The Newman Rambler

Reading John Henry Newman

21 April 2021 ‖ Michael Pakaluk

Michael Pakaluk is Ordinary Professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University, where he studied philosophical logic with W.V. Quine, Burton Dreben, and Warren Goldfarb, philosophy of science with Hilary Putnam, and political philosophy with John Rawls. Rawls directed his dissertation, “Aristotle’s Theory of Friendship,” and Sarah Broadie (then at Yale) also served on the thesis committee. Pakaluk’s main work as a researcher has been in ancient philosophy, as he has authored many papers and three books concerned with Aristotelian ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books VIII and IX (1999); Aristotle’s Ethics: An Introduction (2005); and (with Giles Pearson) Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (2011). Other publications include: The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel According to Mark (2019), Mary's Voice in the Gospel According to John: A New Translation with Commentary (2021), and (with Mark Cheffers) A New Approach to Understanding Accounting Ethics: Principles-based Accounting Professionalism Pride (2005) and Understanding Accounting Ethics (2007). His deeper concern is the recovery of a just appreciation of the classical outlook. In 2011 he was appointed an Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

I cannot begin this talk the way Martin Heidegger once began a lecture on Aristotle, “Aristotle was born, and then he died”, to get the history and personal life out of the way, and turn immediately to Newman’s thinking itself. One reason is that Newman never wrote works of pure theory. He complained that he did not have leisure for this. All of his works were written in response to some controversy, or task, or sensed duty. The other is that we precisely do not admire Newman simply for his thought. His unity of life and depth of character are sources of his great appeal. Here are two encounters with Newman which illustrate this.

I once went on pilgrimage to the cottage in the village outside of Oxford, Littlemore, where Newman and some friends retreated to fast and pray while Newman was deciding whether to convert to Catholicism. I was shown a desk of dark wood, similar to a draftsman’s desk — consisting of a single plank which could pivot. “Here is the desk on which Newman composed the Development of Christian Doctrine” my guide said — the work by which he reasoned himself into accepting the claims of the Catholic Church — “And, when the great Passionist priest, Blessed Dominic Barberi, arrived to receive Newman into the Church,” my guide continued, “they pivoted the desk so that it lay flat, becoming a table and an altar, where Blessed Dominic celebrated Newman’s first Mass worshipping as a Catholic.” No greater image of the unity of scholarship and faith could be sought — and a good reminder for us scholars that our desks are crosses.

On another occasion I visited the Birmingham Oratory, which Newman helped to found, and where he labored as a Catholic priest for the second half of his life. There, I was able to do research in Newman’s own library and, in particular, as I am an Aristotle scholar, I wished to consult his own copy of the Greek text of the Nicomachean Ethics. He taught tutorials from this text. I expected to find insightful marginalia. But, far more than that, I found that he had “interleafed” the Greek text — that is, that he had had the binding cut, had interposed blank pages between the pages of Greek text, and had had it rebound — so that while he studied this great work, so influential for him, he had ample space to write his own commentary and notes. This to me was a great image of the seriousness and depth of his intellectual character — made even more impressive when one considers that his main work of scholarship at the time was in the Arian controversy of the 4th century and the Church Fathers generally.

Like St. Thomas, Newman’s holiness shines forth in his intellect. If we had only his writings as evidence, those might just be enough for a wise tribunal to find him a saint. He himself shows in an exemplary way what he thought all Christian teachers should be for their students. In a sermon, “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training,” which he preached as Rector of the new Catholic University in Dublin, he tells us what he wanted:

“Here, then, I conceive, is the object of the Holy See and the Catholic Church in setting up Universities; it is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God, and have been put asunder by man. Some persons will say that I am thinking of confining, distorting, and stunting the growth of the intellect by ecclesiastical supervision. I have no such thought. Nor have I any thought of a compromise, as if religion must give up something, and science something. I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for is, that they should be found in one and the same place, and exemplified in the same persons. I want to destroy that diversity of centres, which puts everything into confusion by creating a contrariety of influences. I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion. … Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.

“This is no matter of terms, nor of subtle distinctions. Sanctity has its influence; intellect has its influence; the influence of sanctity is the greater on the long run; the influence of intellect is greater at the moment. Therefore, in the case of the young, whose education lasts a few years, where the intellect is, there is the influence. Their literary, their scientific teachers, really have the forming of them. Let both influences act freely, and then, as a general rule, no system of mere religious guardianship which neglects the Reason, will in matter of fact succeed against the School. Youths need a masculine religion, if it is to carry captive their restless imaginations, and their wild intellects, as well as to touch their susceptible hearts.”

Where Newman’s intellect is, there is his influence. And we do well to use this word ‘influence,’ because the phrase ‘personal influence’ is something like a technical term in Newman’s philosophy. It stands for how one person is drawn to be like another in friendship. For Newman, personal influence is the best mode of spreading the faith, and, as it indicates a realm of freedom, it is to be preferred over law and coercion in forming character. When we read Newman, we sense that he has us in mind, that he has befriended us, that in sincerity he speaks from his heart, never to use or manipulate us, always to invite us in.

Thus, Newman is appealing, to academics especially, because of his unity of scholarship and reason, his depth of intellectual character, a holiness that shines through his intelligence, and an intimacy of thinking and reasoning together, to which he seems to invite his reader.

Life and Works

He was born in London on February 21, 1801 and died in Birmingham on August 11, 1890, a life, then, which just about spanned the entire 19th century. All his years of flourishing fell within the reign of Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne in 1837. John Stuart Mill was a contemporary, five years younger, but who died much earlier, and yet Mill and Newman do not engage each other or so much as mention the other in their vast works.

The career of his life is that he was a precocious youth who played the violin and loved the Arabian nights, and who knew from an early age that God was asking him to be celibate. As an undergraduate he attended Trinity College, Oxford, but from anxiety did poorly in his exams, finishing ‘under the line’ with a lower second class honors in Classics, and failing in Mathematics. But he was capable and bright, and, after much diligent study in 1823 was elected a fellow of Oriel College, where he associated with the school of intellectuals called the “Noetics” and assisted Richard Whately in the preparation of his treatise on Aristotelian logic, Elements of Logic. In 1826 he was ordained a priest in the Anglican church. In the 1830s he began reading in the Church Fathers deeply and became one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, also called the “Tractarian Movement,” because of the pamphlets called Tracts of the Times, which its leaders published. From 1824 to 1843 his sermons from the pulpit at St. Mary’s on High Street in Oxford made him magnetically popular in the Oxford community.

Tract 90 (1841) became the most famous of them all, an attempt to show that the 39 Articles of the Anglican Faith admitted of being interpreted in sense completely consistent with Roman Catholicism. The tract became a best-seller throughout the British Empire. Perhaps you have seen photographs of Newman’s desk in his impressive library several stories high in the Birmingham Oratory. He purchased that library with royalties from the sale of Tract 90.

Newman resigned his position at St. Mary’s in 1843, retreated to Littlemore, and was received into the Catholic Church on 9 October 1845. The following year he went to Rome, was ordained a Catholic priest and awarded the Doctor of Divinity by Pope Pius IX. Two years later he returned to England as a father in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri and took up residence in the Birmingham Oratory, mentioned already, where he spent the rest of his life, mainly devoted to establishing a boys’ school there and teaching in the school, except for the four-year period, 1854-8, when he lived in Dublin in the failed effort to establish a university there as its Rector.

The arc of his life to his fellow countrymen looked like a failure. He was the leading intellectual in Oxford in the 1840s, but then converted to Romish superstition and spent the rest of his life teaching boys in an important industrial but not intellectual center (although Hillaire Belloc was a student there, and Gerard Manley Hopkins was hired by Newman out of college to teach there). Newman’s reputation was rehabilitated by the publication of his spiritual autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in 1865; through his election as an honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1878; and through his being created a Cardinal in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII. Newman placed on his cardinal’s shield the motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, “Heart speaks to heart,” taken from St. Francis de Sales, and which commentators today such as the philosopher  John Crosby regard as an apt expression of what is referred to as Newman’s philosophical “personalism.”

On Newman’s gravestone at his request was the inscription, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (“Out from the shadows and phantasms, into the truth.”) A curiosity is that when the grave was opened in 2008, in anticipation of Newman’s beatification, no human remains were found. A forensic archeologist from the University of Birmingham who studied the matter opined that soil acidity could not have been the cause, because when the bones are completely decomposed, the handles of the coffin also do not survive, and yet they were intact.[1] Newman’s remains seem to have suffered a quasi-miraculous reduction to dust, the way some saints show incorruption. Perhaps Our Lord wanted to make it clear that he really had passed ex umbris et imaginibus.

Newman’s major non-fiction works are these: Parochial and Plain Sermons (1824-1843), Oxford University Sermons (on Faith and Reason) (1843), Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Idea of a University (1852), Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865), Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).

Some noteworthy minor works and fiction include: Essays on Miracles (1826), Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (on conscience, 1875), Biglietto Speech (1879), Loss and Gain (1848), Callista (1855), Dream of Gerontius (1865).

Let’s say you know nothing about Newman and want to find a way into his work: what should you read? I think there are three ways to start, corresponding, as it were, to The True, The Good and The Beautiful. It depends on what seems most attractive to you. If the True, then read first the Apologia, which is Newman’s account of his life as a sincere search for the truth about Christ and his Church. You will see for example how Newman’s study of the Fathers led him to see himself in a new light. In a work called the Via Media (1838) he had argued that the Anglican Church was the true church, as it forged a middle way between Protestantism, which was essentially a rebellious position, and Romanism, which was vitiated by superstition. But a maxim which St. Augustine had employed against the Donatists haunted him, Securus iudicat orbis terrarum, “the whole world judges aright”:

“Securus judicat orbis terrarum; they were words which went beyond the occasion of the Donatists: they applied to that of the Monophysites. … They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! not that, for the moment, the multitude may not falter in their judgment,—… but that the deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, … they were like the “Tolle, lege,—Tolle, lege,” of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. Securus judicat orbis terrarum!

“By those great words of the ancient Father, ’interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history,’ the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized.”

On the other hand, if it is The Good which most attracts you, then read the Parochial and Plain Sermons. Ignatius Press collects all five original volumes into a single volume with thin paper that is 1763 pages thick. It took me a year of daily reading to work through them. But let the Spirit guide you. The titles give you a sense, “Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity,” “Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow,” “Love of Relations and Friends,” “Rebuking Sin,” “The Danger of Accomplishments.” Each is deeply interesting. They are invariably brilliant. One finds deep meditations on characters from Scripture, especially the Old Testament, and a shrewd perception of human nature and human psychology. One main theme, for example, is the importance of watchfulness as an essential trait of a Christian. Here is what he says about it at one place:

“Now I consider this word watching, first used by our Lord, then by the favoured Disciple, then by the two great Apostles, Peter and Paul, is a remarkable word, remarkable because the idea is not so obvious as might appear at first sight, and next because they all inculcate it. We are not simply to believe, but to watch; not simply to love, but to watch; not simply to obey, but to watch … He watches for Christ who has a sensitive, eager, apprehensive mind; who is awake, alive, quick-sighted, zealous in seeking and honouring Him; who looks out for Him in all that happens, and who would not be surprised, who would not be over-agitated or overwhelmed, if he found that He was coming at once.”

Finally, if it is The Beautiful which you think would be your best approach, then read Newman’s novel about being a student in Oxford at the time of the Oxford Movement, Loss and Gain, or, better, read his poem, The Dream of Gerontius, and then listen to the choral work by Sir Edward Elgar based on the text. In the poem, Gerontius dies receiving last rites; his separated soul meets his guardian angel, who then escorts his soul to the throne of God, where he is judged and found in need of purgatory.

“Softly and gently, dearly-ransom'd soul,” the angel says at the end,

In my most loving arms I now enfold thee, And, o'er the penal waters, as they roll, I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,

Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow; Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,

And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.

Gerontius contains the famous hymn of Newman, “Praise to the Holiest in the Heights”—in the poem, a “Choir of Angelicals” sings it as the soul of Gerontius approaches God’s throne. My favorite part of the poem is this extraordinary reflection on the human condition, exclaimed by the guardian angel upon greeting the separated soul of his charge:

O Lord, how wonderful in depth and height,

      But most in man, how wonderful Thou art!

With what a love, what soft persuasive might

      Victorious o'er the stubborn fleshly heart,

   Thy tale complete of saints Thou dost provide,

   To fill the thrones which angels lost through pride!

He lay a grovelling babe upon the ground,

      Polluted in the blood of his first sire,

With his whole essence shatter'd and unsound,

      And coil'd around his heart a demon dire,

   Which was not of his nature, but had skill

   To bind and form his op'ning mind to ill.

 

Then was I sent from heaven to set right

      The balance in his soul of truth and sin,

And I have waged a long relentless fight,

      Resolved that death-environ'd spirit to win,

   Which from its fallen state, when all was lost,

   Had been repurchased at so dread a cost.

Oh, what a shifting parti-colour'd scene

      Of hope and fear, of triumph and dismay,

Of recklessness and penitence, has been

      The history of that dreary, life-long fray!

   And oh, the grace to nerve him and to lead,

   How patient, prompt, and lavish at his need!

O man, strange composite of heaven and earth!

      Majesty dwarf'd to baseness! fragrant flower

Running to poisonous seed! and seeming worth

      Cloking corruption! weakness mastering power!

   Who never art so near to crime and shame,

   As when thou hast achieved some deed of name;—

How should ethereal natures comprehend

      A thing made up of spirit and of clay,

Were we not task'd to nurse it and to tend, {338}

      Link'd one to one throughout its mortal day?

   More than the Seraph in his height of place,

   The Angel-guardian knows and loves the ran-

          som'd race.

We could easily spend the rest of this time analyzing these lines for their beauty, subtlety, idiom, and accuracy of Catholic truth. And maybe let’s do that another time.

Once you have entered into the corpus by one of these paths, then read the Idea of a University  and Development of Doctrine next, as these are more approachable, and leave the University Sermons on faith and reason and Grammar of Assent until later, as these are much more challenging.

Contest between Truth and Falsehood in the Church

Some have said that what was most impressive about Newman was how he rediscovered the Christianity of the Fathers in the midst of the high and refined civilization of Victorian England. Newman was not like English lace or a crumpet. He was an austere character, the sort of figure who like St. Philip Neri might have spent weeks praying in the catacombs. He wrote about the desert fathers and admired them deeply. One senses that from this detachment and austerity he arrived at a particular insight into our civilization. Have you ever read the apocalyptic remarks of then Cardinal Woytyla at the World Eucharistic Conference in Philadelphia in 1976?

“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine Providence…”

Newman had an eerily similar view. Not only that but also, at the end of his life, in his famous Biglietto speech, he said that such an insight was the unifying theme of his life.

The speech is called the Biglietto speech after the Italian word for a ticket or card. Newman was summoned to Rome in May 1879, knowing that Pope Leo XIII wished to create him a Cardinal, and, on the day when the Pope formally did so, and a messenger from the Vatican Secretary of State brought the word to Newman on a biglietto or card, Newman gave a carefully prepared speech, in which he summed up his life’s work. I will quote from it at length, because it speaks so directly to our own position today:

“I rejoice to say, to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth; and on this great occasion, when it is natural for one who is in my place to look out upon the world, and upon Holy Church as in it, and upon her future, it will not, I hope, be considered out of place, if I renew the protest against it which I have made so often.”

“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.”

Religion then becomes merely subjective and private. He calls it a Great Apostasy:

“Hitherto, it has been considered that religion alone, with its supernatural sanctions, was strong enough to secure submission of the masses of our population to law and order; now the Philosophers and Politicians are bent on satisfying this problem without the aid of Christianity. Instead of the Church's authority and teaching, they would substitute first of all a universal and a thoroughly secular education, calculated to bring home to every individual that to be orderly, industrious, and sober, is his personal interest. Then, for great working principles to take the place of religion, for the use of the masses thus carefully educated, it provides—the broad fundamental ethical truths, of justice, benevolence, veracity, and the like; proved experience; and those natural laws which exist and act spontaneously in society, and in social matters, whether physical or psychological; for instance, in government, trade, finance, sanitary experiments, and the intercourse of nations. As to Religion, it is a private luxury, which a man may have if he will; but which of course he must pay for, and which he must not obtrude upon others, or indulge in to their annoyance.”

He says that, in the case of England, the “liberalistic theory” is becoming dominant because of religious pluralism; also, because some religious thinkers believed that Christianity would be more pure if completely separated from the state; but mainly because there is much in the theory which is attractive—“not to say more, the precepts of justice, truthfulness, sobriety, self- command, benevolence.” But therein lies a trap.

“It is not till we find that this array of principles is intended to supersede, to block out, religion, that we pronounce it to be evil. There never was a device of the Enemy so cleverly framed and with such promise of success.”

“I lament it deeply,” Newman says, “because I foresee that it may be the ruin of many souls.” He concludes his speech with acts of faith and hope. Of faith:

“I have no fear at all that it really can do aught of serious harm to the Word of God, to Holy Church, to our Almighty King, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Faithful and True, or to His Vicar on earth. Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now.” Of hope: God saves his people in many ways, “Sometimes our enemy is turned into a friend; sometimes he is despoiled of that special virulence of evil which was so threatening; sometimes he falls to pieces of himself; sometimes he does just so much as is beneficial, and then is removed.”

What is our task in the trial?

“Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God. Mansueti hereditabunt terram, Et delectabuntur in multitudine pacis. (“But the meek shall possess the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity” Ps 37: 11)”[2]

How elegant of Newman to end the speech with an allusion in Latin to the Psalms! So let us be clear then. What we may take for granted in our time—the wall of separation between Church and State, the naked public square, the putative separation of law from morality, the culture of disbelief—Newman looks at this culture and this mode of public life, as a Great Apostasy which strangles Christian faith, and he says it was his life’s work to oppose it.  It seems worth noting that this is the kind of figure the Church canonized quite recently.

 In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman asserts a similar idea, that he came to see

“that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other.”

University Education

I will conclude this talk by briefly describing some important ideas, themes, and sentiments in Newman. Newman’s Idea of a University, public lectures he gave on the nature of university education when he was attempting as Rector to found a new Catholic university in Dublin, has two main arguments. The first is that a university as its name implies is a place of universal learning, and that, therefore, since God exists, and God is both the origin and the end of anything else, an institution of learning which did not include a faculty which studied God could not be a true university. A faculty which studied religion comparatively would not meet this demand; it would need to be a faculty which investigated at least what is known as “natural theology,” what may be known about God through natural reason.

The second main idea is that, as a university, in contrast to an institute for research, must be devoted to teaching, its proper object is the intellectual virtue of the students, which Newman understands to have its own type of beauty, inherently worth seeking. Here is the key passage:

“Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence. Every thing has its own perfection, be it higher or lower in the scale of things; and the perfection of one is not the perfection of another. Things animate, inanimate, visible, invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a best of themselves, which is an object of pursuit. Why do you take such pains with your garden or your park? You see to your walks and turf and shrubberies; to your trees and drives; not as if you meant to make an orchard of the one, or corn or pasture land of the other, but because there is a special beauty in all that is goodly in wood, water, plain, and slope, brought all together by art into one shape, and grouped into one whole. Your cities are beautiful, your palaces, your public buildings, your territorial mansions, your churches; and their beauty leads to nothing beyond itself. There is a physical beauty and a moral: there is a beauty of person, there is a beauty of our moral being, which is natural virtue; and in like manner there is a beauty, there is a perfection, of the intellect. There is an ideal perfection in these various subject-matters, towards which individual instances are seen to rise, and which are the standards for all instances whatever. The Greek divinities and demigods, as the statuary has moulded them, with their symmetry of figure, and their high forehead and their regular features, are the perfection of physical beauty. The heroes, of whom history tells, Alexander, or Cæsar, or Scipio, or Saladin, are the representatives of that magnanimity or self- mastery which is the greatness of human nature. Christianity too has its heroes, and in the supernatural order, and we call them Saints. The artist puts before him beauty of feature and form; the poet, beauty of mind; the preacher, the beauty of grace: then intellect too, I repeat, has its beauty, and it has those who aim at it. To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as intelligible (for here we are inquiring, not what the object of a Liberal Education is worth, nor what use the Church makes of it, but what it is in itself), I say, an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.”

As can be seen in the last clause, Newman in his day insisted upon the inherent worth of a liberal education mainly against well-intentioned pious Catholics who saw no point in a university unless it led to moral improvement. Such persons would turn a university into a seminary, Newman thought. Today, surely, he would argue instead against those who regard university education as pre-vocational and merely preparatory for a job.[3]

Newman remarks that his view of education is simply Aristotle’s, which is the occasion for this extraordinary passage in the Idea:

“Do not suppose, that in thus appealing to the ancients, I am throwing back the world two thousand years, and fettering Philosophy with the reasonings of paganism. While the world lasts, will Aristotle's doctrine on these matters last, for he is the oracle of nature and of truth. While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyze the thoughts, feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aristotle; and we are his disciples whether we will or no, though we may not know it.”

The passage reveals something important about Newman. Although his method of reasoning owes much to the Anglican bishop and philosopher, Joseph Butler, whose Rolls Sermons and Analogy Newman studied deeply, the single most important influence on Newman’s intellectual character was Aristotle. In fact, Newman is so appealing to us because his intellectual habits are those of a 19th century Aristotle and thus set clearly apart from the paradigm of a “scientific” philosopher which dominates analytical philosophy, or an a priori and subjective philosopher, which dominates Continental philosophy.

Conscience

Newman scholars have speculated that it is not unlikely that Newman will be declared a Doctor of the Church, and that, if he is, his distinctive contribution to the wisdom of the Church will be identified as what he says about the dignity and claim of conscience. You may have come across his quip from his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, that

“if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

He says this after remarking, in that same Letter,

“Thus, if the Pope told the English Bishops to order their priests to stir themselves energetically in favour of teetotalism, and a particular priest was fully persuaded that abstinence from wine, &c., was practically a Gnostic error, and therefore felt he could not so exert himself without sin; or suppose there was a Papal order to hold lotteries in each mission for some religious object, and a priest could say in God's sight that he believed lotteries to be morally wrong, that priest in either of these cases would commit a sin hic et nunc if he obeyed the Pope, whether he was right or wrong in his opinion, and, if wrong, although he had not taken proper pains to get at the truth of the matter.”

Now in saying such things he is simply repeating standard Catholic doctrine, which one finds for example very clearly stated in St. Thomas, that to disobey a directive of one’s conscience is always a sin, and yet an erring conscience does not itself excuse. (Yes, someone with a badly formed conscience may be in the unfortunate condition of sinning whether he obeys his conscience or not – as in Jasper’s example of the concentration camp guard, who would sin whether, against conscience, he let the Jewish boy escape from the line to the gas chambers, or, following his conscience, he forced the boy in.)

Newman’s distinctive contribution comes rather from two other things. First he very clearly grasps, and very vividly explains, that conscience can have such authority only if it is objective, or rather, only if the most proper characterization of it is as something objective. Conscience is to be specified relative to God’s authority. It is not properly picked out as an internal light merely, a creative power, a locus of sincerity, our core commitments, deeply held beliefs, or anything like that. Here Newman argues against Joseph Butler and influential figures in the British Moralist tradition. He expresses himself as follows:

“I say, then, that the Supreme Being is of a certain character, which, expressed in human language, we call ethical. He has the attributes of justice, truth, wisdom, sanctity, benevolence and mercy, as eternal characteristics in His nature, the very Law of His being, identical with Himself; and next, when He became Creator, He implanted this Law, which is Himself, in the intelligence of all His rational creatures. The Divine Law, then, is the rule of ethical truth, the standard of right and wrong, a sovereign, irreversible, absolute authority in the presence of men and Angels. ‘The eternal law,’ says St. Augustine, ‘is the Divine Reason or Will of  God, commanding the observance, forbidding the disturbance, of the natural order of things.’ ‘The natural law,’ says St. Thomas, ‘is an impression of the Divine Light in us, a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.’

“This law, as apprehended in the minds of individual men, is called ’conscience;’ and though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience.”

We can see from this passage what Newman’s other distinctive teaching about conscience might be, namely, that, if we take the claims of conscience with appropriate seriousness, we can argue from the presence and operation of conscience within us to the existence of God. Suppose that there is no law without a lawgiver (as Newton said), and that we do see clearly that there is a law within us claiming a higher authority than anything else, including the authority to ask for our life rather than disobey. Then there must be a being who gives this law to each of us through our nature, and who has the authority to ask of us our very lives, and this can only be God.

Newman’s letter to the Duke of Norfolk was occasioned by the First Vatican Council’s definition of papal infallibility; accordingly, one of Newman’s aims in that letter is to circumscribe that power carefully and narrowly, to put to rest the Duke’s concerns that Catholics might regard themselves as bound to obey the Pope over their consciences and over established moral law. These passages are good to read today when a particularly aggressive Ultramontanism is promoted by many Catholics. Thus, Newman says such things as that

 “If the Pope prescribed lying or revenge, his command would simply go for nothing, as if he had not issued it, because he has no power over the Moral Law. If he forbade his flock to eat any but vegetable food, or to dress in a particular fashion (questions of decency and modesty not coming into the question), he would also be going beyond the province of faith, because such a rule does not relate to a matter in itself good or bad”

and that

“there are other conditions besides this, necessary for the exercise of Papal infallibility, in moral subjects:—for instance, his definition must relate to things necessary for salvation. No one would so speak of lotteries, nor of a particular dress, nor of a particular kind of food;—such precepts, then, did he make them, would be simply external to the range of his prerogative.”

Newman continues,

“It may be added that the field of morals contains so little that is unknown and unexplored, in contrast with revelation and doctrinal fact, which form the domain of faith, that it is difficult to say what portions of moral teaching in the course of 1800 years actually have proceeded from the Pope, or from the Church, or where to look for such.”

Development of Doctrine

Which brings us to the Essay on the Development of Doctrine. As I mentioned, Newman in the course of writing this work became a Catholic. The first half of the book discusses development of ideas in general: Newman finding it a general truth that ideas are not static but have an inherent dynamism which develops over time. The discussion establishes the “antecedent probability” that the ideas present within the revelation of Christ would develop too, and then the only question is how to discern true from false development.  (Newman follows Whately who taught in his treatise on Rhetoric that the proper method in any scholarly study is to clarify first the antecedent probabilities which pertain to some disputed question before looking at the particular evidence for it.) It is important to note that Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine is just that, a theory. His argument is so successful that development is taken for granted in some Catholic circles as if it were itself part of the deposit of faith. But it would be possible and indeed seems to be the instinct of many Catholics, even saints, to regard the deposit of faith as unchanging. What could be more a matter of development, if anything is, than the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary? And yet, Pius IX when defining the doctrine spoke of it thus:

“This doctrine always existed in the Church as a doctrine that has been received from our ancestors, and that has been stamped with the character of revealed doctrine. For the Church of Christ, watchful guardian that she is, and defender of the dogmas deposited with her, never changes anything, never diminishes anything, never adds anything to them.”

Newman, too, articulated his theory of development to put to rest concerns of his fellow Anglicans that the Catholic Church in its superstitions had added to the deposit of faith.

So what does Newman hold about development? Is there a single unchanging deposit of faith set down at the beginning, which “develops” only in the sense that our passive reception and understanding of it grows, or is the deposit of faith itself dynamic so that, although new teachings are not added to it, or even grafted onto it, they do as it were sprout out of it and are identifiably not present in the original deposit? Newman clearly accepts the first interpretation. Throughout his writings he speaks of the deposit of faith in this way and regards the Pope and bishops as having a fiduciary responsibility to protect and pass on this deposit.

They have no creative powers, nor does he ever speak of the Spirit as that sort of creative power. Moreover, after his conversion, when he put his argument into deductive form in Latin for theologians in Rome, he asserts plainly that, objectively, doctrine is given all at once in the revelation of Christ and never changes.

But how then is his theory of development interesting? In two ways. First, because he shows that ideas themselves have a dynamism which prompts us to appreciate and see things in them which were always there. That is, his theory is distinctive precisely in not attributing development of doctrine solely to us, even though this development is properly speaking always passive and a matter of reception. Second, because in his attention to historical detail he gives many examples of a providence which guides development. Development of doctrine like other works of providence shows a wonderful order, and unintended consequences, that transcend human agency.

A very clear example of this is his explanation of why devotion to Mary was relatively muted among Christians in the first four centuries of the Church but then, as it were, exploded in the fifth century and continued that way onward. Newman attributed the change to the resolution of the Arian controversy. As you known, Arianism is the view that Jesus is not God but the highest created being. Such a view was attractive to the classical world, as it was common in classical thought to regard the visible world as a consequence of a series of emanations, or downward steps, of a divine principle. When the Church at Nicea put Arianism definitively to rest, it thereby definitively clarified the distinction between creator and creature, and indirectly, then, permitted fervent devotion to a creature, without any continued risk of blurring that gap, which was clearly seen as infinite. Here is his wonderful account:

“There was one other subject on which the Arian controversy had a more intimate, though not an immediate influence. …. It discovered a new sphere, if we may so speak, in the realms of light, to which the Church had not yet assigned its inhabitant. Arianism had admitted that our Lord was both the God of the Evangelical Covenant, and the actual Creator of the Universe; but even this was not enough, because it did not confess Him to be the One, Everlasting, Infinite, Supreme Being, but as one who was made by the Supreme. It was not enough in accordance with that heresy to proclaim Him as having an ineffable origin before all worlds; not enough to place Him high above all creatures as the type of all the works of God's Hands; not enough to make Him the King of all Saints, the Intercessor for man with God, the Object of worship, the Image of the Father; not enough, because it was not all, and between all and anything short of all, there was an infinite interval. The highest of creatures is levelled with the lowest in comparison of the One Creator Himself. That is, the Nicene Council recognized the eventful principle, that, while we believe and profess any being to be made of a created nature, such a being is really no God to us, though honoured by us with whatever high titles and with whatever homage. Arius or Asterius did all but confess that Christ was the Almighty; they said much more than St. Bernard or St. Alphonso have since said of the Blessed Mary; yet they left Him a creature and were found wanting. Thus there was "a wonder in heaven:" a throne was seen, far above all other created powers, mediatorial, intercessory; a title archetypal; {144} a crown bright as the morning star; a glory issuing from the Eternal Throne; robes pure as the heavens; and a sceptre over all; and who was the predestined heir of that Majesty? … The vision is found in the Apocalypse, a Woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. The votaries of Mary do not exceed the true faith, unless the blasphemers of her Son came up to it. The Church of Rome is not idolatrous, unless Arianism is orthodoxy.”

Faith and Reason

Newman has a distinctive view of faith, different from the tradition summarized in Aquinas. For Aquinas, to take something on faith is basically to take it on authority, with the result that we “see” something through another’s sight, which we do not directly see ourselves. Reason is seeing, faith is not seeing, but rather seeing through another. For instance, a friend tells you that your child has survived a school bus accident, because she knows your child, and she has definitely seen your child, she says, after the terrible event. You do not see the child yourself, but her seeing is as good as your seeing: you accept what she says “on faith” and are at peace. Faith on this account indeed requires love, since love is productive of unity, and there must be a moral unity between you and the person whose authority you accept— since that other, in seeing for you, is as it were another self to you. On this account, too, faith and reason are in principle distinct, because their objects are distinct: what we see directly through our natural power of reason, we have no reason to learn about indirectly on anyone’s authority. It is simply impossible that the same object be an object of faith and of reason at the same time and in the same respects. Yet there is a kind of energy or impetus of reason inherent in faith, because we yearn to see directly anything which we only see indirectly. All of these matters are explained very well, by the way, in a lovely short treatise by Joseph Pieper, Belief and Faith. Newman in contrast regards faith as risk taking, preceded by an assessment of evidence, which  is conditioned, in the matter of an antecedent probability, by love. Take the acceptance of the report of the gospel by an apostle as an example. Some pagan in Macedonia senses personal sin and is aware of great moral evil in the world, but also recognizes that the creation is good. Loving the creation and its source--call this source “God”--this pagan is disposed to believe that God has not abandoned us and his creation but will somehow make good on it. This working of love establishes an antecedent probability by which great credence is given to a report of the kind that a God-man suffered and died to save us. The offer of salvation requires a response; the offer since it comes from God requires a total response. We are meant to risk our lives, when we have no certainty, except that based on faith, based on love, that this message of salvation is true. In this example faith and reason are not opposed but similar. If we define reason discursively as a faculty of arriving at new truths from old truths, then faith is a kind of reasoning, but it is reasoning based on a guess or gamble, a hazard, a venture, about how the world is, which in turn requires a venture in one’s life to correspond to it. Newman sets forth these ideas in his University Sermons and in a remarkable Parochial and Plain sermon entitled “Ventures of Faith.” In the latter, he asks, what would you have lost if it turns out that Christianity is false? That would be what you have ventured on its truth, and that would be a measure of your faith.

Le style c’est l’homme même (Buffon)

Many great English writers, critics, and scholars have praised Newman’s style. One hears not uncommonly that he is the greatest stylist of the English language, full stop. I have given several samples in this talk, and, if you were not previously familiar with Newman, perhaps even from these passages you have formed a similar opinion yourself. He wrote so easily and voluminously, that his style had to have been a natural expression of his personality and character. I believe it would be possible, then, by a careful analysis of his sentences, to show as it were reflected in them some of the key notes of his teaching. Consider this famous passage from the Apologia:

“I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.”

It makes a commonly drawn distinction between, as popular speakers like to say, the attitude of Zechariah when he heard the angel’s promise, disbelieved, and was struck dumb, and the attitude of Mary, who had less reason to believe the promise that she would conceive, since she “did not know man,” but who wondered nonetheless how it might be so. And yet how appealing and subtle is Newman’s expression of it. Note the humility, “I cannot answer those difficulties” not even “for myself,” and the self-knowledge, “I am as sensitive of them as any one,” –both of which establish a bond of solidarity between Newman and ourselves. He describes something true of himself and all others, both Catholics and Protestants, a common plight. But then he reasons with us, and his reasoning carries us along with its rhythm and cadence, with a 1-2-boom! structure (as Bernstein refers to it in his book on conducting, as a very typical device of musical phrasing):

“Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion I am as sensitive of them as any one but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached.”

And notice how the last clause is deliberately a run-on construction which depicts “multiplying” while describing it. And then one has an allusion to Eudoxos’s theory of proportions, and its definition of incommensurability, which Newman could have assumed would be familiar to his readers from book V of Euclid, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” When he says “as I understand the subject” he implicitly asks his readers to bring as much careful thought to this matter as they would to geometry. And then, as is so common in Newman, a single short statement which wraps up what he is saying in a powerful and memorable form, “difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.” As a curiosity, it seems that a Google Ngram shows that Newman did succeed in introducing this phrase and concept into English literature.

Conclusion

Take Oxford circa 1840 to represent the height of liberal education in Anglophone civilization; take the participants in the Oxford Movement to be the most earnest and serious among students and Fellows at Oxford; take Newman to be the flower of that time, the leader, the most influential, the most admired. He taught us how to see the life of the Church as fidelity to the deposit of faith. He warned us of the dangers of a suffocating secularism. He taught that faith was a venture, and gave a luminous example of unity of faith and reason, devotion and learning. His depth and care of thought remain a model. Who can deny that, in this time of superficial communication through coarse emotions and snark, when reading is becoming rare and true learning is disappearing, when we have even lost a sense of what a well-educated person should be—who can deny that Newman’s canonization is timely for us here and now, and that his life and work provide a model and nourishment for us in our way forward, through an apparent crisis, and toward, as Newman referred to it in a famous sermon, a “second spring” in the life of the Church?

Notes

[1] “Professor probes mystery over missing bones of Cardinal Newman”. West Midlands News. 5 November 2008.

[2] Interestingly, in a homily he gave on Feb 11, 2001, the 200th anniversary of Newman’s birth, St. Pope John Paul II quoted these lines from the Biglietto speech, referring back to Newman.

[3] See my essay, “Newman’s Three Ideas of a University,” where I argue that Newman’s rejection of liberalism, and his embrace of the contrary ‘dogmatic principle,’ connects these two ideas together (The Catholic Thing, Oct 29, 2019).