Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  For all the immense influence he had on his contemporaries, Newman was uncomfortable with the very notion of influence. “I assure you,” he wrote to one correspondent, “nothing has haunted me more continually for years than the idea that undergraduates are trusting me more than they should—and I have done many things by way of preventing it.”67 In another letter to John Keble, his confidante and fellow Tractarian, he wrote: “I am commonly very sluggish and think it a simple bore or nuisance to have to move or to witness movements … as to influencing people, making points, advancing and so on, I do not think these are matters which engross or engage me or even interest me.”68 “Of all persons,” he confessed to another correspondent, “I need guidance and comfort most.”69 Then, again, he was concerned that “… even those who think highly of me have the vaguest, most shadowy, fantastic notions attached to their idea of me; and feel a respect, not for me, but for some imagination of their own which bears my name.”70 He was never unaware of how influence can miscarry.

  In light of this distrust of influence, the sway Newman held over others was all the more extraordinary. “When I was fifteen or sixteen,” the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) recalled, “Newman taught me so much … things that will never be out of me … In an age of materialism, he taught me to venture on the unseen, and this so early that it was well in me when life began, and I was equipped before I went to Oxford with a real good panoply and it has never failed me … So he stands as a great image or symbol of a man … who put all this world’s life in one venture.”71 Matthew Arnold spoke for many of his agnostic contemporaries when he wrote to Newman in 1871: “We are all of us carried in ways not of our own making or choosing but nothing can ever do away the effects you have produced on me, for it consists in a general disposition of mind rather than in a particular set of ideas. In all the conflicts I have with modern Liberalism and Dissent, and with their pretensions and shortcomings, I recognize your work.”72 In the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough, which delves unsparingly into the misgivings of unbelief, the appeal of Newman was ubiquitous. Clough might have tried to resist it but it was always there. Clough’s friend, J. C. Shairp, who, as we have seen, left so vivid an account of what it was like to hear Newman’s legendary sermons at St. Mary’s, spoke for many of his contemporaries when he said that Newman was “a man in many ways the most remarkable that England has seen during this century, perhaps the most remarkable whom the English Church has produced in any century.”73

  What was it about the man that was so special? Frederic Rogers, a close friend, who later became Permanent Under Secretary for the Colonies, gave a good account of his personal appeal. “Newman seemed to have an intuitive perception of all that you thought and felt, so that he caught at once all that you meant or were driving at in a sentiment, a philosophical reflection, or a joke … And so there was in talking with him that combination of liveliness and repose which constitutes ease; you seemed to be talking with a better kind of self, which was drawing you upwards. Newman’s general characteristics—his genius, his depth of purpose; his hatred of pomp and affectation; his piercing insight into the workings of the human mind … are all matters of history.”74 The decorative artist and convert John Hungerford Pollen (1820–1902) singled out Newman’s charming attentiveness to the views of others: “Delightful it was … to hear him draw out with the gentlest possible forceps, what each friend or professor had to say on his own particular theme … He encouraged you to put your conclusions into terms; to see what they looked like from various sides … but all this under the form of easy conversation.”75 Mark Pattison, the author of the classic Memoirs of an Oxford Don (1885), had been a thoroughgoing Tractarian from 1840 to 1842 but when Newman converted he repudiated the Movement, charging that “the ‘Tracts’ desolated Oxford life, and suspended, for an indefinite period, all science, humane letters, and the first strivings of intellectual freedom …”76 Yet not even Pattison could deny the power of Newman’s influence. “Thin, pale, and with large lustrous eyes piercing through this veil of men and things, he hardly seemed made for this world. But his influence had in it something of magic. It was never possible to be a quarter-of-an-hour in his company without a warm feeling of being invited to take an onward step … Newman always tried to reach the heart and understanding of those with whom he had to do.”77

  He was at his best with the bereaving. Having lost his beloved sister Mary when she was 19 and he was 27, and so many other dear friends and family, he could readily empathize with the bereft. John Bramston, an Anglican vicar, who had not seen Newman in years, wrote him in 1844 of “the deep affliction it has pleased God to visit me withal—My dearest wife breathed her last this morning at 2 o’clock … Give me a line my dear friend and you may be blessed to support a tottering pilgrim in the narrow way.”78 Newman wrote back saying how vividly he remembered Bramston, who had gone out of his way 22 years before to put an awkward Newman at ease at a college party. “Time comes and goes, years pass,” Newman wrote, “but kind deeds, warm affections, services of love, the religious ties which bind heart to heart, remain.” He also remembered Bramston’s wife. “In great truth I say that there is no one scarcely whom I have seen but once, whose memory has been so fixed in me as hers …” As for counsel, Newman insisted that “I am not the person to teach or admonish you.” Yet, doubtless remembering the loss of Mary, he told Bramston: “This sorrowful time will pass away—but you will not lose what for the moment you may seem to have lost irrevocably. You will have greater comfort in looking back upon the past than you can now believe possible … for you are from henceforth by God’s great mercy one of those who have their ‘treasure in heaven.’”79

  William Lockhart, who spent some time at Littlemore, and converted in 1842, put it best when he spoke of Newman’s “simplicity, meekness and humility; God, not self, was the centre of all his thoughts …” He was “a seer who saw God, and spoke that which he had seen.”80

  This was the sympathetic response to Newman. There were less than sympathetic responses. The autodidact Congregationalist and hero of the free churches, A. M. Fairbairn (1838–1912), launched a blistering attack on Newman in a lively book called Catholicism Roman and Anglican (1899), which is still worth reading, in which he depicted his Catholic adversary as not only out of step with the triumphant liberalism of his age but actually afraid of it. What is remarkable about Fairbairn is how he manages to encapsulate so many of the criticisms lodged against Newman in his own lifetime and indeed, in some quarters, still lodged against him. For example, Fairbairn took issue with Newman for being a reactionary and a crypto-skeptic—something of which many positivists and Protestants of various stripes accused him. For Fairbairn, Newman’s “whole inner history” could be summed up by recognizing how “He not only doubted reason, but he mocked and scorned all who sought to enlist it in the services of religion. It was to him no witness or oracle of God, but simply a servant, whose duty was to obey, and whose only virtue was obedience.”81 And he sought to substantiate his claim by contrasting Newman’s alleged resistance to reason with the presumed progress that the various rationalists of the age were making. Thus, for Fairbairn, “the formative period of Newman’s life, 1826–1833, and the decade that followed, may be described as a period during which men were waiting for a relevant constructive interpretation of the Religion of Christ.

  The revolutionary forces were spent, constructive forces were at work in every region of thought and life; and they needed but the electric touch of a great religious ideal to be unified and made ministrant to Religion. The old monarchical and oligarchical theories having perished, the Philosophical Radicals were seeking, with but poor success, a new basis for politics, that they might determine what was the chief good; and new-methods in legislation, that they might promote and secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number. John Stuart Mill had just escaped from the dogmatic Empiricism of his father; had been spiritually awakened by the poetry of Wordsworth and the philosoph
y of Coleridge; and was looking about for a faith by which to order his life. Charles Darwin was just beginning to watch the methods of nature and to learn how to interpret her; and while Newman was making verses and gathering impulses in the Mediterranean, he was away in the Beagle exploring many seas and lands. In the “loneliest nook in Britain,” under the shadow of hills and within sight of moorlands consecrated by the heroism and martyrdoms of his Covenanting forefathers, Thomas Carlyle was doing his strenuous best to wed the thoughts that had come to him from German literature and philosophy, with the substance and spirit of his ancestral faith; the effort taking visible shape in the egoistic idealism of his Sartor Resartus, and leading him to look into man and his recent history with the eyes that were to see in the French Revolution the tragedy of retribution and righteousness. Transcendental Idealism was in full career in Germany; Hegel and Schleiermacher were lecturing in Berlin, the one applying his philosophy to the explication of religion and history, the other his criticism to the documents, facts, and doctrines of the Christian faith; while in Tubingen, Strauss was combining and developing the two, with results that were to break upon the alarmed world in a certain Leben Jesu. In France, Saint Simon had developed his Nouveau Christianisme, pleading that Religion might be more an energy directing “all social forces towards the moral and physical amelioration of the class which is at once the most numerous and the most poor”: and Comte had begun the Cours de Philosophie Positive, explaining how the theological and metaphysical states had been passed, and the final and positive state had come; and what were the new ideas of Society, of God, and of Religion on which it was to rest.82

  Here were the contemporaries whom Fairbairn considered the choice and master spirits of the age: Darwin, Carlyle, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Saint Simon and Comte. Newman was not completely opposed to all of these figures. He had the odd good word for Carlyle. “I commend to your notice,” he wrote to his sister Jemima in 1839, “if it comes in your way, Carlyle on the French Revolution—a queer, tiresome, obscure, profound, and original work. The writer has not very clear principles and views, I fear, but they are very deep.”83 And he had fun with Comte’s lunatic metaphysics. “As time went on, I believe he considered religion necessary for the mind – but it was all subjective. I believe he instituted a worship, a rite, to the Aggregate of humanity, the Auto-Man. Religious books would be necessary on this score—and nothing could be better than those of the Middle Ages. He had a great admiration for the Medieval Church—it educated the world in the only possible way for his own truer and purer system …”84 And he did not regard all of Darwin’s theories as incompatible with Christianity: “We do not deny or circumscribe the Creator, because we hold he has created the self-acting originating human mind, which has almost a creative gift; much less then do we deny or circumscribe His power, if we hold that He gave matter such laws as by their blind instrumentality moulded and constructed through innumerable ages the world as we see it. If Mr Darwin in this or that point of his theory comes into collision with revealed truth, that is another matter – but I do not see that the principle of development, or what I have called construction, does.”85 For all of his readiness to see the good points in these men, Newman did not imagine them or their theories capable of saving the world, and it was for this that Fairbairn found him reprehensible:

  Everywhere the struggle was towards positive ideas, constructive ideals, such an interpretation of man’s nature, history, and universe, as would tend to a more perfect organization of society and a better ordering of life. Newman’s attitude was precisely the opposite. Change was in the air; he felt it, feared it, hated it. He idealized the past, he disliked the present, and he trembled for the future. His only hope was in a return to the past, and to a past which had never existed save in the imagination of the romancer. What he hated and resisted he did not take the trouble to understand … . One seeks in vain in Newman’s early writings—poems, essays, articles, pamphlets, tracts—for any sign or phrase indicative of real comprehension of the forces he opposed. He does not comprehend their real nature or drift; what reasons they have for their being, what good they have in them, what truth; what wrongs to redress, what rights to achieve: he only feels that they are inimical to his ideals. There is no evidence that he ever tried to place himself in the position of the philosophical radical, or the rational critic, or the constructive socialist, or the absolute idealist; and look at his and their questions through their eyes and from their standpoint. He hated them and their works too utterly to attempt to do so—perhaps he was haunted by a great doubt as to what might happen if he did … . He emphasized the church idea, the historical continuity, sanctity, authority, rights, prerogatives and powers of the organized society or body which called itself here the Anglican, there the Catholic church. The more he claimed for the church, the more he had to claim; the more he set it in opposition to the movement and tendencies of living thought, the more absolute and divine he had to make its authority. The logic of the situation was inexorable,—if the church alone could save man from the spirit embodied in “Liberalism,” then it must be a divine and infallible church, the vicar and voice of God on earth. But the logic of the situation was one, and the logic of history another and tragically different. In the past Catholic authority had bent like the rush in the river before the stream and tendency of thought; if it had had divine rights it had been without divine wisdom; men and countries it had owned, it had been unable to hold; and for centuries the noblest life, the best minds, the highest and purest literatures of Europe had stood outside its pale … . Newman went to Rome, and carried with him, or drew after him, men who accepted his principles; but the “Liberalism” he hated went its way, all the mightier and more victorious for the kind of barrier he had tried to build against it. He succeeded wonderfully in making Roman Catholics of Anglicans; but he failed in the apologetic that saves the infidel, and baptizes the spirit of a rational and revolutionary age into the faith of Christ.86

  Here are charges against Newman that Owen Chadwick and the scurrilous Frank Turner would also bring, all combined into one compendious dossier. In this, Fairbairn’s treatment of Newman resembles Noel Annan’s treatment of Evelyn Waugh: for both Fairbairn and Annan, their Catholic subjects were “deviants” precisely because they dissented from the liberal consensus of their respective ages. This intolerance of dissent points up the sequacity that often defines rationalists.87 “For intellectuals,” as Paul Johnson observed, “far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior. Taken as a group, they are ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.”88 In his bright books Earthy Powers and Sacred Causes, the wonderfully dissentient Michael Burleigh showed just how irrational and destructive those ideas would prove. What set Newman apart from the intellectuals of his age was not only his Roman Catholicism, with its healthy distrust of the remedies of men, but his own ingrained independence, his readiness to judge things for himself, not in accordance with the approved dicta of parties or cliques. Adhering to the reasonable authority of the Church of Rome freed him to exercise his private judgment critically on issues on which Fairbairn was content to follow the shibboleths of his “rational and revolutionary age.”

  Fairbairn’s charges were also echoed by Frederick Meyrick (1827–1906), the High Church tutor, dean and bursar of Trinity College, Oxford, whose claim that “It is an entire mistake to suppose that the religious movement in Oxford of the last century owes its origin to Newman, or required his help for its success” provided Peter Nockles with his thesis for that slippery book, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857 (1994).89 For Meyrick, the Oxford Movement, “as a concerted movement, failed, and turned out a fiasco, because Newman led it. Keen as was
his intellect, Newman was never guided by his reason, but always by his emotions; and a man so constituted cannot lead a host to victory, though he may stir up in them the enthusiasm which, if directed aright, insures success.”90

  My readers should keep these criticisms of Fairbairn and Meyrick in mind while looking at the chapters that follow to see if any of them survive scrutiny. Did Newman idolize the past? Did he resist change? Was he dismissive of the views of others? Did he fail to understand the nature of the liberalism he opposed? Was he secretly skeptical himself and therefore intent on discounting the skepticism of others? Did he offer himself up to the direction of emotion? Was his preoccupation with the Roman Church authoritarian? Did he disdain reason? Did he embrace the infallibility of the Roman Church to escape the implications of skepticism? These are objections that some still lodge against Newman, and we should look at the record of his life, as it is found in his books and letters, to see if they hold water.

  In researching Newman and His Contemporaries, I discovered afresh what an important place Newman’s letters hold in his work. Of course, he set great store by letters. As he told his sister Jemima, “A man’s life is in his letters. Biographers varnish; they assign motives; they conjecture feelings; they interpret Lord Burleigh’s nods; but contemporary letters are facts.”91 This is not entirely true. Some biographers varnish but so do letter writers, and in any case, letters, like any documents, require interpretation. Ian Ker draws deeply on the letters in his great intellectual biography but never without showing how they relate to Newman’s books or his thought as a whole. In 1890, Anne Mozley published the letters of Newman’s Anglican period with minimal editorial comment, precisely in accordance with Newman’s own recommendations; but no one would now suggest that her two volumes adequately capture his Anglican career. The problem with Wilfrid Ward’s otherwise admirable biography is that he began his account in 1845, blithely assuming that Mozley’s two volumes already covered the earlier period of Newman’s life. Consequently, his own account is unbalanced. Nevertheless, Newman was certainly right to insist on the testimonial force of letters for any biographer wishing to arrive at a fair estimate of his subject. His own letters furnish this testimony by showing how much his interest in his own life was bound up with his interest in the lives of his contemporaries. Accordingly, I have made Newman’s letters my particular quarry. They are, after all, some of the best letters in the language. When all 33 volumes become more widely available in an affordable edition, more general readers will come to appreciate how wonderfully good they are. For my own purposes, the letters proved indispensable because they show like nothing else what animated Newman’s life, which was not only love of God but love of neighbor—a love which won over even the captious Fairbairn, whose last letter to Newman was a letter of thanks: “Your Eminence I desire to thank you very cordially for your courtesy in sending me the paper on ‘Scepticism used as a Preparation for Catholic Belief’. It will be my duty to weigh carefully its varied criticisms and elucidations and I gladly recognise its fair and judicial tone even where unable to admit the correctness of its views or the relevance of its arguments. I remain, Your Eminence Your very obedient Servant A. M. Fairbairn.”92 That the two men should have managed to finish their controversy on this amiable note pleased Newman. As he wrote to Richard Holt Hutton: “I have another great satisfaction. I sent Dr Fairbairn my new answer to him. He seems to have taken my act very kindly as ‘courteous’ – which was enough to enable me to write to thank him for his letter. And thus, although I suppose he will use his right to reply, I don’t expect anything from him of an unpleasant character.”93 In his controversy with Fairbairn, where their first principles were so irreconcilably opposed, Newman might have cited that apothegm of his from the Oxford Sermons: “When men understand what each other mean, they see, for the most part that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.” In confronting his liberal critics, Newman would often encounter this unbridgeable divide. Yet he brought to controversy more than first principles, and in this he reminds us of something else he said in his Oxford Sermons: