Part 3
1.
For John Henry Newman, religion is ‘real’ when one can ‘believe as if’ one sees, and this kind of belief involves, in his view, imagination. He asks, ‘Can I attain to any more vivid assent to the Being of a God, than that which is given merely to notions of the intellect? … Can I rise to … an imaginative apprehension of it? Can I believe as if I saw?’1 And he maintains that one can, in fact, have an ‘imaginative apprehension’ of God, and ‘enter with a personal knowledge into the circle of truths which make up that great thought’.2 The imagination, for Newman, animates religion; and Christianity has its life in an ‘image’ – Christ ‘departs [from the world] … but is found, through His preachers, to have imprinted the Image or idea of Himself in the minds of His subjects individually; and that Image, apprehended and worshipped in individual minds, becomes a principle of association, and a real bond of those subjects one with another, who are thus united to the body by being united to that Image; and moreover that Image, which is their moral life, when they have been already converted, is also the original instrument of their conversion. It is the Image of Him who fulfils the one great need of human nature, the Healer of its wounds, the Physician of the soul, this Image it is which both creates faith, and then rewards it.’3 Christians, for Newman, have their ‘moral life’ in an ‘Image’. ‘That strange and painful feeling of unreality, which religious men experience from time to time, when nothing seems true, or good, or right, or profitable, when Faith seems a name, and duty a mockery, and all endeavours to do right, absurd and hopeless, and all things forlorn and dreary, as if religion were wiped out from the world, may … be the direct effect of the temporary obscuration of some master vision, which unconsciously supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace.’4 In his efforts, over the course of his life, to understand religion, and faith, Newman reflected, again and again, in different ways, on this ‘master vision’, and its relation to the ‘spiritual life’.
Newman took it that ‘the heart is commonly reached not through reason, but through the imagination’. Religion, as engaging, and transforming, the ‘heart’, involves ‘the imagination’: ‘man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal’; so religion ‘has ever been a message, or a history, or a vision’ and ‘no legislator or priest ever dreamed of educating our moral nature by science or by argument’ – ‘Christianity is a history supernatural, and almost scenic: it tells us what its Author is, by telling us what He has done.’5 While Newman contrasted this ‘vision’ with certain forms of ‘reason’, with ‘science’ or ‘argument’, he was, equally, inclined to regard this ‘vision’ as involving certain forms of ‘reason’. Much of his creativity, as a thinker, was spurred by his sense that ‘reason’, as a ‘living’ power, is something more than what is represented in ‘paper logic’, or in ‘explicit’ forms of logical ‘proof’. He sought to characterize, and to legitimate, the reasoning that was the ‘spontaneous’ activity of the mind itself as it engages with ‘concrete’ reality in all its variety – a reasoning that, to be valid, need not be articulated in ‘verbal’, ‘explicit’ forms. Christianity, he maintained, was a ‘message’ addressed to ‘our moral nature’, a ‘message’ to be lived by. ‘Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.’6 Newman did not regard ‘faith’ as an arbitrary ‘assumption’, but he did regard it as ‘for action’, and he considered the ‘proofs’ involved in ‘action’ to be different in kind from those involved in ‘science’, or ‘philosophical or historical research’. His understanding of ‘faith’, as a ‘principle of conduct’, was informed by his understanding of the insight and perception involved in ‘action’ – and his understanding of the insight and perception involved in ‘action’ developed from his reflections on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, and the account Aristotle presents of the ‘phronesis’ or ‘practical wisdom’ of ‘the good man’. The ‘good man’, in forming a view on how to act, in a particular situation, does not merely make an ‘assumption’; yet the ‘reasoning’ involved in forming that view is not a matter of ‘science’, or deductive ‘proof’, or elaborate ‘argument’: it is a ‘reasoning’ that requires a virtuous ‘heart’, and a perceptiveness formed by experience. Newman took up the Aristotelian account of phronesis, and developed it, in his own account of the ‘conscience’; and he maintained that the ‘conscience’ was ‘the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind’.7
The ‘conscience’, as Newman understood it, is concerned with the ‘concrete’. ‘Conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately on conduct, on something to be done or not done. “Conscience,” says St. Thomas, “is the practical judgment or dictate of reason, by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as being good, or to be avoided as evil.”’8 Thomas Aquinas takes ‘conscience’ to be an act of ‘judgement’, applying a knowledge of what is ‘good’ or ‘evil’ to something ‘here and now’, in determining what is ‘to be done’. The virtue of making good judgements, about good and evil – the virtue of having a well-formed conscience, a capacity to judge rightly as to what is good – is, for Aquinas, involved in ‘prudence’, or phronesis. Newman tends to use the term ‘conscience’ to designate not merely particular acts of judgement, but, in addition, the capacity for making those acts of judgement: the acquisition of ‘prudence’ or phronesis is, for Newman, a forming or ‘strengthening’ of ‘the conscience’ (‘the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become’).9 The judgements or ‘dictates’ of the conscience are concerned with ‘something to be done or not done’ – something ‘concrete’. In his account of phronesis, Aristotle maintains that phronesis involves ‘perception’, a kind of ‘intuitive reason’, which registers the significance of ‘particular’ realities; the apprehension of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, involved in this ‘perception’, surpasses, in certain respects, that which is involved in ‘universal statements’ or ‘generalizations’. As Newman observes, ‘The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them.’10 Something more of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is presented in, or via, the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis, than in ‘such jejune generalizations as treatises can give’. Newman, generally, was inclined to regard the ‘concrete’, ‘concrete matter’, as having a fullness of significance that no ‘jejune generalizations’ could compass; and he considered the ‘imagination’ to apprehend, to intuit, something of this fullness of significance in the ‘concrete’.
The Christian revelation, Newman maintains, presents an ‘image’ of that which cannot be comprehended; to be a Christian is to live with a sense that one is ‘in an immense unbounded system with a height above and a depth beneath’ and this registering of an ‘immense unbounded system’, a meaning that cannot be fully apprehended, or articulated, is an act of the imagination.11 Newman observes that ‘the Christian lives … in the unseen; in a word, he lives in no small measure in the unknown’, such that it is a ‘duty’ for the Christian ‘to make the unknown known; to create within him an image of what is absent, and to realise by faith what he does not see’. If the ‘unknown’ is, in some sense, ‘known’ through such an ‘image’, it is not thereby made comprehensible. The imagination can, in an ‘image’, apprehend something of the ‘immense unbounded system’ of reality; it can apprehend a ‘world of information’ in such an image, but what it apprehends cannot be translated or transposed into a comprehensible ‘system’: the ‘immense unbounded system’ of reality cannot be translated into the ‘bounded’ systems of the intellect. Newman would make, in this regard, a contrast between ‘poetry’ and ‘science’.
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 … . 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.12
In a letter, Newman once remarked that ‘when we ask for reasons, we rationalize – When we detach and isolate things, which we should connect, we are superstitious.’13 Newman only considered it mistaken to ‘ask for reasons’ when genuine ‘reasons’ were not to be had: ‘Rationalism is a certain abuse of Reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted’; it is ‘rationalism to accept the Revelation, and then to explain it away; to speak of it as the Word of God, and to treat it as the word of man … to frame some gratuitous hypothesis about [the “contents of Revelation”] and then to garble, gloss, and colour them, to trim, clip, pare away, and twist them, in order to bring them into conformity with the idea to which we have subjected them.’14 If, though, Newman considered it mistaken to ‘ask for reasons’, or to insist on them, where ‘reason’ is ‘unfitted’ to provide them, he equally considered it mistaken to ‘detach and isolate things, which we should connect’; if ‘poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system’, so, to experience this ‘delight’ might be to be indisposed to form a ‘system’ which would dispel it, even when ‘we should’ form such a ‘system’. Newman suggests that the mind, in being formed, starts from, and passes beyond, a ‘poetical’ stage – ‘the season of poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful, because it is new’ – a stage associated with ‘youth’, ‘because when we first see things, we see them in a “gay confusion,” which is a principal element of the poetical. As time goes on, and we number and sort and measure things – as we gain views – we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.’15 If one ought to ‘advance towards philosophy and truth’, then one ought, equally, to ‘recede from poetry’. Whether one should ‘recede from poetry’, though, in relation to the ‘things’ about which one forms ‘views’, might relate to whether or not one can ‘number and sort and measure’ those ‘things’. There might be some things, some realities, that one cannot ‘master’, and a proper apprehension of those things might involve the awareness that one cannot ‘master’ them; if poetry ‘demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet’ and ‘that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves’, then ‘poetry’ would seem to be (inevitably) involved in the apprehension of a reality that is, in truth, ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’ (even when something of that reality might be manifest via a revelation). Newman could maintain that ‘the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets’, ‘rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence or commune with themselves’.16 The Church combines ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’. ‘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.’17 Newman maintains that only ‘in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special manner, knowledge’, yet it is a ‘knowledge’ that does not involve a ‘mastery’ of that which is the object of knowledge: ‘Religious Truth … is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, with forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines, and isolated masses.’18 The Christian ‘vision of faith’ involves, then, an imagining of that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’; Newman himself suggested that the imaginings of the first generation of the Romantic poets ‘prepare[d] men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth’, ‘stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas’.19 To have the Christian ‘vision of faith’ is to have a sense of ‘this world’ as presenting a ‘veil’, through which there can be ‘glimpses’ of a higher reality.
A thick black veil is spread between this world and the next. We mortal men range up and down it, to and fro, and see nothing. There is no access through it into the next world. In the Gospel this veil is not removed; it remains, but every now and then marvellous disclosures are made to us of what is behind it. At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face.20
The ‘Form which we shall hereafter see face to face’ is seen, in the here and now, ‘through a glass darkly’: such ‘dark’ apprehension is as much ‘poetical’ as it is ‘philosophical’.
2.
Newman lived a life marked by a commitment to ‘Religious Truth’ above all else. He would, at the age of forty-four, abandon the Church of England – the Church in which he had been brought up, in which he had become a priest, the Church which he had, in all his literary labours, sought to defend, and to strengthen – and, he would, in this, abandon a form of life in which he had been settled for many years – as an Oxford fellow, a clergyman, living among friends, engaged in work to which he was eminently fitted by his talents and inclinations – to become a Catholic. He knew hardly any Catholics; he had little sympathy with what he had experienced of the culture of English Catholicism; in converting, he would act against almost all of his sympathies. He would do this because he had come to the view, after long deliberation, that the fullness of ‘Religious Truth’ was in the Catholic Church. He would then begin life again. On converting to Catholicism, having determined that he ought to become a priest, he would undertake, in Rome, the elementary training required of all candidates for the priesthood. As he would later observe, ‘A convert comes to learn, and not to pick and choose … . He comes to Catholicism as to a living system, with a living teaching … . And thus surrendering himself to the influences of his new religion, and not risking the loss of revealed truth altogether by attempting by a private rule to discriminate every moment its substance from its accidents, he is gradually so indoctrinated in Catholicism, as at length to have a right to speak as well as to hear.’21
Newman was brought up in the Church of England; he had, as a child, a ‘perfect knowledge’ of the ‘Catechism’, and was taught ‘to take great delight in reading the Bible’, but he had – he claimed in his Apologia pro Vita S ua – ‘no formed religious convictions till [he] was fifteen’:22 he was brought up in a conventional, moderate Anglicanism, characterized by an insistence on right conduct, and by ‘having the Bible read in Church, in the family, and in private’;23 he would later observe that ‘what Scripture especially illustrates from its first page to its last, is God’s Providence’.24 The ‘religious convictions’ Newman formed at the age of fifteen were those of Evangelical Calvinism. His conversion to an Evangelical form of Christianity coincided with an experience of great uncertainty and disruption in his home life: the bank of his father, Ramsbottom, Newman & Co, crashed, in the period of economic instability after the Napoleonic wars. The conversion of Newman to Evangelical Calvinism did not entail any severance with the Church of England – it was a conversion to a particular form of Anglican piety. (Once he had acquired more Catholic views, in the 1830s, Newman would come to regard Evangelical Calvinism as scarcely consistent with Anglicanism – though he retained a genuine regard for Evangelicals, and he considered that Evangelicalism was attractive to those Anglicans who desiderated something spiritually richer than what was presented to them in a typical parish.) At around the same time, Newman observed in his Apologia that a ‘deep imagination … took possession of’ him – an ‘imagination’ not entirely in harmony with his Evangelical convictions – namely, that it was ‘the will of God that [he] should lead a single life’.25 Newman attended Trinity College, Oxford, and, despite performing poorly in his final examinations, secured in 1822 a fellowship at Oriel College, at that time a centre for intellectual ability at Oxford. He became a protégé of Richard Whateley, one of the main figures in the circle of the Oriel ‘Noetics’, a group committed to moderate reform, and to moderate freethinking (within the limits of Anglican orthodoxy). Newman would take orders as a deacon in 1824, and would become a priest, and curate of St Clement’s Church, Oxford, in 1825. He received support and advice, in his first efforts at pastoral work, from Edward Hawkins; the influence of Hawkins, and the experience of parochial work, induced him, as he observed in his Apologia, to ‘give up [his] remaining Calvinism, and to receive the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration’.26 During this period, Newman was much influenced by Richard Whateley; in his Apologia, he would remark that Whateley ‘emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason’.27 At the time when Newman was most closely associated with him, Whateley was engaged in an attempt to revive Aristotelian logic and rhetoric (Newman assisted him in preparing for publication his Elements of Logic). If Newman acknowledged that Whateley ‘taught me to think’, he would, equally, observe in his Apologia that ‘his influence on me in a higher respect than intellectual advance, (I will not say through his fault,) had not been satisfactory’; Newman confessed that, in 1827, he ‘was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; [he] was drifting in the direction of liberalism’ – but that he was ‘rudely awakened from [his] dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows – illness and bereavement’ – the ‘illness’ being a near nervous breakdown, brought on by overwork, and the ‘bereavement’ being the loss of his youngest sister, Mary, who died in January, 1828.28 His ‘drifting in the direction of liberalism’, such as it was, may have been owing as much to the influence of another of his Oriel colleagues – Blanco White, for whom he had a high regard – as it was to the influence of Whateley. In 1836, Newman would write a tract against ‘The Introduction of Rationalist Principles into Revealed Religion’ which was, among other things, a response to a work by White, Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy (1835), which White wrote after leaving the Anglican Church to become a Unitarian; and, in that tract, Newman observes that the ‘spirit’ of ‘Rationalism’, ‘like an infection of the air … has perchance ere now, in some degree, not perhaps as regards the high doctrines of the Gospel, but in some way or other, breathed upon those who, at the present crisis of things, feel themselves called upon solemnly to resist it. The books of the day are so full of its evil doctrine in a modified shape, if not in its grosser forms, – the principles (I may say) of the nation are so instinct with it or based on it, – that the best perhaps that can be said of any of us, or at most of all but a few, is, that they have escaped from it, “so as by fire,” and that the loudness of their warning is but a consequence of past danger, terror, and flight.’29 His escape ‘as by fire’ from the ‘liberalism’ towards which, he later felt, he had been drifting, was owing, more than anything else, to the influence of two other Oriel colleagues, Hurrell Froude and John Keble. It was connected, moreover, to his researches into the writings of the Church Fathers. In his Apologia Newman observed that in the mid-1820s a certain ‘disdain for antiquity had been growing on’ him; but in 1828, he began a course of reading in the Church Fathers. His knowledge of the early Church would become more intensive when he undertook, in the early 1830s, to investigate the early councils of the Church (with this resulting in his first book, Arians of the Fourth Century (1834)). What gave these researches their point, and focus, was the idea that the Church of England was the legitimate successor of the early Church; it was, as Newman observed in his Apologia, the ‘local presence and organ’ of the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’.30 Newman maintained in his Apologia that he had developed a sense of the Church, as a body independent of the state, and a means or conduit of certain graces, prior to the time he had become acquainte d with Froude and Keble. He had been influenced by Hawkins to accept the doctrine of ‘Baptismal Regeneration’, and to recognize ‘Tradition’ as the primary means of teaching Christian doctrine; he had been influenced by Whateley to form an ‘anti-Erastian’ understanding of the Church, recognizing its independence of the state; and he was taught by ‘the Rev. William James, then Fellow of Oriel … [in] about the year 1823 … the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, in the course of a walk … round Christ Church meadow’.31 Newman does not, in the Apologia, attempt to trace everything that he owed to the influence of Keble – though he maintains that Keble was the ‘true and primary author’ of ‘that movement afterwards called Tractarian’, the movement to which Newman would devote his energies over the course of the 1830s – but he does reflect on ‘the effect [on him] of [the] religious teaching’ in The Christian Year by Keble, a volume of poetry published in 1827, which, according to Newman ‘woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school, long unknown in England’.32 The Christian Year, Newman claims in the Apologia, ‘brought home’ to him two ‘intellectual principles’, which he had already encountered in The Analogy of Religion by Joseph Butler, but which were ‘recast in the creative mind of [his] new master’: the principle that ‘material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen’ – a principle informing the ‘sacramental system’, and a ‘sacramental’ sense of reality; and the principle – derived from the view of Butler that ‘probability is the guide of life’ – that ‘the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, [is owing] not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it’.33 The reflections of Keble on ‘probabilities’, and on the ‘living power’ of the mind – in registering those ‘probabilities’ – were informed by his understanding of the Aristotelian notion of ethos; Keble took ethos to be pertinent not only to how one acts, but to what one believes.34 Newman was preoccupied, all his life, with the question of how ethos relates to ‘Religious Truth’ (and there is a sense in which his turn from Whateley to Keble was a turn from an Aristotelianism in which ‘logic’ was regarded as having primacy – inspired by the Aristotle who, according to Newman, took ‘logic’ to be an ‘instrumental art’, an ‘art’ of thinking so as to ascertain the truth – to an Aristotelianism in which ‘practical wisdom’ was regarded as having primacy – inspired by the Aristotle who analysed the ‘practical wisdom’ of the ‘good man’ in the Nicomachean Ethics, and who, rather than regarding ‘logic’ as a ‘technical art’ for ascertaining all truth, maintained that ‘it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; [as] it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs’).35 If Newman took up certain ‘principles’ from Keble, he took, more than that, a certain ‘music’ from him – or, rather, Keble made him aware of a certain ‘music’ in the forms of life, and worship, of the English Church, such that he could discern in them something of the life, and worship, of the primitive Church. He would, later, regard this vision as a mere ‘dream’.
If [the “National Establishment”] were in deed and not only in name a Church, then indeed we may feel interest in it, and reverence towards it, and affection for it, as men have fallen in love with pictures, or knights in romance do battle for high dames whom they have never seen. Thus it is that students of the Fathers, antiquaries, and poets, begin by assuming that the body to which they belong is that of which they read in times past, and then proceed to decorate it with that majesty and beauty of which history tells, or which their genius creates … . But at length, either the force of circumstances or some unexpected accident dissipates it; and, as in fairy tales, the magic castle vanishes when the spell is broken, and nothing is seen but the wild heath, the barren rock, and the forlorn sheep-walk, so is it with us as regards the Church of England.36
In an essay on the poetry of Keble, written a year after his conversion to Catholicism, Newman claims that Keble ‘did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical … . His happy magic made the Anglican Church seem what Catholicism was and is. The established system found to its surprise that it had been all its life talking not prose, but poetry … . His poems became a sort of comment upon its formularies and ordinances, and almost elevated them into the dignity of a religious system. It kindled hearts towards his Church; it gave a something for the gentle and forlorn to cling to; and it raised up advocates for it among those, who otherwise, if God and their good Angel had suffered it, might have wandered away into some sort of philosophy, and acknowledged no Church at all.’37
The Oxford movement, to which Newman devoted himself throughout the 1830s, was animated by the belief that the Church of England was the ‘local presence and organ’ of the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’ – the Church established by Christ, and sustained, by the ‘Apostolic succession’, a succession of validly ordained Bishops, to be the appointed channel and means of grace in England. The English Church was this, in the view of Newman and his fellow ‘Tractarians’ or it ‘was nothing’; and it was this, whether its members were inclined to recognize it as such or not.38 As the English Church was the ‘local presence’ of the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’, so, everything which historical research could show to be a part of the ‘Catholic and Apostolic’ faith, delivered to the Apostles – and historical research could determine this by ascertaining the universal traditions of the early Church – was a part of the faith which the English Church should profess. The English Church – which, according to Newman, had been, since the Reformation, subjected to the state, and domineered over by ‘Protestant’ factions – was in need of a ‘second Reformation’, by which it would recover its original ‘Catholic and Apostolic’ identity.39 The English Church took a ‘middle way’, a via media, in between the extremes of Rome (which vitiated the original, primitive Catholic faith, by presenting ‘upstart’ doctrines as a part of that faith) and Geneva. Newman, and those who participated with him in the ‘movement’, received the name of ‘Tractarians’ from the Tracts for the Times which they began publishing from 1833, tracts – often polemical in tone – which sought to promote ‘Apostolical’ principles. Yet the contribution of Newman to the movement consisted not simply in his controversial writing, but in his personal influence on those who encountered him in Oxford. In his preaching at St Mary’s, Oxford, he set out a vision of Christian perfection as something to be realized by carrying out, with ‘consistency’, and self-denial, the ordinary duties of each day. Newman felt that the ‘tokens’ which would show the English Church to be the ‘local presence’ of the ‘Catholic and Apostolic’ Church would become clearly ‘visible’, not through controversy or polemics (though Newman was certainly not averse to engaging in controversy, where he felt it necessary to do so) but through the efforts of those of its members who sought, sustained by the sacraments of that Church, to realize the ‘doctrine of [its] Services’, to realize an everyday holiness.40 The vision of the English Church as the successor, in England, to the primitive Church, or as ‘Catholic and Reformed’ was not, in itself, novel. What was novel, in the approach taken by Newman, and those who thought like him, was a willingness to promote devotional practices which were widely regarded as ‘Popish’ (such as fasting), a willingness to promote ideas of the nature and function of the priesthood, which were widely regarded as ‘Popish’, and a willingness to decry forms of ‘Protestantism’ (or ‘ultra Protestantism’, as Newman came to call it), which were widely regarded as consonant with Anglicanism; indeed, the Tractarians could seem to present the spectacle of a coterie, assuming – as legitimated by a theory of the English Church which was not in the least widely received – the authority to define the identity of that Church. For Newman himself, matters came to a crisis over Tract 90 in 1841, in which he sought to show how the 39 Articles, to which all clergymen in the English Church were required to subscribe – articles which were regarded by many as bulwark of the Church against Popery – could be interpreted in a sense which Newman regarded as ‘Catholic’, but which seemed, to those of more ‘ultra Protestant’ inclinations, merely ‘Popish’. For Newman, the reception of Tract 90 was one among many indications that the Church to which he belonged was not the ‘Catholic’ institution he had taken it to be. Yet if Tract 90 showed clearly, to some, that Newman ought to make his way, forthwith, to Rome, matters were less clear to Newman himself. That England was, in certain respects, in the wrong did not mean that Rome was in the right. Newman had, from 1839, it was true, felt from time to time a ‘dreadful misgiving’ that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’, but he had certain ‘difficulties’ with regard to Roman teaching (he felt that it involved unwarranted additions to the teaching of the primitive Church) and he had certain ‘difficulties’ with regard to Roman devotional practice (he felt that it involved an idolatrous attitude towards Mary and the Saints) and he needed to resolve these. In 1845 he would set to work on his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in which he set out a theory of doctrinal development – explaining how the primitive creeds of early Christianity might expand into the fuller creed of Pope Pius IV – and an account of certain ‘tests’ for distinguishing authentic developments from corruptions – by which certain ‘Roman’ doctrines might be shown to be genuine expressions of the original ‘deposit’ of Christianity. Before he had finished the Essay, in the autumn of 1845, he was received into the Catholic Church.
In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman suggests that the ‘history of religious opinions’ ends with his reception into the church.
From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no changes to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.41
While he might have been ‘in perfect peace and contentment’, with regard to the ‘religious opinions’ he accepted on becoming a Catholic, his life was not without its frustrations and difficulties. None of his undertakings seemed, quite, to prosper. He was accused, and found guilty (quite unjustly) of libel. His efforts to establish a Catholic University in Ireland were unavailing. The proposal that he should oversee a new translation of the Bible into English came to nothing. His brief tenure as editor of the liberal Catholic journal the Rambler (a post he took up unwillingly) got him into difficulties, when an article of his on ‘Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ was delated to Rome. He encountered suspicion and misunderstanding on the part of some of his fellow Catholics. He was at odds with the ‘ultramontane’ party in the church, which conceived of the authority of the Pope in ways which Newman considered excessive (though he did not, for his part, have any difficulty in accepting the definition of papal infallibility promulgated at the first Vatican Council). (The very chapter, in the Apologia, in which he declared that he had, since becoming a Catholic, been in ‘perfect peace and contentment’, involved an attempt to counter an ‘ultramontane’ vision of the life of the church, as a matter of submission to the highest authority, with a vision of the life of the church as ‘an arena’ for a ‘never dying duel’ between ‘Authority’ and ‘Private Judgement’, such that ‘as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but it presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide’.42 His own ‘perfect peace and contentment’ did not preclude him from engaging in certain intellectual ‘duels’, and, indeed, as he acknowledges, it was a ‘peace’ that was quite consistent with rigorous ‘thinking on theological subjects’.) At a time when Newman was in a state of considerable despondency, he was alerted to a passage in an article, in Macmillan’s Magazine: ‘Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole, ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage.’ On writing a letter of protest to the publishers, at the ‘grave and gratuitous slander’, Newman learned that the writer of the article was Charles Kingsley; and, after an exchange of letters between Newman and Kingsley (which Newman published, with some satirical reflections on the letters of Kingsley), Kingsley wrote a pamphlet assailing the honesty and integrity of Newman. In response, Newman wrote a masterpiece, his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), explaining his own changes of ‘religious opinion’, vindicating his own honesty and attempting, thereby, to show that Catholic beliefs could be honestly entertained. From that time, his reputation, in the Protestant world at least, was much restored, and some of his old friendships – which had been broken when he converted to Rome – were revived. Becoming a Catholic may have meant intellectual ‘peace and contentment’ for Newman, but it did not mean emotional ‘peace’. Yet, after all, it did mean the creation of a ‘home’. Shortly after his conversion, Newman established an Oratory in England. From the Oratory in Birmingham, Newman sent Frederick Faber to establish an Oratory in London. While relations between the two Oratories were not always harmonious, Newman did create, with others, in the Oratory in Birmingham, which was his ‘nido’ or ‘nest’, a home. He understood the creation of such a ‘home’ to be of the essence of the Oratorian vocation – in which the members of the Oratorian congregation were bound together, not by formal vows, but by charity, by obedience to one another, by a common commitment to the creation of a ‘home’.
The Congregation is to be the home of the Oratorian … . The Congregation, according to St Philip’s institution, is never to be so large that the members do not know each other. They are to be ‘bound together by that bond of love, which daily intercourse creates, and thereby all are to know the ways of each, and feel a reference for the “countenances of familiar friends.”’ Familiar faces, exciting reverence, daily intercourse, knowledge of each other’s ways, mutual love, what is this but a description of home?43
The ‘harmony’ of this ‘home’ was to be maintained, not by ‘vows’, but by something like ‘tact’. ‘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) judgment or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception, which takes the place of formal enactment.’44 His mode of life, his vocation, made the importance of this ‘living principle’ peculiarly apparent. As a thinker, he, equally, sought to make the office of this ‘living principle’ apparent, and to secure a proper estimation of ‘judgement or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception’: he maintained that ‘formal enactments’, ‘rules’ – whether in life, or in thought – cannot do that which only ‘judgement’ or ‘moral perception’ can do. His last major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, was an attempt to characterize, and to set out the function of, such ‘judgement’ or ‘perception’, as involved in the apprehension of ‘truth’, and the attainment of ‘certitude’. If Newman experienced various trials as a Catholic, he would, eventually, experience a certain vindication, when in 1879 he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, and permitted to remain in residence at the Oratory in Birmingham, where he would live out his remaining years.
3.
Newman did not set out a definition of ‘the imagination’. He tended to contrast the ‘imagination’ with ‘reason’, though he tended, equally, to use the term ‘reason’ in different ways. He took the ‘ordinary’ use of the term ‘reason’ to designate one form of ‘reason’ – namely ‘explicit reason’, the ‘reason’ that was articulated in ‘verbal reasoning’ and argument – but he did not (certainly, not from the late 1830s) regard such ‘conscious reasoning’ as the only form of ‘reason’. He tended to associate ‘imagination’ with the apprehension of the ‘concrete’. In his Grammar of Assent, he associated ‘real apprehension’, the apprehension of ‘real’ things – which, he observed, are ‘concrete’, ‘unit and individual’ – with the ‘imagination’. Newman tended, moreover, to associate ‘imagination’ or ‘imaginative apprehension’ with ‘feeling’: imaginative apprehension, for Newman, elicits feeling, rouses the ‘affections’.
As early as 1828, Newman was attempting to make sense of the relationship between the ‘intellect’ and the ‘moral feelings’. In a letter to Blanco White, he reflects on how the unique ‘course’ of ‘each mind’, ‘actuated’ by ‘ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings’, can scarcely be represented in ‘words’, which are ‘a certain medium of communication between mind and mind – yet only to a certain extent’.
We cannot gauge and measure by any common rule the varieties of thought and opinion. We all look at things with our own eyes – and invest the whole face of nature with colours of our own. – Each mind pursues its own course and is actuated in that course by ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings. It would be comparatively easy to enumerate the various external impulses which determine the capricious motions of a floating feather or web, and to express in algebraical formula the line it describes – so mysterious are the paths of thought. Nay I might even be tempted to say that on no single point do any two individuals agree – no single object do their minds view from the same spot and in the same light. And this will of course hold good in religious matters – Necessary as it is, that we should all hold the same truths (as we should be saved), still each of them holds them in his own way; and he differs from his nearest and most loved friends either in the relative importance he gives to them, or in the connected view he takes of them, or in his perception of the particular consequences resulting from them. – Accordingly I trust I shall be very slow to quarrel with persons differing from me in matters of opinion. For words are not feelings – nor is intellect ethos. Intellect seems to be but the attendant and servant of right moral feeling and this [sic] own weak and dark state of being, defending it when attacked, accounting for it, and explaining it in a poor way to others. It supplies a certain medium of communication between mind and mind – yet only to a certain extent – and when we think we can detect honest principle, purity of heart, and a single eye, it is irrational to delay the recognition of these real excellences till we have settled subordinate points, to exalt what are but means to an end, and make expressed opinions and formal statements an objection to our believing in the existence of moral feelings in others which by the exercise of common sense we may actually see. – I have Froude’s authority for lowering the intellectual powers into handmaids of our moral nature. But I doubt whether he or Wilberforce will think it safe to proceed to the lengths to which I expatiate. – For instance, it never occurs to me to measure the degree of a Socinian’s error by the deficiency of his creed under the accuracy of the Athanasian – yet this is a common practice … . Let me then challenge W. or F. to give us some account of the connexion (how far) of speculative error with bad ethos – e.g. in what a consistent Socinian is a worse man than an orthodox believer. I think him to be worse, but I wish my mind clear on the subject, which it is not at present.45
Newman acknowledges that he wishes his ‘mind clear on the subject, which it is not at present’. He is concerned, generally, with how differences of ‘opinion’ in religion can, and must, coexist with agreement on the ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold … (as we would be saved)’; and he would connect ‘speculative error’ – with regard to those ‘truths’ – with ‘bad ethos’ (though he wishes for ‘some account of the connexion’ of ‘speculative error with bad ethos’). If there is such a ‘connexion’, then a ‘Socinian’ – denying certain of those ‘truths’, relating to the Trinity – must be ‘a worse man than an orthodox believer’. Newman is concerned, it seems, to distinguish between important and unimportant differences of ‘opinion’, and to relate this to the difference between ‘intellect’ and ‘ethos’. ‘Intellect’ is of less moment than ‘ethos’; differences in ‘matters of opinion’ are of less moment than differences with respect to those ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold’; and there is a ‘connexion’ between ‘ethos’ and the acceptance of those ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold’. Newman seems, generally, to be concerned with a contrast between what can be expressed in ‘words’ and what cannot, and a contrast between what is, or can be, ‘common’, between ‘mind and mind’, and what is not, and cannot be, ‘common’. Newman would maintain, it seems, that what can be represented in ‘words’, in ‘formal statements’, is only a part of the life of the mind; it is the whole life or ‘course’ of the mind that ‘actuates’ the forming of ‘opinions’; and as ‘words’ cannot represent all that makes for the forming of ‘opinions’, they cannot wholly determine the forming of ‘opinions’ – that which actuates the forming of ‘opinions’ cannot be fully present in ‘words’. Argumentation in ‘words’ (‘intellect’) is supplementary to, ancillary to (an ‘attendant and servant’ of), the activity or ‘course’ of the ‘mind’ that makes for the forming of opinions: it is a part of the whole that is the living ‘course’ of the mind. What can be set out in ‘words’ can be made ‘common’ to many minds – as ‘words’ are a ‘medium of communication between mind and mind’. If what is ‘expressed’ in ‘words’ is only a part (an ancillary or ‘attendant’ part) of the life of the mind, this could mean that an apparent unanimity, with regard to an ‘expression’ in ‘words’, might coexist with a considerable diversity, with regard to all that is not, or cannot be, expressed in ‘words’ (those who accept certain ‘truths’, articulated in certain ‘words’, might regard those ‘truths’ differently, and be ‘actuated’ by different considerations, in accepting them, such that those ‘truths’ are present in different ‘ways’ to ‘each mind’). If what is ‘expressed’ in ‘words’ is only a part of the life of the mind, then disagreements with respect to what is expressed in ‘words’ might engage, and involve, only a part of the life of the mind: those who disagree, who ‘quarrel’, might have more in common – with respect to all, in the mind, that cannot be expressed in ‘words’ – than would be apparent in their ‘quarrel’ (and the recognition, by each, of what they had in common, would require, not ‘words’, but a certain perceptiveness, intuition, ‘common sense’); then again, those who disagree, and who ‘quarrel’ in an effort to ascertain that which is occasioning their disagreement, so as to resolve that disagreement, might have differences deriving from that which cannot be expressed in ‘words’ – differences which could not be made apparent in ‘words’, and which could not be resolved in ‘words’. There is much, Newman suggests, in the life or ‘course’ of the mind which is ‘incommunicable’, ‘indescribable’. That in the life of the mind which is ‘incommunicable’ has more influence on the forming of ‘opinion’ – and more influence on the forming of opinion with respect to the ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold’ – than that which can be expressed in ‘words’; and that in the mind which is ‘incommunicable’ has a ‘connexion’ with ‘ethos’. Newman seems, moreover, to regard ‘ethos’, rather than ‘intellect’, as making for genuine communion between ‘individuals’. Just a few months after writing to White, about the contrast between ‘words’ or the ‘common rule’ and the ‘ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings’ making up the ‘course’ of ‘each mind’, by which ‘each mind’ invests ‘the whole face of nature with colours of [its] own’, Newman would write an article for White, who was then the editor of the London Review, on ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in which he would maintain that the ‘poetical mind’, ‘full of the eternal forms of beauty and perfection … colour[s] each object to which it directs its view’, creating a ‘world of its own’; poetry, he insists, is the ‘originality of right moral feeling’ such that ‘a right moral state of heart is the formal and scientific condition of a poetical mind’; and he contrasts this understanding of poetry as the ‘effusion’ of a ‘poetical mind’, in a ‘right moral state’, with an understanding of poetry that would take it to be something that might be ‘modelled on ... scientific principle’, or that would take it to be a form of ‘workmanship’ which might be conducted according to certain general rules: Newman associates poetry with the ‘spontaneous’ life, or ‘energizing’ of the mind – as contrasted with a thinking in, or by ‘rule’ – and he suggests that a good ‘ethos’ is the ‘condition’ for having a ‘poetical’ apprehension of the world; what is more, he maintains that ‘Revealed Religion’ is ‘especially poetical’ – ‘with Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty.’46 A few years later, in 1834, in Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman contrasts the ‘implicit acknowledgement’ of the ‘Blessed Trinity’, in the ‘faith of uneducated men’, with an acknowledgement ‘conceived in those precise statements which presuppose the action of the mind on its own sentiments and notions’; the ‘implicit acknowledgement’ would, then, involve ‘sentiments and notions’ which had not been made, by the ‘action of the mind’ on itself, explicit. ‘Moral feelings do not directly contemplate and realize to themselves the objects which excite them. A heathen in obeying his conscience, implicitly worships Him of whom he has never distinctly heard. Again, a child feels not the less affectionate reverence towards his parents, because he cannot discriminate in words, nay, or in idea, between them and others.’47 There might be, it would seem, a recognition of certain ‘objects’, in the ‘moral feelings’ evoked by those objects, without that recognition being articulated in ‘precise statements’: those ‘moral feelings’ involve, in some way, an apprehension of those ‘objects’.
In a sermon on ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, preached in 1840, Newman associates ‘implicit reason’ with all, making up the life or ‘course’ of the mind, which is not represented in ‘words’. ‘Implicit reason’ is the spontaneous activity of the mind; ‘explicit reason’ is an ‘analysis’, in ‘words’, of that activity. There is always more in the life of the mind than can be made fully ‘explicit’, for ‘no analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately’ all that is involved in the life of the mind. Where, in 1828, he had conceived of this contrast in terms of a distinction between ‘feelings and imaginings’, and ‘intellect’, in 1840 he conceives of it in terms of a distinction between different kinds of ‘reason’ – ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’.
No analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state of mind under which we believe, or the subjects of belief, as they are presented to our thoughts. The end proposed is that of delineating, or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider what it is to portray duly in form and colour things material, and we shall surely understand the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of representing the outhne and character, the hues and shades, in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind, or of giving it that substance and that exactness in detail in which consists its likeness to the original, or of sufficiently marking those minute differences which attach to the same general state of mind or tone of thought as found in this or that individual respectively. It is probable that a given opinion, as held by several individuals, even when of the most congenial views, is as distinct from itself as are their faces. Now how minute is the defect in imitation which hinders the likeness of a portrait from being successful! How easy is it to recognize who is intended by it, without allowing that really he is represented! Is it not hopeless, then, to expect that the most diligent and anxious investigation can end in more than in giving some very rude description of the living mind, and its feelings, thoughts, and reasonings?48
If an ‘analysis’ in ‘words’ cannot represent an ‘intellectual view’ as it ‘really exists in the mind’, then how should ‘words’ be used, and how should they be taken? Newman maintains that almost all the ‘reasons formally adduced in moral inquiries, are rather specimens and symbols of the real grounds, than those grounds themselves.’
They do but approximate to a representation of the general character of the proof which the writer wishes to convey to another’s mind … . They are hints towards, and samples of, the true reasoning, and demand an active, ready, candid, and docile mind, which can throw itself into what is said, neglect verbal difficulties, and pursue and carry out principles. This is the true office of a writer, to excite and direct trains of thought; and this, on the other hand, is the too common practice of readers, to expect every thing to be done for them, – to refuse to think, – to criticize the letter, instead of reaching forwards towards the sense, – and to account every argument as unsound which is illogically worded.49
Newman would maintain much the same thing, almost thirty years later, in his last major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.
It will be our wisdom to avail ourselves of language, as far as it will go, but to aim mainly by means of it to stimulate, in those to whom we address ourselves, a mode of thinking and trains of thought similar to our own, leading them on by their own independent action, not by any syllogistic compulsion. Hence it is that an intellectual school will always have something of an esoteric character; for it is an assemblage of minds that think; their bond is unity of thought, and their words become a sort of tessera, not expressing thought, but symbolizing it.50
In the Grammar of Assent, Newman connects the ‘imagination’ with that which is ‘personal’ – as contrasted with that which is ‘common’ – in the life of the mind, as he associates the ‘imagination’ with ‘real assents’, assents involving the apprehension of images, or ‘imaginative apprehension’, and these, he maintains, are of a ‘personal character’.
[Real assents] are of a personal character, each individual having his own, and being known by them. It is otherwise with notions; notional apprehension is in itself an ordinary act of our common nature. All of us have the power of abstraction, and can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions; and thus to co-operate in the establishment of a common measure between mind and mind. And, though for one and all of us to assent to the notions which we thus apprehend in common, is a further step, as requiring the adoption of a common stand-point of principle and judgment, yet this too depends in good measure on certain logical processes of thought, with which we are all familiar, and on facts which we all take for granted. But we cannot make sure, for ourselves or others, of real apprehension and assent, because we have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special. They depend on personal experience; and the experience of one man is not the experience of another. Real assent, then, as the experience which it presupposes, is proper to the individual, and, as such, thwarts rather than promotes the intercourse of man with man. It shuts itself up, as it were, in its own home, or at least it is its own witness and its own standard; and, as in the instances above given, it cannot be reckoned on, anticipated, accounted for, inasmuch as it is the accident of this man or that … . An abstraction can be made at will, and may be the work of a moment; but the moral experiences which perpetuate themselves in images, must be sought after in order to be found, and encouraged and cultivated in order to be appropriated.51
The ‘images’ involved in ‘real assents’ derive from ‘moral experiences’, and ‘real’ apprehension ‘excites and stimulates the affections and passions, by bringing facts home to them as motive causes’.52 As, then, ‘real apprehension’ involves images, which derive from the ‘moral experiences’ that form the self, and as it elicits the ‘affections and passions’, which are ‘motive powers’ of conduct, such that ‘the imagination may be said in some sense to be of a practical nature, inasmuch as it leads to practice indirectly by the action of its object upon the affections’ (in those for whom that object is in some way ‘congenial’) so, ‘real apprehension’ would seem to be connected to ‘moral feeling’ and to ‘ethos’.53 ‘Real assents’, moreover, create union, harmony, ‘political’ community ‘between man and man’: they ‘kindle sympathies between man and man, and knit together the innumerable units which constitute a race and a nation. They become the principle of its political existence; they impart to it homogeneity of thought and fellowship of purpose.’54
Newman was preoccupied, all his life, with the relationships between ‘imagination’, ‘reason’, ‘moral feeling’, ‘ethos’ and the ‘personal’. Over the course of his life, he would consider these relationships in a number of ways, and in connection with a variety of questions: the way he reflected on this relationship in the 1830s – when he was preoccupied with questions about the relationship between ‘faith’ and right ‘conduct’ – differed from the way he reflected on this relationship in the late 1840s and 1850s – when he was preoccupied with the relationship between ‘divine faith’, the ‘vision of the Unseen’ and ‘reason’. In his letter to White, he makes the jocular remark that ‘I have Froude’s authority for lowering the intellectual powers into handmaids of our moral nature’; Froude, in this, was a representative of the ‘authority’ of Keble. Newman took up from Keble the idea that ‘ethos’, as conceived of by Aristotle, was connected to right belief, but, as he observed in his Apologia, he ‘tried to complete [the ideas of Keble] by considerations of [his] own’.55 During the 1830s Newman sought to understand the relationship between faith, the conscience and the visionary imagination (this is discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). He maintained that genuine faith was a ‘principle of conduct’, that it involved an apprehension of the ‘commands’ of God – and that, in this, it was connected to the development of the conscience – and yet he recognized, equally, that faith was an enrapturing ‘vision’: to live a life animated by ‘faith’ was to experience the world in a manner transfigured by, ‘coloured’ by a ‘vision’, and to be ‘in astonishment at the glories which are around thee and in thee … as though thou hadst nought to do but to contemplate and feed upon that great vision’, and it was, equally, to be presented with the ‘commands’ of God, requiring an ‘obedience’ characterized by ‘anxiety about failing’ ‘the pain of self-denial’, and the undergoing of ‘petty annoyances’, for ‘true faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake’. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman suggests that the vision that animated his endeavours for the English Church, over the course of the 1830s, is ‘brought out’ in the ‘series of compositions’ in Lyra Apostolica (discussed in Chapter 3); it was a vision of a strife between the world and the Church, with the ‘watch-flame’ of the Church being kept by ‘the few’. These ‘few’ are envisaged, in Lyra Apostolica, as isolated figures, in combat with the ‘haughty world’ – so isolated, that there is little sense of any community, or communion, which unites and sustains them. The ‘few’, ‘world-fretted’, are in the ‘deserts’, ‘cast forth’ from the world; and there is little sense of ‘this fair English land’ as affording a ‘visible’ place, a dwelling, for that which is holy. Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s, Newman reflected on the way in which the Church was ‘a visible home and memorial of Truth’ (this is discussed in Chapter 4): the Church was, according to the Scriptures, to be a manifestation of Christ, of the Truth; and yet the Church, at the present time, was, he felt, ‘under eclipse’ – ‘The outward notes of the Church are partly gone from us, and partly going.’ The Church, Newman maintained, was a ‘light to the world’, when it was animated by the image of Christ, apprehended by ‘a Faith vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian’. In the 1830s, Newman envisaged the original ‘Tradition’, the expression, and the means of imparting, this ‘Faith’, as ‘impaired’, existing in various traces or ‘memorials’ (though one might tend towards this ‘Faith’ by striving to assimilate these various traces of the ‘Tradition’). In the 1840s, he came to regard this ‘Faith’ as still present in the world, still occasioning expressions of itself, and as subsisting in the Roman Catholic Church. The novel Loss and Gain (1848), (discussed in Chapter 5) was, in part, about how aspirations towards a ‘Faith’ of this kind were not satisfied by the Church of England. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Newman reflected on Catholic teaching with regard to ‘divine faith’, and sought to characterize the virtue of faith, as understood, and practiced, by Catholics – as a ‘vision of the Unseen’ that was virtually a ‘spiritual sight’ (these reflections are discussed in Chapter 6). During the 1850s, as he engaged in a work of ‘faith’ and ‘civilization’, attempting to establish a Catholic University in Dublin, Newman reflected – in The Idea of a University (1852), and in Callista (1855) – on the relationship between ‘faith’ and the cultivation of the intellect that he considered to be of the essence of ‘civilization’, and on how the ‘religion of civilization’ did not express, or satisfy, what was ‘deepest’ in the ‘heart’ (these reflections are discussed in Chapter 7). In the 1860s, in response to the ‘grave and gratuitous slander’ of Kingsley, as to his own honesty, and integrity, Newman sought, in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, to give an account of the ‘history’ of his ‘religious opinions’, and in relating that ‘history’ (discussed in Chapter 8), he intimates the ways in which his imagination ‘actuated’ the development of his ‘opinions’: ‘for myself, it was not logic that carried me on … It is the concrete being that reasons … the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.’ He observes, in the Apologia, that while he sought, in relation to the religious questions which exercised him, ‘to be guided, not by [his] imagination, but by [his] reason’, he, equally (as a matter of ‘rational’ conviction) regarded the world as a ‘symbol’ of the ‘heavenly facts which fill eternity’, so that he was disposed to consider the (visionary) apprehension of the symbolic, in experience, a means to truth; Newman suggests, moreover, with regard to his own religious development, that his ‘imagination’ intuited certain truths, before his ‘reason’ recognized them. He intimates, in the Apologia, that, alongside the ‘intelligible processes of thought’, by which his ‘religious opinions’ developed, there were ‘day-gleam[s]’ of visionary insight, such that his religious development was a matter, not merely of the forming of ‘opinions’, through ‘intelligible processes of thought’, but of the forming of a vision; less than a year after writing the Apologia, he would present, in The Dream of Gerontius, the vision of a soul, after death, moving towards a ‘sight’ of the divine, through a ‘world of signs and types’, ‘dreams that are true, yet enigmatical’ – a vision that itself presented, in ‘symbols’, in ‘signs and types’, something of the ‘heavenly facts which fill eternity’. A few years later, in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (discussed in Chapter 9), he attempted to set out his developed reflections on the ‘reasoning’ of the ‘concrete being’, the ‘whole man’, in encountering the ‘concrete’ realities of experience: he maintained that the apprehension of the truth, in ‘concrete matter’, involved a judgement which was inalienably personal (which could not be conducted by ‘rule’) and which involved ‘imaginative apprehension’; he maintained that Christianity had its ‘moral life’ in an ‘Image’ of Christ, an ‘Image’ which ‘creates faith’.
Notes
1 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 102.
2 Grammar of Assent, 102.
3 Ibid., 464.
4 ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909).
5 ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’, in Discussions and Arguments [hereafter DA] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 294, 296.
6 ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’, in DA, 295.
7 ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 18.
8 A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation (1875; London: Lon gmans, Green & Co., 1900), 256.
9 ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 18.
10 Grammar of Assent, 354.
11 ‘The State of Grace’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 140.
12 ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in Historical Sketches ii [hereafter HS ii] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 386–7.
13 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al. [hereafter LD] (London: Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarendon, 1972–2008) v, 151.
14 ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 31, 32.
15 Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17.
16 ‘John Keble’, in Essays, Critical and Historical ii (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1907), 442–3.
17 ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 369.
18 ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in ECH i, 41–2.
19 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 268.
20 ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 10.
21 A Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D., on Occasion of His Eirenicon (1865; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900), 19.
22 Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua: The Two Editions of 1864 and 1865, ed. by Wilfrid Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 105.
23 Grammar of Assent, 56.
24 Ibid., 57.
25 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 110–1.
26 Ibid., 112.
27 Ibid., 114.
28 Ibid., 115, 116–17.
29 ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in ECH i, 91–2.
30 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 132.
31 Ibid., 113.
32 Ibid., 119, 120.
33 Ibid., 120, 121.
34 James Pereiro, in Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) has shown how Keble, in a number of sermons of the 1820s, connected ethos not merely with conduct, but with belief.
35 Newman declares in The Grammar of Assent, ‘in spite of Aristotle, I will not allow that genuine reasoning is an instrumental art’. Grammar of Assent, 338. He equally observes that ‘as to the intellectual position from which I have contemplated the subject, Aristotle has been my master’. ‘There is only one Religion in the world which tends to fulfil the aspirations, needs, and foreshadowings of natural faith and devotion. It may be said, perhaps, that, educated in Christianity, I merely judge of it by its own principles; but this is not the fact. For, in the first place, I have taken my idea of what a revelation must be, in good measure, from the actual religions of the world; and as to its ethics, the ideas with which I come to it are derived not simply from the Gospel, but prior to it from heathen moralists, whom Fathers of the Church and Ecclesiastical writers have imitated or sanctioned; and as to the intellectual position from which I have contemplated the subject, Aristotle has been my master.’ Grammar of Assent, 430.
36 John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching i [hereafter Diff i] (1850; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 5–6.
37 ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 442–5.
38 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 132.
39 Ibid.
40 ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in The Via Media of the Anglican Church i (1837; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 263.
41 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 331.
42 Ibid., 343. Ian Ker calls attention to this dimension of the rhetoric of this chapter in the Apologia in his John Henry Newman: A Biography (1988; Oxford: Clarendon, 2009) – see especially, 533–59.
43 ‘Newman’s Oratory Papers No. 5’, in Newman the Oratorian, ed. by Placid Murray O.S.B. (1968; Leominster: Gracewing, 2004), 192
44 ‘Newman’s Oratory Papers No. 6’, in Newman the Oratorian, 208.
45 The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al. [hereafter LD] (London: Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarendon, 1972–2008), ii, 60.
46 ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 3–4, 7, 10, 20, 21, 23.
47 Arians of the Fourth Century (1833; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 143–4.
48 ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, in OUS, 267–8.
49 Ibid., 276.
50 Grammar of Assent, 309.
51 Ibid., 83–4, 87.
52 Ibid., 12.
53 Ibid., 83.
54 Ibid., 89.
55 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 122.