During a Day of Recollection with John Henry Newman, organized by the International Centre of Newman Friends in Rome on 1st March 2020, Prof. Joseph Carola SJ (Pontifical University Gregoriana) gave a reflection on “Newman and Rome”. Here below a summary of his thoughts:
Newman and Rome
Newman had visited Rome once before during his Mediterranean tour with the Froudes in 1833. He spent five memorable weeks in the city.
First impressions
Rome enthralled the young thirty-two-year-old. He found it wonderful, majestic, glorious, vast and overpowering—the first of all cities. All other cities, including Oxford, he insisted, were like dust in comparison.[1] Rome, he concluded after only five days, “is the most wonderful place in the world.”[2]
On his first full day in Rome, Sunday, 3 March 1833, Newman visited Saint Peter’s Basilica, observing how decorously the Romans kept the Lord’s Day—“almost as it is in England.”[3]
Newman loved the great quiet of Rome so conducive to repose and recollection. “Jerusalem alone,” he remarks, “could impart a more exalted comfort and calm than that of being among the tombs and the Churches of the first Christian Saints.”[4] He found the city to be “so intelligent and liberal a place”[5] because, in contrast to Naples, English journals arrived there regularly providing him with news from home only twelve to fourteen days after the events reported. By mid-March Newman wrote that, “Rome is one of the most delightful residences imaginable,” and he was even tempted to think it “a desirable refuge, did evil days drive one from England.”[6]
Reflections upon Rome’s place in history
Newman’s 1833 Roman letters not only recount a tourist’s first impressions, but they also provide us with young Newman’s provocative reflections upon Rome’s place in history both secular and religious. Newman envisioned Rome in a threefold manner: (1) Pagan Rome, (2) Artistic Rome, and (3) Christian Rome.
- Pagan Rome
is “the hateful Roman power, the 4th beast of Daniel’s Vision, and the persecutor of the infant Church.”[7] Hardly a trace of the first three beasts—Babylon, Persia and Macedon—remains. But “the last and most terrible beast lies before us as a subject for our contemplation, in all the visibleness of its plagues.”[8] It is the Great Enemy of God—“an Establishment of impiety.”[9] Among its ruins, the Coliseum stands as a veritable tower of Babel. Newman does not mourn its ruinous state, nor “censure early Christians for destroying the monuments of heathen grandeur.”[10] In fact, he disparages “the moderns who have affected a classical tenderness for what were the high places of impiety and the scenes of primitive martyrdom.”[11] For, after 2,500 years, Pagan Rome’s genius loci is still alive and enslaves the Church residing on its seven hills. It overshadows Christian Rome and mingles with the Church like tares with wheat. The Bishop of Rome’s temporal sovereignty, which joins indiscriminately both Church and State, seems to be the parable’s direct prophetic fulfilment. “That the spirit of old Rome has possessed the Christian Church there,” Newman argues, “is certain as a matter of fact.”[12] Imperial Rome lives on in the Roman Church—in her universal claim to obedience, her Latin language and her political skill. Newman is convinced, moreover, that an apocalyptic judgment still awaits the heathen spirit that inhabits that place. “Rome is a doomed city,” he wrote ominously to his mother.[13] Only its chastisement will free the Church.
- Artistic Rome
In notable contrast to his description of Pagan Rome, Newman favorably assesses Artistic Rome met mainly in the Vatican Museum. It is a world “of taste and imagination.”[14] Its endless collection of statuary enchanted Newman. So taken by the Belvedere Apollo’s incomparable beauty, Newman declared it beyond description. He also praised the transcendent beauty of the faces in Raphael’s paintings. Even though young Newman otherwise vehemently denounces the Pope’s temporal sovereignty, he sympathetically admits that, if he himself were pope, he should suffer were the Vatican Museum, Saint Peter’s Basilica and Rome’s other artistic treasures to be lost.[15] Through his travelling companion Richard Froude’s Roman contacts, Newman also knew of the Nazarene school of art whose leading member, the German Catholic-convert Johann Friedrich Overbeck, had a studio in the city. In 1847, newly converted Catholic Newman would himself pay a visit to Overbeck’s studio open to the public each Sunday from noon until two o’clock in the afternoon. From what he heard in 1833, these artists’ work gave Newman hope for an artistic religious revival in Germany.[16] One and a half decades later, this same school of art would inspire the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England who for the first time since the Reformation revived religious themes in British art.
- Christian Rome
Regarding Christian Rome, Newman had mixed feelings. Christian Rome caused him both pain and pleasure.[17] He gloried greatly in ancient Apostolic Rome, but he suffered immensely on account of the modern Roman system that sanctioned “the wretched perversion of the truth.”[18] In fact, Newman considered the doctrines of the Mass and purgatory to be worse than perversions—they were pure inventions.[19]
Romanism exhibited a “lamentable mixture of truth with error,” Newman observes, “the corruption of the highest and noblest views and principles, far higher than we Protestants have, with malignant poisons.”[20] This lamentable mixture confronted him directly during Pope Gregory XVI’s Mass on the Annunciation celebrated at the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Here was the Pope whose temporal power united him with the Enemy of God. His attendants carried him aloft in procession while others reverenced his foot with a kiss. A young evangelically minded Newman found such homage offered to a minister of Christ to be intolerable. Yet, as Christ’s minister, the Pope performed the Church’s sacred rites. Those liturgical rites did, in fact, move young Newman. Consequently, the whole experience left him quite torn. He knew naught else to do than to repeat to himself the words of his own verse that Rome had previously inspired: “How shall I name thee, Light of the wide west, or heinous error-seat?”[21]
The aversion to Romanism, the Via Media and the fascination of Christian antiquity
Newman’s 1833 visit to Italy only confirmed his loathing for Romanism and caused him to feel it more vividly. Even though Newman did perceive “a deep substratum of true Christianity”[22] among the Italians themselves, he lamented the miserable state of the Church in Italy which had lost its hold on the common people and merely continued from day to day out of force of habit. “If a frost came one morning,” he posits poetically, “it [the Church] would fall off and perish (humanly speaking) as a withered leaf.”[23] Yet Newman remained ever more attached to the Catholic system that Rome had corrupted. Nothing short of “some terrible convulsion,” he wrote to Edward Pusey (1800-1882), could reform the Roman Church, and “nothing short of great suffering, as by fire,” could melt England and her together.[24] Rome’s corruptions made any thought of reunion an impossible dream. The way forward for Anglicanism, under external threat from the Whig government and internal threat from Protestantism, was to be Catholic, but not Roman. The seeds of Newman’s Via Media had clearly begun to take deep root. They would soon sprout. But, in little over a decade, that plant itself would also dramatically wither and die.
From Naples he wrote to his sister Jemima and confided to her that he had left half his heart in Rome—not Rome the city, but rather Rome the scene of sacred history.[25] “As to Rome,” he confesses in another letter,
I cannot help talking of it. You have the tombs of St Paul and St Peter, and St Clement—churches founded by St Peter and Dionysius (AD 260) and others in the catacombs used in the times of persecution—the house and the table of St Gregory—the place of martyrdom of the above Apostles—but the catalogue is endless—O Rome, that thou wert not Rome![26]
Christian antiquity had stolen young Newman’s soon-to-be Tractarian heart.
“… but Rome was a city of faith”
In 1846 Newman, now in full communion with the Roman Church, returned to Rome in order to prepare for the Catholic priesthood. He arrived in the papal capital at 10:00pm on 28 October 1846—a very rainy day, he reports.[27] The environs no longer enchanted him as they had done in 1833. One month after his arrival, he reports quite frankly: “I never saw any city with the tenth part the quantity of dung in the streets as Rome.”[28] It does not seem wrong to suggest that he found the city much as his fictional character Willis, an Oxford University student who converts to Roman Catholicism, experienced it in his 1848 novel Loss and Gain:
[Rome] was so dreary, so melancholy a place; a number of old, crumbling, shapeless brick masses, the ground unlevelled, the straight causeways fenced by high monotonous walls, the points of attractions straggling over broad solitudes, faded palaces, trees universally pollarded, streets ankle deep in filth or eyes-and-mouth deep in a cloud of whirling dust and straws, the climate most capricious, the evening air most perilous. Naples was an earthly paradise; but Rome was a city of faith.[29]In 1833, young Newman had had no patience with those who extolled Naples over Rome.[30] But, in 1848, his earlier disdain for Naples in favor of Rome had clearly given way to a newly acquired appreciation of the former’s expansive bay.
[1] Cf. John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 230.
[2] “To John Frederic Christie, 7 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 240.
[3] “To Henry Wilberforce, 9 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 246.
[4] “To Samuel Rickards, 14 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 287.
[5] “To George Ryder, 14 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 248.
[6] “To R. F. Wilson, 18 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 258.
[7] “To Samuel Francis Wood, 17 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 253.
[8] “To George Ryder, 14 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 248 – 249.
[9] “To John Frederic Christie, 7 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 240.
[10] “To George Ryder, 14 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 249.
[11] “To Samuel Rickards, 14 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 288.
[12] “To Samuel Rickards, 14 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 288.
[13] “To Mrs Newman, 25 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 268.
[14] “To John Frederic Christie, 7 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 240.
[15] Cf. “To Henry Wilberforce, 9 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 246.
[16] Cf. “To Jemima Newman, 20 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 265; also see: Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, M. A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, vol. I (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838), pp. 300 – 301.
[17] Cf. “To George Ryder, 14 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 248.
[18] “To R. F. Wilson, 18 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 258.
[19] Cf. “To Jemima Newman, 20 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 265.
[20] “To Henry Jenkyns, 7 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 280.
[21] “To Mrs Newman, 25 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 268.
[22] “To Mrs Newman, 5 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 274.
[23] “To Henry Wilberforce, 9 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 246.
[24] “To E. B. Pusey, 19 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 259.
[25] Cf. “To Jemima Newman, 11 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 282.
[26] “To Samuel Rickards, 14 April 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 290.
[27] John Henry Newman, LD 11, p. 266.
[28] John Henry Newman, LD 11, p. 285.
[29] John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The story of a counvert, ed. Trevor Lipscombe (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012), p. 253.
[30] Cf. “To Frederic Rogers, 5 March 1833”: John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, vol. III, eds. Ian Ker & Thomas Gornall, SJ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 234.