Two lives of John Henry Newman

When John Henry Newman died in 1890, he left instructions that he should be buried with another priest, his friend Ambrose St John, and he also made it clear that he wished his body to decay.

However, in 2008 the Catholic Church opened the grave, hoping to find bones which could be venerated. But there were no human remains. His physical being is gone for good, but his writings are still important.

Two new books have appeared in the run-up to the Pope's visit next month to Birmingham to beatify him — John Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum, £18.99 ) and Anthony Mockler’s John Henry Newman: Fighter, Convert and Cardinal (Signal Books, £9.99).

Both the authors are Catholics, but Mockler — owner of Milton Manor, near Abingdon — is quite orthodox, whereas Cornwell is a former trainee priest who has written critical biographies of two modern popes.

Mockler’s short book is entertaining and tells us a lot about Catholic converts in Victorian England, but Cornwell’s is the one for the serious scholar.

As an Anglican cleric and fellow of Oriel, Newman’s influence in 1830s Oxford — “clerical, patriarchal, bound by privilege”, to quote Cornwell — was immense. He was a spellbinding preacher and a winning personality.

Lytton Strachey called him “a child of the Romantic Revival, a creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer . . . an artist”.

Unlike his fellow-convert Cardinal Henry Manning and the Christian Socialists, he took little interest in the condition of England, and he decided at an early age not to marry.

This has led to allegations that he was gay, but although his closest friendships were with other (religious) men, he was surely celibate.

He was conscious, he said, of “two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator”. The Oxford Movement which he led was fascinated by the question of how the English Church could be made more Catholic. And most of its adherents were fascinated by the Rev Newman’s personality.

The younger Newman is sometimes hard to like. He opposed letting Dissenters into Oxford University. He objected to a reading room for working-class people because it did not include religious books.

He actually said that it would be better for the whole human race “to die of starvation in extremest agony’ than for one person to commit one venial sin.

Yet non-Catholics often do like Newman, for several reasons. They admire his hymn, ‘Lead, Kindly Light’; his book The Idea of a University, which defends the pursuit of scholarship for its own sake, and his autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (it was natural for men of his generation and background to fall into Latin). This is not an attempt to convert the reader but an account of one person’s struggle for inner peace. The existence of God cannot be logically proved, he would write later, but “the heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination”.

The question which exercised Newman’s very fine mind for years was not whether God existed but whether he could honestly stay in the church of his boyhood or should go over to Rome.

When he finally did so, in 1845, the shock, horror and real grief which it caused his disciples are hard for our cynical age to comprehend.

It meant losing friends, leaving Oxford, his favourite place on earth, and joining an organisation which did not seem to know what to do with him.

He never regretted his decision, but he did often find himself out of step with Manning and the Vatican.

He let it be known that he had no quarrel with Darwin and thought Pope Pius IX’s decision to declare himself infallible ‘most unfortunate and ill-advised’. He would drink to the Pope, he said, but would drink to conscience first.

Yet we should not assume that Newman was a modern, ‘progressive’ thinker. When he finally became a cardinal, at the age of 78, he said clearly that he had no time for the ‘liberal’ notion that all religions are equally good, and that religion is a private affair.

The Pope is about to beatify him because he has (allegedly) produced one miracle after 120 years. There will have to be at least one more before he can actually be canonised.

He is not my idea of a saint, but he was a master of English prose and a very interesting man.

The Prince of the Church, painted by Millais in flowing scarlet robes, will not appeal to everybody. But the tired traveller, far from home and stumbling after a kindly light, may touch our hearts.

SIC: OTUK