Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (10 page)

dealing at this time with the religious scepticism of his brother Charles. And yet, on another level, the quarrel anticipated a crucial insight into the question of justification of religious belief. For Newman, the justification of belief had far more to do with a person’s disposition than specific arguments for and against Christianity.

Charles, who had none of Newman’s self-discipline, and probably suffered from being in his elder brother’s shadow, had written: ‘I am glad to say I have come to a satisfactory conclusion with regard to religion … ’ He found himself, he went on, ‘entirely against Christianity; which I expected to find synonymous with wisdom and knowledge, but which is far otherwise. I think Mr Owen for practical motives to action … beats St Paul hollow.’ The philosophy of Robert Owen, one of the British founders of nineteenth century socialism, taught that human action was determined by environment and education, and that religion weakened the mind. Charles’s preference for determinism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and socialism, so shocked Newman that he suspected that his younger brother might be insane.
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Instead of offering counter-arguments he accused his brother of not being ‘in a state of mind to listen to argument of any kind …’, of giving vent to feelings ‘in wild combinations of thought and expression’. He told Charles that he was ‘
in every thing
… self-willed’; and ‘too excited to decide fairly”. He excoriated the younger brother for the ‘hurry and confusion’ of his thoughts, and ‘now having so hastily cast off what I verily believe you never fully understood, your mind swells and boils’. Then came a sermon: ‘In spirit of the allsufficiency of knowledge, you will find it a cold and bleak state of things to be left carelessly and as it were unkindly by the God who made you, uncertain why you are placed here, and what is to become of you after death.’ After more in this vein, Newman concluded: ‘Pray excuse me if I appear to have said any thing hastily or severely: I have not wished to do so.’

Apart from the arguments that went to and fro between them, Newman was clearly angry at Charles’s apparent lack of respect for his status as clergyman, don, and elder brother. ‘You may think me weak and narrow minded; and some about you may reckon every one of my profession necessarily bigoted …’ His parting shot was: ‘but I am your affectionate brother; I am a natural adviser and friend.’

When Mrs Newman got wind of the spat between her sons, she wrote to John Henry: ‘Poor dear Charles is sadly harassed at present, various ways, in religion. He is anxious to find the truth; in time, I pray and trust he will seek it in the right way, and delightful will it be, if you should be the kind and gentle guide …’ She added that Charles would come round, if he ever would, as a result of ‘a superior power’.
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If Newman’s correspondence reveals self-righteousness and a lack of kindness and gentleness, the passing of the years would not soften his judgmental attitude

towards his younger brother. Some fifty years later he would write a harsh memorandum on Charles’s character. He had evidently resented his brother’s requests for financial support, ‘just as if he were a cripple or bedridden. Hence his attraction from the age of 21 or 22 to the teaching and views of the Socialists.’ While granting that Charles had a good mind and was a scholar in French and German literature, he judged him to have led a ‘forlorn and aimless life’ on account of his ‘preposterous pride and want of common sense’.
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In a second letter written in the Spring of 1825, Newman suspended his attacks on his brother’s character in order to quiz him catechetically, ‘that I may get at your opinions on the whole subject’.
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They would constitute a difficult exegetical quiz for any scriptural scholar, let alone an excitable younger brother with a head full of socialism. ‘Were any of [Christ’s] miracles believed by the Pharisees etc to have been really wrought?’, asked Newman. ‘Is it true that the great men among the Jews constantly opposed his pretentions?’ And, ‘did the people in general, and among them the apostles themselves, expect (before his death) a temporal Messiah?’ On and on went the Q and A: thirty-five hectoring questions in all.

Then the letter shifts to an insightful and characteristic perspective that he would develop in years to come as he pondered the widespread growth of atheism and agnosticism. What was is it about the attitude of an individual that makes a person a believer or an unbeliever? He starts: ‘I consider the rejection of Christianity to arise from a fault of the heart, not of the intellect; that unbelief arises, not from mere error of reasoning, but either from pride or from sensuality.’ He goes on:

The most powerful arguments for Christianity do not
convince
, only
silence
; for there is at the bottom that secret antipathy for the doctrines of Christianity, which is quite out of reach of argument. I do not then assert that the Christian evidences are
overpowering
, but that they are
unanswerable
.
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He ends by reflecting that ‘to be entering into a defence of Christianity against a brother, is, I will not merely say, a novel and astonishing, it is a most painful, a most heart-rending event’.

Ten years on, addressing not his troubled younger brother but his entranced congregation in the university church, Newman would advocate a more positive approach to encounters with unbelief:

When a person for the first time hears the arguments and speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a very novel light they cast upon what he has hitherto accounted most sacred, it cannot be denied that, unless he is shocked and closes his ears and heart to them, he will have a sense of expansion and elevation.
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The justification of religious belief would become central to his life’s work.

‘YEARNING HEART’

While preoccupied with his role as a tutor at Oriel, his pastoral work had taken a new direction. Edward Hawkins, who had been his early guide at St Clement’s, became Provost of Oriel, and Newman was appointed Vicar of St Mary’s, the university church, in his place. St Mary’s would become the main venue for his preaching for two decades. The appointment involved responsibility for a handful of non-university parishioners in Oxford as well as for an entire parish at the village of Littlemore, a fairly poor community some two and a half miles south of the city. In time he would attract large numbers of junior and senior members to the University Church.

Meanwhile, there had come into his life one Hurrell Froude, a man destined to have a profound effect on his spiritual and emotional life. Son of a prosperous archdeacon in Dartington, Devon, Froude was two years Newman’s junior, and was elected to an Oriel fellowship in 1826. He was described as ‘tall, erect, thin’
²⁷
; bold and volubly high-spirited, he was given to slang and irreverence. He had no time for affectation. He was attractive to men. One close friend spoke of his ‘delicate features, and penetrating grey eyes, not exactly piercing, but bright with internal conceptions, and ready to assume an expression of amusement, careful attention, inquiry, or stern disgust, but with a basis of softness’.
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New-man’s description of him a quarter of a century later, in the
Apologia
, breathes undying adulation. He would write of Froude’s ‘gentleness and tenderness of nature, the playfulness, the free elastic force and graceful versatility of mind, and the patient winning considerateness in discussion, which endeared him to those to whom he opened his heart’.
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More than this, went on Newman, he had ‘high genius, brimful and overflowing with ideas and views, in him original’. But there was a fragility. The ideas ‘were too many and strong even for his bodily strength’.
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0
Froude was stricken with tuberculosis.

Ebullient and outspoken, Froude was in many ways opposite to Newman in temperament; they nevertheless became fast friends in the senior common room, and began spending time together outside of the college. Newman had been ordered by his doctor to take exercise, and they often rode out together and competed in daring equestrian jumps. Newman wrote that the attachment developed into ‘the closest and most affectionate friendship’.
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Froude had been an undergraduate at Oriel from the age of eighteen and an intimate of John Keble, a friendship that had been forged at Keble’s parsonage where Froude had spent a long vacation being tutored. Keble, it seemed, saw in Froude, despite his outward going character, a remarkable capacity for spiritual growth and set about encouraging it. After being elected to his fellowship, moreover, Froude’s piety deepened after reading his dead mother’s journal. It was a document of intense moral self-examination which he began to emulate. His

practice of self-mortification and minute self-examination of conscience can be read in the
Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude
, edited and published by Keble and Newman after his death. Reminiscent of the spirituality of seventeenth-century French Roman Catholic ascetics, the journal exemplifies the growing spiritual mores of the Newman-Keble-Pusey circle.

Froude’s journal, anticipating the anorexic anxieties of twentieth century youth, records his fasting regimes in minute detail, his self-congratulation on achieving them, and abject self-castigation for occasional failures.

Looked with greediness to see if there was a goose on the table for dinner: and though what I eat was of the plainest sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was muzzy and sleepy after dinner … As to my meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict rule of simplicity.
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He connects fasting with the need to expunge feelings of pollution and self-disgust. A sense of sexual anxiety is suggested in at least one sermon several years later in which he spoke of the need for ‘external purification’ and the need to avoid all ‘sinful pleasures’. It was necessary, he preached, to acquire the innocence of little children, and ‘to regard as filth what they now set their affections on, and to vomit from their minds every pleasant recollection connected with sin’.
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Froude’s obsession with food, fasting, excessive exercise, the desire to feel himself ever a child, low self-esteem, remarkable thinness, and preoccupation with vomiting, suggest a form of bulimia.

There are passages in the journal that contain hints of sexual guilt: ‘O Lord’, he writes, ‘the thoughts which sometimes come into my head are too shocking even to name.’
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4
Late in 1826 he confesses to his journal an interior conflict over one of his pupils: ‘It seems the fates have thrown us together. I must repress all enthusiastic notions about the event … and above all watch and pray against being led out of the way by the fascination of his society; but rather the steady perseverance in the right course.’
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Early the following year, his anxieties deepen: ‘I stand in my naked filthiness before Thee, whose eyes are purer than to behold iniquity.’
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A few days later he can write: ‘O may the recollection of these dreadful things so fill my soul with deep humility…. Strengthen me … that I may dare to look in the face the hideous filthiness of those ways, in which, for the sins that with open eyes I have acted, Thou has permitted me blindly to stray.’
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Then again, ‘My soul is a troubled and restless thing, haunted by the recollection of past wickedness’.
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