‘John Henry Newman: A Biography’ by Ian Ker

In October I took my time reading this vast biography of Cardinal Newman (1801–1890), originally published in 1988. It was not easy going, being written for readers who are already familiar not just with its subject's life and times, but with a good deal of his thought too. Nor is it a conventional biography that both describes and seeks to evaluate a life. This is neither a rounded portrait nor a thorough dissection of a personality. There are no pictures included. Instead, it is essentially a comprehensive, scholarly guide to Newman's writing – his books, his sermons, his personal diaries and, especially, his letters. His life thus emerges largely indirectly through a detailed account of what he wrote over the course of a very long life. The book is fascinating and illuminating – I took a heap of notes – but it is one for specialists rather than curious general readers.

I have always found Newman to be a fascinating figure while, shamefully really, knowing far less about him than I should. I grew up in Edgbaston, some five or ten minutes' walk away from the Birmingham Oratory, which Newman founded in 1849 and where he based himself during the second half of his life. I then went to King Edward's School and, while not a Catholic myself, took to attending meetings of the Newman Society which were not infrequently presided over by the Oratory's provost, a most impressive priest called Father Gregory Winterton, to whom I took a liking. He seemed very old to me, but was, I later discovered, only then in his early sixties. Many years later, in 2010, when Pope Benedict visited Birmingham, I recall being both delighted and amazed when a by-then genuinely ancient Father Gregory appeared on television greeting the Pope outside his Oratory.

I later studied history at Oriel College in Oxford, where Newman had been a fellow for over twenty years as a young man. If memory serves, one of my tutors had been allocated Newman's old rooms and taught us there. I chose the Oxford Movement, of which Newman was a leading figure, as a special subject to study in my final year, so have always been broadly familiar with his theology. But my knowledge of his life story has always been, at best, patchy. And I have always found it rather difficult to think of him as the saint he has now been declared to be - not because I doubt his goodness or sincerity, but because he seems such a complicated, sensitive and combative intellectual figure.

Reading this book has filled me in to an extent, but I am going to have to read a more approachably written biography which seeks to provide a fuller and more rounded portrait of Newman's life. What Ker's book did was to provide me with a vastly improved understanding of his thought and the development of his theology, but most importantly to encourage me to see him – as he should be seen – as one of the great literary figures of the nineteenth century.

His writing was extraordinarily impressive, combining readability, the use of striking and original metaphor, and intellectual brilliance. His style was, in the main, astonishingly modern and every bit as inspired as that of Dickens, Eliot, Carlyle or any of his major contemporaries. This description in a letter of being seasick while travelling across a stretch of the Mediterranean gives a flavour of what he was capable of:

‘… but the worst of the seasickness is the sympathy which all things on board have with the illness, as if they were seasick too. First all the chairs, tables, much more the things on them are moving, moving, up and down, up and down – swing, swing – a tumbler turns over, knife and fork run down, wine is spilt – swing, swing. In this condition you go on talking and eating, as fast as you can, hiding your misery, which is provokingly thrust upon you by every motion of the furniture which surrounds you. At length you are seized with sickness, up you get, swing, swing, you cannot move a step – you knock yourself against the table – run smack against the side of the cabin – you cannot make the door, the only point you want – you get into your berth at last, but the door will not shut – bang, bang, you slam your fingers. At last things go right for you and down you lie. You are much better, but now a new misery begins, the noise of the bulkheads (ie: the wooden partitions thro’ the vessel). This is not heard on deck – in the cabin it is considerable – but when you lie down, you are in a perfect millhouse. All sorts of noises tenfold increased by the gale; creaking, clattering, shivering, and dashing. And then your bed is seasick too – up and down – swinging without exaggeration as high and as fast (to your feelings) as a swing in a fair….’

The other central point I absorbed was just how controversial a figure Newman was in his time, an era in which theological disagreements were widely followed and debated, and copies of sermons and devotional books of various kinds were bestsellers. He began his religious life under strongly evangelical Protestant influences, before moving steadily towards a more sacramental and Catholic understanding of Christianity. Theologically he journeyed higher and higher as his early life proceeded.

When he was at Oriel he became Vicar of St Mary's Church, giving him a very prominent pulpit from which to preach. During the 1830s he developed what he called the via media, namely a theological position that fell between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism (or 'popery', as it was commonly labelled in England at that time). He, along with like-minded figures such as Froude, Keble and Pusey, published highly provocative 'tracts' as well as sermons seeking to persuade others of the truth of their Anglo-Catholic positions.

The Tractarians encountered fierce opposition from the evangelical and established Protestant wings of the Church of England. Although their movement would partly transform Anglicanism, Newman himself became increasingly convinced that his attempted middle way between Protestantism and Rome was untenable. The controversy surrounding the publication of his notorious Tract 90 in 1841 was particularly significant in this regard. He then gradually inched his way towards Rome, becoming the most celebrated convert of his time when he was finally received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. He left Oxford and subsequently commenced his life as an Oratorian in Birmingham.

Thereafter he continued to court controversy, but now, in some respects, from a more liberal position. He was deeply suspicious of ultramontanism, the movement which sought to strengthen and centralise papal authority, and opposed the campaign to have papal infallibility formally defined as doctrine at the First Vatican Council in 1870. He lost that battle too, although he subsequently accepted the Council's decision, choosing to interpret the new doctrine rather more narrowly than its more enthusiastic supporters.

So during his lifetime, in many areas, Newman ended up on the losing side of the theological debates in which he participated. Yet his thinking was to prove remarkably influential long after his death, anticipating several of the central themes of the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, notably in relation to conscience, the development of doctrine and the role of the laity. His thinking on education, set out in The Idea of a University, remains highly apposite today too, particularly his insistence that the core purpose of universities must always be 'to strengthen, refine and enrich the intellectual powers'. Hear, hear!

The other fascinating aspect of Newman's thought is the justification he put forward for Christian belief, which remained consistent through his life in both churches. Essentially, he argued that religious faith cannot be established by formal reasoning alone. Reason and evidence matter enormously, but they do not operate in isolation. Our convictions are also shaped by experience, imagination, conscience and the cumulative force of impressions that cannot always be reduced to logical propositions. He developed these arguments at considerable length in his Grammar of Assent, published in 1870, but they were present in his thinking much earlier:

First comes knowledge, then a view, then reasoning, and then belief. This is why science has so little of a religious tendency; deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.

… right faith is reasoning upon holy, devout and enlightened presumptions … right faith ventures and hazards deliberately, seriously, soberly, piously, and humbly, counting the cost and delighting in the sacrifice.

Newman was somewhat nonplussed when people's faith started to wobble with the publication of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859. He couldn't see what the problem was. The notion of an earth created by God was not remotely incompatible, in his view, with evolutionary explanations of how life had developed:

It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter.

For him God was absolutely a living, all-knowing, supernatural presence, presiding over an earth and societies that were very clearly changing in all kinds of ways. Christian doctrine should not therefore be considered as something fixed and incapable of evolution. Rather, he argued that the Church's understanding and articulation of religious truth necessarily develops over time, while remaining faithful to its essential foundations. This was a very different proposition from simply adapting doctrine to changing social fashions, but it was an important and original contribution to theological thinking.

One does not need to share Newman's faith to appreciate the originality and power of his thought and to admire the brilliance of his prose. He used metaphor particularly effectively to help make points, and did so very memorably too:

‘A lie is like a shuttlecock, which two battledoors can keep up with great success, if skilfully used, without its falling to the ground’

‘Nothing has such vitality as a lie – and I have been astonished how it is capable of being cut into pieces, like some reptiles, yet without substantial injury to its power of action.’

‘Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgement alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide: - it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power, - into what might be called a large reformatory or training school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes’.

I particularly like that last passage, not least because of the extraordinary succession of metaphors. Newman moves from the ebb and flow of the tide to a reformatory, a hospital, a prison and finally a noisy factory in which human nature is melted down and refined. It is a striking way of explaining how he conceived the relationship between religious authority and individual judgement, neither of which he regarded as dispensable.

What particularly struck me, reading this book, was how unusual a figure Newman was. Here was a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts who devoted almost all his energies to questions of religious truth. It is hard to imagine anyone occupying quite the same position today. Yet the questions he wrestled with – about conscience, authority, the nature of belief and the limits of reason – have lost none of their relevance. Nor has the power of the language in which he explored them.

I found this book to be hugely informative and thought-provoking, but I would have loved Ker also to have said more about Newman's ultimate legacy, to have told me much more about the times he lived through and, most of all, to have at least attempted to provide an account of what he was really like as a man.

Just occasionally he briefly allows a sliver of light to shine on the personality rather than the thought, before moving off again to consider the next tract or sermon, but the examples are few and far between.

On visiting his old undergraduate rooms at Trinity in 1880, Ker writes as follows:

They were then occupied by the future traveller and writer Douglas Sladen, who later remembered Newman as ‘a wan little old man with a shrivelled face and large nose, and one of the most beautiful expressions which ever appeared on a human being’, who ‘talked to me for a couple of hours, prostrating me with his exquisite modesty’.

I would have liked much more of that. And also more about what Newman wrote about his own character, which seems to have been singularly attractive, combining a fierce intellect with limited self-regard:

Do not suffer any illusive notion about me to spring up in your mind. No one ever treats me with deference and respect who knows me – and from my heart I trust and pray that no one ever may. I have never been in office or station; people never bowed to me – and I could not endure it. I tell you frankly, my infirmity I believe is, always to be rude to persons who are deferential in manner to me.

There is something rather touching about that, particularly coming from someone of such immense intellectual confidence and public standing. His evident dislike of personal deference sits interestingly alongside his willingness to engage in fierce theological controversy and defend his positions with formidable determination.

I am very glad indeed to have read this pretty monumental book. I now know vastly more about what Newman thought, what he believed and how his ideas developed over the course of his long life. I have also been alerted to the work of a prose writer of quite extraordinary gifts. But I remain frustrated that I know so much less about what he was really like as a man, and about the world in which he lived. Ker has introduced me to Newman's mind, brilliantly and exhaustively. I must now find another biographer who can introduce me rather more satisfactorily to Newman as a person and a personality.