Ker Ian - Apologia Pro Vita Sua

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN was born in 1801 and educated privately at Ealing School and Trinity College, Oxford. Elected a Fellow of Oriel in 1822, he became vicar of the university church of St Marys in 1828. In 1833 he began the Tracts for the Times, but after his controversial Tract 90, which attempted to interpret the 39 Articles of the Church of England in a Catholic sense, he retired in 1842 to monastic seclusion at Littlemore. Without completing his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, he was received in 1845 into the Roman Catholic Church. Ordained a priest in 1847, he founded the Birmingham Oratory in 1848. In 1851 he was appointed first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland (resigning in 1858), and his Dublin lectures and articles were eventually published as The Idea of a University. His theological autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, appeared in 1864 in response to a public attack by Charles Kingsley. His poem on the afterlife, The Dream of Gerontius, was published in 1865 and later inspired Elgars musical masterpiece. In 1870 he finally completed his philosophical justification of religious faith in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Created a cardinal in 1879, he died in 1890. He was declared Venerable in 1991.

IAN KER teaches theology at Oxford, having previously taught both theology and English at universities in Britain and the United States. He is the author and editor of twenty books, mostly on Newman, including John Henry Newman: A Biography (1988) and The Catholic Revival in English Literature 18451961 (2003).

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Edited by IAN KER

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 1994
Reprinted 2004
13

Introduction and Notes copyright Ian Ker, 1994
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192207-2

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Edited by IAN KER

CHAPTER I
History of my Religious Opinions up to 1833

CHAPTER II
History of my Religious Opinions from 1833 to 1839

CHAPTER III
History of my Religious Opinions from 1839 to 1841

CHAPTER IV
History of my Religious Opinions from 1841 to 1845

CHAPTER V
Position of my Mind since 1845

Newman collected his works in a uniform edition of thirty-six volumes (186881). Until his death in 1890 he continued making minor textual changes in reprints of individual volumes, all of which from 1886 were published by Longmans, Green and Co. of London. Unless otherwise stated, all references are to volumes in the uniform edition published after 1890 by Longmans, except that references to the Apologia are to this Penguin edition.

On 30 December 1863 Newman received in the post a copy of the January number of Macmillans Magazine. It was sent (anonymously) by William Pope, a Catholic priest in Yorkshire and a former Anglican clergyman who had himself been converted by Newmans writings (curiously enough, he was a nephew of Richard Whately, the fellow of Oriel whose formative influence on Newman is generously acknowledged in the Apologia but who was to become an inveterate opponent of all that his former disciple stood for). The issue contained an enthusiastic review by Charles Kingsley of J. A. Froudes anti-Catholic History of England in which various passages had been marked in pencil, including the following words that have become celebrated because of the book they inspired, or rather provoked:

Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage. Whether his notion be doctrinally correct or not, it is at least historically so.