Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (38 page)

‘ploughing in a very stiff clay’, it was as if he was ‘moving on at the rate of a mile an hour, when I had to write and print and correct a hundred miles by the next day’s post’.
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He was like a man, ‘who had fallen overboard and had to swim to land’.
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WHAT KIND OF A BOOK?

Unlike the confessional accounts of his post-Reformation predecessors, John Bunyan and George Fox, Newman was not writing an allegory or a memoir of spiritual trials and tribulations. The
Apologia
is no
Grace Abounding
, nor an inspirational work in the manner of Fox’s
Autobiography
. It has more in com-mon with Augustine’s
Confessions
, proceeding as it does from meditations on the inwardness of consciousness, and the outwardness of the world. Augustine writes that his ‘wishes were inside, and they [the people in the world] were outside, and powerless to get inside my mind by any of their senses’. Newman, as we have seen, starts by asserting that he was isolated ‘from the objects that surrounded me …’ leading to that conviction of ‘two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.
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And while Newman resorts in part to Augustinian images, of illness and health, signalling influences from the Church of the Early Fathers rather than the Old and New Testaments, his story is in no sense an Augustinian conversion to Christian belief, nor to holiness after a life of sin.

The
Apologia
, on the face of it, tells the story of a deeply learned and devout Christian’s mounting anxieties about the rival claims for authenticity of the Church of England and the Church of Rome. The Church of England, as Newman saw it, could claim continuity with the primitive Church of the Apostles, but was no longer universal, or catholic; the Roman Church could claim universality but was subject to corruptions – not least ‘Popery’. Newman’s anxieties, as we have seen, reached crisis point as he attempted to combine the best of both Churches in a
Via Media
: the fruit of the Oxford Movement. But the bid to have his ecclesiastical cake and eat it did not work: the Anglican bishops rose up against him, and he finally became convinced that his
Via Media
existed only on paper. The denouement of the
Apologia
finds him making a final choice between the two Churches.

At the time that Newman embarked on the
Apologia
, it was nearly twenty years since he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. His aim was to explain to the reading public of England the tortuous path that led to that momentous step, including the many misunderstandings of both friends and enemies. But it seemed evident to him that the book’s significance and scope had the potential to go well beyond his initial purpose. His decision to write a kind of autobiography, rather than a logical and factual selfdefence, was critical. ‘Logic’, as he wrote in the Tamworth Reading Room debate in 1841, ‘makes but

a sorry rhetoric with the multitude; first shoot round corners, and you may not despair of converting by a syllogism.’
¹⁸
In the same text, as we have seen, he argued that ‘the heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination’. A literary narrative of his journey was the only feasible way of explaining himself. And yet he was daunted by the task. He unburdened himself of both the labour and the huge difficulty of autobiography. ‘I feel overcome with the difficulty of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled from the attempt.’ He goes on:

For who can know himself, and the multitude of subtle influences which act upon him? And who can recollect, at the distance of twenty-five years, all that he once knew about his thoughts and his deeds, and that, during a portion of his life, when, even at the time, his observation, whether of himself or of the external world, was less than before or after, by every reason of the perplexity and dismay which weighed upon him …
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The
Apologia
, as autobiography, stands in its own right as a remarkable work of literary and religious imagination. The nub of Newman’s story is continuity and discontinuity, and he would express this central tension in the structure. To what extent, Newman is asking, am I a consistent, abiding self while subject to change, growth, and multiple versions of identity? And how can the Church of Rome claim continuity with the authentic apostolic Church when it has undergone so many apparent novelties and alterations since Christian antiquity? Newman gives the impression, false as it turns out, that he is refraining from creative recollection. He is to tell his story, he assures his readers, through painstaking contemporaneous documentation. There are repeated expository signposts to this effect: ‘To illustrate my feelings during this trial, I will make extracts from my letters …’; ‘I have the first sketch or draft of a letter, which I wrote to …’; ‘I have turned up two letters of this period, which in a measure illustrate what I have been saying …’ Newman lets us in on his literary craft, as if we are looking over his shoulder observing his handling of source materials. He gives the impression, moreover, of proceeding prospectively rather than retrospectively. Readers are invited to collaborate in the narrative by tracking the unfolding evidence. Yet, as he admits, the sense of tight, authorial control of the record is every where evident: ‘It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.’
²⁰
Pondering, earlier, the art of saints’ lives he had written: ‘… By “Life”. I mean a narrative which impresses the reader with the idea of moral unity, identity, growth, continuity, personality.’
²¹
Hence the
Apologia
becomes not just a history of his opinions, but a dramatised psy-chology of philosophy of mind, fraught with intellectual, historical, and spiritual anxiety. It is the tale of a personal bid to be both right and righteous; a sustained struggle with doubt and doubt of doubt; a quest for certitude:

Certitude of course is a point, but doubt is a progress, I was not near certitude yet. Certitude is a reflex action; it is to know that one knows. Of that I believe I was not possessed, till close upon my reception into the Catholic Church. Again, a practical, effective doubt is a point too, but who can easily ascertain it for himself? Who can determine when it is, that the scales in the balance of opinion begin to turn, and what was a greater probability in behalf of a belief becomes a positive doubt against it?
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The
Apologia
thus embarks on the ambitious task of reporting the functions of conscience, belief, and conviction, as they occur: not by recollection alone, nor by archival retrieval, but by both. How could anybody judge his private motivation, he is saying, his innermost thoughts and feelings, objectively, accurately, when even he himself remained frustrated, uncertain, assailed by intellectual and religious scruples? And how can one report the action of God in the equation? In one of the most remarkable passages of the
Apologia
Newman reveals how he sees the relationship between his conscience and God’s promptings. Religious inquiry, he begins, is not like mathematics – which proceeds to certitude by rigid demonstration; it progresses by ‘probabilities of a special kind, a cumulative, a transcendent probability but still probability’:

[God] has willed, I say, that we should so act, and, as willing it, He cooperates with us in our acting, and thereby enables us to do that which He wills us to do, and carries us on, if our will does but cooperate with His, to a certitude which rises higher than the logical force of our conclusions.
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The
Apologia
contrasts and parallels a complex inner story with two overarching outer narratives – the history no less of Christianity from antiquity to Newman’s present, and the story of the Church of England from the sixteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century. And if the
Apologia
parallels both personal and ecclesiastical permanence and change, it is also a study of the tensions between Church authority and the primacy of individual conscience. In Chapter III of the
Apologia
Newman impresses upon his reader what is at stake: emotionally, personally. The imagery evokes the trauma of a family or domestic break-up; of a man perhaps who is about to abandon a cherished wife and children for the bosom of another: what caused him ‘to leave my own home, to which I was bound by so many strong and tender ties’.
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The crisis is depicted, at first, as a conflict between refined English tradition and scruffy Roman superstition. Newman’s conservatism, the ties of home and vocation, ran deep. Ox-ford especially represented permanence, entitlement, heritage. Clerical, patriarchal, bound by privilege, Oxford was loveable even in its torpor. Newman was at home within its cloisters and enjoyed its preferments. Comfortable in the protection of its auspices, his attachment to the snapdragon on the walls of Trinity College, signalled, as he tells us, the permanence to which he was wedded as a member of an Oxford college. He saw himself as that clinging, perennially

flowering creeper. As he had written, at the age of 28, to his sister: ‘I am more than ever imprest too with the importance of staying in Oxford … “I am rooted

…”’
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Rome, however, towards which he was increasingly, often reluctantly, drawn in fits and starts, with a pause in the ‘paper Church’ of his
Via Media
, had been characterised in his upbringing as the great whore, the Anti-Christ. None of it was natural to him: the Counter-Reformation architecture, the dog-Latin, the dreary Plain Chant, scholasticism, casuistry, the turbulent Irish, the treacherous Spanish. Then there were the miracles, indulgences, plaster saints, idolisation of the Virgin Mary, and papal demagoguery. Rome was unstable, unreliable, corrupt. Rome had severed its links with the authentic Church of the past. Rome was fickle, corrupt,
foreign
.

Yet as he plunged into the Early Fathers, he tells us, Rome began to appear, in the course of the years, not decaying but protean,
dynamic
, all-embracing, while preserving its essential unbroken connection to its origins and extending its authority and welcome universally. It was not a ‘local’ church, but universal, and yet composed of so many unique individuals: a ‘vast assemblage of human be-ings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power, – into what may 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 …’,
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images designed to contrast with both the sterility of England’s Benthamite institutions, as well as the Protestant fantasies of
Maria Monk
and live burial of nuns! Through his reading in Christian antiquity, and Augustine’s phrase ‘
securus judicat orbis terrarum
’ (the world’s judgment is secure) in that essay by Cardinal Wiseman, he realises that the Church of England is in heresy. Thus the ‘theory of the
Via Media
was absolutely pulverised’,
²⁷
he writes. The image of being ground to dust, absolutely, leaves nothing. The yearning for permanence and development would be finally satisfied in the Church of Rome.

THE ART OF THE
APOLOGIA

The episodes of realisation and resolution are narrated in the course of several, isolated set pieces. While he writes in the main with austere objectivity, citing his horde of documents, he expands during these episodes of transformation, into retrospective dramatisation, his creative imagination fully engaged. These moments include his suspenseful return from the Mediterranean to England in 1833; the shock in 1839 of seeing connections between early Christian heresies and the circumstances of the Anglican Church; the aggressive reception of his
Tract 90
in 1841 and final reception into the Catholic Church in 1845.