Newmania – 2: The method of personation
The second of Newman’s Oxford University Sermons addressed “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively.” He made it clear that the sermon would compare only their respective practical efficacy; he meant no disregard of “those fundamental doctrines of our faith, the Atonement, and the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church.”
He began by explaining what he meant by “natural religion,” a description that might have something to say to contemporary debates:
When, then, religion of some sort is said to be natural, it is not here meant that any religious system has been actually traced out by unaided Reason. We know of no such system, because we know of no time or country in which human Reason was unaided. Scripture informs us that revelations were granted to the first fathers of our race, concerning the nature of God and man’s duty to Him; and scarcely a people can be named, among whom there are not traditions, not only of the existence of powers exterior to this visible world, but also of their actual interference with the course of nature, followed up by religious communications to mankind from them. The Creator has never left Himself without such witness as might anticipate the conclusions of Reason, and support a wavering conscience and perplexed faith. No people (to speak in general terms) has been denied a revelation from God, though but a portion of the world has enjoyed an authenticated revelation.
Newman returned to the theme at the end of the sermon:
And hence, at the same time, may be learned the real religious position of the heathen, who, we have reason to trust, are not in danger of perishing, except so far as all are in such danger, whether in heathen or Christian countries, who do not follow the secret voice of conscience, leading them on by faith to their true though unseen good. For the prerogative of Christians consists in the possession, not of exclusive knowledge and spiritual aid, but of gifts high and peculiar; and though the manifestation of the Divine character in the Incarnation is a singular and inestimable benefit, yet its absence is supplied in a degree, not only in the inspired record of Moses, but even, with more or less strength, as the case may be, in those various traditions concerning Divine Providences and Dispensations which are scattered through the heathen mythologies.
After locating the ground and sanction of natural religion and morality in Conscience, he identified its failure as that of neglecting the personal character of God.
The God of philosophy was infinitely great, but an abstraction; the God of paganism was intelligible, but degraded by human conceptions. Science and nature could produce no joint-work; it was left for an express Revelation to propose the Object in which they should both be reconciled, and to satisfy the desires of both in a real and manifested incarnation of the Deity.
There follows this beautiful paragraph:
No thought is more likely to come across and haunt the mind, and slacken its efforts under Natural Religion, than that after all we may be following a vain shadow, and disquieting ourselves without cause, while we are giving up our hearts to the noblest instincts and aspirations of our nature. The Roman Stoic, as he committed suicide, complained he had worshipped virtue, and found it but an empty name. It is even now the way of the world to look upon the religious principle as a mere peculiarity of temper, a weakness, or an enthusiasm, or refined feeling (as the case may be), characteristic of a timid and narrow, or of a heated or a highly-gifted mind. Here, then, Revelation meets us with simple and distinct facts and actions, not with painful inductions from existing phenomena, not with generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures, but with Jesus and the Resurrection; and “if Christ be not risen” (it confesses plainly), “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” Facts such as this are not simply evidence of the truth of the revelation, but the media of its impressiveness. The life of Christ brings together and concentrates truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which wander idle and forlorn over the surface of the moral world, and often appear to diverge from each other. It collects the scattered rays of light, which, in the first days of creation, were poured over the whole face of nature, into certain intelligible centres, in the firmament of the heaven, to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. Our Saviour has in Scripture all those abstract titles of moral excellence bestowed upon Him which philosophers have invented. He is the Word, the Light, the Life, the Truth, Wisdom, the Divine Glory. St. John announces in the text, “The Life was manifested, and we have seen It.”
Newman called this “the method of personation,” which might be seen as anticipating the argument in the Essay on the Development of Doctrine that Incarnation is the distinctive “Idea” of Christianity. Toward the end of the sermon he returned to the theme:
Further, a comment is hence afforded us on the meaning of a phrase perplexed by controversy—that of “preaching Christ.” By which is properly meant, not the putting Natural Religion out of sight, nor the separating one doctrine of the Gospel from the rest, as having an exclusive claim to the name of Gospel; but the displaying all that Nature and Scripture teach concerning Divine Providence (for they teach the same great truths), whether of His majesty, or His love, or His mercy, or His holiness, or His fearful anger, through the medium of the life and death of His Son Jesus Christ. A mere moral strain of teaching duty and enforcing obedience fails in persuading us to practice, not because it appeals to conscience, and commands and threatens (as is sometimes supposed), but because it does not urge and illustrate virtue in the Name and by the example of our blessed Lord. It is not that natural teaching gives merely the Law, and Christian teaching gives the tidings of pardon, and that a command chills or formalizes the mind, and that a free forgiveness converts it (for nature speaks of God’s goodness as well as of His severity, and Christ surely of His severity as well as of His goodness); but that in the Christian scheme we find all the Divine Attributes (not mercy only, though mercy pre-eminently) brought out and urged upon us, which were but latent in the visible course of things.
Joseph,
Thank you for these splendid excerpts. A question for further clarification. You write: “Newman called this “the method of personation.”
Could you elucidate further the “this?”
Is it that Jesus Christ sums up in the concrete reality of his personal existence what otherwise remains abstract? that he “realizes” what is otherwise merely notional? As when he writes: “The life of Christ brings together and concentrates truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which wander idle and forlorn over the surface of the moral world, and often appear to diverge from each other.”
Bob:
Here are the two paragraphs in which Newman explicitly sets out what he means:
22. It may be observed, that this method of personation (so to call it) is carried throughout the revealed system. The doctrine of the Personality of the Holy Spirit has just been referred to. Again, the doctrine {30} of original sin is centred in the person of Adam, and in this way is made impressive and intelligible to the mass of mankind. The Evil Principle is revealed to us in the person of its author, Satan. Nay, not only thus, in the case of really existing beings, as the first man and the Evil Spirit, but even when a figure must be used, is the same system continued. The body of faithful men, or Church, considered as the dwelling-place of the One Holy Spirit, is invested with a metaphorical personality, and is bound to act as one, in order to those practical ends of influencing and directing human conduct in which the entire system may be considered as originating. And, again, for the same purpose of concentrating the energies of the Christian body, and binding its members into close union, it was found expedient, even in Apostolic times, to consign each particular church to the care of one pastor, or bishop, who was thus made a personal type of Christ mystical, the new and spiritual man; a centre of action and a living witness against all heretical or disorderly proceedings.
23. Such, then, is the Revealed system compared with the Natural—teaching religious truths historically, not by investigation; revealing the Divine Nature, not in works, but in action; not in His moral laws, but in His spoken commands; training us to be subjects of a kingdom, not citizens of a Stoic republic; and enforcing obedience, not on Reason so much as on Faith.
But he had already illustrated the method, I think, earlier in the sermon:
18. It is hardly necessary to enter into any formal proof that this is one principal object, as of all revelation, so especially of the Christian; viz. to relate some course of action, some conduct, a life (to speak in human terms) of the One Supreme God. Indeed, so evidently is this the case, that one very common, though superficial objection to the Scriptures, is founded on their continually ascribing to Almighty God human passions, words, and actions. The first chapter of the book of Job is one instance which may suggest many more; and those marks of character are especially prominent in Scripture, which imply an extreme opposition to an eternal and fated system, inherent freedom of will, power of change, long-suffering, placability, repentance, delight in the praises and thanksgivings of His creatures, failure of purpose, and the prerogative of dispensing His mercies according to His good pleasure. Above all, in the New Testament, the Divine character is exhibited to us, not merely as love, or mercy, or holiness (attributes which have a {26} vagueness in our conceptions of them from their immensity), but these and others as seen in an act of self-denial—a mysterious quality when ascribed to Him, who is all things in Himself, but especially calculated (from the mere meaning of the term) to impress upon our minds the personal character of the Object of our worship. “God so loved the world,” that He gave up His only Son: and the Son of God “pleased not Himself.” In His life we are allowed to discern the attributes of the invisible God, drawn out into action in accommodation to our weakness. The passages are too many to quote, in which this object of His incarnation is openly declared. “In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” “He that hath seen Him, hath seen the Father.” He is a second Creator of the world, I mean, as condescending to repeat (as it were) for our contemplation, in human form, that distinct personal work, which made “the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy.” In a word, the impression upon the religious mind thence made is appositely illustrated in the words of the text, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life; (For the Life was manifested, and we have seen It, and bear witness, and show unto you that Eternal Life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us.”
20. And hence will follow an important difference in the moral character formed in the Christian school, from that which Natural Religion has a tendency to create. The philosopher aspires towards a divine principle; the Christian, towards a Divine Agent.
The entire sermon can be found at: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/oxford/sermon2.html
Newman’s ideas about Natural Religion remind me of the ideas of Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, who believed that there was empirical evidence of a primitive monotheism. He was a linguist, an ethnographer and, I guess, also a missionary. Some of his books are, or least were, available in English translation. I recall reading them with interest. That was fifty years ago.
I was taught that the Bible was all the revelation there was and ever would be, so I’m very surprised to read the Newman. Zaehner, of course, is with him all the way. He thought it quite possible that Judaism got some of its teachings from Zoraoster.
Sometimes I wonder about the influence of neighboring religions on the Adam and Eve story — whether the warning not to eat the fruit of the tree of life was a warning to Adam and Eve not to try to produce what was actually a pseudo-religious experience by means of the “apple”. Some non-religious mystical experiences are caused by ingesting food, e.g., peyotl, a cactus, and muscaria aminita), a mushroom that produces a non-religious sort of experience. A case has been made that that particular mushroom is what the Upanishads call “soma” which produces a “mystical” experience of identity of one and all.
Distinguishing among these “revelations” will, I don’t doubt, be a major area of interest for Asian mystical theologians.
I should add this concerning my hypothesis about Adam and Eve. The tree of life is said to be “the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. In one of the basic kinds of non-theistic experiences which Zaehner describes, the mystics often describe themselves as being “beyond good and evil”. This certainly has no place in the value system of the O,T. So it might be that the point of God’s odd warning was, Don’t do drugs, that way lies a false god.