of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University. On the morning of the
23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they
are seen from the railway.
This passage comes from Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a vindication of his life,
composed in 1864 in response to Charles Kingsley, who had casually remarked in
a review that Newman, like the Catholic clergy generally, did not hold truth to be
a necessary virtue. (Alexander Macmillan, publisher of the magazine in which the
remark appeared, sincerely enquired of Newman whether this was not the
Catholic position.) Newman’s scrupulous history of his religious opinions
showed the falsity of Kingsley’s charge and convinced a sceptical audience of his
own good faith. The Apologia remains a convincing spiritual and intellectual
autobiography.
Newman had studied the Church Fathers and 17th-century Anglican divines, and
like them he composed for the ear, taking pains over rhythmic and syntactic organ-
ization as well as clear argument and distinct diction. Some of his sermons, hymns,
prayers, poems and lives of English saints have outlived their occasions; as have his
Church history, theology and fiction. An early hymn suggests his modesty:
Lead,kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.
Lead thou me on;
The night is dark and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on.
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene;one step enough for me.
Too dim for Kingsley,this hymn was a favourite of Thomas Hardy’s. Newman’s
major wor k in verse is The Dream of Gerontius, made into an oratorio by Elgar. It
dramatizes the destiny of the soul after death.
The most valuable of Newman’s other works are his Development of Christian
Doctr ine, which relates the historical evolution of Christian dogma to the Church’s
teaching authority, and his Grammar of Assent.Another classic is his Idea of a
Univer sity,his discourses as first Rector of University College, Dublin. He defines
and defends the liberal idea of education against Edinburgh Utilitarianism and an
Irish hierarchy which assumed that its new College was there to teach Catholic
doctrine. Newman’s ‘Idea’ is that a university is not to teach useful knowledge or
dogmatic truth, nor to pursue research, but to educate philosophically and critically,
to discipline and enlarge the mind.
In his Apologia Newman approaches Christian belief along converging arguments
from history and personal experience as well as from scripture, philosophy and
theology. His view that Providence has guided the historical development of
Christian revelation brings a British empiricism into theology. His argument from
experience draws on the educated imagination, developing a Romantic doctrine.
Newman also thought that the Oxford Movement developed from Romanticism. In
retrospect, he understood that Movement asa react ion from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the
literature of the last generation, or century; and as a result of the need which was felt
both by the hearts and the intellects of the nation for a deeper philosophy; and as the
evidence and as the partial fulfillment of that need, to which even the chief authors of
the then generation had borne witness. First, I mentioned the literary influence of Walter
Scott,who turned men’s minds in the direction of the middle ages ....270 8 · THE AGE AND ITS SAGES