BOOKS

Martha and Mary

A. N. Wilson

NEWMAN AND HIS AGE by Sheridan Gilley

Darron, Longman & Todd, .C.25, pp.485

John Henry Newman died 100 years ago, on 11 August, 1890. There was a remarkable entry, two days later, in the diary of Lord Rosebery, the future Liberal Prime Minister:

While at luncheon received telegram from Father Neville to say that if I wished to see Cardinal Newman's remains I must come at once. So caught the 2.10 train. Arrived at the [Birmingham] Oratory at 5. Met Father Neville who took me to the Church, then to the little sitting-room and tiny oratory, where he produced a good portrait of the Cardinal which the Cardinal had proposed to give me when he heard I had been disappointed of Millais's, and had been over-ruled, I sup- pose, very naturally: then to his admirably planned library. The sitting-room a mere cell filled with books.

The Cardinal just like a saint's remains over a high altar, waxy, distant, emaciated, in a mitre, rich gloves whereon the ring (which I kissed), rich slippers. With the hat at the foot.

And this was the end of the young Calvinist, the Oxford don, the austere Vicar of St Mary's. It seemed as if a whole cycle of human thought were concentrated in that august repose. That was my overwhelming thought. Kindly light had led a guided Newman to this strange, brilliant, incompar- able end.

Seeing him on his right side in outline one saw only an enormous nose and chin almost meeting — a St Dominic face. The left side was inconceivably sweet and soft, with that gentle corner of the mouth so greatly missed in the other view. The body, so frail and slight that it had ceased to be a body terrestrial.

The drama of Newman's life is an interior drama: a whole cycle of human thought. The world divides between those who (such as Sheridan Gilley in this brilliant new study of Newman's life) find this exciting and attractive and those like Cardinal Manning who regard Newman as 'the most colossal egotist that ever lived'.

Standing with Rosebery beside that strange, waxy, 'inconceivably sweet' corp- se, observers will divide between those who recognise that religion, like sex and every other interesting aspect of life, is something going on inside our own heads, and the pragmatists who look outside themselves and seek to change the world by schemes, politics, or deeds. When Manning, at Newman's funeral, paid tri- bute to 'my brother and friend of more than sixty years', Bishop Patterson 'was nearly knocked off his faldstool' by the staggering hypocrisy of the tribute. Man- ning had blocked any chances of Newman being made a bishop. When the proposal to make Newman into a Cardinal had first been mooted in Rome, Manning had in effect lied to the Holy See, refused the Cardinalate on Newman's behalf without consulting his 'brother and friend'. He had squashed Newman's ambition to set up a Catholic mission or Oratory at Oxford. In private conversation, Manning would 'tick off on his tapering fingers' . . . 'ten distinct heresies to be found in the most widely- read works of Dr Newman'. (And 'Dr Newman' was how Manning always refer- red to him, even after he had become a Cardinal). When someone said that they considered Newman to be a good Catholic, Manning replied, 'Either you are ignorant of Catholic doctrine, or of the works of Doctor Newman'.

History makes cruel reversals, and now Manning is generally regarded as a devious ecclesiastical administrator, an ultramont- ane fanatic, whereas there is talk of making Newman into a saint and a doctor of the church. This is not entirely fair to Man- ning. It is true that, even by the acrimon- ious standards of ecclesiastics, the differ- ences between the two men were played out on a vitriolic and unseemly scale. It is truer to see them, as Sheridan Gilley does, as the Martha and Mary of the Victorian Church, the imperfect exponents of two great Catholic traditions, on the one hand the active, and on the other the contempla- tive life.

One of Newman's more notoriously bitchy put-downs occurred when his brother Frank — a Unitarian for whom he had scant affection — appeared on a public platform in Manchester with Manning, denouncing the drink trade. Manning was a passionate teetotaller, and like many other 19th-century radicals and philan- thropists, he was aware of the destruction wrought by alcohol in the lives of the poor. Frank Newman was naively unaware of the odium with which the two great Catholic churchmen regarded one another. He sup- posed that, in spite of his religious differ- ences with his brother, John Henry would be pleased that he had appeared in public with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminister, that it was a sign that they now shared an 'interest in common'. New- man wrote back to his brother,

As to what you tell me of Archbishop Manning, I have heard that some also of our Irish bishops think that too many drink- shops are licensed. As for me, I do not know whether we have too many or too few.

It was of course a very witty retort, but once again, it divides the world between the thinkers and the doers. It is an archetypically Tory remark, and Manning was an archetypical world-changer. It was Manning who was quite largely responsible for setting up the Roman Catholic Church, as present constituted, in England, with its own dioceses and bishops to rival those of the Established Church. It was Manning, alone among public figures, secular or ecclesiastical, who was accepted by both sides as an arbitrator in the Dock Strike of 1889. It was Manning who had been a chief architect of the Vatican Council of 1870. It was Manning who was largely responsible for setting up Catholic schools for the lower classes. (Compare and contrast New- man, who set up a small Oratory school for the children of the gentry, but bitterly opposed the establishment of the Oratory grammar school and with his crabbed 89-year old fingers, signing his will, elabor- ately excluded the grammar school from his last testament).

Sheridan Gilley surely takes Newman too much at his own estimation when he describes the Birmingham Oratory as 'a major undertaking'. Newman speaks of the 'great domestic works, the care of the Library, the Sacristy, the Accounts', but it hardly seems like a great work beside Manning's towering practical achieve- ments. (At some points in the Oratory's history, not least because Newman was almost impossible to live with, membership of the Birmingham Oratory sank to half a dozen). In extreme old age, Newman humbly broke with ecclesiastical protocol and knelt, a Cardinal and prince of the Church, to receive the blessing of Bishop Ullathorne. With some diffidence, Ullathorne blessed him. Then Newman said, 'I have been indoors all my life, whilst you have battled for the Church in the world'.

We discover the reason why Newman is so much revered today when we recognise that Newman, too, no less than Manning and Ullathorne, was fighting battles, even though he was so much 'indoors' in a sitting-room which was 'a mere cell filled with books'.

Why did Manning, like other Victo- rian philanthropists and do-gooders, labour so tirelessly for better housing and work conditions among the poor, for hos- pitals, public health, education? It was because he believed that a little over 1800 years previous, the Incarnate God had walked the earth, and told the human race how to live. Manning further believed that this Incarnate God, born in a stable, and preaching Good News to the poor, had, after his miraculous resurrection from the dead, established on earth an institution which would not merely carry out his commandments but embody his very self, and that this institution was the Roman Catholic Church, which embodied Christ, not merely in the miraculous sacrament of the Altar, but also in her teachings; and that central to the teaching office of the church was the Papacy, the infallibly guided, truth-bearing line which stretched from St Peter to Leo XIII.

Sceptics, myself among them, must find this vision of history nothing less than fantastical, but Manning was loyal to it, and loyal in a reflective, as well as a practical manner.

The radical social teachings of Leo XIII's Encyclicals were heavily influenced by, if not actually written by Manning. He worked out with heroic energy and self- sacrifice the political and practical implica- tions of the Gospel in which he believed.

But as Newman recognised, the 19th century was the end of the age of faith. A dispassionate study of the New Testament, such as had been pursued by the German theologians at Tilbingen, made it virtually impossible to believe that an itinerant Jewish teacher and healer of the first century would ever have claimed to be God; and a study of the history of dogma makes it clear that most of the doctrines enshrined in the Christian creeds were developed years after the earthly life of Christ. Even such basic presumptions as the theory of Creation had been destroyed by Darwin. When Newman and Manning and Gladstone were all undergraduates at Oxford, they had all taken exams in Paley's Evidences which argued that since the Universe appears to be so intricately de- signed there must be in existence a Grand Designer. Darwinianism had exploded this way of thinking. If the theory of Natural Selection were true, there was no need to posit some celestial craftsman 'making' elephants and orang-utans as a child might make creatures out of clay. Certainly, there was no possibility, after Darwin, of believing that the book of Genesis was a literal and scientific account of how the universe came into being — though this, amazingly, is what men as intelligent as Gladstone or Pusey persisted in believing to their dying day.

If science and textual criticism destroyed the plausibility of the Bible, philosophers, too, were beginning to explore the stark extents of knowledge, and the new quest- ionable basis of morality itself. The famous Dostoevskian question hangs over history like the sword of Damocles: If God does not exist, then is not anything permitted? These were not purely academic questions for Nietzsche — nor were they to be for Lenin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung or Pol Pot.

In other words, Manning could found as many dioceses as he chose. He could formulate as many definitions of papal authority as could be pushed through the committees of the Vatican Council (and what a tale of skulduggery and imposture that was!). But he could not do anything about the March of Mind. He could not 'It's getting worse. They've McDonald's'. stop intelligent men and women question- ing the whole basis of the Christian faith, and in those questions, changing the future of the human race.

To fight those battles was needed not a wheeler-dealer or a good committee man, but a religious genius in a 'cell filled with books'. And the genius was Newman. Sheridan Gilley's biography is less full and less austere than the recent magisterial tome by Ian Ker. It is less emotional and 'pretty' than Meriol Trevor's two volumes.

But it is particularly good (Gilley is a theologian) on matching the man to the work, on tracing that drama which so entranced Rosebery and thousands of Newman's contemporaries, 'as if a whole cycle of human thought were concentrated in that august repose'. He brings New- man's family very vividly to life, and in particular, his 'hopeless' father, who was first a banker, and then a brewer, and then nothing much in particular. At the time of George IV's divorce, John Henry Newman was 19, and they were having a family argument about the king's disgraceful treatment of Queen Caroline. The father thought that, since everyone knew of the King's secret marriage to Mrs Fitzherbert it was the grossest humbug to pillory Queen Caroline for committing adultery. Priggish John Henry, however, was so horrified by what he had read of Queen Caroline's behaviour, and — High Tory as he was — so jealous of the privileges of the Crown, that he said that he thought it was quite right to deprive Queen Caroline of royal status. His father — 'mistaking fanaticism for self-seeking' exploded: 'Well, John! I suppose I ought to praise you for knowing how to rise in the world. Go on! Persev- ere! Always stand up for men in power and you will get promotion'.

It was the bitter remark of a man who knew he was a complete failure (drink?), spoken to a son who was obviously de- stined for a brilliant academic and eccle- siastical career. The fact that the father missed the point of Newman's priggery only emphasises the distance between them, and Sheridan Gilley traces cunningly how distance, separation, stand-offishness were an essential part not merely of Newman's character from the first but also of his strangely self-protective religious genius. It was after his father's bankruptcy, when Newman was 15 years old, that he had experienced an evangelical conver- sion, and thereafter his sense of the pre- sence of God seems to have been almost unwavering until a spiritual crisis in his sixties. At Oxford, whether as the earnest young fellow of Oriel or the hypnotic Tractarian preacher of slightly later years, the pattern repeats itself of Newman attacking a set of values, or a rival group in the Church or State, by going in retreat from it. As his brothers developed along different lines (Francis through Low Church Anglicanism to Unitarianism and finally to a sort of wishy-washydom indis- tinguishable from agnosticism, and Charles to actual professed atheism), Newman wanted no more to do with them. Similar- ly, friends who did not think precisely as he did, found themselves dropped or cut. 'He who is not with me is against me' was one of his favourite texts.

When he finally came to write the story of his spiritual journey, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his readers were confronted with the extraordinary paradox of a thoughtful, honest, introspective soul who had genuinely been persuaded of the truth of Roman Catholicism, but for purely subjective reasons. There again, the Apologia was not the serene reflection of an old man who had arrived at a safe harbour and chosen to meditate on the mystery of things. It was torn out of him by the slanders of Charles Kingsley in Mac- millan's Magazine. Having dispatched Kingsley with magnificent polemic, how- ever, Newman really wanted to write about the drama which had been going on within himself ever since his 'conversion experi- ence' as a boy of 15. 'And now I am in a train of thought higher and more serene than any which slanders can disturb. Away with you, Mr Kingsley, and fly into space'.

As a public man, Newman's three greatest monuments could be seen as the Oxford sermons, the Catholic University of Dublin and his book The Grammar of Assent. All three are of a piece. The famous sermons, which held undergradu- ates like Matthew Arnold and J. A. Froude entranced, became best-sellers. When he reissued them in his Catholic life, 20,000 copies were sold in the first year. They are not controversial, they are entirely person- al. They are about the relationship be- tween an individual and God and the• awe-ful responsibilities of the Christian — with regard to prayer, to money, to sex, drink, and the general conduct of life. In establishing the Catholic University of Dub- lin, he set out in the discourses which became known as The Idea of a University the limits and responsibilities of academic life in each individual's search for truth. And in The Grammar of Assent, his greatest work, he explored the general philosophic- al question of truth itself — the problem of knowledge.

The only technical term which Newman invents in the Grammar is what he calls 'the Illative Sense', and it could be defined as the power to pass straight from facts to conclusions. As an analysis of how we arrive at certainty, it is a considerable advance on English empiricists like Locke, who believed that we may only arrive at certainty about propositions for which we have empirical evidence. Newman argued that there are many truths — for example, the proposition that Great Britain is an island — to which we assent not because we have tested it for ourselves; nor does the proposition that Great Britain is an island become more certain if one adduces evidence for it. In this description of the Illative Sense, Newman anticipates Witt- genstein's argument that it is absurd to doubt obvious certainties merely because there is no compelling proof for them.

Gilley reminds us, though, that Wittgen- stein's reasons for holding this common- sense view were subtly different from Newman's. It derives from the view that, in terms of discourse, language is all there is, 'so that to deny that Great Britain is an island is to repudiate an essential rule of the game and so reduce the game itself to nonsense'. Newman was a 'nominalist', who thought that language and notions were devised by human beings to describe their apprehension of things. For Newman, the act of apprehension was precisely what authenticated the perception, and this was his in-road to metaphysics, and the begin- ning of his defence of the religious posi- tion. He recognised, with disarming frank- ness, that the religious position cannot be defended except — in layman's terms — as something going on inside your head.

Funny things go on inside your head. Newman lived before Freud, and Gilley lives after him, but he does not condescend to Newman (as Geoffrey Faber did) by implying that we can explain his religious position by his psychological history. Nevertheless, by describing the two, side by side, Gilley leaves us in a position to draw our own conclusions.

Newman was not alone in believing what men and women have believed ever since Moses and Plato, that there is a Moral Law operating in the universe, and that we have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, operat- ing through conscience, which suggests that questions of ethics are not merely things we have invented for ourselves. The Grammar of Assent makes out a powerful case for recognising this mysterious phe- nomenon. Few, except Newman's co- religionists or devotees, will think that this entitles him, or us, to move on to a belief in a Personal Creator, still less to delight in the Athanasian creed, 'the war-song of faith', as Newman called it, 'with which we warn first ourselves, then eachother, and then all who are within its hearing of the Truth, who our god is'. . . .

In his Apologia he makes the typically arresting remark that there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to Atheism. It is a sentence which Jews and Muslims might read with some astonish- ment. In terms of the history of Western Christendom, however, these words are probably prophetic. There is something risible about modern Anglican bishops who are unable to believe in the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, but what their critics sometimes fail to see is that the risibility consists in their being bishops, not in their being unbelievers. Newman was a naturally religious man who could only be at home in the great household of faith which is the Roman Church. But his considered judgment in The Grammar of Assent about the plausibility of religious faith itself is, like everything else about him, profoundly ambiguous. We, like Rosebery, see in his serene and mitred corpse the delicate embodiment of a whole cycle of thought. But had that scrupulously truthful and introspective man lived in a post-Freudian age, we may wonder whether he would have placed a different interpretation on that interior dialogue, which had possessed him since childhood, and which he believed to have been a relationship with God. 'I seem to have done nothing', he wrote to a correspondent in 1875, 'and to have frittered away all my time and labour upon dreams'.