Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (9 page)

An Oriel fellowship had acquired extraordinary status in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Provost, Edward Copleston, and his predecessor, John Eveleigh, had broken with Oxford college tradition by inviting all-comers to compete for fellowships. It was a ‘trial’, according to Copleston, ‘not of how much men knew, but of how they knew’.
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Whereas fellowships and other university appointments were invariably based on patronage, backed by success in the
BA
honours examinations (‘the quackery of the Schools’, as Copleston referred to them), the Oriel fellowship examination was open to all. ‘Every election to a fellowship which tends to discourage the narrow and almost the technical
routine
of public examinations’, wrote Copleston, ‘I consider as an

important triumph.’
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He was prepared to take risks even with candidates who had actually done badly in their
BA
examination. Although there had been one at least who had failed to live up to his confidence. That was Coleridge’s eldest son, Hartley, who had done badly in his finals, yet impressed the Oriel fellows only to disgrace himself as a drunkard. But they were prepared to take a risk again with young Newman, who also had done disastrously in his finals. ‘He was not even a good classical scholar’, commented Copleston, ‘yet in mind and powers of composition, and in taste and knowledge, he was decidedly superior to some competitors who were a class above him in the Schools.’
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Copleston believed that it was more important to exercise a student’s mind ‘than to pour in knowledge’.
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Newman was joining a circle of remarkable Oxford figures. The Oriel senior common room was noted for its love of intellectual conversation; and in consequence the fellows were known as the ‘Noetics’. Oriel dons preferred to drink tea rather than port after high table dinner, prompting ribaldry from hearty students who would call out, inquiring whether the kettle was on, when passing the porter’s lodge.

At dinner on his first evening Newman sat next to John Keble, regarded in those days as one of the pre-eminent minds in the university. Keble, who was nine years older than Newman, looked so young, and was ‘so perfectly unassuming and unaffected in his manner’, noted Newman, that he seemed more like an undergraduate than Oxford’s ‘first man’.
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Arriving in 1807 as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, aged only 14, Keble had taken a double first in Mathematics and Classics, and later won the university prizes for English and Latin essays. When Newman was elected, Keble was a college tutor and a university examiner; more importantly he was a poet, already turning out the sacred verse that would make a best-seller of his book
The Christian Year
, published in 1827. Another notable Oriel character was a tall flamboyant man called Richard Whately, recently married and so no longer a resident fellow. He took Newman under his wing, encouraging him to assume greater self-confidence. An Oriel Fellow wrote: ‘The first time I saw Whately, he wore a pea-green coat, white waist-coat, stone-coloured shorts, flesh-coloured silk stockings. His hair was powdered.’
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Newman remembered: ‘If there was a man easy for a raw bashful youth to get on with it was Whately … a great talker, who endured very readily the silence of his company.’
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Whately was known for his uncouth manners. One contemporary reported: ‘I myself have seen him expectorate over his shoulder in the Corpus Common Room, wipe his mouth with his fingers, and then plunge them into a dish of almonds and raisins.’
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Whately admired the young fellow Newman, judging that Oriel had appointed ‘the clearest-headed man he knew’.
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Another Oriel figure soon to become an intimate of Newman’s was Edward Bouverie Pusey. Pusey, a year older than Newman, was tense and pious; he suffered

from migraines. They walked together frequently, conversing on religious themes and in particular the question of the Evangelical spirit. Newman noted prayerfully in his journal: ‘that Pusey is Thine, O Lord, how can I doubt? … yet I fear he is prejudiced against Thy children.’
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Newman gives us a vivid description of his first encounter with this future kindred spirit, demonstrating, with the lightest of observational touches, his developing literary skills:

His light curly head of hair was damp with the cold water which his headaches made necessary for comfort; he walked fast with a young manner of carrying himself, and stood rather bowed, looking up from under his eye-brows, his shoulders rounded, and his bachelor’s gown not buttoned at the elbow, but hanging loose over his wrists. His countenance was very sweet, and he spoke little.
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On one of their many walks Pusey made a form of religious confession to Newman, who consequently wrote in his journal: ‘O, what words shall I use? My heart is full. How should I be humbled to the dust! What importance I think myself of ! my deeds, my abilities, my writings! whereas he is humility itself, and gentleness, and love, and zeal, and self devotion. Bless him with Thy fullest gifts, and grant me to imitate him.’
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Newman had found absorbing intellectual and emotional companionship, but he still treasured his solitude, a circumstance noted by the Provost. Meeting Newman one afternoon as the young don walked alone wrapped in thought, Copleston accosted him with the Ciceronian phrase: ‘
Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus,
’ – ‘Never less alone than when alone.’

HOLY ORDERS

In May of 1824 Newman was appointed curate to the ageing rector of St Clement’s Church, Oxford, and the following month received the diaconate, penultimate stage to the priesthood, in the cathedral of Christ Church. ‘The words “for ever” ’, he reflected, ‘are so terrible … I feel as a man thrown suddenly into deep water.’
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St Clement’s was situated at the east end of the city of Oxford where the roads from London, Iffley and Cowley converge before the traveller crosses Magdalen Bridge and enters the High. With 1,500 working class parishioners, and an ail-ing rector, he was soon hard at work, teaching catechism, raising money for a new church building, and visiting the sick. He would raise £2,000 for the new building, including a gallery for ninety children.

Newman’s mentor during this early pastoral period was Edward Hawkins, fellow of Oriel, and Vicar of St Mary’s, the University Church. Hawkins was one of those acute hypochondriacs who lived to be ninety-three. Newman benefited, however, from his tendency to precision and clarity in thought and

expression. He would write that Hawkins taught him to ‘weigh my words, and to be cautious in my statements’.

He led me to that mode of limiting and clearing my sense in discussion and in controversy, and of distinguishing between cognate ideas, and of obviating mistakes by anticipation, which to my surprise has been since considered, even in quarters friendly to me, to savour of the polemics of Rome.
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Newman’s reputation, among his future enemies, for slippery casuistry, was, according to his own view many years later, Oxonian intellectual precision rather than Roman equivocation. Hawkins criticized the draft of Newman’s first sermon in which he separated, in Evangelical mode, the sheep from goats, saints from sinners, converts from unconverted. Hawkins insisted that religious and moral excellence is matter of degree, rather than black and white.
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Newman was soon to find in his pastoral work that this was indeed the case, although he continued, much to the dismay of his parishioners, to preach the doctrine of eternal damnation.

At the heart of Hawkins’s criticism, however, was Newman’s apparent attachment to the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration. The widely accepted Anglican view, based on the
Book of Common Prayer
, was that baptism conferred rebirth in the spirit by the act of washing with water whether of infants or adults. The Evangelical view was that regeneration, rebirth in Christ, was a result of actual, conscious will to convert rather than the ritual itself: hence infant baptism was deemed to be inadequate by many Evangelical preachers. Newman remained in a quandary on the question for many months; but Hawkins’s influence marked the beginning of the end of his Evangelical convictions.

That year he read Bishop Joseph Butler’s influential
Analogy of Religion: Natural and Revealed
. Butler, who had been a fellow of Oriel as a young man, argued that there are two ways to religion and knowledge of God: through nature and through revelation, and that both paths are complementary and analogous. In Butler, Newman found confirmation of his conviction, since boyhood, that God was to be found in the depths of conscience. Butler taught that human beings are guided by two principles: the impetus of self-interest, and a desire to assist oth-ers. Human beings are not determined towards either self-interest or altruism, he argued; we are moral agents with a capacity to choose between the two. Newman had taken Butler’s notion of conscience, the supreme authority in one’s life, as a way of finding God in nature and thence to finding Him in Revelation.
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In a sermon Newman would preach before the university in 1830, ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively’, he would expand on the idea:

… it is obvious that Conscience is the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind. Conscience implies a relation between the soul and something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to

a tribunal over which it has no power. And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation.
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Newman received full Holy Orders at Christ Church in May 1825. He would write of baptismal regeneration a year into his first pastoral job: ‘Then, I thought there were many in the visible Church of Christ, who have never been visited by the Holy Ghost; now, I think there are none but probably, nay almost certainly, have been visited by Him … Then, I thought the
onus probandi
lay with those who asserted an individual to be a real Christian; and now I think it lies with those who deny it.’
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Meanwhile on a walk around Christ Church Meadow, another fellow of Oriel, the Reverend William James, expounded the doctrine of apostolic succession: that the continuity of the Church back to its original foundation depended on the unbroken line of bishops who owed their Holy Orders to the first apostles. Such a historical contention could only raise a number of uncomfortable questions: not least the discontinuity of the English Reformation. Newman would write in the
Apologia
that he was not entirely sure that he came round to accepting the doctrine at that time; that he was somewhat impatient of it in the course of their conversation. But the seed had been planted.

BROTHERLY LOVE

Newman’s father lay dying in London during September 1824, broken by his business failures. John Henry was at his side: ‘He knew me, tried to put out his hand and said “God Bless you”.’ His last words were ‘God bless you, thank my God, thank my God … my dear’. Newman wrote: ‘Can a man be a materialist who sees a dead body?’
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Newman thus became the head of the family, assuming both emotional and financial responsibilities for his mother and siblings, while attempting to exert moral responsibility over at least one of his brothers. At the same time he was busy in Oxford. He was already junior treasurer of Oriel College when he was invited by Richard Whately, now the new Principal of St Alban’s Hall (a private residential hall for scholars adjoining Oriel) to become effectively ‘Dean, Tutor, Bursar and all’. Newman would acknowledge that the pressures had an effect on him. He wrote of those early days that he had a ‘contemptuous manner’ and was ‘hasty and authoritative’, ‘proud, ill tempered, insincere, implacable’.
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It was this harsh side of his character perhaps that got the better of him when