Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  Shairp certainly understood why Newman’s life merited close study—even by the man who lived it. “The look and bearing of the preacher were as of one who dwelt apart, who, though he knew his age well, did not live in it. From his seclusion of study, and abstinence, and prayer, from habitual dwelling in the unseen, he seemed to come forth that one day of the week to speak to others of the things he had seen and known.”10 This was an important point. One of the reasons why Newman fascinated his contemporaries is precisely because he did not share their worldly preoccupations. Yes, he paid attention to what was happening in England and in Europe: the journalism he wrote for various Tractarian and Catholic papers demonstrates what a well-informed, critical interest he took in political, social and imperial affairs. He was a dutiful and beloved parish priest who never neglected the souls under his charge. He had many friends and was himself a considerate, loyal friend. But he lived outside the world and only entered it to reaffirm the truths of religion. His sermons were the most immediate means with which he accomplished this, and for an introduction to his Anglican sermons, the literary critic Eric Griffiths is one of the best guides.

  Newman had an acute suspicion of the workings of imagination in the religious life, of those who ‘mix up the Holy Word of God with their own idle imaginings.’ … He specifically mistrusts the power of imagination to doll up religious life and deliver it over as a toy for the delectation of a consumer who then ‘appreciates’ it rather than being judged by it. The sermons persistently warn against religious allure: ‘Men admire religion, while they can gaze on it as a picture. They think it lovely in books;’ ‘Many a man likes to be religious in graceful language;’ ‘I am much opposed to certain religious novels … they lead men to cultivate the religious affections separate from religious practice;’ ‘It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples’ feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation.’ The danger of whetting a taste for religion is that, once aroused, it leads people to consider religion as a matter of taste: they adopt the ‘notion that, when they retire from the business of their temporal calling, then they may (in a quiet, unexceptionable way of course) consult their own tastes and likings.’ Even the pious delight of his undergraduate audience, their very interest in him, might turn out in a parodic reversal of his hopes and intention to be complicit with that liberalism and doctrinal indifferentism against which he preached …11

  In 1832, after completing his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman toured the Mediterranean with his dear friend Hurrell Froude and his High Church father, Archdeacon Froude, visiting Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, Sicily, Naples, and Rome, where he was impressed by the devoutness of the Roman Catholic faithful and the power of the Roman Catholic liturgy, though he continued to regard the Roman Catholic Church as “crafty,” “polytheistic,” “degrading,” and “idolatrous.”12 Whether as an Anglican or a Catholic, Newman never minced his words.

  For all of his Protestant prejudices, Newman found Rome fascinating. Many Victorian Anglicans left behind lively accounts of their first encounters with the eternal city. Dickens, after attending Mass in Rome, recalled how “Dotted here and there, were little knots of friars … in their coarse brown dresses and peaked hoods, making a strange contrast to the gaudy ecclesiastics of higher degree, and having their humility gratified to the utmost, by being shouldered about, and elbowed right and left, on all sides. Some of these had muddy sandals and umbrellas, and stained garments: having trudged in from the country. The faces of the greater part were as coarse and heavy as their dress; their dogged, stupid, monotonous stare at all the glory and splendour, having something in it, half miserable and half ridiculous.” The Mass itself left less an impression on him. “There was certainly nothing solemn or effective in it; and certainly very much that was droll and tawdry,” though he was, he admitted, moved by the “raising of the Host, when every man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his sword on the ground,” which he considered had a “fine effect.”13 But no account of Rome was as rich and complex as Newman’s. After attending his first Mass, he wrote to his mother, whose own Huguenot Protestantism was unshakable: “as I looked on, and saw … the Holy Sacrament offered up, and the blessing given, and recollected I was in church, I could only say in very perplexity my own words, ‘How shall I name thee, Light of the wide west, or heinous error-seat?’”14 In April 1833 when the Froudes left Rome for France, Newman decided to return to Sicily by himself, which, as he wrote, “filled me with inexpressible rapture, and to which (in spite of dirt and other inconveniences) I feel drawn as by a loadstone.”15 Here is one of those episodes in Newman’s life which the biographer dismissive of hagiography will find problematic. Why was Newman so drawn to this place? Why did he insist on leaving the Froudes and going there alone? He says himself that he was “drawn by a strange love of Sicily to gaze upon its cities and its mountains.”16 But clearly there was something else that drove him to make this solitary, risky sojourn. It was not simply love of Sicily or love of beauty or a traveler’s whim. Whether he realized it or not, Newman was a pilgrim in Italy, not a tourist. What are those lines by T. S. Eliot from Four Quartets?

  In order to arrive at what you do not know

  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance

  In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by the way of dispossession

  In order to arrive at what you are not

  You must go through the way in which you are not …17

  At Leonforte, when Newman fell seriously ill with typhoid fever, he repeated aloud, “I have not sinned against light.” Near death, he was convinced that he would be spared death. In the lucid intervals of fever he told himself not once but many times: “God has work for me.”18 Biography alone cannot make sense of these things. In a Rambler piece on the life of Saint John Chrysostom (1859), Newman wrote that what readers wanted was “to trace and study … the real, hidden but human life, or the interior of such glorious creations of God …”19 To get at the essence of Newman’s “real, hidden but human life” we must similarly avail ourselves of the resources of hagiography, without confusing hagiography with panegyric.

  After recovering from fever, with the help of a loyal Neapolitan servant named Gennaro, who had been a sailor aboard the Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, Newman sailed from Palermo to Marseille on an orange boat. While becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio, he wrote the poem that expresses so movingly his trust in the Light that meant so much to him.

  Lead, Kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom,

  Lead Thou me on!

  The night is dark, and I am far from home—

  Lead Thou me on!

  Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

  The distant scene,—one step enough for me.

  When Newman arrived back in England in July of 1833, John Keble preached his famous assize sermon “On National Apostasy,” which Newman always regarded as the start of the Oxford Movement. Advanced by a series of tracts, the Movement became known as Tractarianism. Newman, together with John Keble, Hurrell Froude and Edward Pusey, sought to reinvigorate the Church of England by returning it to its apostolic roots. In this regard, D. C. Somervell was right to recognize that “Its original appeal was the vocational pride of the clergy, and its principal adherents have always been found among the clergy and what are conveniently called the clerically-minded laity.”20 Froude called the Tractarians “ecclesiastical agitators.”21 One of the ironies of the Oxford Movement was that Newman was eventually condemned by precisely the same bishops whose episcopal authority he worked so brilliantly to advance. Eventually, in seeking to defend Anglicanism, Newman came to see that it was indefensible. In September, 1843, he resigned the living of St. Mary’s and in October, 1845, he resigned his Oriel fellowship.

  In converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845, Newman left behind not only Oriel and St. Mary’s but
an entire English way of life. In Vanity Fair, the profile of Newman accompanying Spy’s caricature confirmed how “This secession came upon the Anglican Church as a crushing blow under which, as Mr. Disraeli said, ‘it reeled and from which it has not recovered and never will,’ while the Roman Catholics declared it to be, as it indeed it was, ‘the most momentous conversion which has occurred since that of Queen Christina of Sweden.’”22 In my chapters on Keble and Pusey, I look at how Newman’s conversion affected his relations with these two prominent Anglo-Catholic figures. In my chapter on Thackeray, I discuss how one of Newman’s favorite novelists became fascinated with Newman after attending his King William Street lectures in 1850, later published as Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church, which was largely composed with Keble and Pusey in mind.

  After being ordained in Rome, Newman returned to England and founded the Birmingham Oratory, where he left behind Oxford’s undergraduates to minister to a lively mix of Irish Catholics, Old Catholics, English converts and Anglicans doubtful of the legitimacy of the Church of England. In 1853 Newman founded the Catholic University in Dublin and in 1859 the Oratory School, where Hilaire Belloc spent his schooldays and Gerald Manley Hopkins was a master. In my chapter, “Newman and the Americans,” I show how Newman’s idea of university education may have stalled on the banks of the Liffey but revived in America, where it helped form and civilize the immigrant citizenry of that exuberant land. In 1864, Newman published his great autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in response to Charles Kingsley claim in Macmillan’s Magazine that, for Newman and the Catholic clergy, truth for its own sake need not and on the whole ought not to be a virtue. With the publication of the Apologia, the deep suspicion with which Protestant England had formerly regarded Newman changed to admiration, sympathy and affection.

  Shortly before the publication of the Apologia, Newman began corresponding with Richard Holt Hutton, the editor of the Spectator. In my chapter on Hutton, I show how attuned he was to Newman’s war against liberalism, which he saw, in part, as a war against the rising positivism of the nineteenth century. The critical evenhandedness that Hutton brought to his study of Newman is absent from the work of Frank Turner, the Yale professor of history, who follows the Victorian controversialist Walter Walsh (1847–1912), in seeing Newman as at once deluded and duplicitous: the usual straw man of No Popery polemics.23 In his introduction to his edition of the Apologia, Prof. Turner asserts that “… Newman had great difficulty establishing a substantial link other than the term itself between what he designated as liberalism in the 1830s and 1840s and that of the 1860s.” To try to substantiate this, Turner quotes another assertion, this time from Owen Chadwick: “The fact is, what Newman denounced as liberalism, no one else regarded as liberalism.” This would have been news to Pusey, Keble, Hurrell Froude, James Mozley, Cardinal Manning, Bishop Ullathorne, Richard Church, Richard Holt Hutton and many other Anglicans and Catholics, who not only knew what Newman meant by liberalism but shared his apprehensions about it. Yet having made this unsubstantiated charge with respect to Newman’s contemporaries, Prof. Turner turns to Newman’s commentators and insists that “none of his well-informed commentators has been able to assign the concept substantial content or meaning because they have left it alienated from the historical and religious contexts …”24 This is another false assertion. If we revisit the work of Newman’s “well-informed commentators,” whether that of Richard Holt Hutton, Wilfrid Ward, Henry Tristram, Charles Stephen Dessain, Meriol Trevor or Ian Ker, we can see that all of them put Newman’s fight against liberalism in historical and religious context. Indeed, they give it center stage. For Father Tristram, the “supreme mission” of Newman’s life was “to stem, as far as it lay in his power, the tide of unbelief and to dissipate what seemed to him to be the ‘terrible deceit of these latter days.’” Accordingly, in his own excellent anthology of Newman’s work, published in 1948, he focused on Newman’s “protracted struggle against the ‘doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion,’ or ‘liberalism,’ as [Newman] called it, which from tentative beginnings in his earlier years continued to gather strength during the course of his life, and has become the great menace of to-day.”25 To substantiate his point, Father Tristram quoted not an interested Puseyite like Owen Chadwick but the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who had no axes to grind in these matters.

  The witness of history and of common sense tells us that systematic formulations are potent engines of emphasis, of purification, and of stability. Christianity would long ago have sunk into a noxious superstition, apart from the Levantine and European intellectual movement, sustained from the very beginning until now. This movement is the effort of Reason to provide an accurate system of theology… . Thus the attack of the liberal clergy and laymen, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, upon systematic theology was entirely misconceived. They were throwing away the chief safeguard against the wild emotions of superstition.26

  Here, in approving “the effort of Reason to provide an accurate system of theology,” Whitehead might be describing the work of the early Church Fathers, which meant so much to Newman’s religious development and, indeed, paved the way for his conversion. Prof. Turner exposes his own deep misunderstanding of Newman when he speaks of him as “a quasi schismatic priest and typical religious seeker.”27 Newman was not a religious seeker: he was a religious finder. As he told an unknown correspondent in 1874, “Means always cease when the end is obtained. You cease walking when you have got home — if you went on walking, you would get all wrong. Inquiry ends, when you at length know what you were inquiring about. When the water boils, you take the kettle off the fire; else, it would boil away. So it is with private judgment; till you have found the truth, it is the only way you have of arriving at it — but when you have got the truth, there is nothing to inquire about.”28 Prof. Turner is equally wrong to claim that Newman was “schismatic.” On the contrary, whether as an Anglican or a Catholic, Newman never abandoned unity because he never abandoned truth. In 1879, when he received his red hat, he pointedly referred to the fight against liberalism as the fight for truth:

  For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth … Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy … . As to Religion, it is a private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but … which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance.29

  Here Newman recognized how liberalism threatens not only the integrity but the objectivity of truth and, pace Prof. Turner, his fight against it in his own century continues to guide our fight against it in ours.

  Newman demonstrated his controversial mettle by rebutting the leader of England’s political liberals, William Ewart Gladstone, who charged that papal infallibility would undermine the loyalty of English Catholics. Newman responded with A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), which brilliantly parried Gladstone’s wild thrusts. In my chapter on Gladstone, I give an account of the fraught relationship between Newman and the Prime Minister in order to put one of Newman’s great works of controversy in context.

  Newman was made a Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. When the red hat was bestowed, the English, Irish, Scotch and American Residents in Rome issued a statement affirming that “We feel that in making you a Cardinal the Holy Father has not only given public testimony of his appreciation of your great
merits and of the value of your admirable writings in defence of God and His Church, but has also conferred the greatest possible honour on all English-speaking Catholics who have long looked up to you as their spiritual father and their guide in the paths of holiness.”30 In his later years, Newman beheld the unfolding of what he called “the great apostasia” with prophetic clarity. “My own belief,” he told one correspondent in 1864, “is, that, if there be a God, Catholicism is true; but this is the elementary, august, and sovereign truth, the denial of which is in progress. May He Himself give grace to those who shall be alive in that terrible day, to fight His battle well. All the forms of Protestantism, allow me to say, are but toys of children in the great battle between the Holy Catholic Roman Church and Antichrist.”31 Later, in 1873, speaking to seminarians at the opening of St. Bernard’s Seminary, he was even more admonitory: “I will admit that there were certain specific dangers to Christians at certain other times, which do not exist in this time … Still I think that the trials which lie before us are such as would appal and make dizzy even such courageous hearts as St. Athanasius, St. Gregory I, or St. Gregory VII. And they would confess that dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it … Christianity has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious.”32 That England should now be “the epicenter of the culture of death,” as one rather Newmanian English Catholic recently described it, would dismay but not surprise Newman.33