John Henry Newman was mostly a theologian and educator.
He was never
at any time directly involved in political affairs. When he wrote on
social issues his main preoccupations were religious.
He once wrote to a friend, “it never has been my line to take up
political or social questions, unless they came close to me as matters
of personal duty”.
Scholars have usually portrayed him as a conservative in politics and some have lamented that he lacked a social conscience.
In his first published book Stephen Kelly, a young researcher from
UCD, challenges these common assumptions and aims at providing a more
nuanced portrait of Newman’s political and social thought.
He rejects the claim that Newman was not aware of political and
social problems and, moreover, that he continued to be a conservative
over his life.
Withdrawn
Kelly acknowledges that in his years in Oxford Newman remained
withdrawn from contemporary political and social affairs but with his
conversion to Catholicism Newman acquired a stronger social conscience.
Although he was neutral of party politics, in some of the
controversies he was involved (papal infallibility, separation of Church
and state, temporal power of the Pope) he defended a more liberal
perspective.
Kelly relies extensively on Newman’s letters and maintains that even
if throughout his life the English cardinal retained a strong bond with
the principles of conservatism he cannot be labelled as a Tory.
In the most valuable chapter of this book, published as an article
last year in the quarterly Studies, Kelly argues that Newman’s
experience in Dublin and the involvement of some members of the Young
Irelanders in the new established Catholic University of Ireland brought
him to reconsider his disbelief in democracy.
Unfortunately the same
level of detail and accuracy that Kelly shows in his account of Newman’s
years in Ireland is not employed in the rest of the book.
Liberal
Sections are dedicated to the Church-state relations, to the idea of
liberal education and to Newman’s analysis of the British constitution
from an ‘Old Tory’ perspective.
In a chapter on ‘Newman the historian’ Kelly surprisingly claims that
objectivity and rational analysis was always of secondary importance
for Newman as he was unable to detach himself from his theological
beliefs.
In spite of his ambitions Kelly is not always convincing. The main
limitation of his work is that he uses the simplistic
conservative/liberal opposition to explain and understand complex
phenomena.
For instance, if in Newman’s times the life of the Church was simply a
battle between liberal Catholicism and Ultramontanism, as Kelly
portrays, and therefore Newman stood on the liberal side in his
understanding of papal infallibility as it was recently defined by the
first Vatican Council, the logical conclusion would be that also Pius
IX, who was ultimately responsible for the dogmatic formulation, was a
liberal.
Spiritual loyalty
Newman’s political views didn’t change so much if towards the end of
his life, in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in 1875, he could write: “No one can dislike the democratic principle more than I do. No one
mourns more than I, over the state of Oxford, given up, alas! to
liberalism and progress … All I know is, that Toryism, that is, loyalty
to persons, springs immortal in the human breast; that religion is a
spiritual loyalty; and that Catholicity is the only divine form of
religion. And thus, in centuries to come, there may be found out some
way of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is
authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with ‘Progress’
and ‘Liberalism’.”
And yet, according to Kelly, this letter “boosted Newman’s reputation
as a champion of an elegant and reasonably liberal-minded
Catholicism”!
This is not the first full-length attempt to study Newman’s political
and social thought, but the only one produced after the complete
publication of his letters and diaries.
Even considering the limitations just briefly noted, this work gives
insights to the teachings of an original and influencing thinker.