Newman and His Age.

I was introduced to Newman some thirty-five years ago by two professors to whom I will be eternally grateful. For some odd reason one of the first essays I read was his study of the patristic notion of the Antichrist, and I can still recall the seductive power of Newman's prose. More central writings were part of an English literature course, and when I moved on to philosophical studies Newman's mind and example were there to assure me that there could be something more to Catholic thought than the rationalism of the neoscholastic Cursus Philosophiae by Charles Boyer (not the actor) we read in the seminary. Later, while studying theology in Rome, I was attracted to the thought of Bernard Lonergan in good part because he represented the ideal of a Catholic intellect that I feared had died with Newman; only later did I learn how much Newman had influenced Lonergan. My years in Rome were also the first two years of Vatican II, "Newman's Council," as more than one commentator put it. Later, when I had to undergo the trial of a dissertation, the labor was relieved by my being able to do it on Newman's ecclesiology. Newman has, then, been present throughout my adult intellectual life.

Sheridan Gilley's book is, I believe, the fifth or sixth biography of Newman I have read, and perhaps it is enough praise of it to say that it repays a reading even for those familiar with the best of them: Wilfrid Ward's defense of Newman in the midst of the Modernist crisis, Maisie Ward's emphasis on the young Newman her father had somewhat neglected, Muriel Trevor's two-volume love letter, and lan Ker's recent excavations in the treasures of the thirty-one volumes of Newman's letters and diaries. Of them all Gilley's book is also the one I would recommend to anyone beginning a study of the great man.

Gilley distinguishes his work from those of earlier biographers in two ways. He wished "to put flesh on Newman's ideas, showing the relation of spirit to intellect, love to reason, mind to heart," but at the same time "to place Newman's intellectual and spiritual development in its historical setting. It is about Newman, but it is also about his age." Newman the man emerges clearly in the personal drama that led him from a bourgeois Anglicanism into an evangelical fervor that was not lost but only redirected when he became a leader in the Oxford Movement's attempt to revivify the Anglican church. The recovery of the intellectual and spiritual riches of the patristic era eventually led him to turn to Rome as the heir of that patrimony, and throughout the last half of a very long life he was able to offer to an at times ungrateful church the service of a matchless mind and pen, pioneering in the exploration of the development of doctrine, the role of the laity, and the psychology of faith, seeking in all these areas to offer his age an image of a church broader and richer than a merely antimodern structure of authority.

Gilley tells this familiar story very well, but he is particularly good at placing this personal drama against the movements of the nineteenth century. Newman's lifelong campaign against what he called "liberalism in religion" was an effort to combat what today people call "secularization," the removal of religion from public relevance to the point that, as he regretfully noted toward the end of his life, religion was not to be allowed to be in any way "the bond of society." Gilley takes pains to explain the various battles in which the struggle was engaged, often offering helpful analogies from twentieth-century developments. If he does not hide his admiration for Newman - "the greatest of English theologians ...after Bunyan, at once the most profound and passionate of our religious pilgrims" - he neither romanticizes nor idolizes him; opponents get a fair hearing, and Newman criticism when Gilley believes it deserved.

Gilley has a knack for the telling phrase: Maria Giberne, Newman's close friend, was "the Pallas Athene" of his movement; the Apologia had the unintended effect of making Newman "both the Virgil and the Aeneas" of the Oxford Movement; Elgar's music for "The Dream of Gerontius" "might be called strangulated Wagner in an English chapel"; Manning and Newman, linked by contemporaries as inseparably as Gladstone and Disraeli, Dickens and Thackeray, Browning and Tennyson, were "the Martha and Mary of the Victorian Catholic church."

There are, of course, generous examples of Newman's memorable prose, both in sermons, in essays, and perhaps least familiar to many readers, in letters, which reveal the man beneath the public figure. When an enthusiast, preaching in his place at Saint Mary's, proposed that animals also be required to observe the fast days, Newman expressed the hope that the man might "have a fasting horse the next time he goes steeple-chasing." To begin an ecclesiology with the doctrine of the pope, he said, "is to begin to build Saint Peter's with the cross and ball." At the news that he might be named a cardinal, he recalled that Caligula had made his horse a consul, and wondered "would not the pope be reviving by his proceeding the memory of that extravagance?"

There is only one thing missing in the story Gilley tells. He does not pay enough attention to Newman's pastoral ministry, whether in his early years as an eager Evangelical minister at Saint Clement's or later as a leader of the Oxford Movement at Saint Mary's (the one great body of Newman's work that is still unpublished are hundreds of his Anglican sermons) or, still later, as superior of the Birmingham Oratory. Gilley focuses more on the public controversies and on the twists and turns in Newman's many personal relationships and somewhat neglects Newman the pastor. But this is simply to say that, even after this fine book, there will be room for still more books on Newman.