Portraits and Miniatures(48)

The Oriel passage I have dealt with at length not only to illustrate Newman’s attitude to Oxford but also to exemplify both the circumlocutory and the rhetorical nature of his style. He was a great rhetorician. He was so in both the favourable and the less favourable sense of the word. He was certainly a persuasive and impressive speaker. But he was also given to the use of words more for ornamentation than for meaning. Disraeli’s jibe about Gladstone, ‘a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’, could, with the word sophistical, which is not appropriate, left out, be applied just as well to Newman. His style is less portentous than Gladstone’s. It reminds me more of Chrisopher Fry out of whose plays in the 1940s and 1950s felicitous words tumbled like stars from a magnificent firework. Newman was moderately austere in the physical surroundings of life, but not in his use of words or imagery, where he was luxuriantly self-indulgent. He was as addicted to never using one word where ten words would do as Mr Kinnock is accused of being, although his phrases were substantially better chosen.

An outstanding example is provided in Discourse I of The Idea, where Newman has to deal with the awkward fact that the Pope had laid it down that there must be a purely Catholic university. Newman makes no attempt to pretend that it is not awkward: ‘It is the decision of the Holy See. St Peter has spoken, it is he who has enjoined that which seems to us so unpromising.’ He does not attempt to argue for this decision on its merits. Instead he asks for it to be accepted on the basis of the proven record of the Papacy over 1800 years: ‘He has spoken, and has a claim on us to trust him.’ Newman then a little implausibly says, ‘These are not the words of rhetoric, Gentlemen, but of history’; and then proceeds to sweep into a prose-poem of quasi-historical rhetoric that uses every possible evocative name and image not only to extol the early Christian cause but to bind England and Ireland together in a tradition of civilizing holiness.


… the two islands, in a dark and dreary age, were the two lights of Christendom. O memorable time, when St Aidan and the Irish monks went up to Lindisfarne and Melrose, and taught the Saxon youth, and when a St Cuthbert and a St Eata repaid their charitable toil!

And so he continues for several hundreds of words, through the Christian exploits of Mailduf and St Aldheim and St Egbert and St Willibrod and ‘the two noble Ewalds’ to Alcuin, ‘the pupil of both the English and the Irish schools’ who was sent for by Charlemagne to ‘revive science and letters in France’. ‘Such was the foundation of the school of Paris, from which, over the course of centuries, sprang the famous University [which was] the glory of the middle ages.’

So the awkward decision was dissolved in this paean to Anglo-Irish partnership which elided encouragingly into the suggestion that it had led to the foundation of the great University of the Sorbonne. And the lecture concluded by saying that England and Ireland had changed but ‘Rome is where it was, and St Peter is the same … And now surely he is giving us a like mission, and we shall become one again, while we zealously and lovingly fulfil it.’ If that is not rhetoric, I do not know what is.

Equally, at the end of Discourse IX, entitled the Duties of the Church Towards Knowledge, he ends with the most tremendous tour de force that owes more to oratory than to relevance. He is attempting first to sum up what he has previously said, which he is rarely good at, for his thoughts live in his phrases and fade when they are reduced to summary form. Second, he is attempting to reconcile his strong shafts of instinctive tolerance with his respect for the authority of the Church, and gets himself, perhaps only to my inadequately spiritual mind, into a very great muddle. He has just proclaimed a firm libertarian doctrine on literature: ‘I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.’ And he adds, ‘we would be shrinking from our plain duty, Gentlemen, did we leave out Literature from Education.’ The university, he adds, is not to be a convent or even a seminary. ‘It is a place to fit men of the world for the world.’

But how is this to be reconciled with the authority of the Church over every aspect of this university? Is he advocating and defending such pervasive authority? In Discourse II he seems to be taking up a much more modest position in regard to Catholic authority: ‘As to the range of University teaching certainly the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions of any kind.’ In this Discourse he proceeds from this only to the limited claim that as theology is part of knowledge it cannot be excluded from the subjects taught at a true university. It is at least entitled to a chair (or chairs) amongst many. From there he advances to an intermediate position of refuting that which he calls the Lutheran advocacy of the complete separation of science and religion. He postulates a modern philosopher of science, asking him, ‘Why cannot you go your way and let us go ours?’ and says, ‘I answer, in the name of the Science of Religion, when Newton can dispense with the metaphysicians, then may you dispense with us.’ But he is still confining himself to an argument for the wholeness of knowledge and to religion’s claim to a place in it.