Newman and His Contemporaries
Page 67
If our race be in a fallen and depraved state, what ought our religion to be but anxiety and remorse, till God comforts us? Surely, to be in gloom,—to view ourselves with horror,—to look about to the right hand and to the left for means of safety,—to catch at every thing, yet trust in nothing,—to do all we can, and try to do more than all,—and, after all, to wait in miserable suspense, naked and shivering, among the trees of the garden, for the hour of His coming, and meanwhile to fancy sounds of woe in every wind stirring the leaves about us,—in a word, to be superstitious,—is nature’s best offering, her most acceptable service, her most mature and enlarged wisdom, in the presence of a holy and offended God. They who are not superstitious without the Gospel, will not be religious with it: and I would that even in us, who have the Gospel, there were more of superstition than there is; for much is it to be feared that our security about ourselves arises from defect in self-knowledge rather than in fulness of faith, and that we appropriate to ourselves promises which we cannot read.”29
Apropos this sense of sin, which was so vital a part of Newman’s understanding of the primacy of conscience, the poet Geoffrey Hill made an amusing observation in a review of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Most of what one wants to know, including much that it hurts to know about the English language is held within these twenty volumes. To brood over them and in them is to be finally persuaded that sematology is a theological dimension: the use of language is inseparable from that ‘terrible aboriginal calamity’ in which, according to Newman, the human race is implicated. Murray, in 1884, missed the use of ‘aboriginal:’ it would have added a distinctly separate signification to the recorded examples. In 1989 it remains unacknowledged. In what sense or senses is the computer acquainted with original sin?30
The issue of original sin may appear to have led us far afield but it was never far from Newman’s inmost thoughts. That he so consistently acknowledged the effects of original sin in himself is what gives his autobiographical writings their appeal. “I know perfectly well, and thankfully confess to Thee, O my God,” he wrote in a journal entry in 1859. “that thy wonderful grace turned me right round when I was more like a devil than a wicked boy, at the age of fifteen, and gave me what by thy continual aids I never lost. Thou didst change my heart, and in part my whole mental complexion at that time, and I never should have had the thought of such prayers, as those I have … but for that great work of thine in my boyhood …”31
Throughout his writings, even when he was not being explicitly autobiographical, Newman often shed light on the highly personal approach that he took to nearly every aspect of his life and work. Thus, we can glean something of the character of his faith from a sermon he delivered in 1849 on “The Glories of Mary for the Sake of her Son.” Nothing shows the ardor of his faith better than his devotion to the Mother of God.
… Mary is exalted for the sake of Jesus. It was fitting that she, as being a creature, though the first of creatures, should have an office of ministration. She, as others, came into the world to do a work, she had a mission to fulfil; her grace and her glory are not for her own sake, but for her Maker’s; and to her is committed the custody of the Incarnation; this is her appointed office,—“A Virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and they shall call His Name Emmanuel”. As she was once on earth, and was personally the guardian of her Divine Child, as she carried Him in her womb, folded Him in her embrace, and suckled Him at her breast, so now, and to the latest hour of the Church, do her glories and the devotion paid her proclaim and define the right faith concerning Him as God and man. Every church which is dedicated to her, every altar which is raised under her invocation, every image which represents her, every litany in her praise, every Hail Mary for her continual memory, does but remind us that there was One who, though He was all-blessed from all eternity, yet for the sake of sinners, “did not shrink from the Virgin’s womb.”32
And it followed from this, as he affirmed in “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” that “Mary is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.”33 In his immense correspondence with men and women from all walks of life from around the world which he conducted for over seventy years, Newman would follow the Blessed Virgin’s pattern with a personal apostolate that was as untiring as it was wholehearted.
This attention to the personal is one aspect of Newman that endears him to Pope Benedict XVI.34 If one’s encounter with God is with a loving, merciful, personal God, one brings oneself to that encounter in a very direct, inimitable way, and no one urges readers to undertake that encounter more fully than Newman. Understanding how Newman saw himself also helps us to read Newman, for he meant his work to be read as personal testimony. Something of this can be seen in his discussion of literature in The Idea of a University (1873), where he says: “Literature is the personal use or exercise of language … Language itself in its very origination would seem to be traceable to individuals. Their peculiarities have given it its character. We are often able in fact to trace particular phrases or idioms to individuals; we know the history of their rise. Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal.”35 In his own writing Newman often made brilliant use of slang. In one letter he vowed to be more faithful to St. Philip Neri, his patron saint, by becoming more self-effacing, because otherwise he could “fancy St Philip saying to me what a French conducteur once by gestures said, when I looked to see if he had put up all my luggage safely, ‘Who are you? what’s it to you? why do you put in your jaw? won’t you be off? who, I say, are you? save your eyes, who are you? I say?’ I fancy St Philip thus speaking to me …”36 Slang also appealed to Newman’s dislike of side. When Henry Wilberforce was contemplating leaving his curacy at Bransgore for the more remunerative living of Walmer, Kent, Newman wrote to him: “I only hope that your new preferment will not make you a shovel hatted humbug. Beware of the Lambeth livery.”37
For Newman, language was more than an opportunity for rhetorical swordplay: it was a way of being oneself. “The connection between the force of words in particular languages and the habits and sentiments of the nations speaking them has often been pointed out. And, while the many use language as they find it, the man of genius uses it indeed, but subjects it withal to his own purposes, and moulds it according to his own peculiarities. The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, aspirations, which pass within him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect, does he image forth, to all does he give utterance, in a corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward mental action itself and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow: so that we might as well say that one man’s shadow is another’s as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself. It follows him about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal.”38
Gerard Manley Hopkins recognized the personal stamp
of Newman’s prose when he observed: “Newman does not follow the common tradition—of writing. His tradition is that of cultured, the most highly educated, conversation; it is the flower of the best Oxford life. Perhaps this gives it a charm of unaffected and personal sincerity that nothing else could. Still, he shirks the technic of written prose and shuns the tradition of written English. He seems to be thinking ‘Gibbon is the last great master of traditional English prose; he is its perfection: I do not propose to emulate him; I begin all over again from the language of conversation, of common life.”39 One can open Newman’s collected works at random and find examples galore to illustrate the conversational force of his style. Here is one from The Idea of a University (1873). Apropos the many proposals for university reform that clamored for a hearing when he was setting up the Catholic University in the 1850s, Newman wrote:
What would come … of the ideal systems of education which have fascinated the imagination of this age, could they ever take effect, and whether they would not produce a generation frivolous, narrow-minded, and resourceless, intellectually considered, is a fair subject for debate; but so far is certain, that the Universities and scholastic establishments, to which I refer [he is referring to Oxford and Cambridge] … these institutions, with miserable deformities on the side of morals, with a hollow profession of Christianity, and a heathen code of ethics,—I say, at least they can boast of a succession of heroes and statesmen, of literary men and philosophers, of men conspicuous for great natural virtues, for habits of business, for knowledge of life, for practical judgment, for cultivated tastes, for accomplishments, who have made England what it is,—able to subdue the earth, able to domineer over Catholics.40
However right Newman might have been about most proposals for educational reform, he could be patently wrong about himself. Four years after he converted, when he was 48, he remarked to his friend Henry Wilberforce, “It is an awful thing, beginning so new a life in the end of my days. How I wish I had in me the energy which I had when I began the Tracts for the Times! Now I am scarce more, to my own feelings, than an inutile lignum; so stiff so wooden. May you never have, dear Henry, the bitter reflection that you have left yourself but the dregs of life for God’s service!”41 In 1854, he wrote Henry’s older brother Robert, “I am getting an old man now – and have too much to do, and it is telling on me …” In 1856, he wrote Lady Arundel, “Pray say a Hail Mary for me; tomorrow is my birthday, and I enter with thankfulness yet with fear into what the books call ‘the period of old age.’”42 A year later he wrote Viscount Fielding, “Pray, my dear Lord … don’t forget me in your prayers, an old man with too much to do …”43 In 1857, he wrote Mrs. Froude, “Thanks to you and Isy for not forgetting an old man.”44 In 1860, he wrote his sister Jemima, “All through last year I fell off in flesh, and suppose I shall … never recover it … My fingers are so thin that I can’t get accustomed to the sight of them. My skin is getting to gleam like parchment, and I have had difficulty of lying at night from the prominency of my bones.”45 Why Newman persisted in imagining himself senescent when he was in the prime of life is hard to say. Evelyn Waugh saw something of the same thing in his father. “The illusion of old age was much enhanced by his own utterances,” he wrote of Arthur Waugh. “Like his grandfather … he often adverted to his imminent demise… . He found great satisfaction in visiting the site of his grave in Hampstead parish churchyard …” Arthur’s make-believe old age was in complete contrast to the sprightliness he exuded. As his son confirmed, “Most of his acquaintances regarded him as exuberantly jovial.” 46 Newman’s friends similarly marveled at his energy, toughness and capacity for a level of work that most other men would have found unsustainable. Even by his own account, he was anything but the old man that he otherwise portrayed himself. In 1854, he wrote to Ambrose St. John from Harcourt Street in Dublin, where he was busy preparing for the launch of the Catholic University: “It blows a tempest, and rains furiously. I cannot think such weather will last. Next Sunday I am at Carlow – On Wednesday 22nd at Cork – Sunday 26th at Limerick – Ash Wednesday at Belfast. Sunday March 5, I trust in Birmingham. The first week I was here was simply lost, the Archbishop being away. Since then, I have engaged one Lecturer, and almost another – both distinguished persons here – I have laid the foundations of a quasi Oratory, with priests to confess the youths, … set up a debating society … and … thrown lawyers, architects, painters, paperers, and upholsterers into the University house, with a view of preparing for our Autumn opening.”47 Here was proof of the wonderful vitality of the man that was not always on display in his more self-deprecatory letters.
Of course, Newman’s prematurely aging himself might be seen as a consequence of his traumatic conversion. Seen thus, Newman could be said to have felt warrantably old: “wore aht,” as Bill, the Cockney atheist tells Adolphus Cusins, the Professor of Greek in Shaw’s Major Barbara. Newman appeared to support this view when he wrote in his journal in 1847 this lugubrious entry: “In a variety of ways I have fallen away from hope. In the Church of England I had many detractors; a mass of calumny was hurled at me … I became an exile in solitude … but not even in that retreat was I safe from those who pursued me with their curiosity … And now the cheerfulness I used to have has almost vanished. And I feel acutely that I am no longer young, but that my best years are spent, and I am sad at the thought of the years that have gone by and I see myself as a useless log.”48 But even if we allow for the ordeal of his conversion, this screed is still distorting. Newman was never an “exile in solitude,” he never fell away from hope, he never suffered his cheerfulness to vanish, and he was certainly never a useless log. Down in the dumps and alone with his journal, he could exaggerate his woes. Newman himself intimated as much when he was on his deathbed and turned to Father Neville and said, “You must not suppose that these little affairs of mine will be on the tapis in the courts of the next world.”49
Still, the dismay that Newman suffered as a Catholic was real. In January 1863, he lamented what seemed to him the futility of his life as a Catholic: “it came upon me this morning as I lay in bed, What is the good of all this? what is to come of it? what am I living for? what am I doing for any religious end? Alas, it is my habitual thought, now for years, but circumstances have urged it on me at intervals more than usual of late, and something was told me yesterday which was a clincher.”50 Apparently, some busybody had told Ambrose St. John that Newman had not converted as many people as Faber and Manning, which prompted an Olympian grouse from Newman, though it has to be said that he had legitimate grievances with the short-sightedness and the unfair distrust of both the English Church and Propaganda. “Persons who would naturally look towards me, converts who would naturally consult me, are stopped by some light or unkind word said against me. I am passé, in decay; I am untrustworthy; I am strange, odd; I have my own ways & cannot get on with others; something or other is said in disparagement. I am put aside on the ground that I ought to be put aside …”51 In 1863, before the success of the Apologia relieved his sense of isolation in a country that did not always know what to make of him, he could be forgiven for looking back on his earlier Anglican career with occasional nostalgia. “O how forlorn & dreary has been my course since I have been a Catholic! here has been the contrast—as a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary, but not my life—but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion.”52 For Newman, the problem was that Propaganda expected him to make as many influential converts as he could in order to help convert the English en masse; and naturally Faber and Manning had a better opportunity to do this from London than he had from the Hagley Road. But even in his otherwise jaundiced account of his Catholic career, Newman made a number of shrewd observations. First, he differentiated his own mission from that of his London brethren: “I am altogether different—my objects, my theory of acting, my powers, go in a different direction, and one not understood or contemplated in Rome or elsewhere. I never courted men, but they have come to me … And if they
did not come to me, I did not gain them … To me, conversions were not the first thing, but the edification of Catholics … I am afraid to make hasty converts of educated men, lest they should not have counted the cost … the Church must be prepared for converts, as well as converts prepared for the Church … And Catholics in England, from their very blindness, cannot see that they are blind. To aim then at improving the condition, the status, of the Catholic body, by a careful survey of their argumentative basis, of their position relatively to the philosophy and character of the day, by giving them juster views, by enlarging & refining their minds, in one word, by education, is (in their view) more than a superfluity or a hobby, it is an insult. It implies that they are deficient … Now from first to last, education, in this large sense of the word, has been my line,” though he was convinced that his involvement with the Rambler, the liberal Catholic paper (which he attempted to steer clear of heterodoxy) and his establishment of his own Oratory School put him out of favor with the governing body of Catholics in England and in Rome. He was convinced that “so far from being thought engaged in any good work, I am simply discouraged and regarded suspiciously … as doing actual harm.”53 Yet in his failure to endear himself to his superiors Newman saw a comical side. “I should be so out of my element if I were without that cold shade on the side of ecclesiastical authority, in which I have dwelt nearly all my life, my eyes would be so dazed and my limbs so relaxed, were I brought out to bask in the sun of ecclesiastical favor that I should not know how to act and should make a fool of myself.”54