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The Reception of Turner's Newman: A Reply to Simon Skinner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2012

EAMON DUFFY
EAMON DUFFY
Affiliation:
Magdalene College, Cambridge CB3 0AG; e-mail: ed1000@cam.ac.uk
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Extract

In his article on the critical reception of the late Frank Turner's John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion, Simon Skinner contends that Turner's study is ‘empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous’, and he cites with approval Andrew Wilson's judgement that it ‘revolutionizes Newman studies’.1 But this historical masterpiece, he thinks, has been unjustly howled down by a benighted posse of Roman Catholic reviewers, ‘almost none of [whom] are … tenured in a university history department’. Turner's Catholic reviewers, ‘which is to say nearly all reviewers’, are therefore ‘amateurs’, who ‘literally could not comprehend’ what Turner was up to.2 But history is not an arcane discipline, and Skinner's complaint about the ‘lack of disciplinary equipment’ of these hostile reviewers seems hardly to the point in relation to a book offered by a major publisher to a general readership. The ordinary rules of historical evidence are intelligible to anybody, and a de haut en bas restriction of the right to an opinion on Turner's book to the gild of professional historians runs the risk of seeming both arbitrary and condescending.

Type
Debate
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 534 - 548
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Turner, Frank M., John Henry Newman, the challenge to Evangelical religion, New Haven–London 2002Google Scholar; Skinner, Simon, ‘History versus hagiography: the reception of Turner's Newman’, this Journal lxi (2010), 764, 766Google Scholar.

2 Skinner, ‘The reception of Turner's Newman’, 776.

3 Ibid. 772.

4 Ibid. 781.

5 Ibid. 778.

6 Turner excluded the polemical pamphlets which make up pp. 359–464 of Apologia pro vita sua … by John Henry Cardinal Newman, ed. Martin Svaglic, Oxford 1967.

7 Tristram Hunt, Guardian, 4 Jan. 2003.

8 W. R. Ward's review appeared in Journal of Modern History lxxvi (2004), 680–1; Cox's in HJ xlviii (2005), 590–2.

9 Skinner, ‘The reception of Turner's Newman’, 769, 772, 778.

10 Ibid. 770–1.

11 Turner, Newman, 554 (my emphasis).

12 Ibid. 444 (my emphasis).

13 John Henry Cardinal Newman, ‘Apologia pro vita sua’ and six sermons, ed. Frank M. Turner, New Haven–London 2008, 1–115.

14 Skinner himself persuasively documented that deviousness in ‘Newman, the Tractarians and the British Critic’, this Journal l (1999), 716–59.

15 Turner, Newman, 23; Newman, Apologia (Turner edn), 14.

16 Turner, Newman, 23.

17 Skinner, ‘The reception of Turner's Newman’, 765.

18 Turner, Newman, 1.

19 Newman, Apologia (Turner edn), 85.

20 Turner, Newman, 151.

21 Ibid. 434–6.

22 Ibid. 435–6: Turner includes J. A. Froude among those former acolytes who had liberated themselves from Newman's malign sexual spell, ignoring Froude's enduring personal reverence for Newman which continued long after he had repudiated Newman's theology. He also, laughably, thinks Frederick Faber's sexuality, like his spirituality, healthier than Newman's.

23 Ibid. 139.

24 Ibid. 636 (my emphasis).

25 Geoffrey Faber, Oxford apostles, London 1933.

26 Turner, Newman, 595.

27 Ibid. 533.

28 Skinner, ‘The reception of Turner's Newman’, 777.

29 Letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, vi, ed. Gerard Tracy, Oxford 1984, 133.

30 Turner, Newman, 228–9.

31 Ibid. 243.

32 Ibid. 237.

33 Ibid. 141 (my emphasis). Newman's sermon was no. 24 in the first volume of his Parochial and plain sermons: see the one-volume edition, San Francisco 1997, 198–207.

34 Turner, Newman, 145; Newman, J. H., Arians of the fourth century, London 1890, 393–4Google Scholar.

35 Newman, Arians, 41–56.

36 Ibid. 30–1. The targeting of theological liberalism in Arians is illuminatingly explored in Stephen Thomas, Newman and heresy: the Anglican years, Cambridge 1991, 36–49.

37 Newman, J. H., Loss and gain: the story of a convert, London 1881, 402–12Google Scholar.

38 Idem, Apologia (Turner edn), 216–17.

39 Idem, Certain difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic teaching considered, i, London 1879, 27–8.

40 Idem, Apologia (Turner edn), 324.

41 Ibid. 157–8, 209–10.

42 Turner, Newman, 613–15. Frank's uncharacteristically well-intentioned but breath-takingly crass letter is printed in Letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, x, ed. Francis J. McGrath, Oxford 2006, 744–5.

43 Turner, Newman, 598.

44 J. H. Newman, An essay on the development of Christian doctrine: the edition of 1845, ed. J. M. Cameron, Harmondsworth 1974, 92.

45 Letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, ix, ed. Francis J. McGrath, Oxford 2006, 585.

46 Ibid. ix. 327–9. For Turner's muddled discussion of these letters see Newman, 452–3.

47 Letters and diaries, ix. 467.

48 Ibid. ix. 574.

49 Ibid. ix. 595, 616.

50 Ibid. ix. 729–30.

51 Turner, Newman, 565.

52 Henri Bremond, The mystery of Newman, London 1909, 305.

53 J. H. Newman, Fifteen sermons preached before the University of Oxford, London 1872, 257.

54 Skinner, ‘The reception of Turner's Newman’, 780.

55 Newman, F. W., Contributions chiefly to the early history of the late Cardinal Newman, London 1891Google Scholar.

56 Abbott, Edwin A., The Anglican career of Cardinal Newman, London 1892Google Scholar.

57 Newman, Apologia (Turner edn), 128.