Why Did Newman Become A Catholic 1

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

CTC401: Catholic Identity and Its Main Themes Assessment Task 2 (Essay/Book Review) Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua

John Henry Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 9th October 1845. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua1 was produced in just over two months in 1864. Newman was a prolific and industrious writer with a masterly command of prose. He was more than able to communicate persuasively and elegantly on any issue that mattered to him. So why did interested parties have to wait nearly twenty years for a full account of his conversion? There are two answers, one that refers to events in Newman’s life in the 1860’s and the other that relates to an inner necessity to explain himself fully and honestly, both to a generally uncomprehending and distrustful public, and, just as importantly, to himself. Unlike the proximate causes, this inner necessity required a period of gestation before it could emerge into his consciousness and become the principal motive for his self-explanation. The proximate causes are not, however, without interest or relevance. Newman once joked that the vicissitudes of his career could almost be marked out in decades2. He barely scraped through Trinity with a third in 1820. He had been forced out of his Oriel tutorship in 1830. ‘Then again I set to work and by 1840 had become somebody once more, when on February 27, 1841, [Tract] Number 90 was attacked, and I fell down again.’ In 1850 he became a Roman DD but in 1851 became embroiled in the Achilli court case that caused much personal anxiety. He was not altogether accurate in saying that, in the 1860’s, he would be ‘had up’ before Rome, but that decade was to

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John Henry Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Penguin Classics 1994) See Sheridan Gilley: Newman and his Age (Darton Longman & Todd 2003) p. 317

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

prove an extremely trying period for him, indeed one that would bring him to the brink of a breakdown. The caricature of Newman drawn by Punch magazine was of a slippery Roman cleric, expert in all the requisite skills of equivocation and verbal dexterity. Certainly his conversion had cost him his good standing among many reputable Anglicans who regarded him as either calculating or profoundly deluded. What is more, his reception by Catholics, with a few notable exceptions, had been generally cool and occasionally distrustful and even hostile. By the 1860’s rumours were rife that Newman was on the point of returning to the Anglican Church. In all honesty Newman had written that ‘as a Protestant, I felt my religion dreary, but not my life – but, as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion’.3 Newman’s search for a new sort of via media between anti-authoritarian elements in the English Catholic Church and the Ultramontaneism espoused by so many in the hierarchy made him vulnerable to censure and put him outside the mainstream. Other relevant factors contributing to Newman’s eventual decision to publish an autobiographical self-explanation would include the bad odour that remained from the failure to establish an Irish university, the frustration of his attempt to produce a new English translation of the Bible for Catholics, his then controversial view that ‘the divine tradition committed to the infallible Church was proclaimed and maintained far more by the faithful than by the Episcopate’ 4 and his comments on the Catholic Church in Latin countries that managed to upset both the Church of England and the Catholic Church simultaneously. Once the problematic character for Newman of this 1860’s context is made explicit then what is usually referred to as the main stimulus for the Apologia, namely Charles Kingsley’s jibe in Macmillan’s Magazine that ‘Truth … had never been a virtue of the Roman clergy’5 can be seen as the final trigger that propelled Newman into a response that was polemical but essentially deeply humane. The Apologia, however, is much much more than a clever riposte by a 3

Henry Tristram (ed.), John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings (New York, 1957), p254 4 John Coulson (ed.), On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (London, 1961) pp 7576 5 See JH Newman: ApologiaPro Vita Sua (Collins, Fontana 1959) p14

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

beleaguered Catholic cleric to his critics. Chadwick writes ‘[Newman] needed to explain himself to himself; to try to understand what happened, and how it happened, at Littlemore on 9th October 1845. And he had the occasion to set the image of the Church of Rome in a light new to British history since the Reformation.’ 6 The Apologia succeeded in striking a particularly consonant chord in the religious sensibilities of the nation. In the pages of this work was recounted the journey of a Christian soul following with aid of the kindly light of conscience the path of truth wherever it led. This was no clever justification of a conversion to a faith to which the author had always been committed. ‘For the first time in English history’ Chadwick writes, ‘a Roman Catholic priest rejoiced publicly in many of the truths taught by Protestants’.7 Newman once wrote ‘I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me’ 8 Newman’s conversion was not a Damascene moment that occurred on an October morning at Littlemore. The Apologia suggests that Newman’s life was a gradual and painful working out of the implications for faith and belief of a realisation that came into focus in his late teenage years that there were ‘two and only two absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.9 Much later, in the narrative leading up to the account of his reception at Littlemore, Newman affirms that ‘I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God; and if I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it is impossible to believe in my own existence … without believing also in the existence of Him who lives … in my conscience’. 10 Newman’s early Calvinism impressed upon him the importance of dogma to the Christian faith, an issue of the most critical importance during the Tractarian period and during the time of his gradual conversion to Roman Catholicism. Influenced by the Provost of Oriel, Dr Edward Hawkins, Newman moved away decisively from Calvinism by accepting that baptismal 6

Owen Chadwick: Newman (OUP 1983) p.60 Op. cit p. 62 8 From his hymn: Lead, kindly Light. 9 Apologia (Penguin edition) p. 25 10 Apologia (Penguin edition) p.182 7

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

regeneration requires effort on the part of the baptised in order for that person to remain in a state of grace. For Newman, the Church of England with its established, dogmatic foundation (including the doctrine of Tradition, also learned from Hawkins11), its skilled and persuasive exponents (including the Oriel Fellow William James who taught Newman about the Apostolic Succession, Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) who wrote on the visible Church and whose Analogy was a major influence on Newman’s own Essay on Development and Grammar of Assent and the Oxford don Dr Whately who helped to shape Newman’s anti-Erastian views), its emphasis on the sacraments and its English distrust of excessive emotionalism, was the natural choice of spiritual home for this stage of his religious development. Newman was ordained a priest in 1824 and in 1828 was appointed Vicar of St Mary’s, the university church of Oxford. In the Long Vacation of 1828 Newman decided to read the works of the major Church Fathers ‘beginning with St Ignatius’ 12. Later he began work on a history of the principal Church Councils that eventually appeared under the title of The Arians of the Fourth Century. In the course of his reading and studies he became convinced that ‘Antiquity was the true exponent of the doctrines of Christianity’ 13 The Church of England, pulled in one direction by the doctrinal extremes of evangelical Protestantism and in another by the Erastian forces of liberalism was in need, Newman believed, of a ‘second reformation’ 14 and it was Antiquity that would provide the inspiration and the direction: ‘With the Establishment thus divided and threatened … I compared that fresh vigorous Power of which I was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal … I recognised the movement of my Spiritual Mother’ 15 Following a trip to Italy in 1832, Newman returned home and with great alacrity and some trepidation abandoned himself to his divine mission of restoring the Primitive Church in England. On Sunday, July 14th 1833, John 11

Apologia p 29 Apologia p 43 13 Apologia p 43 14 Apologia p 47 15 Apologia p 47 12

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

Keble preached a sermon on ‘National Apostasy’ in Oxford, advocating a return to the dogmas of the Primitive Church, thus marking the beginning of the Oxford Movement. The central plank of this ‘second reformation’ would be the re-establishment of an Anglican Via Media that was firmly rooted in the dogmas and doctrines of the Primitive Church. Newman concedes that the Via Media doctrine had already been applied to the Anglican system by many writers of repute. 16 The essence of the Via Media was that Anglicanism stood in the orthodox middle ground between the heresies of the Protestant reformers and the excrescences on primitive truth that characterised the teachings of the Roman Church. Newman supported this position until 1839 when he came across an article by the catholic Dr Wiseman in the Dublin Review that had a seismic effect on his confidence in the Via Media. In the article St Augustine is quoted as writing in reference to the fourth century Donatists in Africa, a group that created a schism in the African Church. Newman said the phrase securus judicat orbis terrarum (which may be interpreted ‘Catholic consent is the judge of controversy’) ‘kept ringing in my ears’ 17 . He understood this to mean that only a ‘deliberate judgement, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede’. 18 This applied not only to the Donatists but to the Anglicans as well. As far as Newman was concerned, the Via Media was ‘absolutely pulverized’.19 Newman’s faith in Anglicanism had been shaken to the foundations, but he was not about to head, Pied Piper style, a mass exodus from Canterbury to Rome. Indeed, it was to reassure some of his more anxious disciples in the latter stages of convertitis that he composed his most well-known and final Tract 90. As he wrote ‘I had been enjoined to keep [Anglicans favourable to Rome] straight, and I wished to do so; but their tangible difficulty was subscription to the [39] Articles; and thus the questions of the Articles came 16

See Apologia p 76 and Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Scripture and Tradtion – a paper by Lee W Gibbs in the Harvard Theological Review, April, 2002. 17 Apologia p 115 18 Apologia p 115 19 Apologia p 116

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

before me … ‘How can you manage to sign the Articles? They are directly against Rome.’ 20 In studying the Articles Newman concluded that they were ‘evidently framed on the principle of leaving open large questions on which the controversy hinges. They state broadly extreme truths, and are silent about their adjustment.’ 21 He concluded that the prevalent Protestant interpretation was not the only valid one and that the polemical Articles were largely concerned with ‘Romish’ notions – the popular corruptions of Catholic doctrines – and not with formal doctrines. The Anglican Church had split from Rome primarily in response to these abuses and not because of any fundamental disagreement with the authentic Roman Church. Needless to say, this interpretation was greeted with consternation and condemnation by many members of the Established Church. Now that the last remaining defence of the Via Media had broken down, Newman was left with little choice other than to withdraw from the Anglican community. He retreated, along with a few disciples, to Littlemore near Oxford. While there, he experienced yet another blow that completely shattered his faith in the Anglican Church. In studying the history of the Arians he saw a clear parallel with the Church of his own time, identifying the Arians with the Protestants, the semi-Arians with the Anglicans and Rome with the Catholic Church. 22 The similarities were all the more conspicuous because the Arians had proposed their own Via Media referring themselves back to Tradition and Antiquity rather than to Catholicism. Newman decided to deal with the issue of Roman doctrinal excrescences by writing on the subject at length in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Any final hesitations about joining the Catholic Church were overcome while he wrote: ‘as I advanced, my difficulties so cleared away that I ceased to speak of ‘the Roman Catholics’ and boldly called them Catholics. Before I got to the end, I was resolved to be received …’ 23

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Apologia p 84 Apologia p 91 22 See Apologia p 134 23 Apologia p 211 21

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04

Whatever the British public may have thought about Newman, it was clear from the Apologia that his conversion was the act of a man of the highest integrity who, like one of his childhood heroes, Thomas Scott, ‘followed truth wherever it led him’ 24. His journey in search of the kindly light of truth, and his capacity to communicate this with honesty and sensitivity, touched the hearts of many of his own people, irrespective of denominational background. 2044 words

BIBLIOGRAPHY John Henry Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Penguin 1994) John Henry Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Collins 1962) Sheridan Gilley: Newman and his Age (DLT 2003) Owen Chadwick: Newman (OUP 1983) Hallie Riedel: A lover of Truth – the story of John Henry Newman, from The Word Among Us (www.wau.org/about/authors/riedel1.html) John Henry Newman from the Online Catholic Encyclopaedia. Michael Davies: Why John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism from AD2000 Vol 14 No 4 (May 2001) p 10 Adam Parod: The Conversion of John Henry Newman from Religious Studies 347 – see www.newmanfoundation.org/institute/relst347/papers/parod Lee W Gibbs: Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Scripture and Tradition – Harvard Theological Review, April 2002. Tristram Hunt: Cardinal Spin – review of John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion by Frank M Turner, published in The Guardian, Saturday January 4th 2003.

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Apologia p 26

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Why did Newman become a Catholic? A review of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua - Peter Dobbing – 10.01.04