Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  The critic in Henry James had a good deal to say about content and form but nothing as brilliant as this. Still, James is a good figure to keep in mind when studying Newman because he recognized that heroes must not only be figures who experience great trials: they must be conscious of experiencing them. In his preface to The Princess Casamassima (1886), James observed how “the figures in any picture, the agents in any drama, are interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations; since the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibited forms for us their link of connexion with it. But there are degrees of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent … and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is those moved in this latter fashion who ‘get most’ out of all that happens to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of their record, as participants of their fond attention, also to get most. Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware—makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them. We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind …”5 To revisit Newman’s autobiographical writings, whether in his letters or his journals or his printed works is to recognize that he was precisely the sort of “finely aware and richly responsible” figure that James commends, though, of course, Newman’s awareness was not the sort of awareness for the sake of awareness that figures so prominently in James’s understanding of art and life. For example, it is not difficult to imagine what Newman would have made of James’s advice to his friend Ivan Turgenev, the Russian novelist, who was struggling with depression:

  Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in high places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world, as it stands, is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.6

  Recommending consciousness for the sake of consciousness to someone in the meshes of despair would not have struck Newman as the most useful counsel. Still, in his readiness to appreciate all sides of any given matter, and in his ability to express every nuance of every side, Newman could sound distinctly Jamesian. In this chapter I shall show how this attentiveness to his own fortunes was an important part of Newman’s understanding of his vocation. Not only was he dedicated to living the devout life but he was dedicated to leaving behind a record of what that life had exacted in the way of trial and perseverance. In this he was emulating the early Fathers of the Church whose work revealed ‘the daily life, the secret heart, of such … servants of God, unveiled to their disciples in … completeness and fidelity.” For Newman, “when a Saint is himself the speaker, he interprets his own action … I want to hear a Saint converse; I am not content to look at him as a statue; his words are the index of his hidden life, as far as that life can be known to man, for ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.’”7 What he sought to capture in his own letters and journals and in his other writings was precisely that “real, hidden but human, life,” or, as he called it, the “interior.”8

  Something of Newman’s interior can be found in the journal he kept periodically throughout his life. In 1869, he wrote:

  Another thought has come on me, that I have had three great illnesses in my life, and how have they turned out! The first keen, terrible one, when I was a boy of 15 and it made me a Christian—with experiences before and after, awful, and known only to God. My second, not painful, but tedious and shattering was that which I had in 1827 when I was one of the Examining Masters, and it too broke me off from an incipient liberalism—and determined my religious course. The third was in 1833, when I was in Sicily, before the commencement of the Oxford Movement.

  Here Newman showed the extent to which he saw trial as providing the defining structure of his life, and from this he concluded: “I suppose every one has a great deal to say about the Providence of God over him. Every one doubtless is so watched over and tended by Him that at the last day, whether he be saved or not, he will confess that nothing could have been done for him more than had been actually done—and every one will feel his own history as special & singular. Yet I cannot but repeat words which I think I used in a memorandum book of 1820, that among the ordinary mass of men, no one has been so mercifully treated, as I have; no one has such cause for humiliation, such cause for thanksgiving.”9

  The Apologia also furnishes insights into Newman’s interior. When he was writing the book, sometimes for up to 16 hours a day, he wrote to James Hope-Scott, the parliamentary lawyer who made a fortune representing the railroads, “What good Angel has led you to write to me? It is a great charity. I never have been in such a stress of brain, and such pain of heart … Say some good prayers for me … I have been constantly in tears, and constantly crying out with distress – I am sure I never could say what I am saying in cool blood.”10 No work of autobiography ever revisited more harrowing ground.11 And yet he also showed how the convictions that animated his life were with him even as a child. In the Apologia he recalled how his mind rested “in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”12 He also quoted from a journal he wrote in 1820 to record how “I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans. I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.”13 This readiness to see the world sub specie aeternitatis would never leave him. Those who imagine that Newman was somehow a crypto-skeptic must account for this most basal of his first principles. At the same time, Newman’s deep-rooted faith never prevented him from entering into the psychology of skepticism, though understanding and subscribing to skepticism are two different things. The account he gives in the Apologia of his early reading attests to how attractive he found certain skeptical authors. “When I was fourteen, I read Paine’s Tracts against the Old Testament, and found pleasure in thinking of the objections which were contained in them. Also, I read some of Hume’s Essays; and perhaps that on Miracles. So at least I gave my father to understand; but perhaps it was a brag. Also, I recollect copying out some French verses, perhaps Voltaire’s, in denial of the immortality of the soul, and saying to myself something like ‘How dreadful, but how plausible!’”14 Later, as I showed in an earlier chapter, Newman shared his doubts about his imminent conversion with John Keble in order to encourage his friend to try to resolve his own doubts. In the course of their correspondence, Newman confessed to Keble that “what quite pierces me” is “the disturbance of mind which a change on my part would cause to so many … the temptation to which many would be exposed of scepticism, indifference, and even infidelity. These last considerations are so serious, in the standard of reason as well as in the way of inducement, that, if it were not for antagonist difficulties, I don’t see how I could ever overcome them.” Yet overcome them he did. Then, considering the Tractarians who would be left behind if he did convert, he predicted that, “The time may even come, when I shall beg them to join the Church of Rome and they will refuse”—a possibility which made him compunctious, since, when he was writing Keble, he had not made the move himself, which prompted him to admit: “Indeed I sometimes feel uncomfortable about myself—a sceptical, unrealizing temper is far from unnatural to me�
��and I may be suffered to relapse into it as a judgment.”15 As it happened, Newman did not succumb to this “skeptical, unrealizing temper,” though the same cannot be said for Keble, whose decision to remain in the Church of England after Newman’s secession caused him pitiable embarrassment. Speaking of “the position of English Churchmen,” in his long sermon Eucharistical Adoration (1858), which gives the fullest expression we have of his Anglo-Catholic faith, Keble wrote: “it seems to be of the very last importance that we should keep in our own minds, and before all Christendom, the fact that we stand as orthodox Catholics upon a constant virtual appeal to the oecumenical voice of the Church … The position may be called unreal or chimerical, but it is that which has been claimed for the Church of England by two great men [Thomas Cranmer and John Bramhall] … And they were not either of them persons apt to take up with a chimerical, unreal view.”16 For the Anglo-Catholic in T. S. Eliot, the Anglican theology of John Bramhall (1594–1663) was “a perfect pursuit of the via media, and the via media is of all ways the most difficult to follow. It requires discipline and self-control, it requires both imagination and hold on reality.”17 As we have seen, no one knew the difficulties of the via media better than John Keble, or brought more discipline, self-control and imagination to its defense, though whether this brought him any closer to reality is questionable.

  Newman, for his part, in leaving Oxford left all that was chimerical and unreal in his own life, though he accurately recognized that it was Oxford that had made him a Catholic. He also recognized something else: “I was undoing my own work, and leaving the field open, or rather infallibly surrendering it to those who would break down and crumble to powder all religion whatever.”18 The liberal dons Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett would see to that. Nevertheless, Newman’s valedictory to Oxford is one of the glories of English prose.

  I left Oxford for good on Monday, February 23, 1846. On the Saturday and Sunday before, I was in my house at Littlemore simply by myself, as I had been for the first day or two when I had originally taken possession of it. I slept on Sunday night at my dear friend’s, Mr. Johnson’s, at the Observatory. Various friends came to see the last of me; Mr. Copeland, Mr. Church, Mr. Buckle, Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Lewis. Dr. Pusey too came up to take leave of me; and I called on Dr. Ogle, one of my very oldest friends, for he was my private Tutor, when I was an Undergraduate. In him I took leave of my first College, Trinity, which was so dear to me, and which held on its foundation so many who had been kind to me both when I was a boy, and all through my Oxford life. Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman’s rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University.

  On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway 19

  Many years after leaving Oxford, and all the false theorizing of the via media, it was fitting that Newman should have left as his epitaph: “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem,” which Ian Ker nicely translates: “Out of unreality into Reality.”20 If Newman gained from looking at himself from without, he also gained from looking at the Church of England from without—a fact which may not redound to his ecumenical credit but shows his readiness to see things objectively. In the Apologia, Newman spoke candidly of how his conversion had opened his eyes to aspects of the Established Church that he had only partially perceived before converting.

  … unwilling as I am to give offence to religious Anglicans, I am bound to confess that I felt a great change in my view of the Church of England. I cannot tell how soon there came on me,—but very soon,—an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. For the first time, I looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it any thing else, than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as 1836,—a mere national institution. As if my eyes were suddenly opened, so I saw it—spontaneously, apart from any definite act of reason or any argument; and so I have seen it ever since. I suppose, the main cause of this lay in the contrast which was presented to me by the Catholic Church. Then I recognized at once a reality which was quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought; I needed not to make an act of faith in her; I had not painfully to force myself into a position, but my mind fell back upon itself in relaxation and in peace, and I gazed at her almost passively as a great objective fact. I looked at her;—at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and I said, “This is a religion;” and then, when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest of nonentities.21

  In the Apologia, Newman made another admission that revealed how fundamentally he differed from his latitudinarian contemporaries: “I was very superstitious, and for some time previous to my conversion used constantly to cross myself on going into the dark.”22 This was an important recollection because it showed how deep-seated his understanding of superstition was. In his Oxford University Sermons (1843), which, taken together, constitute “the intellectual and spiritual autobiography of a young teacher and pastor,” Newman showed how superstition arises out of the sense of sin.23

  The world cannot bear up against the Truth, with all its boastings. It makes an open mock at sin, yet secretly attempts to secure an interest against its possible consequences in the world to come. Where has not the custom prevailed of propitiating, if possible, the unseen powers of heaven?—but why, unless man were universally conscious of his danger, and feared the punishment of sin, while he ‘hated to be reformed’? … Some have gone so far as to offer their sons and their daughters as a ransom for their own sin,—an abominable crime doubtless, and a sacrifice to devils, yet clearly witnessing man’s instinctive judgment upon his own guilt, and his foreboding of punishment.24

  The positivists of Newman’s age unanimously claimed that natural knowledge, in freeing men from superstition, exculpated them from original sin. They were also convinced that it exploded the authority of the Church. “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority,” Thomas Huxley declared in 1866 at St. Martin’s Hall in the Charing Cross Road.25

  For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature — whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation — Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.26

  Throughout his long career, Newman always rejected the notion that science could moonlight as a kind of metaphysics. In The Tamworth Reading Room, he responded to the advocates of this overweening, false science by reminding his readers that, “Science gives us the grounds or premisses from which religious truths are to be inferred; but it does not set about inferring them, much less does it reach the inference;—that is not its province. It brings before us phenomena, and it leaves us, if we will, to call them works of design, wisdom, or benevolence; and further still, if we will, to proceed to confess an Intelligent Creator. We have to take its facts, and to give them a meaning, and to draw our own conclusions from them.”27 What Newman took exception to was science arrogating to itself capabilities it did not possess—a theme which he would pursue in greate
r depth in The Idea of a University (1873). “First comes Knowledge, then a view, then reasoning, and then belief. This is why Science has so little of a religious tendency; deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.”28 Moreover, Newman saw that in congratulating themselves on being free of superstition Huxley and the other advocates of ‘natural knowledge’ were losing sight of the moral and religious truths to which superstition testified. Apropos the propitiatory sacrifices with which primitive man sought to atone for sins, Newman observed: “Doubtless these desperate and dark struggles are to be called superstition, when viewed by the side of true religion; and it is easy enough to speak of them as superstition, when we have been informed of the gracious and joyful result in which the scheme of Divine Governance issues. But it is man’s truest and best religion, before the Gospel shines on him.” Here Newman was trying to make his Pelagian contemporaries see that from the oblations of primitive peoples they could learn something of that holy fear which the civilization of intellect so dangerously counseled its citizens to abandon.