Part 10

Over the course of the 1850s, Newman reflected, in a number of works, on the relationship between ‘civilization’, ‘barbarism’, and faith. Newman was, at this time, engaged in a work of ‘civilization’ and ‘faith’ – in an attempt to establish a Catholic University in Ireland – and to engage in this work was to be presented with the task of establishing the proper relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘civilization’. How could the ‘intellect … range with the utmost freedom’ and ‘religion … enjoy an equal freedom’?

In his ‘Discourses’ on University teaching, in The Idea of a University (1852) Newman maintains that a University exists to teach all forms of knowledge, with the aim of imparting to those taught, a certain character of mind – ‘Philosophy’, or wisdom. This character of mind, ‘intellectual culture’, is a kind of ‘intellectual proficiency or perfection’ – a state of the intellect analogous to ‘“health” … [in] the animal frame, and “virtue” … [in] our moral nature’.¹ It is the function of the intellect to ‘reach out towards truth, and grasp it’. The cultivation of the intellect is an end in itself, for the perfection of the intellect – like the perfection of any aspect of ‘nature’ – is an end in itself.²

Newman insists that a university, if it is to be worthy of the name, must teach all forms of knowledge: nothing must be omitted. Every science, or form of knowledge, is concerned with an ‘aspect’ of reality. ‘All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact, and this of course resolves itself into an indefinite number of particular facts, which, as being portions of a whole, have countless relations of every kind, one towards another.’³ In the apprehension of ‘all that exists’, the ‘human mind cannot take in this whole vast fact at a single glance’, but views it ‘it under different aspects, by way of making progress towards mastering the whole’ and these ‘various partial views or abstractions, by means of which the mind looks out upon its object, are called sciences, and embrace respectively larger or smaller portions of the field of knowledge’ – with different sciences sometimes being concerned with the same part of reality, but ‘viewing’ it in different ways, according to different principles, and sometimes being concerned with quite different parts of reality.⁴ These ‘sciences’ or aspects ‘have far more to do with the relations of things than with things themselves’: they ‘tell us what things are, only or principally by telling us their relations, or assigning predicates to subjects; and therefore they never tell us all that can be said about a thing, even when they tell something, nor do they bring it before us, as the senses do’; so ‘it is not every science which equally, nor any one which fully, enlightens the mind in the knowledge of things, as they are, or brings home to it the external object on which it wishes to gaze’.⁵ To take ‘man himself as our object of contemplation’, ‘we may view him in relation to the material elements of his body, or to his mental constitution, or to his household and family, or to the community in which he lives, or to the Being who made him; and in consequence we treat of him respectively as physiologists, or as moral philosophers, or as writers of economics, or of politics, or as theologians’ and ‘when we think of him in all these relations together, or as the subject at once of all the sciences I have named, then we may be said to reach unto and rest in the idea of man as an object or external fact, similar to that which the eye takes of his outward form’.⁶ As then ‘sciences are the results of mental processes about one and the same subject-matter, viewed under its various aspects, and are true results, as far as they go, yet at the same time separate and partial, it follows that on the one hand they need external assistance, one by one, by reason of their incompleteness, and on the other that they are able to afford it to each other, by reason, first, of their independence in themselves, and then of their connexion in their subject-matter.’⁷ Taken ‘altogether, they approximate to a representation or subjective reflection of the objective truth, as nearly as is possible to the human mind, which advances towards the accurate apprehension of that object, in proportion to the number of sciences which it has mastered; and which, when certain sciences are away, in such a case has but a defective apprehension, in proportion to the value of the sciences which are thus wanting, and the importance of the field on which they are employed’.⁸ The different sciences ‘correct’ one another – the ‘several conclusions’ of different sciences ‘do not represent whole and substantive things, but views, true, so far as they go; and in order to ascertain how far they do go, that is, how far they correspond to the object to which they belong, we must compare them with the views taken of that object by other sciences’.⁹ The limits of each science, with regard to its application to the world, are made apparent by other sciences. Where a certain science is omitted, then the other sciences are prone to extend themselves beyond their proper limits – beyond the limits that would have been made apparent by the science that has been omitted; and where this happens, it makes for a ‘knowledge’ that is ‘unreal’; it makes for a ‘deciding on facts by means of theories’.¹⁰ One who is versed in a particular science, but who disregards the others, is at risk of ‘making his particular craft usurp and occupy the universe’.¹¹ These considerations are relevant to all the sciences; but Newman mentions them while insisting th at theology – ‘the Science of God, or the truths we know about God put into system’ – should not be omitted from the sciences taught at a university.¹² (The ‘theology’ with which he is concerned is not so much the theology that arises from the Christian revelation, as it is the ‘natural’ theology, which ‘the idea of God embodies’ – the idea of God as the creator of all things, transcending the world, simple, and infinite, possessing all perfections.)¹³ As the God apprehended in this science is the origin of ‘all that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material’, so this science is pertinent to a number of other sciences, and Newman asks – ‘Can we drop it out of the circle of knowledge, without allowing, either that that circle is thereby mutilated, or on the other hand, that Theology is really no science?’¹⁴

Newman observes that ‘when we think of [man] in all these relations [described by the sciences that concern him] together, or as the subject at once of all the sciences I have named, then we may be said to reach unto and rest in the idea of man as an object or external fact, similar to that which the eye takes of his outward form’.¹⁵ Newman suggests that what one is thinking of, when one thinks of ‘man’ as ‘the subject at once of all the sciences’ that concern him, and ‘in all these relations’, is the ‘idea’ of ‘man’. To think of ‘man’ ‘in’ his ‘relations’, is to think of him ‘with’ the various sciences that concern him; while to think of him ‘as the subject’ of the sciences that concern him, is not necessarily to think ‘with’, or to make use of, those sciences: it is to be aware of ‘man’ as something like the referent of various sciences. Newman suggests that the sciences ‘correct’ one another, and that to be aware of the limits of those sciences, one must ‘compare them’ with one another, comparing the view of an ‘object’ taken by one science, with ‘the views taken of that object by other sciences’. That one can think of ‘man’, however, as the ‘subject’ of various sciences, in a manner that does not seem to involve thinking of him ‘with’ any particular science, might indicate that one can be aware of the limits of a particular science – one can be aware of the difference between the ‘view’ it presents of the object, and the object itself – without having to compare it to other sciences. There might be something like a ‘common sense’ understanding of ‘man’, or notion of ‘man’, with which the ‘views’ of different sciences could be compared. Yet it could well be the case that the tendency of a particular ‘view’ to ‘usurp’ reality is restrained more by its encountering other ‘views’ than by anything else. The ‘common sense’ understanding of a particular object might, itself, comprise some of the same ‘aspects’ as those elaborated in the ‘sciences’ pertaining to that object, though in a rudimentary, undeveloped form – in a form less fit to resist the encroachments of a ‘science’ exceeding its proper limits.

There is, Newman maintains, a kind of understanding, insight, or wisdom – which he terms ‘Philosophy’, or ‘philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, or illumination’, or ‘the perfection or virtue of the intellect’ – which arises out of reflection on the various sciences, on how they are coordinated with one another, and on their limits and mutual relations.¹⁶ ‘Philosophy’ involves an awareness of the relations that the various sciences have to one another, of how they complement one another. Rephrasing a sermon, on ‘Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, which he had preached in 1841, Newman maintains that the ‘enlargement’ of the ‘mind’ consists, not simply in the acquisition of ideas, or of sciences, but in ‘the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements’, in ‘a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word … a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought’, so that this ‘substance’ has a certain unity, and the mind ‘takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and … has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre’.¹⁷ True ‘enlargement of mind’, then, is ‘the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence’, and when ‘possessed of this real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part’.¹⁸ This ‘enlargement of mind’ or ‘illumination’ consists in having something like a unified perspective on ‘the extended subject-matter of Knowledge’.¹⁹ It would, as such, ‘communicate the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving them one definite meaning’.²⁰ Newman does not remark on whether this ‘illumination’ or ‘architectonic’ knowledge, this ‘universal system’, could be expressed, or represented, in a set of propositions, a particular philosophical system – whether this sense of the ‘whole’, of a ‘meaning’ that is ‘every where pervading and penetrating’ certain ‘parts’ (that constitute separate ‘sciences’) can be expressed, or represented.²¹ He is concerned, though, with university teaching, as aiming to impart something of this ‘Philosophy’. Since the students at a university cannot be expected to master all the various ‘sciences’ which will be taught there, then how might this ‘Philosophy’ be imparted to them?

Newman suggests that one tends toward ‘Philosophy’ when one starts to reflect on whatever knowledge one has acquired. ‘If we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level; we must generalize, we must reduce to method, we must have a grasp of principles, and group and shape our acquisitions by means of them.’²² To acquire a sense of ‘method’ is to acquire a sense of the possibilities, and limits, of a science, and a sense of its relations to other sciences – to sciences animated by different ‘principles’. A university brings together students who have different kinds of knowledge, and different views of life, and in their ‘conversation’ with one another, they acquire from one another different ‘ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day’ – with these various accessions of ‘matter of thought’ eliciting an effort to reflect on, to harmonize, this ‘matter’. ‘There is much to generalize, much to adjust, much to eliminate, there are inter-relations to be defined, and conventional rules to be established, in the process, by which the whole assemblage is moulded together, and gains one tone and one character.’²³ The ‘youthful community’ will generate, of itself, a ‘living teaching’, ‘a self-perpetuating tradition’, which ‘imbues and forms, more or less, and one by one, every individual who is successively brought under its shadow’.²⁴ The ‘conversation’ of those present at a university involves, and generates, a common intellectual life, and this common intellectual life is a harmonizing, an ordering, of different ‘ideas and views’, different ‘principles’; and there is in this common intellectual life, something of the ‘Philosophy’ which harmonizes different ‘principles’ and ‘ideas and views’ within a ‘universal system’. As with the ‘youthful community’, so with the professors. ‘An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation’, and, in this, they ‘learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other.’²⁵ What is ‘created’, through this conversation, is an ‘intellectual tradition’, a ‘pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude’, and this ‘intellectual tradition … guides [the student] in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses’, so that he ‘apprehends the great outhnes of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts’.²⁶ ‘Philosophy’ is there, then, in the ‘conversation’ that is the common life of a university, and to participate in that common life is to be ‘imbued’ with something of that ‘Philosophy’. Newman suggests, accordingly, that if a university is to be ‘Catholic’, it is not enough that ‘theology’ – even of the most correct kind – be included among the subjects studied there, but, rather, individuals ‘imbued’ with Catholicism must take part in the ‘living’ conversation that is the life of the university. He reflects, in this regard, on the ‘mission’ of St Philip Neri, who ‘preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt’, and who did so ‘by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation’.²⁷ That is, in a properly ‘Catholic’ university, the ‘conversation’, the ‘intellectual tradition’, that is the life of the university, would have a ‘Catholic’ character: the ‘stream’ of that ‘intellectual tradition’ would be animated, ‘direct[ed]’, by a ‘living’ Catholic spirit. The ‘intellectual tradition’ is present, realized, in the ‘conversation’ of those who participate in the life of the university; and those who take part in that ‘conversation’ bring to it, not simply their ‘learning’, but all that they are – their ‘devotion’, as well as ‘their … sciences’. In a sermon on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, preached in 1856, in which he sets out what he would wish a Catholic university to be, Newman remarks that ‘I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion’, so that there are not ‘two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together’, but, rather, ‘the same roof [should] … contain both the intellectual and moral discipline’.²⁸ In this regard, ‘devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion’.²⁹ ‘Science’ and ‘devotion’, in this regard, might be aspects of a single character, and a single ‘intellectual tradition’; and, in this tradition, there need be no stultification of ‘science’ or ‘devotion’ – ‘I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom.’³⁰ The ‘conversation’ which this ‘tradition’ animates, and in which it is realized, would involve the ‘intellectual and moral’ in a certain unity. In The Idea of a University, Newman insists that true religion is consistent with the highest ‘perfection’ of the intellect – grace ‘perfects’ nature. ‘We attain to heaven by using this world well, though it is to pass away; we perfect our nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature, and directing it towards aims higher than its own.’³¹ While grace is ‘higher’ than ‘nature’, and has ‘aims higher’ than nature, nevertheless, the pursuit of those aims is not an ‘undoing’ of nature: what is proper to ‘nature’, and its perfection, is consistent with, in harmony with, grace. The ‘conversation’ that is the ‘intellectual tradition’ of a university, is not stultified, when the ‘principles’ and ‘devotion’ of religion are involved in it. The ‘principles’ and ‘ideas and views’ of the different ‘sciences’, in all their integrity, can be expressed, ‘consult[ed]’, ‘adjust[ed]’, in the ‘conversation’ that constitutes an ‘intellectual tradition’, when that tradition has a character that is Catholic.

In The Rise and Progress of Universities (1856), a series of essays published between 1854 and 1856 for the Catholic University Gazette, Newman insists that ‘conversation’, personal contact, is necessary for the imparting of knowledge: books do not suffice. For genuine education, ‘the ancient method’ must be adopted, the method of ‘oral instruction, of present communication between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of a disciple’.

If we wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we must consult the living man and listen to his living voice … no books can get through the number of minute questions which it is possible to ask on any extended subject, or can hit upon the very difficulties which are severally felt by each reader in succession … [and] no book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation.³²

With regard to ‘any study’, ‘the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already’.³³ This is the case, equally, for ‘religious teaching’.

Its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all education, the personal presence of a teacher, or, in theological language, Oral Tradition … Truth, a subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured into the mind of the scholar by his eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and reason; it is poured into his mind and is sealed up there in perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it, by questioning and requestioning, by correcting and explaining.³⁴

Newman maintains that the ‘essence’ of a university consists in this relationship – in Professors, who possess knowledge, imparting it to their ‘scholars’; and he maintains that, where there is this relationship, then there is – in however rudimentary a form – a university. Something more than a ‘Professorial system’, however, is needed for the integrity, or well-being, of a university. A Professor, who has many ‘scholars’, will not be able to form a close relationship with any of them; so that they may be very much left to themselves, as far as any sort of discipline – scholastic, or moral – is concerned. There arises, accordingly, a ‘system of Colleges, and College Tutors’, to maintain order and discipline.

A College, Newman observes, is ‘a place of residence for the University student, who would there find himself under the guidance and instruction of Superiors and Tutors, bound to attend to his personal interests, moral and intellectual’.³⁵

Regularity, rule, respect for others, the eye of friends and acquaintances, the absence from temptation, external restraints generally, are of first importance in protecting us against ourselves. When a boy leaves his home, when a peasant leaves his country, his faith and morals are in great danger, both because he is in the world, and also because he is among strangers. The remedy, then, of the perils which a University presents to the student, is to create within it homes, ‘altera Trojae Pergama’, such as those, or better than those, which he has left behind. Small communities must be set up within its precincts, where his better thoughts will find countenance, and his good resolutions support; where his waywardness will be restrained, his heedlessness forewarned, and his prospective deviations anticipated. Here, too, his diligence will be steadily stimulated; he will be kept up to his aim; his progress will be ascertained, and his week’s work, like a labourer’s, measured. It is not easy for a young man to determine for himself whether he has mastered what he has been taught; a careful catechetical training, and a jealous scrutiny into his power of expressing himself and of turning his knowledge to account, will be necessary, if he is really to profit from the able Professors whom he is attending; and all this he will gain from the College Tutor.³⁶

Newman maintains that ‘Colleges are the direct and special instruments, which the Church uses in a University, for the attainment of her sacred objects’.³⁷ The College Tutor is to attend to the ‘personal interests, moral and intellectual’ of the students.³⁸ The Colleges are ‘instruments’ of ‘moral and intellectual’ discipline, imposing certain ‘external restraints’, and as such they are the ‘direct … instruments, which the Church uses’; such ‘discipline’ may be ordered toward the realization of the ‘sacred objects’ of the Church. The Colleges are not, however, the only ‘instruments’ of the Church in a university. If the personal relationship of the Tutor to the student is a relationship of ‘discipline’ – a quasi-parental relationship – the personal relationship of the Professor or ‘Master’ to the student is a relationship of ‘influence’ – a relationship more like friendship, involving ‘intellectual isonomy’. Newman maintains that ‘influence’ was the ideal of Athens. ‘The Athenians felt that a democracy was but the political expression of an intellectual isonomy, and, when they had obtained it, and taken the Beautiful for their Sovereign, instead of king or tyrant, they came forth as the civilizers, not of Greece only, but of the European world.’³⁹ This ideal was not realized in the life of Athens – ‘their literature, as it has come down to us, is no sample or measure of their actual mode of living’ – but while ‘her great orators have put to her credit a beautiful idea, which … [was] not really fulfilled in her’, that idea ‘has literally and unequivocally been realized within the territory of Christianity’ – namely, in the Congregation of the Oratory.⁴⁰ As ‘it was the method of Influence’, rather than ‘System’ or ‘Law’, that was the life of the schools of Athens – ‘it was the absence of rule, it was the action of personality, the intercourse of soul with soul, the play of mind upon mind, it was an admirable spontaneous force, which kept the schools of Athens going’ – so the Congregation of the Oratory ‘proceeds from one … who has placed the noblest aims before his children, yet withal the freest course; who always drew them to their duty, instead of commanding, and brought them on to perform before they had yet promised … who in his humility had no intention of forming any Congregation at all, but had formed it before he knew of it, from the beauty and the fascination of his own sainthness; and then, when he was obliged to recognize it and put it into shape, shrank from the severity of the Regular, would have nothing to say to vows, and forbade propagation and dominion; whose houses stand, like Greek colonies, independent of each other and complete in themselves; whose subjects in those several houses are allowed, like Athenian citizens, freely to cultivate their respective gifts and to follow out their own mission; whose one rule is Love, and whose own weapon Influence’.⁴¹ Newman suggests, with regard to his own role in the ‘agitation’ for the ‘establishment of a great University’, that the ‘traditions’ of Oratory might fit him for ‘introducing the great idea into men’s minds’ and ‘bringing many intellects to work together for it, and of teaching them to understand each other, and bear with each other, and go on together, not so much by rule, as by mutual kind feeling and a common devotion’.⁴² The university begins, Newman suggests, in an ‘idea’, and in the encounter of ‘many intellects’, with a ‘common devotion’ to truth. And once a university has become established, its life consists in conversation. In this conversation, there is the forming of a ‘Philosophy’, as ‘many intellects’ are brought ‘to understand each other’: in such understanding there is a kind of coordination of the principles of the sciences, possessed by those ‘intellects’. Those who participate in the conversation acquire, in some measure, something of the ‘Philosophy’ that animates, or that is the substance of, the conversation. ‘Philosophy’ is formed, and acquired, in relationships between persons, in conversation; and it is in such conversation that personal ‘influence’ is exerted. In The Idea of a University, Newman maintains that St Philip Neri became the Apostle of Rome ‘by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation’.⁴³ In conversation, the influence of ‘personal character’ is exerted, and the conversation itself has a kind of character, expressing and forming the characters of those who take part in it. The conversation that is the life of a university can be a medium for the ‘eloquence of personal character’, and that ‘eloquence’ can, in turn, affect the character of that conversation: it can become an ‘instrument’ of Christianity; it can have a Christian life or quality.

The ‘Philosophy’, the ‘intellectual culture’, that is the aim of university teaching, is present in a form that is ‘social’, in a ‘conversation’ that is a ‘tradition’. Newman maintains in The Idea of a University that, while the aim of university teaching is the perfection of the intellect, as an ‘end’ in itself, this perfection has a certain ‘utility’ for ‘society’, in that the ‘training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society’: the ‘practical end’ of a university consists in ‘training good members of society’; its ‘art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world’.⁴⁴ A university training ‘aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life’.⁴⁵ The intellectual ‘life’ created by a university, animates, and is intimately connected to, the life of ‘society’.

Newman maintains that the ‘common possession’ that constitutes ‘civilization’, as distinct from ‘barbarism’, consists in ‘intellect’. In his Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe, delivered in 1853, he proposes a definition of ‘civilization’ itself as ‘a state of mental cultivation and discipline’.⁴⁶

States may be broadly divided into barbarous and civilized; their common possession, or life, is some object either of sense or of imagination; and their bane and destruction is either external or internal. … Barbarous states live in a common imagination, and are destroyed from without; whereas civilized states live in some common object of sense, and are destroyed from within … . By objects of imagination, I mean such as religion, true or false (for there are not only false imaginations but true), divine mission of a sovereign or of a dynasty, and historical fame; and by objects of sense, such as secular interests, country, home, protection of person and property … . But what is meant by the words barbarous and civilized as applied to political bodies? … By ‘barbarism’, then, I suppose, in itself is meant a state of nature; and by ‘civilization’, a state of mental cultivation and discipline … . Civilization is that state to which man’s nature points and tends; it is the systematic use, improvement, and combination of those faculties which are his characteristic; and, viewed in its idea, it is the perfection, the happiness of our mortal state. It is the development of art out of nature, and of self-government out of passion, and of certainty out of opinion, and of faith out of reason. It is the due disposition of the various powers of the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the inferior, and the union of all into one whole. Aims, rules, views, habits, projects; prudence, foresight, observation, inquiry, invention, resource, resolution, perseverance, are its characteristics. Justice, benevolence, expedience, propriety, religion, are its recognized, its motive principles. Supernatural truth is its sovereign law. Such is it in its true idea, synonymous with Christianity; and, not only in idea, but in matter of fact also, is Christianity ever civilization, as far as its influence prevails; but, unhappily, in matter of fact, civilization is not necessarily Christianity … . It is possible – without the cultivation of its spiritual part, which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow of operation, nay, even with an actual contempt of faith and devotion, in comparison of objects tangible and present, – possible it is, I say, to combine in some sort the other faculties of man into one, and to progress forward, with the substitution of natural religion for faith, and a refined expediency or propriety for true morality … . And this is, in fact, what is commonly understood by civilization, and it is the sense in which the word must be used here; not that perfection which nature aims at, and requires, and cannot of itself reach; but a second-rate perfection of nature, being what it is, and remaining what it is, without any supernatural principle, only with its powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control. Such was it, in its higher excellences, in heathen Greece and Rome, where the perception of moral principles, possessed by the cultivated and accomplished intellect, by the mind of Plato or Isocrates, of Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, or Antoninus, rivalled in outward pretensions the inspired teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Such is it at the present day, not only in its reception of the elements of religion and morals (when Christianity is in the midst of it as an inexhaustible storehouse for natural reason to borrow from), but especially in a province peculiar to these times, viz., in science and art, in physics, in politics, in economics, and mechanics. And great as are its attainments at present, still, as I have said, we are far from being able to discern, even in the distance, the limit of its advancement and of its perfectibility.⁴⁷

Newman associates the cultivation of ‘reason’ – associated with ‘civilization’ – with the making of objects of ‘sense’ the ‘common possession, or life’, of a state. Why is it that ‘ratiocination’ should be ‘hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense’? Newman maintains that while ‘a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible, and fix upon the mind by pure reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a bodily form’, nevertheless, ‘taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove the point from which his reasoning starts’, and, in this attempt to identify ‘the point from which his reasoning starts’, ‘he [will not] be satisfied till he ultimately reaches those [first principles] which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself’.⁴⁸ As a result, ‘civilized states ever tend to substitute objects of sense for objects of imagination, as the basis of their existence’.⁴⁹ In illustration of this, Newman observes that ‘the Pope’s political power was greater when Europe was semi-barbarous’.⁵⁰ Newman suggests, then, that there can be a ‘second-rate perfection of nature’ in a ‘civilization’ which has its ‘basis’ in ‘objects of sense’. There can, however, be other ‘objects’, discerned by the ‘spiritual part’ – the part ‘which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow of operation’ – and the perfection of the ‘intellect’ can consist in the forming of a ‘system of theology’ from the contemplation of these ‘objects’, from ‘principles impalpable and invisible’.

Would Newman maintain that these ‘objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension’ are ‘objects of imagination’ (for ‘there are not only false imaginations but true’)? The contrast between ‘sense’ and ‘imagination’, here, would suggest a contrast between what can be experienced (with experience involving a kind of ‘handling and mastery’) and what can only be imagined (as what is ‘invisible’ cannot be experienced). Newman associates ‘objects of sense’ with ‘civilization’, and ‘objects of imagination’ with ‘barbarism’. Yet he connects Christ ianity – which, owing to the association between ‘religion’ and ‘true … imaginations’, might seem to be centred on ‘objects of imagination’ – with ‘civilization’, maintaining that ‘Christianity [is] ever civilization, as far as its influence prevails’.⁵¹ He suggests that ‘man as he is’, when engaged in ‘ratiocination’, is more ‘satisfied’ with starting ‘points’ for that ratiocination that are ‘as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself’ – with ‘objects of sense’, things that can be experienced. While there can be a cultivation of the intellect – and this cultivation is ‘civilization’ itself – which takes ‘objects of imagination’ for its starting ‘points’ – and Newman instances ‘St. Thomas [who] can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible’ – this, for ‘man as he is’, is more arduous, and less ‘satisfying’, than a ‘ratiocination’, a cultivation of the intellect, which ‘starts’ from ‘objects of sense’. (Newman associates the ‘satisfaction’, here, with a kind of ‘mastery’ – an assertion of the self, or an absorption of something into the self.) Where, then, the ‘reason’ is cultivated, the arduousness of reasoning from ‘objects of imagination’ is felt; and, as that which is arduous tends to be neglected, so this reasoning from ‘objects of imagination’ tends to be neglected: there arises an inclination to disregard such ‘objects of imagination’ altogether, as a ‘basis’ for thought. Where the ‘reason’ is not cultivated – as in a state of ‘barbarism’ – and the arduousness of reasoning from ‘objects of imagination’ is not felt, then there is less of an inclination to disregard ‘objects of imagination’ – and those objects are, accordingly, more potent in the ‘life’ of the community. (Hence, ‘the Pope’s political power was greater when Europe was semi-barbarous’.)

If ‘civilization’, in itself, ‘is the due disposition of the various powers of the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the inferior, and the union of all into one whole’, then a ‘second rate perfection’ would seem to be a ‘union’ of these ‘powers’ on a ‘basis’ that consists in ‘objects of sense’. ‘Barbarism’ is animated by certain ‘objects of imagination’, but in barbarism the ‘powers’ of the soul are not brought into ‘union’. In ‘Christianity’ which is ‘synonymous’ with civilization ‘in its true idea’, the ‘powers of the soul’ are brought into ‘union’, in subordination to the insights of the ‘spiritual part’, which apprehends ‘objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension’ – and these ‘objects’ would seem to be ‘objects of imagination’. The ‘spiritual part’, here, might, of course, be something altogether different from ‘sense’, ‘imagination’, and ‘reason’; or it might involve all those ‘powers’, in subordination to a ‘supernatural principle’. One might envisage a scheme where ‘barbarism’ is associated with ‘imagination’, ‘civilization’ with ‘reason’, and ‘Christianity’ with ‘spirit’. Yet Newman proposes a scheme where ‘barbarism’ is associated with ‘objects of imagination’, and ‘civilization’ with ‘objects of sense’. The ‘civilization’ which Newman envisages as ‘based’ on ‘objects of sense’ is, it seems, the civilization created by ‘man as he is’ – in which ‘objects tangible and present’ are preferred to the objects of ‘faith and devotion’ – and this is something ‘second-rate’: omitting the ‘spiritual part’, it ‘combine[s] in some sort the other faculties of man into one’. If the contrast between ‘objects of sense’ and ‘objects of imagination’ is a contrast between what can be experienced, and what can only be imagined, then it would seem that a ‘civilization’ higher than that created by ‘man as he is’, would have as its ‘basis’ the objects of ‘faith and devotion’, which, it would seem, Newman takes to be objects of imagination. Of the ‘second-rate perfection’, realized in ‘heathen Greece and Rome’, Newman observes that it is a perfection of ‘nature’ without ‘supernatural principle’, but with ‘its powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control’.⁵² This ‘second-rate’ civilization does not, then, involve a suppression of ‘imagination’ altogether – the imagination is ‘fully exercised’. It does not, though, have its ‘basis’ in those objects of imagination that inform ‘faith and devotion’. The imagination is ‘exercised’, but is not involved in the ‘basis’. The ‘union’ in the ‘powers’ of the soul, realized in a ‘second-rate’ form of civilization, is a ‘union’ that is ‘second-rate’ because it restricts, or suppresses, certain of those ‘powers’.

Newman examines how the ‘cultivation’ of the ‘reason’ might make for a ‘second-rate’ union of the powers of the soul, a union whereby the ‘educated mind’, disregarding true religion, makes a ‘religion for itself’, in his Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’ in The Idea of a University. The ‘Discourse’ is, in many ways, an elaboration of ideas which Newman had articulated many years previously, in a sermon on ‘The Religion of the Day’, preached in 1832, in which he maintained that in ‘the world’s religion’, a state of character, formed by ‘the mere influence of education and civilization’, is identified with ‘religion’ itself. In the Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, he maintains that the ‘philosophy’ which arises from the cultivation of the intellect is concerned more with ‘moral and social teaching’ than with matters of faith (‘where the country is Catholic, the educated mind takes its articles for granted, by a sort of implicit faith; where it is not, it simply ignores them’).⁵³ The cultivation of the intellect can, he suggest, confer a genuine moral ‘benefit’, prov iding a ‘rescue from that fearful subjection to sense which is [the] ordinary state’ of ‘nature’, so that, while this cultivation does not ‘supply religious motives’, and ‘is not the cause or proper antecedent of any thing supernatural’, it is, nevertheless, something that ‘does a work, at least materially good … [expelling] the excitements of sense by the introduction of those of the intellect’.⁵⁴ What is more, ‘knowledge, the discipline by which it is gained, and the tastes which it forms, have a natural tendency to refine the mind, and to give it an indisposition, simply natural, yet real, nay, more than this, a disgust and abhorrence, towards excesses and enormities of evil’.⁵⁵ The ‘scorn and hatred which a cultivated mind feels for vice’ may, however, involve a kind of self-regard, which is quite different from anything ‘really religious’.

Conscience … is implanted in the breast by nature, but it inflicts upon us fear as well as shame; when the mind is simply angry with itself and nothing more, surely the true import of the voice of nature and the depth of its intimations have been forgotten, and a false philosophy has misinterpreted emotions which ought to lead to God. Fear implies the transgression of a law, and a law implies a lawgiver and judge; but the tendency of intellectual culture is to swallow up the fear in the self-reproach, and self-reproach is directed and limited to our mere sense of what is fitting and becoming. Fear carries us out of ourselves, whereas shame may act upon us only within the round of our own thoughts. Such, I say, is the danger which awaits a civilized age … . Conscience tends to become what is called a moral sense; the command of duty is a sort of taste; sin is not an offence against God, but against human nature … . We find … men possessed of many virtues, but proud, bashful, fastidious, and reserved. Why is this? it is because they think and act as if there were really nothing objective in their religion; it is because conscience to them is not the word of a lawgiver, as it ought to be, but the dictate of their own minds and nothing more; it is because they do not look out of themselves, because they do not look through and beyond their own minds to their Maker, but are engrossed in notions of what is due to themselves, to their own dignity and their own consistency. Their conscience has become a mere self-respect. Instead of doing one thing and then another, as each is called for, in faith and obedience, careless of what may be called the keeping of deed with deed, and leaving Him who gives the command to blend the portions of their conduct into a whole, their one object, however unconscious to themselves, is to paint a smooth and perfect surface, and to be able to say to themselves that they have done their duty. When they do wrong, they feel, not contrition, of which God is the object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation. They call themselves fools, not sinners; they are angry and impatient, not humble. They shut themselves up in themselves; it is misery to them to think or to speak of their own feelings; it is misery to suppose that others see them, and their shyness and sensitiveness often become morbid. As to confession, which is so natural to the Catholic, to them it is impossible; unless indeed, in cases where they have been guilty, an apology is due to their own character, is expected of them, and will be satisfactory to look back upon. They are victims of an intense self-contemplation.⁵⁶

There is a contrast, here, between different ‘looks’, different gazes. Those who ‘shut themselves up in themselves’ do not acknowledge the presence of any gaze other than their own. They wish that their own gaze should have the ‘mastery’, so to speak (‘it is a misery to suppose others see them’). They ‘do not look through and beyond their own minds’ – toward a ‘look’, a gaze, that is other than their own – that of God. They would envisage themselves as an object that ‘their own minds’ can fully compass, for they would not recognize anything that ‘their own minds’ cannot compass, anything that resists the dominion of ‘their own minds’: they aim to realize ‘consistency’ in their conduct, ensuring the ‘keeping of deed with deed’ by regulating their acts according to an idea of themselves. They would – as realizing a certain idea of themselves, with ‘consistency’, and with a sense of ‘what is due’ to themselves – determine themselves by such an idea, making that idea supreme: they sustain a sense of the supremacy of ‘their own minds’ to the extent that they can ‘blend the portions of their conduct into a whole’, a ‘whole’ that conforms to an idea possessed by ‘their own minds’. When they deviate, in their conduct, from that idea, ‘when they do wrong’, they feel ‘not contrition, of which God is the object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation’ and they ‘call themselves fools, not sinners; they are angry and impatient, not humble’. If they ‘call themselves fools’, then they take their fault to consist in something like an infirmity of intellect – they have not regulated their conduct by ‘their own minds’. If they are ‘angry and impatient’, it is in encountering a certain resistance, which they would overcome: they experience themselves as something like refractory material (to be ordered by an idea). Newman contrasts this attitude with the attitude of those who ‘look through and beyond their own minds to their Maker’, who do ‘one thing and then another, as each is called for, in faith and obedience, careless of what may be called the keeping of deed with deed, and leaving Him who gives the command to blend the portions of their conduct into a whole’ – who, in effect, regard the wisdom by which their lives are regulated as something possessed by ‘their Maker’ rather than by themselves. They do not purport to possess an idea of themselves that is adequate to all that they are, and that is, as such, apt to regulate ‘their conduct’: they do not aim to make themselves, to create themselves in accordance with an idea of ‘their own minds’.

The contrast between those who would regard ‘their own minds’ as supreme – who aim to live so as to realize ideas of themselves, making their own ideas supreme – and those who would live in ‘faith and obedience’, from moment to moment, relates to a contrast, on which Newman had long been reflecting, between a moral thinking that is the forming of a ‘system’ of thought – through a reasoning that has ‘external assistance’ from ‘conscience and Scripture’ – and a ‘moral science’ that is implicated in living, and that is ‘the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character’. In a sermon on ‘Evangelical Sanctity, the Completion of Natural Virtue’, preached in 1831, Newman observes that ‘morals may be cultivated as a science; it furnishes a subject-matter on which reason ma y exercise itself to any extent whatever, with little more than the mere external assistance of conscience and Scripture. And, when drawn out into system, such a moral teaching will attract general admiration from its beauty and refinement; and from its evident expediency will be adopted as a directory (so to say) of conduct, whenever it does not occasion any great inconvenience, or interfere with any strong passion or urgent interest.’⁵⁷ ‘Conscience and Scripture’, in this form of moral ‘science’, afford ‘external assistance’ to the ‘exercise’ of ‘reason’. The ‘reason’ by which the ‘system’ is formed is something ‘external’ to ‘Conscience’. (The ‘assistance’ of ‘Conscience and Scripture’, in this regard, might be taken to consist in ‘Conscience’ supplying certain premises, from which various inferences are made – by the ‘exercise’ of ‘reason’ – in forming a ‘system’.) To ‘reason’ so as to form a moral ‘system’, is not to be virtuous. To be attracted to the ‘beauty’ of the ‘system’ is not to be virtuous: the ‘system’, or ‘directory’, attracts for its ‘beauty’, ‘expediency’, and the like, but virtue has something other than this sort of ‘beauty’ or ‘expediency’ as its proper object. (Newman observes, in this regard, that ‘the Roman moralists write as admirably, as if they were moral men’.)⁵⁸ In ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’, preached in 1832, Newman sets out to characterize a different sort of moral ‘system’ or ‘light’ – the moral ‘light’ acquired by those who live so as to be ever ‘engaged in increasing and perfecting the light originally given’, acting rightly from moment to moment. ‘As fresh and fresh duties arise, or fresh and fresh faculties are brought into action, they are at once absorbed into the existing inward system, and take their appropriate place in it.’⁵⁹ The forming of the ‘inward system’ occurs as ‘duties arise’ – that is, by ‘doing one thing and then another, as each is called for, in faith and obedience’. The ‘inward system’ is not a system of propositions, a logical system: it is something more than that – something personal, something present in a kind of life.⁶⁰ The ‘light’ here is something other than the ‘exercise’ of the ‘reason’ in argument (though it is quite consistent with such an ‘exercise’ of the ‘reason’).

In a sermon on ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, preached in 1838, Newman contrasts the ‘true Christian’ with the ‘double-minded’, maintaining that those who are ‘double-minded’ would make ‘self’ the ‘king and judge’: they recur to ‘abstract principle’ in ordering their lives, that they might make such ‘principle’ supreme, instead of God, ‘treat[ing] with’ God as ‘independent parties’.⁶¹ They ‘shut themselves up in themselves’. They would make their own consciousness, their own awareness of themselves, supreme. They would, as such, resist a sense that there is a ‘look’, a gaze, which apprehends more of the truth about themselves, than they do. They would judge themselves: they would take their own ‘notions of fitness’ to be adequate to judge themselves by;⁶² and they would take their apprehension of themselves to be adequate – thinking that they apprehend enough of the truth about themselves, enough of the truth to which such ‘notions of fitness’ would be applied, as to be able to form a right judgment.

A true Christian, or one who is in a state of acceptance with God, is he, who, in such sense, has faith in Him, as to live in the thought that He is present with him – present not externally, not in nature merely, or in providence, but in his innermost heart, or in his conscience. A man is justified whose conscience is illuminated by God, so that he habitually realizes that all his thoughts, all the first springs of his moral life, all his motives and his wishes, are open to Almighty God. Not as if he was not aware that there is very much in him impure and corrupt, but he wishes that all that is in him should be bare to God. He believes that it is so, and he even joys to think that it is so, in spite of his fear and shame at its being so. He alone admits Christ into the shrine of his heart; whereas others wish in some way or other, to be by themselves, to have a home, a chamber, a tribunal, a throne, a self where God is not, – a home within them which is not a temple, a chamber which is not a confessional, a tribunal without a judge, a throne without a king; – that self may be king and judge; and that the Creator may rather be dealt with and approached as though a second party, instead of His being that true and better self of which self itself should be but an instrument and minister … . The true Christian … enthrones the Son of God in his conscience, refers to Him as a sovereign authority, and uses no reasoning with Him. He does not reason, but he says, ‘Thou, God, seest me.’ He feels that God is too near him to allow of argument, self-defence, excuse, or objection. He appeals in matters of duty, not to his own reason, but to God Himself whom with the eyes of faith he sees, and whom he makes the Judge; not to any fancied fitness, or any preconceived notion, or any abstract principle, or any tangible experience … . The merely professing Christian, or, in Scripture language, … the hypocrite [is one of those] who have two ends which they pursue, religion and the world; and hence St. James calls them ‘double-minded’. … A double-minded man … as having two ends in view, dare not come to God, lest he should be discovered … . Adam hid himself among the trees of the garden. It was not simple dread of God, but dread joined to an unwillingness to be restored to God. He had a secret in his heart which he kept from God. He felt towards God – as it would seem, or at least his descendants so feel – as one man often feels towards another in the intercourse of life … . The double-minded approach the Most High … [with] a something private, a hidden self at bottom. They loo k on themselves, as it were, as independent parties, treating with Almighty God as one of their fellows. Hence, so far from seeking God, they hardly like to be sought by Him. They would rather keep their position and stand where they are – on earth, and so make terms with God in heaven … This being the case, there being in the estimation of the double-minded man two parties, God and self, it follows (as I have said), that reasoning and argument is the mode in which he approaches his Saviour and Judge; and that for two reasons, – first, because he will not give himself up to God, but stands upon his rights and appeals to his notions of fitness: and next, because he has some secret misgiving after all that he is dishonest, or some consciousness that he may appear so to others; and therefore, he goes about to fortify his position, to explain his conduct, or to excuse himself.⁶³

One who is aware of the ‘presence’, the gaze, of God, is aware that ‘all his thoughts, all the first springs of his moral life, all his motives and his wishes, are open to Almighty God’: he is aware of his own consciousness, in its ‘first springs’, as an object of the ‘look’ of God; he is aware of the finitude of his consciousness; and he is aware of his consciousness as subject to a judgment other than his own – his judgment is itself to be (rightly) judged. He cannot make the ‘first springs’ of his consciousness an object of consciousness, for his consciousness is what these ‘first springs’ issue in: consciousness cannot observe the ‘springs’ from which it issues (for once there is consciousness, the issuing from the ‘springs’ is past, and can no longer be observed).

If the ‘first springs’ of consciousness are of a ‘moral’ quality, then there are ‘moral’ features of oneself of which one cannot be aware. The ‘perception’ involved in phronesis would seem to be a form of insight that is of the ‘first springs’ of consciousness. Such ‘perception’ is a spontaneous, primordial interpretation of a particular, here and now situation. It is, moreover, implicated with ‘moral’ virtue, as requiring virtuous dispositions. It is a primary form of awareness, issuing from the ‘first springs’ of consciousness, and it is implicated with ‘moral’ character.

The ‘first springs of the moral’ life – ‘first springs’ that consist in spontaneous ‘wishes’, impulses, and the like – are not something of which one is always aware. Those who would make their own awareness, their own consciousness, ‘king and judge’, might, accordingly, be disposed to disregard those ‘first springs’. If one feels ‘towards God … as one man often feels towards another in the intercourse of life’ – if one thinks of oneself as subject to a judgment that is like the judgment of those one encounters ‘in the intercourse of life’ – then what seems subject to judgment in oneself is that which is manifest to others ‘in the intercourse of life’ (not the ‘first springs’ of consciousness in oneself). Those who would ‘treat’ God, as if ‘one of their fellows’ – one of those they encounter ‘in the intercourse of life’ – are inclined to identify their ‘moral’ self with those aspects of themselves that are apparent to ‘their fellows’. They have a clearer apprehension of those aspects of themselves – of their outward conduct, their social guises – and a greater control of those aspects of themselves, than of the ‘first springs of the moral life’; if they take it that only those aspects of themselves have ‘moral’ significance – if they take the ‘moral’ truth about themselves to consist in those more ‘outward’ aspects of themselves – then this reinforces their sense of their own capacity to ‘judge’ and to create themselves. If one looks at oneself in this way, then one identifies the self (or the ‘moral’ self) with a persona. One regards the part of oneself which contemplates that persona as ‘private’, ‘hidden’, exempt from judgment (exempt, in a sense, from finitude). In his account of the attitude of self-regard to which the ‘cultivated mind’ is prone, in the Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, Newman remarks that those who succumb to such self-regard have as ‘their one object, however unconscious to themselves … to paint a smooth and perfect surface, and to be able to say to themselves that they have done their duty’.⁶⁴ By ‘a smooth and perfect surface’, here, Newman might mean something like an adroit social performance, a ‘surface’ apparent to others in the ‘intercourse of life’. He might, then again, mean a ‘surface’ that consists in those aspects of the self that one apprehends clearly, over which one seems to exercise control – something like the more ‘superficial’ aspects of the self.

In the Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, Newman maintains that the ‘moral’ attitude of the ‘cultivated mind’ can become a mere concern with appearances.

The heresy, as it may be called, of which I speak, is the substitution of a moral sense or taste for conscience in the true meaning of the word; now this error … is especially congenial to men of an imaginative and poetical cast of mind, who will readily accept the notion that virtue is nothing more than the graceful in conduct. Such persons, far from tolerating fear, as a principle, in their apprehension of religious and moral truth, will not be slow to call it simply gloom and superstition. Rather a philosopher’s, a gentleman’s religion, is of a liberal and generous character; it is based upon honour; vice is evil, because it is unworthy, despicable, and odious. This was the quarrel of the ancient heathen with Christianity, that, instead of simply fixing the mind on the fair and the pleasant, it intermingled other ideas with them of a sad and painful nature … . The notion of an All-perfect, Ever-present God, in whose sight we are less than atoms, and who, while He deigns to visit us, can punish as well as bless, was abhorrent to them; they made their own minds their sanctuary, their own ideas their oracle, and conscience in morals was but parallel to genius in art, and wisdom in philosophy.⁶⁵

The ‘fear’ associated with Christianity, and with the ‘conscience’, is, in itself, contrary to the ‘fair and the pleasant’ – it is ‘painful’, and it is ungraceful – and it constitutes an ‘unworthy’ motive for right conduct. One should, rather, be moved to be virtuous by a love of the beauty of virtue; and it is something like a ‘moral sense, or taste’ which registers the beauty of virtue. ‘Fear’ involve s a sense of the limits of the self, the vulnerability of the self; and it is not ‘liberal’ to be moved by something external to the self. It is more beautiful to be moved by a sense of the beautiful – in this, one acts in a beautiful way, moved by a ‘taste’ for the beautiful: one makes the beautiful supreme – one makes it the ultimate truth about oneself. Newman intimates, though, that this concern for the beautiful is a concern for a beauty of a rather outward kind: a ‘gentleman’s religion’ is ‘based upon honour’, and ‘honour’, ultimately, is a matter of the regard of others; it identifies ‘virtue’ with ‘the graceful in conduct’ (not with the ‘first springs’ of the ‘moral life’, ‘motives’ and ‘wishes’).

Newman takes the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury to be illustrative of a ‘gentleman’s religion’. For Shaftesbury, ‘Christianity is the enemy of moral virtue, as influencing the mind by fear of God, not by love of good. The motives then of hope and fear being, to say the least, put far into the background, and nothing being morally good but what springs simply or mainly from a love of virtue for its own sake, this love-inspiring quality in virtue is its beauty.’⁶⁶ Newman quotes the declaration of Shaftesbury, that ‘most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth; for all beauty is truth’, and he observes that ‘virtue being only one kind of beauty, the principle which determines what is virtuous is, not conscience, but taste’; so, Newman takes it, ‘Conscience, which intimates a Lawgiver, being superseded by a moral taste or sentiment, which has no sanction beyond the constitution of our nature, it follows that our great rule is to contemplate ourselves, if we would gain a standard of life and morals.’⁶⁷ Newman quotes the claim of Shaftesbury that the ‘imaginary saint or mystic’ is not ‘capable of this entertainment’ – not capable of a clear insight into himself – for ‘instead of looking narrowly into his own nature and mind, that he may be no longer a mystery to himself, he is taken up with the contemplation of other mysterious natures, which he never can explain or comprehend’.⁶⁸ Of the claims made by this ‘Religion of Philosophy’, Newman observes that they ‘are exhibitions of truth under one aspect, and therefore insufficient; conscience is most certainly a moral sense, but it is more; vice again, is a deformity, but it is worse’.⁶⁹ Newman maintains that this ‘Religion’ ultimately consists in a ‘doctrine which makes virtue a mere point of good taste, and vice vulgar and ungentlemanlike’.⁷⁰

Such a doctrine is essentially superficial, and such will be its effects. It has no better measure of right and wrong than that of visible beauty and tangible fitness. Conscience indeed inflicts an acute pang, but that pang, forsooth, is irrational, and to reverence it is an illiberal superstition. But, if we will make light of what is deepest within us, nothing is left but to pay homage to what is more upon the surface. To seem becomes to be; what looks fair will be good, what causes offence will be evil; virtue will be what pleases, vice what pains. As well may we measure virtue by utility as by such a rule … . The splendours of a court, and the charms of good society, wit, imagination, taste, and high breeding, the prestige of rank, and the resources of wealth, [can become] a screen, an instrument, and an apology for vice and irreligion. And thus at length we find, surprising as the change may be, that that very refinement of Intellectualism, which began by repelling sensuality, ends by excusing it … From this shallowness of philosophical Religion it comes to pass that its disciples seem able to fulfil certain precepts of Christianity more readily and exactly than Christians themselves. St. Paul, as I have said, gives us a pattern of evangelical perfection; he draws the Christian character in its most graceful form, and its most beautiful hues. He discourses of that charity which is patient and meek, humble and single-minded, disinterested, contented, and persevering. He tells us to prefer each the other before himself, to give way to each other, to abstain from rude words and evil speech, to avoid self-conceit, to be calm and grave, to be cheerful and happy, to observe peace with all men, truth and justice, courtesy and gentleness, all that is modest, amiable, virtuou s, and of good repute. Such is St. Paul’s exemplar of the Christian in his external relations; and, I repeat, the school of the world seems to send out living copies of this typical excellence with greater success than the Church. At this day the ‘gentleman’ is the creation, not of Christianity, but of civilization. But the reason is obvious. The world is content with setting right the surface of things; the Church aims at regenerating the very depths of the heart. She ever begins with the beginning; and, as regards the multitude of her children, is never able to get beyond the beginning, but is continually employed in laying the foundation. She is engaged with what is essential, as previous and as introductory to the ornamental and the attractive. She is curing men and keeping them clear of mortal sin; she is ‘treating of justice and chastity, and the judgment to come’: she is insisting on faith and hope, and devotion, and honesty, and the elements of charity; and has so much to do with precept, that she almost leaves it to inspirations from Heaven to suggest what is of counsel and perfection. She aims at what is necessary rather than at what is desirable. She is for the many as well as for the few. She is putting souls in the way of salvation, that they may then be in a condition, if they shall be called upon, to aspire to the heroic, and to attain the full proportions, as well as the rudiments, of the beautiful.⁷¹

Is Newman right to maintain that the ‘doctrine’ of Shaftesbury issues in the view that the ‘measure of right and wrong’ is ‘visible beauty and tangible fitness’? Shaftesbury maintains that the ‘moral sense’ is a kind of ‘taste’, and that it registers ‘beauty’, but this ‘taste’ would seem to have as its object, not mere ‘visible beauty’, but certain ‘interior’ qualities – qualities of character. Newman observes, though, that the ‘Religion of Philosophy’ involves a certain disregard of the ‘conscience’, or, at least, of certain aspects of the ‘conscience’ – taking the ‘acute pang’ of the conscience, to be ‘irrational’ and ‘illiberal’. To be moved by ‘fear’ – rather than by an attraction to the ‘beauty’ of virtue – is, on this view, ‘servile’, ‘illiberal’. Newman would have it, though, that this ‘fear’ is not simply a regard to ‘rewards’ or ‘punishments’: it is connected to an awareness of oneself as finite, and as subject to the ‘look’ of an infinite ‘Maker’; it is connected to a sense that one is subject to a just judgment that is other than, and that transcends, whatever judgment one might form of oneself; it is connected to an awareness of a ‘look’ that discerns the ‘depths of the heart’, such that the ‘sense’ of that ‘look’ instigates, or is implicated with, an awareness of those ‘depths’. In his sermon on ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, Newman asks, ‘Are you living in this conviction of His Presence, and have you this special witness that that Presence is really set up within you unto your salvation, viz. that you live in the sense of it? Do you believe, and act on the belief, that His light penetrates and shines through your heart, as the sun’s beams through a room?’⁷² The ‘sense’ of this ‘light’ is connected to a sense that there is that, in the ‘heart’, which ‘we see … not’ – to an awareness of the ‘depths’ of the ‘heart’.

You know how things look when the sun’s beams are on it, – the very air then appears full of impurities, which, before it came out, were not seen. So is it with our souls. We are full of stains and corruptions, we see them not, they are like the air before the sun shines; but though we see them not, God sees them: He pervades us as the sunbeam. Our souls, in His view, are full of things which offend, things which must be repented of, forgiven, and put away … . If we are conscious of nothing, still let us not boast in ourselves or justify ourselves, but feel that ‘He who judgeth us is the Lord’. In all circumstances, of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, let us aim at having Him in our inmost heart; let us have no secret apart from Him. Let us acknowledge Him as enthroned within us at the very springs of thought and affection. Let us submit ourselves to His guidance and sovereign direction; let us come to Him that He may forgive us, cleanse us, change us, guide us, and save us.⁷³

The ‘look’ which apprehends the ‘beauty’ of ‘virtue’ is something other – something more ‘shallow’ – than the divine ‘look’ which apprehends the ‘inmost heart’. The ‘pang’ of conscience is connected to an awareness of that divine ‘look’, and to an awareness of what that ‘look’ apprehends – the ‘depths of the heart’. The Church, aware of those ‘depths’, aware of the ‘essential’, is ‘continually employed in laying the foundation … [and] engaged with what is essential, as previous and as introductory to the ornamental and the attractive’.⁷⁴ Shaftesbury maintains that one should look ‘narrowly’ at oneself, that one ‘may be no longer a mystery to’ oneself. What if, though, there is something mysterious in oneself – what if there is that which ‘we see … not’? If there is, then a look that makes one ‘no longer a mystery to’ oneself, is a look that is not registering what is there. With regard to the virtues that are taken to be ‘beautiful’ – the ‘graceful’, the ‘ornamental and the attractive’ – Newman suggests that the ‘grace’ here is in what is apparent to ‘our fellows’ in the ‘intercourse of life’, in what is ‘winning’, in what makes for social harmony. There is, moreover, ‘grace’ or beauty in such harmonious relationships themselves. The ‘beauty’ of ‘conduct’ makes for harmony with others, and it consists in acts that make for such harmony – acts that aim at ‘what pleases’, and that eschew ‘what pains’ – and this harmony with others is itself beautiful. In his Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe, Newman suggests that there can be a kind of ‘union’ of the ‘powers’ of the soul, a kind of ‘civilization’, that is ‘second-rate’; and it is ‘second-rate’ as it restricts certain of those ‘powers’ – the ‘spiritual part’ of the soul. In his Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, he suggests that the ‘Religi on of Philosophy’ involves, equally, a certain suppression of the ‘spiritual part’: it involves a suppression of that ‘part’ of oneself that has a ‘sense’ of the look, the gaze, of God; and it is, accordingly, not concerned with the self as apprehended by the gaze of God – with the ‘first springs’ of the ‘moral life’, the innermost ‘springs’ of the self – but with the self as apprehended by a gaze akin to the gaze of those one encounters in the ‘intercourse of life’, the gaze of ‘society’. To realize a certain union, grace, harmony, in the self (or the aspect of the self) that is apprehended by the gaze of ‘society’ is merely to ‘paint a smooth and perfect surface’.

In Callista (1855), a novel in which Newman sought to ‘imagine and express, from a Catholic point of view, the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens’ in the third century, Newman is concerned, among other things, with the insufficiency of the ‘Religion of Philosophy’ – with how it cannot satisfy the soul. The epigraph of Callista is taken from ‘The Association of Ideas’ by Aubrey De Vere: ‘Vainly strives the soul to mingle / With a being of our kind / … For the deepest still is single. / … Mortal: love that Holy One, / Or dwell for aye alone.’ There is that in the soul which cannot be expressed in the ‘intercourse of life’, with ‘being[s] of our kind’: if one does not form a relationship with God, if one does not ‘love that Holy One’, then one is left to oneself, one is enclosed in oneself, and must ‘dwell for aye alone’.

Callista is set in North Africa, in Sicca, a town subject to the Roman imperium – a town in which Christians are few, and scattered, and in which various forms of paganism are dominant. In these circumstances, the profession of Christianity makes for an alienation from others. Agellius, a young Christian, chafes at his solitude. He has befriended two young Greeks, Aristo and Callista, brother and sister, sculptors, employed by his pagan uncle Jucundus, who has a business selling statues and ceremonial objects connected to various pagan rites.

Callista is beautiful, accomplished, eminently civilized; she feels, however, a ‘weariness in all things’, is conscious of the evanescence of all that is worldly, and of the ‘ever-splashing oar / Of Charon, ferryman of souls’.⁷⁵ She loves the ‘beautiful, divine light’, the ‘fair, bright-haired God’ Apollo: ‘Thou art my worship, if Callista worships aught: but somehow I worship nothing now.’⁷⁶ To her brother, she remarks, ‘One might do worse than be a Christian … . If all is true that I have heard of them … I mean … if I were a Christian, life would be more bearable.’⁷⁷ Aside from Agellius, she has only known one other Christian – a slave, Chione, who ‘cared for nothing, yet was not morose or peevish or hard-hearted’.⁷⁸

Jucundus, realizing that Agellius is attracted to Callista, encourages Agellius to propose marriage to her, hoping to detach Agellius from his allegiance to Christianity. Agellius hopes (or wishes to believe) that the sympathy between himself and Callista shows that she might have an inclination toward Christianity. He proposes to her, declaring, ‘what I have experienced ever since I first heard you converse, [is] that there is between you and me a unity of thought so strange that I should have deemed it could not have been, before I found it actually to exist, between any two persons whatever.’⁷⁹

There is an unaccountable correspondence in the views we take of things, in our impressions, in the line in which our minds move, and the issues to which they come, in our judgment of what is great and little, and the manner in which objects affect our feelings … . I find between you and me one language. Is it wonderful that, in proportion to my astonishment, I am led to refer it to one cause, and think that one Master Hand must have engraven those lines on the soul of each of us? Is it wonderful that I should fancy that He who has made us alike has made us for each other, and that the very same persuasives by which I bring you to cast your eyes on me, may draw you also to cast yourself in adoration at the feet of my Master?⁸⁰

Callista rebuffs him: ‘Your Master! who is your Master? what know I of your Master? what have you ever told me of your Master?’⁸¹

If, as you imply, my wants and aspirations are the same as yours, what have you done towards satisfying them? what have you done for that Master towards whom you now propose to lead me? No! … you have watched those wants and aspirations for yourself, not for Him; you have taken interest in them, you have cherished them, as if you were the author, you the object of them. You profess to believe in One True God, and to reject every other; and now you are implying that the Hand, the Shadow of that God is on my mind and heart. Who is this God? where? how? in what? O Agellius, you have stood in the way of Him, ready to speak for yourself, using Him as a means to an end.⁸²

When Agellius asks, ‘Do you really wish to be taught who the true God is?’ she responds, ‘I have no such wish. I could not be of your religion.’

Ye Gods! how have I been deceived! I thought every Christian was like Chione. I thought there could not be a cold Christian. Chione spoke as if a Christian’s first thoughts were goodwill to others; as if his state were of such blessedness, that his dearest heart’s wish was to bring others into it. Here is a man who, so far from feeling himself blest, thinks I can bless him! … As for any blessedness he has to show me, why, since he does not feel any himself, no wonder he has none to give away. I thought a Christian was superior to time and place; but all is hollow … . Time was I might have been led to worship you, Agellius; you have hindered it by worshipping me … . There was one thing which I thought you could have given me, be tter than anything else; but it is a shadow. You have nothing to give. You have thrown me back upon my dreary, dismal self, and the deep wounds of my memory.⁸³

Agellius wishes that Callista might become a Christian; he wishes that he might marry her; and there is a sense that he wishes that she might become a Christian, that he might marry her: his aim is to be close to Callista. This closeness, this communion, is, for him, the aim or end. Yet the communion that obtains between Christians exists only where something ‘superior’ to itself, ‘superior to time and place’, is made the ultimate aim or end. Callista is conscious of a wish to transcend herself, her ‘dreary, dismal self’; if Agellius thinks she can ‘bless him’, if he desires her, then – so she thinks – his religion cannot present him with any ‘blessing’ superior to her; and, if this is so, then that religion cannot present her with anything superior to her ‘dreary, dismal self’. She feels, moreover, that there is a sense in which he is treating her as a ‘means’ – as a means of assuaging something lacking in ‘himself’; and, in this, he is deficient in a true ‘goodwill’ to her.

Agellius, on leaving Callista, falls ill with a fever; he is tended in his cottage, on the outskirts of Sicca, by a guest, a priest, Caecilius (St Cyprian), who is in flight from Carthage, where Christians are suffering persecution.⁸⁴

An imperial decree is promulgated, requiring Christians to perform an act of worship to the emperor, that they might show their loyalty to the state. The authorities at Sicca are not prompt to act on it; Christians are few, and some are well connected. In the meantime, an infestation of locusts, and then a famine and a pestilence, brings unrest to Sicca; the people riot, and, in their rage, take up the cry ‘Christians to the lions’.

Callista, fearing for the safety of Agellius, goes to his cottage to warn him of his peril, and there she encounters Caecilius. Realizing that he is a Christian, she tells him that she could never become a Christian – ‘Its maxims are too beautiful to be realized; and then on the other hand, its dogmas are too dismal, too shocking, too odious to be believed.’⁸⁵ She insists that she could never believe in ‘an eternal Tartarus’. In response, he asks her, ‘Are you happy?’ She replies that she is not.

Perhaps you have been growing in unhappiness for years; is it so? you assent. You have a heavy burden at your heart, you don’t well know what. And the chance is, that you will grow in unhappiness for the next ten years to come. You will be more and more unhappy the longer you live. Did you live till you were an old woman, you would not know how to bear your existence … . Every day adds to your burden. This is a law of your present being, somewhat more certain than the assertion which you just now so confidently made, the impossibility of your believing in that law. You cannot refuse to accept what is not an opinion, but a fact. I say this burden which I speak of is not simply a dogma of our creed, it is an undeniable fact of nature. You cannot change it by wishing … if you lived five hundred years on earth, you would but have a heavier load on you as time went on. But you will not live, you will die. Perhaps you will tell me that you will then cease to be. I don’t believe you think so. I may take for granted that you think with me, and with the multitude of men, that you will still live, that you will still be you. You will still be the same being, but deprived of those outward stays and reliefs and solaces, which, such as they are, you now enjoy. You will be yourself, shut up in yourself. I have heard that people go mad at length when placed in solitary confinement. If, then, on passing hence, you are cut off from what you had here, and have only the company of yourself, I think your burden will be, so far, greater, not less than it is now … . Supposing you were among those whom you actually did not love; supposing you did not like them, nor their occupations, and could not understand their aims; suppose there be, as Christians say, one Almighty God, and you did not like Him, and had no taste for thinking of Him, and no interest in what He was and what He did; and supposing you found that there was nothing else anywhere but He, whom you did not love and whom you wished away: would you not be still more wretched?⁸⁶

Caecilius sets out the view which Newman had set out in one of his early sermons, preached in 1826, ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, on ‘the loneliness of a man of earthly dispositions and tastes, thrust into the society of saints and angels’. ‘How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder’; ‘even supposing a man of unholy life were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there’.⁸⁷ Caecilius considers, moreover, not merely the ‘loneliness’ that consists in being among others with different ‘dispositions and tastes’, he considers the ‘loneliness’ that is inseparable from the ‘burden’ of selfhood: simply to be ‘yourself, shut up in yourself’, would be a ‘Tartarus’. Caecilius insists that only Christianity fulfil s the desire for happiness, for Christianity fulfils the need of the soul to transcend itself, in the love of an ‘Object’ truly worthy of unreserved love.

If all your thoughts go one way; if you have needs, desires, aims, aspirations, all of which demand an Object, and imply, by their very existence, that such an Object does exist also; and if nothing here does satisfy them, and if there be a message which professes to come from that Object, of whom you already have the presentiment, and to teach you about Him, and to bring the remedy you crave; and if those who try that remedy say with one voice that the remedy answers; are you not bound … at least to look that way, to inquire into what you hear about it, and to ask for His help, if He be, to enable you to believe in Him? … We have no love for Him who alone lasts. We love those things which do not last, but come to an end. Things being thus, He whom we ought to love has determined to win us back to Him. With this object He has come into His own world, in the form of one of us men. And in that human form He opens His arms and woos us to return to Him, our Maker. This is our Worship, this is our Love.⁸⁸

Callista declares, at this, that ‘it is our own notion of the First and only Fair, yet embodied in a substance, yet dissolving again into a sort of imagination … . It is beyond me.’⁸⁹ When Caecilius urges her to ‘leave the creature for the Creator’, she replies ‘I am a tree which will not bear transplanting … . The pride of mind, the revel of the intellect, the voice and eyes of genius, and the fond beating heart, I cannot do without them. I cannot do without what you, Christian, call sin.’⁹⁰ When he asks, ‘Am not I too a brand plucked out of the fire?’, she replies, ‘So after all, priest … you are but a man like others; a frail, guilty person like myself. I can find plenty of persons who do as I do; I want some one who does not; I want some one to worship.’⁹¹ They are interrupted by the arrival of a mob from Sicca; before Caecilius flees, he gives Callista a parchment, the Gospel of Luke.

Callista is mistaken for a Christian, seized by the mob, and is then imprisoned by the city authorities. Reflecting, in solitude, she realizes ‘to her surprise, [that] the more she thought over what she heard of Christianity, the more she was drawn to it, and the more it approved itself to her whole soul, and the more it seemed to respond to all her needs and aspirations, and the more intimate was her presentiment that it was true’.⁹² It ‘seemed (unlike the mythology or the philosophy of her country, or the political religion of Rome) to have an external reality and substance, which deprived objections to it of their power’.⁹³

She had long given up any belief in the religion of her country. As to philosophy, it dwelt only in conjecture and opinion; whereas the very essence of religion was, as she felt, a recognition of the worshippers on the part of the Object of it. Religion could not be without hope. To worship a being who did not speak to us, recognise us, love us, was not religion. It might be a duty, it might be a merit; but her instinctive notion of religion was the soul’s response to a God who had taken notice of the soul. It was loving intercourse, or it was a name. Now the three witnesses who had addressed her about Christianity had each of them made it to consist in the intimate Divine Presence in the heart. It was the friendship or mutual love of person with person. Here was the very teaching which already was so urgently demanded both by her reason and her heart, which she found nowhere else; which she found existing one and the same in a female slave, in a country youth, in a learned priest.⁹⁴

Recalling the Christians she has known, she recognizes in them ‘a simplicity, a truthfulness, a decision, an elevation, a calmness, and a sanctity to which she was a stranger, which spoke to her heart and absolutely overcame her’.⁹⁵ She cannot consider herself a Christian, yet, called before the magistrate, she cannot carry out the act of worship – to the emperor, and Rome – required of her: ‘I cannot! I dare not!’⁹⁶

While she is in prison, her brother, Aristo, brings a philosopher, Polemo, to talk with her. Polemo urges her to consider that ‘older religions than yours, more intellectual, more beautiful religions, which have had a position, and a history, and a political influence, have come to nought; and shall you prevail, you, a congeries, a hotch-potch of the leavings, and scraps, and broken meat of the great peoples of the East and West? Blush, blush, Grecian Callista … a lady of high character, of brilliant accomplishments, to be the associate of the outcasts of society!’⁹⁷ She asks Polemo if he believes in God – to which he responds that he believes in ‘one eternal, self-existing something’ – and she declares that ‘I feel that God within my heart’.⁹⁸

I feel myself in His presence. He says to me, ‘Do this: don’t do that’. You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as is to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of its divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness – just like that which I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend. So you see, Polemo, I believe in what is more than a mere ‘something’. I believe in what is more real to me than sun, moon, stars, and the fair earth, and the voice of friends. You will say, Who is He? Has He ever told you anything about Himself? Alas! no! – the more’s the pity! But I will not give up what I have, because I have not more. An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear … . Shall I … worship any but Him? Shall I say that He whom I see not, whom I seek, is our Jupiter, or Caesar, or the goddess Rome? They are none of them images of this inward guide of mine. I sacrifice to Him alone … . O that I could find Him! … On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him not.⁹⁹

Callista has attained to the pitch of ‘natural religion’ – recognizing, in the ‘dictates’ of the conscience, the ‘echo of a person’. She has not yet been presented with an ‘image’ of that person. When, eventually, she reads the Gospel, she encounters that ‘image’.

When she had once taken it up, she did not lay it down. Even at other times she would have prized it, but now, when she was so desolate and lonely, it was simply a gift from an unseen world. It opened a view of a new state and community of beings, which only seemed too beautiful to be possible. But not into a new state of things alone, but into the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection. Here was that to which her intellect tended, though that intellect could not frame it. It could approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate. Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard, whose Person she was seeking for … . That image sank deep into her; she felt it to be a reality. She said to herself, ‘This is no poet’s dream; it is the delineation of a real individual. There is too much truth and nature, and life and exactness about it, to be anything else’. Yet she shrank from it; it made her feel her own difference from it, and a feeling of humiliation came upon her mind, such as she never had had before … . O what a new world of thought she had entered! it occupied her mind from its very novelty. Everything looked dull and dim by the side of it … . She saw that there was a higher beauty than that which the order and harmony of the natural world revealed, and a deeper peace and calm than that which the exercise, whether of the intellect or of the purest human affection, can supply … . Thus, by degrees, Callista came to walk by a new philosophy; and had ideas, and principles, and a sense of relations and aims, and a susceptibility of arguments, to which before she was an utter stranger. Life and death, action and suffering, fortunes and abilities, all had now a new meaning and application. As the skies speak differently to the philosopher and the peasant, as a book of poems to the imaginative and to the cold and narrow intellect, so now she saw her being, her history, her present condition, her future, in a new light, which no one else could share with her. But the ruling sovereign thought of the whole was He, who exemplified all this wonderful philosophy in Himself.¹⁰⁰

She is visited secretly by Caecilius in prison, and asks for baptism. ‘There is but One to love in the whole world, and I wish to love him. I surrender myself to Him, if He will take me; and He shall teach me about Himself.’¹⁰¹ Called before the magistrate again, she again refuses to carry out the act of worship required of her – ‘I worship my true Love, who is the Only True; and He is the Son of God, and I know none but Him’ – and she suffers martyrdom.¹⁰²

What moves Callista to become a Christian is a desire for a full and perfect communion, a perfect ‘friendship or mutual love of person with person’. She feels her ‘dreary, dismal self’ to be a ‘burden’ – she is ‘shut up’ in herself, and she would transcend herself. She experiences her selfhood as a kind of obstacle to the ‘intimate presence’ of the other to her ‘heart’, or the ‘intimate presence’ of her ‘heart’ to the other. She can transcend this ‘burden’ only in a ‘loving intercourse’ with one who can discern her ‘heart’ perfectly. The God, in whose ‘presence’ she feels she is, can discern her ‘heart’ in this way; yet if she is to commune with this God, He must manifest Himself to her. She feels that she has, in her experience of the ‘dictates’, of the ‘voice’ of the conscience, a sense of the ‘presence’ of God – as the ‘One’ from whom, ‘ultimately’, that ‘voice’ proceeds. The conscience itself is a ‘voice’, or the ‘echo’ of a ‘voice’. The God, whose presence she senses, in or through the ‘voice’ of her conscience, is ‘more real to [her] than sun, moon, stars, and the fair earth, and the voice of friends’. At the core of herself, in her ‘heart’, there is this ‘voice’, or this ‘echo’ of a ‘voice’; there is no part of herself that is ‘shut up’ from it. Yet to encounter an ‘echo’ is not to encounter the source of that echo: her conscience makes her aware of the presence of God, but she feels she cannot ‘touch Him’ (‘O that I could find Him! … On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him not’). Her ‘instinctive notion of religion was the soul’s response to a God who had taken notice of the soul’. Callista feels that the ‘Person’ from whom the ‘voice’ of conscience ‘ultimately’ proceeds has never ‘told [her] anything about Himself’. She would have this ‘Person’ tell her ‘about Himself’, present Himself to her. Only when this ‘Person’ presents Himself to her, will she feel she has been ‘taken notice of’. When Callista is presented with the ‘image’ at the centre of the Gospels, she feels that this image corresponds to her sense of the ‘person speaking’ to her, in, or through, her conscience: ‘Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard, whose Person she was seeking for.’ In, or through, that image, that ‘Person’ presents Himself. She can recognize that this is the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her in her conscience’. She recognizes that this ‘image’ is not simply a creation of the ‘intellect’: it has not been created out of the sense of this ‘Person’ involved in the experience of the conscience; her ‘intellect could not frame it’ – ‘It could approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate.’ Encountering that ‘image’, she is put ‘into the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection’. It surpasses her own sense of ‘ideal perfection’; it surpasses what she could ‘frame’ or create. She takes it that it surpasses what any ‘intellect’ could ‘frame’ or create: ‘this is no poet’s dream; it is the delineation of a real individual’; it has the quality of what is ‘real’, external to the ‘intellect’, rather than what is ‘ideal’. From her encounter with the ‘image’ at the centre of the Gospels, she gets a sense that in or through this image, the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her’ in her conscience is presenting Himself to her. She is encountering something external to herself, and is not ‘shut up’ in herself. She identifies the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her in her conscience’, with the ‘real individual’, manifest in or through the ‘image’ presented in the Gospels; that ‘Person’ is revealed in that ‘image’. The ‘image’, then, originates in a reality, a ‘Person’, external to her, such that the ‘image’ attests to the presence, the reality, of that ‘Person’. That ‘Person’ is, equally, present in, or to, her ‘conscience’ – in what is innermost in herself. The ‘image’, as attesting to the presence, the reality, of a ‘Person’ external to her, attests to an act of self-revelation on the part of that ‘Person’. The presence of that image to her is something that emanates from an act of self-revelation on the part of that ‘Person’; and, in that image, that ‘Person’ presents Himself to her. That act of self-revelation is itself a kind of ‘taking notice’.

Callista ‘enters a new world of thought’, in responding to the ‘image’ presented in the Gospels. The transition to a ‘new world of thought’ is not simply a matter of taking in certain ideas; it involves a reorientation of her perspective on everything. ‘As the skies speak differently to the philosopher and the peasant, as a book of poems to the imaginative and to the cold and narrow intellect, so now she saw her being, her history, her present condition, her future, in a new light, which no one else could share with her.’¹⁰³ It is a change in the ‘light’ in which she ‘sees’ things; it is a change in the way in which she makes sense of things; it is a change in the way in which things ‘speak’ to her. It is a transformation in the way in which the world presents itself to her, and in the way in which she orients herself in the world. The ‘light’, or the source of the ‘light’, which makes this ‘new world of thought’ appear for Callista, is a person. ‘The ruling sovereign thought of the whole was He, who exemplified all this wonderful philosophy in Himself.’¹⁰⁴ The ‘philosophy’ is somehow inseparable from the person of Christ: it is not simply that He presents or illustrates this ‘philosophy’ or this ‘meaning’, but that it is somehow identified with Him. There is a ‘meaning’, a ‘light’, that is identified with Him, in all His particularity as a ‘real individual’. The ‘light’, then, is manifest to Callista, through her apprehension of that ‘real individual’; and this apprehension, for her, involves a relationship with that individual, where she is ‘taken notice of’: the ‘light’ is manifest to Callista through a relationship, from which nothing in herself is ‘shut up’. When she asks to be baptized, she declares, ‘He shall teach me about Himself.’¹⁰⁵

As a particular ‘individual’ is the ‘ruling sovereign thought’ of the ‘world of thought’ which Callista ‘enters’, that ‘world of thought’ is, ultimately, an expression of that ‘individual’. That ‘world of thought’ manifests a person, and it is somehow instinct with the presence of that person. As that ‘world of thought’, in Callista, is instinct with the presence of the ‘Person’ of Christ, so to ‘enter’ that ‘world of thought’ is to ‘enter’ into the presence of Christ, and to form a relationship with Christ. Newman observes that the ‘new light’ Callista has is something ‘which no one else could share with her’. It is a ‘light’ that is there in a relationship engaging her innermost self. It affects the way in which she makes sense of the world; it affects the ‘first springs’ of her consciousness of things.

When Callista is visited by the philosopher Polemo, he urges her to recall her proper self-respect, as a Greek, and as a civilized person of ‘brilliant accomplishments’, and to abandon a religion that makes her the ‘associate of the outcasts of society’, a religion that is ‘a hotch-potch of the leavings, and scraps, and broken meat of the great peoples of the East and West’.¹⁰⁶

Polemo calls on Callista, as one of the ‘natives of Greece’ – between whom there is a ‘secret sympathy’, as ‘Greeks are what none but they can be’ – to recognize that the current state of civilization, the civilized world, as subject to the dominion of Rome, ‘will be for ever, because it is a whole’; and yet the Romans, unlike the Christians, ‘the upstarts and vagabonds of yesterday’, did not, in establishing their empire, ‘denounce all other rites’ – they ‘left them as they were’.¹⁰⁷ The way in which Rome acts – with regard to religion – is an expression of true civilization, for Rome is the supreme, the ultimate civilization; Christianity acts in a manner contrary to the way in which Rome acts – and as such it is contrary to civilization, making Christians the ‘outcasts of society’. As Rome, the supreme civilization, is obliged to permit a diversity of religions – as it, in effect, ‘leaves’ religion, as something external to its unity – so religion cannot be a ‘basis’ for civilization: ‘unity’ is to be realized on other grounds; and to aim at ‘unity’ in, or through, religion, is to aim at something chimerical, contrary to the only ‘unity’ that can be realized, the unity of civilization.

Polemo, then, urges Callista to reconcile herself to ‘civilization’, to a ‘unity’ realized on a basis other than ‘religion’. In The Rise and Progress of Universities (1856), Newman maintains that ‘Society’ tends to substitute ‘law’, or ‘expediency’ or the ‘sense of beauty’ for the ‘conscience’ (and he observes that the Athenians tended to make the sense of beauty supreme).

The guide of life, implanted in our nature, discriminating right from wrong, and investing right with authority and sway, is our Conscience, which Revelation does but enlighten, strengthen, and refine. Coming from one and the same Author, these internal and external monitors of course recognize and bear witness to each other; Nature warrants without anticipating the Supernatural, and the Supernatural completes without superseding Nature. Such is the divine order of things; but man, – not being divine, nor over partial to so stern a reprover within his breast, yet seeing too the necessity of some rule or other, some common standard of conduct, if Society is to be kept together, and the children of Adam to be saved from setting up each for himself with every one else his foe, – as soon as he has secured for himself some little cultivation of intellect, looks about him how he can manage to dispense with Conscience, and find some other principle to do its work. The most plausible and obvious and ordinary of these expedients, is the Law of the State, human law; the more plausible and ordinary, because it really comes to us with a divine sanction, and necessarily has a place in every society or community of men … . Another substitute for Conscience is the rule of Expediency: Conscience is pronounced superannuated and retires on a pension, whenever a people is so far advanced in illumination, as to perceive that right and wrong can to a certain extent be measured and determined by the useful on the one hand, and by the hurtful on the other … . Another substitute of a more refined character is, the principle of Beauty: – it is maintained that the Beautiful and the Virtuous mean the same thing, and are convertible terms. Accordingly Conscience is found out to be but slavish; and a fine taste, an exquisite sense of the decorous, the graceful, and the appropriate, this is to be our true guide for ordering our mind and our conduct, and bringing the whole man into shape. These are great sophisms, it is plain; for, true though it be, that virtue is always expedient, always fair, it does not therefore follow that every thing which is expedient, and every thing which is fair, is virtuous … There are these three principles of conduct, which may be plausibly made use of in order to dispense with Conscience; viz., Law, Expedience, and Propriety; and (at length to come to our point) the Athenians chose the last of them, as became so exquisite a people, and professed to practise virtue on no inferior considerations but simply because it was so praiseworthy, so noble, and so fair. Not that they discarded Law, not that they had not an eye to their interest; but they boasted that ‘grasshoppers’ like them, old of race and pure of blood, could be influenced in their conduct by nothing short of a fine and delicate taste, a sense of honour, and an elevated, aspiring spirit. Their model man, like the pattern of chivalry, was a gentleman [kalokaigathos].¹⁰⁸

‘Society’ is ‘kept together’, unity is maintained, and, with it, some degree of communion between the members of society, by means of a ‘principle’ other than ‘Conscience’ – whether that principle be ‘law’ or ‘influence’ – a ‘principle’ which, when used, affords a means by which society can ‘manage to dispense with Conscience’.

Callista feels that, in her relationship with Christ, she experiences a communion from which nothing in her ‘heart’, or her self, is ‘shut up’: it is, as such, something ‘deeper’, more ‘real’, than the kinds of communion, or relationship, she experiences in ‘Society’. In this communion, she experiences ‘a deeper peace and calm than that which the exercise, whether of the intellect or of the purest human affection, can supply’ – with this kind of ‘exercise’ of the ‘intellect’, or of ‘affection’, being, it would seem, a feature of the more ‘refined’ forms of ‘Society’.¹⁰⁹

Callista is moved to convert by recognizing, when presented with an ‘image’ of Christ, that ‘here was He who spoke to her in her conscience’.¹¹⁰ Yet she is not moved solely by this ‘inward’ experience – she is moved, equally, by her experience of the Christians she has encountered. It is not simply that the ‘wonderful unity of sentiment and belief in persons so dissimilar from each other’ seems to attest to the ‘external reality and substance’ of ‘the doctrine which they were so unanimous in teaching’; it is that they have certain qualities which ‘[speak] to her heart’ – ‘a simplicity, a truthfulness, a decision, an elevation, a calmness, and a sanctity to which she [is] a stranger’.¹¹¹

To have ‘simplicity’ or ‘truthfulness’ is to show oneself as one is. The Christians whom Callista has met are ‘real’: their professions correspond to who they are. In a sermon on ‘Unreal Words’, preached in 1839, Newman declares that ‘nothing is so rare as honesty and singleness of mind; so much so, that a person who is really honest, is already perfect’; ‘St. Paul says of himself and his fellow-labourers, that they were true because Christ is true.’¹¹² Where a person has ‘honesty’, ‘truthfulness’, then the truth of that person animates the relationships which that person forms with others. Those relationships, and the ‘Society’ that develops in, and from them, are animated by truth.

While Callista senses a ‘truthfulness’ in the Christians whom she encounters, they are, nevertheless, somewhat reserved with her. Some of the reserve of the Christians may be accounted for in relation to the odium attaching to the profession of Christianity in a world dominated by paganism – in such circumstances, Christians need to be cautious, they need to protect themselves. (When Callista first meets Caecilius, and takes him at once for a Christian, he remarks ‘if I am a Christian … who are you that are so careful of us?’ – he does not simply avow himself a Christian). Some of the reserve of the Christians may, moreover, be accounted for in relation to the disciplina arcani, a sense on the part of the Christians whom Callista questions about Christianity, that they must accommodate their answers to her capacity to understand them, that they must convey to her no more than what she is fitted to understand, lest they mislead her. (The case of Agellius is, perhaps, different again. Callista declares to him ‘what have you ever told me of your Master? … . If, as you imply, my wants and aspirations are the same as yours, what have you done towards satisfying them? … you have watched those wants and aspirations for yourself, not for Him.’¹¹³ He has ‘watched’ them as a ‘means’ by which a sympathy, an intimacy, between himself and Callista might be established.) Callista perceives, at any rate, that the Christians she has encountered have certain qualities of character – including ‘simplicity’ and ‘truthfulness’ – to which she is ‘a stranger’: they have something in common, a common ethos.

In his ‘Advertisement’ Newman remarks that Callista is about ‘the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens’ in the third century. In 1843, Newman preached two sermons on the Christian ‘character’, as portrayed in the Scriptures, ‘The Apostolical Christian’ and ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ – reflecting on what the early Christians ‘looked like outwardly’, to those around them, and on what the ‘children of men’ made of them.¹¹⁴ The sermons are about the encounter of two different societies – the ‘city of God’, and the ‘city of man’.

In ‘The Apostolical Christian’, Newman observes that the ‘first great and obvious characteristic of a Bible Christian’ – that is, a Christian as portrayed in the Bible – is ‘to be without worldly ties or objects, to be living in this world, but not for this world. St. Paul says, “our conversation is in heaven,” [Phil. iii.20.] or in other words, heaven is our city’; so ‘he surely is a primitive Christian, and he only, who has no aim of this world, who has no wish to be other in this world than he is; whose thoughts and aims have relation to the unseen, the future world; who has lost his taste for this world, sweet and bitter being the same to him’.¹¹⁵ A Christian, anticipating a more perfect union with Christ, is engaged in ‘watching’ – waiting for Christ – and in ‘prayer’ – ‘conversation’ with Christ.¹¹⁶ For the ‘Apostolical’ Christian, ‘there was no barrier, no cloud, no earthly object, interposed between the soul … and its Saviour and Redeemer. Christ was in his heart, and therefore all that came from his heart, his thoughts, words, and actions, savoured of Christ. The Lord was his light, and therefore he shone with the illumination.’¹¹⁷

Newman attempts to characterize what ‘Christians … in that early time, looked like outwardly, who were citizens of heaven within’.¹¹⁸ He maintains that they ‘were a simple, innocent, grave, humble, patient, meek, and loving body, without earthly advantages or worldly influence’; and in illustration of this, he cites Acts, ch. 4 – ‘the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common’ – observing that ‘such was the natural consequence of a deep conviction of the nothingness of this world, and the all-importance of the other’ for ‘those who understood that they were “fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God,” could not but show it in their actions’, and could not go ‘on eating, and drinking, and conversing like children of men’.¹¹⁹ Newman does not stress the radical unity, the radical community, that obtained among the early Christians; rather, he stresses the difference of those early Christians from the ‘children of men’: their use of the things of this world, he suggests, reflects a sense of the ‘nothingness’ of those things, rather than a sense of the need for those things to be ‘common’. (This would suggest that one makes things ‘common’ if one regards them as being of little moment; yet might one not make things ‘common’ out of a high regard for, a charitable devotion to, those with whom one has those things in common?) He observes that such a mode of life shows a disregard for making provision for the future – a detachment from worldly ‘riches’, from that which makes for worldly security. Of the ‘Our Father’, he remarks that it presents a ‘view of the Christian’ as living with ‘evil round about him, enemies and persecutors in his path, temptation in prospect, help for the day, sin to be expiated, God’s will in his heart, God’s Name on his lips, God’s kingdom in his hopes’.¹²⁰

In his sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman observes that the ‘innocence’ or ‘simplicity’ of the early Christians prompted the ‘world’ about them to suspect them of ‘craft’ or duplicity.

Innocence, or harmlessness, is … simplicity in act, purity in motive, honesty in aim; acting conscientiously and religiously, according to the matter in hand, without caring for consequences or appearances; doing what appears one’s duty, and being obedient for obedience’ sake, and leaving the event to God. This is to be innocent as the dove; yet this conduct is the truest wisdom; and this conduct accordingly has pre-eminently the appearance of craft.¹²¹

Callista recognizes the ‘simplicity’ of the Christians she encounters for what it is – she recognizes in them ‘a simplicity, a truthfulness, a decision, an elevation, a calmness, and a sanctity to which she [is] a stranger’.¹²² She is not, then, such ‘a stranger’ from this state of mind as to be incapable of recognizing it; she does not mistake it for something else, take it for ‘craft’ or the like. Yet she feels, nevertheless, a ‘stranger’ from this state of mind, and, in some sense, from those who have it.

During her time in prison, prior to her conversion, she ‘has not yet a peace within her. Her peace is the stillness of the room in which she is imprisoned … she has no stay whereon to lean.’¹²³ Her ‘brother come s to her: he affects to forget her perverseness or delusion. He comes to her with a smile, and throws his arms around her; and Callista repels, from some indescribable feeling, his ardent caress, as if she were no longer his.’¹²⁴ Callista has tended to acquiesce in his wishes, to show an ‘amiable unresisting submission’ – to be whatever has been expected of her.¹²⁵ Her brother is affecting ‘to forget her perverseness’ – refusing to relate to her as she truly is; he sets out, in this, the terms on which he will relate to her, the terms, in a sense, on which she will exist for him.¹²⁶ In her withdrawal from him, she ‘repels’ these terms: she is not simply ‘his’. She is, at this moment, withdrawing from ‘Society’ – she is refusing to conform to the expectations of a society which she apprehends as false – but she does not have a ‘stay whereon to lean’. Called before the court, and required to ‘sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor’, she feels, for a moment ‘abandoned’ – ‘I have no god. What can I do? I am abandoned; why should I not do it?’ – and she takes up the incense, but then, at the last moment, ‘she looked up to heaven and started, and threw it away. “I cannot! I dare not!”’¹²⁷ Her brother declares that she is ‘mad’ – and makes this a part of his legal defence of her: he proposes that she should be left to herself, and left to ‘get right’, to be ‘restored to the gods and to me’.¹²⁸ Callista feels she cannot carry out an act of ‘worship’ to ‘the genius of the emperor’, because she does not, in truth, worship the genius of the emperor – to do so would violate the truth of her ‘conscience’; those who urge her to do so, do not require her to worship the emperor in truth – rather, they construe the action of ‘sacrifice’ as a demonstration of loyalty to a ‘civilization’, an order, which has a ‘unity’ that is not based on religion (Polemo reminds her that the Romans, in establishing their empire, did not ‘denounce all other rites’, but ‘left them as they were’); what is required of her is that she play a particular role, in a ritual, to show her willingness to play that role, and to show her submission to the authority that appoints that role; in this, it is made plain to her, she is not taken to be professing to believe in the truth of that role (she is not professing that she ‘means’ what she does, so to speak). She almost falters, in this, as she feels ‘abandoned’; but, in the event, she ‘dare not’ disregard her conscience. The expectation of her brother, though, that she will ‘get right’ in time, and be ‘restored to the gods’ is, perhaps, shrewd. How long could such a resistance be maintained? What enables Callista to persevere, in the end, is the sense of communion with Christ that she has after being baptised – ‘He will come to me.’¹²⁹ She is no longer ‘abandoned’ to herself, but belongs to another ‘Society’.

Callista observes a ‘truthfulness’ and ‘simplicity’ in the Christians she encounters: they live in a way that is in accord with what is within them; they are as they appear. They are in a relationship, a communion with Christ, that is such that the truth within them – the truth with which the ‘voice’ of the conscience is concerned – is not ‘shut up’ from Christ but is loved by Christ. ‘The Infinite, had loved the soul of man so much … that He had come upon earth in the form of a man, and in that form had gone through sufferings, in order to unite all souls to Him.’¹³⁰ They are of a ‘city’ – ‘heaven’ – that is other than the city of ‘Rome’; and in the ‘conversation’ that is the life of ‘heaven’, nothing within them is ‘shut up’. The Christians that Callista encounters have a certain ‘simplicity’ or integrity. They are not designing – and this may be due, in part, to their not having ‘aim[s] of this world’, which might be procured through such designs. More than this, though, they are ‘citizens of heaven’: in the ‘conversation’ of ‘heaven’ they have a ‘stay whereon to lean’, and their identity, their selfhood, is not dependent on (or vulnerable to) the ‘conversation’ of the earthly ‘city’. Nothing within them is ‘shut up’ from the ‘conversation’ of ‘heaven’. The ‘conversation’ of ‘heaven’, unlike the conversation of the earthly ‘city’, engages, involves, all of the self, and it forms the self wholly, making for perfect integrity and ‘simplicity’.

Callista is a person of ‘brilliant accomplishments’. Polemo takes it that such ‘accomplishments’ are inconsistent with the profession of Christianity: she is eminently civilized, yet she would join herself to the ‘outcasts of society’. Her profession of Christianity does, as a matter of fact, involve a renunciation of everything else – even her own life. Caecilius observes a marked change in her, after her conversion. When he first encounters her, he is struck by the ‘charm’ of her face – ‘its charm was a noble and majestic calm … the calm of Greek sculpture; it imaged a soul nourished upon the visions of genius, and subdued and attuned by the power of a strong will. There was no appearance of timidity in her manner; very little of modesty.’¹³¹ When he sees her again, after her imprisonment, and after her encounter with the ‘image’ of Christ in the Gospel, an encounter which moves her to ask for baptism, ‘he could hardly keep from tears, of pain, or of joy, or of both, when he saw the great change which trial had wrought in her’.

What touched him most was the utter disappearance of that majesty of mien, which once was hers, a gift, so beautiful, so unsuitable to fallen man. There was instead of it a frank humility, a simplicity without concealment, an unresisting meekness, which seemed as if it would enable her, if trampled on, to smile and to kiss the feet that insulted her. She had lost every vestige of what the world worships under the titles of proper pride and self-respect. Callista was now living, not in the tho ught of herself, but of Another.¹³²

There are, in Callista, scenes of cruelty, of violence, of suffering; and these scenes reveal the chaos, the horror, of the order of things which opposes the ‘city’ of ‘heaven’. Callista herself – on turning from this order – is subjected to a violence that is an expression of it. After she is dead, her body is left on the ground, guarded by Roman soldiers: ‘Her features have reassumed their former majesty, but with an expression of childlike innocence and heavenly peace.’¹³³ A group of Christians arrive – Agellius among them – to take her for burial, and the soldiers protect them from the throng. Agellius, his ‘heart … torn’, contemplates her ‘senseless, motionless, broken frame’.

It was in the pride of her earthly beauty, and the full vigour and elevation of her mind, that he last had seen her. It seemed an age since that morning, as if a chasm ran between the now and the then, when she so fascinated him with her presence, and so majestically rebuked him for bowing to that fascination. Yet on his memory every incident of that interview was fixed, and was indelible. O why should the great Creator shatter one of His most admirable works! If the order of the sun and stars is adorable, if the laws by which earth and sea are kept together mark the Hand of supreme Wisdom and Power, how much nobler perfection of beauty is manifested in man! And of human nature itself here was the supereminent crown, a soul full of gifts, full of greatness, full of intellect, placed in an outward form, equally surpassing in its kind, and still more surpassingly excellent from its intimate union and subordination to the soul, so as almost to be its simple expression; yet this choicest, rarest specimen of Almighty skill, the Almighty had pitilessly shattered, in order that it might inherit a higher, an eternal perfection. O mystery of mysteries, that heaven should not be possibly obtained without such grinding down and breaking up of our original nature! O mysterious, that principle in us, whatever it is, and however it came there, which is so antagonistic to God, which has so spoilt what seems so good, that all must be undone, and must begin anew! ‘An enemy hath done this;’ and, knowing as much as this, and no more, we must leave the awful mystery to that day when all things shall be made light.¹³⁴

Agellius is concerned, here, with the ‘mystery’ of death. What has been ‘shattered’, in Callista, is the ‘intimate union’ of the body and the soul. Why ‘death’ is necessary – why there should be an ‘undoing’ of what has been created, that it might be created anew, in a ‘higher’ form – is a ‘mystery’. He acknowledges that ‘an enemy hath done this’ – the ‘grinding down and breaking up’ is exerted against that ‘which is so antagonistic to God’, which has insinuated itself into that which ‘seems so good’. He is concerned, then, with the violence of death itself, a violence which Callista would have undergone, even if she had lived the most peaceful of lives. Yet it so happens that Callista has suffered a violent death; she has been subjected to violence. Agellius reflects on the violence of death. He characterizes death as a ‘grinding down and breaking up’. Does this suggest a connection between the violence of death – the act of God – with the violence to which Callista has been subjected? Does this associate the act of God with the cruelty to which Callista has been subjected? If the sufferings which Callista undergoes are in some sense ‘purgatorial’, an expression of the retributive justice of God, and yet those sufferings are, equally, an expression of the violence of an order – the earthly ‘city’ – which rejects God, then what is the relationship between the ‘act’ of God and the act of the godless world, with regard to those sufferings? How does her undergoing of these sufferings relate to the loss of her ‘majesty’? Is the ‘majesty’ of God somehow inimical to the ‘majesty’ of Callista (so that the majesty of Callista invites a kind of nemesis – like that envisaged in the ‘pagan’ scheme of things, where Fate, or the affronted gods, subdue human pride by inflicting sufferings)? Before she undergoes any of her sufferings, Callista undergoes a change in which her ‘majesty of mien’ – expressive of ‘a soul nourished upon the visions of genius, and subdued and attuned by the power of a strong will’, a soul that has been ‘subdued and attuned’ by the sense of beauty – is replaced with a ‘frank humility, a simplicity without concealment, an unresisting meekness’ – expressive of a soul that has abjured ‘what the world worships under the titles of proper pride and self-respect’. Callista, in her ‘majesty’, had a ‘soul’ that was in some sense the creation of ‘visions of genius’ and of the ‘will’. (The ‘visions’ could be taken to be something like the common property of ‘Greek’ culture, or civilization – the ‘visions’ which were the ‘poet’s dream’ – or they could be taken to be the ‘visions’ of Callista herself, forming visions, in ‘her most imaginative moments’ of ‘ideal perfection’.) In her ‘majesty’, she has a kind of mastery over herself: she has created herself, through the ‘power of a strong will’, from the ‘visions’ which she has formed, or received. When she begins to live ‘in the thought of Another’, she abandons this self-mastery, or self-possession. The rapture that takes her out of herself involves nothing violent, only ‘mutual love’. The violence to which Callista is subjected, by ‘Rome’, is exerted with the aim of making her abandon herself, or her ‘conscience’. That violence is taken, however, by Callista, as a way of communing with the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her in her conscience’, a ‘Person’ who suffered for her – it is, for her, a way of participating in the sufferings of that ‘Person’, and of having a fuller communion with that ‘Person’: ‘He has been there before me, and He will come to me there.’¹³⁵ When she is told that her god will ‘leave’ her, in her suffering, she replies, ‘He loves me the more.’¹³⁶ The violence which she undergoes is not, then, experienced by her as separating her from Christ. The relationship of Christ to that violence – as Callista understands it – is not that He inflicts it, but that ‘He has been there’, enduring it, and that He will be there, with those who endure it.

Callista undergoes a change in which she abandons a ‘majesty’, a self-mastery, that consists in her cultivation of her ‘soul’, as ‘nourished’ by ‘visions of genius’: she has formed her soul, by her own ‘will’, according to her vision of ‘ideal perfection’. She abandons this state of self-mastery – a realization of the Athenian ideal of a self formed by ‘a fine and delicate taste, a sense of honour, and an elevated, aspiring spirit’ – to live ‘in the thought of Another’. Should this be taken to show that the cultivation of the self, associated with ‘civilization’, is inconsistent with Christianity? In a sermon on ‘The State of Innocence’, preached in 1838, Newman asks, ‘what … is intellect itself, as exercised in the world, but a fruit of the fall … and only not incompatible with the regenerate mind?’¹³⁷ The ‘exercises and developments’ of ‘the powers of mind by which … the structure of society is kept together’ would not have taken the forms they take, indeed, ‘would not have been [at all] but for sin’.¹³⁸ They are good, as countering ‘the effects of the fall’, and they take the form they have as encountering those ‘effects’.¹³⁹ Yet they are marked by the circumstances in which they arise, and, as such, they are ‘probably far from the highest which our mind is capable of’.¹⁴⁰ What is more, while they may be ‘in themselves excellent’, they can ‘subserve sin’: since the fall, ‘passion and reason have abandoned their due place in man’s nature, which is one of subordination, and conspired together against the Divine light within him, which is his proper guide’.¹⁴¹ They take form as encountering the ‘effects of the fall’, and those ‘effects’, as constituting the situation in which they develop, limit, restrict, and mark the ways in which they develop. They can, moreover, take a form that is itself one of the ‘effects’ of the fall: they can usurp the ‘Divine light’ (the conscience). They are good as countering disorder (though as they can do more than counter disorder, the use of them to counter disorder might involve a neglect of some of their ‘higher’ uses) – yet they can themselves become disordered, when they are made supreme, and not subjected to a higher ‘light’. In his sermon on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’ preached in 1856, Newman suggests that the ‘fall’ involved a separation of the ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ aspects of the soul.

It was not so in the beginning; not that our nature is essentially different from what it was when first created; but that the Creator, upon its creation, raised it above itself by a supernatural grace, which blended together all its faculties, and made them conspire into one whole, and act in common towards one end … [but] it is otherwise now; so much the worse for us; – the grace is gone; the soul cannot hold together; it falls to pieces; its elements strive with each other.¹⁴²

There are different ‘dominions … in the soul’, so that ‘you find in one man, or one set of man, the reign’ of different powers – whether ‘passion, or appetite’, or ‘brute strength and material resources’, or ‘intellect’, or ‘the more excellent reign of virtue’, and these are ‘all severally embodied on a grand scale, in large establishments and centres’.¹⁴³ One cannot but ‘choose’ between them for one ‘cannot help thinking, speaking, and acting; and to think, speak, and act, is to choose’.¹⁴⁴ With regard to choosing between ‘intellect’ and ‘conscience’, Callista is captivated by an ‘image’ that she feels to be quite different from the ‘visions of genius’, from any ‘poet’s dream’, from ‘anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection’, and in, or through, this ‘image’ she apprehends, ‘He who spoke to her in her conscience.’ What she is converted from is not so much ‘intellect’ per se, as it is the ‘proper pride’ that would take ‘intellect’, the ‘visions of genius’, and ‘will’ to be sufficient (and supreme) in forming the ‘soul’. Callista, on being converted, acquires a ‘new philosophy’, a new ‘light’, such that ‘all had a new meaning’; and the ‘ruling sovereign thought of the whole was He, who exemplified all this wonderful philosophy in Himself’. One might anticipate that, given opportunity, she might, through the ‘exercises and developments’ of her ‘intellect’, elaborate something of this ‘wonderful philosophy’, relating it to, and subsuming within it, the ‘visions of genius’ – yet she is not given such an opportunity. In his sermon on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, Newman observes that, as ‘conscience’ and ‘intellect’ have, in fact, formed distinct ‘dominions’, ‘it comes to be taken for granted that they cannot be united; and it is commonly thought, because some men follow duty, others pleasure, others glory, and others intellect, therefore that one of these things excludes the other; that duty cannot be pleasant, that virtue cannot be intellectual, that goodness cannot be great, that conscientiousness cannot be heroic’ but he insists that while ‘the fact is often so … there is a separation … I deny its necessity’.¹⁴⁵ In ‘Christianity and Letters’, an essay included in The Idea of a University, Newman observes that while ‘Christianity’ and ‘civilization’ are distinct ‘systems’, operating according to different principles, nevertheless ‘Christianity waited till the orbis terrarum attained its most perfect form before it appeared; and it soon coalesced, and has ever since co-operated, and often seemed identical, with the Civilization which is its companion’; and he maintains that this ‘coalescence’ of Christianity and civilization is maintained, in fact, in the traditions of Rome: ‘The grace stored in Jerusalem, and the gifts which radiate from Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome. This is true as a matter of history. Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning; she has perpetuated and dispensed the traditions of Moses and David in the supernatural order, and of Homer and Aristotle in the natural. To separate those distinct teachings, human and divine, which meet in Rome, is to retrograde.’¹⁴⁶

In a couple of essays, on ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, and ‘The Benedictine Schools’, published in the Atlantis in 1858 and 1859, Newman set out a vision of how Christian ‘education’, and ‘Christian civilization’ had developed, from antiquity to the present. He suggests that Christian civilization has had three phases, each one associated with a ‘Patriarch’, who founded a religious order, characterized by different virtues: ‘St. Benedict has had the training of the ancient intellect, St. Dominic of the medieval; and St. Ignatius of the modern.’¹⁴⁷ Newman associates a different ‘discriminating badge’ with each: ‘To [St Benedict] let me assign, for his discriminating badge, the element of Poetry; to St. Dominic, the Scientific element; and to St. Ignatius, the Practical.’¹⁴⁸ These phases of Christian civilization did not supersede one another – ‘What the Catholic Church once has had, she never has lost.’¹⁴⁹ ‘Imagination, Science, Prudence, all are good, and she has them all. Things incompatible in nature, coexist in her; her prose is poetical on the one hand, and philosophical on the other.’¹⁵⁰ With regard to the Benedictines, Newman maintains that the Benedictine vocation was ‘flight from the world, and nothing else’ – ‘flight’ from a civilized order that was ‘old, decayed, and moribund’, from a ‘society’ that was ‘in a slow fever of consumption’ – and it was this that made ‘the monastic state the most poetical of religious disciplines’, for it ‘was a return to that primitive age of the world, of which poets have so often sung, the simple life of Arcadia or the reign of Saturn, when fraud and violence were unknown’.¹⁵¹ ‘Nature for art, the wide earth and the majestic heavens for the crowded city, the subdued and docile beasts of the field for the wild passions and rivalries of social life, tranquillity for ambition and care, divine meditation for the exploits of the intellect, the Creator for the creature, such was the normal condition of the monk.’¹⁵² Yet, in this ‘flight’ from the civilized world, the monks preserved the elements of civilization, and ‘helped to create’ a ‘new world’: ‘By degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city. Roads and bridges connected it with other abbeys and cities, which had similarly grown up; and what the haughty Alaric or fierce Attila had broken to pieces, these patient meditative men had brought together and made to live again.’¹⁵³

They had sought, in the lonely wood or the silent mountain top, the fair uncorrupted form of nature, which spoke only of the Creator. They had retired into deserts, where they could have no enemies but such as fast and prayer could subdue. They had gone where the face of man was not, except as seen in pale, ascetic apparitions like themselves. They had secured some refuge, whence they might look round at the sick world in the distance, and see it die. But, when that last hour came, it did but frustrate all their hopes, for, instead of an old world at a distance, they found they had a young world close to them. The old order of things died, sure enough; but then a new order took its place, and they themselves, by no will or expectation of their own, were in no small measure its very life. The lonely Benedictine rose from his knees and found himself a city. This was the case, not merely here or there, but everywhere; Europe was new mapped, and the monks were the principle of mapping. They had grown into large communities, into abbeys, into corporations with civil privileges, into land-holders with tenants, serfs, and baronial neighbours; they had become centres of population, the schools of the most cherished truths, the shrines of the most sacred confidences. They found themselves priests, rulers, legislators, feudal lords, royal counsellors, missionary preachers, controversialists.¹⁵⁴

That the ‘lonely Benedictine’ should become ‘in no small measure’ the ‘very life’ of a civilization, might seem inconsistent with the Benedictine ‘vocation’, a ‘vocation’ that involved the renunciation of the ‘world’, and Newman acknowledges that the ‘monastic bodies’ were obliged, in undertaking certain ‘functions’, ‘to come to a compromise with the age … [while] reserving their fidelity to St. Benedict’; in response to this ‘compromise’,¹⁵⁵ ‘there were holy men who were but impelled into a reaction of the most rigid asceticism by this semblance of a reconciliation between their brethren and the world’ – such as St Romuald or St Bruno; yet those who undertook the ‘work’ of civilization were, nevertheless, ‘specimens of fidelity to their founder … impress[ing] the Benedictine type of sanctity upon their literary or political undertakings’ – and while neither ‘the functions of an Apostle, nor of a schoolmaster, are much akin to those of a monk; nevertheless, in a given individual, they may be reconciled, or the one merged in the other’.¹⁵⁶

Newman maintains that the ‘discriminating badge’ of the Benedictine vocation was ‘the element of poetry’, and he associates this ‘element’ with a certain state of the ‘intellect’. The first monks sought ‘flight from the world, and nothing else’.

The troubled, jaded, weary heart, the stricken, laden conscience, sought a life free from corruption in its daily work, free from distraction in its daily worship; and it sought employments as contrary as possible to the world’s employments, – employments, the end of which would be in themselves, in which each day, each hour, would have its own completeness; – no elaborate undertakings, no difficult aims, no anxious ventures, no uncertainties to make the heart beat, or the temples throb, no painful combination of efforts, no extended plan of operations, no multiplicity of details, no deep calculations, no sustained machinations, no suspense, no vicissitudes, no moments of crisis or catastrophe; – nor again any subtle investigations, nor perplexities of proof, nor conflicts of rival intellects, to agitate, harass, depress, stimulate, weary, or intoxicate the soul.¹⁵⁷

Monachism involved ‘as regards the secular life and all that it implies, emphatically a negation, or, to use another word, a mortification; a mortification of sense, and a mortification of reason’.¹⁵⁸ This ‘mortification of reason’ was not simply a rejection of ‘reason’ – it was, rather, a rejection of certain ‘exercises of the reason’, associated with the ‘cultivated’ intellect.

They denied themselves was the various and manifold exercises of the reason; and on this account, because such exercises were excitements. When the reason is cultivated, it at once begins to combine, to centralize, to look forward, to look back, to view things as a whole, whether for speculation or for action; it practises synthesis and analysis, it discovers, it invents. To these exercises of the intellect is opposed simplicity, which is the state of mind which does not combine, does not deal with premisses and conclusions, does not recognize means and their end, but lets each work, each place, each occurrence stand by itself, – which acts towards each as it comes before it, without a thought of anything else. This simplicity is the temper of children, and it is the temper of monks. This was their mortification of the intellect; every man who lives, must live by reason, as every one must live by sense; but, as it is possible to be content with the bare necessities of animal life, so is it possible to confine ourselves to the bare ordinary use of reason, without caring to improve it or make the most of it. These monks held both sense and reason to be the gifts of heaven, but they used each of them as little as they could help, reserving their full time and their whole selves for devotion; – for, if reason is better than sense, so devotion they thought to be better than either; and, as even a heathen might deny himself the innocent indulgences of sense in order to give his time to the cultivation of the reason, so did the monks give up reason, as well as sense, that they might consecrate themselves to divine meditation.¹⁵⁹

The monks renounced that form of reason which is exercised ‘to combine, to centralize, to look forward, to look back, to view things as a whole’ – to master things – and it was this that made their ‘vocation’, and their state of ‘intellect’, ‘poetical’.¹⁶⁰

Poetry … is always the antagonist to science. As science makes progress in any subject-matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are contradictory of each other. Reason investigates, analyzes, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, locates, the objects of its contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is (to use the familiar term), to master them, or to be superior to them. Its success lies in being able to draw a line round them, and to tell where each of them is to be found within that circumference, and how each lies relatively to all the rest. Its mission is to destroy ignorance, doubt, surmise, suspense, illusions, fears, deceits, according to the ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ of the Poet, whose whole passage, by the way, may be taken as drawing out the contrast between the poetical and the scientific. But as to the poetical, very different is the frame of mind which is necessary for its perception. It demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves. It implies that we understand them to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious; so that at best we are only forming conjectures about them, not conclusions, for the phenomena which they present admit of many explanations, and we cannot know the true one. Poetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love. The vague, the uncertain, the irregular, the sudden, are among its attributes or sources. Hence it is that a child’s mind is so full of poetry, because he knows so little; and an old man of the world so devoid of poetry, because his experience of facts is so wide. Hence it is that nature is commonly more poetical than art, in spite of Lord Byron, because it is less comprehensible and less patient of definitions; history more poetical than philosophy; the savage than the citizen; the knight-errant than the brigadier-general; the winding bridle-path than the straight railroad; the sailing vessel than the steamer; the ruin than the spruce suburban box; the Turkish robe or Spanish doublet than the French dress coat.¹⁶¹

Newman maintains that there is a ‘Virgilian’ quality to the life of the monk. ‘Would that Christianity had a Virgil to describe the old monks at their rural labours … How could he have illustrated that wonderful union, of prayer, penance, toil, and literary work, the true “otium cum dignitate,” a fruitful leisure and a meek-hearted dignity, which is exemplified in the Benedictine!’¹⁶²

Repose, intellectual and moral, is that quality of country life which [Virgil] selects for his praises; and effort, and bustle, and excitement is that quality of a town life which he abhors. Herein then, according to Virgil, lies the poetry of St. Benedi ct, in the ‘secura quies et nescia fallere vita’, in the absence of anxiety and fretfulness, of schemes and scheming, of hopes and fears, of doubts and disappointments. Such a life, – living for the day without solicitude for the morrow, without plans or objects, even holy ones, here below; working, not (so to say) by the piece, but as hired by the hour; sowing the ground with the certainty, according to the promise, of reaping; reading or writing this present week without the consequent necessity of reading or writing during the next; dwelling among one’s own people without distant ties; taking each new day as a whole in itself, an addition, not a complement, to the past; and doing works which cannot be cut short, for they are complete in every portion of them, – such a life may be called emphatically Virgilian. They, on the contrary, whose duty lies in what may be called undertakings, in science and system, in sustained efforts of the intellect or elaborate processes of action, – apologists, controversialists, disputants in the schools, professors in the chair, teachers in the pulpit, rulers in the Church, – have a noble and meritorious mission, but not so poetical a one.¹⁶³

The monk did not have a ‘duty’ in ‘undertakings’. ‘To the monk heaven was next door; he formed no plans, he had no cares.’¹⁶⁴

The monk proposed to himself no great or systematic work, beyond that of saving his soul. What he did more than this was the accident of the hour, spontaneous acts of piety, the sparks of mercy or beneficence, struck off in the heat, as it were, of his solemn religious toil, and done and over almost as soon as they began to be. If today he cut down a tree, or relieved the famishing, or visited the sick, or taught the ignorant, or transcribed a page of Scripture, this was a good in itself, though nothing was added to it tomorrow. He cared little for knowledge, even theological, or for success, even though it was religious. It is the character of such a man to be contented, resigned, patient, and incurious; to create or originate nothing; to live by tradition. He does not analyze, he marvels; his intellect attempts no comprehension of this multiform world, but on the contrary, it is hemmed in, and shut up within it. It recognizes but one cause in nature and in human affairs, and that is the First and Supreme; and why things happen day by day in this way, and not in that, it refers immediately to His will. It loves the country, because it is His work; but ‘man made the town’, and he and his works are evil.¹⁶⁵

If, then, the Benedictines renewed, and restored ‘the town’, they did not aim at doing so, as a ‘systematic work’.

[St Benedict] found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way, not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time or by any rare specific or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often, till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration, rather than a visitation, correction, or conversion. The new world which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes, and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully deciphered and copied and re-copied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one that ‘contended, or cried out’, or drew attention to what was going on; but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city.¹⁶⁶

While the Benedictines preserved the ‘elements’ of civilization, and created ‘school[s] of learning’, their learning did not involve ‘sustained efforts of the intellect’; it involved ‘nothing of original research, nothing of brilliant or imposing result’.¹⁶⁷ They transcribed manuscripts – above all, those of the Scriptures, and the Fathers. They collected and arranged passages from the Fathers, commenting on the text of the Scriptures. They established schools, though these were, for the most part, schools for boys, up to the age of fourteen, concerned with elementary studies, principally ‘Grammar’ – which involved ‘such an acquaintance with the literature of a language as is implied in the power of original composition and the viva voce use of it’.¹⁶⁸ For ‘for those who wished to proceed further than the studies of their boyhood, seats of higher education had been founded by Charlemagne in the principal cities of his Empire, under the name of public schools, which may be considered the shadow, and even the nucleus of the Universities which arose in a subsequent age’; but in these public schools ‘it is scarcely to be supposed that, in any science whatever, except Grammar, they professed to impart more than the elements’.¹⁶⁹ Where the Dominicans would make the ‘Latin tongue minister to scientific uses, for which it was never intended’, the Benedictines had ‘the praise of being familiar with the ancient language itself’.¹⁷⁰ The Benedictine adhered to what was received, what was prescribed, and took up ‘the old books and subjects which he found ready to his hand in the pagan schools, as far as he could religiously do so, rather than to venture on any experiments or system of his own’.¹⁷¹ But if ‘he adopted the Latin writers from his love of prescription, because he found them in possession … there were in fact no writings, after Scripture, more congenial, from their fresh and natural beauty and their freedom from intellectualism, to the monastic temperament’.¹⁷²

The theology of the Benedictine ‘was a loving study and exposition of Holy Scripture, according to the teaching of the Fathers’.¹⁷³

[The Benedictine] compared, emendated, and transcribed the text of Scripture; next he transcribed the Fathers who directly or indirectly commented on it; then he attached to its successive portions such passages from the Fathers as illustrated them; then he fused those catenated passages into one homogeneous comment of his own: and there he stopped. He seldom added anything original. In such a task the skill would lie in the happy management and condensation of materials brought together from very various quarters, and here he would find the advantage of the literary habits gained in his early education … . [Benedictine theology] was a loyal adherence to the teaching of the past, a faithful inculcation of it, an anxious transmission of it to the next generation. In this respect it differed from the theology of the times before and after them. Patristic and scholastic theology each involved a creative action of the intellect … . There is no greater mistake, surely, than to suppose that a revealed truth precludes originality in the treatment of it. The contrary is acknowledged in the case of secular subjects, in which it is the very triumph of originality, not to invent or discover what is not already known, but to make old things read as if they were new, from the novelty of aspect in which they are placed. This faculty of investing with associations, of applying to particular purposes, of deducing consequences, of impressing upon the imagination, is creative; and though false associations, applications, deductions, and impressions are often made, and were made by some theologians of the early Church, such as Origen and Tertullian, this does but prove that originality is not co-extensive with truth. And so in like manner as to Scripture; to enter into the mind of the sacred author, to follow his train of thought, to bring together to one focus the lights which various parts of Scripture throw upon his text, and to give adequate expression to the thoughts thus evolved, in other words, the breadth of view, the depth, or the richness, which we recognize in certain early [Patristic] expositions, is a creation. Nor is it an inferior faculty to discriminate, rescue, and adjust the truth, which a fierce controversy threatens to tear in pieces, at a time when the ecclesiastical atmosphere is thick with the dust of the conflict, when all parties are more or less in the wrong, and the public mind has become so bewildered as not to be able to say what it does or what it does not hold, or even what it held before the strife of ideas began. In such circumstances, to speak the word evoking order and peace, and to restore the multitude of men to themselves and to each other, by a reassertion of what is old with a luminousness of explanation which is new, is a gift inferior only to that of revelation itself.¹⁷⁴

The creativity which Newman associates with Patristic and scholastic theology is a creativity in the presentation of ‘old things’ – a matter of discerning a ‘novelty of aspect’ in ‘old things’ – rather than a creativity by which that which is ‘not already known’ is discovered. A creativity of this kind is required in ‘controversy’, to ‘rescue, and adjust the truth’ by a ‘reassertion of what is old with a luminousness of explanation which is new’. This creativity involves more than an adherence to what is ‘prescribed’ or received; it involves a ‘breadth of view’, in which what is ‘prescribed’ or received can be apprehended in a new ‘aspect’. With regard to how the Benedictines conducted themselves, in the controversies of their times, Newman maintains that ‘in proportion as these matters were in substance already decided by the Fathers, they acquitted themselves well in the controversy, and in proportion as these matters demanded some original explanations, the monastic disputants were less successful’.¹⁷⁵

Newman maintains that the Benedictine vocation is ‘poetical’, and that it is, as such, contrary to ‘science’; where ‘science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system’.¹⁷⁶ When the Benedictine ‘turned to Scripture … there supernatural truths stand forth as the trees and flowers of Eden, in a divine disorder, as some awful intricate garden or paradise, which he enjoyed the more because he could not catalogue its wonders’.¹⁷⁷ For one who ‘delights in the indefinite and various, as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system’, the ‘truths’ of the Scriptures are not to be reduced to system, or ‘catalogue[d]’: they are to be ‘enjoyed’, as they are presented, in their ‘divine disorder’; they are to be taken one by one, not related to one another, and reduced to ‘system’.

In his sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman suggested that ‘innocence’ can sometimes be mistaken for ‘wisdom’ or even ‘craft’, because innocence can be effective – it can make for results that look like the results of foresight, calculation, and design. He characterizes innocence as ‘simplicity in act, purity in motive, honesty in aim; acting conscientiously and religiously, according to the matter in hand, without caring for consequences or appearances; doing what appears one’s duty, and being obedient for obedience’ sake, and leaving the event to God’.¹⁷⁸

Those who surrender themselves to Christ in implicit faith are graciously taken into His service; and, ‘as men under authority’, they do great things without knowing it, by the Wisdom of their Divine Master. They act on conscience, perhaps in despondency, and without foresight; but what is obedience in them, has a purpose with God, and they are successful, when they do but mean to be dutiful. But what duplicity does the world think it, to speak of conscience, or honour, or propriety, or delicacy, or to give other tokens of personal motives, when the event seems to show that a calculation of results has been the actuating principle at bottom! It is God who designs, but His servants seem designing; and that the more, should it so happen that they really do themselves catch glimpses of their own position in His providential course. For then what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason, and they are able to recognize the expedience of obedience … [But] why must His human instruments set out with a purpose, because they accomplish one? … Men do not like to hear of the interposition of Providence in the affairs of the world; and they invidiously ascribe ability and skill to His agents, to escape the thought of an Infinite Wisdom and an Almighty Power. They will be unjust to their brethren, that they may not be just to Him; they will be wanton in their imputations, rather than humble themselves to a confession.¹⁷⁹

Newman suggests, then, that the ‘Wisdom’, informing the acts of ‘those who surrender themselves to Christ in implicit faith’ and ‘do great things without knowing it’ is ‘the Wisdom of their Divine Master’: what they do, out of ‘obedience’, without regard to any particular effect, is, as it happens, effectual, but ‘it is God who designs’. (In much this way, the Benedictines ‘helped to create’ a ‘new world’, a ‘new’ civilization, without in any way ‘designing’ to do so.) Newman, equally, observes that some Christians might ‘catch glimpses of their own position in His providential course’: they might discern something of the ‘Wisdom’, which has appointed their duties, and they might discern the ‘expedience’ of what they are required to do. When they do so, ‘what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason, and they are able to recognize the expedience of obedience’. In a later comment on the sermon, in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman remarks, ‘I suggested that shrewd ecclesiastics, who knew very well that there was neither magic nor craft in the matter, and, from their intimate acquaintance with what actually went on within the Church, discerned what were the real causes of its success, were of course under the temptation of substituting reason for conscience, and, instead of simply obeying the command, were led to do good that good might come, that is, to act in order to their success, and not from a motive of faith.’

Some, I said, did yield to the temptation more or less, and their motives became mixed; and in this way the world in a more subtle shape has got into the Church; and hence it has come to pass, that, looking at its history from first to last, we cannot possibly draw the line between good and evil there, and say either that every thing is to be defended, or some things to be condemned. I expressed the difficulty, which I supposed to be inherent in the Church, in the following words. I said, ‘Priestcraft has ever been considered the badge, and its imputation is a kind of Note of the Church; and in part indeed truly, because the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted Christians to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless; but partly, nay, for the most part, not truly, but slanderously, and merely because the world called their wisdom craft, when it was found to be a match for its own numbers and power.’¹⁸⁰

His reflections about those who have been ‘tempted … to the abuse … of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless’ are at the beginning of the sermon, and his reflections about those who were ‘able to recognize the expedience of obedience’ are at the end; and he does not suggest that those who are ‘able to recognize the expedience of obedience’ are ‘under the temptation of substituting reason for conscience’ – he observes, rather, that ‘what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason’, that the motives of ‘conscience’ and ‘reason’ coincide. To substitute ‘reason for conscience’, to be obedient out of a regard for ‘expedience’ would, certainly, be an ‘abuse … of Christian wisdom’; but it is not at all clear that this was the sort of ‘abuse’ that Newman was thinking of, when he remarked that ‘the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted Christians to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless’; and it is not at all clear that, in his account of those who ‘recognize the expedience of obedience’, he was regarding this as something liable to ‘abuse’, as something presenting the ‘temptation of substituting reason for conscience’. In the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman maintains, at any rate, that those who recognize ‘the expedience of obedience’ can be in a state in which ‘what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason’: that ‘their reason’ approves what ‘they do’, need not mean that what they do is any the less ‘from the heart’.

The ‘wisdom’ with which Newman is concerned in ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ is wisdom of a ‘political’ kind – a wisdom that recognizes what is ‘expedient’, or effective, in conduct. In the Idea of a University, characterizing the ‘Philosophy’ that, he maintains, a university should aim to cultivate in its members, he quotes extensively from an earlier sermon of his on ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry’, which is concerned with a ‘wisdom’ that arises from reflection on ‘faith’. What the forms of ‘wisdom’ considered in ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, and ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry’ have in common, is that they are forms of awareness that arise from reflection on more spontaneous forms of awareness: they arise from the ‘action of the mind’ on itself. Newman observes that ‘faith’ and ‘wisdom’ are ‘distinct, even opposite gifts’.

Wisdom belongs to the perfect, and more especially to preachers of the Gospel; and Faith is the elementary grace which is required of all, especially of hearers … . Faith being an exercise of the Reason, so spontaneous, unconscious, and unargumentative, as to seem at first sight even to be a moral act, and Wisdom being that orderly and mature development of thought, which in earthly language goes by the name of science and philosophy.¹⁸¹

As ‘Philosophy’ is ‘Reason exercised on … the Knowledge not merely of things in general, but of things in their relations to one another’, such that ‘instead of discovering, it does but analyze’, and as it involves ‘the power of referring every thing to its true place in the universal system’, such that it ‘never views any part of the extended subject-matter of knowledge, without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the associations which spring from this recollection’, so ‘Wisdom’ is ‘Reason’ exercised on the ‘knowledge’ involved in faith.¹⁸² ‘Wisdom is the clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God; and though there is none who has it in its fulness but He who “searcheth all thin gs, yea, the deep things of” the Creator, yet “by that Spirit” they are, in a measure, “revealed unto us.”’¹⁸³ Where ‘faith … acts promptly and boldly on the occasion, on slender evidence, as if guessing and reaching forward to the truth, amid darkness or confusion’, ‘wisdom’ involves a ‘vision’ of ‘the whole course’ of things.¹⁸⁴ The idea of ‘faith’ which Newman is working with here, would seem to connect ‘faith’ with ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis: it seems to be an insight sufficient for an ‘occasion’ in which one must ‘act’. Newman observes that ‘though Faith be a presumption of facts under defective knowledge, yet, be it observed, it is altogether a practical principle’.

It judges and decides because it cannot help doing so, for the sake of the man himself, who exercises it – not in the way of opinion, not as aiming at mere abstract truth, not as teaching some theory or view. It is the act of a mind feeling that it is its duty any how, under its particular circumstances, to judge and to act, whether its light be greater or less, and wishing to make the most of that light and acting for the best.¹⁸⁵

(As phronesis involves an insight sufficient for the ‘occasion’, for the requirements of acting on that ‘occasion’, so ‘faith’ involves an insight sufficient for the occasion. The insight of phronesis is sufficient for an ‘occasion’ as it is, in part, an insight into a particular occasion or situation – it is concerned with ‘this’ situation, here and now. Newman contrasts a faith which ‘acts promptly and boldly on the occasion’ with a ‘wisdom’ which involves an insight or ‘comprehension’ not limited to, or concerned solely with, a particular ‘occasion’, but encompassing ‘the whole course, the whole work of God’.) As a virtual ‘presumption’, ‘exercised under a sense of personal responsibility’, in relation to a ‘duty’ to ‘judge and to act’ in ‘particular circumstances’, the ‘knowledge’ involved in faith is ‘not insufficient for the purpose’ for which it is used. ‘It is when our presumptions take a wide range, when they affect to be systematical and philosophical, when they are indulged in matters of speculation, not of conduct, not in reference to self, but to others, then it is that they deserve the name of bigotry and dogmatism.’¹⁸⁶ Faith differs from ‘bigotry’ (though it ‘may be mixed with Bigotry in matter of fact in this instance or that’) in that, where ‘Bigotry professes to understand what it maintains, though it does not’ and ‘it argues and infers … disowns Faith, and makes a show of Reason instead of it’, faith ‘proposes instead simple obedience to a revealed command’.¹⁸⁷

Its disciples represent that they are neither statesmen nor philosophers; that they are not developing principles or evolving systems; that their ultimate end is not persuasion, popularity, or success; that they are but doing God’s will, and desiring His glory. They profess a sincere belief that certain views which engage their minds come from God; that they know well that they are beyond them; that they are not able to enter into them, or to apply them as others may do; that, understanding them but partially themselves, they are not sanguine about impressing them on others; that a divine blessing alone can carry them forward; that they look for that blessing; that they feel that God will maintain His own cause; that that belongs to Him, not to them.¹⁸⁸

They are like the ‘innocent’, as characterized in the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, who ‘surrender themselves to Christ in implicit faith … and, “as men under authority,” … do great things without knowing it, by the Wisdom of their Divine Master’. Those who have faith, Newman maintains in ‘Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, do not profess fully to understand the ‘views which engage their minds’ or to ‘apply them as others may do’ – others who have ‘the comprehensive faculty which resolves all things into their true principles, and connects them in one system’, so as to ‘apply or dispense the Truth in a change of circumstances’ – yet, in another respect, those who have faith continually apply it to various ‘matter[s] at hand’: faith ‘is an isolated act of Reason upon any matter in hand, as it comes; yet on this very account it has as wide a range as Wisdom’, such that there ‘is no subject which Faith working by Love may not include in its province, on which it may not have a judgment, and to which it may not do justice, though it views each point by itself, and not as portions of a whole’. These particular ‘judgements’, concerned with particular cases, each taken ‘by itself’, might be regarded as applications of ‘views’ present more in an ‘implicit’ than an ‘explicit’ form; and, in these various applications of those ‘views’, more and more of what is ‘in’ those views becomes manifest. The ‘bigoted, by contrast, have an ‘explicit’ view, and ‘profess … to understand the subjects which they take up and the principles which they apply to them’; they ‘expect to be able to argue others into a belief of them, and are impatient when they cannot’ and they ‘consider that the premisses with which they start just prove the conclusions which they draw, and nothing else’, such that they ‘think that their own views are exactly fitted to solve all the facts which are to be accounted for, to satisfy all objections, and to moderate and arbitrate between all parties’.¹⁸⁹ Those with ‘faith’ do not profess to ‘understand’ the ‘principles which they apply’; they do not profess to have acquired those principles by ‘argument’; but they have implicit ‘views’ or ‘principles’, by which they ‘judge’ rightly of particular cases, each taken ‘by itself’. Those who are ‘bigoted’ take it that they do fully ‘understand’ the ‘principles which they apply’, that they have made those ‘principles’ fully explicit to themselves, and that the y have acquired them by explicit argument: they take incomplete, inadequate ‘explicit’ views to be adequate to ‘all the facts’ they are presented with, imposing those views on those ‘facts’ (for there can be nothing in those ‘facts’ which they do not already ‘understand’); they are not responsive, or receptive, when presented with reality (such responsiveness may be a matter of intuiting certain meanings in things, without being able to set out precisely what those meanings are). Newman suggests that ‘wisdom’, by contrast, develops out of ‘faith’ – ‘Wisdom is the last gift of the Spirit, and Faith the first’. How much, though, can ‘wisdom’ – the ‘clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God’ – ever be attained? Newman himself acknowledges that ‘there is none who has it in its fulness but He who “searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of” the Creator’ – namely, Christ – but he suggests that some have attained to a degree of this ‘wisdom’. When reflecting on ‘philosophy’, as the exercise of reason on ‘the vast field of Knowledge, not in conjecturing unknown truths, but in comparing, adjusting, connecting, explaining facts and doctrines ascertained’, he observes, that such was ‘the reason of those ancient Catholic Divines, nay, in their measure, of those illustrious thinkers of the middle ages, who have treated of the Christian Faith on system, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas’. One may take it that Newman would have regarded the understanding of the ‘Christian Faith’, on the part of these ‘illustrious thinkers’, as having developed in, and out of, lives characterized by an obedience that was ‘from the heart’, and, perhaps, as arising, in part, from their reflections on what was in ‘the heart’; he does not, though, attempt to set out precisely how ‘faith’ develops into ‘wisdom’.

Newman had meant, after writing the essays on ‘The Mission of St Benedict’ and ‘The Benedictine Schools’, to write an essay on one of the other ‘Patriarchs’ of ‘Christian civilization’, St Dominic. Something of his understanding of the Dominican ideal is shown in a sermon on ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’, preached in 1850, in which he claims that ‘it was the magnificent aim of the children of St. Dominic to form the whole matter of human knowledge into one harmonious system, to secure the alliance between religion and philosophy, and to train men to the use of the gifts of nature in the sunlight of divine grace and revealed truth. It required the dissolution and reconstruction of society to give an opportunity for so great a thought; and accordingly, the Order of Preachers flourished after the old Empire had passed away, and the chaos which followed on it had resulted in the creation of a new world.’¹⁹⁰ The ‘aim’ was that of ‘subduing this various, multiform, many-coloured world to the unity of divine service’.¹⁹¹ In his essay on ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, he associates the Dominican vocation with ‘science’. Discussing the ‘poetical’ character of the Benedictine vocation, he contrasts ‘poetry’ with ‘science’, maintaining that where science ‘results in system’, and that its aim ‘is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them … to master them, or to be superior to them’, such that the scientific ‘frame of mind’ is in the perception of that which is understood, ‘mastered’, the ‘poetical … frame of mind’ is in the perception of that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’, that which cannot be mastered. If this is so, though, how can the thought of an ‘illustrious’ Dominican such as Thomas Aquinas – one of those ‘who have treated of the Christian Faith on system’ – be characterized as ‘science’, since that ‘Faith’ is concerned with that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’? In ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, he suggests that, through reflection on a faith that is understood, more and more, by being lived out, and ‘applied’ in the various occasions of life, one might tend toward an apprehension of the ‘whole course, the whole work of God’ (though a perfect comprehension of this ‘work’ is had only by ‘He who “searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of” the Creator’). Such ‘wisdom’, or ‘philosophy’, is a matter of discerning ‘connections’ between truths presented by ‘revealed command’, of making explicit something of what is implicitly understood, when those truths are applied in the various ‘occasions’ of life. (Would Newman take it that one must acquire an implicit understanding of those truths, by applying them to the various ‘occasions’ of life, before one can evolve a more explicit understanding of them?) To discern certain ‘connections’ of this kind, to register something, though not all, of the ‘system’ by which one truth is related to another, is not to have a full comprehension of that which those various truths concern. Newman maintains that the ‘prose [of the Catholic Church] is poetical on the one hand, and philosophical on the other’. Some years earlier, he would observe that ‘such poets as are born under her shadow, she takes into her service … . She can even make schoolmen of them, as she made St. Thomas, till logic becomes poetical.’¹⁹² The ‘logic’, the ‘system’ of St Thomas does not negate the ‘poetical’. In ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’, Newman characterizes the Dominican ‘aim’ as the ‘aim of subduing this various, multiform, many-coloured world to the unity of divine service’: it is the ‘many-coloured world’, rather than the revelation, that is to be ‘subdued’ (mastered); and it is to be subdued to the ‘unity of divine service’ – related to, and subordinated to, the revelation.

With regard to the modern world – the world in which Newman would himself be attempting to contribute, through his oversight of the Catholic University of Dublin, to the making of a ‘Christian civilization’ – Newman suggests, in ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, that ‘St. Ignatius [has had the training] of the modern [intellect]’, maintaining that the ‘modern’ period ‘dates from the Reformation, when that peculiar movement of mind commenced, the issue of which is still to come’.¹⁹³ Newman associates St Benedict with ‘poetry’, St Dominic with ‘science’, and St Ignatius with ‘prudence’.

By common consent, the palm of religious Prudence, in the Aristotelic sense of that comprehensive word, belongs to the School of Religion of which St. Ignatius is the Founder. That great Society is the classical seat and fountain (that is, in religious thought and the conduct of life, for of ecclesiastical politics I speak not), the school and pattern of discretion, practical sense, and wise government. Sublimer conceptions or more profound speculations may have been created or elaborated elsewhere; but, whether we consider the illustrious Body in its own constitution, or in its rules for instruction and direction, we see that it is its very genius to prefer this most excellent prudence to every other gift, and to think little both of poetry and of science, unless they happen to be useful. It is true that, in the long catalogue of its members, there are to be found the names of the most consummate theologians, and of scholars the most elegant and accomplished; but we are speaking here, not of individuals, but of the body itself. It is plain that the body is not over-jealous about its theological traditions, or it certainly would not suffer Suarez to controvert with Molina, Viva with Vasquez, Passaglia with Petavius, and Faure with Suarez, de Lugo, and Valentia. In this intellectual freedom its members justly glory; inasmuch as they have set their affections, not on the opinions of the Schools, but on the souls of men. And it is the same charitable motive which makes them give up the poetry of life, the poetry of ceremonies, – of the cowl, the cloister, and the choir, – content with the most prosaic architecture, if it be but convenient, and the most prosaic neighbourhood, if it be but populous.¹⁹⁴

In his account of the ‘prudence’ of the Jesuits, Newman focuses very much on that aspect of ‘prudence’ which is concerned with utility, with the ‘useful’, with ‘means’ that are separable from ends (with, in truth, only an aspect of the ‘Aristotelic sense’ of that ‘comprehensive word’), though he characterizes this ‘religious prudence’ as animated by a ‘charitable motive’, by a solicitude for ‘the souls of men’.¹⁹⁵ He suggests that the concern of the Jesuits with the ‘useful’ is such that they are disposed to ‘think little both of poetry and of science, unless they happen to be useful’. How much is such a subordination of ‘poetry’ and ‘science’ to the ‘useful’ consistent with the ideal of education set out in The Idea of a University, as a means toward a cultivation of mind that is an end in itself? Newman, certainly, would not regard such a cultivation of mind as an ultimate end; he would not regard such a cultivation of mind as something of more moment than the salvation of the ‘souls of men’; and there would not be any inconsistency in regarding such cultivation of mind as, in one respect, an end, and, in another, as a means, subordinate to a higher end – in deeming cultivation of mind, in certain respects, ‘useful’. Yet, while Newman, in ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, associates ‘Ignatius’ with the ‘modern’ phase of ‘Christian civilization’, he suggests, in The Rise and Progress of Universities, with regard to his own involvement, as a ‘son of St Philip’, an Oratorian, in ‘the preparatory movements of the establishment of a great University’, ‘that there is a providential fitness discernible in the circumstance of the traditions of that Congregation [of the Oratory] flowing in upon the first agitation of [the] design; and, though to frame, to organize, and to consolidate, be the imperial gift of St. Dominic or St. Ignatius, and beyond his range, yet a son of St. Philip Neri may aspire without presumption to the preliminary task of breaking the ground and clearing the foundations of the Future, of introducing the great idea into men’s minds, and making them understand it, and love it, and have hope in it, and have faith in it, and show zeal for it; – of bringing many intellects to work together for it, and of teaching them to understand each other, and bear with each other, and go on together, not so much by rule, as by mutual kind feeling and a common devotion’. Newman understood the Oratorian vocation to consist in the creation of community – a community sustained, not by ‘vows’ or by discipline, but by mutual understanding, influence and, ultimately, charity.

Everyone [in such a community] seems to be acting at his own discretion – he acts from himself – the laws on which the community moves are not external but within – it is selfmoved. As is commonly observed, the Superior is never to say ‘I command’ but always ‘I wish’; and it is recorded even of St Philip that he never used the words ‘I command’ but once. It is the common sense, the delicacy, the sharp observation, the tact of each which keeps the whole in harmony. It is a living principle, call it (in human language) judgement or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception, which takes the place of formal enactment … . An Oratorian … is in great measure a law to himself, and is almost the reverse so far of a regular, for instance a Jesuit. A Jesuit has a rule to fall back upon. When he wants to know how to act, he recurs to it. He keeps it before him, and therefore may be almost content with an external view of others, with whom he has to act – He views them in the light of the rule, he measures them by the rule, he only knows them in the rule. The rule is to settle all disputes and difficulties between him and them – and obedience to a Superior is to complete whatever the rule may leave vague or obscure. Far different is the duty of an Oratorian: his rule does little for him – his community life is not determined by the rule; it will not remain in its perfection by a mere observance of it … . The course of things, to run smooth, is committed to the keeping of each member. Each in his place must stand with his eyes about him, and work independently of others, though in cooperation with them. Each is to be bound to each by a personal attachment; each must throw himself into the minds of the rest, and try to understand them, to consult for them, to take their hints, and to please them.¹⁹⁶

Newman understood the ‘arts’ by which such community could be created, and sustained, to be arts of ‘social life’ (of a kind acquired in the sort of education that, through the cultivation of the intellect, forms ‘the gentleman’).

The first Oratorians were by birth and education gentlemen; and such in a good measure they r emain down to this day … . It does not follow, because refinement is worthless without sainthness, that it is needless and useless with it. It may set off and recommend an interior holiness, just as the gift of eloquence sets of logical argument … . I suppose it may be said that true refinement of thought, word, and manners is the natural result of Christian holiness, and the necessary result when it is carried out into its full and ultimate effect. But so it is that few are able, so to carry it out; nay, though Christian excellence is abstractedly most refined, most amiable, most winning, yet from various circumstances it need not be so, or it may not possibly be so, in the case of individuals, nay of individual Saints … . Hence it is that mere secular training, gentle nurture, good society, classical education, are of special benefit to the Christian, first as at least excluding their contraries, habits of rusticity or oddness or affectation and thus protecting and giving room for the unimpeded development of the saintly character in all its parts, as concurring in that development, encouraging and completing it, and lastly, when there is after all from some fault or other a deficient development, at least simulating it, and supplying from inferior principles and by secular instruments that refinement which ought to follow, and often does follow even in the humblest and least education, from Christian faith and love … . It is not wonderful, if this external polish and refinement, which is so valueless in itself morally, yet so useful as a sort of rhetoric in conduct, nay and valuable too, so far as it is a symptom and the product of Christian excellence within, should have been one of the means by which the Oratory acted in the reformation of both clergy and laity at the time of its establishment.¹⁹⁷

Newman maintains, in The Idea of a University, that the ‘Philosophy’ that is the end of a university education, animates, and is acquired through, the ‘conversation’ that makes up the life of a university: it is, in a sense, the spirit of that conversation, or it is present in that conversation, or it is what that conversation is tending toward. That conversation, Newman suggests, might be imbued with a Christian ‘spirit’ and character, and might be, as such, a means of imparting that Christian spirit to those involved in that conversation – as St Philip became an ‘Apostle of Rome’ by the ‘convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation’.¹⁹⁸ Newman suggests that, in the ‘conversation’ making up the life of the university – a conversation ‘bringing many intellects [possessed of different forms of knowledge, different scientific principles] to work together [and] to understand each other, and bear with each other, and go on together, not so much by rule, as by mutual kind feeling and a common devotion’ – there might be a concord, a mutual adjustment, of the ‘principles’ of the different forms of knowledge, possessed by those participating in the conversation. Newman remarked of St Philip that ‘as from St. Dominic he gained the end he was to pursue [namely, the “aim of subduing this various, multiform, many-coloured world to the unity of divine service”] so from St. Benedict he learned how to pursue it’.¹⁹⁹ In the mid nineteenth century, various new sciences were emerging, with their scope, and their relation to one another, not being altogether clear, such that no explicit philosophical ‘system’ might, at that time, have seemed sufficient, for ordering, and for presenting an overall view, of those different sciences (or ‘subduing … [them] to the unity of divine service’). In a ‘living’ conversation, though, a conversation sustained by ‘mutual kind feeling’ – even mutual charity – in which the ‘intellect’ could ‘range with the utmost freedom’, and all the principles of the ‘sciences’ could be expressed, a form of ‘Philosophy’, presenting ‘the word evoking order and peace’ might, perhaps, emerge.

Notes

1 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Defined and Illustrated (1852; 1858; 1873; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 124, 125.

2 Idea of a University, 126.

3 Ibid., 45.

4 Ibid., 45, 46.

5 Ibid., 46, 47.

6 Ibid., 47–8.

7 Ibid., 47.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 49.

10 Ibid., 58.

11 Ibid., 59.

12 Ibid., 61.

13 Ibid., 62.

14 Ibid., 66, 67.

15 Ibid., 48.

16 Ibid., 125.

17 Ibid., 134.

18 Ibid., 136, 137.

19 Ibid., 137.

20 Ibid.

21 Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, with regard to the kind of ‘tasks’ set for the discipline of philosophy by Newman in The Idea of a University, that ‘the arguments that direct us toward the truth … will be, if Newman’s conclusions in The Idea of a University are correct, arguments that enable us to integrate our theolo gical understanding of the created universe with the understanding of each of the different aspects of that universe that is afforded by the enquiries of each of the secular disciplines’. See Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward/Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 150.

22 Idea of a University, 139.

23 Ibid., 146, 147.

24 Ibid., 147.

25 Ibid., 101.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 235, 236.

28 ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in SPVO, 13.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Idea of a University, 123.

32 ‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’, in Historical Sketches iii [hereafter HS iii] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 8–9.

33 ‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’, in HS iii, 9.

34 Ibid., 14.

35 Ibid., 182.

36 Ibid., 189–90.

37 Ibid., 183.

38 Ibid., 182.

39 Ibid., 81.

40 Ibid., 85, 86.

41 Ibid., 88.

42 Ibid., 89.

43 Idea of a University, 236.

44 Ibid., 177.

45 Ibid., 177–8.

46 ‘Lectures on the His tory of the Turks, in relation to Europe’, in Historical Sketches i [hereafter HS i] (1872; London, Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 163

47 ‘Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe’, in HS i, 163–6.

48 Ibid., 170.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 165.

52 Ibid., 166.

53 Idea of a University, 182–3.

54 Ibid., 184, 185–6.

55 Ibid., 187.

56 Ibid., 191–2.

57 ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’, in OUS, 40–1.

58 Ibid., 41.

59 ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in OUS, 80, 81.

60 For a full analysis of the sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, see Chapter 2, above.

61 ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 230.

62 ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, in PPS v, 230.

63 Ibid., 226–30.

64 Idea of a University, 192.

65 Ibid., 193.

66 Ibid., 197.

67 Ibid., 198, 199–200.

68 Ibid., 200. The quarrel of Newman with Shaftesbury is, in certain respects, parallel to the quarrel of Pascal with Montaigne. (Montaigne maintained that one should contemplate oneself, recognizing all that is ‘human’, particular, concrete, finite about oneself, so that one might accept, and work with, all that is ‘human’, particular, concrete, finite about oneself. In living, one should work with the knowledge one derives from an honest enquiry into oneself, as one is, rather than working from visionary ideals. See M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays (London: Duckworth, 1983).) Newman discusses the quarrel of Pascal and Montaigne, as an instance of how radically different systems of thought can arise from differences of principle deriving from moral temperament, in Chapter 8, Section 2, of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. ‘Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth and error, but that anything is truth to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being; and that in consequence that perception of its first principles which is natural to us is enfeebled, obstructed, perverted, by allurements of sense and the supremacy of self, and, on the other hand, quickened by aspirations after the supernatural; so that at length two characters of mind are brought out into shape, and two standards and systems of thought, – each logical, when analyzed, yet contradictory of each other, and only not antagonistic because they have no common ground on which they can conflict?’ An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1903), 311–2. Newman seems to be more sympathetic to Pascal (and his interpretation of Montaigne is perhaps influenced by how Pascal interprets him). If, though Montaigne is something of a sceptic, Pascal is something of a rigorist. Montaigne developed a form of lay spirituality – the spirituality of a ‘Christian gentleman’ – and he was esteemed by St Francis de Sales. (The unaffected, moderate spirituality of Montaigne is not altogether remote from the ideal of the Christian ‘gentleman’ developed by Newman.) Newman suggests that there is ‘no common ground’ between the ‘systems of thought’ represented by Montaigne and Pascal respectively, but there is a sense in which certain aspects of these ‘systems’ coexist in his own thought.

69 Idea of a University, 200.

70 Ibid., 201.

71 Ibid., 201–4.

72 ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, in PPS v, 235.

73 Ibid., 235–6.

74 Idea of a University, 203.

75 Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (1855; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 17

76 Callista, 118.

77 Ibid., 121.

78 Ibid., 126.

79 Ibid., 127–8.

80 Ibid., 128.

81 Ibid., 128–9.

82 Ibid., 129.

83 Ibid., 130–2.

84 There are a number of influences on Callista: the general form and style owes much to Walter Scott (whose novels Newman had read, with keen pleasure, for many years); certain aspects of the riot scenes owe something to Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens; and I Promessi Sposi by Alessando Manzoni is another important influence. The portrait of St Cyprian, and of the relationship of St Cyprian to Agellius and Callista, owes much to the portrait of Fra Cristoforo (like St Cyprian, a reformed ‘man of the world’) – a portrait that moved Newman deeply when he first read I Promessi Sposi in 1837. There is a sense in which the basic plot of Callista is a reversal of that of I Promessi Sposi: in I Promessi Sposi, a young couple, Renzo and Lucia, wishing to get married, encounter innumerable difficulties, which they eventually overcome (the last of these difficulties being the scruples of Lucia as to whether a vow of celibacy which she had made, somewhat impetuously, while in danger, prohibits her from getting maried – scruples which Fra Cristoforo enables her to overcome, by pointing out that her ‘promise’ to Renzo was prior to her ‘promise’ to embrace celibacy, and could not be annulled by the later promise); Callista begins with an offer of marriage that is refused, and shows the movement of Agellius and Callista – a movement connected (providentially) to their relationship with St Cyprian – toward celibacy and martyrdom.

85 Callista, 216.

86 Ibid., 217–20.

87 ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, in PPS i, 7, 7–8, 3.

88 Callista, 220–1.

89 Ibid., 222.

90 Ibid., 223.

91 Ibid., 223, 224.

92 Ibid., 292.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., 293.

95 Ibid., 294.

96 Ibid., 301–2.

97 Ibid., 313.

98 Ibid., 314.

99 Ibid., 314–5.

100 Ibid., 325–8.

101 Ibid., 347.

102 Ibid., 361.

103 Ibid., 328.

104 Ibid., 328.

105 Ibid., 347.

106 Ibid., 313.

107 Ibid., 309, 311, 312, 313.

108 ‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’, in HS iii, 79–81.

109 Callista, 327.

110 Ibid., 326.

111 Ibid., 292, 293, 294.

112 ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 31.

113 Callista, 129.

114 ‘The Apostolical Christian’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day [hereafter SSD] (1843; 1869; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902), 282.

115 ‘The Apostolical Christian’, in SSD, 278, 279.

116 Ibid., 279, 282.

117 Ibid., 281.

118 Ibid., 282.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid., 289.

121 ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 299.

122 Callista, 292, 293, 294.

123 Ibid., 295.

124 Ibid., 295–6.

125 Ibid., 305.

126 Ibid., 295.

127 Ibid., 301–2.

128 Ibid., 302.

129 Ibid., 361.

130 Ibid., 293–4.

131 Ibid., 213.

132 Ibid., 345.

133 Ibid., 372.

134 Ibid., 374–5.

135 Ibid., 361.

136 Ibid., 362.

137 ‘The State of Innocence’, in PPS v, 112.

138 Ibid., 113, 114.

139 Ibid., 113.

140 Ibid.

141 Ibid., 114.

142 ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in SPVO, 6.

143 Ibid., 6–7.

144 Ibid., 7.

145 Ibid., 7–8.

146 Idea of a University, 265.

147 ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 366.

148 Ibid., 366.

149 Ibid., 368.

150 Ibid., 369.

151 Ibid., 374, 375, 385.

152 Ibid., 385.

153 Ibid., 410.

154 ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in HS ii.

155 Ibid., 443–4.

156 Ibid., 449–50.

157 The Mission of, St. Benedict, 375.

158 Ibid.

159 Ibid., 375–6.

160 Ibid.

161 Ibid., 386–8.

162 Ibid., 408.

163 Ibid., 409.

164 Ibid., 426.

165 ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in HS ii, 452.

166 ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 410.

167 Ibid., 409, 418.

168 ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in HS ii, 460.

169 Ibid., 460.

170 Ibid., 470.

171 Ibid., 454.

172 Ibid.

173 Ibid., 475.

174 Ibid., 476, 477.

175 Ibid., 478.

176 ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 386.

177 Ibid., 427.

178 ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 299.

179 Ibid., 305–7.

180 Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864; London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 386.

181 ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, in OUS, 279.

182 Ibid., 291–2.

183 Ibid., 293.

184 Ibid., 292–3.

185 Ibid., 298.

186 Ibid., 299.

187 Ibid., 300–1.

188 Ibid., 301.

189 Ibid., 305–6.

190 ‘The Mission of St Philip – Part 2’, in SPVO, 221.

191 Ibid., 222.

192 ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 443.

193 ‘The Mission of Saint Benedict’, in HS ii, 366.

194 Ibid., 369–70.

195 Newman can be suspected, perhaps, of giving one part of the ‘Aristotelic sense’ of ‘prudence’ to the Jesuits, that he might reserve another part for the Oratorians.

196 John Henry Newman, Newman the Oratorian, ed. by Placid Murray O.S.B. (1968; Leominster: Gracewing, 2004), 208–9.

197 Newman the Oratorian, 189–90.

198 Idea, 236.

199 ‘The Mission of St Philip – Part 2’, in SPVO, 224.

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