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APOCALYPTIC THOUGHT IN :

DISCERNING IN MODERNITY

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Damon McGraw

Cyril J. O’Regan, Director

Graduate Program in

Notre Dame, Indiana

March 2014

© Copyright 2014

Damon McGraw

APOCALYPTIC THOUGHT IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN:

DISCERNING ANTICHRIST IN MODERNITY

Abstract

by

Damon McGraw

This dissertation is the first full-length study of the apocalyptic thought of John Henry

Newman (1801-1890). As such it fills lacunae in the fields of Newman scholarship and apocalyptic studies simply by showing that there is a significant amount of apocalyptic thought to be found in Newman’s writings and that he deserves to be recognized as an important figure in this Christian theological . The dissertation also makes three larger contributions to scholarship. It addresses the perennial and unresolved question of

Newman’s intellectual coherence and theological identity. It argues that attending to the role of apocalyptic narrative in his thought reveals a unique integrity and consistency in what otherwise appears to be a highly eclectic set of writings. It explains how apocalyptic thought provided a master narrative that oriented his life and work, the varied path of his religious and literary career, as well as the development of his mature mind. To scholars of apocalyptic thought this dissertation demonstrates that Newman was a fervent inheritor of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition and that his efforts to renew and extend its narrative led to his realization of a distinctively modern Catholic apocalyptic perspective Damon McGraw as well as a profound conviction of the “secularizing” effects of the classically Protestant identification of the Pope as Antichrist. To Christian thinkers interested in the criticism of modernity this dissertation shows how Newman’s practice of apocalyptic thought yielded his interpretation and critique of the ‘liberalism’ that he identified in the modern Western reduction of religion to private sentiment and its attendant assertion of ‘secular reason’ as sovereign over all inherited authorities and . This dissertation makes these three arguments in order to construct a new interpretation of Newman as the Anglo-Christian thinker who converted apocalyptic narration from its Protestant misuse to reconstruct a

Catholic figuration of history and produced an “apocalyptic critique of modernity.” It shows that this reading of Newman is obliquely communicated in his autobiographical

Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), and it critically employs that text as a guide to its analysis of the origins, development, and broader significance of Newman’s apocalyptic thought.

For Angela

ii

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments...... v

Chapter 1: Introduction: Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman ...... 1

I. Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman's Intellectual Coherence ...... 9

II. Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman's Theological Identity ...... 18

III. Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman's Historical Significance ...... 29

IV. Apologia Pro Vita Sua as Guide to Newman's Apocalyptic Thought ...... 41

Chapter 2: Heritage: Remembering Protestant Apocalyptic Tradition ...... 49

I. Implications of a Protestant Apocalyptic Prejudice in the Apologia ...... 52

II. John Bale and the Classic British Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative ...... 64

III. Effects of Protestant Apocalyptic Thought through Modern Britain ...... 80

Chapter 3: Early Newman: Renewing Protestant Apocalyptic Thought ...... 92

I. Memories of Receiving Protestant Apocalyptic Thought in the Apologia ...... 93

II. Inheriting and Renewing Classical Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative ...... 98

III. Performing a Full Rendition of the Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative ...... 113

IV. Guarding and Being Governed by Protestant Apocalyptic Thought ...... 130

iii

Chapter 4: Anglican Newman: Reconstructing Apocalyptic Narrative ...... 138

I. Refiguring the Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative in the Apologia ...... 139

II. Remembering How to Wait and Watch for the Second Coming ...... 150

III. The Genesis of Newman's Apocalyptic Figuration of Modernity ...... 161

Chapter 5: Catholic Newman: An Apocalyptic ‘Critique of Modernity’ ...... 171

I. Apologia as Modern Catholic Apocalyptic Narrative in Exoteric Form ...... 172

II. Absorbing and Resisting Romantic Forays into Apocalyptic Thought ...... 186

III. Anticipating the Criticism and the Correction of Modern ...... 196

IV. Affiliating with Secular and Christian Forms of Postmodern Thought ...... 206

V. A Catholic Apocalyptic Narrative and Critique of Modern Secularity ...... 219

Chapter 6: Conclusion: Apocalyptic Return to Catholicism in Modernity...... 234

Bibliography ...... 242

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I learned of the death of Rowan Greer just prior to my defense of this dissertation,

I was reminded of the fact that he was the first to teach Newman to me in a course on the

Anglican Theological Tradition at Yale Divinity School. I also recalled him being quite vocal about his judgment that there was no better place to pursue a doctorate in than the University of Notre Dame. Like so many others with whom I consulted, he recommended this program due to the outstanding quality of its faculty. Indeed, I have received superb instruction and support from an unparalleled group of scholar-teachers. I am glad to thank Matthew Ashley, John Cavadini, Jennifer Herdt, Michael Signer, Joseph

Wawrykow, Robin Darling Young, and Randall Zachman for their important roles in my education at Notre Dame. I am especially grateful to three distinguished scholars who in addition to being my teachers also served on my dissertation committee. Brian Daley and

Lawrence Cunningham led my first forays in scholarly Newman research at Notre Dame.

I want to thank them for their constant willingness to assist me in my work. It has been an honor to hand over my dissertation to their incisive judgment. My greatest academic debt is to my advisor: Cyril O’Regan. His teaching, his scholarship, and his counsel have had an immeasurable influence on me and this dissertation. Being his student is certainly one of the greatest privileges that I have received. Another Notre Dame blessing has been the community of doctoral candidates in theology generally and in the area specifically. Among the many friends there, I especially want to acknowledge Caleb v

Congrove, Shawn Colberg, and Christopher Wells for their encouragement and support, which had already begun at Yale and has continued after we all moved from South Bend.

Since departing from Notre Dame, my institutional home has been the National Institute for Newman Studies. I finished this dissertation there, and I want to thank its board and staff for their support, especially Catharine Ryan and Fr. Drew Morgan. Kevin Mongrain read drafts during my final stage of writing and provided helpful editorial advice. During my research and writing I was fortunate to receive valuable feedback and encouragement from numerous academic colleagues. In this regard I am keen to thank Frederick Aquino,

John Connolly, Michael Darcy, John T. Ford, John Friday, Paul Griffiths, Brian Hughes,

Daniel Lattier, Dwight Lindley III, Gerard Magill, Gerald McDermott, Ryan McDermott,

Mark McIntosh, Terrence Merrigan, Brian Ross, and especially William Wright. Finally,

I could have neither embarked upon my higher education nor brought it to this successful conclusion without the various forms of encouragement given to me by my family. I am very grateful to my parents for their unswerving faith in me and for the constancy of their support. I cannot give enough thanks to my wife Angela for her love and her belief in me, which has provided so much strength for my journey. I dedicate this dissertation to her.

vi CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: APOCALYPTIC THOUGHT AS A KEY TO NEWMAN

This dissertation is the first full-length study of the apocalyptic thought of John Henry

Newman (1801-1890). At the minimum I intend to fill lacunae in the fields of Newman scholarship and apocalyptic studies simply by demonstrating that there is a significant amount of apocalyptic thought to be found in Newman’s writings and that he deserves recognition as an important figure in this Christian tradition. At the maximum I attempt to show that approaching Newman through his apocalyptic thought uniquely illuminates his intellectual coherence, his theological identity, and his historical significance. Thus my explication of Newman’s apocalyptic thought is structured with the intent of making three broader contributions to scholarship. To students of Newman I seek to explain how apocalyptic thought provided a master narrative that oriented his life and work, the varied course of his religious and literary career, as well as the development of his mature mind.

To scholars of apocalyptic thought I endeavor to show that Newman was an enthusiastic inheritor of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition and that his efforts to renew and extend its narrative led to his construction of a distinctively modern Catholic apocalyptic perspective and a deep conviction of the “secularizing” effects of the classical Protestant

1 depiction of the Pope as Antichrist.1 Lastly to Christian thinkers interested in the criticism of modernity I aim to explain how Newman’s participation in the practice of apocalyptic thinking yields his interpretation and critique of the ‘liberalism’ that he apprehends in the modern Western reduction of religion to a private sentiment and its concomitant assertion of ‘secular reason’ as sovereign over all inherited authorities and traditions.2

Although this study is the first of its kind, neither the presence nor the importance of apocalyptic thought in Newman has entirely escaped the notice of previous scholars. A distinguished albeit small group of interpreters draws attention to the apocalyptic side of

Newman’s thought using the category of “the prophetic” and connects this to his critical view of Western modernity. Not long after the First World War, (1889-

1973) articulated his vivid sense of an encompassing prophetic coherence to Newman’s thought. The pioneer of German Newman studies writes, “Newman saw man, the world, and history from the already almost prophetic perspective revealed to him by that final struggle between Christ and Antichrist legible on the countenance of the modern world… amidst the torrent which bears all things to their doom, his gaze is calmly fixed upon the

God of the end.” Przywara saw Newman’s distinctive theological vision as the fruit of vigilant watchfulness for the coming of Christ and incessant mindfulness of and activity

1 In this dissertation I write of the British as opposed to the English Protestant apocalyptic tradition because it includes thinkers throughout the Island of Great Britain and not just within the nation of proper. I might call it Anglo insofar as it will eventually migrate colonially along with its Anglo-Protestant proponents throughout the world and especially to North America during the modern era. However, those developments take place almost entirely outside the timeframe with which I am here concerned and have no bearing on Newman.

2 Throughout this dissertation I typically place “scare quotes” around the term liberalism and other related terms (such as secular reason) in an effort to highlight the fact that Newman uses them in his own unique way, as I will explain in more detail as my argument progresses.

2 toward “the unseen, future world.”3 In a similar fashion, just after the Second World War

Henry Tristram (1881-1955) of the Oratory highlighted a “prophetic strain” that is detectable in nearly all of his texts, directed against the danger of ‘liberalism.’ In what remains one of the most eloquent accounts of the unity of Newman’s life and work,

Tristram attributes this unique quality to careful discernment of and responsiveness to the perduring patterns of human erring and divine providence “in the successive phases of his own life” and “in the processes of history.”4 This strain is only indirectly evident in his work, Tristram explains, because he writes not to grasp the mind of God but to perform his role in a dramatic, historical contest between the Kingdom of God and its adversaries.

Likewise, David DeLaura (1930-2005) was attuned to this aspect of Newman’s writing, grouping him with Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and (1821-1881) as one of the great “prophetic” critics of the corruption of European Christendom and of modern ideological designs for the secular supersession of that corruption.5 Each of these attempts to highlight a pervasive and potent “prophetic dimension” to Newman’s thought seems profoundly right to me, but I propose that the prophetic vision and critique toward they are gesturing is better understood as a form of apocalyptic thought.

While this dissertation is the first full-fledged argument in favor of characterizing

Newman as a particular type of apocalyptic Christian thinker, I am not the first scholar to

3 See Przywara, “St. Augustine and the Modern World,” A Monument to St. Augustine (: Sheed & Ward, 1930), pp. 251-86 (286), as well as “Newmans Seele,” Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk (Freiburg: Herder & Co., 1922 [1921]), pp. 3-10.

4 See Tristram, The Living Thoughts of Cardinal Newman (New : David McKay Co., 1946), pp. 1, 38-39.

5 See David J. DeLaura, “Newman’s Apologia as Prophecy,” in DeLaura, ed. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968), pp. 492-503. Gilbert Kranz also groups Newman with Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, Péguy, and Bloy under the rubric “modern Christian prophecy” in Three Centuries of Christian Literature (London: Burns & Oats, 1961), pp. 134-47.

3 suggest that categorizing him thus is appropriate and salutary. Christopher Dawson (1889

-1970) implies as much in the conclusion to a centennial study of the .

He concludes that an “apocalyptic spirit” underlies all of early Tractarian teaching and is articulated with greatest transparency in some of Newman’s sermons. Aware that modern audiences may be put off by this attribute, he preemptively reminds them that apocalyptic thought is an “authentic note of historic Christianity,” and he chides that our ignorance of it renders incomprehensible not only the Oxford Movement but also the New Testament itself.6 A brief passage in the spiritual and intellectual of Newman by Louis

Bouyer (1913-2004) contains a more explicit statement that Newman is an apocalyptic

Christian thinker. Instead of locating the more apocalyptic of Newman’s texts on the margins of his corpus, Bouyer recommends reading them as a disclosure of the visionary horizon of his thought: “that the machinations of Antichrist are already manifest, that they are the prelude to a of the Kingdom of Christ, is not just one link in the chain, it is the very basis” of his entire point of view.7 Bouyer claims that Newman derives his sense of mission from the belief that he is “living at a turning point in the world’s history,” when an awakening of powers of evil prophesied in Scripture is coming to fruition. For Bouyer, Newman views the modern contest between faith and secular reason in apocalyptic terms, and Newman’s lifelong resistance to “bourgeois liberalism” is animated by his conviction that this historical phenomenon fits the prophetic pattern of

6 See Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement (London: Sheed and Ward, 1934), pp. 143-44.

7 Bouyer, Newman et sa Vie et sa Spiritualité (Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 1952), pp. 235-36. English translation, Newman: An Intellectual and Spiritual Biography of John Henry Newman (New York: Meridan Books, Inc., 1958), pp. 184-86. Bouyer stresses Newman’s ‘visionary’ approach to revelation in Newman’s Vision of Faith: A Theology for Times of General Apostasy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986).

4 a final “supreme effort of the spirit of evil to banish from the world the saving power of the Cross.” One might expect Newman to have left behind such beliefs upon abandoning the Protestant interpretation of the Pope as Antichrist and being received into the Roman

Catholic , but Bouyer states to the contrary that Newman continues to hold his apocalyptic narrative of salvation history and the attendant spiritual discipline of eschatological expectancy as eminently Christian and authentically Catholic and that he even persists in elevating apocalyptic figuration as determinative for “any truly Christian representation of things.” Although Bouyer offers us only a quick summary of this apocalyptic interpretation of Newman, it can be substantiated on all counts, as I intend to show.

My conviction of Newman’s apocalyptic identity is bolstered by some convergent findings of Newman scholarship. In addition to acknowledging a connection between his lifelong battle with ‘liberalism’ and his interest in the figure of Antichrist,8 scholars have noticed that apocalyptic discourse touches his thinking on , tradition, ,9 the papacy,10 and doctrinal development,11 all of which is linked together by the apocalyptic

8 See Robert Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy (New York: , 1991), esp. pp. 186-87, 213-14. I discuss this text further in section three below.

9 Regarding each of these topics, see respectively Terence Kenny, The Political Thought of John Henry Newman (New York: Longmans, 1957), esp. pp. 37, 43; Günter Beimer, Newman on Tradition, translated by Kevin Smyth (London: Burns & Oates, 1967 [1961]), pp. 135-38; Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 249.

10 See Paul Misner, Papacy and Development: Newman and the Primacy of the Pope (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), especially pp. 45-57, 85-108. Misner emphasizes the importance of prophetic figuration in Newman’s thought, which he regards as “outdated” in the wake of historical criticism.

11 See J. Richard Quinn, The Recognition of the True Church according to John Henry Newman (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), which demonstrates the profound role played by biblical prophecy in Newman’s teaching on how one “sees” the Church of Christ in history. The importance of prophecy in Newman’s Essay on Development is also noted in Nicholas Lash, “Faith

5 narrative of salvation history to which Bouyer refers. Surprisingly, Bouyer’s provocative hypothesis has not inspired extended examination of Newman’s apocalyptic thought; it has however been cited with approval and received limited substantiation by studies of adjacent topics in his corpus. In an exhaustive study of Newman’s teaching on the Bible,

Jaak Seynaeve endorses Bouyer’s assessment, calling Newman’s “eschatological doctrine

…an essential element …of his biblical and, in no less degree, of his spiritual teaching.”

He allocates five pages to apocalyptic theology in Newman’s work, noting distinctiveness in his views on the of time between the Ascension and Return of Christ, Antichrist being at work in the world, the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming, and the unity of the Bible in Christ. He also finds significant elements of overlap between Newman’s appreciation of ‘apocalyptic saturation’ in the New Testament and “consistent eschatological interpretation” of Christian origins performed by Albert Schweitzer (1875-

1965).12 In the lone published monograph on Newman’s eschatology, Colm McKeating commends Bouyer’s judgment and confirms that “Newman’s penchant for the apocalyptic passages of Scripture…is not confined to his early period.” McKeating exposits numerous apocalyptic themes in his Anglican sermons, but he does not explicitly describe or analyze them as such. He is not at ease with their prominence in Newman’s writings due to embarrassment by the their popular usage for fanatical purposes, a feeling that seems to be allied with his professed preference for the non-apocalyptic form of

and History: Some Reflections on Newman’s ‘Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine’,” Irish Theological Quarterly, 38 (1971), pp. 224-241 (234).

12 See Seynaeve, Cardinal Newman’s Doctrine of Holy Scripture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), pp. 301-305. For Schweitzer, see The Quest of the Historical , trans. W. Montgomery (London: A. and C. Black, 1910 [1906]).

6 eschatology espoused by (1904-1984).13 Recognition and rigorous study of

Newman’s apocalyptic thought as such has likely been curtailed by modern scholarly discomfort with the subject and a widespread confusion about the meaning and reference of the term apocalyptic itself. I address these obstacles to the dissertation’s argument later in the second section of this chapter.

The contributions of each of these authors are significant precedents for various aspects of this dissertation’s argument, but I regard its most important predecessor to be

Newman himself, who performed his own massively influential act of self-interpretation in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). I find in that autobiographical text a series of signs that can collectively guide us toward a proper understanding of the origins, development, and broader significance of Newman’s apocalyptic thought. Indeed, I argue that Newman there obliquely communicates his identity as an apocalyptic thinker, the emergence of his apocalyptic vision into mature form, and his belief that the British failure to recognize his prophetic legitimacy is a deleterious effect of Protestant apocalyptic misrepresentation of the Roman Papacy as Antichrist. Moreover, I regard this surreptitious line of argument as essential to the Apologia’s stated purposes: to answer a public charge of dishonesty made by the Rev. (1819-75), “break through the barrier of prejudice” against

13 See McKeating, Eschatology in the Anglican Sermons of John Henry Newman (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 1992), pp. 165, 318-20, 11. McKeating expresses strong support for Rahner’s approach to eschatology on pp. 7-8, citing his classic, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions,” Theological Investigations, Vol. 4 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), pp. 323-46. On a smaller scale, Paul Veyriras discusses Newman’s views on discerning ‘signs of ,’ the nature of the millennium, and the end of the world in “Newman et les prophéties des derniers temps,” in Claude Lepelley et Paul Veyriras, eds. Newman et l’Histoire (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1992), pp. 55-70. For a recent overview of Newman’s eschatology, see Juan Vélez, “Newman and Last Things,” The Downside Review (January 2001), pp. 51-68. Two recent dissertations on eschatological topics in Newman’s thought are Vélez, Death, Immortality and Resurrection (University of Navarre PhD Diss., 1998) and Theodore W. Hengesbach, John Henry Newman’s Theology of Death (University of Notre Dame PhD Diss., 1976).

7 him, and “give the true key to his whole life.14 Embedded within Newman’s ostensive defense is a story about the key role that his reception and reconstruction of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative played in his life and thought. His account implies that his struggle to resolve the contradictions of this tradition was not a personal eccentricity but a vicarious work done on behalf of a modern Western world increasingly unaware of its influence and effects. It is not surprising that Newman only writes indirectly of these matters in the Apologia; he consistently disdains public discussion of sacred mysteries of faith, committed as he is to the “principle of reserve.”15 In any case my interpretative use of the Apologia as a guide to Newman’s apocalyptic thought is argued and corroborated with external textual evidence throughout; I do not presume the authority or the reliability of his own testimony.

As I stated at the outset and have indicated throughout the present discussion, this dissertation is intended not only to fill lacunae in Newman scholarship and in apocalyptic studies but also to address three larger areas of scholarly concern. The remainder of this chapter introduces each area and my intended contribution. In the first part I explain how approaching Newman as an apocalyptic thinker can assist the perennial search for a key to his intellectual coherence. I believe that attending to the role of apocalyptic narrative in his thought exposes a certain kind of integrity and consistency in what otherwise appears to be a highly eclectic life and writings. In the second part I show how situating Newman in the apocalyptic tradition can help to resolve the difficulties that beset the determination

14 Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua [1864], ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 5-13. All references to the Apologia hereafter cite this edition parenthetically as Apo.

15 See Robin C. Selby, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

8 of his theological identity. Without in any way diminishing the degree to which Newman is a hybrid of various theological identities and an innovator as well, I think that focusing on his complex relationship to the Christian apocalyptic tradition has a unique capacity to illuminate what distinguishes him as a religious thinker. In the third part I argue that my approach to Newman as an apocalyptic thinker renews and enhances a classical approach to the issue of his historical significance. It shows how his critique of ‘liberalism’ derives from the Christian practice of apocalyptic narration. In a concluding fourth part I explain in more detail how the Apologia guides my analysis of apocalyptic thought in Newman through the remaining four chapters.

I. Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman’s Intellectual Coherence

Many obstacles beset the quest for a key to Newman’s intellectual coherence. First, his voluminous corpus encompasses compositions in numerous literary genres that were produced for diverse occasions. Second, the lengthy drama of Newman’s life is marked by many major episodic transitions which accentuate discontinuity. Third, his texts were written for and have been received amidst multifaceted controversies that further refract his complicated visage. Newman scholarship has no shortage of cautionary tales against simplifying the complexity of his thought.16 One of the first efforts to grasp “the whole

16 For a history and critique of the various attempts to reduce Newman’s complexity to a simple unity, see Jouett Powell, Thee Uses of Christian Discourse in John Henry Newman: An Example of Nonreductive Reflection on the Christian Faith (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 11-65. Although a bit dated now, valuable surveys of the vast secondary literature on Newman are found in the essays by Martin J. Svaglic and Charles Stephen Dessain in David J. DeLaura, ed., Victorian Prose: A Guide to Research (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1973), pp. 113-84. Other useful resources include John R. Griffin, Newman: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Publications, 1981) and Lawrence N. Crumb, The Oxford Movement and Its Leaders: A Bibliography of Secondary and Lesser Primary Sources, 2nd Ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009).

9 Newman” begins by despairingly declaring that he is a riddle that will never be solved.17

Biographical narration of the chronological unity of his life is a necessary but insufficient response to the problem.18 The historical fact that one thought succeeded another does not necessarily imply intellectual consistency or integrity. Indeed, the course that Newman’s intellectual life took exacerbates the difficulties involved in determining the coherence of his thought. He came to national prominence through his participation in public debates on behalf of particular causes; he preferred polemicizing for occasions and operating as a kind of generalist to producing sustained scholarship. This can leave the impression that

Newman is more of an advocate or an activist than an intellectual whose thought follows a particular logic.19

Ambiguities such as these do not necessarily disturb those who are persuaded of

Newman’s genius. Ian Ker is representative of the willingness of many within Newman studies to attribute apparent contradictions to his unique complexity, “so that he may be called, without inconsistency, both conservative and liberal, progressive and traditional, cautious and radical, dogmatic yet pragmatic, idealistic but realistic.”20 However to others the absence of a determinate account of Newman’s intellectual coherence is an invitation to inquire about non-intellectual unifying factors in his life and writings. A distinguished

17 Charles Sarolea, Cardinal Newman and His Influence on Religious Life and Thought (: T. & T. Clark, 1908), p. 8.

18 A list of major would certainly include , The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman: Based on His Private Journals and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), Meriol Trevor, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud and Newman: Light in Winter (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc, 1962, 1963), Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990).

19 Wilfrid Ward insightfully reflects on this perception in the early reception of Newman in his lecture “Newman and the Critics,” in Last Lectures (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1918), pp. 1-22.

20 See Ker, John Henry Newman, p. viii.

10 representative of this approach is the eminent Victorianist Frank Turner (1944-2010). He argues that a rigorous review of all the historical evidence for Newman’s Anglican period reveals that the course of his life, development of his thought, and content of his writings were governed primarily by contingent “psychic forces,” especially “a dislike bordering on hatred” of Evangelical Protestantism and the “determination to live with other celibate males.”21 This argument is unique in that it attempts to identify the content of Newman’s

“interests” with such specificity, but it is nonetheless continuous with the longstanding allegation among Newman’s critics that he is a kind of sophist whose discourse coheres only in the service of causes and interests.22 Of course, this view was fairly common in

Newman’s own time. When the Kingsley fatefully brought it out into the open, he was simply giving public expression to what they both acknowledged was a widespread opinion (Apo, 8-11). Suspicion of an excessive subtlety in Newman’s writing was not exclusive to agents of anti-Catholic prejudice in Victorian England like Kingsley. It was also harbored by some of his coreligionists in the English hierarchy and at the Vatican, and this concern has abided within some circles of Catholic thought. 23

Given the absence of an adequate account of Newman’s intellectual coherence and the existence of prominent and longstanding dissent against its existence, I do not

21 See Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 9.

22 This approach is characteristic of many of the essays in David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, eds. John Henry Newman: Reason, and (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). See also P. J. FitzPatrick, Apologia Pro Charles Kingsley (London: Sheed & Ward, 1969).

23 In this regard see especially the work of Harold L. Weatherby, “Newman and Victorian Liberalism: The Failure of Influence,” Critical Quarterly 13 (1971), pp. 205-213; Cardinal Newman in His Age: His Place in English Theology and Literature (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973); The Keen Delight: The Christian in the Modern World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975); and “Style and its consequence: Newman’s Language of Religion,” James D. Bastable, ed., Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays (: Veritas Publications, 1978), pp. 287-304.

11 think it is acceptable to take it for granted. In this dissertation I aim to contribute to the quest to find a key to Newman’s intellectual coherence by showing how the Christian tradition of apocalyptic thought provides a master narrative through which he interprets and responds to the contingencies of his historical situation. I propose that apocalyptic narrative is the primary resource for the “larger vision” and “universalist rhetoric” that

Turner finds Newman using “to address local problems.”24 Indeed, Turner is very astute to underscore how Newman interweaves the historically particular and polemically local with the theologically “universal” in his writings. But whereas Turner decides to reduce

Newman’s visionary discourse to an expression of his “concerns and passions over the particular” and a mere device to which he “virtually always appealed for his own limited polemical purposes,” I argue that Newman’s practice of figuring the controversies of his time and place in dramatic religious terms derives from a Christian tradition that has its own distinctive intellectual rigor.

By presenting Newman as an apocalyptic thinker I aim to explain his unique style of narration and thus enhance understanding of his rhetorical craft as a “controversialist” or “apologist.” These labels justifiably function as defaults for describing Newman in the absence of more specific categorizations.25 They echo his own self-descriptions, and they

24 See Turner, John Henry Newman, pp. 640-41.

25 Newman’s famous explanation for not writing between 1859 and 1864 is appropriately cited in defense of these labels, “Another reason, closely connected with this, was my habit, or even nature, of not writing & publishing without a call. What I have written has been for the most part what may be called official, works done in some office I held or engagement I had made;” see Newman, John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings, edited by Henry Tristram (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957), p. 272. All references to this text hereafter are cited parenthetically as AW. Also, Newman states in a commonly cited letter of 1867, “It is not often that I have attempted to discuss any point of pure theology, controversy being rather my line of writing;” see Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. 23, edited by Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gornall, S.J. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 10-11. All references to the The Letters and Diaries hereafter are cited parenthetically as LD.

12 foreground the familiar yet important fact that Newman’s texts are the literary remains of ad hoc interventions in concrete situations that called for immediate decision and resolute action; he advocates definite stances with the available linguistic resources. The heuristic utility of the labels of “controversialist” and “apologist” by themselves is however quite limited. They do not illuminate his rationale for advocating particular positions, and they fail to differentiate between various ways of being a controversialist. Thus they leave him vulnerable to the aforementioned suspicions that he is simply a sophist who employs his rhetorical skills for the sake of pursuing his own private interests. My contention is that

Newman’s apocalyptic thought provides a master narrative that identifies the ends and means of his ‘controversial’ writing. It defines his “role” as an agent of the “kingdom of

Christ,” guides his discernment of “antichristian” threats to that kingdom, and discloses a way to “battle” them. My identification of Newman as an apocalyptic Christian thinker is not intended to contest or displace but rather to absorb characterizations of him as a kind of controversialist. More recent categories of a “contextual” or “engaged” theologian are perhaps preferable to “controversialist.”26 They appropriately link him to “enculturated” forms of Christian thought such as one finds in the New Testament and at the center of contemporary theology. Indeed, one reason why Newman adopts the controversial genre is its suitability for the communication of a dissenting perspective in modern Protestant and post-Protestant Britain.

26 See John T. Ford, “John Henry Newman as Contextual Theologian,” Newman Studies Journal 2:2 (Fall 2005), pp. 60-76. Ford usefully employs Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology, Revised and Expanded Edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002). Ford also explains why it is accurate to call Newman a theologian today despite the fact that he prudentially denied the title’s technical propriety in his time. Graham Ward theorizes a culturally and socially “engaged theology” in Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

13 The “contextual” characterization perpetuates a salutary trend in recent Newman studies of emphasizing the extent to which he is not just a precursor but also an originator of the turn to language and to aesthetic rationality as an act of resistance to the rise of rationalism in modernity.27 This association needs to be emphasized because Newman’s

“engaged” approach to thought is not an instrumental strategy but a principled practice.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) cites him in the first paragraph of On Certainty,28 and there is great convergence between both their ideas on the interconnections of language, thought, and forms of life and their great struggles against the paralyzing prioritization of doubt and of mechanical concepts of rationality in modernity.29 Likewise, a number of

Newman’s most profound intellectual commitments are anticipatory of the hermeneutical tradition of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), and Paul

27 Nicholas Lash was one of the first to point out that the fundamental shift toward aesthetic rationality, indicated at the time by widespread interest in the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, better positions one to apprehend Newman’s significance; see Lash, “Introduction,” to Newman, An Essay in Aid of a (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 1-21, and “Literature and Theory: Did Newman Have a ‘Theory’ of Development?,” in J. D. Bastable, ed. Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays (Dublin, 1978), pp. 161-78, and “Tides and Twilight: Newman since Vatican II,” in Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill, eds. Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 447-64 (455). See also John Coulson, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) and T. R. Wright, “Newman on Literature: ‘Thinking Out into Language’,” Literature and Theology 5:2 (1991), pp. 181-97.

28 See Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969-75), p. 2.

29 Coulson was one of the first scholars to draw attention to the parallels between Newman and Wittgenstein in Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in the Language of Church and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). For subsequent analysis of this important relationship, see especially J. M. Cameron, “John Henry Newman and the Tractarian Movement,” in Ninian Smart et al. eds., Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 69-110 (100-101); Basil Mitchell, “Newman as Philosopher,” in Newman after a Hundred Years, Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 223-246; Cyril Barrett, “Newman and Wittgenstein on the Rationality of Religious Belief,” in Ian Ker, ed. Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), pp. 89-99; D. Z. Phillips, “Antecedent Presumption, Faith, and Logic,” in Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan, eds., Newman and Faith (Louvain: Peeters Press, 2004), pp. 1-24, and Wolfgang Kienzler, “Wittgenstein and John Henry Newman on Certainty,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 71 (2006), pp. 117- 38.

14 Ricoeur (1913-2005), such as his emphasis on the existential, historical, and embodied nature of finite thinking, the interdependence between logos and mythos, and the primacy of practical judgment in concrete matters against a monopolizing technical reason. All of these commonalities are at least partly attributable to mutual involvement in a critical retrieval of Aristotle’s practical philosophy as a counter to the modern tendencies toward excessive abstraction, formalization, and instrumentalization.30 Newman is quite akin to

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in his relentless exposé of the emaciating effects and self- defeating results of the impossible quest to render reason autonomous and to produce an adequate representation of reality.31 It is necessary to appreciate Newman’s anticipation

30 In the Apologia Newman characteristically writes, “It is the concrete being that reasons” (Apo, 155). For an excellent discussion of connections between Newman and Heidegger, see Walter Jost, “Philosophic Rhetoric: Newman and Heidegger,” in Gerard Magill, ed. Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. 54-80. Regarding some links between Newman and Gadamer, see Andrew Louth, “The Nature of Theological Understanding: Some Parallels between Newman and Gadamer,” in Geoffrey Rowell, ed. Tradition Renewed: The Oxford Movement Conference Papers, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1986), pp. 96-109, and Thomas K. Carr, Newman and Gadamer: Toward a Hermeneutics of Religious Knowledge (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996). Alan Crowley discusses commonalities between Newman and Ricoeur in “Theory of Discourse: Newman and Ricoeur,” in Magill, ed. Discourse and Context, pp. 81- 94. On Newman’s debt to Aristotle, see Edward J. Sillem, “Notes on the Sources of Newman’s Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 1: General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy (Louvain, Belgium: Nauwelaerts, 1969), pp. 150-63; Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 31-54; Mary Katherine Tillman, “Economies of Reason: Newman and the Tradition,” Magill, ed. Discourse and Context, pp. 45-53; Joshua P. Hochshild, “The Re- Imagined of John Henry Newman,” Modern Age (Fall 2003), pp. 333-42, Gérard Verbeke, “Aristotelian Roots of Newman’s Illative Sense,” in Bastable, ed., Newman and Gladstone, pp. 177-96, and Dwight A. Lindley III, “J. H. Newman and the Aristotelian Structure of Traditions,” and “Aristotle, Newman, and the Cosmic Gentleman,” Anamnesis: A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine’ (March 2012 and March 2013) web essays: http://www.anamnesisjournal.com/issues.

31 See T. R. Wright, “Newman on the Bible: A to Postmodernity,” in Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker, eds. Newman and the Word (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 211-49. Parallels between Newman and Derrida are explored in Alan Crowley, Ezekiel’s Wheels: Reading the Performance of Assent in Newman and Coleridge (Ph.D. Diss., , 1989), a revised chapter of which is published as “The Performance of the Grammar: Reading and Writing Newman’s Narrative of Assent,” Renascence 43:1/2 (Fall 1990-Winter 1991), pp. 137-58. See Gerard Loughlin, “The University Without Question: John Henry Newman and Jacques Derrida on Faith in the University,” in Jeff Astley, ed. The Idea of a Christian University: Essays on Theology and Higher Education (London: Paternoster Press, 2004), pp. 113-31.

15 of these critical and corrective responses to the excesses of modern Western thought in order to understand the significance of his contextual way of operating. Newman does not attempt to disassociate himself from the errors of modern thought or from the ugliness of modern Christianity to maintain his own intellectual and religious purity. He accepts his immersion in the contradictions of his time and place, consistently foreswears any desire to return to a fantastic golden age, and sets about the task of both renewing and reforming modern thought and Christian faith as opportunities present themselves within the course of fulfilling his parochial and plain duties.

The extant model of Newman as a contextual thinker, which I am most content to absorb into my model of Newman as an apocalyptic thinker, is found in the scholarship of Walter Jost. Jost displays an unrivaled grasp of the extent and the import of Newman’s affinities with the aforementioned philosophical trends, and he proceeds to locate him in relation to ancient and modern traditions of rhetorical thought.32 Jost shows that Newman is steeped in Aristotle and but incorporates empiricist and romantic approaches to persuasion as well. What emerges as a result is the first modern philosophic rhetorician, such as has been theorized by Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) and Stephen Toulmin (1922-

2009). Jost shows that Newman theorizes and practices rhetoric as an all-encompassing praxis of persuasion that is not reducible to linguistic conventions but is rather a mode of symbolic action that coordinates all knowing, doing, and making. Newman reprises the classic rhetorical traditions while also anticipating post-Nietzschean perspectivalism and

32 See Jost, Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), “On Concealment and Deception in Rhetoric: Newman and Kierkegaard,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 24 (Winter/Spring 1994), pp. 51-74, “What Newman Knew: A Walk on the Postmodernist Side,” Renascence 49:4 (Summer 1997), pp. 241-60, and “Rhetoric, , and the Claim of Religion,” in Jost and Wendy Olmsted, eds., Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000) pp. 97-129.

16 non-, thereby integrating the modernist emphasis on indeterminacy with the ancient quest for truth. He has a genuinely “postmodern” sense of the relatedness or situatedness of all our signifying and precisely because of this he is unsympathetic to the demonization of tradition and authority as such; he realizes that both are inexorable for finite and fallen human beings. In this respect, Jost thinks, we are still in the process of learning “what Newman knew.” With that said, Newman is quite aware that our forms of language and life are always in the process of decaying, always drifting in the direction of

“opposing vices.” Newman is perhaps most Aristotelian in his consistent effort to strive in both life and discourse for a of vital, mature polarity between “opposing virtues.”33 In order to operate as this kind of a rhetor, Jost explains, one must accept that faithfully inhabiting what Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) calls a “fiduciary framework” is requisite for the world and ourselves to be interpretable at all; the unverified assumption of a relatively stable perspective is a precondition for the operation of any intelligence.34

This, I argue, is the level at which apocalyptic thought is regulative for Newman.

I contend that it performs a fiduciary function in his life and work by providing a master narrative that orients his engaged and rhetorical style of thinking. Therefore it is

33 In the first great effort to find a key to Newman’s intellectual coherence, Erich Przywara made the principle of “opposing virtues” and the attendant goal of human growth to full spiritual maturity the master theme of Newman’s work. See Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk. Jan Walgrave (1911-86) does not explicitly invoke Przywara’s work as a precedent, but he follows the same basic line of analysis, synthesizing Newman’s thought through the theme of “development” in his great work Newman the Theologian: The Nature of Belief and Doctrine as Exemplified in His Life and Works, trans. by A. V. Littledale (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1960 [1957]). Terrence Merrigan advances this fruitful principle of interpretation by theorizing and explicating Newman’s concept of “polarity” more fully in Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991).

34 The profound affinities between Newman and Polanyi are discussed in Martin X. Moleski, Personal Catholicism: The Theological Epistemologies of John Henry Newman and Michael Polanyi (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000).

17 necessary to understand the content of that master narrative in order to apprehend his intellectual coherence.

II. Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman’s Theological Identity

When it comes to the issue of Newman’s theological identity, no one can contest that his religious thought is extraordinarily eclectic. Newman was influenced by many traditions, and he had a unique propensity for perceiving their different strengths as complimentary, preserving what was most persuasive in each of them, and integrating what remained into his own distinctive composite. The quest for a key to Newman’s theological identity must therefore begin by recognizing that he is a hybrid and an innovator of a particular sort; his religious thought is a synthetic derivation of his dynamic effort to weave all of the strands of truth that he discovers along his way into a tentative whole. The difficulty of pursuing this quest becomes evident when scholars try to classify his resulting theological identity.

The first instinct of most is to rehearse the familiar list of influences that Newman recalls in the opening chapter of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Their second instinct is commonly to emphasize that Newman’s path diverges from the prevailing modern theological trends in Protestant systematic theology and .35 As initial replies, these are beneficial and accurate, but they are not adequate responses. Left to themselves, they can leave an impression that his religious thought is a hodgepodge of disparate ideas picked up along an idiosyncratic journey which may not ultimately be a stable position in

35 Useful overviews of the movements mentioned are available in Gerald A. McCool, Nineteenth- Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New York: NY: Seabury Press, 1977) and Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994).

18 the Christian theological tradition. Though the issue remains unsettled, some scholars of

Newman do not regard this as a problem. Indeed, for more than a few, his resistance to a classification is rather evidence of extraordinary originality and genius, and he is simply to be accepted as a singularity. Jan Walgrave represented this opinion when he wrote,

“Newman belongs to no school. In the history of philosophy and theology, he appears as a great ‘outsider;’ he is to be seen as one of those creative personalities whose place is not in the line of tradition but who are the inspiration of new departures.”36 While

Newman is exceptional, this does not imply that his theological identity is inscrutable but rather that it requires a more complicated description than it has previously received.

I propose that focusing upon Newman’s apocalyptic thought uniquely illuminates his theological identity and that this is so because it provides his master narrative. It has primacy in the framing, regulating, orienting, unifying, and integrating of his thinking. I make this proposal without diminishing the complexity, the hybridity, and the originality of Newman’s theological identity. Undoubtedly, Newman is deeply influenced by other sources, such as the traditions of English Protestantism that he was taught,37 the ancient and modern versions of Christian which he studied,38 the empirically-inclined

36 See Walgrave, Newman the Theologian, p. 13.

37 Newman was trained in two great Protestant traditions in the : the pious biblical theology of Calvinistic and the liberal, rationalist churchmanship of the Oriel Noetics. For solid introductions to the Evangelical Protestant influence, see David Newsome, “The Evangelical Sources of Newman’s Power” in J. Coulson and A. M. Allchin, eds. The Rediscovery of Newman (London: Sheed and Ward, 1967) pp. 11-30 and the first half of Thomas Sheridan, Newman on Justification: A Theological Biography (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1967). On the Oriel Noetics influence, see Sillem, “Notes on the Sources of Newman’s Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 1: General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy, pp. 164-70, and Thomas Hummel, “John Henry Newman and the Oriel Noetics,” Anglican Theological Review 74 (1992), pp. 203-15.

38 Newman encourages emphasis on this influence by rhapsodizing about “the broad philosophy of Clement and ” and his alleged “Berkeleyism” (Apo, 26-9). See especially Charles Harrold, “John

19 school of British naturalism that he imbibed,39 and English Romantic thinkers and that he read.40 By contending that Newman is an apocalyptic thinker I am not denying or diminishing these important influences. My view is that his apocalyptic thought governs his absorption and integration of these other traditions. Of course, assimilation is always an ambiguous phenomenon. The question of which influence is ultimately exercising the dominant role usually remains subject to debate. This ambiguity in Newman’s thought is an attribute which strengthens rather than weakens the case for apocalyptic primacy. As experts on classical apocalyptic narrative explain, both the assimilation of rival narratives and symbols and the eclectic synthesizing of neighboring literary genres are characteristic traits of apocalyptic thought.41 My interpretation of Newman is thus analogous to that of biblical scholar John Collins regarding Paul: “While Paul’s theology was fundamentally

Henry Newman and the Alexandrian Platonists,” Modern Philology 37 (1940), pp. 279-91; Louis Bouyer, “Newman and English Platonism,” Monastic Studies 1 (1963), pp. 111-31; Selby, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings on John Henry Cardinal Newman; David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1974); and Louis Dupré, “Newman and the Neoplatonic Tradition in England,” in Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker, eds., Newman and the Word (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Press, 2000), pp. 137-54. With regard to modern Christian Platonism, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, 1736) by (1692-1752) was by far the most important influence on Newman; see Sillem, “Notes on the Sources of Newman’s Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 1: General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy, pp. 170-81.

39 Discussion of this relationship is routine in scholarship on Newman’s . See especially J. M. Cameron, “Newman and the Empiricist Tradition,” in Coulson and Allchin, eds. The Rediscovery of Newman, pp. 76-96 and M. Jamie Ferreira, and Reasonable Doubt: The British Naturalist Tradition in Wilkins, Hume, Reid and Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

40 The literature on “Newman and Romanticism” is voluminous; perhaps the best place to start is David Goslee, Romanticism and the Anglican Newman (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996). The most influential location of him in this trajectory is probably Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). John Milbank reads the mature Newman as an unresolved mixture of Platonic-Romantic and Lockean-positivist traditions in “What is Living and What is Dead in Newman’s Grammar of Assent?” in The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), pp. 36-59.

41 See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998 [1984]), pp. 17-19.

20 apocalyptic, he freely drew on the resources of Greek rhetoric and philosophy.”42 I view

Newman’s assimilation of neighboring and of rival traditions not just as an instrumental strategy or pragmatic calculation but as an effort to preserve and to synthesize ideas that improve and enhance his apocalyptic thought.

The main obstacle to the study of apocalyptic thought in Newman is also what, I submit, has heretofore impeded the recognition of its presence and importance in his life and writings: a strong, modern aversion to the category apocalyptic and phenomena with which it is associated.43 During the greater part of the past two centuries, theologians and scholars have been disposed to neglect and deprecate apocalyptic discourse and traditions because of their association with naïve enthusiasm for supernatural visions and for literal predictions of cataclysmic “end of the world” scenarios, both of which are disregarded as incredible within post-Enlightenment academic culture. A dialectic of popular fascination with and critical dismissal of apocalyptic thought has repelled scholars from its study and theologians from its appropriation. Over recent decades, however, this trend has partially reversed itself. A tremendous amount of valuable research has been done within a variety of disciplines.44 Simultaneously there has been a surge of interest in apocalyptic texts and

42 See Collins, “Apocalyptic Theology and the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Response to Jonathan Wilson,” in John Collins and Craig E. Evans, eds. Christian Beginnings and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), pp. 129-34 (132).

43 An influential discussion of this phenomenon, its effect on scholarship, and the contemporary signs of its undoing is Klaus Koch, Ratlos ver der Apokalyptik (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1970). An English translation by Margaret Kohl is titled The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic: A polemical work on a neglected area of biblical studies and its damaging effects on theology and philosophy (Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson Inc., 1972).

44 Much of this research is either summed up or cited in John Collins, Bernard McGinn, Stephen Stein, eds. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 3 vols. (NY: Continuum, 1998).

21 traditions among theologians and Western thinkers generally.45 This dissertation relies on this recent research and is partially a product of this surge of interest. In particular, recent scholarship on canonical Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts has a profound effect on my approach to the interpretation of apocalyptic thought.46 Consequently, I regard the prevalent image of apocalyptic thought as the product of an unhealthy inclination toward escapist speculation about the future and the as a stereotypical caricature that has been read back into the texts anachronistically. Scholarly study of the literary genres and historical contexts of canonical apocalyptic texts has yielded an awareness that these texts manifest a simultaneously ‘religious’ and ‘political’ concern with the past history, present state, and future prospect of God’s Reign not only in heaven but on earth. From this view, they are better read as theological works of memory and vision, which encourage fidelity under hostile conditions and show communities how to recognize and to resist the powers of evil that animate “empire” from Babylon to to their modern successors. In this light, apocalyptic texts are best interpreted as neither coded messages nor predictions but as narrative configurations of received systems of biblical, cultural, and political symbols that attempt to disclose perennial patterns in the cosmic yet historical contest between the

Kingdom of God and its adversaries.

45 Roman Catholic thinker David Tracy gives three central reasons for this resurgence within contemporary Christian thought: (1) recent biblical scholarship has made it more apparent than ever that apocalyptic thought saturates the New Testament, (2) the avoidance of it has effectively given this potent discourse over to fundamentalist misuse, and (3) it has unrivalled power to ‘fragment,’ that is, to function critically with respect to, modern ideologies; see Tracy, “Form and Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and Incomprehensible God,” Werner Jeanrond and Assulv Lande, eds. The Concept of God in Global Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), pp. 98-114, and “The Christian Option for the Poor,” in Daniel G. Groody, ed. The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 119-31.

46 A great short introduction to the present state of biblical scholarship on ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts is David E. Aune, “Understanding Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic,” in Apocalypticism, Prophecy and Magic in Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), pp. 1-12.

22 I follow a principle that is advocated by Collins—the most influential apocalyptic taxonomist—for using the category apocalyptic and its cognates: “use of the term should be controlled by analogy with [classical] apocalyptic texts and not allowed to float freely as an intuitive ‘theological construct.’”47 The practice of anchoring the semantic range of apocalyptic in classic apocalyptic texts of antiquity is increasingly normative in religious studies; it also makes etymological sense. The English adjective apocalyptic derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which initially entered circulation through its use as the title of the final book in the New Testament canon. Naturally enough, the Oxford English Dictionary first defines apocalyptic as “pertaining to or concerned with the Revelation of St. John.”

Contemporary scholarship on the canonical apocalyptic texts of Judaism and Christianity perpetuates this taxonomic intuition by limiting what is rightly called apocalyptic on the basis of characteristic features of The Apocalypse of John. I follow the current consensus in biblical studies regarding which canonical texts, symbols, and topics of discourse are rightly labeled apocalyptic.48 My definition of apocalyptic thought is derived from their official definition of the apocalypse literary genre.49 I define apocalyptic thought as the

47 Collins, “Genre, Ideology, and Social Movements in Jewish Apocalypticism,” in John J. Collins and James H. Charlesworth, eds. Mysteries and : Apocalyptic Studies since the Uppsala Colloquium (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 11-32 (24). For a more complete development of this principle, see also Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, pp. 1-21.

48 This consensus is well reflected by the articles in Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. I: Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, by Greg Carey, Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2005), and by Frederick J. Murphy, Apocalypticism in the Bible and Its World: A Comprehensive Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012).

49 Compare: “‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality that is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world,” Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semia 14 (1979), pp. 1-20 (9).

23 appropriation of revealed narrative to figure the supernatural horizon and eschatological trajectory of historical experience and thereby interpret its ultimate significance.

In order to count as Christian apocalyptic thought, a given figuration of historical experience must derive from the revealed narrative conveyed by Christianity’s canonical apocalyptic texts. Standing in the “history of effects” or “reception history” of these texts is necessary, but it is not a sufficient condition for belonging to the Christian apocalyptic tradition.50 This is because some thinkers incorporate central symbols and major features of canonical apocalyptic texts in ways that create an impression of continuity but actually vitiate their “narrative grammar.”51 Conceptualizing the identity of Christian apocalyptic thought in terms of the narrative grammar of its canonical texts facilitates an appreciation that this theological tradition has a breadth and flexibility but also a center of gravity and boundaries. Substantial innovation within these parameters is not just possible but actual; the Christian apocalyptic tradition includes great intellectual diversity, such as exhibited by the exceptionally creative and influential (c. 1135-1202).52

50 Hans-Georg Gadamer’s influential notion of “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte) is developed in Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition, revised trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989 [1960]); see especially pp. 300-307. Christopher Rowland has constructed the best maps of the Christian reception history of canonic apocalyptic texts; see Rowland, “‘Upon Whom the End of the Ages have Come’: Apocalyptic and the Interpretation of the New Testament,” in Malcolm Bull, ed. Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 38-57; “The Apocalypse in History: The Place of the Book of Revelation in Christian Theology and Life,” in Christopher C. Rowland and John Barton, eds. Apocalyptic in History and Tradition (New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 151-71; Judith Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation: The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Another valuable survey of the reception history of the Apocalypse of John is Wainwright, Mysterious Apocalypse: Interpreting the Book of Revelation (Nashville, TN: Abington Press, 1993).

51 For discussion of the concept of “narrative grammar” and its use to distinguish Christian apocalyptic thought from ostensibly similar discourses, see Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), especially pp. 65-76, 173-77, 214-20.

52 On Joachim’s apocalyptic thought and its influence, see especially Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1985), Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Medieval Study in Historical

24 Because this dissertation is deeply influenced by the recent harvest of scholarship on canonical apocalyptic texts, it is at odds with the most common approach of historical theologians to the study of post-biblical Christian traditions of apocalyptic thought.53 In this field, scholarship has mostly remained focused upon enthusiastic fascination by and speculative predictions of the chronological imminence of prophesied events as the most definitive feature of apocalyptic thought.54 This approach highlights a central feature of the most fanatical participants in the history of Christian apocalyptic thought and makes it the sine qua non of apocalyptic thought in general.55 While that decision may echo the

Thinking, Second Edition. (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999), Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, Second Ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), and , a Post rit spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1979, 1981).

53 However, for an outstanding, recent work of scholarship which I regard as exemplary for the study of the history of Christian apocalyptic thought, see Kevin Hughes, Constructing Antichrist: Paul, Biblical Commentary, and the in the (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Uuniversity of America Press, 2005).

54 This has been the approach of Bernard McGinn, whose influential introductions, definitions, and syntheses have been widely received as authoritative. At the beginning of his career McGinn stresses that belief in and even prediction of “chronological imminence” is definitive, but his recent work increasingly acknowledges that other forms of imminence, which he calls “psychological,” also count as apocalyptic so long as the thinker in question can be said to live “in the shadow of the Second Coming.” See especially McGinn, “Apocalypticism in the Middle Ages: an Historiographical Sketch,” Mediaeval Studies 37 (1975), pp. 252-86; Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, 2nd Edition (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998 [1979]), pp. 1-36; Apocalyptic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 1- 16; “Early Apocalypticism: the Ongoing Debate,” in C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich, eds. The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 2-39. McGinn’s status in the field is appropriately reflected by his position as editor of The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Volume 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (New York: Continuum, 2000).

55 When Christian apocalyptic thought has been an object of modern study, it has been driven primarily by popular fascination with and liberal fear of the enthusiastic, speculative ideas of sectarians. This interest especially animates scholarship on modern apocalypticism, as is quite evident from the third volume of The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. This field of grew considerably after 9/11; see, for example, Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Dan Cohn-Sherbock, The Politics of Apocalypse: The History and Influence of Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). The mass media use apocalyptic theology and its cognates exclusively with reference to fanatics such as David Koresh (1959-1993) and fundamentalist views associated recently with the Left Behind book series. For example, a Time magazine cover story by Richard Lacayo, “David Koresh: Cult of Death,” on the infamous Branch Davidian leader states that his “Waco cult is the product of an apocalyptic theology” (March 15, 1993). Likewise, in the

25 popular resonance of the term apocalyptic in modern contexts, it does not well reflect the defining characteristics of canonical Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts themselves.56

In this dissertation I approach the determination of Newman’s theological identity as an apocalyptic thinker genealogically. I describe his relationships to preceding thinkers in the Christian apocalyptic tradition and the canonical texts themselves in as much detail as possible. Proof of direct contact and influence is important for placing a genealogy on sound historical footing, and in that regard this dissertation does not start from scratch. A few historians have gathered evidence of Newman’s contact with Protestant apocalyptic thought, although they do not explicitly recognize it as such.57 Peter Nockles and Frank

Turner have underscored the accuracy and the importance of this research. They confirm that an “apocalyptic sensibility” or “always active eschatology” is “never far below the surface” of Newman’s thought, is most apparent during the transitional moments in his

Oxford career, and plays an important role in his movement toward the Roman Church in

November 23, 2001 edition of The New York Times (A33), Kevin Sack titles a piece on the rise in sales of the Left Behind series and other “popular prophecy” after 9/11 “Apocalyptic Theology Revitalized by Attacks.”

56 Regarding prediction of chronological imminence, for example, see Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:31-32; Acts 1:7; I Thessalonians 5:1. Richard B. Hays persuasively argues that it makes little sense to identify a speculative activity discouraged by central canonical apocalyptic texts as the sine qua non of Christian apocalypticism in Hays, “‘Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’ New Testament Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium,” Modern Theology 16:1 (January 2000), pp. 115-35, esp. pp. 115-17, 131-33.

57 See Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, Revised Edition (NY: Verso, 1990 [1971], p. 165, Paul Misner, “Newman and the Tradition concerning the Papal Antichrist,” Church History 42 (Sept. 1973), pp. 377-95, Misner, Papacy and Development, pp. 45-57, 85-108, Sheridan Gilley, “Newman and Prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic,” Journal of United Reformed Church History Society 5:3 (March 1985), pp. 160-188, and J. H. L. Rowlands, Church, State, and Society: the Attitudes of , Richard Hurrell Froude, and John Henry Newman, 1827-1845 (Worthing, West Sussex: Churchman Publishing, 1989), pp. 181-96.

26 the .58 Newman himself draws attention to the significance of this influence in the first chapter of the Apologia, where he emphasizes the “deep impression” made upon his mind by reading “’s Church History” and “Newton On the Prophecies” for the first time in 1816.59 By the latter he recalls being “most firmly convinced that the

Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John.” The former taught him to read the early as genuine representatives “of the primitive

Christians.” In this retrospective account, Newman states his judgment that these narratives are actually “inconsistent with one another” and that his subsequent efforts to resolve this “conflict of mind” drove his intellectual development (Apo, 19-20).

This dissertation reexamines the findings of these historians and Newman’s clues in the Apologia from a taxonomic perspective that is informed by the best scholarship in apocalyptic studies. I will demonstrate that Newman receives, renews, and endeavors to extend the classical British Protestant tradition of apocalyptic thought.60 Familiarity with this school is crucial for interpreting the evidence gathered by historians, comprehending the significance of the references and allusions made in the Apologia, and identifying the early Newman’s apocalyptic thought as a species thereof. For these and other reasons yet

58 See Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 69-70, 78-79, and Frank Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, pp. 160-1, 163, 178, 292, 608-9. Turner resorts to aforementioned stereotypes of apocalyptic thought by appealing to associations with its popular excesses and categorizing it as “ultra-Protestant,” “sectarian,” and “schismatic.”

59 Newman is referring to Dissertations on the Prophecies, which have Remarkably been Fulfilled and at this Time are Fulfilling in the World (London, 1754-58) by Bishop (1704-1782) and The History of the Church of Christ (London, 1794-1809) by Joseph Milner (1744-1797).

60 On classic British Protestant apocalyptic thought (c. 1530-1830), see especially Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English : From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Oxford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978), Katharine , The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), and Christopher Burdon, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unraveling, 1700-1834 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

27 to be discussed, I devote the second chapter to a discussion of its intellectual sources, its major characteristics, and its historical influence. I explain how its architect, John Bale

(1495-1563), selectively synthesized the divergent theological trajectories of (354-430), Joachim of Fiore, and John Wycliffe (1330-1384) in the construction of his grand commentary on The Apocalypse of John, and I show how its figuration of history came to provide a master narrative for early modern England.61 Most importantly,

I analyze its main feature: a figuration of the time between the Ascension and Second

Coming of Christ which centers upon escalating conflict between “the true church of

Christ” and “the false church of Antichrist.” Classic British Protestant apocalyptic thought confidently identifies the historical contestants in its revelatory narrative. The true church of Christ is a continuous line of “real” Christians from the Apostles through the Church Fathers to great Protestant Reformers allied with pious English Sovereigns, and the false church of Antichrist begins with false teachers and persecuting emperors and grows into the Papal Church of Rome.

The key to identifying Newman as an apocalyptic Christian thinker and analyzing the development of his apocalyptic thought, I propose, is to trace his initial appropriation and subsequent reconstructions of this revelatory narrative of the two churches. The text that Newman refers to as “Newton On the Prophesies” is certainly the source of his first narrative of Antichrist, but Newman scholarship has not noted that the text he nominates

“Milner’s Church History” is the source of his narrative of the true church. Once this is

61 Bale’s commentary was titled The Image of Both Churches (London, 1541-47). Regarding the metanarrative function of classical Protestant apocalyptic thought in early modern England, see especially Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, Second Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 11-54, especially pp. 25-31, and Arthur H. Williamson, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Making of the Modern World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).

28 recognized, Newman’s account of resolving the inconsistency of these narratives can be understood as a claim to have resolved an internal contradiction of Protestant apocalyptic thought. Under the guidance of the Apologia, I follow Newman’s intellectual movement from the renewal of classical British Protestant apocalyptic thought through his efforts to revise and extend its narrative in modernity, culminating in his construction of a modern

Catholic apocalyptic perspective. While he changes much in the process, I contend that he retains the defining theme of a conflict between the true church of Christ and the false church of Antichrist and that it never ceases to function as his master narrative. Likewise

Newman continues to pursue its chief occupation: determining the historical identities of the main contestants in the conflict. I show that Newman comes to interpret the classical

Protestant depiction of the Pope as the Antichrist as a tragic misappropriation of Christian apocalyptic thought; Newman believes that it is disorienting all who are under Protestant influence, which is most of the modern West. Newman’s narrative of the true church still consists of Apostolic and Patristic Christianity but Catholic Christianity is figured as their genuine successor. His narrative of Antichrist now foreswears literal identification of that eschatological enemy but still discerns his historical forerunners, most of all in the “spirit of Liberalism” that he sees enveloping the entire “educated lay world” (Apo, 174, 233).

III. Apocalyptic Thought as a Key to Newman’s Historical Significance

Newman is commonly recognized as an outstanding Christian thinker and an important figure in the religious history of the modern West. He initially rose to prominence as the leading intellectual of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, and his writings

29 from that period remain seminal texts for modern Anglican thought.62 Newman’s highly visible conversion to the Roman made him into a public symbol of and representative for the Catholic faith in England during its “second spring” over the latter half of the nineteenth century. This status provided Newman with a stage from which he was able to make many influential contributions to Catholic thought on a range of issues related to the adaptation and response of Christianity to the challenges and opportunities of modernity. Newman’s widely acclaimed Apologia Pro Vita Sua gave him a renewed national reputation as a “Victorian sage” and as a public advocate for “revealed religion” amidst a rising tide of disbelief.63 This positive reception occasioned an historic reversal of public opinion not only with respect to Newman but also regarding the restoration of

Roman Catholicism in England that he represented. Being made a cardinal by Pope Leo

XIII in 1878 seemed to be an official Catholic validation of both his iconic status and his provocative works. During the subsequent century Newman’s writings were influential in

Roman Catholic thought; his ideas and style have seemed so strikingly anticipatory of the

Second Vatican Council that he has often been called its “invisible father.”64 Newman’s iconic status has continued to receive confirmation in the Roman Catholic Church. After an examination of his life and works by the Congregation for the Causes of he was

62 The classic introduction to the thought of the Oxford Movement and Newman’s contribution to it is still , The Mind of the Oxford Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960); see also Cameron, “John Henry Newman and the Tractarian Movement.”

63 A classic study of Newman as one of a few elite “Victorian sages” is John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1953). For a study of the change in perceptions of Newman and of Roman Catholicism during his career, see Erik Sidenvall, After Anti- Catholicism? John Henry Newman and Protestant Britain, 1845-c.1890 (London: T&T Clark, 2006).

64 On Newman’s influence, see the articles in John Coulson and A. M. Allchin, eds. The Rediscovery of Newman. For a good discussion of Newman’s relationship to the Second Vatican Council, which is hardly one of direct influence, see Nicholas Lash, “Tides and Twilight: Newman since Vatican II.”

30 proclaimed venerable in 1991 and beatified in 2010. There is widespread expectation that he will be canonized as a and eventually named a .65

Newman is widely regarded as the most eminent Anglophone Catholic thinker of the modern age, but one does not find the same unanimity when it comes to the narration of his historical significance. In the Preface to the Apologia, Newman wryly remarks that his critic Rev. Kingsley had at least gotten the fundamental question right by entitling his polemical pamphlet What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? Indeed, ever since Newman’s

Tractarian renewal of Catholic doctrine and practice first received public attention, he has seemed a perplexing phenomenon that requires interpretation, and he has continued to be a polarizing figure more than a century after his death.66 The two most common ways of narrating his significance derive from the two main constituencies to which he belonged during his life, and they are directly opposed interpretations.

Both to Protestants and to advocates for liberalizing social reforms, Newman has traditionally appeared to be a kind of conservative and was originally seen as a traitor against England. As Newman recalls in the Apologia, most of his fellow Britons were shocked by this Catholic resurgence in “the bosom of the English Establishment.” It was popular at the time to account for Newman and his influence as a foreign conspiracy of the Roman Church, which was attempting to deceive and to corrupt Protestant England

65 See for example the introduction to the authorized biography for the : Keith Beaumont, Blessed John Henry Newman: Theologian and Spiritual Guide for Our Times (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2010), pp. 6-8.

66 For a discussion of the primary reasons why Newman has tended to elude hermeneutical categories, see Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore, 2nd Ed. (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 91-3. A brief historical overview of Newman’s polarizing effect may be found in the opening pages of John Ford, “Newman Studies: Recent Resources and Research,” The Thomist 46 (1982), pp. 283-306. Newman’s polarizing effect is probably the most prominent theme of the synoptic essays on the Newman secondary literature from his death through the early 1970s by Svaglic and Dessain in DeLaura, ed., Victorian Prose: A Guide to Research, pp. 113-184.

31 from within (Apo, 5-13). This characterization may seem extreme and strange now, but it highlights how alien, regressive, and politically threatening Newman and the movement that he represented seemed to the vast majority of his peers.67 This narrative is no longer common in its hyperbolic form, but a more toned-down, scholarly version of it endures in

Protestant historiography of modern Christian thought, such as in Claude Welch’s classic survey, which places Newman among the movements of “restoration and conservation.”68

Somewhat surprisingly, in recent decades a neo-conservative form of Roman Catholicism has appropriated this interpretation of Newman as a positive depiction.69 This is surprising because throughout Newman’s life as a Roman Catholic and for at least a half century afterward he had a reputation among his coreligionists as a liberal and a reformer.

Insofar as this perception connoted heresy or disloyalty, it was almost entirely a result of misunderstanding or disinformation.70 However, Newman’s views on major issues of the day, such as the development of doctrine, the primacy of conscience, the role of the laity, and the nature of papal authority, were relatively “liberal” in comparison to the dominant

67 A more recent example of this concern regarding Newman’s potentially regressive political effects may be found in David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, who worry “that Newman’s existentialism is a two-sided weapon; it may cut down scholastic rationalism, but it may also be seen as the source of a menacing and irrational authoritarianism. It became a central feature of Italian fascism and it is no coincidence that the French syndicalist, Georges Sorel, whose ideas inspired the young Mussolini, quoted Newman’s Grammar with approbation.” See Nicholls and Kerr, eds., John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, p. 10.

68 See Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 190-94, 207-17.

69 See for example Stanley L. Jaki, Newman’s Challenge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). This neo-conservative Roman Catholic interpretation of Newman is for the most part a popular religious view, and thus Newman’s iconic status is now often appropriated for conservative social stances in the American culture wars, as one sees for example with The .

70 For a brisk account of the main episodes that brought Newman under suspicion, see , Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 98-100, 138- 46, 168-72.

32 views among the English hierarchy and at the Vatican. The impression of Newman as the most visible advocate for Roman Catholic liberalization is what English Catholic leaders like Archbishop (1808-92) and Monsignor George Talbot (1816-

86) invoked as their rationale for marginalizing him.71 This characterization of Newman as a great agent of liberal reform within Roman Catholicism continued in the first half of the twentieth century. It seemed persuasive because he was credited as a major influence on and precedent for the most significant movements of theological innovation during the period: Catholic modernism and nouvelle théologie.72

In this dissertation I attempt to advance a third approach to narrating Newman’s historical significance. I acknowledge the partial truth of the conventional narratives of

Newman as either a conservative reactionary or a liberal reformer and aim to harmonize both dimensions by approaching them through his critique of a broader phenomenon that he called ‘liberalism.’73 From this viewpoint, his seemingly inconsistent stances toward modern Protestant Britain and Roman Catholicism cohere when they are seen through the lens of his criticism of ‘liberalism.’ Newman himself was the first advocate for narrating his life and thought as a “battle against Liberalism.” He does so first in the Apologia and

71 Talbot told Newman this explicitly in a letter dated May 31, 1867: “When I was in England 3 years ago, I heard some…quoting your name in opposition to the authority of the Holy See. I remarked that there was a party forming of what are called liberal Catholics who wished to place you at their head in preference of professing a filial devotion to the Vicar of Christ and a due veneration for the Chair of St. Peter… When I found that there was a dangerous party rising in England, who quoted your name, I was obliged to…stand up for Ecclesiastical Authority in preference of worshipping great intellectual gifts” (LD 23, 242).

72 For Newman’s influence on the former, see Mary Jo Weaver, ed., Newman and the Modernists (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985). For his influence on the latter, see James Patrick Hurley, “Newman and Twentieth-Century French Theology: The Presence of J. H. Newman in Y. M. Congar, H. de Lubac y J. Daniélou,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011), pp. 473-78.

73 One of the best performances of such a harmonizing interpretation is Adrian Hastings, “Newman as Liberal and Anti-liberal” in The Theology of a Protestant Catholic (London: SCM Press, 1990), pp. 116-32.

33 later in his Biglietto Speech upon being made a cardinal (1879), both of which he wrote in order to counter conventional misinterpretations of him. Newman’s first biographer,

Wilfrid Ward (1856-1916), made extensive use of this approach to interpret and to defend his life and work. He acknowledges that Newman’s diverse activities and writings are genuinely difficult and resist unambiguous characterization, but he nevertheless contends that their profound significance derives from Newman’s underlying purposes: to preserve revealed religion amidst an incoming tide of rationalism and strengthen revealed religion to meet the movement of Europe away from and against Christian faith.74 Ward sums up this way of approaching Newman in the introduction to his biography and utilizes it as an organizing principle for that 1300 page account. The other outstanding advocate for this hermeneutic of Newman is Henry Tristram of the , who was widely regarded as a leading Newman scholar during the middle of the twentieth century. He published a brief anthology of what he regarded to be the crucial Newman texts along with an introduction. All of those texts relate to the topic of ‘liberalism,’ and Tristram’s introduction makes the case for viewing this as the organizing theme of Newman’s life and thought.75

Newman and some of his leading interpreters have emphasized the importance of his critique of ‘liberalism,’ but there have been few attempts to conceptualize and explain that critique in a rigorous scholarly way.76 Consequently the nature of Newman’s critique

74 See Ward, Last Lectures, pp. 7, 15, 20, 23, 28, and Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, esp. vol. 1, pp. 1-26.

75 See Tristram, The Living Thoughts of Cardinal Newman (New York: David McKay Co., 1946).

76 Even so, there are a couple of noteworthy discussions; see Edward J. Sillem, “Newman and Liberalism,” The Philosophical Notebook of John Henry Newman, vol. 1, pp. 23-66, and Terrence Merrigan, “Newman and Theological Liberalism,” Theological Studies 66 (2005), pp. 605-21. Also, for a

34 has remained unclear, as have its implications for his historical significance. This lack of clarity derives largely from Newman’s declarations concerning ‘liberalism.’ He gives his most concise definitions of the term first in an appendix to the Apologia as “false liberty of thought” and secondly in his Biglietto Speech as “the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion” (Apo, 256).77 Thus his use of the term liberalism is unique to him.78 To compound matters, the term liberalism was used in his day and has been used since in ways that are different from his use.79 In addition to this semantic ambiguity, there is the issue of the genre of Newman’s texts. He presents himself as a critic of ‘liberalism’ in retrospective pieces that are not scholarly but autobiographical and programmatic. He did not publish an academic study of or argument against ‘liberalism,’ nor did he explain specifically how each of his activities and his writings took part in his larger resistance to

‘liberalism.’ The other contributor to the opacity of Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ is a habit of hermeneutical passivity among Newman scholars. His statements related to this topic are acknowledged and repeated, but they have rarely been the subject of a sustained analysis and have often seemed to function as clichés. As a result, Newman’s critique of

couple of excellent analyses of Newman on “liberal religion,” see Lee H. Yearly, The Ideas of Newman: Christianity and Human Religiosity (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1978) pp. 93-127, and Cyril O’Regan, “Newman’s Anti-Liberalism,” Sacred Heart Review Fall (1991), pp. 83-108.

77 Newman gave his Biglietto Speech in Rome on May12, 1879. It is published in Newman, My Campaign in Ireland (Aberdeen: A. King & Co., 1896), pp. 393-400 (395). Henceforth citations of this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as Camp.

78 As Owen Chadwick frankly explains, “The fact is, what Newman denounced as liberalism, no one else regarded as liberalism. And this led to misunderstanding.” See Chadwick, Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 74.

79 See Marvin R. O’Connell, “Newman and Liberalism” in Stanley Jaki, ed., Newman Today (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius University Press, 1989), pp. 79-94.

35 ‘liberalism’ has been left open to the charge that it does not have conceptual integrity but is instead a rhetorical mirage, which is the argument that Frank Turner makes.80

Turner contends that Newman invents the fiction that his lifelong career has been a “battle with Liberalism” in an attempt to hide two facts, each of which harms his public relations with one of his primary constituencies: from Protestant Britain he wants to hide the fact that Tractarianism was actually an assault on Evangelical Protestantism, and from

Roman Catholic authorities he desires to obscure the liberalizing course that his work as a

Roman Catholic has taken. This view has been widely criticized and rejected by Newman scholars, but the tone of that response has led some to allege that these Newman scholars are simply not amendable to such critical scrutiny of Newman.81 I too think that Turner’s interpretation of Newman is flawed, as I will argue throughout. In short, Turner does not see that Newman viewed Evangelical Protestant discursive practice as a leading religious transmitter of the first principles of ‘liberalism.’ This is why Newman writes, “the spirit of lawlessness came in with the Reformation, and Liberalism is its offspring” (Apo, 179).

Thus from Newman’s viewpoint Tractarianism was ultimately a “battle with Liberalism,” while Turner is correct that it was proximately an assault on Evangelical Protestantism in large part. For Turner, Newman is battling either ‘liberalism’ or Evangelicalism, whereas

80 This is the thesis of Turner’s John Henry Newman. See especially the first chapter. Turner condenses this argument regarding Newman’s use of liberalism in his lengthy “Editor’s Introduction: The Newman of the Apologia and the Newman of History” to a new edition of the Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Six Sermons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 1-115; this latter text includes a very useful survey of Newman’s use of the term liberalism on pp. 54-76, where Turner also discusses the inability of scholarship to make sense of Newman’s idea of “Liberalism.” Turner concisely presents his alternative interpretation of Newman in “Newman,” David Fergusson, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 119-138.

81 See especially Simon Skinner, “History versus : The Reception of Turner’s Newman,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61:4 (October 2010) pp. 764-781. This article drew a reply from , and Skinner wrote a rejoinder to Duffy; both pieces are in the July 2012 edition of this journal.

36 for Newman they are intrinsically related because the latter is the popular progenitor of the former.82 Correcting Turner may be necessary, but it is certainly insufficient. I think that Newman studies has invited Turner’s brand of revisionist skepticism by allowing the critique of ‘liberalism’ to remain so ambiguous. Ultimately, a more rigorous explication and persuasive interpretation of Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ is needed.

In this dissertation I attempt to meet this challenge and thereby advance the third approach to Newman’s historical significance. My intervention draws upon two generally overlooked contributions to the interpretation of his critique of ‘liberalism.’ Christopher

Dawson offers an incisive perspective on “Newman’s Place in History” in his brief piece written for the centennial of Newman’s conversion,83 and literary critic Robert Pattison interprets Newman as the “master of dissent” after the centennial of his death in the only monograph-length work on Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism.’84 Both regard his critique as the key to his historical significance and argue that ‘liberalism’ needs to be understood not simply as an intellectual error but rather as a novel principle of social order which has come to define modern Western civilization. Dawson explains, “‘Liberalism’ was in fact the movement of aggressive secularism which became the dominant force in nineteenth century civilization and shaped the world in which we live to-day.” Dawson emphasizes that Newman saw ‘liberalism’ as especially dangerous because it appeared so benign. It established itself neither through revolution nor through an explicit attack on religion but

82 I explain Newman’s view of this relationship in more detail later in the dissertation.

83 This text was originally published in Newman and : A Centenary Anthology and Appeal (Littlemore, Oxford: Salesian Fathers, 1945), pp. 132-36, and it was reprinted in Dawson, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, New Edition (London: Saint Austin Press, 2001), pp. 147-153 (148-50). In these seven pages Dawson authored perhaps the most fertile and incisive account of Newman’s historical significance ever published, even if it is merely a hermeneutic promissory note that was never fulfilled.

84 See Pattison, The Great Dissent, especially pp. vii, 53, 186-87, 204-206, 210-17.

37 rather through advocacy for religious toleration, the diffusion of useful knowledge, social reform, and economic progress. Even so, Newman detected its indirect subversion of the role that Christianity had played for more than a thousand years as “the law of the land:”

“that is to say all the conscious moral effort of society was inspired by Christian ideas and directed toward Christian ends. Now all this was changed. Religion was no longer the bond of society. A new principle had taken its place: the principle of utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Pattison similarly contends that Newman’s critique of

‘liberalism’ is a “searching rebuke” of the first principles imposed by Western modernity, especially its redefinition of all religious teaching as equally valid. In this respect Pattison sees Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ as comparable to the critique of nihilism authored by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): “Liberalism was everywhere, and finally Newman meant by liberalism what Nietzsche means by nihilism: ‘The view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world.’85

For both…this view was the key to understanding the modern world.” From Dawson and

Pattison I draw the hermeneutical principle that Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ is best understood not merely as a critique of a particular party or group but as an encompassing

“critique of modernity:” an identification and criticism of defining ideological features of modern Western civilization, which are assumed by post-Enlightenment liberals and so- called conservatives alike.

While it is crucial to approach Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ as a critique of modernity, it is just as important to recognize and understand the theological source

85 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, [1901, 1906] 1968), p. 14.

38 which provides that critique with its intellectual coherence. In this regard Pattison again points us in the right direction. He correctly locates “Newman’s fullest description of liberalism” in his Advent sermons of 1835 on “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist,” which were initially published as 83 in 1838 and were republished with other articles as

Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects in 1872.86 Pattison also uniquely recognizes that Newman’s account of “the triumph of liberalism” is written in apocalyptic language. However, Pattison makes no effort to learn the apocalyptic tradition from which Newman’s narrative of ‘liberalism’ derives; instead Pattison simply reads it as a rhetoric of “uncompromising condemnation” and “rejection” of “modern civilization” and “the modern spirit,” which has “totalitarian implications” and demonstrates “how terrorism might subvert liberal society.” This false inference illustrates the limitations of Pattison’s study. He defaults into the stereotypical, modern reading of apocalyptic discourse as a rhetoric of demonization and denunciation. Dawson does not explicitly connect Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ to the apocalyptic tradition, but he does argue that it is related to Newman’s meta-historical conviction that: “‘a new cycle of sacred history’ was about to begin” and as “the rising tide of secularism” submerged “the old tradition of …the Church could rely on no external aid but only on the inherent and indefeasible principle of her supernatural life.” Dawson rightly argues that Newman’s mission as a great critic of ‘liberalism’ has to understood in terms of his rediscovery and renewal of the vitality of what he called “revealed religion:”

86 Pattison, The Great Dissent, p. 186. See Newman, “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist” [1838], in Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1872), pp. 44-108. Henceforth citations of this volume are parenthetical and abbreviated as DA.

39 the internal principle of development in the life of the Church by which what is already implicitly contained in Christian faith and tradition is unfolded and applied to meet the needs of every age, so that every new challenge to the faith becomes an opportunity for the conquest of new truths and reveals unsuspected depths of meaning in truths that are already familiar.

Pattison is unable to explain why Newman seems to embody so much of modern liberal culture even as he criticizes it, but Dawson clarifies that Newman can absolutely reject the first principles of ‘liberalism’ while at the same time exhibiting “an intense faith in the boundless powers of assimilation which the Christian faith possessed” by absorbing its many virtues and valuable gifts. Dawson attributes Newman’s paradoxical capacity to his unique insight into the way “that the divine process of progressive revelation and spiritual revelation could be fulfilled” in history.87

In this dissertation I pursue the hermeneutic approach advocated by Dawson and

Pattison. I do so by showing how Newman’s rejuvenation of revealed religion involves a renewal of apocalyptic narration, which in turn governs his critique of ‘liberalism’ as well as his resistance to it and his assimilation of it. As inheritor of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition, Newman not only renewed its classic narrative but also tried to extend its figuration of historical experience to include his present time. Therefore he engaged in the practice of “watching for the Second Coming,” which involves the discernment of contemporary signs of Antichrist and incorporating those into the established narrative of

Antichristian activity in church history. I will show how Newman’s practice of looking out for “signs of the Times” engendered his initial perception of his age as “a novel era” defined by a “particular form” of “liberty of thought” as early as March 1829 (LD 2, 120,

129). This seminal perception of a great new danger to the Christian faith led Newman to

87 Dawson, “Newman’s Place in History,” The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 148, 151-52.

40 begin the work of revising and reconstructing his apocalyptic thinking, and his extensive rewriting of apocalyptic narrative ultimately yielded his mature critique of ‘liberalism.’

Therefore, the only way to share Newman’s singular insight into the phenomenon of

‘liberalism’ and to understand his unique approach to resisting its first principles while redeeming its gifts and virtues is by studying their development in the historical course of his engagement with Christian apocalyptic thought.

IV. Apologia Pro Vita Sua as Guide to Newman’s Apocalyptic Thought

To recapitulate, this study of apocalyptic thought in Newman focuses on his figuration of historical experience between the Ascension and Second Coming of Christ as centering upon an escalating, historical conflict between “the true church of Christ” and “the false church of Antichrist.” My analysis of this apocalyptic theme is structured by the intent of making three broader contributions to scholarship. First, I contend that this apocalyptic figuration functions as a master narrative in Newman’s thought and thus that it provides a key to his intellectual coherence. Second, I argue that he receives this figuration from the

Protestant apocalyptic tradition and that his renewal and reconstruction of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative offers a key to his eclectic theological identity. Third, I propose that

Newman’s effort to extend this figuration to include his age yields his singular critique of modernity as characterized by the danger of ‘liberalism’ and that this modern Catholic appropriation of the Christian apocalyptic tradition provides a key to his historical significance. At the outset of this chapter I stated that I utilize the Apologia as a precedent and a guide for this dissertation. In this concluding section I explain how Newman’s

41 autobiographical text directs my argument through the course of the remaining four chapters.

In the preface to the Apologia, Newman acknowledges that his accuser, the Rev.

Kingsley, got the fundamental question right by titling his polemical pamphlet: “What,

Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?” Indeed, the questions that had long haunted Newman and tarnished his public reputation were about what was going through the mind of this maverick as he endeavored to restore Catholic teaching and practice to the Church of England and ultimately converted to the Church of Rome. The answer at hand usually involved some mixture of conspiracy, cunning, intrigue, and deceit (Apo, 5-13). Newman concedes that it was not only Kingsley but rather “large classes of men” who had imputed dishonesty to him for more than twenty years. The only way to answer Kingsley and the rest of them, Newman decides, is to “give the true key to my whole life” by narrating the

“the history of my mind…that living intelligence, by which I write, and argue, and act”

(Apo, 12). At its most accessible level, the Apologia is simply Newman’s response to allegations that he is dishonest and disloyal or does not value “truth for its own sake.”

As a defense of his life in this regard, it was an overwhelming success.88 Not only did

Newman rehabilitate his public reputation, the reception of the Apologia transformed him into a religious, literary, and cultural icon whose spiritual journey was and is world- renowned. He overcame the widespread impression that he was a regressive sophist, who was unfaithful to his church and nation, by persuasively presenting himself as an honest

88 There has of course been dissent, much of which is surveyed and recapitulated in FitzPatrick, Apologia Pro Charles Kingsley and “Newman and Kingsley,” in David Nichols and Fergus Kerr, eds. John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism, pp. 88-108.

42 Englishman, a conscientious seeker of truth, and a guardian of revealed religion amidst the deluge of infidelity and of ‘liberalism.’89

Without in any way diminishing either the importance or even the primacy of this reading of the Apologia, I contend that at a less accessible level Newman tells a story of apocalyptic thought. On this reading Newman indirectly answers Kingsley’s question as to his “meaning” by obliquely disclosing himself to be the one through whom England’s classical Protestant apocalyptic narrative was extended into modernity through a work of renewal, reconstruction, and conversion. I propose that in the Apologia Newman attempts to bring the apocalypse-haunted Western imagination along on his journey of apocalyptic conversion by telling a story of how this event proleptically occurred in his own thought.

In direct and indirect ways Newman suggests that he and his fellow Britons are, wittingly or unwittingly, acting under the prejudicial influence of a deranged apocalyptic narrative forged and transmitted by their Protestant forebears. I shall show that Newman attributes the development of his religious thought to a slow, steady effort to resolve a contradiction at the heart of England’s inherited apocalyptic narrative while extending its figuration afresh to discern the spiritual condition of Western Christendom at the advent of modernity. I also show that he figures his perception of the inroads of ‘liberalism’ in

Protestant Britain mandating his journey toward Roman Catholicism as the fruit of a singular fidelity to his indigenous prophetic tradition which had yielded deep insight into

89 For an outstanding analysis of the rhetoric of the Apologia, see Cyril O’Regan, “Newman’s Rhetoric in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” Lonergan Review 3:1 (2011), pp. 88-101. Other important analyses include Walter Houghton, The Art of Newman’s Apologia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945), Vincent F. Blehl, S.J. and Francis X. Connolly, eds., Newman’s Apologia: A Classic Reconsidered (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1964), Martin J. Svaglic, “Editor’s Introduction” (Apo, pp. vii-lx), “Essays in Criticism” in David. J. DeLaura, ed., Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968), pp. 421-503, Ian Ker, “Introduction,” Apologia Pro Vita Sua (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. xi- xxxiii, and Turner, “Editor’s Introduction.”

43 the dark side of modernity, while he figures Kingsley’s anti-Catholic bigotry as the unevolved enthusiasm of a bygone era. On this reading the Apologia is a text in which

Newman attempts to break the spell of the classic Protestant apocalyptic narrative by obliquely telling the story of how its hold on his own imagination was overcome. Rather than just deconstructing it, Newman counters the effect of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative by telling the story of how he came to a modern Catholic apocalyptic narrative for which ‘liberalism’ is the true forerunner of Antichrist and Catholicism is the true successor of the Church of Christ apostolic and patristic.

I draw upon and develop this reading of the Apologia in the first section of each of the four remaining chapters. In the second chapter, “Heritage: Remembering Protestant

Apocalyptic Tradition,” I contend that Newman subtly directs the attention of his British readership to the untoward influence of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition upon himself and his fellow Britons, which he elsewhere explicitly names as the key source of the anti-

Catholic “barrier of English prejudice.” That chapter continues with a study of the origins and classic form of that tradition and then moves to a discussion of its influence over the next three centuries in England. In the third chapter, “Early Newman: Renewing

Protestant Apocalyptic Thought,” I show how the Apologia points us toward the evidence of Newman’s early reception and renewal of classic Protestant apocalyptic narrative. This chapter continues by following those leads back to his primary texts and analyzing his first forays in apocalyptic narration in order to confirm the match and look for early signs of his theological distinctiveness. In the fourth chapter, “Anglican Newman:

Reconstructing Apocalyptic Narrative,” I show that the Apologia indicates that

Newman’s first historical experiences of the phenomenon of ‘liberalism’ challenged his

44 inherited apocalyptic narrative and that this, combined with positive experiences of

Catholicism, led him to begin a process of extending and reconstructing his apocalyptic narrative during his Anglican period. In the second section I discuss Newman’s rehabilitation of the early Christian apocalyptic practice that enabled him to have this perception: the practice of watching for the Second Coming. I contend that his approach to this practice is unique not only in the local context of British Protestantism, which was polarized on the practice of watching between enthusiasts and skeptics, but also in the wider context of the history of Christianity as well, which has always been plagued by a fissure between popular apocalyptic preachers and their cultured critics. In the third part I discuss in more detail the textual remains from Newman’s initial efforts to find an adequate apocalyptic figuration for the advent of what he called this “novel age.” In the fifth chapter, “Catholic Newman: An Apocalyptic ‘Critique of Modernity’,” I discuss the mature apocalyptic narrative of ‘liberalism’ that Newman articulates in the Apologia and in other crucial texts, and I continue by comparing and contrasting his singular critique of modernity with other great traditions of modernity criticism.

My explication of this “apocalyptic story” within the Apologia is an attempt to reveal an “esoteric argument” of the text that is integrally related to its “exoteric rhetoric” but has never been brought to the fore. The distinction I am making between the exoteric and an esoteric dimension of a piece of writing is similar to yet different from the one which has been put into contemporary circulation during the century past by

(1899-1973) the scholar of political philosophy. In Persecution and the Art of Writing,

Strauss explains that thinkers whose ideas are unorthodox in their communities are compelled to “write between the lines” in order to address their thoughtful, receptive

45 readers without incurring unwelcome consequences from authorities. As is well known,

Newman operated under the suspicion of both Protestant Britain and the Roman Catholic hierarchy at the time he wrote the Apologia. Drawing on the writings of ancient rhetoricians, Strauss argues, “an exoteric book contains then two teachings: a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject which is indicated only between the lines.”90

Similarly, I contend that Newman’s story of conscientious integrity and virtue is in the foreground, while his story of a conversion of apocalyptic figuration is communicated more implicitly.

The concept of exoteric writing is not at all unfamiliar to Newman, well schooled as he was in ancient rhetoric.91 However Newman drafted a distinctively Christian theory of exoteric writing in his chapter on “The Church of Alexandria” in The Arians of the

Fourth Century (1833). There he argues that the pedagogical interests of the ancient

Alexandrian Christian teachers required that their writings “partake largely of an exoteric character,” which means “that such men would write, not with the openness of Christian familiarity but with the tenderness or the reserve with which we are accustomed to address those who do not sympathize with us, or whom we fear to mislead or to prejudice against the truth, by precipitate disclosures of its details.” He discerns this type of writing in the very structure of the Bible, sees it used in the gospels and the epistles of the New

90 See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 36.

91 See Walter Jost, Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman and Susan Carole Funderburgh Jarratt, A Victorian Sophistic: The Rhetoric of Knowledge in Darwin, Newman, and Pater (University of Texas at Austin PhD Diss., 1985).

46 Testament, and finds its principle explicitly articulated by the church fathers.92 Thus it should be no surprise that he would practice this kind of cautious, economic writing in a text which was aimed at and has in fact reached the widest possible audience. Newman himself interprets the Apologia this way in response to criticism of his negative characterization of “reason” therein. Newman clarifies that he is not deprecating human reason generally there; by specifying “reason actually and historically” he implied the

“reason” of “the World, the false prophet,” to which he was attempting to speak while being “very loath…to preach.”93 In the Apologia, as in his other attempts at public persuasion, he veils the apocalyptic discourse more openly presented in his sermons in a way that correlates with my distinction between esoteric and exoteric writing.

My hermeneutic approach to the Apologia and to Newman’s writings in general is supported by scholarly recognition that he operates “with reserve” and employs distinct uses of Christian discourse.94 It is also in concord with Paul’s apocalyptic distinction between (1) “people of the flesh” who live according to “the wisdom of this age” on the one hand and (2) “infants in Christ” and (3) “mature, spiritual people” who to various

92 Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century, Third Edition (London: E. Lumley, 1871 [1833] (40-102, 42). Henceforth citations of this volume are parenthetical and are abbreviated as Ari. Newman penciled an annotation in his personal copy of the first edition of The Arians above a passage on the topic of “economy” in the Alexandrian school; there he states his intention to articulate a more comprehensive theory of Christian rhetoric by throwing “Disc. Arc. Allegory & Economy together in one calling it the principle of importing truth gradually and considerately wh. Goes under different names etc. Or qu. begin with remarks on the Address (wisdom of serpent) necessary for preaching gospel, give various instances of the rhetoric from Scripture, e.g. from St. Paul – then branch out” (quoted and cited in Thomas, Newman and Heresy, p. 254).

93 Newman, “The Development of Religious Error,” The Contemporary Review (October 1885), pp. 457-69 (460).

94 For “reserve” in Newman, see Selby, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings on John Henry Cardinal Newman. For the distinction between discourses of inquiry regarding faith, of explicit faith, and of doctrinal explication of faith in Newman, see Jouett Powell, Three Uses of Christian Discourse in John Henry Newman.

47 degrees live by “God’s hidden wisdom” revealed through the Spirit,” which Newman explicitly valorizes.95 Nevertheless, given the relative originality of my argument and the inherent questionability of my reliance on the idea of exoteric writing as a hermeneutical tool, I will belabor textual grounds for my interpretation through quotation and exegesis, even as I maintain that its adequacy depends on fit with and illumination of the Apologia and his work as a whole. Ultimately, my explication of the Apologia’s esoteric exercise in apocalyptic refiguration is a microcosm of my larger argument: apocalyptic thought may appear at first glance to be marginal and tangential to Newman’s life and work, but the study of it provides a unique key to his intellectual coherence as a rhetorical thinker, to his eclectic theological identity, as well as to his historical significance as a Christian critic of Western modernity.

95 See Paul, I Corinthians 2-3. For an example of Newman’s explicit valorization and employment of Paul’s apocalyptic distinction between fleshly and spiritual persons with regard to Christian practices of communication, see especially Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. I, Sermon 18 (London: Rivingtons, 1868 [1834]), pp. 240-41. Henceforth citations of these sermons are parenthetical and abbreviated as PPS.

48 CHAPTER TWO

HERITAGE: REMEMBERING PROTESTANT APOCALYPTIC TRADITION

In order to recognize the presence and the importance of apocalyptic thought in Newman, it is necessary to read his writings without forgetting the Protestant apocalyptic tradition.

Thus the second step in the argument of this dissertation involves a work of remembering this tradition’s classical figuration of historical experience between the Ascension and

Second Coming of Christ as centering on an escalating conflict between “the true church of Christ” and “the false church of Antichrist.” Understanding this figuration is essential in order to recognize its function as a master narrative in Newman’s thought, to identity

Newman theologically as an apocalyptic Christian thinker, and to trace the intellectual process of its adaptation as Newman constructs an encompassing Christian interpretation of Western modernity.

In the first part of this chapter I make the next move in my argument that in the

Apologia Newman is subtly attempting to draw the attention of Protestant Britain to the ideological function that classical Protestant apocalyptic narrative performs by narrating the way he came to identify and exorcise its negative effect on his own mind. I begin by marshaling evidence for the case that Newman implies from the beginning that this is in fact the aim of the Apologia, and in order to further this case I draw on earlier, more explicit or “exoteric” texts such as Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic

49 Teaching (1850) and The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851). Newman’s interpreters have not previously recognized the significance of this theological context.

Although they have noted traces of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition in his writings, the identities of its transmitters and the impressions made as a result of his reception of their writings have never been adequately determined.96 Accomplishing this task is the primary occupation of the present chapter. In the second part I offer an account of just what its

“classical form” is. I analyze its emergence during the Reformation, focusing on John

Bale because he is widely and rightly regarded as the originator of a distinctively British and Protestant form of the Christian apocalyptic tradition. In the 1540s he produced a reconstructive synthesis of apocalyptic traditions that proved to be massively influential in legitimizing British Protestantism. I explain how Bale’s apocalyptic vision selectively blends the theological legacies of Augustine of Hippo, Joachim of Fiore, and John

Wycliffe.97 Since Bale is the key source of the trajectory in apocalyptic thought to which

96 See Chapter One, p. 26. The lone study of Thomas Newton’s influence on Newman is Misner, “Newman and the Tradition concerning the Papal Antichrist.” Misner examines Newton as a source of “anti-Catholicism” rather than as a mediator of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. Sheridan Gilley first brought to light much of the evidence for Newman’s schooling in this tradition in “Newman and Prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic.” However Gilley also does not connect Newman to the classical British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. Instead, he understandably conflates the species of apocalyptic thought that the early Newman renews with the popular apocalypticism which broke out among evangelical Protestants in the wake of the .

97 On the origins and development of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition, see Bryan Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism (Leiden: Brill, 1975); Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the : From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Oxford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); Katharine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969) and Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979); G. J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). I have especially benefited from consulting the volumes by Bauckham and Firth.

50 Newman belongs, it is important to understand his relationships to the apocalyptic traditions on which he draws, both for Newman’s intellectual genealogy and to understand Newman’s mature critique of its “secularizing” effects, which I summarize in conclusion.

Though few make the case as colorfully as Newman does in his Lectures on the

Present Position of Catholics in England, scholars now widely agree that the Protestant apocalyptic narrative had a formative effect on the British “social imaginary” during the subsequent three centuries of its dissemination, which I discuss in the third part of this chapter.98 Its main characteristics became constitutive of what may be called a British

Protestant master narrative, a Weltanschauung or grand récit featuring an encompassing story of a battle between God and Satan, truth and falsehood, good and evil that is at once cosmic and historical. Protestants in England are at the center of the story, figured as the suffering witnesses to Christian liberty in a world darkened by the superstition and tyranny of Antichrist. Although versions of the British Protestant apocalyptic narrative naturally vary, the variations still share a basic structure, which derives from Bale. After reaching the height of its influence in the middle of the seventeenth century, the classical

British Protestant apocalyptic narrative is increasingly whittled down into more generic narratives of providence and/or progress during the subsequent two centuries. Newman’s mentors in apocalyptic thought, such as Newton, Milner, and Thomas Scott (1747-1821), are among those resisting this trend as the eighteen century ends and the nineteenth century begins.

98 For the concept of “social imaginary,” see Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) and A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 159-211.

51 I. Implications of a Protestant Apocalyptic Prejudice in the Apologia

The first sign that the Apologia is not only an exoteric but also an apotropaic work appears in the preface when Newman presents it as an effort to “break through” a “barrier of prejudice” against him and then reflects on the phenomenon of prejudice. The topic is directly relevant to his immediate task. Newman finds the greatest obstacle to making a case for his integrity not in the quality of available evidence but in “the bias of the court” and in the “state of the atmosphere.” The principal difficulty of defending his reputation against Kingsley’s infamous jab and ensuing assault to the effect that Newman does not and Roman Catholic clergy generally do not value truth for its own sake, he suggests, is that Kingsley has preemptively tarred his testimony by associating it with popular images of deceptive Roman clergy.99 Kingsley has drawn on the credit of a longstanding English prejudice and used it at Newman’s expense in an effort to forestall an unbiased hearing of his witness in their controversy. Newman quotes Kingsley, “I am henceforth in doubt and fear, as much as any honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write.

How can I tell that I shall be the dupe of some cunning equivocation?” Kingsley had thus effectively “poisoned the wells,” by which Newman means that he had infused “into the imaginations of my readers suspicion and mistrust of everything that I may say in reply”

(Apo, 11, 10, 6). Newman dwells upon the difficulty of contradicting a prejudice that has had a wide and profound effect to bring home the way prejudice inoculates its recipients from apprehending contrary evidence. How can he respond to allegations of dishonesty,

99 Newman published the initial provocation and subsequent exchange in a pamphlet titled Mr. Kingsley and Dr. Newman: A Correspondence on the Question “Whether Dr. Newman Teaches That Truth Is No Virtue?” It is reprinted in Wilfrid Ward, ed. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: The Two Versions of 1864 & 1865, Preceded by Newman’s and Kingsley’s Pamphlets (London: Oxford University Press, 1913).

52 Newman wonders, when every attempt he makes at persuasion is interpreted as another work of dissimulation?

The obvious intemperance with which Kingsley had vented his anti-Catholicism in the pamphlet “What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?” enabled Newman retroactively to call into question similar allegations which had haunted him for nearly thirty years and to inquire about their roots. He recalls being characterized as a “Romanist” in Protestant clothes doing the bidding of a hostile power in “the bosom of the English Establishment.”

The view that Newman was dishonest to teach Catholic in their Protestant Church was widely held as he led the Tractarian revival of Catholicism in the Church of England.

As his influence grew, so did the popular demand for an explanation of this phenomenon.

Whether Catholicism was interpreted as the national nemesis or as a dead fossil with no right to modern existence, the question was: how can it be growing from inside England today? It was explained in the same way that Britons had explained the maintenance and extension of the Roman Church during the preceding three centuries, Newman recalls: as the consequence of a conspiracy of “craft and intrigue.” Some suggested that he must be receiving underground communications from authorities in the Roman Church. As his teaching continued to approximate Catholic doctrine more closely, the opinion arose that

Newman had already become a Catholic but had been given leave to keep up his outward

Protestant profession so as to better sow subversion from within. The idea that he was in fact a Jesuit came soon afterwards, and his reception into the Roman Church seemed to validate the extravagant legends. Newman finds in these myths of his religious journey a recycling of popular depictions of the Roman Catholic Church as an anti-Christian and un-English institution making its way in the world by “unscrupulous cunning and deceit.”

53 The rote rehearsal and casual reception of this fabulous explanation strikes Newman as evidence of the continuing hold of a myth that has long enthralled England (Apo, 9-11).

The ostensive purpose of Newman’s prefatory reflections on prejudice generally and on anti-Catholic prejudice specifically is local: by suggesting that the playing field is tilted to his disadvantage Newman garners sympathy and improves his chances of getting an open hearing. His larger interest, I propose, is to exhume and to exorcise this prejudice itself. This dimension of the Apologia is more easily apprehended if one remembers that

Newman was neither unprepared for this assault nor unfamiliar with English Protestant mythologies of Roman Catholicism. He had published his own take on the subject, which is part satire, part historical analysis, and all ideology critique, thirteen years earlier in his

Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. This text sheds a great light on the Apologia generally and on its preface specifically. There Newman explicitly takes aim at the anti-Catholic ideology and attempts to expose the truth that it hides. He argues that, since the king took over the place of the Pope in the Anglican Establishment, this royal usurpation was and continues to be legitimated among the multitude by calling the

Pope the Antichrist. The natural English inclination to exalt their Sovereign was thus indulged by elevating him “above the Law and the Gospel” as their savior from the Papal

Antichrist of Rome.100 From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, he avers, this very potent image has been impressed upon the populace of England, instilling sentiments of fear and hostility toward both the Roman Church and the nations under its influence.

100 Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England: Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory in the Summer of 1851 (London: Burns & Lambert, 1851), pp. 85, 59ff. Henceforth citations of this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as PP.

54 Newman explains that the slogan “the Pope is the Antichrist” is shorthand for an historical narrative that takes the form of a three act drama. Christianity begins in pristine splendor but becomes tragically corrupt in its middle age. The infamous darkness of the medieval age is the consequence of the Pope deceiving European nations into committing the apostasy foretold in Pauline apocalyptic texts. The tyrannical Roman Church arose, fulfilling awful images in the Apocalypse of the Babylonian “mother of abominations.”

All genuine worship of God and faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ were said to be replaced by a counterfeit religion: worshipping the blessed virgin, the pope, saints, and images, and so Newman finds the homilies of the Church of England lamenting “the pit of damnable ” in which “all the world, as it were, drowned… until our age.” In this story Christianity triumphantly returns to purity in England through the cooperation of Protestant reformers and British civil authorities, while corruption continues elsewhere in Europe. Rather than being an evil already overcome, the apostate Church of Rome is seen as a living threat, having not yet “disgorged its prey, except, as foresaid, in our own favored country” (PP, 12-14). Newman finds that the source of the self-legitimating story of a luminous antiquity and an enlightened modern England interrupted by a middle age of darkness and surrounded by superstitious tyranny abroad is this anti-papal reading of canonical apocalyptic texts, which was successfully disseminated by English Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.101

101 Interestingly, in one of his earlier works on the deleterious influence of apocalyptic and gnostic ideas in modern political thought, political philosopher Eric Voegelin refers to Newman’s Present Position of Catholics in England for its incisive criticism of Protestant apocalypticism; see Voegelin, The Political Religions [1938], in Manfred Henningsen, ed., Modernity without Restraint, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Vogelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 57.

55 Newman spends four hundred pages analyzing and satirizing the mythologies that have grown from this Protestant apocalypse, conducting what amounted to the first major modern challenge to a state-sponsored historiography that had absorbed the English mind for more than three hundred years.102 Unlike in the Apologia, Newman has no need in this text to be indirect because he is writing for a friendly Catholic audience of lay associates of the Birmingham Oratory and secondarily for interested members of British society.103 His aim is to unveil the true histories of Christianity and of England without idealism, as he explains more directly to former Tractarian comrades a year earlier in his first lecture on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching: “we must not indulge our imagination, we must not dream: we must look at things as they are …ridding our minds of these illusions.” Newman describes this task as difficult and arduous but as inevitable as when “in fairy tales…the spell is broken.” The straight truth that he uncovers in these lectures is that the Church of England “is nothing more or less than an

Establishment, a department of Government, or a function or operation of the State…a mere collection of officials, depending upon and living in the supreme civil power.”104

Newman continues this demythologization project in his Lectures on the Present

Position of Catholics in England; he demystifies the received hagiography of the English

Reformation by reminding readers of considerations that are all too human: “when King

102 See John R. Griffin, A Historical Commentary on the Major Catholic Works of Cardinal Newman (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 57. On the identity-forming status of this narrative for Britons, see especially Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, pp. 11-54, and Williamson, Apocalypse Then.

103 See Carl F. Frandsen, A Rhetorical Analysis of John Henry Newman’s Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (The City University of New York PhD Diss., 1975).

104 Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891 [1851]), vol. 1, pp. 4-6. Henceforth citations of this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as CD.

56 Henry began a new religion, when Elizabeth brought it into shape, when her successors completed and confirmed it,” Newman writes, they were perceptive enough to realize that it could never stand on its own. It had to be forcibly established by the state, he reasons, because the condition of its possibility—the right to assert the private judgment of some particular theologian or school thereof over the church teaching—undermines authority, disintegrates community, and erodes tradition. Newman argues that historically speaking

Protestantism first arose and has been “maintained not in the way of reason and truth, not by appeals to facts, but by…a compulsory tradition” (PP, 54-57). Although Newman’s thesis is a commonplace of historical scholarship now,105 it was a radical proposition in his time and place. Newman’s stress on Protestant alliance with and dependence on civil authorities in the battle against the Roman Church has an affinity with the view of the

German Reformation articulated by Karl Marx (1818-83) right around the same time; he highlighted the way it “emancipated the lay popes – the princes, with the whole of their priestly clique, the privileged and philistines.”106 Both regarded the apocalyptic rhetoric of Roman Catholic corruption and Protestant reform as a veil under which the civil usurpation of ecclesial authority occurred. Newman and Marx are equally concerned to lift the veil, but whereas Marx openly pronounces the usurpation a liberation and aims to complete the work thus inaugurated, Newman repents of the overextension of apocalyptic

105 Hans Hillerbrand for example recently confirms the consensus that “only by obtaining or influencing political power did Protestantism attain formal success” in The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 2007), p. 244.

106 See Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Marx, Early Writings, trans. by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1975 [1843- 44]), pp. 243-57 (252). Newman is also akin to Marx in his view of the relationship between Christianity and class, without however the reductionism and with instead the view that it is naturally empowering: “The Church is essentially a popular institution, defending the cause and encouraging the talents of the lower classes, and interposing an external barrier in favour of high or low against the ambition and the rapacity of the temporal power” in Newman, “Who’s to Blame?” [1855] in DA, pp. 306-62 (321).

57 narration and aims to restore the sovereignty appropriate to ecclesial authority. They nonetheless agree that the bourgeois delusion of classical Protestantism, according to which it is the witness of the Spirit that has led the civil authorities to authorize magisterial Reformation teaching, is a fiction that can no longer function as a narratological source of civil order.

Having redescribed modern English Protestantism as authoritarian and dogmatic,

Newman continues to turn the tables on classical Protestant historiography by examining its “priestcraft” among the masses. In order to persuade the people that it was meet and right for the king to take the place of the Pope as supreme head of the Church in England and to revise authoritative forms of religious doctrine and practice, much less to seize its property, the prominent outline of the new tradition required “bold painting” and “glaring coloring,” Newman explains. The multitude would not have been converted to the cause of the Reformation by careful reasoning or by facts that could be proved, so instead “its upholders were clever enough to call the Pope Antichrist, and they let the startling accusation sink into men’s minds.” Newman marvels at the genius of this “recourse to fiction” (PP, 129). To him it shows a high degree of insight into the difficulty of making a deep “impression on those who have never learned to exercise their minds, to compare thought with thought, to analyze an argument, or to balance probabilities.” The historical depth and traditional breadth of the Roman Catholic Church appeals to the imagination and thus an equally vivid counter-effect was needed. Newman wonders at what “a bold, politic, and successful move” depicting the Pope as Antichrist turned out to be (PP, 224-

25). After hunting for the likeness of the Pope “in the book of Daniel, St. Paul’s epistles, and The Apocalypse” and warranting the startling charge of being a counterfeit church by

58 “chips and fragments of St. Paul and St. John,” English Bible readers have henceforth been trained to apply the language of 2 Thessalonians 2:11 and associated texts to the

Roman Church and its agents (PP, 81, 322).

Far from having only specifically ‘religious’ significance, Newman finds that this teaching became an integrating and cohesive element in “the established Tradition of law, and of the clergy and of the court, and of the universities, and of literature, and of good society” (PP, 256, 85). As a key to the canonical apocalyptic texts, it regulated not only historical memory but also interpretation of the Bible, which supplied the common stock of symbols used in English literature since the age of Elizabeth, when “that succession of great authors which continues to flow on down to this day” first began. Indeed, its great influence could not have come at a more opportune time, coinciding with the Renaissance of classical languages and literature as well as the birth and standardization of the English language in a translation of the Bible “authorized” by the monarchy. The ensuing literary achievements ensured that the Protestant apocalypse would be central to British traditions of “civil intercourse and political life.” As a result, Newman notes, the words “Pope” and

“pagan” just seem to go together in English (PP, 67-72). Though the intensity of explicit belief waxed and waned, the association of the Roman Church with “him whom Scripture emphatically calls the father of lies…the accuser and the slanderer” was seared into the

British imagination. Even after many dissenting religious opinions became tolerable in the Church of England, one remained sacred: “her Majesty the Queen is ‘the Mother and

Mistress of all Churches’,” and a second was truly infallible: “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm” (PP, 141, 76). Newman testifies to the continuing vitality of this apocalyptic ideology in popular Protestant discourses of Victorian England, noting

59 that it can be bought “by the yard at the first publisher’s shop” or heard at any Protestant church that one crosses: “the Church (who can doubt it?) is a sorceress, intoxicating the nations with a goblet of blood” (PP, 14).

Newman’s account of the way that the Protestant apocalypse is interwoven with political authority, social order, cultural production, and religious conformity in modern

England is akin to the practice of Ideologiekritik in the Frankfurt School.107 His exposition of the paradox by which the Reformation represents itself as liberation from superstition while captivating its subjects with another mythology is analogous to the interpretation of modernity famously set forth by Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and

Theodore Adorno (1903-1969) in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.108 An appreciation of this is crucial for understanding what Newman is attempting to accomplish in the

Apologia. When Kingsley, the embodiment of modern English Protestantism in its most respectable and articulate form, so bluntly and rabidly applied this ideological interpretation of Roman Catholicism to Newman, he provided an unprecedented opportunity to bring this “prejudice” to consciousness and break its spell; thus Newman interprets the allegations of Kingsley against him as representative not only of the popular dismissal of his career but also of a long-established English vice.109 When

Newman suggests that Kingsley is the one who “has been furiously carried away by his

107 The Frankfurt School’s practice of Ideologiekritik is introduced in Raymond Geuss, The Idea of Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 26ff.

108 See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1944]).

109 On Kingsley’s identity as the face and voice of English Protestant anti-Roman Catholicism in its most respectable form, see Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 67-76.

60 feelings,” he is using Kingsley as a cipher through which to engage this deeper stain upon the English “social imaginary.” His first step is simply to challenge modern Protestant convictions about the prospect, much less the achievement, of their emancipation from prejudice. Newman reminds his readers that our imaginations are always in danger of running away with us. He regards this peril as perennial because we naturally interpret our experience in terms of “our antecedent impressions. The same sentiments, according as our jealousy is or is not awake, or our aversion stimulated, are tokens either of truth or of dissimulation and pretense.” Newman regards this human trait as inexorable, just as our experience is ineradicably ambiguous. He does not think that history is a contingent process of trading one groundless myth for another, however. He trusts in the old saying:

Prævalebit Veritas. Newman believes that falsehoods, such as the charge against him and by implication against the Roman Church, cannot finally stain even though they can stick for a time. Appealing to the virtue of truthfulness, Newman asks his readers to resist the temptation of falling into familiar habit as they consider his testimony (Apo, 6-7).

Newman does not pretend that there is an unmediated truth to which he intends to give his readers access. He acknowledges that he must provide a counter-hermeneutic to the “positive idea” of “a liar” with which Kingsley has painted him in accordance with a tradition going back three hundred years. The only effective answer, he thinks, will be “a corresponding antagonist unity,” that is, an alternative “antecedent impression” by which to interpret the meaning of the intelligence that animates his writing and action. Newman contends that the only way to dispel the effect of false ideas is with true ideas. The false idea by which he and by implication the Roman Church have historically been disfigured cannot be overcome by argument alone; it must be countered by the idea that illuminates

61 their true meanings. Newman chooses what appears in the light of Present Position to be a telling illustration of what he means by the contest between false and true ideas:

We see, in the case of commentators on the prophesies of Scripture, an exemplification of the principle on which I am insisting; viz. how much more powerful even a false interpretation of the sacred text is than none at all;—how a certain key to the visions of the Apocalypse, for instance, may cling to the mind (I have found it so in the case of my own), because the view, which it opens on us, is positive and objective, in spite of the fullest demonstration that it really has no claim upon our reception. The reader says, ‘What else can the prophecy mean?’ just as my Accuser asks, ‘What, then, does Dr. Newman mean?’…I reflected, and I saw a way out of my perplexity (Apo, 11-12).

As Newman confirms in chapter one, he is referring to the classical Protestant reading of canonical apocalyptic texts, according to which figures of an eschatological arch-deceiver find their referent in the history of the Roman Papacy. The use of this particular analogy to illuminate the way Kingsley’s image of Newman as a deceiver has been received in the absence of the idea that illumines Newman’s true meaning is unlikely to be coincidental.

When Newman states that the correspondence between these interpretations showed him

“a way out of his perplexity,” he seems to imply what he openly asserts in the earlier text: that the Protestant tradition of apocalyptic narration is the historical source and primary mediator of the antecedent prejudice against the Roman Papacy as a corrupt deceiver, on which Kingsley’s allegation concerning Newman and the Roman clergy depends.

In the preface to the Apologia Newman not only surreptitiously communicates his conviction that the Protestant apocalypse is the “barrier of prejudice” which needs to be broken through but also that he aims to do so by giving “the true key” to his “whole life” in what he calls “the history of [his] mind.” This could only be an effective strategy, one rightly infers, if that history is itself the story of such a breakthrough. Newman raises this possibility obliquely in the middle of the illustration quoted above. There he nonchalantly

62 discloses that he is intimately familiar with the aesthetic power of this “key to the visions of the Apocalypse,” of its tendency to cling to the mind due to the “positive and objective” nature of the “view which it opens on us” in spite of the sobering fact that “it really has no claim upon our reception” and is “false.” Thus Newman states candidly that he once explicitly held the very apocalyptic vision that is being used against him, that he came to regard it as false, and that its allure proved difficult to overcome. Moreover, his contention that only a true idea can displace a false idea seems to imply that overcoming it involved conversion to apocalyptic vision of another type, the persuasiveness of which broke the spell of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative. The propriety of this inference is buttressed by the fact that Newman declares something akin to its desirability in a letter of 1855 and in the notes for a sermon in 1872. In the former Newman contends, “It is important …that Catholics should handle the Apocalypse. Protestants are too apt to think that we give it up into their hands, as confessedly their weapon, not our property” (LD

XVI, 416). Newman laments in the latter, “It seems to me a great pity that Catholics leave Scripture prophecy …for rumors and stories about prophecies without foundation, e.g. at this very time” (SN, 228). In order for the spellbinding characterization of

Newman and of the Roman Church that issues from the Protestant interpretation of The

Apocalypse to be broken by the Apologia, its vision would, according to the terms laid out in the preface, necessarily involve displacement by a view of those phenomena that issues from a Catholic apocalyptic perspective (Apo, 11-12, 14).

63 II. John Bale and the Classic British Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative

The British Protestant apocalyptic tradition originated with early exiled reformers at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but Bale is its true architect.110 The ex-Carmelite friar, antiquarian, and playwright constructed his major work, The Image of Both Churches,

Being an Exposition of the Most Wonderful Book of Revelation of St.

(1541-47), as a “paraphrase” of The Apocalypse of John. Drawing on a wide array of biblical texts in consultation with the entire heritage of patristic, medieval, and nascent continental Protestant apocalyptic commentary, he configured a fresh figuration of the cosmic battle between God and Satan which inclusively illuminated the movement of providence in world history and directly addressed thereby the questions which most vexed English Reformers.111 The great challenge to Protestantism was its apparent novelty, locality, and discontinuity in contrast to the antiquity, ubiquity, and continuity of

Roman Catholicism. Christianity had been established in England as a mission of the

Roman Church in the sixth century, and the perpetuation of its authoritative forms was thus widely taken to be England’s natural course. Rather than contradicting these plain appearances, Bale reversed their respective meanings by recontextualizing them within an apocalyptic narrative. England’s Christian history remains glorious, but the Roman papacy’s apostasy in these latter days means that now only rebellion can be true Christian

110 Bale collected, read, and catalogued every commentary on the Apocalypse he could find. In addition to studying the first Protestant adaptations of the apocalyptic tradition, he visited many important Protestant cities in Europe during his exile from England in the 1540s. For an excellent study of parallel developments in apocalyptic thought during the Lutheran Reformation, see Robin B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

111 Andrew Escobedo discusses how Bale’s apocalyptic narrative responds to the issues of religious and national continuity of English identity in Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 28ff. and 85ff.

64 obedience. On his telling, the prima facie marks of the Roman Church’s legitimacy become the deceptive façade of Antichrist lately produced in the Middle Ages, and

Protestantism’s prima facie signs of illegitimacy are turned into tragic consequences of its heroic efforts to purify the Church of corruptions, following in the prophetic line of the

Apostles, Church Fathers, and medieval forerunners of the Reformers. Bale shows how the Catholic catastrophe and its Protestant contestation fits the revealed pattern of apocalyptic expectation and thereby legitimates the Reformation as the providential will of God in this time of eschatological urgency.

One reason why Bale’s reformulation of the Christian apocalyptic tradition is so deserving of extended attention is because, as Newman observed, its historical effects in

England are deep and far-reaching, if often also hidden. Bale popularized his apocalyptic narrative by illustrating its central themes in numerous plays and histories in which the

Roman Church is depicted as irredeemably corrupt and the English kings and common people are rendered heroic defenders of Christian liberty against Papal tyranny even unto death. His interpretation of The Apocalypse of John and of biblical prophecy generally was summarized in the notes of the Geneva Bible, an English translation first published in 1560 and more widely used in private by Britons than any other during the subsequent century. In addition to providing a framework through which the greatest portion of first- generation English Bible readers learned how to interpret scripture, Bale’s narrative also structured the way they were first taught to remember history through the second-most popular book in sixteenth-century England: Actes and Monuments of These Latter and

Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, Wherein Are Comprehended and

Described the Great Persecutions and Horrible Troubles That Have Bene Wrought and

65 Practised by the Romishe Prelates (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583) by John Foxe (1516-1587).

For several hundred years Foxe’s Book of was a second Bible for the English people, frequently chained alongside the Great Bible in English parish churches.112 From popular pamphlets to The Faerie Queene (1590, 96) by Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599), the evidence suggests that the broad contours and main ideas of Bale’s apocalyptic narrative were well established in the English social imaginary by the end of the sixteenth century, providing the common ground for development and division in the seventeenth century which would perdure in modern English thought.113 Far from being eclipsed by eighteenth-century rationalism, the basic structure of his narrative was transmitted in practices of biblical interpretation, historical memory, and poetic figuration well into the nineteenth century, continued to govern identification of good and evil, and provided the ideological bond which held together the of Great Britain during its wars with Catholic France from the Act of Union in 1707 through the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.114 Bale’s significance as the rhetorical “engineer” of this master narrative shift is thus comparable to the role played by Augustine, whose against the

Pagans (426) deconstructed the glory of Rome as prideful glorification of self and

112 See Hillerbrand, The Division of Christendom, pp. 247-48.

113 In addition to the scholarship referenced in the previous three notes, this judgment is supported by C. Patrides and Jospeh Wittreich, eds. The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Robin Barnes “Images of Hope and Despair: Western Apocalypticism ca. 1500-1800,” Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Interpretations of the Revelation of John: 1500- 1800,” and Richard K. Emmerson, “Apocalyptic Themes and Imagery in Medieval and Renaissance Literature” in Bernard McGinn, ed., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Volume 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture, pp. 143-184, 185-203, 402-441; Marjorie Reeves in “English Apocalyptic Thinkers (c.1540-1620),” in Roberto Rusconi, ed. Storia e figure dell’ Apocalisse fra ’500 e ’600: Atti del 4 Congresso internazionale di studi giochimiti. San Gioganni in Fiore—14-17 setembre 1994 (Rome: Viella, 1996), pp. 259-73; and Esther Gilman Richey in The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998).

114 Its influence in the modern period is well demonstrated in Burdon, The Apocalypse in England. Its ideological function is argued in Colley’s well-received Britons, especially pp. 11-54.

66 countered with his narrative of a city dedicated to glorifying God humbly which inspired medieval Christendom.

Bale stands broadly within the tradition of Joachim of Fiore, whose passion for spiritual understanding of figural patterns in the Bible was deemed excessive by other

Augustinian hermeneuts, among whom (1225-1274) was not least.115

Franciscan friar turned Protestant Reformer Francis Lambert (1486-1530) was the primary mediator of the Joachimite tradition to Bale. Like Joachim and Lambert, Bale interprets The Apocalypse as a recapitulation of all the truths of the Bible, which therefore provides a hermeneutical key to its intertextual unity.116 In addition to indicating his debts to other interpreters, the margins of Bale’s exposition are filled with cross-references to other biblical texts. He finds the teachings of Moses in the law, of

David in the Psalms, and of the Prophets concerning the Messianic kingdom of God summed up in The Apocalypse, providing a narrative framework within which all the symbols and teachings of the Old and New Testaments are organized. Focusing on both its vision of Christ’s eternal victory over sin, death, and the devil through his crucifixion

115 Bauckham takes stock of Bale’s medieval sources in Tudor Apocalypse, pp. 17-38. For Joachim’s theology, see Majorie Reeves, Joachim de Fiore and the Prophetic Future. For Joachim’s influence up to and into the sixteenth century, see Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages and McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot. The basic of Joachim is demonstrated in Winfrid M. J. Schachten, Ordo Salutis: Das Gesetz als Weise der Heilsvermittlung: Zur Kritik des L. H. Thomas von Aquin an Joachim von Fiore (Münster: Aschendorf, 1980), pp. 26-31.

116 See Bale, The Image of Both Churches in The Select Works of Bishop Bale, Henry Christmas, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849 [1547]), p. 252. Henceforth citations of this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as IBC. A useful introduction to the concept of intertextuality in recent literary theory and its relevance for study of the New Testament is David E. Aune, The Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and Rhetoric (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), pp. 233-34. Intertextual interpretation of The Apocalypse has once again become central in contemporary biblical studies. See for example David Aune, “Apocalypse Renewed: An Intertextual Reading of the Apocalypse of John,” in David L. Barr, ed. The Reality of Apocalypse: Rhetoric and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2006), pp. 43-70. Henceforth citations of The Apocalypse of John are parenthetical and abbreviated as Apocalypse.

67 and resurrection and its prophetic figuration of the history of Christ’s kingdom from the nativity to his Second Coming at the world’s end, Bale interprets The Apocalypse as the climactic vision in the messianic tradition, an apocalypse unthinkable until after the First

Advent of Christ. The Joachimite hermeneutic of the Bible thus yields an apocalyptic theology of history: The Apocalypse unveils the time from creation until the end of the world as an extended battle between God and Satan, within which the time between

Christ’s First and Second Advents opens the horizon of a dramatic decision for human beings: a time to side either with the Lamb or with the enemies of the Lamb.

Following in the Joachimite lineage, Bale interprets The Apocalypse as a prophetic disclosure of the historical trials that Christ’s kingdom has suffered, is suffering, and will suffer on its way to the consummation of the kingdom at the Second

Advent. This history consists of seven ages, which correspond to the seven seals on the scroll in the right hand of the One seated on the throne (Apocalypse 5:1ff.). The power of

Antichrist increases progressively in every age, but the accompanying seven trumpets symbolize the holy witnesses to truth in whose mouths God places fresh words to counter

Antichrist in each age. Joachim’s trinitarian schematization of history, in which an arriving age of the Spirit promises to exceed the present age of the Son, is not among the patterns that one finds in Bale’s narrative. Bale does say, however, that The Apocalypse reveals both the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit as one everlasting God and Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of the Father more clearly than any other biblical texts. According to

Bale, the primary purpose of The Apocalypse is not speculative but practical: it trains disciples to discriminate between the true church of Christ and the false church of

Antichrist in history, hence the title: the image of both churches. While the Joachimite

68 figuration of church history as seven successive ages in which the disciples of Christ and the legions of Antichrist become increasingly polarized provides the backdrop for Bale’s apocalyptic narrative, an antithesis between Babylon and the New occupies its foreground.

Bale invokes Augustine of Hippo (354-430) as the source of this antithesis, citing him several times (IBC, 252),117 but the theme was mostly likely mediated to him through the mainline western Christian tradition of commentary on The Apocalypse, which stretches from Tyconius (370-90) through Augustine, (c. 673-735), and

Autpert (d. 784) down to Rupert of Deutz (d. 1131), Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), and

Nicholas of Lyre (1270-1349).118 Augustine and Bale both teach that The Apocalypse embraces the whole time between Christ’s First and Second Advents and that its symbolic obscurity and density is due to its illumination of many different aspects of a

117 An excellent study of this major theme in Augustine is Johannes van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon: A Study into Augustine’s City of God and the Sources of his Doctrine of the Two Cities (New York: E. J. Brill, 1991). Augustine has been misleadingly labeled “anti-apocalyptic” because he rejects two obvious characteristics of popular Christian apocalypticism: (1) belief in the future advent of an earthly millennial kingdom in excess of the Church Catholic and (2) speculation on the chronological dates of future fulfillments of apocalyptic prophecies (see for example Gerald Bonner, “Augustine and Millenarianism,” in , ed. The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 235-54; J. Kevin Coyle, “Augustine and Apocalyptic: Thoughts on the Fall of Rome, the Book of Revelation, and the End of the World,” Florilegium 9 (1987), pp. 1-33; Paula Fredriksen, “Apocalypse and Redemption: From John of Patmos to Augustine of Hippo,” Vigilae Christianae 45 (1991), pp. 151-83). In the absence of a persuasive reason as to why millenarianism and chronological speculation should be made definitive of apocalyptic thought rather than one (relatively crude) trajectory therein, recent scholarship is beginning to reconsider Augustine as a kind of apocalyptic thinker embodying a rival trajectory in the Christian apocalyptic tradition (see for example the essays in Mark Vessey, Karla Pollman, and Allan D. Fitzgerald, eds., History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999) and in John Doody, Kari Kloos, and Kim Paffenroth, eds., Augustine and Apocalyptic (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).

118 For the origins and transmission of this tradition see Kenneth B. Steinhauser, The Apocalypse Commentary of Tyconius: A History of Its Reception and Influence (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987).

69 singular transhistorical reality.119 Both likewise regard the supernatural, eschatological battle between Babylon and the New Jerusalem as that central subject matter. In The City of God Augustine employs these two contrasting apocalyptic symbols to construct a comprehensive vision of history as a contest between the city of God and the earthly city, which Bale translates into two mystical churches of Christ and Antichrist. Augustine identifies the Church Catholic as the city of God on pilgrimage through history and sees the Roman Empire embodying the earthly city with its sights set solely on self- glorification, but he does not absolutize this dichotomy. He teaches that the concrete membership of these cities during this exilic time between advents does not necessarily correspond to their eschatological memberships.

Against the Donatist attempt to define sharply the ‘true saints’ and to circumscribe membership in the Church accordingly, Augustine contends that the hiddenness and admixture of our loves in this life excludes the possibility of judging where any particular person’s citizenship ultimately lies. Nevertheless, drawing on I John

2:18, he is keen to warn that the “many ” who are already active in this last time are principally the heretics who are presently going out from the Church. Bale basically abides this application of ‘antichrist’ and ‘Babylon’ to false teachers and imperial power in church history. Whereas Augustine taught that the millennial reign of the saints and binding of Satan (Apocalypse 20) would extend until the end of the world except for the reign of Antichrist during the last three and a half years,120 Bale follows the

119 See Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, edited and trans. by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [426], 20.8 and 20.17.

120 See Augustine, The City of God, 20.19, 20.8, and 20.13. Augustine determines the length of the reign of Antichrist on the basis of Daniel 12:7.

70 hints of John Wycliffe and others, applying the symbol more literally to the time from

Christ’s nativity up to the papacy of Sylvester II (c.950-1003) in 1000 C.E., who some alleged to have studied magic and astrology in Islamic cities. Bale attributes the comparative inadequacy of Augustine’s interpretation not to bad theological judgment but rather to his simple lack of foreknowledge that subsequent church history would not bear it out. For Bale, apocalyptic narration is always performed in the present tense. It builds on the discernment of previous, genuine apocalyptic narrators but insofar as the history of the church is always progressing so must apocalyptic narration of the conflict between the true church of Christ and the false church of Antichrist also advance.

Bale’s apocalyptic thought is a synthesis not only of Joachimite and Augustinian traditions but also of traditions which arose later in the medieval period among radical

Joachites, the disciples of John Huss (1372-1415), and especially disciples of Wycliffe.

Having inherited earlier expectations that Antichrist would become manifest in a pseudo-

Pope, these fourteenth and fifteenth-century Christians taught, on the basis of what they saw as rampant immorality, secular ambition, and false teaching, that the Papacy had been overtaken by Antichrist and that the official Roman Church had been overcome by the carnality of Babylon. On the basis of their own holiness, true teaching, and endurance of persecution and martyrdom, they interpreted themselves as the faithful witnesses whose cry from under the altar to be avenged by the Lord (Apocalypse 6:9-10).

Bale figures himself and his fellow Protestant Reformers as the inheritors of this role. For

Bale, it is precisely this continuity of type—the holy, suffering witness to divine truth— which binds together Christ, the Apostles, the Church Fathers, the Lollards, and the

Protestant Reformers. Their unity of role in the time between advents yields concrete

71 marks by which their identity is historically recognizable, thus providing normative criteria by which their teaching may be authorized from the point of view of those with eyes trained to see them. Bale therefore highlights the fact that the mysteries of The

Apocalypse were revealed to John at a time when he was exiled by the emperor for his preaching and that The Apocalypse was written and sent out of that exile. Bale teaches that this relationship to imperial authority is anything but accidental and that it holds an important clue to the problem of how to recognize authorized Christian interpreters of

The Apocalypse, “Of such a nature is the message of this book with the other contents thereof that from no place is it sent more freely, opened more clearly, nor told forth more boldly, than out of exile” (IBC, 254). Bale asserts that persevering in exile verifies earnestness of faith and that John’s example of endurance was imitated by the first expositors of The Apocalypse, singling out Justin (c.100-c.165), (c.130-c.200),

Hippolytus (c.176- c.236), and other interpreters who were martyred by emperors. As

Bale had written this commentary while exiled from England by its Sovereign, he presented his own attempt to instruct Christ’s true flock of its past perils and prospective dangers as a continuation of this tradition of writing “from the desert.”

Besides his synthetic recapitulation of inherited Christian apocalyptic traditions,

Bale is distinguished by his unprecedented attention to and incorporation of history. The mysteries of The Apocalypse illuminate the chronicles of the church, and Bale is adamant about the direction of illumination: “the text [is] a light to the chronicles, and not the chronicles to the text” (IBC, 254). He rules out beginning with the conviction that an historical event is significant and then proceeding to search out its meaning in prophecy, and he legislates against any speculation about future fulfillments. Only in the wake of

72 fulfillment may a correspondence between text and event be spiritually discerned. The

Apocalypse is not a coded message or puzzle. The supernatural, eschatological drama that it unveils is of a piece with differentiation between good and evil and the discrimination between truth and falsehood. Apocalyptic discernment of history does not obviate natural human knowing that has been perfected but rather constitutes a kind of elevated, meta- judgment—integrated, purified, and amplified by faithful reception of divine revelation.

Bale advocates The Apocalypse as the purest teacher of “the doctrine of health,” by which he means that it is unsurpassed in its power both to illuminate and diagnose corruptions of human being and to render the way Christ renews the human capacity to see truly and to act righteously (IBC, 251).

Conflicting ways of life and death are at the center of Bale’s organization of the contrasting images in The Apocalypse into a narrative of two churches. The true church of Christ is the meek spouse of the Lamb, standing without sin as it preaches truthfully and suffers patiently. It obeys God, practices virtue, and prepares for adversity and temptations so as to withstand the assaults of the devil. Its history is one of constant troubles and persecution, which ensures its conformity to Christ’s cross. The symbols of evil and falsehood, Antichrist, the beasts, the whore of Babylon, etc. are interpreted as adversaries of Christ’s kingdom. Members of the false church, principally emperors who persecute the true church and usurp Christ’s governing authority as well as heretical teachers who distort the word of the true church and usurp its teaching authority, are recognizable by their vices and sins: pride, hypocrisy, covetousness, lust, idolatry, etc.

The superstition and tyranny of the false church are most evident in its pretense to proctor paradise as it multiplies ritual observances and doctrinal formulations. These mechanisms

73 of social and intellectual control indulge its insatiable desire for earthly riches and secular authority above all. Consolidating its power in this world involves the destruction of the true church, which it accomplishes principally through the performance of cruel acts of physical violence and the promotion of deceptive counterfeits of Christian teaching.

The basic contours and major landmarks in Bale’s historical narrative deserve to be surveyed.121 The first seal signifies the age of Christ’s disciples and apostles, who are symbolized by the white horse on which he rides, sending out the arrows of his word into the hearts of his elect people. The New Testament shows signs that false teachers have already begun to emerge at this time. The second seal opens the post-apostolic period; in that time heretics such as Marcion (c.110 -160) and Valentinus (c.100-c.160), who are signified by the red horse, distort the truths taught by the apostles. The Spirit of God strengthens true teachers like Irenaeus to expose and refute the errors of the “deceiving antichrists,” but they ally with emperors from Nero (37-68) to Julian (331-363) and incite them to persecute these genuine teachers on the grounds that they are impious toward the traditional religion and imperial authority of Rome. This breaks up the peaceful unity of

God’s people and leads to the proliferation of divided sects. The third seal speaks of the subsequent age, when martyrdom decreases and the church ceases to be persecuted by the emperors. This boon gives rise to a new danger for Christians: the preference for bodily comfort and the delights of the world above all else, a desire more for sleep and rest than labor, more for eating than preaching, more for taking than giving, and more for dallying than dying. As pride fills the vacuum left by proclamation, such as Sabellianism,

121 Bale summarizes much of his application in his paraphrase of The Apocalypse 6, where the first six seals are broken (IBC, 312ff.).

74 , and spread throughout the world. Bale lists a whole host of Church

Fathers as new faithful witnesses who were raised up in this time to counter these errors, including Origen (185-254), Athanasius (295-373), and Augustine. Thus he recommends,

“whensoever the devil goeth forth with his black horse or deceitful doctors to subvert the ways of the Lord with his untrue balances of crafty interpretations and false judgments in the scriptures, attend you to this voice of the faithful fathers.” Yet Bale reminds that these great teachers erred “in many points,” lest anyone be tempted to place the authority of the

Fathers above that of God’s word (IBC, 318).

On Bale’s telling, there was strife and division in the election of the pope during earlier ages, but the fourth seal signifies the rise of prelates of unprecedented ambition and of extraordinary in their vanity and pride. In this time of great hypocrisy the desire for promotion and preeminence eclipses the love of truth. Bishops are involved in both the destruction of kingdoms and the unspeakable murder of peoples. The archbishop of Constantinople, John IV (d. 642), assumes the title of universal patriarch at the end of the sixth century, and Boniface III (d. 607), the bishop of Rome, in 607 declares himself head bishop in the world, God’s only vicar on earth. Mohammed (c.570-632) proclaims himself to be God’s great prophet. By his life, death, and resurrection Christ had imprisoned Satan and taken his idolatry out of public influence, limiting him to the secrecy of evil human hearts, but around 600 Antichrist reintroduces idolatry, taking the helm of two visible kingdoms: the Roman Church though Boniface’s corruption in his agreement with the Emperor Phocas (d. 610) and the Islamic kingdoms through the apostate Mohammed. Bale considers the Pope, Mohammed, and their followers to be the principal members of the false church of Antichrist. However, Bale singles out the rise of

75 the Pope to universal primacy as the European fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecies of an

Antichrist: “At this loosing of Satan or very defection, as Paul calleth it, openly appeared the man of sin, the son of perdition, and the adversary which exalteth himself above all that beareth the name of God” (IBC, 261-63, 502ff., 562ff).

Bale disagrees with Augustine’s teaching that there will be a single Antichrist who comes at the end of the world. He interprets Antichrist as a mystical persona which comprehends all the enemies of Christ. Bale sees this spirit at work during this time of catastrophe as the scriptures are corrupted by the Jews with their Talmud, by the Muslims with the Qur’an, and by the bishops with their “popish laws and decrees” (IBC, 442). The cumulative effect is the spread of antichrists and the enslavement of the peoples of Asia,

Europe, and Africa within human laws, traditions, and ceremonies. Bale assures that other antichrists came to rule where the Pope and Mohammed have not had influence.

Thus the truth is everywhere extinguished and darkness overcomes the whole world. Bale interprets the image of a pale horse ridden by Death that appears upon the opening of the fourth seal as a symbol of “the universal synagogue of hypocrites or dissembling church of Antichrist, pale as men without health…without that fresh life which is in Christ

Jesus” (Apocalypse 6:8; IBC, 320-21). The confusion and despair of the Dark Ages is thus the fruit of the corruption and decay of holiness and truth in the Christian church.

Satan exercises free reign, replacing scripture with fables, inventing laws by decree, gaining the world’s authority though cardinals and universities, appointing emperors and kings, distributing kingdoms and worldly possessions to whomever he pleases, selling academic degrees and offices for profit, and finally arrogating to himself the power to interpret the gospel as he chooses, to forgive sins for money, and to make new idols.

76 The fourth seal thus signifies for Bale the advent of that global apostasy of which

Paul writes in II Thessalonians 2, a darkness enveloping the whole world as it falls under the spell of Antichrist in its various manifestations. In the absence of the persuasive force of the Divine Word of truth and the of life, coercion and outright violence is required to maintain the unstable order of wicked laws and of erroneous doctrines in this kingdom of sin and vice. In the wake of the fifth trumpet the first woe appears; he applies the image of locusts emerging from the bottomless pit (Apocalypse 9) to the scholastic theologians, ecclesiastical authorities, and monastic orders which rose up in the Roman

Church during the Middle Ages to enforce its tyranny and superstition. Against this woeful backdrop, Christ’s true church is brought into relief, symbolized by the opening of the fifth seal. Bale sees the image of the souls of those slaughtered for their testimony on behalf of the word of God who are given white robes as a symbol of true believers at all times since Christ’s ascension. Indeed it is the key symbol of the true church of Christ.

The Apostles and Church Fathers who comprise the first three trumpets have already been discussed; the fourth trumpet signifies later fathers, some of whom fled the tyrants who occupied the cities for the desert and others of whom aided pious rulers; among others Bale lists Macarius (300-391), Ephrem (306-373), Bede (c.672-735), and

(c.735-804) (IBC, 332ff., 350, 347). Bale does not apply the fifth trumpet to any particular teachers of the subsequent age; they appear to have been few in number and to have taught privately. However he does name Joachim of Fiore and other “illuminated” servants of God as the agents symbolized by that eagle flying through heaven prophesying of the woes to come (Apocalypse 8:13). During this time the visible relationship between the true and false churches becomes inverted. Whereas in the first

77 millennium the Church Catholic was mostly the true church of Christ suffering from infection by false members, now the Roman Church is almost entirely the false church of

Antichrist with only a small suffering remnant of the true church.

Bale sees the fourth and fifth seals as chronologically simultaneous: the extreme contrast between murderous tyranny and the witness of martyrdom brings the conflict between darkness and light to the surface of history. Bale jots down the beginnings of a martyrological narrative of the history of the true church that includes notable medieval kings of England who resisted the papacy and died under suspicious conditions. Bale repeatedly states that he is only attempting to narrate that part of world history with which is familiar: of Europe in general and of England in particular. Although he is confident that an analogous story may be told regarding other continents, he focuses on the Papacy because it is Europe’s great Antichrist. In case one wonders why this narrative is only recently coming to light, Bale interprets the sixth seal as the time in which true spirits are raised up to detect the abominations of the false church of Antichrist in past and present history (IBC, 349, 586, 325ff.). He sees the image of an earthquake fulfilled in an actual earthquake that occurs when “Christ’s doctrine” in Wycliffe’s teaching is officially condemned in 1382. John Hus belongs to this trajectory as well. In an exemplary way they resist the tyrannical Roman authorities and contest the “scholastic sophistry” of theologians who seek out the works of , , and , and even imagine that Aristotle is necessary for biblical interpretation, among whom Bale includes Aquinas, (1217-1274), John (c. 1265-1308), and the successors of their schools. Bale names Wycliffe and Hus as the first figures to fulfill the sixth trumpet, which includes all sincere preachers from that time up through the

78 Protestant movement of reform in his own age. Bale lauds the Reformation for wounding the beast, gaining liberty to preach the word of Christ and loosening the fetters of Rome, but he warns that healing of the wound is evident both in the remaining popery that stains the worship and teaching of the Church of England and in king Henry’s crackdown on

Protestants such as his patron Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540).

Bale comes full circle with his declaration that the Reformation is a work still in need of completion. The production of this paraphrase is itself a faithful attempt to bear true witness; by telling this apocalyptic narrative the spell of Antichrist may be broken and membership in the church of Christ may be realized. Along with many Continental

Protestants, including Martin Luther (1483-1546), Bale interprets the swiftness with which the “two churches” are becoming separate in the sixteenth century as a sign that the conclusion of history may not be far removed. The Reformation is the contemporary embodiment of that “first resurrection” (Apocalypse 20:5-6) which is gradually fulfilled in the history of the true church, but it is currently being besieged by a second woe from its Roman foe (IBC, 358ff., 570-571). Bale sees in his time only the faintest glimmers of the coming seventh age, which will be preceded by a third woe, the conversion of the

Jews, the defeat of Antichrist, and the deliverance of the true church at the Second

Advent. Bale is not a chiliast however; he is not planning for a material . He does not deny that the new heaven and the new earth will be both physical and spiritual, but he interprets it as the spiritual renovation of God’s glory, which had been defiled in heaven by Lucifer’s disobedience and on earth by the fall of man (IBC, 335ff., 567). While Bale is Joachimite about the pattern of growing polarization between good and evil in history, eventually taking the form of two concrete bodies of people opposing each other, he

79 remains committed to Augustine’s vision of a supra-historical eschatological consummation of the kingdom, ruling out its reduction to an immanent, this-worldly project. In these latter days Bale finds neither time nor epistemic warrant for making predictions about the future; he insists that prophecies remain obscure until their fulfillments are brought to pass. What remains morally urgent, however, is the training of one’s spiritual senses by attending to the contrasting images in The Apocalypse so as to be ready to distinguish between agents of Christ and Antichrist and to stand on the side of the Lamb in this time of testing, as the fortunes of Christendom are decided in England and throughout Europe.

III. Effects of Protestant Apocalyptic Thought through Modern Britain

Besides Bale’s own histories, plays, and the Geneva Bible, the most important transmitter of his apocalyptic narrative was John Foxe. Bale’s narrative structures Foxe’s Acts and

Monuments but tells the story of the two churches in much greater historical detail. Foxe presents his work as the “full and complete story,” free from “monkish error” and Roman bias. He integrated two other trajectories of Protestant historiography into his account: (1) a collection of biographies of Protestant martyrs and heroes in the tradition of “lives of the saints” and (2) the tracing of continuity of true doctrine among the faithful versus its abandonment in the Roman Church. Against the backdrop of the apostasy of Mohammed, the rise of Antichrist in the Papacy, and the corruption of the Roman Church by wealth,

Foxe narrates a continuous line of true preachers and faithful sovereigns who suffered persecution by the Roman Papacy for resisting its tyranny and holding to true Christian teaching. Foxe puts special focus on England. The plot leads through the Protestant

80 Reformers exiled and martyred during the reign of Mary (1553-1559), and it ends with the hope that an alliance between Protestant preachers and Elizabeth I (1533-1603) would bring this story to a climax, restoring the true church to its rightful place as the Church of

England. In 1571 copies of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs were ordered kept in all cathedrals.

By the end of the reign of Elizabeth, it was difficult to find anyone in England who did not believe “the Pope is the Antichrist.” This expression is more than an arcane piece of religious fanaticism; it is a slogan which comes to sum up the regnant master narrative of early modern England. The influence of Bale’s apocalyptic story is evident in both a high cultural achievement like Spenser’s The Faerie Queen a populist work like The Ruine of

Rome (1603) by Arthur Dent (d. 1607).122 The failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588 coincided with a surge of interest in the prospective role of Protestant England in bringing about the historical conditions for Christ’s return and the final defeat of

Antichrist.

Taking for granted the apocalyptic master narrative promoted by Bale and Foxe, a new generation of Protestant thinkers attempted to carry their work forward primarily by attending to its more specific details and speculating about the next episode in the story of the true church of Christ. A general shift away from Bale’s mystical-literary sensibilities toward a greater interest in bluntly identifying literal, historical counterparts for every apocalyptic or prophetic symbol is already evident in Foxe’s late, uncompleted commentary, Eicasmi seu meditations in sacram Apocalypsin (1587). Likewise, whereas

122 The full title gives a clear sense of its popular audience: The Ruine Of Rome. Or, An Exposition upon the whole Revelation. Wherein is plainly shown and proved, that the Popish religion, together with all the power and authority of Rome, shall ebbe and decay still more and more throughout all the churches of Europe, and come to an utter overthrow even in this life, before the end of the world. Written especially for the comfort of Protestants, and the daunting of Papists, Seminary , Jesuits, and all the cursed rabble (London: W.I. for Simon Waterson and Richard Banckworth, 1607).

81 Bale understood the symbolism of Antichrist, New Jerusalem, etc. to apply differently yet analogously to all nations, the trend after Foxe is to focus more exclusively on the place of Europe and the role of England in divine providence. As The Apocalypse specifically and the Bible generally became an “open book,” the meaning of which was taken to be plain, the hermeneutical prohibitions Bale made against complete chronologies, excessive systematizations, and speculations about future fulfillments were forgotten more often than not. In the early decades of the seventeenth century there was a great flowering of apocalyptic thought, mainly among the . The Presbyterian Thomas Brightman

(1562-1607), who was one of their most influential writers, taught that the success of the

Reformation signified that progress toward the millennial age was already underway.

Whereas Bale’s integration of Tyconian and Joachimite hermeneutics prioritized the former’s approach of interpreting apocalyptic images as simultaneous illuminations of various dimensions of the seven ages in church history, Brightman reversed this prioritization and simplified Joachim’s narrative along the lines of Franciscan commentator Alexander the Minorite (d. 1271).123 In Apocalypsis Apocalypseos, or a

Revelation of the Revelation (1615), Brightman reads The Apocalypse as a chronologically linear set of prophecies. He stills ends up with an apocalyptic narrative which is very much the same as that of Bale and Foxe, but symbols are correlated more literally with sequential events rather than as types which illuminate larger patterns that overlay one another.

As Protestant apocalyptic thought became increasingly popular it also attained high levels of scholastic rigor and literary excellence. The most intellectually meticulous

123 See Wainwright, Mysterious Apocalypse, pp. 53ff.

82 treatment was Clavis Apocalyptica (1627) by Joseph Mede (1586-1638), who drew on a wealth of historical and philological knowledge. Although he was certainly working within the broad trajectory of Bale and Foxe, Mede shared Brightman’s linear approach and produced his own distinctive correlation of the key symbols with historical events.

Subsequent apocalyptic thinkers commonly regarded him as the interpreter who weighed and sifted the best of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition, making the consultation of his predecessors unnecessary. Mede was a fellow at Christ College Cambridge when

John Milton (1608-74) was studying there. The influence of the apocalyptic tradition is evident not only in Milton’s prose works but also in great literary achievements that have earned him the reputation as Spenser’s successor in visionary poetry.124 The centrality of apocalyptic thought to the upheavals of the Civil War and the Interregnum (c. 1642-60) is well established.125 After the Church and the state had been successfully united for the sake of the messianic kingdom, millenarian revolutionaries looked to complete the work of Reformation by purifying England of every vestige of Antichrist which persisted in the tyranny of the prelates and the monarchy. All ecclesiastical and political arrangements were illegitimate to the extent that they failed to conform to the kingdom of God ruled by

Christ, obedience to whom simply entailed submission to the of liberty which

124 See Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Visionary : Milton’s Tradition and His egacy (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1979). For Milton as an apocalyptic thinker, see Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), Patrides, “‘Something like Prophetic Strain’: Apocalyptic Configurations in Milton,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, pp. 207-37, and the collection of essays in Juliet Cummins, ed. Milton and the Ends of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

125 In addition to the studies cited above in footnote 96, see especially Richard Popkin, “Seventeenth -Century Millenarianism,” in Malcolm Bull, ed. Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 112-34, Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth- Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 298-323, and specifically regarding the role of the central symbol of Antichrist see Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, Rev. Ed.

83 is true human freedom. Thus the master narrative shift experienced in the preceding century was bound up with adjustments in key ideas of law, sovereignty, and legitimate authority. In the wake of the Stuart restoration of 1660, Puritan millenarianism was partly repressed, partly exiled, and partly internalized. Some Protestant apocalyptic thinkers took refuge in dissenting sects; others lamented England’s tragic refusal to be the site of the millennial kingdom and followed earlier pilgrims who were founding a New England in America.126

However, the post-war marginalization of apocalyptic enthusiasm did not excise the more fundamental features of the Protestant apocalyptic master narrative. Superstition and tyranny remained the evils most worth fighting, and faith in the dawning of a new age in human moral progress, when reason—which (1632-1704) called “the candle of the Lord”—would illuminate the whole world, became widespread. Curbing excessively fanatical ways of promoting and achieving English Protestant ambitions became yet another ingredient in turning millenarian dreams of earthly peace and prosperity into reality. Milton’s poetic authority was immense during the subsequent century and beyond, and his via media between the classic British Protestant apocalyptic master narrative and later ideas of a purely immanent or ‘secular’ progress embodied a

126 The movement of British Protestant apocalyptic thought from England to America is the subject of Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). An important recent collection of articles on key figures in this transmission of British Protestant apocalyptic traditions is Richard Connors and Andrew Colin Gow, eds., Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites (Leiden: Brill, 2004). The story from the founding of the first colonies to the ratification of the constitution is summarized in Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 68-77. The focus of the book thereafter is on popular pre-millennial belief rather than apocalyptic thought more generally. Crawford Gribben attempts a comprehensive account of Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

84 tension in modern England that proved hard to sustain.127 The Cambridge Platonist Henry

More (1614-1687) and (1642-1727) are the best known of several first-rate thinkers who kept alive the scholarly trajectory of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition represented best by Mede through the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century.128

Its central ideas were perpetuated in popular English culture by the classic The

Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1628-88),129 an unending flow of new editions of

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Protestant almanacs that included a chronological timeline of the British Protestant apocalyptic narrative. Linda Colley has shown that the basic elements of this story provided the ideological cement that played a major role in holding the United Kingdom of Great Britain together during imperial expansion and a succession of wars with Catholic France during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, essentially confirming Newman’s contention in his Lectures on the Present Position of

Catholics in England. She shows that Britons were united by a story of themselves as a people chosen to defend Protestant liberty against the tyranny of the Papal Antichrist on the continent of Europe and also to spread it abroad. They were consoled by a belief that

127 An eloquent reading of Milton along these lines is Escobedo, “The Millennial Border between Tradition and Innovation: Foxe, Milton, and the Idea of Historical Progress,” in Connors and Gow, eds., Anglo-American Millennialism, from Milton to the Millerites, pp. 1-42.

128 The best text on this era is Burdon, The Apocalypse in England. See also the studies in Richard H. Popkin, ed. Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 1988) and Kenneth G. Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium: Studies in Biblical Eisegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The key text of Isaac Newton is the posthumously published Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (London: J. Darby and T. Browne, 1733). In a brief essay titled “Newton,” (1694-1778) quipped, “A proof of the sincerity of his faith is his writing a commentary on Revelation. Here he finds it clear, to a demonstration, that the pope is Antichrist, and explains the rest of the book exactly as the other commentators have done. Possibly he meant, by this commentary, to console the rest of the human race for the great superiority he had over them;” see The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, Vol. 19: Philosophical Letters [1734], William F. Fleming, trans. (New York: Dingwall-Rock, 1927), pp. 172-76 (172).

129 The full title is more indicative of its apocalyptic character: The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream (London, 1678).

85 their challenges were simply the latter episodes in God’s providential design of purifying the saints through fiery trials and gradually illuminating the darkness of the whole world with the light of Christian liberty.130

Although Protestant preaching and new editions of Bunyan and Foxe regularly reignited popular enthusiasm for this narrative,131 its intellectual credibility was in decline midway through the eighteenth century. Rationalists increasingly asked: if reason teaches everyone directly that liberty is good and tyranny is evil, why keep muddying the water by clothing the eternal struggle in Christian garb? Has not the Church more often been the friend than the enemy of tyranny and superstition?132 In Dissertations on the

Prophecies Bishop Thomas Newton sought to curtail such questions by retrieving the classical Protestant apocalyptic tradition and shoring up its authority. Invoking the name of Isaac Newton and depending on Mede’s scholarship,133 Newton comprehensively arranges biblical promises, prophecies, and revelations into an historical narrative of gradual, progressive fulfillment of divine providence from the pledge of a redeemer in the

Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) to the bright vision of the New Jerusalem (Apocalypse 21-

22). In large part the text is dedicated to demonstrating how well “popery” fits the apocalyptic images of corruption, deception, and idolatry. The final dissertation

130 See Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, pp. 11-54, especially pp. 25-31. See also Williamson, Apocalypse Then.

131 Newman for example records giving “Pilgrim’s progress to servants” as part of his pastoral duties on July 31, 1824 (LD I, 181).

132 J. C. D. Clark illuminates the crucial connection between the hostility of Protestant Dissenters to Anglican hegemony and the modern rise of an Anglo-American discourse of liberty in The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

133 See Newton, Dissertations on the Prophecies, pp. 22, 441-42.

86 recapitulates these prophecies, whose plenteousness is taken to signify that “popery” is the great corruption of Christianity and enemy of humanity. Repeating Bale’s principle that prophecies are obscure until they have been fulfilled historically, Newton hoped that his lengthy tome would steer a via media between skepticism and enthusiasm, reassuring

Britons about the rationality of revealed religion while reminding them how important it remains to support the British Establishment against the threat of the Roman Antichrist as the story continues to unfold.

In an 1840 review of Discourses on the Prophecies Relating to Antichrist in the

Writings of Daniel and St. Paul (1840) by James H. Todd (1805-1869) for the British

Critic, Newman credits Newton as “the main source… of that anti-Roman opinion on the subject of Antichrist now afloat among us,” noting that its great influence is evident in having gone through six editions in thirty years as well as having been translated into

German and Danish.134 Writing in 1885, the celebrated Victorian historian of religion

John Tulloch (1823-86) confirms the accuracy of Newman’s assessment.135 Newman notes both in that review and in an 1842 piece also written for the that

Newton’s colossal recapitulation of the classical British Protestant apocalyptic narrative was welcomed by Bishop William Warburton (1698-1779). Indeed, the great defender of the established alliance of Church and state founded the Warburton Lectures with the

134 See Newman, “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist” [1840] in Essays Critical and Historical (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871), pp. 112-85 (134-35). Henceforth citations of this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as ECH.

135 Regarding Newton’s Dissertations on the Prophecies and Milner’s A History of the Church of Christ (to be discussed in what follows), Tulloch writes “There are, I dare say, some who remember how common these books were in all religious households fifty years ago.” See Tulloch, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1885), p. 93.

87 mission “to prove the truth of Revealed Religion…from the completion of the prophecies…which relate to the Christian Church, especially to the apostasy of papal

Rome.”136 Richard Hurd (1720-1808) was the first Warburton lecturer in 1768, and not long thereafter he published the lectures as Introduction to the Study of the Prophecies.137

Thus the ideological foundation of the established alliance between Church and state in

England was intrinsically tied to the anti-papal interpretation of biblical prophecies, which in turn underwrote the classical British Protestant apocalyptic narrative.

Evangelical churchmen such as Thomas Scott and Joseph Milner welcomed these efforts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were indeed loyal to the

Establishment, but they were primarily concerned to continue the revival of revealed religion ignited by (1714-1770) and (1703-1791) within the Church of England. To this end Scott wrote a best-selling Commentary on the Whole

Bible (1788-1792) and founded the Church Missionary Society in the 1790s. Scott’s interpretation of The Apocalypse and of the Bible as a whole generally follows Newton, whose hermeneutic principles he cites approvingly.138 Milner’s commitment to Protestant apocalyptic thought is evident in The History of the Church of Christ. He describes

Joachim of Fiore as “deservedly…renowned for learning and piety” and responds defensively to a contemporary who writes rudely of Joachim and of others who gave

136 The italicization is from Newman’s texts; see Newman, “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist” and “John Davison” [1842] in ECH, pp. 112-85 (130) and pp. 375- 420 (403-4).

137 See Hurd, Introduction to the Study of the Prophecies concerning the Christian Church; and, in particular, concerning the church of papal Rome: in twelve sermons, preached in incoln’s-Inn-Chapel, at the lecture of the Right Reverend William Warburton Lord Bishop of Glouchester. (London: T. Cadell, 1772).

138 See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Philadelphia: William S. Martien, [1804] 1852), vol. V, pp. 726, 758. Scott provides a synopsis of his interpretation of The Apocalypse on pp. 833-34.

88 serious consideration to The Apocalypse. Milner cites the works of Mede, Isaac Newton,

Thomas Newton, and Hurd as proof that the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition has been and remains intellectually serious.139 As mentioned above, Milner patterned his history after the classic apocalyptic narrative of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He contracts his focus in evangelical fashion to the history of pious individuals, although imperial persecution and papal apostasy remains the backdrop.

Efforts such as those of Scott and Milner to revive the classical British Protestant apocalyptic tradition have received short shrift because two rival trajectories in modernity have absorbed scholarly attention. The French Revolution and its aftermath stimulated a new outburst of apocalyptic thought in England, which almost entirely eclipsed the older, fossilizing tradition.140 On the one hand there was the rise of popular millennialism,141 and on the other there was the emergence of a host of writers and thinkers associated with

Romanticism who, seeing in the revolution signs that ’s perception of God

“decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, ev’n to the reforming of the Reformation itself” was finally being fulfilled, aspired to perform Milton’s prophetic

139 Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, pp. 39-40.

140 See Clark Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), W. H. Oliver, The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 1978), David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Policies to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), and James Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982).

141 See J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of : British and American Millenarianism 1800-1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), David N. Hempton, “Evangelicalism and Eschatology,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (April 1980), pp. 179- 94, and S. C. Orchard, Evangelical Eschatology 1790-1850 ( Ph.D. Diss., 1969).

89 role in their own age.142 While the vast majority of the former had not an ounce of Bale’s mystical sensibility and forgot his strictures on literalism and speculation, most of the latter would not be bound by the narrative grammar of canonical apocalyptic texts and traditions but instead drew liberally on them as figural resources to expropriate for their own novel visions of a revolutionary consummation of the work of Reformation.143 Thus in the early nineteenth century, the classic British Protestant apocalyptic tradition was disintegrating in three different directions: (1) its scholarly trajectory was becoming ossified, (2) its popular trajectory was becoming vulgarized, and (3) its literary trajectory was becoming disfigured.

In “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist” (1840), Newman looks back at the history of effects that this tradition has had in England over three hundred years. He laments that the Protestant practice of interpreting the Pope as the Antichrist and the Roman Church as

Babylon has slowly but surely effected a suspicion of all media between the self and God as willful impositions. The initial aim of the discourse was merely to curtail what were deemed corruptions of ecclesiastical authority, dogmatic belief, and liturgical practice,

Newman explains, but the scope of the critical principle thus introduced has perpetually

142 See Milton, Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the iberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England [1644] in Ernest Sirluck, ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2: 1643-1648, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 553. Robert M. Ryan shows how the Miltonic model of politically engaged religious discourse provided a paradigm for Romantic authorship in The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

143 M. H. Abram made the classic case for situating the leading Romantic authors within the context of apocalyptic traditions in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971), especially pp. 37-45, 325-56; more recent studies which adopt this approach include Burdon, The Apocalypse in England, Morton Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), Tim Fulford, ed. Romanticism and Millenarianism (New York: Palgrave, 2002), and Cyril O’Regan, Deranging Narrative: Romanticism and Its Gnostic Limit (forthcoming).

90 widened throughout the post-Reformation era. It has played no small role in giving all religious authority, every theological doctrine, and any sacred ritual the semblance of tyranny, of invention, and of superstition. Newman sums up the long-term acidic effects of this rhetoric, “in their eagerness to strike a blow at Rome, they have done no little to overturn all visible, all established religion in the world, and to involve the Primitive

Church, our own…nay, all sects and denominations whatever—in one common ruin”

(ECH II, 169-70). Thus he identifies Protestant apocalyptic narration as an ideological engine of that phenomenon often described as the “secularization” of modern western civilization.

91 CHAPTER THREE

EARLY NEWMAN: RENEWING PROTESTANT APOCALYPTIC THOUGHT

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of Newman’s early renewal of Protestant apocalyptic thought. In the first section I discuss signs in the Apologia indicating not only that Newman does in fact engage in such a renewal but also that in retrospect he regards this activity to have been fraught with implications. As discussed in the previous chapter, it prepared him to have a profound realization of its influence and “secularizing” effects over the past three centuries and continuing into the present. In addition to this negative implication, Newman recalls a lasting, positive implication: it enabled him to apprehend a contradiction within its narrative, that if corrected could provide genuine illumination of historical experience once again. The remaining three sections of the chapter turn directly to Newman’s early texts. My basic purpose is to establish and determine his genealogical relations to the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. To that end I perform a thorough review of all of the evidence available in his early letters, journals, and sermons. In the course of so doing I provide the first full study of Newman’s renewal of this apocalyptic tradition in its classical form.

In the second section I excavate the genesis of Newman’s distinctive approach to contemplating revealed truth in Scripture. I focus on his remembrance of its transcendent mystery, his respect for its symbolic form, and his effort to reconstruct an encompassing

92 narrative of the coming messianic kingdom of God, in and through which all the biblical symbols are understood to hang together. In the third section of the chapter I provide an analysis of Newman’s earliest complete rendition of this apocalyptic narrative. I precisely determine how it repeats and how it exceeds the inherited versions, which I discussed in the previous chapter. In the fourth section I discuss Newman’s little-known critique of a contemporaneous specimen of the popular evangelical apocalypticism with which his own apocalyptic thought is commonly conflated. I bring the chapter to its termination by explaining how Newman’s renewed form of classical Protestant apocalyptic thought governs his pre-Tractarian approach to renewing revealed religion in modern England.

This basic intention of this chapter is therefore to establish the early Newman’s theological identity as a member of a dying religious breed, the faithful remnant of the classically British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. At the same time, I attempt to paint a vivid portrait of Newman’s early sense of its inconsistency and thus its tendency toward disintegration. Once this is properly understood, his subsequent revisions of this tradition appear less as disloyalty and more as a struggle to revive it from its near-death condition and fully restore its genuine function: the prophetic illumination of church history.

I. Memories of Receiving Protestant Apocalyptic Thought in the Apologia

In the Preface to the Apologia Newman nonchalantly mentions by the way that “a certain key to the visions of the Apocalypse” has long clung to his mind, and in each of the first three chapters he elaborates on this subtle allusion to the influence of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition. A few pages into the first chapter, Newman recalls the persons, texts, and ideas contributing to his first “great change of thought” during the autumn of

93 1816; there he recollects “a deep impression” made upon his mind by the Dissertations on the Prophecies by Bishop Newton and “in consequence” becoming “most firmly convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John.”

As Newman indicated in Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England and historians have since confirmed, the idea that “the Pope was the Antichrist” was far more than an isolated, idiosyncratic superstition; it was a slogan, which summed up the early modern British master narrative.144 In the second chapter Newman confirms that this is the “key to the visions of the Apocalypse” to which he was referring in the preface; he adds that it was not only an idea that he passively received in his adolescence but also a doctrine which he taught as a young cleric: “When I was young, as I have already said, and after I was grown up, I thought the Pope to be Antichrist. At Christmas 1824-25 I preached a sermon to that effect.” He further explains that this was not simply a general characterization but rather a determinate genealogy which included reference to historical details: “From my boyhood and in 1824 I considered, after Protestant authorities, that St.

Gregory I. about A.D. 600 was the first Pope that was Antichrist, though, in spite of this, he was also a great and holy man.” In the third chapter Newman reiterates the depth of its initial effects while naming it as the third of three pillars that collectively constituted the foundations of his mature Anglican faith: “As a boy of fifteen, I had so fully imbibed it that I had actually erased in my Gradus ad Parnassum such titles under the word ‘Papa,’ as ‘Christi Vicarius’, ‘sacer interpres’, and ‘sceptra gerens’, and substituted epithets so vile that I cannot bring myself to write them down.” This reiteration not only establishes his Protestant bona fides but also reminds his English audience of the formative role that

144 See Colley, Britons, pp. 11-54, especially pp. 25-31. See also Williamson, Apocalypse Then.

94 this narrative has had upon their national and religious character (Apo, 17, 19-20, 57,

113).

Back in the first chapter Newman directly states why this history of his religious thought requires recurring invocations of the early influence of Newton’s apocalyptic narrative of the Papal Antichrist, “My imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843; it had been obliterated from my reason and judgment at an earlier date; but the thought remained upon me as a sort of false conscience” (Apo, 20).

Newman thus makes the history of his progress in overcoming the effects of this classical

Protestant apocalyptic narrative upon his reason and his imagination coextensive with the dramatic development of his mind as recounted in the Apologia. It would also seem that telling his own story of the overcoming is the means by which he intends to loosen its hold upon the British mind. Importantly, Newman posits a kind of influence or effectivity that perdures after explicit repudiation. He implies that the negation of this narrative by reason did not in his case and therefore does not in principle erase its effect on the imagination, that it can in fact continue to function “as a sort of false conscience” or in other words as a kind of ideological illusion. Here he seems close to Derrida’s idea of

“spectrality,” whereby one can continue to be “haunted” by ideas forgotten, actively disbelieved, or thought to have been rendered irretrievably past.145 Newman appears to be insinuating what he is more forthright about elsewhere: modern England imagines that the civil order which it has been spreading globally is truly “liberal,” that is, free of all

145 Derrida develops the concept of spectrality most fully in Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994 [1993]).

95 dogma or “secular,” when in fact its very idea of and quest for such freedom is the vestigial effect of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative.

The hypothesis that Newman’s progress in overcoming the effects of classical

Protestant apocalyptic vision involved its transmutation into another form of apocalyptic thought is strengthened by his crucial albeit cryptic summation of the intellectual process through which the deep impression made by Newton underwent a “gradual decay and extinction.” Newman attributes his “many years of intellectual unrest” to “an intellectual inconsistency” that disabled him. Both of the “seeds” of this inconsistency were planted in 1816. Newman read Milner’s History of the Church of Christ around the same time that he read Newton. He credits Milner’s voluminous history for initially enamoring him with the church fathers and teaching him to read their writings simply as “the religion of the primitive Christians.”146 From Milner Newman also remembers learning a “theory of

Church History” according to which “generations or centuries” oscillate back and forth between “degeneracy or disorder” and “times of revival,” which constitutes a recurring pattern: “upon the visible Church come down from above, at certain intervals, large and temporary Effusions of .” Newman calls this the “leading idea” of Milner’s text (Apo, 20, 32-33). Here Newman is alluding to Milner’s narrative of the church fathers as paragons of Christian vitality, which was eclipsed by ‘Romish’ corruption and never revived again until the Reformation.

146 Newman gives similar testimony in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching: “when I was a boy, my thoughts were turned to the early Church, and especially to the early Fathers, by the perusal of the Calvinist John Milner's Church History, and I have never lost, I never have suffered a suspension of the impression, deep and most pleasurable, which his sketches of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine left on my mind. From that time the vision of the Fathers was always, to my imagination, I may say, a paradise of delight to the contemplation of which I directed my thoughts from time to time” (CD I, 370-71).

96 Newman describes the deep impressions that he received from Newton and

Milner as being “contrary” and “inconsistent with each other.” The influence of each impression, he contends, generated the very “conflict of mind” the resolving of which drives the development of his religious thought as it is narrated in the Apologia (Apo, 20).

What is most remarkable about these statements has gone entirely unnoticed by Newman scholarship: these impressions from Newton and Milner are two contrasting sides—or

“two images” to use Bale’s language—of the same classic British Protestant apocalyptic narrative of church history. Indeed, Milner explicitly acknowledges his debt to Newton as well as his imitation of and borrowing from the most influential work in this apocalyptic tradition: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.147 Both texts narrate church history as a battle between the true and false churches of Christ. Newton describes the false church by demonstrating the conformity of the history of the Roman Papacy to apocalyptic images of Antichrist,

Babylon, and apostasy, while Milner figures the true church by showing the conformity of the apostles, the church fathers, the medieval dissenters, and the Protestant Reformers to apocalyptic images of genuine prophets, faithful witnesses, and holy martyrs. Although

Newton and Milner each focus on telling one only side of the story, both make continual reference to the other side as its backdrop.

In this key paragraph on the early influence of Newton and Milner, Newman is indirectly asserting that there is a disabling “intellectual inconsistency” in the classical

Protestant apocalyptic tradition itself. Newman goes on to say that “many have felt [it] besides himself.” He is suggesting that heirs of this apocalyptic legacy have no choice but

147 See Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, pp. 3-5. Milner cites Newton’s influence on p. 591 for example.

97 to reckon with its contradictoriness in one way or another. Some “make a compromise” while others “beat out the one idea or the other from their minds,” but Newman maintains that he made no recourse to violence of any kind (Apo, 20). He thus invites a reading of the history of his religious opinions as a nonviolent intellectual resolution of this internal contradiction at the heart of Protestant apocalyptic thought. Moreover, he presents this work as the key to the development of his thought generally, according to which the influence of Milner’s apocalyptic narrative of the church fathers as the true heirs of apostolic revealed religion gradually overcame the effects of Newton’s apocalyptic narrative of the medieval church and Roman Papacy as Antichrist. This suggests that by overcoming Newton’s influence Newman did not arrive at a non-apocalyptic form of thought but rather corrected an error internal to his native apocalyptic tradition. It also implies that his refiguration of its classical narrative of the trials and tribulations of the messianic kingdom in history from the fathers through medieval Christendom to modern

Catholic Christianity steadily overcame its theology of the Papal Antichrist. While the influence of the fathers on Newman is well established, it has not been hypothesized that his initial acceptance of the authority of their writings, his historic effort to renew their forms of life and thought, and his work of re-discerning their “continuity of type” in the subsequent history of Christianity was actually governed by his reception, renewal, and internal correction of classical Protestant apocalyptic thought.

II. Inheriting and Renewing Classical Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative

Neither millennial nor Romantic forms of apocalyptic thought had an early influence on

Newman, whose own descriptions of his youthful religious experience very much match

98 Colley’s account of generic English Protestantism. In An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of

Assent Newman described the religious culture in which he grew up as “Bible Religion.”

Common to the religious masses of modern England and involving neither rites nor creeds, it consisted mainly in reading the Old and New Testaments in church, at home, and in private.148 Thus Newman recalled being “brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible” (Apo, 15), receiving religious instruction from his grandmother and his aunt Elizabeth, and using no Bible so much as the one his father gave him at age six in 1807.149 This form of religion firmly effected the classic Protestant apocalyptic figuration of time; history is seen as an ongoing event, linked to a “series of

Divine Providences in behalf of man from his creation to his end” and centered in “the words, deeds, and sacred sufferings” of Christ. Newman regarded his experience of the world’s temporal and material extension in these terms as an intrinsic part of participating in English discourse (GA, 43-44). Still, Newman testifies that neither “Bible Religion” nor a perfect knowledge of his catechism elicited anything more than notional assent before the age of fifteen, at which time he was more taken with entertaining skeptics like

David Hume (1711-1776) and (1737-1809) and pondering the advantages of being virtuous over being religious (Apo, 15-17).

148 Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited by Ian T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985 [1870, 1889]), pp. 43-44. Hereafter all references to this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as GA.

149 A note with this testimony dated July 25, 1844 and the inscribed Bible are held at the Birmingham Oratory Archives and are cited in Francis McGrath, John Henry Newman: Universal Revelation (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), p. 33.

99 Newman attributes his “great change of thought” at the age of fifteen primarily to effects received from books “of the school of Calvin.”150 The influence of William

Romaine (1714-95), Milner, and Scott has often led scholars to characterize Newman’s religious discourse and practice from 1816 through the 1820s as “evangelical.”151 That is relatively accurate so long as one does not confuse the moderately Calvinistic mid- eighteenth through early nineteenth-century form of evangelical with either the dissenting Protestants of that day or with later versions of evangelical Christianity.152

Newman describes his early mentors as belonging to “the school of Calvin” because he traces their intellectual lineage back to the Puritans.153 He testifies to having received from Romaine, Milner, and Scott a strong sense of the reality of “the invisible world,” a

“sharp separation between the elect and the world” in “the warfare between the city of

150 Apo, 11, 20, 17. The closing of Newman’s father’s banking house imperiled the family’s financial situation, and he subsequently experienced a terrible illness. These events preceded what he describes as “a great change of thought” (Apo, 17) which “made [him] a Christian” (AW, 119). Newman’s so-called “first conversion” is analyzed in the following: Louis Bouyer, Newman, pp. 9-29, C. Stephen Dessain, “Newman’s First Conversion,” Newman Studien, vol. 3, ed. Heinrich Fries and Werner Becker (Nürnberg, 1957), pp. 37-53, and Terrence Merrigan, “‘Numquam minus solus quam cum solus’: Newman’s First Conversion – Its Significance for His Life and Thought,” Downside Review 103 (1985), pp. 99-116. Ian Ker briefly rehearses the standard reasons why Newman and subsequent interpreters have never considered this to fit the mold of an “evangelical” conversion in John Henry Newman, pp. 4-5.

151 By far the most comprehensive argument for this ascription is John E. Linnan, The Evangelical Background of John Henry Newman 1816-1826, 2 vols. (PhD Diss., Université Catholique de Louvain, 1965). See also David Newsome, “The Evangelical Sources of Newman’s Power,” and “Newman and the Evangelicals: Justification and Santification,” Journal of Theological Studies XV:1 (1964), pp. 32-53. Newman’s early approach to biblical prophecy is characterized as “evangelical” in Gilley, “Newman and Prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic,” pp. 160-188, and Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, pp. 78-79, cf. 69-70.

152 For a solid survey which makes these important distinctions, see David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992); regarding the moderately Calvinist version which influenced Newman, see especially pp. 63-65. Christopher Dawson connects Newman back through the Evangelical Revival to the Puritans in The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, pp. 25-44.

153 See Newman’s note explaining the religious parties within the Church of England in the French version of the Apologia, an English translation of which is published in the anthology by Henry Tristram: The Living Thoughts of Cardinal Newman, pp. 132-33.

100 God and the powers of darkness,”154 and a confidence that “the converted and the unconverted can be discriminated by man” (Apo, 17, 19). In terms of more specific debts,

Newman retained from Romaine until the age of twenty-one the impression that his inward consciousness of being converted meant that he was one of those elected to eternal glory. Newman thus saw himself as the latest in a long line of ‘real’ Christians going back through the Reformers and Church Fathers to the apostles as depicted in

Milner’s History of the Church of Christ. That this lineage was broken up by lengthy periods of degeneracy did not trouble Newman because the leading idea of Milner’s work was that “large and temporary Effusions of divine grace” come down upon the visible

Church at certain intervals between which lie generations or even centuries of relative gloom. Newman interprets the evangelical revival of late as a sign that just such an effusion is underway and patterns himself after Thomas Scott, who he regards as the greatest exemplar of ‘real’ Christianity in the movement. Scott was “willing to stand on

God’s side against the world” both by surrendering to the authority of revealed truth in scripture without concern for the earthly cost and by loving holiness better than peace. In

1837 Newman claims that he “could bear to stand an examination” in Scott’s works; of the volumes of his Commentary he acquired as an undergraduate he used the volume on the New Testament epistles and The Apocalypse above all (Apo, 18, 32-33; LD VI, 129).

When the doctrine of the papal Antichrist received from Newton is added to these ideas, one has all the main elements of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition, self- consciously sharpened by an evangelical boldness about judging who presently belongs

154 Newman states that “this main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the city of God and the powers of darkness” was also impressed upon him by A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1906 [1729]) by (1686-1761) (Apo, 19), whom Burdon interprets as having “internalized the Apocalypse” in The Apocalypse in England, pp. 72-74.

101 to the kingdoms of Christ and Antichrist. In the Apologia Newman recalls believing from his boyhood and preaching in 1824 that Gregory I (540-604) was the first Pope to have been Antichrist, though still “a good and holy man,” on the basis not simply of Newton but of “Protestant authorities” more generally (Apo, 57). An unpublished paper on which

Newman jotted down major historical landmarks in the Protestant apocalyptic narrative remains from 1816:

A.D. 727 the Pope revolted from the Exarch of Ravenna 755 – obtained the Exarchate of himself 767 – the worship of Images was fully established A.D. 727 1260 1987 A.D. We are living under the 6th Trumpet and Second Woe – Ez.38–39 – Dan. 11—44 and 45. A.D. Mohammed contrived his imposture 606 Phocas granted the supremacy of the Pope 1260 Not to be dated from thence A.D. 1866 The Pope then became supreme in spiritual things But not a temporal horn or beast till 727.155

Here Newman singles out three apostasies: the Roman Papal “supremacy,” the Byzantine authorization of “image-worship,” and the Islamic “imposture” of Mohammed. Working within the context of The Apocalypse, he sees the present as the time of the sixth trumpet and the second woe. Newman’s first publication is an attempt to provoke mindfulness of the peril that Roman Catholicism still presents. Along with his Oxford classmate John

William Bowden (1798-1844), he wrote a virulently anti-Catholic “tale of the sixteenth century” entitled St. Bartholomew’s Eve (1818). The poem in two cantos tells of “the

155 1816 “Lateinos” paper, Birmingham Oratory Archives, A.9.1.a; this quotation is drawn from Gilley, “Newman and Prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic,” pp. 170-71. Gilley shows that the dates are transcribed from Newton and notes that the paper is also covered with arithmetical calculations copied from Newton.

102 unfortunate union of a Protestant gentleman and a Catholic lady” which ends in their

“tragical death.” Newman was responsible for the theological portions, which depict

Roman Catholicism as “a faith impure.” Several commentators have observed that the tone of the work is reminiscent of Newton,156 but the same language of vice, corruption, and idolatry is just as easily found in the works of Milner and Scott, not to mention

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794).157

By Newman’s recollection, the young mind that received the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition already had a strong propensity for imaginative and even fantastic reflection. In the early 1820s Newman recorded his most definite childhood memories of religious thoughts and feelings; in the Apologia he acknowledges that they would have significant bearing on his later convictions: “I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true…

I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow- angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.” He also recalls reading in Remnants of Time (1736) that the saints are unknown to the world because there is no external mark by which to distinguish them and supposing that Isaac Watts (1674-1748) “spoke of Angels who lived in the world, as it were disguised.”158 Finally, Newman remembers being “very superstitious” prior to his conversion in 1816, constantly crossing himself “on going into

156 AW, 40-42. See Misner, “Newman and the Tradition concerning the Papal Antichrist,” pp. 385- 86; he cites , Young Mr. Newman (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948), p. 46, and R. H. Greenfield, The Attitude of the Tractarians to the Roman Catholic Church 1833-1850 (Oxford Ph.D. Diss., 1956), p. 83. A copy of St. Bartholomew’s Eve (1818) is preserved in the Birmingham Oratory Archives, A.7.2.

157 Newman was disconcerted to realize that one line seemed to have been unconsciously cribbed from Gibbon: “Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of Christ” (LD I, 67).

158 The verses to which Newman refers are from Remnants of Time Employed in Prose and Verse, section xvii, in The Works of The Rev. Isaac Waats, D.D. 9 vols. (Leeds, 1813 [1736]), vol. IX, p. 487.

103 the dark.” Naturally enough, interpreters have found in these reminiscences evidence that he already shows early signs both of falling into the Jungian psychological category of the introvert and of belonging to the philosophical school of English Platonism.159

However, it has heretofore gone unnoticed that the entries also evoke central apocalyptic topics: a disinclination to acknowledge the present world of perception and experience as the ultimate reality, visions of a hidden realm, earthly visitations from heavenly agents, and dualism.160

Newman’s fabulous imagination was fertilized at Oxford by schooling in biblical languages and literature, classical works in the Greek, , and English tongues, and extracurricular forays into the works of (1771-1832) and

(1774-1843), both of whom he later credited with expressing the need of the age for “a deeper philosophy” than “the dry and superficial…religious teaching and literature of the last generation, or century.”161 His growing intellectual ability seems to have spurred fresh thought on the hermeneutics of revelatory text, judging from a couple of journal entries on April 30, 1820. In the first Newman questions literalizing approaches to the

Bible due to the finitude of human language and the transcendence of the revealed truths

159 These perspectives are digested and analyzed in Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts, pp. 23-26.

160 These are among the ten most common topics of early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic discourse; see Carey, Ultimate Things, pp. 6-10.

161 See Newman, “Prospects of the Anglican Church,” ECH, vol. 1, pp. 263-308 (268ff.); this text was originally published in the British Critic (April, 1839) as “The State of Religious Parties.” Newman recapitulates this judgment in Apo, 93-94. For evidence of Newman’s early delight in reading Scott and Southey, see LD I, 64, 67, 72, 107. Newman’s undergraduate education is best discussed in A. Dwight Culler, The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Cardinal Newman’s Educational Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 1-22.

104 communicated therein.162 That same day he also wonders whether the meaning of The

Apocalypse is reserved for those to whom it is finally addressed, i.e., those facing martyrdom in the truly “last days,” supposing that the meaning one does or does not apprehend depends upon one’s role in its story.163 After completing his undergraduate degree from Trinity College and becoming a Fellow of Oriel College, Newman began to study scripture more regularly; this discipline intensifies as he discerns whether he will join the clergy and after he decides to do so. For example, he devoted six weeks of his

July vacation in 1821 to collecting biblical passages on topics such as “the unconverted man,” “the law,” “the unswerving justice of God,” and “the scheme of salvation,” filling six books with notes.164 This seems to have been the first excursion into what would become his primary research interest: the historical advance of human communities and individual persons in the realization of sacred truth. As a result he came “to have freer

162 “It is wisely ordained that the sublimity of the Bible consists in the ideas and not in the words, and coincides with the notion of a revelation from realms where there is no language or speech, but every spiritual or mental. Thus the Scriptures are rendered universal objects of admiration. No translation materially affects them, as it does the Koran” (AW, 163).

163 “Grant for an instant that the Apocalypse is to be a sealed book till the last days, and then, when we believe infidelity will corrupt and persecution depopulate the globe, to have its meaning displayed, to sustain the fainting souls of the then martyrs. This is hypothesis, but it shows that there may be reasons of which we know nothing” (AW, 163).

164 See John E. Linnan, The Evangelical Background of John Henry Newman 1816-1826, vol. II, pp. 364ff, 459ff. The manuscripts are filed at the Birmingham Oratory Archives as “Theological Subjects, 1816-34.” Newman’s journals from the time between his graduation in December 1820 and his election as a Fellow of Oriel College on April 12, 1822 contain a number of ruminations on the difficulties of faith. He records an experience which, interestingly enough, shares key traits of an apocalypse and concerns his evolving concept of the significance of the difference between the earthly and heavenly realms for how one understands revealed mystery, “About a week ago I dreamed a spirit came to me, and discoursed about the other world. I had several meetings with it…Among other things it said that it was absolutely impossible for the reason of man to understand the mystery (I think) of the Holy Trinity, and in vain to argue about it; but that everything in another world was so very, very plain, that there was not the slightest difficulty about it. I cannot put into any sufficiently strong form of words the ideas which were conveyed to me. I thought I instantly fell on my knees, overcome with gratitude to God for so kind a message” (AW, 166-67).

105 views on the subject of inspiration than were usual in the Church of England” during the early 1820s (Apo, 21).

A journal entry in July 1822 states, “I give an hour a day to the Apocalypse. My idea is to interpret its symbols etc. by other Scriptures, and then to compare it with actual events. I find it most delightful.”165 Intertextual interpretation and historical application is of course conventional in the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. Newman calls it

“his idea,” though he certainly learned it from Newton and Scott. Like them, he is reading

The Apocalypse as the climactic disclosure and thus as the key to a variegated yet unified canon of revelatory literature, allowing the images and themes in different texts to inform each another. He notes that this practice of giving “the first hour of the day to reading the

Bible” became a habit for him (AW, 187). Two years later he waxes about the benefits of this way of reading scripture in a letter,

you cannot have a better employment than that of sifting, as it were, the contents of the Bible – there is so much in it, which does not appear at first sight, the different books have such an intimate relation with each other, and throw on one another so much unexpected light, that life is not sufficient for a perfect view of the comprehensive subject they treat on – This knowledge is styled in Scripture ‘the full assurance of understanding –’ [Colossians 2:2] (LD I, 171).

Newman’s emphasis on the impossibility of attaining mastery of the “comprehensive subject” treated in scripture again gestures toward a sense of transcendent mystery which is in excess of the Protestantism of his day. He also strikes this note in an 1824 Advent sermon, where he advocates bringing together “parallel passages” for comparison as the

165AW, 187. A month later Newman is figuring his inner experience via apocalyptic symbols, “I know well what a painful and ridiculous sense of shame I have on light occasions. It affects me like bodily pain, and makes me cry out. It is like a sword running through me. Will not this give force to such texts as Dan. xii, 2? To bodily torment, to evil passions &c &c. in the miserable damned is to be added shame and everlasting contempt” (AW, 168). Here Newman applies to his own experience of shame the apocalyptic prophecy of a resurrection to shame in Daniel 12:2, “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

106 chief means by which “to discern the riches of the divine word and the deep mysteries of the scheme of redemption.”166 (JS II, 9).

Youthful Bible reading and the works of Newton, Scott, and other Protestants had taught Newman to see the unity of scripture in a narrative of divine providence, but a journal entry on August 25, 1822 indicates that two months’ worth of his own intertextual studies had given him a deeper apprehension of this coherence. He expresses wonder at

“the vast design of Scripture prophecy,” finding the continuities between the words of

Moses and the messages of the prophets remarkable. Newman observes that their role is always to pronounce a word of judgment against “bad priests & priests of Baal,” often condemning the nation as a whole. Yet even under the worst of circumstances “no teaching more indulgent was introduced, nor the unpopular books destroyed.” The corruption of Mosaic religion from within by disobedience warrants accommodation no more than the external threat of rivals legitimizes coercive purification. Newman concludes, “If not divine, their books and their plan are the most wonderful phenomenon the world has seen” (AW, 169); this comparative judgment undoubtedly subordinates the achievements of Greek and Roman civilization. In his 1824 sermon “On Reading

Scripture” Newman echoes this sense of wonder at the “unity of plan” in the discourses of Moses, David, Isaiah, John, Paul, and James, agreeing with 2 Peter 1 and I Cor. 12 that one finds an identity of Spirit in the various texts of the Bible (JS II, 9). He elaborates on the idea of a dramatic pattern in providence in his 1826 essay “On the of

Scripture.” He defines miracles as “irregularities in the economy of nature…with a moral

166 Newman, John Henry Newman Sermons 1824-1843, ed. by Placid Murray, Vincent F. Blehl, and Francis McGrath, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991-2012), vol. II, p. 3-10 (9). Hereafter all references to this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as JS.

107 end; forming one instance out of many, of the providence of God.” Newman did not skeptically dismiss biblical accounts of miracles as superstitious or contract their significance to the evidentiary authorization of an otherwise arbitrary message; instead he finds that attending to the various narratives of these irreparably irregular interruptions yields a perception of a more encompassing moral coherence. In closing that text he contends that one is most effectively persuaded of the truth of revealed religion not by amassing extra-biblical evidence of its divine origins but by contemplating the way that the Bible hangs together in a system of sacred mysteries which are gradually disclosed as if by extraordinary design, producing the impression that here is “the work of one mind.”167

As is common in the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition, Newman views the church as providentially succeeding rather than superseding the religion of Moses and the prophets. This leads him to expect that upon comparison with Christian history the genuine church would be characterized by an analogous continuity of message, allowing of course for an interregnum of medieval apostasy. Already in 1822 he encounters a difficulty, however, when he looks at the , “Take the Protestant

Church in the course of 300 years, what a striking variation of sentiment and faith is visible!” Standing at this historical distance, Newman is confronted with a question that early exponents of the British apocalyptic metanarrative did not have to face. Compared to the inconsistent history of teachings in Protestantism, Newman notes that “men praise and wonder at the continuous policy of the popes.” Thus, he is already observing that the

167 Newman, “The Miracles of Scripture” [1826] in Two Essays on Biblical and on Ecclesiastical Miracles (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1890), pp. 1-94 (4-5, 94). Hereafter all references to this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as Mir.

108 expectations that the British apocalyptic master narrative generates for post-Reformation

Christian history may actually favor the Roman Catholic Church as the religious successor of Moses and the prophets. He clearly finds this result unpalatable and asserts a key difference. Papal policies “were for their own interest. The course taken by the

Jewish prophets was just contrary to their worldly interests” (AW, 169). Thus he nullifies the Roman Catholic concordance with a bold judgment of the worldly and selfish motives of the papacy. The question of why Protestant history was so lacking in concordance, on the other hand, remained unanswered for the time being.

In an eight-page exegesis of chapter six which he compiled two months after beginning his “hour a day” discipline, Newman displays a growing sophistication in his approach to The Apocalypse.168 Newman’s intertextual analysis yields some clear results; he finds for example that thunder consistently signifies the terror of God’s presence in scripture. However his search for antecedents to the red horsemen runs into difficulty.

Newman cannot determine conclusively if the figure is good or evil, earthly or heavenly, literal or allegorical. He finds numerous biblical associations but no way to reduce the semantic excess without being arbitrary. In this and similar instances, he determines that the imagery is inexorably “hyperbolic” and “discordant” and that its polyvalence should be left unresolved. Of course, this complicated his secondary task of comparing the symbols with actual events. Whereas Newton and Scott repeated the sedimented British

Protestant apocalyptic tradition by interpreting the four horsemen and the six seals as signifying particular past events, Newman worries that this kind of literalism is too

168 These unpublished “Notes on Revelation, Chapter 6” dated “October 7th 1822 – Monday” are preserved in the Birmingham Oratory Archives. Gilley quotes and summarizes a considerable portion of the paper in “Newman and Prophecy, Evangelical and Catholic,” pp. 172-74.

109 wooden and leads one into inconsistencies. He decides that instead of forcing an inordinately literal correlation of textual details with historical particulars, one should focus on the sequence of images as a whole and then allow that entire vision to illuminate the first epoch of church history as a whole. Thus Newman interprets chapter six as a series of images of crises which lead to “a complete subversion of things, a most awful revolution” that he thinks most applicable to the progress of Christianity in ‘breaking the idols’ of the Roman Empire, culminating in the “Constantinian” establishment of

Christianity. Although he rejected the detailed correspondences between apocalyptic symbols and historical events that one finds in the interpretations of Newton and Scott, he retained their basic view that this vision was fulfilled in the historic reversal of ancient

Christianity’s fortunes during the fourth century. Apparently unbeknownst to Newman, he was returning his inherited apocalyptic tradition to the more flexibly mystical and literary form it had in Bale.

Newman ends his paper, the culmination of these summer months of studying The

Apocalypse and through it the narrative coherence of much of the Bible, by jotting down the hermeneutical lessons he had learned. The Bible is a text that demands deep reading; little is comprehended in first glances or by superficial acquaintance. Illumination occurs as one compares sacred truths taught in various texts with one another while distrusting the natural inclination to comprehend them in familiar formulas. Newman believes that undertaking this approach in a spirit of prayerful patience enabled his expectations of literal correspondences to be surprised by a more subtle, thematic interpretation. Thus by the age of twenty-one Newman had internalized the inherited hermeneutic of the British

Protestant apocalyptic tradition in its late, sedimented form and achieved some degree of

110 theological independence through contemplative exegetical practice. After continuing this approach to biblical study for an additional two years, Newman confides that he is dissatisfied with the books and lectures on scripture by the “theologians” of his day,

It is in vain to look for [the full assurance of understanding] in reading comments and treatises though of the most excellent description. It is painful to see many admirable theologians (in the common acceptation of the term) who are very poor textuaries – who are thoroughly acquainted with the history of the different versions, the languages, the arguments for revelation etc etc but who have a very meager knowledge of the book itself – like insects who feed on the shell of the nut, instead of advancing to the kernel. But the Bible itself says, ‘To the law and to the testimony!, etc.’ [Isaiah 8:20].

Newman contrasts interest in accidental features of the Bible at the expense of its subject matter with the example of his recently departed mentor, “That Scripture contains an inexhaustible mine of divine treasures cannot be better proved than by the case of Scott who though for near 40 years engaged in studying it found something new to his dying day. ‘It is delightful’ he beautifully said, ‘to have the whole body of Scripture revolving, as it were, before one day after day’.”169 Newman testifies that the discipline of attending to scripture as a “painful and continuing searching” has enabled him to “see more and more a majesty, a sublimity, a holiness, an awful grandeur, which …affects the heart, subdues the will and convinces the understanding.” This aesthetic experience of inward witness is for Newman “the great evidence for its divine origin” (LD I, 171).

Newman’s mode of study is not an academic attempt to gain critical mastery over the Bible but rather an intellectually rigorous spiritual exercise akin to what Paul Griffiths calls “religious reading.”170 Newman sets forth the main principles of this discipline in

169 John Scott, The Life of Rev. Thomas Scott (London, 1822), pp. 483-84.

170 See Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

111 the 1824 Advent sermon “On Reading Scripture,” taking Isaiah 8:20 as his touchstone.171

He derives them from biblical statements about how scripture should be read. On their basis he determines that scripture is a divinely given hermeneutic lens which unveils a corrupt world and our own evil habits. Even the best err because our are dark and are judgments are prejudiced. Following human direction is like the blind leading the blind, which leads to “death and ruin,” as Newman illustrates by the record of antiquity.

Like Isaiah, who appeals to the law and testimony of Moses as the standard of duty and truth by which to determine whether the light of spiritual knowledge dwells in the teachers of his time, Newman follows Scott in making the Bible his first principle of criticism. As to the frame of mind with which one should study it, Newman recommends faith, defined as reading in a spirit of implicit obedience, absorbed in contemplation of

God as one seeks to “find and eat” the word of life (Jeremiah 15:16). As Hebrews 4 illustrates and so many New Testament texts teach, without faith the spiritual meaning of scripture cannot be seen. He also recommends humility and simplicity, characterized as coming in reverential wonder to be judged rather than to judge, to be instructed rather than to speculate, and to have “our disease and its remedy” disclosed. The divine medicine becomes polluted by human corruption unless the heart is thus prepared.

Newman teaches that scripture is for self-application: through meditation the word dwells in the heart and becomes a principle of action. Because its purpose is to remake human being anew through the light of truth and the spirit of holiness Newman commends a spirit of prayer for grace. He finally presents some general literary principles for reading,

171 Newman employs the : “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”

112 all of which have to do with seeing each part of scripture in relation to the whole. He is most critical of neglecting the Old Testament, where he finds the most impressive instances of virtue and true religion; he also notes that the messianic identity of Jesus is incomprehensible if one is ignorant of the prophets, as is his atoning sacrifice without knowledge of the Mosaic Law. Newman acknowledges that much of scripture is opaque and commends comparing biblical texts with each other. While the duties of this world beckon, Newman concludes that we will be without excuse “at the day of His second coming” if we bury this great talent (JS II, 9).

III. Performing a Full Rendition of the Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative

After Newman was ordained a in June of 1824 he began to share the fruit of his studies. A review of what remains of the eighty sermons he composed before being made a priest in May 1825 shows him continuing what he understood to be Scott’s lineage: reviving English Protestantism by contemplatively attending to central revealed mysteries. Newman consistently proceeded by naming a sacred topic and the primary images to be considered and then unraveling various aspects of meaning by tracing out the main lines of relation each has with adjacent biblical topics. His configurative practice is still regulated by the standard protocols of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition, but he rarely proof-texts established doctrines. Newman selected and arranged biblical texts into a kind of mosaic of revealed truths in a meditative style, making reverence for transcendent mystery a principle of human discourse on divinity.172 He

172 Regarding the content of his early sermons, Newman writes in a July 1824 letter, “I am aware that they contain truths, which are unpalatable to the generality of mankind – but the doctrine of Christ

113 discusses many major themes in apocalyptic narrative, such as the disclosure of God in

Christ crucified (JS I, 268-76), Christ the Lamb of God sacrificed for the forgiveness of sins (JS I, 315-21), Christ the living water proceeding from God’s throne (JS II, 265-71), the Judgment of Christ as a danger to the lukewarm and the unproductive (JS I, 306-13), preparation for Christ’s Second Coming (JS II, 221-26), the eschatological destiny of the saints purified by affliction (JS II, 272-78), and resurrection (JS I, 286-92). For the purpose of securely ascertaining Newman’s early place in the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition, his sermons for the 1824-1825 Christmas season are far and away the most crucial.173 They constitute a summary of his entire early apocalyptic narrative, and therefore an analysis of them will establish a landmark by which his relationship to the inherited tradition may be determined and future revisions in his apocalyptic thought may be measured. This ‘world-historical vision’ establishes his missional identity and provides the horizon within which he interprets all phenomena.

In these two sermons Newman takes up the topic of the messianic kingdom and employs the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 9:6-7 as the main image of his first sermon.174

Befitting the Christmas season, he proposes to discuss a key aspect of the Incarnation: the temporal advent of the messianic kingdom in Jesus Christ is the advent of the eternal kingdom of God on earth. In the first sermon Newman focuses on the union-in-distinction

crucified is the only spring of real virtue and piety, and the only foundation of peace and comfort” (LD I, 181).

173 For these sermons (no. 36 and 41 in the Birmingham Oratory Archive), see JS I, 322-28, 277- 85.

174 The King James Version reads, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever.”

114 of these two kingdoms in Christ, which he respectively calls “the absolute kingdom of

Christ as God and his mediatorial kingdom of Christ as man.” He sees three modes of relation between these two kingdoms envisioned in a succession of contrasting images in

The Apocalypse. First, in chapter four One sitting on a throne in heaven is incessantly praised, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.” Here

Newman sees the eternal kingdom of “Father, Son and Holy Ghost…glorified as one God

– without reference to the scheme of redemption.” He interprets this vision as symbolic of the absolute sovereignty of Christ in the unity of the Trinity before the foundation of the world. Second, in chapter five the angels, creatures, and elders praise, “worthy is the

Lamb that was slain.” In this vision Newman sees the mediatorial kingdom of Christ in the history of salvation.175 Finally, in the climactic vision of chapter seven he sees the

One sitting on the throne and the Lamb of God being praised for delivering salvation.

This is therefore Christ’s absolute kingdom of the Trinity and his mediatorial kingdom united after the accomplishment of salvation (JS I, 327). These visions in The Apocalypse thus disclose for Newman the beginning, middle, and end of the apocalyptic narrative in which the biblical episodes in salvation history cohere. The eternal kingdom of the Triune

God is the origin, the horizon, and the goal of the messianic kingdom in salvation history, remaining sovereign before, during, and after the drama therein. This maneuver seems to be a fresh fruit of his biblical studies rather than a repetition of any particular sources. It

175 The mediatorial Kingdom of Christ is among Newman’s most recurrent topics because it is his preferred symbol for the narrative of salvation history as a whole. It first appears in his “Papers on Conversion” (June-July 1821; Birmingham Oratory Archives). In addition to the two sermons under consideration, it is the principal subject of subsequent sermons on December 25, 1826 (JS I, 293-301), April 15, 1827 (JS I, 329-43), and September 7, 1828 (JS I, 258-67) respectively. Newman preached the latter sermon six times between 1828 and 1836. For the most part, however, it recedes into the background as Newman becomes increasingly concerned to stay focused on the practice of faith for fear of making this grand narrative an object of speculative understanding rather than an orientation for action.

115 is in the spirit if not the letter of Scott, whose The Force of Truth tells the story of being exiled in Unitarian rationalism and returning to trinitarian faith (Apo, 18). It materially instantiates Bale’s formal declaration that The Apocalypse is the most trinitarian scriptural text. It hardly needs to be said that this move went against the general grain of modern Protestant thought, which was becoming accustomed to excising the Trinity for the sake of accommodating Enlightenment norms of rationality and anthropocentricity.

Newman emphasizes the trinitarian horizon of the apocalyptic narrative because the authority of the messianic kingdom depends upon Christ sharing divine authority. He strengthens the impression of Christ’s absolute sovereignty in the unity of the Trinity by tracing some intertextual associations of the names given to the messiah in Isaiah 9:6-7.

“Wonderful” and “everlasting Father” fit the relation between Christ and the Father rendered in the : being with God and yet God (John 1), having unity with

God in distinction from God (John 10), and sharing in the Father’s glory before creation

(John 17). “Wonderful” is also taken to imply that Christ’s human form shares in the divine incomprehensibility. This same truth is found in Apocalypse 19 where Christ has

“a name written which no one knew but He Himself,” a attribute given to God in Genesis

32, Exodus 3, and Judges 13. The divine characteristic of eternality is likewise applied to

Christ when he is called “the same, yesterday, today and for ever” in Hebrews 13 and the

Alpha and the Omega in Apocalypse 1. Newman finds the name “counselor” implicitly applied to Christ in I Corinthians 1, where he is described as the wisdom and word of

God, a connection which warrants applying the saying of Proverbs 8 regarding wisdom, that “he was set up from everlasting,” to Christ. Finally, “the mighty God” is taken to be inclusive of all other titles of divine greatness and majesty, just like “blessed for ever”

116 (Romans 9), “true God and eternal life” (I John 5), and “Lord and God” (John 20). He understands these titles, along with New Testament teachings such as those that Christ dwells in the unapproachable light which no eye has seen (I Timothy 6) and that “all the angels of God are bid worship him” (Psalm 97; Hebrews 1), as applying the divine attributes of infinitude, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence to Christ (JS I,

323-24). Thus Newman illustrates how biblical symbols reserved for God are consistently used throughout the New Testament to unveil the unity of Jesus Christ and God and therefore the unity of Christ’s eternal and temporal kingdoms.

The theological implications that Newman draws forth from this constellation of images demonstrate a Calvinist orthodoxy regarding the sovereign freedom of the eternal kingdom of God at least as unswerving as that of Karl Barth (1886-1968). The kingdom of Christ in the Trinity is absolute in the sense that its reality is not dependent upon any contingencies, such as its acknowledgement by finite creatures. The source of its glorious reality is simply the divine power and majesty itself. It is eternal in the sense of having no end or beginning. It is unchangeable in the sense that its reality does not wax or wane.

One and universal, it extends equally over the realms of nature and thinking spirit, ruling nature with irresistible power but requiring willing obedience from thinking spirit. One with the Father of all created things and Lord over all heavenly spheres, Christ receives the homage of praise and love from invisible hosts and blesses them with the light of his countenance. Newman accents the obligation of obedient worship in order to underscore the doxological vocation of human being and the deep offense of human transgression.

God creates human beings to join the heavenly “crowd of worshippers…in offering to the

Lord the sacrifice of holiness and praise,” but the “fearful and astonishing defection” of

117 humankind’s universal turn to sin in no way affects Christ’s eternal dominion: his power is not weakened, his law does not lose its force, and his demands do not become less strict. All things continue to manifest his glory, if not by obedient service and worship than in suffering punishment. Countering antinomianism, Newman emphasizes that the divine rule cannot be abrogated; the obligation to continue in the path of holiness under his law is unremitting. Because all sinners must be condemned to banishment from his presence, human beings are no longer subjects but rather occupy the position of “an outlaw, a disenfranchised and disinherited outcast” with respect to the absolute kingdom of the Trinity (JS I, 324-25).

In this sermon Newman does not, as he does elsewhere, soften and shade his stark picture of human rebellion against God’s reign with an account of subsequent preparation for and anticipation of the messianic kingdom in the history of the nations and in

Israel.176 Instead, Newman transitions abruptly to the advent of the mediatorial kingdom of Christ, accentuating its gratuity. Attending to the way Christ establishes his mediatorial kingdom is crucial for Newman because that kingdom is recognized in subsequent history only by its historical conformity to the same dramatic pattern. Here again the trinitarian horizon is important because the action begins in Christ’s eternal reign with the Father. There Christ covenants with his Father to suffer the penalty for sin, securing the reinstatement of the offenders in greater privileges than they had forfeited.

The Son’s assumption of human nature to become subject to God’s law is not logically

176 From very early Newman was extremely concerned to differentiate amongst the variety of ways that Christ’s absolute kingdom as God relates to people “unaided by revelation,” among whom Newman counts the Greeks and the Romans, during the progressive disclosure of revealed truth in the antediluvian, patriarchal, and Mosaic dispensations, and in the growth of Christ’s mediatorial kingdom. See especially sermons no. 106-117.

118 necessary but is rather disclosive of divine love for humanity. Attending to the drama of redemption reveals that he gains a kingdom through unfailing obedience and is thus exalted as “King of all worlds for the good of the sinful race…He had so wonderfully redeemed.” Newman sees this pattern summed up in the kenosis hymn of Philippians 2.

The mediatorial kingdom had “come near,” however it was not inaugurated until Christ performed his work of atonement on the cross, rose victorious over death, and ascended to the right hand of God to receive all authority in heaven and earth. Summing up I

Corinthians 15, Newman teaches that Christ will continue to rule until the Day of

Judgment. At the Second Advent “He will come in pomp and great glory to close this earthly scene of things; and then he will deliver up His power unto the Father, that God may be all in all. Then Christ will resume his eternal reign as one with the Father, having accomplished the purposes of His assumed and temporary inferiority to Him” (JS I, 325).

Kenotic obedience to God’s sovereign will and ecstatic surrender of self unto death for the atonement of sins are therefore the iconic hallmarks of victorious advance in Christ’s mediatorial kingdom.

Newman elaborates the signs of Christ’s mediatorial kingdom by unraveling the intertextual associations of three names in Isaiah 9:6-7 and highlighting other key icons by which to recognize its historical manifestation. He connects “the government upon his shoulders” with the vision in Apocalypse 1 of the ascended Christ declaring that he lives forevermore and has the keys of hell and of death. This symbolizes Christ’s role as guide, protector, provider, and advocate for his kingdom. His mediatorial advocacy takes the historical form of turning “all the arts of the adversary to a display of His Father’s glory and the furtherance of His people’s salvation.” Second, as mediator Christ is “the prince

119 of peace,” which Newman associates with Luke 2, where the angels sing of Christ’s birth as bringing not only “glory to God in the highest” but also peace on earth. He emphasizes that the heavenly glory that Christ’s mediatorial Kingdom manifests is unsurpassed and earthly. Invoking Ephesians 3, Newman teaches that the concrete history of the kingdom manifests the wisdom of God’s eternal purpose to the heavenly powers and principalities as Christ brings shalom on earth between God and man, man and man, and man with himself—being no longer at war with his own mind (Isaiah 57). Third, the shalom that

Christ’s government brings shall increase unceasingly and be established forever upon the throne of David. Newman correlates the Davidic reference with Paul’s description of the church as “spiritual Israel.” He connects its continual growth with the vision in Daniel

2 of a stone cut without hands that becomes a great mountain and fills the earth. He sees these images converging in Apocalypse 11, where the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of the Lord. Newman reiterates the trinitarian goal of the mediatorial work of

Christ: when accomplished: “he will resign his delegated authority, and retire back (so to say) into the Unity of the Father and the Holy Spirit” (JS I, 326).

The second sermon is Newman’s own brief account of the historical progress of the mediatorial kingdom of Christ, taking the apocalyptic vision in Daniel 7:13-14 of the messiah’s advent as his guiding image.177 Citing texts such as Matthew 28, Acts 1-2 and

5, Hebrews 1, Ephesians 1, and Apocalypse 1 and 5, he recognizes that Christ’s ascension is consistently interpreted in the New Testament through Daniel 7:13-14 as the historical

177 “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed” (KJV).

120 inauguration of the messianic kingdom. Newman employs numerous prophetic tropes and apocalyptic images to convey the rationale for the kingdom’s gradual progress in history.

He notes that Christ clearly does not take immediate possession of the entirety of his kingdom during his First Advent; the whole earth neither greets him with faith nor becomes holy. It is because Christ requires free worship and obedience of the heart from all peoples that he came as a light to the Gentiles (Isaiah 49), soliciting the willing service of all nations (Psalm 72). Like the grain of a mustard seed, Christ’s mediatorial kingdom began as the least of all seeds before growing into the greatest of all herbs. Like hidden leaven, Christ’s word works silently and effectually until the whole mass is leavened. Newman also cites Christ’s prophecy that “the gates of hell should not prevail against his church” as implying that the kingdom’s historical growth and establishment is be a battle in which sin and the devil will perpetually appear to be heading for victory. He connects the image of a messianic warrior fighting for God’s kingdom in Psalm 45 to images of the Word of God waging war and conquering in righteousness in Apocalypse 6 and 19. Newman interprets these as icons “of the gradual victories of Christ over his enemies,” establishing his “empire over the souls of men and [molding] a race of obstinate sinners into his spiritual and faithful worshippers” (JS I, 280-81). Together with the other icons of Christ and of his mediatorial kingdom already reviewed Newman constructs a mosaic through which the kingdom’s advance may be discerned in history.

Newman shows that the historical expectations generated by this constellation of images are satisfied by the stories of the early church in Acts. There one sees the church small before Christ is “exalted as a priest upon a throne” (Zechariah 6) but growing in strength and spreading through preaching, healing, and suffering persecution in the name

121 of Jesus Christ after he is exalted and the Spirit is sent (Acts 2-6). Pentecost is the event in which the Spirit puts the weapons by which Christ subdued evil into the hands of his disciples and makes them his bodily agency in the war against Satan. Christ’s kingdom becomes manifest when members of the apostolic church conform to the pattern of

Christ’s death, such as when Stephen sees Jesus at the right hand of God during his martyrdom (Acts 7). The wiles of the devil are consistently turned to the kingdom’s advantage: persecution scatters the church into the area adjoining Jerusalem but enables

Samaria to receive the word of God (Acts 8); Saul the persecutor is converted to (Acts 9). The Spirit is poured out on the Gentiles, confirming the apostolic conviction that Christ’s mediatorial kingdom knows no earthly boundaries; Jesus Christ is ordained by God to be the judge of the living and the dead, and the mission of the apostles is to invite all people to submit freely to his rule (Acts 10-15). Newman find in

Acts an exemplary apocalyptic narration of the messianic kingdom’s historical progress

(JS I, 281-82), and he extends this narrative to subsequent church history in the remainder of the sermon.

In accordance with British Protestant tradition, Newman’s apocalyptic narrative is divided into three major epochs, and each has its own characteristic admixture of light

(glorious triumph) and darkness (tragic defeat). The first extends from the apostles into the early period of the post-Constantinian Church. Newman foregrounds the imperial persecution of early Christians as conforming to biblical icons of Christ and the apostles, and he applies the images of growth to victories over the ‘corrupt religions and ’ then prevailing throughout the Roman Empire. The climatic triumph is the conversion of

Constantine and subsequent establishment of Christianity in the fourth century. Newman

122 illustrates the applicability of icons of turning Satan’s barbs to the kingdom’s advantage by recounting the apostate emperor Julian’s failure to subvert the church despite using all his powers to do so. The last great external threat of antiquity was the barbarian invasions that overran the Roman Empire, which were once again transformed into a boon as they embraced Christianity. From the very beginning of this great time of authentic witness and visible conformity to the cross, however, Newman writes, “Satan had all this time been preparing a more crafty device… to corrupt what he could not openly destroy.”

While the church was withstanding external persecution and gaining cultural credibility, it was being corrupted from the inside. Newman offers a neat genealogy of corruption in the early church. Nominal Christians—those who do not practice growth in holiness—are afflicted by pride, carnality, selfishness, etc. Their vices lead to divisive quarrelling as to which of their partial versions of Christian teaching is right. The rise of schismatic rivalry causes confusion and conflict in the Church. These vices dull spiritual discernment just as the multiplication of sects makes discriminating between Christianity and its counterfeits more urgent. The historical outcome is a steady diminishing of contrast between Christ’s mediatorial kingdom and the idolatries it came to overcome (JS I, 282-83). Following the hermeneutic decisions made while studying Apocalypse 6 in 1822, Newman’s narrative of the first epoch focuses on larger patterns instead of correlating particular symbols with discrete events. The insight displayed in his narration of the relationship between external and internal resistance, moral maturation and theological perception, etc. is very much in excess of the sedimented British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. Still, he fundamentally replicates the basic plot found in Scott’s commentary on Apocalypse 6-8 and in Newton’s

123 discussion of the same passages, a plot which structures Milner’s much longer discussion of the same historical period and goes all the way back to Bale.178

Whereas the light of the mediatorial kingdom’s glorious triumphs occupies the foreground and the darkness of internal corruption lies in the background during the first epoch, Newman narrates a gradual reversal of this relationship in the second epoch. The

Dark Ages are a time of almost nothing but tragic defeat for Christ’s kingdom; corruption is left unchecked and Christendom receives its just reward in the form of Papal tyranny and Islamic conquering. The persecuted remnant of Christ’s true bride is recognizable still by its suffering for apostolic witness. In his exposition of this epoch Newman once again focuses his attention on those correlations between apocalyptic icons and historical patterns which are definitive for the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. In terms that are taken almost verbatim from Scott, Newton, and Milner and orbit around Bale,179 he applies the icon of divine judgment in Apocalypse 9:3-4—where “locusts upon the earth” are “given power as the scorpions” and commanded to hurt “only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads”—to the “imposture of Mohammed” and the resulting rise and victory of Islam over “degenerate Christians” in “the East,” Africa, and

Spain. As is customary in penitential accounts of Israel’s history, Newman interprets this allowance as divine chastening of the church’s corruption, division, and idolatry; he laments that the warning went unheeded and that this pattern continued.

178 See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. V, pp. 755-66. Scott cites Newton numerous times; cf. Dissertations, pp. 460-81. See also Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, vol. I, pp. 86- 485. For Bale, see IBC, pp. 313ff., 347; see chapter 2.

179 See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. V, p. 767; Newton is again repeatedly cited— cf. Dissertations, pp. 481ff, and Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, vol. I, p. 537. Bale applies these images to agents of the Roman Church in IBC, pp. 349ff., but he gives Mohammed the same historical role via different symbols (cf. p. 347); see chapter 2.

124 Newman’s application of apocalyptic icons of Antichrist in this sermon earned it mention in the Apologia.180 He applies the Pauline icons of Satan “in the garb of an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11)” and of “the man of sin…‘who opposseth and exalteth himself above all that is called god, or that is worshipped – so, that he is as God sitting in the temple of God shewing himself that he is God’” (2 Thessalonians 2) to the emergence of papal supremacy in Christendom. What makes “that apostate church of Rome” deserving of this application is its usurpation of Christ’s role as king of the mediatorial kingdom, its substitution of “a poisonous creed for the faith as it is in Jesus,” and its seizure and consolidation of earthly power for its own self-aggrandizing ends. In these characteristics the typological identity between the apocalyptic icons of Antichrist and the historical phenomenon of the Roman Papacy is manifest. Likewise, when the Roman Church exhibited the very same beastly accumulation of wealth and use of violence which had characterized the ancient Roman Empire, Newman determines that it conformed itself to the image in Apocalypse 17 of the “whore of Babylon,” “arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and decked with gold… having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication – ‘drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus’.” Just as the true members of Christ’s Kingdom are revealed in antiquity by their conformity to the icon of Christ through faithful witness while suffering persecution, “the real and spiritual bride (Hebrews 11)” submitted to the same fate in the

Middle Ages (JS I, 283-84). While this narrative of the medieval Papacy and of the

Roman Church displays uncommon mastery of the British Protestant apocalyptic

180 “When I was young…and after I was grown up, I thought the Pope to be Antichrist. At Christmas 1824-5 I preached a sermon to that effect” (Apo, 57).

125 tradition’s figural rationality, it basically replicates Bale’s classic narrative as mediated by Scott, Newton, and Milner.181

As is conventional in this tradition, Newman sets the stage for the third epoch by vividly recalling the latter part of the second epoch as a time of deepening despair: the

Roman Papacy grew more controlling and the assaults of Islam returned perennially. The initial onslaught of Islam was the first woe; Newman notes that Apocalypse 9:12 tells of

“two woes more.” He applies the icon of the second woe, “four angels which are bound to the great river Euphrates,” to “the four Kingdoms of the Turks which had established themselves in the neighborhood of the Euphrates” and poured “down their forces upon

Christendom till at length its eastern empire Greece fell into their hands as it remains to the present day.” This literal correlation seems to be lifted almost directly from Newton, whose account is repeated by Scott and Milner.182 Newman makes much of the imminent and complete destruction hanging over a degenerate Christendom. When “Satan seemed to exult in the prospect of speedily wiping away the name of Christ from the earth,” he writes, Christ “appeared to purify his purchased inheritance.” Newman uses the language of parousia to describe the Reformation which broke out in various “popish countries.”

He recognizes it by the same pattern of prophetic witness observable in the early church but adds his own evangelical accent by emphasizing that it consisted of “individuals of piety, learning, and talent” testifying “against the corruptions of the Romish creed.” He

181 See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. V, pp. 430-31, 803ff.; Scott cites Newton in the latter comments. See Newton, Dissertations, pp. 403ff., 566ff. See Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, vol. I, pp. 547ff. For Bale, see IBC, pp. 493ff.; see chapter 2.

182 See Newton, Dissertations, pp. 488ff. See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. V, pp. 768-70, where Newton is cited as his authority. See also Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, vol. II, pp. 197. Bale again applies these images to agents of the Roman Church in IBC, pp. 358ff., but he gives the Turks the same historical role via different symbols; see chapter 2.

126 foregrounds two signs that the Reformation was the will of God and the work of Christ.

First, despite longstanding suppression by Roman power, on this occasion the prophetic witness met with popular success. The spirits of so many people were “stirred up of God to attend to the words of truth” that “whole states, among which (God be ever praised) was England, threw off the yoke of superstition and ungodliness.” The uprising of the faithful against Roman tyranny and superstition legitimizes the Reformation as the providential renewal of the mediatorial kingdom of Christ. As further indication of this,

Newman points out that the progress of “the Turkish power, which seemed raised for the purpose of chastening our idolatry, was arrested” and has since “dwindled in comparative insignificance.” Newman ends his apocalyptic narrative on this triumphant note, claiming that this characterization of the third Protestant epoch brings him all the way “to our own times” (JS I, 284). This British Protestant apocalyptic figuration of the Reformation as a parousia of Christ derives from Bale, who aligned the prophetic voice of the sixth trumpet with the appearance of The Word of God in Apocalypse 19. Newman summarizes the version of Newton, which is repeated by Scott and structures Milner’s history of the Reformation. Popular legitimization is a crucial element in Foxe’s apocalyptic narrative; Milner had recycled both this theme and much of the material Foxe used to exposit it.183

Newman supplements this picture of the triumph of the mediatorial kingdom in

Protestant England with a reminder that Apocalypse 11 offers an icon of a third woe still to come. Siding with Bale against apocalyptic speculation, he discourages inquiry about

183 See Bale, IBC, pp. 546ff. and chapter 2 above. See Newton, Dissertations, pp. 551ff. See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. V, pp. 791ff., where Newton is again cited as his authority. See also Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, vol. II, pp. 45ff. In Milner’s history of the Reformation he repeatedly attributes his material to Foxe.

127 what it may be or against whom it may act. Like the apocalyptic narrative of past history, apocalyptic images of future threats are not for the satiation of curiosity but to motivate purification and to orient in mission. They unveil the dangers to Christ’s kingdom both outside and inside the church so that disciples may be prepared to battle them and to receive their effects profitably, redeeming the dangers as opportunities for the growth of the kingdom. Just as the first two woes marked transitions between the first three epochs, the third woe will likely afflict Christendom on the threshold of the great and complete establishment of the mediatorial kingdom heralded by the seventh trumpet in Apocalypse

11:15. In the icons of Apocalypse 20 Newman sees Christ going throughout the whole earth pouring out his spirit on all, melting hard and unconcerned hearts, and binding “that old serpent which is the devil and Satan in the bottomless pit.” The promised result is the universal realization of the messianic kingdom, which Jewish and Christian prophecy distinguishes by four key characteristics: (1) holiness and purity (Isaiah 60; Malachi 3;

Apocalypse 19), (2) peace and unity (Psalm 72; Isaiah 2, 11), (3) security and prosperity

(Isaiah 54), and (4) glory (Psalm 54; Isaiah 60). The Christian’s principal vocation is to wait for the second, universal advent of this kingdom, to pray for its arrival, and above all to establish it in oneself by living under Christ’s reign now by faith in accordance with

Apocalypse 15 and 19 (JS I, 284-85). Thus, even though the messianic kingdom was inaugurated by the First Advent and reached a new level of purity in the Reformation, its fullness will never be realized by human agents and can only be consummated at the

Second Advent of Christ. The complexity of Newman’s story reflects the hybridization of

Augustinian, Joachimite, and Wycliffite that is Bale’s legacy. His application of millennial icons solely to the future of the kingdom is the product of Mede’s thinning

128 down of this tradition to one rather than multiple meanings, which was transmitted to him by Newton and Scott.184

The primary purpose of this section has been to locate the pre-Tractarian Newman firmly within the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. He stands in a trajectory of

English Reformers that begins with John Bale and John Fox, extends through the

Puritans, and is revived by Thomas Newton, Joseph Milner, and Thomas Scott. Although at this stage Newman is partly repeating the words of his predecessors, he is striving to perform their mission anew for his own time. In an age of rampant amnesia, Newman is attempting to tap back into the power of this apocalyptic master narrative to absorb and illuminate the world, as it had during the past three centuries. In the late 1820s he is only beginning to realize that this amnesia is in a far more advanced state than he imagined. It is afflicting not only the culture of England in general and the Established Church as a whole but has also overwhelmed earnest Protestants, who are constructing their own enthusiastic and revisionist versions of the story that their leading lights of the past three centuries had been telling. The early Newman therefore appears as the faithful remnant in a tradition which is disintegrating. The depth and uniqueness of Newman’s insight into this phenomenon is likely due to the fact that he seems to be the only significant theological voice of the time that is still in vital contact with the classical British

Protestant apocalyptic narrative.

184 See Bale, IBC, pp. 335ff., 567 and chapter 2 above. See Newton, Dissertations, pp. 526-28, 585ff. See Scott, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. V, pp. 770, 778-79, 814-20, where Newton is quoted as his authority.

129 IV. Guarding and Being Governed by Protestant Apocalyptic Thought

Newman not only positively renewed classical British Protestant apocalyptic thought; he was also a vocal critic of the popular enthusiasm into which it was degenerating among

English Protestants. In an 1824 Advent sermon he chastised those who study prophecy merely out of curiosity, “boldly prying” into those which have not yet been fulfilled (JS

II, 6). The French Revolution and the events that unfolded in its wake stimulated much interest in biblical prophecy in England.185 This trend reached a crescendo during the

1820s as ‘inconsistencies’ in the Protestant United Kingdom’s incorporation of Roman

Catholic Ireland increasingly came to the surface.

In April 1825 Newman reviewed a relatively measured specimen of the new outburst of apocalyptic discourse (LD I, 223). The topic of The Crisis by Edward Cooper

(d. 1835) is well indicated by its long subtitle: an Attempt to Shew from Prophecy, illustrated by the Signs of the Times, the Prospects and the Duties of the Church of Christ at the present Period, With an Inquiry into the Probable Destiny of England during the predicted Desolations of the Papal Kingdom.186 Animated by a sense that the events of his generation are momentous, he turns to biblical prophecy in the light of “signs of the times” to determine the future prospects and present duties of the Church of Christ.

Attention to signs and duties is characteristic of classical Protestant apocalyptic thought in England, and addressing “the Church of Christ” rather than the Church of England echoes Milner’s Evangelical contraction of the Church to pious individuals. Newman and

Cooper belong to a common tradition in these respects; indeed both were active

185 See footnotes 140 and 141 for scholarship on the outbreak of apocalyptic enthusiasm in England and elsewhere in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

186 London: Cadell, 1825.

130 participants in the Bible Society which Scott had started. Newman acknowledges

Cooper’s good intent, applauds his continuing practice of prophetic interpretation, and expresses gratitude for his exhortations. However Newman takes serious issue with the lack of rigor in Cooper’s narrative configuration of the prophecies, his haphazard application of prophetic symbols to historical events, and his speculative interest in national destinies without reference to “the fortunes of the church.” In these respects

Cooper repeats the vulgarization of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition that occurred in the seventeenth century. Newman submits him to a schooling in the scholarly trajectory of Mede, Newton, and Scott and chides him for the “rash,” “unsound,” and “childish” character of his reasoning. Similar instances of such harsh rhetoric have led Frank Turner to conclude that Newman’s real enemy during his Anglican years was not ‘liberalism’ but rather the evangelical Protestantism of his youth.187 However Newman explained the symbiotic relationship between these two concerns as early as this 1825 review, which

Turner overlooked. Newman regrets that Cooper’s work was made public because he believes that its effect will be to prejudice further those who are skeptical about thinking through the prophecies. It will most likely convince them that prophecy can be made to say anything an interpreter wants and that anyone who believes them must be of weak mind and enthusiastic temperament. Thus he finds Cooper guilty of providing plausible grounds for an attack of “infidelity…against revealed truth.”188 This is what Newman means when he writes in the Apologia that Evangelicals “played into the hands of the

187 See Turner, John Henry Newman, “Editor’s Introduction, and “Newman.”

188 See Newman, “Cooper’s Crisis,” The Quarterly Theological Review and Ecclesiastical Record (June 1825), pp. 33-44 (43).

131 Liberals” (Apo, 40). For Newman already in 1825 the conflict between secular reason and revealed religion transcends historic affiliations and local loyalties.

Cooper represented for Newman a deformation of Scott’s effort to renew revealed religion, a judgment he becomes increasingly inclined to apply to evangelical Protestants as a group. Newman resists speculative interest and emphasizes that the vision of Christ’s kingdom, of its perpetual warfare and historical progress, is for the practical purpose of enlisting disciples in its struggle and forming a missional ethos. Rather than wondering about the kingdom’s future, he devotes himself to being an agent on its behalf in his parochial and plain duties. The particular shape of his apocalyptic metanarrative lends a specific focus to his vocation. He understands the heavenly conflict to have taken the concrete, historical form of a battle between Roman Catholic corruption and the purity of early Christian revealed religion which true Protestantism is dedicated to restoring. In

Newman’s preaching, teaching, and writing during these next years he is animated by this mission of purifying Christian thought and practice. He is consistently critical of empty confession and routine ritual and relentlessly zealous for revealed truth and holy living, a point that hardly needs belaboring with examples from the eighty sermons he composed during his first two years as a priest.189 The vocation of purification entails the critical discrimination between what is authentically vital and what is sediment in the received

Christian tradition. This intellectual task came increasingly to the fore of his attention as he became more involved in the educational mission of Oxford first as a Vice-Principal of St. Alban Hall under (1787-1863) from 1825 to 1826 and then as

Tutor of Oriel from 1826 through 1830. For Newman the central issue became, as it had

189 For example see especially JS I, pp. 179-86, JS II, pp. 279-315, and PPS VIII:8 , pp. 110-23.

132 for all earnest Protestant thinkers before him: how and where do I draw the line between pure faith and corrupt doctrine on the one hand and between living piety and degenerate superstition on the other? This key question unites Newman with other western Christian thinkers who intended to continue moving the Protestant project forward in the wake of the Enlightenment rather than simply repeat its inherited formulas.

The single most substantial, illustrative work of this period is “The Miracles of

Scripture.” Newman wrote it for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana between August 1825 and April 1826. It is driven primarily by his interest in cleansing Christianity of belief in miracles that are extrinsic to revealed religion. Newman regarded such superstition as an antichristian corruption that especially infected the Roman Church but also affected Islam and other non-Christian religions. He is secondarily concerned to forestall lapses into the skeptical infidelity of a Voltaire, a Hume, or a Bentham, whose commitment to reason he shares in principle. He attempts to accomplish both aims by offering a criterion by which to distinguish rationally between true and false miracles. If the purpose of a is to authorize the revealed religion through which the kingdom of God is established, then only miracles that are rationally demonstrable as necessary to this purpose of divine providence should be held as true. Thus Newman justifies the “great” miraculous events narrated in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures as performing a needed role in the growth of God’s moral governance of the world. However he argues that belief in miracles that either are outside of this historical lineage or come after the kingdom was established is superstitious because such miracles are extrinsic to the divine purpose in the first case and needlessly belated displays in the second case. This authorizes ruling out the claims of Zoroaster and other extra-canonical teachers of wisdom to have performed miracles,

133 and it justifies skepticism toward rabbinical stories, accounts of Mohammed, as well as

“popish” and Jansenist sources. Newman acknowledges that this principal also makes many of the miracles in the ancient church related by the Fathers seem illegitimate and renders improbable a number of “minor” biblical miracles as well. Instead of constructing a hierarchy of relative credibility, Newman sharply divides them into two classes: the questionable patristic and biblical miracles are lumped together with the antichristian superstitions as accounts to be rejected while the miracles associated with major events in the biblical narrative are received (cf. Apo, 32). This essentialist valuation mandates the loss of faith in that which appears dispensable to the growth of God’s moral kingdom in history.190 Newman is thus veering in the direction of John Locke (1632-1704), whose essay on The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) also pares down Christian beliefs and practices to those which can be rationally justified as necessary to what is understood to be God’s so-called “main purpose.” This trend became pervasive in the eighteenth century and found its consummate German expression in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose massively influential blend of Pietist millenarianism and Enlightenment rationalism employed an analogous criterion to strip down Christian beliefs and practices more comprehensively in Religion within the

Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794).191

In the Apologia Newman looks back on his text as evidence of his “drifting in the direction of the Liberalism of the day.” He associates his skepticism toward accounts of

190 Mir, pp. 4-94. Francis McGrath finds evidence of this rationalizing trend elsewhere in Newman’s sermons during the late 1820s; see McGrath, John Henry Newman: Universal Revelation, p. 39.

191 Regarding the role of Protestant millenarian narrative in Kant’s thought, see especially Michael Despland, Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973).

134 miracles in the patristic church with a growing disdain for “unnecessarily scientific” language in Nicene trinitarian doctrine (Apo, 25-26). Indeed, in a memorandum attached to his 1827 Easter sermon on “The Mediatorial Kingdom of Christ” Newman writes that he dislikes “all discussions concerning the nature of God,” “speculations about the mode of his Existence as Three and One,” and even “the words Trinity, Person, Procession etc.”

Newman disavows “any systematic exposition of the doctrine but what is relative to us and practical” (JS II, 343). He prefers narrating how the Trinity is concretely extending its eternal kingdom through the economy of salvation in order to invite deeper human participation in this historical phenomenon. Newman’s evaluative discrimination between the narrative discourse of scripture and the philosophical categories of Christian dogma is a product of his apocalyptic discrimination of revealed religion in its purity from all of its accretions. Indeed, the issue of how and where to draw the line had never been resolved by Protestants in England or anywhere else. It was the source of continuing division precisely because the stakes were so high: too little purity led to Roman tyranny and too much led to the modern apostasy of skeptical infidelity. In British Protestant apocalyptic thought there is only one right way to resolve this dilemma. Newman realizes what needs to be done soon after completing his difficult work on “The Miracles of Scripture.” In a giddy letter to his sister on May 1, 1826, Newman excitedly announces his intention to undertake a project that he is sure will take him at least ten and perhaps as many as twenty years:

But what after all is the subject? – it is to trace the sources from which the corruptions of the church, principally the Romish, have been derived – It would consequently involve a reading of all the Fathers – 200 volumes at least…all on the principal Platonists, Philo, Plotinus, Julian, etc – an inquiry into Gnosticism – Rabbinic literature – and I know not what else – perhaps much, much more. – am not I bold? (LD I, 285)

135

Newman is here proposing what would be the consummate work of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition: a definitive historical narrative of the corruption of Christianity. He realizes that shucking the husk from the kernel in the present has always depended upon a genealogical account of the covering of the kernel with the husk in the past. An adequate purification must reverse the process in perfect proportion. Newman’s storied return to the Fathers is thus conceived as the means for fulfilling the promise of British Protestant apocalyptic narration.

Newman makes an initial foray into the Fathers during the summer of 1828, but it does not yield the expected fruit. His anticipation that ancient Christian discourse would match modern Protestant notions of pure revealed religion is frustrated.192 He looks in vain for the central Evangelical doctrines of atonement and justification by faith in

Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35-c. 107), Justin (c. 100-165), and

(c. 150-c. 215). Absences such as these ignited Newman’s lurking suspicion that modern

Protestantism has hardly been successful in its mission to restore primitive Christianity.

According to the Apologia, this suspicion had first been suggested by the combined effect of his parish experience and his Oxford mentors, both of which convinced him that the

Evangelical habit of distinguishing the invisible body of true believers from the visible church was neither biblical nor practical. Both John Keble (1792-1866) and Richard

Hurrell Froude (1803-1836) were simultaneously softening his antipathy for the Roman

Church while bolstering his nascent valorization of the liturgical and sacramental life of the church as the visible manifestation of Christ’s kingdom. Even

192 See Newman, “The Theology of the Seven Epistles of St. Ignatius” [1838] in ECH, vol. 1, pp. 222-61 (227-34).

136 though Newman had become increasingly sure of evangelical Protestantism’s fatal flaws, he remained repulsed both by the bigotry and the spiritual-intellectual lethargy that he saw in High Churchmen generally. Meanwhile, he attests that the spell of Whately’s

Christian rationalism was broken by a second bout with serious illness and the death of his sister Mary. Both of these events heightened his awareness of the weight of mortality and strengthened his resolve to resist the temptation to prize intellectual excellence above moral virtue (Apo, 26). This memory appears to receive some textual confirmation in a letter he writes soon thereafter; he reflects on the captivating impermanence of the visible world, “What a veil and curtain this world of sense is! Beautiful but still a veil” (LD II,

69). Newman thus began the new academic year that autumn of 1828 in a state of alert suspension between the evangelical Protestants, the Oriel rationalists, and the High

Churchmen. Far from leading to any resignation, his judgment that none of the existing

Anglican parties can serve as an adequate vehicle for the British Protestant apocalyptic work of battling Christian corruption and renewing revealed religion instead inspires his belief that one of those “large and temporary Effusions of divine grace” of which Milner wrote are in order (Apo, 32).

137 CHAPTER FOUR

ANGLICAN NEWMAN: RECONSTRUCTING APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE

By the late 1820s Newman had internalized and appropriated the Protestant apocalyptic narrative. Its figuration of church history was his key resource for interpreting the events of his age. In this chapter I discuss the intellectual process through which the Anglican

Newman began to reassess and reconstruct his received apocalyptic narrative. As in the previous two chapters, I begin with Newman’s own description and interpretation of that process in the Apologia. There Newman attributes his sense of the urgency for this act of revision to his first experiences of ‘liberalism.’ As he explains it, this perception initiated his process of slowly “overcoming” the influence of his inherited apocalyptic narrative of

Antichrist. According to Newman, this occurred because the danger of the Roman Papacy to revealed religion increasingly seemed to pale in comparison to the acidic effects of the

“false liberty of thought” of this “novel age.” In the second part of the chapter I discuss

Newman’s rehabilitation of the early Christian apocalyptic practice that enabled him to have this perception: the practice of watching for the Second Coming. I contend that his approach to this practice is unique not only in the local context of British Protestantism, which was polarized on the practice of watching between enthusiasts and skeptics, but also in the wider context of the history of Christianity as well, which has always been plagued by a fissure between popular apocalyptic teachers and their cultured critics. In

138 the third part I discuss in more detail the textual remains from Newman’s first efforts to extend and refigure his apocalyptic narrative in way that would be adequate for what he called this “novel age.”

I. Refiguring the Protestant Apocalyptic Narrative in the Apologia

As I have shown, in the Apologia Newman interprets the development of his religious thought as the resolution of a contradiction inherited from the Protestant apocalyptic tradition. By so doing he represents himself as the genuine heir of this legacy even as he criticizes and amends its sedimented forms. His task, therefore, is to persuade his readers that his act of correction signifies a kind of continuity with this tradition which is of more enduring importance than the preservation of its mere letter. Kingsley depicts Newman’s transgression of its letter as a microcosm of Newton’s apocalyptic narrative of Roman

Catholic degeneration into corruption and deception, but Newman replies by figuring his amendment as the epitome of the Milnerian apocalyptic pattern of reviving and restoring primitive Christian truth in the course of battling serious decay and grave error. Their contest over Newman’s meaning is therefore a conflict over the future of the Protestant apocalyptic tradition: is Newman’s revision a salutary and prophetic amendment or a harmful declension? It is a crisis regarding the question of how to extend their common apocalyptic narrative and thus render the significance of the modern liberal order. In the

Apologia Newman recapitulates his experience of this religio-political crisis and discloses how his intellectual discernment of its resolution was carried out using the tools of their

Protestant apocalyptic tradition. Newman’s use of a Milnerian apocalyptic narrative in

139 the figuration of the history of his mind has not received scholarly attention, even though he describes its basic form in some detail right before employing it.

Newman sees the origin of his mission in his early realization that the Established

Church is “radically decayed” and threatened by a “Liberalism” appearing in “great events” such as the 1830 revolution in France and “the great Reform agitation” in Britain between 1828 and 1832. Newman responds to this crisis not by reclaiming “Reformation principles,” first of all, because in his judgment the nineteenth-century heirs of classical

Protestantism “seemed to have lost that simplicity and unworldliness which I admired so much in Milner.” More importantly, the “vital question” of this crisis was not how to fight corruption and tyranny in the Roman Papacy but “how were we to keep the Church from being liberalized?” The repristination of classical Protestantism in response to this danger would be anachronistic, and therefore Newman thinks instead of “a second reformation.” He nonetheless follows the example of their approach to ecclesial renewal by drawing directly upon “that fresh vigorous Power of which I was reading in the first centuries” to address this new situation (Apo, 39-40).

Newman’s figuration of the crisis in the Established Church during the late 1820s and early 1830s echoes the way that Milner and other classically British Protestant apocalyptic thinkers figured the sixteenth-century crisis of Catholic Christianity.

Newman’s figuration of himself and of his mission also parallels their characterizations of the Reformation’s mission. While both aim to restore ancient Christian vitality back to the contemporary Church, they name different enemies. While corruption and tyranny in the Roman Papacy were claimed to be the great danger to apostolic revealed religion in the sixteenth century, the great threat to apostolic revealed religion in modernity,

140 according to Newman, is “Liberalism.” He thus foregrounds this “continuity of type” with the first Reformers so prized by Protestantism. Newman implies that the likes of

Kingsley may be literally continuing the Reformation legacy as they keep railing against the Roman Papacy, but he is its genuine heir when it comes to fighting the greatest living danger to apostolic revealed religion and renewing primitive Christianity. Newman thus uses Milnerian apocalyptic narrative in his depiction of the origin and progress of his

“battle against Liberalism” to counter Kingsley’s use of Newtonian apocalyptic narrative to depict Newman as falling into ‘Romish’ corruption and deception. This approach to the Apologia explains why Newman insinuates in the preface that his conflict with

Kingsley over “what Newman means” is between opposing apocalyptic figurations. His conflicted significance is a function of the conflicted British Protestant apocalyptic heritage.

How might Newman legitimate his apocalyptic perception of both the advent of

“Liberalism” and his prophetic mandate to do battle with it? In the conclusion to the first chapter Newman obliquely discloses the typological continuity between this experience and canonical precedents of genuine visionary experience. He recalls writing poems that were later published as Lyra Apostolica under the inspiration of “the vision” that inspired him during his Mediterranean journey of 1832-1833. In the course of his being inwardly

“fretted” by “the success of the Liberal cause,” especially “the Bill for the Suppression of the Irish Sees,” he began to believe that he had a mission. Newman became extremely ill and nearly died, but even in this state he remained confident that he had “a work to do in

England” and wrote the hymn “Lead, kindly light” (Apo, 41-3). The suffering of physical trauma as a consequence of visionary apprehension is customary in canonical prophetic

141 and apocalyptic texts such as Ezekiel and Daniel, and as such it is a defining feature of apocalyptic ethos and of prophetic authority, when the is received as the norm of legitimacy on such matters.193 Newman is invoking it in order to substantiate the legitimacy of his perception of “Liberalism” as the great threat to revealed religion in the modern world and thereby to establish his identity as the rightful heir of British Christian apocalyptic narration.

In the Apologia Newman figures his deepening realization of an “anti-Liberalism” mission modeled on the Milnerian apocalyptic pattern as the source of religio-intellectual energy propelling his progress in overcoming the deep influence of Newton’s apocalyptic narrative of the Papal Antichrist. In the three aforementioned passages Newman sketches the broad trajectory and the crucial turning points in this overcoming. He reflects on the first phase while explicating the third of three propositions on which his Tractarian Via

Media was founded. It involved an emendation of the tone and the content of the classical

Protestant apocalyptic narrative. By 1827 he “accepted eagerly the stanza in the Christian

Year,” which admonishes “speak gently of thy sister’s fall.” Newman also became “less and less bitter on the subject” under the influence of Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-36).

According to Newman, their moderate, catholicizing influence caused a revision of the severity and unambiguousness of the traditional Protestant judgment. The Roman Church was fallen indeed, but this was to be viewed and handled as a tragedy experienced by a sibling. He recalls the effect of this modification on his practice of apocalyptic narration,

“I spoke (successively but I cannot tell in what order or at what dates) of the Roman

193 See Greg Carey, Elusive Apocalypse: Reading Authority in the Revelation of John (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), pp. 84-86.

142 Church as being bound up with ‘the cause of Antichrist’, as being one of the ‘many antichrists’ foretold by St. John, as being influenced by ‘the spirit of Antichrist’, and as having something very ‘Antichristian’ or ‘unChristian’ about her.” Cumulatively, these revisions implied that Roman corruption should no longer be narrated as the prophesied eschatological deception but as one especially potent and influential form of Antichristian deformation. Newman remembers his narrative attaining a degree of stability: “In 1832-3

I thought the Church of Rome was bound up with the cause of Antichrist by the Council of Trent.” This meant halting inherited characterizations of medieval Christendom as a dark age and placing the decisive corruptions in the Reformation and post-Reformation period. However, ongoing conversations with Froude, a Mediterranean trip in 1832-33, and what he was learning of the consonance between the fathers and Roman Catholicism

“was always tending to rub the idea out of [his] mind.” Newman remembers still resisting its complete abandonment, “I had a shrinking from renouncing it even when my reason so ordered me from a sort of conscience or prejudice, I think up to 1843.” This holding pattern or state of irresolution defined his effort to stabilize the great Anglican Via Media between dogmatic, authoritarian Roman Catholicism and anti-papal Protestantism (Apo,

57). Importantly, the integrity of this position derives from its equidistance between the danger of Antichrist in “Popery” on the one side and in “Liberalism” on the other.

Newman characterizes the second phase of his overcoming as a stage of “conflict between reason and affection.” He increasingly “learned to have tender feelings towards” the Roman Church on the grounds of its maintenance of apostolic doctrine and practice as well as its agreement with Christian antiquity on many points that were important to him, which is an exoteric way of stating that his Milnerian perception of the Roman Church’s

143 “continuity of type” with the fathers was growing more powerful. Nevertheless, Newman claims that this did not affect his reason at all. Although it went against his feelings, he continued to characterize the Papacy as Antichrist and thus to protest the Church of Rome as “a matter…of simple conscience.” This, he was convinced, was nothing less than his solemn duty as an Anglican,

The prescription of such a protest was a living principle of my own Church, as expressed in not simply a catena, but by a consensus of her divines, and by the voice of her people. Moreover, such a protest was necessary as an integral portion of her controversial basis; for I adopted the argument of Bernard Gilpin, that Protestants “were not able to give any firm and solid reason of the separation besides this, to wit, that the Pope is Antichrist.” But while I thus thought such a protest to be based upon truth, and to be a religious duty, and a rule of Anglicanism, and a necessity of the case, I did not at all like the work.

Newman recalls being convinced that the identification of the Papacy as Antichrist was crucial for the initial legitimacy, theological identity, intellectual coherence, and popular vitality of Protestantism certainly but no less of Anglicanism. Here Newman is reminding

Britons again of the centrality of this judgment to their religious and national character.

Newman received it due to the historical depth and traditional breadth of its acceptance in the Established Church, confident in the justice of the charges warranting the application of Antichrist images to the Church of Rome. Still, he remembers feeling that his use of such language “had a vulgar and rhetorical look about it.” While he abided its influence upon his imagination, he recalls starting “in 1833 to form theories on the subject, which tended to obliterate” its effect upon his reason. Newman first articulated these theories in a series of essays published as “Home Thoughts Abroad” in the British Critic. Reflecting on his experience visiting Rome, he proposes that Antichrist is “not the Church of Rome, but the spirit of the old pagan city, the fourth monster of Daniel, which was still alive, and which had corrupted the Church which was planted there.” Newman states that he

144 attempted to fine tune this theory in his 1835 Advent sermons published in 1838 as Tract

73 on “The Pastristical Idea of Antichrist.” Under the influence of his patristic research, he was now more inclined to employ the symbolism of false messianism in a figurative yet serious way to perennial “forerunners” thereof, as opposed to its final and definitive

Protestant use to identify the Papacy as Antichrist. Newman quotes extensively from both texts in early editions of the Apologia, “in order to show how Bishop Newton was still upon my mind even in 1838; and how I was feeling after some other interpretation of prophecy instead of his, and not without a good deal of hesitation” (Apo, 59, 113-14).

Newman describes his transition into a third stage of overcoming the influence of

Newton as “a great change of opinion,” which was part of the “great revolution of mind” that he underwent between 1839 and 1841. He recalls expressing this change in “notes written in March, 1839” and his “Article in the British Critic of October, 1840” on “The

Protestant Idea of Antichrist.” Greater familiarity with the reception history of the Papal

Antichrist narrative brought home the recognition that both the Roman and the Anglican

Churches appeared as Antichrist to Puritans and Independents. Newman agreed that the very marks of Antichrist so often cited as evidence—establishment of normative , rites, and disciplines by ecclesiastical authorities—are found in both Churches, and this convinced him that narration of the Roman Church as Antichrist is no more appropriate than it is with regard to the Established Church of England. The way Protestants marked

Antichrist had the historical effect of making every visible, external, doctrinal, and social aspect of religion appear as an illegitimate imposition and/or a redundancy. The classical

Protestant theology of the Papal Antichrist seemed to suffer a reductio ad absurdum in its history of effects, leading to the negation of even itself. Newman recalls that a realization

145 of this sort seemed to invert the implications of the perception of the Roman Church as

Antichrist. Reasoning from Matthew 10:25, “If they have called the Master of the House

Beelzebub, how much more them of his household,” Newman now sees the history of having been “stigmatized by the name of Antichrist” as an indication of the opposite; he concluded, “from the nature of the case, the true Vicar of Christ must ever to the world seem like Antichrist, and be stigmatized as such, because a resemblance must ever exist between an original and a forgery…thus the fact of such a calumny was almost one of the notes of the Church.” With this inversion of the implications of the Protestant theology of

Antichrist, the authority historically wielded by the Roman Church appeared as evidence to its advantage rather than to its disadvantage. This change of mind undid neither his belief in “the practical abuses and excesses or Rome” nor his opposition to “her ambition and intrigue” in “her political and social line of action.” However, it did lead him to forgo speaking out against Roman Catholic doctrine, and it made him feel as if he had been

“taken in” by the Anglican divines on the Papal Antichrist narrative. His new view did not ameliorate the effect of Newton entirely, “Though my reason was convinced, I did not throw off, for some time after, —I could not have thrown off,—the unreasoning prejudice and suspicion, which I cherished about her by fits and starts, in spite of this conviction of my reason.” Rational repudiation of the narrative he received from Newton was thus still insufficient to overcome its effect upon his imagination (Apo, 90, 114-17).

At the same time that the Newtonian apocalyptic narrative of the Papal Antichrist was losing its grip on him, Newman recalls, his study of the fathers yielded a new way of perceiving the Milnerian continuity of type between ancient and modern Christianity. In the course of research into the fifth century Monophysite controversy during the summer

146 of 1839, he remembers discovering “an awful similitude” with modern Anglicanism.

Quoting from his lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching

(1850), Newman states his conclusion, “It was difficult to make out how the Eutychians or Monophysites were heretics, unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; difficult to find arguments against the Tridentine Fathers, which did not tell against the

Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the sixteenth century, without condemning the Popes of the fifth.” This perception was not about doctrinal formulations per se, Newman explains, but about the roles being played by the respective groups in a

“drama” of “the combat of truth and error,” which was “ever one and the same,” in other words in a contest between the true and false churches of Christ. Both then and now,

Newman perceives, the Roman Church “might be called peremptory and stern, resolute, overbearing, and relentless.” Likewise, “heretics were shifting, changeable, reserved, and deceitful, ever courting civil power and never agreeing together, except by its aid,” as seems true in the modern history of British Protestantism. Simultaneously, Newman sees a parallel between Roman and British civil authority: “the civil power was ever aiming at comprehensions, trying to put the invisible out of view, and substituting expediency for faith.” Newman suddenly regards his own attempt to construct a Via Media between the

Roman Catholic Church and Protestants as typologically continuous with the

Monophysite effort to establish a moderating position between Rome and the Eutychians.

He recalls finding “the very same phenomenon, in a far bolder shape” during the summer of 1841 upon returning to the history of Arianism to complete his translation of

Athanasius. In this case, “the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the

Anglicans, and…Rome was what it was then. The truth lay, not with the Via Media, but

147 with what was called ‘the extreme party’.” Newman’s Milnerian practice of discerning continuities of type changed his view of Anglicans, no longer heirs of Athanasius and

Leo but instead of Monophysites and semi-Arians (Apo, 108-11, 130).

Newman’s new way of extending the Milnerian narrative to the present day was occurring to him just as he received an article by (1802-1865) on the bearing of the Donatist controversy on the Anglican Church. Augustine’s teaching that ecclesiastical controversies are decided by the deliberate judgment of the whole Church seemed opposed to the rule of Antiquity employed by Newman and the Monophysites.

Newman heard in Augustine’s voice “one of the prime oracles of Antiquity…deciding against itself.” The combination of these discoveries created a “vivid impression” on

Newman’s imagination and a new “view thus opened” upon him. Just as he had with respect to his apprehension of “Liberalism” between 1829 and 1833, Newman figures this experience in unmistakably apocalyptic terms: “I had seen the shadow of a hand upon the wall. It was clear that I had a good deal to learn on the question of the Churches, and that perhaps some new light was coming upon me. He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again.” Newman also describes his 1841 return to the Arian controversy in the same way, “The ghost had come a second time.” Through the lens of his apocalyptic narrative, these crucial events in early

Christian history seemed to disclose the significance of divisions in modern Christendom to Newman. The ghosts of ancient Christian heresies so long repressed appeared to have returned and to have taken up habitation in Western Christendom under the proper names of Protestantism and Anglicanism; this is why in the “mirror” of the fifth century he saw suddenly his own face: “a Monophysite.” The practical implication of these disclosures,

148 Newman recalls, was that “The Church of Rome will be found right after all” (Apo, 108-

11, 130). The future tense implies the eschatological character of Newman’s insight.

Newman associates his perception of the messianic character of the Roman

Church as the genuine heir of the church of the apostles and fathers with canonical precedents of authentic visionary experience, just as he did when describing the origin of his mission to fight the false messianism of “Liberalism.” Even less ambiguous is his quotation from a sermon on “Divine Calls” written soon afterwards, where he asserts that nothing is more important than “not being disobedient to a heavenly vision.” Newman thus conveys his conviction that his perception of the Roman Church as the successor of

“the church of the fathers” is a legitimate, salutary correction of the classic Protestant apocalyptic narrative, because in that theological tradition ecclesial legitimacy depends on typological concord with apostolic and patristic antecedents. He only indirectly divulges the terminus of his parallel reconfiguration of the classical Protestant theology of Antichrist, which is buried in the midst of a long quote from a letter of 1841 to a

Roman Catholic correspondent:

Are you aware that the more serious thinkers among us are used, as far as they dare form an opinion, to regard the spirit of Liberalism as the characteristic of the destined Antichrist? …Antichrist is described as the άνομος, as exalting himself above the yoke of religion and law. The spirit of lawlessness came in with the Reformation, and Liberalism is its offspring (Apo, 111, 174).

Newman apprehends the narratological basis of modern Western rebellion, the usurpation of established ecclesial and civil authorities, in Protestant apocalyptic narration of a Papal

Antichrist, which authorizes insurrection under the banner of reformation. His experience and investigation of its historical effects and metamorphosis disclosed the self-destructive consequences that mark false messianism but had not been recognized as such. Newman

149 indirectly testifies in the Apologia that the employment of visions of epochal progress to legitimate revolutionary disobedience is the grandest deception. As he states in the final chapter, “The Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible sins the greatest,” with no regard for whatever good is expected may come from it. The approach of the Catholic theologian to the pathology of sin, Newman explains, is to shut her eyes to lighter sins in order to win people from “greater sins.” Thus, it would seem, Newman sets his sights on breaking the spell of the Protestant apocalypse because he sees England and the modern

West, under its—increasingly spectral—influence, echoing a false prophecy and globally disseminating its legitimization of rebellion as the way to true liberty (Apo, 221, 248).

II. Remembering How to Wait and Watch for the Second Coming

From the beginning to the end of Newman’s preaching career he makes much of the fact that the New Testament indicates that few things are more definitive of the apostolic

Christian than vigilance in the practice of “watching.”194 In an Anglican sermon on the topic of “The Apostolical Christian” Newman characteristically teaches that “watching is a special mark of the Scripture Christian, as our Lord emphatically sets before us” (SSD,

279). Newman notes that the command to live on the lookout for the Second Coming proceeds from the mouth of Jesus in all three synoptic gospels, is repeated in the pastoral exhortations attributed to Peter and Paul, and is also found in The Apocalypse of John.

194 Although Newman repeats this point habitually, he goes into greatest detail regarding the nature of the practice of watching in three particular sermons: two Anglican sermons that he published in Parochial and Plain Sermons (PPS IV, 22 “Waiting for Christ” and VI, 17 “Watching”) and the Catholic sermon “Waiting for Christ” [1856] published in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Burns & Lambert, 1857), pp. 31-46. Therefore the present section’s discussion of this topic draws mostly on these three sermons.

150 Likewise, no less an authority on the subject than Bernard McGinn tells us that nothing is more characteristic of the Christian apocalyptic tradition than belief in and looking out for an imminent Second Advent.195 Newman addresses this practice directly in Advent sermons that he first composed as an Anglican and later republished as a Catholic; the sermons and sermon notes that remain from his Catholic preaching indicate that he reused much of the same material then.

In this section I am situating Newman within his more local context of the British

Protestant apocalyptic tradition, but it is also important to see his reflections on the topic of watching within a pattern of polarization between popular enthusiasm for and cultured distancing from apocalyptic discourse that goes back a long way in the history of

Christianity. One already sees early signs of it in the letters of Paul to the Thessalonians, where the first letter’s proclamation of the imminence of parousia is qualified in the second letter by an emphasis on events which must precede the Second Advent and a warning against dereliction of everyday duties. The strictures of Origen and Augustine against early Christian millenarianism are indicative of a deepening of this tension, as is the critique launched by Thomas Aquinas against the direction that the disciples of

Joachim of Fiore were taking their master’s theology in the thirteenth century. This widening fissure played a major role in Reformation-era divisions, fueled modern revolutions against political regimes allied with ecclesiastical establishments, and continues to haunt Christian theology in the form of a chasm-like distance that stands currently between academic eschatology and popular apocalyptic discourses.

195 See chapter 1, p. 25, note 54.

151 Newman directly experienced and responded to the fresh outburst of apocalyptic enthusiasm which enthralled evangelical Protestants in Britain in the wake of the French

Revolution in 1789, the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Catholic Emancipation Act in

1829, and the July Revolution of 1830 in France. The likes of such outbursts had rarely been seen since the heights of Puritanism in the seventeenth century. These apocalyptic enthusiasts were the first representatives of the post-Enlightenment variety of apocalypticism from which most modern Protestant fundamentalists derive. Newman knew this development well; during the late 1820s his own brother Francis William

Newman (1805-97) became a disciple of John Nelson Darby (1800-82), who founded the

Plymouth Brethren sect and whose apocalyptic thought would later form the basis for the popular Dispensationalist theological tradition. As early as his first series of Advent sermons in 1824, Newman is already alleging that these new apocalyptic enthusiasts are studying prophecy mostly out of curiosity, as is evident from their prying into those which have not yet been fulfilled (JS II, 6). Newman echoes this concern in the 1830s, repeating canonical dictums to the effect that no one knows the time but the Father. In this regard Newman simply continues the Augustinian embargo on all speculation about future fulfillments of prophecy, as did his Protestant apocalyptic progenitor John Bale.

The basic elements of Newman’s mature critique of the new breed of Evangelical apocalyptic enthusiasm can already be found in his first theological publication, an 1825 book review in which he sharply criticizes one of the latest installments.196 In that piece the twenty-four year old Newman submits one his Anglican elders to a schooling in the scholarly trajectory of the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition and chides him for the

196 See Newman, “Cooper’s Crisis,” pp. 33-44 (43).

152 rash, unsound, and childish character of his reasoning. Newman shows that classical protocols such as rigorous attention to the narrative configuration of related apocalyptic prophecies, cautious application of apocalyptic symbols to historical events, and abstinence from speculation on national destinies that do not bear on the fortunes of the church are being brazenly broken. He clearly implies that this new enthusiasm is in fact a vulgarization of the Reformation tradition from which it derives. Although Newman still admired the pioneering Evangelicals of the eighteenth century, such as John Wesley

(1703-91), (1759-1833), and Thomas Scott, by the late 1820s he explicitly reaches the conclusion that the storied Protestant tradition of apocalyptic thought had become the victim of radical decay. He decides to distance himself from its new popular forms when he becomes convinced that its degeneration into superstition is dialectically related to the spread of religious skepticism in British intellectual culture. In the 1830s Newman finds himself in general sympathy with the skeptical critique of watching for the Second Coming, if watching is equated with the Evangelical counterfeit thereof. A crucial problem, he agreed, is that the signs that they invoke as proof that the end is upon us are common to every age; all times and places have natural disasters and social upheaval. Newman concedes that the encouragement of watching seems in fact to be yielding narrow fretting and superstitious fancies, not to mention indolence. He too sees this as a form of weakness unbecoming to the Christian disciple and diagnoses it as the surreptitious replacement of faith by an overheated imagination. Newman credits the resulting alarm which was gaining such public notoriety for generating deep incredulity about any attempt to think through apocalyptic texts with intellectual seriousness. The impression that prophecies can be made to say anything an interpreter wants and that

153 anyone who believes them must be of weak mind and enthusiastic temperament was becoming understandably common. Thus Newman finds that the author of the book he was reviewing and the larger movement of which he was a part is guilty of providing plausible grounds for disbelief in revealed truth. This is precisely what Newman has in mind when he recalls in the Apologia that he lamented the way that Evangelicals “played into the hands of the Liberals” during his Anglican years (Apo, 40).

Newman is hard on apocalyptic enthusiasts, but he is even harder on the skeptics.

However he does first allow that Christians living more than eighteen centuries after the

First Advent cannot receive the command to watch for the Second Coming in the same way that early disciples may have. Newman thinks that Christians have to take the point made by skeptics, as a PBS Frontline documentary Apocalypse! relentlessly does,197 that earnest Christians have been tragically disappointed time and time again for almost two- thousand years. Newman agrees that it would be nonsensical to interpret the imminence of the Second Coming as a chronologically literal claim in the ordinary sense, but he does not concede that this disavowal justifies the abandonment of watching altogether. To do so would be to move from one mistaken extreme into the opposite error. Forswearing watching, according to Newman, would mean lapsing into a false sense of security and comfort in this world. Excessive hostility toward the enthusiasts would likewise make one guilty of the very scoffing that New Testament texts consistently designate as a sign of the impending end and thereby strengthen their conviction. Newman contends that enthusiastic watching emerges historically not because watching is taken too seriously but because it is not taken seriously enough. When lapsed watchers are startled by current

197 See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/. Last accessed March 2014.

154 events, they throw themselves into excessive watching. Newman thinks that it is no coincidence that apocalyptic enthusiasm jumpstarted in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Rather than putting enthusiasm under wraps, Newman argues, the cultural legislation of skepticism tends to create an incubator for more rabid forms of enthusiasm to emerge during times of duress. Newman develops this line of thought even further, arguing that irreligious men inevitably become just as superstitious as enthusiasts if not more so because they do not have that critical lens through which to weigh and sift the events unfolding before them. In other words, when we stop looking out for the coming advent of God’s reign, we have no choice but to idolatrously deify one or another of the goods of this world, making it the god that we serve. The only solution, Newman contends, is to transcend this destructive post-Enlightenment dialectic between enthusiasm and skepticism. Thus, having begun by conceding to the skeptics that the enthusiasts are wrong in their watching, Newman ends by concluding that, “It is better to be wrong in our watching than not to watch at all” (PPS VI, 246).

Newman’s assessment of the state of apocalyptic thought in Anglophone culture is akin to Alasdair MacIntyre’s view of the modern state of moral discourse.198 Just as

MacIntyre positions us in the wake of a catastrophe which leaves us with little more than the ruins of classical virtue, Newman places modern Western Christians on the far side of a religious dissolution out of which remains only fragments of apocalyptic thinking.

During the Reformation the Pope was identified as the Antichrist, the Roman Catholic

Church was recognized as Babylon, and the end was thought to be arriving soon, but at a

198 I am referring to MacIntyre’s famous opening chapter, “A Disquieting Suggestion,” in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), pp. 1-5.

155 distance of three centuries, after the Catholic Church had been greatly weakened, France had been defeated, and Ireland had been incorporated into the United Kingdom, this fossilizing British Protestant apocalyptic vision was disintegrating. While most British intellectuals abandoned apocalyptic thought altogether, Newman gathered the fragments that remained, remolded them in the fire of his meditative study of Scripture and the

Church Fathers, and began reviving a renovated practice of watching. Newman’s teaching on the subject has three major components. For him, watching is (1) an existential comportment of the self, (2) a distinctive theology of time, and (3) an approach to discerning the deceptively alluring agency of evil.

To take the first aspect, Newman practices watching not as a speculative activity but as an existential stance. His emphasis on this dimension bears a striking resemblance to the interest of the early Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in the apocalyptic teaching of

Paul.199 For Newman, watching for Christ is a mode of mindfulness comparable to the human experience of waiting in expectation of a friend and desiring to hear news of her.

To watch for Christ is to make Christ one’s first thought in the morning and one’s last thought in the evening. Watching is to hold consciousness in a state of tension, suspended between the First and Second Advents, between conformity to the cross and the prospect of resurrection, and between present suffering and future glorification. It is to maintain a degree of detachment from the present time and place because one is alive to what

Newman calls “the unseen, future world” which is to come. Without comment or fanfare

199 I am referring to Heidegger’s Winter Semester 1920-21 “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” in which he explicates “Concrete Religious Phenomena in Connection with the Letters of Paul” including “The Expectation of the Parousia” in I Thessalonians and “Anticipation of the Parousia” in II Thessalonians. See Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 67-78.

156 it is to bear the death of Christ in our bodies and to wash our robes in the blood of the lamb in the midst of our ordinary activities. It is thus a state of inner intentionality, of remaining focused on that which is ultimate by remembering how the story of this world ends. Watching is thus the highest form of immunization against idolatry and ideology.

By fastening our affections on the coming reign of Christ, the goods of this world lose their power to absorb our gaze and dictate our actions, and every earthly ruler is rendered subject to a transcendent authority.

Secondly, Newman connects the existential stance of watching to his distinctive apocalyptic approach to figuring historical experience.200 The paradox of the parousia is that it is proclaimed to be imminent but is continually delayed. Newman teaches that this is because the First Advent transformed the nature and purpose of time itself. Before then, the course of things ran towards that end. The coming of Christ is the climax of history, and yet time obviously seems to continue. After the end arrived, Newman explains, the course of things altered direction and now runs not towards but along the end, spiraling around its brink. The Second Coming is perpetually imminent, he concludes, because we are at all times equally near that final event. Thus it is and has been true that the Day of Judgment is literally at hand. Newman is also inclined toward this apocalyptic theology of time by a careful reading of New Testament teaching on the great antecedent sign of the Second Coming, the manifestation of Antichrist. He is particularly fascinated by I John 2:18, where it is written that although Antichrist is still

200 In addition to the sermons on “watching” already mentioned, Newman’s 1835 Advent Sermons, which were first published as Tract 83 in 1838 and subsequently again in 1872 as “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist” (DA, 44-108) are the most important texts for understanding Newman’s distinctive apocalyptic theology of history and his unique apocalyptic practice of discerning Antichrist. They are my primary sources for this analysis.

157 to come, there are even now many Antichrists whereby we know that now is the last time.

Paul similarly writes that the mystery of iniquity is already at work. For Newman this fits very well with his conception of imminence as a spiraling around the Second Coming.

Every age of the church exemplifies the pattern of the eschatological events because, quite truly, each age lives out the last days, if only in the mode of foreshadowing. For

Newman, then, the church is ever-enacting the dramatic scene of the last days. He sums up the gist of this idea in an 1835 Advent sermon, which he published as Tract 83 in

1838 and republished as a Catholic in 1872:

In truth, every event of this world is a type of those that follow, history proceeding forward as a circle ever enlarging. The days of the apostles typified the last days: there were false Christs, and risings, and troubles, and persecutions, and the judicial destruction of the Jewish Church. In like manner, every age presents its own picture of those still future events, which, and which alone, are the real fulfillment of the prophecy which stands at the head of them (DA, 49).

Newman is contending that every age of the church is materially particular but typologically identical. The only difference made by the continued passing of chronological time is that the scale of the drama gets larger and larger. Watching is a crucial Christian practice because the true narrative configuration of one’s age can only be discerned through skillful apprehension of its eschatological significance by reference to the days of the apostles and the last days. The liturgical calendar implicitly initiates the

Christian imagination into this discipline by moving backwards and forwards between the time of the First and Second Advents of Christ.

Finally, after one has both learned to practice watching as an existential stance rather than as a speculative activity and become adept at the discipline of imaginatively entering into New Testament images of the apostolic period and the last days, it becomes possible to perform watching as a mode of vigilance against the most deceptive forms of

158 evil. There are a number of eschatological evils for which Christians are commanded to be on the lookout, but the greatest is named Antichrist. For Newman, watching involves remaining alert and responsive to this great enemy of God’s reign. The symbol of

Antichrist signifies the complete and perfect deceiver who elevates himself and his law above all sacred authorities and moral standards. Newman upholds the Augustinian view that the biblical testimony is fairly clear on the issue of the true Antichrist being one person, but he is Joachimite in his conviction that the entire history of the Church is the history of Antichrist’s birth. Shadows of Antichrist precede him just as types of Christ preceded Christ. Newman regards Antiochus IV (215-164 BCE) as the great forerunner of Antichrist from Jewish history, but he names numerous Antichristian precursors from

Christian history as well. He notes that the Church Fathers figured persecuting Roman

Emperors and heretical teachers like Valentinus (c. 100-c. 160) and Arius (256-336) as forerunners of Antichrist, and Newman’s preferred example is the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-63), who attempted to overthrow the church by craft and reintroduce pagan traditions in the fourth century. Newman sees a profound affinity between that ancient event and what took place during the French Revolution. There the assertion of atheism as a principle of violent revolt against the Church and its supporting regime suddenly mutated into the ritual adoration of Liberty and Equality like deities and the appointment of festivals in honor of Reason. To Newman this seemed like the clearest instance in recent memory of a vivid foreshadowing of the manifestation of Antichrist. It also illustrated his view that skeptical infidelity toward revealed religion creates a vacuum which can only be filled by idolatry and ideology, an insight which is remarkably akin to the analysis of modernity performed during World War II by Horkheimer and

159 Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Indeed, this insight was crucial in that “great revolution of mind” which inspired Newman to migrate from Protestantism to

Catholicism. He came to believe that while the Protestant apocalyptic tradition had been right to underscore the evil of Papal tyranny, it was wrong to make that judgment final.

The resulting sedimentation of anti-papal sensibilities and rhetoric, Newman concludes, had undermined respect for established religion of any kind and left Protestant nations extraordinarily vulnerable to modern mutations of the spirit of Antichrist.

By way of concluding this section, it is appropriate to register a few cautionary qualifications to the practice of watching for the Second Coming as Newman rehabilitates it. First, watching is an esoteric as opposed to exoteric Christian activity. In other words, it is a discipline internal to the Church and must be used with what Newman called a prudential “reserve.” Consequently, Newman does not and would not recommend it for public consumption through mass media. This explains why Newman does not directly employ apocalyptic discourse in his major works, which were written for broad audiences encompassing British society at large. Second, superimposing the apocalyptic narrative of eschatological events upon the history of the church should not occlude other aspects of those phenomena but bring them into greater focus. For Newman, the fact that an event is of eschatological significance does not foreclose upon other dimensions that are available by academic investigation. In Newman to the contrary, theological and academic modes of knowing are practiced as complimentary and are ultimately integrated. Finally, looking out for Antichrist should not be conflated with demonization. Newman sees the spirit of

Antichrist is at work in all peoples, times, and places in which Christianity has been a significant presence. Every age has a unique antichristian deception, and attempting to

160 name it does not imply that the phenomenon in question is simply evil incarnate. On the contrary, raising the specter of Antichrist seems to suggest just the opposite to him. It implies that the phenomenon in question is such an apparent good that Christians are in danger of becoming blind to its dark side and giving themselves over to it without qualification. Newman commends watching, not in order to make himself or anyone else the final arbiter of who is good and who is evil, but so that we might sharpen our spiritual sense to the complex mixtures of good and evil in all the realities of this world and become more mature in our discernment.

III. The Genesis of Newman’s Apocalyptic Figuration of Modernity

As the eighteenth century came to a close and the nineteenth century began, many of

Europe’s most gifted thinkers understood themselves to be standing on the cusp of a new age: the modern age. They experienced the advent of modernity most palpably in and associated it most often with the French Revolution. That immense political and social crisis appeared to confirm that a new order, one that had already been inaugurated culturally with the Enlightenment and economically through Industrialization, was sweeping Western Civilization and spreading through its colonies to the whole world.

This phenomenon provoked visionary writing from a host of intellectuals, inspiring the literature of Romanticism and Idealism. Looking back from a distance of a quarter century, Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1830) memorably describes the mood, “It was a glorious dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of the epoch. A sublime emotion ruled that age, an enthusiasm of the spirit thrilled through the world, as though

161 the time were now come of the actual reconciliation of God with the world.”201 Its dramatic promise did of course take an infamously tragic turn when the Terror unfolded.

As Europe was in upheaval and catastrophe loomed as a serious prospect, both poets such as (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge (1772-1834) and philosophers such as Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

(1759-1805), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and Hegel took up the task of interpreting the ambiguous new age which had been born. In various ways they attempted to perform a renovation of the Western imagination that would enable Western Europe to process and pull through this crisis. In this section I propose to consider Newman as a

European thinker who belongs to this grand tradition of interpreting the advent of modernity.

Newman consistently traces the origin of his unique sense of personal mission to a moment of crisis in the late 1820s and early 1830s, when the established union between the British government and the Church of England was damaged by the 1828 repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts and virtually destroyed by the passing of the Catholic

Emancipation Act in 1829. The Act of Catholic Emancipation had a staggering effect on the English religious and political imagination because it directly contradicted the narrative that had bound Brits together for the greater part of the last three centuries, according to which the Babylonian Roman Church and the Papal Antichrist were the sworn enemies of that Christian liberty in God’s kingdom so long upheld in Protestant

England. This apocalyptic narrative had steeled English resolve against foreign tyranny

201 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Georg Lasson (Leipzig, 1919), vol. II, p. 926. These lectures were given in 1822-23; this passage was translated and quoted in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 352. This book by Abrams is an outstanding study of how the leading Romantic and Idealist thinkers were crucially involved in the figuration of modernity’s advent.

162 from the Reformation to the Battle of Waterloo. Most shockingly, this breach occurred on the watch of the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) and (1788-1850), great

Tory guardians of the Establishment. Historian Jonathan Clark argues comprehensively and to my mind persuasively that the event constituted nothing short of a “shattering” of the inherited Protestant confessional order and issued in a new post-Christian order founded on fundamentally discontinuous principles and values.202

Newman was, at that time, too well schooled in and too much of a sincere believer in the established Protestant apocalyptic narrative not to see these events as deeply significant. He wrote just after the passing of the Act, “My views have so much enlarged and expanded that in justice to myself I ought to write a volume.” Newman figured the event in apocalyptic terms as “one of the signs of the Times.” The realization that Europe generally and England in particular had entered “a novel era” filled his mind

“full of ideas” and turned him into a self-described “scribbler” (LD II, 120, 129). From that time until John Keble preached his infamous Sermon on “” in the

Oxford University Pulpit on July 14, 1833, Newman was entranced by what he calls in the Apologia the “great events… happening at home and abroad,” principally the 1830

Revolution in France and “the great Reform agitation,” which brought the Whigs into power and enabled the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832 as well as subsequent reform legislation. Newman credits this historic series of events for bringing “out into form and passionate expression the various beliefs which had so gradually been winning

202 See Clark, English Society, 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime [1985], 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially pp. 547ff. See also Colley, Britons, pp. 321-75. Michael Tomko has added further support to Clark’s contention that 1829 was widely seen as a turning point in the history of Britain by analyzing literary and cultural interpretations of the issue and its eventual resolution in British Romanticism and the Catholic Question in British Romantic Literature: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

163 their way into [his] mind” (Apo, 39). In a letter at the time he connects its novelty with the “advance towards universal education.” Whereas people formerly “depended on others, and especially on the Clergy, for religious truth,” Newman explains, “now each man attempts to judge for himself.” Newman does not think that “Christianity is in itself opposed to free inquiry,” yet he does think that Christianity is “in fact at the present time opposed to the particular form which that liberty of thought has now assumed.” This comment in 1829 is the first explication of ‘liberalism’ as Newman defines it in the

Apologia – a “false liberty of thought” (Apo, 256). He sharply contrasted its spirit with that of Christianity: “Christianity is of faith, modesty, lowliness, subordination; but the spirit at work against it is one of latitudinarianism, indifferentism, republicanism, and schism.” Already at this early stage Newman observed that the classic Protestant rhetoric of resistance to superstition and clericalism is now being employed as a principle for the criticism of Christianity more broadly. He argues that “the spirit at work” in this “liberty of thought…tends to overthrow doctrine, as if the fruit of bigotry, and discipline as if the instrument of priestcraft” (LD II, 129-31).

In a sermon on the rationality of religious faith written in May of 1829, Newman links this false liberty of thought with a dislike of human dependence upon God and neighbor. He writes, “Scoffing men…do not like the tie of religion, they do not like dependence. To trust another, much more to trust him implicitly, is to acknowledge oneself to be his inferior; and this man’s proud nature cannot bear to do. He is apt to think it unmanly, and to be ashamed of it; he promises himself liberty by breaking the chain (as he considers it) which binds him to his Maker and Redeemer.” Newman traces the source of this prideful disdain for dependence to an “image of freedom in their

164 minds” as the absence of “shackles of dependence.” They imagine that such an absence is

“their natural right” and they aim to gain it for themselves. This liberty, Newman provocatively proposes, is “much like that which Satan aspired after, when he rebelled against God” (PPS I, 198-99). The source of the crisis seems clear to Newman in 1829.

The combination of the modern idea of freedom as independence from authority and neighbor with the modern quest to make this idea a reality on the rationale that it is natural right is generating a widespread perception of religion, of visible ties to God, as oppressive restraints from which human beings need liberation. In the widespread rebellion against the established Church at the time Newman sees this new zeitgeist at work. Newman’s realization here seems strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s almost half a century later: that the reductive interpretation of Christian doctrine as formalized bigotry and of Christian discipline as ritualized tyranny was implicitly nihilistic. It implies that established religious forms are arbitrary acts of will, the imposition of human constructs as a means of control.

Newman wrote a number of important letters in the wake of two important events in his own life which occurred in June 1830: (1) quitting the evangelical Protestant “Bible

Society” and (2) accepting his gradual removal from duties as an Oriel College Tutor by

Provost (1789-1882). Soon after these events Newman was paying close attention to news of the July Revolution of 1830 in France, as everyone in Britain was. These letters suggest that Newman was integrating his experience of a certain kind of religious rebellion that he finds in the evangelical Protestantism of the Bible Society with his sense of the principles behind political revolution in Europe. One of the letters,

165 which is written to a friend in August 1830, is also his first clear use of the term liberalism to describe a broad ideological phenomenon that characterizes this novel age:

The tendency of the age is towards liberalism – i.e. thinking established notions worth nothing – in this system of opinions a disregard of religion is included. No religion will stand if deprived of its forms. It is nothing to say it is truth – moral truth is not acceptance to man’s heart; it must be enforced by authority of some kind of [or] another… a system of government was actually established by the Apostles, and is thus the legitimate enforcement of Christian truth.

In an attempt to explain why he quit the Bible Society, Newman makes an explicit connection between its discourse and practices and the phenomenon of liberalism, stating his belief that “IT MAKES CHURCHMEN LIBERALS – it makes them undervalue the guilt of schism – it makes them feel a wish to conciliate Dissenters at the expense of truth. I think it is preparing the downfall of the Church.”203 This text is thus a seminal statement not only of Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism’ but also of his resistance to evangelical Protestantism as a vehicle of ‘liberalism,’ pace Frank Turner.

In a letter shortly thereafter Newman addresses the Revolution and its effect in

Britain more directly. It is not surprising that he regards the Revolution as “the triumph of irreligion.” What is more interesting is his rejection of a common argument for it:

What an absurdity it is in men saying ‘the times will not admit of an establishment,’ as if the ‘times’ were any thing else than the people – it is the people who will not admit of it. Yet coxcombs wag their head and think they have got at the root of the matter, when they assure one that the times, the spirit of the times, make it chimerical to attempt continuing the Catholic Church in France (LD II, 283).

Here Newman rejects an alternative figuration of modernity, which was being popularly used to explain and legitimate the Revolution. It narrated this novel age as one in which

Established Churches are no longer possible or have been superseded. Newman does not

203 LD II, 264-65. The italics and capitalizations are from the text itself.

166 accept the argument that the invocation “the spirit of the times” can supersede legal and religious precedent; he interprets it rather more empirically as the action of people. In a letter from 1831 Newman takes another stab at interpreting the ethos of modernity:

The nation is for revolution – and though they have no more right to accomplish it, or rather tho’ it is as much a breach of plain duty, as it would be to rob a private man, or to commence a war of aggression, yet they certainly have the physical power – and it is a sophism of the day to mistake power for right, or rather I should say, it is the sin of the day to put religious considerations out of sight, and, forgetting there is any power above man’s to think that what man can do, he may do with impunity (LD II, 316-17).

Here Newman identifies for perhaps the first time a crucial aspect of what he eventually nominates ‘secular reason.’ It involves the determination of what one may do—whether individually or collectively—based upon the calculation of what one can do without due regard for moral or religious considerations.

Some of Newman’s most keen insights into the advent of modernity appear in a letter of 1832. He associated the new sense of entitlement to throw aside inherited moral and religious norms with a tendency in England to privilege “indolent contemplation of our advances in the useful arts and the experimental sciences” over and above “the thought and practice of our duties as immortal beings.” Newman believed that this self- congratulatory posture was having a narcotic-like effect: “The country seems to me to be in a dream – being drugged with this fallacious notion of its superiority to other countries and times.” Importantly, the effect is narratological. Newman saw modern England being figured as an “advanced” or “superior” nation both chronologically with respect to its earlier history and geographically with respect to other nations. His frank conclusion is somewhat dire: “Now, I fear, nothing but the reality of severe suffering will bring us to a right estimate of what we are.” (LD III, 90-9). This conclusion is not so surprising when

167 we look back at Newman’s first attempt to employ biblical narrative as a resource for the figuration of the advent of modernity in a letter of September 1830: “As to the present times, I have found several parallels for them in the world’s history. My best is the

Antediluvian times – which were an exhibition of intellectual infidelity in its functions of indifferentism and concession, a union of the Church and the world – a sin against light – vid. Gen. 6:2, Matt. 24:38-41– Jude 3, 14, etc.” (LD II, 289). Newman compares the advent of modernity to the time of widespread sin before the flood, which is in keeping with the apocalyptic discourses of the New Testament that he references. For Newman, the key point of continuity is the establishment of what he calls “indifferentism,” which is essentially the legal imposition of public agnosticism.204

In the epochal events between 1828 and 1832 Newman saw something that seemed in keeping with the revolutionary ideas of 1789. Indeed, Newman made this connection explicit in a letter dated February 28, 1833 during his Mediterranean journey.

While stopping in Newman realized that infidelity and profaneness is not just breaking out in France and England but all throughout Europe. It is, he writes, “as if the whole western world were tending towards some dreadful crisis…The French revolution and Empire seem to have generated a plague which is slowly working its way everywhere.” In less hyperbolic language, Newman would later identify this “plague” as a new theory of that rivaled the traditional religious theory. He would always

204 The second point of continuity that Newman discusses in this letter, “union of the Church and the world,” is important but too complicated to discuss here in detail. Basically, Newman seems to be referring to the dissolution of classical Christianity’s apocalyptic dualism, according to which “the Church” and “the world” are expected to be in perpetual historical conflict until the Second Coming, in favor of a new monistic vision and practice of “the Church” as the spiritual life of “the nation.” One sees this monism not only in a great deal of nineteenth-century Romanticism and Idealism (most famously in Hegel) but also in a less pronounced form in both liberal and evangelical Protestantism. I discuss Newman’s critique of this modern phenomenon in chapter five, p. 189.

168 mark 1827 as the year the alternative secular theory began to animate a formidable movement and to hold public sway in Britain. According to Newman, “the Liberal party” represented the novel idea that “secular expediency” is the sole basis of society (GA, 295-

96). Their principal aim was to assign merely “political or civil motives” to all personal and social duties in the stead of religious motives. Virtue is commended to every individual as being in her self-interest and in the national interest because it will enable the achievement of secular aims, thereby removing all matters of conduct out from under the jurisdiction of religion (LD XXVIII, 363-64). Having withdrawn their reliance upon the Established Church’s authority and teaching to perform the cultural role of sustaining a civil order, politicians and philosophers of this persuasion handed the responsibility for producing law-abiding persons over to a new national system of “universal and thoroughly secular education.” It is because such an education was promoted as a substitute for religious formation that Newman’s most direct and spirited Tractarian critique of this secularizing movement, his 1841 letters to The Times collected as The

Tamworth Reading Room (DA, 254-305), trace the Liberal ascendancy in England to speeches given by the Whig politician Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868) and members of his ‘school’ at the founding of London University in 1827-1828.

As a result of his apocalyptic practice of watching, as early as 1829 Newman sees the lawless spirit of Antichrist in the movement of what we might now call post-Christian modernity to disestablish the Church in England and elsewhere in Europe and to set up in its place a secular model of reason based on expedience and utility as the rule by which the nation and its people operate. Importantly, Newman’s concern is not with “reason” in general, which is of course good which used rightly, but with setting up a particular

169 model of autonomous reason above religion and morality. He sees that this idea of reason is invested with a specific image of freedom as the absence of dependence. Newman sees in post-Christian modernity the advent of what he describes as a “usurping empire of mere reason” which can hardly be curtailed by religious traditions or moral conventions.

In his Oxford University Sermons Newman clearly figures this phenomenon in terms of the imagery of Antichrist: “In the first years of its growth it professed to respect the bounds of justice and sobriety: it was little in its own eyes; but getting strength, it was lifted up; and casting down all that is called God, or worshipped, it took its seat in the temple of God, as His representative. Such, at least, is the consummation at which the

Oppressor is aiming.”205 Newman figures modern ‘secular reason’ this way because he apprehends a typological continuity with the figure of Antichrist; it presents itself in church and society as the rightful heir of Christ’s Messianic role: the judge of which laws need be obeyed and which disclosures may be received. It is this secularizing movement that Newman has in mind when he first begins denouncing ‘liberalism.’

205 Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the , James David Earnest and Gerard Tracey, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1843, 1890] 2006), pp. 56-57. Hereafter all references to this text are parenthetical and abbreviated as US.

170 CHAPTER FIVE

CATHOLIC NEWMAN: AN APOCALYPTIC ‘CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY’

Newman’s effort to renew and extend classical Protestant apocalyptic thought yielded his initial perception of ‘liberalism’ as the great danger to revealed religion in this novel age now commonly called modernity. This new perception led him to reconstruct his received apocalyptic narrative to reflect this contemporary reality. His Tractarian career is defined by his attempt to articulate and defend Anglican Christianity as a Via Media that protects revealed religion from the modern antichristian danger of anarchic ‘liberalism’ without as a consequence falling back into the medieval antichristian danger of tyrannical ‘popery.’

Although Newman never ceases to regard papal absolutism as a temptation to be resisted, he does cease to regard it as a danger that is equivalent to ‘liberalism.’ Newman’s mature apocalyptic thought, which partly surfaces during his Anglican period but is characteristic of his Catholic period, is defined by the figuration of Catholicism and ‘liberalism’ as the historical contestants in the conflict between the churches of Christ and Antichrist.

In this chapter I discuss Newman’s mature Catholic critique of ‘liberalism.’ I argue that his criticism is best understood as a distinctive “critique of modernity” and also that it is couched within a uniquely modern Catholic apocalyptic narrative. In the first section I conclude my ongoing interpretation of the Apologia with an analysis of how it implies and exoterically performs an apocalyptic critique of modernity. In the remainder

171 of the chapter I attempt to demonstrate the distinctiveness of this critique by discussing its similarities to and differences from other important traditions of modernity criticism.

The second section considers the most prominent way of reconciling Newman’s atypical combination of characteristics: interpreting his religious thought as a form of Christian

Romanticism. The third section examines the ways that Newman anticipates the efforts of major twentieth-century intellectuals to diagnose and remedy modern rationalism without devolving into irrational credulity. The fourth section discusses Newman’s proximity to so-called “postmodern” thinkers who challenge modernist assumptions that are shared by

‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ while rehabilitating classical forms of life and thought. The fifth section explores the nature of Newman’s affinity with other prophetic, nineteenth- century critics of emasculated modern Protestant and post-Protestant ‘religion’ such as

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx.

I. Apologia as Modern Catholic Apocalyptic Narrative in Exoteric Form

Obliquely, the Apologia testifies that Newman overcame the influence of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative not by transcending apocalyptic forms of thought altogether but by resolving his inherited vision into a narrative, at once canonical, Catholic and modern, of an enduring and deepening antagonism between the “true Church of Christ” in Catholic

Christianity and the “false church of Antichrist” in ‘liberalism.’ The Apologia gives the impression that the inconsistency of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative has unwound and now requires a fundamental decision: the coming of the ‘liberalism’ embraced by

Kingsley heralds an aggressive expansion of the anti-papal figuration to demonize all establishments of confessional Christianity specifically and of determinate religion

172 generally, whereas the revivification of Catholicism experienced by Newman constitutes a fresh realization of the concrete, historical form that authentic Christianity of apostolic- patristic type naturally takes under modern conditions. The recognition of this decision, the reception of the Catholic vocation, and hence the conversion of apocalyptic vision is thus presented as “the meaning” of Newman.

In the Apologia Newman famously represents the integrity of his life and thought as deriving from a “battle with Liberalism” (Apo, 54), and in his Biglietto Speech of 1879 he likewise characterizes his career during the preceding half century as one extended act of resistance to “the spirit of liberalism in religion” (Camp, 394). The dating of its origins to fifty years earlier does in fact correlate with the event of Catholic Emancipation when

Newman recalls having his initial apprehension of ‘liberalism.’ I have already shown that his sense of the apocalyptic significance of the ‘liberalism’ phenomenon was indicated in the Apologia both by figuring his experience in concordance with apocalyptic precedents and by discretely quoting his own privately penned disclosure of his mature conviction of its Antichristian character. In the Biglietto Speech Newman renders an analogous verdict more explicitly, employing adjacent symbols which are no less apocalyptic. He describes

‘liberalism’ as a “great apostasia,” “an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth,” and the most cleverly framed and promising “device of the Enemy” ever constructed. The difficulty of finding either conceptual coherence or historical determinacy in the language of liberalism as used by Newman has long frustrated scholars.206 I propose that it is best understood as an attempt to apprehend a language and ethos concerning religion that had become dominant in the modern West and in Victorian England especially. His narration

206 See Chapter One: Section Three.

173 of ‘liberalism’ is an effort to unveil this pervasive language and ethos as a deception. His attempt to discriminate a pattern of error and engage in apocalyptic naming is analogous to the construction of “false gnosis” by Irenaeus of Lyons, “Arianism” by Athanasius of

Alexandria, and Roman “amor sui” by Augustine of Hippo. In each case the respective

Christian thinker is more interested in illuminating and combating an alluring religious- intellectual peril than he is in a scholarly demonstration of the historical relationship between this pervasive temptation and the particular agents with whom its proper name has contingently become associated. The event of seeing the phenomenon in question involves experiencing a metanoia with respect to it, whereby it loses its attractive luster of originality and appears instead as yet another broad, errant path of the many.

Just as the less “exoteric” text Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in

England shed light on Newman’s effort in the Apologia to unveil a barrier of apocalyptic prejudice, the less “exoteric” Biglietto Speech illuminates his attempt in the Apologia to unveil Britain’s captivation by ‘liberalism.’ Newman composed and read the speech to his fellow Roman Catholics, and thus one may expect it to have a more “exoteric” character. In it Newman wrote in perhaps his most direct terms about ‘liberalism.’ He defined it as “the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another.” It is the refusal to recognize “any religion as true” and to treat all religions equally on the grounds that all are equally “matters of opinion” deriving from varying sentiments and tastes rather than from anything objective or supernatural.

‘Liberalism’ redescribes religion as something belonging to the realm of the personal, the private, and the domestic as opposed to its classic understanding as the bond of society.

This doctrine, despite being mostly unspoken, is the positive, dogmatic implication of

174 civil decisions to deregulate religious discourse and practice as having no bearing on the public interest or welfare of the nation. Newman was keen to emphasize what an extraordinary revolution this performed in European history. The supernatural sanctions of religion had long been considered the only power potent enough to secure the submission of the masses to law and order. The European civil authorities had been of

Christian confession, whether or not they were estranged from the Roman Catholic

Church. Newman viewed the European framework of society as having been created by

Christianity, and he regarded the vast progress of ‘liberalism’ during the previous century as a prodigal rebellion of the civil society thus birthed against its religious parent (Camp,

393-400).

Newman saw the ubiquitous phenomenon of ‘liberalism’ everywhere that modern

Western civil order has been established, but he insists that its variations of detail and of character deserve attention. On the Continent it was associated with the French revolution and with open infidelity, but its British form, Newman contended, did not arise from such infidelity. In England it is the consequence of a fierce opposition to the union of Church and State, which has been shared by the various religious sects that emerged as public actors in the sixteenth century and have become increasingly powerful during the course of the subsequent three centuries. Here Newman offered a more historically specific analysis, which basically unpacks his dense, hyperbolic statement in the Apologia that

“the spirit of lawlessness came in with the Reformation” and gave birth to “Liberalism”

(Apo, 174). As Newman explained, the sectarian advocacy for “un-Christianizing…the monarchy and all that belongs to it” has been based on a conviction that this would make

Christianity much purer and more powerful. Although they have steadily succeeded in

175 their common work of secularizing national institutions, they have not been able to agree on the content of this “purer” Christianity but have instead multiplied sects. Newman states that the simple fact of the resulting anarchic pluralism, coupled with England’s popular form of government, has made the public policy of ignoring the subject of religion practically inevitable. As a result, Newman concluded, “the liberal principle is forced on us from the necessity of the case.” Despite its comparatively benign origin,

Newman maintains that this course of development still culminates in an infidelity that is analogous to its Continental cousin because the pragmatic imperative to ignore religion has yielded growing frustration with religious resistance to that policy and has thus been transformed into a movement “to supersede, to block out, religion” as the scapegoat for civil ills. It is not until this supersessionist approach is advocated, Newman judged, that the Antichristian character of ‘liberalism’ truly comes to the fore and may be pronounced

“evil” without qualification (Camp, 393-400).

With Newman’s more explicit analysis of ‘liberalism’ from the Biglietto Speech in mind, one is in a better position to understand his discussion of it in the Apologia and also to recognize it as an apocalyptic critique of modernity. Indeed, the ambiguity of the term liberalism in the Apologia troubled readers long before it bewildered scholars, and this is what prompted Newman to append his famous “Note A” on the subject to a later edition of the Apologia (Apo, 254-62). Its basic analogy with classic Protestant anti-papal rhetoric is suggested by his description of it as “the Anti-dogmatic Principle.” As the

Reformation rejects the Papacy as authoritarian, ‘liberalism’ rejects all dogma as authoritarian. Newman interpreted this principled negation as a spiritual evil deriving from the “pride of reason,” a “moral malady” that especially plagues institutions whose

176 object is “the cultivation of the mind and the spread of knowledge.” It is a besetting affliction mainly for those who often measure themselves against “the many,” who are of course not their “equals in intellect.” Newman did not intend to demonize this beneficial activity but to name its temptation. He emphasized that all human objects in every age have their own dangers, and likewise the exercise of mind carries with it the possibility of

“extreme and intemperate” or even “wayward or mistaken exercise.” Newman saw the

“liberty of thought” championed in the modern West as being “in itself a good” while giving “an opening to false liberty.” Newman characterizes “Liberalism” as just this

“false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place.” He saw it most of all in “the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it,” which wrongly presumes our capacity “to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the

Divine Word” (Apo, 26, 35, 255-56).

As discussed in chapter four, Newman received his first vivid impression of the advent of “Liberalism” in the “great events” of “the great Reform agitation” from 1828 to

1832. He recalled, “Keble and Froude…disliked the Duke’s change of policy [regarding

Catholic Emancipation] as dictated by liberalism” (Apo, 26). He thus associated it with a major transition in British civil order. In the first editions of the Apologia Newman stated,

“by ‘liberal’ I mean liberalism in religion, for questions of politics, as such, do not come into this narrative at all.” He erased that qualification in later editions, and the note on

“Liberalism” includes numerous references to matters which did become legal norms of

177 the modern liberal order in England. He stated that he and the Tractarians regarded “the revolutionary doctrines of 1776 and 1789” as “absolutely and entirely out of keeping with theological truth,” and the eighteen identifying “propositions” of “Liberalism” listed by

Newman clearly indicate that it is manifest in making “false liberty of thought” legally normative for civil order. Mostly, Newman listed a host of platitudes that had become a new kind of in the modern liberal “social imaginary.” For example, religion was not to be seen as important unless reason can demonstrate that it is, and no theological doctrine was to be regarded as anything more than an opinion that happens to be held by bodies of people. The conclusions of a science like political economy cannot reasonably be opposed by revealed doctrines or precepts such as the teachings of Jesus on wealth and poverty. Everyone now has the legal right to judge privately about the Bible, and the civil establishment of requirements of religious subscription is outlawed as “Anti- christian.” The Civil power has no obligation to maintain religious truth. Experience and utility are the measure of political duty. It is now to be narrated as lawful that arms were used in uprisings against legitimate princes, such that the Puritan Rebellion and French

Revolution are justified in retrospect. The will of the people is now recognized as the source of legitimate power. Human vice is just the product of ignorance, and virtue is born of knowledge. Thus a civil program of education, periodical reading, traveling, improvement of material conditions, and the arts will serve to make the population moral and happy when fully carried out without need of religion. Newman named the original inspiration of the Tractarian movement in 1833 as a fear that the new Whig government would accomplish an “authoritative introduction” of “liberal opinions” such as these

“into the country.” According to Newman, the main purpose of Tractarianism was simply

178 to make the “stand which had to be made against [this brand of] Liberalism” (Apo, 260-

62).

Newman is rarely as directly prophetic regarding the effects of ‘liberalism’ as he is in the fifth chapter of the Apologia. Attempting to counter modern England’s myopic optimism about secular progress, he bluntly states that when he looks out into the world he sees “nothing else than the prophet’s scroll, full of ‘lamentations, and morning, and woe.’” His study of history, his travels, his knowledge of current events, and his personal experience all testify that this world is in an anarchical condition that is utterly beyond human resolution. Human nature is fierce and willful, incredibly difficult to bring under subjection to oneself or society, much less to its Creator. The intellect, as it actually operates concretely in fallen human beings, tends toward simple unbelief in religious matters because we resist the submission of ourselves to any authority. The spirit of rebellion powerfully animates us. No truth, Newman contended, no matter how sacred, is capable of standing against the fierce energy and passion of the “all-corroding, all- dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries.” This, he explains, is why the last traces of religious knowledge in antiquity were all but disappearing from those portions of the world in which the intellect had been active and had a career; in other words, in those places where the name of (c. 469-399 BC) was reverenced. But the pace of dissolution in that time pales in comparison to what Newman calls “these latter days.” In like manner but with far greater rapidity he saw the whole of Europe insofar as it is external to the Catholic Church tending to atheism in one shape or another

(Apo, 216-19).

179 In his celebrated volume At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Michael Buckley contends that only Nietzsche had as keen a sense as Newman of the massive shift from faith to unbelief which was taking place across not simply Europe but all of western civilization under its global influence.207 As Newman memorably puts it,

What a scene, what a prospect, does the whole of Europe present at this day! and not only Europe, but every government and every civilization through the world, which is under the influence of the European mind! Especially, for it most concerns us, how sorrowful, in the view of religion, even taken in its most elementary, attenuated form, is the spectacle presented to us by the educated intellect of England, France, and Germany! (Apo, 219)

As odd a coupling as they are in so many respects, Newman and Nietzsche are alone in nineteenth-century Europe when it comes to realizing the historical significance and cultural implications of this epochal shift. In Nietzsche’s infamous account of the untimely madman in the third book of The Gay Science, he suggests that Europe, as a civilization, has in effect killed God. It wiped away the horizon that encompassed human existence; it drank up the sea from which we receive the sustenance of meaning; it unchained our earthly life from the sun around which it orbited for so many centuries.208

Newman, likewise, lived in a kind of irrecoverable shock from the radical break with past tradition that had been so recently accomplished. As he explains, “the necessity of some form of religion for the interests of humanity has [until recently], been generally acknowledged.” It had provided the “concrete representation of things invisible.” Nothing else has ever been found to have “the force and the toughness necessary to be a breakwater against the deluge” of untamed human nature. During the three preceding

207 Buckley, S.J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 28-29.

208 See Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882, 1887], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), book 3, #125, pp. 181-82.

180 centuries, Newman recalls, the European countries that separated from the Catholic

Church almost without exception adopted the material, legal, and social establishment of religion as the best way of curtailing human excess. This approach lasted for almost three centuries in England but was effectively dissolved in the late 1820s and early 1830s. In the Apologia, the Biglietto Speech, and other late texts, Newman looked back to this tumultuous period as the time when his vision came into focus and he received the mission that directed the rest of his life. After more than thirty years his first impressions had long since solidified into convictions, and he could sketch the outline of his entire perception with facility. He recalls these events as key episodes at a turning point in the history of European civilization: the successful contestation and eclipse of the traditional belief that religion is necessary to bring human beings into submission to order. Until then only religion had been considered truly potent enough to secure the acquiescence of the masses to law, of keeping the people from fulfilling their self-destructive propensity for chaos (Apo, 219). This recognition constituted the continuation of an ancient tradition of acknowledging religion as the true bond of society. The idea that the civil order has a religious source, end, and scope supported a dictum that had been in force for more than a thousand years in England and most of Europe, according to which “Christianity was the law of the land” (Camp, 396).

Newman stressed that it was not simply the way that the Established Church was being mistreated that arrested his attention between 1829 and 1833 but the new approach to received truths in general and to religious truth in particular. He was convinced that first principles of any kind and revealed truths most of all are of their nature in excess of the capacity for human judgment to comprehend and ground their truthfulness. Instead of

181 accepting this as an inexorable part of the human condition, the determination of secular utility and expedience or of immanent meaning by mere reason now appeared to provide the criteria according to which beliefs and practices would be deemed legitimate without restraint by established law, religion, or tradition. Non-recognition of any positive truth in religion was legally imposed largely for pragmatic reasons, but what first struck and concerned Newman was “the anti-dogmatic principle” implied by this action, which he famously nominated “liberalism.” It is crucial to understand that what Newman calls liberalism is this modern non-recognition of any determinate religion’s positive claim to truth, which is enshrined not only in Anglo-American but also indeed in all broadly western legal codes and is the hallmark of liberal democracy. It infects the way the entire

“educated lay world” regards and even practices religion, regardless of the content of their specific religious beliefs or of whether they lean ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ (Apo,

233).

In the Apologia Newman noted that it is increasingly recognized that universal secular education is not successfully filling the cultural role vacated by religion. He also sardonically observed that in the 1850s there was hope in Europe that “wars would cease for ever, under the influence of commercial enterprise and the reign of the useful and fine arts.” This combination of secular education, commerce, and the liberal arts of course remains more or less the recipe for social and political stability among modern western nation-builders, just as it was at the height of the British Empire. In the U.S. and in

Victorian England the most influential religious supplement has been that of evangelical

Protestantism, which puts forth the Bible as the best way to arrest the human descent into anarchy. Newman finds fault with this solution:

182 Experience proves surely that the Bible does not answer a purpose for which it was never intended. It may be accidentally the means of the conversion of individuals; but a book, after all, cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of man, and in this day it begins to testify, as regards its own structure and contents, to the power of that universal solvent, which is so successfully acting upon religious establishments (Apo, 219).

The historicizing criticism of secular reason has indeed dissolved the cultural authority of the Bible in much the same way that it dissolved the cultural authority of established churches. Newman acknowledged that evangelical Protestantism has energy, but he lamented that its constitutive practices of elevating inward faith at the expense of visible religious institutions and of prioritizing private judgment over communal authority only exacerbates ‘liberalism’ (Apo, 256, 40). The crisis of post-Christian modernity, according to Newman, is that nothing has yet been found that is able to restrain “that freedom of thought, which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts…from its own suicidal excesses,” that is, its tendency to dissolve the ties of dependence that bind people together, the most basic of which are the forms of natural and revealed religion which connect us to the sovereign source of order in the world, the living God (Apo, 220).

Newman’s interpretation of the ethos and the peril of modernity in the Apologia is basically the same as it was in that first period of gestation in the late 20s and early 30s, and it does not seem to vary during the late 1870s and 1880s. His primary concern in this regard was however always its relation to “the fortunes of the Church.” On this topic he wrote a personal letter in 1876 to a Mrs. Maskell which states, “What a future, what awful events lie under that cloud. I don’t mean as to happen in this very year, but as awaiting their birth in the years which lie before us…though I don’t mean to say that the end is coming, at least we are soon to enter upon a new cycle of sacred history” (LD

XXVIII, 8). Upon being pressed by her for details about his opinion regarding “the

183 prospects of the Church,” Newman replied some months later that his assessment is “not new, but above 50 years standing,” dating its origins to the late 1820s. He writes, “I have all that time thought that a time of widespread infidelity was coming, and through all those years the waters have in fact been rising as a deluge. I look for the time, after my life, when only the tops of the mountains will be seen like islands in the waste of waters”

(LD XXVIII, 156). Newman wrote in the same tone more publicly in his 1885 piece “The

Development of Religious Error.” There he looked out at the future prospects of religion in the modern West and wondered, “can religion hope to be successful? It is thought to be already giving way before the presence of what the world considers a new era in the history of man.”209 Here again Newman emphasized that it is the pretension of “the world” to narrate modernity as an epoch in which religion is superseded that he finds especially objectionable.

If any one thing consistently drove Newman from the late 1820s through his last years in the 1880s, it seems to have been a vivid apprehension of an imminent crisis. The crisis, according to Newman, is being birthed by the unprecedented pride of this “novel age,” particularly by its idea and practice of liberty as freedom from authority and dependence and by its concomitant replacement of religion with utility as the unitive principle that binds society together. Newman’s intellectual unrest from 1829 to 1845 is thus generated by his deliberations regarding how this crisis might at least be softened, since it seems unimaginable that it could be altogether averted. After the state abandoned the Church, it largely lost its cultural influence, leaving Newman to set his sights on the very minimal goal of simply retaining revealed religion in Europe. As he surveyed the

209 Newman, “The Development of Religious Error,” p. 462.

184 scene, he saw everywhere the disestablishment of Churches and the disintegration of

Christianity. His turn to Roman Catholicism was therefore rooted in a grim determination that here seems to be the only concrete Christian body in Europe which seems capable of withstanding the corrosive onslaught of this secularizing revolution. He began to see the growing polarity between the Roman Catholic Church and secularizing modernity as having an aesthetic fittingness which conforms to the providential patterns depicted in the bibical narrative. For there he sees that whenever an evil of such intensity has possession of mankind, God provides a suitable antagonist to deliver us. But Newman did not envision a simple surrender of the intellect to the , and he did not have any interest in, as he puts it in the Apologia, utterly weighing down the restless intellect of our common humanity by repressing all independent effort and action whatever. The goal is to redeem modernity, to bring it back into order, not to repress it. Indeed, Newman suggested that Catholic Christendom at its best has never been a simply exhibition of religious absolutism but rather “a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternatively advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide.” Forestalling the anarchy toward which modernity tends is best done therefore not by enfeebling the freedom or vigor of human thought but of resisting its extravagance, of purifying, reforming, and redirecting its energies toward edifying as opposed to destructive ends

(Apo, 221, 225-26).

Newman adopts the reserve appropriate to exoteric writing for the most part when discussing ‘liberalism’ in the Apologia and other relatively public interventions, but he feels free to employ apocalyptic language when in private correspondence with a fellow

185 Catholic or giving a sermon. For example, writing to a Catholic teacher in 1861, Newman declared,

Much as I grieve at what is taking place, I feel no call on me to interfere in the controversy. And that the more, because we shall have a controversy of our own, viz with Atheism…May [God] Himself give grace to those who shall be alive in that terrible day, to fight his battle well. All the forms of Protestantism, allow me to say, are but toys of children in the great battle between the Holy Catholic Roman Church and Antichrist (LD XIX, 488).

Perhaps the most famous of Newman’s apocalyptic pronouncements on his age occurs in his 1873 sermon at the opening of St. Bernard’s Seminary titled “The Infidelity of the

Future:”

St. Athanasius, St. Gregory I, or St. Gregory VII…would confess that dark as the prospect of their own day was to them severally, ours has a darkness different in kind from any that has been before it. The special peril of the time before us is the spread of that plague of infidelity, that the Apostles and our Lord Himself have predicted as the worst calamity of the last times of the Church. And at least a shadow, a typical image of the last times is coming over the world. I do not mean to presume to say that this is the last time, but that it has had the evil prerogative of being like that more terrible season, when it is said that the elect themselves will be in danger of falling away.210

Although Newman does not engage in direct apocalyptic discourse in the Apologia, he comes close enough to reveal himself as an apocalyptic narrator in climactic passages.

The allusions that he employs therein are more than sufficient for those schooled in the

Christian apocalyptic tradition.

II. Absorbing and Resisting Romantic Forays into Apocalyptic Thought

In the Apologia and indeed throughout his writings, Newman seems to embody a modern style of religious thought and communication while at the same time he denounces much

210 Newman, “The Infidelity of the Future,” The Catholic Sermons of Cardinal Newman (London: Burns & Oates, 1957), pp. 113-28 (117).

186 of what is characteristic of modernity. The most common way of resolving the apparent contradiction of Newman’s unique way of criticizing and yet assimilating modern forms of thought is to describe him some kind of Christian Romantic.211 His affinities with various currents in Romantic literature and philosophy are fairly obvious and have been much discussed. These include an appreciation for the role of conscience, imagination, and the affections in the pursuit of truth, a respect for the wisdom to be found in the testimony of history and tradition, and a recognition that nature and human existence are characterized by a mysterious depth that does not yield to rational scrutiny but may in fact be given voice by narrative, poetry, and other forms of art, not to mention religion.

Both Newman and the Romantics saw the revolutionary time in which they were living as an epochal transition that calls for a prophetic interpretation and response.212 Both also view England’s present religious parties—latitudinarian rationalism, evangelical pietism, and orthodox —as respectively too emasculated, too enthusiastic, and too sedimented for the task. This tri-polar division of English religious culture parallels a

211 See especially Charles Frederick Harrold, John Henry Newman: An Expository and Critical Study of His Mind, Thought and Art (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1945), pp. 246-54; D. G. James, The Romantic Comedy (London: Oxford University Press, 1948); Basil Wiley, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949), pp. 73-101; John Beer, “Newman and the Romantic Sensibility,” in Hugh Sykes Davies and George Watson, eds. The English Mind: Studies in the English Moralists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 193-218; Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Weatherby, Cardinal Newman in His Age; Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion; Bernard Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 12-14, and Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, p. 67; James C. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 2nd Edition, vol. 1 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 162-213. Stephen Sykes categorizes Newman as a Roman Catholic version of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) in The Identity of Christianity: Theologians and the of Christianity from Schleiermacher to Barth (London: SPCK, 1984). The most comprehensive and insightful of recent studies is Goslee, Romanticism and the Anglican Newman; this text’s extensive bibliography is an excellent source for finding other contributions to the voluminous secondary literature on this topic.

212 M. H. Abrams eloquently discusses this feature of Romanticism, which it shares with German Idealism, in Natural Supernaturalism, especially pp.11-14, 19-32.

187 similar pattern of fragmentation in Germany. Though not indifferent to the genuine value of tolerance, fervent devotion, and loyalty to the established order, Newman and the

Romantics shared the insight that single-minded advocacy for one of these goods, far from offering a solution, is in large part responsible for the religious and cultural disintegration of the age. Both believed that a fresh vision which addresses this time of crisis is needed, and both sought to rise to the occasion, more often than not figuring themselves as modern offspring of a prophetic lineage with ancient roots. Both return to the sources of their religious and cultural heritage in search of symbols and forms that have the power to illuminate the dawning new world and to orient their fellows accordingly, fully convinced that these traditions must be digested and expressed afresh rather than simply repristinated.

Continuities such as these naturally encourage the identification of Newman as a

Christian Romantic, but the most discerning critics have always quickly followed this convenient placement with a host of qualifications and eventually judged that Newman is simultaneously “un-Romantic” or even “anti-Romantic.”213 Although Newman sided with Romanticism in its critique of Enlightenment rationalism and its call for a “deeper philosophy,” he exposed the ways in which it perpetuates modern self-aggrandizement: its presumption of immediate contact with the divine through self-consciousness, nature, and tradition, its willful revisions of Christian teaching according to its own imaginative measure, and its reluctance if not refusal to acknowledge any authority external to the

213 See Harrold, John Henry Newman, pp. 246-54. The governing theme of Goslee’s Romanticism and the Anglican Newman is a tension between Newman as Romantic and as anti-Romantic; see especially pp. 16-17, 80-81. Robert Pattison’s concluding statement on this issue is rhetorically excessive but contains a measure of truth, “Newman shared nothing substantial with the Romantic culture in which he had his being. His work is a sustained but failed attack on the whole Romantic enterprise;” see The Great Dissent, p. 45.

188 subject (LD VII, 487). Newman utterly rejects the Romantic tendency to describe the revolutionary spirit of the age in those Messianic terms that Christianity has traditionally reserved for the Second Advent of Christ,214 is scathing toward the rhetoric of justifying de-establishment of the church on the basis of changes in “the times” (LD II, 283), and argues that rather than making inevitable progress “the world ever remains in its infancy, as regards the cultivation of moral truth” (PPS 7:18, 250). David Goslee well captures

Newman’s productive tension with the movement. Aligning Newman with what Harold

Bloom would call “high Romanticism” is problematic, Goslee argues, because Newman’s ad hoc valorizations of selfhood, art, and individual vision are disengaged from its larger cultural program. Newman “consistently reinscribes Romantic phenomena within a pre-

Enlightenment, specifically theological vocabulary” and “undermines the conflation of imaginative and religious perspectives characteristic of the more overtly Christian

Romantics.”215 Though Goslee finds it difficult to get a handle on the logic of Newman’s complex cultural negotiation with Romanticism, he finds that Newman’s critique of

Romantic egocentrism anticipates poststructuralist concerns.216

214 Abrams once again provides an excellent synopsis of this characteristic of Romantic and Idealist discourses in Natural Supernaturalism, especially pp. 56-65.

215 Goslee, Romanticism and the Anglican Newman, p. 81.

216 In an essay on Augustine’s conversion first published in the British Magazine (1838), for example, Newman wrote of Lord Byron, “Then we have before us the melancholy spectacle of high aspirations without an aim, a hunger of the unsatisfied… Gifted minds, if not submitted to the rightful authority of religion, become the most unhappy and the most mischievous. They need both an object to feed upon, and the power of self-mastery; and the love of their Maker, and nothing but it, supplies both the one and the other.” Newman contrasts this with the path taken by Augustine, “he sought for some excellence external to his own mind, instead of concentrating all his contemplation on himself.” See Newman, The Church of the Fathers (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1872-3 [1840]), pp. 142-62 (144, 145).

189 The coherence of Newman’s continuities and discontinuities with Romanticism come into greater focus when one sees them as the consequence of different hierarchies of dependence upon the Hellenistic and apocalyptic traditions respectively that they both retrieve. Romanticism’s philhellenic character goes without saying, and as has already been suggested, recent scholarship demonstrates that mainline English and German

Romantic thinkers and poets commonly and often systemically appropriate apocalyptic symbols and images.217 While they selectively assimilate biblical tropes and apocalyptic traditions into their philhellenic aesthetic programs, Newman performs something like the opposite maneuver. He celebrates “the Greek poets and sages” as “in a certain sense prophets” but repositions them as “but a preparation for the Gospel” (Apo, 36). Newman famously though not uncritically commends the ancient Alexandrian Church’s inclusive hospitality toward Hellenistic thought and literature but denies that the Greeks have the authority to serve as arbiters over or critical appropriators of divine disclosures.218 What

C. S. Dessain aptly calls the “revealed of St John and St Paul” always retains hermeneutic primacy in Newman’s encounter with Romantic philhellenism.219 This view is supported by no less an expert on the history of Christian Platonism than Louis Dupré, who has demonstrated Newman’s undeniable connections with the Platonic tradition

217 In addition to Abram’s classic treatment in Natural Supernaturalism, esp. pp. 37-45, 325-56, other valuable work on this topic includes Christopher Burdon, The Apocalypse in England, Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry, Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, Tim Fulford, ed. Romanticism and Millenarianism, and Cyril O’Regan, Deranging Narrative.

218 The classic account of Newman’s relationship to the Alexandrians is Harrold, “John Henry Newman and the Alexandrian Platonists.”

219 See Dessain, “The Biblical Basis of Newman’s Ecumenical Theology,” in John Coulson and A. M. Allchin, eds. The Rediscovery of Newman: An Oxford Symposium (London: Sheed and Ward, 1967), pp. 100-122 (122).

190 while concluding that Newman is not a Platonist.220 Newman’s incessant dualism of the visible and invisible rests first and foremost on apocalyptic distinctions between both the present age and the age to come and the earthly and heavenly realms as opposed to a

Platonic one between the worlds of material appearance and ideal reality.221

The logic of Newman’s relationship to Romanticism is best explained by their intervolvement in a contest for discursive authority between the apocalyptic and Greek inheritances. Newman sought to overcome Romanticism by absorbing as much of it as he legitimately could, in accordance with the key principle of the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, “Doctrines and views which relate to man are not placed in a void, but in a crowded world, and make way for themselves by interpenetration, and develop by absorption.”222 Newman’s mode of incorporating rival symbols and traditions, which is a defining characteristic of apocalyptic literature,223 results in a distinctive combination of affirmation and negation and of preservation and revision. The rhetorical outcome of this complex intellectual process is most memorably illustrated by Newman’s oft-quoted quip regarding :

he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept…and succeeded in interesting [the] genius [of his age] in the cause of Catholic truth (ECH I, 268-69; Apo, 94).

220 Dupré, “Newman and the Neoplatonic Tradition in England,” pp. 137-54.

221 For example, “A thick black veil is spread between this world and the next” (PPS VI, 248).

222 Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888 [1845, 1878]), p. 186.

223 See Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 2nd Ed., pp. 17-19.

191 Without ingratitude for Romantic tilling of modern cultural soil for a fresh reception of

‘revealed truth,’ Newman declines all private flights into speculation, whether fabulous or philosophical, as self-deceiving denials of finitude and dependence. He consistently deflates Romantic pretensions to originality by describing their discourses as the revival of ‘heathenism’ or as the return of “the old Gentile philosophy” (PPS II, 409). Newman gave this school of thought relatively short shrift because he judged that its transparent pride should make its unattractiveness self-evident. He obliquely communicated this perception to his academic peers in one of his Oxford University Sermons during the late

1820s: “the pantheistic systems of the Stoics, the later Pythagoreans, and other philosophers… became divine in their own estimation…in proportion as they drank into the eternal spirit of purity” and “contrasted themselves with those who were below them, knowing no being above them by whom they could measure their proficiency” (US, 31-

32). For Newman, therefore, Romantic thinkers ultimately are not novel but mostly just reproduce ancient Greek thought, and they pretend to a god-like perspective in denial of their human finitude.

Whereas Romantic thinkers selectively assimilated biblical tropes and apocalyptic motifs into their philhellenic mysticisms, Newman absorbed key elements of Romantic discourse into his apocalyptic thought. This primacy of apocalyptic categories over

Romantic ones is best illustrated by recalling Newman’s sharp contrast between the

Romantic vision of history and his own apocalyptic theology of history. Newman criticizes Romantic mystics for making “love the one principle of life and providence, as if it were a pervading spirit of the world” (PPS II, 409). This vision supports a monistic idea of history as the story of humanity’s progressive self-actualization. For Newman, on

192 the other hand, the organizing theme of history in the wake of the First Advent is the battle between God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, the Church and the world: “we are not engaged in a mere conflict between progress and reaction, modern ideas and new, philosophy and theology, but in what is infinitely higher, in one scene of that never- ending conflict which is waged between our Redeemer and the Evil One, between the

Church and the world.”224 Rather than being the site of organic growth or teleological realization, Newman sees “the whole course of Christianity” as “but one series of troubles and disorders.”225 There can be no Romantic narrative of loss and recovery of purity or of alienation and reconciliation because the story of every century is the same:

“the Church is ever ailing, and lingers on in weakness… religion seems ever expiring, schisms dominant, the light of Truth dim, its adherents scattered.” Rather than the triumphal story of the church’s glorious expansion, Newman, drawing on Pauline images, figures the concrete form of the church’s history as the perpetual manifestation of

Christ’s dying. Throughout history Christ’s cause appears to be “ever in its last agony.”

Thus “the Day of Judgment is literally ever at hand,” and the Christian’s duty is “ever to be looking out” for Christ’s coming. Mercifully, truth rallies and the Church is raised again, as Newman explains, “such is God’s will, gathering in His elect, first one and then another, by little and little, in the intervals of sunshine between storm and storm, or snatching them from the surge of evil, even when the waters rage most furiously.” Rather

224 This quote is from one of the more apocalyptic but less known of Newman’s Catholic sermons, which is titled “The Pope and the Revolution” [1866], Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, pp. 281- 316 (305).

225 Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, vol. 1: Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1877 [1837]), p. 354.

193 than being despondent, Newman urges acquiescence in the role of vigilant saints during this time of trial, “they have ever been; they ever shall be; they are our portion.”226 The organic coherence of doctrinal development that Newman so famously elaborates is the consequence of the Church’s “preservation of type” or continuity of Christological character in this “never-ending” warfare with ‘the world.’227 This is one of the most familiar instances of that pattern of inscription which characterizes Newman’s thought: biological metaphors are rewritten into a more encompassing apocalyptic narrative, such that the church’s “organic growth” is in conformity to Christ as it continues his Messianic

‘battle’ with the world.

Newman’s apocalyptic theology of history as extended conflict and perpetual crisis is connected to a unique view of time which is well suited to explain why he defies conventional categories, appearing to be simultaneously conservative and radical. From

Newman’s apocalyptic perspective, “the course of things ran straight” towards Christ’s first coming, but that event altered the direction of time. The ‘course of things’ has since run “not towards the end, but along it, and on the brink of it; and is at all times equally near” the Second Coming, which is literally imminent or “ever at our doors” (PPS VI,

241). For Newman, then, the Church is ever-enacting the dramatic scene of the ‘end- time’ scenario:

In truth, every event of this world is a type of those that follow, history proceeding forward as a circle ever enlarging. The days of the apostles typified the last days: there were false Christs, and risings, and troubles, and persecutions, and judicial destruction of the Jewish Church. In like manner, every age presents

226 Newman, Via Media, vol. 1: Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, p. 355

227 Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, pp. 169-322.

194 its own picture of those still future events, which, and which alone, are the real fulfillment of the prophecy which stands at the head of them (DA, 49).

Synthesizing a wide assortment of canonical apocalyptic texts, Newman argued that every age of the Church is materially particular but typologically identical. The only difference made by the continued passing of chronological time is that the scale of the drama gets larger and larger. Since the true narrative configuration of one’s age can only be discerned by simultaneous reference to the days of the apostles and the last days,

It must surely be profitable for our thoughts to be sent backwards and forward to the beginning and end of the Gospel times, to the first and the second coming of Christ. What we want is to understand that we are in the place in which the early Christians were…awake to the hope and waiting of His second coming, looking out for it, nay, desiring to see the tokens of it (DA, 75-76).

This spiritual exercise of imaginatively entering into New Testament images of “the apostolic days” and “the last days” enables one to apprehend apocalyptic patterns in one’s day and to discern how to conform oneself appropriately to the apostolic roles.

Newman immersed himself in biblical narrative and church history in order to seek analogical guidance from the Spirit regarding his duty, because “the drama of religion and the combat of truth and error” is “ever one and the same” (Apo, 109). He is not simply interested in holding ancient Christian views for their own sake but in a vital

‘realization’ of the apocalyptic mission of the prophetic teacher in his own historical moment. Newman evaded our dichotomous modern expectations for either conservative restoration or liberal revision because his ideal is to be a concrete person of his time and place materially while living and thinking in typological continuity with the prophets, apostles, and church fathers. Newman’s unconventionality as a modern religious thinker comes into greater focus when one approaches his work as—in large part—an attempt to

195 reconfigure Romantic cultural material in accordance with the apostolic character in the light of his distinctively apocalyptic view of time and history.

III. Anticipating the Criticism and the Correction of Modern Rationalism

Newman regards Romanticism as an insufficient form of resistance and indeed even a surreptitious mode of perpetuating that modern rationalism which he always regarded as the great danger of the age (LD VII, 487). In 1977 Thomas Norris observed, “Newman is the pioneer of a remarkable insight which is still gaining ground: the derailing of human reason is responsible for many of today’s most pressing problems.”228 Many interpreters of broad learning increasingly agree that some of Newman’s most profound intellectual affinities are with twentieth-century anti-rationalist movements and thinkers. Perhaps the most prominent trend in this regard is the wide hearing that Newman’s reflections on the distinctive rationality of religious belief have recently received among Anglo-American analytic philosophers.229 This has been spurred in large part by a growing recognition that

Newman’s approach is much more sophisticated than a recycling of British and is actually quite convergent with Wittgenstein’s thought.230

228 Norris, Newman and His Theological Method (Leiden: Brill, 1977), p. 10.

229 The excellent work of M. Jaime Ferreira sets the bar in this regard; see Doubt and Religious Commitment: The Role of the Will in Newman’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) and Skepticism and Reasonable Doubt. See also William J. Wainwright, Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 55-83. More recently, see especially Frederick D. Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004) and An Integrative Habit of Mind: John Henry Newman on the Path to Wisdom (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012).

230 See chapter one, p. 14, footnote 29 above. Wittgenstein’s import for religious thought is discussed in Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, Second Edition (Oxford: SPCK, 1997).

196 Now it is more widely acknowledged that Newman, like Wittgenstein, avoids the two most common pitfalls of modern treatments of religious belief: he neither assumes that it is objectively provable or refutable by secular reason nor interprets it as the mere subjective expression of human will, emotion, or imagination. In a way that anticipated

Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the importance of Lebensformen, Newman resisted these reductive approaches on the grounds that religious beliefs arise and continue to be held confidently through the accumulation, concurrence, and convergence of “antecedent probabilities” that implicitly foster and justify their formation (Apo, 30-32, 180-81; GA,

245-47, 272-76). Like Wittgenstein, Newman advocated a kind of linguistic analysis for resolving disagreements into the recognition of differing “first principles,”

Half the controversies in the world are verbal ones; and could they be brought to a plain issue, they would be brought to a prompt termination. Parties engaged in them would then perceive, either that in substance they agreed together, or that their difference was one of first principles. This is the one great object to be aimed at in the present age, though confessedly an arduous one. We need not dispute, we need not prove,—we need but define (US, 142).

Both Newman and Wittgenstein argued that particular beliefs are upheld through their connections with an entire gambit of more or less tacit practices, habits, values, and commitments which embody “first principles.”231 Rather than yielding to a of incommensurable perspectives, both interpreted this insight as an invitation to pursue new avenues of inquiry and conversation. They enjoined interlocutors in conscientious disagreement to analyze the larger “systems of reference” and “ways of living” that had engendered divergent interpretations of the same “field of evidence” and to search anew

231 For Newman on “first principles,” see Rik Achten, First Principles and Our Way to Faith: A Fundamental-Theological Study of John Henry Newman’s Notion of First Principles (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).

197 for points of contact. Rather than ending conversations, this is a practice that has the potential to clarify the significance of intellectual divergence and to create opportunities to fine fresh approaches to persuasion. For both Newman and Wittgenstein, this critical expansion of horizons is necessary in order to move beyond the dialectically related dead ends of rationalism and romanticism in modern thought.

The attempt to identify Newman as an anticipator of later thinkers goes back at least to the 1920s when Erich Przywara rescued Newman from the debate over whether he supported Modernism or Neo-Scholasticism.232 Przywara argued that Newman’s way of approaching religious phenomena “as they concretely appear” was most akin to the philosophical work being pursued at the time by phenomenology generally and by Max

Scheler (1874-1928) specifically.233 Although parsing this judgment in various ways, numerous scholars have found Przywara’s basic insight to be accurate and illuminating; they generally agree that Newman’s attempt to overcome the historic opposition between empiricism and idealism—by reflecting on experience in a way that shows due respect for the integrity of the impressions made by objects of consciousness—is animated by the same concerns that have driven phenomenology’s development.234 Particular attention

232 See Przywara, “Zur Geschichte des ‘modernistischen’ Newman,” Ringen der Gegenwart: Gesammalte Aufsätze, 1922-1927, Band II (Augsburg: Filser, 1929 [1922]), pp. 802-814, and Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk. For a fairly comprehensive list of and a brief introduction to Przywara’s works on Newman, see Julio Terán Dutari, “Erich Przywaras Deutung des religionsphilosophischen Anliegens Newmans,” Newman-Studien, vol. 7 (Heroldsberg bei Nurnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1957), pp. 247-60.

233 See Przywara, Religionsbegründung: —J. H. Newman (Freiburg: Herder, 1923).

234 See A. J. Boekraad, The Personal Conquest of Truth (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1955), esp. pp. 138-40; Walgrave, Newman the Theologian, esp. pp. 71-92, 334-41; Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, Vol. 8: : Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America (London: Burns & Oats, 1967), pp. 510-25 (511, 521); Edward J. Sillem, The Philosophical Notebook, Vol. I: General Introduction to the Study of Newman’s Philosophy, pp. 127-39; Johannes Artz, “Newman und Kant,” in Heinrich Fries and Werner Becker, eds. Newman Studien, Vol. VIII (Heroldsberg bei Nuernberg: Glock und Lutz, 1970), pp. 123-217, see especially pp. 146-50, “Newman as Philosopher,”

198 has been drawn to Newman’s kinship with the search in phenomenology of religion for a non-reductive method of studying its object.235 Without diminishing these important commonalities, Cyril O’Regan shows that Newman’s mode of reflecting on disclosive phenomena more closely approximated the specifically theological approach of (1905-88).236 Newman did not indulge phenomenology’s common vices: imagining himself as a neutral, transcendental knower or characterizing his descriptions as scientifically objective. On the contrary, Newman was keen to embrace the concrete conditions of everyday existence as the inexorable context of all inquiry. As his aphorism

“it is the concrete being that reasons” suggests (Apo, 155), this aspect of his thought puts him in proximity to Heidegger.237

Associating Newman with Wittgenstein and Heidegger is fitting because all three lament the catastrophic effects of rationalism, which abstracts thought from its ordinary settings in life and artificially expands the sovereignty of instrumental reason over the affective, imaginative, and volitional aspects of human relation to reality. All agree that the tragic result is interminable doubt, the absence of meaning, and endless speculation, which can only be arrested by enthusiasm or authoritarianism. A key element in each of

International Philosophical Quarterly XVI (1976), pp. 263-88, “Newmans philosophische Leistung,” in Fries and Becker, eds. Newman Studien, Vol. X (Heroldsberg bei Nuernberg: Glock und Lutz, 1978), pp. 169-229; Louis Bouyer, Newman’s Vision of Faith, p. 119; and Jay Newman, The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman (Waterloo: Laurier University Press, 1986).

235 See Yearly, The Ideas of Newman: Christianity and Human Religiosity, especially pp. 5-9. See also John F. Crosby “God as Mysterium Tremendum in Newman,” in H. Fries and W. Becker, eds. Newman Studien, Vol. X (Heroldsberg bei Nuernberg: Glock und Lutz, 1978), pp. 105-119.

236 See O’Regan, “Newman and von Balthasar: The Christological Contexting of the Numinous,” Église et Théologie, 26 (1995), pp. 165-202 (179-81). Affinities between Balthasar and Newman are also discussed in Aidan Nichols, “Littlemore from Lucerne: Newman’s Essay on Development in Balthasarian Perspective,” in Ian Ker, ed. Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), pp. 100-116.

237 For an excellent discussion of some connections between Newman and Heidegger, see Jost, “Philosophic Rhetoric: Newman and Heidegger,” in Gerard Magill, ed. Discourse and Context, pp. 54-80.

199 their rehabilitation programs is the retrieval of the forms of language that have suffered emasculation and repression. Healing rationalism is synonymous with learning anew how to curtail abstraction and exercise atrophied discourses. Thus Wittgenstein and Heidegger are key figures for the “linguistic turn” that has been so influential in academic discourse during recent decades, for which the use of language is better understood as constituting rather than representing our experience of reality. Some of Newman’s most perceptive interpreters have observed that he anticipates this turn as well, pointing for example to the following passage in The Idea of the University,238

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is thinking out into language…Call to mind…the meaning of the Greek word which expresses this special prerogative of man over the feeble intelligence of the inferior animals. It is called Logos: what does Logos mean? it stands for reason and speech, and it is difficult to say which it means more properly. It means both at once: why? because really they cannot be divided,— because they are in a true sense one.239

Nicholas Lash was one of the first to see that the fundamental shifts associated with the

“turn to language,” occurring as they have across a broad spectrum of disciplines, put interpreters in a better place to recognize the seminal character of Newman’s thought.240

The parallels between Newman and Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy are especially striking.241 Among other continuities, Newman rehabilitated the positive sense of the term “prejudice” (US, 187ff.), recognized that all thought occurs in a hermeneutical circle

238 For example, see Jost, “Philosophic Rhetoric,” p. 69 and Wright, “Newman on Literature.”

239 Newman, The Idea of the University Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin in Occasional Lectures and Essays Addressed to the Members of the Catholic University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982 [1852, 1873]), p. 208.

240 See Lash, “Introduction,” in Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 1-21 (20-21).

241 Regarding the links between Newman and Gadamer, see Louth, “The Nature of Theological Understanding: Some Parallels between Newman and Gadamer,” Carr, Newman and Gadamer.

200 (GA, 272), and made the anti-Cartesian argument that beginning with trust is preferable to beginning with doubt (GA, 294).242 Newman’s way of studying patterns of formation and dissolution in the Christian tradition by analyzing the “historical effects” of their

“leading ideas” is especially Gadamerian.

Even before these shifts were registering, literary critic John Holloway described

Newman as a “Victorian sage” who transgressed the boundaries between philosophy and literature in an effort to evoke a view of the world which was at odds with those in public circulation.243 Holloway argues that Newman’s mode of thought is literary but not fictive; his artistry involves the configuration of symbols, the control of tone, and the marshalling of illustrative imagery into an intricately woven linguistic mosaic, which was designed to invite his reader to share a broad, variegated visionary perception. Newman’s rhetorically

‘indirect’ mode of communication was the form that best fits his content, as opposed to being a mere instrument to convey it or an ornament to adorn it.244 Lash and Coulson have observed that Christian theologians are still in the process of relearning something

Newman knew nearly two centuries ago: that the religious thinker needs the skills of the literary critic at least as much as she needs those of a metaphysician.245 Newman’s mode

242 For the correlating themes in Gadamer, see Truth and Method, pp. 269-77, 291-95, 238-39.

243 See Holloway, The Victorian Sage; he comments that admiration for Newman was growing among non-Catholics in the postwar era “because he proves to have had perhaps the most comprehensive, detailed and integrated view of things – in the sage’s sense – of any English writer of his century” (158). Holloway’s notion of the sage is redeveloped in George Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

244 Jost explores the affinities between the rhetorical practices of Newman and Søren Kierkegaard in “On Concealment and Deception in Rhetoric: Newman and Kierkegaard.” For an excellent discussion of this topic in Kierkegaard’s life and works, see Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1993).

245 See Lash, “Literature and Theory: Did Newman Have a ‘Theory’ of Development?” and “Tides and Twilight: Newman since Vatican II,” p. 455. See also Coulson, Religion and Imagination.

201 of persuasion involves developing “fugal” patterns of argument which make manifold overlapping metaphorical allusions in an effort both to approximate the complexity of his subject matter and to connect multiple discursive trajectories which are alive in culture.

This feature of Newman’s writing may mystify rationalists, but it increasingly seems prescient to those who appreciate the inexorable intervolvement of metaphor and thought, as do Ricoeur and Derrida.246

Newman anticipated twentieth-century anti-rationalist thinkers and trends because he already recognized as they later would that rationalism is the most basic, pervasive, and deleterious intellectual vice of modernity.247 This led him to dedicate much if not most of his intellectual energy to analyzing its sources, to look for ways to persuade his age of its self-destructive nature, and to articulate how reason might be exercised in a healthier way while seeking to exemplify that ideal in his own discourse. In Tract 73 of

1835 Newman defined rationalism as the narrow, egocentric practice of making one’s own reasoning the standard and measure of things external to oneself.248 In the preface to

246 The interpenetration of the symbolic and the conceptual informs all of Ricoeur’s work and most often associated with his argument that “the symbol gives rise to thought” in The Symbolism of Evil trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). I discuss Newman’s proximity to Ricoeur below. The parallels between Newman and Derrida are explored in Alan J. Crowley, Ezekiel’s Wheels: Reading the Performance of Assent in Newman and Coleridge (Boston College Ph.D. Diss., 1989), a revised chapter of which is published as “The Performance of the Grammar: Reading and Writing Newman’s Narrative of Assent,” Renascence 43:1/2 (Fall 1990-Winter 1991), pp. 137-58. The co-inherence of metaphor and thought is a crucial principle of Derrida’s philosophy; he makes this principle his central topic in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 [1971]), pp. 207-71.

247 Newman’s diagnoses of and prescriptions for modern rationalism have naturally attracted more attention from thinkers than any other aspect of his œuvre. In addition to the studies already cited, see especially Maurice Nédoncelle, La Philosophie Religieuse de John Henry Newman (Strasbourg, 1946), Jan H. Walgrave, Newman the Theologian, Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts, and David A. Pailin, The Way to Faith: An Examination of Newman’s Grammar of Assent as a Response to the Search for Certainty in Faith (London: Epworth Press, 1969).

248 Newman republished this essay “On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion” in ECH I, pp. 30-101.

202 his Oxford University Sermons, which are devoted almost entirely to engaging the challenge of rationalism, Newman explained that his interest is not “reason” in general, which is of course good which used rightly, but the historically specific modern form of

“secular reason” (US, xv-xvi). Newman’s concern was not with natural reason or reason in general but rather with the historically concrete exercise of reason which had become characteristic of England during the eighteenth century and was characterized by what he regarded as an arrogant claim to independence and a lawless freedom in its attitude toward inherited tradition and sacred mystery. As Newman figured them in an 1829 sermon, rationalists “set up some image of freedom in their minds, a freedom from shackles of dependence, which they think their natural right, and which they aim to gain for themselves; a liberty, much like that which Satan aspired after, when he rebelled against God” (PPS 1:15, 198-99).

Newman devoted himself to resisting “the usurping empire of mere reason” because he sees rationalism as a deceit that the author of evil is using in his age to draw the world into apostasy (PPS I:17, 224).249 Newman described secular reason as a

“usurper” which has been aggressively encroaching on the province of revealed religion for centuries but is now openly attempting the legal establishment of its imperialism.

In the first years of its growth it professed to respect the bounds of justice and sobriety: it was little in its own eyes; but getting strength, it was lifted up; and casting down all that is called God, or worshipped, it took its seat in the temple of God, as His representative. Such, at least, is the consummation at which the Oppressor is aiming (US, 56-57).

249 Louis Bouyer is unique in recognizing that Newman’s assault on modern rationalism is saturated by apocalyptic figurations of the battle between faith and secular reason. See Bouyer, Newman, pp. 184-86.

203 Newman figured secular reason as Antichrist because he apprehended a typological identity; it was presenting itself in church and society as the rightful heir of Christ’s

Messianic role: the judge both of which laws need be obeyed and of which disclosures may be received. In the Oxford University Sermon “Contest between Faith and Sight,”

Newman set forth his Johannine vision of this conflict rather directly, as a battle between

“the spirit of anti-Christ” and “the Spirit of Truth” (US, 120). Newman singled out

Gibbon’s combination of “great abilities” with a “cold heart, impure mind, and scoffing spirit” as “one of the masters of a new school of error, which seems not yet to have accomplished its destinies, and is framed more exactly after the received type of the author of evil, than the other chief anti-Christs who have, in these last times, occupied the scene of the world” (US, 126).

Newman’s religious practice of discerning apocalyptic patterns in his age engendered a vision of secular reason’s modern rise to a position of power and privilege in the Church of England and in the Western world generally as a type of Antichrist. This perception is the result of Newman’s apocalyptic theology of history, which led him to live on the lookout for a particular dramatic configuration of events in his time:

the coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by a very awful and unparalleled outbreak of evil, called by St. Paul an Apostasy, a falling away, in the midst of which a certain terrible Man of sin and Child of perdition, the special and singular enemy of Christ, or Antichrist; that this will be when revolutions prevail, and the present framework of society breaks to pieces (DA, 57).

Since this scene plays out in every generation, it is foreshadowed in each age of the church and also in the history of Israel. Newman named a number of the most memorable of its previous occurrences, but his favorite was always the rise of the emperor Julian “the apostate,” which was accompanied by the spread of Arianism. The battle of Athanasius

204 against the alliance of the Roman emperor and Arian Christianity would always stand out as the most fitting analogy for his own time, but this parallel is only legible by virtue of the common apocalyptic figuration, which enables him to perceive their typological continuity. Newman’s attention to the fourth century debates and to those of his own day deepened his perception of a fundamental affinity. The Arians disfigured Christian teaching in order to fit the rationality defined by a certain idea of the integrity of the cosmos, and modern Protestants were disfiguring Christian teaching in order to fit the rationality defined by a certain idea of the integrity of the autonomous human subject. In both cases the accommodation has political significance: conformity to the rationality of these ancient and modern philosophies is also an act of alliance with ancient Roman and modern British imperial authority, respectively, over against an allegiance to Christ as a

Lord who disrupts these orders. With regard to his own time, Newman asserts, “Surely, there is at this day a conference of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world…preparing the way for a general Apostasy.” In exchange for infidelity Christians are offered, among other things, “knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind,”

(DA, 60-61).

Rationalism remained the central occupation of Newman’s Catholic career. He gives a brief genealogy of this particular “form of infidelity of the day” in The Idea of the

University (Idea, 286ff.). Both Newman’s distinctive insight into modern rationalism and his unique mode of resistance are inexplicable without reference to his employment of the apocalyptic symbols of Antichrist and apostasy as hermeneutic keys to the pattern of events in his age.

205 IV. Affiliating with Secular and Christian Forms of Postmodern Thought

One of Newman’s favorite ways of rhetorically undermining rationalism was to show that the quest for a secure noetic foundation, carried out to its logical conclusion, undermines all values and leads to an impossibly inactive state of absolute unbelief. His manner of skeptically demolishing foundationalisms has been compared to Derrida’s deconstructive criticism.250 T. R. Wright illustrates this similarity by showing how Newman challenges

Protestant assumptions about the suitability of the Bible to provide the sole foundation for a system of Christian belief, focusing on Tract 83 of 1838 (DA, 109-253). There

Newman celebrated the polyphonic inexhaustibility of the Bible and problematized all claims to stabilize, much less finalize, its signifying system without reference to a communally-authorized traditionary praxis of and framework for reading. He argued that both classical Protestant theories of its intrinsic unity and modern critical appeals to historical context have not yielded consensus but have instead consistently funded a multiplication of divergent beliefs and practices which ends in that all too familiar dialectical antagonism between enthusiasm and skepticism toward the Bible. Both

Newman and Derrida argue that the quest to secure foundations for knowledge derives from a desire for mastery, and both trace the self-destructive properties of its historical effects in modern Western civilization. Newman, however, was at least as critical of gifted intellectuals who endlessly defer judgment and action in favor of luxuriating in the complexity of the concrete and the ambiguity of language as he is of those who, with a proper sense of urgency, react overenthusiastically on the basis of superficial certainties.

250 See T. R. Wright, “Newman on the Bible: A Via Media to Postmodernity,” in Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker, eds. Newman and the Word (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 211-49.

206 Newman lamented that so many of his fellow European inheritors of the Christian legacy have decided to relegate scripture, doctrine, and church to the dustbin of history; his reasons for rejecting this option were actually somewhat akin to Derrida’s argument for refusing to leave writing behind.251 Newman was well aware that these are ambivalent gifts, just as—if not more—often used to sow deception and deal death as to tell truth and give life, but he contended that the proper response to their poisonous abuse, which is expected in New Testament texts, is neither repression, nor revision, nor privatization but the arduous practice of renewing their curative power.

When Newman argued that all thinking is “philosophically inaccurate,” he seems to be making something like Derrida’s point that no language successfully functions as an adequate referential system. Both saw reality as a vast, ever-expanding network of signs, which includes the interpreter because there is no location “outside text.”252 However, they do seem to disagree about the degree to which is possible to come “reasonably” through faith to a state of ‘certitude’ about what this mysterious network as a whole points toward as original and ultimate. Newman regarded God not as absent but as hidden and the path to God in this life as a kind of “labyrinth,” “rugged and circuitous above other investigations” (GA, 276). William Myers has argued that the view of reality that

Newman gestured toward has similarities to the analysis of “the real” performed by

251 Derrida famously discusses the promise and peril of writing by reflecting on the dual sense of the Greek word pharmakon, which is simultaneously poison and cure, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

252 Derrida’s infamous remark “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” occurs in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158.

207 Jacques Lacan (1901-81).253 Both in The Arians of the Fourth Century and in The

Philosophical Notebook Newman proposed that human consciousness can only entertain

“shadowy representations of realities,” that all knowledge is the product of sensory effects, and that all experience depends upon relation.254 Like the neo-Lacanian Slavoj

Žižek, Newman regarded self-knowledge as unstable; it is bound up with a variable non- self which is always only partially experienced and therefore incompletely known.

Whereas materialists like Lacan and Žižek, whose intellectual genealogy may be traced in significant part to Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), seek release from solipsistic compulsion though the cessation of desire, the relinquishing of all claim to Being, and the acceptance of nothingness, Newman’s discipline of quieting the voices of self and world enabled him to discern the echo of a voice inviting him to see all around him the traces of a Person who is soliciting an everlasting relationship of faith, hope, and love.

Newman’s variety of ‘skepticism’ is quite akin to prominent forms of postmodern suspicion, but his divergences are just as important.255 Newman exemplified a modernist sensibility about indeterminacy and anticipates post-Nietzschean perspectivalism, but he neither forsook the classical search for truth nor reduced every discourse of authority to the expression of an illicit desire for power. Newman stabilized virtuous acts of judgment in “conscience,” without reifying it into an internal law or ground.256 Conscience is the

253 See Myers, “‘What do you want?’: Newman’s Ocean of Interminable Scepticism,” in Merrigan and Ker, eds. Newman and the Word (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2000), pp. 181-210.

254 See Newman, The Philosophical Notebook, edited by Edward Sillem, vol. 2 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts Publishing House, 1970 [1859-1890]).

255 The best short discussion is Jost, “What Newman Knew: A Walk on the Postmodernist Side,” Renascence 49:4 (Summer 1997), pp. 241-60.

256 Jost analyzes Newman’s notion of conscience and brings it into conversation with contemporary interlocutors in “Rhetoric, Conscience, and the Claim of Religion,” in Walter Jost and

208 echo of God’s voice in the human heart, the distinctive sound of which makes it possible to differentiate between good and evil, truth and falsehood.257 It is related to the memory of our dependence upon a loving Creator to whom we will be accountable as a fearful

Judge on the Last Day. Rather than engaging in endless critique, which dialectically generates ever stronger ,258 Newman held the plurality of relative truths and relative goods that he perceived in an ever-evolving tension, never forgetting their inadequacies but never being ungrateful for the measure of relation to reality which they afford.259 In this world of mystery, with its radically open future, Newman warned against dogmatically foreclosing on the possibility that signs and wonders have been or will be given by the wholly Other, whose whisper inspires his perseverance in searching and listening. Genuinely conscientious judgment is never individualist because the well- formed self has always already internalized and exists in continuing reliance upon many truths lived and spoken as a relatively stable yet unproven “fiduciary framework,” the assumption of which is a precondition for the operation of any intelligence, as Michael

Polanyi argues.260

Wendy Olmsted, eds., Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 97-129

257 Thus Newman concluded GA with an abridged quotation of John 10: “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know Mine, and Mine know Me. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me…” (GA, 316).

258 Newman’s view of the dialectical relationship between liberal and evangelical Protestantism, which I have already discussed in earlier chapters, anticipates the insights of Horkheimer and Adorno on the relationship between Enlightenment and myth put forth in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

259 Jost discusses Newman’s pluralistic rhetoric of authorities in Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman, especially pp. 209-35.

260 See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Jost discusses the affinities between Newman and Polanyi in Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman, pp. 89, 233-34.

209 Precisely because he is as iconoclastic as the postmodern hermeneuts of suspicion when it comes to the various ways that foundationalism insinuates itself into discourse,

Newman refused to turn criticism itself into a foundational practice. Like Ricoeur, he is cognizant that critique’s parasitic nature obliges thinkers to practice the hermeneutics of rehabilitation and retrieval at least as assiduously.261 Because criticism is insufficient for emancipation from ideology and ignorance, deliverance from deception requires one to engage in the task of reconstructing meaning and of naming the Power which enables and authorizes one to do so. Otherwise one is only clearing space anew for the return of more virulent ideologies, thereby becoming an accomplice in the acceleration of their auto- immunization. Thus, in terms of philosophical resources, Newman participates in a post- critical retrieval of what Mary Katherine Tillman calls “the phronesis tradition” which extends from Parmenides to Socrates to Plato to Aristotle.262 Newman deems Aristotle’s reflections on the virtuous exercise of good judgment in concrete, indeterminate matters especially generative. Newman saw through Aristotle an intellectual via media between the extremes of relativism and foundationalisms, which is especially ripe for recovery when it comes to post-Enlightenment moral and religious reasoning. Newman did not valorize Aristotle as an unquestionable authority; he took him as guide and attempted to repeat non-identically certain aspects of his intellectual performance in the modern context.263 Walter Jost finds that Newman is similar to the neo-Aristotelian Richard

261 Crowley explores this commonality in “Theory of Discourse: Newman and Ricoeur,” in Magill, ed. Discourse and Context, pp. 81-94.

262 See Tilman, “Economies of Reason: Newman and the Phronesis Tradition,” Magill, ed. Discourse and Context, pp. 45-53.

263 See Jost, Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman, especially pp. 7-27. See also the literature cited in the second half of footnote 30 in chapter one, p. 15.

210 McKeon (1900-1985) in his elevation of rhetoric to an all-encompassing praxis of persuasion that is not reducible to verbal practices but is more like a form of symbolic action that coordinates all our knowing, doing, and making. Some argue that Newman’s resulting rhetoric of knowledge is comparable to that of ancient Sophists, for whom the discovery of truth is a matter of personal persuasion.264 For Newman, incarnating these classical rhetorical ideals involves assimilating everything of value in the traditions that he has inherited and working toward their integration and renewal. Newman’s post- critical goes a long way to explaining Alasdair MacIntyre’s high estimation of

Newman’s significance as a theorizer of tradition as well as his sympathy for Newman’s theological response to the post-Enlightenment “culture of the Encyclopedia.”265

Newman’s unique combination of critique and restoration challenges established ways of conceiving the options for modern thought, and this characteristic is what makes him most akin to ‘postmodern’ thinkers who criticize conservative and liberal apologists for secular modernity alike while rehabilitating classical forms of life and thought.266

Interestingly, those who see Newman this way tend to throw their energies directly into similar projects rather than intervening in Newman scholarship. For example, Pierre

Hadot (1922-2010) is famous for reminding us that ancient philosophers were not

264 See Susan Carole Funderburgh Jarrat, A Victorian Sophistic: The Rhetoric of Knowledge in Darwin, Newman, and Pater (University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. Diss., 1985).

265 For MacIntyre’s praise of and confession of personal debt to Newman’s thinking on tradition, especially in The Arians of the Fourth Century and An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, see After Virtue, 3rd Ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1980]) p. vii, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 8, 353-54, 362. The reference to Newman’s theological response to the post-Enlightenment “culture of the encyclopedia” is found in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 69.

266 Stephen Thomas comes to a similar conclusion in Newman and Heresy, pp. 253-56.

211 professional theorizers but practitioners of “a way of life.” His many detailed studies all attempt to show that it is anachronistic to abstract and assess the arguments advanced in the manuscripts which have been passed down to us without situating them within the

“spiritual exercises”—the praxis of training in wise living—of which they are an integral part. When recounting the earliest and strongest influences on his spiritual development and his intellectual project, Hadot explained,

I was very much influenced by Newman’s Grammar of Assent. Newman shows in this work that it’s not the same thing to give one’s assent to an affirmation which one understands in a purely abstract way, and to give one’s assent while engaging one’s entire being, and “realizing” – in the English sense of the word – with one’s heart and imagination, just what this affirmation means for us. This distinction between real and notional assent underlies my research on spiritual exercises.

Hadot learned from Newman to see the modern uprooting of religious and philosophical reflection from the concrete practice of living as a basic problem for the survival of genuine thought, much less Christianity, in the modern world. For him the disbelief engendered by textual criticism of the Bible raised a more general question: “is modern man still able to understand the texts of antiquity, and live according to them?”267 Cued by Newman and others, Hadot dedicated himself to recovering the existential matrix of ancient philosophy because he was convinced that if the disciplines of Christianity and philosophy are to have a future, it must begin by a tremendous act of remembering the practical purposes of their discourses.

Roman Catholic theologians who participated in the ressourcement movement, such as Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), (1904-95), and Jean Daniélou (1905-

267 See “Postscript: An Interview with ,” in Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. by Michael Chase, edited and introduced by Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995 [1987]), pp. 277, 278. Paul J. Griffiths engages in an effort analogous to Hadot’s with respect to reading habits in Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

212 74), invoked Newman as their inspiration in a similar way.268 Although Louis Bouyer was the only one who wrote extensively on Newman,269 they all imitated his way of addressing the crises of modern Europe and revitalizing the Catholic Church’s discourses and practices by returning to the biblical, patristic, and medieval sources of Christian tradition. Probing the subterranean influence of Newman on de Lubac is especially pertinent. The main lesson of Catholicism, that ancient “Christianity transformed the old world by absorbing it,” echoes the central principle of An Essay on the Development of

Christian Doctrine, and de Lubac includes in the appendix to Catholicism an extract from

Newman’s writings which articulates this idea as eloquently as one might imagine possible.270 Like Newman, de Lubac did not just study this ancient of cultural engagement; he practiced it, as is evident in works such as The Drama of

Atheist Humanism and La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, which perform a theologically interested mode of analyzing the most vital movements in modern

European thought in a quest to understand the “immense drift” of “the peoples of the

West,” who “are denying their Christian past and turning away from God.”271 Both

Newman and de Lubac were interested in the religious and intellectual sources of secular

268See James Patrick Hurley, “Newman and Twentieth-Century French Theology: The Presence of J. H. Newman in Y. M. Congar, H. de Lubac y J. Daniélou,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011), pp. 473-78. Lash writes of Newman’s influence on Karl Rahner and in “Tides and Twilight,” in Ker and Hill, eds. Newman after a Hundred Years, p. 452, and Thomas J. Norris argues that Newman had deep effects on ’s thought as well in Newman and His Theological Method: A Guide for the Theologian Today (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), see esp. pp. 208-10.

269 See Bouyer, Newman: His Life and Spirituality and Newman’s Vision of Faith.

270 See de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. by Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund, OCD (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988 [1947]), pp. 285, 295, 431-33. The quotation is from Newman, “Milman’s View of Christianity” [1841], ECH II, pp. 186-248.

271 See de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. by Edith M. Riley, Anne Englund Nash, and Mark Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995 [1944]), p. 11.

213 modernity’s expectation to supersede religion in general and Christianity in particular, and both traced it in large part to Christianity’s heterodox apocalyptic traditions.272 Like

Newman, de Lubac believed that the revitalization of orthodox Christianity depended on a renewal of the mystical practice of biblical interpretation; indeed, he explicitly cited

Newman’s claim that “It may almost be laid down as an historical fact, that the mystical interpretation [of Scripture] and orthodoxy will stand or fall together” near the beginning of the second volume of his massive retrieval of patristic and medieval exegetical traditions.273 Balthasar’s great theological Trilogy is may be interpreted as continuing this line of renewing Christian mystical thought. Balthasar often mentioned Newman as an outstanding modern antecedent of his quest to reconstruct a Christian ‘theological aesthetics,’274 and he elaborated on Newman’s idea of visionary faith as a key resource for developing a ‘theodramatic hermeneutic.’275 Judging by Balthasar’s emphases and footnotes, Przywara seems to have served as the primary mediator of Newman to

Balthasar, as he did for most German Catholic thinkers.276

272 See de Lubac La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1979, 1981). In his 1840 piece “The Protestant Idea of Antichrist” (ECH II, 112-85), Newman argues that the English Protestant apocalyptic tradition, which he traces back in part to Joachim of Fiore, Peter John Olivi (1248-98), and the spiritual , is an intellectual midwife of the modern secular supersessionist stance toward Catholic Christianity.

273 See de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000 [1959]), pp. 12, 234.

274 See especially von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. By Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. by Joseph Fessio, S. J. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982 [1967]), pp. 139, 167, 176, 238-9, 276, 284, 295-6, 354.

275 See Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. II: Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990 [1976]), pp. 11, 130-36, 227.

276 Rahner recalls, “For the Catholics of Germany in the twenties, thirties, and forties [Przywara] was considered one of the greatest minds. He had a great influence on all of us when we were young;” in Paul Imhof, ed., Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, 1965-1985 (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 14.

214 Profound continuities also exist between Newman and the two most prominent

Anglophone ‘postmodern’ Christian thinkers: George Lindbeck and John Milbank.

Gerard Loughlin argues that Lindbeck’s postliberalism and Milbank’s radical orthodoxy are both rooted in a crucial insight informing Newman’s critique of ‘liberalism:’ the rejection of the supposition that there is an unprejudiced view of the world which we can attain by unclothing ourselves of our inherited traditions.277 In different ways Newman,

Lindbeck, and Milbank argue to the contrary that knowing is always symbolically or textually mediated by an aesthetic vision of reality which cannot be grounded by secular reason. All three therefore understand Christian rationality to have a distinctive character which is inextricably connected to Christianity’s total living complex of beliefs and practices. Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model of doctrine as a ‘grammar’ of religious practice bears a striking resemblance to Newman’s account of the regulative function of early Christian doctrinal formulas in The Arians of the Fourth Century (Ari, 133-50), and

Lindbeck does in fact acknowledge Newman as a strong influence.278 Milbank’s way of rhetorically uniting a “nihilistic voice” of historicizing critique toward secular social theory with a voice of Christian virtue is analogous to Newman’s conjunction of the voices of skepticism and faith.279 Maurice Cowling (1926-2005) identifies Milbank and

277 See Gerard Loughlin, “‘To Live and Die upon a Dogma’: Newman and Post/Modern Dogma,” in Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan, eds. Newman and Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 25- 52; see also “The University Without Question: John Henry Newman and Jacques Derrida on Faith in the University,” in Jeff Astley, ed., The Idea of a Christian University: Essays on Theology and Higher Education (London: Paternoster Press, 2004), pp. 113-31, and Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 89-92, 108, 114-15.

278 See Lindbeck, “Letters,” First Things (January 2004). Lindbeck develops his view in The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984).

279 Milbank explains the relationship between these two voices in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005 [1990]), p. 5. It would be worth

215 MacIntyre as the most notable of recent participants in the English Catholic tradition, which begins with the Tractarian Movement, of analyzing the instability of modern secular order while arguing for the urgency and envisioning the possibility of a renewed

Christian counter-order.280

Newman’s postmodern affiliations are the consequence of a critical stance toward the social and intellectual order of modernity. He does not acquiesce to modern European pretensions to discursive and national autonomy, and he is not tempted by teleological narrations of this transition as humanity’s natural destiny. Like all postmodern thinkers, he is interested in uncovering genealogically the historical sources of and precedents for this style of narration as well as other discourses and practices of modernity. In addition to its diagnostic purpose, he does this in order to help his fellow Europeans remember that they remain mere mortals, and this order will too pass away. As his fellow Britons toasted the advances of science and industry as well as the treasure returning from their colonies, Newman exclaims, “The country seems to me to be in a dream – being drugged with this fallacious notion of its superiority to other countries and times” (LD III, 90-91).

Newman recognized in the early 1830s that Western modernity authorizes its unilateral supersession of the traditions and authorities of ‘primitive’ times and ‘foreign’ lands by narrating its particular configuration of discourses and practices around the rule of utility as the universal goal of human history.

considering whether the union of purgative criticism and edifying persuasion could be understood as a discursive reflection of, anticipation of, or participation in the eschatological judgment of Christ.

280 See Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 1985, 2001), vol. 3, pp. 371-88.

216 Newman was able to get such great critical traction on modernity because he interpreted it as an historical phenomenon within a much more encompassing story. As I have shown, Newman’s critical perspective on modernity derives from an apocalyptic narrative first of the relationship between the kingdom of God and earthly kingdoms and second of the relationship between the true Church of Christ and the false church of

Antichrist. One linchpin of the first narrative is the vision in Daniel 2 of an everlasting

Kingdom which will break into pieces and consume the idolatrous empires that preceded it.281 Newman correlates all New Testament references to the kingdom of God with the same symbol in Daniel. For Newman, the crucial point is that all earthly kingdoms, including the modern secular order, are inaugurated and maintained through acts of violence. They are founded “by the sword” and extended by “usurpation, invasion, conquest, and tyranny” (PPS II: 20, 234).

Newman interpreted the coming of Christ and the arrival of the Spirit as the inauguration of the everlasting kingdom envisioned in Daniel. Newman provides an overview of this “Messianic idea” of Christianity in the last chapter of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (GA, 341). According to Newman, the Jewish expectation of a deliverer who would conquer all unjust earthly empires is fulfilled by a teacher who

“founded not merely a religion, but…a system of religious warfare, an aggressive and militant body…which aimed at the benefit of all nations by the spiritual conquest of all”

(GA, 344). This new kingdom is, properly speaking, not of this world because it is to be created “not by force, but by persuasion,” “to aim at success by suffering,” and to make

281 This topic recurs in Newman’s sermons; see for example PPS II:20-21, 232ff. and Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902 [1843]) XVI-XVIII, which were first preached in the early 1840s when Newman was still an Anglican. Hereafter references to this text are made parenthetically and abbreviated as SD.

217 “sanctity [its] substance and germinal seed.” Newman interpreted “the Sermon on the

Mount” as the Lord’s “description to the Apostles of their weapons and their warfare.” In

“the foolishness of preaching,” the weakness of suffering, and the of virtue the members of this kingdom would perpetuate the icon and spirit of Christ, the King of the everlasting Kingdom (GA, 349ff.). Newman’s Messianic and apocalyptic Christianity is about both resisting the violence, deception, and vice which ground and nourish earthly imperialism and leavening all nations with a heavenly counter-kingdom of Christ’s peace, truth, and holiness. Characteristically invoking Daniel 2:44, Newman exclaimed,

Christ’s religion was not a mere creed or philosophy. A creed or philosophy need not have interfered with kingdoms of this world, but might have existed under the Roman empire or under the Persian. No; Christ’s kingdom was a counter kingdom. It occupied ground; it claimed to rule over those whom hitherto this world’s governments ruled over without rival; and if this world’s governments would not themselves acknowledge and submit to its rule, and rule under and according to its laws, it “broke in pieces” those governments—not by carnal weapons, but by Divine Power (SD XVI, 229).

Newman is unique among nineteenth-century Christian thinkers by virtue of his absolute refusal to broker any compromise with the emergent secular nation-state; he rejects the bourgeois premise that Christianity is a private affair which one can easily reconcile with a life devoted to the consolidation of power and the accumulation of capital.282

While advocating war with modern secular imperialism, Newman consistently contrasted the weapons of Christ’s kingdom with the weapons of earthly kingdoms. The images of Christ in the gospels and the practices of Paul as apostle to the nations are the

282 It is often forgotten that in the sixth of the seventeen propositions that Newman takes to sum up “liberalism” in his famous “Note A” appended to the Apologia, Newman took the idea that “Political Economy may reverse our Lord’s declarations about poverty and riches” as his primary example of the liberal principle that “No revealed doctrines or precepts may reasonably stand in the way of scientific conclusions” (Apo, 260). Newman discusses the conflict between New Testament teaching on wealth and poverty and modern political economy in more detail in The Idea of the University (Idea, 64-71).

218 primary guides for Newman’s efforts on behalf of the counter-kingdom of Christ. One of

Newman’s favorite aphorisms is that the kingdom of Christ wins by losing. This is “the law of Christ’s kingdom” and “the paradox which is seen in its history. It belongs to the poor in spirit; it belongs to the persecuted; it is possessed by the meek; it is sustained by the patient. It conquers by suffering; it advances by retiring; it is made wise through foolishness” (SD, 249). Newman may have interpreted the modern enthronement of self- rule by appeal to the symbols of liberty, reason, and utility as the deceit of his age, but this does not imply that he is nostalgic for an earlier age. Every age is oriented by its own deceit (PPS I:24, 309-24). The character of every time and place is defined by a peculiar form of idolatry which leads to death. All of the orders of this world are passing away.

For Newman, resistance to the temptations of modernity is not a form of reactionary but rather a fight for human survival. It is only by becoming new creatures that the evils which destroy life and corrupt nations may be overcome. It is precisely the historical inadequacy of other measures of resistance that sustain Newman’s conviction that a singular regenerative power has been introduced into the world through Christ and the Spirit, a power which transforms sinners into saints, inspires prophetic witness even unto martyrdom, and overcomes empires.

V. A Catholic Apocalyptic Narrative and Critique of Modern Secularity

Newman’s critical relationships to Romanticism, his anti-rationalism, and his postmodern affiliations cumulatively suggest a certain degree of kinship with Marx, Nietzsche, and

Kierkegaard. In different ways each of those great nineteenth-century critics of modernity and its emasculated ‘religion’ attempt to highlight the blind spot created by the ideology

219 of ‘progress’ and return our attention to concrete matters of existence. Literary critic

Robert Pattison argues that the comprehensive scope and surgical consistency of

Newman’s critique of modern ‘liberalism’ puts him squarely in the company of Nietzsche most of all. Without implying any correlation between their particular diagnoses and prescriptions, both Newman and Nietzsche develop genealogies of modernity and promote programs of resistance. Writing soon after the fall of the Berlin wall and Francis

Fukuyama’s ambivalent reflection on Western liberal democracy’s banal end to history,

Pattison concludes that Newman’s critical perspective “is arguably the most searching rebuke available to liberalism’s cosmic pretensions” and “one of the few intelligible alternatives to [its] ideological monopoly.”283 In his celebrated volume At the Origins of

Modern Atheism, Michael Buckley also couples Newman and Nietzsche as singularly

“prophetic figures” by virtue of their unrivaled awareness of and insight into the importance of the massive shifting of religious consciousness underway in modern

Europe. Both realized that the liberal attenuation of dogma and ritual would not halt the gradual erosion of religious belief because it was in fact a symptom of that erosion.284

Unlike Nietzsche, however, Newman does not conflate the collapse of Christendom with the death of God. For Newman, the corruption of Christianity and the decline of western civilization are not fates to which one must submit but crises that call for a prophetic response.

283 Pattison, John Henry Newman: The Great Dissent, p. 211, 53. Pattison compares Newman’s perspective with Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18 on pp. 213-14.

284 See Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, pp. 28-29, 322. Turner also compares Newman and Nietzsche in John Henry Newman, pp. 449, 478-79.

220 The prophetic aspect of Newman’s thought derives from his perception of a new, unprecedented peril for humanity heralded by secular modernity. Without ever doubting that the inherited alliances between churches, , and states that characterized

European Christendom were often characterized by corruption and oppression, Newman sees the revolutionary movement to reorganize human identities and relationships in terms of the secular principles of utility and expedience as a cure that promises to do more harm than the disease. Christopher Dawson is the lone interpreter to have made the connection between the category-eluding distinctiveness of Newman’s religious thought and his unique response to secular modernity. Dawson notes that in England and in the

Protestant world generally, religious people accommodated secularization, evolving the accord between popular Protestantism and bourgeois capitalism which constituted the

Victorian compromise. Without any such prospect, religious people in Catholic Europe aligned themselves with political conservatism in the hope of restoring the Christian state and defeating the revolution. Dawson observes,

Newman was almost the only Christian thinker who realized the anti-Christian character of the trend to secularism without indulging in wishful thinking or identifying the cause of the Church with that of the political . And consequently he was rejected by both sides and was condemned by the Catholic revival as a Liberal and compromiser and by the Victorian Liberals as an arch reactionary who was misusing his brilliant literary and dialectical powers to serve the cause of obscurantism.285

Newman believes that liberal accommodation, which defines the ‘public’ sphere as the domain of utilitarian calculation while allocating a ‘private’ space for religion, and conservative reaction, which attempts to grab the economic and political levers of secular power to reestablish religion ‘publicly,’ are different ways of being assimilating by the

285 Dawson, “Newman and the Modern World,” pp. 147-153 (150-51).

221 logic of secular modernity. In the former case religion is reduced to an elective that one chooses whether or not to include in a pre-established secular curriculum. In the latter case religion is indifferent to the means by which it gains and maintains its privileged position. In both instances the autonomous sovereignty of secular power to circumscribe and regulate patterns of human activity, including ‘religion,’ is taken for granted. For

Newman, on the contrary, genuine religion is already intrinsically a way of integrating and regulating life and thought as a whole. As Newman argues in A Grammar of Assent, there is a “conflict of first principles” between Christian faith and belief that “the whole structure of society is raised upon the basis of secular expediency” (GA, 295). Newman summed up the narrative to which he adhered throughout his adult life in a letter written in May of 1878:

For the last fifty years, since 1827, there has been a formidable movement among us towards assigning in the national life political or civil motives for social and personal duties, and thereby withdrawing matters of conduct from the jurisdiction of religion. Men are to be made virtuous…on purely secular motives. We are having a wedge thrust into us, which tends to the destruction of religion altogether; and this is our misery that there is no definite point at which we can logically take our stand, and resist encroachment on principle (LD XXVIII, 363- 64).

Newman is far from being against much of what the advocates of this secularization champion, but he refuses to bless the surreptitious institution of a secular simulacrum to perform religion’s synthesizing and organizing function for human life and society

Dawson believed that Newman “was a lonely man because he saw further and deeper than his contemporaries” and predicts that Newman’s name “will live when those of the leaders of enlightened thought…are forgotten.”286 What Dawson finds memorable

286 Dawson, “Newman and the Modern World,” pp. 149.

222 about Newman is his narrow way between the broad paths of revolution and reaction. At the end of the Second World War it was not yet possible to write the religious history of the modern West, however, Dawson was confident that Newman would eventually be seen as a key to that history. For Dawson, the basic storyline is the European rebellion against and secularization of inherited Christian structures which was ushered in by the

French Revolution. However, what Dawson finds most interesting is the concurrence of destructive and regenerative effects in the subsequent century, continuing to his own day.

The event resulted in the demolition of much of what Christianity had been and yet also ignited a Christian renaissance. Dawson sees Newman not only as a central participant in this phenomenon but also as its most prescient interpreter, unique among nineteenth- century Christian thinkers by virtue of his simultaneous appreciation of both the negative and positive aspects. Newman profoundly concurred with most negative assessments of eighteenth-century European Christendom but strongly opposed secularizing revolution.

Thus he stands in a paradoxical relationship to modern thought, at once embodying and contradicting the spirit of the age. He attempted nothing more heroic than standing the religious ground that he happened to be occupying when this ‘secularizing revolution’ came to England. Unsurprisingly, articulating his position persuasively turned out to be nearly impossible, as one sees in the historical reception of Newman’s writings.

The burden of being misunderstood throughout his life is evident in Newman’s letters and diaries. On the occasion of Kingsley’s infamous slight, Newman eloquently responded with his own account of the history of his religious thought in the Apologia

Pro Vita Sua, though he begins by acknowledging that “the words, ‘Secretum meum mihi’, keep ringing in [his] ears” (Apo, 15). Newman placed his struggle to keep religious

223 truth from becoming a casualty of the ‘universal solvent’ of ‘liberalism’ at the center of the narrative. Dawson acutely recognized the need to clarify what exactly Newman was and was not battling in his dramatic “struggle with liberalism.” Newman clearly fought

‘liberalism’ on a ‘religious’ front, but what he is resisting, Dawson argued, is not simply a ‘religious error’ in the modern sense but “the movement of aggressive secularism which became the dominant force in nineteenth-century civilization and shaped the world in which we live today.”287 At the razor’s edge of this secularizing movement was both the dismantling of all authority that could not justify itself on the principle of utility, whether conceived collectively in continental Europe or individualistically in Anglo-American contexts, and the concomitant discarding of all traditions which are not demonstratively comprehensible by instrumental reason. Newman did not resist this movement because of a preferential option for superstition and tyranny. He foresaw catastrophic long-term consequences if these principles were to take hold in human life and society. If every act of submission to authority is contingent upon the human subject’s perception of utility, anarchy or absolutism are the only logical outcomes. If the reception of a tradition is always dependent upon one’s own measure of rationality, then the domestication or disposal of everything that instructively challenges the self in a way that exceeds its limited horizon will seem to be an obligation.

Dawson is unique among Newman’s interpreters for calling attention to the fact that his lifelong “struggle with liberalism” is an attempt to interpret and respond to the cultural onslaught and eventually the legal establishment of the entire social order of secular modernity. For Newman, this is a battle between contrary principles of organizing

287 Dawson, “Newman and the Modern World,” p. 149.

224 and regulating all of life. Because Newman believed that resisting the visible signs of secular modernity by means of modern secular principles is already to be assimilated, he deepens his dependence upon what he sees as the ‘internal’ principle of Christianity’s vitality, which he calls “revealed religion.”288 Newman’s abiding concern was to discern how the biblical narrative and the history of Christianity disclose this conflict between the spirit of ‘the world’ animating secular imperialism and the Spirit of God guiding a heavenly counter-kingdom. This leads Newman to focus on the church’s growth from a small, persecuted Jewish sect into a power which rivals the Roman Empire for authority.

His interest was not to fantasize nostalgically about an historical regression but rather to determine how he might help modern Christianity regain its ancient vigor and perform an analogous role by resisting modern secular imperialism. Because modern thinkers widely regarded secularization as an inevitable and salutary process, Newman appeared to many to be a reactionary, however, the postmodern destabilization of this narrative may open the door for a fresh hearing. Indeed, for those engaged by the post-secular “return of the religious” in recent years he may even seem prescient. As Derrida incisively observes in a late essay, “Nothing seems therefore more uncertain, more difficult to sustain, nothing seems here or there more imprudent than a self-assured discourse on the age of disenchantment, the era of secularization, the time of laicization, etc.”289

288 Charles Stephen Dessain clearly recognizes this when he asserts that “the fundamental interest of Newman’s life is his devotion to the cause of Revealed Religion” and organizes his intellectual biography of Newman accordingly; see Dessain, John Henry Newman, Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 [1966]), p. xii.

289 See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone” [1996], trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 100. Hent de Vries surveys this intellectual phenomenon in recent European thought in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

225 The relationship between religion and secular modernity has become ambiguous;

‘secularization’ is becoming a much more aporetic phenomenon, raising the prospect that the dimension of Newman’s thought of which Dawson was so keenly aware may come into greater focus. That these developments have in fact already begun to have this effect is evident from a recent book by postcolonial critic Gauri Viswanathan. Invoking the work of Johannes Fabian, Talal Asad, and others, she is, like so many of late, dissatisfied with the way scholars and critical theorists alike have relied upon world-historical models developed during European colonialism, which place religious identity at a ‘primitive’ stage of human development which culminates in ‘secular autonomy’ as conceived in the modern West. Whereas these models reduce religion to a sentiment or creed that can only have private significance in modernity and even then ‘really’ only as a form of ideology, she is interested in exploring the hypothesis that religious belief has functioned and can function in the modern context as a ‘worldly’ activity which produces disciplined counter-knowledge and thereby gains some critical leverage on secular imperialism in the concrete world. She finds in Newman the modern Western religious thinker who most closely approximates this ideal. She is fascinated by the way his Tractarian protest and eventual conversion is bound up with dissent against emergent secular English nationalism. She compares his way of questioning the foundationalist assumptions that legitimated its cultural rise and legal establishment to the poststructuralist mode of criticism practice by Edward Said (1935-2003).290 She finds it remarkable that Newman’s

290 Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 44-72. She contextualizes her work by reference to Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and others; see pp. xi-xvii. Said is of course most famous for Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), but Viswanathan draws her comparison with his later work in The

226 attraction to Catholicism was inspired by his perception that it offers the only feasible form of populist, transnational, nonviolent resistance to secular imperialism. Although

Viswanathan’s reading of Newman is uneven in quality, she successfully brings back to the fore central elements of what lies at the heart of Newman’s intellectual and religious pilgrimage. Twentieth-century Newman interpreters have rarely made so explicit the consistent involvement of his specifically religious thinking in this renegotiation of the relationships between religious and secular authority and have by this relative neglect licensed the suspicion that Newman was an eccentric figure who misspent his intellectual and literary talent on obscure obsessions with parochial matters.

Importantly, all of Viswanathan’s criticisms of Newman’s “conservative” and

“regressive” tendencies relate to his conviction that ‘Christianity’ and ‘England’ do have integrity as historical phenomena, complex as they may be, and to his promotion of not only their extension but also their integration. This is a point at which Newman diverges from most forms of postmodernism and post-colonialism. For Newman, the fact that

‘Christianity’ and ‘England’ cannot be stabilized in a foundationalist way does not render every construction of these phenomena equally fictive. Likewise, the recognition that authorities and traditions are always ‘mythologically’ founded and constructed does not necessarily make submission to every authority equally idolatrous or all participatory emendations of a tradition uniformly willful. Additionally, all forms of critical resistance operate according to a logic which has a history and is therefore ultimately part of a tradition which answers to authority, however thoroughly the signs of these relations of

World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), and Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

227 dependence are erased and internalized, thereby enabling their agents to appear autonomous. Newman already knew that dependence upon inherited forms of life and language is an inexorable condition of being human, and thus he feels no guilt for the fact that his critical resistance is particularly Christian and specifically Catholic. The way

Newman gratefully receives and faithfully develops the religious identity given to him obviously distinguishes him from the critical legacies of Marx and Nietzsche, which is why Dawson paired him with Kierkegaard above other nineteenth-century critics.

Connoisseurs of modern Christian thought including Erich Przywara, Bernard

Reardon (1913-2006), and John Macquarrie (1919-2007) second Dawson’s pairing of

Newman and Kierkegaard.291 In what remains perhaps the best short literary analysis of

Newman, David DeLaura underscores Newman’s kinship with Kierkegaard and

Dostoevsky as prophetic modern Christians writing against the current of modernity.292

Their status as spiritual-literary authorities derives in large part from a daring intellectual honesty about the trial that modernity presents to faith. Not only do they concede that religious belief is inseparable from ‘personal’ experience and cannot be verified by secular reason, they also make the skeptical case themselves as eloquently as it has ever

291 See Przywara, “Kierkegaard – Newman,” in Heinrich Fries and Werner Becker, eds. Newman- Studien, vol. 1 (Heroldsberg bei Nurnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1948), pp. 77-101; Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, p. 92; and Macquarrie, “Newman and Kierkegaard on the Act of Faith,” in Ian Ker, ed. Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), pp. 75-88. See also Cornelio Fabro, “Il ‘Problema’ della chisa in Newman e Kierkegaard,” in Heinrich Fries and Werner Becker, eds. Newman- Studien, vol. 10 (Heroldsberg bei Nurnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1978), pp. 120-39, and M. Jaime Ferreira, “Leaps and Circles: Kierkegaard and Newman on Faith and Reason,” Religious Studies 30 (December 1994), pp. 379-97.

292 DeLaura, “Newman’s Apologia as Prophecy.” Gilbert Kranz also groups with Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, Péguy, and Bloy under the rubric of “modern Christian prophecy” in Three Centuries of Christian Literature. See also Barry Ulanov, “Newman and Dostoevsky: The Politics of Salvation,” in Sources and Resources: The Literary Traditions of (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960). The prophetic character of Dostoevsky’s writing is discussed in P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).

228 been made, articulating both the intrinsic difficulty and fragility of faith as well as the unanswerability of radical doubt. Having kicked the habit of questing for metaphysical and epistemological foundations, they continued by explaining how such skepticism undermines modern humanism as well. These features of Newman’s writings inspired

Thomas Huxley (1825-95) to comment, “If I were called to upon to compile a Primer of

‘Infidelity,’ I think I should save myself trouble by making a selection from [Newman’s] works.”293 Newman was more than willing to show skeptical interlocutors the ultimate destination to which their line of reasoning tends. Apprehending the inadequacy of syllogisms, dialectics, and demonstration for ultimate ethical and religious decisions opens the way to understanding the aphorism of Ambrose which Newman placed at the opening of A Grammar of Assent: “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.” Like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Newman attempted to resist the disproportionate emphasis of his age on the power of intellectual abstraction by turning his audience’s attention back to the concrete struggles of existence. Through incisive portraits of the everyday moments of profound decision which determine the course of one’s life, Newman patiently unearthed the religious dimension at the intersection of intellectual, moral, emotional, and social experience. Rather than attempting to prove the universal validity of his views, Newman simply testified to the way that his deepest experiences have converged toward faith and rendered the resulting vision as evocatively as possible. In this way whatever authority he has derives from the intrinsic attraction of

293 Huxley, “Agnosticism and Christianity” [1889] in Essays on Controverted Questions (London: MacMillan, 1892), p. 471.

229 the vision itself. For Newman, this is the mode of persuasion appropriate to the growth of

God’s kingdom.

The vision which Newman renders for the reader and which also engenders his prophetic relationship to secular modernity is best characterized as an apocalyptic one. It is telling that what Matthew Arnold (1822-88) famously recalls of Newman’s preaching centers on apocalyptic topics: “the white throne of God” which stands at the end of “the fever of life” and the prospective irrelevance of “all those aids and appliances of luxury” when one faces Him “whose eyes are a flame of fire.”294 Newman engaged directly in apocalyptic discourse only in the “sacred place” of “the sanctuary,” outside of which he observes his famous discipline of reserve to varying degrees (SV, 303-04).295 However, as has been shown, an apocalyptic narrative of historical conflict between the true Church of

Christ and the false church of Antichrist provides a background figuration for Newman’s work even when he wrote exoterically. While for many the biblical narrative had been eclipsed,296 Newman acts out of the conviction that “we are still under what may be called a miraculous system…our present state is a portion of a providential course” (DA,

75). All of historical experience therefore has visible and invisible aspects: “This is the law of Providence here below; it works beneath a veil, and what is visible in its course does but shadow out at most, and sometimes obscures and disguises what is invisible”

(ECH II, 190).

Newman explicitly connects this view of reality to canonical apocalyptic texts:

294 Arnold, Discourses in America (London: Macmillan, 1885), pp. 139-42. The apocalyptic images are from The Apocalypse of John 4:2 and 1:14 respectively.

295 See Selby, The Principle of Reserve in the Writings on John Henry Cardinal Newman.

296 See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

230 This is one substantial use of the Book of Revelation, and other prophetical parts of Scripture, quite distinct from knowing their real interpretation, viz., to take the veil from our eyes, to life up the covering which lies over the face of the world, and make us see day by day, as we go in and go out, as we get up and lie down, as we labour, and walk, and rest, and recreate ourselves, the Throne of God set up in the midst of us, His majesty and His judgments, His Son’s continual intercession for the elect, their trials, and their victory (DA, 76).

Indeed, Newman extended the apocalyptic sense of revelation as an “unveiling” of the supernatural and eschatological dimension of reality to Scripture as a whole: “God has most mercifully removed the veil off a portion of this world’s history, in order that we may see how He works. Scripture is the key by which we are given to interpret the world”

(PPS 6:17, 252). Studying Scripture may thus teach one how to discern the apocalyptic dimension of historical experience, enabling the spiritually mature to “pierce through the veil of this world and see the next” (PPS 7:15, 211). As a Roman Catholic Newman voiced his concern that prophecy was neglected by his coreligionists in favor of fables,

“It seems to me a great pity that Catholics leave Scripture prophecy…for rumors and stories about prophecies without foundation” (SN, 228).

Newman never ceased to believe that it was his duty to help his brethren learn the discipline of apocalyptic narration by looking

at what is happening, as the sacred writers would now view it and describe it, were they on earth now to do so, in the broad view and the outcome of the whole matter, and to attempt this by means of the light thrown upon present occurrences by what they actually have recorded or taught in the Old Testament or in the New. We must remove, I say, the veil off the face of events, as Scripture enables us to do, and try to speak of them as Scripture interprets them for us (SV, 303-04).

On Newman’s reading, Scripture unveils a battle between God and Satan, which is being fought out between ‘the church’ and ‘the world’ and between Christ and

Antichrist. This conflict stands at the center of Newman’s apocalyptic narrative, and he always regarded it as the heart of ‘Apostolic Catholicism.’ Newman discoursed poetically

231 about this battle throughout his Anglican sermons,297 but in a letter of 1875 he prosaically articulated its essential character in the course of distilling the distinctiveness of the

Catholic ethos. There Newman explained that “the living principle” of Catholicism is an

“ethical system,” the basis of which is a “distinct and universal antagonism between the

Church and the world.” Arising “in the time of the early Roman Empire,” this system was

“proclaimed to be all-important, all-necessary for the present and future welfare of the human race, and of every individual member of it.” According to this system, reprobate society is called “the world” and numbered among God’s enemies with the flesh and the devil. For Newman ‘the Church’ can be identified in history as that community engaged in an unbroken quarrel with ‘the world’ for 1800s years going back to the Apostles and

Evangelists. He sees this antagonism among early Christians for whom martyrdom was

Christianity’s “badge and boast,” in the fourth-century Christians whose war-cry was

“Athanaius contra mundum,” in the Papal theocracy and the dictatus Hildebrandi of the

Middle Ages, and in recent centuries he sees it embodied most of all in the history of the

Jesuits. This last identification is especially interesting because, as Marjorie Reeves has shown, it is among the Jesuits that the apocalyptic traditions deriving from Joachim of

Fiore hold greatest sway in post-Reformation Roman Catholicism, and the last great

Jesuit advocate of Catholic Messianism—Manual de Lacunza y Diaz (1731-1801)—died the year that Newman was born.298 When Newman scanned the horizon for the inheritor of this mantle in nineteenth-century Europe, he found it most evident in the religious community that the civilized philosophes and statesmen of modern Europe decried as

297 See for example PPS VII:3, pp. 13-26 (1829), and SD VIII, pp. 95-111 (1837).

298 See Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future, pp. 116-35.

232 “the Church militant.” This form of warfare is carried out with the world out of love for the world, at once opposing and soliciting it. Newman traced the origins of this principle of balancing opposition and assimilation to “three primitive documents, each quite distinct in character from the other two, differing in accidents and externals, but all intimately agreeing in substantial teaching…[about]… the genius and spirit of Christian ethics: (1) the Synoptical Gospels, (2) St. Paul’s Epistles, (3) St. John’s Gospel, Epistles, and Apocalypse” (LD XXVII, 385-89). On Newman’s reading, these texts share an apocalyptic narrative of the Christian ethos as opposing ‘the world’ of this present evil age by persuading its members through faith to be made new creatures of the coming age of righteousness by Christ and the Spirit. Above all else, in different contexts and under various affiliations, Newman sought to embody and perpetuate this legacy.

233 CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION: APOCALYPTIC RETURN TO CATHOLICISM IN MODERNITY

With little significant precedent, this dissertation has argued not only that apocalyptic thought is present in John Henry Newman but that it plays an important role throughout his intellectual career. At the minimum therefore I have produced the first full-length study of apocalyptic thought in Newman and thereby filled lacunae in the fields of

Newman scholarship and apocalyptic studies. However the dissertation has made three broader contributions which I introduced in the first chapter and developed and supported over the course of the four subsequent chapters. First, I have argued that approaching

Newman through his apocalyptic thought offers a unique key to his infamously elusive intellectual coherence. The quest for such a key has been frustrated by the highly eclectic character of his life and work, the varied course of his religious and literary career, as well as the storied development of his mature mind. I have contended that interpretations of Newman as a certain kind of rhetorical thinker have been most persuasive, and my contribution has been to show how apocalyptic thought provides a master narrative that governs Newman’s rhetorical style of thought by exercising primacy in the framing, regulating, orienting, and integrating of his thinking. The content of this master narrative, to be as concise as possible, is a figuration of the time between the Ascension and Second

Coming of Christ as an escalating conflict between “the true church of Christ” and “the

234 false church of Antichrist.” My contention has been that Newman’s evolving apocalyptic vision of this conflict provides a master narrative that (1) identifies the ends and means of his controversial writing, (2) defines his role as an agent of this “true church of Christ,”

(3) guides his discernment of “antichristian” threats to the Church, and (4) shows him a way to “battle” them. Making this argument has required me to demonstrate not only that this narrative performs a governing function throughout Newman’s thought but also that it is rightly regarded as belonging to the Christian apocalyptic tradition.

Secondly I have argued that Newman’s master narrative and thus his theological identity derive from the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition. I have shown that he fervently inherited and renewed its classic narrative as a young cleric, that he revised and extended it to include his experience of Western modernity during his Anglican period, and that his transformative appropriation of it ultimately yielded a distinctively modern

Catholic apocalyptic perspective. My argument for the preeminence of this apocalyptic tradition in the determination of Newman’s theological identity diminishes neither the presence nor the importance of his other influences. Newman is an intellectual hybrid who integrated various traditions. Nonetheless I have argued that apocalyptic thought governs his assimilation and integration of other influences and thus retains primacy.

Undoubtedly one of greatest challenges that the argument of this dissertation has faced is the need to define the term apocalyptic. There is a great deal of methodological and terminological anarchy in the field of identifying and studying modern apocalyptic thought. I have appropriated a great harvest from apocalyptic studies undertaken over recent decades, and the definition that I have employed derives from scholarship on the canonical apocalyptic texts of Judaism and Christianity. Briefly, in the Christian tradition

235 apocalyptic thought appropriates the revealed narrative conveyed by its canonical apocalyptic texts to figure the supernatural horizon and eschatological trajectory of historical experience and thereby interpret its ultimate significance. My argumentative task was facilitated by the determination that Newman can be connected genealogically to a band of British Protestant thinkers stretching from the mid-sixteenth to the early- nineteenth-century who are widely acknowledged to constitute a distinctive apocalyptic tradition. I have argued that this tradition is the definitive source of Newman’s figuration of the time between the Ascension and Second Coming of Christ as an escalating conflict between “the true church of Christ” and “the false church of Antichrist.” The key to my identification of Newman as an apocalyptic Christian thinker has been tracing his initial appropriation and subsequent reconstruction of this revelatory narrative of these “two churches” and highlighting its perpetual function as his master narrative.

My third contribution has been made simultaneously to the Christian criticism of modernity and to the scholarly effort to characterize Newman’s historical significance.

This dissertation has buttressed and advanced the tradition of tying his import primarily to his interpretation and critique of the ‘liberalism’ that he identifies in modern Western reduction of religion to private sentiment and the attendant assertion of ‘secular reason’ as sovereign over all inherited authorities and traditions. I have argued that his effort to revise and extend his received apocalyptic narrative to include his age is what yields this critique and that it consistently provides its background figuration. I have also advanced this ‘anti-liberalism’ approach to Newman by arguing that his view transcends the post-

Enlightenment polarization between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” because it includes them both in a more encompassing critique of modern secularity. Cumulatively

236 these three broad arguments have converged in a new interpretation of Newman as the

Anglo-Christian thinker (a) who converted apocalyptic narration from its Protestant misuse to reconstruct a Catholic apocalyptic figuration of history and (b) who thereby produced a trailblazing “Catholic apocalyptic critique of modernity.”

To these three broad arguments, I have also added a fourth regarding precedent. I have contended that my interpretation is obliquely communicated by Newman himself in his autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and in order to demonstrate this I began each of the previous four chapters with an opening section on the Apologia in which I have explained how Newman draws attention to a given aspect of his identity as an apocalyptic thinker and/or to an episode in the development of his apocalyptic thought. I have argued that the Apologia obliquely recapitulates Newman’s conversion of apocalyptic thought in an effort to prompt that same conversion among his readers. For Newman, being under the influence of the Protestant deformation of apocalyptic thought is not just his own private trauma but is rather a public trauma that the whole modern West is suffering, especially now that its effects are more implicit than explicit. Indeed, I have shown that an important element of Newman’s genealogy of modernity is his conviction that the classic Protestant identification of the Pope as Antichrist has had a “secularizing” effect in the modern West and its colonies by habituating a pious skepticism toward religious authorities, practices, and visible forms.

Being familiar with the British Protestant apocalyptic tradition is a necessary condition for all of my arguments, and performing that familiarity was the burden of

Chapter Two. I demonstrated that in the Apologia and in other Catholic texts Newman draws attention to the influence, import, and ideological function of this theological

237 tradition for him and for England generally. I also performed a detailed analysis of this tradition’s classical figuration of the time between the Ascension and Second Coming of

Christ as an escalating conflict between the true church of Christ and the false church of

Antichrist. I focused on the originary text in this tradition, showing that The Image of

Both Churches, published in the 1540s by John Bale, selectively blends the theological legacies of Augustine of Hippo, Joachim of Fiore, and John Wycliffe in the service of the

English Reformation. I discussed the historical effects of this classic narrative over the following three centuries. I explained how it became constitutive of the British Protestant master narrative: Protestants in England are figured as suffering witnesses to Christian liberty, the true successors of the Apostles and Church Fathers, in a world darkened by the superstition and tyranny of the Papal Antichrist, who succeeds the false teachers and persecuting emperors of ages past. I demonstrated concrete historical connection and continuity from Bale to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Anglicans who were undoubtedly Newman’s mentors in apocalyptic thought: Thomas Newton, Joseph

Milner, and Thomas Scott. This chapter on classic British Protestant apocalyptic thought served three very important functions: (1) it determined the sources of Newman’s early apocalyptic thought, (2) it explained the master narrative function of this tradition in early modern Britain extending to the early Newman, and (3) it offered evidence that Newman understood his intellectual vocation to be in significant part both an overcoming and a redemption of this deformation of Christian apocalyptic thought.

The third chapter provided a comprehensive account of Newman’s early renewal of Protestant apocalyptic thought on the basis of a thorough review of all of the evidence available in his pre-Tractarian letters, journals, and sermons. First I discussed signs in the

238 Apologia indicating that Newman did engage in such a renewal and that it was fraught with implications: negatively it prepared him to profoundly realize the “secularizing” effects of this classic narrative and positively it enabled him to apprehend and correct a contradiction in this narrative so that it might genuinely illuminate historical experience once again. Secondly I excavated the textual evidence of Newman’s initial reception of the Protestant apocalyptic narrative as well as the genesis of his distinctive approach to contemplating revealed truth in Scripture. Thirdly I analyzed Newman’s earliest complete rendition of this classic narrative in two important sermons from the 1824-25 Christmas season. I determined how Newman largely repeats and partly exceeds inherited versions.

Fourthly I discussed Newman’s early criticisms of popular modern Evangelical Protestant apocalypticism with which his classical Protestant apocalyptic thought is often conflated, and I explained how this latter tradition governs his pre-Tractarian approach to renewing revealed religion in modern England. Most importantly, he begins turning to his patristic predecessors in “the true church of Christ” for guidance regarding his work of reigniting and purifying Christian thought and practice.

Chapter Four explained how Newman’s first experiences of and reflections on the phenomenon that he calls ‘liberalism’ during the late 1820s and early 1830s triggers the major reconstruction of his apocalyptic narrative as he attempts to extend it to encompass what he called this “novel era.” Newman explains in the Apologia that his revisioning process was animated primarily by his dawning realization that what he called the new

“false liberty of thought” that defines his novel age is a far greater danger to revealed religion than the Roman Papacy. I demonstrated that Newman’s perception of this new danger was a result of his rehabilitation of the early Christian apocalyptic practice of

239 watching for the Second Coming, a practice which had become polarized between enthusiasts and skeptics as it has been to varying degrees throughout the history of

Christianity. I showed that in his letters, journals, and sermons of the late 1820s and

1830s, Newman becomes focused upon two concepts which were fundamental to the secularity of the modern liberal order: freedom as the absence of restraint or dependence upon authority and neighbor and reason as the instrumental calculation of expedience and utility. From this perspective religion is regarded either as repressive constraint or as a matter of indifference, and in either case it is to be superseded as principle of social order in favor of this secularized reason. Newman called the progress of this movement a

“usurping empire of mere reason,” and he figured it as the forerunner of Antichrist in modernity. In the terms of his apocalyptic vision, Newman’s Tractarian career is defined by his attempt to articulate and defend Anglicanism as a Via Media that protects revealed religion from the antichristian threat of ‘liberalism’ on the modern front without thereby falling prey to the antichristian danger of ‘popery’ on the medieval flank. Newman never ceases to regard papal absolutism as a temptation to be resisted, but he does slowly cease to regard it as a danger that is equivalent to ‘liberalism.’ I demonstrated that Newman’s mature apocalyptic thought, which partly surfaces during his Anglican period but is characteristic of his Catholic period, is defined by the figuration of Catholicism and

‘liberalism’ as the true modern historical contestants in the escalating conflict between the churches of Christ and Antichrist.

The fifth chapter argued that Newman’s mature critique of ‘liberalism’ is best understood as a distinctive “critique of modernity” and that it is couched in a uniquely modern Catholic apocalyptic vision. First it showed how the Apologia implies and

240 exoterically performs this apocalyptic critique of modernity; it also marshaled evidence that Newman articulates this critique more explicitly in other Catholic texts. The bulk of the chapter demonstrated the distinctiveness of Newman’s perspective in his mature thought by comparing it to important intellectual currents of modernity criticism, such as

Romanticism, anti-rationalism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. Newman focused special attention on the modern idea and practice of liberty as freedom from authority and dependence and also on the supersession of religion as the bond of society by the secular principle of utility. He figured the ascension of this new image of liberty as the distinctive false messianism of modernity and thus its dominant “forerunner of Antichrist,” and he narrated the supersession of the role of religion in western society by secular utility as a foreshadowing of the great eschatological apostasy. Cumulatively Newman saw in these developments the coming of “a darkness different in kind” from that experienced by the apostles, church fathers, and his other great predecessors in “the true church of Christ.”

Newman did not follow the common responses of liberal accommodation or conservative reaction. Instead, he advocated following a path taken by the earlier prophets and saints: standing against the world for the world by using of the weapons of Christ’s kingdom— sanctity, suffering, and persuasion—to build a counter-modern or postmodern Catholic

Christianity. Newman blazed a trail for Catholic apocalyptic criticism of modernity that has arguably been followed in various respects by subsequent Christian thinkers such as

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, and John Milbank.

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