Fr Ian Ker turned 80 at the end of August. In the course of a celebratory dinner at the Oxford & Cambridge Club, he was presented with a festschrift as a commemoration of a lifetime spent in the service of the Church through his scholarship, not least as the leading Newman scholar of our age. His biography John Henry Newman continues to stand as the definitive work on the most recent saint of the English-speaking world.
The idea of the festschrift emerged last September, when Serenhedd James (no stranger to these pages) mentioned to me that his former doctoral supervisor would reach his four score years the following August. Ever the journalist – alongside being in his own right a well-regarded historian of the 19th-century Church in Britain and its empire – he added that someone really ought to organise a festschrift for him.
I duly set to work, and within a few days Tom Longford, the managing director of Gracewing publishing, had lent his backing to the project. The volume, entitled Lead Kindly Light, does not claim to be exhaustive in its coverage of Ker’s life and work, but it does give a glimpse of the range and fecundity of his scholarly endeavours. It begins, naturally, with biography: Edward Short treats the narrative from Ker’s childhood to the present day, taking in much along the way.
John Roe deals with Ker’s character and mischievous sense of humour, while Bishop James Conley considers his priesthood and capacity for friendship. Numerous individuals have followed Newman into the Catholic Church through the influence of his writings and life; Bishop Conley’s article is a welcome addition to those conversion stories, not least because Ker is its central figure.
Three of Newman’s co-princes in the Sacred College have also contributed. Cardinal Gerhard Müller writes on the ecumenical implications for Newman’s conversion and Christian unity; Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, explains why Newman should be made a Doctor of the Church and invites the Christian world to learn from the “prophet of equilibrium” the delicate and dynamic relationship between faith and reason; Cardinal George Pell offers his recent Newman Society lecture at Oxford, “On the Suffering Church in a Suffering World”.
Sections on Newman as a theologian, as a writer and as an educator represent three key areas of his legacy – and ground that Ker himself has mined so successfully. Fr Hermann Geissler FSO explores Newman’s motto Cor ad cor loquitur by drawing on his vision of St Paul, articulated in his sermons and grounded in his pastoral experience. Fr Keith Beaumont, of the French Oratory, explains that what particularly attracted Newman was the “beauty of holiness” of St Philip; it was this quality that drew Newman to the man who became his spiritual father, and inspired him to join his Congregation.
Sr Kathleen Dietz FSO is not the first to write on Newman and the Eucharist, but her distinctive contribution is to examine the subject with an eye to its historical development. Fr Carleton Jones provides a detailed analysis of one section of the first part of Newman’s lengthy Letter to Pusey (1865), which deals with the common patristic patrimony of Christians and how – by seeking common ground to disarm Pusey and other like-minded Anglicans – Newman provides “an excellent example of non-reductive ecumenical discourse”.
Serenhedd James examines the reception of Newman in England through the lens of Punch, giving an insight into how Newman would have been seen by those of his fellow Englishmen who were not acquainted with the niceties of Tractarian debates or knowledgeable about the Church of Rome. Andrew Nash demonstrates that Newman had in fact been writing highly effective polemical satire throughout his Anglican years, and extends the insights of Ker’s own landmark essay “Newman and Satire”.
Meanwhile, Fr James Reidy connects Newman to a major theme in the novels of Henry James: the ambiguity of the idea of the English gentleman, so admirably described in Newman’s Idea of a University. The lure of the “religion of civilisation”, with its “glossing of immorality by external graces” and its high cultural ideal, is the dilemma at the heart of The Ambassadors, where James shows that high civilisation and moral deformity can coexist – just as Newman argued so cogently in the Idea.
Andrew Meszaros develops one of the themes that lies at the heart of the Idea, and puts it into a fuller philosophical framework in order to tease out some implications for the modern university; my own offering pulls together Newman’s thinking and practice on the role of the tutor, a neglected aspect of university teaching, and suggests how it might be reincorporated into the academy in post-Covid times.
The two contributions in the final section of the volume take up the theme of the spread of infidelity and error in our times. Newman saw that dark days lay ahead; he expressed his concerns repeatedly in his private correspondence and occasionally also in his preaching. Stephen Morgan takes readers into the battlefield of the world of heresies with the help of Newman and GK Chesterton – the subject of Ker’s other great biography.
Finally, the late Fr Dermot Fenlon, who died just before the book was published, examines the part played by JS Mill in the demise of Christianity in Britain, using Newman’s analysis on what was unfolding around him as a frame. He traces the collapse of Christianity in England through the writings of one of the most influential thinkers in modern times – and provides a running commentary on the working out of secularism through the mind of Newman himself.
It is extraordinary to consider how Ker has worked in all the fields covered by Newman’s own “imperial intellect”: poetry, novels, letters, religious tracts, journal and newspaper articles, lectures, homilies and pastoral work first as an Anglican clergyman and then as a priest of the Oratory of St Philip Neri. Furthermore, Ker’s work on Chesterton highlights another aspect of his own intellectual energy and versatility.
Much more could have been written about Ker’s tireless energy in accepting invitations to speak about Newman all over the world; only a personal secretary would have been capable of writing about these trips – but he has never had one. Then there were the symposia and conferences he himself organised, shouldering the administrative chores just as a certain Dr Newman had to as the founding rector of the Catholic University in Dublin.
Ker’s achievements were acknowledged one damp morning at Cofton Park, Birmingham in September 2010 during the Mass celebrated by Benedict XVI at which he proclaimed Newman to be Blessed. After the offertory, Ker mounted the steps, knelt before Pope Benedict and exchanged words with him. It was surely a fitting recognition of so much sterling work – and from a pope who deeply admired Newman himself.
The festschrift serves as a different tribute to the scholar and priest who has done more to raise the profile of John Henry Newman than anyone else. Meanwhile, the willingness of his friends and other scholars around the world to contribute to this volume has reinforced what I already knew: that Ian Ker is the greatest Newman scholar alive, and that we have been fortunate to have him among us for so long.
Dr Paul Shrimpton teaches at Magdalen College School, Oxford, and has published widely on Newman. Lead Kindly Light: Essays for Ian Ker is available from Gracewing (£20)
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