by Edward Short
Despite his difficulties with his Catholic superiors, Newman never made the vulgar error of confusing the men who happened to figure in the Church’s hierarchy with the Church herself. In 1868, Sir Frederic Rogers shared with Newman the letter of a man named Bartholomew who confessed to experiencing great anguish when Newman converted—anguish that was shared by many forlorn Tractarians. In his reply, Newman put the occasional asperities that he suffered from Catholic prelates in perspective: “To-day is the 20th anniversary of my setting up the Oratory in England, and every year I have more to thank God for, and more cause to rejoice that he helped me over so great a crisis … there is a depth and a power in the Catholic religion, a fulness of satisfaction in its creed, its theology, its rites, its sacraments, its discipline, a freedom yet a support also, before which the neglect or the misapprehension about oneself on the part of individual living persons, however exalted, is as so much dust, when weighed in the balance. This is the true secret of the Church’s strength, the principle of its indefectibility, and the bond of its indissoluble unity. It is the earnest and the beginning of the repose of Heaven.”55
Newman’s feelings of being passed over, distrusted, even scorned would dissipate after the warm reception of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), when the plain people of England first came round to recognizing what an extraordinary gaffer they had in their midst. But such feelings would never entirely leave him. He was, after all, surrounded by people who did not appreciate his gifts or who appreciated them but sought to thwart him from exercising them. One thinks of that wonderful aside in Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson: “the dullard’s envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.”56 Many regarded Newman in a similarly envious light. Charles Golightly, who instigated the episcopal attacks on Tract 90, and George Talbot, who made continual trouble for Newman in Rome, were only the most notorious: there were many more.57 Still, he took such buffetings in stride. In 1867, he wrote to his dear friend Catherine Anne Bathurst, a dedicated teacher who founded many schools and orphanages, first as a Sister of Charity and then as a Dominican Tertiary: “it has been for so many years my own case to be rudely treated, that (as far as I know myself) it does not distress me at all now – for it is the rule of my life; and I say deliberately, I do not wish it changed, for it is the lightest trial I could have – how much lighter than bad health, loss of friends, loss of faculties, poverty! Indeed the danger is, that, used as I am to be so treated, I could not bear any other lot – and should be as awkward and blundering if I had the sunshine on me, as prisoners who have for years been shut up in a dark dungeon.”58
What makes Newman such an attractive figure is that, for all his greatness, he was never full of himself. “A Rector ought to be a more showy bustling man than I am,” he told one of his friends about his role as Rector of the Catholic University, “in order to impress the world we are great people. I ought to dine out every day, and of course I don’t dine out at all. I ought to mix in literary society and talk about new gasses and the price of labour—whereas I can’t recollect what I once knew, much less get up a whole lot of new subjects – I ought to behave condescendingly to others, whereas they are condescending to me …”59 When his good friend and confidante, Sister Mary Gabriel Du Boulay, whom he received into the Church in 1850, asked if he would come and visit her, Newman wrote back: “Please God I will say Mass for you on the 11th. I am beginning a set of Masses for Revd Mother’s intentions. Is not that more than coming to see you? And am I not wise, not to lessen the sort of imaginations you have of me – so kind, yet so unreal, by showing myself in propriâ personâ? I always feel like a hypocrite who can be detected by holy eyes, just as an accomplished thief or thimble rigger is at once recognized by a police officer. But at a distance I look like a great man, without any hang dog look which I can’t throw off, do what I will, when I am in places where brass will not go for gold.”60
Over the years, he became something of a connoisseur of what he called “the tin-kettle accounts of me which rattle to and fro in the world.”61 When he learned that someone was putting about the rumor that he had lost his mind, he nicely deplored the calumny as a “grave, sleek, imposing lie, which made one smile. People sucked it in greedily and smacked their lips.”62 He was particularly amused by the story a friend had heard in London that “I carried my austerity to such an extent that I would not let my wife wear anything but sad coloured ribbons in her bonnet.”63 In 1850, he wrote his fellow Oratorian Frederick Faber, “The report grows stronger and stronger here, that I am married, and have shut up my wife in a convent.”64
In retrospect, we can see clues to the real character of this still widely misunderstood man in many of his writings. In “St Paul’s Characteristic Gift” (1857), for instance, he divided saints into two kinds: those who “seem, even while … in the flesh, to have no part in earth or in human nature …” and those “in whom the supernatural combines with nature, instead of superseding it…” And in describing the latter category, in which he placed St. Paul, he described himself.
They do not put away their natural endowments, but use them to the glory of the Giver; they do not act beside them, but through them; they do not eclipse them by the brightness of divine grace, but only transfigure them. They are versed in human knowledge; they are busy in human society; they understand the human heart; they can throw themselves into the minds of other men; and all this in consequence of natural gifts and secular education. While they themselves stand secure in the blessedness of purity and peace, they can follow in imagination the ten thousand aberrations of pride, passion, and remorse. The world is to them a book, to which they are drawn for its own sake, which they read fluently, which interests them naturally,—though, by the reason of the grace which dwells within them, they study it and hold converse with it for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. Thus they have the thoughts, feelings, frames of mind, attractions, sympathies, antipathies of other men, so far as these are not sinful, only they have these properties of human nature purified, sanctified, and exalted; and they are only made more eloquent, more poetical, more profound, more intellectual, by reason of their being more holy.65
Holiness meant a good deal to Newman and it was therefore only natural that the aspect of himself about which he should be most perceptive was his celibacy. In one of his most powerful sermons, preached at the religious profession of Mary Anne Bowden (1831–1867), the eldest daughter of his good friend Mrs. J. W. Bowden, before she entered the Visitation Convent at Westbury in 1852, Newman pointed out that the “state of celibacy recommended by philosophers … does but harden the heart,” being “of that forlorn, haughty and repulsive nature,” which “has been imaged and extolled in the pages of heathen writers or in the teaching of false religions … To make a single life its own end, to adopt it simply and solely for its own sake, I do not know whether such a state of life is more melancholy or more unamiable, melancholy from its unrequited desolateness and unamiable from the pride and self-esteem on which it is based.”
This is not the Virginity of the Gospel—it is not a state of independence or isolation, or dreary pride, or barren indolence, or crushed affections; man is made for sympathy, for the interchange of love, for self-denial for the sake of another dearer to him than himself. The Virginity of the Christian soul is a marriage with Christ.66
For Newman, as Ian Ker points out, “the essence of celibacy as a spiritual ideal as opposed to a pragmatic convenience, was not so much that it provides freedom from the ties of marriage and family for a fuller commitment to the work of a religious profession, but rather that the very pain of the lack of intimate human love is meant to impel the celibate to find affective fulfillment in the exclusive love of God.”67 Newman also saw the practical character of celibacy in the context of the sacrifices that all Christians are enjoined to make. “Since the coming of our Saviour on earth,” he wrote in a public letter to the Rambler in 1859, “humiliation, suffering, and poverty
are to be looked on as His livery; and His prophecies to His Church rather foretell thorns than roses, strife than peace, and humiliation than triumph. Of course, the lowly virtues of the New Testament are applicable to different states of life in different proportions; but there must be a recognition of them in the king as well as in the hermit. Heroic, by which I mean self-sacrificing, virtues are, as a general rule, less applicable to fathers of families, simply because all duties being relative, the duty of a man to his wife and children comes before a larger number of more distant duties. This it is which has led, in the Catholic Church, to the celibacy of the clergy; which is … a mere consequence of what I may call the division of labour consequent on a more developed state of Christian civilisation. The attire of the glorified Church is to be wrought about with a variety of ornament.”68
Newman’s Protestant contemporaries saw the matter rather differently. Indeed, much of the hostility to Newman in his own day would always stem from the Protestant contempt for celibacy. The Anglican priest and poet, John Moultrie (1799–1874), who had been at Eton with Praed, wrote some verses to affirm this contempt.69
God give her wavering clergy back that honest heart and true
Which once was there ere Popish fraud its spell around them threw;
Nor let them barter wife and child, bright hearth and happy home
For the hectic bliss of the strumpet kiss of the Jezebel of Rome.70
Apropos Moultrie, one parishioner quipped: “They spoilt a jolly good navvy when they made that old cove a parson.”71 He was a muscular Christian in more ways than one.
Newman’s response to muscular Christianity showed the bully boys of his age that he would not take their slurs lying down. “There have been Protestants whose idea of enlightened Christianity has been a strenuous antagonism to what they consider the unmanliness and unreasonableness of Catholic morality, an antipathy to the precepts of patience, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, and chastity. All this they have considered a woman’s religion, the ornament of monks, of the sick, the feeble, and the old. Lust, revenge, ambition, courage, pride—these, they have fancied, made the man, and want of them the slave.” Indeed, for Newman, it was only logical that “No one could fairly accuse such men of any great change of their convictions, if they were one day found to have taken up the profession of Islam.” In all events, Newman was only too well aware of “men of the world who cannot enter into the very idea of devotion, and think, for instance, that, from the nature of the case, a life of religious seclusion must be either one of unutterable dreariness or abandoned sensuality, because they know of no exercise of the affections but what is merely human; and with others again, who, living in the home of their own selfishness, ridicule as something fanatical and pitiable the self-sacrifices of generous high-mindedness and chivalrous honour.”72
In imagining that Newman’s celibacy was an implicit criticism of the sexual love of marriage, the unbalanced Charles Kingsley followed the Rector of Rugby, though no one can read Newman’s letters, especially to married friends and acquaintances, and credit such wild falsehood. In the sermon he preached for Mary Anne Bowden, Newman wrote of marriage:
Two mortal creatures of God, placed in this rough world, exposed to its many fortunes, destined to suffering and death, join hands, and give the faith to each other that each of them will love the other wholly until death. Henceforth, each is made for the other—each has possession of the affections of the other in a transcendent way; each is all in all to the other; each can confide in the other unreservedly, each is the other’s irreversibly. There is but one mind, one aim, one course, one happiness, between two. Each is reflected in the other; each reads his own thought in the other’s face; each feels for the other more than for himself. Such is the fountain head of human society and the continual provision of the human race: such is the beginning of civilization, the guardian of religion, the norm of philanthropy, and the sanctification of mankind. There is no such union elsewhere in the natural world …73
For all of his gregariousness and, indeed, his genius for friendship, Newman was never spared loneliness. In 1836, in the wake of the death of his mother and Hurrell Froude, he wrote to his sister Jemima, “I am not more lonely than I have been a long while. God intends me to be lonely. He has so framed my mind that I am in a great measure beyond the sympathies of other people, and thrown upon Himself …”74 To his sister Harriet, he was even more revelatory: “Thank God, my spirits have not sunk, nor will they, I trust. I have been full of work, and that keeps me generally free from any dejection. If it ever comes, it is never of long continuance, and is even not unwelcome – I am speaking of dejection from solitude; I never feel so near heaven as then. Years ago, from 1822 to 1826, I used to be very much by myself; and in anxieties of various kinds, from money matters and other things, which were very harassing. I then on the whole had no friend near me – no one to whom I opened my mind fully or who could sympathize with me. I am but returning at worst to that state. Indeed, ever since that time I have learned to throw myself on myself. Therefore, please God, I trust I shall get on very well, and after all this life is very short, and it is a better thing to be pursuing what seems God’s call, than to be looking after one’s own comfort. I am learning more than hitherto to live in the presence of the dead – this is a gain which strange faces cannot take away.”75
If there is one personal quality that comes out in Newman’s self-portraits again and again it is his humility. “I have no tendency to be a saint,” he told one correspondent in 1850. “Saints are not literary men, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales. I may be well enough in my way, but it is not the ‘high line.’ People ought to feel this, most people do. But those who are at a distance have fee-fa-fum notions about one. It is enough for me to black the saints’ shoes – if St Philip uses blacking, in heaven.”76 Newman’s humility gave him not only self-knowledge but perseverance. Throughout his long career as the Father of the Birmingham Oratory, he would always be compared unfavorably to the Oratorians in London, who could seem, in worldly terms, more successful. In a letter to Ambrose St. John, Newman addressed the issue with characteristic candor. “I cannot conceal from myself that we are considered as slow, and humdrum, and twaddling, and unready, and incapable, and idle, and unfruitful, and unspiritual … that we are a set of priests who do nothing equal to their number and their capabilities.
Well, my dear Fathers, if we are conscious to ourselves, if we have reason to suspect, that we are thus inferior to our vocation and our mission, then nothing is to be said for us; but if the case be otherwise, if we are really doing a work, or rather many works, and all that the complaint means is that we do not puff and advertise it to the four quarters of the earth, then I do but rejoice in it, as a mark, special and singular, of our being the children of St Philip. If there be one thing more than another, which is his gift and after his pattern, it is to live in the shade—if there is one thing that will specially interest him in us, it is that we are despised, and not only so, but that we despise being despised.77
This leads to another defining characteristic of Newman and that was his conviction that failure, far from being an unalloyed evil in his life, had always proved an agent of spiritual growth. Newman first became conscious of this conviction, which took shape gradually and over many years, in the wake of the collapse of his father’s bank in 1816.78 It was compounded by his father’s bankruptcy in 1821. On 7 November 1821—six days after he learned the terrible news—Newman wrote to his Aunt Elizabeth: “I am convinced that nothing can be a greater snare and evil to a person than unalloyed prosperity. I cannot say how I should behave were the offer of possessing them made me but in my present state of mind there is nothing I would rather deprecate than wealth or fame or great influence.”79 In 1836, he wrote in response to those critical of the Tractarians, “Such is the law which God has annexed to the promulgation of the Truth: its preachers suffer, but its cause prevails.”80 In 1855, he was convinced that “all thr
ough life, when I have been despised most, I have succeeded most.”81 In 1858, he gave his long-held conviction fuller expression still: “from the first it has been my fortune to be ever failing, yet after all not to fail. From the first I have had bad strokes of fortune – yet on the whole I have made way. Hardly had I begun life, when misfortunes happened to my family – then I failed in the Schools; then I was put out of office at College; then came Number 90 – and later the Achilli matter. You talk of ‘brilliant success’ as not our portion – it is not, because you are all joined to me. When I was a boy, I was taken beyond any thing in Homer, with Ulysses seeming ‘like a fool or an idiot,’ when he began to speak – and yet somehow doing more than others, as St Paul with his weakness and foolishness. I think this was from some presentiment of what was to happen to me.”82
To speak of how Newman accepted failure as a necessary condition for his spiritual development is a commonplace. Yet suffering failure was never easy for him. After all, he was highly talented and naturally eager to see his talents succeed. His own failures, when they came, were harrowing. It was only after the fact, sometimes years after the fact, that he could see the spiritual silver lining. “O Philip,” he wrote in 1859 in one of his most moving journal entries, when he felt his Catholic career had been an irredeemable failure, “gain me some little portion of thy fervor. I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the past may revive in the future. My God, when shall I learn that I have so parted with the world, that, though I may wish to make friends with it, it will not make friends with me?”83 A year later, he was again pleading for the grace to endure failure, “O teach me … teach me how to employ myself most profitably, most to Thy glory, in such cases as remain to me; for my apparent illsuccess discourages me much. O my God, I seem to have wasted these years that I have been a Catholic. What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic works—& this troubles me a great deal.”84 The failures Newman would suffer as a Catholic, including those associated with the Catholic University, his proposed translation of the Bible, his proposed Oxford Oratory, and his delation to Rome after the publication of his article on the laity were all attributable more to others than to himself. Nevertheless, Newman wrote his unhappy journal entries before he wrote some of his greatest Catholic works, including the Apologia, The Dream of Gerontius, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, The Idea of a University and A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Moreover, even at his lowest ebb as a Catholic, he was still a most effective spiritual counselor for hundreds of individuals within and outside of the Church, as his letters attest. Still, the sense of failure he felt was lacerating. In April 1861, in what was something of an annus horribilis, he complained of how “every thing seems to crumble under my hands, as if one were making ropes of sand.”85 Yet towards the end of his life, he could look back and see how providential these terrible trials had been. In 1882, he responded to his friend Lord Braye, who had complained of personal setbacks: