Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (20 page)

PARTING OF FRIENDS

Newman’s retirement at littletons had become a matter of fascination and no lit-tle scandal to the dons and students of Oxford. He would recollect how he could not walk in or out of the cottages without people staring at him. ‘One day when I entered my house, I found a flight of Undergraduates inside. Heads of Houses, as mounted patrols, walked their horses round those poor cottages. Doctors of Divinity dived into the hidden recesses of that private tenement uninvited, and drew domestic conclusions from what they saw there.’
³¹
And what they concluded, of course, was the establishment of a monastic settlement for young men preparing to go over to Rome.

And much as he protested to the contrary, for a time at least, there was a large measure of truth in that conclusion. In March of 1843 he wrote to John Keble: ‘What men learn from me, who learn anything, is to lean towards doctrines and practices which our Church [of England] does not sanction. There was a time when I tried to balance this by strong statements against Rome … But now, when I feel I can do this no more … I am in danger of acting as a traitor to that system, to which I must profess attachment or I should not have the opportunity of acting at all.’
³²
Later he wrote to Keble on 4 May 1843, in a letter he published in the
Apologia
, announcing with great clarity and simplicity the final, drastic decision of heart and mind that had consumed him for so many months: ‘I am very far more sure that England is in schism, than that the Roman addi-tions to the Primitive Creed may not be developments, arising out of a keen and vivid realizing of the Divine Depositum of Faith.’
³³
As for his young men at littletons, in August 1843 William Lockhart disappeared from the cottages and was later received into the Roman Catholic Church by the Rosminian priest and missionary, Luigi Gentili. Others were going over too, or considering their positions, including the young Frederic Faber whom Newman counselled to take his time – recommending at least three years of contemplation and prayer. Meanwhile friends of a life time, close members of the Oxford Movement, and family members, not least his sister Jemima and ageing Aunt Elizabeth, made

known their distress as the signs of his defection to Rome became ever more apparent. This was hard enough, but he also had to contend with suspicions that he was a Catholic renegade while continuing to enjoy the status and privileges of an Anglican priest. The break with most of his family was sealed in September 1843 when his brother-in-law, Harriet’s husband, Tom Mozley, converted, abandoning a parish living to do so and threatening his domestic security. Blaming her brother, sister Harriet would never speak to Newman again, and already he was estranged from his brothers Charles and Francis. Jemima, a remarkable woman, with echoes of their late mother, wrote a letter of understanding and sympathy: ‘Whichever way you decide, it will be a noble and true part, and not taken up from any impulse, or caprice, or pique, but on true and right principles, that will carry a blessing with them.’ Newman’s response revealed an element of self-centredness: ‘Am I not providing dreariness for myself ? if others, whom I am pierced to think about, because I cannot help them, suffer, shall not I suffer in my own way?’
34

That same month he resigned his position as Vicar of St Mary’s, although still clinging to his membership of the Anglican Church, while alluding to his unjust treatment at its hands. His last sermon, preached at a Eucharistic Service at littletons church on 25 September, was entitled ‘The Parting of Friends’. An element of self pity pervades the oration, which contained such strange, outlandish even, parallels with David’s departure from Jonathan at the court of Saul. He also invoked the story of Ruth and Naomi. He received communion on that occasion from Pusey amidst sobs and pregnant pauses. At this symbolic parting of the ways, despite his own long and tortuous path, he could not disguise his disappointment at having failed to persuade the Church of England to move with him towards acceptance of the maternal Catholic origins of the authentic, legitimate Church.

There was more than a hint of bitterness and recrimination in his letters at this time. He had been badly and unfairly treated, as he assured the tractarian Archdeacon Henry Manning: ‘No decency has been observed in the attacks upon me from authority: no protests have appeared against them … the English Church is showing herself intrinsically and radically alien from Catholic principles, so do I feel the difficulties in defending their claims to be a branch of the Catholic Church.’
³⁵
Manning responded that it was unreasonable to expect ‘the living generation to change the opinions, prejudices, and habits of a whole life in a few years at one bidding’.
3
6
Newman, however, was not to be appeased. Meanwhile, William Gladstone (whose Roman Catholic convert sister used the pages of Protestant books as lavatory paper), having viewed the New-man-Manning correspondence, judged that Newman was staggering ‘to and fro, like a drunken man’ at his ‘wits’ end’.
37

That November, 1843, Archdeacon Manning, as if to distance himself publicly from the direction in which Newman was heading, preached virulently against

Popery on Guy Fawkes day. The next day he went to littletons in order, it seems, to reassure Newman (who had obviously received report of the sermon) of his personal regard. Newman, however, refused to be ‘at home’. This was Newman’s obstinate high-dudgeon side.

The new year of 1844 brought harsh winter weather and Newman suffered a series of heavy colds as well deepening anxiety and perplexity. He was beginning to feel a stranger in his own university and college. Even the college servants were looking at him as if he were a stranger, he thought. Then his friend Bow-den died of tuberculosis. ‘He introduced me to College and University’, wrote Newman. ‘He is the link between me and Oxford. I have ever known Oxford in him. In losing him I seem to lose Oxford. We used to live in each other’s rooms as Undergraduates, and men used to mistake our names and call us by each other’s.’ Then he recollected that strange circumstance recorded in the prologue to his book. ‘When he married, he used to make a similar mistake himself, and call me Elizabeth and her Newman. And now for several years past, though loving him with all my heart, I have shrunk from him, feeling that I had opinions that I dared not tell him.’
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Newman reflected by Bowden’s corpse on the consolations of Anglican prayer. He wrote: ‘there lies now my oldest friend, so dear to me – and I with so little of faith or hope, as dead as a stone, and detesting myself.’ Bowden had had an easy death, prompting Keble to invoke George Herbert’s notion of death as ‘going from earth to paradise as from one room to another’.
3
9
Newman sobbed bitterly over Bowden’s coffin, ‘to think that he had left me still dark as to what the way of truth was, and what I ought to do in order to please God and fulfil His will’. He bought books with the legacy of a hundred pounds left him by his dead friend, and with the remainder felt he could afford to fund the purchase of hair shirts and scourges for the littletons community: a rare hint of the Catholic ascetical rigours he had discreetly undertaken.

CHAPTER 8
‌‌

How doctrine develops

‘But one aspect of Revelation must not be allowed to exclude or to obscure another.’

J. H. NEWMAN,
ESSAY ON DEVELOPMENT

In early 1845 matters were coming to a head. The impetuous W. G. Ward had written a book,
The Ideal of a Christian Church
, blatantly asserting the right of an Anglican to profess Roman Catholic spirituality and doctrine, and yet to remain within the Church of England. While exposing Ward to widespread opprobrium for its anti-Protestantism, Newman was also in the firing line for his authorship of
Tract 90
. As Ward put it, ‘in subscribing the [39] articles I renounce no one Roman doctrine’.
1

The difference between the impetuous Ward and the careful, slow moving Newman, was never more succinctly put (despite many distortions in other matters) than by Lytton Strachey:

‘The thing that was utterly abhorrent to [Ward]’, said one of his friends, ‘was to stop short.’ Given the premises he would follow out their implications with the merciless-ness of a medieval monk, and when he had reached the last limits of argument be ready to maintain whatever propositions he found there with his dying breath … Captivated by the glittering eye of Newman, he swallowed whole the supernatural conception of the universe which Newman had evolved, accepted it as a fundamental premise and began at once to deduce from it whatsoever there might be to be deduced.
2

On 13 February Ward was deprived of his Oxford degrees, having declined to withdraw six extracts from the book that offended the spirit of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre was packed to hear Ward defend himself, many
MA
s arriving in Oxford on the newly opened railway line from London. The vote to take away his degrees went against him by a mere 58 out of twelve hundred. A further motion to censure Newman’s
Tract 90
was vetoed by the Proctors.

Newman’s sense of injustice at Ward’s treatment was exacerbated, in his mind, by what he saw as the many ‘atrocious heresies’ of the Church of England, whereas others were being treated ‘so severely for being over-Catholic’. The following month he advised Jemima that he was going to resign his Oriel fellowship. She responded that it was like hearing of the imminent death of a friend. ‘I have a good name with many; I am deliberately sacrificing it’, he replied on 15

March 1845. ‘I have a bad name with more; I am fulfilling all their worst wishes, and giving them their most coveted triumph. I am distressing all I love, unsettling all I have instructed or aided … Pity me, my dear Jemima. What have I done thus to be deserted, thus to be left to take a wrong course, if it is wrong?’ He added that he feared travelling lest he should die suddenly while in his present state; that if he were in danger would send for a priest.
3

All the while he had been in the final stages of a work that was to justify his path to Rome,
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
. In the ‘ad-vertisement’ he wrote that the book’s thesis was directed towards the removal of the obstacle to ‘communion with the Church of Rome’. Yet the theme – how and why primitive Christianity should have developed such beliefs and practices as Purgatory, invocation of saints, popes, veneration of the Virgin Mary, and traffic in indulgences – required, and would continue to require, explanations not only for Anglicans, but for Catholics too. He must show, in particular, how the Council of Trent, which defined the counter-reforming stance of Rome, could have been a continuation of the great earlier Councils, rather than a historic discontinuity. At the heart of the book, moreover, is Newman’s dissociation of authentic Christianity from liberalism – which he would later characterize, on being made a Cardinal, as ‘an error overspreading, as a snare the whole earth’. In the
Essay on Development
he enlarged on his definition and repudiation of liberalism in religion in this way: