Many-sided Newman
John Henry Newman is often heralded as the celebrant of “conscience” and the advocate of “change.” But, of course, his is too discerning a heart and subtle an intellect to be conveniently pigeon-holed or reduced to sound bites.
His sermon on “The Religion of the Day” serves as salutary counterpoint to a too undiscriminating reading of the pastor and thinker. Here is an excerpt:
Now conscience is a stern, gloomy principle; it tells us of guilt and of prospective punishment. Accordingly, when its terrors disappear, then disappear also, in the creed of the day, those fearful images of Divine wrath with which the Scriptures abound. They are explained away. Every thing is bright and cheerful. Religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal, are the first of sins. Austerity is an absurdity;—even firmness is looked on with an unfriendly, suspicious eye. On the other hand, all open profligacy is discountenanced; drunkenness is accounted a disgrace; cursing and swearing are vulgarities. Moreover, to a cultivated mind, which recreates itself in the varieties of literature and knowledge, and is interested in the ever-accumulating discoveries of science, and the ever-fresh accessions of information, political or otherwise, from foreign countries, religion will commonly seem to be dull, from want of novelty. Hence excitements are eagerly sought out and rewarded. New objects in religion, new systems and plans, new doctrines, new preachers, are necessary to satisfy that craving which the so-called spread of knowledge has created. The mind becomes morbidly sensitive and fastidious; dissatisfied with things as they are, desirous of a change as such, as if alteration must of itself be a relief.
The rest is here.
The Pastoral and Plain Sermons seem to appeal to Americans — perhaps because of their puritanism. We hear little of the gorgeous Catholic sermons.
Newman is indeed many-sided, but not ambiguous. His Grammar of Assent is a marvelous plea for a grounding of faith in phenomenological realism (OK, British empirical realism, but he breathes into it a subtlety that begs to be called phenomenological). While not disagreeing with dogma, metaphysics or scholasticism, he clearly makes a subtle modern move that places these forces in a different perspective.
The sectarian rhetoric popping up here and there in connection with the papal visit to Britain is distasteful — the Church of England should have been involved. The atheists are out in force, led by Stephen Hawking and his bootstrap account of cosmic origins. The answers of Jonathan Sacks, Rowan Williams and Vincent Nicholls are not all that convinging. They should have remembered the metaphysics of being, the good, the true and the beautiful. Talk of religion as an “interpretation” sounds weak and talk of a super-intelligence behind the cosmos sounds anthropomorphic and mythological.
This is an interesting sound-bite, and a sentiment with which I would largely sympathize.
But how does this excerpt differ from any other effort to use Newman for our own ends?
What a wonderful last line by Newman to reflect on when reaching the 10th station of the Cross: “composedly awaiting that time when, if we be worthy, we shall be stripped of our present selves, and made new in the kingdom of Christ. Per Galatians 6:15: ” all that matters is that one is created anew.”
Yesterday while walking the stations, my mind placed the Church in each scene, from the condemnation to the tomb, and then the sanctuary lamp flickered ahead, the resurrection!
A magnificent sermon by one who had the fear of God hoping to be saved.
“Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.”
So who said, “All you need is love”? Guess Lennon did not read his Newman, but I’ll forgive him. Why do fear and love here seem analogous to faith and reason?
Thanks for this reflection, Father, and for what it’s worth, if your own ends include providing people with a deeper and more well-rounded understanding of Newman, and themselves, please continue!
“A magnificant sermon by one who had the fear of God while hoping to be saved.”
No doubt, Cardinal Newman understood the significance of the “double-edge sword”, the fact that the sin of pride, from The Beginning, leads to corruption, and why the “charitable anathema” is necessary for the Good of the individual and the Good of His Church.
All we need is Love, for to Love in the fullness of The Truth, is desiring Salvation for our Beloved.
Wouldn’t love and awe be closer to the ideal than love and fear? Fear is so subjective and painful, while awe emphasizes the Object — the infinitely powerful and loving God.
From this week’s Tablet (these are free to all readers):
NEWMAN AND POPE BENEDICT ARE NOT KINDRED SPIRITS
It is almost miraculous that the Pope, who is leading us back to Tridentine ways, is to beatify Cardinal Newman, the godfather of Vatican II. He – the former CDF boss – is symbolically embracing the Newman who declared of the higher clergy, “I cannot fight under the lash … Mere[!] error in theological opinion should be met with argument, not authority.” Here is a theologian, who sees theology as the weapon of the Magisterium, promoting a man whose motto was “Heart speaks to heart.”
Newman said he wished “the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom.” He wanted to return to what he called “primitive truth” (not Trent), because this could reconcile divided Christianity. He wanted the laity brought to the fore, because “in all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit.” Again like Vatican II, he saw the necessity of religious change: “dangers and hopes appear in new relations, and old principles reappear under new forms: [religion] changes with them in order to remain the same … to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
Religious authority he kept in a non-invasive place: “I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe with another‘s lungs.” “You must take men for what they are – they must do good in their own way.” He would, he declared, make a toast “to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.” He shied from Cardinal Manning’s ecclesiastical mentality, his “dully tyranny”, and called his party at the Vatican I “an aggressive insolent faction”. He did not like its chief issue, the declaration of papal infallibility, concluding, “I do not see why a man who denied it might not be as good a Catholic as the men who held it.” Who knew the Pope was so liberal?
Kevin L. Morris, Cheshire
——————————————————————————–
FORGOTTEN FIGURE BEHIND NEWMAN’S CONVERSION
During the run up to the Beatification of Newman, the name of Ambrose St John has often been heard. However the name of Richard Hurrell Froude is almost entirely ignored: without Froude there might well have not have been, humanly speaking, the Anglican Oxford Movement which led eventually to Newman being received into the Catholic Church.
Froude influenced Newman to be more positive about the Church of Rome and led him to believe in the Real Presence. Up to this time Newman was just emerging from his Evangelical phase and at Oriel College both men formed a close friendship which only ended with Froude’s early death from tuberculosis.
Newman accompanied Froude and his father, Archdeacon Froude, on their Mediterranean trip in 1832. Newman left them to go to Sicily. Here it was that he suffered a serious illness – typhoid – and during his return wrote the famous “Lead Kindly Light”. Just after this Keble started the Oxford Movement with the Assize Sermon.
Tracts for the Times, a series of pamphlets written mainly by Newman and Froude, guided the Oxford movement and the Anglican Church to discover its Catholic past. Froude made possible the Oxford movement by bringing Newman and John Keble together and was in its early days the main driving force and inspiration. Froude used the Roman breviary and Newman kept this copy all his life and it used to be in Newman’s room in the Birmingham Oratory, as well as the gingery wig Newman used when covering his baldness after his typhoid illness. After Froude’s death in 1836, Newman and Keble published his edited letters and diaries in the Remains of the Late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, which revealed the holiness of Froude’s life, his fasting and prayer.
Dr Peter Ferrer, Oxon
I don’t quite see the necessity to oppose fear and love. Don’t they go well together? Whenever I encounter biblical mentions of fear, I always think of the fear that goes with love.
“She half enclosed me with her arms,
She pressed me with a meek embrace;
And bending back her head, looked up,
And gazed upon my face.
‘Twas partly love, and partly fear,
And partly ’twas a bashful art,
That I might rather feel, than see,
The swelling of her heart.
I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
And told her love with virgin pride;
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride. ”
(Coleridge)
But I suppose that that reaction would precisely be “contriving to explain away” the texts about fear of wrath.
We can certainly define fear without recourse to any definition of love. So the question might be, does love change the definition of fear?
If we look at a kind of love that people probably know more of than the love of God; that is, the love of another person, does fear enter into the picture? I think it does. But it is not fear of punishment; it is fear of failing to measure up to love. The “wrath” we fear isn’t the wrath of punishment. In some ways the wrath in love is worse, for it represents a failure to be transformed in the way that true love always transforms.
Love isn’t sunshine and lollipops, because true love brings with it a willingness to suffer, not only for the beloved but for love as such. One might say that love radically transforms one and that this transformation is a sort of new form of knowledge. Love transforms a two dimensional relationship into three dimensions. And it is fair to say that this brings with it a temptation to believe that when one loves, one suddenly “knows what it is all about”, because this transformation looks to the beloved as though he or she has accessed a new kind of knowledge..
But you, the lover, while transformed (and transformed radically) definitely do not know what it is all about. You may be transformed, but you are also still precisely the same person that you were before. And since love is something we develop into, we are all molded initially with our own two dimensional ideas (since they are not initially informed by love) of how to love, how to treat ourselves, other people, and the world.
So we fall back (or should fall back) on the accounts of those who have loved before us. For Catholics, these accounts form the Treasury of our Spirituality. In a sense, while love makes everything new, there is no need to invent anything new when it comes to love. Many have already been through it before. While all accounts of love, all rules of love (that is, all moral rules) are not the same as love itself and are not substitutes for love, they are nonetheless part of the human journey towards love and an understanding of love. So I will hold that they need to be respected as part of love. We are transformed by love, but we do not transcend what others have discovered about love.
Nancy has it right when she says: “All we need is Love, for to Love in the fullness of The Truth, is desiring Salvation for our Beloved.” I would add that desiring Salvation for our Beloved requires us to desire Salvation for ourselves. Love is necessary to produce this desire. But it doesn’t produce the means of achieving it. Even when we receive any of the graces of Love, we are still the limited humans that we have always been. Pushing up against the limitations of our humanity, especially the limitations caused by our pride, causes in us suffering. We do not escape this suffering. We do become more willing to bear it and in addition, we hopefully find the faith to continue in Love when we inevitably fail.
Unagidon! You said what I wanted to say but could not articulate, and more beyond that.
Claire–
Thanks for the Coleridge poem. It conjures up memories of fear and awkwardness, tenderness and revelation. But I don’t think it explains anything away, just shows us another dimension where, in a fallen world, fear can lead to goodness. I find a “so there” satisfaction that God has so made the world that fear is not the sole domain of the evil one. Even in a sea of fear there’s a current somewhere that can take us back home. And if Unagidon’s compelling post is not enough, I would suggest that anyone who can’t see a bond between fear and love has never waited up at night for a teenager to come home.
Unagidon’s post is compelling indeed. It also brought to mind one of my favorite works in the philosophy of religion: John Cottingham’s “The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy, and Human Value.”
Cottingham’s first chapter is entitled: “Religion and Spirituality: from Praxis to Belief.” He has two intriguing epigraphs to the chapter. The first is from Wittgenstein: “Glaube Du! Es schadet nicht” — Believe! It won’t hurt you.” The second from Gregory the Great (whose feast we celebrated yesterday): “Amor ipse notitia est” — “Love itself is knowledge,”
Unagidon’s assertion: “One might say that love radically transforms one and that this transformation is a sort of new form of knowledge” seems to echo Gregory’s phrase. And I think Gregory would concur with Unagidon’s further assertion: “the lover, while transformed (and transformed radically) definitely does not know what it is all about.”
One question I have though is whether the further statement, “You may be transformed, but you are also still precisely the same person that you were before,” needs some qualification. Certainly the transformation of the old self is never complete in this life, but has not the genuinely new emerged?
A favorite passage from Scripture is 2 Corinthians 3:18 — “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
Fr. Imbelli said: “One question I have though is whether the further statement, “You may be transformed, but you are also still precisely the same person that you were before,” needs some qualification. Certainly the transformation of the old self is never complete in this life, but has not the genuinely new emerged?”
The genuinely new has emerged. And when this happens, the person experiencing this, whether in the form of a love for God or love for another person, feels utterly transformed. I am still surprised, after all these years to hear new parents marveling at the love they feel for their newborn child, even though they have experienced this love from their parents, have heard about it all their lives, and have fully expected to love their children. Finding love or falling in love truly is like crossing a line.
But using the example of a parent loving a child, falling in love with a baby does not then make a person a good parent. On one hand, love does seem to make some things self-evident. When you love someone, you don’t want to hurt them and you don’t want them hurt. You don’t want to exploit them and you don’t want them exploited. You want them to flourish and you want to make sacrifices to this end. You experience pain when they feel pain and happiness when they feel happiness. You not only tolerate privations on their behalf, you seek them, because you feel joy in being able to contribute your own suffering (even though you still most definitely feel the suffering). One might think that one could almost extrapolate wider social norms from this love; for example when you love someone, you don’t kill them; execute them; let them starve; make them stay out in the cold; kick them out of an emergency room once they are “stabilized”; abort them; torture them; have drone missiles shoot at them; call them stupid red necks or elitist snobs; sexually molest them; ridicule them; ignore them; or write them off as evil. This expansion of love would seem simple enough, but we don’t do it for the same reason that we often utterly fail as parents or lovers. We have been transformed in love, but we are still humans who have been molded by whatever molded us before we fell in love. Before we fall in love, we inhabit an entirely different world and this is the world where we, as we say, received our formation. After we fall in love, this old person enters a radically new world. But we now need a new formation.
It was a mystery to me, when I had my conversion experience and then join a group of Third Order Franciscans, why they suggested that I get a spiritual adviser. They “suggested” this in the way that a parachute instructor “suggests” that you put on a parachute before you jump from a plane. At the point of conversion, like any moment of falling in love, one feels “advised” by something outside of oneself already. But one needs this advice, not just from other living people but from others who are dead but who left behind their own accounts, because one still needs a new formation, even though one is now prepared to embark on the journey because one has crossed that qualitative line and fallen in love.
” On the other hand, all open profligacy is discountenanced; drunkenness is accounted a disgrace; cursing and swearing are vulgarities.”
This reminds me of the current vocabulary for speaking of sins — “That was tasteless”, and most irrelevantly, “”That makes me uncomfortable”.
” On the other hand, all open profligacy is discountenanced; drunkenness is accounted a disgrace; cursing and swearing are vulgarities.”
This reminds me of the current vocabulary for speaking of sins — “That was tasteless”, and most irrelevantly, “”That makes me uncomfortable”.
You also say, “The “wrath” we fear isn’t the wrath of punishment.” I answer, Oh, yes it is.
Unagidon again: One might say that love radically transforms one and that this transformation is a sort of new form of knowledge.”
Ann replies: Hmm. Thomas talks (fuzzily) about “connatural” knowledge, which usually sounds like a description of the will doing the knowing, not the intellect. But that seems to be a sort of affective knowledge, which is a contradiction in terms. Or is it? IF not, why not? What you say here seems to be related to that question: how does love *reveal* what is good and/or beautiful? When we love and *know the loved object* is that the kind of knowledge you’re talking about?
Maritain (like Duns Scotus) says there is a sort of root ability in the depths of the soul which branches out into sensory and intellectual abilities. He says that the appreciation of beauty takes place in the depths of the soul in one unified act of cognition and affectivity, thereby grasping the truth and beauty of the thing as really identical. I suspect this is right. Certainly to the degree that we love something or someone we are aware that it *touches” us or *reaches into us* more or less deeply.
Unagidon and Fr. Imbelli: ” You may be transformed, but you are also still precisely the same person that you were before. ”
Ann comments: This is perfectly consonant with one interpretation of Thomas’ metaphysical model of the self. Our substance/essence/most basic reality is potency relative to substance as actually acting. In other words, first we actually exist as a certain kind of potential being, then love activates, *add* something more to substance-as-potential, and our whole being becomes more complex and more fulfilled. Thus we are the same being (substance) but transformed (activated into something more).
The notion of fulfillment (“flourishing”) is, of course, central to Aristotle’s model, but for him knowledge is ultimately what is most fulfilling of our potential(s). It follows that without knowledge of the greatest realities we can potentially know, theless happy we will be. This, of course, is a terrible problem for Aristotlel because according to him only Pure Act (i.e., God) can actualize our full potential. So it seems that we are condemned to not being completely happy.
But notice that for Aristotle happiness is an *affective* state, a state of an activated will. His theory of the will was sadly not very well developed. But he does say somewhere that there are fleeting intuitions of mysteries, which might refer to the sort of experiences Plato describes and recommends in the Symposium — the dialogue whose subject is Love!. They are intuitions of Absolute Beauty/Goodness. From all this it follows that to know/love the lesser goods/beauties is to be more or less happy, with knowledge/love of God as the greatest happiness, the kind of happiness we really long for. (Enter St. Augustine.)
If anybody here hasn’t read the Symposium, treat yourself and do. Not only is it not technical, it is even funny, and it’s all round one of the ultimate glories of Western civilization, not to mention wise.
St. Augustine has a great deal about the relationship between fear and love, poised between the two biblical statements, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”(Prov 9:10) and “There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). One of his ways of describing the work of grace is to say that it enables us to do out of love what we could not do out of fear. He also has a contrast between two wives: the faithful one who fears her husband’s return will be delayed, and the unfaithful one who fears he will return too soon.
The Symposium is an account of a feast where Love was the topic to be discussed. Here’s a translation. Don’t be shocked by the account of homosexual love. No, it’s not just about pederasty — Alcibiades comes on to Socrates. Very funny.
wiki/Plato%27s_Symposiumhttp://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.htmlvv
Here’s the Wikipedia sketch of the Symposium: http://en.wikipedia.org/ It just gives you some background, if you’re interested.
Ann and Unagidon,
Are you familiar with the talk that Pope Benedict devoted to Thomas and Bonaventure on March 17th of this year. The Pope said, in part:
“St Bonaventure, however, found in the writings of Peusdo-Dionysius another element, an even more important one. Whereas for St Augustine the intellectus, the seeing with reason and the heart, is the ultimate category of knowledge, Pseudo-Dionysius takes a further step: in the ascent towards God one can reach a point in which reason no longer sees. But in the night of the intellect love still sees it sees what is inaccessible to reason. Love goes beyond reason, it sees further, it enters more profoundly into God’s mystery. St Bonaventure was fascinated by this vision which converged with his own Franciscan spirituality. It is precisely in the dark night of the Cross that divine love appears in its full grandeur; where reason no longer sees, love sees. “
Fr. Imbelli –
No, I haven’t read it. I’m leery of Dionysius’ spirituality. Yes, it’s aim is orthodox, and maybe it is orthodox, but I wonder . . . It just denies so much, though I grant that what it denies is not love but “knowing” of various sorts. Still he seems to end up with a certain emptiness reminiscent of the Buddhist negative experience.
Reason fails, “love never fails.”
Jim –
Oh, yes, it does. Fairly often, sadly.