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LO U VA I N T H E O LO G I C A L & PA S TO R A L M O N O G R A P H S
48

ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS

REFLECTIONS ON THEOLOGY
AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

OFFERED TO TERRENCE MERRIGAN

Edited by
Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman

PEETERS
ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS
Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs aims to provide those involved
in theological research and pastoral ministry throughout the world with stud-
ies inspired by Louvain’s long tradition of theological excellence within the
Roman Catholic tradition. e volumes selected for publication in the series
are subjected to peer review by the editorial board and international scholars,
and are expected to express some of today’s finest reflection on current theol-
ogy and pastoral practice.

Members of the Editorial Board

The Executive Committee:

Yves De Maeseneer, Professor of eological Ethics, KU Leuven, editor

Annemie Dillen, Professor of Pastoral and Empirical eology, KU
Leuven
Anthony Dupont, Professor of Church History, KU Leuven
Annemarie C. Mayer, Professor of Systematic eology and the Study of
Religions, KU Leuven, editor-in-chief
Pierre Van Hecke, Professor of Biblical Studies, KU Leuven

International Advisory Board:

Raymond F. Collins, e Catholic University of America, Washington DC, chair

José M. de Mesa, East Asian Pastoral Institute, Manila, Philippines
Gabriel Flynn, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
Mary Grey, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, England
James J. Kelly, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland
Ronald Rolheiser, Oblate School of eology, San Antonio, TX
Donald P. Senior, Catholic eological Union, Chicago, IL
James J. Walter, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
LOUVAIN THEOLOGICAL & PASTORAL MONOGRAPHS • 48

ANSWERABLE FOR OUR BELIEFS

REFLECTIONS ON THEOLOGY
AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

OFFERED TO TERRENCE MERRIGAN

Edited by

Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys

and Viorel Coman

PEETERS
LEUVEN  PARIS  BRISTOL, CT
2022
 We shall miss you.
De collega’s

Cover image: Chapel of Memorial University Newfoundland,

painting by Jana Binon on the basis of a photo by K. Bruce Lane

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

© 2022, Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

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photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
 “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable
for what we choose to believe; if we believe lightly,
or if we are hard of belief, in either case we do wrong.”

(Letter of Saint John Henry Newman

to Mrs. William Froude, June 27, 1848)
Table of Contents

Introduction .............................................................................................. 
Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman

Part I
The Thought of John Henry Newman

1. e Rise and Fall of High Church Anglicanism in the Life and

ought of John Henry Newman, 1826-1841 ............................... 3
Peter Nockles
2. How to Argue with Unbelief: Newman, Ward, and Manning
Engage the Secular ............................................................................ 41
Geertjan Zuijdwegt
3. Newman, Frankl, and Conscience: Individual Call and Eccle-
sial Belonging ..................................................................................... 57
Christopher Cimorelli
4. Purgatory as Agony in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius: An
Essay on the Church’s Suffrages for the Dead .............................. 77
Andrew Meszaros
5. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent Or: On Liturgy’s
Spirituality .......................................................................................... 99
Joris Geldhof

Part II
Christology, Trinity, and Church

6. Tilling the Ground for a Later Christology .................................. 121

Raymond F. Collins
VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS

7. From Mountain to Mountain: e Tremendous Significance of

Jesus’ True Humanity for Salvation ............................................... 135
Jeffrey C. K. Goh
8. Who Is Christ for Us Today? Some Soteriological Reflections
along the Lines of Bonhoeffer’s Theologia Crucis ........................ 155
Annemarie C. Mayer
9. A Cumulative Approach to the Resurrection ............................... 173
Gerald O’Collins, S.J.
10. Christology and Ecology in Dialogue ............................................ 191
Dermot A. Lane
11. omas Aquinas: An Indispensable Contribution to the Renais-
sance of the eology of the Trinity .............................................. 211
Herwi Rikhof
12. “e Doctrine of Divine Unrest”: Pneumatological Perspectives
from Karl Rahner .............................................................................. 229
Declan Marmion, S.M.
13. eological eology and the Quest for Salvation: Soteriologi-
cal Reflections on a eology of Non-Christian Religions ........ 249
Kristof Struys
14. e Absolute Newness of Love: An Innovative ‘Agapology’ in
the Trinitarian Metaphysics of Miklós Vetö ................................. 263
Beáta Tóth
15. Toward a Dialogical Approach of Tradition, Allowing for
Coherent Self-Criticism ................................................................... 279
Emmanuel Durand, O.P.
16. e Ecclesiology of Marie-Dominique Chenu: A Paradigm for
Service to Humanity ......................................................................... 307
Gabriel Flynn
17. Ecclesia semper reformanda: Karl Rahner, Pope Francis, and
eology as Radical Critique ........................................................... 329
Jerry T. Farmer
 TABLE OF CONTENTS IX

Part III
Theology of Interreligious Dialogue

18. Revisiting the Redaction History of Lumen Gentium 16-17 in

Response to a Recent Debate in Catholic eology of Interreli-
gious Dialogue ................................................................................... 347
Peter De Mey
19. From De Iudaeis to Nostra Aetate: e Development of the Text
from November 1963 to October 1965 .......................................... 391
Mathijs Lamberigts and Leo Declerck †
20. “e True Light at Enlightens Everyone”: A Critical Exami-
nation of J. Dupuis’ Application of Jn 1:9, 14 in His Trinitarian
Christology and eology of Religious Pluralism ....................... 443
Nguyen Thi Tuong Oanh, Sr. Maria, ZvMI
21. Graced Religions: Ecumenical Perspectives on Revelation and
Grace in the eology of Interreligious Dialogue ....................... 463
Wouter Biesbrouck
22. “Tread Soly! All the Earth Is Holy Ground”: A Comparativist
Responds Constructively to Terrence Merrigan’s Sacramental
eology of Religions........................................................................ 489
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
23. Is ere a Judeo-Christian Approach to Religious Others? e
Case Study of Jewish and Christian Attitudes to Buddhism ..... 509
Elizabeth J. Harris
24. Can Christians Follow More an One Religious Tradition? On
Buddhist-Christian Dual Practice .................................................. 529
Alexander Löffler, S.J.
25. At the Intersection of Racial and Religious Othering: eolo-
gies of Interreligious Dialogue as a Performance of White
Christian Innocence? ........................................................................ 545
Judith Gruber
X TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part IV
The Significance of Secularization for the Contemporary Church

26. Recalibrating Tradition: Renewal and Retrieval in Contempo-

rary Catholic eology ..................................................................... 571
Stephan van Erp
27. Problematic Predictions: Religion in the Secular Age ................ 587
Hans Joas
28. Re-Imagining God in a Secular Age: Religion, Philosophy,
Science ................................................................................................. 603
James J. Kelly
29. “Which Wolf Will You Feed?”: Good Narratives as the Basis for
Dialogue and Building a Common Life ........................................ 625
Lieven Boeve
30. Secularization and eological Ethics ........................................... 639
Joseph A. Selling
31. Common Discernment in eology............................................... 657
Jacques Haers, S.J.
32. Kenotic Solidarity in a Splinterizing World: A Balthasarian
Response to the Polarization of Contemporary Society ............. 679
Robert Aaron Wessman

List of Contributors ................................................................................. 699

Introduction
Peter De Mey, Kristof Struys, and Viorel Coman

“We are answerable for what we choose to believe”

(John Henry Newman)

With this Festschrift the colleagues from the Research Unit Systematic
eology and eology of Religions of the Faculty of eology and Reli-
gious Studies, KU Leuven, honor a colleague and friend on the occasion
of his retirement as an expression of our profound appreciation for the
exceptional quality of his research in different domains of theological
research, for the deep impression he has made on several generations of
master and doctoral students working under his guidance, and for what
his ever supportive leadership and presence has meant to all of us. e
willingness of many international colleagues and former doctoral stu-
dents of Terry to contribute to this volume shows that this experience is
also shared beyond our research unit.
Since the theology of John Henry Newman has inspired our colleague
during his entire career, it is appropriate to open this volume with
a number of outstanding Newman studies. Already his dissertation Clear
Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry
Newman, published in 1991 as volume 7 of Louvain eological and Pas-
toral Monographs, was considered by reviewers a “must for all serious
students of Newman,” especially for its attention to the structure of New-
man’s thought as a whole.1 Our colleague also was co-editor, together
with the famous Newman scholar Ian T. Ker, of three volumes that con-
tain the rich fruits of the second, third and fourth Oxford International
Newman Conference.2 In 2009, both scholars co-edited the Cambridge

1
Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theo-
logical Ideal of John Henry Newman, Louvain eological and Pastoral Mono-
graphs 7 (Louvain: Peeters, 1991).
2
Terrence Merrigan and Ian T. Ker, eds., Newman and the Word, Louvain
eological and Pastoral Monographs 21 (Louvain: Peeters, 2001); iid., eds.,
Newman and Faith, Louvain eological and Pastoral Monographs 31 (Louvain:
Peeters, 2004); iid., eds., Newman and Truth, Louvain eological and Pastoral
Monographs 34 (Louvain: Peeters, 2008).
XII PETER DE MEY, KRISTOF STRUYS, AND VIOREL COMAN

Companion to John Henry Newman.3 Our colleague has, however, con-

tinued to contribute to Newman scholarship in the last decade as well.4
In the first of five Newman studies in this volume Peter Nockles
explores John Henry Newman’s interaction with high church Anglican-
ism. Nockles seeks to clarify to what extent Newman embraced high
church Anglicanism and what were the motivating factors that deter-
mined him to depart from and critically react against it. e chapter
authored by Geertjan Zuijdwegt analyses the responses and reactions of
three illustrious Victorian Catholic theologians to what they defined as
the secularization process of English intellectual tradition and culture.
Apart from John Henry Newman, Zuijdwegt engages the thoughts of
William George Ward and Henry Edward Manning, two other Oxford
educated converts from Anglicanism. Christopher Cimorelli investigates
John Henry Newman’s and Viktor Frankl’s understanding of conscience,
with particular attention to the similarities and differences of their views.
According to Cimorelli, Newman’s approach to conscience transcends
the limitations of Frankl’s views, especially on central issues related to
the human person’s relational nature and ecclesial fulfillment. Andrew
Meszaros contributes to this volume with a reflection on purgatory as
agony in Newman’s Dream of Gerontius. Meszaros draws a careful paral-
lel between the soul’s experience of judgment and Christ’s agony in
Gethsemane. For Joris Geldhof, the neglect of liturgical spirituality
in Newman’s theology functions as a warning and impulse for contem-
porary theologians to find the right balance between lex orandi (dogma)
and lex credendi (doxa).
Besides his important and influential Newman research, part of pro-
fessor Merrigan’s academic career was dedicated to the fields of Christol-
ogy and Trinity. He founded the biennial Leuven Encounters in System-
atic eology in 1997 with an international colloquium on The Myriad
Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Contemporary Christology.
For many years, he was the holder of the course Dogmatic Theology:
Christology and Trinity. According to what he regularly said himself, this
course was and remained one of his favorites. A considerable number of

3
Ian T. Ker and Terrence Merrigan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to John
Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
4
See among others Terrence Merrigan, “Is a Catholic University a Good
Idea? Reflections on Catholic Higher Education from a Newmanian Perspec-
tive,” Irish Theological Quarterly 11 (2015): 3-18, and Geertjan Zuijdwegt and
Terrence Merrigan, “Conscience,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry
Newman, ed. Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2018), 434-453.
 INTRODUCTION XIII

his publications are situated on the intersection of contemporary Chris-

tology and its soteriological impact within a pluralistic and secularized
context.5 A considerable number of articles in this Festschrift are devoted
to these topics.
Raymond F. Collins delivers a close reading of Paul’s first letter to the
essalonians in order to highlight the passages that play a crucial role
in the development of New Testament Christology. Against any kind of
over-emphasizing of Jesus’ divinity, Jeffrey C. K. Goh holds a plea for the
soteriological importance of Jesus’ real humanity. For his plea, he finds
himself familiar with Pope Francis’ paradigm in his Apostolic Exhorta-
tion Evangelii Gaudium. He reflects on the imitation of Jesus’ praxis of
non-violence towards a Kingdom oriented social order. Annemarie
C. Mayer poses the Christological ‘who-question’ of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and considers this question as very consequential in soteriological reflec-
tions of today, with special focus on the theology of the cross and God’s
love ‘for us’ in it. By way of what he calls a cumulative approach to the
resurrection, Gerald O’Collins critically constructs a case for the resur-
rection based upon philosophical, historical and theological considera-
tions. In his chapter, Dermot A. Lane delivers a mutual discourse
between Christology and ecology with the objective to promote further
reception of Integral Ecology. Lane examines responses to ecological cri-
sis that emerge from three key areas: New Testament Christologies, Deep
Incarnation, and Karl Rahner’s reflections on creation and Incarnation.
For Herwi Rikhof, omas Aquinas’ theology remains an indispensable
resource in the contemporary renaissance of trinitarian theology.
He investigates the implications of Aquinas’ trinitarian theology for
Christian identity in general and sacramental life in particular. Declan
Marmion explores Karl Rahner’s pneumatology as it is presented in his

5
Terrence Merrigan, “‘For Us and for Our Salvation’: e Notion of Salva-
tion History in the Contemporary eology of Religions,” Irish Theological
Quarterly 64 (1999): 339-348; id., “e Historical Jesus in the Pluralist eology
of Religions,” in The Myriad Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Con-
temporary Christology, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Jacques Haers, Bibliotheca
Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 152 (Louvain: Leuven University
Press and Peeters, 2000), 61-82; Terrence Merrigan and Bénédicte Lemmelijn,
“Van de God der Vaderen naar God de Vader: Het christelijk triniteitsdenken
en zijn oudtestamentische achtergrond,” in Triniteit, een kruis erover? Nieuwe
perspectieven op een oeroude christelijke doctrine, ed. Terrence Merrigan, Chris-
toph Moonen, and Kristof Struys (Antwerpen: Halewijn, 2006), 21-34; Terrence
Merrigan, “Faith in the Quest: e Relevance of the First and ird Quests to
the Understanding of the ‘Christ-Event’,” Louvain Studies 32 (2007): 153-163.
XIV PETER DE MEY, KRISTOF STRUYS, AND VIOREL COMAN

treatises on the Trinity, the Church and grace. For Rahner, the Holy
Spirit is part of God’s self-communication which belongs not only to
professional mystics or ecclesial office, but to the everydayness. Marmion
examines the implications of Rahner’s pneumatology for the theology of
religions and concludes with new developments in pneumatology. In his
reflections, Kristof Struys critically explores the epistemological criteri-
ology as it is dealt with in some pluralist theologies of religions. Inspired
by Walter Kasper, he argues that a ‘theological theology’ is a condition
of possibility for the case of human salvation. Beáta Tóth examines
Miklós Vetö’s concept of ‘agapology’ that offers a metaphysical interpre-
tation of love within the intersection of otherness and relationality. By
applying a theological reflection on the trinitarian love, Tóth helps to
further develop Vetö’s social account of love, which she considers as
being beneficial to moral theology. Emmanuel Durand focuses on the
reality of Catholic tradition and its development, by critically analyzing
the questions of continuity and discontinuity, as well as the risks, limita-
tions and self-criticism that are involved in reform. Gabriel Flynn pre-
sents a theological biography of the prominent Dominican scholar,
Marie-Dominique Chenu. Flynn explores Chenu’s contemplative spiritu-
ality, the theological methodology that emerges from this spirituality, as
well as his ecclesiological vision. At the center of Chenu’s work is the
incarnation. In his contribution, Jerry T. Farmer explores the validity of
the Protestant adagium ecclesia semper reformanda, particularly in the
theology of Karl Rahner and the papacy of Francis. Farmer explains how
both Rahner and Pope Francis provide subversive messages that are criti-
cal for the renewal of church life.
As of the outset of his academic career Professor Merrigan developed
a strong interest in the theology of interreligious dialogue. He helped
promoting the views of the deplored Jesuit theologian Jacquis Dupuis,6
but also developed his own views which Francis Clooney identifies in this
volume as a “sacramental theology of religions.”7

6
Some important articles by Dupuis appeared in Louvain Studies: Jacques
Dupuis, “‘e Truth Will Make You Free’: e eology of Religious Pluralism
Revisited,” Louvain Studies 24 (1999): 211-263; id., “Christianity and the Reli-
gions Revisited,” Louvain Studies 28 (2003): 363-383. Among Merrigan’s publi-
cations on Dupuis, see especially: “Exploring the Frontiers: Jacques Dupuis and
the Movement ‘Toward a Christian eology of Religious Pluralism’,” East Asian
Pastoral Review 37 (2000): 5-32, and “Jacques Dupuis and the Redefinition of
Inclusivism,” in In Many and Diverse Ways: In Honour of Jacques Dupuis, ed.
Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 60-71.
7
Among the most relevant contributions by Terrence Merrigan in this field,
are: “Saving the Particular: Incarnation and the Mediation of Salvation in the
 INTRODUCTION XV

Part III of the Festschrift starts with two articles dealing with the
teaching of the Second Vatican Council on non-Christian religions. Peter
De Mey explores the redaction history of Lumen Gentium 16-17 in light
of the particular interpretation of these paragraphs among Catholic
inclusivists such as Gavin D’Costa and Ralph Martin. Mathijs Lamberigts
and Leo Declerck † explore the development of Nostra Aetate from
November 1963 to its official promulgation on October 1965 by Pope
Paul VI. As the chapter emphasizes, once the Nostra Aetate document
was finally finalized and approved, it led to an intensification of the
Catholic Church’s involvement in interreligious dialogue. Maria Nguyen
Thi Tuong Oanh critically explores the Trinitarian Christology and the-
ology of religious pluralism of Jacques Dupuis in light of his engagement
with John 1:19, 14. Although Dupuis’ theology of religions has received
a lot of attention from scholars, the biblical fundaments of his approach
to religious pluralism have not been properly examined. According to
Wouter Biesbrouck, the idea that God’s revelation has a soteriological
dimension bears relevance for a Christian theology of interreligious dia-
logue. Resourcing the Western Christian tradition, Protestant and Cath-
olic alike, the author reflects on the Neo-Calvinist concept of ‘common
grace’ and participatory ontology in order to indicate the reverberance
of an ecumenical notion into the theology of interreligious dialogue.
Francis X. Clooney provides a constructive response to the theology of
religions as developed by Terrence Merrigan. In his opinion the particu-
larity of Jesus Christ stimulates the embracement of an inclusive theology
of religions and fosters the development of a comparative methodological
work that is respectful and attentive to other religions. Elizabeth J. Har-
ris argues that even though due to historical circumstances Christianity
and Judaism have parted ways as early as the first centuries of the first

eology of Religions,” in Orthodoxy, Process and Product, ed. Mathijs Lamberigts,

Lieven Boeve, and Terrence Merrigan, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum eologi-
carum Lovaniensium 227 (Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 299-
322; “Towards an Incarnational Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,” in
The Past, Present, and Future of Theologies of Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Ter-
rence Merrigan and John Friday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17-27;
“Between Doctrine and Discernment: Pope Francis on Interreligious Dialogue,”
in The Geo-Politics of Pope Francis, ed. Jan De Volder, Annua Nuntia Lovanien-
sia 77 (Louvain: Peeters, 2019), 127-150, and “Between Scylla and Charybdis:
Breaking the Impasse in Contemporary Catholic eology of Interreligious Dia-
logue,” in Res opportunae nostrae aetatis: Studies on the Second Vatican Council
Offered to Mathijs Lamberigts, ed. Dries Bosschaert and Johan Leemans, Biblio-
theca Ephemeridum eologicarum Lovaniensium 317 (Leuven, Paris, and Bris-
tol, CT: Peeters, 2020), 469-482.
XVI PETER DE MEY, KRISTOF STRUYS, AND VIOREL COMAN

millennium, both traditions share a lot in common within the field of

interreligious dialogue. e similarities between Jewish and Christian
approaches to interreligious dialogue are greater than their differences.
Alexander Löffler reflects theologically on the topic of individual Chris-
tians who theoretically and practically adhere to more than one religious
tradition. e question that guides his analysis is how to explain, inter-
pret, and assess theologically the phenomenon of double religious belong-
ing and practice. Drawing insight from spirituality, Löffler seeks possible
ways to legitimize Buddhist-Christian religious affiliation from a Catho-
lic perspective. Judith Gruber focuses on the controversy that arose in
Germany in 2020 following the invitation of the Cameroonian philoso-
pher and political theorist Achille Mbembe to the Ruhrtriennale in
Bochum. Examining the controversy through the lens of Gloria Wekker’s
notion of White innocence, Gruber decenters theologies of interreligious
conversation, spotting their role to the consolidation of White supremacy
and re-articulating innocence in a way that does not cover up histories
of conflict and violence.
As a teacher of the courses European Perspectives on Religion and
Christianity and Contemporary Culture, professor Merrigan’s interest is
in bridging the Christian tradition with the contemporary world.8 In
Charles Taylor and Robert Wuthnow he finds, among others, two impor-
tant interlocutors. Our culture is characterized by the quest for ‘selood’
which needs the assistance of communities and traditions, understood
as cumulations of similar experiences of searching for selood through-
out history. Merrigan states that the Church is one such community
which can help people engaging with their quest for selood. In this
Festschrift some authors take it as their perspective to write on the chal-
lenging relationship of faith and culture.
Stephan van Erp, commenting on the recently published Oxford
Handbook of Catholic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), presents
a brief overview of the development of Catholic theology in the nine-
teenth and twentieth century. His final section on the challenges for post-
secular Catholicism, forms a good starting point for Part IV of this

8
Terrence Merrigan, “e Exile of the Religious Subject: A Newmanian Per-
spective on Religion in Contemporary Society,” in A Catholic Minority Church
in a World of Seekers, ed. Staf Hellemans and Peter Jonkers (Washington, DC:
e Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2015), 179-208; id., “Reli-
gion, Education, and the Appeal to Plurality: eological Considerations on the
Contemporary European Context,” in Toward Mutual Ground: Pluralism, Reli-
gious Education, and Diversity in Irish Schools, ed. Gareth Byrne and Patricia
Kieran (Dublin: Columba, 2013), 57-70.
 INTRODUCTION XVII

Festschrift. According to Hans Joas it is not allowed to define seculariza-

tion from the perspective of modernization or in terms of the weakening
of Christianity in the West. An alternative narrative is not to be found
in the simplistic application of the paradigm of ‘disenchantment’. For
him, the future of religious faith largely depends on purposeful human
action. James J. Kelly is convinced that today’s secular context makes
a re-appraisal of the traditional image of God imperative. Dismissing
dualistic worldviews, he explores a theological approach in which tran-
scendence is reconstructed within an immanent process. He argues that
process-thinking safeguards a systemic, ecological and cosmic holism
upon which the future of humanity and creation depends. Lieven Boeve
examines the sociological category of the ‘nones’ within the context of
religious dialogue. Boeve dismisses theological options that either down-
play the Christian identity or rigidly safeguard it as both unsatisfactory,
and rather proposes the approach of dialogue towards a social consensus.
Examining the relationship between secularization and theological eth-
ics, Joseph A. Selling looks at how the ancient church dealt with secular
issues during its formative years in Europe. In the attempt to assert its
autonomy, the contemporary church appears disconnected from the
world: she oscillates between ambiguity and suspicion of the secular.
Selling sustains the hope that Pope Francis provides the appropriate pas-
toral response to secularization. Drawing on the Ignatian spiritual back-
ground, Jacques Haers pleads for a renewed method of theology based
on common ecclesiogenetic discernment, with emphasis on revelation,
shared history and common narratives. Robert Aaron Wessman pro-
longs Terrence Merrigan’s theological engagement with contemporary
Western culture. He deploys the concept of ‘splinterization’ in describing
this culture, and further problematizes the question of identity. Relying
on Balthasar, Wessman proposes that Christians should engage dissimi-
lar groups in a kenotic solidarity that is inspired by the example of
Christ.

We are thankful for the help received in the editing process from Rita
Corstjens and especially from the series editor, our colleague Annemarie
Mayer. We owe great thanks to the other members of the Merrigan fam-
ily: Clairette, Michaël, Klaartje and Katelijne. We involved them in
selecting a cover image which perfectly illustrates the intellectual and
spiritual environment where Terry learnt to become answerable for his
beliefs, the chapel of Memorial University Newfoundland. Many thanks
to Bruce Lane for taking pictures of the chapel and to Jana Binon for
realizing the watercolor painting on the cover.
Part I

The Thought of John Henry Newman

1

The Rise and Fall of High Church Anglicanism

in the Life and Thought of John Henry Newman,
1826-1841
Peter Nockles

“Newman had a peculiar power of seizing intellectually the ethos,

and principles of another, and making them his own,
as if as it were on trial.”1

is observation by Newman’s one-time curate and Tractarian disciple,

Isaac Williams, reveals how Newman interacted with others in the Trac-
tarian triumvirate, notably John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude.
Although the acknowledged leader of the Oxford Movement, recent
scholarship has revealed the extent of Newman’s intellectual and spirit-
ual debt to a supporting cast of others, particularly to his friends, follow-
ers and disciples.2 He was as much influenced as he was the influencer.
Newman’s debt, however, was not only to individuals but to theologi-
cal traditions, different ones of which at different phases in his life he
made his own. Yet the extent of Newman’s debt to and identification
with, different theological systems at different times should not detract
from his own originality. As Stephen Morgan has argued, there was
continuity and consistency as well as change in the development of
Newman’s thought prior to his secession from the Church of England in

1
Autobiography of Isaac Williams, BD. Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College
[…] Edited by His Brother-in-Law, the Ven. Sir George Prevost (London: Spot-
tiswoode and Co., 1892), 43.
2
James Pereiro, “A Cloud of Witnesses: Tractarians and Tractarian Ven-
tures,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, ed. Stewart J. Brown,
Peter B. Nockles, and James Pereiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017),
111-122. Pereiro focuses in particular on the role of Newman’s one-time pupil
and disciple, Samuel Francis Wood (1809-1843). See James Pereiro, ‘Ethos’ and
the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
4 PETER NOCKLES

1845.3 He was creative and inventive, and not merely an external passive
legatee of existing theological systems or the views of others.
Several studies have demonstrated the extent of the role of evangelical-
ism in the early life and thought of John Henry Newman.4 In particular,
Terrence Merrigan has shown the seminal importance of his first conver-
sion in 1816 at the age of fieen.5 is has helped correct a tendency to
downplay Newman’s evangelical early career as a mere preparation rather
than foundational bedrock of his life-long religious journey. e great
Newman scholar Charles Stephen Dessain even claimed that “Newman
was never a real evangelical at all.”6
is trend was encouraged by Newman’s own attempts to reinterpret
his own past, in his Apologia pro vita sua (1864) and Autobiographical
Memoir (1874) with its schematic account of his disengagement from
evangelicalism. e most systematic treatment of evangelicalism in the
making and formation of the young Newman’s theology has been Geert-
jan Zuijdwegt’s recent doctoral dissertation, An Evangelical Adrift.7
Zuijdwegt analyses the factors which led Newman to shed, one by one,
the characteristic doctrines associated with evangelicalism. Following

3
See Stephen Morgan, The Search for Continuity in the Face of Change in the
Anglican Writings of John Henry Newman, unpublished doctoral dissertation
(Oxford: University of Oxford, 2013).
4
For examples, see David Newsome, “Justification and Sanctification:
Newman and the Evangelicals,” Journal of Theological Studies 15 (1964): 32-53;
Timothy C. F. Stunt, “John Henry Newman and the Evangelicals,” Journal of
Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970): 65-74; John E. Linnan, The Evangelical Back-
ground of John Henry Newman, 1816-1826, 2 vols., unpublished doctoral dis-
sertation (Louvain: Faculty of eology, Université Catholique de Louvain,
1965); Joseph A. Komonchak, John Henry Newman’s Discovery of the Visible
Church (1816 to 1828), unpublished doctoral dissertation (New York: Union
eological Seminary, 1976); Edward McCormack, The Development of John
Henry Newman’s View of the Christian Life in His Anglican Sermons, 1824-1843,
unpublished doctoral dissertation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America, 2001); omas L. Sheridan, “Justification,” in The Cambridge Compan-
ion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 98-117, at 98-104.
5
Terrence Merrigan, “Numquam minus solus, quam cum solus – Newman’s
First Conversion: Its Significance for His Life and ought,” Downside Review
103 (1985): 99-116.
6
Charles S. Dessain, “Newman’s First Conversion,” Newman Studien 3
(1957): 37-53, at 50.
7
Geertjan J. Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift: The Making of John Henry
Newman’s Theology, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Louvain: KU Leuven,
2019).
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 5

Gareth Atkins, he shows that this was a longer and messier process of
disengagement than previous accounts allowed.8
A key question which Zuijdwegt raised – what precisely took the place
of evangelicalism? – requires fuller explication. is essay seeks to eluci-
date whether or not it was high churchmanship (what became known as
‘Anglicanism’9), how far Newman embraced it and how and why he
finally abandoned and reacted against it. Several within the high church
tradition in retrospect suggested that Newman took up ‘Anglicanism’
merely as a paper theory which he tested by criteria of his own and that
his expressions of loyalty to the seventeenth-century divines were selec-
tive and based on affection and imaginative recreation rather than intel-
lectual conviction.10 More recently, the late Frank Turner has gone fur-
ther, arguing that Newman’s pursuit of an ideal ascetical Catholicism
meant that he sat loosely to all theological traditions and that as a Trac-
tarian leader he acted on purely sectarian principles. Turner claimed that
in his Apologia, Newman sought to impose an orderly theological devel-
opment on his religious career which was singularly lacking at the time.11
Newman’s essential test in his search for religious truth was always
that of ‘reality’ and ‘realizing’. e imagination and intellectual convic-
tion were not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, as Terrence Merrigan
has argued, the experience of ‘realizing’ the concrete, existent ‘things’ as
mediated by the imaginative faculty was a crucial facet of Newman’s
theological understanding. All beliefs “must first be credible to the
imagination,”12 the fruit of an interaction between the imagination and
reason.13 e rise and fall of high church Anglicanism (in so far as that

8
Gareth Atkins, “Evangelicals,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Henry
Newman, ed. Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2018), 173-195, at 174.
9
See note 14.
10
Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illus-
trated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Compiled and
Edited by Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (London: Morehouse Pub-
lishing, 1935), xxx-xxxi. See also the “Conclusion” of this essay.
11
Frank M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Reli-
gion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), ch. 9: “In Schism with All
Christendom.”
12
Terrence Merrigan, “Newman the eologian,” in John Henry Newman
1801-1890, Louvain Studies 15 (1990): 103-118, at 109; id., “Newman’s Catholic
Synthesis,” Irish Theological Quarterly 60 (1994): 39-48, at 40.
13
Terrence Merrigan, “Revelation,” in The Cambridge Companion to John
Henry Newman, 47-72, at 60.
6 PETER NOCKLES

term is appropriate at this date14) in Newman’s thought can be explained

by his acceptance or rejection of its ‘reality’.

1. Early Adoptions of High Churchmanship

is essay picks up from where Zuijdwegt’s study le off. Its starting
point is a sermon Newman preached in 1826, on the manuscript of which
he scrawled over thirty years later, the words – “one of the first, if not the
first, declaration I made of high church principles.”15 is comment by
Newman was penned in 1857 and was a descriptor made only with hind-
sight. In itself it reveals how the term ‘high church’ by that date was
defined and applied. e title of the sermon which earned Newman’s
own later descriptor was “On the One Catholic and Apostolic Church.”
e question remains whether Newman’s turn towards an emphasis on
the visible Church, itself a gradually unfolding process in three phases
over several years in the 1820s,16 constituted the adoption of what can be
classed as ‘high church principles’.
is author has broadly defined the theology of pre-Tractarian high
churchmen or ‘the Orthodox’ (as they preferred to be called) as empha-
sizing, to varying degrees, the doctrine of apostolic succession and epis-
copal and ministerial order, a doctrine of the visible Church with the
Church of England a branch of the Universal Church, the supremacy of
Holy Scripture but with due reference to authorized standards such as
the Creeds, the Book of Common Prayer, the Catechism, the irty-Nine

14
e term ‘Anglican’ and ‘Anglicanism’, in a theological sense rather than
denoting merely provincial autonomy, is a late construct. ‘Anglican’ was used by
Alexander Knox in 1806, but one of the earliest usages of ‘Anglicanism’ was by
Newman in the first edition of his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the
Church (1837). See Peter B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican
High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 39-41; Anthony Milton, “Introduction: Reformation, Identity and Angli-
canism (c. 1520-1662),” in Oxford History of Anglicanism (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2017), I, 1-27, at 7-8; Paul Avis, “What Is Anglicanism?,” in The
Study of Anglicanism, ed. Stephen Sykes, John Booty, and Jonathan Knight (Lon-
don: SPCK, 1998), 459-476; Stephen Sykes, Unashamed Anglicanism (London:
Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995), xiv; Colin Podmore, Aspects of Anglican Iden-
tity (London: Church House, 2005), 26-42, at 35-37; Paul Avis, “Not Yet Angli-
canism,” Theology 123 (2020): 198-203, at 198.
15
John Henry Newman, No. 157, “On the One Catholic and Apostolic
Church,” Sermon 4, 42, n. 2.
16
Komonchak, John Henry Newman’s Discovery of the Visible Church (1816
to 1828), 347.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 7

Articles and the Book of Homilies. e writings of the early Fathers were
valued especially as witnesses to and expositors, if not interpreters, of
scriptural truth when a ‘Catholic Consent’ of them could be established.
In this context, apostolic Tradition was a source of appeal, even if it was
not binding or authoritative. A high churchman also laid stress on the
primacy of dogma and the efficacy and necessity of sacramental grace,
both in baptism and the Eucharist. He tended to cultivate a practical
spirituality and soteriology based on good works nourished by sacramen-
tal grace and exemplified in acts of self-denial and charity rather on
a purely subjective conversion experience or unruly manifestations of the
Holy Spirit. He also upheld a Church establishment but insisted on
the duty of the state as a divinely ordained rather than merely secular
entity, to protect and promote the interests of the Church.17
By 1826, partly through his own parochial experience as a curate at
St Clement’s in Oxford, and partly through his intellectual experience
as a Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, where he had come under the influ-
ence of key figures among the so-called Oriel ‘Noetics’. rough Edward
Hawkins (on tradition), Richard Whately (on the Church), William
James (on baptismal regeneration), and John Davison (on prophecy),
Newman had embraced some elements of what constituted high church-
manship. Nonetheless, caution here is required. Anglican Church party
labels were still fluid, theological parameters and boundaries porous,
while a degree of cross fertilization and even consensus between evan-
gelical and orthodox churchmen remained a marked feature.18 Many
contemporary churchmen cannot neatly be categorized.19
Newman had come to accept baptismal regeneration by this time, but
this did not in itself signify an abandonment of evangelicalism for high
churchmanship. Rather, it is evidence of evangelicalism itself being in
a state of flux and comprising a spectrum of views. e major influence
prompting Newman’s change of heart was not the Anglican formularies
but his reading of the evangelical John Bird Sumner’s Apostolical Preach-
ing Considered (1815), a copy of which Hawkins had given him on August
19, 1824. Moreover, the evidence of the Oriel College Library records

17
Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 25-26.
18
See Peter B. Nockles, “Church Parties in the Pre-Tractarian Church of
England 1750-1833: e ‘Orthodox’ – Some Problems of Definition and Iden-
tity,” in The Church of England c. 1689 – c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarian-
ism, ed. John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 334-359.
19
Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 26.
8 PETER NOCKLES

suggests that at this time he borrowed other works on the controversy

over Predestination and Free Will.20
e Arminian Sumner undermined Newman’s previous reliance on
a Calvinist idea of efficacious grace by election which, according to Sum-
ner, would have reduced baptism to little more than an external mark of
admission to the visible Church.21 Sumner may not have been an entirely
representative evangelical, and anyway Calvinists themselves held that
grace attended baptism, so that it was not only high churchman who
rejected a ‘low’ view of baptism. In adopting Sumner’s view, Newman did
not reject evangelicalism per se but only the doctrine which denied
“a spiritual change in baptism altogether.”22 If Newman was reacting
against a predestinarian soteriology,23 his own parochial experience had
already showed up the ‘unreality’ of sharply differentiating the converted
from the unconverted, the regenerate from the unregenerate.
Edward Hawkins’ Dissertation on the Use and Importance of Unau-
thoritative Tradition, as an Introduction to Christian Doctrine (1818)24
with its theological method of arguing from doctrine taught by the
Church to scriptural evidence rather than vice versa, sat more awkwardly
with evangelical principles. Newman had maintained a rigid distinction
between the visible and invisible Church, a distinction undermined by
his shi on the doctrine of baptism. However, in his sermon “On the One
Catholic and Apostolic Church” preached in 1826, the Nicene Creed’s
profession of belief marked a point of departure.25 Newman later main-
tained that his belief in the independence of the visible Church from the
state, derived from Whately’s Letters on the Church (1826).26 It was
the apparently latitudinarian Whately who argued “that individual
Christians have no life in them unless they continue branches of the true

20
Atkins, “Evangelicals,” 182-183.
21
John B. Sumner, Apostolical Preaching Considered, in an Examination of
St Paul’s Epistles (1815), 6th ed. (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1826), 181.
22
John Henry Newman, Autobiographical Writings, edited, with an Intro-
duction by Henry Tristram of the Oratory (London: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 78.
23
“I am almost convinced against predestination and election in the Calvin-
istic sense” – February 21, 1826, in Autobiographical Writings, 208.
24
John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet
Entitled “What, then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?” (London: Longman, Green,
Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 65-66.
25
McCormack, The Development of John Henry Newman’s View of the Chris-
tian Life, 60.
26
Whately had “fixed in him those anti-Erastian views of Church polity,
which were one of the most features of the Tractarian movement.” Newman,
Apologia, 69.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 9

Vine as members of the Body of Christ.” e Church was “the appointed

channel through which grace is conveyed.”27
Oriel noeticism had always been more a frame of mind and religious
temper than a distinctively liberal theological creed. It only later came to
be presented as doctrinal liberalism with hindsight aer the rise of the
Oxford Movement. Noeticism encompassed a range of views,28 including
‘high church’, as attested by Edward Copleston’s Bosworth Lectures and
Hawkins’ treatise on tradition.29 Newman’s turn to the visible Church
did not in itself signify the transfer from one theological system to
another.30 Many evangelicals, conscious of charges of being ‘irregular’ or
‘Methodist’, increasingly stressed their churchmanship.31 Some evangeli-
cals valued the Fathers. Newman’s own first interest in them was through
having his imagination inspired by the evangelical Joseph Milner’s His-
tory of the Church of Christ with its vivid portraits of the “age of the
martyrs.”32
Zuijdwegt has shown that a more promising marker of Newman’s turn
in terms of soteriology from evangelicalism to a more sacramental
understanding of religion is to be found in his sermons.33 Newman’s
emphasis ceased to be on faith over works and faith in the atonement as

27
R. Whately to E. Hawkins, September 3, 1830, Oriel College Archives
2/179.
28
e term noetic derived from the Greek word for knowledge. Noesis is the
fourth and final stage in Plato’s chart for the growth of intelligence. David New-
some suggested ‘the free thinkers’ as its meaning in The Parting of Friends
(1966), 66. However, this was more appropriate a term for their later activities
aer 1829 rather than earlier. Michael Brock, “e Oxford of Peel and Glad-
stone,” in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. VI, Part 1, ed. M. G. Brock
and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 7-71, at 48. See also
R. Brent, “Note: The Oriel Noetics,” ibid., 72-76.
29
W. J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, D.D. Bishop of Llandaff
(London: John W. Parker and Son, 1851), 47; William Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian
Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Oriel ‘Noetics’ (London: Smith, Elder, and Com-
pany, 1909), 45.
30
Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift, 141.
31
Gareth Atkins, “‘True Churchmen’: Anglican Evangelicals and History,
c. 1770-1850,” Theology 115 (2012): 339-349.
32
Newman, Apologia, 62.
33
Zuijdwegt rightly questions the alternative interpretation by Paul Vaiss
of a much later ‘evangelical phase’ to Newman based on selective evidence
and a misdating of sermons. Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift, 116. Cf. Paul
Vaiss, “Newman’s State of Mind on the Eve of His Italian Tour,” in From Oxford
to the People: Reconsidering Newman and the Oxford Movement, ed. Paul Vaiss
(Leominster: Gracewing, 1996), ch. 18-19.
10 PETER NOCKLES

the only sure means to salvation in favor of the centrality of moral obedi-
ence to conscience.34 His unpublished critique of the Scottish evangelical
Presbyterian divine, omas Chalmers, involved a rejection of Chalmers’
apparent teaching that the atonement was the sole instrument of conver-
sion and that its effect was “to make religion a matter of feeling.”35 More-
over, for Newman the sacraments increasingly became the main chan-
nels and necessary means of salvation.
Newman did not regard himself as yet aligned to the high church
party as is clear from a letter to his friend, Samuel Rickards in November
1826. Newman pointedly refrained from identifying the historic Church
of England and her divines with any one party: “I begin by assuming,”
he wrote, “that the old worthies of our Church are neither orthodox nor
evangelical, but untractable persons, suspicious characters, neither one
thing nor the other.”
He wanted Rickards to “give a summary of their opinions,” taking
them as ‘the English Church’. He hoped for a consensus fidelium, achiev-
able by “distinctly marking out the grand scriptural features of that doc-
trine in which they all agree.” He hoped that Rickards could present the
‘old divines’ as “a band of witnesses for truth, not opposed to each other
(as they now are).” He wanted these divines to be treated “as a whole,
a corpus theologorum et ecclesiasticum, the English Church.”36 Signifi-
cantly, Rickards baulked at this challenge. e letter shows that New-
man’s ecclesiological vision at this stage was inchoate and evolving. ere
was no inevitability about his theological trajectory. Stephen Morgan has
argued that the best way of treating Newman at any point in his history
is “as a person with an open future, rather than reading back some future
event” in the service of an “apologetic meta-narrative.”37 On the other
hand, Newman’s comments to Rickards contain a hint that he would not
long remain content with diversity and variation – the theological char-
acter of the English Church required systematization.
A better case for Newman’s adoption of high churchmanship is pro-
vided by his attitude during the re-election contest of Sir Robert Peel as

34
Geertjan Zuijdwegt and Terrence Merrigan, “Conscience,” in The Oxford
Handbook of John Henry Newman, 434-455, at 442.
35
[J. H. Newman], “Critical Remarks upon Dr Chalmers’ eology,” 1834?,
Newman MS. A.9.1., p. 9. Birmingham Oratory Archives/Newman Digital
Archive B123-A004.
36
Newman to Samuel Rickards, November 26, 1826, in The Letters and Dia-
ries of John Henry Newman, I, ed. Ian Ker and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1978), 310.
37
Morgan, The Search for Continuity, iv.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 11

MP for the University of Oxford. In February 1829, Peel, Home Secretary

in the Wellington administration, resigned his seat because he had come
out in favor of Catholic Emancipation, an unpopular measure at Oxford
University. Newman always professed to be ‘indifferent’ as to the merits
of the measure itself. His was not the implacable opposition of the Prot-
estant high church party on explicitly anti-Catholic grounds. For him, it
was a matter of rejecting political expediency and reasserting against
men of “rank and talent” the rights and independence of both Church
and University, the latter, as a “place set apart.”38 It was to mark a decisive
parting of the ways between Newman and his erstwhile Oriel noetic
friends and mentors. e Noetics were out of tune with the prevailing
Tory high church anti-Catholic emancipationist sentiment in the univer-
sity. Newman, under Whately’s influence, had himself supported Catho-
lic Emancipation and voted against the university’s anti-Catholic peti-
tions in 1827 and 1828. us his volte-face on the subject dismayed the
Noetics, especially Whately.
Although there had once been some rapprochement between the Oriel
Noetics and so-called ‘Hackney Phalanx’ high churchmen,39 this had
broken down by the late-1820s. e so-called old high church party rep-
resented by divines such as John Hume Spry, himself connected to Oriel,
came to dislike everything that the Noetics stood for. Whately was sin-
gled out as the, “mouthpiece and indefatigable supporter of a party in the
Church which promises to do more harm to her doctrine and discipline
than all the Calvinism, or dissent, or evangelism of the last century has
effected.”40
Whately assumed that Newman must be allying with the ‘high and
dry’ or ‘two bottle orthodox’ churchmen of popular caricature. Whately
took mischievous pleasure as Principal of St Alban Hall in inviting and
seating the fastidious Newman into the company of “a set of the least
intellectual men in Oxford to dinner, and men most fond of port.” As

38
J. H. Newman to Mrs Newman, March 1, 1829, Letters and Correspondence
of John Henry Newman during His Life in the English Church, ed. Anne Mozley,
2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), I, 202.
39
Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate,
1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9-20; Richard Brent,
Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 148-149. On the Hackney Phalanx, see Nockles, The Oxford
Movement in Context, 13-15; Clive Dewey, The Passing of Barchester: A Real Life
Version of Trollope (London: Hambledon, 1991).
40
J. H. Spry to H. H. Norris, December 10, 1829, Ms Eng Lett. c.789, fos.
200-201. Norris Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
12 PETER NOCKLES

Newman recalled, Whately aerwards “asked me if I was proud of my

friends.”41
e story of the genesis of the Oxford Movement, its reaction against
both evangelicalism and liberalism and Newman’s direction of that reac-
tion has been oen told. Likewise, Newman’s readiness to work with
representatives of the old high church party, notably Hugh James Rose
(1795-1838), a Cambridge divine, and William Palmer of Worcester Col-
lege (1802-1885), in the early stages of the Movement, if only for tactical
reasons, has been explored by the present author elsewhere.42 What con-
cerns us here is the extent to which Newman actually drew upon and
made his own, traditional high church Anglicanism. On what terms did
he embrace it? Was it on a provisional basis or one of permanence?
Newman claimed that without a belief in dogma, religion was “a mere
sentiment,” “a dream and a mockery.”43 is belief, he insisted had
guided him from the time of his first conversion at the age of fieen,
throughout his evangelical period, even during the time he came under
the liberal spell of Whately in around 1827. It became “the fundamental
principle of the Movement of 1833.” It is possible of course to regard
Newman’s later claim to a lifelong emphasis on dogma as an example of
a retrospective representation of his religious history, concealing phases
of his life and thought that do not fit this picture. It is clear that what
constituted dogma for Newman changed over time. Moreover, dogma
was never viewed in isolation from praxis.
e Movement’s foundational dogma, in Newman’s words, was “that
there was a visible Church with sacraments and rites which are the chan-
nels of invisible grace.” He thought that “this was the doctrine of Scrip-
ture, of the early Church, and of the Anglican Church.”44 A corollary of
Newman’s emerging emphasis on the necessity of the mediation of the
visible Church in the life of faith was an uncompromising attitude
towards Protestant Dissenters who rejected any notion of an ecclesial
body having authority over an individual and who indulged in unre-
strained private judgment. In this, Newman was at one with the more
rigid high churchmen of earlier generations.45

41
Autobiographical Memoir, 73.
42
Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context, 274-277.
43
Newman, Apologia, 120.
44
Ibid., 121.
45
For an example of Newman’s rigidity over Protestant Dissent, see the Jub-
ber case when in June 1834 Newman refused to marry at St Mary’s the daughter
of a Balliol College pastry cook who was a Baptist, because she was unbaptised.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 13

When it came to the Fathers, Newman himself owed a huge debt to

several distinguished high churchmen. Martin Joseph Routh (1755-1854),
the aged President of Magdalen College, William Van Mildert (1765-
1836), Bishop of Durham, William Rowe Lyall (1788-1857), Archdeacon
of Maidstone, John Kaye (1783-1853), Bishop of Lincoln, and Charles
Lloyd (1784-1829), whose private lectures as Regius Professor of Divinity
at Oxford, Newman had attended in 1823-1824, were sources of inspira-
tion for Newman. Newman was to inherit his evolving view of pre-
Nicene theology from his seventeenth-century Anglican forebears, nota-
bly William Cave and George Bull. His first book, The Arians of the
Fourth Century (1833), started life as a proposed article on the irty-
nine Articles and Church Councils, which the editors of the Theological
Library, Rose and Lyall, had invited him to contribute. In The Arians,
with its discussion on the origins and causes of early heresies, Newman
was writing primitive Church history within an Anglican tradition that
sought a return to the primary sources.46 Newman also used and applied
the history of the Arian controversy to the Church controversies of his
own day in the early 1830s.47
Newman’s early steps into high church Anglicanism were slow and
halting. For Newman, liberalism was the immediate and the most insidi-
ous enemy, not the threat to an establishment.48 While Newman increas-
ingly deplored what he perceived as a subjective tendency in popular
evangelicalism and its potentially liberalizing implications, he did not
disown the evangelical tradition as a whole or even with the evangelical
party in spite of his withdrawal of membership from evangelical socie-
ties. Newman’s assertion in his Apologia that the Oxford Movement was
primarily directed against liberalism should be taken at face value rather
than as the late Frank Turner fancifully suggested, a later smokescreen
for Newman’s real contemporary bête noir, evangelicalism.49

Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman & Todd,
1989), 128-129.
46
Benjamin J. King, “e Church Fathers,” in The Oxford Handbook of John
Henry Newman, 113-134.
47
Stephen omas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-62.
48
“An abundance of champions will easily be roused to defend the Church
as an establishment. For this reason, we have given our efforts exclusively to the
defence of the Church against liberalism whether of doctrine or discipline.”
J. H. Newman to Charles Marriott, [1834 or 1835], in Letters and Diaries, XXXII,
ed. Francis J. McGrath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11.
49
Turner, John Henry Newman, 9-11.
14 PETER NOCKLES

ere is no reason to doubt Newman’s initially inclusive approach dur-

ing his visits to rural clergymen during 1833 in order to rally support for
the Tracts for the Times. As he later made clear: “I did not care whether
my visits were made to high Church or low Church; I wished to make
a strong pull in union with all who were opposed to the principles of
liberalism, whoever they might be.”50
It would seem that Newman, as in that letter of Rickards, was still acting
on the principle of assembling a ‘band of witnesses’, ‘harmonized’ in
their opposition to liberalism. Newman made sure that some of the early
numbers of the Tracts for the Times, notably Tract 8, “e Gospel a Law
of Liberty,” appealed to evangelicals. Newman even commenced a series
of letters advocating a revival of Church discipline which were published
in the hard-line evangelical newspaper, The Record. ere were several
issues – a protest against erastianism in the face of the Whig govern-
ment’s interference in Church affairs, the importance of the ministerial
office and of pastoral responsibility – which could unite Evangelical and
Orthodox. Both would decry the so-called ‘fox hunting parson’ of an
earlier generation. If anything, it was the so-called ‘high and dry’ Church
party who initially were more unsettled by the new movement than
evangelicals were. As long as there was a continuing sense of the ‘Church
in Danger’ generated by challenges from without, the Movement could
remain broad-based in its appeal.
Newman later recalled that it was from 1834 onwards that he put the
ecclesiastical doctrine which he had come to embrace “on a broader
basis, aer reading Laud, Bramhall, and Stillingfleet and other Anglican
divines on the one hand; and aer prosecuting the study of the Fathers
on the other.”51
It has also been suggested that it was Martin Routh who had first
directed Newman to the seventeenth-century divines.52 Apart from
piecemeal reading (as evidenced by his Oriel Library borrowings) for
particular controversial purposes, Newman’s more systematic study of
and familiarity with the Anglican divines came relatively late. It followed
his earlier systematic immersion in the Fathers.
Newman complained that even the defenders of the Church in the
crisis of 1833 appeared to know too little of its institutional and

50
Newman, Apologia, 111.
51
Ibid., 121.
52
T. M. Parker, “e Rediscovery of the Fathers in the Seventeenth-Century
Anglican Tradition,” in The Rediscovery of Newman: A Portrait Restored, ed.
John Coulson and A. M. Allchin (London: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 31-49.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 15

theological past and inheritance. ey dwelt too much on temporalities

and too little on the apostolic and spiritual basis of Church authority. He
increasingly sensed that it was only secular and state interests, and not
doctrinal consensus, that held the Church establishment together.
“Viewed internally,” the Church was not one “except as an Establish-
ment.” On the contrary, he maintained, it had been “the battle field of
two opposite principles; Socinianism and Catholicism – Socinianism
fighting for the most part by Puritanism its unconscious ally.”53
e Church of England needed to be re-catholicized before it could be
successfully defended from its opponents. As he told his friend Maria
Giberne in September 1835, there needed to be a revival of “the system
which nourished our great divines of the 17th century, Taylor and the
rest!”54
Newman’s debt to and reverence for the Anglican divines is clear from
the content of the Tracts for the Times themselves. Of the series of ninety
Tracts, sixteen were reprints of Anglican authors. It was necessary to
show that patristic teaching and practice had persisted throughout the
Anglican centuries. us, in Tract 38, Newman confidently asserted that
“in the seventeenth century the theology of the English Church was sub-
stantially the same as ours is.”55
Newman adopted omas Wilson (1663-1755), Bishop of Sodor and
Man from 1698, as an exemplar in the primitive Church mold in terms
of a revival of ecclesiastical discipline. Wilson’s Form of Excommunica-
tion and Form of Receiving Penitents were reproduced as Tract 37 and
Tract 39, while his Meditations of His Sacred Office formed another seven
of the Tracts for the Times.56 Other reprints in the Tracts were of treatises
on public prayers and liturgical offices of the Church, including by
William Beveridge (1637-1708), Bishop of St Asaph from 1704. e pro-
ject of a recovery of the ‘treasures’ of the Church was directly tied to
overcoming the “ignorance of our historical position as churchmen”
which he regarded as “one of the especial evils of the day.”57 Newman’s
Tract 74 concerned the apostolic succession. A selection of extracts from

53
Newman to H. J. Rose, May 23, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, ed. omas
Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 301, 302.
54
Newman to Maria Giberne, September 4, 1835, in Letters and Diaries, V, 135.
55
Tract 38: “Via Media. No. I,” 11. Tracts for the Times: By Members of the
University of Oxford. Vol. I [1833-1834] (London: Rivington; Oxford: Parker,
1840).
56
Austin Cooper, “e Tracts for the Times,” in The Oxford Handbook of the
Oxford Movement, 137-150, at 141-142.
57
Tract 41. Tracts for the Times [1834], 6-7.
16 PETER NOCKLES

forty-three Anglican authors provided the appropriate chain of witnesses

to the doctrine. Other catenae patrum to the doctrines of Baptism and
catholic Consent made up Tracts 76 and 78 respectively.
Yet even while historic Anglicanism was being enlisted, Newman’s
own future path remained uncertain. He was only one step ahead of the
message which he was promulgating, gaining confidence as his views
developed. e concept of the via media was a way of systematizing
and unifying that “band of witnesses” which he felt necessary for the
identity of the English Church. As Newman’s friend and a later biogra-
pher, R. H. Hutton, put it, it was an ecclesiastical “working hypothesis.”58
However, Newman still lacked a clear idea of “the foundation and limits
of the Anglican consensus needed for a middle path between Protestant-
ism and Roman Catholicism.”59 As he famously put it: “We have a vast
inheritance, but no inventory of our treasures. All is given us in profu-
sion; it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, harmonize, and
complete.”60

2. Newman’s Construct of an Anglican Via Media

e Tracts for the Times were one such inventory.61 ere was nothing
distinctively Anglican about the via media concept per se, as it had been
part of the traditional representation of orthodoxy since the patristic
era.62 e Aristotelian notion of a ‘golden mean’ was well known. It was
a notion which the Restoration Church of England, following the lead of
the Laudian divines, had taken up. However, recent scholarship has
deconstructed the notion that the Church of England historically repre-
sented a middle way between the Roman Catholic Church and continen-
tal Protestantism. e via media was a fragile as well as an ideological

58
Richard H. Hutton, Cardinal Newman, rev. ed. (London: Methuen,
1905), 57.
59
John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, ed. H. D. Weidner
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), xxvii-xxviii.
60
John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London: Rivington,
1837), 30.
61
George Herring, The Oxford Movement in Practice: The Tractarian Paro-
chial World from the 1830s to the 1870s (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016), 18.
62
Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The
Construction of Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 2009), 14.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 17

construct, devised for polemical or apologetic purposes.63 As Paul Avis

observes, the “English Church was not in the middle of anything.”
Rather, it was widely regarded for three centuries aer the Reformation
as “belonging firmly within the family of European Reformed
Churches.”64 Cranmer would have been shocked by Newman’s apparent
application of the via media, as would the great Elizabethan apologist
of the Reformed Church of England John Jewel. Cranmer’s concern is
better understood as seeking a middle way, not between Catholicism and
Protestantism, but between different versions of Protestantism or rather,
a ‘third way’ bypassing both Rome and Wittenberg.65
Taking his cue from his friend, Hurrell Froude, who famously dubbed
Jewel “what you would call in these days an irreverent Dissenter,”66
Newman privately jettisoned the Reformers. By 1838, he was confiding
his sense of relief that he no longer needed “all sorts of fictions and arti-
fices to make Cranmer or others Catholic.”67 In contrast, traditional high
churchmen had celebrated the English Reformers, if on different terms
from that of evangelicals. Jewel’s Apology (1559) was deemed sacrosanct.
Newman got round the problem by claiming that Jewel and others had
allowed themselves to be contaminated by the foreign Protestantism of
Zurich and Geneva68 – a view which recent scholarship has shown to be
an anachronistic misrepresentation.69
Conscious of lack of support for his vision of Anglican Catholicity to
be found in the writings of the English Reformers, Newman called for
a ‘second Reformation’, to complete, if not correct the work of the first.70
Yet if Newman was thereby seeking to forge a new consensus which
obscured an Elizabethan and Jacobean Church past, imposing a height-
ened polarity between Anglicanism and Puritanism, this was only what
some Laudian divines, such as Peter Heylin, had done in the seventeenth

63
See Herring, Oxford Movement in Practice, 15-20.
64
Avis, “Not Yet Anglicanism,” 200.
65
Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation
(London: Allen Lane, 2016), 205.
66
Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, 4 vols. (London:
Rivington; Derby: Mozley, 1838-1839), III, 379.
67
J. H. Newman to T. Henderson, March 1838 (copy), Ollard Papers, Pusey
House Library, Oxford.
68
Tract 38. Tracts for the Times [1834], 6.
69
Peter B. Nockles, “Survivals or New Arrivals? e Oxford Movement and
the Nineteenth-Century Historical Construction of Anglicanism,” in Anglican-
ism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for
Communion, ed. Stephen Platten (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003), 144-191.
70
Tract 41. Tracts for the Times [1834], 3.
18 PETER NOCKLES

century. Like Heylin, Newman sought to marginalize ‘Ultra-Protestant-

ism’ (Heylin’s ‘Puritanism’) from a Church of England mainstream.
It has been plausibly argued that ‘Laudian’ divines such as Andrewes,
Overall, and Montagu, also promoted a strict imitation of primitive doc-
trine and practice as normative for the Church of England in their day.
For them, as much as for Newman, the via media construct symbolized
a determined exclusivity, rather than mere moderation. Neither was it a
mere via negativa – as Newman privately recorded in 1834, that “they
who fix their eye on the Mean between existing extremes instead of eye-
ing the goal, mistake the shadow for the substance.”71
Newman’s via media, fully developed in his Lectures on the Prophetical
Office of the Church (1837) claimed Anglican precedents for the theologi-
cal formulation of the concept. While he chose the term and “under it
arranged my own attack and my defence,” he recognized that it was not
“original with me, but as Hall’s and many others.’’72 He was particularly
indebted to Bishop John Jebb’s The Peculiar Character of the Church of
England (1815),73 while it was Jebb’s life-long friend and correspondent,
the Irish lay theologian, Alexander Knox (1757-1831), who also had an
influence.74 Nonetheless, Newman by no means regarded the Oxford
Movement as a mere passive legatee of the whole Anglican inheritance.
He looked beyond and behind the English Reformation and its formular-
ies to the early and undivided Church. e key here was the well-known
canon or dictum of St Vincent of Lerins from his Commonitorium,
enshrining the idea of ‘Catholic consent’: – quod semper, quod ubique,
quod ab omnibus. e dictum, which Newman had applied in Tract 78,
dictated that an assent of faith was demanded of that which had been
held always, everywhere and by all.

71
Newman MS. D.5.13, “Revolution of 1688,” Birmingham Oratory Archives/
Newman Digital Archive B162-A013. Newman had written on the cover of this
manuscript – “Perhaps about the year 1834 not worth anything.”
72
J. H. Newman to H. P. Liddon, December 18, 1877, in Letters and Diaries,
XXVIII, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain and omas Gornall (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), 283. Joseph Hall (1574-1656), Bishop of Exeter, later Norwich, was
a moderate Calvinist but staunch upholder of episcopacy. He was the author of
a Treatise on the Old Religion (1639), which Newman cited in Tract 38.
73
John Jebb (1775-1833), Bishop of Limerick, 1823.
74
Newman, Lectures on Certain Difficulties, 327. See Peter B. Nockles,
“Church or Protestant Sect: e Church of Ireland, High Churchmanship, and
the Oxford Movement, 1822-1869,” The Historical Journal 41 (1998): 457-493,
at 464.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 19

Initially, Newman and the Tractarians, in line with the older high
church tradition, upheld what Kenneth Parker has called a ‘successionist’
view of history.75 is took for granted the Church of England’s linear
continuity with primitive Christianity. However, Newman’s approach
soon emerged. e Church of England was no longer simply the voice of
Antiquity. It had to prove that it was. is entailed what Parker calls
a ‘supersessionist vision of history’ assuming a normative primitive
Christianity partially weakened or lost in practice. is promoted calls
for a recovery or restoration of lost riches.76 It also entailed a dynamic
application of Church history to reshape the present and reorient the
future direction of the Church.77 Unlike most traditional high church-
men, Tractarians, Newman felt a tension between the quod semper and
the constraints of the Anglican formularies, notably the irty-Nine
Articles and Article VI in particular which dictated that only those doc-
trines found in Scripture could be imposed as of necessary faith. Chafing
against these restrictions, Newman sought to ‘reconstruct’ an ecclesiol-
ogy for Anglicanism based on a fixed, binding authoritative timeframe,
the early Church. is meant going beyond the status quo in doctrinal
and liturgical standards. Although an advance on the high church posi-
tion outlined by Hawkins in his Unauthoritative Tradition, this had been
the position of later Nonjurors such as omas Brett and omas Deacon.
For old high churchmen, Anglicanism and Antiquity were substantially
identical with the Fathers marshalled in Anglican order and costume, as
omas Mozley put it.78 On the other hand, for Newman the Church of
England was identical with Antiquity only in so far as it espoused the
doctrine of the Fathers.
e selectivity of Newman’s appeal to Anglican testimony extended to
his marginalization of the rising latitudinarian element in the later sev-
enteenth and eighteenth-century Church of England. He blamed this
trend on the apparent liberalizing and Erastianizing influence of Dutch
Arminians such as Limborch79 and Hugo Grotius80 on Anglican divines

75
Kenneth L. Parker, “Tractarian Visions of History,” in The Oxford Hand-
book of the Oxford Movement, 151-165.
76
Ibid., 155-160.
77
Ibid., 164.
78
omas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford
Movement, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), II, 400.
79
Philipp van Limborch (1633-1712), Dutch Remonstrant (anti-Calvinist)
theologian.
80
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was a celebrated Dutch jurist and Arminian
theologian who dedicated himself to the reunion of the Churches.
20 PETER NOCKLES

such as William Chillingworth.81 At first Newman remained surprisingly

understanding of the reasons why the late seventeenth-century Church
of England came to pursue a policy of Protestant unity. Nonetheless,
Newman regarded the Revolution of 1688 as “a crisis in her fortunes” for
the Church of England as “it bound her almost in slavery to a latitudinar-
ian and secularizing policy.”82 What he called “Revolution Protestant-
ism” was “too cold, too tame, too Socinian-like to reach the affections of
the people.”83 Newman privately even feared that the revered Caroline
Divine Henry Hammond was “tinctured as regards the Sacraments with
Grotianism.”84 Newman was clearly in agreement with his disciple and
friend Samuel Wood’s comment in May 1837 that he proposed to write
an article in the high church journal the British Critic, pointing out, “that
the Arminianism which succeeded the Calvinism of the Reformation
and was its reaction, and which assumes to itself […] the name of Ortho-
doxy, is just as non-catholic and more Rationalistic, and as far removed
from the Mysterious and True System as Calvinism.”85
For Newman, the Caroline Divines were to remain a selective band
of witnesses, not to be accepted uncritically. Even in the compilation of
catenae in the Tracts for the Times, the theology of the extracts was not
claimed as normative or authoritative in every case. e purpose was
simply to show that the particular doctrines involved had the testimony
of an Anglican ‘chain of witnesses’. For example, Newman defended
against Froude’s the reprint of John Cosin’s History of Popish Transub-
stantiation (1627) as Tract 27, on the ground that it was a useful weapon
against the popularity of ‘low’ views on the Eucharist associated with the
eighteenth-century ultra-latitudinarian divine, Benjamin Hoadly. Like-
wise, when an old high churchman, Godfrey Faussett, Oxford’s Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity, denounced the Tractarians for a “revival
of Popery” partly on account of a Eucharistic doctrine “closely bordering

81
[J. H. Newman], “Le Bas’s Life of Archbishop Laud,” British Critic 19,
no. 88 (April, 1836), 368. A godson of Archbishop Laud and briefly a Roman
Catholic convert, William Chillingworth (1602-1644) was the author of The Reli-
gion of Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation (1638).
82
Newman MS. D.5.13, “Revolution of 1688,” Birmingham Oratory Archives/
Newman Digital Archive.
83
J. H. Newman to H. J. Rose, May 11, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, 295.
84
J. H. Newman to E. Churton, March 14, 1837, in Letters and Diaries, VI,
ed. Gerard Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 41.
85
S. F. Wood to J. H. Newman, April 8, 1837, in Letters and Diaries, VI, 53.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 21

on consubstantiation,” Newman complained that Faussett was really

attacking the teaching of Laud and Cosin etc.86
One of the most significant elements in Newman’s construct of an
Anglican via media between Rome and Geneva was its tentative and
provisional character. For Newman it remained, “to be tried whether
what is called Anglo-Catholicism, the religion of Andrewes, Laud, Ham-
mond, Butler, and Wilson, was capable of being put into practice.”87
For him, it was but “a fine drawn theory, which has never been owned
by any body of churchmen” and which had “slept in libraries.”88 For
Newman, such a theology could not compete with a living system, even
one as corrupted as he then claimed Rome to be. Nonetheless, it would
be wrong to assume, as some (including myself) have plausibly argued,
that at this relatively early stage on his religious journey Newman was
putting the Church of England on trial.89 ere was nothing predeter-
mined about the outcome.
As early as May 1836, Newman had confided to Rose that “the Angli-
can system of doctrine is in matter of fact not complete – that there are
hiatuses which have never been filled up – so that, though one agrees
with it most entirely as far as it goes, yet one wishes something more.”90
By appealing directly to Antiquity Newman advocated abandoned
points of primitive practice such as prayers for the dead (in Tract 77) and
a reintroduction of an at least modified form of monasticism (in the Brit-
ish Magazine, vii. 666-667). In Tract 41, Newman even suggested that the
irty-Nine Articles be supplemented by the insertion of an explicit
statement of a doctrine of apostolic succession. is may have been
in line with later Non-Juror teaching but there was a subtle difference in

86
J. H. Newman, A Letter to the Rev. Godfrey Faussett, D.D. Margaret Profes-
sor of Divinity, on Certain points of Faith and Practice (Oxford: John Henry
Parker, 1838), 19-20.
87
Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 20.
88
John Henry Newman, Discussion and Arguments on Various Subjects
(1872) (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 17-19; Wulstan Peterburs,
“e Rise and Fall of the Anglican Via Media of John Henry Newman: Some
Implications for Ecumenical eology,” Downside Review 129 (2011): 1-21, at 5.
89
For this view, see George Herring’s comment: like Luther three centuries
earlier, Newman was “personally testing the beliefs, formulas and practices of
the ecclesiastical body in which he had been born; did they answer the needs
of both his intellect and spirit? Like Luther he would need time, but the emerg-
ing answer was just as negative.” George Herring, What Was the Oxford Move-
ment For? (London: Continuum, 2002), 62; Nockles, “Survivals or New Arriv-
als?,” 161.
90
J. H. Newman to H. J. Rose, May 1, 1836, in Letters and Diaries, V, 291-292.
22 PETER NOCKLES

tone here in Newman’s position from that of Alexander Knox whose

emphasis was on a via media enshrining ‘mental freedom’. Whereas for
Newman the Anglican faithfulness to Antiquity needed to be proved and
any defects from primitive teaching needed to be made good and ‘real-
ized’ by the current Church of England, for Knox such faithfulness was
taken for granted and any dissonance between Anglican and patristic
teaching was purely hypothetical.91
While for Newman the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church
repudiated the ‘errors’ of both Protestantism and Romanism with the
Church of England positioned as a ‘middle way’ between the two, in
practice Newman was more dismissive of the former than the latter.
When Newman as a Roman Catholic reissued the Lectures in 1877 with
a new preface, he conceded that he had “acted far more as an assailant of
the religion of the Reformation than of what he called Popery.”92 He thus
gave retrospective credence to the fears expressed at the time of the origi-
nal publication by some high church supporters of the Oxford Movement
as well as by its fiercest evangelical opponents. In the Lectures, Newman
invoked a Church Catholic which neither Canterbury nor Rome fully
represented. e same assumption underscored Tract 71 in which New-
man conceded that the sacramentum unitas, regarded as essential for the
purity of faith, had been “shattered in the great schism of the sixteenth
century.” In consequence, Newman argued that at least since that era,
“Truth has not dwelt simply and securely in any visible Tabernacle.”93
Not surprisingly, Tract 71 le a disquieting impression on Newman’s
high church allies, with Rose complaining that Newman had only con-
tended that there was safety in allegiance to the Church of England upon
the mere principle of “any port in a storm.”94 One scholar, on the evi-
dence of this Tract, dates the beginnings of Newman’s “emotional incli-
nation towards Rome.”95

91
David McCready, The Life and Theology of Alexander Knox: Anglicanism
in the Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 41.
92
John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, 2 vols.,
3rd ed. (London: Longmans, 1877), I, xvi.
93
Tract 71. Tracts for the Times [1836], 29-31. Tracts for the Times. Vol. III
[1835-1836] (London: Rivington; Oxford: Parker, 1836).
94
H. J. Rose to J. H. Newman, May 13, 1836, J. W. Burgon, “Hugh James
Rose: Restorer of the Old Paths,” in Lives of Twelve Good Men, 2 vols. (London:
John Murray, 1889), I, 116-283, at 215-216.
95
Rune Imberg, In Quest of Authority: The ‘Tracts for the Times’ and the
Development of the Tractarian Leaders, 1833-1841 (Lund: Lund University Press,
1987), 105.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 23

Newman’s Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838) represented

an attempt to endow the via media with doctrinal as well as ecclesial
meaning. e two were linked. e bête noir of the Lectures was the
Protestant principle of private judgment and in reaction an attempt to
assert the mediation of the visible Church in the life of faith. A via media
was drawn between a Lutheran interpretation of justification by faith
alone and a Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by obedience, by
recourse to a justification formulated in terms of the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit in the soul of the Christian.96 e relationship of faith and
works in justification was construed so as to avoid an undue reliance on
personal spiritual experience. It was on this issue rather than on that of
the doctrine of a visible Church, that Newman parted company most
decisively with evangelicals. Its main argument was “directed against the
beliefs which he himself had held as an evangelical,”97 while it has also
been criticized for its misrepresentation of Luther’s teaching.98 It repre-
sented a departure from the position of many protestant high churchmen
such as Samuel Wilberforce,99 who combined a high doctrine of the vis-
ible Church and sacraments with a highly Protestant forensic view of
justification by faith.100 It was with these sensitivities in mind, that New-
man’s friend Samuel Francis Wood cautioned Newman to tread carefully
when treating this subject. As Wood warned Newman:
Is not the peculiar [i.e. evangelical] view of justification in some sense
their stronghold as it is only false as being partial and distorted, and has
there not been a great school on that side since the Reformation? […] men
must be induced to drop their notions on this point by being made good
Catholics, and not vice versa. e last thing is like pulling at a horse’s tail
instead of his bridle.101

96
John Henry Newman, Lectures on Justification (London: Rivington, 1838),
316-317.
97
Henry Chadwick, “e Lectures on Justification,” in Newman after a Hun-
dred Years, ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 287-
308, at 289.
98
Alastair McGrath, “Newman on Justification: An Evangelical Anglican
Evaluation,” in Newman and the Word, ed. Terrence Merrigan and Ian Ker (Lou-
vain: Leuven University Press, 2000), 91-107, at 107.
99
Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873), later highly influential Bishop of Oxford,
then Winchester.
100
David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and
Henry Manning (London: John Murray, 1966), 334.
101
Samuel F. Wood to J. H. Newman, April 8, 1837, in Letters and Diaries,
VI, 53. Modern scholarship bears out a theological consensus on the doctrine
of Justification by Faith among Elizabethan, Jacobean and early Caroline
24 PETER NOCKLES

However, the Caroline Divines, especially Bishop Bull, were invoked in

support of Newman’s views on this doctrine.
Newman later conceded that the summer of 1839 represented the high
point of the Movement and also of his own Anglican allegiance. He later
recalled that his article, “Prospects of the Anglican Church” in the April
1839 issue of the British Critic, represented his “last words as an Anglican
to Anglicans.” How did this happen? As long as the Church of England
could be proved to be at one with Antiquity, all was well. However, the
confidence of that allegiance predicated in these terms, was dealt two
hammer blows through his private study and reading during that late
summer. As Newman later recalled, “About the middle of June I began
to study and master the history of the Monophysites […] It was during
this course of reading that for the first time a doubt came upon me of the
tenableness of Anglicanism.”102
Antiquity was Newman’s stronghold, but his reading of this history
led him to conclude that it was difficult to regard the Monophysites as
heretics, “unless Protestants and Anglicans were heretics also; difficult
to find arguments against the Tridentine Fathers, which did not tell
against the Fathers of Chalcedon; difficult to condemn the Popes of the
sixteenth century, without condemning the Popes of the fih.”103
is appeared to leave Newman’s Tractarian party “in the position of
the Oriental Communion, Rome was, where she now is.”104 According to
Newman’s Apologia account, his first doubts about Anglicanism were
also influenced by Wiseman’s comparison of Anglicanism with Donatism
in the Dublin Review, which when Newman read it in September 1839,
gave him ‘a stomach ache’ aer the completion of his Monophysite
research. As Newman famously put it, Wiseman’s appeal in that article
to the palmary words of Saint Augustine, ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’,
could be applied to deciding the controversy with the Monophysites as
well as the Donatists, ‘absolutely pulverized’ his theory of the via media.
Recent scholarship has underscored the forcefulness of the impact of
Wiseman’s article and citations on Newman.105 Catholicity was shown to
have been even more important than apostolicity for the early Church.

Divines. Alastair McGrath, “Anglican Tradition on Justification,” Churchman

(1984), 32; Louis Weil, “e Gospel in Anglicanism,” Study of Anglicanism,
64-71.
102
Newman, Apologia, 208.
103
Ibid., 209.
104
Ibid.
105
Morgan, The Search for Continuity, 152-154.
 HIGH CHURCH ANGLICANISM IN JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 25

From now on, any appeal to antiquity as proof of Anglican apostolicity

had to depend on a different basis. Any vision of apostolicity and unity
had to include the authority and unity of the contemporary Church.
Newman’s review of William Palmer’s Treatise on the Church of Christ
in the British Critic in 1838 had already hinted at his uncertainty over
the viability of the traditional high church ‘branch theory’. Palmer had
denied that unity in doctrine was a note of the Church.106 Newman con-
sidered Palmer’s theology to be the best and most authoritative repre-
sentative of Anglicanism.107 However, Newman was already uneasy with
the apparent separation of doctrine from the Church implicit in the
Anglican theory. As he observed in the review, “What becomes of the
notes of the Church? What purpose do they serve? What relief and guid-
ance is afforded to the inquiring mind, if the Church thus indicated
preaches Popery in Rome and Zwingli-Lutheranism in England? e dif-
ficulty is certainly considerable?”108
Wiseman’s article heightened this latent misgiving. Although Benja-
min King has recently suggested that the force of the Donatist/Anglican
and Monophysite analogies were retrospective emphases by Newman
and that ‘doctrinal history’ rather than ecclesiology were primarily at
stake,109 ecclesiology played a part in the first loosening of his Anglican
allegiance. For the first time, Anglicanism was failing Newman’s ‘reality’
test. Nothing would be quite the same again, though some of Newman’s
Tractarian allies, notably Pusey, did not realize this for many years. In
a revealing exchange with Pusey on the matter of ecclesiology as late as
August 1844, Newman wrote: “What am I to say but that I am one who,
even five years ago, had a strong conviction, from reading the history of
the early ages, that we are not part of the Church?”110

106
William Palmer [of Worcester College], Treatise on the Church of Christ,
2 vols. (London: Rivington, 1838), I, 96-97.
107
Essays Critical and Historical by John Henry Cardinal Newman. Vol. 1:
With an Introduction and Textual Appendix by Andrew Nash (Leominster:
Gracewing, 2019), “Editor’s Introduction,” xxvi.
108
[J. H. Newman], “Palmer’s Treatise on the Church,” British Critic 24
(October, 1838): 363.
109
Benjamin J. King, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doc-
trine in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
162-163.
110
Newman to Pusey, August 28, 1844, in H. P. Liddon, Life of Edward
Bouverie Pusey, II, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 406.
26 PETER NOCKLES

3. Where Is the Church of Catholicism?

e central question for Newman was becoming not so much what is the
Catholicism of the Church but where is the Church of Catholicism?111
Newman’s article in the British Critic in January 1840, “e Catholicity
of the English Church” was an attempt to allay his own nagging doubts,
tackling the ecclesiological issue of Anglican Catholicity head-on. e
‘difficulty’ which Newman posed was that, “the Church being ‘one body’,
how can we, estranged as we are from every part of it except our own
dependencies, unrecognized and without intercommunion, maintain our
right to be considered as part of that body?”112
Newman cited various Caroline and Non-Juror Divines as exponents
of the ‘branch theory’ of independent episcopal churches but appeared
to distance himself from it in the face of Saint Augustine’s famous dic-
tum. Nonetheless, he took comfort in the fact that the Church of England
had providentially survived and the fact that the Roman Church had
a much less close connection with the faith of the primitive Church. is
was hardly a ringing endorsement of Anglicanism. at Newman was
not entirely convinced by his own apologetic was revealed in a private
letter at this time in which he confided:
A great experiment is going on, whether Anglocatholicism has a root,
a foundation, a consistency, as well as Roman Catholicism, or whether (in
the language of the day) it be a “sham.” I hold it to be quite impossible,
unless it be real, that it can maintain its ground – it must fall to pieces –
this is a day when mere theories will not pass current.113

‘Reality’ meant ‘living’. As the question of the notes of the Church in

Anglicanism – catholicity or even apostolicity came to be contested and
problematic in his mind, so the ultimate other note, that of holiness
became ever more important for Newman. Without it the other notes
would be superficial. Did the Church of England bear the marks of sanc-
tity? Newman had already begun to wonder if the Church of England
lacked “the provisions and methods by which Catholic feelings are to be
detained.” His own translations of the Roman Breviary in Tract 75 had
been a way of furnishing richer devotional models. He was on the look-
out for signs of holiness and spiritual life in the past and present history

111
Morgan, The Search for Continuity, 215.
112
Newman, “e Catholicity of the English Church,” British Critic 22,
no. 60 (January, 1840): 53.
113
J. H. Newman to W. C. A. MacLaurin, July 26, 1840, in Letters and Dia-
ries, VII, ed. G. Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 369.
Another random document with
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blazing pile, revolving in my mind what could possibly have caused
the failure, for I believed I had observed every particular, that I had
been taught was necessary to convert wood into charcoal.
Fortunately for my credit, just when I concluded that I knew nothing
about it, and had best say so, and before the whole heap had been
consumed, a sudden shower of rain poured down; this of course
spoiled all my arrangements, and among other things, to all
appearance put out the fire. Here was a case for condolence; and
Walderheros, thinking I must want something to support me under
the disappointment, when the rain had ceased, which was not for
some hours, took a straw basket and went to examine the ruins. One
effect of the rain, it seems, had been to beat down the dome of earth
and moist stalks of the thorn apple, when the support of the wood
inside had been lost by the combustion. This buried considerable
portions of unburnt extremities of the pieces of ted, and as they
continued smouldering underneath the fallen cover, the result was
that, much to my surprise, Walderheros brought me back the basket
full of beautifully close-grained shining black and very light pieces of
charcoal. As Walderheros thought it was all quite natural and right, I
made no other remark than merely asking him “if the people in Shoa
ever made charcoal like that.”
Having succeeded so well in this, it encouraged us to proceed,
and I sent to Tinta to say, that on the morrow he must supply me with
hand-mills and mortars to grind down and pulverize the other
ingredients, sulphur and saltpetre, of which a large quantity of each
had been brought to my house from Ankobar during the day.
Both sulphur and saltpetre abound in Shoa, the former being
obtained from the volcanic country immediately to the west of the
Hawash, near Azbottee. From an extinct crater, nearly half a mile
from our halting-place at Lee Adu, I had brought to me a piece of the
purest sulphur, that required no farther process of refinement than
the natural sublimation by which it had been deposited in the fissures
of the cone. The Adal Bedouins who occupy that neighbourhood
bring it to the Negoos of Shoa as a kind of tribute, and sometimes a
demand is made upon them for a certain quantity, which is delivered
in a few days, so plentifully is it found, to the Wallasmah Mahomed,
who forwards it to the Negoos.
Saltpetre is found in many places, both on the table-land of Shoa,
and in the valley countries to the south and east. It is principally
brought from Bulga, where the grey rubbly earth it forms is ploughed
over, and the disturbed soil containing more than fifty per cent. of the
salt is placed in immense earthenware jars containing water, in
which, by frequent agitation, the saltpetre becomes suspended. The
liquor is then decanted, and in large saucers allowed to evaporate,
when the finest needle-formed crystals of the salt are formed.
 CHAPTER XVII.
Determine to be cupped.—​Mode of operating.—​Medical knowledge
of the Shoans.—​Surgery.—​Remarks upon their diseases and their
remedies.—​The cosso tree.—​Mode of using the cosso.—​Other
curative processes.—​Manufacture of gunpowder.—​Success.—​
Health improving.
August 7th.—Being Sunday, Tinta did not come to my house. I also
staid within all day, and took advantage of Walderheros having
nothing to do, to be cupped in the Abyssinian manner, during the
cold stage of the fever, and which I expected would attack me in the
afternoon. A constant dull pain in the left side, just over the region of
the spleen, gave me considerable uneasiness, for although I was
aware that in ague this viscus is always affected, still I could not
divest myself of the idea that in my case it must be organically
diseased. I proposed, therefore, that the incisions should be made in
that situation, but Walderheros would not hear of such a thing.
Abstracting blood, to be beneficial, he asserted, must either be upon
the crown of the head or at the back of the neck, and should he
perform the operation anywhere else, and after all I should die, that
the Negoos would put him to death as my murderer. Seeing that I
could not induce him, and both his wife and Goodaloo being of the
same opinion as himself, I allowed him to use his own discretion.
During the consultation, however, that was held upon the occasion,
Hadjji Abdullah came in, and it was decided among them I should be
cupped upon the top of the head. The hair being accordingly shaved
off the assigned place, in a circle about the size of a crown-piece,
the hollow upper end of a horn, about four inches in length was then
placed upon the bare skin. To the tapered extremity of this, through
which was a small hole communicating with the interior, Walderheros
applied his mouth and exhausted the air. This being done, he then
closed the aperture with a piece of wax, that had been placed ready
for that purpose around the end of the horn. The usual tumefaction
of the integument immediately beneath was occasioned by being
thus relieved of atmospheric pressure. After a little time remaining in
this position, a needle was inserted into the wax, and air being
admitted into the horn, it fell off. Walderheros, with the heel of a
sharp razor, then gave three jerking cuts in the skin, and immediately
replacing the horn over the part, again withdrew the air, and a slight
movement of the tongue closed the aperture as before with the wax.
In a few minutes, the ascending surface of the blood, seen through
the white semi-transparent horn, indicated that sufficient had been
extracted, and holding down my head, at the request of
Walderheros, the primitive instrument was withdrawn, the whole
operation having been performed by these simple means as speedily
and as effectually as with the most expensive apparatus.
Excepting their acquaintance with some few cathartic remedies,
all derived from the vegetable kingdom, the Shoans possess but little
knowledge of medicine. A specific effect upon the bowels appears to
be absolutely necessary to convince them that the remedy employed
is medicine; and it is upon this principle that the articles contained in
their limited “Materia Medica” have been selected. The only
exception to this is a demulcent drink, made with honey and the
mucilaginous seeds of the soof, Carthamus tinctorius, which is taken
to relieve the local symptoms of “goomfon” (common catarrh).
The science of medicine principally consists of mysterious
ceremonies, to be observed whilst collecting the few herbs employed
as remedies, and in a knowledge of certain absurd formula of
characters, which, being inscribed upon a little bit of parchment, is
then enclosed in a case of red leather. The amulet is worn around
the left arm above the elbow, or among the women around the neck,
attached to the front of the martab. Pieces of red coral, sea shells,
and various other things, are also believed to have protective powers
against diseases. Copper rings, especially around the ancles or
wrists, are considered to be very efficacious in the cure of
rheumatism. These kind of remedies are supposed to be obnoxious
to certain demons who afflict the body during sickness, named
“saroitsh,” of which there are several, but great difference of opinion
exists as to their exact number.
 The Shoans have also external applications, and little operations,
by which they remedy the consequences of accidents, but these are
mere exigencies, conceived at the moment by the most sagacious of
the spectators, and, excepting blood-letting and cupping, no art or
mystery exists among them worthy of being dignified with the name
of surgery. A strange operation for the removal of the whole tonsil,
when enlarged by inflammation, I have often heard spoken of, but
never had any opportunity of witnessing, although I believe one of
the Irish soldiers attached to the Embassy, was foolish enough to
submit to the operation, and almost died in consequence. The mode
they employ of blood-letting and cupping is of very ancient origin,
and appears to have been received from former Egyptian connexion;
as, since my return to England, I have observed, in some
representations preserved to us of the arts and manners of the
people of that ancient country, the same method of venesection was
adopted by them, as by modern Abyssinians, and also, I may
remark, by their less civilized neighbours, the Dankalli. This is
performed in Shoa with the blade of a small razor, held between the
fore-finger and thumb. The point of the left thumb of the operator is
then placed upon the frontal vein of the forehead, which becoming
turgid, is laid open by a jerking cut with the razor, and the blood flows
freely. Cupping with the assistance of a cow’s horn, as I have before
been describing, I have also seen practised in exactly the same
manner, by the negroes of the western coast of Africa, so that this
method of abstracting blood appears to be very general, and strongly
attests a previous civilized condition among the ancestors of the
inhabitants of this continent, as such a practice argues a greater
advance in intellectual acquirement for its first introduction into use,
than we are willing, ignorant as we are yet of what civilization exists
in the unknown countries of intertropical Africa, to accord to the
ignorant natives, with whom we are at present acquainted.
I must not omit to observe, that among other external remedies,
counter-irritation is a very favourite practice among the Abyssinians.
Thus, in inflammations of the lungs, several small burns are made
upon the chest, either with a red-hot iron rod, or a piece of burning
charcoal, and this remedial process appears, and, I dare say,
deservedly, to rank high as being very efficacious in the opinion of
the inhabitants. In rheumatism, also, this kind of treatment, and the
disease, is so common on the high table land of Shoa, that an
exhibition of joints, to intimate how the patients have suffered, is
sometimes most ludicrous; our inclination to laugh, such is man’s
nature, not at all diminishing with increased evidences of the patient
submitting to the barbarous, but still, I have no doubt, excellent
remedy.
Syphilis has been represented to be the curse of the land; and
certainly, from King to beggar, according to their own account, they
either have it, or are about to have it. Priests and their wives are not
exempt, nor do even children of the tenderest age escape. The
reputation of this disease is as general among the Shoans, as
scrofula is in England, and it is admitted and spoken of in the same
manner without any reluctance or shame. This disease is supposed
by the natives to originate from several causes; among others, that
of eating the flesh of fowls which have become diseased, by living in
the neighbourhood of some one more than usually afflicted, and
great care accordingly is taken, when purchasing fowls in the
market, to learn from whence they came. The prevalent opinion also
is, that it is communicable by the simplest contact, and those who
are suffering from it are, therefore, carefully avoided, except by their
own relations, and for years after they are quite cured, a reluctance
to eat or drink with them, except with certain precautions, may be
observed among those of their acquaintance who are aware of their
previous condition. From these and many other observances against
contagion, it may be surprising that the disease should be so
general. As it struck me as being very remarkable, I made a point of
examining into the subject, and have concluded that by far the
greater majority of sores, and unhealthy appearances upon the body,
though referred by the patients themselves to this disease, arise, in
fact, from other causes, and are confounded with syphilis,
sometimes, probably, from the consciousness of having deserved it,
but more frequently from their ignorance of the fact, that the
peculiarity of their situation, and the character of their system in
consequence, predisposes them to an extensive ulceration, should
the continuity of the skin be separated by the slightest bruise. The ill
effects which arise from this, the unfortunate sufferers, unable to
account for it in any other manner, refer to a complaint, whose best
known symptoms are of a similar character; and without any idea of
disgrace attaching to them for what has arisen most innocently, they
jump to the conclusion that they have become contaminated by an
unfortunate contact with some affected individual. This is one
reason, also, of the very various remedies popularly employed; for
many of the cases, as I have observed, not having the least taint of
syphilis, when a rapid recovery takes place by the use of any simple
cathartic, a reputation is immediately gained for it, as being a certain
cure for the presumed obstinate disease for which it has been taken,
and which it has so readily subdued. Many vegetables in this manner
are considered to be most efficacious in this disease, without the
least claim to it, farther, than being gentle aperients and generally, in
consequence, having a beneficial influence upon the human frame.
On many such mistaken cases, the effect of blue pill was most
wonderful, and it was a general observation with the medical officers
of the Embassy, the remarkable efficiency of this remedy upon the
Abyssinian human system, when, if its cause had been examined
into, it would have been found that its simple alterative effects,
producing a healthy reaction, was all that was required to establish a
healing process very rapidly in the numerous cases of common
ulcers, that were prescribed for under the impression that they
proceeded from one sole cause: that a universal syphilitic taint
characterized the whole population of Shoa.
The Abyssinians, immoral as they appear to be, are much more
simple than depraved. It is the virtuous confidence of people afflicted
with the reputed complaint, conscious of having no improper cause
to attribute it to, and still, in their ignorance, believing it to be syphilis,
which has given support to the general opinion among them of its
extremely contagious character, and which has occasioned that
apparent shamelessness with which this disreputable and
distressing disease is spoken of by all classes and conditions.
The most generally employed remedy, for common purposes, by
the inhabitants of Shoa, is the flowers and unripe seeds of the
Hagenia Abyssinica, called by them “Cosso.” Bruce gives us a good
description, and was the first who directed the attention of
Europeans to this remarkable tree. In Shoa it grows frequently to the
height of fifty feet. About one half of the way up the Tchakkah ascent,
it flourishes remarkably well. It appears to be a short-lived tree. Of its
wood the Negoos has all his gun-stocks manufactured, as it
approaches nearly in colour to that employed for the same purposes
in the European firearms he possesses. The wood, however, is far
from being strong; but whilst the colour satisfies the eye of the
monarch, the workmen he employs find it is well adapted, by its soft
nature, to their tools, and its excellence for the purposes required is
therefore never questioned, except by the unfortunate gunman, who,
when the stock of his piece is fractured by any accident, must submit
to a stoppage in his rations or pay, until its value has been
reimbursed to the monarch, who always takes this method of
ensuring carefulness as regards valuable property.
The cosso tree, as was remarked by Bruce, does not grow below
a certain elevation, which is about eight thousand feet above the
level of the sea, in the 10th degree of latitude north of the equator. It
is a very beautiful tree in appearance, and, I think, would grow very
well in England. Its leaves are largely pennated, and of a lively green
colour; a great deal brighter than the foliage of the chesnut-tree,
which, in figure, the cosso somewhat approaches to, except that it is
not quite so high. The flowers are of a blood red colour, and hang in
large bunches, sometimes a foot or a foot and a half long, consisting
of numerous small flowerets attached to one common footstalk.
Amidst the bright green leaves of the tree, these drooping crimson
masses have a very picturesque appearance. Cosso-trees do not
seem to be so carefully cultivated at the present day in the country to
the west of Tchakkah, as they appear to have been when the Sara
and Durra Galla tribes occupied the country between the Barissa
and Angolahlah. We find them now generally marking the sites of
former Galla villages. On riding off the road on one occasion to
examine a group of these trees, a civil herdsman conducted
Walderheros and myself into a cave of some extent where cattle
used formerly to be kept by the Galla, whom I then learned, in this
situation had their principal town.
 The fruit of the cosso is gathered for medicinal purposes before
the seeds are quite ripe, and whilst still a number of the flowerets
remain unchanged. The bunches are suspended in the sun to dry,
and if not required for immediate use deposited in a jar. Cosso is
taken in considerable quantities to the market, where it is disposed
of in exchange for grain or cotton, a handful of the latter, or a
drinking-hornful of the former, purchasing sufficient for two doses,
two large handsful. When taken, this medicine is reduced upon the
mill to a very fine powder, having previously been well dried in the
sun upon a small straw mat, upon which from some superstitious
reason or other, several bits of charcoal are placed. The largest
drinking-horn being then produced, the powdered cosso is mixed
with nearly a pint of water, and, if it can be obtained, a large spoonful
of honey is also added. When everything is quite ready, a naked
sword is placed flat upon the ground, upon which the patient stands.
The nurse then takes between two bits of sticks, as a substitute for
tongs, a small bit of lighted charcoal, and carries it around the edge
of the vessel three times, mumbling a prayer, at the end of which the
charcoal is extinguished in the medicine, which is immediately drank
off by the patient, who all this time has been pulling most
extraordinary faces, expressive of his disgust for the draught. The
operation is speedy and effectual, and to judge by the prostration of
strength it occasioned in my servants, when they employed this
medicine, it must be dreadfully severe. I can answer for this, that it
occasions frequent miscarriages, often fatal to the mother, and even
men have been known, after a large dose, to have died the same
day from its consequences. I am, therefore, surprised at the noise
this remedy has occasioned the last few years in Europe, as if it
promised to be a valuable addition to our Materia Medica. This, I
conceive, can never be, for no civilized stomach could bear the bulk
of the drug necessary to produce its effects. Even in Abyssinia it is
but barely tolerated, and let another remedy, equally efficacious for
dislodging tape-worm be introduced into that country, and the use of
cosso will be soon abandoned. In fact, several other vegetable
productions are now employed to escape the punishment of a dose
of this violent cathartic. Among many I could enumerate, but without
any benefit arising from the list, is the “kolah,” the same berry which
is used in making the “barilla” tedge, also the red berries of a
climbing plant called “inkoko,” growing in the forest at the foot of the
hill of Kundi, near Michael wans. These are swallowed whole, like
pills, but a very great number are required to produce the desired
results.
Besides the use of the cold bath, employed in the manner I have
before related, and which may be of considerable benefit in some
diseases, I have no notes upon any other medical treatment
employed by the Shoans, excepting that from which I derived
considerable benefit in my intermittent; the vapour bath, prepared by
putting several species of odoriferous herbs, such as wormwood,
rue, bergamot, and some others in boiling water, and then placing
the vessel beneath a large tobe, I was wrapt up in, and which was
securely fastened around my neck and in front, to prevent the
escape of the vapour of the medicated decoction. This kind of bath
was always followed by profuse perspiration, and assisted materially
to relieve the violence of reaction in the hot stage, by accelerating
that relaxation of the pores of skins which marks the return of
something like comfort to the suffering patient.
August 8th.—Felt a great deal better after the cupping, and even
proposed, as the Negoos was now at his palace at Michael wans,
about six miles distant from Aliu Amba, that either on the morrow or
the next day after, I should take the gunpowder which we had begun
very early this morning to manufacture. Tinta sent me a good pair of
English scales, several wooden mortars, and two handmills, with a
party of labourers, consisting of eighteen or twenty men and boys.
One request he made was, that as he desired to learn how to make
gunpowder, I would not, therefore, commence weighing and mixing
the ingredients till he could come to me.
My garden now exhibited a lively scene, several men standing
around huge mortars two feet and a half high, made out of the round
trunks of trees, and pounding the charcoal, or else the saltpetre into
fine powder. The pestles consisted of heavy pieces of wood three
feet long, which were generally kept going up and down by two men
standing opposite each other, and who were relieved three or four
times in the course of an hour. Several others were on their knees
upon the ground, leaning over coarse flat stones, grinding the
sulphur beneath another heavy one they moved about with the
hands. Some hours were employed in this occupation, for it was long
before the several materials were reduced to a sufficiently fine
powder to commence mixing them together. It was too much to
expect such another fortunate accident, by which the supply of
charcoal had been obtained, and as I knew quite as little of the
manufacture of gunpowder, I was very much afraid I should fail in
this attempt also; I determined, however, it should not be for want of
pounding, and to encourage the men, sent Wallata Gabriel with an
ahmulah to purchase some ale.
Tinta came very soon after, and with him, a learned scribe, who
had been desired by the Negoos to watch the proceedings, and
mark the proportionate amounts of saltpetre, charcoal, and sulphur, I
used. The scales were produced, and then it was discovered there
were no weights, but this difficulty I soon got over by employing
bullets, and having duly apportioned the necessary amount of each
ingredient, they were thrown together into the largest mortar, with
water sufficient to make a stiff paste. A second pounding match now
commenced, for to do the business effectually, I divided the mass
into three portions, which I placed in separate mortars, and set as
many couples at work again. The constant fear, that the whole party
was now in, was most ludicrous. I was scarcely permitted to sit a
moment—here, I was wanted—there, I must go and look, and the
other mortar would, perhaps, be actually deserted; and all arose
from a suspicion that an explosion would take place; water was
continually being added, and the least approach to friableness
frightened the workmen, as if a hot cinder was about to be thrown
into a barrel of dry gunpowder. However, I managed to keep them to
their guns until sunset, when they were discharged, without any
casualty, from the dangerous duty; for which, I don’t know, if the
Negoos has not rewarded some of them for military service.
After Tinta, scribe, and all were gone, then my anxious moments
came as to my success. A small quantity being taken out of the
mortar, was placed upon paper near the fire, and soon drying,
Walderheros had the immortal honour of firing the first sample, which
flashed off in the most approved manner, much to the delight of
Wallata Gabriel, and Goodaloo, and in fact, of us all, and more
especially of myself, as I least expected it.
August 9.—Tinta was at my house, as soon as it was light, and as
I had put the evening before a small portion of the damp powder in
the fragment of a jar, and placed it among the warm ashes of the
hearth, sufficient for two charges, was quite dry and ready for
proofing when he came. I soon loaded my double-barrelled carabine,
and having examined the nipples of the locks, covered them with
caps. The shoulder-bone of an ox was our make-shift target, and
each taking a shot at the distance of about forty yards, both of us
were successful in perforating it with the balls.
It was now determined, that Tinta should provide me with a mule,
and that next day I should follow him to Michael wans, usually
pronounced Myolones, to bring the gunpowder and present it to the
Negoos. Accordingly, Walderheros returned with Tinta to his house,
and after some hours brought me back a mule; during which time, I
and Goodaloo, dividing the powder into small portions, dried them
well before a low red fire of the spare charcoal. The temerity of the
latter was extraordinary, but it was quite in keeping with the silent
steady manner he always performed any service I required. The
large grains of the powder being afterwards forced through a sifting
basket of grass, used in fining flour, I then secured it in a quart bottle
I happened to possess; and which it about two-thirds filled.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
Start for Myolones.—​Account of the road.—​Effect of the Earthquake.
—​Dangerous passage.—​Ford the Gindebal wans.—​Dubdubhee.
—​Reach Myolones.—​Remarks upon taking possession of the
land.
August 10th.—It had rained very heavily all night, and as the sky was
covered with clouds, I did not feel inclined to go to Myolones.
Walderheros, however, had set his mind upon it, and as the ride was
a very short one, and might, perhaps, be of service in many
respects, I at last consented. Walderheros had the mule ready
before I could change my mind, and giving some precautions to
Wallata Gabriel to look after everything well whilst we were away,
and to let no one enter the house upon any pretence, off we started,
Goodaloo running before, with the skin containing my bed-clothes
upon his head, and Walderheros following slowly after me, having in
special charge the very precious bottle of gunpowder.
We proceeded along the narrow arid winding path, that leads
down the steep western slope of the rock of Aliu Amba. Here the
road is deeply worn in the hard stone, so as to form a kind of hollow
way, upon each bank of which thick bushes of a large strong-leaved
plant, meeting above the head of the traveller, forms an umbrageous
tunnel, nearly impervious to the sun’s rays. At the bottom of the
descent we crossed a stream, yellow with suspended earth, for, like
most other rivers of Shoa, during the wet season, its running water is
an active agent of denudation. We now slowly ascended the
opposite bank of the valley, and passing through the little Christian
village upon its summit, called Aitess, we then again descended to
the level of another stream, along whose miry banks, crossing and
re-crossing it several times in its tortuous course, we at length
reached, where, in a narrow cascade, the water falls suddenly the
distance of two hundred feet, with the usual rushing din of an
impetuous torrent. Here the bald face of a rock, across which not the
trace of a road could be perceived, projected a smooth surface of
compact stone, from beneath a super stratum of a loose schistose
formation of several hundred feet high, whilst below us appeared an
almost perpendicular wall, with just such a sliding inclination as
suggested an idea of the bridge said to be situated by some
Orientalists between heaven and earth, for there required scarcely
the impetus of a wish, to have slipped from life to death during the
walk across. The earthquake that ushered in the rains had
occasioned this obliteration of the road, for the effects of some
thousands of tons of the overlying detritus which had been detached,
with bare skeleton branches of overturned trees protruding amongst
the ruins, were visible over the devastated fields of vetches and
horse-beans that occupied the bottom of the large valley into which
we had opened, where the stream we had previously kept along, fell
over the waterfall into this the bed of the principal tributary of the
Dinkee river. This fallen earth, scattered far and wide, had converted
the green appearance of large tracts of cultivated lands, with the
crops far advanced, to the condition and character of a freshly
ploughed fallow.
I halted when I arrived at the dangerous pass, to see if there were
not another passage somewhere else, and looked up and down, but
saw no way available but the one back again, which, as I had come
so far, I did not choose to take, so at once put the question of its
practicability to my mule by urging her forward, willing to depend
upon instinct not leading the animal into a position, where she was
not perfectly satisfied that her preservation was well assured. The
termination of the road, where its continuity had been swept away by
the land-slip, was opposite and in sight; and with this
encouragement, and perhaps satisfied, that her rider was a
reasonable creature, and would not attempt anything impracticable,
the mule did not hesitate the least, and on my intimation to proceed,
began carefully to place her feet, one after the other, on the sloping
rock, and slowly entered upon the death-inviting scene. After we had
started, and it was impossible to come back, as usual I began to
think of the value of life, and the little courage that man really has,
just sufficient to make him take the first step into peril, and then, from
despair, or the recklessness of a suicide, bear himself up against all
contingencies, and comes out a brave man if he lives, with the
certainty of being thought a wretched fool if he is killed. With teeth
set, and eyes fixed upon the yawning gulph on one side, I muttered
to my mule, as if she had been my murderess, “my blood be upon
your head,” and to her folly, not my own, attributed my present
perilous position. Once I looked upon the other side, but there,
overhanging, as if suspended by the air which it projected into, was
the high black wall of the loose angular fragments of an easily
fractured schistose rock, which seemed as if a thousand ton torrent
of stones was suspended only whilst I passed, to follow in one rush
of ruin the land-slip which, but a few mornings before, had been
detached and, precipitated into the foaming river below, carrying
along with it many acres of jowarhee and cotton plantations. My
carefully slow mule seemed to invite the catastrophe, and it was long
after I had really passed the horrible ordeal, before the conscience-
stirring scene lost its repentant effect upon my mind.
Having got safely over this delicate pass of about one hundred
yards long, I turned round to look after Walderheros. I found he had
not dared to attempt it until he saw that I had reached the end of the
road, when he came cautiously along, making no reply to my loud
shout of caution that he should take care of the bottle. He looked
perfectly satisfied, however, when he saw himself landed upon
sound ground again, after a little spring over the two or three last feet
of the distance, impatient even then of peril impending. Away we
went, talking over the rash feat, and determined not to come back
that way again if we could help it. A little reaction, too, consequent
upon the excitement had taken place, and I no longer felt fatigued as
I had done before, but proceeded in much better spirits. The hill, or a
prolonged height of Lomee, was now crossed, covered almost
entirely with fields of the common horse-bean, whose grey blossoms
perfumed the whole neighbourhood. Generally, the fields were quite
green with young grain but a few inches high, and through these our
road lay for nearly an hour, when, by a gradual descent, we found
ourselves upon the edge of a coarse gravel bank, that in this
situation had been cut into a perpendicular cliff, about thirty feet high,
by the action of the confined, impetuous river that rushed around its
base. The river is here called “Gindebal wans,” the tree-eating
stream, and is singularly characteristic, like most other Abyssinian
names of localities. Here, in the little reaches that alternated with
rough stone waterfalls, were numerous trunks of the sigbar, ted, and
“waira,” or wild olive tree, which had been brought down from the
forests that surround its remotest sources. Through the dark green
mass of foliage could be observed, in several places, broadly cut
channels, produced by the crashing boulders from the edge of the
table land behind, detached by the late earthquake, and it is such an
agent, rather than the denuding effect of the stream itself, that
occasions such vast numbers of these trees that are annually floated
down the “Gindebal wans.”
I considered that it would be hopeless to attempt fording this
stream, for although above it widened considerably, and was spread
over a rocky cascade, still between the huge stones that there
appeared above its surface, wide channels existed, and however
shallow the water might be, the swiftness of the current would have
turned a man over like a leaf. At all events the mule would not take
me over, and so I sat down whilst Walderheros was looking out for
the ford, leaping from stone to stone, and instructed by Goodaloo,
who, on the other side, was shouting out directions, which were very
indistinctly heard amidst the noise of the torrent. His appearance
alone demonstrated the possibility of the passage, but seeing him in
a very short time joined by Walderheros, who, for a few moments
had disappeared, I got up to see what success I might have.
Walderheros having given the bottle containing the gunpowder to
Goodaloo, returned to assist me, and I soon found that by a very
indirect mode of progress, successively leaping in different
directions, the opposite bank was being gained. The mule came
clattering after me, jumping like a cat, her four feet occupying
sometimes the summit of a stone not the size of a dinner-plate, and
sometimes scratching up on to a high rock, as if she had strong
claws rather than smooth horny hoofs. I kept a sharp look out
behind, for though she was making use of me as a guide, she came
so fast that, occasionally, a very summary kind of ejectment
precipitated me forward, to make room for her upon the stone.
 After reaching the opposite bank we all sat down to rest
ourselves, previous to commencing an ascent before us, that if not
so steep, seemed to promise to be as long as that of Tchakkah. As I
looked up I could not help expostulating with Walderheros for having
persuaded me, ill as I was, to undertake a journey which I had
calculated would only occupy me an hour, and here we had now
been that time, and by his own confession we were not half way yet.
Some consolation was afforded by the sun breaking out, and
enlivening me by its warmth and brightness. I mounted my mule
again, and with a desperate resignation faced the rugged steep. Half
an hour we were climbing this stone ladder before we reached the
little town upon its summit, called Dubdubhee. In one of the best
houses the mother of Walderheros lived, so here it was resolved to
stay and breakfast, having, after the usual Abyssinian custom,
brought the meal with us. Of course, I alone partook, as the
observance of the fast required my servants to abstain from food
until evening.
The mother of Walderheros lived with a second husband, by
whom she had had several children. Her first husband, the father of
Walderheros, occupied a farm a short distance from Myolones, and
he also had married again, and had another numerous family by his
second wife; so what between both parents, my servant was very
well off for parental and fraternal relations, a thing, too, which he
considered to be a great advantage; especially as all parties were
still on the very best of terms.
From Dubdubhee, the road to Myolones was along a narrow
ridge, similar, in many respects, to that in front of Ankobar, and it was
not until the shallow circular valley of Myolones spread below us in
full sight, that we commenced a short descent into it; having first
passed close to the side of the grove of the new church of St.
Michael, the cone-like thatched roof of which was terminated by a
wooden cross, on the top, and on the two arms of which were fixed
ostrich eggs; these eggs, by-the-by, are favourite ornaments of
Abyssinian churches; one that I had brought up to Shoa with me
from the Adal country had been begged from me by Tinta, who
presented it as a desirable offering, to the priests of the church of St.
George, on the road from Aliu Amba to Ankobar.
The palace, a number of long thatched residences, enclosed by a
strong stockade, and surrounded with ted and wild olive trees,
occupied the left side of the valley, as we approached from the east.
A little spur, projecting into the valley, affords a convenient perch,
and the side opposite to us was dotted with white tobed courtiers,
and numerous individuals passing and repassing, formed a lively
scene. The heights of Kundi and Mamrat behind, enveloped in fogs,
and the sun struggling through a thick bank of clouds, made
everything seem uncomfortable, which impression was aided
considerably when I dismounted, and found I had to walk some
distance up the palace hill on a moist, soddy turf, that seemed to
hold water like bog-moss.
My arrival was soon notified to the Negoos whilst I was invited
into a large new building of the usual character, constructed outside
of the palace enclosures, and which was intended for the
accommodation of the numerous train of attendants, guards, and
guests that now followed his Majesty; and which, having greatly
increased by the successes of his arms and his reputation for
wisdom, had rendered it necessary to enlarge considerably all the
royal residences since he had come to the throne. The palace of
Myolones, however, had been erected for his own use, numbers of
individuals having been dispossessed of their holdings to make room
for this favourite retirement of Sahale Selassee; for once or twice
during the year the ordinary public business is suspended, and here
the monarch indulges in a short relaxation for fourteen or fifteen
days.
As I was told two or three times of the manner in which the people
who previously held the land had been driven from Myolones, I made
particular inquiries to learn if any injustice had marked this course,
for I felt naturally so inclined to respect the character of Sahale
Selassee, that I was jealous of allowing myself to be deceived by
false appearances, into the belief that he was the admirable
character I could not help taking him to be.
 Walderheros’ own father was one of those who were thus ejected,
but when I asked him what return he had received, said promptly
that his present farm had been given to him in exchange, and
seemed perfectly satisfied with the conduct of the Negoos. Goodaloo
also represented that every one so removed was more than
compensated for their loss. I had, therefore, no reason to suppose
that the fair fame of Sahale Selassee had been tarnished at all by
this transaction, for although any opposition to the wishes of the
Negoos would, I have no doubt, have been severely punished, and
summary ejectment have been enforced, yet I do not see how any
frail human being, educated a despotic monarch, could help feeling
angry should his presumed rights be questioned in such a manner
by a subject. I contend, therefore, that no injustice was committed in
the apparently arbitrary taking possession of the valley of the
Michael wans, when the previous possessors of the land were
remunerated, as that is all our own Parliament demands on the
occasion of carrying out any public works.
When William Rufus formed the New Forest in Hampshire, his
situation and circumstances were as nearly parallel as possible with
those of the present King of Shoa, yet we are told that he did not
observe towards the ejected inhabitants, that justice which
characterized the proceedings of the Abyssinian monarch.
 CHAPTER XIX.
Examination of the gunpowder.—​Tinta in disgrace.—​The remedy.—​
The scribes, or dupteraoitsh.—​Their mode of writing.—​Audience
with the Negoos.—​Memolagee.—​College of priests.—​My new
residence.—​Night of storm.—​Uncomfortable situation.—​Weather
clears up.
I declined taking a seat in the waiting-room outside the palace-
courts, as I thought that by being reported waiting at the gate, I might
be called sooner to an audience with the Negoos. It was not long
before Tinta, who had already arrived at the palace, came to inform
me that after some little business was concluded with the superior of
the Church in Shoa, the Negoos would see me. A crowd of idle
courtiers had now surrounded me, amusing themselves with the
gunpowder, tasting it, smelling it, and giving their opinion, and
questioning Walderheros how it was made. A judicious silence,
however, obtained for my servant the credit of knowing fully how it
was prepared; he was wise enough to keep his ignorance to himself,
and then, as he remarked afterwards, nobody knew anything about
it. Tinta had also got something to ask me, but as it was very private,
and there was no other place to retreat to, he spoke to the outer
gatekeeper, who admitted us both into the intervening space
between the only two stockades which surround the palace of
Myolones. Walderheros and the King’s scribe, who had been sent to
take notes of the process and relative weights of the different articles
used in manufacturing gunpowder, also accompanied us, and I then
found that my system of weights and measures, by leaden bullets
and table-spoonsful had quite bothered them; and a most
extraordinary report of the business had been drawn up, which the
Negoos soon detected to be erroneous, and had expressed himself
very dissatisfied with them. They therefore now applied to me to
assist them in their dilemma, and we accordingly sat down upon
some large stones, and occupied ourselves for some time in getting