Apologia pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons (review)

This “historian’s edition” (p. vii) claims to set Newman’s Apologia in its historical context, principally through an introduction of more than a hundred pages, for the most part repeating Turner’s thesis in his revisionist John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, 2002) that Newman self-servingly rewrote history in the Apologia. There is only space here to list the main errors, misinterpretations, unsubstantiated speculations, and selective uses of evidence in Turner’s rewriting of history.

Turner’s central charge is that Newman pretended that his battle as a Tractarian was with the liberals rather than the Evangelicals because of his desire to ingratiate himself with his Protestant audience and to conciliate his Ultramontane opponents. However, the Tractarian movement formally began with John Keble’s Assize Sermon protesting against the Whig government’s reform of the established Church of Ireland, in which it was supported by its natural allies, liberal Anglicans such as Thomas Arnold. The biggest Tractarian battle was over the appointment of R. D. Hampden as regius professor of divinity, who was charged with “rationalism,” but “with no mention of liberalism,” Turner argues (p. 60)—as though the two were not the same thing. Hampden was an extreme liberal Oriel Noetic who equated Christianity not with doctrine but “the simple religion of Jesus Christ,” even recognizing Unitarians as Christians, and who was as much opposed by Evangelicals as Tractarians. All three parties would have been astonished to hear that “Liberalism in religion was evangelical Protestantism” (p. 63)—although Newman did think that evangelicalism led logically to liberalism. Nor was evangelicalism “popular Protestantism” (p. 63). The Evangelicals were only a party in the Church of England, and most people belonged to what Newman called “the national religion” or “Bible Religion”;³ indeed, it had been the religion of his upbringing before his Evangelical conversion. R.W. Church, a participant in the Oxford movement and its first historian, agreed with Newman, saying, “The Apologia is the history of a great battle against Liberalism, understanding by Liberalism the tendencies of modern thought to destroy the basis of revealed religion. . . .”⁴ Pace Turner (p. 65), the Apologia makes it manifestly clear that Newman meant the same by liberalism and that neither he nor Church would have had the slightest difficulty in naming liberals, principally Arnold (“is he a Christian?” Newman had famously asked in 1833)⁵ and Hampden. Pace Turner (p. 71), Church agreed “on the whole” with Newman that it was the liberals, who “supplied the brains,” that were responsible for the condemnation of Tract 90 in 1841.⁶

Pace Turner (pp. 21, 93), it was not Wiseman’s article of August 1839 in the Dublin Review, and that was not on the Monophysites but the Donatists, that first raised a doubt in Newman’s mind about the Tractarian Via Media, but his research earlier in that summer into the Monophysite heresy. Nor was his disquiet aroused by the unremarkable “fact that the Monophysites had not been in communion with Rome” (p. 21), but by the disturbing parallel between the Tractarians and the moderate Monophysites who also occupied a “midway” position between the more extreme Eutychians and Rome. Nor did Newman appeal “to his perception of the Monophysite parallel of 1839 long after the fact as a post facto [sic!] explanation for actions and attitudes that had arisen from his enormous frustration, anger and isolation after Tract 90” (p. 93). In fact, at the time he confided his alarm to his two closest friends, Frederic Rogers and Henry Wilberforce. It would have been utterly irresponsible for him as the leader of the movement to broadcast what at this point might only be a passing fear to all and sundry.

Pace Turner, Newman could hardly have become a Roman Catholic only because he “desperately wished to preserve . . . community” (p. 102) with his Littlemore community...