The volume of publications on, let alone by, John Henry Newman, is now so immense that they could scarcely be surveyed in a single article. However, the Victorian cardinal’s recent canonization provides an opportunity to offer an overview of the more significant recent contributions towards and salient trends in Newman scholarship.

Even prior to the recent and ongoing outpouring of studies on Newman, theological, philosophical, educational, literary and biographical, to mark his canonization, various Newman anniversaries and landmarks over the last half century had already greatly added to the corpus of writing on Newman. In particular, the centenary of his death and being declared Venerable in 1990, and his Beatification in 2010, provided opportunities for reassessments and reappraisals of Newman’s life and thought. In the case of the former, we owe such significant contributions as Fr Ian Ker’s magisterial biography John Henry Newman, Sheridan Gilley’s no less noteworthy Newman and his Age, Terrence Merrigan’s edited special edition of Louvain Studies in honour of the Newman centennial, Merrigan’s Clear Heads and Holy Hearts, Newman after a hundred years edited by Fr Ian Ker & A.G. Hill, David Brown’s edition of Newman: A Man for our Time, Fr Halbert D. Weidner’s edition of Newman’s Via Media as well as the late David Newsome’s The Convert Cardinals.Footnote ¹ However, there was one collection of essays on Newman published at that time which seemed to be deliberately intended to act as a ‘party spoiler’ – its provocative aim was that of supposedly ‘demythologising Newman’; its editors even asserting that most of their contributors would deny that Newman had ‘something true and important to say to the modern world.’Footnote ² It was an extraordinary claim then (and of course even more so now) and ran in the face of the previous thirty or more years of scholarship that had proclaimed the precise opposite.

The era of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) coincided with, if it did not actually contribute towards, what at the time was described as ‘the rediscovery of Newman’. This was the context for the launch of the massive project undertaken by the late Fr Stephen Dessain and the Birmingham Oratory fathers of the publication of a series of what was to become thirty-two volumes of the Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, the first of which was published in 1961, and the last as recently as 2008. The Birmingham Oratory had already in 1956 published the recently deceased Oratorian Fr Henry Tristram’s edition of Newman’s Autobiographical Writings (1874), and it commissioned Meriol Trevor’s two volume biography of Newman published in 1962.Footnote ³ In Fr Ian Gornall, Fr Ian Ker as well as Fr Stephen Dessain, it was either Oratorians or Jesuit fathers who edited most of the earlier editions in the series of Letters and Diaries. There were other fruits of the revival of Newman studies fostered by the climate of Vatican II. A highly influential volume published in 1967, based on a conference held in Oriel College, Oxford, in the summer of 1966,Footnote ⁴ was followed by the work of Günter Biemer, Martin Svaglic and Christopher Hollis.Footnote ⁵ In the following decade, publications by John Coulson, Nicholas Lash, and Fr Paul Misner were all part of this post-Conciliar wave of Newman scholarship.Footnote ⁶

It was a commonplace of this phase in Roman Catholic Newman scholarship that the legacy of John Henry Newman bore fruit not in his own nineteenth-century age but in the century to follow. International Newman conferences on the continent had been the brainchild of the Abbé Theis in Luxembourg, with four held in 1956, 1961, 1964, and 1970 respectively. Of course, generations of Anglican scholars had produced studies of Newman, notably F. L. Cross, who had focused upon Newman’s Oxford Movement and Anglican career.Footnote ⁷ Ecumenical overlap, however, was limited and different audiences and readerships were involved with the two rarely connecting.

The English participants of the continental Roman Catholic Newman conferences of 1956-64 recognised the need for a similar conference in England. This would further explore the distinctive English contribution to Newman studies with a recovery of an appreciation of the particular Anglican context in which he had first developed his ideas and which continental writing on Newman did not always capture. The Oriel conference on Newman in 1966 proved, according to one of its participants, the late Geoffrey Rowell, to be a landmark in ecumenical relations between Rome and Canterbury in the context of Vatican II, sometimes referred to as ‘Newman’s Council’.Footnote ⁸ According to this emerging narrative, if the First Vatican Council was the apparent climax of much of what Newman was deemed to have deplored in the Catholicism of his day, then it became something of a theological truism that Vatican II with its ecumenical and reforming dimensions and move away from what was interpreted as papal authoritarianism, was ‘Newman’s Council’ and that he was its ‘godfather’, even though he was scarcely quoted in Council debates or documents.Footnote ⁹

Newman’s corpus of writings have rightly come to be regarded as marking a watershed in the development of modern (especially Roman Catholic) theology – regarding the role of the early (especially Greek) Fathers, the concept of ‘deification’ and Indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the importance of historical-critical research, the idea of doctrinal development, the role of lived experience in the life of faith, the link between theology and literature, and the reinterpretation of the nature of Faith and its relation to Reason.

There has been a natural and understandable tendency for some modern Newman scholars, mainly theologians and philosophers, to systematise Newman’s thought under well recognised doctrinal and philosophical topics and labels. There is no doubt that many theological and philosophical themes can be helpfully extracted, categorised and analysed from the corpus of his writings, especially such themes as Revelation, Faith and Reason, Conscience, Ecclesiology, Justification, Development of doctrine, Infallibility, Sermons and Preaching, and Hymnody. Some of the most significant recent studies of Newman follow this format, notably the Louvain Studies volume and Newman after a Hundred Years Footnote ¹⁰, and the more recent The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, and The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman.Footnote ¹¹ In contrast, the editors of Receptions of Newman have followed a somewhat different structural model.Footnote ¹² However, as the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Newman rightly remind us, ‘without historical analysis, Newman’s life, thought, and writings become strangely disembodied, escaping from the sort of contextualising that is needed to see and read him through the eyes of his contemporaries.’Footnote ¹³ In short, ‘the Newman of history’ must not be ignored.

With Newman an awareness of the historical context of and tensions within his own writings is essential but has not always been sufficiently well observed. Some Roman Catholic authors have tended to treat Newman’s Anglican, let alone Evangelical period as a mere backcloth for discussion of his life and thought as a Roman Catholic, a trait which is evident in the biography by Wilfrid Ward and adhered to by Fr Ian Ker. Even Fr Stephen Dessain spent less than one-tenth of his Newman biography on what he merely calls ‘The First Thirty Years’, though half the volume does cover Newman’s Anglican career.Footnote ¹⁴ There is a tendency in such works to ‘read back’ the later Newman on to the early Newman. Newman himself has been accused of this, as we shall see below. In fact, not only were Newman’s theological positions never static but they evolved considerably over time. Newman’s erstwhile Anglican friends claimed that in the Apologia, Newman resisted the temptation ‘to do injustice to his former self and his former position’.Footnote ¹⁵ However, Newman increasingly sought to explain or correct his earlier by his later self, most obviously in the 1877 Via Media Footnote ¹⁶ edition of his original Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), but also in his two volume 1871 edition Essays Critical and Historical, which comprised a collection of articles from his Tractarian Anglican years, mainly taken from the British Critic (which Newman edited from 1838-41).Footnote ¹⁷ On the one hand, in the wake of his Apologia, Newman was anxious to enlist the sympathy of Anglican readers and thus made relatively minimal changes to the texts of articles first published in the 1830s and 1840s. On the other hand, he was aware that his earlier Anglican writings were still being used to defend the Anglican position – indeed he was even to be claimed as ‘the founder of modern Anglicanism’ by later exponents of the Anglo-Catholic tradition.Footnote ¹⁸ Newman’s strategy, as Andrew Nash has shrewdly observed, was to show where the principles of the Oxford Movement really led – to the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ¹⁹ This was a methodology which reverted to that which he had employed in his more polemical post-convert On Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in submitting to the Catholic Church (1850). An Anglican appropriation of Newman has flourished into our own day, particularly with the scholarship of F.L. Cross, Geoffrey Rowell and Owen Chadwick.Footnote ²⁰

Newman himself was notoriously reluctant to admit that he was a theologian at allFootnote ²¹ but rather, a controversialist, as well as of course preacher, spiritual guide, poet and hymn writer. Of course one can question this reluctance as an underestimation of his own theological credentials but his unease points to a significant truth, too often overlooked - the unsystematic, if not random and ‘occasional’ nature and character of his writings. Newman mainly wrote in response to specific theological or spiritual challenges of the day. His writings, especially during his Anglican years as leader of the Oxford Movement, tended to be contingent on context and were always nuanced, subtle and evolving. It has been perhaps only too easy for later generations, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, to pick and choose those aspects of Newman and stages or phases in his lifelong religious journey with which they could most readily identify. Thus, we have an Anglican Newman, a liberal Roman Catholic Newman and an Ultramontane Roman Catholic Newman, though interestingly until a recent distinguished University of Leuven doctoral dissertationFootnote ²², rarely an Evangelical Newman.

There is no doubt that after an eclipse in the era of the Modernist crisis when some Modernist authors drew illegitimate inferences from his writings, the significance of Newman’s theological contribution re-emerged through the writings of such figures as Henri Bremond, Maurice Blondel, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and Erich Przywara, in the run up to Vatican II. Some of the various Newman studies in the 1970s and 1980s also clearly had a post-conciliar reformative theological message. A ‘liberal Newman’ could be claimed as a prop or foil in ongoing divisions within the self-understanding of the contemporary Catholic Church; an outlook to be found in some recent studies such as that of John Cornwell.Footnote ²³ There is even an eloquent and nuanced echo in Eamon Duffy’s recent work, where Newman is credited with championing ideas that were to be the basis in the 1960s and beyond of ‘a radical re-imagining of what it was to be Catholic.’Footnote ²⁴ On the other hand, others have warned against tying Newman to ‘a soi-disant “Spirit of Vatican II”’, whereby innovations and changes are accepted but which do not cohere to antecedent teaching or practice. Rejecting this approach, some have highlighted a counter-cultural (not merely conservative) and more polemical Newman ‘against the liberals’. Works by Robert Pattison, the late Fr Stanley Jaki, a distinguished scientist, and by Edward Short, the latter in a trilogy of works, are the more obvious examples of this approach.Footnote ²⁵ In the case of Pattison, Newman is an anti-liberal voice and prophet crying in the wilderness. In the case of Jaki, notably in his Newman’s Challenge (2000) but also in an impressive list of other works and editions of Newman texts, Newman is fairly and creatively enlisted in defence of the supernatural and as one who always rejected the notion that unity should be pursued at the price of truth.Footnote ²⁶ On the other hand, Short’s writings, while full of insights and interest and based on wide reading in the sources, are somewhat marred by unsubstantiated and misleading criticisms of the work of other scholars, by sometimes irrelevant and long-winded digressions, and by an overly polemical and often accusatory tone.

Thus, while it is undeniable that Newman has proved to be a polarising figure for later generations as he was in his own lifetime, contestability need not be denominationally biased and indeed has not been for several decades.Footnote ²⁷ A constructive method is to look for the underlying continuities and broader integrity and wholeness of Newman’s lifelong quest for religious truth, wherever it took him, evaluating Newman on his own terms and in the context of his own times. Stephen Morgan, in a highly stimulating recent doctoral dissertation makes the point eloquently when he argues that the best methodology is to treat ‘Newman at any point in [t]his history as a person with an open future, rather than reading back some future event, or an over-arching polemic or apologetic meta-narrative’.Footnote ²⁸ Newman scholars might try to avoid too much of a purely present-day ideological agenda in which Newman is enlisted in a particular cause. This is not to deny the propriety of Newman being properly appealed to in some of our current ‘culture wars’ in an appropriate context, such as in the medium of addresses to church meetings or in homilies, pastoral letters, encyclicals, etc. For Newman undoubtedly had a prophetic sense of a great battle looming between Christianity and secularity, that seems to be being fulfilled in our own times. However, when it comes to academic discourse, Professor Kenneth Parker has suggested that disputed theological questions in which Newman is enlisted on ‘one side’ or ‘the other’ so that the historical theologian remains either open to new interpretations of Church teaching or sees these as compromising the historic faith will partly be determined by the particular historical metanarrative that he or she employs.Footnote ²⁹

It has been natural and right that in the years when Newman’s cause was being promoted to first that of Venerable, then Beatus, and finally to Sainthood, that a plethora of works tracing and extolling his spiritual journey and life of holiness should have appeared. The more noteworthy of these include those by Fr Vincent Blehl, Fr John T. Ford, Fr Ian Ker and Fr Halbert Weidner.Footnote ³⁰ These appeared alongside various editions of Newman’s Anglican Sermons including one five-volume edition and the edition of fifteen University of Oxford sermons.Footnote ³¹ The twenty years between the centennial of 1990 and Beatification in 2010 also witnessed an outpouring of distinguished biographical studies of Newman. These included the work of Fr Ian Ker, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Monsignor Roderick Strange, Peter Chisnall, Anthony Mockler, Dermot Mansfield and Thomas J. Norris.Footnote ³² Other more niche and specialised Newman studies cover themes including Newman’s philosophy and epistemology, Faith and Reason, and the Grammar of Assent (1870), Christology, Revelation, Conscience, Biblical Inspiration, the Fathers, Conversion, Justification, the Sacraments, the Development of Doctrine, mysticism, eschatology, education, Anglicanism, Evangelicalism, Oriel College, the Oxford Movement, the Oratory, political and social thought, science, historiography, the Caroline Divines, Ecumenism, Mariology, the Papacy and Infallibility, and Ireland. Space allows only some of the more important themes in recent Newman scholarship to be highlighted here. For example, the literature on Newman and conversion alone is vast. The best studies manage to integrate a specific theological or ecclesiological topic within a wider overarching treatment of Newman’s thought, as well, as we shall see, the historical context in which he wrote. My focus below will be on these select examples and will necessarily be far from being comprehensive.

A more synoptic multi-disciplinary, though essentially literary critical approach informed another recent contribution to Newman studies by Lawrence Poston which seeks to explore through Newman’s writings the idea of Personality in the Christian tradition.Footnote ³³ The literary and aesthetic dimension of Newman’s contribution in terms of the novel, satire, poetry, letter writing, architecture, worship, music, liturgy, and preaching have also been creatively explored in the work of Alan G. Hill, Fr Ian Ker, Mary C. Frank, Stephen Prickett, Joyce Sugg, Eric Griffiths, Donald Withey, Sheridan Gilley, William Whyte, Guy Nicholls, and Eamon Duffy.Footnote ³⁴ It is worth singling out Whyte’s recovery of something too often overlooked by Newman scholars who rely too much on his well-known criticism of the Cambridge Camden Society: Newman’s genuine interest in the symbolic spiritual importance of church architecture as exemplified in the extent of his involvement in the building of a new church at Littlemore in 1835 and 1836. Recent studies of Protestant critiques of the convert Newman also deserve a mention,Footnote ³⁵ along with those on Newman’s reception in FranceFootnote ³⁶ and Germany.Footnote ³⁷

The sheer volume of Newman’s own writings, published and unpublished, can be daunting for any Newman scholar, general reader, catechist or apologist, so the authors of Newman anthologies deserve a special debt of gratitude. Mention can be made here of the work of David Armstrong, and Monsignor Roderick Strange’s one-volume compilation edition of Newman’s published letters.Footnote ³⁸ Newman scholarship has also been immensely enriched by the spate of first-rate new editions of Newman’s published and unpublished writings, many being published in the Newman Millenium Edition (general editor, Fr James Tolhurst) by Gracewing and the University of Notre Dame Press over the last twenty years. Moreover, there have been excellent translations of Newman’s writings into various European languages and also Japanese. The bibliographies in past volumes of Newman-Studien reveal the extent of the world-wide flourishing of Newman studies.

A fear has been expressed that Newman’s elevation to sainthood might signal ‘the taming and enfeebling of his legacy’ and selectivity in the transmission of his teaching. As long ago as 1991 in the volume that attempted to ‘demythologize’ Newman, it was asserted that the ‘attempt to make an objective assessment of Newman’s significance is to some degree hampered by the movement for his canonisation’.Footnote ³⁹ While a Newman biographer like Meriol Trevor had appeared to rationalise Newman’s political and religious conflicts, viewing everything through his eyes and consequently faulted for lack of detachment,Footnote ⁴⁰ lack of objectivity was never a necessary consequence of promoting his cause, though much hinges on what is perceived as ‘objective’. In fact, Newman’s life, thought and legacy have been explored in ever greater fullness since those editors in 1991 raised that spectre and now in the wake of the canonisation they seem more likely to be worked over than even before. Differences of interpretation and emphasis in evaluations of Newman are anyway hardly surprising given his own habit of qualifying and ‘saying’ and ‘unsaying’ as he drew towards a conclusion in argument. Moreover, as Cyril O’Regan has reminded us, ‘sainthood’ should be distinguished from moral excellence. He warns against a faulty understanding of sanctity, often presupposed by Newman’s admirers and detractors alike.Footnote ⁴¹ Unfortunately, one reviewer of Receptions of Newman in which O’Regan makes this point not only misses O’Regan’s careful distinction here but totally misrepresents him as saying that Newman’s sanctity was in doubt because ‘he did not treat his controversial opponents with kid gloves’.Footnote ⁴² This is actually a travesty of O’Regan’s subtle argument and just one of many examples of Short’s misrepresentations of other authors in that collection of essays. It is somewhat ironic that these distortions, which recur at various points in his Newman and History, are particularly evident in a chapter provocatively entitled ‘Travesties of Newman’.

The most significant recent and potentially transformative development in Newman studies, however, lies in what can only be described as a digital revolution. The Newman digital archive programme is being spearheaded by the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) at Pittsburgh, Pa., under the direction of Professor Kenneth L. Parker and now Dr Ryan M. Marr. NINS has the largest single collection of published books, articles, and journals on Newman in the world. Within the next year, NINS will publish the majority of these resources online, with full-text search, including options to compare published works with the handwritten originals.Footnote ⁴³ This is likely to revolutionize not only access to hitherto obscure or unpublished Newman materials but to influence and extend the scope and reach of Newman scholarship more widely. Future scholars are also going to be immensely indebted to the labours of Kenneth Parker in compiling over many years a database of Newman’s reading and borrowing from the Oriel College Library while Newman was a Fellow (1822-45). NINS holds this never-seen-before database of Newman’s borrowing from the Oriel College Library. This record makes it possible to compare what Newman was reading concurrent with his writing.

What makes the continued growth of Newman studies almost inevitable lies in the impact of a ‘new wave’ of scholarship linked to the NINS initiatives but predating it. This has been the emergence under the tutelage of Professor Kenneth Parker and Professor Grant Kaplan, of a so-called ‘Saint Louis Circle’ of Newman scholars, among whom can be listed Charles Michael Shea, Daniel Handschy, Ryan Marr, Matthew Muller, and the late and lamented Michael Pahls. They have set new standards of productivity and excellence in their doctoral dissertations and subsequent publications, and have fully utilised the new digital Newman archive resources and databases hosted by the NINS. Moreover, linked to the NINS, the Newman Studies Journal, a double-blind peer reviewed journal, dedicated to ‘promoting the study and spreading the knowledge of Newman’s life, influence, and work’, has become a major vehicle and showcase for the latest Newman scholarship.Footnote ⁴⁴

One of the most striking features of contemporary Newman scholarship, particularly evident in the work of this new generation, has been a recovery of the historical contexts and contingencies of Newman’s writings. Newman might still be claimed as a prophet and as ahead of his time, but it is now better appreciated that Newman’s legacy manifested itself in his own age, especially the influence of the Anglican Newman. Above all, a whole series of recent theologically rich publications on Newman each closely examines the way in which external circumstances, both political and ecclesial, affected Newman’s evolving theological and ecclesiological and patristic understanding over a span of many decades from the 1830s through the 1880s. Works which stand out in adopting this approach include that of Benjamin King, Ryan Marr, Charles Michael Shea, and doctoral dissertations by the late Michael Pahls and Matthew Muller.Footnote ⁴⁵

While it is well known that Newman was devoted to the Church Fathers, King draws on primary sources to explore how Newman interpreted specific Fathers at different periods of his life. For example, many scholars who have treated the Arians of the Fourth Century as straightforward patristic history overlooked its original context and how much the work depended on its time.Footnote ⁴⁶ In short, King traces how Newman’s appropriation of patristic theology changed with the varying circumstances of his career. He characterises Newman’s method as ‘writing history in the first person’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Crucially, he concludes that it was events in Newman’s life that changed his interpretation of the Fathers, not the interpretation of the Fathers that caused Newman to change his life. As Stephen Thomas in his Newman and Heresy: the Anglican Years (1991) and Rowan Williams argued in a key essay on Newman’s Arians of the Fourth Century (1833)Footnote ⁴⁸ and more fully in his introduction to a new Gracewing/Notre Dame edition of Newman’s Arians text (2001),Footnote ⁴⁹ Newman’s patristic scholarship was used to shape his rhetoric in the Oxford Tractarian controversies of the 1830s. Thomas had focused on the comparisons which Newman had drawn between his contemporaries and ancient heretics. King, on the other hand, shows that Newman not only focused on the patristic age’s struggle against heresy as part of his contemporary battle against liberals but also as a positive blueprint for orthodoxy in his own day. Drawing on Newman’s Christological sermons, King argues that Newman reasserted the positive doctrine of Christ’s person and work. He even proposes an alternative chronology for dividing Newman’s career – not so much that of pre- and post-1845 (the year of his conversion to Rome) but to three different overlapping periods in his use and application of patristic and (later) scholastic scholarship.

In the same spirit and consciously following King’s template applied to a different area of Newman’s theological development, Ryan J. Marr’s study has sought to correct the impression left by many Newman studies on the subject that Newman’s ecclesiological perspective was more static and systematic than it actually was. He sought to provide as a counterweight a synthetic, historically contextualised treatment of the development in Newman’s ecclesiology during the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. From this perspective, it should no longer be axiomatic to refer to ‘Newman’s Catholic ecclesiology’ as almost hermetically sealed from that of his Anglican period, with Marr demonstrating that even in his Roman Catholic period Newman’s ecclesiological convictions underwent significant development, flowing outward from his initial perspective as a young convert to his mature vantage-point after three decades of active life in the Roman Catholic communion.Footnote ⁵⁰

The third ground-breaking work in the trio of recent publications on Newman noted above belongs to Charles Michael Shea’s scholarship. In the field of Newman studies, it is the chronological intellectual genesis of Newman’s famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) along with the wider question of the causes of his conversion to Roman Catholicism that has received the most attention from scholars.Footnote ⁵¹ Some have cautioned against an early date or complete originality in Newman’s coming to grasp the concept of doctrinal development and have pointed to the role and influence of others, notably that of Newman’s disciple and friend the lawyer Samuel Francis Wood.Footnote ⁵² Owen Chadwick dates Newman’s ‘crossing the Rubicon’ of the idea of development to between 1841 and 1843 and stresses the influence of W.G. Ward.Footnote ⁵³ On the other hand, others argue for much earlier roots or hints of the doctrine in Newman’s own religious history.Footnote ⁵⁴ Shea’s recent monograph and his earlier articles on the subjectFootnote ⁵⁵ represent a hugely original contribution to both the origins and prehistory but more especially the reception of Newman’s Essay. Shea takes issue with that earlier trend in Newman studies whereby Newman’s own writings become a privileged, if not dominant source for historical inquiry. Shea goes beyond examining Newman’s corpus in isolation or through the narrow lens of Newman’s own notes and letters. He makes the case for a wider historical study that goes beyond partial approaches of examining merely the themes and tensions in Newman’s own published writings. He explores often neglected or overlooked unpublished archival sources.

Shea points up the limitations of the Anglo-centric insularity in scholarship on the Oxford Movement and its relative lack of critical attention towards Roman Catholic theology on the European continent in the mid-nineteenth century. Consequently, the extent to which Newman’s theory of development was actually well received in Rome and elsewhere has been overlooked.Footnote ⁵⁶ Shea draws particular attention to the pivotal influential Roman figure of Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876) who, far from questioning or rejecting Newman’s theory, emerges as a significant supporter. Shea’s work builds on that of the late Owen Chadwick,Footnote ⁵⁷ while offering a corrective to Chadwick’s argument and conclusions as to the origins of and background to Newman’s theory. What is clear is that such a revisionist study may not have been possible without the enhanced scholarly resources, especially digital ones, now available in the early twenty-first century.

The fourth significant recent contribution to Newman scholarship again emanates from the ‘Saint Louis circle’, that of Matthew Muller, though at present it is an as yet unpublished dissertation on Newman and biblical inspiration. Muller draws attention to the neglect of Newman’s engagement as an Anglican with the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Muller is critical of unhistorical attempts to view Newman’s views on the subject too much in terms of his apparent intellectual patronage of Vatican II - again a fault of reading backwards without due regard for context. He warns against a spirit of ‘Whiggish hindsight’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The final contribution to this new wave of Newman scholarship can be seen in the writings of Gerard Zuijdwegt, cited above and below.Footnote ⁵⁹

Some of this current Newman scholarship which privileges historical context and contingency as a factor in the development of Newman’s theological trajectory has been stimulated by the late Frank Turner’s highly controversial but seminal and innovative biography in 2002, and his 2008 edition of Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua, at the heart of which lay an attempt to recover ‘the Newman of history’.Footnote ⁶⁰ All the studies in question here constructively engage with and apply in their respective fields Turner’s insights on this point. The impact of Turner’s biography has been likened to ‘a bomb in the playground of the theologians’,Footnote ⁶¹ and it was as polarizing as the figure about whom he writes. However, some of its more reductionist and Freudian psychologising claims echoed those of Edwin Abbott, Geoffrey Faber in his Oxford Apostles (1933) and later articles by Fr P. J. FitzPatrick, taking Kingsley’s side in his controversy with Newman that triggered the Apologia.Footnote ⁶² Significantly, that notoriously Newmanophobic collection of essays in 1991, John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romantism, has attracted less attention.Footnote ⁶³ Yet nothing Turner wrote could match the animus of many of the contributors to that earlier collection, for example Valerie Pitt’s explanation of Newman’s conversion to Rome as the result of a ‘complex process of psychological need and rational enquiry of a kind we should now call “cultural”’ and her dismissal of his ‘virtually inventing’ a concept of ‘development’ in the Church ‘to save his own appearances’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nor could it rival in reductionism, the late and then Vicar of Littlemore David Nicholls’s characterisation in that volume of Newman’s mistrust of the reality of material phenomena and admission that he was conscious of only two ‘absolute and luminously self-evident beings’, himself and God, as ‘psychic individualism’ and ‘atomism’. Remarkably, Nicholls interpreted this as proof of Newman’s inability to understand ‘how people relate to each other in the context of community’!Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet, it was not this but Turner’s later revisionist reading which sparked huge debate and some outrage.

Turner invited Newman scholars in effect to ‘meet Newman again for the first time’ by paying closer attention to Newman’s writings within their historical context and resisting the allowing of Newman’s account of his spiritual journey to become the primary lens for understanding his life and writings. There are many flaws in Turner’s use or misuse of evidence and in his invariably speculative conclusions as this writer has set out elsewhere,Footnote ⁶⁶ but his methodology had much merit and in his own earlier edition of Newman’s Idea of a University (1996) he had applied a model of historical contextualisation. In a lively debate in the pages of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 2010, Simon Skinner defended Turner’s work for privileging history over hagiography with a clear swipe at a ‘coterie of like-minded celebrants’ of Newman among Roman Catholic Newman scholars.Footnote ⁶⁷ Duffy responded in the same journal in 2012,Footnote ⁶⁸ to which Skinner made a further reply.Footnote ⁶⁹ Skinner’s critique was taken as implying that in practice only secular-minded historians and not Roman Catholic theologians could objectively treat the Newman of history. In fact, there were Roman Catholic Newman scholars who appreciated that Turner’s work had played a part in awaking ‘some students of Newman from their dogmatic slumbers’,Footnote ⁷⁰ while Skinner himself defended Turner’s methodology but not all of his evaluative judgements. Moreover, as O’Regan argues, one should always ‘be wary of claims to historical objectivity as if there was a way of immediately grasping truth and consequently avoiding the detour of interpretation and the pain of the conflict of interpretation’.Footnote ⁷¹ Newman himself acknowledged his difficulties with others and was aware, at least in retrospect, of his own frailties, even on the eve of his conversion apologising to his brother Francis for overbearing behaviour towards him during his early days at Oxford.Footnote ⁷²

Skinner, like Turner, had actually opened up a wider constructive debate. His timely intervention in this debate followed his seminal article in the same journal back in 1999. In that forensic and important article, Skinner had faulted Newman’s sparing mention in the Apologia of his involvement as editor of the British Critic. This, Skinner argued, amounted to a hijacking of an old fashioned periodical previously managed by an older school of high churchmen, challenging head-on Newman’s claim in the Apologia that he had allowed contributions from all schools and none.Footnote ⁷³ Skinner’s evidence undermined that claim. Turner citing this article was right to note that the concealment of the role and importance of the British Critic in Newman’s Apologia enabled him to downplay his role as party leader in the Church of England, though it is debatable whether this was really Newman’s deliberate intention.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, this reviewer had adopted a similar historical method in his essay on Newman and Tract 90 published as long ago as 1991.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet how much did any of this really prove?

Turner claimed that once you ‘shake the historical adequacy of the Apologia’ then ‘other structures of historical understanding and religious devotion based on that foundation might collapse’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This seems an unwarranted inference to draw and it grossly overstates the case. The kind of details regarding Newman’s selection of writers for the British Critic or whether or not he had fairly interpreted a supposed agreement which he thought had been made with the Anglican bishops not to attack Tract 90 was never directly relevant to Newman’s apologetic purposes in defending himself against Kingsley.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is easy enough to show that Newman’s own account of his life in his Apologia has overdetermined too much of the scholarship in the field. Yet such selectivity and bias is inherent in any autobiographical work. Although it is true that Newman denied that he was writing ‘controversially’ and that he ‘wrote with the one object of relating things as they happened’,Footnote ⁷⁸ he was no less adamant in private correspondence that he was not writing objective or a complete history of the Oxford Movement ‘but of me – it is an egotistical matter from beginning to end’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In short, he was clear that he was being subjective and contemporary and later Roman Catholic readers and reviewers accepted the work in these terms as a defence of his own sincerity and convictions and record of his changes of view but not an autobiography or exact history.Footnote ⁸⁰ Some commentators may subsequently have made a too one-dimensional reading of Newman’s account in faulting it for historical accuracy.Footnote ⁸¹ Newman himself should not be blamed for this. Thus, to some extent Turner was trying to ‘slay’ a ‘paper tiger’ or bogey of his own construction in so severely faulting the Apologia on this ground.Footnote ⁸² On the other hand, Newman has been no less ill-served from an opposite quarter by one recent author who seems to view the Apologia precisely in such one-dimensional terms as pure autobiography while misrepresenting even those who defend Newman’s veracity against his critics as ‘disciples of Turner’.Footnote ⁸³

Ryan Marr, like Turner, rightly seeks to avoid viewing the relevant historical evidence for developments in Newman’s theological perspectives entirely through the lens of Newman’s construal of events. Any similarity of method, however, ends there. For unlike Marr, Turner went beyond the evidence in pure speculation and imposed his own psychologising and reductionist anti-Newman agenda to explain or discredit Newman’s actions at every turn. Few have doubted the extent of Turner’s research and grounding in the primary source material but unfortunately the evidence he unearthed often failed to support the highly speculative and tendentious conclusions which he drew. The problem about Turner’s monumental effort is that ironically, as Zuijdgwegt shrewdly points out, it is as history that his work falls short.Footnote ⁸⁴

Turner was right to highlight Newman’s Tractarian reaction against, if not hostility towards Evangelicalism during the 1830s and Newman’s relative silence about this preoccupation in the Apologia, though he fails to allow for nuance and treats Evangelicalism too much as a monolith, overlooking its own internal tensions and even the differences between Evangelical Anglicanism and Evangelical Dissent. Newman’s early Evangelical commitment was deep and its hold on him only gradually loosened.Footnote ⁸⁵ Turner fails to account for Newman’s shift from evangelicalism to anti-evangelicalism from any of the sources (and entirely overlooks those which would have enabled him to do so), but he strains the evidence when he speculates that Newman, in appearing to substitute liberalism for Evangelicalism in his own account in the Apologia, was merely projecting the pressing needs of the Roman Catholic Newman in the era of the Syllabus of Errors in the 1860s on to the Anglican Newman of the 1830s and 1840s who at that time had different concerns. Turner failed to recognise that Newman’s critique of Evangelicalism, as in No. 73 of the Tracts for the Times, ‘The Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into revealed Religion’, was primarily on the ground that in its privileging of affective and practical religious feeling as a criteria test of true doctrine and in its neglect of ecclesial structures, Evangelicalism, albeit unintentionally, promoted or at least opened the door to liberalism in the longer term. Dogma was reduced to its spiritual and moral relevance and utility.Footnote ⁸⁶ Turner ignored the fact that Newman’s Tractarian polemic against evangelicalism was premised on his earlier and ongoing rejection of liberalism. As Zuijdwegt makes clear, Newman came to reject evangelical Protestantism because he came to believe that it issued in liberalism or Socinianism.Footnote ⁸⁷ For Newman, Evangelicalism was not liberalism per se but ‘liberalism lying in wait’. Moreover, as Eamon Duffy has concluded, ‘to treat the relative lack of emphasis on Evangelicalism in the Apologia as a smokescreen seems a crassly reductive characterization of one of the world’s masterpieces of confessional writing’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Newman was still prepared in the mid-1830s to make common cause with Evangelicals in opposing the appointing of the liberal Renn Dickson Hampden to the Regius Chair of Divinity at Oxford. Moreover, as Andrew Nash reminds us, Newman’s most withering satire in what he called his ‘last words…as an Anglican to Anglicans’ in his article ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’ in the British Critic in April 1839, was directed against latitudinarians and liberals in the Church of England, not Evangelicals.Footnote ⁸⁹ Another way of looking at this issue has been recently suggested by Walter Conn: both liberalism and evangelicalism remained in Newman’s sights precisely both they were both, albeit different, manifestations of subjectivism.Footnote ⁹⁰ Finally, Newman’s Evangelical inheritance continued to play a part in his later religious journey. In fact, it is possible to regard his conversion to Rome not as a repudiation but as a completion or fulfilment of his Evangelical past.

Turner identifies with Leslie Stephen’s and Thomas Huxley’s sweeping assertion that Newman’s No. 85 of the Tracts for the Times, ‘The Scripture Proofs of the Doctrine of the Church’, was a harsh and extensive attack on the religious and historical authority of the Scriptures and provided arguments against Christianity as powerful as any put forth by any unbeliever’.Footnote ⁹¹ Turner seeks to clinch his argument that Newman was a ‘cultural apostate’ and sceptic (contemporary Evangelical critics of Tract 85 had made the same claim) by appealing to the later authority of such later nineteenth-century Sceptics and Rationalists as Leslie Stephen, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Thomas Huxley, Edwin Abbott, who following James Anthony Froude and Charles Kingsley, maintained that Newman defended credulity by means of scepticism. Far from offering a preservative for belief, Newman was blamed for the Victorian Crisis of Faith which his Grammar of Assent (1870) did nothing in their eyes to resolve. Against these claims, following earlier critiques of the Newman as Sceptic hypothesis by Fr John Griffin and Gerard ZuijdwegtFootnote ⁹², Matthew Muller has convincingly argued that while Tract 85 sealed Newman’s move away from his earlier Evangelical emphasis on internal evidences for the truths of Christianity, the only ‘apostasy’ involved was that from his own early Evangelicalism. As a child of Romanticism, what Newman now substituted for his earlier evidential defence of Christian orthodoxy was a new poetic theory of the divinely inspired illuminated imagination and a belief in the inspiration of the bible that was based on the witness of the early church.Footnote ⁹³ The supernatural content of divine revelation remained sacrosanct for Newman but it could only be best communicated through the medium of indirect, symbolic or poetic forms.

Turner also appears to misunderstand the ascetic and spiritual dimension of Newman’s direction of the Oxford Movement and in particular his rationale for Oriel tutoring and discipleship and for the community life at Littlemore. While it is true that psychological considerations and episodes in his family history, notably the shock over his father’s bankruptcy in 1816, his epistolary conflict with his brothers Charles and Francis respectively, and the shock of the death of his adored younger sister Mary in 1828, had a place in Newman’s religious journey and that some scholars have fruitfully explored them to the extent that ‘the heart’ was shown sometimes to have ruled ‘the head’,Footnote ⁹⁴ contingency and psychoanalysis can be taken too far. Turner’s particular type of psychologising has been characterised as ‘remote and inexpert’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Turner arguably oversteps the bounds with his unconvincing speculation that his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary was related to his devotion to the memory of his dead sister Mary.Footnote ⁹⁶ In short, in his over-zealous attempts to be anti-hagiographical, Turner ends up being blindly counter-hagiographical. Turner’s Newman is too much of a one-dimensional caricature of a complex person.

Studies of Newman as both a philosopher of education and rhetorician of education are well represented in the writings of Katherine Tillman.Footnote ⁹⁷ This reviewer and others have explored the practical roots of Newman’s educational thought as acquired in his experience of the Oriel Common Room and as a tutor at Oriel College.Footnote ⁹⁸ David Delio has also examined Newman’s educational philosophy in association with his doctrine of the church in an insightful recent study of Newman’s controversial Lectures on the Tamworth Reading Room published under the pseudonym ‘Catholicus’Footnote ⁹⁹ in The Times in 1840, though in many ways Dwight Culler’s earlier study remains unsurpassed.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, it is in the two interconnected areas of burgeoning Newman scholarship–Newman’s educational ideals as expressed in his Idea of a University, and in the related Irish context of his involvement in the foundation of a Catholic University in Dublin in the 1850s–that the tendency to read Newman’s words in isolation from Newman’s actions has been most trenchantly and effectively challenged in recent scholarship.

Colin Barr has done more than anyone to expose what he calls ‘the fatal flaw of Newman Studies: the failure to raise the gaze from the great cardinal and examine his surroundings’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Not only is Newman’s Idea widely recognised as ‘a classic of Victorian literature’Footnote ¹⁰² but its influence as conveyed in Newman’s original Dublin lectures in the 1850s and only later enshrined in the published Idea (1873), has helped shape and challenge current academic and higher educational thinking. In fact, Newman’s ideas have been hotly contested on either side in debates over ‘what are universities for?’ The problem, as Barr shows, is not only the diametrically opposite conclusions that those on the political Right and Left have tended to draw from what Newman actually said or wrote but that too many have examined what Newman wrote on the subject incompletely or uncritically and read the Idea for whatever they wished to find there. The paucity of the then available source material that could be consulted and the fact that only Newman’s writings were consulted did not help. In his attempts to set up a university in Ireland, as Paul Shrimpton in his recent study shows, Newman was very much taken up with practical administrative details.Footnote ¹⁰³ In fact, Newman justified the extent of his involvement in devising courses precisely on the ground that his writings and lectures on the subject of university education might be construed as too theoretical. The reasons for the apparent eventual ‘failure’ of the project were varied and complex, but for Barr, too much blame has been heaped upon Cardinal Paul Cullen and Newman’s side of the story (in a detailed memorandum dated 1873 Newman had indicted Cullen’s conduct) has too often been accepted uncritically.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He argues that Newman was insufficiently alive to Irish sensitivities and concerns, and tended to overlook the fact that the Catholic University was an Irish institution.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Barr concludes that any account of events in relation to the Catholic University in Ireland other than Newman’s own has allowed the latter to pass largely uncontested.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Above all, the Idea’s posthumous reputation has actually obscured Newman’s actual experiences as an educator, both in Oxford and Dublin.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Shrimpton’s study of this experience, complementing Barr’s, is thus to be welcomed, even if differences of interpretation of the record between the two are apparent.

Newman thus continues to provoke critical reaction as he did in his own lifetime. The apparently obsessive vehemence of some critiques, long before Turner’s, have been interpreted by one Newman scholar as evidence that Newman has come to represent ‘a permanent standard of judgment against the confident secularism of the modern world’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ However, while courtesy has sometimes been absent in the heat of contested scholarly interpretation, there has been a refreshing trend in recent and current writing to examine Newman’s life and thought and legacy constructively from the varying perspectives of philosophy, theology, history, education, and literature. In this respect, the recent Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman emerges as a model of interdisciplinary investigation and understanding. It is a model that deserves to be followed more widely. ‘The Newman of history’ has been and is continuing to be recovered.