My online Book Review of the Month is dedicated to Newman’s Unquiet Grave by John Cornwell (Published by Continuum)
I have two reasons for picking John Cornwell’s biography of Newman as my latest book of the month.
First on the personal front, my own recently published attempt at biography, Papa Spy , reminded me of how much its subject, my father, the late Tom Burns, owed to Newman, as a leading Catholic publisher (and wartime spook at odds with those Marxists who had infiltrated British intelligence.) From his early schooldays with the Jesuits, Tom had a reverence for a great-uncle James Burns, an Anglican publisher who followed his star author Newman into the Catholic fold.
James Burns (after who I am partly named-the other part being St James, patron saint of Spain, in memory of my Spanish mother) initially lost his livelihood as a result of Newman’s conversion, but subsequently, with the help of Newman’s gift of the copyright of his novel Loss & Gain and other works gradually restored it under the imprint of Burns & Oates, of which my father would become chairman many years later.
My principal reason for picking Cornwell’s book is that whatever the controversies surrounding the upcoming Papal Visit to the UK, it will be the beatification of John Henry Newman on Sunday that will play an important if not key moment during Benedict’s XV1 four day state tour.
And yet as his latest biographer John Cornwell recognises, anyone writing about the life and character of Newman faces a problem of scope and definition. The problem with Newman is that neither his character nor life fits easily into popular notions of sainthood, while his following has built up for different reasons that appear to contradict each other. The latter is partly the result of Newman’s substantial literary output which while perhaps not having that intention, have been open to opposing interpretations, not least on how Catholics should conduct their relationship with the Vatican.
Cornwell is a prize-winning Catholic journalist and academic who has earned a reputation among his co-religionists for writing books on tricky subjects that question dogma and institution. His better selling tomes have included Hitler’s Pope, a critical study of Pius X11 alleged appeasement of Nazism and Seminary Boy, a sensitive heart-felt memoir about the travails of studying for the celibate priesthood (Cornwell opted in the end for married secular life.)
Let me say from the outset that anyone remotely interested in the Catholic faith and what makes it endure despite its controversies should read this well researched and incisive biography, Newman’s Unquiet Grave . In an age of doubt and scepticism, it is a book worth keeping by one’s bedside, if nothing else as a refreshing antidote to media hype.
While professing an interest in his subject dating back to his days as a seminarian, it is with a keen sense of journalistic timing that Cornwell wrote and published his latest book in the run-up to the Papal visit. Already well aware of Newman increasingly being thrust into the media limelight, Cornwell set out with the aim of writing a less academic account of Newman’s life than scripted by previous biographers, one that, in his words, would be “accessible not only to Catholics, but non-Christians as well.”
Newman was a university don and preacher who spent much of his adult life in Victorian England, rarely stepping beyond the privileged circles of Oxford university life, and later his community of priests in Birmingham. Apart from a four year interlude in Dublin as rector at the newly founded Catholic University of Ireland, Newman’s trips abroad became increasingly focused on Rome during an extended process of conversion to Roman Catholicism.
While the painted portraits of an older Newman confirm a certain intellectual gravitas, Newman lacked the mysticism of St John of the Cross, the simplicity of St Francis of Assisi, the missionary zeal of St Ignatius. His contemporary Cardinal Manning, another convert to the Catholic Faith, arguably can lay a greater claim than Newman as a major influence on Catholic social teaching, and the driving force behind the building of London’s impressive Westminster Cathedral which has endured as symbol of Catholic self-confidence. Today many of those who defend a liberating theological ‘ option for the poor’ contrast the willingness with which this Pope agreed to beatify Newman with the Vatican’s continuing reluctance to make a saint of Archbishop Romero-assassinated by a right wing death squad in El Salvador and now venerated by Latin America’s downtrodden.
Newman was no martyr. He died peacefully in his bed after leading a comfortable life, much of it in later years secluded from the harsher realities of industrial Britain. In his lifetime, his occasional fasting included breaks for food. To others than a closed intimate circle, his humanity was hard to dissect, not least because of his ambiguous sexuality. Newman disapproved of his male friends marrying while allowing a coterie of unquestioningly devotional, if occasional hysterical women to build up around his celibate life. The priest Ambrose St John, Newman’s close companion in adult life was so inseparable that the Cardinal insisted that when they were both dead they should lie buried side by side.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, Cornwell insists that Newman was heterosexual, however much human right activist and leading anti-pope campaigner Peter Tatchell might have proclaimed him as ‘gay’ and charged the exhumation of his grave as a gesture of Vatican homophobia.Cornwell, with his academic scientific hat as well as the nose of an investigative journalist, casts doubt over the ‘miracle’ that has supported Newman’s beatification. What is beyond dispute is that Newman himself refused to be considered a saint- “I have nothing of a saint about me as everyone knows”, he wrote as he prepared for his ordination as a Catholic priest- and gave instructions for compost to be thrown on his coffin to accelerate the process of decomposition and thus the eradication of any future relics.
In assessing the man, Cornwell focuses on his literary legacy. One of this book’s strength is the forensic and intelligent way in which the author manages Newman’s huge output of letters, essays, sermons, and semi autobiographical novels and presents them as a rich and generally engaging tapestry of thought. We come to realise not just what a huge influence Newman had on a wealth of literary talent, from Hopkins and Joyce to Chesterton, Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, but his relevance to the present day.
To quote Cornwell from a piece he recently wrote in the FT, what comes out in the wash is “the most electrifying religious thinker and writer in English of the past 200 years- subtle, imaginative, deeply learned, at times maddeningly paradoxical and dialectical.”
Believing in Christianity, wrote Newman was a process of ‘heart speaking to heart’, a deeply personal relationship with God which defied clever argument. Not everything Newman wrote, by any means, is easily digestible. But the Newman that comes through in the pages of this book is that of a literary workaholic who, as Cornwell wonderfully puts it, “prayed with his pen”.
Newman’s conversion from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic faith was slow moving, filled with doubt prior to conviction.Cornwell sympathetically charts Newman’s development of Christian doctrine-from his days with the Oxford Movement hoping to renew the Anglican Church from within to the second half of his adult life as a Catholic priest in Birmingham- as a deeply thought out internal journey not without personal cost. In the bigoted, sectarian world in which he moved, Newman’s path to Rome not only fuelled his rejection by family, friends, and pupils, but also his exile from Oxford after he was forced to resign his fellowship at Oriel College
Newman enraged fellow Anglicans and not a few fellow Catholics both prior and after his conversion to Rome. Within the Vatican of his time, Newman fuelled suspicions as an intellectual priest who could come across both as too independent and too English. Even after being made a cardinal, Newman was accused by some Catholic priests of being too ‘liberal’.
Certainly Newman’s constituency has broadened since his death in 1890, among new generations of educated Catholics in England, Ireland, North America, New Zealand and Australia who, like Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man have, in matters of faith, shared a tendency to follow ‘intuition’, a sense of ‘strange unrest’, the exercise of imagination, and conscience in the form of private judgement. My father, one of the leading English lay Catholics of the late 20th century, saw Newman’s thoughts as an enduring influence when he was editor of the Catholic weekly The Tablet, when he came to believe that the liberal spirit is as much as mark of the Roman Church as its authoritarian structure, exemplified supremely by the Curia.
In discussing Newman’s legacy Cornwell argues that had he lived today he would have clearly defended religious pluralism against al expressions of fundamentalism. He encouraged a historical approach to theology as opposed to the timeless abstractions of neoscolasticism. He also came to be convinced that each individual encounters the divine presence in the voice of conscience.
In his famous letter to the Catholic Duke of Norfolk, at a time when anti-popery, led by Gladstone, was on the attack, Newman wrote: “Certainly if I obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts…I shall drink-to the Pope, if you please,-still to Conscience first, and the Pope afterwards.”
For all these wise words, Newman was regarded as a major influence by the reformers at the Second Vatican Council. And yet Cornwell suspects that enough has been written by Newman for him to be ultimately ‘hijacked’ by the current Pope and used to encourage the conversion of disaffected Anglicans, while discouraging doubt and dissent within the Catholic Church.
Some Newmanists may well object to Cornwell’s idea of ‘hijacking’. The concept of a liberal Newman as odds with the present papacy sits uneasily with the fact that at his investiture as Cardinal, Newman stated that as and Anglican and as a Catholic, his life’s work had been a struggle against ‘liberalism in religion.’ Newman warned of the danger inherent in liberalism as religious toleration and religious relativism: the idea that one religion may be as good as any other or indeed as no religion at all. This is Newman perfectly in sync with Pope Benedict’s XV1.
And yet Cornwell reminds us that in his life-time Newman was not uncritical of the papacy, particularly an ageing one. “It is anomaly” he wrote, ‘and bears no good fruit. He (the Pope) becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it.
In the end Cornwell suggests that Newman’s habit of ‘saying and unsaying towards a conclusion’ makes him vulnerable to distortion. But the author leaves us with an impressive portrait of a remarkable mind and complex human being, who while inspirational, may have, as he himself recognised, fallen short of sainthood, but in the process made Catholics of opposing tendencies think more deeply about their faith, to the benefit of the common good. Saint or not, Newman may end up being the one reconciling element of an otherwise divisive Papal visit.
