BOOKS
Newman: A French View
By ROSE MACAULAY
TN dealing with Newman, as with other great men, one looks for the solving of riddles, the resolving of some odd contradictions. Here is a remarkable intellectual ability, an acute and powerful mind; yet it apparently became—or probably always was—in some ways a blinkered mind, only open to the apprehension of a certain category of interests. We learn from his Oxford contemporaries that he was a brilliant talker on a wide variety of subjects; his reading was enormous and various, his general knowledge immense, his company most rewarding. But little of this comes out in his letters, or in records of his talks; they are nearly all of two kinds—ecclesiastical discus- sion and personal statements. As life went on, his vision narrowed; when in Rome in 1833, his letters reflect the interest of most cultivated travellers; he describes not only churches but classical Rome. In Rome again in 1846 and 1847, he ignores everything but the ecclesiastical scene; churches, the Vatican, the Propaganda College, the priests. There might be no monuments of pre- Christian Rome. He seems to regard these no more than did the Christian pilgrims of the early cen- turies, going about with their Mirabilia Urbis Roince in their hands. He writes much about the disregard paid to his own works, which were ig- nored or slandered; 'I have not yet been done justice to. . . . People do not know me, and sometimes they pass me by. It has been the por- tion of saints, even, and may well be my portion. . . . It is marvellous to see how life is passing, and I have never been brought out prominently.' He had left the influence and position he had enjoyed at Oxford to join a Church that seemed as yet disinclined to use his gifts. Despondency was natural. So was his intense concentration on ecclesiastical Rome, for it enshrined, he knew, the eternal truths. The deeper his personal hurt, the sterner his self-accusation. He wrote it down at a retreat in Rome at this time. 'I have got in my mind a kind of wound or canker which prevents me from being a good Oratorian.' He condemns his love of comfort, his desire for an Epicurean existence. His lively faith and hope have dwindled. He shrinks from the practices of religion, such as prayers for obtaining indul- gences; indeed, he shrinks from any effort at all. What sounds like mental exhaustion, Fr. Bouyer, in this brilliant book,* attributes to a growing opposition to 'the Italianising practices' of some of his associates. He felt himself growing old at forty-five; his morbidly sensitive nature reacted sharply to disappointment and misunderstanding, and his conscience seared him with remorse. It was a state from which he did not fully recover until the welcome given to his Apologia many years later.
Father Bouyer, the Oratorian and liturgiologist, first published his book in 1952, and it now appears in English. He has had access to un- published material in the keeping of the
* NEWMAN: His LIFE AND SPIRITUALITY. By Louis Bouyer, translated by J. Lewis May. (Burns and Oates, 30s.)
Birmingham Oratorians, and writes at their re- quest. Apart from this, his long study of and
interest in Newman justify the adding of another book to the already vast Newman library. The translation could be better; it reads rather pon- derously here and there, omits phrases that per- haps seem to Mr. May foolish, has some clumsy locutions (`prior to' for 'before') and too great an addiction to the word `worthy' for bon, brave and excellent, and 'British' for anglais. However, Fr. Bouyer's own writing perhaps a little lacks style; his gift is rather for understanding analysis and presentment. He stresses the adolescent boy's evangelical conversion as a major clue to his religion-centred life; actually it might be truer to say that the conversion was the result of this. Given the evangelical influences that shaped him, it was a foregone conclusion to a nature which required God as it required food and drink. Any- how, it got him off to a flying start; in it were the seeds of his future Christian lift; whatever faith he was to attach himself to, that faith held him as sa proie tout a fait attachee. Fr. Bouyer, himself brought up a Calvinist, understands the phenomenon of adolescent conversion, so alien to Anglicans. Indeed, this common background helps his understanding of Newman's whole life.
One merit of his study is its breadth of view. Fr. Bouyer has made what is, for a foreigner, a remarkable study of the Oxford Movement and of the Anglican Church of the time. He is not always quite accurate; not about the Whigs, who, he says, 'dissembled' their real policy in religious matters,' which was a wholesale repudiation of Christianity, behind a screen of liberal measures. It is never easy for foreigners to grasp the mild irreligion of the English, whose anti-clericalism is such a tranquil, unheady brew. He perhaps also rather over-paints the plight of the old English Catholics—`They had lived the lives of a down- trodden, despised and negligible minority, out- side the pale of Society. . . . Debarred from the universities, unable to give their priests a worthy cultural education, they lived as it were on the fringe of the world, clinging like wild creatures to the protection of a sort of ghetto, which . . . they showed no disposition to quit.' There is a less highly coloured account in Archbishop Mathew's Catholicism in England.
Neither is his picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglicanism complete—`A Protestantism first Presbyterian, then Puritan, and finally Deist,' to be made more chaotic by `Methodism and Evangelicanism,' omits the whole Anglican strain (though later allusions show awareness of it) represented by Hooker, Laud, Andrews, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Cosin, Jeremy Taylor, Ken and Law and the Non- Jurors, who paved the way for the Oxford Move- ment of two centuries later. But, by and large, his presentment of both the English and the Roman scenes is brilliant. He does not solve all the Newman riddles : probably no one could. One is the mixture of intellectual ability with simple peasant credulity which enabled him to accept as
miraculous the Liquefaction of the Blood at Naples and other simplicities. Not perverse like Ward, or a play-actor like Faber, he still was able to bend his acute mind to puerilities. For a time he vexed the sober and tradition-steeped English Catholics (including that courteous and dignified Benedictine Dr. Ullathorne) by letting himself be persuaded into `the frenzied follies' and post- Tridentine antics of his younger convert friends. Since he had been rooted and grounded from youth in the Fathers, this was a brief phase. It was accompanied by admiration for Faber's Lives of the Saints, a contemptuous attack on his friend Keble's poems and a scornful ridicule of the Church which had been once his cherished Via Media, which he had conducted for years with such love and care towards the heights, but was now shown up for a fraud, superseded by the 'corrupt mass of superstitions,' as he had been used to call it, which was now the true and only Church (and no doubt of this, through all disap- pointments and bitterness, ever crossed his mind; he had found his spiritual home, his fortress and his peace). Such exuberances are, Fr. Bouyer implies, the wild oats that converts, unbalanced by excitement and unaccustomed fare, sometimes sow. Newman's balance was soon restored.
It is hard to say which is the more interesting part of this book, its masterly dealing with the architect-in-chief of the Oxford Movement, or with the convert Catholic, involved in one pro- ject after another which, owing to the apathy or suspicion of the hierarchy, foundered before it was begun. Through these familiar disasters Fr. Bouyer conducts their victim with sympathy and comprehension to his triumphant end. His indignation with Wiseman, Manning and Mgr. Talbot (the arch foe) is not concealed.
We shall doubtless have more Newman books: we are unlikely to get a better one.
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