Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (3 page)

Accused by the writer Charles Kingsley of promoting lying on a system, while pretending to be an Anglican when secretly a Catholic, Newman made a remark-

able bid to explore and confirm the integrity of his personality and beliefs through a period of change:

I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me … I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind.
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In 1864 he published his autobiography
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
, a history of his opinions through the course of more than half a century. The
Apologia
, widely deemed a great spiritual classic in Newman’s day as in ours, is yet another version of the life, amply citing letters, drafts of letters, memoranda, journal entries, texts of sermons, to create a tightly crafted narrative. While the book has had enduring influence it hardly constitutes the final word even on the question of his honesty. His biographer of the early 1960s, Meriol Trevor, declared: ‘Dishonest Newman was laid for ever; not a critic, however hostile, but conceded that he was the last man on earth to be called a liar and deceiver.’
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But Newman’s honesty, after the publication of the
Apologia
, was impugned by a constituency of well-known Victorian and Edwardian figures, including Benjamin Jowett, Leslie Stephen, T. H. Huxley, and F. D. Maurice,
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of which, take Huxley: ‘That man is the slipperiest sophist I have ever met with. Kingsley was entirely right about him.’
⁴
Cardinal Manning, his fellow Catholic convert and confrere in religion, would later say: ‘He bamboozles you with his carefully selected words, and plays so subtly with his logic that your simplicity is taken in.’
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THE WRITER

Yet whatever the versions, the mythologies and iconographies, ecclesiastical and secular, his most compelling, and perhaps most neglected, reputation is as New-man the writer. The
virtuosity
, the energy, was prodigious: polemic, essays, poetry, hymns, tracts, satires, histories, scholarly monographs, discourses, lectures, meditations, novels, sermons, letters – scores of them daily. His prose, described by James Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus as ‘cloistral silverveined’,
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is commonly characterised as luminous, melodic, marked by
politesse
. Such characterisations fail to acknowledge the sheer dogged, driven, multi-drafted, self-disciplined industry. The impression is of a night and day foundry, an indefatigable, pressurised, letting-off-of-steam. One is reminded of his friend John Keble’s notion of literary energy as a ‘vent for over-charged feelings, or a full imagination, … which are apt to fill and overpower the mind so as to require a sort of relief ’.
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To borrow from Newman’s own industrial metaphor for Catholic Christendom, his output was like ‘some moral factory, for the melting,

refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes’.
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He was, in short, a superabundant literary workaholic, a tutor in Christendom’s vast ‘training school’, as copiously productive in his genre as Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, Gladstone, in theirs. Newman’s role as a writer defines his character and relationships. His companion and minder in old age, Father William Neville, remarked that Newman even prayed with a ‘pen in his hand’.
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Newman’s literary gifts were those of a prose writer rather than a poet. His script, in black ink, written with modest pens, barely altered from youth into old age. It was spare, forward tilting, keeping to a straight line, the loops in the small letters hardly noticeable (especially on the f ’s and the h’s); no loops on the g’s, but with a tendency to flourish the d’s and the capitals. The manuscript of his hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’, written at sea, shows the same evenness as at his desk on land.

In a letter to W. G. Ward,
¹⁰
looking back over a lifetime’s writing, he employed an image he claimed he had often used: ‘It is one of my
sayings
(so continually do I feel it) that the composition of a volume is like gestation and childbirth. I do not think that I ever thought out a question or wrote my thoughts, without great pain, pain reaching to the body as well as the mind.’

As early as 1838 he was complaining of the toil that went into the editing of his published
Lectures on Justification
, his major offensive on the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. Few writers have ever described the labour of drafting, and redrafting, in such vivid and specific detail:

I write – I write again – I write a third time, in the course of six months – then I take the third – I literally fill the paper with corrections, so that another person could not read it – I then write it out fair for the printer – I put it by – I take it up – I begin to correct again – it will not do – alterations multiply – pages are re-written – little lines sneak in and crawl about – the whole page is disfigured – I write again. I cannot count how many times this process goes on.
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He was convinced, quoting Shakespeare (‘The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling’), that writers of genius laboured over their work. He would write of the need to ‘pause, write, erase, rewrite, amend, complete …’ Whereas the mere ‘dealer in words cares little or nothing for the subject’, the true artist ‘has his great or rich visions before him’.
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Why all this labour, these corrections on corrections, those lines sneaking and crawling? When he became a Cardinal he chose as his motto the words ‘
Cor ad cor loquitur
’ (Heart speaks to heart). He strived and toiled to reach out through the medium of cold print to achieve a heartfelt luminosity and personal contact and feeling. He worked hard for it, all the while conscious of the power of mass publishing that dominated the reading public.
¹³
Not long

after becoming a Catholic he would give a talk on the overwhelming power of the press to alter public consciousness:

Never could notoriety exist as it does now, in any former age of the world; … private news as well as public, is brought day by day to every individual … by processes so uniform, so unvarying, so spontaneous, that they almost bear the semblance of a natural law. And hence notoriety, or the making a noise in the world, has come to be considered a great good in itself, and a ground of veneration …
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In his own view, his literary vocation would disqualify him from sainthood. ‘I have no tendency to be a saint – it is a sad thing to say so. Saints are not literary men….’
¹⁵
Whatever the case, his claim to eminence consists not in his status as a prelate, nor in claims for conventional piety, but his genius for creating new ways of imagining and writing about religion.

!

John Henry Newman was born in 1801 and died in 1890. When he was four years of age he saw candles burning in the window in celebration of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. He was a young Oxford scholar when dreams of the Romantic egotistical sublime were at odds with the scepticism of Hume and the growing utilitarianism of Bentham. He was born in the late age of horse power and sail, and lived to see the awesome expansion of the modern age of Victoria: the rapid growth of Britain’s cities, mass market books, newspapers, photo-graphy; proliferating discoveries in the natural sciences; the mighty juggernaut of industry, trade, and capitalist wealth; widespread poverty, insecurity, and oppression of working people. He came into his prime during a period that spanned the electoral liberalisation of Britain’s Reform Act, the flourishing of the Chartists, the publication of the
Communist Manifesto
(the first English edition, 1850), and the challenge to Christian belief of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
. He harnessed the modern age of travel, communications, and publishing in the service of his pastoral and polemical aims.

He departed home aged sixteen for Oxford in a horse-drawn carriage; by his mid-fifties we find him hurrying around England, to Ireland and across Europe, by rail and steamship. He spent the first half of his adult life in an Oxford college, and the second in one of Europe’s largest industrial cities. In his sixties, twenty years after leaving the university, he wrote: ‘I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.’
¹⁶
It was as if he marked the distance he had travelled in the second half of his life from the perspective of the age of steam locomotion and production. Had he remained in Oxford he might well have become cloistered, self-incensing, sterile.

Until old age, Newman was constantly developing, constantly converting, in

the hope of becoming ever more true to himself: ‘We can only set right one error of expression by another.’
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His writing is multilayered, metaphorical, free, tactile, concrete. He was engaged in growth, development. He was not attempting a lapidary magisterium. He wrote as he thought, endlessly drafting, revising and expanding – generating polarities, contradictions, reconciliations, and connections. One of his most influential books,
Essay on Development
, explored how the Catholic Church had remained ever the same and true to itself while undergoing remarkable change.

Newman realised that the loss of faith would, in time, become publicly manifest in the ‘educated intellect of England, France, and Germany’,
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spreading to every dimension of culture and society, driving faith into the recess and final refuge of individual privacy. He spent thirty years drafting a book on the justification of belief, the
Grammar of Assent
.

Newman, as we shall see, was by no means anti-science, nor did he see in Charles Darwin’s ideas a repudiation of religious faith. Attending geology lectures in Oxford as an undergraduate and young don, he was prepared for the impact of the huge age of the world, and in consequence the theory of evolution. As he wrote to a correspondent in 1868, nine years after the publication of Darwin’s great work:

It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter. He first created matter and then he created laws for it – laws which should
construct
it into its present wonderful beauty, and accurate adjustment and harmony of parts
gradually
…
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If there is one outstanding written achievement, beyond his theological legacy, it is his
Idea of a University
. Asked by Rome, and an Irish archbishop, to found a Catholic university in Dublin, he laid down the notion of ‘a University, viewed in itself, and apart from the Catholic Church, or from the State, or from any other power which may use it’.
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It would become the basis of the ideal academic institution, free of the constraints of mere professional training, with independence, time and freedom to bear its fruits – without insistence on usefulness, and allowing each comprising discipline to reach its own perfection.

The ideal university, he wrote, is a place

in which the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth…where the professor becomes eloquent, and a missionary and a preacher of science, displaying it in its most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his hearers.
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