A New Life of Newman
Cardinal Newman. By J. Lewis May. (Geoffrey Bles. 102. 6d.) IT has often been said that Newman's career was a mystery. The word comes too easily to describe the dramatic puzzle of a secession which almost to the last moment of Newman's life seemed to bring him in his own country nothing but thwartings and dispraise. The drama was wholly external ; in the interior of Newman's mind no mystery at all can be found ; his con- viction that the Church of Rome was right and the Church of England wrong was a gradual process which is seen to have been inevitable when we watch his reasoning in conflict with the ecclesiastical circumstances of his day.
Having persuaded himself that he must change his Church, he never looked back with a moment's regret to his decision ; never for a moment thought that he could have done otherwise.
It was convenient to Mr. Lytton Strachey to hint that this object of thwartings and dispraise wistfully reproached himself with a wrong step and received but bitter compensation when —his physique being past any capacity for exultation—he contemplated his Cardinal's Hat. The merit of this new biography by Mr. J. Lewis May (frankly written from the point of view of a Roman Catholic) is that it puts Newman's mental habits in such a clear light that his decision to leave the Church of England never seemed easier to understand.
Mr. May, so far as we can discover, adds no single new fact to what was already known. No doubt R. H. Hutton and Mr.
Wilfrid Ward left him nothing new to say. Our praise of the book, therefore, must be confined to recording this clarity about Newman's intellectual and spiritual motives.
It is not irreverent to saintliness to say that its form is generally determined by temperament. To some saints the pillar and the hair shirt may have been necessary ; to others unremitting social labour among all classes of men has been a greater sacrifice. For this reason alone it seems to the present writer that a truly spiritual church needs to be a truly comprehensive church. But that was not the way Newman thought. He was an absolutist. A nervous, fanciful child, he felt the unseen impinging upon the seen with a perception much acuter than even that of the ordinary child about whom the shades of the prison house have not yet begun to close.
With a stark reality he saw personified Direction in all phenomena. Until he was well into manhood his Evangelical- ism, the spiritual elation conferred upon him by Evangelical conversion, and his belief in the literal inspiration of the Bible satisfied his absolutist propensities. It was only when an old-fashioned belief in the plenary inspiration of Canonical Scripture and in the Canonical ascriptions of authorship failed him that he began (unconsciously to begin with) to look elsewhere for another absolute standard.
He found it in the Church—not at first in the Roman Church but in the idea of a Church as an inspired organism.
The Church was superior to the Scriptures. Hence the Tractarian Movement. If only the Anglican Bishops of those days had smiled upon the Oxford Movement, Newman might never have left the Church of England. When he seceded, the Oxford Movement, as such, broke up. From one extreme he had gone to the other, as absolutists do. In the case of a man with his temperament there was no mystery
in the change. While writing his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine he steadily but surely thought himself
into Roman Catholicism. He had not fashioned the final argument before his decision was taken. The summoning of the Passionist Father to receive him into the Roman Church was already inevitable.
" To believe in a Church is to believe in the Pope " had become Newman's position. That might be taken to mean that the alternative to a belief in Roman Catholicism was no faith at all ; but Newman, of course, never went so far as to say that. If there be any mystery in Newman's progress it was that this remarkable essay contained implicitly the principle of evolution. That principle, however, was recon- cilable with his acceptance of the infallible authority of the Roman Church. Doctrine grew as the Church directed.
For the rest Mr. May gives us a most agreeable picture of the nobility and beauty of Newman's life—and of his style which was of the essence of his life. Mr. May is so adulatory in holding up for our admiration the perfection of Newman's language—sometimes finding perfections where perfections hardly exist—that the chapter in which he denies to Newman all claim to be a poet strikes the reader with almost a ludicrous effect. Let us not, however, complain of the jolts of an analysis which tries to save itself by one violent reservation from being too lyrical. It is good to be taken again into the company of a majestic spiritual leader who was one of the greatest of the sons of Oxford, and whose personality and intellect towered so high that even Gladstone and Disraeli agreed that the Church of England had seldom suffered such a shock as when he left it.
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