Newman and History by Edward Short, Gracewing, 376pp, £20
In Newman and History, Edward Short maintains the high standard of his two previous books on the cardinal. The first essay here incisively treats John Henry Newman’s response to Gibbon’s Enlightenment critique of Christianity. Short contrasts the cardinal’s understanding of the spiritual dynamics that led ancient men and women to live and die for Christ with Gibbon’s narrow 18th-century prejudices, which culminated in the French Revolution. There was nothing parochial about Newman’s mind. His deep historical research protected him from glib Protestant and liberal interpretations.
Short goes on to focus on Newman’s “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine”, and delineates with scalpel sharpness the parallels between primitive Christianity and 19th-century Catholicism, both despised as “superstition” by Whig historians. For Newman, superstition acknowledges the supernatural, even if it misinterprets it, and the Whig historian’s dismissal of superstition all too often boils down to a mere disdain for the supernatural.
The third essay, “Travesties of Newman” is the first of Short’s book reviews included here. In it, the author is gracefully pugilistic, pouring potent scorn on those who impugn Newman’s character and intellect.
“Newman and the Liberals” is a weighty riposte to those (including the historian Frank Turner) who claim that Newman misunderstood or wilfully misrepresented liberalism. Traditional Anglican and liberal criticisms of Newman, repeated to this day, get short shrift. With abundant quotations from the cardinal and an array of contemporary witnesses, including opponents of Newman such as Fitzjames Stephen, Short proves that Newman understood liberalism perfectly well and consistently opposed it from the start of the Tractarian Movement to the end of his life.
Rather than being a front for some anti-evangelical crusade, Newman’s lifelong campaign against liberalism recognised the encroaching challenge that rationalists of all stripes were making to the doctrinal integrity and power of the Church. Here, Short strikes hard but honest blows.
In the chapter “Signs of Contradiction, Signs of Hope”, Short reminds readers of Newman’s “holy simplicity”, a phrase which encapsulates the author’s view of Newman as a whole. The cardinal was honest about his age, and this enabled him to be honest about the past and the future, which we can see unfolding today. No religious sceptic, he was instead sceptical about the substitutes his age offered to the pure, demanding truth of the Catholic Church, and his integrity inspires us still.
For light relief, there follows a review of a recent collection of essays on the Oxford Movement, which playfully deploys the arguments of the Catholic Newman against the quixotic vagaries of Anglo-Catholicism.
“Newman, CS Lewis and the Reality of Conversion” explores the painstaking conversions of Newman and CS Lewis, and ponders with some regret why Lewis ultimately remained in the Protestantism of his Ulster childhood.
The chapter entitled “Newman Distilled” gives a glowing review of Fr Ian Ker’s anthology of Newman’s writings, which exhibits not only the cardinal’s stylish prose, but also his keen, satirical appreciation of human nature “Newman and the Law” gives witness to Newman’s struggles against an Erastian Protestantism buttressed by English law, a struggle made luridly plain in the injustice of the Achilli trial, in which Newman was found guilty of libelling a Protestant ex-friar and notorious rapist, to the disgust even of many Protestants.
In Short’s review of Mgr Roderick Strange’s excellent collection of Newman’s letters, which Oxford University Press brought out a few years ago, he emphasises the sincerity and generosity of his subject, not to mention the development of his thought.
The final essay, “Hagiography, History and John Henry Newman”, looks at history and holiness. Newman might have reluctantly agreed to suspend Faber’s series of hagiographies, but he defended the role of hagiography, even in the forms common to popular religion.
As Short nicely demonstrates, Newman recognised that any religious devotion that makes good taste its sole criterion – even if it eschews extravagance or superstition – still risks becoming tastefully dead. In other words, one extreme must not be substituted for another.
Newman took sanctity seriously, and his sense of history was alive to the importance of saints serving God’s purposes. As the author shows again and again in this wide-ranging study, any understanding of Newman that ignores this sense of sanctity – rooted in the sanctity of the man himself – is deficient. Thus, Short gives erudite and impassioned witness to a saint who saw eternity in the productions of time, and sings eternity to us even now.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.