Monday, December 06, 2010

Eminent maverick ...

... and A Hero of the Church. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is certainly true that Newman was a man often intellectually at odds with his Church, indeed, with both his churches.His career straddled almost the whole nineteenth century, and what were then two different worlds, Protestant and Catholic. In both, he was a force for unsettlement. We think of him as a Victorian, but like his younger contemporary Dickens, he was in fact a product of Regency England. Born in 1801, the son of a prosperous London banker, he could remember candles placed in windows to celebrate Nelson’s fatal victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Educated at Great Ealing School and Oxford, he read the novels of Austen and Scott and the poems of Byron as they first appeared, and he had reached the pinnacle of his preeminence within the Church of England before the young Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.

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