Apologia pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons by John Henry Cardinal Newman

Abstract

NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 82 BOOK REVIEWS NEW EDITION OF NEWMAN’S WRITING John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons. Edited, annotated, and with an Introduction by Frank M.Turner. New Haven & London:Yale University Press, 2008. Pages: ix + 513. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11507-9. The editor, Frank M.Turner, author of John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion,1 acknowledges in a superb introduction that this is an historian’s edition of Newman’s famous text, but Turner’s approach does not need to run into difficulties with readers who read Newman for intellectual and spiritual nourishment. In fact, to know the context is of great importance for anyone who seeks such theological or spiritual benefit, and to ignore it can be dangerous. The correspondence between Charles Kingsley and John Henry Newman has not been reprinted in this edition but Turner decided to include as an appendix six Anglican sermons, among them,“Wisdom and Innocence.” Turner assumes that the Apologia is “one of the most significant spiritual autobiographies of the nineteenth century” but also that Newman’s masterpiece “does not fully relate or account for the personal, intellectual, religious, or spiritual history of its protagonist.” Hence, in Turner’s judgment, the book should be considered only another source for the study of Newman“and not a privileged one.” I found the Introduction (115 pages) fair and enlightening, a most necessary text to understand better what Newman did and did not do in his Apologia. Like many readers, I have always enjoyed and learned much from Newman but neither enjoyment nor benefit are impeded by accepting that he didn’t tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth,which is whatTurner concludes.Is this yet another case of distinguishing “the Newman of history” and “the Newman of the Apologia”? If anything, what Turner has discovered by immersing himself deeply into the English religious history of those decades will help to understand Newman even better and to place him in his real context. The title of“pioneer of the SecondVatican Council”though in many ways,fair and just,can also influence our reading of Newman.Whatever the flaws ofTurner’s recent lengthy study on Newman and Evangelicalism, which several reviewers promptly criticized, I believe that Turner should be thanked.At least, in my own reading of the famous English convert to Roman Catholicism, I can appreciate the expression “sacramental clericalism” or the early effort in Newman and his friends at Oxford to be more clerical than the Roman Church. Newman did have it against evangelism and Turner thinks that Newman’s critique of evangelical religion is as“applicable in the early twenty-first century as in early nineteenth.” Here Turner praises Newman’s courage and the intellectual 1 John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, published by Yale University Press in 2002 (ISBN 0–300–09251–2), was reviewed by Edward Enright, Newman Studies Journal 1:1 (Spring 2004): 77–78; also see the article by Walter E. Conn, “Newman versus Subjectivism: Liberalism Evangelicalism and Rationalism,”Newman Studies Journal 4:2 (Fall 2007): 83–86. 83 freedom he asserted for Roman Catholics in the church. “The Apologia became a classic because Newman persuaded his audience that he could be both a Roman Catholic convert and a good Englishman.” I am not a Newman scholar but have read the Apologia several times and looked forward to read it again with profit and pleasure. More so, this new edition was not only another opportunity; being a historian’s edition proved an illuminating experience.The literary and historical value is certainly there, undiminished; and Turner’s superbly erudite and detailed historical investigation enhances it. Alvaro Silva REVIEW ESSAY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: PLACES, ACTIVITIES, IDEAS Family Publications of Oxford, England, has published two collections of essays about Newman, his life, his activities, and his ideas. The first volume, John Henry Newman in His Time,contains fourteen essays devoted to places important to his life and his various activities. The second volume, John Henry Newman: Doctor of the Church, contains sixteen essays treating major aspects of his thought. As a whole, these two volumes of essays...