Newman, JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL (1801-90), the leader of the Oxford Tractarian movement of 1833 in the Church of England, who joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, and was made a cardinal by Leo XIII. in 1879. He was born in London on the 21st February 1801. His father was John Newman, a member of the banking firm of Ramsbottom, Newman, & Co. His mother was the child of an old Huguenot family which had settled in London as paper-manufacturers. She was a moderate Calvinist, and taught her children to love the school of Scott, Romaine, Newton, and Milner. Her children learned early to take great delight in the Bible, and Newman has always ascribed the utmost influence over his early religious views to his mother's teaching. From Scott, the commentator on the Bible, he learned two principles which may be traced in all his subsequent career. The first was to prize 'holiness before peace;' the second was that 'growth' is 'the only evidence of life.' From his reading of Law's Serious Call he dates his firm inward assent to the doctrine of eternal punishment, which he always held as taught by our Lord himself; a doctrine, however, of which he often endeavoured to attenuate the mystery—notably in Callista (chap. xix.). Milner's Church History first attracted Newman to the writings of the early Fathers. Yet at the same time he derived from Newton's book on the prophecies a belief which more or less biased his mind long after he had ceased to accept it as a truth—that Rome is Antichrist. In the autumn of 1816 a belief took possession of him, as he tells us in his Apologia, that he was to lead a life of celibacy; and this belief held its ground, with certain brief intervals of 'a month now and a month then,' up to the age of twenty-eight, after which it remained absolutely fixed. Newman went to a private school at Ealing. The stoppage of his father's bank compelled him to take his degree at Oxford as early as possible without taking full time to read for honours, and he actually took it (from Trinity College) in 1820, when he was only nineteen, but overwork resulted in a partial failure. In 1821 he wrote jointly with a friend two cantos of a poem on St Bartholomew's Eve, but the fragment has never been republished. It should be added that Newman was always passionately fond of music, and showed delicacy and skill as a violinist.
In 1822 Newman was elected to a fellowship in Oriel College, then the most distinguished in the university; and it was here that, after a period of some loneliness, he formed his close intimacy with Dr Pusey, and subsequently with Hurrell Froude, whose dash and genius exerted a great influence over Newman, and who had a great share in starting the Tractarian movement of 1833. In 1823, too, Newman first read Butler's Analogy, from which he tells us that he learned to interpret the less certain aspects of natural religion in the sense of revealed religion, and especially to interpret natural phenomena in the sense of the sacramental system—i.e. as conveying mystical spiritual influences of which there is no external sign. Keble's Christian Year (1827) fell in exactly with this impression of the mystery at the heart of apparently purely physical influences. From Bishop Butler Newman also derived the principle that 'probability is the guide of life,' which, however, he more or less modified when he became a Roman Catholic, holding thenceforward that in all matters of first-rate religious importance certitude can be attained and not merely probability. At Oriel Newman formed cordial relations with Dr Hawkins, afterwards the provost of the college, and Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin. Both of them exercised great influence over him by teaching him to define his thoughts clearly; and he afterwards expressed surprise that the casuistry of the Roman Church should have been credited with those habits of subtle discrimination which he had really gained from his Oxford colleagues.
Newman's first book, completed in 1832, but not published till 1833, was that on The Arians of the Fourth Century. It was a very careful and scholarly production, intended to show that the Arian heresy was not, as had been supposed, of Alexandrian origin, but was one of the Judaising heresies which sprang up in Antioch. The book is a powerful vindication of the Athanasian doctrine of the divine nature of Jesus Christ from the imputation of being arbitrary, or in any way an unauthorised ecclesiastical addition to the essence of the Pauline and Johannine theology. Newman insists on the dogmatic definition of the Son as being 'of one substance' with the Father, and not merely 'of like substance,' as the only escape from either creature-worship on the one hand or the impossible assertion of the voluntary self-sacrifice of an eternal creator on man's account on the other.
In the late autumn of 1832 Newman accompanied Hurrell Froude and his father in a Mediterranean tour undertaken in the hope of restoring the health of the former. It was on this tour that the fire gradually kindled which was to bear fruit in the Anglican movement of 1833. Most of Newman's smaller poems were written on this voyage, and were soon afterwards published with the signature in the Lyra Apostolica, a volume of verse the object of which was to reassert for the Church of England her spiritual authority and mission with something of the ease and buoyancy of poetic license. It was on this tour that Newman first saw Monsignore (afterwards Cardinal) Wiseman in Rome, and told him gravely in reply to the expression of a courteous wish that Hurrell Froude and he might revisit Rome, 'We have a work to do in England.' At Rome Newman left his friends to go alone to Sicily, where he fell ill of malarial fever. His mind was deeply possessed during this illness by the idea of the work he had to do in England, and the delay in finding passage to England was very trying to him. He spent much of his time in the Roman Catholic churches, which he had up to this period refrained from visiting, and speaks with great feeling in one of his poems of the good offices of that church, though a 'foe,' in ministering to his sickness, like the good Samaritan to the wounded Jew. At last he got passage on an orange boat to Marseilles. Becalmed in the Straits of Bonifacio, he wrote the best known of all his poems, 'Lead, kindly Light.' From Marseilles he travelled straight to England, reaching home in time to be present at Keble's Oxford assize sermon on National Apostasy, which he always regarded as the date at which the Tractarian movement began. It was preached on July 14, 1833.
Into the series of Tracts for the Times which now commenced Newman threw himself with great energy; indeed he himself composed a considerable number of them. In the very first page of the first tract, which was his own, he told the bishops that 'black event though it would be for the country, yet we could not wish them a more blessed termination of their career than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom.' The tracts which now began to pour forth were all intended to assert the authority of the Anglican Church, to claim apostolical descent for the Anglican episcopate, to advocate the restoration of a stricter discipline and the maintenance of a stricter orthodoxy, to insist on the primary importance of the sacraments, and the duty of loyalty to the church—Newman persuaded a friend to stay away from the marriage of a sister who had seceded from the Anglican Church—and in general to preserve the dogmatic purity of the church as well as to guard her divine ritual. But while he was full of confidence in these principles, which he held in common with Rome, what puzzled him was to justify adequately the strong anti-Romanist language of the greater Anglican divines; and a great part of his time was given during the Tractarian movement to laying down clearly the doctrine of the via media or midway course between popular Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, which he claimed that the Anglican divines of the 17th century had taken up. Up to nearly the end of his Anglican period he disapproved strongly the cultus of the Virgin Mary and the saints as interfering with the true worship of God. In 1837 he made an attempt to distinguish the Anglican via media from the doctrine of the Church of Rome in a course of lectures on 'The Prophetic Office of the Church viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism.' In these lectures he contrasted the attitude of the Anglican and Roman churches in reference to the use and abuse of private judgment, their attitude towards the principle of infallibility, their very different use of Scripture, and their view of the fortunes of the church. But while defending and defining as far as possible the via media of Anglicanism,
Newman frankly admitted that it had never been practically enforced, and that it was a theoretic line on which no actual ecclesiastical policy had been founded. This it was which it remained for the Tractarians to do.
In 1838 Newman followed up his discussion of the via media so far as it affects authority with a volume on the via media in its relation to the doctrine of justification by faith. Again he taught that the Anglican Church takes a middle course between the Roman Catholic Church and popular Protestantism in maintaining that justification by faith—or the imputation without the reality of righteousness—must precede sanctification, which gives the reality, though sanctification must necessarily follow; while the Roman Catholic theology regarded sanctification as the whole substance of justification.
In Tract 85, which was also published in 1838, Newman made an effort to apply the theology of the via media to the interpretation of Scripture. He held that the Roman Catholic Church takes a view too independent of Scripture, while the Anglican Church is right in asserting that all revealed doctrine is to be found in Scripture, though it could not be found on the mere surface of Scripture, since it needs the guidance of the church's traditions to help us to find it there. He admitted most fully that the stress which one might expect to be laid is not laid in Scripture on baptism, on confession, on absolution, nor even on public worship itself, and that we can only find these doctrines in Scripture by attaching the importance which tradition teaches us to attach to the hints and obiter dicta of Scripture. Scripture, he held, verifies the teaching of the church rather than systematically inculcates it. Tract 85 was one of the most careful and characteristic of all Newman's essays as a Tractarian.
Tract 90, which appeared early in 1841, and which gave rise to so much agitation in Oxford, was the most famous, but certainly one of the least interesting of the tracts. The right wing of the Tractarian party, headed by William George Ward (q.v.), was at this time urging Newman to reconcile his High Church doctrines with the Thirty-nine Articles. This Newman thought a comparatively easy matter. The Articles recognise the teaching of the Books of Homilies as 'godly and wholesome;' and Newman contended that there was therefore ample evidence that the intention of the Articles was Catholic in spirit, and that they were aimed at the supremacy of the pope and the popular abuses of the Catholic Church in practice, and not at Catholic doctrine. The Homilies regard the first seven hundred years of the Catholic Church as quite pure, recognise six councils as received by all Christians, and speak of many of the Fathers as inspired by the Holy Ghost. Clearly therefore, in Newman's opinion, they were meant to gain over the moderate Romanists; and clearly they were not directed against the Council of Trent, for when the Articles were promulgated the council was not over. But in spite of this really substantial defence for the Anglican view of the Articles, Tract 90 provoked an explosion which was the end of the Tractarian movement, and brought on the conversion to Rome of those of the Tractarians who were most logical as well as most in earnest. The tract was repudiated by those in authority; the bishops almost all declared against the movement; Newman struggled for two years longer to think his position tenable, but in 1843 resigned the vicarage of St Mary's, which he had held since 1828, and retired to Littlemore (q.v.). The magnificent university sermon on 'Development in Christian Doctrine,' which was the preliminary stage of his Essay on Development, was the last which he preached in the university pulpit—viz. on the 2d February 1843. During his life at Littlemore he was a man suspected of all sorts of disloyalty to his church—for example, of being a Roman Catholic already, who only concealed his change of faith in order to exert more influence over other Anglicans—a course of which he was quite incapable. On the 8th October 1845 he invited the Passionist Father Dominic to his house at Littlemore in order that he might be received into the Roman Catholic Church, and on the following day he was received; and within a few months he had left Oxford, which he never saw again for thirty years.
Of Newman's life as a Roman Catholic it is necessary to speak only briefly. It was, however, in a literary point of view much more free and natural than his somewhat repressed and severely reined-in life as an Anglican. He first went to Oscott to be confirmed; then he went to Rome for a year and a half; and on his return in 1848 he published Loss and Gain, the story of an Oxford conversion very different from his own, but full of happy and delicate sketches of Oxford life and manners. Shortly afterwards he began, but did not at that time conclude, Callista, the story of a martyr in Africa of the 3d century. The little book is full of literary genius as well as of religious devotion, and it contains a most vivid picture of the devastation worked by the locusts in that country, as well as a still more impressive picture of Newman's conception of the phenomenon of demoniacal possession. In 1849 Newman established a branch of the brotherhood of St Philip Neri (q.v.) in England (see ORATORY). Newman established himself at Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham; and here he did a great deal of hard work, devoting himself to the sufferers from cholera in 1849 with the utmost zeal. The lectures on Anglican Difficulties, intended to show that Tractarian principles could only issue in submission to Rome on the part of any Tractarian who had a logical perception of what the movement meant, was the first book which drew public attention to Newman's great power of irony and the singular delicacy of his literary style. These lectures were delivered and published in 1850, and were followed in 1851 by the Lectures on 'Catholicism in England,' in which the Protestant prejudices and prepossessions about Roman Catholics were painted with a great power of ridicule and even caricature. This was the book which gave occasion to Dr Achill's action for libel against Newman, tried by Lord Campbell, in which the verdict went against Dr Newman so far as this, that the jury thought that he had not succeeded in justifying the libel, and awarded damages of £100 against him, while the costs of the case are said to have amounted to £10,000. Lord Campbell's charge was deemed very one-sided even by Protestants.
Newman will probably be longer remembered as a great preacher than in any other capacity. His long series of Oxford sermons contain some of the finest ever preached from an Anglican pulpit, and his Roman Catholic volumes—Sermons addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849) and Sermons on Various Occasions (1857)—though less remarkable for their pathos, are even fuller of fine rhetoric, and show the rarest finish. In 1864 a casual remark by Canon Kingsley in Maemillan's Magazine on the indifference of the Roman Church to the virtue of truthfulness, an indifference which he asserted that Dr Newman approved, led to a correspondence which resulted in the publication of the remarkable Apologia pro Vita Sua, afterwards slightly recast as A History of My Religious Opinions. In this book Dr Newman gave us much the most fresh and effective religious autobiography of the 19th century, and completely vindicated the simplicity and candour of his own theological career. It is perhaps the most fascinating of his many works, as it is of course the most personal. In 1865 Newman wrote a poem of singular beauty, giving his view of a good Roman Catholic's experience in death, called The Dream of Gerontius. It is a poem of marvellous subtlety and pathos, as unique in treatment as it is in subject, and is now republished in the volume of Verses on Various Occasions (1874), which contains also all the pieces originally published in the Lyra Apostolica. In 1870 he published his Grammar of Assent, a book on the philosophy of faith, based on the view that a believing and even credulous attitude of mind clears itself much more easily of false beliefs than a sceptical attitude of mind clears itself of false denials. In the controversies which led to the Vatican Council Newman sided with the Inopportunist. He believed that the decree of the pope's personal infallibility in putting forth ex cathedra definitions on theology or morals intended to teach the church would alienate many Anglicans from the Roman Church, and he thought the doctrine, though true, not ripe for definition, nor pressed upon the attention of the church by any heresy. He was at this time in vehement opposition to the Ultramontanes under Archbishop Manning and William George Ward, and the bitterness between the two parties ran very high. Nothing seemed less likely at that time than that Newman should ever become a Cardinal; but after the death of Pio Nono and the election of Leo XIII. the policy of the church altered, and the new pope was very anxious to show his sympathy with the moderates in various countries, and especially with the English Catholic moderates, of whom Dr Newman was much the most distinguished. Accordingly in 1879 Newman was summoned to Rome to receive the Cardinal's hat, which was conferred on him in a secret consistory on the 12th May in that year. In acknowledging the congratulations which flowed in upon him on that event he renewed his protest against liberalism in religion, by which he meant the depreciation of revealed dogma, and the popular view that one creed, honestly held and practised, is as good as another. For the last eleven years of his life Cardinal Newman seldom broke silence, and his chief contribution to the religious controversy of the day was an essay in attenuation of the difficulty of treating Scripture as plenarily inspired, its tendency being to suggest that inspiration does not necessarily include mere matters of detail in history, unless these are of the nature of what are called 'dogmatic facts'—i.e. facts which lie at the basis of revealed truths, such as the supernatural birth of Christ. Cardinal Newman died on the 11th August 1890, after a very short illness, of pneumonia.
See a work on Newman by the author of this article (1890); and Cardinal Newman's Letters and Correspondence, edited by Miss Mozley (1891).