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| Foreword | p. vii |
| Always Challenged and Forever Challenging | p. 1 |
| A Gentleman and Original Sin | p. 19 |
| Miracles | p. 43 |
| Angels, Brutes and the Light of Faith | p. 67 |
| Convert and Converts: Existential Ecclesiology | p. 79 |
| Anglo-Catholics | p. 107 |
| Newman's Logic and the Logic of the Papacy | p. 149 |
| Faith and Church History | p. 179 |
| Assent to Truth: Natural and Supernatural | p. 197 |
| Meditation on the Grammar of Assent | p. 229 |
| Science | p. 245 |
| Evolution | p. 265 |
| A Mystic? | p. 291 |
| Priestly Celibacy | p. 295 |
| Newman, "Cathedra Sempiterna" | p. 307 |
| Index of Names | p. 311 |
| Index of Subjects | p. 317 |
| Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved. |
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Chapter One
Always challenged and forever challenging
During the last winter of Cardinal Newman's life a Catholic priest in Birmingham took a stand that appeared an act of rank intolerance to the foremen ("masters" they were called) of a factory there. The priest would not yield on his demand that Catholic workers not be obligated to take part in Bible readings which those zealous "masters" regularly imposed on their employees. To break the impasse the "masters" asked Cardinal Newman, the grand old man of Birmingham, to settle the dispute between them and the priest. In doing so they were hardly inspired by the activities of another Cardinal, Manning, who for all his social "liberalism" was a chief representative of theological "conservatism." In soliciting Cardinal Newman's good services those "masters" relied on his reputation as a man of broad views, which in many ways he was, but, as the "masters" were to find out, not with respect to the kind of issue at hand.
Heedless of the inclement weather, Newman hastened to see the "masters" on their premises. Once he was back in the Oratory, he cheerfully remarked that he was glad to live on, if he could be of similar assistance again. But the old Cardinal had done exactly the opposite of what a typical liberal would have done in the circumstances. Instead of showing the slightest readiness to become part of a compromise, he had made the "masters" understand that Catholics could not be expected to compromise in matters of conscience. Catholics were not to be compelled to take part in Protestant devotional practices, for as Catholics they were not at liberty to do so.
Undoubtedly Newman used both reason and sweetness in making the "masters" see his point and agree with it. The almost nonagerian Newman had, of course, a presence that spoke more eloquently than his always eloquent words. That alone, and the opportunity to brag about the fact that the Cardinal paid a visit to them in the factory, may have been enough to bring the "masters" around to his point of view. Still, sweetly as Newman could act whenever he saw that not malice but lack of information confronted him, here too he was true to himself. He again did what he had been doing all his life: he acted as a challenge on behalf of what he thought was God's clear command to man, a command embodied in a very concrete plan of salvation.
Newman's character was indeed the very opposite of that which some contemporary portraits of him seem to convey. He was not the kind of suave gentleman who is ready to use refinement to gloss over stark differences. He was the very opposite of a skillful diplomat who thrives on compromises that invariably end up in glossing over serious issues. He was a far cry from the one for whom the new, the progressive, had an intrinsic advantage over the old, the traditional. He could persuasively urge that "to live is to change and to change often," but only because he had his eyes fixed on what was permanently valid in the old. He espoused the idea of development because he accepted the challenge to be faithful to the type set by a divine plan that no welter of change could ever alter.
Unlike many latter-day reformers, he never challenged anything or anyone just for the sake of challenging. Whenever he challenged, either himself or others, it was only because he knew that there were principles and truths that were never to be challenged in the sense of being circumvented by convoluted reinterpretations. He was not a liberal with an advance form of liberation theology. Had those "masters" sensed in him anything of that sort, they would not have thought even for a moment of turning to him. But they hardly expected him to challenge them on a point far more serious than ever could be implied by a "socialized" Gospel. The challenge was even more serious than the purely liberal or democratic issue that all were equally entitled to follow their own conscience.
Those "masters" were hardly the ones to recall that fifteen years earlier Newman had defended the rights of conscience without giving the slightest concession to doctrinal or moral relativism. Then he had challenged any and all to take most seriously the voice of a conscience that imposed the duty on everyone to search for truth and demanded utter faithfulness to truth from those who had found it. The duty consisted in a single-minded attention to the business of saving one's soul. He had many times stated that he had converted to Rome for the sole reason that it was his duty, too, to secure his eternal salvation. He also noted that no matter how many times he had assured doubting Thomases about his never having had a moment's doubt about having done the right thing, they would not believe him. But his very perseverance remained a sharp challenge to that disbelief.
Challenge in that sense sums up what Newman truly represented and still does. As one who has been recognized by the Church to have practiced the virtues in a heroic way, Newman certainly lived up to the dictates of the most difficult challenge a human being can face: the relentless challenge of dealing with one's own fallen self. This is why he could challenge that old man in others in a way no less thoroughgoing than he faced the challenge posed to himself.
First he responded in full to the voice that challenged him inwardly to live a life ever more centered, as he put in, on an invisible world. It made him commit himself to lifelong celibacy, apart from taking orders in the Church of England. His first plans were to be a missionary in foreign lands. As an Anglican clergyman, he had to face up to the challenge of sinking with the Established Church to the lowlands of the polished naturalism of civilized society. The challenge meant a work to be done, a work that became known as the Tractarian Movement. Its aim was to recover the supernatural (or "Church principles" in the Tractarians' vocabulary). But those principles, when taken with full consistency, brought the challenge of turning to Rome. This challenge, as Newman was to find out, was too much for most of his fellow Tractarians, and inconceivable to other Anglicans.
Contrary to Newman's expectations, the Tractarian Movement made hardly a dent on most of his co-religionists. This in turn helped him perceive even more clearly that the concretely and fully supernatural, as ordained and channelled by Revelation, was inseparable from Rome. It posed for him an excruciating challenge, but he did not shirk from it. It meant for him a self-imposed exile from Oriel College, his intellectual paradise, then it demanded from him the parting from most of his friends. Even his closest relations thought that he had become unhinged. Then he took up the challenge of implementing his religious vocation. The result was the introduction of St. Philip Neri's Oratory to England, which brought him the daily challenges of religious community life.
About the same time he did not shrink from the task of challenging his former fellow Tractarians who thought it possible to be Catholics and still be members of the Church of England. He gained only a few percent of the Tractarians, who in turn represented only a few percent of Anglicans. It was a strange anticipation of what turned out to be an uncannily quantitative "constant" of the "science" of ecclesiology. This is a point, which those who cultivate ecclesiology as if it were a science, in particular in reference to reunion with the Church of England, would do well to keep in mind as they draw up their ecumenical formulas and paint rosy expectations.
Relatively easy among the challenges which Newman as a newborn Catholic had to take up was that of seeking ordination as a Catholic priest. Nothing was easier for him than to ward off dreams about the validity of Anglican orders, although at that time he did not yet feel about them the strong repugnance which later took hold of him. He wanted to be the sort of Catholic priest whose chief vocation is to challenge all "the lost sheep of Israel" and to do so in season and out of season, as Paul urged Timothy to do. He knew, of course, that he was to live up to that challenge mainly through speaking to the educated and therefore with a marked intellectual touch. Although he knew by 1850 that his calling was to be mainly to half-believers, since society was rapidly losing its traditional attachment to faith, he accepted Archbishop Wiseman's challenge to deliver in London a series of talks which he knew would be mostly attended by former comrades-in-arms in the Tractarian Movement. Again, he did not refuse the request of the by the then Cardinal Wiseman to be the keynote speaker at the first Synod of the Catholic Church in England since Reformation times.
His speech, "The Second Spring," ushered in for him a Winter, in which the light was not to break through until much later. But since the Spring was to be genuine, and not a matter of rosy dreams, it brought along spells of storm. One brought the prospect of being jailed. He was fully aware of this as he, still a neophyte priest, rose in court in defense of all priests as he challenged the accusations of Achilli, an apostate priest who delighted overflow Protestant audiences with juicy insinuations of sacerdotal immorality. Newman was not the one to avoid that challenge by recommending a change in the rule of celibacy as some Newmanists would do a hundred years later.
Then there was the challenge of setting up a Catholic University in Dublin, with its endless and thankless duties of explaining things that all too often should have seemed self-explanatory except for those who had to be courted to hear common sense. His major answer to them was that since the Apostolic See wanted that university, there remained no ground for specious excuses not to obey wholeheartedly. His clarion call for obedience and loyalty, his "Cathedra sempiterna," was not remembered a hundred years later when countless Catholic academics made a sport of turning Catholic universities and colleges into breeding places of "loyal opposition."
Then he took up the challenge of translating the Bible, only to find himself let down. No happier was his brief stint as editor of The Rambler , where an article of his on the role of laity was the last straw in the eyes of his ecclesiastical critics. He rose to the challenge of remaining obedient to Church authorities. The world, including the Catholic world, saw little of his faithfulness amidst the challenges of daily drudgery in the Oratory and its School. There he seemed to be buried while still in his prime.
The challenge Kingsley posed to the sincerity of Newman and of the Catholic clergy seemed to come out of the blue. Newman's response to it, the Apologia pro vita sua , made literary, theological, and social history. It became impossible in England to treat Catholics with contempt and get away with it without running the risk of being taken for an outmoded bigot. More importantly, no reader of the Apologia could seriously doubt that it was solely a sincere search for the supernatural that had made Newman turn his back to the Church of England and embrace the Church of Rome.
And since he turned to Rome only because he saw in it the fulcrum on earth of God's very plan of salvation, he never challenged Rome's decision that no Catholic college was to be set up in Oxford. A great sacrifice it must have been for him as he felt that to run such a college was the only thing he could really do well and feel at home with. But precisely because he accepted the challenge that demanded sacrificing one's human self, years later he did not sound hollow as he urged full obedience not only to policies set by the pope himself but also to those set by all the pope's offices, the Curia, much maligned by "enlightened" Catholics then as now. This should be a painful challenge to some Newmanites, who are so prolific at preaching in his name a newfangled spirituality: Its primary precept is the full development of one's own natural potential, at the practically total disregard of the often "unnatural" demands of the supernatural.
For a long time after Newman's death only a few Newman scholars tried to take that supernatural edge from the challenge which Newman's life and thought continued posing. The modernist image which Bremond first painted of Newman remained for decades a literary curiosity. Others, like Przywara, overemphasized the existential character in Newman's thinking, his insistence on the concrete as opposed to the general, and his ability to portray and relish the personally experienced faith. Such efforts could not help, at least indirectly, but create the impression that for Newman hierarchical authority, speaking infallibly in the pope, was somehow a secondary matter.
Still, around the centenary of Newman's conversion the great majority of publications on Newman and his thought--and they ran to over ten thousand items--presented a picture that, for want of a better word, was "conservative." Above all, he was still a convert, to put it bluntly, who was respected as such because it was still respectable to go out and make converts. Within a decade or so he began to appear in a light which increasingly distracted from the towering fact of his conversion. The light was the one in which Vatican II began to be bathed, contrary to its official intentions and to the very words of its documents. It became a sign of theological and ecclesiastical sophistication to hail Newman as the chief inspiration of Vatican II and to leave aside the task of listing the factual and documentary proofs on behalf of that shibboleth.
A purpose was thereby served, and the more effectively, the less any effort was made to specify the sense in which Vatican II could be related to Newman's very words, formal and informal. There was a supreme irony in the fact that the publication of Newman's thirty-odd-volume correspondence just began when Vatican II ended. The more the riches of those volumes will be mined, the more fatuous will appear this tying of Newman to the "spirit" of Vatican II, a spirit certainly to be distinguished from its official documents. But the Newman who, even with an eye on the Bible itself, said that a book cannot defend itself from false interpretations would not be surprised.
Theological efforts began to multiply to find Catholic fullness in his Anglican writings and to put an Anglican spin on his Catholic writings. In both cases studied selectivity ruled vis-a-vis what he actually bequeathed. Less and less was he looming large as a convert, let alone as arguably the most important convert since Reformation times. By the time of the centenary of his death, Anglicans were ever bolder to claim him. Most recently, they have inserted Newman into their liturgical calendar, to the greater glory of that ecclesiastical eclecticity in which they are past masters. He is one more item in that spiritual smorgasbord which they take glory in serving up, so that anyone may satisfy his or her palate from Anglo-Catholics to rank modernists and to some who believe even less.
This tactic has been the standard weapon in the hands of Anglicans ever since the Tractarian Movement. Christopher Hollis, a convert and subsequently the father of Bishop Hollis of Southampton, was confronted with it in the 1920s, when his own father, an Anglican Bishop, tried to dissuade him from going over to Rome. In our time, the same tactic was prominently used by the Archbishop of Canterbury, when the ordination of women in the Church of England was found by some Anglo-Catholics--bishops, priests, and laity--to be the last straw for them. They failed to recall that Newman's chief effort consisted, in a sense, in discrediting any further waiting for another last straw to come.
Those Catholics in England who thought that the doors of the Establishment had sprung wide open to them, had less and less interest in Newman, except in carefully cultivated cliches about him. Insofar as the Establishment stood for worldliness in the guise of polished comportment, Newman could only diminish in significance to Catholics who set the highest spiritual premium on rising on the ladder of social respectability. Meanwhile the obfuscation of what Newman really stood for proceeded by leaps and bounds. A good deal of what was published to celebrate the centenary of his death would have made him turn in his grave.
It would surely be interesting to probe into the studied vagueness of those Catholic dignitaries and theologians who referred to Newman as the inspiration of Vatican II. It is not easy to sum up the inspiration of Trent and Vatican I, although both were emphatically dogmatic and therefore very specific in their messages. Contrary to cliches, Trent was not a counterblast at Protestantism but the final stage of a positive Reform movement within the Church. Vatican I was not meant to be, and was not, a blast at the world. It was meant to be above all a revitalization of dogmatic Catholic faith in Catholics caught in a growing secularization around them and within their ranks.
It is far more difficult to sum up clearly the inspiration of Vatican II, a Council that decidedly did not wish to be dogmatic, and in that sense specific, but aimed to be pastoral. To be sure, both Trent and Vatican I meant to be pastoral as well, but in the sense, and this is especially true of Trent, that only after the truth had been spelled out, could pastoral tasks, including reforms, be confronted.
Exactly the reverse position was taken at Vatican II. It is well to recall that even the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church is primarily a pastoral document. Apart from that everything is "pastoral" or markedly non-doctrinal in the manifold documents of that Council. Tellingly, its sole definitional part, the passage on episcopal collegiality, is not a dogmatic definition but merely an authentic statement of the mind of the Church.
In adopting this non-dogmatic, or attenuatedly dogmatic approach, Vatican II unintentionally opened the gates to vagueness, ambiguity, and indecision (all, of course, in the disguise of "pastoral" solutions) that do not cease to take a heavy toll on Catholic life--priestly, religious, and lay. Worse, Vatican II cultivated the non-dogmatic and in that sense vague approach, in a distinctly unbalanced way. Indeed, leading periti of Vatican II did not cease criticizing Trent and especially Vatican I as one-sided Councils. They still have to discover Newman's rather dim view of Councils as so many places of infighting, as so many events that have been invariably followed by long phases of crisis within the Church.
With his penetrating eyes Newman might even note today that if Vatican II had much less bitter infighting than the previous Councils, it was possibly because it was the first Council held under the watchful eyes of the media. The latter is particularly effective at putting those under its glare on their best behavior. At any rate, the theological decibels of those who accused Trent and Vatican I of being very one-sided drowned out the voices of those who said that Vatican II had become an intentionally one-sided affair. For indeed there were periti (to leave aside bishops, whom only their fellow bishops and the pope should judge) who were hell-bent on turning Vatican II into a one-sided affair.
Paul VI knew whereof he spoke when, shortly after Vatican II, he bitterly deplored those who tried to protestantize the Church from within. By November 1964 he had found that there were Protestantizing traitors even among his own theological councilors. They aimed at nothing less than to lay mines under the very citadel of the Church, papal infallibility, by securing a potentially ambiguous text for episcopal collegiality. Paul VI, who broke down in tears on finding out that some of his own had betrayed him, had no choice but to make crystal clear what the authentic meaning of the text on collegiality was. Newman, of course, would have recalled that this was not the first time that divine Providence protected the See of Rome from being ensnared by the scheming of the Prince of Lies.
Pope Paul VI revealed some of the agonies he felt over all this when on an occasion he noted, with an eye on Vatican II, that all Ecumenical Councils have been unbalanced. His words created no serious echo. Or rather those who wrote most and controlled most the direction of the new theology did their best to prevent the words of Paul VI from taking the center stage of theological attention. They did so because otherwise much of the new theology would have been revealed to be studiedly one-sided. This they had to forestall at any price in order to save their skin and reputation and to protect their cherished aims.
Tellingly, some remarks which Cardinal Ratzinger made a dozen or so years after Paul VI unburdened himself in reference to Ecumenical Councils created a far greater echo. No wonder. The Cardinal, in his conversations with the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, admitted that the Council was greatly mistaken in an all-important pastoral respect. Most Council Fathers and periti felt, so Cardinal Ratzinger reminisced, that certain points of belief and morals were so much engraved in Catholic consciousness as to make it unnecessary to emphasize them along with points that the Council Fathers and the periti felt it was their timely duty to impress on the minds of the faithful.
Purgatory is mentioned but in passing in the Documents of Vatican II, whereas Hell is passed over entirely. Grace is celebrated, though not with sin as a stark background, as if grace could abound except where sin had proliferated. Original sin is treated with theological kid gloves as if there were nothing seriously wrong with man. While the Documents acknowledge the World's undying antagonism to the Church, this fact, which the Documents characterize as a most realistic condition of the Church in the world, receives a scant five lines out of the twenty-thousand or so that make up the Documents.
Clearly, there was a monumental imbalance here set up in the name of a "balanced" approach. Its justification, that Vatican I and Trent were "lopsided," should seem an egregious error in a dubious balancing act. Such a misjudgment could not help but invite its rebuttal. It came with the radical secularization, first of the affluent world, then of the developing nations. Some underdeveloped nations were also very successful in catching up in the techniques and pleasures of secularization, that is, in the joyful celebration of naturalism, with no restraint whatsoever.
For only those who slighted the stark dogmatic teaching of the Magisterium of Church Fathers, of trustworthy theologians, and, last but not least, of the Saints, could ignore the obvious: Already during Vatican II, the trend toward naturalism was moving ahead apace within the Church, and it turned, shortly afterwards, into a juggernaut. Clearly, when Cardinal Ratzinger said three years ago to another journalist, this time a German, that "to a certain extent we simply did not properly appraise the great trends of the times," he did not make an insignificant admission. For is it possible to think that the Council Fathers were not to some extent shortsighted in appraising those trends? Do not the texts of Vatican II bespeak of a lopsided optimism, at least in the sense that they contain no appropriate presentation of mankind's fallen predicament and of the chain of ongoing historical tragedies implied therein? Did not, say, a Maritain give witness right there and then that such an optimism was misplaced, an evaluation which within a few years amply proved itself by the rapid de-Christianization of public mores throughout the Western world? Did not that admission imply that the periti were the weakest in what they took for their forte , namely, their ability to read the signs of times? They looked forward to the emergence of a new humanism most sympathetic in many ways to the most cherished cultural objectives of the Church. Such a hope proved itself very hollow when the legalization of rank immoralities made great strides even in such Catholic countries as Ireland and Poland, to say nothing of half a dozen other so-called "Catholic" countries in Europe.
No such vain hopes were part of Newman's reading of the signs of times, both in respect to his own times and to the relatively near future. He, as the subject of an apparently unshakable British Empire, could hardly foresee World War I, which as late as 1913 prominent experts in economics thought to be impossible on the ground that big companies were now spread across national boundaries and shareholders were an internationally mixed lot in almost every major business venture. Much less could he foresee World War II with its genocides, and the two hundred local wars that had taken place prior to Mao's Cultural Revolution, which took no fewer victims than each of the two World Wars had taken. Nor could Newman foresee television and internet, although he would have been right on target in stating that like other means these two would become the channels of incalculable evil, as well as of much good.
The huge losses suffered by the Church, especially in the affluent world, bear out Newman' s cultural pessimism. Whether he was right or wrong in his views on his own times and on the decades to come, his cultural pessimism stands in stark contrast to the optimism of the 1960s that saw him established as the guiding light of Vatican II. And he was proven right in his repeated observations that a firm guiding hand was absolutely indispensable to the Church and that even with such a hand at the helm a wholesale apostasy was in the making. He was wrong in taking the view that there was no real need for the definition of papal infallibility, although he explicitly held it to be a matter of faith from almost the moment of his conversion on, that is, twenty or so years before Vatican I. Contrary to his view, it was that definition that provided the Church with its strongest means of self-preservation in ever more turbulent times. That dogma proved itself to be the only means to prevent "consultation" from turning into a theological and pastoral filibuster, a chief weapon of some willful groups.
About the turbulence of those times he had grim premonitions. He foresaw a not-too-distant future when only some peaks would be visible in a deluge of infidelity. As one who saw the age of the Antichrist coming, he would now shake his head on finding no reference to the Antichrist in the documents of Vatican II. As one who took theological schools for the chief agents in the promotion and unfolding of truth, he would now be appalled by the anti-papal revolt of so many theological faculties all over the Catholic world. As one who hardly ever was at loss for a word, he would now find no words on learning that the officially approved catechists in this or that large archdiocese can tell Catholics of tender age that there is no such a thing as Purgatory and that the doors of Hell were shut tight by Vatican II. As one who could imagine no greater pain than to sin against purity, he would certainly find the Antichrist' s doing in so-called "dignity" masses, going on for years before public outrage forces local Church authorities to bear down on defiant culprits, who, incidentally, have a solemn vow to obey the Pope!
This should not be surprising when ecclesial impunity, indeed great respectability, can accrue to theologians some of whose dicta imply that Hell may be completely empty and that the human soul of Jesus was not in the state of beatific vision during the excruciating agony of his passion. Could such vagaries be tied to a Newman who was hardly ever more acerbic than when he denounced Eusebius for not calling Arius a most dangerous heretic and for treating with sympathy those bishops who sympathized with that heresiarch? Was not Eusebius, who knew the heretics of the past but not those of the present, a strange forerunner of some theologians very active in Vatican II?
Could the celebration of the role of laity by Vatican II invoke a Newman when it led to a heedless campaign to assure to lay-people "leadership" positions in the Church? Did he not most emphatically deny to the laity precisely that leadership which is to speak authoritatively in matters theological, even though he wanted them to be consulted and to be fully articulate? He would today wonder on seeing, three full decades after Vatican II and four centuries after Trent, long instructions come forth from the Vatican about the difference between laity and priests (hierarchy), as if this should not be self-evident and glaringly obvious.
Newman would then be right in registering a strange contrast: whereas the medical profession cannot allow itself the luxury of tampering with such basics as the circulation of the blood, the Church apparently cavorts in the luxury of such tampering and yet does not founder. From this he would rightly infer the presence of some divine force at work in the Church that protects it from the bungling of humans within it. He would then challenge his fellow Catholics to be alive to this superhuman feature of the Church and not to take it for a licence for irresponsible behavior in matters of faith, morals, and discipline under the pretext of an "in depth approach" to inculturation that includes everything except the true cult.
The reader of this collection of essays, published over a period of ten or so years, finds in them a Newman who is a challenge to various fashionable trends in the Church today, but especially to the most dangerous of them all, the trend toward naturalism in the guise of renewal. Newman may have been, and indeed was, mistaken on a number of points, which only such Newmanists would sweep under the rug who try to use him in their strategy, first to "protestantize" the Church, then to "humanize" it by setting up the natural as the measure of the supernatural. But his writings contain no trace of those contortional discourses on the supernatural that have certainly weakened missionary zeal. Why indeed should the Gospel be preached in the arenas of technological wizardry, in the sleek comforts of higher education, and in the torrid zones of moral jungles, if the supernatural is already flourishing among those who have never heard of Jesus Christ and among those who are literally hell-bent on having Him on their own terms?
In this age when the Pope had to urge, on a visit to Lourdes, that Catholics should pray more intently for miracles, Newman's thoughts on miracles may seem an anticipation of that pontifical concern. His thoughts on miracles should seem a devastating challenge to theologians who systematically slight the natural evidence about miracles by overemphasizing the supernatural effects they ought to produce. In this age when science acts as a cornucopia of devices that produce "miraculous" cures of physical and mental ills, Newman's insistence on the truth of miracles, biblical and ecclesiastic, as well as on the prodigious number of the latter, should give pause to some "enlightened" Catholics.
In an age that saw so many Catholics take for a sign of theological progress that Saint Michael and his undoubtedly supernatural hosts were no longer to be invoked after the Mass, there may be found a much needed corrective in Newman's views on angels. Those views were also ecological in the best sense. For a healthy life of body and soul, he insisted that Catholics should keep a keen awareness of the presence of angels everywhere, even in the small details of wildlife, which are now worshiped by so many nature fanciers as a substitute for true worship.
In this age of science, when science is being turned into the sole avenue to truth and reality, Newman's excoriation of a science-based education should seem offensive, though very timely. Today even more than in his time, he would look askance at efforts to take scientists as a body for unbiased spokesmen of objective truth. Today, he would lash out as much as he did in his own time at conspicuous gatherings of scientists that sound increasingly like platforms for declarations of secularist dogmas. And just as he turned his back on the British Association for the Advancement of Science from its first meeting in Oxford, in 1833, so he would warn his fellow-Catholics about the anti-supernatural propaganda that blares forth from the big annual gatherings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and from the pages of magazines that popularize science.
Although he would not tolerate even for a moment the irresponsible supernaturalism of creationists, he would protest against being ranked as one of Darwin's soul-mates. What he told Baron von Hugel about the failure of the Darwinian mechanism of evolution to explain a mere blossom in a rhododendron tree, should refute all those who take Newman for an evolutionist and do so with no stark qualifications. He disagreed with Darwin on precisely the basic issue, the issue of the adequacy or inadequacy of the merely natural. He saw the supernatural at work everywhere, without slighting the role of purely natural forces and agencies. He was no mystic though, in spite of being a saint, a point one does well to ponder nowadays when so many fancy that they are engaged in "contemplation" in the midst of their feverish social and pastoral activities, if not activism.
He knew how to distinguish, as befitted a master of logic, who time and again made feel desperate, at times furious, his ecclesiastical and secular antagonists by advancing conceptual nuances they could grasp but were unable to match. Like many other masters of logic, he could have easily gone astray. In his major philosophical work, the Grammar of Assent , he came time and again to the edge of an epistemological abyss, with sheer subjectivism and egocentric personalism at its bottom. If he drew back again and again, as if at the last moment, it was only because the supernatural realities remained his chief guiding lights and inspiration even in the midst of what could appear on his part to be a most naturalistic logic-chopping. One wonders whether such caution was at work with the spokesmen of that most dangerous Trojan horse, Aquikantism (or transcendental Thomism), lately spirited into the Church.
It was his unlimited trust in the supernatural as deposited in the Church that saved him from becoming another Dollinger in connection with debates on the advisability on the definition of papal infallibility. A man of "imperial" or universal intellect, he remained forever an Oxford man, with a distinct touch of insularity. He never fully mastered a major foreign language. He failed to perceive that there were considerations far more weighty in support of defining that dogma than that one against it, namely, that one should not cause further aggravation to former Tractarians who did not follow him to Rome. As one who had such a profound faith in the divine Providence assisting the one in the chair of Peter, he failed to see that the same Providence would certainly prevent the definition of "maximalist" views on infallibility. If he ever lost his theological nerve, it was in 1870. In fact it took an Anglican to make him realize that in his opposition to the definition of the dogma, he had unwittingly taken the Gallican position, for which he had only contempt.
Only Newman's infatuation with Oxonian insularity can explain that someone so conscious of the unique contributions of the Church to human history could be so mistaken in his strategy toward an act of the Church without which, as history was soon to show, the Church would have become as paralyzed as she was at the height of the Gallican crisis. In this age, when Catholics are caught in heedless acts of begging forgiveness for the Church's failures, real and imaginary, it may come as a shock to find Newman roundly rejecting this policy. Newman, who took special delight in evoking the past of the Church as a pattern to follow, spoke from the depths of his mind and from the bottom of his heart when setting forth in several long letters his thematic apologetics of Church history. It was an apologetics with no essential concession to anyone, because the supernatural at work in the Church had to be unfailing if it was supernatural and therefore patently productive in benefits which the World could not match at all.
At the basis of Newman's attachment to the supernatural, which is his chief challenge to Catholics today, there lay his conviction that natural man's fallenness was something empirically most evident. To be sure, Newman was no Puritan, no Calvinist. However emphatic he was on the empirical obviousness of man's fallenness and on its dire particulars, he held that even fallen man could recognize the existence of God and the voice of a conscience aware of an absolute difference between moral evil and good. Newman's supernaturalism was sound because it rested on the natural. The rest was a logic strengthened by the supernatural: If there is God, and obviously there is one, then it follows that divine mercy could not leave man a ruined being. Hence a divine plan of salvation, a plan not offered as a convenience but as a sole means of rescue in the midst of a moral deluge. To seek entry into the Church was for him equivalent to finding the sole ark of Noah, the search for which was a most serious moral obligation.
A convert he was, who all his life had as his chief mission the making of converts. Nothing else can better convey the gist of his challenge in this age of often misguided and mistaken ecumenism and of rampant naturalism. His challenge is the challenge of the supernatural in its full and pristine strength, a supernatural to which he never failed to show a commitment with no reservations whatsoever.
Herein lies his achievement, the achievement of a saint. He was not a saint who practiced virtues "heroically in an unheroic way," whatever such a phrase may mean. Many Newman fanciers today still have to discover that as a saint he too was a "peculiar being," as he once characterized saints. Peculiar as this may sound, he was no mystic, in spite of having practiced the virtues heroically. At a time when it passes for theological enlightenment to push for the marriage of priests, Newman would appear very peculiar for his defense of priestly celibacy.
Nobody can disagree, however, that he was peculiarly good at articulating, at verbalizing God's appeal to man and man's all too often fumbling responses to it. Yet he would never have taken that articulation for an end in itself. He knew with Thomas Aquinas that all sins consist in taking means for an end. The end he never put so charmingly and strikingly as when he spoke, in his last years, of his approaching death as something to which he looked forward as schoolboys wait eagerly for the moment of going home for Christmas. Heaven was his home which, he knew, could be anticipated only supernaturally here below.
Most of us, who are admirers of Newman, fall far short of having a similar attitude. But all true admirers of his must keep in focus that supernatural heaven because it was his focus. It was the motive force, the steady reference point, and ultimate objective of his vast achievement. To weigh Newman according to whether he was a liberal or a conservative, a progressive or a traditionalist is a thoroughly misplaced approach to him, because he was all this, provided those terms are carefully defined. His real stature emerges only in the perspective of seeing him as the giant spokesman of the supernatural. The supernatural was his focal point where everything came together in his burning zeal for God's cause on earth. To be his true admirer is to keep that focal point in view when speaking of what Newman did and wrote, so as to live up to the challenge of doing justice to him. For he was one who largely ignored all challenges of a purely natural sort, however appealing and promising they might be, but he never shirked any challenge that served the supernatural.
Copyright © 2000 Stanley L. Jaki. All rights reserved.
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