Lingard on Newman, Part Two

I've been waiting for this article since January of this year, when I wrote:

I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. . . .

I also commented that John Lingard's desire for conversions to the Catholic Church was not completely satisfied by those who converted: he mistrusted Newman and Faber, etc.

Shaun Blanchard's concluding article about Lingard's mistrust and dislike of Newman continues the same theme: rather contradictory but also rather ignorant. For example Blanchard notes that Lingard associated Newman with Faber too closely--he lumped the Oxford converts together without distinction or discrimination:

Lingard followed news of Newman and his conversion closely.[12] However, in addition to never really permitting Newman to shake his association with the Oxford Movement (a strike against him in Lingard’s eyes), the old Cisalpine also seems to have negatively associated Newman with Faber (whom he called “credulous”)[13] and with the burgeoning ultramontanism and Romanticism sweeping English Catholicism. Unfortunately, Lingard never recognized Newman as the profoundly unique thinker he was, nor as one who deftly eschewed the standard binaries and party lines of the age and of the church. Lingard even admitted, in 1845, to not having yet read Newman![14] . . .

The second reason for Lingard’s sense of alienation from those he called the “Newmanites” was more principled. When he bluntly admitted to John Walker in January of 1850 that he “didn’t like Newman” that reasons he cited are telling: “too much fancy or enthusiasm.”[20] While there is an element of taste here—Lingard was a man of the Catholic Enlightenment who naturally recoiled from Romanticism and Pugin’s neo-Gothic revival—there was also an important principle at stake.[21] For Lingard, and many of his generation, the theologically correct and pragmatically most effective way to engage Protestants was through stripping away superstitions, triumphalism, and any unnecessary accretions to the Old Faith. Protestants rightly resented all of these things. What remained could be grasped by Protestants of good will as the pure faith of their English ancestors and, indeed, of the early church.

We have to remember that Lingard died in 1851, just after the Restoration of the Hierarchy and just six (6) years after Newman's conversion--but for one who knows a little about Newman's devotional and even architectural proclivities, these comments are strange and seem unfair. If Lingard hadn't read of any Newman's writings in 1845, would he have read Loss and Gain, the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, or Anglican Difficulties (or followed the reports of the lectures) by 1850? 

He seems to have relied merely upon his impressions and prejudices, not upon any real research or sources.

Lingard had very particular goals in mind for any converts, and Blanchard again highlights Lingard's rather contradictory views of the converts coming out of the Oxford Movement:

There is a kind of paradox here, or at least a tension, because on one hand Lingard intimated that the new converts were not Catholic enough—or at least suspiciously attached to “false ideas they imbibed at Oxford”—but on the other hand they were resented for being too Catholic, in the sense of trying to assimilate their Catholicism too much to a foreign standard that was Roman, “Jesuitical,” or Italian.

In an odd way, Newman appears to great advantage in this article, because not knowing what Lingard had written about him, he expressed admiration of Lingard's methods and "comportment":

Newman, thankfully, seems to have been totally unaware that Lingard disliked him. At the death of Lingard’s close friend John Walker in 1873 (to whom Lingard confided so much of his disdain for “Newmanites”!). Newman wrote of his “greatest esteem” for Walker. Newman “looked at [Walker] with veneration as one of the few remaining priests who kept up the tradition of Dr. Lingard’s generation of Catholics.”[24] Seven years earlier, Newman had written to John Walker, thanking him for sending information on Lingard’s intra-Catholic controversies in the early 1830’s. In light of his later praise of Lingard, Newman presumably approved of his comportment. In Lingardian fashion, Newman went on in the same letter to caution against the merits of seeking out confrontation with Anglicans.[25] . . .

Blanchard hopes that Lingard might have learned to like Newman if he had lived longer:

Had he lived longer, or had he been fairer to Newman and actually engaged with his thought as an individual rather than a symbol, Lingard would have seen that the sensitive and brilliant Oxford convert was in fact preserving many of the concerns that Lingard himself held dear. We should keep in mind that in the years around Newman’s conversion, Lingard was an old man, suffering on and off from ill health. It is nevertheless unfortunate that Lingard did not engage with Newman’s ecclesiology in particular. He would have discovered a kindred spirit with nuanced and sophisticated views of the structures and offices of the church. Lingard would have also seen how much more he had in common with Newman than with the Mannings, Fabers, and Wards with which he lumped him together. . . .

In his first footnote to the article, Blanchard highlights an excellent source for a review of Father John Lingard's historical career and outlook for his future investigation, which I reviewed in 2010:

An informative chapter on Lingard from John Vidmar should be included in my review of the secondary literature on Lingard: Vidmar, English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585–1954 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 52–74.

By the way, it's available in paperback now!

Lingard on Newman in "The Newman Review"

Shaun Blanchard, Assistant Professor of Theology at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tantalizes us in the opening paragraphs of an article in The Newman Review--and then promises more in a subsequent article--by quoting the Catholic historian Father John Lingard's opinion of the recent convert and Oratorian, Father John Henry Newman:

“I don’t like Newman,” wrote the famous English historian Fr. John Lingard in January 1850. The reasons the aged and ailing Catholic historian gave for his antipathy towards perhaps the most celebrated English convert of all time encapsulated the collision of old and new: “too much fancy or enthusiasm”[1] was Lingard’s gripe in a letter to his friend John Walker. The relative obscurity of Lingard today is surprising, since in his day (he died in 1851) he was “the best-known and most widely read English Catholic writer.”[2] Lingard’s “Victorian celebrity” was due primarily to ground-breaking historical works, but also significantly buttressed by his reputation as a formidable theo-political controversialist: both in intra-Catholic squabbles and in defense of his community against Protestant detractors.[3] The crowning achievement of a life of research, his eight-volume History of England (1819–1830) featured pioneering work with primary source material.[4] Lingard’s History was widely reviewed and debated. It was translated into many languages, went through multiple editions, and was even abridged for use as a school textbook in France. In the twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc added a final volume to bring the narrative from 1688 to the present; this version of Lingard’s History of England can still be found in old family libraries around the UK. Lingard can be counted as a kind of founding father of certain “revisionist” historical positions on English history advanced by scholars like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh. Long before Duffy’s classic The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Lingard’s work suggested a re-narration of the Whiggish and triumphalist national story vis-à-vis Catholicism.[5]

Lingard in fact had quite a lot of interesting things to say about Newman, dating from his growing awareness of the importance of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s until Newman’s conversion in 1845, when Lingard was in his mid-seventies. In a subsequent essay, I’ll explore Lingard’s take on Newman and on the great changes sweeping the English Catholic community at the end of his life (Lingard strongly associated Newman with many of these changes, and mostly bemoaned them). This essay, however, will introduce readers to Lingard, one of the major intellectual lights of the English Catholic community when Newman joined it in 1845 at Littlemore. . . .

Please read the rest there. I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. Lingard seems to have been most particular about how Catholics practiced their faith, and the last sentence in this quotation seems most contradictory:

While his willingness to defend the Catholic community from outside critics had won him renown, he grew extremely critical of elements within English Catholicism that he found embarrassing, theologically suspect, or intellectually wanting. He dismissively mocked Italian priests who came to England to run retreats fueled by “enthusiasm,” and criticized the women who attended them (sometimes directly, by letter, as attendees included close friends). Lingard’s correspondence also reflects a stereotypical English mistrust of the French and the Irish. A man of the eighteenth century and the Catholic Enlightenment, he could barely contain his dislike of Gothic revival, Pugin’s work, and the Anglo-Catholic Tractarians. While ardently desiring the conversion of non-Catholics, especially socially prominent Anglicans, he distrusted the leading converts of the Oxford Movement like Frederick Faber and Newman. . . .

Thomas Babington Macaulay the Whig

I found this resource from the University of Cambridge for prospective undergraduate history majors. One of their topics is "The Whig Tradition" of English history, focused on Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England:

This important strand in British historiography derives its name from one of the two main political parties in parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the other party were known as Tories. Whigs tended to stress the importance of parliament, as a counterbalance to the Crown and of the Church of England; Tories were much more deeply attached to the power and authority of Crown and Church.

The Whig view of history grew out of the unprecedented strength and prosperity of mid-nineteenth century Britain, which led the world in scientific and technological development and ruled an empire which stretched from Canada to South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean. It is little wonder that the Victorians saw themselves as the heirs to the Romans, but with one important difference: instead of an autocratic emperor, the British had a limited, parliamentary monarchy which, they believed, placed Britain on a higher moral plane; as a result the Victorians tended to revere institutions such as parliament, the Church of England, the legal system, the universities and the monarchy, as components of a perfectly balanced constitution, a model for other countries to follow. When the Victorians asked themselves how they had come to live in such an apparently perfect society, they looked for an explanation to the history of England. . . .

Central to the Whig interpretation of history was the long conflict between Crown and Parliament that dominated the seventeenth century. While they regretted the bloodshed of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I, the Whigs saw the defeat of the Crown and its subjugation to Parliament as essential to the establishment of a free society. However, in 1660 the Stuart monarchy returned. King Charles II, and especially his Catholic brother, James II, seemed to pose a formidable threat to the supremacy of parliament and appeared to be trying to establish Catholic autocratic rule in England. How, in the crucial year 1688, parliament was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and lay the foundations for the prosperity of Victorian Britain was the story that the Whig writer and administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay set out to tell in his History of England.

Macaulay was a firm believer in the superiority and moral integrity of Britain's institutions. As a member of the government of British India he had dismantled the previous education system by which British administrators learned about the history, languages and culture of India, in favour of an entirely western curriculum, declaring scornfully that there was more value in a shelf of western authors than in the whole literary culture of the east. He applied much the same bumptious self-confidence to his reading of English history, which he sought to relate in an engaging style that, he hoped, would make his book as popular a read as the latest novel. In that aim he certainly succeeded.

The site then offers an excerpt from Macaulay and analyses his method, language, and use of sources. Other topics are addressed on this site, including the discipline of social history, different views the Crusades, etc.