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The Structure of Newman's Apologia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Martin J. Svaglic
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Extract

The Apologia pro Vita Sua is not the autobiography of Newman from 1801 to 1845. It tells us nothing of the family life, the student activities, the intellectual and artistic interests of its complex subject. Nor is it even a spiritual autobiography of those years except in a limited sense. We must turn to the Letters and Correspondence, with their “Autobiographical Memoir”, to supplement the bare account given in the Apologia of Newman's conversion to Evangelical Christianity. The Apologia is primarily a work of rhetoric designed to persuade a body of readers or “judges”, English, Protestant, and suspicious of a convert to an unpopular religion, that Newman, whom Kingsley had made a symbol of the Catholic priesthood, was a man not of dishonesty but of integrity. Newman chose autobiography as his method because of his lifelong English preference of the concrete to the abstract, his vivid realization of the rôle in persuasion of personal influence: “I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear. … I gain more from the life of our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.”1 “The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us/'sj^was his conversion to Catholicism after a long puzzling delay, many predictions of the event, and even) charges of treachery to the Church of England that had created th^ atmosphere of suspicion in which his character had been impugned! Therefore he would confine the autobiography principally to a brief explanation of how he arrived, to begin with, at what so many regarded with suspicion and fear: Anglo-Cathoiic principles; and to a detailed one of how, having accepted them and devoted himself to propagating them, he became convinced that the principles which had led him thus far must lead him farther still, into the Catholic Church. ”I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means“ (p. 27). If that history of opinions, in spite of its limited scope, has so much of the richness and variety of great autobiography, it is because Newman held that the means by which we arrive at belief, all of which he would try to chronicle for his own life so far as that was possible, were multiform and complex.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , March 1951 , pp. 138 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

1 Introduction to “St. Chrysostom”, Historical Sketches, ii, 217. All references except those to the Apologia are to the standard edition of Newman's Works (London, 18911903). References to the Apologia are to the edition of Charles Frederick Harrold (New York, 1947).

2 Discussions and Arguments, p. 293.

3 “Implicit and Explicit Reason”, University Sermons, p. 258; cited by Houghton, The Art of Newman's “Apologia” (New Haven, 1945), p. 28 (an admirable study, to which I am much indebted).

4 Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, The Victorian Tragedy (London, 1931), p. 174.

6 Introduction to “St. Chrysostom”, Historical Sketches, ii, 218, 219. This essay has received considerable attention in recent years. See Fernande Tardivel, La Personnalité littéraire de Newman (Paris. 1937), pp. 231–238; and Houghton, pp. 14–20.

6 Historical Sketches, ii, 221–222, 224, 227.

7 Letters and Correspondence, i, 366. Italics mine.

8 A Grammar of Assent, p. 436.

9 Wilberforce's review, which originally appeared in the Quarterly (cxvi [1864], 528573) is reprinted in his Essays Contributed to the “Quarterly Review” (London, 1874), I, 334–393. For the comments of Gates, see his Selections from tlte Prose Writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman (New York, 1895), pp. xvii-xviii.

10 Op. cit., pp. 46–67.

11 Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others: 1839–1845, edited at the Birmingham Oratory (London, 1917), p. 165.

12 See Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London, 1912), i, 61–62.

13 A Grammar of Assent, p. 444.

14 Wilberforce in the Quart. Rev., cxvi (1864), 549.

15 Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, p. 178 (hereafter referred to as Occasional Sermons).

16 Verses on Various Occasions, p. 15.

17 Parochial and Plain Sermons, v, 76.

18 Quoted from Eph. vi.12–17, Occasional Sermons, p. 306.

19 The Arians of the Fourth Century, p. 67.

20 Occasional Sermons, pp. 127, 136, 160.

20 Apologia, p. 391. Originally the end of Part ii of the 1864 edition but part of the preface to the revised edition of 1865. It is this latter edition, revised slightly in subsequent impressions, which most readers know.

22 Discourses to Mixed Congregations, pp. 98–99.

23 See Apologia, p. 71. It appears that Newman originally intended the story proper to consist of three parts but changed his mind in the process of composition. This may account for his ending the second chapter with the reception in 1841 of Tract 90. See Henry Tristram, “Note au bas d'un grand texte”, La France franciscaine, m“ Série, xxii (1939), 43–44.

24 The words of Turnus, about to be slain. Aeneid xil. 895.

25 The elegiac note which pervades the Apologia and culminates in the unforgettable ending of Ch. v is perhaps the great secret of its irresistible appeal even to those who regret Newman's departure from the Church of England. Like the conception of life and conversion we have been discussing, it is all the more effective as a rhetorical device in being first a deeply genuine sentiment. Compare the effect of the Apologia with that of Piloses of Faith, the spiritual autobiography of Newman's brother Francis, who refused to be subdued by anything outside of himself and in whom there is nothing which might be called elegiac.

26 See Occasional Sermons, p. 73.

27 Ibid., pp. 136–137.