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Abstract
Scholarly accounts of John Henry Newman's writings often emphasize passages where he describes the impossibility of persons adopting an objective view of their own perspectives and commitments. Newman seems, in this respect, quite at odds with nineteenth-century valorizations of detachment. “Newman's Detachment” seeks to modify this consensus. Focusing on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850) and Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), this essay uncovers Newman's distanced and provisional attitude toward belief. His surprising affinity with modern liberal detachment becomes particularly clear when he uses rhetorical tactics such as self-quotation to establish a stance of detachment from his past life and, in particular, from the beliefs that he held before his conversion to Catholicism. Newman's dramatized impartiality proves to be all the more complex because his life-writings are structured around competing strains of objectivity: his abstraction from his past self, that is, leaves his present commitments vulnerable to a countervailing style of detachment embodied by that very self.
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