John Henry Newman's last act of friendship

Why the beatified cardinal wanted to be buried with Ambrose St John is disputed, but for me this was an act of 'sworn brothers'
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John Henry Newman saw friendship as the foretaste of heaven.
John Henry Newman saw friendship as the foretaste of heaven. Photograph: Herbert Barraud/Getty Images

Why was John Henry Newman buried in a shared grave with Ambrose St John? It was his express wish – of St John he wrote: "From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable" – and has been used to claim he is a gay saint. That's clearly anachronistic and, to my mind, distorts and abuses the significance of Newman's last act, which was actually about friendship.

Newman was self-consciously adopting a tradition of centuries, whereby individuals, now called "sworn brothers", were buried together beneath epitaphs such as: "In life united, in death not divided." It was not a romantic gesture, but a theological statement. Committed friendship in life had been for them a foretaste of communion in heaven. It's a view brilliantly expounded in Alan Bray's The Friend.

Bray's conclusion is inevitably speculative when it comes to Newman in particular. Newman didn't leave unequivocal evidence about what he was doing, though the circumstantial evidence is compelling. And more so, I think, than an alternative thesis in this month's Standpoint.

It's penned by Dermot Fenlon, the academic Oratorian who was expelled from the Oratory and banned from the Newman beatification ceremony. There's nothing of that in the piece. Instead, Fenlon outlines a view of communal burial based on the notion of ad sanctos.

Christianity is an incarnational religion, which means that the material world matters. Holy places, in particular, are routinely visited and venerated, none more so than sites where saints are buried. Further, Christians have long sought to be buried near saints – the practice of ad sanctos. Fenlon outlines this tradition and argues that this is what Newman wanted to imitate. It was not friendship but sanctity he sought to express.

Not his own sanctity, though, but those of his fellow Oratorians, including St John, who had clearly suffered as a result of their exertions for Newman's various causes. In death, Fenlon argues, Newman wanted to point to them. So he arranged for them to be buried together.

However, there are parts of this alternative explanation that don't add up – or at least the article raises questions. The most obvious is why Newman was placed in a shared grave with St John, and only near his other brethren. The significance of the shared grave is the strength of Bray's thesis, explored at book length. Fenlon doesn't account for it.

Also, Fenlon links ad sanctos to the practice of moving the bones of saints into city churches. It has a powerful political, as well as devotional, meaning: making the city a Christian city – and by extension the country Christian, and indeed Europe Christian. That all chimes with the Pope's Christianisation agenda. But if Newman was engaged in that too, why did he deliberately have himself buried in compost so that his bones would dissolve, as they were discovered to have done at the exhumation of the grave? That reads more like a rejection of the practice, not an affirmation. Perhaps Newman wanted to be clear his wasn't an ad sanctos burial but one of sworn brothers. (Fenlon accounts for the compost as Newman's desire to point to his community and not himself. But why erase yourself when you are clearly so important for that community? To do so would only draw further attention to yourself.)

Alternatively, it's also possible that the two theories needn't compete. Fenlon notes Newman "believed that nobody became a saint on their own". If the word "saint" is used in the sense of living in heaven, that is precisely the point of the committed friendship Bray explores – friendship as the foretaste of heaven, and also friendship as part of being made ready for heaven, as Newman explains in his sermons: friendship was, for him, a school of divine love.

Newman's advocacy of friendship is hard to make when, on the one hand, there are those who would use him as a gay icon and, on the other, there are others who would make him a comfortable, conservative saint. But I suspect that friendship is where it's at for him, and it's on friendship that – along with his other concerns – he is so rich a thinker.

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