Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Description

Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman is one of the most important essays on religion in the 19th century and also a powerful and poetic spiritual autobiography of a man of integrity and of high moral standards.

John Henry Newman was born in 1801. Educated in Oxford, he became an academic, a Church of England priest and a leader of the Oxford Movement, an Anglican group that advocated the return of the Church to rituals and principles from before the Reformation. The movement generated much controversy and led to Newman’s decision to leave the Church of England as well as his position as a professor at Oxford and to convert to Catholicism in 1845. Newman was harshly attacked for his decision by one of his formal rivals, Charles Kingsley, a progressive priest of the Church of England and a friend of Charles Darwin. Kingsley questioned Newman’s honor as well as his faith and accused him of trying to undermine the Church of England way before he became a Catholic. It was this criticism that prompted Newman to write his Apologia, an apology of his decisions and motives.

What makes Newman’s response very special is not only that it sheds light on a deep controversy inside the Church and presents the conflict through the eyes of a participant, but also the honesty that Newman views his life with. The prose was written is conversational style that is just as easy to read today as it was in the 19th century and it discusses how Newman’s faith changed over time, revealing how he gradually understood the difference between the dogmas at the core of the Church of England and the principles that informed faith in the fourth and fifth centuries. He also provides an account of the motivation behind his conversion to Catholic faith – an account that surprises even modern readers with its honesty.
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