Read Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint Online
Authors: John Cornwell
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Leaders & Notable People, #Religious, #Catholicism
When the attempted exhumation of Newman’s remains took place in October 2008, it was an occasion to ponder these circumstances and their significance. The popular media took over the story, obscuring to a large extent the nuanced, spiritual meaning of Newman’s burial instructions. The Oratorian Fathers had announced the need to remove Newman’s remains to a more accessible place for public veneration. But it was widely suggested that the Vatican had been anxious lest Newman’s union in death with his friend in life should be interpreted as evidence of a gay relationship.
My memory of Newman and St John’s grave had no context for me until I came across two more such joint, religious same-sex friendship unions in death. The discoveries occurred a quarter of a century apart, and raised questions about Newman and St John. In 1964 I arrived at Christ’s College, Cambridge, as a graduate student. On the first day of term the Master, the famous chemist, Lord Todd, lectured new arrivals in the college chapel. It was an outlandish pep-talk on the importance of using condoms; there were three young Catholic monks from the Abbey of Downside seated opposite me, whose faces grew redder by the minute. But equally distracting, on the wall above the Communion table, was a magnificent monument. It was dedicated to two seventeenth century former members of the college, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, whose remains were buried together in the chapel. The monument depicts two plinths, joined by a knotted sheet, surmounted by portraits in stone of the two men. Above is a single lighted vessel, as if to signify that two flames burn brighter than one. Surrounding and unifying the effigies is a sculpted garland of roses, tended by two cherubs, more suited for a nuptial than a funereal celebration. Finch and Baines, both unmarried, had been students together, forming a lasting intimacy. The imagery of their monument is confirmed in the words of their epitaph: ‘So that they who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels nay rather souls, might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.’
I was to remember that monument, twenty-five years on, when staying at the Venerable English College, the seminary for England and Wales in Rome. On the wall of the college chapel, again close to the altar, was a memorial to ‘the Reverend Nicholas Morton, priest, Englishman and celebrated doctor of sacred theology’. The inscription proclaims that it was ‘his wish to be buried in the same tomb with the Reverend John Seton with whom he fled from England for
the same cause, that of religion, and who came to Rome at the same time’. I later learned that the two priests died twenty years apart, but Morton’s love and determination on joint burial had survived the interval.
It was not until I read the late Alan Bray’s remarkable book,
The Friend
(Chicago, 2003), that I came to appreciate the potential significance of these three joint same-sex burials of friends. Bray not only cited the three examples known to me, but a wide circuit of similar tombs and graves involving religious people, both men and women, from England to the Middle East, spread across the entire second millennium. They included a joint tomb at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and another in the chapel of Merton College, Oxford. Quoting the inscription on the Christ’s College monument, Bray argued that the text echoed Jeremy Taylor’s seventeenth-century
Discourse on Friendship
, in which he speaks of friendships’ ‘marriages of the soul, and of fortunes and interests, and counsels’.
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Bray saw the Christ’s College burial, in the light of the monument’s inscription, as a form of ‘connubium’, or marriage in death. He produced evidence that such public commitments to special friendship were common in pre-modern times, and he rejected the contemporary tendency to project homoerotic desires where none may have existed.
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In the final chapter of
The Friend
, published five years ahead of the attempted exhumation of Newman, Bray proposes that Newman’s wish to be buried with St John connected with traditions of joint same-sex burial that had been eroded and finally lost in the Enlightenment:
My argument has been that Newman’s burial with St John cannot be detached from Newman’s understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its long history
… The Enlightenment put aside this traditional ethic with contempt and put in its place a Fraternity that it claimed would be ‘universal’, ‘rational’, even ‘scientific’; but as the nineteenth century drew to its end, that experiment was terrifyingly failing and Europe was moving toward a war that would engulf the whole world, in fire and blood.
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Newman and St John lived and worked closely together for thirty years, but betrayed very little of the nature of their regard for each other save by unob-trusive public example. It was only following the death of St John, aged 60 in 1875, that Newman, then aged 74, recorded on 23 July 1876 his desire for joint burial. As he wrote, again and again, during this period of bereavement: ‘he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable.’
RUTH AND NAOMI
Among his many letters after St John’s death, Newman wrote to Lady Louisa Kerr, a convert to Catholicism, in thanks for her commiserations. The letter confirms a self-sacrificial devotion on St John’s part, familiar in relationships
where one partner supports an individual burdened with heavy responsibilities or demanding artistic toil. Newman accepted the support and service of St John as if it came from God. There is no indication that Newman returned the compliment of a supporting role in kind. He appears to have understood, in retrospect, however, that St John’s self-sacrificing partnership allowed him freedom and energy to achieve his great literary, polemical and missionary goals. At the same time, the letter indicates another, more intriguing and complex dimension of same-sex friendship, permeating their lives together. His letter to
Lady Kerr begins:
I praise God for having given me for 32 years not merely an affectionate friend, but a help and stay such as a guardian from above might be, as making my path easy to me in difficulties, and cheering me by his sunny presence, as Raphael took the weight upon him of Tobias. I cannot think how I could have done anything without him, and, as knowing how timorous and unready I am, therefore doubtless God gave him to me. Just when all friends Protestant and Converts were removed from me, and I had to stand alone, he came to me as Ruth to Naomi.
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The drift of the letter is an admission that he was the passive recipient of St John’s initiating love and practical service. The parallels from Scripture are of contrasting interest: first, the Angel Raphael in the Book of Tobit comes down from Heaven to assist Tobias, including salvation from live burial, and returns when his work is done. As Newman, and indeed others would recollect, when Newman and St John arrived in Rome to prepare for Catholic Holy Orders after their conversions, Ambrose was known among the Roman clergy as Newman’s ‘Angel Guardian’, as much for his youthful face and golden hair as his role as faithful servant:
How I should ever in 1846 have gone to Oscott and then to Rome … how I should have journeyed to and fro, without him, I do not know and cannot fancy. At that time being young and fair he was even called by the Romans my Angel Guardian – and so on.
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As we shall see, St John would not long retain his angelic looks. He put on weight early, lost those golden locks, smoked cigars, and tended to speak loudly and ebulliently. His support of Newman, however, was unremitting, and he used his forceful, practical personality to ensure that Newman’s every wish was fulfilled.
The second Biblical parallel, however, invokes the story of Ruth and Naomi. Naomi is an Israelite woman living in exile among heathens. She has lost her husband and two married sons, leaving her with two heathen daughters-in-law
Newman was to invoke this same story when preaching his final sermon before converting to Catholicism. It was known, as we have seen, as ‘The Parting of Friends’, preached before his Anglican congregation at littletons in 1844, the year before his conversion to Catholicism. That sermon, delivered in circumstances of high emotion, signalled his departure from the Anglican priesthood. Newman saw himself as the exiled Naomi, while Oprah represented friends who would remain within the Church of England. Ruth represented those who would stay with him on his sojourn into the Catholic Church, including St John.
In the letter to Lady Kerr, Newman evidently saw the parallel more in relation to their particular personal friendship over the years. To understand the significance of the Ruth-Naomi relationship, and how Newman might have viewed it, we need do no more than go to the words of Newman’s ‘Parting of Friends’ sermon: ‘Ruth clave unto her’, preached Newman in the King James translation. ‘And [Naomi] said, Behold, thy sister-in-law is gone back unto her people and unto her gods; return thou after thy sister-in-law. And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.’
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Newman now comments that the tears of the less loyal Oprah, the departing sister-in-law, were ‘the dregs of affection’. He goes on, ‘she clasped her mother-in-law once for all, that she might not cleave to her’. So, following the King James translation, Newman twice employs the verb ‘to cleave’, which means in this context to stick firmly to; although the connotation of the original Hebrew verb ‘dabaq’ extends to sexual and marital union, familiar in the second book of Genesis, where God ordains that Adam and Eve shall ‘cleave’ to each other. The ‘cleave’ verb is also used in the marriage service of the Book of Common Prayer.
It is hard to imagine that Newman, a master of subtle, multilayered language, would not have appreciated the inferences to be drawn from Ruth’s vow. Yet while there is a contemporary tendency to see a Lesbian or homosexual relationship in Ruth’s devotion (the text of the vow is often used today in same-sex union ceremonies, as well as in marriages), this is only one reading of the story and the vow. The important feature of Newman’s letter to Lady Kerr is his admission that he had acquiesced in a loving relationship, with nuptial undertones, not only until death, but beyond it. If Ruth is St John, as Newman claims, then the plea for joint burial, as Newman might have understood it, may well have come from St John.
The final section of the Lady Kerr letter, a summary of Newman’s perception of the friendship, leaves no room to doubt the depths of St John’s serviceable
devotion and Newman’s profound, almost addictive dependence on that devotion.
Never would he let me undertake any work without doing his part to save me the burden or the pain of it, as when he insisted on coming to Town with me on the day of your dear Brother’s Requiem Mass. And so to the last, while his senses remained to him, his last thoughts were on a plan for my comfort; and, when he had lost them, he still knew me and flung his arms about my neck, and except one day when his fever was at its height, he obeyed whatever I ordered him and on the last day, when his senses were restored to him though he could not speak, again flung his arms over my neck and drew me tightly to him, he knowing he was near death, though we were exulting in the prospect of his recovery.
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Newman’s bereavement was remarkable – he repeatedly told correspondents, as we have seen, that it exceeded the loss of a spouse:
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.
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That Newman’s love for St John was essentially passive appears to be evinced by his statement, with echoes of the Book of Revelation: ‘I was
his
first and last’ [my italics]. In fact, with the exception of Hurrell Froude, Newman was all too conscious throughout his life of his essentially passive role in most of his deep friendships. ‘It was not I who sought friends, but friends who sought me. Never man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had … Speaking of my blessings, I said, “Blessings of friends, which to my door
unasked
,
unhoped
, have come”.’
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Newman from the very beginning of his Catholic life declined, as we have seen, to follow the ordinance to avoid special or particular friendships