Legacy
Legacy
Newman died a prince of the Church and, somewhat improbably, an English national treasure, eulogized in the Spectator as ‘the great Anglican, the great Catholic, the great Englishman.’ The Times printed a suggestion that Newman’s hymn ‘Lead kindly light’ should be sung in tribute in every Protestant Church on the Sunday after his death, an Anglican dignitary even suggested a funeral in Westminster Abbey.180 And his old foe, Cardinal Manning, preaching at a requiem Mass in the Brompton Oratory, placed Newman ‘… among the greatest of our people, as a confessor for the faith, a great teacher of men, a preacher of justice, of piety, and of compassion.’181
But despite all that, Newman’s distinctive ideas had been neither understood nor widely accepted within the Catholic Church. The development of doctrine had indeed been invoked as justification for the definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and to Newman’s vexation was also used to justify the definition of papal infallibility in 1870: ‘It has been my fate,’ he complained to his friend Bishop Moriarty, ‘to have my book attacked by various persons, praised by none – till at last it is used against me.’182 But Cardinal Manning privately thought Newman’s writings were a school of heresy, and suspicion, or worse, ignorance of Newman was widespread among the scholastically trained theologians in favour at Rome. To men convinced that ‘the Catholic Church alone can challenge the world to point out a single inconsistency in her teaching, or a single weak point in the perfect system of divine Philosophy which God through her has given to the world,’ the subtle and exploratory teaching of the Oxford University Sermons or the Grammar of Assent was bound to seem a subjective retreat on defective logic, the ‘illative sense’ a high-falutin’ way of dressing up sloppy emotionalism.183 Leo XIII’s promotion of Thomas Aquinas as the model of Catholic theology encouraged the growth of a late nineteenth century neo-scholasticism which understood theology as bringing hard deductive reasoning to bear on revealed assertions, with no place for the ‘personal conquest of truth’, and no account of the preparation of the heart for truth, that Newman believed was the essence of faith. The result was a prevailing ‘supernaturalized rationalism’ in which ‘immobility in practice and immutabilty in belief’ became the twin faces of the theology favoured by the papacy.184
But there were many Catholics who felt the inadequacy of such a mindset as a response to the challenges to faith posed by modern philosophy, the natural and social sciences, and by historical and biblical studies. For such ‘Liberal’ Catholics, in France as well as England, the Essay on Development seemed to offer the key to an accommodation between modernity and the Church. And in Newman’s marginalizing of external evidences as a starting point for faith, in favour of an emphasis on the role of conscience, and his account of ‘the Illative sense’ in the Grammar, many in the 1890s recognized an account of religious belief which assigned a vital place to human experience, intuition and imagination, dimensions of faith ignored or denied by the official theology.
French perception of Newman was coloured by the brilliant but misleading interpretation placed on his life and writings by Newman’s most ardent French student, Henry Bremond, who saw the Newman of the Grammar of Assent as a fideist, hostile to human reason: Newman’s emphasis on ‘conscience, Christian experience and personal realization of the divine’ made him, for Bremond, an English Schleiermacher, basing religion on personal feeling: for good and ill, that picture of Newman was widely believed. More nuanced and accurate presentations of the Essay on Development and the Grammar of Assent were mobilized by Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell, whose attempts to reformulate Catholicism for an age of criticism nevertheless moved both of them away from an understanding of the deposit of faith as in any sense propositional, towards the canonization of subjective religious experience as the fundamental content of an ongoing revelation, whose successive doctrinal formulations were liable not merely to development, but to supercession. In the process they parted company with Newman, in Tyrrell’s case to an explicit repudiation of the very idea of doctrinal development itself.185
Inevitably, this theological ferment triggered a reaction from the authorities, in which Newman himself seemed to be targeted. In January 1901 a joint pastoral letter against ‘Liberal Catholicism’, signed by all the English and Welsh bishops, tried to close down theological discussion with a distinction between the ‘ecclesia docens’ and the ‘ecclesia discens’ so stark as to make it seem that Newman’s Rambler essay on consulting the laity was in their sights.186 Worse was to follow. In July 1907 the profoundly anti-intellectual Pope Pius X, having excommunicated Loisy, issued a syllabus of current errors, Lamentabili sanu exitu, drawn mainly from the writings of Loisy and Tyrrell, and in September this was followed by an encyclical, Pascendi dominici gregis, denouncing ‘Modernism’ as the synthesis of all the heresies and inaugurating an authoritarian clamp-down on anything savouring of theological novelty.
Both documents seemed to target ideas associated with Newman, under the general heading of ‘subjectivism’ in matters of faith. The Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory hurried to secure a statement from Rome that Newman’s views were not in fact being condemned, which of course made everyone suspect that they were. A panic-stricken Wilfred Ward, hard at work on his hero Newman’s biography, was certain of it, and told the Duke of Norfolk that ‘to maintain that the Encyclical does not say what it does will make things worse.’ Gleefully Tyrrell published a series of letters and articles insisting that Newman, despite being ‘an incurable ecclesiasticist’ had forged in the Essay and the Grammar of Assent weapons which the Modernists were now using in their fight against scholasticism, ‘Not in his scope or motive, but his method, Newman is the father of Modernists.’187
In fact Fr Joseph Lemius, who drafted the encyclical, had never read a word of Newman, and was working at the instigation of Pius X’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val, who greatly admired Newman. But Tyrrell’s judgement contained an uncomfortable kernel of truth, and the effect of the Modernist crisis was to slow the reception of Newman’s thought into Catholic theology for a whole generation, since most of those who defended Newman did so by downplaying the distinctiveness of his ideas and assimilating them to the current orthodoxy: so an American study of Newman’s epistemology in 1918 could make the bizarre claim that Newman’s theory of knowledge was ‘in all essentials the same as that of the scholastics.’188
But between the two world wars Newman’s works became better known, with good German translations of the Essay on Development and the Grammar of Assent appearing in 1920 and 1921. The revival of German Catholic theology in those years was spearheaded by men like Erich Przywara, Romano Guardini and Karl Adam, all of whom were appreciative readers of Newman, concerned to complement (or offset) the ‘objective’ theology of St Thomas with the psychological understanding of the nature of faith they found in The Grammar of Assent. As Przywara wrote, ‘Newman’s epistemological difficulties were the same as ours, he understood our historical situation and also what is going on in our hearts.’189 This interest in Newman would blossom after 1945 in the generation of theologians who were to shape the theology of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath, in Karl Rahner’s and Bernard Lonergan’s intense interest in the Grammar of Assent,190 but perhaps above all in the movement known as the Nouvelle theologie, and the work of Yves Congar, for whom Newman’s Essay on Development was a seminal text. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has recorded his own early exposure to Newman’s work as a seminarian at Freising in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War:
For us at that time, Newman’s teaching on conscience became an important foundation for theological personalism, which was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of departure. We had experienced the claim of a totalitarian party, which understood itself as the fulfilment of history and which negated the conscience of the individual. One of its leaders had said: “I have no conscience. My conscience is Adolf Hitler”. The appalling devastation of humanity that followed was before our eyes. So it was liberating and essential for us to know that the “we” of the Church does not rest on a cancellation of conscience, but that, exactly the opposite, it can only develop from conscience.191
Later, in Munich, he would deepen his acquaintance with the Grammar of Assent, and, through the work of Heinrich Fries, would study the Essay on Development, ‘which I regard along with his doctrine on conscience as his decisive contribution to the renewal of theology.’ Newman’s name was seldom invoked during the debates at Vatican II, but some of the Council’s key theological and ecclesiological concerns derive ultimately from his example, most obviously the recognition given to the role of the laity and the sensus fidelium in the life of the Church in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, in the formal acceptance of the idea of doctrinal development in paragraph 8 of the Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum and in the Council’s dramatic recasting of Roman Catholic teaching on Mary in scriptural and patristic terms in the final chapter of Lumen Gentium.
Newman was not an ecumenist: he envisaged the goal of Christian unity as a ‘return’ of schismatic or heretical Christians to the unity of Rome: as Vincent McNabb remarked, what ‘began in the common-room at Oriel … can end only under the dome of St Peter’s.’192 A crucial aspect of his legacy, nevertheless, was his profound impact on the ecumenical movement, and not only on relations between the churches of Canterbury and Rome. A key text here was the Lectures on Justification. Those lectures purported to contrast Luther’s teaching with that of the Roman Catholic Church, and Newman’s exposition of Catholic teaching in them was considered by Hans Kung to be ‘one of the best treatments of the Catholic theology of Justification.’193 But Newman equated Luther’s teaching on Justification with that of popular nineteenth century Evangelicalism and laid the faults he saw in that system at Luther’s door: ‘He found Christians in bondage to their works and observances; he released them by his doctrine of faith; and he left them in bondage to their feelings.’194 Whatever the inadequacies of Newman’s account of Luther’s teaching, however, the Lectures on Justification struck out in a new direction by placing the indwelling presence of Christ through the Spirit as the agent and meaning of Justification. ‘Uncreated grace’, and the role of the Spirit in communicating the divine presence, had been neglected in both Protestant and Catholic thinking: Newman’s introduction of a Trinitarian and Christological dimension to talk about Justification was a theological insight which would bear ecumenical fruit in modern Lutheran-Catholic dialogue.195
That Christological emphasis was the fruit of Newman’s patristic studies. In the same way, his recasting in the Letter to Pusey of conventional Catholic Mariology, away from the decadent Baroque paradigms reflected in works like St Alfonso Ligouri’s Glories of Mary, into a more patristic form, anticipated both the strategies of the nouvelle theologie, and the Mariology of the Second Vatican Council, and opened the way for fruitful ecumenical engagement between Catholics and Protestants on the role of Mary in the order of salvation.
But Newman’s most significant contribution to ecumenism was himself: in becoming a Catholic, Newman repudiated none of the modes of thinking he had acquired as an Anglican, and those modes of thinking would in due course fertilize the theology of the Church into which he carried them. Manning’s complaint that Newman represented ‘the old Anglican patristic, literary tone transplanted into the Church’ was absolutely right, and it was precisely those features of his thought that gave Newman’s thought freedom from the scholastic rigidities that were sterilizing the theology of his adopted Church. He was perfectly aware of the continuities in his own thinking, but there has been surprisingly little recognition of just how astonishing it is that a priest in an age when the Catholic Church was morbidly hostile to other Christian traditions should systematically set about republishing all his Protestant writings, with only minor alterations.
Newman is a complex figure, and his legacy is almost impossible to characterize simply. Pope Benedict found in Newman’s writings on Conscience not the question mark against the exaggerations of power that Newman intended, but an endorsement of authority: as he explained in 1990,
It was from Newman that we learned to understand the primacy of the Pope. Freedom of conscience, Newman told us, is not identical with the right “to dispense with conscience, to ignore a Lawgiver and Judge, to be independent of unseen obligations”. Thus, conscience in its true sense is the bedrock of Papal authority; its power comes from revelation that completes natural conscience, which is imperfectly enlightened.196
Warrant for every word of that can of course be found in the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Yet, it is not the most obvious reading of the text. As this book has tried to show, in the church of Pio Nono Newman was an angular and uncomfortable figure, ill at ease with authority as it was actually exercised, fighting with all his immense intelligence and mastery of words to preserve ‘elbow-room’ for original thought, even where that might lead into uncharted territory, patient with those who were troubled or doubting, yet also a passionate believer in the objectivity of Christian truth and the right and obligation of the Catholic Church to declare and interpret it. Those tensions were fundamental to his thought, but they puzzled and on occasion antagonized those with less patience with ambiguity and incompleteness. In 1861, he jotted down in one of his theological notebooks, ‘It is very inexpedient for oneself to go as near the wind as possible in faith, but it is very wrong not to open the necessary faith as wide as possible for others.’197 That remark captures the generosity of intelligence that motivated Newman’s detestation of slick answers to hard questions. Donald McKinnon spoke appreciatively of Newman’s ‘subtle, exploratory intelligence’, and John Coulson of the ‘note of interrogation’ that characterized his epistolary style.198 Lord Acton, a man of absolutes, moved from awed admiration of Newman as a defender of freedom of thought in the Church, to outrage and detestation that ‘the venerable Noggs’ had first resisted but then accepted the Vatican Council’s definition of Papal Infallibility. Newman’s caution, his refusal to opt for black and white solutions and outright statements, irritated Acton, he thought Newman was always covering his back. But, though in a more hostile key, he too noted the same exploratory character of Newman’s mind, ‘fervid, anxious and unresting … so intense, so little of the rank and file, his mind so subtle, so dexterous, so original.’199
The canonization of Newman is no conventional accolade to a very pious man. Newman strove all his life after holiness, but he had more than his share of human frailties. He could be tyrannical in friendship, he was thin-skinned and easily offended, slow to forgive, even at times implacable. Canonizations always have a point, which is often political, in the broadest sense. Newman believed passionately that religion without dogma slid inexorably into mere sentiment, and it would be possible to portray him as the patron saint of dogmatism, a model for the tame theologian anxiously eager to stay within the bounds of orthodoxy. But that would be a radical misunderstanding of his life’s work. Newman possessed one of the most original Christian minds of modern times, indeed of any time. His significance for the Catholic Church, and for all the churches, is neither as a model of mere piety, nor as a paragon of conformist orthodoxy, but specifically as a teacher and exemplar of Christian thinking at the edge, for the patient, generous, attentive and interrogative mind he brought to bear on the questions of good and evil, meaning and purpose, that are the heart of religion. Gifted with a radiant intelligence, he had an intense distrust of mere intellect. Towards the end of the Grammar of Assent, he wrote, ‘I do not want to be converted by a smart syllogism; if I am asked to convert others by it, I say plainly I do not care to overcome their reason without touching their hearts. I wish to deal not with controversialists, but with inquirers.’ Newman adopted as his cardinalatial motto the phrase ‘Heart speaks to heart’. By both heart and head, he remains worth attending to.