Professor Turner clearly and forcefully sketches the attitudes toward truth telling that permeated most English gentlemen both in 1841 at the time of Tract 90 and again later when Kinglsey thought his victim would easily succumb to his accusation that "truth for its own sake was not a virtue."

Professor Turner refers to Steven Shapin, A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TRUTH: CIVILITY AND SCIENCE IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp.196-7. Indeed Shapin's entire book, though referring to an earlier era than Kingsley's and Newman's, underlines that Englishmen have always inclined to believe aristocrats and gentlemen, because they are free, fear no one and are under no irresistible pressure to lie.

Many gentlemen, both Professors and Anglican bishops thought Tract 90 a dishonest, dissembling document, reminding of the mental reservations of late 16th century English Jesuits. Newman's timing in publication was not the best.

In 1969, under the pseudonym G. Egner (for the German "Gegner" = Opponent), Dr Patrick James FitzPatrick issued APOLOGIA PRO CHARLES KINGSLEY. This book focused narrowly but at some length on Kingsley's several critiques of Newman regarding truth-telling. Some of that argument was later condensed and added to in an essay by FitzPatrick, "Newman and Kingsley," issed in 1991 by David Nicholls and Fergus Kerr, OP in the critical collection JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: REASON, RHETORIC AND ROMANTICISM.

Buried within Kingsley's often intemperate, sometimes inept critique of Newman in several sermons and other writings, Dr FitzPatrick finds some criticisms of the future cardinal which have stood the test of time and which provide insights into the Roman Catholic Newman's uneasy relationships with his new communion over intellectual freedom of theologians. 

Kingsley forced a grudging Newman to acknowledge in future editions of various works that Clement of Alexandria actually defended lying under certain circumstances (e.g., doctor/patient) and was not just writing hyperbole. Kingsley also goaded Newman into standing in opposition to the relaxed views of lying of sin by the great theololgian St Alphonso da Liguori. Nor did Newman satisfactorially answer Kingsley's implicit indictment of Roman Catholicism as tending to produce greater tolerance of equivocation and lying even in times of peace than Protestants would grudgingly allow in times of war.  (added 8/30/2003)
 
 

[TO READ THE "REMARKS" WHICH THESE NOTES SUPPORT, CLICK HERE.]
 
 

http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/newman_2003_turner_endnotes.html

For earlier Killough reviews of Turner's NEWMAN (for www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com, 
see http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/newman_turner.html

For a listing of books on and about Newman which I have collected and drawn on since 2001 see http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/newman_bibliography.html
 

Materials added since July 1, 2003 are printed in red.
 

T. Patrick Killough

122 College Circle
Swannanoa, NC 28778

killswan@earthlink.net

Friday July 24, 2003
 
 
 
 

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