Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (12 page)

Provost Hawkins, who was elected at the point at which Newman’s reforms began to bite in 1828, was anxious not to alienate the young gentry. He was not pleased with Newman’s attempts to rewrite the teaching policies of the college. Hawkins was insistent, moreover, that the role of tutor should be largely secular. The conflict over policy ended with Hawkins declining to assign students to Newman and his reformer colleagues.

By default therefore Newman had more time for the Fathers, and he was spurred on by the encouragement of the editors of the
Theological Library
series to write a book on the early Councils of the Church. His former students (the serious and assiduous ones) and supportive fellows banded together to purchase more volumes of the Fathers, 36 in all, which were now arrayed on the shelves of his college rooms. In the event, he restricted the scope of his first book, published in July 1832, to the Council of Nicea, with the title
The Arians of the Fourth Century
.

Nicea constituted an outstanding instance of the Church’s need to clarify doctrine for the sake of converts to Christianity. The early Church, he argued, had kept back the teaching of the Our Father, the Creed, and crucial doctrines such as the nature of the Trinity, until a spiritual discipline had been inculcated: a
disciplina arcana
. Newman had in his sights contemporary Evangelicalism and

‘much of that mischievous fanaticism’ that ‘at present abounds from the vanity of men, who think that they can explain the sublime doctrines and exuberant promises of the Gospel, before they have yet learned to know themselves and to discern the holiness of God’.
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Arianism, went on Newman, was equivalent to Wesleyan style Evangelicalism which put Christians and those seeking to become Christians (known as cate-chumens) on an equal footing, allowing women to preach, teach and baptize. In-deed, among the ‘present perils’ of Anglicanism, he found ‘a marked resemblance to those of the fourth century … of an Heretical Power enthralling [the Church], exerting a varied influence and a usurped claim in the appointment of her func-tionaries, and interfering with the management of her internal affairs’.
5
5
That heretical power, moreover, in his view, was an enemy within the Church, rather than outside it.

CHAPTER 5
‌‌

To the Mediterranean

‘Oh that Rome were not Rome; but I seem to see as clear as day that a union with her is
impossible
. She is the cruel Church – asking of us impossibilities, excommunicating us for disobedience, and now watching and exulting over our approaching overthrow.’

J. H. NEWMAN LETTER TO HIS SISTER JEMIMA, 11 APRIL 1833

Of Newman’s six hundred or more published sermons, more than half were preached before 1832 while he was a young Anglican minister at littletons and in St Mary’s Church, Oxford. During a preaching ministry that spanned more than five decades there would be developments in his preaching both in content and style at each stage of his life. His early homilies, contained in the first three volumes of his
Parochial Sermons
, were mainly preoccupied with individual spiritual growth, and were strikingly severe in tone and language.

He wrote his sermons, and read them word for word. He did not declaim or gesture. His most effective oratorical device was an occasional dramatic pause. He read calmly, quietly, in simple language, rarely looking up from the page before him. William Wilberforce would recollect:

[He] never moved anything but his head. His hands were literally not seen, from the beginning to the end. The sermon began in a calm musical voice, the key slightly rising as it went on: by-and-by the preacher warmed with his subject; it seemed as if his very soul and body glowed with sternly-suppressed emotion. There were times, when in the midst of the most thrilling passages he would pause, without dropping his voice, for a moment which seemed long, before he uttered with gathered force and solemnity a few weighty words. The very tones of his voice seemed as if they were something more than his own.
1

Wilberforce went on to describe the ‘breathless’ and ‘expectant attention’ of the congregation. He described the ‘gas-light, just at the left hand of the pulpit, lowered that the preacher might not be dazzled’. The congregation was invariably packed, many of them ‘standing in the half-darkness under the gallery’.

Newman deplored earnest preaching, and made this interesting comment when he was in his fifties:

We may of course work ourselves up into a pretence, nay, into a paroxysm, of earnestness; as we may chafe our cold hands till they are warm. But when we cease chafing, we lose the warmth again; on the contrary, let the sun come out and strike us with his

beams, and we need no artificial chafing to be warm. The hot words, then, and energetic gestures of a preacher, taken by themselves, are just as much signs of earnestness as rubbing the hands or flapping the arms together are signs of warmth.
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According to many of his listeners, Newman’s developing sense of charisma owed much to the impression that he was living according to the words he preached. We have seen in the opening chapter the effect he had on his congregation. Matthew Arnold’s famous description speaks of ‘words and thoughts which were a religious music, – subtle, sweet, mournful’. The beguiling musicality of his voice matched the elegant cadences of his prose.

Richard Church, friend of Newman and later Dean of St Paul’s, wrote of the early sermons that they preached the ‘Holiness necessary for future Blessedness’:

They showed the strong reaction … against the poverty, softness, restlessness, worldliness, the blunted and impaired sense of truth, which reigned with little check in the recognised fashions of professing Christianity; the want of depth both of thought and feeling; the strange blindness to the real sternness, nay the austerity of the New Testament.
3

In these sermons of the late 1820s and early 1830s he stressed the hardship of the Christian life, the difficulty of obeying the call to perfection, while warning against both complacency and Evangelical enthusiasm. There are all too many Christians, Newman said, ‘who have rejected the austerity aspect of the Gospel, considering it enough to be benevolent, courteous, candid’. Newman’s youthful sermons insisted on the small daily acts of consistent self-denial and self-discipline. He believed that the holiness of the most eminent saints was a result of their consistency, which he saw as form of religious obedience:

Nothing is more difficult than to be disciplined and regular in our religion. It is very easy to be religious by fits and starts, and to keep up our feelings by artificial stimulants; but regularity seems to trammel us, and we become impatient.
4

It was not necessary to indulge in self-wounding mortification, he insisted. We are not called to ‘literally bear Christ’s Cross’, or to live on ‘locusts and wild honey’. The Christian obligation is to carry the everyday burdens that come our way, such as overcoming temptation to anger. He was no Calvinist, however. His spirituality was both that of Good Friday and of Easter Day: suffering tempered by joy and hope.

The Holy Spirit works through human nature, he declared. That is why persistent examination of conscience is crucial for growth in spirituality: ‘For it is in proportion as we search our hearts and understand our own nature, that we understand what is meant by an Infinite Governor and Judge.’
⁵
In this way it might be possible to conquer ‘deceitfulness of the heart’. Pride, hypocrisy, affectation, ‘unreality’, and lack of simplicity are major drawbacks from progress

in holiness. Feelings and words must be matched by action; otherwise our lives are a mere fiction – like a novel, he observed. Those who speak of love without practising it in their every day lives and relationships are spiritually dislocated:

The real love of man
must
depend on practice, and therefore, must begin by exercising itself on our friends around us, otherwise it will have no existence.
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Newman at times addressed his mainly student congregation on the special temptations of youth, when good habits should be formed and bad habits eradicated. He warned of the assumption that conversion of life can be put off to be dealt with later by the power of free will. For bad habits ‘clog’ the exercise of the will. The characteristic toughness of his preaching can be savoured in the following passage on the importance of timely repentance:

I do not speak of the dreadful presumption of such a mode of quieting conscience (though many persons really use it who do not speak the words out, or are aware that they act upon it), but, merely, of the ignorance it evidences concerning our moral condition, and our power of willing and doing.…

So very difficult is obedience, so hardly won is every step in our Christian course, so sluggish and inert our corrupt nature, that I would have a man disbelieve he can do one jot or tittle beyond what he had already done; refrain from borrowing aught on the hope of the future, however good a security for it he seems to be able to show; and never take his good feelings and wishes in pledge for one single untried deed. Nothing but
past
acts

are the vouchers for
future
.
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The metaphor conjured from the world of banking – borrowing, futures, securities, pledges, vouchers – would have come with feeling from the son of a man whose bank had gone under.

Sin is not only a matter of outward actions and deeds, but of private thoughts too. ‘Evil thoughts’, he declared, ‘do us no harm if recognized; if repelled, if protested against by the indignation and self-reproach of the mind. It is when we do not discern them, when we admit them, when we cherish them, that they ripen into principles.’ Hence he preached the existence of the individual soul, impressing on his congregation that sense he had felt since boyhood of the contrast between inner and outer worlds.

In these early sermons on personal strivings for holiness, Newman frequently employed the language of guilt, sin, repentance, passions, the Devil, temptation, seductions of the world, and even ‘hell fire’. The imagery is intense, yet disciplined: sin acts like a ‘poisoned garment’ which eats into the flesh: the Devil’s temptations inflame ‘the wounds and scars of past sins healed’.

J. A. Froude, Hurrell’s brother, would praise Newman’s genius for giving the impression that he was looking into the hearts of each member of his young congregation: