John Henry Newman’s engagement with classical antiquity is one of the less fully researched areas of his work. This is both surprising and unfortunate. It is surprising in view of the central role that the past played in Newman’s world-view; and it is unfortunate in that an examination of Newman’s shifting relationship with the classics sheds valuable light both on his own religious concerns and on broader tensions and trends in Victorian Christian culture.
From the early part of Newman’s career, it was the past that legitimised his Catholicising vision of Christianity, both in its ecclesiological form and in its doctrinal content. His thought was based, at bottom, on an appeal to apostolicity against the threats posed by evangelical Protestantism and post-Enlightenment liberalism. It is sometimes casually assumed that the past in which Newman’s ideas were anchored was that of the middle ages. To this extent, he continues to be seen as a typical representative of Victorian Ritualism, which itself is seen as an expression of the ‘prevailing aestheticism, antiquarianism, medievalism, and romanticism’ of the era.Footnote 1 One thinks of Lytton Strachey’s memorable but misleading characterisation of Newman as preoccupied with the ‘last enchantment of the Middle Age’.Footnote 2 In less polemical vein, Martin Bernal identified Newman as a representative of the mediaevalist right wing of nineteenth-century Romanticism, as distinct from the Hellenist left wing represented by figures like Byron and Shelley:
His conversion provides a good illustration of the division within the Romantic movement between the ‘progressive’ lovers of Greece and Germany, and the ‘reactionary’ passion for Christian ritual and the Middle Ages that could lead the unwary to Rome.Footnote 3
As will become apparent, this article accepts the basic premise that Newman stood within the Romantic movement.Footnote 4 His Romanticism was inseparable from his preoccupation with history: his fundamental commitment to apostolicity looks very like a ‘typical Romantic appeal to the past, to tradition’.Footnote 5 Yet a judgement like that of Bernal cannot be accepted. Newman was not a mediaevalist. Indeed, it has been said that ‘of all the leading lights in the [Oxford] movement, Newman was perhaps the least interested in the Middle Ages’.Footnote 6
Far more important for Newman’s intellectual and religious formation was the world of antiquity. That Newman was profoundly influenced by the writings of the early Fathers is something of a truism. But it raises an interesting issue which has not to date been fully explored. The church of the Fathers emerged from and developed within a vast, variegated, pre-existing culture with which Newman was intimately familiar: the civilisation of classical Greece and Rome. Surprisingly little attention has been given to Newman’s engagement with the classical, as opposed to patristic, side of antiquity. Indeed, Newman was cited a few years ago by the leading British classicist Sir Kenneth Dover as an antitype of the vigorous, hard-headed ancient culture which Dover admired: ‘Personally I find Ajax much more familiar and more intelligible than, say, Cardinal Newman.’Footnote 7
It is an arresting fact that John Henry Newman stood at the intersection of two enormously important concerns for Victorian England: ‘Classics and theology mattered in Victorian society with an insistence not seen since the sixteenth century and the Reformation.’Footnote 8 Like other upper-middle-class Englishmen of his generation, Newman was brought up to be both a Christian and a classicist. He started learning Latin and Greek before the age of 10. At school, his reading included Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Xenophon, Horace, Virgil and Cicero; and he performed in Latin comedies by Terence which his school staged in the original language. At Oxford, he studied both classics and mathematics. Although he famously flunked his final exams, it was not for want of application: he read an impressive range of Greek and Roman authors, working punishing hours through both term times and vacations.Footnote 9 Later in life, he taught Latin and Greek to his own students at the Catholic University of Ireland and the Oratory School.Footnote 10
The effects of Newman’s classical education are apparent even to a casual reader of his works. Newman reaches naturally and instinctively for classical exempla, and he adorns his prose with untranslated Greek and Latin quotations. Even apparently casual allusions may have more to them than meets the eye: one writer has unpacked Newman’s passing use of Virgil’s two-word phrase ‘infandum dolorem’ in the Apologia to show how it neatly depicts him as an exile from a ruined homeland headed for a future destiny in Rome.Footnote 11 Newman wrote both poetry and prose in Latin, and he was capable of conversing in the language.Footnote 12 His English writing style was manifestly influenced by Cicero, whom he claimed as his only literary model.Footnote 13
Particularly striking to a modern reader is Newman’s familiarity with both the primary and the secondary literature on classical antiquity. He refers to a long medley of classical authors, ranging from household names (e.g. Homer, Virgil, the Greek tragedians) through B-list figures (e.g. Isocrates, Martial, Plautus, Suetonius, Theocritus) to writers who are relatively obscure even among scholars (e.g. Andocides, Bion, Carneades, Columella, Oppian). As for secondary sources, Newman reveals almost casually, in a section of the Grammar of Assent, that he is familiar with debates in ancient historiography involving B.G. Niebuhr, Henry Fynes Clinton, Sir George Lewis, George Grote, William Mure and his brother, the classicist Francis Newman.Footnote 14
Mention of Francis Newman makes it appropriate to sound a note of caution. Unlike Francis, John Henry cannot be regarded as a classical scholar. He has an entry in the Dictionary of British Classicists, but this is of limited significance.Footnote 15 His acquaintance with the ancient authors did not have the range or depth of a professional classicist’s, and his command of Latin was closer to competent than brilliant.Footnote 16 His only direct contributions to classical scholarship were two articles which he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana as a young man, on Cicero (1824) and Apollonius of Tyana (1826). These pieces are well informed and thoughtful; but they were essentially ephemeral. Only Newman scholars still read them.
Nevertheless, for a man of Newman’s class and background, a deep familiarity with the classics was quite unremarkable. The interesting point for our purposes is that this posed an unavoidable challenge, not only to a clergyman of conservative leanings like Newman but to Victorian Christian society more generally. Ancient learning is all very well, but once one ventures outside the safe boundaries of the Fathers, ‘ancient’ inescapably means ‘pagan’. This was a problem that Newman never really solved – and that is the point. It is precisely the tensions and anomalies in his engagement with the ancient pagan world that are illuminating to the modern researcher.
In one sense, Newman’s ambivalence towards pagan antiquity mirrors an ambivalence which goes back to the patristic period itself: the conflict between Quid Athenae et Hierosolymis? and Praeparatio evangelica.Footnote 17 Of more immediate interest, however, are the ways in which Newman’s shifting stances reflect tensions within the broader culture of Victorian England. Ronald Hutton has drawn attention to the varying responses of Victorian society to ancient and modern paganisms, ranging from a view in which ‘pagans are people who bow down to idols, offer up blood sacrifices, and represent the religious aspect of human savagery and ignorance’ to a deep respect for an ancient ‘religion which had been associated with magnificent art, literature and philosophy, and was deficient to Christianity only in its ethics and in its lesser component of divine revelation’.Footnote 18 Newman’s relationship with the classics forms a microcosm of how Victorian Christian culture struggled by turns to align itself with and to distance itself from differing visions of classicism and paganism. The cardinal was an original thinker; but perhaps not entirely as original as is sometimes thought. His works exemplify the diverse ways in which his culture could praise and criticise the classical world.
This article will proceed in the following manner. First, it will examine, one by one, several distinct and competing conceptions of classical pagan antiquity which Newman employed in his writings. These conceptions might be described as amounting to differing rhetorical strategies; and the use of the term ‘rhetorical’ should not be taken as dismissive, as ‘Newman’s literary rhetoric always serves an end’,Footnote 19 and rhetoric is itself a very characteristic classical concern. Next, we will consider Newman’s views on the continuing practical application of classical literature and learning. Finally, we will look specifically at the novel Callista, the only book that Newman wrote which is set wholly against the backdrop of the pagan Graeco-Roman world.
Newman’s four visions of antiquity
Let us begin with the most hostile possible manner of engaging with the classical world. It is found in innumerable Christian writers through the ages, of whom John Henry Newman is just one. According to this view, classical civilisation was a tragic and sinister place. It lay under the yoke of false religions which were literally Satanic in nature. The proper relation of Christianity to this world was one of enmity. This conception naturally generated a triumphalist historiography of the early church in which the light of the Gospel providentially penetrated and overcame the pagan darkness.
This zero-sum view of Christianity and the classical world was always going to have limited appeal to a thinker of Newman’s sophistication. But it is clearly in evidence at certain points in his writings. It is expressed, for example, in this 1840 account of the ministry of St Martin of Tours:
Gaul was, even at this time, almost pagan: its cities, indeed, had long enjoyed the light of Christianity.... [B]ut the country people had never been evangelized, and still frequented their idol temples.... In the first years of Martin’s episcopate, heathen sacrifices were forbidden by law; and the resignation with which the pagans submitted to the edict, at least showed, what the history of the times so often shows otherwise, that their religion had no great hold on their hearts. Martin took upon him to enter and destroy the kingdom of Satan with his own hands. He went, unarmed, among the temples, the altars, the statues, the groves, and the processions of the false worship, attended by his monastic brethren: he presented himself to the barbarian multitude, converted them, and made them join with him in the destruction of their time-honoured establishment of error.Footnote 20
There is nothing very subtle about this. The Christian vocation was to destroy the ‘kingdom of Satan’, with all its apparatus of false idol-worship. The success of the church’s evangelism was attested by the fact that paganism was the religion only of backward country people; and it did not have any strong hold even on them.
Evidence of the same adversarial orientation towards classical antiquity may be found in other places in Newman’s works, particularly in his sermons. The genre of the sermon does, after all, lend itself more to the broad brush than to shades-of-grey analysis. In this context, Newman spoke of the ‘degenerate and corrupt religions’ of classical pagans;Footnote 21 and he described the advance of the early church in this way: ‘Men, who had lived all their lives in the pollutions of sin unspeakable, who had been involved in the darkness of heathenism, were suddenly brought to the light of Christian truth.’Footnote 22 Elsewhere, he labelled the Roman Empire the ‘fierce enemy of God’,Footnote 23 and he spoke of the enmity between the empire and the early church, which constituted a rival kingdom in itself.Footnote 24 He also made the points (as in his writing on St Martin) that the gods of the pagans were devils, but that they had lost their hold on people’s minds by the Christian era.Footnote 25
As already noted, this condemnatory view of antiquity was not new. The idea, for example, that pagan gods were demons comes straight from the Bible, as Newman himself was well aware.Footnote 26 Yet the interesting thing about his hostile rhetoric against classical civilisation is its modernity. It was essentially modern in two respects.
First, it corresponded closely with the orthodox view of the church’s mission among the present-day pagans who inhabited the expanding territories of the British Empire. A key element of Victorian religiosity was the quest of Western missionaries to bring the saving light of Christ to the heathen who – in the words of Bishop Heber’s famous hymn – bowed down to wood and stone. As a young man, Newman himself had considered going to do ‘missionary work among the heathen’ (and his brother Francis actually did so).Footnote 27 He spent some time as a member of the Church Missionary Society, and he openly declared in his preaching that ‘[t]he greater part of the world is in heathen darkness’.Footnote 28
Second, an adversarial view of pagan antiquity fits with the fact that paganism in the nineteenth century had become a more menacing proposition than it had been in ages past. Christian writers had previously been more concerned about the threat posed by Christian heresies and the other Abrahamic faiths. Bellarmine, for example, held that classical texts, unlike Protestant books, need not be censored because the paganism contained in them was so absurdly unconvincing.Footnote 29
Christians of Newman’s time could no longer afford to be so sanguine. In part, this was because of the long shadow cast by the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century had been preoccupied with classical pagan ideas and models, which served as icons of rationalism and republicanism. Peter Gay aptly described the philosophes as being ‘wrapped in the toga of Cicero or Lucretius’ as they looked to the classical masters as ‘signposts to secularism’.Footnote 30 Another reason why pagan antiquity had suddenly become more troubling lay in the rise of Romantic Neopaganism – which brings us on to our next area of inquiry.
The second perspective on pagan antiquity which is found in Newman’s works is somewhat less hostile than the first, but it is still distinctly critical. It was clearly in evidence in a sermon delivered by Newman in his Anglican days, in which he suggested that the great distinction between classical paganism and Christianity was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. This doctrine was, he affirmed, a bulwark against hedonism. When people believed that this life was all that existed, the results were unedifying:
[Ancient peoples] had their profane worship, their gaudy processions, their indulgent creed, their easy observances, their sensual festivities, their childish extravagances, such as might suitably be the religion of beings who were to live for seventy or eighty years, and then die once for all, never to live again. ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,’ was their doctrine and their rule of life.Footnote 31
This sensual vision of classical paganism continued to recur in texts from Newman’s Catholic period.Footnote 32 Newman also made essentially the same point in his Essay on Development when he wrote that ancient pagans looked down on Christianity as a religion of ‘gloom and sadness’, ‘consisting, not in the rational and cheerful enjoyment, but in a morose rejection of the gifts of Providence’.Footnote 33 It is interesting to note that qualifications sometimes enter the picture. In some places, Newman puts forward the view that only civilised pagans like the Greeks had ‘genial and indulgent’ deities; more ‘barbarous’ peoples had a religion of ‘gloom and sternness’.Footnote 34 He was also prepared to draw a distinction between joyous Greece and severe Rome: ‘the Romans deified Law, as the Athenians deified the Beautiful’.Footnote 35
The hedonistic conception of antiquity had some ancient support. The ‘eat and drink’ quotation in the passage above is from St Paul;Footnote 36 and most modern scholars would agree that the Greeks and Romans were relatively unconcerned about the afterlife. But there may also have been something else behind Newman’s rhetoric of pagan hedonism; and that something seems to have been contemporary Victorian concerns about the return of paganism.
It has been observed that ‘the imminent revival of a debauched paganism [was] a surprisingly pervasive concern in late Victorian Britain’;Footnote 37 and one might quarrel here only with the word ‘late’. Educated opinion in Newman’s time showed significant concern both about the growth of paganism in the sense of general post-Christian de-moralisation and, more specifically, about the small but influential phenomenon of Neopaganism. This movement, whose prominent figures ranged from Shelley to Swinburne (and later Madame Blavatsky and the members of the Golden Dawn), actively celebrated classical deities and embraced a value system that emphasised liberation and the sensual.Footnote 38
One can see contemporary concerns surfacing explicitly when Newman recalls how Neopaganism had figured in the French revolutionaries’ religious experimentations.Footnote 39 He also wrote with disapproval about the original source of the Neopagan revival in the Renaissance.Footnote 40 And there are scattered but unmistakable examples of him engaging with the phenomenon as it existed in Victorian England, such as his denunciations of ‘Shelleyism’;Footnote 41 we will see further instances later when we consider his novel Callista. Here, then, is a useful clue to the concerns which lay behind Newman’s hedonistic conception of classical culture.
The third face of pagan antiquity to be found in Newman’s work is that of the ancient philosophers. Newman was aware that classical popular religion – whether seen as devilish or merely debauched – was distinct from the religion of Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle. His response to the intellectual side of classical civilisation accordingly differed from his response to the ‘eat and drink’ side. This aspect of the ancient world was not dangerous or irresponsible; rather, it was frigid and unlovely. It appealed not to the self-indulgent but to the self-righteous.
Curiously, this notion does not appear in Newman’s very earliest work. In his encyclopaedia article of 1826 on Apollonius of Tyana, Newman appeared to make a relatively favourable comparison of Pythagorean philosophy with Christianity, having regard to the former’s ‘attachment... to the discipline of the established religion... its austerity, its pretended intercourse with heaven, its profession of extraordinary power over nature, and the authoritative tone of teaching which this profession countenanced’.Footnote 42 Years later, in a publication from 1854, he was prepared to call the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus ‘one of the noblest effusions of the kind in classical poetry’.Footnote 43
Yet there was very definitely another strand in Newman’s writings. Already in 1830, he was telling a university congregation in Oxford that the Stoics, Pythagoreans and other philosophers had been too satisfied with their own purity: they became gods unto themselves.Footnote 44 Not long afterwards, Newman wrote of the Neoplatonists as arrogant pseudo-mystics; men who were addicted to excessive asceticism while neglecting the ‘practice of virtue’.Footnote 45 Much later, in The Idea of a University, Newman applied these ideas to Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome; a man who (as he noted) was traditionally seen by Catholics as a type of the Antichrist. In a passage which has become fairly well known, Newman acknowledged that Julian was ‘all but the pattern-man of philosophical virtue’; but he considered that he had harboured a cold self-satisfaction which fatally lacked a sense of sin.Footnote 46
This all amounted to quite a different approach to classical culture from the first two that we have looked at. In contrast to the conception of classical paganism as essentially hedonistic, we are dealing with a rhetoric in which it was the Christians who were the bodily, sensual ones. Newman contrasted the way in which ancient philosophers spoke ‘slightingly and contemptuously’ of the body with the Christian idea of bodily resurrection.Footnote 47 He noted elsewhere that the Athenian philosophers had mocked St Paul for preaching this doctrine.Footnote 48
As to what underlay this approach to classical culture, it is suggested that we can again see the influence of the Enlightenment. It is not difficult to draw a line between the lumières and Newman’s proud but spiritually vacuous ancient intellectuals. Yet there is an irony here; for Newman had his own connections to the same Platonist philosophical tradition that produced the Emperor Julian and the rest. It has been noted that Neo-Platonic philosophy was the hidden common factor between two of Newman’s major sources of inspiration: the Fathers and the Romantic movement.Footnote 49 It is also worth mentioning that, in The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman followed a Platonic-friendly historiography.Footnote 50
Newman’s fourth and final model for conceptualising Graeco-Roman culture and religion was quite different from the others, and markedly more sympathetic. From the beginning of his career, Newman sought to devise a way of approaching the classical world that would allow for a reconciliation between the paganism of antiquity and the Christian revelation. We are concerned with this subject from a purely historical point of view, but it is worth noting that Newman’s views in this area have provoked interest among scholars who are interested in interreligious dialogue from a theological perspective.Footnote 51
This model of engagement with classical antiquity appears to have originated from Newman’s reading of St Justin Martyr around 1828, although Newman credited St Clement of Alexandria with supplying the name that has become associated with it: the ‘Dispensation of Paganism’.Footnote 52 Newman first presented this model publicly, in relatively attenuated form, in his second university sermon at Oxford, which he delivered in 1830.Footnote 53 It then resurfaced in 1831 in an unpublished manuscript which he intended to send to his brother Charles.Footnote 54 It subsequently reappeared in a short poem composed in 1833.Footnote 55
The best known expression of Newman’s Dispensation of Paganism theory appeared at around the same time, in the opening chapter of The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833). In short, Newman argued that the classical world had benefited from its own means of enlightenment from God. He went beyond the commonplace idea, well known since St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, that conscience acted as a conduit for transmitting the natural law from God to unregenerate humanity. Newman was prepared to argue that classical paganism contained an element of revealed religion. The truths that God had originally presented to the patriarchs of Genesis had survived down the years, albeit in a debased form.
As an example of such a truth, Newman put forward the Holy Trinity. He argued that this doctrine had been preserved among ancient pagan peoples:
It is unquestionable that, from very early times, traditions have been afloat through the world, attaching the notion of a Trinity, in some sense or other, to the First Cause. Not to mention the traces of this doctrine in the classical and the Indian mythologies, we detect it in the Magian hypothesis of a supreme and two subordinate antagonist deities, in Plutarch’s Trinity of God, matter, and the evil spirit, and in certain heresies in the first age of the Church.... Plato has adopted the same general notion.... On the whole, it seems reasonable to infer, that the heathen world possessed traditions too ancient to be rejected, and too sacred to be used in popular theology.Footnote 56
It is sometimes thought that Newman was taking something of a risk in framing classical antiquity in terms of a Dispensation of Paganism; and certainly, many other theologians would have disagreed with him.Footnote 57 But this way of thinking was not original to Newman. As he himself recognised, the theory of a Praeparatio evangelica went back to the Fathers and beyond;Footnote 58 he repeatedly mentions St Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus in this connection.Footnote 59 In more recent times, the Dispensation of Paganism idea had formed an identifiable strand in English Christian thought.Footnote 60 It neither started nor ended with Newman. An equally eminent Victorian, William Ewart Gladstone, adopted similar ideas in his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858). Gladstone posited that Zeus, Poseidon and Hades represented a dim memory of the Holy Trinity; and that the promised Messiah was represented in the Homeric epics by Athena and Apollo.
The Dispensation of Paganism model included a further important claim. The elements of primitive revelation which had descended from the patriarchs had been supplemented from time to time by specific supernatural visitations to individuals in ancient pagan societies:
….[T]here is nothing unreasonable in the notion, that there may have been heathen poets and sages, or sibyls again, in a certain extent divinely illuminated, and organs through whom religious and moral truth was conveyed to their countrymen; though their knowledge of the Power from whom the gift came, nay, and their perception of the gift as existing in themselves, may have been very faint or defective.Footnote 61
Such ideas seriously problematised the more critical conceptions of ancient paganism which we have seen elsewhere in Newman’s works.
Newman’s views in this regard remained remarkably consistent through his career. In a sermon from 1856, he can be found referring to classical paganism as containing ‘remnants of true religion’.Footnote 62 In an article from 1854, he even had a good word for the Roman Empire, which (he said) had brought both material prosperity and, in the case of some emperors, ‘wise and gentle government’.Footnote 63 A little later, preparatory notes for the Grammar of Assent dating from 1869 contain the comment that ‘[t]he Greek ethics is too like to the Christian to suppose it to be from accidental association’;Footnote 64 and the Dispensation of Paganism theory duly appeared in the Grammar itself. As late as 1882, Newman was explicitly standing by the views that he had expressed in The Arians half a century previously.Footnote 65
Perhaps the most rhetorically elaborated statement of Newman’s positive conception of the ancient world comes in The Idea of a University. The following memorable passage deserves quoting in full:
Anticipations or reminiscences of His glory haunt the mind of the self-sufficient sage, and of the pagan devotee; His writing is upon the wall, whether of the Indian fane, or of the porticoes of Greece. He introduces Himself, He all but concurs, according to His good pleasure, and in His selected season, in the issues of unbelief, superstition, and false worship, and He changes the character of acts by His overruling operation. He condescends, though He gives no sanction, to the altars and shrines of imposture, and He makes His own fiat the substitute for its sorceries. He speaks amid the incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel’s spirit in the witch’s cavern, prophesies of the Messias by the tongue of the Sibyl, forces Python [i.e. the Delphic oracle] to recognize His ministers, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams.Footnote 66
Little comment on this is required, save to note that Newman regarded even non-religious classical literature as being in some sense inspired. We will return to this point.
Remarkably, Newman was even prepared to concede that the ancient pagan world was in some ways superior to the Christian era. In a piece from 1841, he daringly reversed the Dispensation of Paganism argument. It was not (or not only) the case that paganism drew on true divine revelation; the true religion also acquired truth from ancient paganisms:
[The true religion] began in Chaldea, and then sojourned among the Canaanites, and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia, till she rested in her own land. Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre, and the wisdom of the East country, and the luxury of Sheba. Then she was carried away to Babylon, and wandered to the schools of Greece. And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High; ‘sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions;’ claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching. So far then from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world, and, in this sense, as in others, to suck the milk of the Gentiles and to suck the breast of kings.Footnote 67
In another place, Newman similarly seemed to acknowledge the alternative possibilities that ancient Judaism either borrowed from or had a common origin with pagan religions.Footnote 68
We are clearly in a different place here from the heathen bowing down to wood and stone. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the conceptions that we have been discussing are necessarily inconsistent. It is only fair to note that Newman himself saw no contradiction between the various approaches that he took to classical antiquity. In practice, the different rhetorical modes could be blended more or less seamlessly. This is shown by a remarkable passage from the Essay on Development. Newman is discussing how the Christian church borrowed from pagan forms and customs. He juxtaposes the conception of paganism as ‘demon-worship’ with the proposition that paganism drew on ‘primitive revelations’, and he adds in the idea that Christians should be willing to learn from élite classical philosophy:
Confiding then in the power of Christianity to resist the infection of evil, and to transmute the very instruments and appendages of demon-worship to an evangelical use, and feeling also that these usages had originally come from primitive revelations and from the instinct of nature, though they had been corrupted... and that they were moreover possessed of the very archetypes, of which paganism attempted the shadows; the rulers of the Church from early times were prepared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imitate, or sanction the existing rites and customs of the populace, as well as the philosophy of the educated class.Footnote 69
Newman and the classical legacy
So much for Newman’s different ways of looking at classical antiquity. What of his ideas for making use of the classical legacy?
As can perhaps be guessed by this point, his ideas in this area were not entirely straightforward. There is an element in Newman’s writings of Quid Athenae et Hierosolymis? For example, he criticised the humanistic classical scholarship of the Renaissance for its paganising character;Footnote 70 and he wrote, in relation to ancient Greek philosophy:
Even among the Athenians... intellectual amusement, not the discovery of Truth, was the principal object of their discussions. That we must thus account for the ensnaring questions and sophistical reasonings of which their disputations consisted, has been noticed by writers on Logic.Footnote 71
Yet Newman readily recognised that classical scholarship had become central to Christian education. St Paul was an educated man, and he quoted from Greek literature on several occasions.Footnote 72 The classical curriculum, deriving from Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, was absorbed into the Christian church. Newman drew attention to how men of God were also men of classical learning, although he also made clear that an addiction to pagan writers was considered a vice.Footnote 73
To some extent, Newman valued the classics on a purely literary and aesthetic level. This was, so to speak, his own Romanticising version of ‘Shelleyism’. We may refer here to an extraordinary panegyric to Virgil and his poetry which appears in the middle of an 1858 essay dealing with the Benedictine order. In a series of purple passages, Newman wishes that Virgil or his Christian equivalent had been able to write about the life of the monks. The passages are too long to quote in extenso, but they are heavily indebted to a Romantic sensibility which privileged the bucolic, the organic and the poetic over the urban, the artificial and the mundane. Interestingly, Newman also referenced the old theory that Virgil had predicted the incarnation in his fourth Eclogue: ‘That ethereal fire which enabled the Prince of Latin poets to take up the Sibyl’s strain, and to adumbrate the glories of a supernatural future....’Footnote 74
The Idea of a University contains a similar purplish panegyric to Virgil’s Greek predecessor Homer. Newman depicts Homer in Romantic terms as being at once ‘poor and a wanderer, and feeble in the flesh’ and yet ‘the first Apostle of Civilization’.Footnote 75 The passage in question is also noteworthy for another reason. Newman embraced the theory that Homer’s works had been assembled together in later times by the Athenian ruler Pisistratus. The theory of a Pisistratean recension had been the subject of discussion since the publication of the German scholar F. A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795, so Newman was evidently familiar with relatively technical debates in nineteenth-century Homeric scholarship. Not that this necessarily marked him out as unusual: other educated Victorians were also engaged in prosecuting this and other Homeric debates. We have already mentioned Gladstone in this connection; another example, from the proximity of Newman’s circle, would be Richard Hurrell Froude’s brother, the writer James Anthony Froude.Footnote 76
Going beyond the Romantic and the poetic, it is clear that Newman also valued the classical writers for the depth and quality of their thought. He acknowledged that ancient thinkers could be enlisted in the service of Catholic theology.Footnote 77 In the Apologia, he was willing to go so far as to say that ‘[t]he Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets’.Footnote 78 In his letters, he was even prepared to draw out Christian lessons from the witty and caustic Roman poet Horace.Footnote 79
This perspective is perhaps clearest in The Idea of a University, the principal work in which Newman gives attention to the subject of classical education. He ranges himself explicitly against other currents of opinion in Victorian society: both those who compare the classics unfavourably to the scriptures and those who disparage them in favour of utilitarian knowledge. He floats the idea that God raised up ancient pagan figures to be no less than the eternal teachers of mankind:
When we pass from Greece to Rome, we are met with the common remark, that Rome produced little that was original, but borrowed from Greece. It is true; Terence copied from Menander, Virgil from Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus; and Cicero professed merely to reproduce the philosophy of Greece. But, granting its truth ever so far, I do but take it as a proof of the sort of instinct which has guided the course of Civilization. The world was to have certain intellectual teachers, and no others; Homer and Aristotle, with the poets and philosophers who circle round them, were to be the schoolmasters of all generations, and therefore the Latins, falling into the law on which the world’s education was to be carried on, so added to the classical library as not to reverse or interfere with what had already been determined.... I think it very remarkable, too, how soon the Latin writers became text-books in the boys’ schools. Even to this day Shakespeare and Milton are not studied in our course of education; but the poems of Virgil and Horace, as those of Homer and the Greek authors in an earlier age, were in schoolboys’ satchels not much more than a hundred years after they were written.Footnote 80
Elsewhere in the same work, Newman refers to the Athenian tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles as teaching ‘majestic lessons concerning duty and religion, justice and providence’.Footnote 81 In Newman’s world-view, the Dispensation of Paganism is not closed: the ancients still have much to teach us.
The complexity of Newman’s engagement with classical thought may be shown through his attitude towards Aristotle. Aristotle was a noteworthy influence on Newman, both in relation to the substance of his philosophical thought and in relation to his ‘understanding of the harmony between logic and rhetoric’.Footnote 82 Newman’s involvement with Aristotle went back at least to his student days,Footnote 83 and it was filtered in part through John Keble, the founder of the Oxford movement – a significant point to which we will return.
As early as one of his encyclopaedia articles from 1824, Newman describes Aristotle as an ‘acute philosopher’ who furnishes ‘important aid’.Footnote 84 But his most significant early work on Aristotle was an 1829 essay on the Poetics. This curious piece is still quite well known among Newman scholars. Newman accepts Aristotle’s basic contention that poetry has as its subject matter the general rather than the particular: imaginative ideals rather than specific facts. Yet the essay stands out for two reasons. First, Newman is prepared to criticise Aristotle, on the grounds that he ‘treats dramatic composition more as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, than as a free and unfettered effusion of genius’;Footnote 85 a criticism which seems to derive from Keble.Footnote 86 Second, the essay is essentially a Romantic celebration of the ‘spirit of beauty’ and the ‘superhuman loveliness’ of poetry. Lines like, ‘the poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of beauty and perfection’ could just as well have been written by Shelley or Oscar Wilde.Footnote 87 Homer in particular is held up as ‘free, manly, simple, perspicuous, energetic, and varied’; he was ‘one who rhapsodized without deference to hearer or judge, in an age prior to the temptations which more or less prevailed over succeeding writers’.Footnote 88 This is reminiscent of Newman’s treatment of Homer years later in The Idea of a University.
Aristotle continued to feature in Newman’s thinking as he moved towards his conversion to Rome. It has been argued that his theory of the via media represented the application to ecclesiology of Aristotle’s ‘golden mean’.Footnote 89 The philosopher is mentioned several times in the Essay on Development: Newman refers to his conception of happiness, his famous depiction of the ‘great-souled’ man and his ideas about proof, and he does so in each case either neutrally or with approval.Footnote 90 In his Catholic period, Newman’s best known debt to Aristotle came from the latter’s concept of phronesis – the virtue of character which allows one to judge what is morally right or wrong in particular circumstances. This notion was a forerunner of Newman’s famous ‘illative sense’, as described in the Grammar of Assent. The illative sense essentially amounted to phronesis applied to intellectual matters rather than to moral behaviour.Footnote 91
It has been said that this borrowing of phronesis from Aristotle was ‘the most explicit and detailed appeal that [Newman] makes to the authority of another philosopher’.Footnote 92 But the borrowing was not direct, and it serves to illustrate the key point that Newman’s classical influences were filtered through his own life circumstances. Newman’s theory of the illative sense did not fully come to fruition until the Grammar was published in 1870, but its roots lay in the particular reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that John Keble had developed back in the 1820s. It was Keble who had impressed upon Newman (and Hurrell Froude and others) the notion that the ability to discern religious truth was something that was embedded in a virtuous character: it was not merely the result of exercising a mechanical reasoning faculty. Keble himself had been influenced by the eighteenth-century Anglican bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler, who had pioneered the importation of phronesis from ethics into epistemology.Footnote 93
In spite of his crucial influence, however, even Aristotle received ambivalent treatment from Newman. We have already alluded to his 1829 essay. In The Arians, Newman criticised Aristotle and identified him as an intellectual forefather of the Arian heresy.Footnote 94 In an 1840 piece, he referred to the Fathers’ criticisms of the philosopher, although without endorsing them.Footnote 95 Later, in The Idea of a University, he asserted that Aristotle had served as a dangerous pantheistic influence in the middle ages.Footnote 96
The essential ambivalence of Newman’s attitude towards Aristotle can be brought out in two sample quotations. The first is from The Idea of a University. Newman has just appealed to Aristotle’s distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘useful’ possessions, in the context of arguing that education is an inherent good (it is significant in itself that Newman goes to the classical world in seeking to defend this idea, as it is foreign to patristic Christian thoughtFootnote 97 ). The quotation neatly captures a freeze-frame of Newman on the horns of his dilemma:
Do not suppose, that in thus appealing to the ancients, I am throwing back the world two thousand years, and fettering Philosophy with the reasonings of paganism. While the world lasts, will Aristotle’s doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth. While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle....Footnote 98
The second quotation comes from an 1830 sermon. Newman is taking issue with Aristotle’s description of the ‘great-souled’ man, who represents a classical pagan rather than a Christian ideal of humanity:
An incidental and unstudied greatness of mind is said by [Aristotle] to mark the highest moral excellence, and truly; but the genuine nobleness of the virtuous mind, as shown in a superiority to common temptations, forbearance, generosity, self-respect, calm high-minded composure, is deformed by an arrogant contempt of others, a disregard of their feelings, and a harshness and repulsiveness of external manner. That is, the philosopher saw clearly the tendencies of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature; but when he attempted to delineate the ultimate complete consistent image of the virtuous man, how could he be expected to do this great thing, who had never seen Angel or Prophet, much less the Son of God manifested in the flesh?Footnote 99
In rhetorical terms, these quotations are constructed differently. The first places the disclaimer against paganism at the beginning, and then goes on to extol the ‘great Master’ in extravagant terms. The second begins by giving some praise to Aristotle, and then starts to mix in heavy criticism. Both quotations, however, are manifesting the same underlying dynamics. Once again, we are confronted with the essential ambivalence towards the classics that runs both through Newman’s oeuvre and through the culture in which he lived.
Newman’s ‘Callista’
Finally, let us take a look at Callista: A Tale of the Third Century. This was one of only two novels that Newman wrote, the other being Loss and Gain (1848), his famous narrative of a young Oxonian’s conversion to ‘Romanism’. Callista was a historical novel which was influenced by St Cyprian’s writings and the account of his martyrdom. As noted earlier, it is the only book that Newman wrote which is set entirely against the backdrop of classical pagan antiquity.
Callista was written in 1855, although it drew on some preliminary work dating back to 1848. It was published (anonymously) in 1856 and proved to be a commercial success. It is generally thought to have been written as a riposte to Charles Kingsley’s patristic-era novel Hypatia (1853), in which the early Catholics were depicted unflatteringly.Footnote 100 It was published at the suggestion of Cardinal Wiseman. Wiseman himself wrote his own early Christian novel, Fabiola (1854), which was probably also intended as a reply to Hypatia; both Callista and Fabiola were published in the same series, the Catholic Popular Library.Footnote 101 Interestingly, it has been suggested that Walter Pater, a significant figure for Victorian Neopaganism, wrote his 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean in response to Callista; and that Newman revised and re-released Callista in the same year as a consequence.Footnote 102
Going back to Kingsley, the claim that Callista is a Catholic rebuttal of Hypatia must be modified in two important ways. First, it wasn’t just Kingsley. Hypatia, Callista and Fabiola were all in dialogue with a much larger genre: over 200 novels about ancient Rome were published in English between 1820 and 1914, and they seem to have had a disproportionate tendency to focus on the early Christian period.Footnote 103 Second, Kingsley and Newman had more in common than is generally acknowledged. Their uses of antiquity were remarkably similar. Kingsley was concerned with the quest for true Christianity in a morally dubious international empire with a conventionally worldly religious establishment. So was Newman.
Callista is set in the town of Sicca Veneria: modern-day El Kef in Tunisia. It begins at the start of the Decian persecutions of the mid-third century AD. The backdrop to the story would have been very familiar to a Victorian audience. It is set in the territory of a great, wealthy imperial power which is at once both conservative and multicultural. In north Africa, the Romans mingle with Phoenician colonists and African natives. Religious diversity is the order of the day. There are the traditional Roman gods: Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, and so on. There are Semitic deities like Astarte (Newman drops oblique hints that her cult involves temple-prostitution). There is Greek philosophy. There is irreligion among the lower classes and the young. And there are strange Eastern cults – the Corybantes, the Phrygians, the Mithraists, the worshippers of Isis, and of course the Jews.
It is into this last category of strange Eastern cults that public opinion places Christianity, along with its heretical offspring, Gnosticism and Montanism. Nevertheless, a period of official toleration has allowed Christians to assimilate to some extent into local society. Laxity has set in; and, when persecution comes, many quickly abandon the faith.
The strange-Eastern-cults trope is not unique in Newman’s work: similar ideas are also to be found in the Essay on Development. In the Essay, Newman had pointed to Eastern mystery religions which spread through the Roman Empire – such as the cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras – as providential precursors of the Christian church. He was unadmiring of such movements, and his perspective was unabashedly Orientalist (‘oriental superstitions’). But he does say that their acceptance of notions such as guilt, self-mortification and the afterlife set them apart from the ‘gay and graceful’ mainstream of ancient polytheism.Footnote 104 It is perhaps unsurprising that Newman is less generous to such movements in Callista, which was written for a different purpose.
The principal male character of the novel is Agellius, a young farm administrator. He is a cradle Christian thanks to his late father. He does not regularly practise the faith, but he has imbibed enough of it to reject the paganism by which he is surrounded. An introspective youth with religious and intellectual inclinations, he has obvious similarities to Newman himself. The cast of characters also features several other members of Agellius’ family. His brother, Juba, is a proud, headstrong man who has lapsed from the faith. His mother, Gurta, is an evil and depraved witch. His uncle, Jucundus, is an ambivalent figure. He is not wicked like Gurta, but he is vulgar and ignorant. He owns a shop which sells pagan statues and trinkets, but he is quite unspiritual. A conservative Roman nationalist, he sees Christianity as a form of treason against the state.
The eponymous Callista is a pagan craftswoman who is employed in making idols for Jucundus. She is a fairly typical nineteenth-century literary heroine: a beautiful, clever, spiritually minded girl who has refined manners and is an accomplished musician. She could walk without too much difficulty into one of Jane Austen’s drawing rooms. And indeed, for a time, the novel looks like it is going to be a stereotypical love story, with Agellius getting the girl by the final chapter. (Interestingly, Agellius is disturbed when Jucundus suggests that he marry Callista in a customary union which allows for easy divorce: there is probably an allusion here to the debates over the introduction of divorce legislation which preceded the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857.)
The couple’s courtship goes nowhere. Callista rejects Agellius, and he briefly considers seeking out martyrdom in order to impress her. Then a plague of locusts arrives. A riot breaks out and turns into a pogrom against Christians. Callista helps to protect a priest called Caecilius – who turns out to be St Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage – and he entrusts a copy of St Luke’s Gospel to her. Caecilius is unexpectedly saved by Juba, but Callista is seized and imprisoned by the authorities. Order is restored as the rioters are massacred by Roman soldiers.
Jucundus now fears that Agellius is going to be arrested and executed. He uses his influence to have the youth committed to his personal custody in the hope that he will recover his senses. This plan goes awry when Gurta casts a spell on Juba and the latter, in the throes of demonic possession, sets Agellius free. Luckily for him, Agellius manages to reach a secret Christian place of refuge.
Callista now comes to be tried before the magistrates. Although she is still not yet a Christian, she has ceased to be a pagan and is not prepared to sacrifice to the gods of the state. She is offered the chance of signing a false statement to the effect that she has duly sacrificed, but she refuses. As Newman points out, this reflects the church’s judgment on the real-life libellatici. She is finally converted when she reads the copy of St Luke’s Gospel which Caecilius gave to her. In a scene which owes more to nineteenth-century apologetics than to ancient culture, she is won over by the verisimilitude of the scriptural text:
This is no poet’s dream; it is the delineation of a real individual. There is too much truth and nature, and life and exactness about it, to be anything else.Footnote 105
Caecilius manages to give Callista the sacraments of baptism, confession and the Eucharist. She has a dream-vision of Christ; refuses a final opportunity to commit suicide; and then submits to torture and execution. Agellius and other Christians rescue her body. Juba is exorcised of Gurta’s sorcery and eventually returns to Christianity. Agellius becomes a bishop and is martyred in a later persecution. He is entombed alongside Callista: and that is how the couple end the story together.
The African Christians in the novel patently stand for the Catholics of Newman’s time. Their Catholicity is absolutely unmistakable. They practise confession, venerate the Virgin Mary and celebrate Mass with vestments and incense. Their clerics are priests who are called ‘father’, and they look to the see of Rome as their highest authority. At one point, Newman explicitly compares the African Christians’ willingness to display the cross on their private premises with Victorian Catholics’ willingness to display the crucifix.Footnote 106 Yet they are unfairly maligned, accused of being sorcerers and killers of children.
The hostile conception of ancient paganism as essentially Satanic is much more prominent in the novel than it is in most of Newman’s other writings. After all, Newman was writing a work of mass-market fiction rather than one of philosophical reflection. Here, for example, is his description of the city of Sicca, adorned as it was with idols:
Well is it for us, dear reader, that we in this age do not experience – nay, a blessed thing that we cannot even frame to ourselves in imagination – the actual details of evil which hung as an atmosphere over the cities of Pagan Rome.... Unfortunate Agellius! what takes you into the city this morning? Doubtless some urgent, compulsive duty; otherwise you would not surely be threading its lanes or taking the circuit of its porticoes, amid sights which now shock and now allure; fearful sights – not here and there, but on the stateliest structures and in the meanest hovels, in public offices and private houses, in central spots and at the corners of the streets, in bazaars and shops and house-doors, in the rudest workmanship and in the highest art, in letters or in emblems or in paintings – the insignia and the pomp of Satan and of Belial, of a reign of corruption and a revel of idolatry which you can neither endure nor escape.Footnote 107
It is worth contrasting this grim vision with a description of classical Athens that Newman penned in a near-contemporaneous publication. In the latter case, he was happy to extol the pagan city in fulsome terms:
Hither, then, as to a sort of ideal land, where all archetypes of the great and the fair were found in substantial being, and all departments of truth explored, and all diversities of intellectual power exhibited, where taste and philosophy were majestically enthroned as in a royal court, where there was no sovereignty but that of mind, and no nobility but that of genius, where professors were rulers, and princes did homage, hither flocked continually from the very corners of the orbis terrarum, the many-tongued generation, just rising, or just risen into manhood, in order to gain wisdom.Footnote 108
Admittedly, some pages later Newman excused himself and provided a disclaimer in which he referred to the ‘many deformities’ of the ‘heathen city’.Footnote 109 Even so, Callista is written in quite a different rhetorical gear.
It is worth mentioning in this context Newman’s description of the grisly fate of a lapsed Christian. During the riot in the town, the pagan mob forces this man to worship an idol, an ass and the genius of the Emperor. But, as is often the case with mobs, this only left a greater price to be paid. The bloodthirsty townspeople trampled the unfortunate man to death and ‘sent him to the powers below, to whom he had just before been making his profession’.Footnote 110 This is not the Dispensation of Paganism model: it is paganism as literally demonic. Moreover, Gurta is a deliberately troubling figure. Her witchcraft seems to be a kind of end point of paganism, the destination to which classical culture leads, descending via Jucundus’ respectable conservatism and the common people’s festivals of Astarte. She does what the Christians are falsely accused of. She really does use sorcery; she really does kill children.
Newman is too tasteful to make his depiction of ancient religious culture lurid, but it can lapse into coloured Gothic-Romantic prose. Take the following passage, for instance:
There... was a choir of Bacchanals, ready at a moment with songs as noisy as they were unutterable. And there was the priest of the Punic Saturn, the child-devourer, a sort of Moloch, to whom the martyrdom of Christians was a sacred rite; he and all his attendants in fiery-coloured garments, as became a sanguinary religion. And there, moreover, was a band of fanatics, devotees of Cybele or of the Syrian goddess, if indeed the two rites were distinct. They were bedizened with ribbons and rags of various colours, and smeared over with paint. They had long hair like women, and turbans on their heads.... Some of them were playing the fife, others clashing cymbals, others danced, others yelled, others rolled their heads, and others flogged themselves.Footnote 111
It is interesting to note that this passage, which shows significant technical knowledge of ancient religious practices, neatly mixes two of Newman’s stock ideas: paganism as demonic and paganism as sensuous and hedonistic. In addition, of course, there is the Orientalist motif of Eastern cults as exotic and dangerous.
In other parts of the book, Newman is more explicit in presenting paganism as a religion of this life, focused on the tangible works of nature and on material pleasures. This is what Jucundus has to say in this connection:
....[C]an truth pour me out a cup of melilotus? can truth crown me with flowers? can it sing to me? can it bring Glyceris to me? drop gold into my girdle? or cool my brows when fever visits me? Can truth give me a handsome suburban with some five hundred slaves, or raise me to the duumvirate? Let it do this, and I will worship it.... Eat, drink, and be merry, that’s my philosophy, that’s my religion; and I know no better. To-day is ours, to-morrow is our children’s.Footnote 112
In spite of the Pauline ‘eat, drink...’ language, this passage has a Shelleyan Neopagan tinge to it. Jucundus is a hard-headed businessman, but he is in danger of lapsing here into the language of a Victorian aesthetic poet. It is also significant that Newman later makes specific reference to Pan, whom he calls a ‘hideous brutal god’. Pan was a minor deity in the ancient world, but he was a figure of great significance to nineteenth-century Neopaganism.Footnote 113 Once again, Newman was talking both to and about his own society.
The whole novel, indeed, is a prime example of the use of classical pagan antiquity as a means of mounting a critique of contemporary English culture.Footnote 114 It is not difficult to equate the respectable, comfortable Roman establishment with the Anglican establishment of Victorian England. Newman displays a characteristic lack of sympathy for the form of religion that goes together with bourgeois conservatism and patriotic imperialism. We may quote from a harangue that Jucundus delivers to Agellius:
The State is taking up the matter, Rome herself, thank the gods!... Great Rome is now at length in earnest, my boy, which she ought to have been a long time back, before you were born....
Take your treason elsewhere.... This accursed obstinacy! I say by this day five years there will not be a single ragamuffin Christian in the whole Roman world.... Ye gods! Rome, Rome has swept from the earth by her very breath conspiracies, confederacies, plots against her, without ever failing; she will do so now with this contemptible, Jew-begotten foe.Footnote 115
The deep structures of Newman’s Africa are the same as those of Newman’s England. A despised, but pure and sincere, minority faith is oppressed by a conservative nationalistic establishment. All around, the culture appears to be lapsing into folly and unbelief as a spiritual supermarket of exotic sects proliferates. It is significant that Newman at one point speaks of Roman Christians who ‘conformed’ to official paganism.Footnote 116 This was, of course, the standard term used for non-Anglicans who chose to submit to the Church of England.
This leads us on to a final point which we have alluded to but which has not yet been sufficiently recognised in the secondary literature. In using their early Christian novels to critique contemporary English culture, the great adversaries Newman and Kingsley were in fact ad idem. Callista and Hypatia are both anti-Victorian books. They are concerned with the search for true faith in the gaps between proliferating religious diversity and the dead hand of the establishment. Naturally, Newman found his truth in Catholicism and Kingsley found his in Protestantism; but the truly interesting fact about the two men’s exchange of novels is that they had more in common than they were willing to admit. The essential similarity of Hypatia and Callista in their conceptions and uses of classical antiquity is a subject that would repay further study.
It will be clear by now that John Henry Newman viewed the world of classical Greece and Rome through a set of distinct and alternating lenses. The tensions and ambivalences in his picture of antiquity reflect the influences of the wider society around him, as it attempted to reconcile its increasingly embattled Christian commitment with its celebration of classical learning, against the backdrop of post-Enlightenment secularism and insurgent Neopaganism. The only simple generalisation that can be made about Newman’s engagement with the classics is that it constituted him squarely as a man of his times.
