The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 9, Littlemore and the Parting of Friends, May 1842–October 1843 ed. by Francis J. McGrath, F.S.M. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 147 The Letters and Diaries ofJohn Henry Newman, vol. 9, Littlemore and the Parting ofFriends, May 1842-0ctober 1843. Edited at the Birmingham Oratory. Notes and introduction by FRANCIS J. MCGRATH, F.S.M. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xxxix + 833. ISBN 0-19925458 -3. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Uniform Edition [London: Longmans, Green, and Co.], p. 147), Newman remarked that "from the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church." Such haunting words reflect the "three great blows" that progressively suffocated Newman's Anglican life: the perceived parallel to early Church heresies in the Via Media theory he used to justify Anglican integrity, the establishment of a single bishopric in Jerusalem serving Anglican and Prussian Protestant interests that fudged the Catholic/Protestant distinction, and the recurring episcopal condemnations of Tract 90. Volume 9 of Newman's Letters and Diaries documents the third blow and completes, as it were, the famous death-bed scene. The two previous volumes of Newman's letters detail the first two blows. (See my reviews in The Thomist, April 1997 and October 2003.) As one may surmise, these published letters have appeared but slowly in print, the lack of haste reflecting the uncommon scholarship characterizing them. It is worthwhile to recall the series' overview. Rev. Charles Stephen Dessain, the great modern archivist of Newman's writings, began publishing Newman's correspondence in 1961, beginning with the Roman Catholic period. Having collated and mapped the entire correspondence to fill thirty-one volumes, Dessain began with volume 11(October1845). He died as he was bringing to print the last of the Catholic-period letters. After the first five volumes, dealing with Newman's early Anglican life, were published by others, Mr. Gerard Tracey, who had replaced Fr. Dessain as archivist, published volumes 6-8. He died as volume 9 was in preparation. Marist brother Dr. Francis McGrath has completed the work and dedicated this present volume to Mr. Tracey. Newman's published correspondence has come almost full circle, although there are plans for many Newman letters that have been discovered since Dessain's earlier collation. Newman thought he had an "understanding" (Apologia, 90) that the bishops would not censure Tract 90 if the High Church party would cease publishing more tracts. How unsettled his Anglicanism became when bishop after bishop attackedTract 90 over a three-year span is clear: "I could not stand against such aunanimous expression ofopinion from the Bishops" (LD 9:573); "[the charges] have got worse and worse every year" (W 9:575). Newman's own bishop, Bagot of Oxford, delivered his "charge" (a triennial official teaching of an Anglican bishop to his presbyters) on 23 May 1842. Surprisingly, Newman's summary of it, in a letter to Keble the following day, gave the bishop's words a benign interpretation (e.g., "very favorable to us, or rather to our cause" [LD 9:14]), and to brother-in-law Tom Mozley the same day he termed it "a noble charge, very favorable to us" (LD 9:18). But eighteen months later, Newman recalled 148 BOOK REVIEWS that he could not "believe my ears" when Bagot said Tract 90 made the 39 Articles of Religion mean "anything or nothing" (LD 9:574). Painful intervening months surely shaped this retrospective! During those months other episcopal charges (eleven are given in appendix 2) condemned Tract 90 as unfaithful to Anglicanism, making Newman feel like "a foreign material [who] cannot assimilate with the Church of England" (LD 9:573). One senses the irony. Newman had written Tract 90 to prove that Anglo-Catholic sentiments were tolerated by the Articles of Religion, but its censure by the bishops served to drive Anglo Catholics toward Roman Catholicism. To confidante Marie Giberne he wrote in October 1843: "The Tractarian party is in process of being broken up.... All the Anglo Catholics are trooping off.... Pusey's assistant in Hebrew, Mr. Seager, has joined the Church of Rome" (LD 9:589-90). Whence Newman's famous recollection in the Apologia (140): "There were no converts to Rome, till after the condemnation of No. 90." His letters describing...