The life-long literary vocation of John Henry Newman

Many saints have written on spirituality or theology. But few have been what John Henry Newman was, a writer by vocation, the author of lasting works in a wide variety of genres.

The seeds of his sainthood, indeed the full flowering of his sainthood, are to be found in his writings, the whole range of which very few of his admirers can be acquainted. Indeed, one has sometimes to wonder if it was not the sheer volume and breath of what Newman wrote during his long life that made those who dealt with the matter of his cause at Rome delay his canonisation for so long.

Many saints have also written and published books. That in some ways is no real achievement. But Newman was something more: all his life he was a writer by nature and inclination. His pen it seems was never out of his hand. His true metier was literature.

In this week’s books page we will provide a brief overview of these writings, which will hopefully encourage readers of all points of view to explore them.

My first real encounter in depth with the writings of Newman — aside from a couple of essays read at school — was at my American university in the honours course in English which I was taking, where he was presented to a very varied student body, along with Ruskin, Mathew Arnold and Wordsworth, as one of the giants of Victorian literature. This indeed he was, but as the ceremonies in Rome on Sunday will merely confirm, he was also a great deal more.

As other contributors are dealing with the chronological developments in Newman’s life, here my remarks will be arranged under literary categories, which will try to treat Newman’s career as a continuity of a Christian writer’s intellect, albeit one divided into two main parts, his years of growth as an Anglican (1801-1846), and his mature years as a Catholic (1846-1890).

The poet and hymn writer

He was a skilled poet and hymn writer. Elgar’s choral work of 1900 based on Newman’s long poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865) is still widely performed and enjoyed. For some people this would have been enough to fill a life. But for Newman poetry was a mere corner of his work, which he turned to from time to time, to give his thoughts and feelings a special treatment. I have often felt that his hymns retain something of the Anglican manner in their style. But in these days that is not fault, but merely an added interest.

Yet one of his hymns can truly be said to have entered the popular culture of the English-speaking world — it was sung on the listing deck of the sinking Titanic. This is Lead Kindly Light, written in 1833 when he was becalmed for a week off the coast of Corsica in a mood of deep discouragement and anxiety. It has struck a chord with many over the decades and still does.

Lead, lindly light, amidst th’ encircling gloom,

Lead thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home,

Lead thou me on!

Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me … .

Newman the novelist

The historical novel was the great literary invention of the 19th Century. Created by Walter Scott with Waverley (1814), a tale of the Jacobite rising out in 1745, it aided individuals, and indeed whole communities, come to an appreciation of their history and of the religion or politics they followed.

They were written by surprising people. The author of Ben Hur (1880), for instance, Lew Wallace, was a US army general and governor of New Mexico. It proved to be one of the great popular successes of all time, selling many millions of copies and remains in print to this day.

For Newman the historical novel was a vital form of communication, using a form of entertainment to achieve emotional understanding”

One might mention too other novels about the history of Christianity: Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896) and Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola (1854), a novel of the Church of the Martyrs, are well known. Newman’s novel, Callista: a tale of the third century (1855) was a sort prequel to Wiseman’s book.

But Callista is not just a period piece, for the novel in its presentation of denial, faith and acceptance reveals much about Newman’s own outlook. Anyone seriously interested in Newman should read it at least once.

But though they both had beautiful heroines, Wiseman also had gladiators, which led to his book being filmed three times. Newman’s novel, so far as I can discover never reached the screen; it was too intellectual. But it was, nevertheless, a popular success and remained in print into the first decade of the last century, with a occasional reprints since.

Ordinary readers cannot be expected to give attention to learned theological controversies. But historical novels expressing a Catholic point of view allowed a great many people to make contact with what had been in so many ways a form of outlawed thought in Britain down to 1829, to understand a little of what the restoration of the English hierarchy in 1850 meant for their Catholic compatriots. For Newman the historical novel was a vital form of communication, using a form of entertainment to achieve emotional understanding.

This was not Newman’s only novel. Earlier, just after his conversion, he had written Loss and Gain (1848), a philosophical novel dealing with the nature of religious experience. This too was a very typical product of the century, but it did not prove as popular as his later novel. Yet it inevitably cast a great deal of light on the development of Newman’s own religious ideas, drawn as it was directly from his own experiences at Oxford. While important for Newman’s life, the novel is also interesting for the revelations of the high seriousness with which the Victorians took religious belief, and how doubt as much as faith prevailed in the hearts of many, especially in the Tractarian era (1833-1841).

The controversialist

Perhaps Newman’s most widely known book is his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). This account of the growth of his religious opinions has long been the book most famialr to readers of Newman, and it has indeed a special place in Victorian literature.

It arose from a controversy initiated by the ‘muscular Christian’ Charles Kingsley (author Westward Ho!, a book once placed on the Index because of the excesses of its anti-Catholic comments). Kingsley claimed that Newman taught that truthfulness was not necessary quality in a priest.

He presented Newman with an opportunity to explain not just to Kingsley, who was well beyond persuasion, but to the wider world, the nature both of Catholic belief as he had experienced it and the nature of the priestly vocation has he saw it.

At the present day when the discussion of belief is often carried on at a very shallow level Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua remains a pre-eminent piece of literary expression.

Newman the historian

Newman was at the beginning of his career an historian of early Christianity, for its was in those first centuries that many of the Church’s fundamental doctrines were forged, not so much from the gospels, as from the difficulties in establishing a common set of beliefs, coherent with Greek philosophy, for all Christians – a task which still proves difficult today.

Newman’s monograph The Arians in the Fourth Century appeared in 1833. This was one of many historical or quasi-historical writings, but in everything he wrote the historical ideal of knowing when and how things happened, and why, underlay every aspect of his thought.

Later, after he had become a Catholic, he remarked about the course the work followed: “I saw clearly that in the history of Arianism, the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans and that Rome now was what it was then. The truth lay, not with the via media, but with what was called the ‘extreme party’.”

His inquiry into Arianism was a key step on his path to Rome.

The Anglican theologian

Today we still hear people speak about the “unchanging doctrines” of the Church. Would it were that simple. In the early 19th Century biologists still believed in the immutability of species. This idea was shattered by the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Life, he observed, can be seen to be a developing matter, getting more complicated and more deeper, so to speak as times advances, from simple organisms to complex ones.

Through his historical and doctrinal studies Newman now found that he could no longer remain within the Anglican fold”

Fourteen years before that in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Newman had written of “the development of doctrine”, how over time the Church’s understanding of its teaching, through the efforts of theologians, changed and deepened. What had been understood in an earlier century was still true, but now theologians, and hence the faithful, could have a deeper, more refined understanding of it.

This was, so to speak, ‘Darwinism’ in the cloister avant l’heure of Darwin himself.

Through his historical and doctrinal studies Newman now found that he could no longer remain within the Anglican fold. He would have to seek a new shepherd in the pastor of Rome. Essentially this book argued Newman out of his position as a High Church Anglican espousing the Catholic tradition, forcing him to make the next step and simply abandon what he had come to feel was only a limited position.

He left Littlemore and sought acceptance into the Catholic Church. Though perhaps not so obvious to modern readers this was not just a step for one man: it was a positive move towards the emergence of the Catholic Church as an accepted part of English society once again. His passage into the Church of Rome in 1846 was a momentous moment not only in his life, but in the intellectual history of Victorian England.

The Catholic theologian

In the Apologia Newman had provided an account of the evolution of his own religious views. Over some 20 years he worked on A Grammar of Assent (1870). Here he developed his ideas that formal logic (such as is so often invoked by many modern sciencists) was not applicable in all real life situations. He argued that it was possible to assent to a proposition without in fact understanding it. This book would become a key work in his lifetime’s work, and remains one of two or three most influential books.

Newman the correspondent

From an early age Newman was a tireless correspondent. The letter was then the most urgent way of keeping in touch with family, friends and disciples. His correspondence went on to the end of his life in 1890 – he was born in February 1801- Newman was a great letter writer, for the letter was the only reliable form of communications with his friends and colleagues in the British Isles and elsewhere.

The publication of his correspondence is one of the great publishing enterprises of the present day. It was initiated under the supervision of the Oratorian fathers to be published originally by Longman, and is now in the hands of the Oxford University Press. It began, given the peculiar circumstances of Newman’s life and career, with a ‘Catholic series’ which ran from 1845 down to his death.

When that was completed (is so far as a project of this kind is ever complete), the editors turned back to the beginning of his life with an ‘Anglican series’. In any relevant library these volumes occupy, as may be imagined, a great many shelves.

It is no disrespect to the eminent writers who have provided critical biographies of Newman, that his real biography, the true account of the struggles and resolutions of his life is to be found in these massed volumes. Anything else is, in reality a mere epitome, and for those who would try know the man these volumes are what have to be read. These papers will have inevitably formed a major part of the documentation which those dealing with his cause in Rome will have examined.

In these one can hear the essential voice, manner and spirit of the man – and in them from now on his admirers and others will be able to see the slow emergence not just of the man, or the intellectual, but of the saint.

Essentially, in what he wrote through the course of his life Newman pleaded his own cause for canonisation.

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Newman and Joyce

James Joyce was an admirer of what he called Newman’s “silver-veined” prose. Today his name and that of Gerard Manley Hopkins are linked with the saint’s on a plaque outside Newman house (now the setting for a new museum dedicated to Irish literature). But the extent of Joyce’s admiration for Newman was limited.

It has been shown that all of the quotations and allusions to Newman in Joyce’s work come from one book Characteristics from the writings of J. H. Newman (1885), selected by W. S. Lilly, a dumpy anthology of extracts, which had a very wide sale in its time.

This shows two things. One that Joyce was perhaps less deeply read than some imagine, and two, that Newman’s influence in his lifetime seeped into many corners of life where we might not expect to find it. Through this volume Newman was read and appreciated by many who were not Catholics.