It is a propitious time to publish on Newman. Geoffrey Rowell observes that his Beatification in 2010 ‘gave opportunities for new appreciations and re-evaluations’ (p. 531), and his canonisation in 2019 will again excite fresh interest in his life, sainthood also opening the way to revisiting his contributions to theology (he is often called ‘the Father of Vatican II’), especially if he is, as seems likely, also made a Doctor of the Church.

The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman gathers together some of the most distinguished writers on Newman, as well as some younger scholars, and the balance refuses any single, partisan perspective. In an earlier publication, Frederick D. Aquino had stressed the unhelpfulness of responding to Newman by adopting either a ‘hagiographical’ or a ‘hypercritical’ posture,Footnote ¹ and that same good sense is spelt out by the editors in the Introduction to this volume too: ‘we do not intend to protect his legacy but to examine his life, writings, thought, and significance from perspectives and disciplines of philosophy, theology, history, education, and literature’ (p. 2).

No publication, however large, could offer an exhaustive treatment of Newman, but he is certainly to be found here in his many parts, as a great thinker and stylist and restlessly courageous seeker of truth, as well as occasionally thin-skinned and waspish. Cardinal Manning once called him ‘a great hater’, though that is not a patch on what he could say about himself, when sensing his ‘utter hollowness’, ‘as a pane of glass, which transmits heat being cold itself’ (p. 227).

It is a decade since the publication of The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, edited by Ian Ker, and The Oxford Handbook at once updates the scholarship and expands the purview of its precursor. Each of its twenty-nine chapters (The Cambridge Companion had only thirteen) is driven by a thesis but also provides a survey of the major critical work on the subject, complete with a directive list of ‘Secondary Reading’. The way chapters and sections have been organised will allow readers to dip in and out very easily, which is exactly what is wanted from a handbook.

The volume is especially good in providing ‘Context for his Writings’. That is the title of the first section, containing chapters on ‘The Oxford Movement’, ‘The Oratory’, ‘Ireland’, ‘Brothers’, and ‘Print Culture’; but the same contextual impulse—intellectual, biographical, historical—is usefully evident in the subsequent sections, too (‘Influences on Newman’, ‘Themes of his Writings’, and ‘Ongoing Significances’). Three examples: Mary C. Frank’s chapter on ‘The Literary Stylist’ does not attempt an essentialist snap-shot of Newman’s stylistic repertoire, but instead tracks how his writing developed, and why; The Idea of a University is often the only text consulted when it comes to Newman’s ‘Philosophy of Education’, but M. Katherine Tillman looks to several other writings as well that instructively complicate the picture (from University Sermons to Grammar of Assent); C. Michael Shea provides a richer sense of the theological underpinnings of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine than had previously been offered in Nicholas Lash’s (1975) seminal study of the Essay, attending to its evolution over three editions.

The only cavil that might be raised with the Handbook is one that perhaps follows inevitably from the handbook genre. While its division of labour between chapters rightly emphasises how far Newman worked within different disciplines, that same division makes it harder to appreciate how far he also thought and wrote across them. Eamon Duffy notices that Newman routinely described his afternoon sermons as ‘Lectures’ (p. 233), for instance, but there is little room in the volume to test what that kind of disciplinary-bridging means. C. Michael Shea suggests that a complete theological study of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine would have to account not only for his ‘explicit lines of argument’, but also for ‘the largely implicit themes and commitments that provides these concepts with orientation’ (p. 300), such that a ‘comprehensive study’ would require ‘several disciplinary approaches … to come into play’ (pp. 300–1). What Shea claims for the Essay—its ‘pluralism of discursive modes’—applies to many of Newman’s other kinds of writing as well. Stephen Prickett contends that ‘literature was, for Newman, an essential part of this theology’ (p. 581), and his chapter on ‘Literary Legacy’ goes some way to explore this interconnectedness; but the volume as a whole might go much further, especially in reading his theological works through their ‘literary’ strategies. ‘Style is’, Newman explained, not an ornamental or even a straightforwardly instrumental feature of language, but a mode of ‘thinking out into language’, and the implications of that dictum require more serious attention, starting perhaps with his Grammar of Assent, and his insistence that ‘the great difficulty, the great problem’ of faith and reason could not be addressed through formal logic—that ‘Syllogizing won’t meet it’.Footnote ²

While the Handbook does a superb job at showing Newman’s variousness, then, it is less successful in exploring the extent to which his talents, ideas, and achievements confound the conventional categories by which we might wish to appraise them. Nonetheless, the Handbook’s scholarly contribution is both original and significant. Prickett’s chapter closes the volume with the sober note that ‘posthumous reputations change and morph according to the needs of later periods’ (p. 578), and while it does indeed remain to be seen what our current period might take from Newman, we may at least say with grateful confidence that The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman will shape and inform his reputation for many years to come.