The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 7 ed. by Gerard Tracey (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 325 debate, this time without condemnations based on unwarranted stereotypes? Rogers wisely leaves such issues open. It is more than enough to have resisted the cliches, analyzed the texts with such care, and shown us a way through a seeming impasse. Rogers's book will be an indispensable part of the future debate on Aquinas, Barth, and natural knowledge of God. ]AMES]. BUCKLEY Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 7. Edited by GERARD TRACEY. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xxvi + 550. $95.00 (cloth). C. S. Dessain began editing and publishing Newman's twenty thousand extant letters and his diary entries thirty-five years ago, beginning with the Roman Catholic period, 1845 (vol. 11 of the projected thirty-one volume series). Fr. Dessain died as volume 31 went to press. Gerard Tracey, Dessain's successor as archivist of the Birmingham Oratory, coedited the first six volumes of the Anglican period and now, as sole editor, gives us volume 7, covering the important years 1839 and 1840. What I wrote years earlier regarding Dessain's scholarly editorship (The Thomist 38 [1974]: 372-75) is equally applicable to Tracey's editing of this volume. Newman's autobiographical Apologia of 1864 and Anne Mozley's 1890 edition of selected Anglican-period letters that Cardinal Newman put into her hands-she was sister to the Mozley brothers who had married Newman's sisters Harriett and Jemima-had been the best windows on the events of 1839 and 1840 from primary sources. Tracey's volume is now the definitive window. Not only does Mozley's edition present a small portion of Newman's letters, whereas Tracey presents everything extant, including the diary entries, Mozley also cut off portions of letters. For example, Newman wrote a letter of spiritual direction to Ms. Mary Holmes on 19 July 1840; Anne Mozley has the letter, but the opening paragraphs are excised, where Newman wrote of the consequences of sinning and of God's punishment of those God still loves-important issues to be sure! For more than a century the Apologia (114, 116) has been the normal window through which to view the eventful happenings of these years in Newman's spiritual odyssey. During the summer of 1839 he studied the fifthcentury Monophysite controversy and said, "I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite"; in August he was handed Nicholas Wiseman's article on Augustine and the Donatists, and Augustine's anti-schismatic recipe, securus judicat orbis terrarum, "kept ringing in my ears." These 1864 words 326 BOOK REVIEWS of Newman are a retrospective; he had lived through the subsequent explosive impact of those 1839 perceptions and viewed matters accordingly. The Tracey volume gives us a more realistic feel for the events, for we are viewing Newman day by day during those unsettling times. We see matters arise, fade, perhaps to rise again, perhaps overtaken by other events. In a phrase, we get what Newman himself desiderated in knowledge of this kind: we get a real apprehension of his unfolding life and its issues. For example, the Monophysite alert was in reality more muted, with only a 12 July letter to Frederic Rogers noting "two things ... very remarkable at Chalcedon-the great power of the Pope ... and the marvelous interference of the civil power" (104). In 1839 Newman saw this exercise of civil power as a rejoinder to the Roman charge of an Erastian Anglican church, and the exercise of papal power supplied him ammunition against the liberals in his own church. Only some years later did he see the import of these events at Chalcedon, such that the contending parties (the papal party, the Monophysites, the Eutychians) mirrored respectively the Roman Catholics, the Anglicans, and the Protestants. Newman's "via media" AngloCatholicism began to look suspiciously like a heresy itself, hence Newman's reference in the Apologia to seeing one's Monophysite face. If Newman's study of the Council of Chalcedon had an initially more muted effect, the appearance of Fr. Nicholas Wiseman's 1839 Dublin Review a1iicle on the Donatists apropos Anglicanism was absolutely unnerving, as the Apologia expresses and as the...