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Aside from Amazing Grace

Helping win a historic victory for humanity was an influencer with a shocking back story. Biographer Jonathan Aitken discovers there’s more to John Newton than penning Amazing Grace.

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan is a former politician, and now a prison chaplain.

Statue of John Newton

John Newton is back in the news. 250 years ago in January 1773 he wrote the words of what has become the most recorded, performed and loved hymn of all time – Amazing Grace. 

As a popular song it is right up there competing with Happy Birthday and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. And the spiritual power of its lyrics shines out at an estimated ten million annual weddings, funerals, celebrations and services across the world. 

As a biographer of John Newton I have paradoxical feelings about Amazing Grace.  I love the hymn as much as anyone particularly when it brings tears in the prison chapels where I serve as a chaplain.   

Yet for historical reasons I am disappointed on this great man’s behalf that he is largely remembered only for this hymn.   

For there is much more to John Newton than Amazing Grace. 

For starters he was so close a mentor to William Wilberforce, and so important a witness as an ex-slave ship captain to the horrors of the evil trade, that without Newton the Abolition of Slavery Act 1807 would never have won the necessary Parliamentary votes to pass into law. 

If this great historical achievement was not enough Newton’s colourful back story was the stuff of which best sellers and movies came to be made. 

In his wild youth Newton was a serial rebel.  He ran away from home, church, school and military service.  He was jailed and publicly flogged for desertion from the Royal Navy. 

After being thrown out of the Navy he ended up working as a slave trader in West Africa. 

There the hard drinking, riotous and ruthless young Newton indulged in every imaginable vice.  His business as a brutal kidnapper of natives, whom he sold to slave ships, made him a fortune.  

Then came a dramatic change, Newton got religion.  This happened on the 9th of March 1748.  Newton was on board a ship, The Greyhound, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly a massive storm wave hit the ship and almost broke it apart.  Newton was roused from sleep by a cry of “all hands on deck, the ship is sinking.”   

The storm of gale force winds which ripped a huge hole in The Greyhound lasted for the next seven days.  For most of that time Newton, a strong young seaman, took the helm.  He was certain that he and everyone else on board would be drowned.  In desperation he remembered some of the prayers he had learned from his mother, in his childhood, and started to pray for God to save his life. 

So when, against all the odds, The Greyhound did not sink and limped into the Port of Londonderry, Newton decided that perhaps there might be a God and began going to church. 

Although Newton did start praying and reading his Bible, he did not stop slave trading.  Promoted to being a slave ship Captain he made five further voyages to West Africa.  On his ships he indulged in many of the vicious cruelties that characterised the slave trade. 

Newton kept diaries of these horrors which included chaining, shackling, flogging, thumb screwing and throwing overboard the slaves during their long and dangerous voyage from the West Coast of Africa to the East Coast of America. 

Yet gradually, his self-educating Bible study and some teaching from Christian friends caused Newton to see the light. He gave up the slave trade.  He got a good shore job in his home port of Liverpool, a city which was being targeted by Methodist preachers such as Wesley and Whitefield. 

Newton, by now a soul on fire, became a preacher in dissenter chapels in Lancashire and Yorkshire.   

After some years he applied for ordination in the Church of England.  But he was turned down for ordination seven times in six years by various Bishops and Archbishops.  

These rejections had nothing to do with Newton’s sinful past career as a slave ship Captain.  For in the 18th Century, the Church of England was not merely tolerant of the slave trade.  It reaped many benefits from its large investments in it and the large donations it received from it. All documented in a recent Lambeth Palace Library exhibition.  

Astonishingly the reason why Newton was turned down for ordination was because he was thought to have ‘too much enthusiasm’.  

This was a coded phrase meaning that he was felt to be too close to the Methodists whose evangelical preaching and hymn singing was disapproved of by the established church hierarchy. 

But with the help of an admiring patron, the Earl of Dartmouth, Newton was ordained as a Church of England priest and appointed to a Dartmouth living at Olney church in Buckinghamshire. 

As a Parish Priest Newton was a huge success.  He trebled the size of his congregation to over 600 worshippers.  As a result, the church had to build a gallery to accommodate them. 

But his biggest break through was that Newton started writing articles, books and hymns. These bought him fame and a move to the strategically important church of St. Mary Woolnoth in the heart of the City of London. 

During his 28 years of service there, Newton continued to be a best-selling author, a campaigner for social reforms and a renowned preacher.  Influential people flocked to hear his sermons including an unknown young MP called William Wilberforce. 

Wilberforce first approached Newton to ask him to resolve what the young MP called “my anguish of soul”.  He said he wanted to give up being a Member of Parliament in order to become a Minister of Religion.   

Newton persuaded Wilberforce that it would be better for him to serve God by staying in Parliament. After taking that wise advice, Wilberforce developed a close friendship and mentoring relationship with Newton. 

During the next 15 years there were periods when Wilberforce became depressed and wanted to give up his abolitionist campaign. It was Newton who persuaded him to keep going.   

More importantly Newton became Wilberforce’s most vital witness about the horrors of the slave trade in front of a Select Committee in the House of Commons and in front of William Pitt and his Cabinet. 

Newton’s authentic eye witness accounts of the suffering of the Africans on board slave ships were devastating.   

His evidence and his best-selling pamphlet Thoughts on the African Slave Trade were game changers. Gradually the tide of public and parliamentary opinion turned against the slave trade.  Eventually in 1807 when 82 year old Newton was still the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth,  William Wilberforce’s Abolition of Slavery Bill was voted into law by the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16. 

It was an historic victory for humanity.  And a political triumph for William Wilberforce.  But that victory and that triumph would never have been achieved without John Newton’s mentoring, supporting and his giving of vital evidence to Wilberforce’s campaign. 

In his last years John Newton was venerated as an iconic church leader, bestselling author, and abolitionist reformer. 

Surprisingly, he was not well known in his lifetime for Amazing Grace which only became famous when American churches took it up and made it an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.  So Newton was regarded as a great man long before he was recognised as a great hymn writer. 

Fame was of little interest to John Newton.  He remained endearingly humble.  When he was on his deathbed the 18th century equivalent of a tabloid reporter burst into his bedroom and asked:

“Any last words Mr Newton?” 

He replied:

“Sir I know only two things. That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour!” 

What an exit line!  What a life! 

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5 min read

Faith in Beethoven

Why did Beethoven, the hero of humanism, write music for a mass? Musicologist Daniel Chua explores the maestro’s faith.

Daniel KL Chua

Daniel KL Chua is a musicologist and Professor and Chair of music at the University of Hong Kong. He writes on music, particularly Beethoven, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology. 

Agrand statue of Beethoven as a classical hero seats him on a throne on a dias.
Max Klinger’s Beethoven monument.

Bach’s theological credentials are impeccable, as Jeremy Begbie wrote about previously for Seen & Unseen. But Beethoven’s? Not really. In fact, not at all. Most scholars on Beethoven see him as a secularizing force. If Bach represent the summit of theological expression in western music history, then Beethoven is the poster boy of the Enlightenment progress. He spells the end of sacred music. In the narrative of music history, Beethoven is the catalyst for a new secular epoch. After Beethoven, music is no longer about God but humanity; sacred music drops out from the historical narrative as something irrelevant or even regressive to the progress of modernity.  

But it is not just any Beethoven who wields this secularising power. It is a very particular Beethoven, more myth than man. This is Beethoven as Promethean hero. He overcomes his deafness by defiance, grabbing fate by the throat as it knocks loudly in the opening bars of the Fifth symphony - da-da-da-daaaa! - and triumphing over its C-minor threat in a glorious blaze of C major in the finale.  The symphony is a musical model of human self-determination. It projects Beethoven as a revolutionary artist living in revolutionary times, channelling the anticlerical and antimonarchist fervour of the French Revolution in musical form. His story is one of freedom and autonomy; and his music is made in his image, free from servitude to church and court, and free to be itself.  

This Promethean image precludes Beethoven from being a sacred composer. It is not that he isn’t a sacred composer; rather, he can’t be one in this historical narrative. In fact, Beethoven stands as a rival to the sacred, because by the beginning of the 20th Century, artists such as Max Klinger were building shrines to the composer: Beethoven is the high priest of an art religion. 

The Beethoven monument

A statue of a seat hero, Beethoven, sits on a raised dais in a purpsoe built rom
Max Klinger’s Beethoven monument.

The Vienna Secession’s fourteenth exhibition in 1902 was a shrine dedicated to Beethoven with Max Klinger ‘s monument as the altar. 

But there is a problem. Beethoven wrote sacred music. Not much, admittedly, but enough, including what he declared to be his ‘greatest work’ – the Missa Solemnis. So in order to uphold a more secular Beethoven, scholars have had to explain away his sacred music as inconsequential and his religious beliefs as unorthodox or non-existent. They tie themselves up in knots trying to solve the problem, especially with regard to Beethoven’s magnum opus. Although there is nothing theologically unorthodox in the Missa Solemnis, somehow the mass has to be theologically unorthodox for these commentators: at best it is a mass for deist, but it is mostly a mass about humanity. The liturgical bits can be dismissed, they claim, as something that stifles what is truly Beethovenian; instead, to grasp its meaning, you have to listen to the mass as if it where a symphony resonant with tones of human freedom and autonomy. It is almost as if Beethoven wrote the mass against his will. In one recent biography, the chapter on the Missa Solemnis opens with the incredulous question: “Why did Beethoven write a mass?” 

Why not? The problem is not Beethoven’s (obviously) but the biographer’s belief in a history that sits uncomfortably with the composer. Yes, Beethoven was a revolutionary in the times of revolution. Yes, he was born in the Age of Enlightenment, and even declared ‘freedom and progress’ as the main purpose of art. But that does not make him French; he did not step foot in France, and despite the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution, what Enlightenment meant in Bonn where Beethoven was born and in Vienna where he died, could not be anticlerical or antimonarchist because these cities were under the rule of Enlightened despots who by definition had both kingly and ecclesiastic functions.  In other words, Beethoven was a child of a religious Enlightenment. This means that his innovative and radical works were not composed against the sacred but were inspired by it. This is not to say that there is no truth in a Promethean view of Beethoven or that there is no conflict in his music during this tumultuous period in Europe, but it does imply that Beethoven upheld sacred music. In fact, he leads it in a new direction. And, if we have ears to hear, then the Missa Solemnis can open up a new sound world full of theological resonance. 

While working on the Missa,  Beethoven wrote out the Latin text of the mass on a piece of paper and added a German translation next to each line. As a teenager, Beethoven regularly played the organ for mass in the court at Bonn; he knew the Catholic liturgy from memory. So why would he write out the text and its translation? Because he wanted to explore the meaning of each word more fully, looking up a German dictionary for definitions and synonyms that would enlarge his understanding of the text. And if the expression mark in the score of the Missa (‘with devotion’) and his collection of devotional literature in his library is anything to go by, this process was an act of meditation for the composer. This was no routine setting of the mass. In fact, if you listen carefully, not only did Beethoven look up individual words to amplify their meaning, it seems that he also looked up the biblical reference to set their meaning in context. 

Listen to the Sanctus: you will hear echoes of the biblical book of Isaiah, chapter six. Beethoven conjures up a temple trembling at its foundations as the angels sing ‘Holy, holy, holy’. Similarly, in the Benedictus, you will hear echoes of the Palm Sunday procession from the gospels. The music is a match in the form of a pastoral; it depicts Jesus arriving as a king but in the form a humble shepherd riding a donkey, as the crowds chant “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” There is no sense of Promethean triumph here, but the sound of meekness and majesty. 

We don’t need to tie ourselves up in knots to understand Beethoven or the Missa solemnis as secular. May be, to use the composer’s own words, Beethoven was just an ordinary Catholic writing extraordinary music to ‘instil religious affections’ in the congregants. This view would be a more faithful account of the composer’s life, but it would also radically change the way we understand Beethoven and the subsequent ‘progress’ of music history in our textbooks.  And this, perhaps, points to the most critical function of sacred music: to reveal the hearts of its hearers. The Missa solemnis, as Beethoven's greatest work, is a capstone which many have rejected as the cornerstone of his oeuvre. Try not to trip up on it. 

Listen to Beethoven's mass

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