Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (18 page)

see’. In the
Apologia
he would write that the words ‘
securus judicat orbis terrarum
’ struck with a ‘power which I never had felt from any words before … they were like the “Turn again Whittington” of the chime; or … the “Tolle lege, – Tolle, lege” of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself … By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the
Via Media
was absolutely pulverized.’
⁴
The ‘Tolle lege’ – ‘take up, read’ – refers to the incident in Augustine’s
Confessions
, when he hears the voice of a child repeatedly asking him to take up his Bible. He opens the book on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 13: 13–14, and is converted.

Newman nevertheless hung on uncomfortably within the Anglican communion, attempting to assuage his scruples while still hoping to discover a way to bring the Churches of Rome and England closer together. But by now his heart was not in it. As he would write in the
Apologia
: ‘I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church.’
⁵
But, yet again, he attempted to solve the contradictions in an essay arguing that the fundamental principles of his Church, as stated in the Thirty-Nine Articles, could still be reconciled, partially at least, with the ‘old Catholic Truth’. The essay would be published as
Tract 90
in February of 1841, and would prove the last of the tracts; but first he was drawn into another controversy.

TAMWORTH READING ROOM

Ahead of the publication of
Tract 90
Newman, signing himself CATHOLICUS, wrote a series of anonymous letters to
The Times
objecting to what he judged a strident reformulation of utilitarian ideas. The occasion was a speech published as a pamphlet by Sir Robert Peel to mark the opening of a reading room for working-class men and women at Tamworth in the industrial Midlands. The institute provided instruction manuals for such work-skills as building, engineering, and agriculture, and a wide range of literary and historical reading matter. The library committee, however, would not allow works of religious and political ‘controversy’ on its shelves.

On the face of it, the initiative seemed praiseworthy and progressive – recognising the need for inclusive adult education among the poor. What incited New-man’s scorn, however, was Peel’s assumption that science leads people naturally and inevitably towards happiness, higher moral standards, and belief not only in a theistic creator God but even in the claims of Christian revelation. The concerns on both sides – those of Peel and those of Newman – are as familiar and relevant today as they were in the mid-nineteenth century. For Newman, the initiative was tainted with the same secularist fallacy that had been evident at the foundation of London University. A library without religious books, he believed, was as culturally unacceptable as a university without a faculty of theology. His

most interesting and powerful arguments focus on the relationship between science and religion. Newman challenged Peel’s assertion that science and rational philosophy alone provide an ideal basis for the creation of a good society – ‘that an increased sagacity’, as Peel put it, ‘will administer to an exalted faith; that it will make men not merely believe in the cold doctrines of natural religion, but that it will so prepare and temper the spirit and understanding, that they will be bet-ter qualified to comprehend the great scheme of human redemption’. Newman was not attacking science or natural theology as such, nor claiming that reason and science are opposed to religion. He was saying that scientific conclusions and deductions do not, as Peel was arguing, encourage morality and religion. ‘This is why science’, he writes, ‘has so little of a religious tendency; deductions have no power of persuasion.’ Then comes a remarkable plea for the engagement of a person’s total humanity in religious conviction and practice. ‘The heart is commonly reached’, he writes, ‘not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.’
6

Nor, by invoking imagination, is Newman drawing an equivalence between religion and literature. ‘A literary religion is so little to be depended upon; it looks well in fair weather, but its doctrines are opinions, and when called to suffer for them, it slips them between its folios, or burns them at its hearth.’ He is emphasising the multi-faceted, multidimensional lived nature of what it means to be a complete human being capable of religious belief and expression: ‘Man’, he insists, ‘is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise. It is very well to freshen our impressions and convictions from physics, but to cre-ate them we must go elsewhere.’
7

As for religious belief based on philosophical reasoning:

I have no confidence … in philosophers who cannot help having religion, and are Christians by implication. They sit at home, and reach forward to distances which astonish us; but they hit without grasping, and are sometimes as confident about shadows as about realities. They have worked out by calculation the lie of a country which they never saw, and mapped it by a gazetteer; and like blind men, though they can put a stranger on his way, they cannot walk straight, and do not feel it quite their business to walk at all.
8

LITTLEMORE

Newman’s former curate at littletons, J. R. Bloxam, recalls paying a visit to the village and looking through the window of his former dwelling where he saw a figure ‘kneeling in prayer’. It was Newman, who had spent the Lent of 1840 experimenting with a semi-eremitical life, following devotional practices more

familiar within mainstream Catholicism than Anglicanism. Newman’s journal entries for this period reveal a measure of self-absorption reminiscent of the diaries of Hurrell Froude; although both echo the ascetical retreat ‘notes’ of Catholic spiritual exercises:

I have this Lent abstained from fish, fowl, all meat but bacon at dinner; from butter, vegetables of all sorts, fruit, pastry, sugar, tea, wine, and beer and toast. I have never dined out. I have not worn gloves … On Wednesday and Friday I abstained from all food whatever to 6 P.M. when I added a second egg to my usual supper. I sometimes drank a glass of cold water in the morning for a particular reason …
9

The refinement of examination of motive and conscience betrays the scrupulosity of a monastic novice: ‘[I] have felt very little fatigue, very little pain, and no languor or lowness of spirits.’
¹⁰
He writes that he has kept quinine pills by him, and taken them from time to time. He admits to have indulged himself in a minor way: ‘I have happened to see two newspapers, not more; I have seen my friends who now and then called, and Bloxam and Rogers once or twice stayed a while.’
1
1
On Sundays, and on a feast day, he confesses, ‘I wore gloves’.
12

Newman had purchased an L-shaped block of stables and cottages in littletons village which he aimed to turn into a simple community residence where he could settle to pray and study. It stands to this day, much as it was, a single-storeyed simple building in College Lane, just off the Eastern by-pass south of Oxford, in an area that has become part of the suburban fringe extending down from the city to Iffley and Cowley. As the building was undergoing necessary preparations, the reception of
Tract 90
had raised a storm of protest in Oxford. ‘The main thesis of the Essay’, Newman wrote, ‘was this: – the [39] Articles do not oppose Catholic teaching; they but partially oppose Roman dogma; they for the most part oppose the dominant errors of Rome.’
¹³
He was clearly offering a final recipe for reconciling the best of Catholicism with fundamentals of Anglicanism in the vain hope of remaining within the Church of England in good faith. Many leading clerical dons were having none of it. Open letters were published and circulated throughout the university, accusing Newman of seducing members into violating their ‘solemn engagements’. Heads of colleges published a condemnation; and, finally, his bishop, Richard Bagot, signalled disapproval. Newman decided that the ninetieth tract was to be the last. The Oxford Movement was in effect at an end. With a chorus of criticism ringing in his ears, he plunged again into the Early Fathers and reviewed the details of the Arian heresy, which doubted the equivalence of God the Father and God the Son. He fixed on the relationship between different shades of Arianism and the Catholic Church at large. Newman saw that in his own contemporary parallel ‘the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and that Rome now was what it was then’.
1
4
The Eternal City beckoned.

Then, in 1841, came another blow to any remaining hope Newman might have entertained of finding a safe haven in the Church of England. That year saw the proposal to establish an Anglo-Prussian bishopric of Jerusalem. Michael Solomon Alexander was a former Jewish Rabbi, who was intended as a bishop to represent Protestants of a variety of confessions, as well as converts from Judaism. As Newman put it:

What a miserable concern this Jerusalem Bishoprick is! We have not a single member of our Church there, except travellers and officials. It is a mere political piece of business, to give our government influence in the country, such as the Russians have through Greeks and the French through Latins. We are to head the Protestant Church – which I fear too truly will be composed of Jews (whether converted or not) Lutherans
etc.
whether conformed [conforming] or not, Druses who are half Mahometans, and the Monophysites of Mesopotamia
etc.
– a remarkable collection of Jews, Turks, Infidels and Heretics. It is deplorable.
15

His principal anger was against a Church that could gather together such a random collection of Christian hybrids of dubious apostolic provenance. New-man later commented with relish: ‘I never heard of any good or harm [the Jerusalem bishopric] has ever done, except what it has done for me; which many think a great misfortune, and I one of the greatest of mercies. It brought me on to the beginning of the end.’
16

By the Spring of 1842 Newman had moved into the community residence at littletons and begun a style of living that included the reading of the Roman breviary, meditation, rigorous fasting, and the study of Athanasius, the scourge of those Arian heretics. Newman’s journal for March 6, noting the date in Romish style, ‘
Dominica Quarta in Quadragesima
’ (the Fourth Sunday in Lent), records renewed absorption in his ascetical practices, and concern about his bowel movements:

I have eaten nothing between breakfast & tea, besides eating no meat except on Sundays, but on the other hand I have eaten more eggs and taken tea. However my relax-ations have been these, & for these reasons. The addition of milk (not in tea) I have already mentioned. I have lately added butter, because it enabled me to eat more bread, because it seems to contribute to relieve the more inconvenient effect of (eggs), because it enables me to take powdered rhubarb with my meal, which seems to succeed better than anything else… I am very much exhausted – & from exhaustion have not been regular sometimes in the Breviary Offices.
17

He was now joined by the first members of his embryonic community. There was John Dalgairns, an excitable, pious young man who had failed to be elected to an Oxford fellowship because of his Roman tendencies. Next came William Lockhart, with family links to Sir Walter Scott; his stay at littletons appears to have been a substitute for going over to Rome. Then Frederick Bowles from

Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Finally, came Ambrose St John, 28 years of age, a lin-guist ancient and modern. Other visitors, such as Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude, and David Lewis would drop by or stay briefly.