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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 this passage, the longish article Wiseman had written disappears, and is replaced by a single sentence written by St. Augustine. Newman repeatedly refers to "the words of Saint Augustine," never again mentions Wiseman, and is careful to maintain the severance of Augustine's words from Wiseman's essay. When Newman reads "The Catholic and Anglican Churches," he misses the quotation from Augustine; consequently, he encounters the saint's dictum primarily through the voice of his "still Protestant friend" rather than through Wiseman's text. Even the application of Augustine's "palmary sentence" to the rest of "ecclesiastical history" is attributed by Newman to the saint himself, although, as I have shown, Wiseman had explicitly dubbed the statement a "general rule" for "all future possible divisions" and had said that it "should be an axiom in theology" ("Catholic and Anglican" 217, 224-25). As written by Augustine, the article has a real "cogency," and its words have an oracular power that ultimately determines Newman's destiny. Since the article, as Newman describes it, is now written by a key Church Father who holds no brief in the Anglican-Catholic debate, its influence over Newman, while remarkable, in no way contradicts Newman's model of literary authority.
However, if the Via Media falls not under the words of the revered "Ancient Father," Saint Augustine, but under the words of the Victorian Cardinal, Nicholas Wiseman, Newman's authority comes crashing down alongside it. One of Newman's concluding metaphors for the effect Augustine's words had on him is that he "had seen the shadow of a hand upon the wall" (Apologia 99). This metaphorical hand directly proclaims the death of Newman's Via Media and foretells his conversion to Catholicism; this metaphorical hand indirectly leaves him a theologian without a theological system and renders "the reins" of his authority over his followers "broken in [his] hands" (Apologia 99, 101, 106). In the implied allusion to the book of Daniel, the hand is God's; in the direct context, the hand is Augustine's. In either case, Newman's authority is temporarily disturbed and momentarily thrown, but the principles on which it is erected are not undermined.
If, however, this hand were Wiseman's, the Ultramontanes' model of ecclesiastical authority would be vindicated at Newman's expense. The Apologia'?, narrative would essentially be that of The Journal, 1859-79, where Wiseman has broken Newman's staff (here, "reins"), and his influence can be escaped only by his death. By the strange but deftly handled tactic of absenting Wiseman from the more persuasive parts of his own essay, Newman avoids this tremendous threat. The success of Newman's rhetoric in his discussion of the "Catholic and Anglican Churches" essay is evidenced by the general tendency of literary critics to interpret the passage as if it were a narrative of Newman reading the work of Augustine rather than a narrative of Newman reading the work of a contemporary who references Augustine. In this famous passage, Newman frees himself from Wiseman's influence by "misreading" his ecclesiastical precursor's work in a manner so flamboyant and rhetorically effective that it is best interpreted in a Bloomian register.14
