Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (17 page)

There, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind, Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.
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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with links via Faber and Hopkins, Roman Catholicism would attract a constituency of writers and poets who were homosexuals: Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas; Lionel Johnson, author of the ‘Dark Soul’; the extraordinary Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo of
Hadrian VII
fame who spent time at Oscott College and the Scots’ College in Rome (being turned out of both – from the Scots’ College while still in his bed); John Gray, who studied at the English College in Rome, and his lover André Raffalovich who saw connections between Catholicism and homosexuality – unisexisme, he called it, or the third sex. He distinguished between those who were born homosexual, and those who chose homosexuality. The ideal life for the born homosexual was to transcend his tendencies through sublimation, aided by art and the nurturing of spiritual relationships. Those non-congenital homosexuals, he asserted, who chose such a life style were guilty of vice and beastli-ness. While Faber to an extent anticipated something of the mood and sentiments of this circle, the attempts to make connections with Newman are ill-conceived.

NEWMAN ON POETRY

Newman’s ideas about the art of poetry and religion found expression during the era of his Oriel fellowship in an essay he wrote as a contribution to a new magazine edited by an ex-Catholic priest called Blanco White. White was one of the more bizarre individuals in the Oriel circle. Something of a verse writer himself (his sonnet ‘Night and Death’ was deemed by Coleridge ‘the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language’), he was famously anti-Catholic, the author of an essay entitled ‘Evidences against Catholicism’. He was clearly an entertaining and plausible conversationalist since he was allowed the run of the Oriel Senior Common Room as if he were an elected fellow. Blanco’s spiritual journey had brought him from Catholicism, via agnosticism, and Unitarianism, to Anglicanism (he would end an atheist). Hence he was an object of some

fascination to Oriel’s dons: a source of insider knowledge on fallacious arguments of Romanism and Non-Conformism, as well as a redeemed apostate from unbelief. He had studied theology in Oxford and made friends with Thomas Arnold and Newman after being offered a home at Oriel.

In November of 1828 White was invited to edit a start-up periodical,
The London Review
, and appealed to Newman for an article for the first issue. White asked him to write on a non-religious theme with a secular treatment. ‘Give me any article on any subject you like’, he wrote to Newman, ‘Divinity excepted for the present, for of that I expect a flood.’
³⁵
With a fast approaching deadline, White begged Newman to put down his thoughts as they came. ‘I should strongly advise you to venture upon the strength of your
household stuff
– on the reading and reflection of many years. Write without much concern; you are sure to write well … imagine yourself in our Common-Room, myself in the corner, Dornford passing the wine, etc, etc, and tell us your mind on paper.’ Newman responded enthusiastically with an article entitled ‘Poetry with Reference to Artistotle’s Poetics’, which he delivered to White on 8 November 1828. The theme is an ancient problem that poets and critics were exploring with renewed interest in the nineteenth century: is the poet a different kind of person from the rest of humankind? Newman argues that Aristotle was wrong to teach that poetry exists in the work, rather than in the poet. For Newman, poetry is the rhapsodic or prophetic gift itself – the genius or talent that separates and isolates the artist from the common run; whereas a poem is ‘no essential part of poetry, though indispensable to its exhibition’. The isolation of the poet, New-man goes on, finds parallels in the interior life of religion and a sense of God. The Christian spends ‘the greater part of his time by himself, and when he is in solitude, that is his real state’. Hence Newman suggests that each Christian is a kind of poet:

With Christians, a poetic view of things is a duty, – we are bid to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a Divine meaning in every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are invested with unearthly brightness – no longer imperfect men, but being taken into Divine favour, stamped with His seal, and in training for future happiness. It may be added, that the virtues peculiarly Christian are especially poetical

– meekness, gentleness, compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional virtues; whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry – anger, indignation, emulation, martial spirit and love of independence.
36

This does not mean that Newman expected every poet to be a Christian, but, according to his view of the matter, the good person should strive to be a poet. After he became a Catholic, Newman would review a collection of Keble’s poems,
Lyra Innocentium
, in the
Dublin Review
, arguing that ‘the Church herself

is the most sacred and august of poets’. What is the Church, he would ask, if not a channel through which emotion finds expression. She is ‘a discipline of the affections and passions … She is the poet of her children; full of music to soothe the sad and control the wayward, wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence or commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry …’
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If Newman saw the religious life as parallel to the life of a poet, the comparison stopped short of the poet as a person of aesthetic pretensions. He was averse to art for art’s sake and he found the literary type unattractive. ‘I am hard hearted’, he wrote three years after his conversion to Catholicism, ‘towards the mere literary ethos, for there is nothing I despise and detest more’.
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CHAPTER 7
‌‌

Parting of friends

‘My sole ascertainable reason for moving is a feeling of indefinite
risk

to my soul in staying … shall one bear to live, where die one cannot?

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO JOHN KEBLE, 21 NOVEMBER 1844

While members of the Oxford Movement promoted their ideas in the tracts, Newman continued to lecture small groups in a chapel within Oxford’s university church. He was like a man torn between two loves. Increasingly he felt attracted to the Roman Mother Church. As one of his characters, drawn to Catholicism yet still unable to make the plunge, puts it in Newman’s novel
Loss and Gain
(written in 1847):

She is our mother – oh, that word ‘mother!’ – a mighty mother! She opens her arms – oh, the fragrance of that bosom! She is full of gifts – I feel, I have long felt it. Why don’t I rush into her arms? Because I feel that she is ruled by a spirit which is not she. But did that distrust of her go from me, was that certainty which I have of her corruption, disproved, I should join her communion tomorrow.
1

For the time being he felt that he could not abandon the Church of England despite the doubts he entertained about the authenticity of her traditions. He was still looking for that reliable connection back to God’s true Revelation. He was looking for guarantees.

Newman throughout this period had been pondering a Via Media or middle way, that drew on what seemed to him the most authentic aspects of both Churches, while rejecting the evident shortcomings of each. Was that middle way not Anglo-Catholicism, the Catholic Church in England? And was this not the Church that would bring England back to the one, true, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, while loosening the stranglehold of a Parliament and Government comprised of Evangelicals, Dissenters, and Papists?

The lectures that lay the ground for this Via Media had been published in March 1837 in a volume entitled
The Prophetic Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism
. The Tractarians had adopted the term Anglicanism (originating from the time of King James I) with its resonances of Gallicanism – the French experiment with a Catholicism of strong local discretion. Then the coinage ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ gradually came into vogue. Yet Newman was soon openly admitting that, despite its growing popu-

larity, Anglo-Catholicism existed, alas, only in theory. It had no substance: it was a ‘paper Church’. But he remained optimistic that the Christians of England, led by the bishops and pastors, might still awaken to its claims and make it a Church in reality.

By 1839, however, he was assailed by a serious scruple. Absorbed in his readings of long forgotten religious quarrels, he was shocked to discover that fourteen centuries earlier a similar compromise in a doctrinal controversy had resulted in a Catholic anathema. The Latin and the Greek wings of the Church, East and West, had insisted that Jesus Christ possessed two distinct natures, human and divine: Jesus Christ was God and he was Man. Whereas the West talked of two natures ‘in’ Christ, the East spoke of the two natures ‘of ’ Christ: but two natures, nevertheless. While the recondite bickering continued as to how this should be expressed, a group of North African Christians, known as Monophysites, aimed to resolve the dilemma by positing a middle way: a coalesced single nature of Christ. For this they were roundly condemned. As Newman reviewed the episode, he was stunned by the parallel with Anglo-Catholicism and himself: ‘I saw my face in that mirror’, he wrote, ‘and I was a Monophysite

… there was an awful similitude, more awful, because so silent and unimpas-sioned, between the dead records of the past and the feverish chronicle of the present.’
²
Theologising adrift from history landed one in heresy.

There was more to come. Nicholas Wiseman, Rector of the English College, whom he had met in Rome with Hurrell Froude, had written an article for the
Dublin Review
in which he compared the Church of England with a fourth century schismatic sect known as the Donatists. They claimed that the Catholic Church was out of step with doctrinal orthodoxy in declaring that a priest in mortal sin could nevertheless administer valid sacraments. Newman was at first unimpressed by the article, but a friend emphasized Wiseman’s quotation of the words of Saint Augustine ‘
Securus judicat orbis terrarum
’ – the entire world is the secure judge. In other words, in seeking authentic doctrine one does not merely hark back to antiquity; one listens to the echoing judgment of the contemporary faithful majority of Christendom. Newman could now see the mer-its of the parallel Wiseman had drawn between the Church of England and the Donatists. With aid of an uncharacteristically atrocious mixed metaphor, he wrote to Frederick Rogers in September 1839 that Wiseman’s argument was ‘the first real hit from Romanism which has happened to me … it has given me a stomach-ache. You see the whole history of the Monophysites has been a sort of alterative, and now comes this dose at the end of it. It does certainly come upon one that we are not at the bottom of things. At this moment we have sprung a leak …’
³
The term ‘alterative’ refers to a medicine that affects the process of digestion. A little later, on a walk in the New Forest, he compared his situation to one who has been presented with a landscape ‘to the end of which I do not