John Henry Newman

IN the great gulf fixed between personal conviction and submission to authority lies the eternal schism which separates the followers of Christ. For forty-five years — half of his long life — John Henry Newman walked along the hither brink of the Great Divide, then crossed the chasm, and for forty-five years more walked delicately along the precipice on the further side. That one so rooted in his affection for the Anglican Church, so learned in its history, so devoted to its offices, could pass from one shore to the other, amazed the world, and men crowded to the gulf’s edge to marvel at the airy spider’s web by which he passed, and to wonder whether that frail and imaginative structure might not bear the weight of a national pilgrimage. Even now when two generations are passed, and we know that Newman’s adventure was not decisive in the world’s history, we feel the thrill of it.

Newman was a paradox. The greatest dialectician since Pascal was no philosopher. Tender and infinitely lovable by nature, he involved himself in acrimonious disputes. The most personal of human beings, he obeyed an impersonal standard. By a supreme exercise of private judgment, he accepted the infallibility of another’s will. He was a riddle, and to resolve it the world has striven ever since.

What is the difference between marvels and miracles? You may call the great events of Newman’s life by either name. But consider this: It was not so much Newman’s conversion as his account of it which has affected human thought. Yet the Apologia would never have been written had not a skeptic written a History of England, and if a belligerent Protestant had not reviewed it and, by way of emphasizing his buffets, had not lugged in by the heels an outrageous reference to Newman.

‘Truth for its own sake,’wrote Charles Kingsley in a review of James Anthony Froude, ‘has never been a virtue of the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and, on the whole, ought not to be.’ To answer that mendacious insult the Apologia came ultimately into being.

Any reader of Dr. Boss’s just and interesting Life of Newman will be struck by the long anticlimax which succeeded the conversion of his hero. Instead of going from strength to strength, Newman seemed to proceed from weakness to weakness. He was convicted of criminal libel in a suit most foolishly incurred. He failed signally in attempting to found an Irish University against his own better judgment. He essayed an unsuccessful career as an editor. His very orthodoxy was suspect. And then came the transformation wrought by the Apologia, and finally, when he was an old, old man, the triumph of the Cardinalate.

We are interested that 1934 marks the tenth year of the intelligent conduct of a publishing house by W. W. Norton. This biography, issued under his guidance, is a good example of a short and well-considered ‘Life.’ Newman’s chronicler is not a poet, as in the divine order he should be, but he has what the jargon of psychologists calls ‘depth perception.’ He has charity and discernment. Living in the Catholic world, he realizes that, in the inscrutable wisdom of his Maker, unbelievers also have their place under the sun.

E. S.