October 2010 cover

 Father Schiefen, a Newman scholar and long-time professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, died in 2003. The following article, one of the last he wrote, anticipated the event of 19 September, 2010 when Pope Benedict XVI beatified Cardinal Newman in Birmingham, England, the city in which he passed most of his life after his conversion in 1845.

“… a wisdom that can come from God alone.”

      On 11 August 1890 Blessed John Henry Newman died quietly at his Oratory home in Birmingham. His obituary in The Times read:

      Of one thing we may be sure, that the memory of his pure and noble life, untouched by worldliness…will endure and that whether Rome canonizes him or not, he will be canonized in the thoughts of pious people of many creeds in England. The saint…in him will survive.

      Almost a century later, in July 1989, Vincent F. Blehl, S.J, Postulator of Newman’s cause for canonization, submitted the Positio, or official case, to the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and shortly afterward presented a bound copy to His Holiness Pope John Paul II. A decade earlier the Pope had said:

      I…wish to express my personal interest in the process of beatification of this “good and faithful servant” of Christ and the Church. I shall follow with close attention whatever progress may be made in this regard.

      Cardinal Newman did not consider himself saintly. Holy men and women do not view themselves in that way. “I have nothing of a saint about me as everyone knows,” he wrote, “and it is a severe (and salutary) mortification to be thought next door to one.” Others did not agree. His own bishop, William Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham, described a meeting with his most famous subject and concluded, “I felt annihilated in his presence; there is a saint in that man.”

      In this century Pope Paul VI expressed regret that he would not live to see Newman beatified and described his significance as “an ever brighter beacon for all who are seeking an informed orientation and sure guidance amid the uncertainties of the modern world—a world which he himself prophetically foresaw.” John Paul II, while visiting England in 1979, noted the centenary of Newman’s elevation to the cardinalate:

      I cannot come to the Midlands without remembering that great man of God, that pilgrim for truth, Cardinal John Henry Newman. His quest for God and for the fullness of truth—a sign of the Holy Spirit at work within him—brought him to a prayerfulness and a wisdom which still inspires us today.…He can help you to draw nearer to God, in whose presence he lived, and to whose service he gave himself totally. His teaching has great importance today in our search for Christian unity too, not only in this country but throughout the world. Imitate his humility and his obedience to God; pray for a wisdom like his, a wisdom that can come from God alone.

      It is noteworthy that the Holy Father cited for special commendation Newman’s “prayerfulness,” and that while pointing out the importance of his teaching, as Paul VI had done, urged the faithful to imitate and pray for his “humility,” his “obedience to God’s will,” and his “wisdom.”

      The genius of Newman’s thought and literary skill are acknowledged almost universally. His influence, however, should always be seen in the light of his own explanation of the means by which truth is sustained: “[It] has been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, not by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men as are at once the teachers and patterns of it.” His writings, when coupled with the consistency of his life in adhering to the principles he promoted, are cause for considering him a giant among those who in modern times have defended the faith in an increasingly secular society.

      At first glance it is somewhat surprising that a nineteenth-century priest and author who neither sought nor enjoyed personal attention should continue to attract devotees in ever-increasing numbers. Those who have attended any of the many Newman conferences in recent years have noted that his reputation has spread far beyond an elite band of scholars. Many who are drawn to him are unacquainted with the vast corpus of his writings, although most know him as the author of “Pillar of the Cloud,” popularly called “Lead Kindly Light;” and some identify him with “Praise to the Holiest,” stanzas popularized from his Dream of Gerontius, a poem immortalized by the majestic music to which much of it was set by Edward Elgar. Some are familiar with portions of The Idea of a University, or Apologia pro vita sua or, less commonly, the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, or An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. The lasting admiration for Newman, renowned for his holiness of life as well as the breadth and depth of his thought, is based on the perception that there is much to be gained by familiarity with, and even devotion to, one about whom so much has been written.

Anglican Background

      John Henry Newman was born in London on 21 February 1801, the oldest of six children. Raised an Anglican, he was sent to a boarding school just outside the city where, at the age of fifteen, he experienced “a great change of thought” that was to be the guiding force of his life. He described it in his Apologia: “I felt under the influence of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impression of dogma which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.”

      At the age of sixteen Newman was enrolled in Trinity College, Oxford, where, in the fall of 1820, having exhausted himself over preparation, he completed his examinations without distinction. His genius did not pass unnoticed, however; in April 1822 he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, a coveted honour. When he was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church in 1824, he wrote in his journal, “I have the responsibility of souls on me to the day of my death.” Docility to the word of God and the conviction that his talents were to be applied in the saving work of the Church were principles that guided Newman throughout his long life.

      In 1828 Newman was appointed vicar of the university-church of Saint Mary the Virgin. From its pulpit he preached sermons that captivated Oxford. W.C. Lake, later Dean of Durham, described Newman’s sermons and their effectiveness:

      There was first the style, always simple, refined, and unpretending, and without a touch of anything which could be called rhetoric; but always marked by a depth of feeling which evidently sprang from the heart and experience of the speaker, and penetrated by a suppressed vein of the poetry which was so strong a feature in Newman’s mind, and which appealed at once to the hearts and highest feelings of his hearers.

      Dean Lake considered Newman to have been “the greatest force in his time, both morally and intellectually, in the university.” James Anthony Froude, another observer, acknowledged Newman’s influence more personally: “I had never seen so impressive a person.” In later years William George Ward, by then less than sympathetic to him, asked, “Was there ever anything in the world like Newman’s influence on us?”

      Newman’s sermons, when published, touched the hearts of people far beyond Oxford. A century and a half after he first preached them they are still being read; a new collection of his Parochial and Plain Sermons was reprinted in the United States as recently as 1997. Clearly, one need not be holy to prepare an effective sermon, but it is not credible that one man’s influence could be so profound, so far-reaching, and so lasting if it were not based upon the perceived truth of the message and the sincerity of the messenger.

Oxford movement

      In the summer of 1833 Newman launched the so-called Oxford Movement by publishing three Tracts for the Times, brief pamphlets calling upon the clergy of the Established Church to revere its apostolic origin and heed its responsibility to preserve the doctrine and worship confided to the Apostles, taught by the Fathers of the Church, and handed down through subsequent generations. Others joined Newman, producing in the course of the following decade ninety tracts, some of them long treatises intended to provide Anglicanism with a recognizable theology and spirituality.

      The Tractarians, as they were dubbed, had a profound influence on their church. Increasingly, however, they were criticized for the “Roman” content of their teaching. In his effort to explain the evident additions to the teachings of the Apostles and Fathers, Newman, fearful that in fact the Anglican communion might be schismatic, began to write an explanation which he described as “an hypothesis to account for a difficulty.” Professor J.M. Cameron has compared the influence of Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine to that of Saint Augustine’s City of God, Saint Thomas’ Summa theologica, and Calvin’s Institutes as one of those works “of which we can say that after their appearance nothing was ever again quite the same.” He later expanded on this observation:

      Newman’s work sums up and brings to an end a period in the history of the Church of England and of Anglican theology, the period we call the Oxford Movement and the theology we call Tractarianism; at the same time it inaugurates a new period in theology, Catholic and Protestant, and the reverberations the Essay provoked and the problems it raised and tried to resolve are still with us, and the form in which they are with us has been in part determined by Newman’s speculations.

Christian Doctrine

      The fact that doctrine has developed since apostolic and even patristic times is not in question for most theologians today. What is more to the point is how one distinguishes a true development from a corruption. Newman understood the critical dimensions of the question and saw the Catholic system as its answer. “If Christianity be an universal religion,” he wrote, “suited not simply to one locality or period, but to all times and places, it cannot but vary in its relations and dealings toward the world around it, that is, it will develop.” If developments are to be expected, there must be provision for assuring the faithful of their legitimacy: “If the Christian doctrine, as originally taught, admits of true and important developments…this is a strong antecedent argument in favour of a provision in the Dispensation for putting a seal of authority upon these developments.” The argument, never intended as a proof in the strict sense, was sufficiently compelling for him to abandon much that he had long cherished—church, career, family, and friends—in order to embrace a religion that he had devoted many years to refuting. He was received into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845.

Conversion to Rome

      Following studies in Rome, Newman returned to England in December 1847, to Birmingham, where he founded the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. In 1851 he was asked to assist in the foundation of the Catholic University in Dublin, a task which he accepted with the understanding that it was the wish of Pope Pius IX that he do so. It was to inaugurate this project that he began to sketch, in the fall of the same year, the lectures which constitute the first part of his famous Idea of a University. Although the university was not established, for practical purposes, until 1854, much of the period until his resignation in the fall of 1858 was spent commuting between Birmingham, where he retained his position as Superior of the Oratory, and Dublin.

      With the exception of his visits to Dublin, Newman remained in Birmingham for the rest of his life, defending the Church in his writings and responding to the pastoral concerns of those who attended the school he established and of the many persons who sought his assistance and counsel. His Catholic life was not without controversy, however. To many Anglicans he had betrayed a trust, although his Apologia pro vita sua, written in 1864, was instrumental in restoring his standing among his former friends within the Anglican communion. There were Catholics, as well, who mistrusted him. “I don’t like Newman,” wrote the historian John Lingard: “Too much enthusiasm.” Lingard represented Catholics of an older generation who tended to view converts as only half Catholic, unseasoned by the persecution, official and personal, that had been endured for three hundred years.

      There was another group of Catholics with whom Newman found himself at odds: the ultramontanists, who supported and promoted the absolute supremacy of the pope. Newman had defended the Church’s infallibility and the papacy’s indispensable role in his Essay on Development. He never identified himself, however, with the extreme position of those like W.G. Ward, to whom he wrote in 1867 that “you are making a Church within a Church, as the Novatians of the old did within the Catholic pale, and as, outside the Catholic pale, the Evangelicals of the Establishment.”

      Nevertheless, seven years later Newman defended the decrees of the First Vatican Council. He had opposed the exaggerated position of those who were eager for a solemn definition of papal infallibility. He also questioned its timeliness, fearful that it would do more harm than good and be a cause of misunderstanding for years to come. But he accepted and explained the definition of Vatican I in such a way that even his opponents acknowledged the cogency and charitable exposition of his arguments.

      In 1878 Newman’s orthodoxy was vindicated when Pope Leo XIII made him a cardinal. The honour did little to change his way of life, though, since his one condition in accepting it was that he might be permitted to return to his Oratory home where, in fact, he remained until his death eleven years later. Punch magazine, characteristically anti-Catholic but appreciative of Newman, published the following verse:

A Cardinal’s hat! Fancy Newman in that

For a crown o’er his grey temples spread;

‘Tis the good and grey head that would honour the Hat,

Not the Hat that would honour the Head.

      Newman himself appreciated the true value of the pope’s gesture when he observed, “The cloud is lifted from me forever.”

      Newman’s significance today is many faceted, but his lasting contribution must be related to the consistency with which he lived the principles that he espoused and defended. His spirituality was essentially ecclesial. It is impossible to grasp the ultimate worth of his life and achievement without an appreciation of his deep love for the Church. In anticipation of his own death he wrote:

      I die in the faith of the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. I trust I shall die prepared and protected by her sacraments, which our Lord Jesus Christ has committed to her, and in that communion of saints which he inaugurated when he ascended on high, and which will have no end. I hope to die in the Church which our Lord founded on Peter, and which will continue till his second coming.

      His view of what Christ provided in leaving us the Church was not altered significantly by his conversation. In 1864 he recalled:

      I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of revelation, or of more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea.…My happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

      The late Father Stephen Dessain, unrivalled for his life-long devotion to and understanding of Newman, acknowledged that “various answers” could be offered to explain “the special value of Cardinal Newman today.” He concluded, however, that the “fundamental one is that the effectiveness of the Christian religion, its power of controlling and influencing our lives in the way God intends that it should, depends on the fullness and correctness with which it is held.”

The observation
was perceptive.

      Truth, of course, has a reality that transcends the interpretation and understanding of any single individual. Newman came to realize this at fifteen. In his first address as a Cardinal, he recalled that, “for thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion.” He was neither narrow-minded nor bigoted, nor did he ever fail to appreciate the significance of theological speculation, but he carefully described what he believed was an all-encompassing threat to religious unity:

   Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith.

      Father Dessain explained that Newman’s adherence to what he called the “dogmatic principle” was due to his conviction that “when a revealed message is altered or exaggerated, it presents a caricature of its true self, thus failing to be effective, and deterring those who should be attracted to it.”

      If Newman saw the necessity of an infallible authority, it must not be thought that he denied the possibility of its abuse. It was unthinkable, however, that God should not have provided us with the means of harnessing humanity’s “restless intellect” when dealing with matters that are, of their nature, beyond human explanation. Newman’s treatment of ecclesiastical authority was marked by remarkable balance:

   Every exercise of infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action of reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the state exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of authority and private judgement alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide.

      When preparing in 1877 an edition of his Anglican Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman included a Preface which anticipated an approach followed in Lumen gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Professor John Coulson has observed:

      Newman’s purpose is to show how the different and apparently contradictory faces of the Church may be reconciled: if the mission of the Church is to restore all men to Christ by serving them, how can this be reconciled with the needs of internal Church discipline; and how are those needs to be reconciled with the rights of the individual conscience to seek truths and to follow them?

Newman found the answer to what he had once considered inconsistencies by defining the threefold office of Christ as transmitted to the Church:

   He is Prophet, Priest, and King; and after his pattern, and in human measure, Holy Church has a triple office too; not the prophetical alone and in isolation…but three offices, which are indivisible, though diverse, viz., teaching, rule and sacred ministry.…Christianity, then, is at once a philosophy, a political power, and a religious rite: as a religion, it is holy; as a philosophy, it is apostolic; as a political power, it is imperial, that is, one and catholic. As a religion, its special centre of action is pastor and flock; as a philosophy, the schools: as a rule, the papacy and its curia.

      It would be too strong to claim that this vision of the Church’s nature originated with Newman or that it was upon his writing that the framers of Lumen gentium depended. Those who point to Newman’s invisible presence at the council, however have solid reasons to support their observation.

the role of the laity

      Much has been written about Newman’s defence and explanation of the laity’s role in the Church, treated effectively in Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church as well as in Apostolicam actuositatem, its Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People. There were some in his own day who viewed him as a troublemaker, stirring up those whose appropriate role was to be taught and governed. This was a misinterpretation of Newman’s intent. He argued that “the body of the faithful is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine, and…their consensus through Christendom is the voice of the infallible Church.” He was not asserting, in this case, the right of an individual to be heard, but rather that “each constituent portion of the Church has its proper functions, and no portion can safely be neglected.” He developed his theme in a famous essay written in 1859, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.” The same point is made even more strongly in Lumen gentium:

   The body of the faithful as a whole, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. Thanks to a supernatural sense of the faith which characterizes the people as a whole, it manifests this unerring quality when, “from the bishops down to the last members of the laity,” it shows universal agreement in matters of faith and morals.

      Such an understanding, far from diminishing the necessary role of the magisterium, enriches it by broadening the foundation of its teaching.

      Newman was clearly not a minimalist in matters of doctrine. With reference to his adhesion to the teachings of the Church, he wrote, “I profess my own absolute submission to its claim. I believe the whole revealed dogmas taught by the Apostles, as committed by the Apostles to the Church, and as declared by the Church to me”:

   I receive it, as it is infallibly interpreted by the authority to whom it is infallibly interpreted by the authority to whom it is thus committed, and (implicitly) as it shall be, in like manner, further interpreted by that same authority till the end of time. I submit, moreover, to the universally received tradition of the Church, in which lies the matter of those new dogmatic definitions which are from time to time made, and which in all times are the clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined. And I submit myself to those other decisions of the Holy See, theological or not, through the organs which it has itself appointed, which, waiving the question of their infallibility, on the lowest ground came to me with a claim to be accepted and obeyed.

      This is not the assertion of one who takes lightly the claims of ecclesiastical authority. It was Newman’s conviction, nevertheless, that the Church needed learned champions, and that the laity had exercised such a role historically as early as the fourth century. His purpose in accepting the rectorship of the university in Dublin had based on his belief that the laity had to be educated if they were to assume their proper role in defending the faith. As he said in 1851:

      You must not hide your talent in a napkin, or your light under a bushel. I want a laity not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity…. I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism…. I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above, and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and to be saved.

      “In all times,” he concluded, “the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit.

secularism

      Newman saw the approaching battle with secularism as critical. In 1851, discovering that his name had been suggested for the episcopate, he begged to be spared:

   My writings would be at an end, were I a bishop. I might publish a sermon or two, but the work of a life would be lost. For twenty years I have been working on toward a philosophical polemic suited to these times. I want to meet the objections of infidels against the Church.…A fearful battle is coming on and my place seems to lie in it.

      The work to which he alluded, his famous Grammar of Assent, would not be published until nineteen years later. It was the culmination of an effort begun in the pulpit of Saint Mary’s when he delivered, in the course of almost two decades, his Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford. Faith, he sought to illustrate, is reasonable, but not everyone can provide reasons conceptually. His purpose was to provide an apologetic related to human experience. “Ten thousand difficulties,” he wrote, “do not make a doubt.” If, however, reasons for faith had to be put into strict logical form, only the learned could have reasonable certainties.

      “As to the prospects of the world,” he wrote to a friend in 1873, “I agree with you they are very bad. It looks as if a great and almost fiery trial of souls, especially as regards faith, is destined for the next generation.” He viewed the future of his students at the Oratory School “with anxiety and compassion, feeling what sophistries and temptations of the intellect and social perplexities may be in store for them in middle life.” Yet so little was being done to meet the challenge: “Religion is in process of exclusion from the education of high and low, and what will be the issue of this tyranny?”

      Although not grounded in scholastic theology, Newman was certainly appreciative of the Church’s vast theological tradition. As he wrote in the Apologia:

   I consider that, gradually and in the course of ages, Catholic inquiry has taken certain definite shapes, and has thrown itself into the form of a science, with a method and a phraseology of its own, under the intellectual handling of great minds, such as Saint Athanasius, Saint Augustine, and Saint Thomas; I feel no temptation at all to break in pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us for these latter days.

He described theology as the fundamental and regulating principle of the whole Church system, concluding that it “is commensurate with revelation, and revelation is the initial and essential idea of Christianity.”

Scripture

Love of Scripture and the Fathers led Newman to blend them uniquely in his writings. If his theology was essentially biblical, however, he never saw Scripture and tradition as divisible. He recognized the limitations of each when isolated. In his Essay on Development he wrote:

   It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the left and right of our path and close about us, full concealed wonders and choice treasures. Of no doctrine whatever, which does not actually contradict what has been delivered, can it be peremptorily asserted that it is not in Scripture; of no reader, whatever be his study of it, can it be said that he has mastered every doctrine which it contains.

      Scriptural scholarship within the Church left much to be desired in the nineteenth century. “Theologians decide many questions about Scripture which the Church has not decided,” Newman wrote in 1883. “Another great difficulty is the ignorance of our people in the Scriptures. It is to them a terra incognita. The Old Testament especially excites no sentiment of love, reverence, devotion, or trust.” He would have understood and applauded the exposition of the relationship of Scripture and tradition found in Dei verbum, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation.

newman’S prophetic insight

      Newman’s significance today, then, is at least partially the result of his prophetic insight into the century that would succeed his. He seems to speak to us directly and, to cite Paul VI, many find in him “an informed orientation and sure guidance amid the uncertainties of the modern world.” His writings, coupled with the holiness of his life, have led many to a devotion for Newman which would be inexplicable were either aspect separated from the other.

      While he was seriously concerned about the future, only rarely could it be said that Newman was despondent. His faith and his confidence in God were too deep for that. “It is the rule of God’s providence that we should succeed by failure,” he wrote in 1882. Almost fifty years earlier he had concluded his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church with the following passage:

   In truth the whole course of Christianity, from the first, when we come to examine it, is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it. The Church is ever ailing, and lingers on in weakness, “always bearing about in her body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in her body.” Religion seems ever expiring, schisms dominant, the light of truth dim, its adherents scattered. The cause of Christ is ever in its last agony, as though it were but a question of time whether it fails finally this day or another. The saints are ever all but falling from the earth, and Christ all but coming: and thus the Day of Judgement is literally ever at hand…. God alone knows the day and the hour when that will at length be, which he is ever threatening; meanwhile, thus much comfort do we gain from what has been hitherto—not to despond, not to be dismayed, not to be anxious at the trouble which encompass us. “They have ever been; they ever shall be; they are our portion. The floods are risen, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their waves. The waves of the sea are mightily and rage horribly; but yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier.”

      In 1973 Pope Paul VI beatified Dominic Barberi, who received Newman into the Church. The pope then described Newman’s journey as “the most toilsome, but also the greatest, the most meaningful, the most conclusive, that human thought ever travelled during the last century, indeed one might say during the modern era.” The Holy Father’s tribute was a fitting affirmation of the importance of John Henry Newman.

© The Canadian Catholic Review. Reprinted with permission. Ω