Newman’s 225th Birthday: in celebration of his parents

“We are to begin with loving our friends about us, and gradually to enlarge the circle of our affections, till it reaches all Christians, and then all men.”

-Newman’s sermon “Love of Relations and Friends“

Today, 225 years ago, St. John Henry Newman was born in London to John and Jemima Newman. His humble Anglican parents would likely be flabbergasted to witness the full range of his eventual distinctions and accomplishments as a scholar, writer, and man of the Church, not least of all his recent status as Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education. Although both his parents died before he became Roman Catholic, it is clear that he looked back to his natural family with deep gratitude, warmth, and honor. It is from John and Jemima that Newman was taught Christian virtue and trust in God, and they set him on a course of deep personal and conscientious pursuit of truth. Inasmuch as Newman would come to change his religious opinions, he would see these changes as growths from the strong foundation of his child-hood faith and conscientious awareness of God’s presence in his life. Just as grace perfects, and does not destroy, nature, Newman experienced a rich Christian formation from his parents that was leavened and brought to perfection across his long life. On this birthday of his, Newman undoubtedly smiles to have us consider with affection his dear parents.

His father, John Newman (1767-1824), was a London banker of gentlemanly disposition and warm affection. He saw and stoked John Henry’s intellectual potential from a young age. He sent John Henry to boarding school at Ealing in 1808, and was personally involved in the decision for Newman to enter Trinity College at Oxford in 1816. John Henry, at the last minute, experienced some doubt about choosing Oxford or Cambridge, but his father patiently saw him through this and traveled personally with him to see him off at Trinity in December 1816. One can imagine the tender conversations between father and son, and the pride with which the father saw in his son the formation of a young Christian of conscience with serious intellectual potential. Although John wished for his son to become a lawyer, Newman’s brief training for this at Lincoln’s Inn gave way to discerning the Anglican priesthood, and his father accepted the decision.

Newman’s regular letters home show deep love and care to honor his duty to his parents and their sacrifices for him by doing well in school. He would keep them informed about minute details related to his friends, moral progress, and studies. The same year of his matriculation, however, would bring familial difficulties. His father’s career suffered during a London banking crisis, and the economic turmoil brought lasting financial uncertainty to his family. (In a Memorandum of 1872, Newman implies, with restraint so as to avoid “slander,” that the failure of his father’s bank was brought on by a bad investment in a brewery at the suggestion of certain colleagues, the failure of which may not really have been within John’s control.) Newman cites this event as one of several difficulties during his years at Oxford, but the true “blow” came in 1824, the year of his father’s death. Newman was only 23, and deeply mourned the loss of what could have been a much longer and fruitful companionship with his father. This and other difficulties during this decade, like the death of his dear sister Mary, weighed heavily on Newman, and brought home to him the reality of death as well as the reality of eternity.

John was a Christian role-model at least in attending Anglican Sunday services. But Jemima, especially, nourished Newman’s spirituality. Jemima Fourdrinier Newman (1772-1836) was of French Huguenot descent. Her religious faith, love of literature, and intellectual interests extended to her children through regular reading of Scripture and a natural atmosphere of domestic learning. Her devotion to reading literature certainly rubbed off on her son; letters from his school days report to her his reading lists, and he evidently loved discussing his reading with his mother as well as his sisters.

Fourdrinier Family; attributed to John Downman
oil on copper, circa 1786

Newman also credits his mother for evoking a deep sense of the reality and priority of the “invisible world” of God. Especially after John’s death, she remained a devoted and caring mother, and John Henry showed special concern for her needs as a widow. Her death in 1836 came in the midst of Newman’s famous “Oxford Movement,” when his convictions were becoming more Catholic. This makes one wonder how she might have taken his eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism, given her French Protestant background. Perhaps the exchange would have been similar to that between Newman and his sister (the mother’s name-sake) Jemima: cordial, warm, and loving, yet honest and expressive about the painful sense of separation their religious differences elicited.

From at least the age of fourteen, his letters to both his father and mother are full of everyday details about his health, school, the weather, his violin, and purchases. Newman’s father would frankly inform him about matters in the banking business. He signed letters, “Your affectionate father,” and John Henry signed his “your dutiful son.” Neither was shy to express love in their signatures, John Henry frequently signing “love to all” via his father. While at Trinity College, he was also honest with them about his dislike of certain immoral habits in fellow students, and about his poor performance on examinations in 1820, which he felt “obliged” to inform them about. Newman wished to please his parents, but their high expectations for faith and education were not cold or austere. The affectionate Christian ethos of the Newman household expanded into a mature love for God, life, truth, and honest self-reflection, steeped in loving affection and warm regard while pursuing excellence.

While abroad on his Mediterranean journey at thirty-three years old, Newman wrote to his mother about how much he missed home, and how nowhere in the world was quite like it. These letters home convey fascinating details, including the state of his inner life leading up to a serious illness and religious experience of deeper conversion. For example, he shared with her about a haunting dream he had had, representing anxieties and uncertainties about his work at Oriel College. His mother was privy to some of his most private thoughts and feelings, and he respected her input. After Newman moved to Littlemore, it was her encouragement that moved him to be more involved in the lives of his parishioners. He accepted and honored her advice well into adulthood. He gave her the honor of laying the first cornerstone of the foundation of the new chapel at Littlemore on July 21st, 1835, but she died before it was finished (May 17th, 1836–see image below). It is truly marvelous to wonder what depths of his soul might have been conveyed to his dear mother in later years if she had lived longer than 1836.

St. John Henry Newman is celebrated today for his witness and contributions in at least three key areas: education, development of doctrine, and conscience. These three domains deserve more attention as originating from the tender and strong formation he received from his Christian parents. John, the father, was a role model of human virtues, and Jemima was particularly committed to his on-going development as a human, an intellectual, and a Christian, even after he left home. It does not seem an exaggeration to say that Newman’s lifelong interest and accomplishments in wedding faith with reason, religion with intellect, had its substantial seed in the formation he received from his parents, who showed equal concern for his studies as for his soul.

Newman would credit his mother, especially, for imparting a seriousness about religion. At 14, after dabbling in skeptical atheism via David Hume, Newman famously said that he experienced a deep sense of having betrayed his Maker, and came to “rest in the thought of two and two only luminously self-evident beings, Myself and my Creator.” We need look no further than to John and Jemima Newman for having formed in him a foundation for returning to this rich sense of God’s active presence in his life. The priority of the soul, intellectual humility toward the things of God, and the duty to truth above all, were imparted directly by his parents. For this he was ever thankful, and the great St. John Henry would surely ask us to share in gratitude for his parents, as well as for our own.