Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (6 page)

Newman would relate, however, that he owed to these tales an early and abiding encounter with God.

By the first decade of the nineteenth century the
Arabian Nights Tales
had reached a peak of popularity among the children of England’s literate classes. Eastern mystery, genies, magic, invisible worlds, tyranny, cruelty to women, thrilled and disturbed the imaginations of many generations of the young. The tales were staple childhood reading of future poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Keats, all conceded the debt they owed to the Arabian stories for the growth of their imaginative talent. The predicament of Scheherazade was recognized as a crucial catalyst: her life was suspended on a thread, saved only by her talent for story-telling. But if the tales unblocked the hidden well springs of imagination, releasing strange urges and unbidden fantasies, they also drove young readers inwards – raising doubts about the world of mere appearances.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a typical young reader, recalling his copy of
Arabian Nights
in middle-age, wrote how ‘with what a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense desire I used to look at the volume and watch it, till the morning sunshine had reached and nearly covered it, when, and not before, I felt the courage given me to seize the precious treasure …’
³
His father, a pious Devon parson, threw the book on the fire. In consequence of those tales, Coleridge tells us, he became a ‘dreamer’, with an understanding ‘forced into almost an unnatural ripeness’. His ‘whole being was with eyes closed to every object of present sense’.

John Henry Newman, the eldest of five siblings – two brothers and three sisters, was similarly drawn into imaginative interiority by the Arabian stories. He wrote in his
Apologia
: ‘I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.’
⁴
Newman would write that his early sense of isolation from surrounding objects confirmed his mistrust of the ‘reality of material phenomena’, thus enabling him to ‘rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.
⁵
He is not precise as to when this conviction of the ‘two and two only’ self-evident beings dawned on him, but he gives the impression that it was gradual, early, and defined a consistent quality of his imagination into adulthood. For Newman’s French biographer, the Abbé Henri Brémond, the conviction reveals Newman’s profound
autocentrisme
, locating him within an ambit of benign Romantic egotism – what Keats would call ‘the egotistical sublime’.

Newman’s central preoccupation in life, by his own admission, was from the outset his inner life. No figure in the nineteenth century, save Wordsworth perhaps, would spend so much time, energy and emotion, absorbed in every aspect of the story of his own development as Newman. Living to a great age, he would spend long hours reflecting, re-reading, rewriting, correcting and destroying, those papers that had a bearing on his history, while recalling from correspondents materials that had gone out of his hands. Every stage, every relationship, every controversy, argument, insight, feeling, and idea, would be checked, double-checked, mulled over, tweaked. The interest of Newman’s life is the story of his voracious, unrelenting fascination with the quest to locate his story within the meaning of that second ‘luminously self-evident being’, his Creator.

While Newman had an early ‘feeling of separation from the visible world’,
⁶
‘what a dream life is’, and his sister accused him, when he was still a boy, of a Berkeleian idealistic solipsism, his domestic years of childhood, his education at school, and later at Oxford, reveal that he was no introvert. There was from the beginning a remarkable interplay between his inward-directed dreaminess and his outward sensitivity to people, relationships, and the tangible world about him. The fascination with the exterior was characteristically self-referential. And it was religious. He could look back on his childhood remembering the suggestiveness of ‘little details … some relic or token of that early time, some spot, or some book, or a word, or a scent, or a sound …’.
⁷
To one of his women correspondents he would write:

I think nothing more interesting, and it is strange to think how evanescent, how apparently barren and result-less, are the ten thousand little details and complications of daily life and family history … are they themselves some reflexion, as in an earthly mirror, or

some great truths above? So I think of musical sounds and their combinations – they are momentary – but is it not some momentary opening and closing of the Veil which hangs between the worlds of spirit and sense?
8

CONVERSION

His family was prosperous; there were servants, a house in town, a second home in the country; a sense of privilege, entitlement to affluence and the good things of life. He had memories of languid days at their family rural retreat: lying in bed on a summer’s morning, hearing the sound of the scythe in the grass outside; picking wildflowers, gazing at magnolia blossoms. Aged 44, he went back to the rural cottage of his Aunt Elizabeth where the sight of a room where he once had breakfast prompted a memory: ‘coming down in the morning and seeing the breakfast things looking bright and still – and I have some vague reminiscence of dry toast. And I have a sort of dream of my father and mother coming one day to call, and the room being crowded.’
⁹
The stillness of the breakfast things eternalizes the enchantment of the moment through the eye of childhood. The written recollection reveals a benign self-absorption spanning childhood to adulthood.

The details of his childhood speak of a doting mother, a protective father, highly intelligent loving sisters Jemima, Harriett, and Mary, and gifted, if increasingly neurotic younger brothers Charles and Francis. Newman’s brothers would mean less to him (and he to them) than the eight female members of his extended family: his lively sisters, his mother, his devout grandmother Elizabeth Newman, and his Aunt Elizabeth Good, known as Betsy. It was Betsy who encouraged him as a child to read the Bible. The influence of so many intelligent, voluble women in his younger life might well have affected his speech and mannerisms.

His father was an assiduous working partner of a bank in Lombard Street. Mr John Newman appears a detached figure, but vigilant for his children’s welfare; prompt on one occasion to advise his son against religious enthusiasm. ‘Take care … you are encouraging a nervousness and morbid sensibility, and irri-tability, which may be very serious’, he warned the earnest teenager.
1
0
The father sent him, aged seven, to a private boarding school in Ealing, where he was happy and academically successful. It appears that he was clever, curious, precocious. He struck his sister Harriet as a ‘very philosophical young gentleman, always full of thought and never at a loss for an answer, very observant and considerate.’
11

When he was fourteen years he went through a period of smart scepticism. He read ‘Paine’s
Tracts against the Old Testament
…’ also ‘some of Hume’s Essays; and perhaps that on Miracles’.
1
2
Hume wrote famously against miracles: ‘When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider

with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.’
¹³
Newman remembers copying out verses ‘perhaps Voltaire’s, in denial of the immortality of the soul’.
¹⁴
During this period he recollects saying to himself ‘something like, “How dreadful, but how plausible!” ’
15

Then his father’s business failed in the 1816 banking crisis that followed the end of the Napoleonic war. Inflation was rampant, thousands of secure fortunes sank as in a dream. Newman fell ill and remained at school through that sum-mer while the family was obliged to leave the London home. They eventually took up residence at a house in Alton, Hampshire, where Mr Newman embarked on a new career as manager of a brewery. It was the beginning of several years of sliding fortunes, humiliation, and, in time, a succession of temporary and increasingly down-at-heel abodes – Kentish Town, Holborn, Covent Garden. Watchful over the family’s middle-class respectability and his father’s reputation (another Mr Newman of the City of London had notoriously committed suicide during the financial crisis), John Henry would attempt to expunge details of his father’s financial difficulties. Mr John Newman was eventually declared bankrupt and would die in his prime of what they used to call a broken heart. The anxiety drove the boy in on himself; unwell, depressed, and solitary, he became receptive, and perhaps a target, of the religious enthusiasm of one of his young school teachers. Mr Walter Mayers, a classicist, had recently converted from mainstream Anglicanism to fervent Evangelicalism. It was a familiar shift in the early nineteenth century. The previous fifty years had seen a decline in fervor within the Church of England, partly owed to its Establishment torpor and fragmentation, partly owed to a widespread appeal to ‘rationalism’ in support of religious belief. Evangelicalism and Methodism offered an antidote to spiritual indifference through powerful preaching and emphasis on Bible

reading.

Newman has left no clear impression of the dramatic impact on his feelings that summer. Looking back from late middle age, he focused on the literature that influenced him rather than his emotions. The fervent Mr Mayers placed in the young Newman’s hands
The Force of Truth
by Thomas Scott, who had himself undergone an Evangelical conversion. But Scott, as Newman would write later, enabled him to avoid the ‘detestable’ Evangelical doctrine, expounded by the Calvinists, which held that many were predestined to Hell. Scott ‘made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul’.
1
6
Scott convinced Newman that acceptance of Christianity brings the ‘living truth’ in all its ‘unfolding riches’. Newman would write that he now, for the first time, consciously accepted revealed religion. ‘I fell under the influences of a definite Creed’, he would write in the
Apologia
, ‘and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never

been effaced or obscured.’
¹⁷
A conviction of the truth of the Holy Trinity was accompanied by a sense of his ‘inward conversion of which I was conscious (and of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet ) would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory.’
1
8
According to Henri Bouyer, the young Newman received confirmation of, and assented to, the truth of the indwelling God, already sensed in childhood as the presence of that second luminous being in the depths of his consciousness. ‘If it be true’, writes Bouyer, ‘as he was now beginning to feel that it was, that all complete consciousness of self is moral consciousness, he realised that moral consciousness is the consciousness, the awareness, of Someone, of God.’
19

Yet, aged fifteen, he was already taking a position on the conflicts and squabbles of institutionalized Christianity. He would admit, in retrospect, ‘the seeds of an intellectual inconsistency’.
2
0
He believed in the Church founded by Christ’s apostles, and yet he was convinced that the Pope, Peter’s successor, was a tool of Satan. The problem was, he wrote later, that he had been reading
The History of the Church of Christ
by Joseph Milner, with its extracts from Augustine, Ambrose and other great writers of the early Church, the ‘Early Fathers’. At the same time he was plunging into Thomas Newton’s
Dissertations on the Prophecies
, which argued that the Pope was the Antichrist foretold in Scripture. Newman would later comment, ‘I speak of the process of conversion with great diffidence, being obliged to adopt the language of books. For my own feelings, as far as I remember, were so different from any account I have ever read, that I dare not go by what
may
be an individual case.’
²¹
He also tells us in the
Apologia
that he be-came convinced that he would never marry.