John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua is a spiritual autobiography built out of a controversy. It traces the movement of one man’s religious convictions from his Anglican boyhood through his leadership of the Oxford Movement and, finally, to his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. Newman wrote it in the early 1860s, after a public accusation that he had defended deceit and equivocation, and the book is at once a personal history and a formal answer to that charge. Its five chapters follow his opinions year by year, from his early life to 1833, then through the Tractarian years to 1845, and close with a chapter on the position of his mind after his conversion.
“Consistency is the life of a movement.”
The Accusation That Started It
The book grew from an accusation. In January 1864 a popular writer, in an article on Queen Elizabeth, charged Newman by name with holding that truth need not be a virtue for the Roman clergy, and that cunning was the weapon heaven had given the Saints. Newman had said nothing of the kind. He demanded proof in form and detail; his accuser refused to specify the passages, then withdrew the charge—not on the ground that it was false, but only on Newman’s assurance that he had meant no offence. That was not enough. Newman published the correspondence as a pamphlet, and his accuser replied with a longer one asking “What then does Dr. Newman mean?”, assembling extracts to suggest that Newman had reasoned his mind into a morbid state in which nonsense was the only food it hungered for, and that no honest man could any longer believe his word. The Apologia is Newman’s answer, written at speed because no time was allowed for studied statements.
Why He Wrote at All
Newman opens by explaining why he wrote at all. The book, he says, was originally a defence embedded in a larger controversy, and he has now detached the “History of my Religious Opinions” from that setting and given it an introduction. Left to himself, he would rather have wiped out every trace of the circumstances that provoked it; but the title Apologia is too exactly justified by the matter and structure of the work, and the circumstances were too grave to pass over. In this edition he has cut nearly a hundred pages of merely ephemeral importance and prefixed an account of the provocation instead.
For more than twenty years, he writes, a vague impression to his disadvantage had rested on the popular mind—as though his conduct toward the Anglican Church, while he was a member of it, had been inconsistent with Christian simplicity and uprightness. Such an impression was almost unavoidable when a man who had written strongly against a cause, gathered a party by his writings, then faltered, unsaid his words, threw his friends into perplexity, and ended by passing over to those he had denounced. He had never felt much impatience under these imputations, taking them as a penalty justly incurred by his change of religion, and had left their removal to a future day when documents would see the light.
The Charge of Insincerity
At the beginning of 1864 he found himself publicly put upon his defence. He had long held a tacit understanding that, in the improbable event of a formal challenge from a person of name, it would be his duty to meet it, and he seized the opportunity at once; the fact that no time was allowed for studied statements compensated, in the public’s equitable judgment, for imperfections in composition. The accusation appeared in the January 1864 number of a widely circulated magazine, in an article on Queen Elizabeth, where a popular writer formally accused him by name of thinking so lightly of veracity as to have countenanced and defended neglect of it—an offence he also imputed to the Catholic priesthood. The quoted words were that truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy; that Father Newman informs us it need not be, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon heaven has given the Saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage.
Newman says these assertions had no foundation whatever in fact; he had never said or dreamed of saying such things. In the correspondence that followed, the writer rested his charge on a sermon Newman had preached, before he was a Catholic, in his church at Oxford, and refused to specify the passages, saying he was not bound to do so. Newman demanded proof in form and detail or a confession of inability. The accuser persevered in refusal, and though he consented to withdraw the charge, he would not do so on the issue of truth or falsehood, but simply on the ground that Newman assured him he had had no intention of incurring it. That did not satisfy Newman’s sense of justice: formally to charge a fault is one thing; to allow that it was not intended is another. Unable to gain redress where he had a right to ask it, he appealed to the public, publishing the correspondence as a pamphlet with remarks of his own at the end.
“What Then Does Dr. Newman Mean?”
This pamphlet, appearing in the first weeks of February, drew a reply toward the end of March in another pamphlet of forty-eight pages entitled “What then does Dr. Newman mean?” In it the accuser professed to bring together extracts from Newman’s various works, Catholic and Anglican, to show that if Newman was to be acquitted of teaching and practising deceit and dishonesty, it was at the price of being considered no longer responsible for his actions. He said Newman had once had a human reason, but had gambled it away, and had worked his mind into that morbid state in which nonsense was the only food for which it hungered; that it could not be called a hasty or far-fetched or unfounded mistake when he concluded Newman did not care for truth for its own sake; and that though too many prefer the charge of insincerity to that of insipience, Dr. Newman seemed not to be of that number. He ended by returning to his original imputation, which he had professed to abandon. Alluding by anticipation to Newman’s probable answer, he professed heartfelt embarrassment how he was to believe anything Newman might say in exculpation in the plain and literal sense of the words. He was henceforth, he said, in doubt and fear, as much as an honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman might write—how could he tell that he should not be the dupe of some cunning equivocation, of one of the three kinds laid down as permissible by the blessed St. Alfonso da Liguori and his pupils, even when confirmed with an oath, because then we do not deceive our neighbour, but allow him to deceive himself? How could he tell that he might not in this pamphlet have made an accusation of the truth of which Dr. Newman was perfectly conscious, but that, as he, a heretic Protestant, had no business to make it, Newman had a full right to deny it? Newman says that even if he could have left such an elaborate impeachment of his moral nature unanswered consistently with duty to his own reputation, his duty to his brethren in the Catholic priesthood would have forbidden it, for they were involved in the charges the writer had all along been making.
The Break with Whately
The narrative then turns back to 1829 and the formal break with Dr. Whately, occasioned by Mr. Peel’s re-election. Newman had voted in the minority in 1828 or 1827, when the petition against the Catholic claims was brought into Convocation, influenced by the Letters of an Episcopalian and shrinking from the “two-bottle-orthodox.” His opposition to Peel was academical, not ecclesiastical or political: Peel had taken the University by surprise, and a great University ought not to be bullied even by a great Duke of Wellington. He was also under the influence of Keble and Froude, who disliked the Duke’s change of policy as dictated by liberalism. Whately took a humorous revenge, inviting the least intellectual men of Oxford to dinner and placing Newman between Provost This and Principal That, asking if he was proud of his friends; but he seriously saw that Newman was separating from his friends for good. Whately attributed Newman’s leaving his clientela to a wish to head a party himself, which Newman denies, saying friends sought him, not he them, quoting verses of 1829: “Blessings of friends, which to my door unasked, unhoped, have come.”
From Loneliness to Influence
Newman explains his early loneliness at Oriel, his walks alone, Dr. Copleston’s bow and remark Nunquam minus solus, quàm cùm solus, his intimacy with Dr.
The Shadow of a Hand Upon the Wall
A new view opened before him as he began a round of visits, and the excitement of it was strong enough that he spoke of his state of mind to two intimate friends. The vivid impression faded and he grew calm, but he resolved to test the thing by logic and by duty rather than by feeling. What he concluded was that he had seen the shadow of a hand upon the wall; that he had much to learn about the Churches; and that the passing thought, “the Church of Rome will be found right after all,” had crossed his mind while his old convictions still held. The Sermon on Divine Calls, later printed in the Plain Sermons, belongs to this moment, with its closing prayer to see the world to come.
He traced the succession of his thoughts and found a latent, habitual notion that his mind had not reached its rest and that he was on a journey. The verses written during the Mediterranean passage, under the heading “Providences,” and a memorandum of September 1829 describing himself as led on by God’s hand blindly, both belonged to that long unsettledness. He resolved to be guided by reason and not by imagination—without that resolve, he says, he would have been a Catholic sooner—and he weighed the possibility that the suggestion came from below, deciding that only time could settle it and that he should go on as usual, like Samuel before he knew the word of the Lord.
The Via Media Under the Blows of St. Leo
The new historical fact had logical force. The Via Media had come down under the blows of St. Leo; his Prophetical Office had come to pieces; he had no distinctive plea for Anglicanism left unless he would become a Monophysite. He could fall back only on three beliefs—the principle of dogma, the sacramental system, and anti-Romanism—and the first two, he saw, were better secured in Rome. He was nearly a pure Protestant, and he recalled with distaste erasing the titles under “Papa” in his Gradus ad Parnassum as a boy of fifteen, a stain upon his imagination. By 1838 he took Antichrist to be not the Church of Rome but the spirit of the old pagan city, the fourth monster of Daniel; soon after, before the Monophysite controversy, he changed his opinion, seeing that the true Vicar of Christ must seem like Antichrist. Unreasoning prejudice, he admits, remained.
After the summer of 1839 he grew to dislike speaking against Roman doctrines and had misgivings about having taken Anglican divines’ statements for granted. He wished for union between the Anglican Church and Rome and sought weekly prayers for it, feeling the moral ground good against her. His Letter about Tract 90 conceded that Rome “does seem to me, as a popular system, to preach the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, and purgatory,” and he remembered Hurrell Froude’s dying protest against his cursing and swearing. His aversion to O’Connell’s policy and his rudeness to Mr. Spencer, who came with Mr. Palmer of Magdalen in January 1840 to promote prayers for Unity, he later begged pardon for, quoting his own apologetic letter: “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” He explains his sternness toward interfering Catholics and quotes savage words of his own in the British Critic of 1840 against Roman controversialists, noting that this diminishes his right to complain of slanders.
Littlemore and the Experimentum Crucis
Returning to Oxford in October 1839, he found occurrences that compromised him with his Bishop and the University authorities; the reins, he says, had broken in his hands. He addresses the Thirty-nine Articles as a stumbling-block, maintaining their Catholic sense, and describes Tract 90 as an experimentum crucis, no feeler. He contemplated resigning St. Mary’s and retiring to Littlemore, an integral part of the parish two or three miles from Oxford, where he had built a church, taught in the parish school, practised the choir, bought ten acres, and planned a monastic house never carried out. His October 1840 letter to Keble on giving up St. Mary’s, and Keble’s advice to stay, belong here; his reply cites Hooker, Taylor, and Bull, and names Rationalism as the great evil. He had a curate and gave up the British Critic in July 1840.
On the publication of Tract 90 in February 1841 he describes his state in extracts from letters to Mr. Bowden and another friend, and in his reply to a Catholic correspondent of April 8. In summer 1841 at Littlemore he began translating St. Athanasius, and between July and November three blows broke him. In the Arian History he found the same phenomenon as in the Monophysite: the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians the Anglicans, and Rome then what it was now. The Bishops began charging against him, which he recognized as condemnation, and he wrote to a friend on October 17 and answered a stranger on October 22, prophesying secessions to Rome. Then came the affair of the Jerusalem Bishopric, bound up with the Prussian Court’s desire to introduce Episcopacy, with M. Bunsen, and with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Lowering the Theory: Samaria and the Four Sermons
After Tract 90 he lowered his theory of the Church to a lower level. He had held that a religious body is part of the One Catholic and Apostolic Church if it has the succession and creed of the Apostles with holiness of life—a view suited to English common sense. But when Bishops and people rejected primitive Catholic doctrine and tried to eject those who held it, he placed himself and his sympathizers on a lower level by the end of 1841, comparing the Anglican Church to Samaria. He preached Four Sermons at St. Mary’s in December 1841 to present this view, bringing current controversy into the pulpit for the first time because his mind was urgently unsettled; fearing one man’s meat was another man’s poison, he recommended in 1843 that none read them who did not need them. The virtual condemnation of Tract 90 was an enormous disappointment, and his Protest against the Jerusalem Bishopric both excited and calmed many. The sermons gave the Anglican Church’s disorders a place in the Revealed Dispensation: despite the Jewish law’s rigidity and the schism of the Ten Tribes, Divine Mercy still recognized them, and the prophets Elias and Eliseus preached to them without requiring reconciliation to David’s line or the Aaronic priesthood. They were not in the Church, yet had means of grace. Applied to Anglicanism, no Anglican was called to leave for Rome though he did not believe his Church part of the One Church, since Israel was cut off from the Temple yet its subjects were not commanded to submit to Judah—going to Jerusalem was bodily, not spiritual. The theory lowered the Anglican Church’s level and weakened its controversial basis; its novelty made it suspicious, with no guarantee the subsidence might not end in submersion. To many, saying England was wrong meant Rome was right.
The Burden of Infallible Definitions
Newman turns to the practical weight of infallible teaching and finds it lighter than critics suppose. Defining even a single doctrine, such as the Immaculate Conception, took roughly eight centuries of preparation, so “new doctrines” need not alarm the faithful. The Pope in Ecumenical Council is the normal seat of infallibility, yet only eighteen such Councils have met since Christianity began—about one a century—and several passed no doctrinal decree at all, while many treated only elementary points of the Creed. Trent covered a wide field, but its Canons resemble the verses of the Athanasian Creed, repetitions in various shapes of one idea. Papal censures look more numerous but are no greater burden: the Holy See mostly repudiates one or two great lines of error, chiefly ethical rather than doctrinal, and says only what any sound Catholic would say.
Authority Beyond Doctrine
Infallible authority reaches indirectly beyond its proper limits, like a nation claiming “British waters,” judging opinions in philosophy, science, literature, and history, censuring books and silencing authors. Here it acts by discipline, not doctrine; such measures must be obeyed, though it may tacitly recede from them. Faith is not involved, since what is of faith is true for all times. Nor does infallibility make its holders infallible in all proceedings—legitimate power has been harshly used, the divine treasure sitting in earthen vessels. Prohibitions bind actions, not thoughts, like a ban on publishing a libel, so they breed no hypocrites. History, Newman thinks, vindicates the authorities: in the contest with Origen’s followers his opponents were right, though Origen’s name is dear; Theophilus of Alexandria and Pope Vigilius were unadmirable men. As an Anglican he saw heresy often begin by urging a truth against authority at an unseasonable time—such a man spoils a good work in his own century, and authority ought to silence him, though posterity may call it tyranny.
Liberalism, Science, and the Patience of Christians
Liberalism now is scarcely a party; it is the educated lay world, a deep, plausible scepticism. Newman distinguishes hostile liberals from honest scientific men and pities sincere minds perplexed by modern discoveries, quoting Augustine’s “Illi in vos sæviant.” He declined to champion revealed truth against opponents because it is hard to say what must be overthrown—hypotheses rise and fall—so Christians should be patient, and he reads recent acts of authority as confirming this, citing Moses: “Fear ye not, stand still.” There has been no real conflict with science; the secular sciences are new, and Galileo is the one stock argument, exceptio probat regulam. Authority never decrees on pure physical subjects. Individuals, not the Holy See, have led theological inquiry; the Church is reproached with originating nothing—an objection Newman embraces as its purpose. Rome had no great mind during persecution; St. Leo taught one point; St. Gregory has no place in dogma; St. Augustine, no infallible teacher, formed Christian Europe. In Councils individual reason was paramount—the young deacon Athanasius with the 318 Fathers at Nicæa, Anselm at Bari, Bonaventura and Salmeron at Trent. Authority interferes slowly, fostering the theologian’s liberty; Zosimus was forbearing with Pelagius, Gregory VII with Berengarius. The multitude of nations protects against Roman narrowness, and Catholicity is a security. Newman regrets the loss of the English element and thanks Pius IX for giving England its own Church.
Reserve, Economy, and Priestly Truthfulness
The charge of economy rests on his History of the Arians, a sermon note, and two Tracts he edited. The Economy derives from “Cast not your pearls before swine”: concealing truth without deceit, stating it partially, representing it under the nearest form—drawing Angels with wings is the third, answering “They believe in only one God” to the Trinity question the second. Clement called the second and third lying; Newman once thought this hyperbole but now believes Clement held a lie sometimes lawful—a doctrine he never maintained. Of priests he gives his own testimony: at Oscott, Old Hall Green, and Ushaw he found them outspoken and natural, confirmed over many years and in his own Bishop. He never heard of an infidel priest in England in nineteen years. Their self-devotion—thirty killed by the Irish fever between Liverpool and Leeds, a bishop dying on sick calls, volunteers for cholera—excludes hypocrisy; discipline cannot be purchased. Prejudice persists from moral theology books, and St. Alfonso Liguori—
The Oxford Parties and the Frame of Mind in 1845
Newman describes the Old Tory party in Oxford as having no principle or power of development, while the Liberals represented a new idea gradually learning to recognize itself. The Liberal party grew in numbers, doctrinal breadth, and power during his time, gaining elevation of character through Dr. Arnold’s pupils. The clerical interest found support in Keble, whose weak point was his consistency: his love of authority made him gentle toward the Catholic Religion, so he could not throw himself into opposing Catholic Emancipation, though he revolted from the politics that won it. The Revolution of 1688 was too lax for him and his friends, and far less could they subscribe to the doctrines of 1776 and 1789. Newman insists he left Oxford upon the University proceedings of 1841, whose leaders were Liberals; he deserved nothing else at their hands. By 1845 he felt himself dead as regarded his relations to the Anglican Church, his leaving it all but a matter of time; he did not even thank the two Proctors whose Veto stopped the condemnation of Tract 90. Quoting Horace’s Pentheus, he glossed the 39 Articles as the compedes, and “Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet” as “Moriar. Mors ultima linea rerum est.”
The Eighteen Theses of Liberalism
Newman lists eighteen propositions he denounced and abjured, each with an illustrative “Therefore”
Dogma, the Visible Church, and the Bishop as Pope
Three principles held the Oxford Movement together, and Newman takes them one by one. The first is dogma: from the age of fifteen, religion as a mere sentiment was to him a dream and a mockery, and he resisted every train of thought in Dr. Whately that seemed to soften the great dogmas. The second is a definite religious teaching founded on dogma—a visible Church with sacraments and rites that are channels of invisible grace, argued in the Tracts from Scripture, the Prayer Book, and the Epistles of St. Ignatius. The third is the Episcopal system, and here Newman’s language becomes personal: he loved to act as in his Bishop’s sight, was strict in clerical engagements because he was his Bishop’s servant, and cared little for the Bench of Bishops except as the voice of his Church. “My own Bishop was my Pope,” he writes. When he wrote to Bishop Wiseman in 1845 to announce his conversion, the best thing he could find to say was that he would obey the Pope as he had obeyed his own Bishop in the Anglican Church.
The third point of his early creed—his view of the Church of Rome—he utterly renounced. As a young man he had thought the Pope Antichrist; at Christmas 1824 he preached a sermon to that effect. From Froude he learned to speak less bitterly, and the notion thinned by stages: Rome as bound up with the cause of Antichrist, as one of the many antichrists, as having something very anti-Christian about her. When he deliberately gave up the idea altogether he cannot say. He had a shrinking from renouncing it, a sort of conscience or prejudice, up to 1843.
The Via Media Breaks
The crisis came through reading, not through events. In the summer of 1839, studying the Monophysite controversy, Newman saw the same pattern he would meet again in the Arian History: the pure heretics of the early centuries answered to the Protestants, the semi-heretics to the Anglicans, and Rome to what Rome was now. His Via Media, the theory of a middle way between Rome and Protestantism, came down under the blows of St. Leo. He had “seen the shadow of a hand upon the wall.” Then came three further shocks: the Bishops began charging against him after Tract 90; the affair of the Jerusalem Bishopric, with its alliance of Anglican and Prussian Protestantism, seemed to him a betrayal; and the condemnation of the Tract by the authorities convinced him that the Anglican Church had formally rejected the primitive doctrine he had been teaching. He lowered his theory of the Church to a “lower level,” comparing the Anglican communion to Samaria—cut off from the Temple, yet not without means of grace. The sermons he preached at St. Mary’s in December 1841 gave the Church’s disorders a place in the revealed dispensation, but the theory was novel, and novelty made it suspect.
Development, and the Last Years of Doubt
At the end of 1844 Newman resolved to write an Essay on Doctrinal Development, and if his convictions in favour of Rome were not weaker when it was done, to take steps for admission. The years between are the most painful in the book. He describes a literal ache about his heart, distress at the perplexity he caused friends, and the sense of being like a guilty person among them. He gave up his living at Littlemore; he could not bring himself to unsettle an old friend near death, having nothing certain to offer him in exchange. He was haunted by the fear of having been deceived once and being deceived again, and he had no inward test by which to know that he would not change once more. The Essay on Development supplied the intellectual ground he needed: the argument that doctrine may grow in the Church without changing, that the Pope in Ecumenical Council is the normal seat of infallibility, and that the real trial to reason is not the number of definitions but the indirect jurisdiction of authority over philosophy, science, and letters. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1845.
What the Book Is
The Apologia is not a defence of Catholicism against Protestantism, though it contains plenty of controversy. It is a defence of a man’s veracity, and its method is to show that a life of changing opinions can still be a life of consistency—that Newman’s course, however it looked from outside, was governed throughout by the principle of dogma and by obedience to authority as he then understood it. The famous set pieces—the eighteen theses of Liberalism he abjured, the defence of the Economy and of priestly truthfulness, the long note on lying and equivocation—all serve that end. The book’s final chapter turns from narrative to argument, and its closing notes gather the letters and papers on which the whole account rests, as if to say: test me against the documents. Newman’s accuser had asked what he meant; the Apologia answers that he meant what he had always meant, and that the record shows it.
