the New Pantagruel

“Questions of Truth and Falsehood Never Entered His Imagination!”: The Double Irony of Frank Turner’s John Henry Newman

by Joshua P. Hochschild

hat is the significance of John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism? As an Anglican priest, Newman was already famous for his spirited leadership of the Oxford Movement. He converted to Catholicism in 1845, and among his numerous works is an autobiographical classic, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in which Newman defended the reasonableness of his conversion, and A Grammar of Assent, in which he offers an epistemology of religious belief. As Anglicanism’s most prominent convert to Rome, Newman has naturally become a favorite of intellectual Catholic evangelists. Any intellectual historian who dares confront Newman must address the Catholic conversion. Frank Turner, a distinguished scholar of Victorian intellectual history, recently displayed a novel strategy for doing so: he has faced the question of the significance of Newman’s conversion precisely by pretending not to face it.

John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
by Frank M. Turner
Yale, August 2002 752 pages
ISBN: 0-300-09251-2 (Cloth)

Turner’s massive book, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (Yale, 2002), is not a full-scale biographical study; it’s attention is restricted to Newman’s activity before converting to Roman Catholicism, especially during his days as the vanguard of an Anglican reform movement at Oxford. Turner’s rationale is that the Oxford Movement Newman of 1833-1845 is usually interpreted in light of his later, Catholic career, so that his Anglican activities—especially writing and editing a series of Tracts, and otherwise engaging in theological controversies—are seen as preparation for, even as providentially ordered toward, Catholic conversion. This is in large part due to the Apologia, in which the Catholic Newman described the development, and defended the coherence and consistency, of his “religious opinions.” Those fond of Newman, and especially Catholics, have happily taken Newman’s Apologia at its word, but Turner, a cool and objective academic historian, believes they may have been hoodwinked. The Catholic re-interpretation of Newman’s life presented in the Apologia involved, according to Turner, the “domestication” of Newman’s fierce Anglican polemics. It is Turner’s strategy to uncover the real Anglican Newman by ignoring the ex post facto gloss of the Apologia, and examining the contemporary evidence in its own historical context.

In itself this is a worthy strategy, and a historical inquiry carried out on this plan is certainly a legitimate project. A historian need not rely on the Apologia as a source for Newman’s Oxford Movement years, especially since there is a plethora of contemporary textual evidence. But when it comes to understanding Newman the Tractarian, Turner does more than just ignore the Apologia gloss; he claims to have exposed it as dishonest, refuted it, and uncovered a Newman distinctly at odds with the familiar version. So Turner, summarizing his conclusions, remarks:

The personal religious development of Newman of Oriel, rather than constituting either combat with a critical liberalism or a spiritual pilgrimage concluding to Roman Catholicism, as portrayed in the Apologia, more nearly resembled the typical pattern of Victorian loss of Protestant religious faith … . That the conclusion of [Newman’s “process of separation from” his “adolescent” Evangelical faith] was Roman Catholicism does not make it any less a loss of evangelical faith than if, like others of his and later generations, he had ended in Unitarianism … or in agnosticism.

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