Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (25 page)

One cannot help feeling sympathy with Sheffield, who soon grows weary of Charles’s preoccupation with religion. And while Newman intends the reader to gather that Sheffield is a shallow individual, Charles’s interest in ecclesiastical matters, crucial as they are to the purpose of the story, border at times on the superficial: comparative liturgies, rood screens, Gregorian versus Gothic architecture, credence tables, holy water stoups, vestments, styles of church music.

Newman would claim that the book was not apologetic; yet he has a strong design on the reader. The underlying theme is the contrast between religionists who have no sense of history, and those that do. Newman portrays a contrast

familiar among the dons of Oriel between ‘viewiness’ and having a ‘view’. ‘Viewiness’, according to this parlance, is to be ‘impatient to reduce things to a system’. A true view is gained by a process of development. Writing to a correspondent in 1845 about the reasons he had written the
Essay on Development
, Newman asserts: ‘When we have lost our way we mount up to some eminence to look about us’,
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rather than diving ‘into the nearest thicket to find out his bearings.’
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Those guilty of ‘viewiness’ rather than views

hear of men, and things, and projects, and struggles, and principles; but everything comes and goes like the wind, nothing makes an impression, nothing penetrates, nothing has its place in their minds. They locate nothing; they have no system. They hear and they forget; or they just recollect what they have once heard, they can’t tell where.
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Charles is depicted as one who comes to Catholicism not as a ‘conclusion from premises’ but through a process of gradual experience, process, growth. ‘All the paper-arguments in the world are unequal to giving one a view in a mo-ment.’
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Newman was evidently pondering the nature of faith, or assent, as a process of many strands; and there is an impressive moment when a priest tells Charles: ‘A man’s moral self is concentrated in each moment of his life; it lives in the tips of his fingers, and the spring of his insteps.’
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Yet, while a work of fiction, with its narrative progression, might have demonstrated this idea, so replete in Newman’s own life, and powerfully to be argued in his
Grammar of Assent
, the novel fails to exemplify the conviction.

There are nevertheless glimpses of his powerful literary imagination at work. Here he is, dealing with the great paradox of conscience versus dogma and Church authority. Of ‘private judgement’ as a guide for converts, he writes:

they use it in order ultimately to supersede it; as a man out of doors uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home. What would be thought of his bringing it into his drawing room? … if he came in with a great-coat on his back, a hat on his head, an umbrella under his arm, and a large stable-lantern in his hand?
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Loss and Gain
was written, evidently, with Anglican waverers in mind, and the Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics Newman had left behind had plenty to waver about by the time Newman had returned from Rome.

That year an Evangelical parson of the Church of England, George Cornelius Gorham, had been promoted to a new parish, but the Bishop of Exeter, the High Anglican Henry Phillpotts, had rejected the appointment because he considered the incumbent-to-be’s position on the theology of baptism tainted by Calvin-ism. Gorham appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Court of Arches, which confirmed the bishop’s decision. So Gorham next took his case to the secular Privy Council, which found in his favour. Here again was proof that the supposedly apostolic Church of England was run by lay politicians. Among

those who left the Established Church for Rome at this time was Archdeacon Henry Manning.

Ironically, while High Anglicans continued to agonise over the conundrum as to how an Established Church could at one and the same time be the one true Church of the apostles, the sister Church of the Episcopalians in the United States of America had shown how its members could thrive as a disestablished community that was both sacramental and apostolic. Bishop John Henry Ho-bart of New York had proved himself a great leader of his Church in America, initiating worldwide missions. While the Churches in England continued to suffer fragmentation and erosion Episcopalian and Anglican efforts redoubled to take the Gospel into every continent on earth. The Tractarian movement and its followers had made available to the Church of England a deeper understanding of the dignity and authority of bishops. At the same time the Episcopal authority gave impetus to new, more independent Church structures such as the resumption of the Convocations of York and Canterbury. The new sense of confidence and identity would sustain the Anglican and Episcopalian Churches in colonies throughout the world. In New Zealand Bishop George Selwyn encouraged lay participation that would in time influence practices in England.

Newman had delivered a blow to the Church of his birth; but while he was followed by some notable former Tractarians and stragglers, and while there would be a steady stream down the years, it was not to be a grand walk-out. As Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch puts it succinctly: ‘Newman’s background in intense Evangelical religiosity meant that his years as a Tractarian were a stag-ing post on an unstable lurch away from his roots, but the existing High Church party, much caricatured by callow Tractarians as “High and Dry”, was not so easily tipped towards Rome, and beyond the shores of Britain, there were other sources of strength.’
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PIO NONO’S TRIBULATION

If the depth of Newman’s Catholicism was marked by his new, fervent devotion to the Virgin Mary, it was revealed equally in his professed regard for the papacy, and the Pope in person, Pio Nono, who had shown an interest and concern for him. Indeed the Pope had given a considerable amount of his time to Newman and his confreres’ welfare and future, despite a host of mounting political crises in Italy and Rome that year. The relationship between spiritual and temporal powers was at once complex and perilous.

On his accession in 1846, Pio had instituted a raft of liberal reforms in reaction to the authoritarianism of his predecessor Gregory XVI. He curbed the

power of the papal police, abolished the Jewish ghetto in Rome, and declared a general amnesty. Newman, with his anti-liberal instincts, referred to the opening of the papal prisons as the release of ‘scum of the earth’. Pio announced the introduction of lay participation in the government of the papal states, reforms in education, greater freedom of the press, and the introduction of such modern amenities as gas-light and railways. For a year or two, spanning Newman’s time in Rome, Pio appeared to support the unification of Italy and even the formation of lay advisory and, later, executive, bodies. He appeared to toy with the idea of becoming a constitutional monarch in so far as his temporal power was concerned; some optimists even thought that he might preside over a federal united Italy. Yet he rejected the idea as unfeasible in view of the disjointed state of the peninsula. Meanwhile progressive factions in Rome grew stronger by what they fed on, leading to calls for republicanism and revolution. Pio, who started out, according to Britain’s
Morning Post,
as ‘the most enlightened of modern sovereigns’, would within two years become a Pope of intransigence whose attitude towards unification was emphatically ‘
non possumus
’ – or in our contemporary parlance: ‘no way!’ The effective issue was his refusal to side with King Charles of Piedmont when war broke out with Austria, the traditional military ally of the Popes. In October 1848 revolutionaries in Rome murdered Count Pellegrino Rossi, lay government minister of the papal states, and besieged the papal Quirinal palace. Pio escaped disguised in a priest’s simple cassock, fleeing to the seaside fortress of Gaeta within the safety of the neighbouring kingdom of Naples. From this fastness Pio hurled denunciations against the ‘outrageous treason of democracy’ and threatened prospective voters with excommunication. Only with the help of French troops and a loan from Roth-schilds, did Pio contrive to return to the Vatican a year later to resume his reign over the city of Rome and what was left of the papal territories. A council of censorship was charged with investigating those implicated in the republican plot. The new papal regime was not beneficent. Writing to William Gladstone in 1852, two years after Pius’s return to the Eternal City, an English traveller characterized Rome as a prison house: ‘There is not a breath of liberty, not a hope of tranquil life; two foreign armies, a permanent state of siege, atrocious acts of revenge, factions raging, universal discontent; such is the Papal government at the present day.’
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The Jews were made a target of post-republican reprisal. Although his return to Rome had been paid for by a Jewish loan, the Roman Jews were forced back into the ghetto and made to pay, literally, for having supported the revolution.

These events occurred after Newman returned to England to establish his Oratory. Despite his manifold troubles, Pio had proceeded with the formation of a hierarchy for England, a deeply threatening move in the view of non-Catholics, and began work on the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate

Conception – a belief that provoked Protestant antipathy towards the papacy and Catholicism in general. Newman’s personal devotion to Pio, his newly established Romanism, and his sympathy for the Pope’s recent political troubles, moved him to write a remarkably energetic and imaginative defence of the supernatural power of the papacy:

Behold, the mighty world is gone forth to war, with what? with an unknown something, which it feels but cannot see; which flits around it, which flaps against its cheek, with the air, with the wind. It charges, and it slashes, and it fires its vollies, and its bayonets, and it is mocked by a foe who dwells in another sphere, and is far beyond the force of its analysis, or the capacities of its calculus…. Whom have you gone out against? a few old men, with red hats and stockings, or a hundred pale students, with eyes on the ground and beads in their girdle; they are as stubble; destroy them; – then there will be other old men and other pale students instead of them. But we will direct our rage against one; he flees; what is to be done with him? Cast him out upon the wide world. But nothing can go on without him. Then bring him back: but he will give us no guarantee for the future. Then leave him alone; his power is gone, he is at an end, or he will take a new course of himself: he will take part with the world. Meanwhile, the multitude of influences in active operation all over the great Catholic body, rise up all round, and hide heaven and earth from the eyes of the spectators of the combat; and unreal judgments are hazarded, and rash predictions, till the mist clears away, and then the old man is found in his own place, as before, saying Mass over the tomb of the Apostles.
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Twenty years on, Newman would take a very different view of Pio Nono’s papacy. He would write that the dogma of papal infallibility had been conducted ‘very cruelly, tyrannically, and deceitfully’.
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He would temper his earlier, largely sentimental, view of the papacy with a perspective based on personal experience.

For myself, I think that a new world is coming in, and that the Pope’s change of position (which in spite of any temporary reaction which may come, is inevitable) will alter matters vastly. We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years. It is anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.
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Nevertheless that early devotion to the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, his first sense of being a Catholic, would remain as strong as ever. He would write in November 1870:

For years past my only consolation personally has been in our Lord’s Presence in the Tabernacle. I turn from the sternness of external authority to Him who can immeasur-ably compensate trials which after all are not real, but (to use a fashionable word) sentimental. Never, thank God, have I had a single doubt about the divine origin and grace of the Church, on account of the want of tenderness and largeness of mind of some of its officials or rulers.
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