In the Times Literary Supplement, Anthony Kenny reviews a new biography of John Henry Newman:
. . . Newman’s own character is full of paradox. Here is a man who spent the first half of his life trying to persuade the Church of England to be more like the Church of Rome, and the second half of his life wishing that Roman Catholics were more like Anglicans. Beyond other theologians, he exalted the episcopal office; yet he spent much of his life annoying the bishops of both his Churches. A Catholic of liberal bent, he repeatedly denounced liberalism as one of the greatest evils. Even his most obvious virtues provide obstacles for his biographer. Anyone who writes about him quickly discovers that he is such a gifted writer, and his style is so bewitching, and so superior to one’s own, that one hardly dares to paraphrase his thought, and ends up overloading one’s text with verbatim quotations.
August 2nd, 2010 | 1:05 pm
I thought that we were past the time when Newman could be called, with a straight face, “of liberal bent.” There is no indication from his zealous, evangelical religiousity, or from his writings, that such a calumny could be true of him. He deeply, intuitively opposed the “anti-dogmatic principle,” and his way of life shows this quite clearly. One has to go far beyond his writings, so far, in fact, as to step outside the bounds of historical credibility, in order to level such a claim.
His thesis on the development of doctrine is anything but liberal. His unfortunate pleading against the explicit definition of papal infallibility does not, in fact, in any way indicate a spirit sympathetic to the intuitions of “liberals.” Upon conversion to the Catholic Church, he did not doubt the theological importance of the primacy of the Roman See. His personal letters, throughout the latter half of his life, show this quite clearly.
I had thought that Ian Kerr put this manner of understanding of Newman to rest.
It is in fact, meaningless to speak of him as of “liberal bent.”
August 2nd, 2010 | 2:49 pm
It’s hard to say what is meant by, “A Catholic of liberal bent, he repeatedly denounced liberalism as one of the greatest evils.” Add to that the fact that “liberal” has a different meaning in contemporary British English than in American, and likely a different one again in Victorian English.
August 2nd, 2010 | 5:22 pm
The paragraph quoted is very English — urbane, reasonable, and quite wrong — but the review is a good one. My only reservation is that the evidence of Cornwell’s other writing suggests the biography may be much more critical than Kenny suggests.
For example, Father Ian Ker responds to an article of Cornwell’s in It’s wrong to use Newman to attack Pope Benedict, published in The Catholic Herald.
See this article on Kenny’s religious views, as an ex-priest who’s been excommunicated: An agnostic happy to nurse the ‘vice’ of religion
August 3rd, 2010 | 4:05 pm
Please, guys, get a grip. Nobody is accusing Newman of being a Democrat to the left of the president. He was liberal only in the sense that he was not an ultramontane – this was well understood in his own time which was why there were constant murmurings against him in the halls of the Vatican.
Nor does it go down easily to hear Kenny brushed off as an “ex-priest” as if that disqualifies him from making a judgment about the book.
August 23rd, 2010 | 11:47 am
In the course of Newman’s famous “biglietto speech” on being made a Cardinal in 1879, Newman defined precisely the form of liberalism that he had been fighting all his life: it was the notion that any one religion is as good, or bad, as any other. In other words, the liberalism he detested and fought was relativism. And what Catholic in her or his right mind would quarrel with such a form of liberalism? We must not forget however, that when Leo XIII, commented on his decision to make Newman a Cardinal, he admitted that it had been difficult, because Newman was considered to be a “liberal” in Vatican circles. If a contemporary Pope could acknowledge this reputation, then we should surely not critisize Anthony Kenny for suggesting something similar. “Liberal” is a notoriously weasel word: do we mean politics, education, party, forms of generosity? I do hope and trust that First Things will consider sending my book for review to an American reader and that the discussion of its contents will extend beyond this single, or indeed a review published in the TLS.
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