Apologia pro Vita Sua

Apologia pro Vita Sua, by John
Henry Newman

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Title: Apologia pro Vita Sua
Author: John Henry Newman
Release Date: October 31, 2006 [EBook #19690]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA
By John Henry (Cardinal) Newman
London: Published by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. And in New York by E.P.

Dutton & Co.

Introduction
"No autobiography in the English language has been more read; to the
nineteenth century it bears a relation not less characteristic than
Boswell's 'Johnson' to the eighteenth."
Rev. Wm. Barry, D.D.
Newman was already a recognised spiritual leader of over thirty year's
standing, but not yet a Cardinal, when in 1864 he wrote the Apologia.
He was London born, and he had, as many Londoners have had, a
foreign strain in him. His father came of Dutch stock; his mother was a
Fourdrinier, daughter of an old French Huguenot family settled in this
country. The date of his birth, 21st of February 1801, relates him to
many famous contemporaries, from Heine to Renan, from Carlyle to
Pusey. Sent to school at Ealing--an imaginative seven-year-old
schoolboy, he was described even then as being fond of books and
seriously minded. It is certain he was deeply read in the English Bible,
thanks to his mother's care, before he began Latin and Greek. Another
lifelong influence--as we may be prepared to find by a signal reference
in the following autobiography, was Sir Walter Scott; and in a later
page he speaks of reading in bed Waverley and Guy Mannering when
they first came out--"in the early summer mornings," and of his delight
in hearing The Lay of the Last Minstrel read aloud. Like Ruskin,
another nineteenth-century master of English prose, he was finely
affected by these two powerful inductors. They worked alike upon his
piety and his imagination which was its true servant, and they helped to
foster his seemingly instinctive style and his feeling for the English
tongue.
In 1816 he went to Oxford--to Trinity College--and two years later
gained a scholarship there. His father's idea was that he should read for
the bar, and he kept a few terms at Lincoln's Inn; but in the end Oxford,
which had, about the year of his birth, experienced a rebirth of ideas,

thanks to the widening impulse of the French Revolution, held him, and
Oriel College--the centre of the "Noetics," as old Oxford called the
Liberal set in contempt--made him a fellow. His association there with
Pusey and Keble is a matter of history; and the Oxford Movement, in
which the three worked together, was the direct result, according to
Dean Church, of their "searchings of heart and communing" for seven
years, from 1826 to 1833. A word might be said of Whately too, whose
Logic Newman helped to beat into final form in these Oxford
experiences. Not since the days of Colet and Erasmus had the
University experienced such a shaking of the branches. However, there
is no need to do more than allude to these intimately dealt with in the
Apologia itself.
There, indeed, the stages of Newman's pilgrimage are related with a
grace and sincerity of style that have hardly been equalled in English or
in any northern tongue. It ranges from the simplest facts to the most
complicated polemical issues and is always easily in accord with its
changing theme. So much so, that the critics themselves have not
known whether to admire more the spiritual logic of the literary art of
the writer and self-confessor. We may take, as two instances of
Newman's power, the delightful account in
Part III.
of his childhood and the first growth of his religious belief; and the
remarkable opening to
Part IV., where he uses the figure of the
death-bed with that finer reality which is born of the creative
communion of thought and word in a poet's brain. Something of this
power was felt, it is clear, in his sermons at Oxford. Dr. Barry describes
the effect that Newman made at the time of his parting with the
Anglican Church: "Every sermon was an experience;" made
memorable by that "still figure, and clear, low, penetrating voice, and
the mental hush that fell upon his audience while he meditated, alone

with the Alone, in words of awful austerity. His discourses were poems,
but transcripts too from the soul, reasonings in