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

by Joshua P. Hochschild

What 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.

Turner is clearly having fun here, describing the trajectory of Newman’s intellectual development as a “loss of faith” instead of a religious journey to Catholic orthodoxy. One or two passages like this might seem like an understandable indulgence in hyperbole. But this language is not just an isolated wink in the middle of a serious, modulated study; this is part of a sustained tone of flaunted iconoclasm, kept up for several hundred pages. By the end, Turner has crescendoed to a paragraph which I cannot refrain from quoting at length:

Newman stands among the first cultural apostates, who established new foundations for a late Victorian English culture that would be pluralistic religiously, morally, and intellectually, rather than exclusively Protestant in character. Conservative as he and his fellow Tractarians may have been politically, they nonetheless paradoxically demanded a pluralism in the English Church that mirrored the political pluralism they so disliked external to it. In the process, they helped to break the Protestant religious-cultural mold into which they had been born, and because that mold determined so much of English life and values beyond religion, they prepared the way for wider cultural transformations. In conducting his own experiment in monastic living and religious observance at Littlemore, Newman had challenged the domestic expectations of his society and the devotional expectations of his church. During his ministry in the English Church, though often clothing himself in a rhetoric of unctuous obedience, Newman had actually pursued the practice of “doing as one likes,” later so deplored by his admirer Matthew Arnold. The restlessness of Newman’s mind, the inability of his spirit to find a steady spiritual refuge, his family conflicts, his resentment of authority, his frustrated personal ambitions, and his determination to dwell with other celibate males had led him to challenge evangelicalism and all its works. Through that cultural as well as religious apostasy, Newman emerged as the first great, and perhaps the most enduring, Victorian skeptic.

Now, this is a brilliant composition. Turner has taken Newman—usually remembered as a faithful defender of orthodoxy, tradition, authority, and reason—and has managed to describe him as an apostate; a liberalizing, experimenting radical; and an individualistic, subjectivizing, anti-authoritarian, inconsistent, emotionally unstable skeptic. What one cannot appreciate about this passage when taken out of context is that, in light of the 640 pages that precede it, Turner is not speaking tongue-in-cheek but as an earnest academic research historian. Turner’s interpretation is contentious and speculative, not merely revisionist but radically subversive. But the interpretation is advanced, we may say, clothed in the rhetoric of unctuous professional objectivity.

Turner is, to be sure, a genuine and accomplished historian, and the virtues of his scholarly research into Newman should not be ignored. Turner’s attention to Newman’s correspondence is laudable, as is his attention to the Tracts for the Times. Turner’s research also tries to take seriously the polemical context of much of Newman’s writing and so gives special attention to the politics of the Oxford Movement. Some of the results of Turner’s research therefore include the following important points:

Many Anglicans disagreed with Newman intellectually and religiously, and disliked him personally; indeed, according to Turner, most Protestant Anglicans were glad to see Newman leave the Church of England in 1845.

Newman was a consistent critic of evangelical Protestantism; in fact, Turner finds, the Tractarian Newman was more a critic of evangelical Protestantism than of secular liberalism.

Newman’s theoretical interest in Catholic theology was bound up with a practical interest in a particular vision of the religious life and accompanying devotional practices.

Newman’s conversion to Catholicism was not “inevitable” but depended on contingent human choices, and even when it was clear he had sympathies for Rome, Newman held himself back from a more immediate and “aggressive” embrace of Catholicism.

The first thing to note about these points is that they are not really new, surprising, or provocative findings. While they are valuable reminders, adding nuance to more simplistic pictures of Newman, these points are hardly neglected by Newman scholars or historians of the Oxford Movement; indeed, they could all be gathered from a reading of Newman’s Apologia.

So the second thing to notice is that these points do not, taken independently or together, entail the two major and certainly provocative conclusions that Turner’s book advances as its main theses: first, that Newman’s claim to be a consistent critic of liberalism is a late Catholic invention which falsifies his actual Tractarian thought; and second, that Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism was prompted not by principled theological, philosophical, or spiritual conviction but by peculiar psychological, political, and personal interests.

Even apart from the lack of historical support, there is something odd about the very formulation of these claims. Regarding the first—that the “critique of liberalism” is a misleading, late reinterpretation—Turner seems unaware of Newman’s sense of “liberalism.” Turner explains that the “chief connotation” of “liberalism” when Newman wrote the Apologia was “secular rationalism or secular critical thought,” and notes that this generally was not Newman’s target as an Anglican polemicist. This may be the case, but “liberalism” in Newman’s own sense, which he did target, was never primarily a phenomenon of “secular” thought. It was, instead, a “rationalizing” intellectual habit. As Newman defined it in the Apologia, liberalism is the overreach of reason. This is precisely what the Anglican Newman had attacked as “rationalism,” for example in Tract 73 and in his Oxford Sermons. This is why, for Newman, liberalism could be just as common, and especially dangerous, in religious as in secular thought. Turner quotes a part of the Apologia definition of liberalism, but not the part that specifies that it has to do with an attitude toward “first principles … especially … the truths of Revelation.” Liberalism, for Newman, is as much theological heresy as philosophical mistake. It is “the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word.” Turner fails to appreciate that it is precisely this sense of liberalism or rationalism that, in Newman’s judgment, was common, perhaps endemic, to the Protestant Evangelical variety of Christian theology, with its emphasis on “private judgment” and its questioning of the authority of tradition and a “Catholic” community of interpretation.

Turner does not see that “rationalism” could be used by Newman as a precise philosophical term, designating the view that human reason is or should be independent of authority, community and tradition. Newman’s use of the term, and his perception of this problem, should by now be familiar, having been revisited by a slew of thinkers in the 20th Century; and the relevance of Newman’s critique seems to be confirmed by the fact that prominent Evangelical theologians today give their attention to the need for a more sophisticated, tradition-sensitive epistemology to undergird Biblical hermeneutics.

The burden of Turner’s argument rests in large part on the accusation that Newman was not philosophically coherent. One cannot but notice that this requires of Turner a certain selectiveness when it comes to sources—almost totally ignored are Newman’s most philosophical Anglican writings, the so-called Oxford University Sermons on faith and reason. When Turner does address philosophy, one senses that he is out of his depth. Newman’s critique of rationalism is, for Turner, indistinguishable from skepticism or subjectivism; throughout Turner’s, book Newman’s views are associated with Hume and Nietzsche. At one point, Turner even suggests that Newman would have had “more dynamic philosophical presuppositions” and a more secure “metaphysical foundation” if only he had read more Hegel.

Since Turner can discern no coherent critique of liberalism in Newman’s Tractarian career, he must insist instead on a “challenge to Evangelical faith” as Newman’s real motive. Turner conceives of this “challenge” as essentially political, and therefore distinct from Newman’s putative intellectual or theological concerns, and so here we see reproduced, on another level, Turner’s blindness to the connection between Newman’s critique of Evangelicalism and his critique of liberalism.

Indeed, it seems that Turner simply never considers the sense in which Newman argued that a certain Protestant tendency is inherently “liberal.” Perhaps this is because this view itself already sounds too “Catholic,” which brings us to Turner’s second major thesis: that Newman’s trajectory toward Roman Catholicism was more arbitrary and personal than consistent and intellectual. Turner can’t exactly deny the clear Catholic tendencies of Newman’s main Anglican writings—especially Arians of the Fourth Century, Lectures on Justification, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, and various of the Tracts, especially the infamous Tract 90, on the 39 Articles. Although Turner does not ignore these works, he does deny that they are expressions of principled theological reflection, appealing instead to political and psychological explanations for Newman’s positions. For Turner, ecclesiological differences are never about theological ideas but about political interest. He consistently reduces Catholic views on sacraments and ecclesiology to matters of clerical power and social authority. In grasping for any motive other than theological commitment or philosophical principle, Turner even descends to speculations about psychosis and social dysfunction: sibling rivalry, death fixations, eating disorders, and (of course) “conflict over sexual orientation.” Turner is so bent on finding anything but ideas motivating Newman’s intellectual life that at times we are tempted to say of Turner what an exasperated Newman once said of his stubborn and uncomprehending Unitarian brother: “That I could be contemplating questions of Truth & Falsehood never entered into his imagination!”

If Turner’s two main theses, denying both the critique of liberalism and the spiritual journey to Catholicism, are not established by his historical research, they do find support—in each other. Turner’s two controversial claims are not grounded by historical evidence, but they are mutually reinforcing. This accounts for the recurring dissonance of Turner’s study. Intertwined with genuine historical reporting we find a logically independent, undoubtedly contentious, and tightly circular, argument: upon rejecting the Apologia interpretation of Newman’s conversion and the consistency of his critique of liberalism, Turner refuses to countenance any rationally consistent or theologically intelligible motivations during Newman’s Tractarian career; so then of course Turner “discovers” that Newman was motivated by pride, politics, psychosis, or will-to-power—anything other than philosophical or theological principle.

There is an obvious irony here. The historiographical lens through which Turner interprets Newman filters out any sign of consistency or intelligibility in Newman’s mind, apparently fearing that these would be hints of “teleology” which would threaten the historian’s duty to chronicle “contingency.” Turner’s historical interest in contingency thus leads him to treat Newman as a captive of his psychological urges and political interests—in other words, as precisely the opposite of the sort of rational agent who, having made free and intelligent choices, can properly be said to have a history.

But there is a deeper irony here as well. For had Turner paid more attention to Newman’s ideas, he might have noticed that Newman was long occupied with articulating a proper understanding of, among other things, human agency, history, and the role of character in reason and action. Newman the Tractarian was concerned with making sense of the development of ideas, of the connection between personal and intellectual motives, of the nature of one’s responsibility for one’s beliefs, of the connection between personality and persuasion. Newman would not have disagreed with Turner that there are often personal motivations behind philosophical commitments, but he would not therefore have reduced all such commitments to mere irrational drives. I have been suggesting that Newman was a more sophisticated philosopher than Turner allows, but Newman also a far more sophisticated psychologist than Turner shows himself to be.

Turner could not pay attention to Newman’s consistent thought about the nature of human reason, however, because he was too preoccupied with showing that Newman’s conversion to Catholicism was not “inevitable.” Although materially prescinding from the Apologia narrative and from the significance of Newman’s conversion, the argument of Turner’s book continually looks forward to that conversion and claims to give us insight into the Newman who would become Catholic, and why. Turner is preoccupied, no less than Newman’s biographers (and hagiographers), with explaining Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. This preoccupation is perfectly understandable, but to pursue it, one cannot systematically and deliberately ignore Newman’s own thought. Nor can one avoid substantive theological engagement. Turner sheds no light on Newman’s conversion, then, but more generally he fails to address any of the ideas that would lead one to read a book about Newman in the first place, ideas that make Newman’s life not only interesting in its own right, but relevant to continuing discussions of faith and reason, theology and hermeneutics, Protestantism and liberalism, religion and reform.