The Newman Rambler

Newman: A Model for the Synodal Conversion of the Church

15 April 2021 ‖ Grégory Solari

Grégory Solari is a lay philosopher and theologian. He holds the Chair of Catholic Theology of the University of Geneva and is researcher and Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University of Paris. He also works as formator with the Episcopal Vicariate of Lausanne. He completed his doctorate on John Henry Newman at Catholic University of Paris and directs the Ad Solem editions. Author of numerous academic and popular articles, he is the editor of Méditations sur la doctrine chrétienne (2008), co-author of Tolkien, faërie et christianisme (2002), Radical orthodoxy: Pour une révolution théologique (2003), Lire John Henry Newman au XXie siècle (2015), and notably the sole author of Les raisons de la liturgie (2009), Le Temps découvert : développement et durée chez Newman et Bergson (2014), Signes de vie. Chroniques sur la liturgie (2015), John Henry Newman: L’argument de la sainteté (2019), and of the forthcoming Le Cogito newmanien: La prevue du théisme (2021).

The decree recognizing Newman’s second miracle was signed by Pope Francis on February 13, 2019. Besides this miracle, why, for what reasons do we canonize John Henry Newman? Are we canonizing the man? His thought? His conversion? And if beatification seemed like a natural thing under the pontificate of Benedict XVI, who is known to have firsthand knowledge of Newman’s thought, its canonization under the pontificate of Pope Francis may be surprising. A canonization recognizes the sanctity of a life; but it is also an act of the magisterium, and as such is inseparable from the orientation of the pontificate that recognizes sanctity. Let us remember the canonization of Maximilian Kolbe or Edith Stein by John Paul II, or the proclamation of Saint Therese of Lisieux as a Doctor of the Church. What does Francis’ canonization of Newman tell us? Which “Newman” is he canonizing?

Newman and Synodality

To this question we can answer that it is above all the Newman of synodality who will be canonized. Let us recall the publication of the document of the International Theological Commission (ITC) on the “sense of faith” [sensus fidei] of the lay faithful, shortly before the convocation of the Synod of Bishops on the family. What does this “sense of faith” mean? This: that through baptism, each baptized person possesses an “instinct” of faith (right - ortho-doxa), which gives him or her the ability to feel, or to perceive, with the Church what the Spirit says to the Churches. This instinct, or sense, is the life of grace, the life of Christ –the Spirit at work in every Christian, and which finds its objective mirror in the ecclesial institution. Hence a symphony, or a dialogue, between the baptized and the pastors, all beneficiaries of this “sense of faith”. Among the theological authorities mentioned in the ITC document, the name of Newman comes first. For in 1859 (in an article in The Rambler, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine”), almost 15 years after joining the Catholic Church, Newman reminded us that it was natural to “consult” the faith of the baptized, especially in the period before a possible doctrinal definition. To consult: that is, to give them a voice, as is the case in the Synods being held under Pope Francis. In the Newman defending the Church as a people of the baptized, as actors in ecclesial life according to the three modes of diakonia (kerygma, liturgy, charity), Francis gives the Church the living model of “synodality” which constitutes the “path of the Church of the 3rd millennium”. And if we know that the article in the Rambler cost Newman, if not a blacklisting, at least a tenacious distrust on the part of the Roman Curia (“Newman is the most dangerous man in England” was said of him in the Roman corridors, as if echoing the whispers of English prelates in the Vatican), we can also see in it a characteristic gesture of Pope Francis towards his critiques. After Leo XIII, who made Newman a Cardinal in 1877 (“It will no longer be possible to say that I am a heretic,” said Newman, thinking of the ultramontane party, whose vexations he did not cease to endure between 1859 and 1877), it is once again a pope who “confirms” Newman’s ecclesiology. When he received the formal announcement of his election to the cardinalate, Newman raised his famous toast: “If I were to raise my glass, I would raise it first to conscience and then to the Pope.” Will he raise it to the Pope on the day of his canonization? No doubt –but because that pope is Pope Francis. The Pope of the Church that he knew would not see the light of day in his lifetime, but for which he was aware at the time of working.

Synodality and the Conscience of God

This Church –the synodal Church– now has its model, and this model is a saint, because synodality is not a way of life, but the very life of the Church, and this life is none other than that of the Holy Spirit. This is why the theme of conscience is inseparable from that of the Church in Newman. Conscience means three things: a sense of good and evil; a sense of one’s own existence; and last but not least, a a sense, a “feeling”, an affection –a feeling through which and in which the Word of God resounds; a holy Word, a Word of Fire, which burns away all impurity and causes to be consumed all that hinders our journey (syn-odos) towards the Truth, “out of shadows and images” (“Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem”, Newman’s epitaph). The Word of God, the Word made flesh, cannot be proven: it is experienced, before any reasoning, any explanation, in an original “impression” that always exceeds what can and will be said about it. This is what Newman became aware of in 1816, during his “first conversion” in the milieu of English Calvinism. “There are only two absolute beings, and two only, whose existence attests and enlightens each other: myself and my Creator. Newman’s whole life constitutes the unfolding of this awareness, in the sense of an “impression”, a feeling, a self-affection coming from Elsewhere, and yet felt as within ourselves. “As”, because here the border blurs between “interiority” and “exteriority”. It is a Life that is experienced - the Life of God that we live, unbeknownst to us, because it is still “hidden with Christ in God”. It is to this ground, to this “world [baptismal and ecclesial] of Life” that Newman always leads us back, beyond theoretical constructions, logical formalizations, as to the gold on which all our sciences are indexed, including that of God (theology). This ground, from the point of view of Newman’s ecclesiology, is the life of the baptized.

Returning to the Basis of Faith

This is why we must consult them, as we consult the color of the sky to sense [(pres)sentir] the variations of the climate. In this sense, the people of the baptized are not so much the “base” of the ecclesial pyramid, according to a distorted representation, since corrected by Vatican II, as the “milieu” in which and through which the Word of God is heard. The Word always resounds there, but because what it says –because of what it is: Revelation –exceeds all that we can say about it, we never stop spelling out the Name “above all names” that is said there. The “Idea”, or the “Dogma” –that is, Revelation as Figure and as Word– according to Newman’s lexicon, because they are always given with an “overlay”, therefore imply a grasp by sketches: the Dogma unfolds in doctrines (doctrinal development); the Implicit appears in its explicit formalizations: doctrines, but also and above all in concrete lives, inhabited by the Life of Christ, allowing themselves to be led by the Spirit to the point of becoming transparent to the Father’s view. And once again, it is not in the Doctors that Newman looks for models (not knowing himself to be a model); or rather, these models are not those of the Church of the second millennium (the medieval Doctors, then the modern theologians), that is to say, those of the period known as “metaphysics” (13th-19th century), but the Fathers of the Church, and even more so the apologetic Fathers, prior to or contemporaneous with the Council of Nicaea (in particular Athanasius of Alexandria). That is to say, the theologians who witnessed to the fact that the “right faith” [ortho-doxa] was defended not by the “wise and learned”, but by the “simple”: the people of the baptized, who in turn witnessed to the synodality of the Church –and also to the fact that synodality conveys a scheme of thought (let us say: a rationality) which, because it derives from the sacrament of baptism, can be considered as the authentic exercise of reason in the face of revelation. This exercise is “confession”: confession of faith (apology, not to be confused with apologetics), that is, thanksgiving for the gift of faith, for the gift of Life, for the salvation given.

Letting the Word Ring Out

During the first millennium, synodality as the life of the Church and as a way of experiencing and expressing what is given to the Church (the Word) has found its authentic translation in the vita monastica [monastic life]. The monastic life testifies to what the baptismal life is when it is reduced to the awareness that there are only two beings that mutually attest to their existence: myself and my Creator. This is why, rather than the Dominicans in the Middle Ages, who “predicate” rather than preach the Word and tend to produce sums and treatises to establish the truth rather than letting it appear or resound in the speaking response to the given Word –rather than the Jesuits (pace pope Francis) in the modern age who are busy penetrating Creation rather than dwelling in the dazzle of discovering the Creator, like Ignatius at Manresa, Newman turns instead to the Benedictines: namely the monastic life, without restriction of order or obedience, as witnesses to the synodal and baptismal life of the Church. But because this monastic life sometimes tends to dwell more on the “rule of life” (its theoretical formalization, therefore) rather than on the Life of God as the rule of rules, faithful to the proper impulse of its thought, it is to the ground of this “life regulated” by God and for God –better: to what God’s life is, as he himself has manifested it to us in Jesus Christ, that Newman leads back and makes the Christian life rest: on love –on charity, which, like a “hyperbole,” always surpasses all reason, all reasoning. “We believe because we love”.

Charity as a Way out of Nihilism

Newman, as a model of synodality in all the senses we have attached to this term, is presented as the saint of the Church of the third millennium. By this primacy given to the logic of charity as the authentic expression of the rationality of Revelation, he also presents himself as the Father of the Church who will see the night of nihilism gradually dissipate. If we no longer know how to believe, if the question of God no longer arises, except as a resolved question, it is because we no longer know how to love. We look for God, or the “proof of his existence” in “reasons”, “demonstrations”, and in the face of indifference, we turn to the schemes which presided over the eclipse of God, because they bring back the [Platonic] One who remains beyond everything inside a dialectic scheme. Now another grandeur animates the Dogma, like the constitution of the doctrines: that of charity. In an Anglican sermon on the nativity, Newman evokes the time when the first Christians lived by the vision of the icon of Christ in them. They saw him because they loved him. When the love had cooled, then began the questions and objections; the heretics spoke, and the Christians had to answer. But always this answer (doctrinal and also existential) is marked by the logic of charity as the seal of truth. He who loves does not speak of what he loves; he wants to be near. He wants to speak to him. What is the first concrete, pastoral lesson that can be drawn from this link between synodality, the test of God’s life, monastic life, and charity in the light of Newman? The Acts of the Apostles states that it was not the speech or actions of Christians that impressed the world around them, but this: “see how they love one another”. Let’s hear it well here: “how they love each other”, not “how they love us”. In this perceived mutual love, it is not a self-centered Church that celebrates itself, it is the Life of which it lives –the Trinitarian love that runs through the community and is manifested, felt, heard, in the love of the baptized for the Lord who makes himself present in their midst in thanksgiving, in praise, in prayer. Newman would perhaps say to us: “Let us love, let us pray, and the world around us will in turn see Him whom we see”.

The Synodal Church as Oratory?

A final word, to bring everything together. When Newman joined the Catholic Church in 1845, the Anglican clergyman and former Oxford scholar that he was did not become a monk, nor did he join the Dominicans or the Jesuits, for the reasons given above. He chose the Oratory (founded by St. Philip Neri) because there was no rule except charity, and also because in the Oratory he found something of the synodality that the Christian communities of the Reformation had retained. Priests and lay people coexisted in this free society open to all the cultural and social horizons of society, including the poorest. The Church as Oratory is perhaps the best definition of synodality in Newman.

* This text was first published in French as «Newman – la canonisation en question» on 14 February 2019 in La Croix, https://faire-eglise.blogs.la-croix.com/newman-la-canonisation-en-questions/2019/02/14/. The text has been translated and republished in The Newman Rambler: Faith, Culture & the Academy with the gracious permission of the author.