Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (13 page)

While so much of our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fallings, aspir-ings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real enough to us; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of our own mysteries … It was into these that N’s power of insight was so remarkable. I believe no young man had ever heard him preach without fancying that some one had been betraying his own history, and the sermon was aimed specially at him. It was likely that, while he had possession so complete of what we did know about ourselves, we should take his word for what we did not.
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Yet preaching cannot be an end in itself, he counseled; it is a prelude to the Church’s salvation – a theme that he would develop, expand, and take in new directions, in the next stage of his Oxford ministry. Preaching, he insisted, is no substitute for the sacraments – ‘means and pledges of grace, – keys which open the treasure-house of mercy’. Through the influence of Hurrell Froude, he was beginning to nurture a special devotion to the Eucharist. And he had a growing regard for the role of the Virgin Mary, also a token of Froude’s influence. On the Feast of the Annunciation, 1832, he preached a sermon in praise of Mary that drew criticism for its warmth towards the Mother of God:

Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ? … For truly, she is raised above the condition of sinful beings, though she was a sinner; she is brought near to God, yet is but creature … We cannot combine in our thought of her, all we should ascribe with all we should withhold.

JOURNEY SOUTH

Late in 1832 Newman preached a sermon he entitled ‘Wilfulness the Sin of Saul’,
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in which he insisted on the role of revealed as opposed to philosophical religion: ‘Revelation provides us with an important instrument for chastening and moulding our moral character’, he said, but ‘the so-called philosophical Christians’ want to rid themselves ‘altogether of the shackles of a Revelation.’ The sermon was delivered against the background of the passing of the Reform Act in Britain’s parliament, demonstrating for Newman the relentless advance of secularism and relativism. As he would write in the
Apologia
, ‘Great events were happening at home and abroad, which brought out into form and passionate expression the various beliefs which had so gradually been winning their way into my mind’.
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The Reform Act aimed to increase and broaden the British electorate, diversifying representation in parliament and creating new constituencies in the rapidly expanding industrial cities. There were other reforms within the Act, including bids to eliminate bribery of voters and the existence of ‘pocket boroughs’, constituencies that were ‘owned’ by great landowners, giving the aristocracy the right to control representation in the House of Commons. But Newman, like many Anglican priests and bishops, had opposed the Act for

ecclesiological rather than political reasons. Since parliament ultimately governed the Church of England, the enlargement of representation signalled a House of Commons open to candidates of any creed and of none. Meanwhile the Whig government was set to reform the established Church – a prospect Newman believed would lead to the final destruction of Anglican claims to apostolic continuity and authority. None of this concerned Dissenters, of course, but even clergy of the Church of England, Newman maintained, appeared unaware of the disastrous implications: ‘What is most painful’, he would write to his aunt, ‘is that the clergy are so utterly ignorant on the subject. We have no
theological
education.’
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At a point when he felt drawn to enter the fray, however, he took an extended break from his Oxford duties. Hurrell Froude, with advanced tuberculosis of the lungs, believed that another winter in England would prove the death of him. He and his father, Archdeacon Froude, had decided on wintering abroad, and they asked Newman to join them. The journey would change his life.

On 8 December they boarded the
Hermes
at Falmouth. With the prospect of several months travel, a weight seemed to lift from his shoulders. His talent for lively observation was about to enjoy free rein. He wrote to his mother: ‘Fowls, Ducks, Turkeys, all alive and squatted down under the legs of beef, hampers, and vegetables. One unfortunate Duck got away, and a chase ensued – I should have liked to have let him off, but the poor fool did not know how to use his fortune and instead of making for the shore, kept quacking with absurd vehemence close to us.’
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They saw Portugal from out at sea. At Cadiz they took on passengers, but were unable to land. They arrived in Gibraltar on Monday, 18 December, and after a day in quarantine Newman set foot for the first time on ‘foreign land’. They were in Malta on Christmas Day, but stayed on board because of a cholera scare, reaching Patras in Greece by the New Year. He relaxed into the role of tourist: he noted the traditional dress worn by men, Greek coffee, Orthodox churches, Turkish confectionary (honey, otto of roses, almonds), and the wine of Ithaca. On to Messina and Palermo, Newman was enthralled with a journey by mule to Segesta: ‘From the moment I saw Sicily, I kept saying to myself “This is Sicily”.’ He longed to breathe it in, ‘as one smells again and again at a sweet flower’.
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In Naples, his Anglican sensibilities were offended by pictures of the souls in Purgatory and other ‘pagan’ items of ‘popular and exoteric religion’. He was aghast at the universal habit of spitting, even among ladies of fashion, and on one occasion witnessed a priest spitting ‘at altar in the most sacred part of the service’. It was in Naples that he heard news of the plan to abolish ten dioceses of the Church of Ireland (the established extension in Ireland of the Church of England), at the same time levying taxes on bishoprics, and rich parishes. The

proposal had been written into the draft of an act of parliament known as the Church Temporalities Bill. Up to this time Church revenues had been extracted from the Irish population, who were mainly of course Roman Catholic. Where would it end? He wrote to his mother. ‘We have just heard the Irish Church Reform Bill – well done my blind Premier, confiscate and rob, till, like Samson, you pull down the political structure on your own head, tho’ without his deliberate purpose and good cause!’
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Arriving finally in Rome, he wrote to one of his pupils this remarkable first impression with its metaphor of separated body and soul:

We arrived at this wonderful place only Saturday last … the effect of every part is so vast and overpowering – there is such an air of greatness and repose cast over the whole, and, independent of what one knows from history, there are such traces of long sorrow and humiliation, suffering, punishment and decay, that one has a mixture of feelings, partly such as those with which one would approach a corpse, and partly those which would be excited by the sight of the spirit which had left it. It brings to my mind Jere-miah’s words in the Lamentations, when Jerusalem, or (sometimes) the prophet, speaks as the smitten of God.
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His thoughts, still pervaded by a Protestant perspective, continued to run on the corruptions of the Church of Rome, intermixed with forebodings for the Church back home: ‘It is a beautiful flower run to seed … I am impressed with a sad presentiment, as if the gift of truth, when once lost, was lost for ever. And so the Christian world is gradually becoming barren and effete, as land which has been worked out and has become sand. We have lasted longer than the South, but we too are going, as it would seem.’

He did the round of the churches and ruins. He was astonished at the splen-did sight of St Peter’s illuminated, and was enraptured by the Raphael figures on a visit to the Vatican museum. He was tempted to consider whether the Churches of Rome and England could unite, but decided that it was impossible as things stood. ‘A union with Rome, while it is what it is, is impossible; it is a dream.’ This did not mean that he could not nourish admiration of individual Roman Catholics: ‘As to the individual member of the cruel church, who can but love and feel for them?’
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He came to admire an individual Catholic clergyman in the person of Nicholas Wiseman, Rector of the Venerable English College which he visited with Froude. The three discussed prospects for greater union between the English and Roman Churches, but Wiseman himself was not sanguine. He could see little progress unless the Church of England accepted the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had set out the principles of the Counter-Reformation. Nevertheless, perhaps sensing that his two visitors had potential for ‘coming over’, he ‘courteously expressed a wish’ that they might find their way back to Rome, or

stay longer. Newman recollected later that he had replied, by way of expressing his regrets, that they had ‘work at home’. Union with Rome, he concluded at the time, would remain a ‘dream’.

SICILY AND ILLNESS

The Froudes departed for Marseilles in early April, but Newman decided to travel back to Sicily via Naples alone. The trip had found him ambivalent about his travelling companions. Much as he loved Hurrell, he cherished control of his own solitude. There had been an occasion on the journey when he had written of himself as being in the constant company of ‘strangers’. Yet, on parting with the stricken Hurrell, Newman may well have felt a pang of emotion. In the previous year in England, he had taken Hurrell’s hand on one such parting and ‘looked into his face with great affection’. Later, in Sicily, he would write that verse of extraordinary feeling – ‘fond adoring gaze’ – with echoes of another parting look.

He saw his initiative to travel alone as an act of crucial self-fulfilment. There had been something of the ‘grand tour’ about their trip so far, something too of the classical scholar’s exploration of antiquities. But Newman realised that his desire to return to Sicily was fairly located in Romantic yearnings – of creative and imaginative renewal, which he must experience alone.

It will be a vision for my whole life; and, though I should not choose, I am not sorry to go alone, in order, as Wordsworth would say, to commune with high nature.
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And yet he was not entirely alone; he took, as behoved an English gentleman, a servant in the form of Gennaro, a Neapolitan who had served on board the
Victory
at the Battle of Trafalgar, and had been in service for some years with an English family. They landed in Messina off an English sailing brig, hired mules and muleteer, and set off into the interior.

Sicily was ‘Eden’, and the view from Taormina was more than anything he ‘had conceived possible’.

It realized all one had read of in books of the perfection of scenery – a deep valley – brawling streams – beautiful trees – but description is nothing – the sea was heard in the distance. I felt for the first time in my life with my eyes open that I must be better and more religious, if I lived there …
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Yet down-to-earth reality was intervening in the form of blisters, sleepless nights, filthy lodgings, hunger, and fleas. As his journey progressed bad weather, discomforts, and poor food, began to tell on him. He became feverish, and with the fever he pondered his character – in particular his self-willed nature. Then

he contracted typhoid. He was bled by a local doctor, with whom he had communicated in Latin, and certainly should have died had it not been for the trusty Gennaro, who remained by his side day and night despite his own hardships.

He recounted his delirium in simple, powerful language, while suggesting a sense of destiny, which he professes to find incomprehensible:

My servant thought that I was dying, and begged for my last directions. I gave them, as he wished; but I said, ‘I shall not die’. I repeated, ‘I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light.’ I never have been able to make out what I meant.

I got to Castro-Giovanni, and was laid up there for nearly three weeks. Towards the end of May I left for Palermo, taking three days for the journey. Before starting from my inn in the morning of May 26th or 27th, I sat down on my bed, and began to sob violently. My servant, who had acted as my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer