- Born:
- February 21, 1801, London, England
- Died:
- August 11, 1890, Birmingham, Warwick; beatified September 19, 2010 (aged 89)
- Subjects Of Study:
- Oxford movement
- Roman Catholicism
- Role In:
- Oxford movement
From the sense of frustration engendered by these experiences Newman was delivered in 1864 by an unwarranted attack from Charles Kingsley upon his moral teaching. Kingsley in effect challenged him to justify the honesty of his life as an Anglican. And, though he treated Kingsley more severely than some thought justified, the resulting history of his religious opinions, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864; “A Defense of His Life”), was read and approved far beyond the limits of the Roman Catholic Church, and, by its fairness, candour, interest, and the beauty of some passages, it recaptured the almost national status that he had once held.
Though the Apologia was not liked by Manning and those who thought as he did because it seemed to show the quasi-liberal spirit that they feared, it assured Newman’s stature in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1870 he expressed opposition to a definition of papal infallibility, though himself a believer in the doctrine. In the same year, he published his most important book of theology since 1845, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (commonly known as The Grammar of Assent), which contained a further consideration of the nature of faith and an attempt to show how faith can possess certainty when it rises out of evidence that can never be more than probable. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII made him cardinal deacon of St. George in Velabro. Newman died at Birmingham in 1890 and was buried (with his closest friend, Ambrose St. John) at Rednal, the rest house of the Oratory. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on September 19, 2010, and canonized by Pope Francis on October 13, 2019.
Mind and character of St. John Henry Newman
Newman’s portraits show a face of sensitivity and aesthetic delicacy. He was a poet—most famous are his contributions in the Lyra Apostolica of his Anglican days, including the hymn “Lead, kindly light,” written in 1833 when he was becalmed in the strait between Sardinia and Corsica, and The Dream of Gerontius (1865), based upon the requiem offices and including such well-known hymns as “Praise to the holiest in the height” and “Firmly I believe and truly.” He was always conscious of the limitations of prose and aware of the necessity for parable and analogy, and logical theologians sometimes found him elusive or thought him muddled.
But his was a mind of penetration and power, trained upon Aristotle, David Hume, Bishop Joseph Butler, and Richard Whately, and his superficial contempt for logic and dialectic blinded some readers into the error of thinking his mind illogical. His intellectual defect was rather that of oversubtlety; he enjoyed the niceties of argumentation, was inclined to be captivated by the twists of his own ingenuity, and had a habit of using the reductio ad absurdum in dangerous places. Newman’s mind at its best is probably to be found in parts of the Parochial and Plain Sermons or the University Sermons, at its worst in the Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles of 1843.
His sensitive nature, though it made him lovable to his few intimates, made him prickly and resentful of public criticism, and his distresses under the suspicions of his opponents, whether Anglicans defending the Reformation or ultramontanes (exponents of centralized papal power) attacking his Roman theology, weakened his confidence and prevented him from becoming the leader that he was otherwise so well equipped to be. Nevertheless, as the effective creator of the Oxford movement, he helped to transform the Church of England, and, as the upholder of a theory of doctrinal development, he helped Catholic theology to become more reconciled to the findings of the new critical scholarship, while in England the Apologia was important in helping to break down the cruder prejudices of the English against Catholic priests. In both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, his influence was momentous.
W. Owen Chadwick The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica