The Newman Rambler

The Significance of John Henry Newman for Christians Today

28 September 2019 ‖ Thomas Cardinal Collins

I have been a fan of Newman for many, many years, ever since I was in university. I will never forget reading my first biography of Newman, the one by Meriol Trevor.  It deals very much with the man himself, and the adventurous journey of his life, rather than with his ideas.  The excellent biography by Ian Ker, of course, is in many ways the fullest one and it treats of Newman particularly with reference to his profound ideas, which have so much shaped the life of the Church ever since his death.

It is probably true to say that we can enter into the life of Newman more fully than into that of any other person in history. This is not only because of the many volumes of his collected works, but especially because of the Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman – over 30 volumes of them, magnificently edited and annotated.  Joyce Suggs has published a small sample in A Packet of Letters, and recently Roderick Strange has published an extensive selection in John Henry Newman: A Portrait in Letters. We can follow Newman day by day, year by year, through his immense correspondence with all kinds of people. I suppose we can be grateful that in his time the telephone had not yet been invented, and so the great wisdom contained in his letters was not lost in the air, but rather was preserved for us. It may be one of the great benefits of our modern technology, something we rarely think about, that although we no longer use quill and paper for letter writing, we now have at least to some degree replaced telephone conversations with emails and text messages, which at least can be preserved – though whether there is much worth preserving is another question.

With Newman, pretty well everything seems to have been preserved, including his most intimate private journals. The net result of his letter writing, and of the great attention that those around him paid to him, is that we know a lot about Newman, and we can see why his influence was so significant in the lives of so many people.

For Christians today, and for others as well, Newman’s life and his ideas continue to have that significant influence. This will only increase with his canonization. Ironically, Newman in his lifetime tended to energize enemies as much as he attracted friends, both inside and outside of the Church, and many were suspicious of him. Perhaps that is the price to be paid by someone so subtle in his thought, and so masterful in his use of language; such a person can be seen as being slippery. That was his effect not only upon the blunt and hearty Anglican Charles Kingsley, but also upon fervent ultramontane Catholics. When Leo XIII made him a cardinal in 1879, that action served to give an official seal of approval to him personally and to his teaching, and made it more likely that a wider audience would be drawn to study his life and works, and so be influenced by them. Obviously, being declared a saint will have even more effect in extending Newman’s influence, as also will declaring him a doctor of the Church, if that ever happens.

With all of the mass of written material in which we can become lost when studying John Henry Newman, it may be helpful, when we seek to discover his significance for Christians today, to organize our thoughts by focusing on the two expressions which are most associated with him: “Cor ad cor loquitur” (“Heart speaks to heart”) and “Ex umbris et imaginibus in Veritatem” (“From shadows and images into truth”). The first he chose as his motto as a cardinal; the second he chose as his epitaph.

“Cor ad Cor loquitur”

First, the motto he chose as a cardinal, “Cor ad Cor loquitur”, which he took from a lengthy letter from Saint Francis de Sales to a young archbishop who had asked for advice on preaching. In that letter, Saint Francis said that the lips speak to the ears, but heart speaks to heart. Like Newman, and like that other English saint, Saint Thomas More, Saint Francis de Sales was a person who was “born for friendship”; he won people over by the attractiveness of his gentle spirit, by personal influence: heart speaks to heart. Whereas others could beat someone down in argument, using the brute power of the intellect or the weight of undeniable facts, Saint Francis de Sales, brilliant and learned as he was, relied mainly on personal influence, which by God’s grace converted thousands.

In this, Saint Francis de Sales, like Newman, was building upon the old Aristotelian rhetorical wisdom, which we also need to keep in mind as we seek to proclaim Christ in an antagonistic world, as did Saint Francis and Newman in their day. It is a matter of ethos, pathos, logos: first ethos: build a personal bridge of trust; then pathos: touch the heart; and then the person with which you are communicating will be ready to receive the intellectual content of your message, the logos.

There is an old Jewish saying that one must not make an ax of the Torah, and both St Francis and Newman acted in that spirit: though both were capable of demolishing opponents with their sheer intellectual power, they generally took the gentler path of speaking to the heart, and conquering through the persuasion inherent in personal relationship.

That heart to heart approach was usually Newman’s way, as when in the Apologia he skilfully leads us to an intimate sharing of his journey of conversion. I would say usually, but not always, for there are feisty sections of the Apologia, when he takes on Kingsley directly – “Away with you, Mr. Kingsley, and fly into space!” – those sections are sheer delight but are a trifle sharper than intimate sharing.

We Christians of today live, as did Newman, in a world in which our faith is unfashionable, and, in fact, in our day the powers that control secular society slap the label of “bigot” upon anyone who proclaims even gently the moral absolutes of divine revelation or the natural law. It is not effective to shout our beliefs into the wind, in a futile effort whose only benefit is to give us the satisfaction of saying to ourselves that we have been faithful prophets. I think that God expects more of us than that. He expects us to actually succeed in getting through the barriers to understanding which confront us in the minds and hearts of our militant secularist “woke” interlocutors.

As the great British military strategist, Sir Basil Liddel Hart, pointed out after the futile experience of charging directly into the machine guns in World War I, the more indirect approach is a wiser strategy.

This is one reason why Newman is significant for modern Christians, as we confront the massed forces of virulent secularism, eager to shut us down and exclude us from the public square; in that situation especially, we can learn from Newman. He can show us the way to engage in effective evangelization in a hostile environment. How can we learn from him?

First, all of his writing was founded on a life of prayerful integrity; his rhetoric does not mask a hidden agenda: everyone realized that what he said came from the heart, and from the heart to the mind: heart speaks to heart. So it must be with us. We do not evangelize by technique or technology alone; we address this world from a place of prayerful integrity, reliant like Newman not only upon our wits but upon God’s grace. When the Oxford students heard Newman preach, each felt that he was speaking personally to them, that he knew each individually, and the particular struggles they faced. We sense that as well as we read his sermons. How is that possible? How can he read our hearts? It is because his words were rooted in a deep and prayerful awareness of his own heart, with all its sinful human urges and generous human impulses. His words were real for others because they came from a deep well of repentant humility. So must ours be, if we are to touch the hearts of our secular neighbours, and share with them the light of the Gospel and the experience of the encounter with Christ.

We also can learn from the instrument Newman used to touch the heart of his interlocutors. He wrote with an exceptional mastery of language and imagery. None of us has the genius of Newman, but we do need to use language well. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation on the moral theology of the Apocalypse, I spent as much time as I could reading Newman. This was not because the texts of Newman that I was reading had any connection to the Apocalypse; I simply hoped that if the language of Newman was coursing through my mind, I might pick up just a little bit of his effectiveness in communication. We fish with the net of language; and if we are to reach the hearts and minds and wills even of those who are antagonistic to the Gospel, we must like Newman use language well: remember the verb in his famous motto: “heart speaks to heart”.

We should also learn from the simple practicality of his way with words. He was after real assent to the Gospel, not just notional assent – not just assent from the neck up. That was surely true when he wrote and preached the Parochial and Plain Sermons as a young man, long before he wrote The Grammar of Assent; as we read those sermons today, we can still experience the master in action, as did the young university students listening to him in Saint Mary’s Church. But we can also learn from advice he gave about preaching, much later in his life. A young seminarian wrote to the elderly cardinal for some advice on preaching. The eminent and already legendary Cardinal Newman replied to the seminarian – a sign in itself of his humble spirit – by saying that a preacher is like a man walking on a plank over a crevasse. Just aim for one thing, he wrote; give the people one useful practical thing that can help then in their life in Christ. Then we will speak to their hearts, and have a chance, by God’s grace, to move their wills to conversion.

We are incarnate spirits, and so we need practical images which touch the heart and illuminate the imagination. This is why Jesus used memorable images, and told stories. For all his learning and intellectual sophistication, this was the way of Newman as well. Think of his marvellous image of the futility of cutting granite with a razor, or mooring a vessel with a thread of silk – images of the limitation of mere human reason when confronted with the pride and the passion of man. Think of his example of the weather wise peasant who knows what is going to happen next, not because he has a single clear and convincing reason that he can articulate, but rather because he has an unconscious sense of the cumulative indications that all together allow him to know correctly what lies ahead. Newman illuminates our minds because he touches our hearts and imagination through concrete imagery. He shuns that which is merely notional; we humans are not angels: we live in the world of concrete reality which our mind apprehends.

My favourite TV show is “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”. It is hilarious because of its insights into government, but also into the way in which language can be manipulated to control or to baffle others – and sometimes to baffle is to control. The wily civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby dazzles the politicians and us with his complex and abstract streams of notional language, unanchored in the clear world of concrete reality; he is the very image of all that Newman wisely tells us to shun.

Newman shows us the way in which we must use language to evangelize a hostile world, so that we are not merely spouting wordy abstractions – “unreal words” – but rather are connecting and helping others towards a real assent to the Gospel. The lips speak to the ears, but heart speaks to heart.

In our mission of evangelization, we Christians can learn not only from Newman’s use of language in sermons and writings – such as the immortal Parochial and Plain Sermons – but also through the pathway of personal relationship, so much attuned to Newman’s own personality and gifts, and also of course a central aspect of the charism of Saint Philip Neri and his Oratorians. Newman influenced friends, and by the path of friendship and personal intimate relationships exercised a kind of leadership so different from, but actually complementary to, the leadership exercised by his rival Cardinal Manning. We can lead through the wise use of power, and we can lead through influence; Manning was the master of power; Newman was the master of influence.

Manning addressed the challenges of his age, and became an effective evangelizing Christian, through the astute exercise of power and authority, building up the institutions of the Church, contending with the political forces of his age, and establishing to a large degree the social teaching of the Church which has been so fruitful. Manning is sometimes unfairly maligned as the austere and rigid foil of the charming and subtle Newman, but we need Christian leaders who do what Manning did. Like Saint Charles Borromeo in the time of the counter-reformation, Manning used the direct approach, the pathway of deeds, and did much good.

But that was not the approach of Newman. He certainly was not detached from practical reality: he ran a school and founded a university, both of which required managerial expertise. And he did engage, especially in the years following his conversion, in intellectual contests in the public square.

But his distinctive approach was “heart speaks to heart”, not only in the way in which he used language, but in the way he exercised leadership along the pathway of friendship. Any life of Newman reveals, as do the volumes of his letters and diaries, the many friendships with men and women which enriched his life, and through which he enriched the lives of others.

His Oxford days were marked with his friendships as well as rivalries with his colleagues at Oriel, and the journey to Europe that led to “Lead, Kindly Light” was made with a close friend and the friend’s father. The Tractarians were a group of friends, as were the group the gathered with Newman at Littlemore. In his Catholic life, he lived his priestly life in the community of the Oratory, a society of friends coming together in the service of Christ. This must never be idealized, however, since we live in a world of original sin, which Chesterton called the only Christian doctrine that we can clearly prove. Newman experienced, especially with Faber, but also with Manning and others, the bitter reality of friendship impaired, broken, and sometimes betrayed. That is this fallen world, and Newman prayed daily not only for his many friends, but also for his many former friends and enemies. 

But Christian friendship is the standard for how we disciples of Jesus are called to live. In his farewell to his Anglican friends, and to his life in the Anglican Church is described in his great sermon “The Parting of Friends”. He ends:

And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know anyone whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has  read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there is a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he may know God’s will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfil it.[1]

This great expression of Christian friendship speaks to us of the personal “heart speaks to heart” reality of our life in Christ. Jesus himself said, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.” We read of the great friendship of Saints Basil and Gregory in the patristic era, so dear to Newman. Aelred of Rievaulx wrote a great treatise On Christian Friendship. In his life and writings as well, in sermons and letters, Newman reveals to us the path of Christian friendship which is ever more essential in our life in Christ in an increasingly hostile world.

I would note that the spirit of Newman, conveyed to J. R. R. Tolkien in Birmingham through his guardian, Father Morgan, the Oratorian disciple of Newman, leads us to see how the fellowship of the ring, the friends united in a sacred quest, is able to destroy the resilient and seemingly irresistible power of the Dark Lord.

Christian friendship, in which heart speaks to heart, is necessary for the conversion of the world to Christ, and specifically for the strengthening of the frail disciples who are together engaged in that sacred quest. In these days, we need this more and more: Christians gathered as friends “In Christ”, in the fellowship of Christ the King. Newman Centres are aptly named, and more needed now than in the days of  Newman, as places in which Christians can come to a kind of Rivendell to be strengthened and to speak heart to heart before setting forth again on their mission.

Pope Benedict reminds us that Christianity is not simply the proclamation of a message, but the encounter with a person, indeed with our Lord Jesus Christ, who has called us to be friends. The closer we are to Christ, the truer we can be as friends in Christ. Understanding the challenges the disciples faced, and better than they did themselves, he sent them on their mission not alone, but two by two. And he gathered a fellowship of twelve apostles as the foundation of the Church.

But he does ask us not only to build the fellowship of the gathered, but to reach out to the scattered. And one way to do that is through friendship; friends leads friends to Christ. At the Easter Vigil, the lone Easter candle enters the darkened Church, but as the light is shared, from candle to candle, the whole Church becomes bright with the light of Christ. Christian faith has, from the beginning, been shared by the pathway of friendship, as heart speaks to heart.

“From shadows and images (or illusions) into (the) truth.”

Newman always sought the truth, and so should we. In fact, he eventually asked that his epitaph be “From shadows and images (or illusions) into (the) truth.” He never could accept the idea, common in his day and very common in ours, that religion is mainly a matter of personal taste: some prefer this belief, some prefer that, just as some prefer chocolate and some prefer vanilla. No: what matters is whether a religion tells us the truth about God, and His will for us.

Our life of Christian discipleship must be based on an encounter with Christ, in word and sacrament. We need clear teaching, rooted in the Gospel, so as to know the Lord we love. We heed His call to repentance, and He sends us out to proclaim the Good News. The sequence of Christian discipleship, beginning with the truth of the Gospel, and leading to changed behavior, is powerfully symbolized when the bishop hands the Book of the Gospels to a deacon at his ordination with these words:

Receive the Gospel of Christ, whose herald you now are: believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach.

 We learn from Newman that we need to know our Catholic faith, which is the true guide for our life in this world of ever shifting trendy ideas, some of which are as deeply troubling as they are popular. We serve the Holy Spirit, not the Spirit of the Age.  While Christians need to adapt the way in which they proclaim their Gospel faith to the diverse cultures in which they live, the substance of Christian faith and life comes from the Gospel, not from any earthly society. In fact, the truth of the Gospel always challenges any earthly society. It is not derived from the environment, but has come down to us from the apostles, and so from Jesus Himself, who is the way, the truth, and the life.

We need to have the courage of our convictions to profess our faith in a hostile society, as Newman did, and let the chips fall where they may. In Newman’s case, he had to leave his beloved Oxford, lost most of his friends, and set out at the age of 45 into an uncertain future. Today as well, people can lose their livelihood by being true to their conscience. We must be ready, with clarity and charity, to stand up for our faith in the public square.

 When Newman became a Catholic, he faced the hostility of those he had left behind, and the incomprehension of those he had joined. They did not know what to do with him. His life as a Catholic was one frustration after another. The Archbishop of Dublin asked him to found a university there, and he worked on that with mixed success, amid opposition from the bishops and others, and eventually he went back to Birmingham, although in those frustrating Dublin years he produced the The Idea of a University, the greatest description ever written of what a university should be.

The English bishops asked him to translate the Bible, and after he had obediently spent money and time on the project, they dropped it. An English bishop secretly reported him to Rome as a heretic. Newman denounced a former priest called Achilli for his immoral behavior as a priest. Newman could see plenty of corruption and incompetence in the Catholic Church.

But despite all that, he never regretted his decision to become a Catholic, which was made not because he admired Catholics, but because he realized that the Catholic faith is true.

That is another thing that we should learn from Newman: our life as Catholic Christians does not depend on the goodness or the intelligence or the integrity of our fellow Catholics, including priests and bishops. Though most of them are faithful, they have sometimes been a disgrace. No, we depend upon Jesus Christ, and the Church which he established, in which he comes to us in word and sacrament, and the faith which it professes, which leads us home to the heavenly Jerusalem, from shadows and illusions into the truth. Newman realized that, and so although he was shocked by the wrongs he saw and deeply hurt by the shabby treatment he received, that did not in the slightest shake his faith. His faith was founded on the person of Christ, not on the personnel of the Church Christ established, and certainly not on its earthly leadership.

Because Newman saw that much of what we see around us is mere shadow and illusion, he was especially conscious of the world of ultimate reality, the unseen world of the Kingdom Of God. That insight is found throughout his writings, and especially his sermons. When, as a Catholic, he faced the immense anxiety of the Achilli trial, in which he faced the prospect of ruin, he was consoled that he lived under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament. Like Gerald Manley Hopkins, whom he received into the Church, he saw that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. He was always on his way through shadows and illusions, into the truth, and his awareness of the unseen world that is the divine context of life in this world allowed him to test the vanities of the human world, and to act according to the mandate of the heavenly kingdom to which he journeyed for 90 earthly years.

 If Newman is ever named a Doctor of the Church, it has been said that he should be called “The Doctor of Conscience”, because he is especially known for his teaching on the nature and primacy of conscience. In fact, when people these days speak of the necessity of following one’s conscience, they often refer to Newman, and frequently incorrectly.

In 1875, in his “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk”, Newman laid out a masterful explanation of the Catholic concept of conscience, which has influenced Catholic teaching ever since.

He called conscience the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ”, and even made the quip that if at a banquet he was called upon to propose a toast, he would first toast Conscience, and only then toast the Pope. Newman was simply repeating the ancient Catholic teaching that we obviously must always act according to our conscience. Just as obviously, however, we have the responsibility to be sure that our conscience has been formed and informed by the truths of faith and reason. If we do not, we will be operating with a deformed conscience that will lead us astray.

In his letter to Norfolk, Newman explicitly rejects the false modern view, in which the appeal to the supremacy of conscience is really just a way of trying to rationalize going for what the ego wants. He says:

Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will.

Though we must certainly follow our conscience, Newman does not mean by conscience a pass to evade God’s law, and the sharp Gospel challenges of the life of Christian discipleship, and the insight of reason and common sense, in favor of our subjective desires. Just read his Parochial and Plain Sermons to discover the bracing call to nothing less than holiness, and obedience to the demands of the Gospel. In his letter to Norfolk, Newman writes that

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.

 He says that for Catholics conscience is “the internal witness of both the existence and the law of God”. When we are tempted to do evil, such as abuse of the vulnerable, or abortion, or euthanasia, or other such actions, the voice of a conscience formed in accord with the objective law of God found in Scripture and Catholic faith will shout out: “Stop!” An overly subjective conscience will not; the voice it hears will only be the echo of our own desires. It is the counterfeit of conscience: the right of self-will.

It occurs to me that the period from around the late 1960’s until the early 1990’s, when most of the clerical sexual abuse occurred, was also a period in which a very subjective view of conscience, disconnected from objective moral norms, was being promoted, especially as a way of rationalizing disobedience to Humanae Vitae. For that matter, this highly subjective view of conscience is still prominent in the Church.

When conscience is seen as a free pass to go along with our own desires and the Spirit of the Age, then the flame of faith flickers and dies, and the Church shrivels away; when conscience is seen, as it is seen by Newman and Thomas Aquinas and all the great teachers of Catholic faith, as a stern monitor that challenges us to repentance and to holiness, for the Kingdom of God is near at hand, then the Church flourishes as, filled with the Holy Spirit, we set out with joyful boldness on our mission to bring Christ to this world.

The two great mottos chosen by Newman – “Cor ad Cor Loquitur” and “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem” – help us to grasp the significance for us modern Christians of this great disciple, priest, teacher, and saint.

The life of individual disciples of Jesus, and of the Church as a whole, involves a perilous journey home to the heavenly Jerusalem through this fallen world, this valley of tears, this place of shadows and illusions. A trusty companion on that journey is the great John Henry Newman.

I will end with his magnificent poem about life’s journey, which he wrote as a young man, a kind of examination of conscience in which he reflects on how God guides us sinners on our way home to heaven.

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom,

lead Thou me on!

The night is dark, and I am far from home;

lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

 

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou

Shouldst lead me on.

I loved to choose and see my path,

But now lead Thou me on!

I loved the garish day, and spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will.

Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me; sure it still will lead me on.

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,

Till the night is gone,

And with the morn those angel faces smile,

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.”

Footnotes

[1] John Henry Newman, Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day, 26.