Summarized Remarks of Patrick Killough 

Frank Miller Turner is a Yale University Professor of History. He explores “the Tractarians and the career of John Henry Newman of Oriel in their challenge to evangelical Protestant religion." For whom does he write? How does he do history? What does his method produce? Where does he not apply it? What does he offer amateurs? 

Turner writes for those historians of 19th Century England professionally qualified to assess his JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION. Yet non-specialist readers like me also value his 740 page book of the year 2002.

Within prima facie spiritual topics Turner finds earthly nuggets in pamphlets and tomes not read for decades. Religion is its own autonomous reality. 

In 1993’s CONTESTING CULTURAL AUTHORITY: ESSAYS IN VICTORIAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE Turner advocated that historians 

--(1) reclaim treasures “once abandoned or demeaned by scholars"; 

--(2) ”recapture that world of concrete social reference that informed both religious and non-religious intellectual life and exchange.“

Historians should also  

--(3) apply to the Tractarians general scholarship about the 19th Century: its trade, laws and biographies of scientists and statesmen; 

--(4) imaginatively bring to 19th Century England recent insights into truth-telling, sexuality, eating disorders, hypnotism and magic.  

To grasp “the Newman of history,” non-specialists should read works not only by Newman and by agenda-driven commentators but also by contemporaries closer to him than we shall ever be. 

--I. Turner elects not to apply his method  to the Newman family's bible-reading, non-fanatical Anglicanism.  

--II. He speculates at length and thereby roots in context and clay the feet of Tractarians and others serious 19th century writers about religion. 

--III. Most of Turner's chronological narrative makes excellent sense even on first reading. 

--All important texts 1801-1845 bearing on THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION are presented. 

--Those texts are interpreted in a timeless way that both Edward Gibbon, Hillaire Belloc, Stuart Vyse, Alison Winter and Mary Katherine Tillman can  approve. 

--Interpretation is original, crosses disciplines and applies avant-garde hypotheses. Speculations are labeled. 

Six things in NEWMAN both puzzle and point to areas for fresh research
. 
--(1)  What Was Newman's  Inherited Family Religion?

Professor Turner pays scant attention to the Protestantism which John Henry learned from parents and family, their “mere Anglicanism.”  Why did his inherited religion not hold John Henry free from sin when he was exposed around 1814 to sceptical writers?  Researchers should study churches which the Newmans and Fourdriniers attended and preachers whom they heard. 

--(2) Did Newman Believe in Magic?  Was he Superstitious?

Dr Turner hints that belief that prayers will be answered is superstitious. He writes of Newman in 1824: 

 "... he prayed about his financial problems and repeatedly saw those prayers answered, as if by magic, when small amounts of money arrived unexpectedly in the mail." 

Yet nothing in Turner's source suggests that Newman either believed in magic or had a superstitious personality. 

--(3) Were Evangelical Christians susceptible to mesmerism (hypnotism)?

Chapter Seven connects natural theology and evangelical religion. Turner's endnote 61 at p. 682 says, 

 "Mesmerism could prove itself quite compatible with evangelical theology and   other non dogmatic religion." 

But believing in this theology rather than that theology does not demonstrate hypnotic susceptibility.

--(4) Did Tractarians suffer from eating disorders caused by sexual problems?

The rapidly asceticizing lifestyles of younger Tractarians, particularly men at Littlemore, ran counter to axioms of every moderate family. Celibacy, silence and fasting seemed shocking and medieval to 19th Century  Englishmen. Were Tractarians therefore ill or perverse? Not necessarily.

--(5)  How Devastating Was Father John Newman's bankruptcy?

Newman's father's formal bankruptcy in 1821 - 22 had lifelong negative effects on John Henry too. 

 --(6) Did  Kingsley Prove JHN’s unmanliness and deception?

Regarding Newman's reputation for shaving the truth, people fond of “Newman of the Apologia” sometimes dislike two of his opponents: Henry Cardinal Manning and the underrated Professor Charles Kingsley. Kingsley objected to the mindset behind Newman's 20th Sermon of the Day, "Wisdom and Innocence," whose text was

  "I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (Matt. x. 16.) 

Newman's exegesis is subtle, reminding that “equivocation” by English priests had seemed a national threat since the 1580s. What blows of Kingsley did Newman dodge? This deserves further research. 

Non-specialists cannot understand Newman the religious thinker by reading only the sunniest of his frequently revised works plus adulatory commentaries. Newman lived in an age alien to ours when serious people were profoundly anti-Catholic, into mesmerism and spiritualism, fearful of bankruptcy and disease  and absorbed by politics and literature.  
 

For the text of the complete remarks see 

http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/newman_2003_turner.html
 
 
 
 

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Swannanoa, NC July 30, 2002