John Henry Newman
born Feb. 21, 1801, London, Eng.
died Aug. 11, 1890, Birmingham, Warwick
influential churchman and man of letters of
the 19th century, who led the Oxford
Movement in the Church of England and later
became a cardinal-deacon in the Roman
Catholic church. His eloquent books, notably
Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–42),
Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the
Church (1837), and University Sermons
(1843), revived emphasis on the dogmatic
authority of the church and urged reforms of
the Church of England after the pattern of
the original “catholic,” or universal,
church of the first five centuries ad. By
1845 he came to view the Roman Catholic
church as the true modern development from
the original body.
Early life and education.
Newman was born in London in 1801. After
pursuing his education in an evangelical
home and at Trinity College, Oxford, he was
made a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in
1822, vice principal of Alban Hall in 1825,
and vicar of St. Mary’s, Oxford, in 1828.
Under the influence of the clergyman John
Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude, Newman
became a convinced high churchman (one of
those who emphasized the Anglican church’s
continuation of the ancient Christian
tradition, particularly as regards the
episcopate, priesthood, and sacraments).
Association with the Oxford Movement.
When the Oxford Movement began Newman was
its effective organizer and intellectual
leader, supplying the most acute thought
produced by it. A High Church movement
within the Church of England, the Oxford
Movement was started at Oxford in 1833 with
the object of stressing the Catholic
elements in the English religious tradition
and of reforming the Church of England.
Newman’s editing of the Tracts for the Times
and his contributing of 24 tracts among them
were less significant for the influence of
the movement than his books, especially the
Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the
Church (1837), the classic statement of the
Tractarian doctrine of authority; the
University Sermons (1843), similarly
classical for the theory of religious
belief; and above all his Parochial and
Plain Sermons (1834–42), which in their
published form took the principles of the
movement, in their best expression, into the
country at large.
In 1838 and 1839 Newman was beginning to
exercise far-reaching influence in the
Church of England. His stress upon the
dogmatic authority of the church was felt to
be a much-needed reemphasis in a new liberal
age. He seemed decisively to know what he
stood for and where he was going, and in the
quality of his personal devotion his
followers found a man who practiced what he
preached. Moreover, he had been endowed with
the gift of writing sensitive and sometimes
magical prose.
Newman was contending that the Church of
England represented true catholicity and
that the test of this catholicity (as
against Rome upon the one side and what he
termed “the popular Protestants” upon the
other) lay in the teaching of the ancient
and undivided church of the Fathers. From
1834 onward this middle way was beginning to
be attacked on the ground that it
undervalued the Reformation; and when in
1838–39 Newman and Keble published Froude’s
Remains, in which the Reformation was
violently denounced, moderate men began to
suspect their leader. Their worst fears were
confirmed in 1841 by Newman’s Tract 90,
which, in reconciling the Thirty-nine
Articles with the teaching of the ancient
and undivided church, appeared to some to
assert that the articles were not
incompatible with the doctrines of the
Council of Trent; and Newman’s extreme
disciple, W.G. Ward, claimed that this was
indeed the consequence. Bishop Richard Bagot
of Oxford requested that the tracts be
suspended; and in the distress of the
consequent denunciations Newman increasingly
withdrew into isolation, his confidence in
himself shattered and his belief in the
catholicity of the English church weakening.
He moved out of Oxford to his chapelry of
Littlemore, where he gathered a few of his
intimate disciples and established a
quasi-monastery.
Conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Newman resigned St. Mary’s, Oxford, on Sept.
18, 1843, and preached his last Anglican
sermon (“The Parting of Friends”) in
Littlemore Church a week later. He delayed
long, because his intellectual integrity
found an obstacle in the historical contrast
between the early church and the modern
Roman Catholic church. Meditating upon the
idea of development, a word then much
discussed in connection with biological
evolution, he applied the law of historical
development to Christian society and tried
to show (to himself as much as to others)
that the early and undivided church had
developed rightly into the modern Roman
Catholic church and that the Protestant
churches represented a break in this
development, both in doctrine and in
devotion. These meditations removed the
obstacle, and on Oct. 9, 1845, he was
received at Littlemore into the Roman
Catholic church, publishing a few weeks
later his Essay on the Development of
Christian Doctrine.
Newman went to Rome to be ordained to the
priesthood and after some uncertainties
founded the Oratory at Birmingham in 1848.
He was suspect among the more rigorous Roman
Catholic clergy because of the quasi-liberal
spirit that he seemed to have brought with
him; and therefore, though in fact he was no
liberal in any normal sense of the word, his
early career as a Roman Catholic priest was
marked by a series of frustrations. In
1852–53 he was convicted of libeling the
apostate former Dominican priest Achilli. He
was summoned to Ireland to be the first
rector of the new Catholic university in
Dublin, but the task was, under the
circumstances, impossible, and the only
useful result was his lectures on the Idea
of a University (1852). His role as editor
of the Roman Catholic monthly, the Rambler,
and in the efforts of Lord Acton to
encourage critical scholarship among
Catholics, rendered him further suspect and
caused a breach with H.E. Manning, who was
soon to be the new archbishop of
Westminster. One of Newman’s articles (“On
Consulting the Faithful in Matters of
Doctrine”) was reported to Rome on suspicion
of heresy. He attempted to found a Catholic
hostel at Oxford but was thwarted by the
opposition of Manning.
Apologia pro Vita Sua.
From the sense of frustration engendered by
these experiences Newman was delivered in
1864 by an unwarranted attack from Charles
Kingsley upon his moral teaching. Kingsley
in effect challenged him to justify the
honesty of his life as an Anglican. And
though he treated Kingsley more severely
than some thought justified, the resulting
history of his religious opinions, Apologia
pro Vita Sua (1864; “A Defense of His
Life”), was read and approved far beyond the
limits of the Roman Catholic church, and by
its fairness, candour, interest, and the
beauty of some passages, it recaptured the
almost national status that he had once
held.
Though the Apologia was not liked by
Manning and those who thought as he did
because it seemed to show the quasi-liberal
spirit that they feared, it assured Newman’s
stature in the Roman Catholic church. In
1870 he expressed opposition to a definition
of papal infallibility, though himself a
believer in the doctrine. In the same year,
he published his most important book of
theology since 1845, An Essay in Aid of a
Grammar of Assent (commonly known as The
Grammar of Assent), which contained a
further consideration of the nature of faith
and an attempt to show how faith can possess
certainty when it rises out of evidence that
can never be more than probable. In 1879
Pope Leo XIII made him cardinal-deacon of
St. George in Velabro. He died at Birmingham
in 1890 and is buried (with his closest
friend, Ambrose St. John) at Rednal, the
rest house of the Oratory.
Mind and character.
Newman’s portraits show a face of
sensitivity and aesthetic delicacy. He was a
poet—most famous are his contributions in
the Lyra Apostolica of his Anglican days,
including the hymn “Lead, kindly light,”
written in 1833 when he was becalmed in the
strait between Sardinia and Corsica, and The
Dream of Gerontius (1865), based upon the
requiem offices and including such
well-known hymns as “Praise to the holiest
in the height” and “Firmly I believe and
truly.” He was always conscious of the
limitations of prose and aware of the
necessity for parable and analogy, and
logical theologians sometimes found him
elusive or thought him muddled.
But his was a mind of penetration and
power, trained upon Aristotle, David Hume,
Bishop Joseph Butler, and Richard Whately,
and his superficial contempt for logic and
dialectic blinded some readers into the
error of thinking his mind illogical. His
intellectual defect was rather that of
oversubtlety; he enjoyed the niceties of
argumentation, was inclined to be captivated
by the twists of his own ingenuity, and had
a habit of using the reductio ad absurdum in
dangerous places. Newman’s mind at its best
is probably to be found in parts of the
Parochial and Plain Sermons or the
University Sermons, at its worst in the
Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles of 1843.
His sensitive nature, though it made him
lovable to his few intimates, made him
prickly and resentful of public criticism,
and his distresses under the suspicions of
his opponents, whether Anglicans defending
the Reformation or ultramontanes (exponents
of centralized papal power) attacking his
Roman theology, weakened his confidence and
prevented him from becoming the leader that
he was otherwise so well equipped to be.
Nevertheless, as the effective creator of
the Oxford Movement, he helped to transform
the Church of England; and as the upholder
of a theory of doctrinal development he
helped Catholic theology to become more
reconciled to the findings of the new
critical scholarship, while in England the
Apologia was important in helping to break
down the cruder prejudices of the English
against Catholic priests. In both the
Catholic church and the Church of England
his influence has been momentous.
W. Owen Chadwick
