John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility: Distant Scene

John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility scrutinises Newman's theological writings to establish how his theology can be considered distinctively English or un-English at the different stages of its development.

Jacob Phillips finds that in Newman's Tractarian period, his theology is profoundly characterised by common 19th-century tropes of a perceived English sensibility, namely an instinct for compromise. In the period following Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845, however, this book argues that Newman's mature theology remains unabashedly one-sided in its understanding of God and the Catholic Church, taking precedence over elements of a cultural sensibility pertaining ultimately to the sphere of the natural. The affection for reserve, however, is shown to be capable of gracious elevation when reconfigured on a Catholic grounding. Most importantly, the profoundly empirical orientation to life which was considered typical of Englishness in Newman's day emerges as something exhibiting what Newman might consider a 'antecedent affinity' to Catholic theology.

This book thus concludes by offering a view of the English Catholic sensibility as characterised by a mindset of careful reserve toward knowledge and words about God, arising from a marked concern for the living, embodied present as the site of God's transformative action in the twists and turns of human life.