John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman CO (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English theologian, academic, philosopher, historian, writer, and poet, first as an Anglican priest and later as a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s,[11] and was canonised as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.
This article is about the English cardinal. For the Bohemian-American bishop, see John Neumann.
John Henry Newman
15 May 1879
11 August 1890
- 13 June 1824 (Anglican deacon)
- 29 May 1825 (Anglican priest)
- 30 May 1847 (Catholic priest)
12 May 1879
by Pope Leo XIII
21 February 1801
11 August 1890 (aged 89)
Edgbaston, Birmingham, England
Oratory Retreat Cemetery Rednal, Metropolitan Borough of Birmingham, West Midlands, England
British
- Church of England (1824–1845)
- Catholic Church (1845–1890)
- John Newman (died 1824)
- Jemima Fourdrinier (1772–1836)
Cor ad cor loquitur
('Heart speaks unto heart')
- 9 October (Catholic Church)
- 11 August (Church of England)
- 21 February (Episcopal Church)
19 September 2010
Cofton Park, Birmingham, England
by Pope Benedict XVI
13 October 2019
Saint Peter's Square,[1] Vatican City
by Pope Francis
Cardinal's attire, Oratorian habit
30 May 1847[10]
12 May 1879[10]
Originally an evangelical academic at the University of Oxford and priest in the Church of England, Newman was drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became one of the more notable leaders of the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to restore to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this, the movement had some success. After publishing his controversial Tract 90 in 1841, Newman later wrote: "I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church."[12] In 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, officially left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, although he had left Dublin by 1859. (The university in time evolved into University College Dublin.)[13]
Newman was also a literary figure: his major writings include the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–1866), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865),[14] which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns "Lead, Kindly Light", "Firmly I believe, and truly", and "Praise to the Holiest in the Height" (the latter two taken from Gerontius).
Newman's beatification was proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom.[15] His canonisation was officially approved by Pope Francis on 12 February 2019,[16] and took place on 13 October 2019.[17] He is the fifth saint of the City of London, after Thomas Becket (born in Cheapside), Thomas More (born on Milk Street), Edmund Campion (son of a London bookseller) and Polydore Plasden (of Fleet Street).[18][19]
Writer[edit]
Some of Newman's short and earlier poems are described by R. H. Hutton as "unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect"; while his latest and longest, The Dream of Gerontius, attempts to represent the unseen world along the same lines as Dante. His prose style, especially in his Catholic days, is fresh and vigorous and is attractive to many who do not sympathise with his conclusions, from the apparent candour with which difficulties are admitted and grappled; while in his private correspondence, there is charm.[107] James Joyce had a lifelong admiration for Newman's writing style and in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver remarked about Newman that "nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church".[115][116]
Theologian[edit]
Around 1830, Newman developed a distinction between natural religion and revealed religion. Revealed religion is the Christian revelation which finds its fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Natural religion refers to the knowledge of God and divine things that has been acquired outside the Christian revelation. For Newman, this knowledge of God is not the result of unaided reason but of reason aided by grace, and so he speaks of natural religion as containing a revelation, even though it is an incomplete revelation.[117]
Newman's view of natural religion gives rise to passages in his writings in which he appears to sympathise with a broader theology. Both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, he put forward the notion of a universal revelation. As an Anglican, Newman subscribed to this notion in various works, among them the 1830 University Sermon entitled "The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively", the 1833 poem "Heathenism",[118] and the book The Arians of the Fourth Century, also 1833, where he admits that there was "something true and divinely revealed in every religion".[119] As a Catholic, he included the idea in A Grammar of Assent: "As far as we know, there never was a time when ... revelation was not a revelation continuous and systematic, with distinct representatives and an orderly succession."[120]
Newman held that "freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion", but was "the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church".[107][121] In 1877 he allowed that "in a religion that embraces large and separate classes of adherents there always is of necessity to a certain extent an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine".[107][122]
Newman was worried about the new dogma of papal infallibility advocated by an "aggressive and insolent faction",[123] fearing that the definition might be expressed in over-broad terms open to misunderstanding and would pit religious authority against physical science. He was relieved about the moderate tone of the eventual definition, which "affirmed the pope's infallibility only within a strictly limited province: the doctrine of faith and morals initially given to the apostolic Church and handed down in Scripture and tradition."[124]
John Henry Newman
21 February 1801
11 August 1890 (aged 89)
19 September 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI
13 October 2019 by Pope Francis
9 October
Cardinal's attire, Oratorian Habit
Attribution
