Newman
Outstanding Christian
Thinkers Series
by Avery Dulles, S.J.
Continuum, 168 pp., $22.95 John Henry Newman
The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
by Frank Turner
Yale University Press, 752 pp., $35
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN is modernity's most famous Catholic convert--and, at least until Frank Turner's "John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion" appeared late last year, the prevailing wisdom was that Newman managed in his conversion to become a very good Catholic, indeed. Perhaps even a saint. Turner challenged that prevailing wisdom in a variety of learned, although often implausible, ways--almost all involving Newman's place in the historical tides that washed through the nineteenth century.
Now, in a volume called "Newman," the American Jesuit, Cardinal Avery Dulles, undertakes a focused reading of Newman's theology. The result is a revival of much of the traditional understanding of John Henry Newman. Still, Turner's "John Henry Newman" is extremely useful in laying out the historical conditions in which the Englishman's conversion occurred. Newman began, of course, as an Anglican, and, according to Newman's own version, the nineteenth-century Church of England contained four parties: conservatives, liberals, evangelicals, and catholics.
The first party, the conservatives, advocated the union of church and state, and the conservatives' principles were, Newman said, "political or at least ecclesiastical rather than theological."
The second party, the liberals, wanted to dissolve this union of church and state. Unlike the conservatives, these liberals held theological views as well as political, although their God was (Newman thought) a false god, the god of "deism," and they marched beneath the banner of what Newman called "false liberty of thought."
That left the evangelicals and the catholics--theological parties "violently opposed" to each other. Although the evangelical party was, as Newman put it, "by far the most important" in his day, he nonetheless thought it "almost justifiable to believe that in the coming generation the religious world will be divided" between the deistical liberals and the catholics.
Newman was born in 1801 to a conservative family. According to his autobiographical "Apologia pro Vita Sua," however, he was also influenced both by "superstitious" Catholic practices such as crossing himself in the dark and by the liberal skepticism common among intellectuals in his day. He tells us that at fifteen he became an evangelical (what we might call today a born-again Christian, indebted to the theology of Calvin as well as to Lutheran pietism's call for a devout and holy life). Shortly after that he went to Oxford, where he became a part, and eventually far more than a part, of the famous "Oxford Movement," which was determined to reform the Anglican church in an anglo-catholic--and even Roman Catholic--direction. The movement published a series of "tracts," and when one of Newman's tracts argued that it was possible to give a Catholic interpretation of Anglicanism's Thirty-Nine Articles (promulgated in 1563 as part of the Church of England's Elizabethan Settlement), resistance was vigorous.
NEWMAN SOON began reconsidering his attitudes toward the Roman Catholic faith. He also founded what he called "a parsonage-house" at Littlemore, a few miles outside Oxford, for his personal edification and that of his friends. By a series of "accumulated probabilities" narrated in his "Apologia," he overcame his difficulties with certain Catholic practices (devotion to Mary and the saints, in particular) and became a Catholic in 1845.
Many of England's conservative and liberal Protestants (many Roman Catholics, for that matter) were suspicious of his conversion at the time. Indeed, the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" was written twenty years after Newman's conversion to refute the charge that Newman had not been truthful--indeed, that he, and perhaps all Catholics, not only held untrue beliefs but were systematic liars.
Now, according to the usual way the story is told, Newman overcame such suspicions among both English Protestants and European Catholics when he wrote his wildly popular spiritual autobiography, the "Apologia," in 1865 and when Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal in 1879. His other works--particularly "The Idea of a University," "Grammar of Assent," and the long narrative poem "The Dream of Gerontius"--became enduring contributions to the intellectual life of the West. So vast was his appeal to Catholics in America that institutes of Catholic life at non-Catholic colleges and universities throughout the nation quickly came to be called "Newman Centers."
Newman also became a central figure among the reformers who formed the background to the Second Vatican Council. That meeting of Catholic bishops in the early 1960s brought about the largest changes in Catholic life and thought at least since the Gregorian Reform a millennium earlier. Vatican II opened the way to new relations with Orthodox and evangelical Christians as well as Jews, members of other religions, and the modern world. Interestingly, Vatican II also opened the door to new forms of Catholic dissent, and the new dissenters equally claimed Newman as their precursor.
The questions of the time remain unanswered. Did Vatican II call Catholics to reform as a way of recovering the best of their traditions in Scripture and liturgy and theology--a conservative strategy? Or did the council call Catholics to reform as a way of becoming more up-to-date, more modern or even postmodern--a liberal strategy? In any case, both sides appeal to Newman. We have versions of Newman that focus on his dramatic readings of Scripture in his sermons and his reading of tradition as an organic whole--a key precursor of the theologies of such contemporaries as John Paul II. But we also have readings of Newman that focus on his calls for religious and intellectual freedom as well as a tradition that has to change. As Cardinal Dulles explains, "Modernists, liberals, and theological conservatives can all find texts from his writings to support their preferred theses."
AT 176 PAGES, Dulles's "Newman" is a clear, concise, and insightful survey of Newman's ideas. Frank Turner needed a much more massive 750 pages to make the case that who Newman is today depends crucially on who he was yesterday. Turner is not the first skeptic about Newman, but his way of questioning the convert is quite original. According to Turner, the path Newman took depended on two aspirations, to Catholicism and to monastic celibacy, "with Catholicism more often than not serving the goal of monasticism."
In this view, Newman's community at Littlemore reestablished the monastic form of life founded in the early church by the likes of St. Benedict and violently overthrown by the Protestant Reformation. It also flew in the face of Victorian evangelical assumptions about marriage, family, domesticity, and business.
As it happens, Newman himself "displayed a talent for modest entrepreneurship" that enabled him to spurn Anglican orthodoxy even while enjoying its economic and social advantages. In contrast to many of his friends, "Newman became a Roman Catholic so that he could continue to remain a monk, and if possible, a monk surrounded by his Littlemore male friends." He was not a Catholic like William George Ward and Henry Manning, who were equally dogmatic but more accommodating to the evangelical and liberal world of domesticity and business.
Turner argues, however, that Newman also stands "among the first cultural apostates"--indeed, "the first great, and perhaps the most enduring, Victorian skeptic," like Nietzsche in this one respect. Newman underwent "one indeterminate metamorphosis after another, with no certain teleological direction necessarily leading him into the Roman Catholic communion." He thus helped create an English culture "that would be pluralistic religiously, morally, and intellectually, rather than exclusively Protestant in character." Newman was, in sum, an anti-evangelical monk and a founder of pluralistic skepticism--but not, at least primarily, a Catholic.
This means, of course, that Newman got himself wrong in his "Apologia pro Vita Sua"--which will seem equally implausible to modern Catholics and pluralistic skeptics. Still, Turner is one of the premier historians of Victorian England. He has long resisted, for example, histories that isolate "religion" and "science" from each other. One of the main themes of his 1993 "Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life" is that modern historians have persistently separated religious and social history, ignoring the intersections of the two for most nineteenth-century English people.
WHAT TURNER rightly understands is that Newman wrote for an audience that was suspicious of his conversion, and that we are not such an audience. In his time, as Newman saw, it was "almost unavoidable" that his conversion seem a violation of "Christian simplicity and uprightness"--if only because of the unchristian divisiveness the public debate that his conversion created. Turner's careful historical settings, combined with Turner's skepticism about Newman's Catholicism, help recreate for the modern reader the problem Newman presented to the Victorian reader.
This seems to make Turner more persuasive than Dulles in explaining Newman's career. And yet, this is also where Turner's account begins to break apart. Unlike Dulles's book, Turner's volume ends with Newman's 1845 conversion, twenty years prior to the "Apologia." Of course, Turner could hardly avoid periodically mentioning the "Apologia," which he finds sometimes correct, sometimes self-serving, and sometimes self-deceptive. (One of the few times Turner believes Newman shows "mature, even incisive, self-knowledge" is when the young Newman in 1826 writes "I am full of art and deceit, double dealing, display.") But Turner does not provide the extended analysis of the "Apologia" that he needs to make his case.
So, for example, Turner finds Newman and other "Tractarians" needlessly polemical, pressing a Catholic case in a way that could only have been done in a Protestant context. And it's true, as Dulles points out, that Newman considered himself even more a "controversialist" than a "theologian." But in the "Apologia" Newman confessed that his behavior sometimes had "a mixture in it both of fierceness and of sport," which he regretted--even as he repented of none of his arguments.
SUCH THIN READINGS of the "Apologia" trap Turner in various ways. He contends, for instance, that Newman's "Apologia" "imposed a structure of spiritual search on what in actuality had been a series of contingent events infused with enormous personal confusion, anger, despondency, and mixture of other motives"; Newman even "imposed a divine pattern upon events that he could no longer influence or determine." But why cannot an authentic "spiritual search" include a series of contingent events? Every conversion ever recorded tells of contingency after contingency. God's providence, one recollects, often consists of writing straight with crooked lines.
Curiously, Turner imposes his own quite determinate teleology on Newman's story. "John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion" opens with a wonderfully thick description of England's domination by evangelical Protestant culture--and the book closes with what it conceives as the happy ending that evangelical religion is no longer dominant, thanks in part to unwitting Catholic skeptics like Newman.
It's true, of course, that Newman challenged the Protestant empire, but he did so while leaving evangelical religion thriving in the home and the public square. Indeed, as Dulles points out, Newman himself knew his continued debt to his evangelical heritage.
NEWMAN'S FATHER had several business failures, and Newman became essentially the head of the household, supporting his mother and two brothers and three sisters financially, educationally, and spiritually. The death of his sister Mary in 1828 was a deep and enduring sadness. His brother Charles was a follower of religious socialist Robert Owen, and his brother Francis embraced a more radically evangelical way of life and eventually became Unitarian. It was thus, as Turner says, within his own family that Newman encountered the "radical secularism and radical evangelicalism" he considered most dangerous to Christian faith.
Turner rightly wonders how these events affected Newman. But is it really the case that "the driving psychic force" behind Newman's critique of evangelical religion comes from his family? Or that his early sermons reveal an eldest child looking for praise for his ascetical obedience as well as condemnation of his brothers' disobedience?
Turner admits that we know almost nothing about why Newman chose the celibate path, and he acknowledges that Newman's remarks about love and affection for men express "an unfulfilled desire for emotional intimacy" and have "no hint of sexual relation or contact." But he also says that "it is by no means clear that Newman ever achieved that level of adult emotional development and personal confidence required for a committed relationship of love or sexuality."
Even more extreme is Turner's suggestion that the enduring tragedy of his sister Mary's death helps explain how Newman overcame his difficulty with Catholic Marian devotions: If devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary did not violate the distinction between Creator and creature, it "seems possible that" his intense affection for his sister Mary did not violate familial relationships. Turner candidly admits that this last comment is "speculative and tendentious"--to which the response must be: Yes, it is.
Turner feels confident enough to offer Newman not just psychological advice, but theological advice as well. What Turner finds missing in Newman's theology of development of doctrine and practice is "a significantly articulated consideration" of the Holy Spirit.
It's true, as Dulles once again points out, that Newman focused more on issues of philosophical theology and the Church than on the traditional doctrines of the Trinity and Jesus Christ. But Turner has a remedy. Newman would have done well to make use of German idealism's "theology of divine immanentism," like the American Evangelical Reformed theologian Philip Schaff. This would offset "the empiricist philosophy that, despite his efforts to resist, nonetheless largely determined his frame of mind."
This is an intriguing aside. German idealism shaped European evangelical theology from Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century to Karl Barth and Paul Tillich in the twentieth--as well as European Catholic theology from Johann Sebastian Drey and Johann Adam Möhler in the nineteenth century to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner in the twentieth century. Barth and Balthasar were critical of modern efforts to make God a function of our social or psychological histories (one kind of "divine immanentism"), while Tillich and Rahner were more accommodating to such efforts.
It is a crucial question, for both Catholics and non-Catholics, where Newman fits into all this, or whether he offers a third option and, potentially, a path out of the endless debate. Turner's first Newman--the self-deceived celibate in a male ghetto that needs a more immanent God--provides more ammunition for liberal than conservative Catholics. Turner's second Newman--the Nietzschean skeptic about domesticity and business--will not please those who wish to be more accommodating to culture.
AVERY DULLES'S "Newman" ends with a comparison of Newman and Vatican II on many issues, concluding--with typical Dullesian balance--that "they often supplement each other, offering alternative perspectives that can be helpful for facing the problems of our day." Along the way, Dulles gives a more accurate reading of Newman's theology and intellectual life than Turner can.
Still, in opening up a thinker who is neither a liberal nor a conservative Catholic, Turner offers us resources for rediscovering the radical Newman. The famous Victorian convert may well be a different sort of Catholic--philosophically more Aristotelian than empiricist or idealist, more like St. Benedict's churchly monk than the leader of a sectarian coven, as much a debtor to his evangelical roots as a challenge to evangelical religion.
James J. Buckley is professor of theology and dean of the college of arts and sciences at Loyola College in Baltimore.