Cardinal Newman

TO SAY that it was a strange turn of events is an understatement. The plan was straightforward enough. The body was to be exhumed from its humble grave, examined and then reinterred in a new sartorial tomb. All done in anticipation of the probable beatification by Benedict XVI, this December. The bodies of numerous other men and women have followed similar itineraries.

The only thing is that when workmen opened the grave, John Henry Newman was gone. Except for a small cross and a name plaque, nothing was to be found. The body, coffin and all, had decomposed. It had vanished completely into the marly clay.

As ghoulish as it sounds, I was disappointed. Not that I’ve ever understood the devotion of some to a category of saints dubbed, unfortunately enough, the “incorruptibles.” But I had looked forward for a long time to taking a train through the Midlands of England to pay my respects to the body of St. John Henry Newman, entombed at long last in the Birmingham Oratory. I owe the man everything.

But the more that I consider that Cardinal Newman now has two graves, both of which stand empty, the more appropriate it seems. “Newman’s empty grave foils re-interment plan,” exclaimed one headline. I have no doubt that Newman himself would have found it a fitting testament to his life.

Since his death, in 1890, John Henry Newman has become an epitome of English Catholicism. The Oxford don who quixotically tried to convince a nation — and himself — that the Church of England was more than a Protestant denomination in Tudor drag. The introvert who read his sermons in a barely audible voice to a university church packed with undergraduates. The ascetic whose prose style remains the finest in our language. The intellectual equilibrist whose theological subtlety merited the Vatican’s suspicion for much of his career. The stinging polemicist who was discovered to have aided hundreds of the Birmingham poor — a discovery made only after his death.

Cardinal Newman was one of those eminent Victorians peculiar to 19th Century England; his voice a part of that grand conversation that included Thomas Carlyle and Mary Ann Evans, John Stuart Mill and Elizabeth Gaskell, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin — archangels all in Blake’s “mental fight.”

Conservative and liberal Catholics alike have claimed him. To be sure, throughout his career Newman set his face against liberalism in all its guises — the belief bequeathed us by the 18th Century Enlightenment: that humanity and divinity occupy the same continuum, and that men and women are perfectible. But it’s hard to imagine that Newman would have any time for certain American conservatives who are no more than a variation of the liberalism he abhorred. And true it is that Newman privileged individual conscience above all the claims made on the soul. But unlike modern liberals Newman assumed that such an imperial conscience would have been formed and informed by a composite and reflective tradition. For Newman, a free conscience was a conscience bound by obligations.

What really makes Newman our contemporary was his life-long sense that at the heart of modernity churns a moral vortex that promises to consume us all. Writing in 1875, Newman captured the century and a half to come:

“To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.”

Newman always sensed that we live out our lives in spiritual exile, pretending all-the-while to be at home. And he came to see in most political wrangling a wrestling with smoke and fog, having little relevance to the “aboriginal calamity” that has marred the human soul. For Newman, here we have no abiding city. We belong elsewhere.

Some critics argue that Newman converted to Roman Catholicism out of his own psychological need for authority. There’s some truth in this, but not much. When viewed from the shores of 19th Century England, the Catholic Church could hardly be considered a rock by which to steer any course; it was primarily a church of Irish immigrants whose Italian hierarchy lay far away in a country riven by tribal vendettas.

Rather what Newman found in Roman Catholicism was what he believed to be the truth tout court, the certain passage through the ever-accelerating terrain of a modernity that disintegrates the very instant it slides into view. Catholicism presented itself to Newman as a deep and broad muddy river whose currents were complex, treacherous at times, and, ultimately, life-sustaining. As he described it in the conclusion of his Apologia, Catholicism was a “moral factory, for melting, refining, and molding by an incessant noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purpose.” Only Newman could find in the grim industrial landscape of Birmingham a metaphor for the Body of Christ!

In deciding to become a Roman Catholic, Newman knew that more was at stake than simply a move from the spires of Oxford to the factory-stacks of Birmingham. And more was at issue than those arcane ecclesiastical differences that innumerable church bureaucrats who staff endless ecumenical sub-committees nowadays enjoy talking about.

Rather Newman realized that if anyone “will not put an establishment or philosophy in the place of the Church, if he will not do homage to talent as such, or wealth as such, or official eminence as such, then he is out of joint with the age, and not only his words, but his look and his air are like a pail of cold water thrown over every man of the world he meets.” In deciding to become a Catholic, Newman was intentionally choosing to be out of joint.

The liberalism that Newman opposed has been regnant now for a good four decades. And the results are what Newman anticipated. Western Christianity has become a congeries of a happy-clappy moralism, nostalgia for the quaint, faux spiritualities, and fumbling forays into political action. Even much of American Catholicism is tempted to image our non-dogmatic Protestant churches. Balkanized into innumerable ideological sects, and preaching only to their respective choirs, Christian churches have long since ceased to articulate any integral cultural vision.

Not that this liberalism hasn’t been showing signs of hemorrhaging for some time. (Whether or not the recent market collapse is a harbinger of the liberal mind’s inevitable descent into imbecility remains to be seen.) And if anyone has had intimations of the demise of Western liberalism, it has been Benedict XVI. Surely, if and when the pope does beatify Newman, it will not be so much because the recognition is long overdue, but because the Englishman’s moment has finally come. For if Newman spent his life warning us of modernity’s toxicity, now that the patient has entered a terminal state, we just might be ready to hear the cardinal again for the first time.

Two empty graves. This is as it should be. For if Dr. Newman had remained in the humble earth that was his first abode, we would have continued to memorialize him as one more eminent Victorian who wrote great prose and fussed over irrelevant religious questions. And if John Henry Cardinal Newman had come to rest in the marmoreal splendor of the Birmingham Oratory, we would have been seduced by the unavoidable triumphalism of the church militant. As it is, standing in the presence of a body that has evanesced completely, we are confronted by the gritty fact that however much we like to pretend we’re at home in modernity, each of us belongs elsewhere. That now, even after we’ve elected yet another hope to believe in, here we have no abiding city.

The Rev. David Lewis Stokes Jr., a Catholic priest and a former Episcopal priest, is an associate professor of theology at Providence College.