John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility - (T&t Clark Studies in English Theology) by Jacob Phillips (Paperback)

About the Book

"Jacob Phillips employs key coordinates of cultural theory to discern how the notion of English sensibility applies to John Henry Newman, with a detailed study of Newman's lifelong conflict with his own cultural identity. Phillips compares Newman's early Anglican work, featuring integral qualities of 'reserve', 'pragmatism' and 'moderation', and compares them both with Newman's later critiques of his own work, and the ways in which English tendencies resurface in his mature work. This book thus sheds new light on the complexity of Newman's Englishness, as well as the broader lineaments of English theology, by examining the body of scholarship on Newman, English culture and Newton's fluctuating proximity and distance, English sensibility and Newman's distance after his conversion. Phillips also contributes to theological reflection on culture more generally, by discerning how theological subject matter is always determined by cultural expression, and yet expands the reach of that expression to attain a scope more fitting to its proper scope; the ultimate universality of God"--

Book Synopsis

Asides about John Henry Newman being either particularly English or particularly un-English are common. John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility scrutinises Newman's theological writings to establish how his theology can be considered distinctively English or un-English at the different stages of its development.

In his Tractarian period, Newman's theology is shown to be profoundly characterised by common 19th-century tropes of a perceived English sensibility, namely an instinct for compromise, an affection for reserve and a markedly empirical orientation to life. In the period following Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845, however, his theology turns against the Englishness of his earlier years as he critiques of the many theological dangers of a self-confident cultural sensibility. In his mature writings, nonetheless, Newman re-incorporates certain elements of his earlier Englishness with a Catholic grounding, yet also maintains an antipathy to certain targets of his post-conversion polemics.

Phillips finds that the English instinct for compromise is not incorporated into Newman's mature theology, which remains unabashedly one-sided in its understanding of God and the Catholic Church, taking precedence over elements of a cultural sensibility pertaining ultimately to the sphere of the natural. The affection for reserve, however, is shown to be capable of gracious elevation when reconfigured on a Catholic grounding. Most importantly, the profoundly empirical orientation to life which was considered typical of Englishness in Newman's day emerges as something exhibiting what Newman might consider a 'antecedent affinity' to Catholic theology.

This book thus concludes by offering a view of the English Catholic sensibility as characterised by a mindset of careful reserve toward knowledge and words about God, arising from a marked concern for the living, embodied present as the site of God's transformative action in the twists and turns of human life.

Review Quotes

[T]his volume remains a valuable work of scholarship in challenging too easy assumptions that only one interpretation must be right.
The Pastoral Review

Dean Church, Newman's lifelong friend, called attention to the convert's inalienable Englishness, his "chief interests" being "for things English -- English literature, English social life, English politics, English religion." In John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility, Jacob Phillips revisits this characteristic aspect of Newman with fresh, judicious, learned insight.

It is a common observation that John Henry Newman was quintessentially English, however Philips demonstrates that in the encounter between Catholicism and Englishness in Newman's theology, there are both coalescences and corrections to English sensibilities and intellectual fashions. German readers of Newman have long been aware of this. This work by Philips offers a comprehensive treatment of the issue. It is written with a high level of English literary elegance that does justice to the genre of Newman studies. It is likely to become a seminal reference work in the field.

About the Author

Jacob Phillips is Director of the Theology Institute at St Mary's University, UK.