CARDINAL NEWMAN
(1912)
The life of Newman was divided into two nearly equal portions by his change of religion in October 1845. For the earlier half of his career we have long had his own narrative; and Newman is a prince of autobiographers. It was his wish that the 'Apologia' should be the final and authoritative account of his life in the Church of England, and of the steps by which he was led to transfer his allegiance to another communion. The voluminous literature of the Tractarian movement, which includes large collections of Newman's own letters, has confirmed the accuracy of his narrative, and has made any further description of that strange episode in English University life superfluous. With the 'Apologia' and Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement' before him, the reader needs no more. Mr. Wilfrid Ward has therefore been well advised to adhere loyally to the Cardinal's wishes, by confining himself to the last half of Newman's life, after a brief summary of his childhood, youth, and middle age till 1845. Nevertheless, it is misleading to give the title 'The Life of Cardinal Newman' to a work which is only, as it were, the second volume of a biography. There are very few men, however long-lived, who have not done much of their best work before the age of forty-five, and Newman was certainly not one of the exceptions. From every point of view, except that of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical historian, Newman's Anglican career was far more interesting and important than his residence at Birmingham. He will live in history, not as the recluse of Edgbaston, nor as the wearer of the Cardinal's hat which fell to his lot, almost too late to save the credit of the Vatican, when he had passed the normal limit of human life, but as the real founder and leader of nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism, the movement which he created and then tried in vain to destroy. The projects and failures and successes of his later life seem very pale and almost petty when compared with the activities of the years while he was making a chapter of English history. His greatest book, though it was written many years after his secession, is the record of a drama which ended in the interview with Father Dominic the Passionist. It is 'The History of my Religious Opinions'; and after 1845 his religious opinions had, as he says himself, no further history. The incomparable style which will give him a permanent place among the masters of English prose was the product of his life at Oxford, where he lived in a society of highly cultivated men, whose writings show many of the same excellences as his own. Newman's English is only the Oriel manner at its best. Such an instrument could hardly have been forged at the Birmingham Oratory, where his associates, who had followed him from Littlemore, were of such an inferior type that Mark Pattison, who knew them, was surprised that he could be satisfied with their company. His best sermons and his best poetry belong to his Anglican period. 'The Dream of Gerontius,' with all its tender grace, is far less virile than 'Lead, kindly Light,' and other short poems of his youth. Moreover, his record as a Roman ecclesiastic is one of almost unrelieved failure. If he had died eighteen years after his secession, when he already looked upon himself as an old man whose course was nearly run, he would have been regarded as one who had sacrificed a great career in the Church of England for neglect and obscurity. From the first he was distrusted by the 'Old Catholics' (the old Roman Catholic families in England), and suspected at the Vatican, where Talbot assiduously represented him as 'the most dangerous man in England.' When Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, followed his example and joined the Roman Church, Newman was confronted with a still more subtle and relentless opponent, whose hostility was never relaxed till the accession of a Liberal Pope made it no longer possible to resist the bestowal of tardy honours upon a feeble octogenarian. The recognition came in time to soothe his decline, but too late to enable him to leave his mark upon the administration of the Roman Church.
The main events in a very uneventful career are narrated at length in Mr. Ward's volumes. After his 'conversion' Newman first resided in a small community at Maryvale (Oscott) but soon left it on a journey to Rome, where he spent some time at the Collegio di Propaganda, and had a foretaste of the distrust with which Pius IX and his advisers always regarded him. His plan at this time was to found a theological seminary at Maryvale; and in this scheme he had the support of Wiseman, the ablest Roman ecclesiastic in the United Kingdom. But the 'Essay on Development,' with its unscholastic language and unfamiliar line of apologetic, seriously alarmed the theologians at Rome; and Newman, accepting the first of many rebuffs, abandoned this project in favour of another. He resolved to join the Oratorians, an order founded by St. Philip Neri, and obtained permission to modify, in his projected establishment, the rules of the Order, which, among other things, prescribed frequent floggings in public. He visited Naples, and came back a believer in the liquefaction of the saint's blood. The amazing letter to Henry Wilberforce, writter from Santa Croce, shows that he was the most docile and credulous of converts. Even the Holy House at Loreto caused him no difficulty. 'He who floated the ark on the surges of a world-wide sea, and inclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might remove mountains ... could do this wonder also.' It 'may have been'; 'everybody believes it in Rome'; therefore Newman 'has no doubt'!
The new Oratory was placed by Papal brief at Birmingham. The first members of it were his friends who had left the English Church with him. Recruits soon came in, and branch houses were talked of. But for many years Newman had reason to complain of neglect and want of sympathy. He even found empty churches when he preached in London. In conjunction with Faber, he next started a series of 'Lives of the Saints,' in which the most absurd 'miracles' were accepted without question as true. The 'Old Catholics,' who had no stomach for such food, protested; and Newman, this time thoroughly irritated, had to admit another failure. The Oratory, however, and its London offshoot under Faber were prosperous, and the churches where Newman preached were not long empty. In 1850 we find him in better spirits. He employed his energies in a series of clever lectures on 'Anglican Difficulties,' in which he ridiculed the Church of his earlier vows with all the refined cruelty of which he was a master. But he was soon in trouble again. One Dr. Giacinto Achilli, formerly a Dominican friar, gave lectures in London upon the scandals of the Roman Inquisition, which had imprisoned him for attacking the Catholic faith and fomenting sedition. The temper of the British public at this time made it ready to believe anything to the discredit of the Roman Church, and Achilli became a popular hero. Wiseman published a libellous article upon him in the Dublin Review, which passed unnoticed. But when Newman repeated the charges of profligacy in a public lecture, Achilli brought an action for libel, which in costs and expenses cost Newman £12,000. The money however was paid, and much more than paid, by his co-religionists. This trial was quickly followed by the inauguration of a scheme for founding a Catholic University in Ireland, the avowed object of which was to withdraw young Catholics from the liberalising influences of mixed education. This scheme was sure to appeal strongly to Newman. Liberalism had come in with a rush at Oxford, after the dissipation of the 'long nightmare' (as Mark Pattison calls it) while the University was dominated by religious medievalism. The Oxford of Newman had become the Oxford of Jowett. The ablest of Newman's young friends and disciples, such as Mark Pattison and J.A. Froude, were now in the opposite camp, full of anger and disgust at the seductive influences from which they had just escaped. Newman, as might be expected, was anxious to protect Catholic students from similar dangers, and accepted the post of Rector of the proposed Catholic University. He intended it to provide 'philosophical defences of Catholicity and Revelation, and create a Catholic literature.' The lectures in which he expounded his ideals at Dublin were a great success, and he returned to England full of hope. With a curious inability to read the character of one who was to be his worst enemy, he offered Manning the post of Vice-Rector. Manning's refusal was followed by his failure to obtain the support of Ward, Henry Wilberforce, and others; and Catholic opinion in Ireland was much divided. For three or four years Newman was engaged in ineffectual efforts to push his scheme forward. At last, in 1855, he was installed as Rector, and began his work at Dublin. A fine church was built at St. Stephen's Green with the surplus of the Achilli subscriptions, and Newman produced some excellent literary work in the form of University lectures and sermons. But the whole movement was viewed with distrust by the Irish ecclesiastics, who, as he said in a moment of impatience, 'regard any intellectual man as being on the road to perdition.' There was a cloud over his work from first to last. He had been promised a bishopric, without which he was made to feel himself in an inferior position by the Irish prelates; but the promise was not fulfilled. The Irish objected to one or two English professors on his staff, because they were English. Dr. Cullen, the ruling spirit in the Irish hierarchy, was a narrow conservative, who wished to use Newman merely as an instrument against progressive tendencies in Church and State. In 1857 he resigned an impossible task, and returned to Birmingham.
New undertakings followed, no more successful than the abortive university scheme. There was to be a new translation of the Bible, and a new Catholic magazine called the Rambler. The former enterprise was already well advanced when the general indifference of the Catholic public caused it to be abandoned. The Rambler, the contributors to which used a freedom of discussion unpalatable to Roman ecclesiastics, struggled on amid a storm of criticism till 1859, when Newman, who was then himself editor, resigned, and one more humiliating failure was registered. The management of the magazine passed into other hands. The Oratory School at Birmingham, a much less contentious undertaking, was successfully launched in the same year.
In 1860 came the emancipation of the States of the Church by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel. Newman referred to the Piedmontese as 'sacrilegious robbers,' but his advocacy of the temporal power was not strong enough to please the Vatican, while the strength of Manning's language left nothing to be desired. Newman became more unpopular than ever. His reputation suffered by his former connection with the Rambler and his supposed connection with the Home and Foreign Review, which Acton intended to represent the views of progressive Catholics, till it also was snuffed out by the hierarchy. The five years from 1859 to 1864 are considered by Mr. Ward to have been the saddest in Newman's life. He felt, truly enough, that the dominant party had no sympathy with his aims, and that he was treated as 'some wild incomprehensible beast, a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the hunter who captured it.' 'All through my life I have been plucked,' he writes to an old Oxford friend. There was even in his mind at this time a wistful yearning after the friends and the Church that he had left—a feeling, doubtless transient, but significant, which his biographer has allowed to show itself in a few pages of his book. After reminding himself, in his diary, of the warning against those who, after putting their hand to the plough, 'look back,' he proceeds to look back, because he cannot help it.
'I live more and more in the past, and in hopes that the past may revive in the future.... I think, as death comes on, his cold breath is felt on soul as on body, and that, viewed naturally, my soul is half dead now, whereas then [in his Protestant days] it was in the freshness and fervour of youth.... I say the same of my state of mind from 1834 to 1845, when I became a Catholic. It is a time past and gone—it relates to a work done and over. "Quis mihi tribuat, ut sim iuxta menses pristinos, secundum dies, quibus Deus custodiebat me? Quando splendebat lucerna eius super caput meum, et ad lumen eius ambulabam in tenebris?" ... I have no friend at Rome; I have laboured in England, to be misrepresented, backbitten and scorned. I have laboured in Ireland, with a door ever shut in my face.... Contemporaneously with this neglect on the part of those for whom I laboured, there has been a drawing towards me on the part of Protestants. Those very books and labours which Catholics did not understand, Protestants did. I am under the temptation of looking out for, if not courting, Protestant praise.... What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic works.'
Such reflections might seem to indicate a disposition to return to the Anglican fold. But a man must have vanquished pride in its most insidious form before he can leave the Church of Rome for any other. The aristocratic hauteur of the civis Romanus among barbarians lives on in the sentiment of the Roman Catholic towards Protestants. When Newman was publicly charged with intending to return to Anglicanism, this spirit broke out in a disagreeable and insulting manner.