THE
P RTAL
July 2016
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Long, lazy
summer days
Dr Stephen Morgan considers what to do with them,
and what Newman did with them
The summer
holidays have become a period when nothing ever gets done. Soon after the middle
of June, it becomes progressively more difficult to organise meetings, to obtain decisions or begin
initiatives. By mid-July a collective torpor has settled on the world; one which begins to lift only after the
first week of September.
Proverbially, the Vatican begins its summer routine
on the Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul and only
returns to its near legendary industriousness following
the Feast of the Holy Cross. Although the occasion of
not inconsiderable frustration to this poor piscator, it
presents guilt-free opportunities to sneak away to the
banks of the chalk streams of Hampshire and Wiltshire
for often catchless but rarely wasted late-afternoons of
what Izaac Walton, biographer of George Herbert and
Richard Hooker and author of the classic The Compleat
Angler, called the contemplative sport.
The Oxford University long vacations of Newman’s
day, lasted quite as long or even longer than today and
yet they were, for him, far from a time of idle leisure.
Quite apart from the punishing travelling schedule to
which filial piety and solicitude for friendship obliged
him, these weeks were those in which, year after year,
John Henry Newman undertook the kind of systematic
reading that the quotidian cares of his tutorship and
pastoral responsibilities prevented during term time. It
was during the summer months of 1830 that Newman
embarked on his systematic reading of the volumes of
the Fathers that Pusey had sent him from Germany in
1827.
vacation, free of onerous commitments, in college, as
he had described such summers, with only the mice
behind the wainscoting for company.
This existence, punctuated only by occasional
callers and by a couple of lengthy journeys to visit
his mother and sisters, gave Newman the purposeful
leisure to consider Wiseman’s six articles – his especial
attention had been drawn to them by Robert Williams,
one of those summer visitors. The more Newman
considered Wiseman’s articles, the greater the
difficulties of the Anglican position seemed to him.
Wiseman took as his subject a review of the Tracts for
the Times; through the Donatist crisis of the late-fourth
century – territory that, by 1839, Newman knew very
well – he sought to highlight the contradictions of the
Tractarian position. Wiseman’s purpose in writing the
articles was no mere Patristic interest but an explicit
attempt to confute and ensnare the leaders of the
Oxford Movement.
Reading the articles is not dissimilar to the experience
of watching a highly skilled fly-fisherman accurately
and repeatedly presenting a carefully chosen dry fly
over the nose of a particular fish: the other fish in
This project took several years to complete and the river, distracted by other business, other food,
eventually, in 1839, was the remote, efficient cause of are unaffected but the chosen fish rises to look at the
the first serious crisis of confidence in the Church of imitation time and again, until, as if hypnotised, rises,
England, during a late-summer thunderstorm in the sucks in the fly and is hooked. He must still be carefully
New Forest. The proximate efficient cause was a series played if he is to be landed but if well enough hooked,
of articles in The Dublin Review by Nicholas Wiseman. it is simply a matter of time. Wiseman knew that all he
These articles had little direct effect on the other had to do was induce the take: the Anglican Newman
luminaries of the Oxford Movement – Pusey himself, was done for.
and John Keble – who, though they read Wiseman,
Beware the otium aestivum: (summer of leisure) it
were kept busy by domestic and parish responsibilities.
can be as dangerous to our settled religious positions
Newman, however, had the leisure of a long summer as it can to a careless Brown Trout.