Portraits and Miniatures(43)

John Henry Newman and the Idea of a University



This is a lightly edited version of a lecture given in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February 1990. It was part of a series organized for the centenary of Newman’s death. All the other participants were considerable Newman and/or theological scholars. I was asked as Chancellor of the University: hence the occasionally defensive tone.





I Have Found the preparation of this lecture one of the most formidable tasks I have ever undertaken, and am inclined to the view that my sense of cancellarian duty to the University -which I interpret as meaning that I should not refuse a serious engagement which it is physically possible for me to fulfil - has led me to take leave of my senses. A few months ago I knew little about Newman, beyond the facts he was a Trinity undergraduate, an Oriel fellow in the years when that college led the awakening from the Oxford slumber of the eighteenth century, and Vicar of St Mary’s. I had some vague knowledge of his part in the launching of the Oxford Movement and of his retreat to Littlemore.

Forty years ago, which is nearly a third of the time back to his sojourn there, I addressed an election meeting in the Anglican schoolroom at Littlemore, but got little response from the small and stolid audience for what I hoped was my felicitous reference to their former parish priest. I think I would have got the correct year for his conversion to Rome, but I was hazy about the exact date of his move to Birmingham, although during my long years as an MP for the other end of that city I was aware of the presence of Oratory and the Church of St Philip Neri and of their Newman connection. I knew that Pope Leo XIII had shown that he was not Pope Pius IX by making Newman a cardinal, and I thought that was a good thing, rather like Cinderella being taken to the ball, and one in the eye for Cardinal Manning, although whatever else may be said about Manning he was neither ugly nor a sister. I had read Apologia Pro Vita Sua as a very young man and had found it surprisingly easy going. But that was about it.

I therefore found myself committed to spend quite a lot of time immersed in Newman, in the Discourses that make up The Idea of a University in particular, and in the circumstances in which they were delivered and/or composed. This concentration left a number of impressions, some of them contradictory, upon my mind. First (a blinding truism) that Newman was a man of exceptional interest. There seems to me to be more room for argument about his piety, although I would hesitate to pronounce on that, his charity, his simple niceness, or even his modesty, than about his fascination. This stems partly from his brilliance as a stylist, even though his imagery could be lush and his use of words was rarely economical, as an ironist, and as a polemicist. But it was more than that. He could write dull passages, sometimes it seems almost intentionally so, because he was getting round a corner in his argument with which he did not feel wholly at ease. But whether or not it was intentional he was always conscious that he had written a relatively dull passage. You can almost feel him waiting in slack water, hardly moving his paddle, yet preparing to swoop into the next stage of the argument as soon as a favourable current developed.

He had star quality, as surely as did, amongst his contemporaries, Gladstone or Tennyson or Carlyle. It is possible to confuse Keble with Pusey, or Pusey with Keble and to wonder which was doing what at a particular time. It is never possible to confuse Newman with anyone. It is possible to be irritated or to be muddled by Newman, but very difficult to be bored by him. This is the more striking because I felt throughout that Newman’s mentalité (my excuse for using the French rather than the English word is that I fondly imagine it to embrace not only the working of his own mind but also the intellectual climate in which he operated) is an ocean away not only from my own but from that of almost anyone, inside or outside the University, with whom I have frequent contact.

Next week these centenary celebrations culminate with a Newman sermon (from the Archbishop of Canterbury) and service in St Mary’s. It will be a notable occasion, but I doubt if any service can recapture the atmosphere in which Newman, having slipped across the cobbled and trafficless High from Oriel, or in later days walked in from Littlemore, and then, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘after gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles [of St Mary’s] [and] rising into the pulpit, in the most entrancing of voices breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music - subtle, sweet, mournful’. Yet we are told from another source that Newman’s ‘sermons were read, with hardly any change in the inflexion of the voice and without any gesture on the part of the preacher, whose eyes remained fixed on the text in front of him’. The two descriptions are only superficially incompatible, and whatever was or was not the histrionic quality of Newman’s sermons there was a still more remarkable quality about the later ones, and that was their capacity to excite and divide the University. What would the Vice-Chancellor think? Would the Regius Professor of Divinity retaliate? What would the Heads of Houses do? How might the Provost of Oriel navigate between his peers and his turbulent fellow? Would Convocation censure Tract Ninety, which was a Newman sermon in print, or would dedicated Tractarian Proctors, as happened in February 1845, veto the censure being put to the vote? What would be done by poor Bishop Bagot of Oxford, a High Church sympathizer, who liked a quiet life and found himself presiding over the cockpit of whether or not Anglicanism could be Catholicism.