This is a challenging and ambitious study of a largely unexplored aspect of the theology of John Henry Newman, his ‘Englishness’. Jacob Phillips takes as his starting point the third of Newman’s seven notes or tests of authentic doctrinal developments of Christianity, ‘the power of assimilation’. ‘Englishness’ as deployed in this study is less a reference to Newman’s patriotism or even prose style, though both are mentioned. Phillips probes further, using the concept as an interpretative tool for understanding Newman’s theology more broadly, both as a Tractarian Anglican and a Roman Catholic. The great merit of this study is its pointing the way to a new and original interpretation of Newman’s personal understanding of development of doctrine. Phillips shows how Newman displayed through his writings and actions the assimilative power of Catholicism as operative in nineteenth-century England, a topic of great interest and relevance to readers of this journal. To explore the influence of an English ‘national character’ on his writings is timely given that, as the author points out, ‘English nationhood, ethnicity and identity are perhaps more fraught with controversy than ever before, at least in the Academy’. Phillips is open and clear about why today such aspects of the national character which he selects might seem like ‘arbitrary quirks’ (p. 17). As contextual background, he gives numerous examples of nineteenth-century usage of the word ‘English’ and why it can be preferred to that of ‘British’. He also explains what he means by ‘sensibility’ and ‘English sensibility’.

Focusing on the encounter between Newman’s Tractarianism and then Catholicism and his ‘Englishness’, Phillips traces three or four key constituent elements which he identifies as ‘Englishness’ in the trajectory of Newman’s theology’ theology—compromise, moderation, reserve, and empiricism. Phillips judges the various phases in Newman’s lifelong religious journey and analyses them in terms of these selected attributes. However, while attention is bestowed on the Tractarian Newman, and the Roman Catholic Newman, the Evangelical Newman is overlooked. Newman’s major works selected by Phillips’ application of his criteria of ‘Englishness’ include the Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), the Plain and Parochial Sermons, the events of 1841 (Tract 90), the Second Spring (1852), the Apologia and the Kingsley controversy (1864) and the Grammar of Assent (1870). The strongest and most persuasive part of his study focuses on the mature Catholic Newman. Phillips echoes John Cornwell’s argument that Newman had an imaginative apprehension of the Church that is peculiarly English and alien to scholastic and Roman ways of thinking about development’, though even this viewpoint has been challenged in recent Newman scholarship (by Charles Shea, Stephen Morgan, Benjamin King and Kenneth Parker). Philipps concludes with an impressive and insightful investigation of those elements of his Englishness that were absorbed and assimilated into his Catholic theology. Nonetheless in the work as a whole, there would have been benefit in considering evolving contexts in which Newman wrote each of these works (not least between the Anglican and Catholic Newman). As a result ‘Englishness’ as an explanatory interpretative cannot easily be sustained and becomes a slippery concept.

Aware as he is of the problems inherent in his methodology and its consequent tensions, both of which he addresses, the author makes some demands on the reader. Although complex, his argument is certainly thought-provoking. Newman’s writings are clear, if albeit subtle and nuanced, but Phillips’ analysis sometimes obscures more than it illuminates and satisfactorily explains. His argument is intricate and potentially reductionist in places. Newman’s subtleties of thought cannot be easily or satisfactorily ‘shoe-horned’ into the categories of ‘Englishness’ applied by the author. For example, it seems something of a misrepresentation to regard Newman’s Tractarian concept of the ‘via media’ as evidence of any ‘instinct for compromise’ and desire for a mere moderating between extremes, albeit between the rival poles of Rome and Geneva which Newman set up as binary opposites to ‘Anglicanism’ in his Prophetical Office of the Church. On the contrary, for Newman, the via media in itself symbolised a determined exclusivity rather than moderation. It is of course true that Newman was reliant on the testimony of the Caroline divines for his emphasis on the via media but he only called them our ‘English divines’ to highlight the Anglican case against Rome and ‘Romanism’. Moreover, as this reviewer has argued elsewhere, moderation was not the main message which he imbibed from those divines. In fact, Newman eventually lost faith in those divines precisely because they did not go ‘far enough’ for his purposes by the early-1840s. They were held in esteem by him for a season and only insofar as they upheld the fuller teaching of the early Church. In short, the via media for Newman was part of his Tractarian campaign to recover and reconstruct historic traditional Anglicanism rooted in apostolic order, the early Fathers and primitive Christianity. As Christopher Dawson once put it, it was more akin to a ‘via ultima’ – a steep and narrow way, or as Stephen Morgan recently has perceptively suggested, it was not a mere via negativa’.

Likewise, it seems mistaken to equate the notion of English cultural reticence in behaviour, character and ‘sensibility’ (if that is supposed to denote a lack of emotion and dislike of effusive or florid religious expression) with Newman’s Tractarian theological principle of reserve in communicating religious knowledge. The principle or doctrine of reserve in this sense was drawn from the Fathers and early Church, with its attendant notion of ‘economy’. Moreover, the author seems rather wide of the mark in linking ‘reserve’ along with the via media with an ‘instinct for compromise’ or moderation between extremes (p. 41). On the other hand, the author himself seems aware of the limits inherent in transmuting cultural values and states of mind into theological attributes. He also sensibly recognises that Newman was not only ‘proximate to his English context but in some respects distant from it as well (p. 40). Nonetheless, for all such important and well-made qualifications, Phillips’ approach unsurprisingly leads to contradictions, not so much in Newman’s thought but ones of the author’s own making. For example, he recognises that his caricature of the Oxford Movement in ‘quintessentially English’ terms, as one of ‘Oxford gentlemen sitting at high table and in quire, or taking dignified constitutionals alongside the Isis to discuss the finer points of obscure patristic controversies’ (p. 6), fails to match the markedly and avowedly counter-cultural controversial agenda of the Tractarians. This early Tractarian period represented Newman’s avowedly ‘fierce’ phase, well represented by Newman’s sermon of December 1830, (‘Christ will come in a wicked age’) in which he indicted the whole of English culture along these lines. ‘Do not we constantly hear mention made of our glorious far spreading empire on which the sun never sets’ he observed, and ‘do we not think ourselves wise, sagacious, enlightened, dexterous, beyond all former ages?’ Newman was here rejecting key tenets of England’s cultural consensus as part of his assault on liberalism and its resulting religious indifference and relativism. In another sermon, in August 1832, ‘The Religion of the Day’, he claimed that the attitude of too many contemporary Englishmen was one of ‘worldly optimism’ on account of the popular adulation of English political and military power and prestige, material, economic and scientific progress and achievements. Phillips himself later acknowledges this point when discussing Newman’s Second Spring sermon of 1852 as a Roman Catholic. In that later context, Phillips states that ‘Newman argues that the “presumptive nature of the English has led them to usurp the place of God with the place of culture”’ (p. 90). In fact, as early as his Tractarian period sermon Newman had already fastened on those aspects of what the author would regard as ‘Englishness’ which were in danger of becoming a substitute religion or ‘a religion of the world’. It was the Tractarian Newman who famously concluded ‘that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be’.

A key dimension of the Oxford Movement was to prioritise allegiance to, and the claims of, the wider once undivided Church over the national Church of England as an establishment. The Tractarian Newman was inspired not by the ‘Englishness’ of the established church but its rootedness in antiquity. In short, as Phillips recognises, Newman was alive to the threat of the Church ‘being subsumed by its English identity’ (p. 35). Moreover, when it came to the ideals of and the practice of sanctity and the pursuit of holiness, even the Anglican Newman came to find English exemplars to be sadly wanting when compared to continental Roman Catholic models. For Newman, even the most saintly exemplars among the Caroline and later English divines, Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Ken, and Thomas Wilson were no match for their continental counterparts. Newman’s lifelong Anglican friend, R.W. Church, Dean of St Paul’s, observed why, as a consequence, Newman lost faith in the Church of England:

‘it [the Church of England] had little taste for the higher forms of the saintly ideal; it wanted the austere and high-strung virtues; it was contended for the most part, with the domestic type of excellence, in which goodness merged itself in the business and interests of the common world, and working in them, took no care to disengage or mark itself off, as something distinct from them and above them’.

In short, it would seem from this that he found the ‘Englishness’ of Anglican spirituality wanting.

When it comes to the last of the attributes of Newman’s ‘Englishness’, the author appears to be on strong ground, as he sees evidence of it in Newman’s prioritizing of ‘action over ideas’ in an emphasis on Christian obedience, as in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (p. 7). However, while Newman drew on the empirical philosophical tradition of Locke and Hulme, he was also very well versed in the dominant Aristotelian philosophy at Oxford and the neo-Platonic influence emanating from the Greek Fathers.

In conclusion, this comprehensive and highly original study can be commended as a seminal contribution to Newman studies. Its strength is as a work of reference and stimulus to further scholarship. It draws out Newman’s coalescences and corrections to English sensibilities and intellectual fashions in a way that is (in the best sense) exhaustive.