Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (27 page)

If the world has its fascinations, so surely has the Altar of the living God; if its pomps and vanities dazzle, so much more should the vision of Angels ascending and descending on

the heavenly ladder; if sights of earth intoxicate, and its music is a spell upon the soul, behold Mary pleads with us, over against them, with her chaste eyes, and offers the Eternal Child for our caress, while sounds of cherubim are heard all round singing from out the fulness of the Divine Glory.
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While the pioneer Oratorians under Newman’s leadership were now hard at pastoral work in Birmingham, Faber remained behind at St Wilfrid’s as novice master, and Robert Coffin as Rector. Faber was not happy with the separation, and continued to urge that the Oratory should be in London rather than in Birmingham. He believed that Newman should be in the nation’s capital, evangelising the social elite, while he, Faber, should be engaged in wider pastoral care of the ordinary people, conducting missions in London parishes. Newman was keen on a London Oratory, but he was determined that having made his start in Birmingham, he would continue there. It looked certain that there would be two Oratories rather than one. In April Newman bought a 21-year lease for

£400 on premises in King William Street (now William IV Street), off the Strand in London. Faber was to be ‘the acting Superior’, and the London Oratory was accordingly founded on 31 May 1849, Wiseman preaching in the morning, and Newman in the evening. In a note on the ‘colonisation’ from Birmingham to London, Newman declared that the Faber group would get ‘the
Metropolis
, the centre of political and ecclesiastical influence, instead of factory youths and snobbish intellects’.
⁷
St Wilfrid’s, Cotton, after long drawn-out acrimonious discussion with the Earl of Shrewsbury, would be handed over eventually to the Passionist Order.

Newman continued as Superior of both the London and Birmingham Oratories which led to tensions between him and Faber. Directing and administer-ing affairs in London from Birmingham, with frequent visits between the two cities and his own energetic programme of preaching and writing, was never going to be easy; nor was the task of managing Faber. Faber and his confreres soon became a familiar sight in central London, parading around in their soutanes and sweeping clerical cloaks. A comment of Newman’s about the effect of an Oratorian novice spreading out ‘his cloke [
sic
] like a peacock’s’
⁸
in the street, suggests an awareness of potential for clerical high camp as well as unnecessary provocation of Protestant sensibilities.

Meanwhile Faber’s volatile personality made him a difficult head of house and an impossible subordinate to manage at a distance. He had a catalogue of bigotries. An example was the case of two Irish priests in his charge – Robert Whitty and James McQuoin. Newman was keen that the London Oratory should include men who were Irish-born Catholics as well as converts. Faber, however, had a deep prejudice against Hibernians, as he liked to call them. He whinged about the smells and lice of the Irish poor deterring ‘respectable’

members of the congregation in the confessional. Faber insisted that ‘weakness and treachery are next door to each other; in an Hibernian they are synonyms

… Why even the civility of an Irish man riles me.’
⁹
In the event Whitty and McQuion (whom Faber characterised as ‘fickle and shilly shallying’) departed. The tensions would continue between the Father Superior Newman and Acting Superior Faber, as Faber swung between abrasive complaints and obsequious gestures of affection. A frustrated Newman wrote to him: ‘Save me from such affection and devotion, and give me a little more tenderness for others, and a little less self will.’
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Newman, while mainly irenic and reluctant to be firm, was capable of decisiveness when pressed to his limit: ‘I am quite conscious always of not liking to tell people how keenly I feel things, both from tenderness to them, and again from a consciousness that, when I once begin, I am apt to let out and blow them out of the water.’
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We get an insight into Newman’s manner of dealing, in last resort, with individuals in his community, as well as a flavour of the teething problems at Alcester Street in a letter written in April 1849. He is complaining to Father Dalgairns, who was about to depart for London to join Faber, about his indulgence towards a gang of larky teenage ‘converts’ who had made free of the Birmingham Oratory house, stealing and causing damage. Dalgairns had written to Newman on the previous day: ‘I wish you now as an act of charity to tell me plainly where I have been wrong.’ Newman obliged him, frequently addressing him as ‘charissime’, yet with an undisguised iciness, given the context:

I think then, Charissime, that you have a great fault, which, if I put it harshly, I should call, contempt of others … You never asked my advice from the first in any thing. You took up certain youths … You filled the rooms with them … I went into the guest room soon after we came, and to my surprise saw a party of them by themselves; I rushed into Chapel and told you, thinking you did not know of it; you told me to let them alone … I was obliged to take the carpet up; you laughed, when you heard I was putting locks on the closets and advised locking the doors … I found them strumming on the Piano, they ate the sugar and the jam and stole the candles; you laughed when it was complained of. F. Ambrose ran up to me, ‘What
am
I to do? I can’t hear a confession in my room, for the noise of the boys in F. Bernard’s’. They flung about the ink in the guest room, broke the chairs, squandered coal and gas, broke into the closet, took out the Crucifix, and put it back head downwards … You gave them the lay brothers’ books, and they made away with them … They took to playing tricks with the gas. I say nothing of their rudeness to me personally which you would naturally try to prevent …
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On settling in London, Dalgairns would make common cause with Faber in resisting Newman’s view that Oratorians should be men of learning and teachers as well as pastors. Faber had roundly informed Newman that intellectualism in the Oratorian movement was a ‘French’ aptitude, which would end in

Jansenism. Faber and Dalgairns insisted that Oratorians were more at home hearing confessions than reading in a library. Dalgairns wrote to Newman: ‘Since I have been a priest my intellect is gone; gradually what was once a pleasure has become a pain. I loathe literature; I am not even easy if I dip into a modern historical book. It troubles my mind, and I am forced to mention it in confession. Saints’ lives on the contrary fill me with peace. In a word my intellect has disappeared.’
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The difference between Newman and Faber who had come to Catholicism from the Oxford Movement was that Newman saw the religious life in terms of growth and development, while Faber was moved by nostalgia, manifesting itself in authoritarianism. It is interesting that they disagreed even over the ideal number for an English Oratorian house. Newman insisted, contrary to Faber’s idea of a large community, that twelve should be the limit (and would have preferred even less – ‘6 children form a fair fire side’ as love ‘cannot exist among many’).
¹⁴
Long before the split Newman had declared to Faber, ‘I can’t command people about like so many soldiers or pieces of wood’.
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He had advised Faber that they should let ‘Providence, gently to work our separation … as fruit ripens on the tree and falls; you all force me to take a knife and cut it off. I repeat, I cannot fight with facts.’
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Here at the outset of his religious life as a Catholic Newman was setting out principles that would guide his practical, intellectual and spiritual life. As he would put it in the
Idea of a University
, ‘I should not rely on sudden, startling effects, but on the slow, silent, penetrating, overpowering effects of patience, steadiness, routine, and perseverance’.
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The two Oratories were shearing apart, yet Newman, despite a busy schedule in Birmingham, continued to make frequent visits to the capital to preach and to lecture. In May of 1850 he gave the first of a series of lectures
On Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church
.

DIFFICULTIES OF ANGLICANS

The lectures on
Certain Difficulties
were principally aimed at Anglo-Catholics, and, as he explained, were intended ‘to remove impediments to the due action of the conscience, by removing those perplexities in the proof, which keep the intellect from being touched by its cogency, and give the heart an excuse for trifling with it’.
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Newman was demonstrating the multidimensional nature of conversion, emphasizing the role of imagination. In his letter to
The Times
on the Tamworth Reading Room quarrel, he had urged that ‘the heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination’. Newman now developed the argument further, warning that imagination in aid of religious understanding should be restrained in its exploitation:

We must not indulge our imagination, we must not dream: we must look at things as they are … we must not indulge our imagination in the view we take of the [Church of England] National Establishment. If we dress it up in an ideal form, as if it were something real … as if it were in deed and not only in name a Church, then indeed we may feel interest in it, and reverence towards it, and affection for it, as men have fallen in love with pictures, or knights in romance do battle for high dames whom they have never seen. Thus it is that students of the Fathers, antiquaries, and poets, begin by assuming that the body to which they belong is that of which they read in time past, and then proceed to decorate it with that majesty and beauty of which history tells, or which their genius creates.
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He goes on to explain that it is not so much imagination itself which is at fault, as its misdirection. In other words, his readings in Christian antiquity, leading to the formation of a shining idea of the Church, had originally been mistakenly applied to the Church of England, rather than to their true object – the Roman Catholic Church. It is not enough, he is saying, to nurture religious imagination in the search for truth; we must employ reason, to ensure that there is a correspondence between imagination and reality. Newman had worked through this process by drawing analogies between the present and the way in which the early Church strived to separate heresy from orthodoxy.

Newman’s purpose was to bring over to Rome the constituency of Anglicans who believed that they had found Catholicity within the English established Church. With a series of skilful metaphors, he pities these attempts to linger in a Christian community separated from the Mother Church, typical of which:

there is no lying, or standing, or sitting, or kneeling, or stooping there, in any possible attitude … when you would rest your head, your legs are forced out between the Articles, and when you would relieve your back, your head strikes against the Prayer Book; when, place yourselves as you will, on the right side or the left, and try to keep as still as you can, your flesh is ever being punctured and probed by Episcopate, laity, and nine-tenths of the Clergy …
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But he had a wider argument for the nurturing of religious imagination at all times and in all circumstances. Religious conviction he was saying, yet again, was not derived from logic and reason alone, nor could it be demonstrated through objective apologetics. It is an ‘ineffably cogent argument’, combining subjective imagination, reason, and common sense.

Yet common sense, reason, and a sense of the relationship between social good and morality, deserted Newman when he attempted, with preposterous exaggeration, to contrast the sacred nature of the Church of Rome, with the secular nature of the established Church of England. The Catholic Church, he wrote:

holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse … she would rather save the soul of one single wild bandit of Calabria, or whining beggar of Palermo, than draw a hundred lines of railroad through the length of Italy …
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