LD

Letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, London 1961–

So John Henry Newman wrote of the Church of Rome shortly after his first visit to the Eternal City. The young Newman was delighted with Rome, which did indeed ‘soothe his heart’, reminding him of the triumphs and faith of the Apostles and martyrs, a subject which had long been dear to him.Footnote ² At the same time, however, he was suspicious and wary of its historical and devotional appeal, finding certain aspects of the religious life and fabric of the city to be deeply disturbing.Footnote ³ He was both attracted and repelled by the devotional climate of Rome and in a letter to his sister Jemima gave vent to his frustration: ‘Oh, that Rome were not Rome’, a lament he repeated later in more formal language to his former colleague Samuel Rickards: ‘O Rome, that thou wert not Rome!’Footnote ⁴ His letters home clearly reveal his rational efforts to deal with this essentially emotional dichotomy. In one such, Newman spoke of these mingled feelings of pain and pleasure, which one biographer has described as ‘a kind of emotional and intellectual paralysis’:Footnote ⁵

Rome was a cruel place for the young Newman because he was acutely aware of the historical attraction of the city and was sensitive to the depth of religious feelings that these monuments of ancient Christianity could inspire. He was incapable, however, of accepting and appreciating such feelings because of his deeply ingrained abhorrence and distrust of the trappings of contemporary Roman religion. Everything about the city seemed to conspire to accent and exacerbate this intensely personal conflict.

On Sunday mornings Newman would attend services at the English Chapel at Rome, where he occasionally assisted the chaplain, Richard Burgess, in the administration of the sacrament.Footnote ⁷ On Sunday evenings, he often attended the Catholic service at the church of Gesu e Maria, near the Piazza del Popolo, where one evening he heard the charismatic Rector of the English College at Rome, Nicholas Wiseman, preaching the ‘English’ sermon. There were also the rich services of holy week, when Newman was confronted with the solemn grandeur and ostentatious display of the papal liturgies. He was much impressed by the sumptuous tapestry of the papal court on the feast of the Annunciation, which he described in some detail in a letter to his mother. Soon afterwards, however, like so many other Protestant tourists, he was scandalised by the custom of kissing the pope's foot, which forcefully reminded him of the doctrinal errors which stood behind such displays and which made them an ‘unedifying dumbshow’.Footnote ⁸

Newman was torn in two by his Roman tour, pulled in two seemingly opposite directions, oscillating between poles of devotional attraction and repulsion. After leaving Rome he confided to Jemima that he felt immensely sad departing from the ‘tombs of the apostles’. ‘Rome’, he wrote, ‘not as a city, but as a scene of sacred history, has part of my heart, and in going away from it I am as if tearing it in twain.’Footnote ⁹ For the young Newman, Rome was a city under a curse, distorting the beauty of its historical gifts with false doctrines and corrupt devotions, and yet, as he wrote to a former pupil, it is a city ‘reverend even in so far as it is stricken with God's curses’.Footnote ¹⁰ In perhaps the most graphic image of the internal struggle that constantly attended him, Newman described his mixed feelings as ‘partly such as those with which one would approach a corpse, and partly those which would be excited by the sight of the spirit which had left it’.Footnote ¹¹ The spirit of the primitive Church was tangibly present for Newman in the Christian monuments of the city, but that spirit was encased in the corpse of the contemporary devotions of the Church of Rome which were racked with doctrinal decay.

At the time of Newman's visit, however, the English Catholics in that city had a vital and vibrant appreciation for the material relics of the primitive Church which they firmly and confidently believed reflected and revealed the deep apostolic roots of current Catholic doctrines, devotions and practices. For them, the corpse and the spirit were one, presenting the sensitive and educated viewer with a seamless historical vision of ecclesiastical integrity and continuity. English Catholic circles in Rome were being infused with this new sense of confidence which proudly pointed to the material remains of the primitive Church as emblems of the apostolic spirit that they firmly believed resided at the heart of Roman Catholicism.

The seminal ground for the recovery of English Catholic confidence was the English College. The college had been closed in 1798 at the time of the French invasion, and was not reopened until 1818 when Cardinal Consalvi took an interest in it after he had received an exceptionally hospitable reception in England. The College was reopened with a class of students taken from Ushaw College and other Catholic schools; among the entering class were Daniel Rock and Nicholas Wiseman. Charles Baggs entered the college six years later, in 1824. All three of these men spent many hours touring the sites of the primitive Church of Rome and all would produce works that reflected their aggressive confidence in the apostolic witness of those material relics. These men firmly believed that the Church of Rome was the legitimate heir to the Church of the catacombs.

Daniel Rock found within the Christian monuments of Rome a vibrant source of historical testimony that he believed witnessed to the apostolicity and orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic faith. He made a ‘repeated inspection’ of the catacombs while he was a student at the English College, and these visits convinced him of the inestimable historical importance of the sites.Footnote ¹² In 1827 he became the domestic chaplain to the earl of Shrewsbury and accompanied him to Rome in the winter of 1828–9. When Rock expressed an interest in the subject of the catacombs, the earl generously procured various works on the catacombs for him, ‘works not only highly interesting, but necessary, yet so expensive, as to be beyond the author's means of purchase’.Footnote ¹³ In 1833, the same year Newman was in Rome, he published the first nineteenth-century English work to make extensive use of the evidence of the catacombs.

Hierurgia: or the holy sacrifice of the mass was Rock's best-known and most influential work. In it he sought to present doctrinal and historical support for the ceremonial and liturgical practices of contemporary Roman Catholicism. Although the eucharist provided the central focus of the work, Rock included a series of ‘dissertations’ that dealt with various controversial topics such as the invocation of the saints, the doctrine of purgatory, the use of images and the use and style of vestments, all of which were designed to demonstrate the primitive character of contemporary Catholic beliefs. He used the evidence of the catacombs to defend the doctrine that both species of the sacrament contain the body and blood of Christ and to demonstrate that the primitive Church practised reception in one kind. He referred to the inscriptions and frescoes of the catacombs to prove that the early Christians invoked the prayers of the saints and martyrs and preserved and venerated their relics. He argued that the catacombs clearly indicate that the early Christians decorated their places of worship from the ‘earliest epoch’ and within those painted decorations Rock found paradigms for modern Roman vestments, and models for contemporary liturgical practices.Footnote ¹⁴

Rock closed with a fitting tribute to the devotional and historical character of the catacombs. In those subterranean corridors, the Christian finds ‘documents that proclaim the similarity of discipline, and identity of doctrine, which incorporates the Catholics of the nineteenth, with the apostles and their disciples and immediate successors, of the first century, in one spiritual body, by a unity of faith’.Footnote ¹⁵ Daniel Rock was steeped in the belief that the monuments of Christian Rome dramatically illustrated and tangibly represented the apostolicity of the Church of Rome, uniting members of the primitive and contemporary communities ‘in one spiritual body, by a unity of faith’.

Nicholas Wiseman shared Rock's appreciation of the spiritual character of monumental Rome and particularly the witness of the Roman Catacombs. He wrote and spoke about the catacombs frequently in various articles and lectures and in 1856 produced a novel about the Church of the catacombs that became one of the most influential treatments of the subject in the Victorian era and beyond.Footnote ¹⁶Fabiola or the Church of the catacombs is a story designed to illustrate Rock's assertion that the primitive Church and that of contemporary Rome are one contiguous spiritual body, enlivened and animated by the same faith and spirit. It is no small wonder that, when speaking to the Catholic Congress of Malines on the religious and social position of Catholics in Britain in 1863, the author of Fabiola wrote of the Emancipation Act: ‘The year 1829 was to us what the egress from the catacombs was to the early Christians.’Footnote ¹⁷

Charles Baggs was well read in the history of Christian antiquity and was acutely aware of the spiritual and devotional value of the historical monuments of Rome. He first wrote about his appreciation of the devotional power of the catacombs in 1836 in a pamphlet attacking the writings and misconceptions of the English chaplain at Rome, Richard Burgess, the same Anglican priest whom Newman assisted at services in the English Chapel.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1839 Baggs produced two short guide-books for the ever-increasing stream of British tourists. In the preface to the first of these, The papal chapel described and illustrated from history and antiquities, Baggs wrote that he intended to provide the British tourist with a summary of ‘interesting and useful information’ gleaned from more scholarly works. In this summary, he hoped to impart to his subject a ‘charm of antiquity’ by pointing to the evident connection of ‘the present forms of the Roman Church with those of by-gone ages’.

Baggs began with a section on places of Christian worship before and after the Constantinian Triumph, noting that the faith was first planted in Rome by Peter and Paul, and that during the persecutions the sacred rites were celebrated in private homes and in the catacombs. He invited his readers to imagine those early rites, and to aid their efforts, he provided them with an evocative description:

For Baggs the catacombs are not to be viewed passively as inanimate relics of a past and forgotten age, but are to be experienced as active and emotive agents, vibrant reminders of the primitive heritage of the Catholic faith, capable of inspiring feelings of devotion and historical identification.

For Wiseman, Rock and Baggs, and for many young seminarians like them, the city of Rome was far more than simply the seat of papal splendour and authority. It was an historical and monumental treasure house, ‘an illuminated page’, as Wiseman once wrote, where a sensitive student could encounter portraits of Christian antiquity:

English Catholic writers were becoming secure in their belief that the devotional and historical fabric of Rome clearly expressed its apostolic lineage. In his biography of Wiseman, Wilfrid Ward captured the germ of this new spirit in his description of Wiseman's early impressions of Rome while a student at the English College:

The ‘corpse’ of the Church of Rome that confronted the young Newman was one that its adherents believed was animated by the spirit and soul of its apostolic predecessor. This was not an apologetic Church, but a confident one, secure in its apostolic foundations and the power of its ceremonies and monuments to express the historicity of its devotions and beliefs. The monuments of the primitive Church in Rome were enveloped with this vibrant piety, and it is no wonder that Newman felt somewhat bewildered by this confusing contrast of primitive remains and contemporary devotions.

On the Monday after Palm Sunday, 1 April 1833, Newman set out on one of the standard daily tours of Rome, which carried him out on the Via Ostiensis to the Basilica San Paolo, and then over to the Via Appia, where he visited the tomb of Caecilia Metella and the Church of San Sebastiano ‘fuori le Mura’.Footnote ²² Newman wrote to Jemima eleven days later that he really should tell her all about his visit to Rome: the Miserere sung in the Sistine Chapel, his conversation with Dr Wiseman, his visit to the catacombs, ‘and all the other many sights that have stolen half my heart’.Footnote ²³ He desists from doing so, however, because he will soon see her and be able to tell her about them face to face. In a similar vein, Newman wrote to Samuel Rickards listing all those sights that he cannot ‘keep from talking about’, including his visit to the catacombs ‘used in the times of persecution’.Footnote ²⁴ Yet despite these occasional references, Newman left no detailed description in his diary or correspondence of his tour of the catacombs. Such a description might well have forced him to grapple explicitly with the devotional attraction of the sites, an area well within the realm of Catholic religion, which filled him with such mixed feelings of pain and pleasure.

Newman, however, had a very interesting understanding of the relationship between the actual experience of a sight or event and the memory of it. In a letter to Frederic Rogers, the last of his Oriel tutees, Newman writes that ‘the sights of celebrated places are like seeds sown in the mind. I have often found the retrospect more delightful than the first enjoyment, as great as that was’.Footnote ²⁵ He echoes this idea later in a letter to John Frederic Christie when he talks about his homesickness and then adds ‘the exquisite sights, which foreign countries supply both to the imagination and the moral taste are more pleasurable in memory, but scarcely satisfying as present enjoyment. There is far too much tumult in seeing the places one has read so much about all one's life, to make it desirable for it to continue’.Footnote ²⁶

Although he did not immediately record his impressions of the catacombs, Newman did so later on as his memory continued to enjoy and digest the initial experience. Such a delay may have also allowed him time to distance himself from the emotional confusion he might well have experienced during his actual visit. Upon his return to England, he published two articles in the British Magazine entitled ‘Home thoughts abroad’. In these Newman attempted to deal with some of the conflicting thoughts and emotions that had arisen from his trip to Rome. One of Newman's biographers, Maisie Ward, has argued that the Oxford Movement ‘in embryo’ can be seen in these articles, within the author's desire to create a via media that would enable him to reclaim for the Anglican tradition all that belonged to its Catholic past by reconciling his loyalty to the Catholic Church, the one Church founded by Christ, with his first-hand experience of the Church of Rome, its apostolic remains and its scandalous devotional practices.Footnote ²⁷

Newman described several sites of Christian antiquity in the first of the articles. He spoke of the Coliseum and of the strange attraction of such places where the primitive martyrs suffered. ‘It is no paradox’, he wrote, ‘to say that the most sorrowful seasons of our life are often the most exquisitely pleasurable.’Footnote ²⁸ God has placed on such places a blessing and a curse, he noted, ‘so that while preserving all abhorrence of Rome as a seat of empire, still the Christian pilgrim may traverse it, and diligently trace out, and piously venerate, the footsteps of apostles, bishops and martyrs’. One such shrine was the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, which, as Newman pointed out, were then thought to have been used by the early Christians as places of refuge and sites of ‘united worship’ as well as sepulchres for their dead. Newman also wrote of the crypt of San Martino, which he mistakenly thought was a catacomb, and he noted that there was a picture of the virgin there, an image of great antiquity ‘remarkable for the high expression of countenance which it gives her; one might almost fancy it traditionary’.Footnote ²⁹

In his autobiography, Newman wrote of his first trip to Rome: ‘I saw nothing but what was external; of the hidden life of Catholics I knew nothing. I was still more driven back into myself, and felt my isolation.’Footnote ³⁰ He suggested that this preoccupation stemmed from his obsession with affairs in England, where his native Church struggled with issues of authority and autonomy. ‘England was in my thoughts solely’, he wrote. Yet his letters from Rome and his articles in the British Magazine reveal his deep sensitivity to the historical character of the city, the powerful emotional attraction of the historical monuments of Christian Rome which excited within him thoughts of devotion and veneration. These historical sites were, however, embodied within the devotional practices of the modern Church, pious trappings that were unacceptable to the young Newman because they were tainted with the corruptions of Roman Catholicism. The actual experience of these sacred sites was too painful and confusing for him and so he preferred to dwell on the flowers those seeds produced within the fertile soil of his imagination and memory. He wanted to venerate those sites, to express imaginatively the devotion that they inspired within him, but to do so would be to accept and validate the material relationship between the apostolic Church and that of nineteenth-century Rome. ‘Oh that Rome were not Rome’, the young Newman laments – if only the soul of the primitive Church could be released from the corrupt corpse. If only these relics of the primitive Church could be freed from the devotional fabric that enshrouded them and could be venerated and studied, like a patristic text, in the safe intellectual confines of an Oxford study.

From his return to England in 1833 until his second trip to Rome in 1846, Newman continued to be absorbed and excited by his study of the history of the primitive Church. For Newman the study of the early Church always had contemporary implications. In 1833 he closed his study of the Arian heresy by drawing an analogy between the ‘present perils’ of the Church of England and those of the Church in the fourth century.Footnote ³¹ He firmly believed that the lessons offered through a study of the primitive Church might prove to be ‘cheering and edifying to Christians of the present day’.Footnote ³² Antiquity was for Newman the criterion for orthodoxy, the rule by which present realities should be judged and evaluated, and so he used early church history to cast light on controversies within the contemporary Church.Footnote ³³ Following his Mediterranean tour, Newman contributed a series of articles to the British Magazine on the Church of the Fathers, which was later published in book form. In this series he again expressed his belief that the Anglican Church might learn to live and breathe again if it immersed itself in the invigorating atmosphere of the primitive Church.Footnote ³⁴ This wedding of past and present history was far more than simply a didactic understanding of history. Newman saw current events in terms of ancient history and vice versa. He was able to see his own face in the mirror of a fifth-century heresy, and in his writing and thinking he could bring Ambrose and Athanasius to the streets of Oxford with disarming ease. His historical sensibility and his conscious perception were often one, meshed by the impressive power of his active imagination.Footnote ³⁵ It was this ability to make such associations that made Rome such a cruel place for the young Newman, because it required him to engage historical associations that he found repugnant, forcing him to place his veneration for the City as the cradle of the apostolic Church alongside his belief that papal Rome was the realm of the AntiChrist. His conversion to Roman Catholicism in October of 1845, and the intellectual pilgrimage that led up to it, resolved that painful conflict, and allowed him to recapture and experience in Rome that imaginative fusion of the past and present which was so very dear to him.

In his Apologia, Newman acknowledges the guidance and influence of the Roman Catholic priest and professor Charles Russell as he made his way along the path of his conversion. ‘He had’, Newman writes, ‘perhaps, more to do with my conversion than anyone else.’Footnote ³⁶ Their relationship began in April of 1841 when Russell wrote a letter to Newman questioning his recently published understanding of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.Footnote ³⁷ He later sent him a copy of some sermons by St Alphonso Liguori on devotional practices and understandings. They were to correspond regularly and visit frequently until Russell's death in 1880 and Newman relied on Russell for guidance on a variety of historical and political issues and questions.

Russell himself first became interested in the subject of the catacombs while serving as professor of humanity at Maynooth College in Ireland, where, in the late 1830s, he avidly read articles on the subject written in Italian, German and English. In 1841, just before writing to Newman, he achieved a life-long ambition by travelling to Rome for the summer vacation. The city impressed him deeply, particularly those shrines associated with martyrs and saints:

Russell returned to Rome in 1843, and during his two visits he met numerous Roman scholars and dignitaries, including Cardinal Mai of the Vatican Library, and G. B. De Rossi, who was just beginning his researches into the Roman catacombs which would revolutionise the study of Christian archaeology in the nineteenth century. In 1845 Russell was appointed professor of ecclesiastical history at Maynooth, a position that enabled him to continue to pursue his growing interests in archaeology and the history of the primitive Church. In 1847, in the pages of the Dublin Review, he would enter into the polemical lists in the ongoing debate about the interpretation of the evidence of the catacombs, attacking the major Protestant work that had appeared on the subject in 1846.Footnote ³⁹ Like Baggs, Rock and Wiseman, Russell's faith was rooted in the soil of the Roman catacombs and in the apostolic power of those material remains. It was a devotional and historical perspective that surrounded Newman as he sought to find his way to and through Roman Catholicism.

When he arrived in Rome on 28 October 1846, Newman registered surprise at how well he remembered the city; but then, he added, Rome is not an easy place to forget.Footnote ⁴⁰ He seems to have begun his stay by immediately making a pilgrimage to visit the seven basilicas with his companion and fellow convert, Ambrose St John, an important devotional practice that carried an indulgence, and ended with a visit to San Sebastiano and the catacombs beneath. One week after his arrival, he and St John completed the pilgrimage and in a letter to Jemima, now Mrs Mozley, Newman reported that ‘We have only been into one catacomb yet, and we carried away some of the earth where the body of St Cecilia was found.’Footnote ⁴¹ Newman could now act upon his devotional impulse. He could now participate in the devotional life of Rome, using it to express his historical passion for the material relics of the primitive Church. As the burial grounds of the martyrs, soil from the corridors of the catacombs is sacred, and one cannot help but wonder where Newman kept his cherished souvenir from the grave of St Cecilia.

The pilgrimage to the seven basilicas began as an important spiritual discipline of the Jubilee Year which became very popular during the Counter-Reformation. It was among the catacombs beneath San Sebastiano that Philip Neri, one of the architects of ecclesiastical reform in sixteenth-century Rome, practised his own devotions. Neri would frequently descend to the ‘grotto’ under the Church of San Sebastiano where, flanked by grave-lined walls, he would pass the night in prayer. These long periods of meditation inspired within Neri a passionate love for the primitive Church. His nineteenth-century biographer, Alfonso Capecelatro, well captures the effect that these burial grounds had on his devotional frame of mind:

Like Bagg, Wiseman, Rock and Russell, in the corridors of the catacombs Neri found an imaginative setting that inspired his devotions, enabling him to place his own religious ideas and emotions within the spiritual context of the early Christian faith. In those catacombs, Neri focused his devotions upon the image of the early Church, a vision of a pure and holy community of faith, which became for him a spiritual and moral paradigm for the revival of the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. The historian of the papacy, Ludwig Pastor, notes that it was the image of the primitive Church ‘with its heroic spirit of faith and love of Christ, which spread itself before the eyes of his [Neri's] soul, and inflamed his heart with an insatiable thirst for a like heroic courage’.Footnote ⁴³

In 1557 Neri had founded the congregation of the Oratory, a group of laymen who met regularly to pray, meditate on Scripture and to discuss the Fathers and ecclesiastical history. The Oratory quickly became one of the leading centres of spiritual and moral reform, a movement that was certainly influenced by Neri's passion for the faith of the early Church. Neri would often lead members of the Oratory on a pilgrimage to the seven churches, ending with devotions in the catacombs beneath San Sebastiano, which provided him with an ideal ‘classroom’ for his devotional lessons. Their location, under the streets and campagna of the papal city itself, spoke dramatically of Rome's continuity with the primitive Church. Papal Rome rested literally upon the foundation of the primitive Church of the catacombs, the community of the saints and martyrs. The corridors of the catacombs presented a vision of a pristine Church with a dynamic faith, a model that could be used to combat any spirit of corruption that assaulted the moral and spiritual purity of the contemporary Church. No nineteenth-century visitor to the catacombs of San Sebastiano escaped without some commentary on the famed use of the site by Neri and his disciples and it is interesting that at the time of his visit Newman was struggling to determine with which Roman Catholic order he and his band of disciples would align themselves. Ultimately, of course, Newman chose to become an Oratorian and he went on to develop a special devotion to St Philip Neri. It is also not surprising that the following spring, as his colleagues from Maryvale gathered in Rome to begin their novitiate as Oratorians, Newman immediately carried them off on a pilgrimage to the seven churches.Footnote ⁴⁴

On 30 November Newman paid a second visit to the Roman catacombs, this time to the catacombs of Santa Agnese, where he was taken on an extensive tour of the site by the then Curator of Sacred Cemeteries, the Revd Giuseppe Marchi. Marchi was one of the nineteenth-century scholars who applied new historical and archaeological methods to study the catacombs which led to new discoveries and more accurate methods of research.Footnote ⁴⁵ In a letter to J. D. Dalgairns, dated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Newman spoke of a particularly appropriate aspect of the tour: ‘We have been with Father Marchi to the Catacombs of St. Agnese: and there seen a painting of the Blessed Virgin of the 2nd and 3rd century over the altar, with hands stretched out in prayer as the priest in Mass. Our Lord is in her lap praying, but the lower portion is destroyed.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Five days later, in a letter to his close friend Henry Wilberforce, Newman described this tour in greater detail. He introduced the subject by noting that they had recently received at the Collegio di Propaganda the newly discovered relics of St Hyacinth. He then went on to describe his own visit to the catacombs of Santa Agnese. It is a lengthy description but worth quotation in full, since it clearly reveals how successfully Newman had adopted a new devotional perspective:

Newman now joyfully and enthusiastically makes the association between the relics of the primitive Church and the contemporary Church of Rome, and despite his protest to the contrary, the subterranean chapel of the catacombs of Santa Agnese seems to have made a decided impression on his imagination.

In his novel Callista, published in 1855, Newman provided a picture of a subterranean church, where the Christians of North Africa took refuge as news of the Decian persecution spread through their towns and villages. The chapel that Newman described is clearly based on his experience in the catacombs of Rome. The altar at the east end of the chapel is placed in a funerary recess, or arcosolium. The stone slab that serves as an altar rests upon a sarcophagus, a tomb that houses the relics of a martyred bishop. Over the altar, in a lunette that stands above it, there is a painting of the Blessed Virgin ‘exercising her office as advocate of sinners, standing by the sacrifice as she stood at the cross itself, and offering up and applying its infinite merits and incommunicable virtue in union with the priest and people’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Into this primitive setting, Newman sets the splendour of a solemn high mass, with St Cyprian himself as celebrant, assisted by deacon and subdeacon, all immaculately vested. It is an imaginative synthesis of the historic Christian monuments of Rome and the solemnity and grandeur of contemporary Roman Catholic worship, a fictional rendition of the primitive Church of the catacombs.

Scholars have frequently referred to the autobiographical elements within the plot and characterisations of Callista.Footnote ⁴⁹ The central character, Agellius, is a lonely and isolated creature, a pious and reflective Christian living in the midst of a pagan society, ‘lonely at home, lonely in the crowd’. He is one who needs ‘the sympathy of his kind, hearts which beat with his heart; friends with whom he might share his joys and griefs; advisors whom he might consult; minds like his own, who would succour and respond to him’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As one critic has observed, no biographer has written a better description of the temper of Newman's own personality.Footnote ⁵¹ Like Newman, Agellius suffers from a fever that provides him with spiritual renewal. He even endures the same physical symptoms that Newman experienced during his near fatal illness in Sicily. It is through Agellius' eyes that we see the subterranean chapel and the pontifical mass. As he enters that Catholic church of the catacombs, Agellius is transported: ‘He was almost for the first time coming home to his father's house.’Footnote ⁵² He falls on his knees and bursts into tears.

Agellius, however, is not the only character in Callista who bears autobiographical traits. Agellius' brother, Juba, is an antithetical character, an emotional and gregarious creature who always speaks what is on his mind and acts impulsively, with animal cunning rather than reflection and forethought. He is a free spirit, who has rejected Christianity, denied his natural religious instincts, and taunts his brother's piety, denigrating his belief and devotions and telling him that he despises him. Later in the novel, however, Juba is demonically possessed, cursed by Grunta the witch, the brothers' own mother. He wanders through the African countryside in a ranting fit of madness and destruction until he finally stumbles into St Cyprian. Cyprian calms the evil spirit that possesses him, but he does not or cannot expel it. The exorcism of the spirit takes place in the subterranean chapel, where the solemn mass is being celebrated in the presence of the bodily remains of the recently martyred Callista. Struggling and screaming, exerting himself with all his might to escape, Juba is forced to place his hand on the corpse of the departed saint. By the end of mass, Juba sits quietly, delivered from the evil spirit, but now an idiot. Ten years later, we are told, Juba is restored to sanity through the intervention and intercession of Callista herself. He is baptised, and dies still in his baptismal robes, praying before the martyr's tomb. Like Agellius, Juba too has come home – come home by way of an emotional and spiritual pilgrimage as demanding and exhausting as the intellectual and soul-searching trials of his brother.

For Newman, historical reflection was itself a devotional exercise, a process through which the believer came face to face with the real and vital traditions of the faith. It was that perspective which made him incapable of devoting himself to the historical fabric of Rome in 1833. After he had accepted the tenets of Roman Catholicism, he was able to touch the corpse that enshrined the spirit and soul of the primitive Church, then he was able once again to wed his imagination with his intellect, his emotions with his piety. Newman's visit to the subterranean chapel of Santa Agnese allowed him to express his recovery of that historical perspective. Like Juba, he placed his hands on the remains of the primitive faith, and he was restored to sanity, to a devotional perspective that allowed him to embrace his faith with his heart and his mind, united together through the powerful bonds of his imagination. The image of the primitive Church that arises from his descriptions is one that is skilfully filtered through his newly acquired ecclesiastical prejudices. Stone chairs, by virtue of their juxtaposition, are seen as confessionals, projecting cornices become ledges where devotional images are placed, and the chapel itself is seen to be ‘just like a modern Catholic one’, as he wrote to Wilberforce. The contemporary Church of Rome has been draped over the evidence of the catacombs so that the image of the early Church, mirrored by the corridors of the catacombs, is actually a synthesis of the two. As Daniel Rock had argued, the corridors of the catacombs proclaimed the similarities between the Catholics of the nineteenth century and those of the first ‘in one spiritual body by a unity of faith’. It was his dedication to this fusion of the contemporary Church of Rome with the Church of the catacombs that made Newman a loyal ultramontane, despite all the intellectual difficulties he continued to have with that ecclesiastical perspective.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Roman Catholic and Protestant authors used the backdrop of the catacombs to stage their imaginative productions of the primitive faith, creating polemical dramas that enabled them to profess adamantly that their Church and faith were the legitimate heirs of the Church of the catacombs. The corridors of the catacombs were an historical mirror designed to reflect and enhance the polemical images that were projected upon them. The construction of imaginary visions of the Church of the catacombs received a final and fatal blow when scholars began to ascertain and to publish the fact that the underground passageways were never used by the community of the early Church for refuge and worship.Footnote ⁵³ The catacombs were exclusively places of burial and were not the scene of primitive liturgies, and as such they were not capable of providing evidence for the worship and practice of the early Christians, at least not to the degree imagined in the nineteenth century. The mirror of history was shattered.

The fact that the catacombs were exclusively burial grounds successfully undermined any attempt to find within them images and visions of the persecuted Church in corporate worship. There was, in fact, no Church of the catacombs, and the treatment of the catacombs in Wiseman's Fabiola and Newman's Callista were both relegated to the realm of pure fiction. The destruction of the Church of the catacombs brought with it the end of the controversies which had enveloped and enshrouded it for over three centuries; the cemeteries were now viewed as graveyards, still capable of teaching much about the faith and beliefs of the Church which reverently buried its dead within its grave-lined corridors.