John Newman, born in 1801, was a graduate of Trinity College Oxford, an impressive young preacher who flirted briefly with evangelical thought before working to bring the Anglican church closer to its origins in Catholic thinking. When the Oxford Movement failed to sway the Anglican hierarchy, Newman and a small band of followers abandoned the comforts of Anglican clerical life for the rigours of Rome. He found a home, he wrote later, in ‘the One True Fold of the Redeemer’.

It was a decision driven by the head, not the heart. Defecting to Rome meant leaving the established church, a secure life in Oxford, respectability; but Newman felt he had no choice. As he examined the competing claims of the two churches, he could find no firm foundation for Anglican practice. The prior claims of the Catholic faith seemed irrefutable, and in 1845 Newman renounced clerical life for training as a priest and a new life among the celibates of the Birmingham Oratory, his base for decades until his death at the age of eighty-nine.

Newman had many reasons to reflect on the choice. He was not impressed by the intellectual life of the Catholic Church in England, and often found himself in conflict with a petty local hierarchy. Nor did he warm to the Vatican, remaining deeply sceptical when Pius IX claimed Papal Infallibility, in 1854. In Newman’s reading of Catholic tradition, even the pontiff should be careful about pronouncing in areas without a firm theological base.  ‘I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please’, as Newman once said, ‘still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’

Yet Newman displayed no obvious doubts about his vocation. Instead, year after year, he produced sermons and tracts, pamphlets, and books arguing the case for faith. It was an astonishing output, establishing a reputation and influence for Newman far beyond the university, school, and congregations he led at various times. Newman’s works – with their distinctive style, influenced by the Romantic poets, extended metaphors drawn from nature, and arguments that circulate leisurely around a topic, exploring it from every angle – are read still in Catholic circles and beyond.

Such writings did not always endear Newman to his readers. Some did not appreciate the imagination and verve required, for example, to describe Catholic Christendom as a ‘… moral factory for the melting, refining and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes’.

When Leo XIII became pope in 1878, the Church was no longer in the hands of a disappointed conservative, brooding over the loss of the Papal States to the new Kingdom of Italy, but of a fellow intellectual. Leo XIII was determined to make sense of the modern world through a Catholic lens, and had time aplenty to see through his reforms – he would reign for twenty-five years, dying in office at the age of ninety-three (not 103, as Cornwell mistakenly suggests).

The new pope, younger than Newman, was a fan – he had read Newman’s writings over many years, and shared his interest in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. Soon after his election, Leo XIII invited Newman to Rome, and offered him the post of cardinal, a rare honour for a man still a priest who held no high office in the church. Newman accepted, but on condition he could return to Birmingham and resume a quiet life of writing and preaching.

Newman recounted his religious life in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a book still in print. There have been several biographies since, including an acclaimed new detailed life by Ian Ker. But few are as engaging as John Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint. Cornwell takes his subject seriously, finding virtue and wisdom in almost all Newman’s works and deeds. To make Newman intelligible, Cornwell carries his reader through Anglican and Catholic church history and Newman’s extensive writing, including a novel, hymns, and The Dream of Gerontius, an influential poem about life after death.

The John Henry Newman who emerges is above all an impressive mind, with a subtlety of thought that endures. Faced with the writings of Charles Darwin, Newman did not panic as did some of his contemporaries. He saw the elegance and common sense of Darwin’s observations: as he wrote in a notebook, ‘I mean that it is as strange that monkeys should be so like men, with no historical connection between them’. Yet, as he said in a letter, ‘It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter’. A mind nurtured on the poetry of Wordsworth could appreciate that faith might respond to the sublime alongside a close reading of texts.

Despite the striking sentences and occasional flashes of malicious wit, there is also a coldness in the portrait offered by Cornwell. This is a man who loved all but none too close, who lived an institutional rather than a personal life, always in male religious establishments, with help close at hand so he could close the door and concentrate on drafting. No wonder his collected writings ran to thirty-two volumes.

When Newman did venture into the world, the results were not always impressive. His Oratory split into tense groups in Birmingham and London. A boys school founded with high hopes was kept alive only by the extraordinary hard work of a college. That Catholic University in Ireland, so celebrated by President Hugh Brady, proved a disappointment to Newman and the Irish bishops. After a promising start, interest dropped sharply, until only three students were enrolled. The project would have failed entirely had it not quietly folded into other institutions, to become part of University College Dublin.

Cornwell pays dutiful attention to modern speculation about whether Newman was gay. There is no evidence and, as he rightly judges, even less reason to ask. This was a man who lived in his mind, supported by faith, and there is no reason to doubt he took seriously his vows of chastity. There appears no rich private life hiding behind the public mask. Newman was as he presented: a man in love with God his whole life, often distant, therefore, from those closer to hand.

John Cornwell has provided a memorable life, skilfully tracing the intellectual development of a formidable theologian and educator. Like celebrity, sainthood looks a dubious honour – to the modern eye, a sad and lonely existence. But that would be unfair to Newman. His works, his letters, and his acts make clear, with a vividness often startling, that this was the life he valued. He is fortunate indeed to find in John Cornwell a sympathetic and perceptive champion.