Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (19 page)

The day was organized along monastic lines. The community observed a ‘greater silence’ from seven-thirty in the evening until two in the afternoon the following day. Rising at five in the morning, four hours were set aside for ‘devotions’, including Matins, Lauds and Compline, and nine hours for study. The rumour went around that the members of the littletons group, excepting New-man, were already Catholics. A newspaper asserted that Newman had founded an ‘Anglo-Catholic Monastery’ comprising a chapel, ‘cells of dormitories’, cloisters, and a refectory. Newman wrote to his bishop insisting that this was pure fantasy: ‘There is no chapel; no refectory, hardly a dining room or parlour. The “cloisters” are my shed connecting the cottages.’
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‘I do not understand what “cells of dormitories” means.’ The littletons experiment was clearly monastic by any standard, yet there was another crucial motive, of which Newman wrote as follows: ‘I am almost in despair of keeping men together. The only possible way is a monastery.’ Was this not an acknowledgment of his disappointment with former ‘men’ who had departed to get married? But the monastic regime, in his view, was also an expression of a religious impulse: ‘Men want an outlet for their devotional and penitential feelings – and if we do not grant it, to a dead certainty they will go where they can find it.’
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While it seemed more obvious to outsiders that Newman was moving inex-orably, by sheer power of the logic, towards Rome, he appeared to be taking an inordinate amount of time about it. He seemed conscious of the impatience of others. ‘I had a great dislike of paper logic’, he wrote.

For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quick-silver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? The whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did; as well might you say that I have arrived at the end of my journey, because I see the village church before me … Great acts take time.
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Newman continued to experiment with ‘Catholic’ spirituality using a medley of books of devotion. In
Loss and Gain
he registers the stock Anglican objections to Roman Catholic works. ‘But look at their books of devotion’, insisted Carl-ton, ‘they can’t write English.’ Then Reding, Newman’s young alter ego, smiles and responds: ‘They write English, I suppose, as classically as St John writes Greek.’
²¹
But coming around to that view point, written in 1847, took some time. The littletons retreats, lacking an experienced retreat director, proceeded with an amalgam of the
Ignatian Spiritual Exercises
, Rosmini’s
Manual
, and Stone’s
Spiritual Retreat
. We know that by 1841 he was reading St Francis de

Sales’s
Love of God
, and, later, his
Introduction to the Devout Life
, expurgated of the ‘Errors of the Popish Edition’.

Meanwhile he was energetically writing and publishing. Among the new publications was his
Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages
. The book falls into two parts, the first, on miracles in Scripture, was written in his early Oriel days (1825–1826), the second, on miracles throughout the history of Christianity (following the death of the last Apostle), was written later at littletons. Newman aimed to combat the Protestant rejection of miracles outside Scripture as typical of Romish decadence. In this sense it is an anti-Protestant, pro-Catholic essay. His logic is impeccable, at least for a believer: ‘What God did once’, he writes, ‘He is likely to do again.’
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He judges authentic miracles to be phenomena, with a deep religious connection, that defy natural explanation.

And while he had espoused the power of the religious imagination in the Tamworth letters to
The Times
, there is no place for the role of imagination in his essay on the authentically miraculous. ‘The force of imagination may also be alleged to account for the supposed visions and voices which some enthusiasts have believed they saw and heard; for instance, the trances of Montanus and his followers, the visions related by some of the Fathers, and those of the Romish saints.’ He speculates moreover that ‘Mahomet’s pretended night-journey to heaven’ might not unreasonably be ‘referred to the effects of disease or of an excited imagination’.
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The essay was widely castigated by Protestant critics, not least for the examples of miraculous authenticity he cited in the final chapters: the prayers by the Thundering Legion that relieved a drought; St Helena’s discovery of the True Cross; St Gregory Thaumaturge’s miraculous alteration of the flow of a river.

If Newman’s interest in ecclesiastical miracles indicated his taste for Roman Catholic culture, so did a new preoccupation with the lives of the saints. Dur-ing this time he encouraged his young men, following the cue of Frederick Faber, who had been translating the hagiographies of Continental saints, to write up the lives of the British saints as way of exploring the ancient and authentic Catholicism of the island race. Signs, wonders and miracles mingled in the thoughts and conversations of the community at littletons. Newman himself wrote the lives of Saint Ediwald and St Gundleas, and co-authored a life of St Bettelin. James Froude, younger brother of Hurrell, took on the life of St Neot, a task that may well have sown the seeds of his later agnosticism, as pointed out in Herbert Paul’s biography of him (
Life of Froude
, 1905). In his
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey would exploit gleefully Paul’s account, including Froude’s remarks about his researches into Saint Patrick: ‘St Patrick I found once lighted a fire with icicles’, Froude had written, ‘changed a French marauder into a wolf, and floated to Ireland on an altar stone. I thought it nonsense. I found it even-

tually uncertain whether Patricius was not a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as existed.’
²⁴
At the end of his version of the life of St Neot, Froude famously added: ‘this is all, and perhaps rather more than all that is known of the life of the blessed St Neot.’

MARY, PATTERN OF FAITH

On 23 May 1842, in St Mary’s Church, Bishop Richard Bagot of Oxford had declared publicly against Newman’s
Tract 90
, which had sought to remove any deep and permanent enmity between the Church of Rome and the Church of England. It was not the first explicit attack on the Tractarians. Pusey, for example, had been banned from preaching to the university because of a sermon he had delivered promoting the doctrine of transubstantiation – the belief that the bread and wine changes substantially into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ at the words of the consecration in the Eucharist.

Now Bishop Bagot tackled head on Newman’s claim that there was nothing in the 39 Articles that drove a wedge between the two Churches:

I have already expressed my opinion, that [Tract 90] was objectionable, and likely to disturb the peace of the Church. I thought so last year, and I think so still. I deeply regret its publication … and I cannot reconcile myself to a system of interpretation, which is so subtle, that by it the [39] Articles may be made to mean anything or nothing.
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Newman, who was present during the bishop’s charges, was deeply upset since the bishop had assured him that no further criticism would be made of the tract provided that it was to be the last.

On the Feast of the Purification (also known as Candelmas), 2 February 1843, in the second year of his littletons retirement, Newman preached a sermon that proved to be the last of the series published as
Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford
. Its theme was ‘the theory of developments in religious doctrine’, and it contained important seeds of ideas on faith and reason that he would work up into an entire book the following year. Development of doctrine would be the key to understanding how later beliefs, that appeared to be accretions and corruptions, had existed in embryo form in Scripture and antique Christianity.

His text, taken from Luke 2:19, was ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’. Taking Mary as his exemplar, was of course, a tribute to Roman Catholicism, and a significant indication of his Romeward tendency. ‘St Mary’, he said, ‘is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth.’ None are spared the obligation, as Mary taught, of balancing belief with reason, reason with belief, assenting, developing, loving, reverencing,

investigating, weighing, defining belief, as does the Church, its theologians, and doctors down the ages – and as should the ‘unlearned’: nobody, he is saying, is spared the responsibility of approaching faith with one’s whole being – or one’s whole imagination:

She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she developes it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.
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Deep in this richly textured sermon is the proposal that we imagine religious truths quite differently from the way in which we know the tangible world about us. While echoing the thought in the Tamworth letters – ‘the heart is commonly reached not through reason but the imagination’ – he appeals to the idea of a powerful religious symbolism which partakes in what it renders intelligible: ‘The metaphors by which [supernatural truths] are signified are not mere symbols of ideas which exist independently of them, but their meaning is coincident and identical with the ideas.’
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As Newman sees it, the Church, like Mary, ‘ponders’ Scriptural utterance in its heart. With remarkable elasticity of thought and imagination, he analogously expands the idea of authentic doctrinal development to parallels in physics, music and even mathematics. ‘While [
calculi
] answer’, he writes, ‘we can use them just as if they were the realities which they represent, and without thinking of those realities; but at length our instrument of discovery issues in some great impossibility or contradiction, or what we call in religion, a mystery.’
²⁸
In the ambit of physics he notes that its laws, ‘as we consider them, are themselves but generalizations of economical exhibitions, inferences from figure and shadow, and not more real than the phenomena from which they are drawn’:

Scripture, for instance, says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary; and science, that the earth moves, and the sun is comparatively at rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is the very truth, till we know what motion is?
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In a final reflection, he considers music as an instance ‘of an outward and earthly form, or economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified’. He asks: ‘What science brings so much out of so little?’ He goes on:

Is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen

emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself ? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter, – though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them.
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