‘ORIEL & THE MAKING OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN– HIS MISSION AS COLLEGE TUTOR’.

From 12 April 1822 when John Henry Newman was elected a Fellow until 3 October 1845 when he tendered his resignation to Provost Hawkins, Oriel College was to be the centre of Newman’s life. As Newman later recorded:

‘he ever felt this twelfth of April, 1822 to be the turning point of his life, and of all days most memorable. It raised him from obscurity and need to competency and reputation. He never wished anything better or higher than, in the words of the epitaph, “to live and die a fellow of Oriel”. Henceforth his way was clear before him; and he was constant all through his life, as his intimate friends knew, in his thankful remembrance year after year of this great mercy of Divine Providence, and of his electors, by whom it was brought about.1

Newman went on to assert that but for Oriel, he would have been nobody, entirely lacking in influence. It was through Oriel (and the pulpit of the Oriel living of St Mary the Virgin) that he was able to exert such a dominant religious and pastoral influence on 1 John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings, edited with an introduction by Henry Tristram of the Oratory (London, 1956), p. 63.

1

his academic generation and those that followed. It was through Oriel that he would be in a position to emerge by 1833 as the well-known leader of that great movement of religious revival in the Church of England known as the ‘Oxford Movement’ or ‘Tractarianism’ (the name being coined in consequence of the series of Tracts for the Times published by Newman and his cohorts).2

Newman’s experience as an Oriel Fellow,especially the few years when he acted as a college tutor, indelibly shaped and molded his religious development. His intellectual initiation and formation, however largely predated his time as tutor and owed much to the pedagogical role and mentorship of the so-called Oriel Noetics, notably Richard Whately and Edward Hawkins, the future Provost.3 As Newman later recalled, Whately ‘was the first person who opened my mind, that is who gave it ideas and principles to 2 For the etymology and origin of the term, see P.B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context : Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760-1857 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 36-43. For the first use of the epithet ‘Tractarian’, see C. Benson, Discourses upon Tradition and Episcopacy (London, 1839), p. 101.3 The term literally meant ‘free thinkers’. For an analysis of the OrielNoetics and what they stood for, see R. Brent, ‘The Oriel Noetics’, Historyof the University of Oxford, vi: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1. Edited by M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys (Oxford, 1997), pp. 72-6; P. Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican debate, 1800-1860 (Cambridge, 1988).

2

cogitate upon’.4 In short, the Noetics helped create the intellectual atmosphere in which Tractarianism would later flourish, even while it reacted against the relative or incipient liberalism represented by Noeticism.However, Newman’s moral and religious formation within Oriel owed much to other sources, notably John Keble (1792-1866) and Keble’s one-time pupil and his own disciple and friend Richard Hurrell Froude (1800-36). It was at Oriel, and partly through the example of Keble and Froude, that Newman first grasped that characteristically Tractarian attribute, ethos. For Newman, ethoswas not a mere matter of taste or feeling butembodied moral characteristics which includedself-resignation, self-denial, obedience, reverence, reserve, awe, submissiveness to authority, and an openness to the Divine Will. An ‘Apostolical’ ethos was opposed to intellectual pride, self-sufficiency and speculation, the claims of private judgment, and mere mental agility and dialectical skill. It was also rooted in a theory of religious knowledge by which orthodox belief was bound up with moral conduct and behavior.

4 J.H. Newman to W. Monsell, 10 October 1852, Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman [hereafter LDN], xv, ed. C.S. Dessain & V. Blehl (London, 1964),p. 176.

3

Moral or ethical flaws could be productive ofdoctrinal error or heresy. As James Pereiro has shown, the Tractarians imbibed deeply andreapplied certain key precepts of Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics and Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736)5: works prominent in the syllabus and lectured upon in Oriel. The Tractarians interpreted Aristotle and Butler anew, however, applying their well-known precepts well beyond the sphere of philosophical evidence and into therealm of ethical conduct.6

The Tractarian understanding of ethos colored Newman’s philosophy as a public tutorat Oriel College from January 1826 until June1832 (the Provost having closed his supply ofnew pupils from June 1830 onwards). It also left its mark on pupils such as Henry Wilberforce and Samuel Francis Wood. Academicstandards needed to be raised but alongside religious and moral ones and this underpinned5 J. Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the heart of Tractarianism (Oxford, 2007), pp. 89-95.

6 For fuller discussion of how Oxford and Oriel’s educational traditionsand curriculum helped create a receptive climate for Newman’s propagation of Tractarian ideals, see P.B. Nockles, ‘An Academic Counter-Revolution: Newman and Tractarian Oxford’s Idea of a University’, History of Universities, x (1991), pp. 137-97; P.B. Nockles, ‘Newman and Oxford’, P. Lefebvre & C. Mason, eds. Newman in his Time (Oxford, 2007), pp. 21-47.

4

Newman’s determination to reduce the numbers and influence of the sometimes profligate Gentlemen-Commoners for whom Oxford sometimeswas no more than a ‘finishing school’ of pleasure and for whom a degree did not often matter. In Newman’s view, the role of a college tutor involved more than the imparting of knowledge or preparation for examinations. For Newman, the tutorial officepossessed an inherent moral, spiritual and pastoral dimension. He regarded it as part ofhis ordination vow. Years later, he describedhis ideal of pastoral care over undergraduatepupils at Oriel. He recalled, for example,

‘I never would allow that in teaching the classics, I was absolved from carrying on, by means of them, in the minds of my pupils, an ethical training; I considered a College tutorto have the cure of souls’.7

He also described in detail his model for relationships with his Oriel pupils, a model which he claimed went against that which thenpertained in the college:

‘With such youths he cultivated relations, not only of intimacy, but of friendship, and almost of equality, putting 7 W.P. Neville, ed. Addresses to Cardinal Newman, with his Replies, 1879-81 (London, 1905), p. 184.

5

off, as much as might be, the martinet manner then in fashion with College Tutors, and seeking their society in outdoor exercises, on evenings, and in Vacations’.8

Mark Pattison, the famously sour Rector of Lincoln College from 1861, had been an Oriel undergraduate from 1832-5. He was a one-time disciple of Newman who reacted against his influence: his religious journey taking him from Tractarianism to rationalism.9 From his later perspective, Pattison complained that Newman as Oriel tutor had intended to reduce the college to the level of ‘a mere priestly seminary and not an agent of a university’.10 The charge was misplaced and ironic, given that when founding a Catholic university in Dublin in the 1850s Newman had to convince his sponsorsamong the Irish Catholic bishops that a university was not a seminary! Newman was always aware of the distinction between the two, though historically the University of Oxford had a role as a training ground for candidates for holy orders as well as in educating laymen. In fact, Newman’s pastoral 8 John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writing, p. 90.

9 See M. Pattison, Memoirs (London, 1885), esp. pp. 226, 230.

10 Ibid, p. 87.

6

concept of the tutorial office can be regarded as integral to the system of education which had evolved in the universityover many centuries. Newman was right to claim countenance from the Laudian Statutes (1636), for his view that a college tutor ‘was not a mere academical Policeman, or Constable, but a moral and religious guardianof the youths committed to him’.11 With the growth of private tutors or ‘crammers’ as a result of the academical reforms of the 1800s, Newman feared that this higher view ofthe tutorial office was in danger of being lost sight of. It is possible to determine the extent towhich Newman put his educational principles into practice in his time as Oriel tutor and to measure some bench marks of the religious,pastoral and academic successes of his tutorship. In a recent study of Newman as tutor at Oriel (private and public) from 1821-31, Philippe Lefebvre has demonstrated that there was a decline among the student population in the number of men of family andfortune (the Gentlemen-Commoners), a decreasein the number of students who did not graduate (with fewer Gentlemen-Commoners 11 John Henry Newman: Autobiographical Writings, p. 91.

7

among them), an increase in the number of undergraduates sitting for honors, and an increase in the number of future clergy amonghis pupils.12 Lefebvre shows (from evidence in Newman’s Autobiographical Memoirs and Newman’spublished correspondence) that Newman had a clear conception of what he identified as evils in the existing system, one of which was the over-preponderance of the aristocratic Gentlemen-Commoners, a body previously favored. For example, Thomas Mozley wrote of Vice-Provost James Endell Tyler, that it was commonly held that he ‘hadcared for gold tufts and silk gowns more thanfor the college generally’ and that his ‘especial fondness was reserved for the Gentlemen Commoners’.13 In a letter to his friend and former Oriel Fellow, Samuel Rickards in February 1829, Newman outlined the ‘innovations’ which he had introduced into the college over the preceding year, among which he included the marked diminution(by over half) of the Gentlemen Commoners, 12 P. Lefebvre, ‘The student population at Oriel College and Newman’s pupils (1821-33)’, Annexe 1.A, ‘John Henry Newman tuteur: Tradition, rupture, developpement: (1826-1831)’ (unpublished dissertation, Universite de Paris III, 2004), pp. 105-115.

13 T. Mozley, Reminiscences: Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols (London, 1882) i, p. 82. Newman himself privately accused Tyler of ‘tuftand silk courting’. J.H. Newman to S. Rickards, 19 March 1827, LDN, ii.eds. T. Gornall & I. Ker, (Oxford, 1979), p. 8.

8

the rejection of unprepared candidates and the refusal of testimonials to unworthy candidates.14

As Pereiro shows, Samuel Wood, who took a First in Classics in 1831, was one of the last and best fruits of Newman’s moral training methods before Hawkins removed him from his tutorial office: in fact, such was Wood’s life, personality, and principles, that he has been justly described as the ‘ethos of the Oxford Movement incarnate in a person’.15 However, Newman as tutor also had ‘failures’, not surprisingly it was some of the Gentlemen-Commoners who remained immune to his influence and charm. Thus, James Fitzharris, third Earl of Malmesbury (matriculated, 1825), one-time Foreign Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, left on recorda critical account of Newman’s tutorial methods in his Memoirs of an Ex-Minister. Malmesbury, writing in 1884, charged Newman with weakness as an Oriel tutor in 1826-7, insuffering his students to advance a table on him in his lectures until he was jammed in a corner, and in passively enduring a vocal

14 J.H. Newman to S. Rickards, 6 February 1829, LDN, ii, p. 117.

15 Pereiro, Ethos and the Oxford Movement, p. 5.

9

rebuke at table from Edward Copleston, the epicurean Provost of Oriel (1814-27), for apparently mutilating at table a fine haunch of venison: ‘Mr Newman you are unaware of themischief you have done’.16 Copleston’s bellowed admonition entered Oriel folklore and was overheard by many but there seems to have been poor foundation for Malmesbury’s first charge, Frederic Rogers, Lord Blachford, asserting that the incident over the table involved another Oriel tutor, William James, and that Newman was always in control of his classes.17

Newman admired Hawkins and had even preferred him over Keble at the election of anew Provost in 1828. Hurrell Froude had urgedKeble’s claims, arguing that he,

‘would bring in with him a new world, that donnishness and humbug would be no more in the College, nor the pride of talent, nor an ignoble secular ambition’.

The implication was that as Provost Coplestonhad encouraged these things, but Newman at 16 Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, An Autobiography. By the Rt. Hon the Earl of Malmesbury, 2 vols,(3rd edn, London, 1884), p. 18.

17 S. Gilley, Newman and his Age (London, 1990), p. 414; D.W. Rannie, Oriel College (London, 1903), p. 223.

10

the time was unmoved, backing Hawkins as ‘themore practical man’, and famously declaring, ‘that if an Angel’s place was vacant, he should look towards Keble, but that they wereonly electing a Provost’.18 Newman himself conceded that Hawkins initially supported histutors ‘in their measures of enforcement of discipline and the purification of the College’.19 However, a conflict between the two came to a head in 1830 when Newman, alongwith two other Oriel tutors, Hurrell Froude and Robert Wilberforce, sought to exercise greater control in the choice of undergraduate students and rearrange classes enabling them to give more pastoral attentionto favored pupils. Hawkins obstructed them and all three resigned as tutors. Newman argued that the Heads of Houses had,

‘usurped, or at least injuriously engrossed power in University matters, and that those who did the work, the resident fellows, not those who had no work to do, should have the power’.20

18 Autobiographical Writings, p. 91.

19 Ibid, p. 92.

20 Ibid, p. 96.

11

Copleston stiffened Hawkins’s resolve in countering this view. He insisted that the examination reforms of the 1800s had necessarily changed the academic balance of power in the University by increasing the educational responsibility of the Heads and thus making the action of the Oriel tutors the more dangerous.21

Newman felt let down by Hawkins who ‘when a member of the Common Room, had ever used the language of a Tribune of the people’. It was soon felt to be otherwise when Hawkins assumed the Provostship and declared ‘that all was as it ought to be’. Newman described the change in attitude towards the new Provost among the Oriel Fellows, clearly including himself:

‘They accused him also in their talk with each other, of assuming state and pomp, and of separating himself from his Fellows, as if his membership in the Hebdomadal Board was a closer tie than his membership with his College, and moreover, of courting the society and countenance of men of rank and fortune, whether in the world, or the in the state,or the Church. They smiled, when instead of speaking of the Provost’s “lodgings”, he talked about “my house”’.22

21 Rannie, Oriel College, p. 201.

22 Ibid, p. 97.

12

Hawkins was also accused of sacrificing college interests on the altar of Westminsterpolitical allegiances and non-Oxonian influences.

It was the nature as well as extent of Newman’s personal influence as college tutor that gave Provost Hawkins misgivings. Copleston (since 1828 Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St Paul’s) fully shared these misgivings, telling Hawkins:

‘From what you say of Newman’s religious views, I fear he is impractical. His notion of dangers to church and state I cannot understand. For even under the system we wish to continue religious instruction is part of the class lectures, and in private it is part of each tutor’s business with his own pupils’.23

Copleston himself had first developed the idea that there should be greater and more personal intercourse between tutor and pupil.The development itself owed much to Oriel’s system of Open Fellowships which Provost Eveleigh (died 1814) had instigated. It is difficult to represent Hawkins and Copleston

23 Quoted in ibid, p. 202.

13

as part of any overtly secularizing trend. Itwas not so much that the two sides differed over the importance of the religious dimension of the tutorial office but over itsapplication and direction. G.C. Richards in his centennial article on ‘The Oriel Common Room in 1833’ in the College Record for January 1933, suggested that the controversy represented a conflict of two strong wills rather than any fear of Newman’s religious influence24. The evidence suggests otherwise,though there were other elements in the dispute: these involved the matter of testimonials for orders, in which Newman claimed to take the stricter side, and the Provost the laxer side; and the custom of Gentlemen Commoners dining with the Fellows, which Newman wished to dispense with but which the Provost insisted was one of the laudable customs to which all were bound.25 The dispute and its outcome damaged Oriel. Some have dated the decline of Oriel’s stunning academic supremacy to the removal ofNewman, Froude, and Robert Wilberforce as tutors.26 Although, Whately and other Noetics 24 [G.C. Richards], ‘The Oriel Common Room in 1833’, Oriel College Record, vi, no. 10 (January, 1933), p. 237.

25 LDN, ii, ‘Memorandum on Edward Hawkins’ (15 July 1860), p. 203.

26 Mark Pattison was one of the first to make this claim. See Pattison, Memoirs, p. 88.

14

blamed Newman and his tutorial methods for this decline, the consensus view is that the tutors had the better of the argument on educational grounds, Newman and his colleagues being able to provide their pupilsfree for what they had to pay for under the old system when private tuition was often essential.27

The evidence of Lefebvre’s study shows that academic achievement as well as religious orthodoxy and cultivation of moral habits was a high priority for Newman as tutor. The care which he took over his pupilsas individuals whom he took into his confidence is clear from the manuscript memorandum books on his pupils which he kept,the originals of which are in the archives ofthe Birmingham Oratory; a care and a record that extended to moral formation and spiritual as well as intellectual progress. Asample entry, dated ‘Easter 1826’, for a particular favorite, his future brother-in-law Thomas Mozley, is revealing: ‘very promising – clear & elegant mind – hopeful in

27 K. Turpin, ‘The Ascendancy of Oriel’, History of the University of Oxford, vi, p. 190.

15

religion; a good scholar’.28 Newman’s successes with his pupils may have attracted jealousy. One reason may have been because, as Lefebvre suggests, he regarded his tutorial office as a way of preparing some ofhis pupils for a defense of the Church in certain future trials which he evidently foresaw.29 Certainly, the names of many of his or Froudes’s Oriel pupils or their tutorial associates, reads like a roll-call of Tractarian disciples in the 1830s: RobertWilberforce, Thomas Mozley, Charles Marriott,Samuel Wood, Frederic Rogers, Sir George Prevost, George Dudley Ryder, Charles Page Eden, Robert Francis Wilson, John Frederic Christie, and many others. It was as if he was training them up for some expected futurechurch crisis. When that crisis came in 1833,many of his former pupils were indeed at their posts and ready to enter into the fray.Thomas Mozley who knew his brother-in-law so well, later elucidated Newman’s future high expectations of his Oriel disciples in this

28[J.H. Newman], ‘Memorandum Book about [Oriel] College Pupils’, Ms. A6.15, Newman Archives, Birmingham Oratory. I am grateful to Monsieur Lefebvre for allowing me access to his photocopies from a microfilm version of this document in Yale University Library apparently made by Dwight Culler in preparation of his study of Newman entitled Imperial Intellect (New Haven, 1955).

29 Lefebvre, ‘Student population at Oriel College’.

16

regard.30 Newman always had a deep sense of theProvidential destiny and special work to be accomplished by everybody, in accordance withhis powers and his circumstances.

Newman remained hopeful that Oriel Fellows might be appointed from among his former pupils and followers. This put him in conflict with his former friends and mentors within college among the Noetics such as Richard Whately who felt that the college wasbecoming packed with Newman’s favorites. Thismight not have mattered but for the party andpersonal differences that had arisen between him and his former mentor. For from the time of the controversial rejection of Sir Robert Peel as the University’s MP in 1829 over Catholic Emancipation, an incipient but deep-seated theological gulf had arisen between Newman and the future Tractarians on the one hand and the Noetics on the other. An odium theologicum exacerbated academic and politicaldifferences, 31 and colored the later 30 Mozley had first-hand personal experience of this aspect of Newman’s college influence, citing as an example Newman’s letter of appeal to himin May 1832: ‘You have various gifts and you have good principles, for the sake of the Church, and for the sake of your friends, who expect it of you, see that they bring forth fruit’. Mozley, Reminiscences, ii, p. 449.

31 On the significance of the divisive impact of the Peel election, see P.B. Nockles, ‘The Oxford Movement and the University’, The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. VI: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part I. Edited by M.G. Brock and M.C.

17

controversies between the two sides over plans to weaken terms of undergraduate subscription in 1834-5 and over the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden to the Regius Chair of Divinity in 1836.32

An embittered Whately, whose fall-out withhis one-time friend and disciple Newman became personal, even suggested that Fellowship candidates were only brought forward by Newman ‘on the strength of party cabal’.33 Certainly, the fortunes of Oriel continued to be everything to Newman even when he was searching for ‘kindly light in the encircling gloom’ on his Mediterranean journey in 1832-33. He had hardly recovered from the fever in Sicily which nearly carriedhim off, when he anxiously perused the local newspapers for news of an Oriel Fellowship election and whether his friend and disciple Frederic Rogers was listed as being successful. When he received the news, his reaction was ecstatic.34 Mark Pattison later Curthoys (Oxford, 1997), pp. 201-3. 32 For discussion of these episodes, see Nockles, ‘Oxford Movement and the University’, pp.

33 R. Whately to E. Hawkins, 29 April 1836, Oriel College Archives, Letterbook III, no. 216.

34 J.H. Newman to F. Rogers, 5 June 1833, A. Mozley, ed. Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during his life in the English Church, 2 vols,

18

maintained that for about ten years from 1830elections to Oriel Fellowships were protracted struggles between Newman endeavoring to fill the college with men likely to carry out his ideas and the Provost‘endeavoring, upon no principle, merely to resist Newman’s lead’. Pattison felt that this led to some inferior elections, but for all his anti-Newman animus, he laid the blamefor the worst elections on ‘the Provost’s party’, claiming that Newman was the more true to the old Oriel principle of looking for promise rather than performance in candidates.35

It is not surprising that Newman’s feelings about the Oriel Noetics were ambivalent, conscious as he was of losing theargument with Hawkins over the future of the college as well as enduring theological censure from this quarter. Yet, as he surveyed his Oriel career, there was cause for thankfulness and a sense of Providential destiny for good. Given their later history of antagonism, it was a supreme irony that Newman should have helped Hawkins rather than

(London, 1891), i, p. 404.

35 Pattison, Memoirs, p. 99.

19

Keble, whom Froude had wanted, to the Provostship in 1828. Yet in 1828 Hawkins had seemed to Newman to be the stronger candidatefor what the office ought to entail. Hawkins’s promotion also enabled Newman to beVicar of St Mary’s and thereafter to wield his well-known influence from that pulpit. AsNewman later explained,

‘Nothing indeed all through this course of things strikes me as more strange than the intertwining of things good and bad. e.g. one is tempted to say, knowing what misery has resulted and does result from Dr Hawkins being Provost of Oriel, “O, that Hurrell’s wish had been accomplished of placing Keble in his place!” But if Keble had been Provost, I for one should probably be Tutor of Oriel to this day. What great things Keble might have done there, of course is quite hid from us – they would have been great – but we should never have been dismissed from the Tuition. We (Keble, Froude and I) should never have turned our minds so keenly to other subjects, not a Tract would have been written – I should have gone on with Mathematics (which I was bent ondoing and did)…’36

Provost Hawkins, for all his autocratic instincts, often struggled to assert his

36 J.H. Newman to Mrs William Froude, 4 April 1844 cited in G.H. Harper,Cardinal Newman and William Froude, F.R.S: A Correspondence (Baltimore, 1933), p. 42.

20

authority at rebellious college meetings, later likening his role to that of a beleagured captain of a crew constantly on the verge of mutiny!37 The lack of cooperation between Provost and Fellows, partly a result of the Tractarian controversy, weakened the college though being the genius loci and epicenter of the Oxford Movement bestowed its own prestige. Even Pattison blamed Hawkins, rather than Newman, for Oriel’s loss of its previous academic preeminence. For his part, Newman later conceded that he was ‘not always respectful’ to the Provost and that he ‘mighthave acted more generously to a man to whom he owed much’.38 In a private memorandum on Hawkins dated 1860, Newman lamented,

‘the painful state of our relations between 1829 (February) and 1845 when I became a Catholic – a state of constant bickerings – of coldness, dryness and donnishness on his part, and of provoking insubordination and petulance on mine. We differed in our views materially, and he, always mounting his horse, irritated and made me recoil from him’39. 37 Mozley, Reminiscences, i, p. 236.

38 Autobiographical Writings, p. 101.

39 [J.H. Newman], ‘Memorandum on Edward Hawkins’, 15 July 1860, LDN, ii.Eds. I. Ker & T. Gornall (Oxford, 1979), pp. 202-3.

21

Newman accepted that his own ‘infirmities’ were as much to blame as the Provost’s. In reading over the Provost’s letters, he concluded:

‘It is plain…that I had angered and alienated him. He is, when not frigid, hot (or rather always frigid in manner, oftenhot in thought). But I doubt not, if I would see my own letters, I should be very much ashamed of them’.40

Moreover, according to Thomas Mozley, Newman was dismayed when Pusey maintained in a sermon preached in 1876 at the consecration of Keble College, that he ‘had lived to regret the part he had taken in Hawkins’ election to the Oriel Provostship’.41 As Mozley explained, it was Newman’s ‘wont to accept his own acts as Providentially overruled to purposes beyond his own ken’.42 It was left to Newman’s Tractarian disciples to vent their spleen on Hawkins’s memory. 40 Ibidem.

41 H.P. Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols, (4th edn, London, 1894), ii, p. 139. Cf. Mozley, Reminiscences, I, p. 39. However, according to Liddon (Life of Pusey, ii, p. 139), Newman contradicted Mozley and informedPusey in August 1882: ‘I never expressed, I never felt, any surprise whatever, any concern whatever, at your words about me, including me with yourself in what you said about Hawkins’s election’. 42 Mozley, Reminiscences, i, p. 39.

22

Newman was a charismatic influence in Oxford, marking for ever the lives of many ofhis Oriel pupils. He held that moral and religious truth was best communicated and most likely to stir the heart by the power of‘personal presence’ and his tutorial methods were conducted on that basis. Cold abstractions of truth were not enough. Newmanled a young religious movement which captivated an idealistic and serious-minded younger generation of ‘juniors’ in the university in reaction against a combination of academic conservatism and relative religious laxity among the ‘seniors’. Bruisedby internal disputes, Newman nonetheless tookfrom his experience at Oriel an ‘idea’ of a university education and its tutorial basis which he was to make famous. A university, hewrote, was ‘an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill’.43 A university education crucially depended on the personal influence of mind upon mind. Newman learned this lesson at Oriel, the college in which hehad expected to see out his days. Mark Pattison acknowledged that Newman helped 43 Cited in G.P. Landow, Newman and the Idea of an Electronic University (Yale, 1996).

23

instigate ‘a revival of the spirit of learnedresearch’ in Oxford.44 Far from being inimical to academic values per se, the ‘clericalism’ of Newman and the Oriel Tractarians enriched and deepened Oxford’s collegiate life, even if the future of university reform lay with antagonistic utilitarian ‘German’ secular models.

Personal influence, memory, sense perception and a sense of place (the genius loci) were key components of Newman’s spirituality and of what Vincent Blehl calledhis ‘pilgrim journey’.45 For Newman, a college was a milieu and not merely an institution or even merely a place of abstract teaching, important as that was. It was a living entity which was the medium of the personal influence of a teacher. Any academical system without the personal presence of a teacher influencing pupils was but ‘an arctic winter…ice-bound, petrified, cast iron’.46 A college, thus imbued, thereby44 H.S. Jones, Pattison, Intellect and Character: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge, 2007), p. 30.

45 V. Blehl, Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman (London, 2001). It is clear from thelate Fr Blehl’s insightful study that the depth and subtlety of Newman’s spiritual influence over Oriel and other Oxford undergraduates was a keycomponent in his personal quest for holiness.

46 Cited in I. Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman (London, 1991), p. 188 n39.

24

acted on the minds of an impressionable younger generation reared under the spell of Romanticism, inspiring intense loyalties and affections to an extent unknown in the previous century. Newman spoke not only for himself but for many of his generation when he later observed of a college:

‘It is the shrine of our best affections, the bosom of our fondest recollections, a spell upon our afterlife, a stay for world-weary mind and soul, wherever we are cast, till the end comes’.47

A college, with its corporate esprit de corps, was well suited to provide a formative educational influence. As he put it in his Idea of a University,

‘It will give birth to a living tradition, which in course of time will take the shape of a self-perpetuating tradition, or geniusloci, as it is sometimes called; which haunts the home where it has been born, and which imbues and forms, more or less,and one by one, every individual who is successively broughtunder its shadow’48.

47 J.H. Newman, Historical Sketches, iii, p. 215. See S. Rothblatt, ‘An Oxonian “Idea” of a University: J.H. Newman and “Well-Being”’, History of theUniversity of Oxford, vi, p. 295.

48J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University, I. Ker, ed. (Oxford, 1976), pp. 129-32.

25

Newman was inspired to write in this way on the basis of his direct Oriel experience, while his reference to the ‘arctic winter’ which resulted when personal influence was lacking, was clearly autobiographical of his own undergraduate experience at Trinity. His Oriel years, especially those in which he was engaged as atutor, were thus crucial in providing him with both memory and a sense of place and association and in thereby shaping his ongoing religious development. It was significant that he always recalled in his letters and diaries throughout his life the memory of the day of his election as an OrielFellow.

Above all, Newman left an educational legacy from his time at Oriel that transcended, even while it nurtured and underpinned his spirituality and wider religious vision. Oriel, the cradle of the Oxford Movement, as it had been of Noeticism, was truly the making of him.

26

27