Mystery of the empty tomb

John Henry Newman was an electrifying personality who has attracted numerous biographers and commentators. John Cornwell, in his excellent guided tour around this well-ploughed field, recalls the young woman in Oxford in the 1830s who ‘wept with emotion’ at Newman’s very appearance. W. G. Ward recalls the awe which fell upon him and his undergraduate friends if Newman so much as passed them in the street. And figures such as Mark Pattison, James Anthony Froude and Matthew Arnold, none of them followers of the Newman cult in grown-up life, recollected similar feelings in their youth. When the mature George Eliot read Newman’s spiritual autobiography, she said it ‘breathed much life into me’.

What qualities does John Cornwell, himself a Roman Catholic, an excellent writer and former candidate for the priesthood, bring to the task of recreating Newman’s life? There are three qualities which mark this book out for special commendation. First, Cornwell sees that Newman was first and foremost a writer. One of Newman’s fellow priests, after he had become RC, noted that he even prayed with a pen in his hand. Those who did not like Newman — and they included a high proportion of his new co-religionists after he left the C of E — never really came to grips with the fact that he was a writer with a writer’s temperament. His spiritual development, and the crisis of the 19th century, its loss of faith, were matters which Newman addressed through the medium of the written and printed word. His autobiography was sparked by a controversy in a magazine with another author — Charles Kingsley.

Cornwell has a natural feel for all this, and his exposition of the Newman masterpieces is flawless. These books are the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, one of the most original works of theology ever written, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and the book he published in old age, An Essay in Aid of the Grammar of Assent, a defence of theism which I, for one, find persuasive.