A WILD BEAST CAUGHT BY DR. WISEMAN: THE RHETORICAL PROBLEM OF CARDINAL WISEMAN IN CARDINAL NEWMAN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

The Journal 1859-79 is quite plain about the interpretive claim Wiseman possesses over Newman, and is quite bleak about its effect on Newman's authority. The bulk of the discussion of Wiseman was written in January 1863, when Wiseman was still alive and at the height of his popularity, and when Newman was in the depths that preceded the Apologia. Here, Newman depicts his conversion to Catholicism as a process of objectification, in which he ceases to be a thinking subject, and becomes instead an object in thrall to the Catholic gaze in general and to Wiseman's interpretations in particular. Newman recollects that when he converted, he also granted a principle repeatedly articulated by Wiseman, and applied by him to the Anglican Newman: theologians who have changed their opinions about important matters have shown themselves unreliable, and are therefore not to be readily believed (cf. Apologia 160). Consequently, with Wiseman's assistance and encouragement, Newman renounced his own right to teach after his conversion. He writes: "When I became a Catholic . . . . I determined, that it did not become one, who had taken a prominent part against the Church, to be taking a prominent part against Anglicanism, but that my place was retirement. . . . 'I broke my staff'; and the Cardinal [Wiseman] did not hinder it. Rather he co-operated" (Journal 258).9 Fittingly, in the logic of The Journal, once Newman, with Wiseman's assistance, has broken his staff, he becomes entirely objectified, quite explicitly held in Wiseman's thrall. Of the year following his conversion, Newman laments, "I was the gaze of so many eyes at Oscott [an English Catholic seminary], as if some wild incomprehensible beast, caught by the hunter, and a spectacle for Dr. Wiseman to exhibit to strangers, as himself being the hunter who captured it!" (Journal 255).

Trapped in Wiseman's theological cage, Newman sees himself as devoid of literary and religious authority, and holds himself to be no longer sufficiently free to write a work of real power. Putting the matter directly in literary terms, Newman mournfully exclaims, "O my God, I seem to have wasted these years that I have been a Catholic. What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater power, force, meaning, success, than my Catholic works - and this troubles me a great deal" (Journal 253). Newman also places the blame for this situation in part on Wiseman himself. Wiseman in his public writings had depicted Newman as his obedient ecclesiastical subordinate, but he had also privately complained to influential Catholics about Newman's arrogance and independence (cf. Chadwick 136). In the Journal, Newman asserts that his failure to meet the terms (intellectual submission and convert production) that many Catholics, especially "the Cardinal [Wiseman]," have placed on him cause him to be treated in most Catholic quarters with "opposition and distrust," and this "opposition and distrust," Newman laments, "have (to all appearance) succeeded in destroying my influence and usefulness" (Journal 256-57).