Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:43:59.711Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

John Henry Newman and the uses of antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2018

Graham John Wheeler
Graham John Wheeler*
Affiliation:
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

John Henry Newman’s engagement with classical antiquity is one of the less fully researched areas of his work. An examination of Newman’s shifting relationship with the classics sheds valuable light both on his own religious concerns and on broader tensions and trends in Victorian Christian culture. This article initiates three lines of inquiry. First, it examines, one by one, several distinct and competing conceptions of classical pagan antiquity which Newman employed in his writings. Second, it considers Newman’s views on the continuing practical application of classical literature and learning. Third, it looks specifically at the novel Callista, the only book that Newman wrote which is set wholly against the backdrop of the pagan Graeco-Roman world. It may be seen that Newman’s relationship with the classics forms a microcosm of how Victorian Christian society struggled by turns to align itself with and to distance itself from differing visions of classicism and paganism. His works exemplify the diverse ways in which his culture could praise and criticise the classical world.

Keywords

Classical reception studiesJohn Henry NewmanVictorian BritainVictorian Christianity
Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , May 2018 , pp. 129 - 154
Copyright
© Trustees of the Catholic Record Society 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Yates, Nigel, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain 1830–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 69 Google Scholar.

2 Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., [1928]), 16-17 Google Scholar. Strachey borrowed this phrase from Arnold, Matthew, Discourses in America (London: Macmillan, 1885), 142 Google Scholar.

3 Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (London: Vintage Books, 1991), 322Google Scholar.

4 On this issue, see e.g. Pitt, Valerie, ‘Demythologising Newman’, in David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, eds. John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism (Bristol: Bristol Press, 1991), 13-27 Google Scholar at 16-18. See also, more equivocally, Harrold, Charles F., John Henry Newman (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1945), 246-254 Google Scholar and Beer, John, ‘Newman and the Romantic Sensibility’, in Hugh S. Davies and George Watson, eds. The English Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 193-218 Google Scholar. For a contrary view, see e.g. Martin, Brian, John Henry Newman: His Life and Work (London: Continuum, 2000), 9-10 Google Scholar.

5 Reardon, Bernard M. G., Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Joseph Cronin, ‘The Medievalism of the Oxford Movement’, Reinvention 3(2) (2010), http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/reinvention/issues/volume3issue2/cronin/ (accessed June 23, 2017).

7 Stephen Halliwell, ‘Kenneth Dover and the Greeks’, n. xvi, https://www.academia.edu/2581374/Kenneth_Dover_and_the_Greeks (accessed June 23, 2017).

8 Goldhill, Simon, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 243 Google Scholar.

9 Tristram, Henry, ‘The Classics’, in Michael Tierney ed. A Tribute to Newman (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1945), 246-278 Google Scholar at 249-59.

10 See e.g. Tristram, , ‘The Classics’, 273-274 Google Scholar; Ker, Ian, John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 447-8, 537 Google Scholar.

11 See Weatherby, Harold L., Cardinal Newman in His Age (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973), 129-131 Google Scholar. ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ is, of course, itself a Graeco-Latin title.

12 Tristram, Henry, ed. John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 151 Google Scholar.

13 See Ker, Ian, ‘Newman the Satirist’, in Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill, eds. Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 1-20 Google Scholar at 3-4; and, in the same volume, Hill, Alan G. and Ker, Ian, ‘Newman as a Letter-Writer’, 129-151 Google Scholar at 130, 134.

14 Newman, John Henry, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), 363-371 Google Scholar. This article uses the uniform Longmans edition of Newman’s works (save where it is necessary to make reference to other, specific critical editions). Each volume from the Longmans edition is cited as a separate work, even where it forms part of a multi-volume set, as the individual parts of multi-volume sets were not necessarily published at the same time. The same practice is followed for volumes of Newman’s Letters and Diaries.

15 Todd, Robert B., Dictionary of British Classicists, 3 vols (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 2:711-712 Google Scholar.

16 A political enemy like Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran could call him a ‘bad Latinist’, see Stockley, W.F.P., Newman, Education and Ireland (London: Sands & Co, 1933), 64 Google Scholar.

17 ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ (Tertullian, Prescription, 7.9) and ‘Preparation for the Gospel’ (the title of Eusebius’ well known work). Newman himself explicitly accepted the ‘Preparation for the Gospel’ theory: Newman, John Henry, Historical Sketches, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 85 Google Scholar and Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 128.

18 Hutton, Ronald, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5, 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Prickett, Stephen, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 180 Google Scholar. On rhetoric in Newman’s writings generally, see Jost, Walter, Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

20 Newman, John Henry, Historical Sketches, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1906), 190-191 Google Scholar.

21 Newman, John Henry, Sermons on Subjects of the Day (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 214 Google Scholar.

22 Newman, John Henry, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 43 Google Scholar.

23 Newman, , Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 16 Google Scholar.

24 Newman, John Henry, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 236-238 Google Scholar.

25 Newman, John Henry, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), 88, 200-201 Google Scholar.

26 He alludes to Ps. 106:37 and 1 Cor. 10:20 in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 171-2 and Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 240.

27 Newman, , Apologia, 111 Google Scholar.

28 Newman, John Henry, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 6 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 204 Google Scholar.

29 Bellarmine, St Robert, De Laicis, chapter 20 Google Scholar.

30 Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 32, 44 Google Scholar.

31 Newman, , Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, 16Google Scholar.

32 See Newman, John Henry, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 27; Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 105-6Google Scholar.

33 Newman, John Henry, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 240, 245 Google Scholar.

34 Newman, , Grammar of Assent, 395-396 Google Scholar; see also Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 120.

35 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 81Google Scholar.

36 1 Cor. 15.32.

37 Dawson, Gowan, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 86 Google Scholar.

38 The standard treatment is Hutton, Triumph of the Moon. See also e.g. Davis, Philip G., Goddess Unmasked (Dallas: Spence, 1998)Google Scholar, from a conservative Christian perspective; and Barnett, Suzanne, ‘“The great God Pan is alive again”: Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Shelley in Marlow’, Essays in Romanticism 21(1) (2014): 65-87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Newman, , Discussions and Arguments, 71 Google Scholar.

40 Newman, , Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 207-208 Google Scholar.

41 See Ker, Ian and Gornall, Thomas, eds. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 292 Google Scholar; also Newman, John Henry, Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1907), 304 Google Scholar.

42 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 306 Google Scholar.

43 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 34 Google Scholar.

44 Newman, , Fifteen Sermons, 28 Google Scholar.

45 Newman, John Henry, The Arians of the Fourth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 109-110 Google Scholar. For other examples of the same attitude, see Newman, , Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 18, 22-23 Google Scholar.

46 Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), 194-196 Google Scholar. On Julian as a type of the Antichrist, see also Discussions and Arguments, e.g. 57-8.

47 Newman, , Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, 275-6Google Scholar.

48 Newman, , Essay on Development, 402-403 Google Scholar.

49 Weatherby, , Cardinal Newman, 100 Google Scholar.

50 See Rowan Williams’s comments in ‘Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History’, in Ker, Ian and Hill, Alan G., eds. Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 279-282 Google Scholar and Newman, John Henry, The Arians of the Fourth Century, Rowan Williams, ed. (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001), xxxvi-xli Google Scholar.

51 See e.g. McGrath, Francis, John Henry Newman: Universal Revelation (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1997)Google Scholar and ‘John Henry Newman and the Dispensation of Paganism’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 1 (2001): 26-42; also Merrigan, T., ‘Newman and Religions’, Louvain Studies 35 (2011): 336-349 Google Scholar.

52 Newman, , Arians, 80-81 Google Scholar. See also Connolly, John R., John Henry Newman (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 54 n.51 Google Scholar; McGrath, Francis J., ed. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 118 n.6; andGoogle Scholar Newman, John Henry, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 349 Google Scholar.

53 Newman, , Fifteen Sermons, 16-36 Google Scholar.

54 Ker, Ian and Gornall, Thomas, eds. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 281-283 Google Scholar.

55 Newman, John Henry, Verses on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1903), 134 Google Scholar.

56 Newman, , Arians, 90-91 Google Scholar.

57 For example, the influential eighteenth-century Catholic theologian Luke Hooke wrote: ‘The Christian religion has the unique honour of being as old as the world.... All pagan religions, to the extent that they differ from the true religion, are novel.... The Romans, the Greeks and the Egyptians knew what the origins were of almost all their superstitions: they knew at whose behest, at what time and in what circumstances they were established.’ (De Vera Religione, Pt. 2, Quaestiones subsidiariae, Chapter 2).

58 Newman, , Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 97-98 Google Scholar. See also the references in n. 17 above.

59 Newman, , Discussions and Arguments, 200 Google Scholar; Arians, 83-4; Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 211; Fifteen Sermons, 247-9, 329; Faith and Prejudice (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956), 125.

60 See Kidd, Colin, The World of Mr Casaubon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Newman, , Arians, 83 Google Scholar.

62 Newman, , Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 18 Google Scholar.

63 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 105-106 Google Scholar.

64 See de Achaval, Hugo M. and Holmes, J. Derek, eds. The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 138 Google Scholar.

65 See Dessain, Charles Stephen and Gornall, Thomas, eds. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 30 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 105 Google Scholar.

66 Newman, , Idea of a University, 65-66 Google Scholar.

67 Newman, John Henry, Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 232 Google Scholar.

68 Newman, , Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 214 Google Scholar.

69 Newman, , Essay on Development, 371-372 Google Scholar.

70 Newman, , Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, e.g. 203-207 Google Scholar.

71 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 1, 259 Google Scholar.

72 Newman, , Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, 97-98 Google Scholar.

73 See e.g. Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 2, 461-474 Google Scholar; and, in similar vein, Idea of a University, 260-1.

74 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 2, 408 Google Scholar.

75 Newman, , Idea of a University, 256-259 Google Scholar.

76 See Froude, James Anthony, Short Studies on Great Subjects, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1868), 334-362 Google Scholar.

77 See e.g. Newman, , Idea of a University, 6 Google Scholar.

78 Newman, , Apologia, 128 Google Scholar.

79 See Tristram, , ‘The Classics’, 272-273 Google Scholar; Dessain, Charles Stephen and Gornall, Thomas eds. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 389 Google Scholar.

80 Newman, , Idea of a University, 259-260 Google Scholar.

81 Newman, , Idea of a University, 258 Google Scholar.

82 Newsome, David, Two Classes of Men (London: John Murray, 1974), 62 Google Scholar; see generally 57-72 on Newman’s Aristotelianism in the English context. See further on Aristotle’s influence on Newman (and its limits) Jost, Rhetorical Thought and Magill, Gerard, Religious Morality in John Henry Newman (Cham: Springer, 2015), 65-66 Google Scholar, with bibliography.

83 See e.g. Harrold, , John Henry Newman, 13 Google Scholar; Gilley, Sheridan, Newman and his Age (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), 35-36 Google Scholar.

84 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 1, 274 Google Scholar.

85 Newman, , Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 1, 7 Google Scholar.

86 Cf. Keble’s Lectures on Poetry, trans. E.K. Francis, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), 2: 216-9.

87 Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 1, 4, 10. There is probably also an allusion to Plato’s theory of forms.

88 Ibid, 26.

89 Newsome, , Two Classes of Men, 58-59 Google Scholar.

90 Newman, , Essay on Development, 49, 52, 113 Google Scholar.

91 See Newman, Grammar of Assent, e.g. 353-5. For some background and context, see e.g. Aquino, Frederick D., Communities of Informed Judgment (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 69-70 Google Scholar, with notes; and Ker, John Henry Newman, 618-25, 636-50.

92 Richardson, Laurence, Newman’s Approach to Knowledge (Leominster: Gracewing, 2007), 125 Google Scholar. No attempt is made here to settle the technical debates on Aristotle’s influence on Newman in this regard: for example, whether Newman’s reading of Aristotle was mistaken (see e.g. Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), 171-2).

93 On the history here, see generally Pereiro, James, Theories of Development in the Oxford Movement (Gracewing: Leominster, 2015)Google Scholar, esp. 19-24 (the relevant material originally appeared in ‘Ethos’ and the Oxford Movement (Oxford: Clarendon, 2008)). Interestingly, Pereiro observes (22) that Newman’s ideas in this area may also have been influenced by St Athanasius.

94 Newman, , Arians, 30-31 Google Scholar.

95 Newman, , Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 2, 42 Google Scholar.

96 Newman, , Idea of a University, 383 Google Scholar.

97 See Griffin, John R., A Historical Commentary on the Major Catholic Works of Cardinal Newman (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 71 Google Scholar.

98 Newman, , Idea of a University, 109-110 Google Scholar. See also 414-5 for a curiously similar passage about Aristotle’s teaching on rhetoric.

99 Newman, , Fifteen Sermons, 28-29 Google Scholar.

100 On the relationship between the two books, see e.g. Dorman, Susann, ‘ Hypatia and Callista: The Initial Skirmish between Kingsley and Newman’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34 (1979): 173-193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lankewish, Vincent A., ‘Love Among the Ruins: The Catacombs, the Closet, and the Victorian ‘Early Christian’ Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture 28 (2000): 239-273 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 See Crawford, Charlotte E., ‘Newman’s ‘Callista’ and the Catholic Popular Library’, Modern Language Review 45 (1950): 219-221 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 See Lankewish, ‘Love Among the Ruins’. Cf. DeLaura, David J., Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 315 Google Scholar.

103 See Goldhill, , Victorian Culture, 156 Google Scholar; Vance, Norman, ‘The Novel’, in Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace, eds. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 4, 1790-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 279-298 Google Scholar at 285-91.

104 Newman, , Essay on Development, 211-219 Google Scholar.

105 Newman, , Callista (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1904), 326 Google Scholar.

106 Ibid, 26.

107 Ibid, 113-4.

108 Newman, , Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 18 Google Scholar; see also 40-3 for another purple passage.

109 Ibid, 33, 65.

110 Newman, , Callista, 193 Google Scholar.

111 Ibid, 192.

112 Ibid, 249-50.

113 Ibid, 271. See further, Hutton, , Triumph of the Moon, 43-51 Google Scholar.

114 On this aspect of the book, see e.g. Wolff, Robert Lee, Gains and Losses (New York: Garland, 1977), 69-70 Google Scholar.

115 Newman, , Callista, 242-243 Google Scholar.

116 Ibid, 90.