by Edward Short
Newman died on the evening of 11 August 1890. A good sense of the impact of his death on his contemporaries can be gleaned from the obituaries that appeared in contemporary newspapers: in an appendix to the 32nd volume of Newman’s Letters and Diaries, they run to over sixty pages. For a sense of one aspect of his achievement, readers can turn to his books. Throughout his career, Newman remained extraordinarily prolific. Some of his more noteworthy books include The Tamworth Reading Room (1841); Oxford University Sermons (1843); Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845); Loss and Gain (1847); Anglican Difficulties (1850); Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851); Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864); An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870); The Idea of a University (1873); and A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875). In addition to these, Newman also wrote splendid sermons and letters.
Since most of the contemporaries I chose to cover were Protestants, it might be useful to describe something of the Anglican ethos from which Newman bolted. In 1884, Newman had occasion to contrast the Anglican with the Catholic Church in England and, speaking of the former, he wrote: “think of the numbers, the wealth, the prestige, the popularity, the political weight of that communion; of the knowledge of the world, the learning, the traditions of its three centuries. Think of its place in English history, its biographies, ecclesiastical and lay, its noble buildings, memorials often of the Catholic past but in the occupation of Protestantism …” These were the many enticing emblems of the power of the Established Church on which Newman turned his back when he converted to Catholicism. In contrast, there were no plums associated with Catholicism in England. When he asked what Catholics had to show “in contra,” Newman’s answer was not entirely facetious: “the Gunpowder Plot and the blundering Stuarts!”34
Tract 90 (1841) is another good way into the Anglican world that Newman left because it famously precipitated what would become the crisis of Tractarianism. Newman wrote the tract to keep such young Rome-leaning Anglicans as William George Ward and Francis Oakeley within the Church of England by arguing that the 39 Articles, to which all dons, as well as Anglican clergymen were required to subscribe, “do not oppose catholic teaching; they but partially oppose Roman dogma.”35 In effect, he was arguing for the inclusiveness of the Articles, which Elizabeth I had originally framed, in part, to conciliate her more obdurately Catholic subjects. Yet this was not how the majority of Newman’s co-religionists saw matters. For the bishops, as for most of the English, the Articles were unambiguously Protestant and Newman was guilty of trying to subvert them. Indeed, there were some who were convinced that Newman’s object in interpreting the Articles thus was to Romanize the English Church and when that failed to abscond with as many converts as he could. Newman himself would always claim that he was baffled by the fierce indignation and indeed fury that Tract 90 set off: as he told Maria Giberne, a lifelong friend, in writing the Tract he was “aiming at no idea at all.”36
The No Popery hysteria that gripped England after Tract 90 was mild compared to that which followed the reconstitution of the English hierarchy on Michaelmas Day, 1850, when Cardinal Wiseman spoke of how “Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light has long vanished and begins anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction …”37 In response, the English rabble, emboldened by Prime Minister Lord John Russell, burned Wiseman and the pope in effigy. This recrudescence of No Popery confirmed Newman’s sense of how averse the English were to the very idea of Catholicism, which he first encountered among his own siblings. In the chapters that follow, I show how Newman took this aversion as the great given of his work. The English had been effectively turned against their traditional faith, and he dedicated a good deal of his energies to trying to make them understand what they and their Protestant forbears had repudiated. One way that “the ruling spirits of the English Reformation” had contrived “to make Protestantism live,” Newman pointed out in The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), was to embody it in the person of the Sovereign.
English Protestantism is the religion of the throne: it is represented, realised, taught, transmitted in the succession of monarchs and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in argument, not in fact, not in the unanswerable controversialist, not in an apostolical succession, not in sanction of Scripture—but in a royal road to faith, in backing up a King whom men see, against a Pope whom they do not see. The devolution of its crown is the tradition of its creed; and to doubt its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. Kings are an Englishman’s saints and doctors; he likes somebody or something at which he can cry “huzzah,” and throw up his hat. Bluff King Hal, glorious Bess, the Royal Martyr, the Merry Monarch, the pious and immortal William, the good King George, royal personages very different from each other,—nevertheless, as being royal, none of them comes amiss, but they are all of them the objects of his devotion, and the resolution of his Christianity.38
This identification of Protestantism with the English throne—the cynosure of loyalty—helps account for the rancor set off by Tract 90, which was regarded as an attempt to undermine that loyalty. A public letter issued by the inhabitants of Blackburn to their Bishop, in the wake of Tract 90, gives a good account of the loathing Catholicism inspired in a people convinced that it was synonymous with treason:
Adhering as we hope we ever shall do, to the principles [of the English Reformation], we can feel neither sympathy nor respect for any of those pioneers of Popery who are industriously labouring to undermine the walls which they have been appointed to defend, and who seem resolved to reduce our country again to that yoke of bondage which our forefathers were unable to endure. We rejoice therefore … that we have amongst us a faithful watchman on one of the chief towers of our citadel, vigilant to detect, fearless to denounce, and equally zealous to counteract the insidious devices of traitors within our gates, or the open and more honest assaults of the enemy without.39
While many around him were succumbing to the general hysteria, Newman remained characteristically calm. After first becoming aware, in 1839, of his doubts about the legitimacy of the Church of England, he resolved to test his doubts before making any decisive move. He could counsel others against precipitancy because he had taken the same good counsel himself. As it happened, he waited for six long deliberative years. Apropos this period, he wrote in his Apologia that “A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back; and since the end is foreseen, or what is called a matter of time, it has little interest for the reader, especially if he has a kind heart.” Yet his letters of the period reveal another more complicated history: his gradual acceptance of a new, if quite uncertain, Catholic future.40 His Anglican deathbed was also a Catholic cradle.
To understand how revolutionary converting to Roman Catholicism was in nineteenth-century England, one has to recognize that for the English it was not only spiritually misguided—Roman Catholicism being synonymous with corruption, superstition and backwardness—it was also profoundly un-English. Readers can see something of this in Arthur Hugh Clough’s epistolary novel in verse, Amours de Voyage, and in Thackeray’s response to Newman’s lectures, Anglican Difficulties. The Irish might succumb to the despotism of priests but not free-born Englishmen. When it became clear that Newman would soon commit the unthinkable and convert, the ranks of the Anglo-Catholic faithful became aggrieved. As one Tractarian woman wrote to Jemima, “A sound from Littlemore and St. Mary’s seems to reach us even here … but, when the voice ceases … we shall have sad thoughts … Such was our guide, but he has left us to seek his own path—our champion has deserted us—our watchman whose cry used to cheer us is heard no more.”41 In my chapters on Keble and Pusey I show how Newman tried to convince his old Anglican friends how Catholicism completed Tractarianism. Yet, after Newman’s secession, many of the Tractarians he
left behind—including Keble and Pusey—spent the rest of their lives trying to salvage the Tractarianism that his departure had so deeply undermined.
Still, throughout his last years as an Anglican, Newman was adamant about dissuading impetuous would-be converts from taking a step they might regret. “Converts to Rome,” he insisted, must “not go out from St. Mary’s parsonage.”42 The career of Richard Waldo Sibthorp became the great cautionary tale. A Fellow of Magdalen College, Sibthorp converted to Roman Catholicism in 1841 and was ordained a priest in 1842. Shortly thereafter, while staying on the Isle of Wight, he began to have second thoughts. In 1843, he converted back to Anglicanism, claiming that it was the sea air that convinced him that Rome was, after all, πόρνη μεγαλη—the “great whore.”43
Denounced by the Anglican episcopate, cut by friends, vilified in the public prints, Newman retreated to the lay community he had set up at Littlemore, only venturing out to give sermons at St. Mary’s or to meet friends in Oxford. When he finally decided to convert on October 9th, 1845, he was received into the Church by the Passionist priest, Domenico Giovanni Luigi Barberi (1792–1849), a short, stocky, ebullient man who had worked with the English converts George Spencer and Ambrose de Phillipps De Lisle to pray for the conversion of England as early as 1828. When Barberi arrived on October 8th to receive Newman he was sopping wet from a five-hour coach journey from Aston, Staffordshire, where he had set up the first Passionist house in England. Later, he wrote back to his Superiors of his first encounter with Newman: “The door opened—and what a spectacle it was for me to see at my feet John Henry Newman begging me to hear his general confession and admit him into the bosom of the Catholic Church! And there by the fire he began his general confession with extraordinary humility and devotion.”44 That evening, Newman, Frederick Bowles and Richard Stanton made their profession of faith and Father Domenic gave them conditional baptism. The following morning, in the small Littlemore chapel, Father Dominic said mass on an altar improvised out of Henry Wilberforce’s writing desk, and all three were given communion. Two years later, Newman wrote to Father Dominic from Rome: “I have thought of writing to you many times since I have been here, but am not sorry to have waited till I can tell you something about ourselves. We are to be Oratorians … How long we shall remain here I do not know – when we return, we shall set up, I suppose, in some large town, and try to convert that numerous class of youths who at present have a little education and no religion …”45 Father Dominic’s impression of the man whom he set on his Catholic way was of a characteristic acuity: “In my judgment he is one of the most humble and lovable men I have met in my life.”46
Many other contemporaries from a wide range of backgrounds left behind striking impressions of Newman. After the publication of the Apologia, F. D. Maurice (1805–1872), the liberal theologian and founder of the Christian Socialist Movement, wrote to A. P. Stanley, Dr. Arnold’s biographer: “I would have given much that Kingsley had not got into this dispute with Newman. In spite of all apparent evidence, I do believe that Newman loves truth in his heart of hearts, and more now than when he was an Anglican.”47 That Kingsley was one of the most prominent members of the Christian Socialist Movement gave this regret added point. Thomas Huxley (1825–1895), Darwin’s disciple, regarded Newman as “one of the acutest and subtlest disputants who have ever championed Ecclesiasticism.”48 Edward Pusey, the learned Canon of Christ Church and later head of the die-hard Tractarians, wrote to Newman in July of 1839, after the death of his wife, of whom Newman had been very fond, “God bless and reward you for all your love and tender kindness to us … Your first visit was to me like that of an angel sent from God. It seems as though it had changed, in a degree, the character of my subsequent life … I pray that He may make you what, as you say, there are so few of, ‘a great saint.’”49 Edward Badeley, Q.C. the convert and lawyer to whom Newman turned for legal counsel during the Achilli trial, wrote to another of Newman’s friends, James Hope-Scott, who converted after the Gorham Judgment:50 “you will respect the high character of Dr. Newman, his genius, his learning, his piety, his zeal, the purity of his motives, the sanctity of his life.”51 An American from Virginia named William Ryan wrote to Newman in 1887: “Dr. Hage, the most eminent divine in the Southern Presbyterian Church, in referring to you recently, said he was catholic enough to wish the venerable English Cardinal well. Said he: ‘I regard Cardinal Newman as one of the Saintliest men of the Nineteenth Century, and when I am sorry and depressed I read one of Dr. Newman’s sermons for refreshment.’”52 Of all the many laudatory letters Newman received in his long life, this might have pleased him the most.
The Anglo-Irish poet and convert Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902), whose friends included Wordsworth, Edward Fitzgerald and Alfred Tennyson, and whose father had been at Harrow with Byron and Peel, was equally struck by Newman. At their first meeting, Newman put de Vere in mind “of a high-bred young monk of the Middle Ages, whose asceticism cannot quite conceal his distinguished elegance.”53 De Vere, whom his niece Lady Shaw described as “a gentleman to his fingertips, courteous, kindly, and honourable,” corresponded frequently with Newman and became one of his good friends.54 In a letter to Sara Coleridge, who made a wonderful sketch of Newman, de Vere confirmed that “Newman is wholly free from temptation toward infidelity … he anticipates an unprecedented outburst of infidelity all over the world … to withstand it he deems his special vocation … There is occasionally an iron hardness in Newman; but in him, as in Dante … an exquisite and surpassing sweetness.”55 Nothing in his long life pleased de Vere more than walking in his beloved Curragh Chase in Limerick, which gave his thinking a certain philosophical balance. When Huxley, Mill and Tyndall began publishing their attacks against what they claimed was the irrationality of the Christian faith, de Vere marveled at how his contemporaries could credit them: Comtists, after all, knew nothing of God—not even that He existed.56 In recognition of de Vere’s interest in Irish affairs—he worked heroically to save lives during the famine—Newman appointed him to the chair of Political and Social Science of the Catholic University in Dublin, though no Catholic Irish students would enroll in any of the proposed lectures of the Anglo-Irish convert.57 After Lord Frederick Cavendish, the newly appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland, was hacked to death with surgical knives by Fenians in Phoenix Park, de Vere wrote a prescient pamphlet, Constitutional and Unconstitutional Political Action (1882), which, had it been read, might have spared the place that James Joyce called Errorland a century of additional violence.58 De Vere’s poetry is unreadable but his auto-biography and letters are full of interesting things. In one, this tall, spare, genial man wrote with moving simplicity of what prompted his conversion: “My convictions with respect to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church seemed to me to reach such a degree of certainty and moral urgency as left me no choice, as a conscientious man, desirous of being sincere with himself and with others, and of obeying the will of God.”59 Here was confirmation of precisely the religious certainty that Newman would defend in the Grammar of Assent (1870), which Gerard Manley Hopkins praised for its “justice and candour and gravity and rightness of mind …”60 Unfortunately, when Hopkins offered to write a commentary of the Grammar, Newman turned him down, telling him: “I could not, as a matter of conscience, allow you to undertake a work which I could not but consider as at once onerous and unnecessary …”61 Hopkins, who was fond of Duns Scotus’s insights into the individuality of knowledge, might have written a lively commentary.
The man who inspired so much respect and affection was self-deprecatory, even dismissive about his writings. Apropos his brilliant sermon on religious development, which he would later expand into An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), he wrote to Pusey: “If any one values his luncheon on Thursday, he must not go to hear me at St. Mary’s, for my sermon is of portentous length—and my only satisfaction is that, if any persons go out of curiosity, they will be punished.”62 About his Fifteen Sermons Pr
eached Before the University of Oxford (1843), he was even more impatient: “I am publishing my University Sermons, which will be thought sad dull affairs—but having got through a subject I wish to get rid of it.”63 Later, when he sent Dean Church his Grammar of Assent (1870) he wrote hoping that it would not “bore him.”64 It is some proof of the abiding power of these and indeed most of his books that since their first publication they have never gone out of print. Yet for Newman, writing was never an end in itself.
William Clifford, the Bishop of Clifton, certainly recognized this when he preached at Newman’s funeral mass.
God in his tender mercy towards this land, chose him for a special work, and endowed him with gifts specially fitting him for that work … But the preaching and writings of Dr. Newman … are far from constituting the whole or even the greater part of what, at this time, he was doing for the Church of God. His kind and gentle nature, the sympathy he always felt towards those who were in anxiety and doubt, and the art he had of gaining their confidence and ministering to them comfort and advice, no less than the high esteem in which his learning was held, caused men of all classes and callings to have recourse to him in their difficulties, and he was most indefatigable in giving them his assistance both in person and by letter. There is scarcely an individual of any note who has been received into the Church in the last thirty years who has not in the course of his search after truth received assistance from Cardinal Newman. Many owe their conversion, under God, entirely to him.65
This was an assessment with which Cardinal Manning, who was not always uncritical of Newman, concurred: “beyond the power of all books has been the example of his humble and unworldly life: always the same, in union with God; and in manifold charity to all who sought him. He was the centre of innumerable souls, drawn to him as Teacher, Guide, and Comforter, through long years, and especially in the more than forty years of his Catholic life. To them he was as a spring of light and strength from a supernatural source.”66