Elite and Popular Religion: The Case of Newman*

¹ Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1953).

² MacMullen, Ramsey, ‘A Note on Sermo humilis’, JTS n.s. 17 (1966), 108–12.

³ Momigliano, Arnaldo, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Roman Historians’, in Cuming, G. J. and Baker, Derek, eds, Popular Belief and Practice, SCH 8 (Cambridge, 1972), 1–29 , 8, quotation at 17.

⁴ Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo (2nd edn, London, 2000).

⁵ Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews was published in 1829; in 1840 his History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire appeared; in 1849 he was made Dean of St Paul’s; in 1855 he published his History of Latin Christianity.

⁶ Brown, Peter, ‘Religion and Imagination’, in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1982), 10–13 , and idem, , The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, IL, and London, 1981), 16.

⁷ Two Essays on Biblical and Christian Miracles (Westminster, MD, 1969), 1–94.

⁸ Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al., 28 vols (Oxford and London, 1961-) [hereafter: LD], 6: ed. Gerard Tracey, 47.

⁹ LD 7: 283, 487.

¹⁰ Two Essays, 226–7.

¹¹ Newman to T. W. Allies, 30 September 1842, in Correspondence of John Henry Newman with John Keble and Others (London, 1917), 196–7. The place of Huet calls for investigation.

¹² ‘Milman’s view of Christianity’ in Essays Critical and Historical II (2nd edn, London, 1871), 192. For Newman’s application of the principle to the natural sciences, see his University Sermons, no. 15, (originally 14, in the 1843 edn); and for the relation between natural religion and the rise of Christianity, his critique of Gibbon in the Grammar of Assent, especially chs 9 and 10. Newman’s insistence (against Milman) on the significance of the doctrines of Christianity in the world of Late Antiquity is illuminated in the works of Peter Brown.

¹³ Forbes, D., The Liberal Anglican Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1952), 81.

¹⁴ Two Essays, 239.

¹⁵ Newman to Keble, 4 May 1843 {Correspondence, 219).

¹⁶ Kingsley’s text repr. in the Fontana edition of Newman’s Apologia (London, 1959), 29–65, quotation at 65.

¹⁷ Autobiographical Writings, ed. H. Tristram (London, 1957), 175; Loss and Gain, ed. Alan G. Hill (London, 1986), 294. Frank McGrath draws attention to the theme of the saints in Newman’s diary for 1843, in his impending edition of Newman’s LD 9. I am grateful to him for permission to read the text in advance of publication.

¹⁸ An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (6th edn, Notre Dame, IN, 1989), 372–3.

¹⁹ Ibid., 327–8.

²⁰ Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (Westminster, MD, 1968), 261.

²¹ Ker, Ian, The Catholic Revival in English Literature: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (Notre Dame, IN, and Leominster, 2003), 13–33.

²² The Mother of God, ed. Stanley Jaki (Pinckney, MI, 2003), 74. The advantage of this edition is that it supplies Newman’s emendations.

²³ LD 22:173-4.

²⁴ Ibid., 196–7.

²⁵ Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered 1 (Westminster, MD, 1969), 279.

²⁶ Ibid., 288–9.

²⁷ Momigliano, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs’, 16.

²⁸ Ibid., 17–18.

²⁹ Historical Sketches 2 (Westminster, MD, 1970), 315.

³⁰ Ibid., 315–16.

³¹ Ibid., 317.

³² Ibid.

³³ Momigliano, ‘Popular Religious Beliefs’, 18.

³⁴ Faith of our Fathers (London and New York, 2004), 25–7. I cannot, however, concur with the description of Newman as a ‘romantic individualist’ whose ‘vision of purgatory’ was ‘an all but absolute loneliness’ (ibid., 132). Newman’s doctrine of purgatory was taken from St Catherine of Genoa and St Francis de Sales.

³⁵ Worship and Theology in England IV: From Newman to Martineau, 1850–1900 (London and Princeton, NJ, 1962), 302–3.

³⁶ Appendix V to the third edition (1871) of The Avian Crisis of the Fourth Century, at 454–5. This, it seems to me, supplies the perspective requisite to a reading of his Preface to the final edition (1877) of the Via Media.

^* My thanks are due to Lewis Berry, Philip Cleevely and Sheridan Gilley for helpful criticism. My thanks are also due to Peter Brown for his deeply generous response to this paper.