As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, John Henry Newman rapidly became the prime mover in the Oxford Movement. Between the friends and enemies of Newman, however, it
is difficult to decide which has made understanding him more difficult. Enemies tend to portray him as the arch-traitor
to the Church of England. He is a
veritable Ahriman who led so many down the primrose path along the road to
apostasy and out of the nurturing cradle of the Anglican Communion into the
arms of the Whore of Babylon.
These defenders of the faith root out evidence of
“Romanizing” from Newman’s earliest days.
They assume that his animadversions on the evils of the Catholic Church
before his conversion are an instance of the lady protesting too much.
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| Charles Kingsley, Muscular Christian Minister |
Anything Newman said disparaging the Catholic Church prior
to 1840 is therefore a lie told to deceive others and catch them off guard, so
he could insinuate Romanism into their belief systems without their realizing
it. Anything and everything that can be
twisted or invented to support Newman’s perfidy is trotted out and presented as
evidence that he was a consummate villain from the very beginning.
Of these, the most notorious example is, of course, the
attacks by Charles Kingsley that began in the January 1864 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine and that called forth
Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Even more scurrilous, however, and certainly
much more influential on current public opinion, is the snarky Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the
Oxford Movement (1933) by Sir Geoffrey Cust Faber (1889-1961).
Having a certain credibility due to the fact that Faber
was related to an important figure in the Movement who also converted to
Catholicism and became a priest, Frederick William Faber (1814-1863), Oxford Apostles is a thinly veiled
hatchet job on Newman. Faber skillfully
employed innuendo and sly, unsupported accusations to suggest not only that
Newman was a traitor to Christ, the Church of England, socialism, and modernism,
but a pervert as well. With no evidence
to support it, the last was something Faber invented out of whole cloth, but
which has now become “common knowledge” through repetition without
investigation.
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| Young Mister Newman |
Friends of the more superficial variety have the tendency
to do, in a sense, even worse. They
unconsciously corroborate the theory that Newman was conniving, cunning, and deceitful
by searching for every possible hint that prior to 1840 he was not merely in
sympathy with Rome despite his clear statements to the contrary, but a Catholic
in all but name, i.e., lying about
being an Anglican.
Maisie Ward in particular fell into this trap in her
biography of Newman, Young Mr. Newman
(1948). Ward’s book gained credibility
due to the fact that her grandfather, William George Ward, was also a
participant in the Movement, a convert to Catholicism, and a friend of Newman.
Consequently, while acknowledging that Newman did not
hesitate while an Anglican to declare his animus against the Catholic Church,
Ward comes across as hinting more than a little broadly that Newman and the
others who ended up converting were always Catholics at heart. Not only that, but that Newman fully
supported her interpretation of everything G.K. Chesterton — the subject of two
of Ward’s other biographies — said or did before Chesterton was even born. As Ward closed her chapter on the beginning
of the Movement,
As we try to recall in imagination the actual England in
which Newman and his friends were working we feel the truth of Richard Holt
Hutton’s comment — that they lived “more like a colony of immigrants amongst a
people of different languages and customs than like a band of patriots who were
reviving the old glories of their native country.” He noted in their efforts “an air of anxious
venturesomeness, of hesitating audacity, of careworn courage”: but it took an
outsider to notice it: for them the courage had lifted their hearts high and
they were living in an unreal world in which they were carrying all England
with them on a tide of returning Catholicism.
(Ward, Young Mr. Newman, op. cit., 251.)
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| William Cobbett |
Even William Cobbett (1763-1835) made a rather
uncomfortable series of appearances in Ward’s book, evidently on the strength
of Chesterton’s self-consciously witty sketch of the noted Radical politician
and journalist, sadly for admirers of Cobbett and Chesterton not one of the
latter’s better efforts (G.K. Chesterton, William
Cobbett. London: Hodder and
Stoughton, Limited, 1925). This is
despite the fact that Cobbett was dead by the time the movement was in full
swing, and Newman had little or no sympathy with him or any other liberal or
radical politician, especially one who was a strong advocate of the Catholic
Emancipation Newman opposed.
Other authors are also guilty of this sort of wishful
thinking, although it may be because Catholic writers tend to focus on the
Oxford Movement and its aftermath, while non-Catholics concentrate on the
Oxford Movement and its buildup. The
massive two-volume biography of Newman by Wilfrid Ward, Maisie’s father
(Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry
Cardinal Newman, Vols. I and II.
London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), falls into this category, as
does Charles Stephen Dessain’s book (John
Henry Newman. London: Thomas Nelson
and Sons, Ltd., 1966). None of them
precisely comes out and says it, but the selection of events and their
presentation suggests a flattering (to Catholics) hidden longing on the part of
Newman to find his true home in the Catholic Church.
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| Fabians: self-proclaimed wolves in sheep's clothing. |
This is understandable up to a point, for Newman’s
conversion has always been something of a puzzle to those who isolate his life
as an Anglican from his life as a Catholic, and people love to speculate on
such things instead of leaving conversions to God. Less understandable is the tendency to turn
Newman into a proto liberal or modernist Catholic, as Harold L. Weatherby did
in his obscurely written tome, Cardinal
Newman in His Age (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973), which
credits Newman with advocating everything to which he was most strongly opposed.
Newman was therefore, by these enthusiasts’ lights, a
“fifth column” in the Church of England, attempting to bore from within and
convert Anglicans to Catholicism without them (or him) being aware of it — the
program of the Fabian Society in reverse.
His 1852 “Second Spring” sermon is taken as confirming this in the eyes
of both friends and enemies.
Lost in the shuffle are works like those of R.W. Church,
who while he did not get everything right in his book, at least did not get
anything profoundly wrong, and was sympathetic to both sides of the issue. Church was a follower of Newman, one of those
castigated by Faber as mesmerized by Newman’s wiles and part of the “escort of
hermaphrodites” that shadowed Newman constantly. (Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles. London:
Pelican Books, 1954, 328.) Faber
commented further that Newman was never “a man” (ibid.); his book overflows with this sort of sneering and amateur
advocacy psychoanalysis.
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| Reverend Edward B. Pusey |
Church, however, remained in the Church of England, as did
Keble and Pusey. Pusey, in fact, gave
his name to the ultra-conservative (i.e.,
orthodox), “Anglo-Catholic” branch of the High Church party in the Church of
England as a result of his involvement in the Movement.
A great gain to the Movement, almost a coup, was the
formal adherence of Pusey late in 1833, which also corroborates Newman’s utter
fidelity to the Church of England.
Before Pusey joined, the core group of the Movement had been perceived
as a set of brilliant but radical Young Turks, a group of out-of-control Oxford
Dons and viewed with a somewhat jaundiced eye.
Pusey gave the Movement not merely his intellectual
guidance — Newman greatly admired his learning — but a large measure of
respectability. Having been appointed
Regius Professor of Hebrew in 1828, he was counted among the great dignitaries
of the University.
Although the Tracts had been revolutionary in conception
and execution before Pusey came on board, they now became much more academic in
tone — and much longer. Another
innovation was that prior to Pusey’s first tract (on fasting), all
contributions had been anonymous. His he
signed with his initials, and publicly acknowledging authorship became the
rule.
By the end of 1834, the term “tract” could be said to have
been used only by courtesy to maintain the integrity of the series. A more accurate label would have been
“treatise.” At the end of 1835, Pusey published
an extended treatise on baptism in a series of three tracts consisting of a
total of more than three hundred pages (hardly a tract!) that changed the whole
character of the series as well as its form, being tantamount to a doctoral
thesis in both content and intellectual rigor.
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| "The Oriel Fellows" |
An ironic footnote is although Pusey was not one of the
original group, the Movement became pejoratively known as “Puseyite,” which
name still applies to the more tradition-minded High Church party of the Church
of England. It worked its way into a
number of other European languages, including French, German, Italian, and
Greek. Ollard claimed that he had found
it even in a Danish dictionary erroneously derived from “pussy-cat” (Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement, op.
cit., 48). The term, however, did
not come into common use until after 1840.
Before then the denigrating term was “Tractarian” or, more often,
“Newmanite.”
For it becomes clear that, whatever the contributions of
the other members of the Movement, it was Newman who became the public face of
it. Most authorities credit this to
Newman’s sermons.
In 1828 Newman had become Vicar of Saint Mary’s, the
University church. He used his position
to try and re-instill the fundamentals of Christianity as traditionally held by
the Church of England in his parishioners.
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| John Wesley preaching |
It is difficult for most people today to understand the
impact of a good preacher and a substantive sermon in the days before radio and
television. For example, one of the
attractions of John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism — and why we
know so much about his style of preaching — is that people who had no interest
whatsoever in Wesley’s message or even religion in general would go to a
Methodist prayer meeting just for the entertainment value.
This makes the dullness of the typical Anglican sermon of those
days even less understandable — and much less forgivable. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries it was not unusual for a minister of the Church of England to give
exactly the same series of sermons his entire career on a rotating cycle, or
even just take them out of a collection of someone else’s sermons. Nor was the delivery anything likely to
interest a congregation in the subject matter, with the text being rattled off
in an inaudible or incoherent monotone.
Religion was increasingly simply not part of people’s
lives. The growth and spread of
liberalism and Christian socialism in opposition to the Oxford Movement greatly
accelerated the process in the generation following, although it appeared to
make religion more relevant to the then-modern world, at least for a while,
until people realized that a religion without spirituality really wasn’t much
worth having when the State could do all that a materialistic religion could
do, and better.
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| Effect of typical early 19th century sermon. |
In any event, in the early 1830s on the eve of the
Movement, the Church of England was virtually an institutional corpse. As Ollard noted,
It is easy to exaggerate the state of things, and there were
oases in that desert . . . but on the whole and broadly, in 1833, the English
Church appeared to be nearly spiritually dead. . . . [T]he picture of the
clergyman of the time suggests that they had gradually forgotten their calling. They had become, for the most part, amiable
and respectable gentlemen, who were satisfied to read Morning and Afternoon
Service on a Sunday, and to dislike Dissenters.
The bishops were little better.
(Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford Movement, op. cit., 28.)
As Ollard concluded, “With worldly bishops and a worldly
clergy the Church was not likely to have a great hold on the hearts of her
children. The day of visitation was at
hand: ominous changes lay ahead.” (Ibid.,
30.)
Thus, even though Newman would come off a distant second
or third in comparison with some of today’s more spectacular televangelists, at
least in delivery, the effect of his preaching on the Oxford student body and
faculty, which soon spread far beyond those confines, was nothing less than electrifying. Decades later, J.R. Froude, the review of
whose book by Charles Kingsley resulted in Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and whose repudiation of Christianity was
almost notorious, sent a letter to the Catholic Duke of Norfolk asking
permission to hear Newman preach once again.
As Froude said, “Since last I heard that musical voice my
faith is all but shattered. Perhaps if I
might hear him again it would at least awaken in me some echoes of those old
days.” (Moody, John Henry Newman, op. cit., 315-316.) Whatever the charms of Newman’s voice,
however, it was the substance of the sermons, not their delivery, that swayed
people; maudlin sentimentality, even less than honest sentiment, is not a solid
foundation on which to build or rebuild faith.
Perhaps influenced or disillusioned by the materialism of his brother in
law Kingsley’s “muscular” Christian socialism, Froude never returned to the
practice of any form of Christianity.
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| John Campbell Shairp |
Others more thoughtful, intellectual, or just less
emotional were, however, persuaded or impressed if not persuaded by Newman’s
sermons, despite the rising tide of liberalism and socialism. Worldlings, dissenters, and liberals who had
no sympathy whatsoever with the Movement were, to put it mildly, stunned. Even Charles Kingsley claimed to have been
enthralled by hearing Newman preach, and had to bring himself forcibly back to
the principles of Christian socialism to which he devoted his own clerical
career — and he resented ever after almost being persuaded to abandon his
“muscular Christianity” and the principles of socialism.
Yet there were none of the novelties and extravagant
theologies so common to popular preachers in any day and age, but sound
teaching and common sense. As the
Presbyterian John Campbell Shairp (1819-1885) of Saint Andrew’s University related
of Newman’s sermons,
Here was no vehemence, no declamation . . . one who came to
hear “a great intellectual effort” was almost sure to go away
disappointed. His power showed itself in
the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched into life old truths, which
all Christians acknowledge but most have ceased to feel, . . . After hearing
these sermons you might come away still not believing the tenets peculiar to
the High Church system, but you would be harder than most men if you did not
feel more than ever ashamed of coarseness, selfishness, worldliness, if you did
not feel the things of faith brought closer to the soul. (J.C. Shairp, Studies
in Poetry and Philosophy, 1868, pp. 275-8, quoted in Ollard, A Short
History of the Oxford Movement, op. cit., 49.)
As the liberal Matthew Arnold, who had no sympathy at all
with the Movement, said, “Happy the man who in the susceptible season of youth
hears such voices. They are a possession
to him for ever.” (M. Arnold, Discourses in America, p. 139, quoted in
Ollard, A Short History of the Oxford
Movement, op. cit., 49.) As R.W.
Church noted,
None but those who remember them can adequately estimate the
effect of Mr. Newman’s four o’clock sermons at St. Mary’s. The world knows them, has heard a great deal
about them, has passed its various judgments on them. But it hardly realises that without those
sermons the movement might never have gone on, certainly would never have been
what it was. Even people who heard them
continually, and felt them to be different from any other sermons hardly
estimated their real power, or knew at the time the influence which the sermons
were having upon them. (Church, The
Oxford Movement, op. cit., 92.)
#30#
