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John Henry Newman

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Saint
John Henry Newman
Saint John Henry Newman in 1887
Saint John Henry Newman in 1887
Born 21 February 1801, London
Died 11 August 1890, Edgbaston
Roles Oratorian priest; cardinal; theologian; educator
Tradition Patristic revival; theology of doctrinal development
Major works Apologia Pro Vita Sua; Essay on Development; Grammar of Assent; Idea of a University
Ecclesial status Saint and Doctor of the Church; General Roman Calendar optional memorial, 9 October

John Henry Newman was an English Oratorian priest, cardinal, theologian, convert, saint, and Doctor of the Church.[1]

Overview

John Henry Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English Catholic theologian, academic, philosopher, historian, writer, and poet. He was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century.[2]

Originally an evangelical academic at the University of Oxford and priest in the Church of England, Newman was drawn to the high church tradition of Anglicanism. He became one of the more notable leaders of the Oxford Movement, an influential group of Anglicans who wished to restore to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals practiced before the English Reformation. In this, the movement had some success. After publishing his Tract 90 in 1841, Newman later wrote: "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church."[3]

In 1845, Newman resigned his teaching post at Oxford, left the Church of England and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, which later became University College Dublin.[4]

Newman was also a prominent writer: his major writings include the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), and the Grammar of Assent (1870).[5] In particular, his theory on the development of doctrine has been highly influential on subsequent Catholic theology.[6]

Newman's canonization was approved by Pope Francis and took place on 13 October 2019.[7] He was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV in 2025 and was also named co-patron of Catholic education, joining Saint Thomas Aquinas.[8]

Life

Newman became an Anglican clergyman and a leader of the Oxford Movement, seeking to recover the apostolic and patristic inheritance of the English Church. Historical study and controversy led him into full communion with the Catholic Church in 1845. Ordained a Catholic priest, he founded the Birmingham Oratory and later became a cardinal.

Thought

His Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine explains how a revealed deposit can unfold organically without becoming a different faith. The Grammar of Assent distinguishes formal inference from the converging judgments by which persons responsibly attain certitude in concrete life.

Newman defended conscience as the voice of moral obligation before God, not as permission for self-will. His educational writings unite intellectual breadth, formation of judgment, and the proper relation of theology to the community of knowledge.

Major works

Newman's sermons, letters, novels, polemics, devotional works, and autobiographical Apologia form a large literary corpus. His style joined historical argument to close observation of the moral and spiritual life.

Catholic reception

Canonized in 2019, Newman was proclaimed a Doctor of the Universal Church by Pope Leo XIV on 1 November 2025 and named co-patron, with Saint Thomas Aquinas, of the Church's educational mission. His optional memorial was inserted into the General Roman Calendar for 9 October.[9]

Early life and education

Newman was born on 21 February 1801 in the City of London,[5][10] the eldest of a family of three sons and three daughters.[11] His father, John Newman, was a banker with Ramsbottom, Newman and Company in Lombard Street. His mother, Jemima (née Fourdrinier), was descended from a notable family of Huguenot refugees in England, founded by the engraver, printer and stationer Paul Fourdrinier. Francis William Newman was a younger brother. His younger sister, Harriet Elizabeth, married Thomas Mozley, also prominent in the Oxford Movement.[12] The family lived in Southampton Street (now Southampton Place) in Bloomsbury and bought a country retreat in Ham, near Richmond, in the early 1800s.[13]

At the age of seven Newman was sent to Great Ealing School conducted by George Nicholas. There George Huxley, father of Thomas Henry Huxley, taught mathematics,[14] and Walter Mayers taught classics.[15] Newman took no part in the casual school games.[16] He was a great reader of the novels of Walter Scott, then in course of publication,[17] and of Robert Southey. Aged 14, he read sceptical works by Thomas Paine, David Hume and perhaps Voltaire.[18]

Evangelical

At the age of 15, during his last year at school, Newman converted to Evangelical Christianity, an incident of which he wrote in his Apologia that it was "more certain than that I have hands or feet".[19] Almost at the same time (March 1816) the bank Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. crashed, though it paid its creditors, and his father left to manage a brewery.[20] Mayers, who had himself undergone a conversion in 1814, lent Newman books from the English Calvinist tradition.[15] "It was in the autumn of 1816 that Newman fell under the influence of a definite creed and received into his intellect impressions of dogma never afterwards effaced."[17] He became an evangelical Calvinist and, under the influence of the writings of Thomas Newton[21] and of Joseph Milner's History of the Church of Christ, held the typical belief that the Pope was the antichrist.[12] Mayers is described as a moderate, Clapham Sect Calvinist,[22] and Newman read William Law as well as William Beveridge in devotional literature.[23] He also read The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott.[24]

Although to the end of his life, Newman looked back on his conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 1816 as the saving of his soul, he began to shift away from his early Calvinism. As Eamon Duffy puts it, "He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church's role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism."[25]

At university

Newman's name was entered at Lincoln's Inn. He was, however, sent shortly to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied widely. His anxiety to do well in the final schools produced the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, under Thomas Vowler Short,[17][26] and so graduated as a BA "under the line" (with lower second class honours in Classics, and having failed classification in the Mathematical Papers). Desiring to remain in Oxford, Newman then took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel College, then "the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism".[17] He was elected a fellow at Oriel on 12 April 1822. Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected a fellow of the same college in 1823.[17]

Anglican ministry

On 13 June 1824, Newman was made an Anglican deacon at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Ten days later he preached his first sermon at Holy Trinity Church in Over Worton (near Banbury, Oxfordshire), where his former teacher, the Reverend Walter Mayers, was curate.[27] On Trinity Sunday, 29 May 1825, he was ordained a priest at Christ Church Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford, Edward Legge.[28] He became, at Pusey's suggestion, curate of St Clement's Church, Oxford. Here, for two years, he was engaged in parochial work and wrote articles on "Apollonius of Tyana", "Cicero" and "Miracles" for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana.[17]

Richard Whately and Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel, were leaders in the group of Oriel Noetics, a group of independently thinking dons with a strong belief in free debate.[29] In 1825, at Whately's request, Newman became vice-principal of St Alban Hall, but he held this post for only one year. He attributed much of his "mental improvement" and partial conquest of his shyness at this time to Whately.[17]

In 1826, Newman returned as a tutor to Oriel, and the same year Richard Hurrell Froude, described by Newman as "one of the acutest, cleverest and deepest men" he ever met, was elected fellow there.[17] The two formed a high ideal of the tutorial office as clerical and pastoral rather than secular, which led to tensions in the college. Newman assisted Whately in his popular work Elements of Logic (1826, initially for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana), and from him gained a definite idea of the Christian Church as institution:[17] "a Divine appointment, and as a substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives and powers of its own".[12] Newman broke with Whately in 1827 on the occasion of the re-election of Robert Peel as Member of Parliament for the university: Newman opposed Peel on personal grounds. In 1827 Newman was a preacher at Whitehall.[17]

Oxford Movement

In 1828, Newman supported and secured the election of Edward Hawkins as Provost of Oriel over John Keble. In the same year Newman was appointed vicar of St Mary's University Church, to which the benefice of Littlemore (to the south of the city of Oxford) was attached,[30] and Pusey was made Regius Professor of Hebrew.[17] At this date, although Newman was still nominally associated with the Evangelicals, his views were gradually assuming a higher ecclesiastical tone. George Herring considers that the death of his sister Mary in January had a major impact on Newman. In the middle part of the year he worked to read the Church Fathers thoroughly.[31]

While local secretary of the Church Missionary Society, Newman circulated an anonymous letter suggesting a method by which Anglican clergy might practically oust Nonconformists from all control of the society. This resulted in his being dismissed from the post on 8 March 1830; and three months later Newman withdrew from the Bible Society, completing his move away from the low church group. In 1831–1832, Newman became the "Select Preacher" before the university.[17] In 1832 his difference with Hawkins as to the "substantially religious nature" of a college tutorship became acute and prompted his resignation.[17]

Mediterranean travels

In December 1832, Newman accompanied Archdeacon Robert Froude and his son Hurrell on a tour in southern Europe on account of the latter's health. On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands and, subsequently, Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman. In a letter home he described Rome as "the most wonderful place on Earth", but the Roman Catholic Church as "polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous".[17][32]

During the course of this tour, Newman wrote most of the short poems which a year later were printed in the Lyra Apostolica. From Rome, instead of accompanying the Froudes home in April, Newman returned to Sicily alone.[17] He fell dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever at Leonforte, but recovered, with the conviction that God still had work for him to do in England. Newman saw this as his third providential illness. In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseille in an orange boat, which was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio. Here, Newman wrote the verses "Lead, Kindly Light" which later became popular as a hymn.[32][33]

Tracts for the Times

Newman was at home again in Oxford on 9 July 1833 and, on 14 July, Keble preached at St Mary's an assize sermon on "National Apostasy", which Newman afterwards regarded as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Richard William Church, it was "Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus, and Newman who took up the work"; but the first organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled "the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement".[34] Rose met Oxford Movement figures on a visit to Oxford looking for magazine contributors, and it was in his rectory house at Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergy was held over 25–26 July (Newman was not present, but Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval, and William Palmer had gone to visit Rose),[35] at which it was resolved to fight for "the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer Book".[34]

A few weeks later Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times, from which the movement was subsequently named "Tractarian". Its aim was to secure for the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline. At the time the state's financial stance towards the Church of Ireland had raised the spectres of disestablishment, or an exit of high churchmen. The teaching of the tracts was supplemented by Newman's Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary's, the influence of which, especially over the junior members of the university, was increasingly marked during a period of eight years. Through Francis Rivington, the tracts were published by the Rivington house in London.[36]

In 1835, professor Edward Pusey joined the Oxford Movement and contributed tracts on Baptism and the Eucharist, and the wider movement became known as the so-called "Puseyites", a term soon generally applied to Anglican ritualists.[34] In 1836, the Tractarians appeared as an activist group, in united opposition to the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity. Hampden's 1832 Bampton Lectures, in the preparation of which Joseph Blanco White assisted, were suspected of heresy; and this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr Hampden's Theological Statements.[34] At this date, Newman became editor of the British Critic. He also gave courses of lectures in a side chapel of St Mary's in defence of the via media ("middle way") of Anglicanism between Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism.[34]

Doubts and opposition

Newman's influence in Oxford was supreme about the year 1839.[34] Just then, however, his study of monophysitism caused him to doubt whether Anglican theology was consistent with the principles of ecclesiastical authority which he had come to accept. He read Nicholas Wiseman's article in the Dublin Review on "The Anglican Claim", which quoted Augustine of Hippo against the Donatists, "securus judicat orbis terrarum" ("the verdict of the world is conclusive").[34] Newman later wrote of his reaction:

For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before.... They were like the 'Tolle, lege,—Tolle, lege,' of the child, which converted St Augustine himself. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum!' By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised. (Apologia, part 5)

After a furore in which the eccentric John Brande Morris preached for him in St Mary's in September 1839, Newman began to think of moving away from Oxford. One plan that surfaced was to set up a religious community in Littlemore, outside the city of Oxford.[37] Since accepting his post at St Mary's, Newman had a chapel (dedicated to Sts Nicholas and Mary) and a school built in the parish's neglected area. Newman's mother had laid the foundation stone in 1835, based on a half-acre plot and £100 given by Oriel College.[38] Newman planned to appoint Charles Pourtales Golightly, an Oriel man, as curate at Littlemore in 1836. However, Golightly had taken offence at one of Newman's sermons and joined a group of aggressive anti-Catholics.[39] Isaac Williams became Littlemore's curate instead, succeeded by John Rouse Bloxam from 1837 to 1840, during which the school opened.[30][40] William John Copeland acted as curate from 1840.[41]

Newman continued as a High Anglican controversialist until 1841, when he published Tract 90, which proved the last of the series. This detailed examination of the Thirty-Nine Articles suggested that their framers directed their negations not against Catholicism's authorised creed, but only against popular errors and exaggerations. Though this was not altogether new, Archibald Campbell Tait, with three other senior tutors, denounced it as "suggesting and opening a way by which men might violate their solemn engagements to the university".[34] Other heads of houses and others in authority joined in the alarm. At the request of Richard Bagot, the Bishop of Oxford, the publication of the Tracts came to an end.[34]

Retreat to Littlemore

Newman also resigned the editorship of the British Critic and was thenceforth, as he later described it, "on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church". He now considered the position of Anglicans to be similar to that of the semi-Arians in the Arian controversy. The joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric set up in Jerusalem was to him further evidence that the Church of England was not apostolic.[34][42]

In 1842, Newman withdrew to Littlemore with a small band of followers, and lived in semi-monastic conditions.[34] The first to join him there was John Dobree Dalgairns.[43] Others were William Lockhart on the advice of Henry Manning,[44] Ambrose St John in 1843,[45] Frederick Oakeley and Albany James Christie in 1845.[46][47] The group adapted buildings in what is now College Lane, Littlemore, opposite the inn, including stables and a granary for stage coaches. Newman called it "the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Littlemore" (now Newman College).[48] This "Anglican monastery" attracted publicity, and much curiosity in Oxford, which Newman tried to downplay, but some nicknamed it Newmanooth (from Maynooth College).[49] Some Newman disciples wrote about English saints, while Newman himself worked to complete an Essay on the development of doctrine.[34]

In February 1843, Newman published, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Roman Catholicism. Lockhart became the first in the group to convert formally to Catholicism. Newman preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore, the valedictory "The parting of friends" on 25 September, and resigned the living of St Mary's,[34] although he did not leave Littlemore for two more years, until his own formal reception into the Catholic Church.[34][30]

Conversion to Catholicism

An interval of two years then elapsed before Newman was received into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845 by Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, at the college in Littlemore.[34] The personal consequences for Newman of his conversion were great: he suffered broken relationships with family and friends, and attitudes toward him within his Oxford circle became polarised.[50] The effect on the wider Tractarian movement is still debated since Newman's leading role is regarded by some scholars as overstated, as is Oxford's domination of the movement as a whole. Tractarian writings had a wide and continuing circulation after 1845, well beyond the range of personal contacts with the main Oxford figures, and Tractarian clergy continued to be recruited into the Church of England in numbers.[51]

Oratorian

In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for St. Mary's College, Oscott, where Nicholas Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Pope Pius IX. At the close of 1847, Newman returned to England as an Oratorian and resided first at Maryvale (near Old Oscott, now the site of Maryvale Institute, a college of Theology, Philosophy and Religious Education); then at St Wilfrid's College, Cheadle; and then at St Anne's, Alcester Street, Birmingham. Finally, he settled at Edgbaston, where spacious premises were built for the community, and where (except for four years in Ireland) he lived a secluded life for nearly forty years.[34] Before the house at Edgbaston was occupied, Newman established the London Oratory, with Father Frederick William Faber as its superior.[34]

Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England

Anti-Catholicism had been central to British culture since the 16th-century English Reformation. According to D. G. Paz, anti-Catholicism was "an integral part of what it meant to be a Victorian".[52] Popular anti-Catholic feeling ran high at this time, partly in consequence of the papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae by which Pope Pius IX re-established the Catholic diocesan hierarchy in England on 29 September 1850. New episcopal sees were created and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman was to be the first Archbishop of Westminster.[53] Wiseman announced the restoration of the hierarchy in England on 7 October in a pastoral letter dated "from out of the Flaminian Gate".

Led by The Times and Punch, the British press saw this as being an attempt by the papacy to reclaim jurisdiction over England. This was dubbed the "Papal Aggression". The prime minister, John Russell, wrote a public letter to the Bishop of Durham and denounced this "attempt to impose a foreign yoke upon our minds and consciences".[54] Russell's stirring up of anti-Catholicism led to a national outcry. This "No Popery" uproar led to violence with Catholic priests being pelted in the streets and Catholic churches being attacked.[55]

Newman was keen for lay people to be at the forefront of any public apologetics, writing that Catholics should "make the excuse of this persecution for getting up a great organization, going round the towns giving lectures, or making speeches".[56] He supported John Capes in the committee he was organising for public lectures in February 1851. Due to ill health, Capes had to stop them halfway through. Newman took the initiative and booked the Birmingham Corn Exchange for a series of public lectures. He decided to make their tone popular and provide cheap off-prints to those who attended. These lectures were his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England and they were delivered weekly, beginning on 30 June and published on 1 September 1851.[34][12] In total, there were nine lectures:

  1. Protestant view of the Catholic Church
  2. Tradition the sustaining power of the Protestant view
  3. Fable the basis of the Protestant view
  4. True testimony insufficient for the Protestant view
  5. Logical inconsistency of the Protestant view
  6. Prejudice the life of the Protestant view
  7. Assumed principles of the intellectual ground of the Protestant view
  8. Ignorance concerning Catholics the protection of the Protestant view
  9. Duties of Catholics towards the Protestant view

which form the nine chapters of the published book. Following the first edition, a number of paragraphs were removed following the Achilli trial as "they were decided by a jury to constitute a libel, June 24, 1852."[57] Andrew Nash describes the Lectures as "an analysis of this [anti-Catholic] ideology, satirising it, demonstrating the false traditions on which it was based and advising Catholics how they should respond to it. They were the first of their kind in English literature."[58] John Wolffe assesses the Lectures as:

an interesting treatment of the problem of anti-Catholicism from an observer whose partisan commitment did not cause him to slide into mere polemic and who had the advantage of viewing the religious battlefield from both sides of the tortured no man's land of Littlemore.[59]

The response to the Lectures was split between Catholics and Protestants. Generally, Catholics greeted them with enthusiasm. A review in The Rambler, a Catholic periodical, saw them as "furnishing a key to the whole mystery of anti-Catholic hostility and as shewing the special point of attack upon which our controversial energies should be concentrated."[60] However, some Catholic theologians, principally John Gillow, president of Ushaw College, perceived Newman's language as ascribing too much to the role of the laity. Gillow accused Newman of giving the impression that the church's infallibility resides in a partnership between the hierarchy and the faithful, rather than falling exclusively in the teaching office of the church, a concept described by Pope Pius IX as the "ordinary magisterium" of the church.[61] The Protestant response was less positive. Archdeacon Julius Hare said that Newman "is determined to say whatever he chooses, in spite of facts and reason".[62]

Wilfrid Ward, Newman's first biographer, describes the Lectures as follows:

We have the very curious spectacle of a grave religious apologist giving rein for the first time at the age of fifty to a sense of rollicking fun and gifts of humorous writing, which if expended on other subjects would naturally have adorned the pages of Thackeray's Punch.[63]

Ian Ker has raised the profile of Newman's satire.[64] Ker notes that Newman's imagery has a "savage, Swiftian flavour" and can be "grotesque in the Dickens manner".[65] Newman himself described the Lectures as his "best-written book".[66]

Achilli trial

One of the features of English anti-Catholicism was the holding of public meetings at which ex-Catholics, including former priests, denounced their prior beliefs and gave detailed accounts of the alleged "horrors" of Catholic life. Giacinto Achilli (1803–1860), an ex-Dominican friar, was one such speaker.[67]

In 1841, the Roman Inquisition had suspended Achilli's priestly faculties for sexual misconduct and sentenced Achilli to three years of penance in a Dominican house.[67][68] Achilli left the house in 1842, becoming Protestant and asking for political asylum in Corfu. In 1850, he was brought to England by the Evangelical Alliance, which portrayed him as a victim, to speak against the Catholic Church.[67] In July 1850, Wiseman wrote a detailed exposé of him in The Dublin Review which listed all of his offences. Newman therefore assumed, after seeking legal advice, that he would be able to repeat the facts in his fifth lecture in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England.[69]

The section of the lecture that was decided by jury to constitute a libel was:

I have been a Catholic and an infidel; I have been a Roman priest and a hypocrite; I have been a profligate under a cowl. I am that Father Achilli, who as early as 1826, was deprived of my faculty to lecture, for an offence which my superiors did their best to conceal; and who in 1827 had already earned the reputation of a scandalous friar. I am that Achilli, who in the diocese of Viterbo in February 1831, robbed of her honour a young woman of eighteen; who in September 1833, was found guilty of a second such crime, in the case of a person of twenty-eight; and who perpetrated a third in July 1834, in the case of another aged twenty-four.[70] I am he, who afterwards was found guilty of sins, similar or worse, in other towns of the neighbourhood. I am that son of St. Dominic who is known to have repeated the offence at Capua, in 1834 or 1835; and at Naples again, in 1840, in the case of a child of fi[f]teen. I am he who chose the sacristy of the church for one of these crimes, and Good Friday for another. Look on me, ye mothers of England, a confessor against Popery, for ye 'ne'er may look upon my like again.' I am that veritable priest, who, after all this, began to speak against, not only the Catholic faith, but the moral law, and perverted others by my teaching. I am the Cavaliere Achilli, who then went to Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her husband, and lived publicly and travelled about with the wife of a chorus-singer. I am that Professor of the Protestant College at Malta, who with two others was dismissed from my post for offences which the authorities cannot get themselves to describe. And now attend to me, such as I am, and you shall see what you shall see about the barbarity and profligacy of the Inquisitors of Rome.

You speak truly, O Achilli, and we cannot answer you a word. You are a Priest; you have been a Friar; you are, it is undeniable, the scandal of Catholicism, and the palmary argument of Protestants, by your extraordinary depravity. You have been, it is true, a profligate, an unbeliever, and a hypocrite. Not many years passed of your conventual life, and you were never in the choir, always in private houses, so that the laity observed you. You were deprived of your professorship, we own it; you were prohibited from preaching and hearing confessions; you were obliged to give hush-money to the father of one of your victims, as we learned from an official document of the Neapolitan Police to be 'known for habitual incontinency;' your name came before the civil tribunal at Corfu for your crime of adultery. You have put the crown on your offences, by as long as you could, denying them all; you have professed to seek after truth, when you were ravening after sin.[71]

The libel charge was officially laid against Newman in November. Under English law, Newman needed to prove every single charge he had made against Achilli. Newman requested the documents that Wiseman had used for his article in the Dublin Review but he had mislaid them. He eventually found them but it was too late to prevent the trial. Newman and his defence committee needed to locate the victims and return them to England. A number of the victims were found and Maria Giberne, a friend of Newman, went to Italy to return with them to England. Achilli, on hearing that witnesses were being brought, arranged for the trial to be delayed. This put Newman under great strain as he had been invited to be the founding rector of the proposed Catholic University in Dublin and was composing and delivering the lectures that would become The Idea of a University.

On 21 June 1852, the libel trial started and lasted three days.[72] Despite the evidence of the victims and witnesses, Achilli denied that any of it had happened; the jury believed him and found Newman guilty of libel.[34] The Times said in response that "a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country".[73] A second trial was not granted and sentencing was postponed. When sentencing occurred, Newman did not get the prison sentence expected but got a fine of £100 and a long lecture from Judge John Taylor Coleridge about his moral deterioration since he had become a Catholic. Coleridge later wrote to Keble: "It is a very painful matter for us who must hail this libel as false, believing it is in great part true—or at least that it may be."[74]

The fine was paid on the spot and while his expenses as defendant amounted to about £14,000, they were paid out of a fund organised by this defence committee to which Catholics at home and abroad had contributed; there was £2,000 left over which was spent on the purchase of a small property in Rednal, on the Lickey Hills, with a chapel and cemetery, where Newman was eventually buried.[34] Newman removed the libellous section of the fifth lecture and replaced it with the inscription:

De illis quae sequebantur / posterorum judicium sit – About those things which had followed / let posterity be the judge.[75]

Educator

In 1854, at the request of the Irish Catholic bishops, Newman went to Dublin as rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College Dublin. It was during this time that he founded the Literary and Historical Society. After four years, he retired. He published a volume of lectures entitled The Idea of a University, which explained his philosophy of education.[34]

Newman believed in a middle way between free thinking and moral authority—one that would respect the rights of knowledge as well as the rights of revelation.[5] His purpose was to build a Catholic university, in a world where the major Catholic universities on the European continent had recently been secularised, and most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. For a university to claim legitimacy in the larger world, it would have to support research and publication free from church censorship; however, for a university to be a safe place for the education of Catholic youth, it would have to be a place in which the teachings of the Catholic church were respected and promoted.[76]

The University... has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.[77]

This philosophy encountered opposition within the Catholic Church, at least in Ireland, as evidenced by the opinion of bishop Paul Cullen. In 1854 Cullen wrote a letter to the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (now called the Dicastery for Evangelization), criticising Newman's liberal exercise of authority within the new university:

The discipline introduced is unsuitable, certainly to this country. The young men are allowed to go out at all hours, to smoke, etc., and there has not been any fixed time for study. All this makes it clear that Father Newman does not give enough attention to details.[78]

The university as envisaged by Newman encountered too much opposition to prosper. However, his book did have a wide influence.[79]

In 1858, Newman projected a branch house of the Oratory at Oxford; but this project was opposed by Father (later Cardinal) Henry Edward Manning, another influential convert from Anglicanism, and others. It was thought that the creation of a Catholic body within the heart of Oxford was likely to induce Catholics to send their sons to that university, rather than to newly formed Catholic universities. The scheme was abandoned.[34] When Catholics did begin to attend Oxford from the 1860s onwards, a Catholic club was formed and, in 1888, it was renamed the Oxford University Newman Society in recognition of Newman's efforts on behalf of Catholicism in that university city. The Oxford Oratory was eventually founded over 100 years later in 1993.[80]

In 1859, Newman established, in connection with the Birmingham Oratory, a school for the education of the sons of gentlemen along lines similar to those of English public schools.[34] The Oratory School flourished as a boys' boarding school, and was one of a number which were to be dubbed "The Catholic Eton".[81] Newman's published writings and sermons had a profound influence on one of the greatest of American educators, William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796–1877). At his model schools on Long Island (1828, 1836), Muhlenberg would sometimes read Newman's sermons to the boys. Muhlenberg, pioneer of a new kind of education in America, and a staunch Protestant, distanced himself from Newman when the latter converted to the Roman Church in 1845. But the influence went deep, nonetheless, as can be seen in the literary remains of Muhlenberg's former pupils, especially in those of the missionary school-maker Lloyd Breck (1818–1876) and John Barrett Kerfoot (1816–1881), founder of Saint James School of Maryland.

Relationships with other converts

Newman had a special concern in the publisher Burns & Oates; the owner, James Burns, had published some of the Tractarians, and Burns had himself converted to Catholicism in 1847. Newman published several books with the company, effectively saving it. There is even a story that Newman's novel Loss and Gain was written specifically to assist Burns. In 1863, in a response to Thomas William Allies, while agreeing that slavery was bad, Newman would not publicly condemn it as "intrinsically evil" on the grounds that it had been tolerated by St Paul—thus asserting that slavery is "a condition of life ordained by God in the same sense that other conditions of life are".[82]

Newman and Henry Edward Manning both became significant figures in the late 19th-century Catholic Church in England: both were Anglican converts and both were elevated to the dignity of cardinal. Despite these similarities, there was a lack of sympathy between the two men who were different in character and experience, and they clashed on a number of issues, in particular the foundation of an Oratory in Oxford. On theological issues, Newman had reservations about the declaration of papal infallibility (Manning favoured the formal declaration of the doctrine). Newman, while personally convinced, as a matter of theological opinion, of papal infallibility, opposed its definition as dogma, fearing that the definition might be expressed in over-broad terms open to misunderstanding.[83]

George W. E. Russell recorded:

When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof. I ventured to ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches. He replied that he had and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety, after a moment's pause he added: "But if you ask me if they are like poor Newman, I am bound to say—a photograph."[84]

Apologia

In 1862, Newman began to prepare autobiographical and other memoranda to vindicate his career. The occasion came when, in the January 1864 issue of Macmillan's Magazine, Charles Kingsley, reviewing James Anthony Froude's History of England, incidentally asserted that "Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be." Edward Lowth Badeley, who had been a close legal adviser to Newman since the Achilli trial, encouraged him to make a robust rebuttal.[85] After some preliminary sparring between the two, in which Kingsley refused to admit any fault, Newman published a pamphlet, Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman: A Correspondence on the Question Whether Dr. Newman Teaches That Truth Is No Virtue? (published in 1864 and not reprinted until 1913). The pamphlet has been described as "unsurpassed in the English language for the vigour of its satire".[34] However, the anger displayed was later, in a letter to Sir William Cope, admitted to have been largely feigned.[34] After the debate went public, Kingsley attempted to defend his assertion in a lengthy pamphlet entitled What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?, described by a historian as "one of the most momentous rhetorical and polemical failures of the Victorian age".[86]

In answer to Kingsley Newman published his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a religious autobiography, in seven weekly parts starting on 21 April, followed by an appendix two weeks after the seventh part.[87] Its tone changed the popular estimate of its author, by explaining the convictions which had led him into the Catholic Church. Kingsley's general accusation against the Catholic clergy is dealt with in the seventh part in the work;[85] his specific accusations are addressed in an appendix.[88] Newman maintains that English Catholic priests are at least as truthful as English Catholic laymen.[34] Newman published a revision of the series of pamphlets in book form in 1865; in 1913 a combined critical edition, edited by Wilfrid Ward, was published. In the book, Newman wrote, "[T]here are but two alternatives, the way to Rome, and the way to Atheism."[89] In the conclusion of the Apologia, Newman expressed sympathy for the Liberal Catholicism of Charles de Montalembert and Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire: "In their general line of thought and conduct I enthusiastically concur, and consider them to be before their age."[90][91]

Later years and death

In 1870, Newman published his Grammar of Assent, a closely reasoned work in which the case for religious belief is maintained by arguments somewhat different from those commonly used by Catholic theologians of the time. In 1877, in the republication of his Anglican works, he added to the two volumes containing his defence of the via media, a long preface in which he criticised and replied to anti-Catholic arguments of his own which were contained in the original works.[92]

At the time of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), Newman was uneasy about the formal definition of the doctrine of papal infallibility, believing that the time was "inopportune".[93] In a private letter to his bishop (William Bernard Ullathorne), surreptitiously published, he denounced the "insolent and aggressive faction" that had pushed the matter forward. Newman gave no sign of disapproval when the doctrine was finally defined, but was an advocate of the "principle of minimising", that included very few papal declarations within the scope of infallibility.[94] Subsequently, in a letter nominally addressed to the Duke of Norfolk when Gladstone accused the Roman church of having "equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history", Newman affirmed that he had always believed in the doctrine, and had only feared the deterrent effect of its definition on conversions on account of acknowledged historical difficulties. In this letter, and especially in the postscript to the second edition, Newman answered the charge that he was not at ease within the Catholic Church.[95]

Cardinalate

In 1878, Newman's old college elected him an honorary fellow, and he revisited Oxford after an interval of thirty-two years, on the same day Pope Pius IX died. Pius had mistrusted Newman but his successor, Pope Leo XIII, was encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other English Catholic laymen to make Newman a cardinal, despite the fact that he was neither a bishop nor resident in Rome.[95]

Cardinal Manning seems not to have been interested in having Newman become a cardinal and remained silent when the Pope asked him about it. Ullathorne, as Newman's immediate superior, sent word to Pope Leo that he would welcome the honour. The offer was made by Rome in February 1879. Newman accepted the gesture as a vindication of his work, but made two requests: that he not be consecrated a bishop on receiving the cardinalate, as was usual at that time; and that he might remain in Birmingham.[95] Newman was elevated to the rank of cardinal in the consistory of 12 May 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, who assigned him the Deaconry of San Giorgio al Velabro. While in Rome, Newman insisted on the lifelong consistency of his opposition to "liberalism in religion"; he argued it would lead to complete relativism.[95][96]

Death

After an illness, Newman returned to England and lived at the Birmingham Oratory until his death, making occasional visits to London and chiefly to his old friend R. W. Church, now Dean of St Paul's. As a cardinal, Newman published nothing beyond a preface to a work by Arthur Wollaston Hutton on the Anglican ministry (1879) and an article, "On the Inspiration of Scripture", in The Nineteenth Century (February 1884).[95] In 1880, Newman confessed to an "extreme joy" that Conservative Benjamin Disraeli was no longer in power, and expressed the hope that Disraeli would be gone permanently.[97]

From the latter half of 1886, Newman's health began to fail. He celebrated Mass for the last time on Christmas Day in 1889. On 11 August 1890[5] he died of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory. Eight days later his body was buried alongside Ambrose St. John in the cemetery at Rednal Hill, Birmingham, at the country house of the oratory. In accordance with his express wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John.[5]

The pall over the coffin bore the motto that Newman adopted for use as a cardinal, Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"),[98] which William Barry, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), traces to Francis de Sales and sees as revealing the secret of Newman's "eloquence, unaffected, graceful, tender, and penetrating".[5] Ambrose St. John had become a Roman Catholic at around the same time as Newman, and the two men have a joint memorial stone inscribed with the motto Newman had chosen, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth"),[99] which Barry traces to Plato's allegory of the cave.[5] On 27 February 1891, Newman's estate was probated at £4,206.

Remains

Newman's grave was opened on 2 October 2008, with the intention of moving any remains to a tomb inside Birmingham Oratory for their more convenient veneration as relics during Newman's consideration for sainthood;[25] however, his wooden coffin was found to have disintegrated and no bones were found. A representative of the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory alleged that this was because the coffin was wooden and the burial took place at a damp site.[100] Contemporary sources show that the coffin was covered with a softer type of soil than the clay marl of the grave site.[101] Forensic expert John Hunter, from the University of Birmingham, tested soil samples from near the grave and said that total disappearance of a body was unlikely over that timescale. He said that extreme conditions which could remove bone would also have removed the coffin handles, which were extant.[102]

Writer

Some of Newman's short and earlier poems are described by R. H. Hutton as "unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect"; while his latest and longest, The Dream of Gerontius, attempts to represent the unseen world along the same lines as Dante. His prose style, especially in his Catholic days, is fresh and vigorous and is attractive to many who do not sympathise with his conclusions, from the apparent candour with which difficulties are admitted and grappled; while in his private correspondence, there is charm.[95] James Joyce, an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic, had a lifelong admiration for Newman's writing style and in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver remarked about Newman that "nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church".[103][104]

Theologian

Newman defined theology as "the Science of God, or the truths we know about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it geology".[105] Around 1830, Newman developed a distinction between natural religion and revealed religion. Revealed religion is the Christian revelation which finds its fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Natural religion refers to the knowledge of God and divine things that has been acquired outside the Christian revelation. For Newman, this knowledge of God is not the result of unaided reason but of reason aided by grace, and so he speaks of natural religion as containing a revelation, even though it is an incomplete revelation.[106]

Newman's view of natural religion gives rise to passages in his writings in which he appears to sympathise with a broader theology. Both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, he put forward the notion of a universal revelation. As an Anglican, Newman subscribed to this notion in various works, among them the 1830 University Sermon entitled "The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively", the 1833 poem "Heathenism",[107] and the book The Arians of the Fourth Century, also 1833, where he admits that there was "something true and divinely revealed in every religion".[108] As a Catholic, he included the idea in A Grammar of Assent: "As far as we know, there never was a time when... revelation was not a revelation continuous and systematic, with distinct representatives and an orderly succession."[109]

Newman held that "freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion", but was "the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church".[95][110] In 1877 he allowed that "in a religion that embraces large and separate classes of adherents there always is of necessity to a certain extent an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine".[95][111] Newman was worried about the new dogma of papal infallibility advocated by an "aggressive and insolent faction",[112] fearing that the definition might be expressed in over-broad terms open to misunderstanding and would pit religious authority against physical science. He was relieved about the moderate tone of the eventual definition, which "affirmed the pope's infallibility only within a strictly limited province: the doctrine of faith and morals initially given to the apostolic Church and handed down in Scripture and tradition."[113]

Character and relationships

A 2001 biography of Newman notes that since his death in 1890, he has suffered almost as much misrepresentation as he did during his lifetime. In the Apologia he had exorcised the phantom which, as he said, "gibbers instead of me"—the phantom of the secret Romanist, corrupting the youth of Oxford, devious and dissimulating. But he raised another phantom—that of the oversensitive, self-absorbed recluse[114] who never did anything but think and write.[115] Unwary readers took the Apologia as autobiography, but it is strictly what Newman called its first parts—"A History of My Religious Opinions".[114]

In Newman's letters and memoranda and those of his friends, a more outgoing and humorous character is revealed.[114] Newman lived in the world of his time, travelling by train as soon as engines were built and rail lines laid, and writing amusing letters about his adventures on railways[116] and ships, and during his travels in Scotland and Ireland.[115] He was an indefatigable walker, and as a young don at Oriel he often went out riding with Hurrell Froude and other friends.[117] At Oxford he had an active pastoral life as an Anglican priest, though nothing of it appears in the Apologia. Later he was active as a Catholic priest.[115] His parishioners at the Oratory, apart from a few professional men and their families, were mainly factory workers, Irish immigrants, and tradespeople. He was a caring pastor, and their recorded reminiscences show that they held him in affection.[118]

Newman, who was only a few years younger than Keats and Shelley, was born into the Romantic generation when Englishmen still wept in moments of emotion. But he lived on into the age of the stiff upper lip, with the result that later generations, hearing of his tears on a visit to his mother's grave or at the funerals of old friends such as Henry Wilberforce, thought him not only sensitive but melancholy.[119]

Described as the "sensitive recluse of legend",[116] Newman had a wide currency, appearing for instance in Lytton Strachey's description, in his famously debunking set of portraits Eminent Victorians, as Newman's "soft, spectacled, Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence".[120] Geoffrey Faber, whose own account of Newman in Oxford Apostles was far from hagiographic, found Strachey's portrait a distasteful caricature, bearing scant likeness to the Newman of history and designed solely "to tickle the self-conceit of a cynical and beliefless generation".[121] In Strachey's account, however, the true villain is Cardinal Manning, who is accused of secretly briefing the Press with the false story that Newman would turn down the Cardinalate, and who privately said of his late "friend": "Poor Newman! He was a great hater!".[122]

Strachey was only ten when Newman died, and they never met. In contrast to Strachey's account, James Anthony Froude, Hurrell Froude's brother, who knew Newman at Oxford, saw him as a Carlylean hero.[123] Compared with Newman, Froude wrote, Keble, Pusey, and the other Tractarians "were all but as ciphers, and he the indicating number". Newman's face was "remarkably like that of Julius Caesar....I have often thought of the resemblance, and believed that it extended to the temperament. In both there was an original force of character which refused to be moulded by circumstances, which was to make its own way, and become a power in the world; a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose. Both were formed by nature to command others, both had the faculty of attracting to themselves the passionate devotion of their friends and followers.... For hundreds of young men Credo in Newmannum was the veritable symbol of faith."[124]

Celibacy

Newman's celibacy, which he embraced at the age of 15,[5] also contributed to negative representations of his character,[125] laying him open to what he called "slurs".[126] To exponents of muscular Christianity such as Charles Kingsley, celibacy was synonymous with unmanliness. Kingsley, who interpreted the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as expressing a "binary law of man's being; the want of a complementum, a 'help meet', without whom it is not good for him to be",[127] feared and hated vowed sexual abstinence, considering it, in Laura Fasick's words, "a distinct and separate perversion".[128] The charge of effeminacy was aimed not just at Newman but at Tractarians and Roman Catholics in general. "In all that school", wrote Kingsley in 1851, "there is an element of foppery—even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement".[129] John Cornwell comments that "the notion of Newman's effeminacy tells us more about the reaction of others to him at the time than [about] any tendency in his own nature".[130]

To many members of the Oxford Movement, Newman included, it was Kingsley's ideal of domesticity that seemed unmanly. As R. W. Church put it, "To shrink from [celibacy] was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints".[131] Defending his decision to remain single, Charles Reding, the hero of Newman's novel Loss and Gain, argues that "surely the idea of an Apostle, unmarried, pure, in fast and nakedness, and at length a martyr, is a higher idea than that of one of the old Israelites sitting under his vine and fig-tree, full of temporal goods, and surrounded by sons and grandsons?"[132] James Eli Adams remarks that if manliness is equated with physical and psychological toughness, then perhaps "manhood cannot be sustained within domesticity, since the ideal is incompatible with ease".[133] A "common antagonism to domesticity" links "Tractarian discipline to Carlylean heroism".[123]

Friendships

Although Newman's deepest relationships were with men, he had many affectionate friendships with women.[134] One of the most important was with Maria Giberne, who knew him in his youth and followed him into the Catholic Church. She was a noted beauty, who at age fifty was described by one admirer as "the handsomest woman I ever saw in my life".[135] A gifted amateur artist, she painted many portraits of Newman at various periods, as well as several of the pictures hanging in the Birmingham Oratory. Newman had a photographic portrait of her in his room[136] and was still corresponding with her into their eighties. Emily Bowles, who first met Newman at Littlemore, was the recipient of some of his most outspoken letters on what he felt to be the mistaken course of the extreme infallibilists and his reasons for not "speaking out" as many begged him to do.[137] When she visited Newman at the Birmingham Oratory in 1861, she was welcomed by him "as only he can welcome"; she would never forget "the brightness that lit up his worn face as he received me at the door, carrying in several packages himself".[138]

Newman also experienced close male friendships, the first with Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836), the longest with Ambrose St John (1815–1875), who shared communitarian life with Newman for 32 years starting in 1843 (when St John was 28).[139] Newman wrote after St John's death: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine".[140] He directed that he be buried in the same grave as St John: "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John's grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will".[141]

Newman spelt out his theology of friendship in a sermon he preached on the Feast of St John the Evangelist, "whom Jesus loved". In the sermon, Newman said: "There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffuse as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally.... Now I shall maintain here, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour's pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate our intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us".[142] For Newman, friendship is an intimation of a greater love, a foretaste of heaven. In friendship, two intimate friends gain a glimpse of the life that awaits them in God.[143] Juan R. Vélez writes that someday Newman "may well earn a new title, that of Doctor amicitiae: Doctor of the Church on Friendship. His biography is a treatise on the human and supernatural virtues that make up friendship".[144]

Discussion about potential homosexuality

David Hilliard characterises Geoffrey Faber's description of Newman, in his 1933 book Oxford Apostles, as a "portrait of Newman as a sublimated homosexual (though the word itself was not used)".[145] On Newman's relations with Hurrell Froude, Faber wrote: "Of all his friends Froude filled the deepest place in his heart, and I'm not the first to point out that his occasional notions of marrying definitely ceased with the beginning of his real intimacy with Froude".[146] However, while Faber's theory has had considerable popular influence, scholars of the Oxford Movement tend either to dismiss it entirely or to view it with great scepticism,[147] with even scholars specifically concerned with same-sex desire hesitating to endorse it.[148]

Ellis Hanson, for instance, writes that Newman and Froude clearly "presented a challenge to Victorian gender norms", but "Faber's reading of Newman's sexlessness[149] and Hurrell Froude's guilt[150] as evidence of homosexuality" seems "strained".[151] When John Campbell Shairp combines masculine and feminine imagery in his highly poetic description of Newman's preaching style at Oxford in the early 1840s, Frederick S. Roden is put in mind of "the late Victorian definition of a male invert, the homosexual: his (Newman's) homiletics suggest a woman's soul in a man's body".[152] Roden, however, does not argue that Newman was homosexual, seeing him rather—particularly in his professed celibacy[153]—as a "cultural dissident" or "queer". Roden uses the term "queer" in a very general sense "to include any dissonant behaviours, discourses or claimed identities" in relation to Victorian norms.[154] In this sense, "Victorian Roman and Anglo-Catholicism were culturally queer".[155] In Newman's case, Roden writes, "homoaffectivity" (found in heterosexuals and homosexuals alike)[156] "is contained in friendships, in relationships that are not overtly sexual".[157]

In a September 2010 television documentary, The Trouble with the Pope,[158] Peter Tatchell discussed Newman's underlying sexuality, citing his close friendship with Ambrose St John and entries in Newman's diaries describing their fond love for each other.[159] Alan Bray, however, in his 2003 book The Friend,[160] saw the bond between the two men as "entirely spiritual",[161] noting that Newman, when speaking of St John, echoes the language of John's gospel.[143] Shortly after St John's death, Bray adds, Newman recorded "a conversation between them before St John lost his speech in those final days. He expressed his hope, Newman wrote, that during his whole priestly life he had not committed one mortal sin. For men of their time and culture that statement is definitive.... Newman's burial with Ambrose St John cannot be detached from his understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its long history". Bray cites numerous examples of friends being buried together.[161] Newman's burial with St John was not unusual at the time and did not draw contemporary comment.[162]

David Hilliard writes that relationships such as Newman's with Froude and St John "were not regarded by contemporaries as unnatural.... Nor is it possible, on the basis of passionate words uttered by mid-Victorians, to make a clear distinction between male affection and homosexual feeling. Theirs was a generation prepared to accept romantic friendships between men simply as friendships without sexual significance. Only with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the doctrine of the stiff upper lip and the concept of homosexuality as an identifiable condition, did open expressions of love between men become suspect and regarded in a new light as morally undesirable".[163] Men born in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a capacity, which did not survive into later generations, for intense male friendships. The friendship of Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, immortalised in In Memoriam A.H.H., is a famous example. Less well-known is that of Charles Kingsley and his closest friend at Cambridge, Charles Mansfield.[164]

When Ian Ker reissued his biography of Newman in 2009, he added an afterword[165] in which he put forward evidence that Newman was a heterosexual. He cited journal entries from December 1816 in which the 15-year-old Newman prayed to be preserved from the temptations awaiting him when he returned from boarding school and met girls at Christmas dances and parties.[166] As an adult, Newman wrote about the deep pain of the "sacrifice" of the life of celibacy. Ker comments: "The only 'sacrifice' that he could possibly be referring to was that of marriage. And he readily acknowledges that from time to time he continued to feel the natural attraction for marriage that any heterosexual man would."[167] In 1833, Newman wrote that, despite having "willingly" accepted the call to celibacy, he felt "not the less... the need" of "the sort of interest [sympathy] which a wife takes and none but she—it is a woman's interest".[168][169]

Influence and legacy

Within both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, Newman's influence was great in dogma. For the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, Newman's conversion secured prestige. On Catholics, his influence was mainly in the direction of a broader spirit and of a recognition of the part played by development, in doctrine and in church government.[95] He is also remembered for his famous quote "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant."[170] If his teaching on the church was less widely followed, it was because of doubts as to the thoroughness of his knowledge of history and as to his freedom from bias as a critic.[95] Catholic Cardinal Marc Ouellet, then Prefect of the then Congregation for Bishops, has said that Newman qualifies to be a Doctor of the Church, ranking with Athanasius and Augustine.[171] On 31 July 2025, Pope Leo XIV confirmed that Saint John Henry Newman would soon be proclaimed a Doctor of the Church,[172] and this proclamation was carried out in Rome on 1 November 2025.[173]

Tertiary education

Newman founded the independent school for boys Catholic University School, Dublin, and the Catholic University of Ireland which evolved into University College Dublin, a college of Ireland's largest university, the National University of Ireland.[174] A number of Newman Societies (or Newman Centers in the United States) in Newman's honour have been established throughout the world, in the mould of the Oxford University Newman Society. They provide pastoral services and ministries to Catholics at non-Catholic universities; at various times this type of "campus ministry" (the distinction and definition being flexible) has been known to Catholics as the Newman Apostolate or "Newman movement". Additionally, colleges have been named for him in Birmingham, England;[175] Melbourne, Australia;[176] Edmonton, Canada;[177] Thodupuzha, India,[178] and Wichita, United States.[179] Newman's Dublin lecture series The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated is thought to have become "the basis of a characteristic British belief that education should aim at producing generalists rather than narrow specialists, and that non-vocational subjects—in arts or pure science—could train the mind in ways applicable to a wide range of jobs".[180]

Canonisation

In 1991, Newman was proclaimed venerable by Pope John Paul II after a thorough examination of his life and work by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.[181] In 2001, Jack Sullivan, an American deacon from Marshfield in Massachusetts, attributed his recovery from a spinal cord disorder to the intercession of Newman. The miracle was accepted by the Holy See for Newman's beatification, which Pope Benedict XVI announced on 19 September 2010 during a visit to Britain.[182][183]

The approval of a further miracle at the intercession of Newman was reported in November 2018: the healing of a pregnant woman from a grave illness.[184][185] The decree approving this miracle was authorised to be promulgated on 12 February 2019.[186] On 1 July 2019, with an affirmative vote, Newman's canonisation was authorised and the date for the canonisation ceremony was set for 13 October 2019.[187] Newman was canonised on 13 October 2019, by Pope Francis, in St. Peter's Square. The ceremony was attended by the Prince of Wales (now Charles III), representing the United Kingdom.[188]

Feast day

The general rule among Roman Catholics is to celebrate canonised or beatified persons on the date of their dies natalis, the day on which they died and are considered born into heaven.[189] Newman's dies natalis is 11 August, the same day as the obligatory memorial of Saint Clare of Assisi in the General Roman Calendar which would take precedence. Thus, once Newman was beatified, the Congregation of the Oratory and the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales opted to place Newman's optional memorial on 9 October, the date of his conversion to Catholicism.[190][191] This date was chosen because "it falls at the beginning of the University year; an area in which Newman had a particular interest".[192]

In 2026, Pope Leo XIV made Newman's commemoration an optional memorial and inscribed it on the General Roman Calendar.[193] Newman is remembered in the Church of England with a commemoration on 11 August.[194] He is remembered in the Episcopal Church on 21 February.[195]

Works

Anglican period

Catholic period

Other miscellaneous works

Selections

  • Realizations: Newman's Own Selection of His Sermons (edited by Vincent Ferrer Blehl, S.J., 1964). Liturgical Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8146-3290-1
  • Mary the Second Eve (compiled by Sister Eileen Breen, F.M.A., 1969). TAN Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-89555-181-8
  • Newman, John Henry (2006). Earnest, James David; Tracey, Gerard (eds.). Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford. Oxford University Press.

See also

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

John Henry Newman — (1801-1890)

Cardinal-Deacon of St. George in Velabro, divine, philosopher, man of letters, leader of the Tractarian Movement, and the most illustrious of English converts to the Church.

Born in the City of London, 21 February, 1801, the eldest of six children, three boys and three girls; died at Edgbaston, Birmingham, 11 August, 1890. Over his descent there has been some discussion as regards the paternal side. His father was John Newman, a banker, his mother Jemima Fourdrinier, of a Huguenot family settled in London as engravers and paper-makers. It is stated that the name was at one time spelt Newmann; it is certain that many Jews, English or foreign, have borne it; and the suggestion has been thrown out that he was of Jewish descent. But no documentary evidence has been found to confirm the suggestion. His French pedigree is undoubted. It accounts for his religious training, a modified Calvinism, which he received at his mother's knees; and perhaps it helped towards the "lucid concision" of his phrase when dealing with abstruse subjects. His brother Francis William, also a writer, but wanting in literary charm, turned from the English Church to Deism; Charles Robert, the second son, was very erratic, and professed Atheism. One sister, Mary, died young; Jemima has a place in the cardinal's biography during the crisis of his Anglican career; and to a daughter of Harriet, Anne Mozley, we are indebted for his "Letters and Correspondence" down to 1845, which contains a sequel from his own hand to the "Apologia."

A classic from the day it was completed, the "Apologia" will ever be the chief authority for Newman's early thoughts, and for his judgment on the great religious revival known as the Oxford Movement, of which he was the guide, the philosopher, and the martyr. His immense correspondence, the larger portion of which still awaits publication, cannot essentially change our estimate of one who, though subtle to a degree bordering on refinement, was also impulsive and open with his friends, as well as bold in his confidences to the public. From all that is thus known of him we may infer that Newman's greatness consisted in the union of originality, amounting to genius of the first rank, with a deep spiritual temper, the whole manifesting itself in language of perfect poise and rhythm, in energy such as often has created sects or Churches, and in a personality no less winning than sensitive. Among the literary stars of his time Newman is distinguished by the pure Christian radiance that shines in his life and writings. He is the one Englishman of that era who upheld the ancient creed with a knowledge that only theologians possess, a Shakespearean force of style, and a fervour worthy of the saints. It is this unique combination that raises him above lay preachers de vanitate mundi like Thackeray, and which gives him a place apart from Tennyson and Browning. In comparison with him Keble is a light of the sixth magnitude, Pusey but a devout professor, Liddon a less eloquent Lacordaire. Newman occupies in the nineteenth century a position recalling that of Bishop Butler in the eighteenth. As Butler was the Christian champion against Deism, so Newman is the Catholic apologist in an epoch of Agnosticism, and amid the theories of evolution. He is, moreover, a poet, and his "Dream of Gerontius" far excels the meditative verse of modern singers by its happy shadowing forth in symbol and dramatic scenes of the world behind the veil.

He was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible; but he had no formed religious convictions until he was fifteen. He used to wish the Arabian tales were true; his mind ran on unknown influences; he thought life possibly a dream, himself an angel, and that his fellow-angels might be deceiving him with the semblance of a material world. He was "very superstitious" and would cross himself on going into the dark. At fifteen he underwent "conversion", though not quite as Evangelicals practise it; from works of the school of Calvin he gained definite dogmatic ideas; and as he rested "in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator." In other words, personality became the primal truth in his philosophy; not matter, law, reason, or the experience of the senses. Henceforth, Newman was a Christian mystic, and such he remained. From the writings of Thomas Scott of Aston Sandford, "to whom, humanly speaking", he says, "I almost owe my soul", he learned the doctrine of the Trinity, supporting each verse of the Athanasian Creed with texts from Scripture. Scott's aphorisms were constantly on his lips for years, "Holiness rather than peace", and "Growth is the only evidence of life." Law's "Serious Call" had on the youth a Catholic or ascetic influence; he was born to be a missionary; thought it was God's will that he should lead a single life; was enamoured of quotations from the Fathers given in Milner's "Church History", and, reading Newton on the Prophecies, felt convinced that the pope was Antichrist. He had been at school at Ealing near London from the age of seven. Always thoughtful, shy, and affectionate, he took no part in boys' games, began to exercise his pen early, read the Waverley Novels, imitated Gibbon and Johnson, matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, December, 1816, and in 1818 won a scholarship of 60 pounds tenable for nine years. In 1819 his father's bank suspended payment, but soon discharged its liabilities in full. Working too hard for his degree, Newman broke down, and gained in 1821 only third-class honors. But his powers could not be hidden. Oriel was then first in reputation and intellect among the Oxford Colleges, and of Oriel he was elected a fellow, 12 April, 1822. He ever felt this to be "the turning point in his life, and of all days most memorable."

In 1821 he had given up the intention of studying for the Bar, and resolved to take orders. As tutor of Oriel, he considered that he had a cure of souls; he was ordained on 13 June, 1824; and at Pusey's suggestion became curate of St. Clement's, Oxford, where he spent two years in parochial activity. And here the views in which he had been brought up disappointed him; Calvinism was not a key to the phenomena of human nature as they occur in the world. It would not work. He wrote articles on Cicero, etc., and his first "Essay on Miracles", which takes a strictly Protestant attitude, to the prejudice of those alleged outside Scripture. But he also fell under the influence of Whateley, afterwards Anglican Archbishop of Dublin, who, in 1825, made him his vice-principal at St. Mary's Hall. Whateley stimulated him by discussion, taught him the notion of Christianity as a social and sovereign organism distinct from the State, but led him in the direction of "liberal" ideas and nominalistic logic. To Whateley's once famous book on that subject Newman contributed. From Hawkins, whom his casting vote made Provost of Oriel, he gained the Catholic doctrines of tradition and baptismal regeneration, as well as a certain precision of terms which, long afterwards, gave rise to Kingsley's misunderstanding of Newman's methods in writing. By another Oxford clergyman he was taught to believe in the Apostolic succession. And Butler's "Analogy", read in 1823, made an era in his religious opinions. It is probably not too much to say that this deep and searching book became Newman's guide in life, and gave rise not only to the "Essay on Development" but to the "Grammar of Assent." In particular it offered a rejective account of ethics and conscience which confirmed his earliest beliefs in a lawgiver and judge intimately present to the soul. On another line it suggested the sacramental system, or the "Economy", of which the Alexandrians Clement and St. Athanasius are exponents. To sum up, at this formative period the sources whence Newman derived his principles as well as his doctrines were Anglican and Greek, not Roman or German. His Calvinism dropped away; in time he withdrew from the Bible Society. He was growing fiercely anti-Erastian; and Whateley saw the elements of a fresh party in the Church gathering round one whom Oriel had chosen for his intellectual promise, but whom Oxford was to know as a critic and antagonist of the "March of Mind."

His college in 1828 made him Vicar of St. Mary's (which was also the university church), and in its pulpit he delivered the "Parochial Sermons", without eloquence or gesture, for he had no popular gifts, but with a thrilling earnestness and a knowledge of human nature seldom equalled. When published, it was said of them that they "beat all other sermons out of the market as Scott's tales beat all other stories." They were not controversial; and there is little in them to which Catholic theology would object. Their chastened style, fertility of illustration, and short sharp energy, have lost nothing by age. In tone they are severe and often melancholy, as if the utterance of an isolated spirit. Though gracious and even tenderhearted, Newman's peculiar temper included deep reserve. He had not in his composition, as he says, a grain of conviviality. He was always the Oxford scholar, no democrat, suspicious of popular movements; but keenly interested in political studies as bearing on the fortunes of the Church. This disposition was intensified by his friendship with Keble, whose "Christian Year" came out in 1827, and with R. Hurrell Froude, a man of impetuous thought and self-denying practice. In 1832 he quarrelled with Dr. Hawkins, who would not endure the pastoral idea which Newman cherished of his college work. He resigned his tutorship, went on a long voyage round the Mediterranean with Froude, and came back to Oxford, where on 14 July, 1833, Keble preached the Assize sermon on "National Apostasy." That day, the anniversary of the French Revolution, gave birth to the Oxford Movement.

Newman's voyage to the coasts of North Africa, Italy, Western Greece, and Sicily (December, 1832-July, 1833) was a romantic episode, of which his diaries have preserved the incidents and the colour. In Rome he saw Wiseman at the English College; the city, as mother of religion to his native land, laid a spell on him never more to be undone. He felt called to some high mission; and when fever took him at Leonforte in Sicily (where he was wandering alone) he cried out, "I shall not die, I have not sinned against the light." Off Cape Ortegal, 11 December, 1832, he had composed the first of a series of poems, condensed, passionate, and original which prophesied that the Church would yet reign as in her youth. Becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio, he sought guidance through the tender verses, "Lead, Kindly Light", deservedly treasured by all the English-speaking races. They have been called the marching song of the Tractarian host. But during the earlier stages of that journey it was not clear, even to the leader himself, in what direction they were moving — away from the Revolution, certainly. Reform was in the air; ten Irish bishoprics had been suppressed; disestablishment might not be far off. There was need of resistance to the enemies without, and of a second, but a Catholic, reformation within. The primitive Church must somehow be restored in England. Others met in committee and sent up an address to Canterbury; Newman began the "Tracts for the Times", as he tells us with a smile, "out of his own head." To him Achilles always seemed more than the host of the Achans. He took his motto from the Iliad: "They shall know the difference now." Achilles went down into battle, fought for eight years, won victory upon victory, but was defeated by his own weapons when "Tract 90" appeared, and retired to his tent at Littlemore, a broken champion. Nevertheless, he had done a lasting work, greater than Laud's and likely to overthrow Cranmer's in the end. He had resuscitated the Fathers, brought into relief the sacramental system, paved the way for an astonishing revival of long-forgotten ritual, and given the clergy a hold upon thousands at the moment when Erastian principles were on the eve of triumph. "It was soon after 1830", says Pattison grimly, "that the Tracts desolated Oxford life." Newman's position was designated the Via Media. The English Church, he maintained, lay at an equal distance from Rome and Geneva. It was Catholic in origin and doctrine; it anathematized as heresies the peculiar tenets whether of Calvin or Luther; it could not but protest against "Roman corruptions", which were excrescences on primitive truth. Hence England stood by the Fathers, whose teaching the Prayer Book handed down; it appealed to antiquity, and its norm was the undivided Church. "Charles", said Newman, "is the king, Laud the prelate, Oxford the sacred city, of this principle." Patristic study became the order of the day. Newman's first volume, "The Arians of the Fourth Century", is an undigested, but valuable and characteristic, treatise, wholly Alexandrian in tone, dealing with creeds and sects on the lines of the "Economy." As a history it fails; the manner is confused, the style a contrast to his later intensity and directness of expression. But as a thinker Newman never travelled much beyond the "Arians" (published 1833). It implies a mystic philosophy controlled by Christian dogma, as the Church expounds it. In the "Apologia" we find this key to his mental development dropped by Newman, not undesignedly. He says,

I understood... that the exterior world, physical and historical, was but the manifestation to our senses of realities greater than itself. Nature was a parable, Scripture was an allegory; pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a sense prophets.

There had been a "dispensation" of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews. Both had outwardly come to nought; from and through each had the evangelical doctrine been made manifest. Thus room was granted for the anticipation of deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter. Holy Church "will remain after all but a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the expression in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal" ("Apol." ed. 1895, p. 27). Such was the teaching that "came like music" to his inward ear, from Athens and Alexandria. Newman's life was devoted, first, to applying this magnificent scheme to the Church of England; and then, when it would not suit those insular dimensions, to the Church of the centre, to Rome. But its wide implications even this far-glancing vision did not take in. However, it substituted a dynamic and progressive principle in Christianity for one merely static. But the Anglican position was supposed to rely on Vincent of Lerins's Quod ubique, admitting of no real developments; its divines urged against Boussuet the "variations" of Catholicism. From 1833 to 1839 the Tractarian leader held this line of defence without a misgiving. Suddenly it gave way, and the Via Media disappeared.

Meanwhile, Oxford was shaken like Medicean Florence by a new Savonarola, who made disciples on every hand; who stirred up sleepy Conservatives when Hampden, a commonplace don, subjected Christian verities to the dissolving influence of Nominalism; and who multiplied books and lectures dealing with all religious parties at once. "The Prophetic Office" was a formal apology of the Laudian type; the obscure, but often beautiful "Treatise on Justification" made an effort "to show that there is little difference but what is verbal in the various views, found whether among Catholic or Protestant divines" on this subject. Döllinger called it "the greatest masterpiece in theology that England had produced in a hundred years", and it contains the true answer to Puritanism. The "University Sermons", profound as their theme, aimed at determining the powers and limits of reason, the methods of revelation, the possibilities of a real theology. Newman wrote so much that his hand almost failed him. Among a crowd of admirers only one perhaps, Hurrell Froude, could meet him in thought on fairly equal terms, and Froude passed away at Dartington in 1836. The pioneer went his road alone. He made a bad party-leader, being liable to sudden gusts and personal resolutions which ended in catastrophe. But from 1839, when he reigned at Oxford without a rival, he was already faltering. In his own language, he had seen a ghost — the shadow of Rome overclouding his Anglican compromise.

Two names are associated with a change so momentous — Wiseman and Ward. The "Apologia" does full justice to Wiseman; it scarcely mentions Ward (see ). Those who were looking on might have predicted a collision between the Tractarians and Protestant England, which had forgotten the Caroline divines. This came about on occasion of "Tract 90" — in itself the least interesting of all Newman's publications. The tract was intended to keep stragglers from Rome by distinguishing the corruptions against which the Thirty-Nine Articles were directed, from the doctrines of Trent which they did not assail. A furious and universal agitation broke out in consequence (Feb., 1841), Newman was denounced as a traitor, a Guy Fawkes at Oxford; the University intervened with academic maladroitness and called the tract "an evasion." Dr. Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, mildly censured it, but required that the tracts should cease. For three years condemnations from the bench of bishops were scattered broadcast. To a mind constituted like Newman's, imbued with Ignatian ideas of episcopacy, and unwilling to perceive that they did not avail in the English Establishment, this was an ex cathedra judgment against him. He stopped the tracts, resigned his editorship of "The British Critic", by and by gave up St. Mary's, and retired at Littlemore into lay communion. Nothing is clearer than that, if he had held on quietly, he would have won the day. "Tract 90" does not go so far as many Anglican attempts at reconciliation have gone since. The bishops did not dream of coercing him into submission. But he had lost faith in himself. Reading church history he saw that the Via Media was no new thing. It had been the refuge of the Semiarians, without whom Arianism could never have flourished. It made the fortune of the Monophysites, thanks to whom the Church of Alexandria had sunk into heresy and fallen a prey to Mohammed's legions. The analogy which Newman had observed with dismay was enforced from another side by Wiseman, writing on the Donatists in "The Dublin Review." Wiseman quoted St. Augustine, "Securus judicat orbis terrarum", which may be interpreted "Catholic consent is the judge of controversy." Not antiquity studied in books, not the bare succession of bishops, but the living Church now broke upon him as alone peremptory and infallible. It ever had been so; it must be so still. Nicæa, Ephesus, and Chalcedon thus bore witness to Rome. Add to this the grotesque affair of the Jerusalem bishopric, the fruit of an alliance with Lutheran Prussia, and the Anglican theory was disproved by facts.

From 1841 Newman was on his death-bed as regarded the Anglican Church. He and some friends lived together at Littlemore in monastic seclusion, under a hard rule which did not improve his delicate health. In February, 1843, he retracted in a local newspaper his severe language towards Rome; in September he resigned his living. With immense labour he composed the "Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine", in which the apparent variations of dogma, formerly objected by him against the Catholic Church, were explained on a theory of evolution, curiously anticipating on certain points the great work of Darwin. It has many most original passages, but remains a fragment. On 9 October, 1845, during a period of excited action at Oxford, Newman was received into the Church by Father Dominic, an Italian Passionist, three days after Renan had broken with Saint-Sulpice and Catholicism. The event, although long in prospect, irritated and distressed his countrymen, who did not forgive it until many years had gone by. Its importance was felt; its causes were not known. Hence an estrangement which only the exquisite candour of Newman's self-delineation in the "Apologia" could entirely heal.

His conversion divides a life of almost ninety years into equal parts — the first more dramatic and its perspective ascertained; the second as yet imperfectly told, but spent for a quarter of a century sub luce maligna, under suspicion from one side or another, his plans thwarted, his motives misconstrued. Called by Wiseman to Oscott, near Birmingham, in 1846, he proceeded in October to Rome, and was there ordained by Cardinal Fransoni. The pope approved of his scheme for establishing in England the Oratory of St. Philip Neri; in 1847 he came back, and, besides setting up the London house, took mission work in Birmingham. Thence he moved out to Edgbaston, where the community still resides. A large school was added in 1859. The spacious Renaissance church, consecrated in 1909, is a memorial of the forty years during which Newman made his home in that place. After his "Sermons to Mixed Congregations", which exceed in vigour and irony all other published by him, the Oratorian recluse did not strive to gain a footing in the capital of the Midlands. He always felt "paucorum hominum sum"; his charm was not for the multitude. As a Catholic he began enthusiastically. His "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" were heard in London by large audiences; "Loss and Gain", though not much of a story, abounds in happy strokes and personal touches; "Callista" recalls his voyage in the Mediterranean by many delightful pages; the sermon at the Synod of Oscott entitled "The Second Spring" has a rare an delicate beauty. It is said that Macaulay knew it by heart. "When Newman made up his mind to join the Church of Rome", observes R. H. Hutton, "his genius bloomed out with a force and freedom such as it never displayed in the Anglican communion." And again, "In irony, in humour, in eloquence, in imaginative force, the writings of the later and, as we may call it, emancipated portion of his career far surpass the writings of his theological apprenticeship." But English Catholic literature also gained a persuasive voice and a classic dignity of which hitherto there had been no example.

His own secession, preceded by that of Ward (amid conflicts of the angriest kind at Oxford), and followed by many others, had alarmed Englishmen. In 1850 came the "Papal Aggression", by which the country was divided into Catholic sees, and a Roman cardinal announced from the Flaminian Gate his commission to "govern" Westminster. The nation went mad with excitement. Newman delivered in the Corn Exchange, Birmingham, his Lectures on the Position of Catholics (he was seldom felicitous in titles of books), and, to George Eliot's amazement, they revealed him as a master of humorous, almost too lively sketches, witty and scornful of the great Protestant tradition. An apostate Italian priest, Achilli, was haranguing against the Church. Prompted by Wiseman, the Oratorian gave particulars of this man's infamous career, and Achilli brought a charge of libel. Newman, at enormous expense, collected evidence which fully justified the accusations he had made. But a no-popery jury convicted him. He was fined 100 pounds; on appeal, the verdict was quashed; and "The Times" admitted that a miscarriage of justice had taken place when Newman was declared guilty. Catholics all the world over came to his relief. His thanks are on record in the dedication of his Dublin "Lectures." But he always remembered that to Wiseman's haste and carelessness he owed this trial.

There was much more trouble awaiting him. The years from 1851 to 1870 brought disaster to a series of noble projects in which he aimed at serving religion and culture. In Ireland the bishops had been compelled, after rejecting the "Godless" colleges in 1847, to undertake a university of their own. Neither men nor ideas were forthcoming; the State would not sanction degrees conferred by a private body; nevertheless, an attempt could be made; and Newman was appointed rector, November, 1851. Three years passed as in a dream; in 1854 he took the oaths. But he had, in 1852, addressed Ireland on the "Idea of a University" with such a largeness and liberality of view as Oxford, if we may believe Pattison, had never taught him. The "Lectures" end abruptly; they gave him less satisfaction than any other of his works; yet, in conjunction with his brilliant short papers in the "University Magazine", and academic dissertations to the various "Schools", they exhibit a range of thought, an urbanity of style, and a pregnant wit, such as no living professor could have rivalled. They are the best defence of Catholic educational theories in any language; a critic perhaps would describe them as the Via Media between an obscurantism which tramples on the rights of knowledge and Free-Thought which will not hear of the rights of revelation. Incidentally, they defended the teaching of the classics against a French Puritan clique led by the Abbé Gaume. This was pretty much all that Newman achieved during the seven years of his "Campaign in Ireland." Only a few native or English students attended the house in St. Stephen's Green. The bishops were divided, and Archbishop MacHale opposed a severe non possumus to the rector's plans. In administration difficulties sprang up; and though Newman won the friendship of Archbishop Cullen and Bishop Moriarty, he was not always treated with due regard. The status of titular bishop had been promised him; for reasons which he never learnt, the promise fell through. His feeling towards Ireland was warm and generous; but in Nov., 1858, he retired from the rectorship. Its labours and anxieties had told upon him. Another large enterprise, to which Cardinal Wiseman invited him only to balk his efforts, was likewise a failure — the revision of the English Catholic Bible. Newman had selected a company of revisors and had begun to accumulate materials, but some small publishers' interests were pleaded on the other side, and Wiseman, whose intentions were good, but evanescent, allowed them to wreck this unique opportunity.

During the interval between 1854 and 1860 Newman had passed from the convert's golden fervours into a state which resembled criticism of prevailing methods in church government and education. His friends included some of a type known to history as "Liberal Catholics." Of Montalembert and Lacordaire he wrote in 1864: "In their general line of thought and conduct I enthusiastically concur and consider them to be before their age." He speaks of "the unselfish aims, the thwarted projects, the unrequited toils, the grand and tender resignation of Lacordaire." That moving description might be applied to Newman himself. He was intent on the problems of the time and not alarmed at Darwin's "Origin of Species." He had been made aware by German scholars, like Acton, of the views entertained at Munich; and he was keenly sensitive to the difference between North and South in debatable questions of policy or discipline. He looked beyond the immediate future; in a lecture at Dublin on "A Form of Infidelity of the Day" he seems to have anticipated what is now termed "Modernism", condemning it as the ruin of dogma. It is distressing to imagine what Newman's horror would have been, had his intuition availed to tell him that, in little more than half a century, a "form of infidelity" so much like what he had predicted would claim him as its originator; on the other hand, he would surely have taken comfort, could he also have foreseen that the soundness of his faith was to be so vindicated as it has been by Bishop O'Dwyer, of Limerick, and above all, the vindication so approved and confirmed as it is in Pius X's letter of 10 March, 1908, to that bishop. In another lecture, on "Christianity and Scientific Investigation", he provides for a concordat which would spare the world a second case of Galileo. He held that Christian theology was a deductive science, but physics and the like were inductive; therefore collision between them need not, and in fact did not really occur. He resisted in principle the notion that historical evidence could do away with the necessity of faith as regarded creeds and definitions. He deprecated the intrusions of amateurs into divinity; but he was anxious that laymen should take their part in the movement of intellect. This led him to encourage J. M. Capes in founding the "Rambler", and H. Wilberforce in editing the "Weekly Register." But likewise it brought him face to face with a strong reaction from the earlier liberal policy of Pius IX. This new movement, powerful especially in France, was eagerly taken up by Ward and Manning, who now influenced Wiseman as he sank under a fatal disease. Their quarrel with J.H.N. (as he was familiarly called) did not break out in open war; but much embittered correspondence is left which proves that, while no point of faith divided the parties, their dissensions threw back English Catholic education for thirty years.

These misunderstandings turned on three topics:

  • the "scientific" history which was cultivated by the "Rambler", with Newman's partial concurrence;
  • the proposed oratory at Oxford; and
  • the temporal power, then at the crisis of its fate.

Newman's editorship of the "Rambler", accepted, on request of Wiseman, by way of compromise, lasted only two months (May-July, 1859). His article, "On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine", was denounced at Rome by Bishop Brown of Newport and Menevia. Leave was given for an Oratorian house at Oxford, provided Newman did not go thither himself, which defeated the whole plan. A sharp review of Manning's "Lectures on the Temporal Power" was attributed to Newman, who neither wrote nor inspired it; and these two illustrious Catholics were never friends again. Newman foresaw the total loss of the temporal power; his fears were justified; but prevision and the politics of the day could not well be united. Of all Christians then living this great genius had the deepest insight into the future; but to his own generation he became as Jeremiah announcing the fall of Jerusalem. Despondency was his prevailing mood when, in January, 1864, from an unexpected quarter, the chance of his life was given him.

Charles Kingsley, a bold, picturesque, but fiercely anti-Catholic writer, dealing, in "Macmillan's Magazine", with J. A. Froude's "History of England," let fall the remark that

Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which heaven has given to the Saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.

These assertions had no foundation whatever in fact. Newman demanded proof; a correspondence ensued in which Kingsley referred to one of the Oxford Anglican sermons generally; he withdrew his charge in terms that left its injustice unreproved; and thus he brought on himself, in the pamphlet which his adversary published, one of the most cutting replies, ironical and pitiless, known to literature. He returned to the assault. "What then does Dr. Newman mean?" was his question. The answer came in the shape of an "Apologia pro Vita sua", which, while pulverizing enemies of the Kingsley stamp, lifted Newman to a height above all his detractors, and added a unique specimen of religious autobiography to our language. Issued in seven parts between 21 April and 2 June, 1864, the original work was a marvel of swift and cogent writing. Materials in expectation of some such opportunity had been collecting since 1862. But the duel which led up to an account of Newman's most intimate feelings exhibited sword-play the like of which can be scarcely found outside Pascal's "Provincial Letters" and Lessing's "Anti-Goeze." It annihilated the opponent and his charge. Not that Newman cherished a personal animosity against Kingsley, whom he had never met. His tone was determined by a sense of what he owed to his own honour and the Catholic priesthood. "Away with you, Mr. Kingsley, and fly into space", were his parting words to a man whose real gifts did not serve him in this wild encounter. Then the old Tractarian hero told the story of his life. He looked upon it with the eye of an artist, with self-knowledge like that of Hamlet, with candour, and pathos, and awe; for he felt a guiding power throughout which had brought him home. The handling was unaffected, the portraits of Oxford celebrities true and yet kind; the drama which ended in his renunciation of place and power at St. Mary's moved on with a tragic interest. His brief prologues are among the jewels of English prose. A word from St. Augustine converted him, and its poignant effects could not be surpassed in the "Confessions" of the saint himself. The soliloquy, as we may term it, which describes Newman's attitude since 1845, presents in a lofty view his apology, which is not a surrender, to those Catholics who mistrusted him. Though he never would discuss the primary problems of Theism ex professo, he has dwelt on the apparent chaos of history, goodness defeated and moral efforts futile, with a piercing eloquence which reminds us of some lament in "schylus." He met Kingsley's accusations of double-dealing proudly and in detail. But by the time he reached them, Englishmen — who had read the successive chapters with breathless admiration — were completely brought round. No finer triumph of talent in the service of conscience has been put on record. From that day the Catholic religion may date its reentrance into the national literature. Instead of arid polemics and technical arguments, a living soul had revealed its journey towards the old faith wherein lay the charm that drew it on. Reality became more fascinating that romance; the problem which staggered Protestants and modern minds — how to reconcile individual genius with tradition, private judgment with authority — was resolved in Newman's great example.

Amid acclamations from Catholics, echoing the "aves vehement" of the world outside, he turned to the philosophy which would justify his action. He began the "Grammar of Assent." Still, Manning, now archbishop, Talbot, chamberlain of Pius IX, Ward, editor of the "Dublin Review", were not to be pacified. Manning thought he was transplanting the "Oxford tone into the Church"; Talbot described him as "the most dangerous man in England"; Ward used even harder terms. In 1867 an attack by a Roman correspondent on Newman led to a counter-move, when two hundred distinguished laymen told him, "Every blow that touches you inflicts a wound upon the Catholic Church in this country." His discriminating answer on the cultus of Our Lady to Pusey's "Eirenicon" had been taken ill in some quarters. One of his Oratorians, H.I.D. Ryder, was bold enough to cross swords with the editor of the "Dublin", who inflicted on friend and foe views concerning the extent of papal infallibility which the Roman authorities did not sanction; and Newman rejoiced in the assault. In 1870 the "Grammar" was published. But its appearance, coinciding with the Vatican Council, roused less attention than the author's suspected dislike for the aims and conduct of the majority at Rome. Years before he had proclaimed his belief in the infallible pope. His "Cathedra Sempiterna" rivals in fervour and excels in genuine rhetoric the passage with which de Maistre concluded his "Du Pape", which became a text for "ultramontane" apologetics. Yet he shrank from the perils which hung over men less stable than himself, should the definition be carried. He would have healed the breach between Rome and Munich. Under these impressions he sent to his bishop, W.B. Ullathorne, a confidential letter in which he branded, not the Fathers of the Council, but the journalists and other partisans outside who were abounding in violent language, as "an insolent and aggressive faction." The letter was surreptitiously made public; a heated controversy ensued; but Newman took no further part in the conciliar proceedings. Of course he accepted the dogmatic definitions; and in 1874 he defended the Church against Gladstone's charge that "Vaticanism" was equivalent to the latest fashions in religion (see his "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk").

Newman's demeanour towards authority was ever one of submission; but, as he wrote to Phillips de Lisle in 1848, "it is no new thing with me to feel little sympathy with parties, or extreme opinions of any kind." In recommending the Creed he would employ "a wise and gentle minimism", not extenuating what was true but setting down nought in malice. The "Grammar of Assent" illustrates and defends this method, in which human nature is not left out of account. It is curiously Baconian, for it eschews abstractions and metaphysics, being directed to the problem of concrete affirmation, its motives in fact, and its relation to the personality of the individual. This hitherto unexplored province of apologetics lay dark, while the objective reasons for assent had engrossed attention; we might term it the casuistry of belief. Newman brought to the solution a profound acquaintance with the human heart, which was his own; a resolve to stand by experience; and a subtilty of expression corresponding to his fine analysis. He believed in "implicit" logic, varied and converging proofs, indirect demonstration (ex impossibili or ex absurdo); assent, in short, in not a mechanical echo of the syllogism but a vital act, distinct and determined. The will, sacrificed in many schools to formal intellect, recovers its power; genius and common sense are justified. Not that pure logic loses its rights, or truth is merely "that which each man troweth"; but the moral being furnishes an indispensable premise to arguments bearing on life, and all that is meant by a "pious disposition" towards faith is marvellously drawn out. As a sequel and crown to the "Development" this often touching volume (which reminds us of Pascal) completed the author's philosophy. Some portions of it he is said to have written ten times, the last chapter many times more. Yet that chapter is already in part antiquated. The general description, however, of concrete assent appears likely to survive all objections. How far it bears on Kant's "Practical Reason" or the philosophy of the will as developed by Schopenhauer, has yet to be considered. But we must not torture it into the "pragmatism" of a later day. As Newman held by dogma in revelation, so he would never have denied that the mind enjoys a vision of truth founded on reality. He was a mystic, not a sceptic. To him the reason by which men guided themselves was "implicit" rather than "explicit", but reason nevertheless. Abstractions do not exist; but the world is a fact; our own personality cannot be called in question; the will is a true cause; and God reveals Himself in conscience. Apologetics, to be persuasive, should address the individual; for real assents, however multiplied, are each single and sui generis. Even a universal creed becomes in this way a private acquisition. As the "Development" affords a counterpart to Boussuet's "Variations", so the "Grammar" may be said to have reduced the "personal equation" in controversy to a working hypothesis, whereas in Protestant hands it had served the purposes of anarchy.

For twenty years Newman lay under imputations at Rome, which misconstrued his teaching and his character. This, which has been called the ostracism of a saintly genius, undoubtedly was due to his former friends, Ward and Manning. In February, 1878, Pius IX died; and, by a strange conjuncture, in that same month Newman returned to Oxford as Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, "dear to him from undergraduate days." The event provoked Catholics to emulation. Moreover, the new pope, Leo XIII, had also lived in exile from the Curia since 1846, and the Virgilian sentiment, "Haud ignara mali", would come home to him. The Duke of Norfolk and other English peers approached Cardinal Manning, who submitted their strong representation to the Holy See. Pope Leo, it is alleged, was already considering how he might distinguish the aged Oratorian. He intimated, accordingly, in February, 1879, his intention of bestowing on Newman the cardinal's hat. The message affected him to tears, and he exclaimed that the cloud was lifted from him forever. By singular ill-fortune, Manning understood certain delicate phrases in Newman's reply as declining the purple; he allowed that statement to appear in "The Times", much to everyone's confusion. However, the end was come. After a hazardous journey, and in broken health, Newman arrived in Rome. He was created Cardinal-Deacon of the Title of St. George, on 12 May, 1879. His biglietto speech, equal to the occasion in grace and wisdom, declared that he had been the life-long enemy of Liberalism, or "the doctrine that there is no truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another", and that Christianity is "but a sentiment and a taste, not an objective fact, not miraculous."

Hitherto, in modern times, no simple priest, without duties in the Roman Curia, had been raised to the Sacred College. Newman's elevation, hailed by the English nation and by Catholics everywhere with unexampled enthusiasm, was rightly compared to that of Bessarion after the Council of Florence. It broke down the wall of partition between Rome and England. To the many addresses which poured in upon him the cardinal replied with such point and felicity as often made his words gems of literature. He had revised all his writings, the last of which dealt somewhat tentatively with Scripture problems. Now his hand would serve him no more, but his mind kept its clearness always. In "The Dream of Gerontius" (1865), which had been nearly a lost masterpiece, he anticipated his dying hours, threw into concentrated, almost Dantean, verse and imagery his own beliefs as suggested by the Offices of Requiem, and looked forward to his final pilgrimage, "alone with the Alone." Death came with little suffering, on 11 August, 1890. His funeral was a great public event. He lies in the same grave with Ambrose St. John, whom he called his "life under God for thirty-two years." His device as cardinal, taken from St. Francis de Sales, was Cor ad cor loquitor (Heart speaketh to heart); it reveals the secret of his eloquence, unaffected, graceful, tender, and penetrating. On his epitaph we read: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (From shadows and symbols goes the truth); it is the doctrine of the Economy, which goes back to Plato's "Republic" (bk. VII) and which passed thence by way of Christian Alexandria into the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, the poetry of the Florentine, and the schools of Oxford. John Henry Newman thus continues in modern literature the Catholic tradition of East and West, sealing it with a martyr's faith and suffering, steadfast in loyalty to the truth, while discerning with a prophet's vision the task of the future.

As a writer of English prose Newman stands for the perfect embodiment of Oxford, deriving from Cicero the lucid and leisurely art of exposition, from the Greek tragedians a thoughtful refinement, from the Fathers a preference for personal above scientific teaching, from Shakespeare, Hooker, and that older school the use of idiom at its best. He refused to acquire German; he was unacquainted with Goethe as with Hegel; he took some principles from Coleridge, perhaps indirectly; and, on the whole, he never went beyond Aristotle in his general views of education. From the Puritan narrowness of his first twenty years he was delivered when he came to know the Church as essential to Christianity. Then he enlarged that conception until it became Catholic and Roman, an historical idea realized. He made no attempt, however, to widen the Oxford basis of learning, dated 1830, which remained his position, despite continual reading and study. The Scholastic theology, except on its Alexandrian side, he left untouched; there is none of it in his "Lectures", none in the "Grammar of Assent." He wrote forcibly against the shallow enlightenment of Brougham; he printed no word concerning Darwin, or Huxley, or even Colenso. He lamented the fall of Döllinger; but he could not acquiesce in the German idea by which, as it was in fact applied, the private judgment of historians overruled the Church's dogmas. Conscience to him was the inward revelation of God, Catholicism the outward and objective. This twofold force he opposed to the agnostic, the rationalist, the mere worldling. But he seems to have thought men premature who undertook a positive reconciliation between faith and science, or who attempted by a vaster synthesis to heal the modern conflicts with Rome. He left that duty to a later generation; and, though by the principle of development and the philosophy of concrete assent providing room for it, he did not contribute towards its fulfillment in detail. He will perhaps be known hereafter as the Catholic Bishop Butler, who extended the "Analogy" drawn from experience to the historical Church, proving it thus to be in agreement with the nature of things, however greatly transcending the visible scheme by its message, institutions and purpose, which are alike supernatural.

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  122. Back to citation Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 1918. s:Eminent Victorians/Cardinal Manning#VI
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  124. Back to citation Quoted in Wilfrid Ward, The Genius of Cardinal Newman: Lecture 1 Archived 25 July 2001 at the Wayback Machine
  125. Back to citation Oliver S. Buckton. Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography. University of North Carolina Press, 1998, p. 31. ISBN 978-0-8078-4702-2.
  126. Back to citation Meriol Trevor. Newman's Journey, Fontana Library, 1974, p. 23.
  127. Back to citation Frances Eliza Kingsley (ed.), Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, Vol. I. New York: Fred De Fau, 1899, p. 162. Kingsley here cites Genesis 2:18. (KJV: "And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.")
  128. Back to citation Laura Fasick. "The Seduction of Celibacy: Threats to Male Sexual Identity in Charles Kingsley's Writings", in Jay Losey and William D. Brewer (eds), Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century England. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000, p. 225. ISBN 978-0-8386-3828-6.
  129. Back to citation Francis Eliza Kingsley (ed.), Charles Kingsley, Vol. I, pp. 217–18.
  130. Back to citation John Cornwell. "Comment (10.10.10)" on a misleading citation from his biography, Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (London: Continuum, 2010) in Jonathan Aitken, "A Saintly Conscience" Archived 18 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine, The American Spectator, September 2010.
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  147. Back to citation Buckton (p. 36) cites Piers Brendon and Sheridan Gilley as scholars who dismiss Faber's theory.
  148. Back to citation Buckton (p. 30) cautions: "We ought, of course, to be wary of repeating [Charles] Kingsley's obsessive practice of eroticizing every aspect of Newman's life and faith."
  149. Back to citation Faber's book came out in 1933. Later research by Ker (see below) and others does not support the idea of Newman's "sexlessness".
  150. Back to citation As Hilliard notes (p. 5), Piers Brendon, in his biography of Froude, offers a very different interpretation of Froude's sense of guilt.
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  152. Back to citation Frederick S. Roden. Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. Palgrave MacMillan, 2003, p. 16. ISBN 978-0-333-98643-1. In the passage cited by Roden, Shairp describes the style of Newman's sermons as "so simple and transparent, yet so subtle withal; so strong yet so tender; the grasp of a strong man's hand, combined with the trembling of a woman's heart... laying the most penetrating finger on the very core of things".
  153. Back to citation Roden, pp. 4, 6, 13–14.
  154. Back to citation Roden, p. 1.
  155. Back to citation Roden, p. 2.
  156. Back to citation Roden, p. 1. Roden here explicitly follows Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose term "homosociality" he uses in the sense of "homosociability or homoaffectivity" (p. 7).
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