Catholicus

On this feast of Saint John Henry Newman, David Coates writes:

In February 1841 a series of letters entitled “The Tamworth Reading-Room” appeared in The Times, attributed to “Catholicus”. This nom de guerre was the pseudonym of John Henry Newman, at that time one of the heads of the “Tractarian” movement of the Church of England.

For eight years Newman had been publishing and editing the Tracts for the Times, in which he and his collaborators sought to recover and revitalise the Catholic character of the Anglican Church. Hostile both to the errors of Protestantism and to what they believed to be the “corruptions” of the Roman system, the Tractarians asserted that Anglican theology held to a “via media” which successfully preserved the doctrines of the primitive church. Yet it was precisely Newman’s study of the primitive church during the summer of 1839 which undermined his confidence, as his analysis of the Monophysite controversy during the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century demonstrated that the primitive church had never appealed to any “via media” but had always defended orthodoxy. This revelation shattered Newman, and by 1841 he was “on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church”.

“The Tamworth Reading-Room” was one of the last controversial works Newman published whilst an Anglican, and it is distinct from his other publications of this period in that it is not concerned with theological disputes between different communions. Instead, the letters assert the fundamental importance of religion in education in a manner which was intended to be acceptable to Christians of all denominations.

Newman was provoked to publication by a speech by Sir Robert Peel inaugurating the opening of a library and reading room in his constituency of Tamworth. Peel had been a source of irritation for Newman since the late 1820s, when he was still the MP for Oxford University and had reversed his earlier opposition to Catholic emancipation; Newman regarded this as a typical example of Peelite conservatism, which could always be relied on to swallow the opinions and the presumptions of its liberal opponents after a few years fruitlessly opposing them. The critique which the heart of the Tory Party would later make of Peel following his reversal of opinion in the Corn Laws crisis of 1846 was already developed by Newman in 1841.

Newman’s basic critique of Peel’s speech was that it was identical in content to the defences of secular and utilitarian education which the Whig Lord Brougham had been promoting for the previous 15 years, and that if an unknowing reader were to “take it up without looking at the heading, he would to a certainty set it down as a production of the years 1827 and 1828 – the scene Gower Street, the speaker Mr Brougham or Dr Lushington, and the occasion, the laying the first stone, or the inauguration, of the then-called London University”. Newman recognised that, unlike Brougham, Peel understood the importance of religion, but that Peel’s belief that religion could be derived from science was fallacious.

During Peel’s opening address he had asserted that discussions of religious controversy ought to be excluded from the Reading Room, but that a greater knowledge of the physical sciences would improve man’s moral condition. It wasn’t that Peel sought to exclude religion, but that he believed that “an increased sagacity will… make men… better qualified to comprehend the great scheme of human redemption”, and that familiarity with science should lead to “more enlarged conceptions of God’s providence, and a higher reverence for His name”. For Newman, this was to misunderstand the core differences between these two activities. As he was later to assert in The Idea of a University, “Induction is the instrument of Physics, and deduction only is the instrument of Theology.” The former uncovers facts and seeks to arrive at conclusions about them; the latter begins from revelation and seeks to deduce consequences.

Newman was entirely dismissive of Peel’s suggestion that a knowledge of science could improve a man’s moral character. He attacked the assumption that virtue was to be founded in knowledge, or vice in ignorance. Ethics derives from faith, and faith operates on man in his fullness, not simply on his rational faculties: “Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion… No one, I say, will die for his own calculations; he dies for realities.”

Contained within “The Tamworth Reading-Room” is an early anticipation of the phenomenology of belief which Newman would develop at such great length and with such precision in his late masterpiece, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). He asserts the need for belief to speak to the heart of man, not simply his head. It is imagination and description which is the spring of action, and not reason. “After all,” Newman asserts, “man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise. It is very well to freshen our impressions and convictions from physics, but to create them we must go elsewhere.”

This is not to deny the importance of human reason, nor of the enormous benefits which can derive from a study of the natural sciences. Newman recognises that scientific pursuits are “intrinsically excellent and noble… worthy of a place in a liberal education, and fruitful in temporal benefits to the community”, yet he asserts that no ethical doctrines can be derived from them: they offer neither consolation nor motivation. “The material world, indeed, is infinitely more wonderful than any human contrivance; but wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads.”

Newman anticipates the danger of “scientism”, instead presenting a pedagogy which has religious truth at its core. All scientific knowledge is useful and worth pursuing for its own sake, but one should never mistake intellectual cultivation for moral instruction. A decade later, as president and rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman was able to apply his theories, developing a faculty dedicated to all the branches of human knowledge, but which had theology at its core.

The final letter in “The Tamworth Reading-Room” was published on February 27. On that date Tract 90, the final production from the Tracts for the Times, was also published. Tract 90 attempted the impossible: a hopeless effort to provide an interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England which would be consistent with Catholic teaching. He was condemned by his own bishops and obliged to cease publishing on matters of religious controversy.

Two years later, in February 1843, he would publish a retraction of his hostile comments towards the Roman Catholic Church, and later that year resigned his living. Received into the Church in 1845, it was on November 1, 2025 that the Anglican parson who had once published under the name “Catholicus” would finally be recognised by Pope Leo XIV as the 38th Doctor of the Church.