Chapter 6: Newman’s Religious Development
CHAPTER 6
NEWMAN’S RELIGIOUS
DEVELOPMENT
AT Oriel College, Newman’s religious beliefs were forged through continuous study and many conversations with his mentors, peers, and students. From 1824 to 1828, he wrestled with some of the Protestant doctrines that he had previously accepted. Newman studied the scriptural and dogmatic foundations of many Christian doctrines concerning salvation. He focused on various central doctrines over the following years, particularly baptismal regeneration, the means for justification, the nature and office of the Church, Purgatory, and the intercession of the saints.
At the end of 1824 and start of 1825, Newman thought at length about the arguments regarding the Lutheran doctrine of justification known as imputed righteousness. Based on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, Luther had emphasized the need for faith as the source of man’s salvation, almost to the exclusion of good works. According to Luther, salvation is a legal declaration through which Christ obtains man’s salvation by “covering” over his sins. This view, which looks to salvation from an extrinsic perspective, contrasts with the Roman Catholic teaching of baptismal regeneration whereby the sinner’s soul is intrinsically renewed through Baptism. Christ’s grace acts on the soul, giving it a new supernatural life-principle. Sanctifying grace is a supernatural quality that inheres in the soul, enabling it to participate in the nature and life of God.
In 1824, Newman was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church. Visiting the sick and dying the young curate considered the state of their souls and salvation. He realized that although some parishioners had lived estranged from the faith, they were not altogether without grace.1 Years later he referred to this experience in one of his sermons:
We know, indeed, that privileges not improved will save no one; but we do not know, we cannot pronounce, whether in souls where there is but a little strength, yet much conflict, and much repentance, their regeneration may not, as in the case with children, avail them hereafter in some secret manner which, with our present knowledge, we cannot speak about or imagine.2
Newman believed that the grace of Baptism required growth on the part of the recipient, but even when little growth was evident, there was reason to believe in the soul’s regeneration. Newman applied this belief to the consideration of the action of grace in the souls of those who had been ordained deacons with him. He did not think they led the proper life of piety and zeal, yet he realized that he should not judge regarding God’s action in their souls.
During his first sermon preached at Mayer’s parish in July of 1824, Newman made a sharp division of Christians into two classes of men, corresponding to the Evangelical distinction of “the converted and the unconverted.” The claim that only some baptized persons were converted or saved through a tangible experience of conversion was a denial of baptismal regeneration and served as a test of Evangelical orthodoxy. Dr. Hawkins was upset at Newman and told him that pastoral experience argues against a strict line of demarcation between two types of Christians.3 He loaned him John Bird Sumner’s Apostolic Preaching Considered In An Examination of St. Paul’s Epistles to support the position that St. Paul did not divide Christians into two categories, “the converted and the unconverted.”4
In August, a month after this rebuff from Dr. Hawkins, Newman noted in his diary that he continued to wrestle with the perplexing subject of baptismal regeneration. Sumner’s book argued that the preaching of the Apostles in the New Testament ran counter to the Calvinist doctrines of predestination, but this text also shed doubt on baptismal regeneration. Newman noted that “it threatened to drive him into either Calvinism or the Catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration.”5 That month he was so distressed by his doubts that he shed tears and even considered that he might have to leave the Church. He wrote, “I do not know what will be the end of it. I think I really desire the truth, and would embrace it wherever I found it.”6 And a week later, after tea with friends who wished him to be more Calvinist, he wrote similarly, “What shall I do? I really desire the truth.”7 The search for doctrinal truth was already a clear guiding force in Newman’s life.
In January of 1825, Newman finally gave up belief in the doctrine of imputed righteousness. He reasoned that, if God did not grant grace with Baptism, why would He ordain Baptism for infants? A few years later he preached a sermon in which he said, “We need a new birth, because our first birth is a birth unto sin. Who does not see that this reason is equally cogent for infant Baptism as for Baptism at all? Baptism by water and the Spirit is necessary for salvation … because man’s nature is corrupt; therefore infants must need this regeneration too.”8
Newman’s own conversion had not been a special Evangelical experience verified by religious feelings. He took back his earlier thoughts that sinful acts indicate the absence of regeneration. It was more reasonable to think that in a baptized person, holiness is achieved gradually by countless degrees.
While he prepared sermons he was obliged to organize and complete his ideas on many subjects, including Baptism. He realized that he had accepted in an uncritical manner the doctrine denying baptismal regeneration and the doctrine of predestination of individuals. It was not until eleven years later, as shown in his Lectures on Justification, that he fully understood that those doctrines taught by Scott lacked scriptural confirmation.
In July 1825, he read Bishop Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, a book that ascertains the reasonableness of natural religion based on an analogy with human nature. For instance, Butler wrote that a remedy to an illness might serve as an analogy of redemption for man’s fall. Butler also compared God’s government of the world to the authority exercised by a father in a family and by a governor in a state. These comparisons strengthened the cogency that God exerts a moral government over the world. Butler’s book taught Newman, perhaps more than his senior colleagues did, how to show the credibility of Christianity. The book contained various arguments that helped Newman to refute the claims and objections of various moral philosophers.
Butler, who had been a student at Oriel College one century earlier, had lived during an age of rationalism and Deism, which persistently demanded evidence for the truth of Christianity. Butler rejected the demand of proofs for the existence of God and His attributes. He thought that proofs were insufficient and reduced Revelation to that which reason might explain. Instead, Butler sought, by means of inductive thinking, to draw from the moral experience of individuals and of society to reach a firm knowledge of the intelligent Author and Moral Governor of the universe. Richard Church, a contemporary of Newman at Oxford, would later write that Newman had learned from Butler “as a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our own condition and God’s dealing with it.”9
Butler explained that the observation of the repetition of events in nature leads the mind to expect their future repetition. Through reason, man presumes that God, who is the Author of Nature, acts in a similar way in the supernatural realm. By comparison with the order in nature, in which the probability of an event becomes a prediction of the likelihood of similar future events, man accepts the probability of a divine order in the realm of morality and the probability of God’s revelation to men.
In a work entitled On Development of Christian Doctrine, which Newman would write in 1845, he explained the concept of antecedent probability and various rules for syllogisms, which are the grounds for the art of reasoning.10 He wrote that on the basis of observation there are many events in life that we take for granted without seeking a reason or a demonstration. For example, we take for granted, without any special reasoning, that the sun will come out tomorrow. The likelihood that the sun will rise tomorrow is, in logical terms, called the antecedent probability of the sun coming out. In this case, the antecedent probability is very high. He cited as another common example of antecedent probability the high likelihood of the recurrence of the effects of Newton’s laws of gravity.
Newman explained that antecedent probability is as necessary in ethics, history, theology, and philosophy as induction is necessary in medicine. The former require authority, tradition, and analogy, whereas the latter (and other experimental sciences) requires facts. Nonetheless, antecedent probability also leads to the truth about things and, for it to bear weight, the truth of the starting premise is very important. Newman remained indebted to Butler’s teaching that material realities speak of unseen realities and that faith has a logical cogency.
During 1825, John Henry thought a great deal about the inspiration and canonicity of the books of Sacred Scripture. He wished to answer objections to the truth of Christianity that his brother Charles posed to him. Charles argued that a few books of the New Testament were non-inspired, corrupted, or interpolated. John Henry was cognizant that some scholars had rejected certain books of the New Testament, but thought that this did not invalidate the likelihood of the divine inspiration and commission of the New Testament. He believed that even if the Apostles had made mistakes in their writings, it would not invalidate the inspiration of the New Testament books.11 In refutation of his brother’s idea that the accounts of miracles were later second and third-century additions to the New Testament, John Henry argued that if this were the case, St. Irenaeus and St. Clement would have known about these large additions and would not have attributed to Mark the authorship of the Gospel that bears his name.12
Discussions with his younger brother Frank also helped Newman to study doctrine and articulate his beliefs. In February 1827, Newman completed a paper on infant Baptism that he wrote in refutation of the Evangelical ideas held by Frank.13 The paper was sent to his sisters, but it was as much Newman’s attempt to educate himself concerning the objective nature of the sacrament of Baptism as it was to educate his siblings.
The comments by the Provost and men at Oriel continued to help Newman to correct his understanding of various doctrines. On Easter Sunday, April 15, 1827, Newman preached a sermon in the chapel at Oriel entitled On the Mediatorial Kingdom of Christ. Hawkins, Whately, and Joseph Blanco White criticized him for the content of the sermon. Whately accused it of Arianism, the fourth-century heresy that denied the divine nature of Jesus Christ. In a personal note to himself, Newman explained that his incorrect expressions were the result of trying to account for perplexing Scripture texts. He wrote: “I do not even like the words Trinity, Person, Procession etc etc—indeed any systematic exposition of the doctrine but what is relative to us and practical.”14 Newman disliked discussions about the nature of God and shunned any systematic exposition of doctrine. In this regard he would later criticize excesses that he found in Scholasticism.
Although Newman was struggling with these doctrinal questions, he greatly enjoyed the company of Joseph Blanco White, an Anglican clergyman, formerly a Roman Catholic priest, who, after publishing a work entitled Evidences Against Catholicism, was awarded a Master of Arts degree at Oxford and was made a Tutor by Oriel College. Newman admired Blanco White’s life experiences and critical opinions of Catholicism. In addition to White’s quiet and sensitive character, his kindness must have struck a chord with the young Fellow. In January 1829, Newman published an article on Aristotle’s poetry in a new publication, the London Review, begun by White, who was keen on Newman’s future collaboration. The journal died, however, after only two editions.
For some years, under the influence of the Oriel Common Room, Newman went through a period of intellectual criticism of religion that he later called “a drift towards liberalism.”15 By this, he was referring to his critical approach to Church doctrine and tradition exemplified by his ideas on the subject of the Holy Trinity, the Athanasian Creed, and miracles of the first age of Christianity. Newman awoke from this drift following an illness in 1827 and the death of his sister Mary in 1828. The latter marked the beginning of Newman’s appreciation for the High Church Anglican tradition due to the close friendship forged with two Oxford men: John Keble and Keble’s former student, Richard Hurrell Froude. Both men had an extensive knowledge on the Anglican tradition, and embodied its true character and piety.
When Newman entered Trinity, Keble had already earned a name for himself at Oxford. John Keble had studied at Corpus Christi College, where he graduated with two first-class honors; he had become a Fellow of Oriel in 1811, and a Tutor in 1817. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, who had raised him in a country parsonage in Gloucestershire, in the best of the old English family life. He grew up with the Anglo-Catholic tradition and the theology of the seventeenth-century Anglican. In 1827, Keble published the Christian Year, a book of poems based on the Sunday and Feast Day services of the Book of Common Prayer. The poems conveyed the symbolic and sacramental character of Christian doctrine and worship. Newman praised the beauty and depth of the book’s religious teaching, which he said, “struck an original note and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school, long un-known in England.”16 After reading it, he sent a copy off to his mother and sisters. Newman would later say that the Christian Year impressed on him two truths similar to the ones that he learned from Butler.17 The first was the belief in a sacramental system whereby material phenomena are types and instruments of real things that are unseen. According to this there is much more to reality than what man can perceive with his senses, namely, the purely spiritual beings, but the material realities point to them and can serve as a medium to them.
The second truth was an improvement on Butler’s idea that probability is the guide of life. In the Apologia, Newman would write that, for Keble, faith and love gave a firmness of assent that probability did not have. Faith and love are directed to an Object, and this Object renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal evidence. Newman wrote about Keble, “In matters of religion, he seemed to say, it is not merely probability which makes us intellectually certain, but probability as it is put to account by faith and love.”18 An illustration can make this clear: a child knows that a burning forge causes damage, so that it is probable the forge will harm him if he touches it. The child, however, reaches certainty about this by faith and love for his father, who tells him not to touch the forge because it will harm him.
Newman admired Keble’s view on probability, but attempted to complete it. For Newman, absolute certitude regarding the truths of natural theology and the existence of Revelation arose from the result of concurring and converging probabilities. This altered his thinking about miracles following those recorded in the New Testament. He arrived at the conclusion that, since laws of nature have been suspended in great miracles, such as the Resurrection, there is a probability for future miraculous interventions.19
Despite his respect for Keble, when Edward Copleston became bishop in December 1827 and vacated the position of Provost at Oriel, Newman joined Pusey and other Fellows in support of Hawkins’s candidacy against Keble. At that time, Newman preferred the practical notions and religious opinions of Hawkins and thought that he would carry out necessary college reforms. Newman candidly admitted this in a letter to Keble, who responded in an understanding and gracious manner.20 Hurrell Froude and Robert Isaac Wilberforce instead supported Keble, their teacher and friend, but the latter withdrew his candidacy before the election. Hawkins became Provost and occupied the post for forty-six years and, ironically, later strongly opposed Newman’s ideas for educational reform.
In August 1828, Newman visited Keble at his parents’ home. He was liked at once by the Keble family, and the men grew to be close friends. Over the next years, they corresponded often and sought regular advice from one another. When, on one occasion, Newman read Keble’s translation and adaptation of the Psalms to popular tunes and offered some criticism, Keble replied expressing his trust in Newman’s honesty.21
The other close friendship that Newman developed as a Tutor was with Richard Hurrell Froude, an undergraduate at Oriel, also from a noble family who belonged to the High Church tradition. Richard’s father, Robert Hurrell Froude, had studied at Oriel and held a high ecclesiastical office (Archdeacon of Totnes and Rector of Dartington). Richard Hurrell was a gifted youth with a bold character and a cheerful disposition. He had been a student under John Keble at Oriel, and was the one responsible for bringing Keble and Newman together.
In March 1826, Richard Hurrell Froude and Robert Isaac Wilberforce were elected Fellows at Oriel. Newman, who had participated in the deliberations, was delighted. He wrote to his mother: “We were in grave deliberation till near two this morning, and then went to bed. Froude is one of the acutest and clearest and deepest men in the memory of man.”22 At first, Froude looked with suspicion at Newman’s Evangelical habits and liberal views on religion and declined an invitation by Newman to spend Christmas with his family in Brighton. When Newman later changed religious views, they became best friends. Froude taught him to admire Tradition and Roman Catholicism as well as the ideal of celibacy and its role model, the Virgin Mary. Froude, who had a firm faith in the Real Presence, the belief in Christ’s sacramental presence in the Eucharist, also awakened Newman’s belief in this doctrine.23
During the summer and in the fall term of 1827, Newman spent many hours a day preparing for “the Examination Schools,” a prestigious university appointment that consisted in examining students for Bachelor’s degrees. In November, he fell ill just one day before the Schools began. After the first day, he was obliged to retire.24 The cause of the illness, whose symptoms were a crippling fatigue with an inability to concentrate, was most likely extreme physical and mental exhaustion. Various causes came together to tax his health: a serious financial debt incurred by his Aunt Elizabeth,25 concern over the election of a new Provost for Oriel, and long hours of study in preparation for his role as examiner had taxed his health. After a few weeks of rest at his family home in Brighton, he recovered.
Newman remarked later that it was a second conversion; as before, he briefly confessed that he had preferred intellectual excellence over moral excellence. His primary concern had been success at Oriel and “the Schools.” As a consequence of this mental collapse, Newman began to realize that he had placed too much reliance on his own mental faculties and strength. He saw the need to turn more to God and away from the concerns of the world. In the following months, Newman’s bereavement over the death of family members would complete this conversion.
The liberal intellectual environment of the Oriel Common Room and the High Anglican influence of his friends had acted as a catalyst for Newman’s departure from Evangelical ideas. He replaced these ideas with the traditional liturgy, sacramental practice, and doctrine. Years later, while still an Anglican, he described in various sermons “the danger” to which he thought Evangelicals are exposed; that is, to make themselves the object of contemplation rather than contemplating God Himself, and the temptation to dwell on their religious feelings rather than on the mystery of God. In one of the Parochial and Plain Sermons, entitled “Self-Contemplation,” he indicated how this attitude leads to rigid views of predestination and raises the individual’s importance above that of the Church.26
Newman was not disparaging the important contribution to public morality and missionary activity that Evangelicals made to society. Out of concern, however, for truth and sound doctrine, he objected to the weakness of doctrinal claims made by Evangelicals. At times, he disputed their indifference toward doctrine, as in the case of Hannah More, a very popular writer of plays, novels, and tracts.27 More employed her wealth and her influence to open many schools and to generously assist the poor. As the title of one of More’s books, Practical Piety, describes, she was concerned with prayer and reading of the Bible to encourage the service of one’s neighbor and the attack on vice. She thought that speaking of doctrines was unprofitable and divisive, and thus she favored the practice of private judgment in religious matters. She believed in focusing on the subjective awareness of one’s own salvation. A few years later, Newman commented that some of More’s letters criticizing Church Creeds only strengthened Unitarianism, the epitome of liberalism in religion.
Newman feared this path from liberalism to Unitarianism, which his friend Blanco White had followed. Unitarians not only denied the doctrine of the Trinity but also the divinity of Jesus Christ; in addition, they believed in universal salvation of all men. For Newman, Evangelicals’ emphasis on moral teaching and disregard for doctrine unwittingly set the stage for the absence of doctrine, or all-inclusiveness of doctrine.
When his Evangelical mentor, Walter Mayers, died on April 2, 1828, Newman had already given up the majority of his Evangelical views. Naturally, he preached at the funeral of his good friend and teacher, but by this time, he had adopted many Anglican doctrines concerning Apostolic Succession, Tradition, Revelation, liturgy, and church architecture. He did not yet understand devotion to Mary, the intercession of the saints, and the belief in Purgatory, nor, of course, the papacy.
In 1826, Newman told his sister Jemima that he was planning to read the Church Fathers. These early writers, distinguished for holiness of life and orthodox teaching, wrote during the first nine centuries of Christianity. He had told her that it would take him from ten to twenty years to read the more than two hundred volumes of the Fathers. Pusey bought him an edition while in Germany and sent the books to Oxford in the fall of 1827. In a letter to his mother, Newman wrote: “My ‘Fathers’ are arrived all safe—huge Fellows they are, but very cheap—one folio costs a shilling!”28
With a systematic approach, Newman began to read them over the summer or “Long Vacation” of 1828. He started with the Apostolic Fathers, those succeeding the Apostles. He studied Barnabas, St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp, and St. Justin. Intent on tracing the deviations or corruption of the Roman Church, he made slower progress than he desired. A year later he wrote, “I am so hungry for Irenaeus and Cyprian—I long for the Vacation.”29 But by the end of summer 1829, he had made little progress and considered the need to give up his tuition or position as Tutor to be able to advance his plans.
The general outcome of Newman’s first reading of the Fathers was disappointing because he read them from a Protestant point of view. He cataloged them according to Protestant principles such as justification by faith alone and looked for Protestant doctrines. He reached the rash conclusion that they did not say much, but he later realized the error of the method he had followed in his reading of them.
One exception to his overall poor impression of the Fathers was the doctrine of the Episcopal office that he found in them. They showed the episcopate to be a divine institution, a belief that lay in sharp contrast to Erastianism, a doctrine named for Thomas Erastus (1524–1583). Erastus was a Swiss Protestant who defended the subordination of ecclesial government to civil jurisdiction. Based on his reading of the Fathers, as well as his knowledge of Sacred Scripture and of ecclesiastical history, Newman asserted instead that the Church should have independence from civil government. As he read the Fathers, the book Letters on the Church by an Episcopalian, attributed to Whateley, resonated in Newman’s mind. The book advocated protesting against the interference of the Church in temporal matters and of the State in spiritual matters. At the same time the author also held that although the clergy are not hired servants, they should support the State and receive State revenues.30
Newman read the Fathers of the Church in the wake of his second spiritual conversion at Oriel College. The first one had been a conversion from skepticism. This time he turned from an incipient religious liberalism to a Christianity founded on doctrines that were based on Sacred Scripture and transmitted by Tradition. The two principal doctrinal truths that he embraced during these years were Apostolic Succession and baptismal regeneration. Both marked his passage from Protestant Evangelicalism to High Church Anglicanism. He reached these beliefs with the help of his Anglican friends but also with the experience of the real-life pastoral situations of the parishioners of St. Clement’s Church where he served as curate. During these years at Oriel College Newman’s religious beliefs changed significantly. While the intellectual environment at Oriel contributed to Newman’s departure from Evangelical beliefs, Newman was able to reject the pure rationalism of the Oriel Common Room.
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1See AW, 206.
2“Infant Baptism,” in PPS, Vol. III (May 24, 1835), 298.
3AW, 77.
4In 1825, Newman recommended to his friend Simeon Lloyd Pope that he read, study, and pray over Sumner’s “Apostolical Preaching.” See LD, Vol. I, JHN to Simeon Lloyd Pope (June 1, 1825), 234-35.
5AW, 202.
6Ibid.
7AW, 202.
8PPS, Vol. II, “Infant Baptism” (June 15, 1825), 223.
9Richard W. Church, The Oxford Movement, Twelve Years, 1833-1845, MacMillan and Co. Ltd, London, 1904, 211.
10John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 99-121, available at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/development/index.html. After this it will be cited Dev.
11LD, Vol. I, JHN to Charles Robert Newman (August 25, 1825), 254.
12LD, Vol. I, JHN to C.R. Newman (September 26, 1835), 258-60.
13LD, Vol. II, 4-5.
14LD, Vol. II, Memorandum: Sermon “On the Mediatorial Kingdom of Christ” (May 13, 1827), 15-16.
15Apo., 14.
16Apo., 18.
17Apo., 18-19.
18Apo., 19.
19Dev., 99-121.
20LD, Vol. II, JHN to John Keble (December 19, 1827), 44-45; J. Keble to JHN, ibid., 46.
21LD, Vol. II, JHN to John Keble (August 30, 1831), 354-56; J. Keble to JHN, ibid., 357.
22LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (March 31, 1826), 282.
23In this book we capitalize the term “Real Presence,” “the Sacrament” and the names of particular Sacraments as proper nouns, whether referring to Catholic or Anglican, but without implying identity between Catholic and Anglican rites.
24LD, Vol. II (entries for November 25 and 26), 37.
25Newman recorded that he and his brother Frank paid £500 to £700 for their aunt’s debt. AW, 213.
26“Self-Contemplation,” in PPS, Vol. II, 163-74.
27Ward, “We Must Look Back a Little” in Young Mr. Newman, 78-92; 86-92.
28LD, Vol. II, JHN to Mrs. Newman (October 18, 1827), 30.
29LD, Vol. II, JHN to Harriet Newman (June 25, 1829), 150.
30Apo., 13.