Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (16 page)

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND CELIBACY

The ideal of priestly or clerical celibacy, meaning an obligation on the part of ordained priests not to marry, was a norm within the Western tradition of Christianity from at least the eleventh century. Celibacy is not to be confused with continence, which means avoidance of all sexual activity, including

‘impure’ thoughts, and masturbation; although continence is often interpreted as a requirement of celibacy. Nor is celibacy to be confused with the virtue of chastity, which means avoidance of impurity for both single and married people

– avoidance of adultery, for example.

Celibacy as an ideal, if not an obligation, among the Anglican priesthood, as expounded by Newman and Hurrell Froude, became an aspect of the Oxford Movement that would draw criticism and suspicion. There were widespread insinuations that celibacy would lead to fornication, a prejudice widely entertained about Roman Catholic priests in the confessional as a result of luridly anti-Catholic popular novels of the
Maria Monk
variety. There have been retrospective suggestions of a link between Anglican celibacy and the intense same-sex relationships that have been leveled against Catholic priests and religious: that young men troubled by unacknowledged homosexual feelings are attracted to celibacy as a form of sublimation.

Central to the Tractarian ideals was the aim to restore the sacred nature of priestly ordination as an estate higher not only than common humanity but even that of the angels. If the sacraments were the means of grace and salvation for all, then this privileged the priesthood and those on whom it was bestowed; in contrast to the Evangelical clergy, who controlled their faithful through preaching.

In their initial polemic in 1864, leading to the writing of the
Apologia
, Kingsley would accuse Newman of preaching that ‘a Church which had sacramental confession and a celibate clergy was the only true Church’.
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Newman, in those early exchanges, would hotly deny that he had intimated any such thing: in fact, he wrote, he would have been ‘the dolt to say or imply that celibacy of the clergy was a part of the definition of the Church …’
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Yet in 1840, he would write to a friend arguing that the texts stating that ‘concupiscence has the nature of sin’, and ‘in sin hath my mother conceived me’, indicated that celibacy was a ‘holier state than matrimony’. And was not a priest, as he constantly insisted, called to holiness? More important, however, was Newman’s expression of self-knowl- edge: his admission of a consistent repugnance towards the ties of marriage and connubial domesticity. He would also write in 1840:

All my habits for years, my tendencies, are towards celibacy. I could not take that interest in this world which marriage requires. I am too disgusted with this world — And, above all, call it what one will, I have a repugnance to a clergyman’s marrying. I do not say it is not lawful – I cannot deny the right – but, whether prejudice or not, it shocks me.
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The self-examination appears to be going in three directions. He appears celibate by force of inclination – a happily confirmed bachelor; yet he also presents a rationale based on his self-professed unworldliness – an argument for celibacy

that he would urge in his historical sketch on monasticism some years later. Yet mention of ‘repugnance’ and ‘shock’ at a clergyman marrying suggests disgust at what he sometimes termed ‘sensuality’ or ‘carnal indulgence’.

At the very least Newman gives the impression that celibacy, and indeed chastity, never involved, for him, a sacrifice or struggle. It came naturally like his talent for writing. Newman’s isolation, despite his fervid professions of intimacy with male friends, is at times reminiscent of the sense of artistic independence of ties expressed by others in his era (William Godwin’s
St Leon
, for example: ‘a limb torn off from society’) who struggled to come to grips with what separated the artist from the common run of human beings. And Keats, who was prepared to live like a ‘hermit’ in the world, put up with anything ‘any misery, even imprisonment – so long as I have neither wife nor child’. Yet this was not so much Keats’s misogyny and a dislike of children as the writer’s need for freedom from sexual intimacy and domesticity alike. Such isolation, however, would not preclude New-man’s need for close, devoted friends; nor later, for a faithful companion-servant, such as Ambrose St John, who served a wide scope of practical needs, as well as offering a measure of emotional comfort, affection, and support, albeit non-sexual. It is in Newman’s persona as literary artist that one begins to understand his emotional attachments and dependence on particular individuals – known in Catholic ascetical theology as special or particular friendships. These attachments, in Newman’s case, are less suggestive of preludes to a homosexual relationship than to the strong same-sex literary intimacies of the previous generation, such as existed, for example, between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who employed epithets of affection between each other that might

appear suspect in the twenty-first century.

During the early years of the Oxford Movement, the impression of the group as a circle of artists, of poets, was reinforced by their enthusiasm for publishing verse together. The existence of an aesthetic dimension to the group has led some commentators to draw parallels with homosexual aesthetes later in the nineteenth century, rather than the Romantic circles of the previous generation, or deep Victorian same-sex intimacies – such as Tennyson and Hallam. The versifying of the Oxford Movement, however, is less aesthetic than catechetical. John Bowden, Hurrell Froude, John Keble, Henry Wilberforce, Isaac Williams, and Newman came together in the
Lyra Apostolica
, published in 1836. The fact that many of their contributions were penned with a palpable spiritual design upon the reader explains perhaps the poor quality. Newman’s ‘Lead Kindly Light’ is by far the best of the inclusions; but a typical example of the rest can be gathered from another verse of Newman’s entitled ‘Discipline’ which feebly parallels the greater hymn:

So now, whene’er, in journeying on, I feel The shadow of the Providential Hand,

Deep breathless stirrings shoot across my breast,

Searching to know what He will now reveal, What sin uncloak, what stricter rule command, And girding me to work His full behest.
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Two poems in the
Lyra
collection by Newman clearly allude to his friendship with Hurrell Froude who had died before publication: ‘David and Jonathan’, and ‘James and John’. The ‘David and Jonathan’ verses
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are headed with a line from Samuel: ‘Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.’ It ends with the line: ‘he bides with us who dies, he is but lost who lives.’
²⁷
A stanza in ‘James and John’ reads:

Brothers in heart, they hope to gain An undivided joy,

That man may one with man remain, As boy was one with boy.
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James dies young, falling to ‘Satan’s rage’, while John lingers out his fellows all, and dies ‘in bloodless age’. Newman’s aptitude for intimate same-sex friendship finds expression in these verses against the background of the death of Hurrell, yet the imagery lacks eroticism to the point of desiccation.

INTIMATIONS OF HOMOEROTICISM IN THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

Ever since the publication of Geoffrey Faber’s
Oxford Apostles
(1933), the Oxford Movement has been linked in the minds of some commentators with homosexuality. If there were indications of the homoerotic in Newman’s circle, they more properly attach to the early writings of Frederick Faber who would be closely involved with Newman after they became Catholics and Oratorians. It is an appropriate point at which to explore Faber’s early homoeroticism in order to contrast him with Newman.

When Faber came up to Balliol College in 1833, a fellow undergraduate, Roundell Palmer, wrote of him: ‘The attraction of his looks and manners … soon made us friends, and our affection for each other became not only strong but passionate. There is a place for passion, even in friendship; it was so among the Greeks; and the love of Jonathan for David was “wonderful, passing the love of women”.’
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It is the fusion of the Biblical and Classical references that distinguishes him from Newman’s citation of Samuel, and confirms the ambivalence of religiosity and homo-sentimental.

Faber won the Oxford University Newdigate poetry prize in 1836 and began to specialise in writing verses that expressed highly emotional male intimacy.

Exchanges between Faber, already in Holy Orders, aged 24, and one of his close friends, George Smythe, bordered typically, and queasily, on the homoerotic.

We pulled each other’s hair about, Peeped in each other’s eyes,

And spoke the first light silly words That to our lips did rise.

Ah, dearest! – wouldst then know how much My aching heart in thee doth live?

One look of thy blue eye – one touch

Of thy dear hand last night could give Fresh hopes to shine amid my fears,

And thoughts that shed themselves in tears.
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Smythe wrote to Faber after a holiday together in the Lake District:

Dear Master – I do love thee with a love Which has with fond endeavour built a throne In my heart’s holiest place. Come sit thereon

And rule with thy sweet power, and reign above All my thoughts, feelings, they to thee will prove Loyal and loving vassals, for they burn

With a most passionate fire and ever yearn And cleave to thee as ne’er before they clove, Dearest, to others.
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Faber’s brother Francis wrote to him at about this time suggesting that such sentiments between male friends were not healthy. Faber responded: ‘I feel what they express to
men
: I never did to a born woman. Brodie [a Harrow friend] thinks a revival of chivalry in male friendships a characteristic of the rising generation, and a hopeful one.’
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Faber’s early verse would anticipate the scores of hymns he would write with a mix of saccharine piety and sensuality: for example his hymn to the Child Jesus:

Dear Little One! how sweet Thou art! Thine eyes how bright they shine! So bright they almost seem to speak When Mary’s look meets Thine!

How faint and feeble is Thy cry, Like plaint of harmless dove, When Thou dost murmur in Thy sleep Of sorrow and of love!
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Thirty years after Faber left Balliol, Gerard Manley Hopkins came up to Oxford. Hopkins, influenced at Balliol by Benjamin Jowett and Walter Pater, fell in love with Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben who felt drawn to Pusey’s spirituality and had a taste for Faber’s versifying. He walked around in a Benedictine habit, and was contemplating going over to Rome when he was drowned aged 19 in the River Welland.

Hopkins became a Catholic, and a Jesuit, and would end his life teaching at the university Newman founded in Ireland. It is arguable that Dolben made available to Hopkins, under the influence of Faber, the realisation of a mix of the religious and the homoerotic. In his ‘The Lantern Out of Doors’, Hopkins observes men walking in the night – ‘either beauty bright/In mould or mind or what not else’. All these men are cherished, he reflects, by Christ as if by an intimate friend:

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend