The ‘Englishness’ of John Henry Newman has been disputed at least since the controversy with Charles Kingsley which led to the writing of the Apologia. Kingsley’s initial slur cast Newman as representative of the dishonesty and unmanliness characteristic of the Roman clergy. Kingsley was othering Newman at the same time as he slandered him, and the plausibility of the slander relied on the othering. Newman’s response called out the deviousness of this appeal to the subconscious ‘bias’ of English public opinion against the good character of (Roman) Catholic clergy. Commenting on this exchange, Jacob Phillips reminds us that the Apologia, far from being a ‘straightforward autobiography’, set out to answer definite charges against a public backdrop of presumed immoveable antipathy between England and Catholicism. Precisely the Apologia’s resoundingly positive reception helped to dislodge that presumption (pp. 94-97).
Phillips’ book is an attempt to define, qualify, and in some measure justify the case on behalf of Newman’s Englishness. This effort is made in view of a further theological end, namely, to present a case-study in the theology of culture suggested by Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. By observing Newman’s changing attitudes to certain commonly recognised English traits, as he passed from his Tractarian phase through his conversion into a mature Catholicism, Phillips means to trace the operations of grace correcting, refining, and elevating these same traits as they show themselves in Newman’s oeuvre to make them compatible with and expressive of Catholic religion. The conclusion suggests that this working of grace may explain how Newman’s distinctively Victorian and English thought and sanctity may continue to inspire Catholics around the world today. What confers lasting value on Newman’s legacy is at once its ‘proximity and distance from its native setting’ (p.131).
Rather than ‘Englishness’, Phillips prefers to speak of ‘the English sensibility’. He means by sensibility ‘an unreflective and unarticulated intuitive sense of a good way of living’ (p.14), ‘good’ here being understood in both a moral and an aesthetic sense. Sensibility overlaps with what 19th century writers spoke of as a nation’s ‘manners’ or ‘genius’ and what we might refer to as culture and national character. Phillips stresses that national sensibility, for the Victorians, was not a racially determined category in the modern sense of race: with an eye principally to Edmund Burke, he explains that it has more to do with the constitution of a group-identity by a specific history in a particular place. These contingencies give rise to a tradition with its own distinct language (literal and figurative) and ways of doing things. Different traditions, different sensibilities, naturally emphasise or downplay, excel in or fall short of, particular aspects of the good. Romantic thought might have merited more attention in this section: it is not clear whether Phillips sidelines this tradition because he considers that it did not significantly influence Newman.
National sensibilities are not fixed quantities: they change in the course of history; they exist in a defined way only to the extent that they are perceived and remarked upon; once perceived, often they are consciously remoulded. Newman and his contemporaries did tend to speak of national character as a fixed and singular quality. But Phillips makes clear ‘that we [he and his readers, presumably] are dealing with a received notion of the English sensibility, with common norms of English self-understanding’ as it was perceived among men of letters in Newman’s day (p.19). This sensibility was given fresh articulation during particular periods of history, often by way of express contrast with other peoples (not least the revolutionary French in the century preceding Newman). Phillips discerns three interrelated aspects of the English sensibility to which Victorian writers commonly appealed: the capacity for compromise, a tendency to understatement or reserve, and ‘empiricism’, a preference in thinking and decision-making to rely on the results of concrete experience over theory.
The body of Phillips’ book examines Newman’s attitude to each of these aspects of the English sensibility at three stages of his life: first, in his Tractarian phase, which enjoyed its heyday in the 1830s; then what Phillips calls Newman’s ‘Second Spring’, from the fixing of his conviction that he must become a Catholic (1845 or shortly before) until some time before the writing of the Apologia in 1864; finally, Newman’s ‘mature’ period reflected in the Apologia and subsequent writings. These chronological divisions are not arbitrary and find their justification in the course of Phillips narrative. Indeed, the narrative is effectively the argument, supported at each stage by a close reading of selected key texts against the backdrop of whatever controversies they were intended to engage.
The shape of Phillips’ narrative argument is as follows. In his Anglican years, Newman somewhat uncritically embraced all three mentioned aspects of the English sensibility, not realising the degree to which they sometimes conflicted with the dogmatic cast of his thought. Newman later experienced his reception into the Catholic Church as an irruption of grace that unsettled him from his own English character: this event drove home the realisation how much the English sensibility was a Protestant sensibility, not moulded by the sanctifying influence of the Catholic Church. Yet his critical attitude toward the English character in this period was to be tempered in later years, as he arrived at a theology and devotion that integrated insights from both his English formation and wider Catholic practice. The Apologia marks a turning-point in Newman’s self-understanding, since there for the first time he feels confident to chart a development from his Anglicanism to Catholicism – to see continuities in the break.
Phillips’ project is attractive in its combination of biography and theology. In Newman studies, at least, he is breaking new territory by trying to spell out and assess the content of Newman’s Englishness; his conclusions are accordingly richer and more measured than most of the passing remarks one usually finds on this subject. His readings of particular texts are supported by an acute attentiveness to context; yet he always expresses himself with great concision – none of the context provided is immaterial to his discussion. One could even say that these three features of Phillips’ work respectively evince just the virtuous aspects of empiricism, moderation, and reserve!
Phillips’ evidence suggests that the English sensibility only really became an express theme for Newman in his post-conversion polemical writings, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching and Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. Those works in several places mean to call out the unjustified, subconscious prejudices and habits of thought that ill-dispose or even blind the English to the goodness and truth of Catholicism. Before this period, the features of an English sensibility that Phillips identifies as governing Newman’s thought are not present (to Newman’s mind) qua features of the English sensibility. Compromise might be an exception, inasmuch as Newman labels pursuit of the via media a distinctive virtue and mission of the English Church. But Newman pronounces no comparable connection with reserve or practicality. Indeed, reserve is always associated by Newman with the ancient Alexandrian church and the reverence intrinsically demanded by the revealed object. Consequently, Phillips’ invocation of the English sensibility to account for the thought of the early Newman at times appears misplaced.
Perhaps it is in light of Newman’s later criticisms of the English that Phillips judges the Tractarian fondness for reserve and practicality as unconscious and unwarranted intrusions of the English mindset. The case would remain unconvincing. Let us take reserve. Phillips claims that the prominence given to this notion ‘brings an attribute of the English sensibility into the very centre of Christian life’ (p. 51). Now, Tractarian reserve was a moral, religious quality: it had to do with reverence before the divine, and prudence in the communication of truth. By contrast, reserve as a feature of Victorian English sensibility, described by Phillips, has much more to do with a quality of style and self-presentation: the ‘taciturnity’ of the Englishman and his preference for ‘understatement’ or restraint in speech (pp. 26, 41). Even in Newman’s ‘Second Spring’, Phillips insinuates that the pessimistic account of dogmatic formulations as undesirable necessities (in the Essay on Development) can be attributed to an ongoing uncritical attachment to English reserve. It might more plausibly be connected with an uninterrogated Romanticism or (what Phillips also suggests) a not yet fully worked-out theological understanding of mystery.
