Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Gender, Self, And Conscience‪.‬

The historical Newman has proven an elusive figure. Reviewer Richard Shannon celebrates Ian Ker's recent biography of John Henry Newman as "high achievement" for its critical exposition of Newman's prose (especially Newman's skillful employment of rhetoric, imagery, metaphor, and satire), but bemoans the fact that Ker, like the many Newman biographers before him, fails to situate Newman within his historical context. This is a serious shortcoming because the historical Newman has been the subject of much controversy. According to Shannon, "the man whom a multitude of his public and private contemporaries knew, or thought they knew, in reverence, pity, or hate, is not here"; in fact, "one frequently gets a sense of a Newman temporally disembodied." The conflicting feelings which Newman prompted among his contemporaries appear to be due to a kind of paradoxical doubleness inherent in the man. Newman was a shy man who was respectful of, even deferential to, authority; nonetheless, he was proud and ambitious. He was a mild-mannered man who was attracted to ascetism; yet, he was a skilled and combative occasional writer spurred into action by controversy. He was a traditional man who devoted his life to the dogmatic principle in religion; nevertheless, he championed the rights of conscience and prepared the way for Vatican II. Ker himself wonders about the varying reactions this doubleness has produced: "It was odd how Newman could attract such professed adulation, and yet at the same time such downright hostility" (607). What we have at the moment are two very different schools of interpretation: the first contending that Newman possessed an extraordinary saintliness (Ward, Trevor, and Ker); the second arguing that Newman possessed a limited, if not devious, human nature (Faber, O'Faolian, and Robbins). Both, however, have failed to realize the historical Newman because of limitations in their perspecvtive. Wilfrid Ward is wise enough to alert us to the danger of "partial" readings of the man: "John Henry Newman is indeed himself a remarkable instance of one of his most characteristic contentions, that the same object may be seen by different onlookers under aspects so various and partial as to make their views, from their inadequacy, appear occasionally even contradictory" (I.2).