Newman’s Battles with Liberalism

In chapter 2 of the Apologia Newman summarizes “the position” he took in the Tracts for the Times. His first “proposition,” he says, was his “battle . . . with liberalism,” which he then defines: “by liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments.” The Tracts were published between 1833 and 1839. Newman wrote of his battle with liberalism in 1864 and adds that, although in the meantime he has repudiated Anglicanism in favor of Catholicism and thus changed some of his beliefs, his convictions on the subject of liberalism have remained unaltered: in regard to them, “I have nothing to retract, and nothing to repent of”; what “I held in 1833 . . . I hold in 1864.” In his long (115 pages) and excellent introduction to this new edition, Frank M. Turner quarrels with that claim.

Most who have written about the Apologia have been theologians or literary critics; but Turner is the John Hay Whitney professor of history at Yale. His concern here (as in his John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion) is with “the Newman of history”—as opposed to the “Newman of the Apologia”—the latter “created” by the former “for his own deeply personal and public polemical purposes.” For his characterization of the historical Newman, Turner relies on sermons and correspondence from the 1830s and finds there a Newman quite different from the one who presents himself in his account of that period in 1864. “The authority of the Apologia and the determination of its admirers to defend its narrative” have resulted in an “enormous historical misunderstanding . . . [of] Newman’s Anglican life and the character of the Tractarian Movement.” At the heart of that misunderstanding, says Turner, is Newman’s claim in 1864 to have been in 1833, above all else, an opponent of liberalism.

On the contrary, Turner declares, the “fundamental aspect of his Anglican career” was “his critique of evangelical and finally historic Protestantism.” “It is quite simply a fact that the Anglican Newman of history spent the preponderance of his polemical energy attacking the doctrines, mores, institutions and ecclesiastical influence of evangelical Protestants.” The Newman of the Apologia claimed that “the men who had driven me from Oxford were distinctly the Liberals.” By no means, says Turner; instead it was the evangelical party in the English church. And he quotes Theodore Walrond in the North British Review (1865): “‘It is certain that the liberals had no share in the measures which ultimately drove from Oxford one whom they regarded with distrust indeed, but with unfeigned admiration and interest. . . . Dr. Newman ought to know well . . . that the real force against which he had to contend . . . was that turbid stream of mingled “two-bottle orthodox” and narrow Puritanism.’” Why then did Newman attribute his defeat instead to liberalism?

Turner argues persuasively that the motive was polemical. By 1864 Newman was being attacked by ultramontane Catholics—his former disciples Ward and Manning among them—who considered Newman himself a liberal because he sought for Catholics a measure of latitude in interpreting doctrine. Newman wanted to clear himself of that imputation, and Turner shows that in his “Note A, on Liberalism,” appended to the Apologia in 1865, he even drew upon that most ultramontane of documents, Pius ix’s Syllabus of Errors. Newman also wanted “to domesticate Roman Catholicism for those outside that communion and to present it in a manner especially attractive to Protestant readers.” It behooved him, therefore, speaking now as a Catholic, to downplay the strenuous critique of evangelical Protestantism of the 1830s. “In 1864 the Roman Catholic Newman seeking accommodation for his co-religionists in the wider culture [in which evangelical Protestantism had great influence] had no desire to indicate how far removed from the values of that culture he had been as an Anglican,” writes Turner. Therefore he “refocused his career from that of a religious and theological polemicist [attacking Evangelicals] into that of an opponent of the [liberal] march of mind.”

Does Turner overstate...