Newman and the Victorian Era
Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem
“From out of shadows and appearances, into the reality”—The words Newman chose for his epitaph
John Henry Newman was born into this world on February 21, 1801, into eternal life on August 11, 1890, and canonized on October 13, 2019. He was, in mind and spirit as well as nationality, an Englishman through and through, but a Catholic and a priest before all else. His epitaph, carefully chosen to sum up both his life and his hopes for eternity in heaven, expresses the realization that God alone is complete reality and truth, and that this world is but a shadow cast in time.
If anyone has heard anything of Newman, they probably know that he had been a famous minister in the Church of England, and that half-way through his long life he converted to Catholicism, became a priest, and was made a cardinal. Some people also know that as an Anglican, he had been one of the founders of the “Oxford Movement,” and as a Catholic he had transplanted into England the Italian way of priestly life called “the Oratory,” adapting it for contemporary English conditions, allowing priests a settled, almost monastic life in one religious house, their Oratory.
John Henry Newman has long been celebrated in Catholic circles; many of his books, including his lengthy poem The Dream of Gerontius have been continuously republished, and his hymns “Firmly I Believe and Truly,” and “Lead Kindly Light” are sung in many traditional churches. The University of Notre Dame Press, together with Gracewing, are publishing in an attractive series the entire body of his writings; and a large, substantial body it is, too. Of the seventeen volumes which have appeared, some are established classics, such as An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, and the novel Loss and Gain; while others collect essays and articles from his Irish and other periods, most of which have been hard to find in print. Our task today is not to celebrate his sanctity or his work in general terms, but rather to relate this great saint to the Victorian era.
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“Now there must be such things as First Principles—that is, opinions which are held without proof as if self-evident. … If you trace back your reasons for holding an opinion, you must stop somewhere … else, life would be spent in inquiring and reasoning, our minds would be ever tossing to and fro, and there would be nothing to guide us.” |
The Victorian Era
The ground for the Victorian Era had been prepared especially during the time of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), who with but one intermission, served as Prime Minister from 1783 until his death twenty-three years later. Due to his genius for administration and finance, and his ability to see where his powers should be directed, he was responsible for charting and ensuring Britain’s recovery after the disastrous defeat in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), when England’s ancestral foe, France, assisted the locals to obtain the victory. France was, at that time, the most powerful state in Europe: only the English Channel and some tempestuous weather saved Britain from invasion once Bonaparte had defeated all the continental powers (the losses at Bantry Bay, and the Battles of the Nile, Trafalgar). It is difficult now to appreciate how close Britain came to absorption into the Empire, and also how powerful the English military was for almost the entirety of the Victorian age, once Pitt had built up its navy and assisted the development of the Industrial Revolution.
By cutting punitive government excises, Pitt both minimized the smuggling industry, and raised government revenues. He also introduced, for the first time ever, an income tax, which, although it was suspended for a time, put the country’s finances on a stable footing, even if the cost of the Napoleonic Wars consumed the surplus he had been building up. Pitt had also agitated for Catholic Emancipation and the reform of Parliament: both measures which were opposed by George III, but would come to fruition after Pitt’s premature death. The prosperous and peaceful England in which Newman lived was a product of Pitt’s statesmanship.
Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. So powerful was her image in Great Britain, so powerful did Great Britain become, and so powerfully did her character represent the mind and heart of Great Britain, that the entire period came to be known as “the Victorian Era.” It was a distinctive age, marked by wealth, advances in science, moral steadiness, and optimism. However, the shadow side of the era was the proliferation of large pockets of poverty, the incipient decline of religion, the growth of amorality, and self-criticism, even self-hatred, on a social scale. All of these characteristics are sketched in the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), from the perspective of the rising middle class to which these authors belonged. Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist (1838) graphically depicts the worlds of the miserable and the comfortable, and how immorality permeated society together with a rather sentimental form of Christianity.
Perhaps the title of Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair (1847) accurately expresses the impressions we have today of that era: a lively and colorful street market, full of fun and excitement, but still, at its heart, vain. Yet, there was more than mere pomp. There was the high-minded seriousness of the Catholic Church which was re-establishing itself and its mystical liturgy throughout the British Isles, and attracting to itself a multitude of converts, some celebrated, others unknown, and very many belonging to the burgeoning middle class. However, also in this Victorian Era, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was instrumental in propagating a theory of evolution which, as it ramified into all areas of thought, partly caused and partly marked a catastrophic change in how men viewed God, human life, and the world. It is easy to forget that although he was German, the work of Karl Marx (1818-1883) was chiefly conducted in England, referred to local conditions, and that Marx (like Freud) was influenced by Darwin. By the end of the era, British politics had been transformed from a fledgling into a rather fully formed modern parliamentary democracy, in which more men, and now women, had begun to receive the suffrage in certain elections, a process which continued until it was consummated in 1928 when all citizens, male and female alike, over the age of 21 were enfranchised.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Church of England was the established Church. By the end, it had effectively lost much of its social and political power. As the Victorian Era dawned, the Anglicans were suffering from the inevitable results of the Reformation: having rejected the authority of the Church and tradition for personal interpretation of the Bible, Luther saw his “reformation” splintering before his very eyes, and the historian knows that the principle of disintegration has obtained ever more and more power over Protestants, Evangelicals, and Pentecostalists.
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Oriel College (Oxford University) founded in 1324 (Source: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0). Newman was elected a fellow at Oriel on April 12, 1822. |
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (David Hawgood). Newman was made an Anglican deacon on June 13, 1824 at Christ Church Cathedral, and ordained an Anglican priest the year after. |
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The nave of the Oratory church, Birmingham. Newman established the English Oratory of St. Philip Neri starting in Birmingham in 1849. He also founded the Oratory School there in 1859. |
The London Oratory on Brompton Road (“Brompton Oratory”/Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) . Newman established the London Oratory in 1849 with Fr. Frederick William Faber as its superior. |
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In 1854, at the request of the Irish Catholic bishops, Newman went to Dublin as rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland (1854-1858), now University College, Dublin. It was during this time that he founded the Literary and Historical Society. |
Newman’s personal coat of arms upon his elevation to the cardinalate (1879). The Latin motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, translates as “heart speaks unto heart.” |
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“It is a First Principle that man is a social being; a First Principle that he may defend himself; a First Principle that he is responsible; a First Principle that he is frail and imperfect; a First Principle that reason must rule passion.” |
Newman
The future saint was born an Anglican. Writing of his childhood in the Apologia, Newman recalls:
I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.
He was precocious in his religious development. In his magnificent Apologia pro vita sua (“defense of his life”), as to which, see further below, Newman wrote:
I am obliged to mention, though I do it with great reluctance, another deep imagination, which at this time, the autumn of 1816, took possession of me,—there can be no mistake about the fact; viz. that it would be the will of God that I should lead a single life. This anticipation, which has held its ground almost continuously ever since,—with the break of a month now and a month then, up to 1829, and, after that date, without any break at all,—was more or less connected in my mind with the notion, that my calling in life would require such a sacrifice as celibacy involved; as, for instance, missionary work among the heathen, to which I had a great drawing for some years. It also strengthened my feeling of separation from the visible world, of which I have spoken above.1
The “sacrifice” is clearly the forsaking of marriage. In 1840, he wrote of having foregone “the sort of interest which a wife takes and none but she … I willingly give up the possession of that sympathy, which I feel is not, cannot be, granted to me. Yet, not the less do I feel the need of it.” In this, Newman was setting an example: and the Oxford Movement of which he was one of the leading lights, and by far the most important theologian, inspired the first Anglican order for men, which opened in the USA in 1842, and in England in 1866. The development of the tradition of High Church Anglicanism in the Victorian Era, including a new and favorable view of celibacy, was a major result of Newman’s work.
The Oxford Movement, begun when Newman was teaching there, was an effort to find a middle ground between Catholicism and Protestantism, so that the Anglicans could think of themselves as part of a universal Church, in possession of the full apostolic truth. They were opposed to what Newman called the “liberal principle,” what we might call relativism, opposing to it the “dogmatic principle,” that there really is an ultimate truth about human salvation, that it is known to the Church, and the tenets of the faith must accordingly be held to obtain salvation. The most distinctive productions of the Movement were the Tracts for the Times, many of which have recently been published in the Millennium edition. The most important of these controversial documents, which succeeded in causing Anglicans to consider fundamental questions about their faith, were written by Newman. The final Tract, the ninetieth of the series, was penned by Newman to explain the charter document of Anglicanism in a more Catholic sense. In 1841, the Bishop of Oxford saw to it that the series ceased forthwith, and the next year, Newman and some friends moved to nearby Littlemore where they maintained a quasi-monastic fellowship. Ever cautious, Newman did not seek to be received into the Catholic Church until he had completed An Essay on the Development of Doctrine, showing that he had intellectually and not just emotionally accepted the truth of the faith. On October 9, 1845 he was received, and in 1846 he was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome, where Pope Pius IX awarded him a doctorate in Divinity. The next year, he returned to England, a member of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, and established the Oratory, as we have mentioned.
The Apologia
Newman had a relatively quiet and inconspicuous life, serving the Church and the Oratory and working in the education of children: something of increasing importance for the middle and lower classes of the Victorian Era. He was invited to found a Catholic university in Dublin. He worked to the edge of extinction, and in the process produced lectures on education, culture, the idea of the university, and the formation of young people, which have since become classics. But at the time, his achievement was not appreciated. Indeed, he was treated rather shabbily. Newman was neglected not only by his own Church (within which he was unfairly regarded with suspicion), but also by other Englishmen. Then, the January 1864 edition of Macmillan’s Magazine printed an allegation that “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy,” and that Newman himself had taught this. This eventually led to Newman’s writing the Apologia pro vita sua, which defended not only the author himself but, the Church, too. The Apologia was immensely successful, and brought about a cultural shift in how the Catholic Church was seen, turning Newman into a treasured, even beloved figure.
Newman had completely routed his opponent, Charles Kingsley, who was then the leading Anglican figure of his generation. Kingsley was Cambridge professor of history and a highly successful novelist who had made a large impact on his world with his ideas of “muscular Christianity” and “Christian socialism.” Even Kingsley’s wife admitted that, in Newman, her husband had finally met more than his match. All his life, Newman’s writing style was unmatched. He delivered the most powerful sermons of his age. He had been a magnet to the young intellectuals of Oxford University. His works dealt with everything from Patristic studies, to poetry, through to modern moral controversies. He also studied mathematics to a high level, and was an accomplished violinist. But he gave it all up for the truth, and to live it.
Newman’s private chapel in the Birmingham Oratory.
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
A reputable work, Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy, vol. 4, Philosophy in the Modern World, gives an honored place to Newman, and especially to his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Newman’s work in this regard was trailblazing: he inquired not into what knowledge is, but how we come to believe something, and when that belief can be said to be rational. Against the attack that religion is nothing more than superstition, Newman argued, no, to hold a religious observance can be a most rational activity, analogous to any other reasoned position we may hold. If the religious attitude is to be distinguished, it is by the fact that religion moves the whole man, feeling and intellect together, to hold something as true. As I read the Grammar, it effectively argues that to be religious is to hold to a noble, intelligent, and eminently defensible cause.
J. M. W. Turner, The Angel, Standing in the Sun (1846).
The Dream of Gerontius
This extraordinary poem, telling the story of the passage of a soul from this earth into eternity still retains the awe-inspiring and almost eerie power which made it such a success. In an artistic way, it completes the Apologia and the Grammar because it allows us to glimpse the soul of John Henry Newman which sustained him through the hard years of his autobiography, and the sublimity of the Catholic faith which the “whole man” adopted and defended. It is best known for its wonderful hymn, “Firmly I believe, and truly.”
Firmly I believe and truly
God is Three and God is One;
and I next acknowledge duly
manhood taken by the Son.
And I trust and hope most fully
in that manhood crucified;
and each thought and deed unruly
do to death, as he has died.
Simply to his grace and wholly
light and life and strength belong,
and I love supremely, solely,
him the holy, him the strong.
And I hold in veneration,
for the love of him alone,
Holy Church as his creation,
and her teachings as his own.
Adoration ay be given,
with and through the angelic host,
to the God of earth and heaven,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Newman paved the way for the great Catholic converts, among whom R.H. Benson, G.K. Chesterton, and Ronald Knox might be singled out. He has lent his name to countless student societies. But it would take too long to trace his influence. Newman’s diverse output shows not that he was good at many things, but rather that he excelled in one critical respect, and that enabled him to do many things well: he excelled in thinking about the fundamentals—the reality and the purpose of anything. He always spoke of what was “real” and what was “unreal.” He always sought to see through the shadows (the appearances of things) through to the reality. He could stand back and look with clear eyes at himself and whatever he was engaged in or thinking about, and see, with a minimum of self-deception, what it was he was doing, what its value was, and where it was heading.
My own view is that, although his holiness of life was necessary to see him canonized, the reason he was remembered after his death, and thought of as a possible saint, is threefold. It is, I think, first because of the fame he had achieved as the most important of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. But the second matter is the extraordinary depth and range of his thought. This was necessary to keep his reputation alive, when the others who shared in the Movement with Newman are chiefly remembered now because of him. But I think the third element is just as essential as the other two: it is his unconditional willingness to sacrifice all the glories the Church of England had to offer its leaders, and to work and suffer for the truth.
Endnotes
1 J.H. Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, ed. Ian Ker, (London: Penguin, 1994), 28. The Apologia was first published in 1864.
TITLE IMAGE: John Everett Mills, John Henry Newman (1881).