Though some writers have tried to prove that Newman was at heart a scholastic, perhaps even a Thomist, the tendency of Newman critics at one time was to go to the opposite extreme and put him forward as the founder of a new philosophy which might even supplant the traditional philosophy of the Church. This idea was behind some of the attempts of Modernists to put Newman forward as the prophet of modern Christian thought and apologetics. Neither of these contentions is justified. Newman was not a Thomist. He had on his shelves the Summa Contra Gentiles, but it is doubtful whether he studied St. Thomas, except in the quotations of modern scholastic writers. When he did read the scholastics, his mind was already formed, and Newman was not the man to take up a fundamentally new position in late life. But it was even more true that Newman was not a propounder of a philosophical system in opposition to any other philosophy, either ancient or modern. Though one does find a certain amount of even deep metaphysical thought, particularly in some of his many unpublished opuscula, yet metaphysics was at no time Newman’s principal interest. In his early days, he does from time to time hint at a sympathy with idealistic metaphysics. But he never commits himself to a single definite statement in its favour, still less an argument. He admits in a very early work a sympathy for the platonism of the Alexandrian Fathers; but he makes it quite clear that it is the Alexandrian Fathers which interest him much more than their platonism.

A recent reading of the reviews of Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman in 1912 has deepened a long-harboured suspicion that appreciation of Newman is very much a moral matter. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, you will never do him justice until you yourself begin to feel some spark of his deep and self-disregarding love of truth. Just acknowledgements have yet to be made by the literary spokesmen of England to the titanic genius of this great Englishman; but the failure, if failure it can be shown to be, is mainly a moral one.

When his biography appeared in 1912 it was met by a cautious but unmistakable disparagement of the Cardinal’s intellect. None of the writers indeed stooped so low as some of those of the generation before, when Carlyle, with shattering imperceptiveness, had described him as possessing “the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit’’. Lord Morley too, more sweetly but with hardly less critical obtuseness, had written: “Mill had none of the incomparably winning graces by which Newman made mere syren style (italics mine) do duty for exact, penetrating and coherent thought: by which moreover he actually raised his church to what would not so long before have seemed a strange and inconceivable rank in the mind of Protestant England. Style has worked many a miracle before now, but none more wonderful than Newman’s.” To trace the Catholic Revival in England to Newman’s style needs nerve enough. But only the conviction that his readers knew the writings of Newman as little as he, could have steeled honest John Morley to accuse the author of The Grammar of Assent of abandoning exact, penetrating and coherent thought for mere honeyed words.