Announcing the details of the Pope's forthcoming visit to Britain a couple of weeks ago, the BBC said that Benedict XVI would be beatifying "a 19th-century cardinal".The description was accurate, but misleading, rather like referring to Alfred Tennyson as "a 19th-century peer".
The man in question was never a bishop and only became a Cardinal in his late seventies. His interest lies elsewhere.
But one can see the BBC's difficulty. How could one quickly describe John Henry Newman? The most important Catholic convert in the history of the English-speaking world? The best Romantic writer of the Victorian age? The most influential spiritual leader in England since John Wesley? All these, perhaps, and more. In the subtitle of this book, John Cornwell calls Newman "the reluctant saint", which is not a terribly useful epithet, since no one who was not reluctant could possibly qualify for sainthood.
There is a bit of an "agenda" behind this book, I suspect. Cornwell is clearly on the reforming wing of the Catholic Church, and he wishes to enlist Newman as a prophet of that cause. Newman's belief in the primacy of conscience, says Cornwell, can be used to uphold attacks on Vatican teaching on contraception. His liberal idea of a university is taken to imply that he might have favoured student protest against the Vietnam war.
But don't let that put you off. This book is a highly readable attempt to convey why Newman was, and remains, a fascinating figure. It overcomes the problem for the new reader that Newman engaged prolifically for nearly 70 years in controversies and religious inquiries many of which, even at the time, seemed obscure. It explains why, then and now, his words and his story enraptured hearts and minds.
That phrase is a cliché, but I use it deliberately, because Newman was very interested in both the heart and the mind, and the link between the two. He was learned, and never avoided intellectual rigour. His power of pure argument was prodigious. But he was also fascinated by how it is that a human being comes to understand and to love; particularly, to understand and love God.
Nowadays, people like to distinguish between "style" and "substance" (and when you think of modern politics, you can see why), but Newman understood that the style "of a really gifted mind" cannot "belong to any but himself".
It follows him about as a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and so his language is personal. You cannot have mere abstraction: "A man's moral self is concentrated in each moment of his life; it lives in the tips of his fingers, and the spring of his insteps."
So, as the possessor of what Cornwell calls "benign Romantic egotism", Newman naturally saw autobiography as the most arresting way of conveying the human encounter with the divine. That is why Lead, Kindly Light, written after he had nearly died in Sicily as a young man, is his most famous hymn, and why the Apologia is his most popular book. As a child, he wrote, he did not believe much in the "reality of material phenomena", but preferred to "rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator".
That luminosity never left him. And although he was in many ways a conservative, he had a surprisingly modern sense of how faith can vanish, making the world seem a hopeless place. He had a unique gift for relating this sense to human experience: "If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator."
He had the same gift for identifying happier experiences: he wrote that arriving at religious certitude was like being "a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself… leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another". Newman did everything he could to leave his own track behind, and to teach.
This image of dangerous movement towards truth ("o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent") also helps explain Newman's continuing importance. His life was a painful pilgrimage. As a young don at Oxford, he saw himself as being like the snapdragon growing up the wall of his college, and never wanted to leave, but his spiritual quest forced him out. He began as an evangelical, became a High Anglican and then converted to Rome. By becoming a Catholic, he lost his place at Oxford (then an Anglican institution) forever. People sometimes speak of conversion to Catholicism as "coming home", but Newman never found it so. Its truth he believed; its habits he found foreign.
Many people also think of religious belief, especially Catholicism, as a form of imprisonment. Newman's
story is one that points in the opposite direction. His search for God expressed and produced freedom.
The present Pope is known to admire Newman, and I do hope that, when he comes, he will say exactly why. He has chosen as the slogan for his visit the motto which Newman took when he became a cardinal: "Heart speaks unto heart." It is the same idea, as Cornwell reminds us, which Beethoven wrote on the score of his Mass in D: "From the heart – may it go to the heart again."
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