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A WILD BEAST CAUGHT BY DR. WISEMAN: THE RHETORICAL PROBLEM OF CARDINAL WISEMAN IN CARDINAL NEWMAN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Renascence, Summer 2007 by Heady, Chene
IN his critically renowned autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), John Henry Newman openly abandons the fiction that autobiography is a private act, a solitary expression of the soul. The Apologia is a flamboyantly intertextual autobiography; it is written in response to hos tile contemporary accounts of Newman's life and work (many of which it directly cites), and attempts to refute these accounts by means of ample quotations from Newman's letters and published writings. This dynamic is most transparent in the case of the broad church Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley, whose attack on Newman triggered the work's composition. While the influence of Kingsley's pamphlet What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? on the shape of the autobiography Newman wrote to answer it is well known, the influence of other contemporary narratives of Newman's life on the Apologia has been a subject of comparative critical neglect. I contend that juxtaposing the Apologia with Newman's primary other autobiographical work, The Journal: 1859-79, reveals that key elements of Newman's autobiographical rhetoric are directed against Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman's accounts of his life and work.
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The central thesis of the Apologia, like that of Newman's autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, is that "it is impossible to stop the growth of the mind"1; the independence of Newman's thought - particularly his pre-conversion freedom from Catholic influence - is repeatedly presented as evidence of the authenticity of his mental development. To create this independence textually, Newman must construct a narrative that carefully erases the influence of the popular author, speaker, and ecclesiastic Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman on his life and thought. This task is rhetorically difficult, for Wiseman, both the highest ranking English Catholic ecclesiastic and a bestselling author,2 had already published works trumpeting his influence on Newman to Victorian readers. By simultaneously narrating and erasing Wiseman's influence on his life, Newman recovers his intellectual independence and literary authority; the critical neglect of Wiseman's theological and literary relation to Newman evidences the success of the Apologia's narrative rhetoric.
On the face of it, Catholic influence, the larger accusation for which Wiseman's writings serve as the key supporting example, hardly seems a grave charge to bring against a convert to Catholicism. The idea that Catholics influenced Newman's conversion may seem benign, intellectually irrelevant, or even fitting, given Newman's own defense in his Oxford University Sermons of personal influence as a means of spreading faith. However, from the initial pamphlet exchange with Kingsley onward, Newman himself clearly considers it to be one of the most serious charges against him. Before the Apologia even begins, Newman categorizes the rumor that his ideas were "inspired by Roman theologians" as an important charge he must refute; in Chapter One, he emphasizes that while visiting Italy in 1833, he and Hurrell Froude "kept clear of Catholics" as a rule; in Chapter Three, he asserts that his "opinions in religion were not gained, as the world said, from Roman sources," explains that during the Tractarian movement he refused to "meet familiarly any leading persons of the Roman Communion," and says that the "interference" of "Catholics" was "more likely" to "throw" him "back" towards Anglicanism than to lead him to the Catholic church; and in Chapter Four, he maintains that from 1843 to 1845, even while contemplating conversion himself, he "abstained] altogether from intercourse with Catholics" (True Mode 358, Apologia 38, 82, 104, 105, 167). Throughout the Apologia, Newman stakes his intellectual authenticity on the claim that he has reached his intellectual positions through "honest external means," which is to say, through non-Catholic literary and intellectual sources (36). In short, as Newman wrote elsewhere of himself and his fellow Tractarians, "Catholics did not make us Catholics; Oxford made us Catholics" (qtd. in Altholz 3-4).
Newman's uncharacteristically loud and repeated emphasis on this point may strike the reader as excessive and disproportionate. However, here, as is often the case, the intertextual context of the Apologia, the nineteen-year-old public debate over the nature and meaning of Newman's conversion, best clarifies the work's rhetorical concerns. The Catholic influence on Newman's conversion was used as a key piece of evidence to support two of the most damaging caricatures of Newman: the image of the Oxford Movement Newman (1833-1845) as a Catholic spy undermining the Anglican church while awaiting his superiors' orders to convert, and the image of the Catholic Newman (1845-1864) as an intellectual slave to the papacy no longer capable of producing original thought.
Even before his conversion, Newman had been accused of being a spy in the service of the Church of Rome. 1830s and 1840s pamphleteers like Edward Thompson referenced, hinted at, and sometimes explicitly made, the charge that Anglican Newman and the other Tract writers were "Papists in disguise" whose works possessed "the very spirit of Popery" (Thompson 14; "Remarks" 197, cf. 178). As G.S. Faber openly asserted, "As for the Tractarians, they are mere Papists under a different name, dishonestly holding English preferment, when they can get it, with Romish doctrines" (9). Newman, who had read G.S. Faber's pamphlet among many others, was terribly concerned with this charge against him, and observed as he was planning the Apologia that "the whole strength of Kingsley's attack "as directed rhetorically to the popular mind, lies in the antecedent prejudice that I was a Papist while I was an Anglican" (qtd. in Ker 542, emphasis Newman's; cf. Newman Mr. Kingsley's Method 342).
