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‘A Blessed and Ever-Enduring Fellowship’: The Development of John Henry Newman's Thought on Death and the Life Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

James Tolhurst
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Extract

No century previous to the nineteenth was so assiduous in its cultivation of the diary to record the minutiae of daily life. Partly because the average nineteeth century family knew that death was a frequent visitor, the diary assumed an importance that a century later was lost, along with the reverence for death. In Newman's Obituary List we have that full development of his thought concerning the dead, which began with the demise of those he had loved in his youth and ended with his remembrance of them at the altar in his room at Edgbaston, surrounded by their pictures and memorial cards. It will be helpful to trace the development of that process because it illuminates the Evangelical and Tractarian understanding of prayer for the dead and provides a useful basis for current concepts which have frequently been over-laid either with sentimentality or with a tendency to demythologise the reality of the next life altogether.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , May 1995 , pp. 424 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1995

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References

Notes

1 Cf. under 27 May.

2 Ann Small is crossed out (cf. under 21 July).

3 Mozley is substituted for Newman.

4 In fact 27 August (at 3 p.m.).

5 Edward Fortescue 1877 is crossed out, cf. under 18 August.

6 Added in another hand. Newman elsewhere spells it Katharine.

7 Anthony Grant 1883 crossed out, cf. under 25 November.

8 Law substituted for Bowden.

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38 PPS, 4, p. 178 (14 May, 1837).

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68 Tr, 79, p. 3.

69 LD, 5, p. 260.

70 PPS, 3, No. 25, (1st edition, 1836).

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87 Ess, 1, pp. 227, 228.

88 Apo, p. 26.

89 Letter to Moore, Henry: ‘Another thing which somewhat hardens me against such friendly remonstrances as yours, is this—that from the time my friends and I began to write on the subjects to which the Church of the Fathers relates, we have been exclaimed against, reprobated, and followed.’ LD, 7, p. 330.Google Scholar

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91 HS, 2, p. 158. The quotation is from his Confessions, Book 9.

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93 LD, 7, p. 331.

94 Convocation of Canterbury in 1604 and Convocation of York in 1606.

95 q. LD, 7, p. 331n.

96 Diff, 2, p. 69. Cf. also DA, p. 205, (Tr. 85).

97 Jfc, p. 205.

98 Jfc, p. 204.

99 DA, p. 204.

100 Dev, pp. 384–388.

101 Dev, p. 389.

102 The Stripping of the Altars op. cit., pp. 348–349.

103 VM, 2, pp. 174f; Dev pp. 390f.

104 VM, 2, p. 176.

105 pps, 4, p. 102, (6 August, 1837).

106 Dev, p. 392, and cf. W, pp. 355–356.

107 CS, p. 37, (20 February, 1848).

108 Eschatology in the Anglican Sermons …, p. 328.

109 SN, p. 24, (11 November, 1849).

110 ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell and from the deep pit/lake … ’ (Offertory Prayer)

111 VV, 365.

112 Mix, p. 81.

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121 LD, 26, pp. 308; 391; ‘The one effect of Purgatory to bum away in everyone of us that in which we differ from each other’, SN, p. 284, (25 June, 1877).

122 LD, 26, p. 240, (27 January, 1873).

123 CS, p. 35. Cf. (Particular judgement) ‘A protestant really has no notion of it; SN, p. 40, (14 July, 1850).

124 Mix, p. 81. Cf. ‘O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe/Consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God’ VV, p. 362.

125 Newman to Miss Geoghagan, 19 June 1874, LD, 17, p. 323.

126 MD, p. 602.

127 Cf. LD, 20, p. 43. ‘But day by day a memento is still made in the Holy Sacrifice by at least one Catholic Priest, once a member of that College, for the souls of those Catholic benefactors who fed him there so many years,’ Idea, p. 155.

128 VV, p. 370.

129 Newman to Henry Bowden's children on the death of their mother, LD, 21, pp. 136–7.

130 SN, p. 25. However in SN, p. 270 he says it is ‘next to the content of paradise’.

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133 OS, p. 31,(1856).

134 Stray Essays, p. 88.

135 LD, 23, pp. 26–261, (3 July, 1867).

136 Call, pp. 219–220.

137 PPS, 4, p. 82, (27 March, 1836).

138 PN, 2, p. 189, (10 September, 1876).

139 Apo, p. 26; LD, 23 p. 261, and Cf. Origen: De Principiis, 1, 6, 3, R. 457.

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143 MD, p. 388.

144 MD, pp. 587–588.

145 Newman's letter to George T. Edwards, 7 January, 1889, LD, 31, p. 269.

146 MS, Birmingham Oratory Archives, (Neville).

147 Carus, W., (ed), Memoirs of the Life of Charles Simeon (1847), p. 810.Google Scholar

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149 ‘She (Miss Rigby) told me that Archbishop Whately had once said in the Oriel Common Room, when the child's story of the Three Wishes was mentioned, if I had three wishes, they would all be for a “mind like Newman's”, Recollections of Dean Boyle (London 1895), pp. 89–90. In a manuscript entry dated 30 March, 1877, Newman noted that John Hewitt (cf. Obituary Booky died 7 August 1876 aged 65, had eleven children, only 6 now alive. John was at New Orleans in 16th. U.S. Infantry—married—two children—wrote to J.H.N. some years ago—16 years from England. Henrietta married to Rev. Granville Bailey, Newcastle under Lyne four children. Edward an engineer married Sheffield—one child Pattie, married to Mr. Radford, engineer, two children Margaret Edith.’

150 LD, 30, p. 153 to Mrs. Hawkins. It has the monogram I.H.S. on the front and a cross on the back cover.

151 De la Peiia, R., La otra dimension (Santander 1986) p. 295.Google Scholar

152 Cf., note 2.

153 Tristram, H., Newman and His Friends (London 1933), p. 255.Google Scholar

154 MS, A.10.4.