Scholars of Newman, it seems, cannot help relating the Cardinal’s life to his theories. Specifically, his theory that church teaching develops and his theory that humans possess a skill of inferring truth in matters of faith and reason (what in the Grammar of Assent he called the ‘illative sense’). First, Newman’s life as it is recorded in Apologia pro vita sua is taken to be an inner history of development, as he moved from Evangelical to High Churchman to Roman Catholic. Second, ‘the Apologia dramatizes the self as a case history; the Grammar [dramatizes] the internal processes that lead to personal conviction’ (p. 130). For scholars who give into this temptation to see continuity within and between Newman’s life and his thought, rather than inconsistency or even shiftiness, the Apologia (1864) thus forms a trio with Newman’s essays on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and the Grammar of Assent (1870).
Among those who regard Development of Christian Doctrine as a first draft of the Apologia are Frank Cross (John Henry Newman, P. Allan, 1933), Meriol Trevor (Light in Winter, Doubleday, 1963) and Ian Ker (Newman on Vatican II, Oxford University Press, 2014). Among those who connect all three works are William Kelly (in James Bastable’s edited volume Newman and Gladstone, Veritas, 1978) and now Lawrence Poston (esp. pp. 226, 234).
In spite of the fact that Poston makes yet another contribution to this scholarly tendency, his is a thought-provoking book. His contribution (not unique but here extended) is to focus on Newman’s lifelong fascination with the personal – which in this book variously means the individual person, the influence of one personality on another, the rhetorical and philosophical reasons for giving a personal account, the collective personality of the Church, and (analogical with all of the above) the three Persons in one God, particularly the incarnate Second Person. The paradoxes of personality – oppositions and affinities, errors and insights, humanity and divinity – are also brought out in this chronological rather than thematic account of Newman.
As Poston weaves these various senses of personal together, like strands forming a cable, his evaluation of Newman becomes more and more probable. For instance, here is what Poston writes about the conversion to Roman Catholicism: ‘What Newman had sought in the collective personality and practice of the Church of England did not furnish what his own personality required. The sometimes warring and almost always inconclusive metaphors with which he had sought to describe it … were inadequate to give it life’ (p. 113). And here is Poston’s defence of the famous statement in the Apologia so often seen as an example of Newman’s solipsism and lack of social concern:
To proclaim where knowledge begins, ‘to rest in the thought of … myself and my Creator’, is not to assert that all knowledge terminates there, nor does it confine Newman to a sort of paradoxically theocentric solipsism … Nonetheless it must be conceded that Newman, if not an egotist in the pervasively negative sense of the term, nonetheless manifested a form of egocentrism … [and] a recurring despondency about his own prospects. (pp. 243-44)
Poston does not over-psychologize the evidence that he draws from Newman’s letters and other autobiographical writings. Rather he convincingly portrays a combative writer who often felt very threatened, a person with many close friendships but whose ‘curious astigmatism’ would not allow ‘for the possibility that a Dissenter or a theologically experimental Broad Churchman might have as acute a sense of the Divine Personality as he’ (p. 244). The exclusion of this possibility led to Newman’s estrangement from his two brothers. Poston excels in showing us the complexity and poignancy of Newman’s life, as well as the profundity of many of his works.
Some of Poston’s theological statements will give theologians pause (e.g. in order to accord with Newman’s orthodoxy, ‘To the extent that Jesus is fully human’, should rather be stated, ‘In regard to Jesus’s full humanity’, [p. 19]). Some of Poston’s errors will surprise historians (e.g. S.F. Wood was not ‘the Rev.’ [p. 119], and the person who said the role of the laity was ‘to hunt, to shoot, to entertain’ was not Henry Manning but George Talbot [p. 218], who was a Monsignor not a Cardinal [p. 219]). On the other hand, observing from outside of Poston’s own discipline of English, I learned a great deal about the Victorian context of Newman’s thought by means of comparisons between him and Carlyle or Mill.
Overall this emeritus professor of English is to be commended for attempting to bridge the disciplines and help us to understand Newman better. That is justification enough for Poston’s use of the three famous works to inform one another, closing – but not blurring – the distinction between spiritual autobiography, history of doctrine and religious epistemology. Poston’s own book is just such a merger of biography, history and epistemology, to be read by people who view Newman from any of those perspectives or who simply are interested in him.
