A New Newman?

...Benedict's churchly monk than the leader of a sectarian coven, as much a debtor to his evangelical roots as a challenge to evangelical religion...

...One of the main themes of his 1993 Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life is that modern historians have persistently separated religious and social history, ignoring the intersections of the two for most nineteenth-century English people...

...Shortly after that he went to Oxford, where he became a part, and eventually far more than a part, of the famous "Oxford Movement," which was determined to reform the Anglican church in an anglo-catholic—and even Roman Catholic—direction...

...Now, in a volume called Newman, the American Jesuit, Cardinal Avery Dulles, undertakes a focused reading of Newman's theology...

...Such thin readings of the Apologia trap Turner in various ways...

...It's true, as Dulles once again points out, that Newman focused more on issues of philosophical theology and the Church than on the traditional doctrines of the Trinity and Jesus Christ...

...The questions of the time remain unanswered...

...Frank Turner needed a much more massive 750 pages to make the case that who Newman is today depends crucially on who he was yesterday...

...So, for example, Turner finds Newman and other "Tractarians" needlessly polemical, pressing a Catholic case in a way that could only have been done in a Protestant context...

...In his time, as Newman saw, it was "almost unavoidable" that his conversion seem a violation of "Christian simplicity and uprightness"—if only because of the unchristian divisiveness the public debate that his conversion created...

...Turner is not the first skeptic about Newman, but his way of questioning the convert is quite original...

...Turner rightly wonders how these events affected Newman...

...Turner candidly admits that this last comment is "speculative and tenden-tious"—to which the response must be: Yes, it is...

...The second party, the liberals, wanted to dissolve this union of church and state...

...But we also have readings of Newman that focus on his calls for religious and intellectual freedom as well as a tradition that has to change...

...He has long resisted, for example, histories that isolate "religion" and "science" from each other...

...Turner admits that we know almost nothing about why Newman chose the celibate path, and he acknowledges that Newman's remarks about love and affection for men express "an unfulfilled desire for emotional intimacy" and have "no hint of sexual relation or contact...

...The result is a revival of much of the traditional understanding of John Henry Newman...

...Newman was, in sum, an anti-evangelical monk and a founder of pluralistic skepticism—but not, at least primarily, a Catholic...

...In contrast to many of his friends, "Newman became a Roman Catholic so that he could continue to remain a monk, and if possible, a monk surrounded by his Littlemore male friends...

...Or did the council call Catholics to reform as a way of becoming more up-to-date, more modern or even postmodern—a liberal strategy...

...Indeed, the Apologia pro Vita Sua was written twenty years after Newman's conversion to refute the charge that Newman had not been truthful— indeed, that he, and perhaps all Catholics, not only held untrue beliefs but were systematic liars...

...Newman even "imposed a divine pattern upon events that he could no longer influence or determine...

...Along the way, Dulles gives a more accurate reading of Newman's theology and intellectual life than Turner can...

...We have versions of Newman that focus on his dramatic readings of Scripture in his sermons and his reading of tradition as an organic whole—a key precursor of the theologies of such contemporaries as John Paul II...

...Newman began, of course, as an Anglican, and, according to Newman's own version, the nineteenth-century Church of England contained four parties: conservatives, liberals, evangelicals, and catholics...

...As Cardinal Dulles explains, "Modernists, liberals, and theological conservatives can all find texts from his writings to support their preferred theses...

...He was not a Catholic like William George Ward and Henry Manning, who were equally dogmatic but more accommodating to the evangelical and liberal world of domesticity and business...

...But Turner has a remedy...

...Interestingly, Vatican II also opened the door to new forms of Catholic dissent, and the new dissenters equally claimed Newman as their precursor...

...Perhaps even a saint...

...One of the few times Turner believes Newman shows "mature, even incisive, self-knowledge" is when the young Newman in 1826 writes "I am full of art and deceit, double dealing, display...

...His brother Charles was a follower of religious socialist Robert Owen, and his brother Francis embraced a more radically evangelical way of life and eventually became Unitarian...

...Indeed, as Dulles points out, Newman himself knew his continued debt to his evangelical heritage...

...According to his autobiographical Apologia pro Vita Sua, however, he was also influenced both by "superstitious" Catholic practices such as crossing himself in the dark and by the liberal skepticism common among intellectuals in his day...

...Even more extreme is Turner's suggestion that the enduring tragedy of his sister Mary's death helps explain how Newman overcame his difficulty with Catholic Marian devotions: If devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary did not violate the distinction between Creator and creature, it "seems possible that" his intense affection for his sister Mary did not violate familial relationships...

...And yet, this is also where Turner's account begins to break apart...

...Or that his early sermons reveal an eldest child looking for praise for his ascetical obedience as well as condemnation of his brothers' disobedience...

...According to Turner, the path Newman took depended on two aspirations, to Catholicism and to monastic celibacy, "with Catholicism more often than not serving the goal of monasticism...

...Turner's first Newman—the self-deceived celibate in a male ghetto that needs a more immanent God—provides more ammunition for liberal than conservative Catholics...

...Unlike the conservatives, these liberals held theological views as well as political, although their God was (Newman thought) a false god, the god of "deism," and they marched beneath the banner of what Newman called "false liberty of thought...

...Still, Turner's John Henry Newman is extremely useful in laying out the historical conditions in which the Englishman's conversion occurred...

...His other works—particularly The Idea of a University, Grammar of Assent, and the long narrative poem The Dream of Gerontius—became enduring contributions to the intellectual life of the West...

...It also flew in the face of Victorian evangelical assumptions about marriage, family, domesticity, and business...

...But is it really the case that "the driving psychic force" behind Newman's critique of evangelical religion comes from his family...

...As it happens, Newman himself "displayed a talent for modest entrepre-neurship" that enabled him to spurn Anglican orthodoxy even while enjoying its economic and social advantages...

...The famous Victorian convert may well be a different sort of Catholic—philo-sophically more Aristotelian than empiricist or idealist, more like St...

...Avery Dulles's Newman ends with a comparison of Newman and Vatican II on many issues, concluding— with typical Dullesian balance—that "they often supplement each other, offering alternative perspectives that can be helpful for facing the problems of our day...

...He contends, for instance, that Newman's Apologia "imposed a structure of spiritual search on what in actuality had been a series of contingent events infused with enormous personal confusion, anger, despondency, and mixture of other motives...

...This means, of course, that Newman got himself wrong in his Apologia pro Vita Sua—which will seem equally implausible to modern Catholics and pluralistic skeptics...

...Still, Turner is one of the premier historians of Victorian England...

...BY JAMES J. BUCKLEY John Henry Newman is modernity's most famous Catholic convert—and, at least until Frank Turner's John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion appeared late last year, the prevailing wisdom was that Newman managed in his conversion to become a very good Catholic, indeed...

...Still, in opening up a thinker who is neither a liberal nor a conservative Catholic, Turner offers us resources for rediscovering the radical Newman...

...Curiously, Turner imposes his own quite determinate teleology on Newman's story...

...By a series of "accumulated probabilities" narrated in his Apologia, he overcame his difficulties with certain Catholic practices (devotion to Mary and the saints, in particular) and became a Catholic in 1845...

...The death of his sister Mary in 1828 was a deep and enduring sadness...

...Every conversion ever recorded tells of contingency after contingency...

...Newman soon began reconsidering his attitudes toward the Roman Catholic faith...

...Unlike Dulles's book, Turner's volume ends with Newman's 1845 conversion, twenty years prior to the Apologia...

...God's providence, one recollects, often consists of writing straight with crooked lines...

...James J. Buckley is professor of theology and dean of the college of arts and sciences at Loyola College in Baltimore...

...Newman underwent "one indeterminate metamorphosis after another, with no certain teleologi-cal direction necessarily leading him into the Roman Catholic communion...

...The movement published a series of "tracts," and when one of Newman's tracts argued that it was possible to give a Catholic interpretation of Anglicanism's Thirty-Nine Articles (promulgated in 1563 as part of the Church of England's Elizabethan Settlement), resistance was vigorous...

...It's true, of course, that Newman challenged the Protestant empire, but he did so while leaving evangelical religion thriving in the home and the public square...

...At 176 pages, Dulles's Newman is a clear, concise, and insightful survey of Newman's ideas...

...Newman was born in 1801 to a conservative family...

...Benedict and violently overthrown by the Protestant Reformation...

...But Turner does not provide the extended analysis of the Apologia that he needs to make his case...

...What Turner finds missing in Newman's theology of development of doctrine and practice is "a significantly articulated consideration" of the Holy Spirit...

...John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion opens with a wonderfully thick description of England's domination by evangelical Protestant culture—and the book closes with what it conceives as the happy ending that evangelical religion is no longer dominant, thanks in part to unwitting Catholic skeptics like Newman...

...This is an intriguing aside...

...What Turner rightly understands is that Newman wrote for an audience that was suspicious of his conversion, and that we are not such an audience...

...Turner feels confident enough to offer Newman not just psychological advice, but theological advice as well...

...In any case, both sides appeal to Newman...

...Did Vatican II call Catholics to reform as a way of recovering the best of their traditions in Scripture and liturgy and theology—a conservative strategy...

...Although the evangelical party was, as Newman put it, "by far the most important" in his day, he nonetheless thought it "almost justifiable to believe that in the coming generation the religious world will be divided" between the deistical liberals and the catholics...

...German idealism shaped European evangelical theology from Friedrich Schleiermach-er in the nineteenth century to Karl Barth and Paul Tillich in the twenti-eth—as well as European Catholic theology from Johann Sebastian Drey and Johann Adam Mohler in the nineteenth century to Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner in the twentieth century...

...Of course, Turner could hardly avoid periodically mentioning the Apologia, which he finds sometimes correct, sometimes self-serving, and sometimes self-deceptive...

...But he also says that "it is by no means clear that Newman ever achieved that level of adult emotional development and personal confidence required for a committed relationship of love or sexuality...

...It was thus, as Turner says, within his own family that Newman encountered the "radical secularism and radical evangelicalism" he considered most dangerous to Christian faith...

...Barth and Balthasar were critical of modern efforts to make God a function of our social or psychological histories (one kind of "divine immanentism"), while Tillich and Rah-ner were more accommodating to such efforts...

...And it's true, as Dulles points out, that Newman considered himself even more a "controversialist" than a "theologian...

...This seems to make Turner more persuasive than Dulles in explaining Newman's career...

...Turner's second New-man—the Nietzschean skeptic about domesticity and business—will not please those who wish to be more accommodating to culture...

...But why cannot an authentic "spiritual search" include a series of contingent events...

...He thus helped create an English culture "that would be pluralistic religiously, morally, and intellectually, rather than exclusively Protestant in character...

...But in the Apologia Newman confessed that his behavior sometimes had "a mixture in it both of fierceness and of sport," which he regretted—even as he repented of none of his arguments...

...The first party, the conservatives, advocated the union of church and state, and the conservatives' principles were, Newman said, "political or at least ecclesiastical rather than theological...

...Turner argues, however, that Newman also stands "among the first cultural apostates"—indeed, "the first great, and perhaps the most enduring, Victorian skeptic," like Nietzsche in this one respect...

...Many of England's conservative and liberal Protestants (many Roman Catholics, for that matter) were suspicious of his conversion at the time...

...This would offset "the empiricist philosophy that, despite his efforts to resist, nonetheless largely determined his frame of mind...

...Newman's father had several business failures, and Newman became essentially the head of the household, supporting his mother and two brothers and three sisters financially, educationally, and spiritually...

...Turner challenged that prevailing wisdom in a variety of learned, although often implausible, ways— almost all involving Newman's place in the historical tides that washed through the nineteenth century...

...Now, according to the usual way the story is told, Newman overcame such suspicions among both English Protestants and European Catholics when he wrote his wildly popular spiritual autobiography, the Apologia, in 1865 and when Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal in 1879...

...Newman also became a central figure among the reformers who formed the background to the Second Vatican Council...

...So vast was his appeal to Catholics in America that institutes of Catholic life at non-Catholic colleges and universities throughout the nation quickly came to be called "Newman Centers...

...He also founded what he called "a parsonage-house" at Little-more, a few miles outside Oxford, for his personal edification and that of his friends...

...Newman would have done well to make use of German idealism's "theology of divine immanentism," like the American Evangelical Reformed theologian Philip Schaff...

...That meeting of Catholic bishops in the early 1960s brought about the largest changes in Catholic life and thought at least since the Gregorian Reform a millennium earlier...

...In this view, Newman's community at Littlemore reestablished the monastic form of life founded in the early church by the likes of St...

...That left the evangelicals and the catholics—theological parties "violently opposed" to each other...

...He tells us that at fifteen he became an evangelical (what we might call today a born-again Christian, indebted to the theology of Calvin as well as to Lutheran pietism's call for a devout and holy life...

...Vatican II opened the way to new relations with Orthodox and evangelical Christians as well as Jews, members of other religions, and the modern world...

...Turner's careful historical settings, combined with Turner's skepticism about Newman's Catholicism, help recreate for the modern reader the problem Newman presented to the Victorian reader...

...It is a crucial question, for both Catholics and non-Catholics, where Newman fits into all this, or whether he offers a third option and, potentially, a path out of the endless debate...