THE GENIUS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
In anticipation of John Henry Newman’s canonization this weekend, Joseph Pearce looks at the genius of the great man.
The reception of John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church in 1845 heralded a new dawn for the Faith in England. It would, in fact, be no exaggeration to say that Newman’s conversion was the very birth of the English Catholic Revival. Before Newman, the Catholic presence in England had withered to such a degree that only the remnant of the old recusant families still carried the Faith from one beleaguered and persecuted generation to the next. These courageous adherents to the “Old Faith” bore the Catholicism in their hearts and in their homes, but they were effectively excluded from bringing it into public life. After Newman’s conversion, however, Catholicism became a major intellectual presence in English cultural life, and, in Newman’s wake, thousands of Englishmen followed his example, and converted in droves. Also in 1845, simultaneous with Newman’s conversion, the Great Famine began in Ireland, leading to a mass influx of Irish immigrants to England’s cities. Thus, almost overnight, Catholicism was resurrected from its moribund state to one of great and growing vibrancy. Newman had gained the intellectual high ground for the Faith, winning a host of converts, whereas the Irish provided a powerful presence among the working classes. In terms of prestige and in terms of numbers Catholicism was once more in the ascendant.
If Newman’s historical importance is beyond question so is the great legacy he has bequeathed to posterity. In theology, philosophy, education, and literature he has bestowed an abundance of riches on the Church and the world.
Born in 1801, Newman graduated from Trinity College, Oxford, was elected a fellow of Oriel in 1822, and was ordained into the Anglican ministry two years later. He began an intensive study of the Church Fathers, that would eventually lead to his conviction that the Catholic Church was indeed, as she claimed, the Church of the Apostles. In 1833 he published his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century. Many of his finest poems, including “Lead, Kindly Light”, were written at around this time, and it was also in this year that the Oxford Movement, of which Newman would be the leading light, came into existence.[1] Such was Newman’s leading role in the Oxford Movement, which would give birth to the singularly odd hybrid known as Anglo-Catholicism, that its enemies and detractors referred to those adhering to the Movement and its Tracts as “Newmanites”. The most famous and most controversial of the Tracts was Tract 90, published in 1841, in which Newman argued that the Thirty-nine Articles were Catholic in spirit and were not intended as an attack on Catholic doctrine. The furore surrounding the publication of Tract 90 effectively put an end to the Tractarian Movement, and in its explosively divisive aftermath many members of the movement converted to Catholicism.
Newman’s last great sermon as an Anglican was entitled “Development in Christian Doctrine”, a sermon he preached in February 1843. This understanding of doctrinal development has had a profound influence ever since, and it helped to elucidate the teaching authority of the Church’s Magisterium in the light of the ecclesiology surrounding the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. His discourses on liberal education, delivered to Catholic audiences in Dublin in 1852, as he prepared to become rector of the new Irish Catholic University, would be published two years later as The Idea of a University, a book that remains one of the finest and most eloquent works advocating the efficacy of an integrated liberal arts education. His greatest contribution to philosophy is his seminal work, The Grammar of Assent (1870), the product of twenty years’ labour, which highlighted the inadequacy of empiricism and the rational foundations for religious belief. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) is arguably the greatest autobiographical spiritual aeneid ever written, with the obvious exception of St. Augustine’s incomparable Confessions.
Years earlier, in 1848, only three years after his reception into the Church, Newman had foreshadowed his Apologia with his first novel, Loss and Gain, a fictionalised semiautobiographical account of a young man’s quest for faith amid the scepticism and uncertainties of early-Victorian Oxford. He also addressed the issue of conversion in his historical novel, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century, published in 1855.
As a prose stylist, the critic George Levine judged Newman as “perhaps the most artful and brilliant prose writer of the nineteenth century”, a judgement seemingly echoed by James Joyce, via Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Newman was also one of the finest poets of the Victorian age, writing poems, such as “The Sign of the Cross”, “The Golden Prison” and “The Pilgrim Queen”, which rank alongside the best verse of his illustrious contemporaries. His most ambitious poem is The Dream of Gerontius, later the inspiration for an oratorio by Sir Edward Elgar, which presents the vision of a soul at the moment of death, and its conveyance by its guardian angel to the cleansing grace of purgatory. “It reminds us at times of Milton”, suggested the critic A. S. P. Woodhouse, “and it strikingly anticipates T. S. Eliot in its presentation of Christ as the surgeon who probes the wound in order to heal.” Newman’s Dream was also greatly admired by C. S. Lewis, who drew on what he called its “right view” of purgatory as one of the inspirational sources for his own purgatorial excursion in The Great Divorce.
Whether or not, at the moment of his death in 1890, Newman followed in the faithful footsteps of the penitent protagonist of his most accomplished poem, being guided by his guardian angel to the place where the temporal punishment due for his sins would be purged, Newman's canonization serves as confirmation that this sagacious crusader for the truth has attained his heavenly reward. Yet he entered the after-life without fully exiting this life. He is alive in the works that he has left and the influence he has exerted. Indeed, it might be said that not only is Newman the father of the Catholic Revival but the whole revival that followed in his wake stands on his sturdy and studious shoulders. Remembering the famous words of Sir Isaac Newton that he had “seen further … by standing on the shoulders of giants”, those of us in today’s beleaguered world can be comforted by the knowledge that we can see further by standing on the shoulders of John Henry Newman.
