‘An Aristocracy of Exalted Spirits’
The Idea of the Church in Newman’s
Tamworth Reading
Room
David P. Delio
In ‘An Aristocracy of Exalted Spirits’, the first book-length study of John Henry
Newman’s Tamworth Reading Room, David P: Delio offers a new framework for understanding
this highly original work of satire, politics, and theology. In February 1841 John
Henry Newman responded in The Times of London to an address given by the leading
Conservative politician, Sir Robert Peel, who was to become prime minister of the
United Kingdom for a second time later that year. Newman assumed the penname Catholicus
and composed seven letters woven together by theological and philosophical themes.
These themes coalesced into Newman’s ‘idea’ of the Church which contested an errant
view, argued by Peel and others, that science and education divorced from the Church
provided an alternate means to human fulfillment. This original study traces the
intertwined histories of Peel and Newman and the background and consequences of the
letters, while showing how Newman’s ecclesiology was at the heart of his project.
The drama surrounding the Tamworth Reading Room helps to complete a picture of the
Church and of a Christian trying to negotiate an emerging democratic, scientific,
and industrial nineteenth century. This story is still with us today over fifty years
from the Second Vatican Council, forty from Lausanne, through the Lambeth Conferences
and other ecclesial movements. A return to the Tamworth Reading Room, an oft forgotten
work, may help the Church negotiate the perils and promise of the third millennium.
9780852448823 380 pages £20.00