2. Turner’s Newman

When Turner drove his wedge between the Newman of the Apologia and the Newman of history, he did so at the point where it hurt most for many Catholic Newman scholars. He challenged Newman’s claim that his core purpose in life had been to fight religious liberalism. Instead, Turner argued, the Anglican Newman’s real target had been evangelicalism. The professed anti-liberalism of the Newman of the Apologia was meant to conceal ‘his antipathy as the Newman of Oriel and St. Mary’s to evangelical Protestantism’.Footnote ¹⁰ The Apologia was Newman’s conscious effort to make his story and person relevant to the religious debates of the 1860s by recasting his outdated anti-evangelicalism as a more fashionable anti-liberalism.Footnote ¹¹ Newman’s claim in the Apologia that his ‘battle was with liberalism’ was a ruse: a clever and highly successful attempt to make his legacy more enduring.

In my book An Evangelical Adrift: The Making of John Henry Newman’s Theology, I have argued on strictly historical grounds that Turner’s attempt at revisionism is misguided.Footnote ¹² Put simply, Turner makes two valid observations but draws the wrong conclusion. The two things he highlights correctly are, first, that Newman turned against evangelical religion around 1830, both privately and publicly, and secondly, that the issue of evangelicalism is almost completely absent from the Apologia, which focuses on liberalism instead. These two observations involve two historical puzzles. The first concerns Newman’s turn against evangelical religion: how and why did it come about? The second concerns the Apologia: why all the talk of liberalism?

Turner’s answer to the first puzzle is meagre. Instead of focusing on the theological content of Newman’s change, Turner elaborates on the psychological forces that supposedly drove it.Footnote ¹³ ‘Energized by anger, disappointment, and frustration’ over a series of conflicts with his radical evangelical brother Francis, Newman supposedly ‘lifted the private battles located in his family to a universal plane of criticism’.Footnote ¹⁴ Simply put, Turner argues that Newman began to preach the importance of religious obedience at St Mary’s, because Frank would not listen to him at home.

From a historian’s point of view, the main problem with this explanation is not Turner’s speculative psychologizing, but the fact that he overlooked or ignored all the sources that account for Newman’s shift in theological terms. Except for correspondence and journal entries, Turner ignores nearly all of Newman’s writing prior to 1830. He cites none of his published articles, nor any of his many manuscript papers, and he uses only two out of more than two hundred sermons.Footnote ¹⁵ Surely, one cannot plausibly claim, as Turner does, that ‘contingency after contingency determined the emergence of Newman’s religious character and thought’, without consulting the overwhelming majority of relevant sources.Footnote ¹⁶ If one does look at the sources, a very different picture emerges. Newman’s change of view was the product of careful and consistent theological reasoning and reflection, shaped, but certainly not determined, by contingent factors. More importantly, anti-liberalism was part and parcel of this development.

Newman developed his idea of liberalism independently from but coincident with his qualms about evangelicalism, in response to the political and ecclesial zeal for reform in the late 1820s and early 1830s.Footnote ¹⁷ Soon, the two developments began to converge. Newman discovered a tendency toward liberalism in much of the Protestant theology of his day, and especially in evangelical religion. That he did so is not surprising at all. Newman was bound to make this discovery, because his own evangelical theology in the mid-1820s had tended that way. What he calls his ‘drift toward liberalism’ in the Apologia was only a modification of an evangelical theology that was congenial to liberalism or even invited it.Footnote ¹⁸ This explains our second historical puzzle. The Apologia’s focus on liberalism is not a red herring, as Turner has it. There is nothing disingenuous about it. Newman is merely simplifying things. Yes, he attacked evangelicalism as a Tractarian. And yes, he does not say much about it in the Apologia. But there is good reason for the omission. The Tractarian Newman critiqued evangelicalism, not for its own sake, but because it tended toward the liberalism that was his main target all along.

3. Short’s Newman

The answer to Turner I have just formulated is that of a historian. It justifies, in strictly historical terms, the core contention of Newman himself and of supposedly hagiographic Catholic Newman scholars that Newman’s battle was with liberalism. In this concrete case, the Newman of Faith stands vindicated by the Newman of History. But deeper questions about the relationship between the Newman of Faith and the Newman of History remain. To approach them, I will briefly consider an insightful critique of my book, written by the New York Newmanist, Edward Short.Footnote ¹⁹

Short agrees with most of my argument, and he is generous in his praise, but he has methodological qualms. What he likes is that I show throughout that Newman’s chief aim is to resist liberalism. What he does not like is how I show it: by applying the strict rules of historical criticism. I have worked strictly chronologically, used the earliest possible sources (first editions, or manuscripts where available), and have tried to avoid interpreting the earlier Newman by the later. This was a conscious choice. I believed Turner’s challenge ought to be met on strictly historical (Short would say historicist) grounds, and I had no wish to be a hagiographer. I stand by that choice, but Short points out its limits. He argues that retrospection – interpreting the earlier by the later – is indispensable for ‘any truly incisive handling of intellectual history’.Footnote ²⁰ He cites Chesterton to highlight the shortcomings of rigidly adhering to chronology. Because ‘the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes’, Chesterton writes, ‘no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness for anachronism’. Thus, ‘Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin’.Footnote ²¹

Short’s overarching point, it seems to me, is that in writing history you need a sense of the whole to do justice to the parts; some inkling of the arc of history to see the import of individual periods or events. But to discern the bent of history, or the bent of a life such as Newman’s, is not a neutral enterprise. To say that Newman was not an ‘evangelical adrift’ but ‘a disappointed Anglican hungry for Catholic truth’, as Short does, obviously presupposes the firm faith conviction that Newman’s conversion to Catholicism was right. And this is, of course, exactly what Short thinks: if the arc of Newman’s development was toward ‘the one true fold of the Redeemer’, this should inform a historical study of the period that went before.Footnote ²²

Such a teleological reading of Newman’s life is precisely what historians such as Turner and Skinner deride as unhistorical. Only by ‘eschewing the resort to Providence and setting aside the hagiographic legacy, can a reader of the early twenty-first century understand Newman’s Apologia’, Turner writes.Footnote ²³ Skinner approvingly cites Herbert Butterfield: ‘The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.’Footnote ²⁴ To think otherwise – as hagiographical Newman scholars do – jeopardizes ‘the legitimacy and remit of historical inquiry itself’.Footnote ²⁵ This, then, is the issue when it comes to the Newman of History and the Newman of Faith. Can the Catholic tradition function legitimately as the whole in which Newman’s life and work receive their true place? Or does this mean the end of history as a credible form of academic inquiry?

4. Faith, memory, and history

To probe these questions, let me begin with faith. Even without any formal study of history, faith has an integral relationship to the past. This insight is expressed well in Lumen Fidei, the first encyclical that had the name of Pope Francis attached to it. Attached, because this text on faith was written by and large by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, to complete his trilogy on the theological virtues. Faith, Pope Benedict argues, is intimately tied up with collective memory. ‘Self-knowledge’, he writes,

This is said of Jesus, but it also applies to Newman, who is now remembered as a saint and a universal doctor.

It should be obvious that the remembering Pope Benedict speaks of is not quite, perhaps not at all, what is called doing history in modern academic institutions. The Church’s memory of Jesus is not the critical historical reconstruction of a marginal Jew from Galilee, but the remembrance, especially in the Eucharist, of the crucified and risen Christ, the Son of God, God himself. There is nothing specifically Catholic, or even religious, about the distinction between remembrance and historiography. Scholars have emphasized for decades that memory and history are distinct modes of relating to the past.Footnote ²⁷ One of the distinction’s pioneers, the French historian Pierre Nora, even considers memory and history as near opposites.

Nora describes memory as a living process, in which societies or groups spontaneously retain certain recollections as significant within an ever-evolving tradition. Memory is unreflexive. History, by contrast, is reflexive. It is a work of reconstruction and representation, which demands critical distance and analysis. Memory is deeply textured, elevating certain events, persons or places to sacred status, while history is flat: it brings everything down to the profane level of indifferent causal sequences. ‘History’, Nora writes, ‘binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative’.Footnote ²⁸

To realize the difference, consider how a family relates to its past. What a family spontaneously retains in memory – its funny moments, its tragedies – would correspond only very partially with what a disinterested historian would write if asked to chronicle its life. Small, seemingly unimportant facts or events somehow become canonical, even foundational, in the living memory of a family in ways that no historian could trace or explain. And no historian is needed to ensure they are remembered.

The memory of a people is another example. Coincident with Nora, the Jewish-American historian, Yosef Yerushalmi, worked out a similar distinction between memory and history.Footnote ²⁹ In his famous book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yerushalmi argues that the Jewish people are perhaps of all peoples the most deeply anchored in the past. Their religion is one of remembrance. The duty to remember (zakhor) is even an explicit divine command. And yet historic Jewries looked with suspicion on the writing of history. Barring a few half-hearted attempts at historiography in the sixteenth century, in the wake of the Jewish expulsion from Spain, Jews before the nineteenth century had no interest in tracing what had happened to them after Biblical times. And yet, for all those centuries, their lives revolved around the ritual remembrance of God’s past action. Clearly, for them, history and memory did not coincide.

Now, the Jewish people are not the Catholic Church. Christianity has always had its ecclesiastical historians. Some exegetes have argued that the Gospels are antique biographies and that Acts is a work of history in the genre of Thucydides and Polybius.Footnote ³⁰ But true as that may be, it is not the historiography of modern academic institutions. It is sacred history, and in academic history, not much is really sacred. Besides, even in the Church, history and memory do not coincide. No one would mistake the works of Eusebius or Bede for the Roman Canon. Let us, then, for this article, think of the Catholic tradition as a form of memory in Nora’s and Yerushalmi’s sense of the word, that is, as distinct from the writing of history.Footnote ³¹ Whatever else the merits of the distinction are, it certainly helps to explain our Newman-conundrum.

For many Catholics, Newman is not just an object of historical representation but a person who is, and is to be, remembered within the great memory-tradition of the Church. Within this living memory, and through the vicissitudes of ecclesial life, different aspects of Newman’s life and thought have spontaneously acquired special significance. Their meaning and import are not enclosed by the contemporaneous horizon of Victorian religion and culture. A Catholic might even go so far as to say that the significance they acquire within the Church’s life is their true meaning. Just as he might say that the true arc of Newman’s shedding of evangelicalism was not his adoption of Tractarian views, but his conversion to Rome.Footnote ³² Whatever one might think of the legitimacy of such a way of remembering, it certainly seems at play in what Turner derisively calls the ‘hagiographic legacy’ of Newman studies, but what could also be called the Catholic memory of Newman.

Examples abound, but the historic neglect of Newman’s evangelical period is a particularly revealing instance. In the Apologia, Newman wrote 30 pages about his life before 1833 and 270 about the twelve years that followed. Given that he was defending himself against Charles Kingsley’s attack on his integrity as an Anglican, this made perfect sense. He was on trial for his Tractarian opinions. What came before only served to set the stage. But later biographers replicated the procedure without the excuse. Wilfrid Ward could still appeal to Newman’s express wishes, but even Charles Dessain spends less than one-tenth of his biography on what he rather vacuously titles ‘The First Thirty Years’.Footnote ³³ The ratio is similar in the big biographies by Meriol Trevor and Ian Ker.Footnote ³⁴ Even a biographer as conversant with the full range of sources as Maisie Ward does not, by her own admission, know what to do with Newman’s evangelical writings.Footnote ³⁵ It was too foreign a world for a Catholic like her.

In English, the only substantive study on Newman’s evangelical theology used to be Thomas Sheridan’s Newman on Justification, published in 1967. Sheridan made use of nearly all the key sources, but his story is tailored to explaining how Newman came to hold the right, Catholic view in his Lectures on Justification.Footnote ³⁶ Again, this is Catholic memory at work. In fact, I, too, would not have studied Newman’s evangelical theology if Turner’s revisionist biography had not turned the spotlight on Newman’s relationship to evangelicalism. After all, in later life, Newman himself downplayed the importance and even the reality of his ever having been an evangelical, and the older he got, the less important it seemed to him. Many of his evangelical convictions, he thought, firm though they had seemed, had not been genuine certitudes.Footnote ³⁷ He had shed them along the way, as the snake does his skin, without pain or loss. If this is the picture Saint John Henry Newman draws of the arc of his religious life, why should Catholics bother to remember what he deemed safe to neglect?

5. Newman and his Victorian critics

Another reason why mainline Newman scholars have tended to adopt Newman’s perspective without too much critical acumen is that he always seemed in need of defenders. Newman was always a contested figure, both as an Anglican and as a Catholic. There is no other Victorian intellectual whose sincerity was discussed so extensively, so publicly and with such consistently varied outcomes as Newman’s.Footnote ³⁸ When he was an Anglican, many considered him a kind of Popish secret agent who was undermining the Church of England from within. When he was a Catholic, many considered him a covert liberal, who was now undermining the Church of Rome from within. Newman himself tried to dispel the first myth in the Apologia. Wilfrid Ward, Newman’s first official biographer, tried to take care of the second myth. Neither was completely successful.

Already in 1892, Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote in his The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman that the Apologia,

But the work of the Anglican Abbott, who by his own admission had little sympathy for Newman, was ignored in Catholic Newman studies. Even before, reviews of the Apologia had been mixed.Footnote ⁴⁰ Many prominent Victorians retained unfavourable views, if not of Newman’s personal honesty, then at least of his intellectual integrity. The picture of Newman as a sceptic at heart, who embraced an outright superstition for solace, and spent the rest of his days fabricating ingenious arguments for that irrational conclusion was painted in a hundred different ways from the height of the Tractarian Movement down to Newman’s death and beyond.Footnote ⁴¹

In Catholic Newman studies, this image has long been forgotten. The last scholar to address the Victorian critiques in any depth was Wilfrid Ward – himself a late-Victorian – in his 1914 Lowell Lectures.Footnote ⁴² I still remember my surprise when stumbling upon all these critics as a graduate student, wondering why no Catholic Newman scholar had bothered to write about them: eminent Victorians who engaged intelligently with Newman’s work, and who voiced criticisms that were widely shared among Newman’s contemporaries.Footnote ⁴³ But perhaps such forgetting is to be expected within a living tradition whose main concern is not the accurate representation of Victorian religion and culture or even of Newman’s place in it. In the first half of the twentieth century, Catholic Newman scholars had bigger fish to fry. The Victorian critiques surfaced for the last time in some of Newman’s modernist interpreters, such as Henri Brémond and George Tyrrell. In the concerted effort to suppress modernism and salvage Newman from its taint, they fell into oblivion.

As the instance of modernism suggests, the development of an allegedly hagiographic tradition was not just a matter of Catholics siding with Newman against Victorian Protestants and agnostics. Modernists and anti-modernists also had an intra-Catholic tug of war over what Newman really taught. A typical example is the introduction to Newman’s life and work that Erich Przywara published along with Otto Karrer’s German Newman translations. The main section, on Newman’s fundamental concepts (Grundbegriffe), is almost entirely concerned with combating modernist interpretations of Newman’s basic ideas.Footnote ⁴⁴ The point here is not to criticize Przywara’s interpretation of Newman. Quite the contrary. I merely want to show that Newman always needed partisans, because his status was continually contested. Przywara was more concerned with salvaging Newman for present-day Catholic theology than with detached historical contextualization, and this is precisely what is to be expected within a living tradition.

6. The Newman legend

Newman scholars not only defended Newman against Protestants and agnostics but also against his Catholic critics: ultramontanists, such Cardinal Henry Manning and William George Ward in England, or Monsignor George Talbot in Rome, who accused Newman of siding with liberal Catholics. Lytton Strachey’s impish portrait of Manning in Eminent Victorians is a paradoxical witness to this tendency.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Strachey was as far from being a Catholic as one can be. Yet, the way he pitched a sensitive, otherworldly Newman against a domineering and crafty Manning was very much indebted to his Catholic sources, especially to Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning. Of course it was a caricature. Strachey gloried in juxtaposing descriptions of Manning’s most conniving schemes with his most pious appeals to the workings of the Holy Spirit. But Purcell offered ample material for the caricature.Footnote ⁴⁶ Purcell himself was not, perhaps, representative of the state of Newman scholarship of his day, but the fact remains that long before Turner or Skinner, people complained about the hagiographic character of Catholic Newman studies. Even Catholics.

Take, for instance, the discussions raised by the publication of the American edition of Newman’s Autobiographical Writings in 1957.Footnote ⁴⁷ No one remembers the controversy, but it would be worth excavating if someone wished to chronicle Newman’s path to sainthood. Here, I can offer only the briefest of outlines. The debate began with an article in the American Ecclesiastical Review by its editor, Joseph Clifford Fenton, then a professor at the Catholic University of America and a trusted adviser to the Holy Office.Footnote ⁴⁸ ‘Some Newman Autobiographical Sketches and the Newman Legend’, it was titled. Although no two men could be further apart, there is something of Strachey’s wit in Fenton’s review. Newman himself had not liked the journal now posthumously published in the Autobiographical Writings. ‘I am dissatisfied with the whole of this book’, he had written on the manuscript. ‘It is more or less a complaint from one end to the other’.Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘More or less a complaint from one end to the other’, Fenton commented fiendishly, ‘is a very fair and adequate evaluation of this journal. Over and over again the author manifests his resentment against Cardinals Barnabo, Wiseman, and Manning, Monsignor Talbot, Fathers Faber and Dalgairns, and Mr William George Ward. He is especially bitter against Father Faber, and his expressions of dislike, unrelieved by any trace of sympathy or charity, continue to appear even after the death of the saintly London Oratorian’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Fenton insisted that Newman had been deeply resentful, lacking in charity and deficient in priestly spirituality. Add to this the ‘appalling doctrinal weakness’ of the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk – which was only saved from censure through Manning’s intervention – and Newman’s complaint that he was treated unfairly within the Catholic Church loses all substance. ‘The story of the poor, persecuted, and almost forgotten Newman is one of the least plausible fables that has managed to attach itself to the fabric of modern ecclesiastical history’, Fenton writes.Footnote ⁵¹ ‘Newman has been idolized rather than studied’, with pernicious results. For Fenton, Henry Tristram’s introduction to the Autobiographical Writings perfectly illustrated how unwavering support of Newman led to the blatant misrepresentation of important nineteenth-century ecclesiastics and even of the First Vatican Council. Tristram’s introduction was a prime instance of ‘a great evil’, Fenton concluded: ‘the inculcation of the Newman legend in place of genuine history and theology’.Footnote ⁵²

Of course, Fenton’s accusations did not go unanswered. All his critics agreed that Newman was a very sensitive man, but the real question was whether this counted against his holiness. Fenton thought it did, but his critics drew the opposite conclusion. Precisely because he was by nature sensitive, Newman had displayed heroic virtue in his devotion to duty. One of them approvingly cited Wilfrid Ward, who concluded that Newman ‘had strength to put his hand into the fire and keep it there. He had not strength never to cry out with pain, or always to preserve an attitude of studied grace’.Footnote ⁵³ For Ward, as for Fenton’s critics, the fact that Newman had to strive against his own sensitive nature was an additional argument for, rather than a detraction from, his holiness. Vincent Blehl, another of Fenton’s critics, approvingly cited Louis Bouyer, whose biography of Newman had just been translated from the French. ‘The qualities that go to make a saint are not measured by his temperament,’ Bouyer wrote, ‘what he wrings from nature, nature that is rebellious in us all, by his obedience to grace – that is what makes the saint!’Footnote ⁵⁴

Interestingly, Fenton’s critics immediately made the debate about Newman’s sanctity. Fenton noticed too. He made sure to have the last word (easy feat for an editor), and although he tempered his tone about Newman personally, he insisted that none of his critics had properly addressed the historical problem. He was right. Presenting nineteenth-century theology and church history solely sub specie Newmani is historiographically indefensible. Even if Newman was a saint, he was not omniscient, or always right about other people’s bearings and motives.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, the critics rightly surmised that Fenton did not care as much about objective history as he pretended to do. He was grinding a decidedly theological axe, worried as he was about the cause for Newman’s sainthood, which had been gathering steam since 1941.

The ‘Newman legend’ undermined some of Fenton’s own most cherished convictions. It put some of his favourite nineteenth-century prelates in a bad light, and it relativized the importance of Vatican I. Besides, Newman’s anguished journal set a bad example for American priests. What if they all started complaining about their ecclesial superiors the way Newman had? Needless to say, the eventual judgment of the Church was not on Fenton’s side. His theological instincts were behind the times, just as they would be a few years later, when he served as Cardinal Ottaviani’s peritus at Vatican II.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Church sided with Ward, Bouyer, and Blehl, the latter becoming, in fact, the Postulator for Newman’s beatification in 1991.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hagiography, it seems, won the day.

7. History and the Tao

It would seem that the kind of historiography that tries to turn someone into a saint is by definition hagiography. It is history done with the express purpose of highlighting someone’s virtues. It is meant to make saints. If this is not hagiography, what is? Perhaps, then, Turner and Skinner were right after all. Perhaps the Catholic interest in Newman’s sanctity does jeopardize serious historical inquiry. But let us pause before we draw this conclusion and return once more to the distinction between memory and history. Memory and history do not coexist peacefully. Nora and Yerushalmi published their work in the 1980s, against the backdrop of a vanishing collective memory (of the French nation and the Jewish people, respectively). Meanwhile, historians were turning increasingly critical and reflexive. The history of historiography was becoming all the rage. Historians no longer just studied the past; they began to study those who studied the past in the past. Increasingly, the past itself seemed to lose any coherent meaning. ‘Conceivably’, Yerushalmi wrote in the final pages of Zakhor, ‘someday there could be a history of the history of historiography, and then a history of that, and so on in a continuing spiral. It is enough to tease us out of thought’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Nora, for his part, insisted that history is in a real sense at war with memory. ‘At the heart of history’, Nora writes, ‘is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is the duty of the historian not to be satisfied with the productions of something as unreliable and prone to misrepresentation as memory. These productions must be interrogated and can often be exposed as the mere hallowing of vested interests or of some power or other (ecclesial, gendered, colonial, imperial, etc.). Memory, however sacrosanct, must never be allowed to stand in the way of historical demystification. The limit of history is the eradication of memory. What Nora calls ‘lieux de mémoire’ – modern sites of remembrance, such as museums, memorials or monuments – could not continue to exist in ‘a society living wholly under the sign of history’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Everything would have been flattened out; nothing would be sacred.

It is because of this historicist drive that scholars such as Turner and Skinner are annoyed by what to them can only appear as a kind of special pleading on behalf of Newman by Catholic scholars. On a historicist view of history, there are no saints. But what, then, does historicism leave to remember? Here we hit the crux of our problem. All historical inquiry happens against the background of a worldview in which some things seem significant or worth investigating, and others do not. It must, or otherwise we end up with nothing more than endless records of fact with no meaning. It would leave the historian adrift, equipped with all her critical tools but with no sense of direction, guided by nothing but current academic vogues and the agendas of funding bodies. In a lecture on forgetting, appended to the second edition of Zakhor, Yerushalmi makes this very point.

Yerushalmi insists once more that modern critical historiography is neither memory (mneme) nor recollection of what was forgotten (anamnesis). It is ‘a radically new venture’. The modern historian in quest of a ‘total past’ becomes increasingly detached from any kind of group memory.Footnote ⁶¹ Yerushalmi does not reject this quest, but he identifies its problem.

‘The Hebrew noun derives from halakh, “to walk’’,’ Yerushalmi had explained earlier, ‘hence halakhah – the Path on which one walks, the Way, the “Tao” – the complex of rites and beliefs that gives a people its sense of identity and purpose’.Footnote ⁶³ The halakhah of a people determines what is to be remembered or recollected. ‘Only those moments out of the past are transmitted that are felt to be formative or exemplary for the halakhah of a people as it is lived in the present; the rest of “history” falls, one might almost say literally, by the “wayside”’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The case of Newman has shown how true this is for the Catholic memory tradition. But what is the alternative? Skinner argues that a more human Newman would appear if Catholics would stop focusing on his sanctity. This might be true for many people, but it could also be that sanctity as a real human possibility – the highest human possibility – does not enter Skinner’s worldview as a patron of Humanists UK and, therefore, does not seem worth attending to. One could certainly argue that virtue is a narrow historical lens, or even a boring one, but it is hard to see why it would be unscholarly or illegitimate. If one can approach a historical subject from the perspective of class, gender, or power, why not from the perspective of virtue? After all, the Church does not claim to make saints, only to recognize them.

Turner, for his part, considers all historiography that has an eye on the hand of Providence a mistake, because everyone can claim Providence on their side. He writes: ‘Just as engaged commentators from the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church discern the action of Providence in the life of John Henry Newman, others with faith commitments outside those communions may with equal sincerity and fervor discern Providence at work in the lives of religious figures, such as Thomas Chalmers, Alexander Campbell, John Nelson Darby, Joseph Smith, or Mary Baker Eddy’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Of course they might, and perhaps they will, but this is nothing to the point. It only means that there are theological discussions to be had that cannot simply be obviated by taking a putatively neutral historical stance, which does not answer, but only bypasses the question of God’s presence in the course of human affairs.

This is not to say that all history resolves into theology. Facts, happily, are more robust than that. But worldviews do inevitably shape the historical questions one asks and the answers one gives. If a particular memory tradition, such as the Catholic one, is self-conscious, robust, and committed to beliefs at odds with the putative neutrality of public discourse in the West, conflicts are bound to remain. The Newman of History will always be shaped by the Newman of Faith – of anyone’s faith. There is no neutral standpoint that pleases everyone: one man’s history will always be another man’s hagiography. But true as this may be, it does not give us licence to simply continue to construe our conflicting portrayals of Newman, and, in case we disagree, to point to differences in first principles, which, as Newman teaches, are ultimately unresolvable. This would be too facile. Newman is right about first principles, but we have to dig very deep in our systems of belief before we hit upon them, and to appeal to them prematurely is to make rational discussion impossible.

Yerushalmi’s description of the halakhah echoes C.S. Lewis’s description of the Tao in The Abolition of Man. One thing we learn there is that humankind’s historic tradition of value is not as radically diverse as many today think. The genius of Lewis’s argument is that it shows how even people who contradict the Tao still do so based on values that are themselves derived from the Tao. All attribution of value is parasitic upon the Tao. Without the Tao there can be no attribution of value. This means that all debates about value take place somehow within the Tao, as a shared framework, even if different people reject different aspects of it.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is a hopeful perspective. More hopeful than Yerushalmi’s. Maybe we have not lost the halakhah completely. Historians from different walks of life find plenty to disagree on, but they also hold many values in common. Perhaps we can agree on what is worth remembering more than today’s hardening ideological fault lines would suggest.