Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  In his later years, Thackeray recalled the faith that a life-threatening illness gave him when he was a young man, which suggests that the deflationary skepticism that he first learned from Fitzgerald did not altogether take: “when I was going to die as I thought I was one night when I had my illness, I was as easy in mind and as trustful of God and as confident in his wisdom & mercy, as St. Augustin or St. Theresa or Lady Huntingdon or the Revd Cesar Malan. I mean any Church man high or low …”151 At the same time, he contrasted this sharply with his Mother’s Evangelical faith, in a passage which suggests that one reason why he looked askance at religious certainty is that he associated it with fanaticism. “The very comforts you get from your religion the delights of rapturous faith with wh you receive and peruse the oracles of Heaven and wh you and all strong believers hold out as the blessed consequences of your belief … the misery that those dear to you can’t be brought to think like you, are cut off from inexpressible benefits or liable to awful penalties for rejecting the Truth—that is your Truth. You must be miserable. Your text-worship gives you vast advantages, refuges in sorrow, delights in contemplation, a communion with Heaven seeming to be actual & personal—but along with these pleasures a corresponding grief and gloom—or, according to the temperament of the believer, a righteous wrath against those who do not hold the faith. And you plead in tears and passion for the Unbeliever, or destroy his heresy by fire and sword according to your disposition or the age in wh you live. St. Theresa was as tender as you are but in her time the Church burned and racked heretics. How you would have gone off singing to be roasted!”152 For someone who claimed to find so many aspects of Christianity, whether in its Evangelical or its Catholic guise, unsympathetic, it is remarkable how frequently he returned to the topic in his letters. One thing that might have kept him returning to the question of Christianity was the abiding guilt he felt over his wife’s madness, which he might have had a hand in precipitating. In August 1840, when Thackeray decided to leave Isabella to holiday in Belgium, she was suffering from post-natal depression after the birth of her third child. Was it to see the young woman on whom he based Becky Sharp that he left his wife? And was this a lingering affair of which Isabella was aware? And did her awareness of the affair push her over the brink? These are questions that none of Thackeray’s biographers have been able to answer conclusively. Nevertheless, it is clear that Thackeray was not only a haunted but a guilty man.153 He certainly sought forgiveness in prayer, which was another aspect of the man that would have appealed to Newman, who knew that the Saints themselves, “whatever be their advance in the spiritual life … never rise from their knees … never cease to beat their breasts, as if sin could possibly be strange to them while … in the flesh.” For Newman, “Such utter self-prostration was the very badge and token of the servant of Christ …”154

  Yet what Newman could not have known was how hostile Thackeray was to the sacramental aspects of Catholicism—a hostility which the guilt he suffered may very well have exacerbated. From Munich, in 1852, he wrote of being in what he described as a “sham-antique church,” where “at dusk he heard whisswhisswhisspiring in the confessional, and then hummummumbrum the Priest talking, and all this excited my awe and curiosity and I thought to myself perhaps there is some lovely creature on her knees to a venerable friar confessing some tremenjuous crime …” But when an old woman in a green shawl emerged, Thackeray was disappointed. As he confessed, “all the romance was gone at the sight of the queer little trot of a woman, who I am sure could have only had the most trumpery little Sins to chatter about and so I came out of the church not a bit better Catholic than I went in.” Here one can see that Thackeray was more of a romantic than he cared to admit. “Don’t you see if she had been a lovely Countess who had just killed her Grandmother or smothered her babby, I might have gone on being interested and awe stricken? but Polly the Cook maid who owns to having given a piece of pie to the Policeman, or melted the fat into the grease-pot I can’t go for to waste my compassion and wonder upon her.” In all events, the moral he drew did not argue any great insight into the needs of countesses or cook maids: “heres the mistake about these fine churches pictures music and splendid and gracious sights and sounds with wh. the Catholics entrap many people. Their senses are delighted and they fancy they are growing religious: it’s a romantic wonder not a religious one. We must set to work to learn the Truth with all our hearts and Soul and Strength and take care not to be juggled by romanticalities and sentimentalities.”155 Here, again, Thackeray showed how susceptible he was to No Popery caricature. In seeming to deplore “romanticalities and sentimentalities,” he perpetuated them.

  And yet, for all his English antipathy to Roman Catholicism, his letters make clear that he yearned for a more definite faith, beyond caricature. Writing to his mother from Rome at the time that he was meeting with Pollen, he spoke of his three daughters, “who have been as happy as any women in Europe perhaps and so good and contented and obedient and eager to please me, that my heart is thankful to God for blessing me with them.” Then he thought of his love for them in a wider context, of how they would have “this recollection when you & I are gone … So the generations of men pass away: and are called rank after rank by the Divine Goodness out of the reach of time and age and grief and struggle and parting—leaving these to their successors who go through their appointed world, work, and are resumed presently by the Awful Owner of us all—Whose Will is done on earth as it is in Heaven, and whose Kingdom and Glory are for ever and ever. Oh me! We all in our incomplete poor way adore and confess thee.” That Rome should have inspired this impromptu prayer was fitting, but it was also the company he was keeping in Rome that inspired him. “I have been seeing something of some R. Catholic converts here, who have given up everything to follow the Truth as they best understand it. Their truth as it seems to me is a farrago of impossible follies, leading to inevitable farther falsehood deceit degradation and tyranny; but they give up rank ease and all worldly things for the sake of their convictions. They find consolations and delights and amendments even of life in their new creed. I am glad to have seen them, and to have been touched by their goodness piety and self-negation … My dearest old Mother. I think of these things and pray God to enlighten me and purify my life, and I love and worship my lord Jesus Christ—whose Divine Heart had pity for all errors, and will, I think & trust, compassionate mine …”156

  Here was the admirable humility of the man, which Newman inferred from his published work, and Frederick Meyrick encountered face to face when the novelist was seeking to become M.P. for the city of Oxford. “As he was dining with me,” Meyrick recalled, “after his first day’s canvassing, I said to him: ‘You must be in a different position from most men who canvas a strange constituency, as you must be known by fame to most of those whom you visit.’ ‘Now,’ he said, laying down his knife and fork, and holding up a finger, ‘there was one man among all that I went to see who heard my name before; and he was the circulating librarian. Such is mortal fame!’”157

  Chapter 9

  Newman and the Americans

  In 1843, when John Henry Newman was living at Littlemore, the religious retreat he set up outside Oxford, he had an unexpected visitor: Jacob Abbott, a Congregationalist minister from Maine, whom Newman had taken to task for a book of his called The Corner-Stone (1834). There Newman detected the same tendency to deny the divinity of Christ that he saw in the liberal Broad Churchman R. D. Hampden, whose wildly unorthodox Bampton Lectures epitomized what Newman, even as an Anglican, saw as the undogmatical incoherence of the Established Church. Robert Wilberforce, one of the Great Liberator’s sons, who would eventually follow Newman to Rome, fully agreed: “you have not overstated the falsehood and danger of them,” he wrote to his friend. For Wilberforce, they exhibited a “marvelous fogginess.”1 In Tract 73, Newman complained that Abbott’s book “savours unpleasantly of pantheism. It treats the Almighty, not as the great God, but as some vast physical and psychologica
l phenomenon.”2 Moreover, he saw Abbott’s misapprehensions as redolent of a much larger problem—a problem that is with us still. “There is a widely, though irregularly spread School of doctrine,” Newman wrote, “within and without the Church” that “aims at and professes peculiar piety … I do not hesitate to assert that this doctrine is based upon error, that it is really a specious form of trusting man rather than God, that it is in its nature rationalistic, and that it tends to Socinianism.” Newman regarded Socinianism as the besetting sin of American and indeed British religion. “To tell the truth,” he wrote, “one special enemy to which the American Church, as well as our own … lies open is the influence of a refined and covert Socinianism.”3 Still, if Abbott’s views were mistaken, the man himself was engaging. Before they parted, Newman noted, “We talked on various matters for an hour or so, and when he rose to go I offered him my Church of the Fathers—in which he made me put my name … I showed him on his way, accompanying him in the twilight through the village and across Mr. Allen’s field into the road, and we parted with a good deal of warm feeling. He is a Congregationalist Minister—not much above 30, I should think—with somewhat of the New England twang, but very quiet in manner and unaffected. How dreadful it is that the sheep of Christ are scattered to and fro …”4 This Anglo-American encounter shows how both countries, however dissimilar, were alike in their susceptibility to precisely that denial of the divinity of Christ, which, Newman recognized, even as early as the 1830s, was readying what he would later call the “plague of unbelief.”5 It also shows the personal interest that Newman took in Americans, which, by and large, Americans reciprocated. In 1851, for example, when Newman was sued for libel by Giovanni Achilli, an apostate Dominican, notorious for seducing scores of women, American Catholics helped cover his legal fees, which one historian estimates could have been as much as £100,000 in today’s money, an outpouring of generosity for which Newman was deeply grateful.6

  Since the topic of Newman and the Americans is an immense one, I shall limit myself in this chapter to a few themes. I shall compare the reception Tractarianism met with in England and America to show how it deepened Newman’s understanding of that “temper of Socinianism,” from which both countries suffered. I shall show how America demonstrated to Newman that if the laity were susceptible to this temper, they could also be made the means of combating it, as Newman himself combated it, especially in his role as Rector of the Catholic University in Dublin. Since Newman intended this center of Catholic learning—his Oxford on the Liffey—to benefit not only Ireland and England but also the United States, it is fitting that he first encountered examples of vibrant Catholic education in his study of a land otherwise rife with sectarianism. Accordingly, I shall also show how Newman’s idea of Catholic education, far from being “narrow,” “exaggerated” and “sterile,” as the historian and former Warden of Merton, J. M. Roberts contended, was profoundly creative, though many of America’s Catholic colleges have gone gravely astray.7 And lastly I shall endeavor to show how the personal interest Newman took in America and Americans embodied his hopes for the future of Catholicism.

  America always appealed to Newman’s sense of awe. One suspects that he would have had no difficulty entering into that memorable passage in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway imagines how “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”8 In one of his sermons, Newman describes the sixteenth-century society which produced his patron saint, the Florentine Philip Neri, as one in which “America … became known to Europe, and the extent of the earth was doubled … The public mind was agitated by a thousand fancies; no one knew what was coming; anything might be expected; a new era had opened upon the world, and enormous changes, political and social, were in preparation. There was an upheaving of the gigantic intellect of man, and he found he had powers and resources which he was not conscious of before, and began in anticipation to idolize their triumphs.”9 Here was a Jazz Age with which Fitzgerald could identify. Certainly in those rueful essays of his that Edmund Wilson collected in The Crack-Up (1936), he wrote of idolatry’s end with great cautionary conviction.

  Newman also saw America as a means of showing how we arrive at certainty. In one letter, written a year after he composed that marvelous book, A Grammar of Assent (1870), Newman likened America to Heaven. “I believe absolutely that there is a North America, and that the United States is a Republic with a President – why then do I not absolutely believe, though I see it not, that there is a Heaven and that God is there? If you say that there is more evidence for the United States than for Heaven, that is intelligible – but it is not a question of more or less. Since the utmost evidence only leads to probability and yet you believe absolutely in the United States, it is no reason against believing in heaven absolutely, though you have not ‘experience’ of it.”10 Newman also liked to cite America to explode the branch theory for the catholicity of Anglicanism.11 “The Church of England once was part of the Catholic Church, as the United States once were part of the Kingdom of England – but, as well might they at this day claim to have a pecuniary interest in our lands, in our rivers, in our harbour and docks, in our Cathedrals, in our public buildings, as the Anglican Church to have any part in the Sacraments and the spiritual privileges of the Catholic Church. Yet that does not hinder one’s loving and interchanging good offices with members of the United States when one meets them, though we do not make them our Members of Parliament or our Ministers of State; and in like manner I will think all good of the Protestants I meet with, and rejoice in the fruits of grace I may discern in them, without owning them as members of the Catholic Church.”12 And finally in that rollicking send-up of English bigotry, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), Newman likened the vastness of America to the vastness of Catholicism. Speaking of that contempt for the monastic that has held sway in England since at least Cromwell’s visitations, Newman wrote: “It is familiar to an Englishman to wonder at and to pity the recluse and the devotee who surround themselves with a high enclosure, and shut out what is on the other side of it; but was there ever such an instance of self-sufficient, dense, and ridiculous bigotry, as that which rises up and walls in the minds of our fellow-countrymen from all knowledge of one of the most remarkable phenomena which the history of the world has seen? This broad fact of Catholicism—as real as the continent of America, or the Milky Way—which Englishmen cannot deny, they will not entertain; they shut their eyes, they thrust their heads into the sand, and try to get rid of a great vision, a great reality, under the name of Popery.”13

  Matthew Arnold articulated a common prejudice among the nineteenth-century English when he complained of how Americans “cover the defects in their civilization by boasting … They do really hope to find in tall talk and inflated sentiment a substitute for that real sense of elevation which human nature … instinctively craves. The thrill of awe, which Goethe pronounces to be the best thing humanity has, they would fain create by proclaiming themselves at the top of their voice to be ‘the greatest nation upon earth.’”14

  Newman would not have agreed with Arnold or with Goethe that the “thrill of awe” is “the best thing that humanity has” and he would never have begrudged Americans their delight in their own good fortune, for all their presumed “tall talk and inflated sentiment,” though he could be sharply critical of Americans. In 1872, he wrote to his old friend Lord Blachford: “For these forty years the Yankees have in the eyes of the whole world been insulting us, and playing with us, and presuming on our tenderness for them, remorse at our past tyranny, and love of kindred. The more you grant, the more they ask – to be considerate is deemed cowardice … it is the very worst policy to seem to be afraid of them.” The relationship between the English and the Americans reminded N
ewman “of some of Punch’s pictures, in which policemen are acting with great politeness towards thieves and vagabonds.” Still, he was careful to qualify. “Don’t suppose I so call the American people. I believe they have among them as great gentlemen as we have. I know many, whom I love and admire – but I have no affection for Grants and Fiskes …”15

  Something of Newman’s interest in Americans and their country may have come initially from his father, a banker in the City of London, who, as Newman’s brother Frank attested, was an admirer of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.16 Like his father, Newman, for all his Englishness, saw the world in rather cosmopolitan terms, and his attitude to Americans, while not uncritical, was certainly never dismissive. The attitude of the Anglican churchman F. W. Hook, who was nearly sent down from Christ Church for devoting too much of his time to the novels of Walter Scott, was rather more typical. “It is obvious that surrounded as the Church there [in the United States] is by papists and fanatics, our grand hope, under God, must rest with a learned clergy … Certainly the divinity of some of our transatlantic brethren (and fathers even) is somewhat crude … We can purchase a complete set of the Fathers for (I should suppose) £350. Now why should not some two or three hundred of us subscribe this sum, and present these books to the Episcopal College of New York?”17

  Hook is an instructive figure because as Vicar of Leeds he was presented with many of the same challenges that confronted Episcopal churchmen in America, most pressingly, how to integrate the Anglican Church into the new industrialized city and how to put Tractarian principles to work in the pastoral life of the Church. Hook was successful in negotiating the first challenge. Although Leeds was a Methodist stronghold, he doubled the number of Anglican churches from six to twenty-nine and increased the number of Anglican schools from six to thirty.18 When it came to introducing Tractarian principles into his churches, however, he was less successful. When Edward Pusey came to him with the idea of building St. Saviour’s as a model Tractarian church that would operate as a kind of Tractarian seminary, Hook offered his strong support, though he soon regretted it. He was particularly aghast when troops of Roman converts issued from the church.19 In one letter to Pusey, Hook gave vent to understandable exasperation.