In 1853, John Henry Newman started sketching out a life of St Philip Neri, declaring that he wished “so to bring him before me, that the most opposite or apparently irreconcilable points in his conduct … should at once by the very sight of him be understood and coalesce”.

The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman
edited by FREDERICK D. AQUINO and BENJAMIN J. KING
(oxford university press, 624 PP, £110)
Tablet bookshop price £99 • Tel 020 7799 4064

In 1853, John Henry Newman started sketching out a life of St Philip Neri, declaring that he wished “so to bring him before me, that the most opposite or apparently irreconcilable points in his conduct … should at once by the very sight of him be understood and coalesce”. Newman, when defending his conversion to Catholicism in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, felt he had to ­present something of the “living intelligence by which I write, and argue, and act” to cast out the “phantom … which gibbers instead of me”, the public view of him as a Romish schemer so habituated to rhetorical trickery as to have corrupted his own sense of truth.

Newman has, on the whole, been well served by his biographers, not least by Ian Ker, whose 1988 biography provided a meticu­lous portrait of his intellectual life. But, in 2002, Frank M. Turner declared that Newman scholarship had been unduly influenced by the image Newman presented of himself in his Apologia. If Turner’s account was itself marred by his animus against Newman, it was, nevertheless, well researched, and informed by an extensive knowledge of the circumstances in which Newman wrote, argued and acted.

Get Instant Access

Continue Reading

Register for free to read this article in full

REGISTER

Subscribe for unlimited access

SUBSCRIBE NOW

From just £37.50 quarterly

  Print copy of The Tablet delivered directly to your door.
  Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content.
  Access to the weekly digital copy of The Tablet.
  Full access to The Tablet’s archive – over 180 years of back issues.

Already a subscriber? Login