Wilfrid Ward and his Life of Newman

Abstract

The most subtle nineteenth century analysis of religious conviction was the work of John Henry Newman; but who would analyse Newman himself? The simplest, most brilliant and wicked interpretation was that of Henri Bremond, for whom the ‘mystery of Newman’ was an all-devouring ‘autocentrism’ and self centredness, evidenced in an impassioned sense of self-identity and intensified by a twofold conviction of the reality of God and of the unreality of the visible world. Bremond's proof text was Newman's account of his Calvinist conversion, ‘confirming me in my mistrust of material phenomena, and making me rest in die thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. ‘Myself and my Creator’—here, thought Bremond, was an appalling glimpse of Newman's egotism, die secret of a spirit alien to other men, for whom ‘every individual soul is a closed world’. Here was the making of that touchy hypersensitive melancholic, ‘the solitary by choice’, who ‘by confining his universe to two beings, his Creator and himself, made forever that void at the very bottom of his heart’.