This paper examines the poetry of John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in the context of the revival movement in the Victorian era. Although poetry does not make up the bulk of his writings, it can still be ...a vehicle for a return to distant literary sources in the interests of revival. This is particularly true of the poetic dream in The Dream of Gerontius, which borrows characteristics from both the anonymous Old English poem The Dream of the Rood and Dante’s Divine Comedy. This creative recourse to old literary and aesthetic sources as an inspiration is marked by porosity, hybridity, and subversion when the mutation of the character takes place in a gradual process from de-personification to kenosis. The poetic journey as well as the passage from life to death are addressed in renewed forms, figures and motifs.
The first full-length biography to pay equal attention to both Newman's achievements as a thinker and writer and his personal life-story. Newman, whose religious significance transcends his own ...culture and time, is here revealed in his complexity, his sadness and sensitivity set against his exuberance, humour, and strength in the face of adversity.
TWO FALSE NEWMANS Schmitz, Matthew
First things (New York, N.Y.),
10/2019
296
Journal Article
...he also opposed liberalism in politics insofar as it led men to deny the reality of sin and the need for redemption. Since at least the Glorious Revolution, he believed, "Men saw the good in ...themselves and not the evil, and consequently were puzzled by the failure of certain parts of the social system to work well, ascribing the failure to a lack of knowledge, rather than of personal virtue." ...he declined to help Lord Acton and Ignaz von Döllinger, the two great liberal Catholics of the age, in their campaign against the decree of papal infallibility at Vatican I. Though Newman's writings on development and conscience would later be put to bad use by clever men, they exclude the kinds of doctrinal revolution and moral autonomy favored by liberals. In the face of revolutionary att Catholic states across Europe, a group of "ultramontanes," men who identified with the pope "over the mountains" in Italy, insisted on the necessity of the ancien régime.
In this article I argue for the uniqueness of The Development of Doctrine vis‐à‐vis other classic texts on doctrinal development supplied by the German theologians J.S. Drey and J.A. Möhler. Whereas ...the accounts of the German theologians are ‘theological’ in the strict sense, Newman's is theological only indirectly and forensic in its primary construction and execution. By ‘forensic’ I mean that the bulk of his reasoning is argumentative and intends to clear a space for thinking plausibly of the development of doctrine given other assumptions in the secular imaginary. While I make plain that in his classic text Newman is taking issue with the barriers against the idea of development from a number of religious constituencies, I suggest that in the end the enemy of enemies are religious rationalists, especially those with a historical sense largely derived from reading Edward Gibbon. Although The Development of Doctrine is an extraordinary text in so many ways, it comes to life when one understands it as Newman doing battle with Gibbon over the proper historiography of Christianity over the ages.
The canonisation of John Henry Newman by Pope Francis in 2019 was an opportunity to communicate to a largely secular audience in Britain and the rest of the world the search for truth that inspired ...Newman’s life. A giant of 19th century Britain, an eminent Victorian, a respected intellectual, a prolific writer and a religious reformer, Newman was now going to be declared a saint in the Catholic Church. After a brief historical summary, this article explains how the communications plan for the event was drawn up and executed to reach this secular public.
John Henry Newman's reflections on first principles aim to account for the insurmountable differences between people's worldviews.1 The emphasis Newman puts on first principles cannot be overstated. ...Newman argues for the ultimately determinative role that they play in any dispute. There can be little doubt that Newman was familiar with Aristotle's statement from the Nicomachean Ethics that ‘It is thought…that the starting‐point or principle is more than half the whole matter.’2 In Newman's words, these ‘first elements of thought’ are ‘half the battle’.3Since first principles are so central to the thought of Newman, much has been written on this topic, not only to elucidate Newman's thoughts on the matter, but also to make sense of the term's development in Newman's corpus.4 This article will summarize some of the main points of the latest contributors with special attention to the work of Rik Achten.5 While his work has much to commend for itself, I will criticize one aspect of it while offering a close reading of relevant passages from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in order to shed light on the noetic aspect of the Illative Sense in its acquisition of first principles.
...there was only one chapter where a reference to Turner's book might have been appropriate; neither I nor my coeditor gave any instruction to its author as to whether there should or should not be ...any such reference. ...I did not respond to Simon Skinner's attack on me and other so-called "hagiographers" for daring to criticize Turner's book-which, in the event, was answered by the eminent Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy.2 I gather from Poston's letter that the thesis that I thought I had managed to glean from his book is not what his book "actually is about."
According to Hesketh, Seeley's decision to publish Ecce Homo anonymously at a time when anonymous publishing was falling out of practice was an attempt to hold together the competing strands of a ...scientific approach to history with the moral principles of liberal Anglicanism. Evangelicals criticized the book for pushing the "cant of science to a monstrous extreme" (99), while those committed to positivism believed that "Seeley actually failed to live up to some of the most basic premises of historical criticism" (105). ...rather than igniting intellectual dispute purely because of its content, it was the form of Ecce Homo, especially its anonymous authorship and marketing strategy, that caused confusion and uproar, forcing readers who failed to comprehend it to rely "on the old denominational divisions to make sense of it and its author" (123). Rather than opening up theoretical questions about the interplay between text and context, the historical construction and performativity of authorship, or even returning to the constitutive role of print culture in Victorian religion, Hesketh's conclusion jettisons all of his previous claims in the book about the centrality of anonymous authorship and print culture in intellectual history.
This essay charts the parallel growth of Newman's theory of doctrinal development, and infallibility within that doctrinal development, with its author's movement from a via media in Anglicanism to ...recognition of the truth in the Roman Church. This essay analyzes the theological need for a theory of doctrinal development, the failure of Newman's via media project, and his role as a creative theologian. Then this essay examines in detailed Newman's 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, looking specifically at the second section of the second chapter, ‘On the Probability of a Developing Authority in Christianity.’ The main body of the paper treats the expansion of the scope and feasibility of infallibility in Newman's 1845 Essay.
It is clear that interest in the life and writings of Cardinal John Henry Newman transcends the various Christian denominations and indeed extends beyond that. The Symposium held at St Margaret's ...Westminster on 18 October 2019 to celebrate Newman's Canonisation was testimony to this fact. This in itself is significant surprising given Newman's well known ability to become a focus of controversy and to be a sometimes polarising figure during his own lifetime - a trait that has been bequeathed to posterity as scholars and commentators have contended over his disputed legacy, even though the contestation in recent times has tended not to be drawn along denominational lines. Newman spent half his life as an Anglican and so it is fitting that his relationship to the Church of England should loom large in the literature and historiography in Newman studies and to have been a prominent element in the recent Symposium.
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