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Elite and Popular Religion: The Case of Newman*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Dermot Fenlon
Dermot Fenlon*
Affiliation:
The Oratory, Birmingham
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Extract

Among the signal insights of twentieth-century scholarship was the recognition that early Christianity accorded personal importance to the plebs. First, Eric Auerbach analysed the humble speech forms of early Christianity, contrasting them with the literature of learned pagans. The point was developed by Ramsay MacMullen in an important essay entitled ‘Sermo humilis’. Arnaldo Momigliano applied these insights to the theologians, historians and hagiographers of the fourth and fifth centuries. He showed how Augustine, Jerome, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret of Cyr succeeded, as pagan intellectuals had not succeeded, in ‘abolishing the internal frontiers between the learned and the vulgar’. Finally, Peter Brown, in a series of brilliant works from The Cult of the Saints to his revised biography of Augustine, supplied a means of discerning in the practice of universal baptism the ‘antidote’ to the exaggerations of fourth-century ascetical elitism. Augustine imparted to the Western Middle Ages a confidence in the power of sacramental grace as efficacious not only for the ascetic few, but as communicating to the many a capacity for growth in charity, purity, and prayer. Such a perspective on the religion of the many bids adieu to Gibbon’s story of ‘philosophy’ collapsing into ‘barbarism and religion’; to Hume’s account of the superstitious and the credulous; and to Henry Hart Milman’s Romantic brand of Liberal Anglicanism as marked by ‘condescension’ towards ‘popular religion’ occluding ‘the thought processes of the average man’; a habit of mind to which Peter Brown surprisingly appended the name of Newman.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 42: Elite and Popular Religion , 2006 , pp. 372 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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Footnotes

*

My thanks are due to Lewis Berry, Philip Cleevely and Sheridan Gilley for helpful criticism. My thanks are also due to Peter Brown for his deeply generous response to this paper.

References

1 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1953).Google Scholar

2 MacMullen, Ramsey, ‘A Note on Sermo humilis’, JTS n.s. 17 (1966), 108–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Momigliano, Arnaldo, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Roman Historians’, in Cuming, G. J. and Baker, Derek, eds, Popular Belief and Practice, SCH 8 (Cambridge, 1972), 1–29 Google Scholar, 8, quotation at 17.

4 Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo (2nd edn, London, 2000).Google Scholar

5 Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews was published in 1829; in 1840 his History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire appeared; in 1849 he was made Dean of St Paul’s; in 1855 he published his History of Latin Christianity.

6 Brown, Peter, ‘Religion and Imagination’, in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1982), 10–13 Google Scholar, and idem, , The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, IL, and London, 1981), 16.Google Scholar

7 Two Essays on Biblical and Christian Miracles (Westminster, MD, 1969), 1–94.

8 Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al., 28 vols (Oxford and London, 1961-) [hereafter: LD], 6: ed. Gerard Tracey, 47.

9 LD 7: 283, 487.

10 Two Essays, 226–7.

11 Newman to T. W. Allies, 30 September 1842, in Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others (London, 1917), 196–7. The place of Huet calls for investigation.

12 ‘Milman’s view of Christianity’ in Essays Critical and Historical II (2nd edn, London, 1871), 192. For Newman’s application of the principle to the natural sciences, see his University Sermons, no. 15, (originally 14, in the 1843 edn); and for the relation between natural religion and the rise of Christianity, his critique of Gibbon in the Grammar of Assent, especially chs 9 and 10. Newman’s insistence (against Milman) on the significance of the doctrines of Christianity in the world of Late Antiquity is illuminated in the works of Peter Brown.

13 Forbes, D., The Liberal Anglican Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1952), 81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Two Essays, 239.

15 Newman to Keble, 4 May 1843 {Correspondence, 219).

16 Kingsley’s text repr. in the Fontana edition of Newman’s Apologia (London, 1959), 29–65, quotation at 65.

17 Autobiographical Writings, ed. H. Tristram (London, 1957), 175; Loss and Gain, ed. Alan G. Hill (London, 1986), 294. Frank McGrath draws attention to the theme of the saints in Newman’s diary for 1843, in his impending edition of Newman’s LD 9. I am grateful to him for permission to read the text in advance of publication.

18 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (6th edn, Notre Dame, IN, 1989), 372–3.

19 Ibid., 327–8.

20 Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (Westminster, MD, 1968), 261.

21 Ker, Ian, The Catholic Revival in English Literature: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame, IN, and Leominster, 2003), 13–33.Google Scholar

22 The Mother of God, ed. Stanley Jaki (Pinckney, MI, 2003), 74. The advantage of this edition is that it supplies Newman’s emendations.

23 LD 22:173-4.

24 Ibid., 196–7.

25 Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered 1 (Westminster, MD, 1969), 279.

26 Ibid., 288–9.

27 Momigliano, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs’, 16.

28 Ibid., 17–18.

29 Historical Sketches 2 (Westminster, MD, 1970), 315.

30 Ibid., 315–16.

31 Ibid., 317.

32 Ibid.

33 Momigliano, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs’, 18.

34 Faith of our Fathers (London and New York, 2004), 25–7. I cannot, however, concur with the description of Newman as a ‘romantic individualist’ whose ‘vision of purgatory’ was ‘an all but absolute loneliness’ (ibid., 132). Newman’s doctrine of purgatory was taken from St Catherine of Genoa and St Francis de Sales.

35 Worship and Theology in England IV: From Newman to Martineau, 1850–1900 (London and Princeton, NJ, 1962), 302–3.

36 Appendix V to the third edition (1871) of The Avian Crisis of the Fourth Century, at 454–5. This, it seems to me, supplies the perspective requisite to a reading of his Preface to the final edition (1877) of the Via Media.