The Antagonist Principle: John Henry Newman and the Paradox of Personality by Lawrence Poston (review)

Abstract

The Antagonist Principle: John Henry Newman and the Paradox of Personality. By Lawrence Poston. [Victorian Literature and Culture.] (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 281. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8139-3633-8.)It is hard to perceive any real point to this book. We are told rather vaguely in the preface that it is a study of the of Personality in the Christian tradition, and its reverberations, beyond the more narrowly theological, to explain something of Newman's recurring efforts to organize his thoughts around that idea and that its principal concern is to re-situate Newman as one of the most combative of the Victorian seekers (pp. x-xi). But it is hardly a case of re-situating when it is already very well-known that Blessed John Henry Newman was one of the great Victorian controversialists.The nearest, effectively, that we get to a thesis is Poston's assumption that Newman studies are dominated by a dash between so-called hagiographers and iconodasts and that he sees himself as standing in via media. Truth, however, is not always to be found in the via media, as Newman himsdf came so painfully to believe. Poston, for example, thinks that the truth must lie between the arch-iconodast Frank T urner's revisionist attack on Newman (2002) and his allegedly hagiographical critics (although, to be fair, he recognizes the problematic nature of such an assumption). But the question of whether T urner's accusation that Newman lied in his Apologia pro Vita sua is true or not is not to be dedded by attempting to compromise between the iconodast and the hagiographers. Rather, the truth is to be discovered by looking at the actual historical evidence. This shows plainly that the Oxford Movement was launched in reaction to the threat posed by the reforming Whig government, which was to pass the great Reform Act a year later in 1834. The fear was that the state would interfere in the affairs of the Church of England, with the support of liberal Anglicans like Thomas Arnold who advocated a more comprehensive national Church that would embrace Dissenters. The liberal government, after all, had already intervened in Ireland, even suppressing several sees of the established Church there, a flagrant state interference that provoked John Keble's famous Assize Sermon in the university church in Oxford, an event that Newman always considered the beginning of the Oxford Movement. In any case, Turner's thesis that Newman's role in the movement was dictated by hatred of the Evangelicals and not by opposition to the liberals does not make any historical sense: for why should such a movement suddenly begin in 1833 when the Evangelical party was long established in the Church of England and posed no such threat as did the liberal party allied to the Whig government? …