a seemingly disinterested tone, but as soon as the messenger left, he flung down his instrument and dashed to Oriel College.
That same day, Newman wrote with the news to his father, his aunt, Dr. Nicholas, and Bowden. To Mr. Newman he wrote: “I am just made Fellow of Oriel. Thank God. Love to all.”1 Newman would spend the next eleven years, from 1822 until 1833, at Oriel College, where he would hold two academic appointments, first that of Fellow and later that of Tutor.
Still today, those who wish to teach at Oxford follow a similar career path. Having obtained the Bachelor of Arts degree, a graduate competes for Fellowships at one of the colleges. Once made a Fellow, he remains a Fellow for life unless he gives up his position. Usually after twenty-one terms (seven years) at the university, a Fellow may obtain his Master of Arts degree. Some Fellows, also known as Dons, are later offered the post of College Tutor and a few are elected professors. Undergraduates are assigned to a Tutor with whom they meet once a week to discuss their subject of study.
At the time Newman went to Oxford, the Anglican Church was the official State religion and the clergy was formed at Oxford and Cambridge. The State imposed significant interference in Church affairs, including the establishment of dioceses and the naming of bishops and certain university professors. Bishops even held a seat in the House of Lords in Parliament. Membership in the Anglican Church and making an oath of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles dating back to Edward VI were requirements for teaching at a university and for holding government posts. Taxes went to pay for part of the financial support of the State Church.
For the greater part of its three-century existence, with each new monarch, the Anglican Church underwent numerous changes in ecclesiastical governance, theology, and liturgical practices. Clergy and theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, vied with one another to exert their influence on the government, doctrine and liturgy of the Established Church. Anglicanism was soon divided into High Church and Low Church, the former resembling Roman Catholicism in its doctrine and liturgy and the latter identifying with Protestantism. High Church Anglicans were also known as Anglo-Catholics.
As will be explained later, many High Church Anglicans in Newman’s time subscribed to the Branch Theory, according to which the Anglican Church was one of three branches of the true Catholic Church, the other two branches being the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Newman himself would later embrace this theory for a period of years. With this notion of the Church, he would struggle to recapture the true Catholic understanding and practice of the Holy Eucharist, Confession and the other sacraments, based on his assumption that these rites were valid sacraments within Anglicanism.
Still other Anglicans, such as Newman when he entered Oriel, were Evangelicals. These Anglicans were inspired by John Wesley, a clergyman at Oxford who had begun the Methodist revival, which at first was part of the Evangelical Movement within the Anglican Church. Wesley, initially influenced by the rule and practice of holy living of William Law, fell under Luther’s ideas of sola fide. Subsequently, he underwent a classical experience of justification by faith alone, which was heavily dependent on a subjective assurance of being saved without reliance on any personal spiritual works. Wesley’s Movement led to a schism from the Anglican Church; by 1795, the Methodists had broken away from the Anglican Church.
Unlike the Methodists, most Evangelicals remained within the Anglican Church, but they conceived of Christian life primarily in terms of personal piety and evangelization. They reduced doctrines to a few basic Christian truths and paid little attention to ecclesiastical hierarchy. One aspect of the Evangelical spirit that initially seized Newman was the need for missionary work, and he held membership in various missionary societies while at Oriel. He also entertained the possibility of going abroad to do missionary work, but due to poor health, he desisted from this pursuit.
The ensuing period of life at Oriel was a critical one for Newman’s religious growth. During these rich years of his youth, he sought answers to many theological questions concerning Revelation, the sacraments and the nature of the Church. The environment of the Oriel Common Room, the meeting room for the college, was a difficult one because its members, sometimes known as the Noetics, were older than Newman and more interested in philosophy and politics. These men were leading intellectuals at Oxford, noted for liberal ideas in religion. Newman received a wide range of theological influences, although the predominant influence was a liberal one, which placed into doubt and even rejected commonly held religious doctrines. In the Common Room, Newman had many discussions with influential men such as Edward Hawkins, Richard Whately, and Joseph Blanco White. The last-named, a former Roman Catholic priest, was markedly anti-Catholic. Reading the books of these men and having discussions with them helped Newman to think on his own and formulate ideas; this exchange of ideas forced him to defend his conclusions.
Once elected Fellow at Oriel in 1822, Newman learned a great deal from Dr. Hawkins, who was the Provost of Oriel and Vicar of St. Mary’s, the University Church. Hawkins challenged Newman’s Calvinist notion of Christianity, which Newman exemplified in his first sermon. In that sermon, Newman had divided men into two classes, the one being all darkness and the other all light. Hawkins objected that men were neither saints nor sinners, but somewhere in between. Hawkins was the first who taught him to “weigh his words and to be cautious in his statements,”2 as well as to anticipate objections.
One of the first friends John Henry made at Oriel was Edward Bouverie Pusey, with whom he would share a lifelong friendship. Pusey, who was six months Newman’s senior, came from a family of wealthy landowners. Having studied at Christ Church, Oxford, Pusey was elected a Fellow at Oriel in 1823. Although initially Newman regretted Pusey’s lack of sympathy for the Evangelical Movement, he was impressed by his religious gravity. Both took a private class with Charles Lloyd, Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church. Lloyd’s views differed completely from Whately’s; he represented the High Church with its emphasis on authority and tradition. It seems Lloyd liked Newman as a person, but was impatient with his Evangelical doctrines. Pusey, on the other hand, became a disciple of Lloyd and, on the professor’s recommendation, went to Germany to pursue theological studies.
Newman credited William James, another Fellow of Oriel, with teaching him in 1823 the doctrine of Apostolic Succession.3 Although he did not provide details on their conversations, Newman would later refer to this central belief, and to the Antiquity of the Church, as some of the criteria for ascertaining the authenticity of the Catholic Church.
Richard Whately, a former Fellow of Oriel from 1811 to 1821 and Anglican Archbishop of Dublin by 1831, took Newman under his wing. He wanted to see what Newman, often struck dumb among the older Fellows, was made of and to whip him into shape. Whately, just married, was a huge man with an aggressive manner. He soon recognized that Newman had a very clear mind and put him to work writing articles on Aristotelian logic for him; the articles were later turned into a book. In 1824, Whately had Newman commissioned by the Encyclopedia Metropolitana to write an article on Cicero. Newman completed the assignment on short notice and demonstrated his capacity for intense work and his talent for writing.
The following year, urged on by his mentor, Newman worked on two more articles for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. The first was on Apollonius of Tyana, a Pythagorean teacher and mystic, reputed by his biographers to have performed miracles that rivaled those of Christ;4 the second, Essay on Miracles, was almost a sequel to the Essay on Apollonius of Tyana.5 Edward Smedley, the editor of the encyclopedia, was a demanding man, and Newman had to work at a fast pace to meet the deadlines. The week that he sent the article on Apollonius to the publisher, he wrote to Harriet: “I am up to my chin in Apollonius, and very cross, as you may suppose.”6 A month later, he sent Smedley the finished Essay on Miracles.
In this early writing, Newman displayed his skill for identifying internal and external errors in a text. As for the former, he noted that Apollonius himself never claimed to perform miracles and that Apollonius’s alleged miracles could be explained by his knowledge of events, such as foretelling the death of a tyrant based on the sage’s political connections. The refutation from external evidence was based on the date of composition of Apollonius’s life, which was over a century after his death, and from the exaggerated style typical of the esoteric and mystical Pythagorean School.
The article on miracles dealt with the nature of miracles and the criteria for distinguishing authentic miracles from those professed miracles attributed to pagans like Apollonius, Christians of the primitive Church, or Catholic saints. It was a defense for the evidence of the New Testament miracles that Newman described as God’s intervention or interposition in the ordinary course of nature. He discounted as true miracles those events explained by known ordinary causes or surrounded by suspicious circumstances.
Before writing the article, Newman read many authors of the preceding centuries who wrote on this subject. They ranged from men like Hume, who denied the existence of miracles, to those like Butler, who established their antecedent probability as proof of Revelation. In the article, Newman refuted Hume’s claim that all miracles are based on exaggeration, deception or invalid testimony because of ignorance on the part of the observer. Newman explained that an uneducated person using common sense might be as credible a testimony of the miraculous event of a resurrection as a physician might.
Following Butler, Newman wrote that the intrinsic character of miracles is in accord with man’s knowledge of the attributes and government of Almighty God. They are what one would expect from God’s works. Furthermore, the purpose of Scripture miracles, the sober manner of their recounting, and their attending circumstances, bear the mark of the divine. “Their grandeur, beauty and consistency; the clear and unequivocal marks they bear of superhuman agency; the importance and desirableness of the object they propose to effect, are in correspondence with the variety and force of the evidence itself.”7
At the same time, Newman discounted many professed miracles based on invalid testimony, which was motivated by the desire for gain, or power on the part of witnesses or by rivalry between religious parties. He enumerated other reasons to invalidate testimony for professed miracles, such as the previous history of pious frauds by Catholics, inconsistencies in testimony, and a significant distance in time and place from the miraculous event to the telling.
This study reveals the breadth of Newman’s analysis of subject matter and the importance that he attributed to miracles as confirmation of divine teaching. It also manifests the anti-Catholic bias that poisoned some of his reasoning. For example, in this first article on the subject of Miracles, Newman distinguished between Scripture miracles and those attributed to Catholic saints. Due to the weak evidence provided, testimony adduced many years after the fact, and superstition, he rejected the miracles attributed to Catholic saints, or “Popish Miracles,” as not authentic miracles. In 1843, he wrote a longer essay on Miracles in which he corrected the harsh and incredulous tone toward the Roman Catholic claim to miracles and disavowed his general dismissal of them.8
In March of 1825, Whately became Principal of St. Alban’s Hall, a small residence for undergraduates unable to enter or to stay at one of the colleges. He offered Newman the office of Vice-Principal. Newman, who had been seeking the authority and responsibility of a college office, readily accepted and, overnight, he became “Dean, Tutor, Bursar and all—in his absence indeed, Principal.”9 His relationship with Whately, however, soon grew cold over religious and political differences. Despite this parting of beliefs, Newman later complimented Whately in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua as a kind and generous mentor who taught him to reason: “He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason … he taught me to see with my own eyes and to walk with my own feet.”10 Furthermore, Newman credited Whately with having taught him, at least on a theoretical level, that Church and State should be independent of each other. He argued that the Church should not interfere in temporal affairs nor the State in spiritual ones.11
Newman matured during his first years at Oriel and acquired understanding about liberalism in religion and about politics. Whately and Hawkins had taught him a great deal. Article writing sharpened his logical reasoning and writing skill. As a result of many discussions in the Oriel Common Room and much personal study, he began to form his own theological opinions and to criticize the opinions of his peers. He thus grew in the necessary self-confidence and social skills that he would later employ as a leader.
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1LD, Vol. I, JHN to Mr. Newman (April 12, 1822), 129.
2Apo., 8.
3Apo., 10.
4This article first appeared in The Encyclopedia Metropolitana. (1826) and was later published under Newman’s Historical Sketches, Vol. I, 1910.
5This article first appeared in The Encyclopedia Metropolitana. (1825-1826) and was later published under Newman’s Two Essays on Biblical and Ecclesiastical Miracles, I, 1910.
6LD, Vol. 1, JHN to Harriet Newman (March 21, 1826), 280.
7John Henry Newman, Two Essays on Biblical and Ecclesiastical Miracles, 93, available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/miracles/index.html.
8“The Miracles of Early Ecclesiastical History” was published under Two Essays on Biblical and Ecclesiastical Miracles.
9LD, Vol. I, JHN to Mrs. Newman (March 29, 1825), 222.
10Apo., 11.
11Apo., 13.