Section 8

John Henry Newman was born in London on 21 February 1801, the eldest of the six children, three sons and three daughters, of a banker, John Newman, an easygoing member of the Church of England without strong dogmatic convictions, and of his wife Jemima née Fourdrinier, whose ancestry was French Huguenot. Newman was baptized an Anglican in the London church of St Benet Fink on 9 April, though he was only to make his first communion as an undergraduate in Oxford in November 1817. His religious upbringing was a conventional, non-sacramental middle-class one. His childhood religious education was the then commonplace Anglican undoctrinal Bible-reading of his aunt Elizabeth Good Newman, and his paternal grandmother Elizabeth née Good, but he brought to it a profound sense of the superior reality of the supernatural, as in his wish that the Arabian Nights were true and in his imagining that he was an angel and the world was a deception played upon him by his fellow-angels.

This state of mind was interrupted by an adolescent reading of the Deist Tom Paine and the sceptic David Hume. His conversion to a more dogmatic form of Christianity, Calvinist Evangelicalism, occurred, according to his own account, at the age of fifteen in the autumn of 1816. It took place during the summer holidays while he was staying on at his boarding school as a result of the failure of his father’s bank and under the influence of his Anglican Calvinist schoolmaster mentor, the Rev Walter Mayers. Newman was thereby caught up into the Evangelical Revival, the most vital religious movement of his youth. The basis of his conversion was his sense of the ultimate reality of ‘two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings’, himself and his Creator. These are the subjective and objective twin poles of his subsequent thought: the self, with its feelings and intellect and conscience, and the God in whom the self finds the means of escape from its own selfishness and subjectivity. He later summed up this private and personal religion in Cicero’s aphorism, ‘never less alone than when alone’, and it was the permanent foundation of his growth into a stronger public institutional and intellectual understanding of the doctrine of the Church.

Newman later came to consider his experience to be quite unlike the standard form of Evangelical conversion, of conviction of sinfulness and the sensation of transforming release by the divine deliverance from it. Rather, he ‘fell under the influence of a definite Creed’.¹ It was, moreover, accompanied by a stern moralism. Newman read the autobiography, The Force of Truth, by the Evangelical Anglican clergyman Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford, to whom ‘humanly speaking’ he said he almost owed his soul. Newman summarized Scott’s teaching, deriving from Scott’s conversion from Unitarianism to Trinitarian orthodoxy, in the phrases ‘Holiness rather than peace’ and ‘Growth the only evidence of life’. Holiness is the principle of growth within the soul; and it is only by growth in holiness that the soul can know it is alive. This emphasis upon personal holiness preserved Newman from any hyper-Calvinist tendency to antinomianism, or an assurance of salvation which had freed him from the need to obey the moral law. It accompanied his private dedication to the celibate life.

Newman’s conversion was also, however, the beginning of his serious intellectual life, giving him the ‘impressions of dogma’ which remained at the heart of his religion, and which at first included the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation and Atonement, and of the Lutheran apprehension of Christ, or the doctrine of justification by faith alone. He also embraced the idea of his own ‘final perseverance’ through predestination to eternal life, in his strong sense of his own divine calling, but like other moderate Calvinists, he did not embrace the concurrent doctrine of reprobation, of God’s preordained rejection of sinners, which he later pronounced ‘detestable’, thinking only of the mercy to himself. His belief that the pope was Antichrist, deriving from the Evangelical Joseph Milner’s Church History, put him in the radical Evangelical camp, and gave him an odd tendency to millennial speculation. Long after he had outgrown it intellectually, the image of the papal Antichrist stained his imagination. He remained ever after more certain of his conversion than that he had hands and feet, but his belief in predestination was fading by the age of twenty-one. From that time, his faith would always seek to balance the light of reason with the life of experience: true religion must satisfy the demands of both head and heart.²

The Oxford in which Newman became resident as an undergraduate in 1817 was a bulwark of the Church of England, the principal training ground, with Cambridge, for its ministry, governed by the Heads of Houses and Fellows of the Colleges who were usually Anglican clergy (and as Fellows, had to be celibate). Newman’s Evangelicalism made him an outsider to the heavy-drinking undergraduate culture of Trinity College, but his poor performance at his Finals in schools in 1820 was the result, he thought, of overwork and a crisis of seeking intellectual excellence over moral. In 1822, however, he triumphed in his election by examination to a Fellowship at the intellectually progressive Oriel College, where he came under the influence of Richard Whately, later Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, whom he helped to write a textbook on logic. Whately was accounted a radical thinker, teaching Newman not only to think, but to rely upon himself, yet, despite this liberal influence, Newman also learned about the doctrine of the Church in an Anglican tradition rooted in the writings of the sixteenth-century Richard Hooker and the Caroline divines of the reign of Charles I. Whately showed Newman the importance of the independence of the Church from the State in its own separate sphere, while another Fellow, Edward Hawkins, taught him the value of tradition beside the Bible, and the Rev William James imparted a version of the idea of the apostolic succession of the clergy, of their descent through long lines of bishops from the first apostles.

These three principles – tradition, the apostolic succession, and the Church’s own independent authority – were to be fundamental to the Oxford Movement in the 1830s; but the major change in Newman’s mind took place in the year between his ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood, between 1824 and 1825, over the issue of baptismal regeneration, the spiritual rebirth of the child at the font. This doctrine, taught by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was a stumbling block to some Evangelicals, as it appeared to contradict their understanding of God’s justification of the sinner at conversion, a free and undeserved pardon for sin which led to regeneration or the second birth into a new state of life. Such a true converted Christian was thereby distinguished from the merely ‘nominal’ unconverted one. Whether a vital Christian, a real Christian, was created by baptism or conversion, was an issue fraught with significance for the Anglican doctrine of the Church as well as for her pastoral theology.

The matter was still a grey area in the 1820s, and Evangelicals like Mayers could adopt the compromise of a conditional or partial or ecclesiastical change of state to the child at baptism, to be completed, in some cases at least, at conversion. Newman, however, like another young Evangelical, William Ewart Gladstone, chose to embrace the full Prayer Book doctrine. This was partly because of his sense that the sharp distinction between the regenerated convert and the unregenerate, the saved and the lost, was an unreal one, as Hawkins had told him. It did not describe the people at St Clement’s in Oxford where Newman was a curate, raising the money to rebuild the church, and would therefore not work in a parish. But with this belief came a new sense of the importance of the sacrament, and of sacraments in general, and of the Church which by sprinkling with water and pronouncing a formula could make all the difference to the spiritual character of her children.

There were two possible developments arising from Newman’s drift from Evangelicalism. The first was into some form of liberalism, by which he meant not so much unbelief as the principle of indifference towards doctrine, that one religion is as good as another. By his own account, he flirted briefly with liberal views in 1827, but this ended with his own breakdown as an examiner in schools in autumn 1827 and the death of his favourite and youngest sister, Mary, early in 1828. Or he could move forward into the High Church tradition. In 1828, he acquired and began to read systematically the writings of the Fathers of the early Christian centuries, finding his hero in St Athanasius, who had defended the Nicene faith, in St Jerome’s phrase, contra mundum, against the world. Complementing the influence of the eighteenth-century Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler, he also imbibed the philosophy of the ancient theological school of Alexandria, its mystical interpretation of Scripture, its love of learning, its belief in a divine revelation to the gentiles in the pagan philosophers, as well as to the Jews, and its understanding of nature as a mysterious sacrament and symbol of the Godhead. Newman’s patient labour of careful scholarship in this area inspired his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), and continued through his remaining years as an Anglican, bearing its final fruit in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.

It was a High Anglican tradition to appeal to the Fathers as well as to the Bible, but no one wrote about them with quite the intensity of Newman. His new High Churchmanship inspired this quest for the proper fourth-century pattern of the Church, as he sought out the origins of the modern heresies in the early ones, in the darkening world of ecclesiastical politics around him. In 1828, he succeeded Hawkins as Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and from its pulpit preached the succession of wonderful, uncontroversial parochial sermons which beyond his ordinary congregation of tradesmen attracted the fascinated interest of generations of undergraduates for the height of their spiritual teaching and the simplicity and beauty of their prose. He also preached the university sermons in which he expounded the role of reason as subordinate to conscience and experience in forming the conception of God. Partly inspired by Bishop Butler, he attacked those who treated belief as a matter of deductive logic and evidence and proof, regardless of the moral and spiritual dispositions of the believer, and tried to distinguish the forms of argument helpful to religion from those hurtful to religion. The university sermons embodied Newman’s response to much of the conventional divinity of his own day as well as to the scoffers of the eighteenth century. Newman’s teaching that faith is personal in character, as heart speaks to heart, passed into the very personality of the Oxford Movement itself, as a band of brothers devoted to one another, and to an ideal intellectual and spiritual community in Oxford. It was this sense of a common cause that Newman depicted in all its intensity in his later spiritual autobiography the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), and it entered into the classic account The Oxford Movement (1891) by Newman’s great Anglican disciple, Dean Richard Church, which both have a readership today.

Controversy was inevitable, with such intensity of feeling, and in 1829, Newman abandoned his own former support for Catholic Emancipation to oppose the re-election of the Home Secretary Robert Peel as a member of parliament for the University of Oxford. Newman called Peel a ‘rat’ for changing his mind on the issue when it was his duty to represent the Anglican interest of Oxford, but Newman also found himself in conflict with his former mentors Whately and Hawkins, now Provost of Oriel. Newman assumed the leadership of a younger set of dons, including his bosom friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, and the older but quietly inspirational John Keble. Keble’s volume of poems, The Christian Year, published in 1827, with a poem for every service of the Book of Common Prayer, made the dangerous new imaginative world of early nineteenth-century Romanticism pioneered by Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth safe for the Anglican tradition, in what Newman, with reference to the Caroline poets, described as the revival of the music of a school long dead in England.

The election of a new Whig government in 1830, after four decades of almost unbroken Tory rule, raised fears of reform of the Church as of the other parts of the constitution which radicals called the ‘Old Corruption’. There were popular attacks upon the bishops, most of whom opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, and the government decided as a first ecclesiastical measure to reform the over-privileged minority Protestant Church of Ireland, united to the Church of England in 1800. The Oxford Movement began in a paradox, in effect the defence of the aggressively Protestant Irish Church against a Roman Catholic crusade to reduce her power. Newman was stirred by the news of the government bill when on a holiday in Italy, but nearly died on revisiting Sicily. His recovery convinced him that God had preserved him for a purpose, reflected in his hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light’, and that he had a work to do in England. The poems written on his continental journey were published as the ‘Lyra Apostolica’ in the British Magazine and with those of other High Churchmen in the Lyra Apostolica in 1836.

After Newman’s return to Oxford, John Keble preached his sermon on National Apostasy from the pulpit of St Mary’s, and ever after Newman kept the date, the 14 July, as the beginning of ‘the religious movement of 1833’, or as it was to come to be known after 1839, the Oxford Movement. The Movement opened its campaign in September by publishing the Tracts for the Times, originally brief productions only a few pages long. Newman was to publish or edit or contribute to thirty of the ninety Tracts. In the first, he began in militant manner by calling for a reassertion of the authority of the office of the bishop as the local and present embodiment of apostolic authority in the Church, signifying her independent foundation by Christ. The Tracts taught that the Church was a supernatural society with her foundations in the heavens, Christ’s body and bride, ‘His very self below’, bearing the divine message even to the end of the world.

Though this was partly a response to the claim by the State to reform the Church, there was another paradox here, that the Movement began among arch-conservative Tories traditionally attached to notions of sacral monarchy, and to the British constitution in which Church and State were one. Thus High Anglicans might protest at the Church’s Babylonian captivity, and set out to make the Church a popular power, yet they would never agree on the desirability of disestablishment, which might have weakened the Church though giving it her freedom. There was, however, now a tension between the principle of the Church as established by the State, once all but a High Church article of faith, and the Church’s Catholicity. To the new High Churchmen, or Apostolicals, like Newman, the Church was Catholic, or she was nothing.

The Tracts also rejected the ecclesiastical status of the Nonconformist Churches which, under Evangelical influence, had grown massively in membership in England and Wales during the preceding thirty years. On High Anglican theory, they lacked bishops and were therefore not Churches. With the accession of Edward Bouverie Pusey, the young and erudite Professor of Hebrew, to the Movement, the Tracts increasingly became learned treatises, with a strong stress upon re-establishing High Churchmanship from the writings of the theologians of the Anglican tradition as well as from the Fathers.

The publication of a separate library of the Fathers began in 1838, and of the Anglo-Catholic divines in 1841. Newman’s own patristic essays, another effort to change the whole spiritual and intellectual atmosphere or ‘ethos’ of Anglicanism, originally appeared in the British Magazine. They were republished as The Church of the Fathers in 1840.

There was good Anglican precedent for claiming a special ecclesial excellence for the Church of England, as superior to the other Protestant Churches, but the High Church tradition had usually acknowledged the benefit of the sixteenth-century Reformation, considering the Church of England to be Reformed as well as Catholic. Yet the Church of England had the special virtue of preserving the traditional Catholic threefold apostolic order of bishop, priest and deacon, as had the Roman and Orthodox Churches, while being free from their corruptions. On this basis, on the ‘branch theory’, Rome and Orthodoxy were ‘branches’, with the Church of England, of the original undivided primitive Church. Or on a different perspective, Rome, while corrupt, had a proper ministry which continental and dissenting Protestants lacked, and Canterbury held to a middle way between Rome and Geneva, or between Popery and a more radical Protestantism or Puritanism.

In Tracts 38 and 41, The Via Media, Newman suggested that the Church of England had become more Protestant than she once had been. In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church of 1837, a work which grew out of his controversy with the Abbé Nicolas Jager, and which was delivered in the Adam de Brome chapel of St Mary’s Church, Newman redefined the via media or ‘Anglicanism’ as lying midway between popular Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Yet even here he declared that unlike Rome and Protestantism, which had reality, forming the character of nations, ‘Anglicanism’ was only a ‘paper theory’, in the writings of a distinguished body of High Anglican theologians, not yet realized in concrete terms in the real experience of a living Church. Moreover, Newman distinguished, within the Church’s teaching, the ‘episcopal tradition’ which he identified with the Catholic creeds, and which resembled the Anglican idea of the fundamentals of the faith, passed from bishop to bishop, from the ‘prophetical tradition’ within the broad current of the Church’s theological reflection in its widest sense, including its worship in the lex orandi. This idea, of the subtle and complex relationship of the lex credendi, of what is believed, to the lex orandi, or how the Church prays, has had a profound effect on theology since, and it reaffirmed the importance for Newman of the Prayer Book. In stressing, however, the vitality and vigour of the ‘prophetical tradition’, Newman widened the possibility for change and growth in the Church’s teaching way beyond the primitive creeds, while identifying the faith with the whole range and scope of it in a manner nearer to Roman Catholicism. Significantly, Newman renamed ‘Anglicanism’ ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ in his second edition of the Lectures in 1838.

Newman had some basis in the Anglican tradition for his Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification of 1838, his principal attempt to apply his understanding of the via media to a particular dogma, in which he took to pieces the Reformation principle on which the Church was said to stand or fall. Newman united the Protestant position, that justification is being declared just, that is given a full and free pardon regardless of one’s sins, in a new relationship with God, with the Roman Catholic understanding that justification is being made just, that is restored, regenerated, renewed, in holiness and righteousness, God effecting what He declares. To the Protestant who argued that the formal cause of justification is the imputation of Christ’s death to the sinner, and to the Roman Catholic who made the formal cause the infusion of Christ’s merits through his death upon the cross, Newman preferred the language of the ‘impartation’ of Christ’s merits through God’s indwelling Trinitarian presence in the soul.

Newman made the instrumental cause of justification both baptism, as Catholics do, and faith, as do Protestants. The work of salvation is begun in baptism, sustained by faith, hope and love, good works and sacraments, and transforms the believer in holiness and righteousness in the image of Christ, from glory into glory. Newman thought that the Protestant formula, justification by faith alone, had some merit, in pointing to Christ as our sole justifier. Its defect in English popular Protestantism is that it produces the neglect of hope, love, good works, sacraments, holiness and righteousness, with a reliance not on Christ but on one’s subjective feelings about Him, so that Christians are justified not by their faith but by their feelings. On the other hand, Newman argued polemically that the Roman Catholic position made righteousness a human possession to be trafficked with, as between equals, but his conclusion that justification includes regeneration was obviously closer to the Catholic position than to the Protestant one, as a process rather than an act, even while his emphasis upon the divine indwelling widened the subject with the teaching on deification by Athanasius and the Greek theological tradition.

The Oxford Movement’s repudiation of the Reformation became still clearer with the posthumous appearance of the first two volumes of Hurrell Froude’s Remains, also in 1838. Tract 85, Newman’s ‘Lectures on the Scripture Proof of the Doctrine of the Church’, showed a radical awareness of the difficulties in the Protestant appeal to Scripture worthy of a German Higher Critic. There was, however, also controversy with the new Anglican liberals, and with the cloudy theology of the Oxford professor Renn Dickson Hampden. Newman had questioned whether another sometime Oriel liberal, Thomas Arnold, the celebrated reforming headmaster of Rugby School, was formally a Christian; in 1836, Arnold attacked him as one of the ‘Oxford Malignants’. By 1837, Newman’s attempt to define a new Anglican ecclesiology was inflaming the hostility of Protestants of every stripe and was worrying old-fashioned High Churchmen, whose conservatism was as remote as it could be in its moderate tone and temper from Newman’s own innovative and quicksilver mind.

Newman’s activities, however, were as much spiritual as intellectual: with editions and translations of the Breviary hymns; with Tract 75, on the Roman Breviary, and the revival of daily services and of auricular confession. His construction of a church in the hamlet of Littlemore gave him another field of responsibility, assisted by his mother and sisters. His belief in the Anglican via media was first shaken in the summer of 1839 by an apparent parallel between Anglicanism and moderate Monophysitism as a mediating position. It was even more shaken in 1839 on reading an essay on the Donatists of North Africa in the Dublin Review by Nicholas Wiseman, the principal intellectual figure in the Roman Catholic revival in England. Wiseman quoted St Augustine’s phrase, ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum’ (‘the whole (Catholic) world judges surely’), to distinguish the local Donatist schismatics from the African Catholics in full communion with the world-wide Church. Newman recovered from the shock, which came to him with an incantatory power, distressing him with the thought that the Church of England, for all her claim to be apostolic, was in difficulty in claiming to be Catholic. He had applied the doctrine of apostolicity as one of union with his bishop, the sympathetic Richard Bagot – he regarded his bishop as his pope – but Augustine’s universalism had emerged to resolve the problem of heretical bishops, through the need for a living authority superior to the bishop himself.

Newman assumed a heavy journalistic responsibility from 1838 to 1840 as an editor, as well as a frequent contributor, to the British Critic, and in 1841 he wrote a series of letters to The Times attacking his old adversary Sir Robert Peel’s speech opening a reading room at Tamworth, which recommended religious neutrality. Newman’s letters, subsequently published as ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’, contain a brilliant dissection of the powerlessness both of Peel’s non-denominational Christianity and of a faith claiming to be based on reason and culture. The letters include some of Newman’s most powerful writing on the role of reason in religion, so that he quoted certain passages from them nearly thirty years later in the formal and systematic conclusion to the argument of the University Sermons, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.

In 1841, however, Newman unwittingly unravelled his enterprise of catholicizing Anglicanism. The Church of England, according to a famous aphorism, had a Catholic Prayer Book, but its sixteenth-century formulation of faith, the Thirty-nine Articles, was Protestant. The Articles were important as the guarantee of the Anglican monopoly in Oxford, where undergraduates had to subscribe to them at matriculation and the clergy on ordination and on becoming Fellows. They therefore had to be shown to be compatible with Newman’s developing Catholicism. The authors had been Protestants, but Newman chose ‘to take our reformed confessions in the most Catholic sense they will admit; we have no duties towards their framers’. By Catholic, he did not mean primarily Roman Catholic, but according to the faith of the primitive Church, and he specifically rejected such popish doctrines as prayer before images and the papal supremacy. But damagingly, he spoke of the Church as ‘teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies’ in the Articles, which had been deliberately phrased obscurely to include the Catholic-minded in the Tudor era, and could therefore be understood in a Catholic sense as well as a Protestant one.

Newman then set out, like a lawyer, to take them in their literal or legal sense. Thus the Articles recommend the official Tudor sermon collections, the Books of Homilies, which shed a Catholic light upon the Articles if these last are interpreted by them. He sailed closest to the wind of seeming sophistry in arguing, over Article XXII, which condemns ‘the Romish doctrine’ of purgatory as ‘a fond thing vainly invented’, that this did not condemn the official Roman Catholic doctrine, which was published by the Council of Trent after the Article had been drawn up, but only the abuses among ill-educated papists. So too, Article XXXI, on the ‘sacrifice of Masses’ (in Latin, ‘sacrifices’) as ‘blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits’, was directed against the widespread abuse of the doctrine, in private Masses, and not against the idea that the Mass was in some sense a sacrifice. Here Newman was thinking, as in much of his writing, of the distinction between popular religious practice and the Church’s formal theology, a key not likely to occur to the ordinary reader. Yet far from being a dishonest document, enabling a man to hold the best living in the Church of England with the worst teachings of the Church of Rome, the most noticeable aspect of Tract 90 was its artless candour about the difficulties of its author’s own Anglo-Catholicism. In the storm of controversy which followed, Newman brought the Tracts for the Times to an end.

The din of condemnation of Newman by the Anglican bishops and the joint establishment of a Protestant bishop in Jerusalem by the State Church of Prussia and the Church of England brought Newman in 1841 to his deathbed on the Church of England. From 1842, he lived at Littlemore with a few disciples, engaged on his translations of the Select Treatises (1842–44) and Historical Tracts (1843) of St Athanasius, while editing the translation of the Abbé Claude Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History (1842–44), for which he wrote an essay on ecclesiastical miracles (1843), and commissioning the Lives of the English Saints. On his resignation from St Mary’s in 1843, he preached his most affecting sermon, ‘The Parting of Friends’, at Littlemore, evoking the mutual love and loyalty of his companions which had made the Oxford Movement what it was.

Yet Newman still hesitated to become a Roman Catholic. The fifteenth and last of his University Sermons, published in 1843, ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, derived the development of doctrine from the character of divine revelation, which was given as the impression of facts and actions on the mind, from which it reasons into doctrine. The Blessed Virgin, pondering the mystery of the Christ Child in her heart, had received an implicit knowledge of His person which would only later be made explicit in the doctrine of the Church. The same was true of the Apostles. The formulation of the doctrine deriving from this implicit knowledge would be part of inspired Scripture, but would go beyond it in the formulae which became the creeds, and which would admit of further doctrinal development down the centuries.

But perhaps the principle of development dealt with Newman’s difficulty, that modern Roman Catholicism seemed to him to look so unlike primitive Christianity, especially in a matter like the papal primacy. Although revelation had ceased, doctrinal development continued to elucidate the original divine deposit, given in revelation, through the Spirit’s presence in the Church. Just as an acorn looks unlike an oak, or a baby can only foreshadow the appearance of the man he becomes, so the Church could not exactly resemble her early self, but, if she is indeed still that original, must bear the evidence of nineteen centuries of development and growth upon her.

The principle of the development of doctrine has become so important in modern Roman Catholic theology that it is difficult to imagine a world in which Catholic theologians defended dogma by insisting that it was simply unchanging. No sentence in Newman has, however, been more misunderstood than his remark that ‘In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. This ignores the preceding sentence, which urges that the idea of Christianity changes as it enters the world ‘in order to remain the same’. Thus Newman has been wrongly taken to justify any and every kind of change, when his whole point is that development, properly understood, has its own laws, by which the idea of Christianity unfolds itself in every form of intellectual and institutional expression, making the Church ever more herself. It is true that by change an organism shows that it is alive, but it can only alter according to its own nature: a gazelle cannot grow up a gorilla. This is the very opposite of the Protestant notion of change, of a corruption of the original message which requires constant correction according to the principle of semper reformanda, a continuing revolution of returning to Scripture for the reinvention of the New Testament Church.

The Catholic, on the other hand, has to take into account the complete Christian story. Newman admits the possibility of corruption, and discusses seven criteria for distinguishing true developments from false ones: preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, early anticipation, logical sequence, preservative additions, and chronic continuance. On the vexed issue of the papal primacy, he argues that there is more early evidence for it than for the doctrine of the real presence, which he received as an Anglican, and that if development accounts for the Athanasian Creed, it also explains the sixteenth-century creed of Pope Pius IV. In short, the work of spirit had never failed in the Church, any more than it had failed in him, as he projected his own personal capacity for life and growth to the whole of Christian history.

Newman’s argument was complete, but the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was still unpublished when he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by the Italian Fr (now Blessed) Dominic Barberi of the Passionist Order on 9 October 1845. Nicholas Wiseman, as assistant Vicar-Apostolic of the Central District, advised Newman to publish the work as it was, as the evidence of his intellectual movement into the Catholic Church. In that sense, the book was written for a particular purpose, not to prove Roman Catholic Christianity to be true but to remove a widely held objection to it, that Rome had changed, by making this change an argument in her favour. Like Darwin in On the Origin of Species, Newman offers his thesis modestly, as an hypothesis to account for a difficulty. Newman illustrates Bishop Butler’s principle that conviction rests, not on binding syllogistic proof, like a chain, which is only as strong as its weakest link, but insofar as it is reasonable, on converging probabilities, like a rope, in which the weaker strands reinforce the stronger. The Essay carries the whole power of his personal pilgrimage, especially in its concluding passage – ‘Time is short, eternity is long’. In the end, as Butler had taught, action cannot wait on perfect argument, but must make a definite choice.

Newman also brought to Roman Catholicism certain of his Anglican teachings, on the sovereign role of conscience, the importance of the laity and the development of doctrine. Above all, he saw himself as the same man before and after his submission to Rome, in a continuity unbroken by his new allegiance, in his quest for holiness and truth. Benjamin Disraeli may have exaggerated in claiming that Newman’s conversion was the blow from which the Church of England still reels, but it is notable that the greatest of modern Anglican theologians ceased to be an Anglican. He had, moreover, given some of his best thought to the question of the identity of Anglicanism, and concluded that it was essentially Protestant.

On the centenary of Newman’s death in 1990, the celebrations tended to stress his role as a bridge between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, a judgement summed up by Adrian Hastings’s view of him as ‘the supreme reconciler’, ignoring his many anti-Anglican remarks after his submission to Rome while remembering his reunion with his old Anglican friends who never ceased to love him, including Keble and Richard Church. The republication of his Anglican sermons in eight volumes by another Anglican friend, the Rev William Copeland (1868), testifies to his surviving influence in the Church of England, which he continued to regard as a bulwark against the rising tide of unbelief.

But the recommendation was a negative one, and Newman’s legacy to the Church of England was ambiguous. His own insistence as a Roman Catholic that the Oxford Movement had its end in Rome from the first was denied by his Anglo-Catholic followers who tried to maintain his earlier teaching. His repudiation of the Reformation and of Protestantism gave rise to a very one-sided reading of Anglican history among Anglo-Catholics, and it turned Anglican Protestantism in a more radically anti-Catholic direction and fostered innumerable local Anglo-Catholic disputes with Evangelicals within the Church and with Nonconformists outside it. With the development of a more radically liberal Anglican school of thought by the 1850s, the heirs of Whately and Hampden, the successors to the Oxford Movement helped to precipitate the Church’s division into warring parties of High, Low and Broad Churchmen with their own theological colleges and newspapers, so that Newman’s own quest for a clearer theology resulted in a kind of undeclared but permanent state of Anglican theological civil war. Does the Church of England belong to the Reformation, or the Counter-Reformation, or the Enlightenment, or to some judicious amalgam of all three, and in what degree? Newman himself had weakened the Articles as a security for the Church’s Protestantism, in a manner which benefited theological liberalism, as liberals like A. P. Stanley saw. The Anglo-Catholics were forced by episcopal persecution to practise a liberal congregationalism, with an infallible priest-pope in every parish, and the failure of the State and the bishops to control the ritualist clergy who introduced medieval or modern Roman ceremonial into their churches left unrealized Newman’s own original programme for the restoration of Anglican episcopal authority. He had tried to exalt the office of the bishops, as angels of the Church, and the angels had knocked him down. He looked back over his shoulder at the lack of an ultimate authority in the Church of England, and having found a true authority, however marred by the flaws inseparable from mere humanity, he was not going to surrender it now.

Newman’s first major new publication as a Roman Catholic was the novel Loss and Gain (1848), which he wrote while in Rome. It is a witty satire on the extremes of Oxford religion as he had encountered it, as in holding up to ridicule the tea parties of the Evangelical Freeborn and the Gothic aestheticism of the High Church Bateman, but the sharp cut and thrust of the theological debate requires some specialist knowledge of what he was parodying. The novel’s account of the interior development of its hero, Charles Reding, from Oxford to Rome, is a moving one, and the portrait of Oxford has its interest, especially in Newman’s pioneering quotation of university slang, some of which seems to appear in print in the book for the first time. But Reding is a solitary figure. Although Newman himself briefly appears under two aliases, there is no real narrative of the collective activities of the Oxford Movement itself, and it does not touch the spiritual and intellectual heart of the Movement, about which Newman was to write so movingly in the Apologia.

Newman also began another novel, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century, with its story set in North Africa, which is depicted in luxuriant and sometimes gory detail, enriched from its author’s patristic reading. The narrative of the plague of locusts and of the subsequent persecution of the Christians of the decaying North African Church, and various horrors to do with the native paganism, are part of Newman’s oppressive picture of the tropical over-richness of its setting. The heroine, Callista, with her natural purity deriving from her Hellenic inheritance, is by imaginative contrast with her sensual surroundings a convert and a virgin-martyr, like the heroine of Cardinal Wiseman’s novel of the same period, Fabiola (1854), which is set in Rome, and was to be the first in a new Catholic library of fiction. Newman’s work was not published until after Wiseman’s, in 1856.

Newman’s Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849) is a sermon collection notable for the terror of the address on hell, ‘Neglect of Divine Calls and Warnings’, depicting the damnation of an ordinary man no worse than most are. The Lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Submitting to the Catholic Church (1850) is Newman’s most anti-Anglican publication, and still arouses Anglican hostility. The first half is addressed to his old High Church brethren, with its thesis that ‘communion with the Holy See [was] the legitimate issue of the religious movement of 1833’: the Oxford Movement always had its proper end in Rome. The second part of the work addresses some of the standard objections to Roman Catholicism beginning with the social and religious state of Catholic countries, which Newman painted in no unsparing hand, acknowledging the characteristic excesses of popular Romanism in a fashion which tries to weaken the objections to them by the very entertaining frankness of the description. Here Newman’s brilliance is at scene painting, in a sort of impressionism before the impressionists. Yet Newman also recalled the happier dimension of his Anglican faith: ‘Can I wipe out from my memory, or wish to wipe out, those happy Sunday mornings, light or dark, year after year, when I celebrated your communion-rite, in my own church of St Mary’s; and in the pleasantness and joy of it heard nothing of the strife of tongues which surrounded its walls?’ On the other hand, he found the Church of England as a national establishment to be ultimately unreal, however outwardly impressive, when ‘as in fairy tales, the magic castle vanishes when the spell is broken, and nothing is seen but the wild heath, the barren rock, and the forlorn sheep-walk.’³ A papal doctorate followed soon after, and it was as Dr Newman that he was known to the public until he was made a Cardinal.

Newman’s ‘best-written work’, in his own view, the Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), addressed to the Brothers of the Birmingham Oratory and delivered in the Birmingham Corn Exchange, followed on the national anti-Catholic furore over the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’ of the pope’s restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of bishops in 1850, under Wiseman as Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. This shows Newman at the very height of his powers as a satirist, in his attack on the great British monster of No Popery, as in his comparison of the Anglican bishops’ thunderous charges against Rome to a very English phenomenon, a peal of bells. He also parodied No Popery as a tradition in the speech of a fabulous Russian Count Potemkin (supposed to be a junior member of the family of Catherine the Great’s alleged builder of phantom villages) about the infernal British Constitution and ‘the atheistical tenets and fiendish maxims of John-Bullism’.⁴ Quoting Blackstone’s Commentaries, Potemkin speaks in horror to his shocked audience of the maxim ‘The King can do no wrong’, ascribing ‘ABSOLUTE PERFECTION’ to the monarch, who is ‘the fount of justice’, and works by ‘grace’, whose parliament claims ‘OMNIPOTENCE’, whose ancestor James I had called himself ‘a god’, who has ‘UBIQUITY’ in her courts, and whose ‘ABSOLUTE IMMORTALITY’ is asserted in the maxim, ‘THE KING NEVER DIES’. To these must be added the past horrors of the British penal system and the evil actions of Britain down the centuries. The speaker multiplies the 37 in the year of the Queen’s accession in 1837 with her then age of 18 years to give 666, ‘the number of the beast’ in the Book of Revelation. Clearly Queen Victoria is the Antichrist itself.⁵

The outcome of the work for Newman was a tragic one, for he attacked the character of Giovanni Giacinto Achilli, an ex-Dominican friar, and a mass seducer of young Italian women, who had become a Protestant and a popular speaker on the anti-Catholic lecture circuit. Newman relied for his charges on an essay by the inefficient Cardinal Wiseman, who had lost the documents on which his charges had been based. Newman faced the possibility of prison, and had to send emissaries to Italy to find the women to testify on the truth of his remarks, but though he was found guilty by a prejudiced judge and jury, he was let off with a lecture from the bench on the moral deterioration of converts and with a fine of £100. This was quickly paid from the large sums raised to assist him throughout the Catholic world, part of which went to the building of the University Church in Dublin. The further editions of the Lectures presented a gap where the pages on Achilli had been, with asterisks and in Latin the words, ‘About these things which followed let posterity judge’.

This did nothing to diminish his stature among his fellow Catholics, and Newman remained at the heart of the Catholic Revival. His brilliant sermon, ‘The Second Spring’, preached to the assembled Fathers at the First Synod of Westminster at Oscott in 1852, drew an over-pessimistic picture of the meagre survivals of Catholicism in England after the Reformation, while predicting a glorious future. The preacher like some of his hearers, including Wiseman, broke down in tears, as Newman evoked the feelings of its time and place, in the mood of optimism created by the Church’s rapid expansion, and the aspiration of some to reconvert the nation to the Catholic faith.

Newman’s chief services to the Church in the 1850s came in connection with his Rectorship (1854–58) of the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin, which he modelled partly on Oxford and partly on the Catholic University of Louvain. His most celebrated works of the decade were his lectures on university education in Dublin, published as Discourses on University Education (1852) and Lectures and Essays on University Subjects (1859). Most of these were reshaped and reassembled as The Idea of a University in 1873. The Office and Work of Universities, a collection of articles in the Dublin Catholic University Gazette, appeared in 1856. Newman’s inspiration for the idea of a university came partly from the conflict between Oxford and Edinburgh in 1808–10, and the defence of Oxford by Edward Copleston of Oriel against the Scots of the primary end of a university as a training of the mind, in a love of knowledge for its own sake, through a ‘liberal education’ in the true sense of ‘liberal’, as the free work of a free man rather than the servile work of a slave. For Newman, this training, in ‘a habit of mind’, a ‘philosophical habit’, in an enlargement of mind, like the intellectual contemplation which Aristotle considered the highest good, is an ultimate value, and requires no religious or moral defence, as it is an end in itself regardless of any use it might possess for the learned professions and religion.

Newman thought the university should teach universal knowledge, and impart a synoptic vision of all the sciences in their relations with one another, though he also commended as a basis for any education, the inculcation of intellectual habits like a disciplined mastery of detail, ‘the idea of science, method, order, principle, and system; of rule and exception; of richness and harmony’. Again, while creating a curriculum based on the humanities, he did not undervalue the university’s useful contribution to the professions like medicine, for which he founded a school in Dublin. With his insistence on a balance among the disciplines, he also accorded a large place to both the classics and theology, the latter as a science indispensable in a Catholic institution, which might yet produce an educated Catholic laity. His famous semi-satiric passage on the virtues and vices of the gentleman as the product of knowledge and culture, ‘the creation, not of Christianity but of civilization’, shows both the scope and limitations of the university ideal, as a good in itself, requiring supplementation by another. The Church exists to create saints, not gentlemen, and all saints are not gentlemen as all gentlemen are not saints. The rhetorical splendour of Newman’s evocation of the long history of the papacy belongs to the argument for the Church’s role as an agent of civilization. A university need not be Catholic, and Newman’s name lives on among non-Catholics as the most distinguished of Victorian theoreticians of higher education. Indeed Newman shows an Oxonian devotion to the idea of the university in itself, as to the life of the mind. But Newman thought that if Catholic theology is true, the only complete university is one in which it is taught, and a Catholic university also makes its own kind of necessary contribution to the life of the Church.

Yet Newman’s woes in Ireland wore him down. He later thought that he had been sent to Ireland trusting that any work blessed by the pope would prosper, when the pope knew no more about Ireland than he did. He felt that he was inadequately supported by his own patron Archbishop Paul Cullen, who declined to answer his letters, against some of the other Irish bishops, like the ultra-nationalist John MacHale, Archbishop of Tuam, and that he was suspected of Anglo-Oxonian elitism by those in the Irish hierarchy who had been prepared to accept the government’s own secular Queen’s colleges, or who saw the main function of the institution as a utilitarian one, the creation of an educated professional class of teachers, doctors and lawyers. Newman caused political disquiet in different quarters by appointing both English converts and Irish nationalists. He resigned from his Irish post in 1858.

Newman’s Rectorship coincided with his conflict with Faber, as superior of the London Oratory, over a case which began with a dispute over whether it was the proper work of the Oratory to hear nuns’ confessions but was related to different visions of what the institute was, the subject of a number of Newman’s addresses to his brethren. The Birmingham Oratory was a large responsibility in itself, and its numerous good works were complemented from 1859 by one in which Newman took the keenest interest, the foundation of a public school, whose early pupils included Newman’s future patron, the young Duke of Norfolk.

Yet Newman’s rate of publication in the 1850s was an extraordinary one: it included writings on a range of historical subjects, including the Lectures on the History of the Turks, published in 1854, the year of Crimean War, and essays on the Northmen and Normans, the mission of St Benedict and the Benedictine schools, later gathered together with other matter in three volumes of Historical Sketches (1872–73). This productivity came to a sudden end. In 1859, Newman briefly undertook the editorship of the journal The Rambler which was in trouble with the Roman authorities over its lack of enthusiasm for the pope’s Temporal Power in the papal states, then under threat from Italian nationalists and the House of Savoy. Newman himself did not think the Temporal Power essential to the papacy’s survival, a position in which time has proved him right. His own essay, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, which appeared in The Rambler in July 1859, was delated to Rome by Bishop Brown of Newport, later his champion. The essay has been regarded as the charter of freedom of the laity in the Church, though as Newman protested, it only allowed laymen a passive role, to be consulted as one does one’s watch or a sundial, whenever authority wished to know what the faithful believed as a spirit-given witness to the truth.

But Newman’s failure to explain himself in Rome, for which the dilatory Wiseman was partly responsible, left him under a cloud until 1867. He suffered from depression and wrote little during the five years from 1859, and there were rumours that he intended returning to the Church of England, which he indignantly repelled with the response that the ‘thought of the Anglican service makes me shiver’.⁶ His experience did not alter his fundamental loyalty to the pope, of whom he was personally fond, but it confirmed him in his conviction that Rome’s place in the Church, while essential, had become over-weighted into a kind of tyranny through contemporary circumstances, especially the Church’s loss of her theological schools at the French Revolution.

Newman was aroused from this state by Charles Kingsley’s attack upon him for having no love of truth for its own sake like other Catholic clergy, in the December 1863 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine. Newman’s response, standing at his desk for hours to write while weeping, appeared in weekly instalments, beginning with the thirty-nine blots in Kingsley’s charges, in a backwards reference to the Thirty-nine Articles. The resulting work, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), despite its knockabout reply to Kingsley, is a spiritual autobiography, lacking much normal autobiographical detail like the names of his parents. But the sheer beauty of its prose and its strength of feeling, as an account of a personal pilgrimage, in a transparently sincere quest after religious truth, make it worthy to stand beside St Augustine’s Confessions, and carried all before it to convince most of its Protestant readers that however great were his difficulties in showing the complexities of a state of mind which changed over time, here was an honest man. Subsequent attempts to convict Newman of error in his detail have not shaken the general acceptance of his integrity which was the general reaction to the work.

The Apologia also gave Protestant England an understanding of the romance of the Oxford Movement, as a spiritual and intellectual force for transforming the Church of England. It thereby did a high service to Anglo-Catholicism, as well as to the Roman Catholic Church, and occasioned Newman’s resumption of his old friendships with Richard Church and Keble, who died only two years later, while making Newman himself a respected figure in the Victorian pantheon of great men, as one of whom the ordinary Briton could be proud.

There was a further triumph, as yet unforeseen in 1865, in Newman’s publication in the Jesuit periodical The Month of ‘The Dream of Gerontius’, a poem describing the soul’s departure through death to Purgatory. As well as softening the harshness of much Catholic teaching on the last things – the soul is cleansed in water as well as fire – ‘The Dream’ supplied popular Victorian popular hymnody with two of its favourite hymns, ‘Praise to the holiest in the height’ and ‘Firmly I believe and truly’, and later gained a further popularity among Protestants, astonishing in so ‘popish’ a production, through the setting of most of the text by Edward Elgar.

Newman’s new moral stature confirmed his standing with the less aggressively neo-Ultramontane body of English Catholics, including much of the aristocracy and gentry, apprehensive of the policies of Newman’s sometime friend and fellow convert, Henry Edward Manning, who in 1865 succeeded Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster. Manning was responsible for the failure of Newman’s various attempts to establish an Oratory at Oxford, on the grounds of Rome’s policy of opposition to religiously mixed education: after all, it was that opposition, embodied in the person of Paul Cullen, which had inspired the creation of the Catholic University in Dublin. Newman’s reply in 1865 to the attack in Edward Bouverie Pusey’s Eirenicon on Faber’s extravagant Mariology defended the moderation of the Church’s Marian teaching in both the English and Roman traditions, by invoking an argument, persuasive to Anglo-Catholics, which cited the second-century St Justin’s description of the Virgin as the Second Eve.

Newman did not respond to Pusey’s twin assault on Manning’s doctrine of the papacy. Newman himself believed in papal infallibility, as a private opinion: he was not a Gallican, or a Liberal Catholic, but a moderate Ultramontane. He thought, however, that it was ‘inopportune’ at the time to define the doctrine, and held this position consistently throughout the period before and during the First Vatican Council (1869–70), which made the dogma binding on Roman Catholics. Yet the Council’s definition, however outrageous it might seem to Protestants and liberals, disappointed the more extreme neo-Ultramontanes by keeping to the narrow confines of the Roman tradition of teaching on the matter. Newman suffered embarrassment when his private letter to his bishop, William Bernard Ullathorne, then in Rome, became public, describing the keener partisans of defining the doctrine as ‘an insolent and aggressive faction’.

But Newman was impressed by the gradual submission of the whole episcopal hierarchy to the new decree, and after it had been intemperately attacked by William Ewart Gladstone, he defended it in the traditional restricted sense in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in 1875. The Letter pointed out that the pope’s infallibility did not mean impeccability or sinlessness, and disarmed critics by listing numerous instances of past papal bad behaviour. Infallibility does not endorse the pope’s private theological opinions, and only extends to an official definition concerning faith and morals, and not to matters of secular fact or history, or to particular commands. In an infallible utterance, the pope must intend to address the whole Catholic world, ex cathedra Petri, from St Peter’s chair, and not just order or instruct a part of it. Such definitions are not a primary means of moral teaching, which arises from conscience. Infallibility belongs only to the words of the definition itself, and does not extend to its supporting documents or arguments.

Newman’s understanding of infallibility has been generally accepted by the modern Church, and has been clearly exercised only twice in the modern era, to define the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, in 1854, and the Assumption in 1950. Newman also had to answer Gladstone’s charge that the doctrine had made a difference to the civil allegiance of Roman Catholics to the Crown. Newman replied that infallibility did not apply to such a political loyalty, and that in after-dinner etiquette, he would toast the pope, but conscience first, thereby restating his primary loyalty to this inner ‘aboriginal Vicar of Christ’ as the pope within: belief in Rome depends upon the very obedience to conscience which the pope could not disturb without undermining himself.

Newman’s reference to the ‘malaria’ at the foot of St Peter’s caused disquiet in Rome, as referring to the papal curia, which took exception to parts of the document, and proposed in 1876 to censure it.⁷ The move was stopped by Manning, now a cardinal, on the grounds that Newman had provided the most sympathetic and winning interpretation of the Vatican decrees to the British Protestant public. Indeed Manning supported the Duke of Norfolk’s action in 1879 to secure for Newman a cardinal’s hat, but Manning chose to interpret literally Newman’s formal refusal of the honour: a non-episcopal cardinal had normally to reside in Rome, and Newman did not wish to negotiate the point with Pope Leo XIII. In the end, Newman received the hat, declaring that the cloud had lifted from him forever. His motto as cardinal, ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’ (‘heart speaks to heart’), summed up his experience of both the communion of believers and of God Himself. His long ordeal of trial by the very authorities which he had tried to uphold, both as an Anglican and as a Roman Catholic, was at an end.

Newman was brought up against the issue of authority in republishing his Anglican works. Here he saw that it was impossible to alter the record of his past opinions, but for the two-volume collection The Via Media, containing both the third edition of his Lectures on the Prophetical Office and a miscellaneous body of Anglican publications, including his retractions of his anti-Roman opinions, he wrote a long corrective Preface answering the charge of corruption, in which he set out his mature thoughts on the distribution of functions within the Church. The key, he thought, lay in Christ’s three offices as Prophet, Priest and King, which are exercised by the Church in His name. The Priestly Office includes worship, piety and the spiritual life. Its credal note is Holiness, its instrument the affections, its aim or end is devotion, and its bad tendency is to superstition. It is chiefly the activity of priesthood and people. The Prophetical Office is intellectual, theological and philosophical. Its credal note is Apostolicity, its instrument is reason, its aim or end is truth. Its bad tendency is towards rationalism or heresy, and it is chiefly the activity of the theologian. The Regal Office has the care of rule, government and administration. Its credal marks are Oneness and Catholicity, its instrument is command, its end or aim is order, its bad expression is tyranny, and it is chiefly exercised by the papacy and curia. In short, given that the Church consists of peccable mortals, there is a natural tendency of the offices to exceed their proper sphere and to collide, giving rise to the conflict and scandal that the enemies of the Church always hold against her.

The implications, which Newman delicately suggested rather than spelled out in detail, are clear, in a lesson in common tolerance. The theologian should respect the old Neapolitan crone who chattered to her crucifix, for within her seeming idolatry lies a kernel of true devotion. The theologian cannot be the final arbiter of truth, and Rome should provide space for theological disagreement and debate, and only condemn when the faith is in danger. Newman’s categories were enlarged by the Baron Friedrich von Hügel as the ‘ethico-mystical’, the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘institutional’ in his work The Mystical Element of Religion (1908) into a general theory of religion, but Newman’s work also suggests that, as in contemporary economic or evolutionary theory, a true balance can emerge should conflict occur.

The ‘Preface’ could be taken as the ecclesial summit of Newman’s long religious pilgrimage. He had found his early Evangelicalism lacking in a defence in reason. His brief flirtation in liberalism showed its deficiency in faith, his Anglo-Catholicism proved to be deficient in order. He thought that Liberal Catholicism leaned too far towards reason, neo-Ultramontanism too far towards order. There was a balance, a classic position, which held each with its due weight in its proper relation to the others.

This attempt to analyse the constitutional complexity of the Church had its complement in Newman’s effort to show the structural complexity of personal belief. Whereas his works usually were written for particular occasions, to answer a case or meet a challenge, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), which had a large number of false beginnings over the years, was an uncharacteristically systematic study from its rebarbative opening sentence, ‘Propositions (consisting of a subject and predicate united by the copula) may take a categorical, conditional, or interrogative form’.⁸ With a theory of knowledge resting on empiricists like John Locke, Newman argued that the mind operates by receiving the real images or impressions of individual objects, which are private and personal to the receiver. General public notions are based upon them, but there are many such notions of which a person may have no personal experience but of which he has only heard or read. But that gives rise to two modes of argument, about matters of which individuals have a real personal experience, from the inside, and notions which they only know from externals or at second hand. Newman calls the first real inference, leading to conclusions which as assents or assertions are held with certitude. He thereby explained the fundamental conflicts in conviction between one person and another as arising ultimately from the differences in what they find in experience to be real.

Of course, the same real forms of experience give rise to wider loyalties, as to a flag, a nation or a Church. But because such loyalties are ultimately rooted in what the individual finds real, they lead to divergences in any argument about them. In this, religion is like other subject areas in which differences are not to be resolved by reason alone. Yet such convictions are not simply irrational, though the arguments supporting them are only implicit and unstated. The mind may find a certitude in conclusions from probable arguments which accumulate to reinforce one another, and indeed, as Wittgenstein was to recognize, holds a host of propositions as certain which it has never thought to confirm, such as the claim that Great Britain is an island. Here, in spite of Locke’s argument that beliefs should be held with a degree of conviction which is in proportion to the evidence for them, such propositions do not become more certain if further proofs are found for them. Certitude is absolute, not proportional to evidence, and is a normal and natural state of mind, even where it does not arise from a conclusion based on the binding formal logic of the syllogism or mathematical proof.

Yet such a certitude is not unreasonable, even though the mind may take a synoptic view of concrete particulars without propositional or linguistic intermediaries, as it brings to its materials a surplus which is not obviously in those materials themselves. A weather-wise peasant surveying the clouds, or a Napoleon concluding his strategy from a swift survey of his opposing armies, or even in mathematics, a Newton pointing to the rule for finding the imaginary root of equations, seems to have a power of argument, which is common sense in the multitude, in matters of practical everyday judgement, but is a special skill in the gifted and genius in the few. Newman called this power to judge (with reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) the Illative Sense, and was thereby seeking to show the complex rationality of disciplines outside mathematics and logic, in a manner which has had its influence on philosophers to the present day. The Grammar was Newman’s last independent major book, his attempt to show the new scientific spirits, who insisted on mathematical or empirical proofs for everything, that religious belief is, with other kinds of mental activity, a normal and natural activity of the mind, as indeed are such other areas in which the mind makes reasoned judgements on the basis of real experience, from aesthetics to human relations.

Newman devoted much of his remaining old age to the revision and republication of his complete works. This, however, left much in manuscript which has seen the light of day since, and he has been shown to be one of the greatest letter-writers of the nineteenth century by the publication, from 1961, of his letters in thirty-one volumes. They show him exercising his full literary powers in all his moods, from tenderness and affection to sarcasm and rebuke.

Newman would have disapproved the opinions of those secular admirers who think that his genius conjured masterpieces from passing dead-and-gone theological controversies. His output was mainly ecclesiological, a gigantic exercise in showing the compatibility of the critical spirit with Roman Catholicism. His wider reputation has grown with time, but this has been especially true in his own communion, in which Rome has declared him Venerable. He did, however, confront a major historic difficulty as a Roman Catholic. His career in the Church coincided with the neo-Ultramontane movement among Catholics to reaffirm their loyalty to Rome, as the papacy became the symbol of Catholic resistance to liberal and anticlerical attacks upon the Church in Catholic countries, and the heart of her demands for spiritual independence from the State. This was especially so in Italy where nationalists assailed the States of the Church. The personal benevolence of Pius IX (1846–78), the longest ruling pope in history, helped to redefine him as the centre of a cult aided by new technologies, as cheap colour printing made his picture available to every Catholic home, and the popular press and the telegraph carried his words to the remotest corners of the earth.

Neo-Ultramontanism had much to be said for it: it helped to inspire the largest efflorescence of the religious life in the Church’s history, not least in the new orders of women, and through a figure like Cardinal Manning, sustained a renaissance of interest in social justice. Above all, it had defended, often heroically, a principle which was more to Newman than life itself, both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, the sovereignty and independence of the Church. But though many of the leading neo-Ultramontanes were also laymen like Ward, the movement reinforced clericalism and central authority, in a Church which Newman thought had enough of both already. So it was that Newman’s lack of enthusiasm for the Temporal Power, and his defence of the role of the laity and of the critical role of the theologian, made him suspect as less than wholeheartedly Ultramontane to Rome’s more embattled defenders, such as his sometime Anglican disciples Frederick William Faber and William George Ward.

But the chief English Liberal Catholic critic of Rome, Lord Acton, and his great German theologian ally Ignaz von Döllinger, found Newman equally unsatisfactory as an ally, especially in his refusal to attack Rome openly. Newman’s first major biographer Wilfrid Ward made Newman the spokesman for a lonely ‘Via Media’ in the Catholic Church, between liberal Catholics and neo-Ultramontanes, reflecting Ward’s own ‘Via Media’ between the Modernists and the integralists around St Pius X. Even this, however, had the disadvantage of turning Newman, who was always surrounded by friends and sympathizers, into a solitary martyr for the truth. The Modernists like George Tyrrell themselves confessed that however stimulating they found Newman, especially in framing a non-propositional understanding of divine Revelation, he would never have been a recruit to their cause. More recent liberal Catholics who invoke his name tend to ignore his massive and fundamental orthodoxy. Newman’s mature insistence that the theologian is not the sovereign power in the Church but must defer to the pope and curia placed severe limits on his own radicalism.

On the other hand, to call him a conservative or a traditionalist is to ascribe to him a defensiveness which he did not possess, and to misunderstand his sheer originality and quality of mind. He did not repeat the past, but offered a new interpretation of it. He aspired to show that orthodoxy and criticism were compatible with each other, and that above all, the Church could only welcome truth.