Newman's 'Lesson of the Marriage Ring': Celibacy and Marriage in The

Louvain Studies 22 (1997) 59-84

Newman's ‘Lesson of the Marriage Ring': Celibacy and Marriage in the Thought of John Henry Newman Daniel Cere

Introduction

Newman's views on marriage have not received a very sympathetic hearing. Newman's detractors argue that character flaws undermine his ability to address this topic in a meaningful way. There are complaints about his individualism, ingrained chauvinism, and morbid sensitivity.1 Perhaps the most curious critiques are those which target Newman's “perversity,” “effeminacy,” and his homosexuality. Rumours of this type were floated by the Queen's chaplain, Charles Kingsley, during his public controversy with Newman in the 1860s. Kingsley had become a leading spokesman for the tradition of “Muscular Christianity” in Victo- rian religious thought.2 For this “manly” Christian Englishman the choice of a celibate life-style would automatically raise suspicions.3 Newman did little to rebut such personal attacks aside from noting how deeply this “prejudice” against celibacy was engrained within popular Protestant culture.4 Ward's classic biography unwittingly fuelled suspicions by

1. Valerie Pitt, “Demythologising Newman,” in John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, eds. David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, OP (Bristol: Bristol Press, 1991) 13-27. 2. For a sympathetic assessment see Norman Vance, Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1985). 3. Oliver S. Buckton, “‘An Unnatural State': Gender, ‘Perversion', and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” Victorian Studies 35 (1992) 362; Sinews of the Spirit, 127, 36-41. 4. Newman writes: “… It is now a recognized principle with the world, that there can be no certainty of holiness except in married life, and that celibacy is all but a state of sin,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907) vol. 6, 187-188. In Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889), he challenged the assumption that celibacy is linked to sexual immorality (133-136). 60 DANIEL CERE accenting Newman's sensitive or “feminine” side.5 Geoffrey Faber's Oxford Apostles welded these hints and whispers of possible deviance into a Freudian exploration of Tractarian sexual abnormality.6 The echoes are still found in contemporary literature.7 However, the rele- vance of these stereotypes to the study of Newman's contribution are dubious at best. First, the evidence supporting such theories is weak. Ian Ker's acclaimed biography successfully contests Ward's emphasis on Newman's “femininity” and draws out the “highly ‘masculine' side of his temperament.”8 However, even more problematic is the loaded nature of this whole controversy about Newman's “femininity” or “mas- culinity.” Oliver Buckton warns that this debate reveals more about the gender biases of Newman's critics (and sympathizers?) than anything of significance concerning Newman himself.9 A more mundane impediment to the study of Newman's views on marriage is the perception that his contributions are of such minor significance that they can be safely ignored. At first glance there appears to be some warrant for this dismissive attitude. Newman's writings on marriage form a modest part of his corpus and seem marginal to his main theological interests. However, this needs to be put in perspective. According to Newman, evidence of caution or reserve in the treatment of a theological topic may underscore its depth significance for Chris- tian faith, not its marginality. Few would deny the importance of celibacy for Newman. Yet Newman's treatment of this question is just as reserved as his treatment of marriage. In fact, the two topics are tightly linked in his work. He seldom speaks at length about celibacy without addressing the question of marriage. Moreover, when Newman does turn his attention to the question of marriage or celibacy his reflections are seldom trite. He opens up a number of theological puzzles concerning vocational commitment, love, and the relation between marriage and celibacy.

5. Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912). 6. Geoffrey Faber, Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954). 7. See David Hilliard, “Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homo- sexuality,” Victorian Studies 25 (1982) 181-210. Nicholls and Kerr complain that New- man is “altogether too subtle and refined, even over-delicate and old-maidish” – “an introverted and feline character,” John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanti- cism, 4-5. 8. John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) viii. P. Zeno takes issue with the view that Newman had difficulty forming stable rela- tionships, in John Henry Newman, His Inner Life (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987) 253ff. 9. Buckton, “‘An Unnatural State',” 359-383. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 61

Finally, Newman's contributions may be more substantial than they appear. Apart from a group of sermons written during the 1830s, Newman's most significant discussions of marriage are framed by his two novels, Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856). Sermons on marriage raise no theological eyebrows. However, the medium of the novel may seem odd and Newman had doubts whether his readers fully grasped his intentions.10 Ian Ker argues that Newman uses the novel as a vehicle for theological speculation.11 Ker highlights the theologies of conversion and faith developed in these stories. However, their import is not exhausted by these themes. The texts also probe into the world of marital and celibate love. Through the lens of narrative and imagery the reader encounters particular men and women living out their journeys in relation to one another. This type of approach fits with Newman's contention that theological argument should be rooted in a “real” rather than “notional” apprehension of religious truth. Real apprehension occurs by means of “image” rather than argument.12 Newman's versatility as an author – his novels, poems, hymns, and autobiography – gave him the ability to communicate through mediums other than the purely notional mode of theological treatise. However, this versatility poses problems for his interpreters.

‘A Home for the Lonely'

Newman's Anglican sermons table a number of perspectives on the family which seem to anticipate the concerns raised by contemporary “communitarian” theorists.13 Newman draws a firm distinction

10. Discussing the reception of Callista Newman wondered whether “Catholics have ever done justice to the book.” He complained that “they read it as a mere story book.” The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 26, ed. C. S. Dessain and Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) 130. 11. John Henry Newman: A Biography, 422. 12. An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent, ed. Ian T. Kerr (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) 22-27. 13. See James Tolhurst, The Church – A Communion (Leominster: Fowler, 1988) 14-18; E. Campion, John Henry Newman, Friends, Allies, Bishops Catholics (Melbourne, 1980) 16-36. For contemporary communitarian accounts of the family, see Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Christopher Lash, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See Will Kymlicka's assessment of debates between liberals and communitarians in Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 62 DANIEL CERE between public and private spheres of community. Each form of life is orientated towards a distinct set of ends. The public domain is the “attractive and exciting” context for the pursuit of “liberty” and “independence” – where men strive to “be their own masters.” However, autonomy and self-sufficiency do not ensure personal fulfilment and happiness: “All men, whether religious or not, find in no long time that the world is insufficient for their happiness, and look elsewhere for repose.”14 The private realm meets needs for affective intimacy and support that cannot be met in the public sphere. The outward world is found not to be enough for man, and he looks for some refuge near him, more intimate, more secret, more pure, more calm and stable. This is the main reason and a praise- worthy one, why a great number of the better sort of men look forward to marriage as the great object of life. … Supposing a man to make money, to get on in life, to rise in society, to gain power, whether in a higher or lower sphere, this does not suffice; he wants a home, he wants a centre on which to place his thoughts and affections, a secret dwelling-place which may soothe him after the troubles of the world, and which may be his hidden stay and support wher- ever he goes…15 The domestic sphere also has a key role in the moral formation of an individual. Unsituated freedom is not conducive to the development of certain kinds of social virtue. Newman argues that, “Nothing is more likely to engender selfish habits (which is the direct opposite and nega- tion of charity) than independence in our worldly circumstances.” Indi- viduals “who have no tie on them, who have no calls on their daily sympathy and tenderness, who have no one's comfort to consult, who can move about as they please” are “very unfavourably situated” for the cultivation of certain virtues.16 A web of committed familial relations situates human freedom within a context that fosters the gentle habits of mutual accommodation, tolerance, sympathy, and care. This form of life can also call forth the more austere virtues of self-denial and self- giving love. I cannot fancy any state of life more favourable for the exercise of high Christian principle, … than that of persons who differ in tastes and general character, being obliged by circumstances to live together,

14. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 4, 185-199, esp. 187-188. 15. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 4, 188-189. 16. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 2, 58. This celebration of the moral and spiritual significance of domestic life is characteristic of mid-Victorian thought. Walter E. Houghton discusses this development in The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) 341-347. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 63

and mutually to accommodate each other their respective wishes and pursuits. – And this is one among the many providential benefits (to those who will receive them) arising out of the Holy Estate of Matrimony; which not only calls out the tenderest and gentlest feelings of our nature, but, where persons do their duty, must be in various ways more or less a state of self-denial.17 Familial love is grounded in bonds of intimacy and mutuality. It is not a contemplative orientation to the beautiful – “merely looking at what does not notice us.” It is “a friendship” constituted by concrete forms of mutual recognition: “(1) mutual love; (2) mutual consciousness and sympathy; (3) mutual intimacy…”18 This relationship involves real apprehension and assent to specific persons, not just ideals. It is “absurd” to “talk magnificently about loving the whole human race … This is not to love men, it is but to talk about love”19 The real “test of love” is “loving those whom we actually see.”20 Christian love is marked by attachments which are specific and particular, not abstract and uni- versal. The family is a unique form of life which nurtures this loving particularity. For Newman, the deep significance of the domestic sphere is underlined by the fact that the church itself is revealed as family. Scrip- ture refers to the church as a “home.”21 Both the domus and the ecclesia share common cause in their “witness against” the public world. The church and the family sustain an interpersonal life which is not evident in the institutional patterns of the public realm. The domus, as church or family, is “the real domain of the person.”22 They provide social con- texts to meet the deeper needs of human nature for personal intimacy and love. This communitarian account of the church and the family remained a permanent feature of Newman's thought. As Superior of the English Oratorians he developed this theory into a unique approach to religious community. His vision of community accentuates the informal “familial” dynamics within ecclesial life. He contrasts this approach with traditional monastic approaches where relations tend to be structured by more overtly institutional rules and discipline. He points out that St. Philip Neri shelved vows, disciplinary regulations, and juridical patterns

17. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 2, 58. 18. Sermon Notes (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913) 124. 19. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 2, 55. 20. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 4, 184. 21. “The Church a Home for the Lonely,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 4, 185-199. 22. J. H. Walgrave, Newman the Theologian (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960) 326. 64 DANIEL CERE of obedience. The “life of home” defines the “very essence” of the Ora- torian community. Newman maintains that this approach highlights a dimension of New Testament ecclesiology which is obscured in institutional models. It also makes sense of the foundational importance of the “hidden life” of Christ. Jesus's public ministry is grounded in a prolonged period of family life. Oratorian community attempts to embody this dimension – to be an ecclesial “realization of the family in its perfection.”23 Such a community must be small: “One cannot love many at one time.” It is “a domestic circle” whose intimacy must be carefully “bounded and rounded.” The familial patterns of “mutual attachment,” “daily intercourses,” attachment “to place and neighbour- hood … and to one's own room,” form the basic principles of its communal life.24 Newman concedes that this familial model of ecclesial community seems somewhat unfamiliar. However, he maintains that this approach to community is deeply rooted in tradition and provides a unique response to the needs and difficulties of religious life within modern culture.

Marriage and Vocation: The Problem of Reding's Nausea

Newman's reflections on marriage and family are not exhausted by this “communitarian” account. Access to mystery requires many con- ceptual and imaginative approaches: “The heart runs out, as it were, only at one door.”25 Doors which are opened in Newman's novels often signal moments of insight and self-revelation. One such moment occurs in a passage from his first novel, Loss and Gain. The scene takes place in a religious book-store on Danvers Street in Bath. [Charles] heard the shop-door open, and, on looking round, saw a familiar face. It was that of a young clergy-man, with a very pretty girl on his arm, whom her dress pronounced to be a bride. Love was in their eyes, joy in their voice, and affluence in their gait and bear- ing. Charles had a faintish feeling come over him; somewhat such as might beset a man on hearing a call for pork-chops when he was sea-sick. He retreated behind a pile of ledgers and other stationary.26

23. Addresses to Cardinal Newman with His Replies (1879-81) (London: Long- mans, Green and Co., 1905) 104; Newman the Oratorian: His Unpublished Oratory Papers, ed. Placid Murray (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1969) 118, 94. 24. Newman the Oratorian, 387, 328-330. 25. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5, 318. 26. Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906) 349. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 65

The “sea-sick” fellow browsing in the bookstore is Charles Reding, the hero of Loss and Gain. Reding is on the last difficult stage of his journey towards Catholicism. The newly weds are Henry and Louisa White. The troubling question raised by this chapter is the reason for Reding's nausea.27 Newman's critics believe that this passage exposes the dark under- belly of Newman's view of women and marriage.28 Kerr and Nicholls argue that “the message” of this scene “is that a wife must always degrade a man's ministry.” Spousal love is portrayed as flawed compared to the ascetic purity of celibate devotion. Those with insight into the high vocation of celibacy are “expected to share the hero's repugnance at the couple for being so much in love.” Newman's hero experiences conjugal love as “succulent, greasy, nauseatingly glutinous.”29 Marriage is something “repugnant,” if not sinful.30 This diagnosis of Reding's sea-sickness is misleading. The nausea evoked by Henry and Louisa's entry is not a response to marital love, but a reaction to a “sham.” Loss and Gain offers literary study of Oxon- ian religious life and personalities in the light of a central theme in Newman's thought – the dialectic between real and unreal religious professions of faith.31 Newman depicts the religion of Henry and Louisa White as “talk” and “fashion,” not life. It happened to be Anglican ultra-Catholic fashion; it could have been Evangelical fashion or liberal fashion. Reding's sea-sickness expresses a type of existential “nausea” provoked by manifestations of “bad faith.” The contrast between real and unreal religious commitment is highlighted in the opening chapters of the final part of the novel. The bookstore episode is sandwiched between Reding's painful last conversation with his mother and his final visit to his beloved Oxford. These scenes describe the sacrifices of family, boyhood friends, and career prospects entailed in his conversion.32 Reding's growth in faith to Catholicism is gradual, but real and costly. Henry and Louisa White symbolize the “bad faith” of an extravagant aesthetic ultra-Catholicism. The Anglican “Ultras” sigh for the beauties and fashions of the old Church. They pine for the stained glass windows, the exquisite statues

27. Loss and Gain, 348-352. 28. David Nicholls and Fergus Ker, “Introduction,” John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, 6-7; William Robbins, The Newman Brothers: An Essay in Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1966) 83-84. 29. John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, 6. 30. Faber, Oxford Apostles, 221-223; Robbins, The Newman Brothers, 83-84. 31. Ker stresses the importance of this theme for understanding Newman's contribution, John Henry Newman: A Biography, viii, 332-336. 32. Loss and Gain, pt. III, ch. 1, 338-347; ch. 3, 353-375. 66 DANIEL CERE of dreamy-eyed celibate saints, and the byzantine rituals. They marvel at the mysteries of the confessional and fantasize about the romantic and dangerous act of converting to this very “foreign” faith. It is all “so devotional,” so “sweet,” so “beautiful,” so “flowing and ebbing.”33 How- ever, beneath this aesthetic fascination with religion there is little of real substance. Ultra-Catholic dreams are easily shattered by the sting of reality – the suggestion, for example, that converts might be expected to confess. Such comments tend to put a damper on sparkling evening conversations about the more esoteric mysteries of Romanism.34 Henry White's celebration of the glories of Catholicism, monasticism and the celibate state of life proved to be short-lived. He is sobered up by superiors who make it clear to him that such enthusiasms will adversely affect his ecclesiastical prospects.35 Henry promptly adjusts his theological stance, marries and gets on with his career. The bookstore conversation gives the reader a glimpse into the utilitarian motives that subtly structure religious life and discourse.36 The rhetoric of religious devotion continues, but it is diverted into new channels. The books which now interest the Whites are titles such as “Modified Celibacy.” Louisa's excitement about a new book on monasticism, “Abbeys and Abbots,” is sparked by her enthusiasm for interior decoration rather than spirituality. She wants to consult it “to get some hints for improving the rectory windows” and designing a new porch for their parsonage. Reding is nauseated by the “worldly air” of Victorian Christianity. Here are ministers of Christ with large incomes, living in finely furnished houses, with wives and families, and stately butlers and servants in livery, giving dinners all in the best style, condescending and gracious, waving their hands and mincing their words, but without anything to make them clergymen but a black coat and a white tie. And then Bishops or Deans come, with women tucked under their arm; and they can't enter a church but a fine powdered man runs first with a cushion for them to sit on, and a warm sheep- skin to keep their feet from the stones. Reding concedes that they are all “very good persons” but he cannot “bear the pomp and pretence” of religiosity.37 The author can sympathize with hard-nosed skeptics who dismiss cultured Christianity as “beneath contempt.”38

33. Loss and Gain, 53-64. 34. Loss and Gain, 58. 35. Loss and Gain, 232-233. 36. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5, 240. 37. Loss and Gain, 256. 38. “Profession without Practice,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, 124-138. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 67

Reding is also disturbed by the facility with which Henry White shifts ground from his earlier avowals of celibacy. The fact that these shifts seem to cost him so little betrays a shallowness of commitment. Reding doesn't like “talkers” and the Whites, if anything, are talkers. He is baffled by the lack of fit between the Whites' religious pretensions and their actions. He wonders how “people mean so little what they say.”39 Reding echoes Newman's Sartre-like conviction that “choice” and “action” are truth – mere talk is mauvaise foi.40 “Let not your words run on,” Newman warns, “force every one of them into action as it goes.”41 To make professions is to play with edged tools, unless we attend to what we are saying … Let us aim at meaning what we say, and saying what we mean; let us aim at knowing when we understand a truth, and when we do not.42 Newman argues that a literate and cultured society is one that is particularly prone to verbal professions of religiosity without real content in terms of lived faith.43 The Whites present a rich caricature of this malaise. While Nichols and Ker's interpretation of Reding's nausea may be mistaken, nevertheless Loss and Gain does shed some light on New- man's views of marriage. There is a real tension between marriage and celibacy in the novel. The location of this scene alludes to the Wife of Bath's ribald defense of marriage and condemnation of celibacy in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. However, Newman's bookstore scene is not mere comic rebuttal. Newman is posing some troubling questions about personal authenticity. The costliness of Reding's faith commitment is meant to highlight the “unreality” of the religious professions that var- nish most vocational choices. Marriage or celibacy may be the product of an inauthentic choice – something one has slid into out of need, fashion, fleeting interest, social conformity, or worldly ambition. Such choices do not demand any concrete change in moral conduct and life- style.44 Celibacy and marriage become vehicles for social accommodation rather than ventures of faith that involve personal transformation. An unreal vocation is self-preserving rather than self-transforming. It

39. Loss and Gain, 190. 40. Loss and Gain, 34. On Sartre’s views see Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Penguin, 1987) 34. 41. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, 70. 42. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5, 33, 45. 43. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5, 34. 44. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, sermons 10-13. 68 DANIEL CERE becomes a way of securing the independence of the self and extending its interests by possessing and utilizing the other as opposed to a self- transcending surrender of self to another.45 Finally, for Reding, as for Newman, the decision “not to marry” brings the question of marriage to centre stage rather than marginalizing it. The justification for one vocation becomes intimately bound up with that of the other. In Loss and Gain this interconnection is presented as a tangled knot of existential options and open theological questions.46 In his later work the contours of this knot will receive a more thoughtful theological response.

Pagans and Christians in Love

Another novel and another door: The door was thrown back, and a female form presented itself at the opening … The woman was young, tall, and graceful in person. She was clad in a yellow cotton tunic, reaching to her feet, on which were shoes. The clasps at her shoulders, … seemed to serve the purpose, not only of fastening her dress, but of providing her with sharp prongs or minute stilettos for her defense, in case she fell in with ruffians by the way; and though the expression of her face was most feminine, there was that about it which implied she could use them for that purpose on an emergency. That face was clear in com- plexion, regular in outline … Its charm was a noble and majestic charm … It was the charm of Greek sculpture; it imaged a soul nourished upon the visions of genius, and subdued and attuned by the power of a strong will. There was no appearance of timidity in her manner; very little of modesty.47 The scene depicts a cultured young pagan women, Callista, entering a home where she will confront Cyprian (Caecilius) of Carthage, a third- century bishop who exemplified a tough masculine Christianity. In this first encounter Callista and Cyprian immediately clash in a direct and personal confrontation over the Christian faith. Callista's rebuttals to Cyprian's arguments are almost brutally honest. For Newman the out- standing trait of his heroine is her “reality.” Her words and actions ring with existential authenticity that is the expression of an inner autonomy. She sees through verbal professions that are “unreal” or superficial. Neither family, nor suitors, nor bishops can browbeat this woman into

45. “Sincerity and Hypocrisy,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 5, 222-236. 46. Loss and Gain, 188-201; Faber, Oxford Apostles, 221-222. 47. Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910) 212-213. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 69 any cheap accommodations with the society around her, into marriage, or into faith. There are more than a few surprises here. Newman turns to a woman and a pagan to draw his literary portrait of a figure who exem- plifies the greatness and splendour of human nature. It is Callista, not Cyprian, who “in the pride of her earthly beauty, and the full vigour and elevation of her mind” expresses all “perfection of beauty” that can be “manifested in man.”48 Her attributes go beyond her capacity for existential honesty. Callista is educated, cultured, athletic, strong-willed, and self-assured. Her physical and intellectual gifts are harmoniously integrated under a sovereign will giving her character a dignified sim- plicity characteristic of authentic self-possession: a soul full of gifts, full of greatness, full of intellect, placed in an outward form, equally surpassing in its kind, and still more excellent from its intimate union and subordination to the soul, so as almost to be its simple expression. This women is a paradigm of human nobility – the “choicest, rarest specimen of Almighty skill.”49 Newman gives a peculiar, almost feminist, spin to this portrait of Callista. This cultured, independent, and strong-willed woman is a creation that should have sprung from the pen of a Mary Wollstonecraft, not from a Victorian Catholic cleric. She is a woman who can engage the public world, a skilled artist capable of supporting herself and par- ticipating in the urban world of Sicca. By the end of the novel Callista has gone toe to toe with many formidable male figures. In her final test she faces the hard-edge of Roman political power in the Decian perse- cution. There is “no appearance” of traditional feminine “timidity” and “very little of modesty” in this woman.50 However, this portrait of Callista fits with other largely overlooked aspects of Newman's thought. Victorian ideology insisted on a strict gender complementarity between men and women. In celebrating the unique role of women within the private sphere Victorian authors

48. Callista, 374. 49. Callista, 374. 50. Joseph H. Wessling argues that Newman's portrait of the female saint/martyr in Callista is cast in an “androgynous” style. See “The Androgynous Ideal: Newman's Callista,” in Personality and Belief: Interdisciplinary Essays on John Henry Newman, ed. Gerard Magill (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994) 43-52. He points out that Newman's portrait of the ideal “gentleman” in The Idea of a University also exhibits this androgynous combination of masculine strength and self-control with “a certain tenderness and effeminacy of feeling.” See The Idea of a University (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960) 160. 70 DANIEL CERE typically insisted on the need to restrict their access to public life. Newman's comfortability with women in the public sphere stands in contrast to these Victorian anxieties.51 For example, in his discussion of the monastic movement Newman notes a virtue in “such establishments which applies particularly to women.” Monastic institutions opened windows of opportunity for women that were otherwise non-existent.52 Newman argues that Protestantism reconstrued social life in such a way that women were confined to the domestic sphere. He characterizes this as one of the most problematic features associated with the rise of Protestantism. I know not any more distressing development of the cruel temper of Protestantism than the determined, bitter, and scoffing spirit in which it set itself against institutions which give dignity and independence to the position of women in society.53 Newman saw this prejudice operative even within modern liberal reform movements. He attacks the gender biases in liberal educational proposals.54 This is one of the few occasions when Newman will take liberals to task for their failure to live up to their principles. Towards the end of his life he wrote to Jane Mozley and cited one important quali- fication to his largely critical evaluation of modern society. “It is one of the best points of this unhappy age, that it has made so many openings for the activity of women.”55 Callista offers Newman's portrait of a

51. On Victorian gender ideology see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). Joyce Sugg detects an “implicit program for emancipation” in Newman's work. However, she does point out that his concerns for the advancement of women were couched in quite cautious and conservative terms. See “Newman and the Intellectual Advancement of Women,” Personality and Belief: Interdisciplinary Essays on John Henry Newman, 53-62. 52. Historical Sketches (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906), vol. 2, 168-184. 53. Historical Sketches, vol. 2, 165. 54. Discussions and Arguments (London: Longmans and Green, 1907) 280-281. Newman states that “the Tamworth Reading-room admits of one restriction, which is not a little curious, and has no very liberal sound. It seems that all ‘virtuous women' may be members of the Library … A very emphatic silence is maintained about women not virtuous. What does this mean? Does it mean to exclude them, while bad men are admitted?” (281). Women must meet some undefined standard of virtue. Newman sighs, “Alas, that bigotry should have left the mark of its hoof on the great ‘fundamental principle of the Tamworth Institution'!” (282). 55. Letters and Diaries, vol. 30, ed. C. S. Dessain and Thomas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 316. This desire to see women have a fuller range of opportu- nities in the public realm was not just verbal. Newman attempted to create a place for women in the Oratorian community by opening up an Oratory for women (Newman the Oratorian, 311). When an Oratory School was founded, Newman broke with the tradition of hiring only “masters” for the training of the boys and appointed a “matron,” Mrs Frances Wooten. The presence of a strong-willed capable woman proved to be too NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 71 woman who exemplified a formation, independence and assurance suited to real participation in the public sphere.56 A woman like Callista is bound to have some interesting repercus- sions for any discussion of marriage. In the novel this theme is intro- duced through the story of a less formidable figure, a Christian named Agellius. Agellius is a likeable, simple young man with a “sanguine temperament” and a moderate amount of financial security.57 His religious faith seems firm, but Agellius has some difficulty in connecting his very private faith to his public life. Above all, he is “lonely.” “He was lonely at home, lonely in the crowd. He needed the sympathy of his kind; hearts which might beat with his heart; friends with whom he might share his joys and griefs; … minds like his own, who would understand him – minds unlike his own, who would succour and respond to him.”58 The unsituated freedom of his single life is stunting his personal development. Agellius is a problem waiting for a communitarian solu- tion – he needs a home. However, Agellius's needs can be manipulated. His brother, Juba, and his uncle, Jucundus, plot to exploit his loneliness in order to spring him loose from his faith and bend him into conformity with pagan culture through marriage. Their trap will be “the divine Callista.” Jucundus is convinced that Callista will “take in hand this piece of wax, sing a charm, and mould him into a Vertumnus.”59 However, there is a word of caution. Juba warns his uncle that he had once tried to seduce Callista. Juba's stark masculine presence failed to lure her and he com- missioned Gurta, a wise old witch, to concoct a “love potion.” The spell much for his headmaster, Nicholas Darnell. Darnell accused her of insubordination and asked Newman to dismiss her. When Newman failed to act, Darnell forced the issue by an ultimatum – Darnell and the other “masters” were prepared to walk if Wooten stayed. The ultimatum backfired. Despite the risks involved in reorganizing a fledgling school in mid-term, Newman retained his “matron” and dismissed his angry “masters.” See Ker's discussion of this episode in John Henry Newman: A Biography, 504-507, also 189-190, 210, 734. 56. Newman's meditation on the biblical story of Mary and Martha cites another woman as an exemplar of life in the public sphere. Martha represents one basic form of Christian service – the way of “active business” and public engagement. Martha is “the head of a family” who “directs and acts” while Mary retires in “quiet adoration.” “The necessity of getting a livelihood, the calls of a family, the duties of station and office,” are aspects of “Martha's path for the many.” Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 3 (Lon- don: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910) 319-322. 57. Callista, 123, 116, 23. 58. Callista, 27. 59. Callista, 67. Vertumnus was a Roman deity who was capable of endless self- metamorphosis. Through one of these self-transformations he won the hand of his wife, Pomona. 72 DANIEL CERE was “one of the most tremendous spells in her whole budget … enough to dance down, not only the moon, but the whole milky way.” But, it did not “dance down Callista.” Gurta was “savage” and “protested that Callista was a Christian.”60 Jucundus dismisses the story. Callista is an avowed pagan. How could this cultured woman, someone who crafts magnificent idols of the gods for public and private religious worship, be interested in a crude Christian superstition? However, the old witch, like Newman, is alert to the presence of an interior religious quest hidden behind the anonymity of her pagan exterior. Jucundus is a third-century Jeremy Bentham – benevolent, utilitarian, shrewd, good-natured, and worldly to the core. He is aware of Agellius's attraction to Callista and broaches the subject of marriage. He surveys three possible types of marriages for Agellius.61 First, there is the matrimonium confarreationis, a traditional Roman religious marriage. Jucun- dus dismisses this as obsolete, unfashionable and expensive. Secondly, there is marriage ex coemptione. Jucundus describes it as a reciprocal “mercantile transaction” which binds the partners reciprocally and irrevocable. He dislikes both its reciprocality and its finality: I like to be my own master, and am suspicious about anything irrevocable. Why should you commit yourself (do you see?) for ever, for ever, to a girl you know so little of? Don't look surprised: it's common sense. It's very well to buy her, but to be bought, that's quite another matter.62 Agellius's negative reaction calls attention to an inconsistency in his uncle's remarks. This passage spotlights a gender bias as common to prudent Victorians as it was to this third-century North African. Surrender is appropriate as long as it is only hers. It fitting to speak of the wife belonging to the husband, but not of the husband to the wife. For New- man this bias subverts the inner meaning of marriage. Jucundus concludes by recommending the third kind of marriage, matrimonium ex usu. This is a form of co-habitation which receives recognition as a marriage after a trial period: “‘if, as time went on, you got on well together, it would be a marriage; if not,” – and he shrugged his shoulders – “no harm's done; you are both free.'”63 Agellius's angry reply to this proposal leaves Jucundus perplexed. The uncle complains that he is only acting out of concern for his “nephew's welfare” and warns Agellius that he “must act according to received usages of society!

60. Callista, 66-67. 61. Callista, 101-103. 62. Callista, 102. 63. Callista, 103. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 73

You cannot make a world for yourself.” Agellius and Jucundus are at cross purposes since both are operating on fundamentally different “instincts” and “first principles.” Agellius complains that Jucundus has recommended “a marriage which really would be no marriage at all.”64 But Agellius is also at cross purposes with himself. His attraction to a cultured pagan woman is running into tension with his Christian faith. Agellius is forced to suppress a number of serious “difficulties” and “apprehensions” in order to proceed with his proposal. What, then, is the view of marriage which is causing such problems for Agellius? New- man's earlier communitarian account of marriage seems insufficient to account for the “apprehensions” that needle Agellius as he considers the possibility of marriage. The source of the difficulty lies elsewhere. In Callista Newman puts forward a more penetrating discussion of the theological nature of marriage in his prologue to Agellius's proposal to Callista. The prologue underlines the fact that marriage, however natural it may seem, is really “a superhuman engagement” that requires “superhuman assistance.”65 The sacrament of marriage involves a mutual surrender that is complete and irrevocable. The husband “surrenders himself, soul and body” to his wife and she surrenders herself as fully to her husband. The decision to marry entails a covenantal act which profoundly situates one's life in relation to another. It is undeniably a solemn moment, under any circumstances, and requires a strong heart, when any one deliberately surrenders himself, soul and body, to the keeping of another while life shall last; and this, or something like this, … is the matrimonial contract. In individual cases it may be made without thought or distress, but surveyed objectively, … it is so tremendous an undertaking that nature seems to shrink under its responsibilities.66 In contrast to the perspective presented by Jucundus, Newman underlines the mutuality of marital surrender. The very unusual angle from which Newman explores this dimension of unconditional marital surrender must have jarred Victorian sensibilities. The act of surrender is read from the side of the bridegroom – he “deliberately surrenders himself, soul and body, to the keeping of another.” This account fits with Newman's view that surrender or subjection in marriage must be mutual rather than one-sided. However, how does this emphasis on mutual subjection fit with the traditional Christian stress on male authority and headship? Newman does not seem to be overly troubled

64. Callista, 105, 107, 104. 65. Callista, 123. 66. Callista, 122. 74 DANIEL CERE be the apparent lack of fit. He pays little attention to the Pauline and Petrine “household codes” which traditionally serve as proof texts for this view. The codes stress the importance of submission to legitimate human authorities – husbands, parents, masters. However, Newman shows little interest in traditional depictions of the marital relation as an authority relation. One of his Lenten sermons, “Surrender to God,” does allude to the household codes. However, there is a telling modifi- cation to the order of submission. Newman writes, We all like our own will – let us consult the will of others. Numbers of persons are obliged to do this. Servants are obliged to do the will of their masters, workmen of their employers, children of their parents, husbands of their wives.67 The phrase, “husbands [are obliged to consult the will] of their wives,” reverses the order of submission.68 This teasing inversion squares with the principle of mutuality which guides his theology of the relationship between spouses. There is no entrenched asymmetry. The mutuality of subjection implies an interpersonal equality that is obscured in more one-sided formulations of structures of submission in marriage.69 This self-surrender of conjugal love is not made to some abstract ideal but to another person. One's life is nailed down to a specific other with all their flaws, weaknesses, sins, and struggles. It is an intimate life-long commitment without institutional regulations and safeguards. In a sense the choice of marriage entails more risks than the choice of a religious vocation. This sacramental act of self-surrender is directed towards a finite and sinful person not to an all-perfect God. When the Christian binds himself by vows to a religious life, he makes a surrender to Him who is all-perfect, and whom he may unreservedly trust. Moreover, looking at that surrender on its human side,

67. Faith and Prejudice: Unpublished Sermons of John Henry Newman (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956) 73. 68. The inversion is not an error in the published transcripts of the text (Faith and Prejudice). Gerard Tracey, archivist at the Birmingham Oratory, checked the origi- nal manuscript of the sermon and confirmed this reading. Given Newman's reputation for meticulous editing it is unlikely that this remark is merely a faux pas. Tracey writes that “Newman definitely and deliberately used the phrase ‘husbands of their wives,' thus reversing the traditional order of obedience.” There is an error of transcription at the beginning of the sentence. “Servants are obliged to do the will of their masters,” should read, “Servants are obliged to consult the will of their masters” (Gerard Tracey, Letter to the author, Nov. 24, 1993). 69. This anticipates developments in church teaching since Vatican II. One-sided concepts of spousal submission have been dropped and replaced by the principle of “mutual subjection.” See John Paul II, The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1986) 184-190; Mulieris Dignitatem, 24. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 75

he has the safeguard of distinct provisos and regulations, and of the principles of theology, to secure him against tyranny on the part of his superiors. But what shall be his encouragement to make himself over, without condition or stipulations, as an absolute property, to a fallible being, and that not for a season, but for life?70 Given the precarious nature of any relationship to another finite human, the mind almost “instinctively” knows that marriage should be “dissoluble.” Marriage, like celibacy, is a dialectic of nature and grace. However, because both poles of the marital relationship are rooted in the human it demands a “superhuman assistance” if it is to be as binding and as irrevocable as a celibate's surrender to God. The mind shrinks from such a sacrifice, and demands that, as religion enjoins it, religion should sanction and bless it. … that the subjects of it should be sacramentally strengthened to maintain it. “So help me God,” the formula of every oath, is emphatically necessary here.71 For Newman the depth of surrender in the spousal relationship is anal- ogous to the celibate's surrender to God. It is an irrevocable commitment that powerfully defines and constitutes the life of the married Christian. However, Agellius's legitimate need for companionship leads him to bracket out any serious consideration of the significance of his undertaking. He pushes these difficulties aside as he reaches Callista's door. On the other side, Callista's brother, Aristo, had been preparing the way by extolling the social benefits of this match. However, all of this manoeuvering has only lined up one side of the equation. Agellius enters and makes his intentions known, but Callista flatly turns down the offer. The reasons for the refusal are complex. Callista senses something second-rate about Agellius's offer. His faith has been shelved and he is looking to her for meaning and comfort. Callista calls him on this. If Agellius's God is his source of joy and meaning how can he come to her in such self-serving need? Callista wants to give her life fully to something. Here I am a living, breathing woman, with an overflowing heart, with keen affections, with a yearning after some object which may possess me. I cannot exist without something to rest upon.72 Callista maintains that the rites and cults of Roman and Greek religions leave her cold. And so, in the last analysis, does Agellius' offer of himself.

70. Callista, 122. 71. Callista, 122-123. 72. Callista, 131-132. 76 DANIEL CERE

Agellius brackets out his faith and offers a fragment of his self. He is seeking a communitarian contract for mutual comfort and edification – not a covenantal surrender. Callista wants something more. I must have something to love; love is my life. Why do you come to me, Agellius with your every-day gallantry? Can you compete with the noble Grecian forms which have passed before my eyes? Is your voice more manly, are its tones more eloquent, than those which have thrilled through my ears since I ceased to be a child? Can you add perfume to feast by your wit, or pour sunshine over the grot and rushing stream by your smile?73 The one thing he could have offered, his faith, he muddied and discred- ited by his self-serving duplicity. His faith is unreal. What can you give me? There was one thing which I thought you could have given me, better than anything else; but it is a shadow. You have nothing to give. You have thrown me back upon my dreary, dismal self, and the deep wounds of my memory.74 Callista's “majestic rebuke” is a painful moment of revelation for Agel- lius. It cuts to the core and throws Agellius back upon himself. Agellius quite literally becomes sick.75 But his nausea is more radical and prolonged than Reding's – it is a sickness unto “death.” It is an existential dizziness occasioned by an exposure of the inconsistency and hypocrisy of his faith. After this episode the novel turns to Callista's very solitary journey towards God and her eventual martyrdom. In the penultimate chapter we find Agellius standing over Callista's martyred and mutilated body. Her religious journey was swift and sure. Her life spanned the precarious poles of human and spiritual greatness. Her torturers attempt to blot out every visible trace of this dignity and beauty. But as they apply their skills of destruction the sheer power of her love and unconditional surrender to God emerges as a constant refrain until her death.76 The conclusion of the novel ends with a strange allusion to the story of Abelard and Heloïse. After Abelard's death, Heloïse requested that his body be buried at her convent. Upon her death her body is placed with Abelard's in his tomb. In Callista this pattern is reversed. Agellius eventually rises to the bishop's chair. Callista's body is entombed beneath the cathedral altar where Agellius celebrates the Eucharist. When Agellius dies his body is placed under the altar with

73. Callista, 132. 74. Callista, 132. 75. Callista, 135-144. 76. Callista, 345-348, 360-362, 369. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 77

Callista. Their final unity in death testified to the fact that his religious life followed the paths broken by Callista. Newman, like Rousseau, was intrigued with the Abelard and Heloïse story.77 Newman's Callista, like Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloïse, presents a dramatic revision of the story. In Newman's version the woman is no longer the forlorn lover (Heloïse) who sacrifices her religious vocation for her beloved, nor the dutiful and obedient wife struggling with romantic temptations (Rousseau's Julie), but a powerful and independent exemplar of religious heroism. Callista will not settle for a second-rate vocation. There is a lesson in Agellius's failed proposal. For Newman any adequate theology of marriage must be measured against the kind of dignity, autonomy and authenticity that Callista symbolizes.

John Henry and Mary Anne

Perhaps Newman's most significant “theological” discourse on marriage and celibacy is found in a relatively unknown sermon delivered for a young woman, Mary Anne Bowden.78 Mary Anne's father was Newman's closest friend. They met as undergraduates at Trinity. John Bowden married in 1828 and his wife, Elizabeth, was brought into this intimate circle of friendship. Newman baptized Mary Anne into the Church of England. His close friendship with the Bowden family con- tinued after John's death in 1844. Mary Anne converted to Catholicism when she was fifteen. In her early twenties Mary Anne decided to enter the Visitation Convent at Westbury. Newman preached for her on the day of her profession. The significance of Newman's homily for Mary Anne becomes clear when placed against the foil of a poem on the same theme written twenty years earlier, “The Married and the Single” (1834).79 The poem is a “rude and free” paraphrase of a text from a fourth century Cap- padocian Father, Gregory Nazianzus.80 The poem probes the meaning of marriage and celibacy by accentuating the contrast between these two

77. See his discussion in “The Rise and Progress of the Universities,” Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 192-202. See Étienne Gilson's interpretation Heloïse and Abelard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). 78. Newman the Oratorian, 270-281. Mary Anne's profession took place on 12 January 1854. See Meriol Trevor's discussion of this sermon in Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud (London: MacMillan & Co., 1962) 88-96. 79. Verses on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910) 202- 207. 80. Historical Sketches, vol. 2, 89-92. 78 DANIEL CERE states of life. Marriage is the Law of the Old Covenant while celibacy is the “Word of Grace” of the New Covenant. Celibacy surpasses marriage as “the soul the body, heaven this world below,” as “the eternal peace of saints, life's trouble span, and the high throne of God, the haunts of man.”81 The dialogue between the married and the celibate begins with a defense of marriage. The advocates for marriage are numerous, richly attired, and confident. Their defense of the institution centers on its foundational importance for the entire domain of communal existence. First, all forms of public life – commerce, political order, and social union – rest upon this primary bond. Secondly, it creates a unique domain for social intimacy, love, joy, and sympathy. Without this private realm “life would be defaced” and would become “a ghastly vision on a howling waste.” Third, marital life generates a certain natural religiosity born of temporal need and anxiety for the future. Finally, religious and secular leaders owe their birth to the “marriage-promise.”82 In short, the “soft thraldom of the marriage vow” is a “primal law of God” – a law “Stamp'd at creation on our blood and clay.” However, it is a law for the earth and a “law of the earth.”83 When all is said and done, the virtues of marriage never reach beyond the temporal order. The celibate appears alone, poor, humble, and silent. When finally moved to speak, the meek virgin murmurs a brief apologia: I have no sway amid the crowd, no art In speech, no place in council or in mart… Let others seek earth's honours; be it mine One law to cherish, and to track one line, Straight on towards heaven to press with single bent, To know and love my God, and then to die content.84 The poem celebrates the “high severe idea of virginity” which Newman had acquired from Froude and from his patristic studies. There is no sense of a common ground between the earthly vocation of marriage and the heavenly vocation of celibacy. A very different tone emerges in the homily for Mary Anne Bowden. This may reflect the influence of the Bowdens' friendship upon New- man. After John's death Newman confided to Elizabeth that the example of their married life made it difficult for him to accept that there could be any higher state of life.85 In this homily Newman reinterprets

81. Verses on Various Occasions, 203. 82. Verses on Various Occasions, 204-206. 83. Verses on Various Occasions, 203-204. 84. Verses on Various Occasions, 207. 85. Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud, 90. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 79 celibacy in the light of the primacy of spousal love and unearths a basic inner connection between these two vocations. He begins his homily stating that the “fundamental truth of all religion” is love. The com- mand to love God requires “a profound self surrender to Him.” This is “the very law of all created beings.” The “way of love” is also the way of God. The Word becomes flesh “for the sake of the poor sinful soul, to ask its love, to display to it His own celestial excellence, to win it, and to join it to Himself in an eternal marriage.” In the Crucifixion, “He determined to give a proof of how much He loved and how much He would sacrifice for the object of His choice.”86 God's love is spousal. It joins the soul “to Himself in an eternal marriage.” Mutual self-giving spousal love becomes the central symbol of the relationship between God and the human person. At this point Newman turns to theological anthropology. In order to understand the divine/human relation “we must consider more atten- tively what man is, and what is his condition.”87 Newman's anthropology emphasizes the complex, fragmented, often disintegrated character of human personality. The human person is not “constituted” as a “pure spirit” but has a “compounded nature.” “He is a creature of elements, … wayward, irritable, irrepressible, wavering, capricious; he is carried off in various directions.” Thus, a fundamental requirement for human development is the task of integration. Newman argues that integration depends upon being “directed to one object and fixed in one course.”88 The complex powers of the human spirit must be channelled and fixed on one object of love if personality is to be unified and perfected. Mar- riage is viewed in the light of this dynamic of integration. Newman still notes the “foundational” importance of marriage for social life, but now he now gives more attention to its foundational significance for the interior life.89 Spousal love is essential to the full integration of the person. The “only human way of bringing him into harmony with himself” is to “fix” his mind and heart upon another person.90 Man has great capacities; he has an intellect, and a heart for many things; his nature is expansive, nor can you say how many things he can know, how many things he can love, but he must begin from some fixed points. It is by the law of our nature, the happiness of everyone, man and woman, to have one central and supreme

86. Newman the Oratorian, 272-273. 87. Newman the Oratorian, 274. 88. Newman the Oratorian, 274. 89. Newman the Oratorian, 275. 90. Newman the Oratorian, 274-275. 80 DANIEL CERE

attachment, to which none other can be compared. An affection, one, mutual, sovereign, unalterable, is earthly happiness and his earthly strength.91 Marriage, for Newman, is precisely this sacrament of self-surrender to “one central and supreme attachment.”92 This love is not a Platonic attraction to abstract ideals, virtues, or attributes. It is an irrevocable attachment to and communion with another person in mystery of their concrete individuality. Two mortal creatures of God, placed in this rough world, exposed to its many fortunes, destined to suffering and death, join hands, and give the faith to each other that each of them will love the other wholly until death. Henceforth each is made for the other – each has possession of the affections of the other in a transcendent way; each loves the other better than any thing else in the way; each is all in all to the other; each can confide in the other unreservedly, each is the others irreversibly.93 A relationship of spousal love requires a deliberate and dangerous sacrifice of personal autonomy. In the sphere of interpersonal relations the language of surrender, belonging and possession can justify patterns of domination. However, Newman insists on the complete “mutuality” of marital surrender and possession. The very idea of matrimony is possession – whole possession – the husband is the wife's and no other's, and the wife is the husband's and none but his. This is to enter into the marriage bond, this is the force of the marriage vow, this is the lesson of the marriage ring.94 This covenant of love transcends all other forms of human love. It even overshadows parental love. In a passage that might make a Mariologist flinch, Newman suggests that the love Mary shares with her husband in some sense cuts deeper than the love with her Son. Marital love is a mystery which echoes the ineffable love within Trinity. There is no such union elsewhere in this natural world; even the tie which binds mother and child may be broken – Ineffable as was the interchange of love, and close union which bound Mary and Jesus – Thirty years it lasted, but then He had to go to preach and suffer; and, as far as this world went, He had little more to do with His Mother. But conjugal unity is indestructible: and in its ardour and its security it may seem (if I may speak the word with reverence) to recall to us the everlasting ineffable love with which the Father loves

91. Newman the Oratorian, 275. 92. Newman the Oratorian, 275. 93. Newman the Oratorian, 275. 94. Newman the Oratorian, 277. NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 81

the Son who is in His bosom and the Son the Father who has from all eternity begotten Him.95 This self-giving love is an imperative, a “law of our nature:” “man is made for sympathy, for the interchange of love, for self-denial for the sake of another dearer to him than himself.”96 At this point Newman underlines a profound continuity between marriage and celibacy. Celibacy is a fundamental human vocation in so far as it embodies the self-giving act of spousal love. Flawed approaches to celibacy “harden the heart” and promote a “state of independence or isolation.”97 These “negative” views are marked by “the absence of love.” The “peculiarity of Christian celibacy” is that it flows from an “excess” of loving and rises “from love to God.”98 It does not destroy or suspend nature but “draws around it the choicest blessings of human nature.” Celibacy is grounded in, rather than opposed to, the mystery of spousal love. In this “surpris- ing love” individuals reach towards God “without ceasing to be men.” Newman maintains that this approach finds its roots in the biblical vision of celibacy as a form of spousal love: “The Virginity of the Christian soul is a marriage with Christ.”99 In contrast to the jarring antiphonies of his earlier poem, this homiletic hymn is marked by a profound choral unison between the married and celibate. There are occasions when Newman directs his satire at the evasions and compromises of married Christians. But this does not imply a den- igration of marriage. In fact, if there is a difficulty in his thinking, it may be that he presents a theology of marriage that is too high, perhaps unattainable. Newman's view of marriage in his early sermons and poems may have been clouded by a certain theological cynicism. Against this foil the high view of marriage in his later theology represents a development and corrective to traditions of discourse which offer fairly prejudicial comparisons of marriage and celibacy. Newman's deepest theological insights emerge out of his ever-developing sense of the fundamental unity of two vocations. The paths of the married and celibate illuminate each other. The celibate is called to a spousal relation with God. But the celibate's self-surrender to God also reveals the new depths of mutual surrender to which the married are called. The binding loves of the domestic circle provide patterns for the intimate

95. Newman the Oratorian, 275. 96. Newman the Oratorian, 277. This principle reappears in John Paul II's teaching, The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy. 97. Newman the Oratorian, 276-277. 98. Sermon Notes, 139-140. 99. Newman the Oratorian, 276, 277. 82 DANIEL CERE familial forms of ecclesial life which celibates must rediscover. In turn, a religious community can become “the realization of the family in its perfection, and a pattern to every family … throughout the whole of Christendom.”100

Conclusion

Is there anything of value in Newman's contribution to current debates on marriage? While a substantive discussion lies beyond the scope of this essay, some tentative connections can be sketched. Con- temporary controversies tend to be framed by two competing accounts of the nature of marriage.101 One account represents a feminist articu- lation of liberal theory that reaches back to the work of Mary Woll- stonecraft.102 In the liberal account our status as persons must be defined by our fundamental capacity for rational self-determination and autonomy. All social relations, including conjugal relations, must ordered so as to respect and enhance these primary values. Spousal love carries conno- tations of mutual dependence and vulnerability that are problematic in the light of the requirements for autonomy and impartiality.103 Wollstonecraft's Vindication was written in response to Rousseau's Émile. Rousseau presents a communitarian philosophy of marriage. Contemporary communitarians repudiate Rousseau's patriarchalism but they continue to develop his critique of the liberal concept of individuality.104 Communitarians argue that personal identity is situated by community, tradition and language. The varied forms of social inter-dependence are the stuff of meaningful identity. The domestic sphere represents an intimate and complex form of mutual dependence that meets fundamental personal needs for recognition, affection and love. These needs are not adequately addressed in liberal appeals to justice, rights and autonomy.

100. Newman the Oratorian, 118, 335-336. 101. For a discussion of this debate see the author's essay, “Justice, Gender and Love: Liberal and Communitarian Perspectives on the Domestic Church,” Église et Théologie 26 (1995) 225-252. 102. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Pen- guin, 1992). 103. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989) ch. 7. 104. Jean Elshtain provides a feminist “communitarian” account of marriage and family, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). NEWMAN'S ‘LESSON OF THE MARRIAGE RING’ 83

Newman's analysis provides some interesting clues as to how a constructive theological response might respond to this impasse. First, it avoids entrapment within one camp of social philosophy. Contempo- rary theological and exegetical debates on marriage and gender issues often tend to get locked into these competing theoretical accounts. The temptation is to employ one's theological or exegetical arsenal in defense of a particular position. Newman's thought displays a healthy equivo- cality. These two traditions interweave in his analysis. Communitarian insights can be detected in his celebration of the pivotal role of the private sphere for social life, moral development and personal integration. His Callistan affirmation of the “dignity and independence” of women and his more egalitarian redefinition of the nature of spousal relations, responds to liberal values. His analysis cannot be neatly pigeon-holed into either tradition of social philosophy. However, Newman was also under no illusions as to which tradition would be the major player within modern culture and the major problem for Christian faith. Communitarianism or, in Newman's terms, “Tory- ism,” was a spent force.105 The communitarian appreciation of tradition, community and history may, in various ways, continue to inform our intellectual life. These perspectives “spring immortal in the human breast.” However, as a social and political force it has “melted away, like the snow at spring-tide.” During the nineteenth century “the whole theory of Toryism, hitherto acted on, came to pieces and went the way of all flesh.”106 Communitarians may generate theoretical insight, but liberalism is empowering our moral and political culture. Newman insisted on the need to subject dominant social philosophies to theological scrutiny. He argued that such philosophies typically dodge rather than confront the claims of religious faith.107 In this instance, theology must be alert to liberal evasions of the vocation to love. The liberal quest for autonomy can carefully detour around the covenantal act of self-surrender required in spousal love. The liberal goal of self-sufficiency gets articulated as a way of avoiding the “venture” of love. Uncertainty and lack of binding commitments are celebrated as freedom. It is a definition of free agency that aims low; it “struts, or frets upon the earth's level, without wings to rise.”108 For Newman, the freest and most “sovereign” act in life is one of committed love. No other deed

105. Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1900) vol. 2, 263-273. 106. Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, vol. 2, 266-268. 107. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1, 309-324. 108. Discussions and Arguments, 272. 84 DANIEL CERE can concentrate and constitute human life so radically. “Sovereign” acts of love are predicated upon an autonomy, self-possession and self-gover- nance revered by liberals but exemplified by saints. The whole person is gathered up, integrated and focused in this free gift of self. The other is chosen as the categorical imperative for one's life. This act is “no common choice, but above all things;” it is a choice that overrides all other commitments.109 Until life is freely nailed down in love for another person all else is mere shuffling and biding time. The place where Newman's life was nailed down in love was his little Oratorian community in Birmingham. The nature of his commitment was underscored by the fact that he was ready to turn down Pope Leo XIII's offer of a Cardinalate if it meant leaving his home, his “nest (nido).”110 His abiding love for this small circle of priests was a marked feature of his life story. Newman told his brothers that the test of their love for one another was not in eloquent vows of commitment but in simple acts of fidelity – in staying with each other and resisting the lure of missions pulling them far from home. To die at home and be buried with one's brothers was the final test of an Oratorian's love. Newman “forced” every one of his words “into action.” His request to be buried at the grave of a brother priest, Ambrose St. John, was his own last tes- timony to a love marked by deep familial attachment. In life and in death, Christian love is called to be a spousal gift of self to others. It is unclear whether there has been much response to this aspect of New- man's legacy. The greatness of the man is remembered but the little community so central to his life is forgotten. This blind-spot in our view of Newman is telling. Many aspects of his life and work excite interest and attention. Yet there is something about the way that he loved which seems to elude our field of vision.

Daniel Mark Cere is director of the Newman Institute of Catholic Studies at McGill University. He has published in the areas of Newman studies, religious ethics, and nineteenth-century theology. Current address: Newman Institute of Catholic Studies, McGill University, 3484 Peel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1W8.

109. Sermon Notes, 124. 110. Ward, The Life of John Henry Newman, vol. 2, 439-440. Nido is an Orato- rian term for one's home or residence.