Daily Episcopalian will publish every other day this week. This is the first of two articles on John Henry Newman.
By Frederick Quinn
When Pope Benedict XVI pays a state visit to the United Kingdom this September 16 -19 an important event will be his September 19 stop in Birmingham, where, 120 years after his death, John Henry Newman will be beatified. This represents a major step toward becoming a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. The story line for much of the church and popular press is that Newman was a brilliant, saintly figure who left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church through a carefully reasoned process. That is the Newman of most media presentations.
But the real Newman was far more complex. He once wrote, “O how forlorn and dreary has been my course since I have become a Catholic! Here has been the contrast—as Protestant I felt my religion dreary, but not my life—but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion.” Born in 1801 into a wrenchingly unstable London family, he converted to Evangelical Anglicanism in his youth, and while at Oxford became increasingly a part of the Church of England’s High Church movement in the 1830s. But this gets tricky. Newman, in Tracts for Our Times, made a lengthy case that the Church of England was an ancient, valid Catholic Church and Rome was corrupt, deficient, and schismatic in part because of its magnetic attraction to papal power. But much later in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and other writings, Newman deftly avoided most of the sharp criticisms of Rome he had made earlier in the Tracts. And clearly, Tract 90, that argued the Thirty-Nine Articles could actually be considered documents favorable to Roman Catholicism, was a stretch even in its time (1841). Newman, one of the greatest ever writers of English prose, after his 1845 conversion, followed the Roman practice of not writing out sermons, and much of his literary production from them until his death in 1890 was a highly selective, immensely skilled rewriting of earlier material causing it come out favorable to his new allegiance.
Then there was Newman’s personality. Frustrated and often angry at Oxford, he had difficulty making common cause with colleagues like Keble and Pusey. Uncomfortable with women, he sought to lead a community of celibate young males in Oxford and at Littlemore, near Oxford, but their numbers and allegiances kept shifting. Frank Turner, in a magisterial work, John Henry Newman, The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (Yale University Press, 2002) concludes that Newman’s crossing the Tiber was never certain, and came only after many of the men he thought he was leading left him for Rome. Turner, with the patience of a skilled detective on a complex case, has carefully traced through Newman’s various reworkings of his earlier writings. The Yale historian argues, “Quite simply put, Newman became a Roman Catholic so that he could continue to remain a monk, and if possible, a monk surrounded by his Littlemore male friends. It was more nearly Newman’s personal social salvation than his eternal salvation that lay in the Roman Catholic Church in October 1845.” Newman’s written attempts to present his conversion as a supremely reasoned act constitute a “Whoa! Wait a minute!” moment in historical interpretation. The early 1840s were a conflicted and confused time when Newman’s leadership was severely challenged on all sides, from those closest to him at Oxford, and from influential high churchmen and evangelicals, plus his two outspoken brothers.
None of this detracts from Newman’s lasting place in nineteenth century English history. He shook the moribund English Church’s complacency, unleashed a current of theological and biblical argument that remains unsettled today, and, in Turner’s words, “as the first great, and perhaps most enduring Victorian skeptic” helped establish the robust foundations of late Victorian culture.
Newman needs to be considered across his lifetime of almost ninety years, as an often contradictory and difficult personality and a religious writer of genius, if one sharply selective in his manner of presentation. He was made a cardinal at age 78, largely for his unstinted loyalty to Rome. Today’s Newman, the elderly, irenic Roman Catholic cardinal of the Birmingham Oratory, would not have been recognizable to the abrasive, and polemical younger Newman of Oxford and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, where during the 1830s and early 1840s he helped shape the character of modern Anglicanism. Hopefully the Newman that emerges in the wake of the papal visit will be the real Newman, in all his complexity and resilient humanity.
Frederick Quinn is a historian and contributor to Episcopal Café.