Gothic Reason and Grecian Heart
by Joseph Carola, SJ, appearing in Volume 48
John Henry Newman built three churches—the Church of Saint Mary and Saint Nicholas at Littlemore in 1835-1836, a temporary church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception for the Birmingham Oratory at Edgbaston in 1852-1853, and the Catholic University Church at Dublin in 1854-1856. “Surely to build a house to God’s honor and service is a good work,” preached Newman during the ceremony at which his mother, Jemima Froudrinier Newman, laid the first stone at Littlemore. When building churches, he preached on another occasion, “we realize the unseen world and bring down heaven upon earth. Every thing about them is so contrived as to lead us to serious thoughts.” In the church’s very structure, the Christian faithful see and hear what those who had lived before the incarnation had longed to see and hear. But Newman warned at the consecration of the Littlemore chapel that “[p]rofane people see no more in a church than they see in a common house, because they have not faith.” The faithless are deaf to the “silent sermon” that the church building itself preaches. For believers, however, sacred architecture is “a kind of book.” “Thus this church [at Littlemore],” Newman explained to the congregation, “is so built as of itself to preach the gospel to those who can receive it—yet observe it preaches silently—it makes no noise—it speaks as if by a still small voice, to the heart—it does not strive, nor cry. This is true gospel preaching.” For churches are in fact sermons in stone.
Newman’s three architectural sermons attest to the development of their orator’s theology. At Littlemore Newman had built a modest, neo-Gothic structure, but at Dublin he constructed a Roman basilica. Anglican Newman had looked to a traditionally English form, but Catholic Newman looked to Rome. What the Tractarian had not hesitated to build, the Oratorian later resisted on theological grounds. Newman’s debate in the late 1840s with Augustus W. N. Pugin, Catholic convert and Britain’s outstanding neo-Gothic architect, occasioned the felicitous articulation of the mature principles that inform his architectural decisions. Despite Catholic Newman’s confessed fancy for the Grecian, his preferences were never merely a matter of taste. The seeing and hearing, upon which Anglican Newman had insisted at Littlemore, prove to have been a seminal reality that took deep root, sprouted, and bloomed in the post-Tridentine light of his Catholic faith.
Grecian rather than Gothic
Lecturing on the idea of a university at Dublin in 1852, the English Oratorian John Henry Newman laid the initial intellectual foundations for a Catholic university in Ireland. In his fourth lecture on the bearing of other branches of knowledge on theology, Newman briefly examines architecture’s role. He highlights specifically the Gothic revival that had captured the British imagination. “Everything is going the way of Gothic,” Newman had observed only the year before—everything, that is, but Newman. For even though he willingly acknowledged the Gothic’s merits, he also perceived the significant risks that it posed for the Catholic Church if its use in ecclesiastical architecture meant the exclusive canonization of an obsolete, medieval form. Newman explains that
that style which, whatever be its origin, is called Gothic, is endowed with a profound and a commanding beauty, such as no other style possesses with which we are acquainted, and which probably the Church will not see surpassed till it attain to the celestial city. No other architecture, now used for sacred purposes, seems to be the growth of an idea, whereas the Gothic style is as harmonious and as intellectual as it is graceful.
Or, in the words of Newman’s fictional character, the Anglo-Catholic Campbell, in Loss and Gain, Gothic architecture is “the one true child and development of Christianity.” The university rector recognized that it was a divine gift. But gifts can be both poorly received and misused. Herein lies the danger to which our feelings about Gothic architecture can blind us, Newman warned. Architecture, along with literature and art, is a means to an end, and never an end in itself. It is to serve religion, not dominate it, and certainly not replace it. Thus Newman cautions, “that revival of an almost forgotten architecture, which is at present taking place in our own countries, in France, and in Germany, may in some way or other run away with us into this or that error, unless we keep a watch over its course.” Newman feared especially for England where Gothic architecture loomed as “a serious evil, if it came as the emblem and advocate of a past ceremonial or an extinct nationalism.”
As an Anglican Tractarian, Newman had hoped to construct a Via Media between Protestant heresy and alleged Roman corruptions for the sake of Anglican ecclesiastical reform. He looked to the fourth and fifth Christian centuries for an ecclesial standard by which to judge all else. But his discovery of doctrinal development in Christian antiquity led him to behold the Church of the Fathers in the contemporary Catholic Church. While Catholic Newman never lost his deep affection for Christian antiquity, neither did he make any further attempts to canonize any particular period in the Church’s history to the detriment of her vital, posterior development. When it came to architecture, then, he was quick to point out that nineteenth-century Catholics no longer lived in the Middle Ages. “Our rules and our rubrics,” the university rector concludes, “have been altered now to meet the times, and hence an obsolete discipline may be a present heresy.” It is important to note immediately that the notion of architectural heresy did not originate with Newman. Others rather had first used it against him. When he employed it, he did so in self-defense.
Newman’s own personal engagement with the Gothic was in fact nuanced. As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Oxford, he had loved that Gothic structure more than any other building. In the summer of 1846, some months before leaving to study for the Catholic priesthood in Rome, Newman declared Pugin’s new, neo-Gothic church Saint Giles at Cheadle to be “the most splendid building” that he had ever seen. Its sumptuous colors “contrived to make up for the mosaics” and marbles found in southern European churches. The Blessed Sacrament Chapel, that “blaze of light,” moved Newman profoundly. “I could not help saying to myself ‘Porta Coeli,’” he later remarked. He even commented favorably on the rood screens that were “brass and gilt wood, and thus exceedingly light.” Finally, he noted the paintings from the German school at Rome colloquially known as the Nazarenes under the direction of Johann Friedrich Overbeck whom Newman was soon to meet. Even in his later debate with neo-Gothic enthusiasts, Newman acknowledged that he felt “the greatest admiration of the Gothic style.” He admitted that “Gothic is on the whole a far more beautiful idea in architecture than Grecian—far more fruitful, elastic, and ready.” Yet Newman’s own personal tastes and convictions led him to the Grecian just as his theology of development had led him to Rome.
In the late summer of 1846, Newman and his companion Ambrose St. John set out for the Eternal City in preparation for ordination to the Catholic priesthood. On their journey, they stopped first at Milan. The city enthralled Catholic Newman. Writing to a friend, he exclaimed: “This is a most wonderful place—to me more striking than Rome.” For Milan continued to witness to the existence of “the ‘primordia,’ the cradle, as it were, of Christianity.” While the city’s Gothic Duomo, “that overpowering place,” was “the most beautiful building” that he had ever seen (how soon he had forgotten Saint Giles at Cheadle!), the baroque church of San Fidelis captured his heart. “It is like a Jesuit church, Grecian or Palladian,” Newman explained to Henry Wilberforce, “but I cannot deny, that, however my reason may go with Gothic, my heart has ever gone with Grecian.” He admitted to another friend: “I fear I like that style of architecture more than some of our Oscott and Birmingham friends would approve. The brightness, grace and simplicity of the classical style seems more to befit the notion of Saint Mary or Saint Gabriel than anything in Gothic.” For, as Newman remarked further, “[t]he Gothic style does not seem to me to typify the sanctity or innocence of the Blessed Virgin, or Saint Gabriel, or the lightness, grace, and sweet cheerfulness of the elect as the Grecian does.” Newman never tired of visiting San Fidelis to which he had easy access from the adjacent priest house where he was lodging. To enter the church was for him “a refreshment to the mind.”
Milan’s Church of Sant’Ambrogio also strongly attracted Newman, for there he found himself immersed in the Church of the Fathers. The bonds that had united Newman with ancient Milan consequently drew him frequently
to Saint Ambrose’s Church—where the body of the Saint lies—and to kneel at those relics, which have been so powerful, and whom I have heard and read of more than other saints from a boy. It is thirty years this very month, as I may say, since God made me religious, and Saint Ambrose in Milner’s history was one of the first objects of my veneration. And Saint Augustine too—and here he was converted! and here came Saint Monica seeking him. Here too came the great Athanasius to meet the emperor, in his exile.
Even though his theory of doctrinal development had moved Newman to embrace contemporary Catholicism, Christian antiquity always anchored his heart. As Newman wrote two decades later to his former Anglican colleague Edward Pusey, “The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you know, a process of development in apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.”
While Christian antiquity had certainly inclined Newman toward the classical, a psychological element also informed his preference for the Italian style’s “simplicity, purity, elegance, beauty, [and] brightness” befitting an angel or saint. Elderly people, he explains, “are happy to dispense with officious intentional sadness—and as the young prefer autumn and the old spring, the young tragedy and the old comedy, so in the ceremonial of religion, younger men have my leave to prefer Gothic, if they will [but] tolerate me in my weakness which requires Italian.” It was just such toleration, however, that Pugin, Newman’s junior by eleven years, would not admit.
According to Newman, Pugin, a rigidly principled man, pronounced dogmatically on architecture. He united relentlessly and indissolubly the principles of his art with its particulars, failing to distinguish properly between constant principles and developing details. While Newman acknowledged that Pugin was “a man of genius” to whom Catholics owed a debt of gratitude for his labors reviving Gothic architecture, he also considered him to be an intolerant bigot who does “not understand or admit anything but his own narrow view of things.” “The Canons of Gothic architecture,” Newman observed, “are to him points of faith, and everyone is a heretic who would venture to question them.” Yet, as Newman insisted, love for the Gothic is no more orthodox than is love for the Italian heretical.
In our present study, we can do justice to neither the mid-century neo-Gothic debate, nor Pugin himself whom Newman accused of lacking good sense (Pugin did in fact suffer insanity before he died.) But as Rosemary Hill has masterfully demonstrated, Pugin’s own thought and practice did indeed develop beyond a principled inflexibility to a mature engagement with the Gothic medium. While not always fair to Pugin, Newman’s polemic, nonetheless, does shed light on the Oratorian’s own particular architectural ecclesiology. Newman was well aware that he was swimming upstream against a strong neo-Gothic current in both ecclesiastical and civic architecture. Perhaps, on this account, Newman placed on Campbell’s lips in Loss and Gain his own personal plea: “I am for toleration. Give Gothic an ascendancy; be respectful towards classical.”
Newman’s objections to the Gothic craze that had enthralled both Anglicans and Catholics in England arose from serious concerns that far transcended his own personal taste. On November 10, 1848, the Oratorian expressed his concerns in a Latin brief to his good friend Bishop Giovanni Battista Palma, private secretary to Pope Pius IX, intending for Palma to convey them to the Pontiff himself. Unfortunately, on November 16, standing near a window in the Quirinal Palace during a hostile attack on the papal residence by Roman revolutionary forces, Palma was shot dead. On November 24, moreover, the very day that Newman’s letter arrived in the Eternal City, the besieged Pius fled Rome for Gaeta. As a result, the Pope never saw Newman’s letter. Its contents are, nonetheless, pertinent to our discussion.
In his letter, Newman acknowledged the possible ecumenical benefits derived from the Anglicans’ and Catholics’ common, ecclesiastical use of Gothic art, architecture, and vestments. By means of those external, medieval forms, Catholics could teach a heretical people the doctrine of the one, true Church. But Newman perceived a far greater threat under that Gothic veneer. For, by means of their own use of the Gothic long since declared the “national style” in Britain, Catholics would unknowingly and unwillingly be propagating a nationalist spirit contrary to the universality of their faith. Newman recognized further that Gothic forms thus rigidly reclaimed forced Catholics to revert to an obsolete discipline no longer applicable in the contemporary age. For while the Catholic faith remains the same throughout the centuries, the Church’s discipline necessarily changes in order to meet the needs of each age. Architecture, Newman argues, is the exterior face and expression of the Church’s discipline. It needs to adapt. Medieval Catholic England, moreover, had no fixed architecture. Indeed, over the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the Gothic itself evolved. But as Protestantism succeeded in England, the Gothic’s forms petrified. They lost their inner vitality and died. “As the discipline of Greek schismatics,” Newman intended to warn the Roman Pontiff through Palma, “they became the petrified witnesses of past ages hardly adequate in fact for Post-Tridentine ceremonies”—a point that the Birmingham Oratory’s master of liturgical ceremonies had insisted upon with Newman. In other words, the Gothic craze opposed the developmental dynamic that had led Newman into full communion with the Catholic Church. The Oratorian feared greatly that the Gothic would reverse for his fellow English Catholics the path upon which he himself had walked.
The problem, as Newman saw it, arose from the failure to distinguish between doctrine and ritual. While doctrine rightly requires unity, ritual allows for diversity. Yet Pugin, according to Newman, confused legitimate opinions regarding ritual with doctrinal errors. Uniformity in ritual—to be precise, Gothic ritual—became Pugin’s priority, thus suggesting to Newman that there were persons “who would be more distressed at a man’s disliking a chancel screen than at his being a gallican.” Taking his argument even further, Newman declared that “Puginism exalts architecture to the profanation of higher things.” It promotes architecture over both doctrine and ritual. Consequently, architecture had ceased to be a means, and had become an end in itself no longer at the service of the Church. Newman vehemently rejected this perverted order that threatened to petrify the Church’s discipline and architecture in a past age. “Now if the rites of the Church have changed,” argued Newman, “let the architecture develop—let it modify and improve itself to meet them.” Otherwise, he feared that “[t]hus the architectural movement is reduced to a sort of antiquarianism or dilettante unpractical affair for Puseyites, poets, and dreamers, who have no religious earnestness.”
These observations led to a further point in Newman’s architectural critique that touches directly upon his own theological method. The neo-Gothic craze entailed the “revival of an almost forgotten architecture.” Although Pugin and company engaged in a retrieval, they acted as if they drew upon “an uninterrupted tradition of Gothic architecture from the time it was introduced till the present day; but this even is not the case. Mr. Pugin is notoriously engaged in a revival—he is disentombing what has been hidden for centuries amid corruptions.” In other words, the very fact of Pugin’s revival witnesses against its continuous tradition.
A similar insight into the Oxford Movement’s retrieval of an ancient patristic standard had led earlier to the collapse of Newman’s own carefully constructed, but ultimately unreal Via Media when he recognized the implicit hermeneutic of discontinuity by means of which it had attempted to retrieve what had been lost. As Newman became disconcertingly more aware of that retrieval’s inherent antiquarianism, he gradually distanced himself from it. Indeed, he had never been inclined toward any form of antiquarianism—theological, ecclesiological, architectural, or otherwise. While still a convinced Tractarian, he had chosen not to join forces with the Cambridge Camden Society that sought to retrieve Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in order to restore pre-Reformation forms of worship in the Church of England.
On the contrary, he cringed before all things extravagant and unreal. Thanks to his patristic studies, Newman had discovered in the contemporary Catholic Church the vital dynamic of development in continuity that enabled not only the Church’s ever greater comprehension of the apostolic deposit of faith, but also the necessary adaptation of her discipline and ritual in response to the needs of each age. Consequently, in his debate with Pugin and his defenders, Newman concluded: “In order that any style of architecture should exactly suit the living ritual of the nineteenth century, it should be the living architecture of the nineteenth century—it should never have died—else, while the ritual has changed, the architecture has not keep pace with it.”
Nonetheless, despite Newman’s personal preference for the Grecian and his serious concerns about the Gothic revival, he was not opposed to the Gothic on principle. As we have already noted, he did in fact admire it. But if it were to be employed in nineteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture, it had to be adapted. “Gothic is now like an old dress,” Newman explains, “which fitted a man well twenty years back but must be altered to fit him now. It was once the perfect expression of the Church’s ritual in those places in which it was in use: it is not the perfect expression now. It must be altered in detail to become that expression.”
Yet the highly principled Pugin who, according to Newman, equated principles with details as if the latter were a matter of faith, allowed for no such freedom. When, for example, Newman had met Pugin in Rome in 1847, Newman had considered the possibility of building his future Oratory in the Gothic style—suitably adapted, of course. But Pugin rejected the idea outright. He told Newman that he would rather build a mechanic’s institute than an Oratory. For no Oratory had existed in the Middle Ages. On that particular point, Newman agreed with Pugin. The Oratory had arisen in the early modern period, and therefore it rightly looked to the modern, not the medieval. No wonder, then, that Newman preferred Philip Neri, a saint of early modernity, to Augustus Pugin, the reviver of medieval Catholic England.
By the nineteenth century, 300 years had passed since the Church of England had broken with Rome. In the meantime, Catholicism had not stood still. Much had occurred not the least of which was the Council of Trent. Its conciliar reforms had promoted not only the didactic in sacred music and art, but also visibility in ecclesiastical architecture. The half-seen mysteries unfolding sacramentally behind the medieval rood screen gave way to highly visible celebrations in unobstructed sanctuaries. As a young Anglican touring the Mediterranean in 1833, Newman had preferred the half-seen to the fully visible. At that time he wrote from Naples to his sister Harriett: “We went into many of the churches both here and at Palermo—and saw somewhat of the Roman service, which is less reverent than the Greek, being far more public—there is no screen—the high altar is in sight.” Clearly, young Newman preferred the autumn. But thirteen years later at Milan, a more mature and by now Catholic Newman had come to love the spring. Describing San Fidelis, he noted: “It has such a sweet, smiling, open countenance—and the altar is so gracious and winning—standing out for all to see, and to approach. The tall polished marble columns, the marble rails, the marble floor, the bright pictures, all speak the same language. And a light dome perhaps crowns the whole.” For Newman, Puginism exhibited the opposite traits that effectively rejected Trent. As Newman related to a friend in 1850,
I was in a church the other day, and there was a high eagle with the large cross on it inside the rail, immediately before the altar—who could see the priest or the Blessed Sacrament at the elevation? What is the meaning of elevation, but to exhibit the Blessed Sacrament? We hear of the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. How is this done in a Puginian church? The throne is atop of the tabernacle, and the top of the tabernacle is on a level with one’s eyes, (standing at the altar); a small chance has such an exposition of fulfilling its name, through eagle, screen and the arches and thick buttresses of the nave.
Despite the praise that Newman had offered only four years earlier for the screens at Saint Giles, he now took issue with the rood screens that had become Pugin’s non-negotiable trademark. Newman lamented that “his skreens [are] so heavy that you might as well have the [liturgical] function in the sacristy, for the seeing it by the congregation.” By means of that architectural idiom, Pugin seemingly exclaimed: “The living spirit shall expand, the outward material case shall not; I will adore mullions of tracery more than the Blessed Sacrament.”
Such architectural seeing and hearing had formed part of Newman’s nascent architectural ecclesiology since his days at Littlemore. He harvested that seed from the Gospel itself. It germinated quietly in his Tractarian intellect until his study of the ancient Church Fathers led him into the Catholic Church. Only then, especially after his Italian sojourn in 1846-1847, did it begin to flourish. The neo-Gothic revival among British Catholics provoked its mature articulation. Those two principles, along with his insistence upon Rome’s universality (Securus iudicat orbis terrarum) and ritual development, firmly guided Catholic Newman’s final two ecclesiastical construction projects.
The Churches Newman Built
Newman became the Vicar of Oxford University’s parish church, Saint Mary the Virgin, in 1828. The village of Littlemore, five kilometers south-south-east of Oxford, fell within its parish boundaries. Unlike the villages around it, Littlemore had no church. Weekly services took place in a rented room. In the spring of 1835, the villagers petitioned the competent authorities at Oriel College, who exercised pastoral oversight of Littlemore, for a church. Once permission had been obtained, Newman began to raise the necessary funds. He engaged the architect Henry Jones Underwood. But, as Peter Howell observes, “[i]n many ways the church was typical of the man [Newman]: he refused to start building until he had all the money needed, he wanted simplicity with dignity, but insisted on combining economy with strength—deep foundations, walls three feet thick, good solid stonework.” The ground breaking took place on July 15, 1835, exposing four skeletons buried east to west in a Christian manner—eighteen more skeletons were eventually found. On Tuesday, July 21, 1835, Newman’s mother laid the foundation stone. She noted later in her diary that the whole village had turned out for the event. On September 22, 1836—a fine day, Newman reports—Oxford’s Anglican Bishop Robert Bagot consecrated Littlemore’s Church of Saint Mary and Saint Nicholas. Newman preached at the ceremony.
At Littlemore Newman built a plain Gothic, utilitarian structure later heralded in the Camden Society’s journal The Ecclesiologist “as being in itself the first unqualified step to better things that England had long witnessed: the first building for many a long year erected, showing itself to be not so much a sermon-house, as a temple of the MOST HIGH.” The church was richly symbolic. The three lancet windows in the eastern apse represented the Trinity. The seven arches under the apsidal windows signified the six days of creation and the seventh on which God rested, the seven last words of Christ, and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Twelve other windows in the nave recalled the twelve apostles. Tractarian Newman boldly built a church, and not a meeting hall. It was Catholic, but not Roman. It was also barely Gothic. For, despite its early English style, argues Guy Nicholls, “it was such a severely simple, rectangular design, whose lancet windows were filled with clear glass, that it was almost impossible to identify any of the elements in it as truly ‘Gothic’ in a sense of which Pugin would have approved.” Thus does Nicholls conclude, “Littlemore chapel was not, nor was it intended to be an essay in Gothic revivalism.”
Littlemore’s architectural simplicity contrasts starkly with its profound significance in Newman’s life. On September 23, 1843, in the Church of Saint Mary and Saint Nicholas, an ecclesiologically challenged Newman preached his farewell sermon The Parting of Friends. Three weeks later he resigned his post at Saint Mary the Virgin, and took up permanent residence with other companions in the modest “monastic” house that he had built also at Littlemore. Two years later at Littlemore, on the rainy night of October 9, 1845, John Henry Newman entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. The neophyte left Littlemore definitively on February 23, 1846. In late summer of that same year, he passed through Milan on his way to Rome. While in Rome he, along with other English companions, espoused the common life of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, adapting it to meet the needs of ecclesial life in contemporary England. As a Catholic priest and Oratorian, Newman built two other churches that demonstrate the development of his religious ideas after the construction of the church at Littlemore. “The building and furnishing of these churches,” observes Nicholls, “was to provide him with an opportunity to put his principles of art into action.”
In the summer of 1850, Newman began planning the construction of a temporary church for the new Oratory at Edgbaston near Birmingham. On May 23, 1851, Newman explained to his fellow Oratorian Richard Stanton that “[n]othing strikes my fancy in style more than the sort of Roman style […] it has a smack of moorish and Gothic—and has all the beauty of Greece with something of the wildness of other styles—yet without the extravagance of the moor and the gloom of the Goth.” Hoping to proceed accordingly with the church’s design, Newman looked for either an Italian or French architect. For he was convinced that “foreigners do such things infinitely better than we.” At least they were less likely to be infected with the English craze for the neo-Gothic.
In August 1851 Newman received at Edgbaston the French Architect Duc (not to be confused with the neo-Gothic architect Eugène Emmauel Viollet-le-Duc) who left Newman with plans for an elaborate Byzantine basilica. The proposed project was not only elaborate, but it was also too expensive. For, unfortunately, due to the Achilli Affair (a libel case that Newman lost unjustly in court), Newman was strapped for funds. He had to content himself, therefore, with “a building large enough for immediate needs, but nothing more.” Consequently, at Edgbaston, he built rather quickly a temporary chapel consisting of four plain brick walls and a second-hand roof from an abandoned factory. The church dedicated to the Immaculate Conception opened on November 22, 1853, the feast of Saint Cecilia to whom the Oratorians were particularly devoted. It housed relics of the ancient Christian martyr Saint Valentine taken from the Roman catacombs that Pope Pius IX had given to Newman and the Birmingham Oratorians. Within three years the church had already become inadequate for the growing needs of the neighborhood. Thus did Newman contract architect John Hungerford Pollen, with whom he had worked on Dublin’s Catholic University Church, to undertake various renovations that Newman himself meticulously supervised.
The piecemeal renovations continued until 1861. A continual lack of funds, however, meant that Pollen had to be satisfied with “a plain altar and a plain decoration.” The Oratorian Henry Tristram explains that the final, makeshift structure was “dingy, shabby, and dowdy, although quaint and attractive in many ways, and entirely devotional.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, the old church was gradually demolished in order to make room for the present church constructed on the same site.
Today all that remains of the former church is the original sacristy that now houses the shrine of Saint John Henry Newman. For these reasons, Newman’s church at Edgbaston tells us little about the Oratorian’s architectural ecclesiology inasmuch as he was unable to unleash his creative forces upon it. But it does witness at least to Newman’s preference for the Roman rather than the Gothic. When his confrères at Birmingham were finally able to construct a permanent church in Cardinal Newman’s memory, they purposefully built “a small basilica carried out in the Italian Renaissance manner.”
In contrast to the church at Littlemore and the chapel at Edgbaston, the Catholic University Church at Dublin represents best Newman’s mature architectural ecclesiology. On June 23, 1853, Newman signed the deed for the land alongside and behind the University House at number 87 on Saint Stephen’s Green. He commissioned the Catholic convert and architect John Hungerford Pollen, whom he had hired to teach Fine Arts at the university, “to draw up plans for a church in the style of the early Roman basilicas.” The church opened on Ascension Thursday, May 1, 1856, but Newman did not install the Blessed Sacrament until November 9. From the beginning, Father Rector had given priority to have ing “a university church, for all those high occasional ceremonies, in which the university is visibly represented … the place [also] for the ordinary preaching on Sundays and holydays, when the pulpit will be filled by some distinguished theologian or sacred orator.” But that “small, shut in, and narrow” construction site imposed strict limitations. Consequently, the church came to resemble a Roman confraternity chapel whose hidden exterior is plain while its interior is not only dignified, but indeed sumptuous. Its style and decorations followed Newman’s preferences—“the ancient churches of Rome serving him as his model, both from his liking them, and from their historical associations.”
In her study of the University Church, Eileen Kane frankly notes that Newman aimed at building a beautiful barn. For even though he considered form superior to color, he had to be content with colorful decorations to enhance the church since the narrow site allowed for little flexibility. As Newman had noted when constructing the Oratory church at Edgbaston, “since we do not distinguish ourselves in form, we must make much of color.” To that end, in conscious imitation of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Newman had Pollen employ rich Irish marbles from Kilkenny in County Offaly. Through Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s assistant Ferdinand Platner at Rome, Newman commissioned French artists Sublet and Souslacroix to paint a series of bright, colorful copies of Raphael’s tapestries for the Sistine Chapel and other images found at the Abbey Church of Tre Fontane depicting the apostles. Newman insisted that clear window glass be used in the clerestory in order not to impede the light nor to interfere with the effects of the “highly-coloured pictures and rich marbles below.” Newman also instructed Pollen to build a flat ceiling for better acoustics. Preaching from the large Italianate pulpit placed outside the sanctuary was, after all, among the University Church’s primary purposes.
In designing the University Church’s apse, Pollen imitated the spectacular, mosaic apse of San Clemente at Rome, providing not only an allusion to that Roman basilica, but also a nod in the direction of the Irish Dominicans who administer it. Pollen’s apse incorporates a semi-dome that depicts the University Church’s patroness, the Sedes Sapientiae, surrounded by a vine whose twinning branches encircle virgins of both sexes. At first Newman had oddly judged the apse to be magnificent, but not splendid. Yet after celebrating High Mass at the altar below, he immediately declared, “the more I looked at the apse, the more beautiful it seemed to me—and, to my taste, the church is the most beautiful one in the three Kingdoms.” Its semi-dome, rows of columns, large pulpit, rich marbles, and colorful paintings assured its architectural beauty, and made it a sacred place where dignified worship contributed directly to the instruction of youth. Thus did the University Church itself become a sermon in stone for those who entered it. Its bright sights and clear acoustics raised the congregants’ minds and hearts to God.
Conclusion
The Brompton Oratory in London has gloriously reproduced the Roman Oratory’s Chiesa Nuova near Kensington Gardens. Had Newman had the funds and the land to build as he pleased, it seems unlikely, though, that he would have done as his London confrères did. Eileen Kane rightly notes that “[i]n his efforts to get back to sources, he had got back to Rome. But it was not the contemporary Rome of Pio Nono, nor the Baroque Rome of the Counter-Reform, rather the heroic, mystical Rome of the early centuries of Christianity. That is where, intellectually and spiritually, he belonged.”
Newman, of course, loved the sixteenth-century Saint Philip Neri and looked to him as his model. But his heart abided with Philip more so within the Roman catacombs than perhaps at the Vallicella. Christian antiquity always remained Newman’s point of reference. He had embraced the Catholic Church because he had discovered within her the Church of the Fathers. Across the ages of doctrinal development, the Fathers’ normative witness to the received apostolic tradition has remained foundational. It assures that ecclesial development does not devolve into a chaotic, free-flowing flux. For despite evolving details, the Church’s constitutive principles do not change. Universality amid legitimate diversity and development in continuity constantly characterize her. Her architecture, Newman argued, must respect both. The evangelical realities of seeing and hearing, moreover, perennially distinguish the Church’s life and mission. The Council of Trent promoted both in the ecclesiastical arts and architecture. Newman followed suit.
The neo-Gothic debate into which he was drawn happily occasioned the articulation of his own mature, ecclesio-architectural principles. Those principles remain as applicable in the twenty-first century as they were in the nineteenth. For the Church, while adapting her discipline to meet the needs of each age, remains in and of herself always the same.
This article originally appeared as “Newman’s Architectural Ecclesiology” in John Henry Newman: Welt Gottes und Wahrheit des Menschen, ed. by Peter Becker, Marianne Schlosser, and Paul Bernhard Wodrazka (Verlag Herder, 2022). Courtesy of Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg i. Breisgau.