Newman's Own Church.(John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion)(Book Review)

John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, by Frank M. Turner (Yale, 724 pp., $35)

It is said, with mixed feelings, that of the writing of books on Newman there is no end. Few figures are as representative of the Victorian age's tectonic cultural shifts. Queen Victoria herself was no more a Victorian than Jesus was a Jesuit, but ask for a Victorian and Newman appears. As much as Gladstone, he was a force whose consecration to conservative principles proved to be more radically disruptive of social assumptions than many self-conscious revolutionaries.

Frank M. Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale, is entitled to add another book onto the Newman pile by virtue of his broad acquaintance with the Evangelical movements that usually are given short shrift in Newman studies. Turner's beautiful writing bears the brush of one who has spent a long time with writers of a neo- Ciceronian age whose letters by comparison put our generation on the junk heap of Western literature. Among them, Newman was the best.

This study, which goes up to Newman's conversion, is a rare revival of profound cynicism toward Newman's project. Turner is as genuinely bewildered as any 19th-century Protestant that a man with brains could take Catholicism seriously. "Popery" is almost as fluidly condescending on Turner's lips as when spoken by a Victorian Evangelical. A sympathetic account of Protestant frustration with the subtleties of the Tractarians, who moved from the old High Church theology straight into the arms of the Catholic Church, is helpful for its provocative animus, but a scholar so well read in the period should detect old biases speaking through himself. Turner is clearly annoyed that Newman's "self-generated transformation" and "characteristic narcissism" in his Apologia and other masterpieces turned him into an idol that even Lytton Strachey dared not completely tear down.

If Turner does not match Strachey's feline innuendo in trying to shrink "the young, angry, fiercely polemical Oxford Newman," his publisher tries hard. The book's publicity says Newman's conversion to Catholicism (or, rather, "passage to Rome") was very much a result of "family quarrels, thwarted university ambitions, the inability to control his followers, and his desire to live in a community of celibate males." The book's supremely ironical proposition is that Newman was, either by calculation or self-delusion, "perhaps the most enduring Victorian skeptic."

Turner adds to the cauldron of Newman's alleged neurosis, mendacity, and repressed maladjustment, an obsession with his sister Mary. He reads significance into Newman's constant association with churches and oratories named Mary. That would not seem to be remarkable to someone familiar with the Catholic world, but of that culture the magisterial Turner seems at times quaintly innocent. Newman is drawn as a disruptive and confused schismatic. Disruptive he certainly was, and Turner begrudgingly admits that he changed forever "the domestic expectations of his society and the devotional expectations of his church." But only from a prospect where fog in the English Channel isolates the Continent can conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism be thought schismatic.

As Newman drew closer to Catholicism in the early 1840s, his tightening circle of friends was to Evangelical eyes a pantheon of quiet hysterics. "The single most consistent element in Newman's adult life was his sustained determination to dwell among other celibate males and outside the company of women. . . ." Newman was chagrined at Frederick Faber's maudlin Marian piety, and we are told this "may have been another way in which he protested that his love for his own sister Mary had not exceeded the boundaries of good taste and morality." Yet we are also told that Newman shared Faber's baroque piety because "it is possible that in his mind he entertained a sense of sin over some thought or fantasy related to his deceased sister." On the next page Turner ups the voltage: "Newman may have felt that in his escape from an English Church fallen into evangelical heresy he could also remove the beloved Mary from the turmoil and ...