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John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion

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Having read a number of Newman's greatest works, including the Apologia, Development of Christian Doctrine, The Grammar of Assent, the Oxford University Sermons, and a number of biographies, I could not find the real John Henry Newman in Turner's work. This would be a very poor place to begin if one is looking for a Newman biography. Turner makes Newman out to be a confused man, yet Newman is one of the least confused people I have ever read. It is abundantly clear that Turner cannot accept Newman's eventual rejection of evangelical Christianity. As a result, he tries to read into it a variety of historical and psychological factors that really tell us a great deal about Turner but little about Newman. Turner's anti-Catholic bias is quite strong. Turner does not take the deepest movements in Newman's mind and heart seriously. He cannot, therefore, respect Newman's proclivity to live according to the evangelical counsels. Turner writes off Newman's deepening conversion as though it were some strange psychological idiosyncrasy, refering to it as a desire to live in a community with celibate males.

Definitely not recommended.

Turner proposes that the supposedly unifying feature of Newman's life-the philosophical critique of liberalism-is in fact an invention of the later Catholic Newman, a myth which Newman used to justify the behavior of his prior Anglican self, and which has been perpetuated by sympathetic Catholic hagiographers. According to Turner, a proper historical examination reveals that Newman's activity in the Oxford Movement was motivated more by political, psychological and personal preoccupations, and an emotional antipathy for Evangelical faith, rather than an intellectual critique of "liberal" ideas. But Turner's judgment is not so much the conclusion of historical research as the direct implication his historiographical assumptions. The integrity of the "continuity thesis" regarding the critique of liberalism must be ruled out by Turner a priori, because his historical method leads him to treat any sign of intellectual coherence as implying a "teleology" and "inevitability" directly opposed to historical "contingency." The first irony is that in trying to be a more authentic historian of contingency, Turner reads Newman as a captive of his psychological urges and political interests-in other words, as precisely the opposite of the sort of rational agent who, having made intelligent and free choices, can thus be said to have a genuine history. The second irony is that articulating a proper understanding of human agency and historical knowledge is one of the central concerns of Newman's intellectual critique of liberalism. We may say of Turner what Newman once said of his own obstinate brother: "That I could be contemplating questions of Truth & Falsehood never entered into his imagination!" (quoted by Turner, p. 615).

One cannot help asking how a 724 page book of such unsupportable pretension can get itself published. Then, again, not much should surprise us these days. The author, formerly Provost at Yale University, is well-connected, after all. The jacket carries four accolades from what appear prima facie to be well-credentialed authorities. I say "prima facie," because they turn out on closer inspection, either to have published nothing of any significance (if at all) on Newman themselves, or to be as bent on besmirching and burying Newman's memory as the author. One senses that Newman still poses a colossal challenge for many within the Protestant texbook tradition of ecclesiastical history, whether Protestants of the conservative evangelical variety or the liberal "Christianity-and-water" variety one finds here. To the former Newman is a challenge because of the transparent honesty and programmatic reflection with which he agonized his way out of his evangelical Protestant background and Oxford Tractarian movement--against the overwhelming anti-Catholic cultural biases of his British milieu--into the Catholic Faith. To the latter, he is an offense because of his utterly sincere supernaturalism and belief in objective and absolute truth, which sticks like a thorn in the side of their urbane, self-congratulatory naturalism, subjectivism and relativism. Turner shows utterly no appreciation or sympathy for these dimensions of Newman's convictions. Instead, one finds in this pretended biographer of a dogmatist a haughty contempt for all dogma (tenets of faith proclaimed by the Church as supernaturally revealed). Even Keble and Pusey are portrayed as sickly souls, which is more than any Anglicans worth their salt should tolerate. Turner consistently plays fast and loose with his facts, marshalling his historical data selectively in support of his foregone conclusions. He says nothing, for example, about those numerous eminent (and Protestant) Victorians who sided with Newman in his argument (in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua) against Kingsley's claim that he was insincere. Instead, quixotically tilting at a colossus of a man far greater than himself, Turner tries to belittle and besmirch a mind far greater than his-- a mind described by the Victorian Gladstone as "sharp enough to cut the diamond, and bright as the diamond which it cuts." Turner's volume is ineluctably self-serving, iniquitously malicious, incorrigibly biased, and irreparably flawed. For a thorough critique, see Stanley L. Jaki's review in the New Oxford Review (May 2003), pp. 37-46.

The danger of biography was well put by John Henry Newman in a letter to his sister, Jemina: 'Biographers varnish; they assign motives; they conjecture feelings; they interpret Lord Burleigh's nods; they palliate or defend' (Martin, Brian, p. 152).

To me, it is the height of irony that the very topic which provoked Newman to write his famous autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, that being the sincerity and fastidious evolution in thinking behind his famous conversion to Catholicism, is now being brought up yet again.

Do yourself a favor and read the Apologia. Remember that it was written and published by Newman while he had another twenty years to live, and while the principles involved in and aware of the details of his life were still alive and able to comment and respond.

In fact, the Apologia was a 'bestseller,' brought Newman great fame and a kind of intellectual redemption among the intellectuals in England, if not around the world, and was in some measure a contributing event to his election to the Cardinalate.

Read the Apologia, and see if it does not 'ring true.' Then if you have the time read Turner if you must, and judge for youself.

Twaddle. A pile of half-baked Freudianism and psychobabble. Frank Turner has got to be some aging hippie whose only hermeneutic structure is the pile of discredited ideas he randomly encountered on the Ashram, or munching Space Cakes.

This whole exercise advances the thesis that the Tractarians didn't believe what they preached, did it only for economic means, or for (repressed) homosexual agendas. If a Marxist-Freudian cliché has been missed, please alert the media....opps, wasn't really able to get anything in there about racism, could you Turner?

The book is about the flaws of Newman and the Tractarians, of which a fair criticism is overdue. But this book isn't it. In brief, here are John Henry Newman's flaws: he was fussy and precious, his sermons could be tedious long after his point was obvious, he had an immense sense of self-importance, he was a prig, he was boring, he was abstract when he could have been direct, his sense of Holy and English Propriety were nearly coincidental, the arc of his conversion cycle could be characterized as unstable, he was scrupulous (a venial sin), and his points of thought on the Incarnation are so ethereal anyone reading them is right back in the mind-body problems (I always think Newman seeing some sort of Monty Python sketch on the "Holy Placenta" would have done him some good. That, or knowing that dead men evacuate their bowels and that is what the deposition from the Cross smelled like). In other words, he was a Victorian through and through.

Here are what Newman's flaws were not: he wasn't dishonest about his work and thought, he didn't care for money or the security of a "living," he had no problems with intellectual or spiritual competition for winning souls, he wasn't a closeted and repressed homosexual, he wasn't lying about his conversion experience(s), and Newman did not take care of his own soul in some cavalier fashion in subjection to his brilliant career.

Newman was a flawed soul, in need of God's grace. But he was a wise man who shared his wisdom and his sincere efforts at holiness. This book reflects none of that and instead is a pile of speculation built on the flimsiest foundations ever advanced. To call it scholarship is to shame the word. This is a collection of lies and speculation not seen since "The Protocols" or the tirades of Jim Jones's People's Temple. Even honest atheist reviewers can spot a hatchet job on Newman by Turner. It sadly isn't even bad enough to be funny, just another bunch of hippie stew. When will this generation pass away?

One of the assertions of this work, that Newman's conversion from the Church of England to the Church of Rome was not inevitable, is underwhelming. Well, yes, John Henry Newman could have chosen any or several of myriad other paths than the one he followed from Anglicanism to (Roman) Catholicism. But Professor Turner builds scant support for rejecting Newman's own rationale for his journey and instead proffers his own tendentious speculations. In "First Things: the Journal of Religion and Public Life" ("Newman's Liberal Problem," April 2003), Fr. Edward T. Oakes, S.J., shoots and autopsies some of Professor Turner's other flights of speculation. Better to read Newman's self-analyses ("Apologia Pro Vita Sua" or "An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine") than Turner's flighty psychoanalysis.

In 1845 the Reverend John Henry Newman left the Anglican Church of his birth. Why?***

He at once joined, without notable enthusiasm, the Church of Rome, which he had attacked for two decades and which he believed still in need of serious reform. Why?***

And why do this on October 9, 1845, when he had dithered for nearly four years?***

These questions are raised by Yale history professor Frank B. Turner in JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION.***

Newman lived from 1801 until 1890, for the first half Anglican, for the second half Roman Catholic. He had been strongly tempted by agnosticism or even atheism before a life-transforming conversion to Evangelical Christianity at age 15. Staunchly Evangelical as an Oxford undergraduate, he slowly gave up its Calvinistic theology under influence of colleagues of the Oriel College Common Room, moving from Low Church to High Church views. Then, under the spell of his younger colleague Hurrell Froude, Newman became first anti-Evangelical and ultimately anti-Protestant while finding ever more signs of an ideal, mystical Church Catholic in its flawed Roman incarnation.***

Frank Turner contends that, in his 1864 APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, Newman put a questionable spin on his Anglican years and the reasons and the timing for becoming Roman Catholic. APOLOGIA left the impression that God was leading Newman from an early age towards peace and fulfillment in the bosom of Rome. Newman's artful re-interpretation for decades held the field. But growing accessibility of his more than 20,000 letters and more attention by scholars to contemporaries' view of Newman as an ecclesiastical wrecking ball within the Anglican Church gave Professor Turner a plausible basis for his revisionist interpretation of why and when Newman became Roman Catholic.***

Turner portrays an increasingly sceptical, confused Newman doing everything he can to stay a loyal Anglican. He also points to a wider Victorian "conversion" milieu to show that deep inside his conscience Newman remained to the end of his Anglican days Evangelical and Protestant in his claimed right to a private judgment and to an autonomous conscience directly linked to a loving God leading him on through severe trials. There was more emotion and personal frustration behind Newman's unconvincing and unenthusiastic conversion to Rome than other historians and biographers commonly assert.***

Turner sketches Newman's ever changing day to day relationships: with his parents and five siblings, with friends (primarily male), mentors, critics, church authorities and with his books. From these relations emerges Newman's vision of a God-intended, visible church authoritatively teaching truth and providing channels of holiness. Newman is presented as often in communication at one and the same time on the same issue or decision with God, Church, personal speculations, friends, enemies, family and his Victorian milieu. To Professor Turner Newman is temperamentally a counter-puncher, reacting to his milieu rather than proactively dominating it. Newman is described as Protean, indeterminate--a kind of Aristotelian prime matter passively receiving impressions and forms from everything in his busy daily life of prayer, penance and controversy. Whenever he acquires new friends (e.g. Richard Whately, Hurrell Froude) he is also likely to acquire new ideas and changes of heart and mind. ***

Will Newman or won't he--i.e., become Roman Catholic? That was asked by thousands in England and elsewhere when Newman, Froude, Keble and soon Pusey launched the Oxford or Tractarian Movement and with 14 others wrote 90 Tracts for the Times between 1833 and 1841.***

Professor Turner emphasizes both Newman's battle against Protestantism and his derivative but growing sympathy for contemporary Roman Catholicism. Newman's becoming Roman was never inevitable. Had Anglican Bishops not rejected Newman's Tract 90 and made it clear that England was a Protestant nation in vigorous opposition to Rome, had he found more warm personal sympathy and more public support from 1841 to 1845, had his younger monastically inclined coterie not moved so strongly towards and into Rome and away from him as their leader, then Newman would likely have remained within the established Church of England, warts and all.***

Newman was also well aware of other viable, socially workable choices taken by eminent Victorians. He might become Methodist or join a dissenting body. He might form his own sect. He might become a sceptical worldling. To many observers Newman had already tailored a private religion for himself. What drove him to Rome? In large measure mere contingencies, according to Turner. In the end an ecclesiastical court decision against one of his younger disciples, the prospect of a new, less sympathetic Anglican bishop arriving in Oxford, the conversions of his young disciples, such proved the external signs which the perennially Evangelistic Newman demanded of God to prove that it was time for Rome. Not on a planned timetable, but prematurely, shortly before completion of his great book on the development of Christian doctrine, Newman bolted. He simply cut and ran.***

This is a book for scholars. But it is so well written and concrete and moves along so deliberately that non-scholars with a couple of preparatory Newman studies under their belts can tackle it with pleasure and gain. In the end Frank Turner makes a fair case that Newman's transplanting himself into the Roman Church was neither inevitable nor entirely rational. Newman to the last moment enjoyed a range of other real choices. Had he followed his head more than his heart, Newman might have turned out very differently from the icon who is today's Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman, Father of the Second Vatican Council.***

The book is long. Its arguments are complex, its speculations many, tantalizing and not always persuasive. It could use but does not have a five page executive summary. Its great merit is to compel Newman scholars to revisit their sources in order to challenge Turner's "what ifs."-OOO-

I had only known of Cardinal Newman as a Catholic, so I was fascinated by his Anglican background. The book is very good at conveying the sense of his struggle over conversion.