In his article on the critical reception of the late Frank Turner's John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion, Simon Skinner contends that Turner's study is ‘empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous’, and he cites with approval Andrew Wilson's judgement that it ‘revolutionizes Newman studies’.Footnote ¹ But this historical masterpiece, he thinks, has been unjustly howled down by a benighted posse of Roman Catholic reviewers, ‘almost none of [whom] are … tenured in a university history department’. Turner's Catholic reviewers, ‘which is to say nearly all reviewers’, are therefore ‘amateurs’, who ‘literally could not comprehend’ what Turner was up to.Footnote ² But history is not an arcane discipline, and Skinner's complaint about the ‘lack of disciplinary equipment’ of these hostile reviewers seems hardly to the point in relation to a book offered by a major publisher to a general readership. The ordinary rules of historical evidence are intelligible to anybody, and a de haut en bas restriction of the right to an opinion on Turner's book to the gild of professional historians runs the risk of seeming both arbitrary and condescending.

In his assault on the alleged religious bias of Turner's reviewers, Skinner is careful to insist that he himself has no confessional axe to grind. But his excitable, and it must be said often discourteous, rhetoric, accusing Turner's opponents variously of bias, naïveté, incompetence, incomprehension and ‘downright dishonest(y)’, sits uneasily with this insistence. He himself is not above mobilising some drearily familiar sectarian tropes, as when he accuses Turner's critics collectively of being proponents of inquisitorial mind control: ‘thus was [Turner's] book early placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for the Catholic faithful’.Footnote ³ These Catholic reviewers are ‘shrill detractors … a vocal interest group’, ‘hagiographers’, engaged in ‘a contemporary echo of the odium theologicum which is the subject of the book’.Footnote ⁴ Skinner's polemic even at times carries him dangerously close to conspiracy theory. He is outraged that the mainly clerical contributors to the 2009 Cambridge Companion to Newman quote from Martin Svaglic's standard 1967 Oxford edition of Newman's Apologia, rather than Frank Turner's Yale edition of 2008 , which, Skinner considers, has ‘supplanted’ Svaglic. This ‘prohibition’, he thinks, ‘was not accidental’, and he sees in it a sectarian attempt to sideline Turner's scholarship.Footnote ⁵ This fear, however, seems to be ill-founded. Svaglic's is the edition routinely cited in most Newman studies, and, more to the point, Turner's edition of the Apologia had not yet been published when the Cambridge Companion went to press, so the contributors could not have cited it, even had they wished to do so. But in any case, Turner's edition of the Apologia is, as it happens, unsatisfactory, for reasons entirely unrelated to confessional allegiance or anyone's attitude to Newman. Turner included in his edition six sermons which he felt supported his reading of Newman's character and motivation. Perhaps to make room for these, he made the very regrettable editorial decision to base his edition on the text of the second edition of the Apologia, omitting both Kingsley's pamphlet What then does Dr Newman mean? and Newman's merciless reply, both of which Svaglic (and indeed most other editions) includes. Any serious student of the Apologia, wishing to read it in its first form, and its proper context, will therefore have to look beyond Turner's edition.Footnote ⁶

As Skinner points out, reviewers in the broad-sheet press welcomed Turner's book as a bracing exercise in iconoclasm. One of them greeted gleefully the sight and sound of an historical ‘sledge-hammer’ being wielded with ‘panache’.Footnote ⁷ Reviews by nineteenth-century religious specialists were also broadly favourable, but rather more measured. Most paid tribute to the learning revealed in the dense footnotes underpinning Turner's book, and most recognised that in highlighting Newman's hostility to Evangelicalism, Turner had indeed put his finger on an important and neglected aspect of Tractarian history. But even well-disposed reviewers were unhappy with the recurrent psycho-sexual speculation which was an integral feature of Turner's unrelentingly hostile handling of Newman's motivation, what Jeffrey Cox considered Turner's ‘reckless’ and ‘often unpersuasive inquiry into [Newman's] emotional life’, which was prone, as the late Reg Ward wrote in an otherwise approving review, to ‘rocket into the stratosphere’.Footnote ⁸

These reservations, however, were nothing to the reaction of professional Newman scholars, many of whom were indeed Catholics, and interested in Newman mainly as a theologian and spiritual leader. Turner's manifest distaste for many aspects of Tractarianism, his consistently disparaging portrait of the young Newman as a vindictive and spiteful narcissist, and his cod-psychological speculations about the submerged motivation of Newman's actions in his allegedly disfunctional family relationships and domineering friendships with younger men, all evoked pained or scathing responses from these reviewers, criticism that Skinner attributes variously to hysteria, hagiographic gullibility, historical incompetence or simple dishonesty.Footnote ⁹

Skinner seeks in particular to minimise, and portrays as disproportionate and even ‘hysterical’, objections to Turner's psycho-sexual speculations. Such speculations comprise, he assures us, ‘precisely 1.5 per cent of the book's content’, and they are always ‘evidentially scrupulous and tonally cautious’.Footnote ¹⁰ A merely quantitative assessment, however, does not do justice to the very prominent role of such speculations in Turner's overall project. It is central to Turner's argument that the overt explanations that Newman offered for his actions were usually bogus, and that we need to look to the underlying psychological drives of a devious and dysfunctional personality for real understanding. He constantly explains Newman's behaviour, therefore, in terms which are anything but cautious, and which indeed are often based on nothing more than arbitrary speculation, for example when he suggests that the nomination of Samuel Wilberforce as bishop of Oxford helped to precipitate Newman's conversion in October 1845, an event which did not take place till a week after Newman had become a Catholic, and which Newman never once alludes to. Turner nevertheless solemnly assures us that ‘It is possible that Newman at Littlemore may have known’ (his emphasis) and which, had he known of it, ‘would have proved deeply disturbing’.Footnote ¹¹ At other times, Turner relies on equally arbitrary post-modernist wordplay as a substitute for explanation, as in the frankly silly passage where he suggests that Newman's very real (and life-long) shame over his father's bankruptcy underlay the writing of Tract 90: ‘in other words, according to the thrust of Tract 90, no Catholic clergyman could, like Newman's father, stand accused of theological bankruptcy or failure to meet the terms of his ecclesiastical contract’.Footnote ¹²

Turner's book sought to place a question mark against the reliability of the Apologia as a guide to Newman's inner history in the years before his change of Churches, and in 2008 he further distilled and elaborated his views in the introduction and notes to a new edition of the Apologia.Footnote ¹³ For Skinner, resistance to Turner's theorising can only spring from a lack of the relevant ‘disciplinary equipment’, or a hagiographic belief in Newman's impeccability. But one may perfectly well accept that Newman was by no means enthusiastically heterosexual, and recognise that he could indeed be devious, disingenuous, thin-skinned and petulant,Footnote ¹⁴ while still thinking Turner's book a very poor guide to Newman's inner life and motivation. It seems worth putting to one side allegations of confessional bias, and instead examining whether there might be serious historical grounds for contesting the claim that Turner's Newman is ‘empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous’.

Turner argues that in the Apologia Newman deliberately and systematically ‘omitted and concealed’ the truth about his early religious opinions, in order to ‘deflect’ readers from the truth about his early life, and about the Tractarian movement in general.Footnote ¹⁵ Newman claimed in the Apologia that his major battle in the 1830s and early ’40 s had been with what he called ‘liberalism’, by which, roughly speaking, he meant rationalism in religion, and the privileging of private judgement over the dogmatic principle and the authority of Catholic tradition. But this emphasis, Turner maintained, reflected the pressing needs of the Catholic Newman of the 1860s, not the concerns of the Anglican Newman thirty years earlier. The battle with ‘a diffuse liberalism onto which his readers … might project their own particular religious antipathies’Footnote ¹⁶ was projected retrospectively on to his Tractarian self by the Catholic Newman, to deflect suspicions at Rome and among English ultramontanes like Manning that Newman was in fact a disloyal Catholic, himself guilty of excessive liberalism. Newman's real obsession in the 1830s and 1840s, according to Turner, had been the battle against Protestant Evangelicalism, and the Tractarian movement as a whole, he contended, was far more accurately seen as anti-Evangelical than as opposed to the hazy and elusive phantom of ‘liberalism’. For Turner, therefore, in Skinner's summary, the Newman of the early 1830s and '40 s was not the consistently evolving Catholic mind portrayed in the Apologia, but a man ‘vulnerable, confused, contradictory, disingenuous, morbidly introspective and manipulative, an aggressive religious activist by whose often dazzling rhetoric posterity should not have been fooled’.Footnote ¹⁷

Turner was writing almost a decade before Newman's beatification, but he was conscious of assailing a cultural and religious icon, and he was careful to insist, not altogether convincingly, that his work did not reflect on the later Newman of the Apologia and the Dream of Gerontius, nor on the saintly cardinal who had become the revered focus of modern Catholic devotion.Footnote ¹⁸ The ‘protagonist’ of his book was the fierce young Anglican Newman of the 1830s and 1840s. And this J. H. Newman turns out, on Turner's account, to be a contemptible creature, a dishonest, self-serving bigot, driven by spite, animosity and ‘explosive rage’. His attacks on former friends and colleagues like Edward Hawkins and Richard Whately, and on the allegedly heretical Dr Renn Dickson Hampden, according to Turner, had less to do with their alleged religious liberalism than with his enraged envy at their financial prosperity: ‘without exception, those whom he associated with latitudinariansim and liberalism … were those whose career advancement had blocked or gone beyond his’.Footnote ¹⁹ His ‘enormous anger and spite’ towards liberals in the Oriel Common Room haunted even his dreams, and made him secretly long that his own college ‘might experience decline into awkward fellows, ugly undergraduates, families seeking scholarships in other Colleges, and a married provost transformed into a servant’. These venomous longings ‘to no small extent’ paralleled Newman's similarly hostile feelings ‘towards his [own] family’.Footnote ²⁰

The Tractarian Newman was to be deplored on many other accounts, too. His religion was ‘utterly joyless’, his excessive fasting and that of his disciples proceeded, not from overzealous asceticism, but was an eating disorder, a form of male anorexia, simultaneously designed to quell insistent homosexual longings and springing from a ‘body-hating misogyny’.Footnote ²¹ Turner takes no notice of Newman's lifelong and self-consciously English distaste for excessive asceticism, and dismisses the possibility that ascetical practices like fasting, which are as old and as widespread as Christianity itself, might be embraced by indiscreetly zealous young Tractarians from a sense of duty or religious conviction, rather than as a result of a morbidly compulsive psycho-pathology. Implausibly, and on no evidence whatever, Turner suggests that the later bitter personal and ideological hostility towards Newman of Ultramontane converts like W. G. Ward and F. W. Faber ‘may well have been’ a delayed reaction ‘to what they had come to regard as his misguided views’ on sexuality.Footnote ²² Even Newman's sublimely austere Parochial and plain sermons, with their daunting emphasis on the moral and spiritual demands of Christian discipleship, sprang in Turner's view from a deep animosity towards his wayward brothers Charles and Frank: ‘Newman's voice from St Mary's pulpit resembled that of an eldest child insisting upon order among disobedient younger siblings in hope of restoring to himself the primary and once exclusive love of parents disrupted by the advent of those new children.’ Thus the earnest moralism of the sermons ‘expressed a profound personal wish that within his family his own obedience might receive praise and the wilfulness of his brothers be condemned’.Footnote ²³ But if Turner's Newman hated his brothers, he harboured an incestuous love for his sister Mary. His growing acceptance of the legitimacy of devotion to the Virgin Mary was in fact an emotional surrogate for that forbidden love, so that, as Turner solemnly tells us, ‘it seems possible … that if Newman could convince himself that Marian devotion did not obscure the distinction between creator and creature, then his intense affection for his own sister Mary had not challenged the decencies of family relationships’.Footnote ²⁴

Turner's Newman, then, was multiply sexually dysfunctional, family-hating, and unhealthily obsessed with celibacy. He gathered around him a group of unmarried male disciples. It was the overwhelming need to hold on to this adoring circle of celibate younger men (Turner never quite makes up his mind whether they are to be viewed as substitute siblings or would-be lovers), which provided the real motivation both for Newman's long-postponed conversion to Rome during the long-drawn-out years at Littlemore, and then for his apparently precipitate conversion in October 1845. This aspect of Turner's book predictably aroused special fury, though his emphasis on the repressed homosexuality of Newman's circle should not have surprised anyone familiar with Geoffrey Faber's satire on Newman's ‘coterie of hermaphrodites’ in his 1933 study Oxford apostles.Footnote ²⁵ Turner however weaves these claims about the repressed sexuality of Newman and his circle into his overall interpretation of the Anglican career, and its end. That interpretation will bring us to the heart of Turner's book and to what I will argue is its failure as objective history.

By 1845 Newman's impatient disciples, Turner argues, were one by one leaving the ‘monastery’ at Littlemore to join the Catholic Church. Newman, till then content to remaining hermetically sealed in his Anglo-Catholic bubble there, reluctantly realised that if he himself did not become a Catholic, he would cease ‘to be the centre of their attention and affection’.Footnote ²⁶ The anguished self-analytical letters of those last years as an Anglican were not therefore the trace of genuine religious unsettlement, Newman's ‘deathbed’ in the Church of England, for Newman ‘had taken himself to a brink over which he had no real desire to step’. They were, rather, exercises in attention-seeking, a characteristically devious way for Newman ‘to intrude himself into the lives of a whole series of people … who might otherwise not necessarily be thinking very much about him’.Footnote ²⁷

It is here above all that Turner's credentials as an interpreter of the young Newman seem most dubious. In his determination to establish his central claims, he repeatedly misreads, misunderstands or distorts evidence. To document that claim fully would require a book almost as long as Turner's: I will confine myself here to examining two central planks of Turner's arguments. The first of these is his insistence that Evangelicalism and not liberalism was Newman's real target throughout his Tractarian years, so that his later portrayal of his religious journey as a struggle with liberalism in all its forms was a deceitful smokescreen, designed to conceal and mislead, and by which, in Skinner's word, historians have been ‘fooled’. And, secondly, I will look briefly at Turner's contention that Newman's portrayal of the years from 1843 and 1845 as his ‘death bed’ in the Church of England was another smokescreen. Turner insists that Newman might well have been permanently content to live in a schismatic mini-Church based at Littlemore, consisting of himself and his acolytes, but that he was bounced into a sudden move to Rome by the threatened dissolution of the group. Turner pursues both these claims with such single-mindedness in the face of plain evidence to the contrary, as to call his judgement as an historian seriously into question.

First the question of Evangelicalism versus liberalism. One of the undoubted merits of Turner's book is his recovery and detailed mapping of the centrality of resistance to Evangelicalism as a key to Newman's concerns in the 1830s and '40 s. But, as Skinner concedes,Footnote ²⁸ Turner pursued this insight too far, into a blanket denial of the significance of any other target in Newman's critique of contemporary Protestantism. Newman did indeed detest Evangelicalism. But he repeatedly made it clear that this detestation sprang in large part from his conviction that the characteristic Evangelical emphasis on religious feeling and neglect of ecclesial structures and the credal elements of Christianity, opened the door to a far worse enemy, rationalistic unbelief, which he came to characterise as ‘liberalism’. Newman made this connection repeatedly in the 1830s: as he told the Evangelical layman Lord Lifford in September 1837, he hoped that the outcry against the alleged heresies of the liberal Dr Hampden would open Evangelical eyes to the liberalising tendency of their opinions: ‘that system has become rationalistic in Germany, Socinian in Geneva … it tends to Socinianism among our own evangelical party’.Footnote ²⁹ As Turner himself notes, Newman found vivid confirmation of the slide from Evangelicalism to unbelief in the career of his own brother Frank, whose journey from sectarian Evangelicalism to Unitarian rationalism confirmed Newman's worst fears about the tendency of Evangelical principles, ‘that wretched Protestant principle about Scripture’ which, ‘when taken in by an independent and clear mind, is almost certain to lead to errors I do not like to name’.Footnote ³⁰

Bizarrely, Turner concludes from all this that whenever Newman attacked rationalism he really meant ‘little more than a firm adherence to Protestantism in general and evangelicalism in particular’.Footnote ³¹ But this is to put the matter precisely the wrong way round. For Newman, Evangelicalism, the religion of the ‘Peculiars’, was indeed bad in itself, but its worst aspect was as a staging post on the road to unbelief. That was why he and the other Tractarian leaders could see the theological wars of the 1830s not as a quarrel between High Churchmen and Evangelicals, but ultimately, as John Keble remarked, a struggle between ‘Faith and Rationalism’.Footnote ³²

Turner is so intent on collapsing all Newman's targets into the single bête noire of Evangelicalism, however, that he systematically misreads all texts which suggest the contrary. One of Newman's most eloquent early sermons, ‘On the religion of the day’, is famously a sustained attack on the lukewarm, rationalising, undogmatic, optimistic and ‘enlightened’ religion current in polite society, a generalised piety which Newman believed mistook social decorum for Christian morality. This religion of the world, Newman warned his congregation, looks to ‘natural theology and human enlightenment rather than scripture and conscience to understand God's will’. The sermon culminated in Newman's notorious claim that ‘it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion’. Newman's contrast here was clearly between on the one hand a shallow rationalism which ignored scriptural revelation in favour of ‘human enlightenment’, and on the other, a deeper religion which took sin seriously. That account of ‘the religion of the day’ manifestly did not fit the earnest biblicism of the Evangelical party. Yet Turner's thesis forces him to claim that Newman's target here really is a composite pantomime-horse, namely ‘this rational, optimistic, evangelical religion’.Footnote ³³

In the same way, Turner insists that Newman's first major book, his Arians of the fourth century, had Evangelicalism as its main target, and that in it Newman equated the Arian clergy with the contemporary Evangelical party. Turner therefore interprets Newman's peroration to the book, denouncing the ‘Heretical Power enthralling’ the contemporary Church of England, as an attack on Evangelicalism, an enemy, in Turner's words, ‘internal to the English Church and not … an external political or secular opposition’. In fact Newman quite clearly had Whig attacks on the Church in mind in that passage, not the Evangelicals.Footnote ³⁴ There is indeed a polemic against Evangelicalism in his book on Arianism, most obviously in Newman's discussion of the disciplina arcani practised by the early Church, which he explicitly contrasted with the preaching of modern Evangelicals.Footnote ³⁵ But he made no simple identification of modern Evangelicalism with ancient Arianism, and in fact angled his book to suggest, rather, parallels between Arianism and the contemporary liberal churchmanship of men like Thomas Arnold. Thus he emphasised the indebtedness of the Arians to pagan dialectic, ‘the schools of the Sophists’, declared that the Arian bishop Acacius had ‘succeeded in establishing the principle of liberalism at Constantinople’, repeatedly described the Arians as ‘a Court faction’, in deliberate allusion to the political ascendancy of Whig churchmen in his own time, and specifically compared the evolution of the heresy to the spirit of contemporary ‘Neologism’.Footnote ³⁶ Newman did indeed lampoon Evangelicalism for its vulgarities and superficiality, most hilariously in the portraits of Dr Kitchens, Mr Gabb and Mr Mackanoise in his novel Loss and gain.Footnote ³⁷ But for him Evangelicalism was dangerous above all because its reliance on feeling and lack of interest in dogma made it an unwitting collaborator in the headlong progress towards infidelity, of which the optimistic ‘religion of the day’ was another but quite different symptom. This was not hindsight or later fabrication. In the Apologia he would quote his own dismissive judgement on Evangelicalism in an essay of 1839: ‘We have no dread of it at all; we only fear what it may lead to … it does but occupy the ground between contending powers, Catholic truth and Rationalism’, and he had gone on to insist that the real religious battle of the age would be fought out between those two ‘real and living principles’.Footnote ³⁸ As he was to declare in the wake of the Gorham judgement in 1850, Evangelicals might preen themselves in the belief that the spirit of the age was with them, but their success was only because they offered no resistance to the Zeitgeist: ‘they glide forward rapidly and proudly down the stream’. Unbeknownst to them, that stream was flowing into a vast sea of unbelief, and it would one day sweep aside Evangelical doctrines, as it had swept aside the catholic doctrine of baptismal regeneration in the Gorham judgement. Evangelicals would ultimately be the casualties of the Zeitgeist, unless indeed they proved to be its active and willing collaborators in betraying the Gospel. ‘Poor victims! Do you dream that the spirit of the age is working for you, or are you indeed secretly prepared to go further than you avow?’Footnote ³⁹

That was Newman in 1850, still relatively fresh from the battles of his last years as an Anglican. By the time that he came to write the Apologia, fourteen years on, the role of Evangelicalism within Anglicanism was of course no longer for him a matter of existential urgency. He had also tempered his initial convert's zeal for direct confrontation with what in 1850 he had called ‘that imbecile inconsistent thing called Protestantism’ an entity which for him had deeper and wider roots than Evangelicalism alone. But in 1864 he saw the same fundamental struggle going on between dogmatic religion and rank unbelief as in the 1830s, but now even more starkly defined. ‘In these latter days’, he wrote, ‘outside the Catholic Church things are tending … to atheism in one shape or another’.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is simply not true that Newman attempted in the Apologia to conceal his youthful polemic against Evangelicalism: on the contrary, he repeatedly alluded to it, emphasising his ‘thorough contempt’ in the 1830s for Evangelical tenets, while ruefully acknowledging at the same time the ferocity and offensiveness of his controversial methods in combating them, at a time when he believed that the Church of England was being ‘tyrannised over by a mere party’.Footnote ⁴¹ But the Apologia was never intended to be an exhaustive autobiography, and there was no reason why he should have dwelt on the detail of those polemics against Evangelicals. Every exercise in autobiography bears the marks of the moment at which and the purposes for which it was composed, but the notion that in the Apologia Newman set out to ‘fool’ the world is simply crass. He had spent the years before the writing of the Apologia collating papers and reflecting on the shape of his Tractarian career, and the disappointments and failures of its Catholic aftermath. It was perfectly natural that in describing it, Newman should highlight the struggle with anti-dogmatic liberalism, in which he was still and would remain deeply engaged, rather than his battles with liberalism's unwitting collaborator, Evangelicalism, as the key to his own life's deeper continuities, and to the fundamental religious confrontation of his times.

In considering Newman's last years as an Anglican Turner once again offers a single master-key to Newman's behaviour. Offended and alienated by Anglican and predominantly Evangelical opposition to his Tract 90 on the Thirty-Nine Articles, Turner's Newman retreated into a semi-schismatic retirement at Littlemore, surrounded himself with celibate young disciples, and hungrily devoted his energies to keeping those disciples in emotional and intellectual thrall. The picture in the Apologia of these years as a long, slow, and largely eventless ‘death-bed’ as an Anglican, culminating in the inevitable move into the Roman Catholic Church, is therefore for Turner a bogus construct. Till October 1845, he argues, Newman would have been more than content to stay indefinitely in his ecclesiastical limbo at Littlemore, neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, provided he had been able to keep his adoring coterie around him. Turner produces as confirmation of this account of Newman's real options a staggeringly uncomprehending letter to him from Frank Newman of August 1845. Frank told his brother that if he really believed in the truth of the Roman Catholic Church he would have converted long since. His best bet was therefore to found his own ‘independent Episcopal system’, a ‘new church’, in a word, a sect.Footnote ⁴² Frank's doubtless kindly meant letter starkly revealed the utter lack of any intellectual or religious sympathy between the two brothers and, rereading it in old age, Newman drily annotated it: ‘That I should be contemplating questions of Truth and Falsehood never entered his imagination.’ But Turner was convinced that Frank had indeed called the elder Newman's bluff, and he refused to credit Newman's reply, in which he told Frank unequivocally that it was ‘literally true’ that he intended to join the Roman Catholic Church, that ‘I have always resisted, and do heartily resist, the notion of choosing a religion according to my fancy’, and that ‘I feel the utmost disgust at the thought of forming a new sect’. These protestations, Turner assures us, ‘lacked conviction’. That he could think so speaks volumes about his own tin ear when confronted with his subject's most deeply-felt thought processes and motivations. In the face of such declarations, on the very eve of Newman's change of Churches, Turner still insists that Newman had no real intention of converting to Rome, till the move to the Catholic Church by one disciple after another persuaded him that the only way to hang on to his male harem was to become a Catholic himself. The Essay on development, therefore, in which he announced his conversion, was for Turner not written, as Newman pretended, to remove the intellectual obstacles to his becoming a Catholic, namely the apparent mismatch between the doctrines and practice of the modern Roman Catholic Church and the Church of antiquity. On the contrary, its real object was to justify the outré devotional practices and lifestyle of the semi-sectarian community at Littlemore. ‘That is to say’, Turner claimed, ‘he wrote a very long, intricate book to defend the practices of a very small and never cohesive monastic community.’Footnote ⁴³

So perverse a misreading of one of Newman's seminal works beggars belief. It cannot survive a reading of the text itself, which was explicitly designed, as Newman explained, to remove the intellectual obstacles to acceptance of the modern Roman Catholic Church as the Church of the Fathers by offering ‘a solution of such a number of the reputed corruptions of Rome, as might form a fair ground for trusting her, where the investigation has not been pursued’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Turner's determinedly hostile reading of Newman's state of mind between 1843 and 1845, however, locks him into a hermeneutic of suspicion which obliges him systematically to disregard or distort any evidence which contradicts his reading. This is especially clear in his handling of Newman's harrowing correspondence in those years. In a stream of letters from the summer of 1843 Newman repeatedly made clear to his family and close friends that he was now morally convinced of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, and that he considered his own conversion inevitable. As he told Henry Manning in October 1843, ‘I think the Church of Rome the Catholic Church, and ours not a part of the Catholic Church, because not in communion with Rome’, while at the same time making it clear that he intended to pursue a ‘slow course of change’, and would refrain from ‘hasty acts or resolves with a doubtful conscience’.Footnote ⁴⁵ He held back as yet from a change of Churches, he explained, because he was fearful that his state of mind was self-deluding, the exercise of mere private judgement rather than a response to divine guidance. Newman had confessed these same agonisings much more frankly and fully to John Keble in a linked pair of letters in May the same year, confessing the certainty ‘which has at last been forced upon my full consciousness’ namely that ‘England is in schism’ and that ‘the Roman additions to the Creed’ were legitimate developments ‘arising out of a keen and vivid realising of the Divine Depositum of Faith’. Fearful that this revelation would shock Keble, Newman prefaced his confession with an introductory letter, acknowledging the difficulty of knowing the sincerity of one's own heart in such matters. Characteristically, Turner reports Newman's scrupulous frettings about his sincerity in detail, while failing to grasp that the letter in which he made them was specifically written to soften and excuse the impact of the letter enclosed with it, and which contained what he feared would be for Keble the shocking confession of Newman's loss of faith in Anglicanism. Misunderstanding the relationship between the two letters, Turner mistakenly supposed that in between them, Newman had somehow changed his mind.Footnote ⁴⁶

Over the next two years Newman repeatedly reiterated the inevitability of his ultimate conversion to Roman Catholicism. In December 1844 he told his sister Harriet that she should discount malicious gossip ‘that I must be disappointed, or set on a theory, or carried on by a party, or coaxed into it by admirers’: he had sincerely come to believe ‘the Roman Church to be true’, and only a lingering fear that some secret undetected fault might have misled him ‘keeps me where I am, waiting’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In February 1845 he told Edward Pusey that ‘I am as much gone over as if I were already gone. It is a matter of time only.’Footnote ⁴⁸ In March he asked his sister Jemima ‘Is it not like a death-bed repentance to put off what one feels one ought to do?’ and in April he told Henry Wilberforce that ‘Certainly something will happen about Christmas, but it may be sooner or later.’Footnote ⁴⁹ In July that year he told Richard Westmacott that ‘It is morally certain I shall join the Roman Catholic Church … I do not see any medium between disowning Christianity, and taking the Church of Rome … If Christianity is one and the same at all times, then I must believe, not what the Reformers carved out of it, but what the Catholic Church holds.’Footnote ⁵⁰

All that seems unequivocal, and in the light of these and many similar letters, Newman's reception in October 1845 looks anything but unexpected: certainly it surprised none of his friends. But Turner's conviction that Newman had no real intention of converting till October 1845 cannot accommodate this kind of evidence. And so he insists that the unequivocal letter to Westmacott is in fact ambiguous, and that when Newman wrote it he was still clinging to the mirage of a permanent semi-schismatic enclave in Littlemore. So Turner writes, ‘It is not certain, and may not have been clear in his own mind, whether in the letter to Westmacott, by “Catholic Church” he meant the Roman Catholic Church, or his still much sought after Church Catholic independent of England and Rome.’Footnote ⁵¹

It is hard to see how any competent historian could so egregiously misread a document. We are not dealing here with ‘history versus hagiography’. One does not have to be a credulous Newman acolyte to think that in such passages Turner clung to a thesis in defiance of the facts. That persistence in the face of unambiguous evidence exposes once again Turner's fundamental tone-deafness to much in Newman's personality and inner history, and can only be explained by the manifest distaste with which he approached his subject. While still in the midst of it, Newman repeatedly commented on his own long-drawn-out journey towards conversion: his painfully self-questioning letters on the subject to Keble, to his sisters and to many others are marked by an unmistakable honesty. Newman's reluctance to act on the growing conviction that he must become a Catholic, which Turner dismisses as filibuster and posturing, was in fact the result of a lifelong distrust of action on the basis of ‘paper logic’, and an intellectual fastidiousness and caution characteristic of Newman's entire mindset, the conviction, as he declared in the Apologia, that ‘great acts take time’. It was shrewdly captured by Henri Bremond, who wrote that Newman in the 1840s was like a sea-voyager, long packed and ready for the journey to Rome, but in these final years at Littlemore he was ‘waiting for the wind’.Footnote ⁵²

The passage of a mind from one position to another, Newman wrote, ‘advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation’.Footnote ⁵³ Turner will have none of these subtleties: for him, Newman's hesitations and self doubts, so painfully chronicled in the letters of the last Anglican years, and so brilliantly analysed in retrospect in the Apologia, are smoke and mirrors, designed to conceal a sectarian clinging to a semi-permanent state of schism, and concealing motives which had little to do with a quest for truth. Turner's Newman was driven to Rome in the end, not by religious conviction, but by the desperate desire to retain a Svengali-like hold over his male acolytes at Littlemore. Skinner assures us that Turner's book was written out of ‘a conviction of Newman's towering importance’.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the Newman whom Turner portrays is a spiritual pygmy, the prisoner of a dysfunctional psycho-pathology, mean-spirited and small-minded in all his doings. No one reading Turner's book would suspect that in the period it deals with its subject established himself as the most austerely eloquent preacher of the nineteenth century, or that, in his Oxford University sermons, he had composed one of the most searching studies ever written of the relationship between faith and reason, or that the Essay on development that he wrote to resolve his own intellectual difficulties in accepting the claims of Rome has remained one of the seminal works of modern ecclesiology. And it is hard to see how so unredeemed a bundle of vindictiveness and spite could ever have attracted and held the devoted admiration of so many of his contemporaries.

But Newman has always aroused fierce hostility as well as fierce loyalty, and Turner's flawed book takes its place in a succession which includes Frank Newman's venomously fratricidal little memoir,Footnote ⁵⁵ Edwin Abbot's altogether more formidable two-volume hatchet-jobFootnote ⁵⁶ and Geoffrey Faber's Stracheyesque debunking. Simon Skinner deplores the hagiographical reverence which he thinks has blinded Newman's admirers to the momentousness of Turner's scholarly achievement. But loathing is just as insidious an enemy of objectivity as adulation, and whatever lip-service Turner may have paid to Newman's greatness, his book is manifestly informed by loathing. Newman himself declared that he had written the Apologia because ‘I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes.’Footnote ⁵⁷ For all the undoubted learning and passion which went to its making, Turner's Newman is, in the end, a scarecrow. Caveat lector.