Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (14 page)

him, ‘I have a work to do in England’.
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Newman would record that during the worst of his illness he could not bear Gennaro to be absent from the room even for five minutes. Whenever he went out Newman would call out: ‘Gen-na-rooo.’

After the crisis had passed he began to enjoy the scenery again, but he was now homesick for England and for Oxford. In retrospect, Newman wondered whether Satan himself had not sought to destroy him in Sicily in order to frustrate his destiny and vocation.

As he waited in Palermo for a boat to start his journey back to England he wrote some of the poems that would appear in the volume of verse to be called
Lyra Apostolica
, by members of his circle in Oxford. He also wrote a curiously ambivalent verse occasioned by his visits to the city’s churches where he had sought respite from the ‘city’s sultry streets’:

O that thy creed were sound!

For thou dost sooth the heart, Thou Church of Rome, By thy unwearied watch and varied round

Of service, in thy Saviour’s holy home.
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At sea, he wrote what would become one of the most famous hymns in the English language: ‘Lead kindly Light’, which he entitled ‘The Pillar of the Cloud’

– an allusion from Exodus to the guidance of God to the people of Israel as they wandered in the desert. ‘Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.’ As the Newman scholar Ian Ker writes:

The words which are most characteristic of Newman come at the end of the first stanza: ‘I do not ask to see/the distant scene, – one step enough for me.’ It was a thought which was always to be at the heart of his spirituality, namely, that light is only given to us

gradually bit by bit, but that we are always given enough to see what we have to do next, and that when we have taken that step which has been lit up for us, we shall see the next, but only the next, step illuminated – while to attempt to see several steps ahead or the end of the path is not only futile but also self-defeating.
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The hymn embodies a profound personal resolution and insight: the abandonment of his own will, and surrender to God’s will. It would become the watchword of his future spiritual life: ‘… we are in God’s hands, and must be content to do our work day by day, as He puts it before us, without attempting to understand or to anticipate His purposes.’
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Then again:

The Providence of God has been wonderful with me all through my life…. Everyone doubtless is so watched over, and tended by Him that at the last day, whether he be saved or not, he will confess that nothing could have been done for him more than had been actually done; and everyone will feel his own history as special and singular.
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The illness and the consequent second conversion would remain with him for the rest of his life. ‘It made me’, he would write, ‘a Christian.’

The Mediterranean trip also seemed to have awakened and expanded in Newman a capacity for perceiving in literary terms the sensuous concrete, an ability to keep his eye steadily focused on immediate specific objects. It was in Sicily that he observed with exquisite sensitivity the gentleness of the massive finger-tips of Gennaro’s ‘great bullet-tips’ while the man was applying vinegar to his nostrils. At sea, describing the noises above his cabin, he could pen passages of impressively refined observation, his senses and imagination fully engaged:

It is like half a hundred watchmen’s rattles … mixed with the squeaking of several Brob-dingnag pigs, while the water dashes dash dash against the sides. Then overhead the loud foot of the watch, who goes on tramping up and down the whole night more or less. Then (in the morning) the washing of the deck … Rush comes an engine pipe on the floor – ceases, is renewed, flourishes about, rushes again – then suddenly 1/2 a dozen brooms, wish, wash, wish, wash, scrib, scrub, roaring and scratching alternately. Then the heavy flump, flumps of the huge dabbing cloth which is meant to dry the deck in a measure instead of a towel or duster.
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The Mediterranean interlude may well have been a crucial prelude to his developing skill in clothing abstract ratiocinations with precise and powerful metaphors.

Newman arrived in Oxford on Tuesday, 9 July 1833. The following Sunday, July 14, as Newman would write in the
Apologia
, ‘Mr Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title “National Apostasy”. I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833.’
²⁵
The movement was the Oxford Movement.

CHAPTER 6
‌‌

The Oxford Movement

‘Every feeling which interferes with God’s sovereignty in our hearts, is of an idolatrous nature …’

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO BISHOP RICHARD BAGOT, 29 MARCH 1841

‘Scoundrels must be called scoundrels!’
¹
That’s how Newman’s friend, the pious John Keble, denounced in 1833 those he believed were destroying the Church of England, the established religion of the nation. Preaching in St Mary’s University Church on the biennial occasion of the opening of the Oxford Assizes, the local law courts, he seized the opportunity to launch an attack on what he called the ‘National Apostasy’. Like so many would-be religious reformers and revival-ists, before and since, Keble insisted that the nation’s religious decline must be reversed with the renewal of each individual human heart:

… the surest way to uphold or restore our endangered Church, will be for each of her anxious children, in his own place and station, to resign himself more thoroughly to his God and Saviour.
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But he had wider political and ecclesiastical concerns, familiar among the devout and orthodox of every Faith in the modern period in Europe: how to combat the effects of encroaching secularism, doubt, and indifference. For years he had deplored the lukewarm practices of Anglican clergy and laity. Bishops, he complained, were all too often selected with regard to secular and political considerations; clergy were more intent on leading comfortable lives than tending their flocks.

The political background to Keble’s sermon was the perception that the established Church was increasingly in the grip of Dissenters, agnostics, atheists, and even Roman Catholics. The Tory Government, Keble asserted, had in 1828 forfeited its right to influence the Church by repealing the Test Acts, so allowing dissenters to enter public office. The following year the Catholic Relief Act was passed, allowing Catholics into Parliament. Then came the Reform Act of 1832, creating new constituencies in industrial areas and allowing broader categories to vote than property owners. And now the Church of Ireland episcopate was about to be taxed, turned upside down, and decimated.

Opposition to electoral reform appeared on the face of it a reaction to the liberalizing aspirations of an expanding industrial society; but there were deeper,

institutional insecurities nagging within the ranks of the more devout clergy. The Church of England seethed with conflicting affiliations: ‘High’, ‘Low’, ‘High and Dry’, ‘Broad’, ‘Evangelical’. The Low Church, cherishing the legacy of Puri-tanism, adhered strictly to the Thirty-Nine Articles defining the essential Protestantism of an Anglican in contrast to a Roman Catholic. For example, the Articles rejected the ‘fond’ belief in Purgatory, and scorned transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic belief that the bread and wine change ‘substantially’ into the flesh and blood of the living Christ. The High Church, flirting with Romish practices, had inclined towards Catholic liturgy, incense, vestments, miracles, veneration of the Virgin Mary and the saints. The Broad Church welcomed all shades of opinion and practice, risking the charge of relativism. Meanwhile diverse Evangelical movements espoused individual feeling, primacy of Bible reading, and preaching, rather than sacraments, priesthood, and the divinely ordained authority of bishops.

Keble’s sermon resonated feebly in the country at large, but it galvanized the circle of Oxford clerical dons, and former dons, that included Newman, Pusey, Keble, Henry Wilberforce, and Hurrell Froude. There were excited meetings near and far from Oxford. Groups were formed, and yet not a ‘party’ as such (nor any association, as Newman put it, ‘in which a majority bound a minority’). Eventually they called themselves ‘Friends of the Church’ and determined to publish a series of campaigning pamphlets known collectively as ‘Tracts’: hence they would come to be known as the Tractarians. The first, entitled
Tract for the Times
, just three pages in length, was dedicated to ‘my England, ordained by the Holy Spirit and by the laying-on of hands’. While attacking the intrusion of the government in the ambit of the Church, it insisted that the bishops owed their authority not to the King but to the unbroken succession that went back to the first apostles, and to Jesus himself. The anonymous author was John Henry Newman. The Oxford Movement was launched. The closest historic precedent for such a hiatus in the Church of England had been the group of non-juring bishops and clergy who refused to swear allegiance to William of Orange following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688. Those refuseniks of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had speculated on the notion of the Church of England as a local branch of the Catholic Church.

Newman was a whirl of activity. His
Arians of the Fourth Century
was published, and the first volume of
Parochial and Plain Sermons
. Now he was writing on the apostolic succession for the
British Magazine
, now on church discipline for the
Record
. He was frequently on the road, drumming up Tractarian support; yet hurrying back to Oxford to hold daily services. At the same time, he was becoming pastorally rigorous, and getting a name for it. He was derided in the national press for refusing to marry a certain Miss Jubber and her betrothed. The unfortunate lady could not produce a baptismal certificate;

Newman refused to marry them. A report of the episode published in the
Weekly Dispatch
(6 July) gives an impression of the tensions generated by Newman’s rigorism:

The Vicar of St Mary the Virgin parish Oxford, in his hyper-anxiety to signalize his zeal against dissent and in favor of ‘orthodoxy’ refused on Tuesday last to marry a young couple of very respectable connexions in that City solely because the blooming to be Bride had not been christened, and was in the rev: bigot’s phraseology an
outcast
, the matrimonial knot was however tied directly afterwards by the more tolerant and less pharisaical minister of a neighbouring parish-church, and the happy pair were very properly relieved from the cruel disappointment which threatened them.
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