The Paradox of John Henry Newman

In the Times Literary Supplement , Anthony Kenny reviews a new biography of John Henry Newman :

. . . Newman’s own character is full of paradox. Here is a man who spent the first half of his life trying to persuade the Church of England to be more like the Church of Rome, and the second half of his life wishing that Roman Catholics were more like Anglicans. Beyond other theologians, he exalted the episcopal office; yet he spent much of his life annoying the bishops of both his Churches. A Catholic of liberal bent, he repeatedly denounced liberalism as one of the greatest evils. Even his most obvious virtues provide obstacles for his biographer. Anyone who writes about him quickly discovers that he is such a gifted writer, and his style is so bewitching, and so superior to one’s own, that one hardly dares to paraphrase his thought, and ends up overloading one’s text with verbatim quotations.

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