Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (50 page)

CHAPTER 18
‌‌

Last years and death

‘To be detached is to be loosened from every tie which binds the soul to the earth …’

J. H. NEWMAN,
HISTORICAL SKETCHES

After he had received the Cardinal’s hat, Newman had twelve more years to live. His work as an author was at an end, although his flow of correspondence continued unabated into his late eighties. There were old friends and young members of family to keep up with; and deaths. He would occasionally go into the school. Hilaire Belloc remembered him standing at the classroom door, weeping as he heard Virgil’s
Aeneid
being read out (whether the tears were for the poetry or the brutal juvenile rendition, Belloc did not say).

An old friend, Charles Furse, visited the Oratory in the late 1870s and recorded: ‘He looks well, and
so happy
.’ Gone was the furrowed brow of the earlier days. ‘There is not a line about him that is careful or severe – especially when he is going to say something about any one given
his
point of view, he has the gentlest apologetic smile.’ Furse went on: ‘He is less acute in look, and voice, and mind than he was, if acuteness means sharpness with a turn towards harshness; but he seems as facile, and quick, and fluent in thought and action, as ever.’
¹
Matthew Arnold, aged fifty-seven, met Newman at the Duke of Norfolk’s house in St James’s Square, a year after the bestowal of the hat. Arnold wrote of

the encounter:

Newman stood in costume, in a reserved part of the drawing room, supported by a chaplain and by the D. of Norfolk. Devotees, chiefly women, kept pressing up to him; they were named to him, knelt, kissed his hand, got a word or two and passed on …

Arnold made ‘the most deferential of bows’ when it came to his turn. He went on: ‘[Newman] took my hand in both of his and held it there during our inter-view.’ Newman said to Arnold: ‘I ventured to tell the Duchess I should like to see you.’
2

Newman’s charisma still had power impress; even to heal. A visitor at the Oratory reported how Newman healed his toothache: ‘at the instant of touching his hand when he received me, my pains vanished, nor did they return while I was staying in the house. Newman’s was a wonderful hand, soft, nervous, emotional, electric. I felt that a miracle had been wrought.’
3

Writing on his knees one day, he wondered whether with the passing of time he had ‘less sensible devotion and inward life’. He wondered whether it was age itself: ‘Old men are in soul as stiff, as lean, as bloodless as their bodies except so far as grace penetrates and softens them.’ He prayed to St Philip for a share of the fervour the saint evidently enjoyed in old age.
4

In his
Meditations and Devotions
he penned a remarkable, original prayer for fervour:

In asking for fervour, I ask for all that I can need, and all that Thou canst give; for it is the crown of all gifts and all virtues. It cannot really and fully be, except where all are present. It is the beauty and the glory, as it is also the continued safeguard and purifier of them all … In asking for fervour … I am asking for the gift of prayer …
5

As he entered his eighties, Newman continued to model his spirituality, his habits of prayer and devotion on the example St Philip Neri. He valued, he wrote, the domestic religious ambiance of a house of fellowship with restricted numbers, enough ‘for a fireside’. He wrote, ‘whether or not I can do any thing at all in St Philip’s way, at least I can do nothing in any other’.
⁶
These habits and outlooks remained with him, and deepened, as he entered old age. Philip, he believed, was a modern funnel for the ‘three great masters of Christian teaching’,
⁷
St Benedict, St Dominic, St Ignatius. St Philip learned, as Newman put it in a sermon, ‘from Benedict what to be, and from Dominic what to do, so … from Ignatius he learned how he was to do it’.
⁸
Ignatius and Philip were, for him, exemplars of how to carry religious practice into the world:

An earnest enforcement of interior religion, a jealousy of formal ceremonies, an insisting on obedience rather than sacrifice, on mental discipline rather than fasting or hair-shirt, a mortification of the reason, that illumination and freedom of spirit which comes of love … these are the peculiarities of a special school in the Church, and St Ignatius and St Philip are Masters in it.
9

Among the many religious virtues Newman studied and sought to emulate, the greatest, he declared, was that of detachment, which he declares in his
Historical Sketches
that he has learnt from Philip.

To be detached is to be loosened from every tie which binds the soul to the earth, to be dependent on nothing sublunary, to lean on nothing temporal; it is to care simply nothing what other men choose to think or say of us, or do to us; to go about our own work, because it is our duty, as soldiers go to battle, without care for the consequences; to account credit, honour, name, easy circumstances, comfort, human affections, just nothing at all, when any religious obligation involves the sacrifice of them.
10

‘Work’ now centred on the Mass, the liturgical round, and his prayer life. He was said to be punctual at every duty, arriving before the bell rang. One

Oratorian Father has recorded his impression of Newman saying Mass before he was made Cardinal:

Ready vested before the clock struck, punctual to the minute, he would come out of the sacristy, and as often as not, before 1879, go to the St Joseph’s Altar or the Bona Mors Chapel beyond. The opening
Judica me Deus
psalm and
Gloria
were said swiftly, with a swaying to and fro in many directions; the words of consecration were in an audible whisper, with lingering emphasis and a tone of awe at
mysterium fidei
. The
Pater Noster
was given as expressively as ever, and had speaking pauses without much sense of bro-ken continuity.
Panem nostrum quotidianum
and
ne nos inducas
were tenderly expressed. He would blow out the candles after the last Gospel.
11

After he became a Cardinal a partition was erected in his room, and his sleep-ing area was replaced by an altar where he said Mass; his bed was removed to a neighbouring room. On the partition were pasted passages from the Psalms: ‘I was dumb, and was humbled … thou has made me a reproach to the fool. I was dumb, and I opened not my mouth…. Commit thy way to the Lord and trust in him…. And he will bring forth thy justice as the light, and thy judgment as the noon day.’
12

On the wall overlooking the Epistle or right-hand side of the altar Newman had hung pictures and pinned memorial cards of his departed friends – including Ambrose St John, Joseph Gordon, Edward Caswall. Corresponding to these images of past intimates, he had a notebook with a cloth needle-pointed bind-ing made by Mrs Pusey during her last illness. It contained the names of all his friends who would be remembered immediately after the consecration on the dates of the anniversaries of their deaths, but, for special friends, on a daily basis. He said his last Mass at his private altar on Christmas Day, 1889, telling a mem-ber of the community later that day: ‘Never again, never again.’

He had learned by heart a Requiem Mass and a Votive Mass, and would repeat one or the other daily, in part or in whole, in the hope that he might manage the service one more time if his health improved. As he sat repeating the words of these Masses his face would light up. Father Neville, who had taken the place of Ambrose St John, left this manuscript note:

On these occasions the brightness of his face, the speaking intelligence of his eyes, the suppleness of limb and joint and neck in his expressive little gestures, the vigour too with which his whole body seemed to be filled, were somehow wonderful to see – this is how memory pictures him at such times. So solemn was it to witness this, that it would bring a momentary feeling of both expectation and disappointment combined, as one then called to mind, what Gallonio and Bacci have described of St Philip.
13

When he could no longer recite the Breviary he substituted the saying of the Rosary with Bishop Ullathorne’s permission. His beads were always in his hands.

He claimed that its routine made up for the loss of the Divine Office. In time he gave up the Rosary when he could no longer feel the beads.

Bishop Ullathorne, himself an octogenarian, records a late encounter:

I have been visiting Cardinal Newman to-day. He is very much wasted, but very cheerful. Yesterday he went to London to see the oculist. When he tries to read, black specks are before his eyes. But his oculist tells him there is nothing wrong but old age. We had a long and cheery talk, but as I was rising to leave, an action of his caused a scene I shall never forget, for its sublime lesson to myself. He said in low and humble accents ‘My dear Lord, will you do me a great favour?’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. He glided down on his knees, bent down his venerable head and said ‘Give me your blessing’. What could I do with him before me in such a posture? I could not refuse without giving him great embarrassment. So I laid my hand on his head and said: ‘My dear Lord Cardinal, notwithstanding all laws to the contrary, I pray God to bless you, and that His Holy Spirit may be full in your heart.’ As I walked to the door, refusing to put on his biretta as he went with me, he said: ‘I have been indoors all my life, whilst you have battled for the Church in the world.’ I felt annihilated in his presence: there is a Saint in that man!
14

One last glimpse of Newman at prayer is recorded in Ward’s biography. It was Good Friday, 1890, his last. He was kneeling in St Philip’s Chapel, where, according to the rite of the day, the Blessed Sacrament was kept in ‘repose’. He was observed ‘with his face in his hands, or with his hands clasped against the back of his head’.
15

DEATH

That summer Cardinal Newman was 89 and barely clinging to life. He had suffered several falls earlier in the year and was mainly confined to his room, capable of little more than shuffling a few yards; arthritic, toothless, with failing eyesight and faulty memory. Bishop Herbert Vaughan reported that he was now hardly recognizable from his former self: ‘doubled up like a shrimp and walking with a stick longer than his doubled body … his mind very much impaired.’
1
6
Another wrote that he ‘looked like a corpse’.