John Henry Newman

...That context was of party strife within the Church of England that was the sectarian equivalent of a blood sport...

...The patient is beyond analysis, though, and Turner's hand is less sure here than it is in his situating of Newman within the context of party controversy, where he is an unerring guide...

...There was a dynamic at work within English Protestant Christianity of this time in which even to begin to advocate a Catholic position was to invite rejection...

...the virginal but doomed younger sister idolized by her brother...

...He may never have intended, may not have wanted, to become a Roman Catholic...

...But once he dared to raise the standard of Catholicism as a challenge to evangelical religion and would not draw back, his contemporaries drove him beyond the pale of English Christianity...

...Indeed, at the time, Newman was condemned by the right-thinking for his skepticism as well as for his Catholicism...

...It will not help "the cause," and those who think that Newman must always have been a saint will resent it...

...Unfortunately, this will be the main point of reaction to this book...

...his misogyny...

...That is to say, he reads the Newman of the tracts and the controversial writings of the thirties and forties, and he reads the letters...

...They attacked spokesmen for evangelical theology at Oxford, like R. D. Hamp-den, in ways that remind one of Joe McCarthy...

...Indeed, the question is, did he have any choice but to enter the Church of Rome...

...the rebellious younger brothers who rejected the authority of their elder...

...They came to hate evangelicalism as a heresy and a sham that sent souls to hell for failure in obedience to divine law, because evangelicalism confused fervor with holiness...

...The Apologia was written in 1864 in response to an attack on Newman's veracity by the hapless Charles Kingsley...

...If there is an aspect of Newman's experience in the Church of England of which Turner might have taken greater account, it is this...

...I had, however, not read any part of it prior to this review, and so have come to it with fresh, and, as I hope the review demonstrates, objective judgment...

...Yet the events described in the Apologia happened twenty to thirty years before Newman wrote about them, and anyone who has tried a hand at memoir will know the distorting lens through which the passage of time-to say nothing of the agenda of the moment (in Newman's case, the need to justify himself to his coreligionists)-casts our memories...

...Turner's great contribution is to see the young Newman in context...

...Frank Turner reads Newman as if the Apologia had never been written...

...The Newman who appears here is a much less attractive although perhaps a much more human figure than the omniscient and irenic figure of the Apologia and afterwards...

...Newman and his friends themselves formed a party within the church, but one that appealed to Catholic tradition against Protestant private judgment and to apostolic succession against the dissenting notion of the invisible church...

...Love him or hate him-and, of course, most people today love him-you must view Newman, especially the young Newman on the road to conversion, through the prism of the Apologia: that is, until Frank M. Turner's John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion...

...Advocacy of Catholic belief or practice within the church was qualitatively different from advocacy of any other theological or devotional position...

...Whether they lived before or after the Reformation, Catholics were apostates and their church the antichrist...

...the rejection of followers who dared to marry: there is, it cannot be doubted, rich material here for psychologizing...

...The young Newman's vision of Catholic Christianity was never Roman Catholicism, and was, in some ways, as individualistic as the oddest and most idiosyncratic breakaway sect...

...Newman became a Roman Catholic because his project of establishing a party within the church or a sect outside of it could not succeed...

...Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., is dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Bronx, Neiv York, and associate professor of history...

...His most recent work has been on the Roman Catholic community in late-nineteenth-century Britain...

...Perhaps never before in literary history was such overwhelming rhetorical firepower directed against such a puny target...

...Rather, it was the consequence of his failure to rally a party within or outside the church to stand against evangelicalism and for Catholic Christianity as Newman understood it...

...His followers either drew back or preceded him to Rome, and when Newman himself submitted to Father Dominic Bar-beri on October 9,1845, it was because he was alone and had literally nowhere else to turn...

...In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Frank Turner is a former teacher of mine, with whom I have discussed this book- ten years in the making!-on a number of occasions, for which he has kindly thanked me in the acknowledgements...

...But that will be to miss the point of the book entirely...

...From this point of view, there seems almost an inevitability to Newman's recourse to Roman Catholicism...

...Yet, it is precisely the compelling prose of the Apologia-anything so powerfully written must be true!-that has led Newman scholars, as well as a host of admiring readers, to accept it as the truth...

...Hatred of Catholicism-and, of course, Newman's contemporaries made no fine distinctions between Roman and non-Roman varieties thereof-was deeper and more powerful than we in a more ecumenical age can easily credit...

...Jeffrey von Arx Hew major intellectual figures have been so fortunate in controlling the way posterity viewed them as John Henry Newman...

...the lifelong quest to establish himself as the leader of a community of younger celibate males...

...Practitioners of their religion were either sunk in superstition or hypocrites and impostors...

...Anglican bishops and Oxford D.D.s, as well as the average Protestant within or outside the church, considered Catholics idolaters-not really Christians at all...

...The most controversial and most problematic aspect of Turner's portrait of Newman is certainly his psychological conjectures about his subject...

...Turner makes the further point that Newman's attacks on private judgment and the belief that the meaning of Scripture was self-evident placed him in company with Victorian doubters and skeptics, like his own brother, Frank, and others whose questioning of Protestant verities led them into agnosticism...

...In any case, it is not clear that Turner needs the psy-chohistory to make the central, radical, compelling point of the book: that Newman's conversion to Roman Catholicism had little to do with the intellectual and spiritual process described in the Apologia...

...The failed, bankrupt father...

...Newman was able to set the terms of the interpretation of his life in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, much as Augustine did in the Confessions...

...The triumph of evangelicalism both within and without the church in the first decades of the nineteenth century was bound to raise a reaction, and Newman and his friends- John Keble, E. B. Pusey, and Hurrell Froude-provided it...