Part 5
CONSCIENCE, AND THE ‘LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL’
1.
In the first volume of his Parochial Sermons (1834) Newman presents a vision of the spiritual life as a life of ‘obedience’. Spiritual ‘perfection’ is only to be realized if one lives in ‘obedience’ to the intuitions of the ‘conscience’ and the ‘precepts’ of ‘the Church and the Bible’. In The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), published a year previously, in which he had set out his view of the life of the early Church, he observed that the Church had exercised a certain reserve – a discipline arcani, or ‘discipline of the secret’ – in presenting its doctrines to those unacquainted with them, being animated, in this, by a ‘truly charitable consideration for those … addressed, who were likely to be perplexed, not converted, by the sudden exhibition of the whole evangelical scheme’: it would not have been ‘charitable’ to present to the ‘unbelieving or unstable’ that which they were not yet fitted to appreciate or to understand.1 The Church distinguished between ‘elementary’ or ‘exoteric’ teaching and more ‘esoteric’ teaching; the ‘elementary’ teaching was true, but not complete. ‘The elementary information given to the heathen or catechumen was in no sense undone by the subsequent secret teaching, which was in fact but the filling up of a bare but correct outhne.’2 The ‘example of the inspired writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was [the main] authority [cited to justify] making a broad distinction between the doctrines suitable to the state of the weak and ignorant, and those which are the peculiar property of a baptized and regenerate Christian’.3 The ‘secret teaching’, then, was imparted to the ‘baptized’, and to those who evinced ‘habitual piety’ and ‘religious proficiency’ – and, indeed, to be baptized, one had to undergo a ‘season of preparation’, lasting two or three years, in which one was formed in ‘piety’ and ‘religious proficiency’.4 That is, the state of understanding, which one had to attain before being fit to appreciate the ‘Christian mysteries’ – ‘the exact and fully developed doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and still more, the doctrine of the Atonement’5 – was a ‘moral’ state, formed by right ‘practice’, involving a participation in the sacraments: one had to form in oneself the requisite ‘moral discernment’.6 The ‘elementary’ doctrines, Newman observes, were concerned with ‘repentance, faith in God, the doctrinal meaning of the rite of baptism, confirmation as the channel of miraculous gifts, the future resurrection, and the final separation of good and bad’;7 it was necessary to proceed ‘from the most simple principles of Natural Religion, to the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel, from moral truths to the Christian mysteries’.8
The doctrines which Newman identifies, in The Arians of the Fourth Century, as making up the ‘elementary’ teaching are the doctrines to which the greater part of the first volume of his Parochial Sermons is devoted. Only a couple of the sermons are concerned with the ‘esoteric’ doctrines and one of these – ‘The Christian Mysteries’ – aims less to present an ‘exact and fully developed’ account of them than to present a defence of ‘mystery’ in general, and an account of ‘Christian knowledge’ as ordered to ‘good works’: ‘Christian knowledge’, Newman insists in ‘The Christian Mysteries’, is ‘practical knowledge’, ‘the grace promised us is given, not that we may know more, but that we may do better’.9 In this, Newman might be regarded as treating the wider public, to whom the volume was presented, like catechumens; and indeed he maintains, in several sermons in that volume, that the ‘religion of the day’, though nominally Christian, was in certain respects a substitution of a ‘dream’ for ‘real’ Christianity – many, in his view, had not had the true ‘elements’ of Christianity presented to them.10 More than that, though, for Newman, the ‘elementary’ doctrines – of ‘repentance and pardon, of the necessity of good works’ – are pertinent to those who need to repent, those who have not attained to a ‘habitual piety’ – and most are, inevitably, in this state. ‘Alas! to be alive as a Christian, is nothing better than to struggle against sin, to disobey and repent.’11 For Newman, the disciplina arcani observed by the early Church involved a sense that if one was to attain a right appreciation of the ‘peculiar doctrines of the Gospel’, one had to attain a certain ‘moral’ state, and a ‘proficiency’ in a form of ‘practice’. In the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, he presents a vision of Christianity as, above all, a kind of practice characterized by ‘obedience’ to God. ‘Spiritual life is obedience to a Lawgiver, not a mere feeling or taste.’12 Through this ‘obedience to a Lawgiver’, one becomes a certain sort of person, one becomes holy. In ‘Religious Faith Rational’, Newman maintains that if one obeys ‘God’s voice’ in t he ‘heart’ then ‘faith’ will become ‘like sight’ – ‘we shall have no … difficulty in finding what will please God’: he identifies the office of ‘faith’, here, with ‘finding what will please God’; ‘faith’, like the conscience, is concerned with how one should act.13 In the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, generally, he presents ‘faith’ as intimately connected with the ‘conscience’. As the conscience, the ‘law of God written in our hearts’, apprehends a ‘Lawgiver’, so faith apprehends that ‘Lawgiver’ more clearly; as the conscience is ‘strengthened’ the more one lives in accordance with it (such that one has an ever clearer apprehension of the good), so faith becomes ‘like sight’ the more one lives in accordance with it; as one must be virtuous to have a ‘vigorous’ conscience – the conscience is ‘strengthened’ the more it is obeyed, and in obeying it one forms oneself as a person, becoming virtuous – so one must be holy, one must have a ‘spiritual mind’, to have a ‘vigorous’ faith: there is a sense in which Newman would regard everything in ‘religion’ as ‘tending’ to form a certain character, and in which he would regard everything in ‘religion’ as present, so to speak, in the character of the ‘long practised Christian’.14
In sermon after sermon in the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, Newman insists on one thing – that ‘faith’ is to be ‘acted on’, that it is a matter of ‘acts’, above all, rather than ‘thoughts’ or ‘feelings’. In ‘Promising without Doing’, Newman maintains that ‘as far as we know any thing of the matter, justifying faith has no existence independent of its particular definite acts’, and he makes it plain that by these ‘particular definite acts’ he means ‘deed[s] of obedience’.15 ‘Faith’, he suggests, ‘may be described as the temper under which men obey; the humble and earnest desire to please Christ which causes and attends on actual services.’16 In ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, he characterizes ‘faith’ as a ‘principle of conduct’.17 In ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, he maintains that ‘religion’ is the ‘science of living well’.18 For Newman, this ‘science’ is present, above all, in the ‘conscience’: to have a rightly formed conscience is to have an apprehension of the good, enabling one to ‘live well’. In ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, he suggests that ‘Scripture’ completes, and perfects, this apprehension of the good: ‘The law of God written on our hearts bids us serve him, and partly tells us how to serve Him, and Scripture completes the precepts which nature began.’19 One can only recognize that ‘Scripture completes the precepts’ of the conscience if one already recognizes the ‘precepts’ of the conscience. In ‘The Religion of the Day’, Newman observes that ‘religion’ is a ‘system of commands and promises from God towards us’:20 ‘religion’ involves the apprehension of certain ‘commands’, and it consists in a life that is a response to those ‘commands’. Newman characterizes the ‘conscience’, equally, as ‘commanding’ certain things – it ‘bids us’ do this, and not that. The ‘conscience’ registers the ‘law of God written in our hearts’,21 presented in certain ‘commands’, concerned with particular acts; and ‘faith’ registers ‘commands and promises from God towards us’; the conscience is most fully formed when the ‘commands’ it registers are acted upon, and faith is most fully realized when the ‘commands’ it registers are acted upon. Faith, for Newman, figures almost as the awareness of certain ‘precepts’ as the precepts of God: that a precept is of God, is a motive for obeying it; so to have faith, to recognize fully that a precept is of God, is to be motivated to obey that precept – faith has ‘existence’ in ‘its particular definite acts’, in animating those acts. In ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, he observes that a ‘vigorous and clear-sighted faith … would enable us accurately to discern and closely to follow the way of life’.22 Faith ‘discerns’ the ‘way of life’ – like the ‘conscience’, it discerns the acts that are involved in ‘living well’. To discern these acts ‘accurately’, is to be enabled to ‘closely … follow the way of life’ – one must discern the way, if one is to ‘follow’ it. ‘Faith’ for Newman, it would seem, is an awareness with which one acts, in obedience to God the ‘Lawgiver’: it animates ‘particular definite acts’. Faith is a ‘practical knowledge’ in that it enables one ‘accurately to discern and closely to follow the way of life’ – it relates to practice, identifying certain ‘acts’ as right – and it is a ‘practical knowledge’ in that it is present in, it has ‘existence’ in, practice – informing, motivating and informed by, ‘particular definite acts’.
In ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, Newman suggests that there can be a kind of ‘faith’ that is present even when one experienc es ‘doubts about the reality of religion altogether’, a faith that is present when one strives to be ‘dutiful’ in ‘ordinary’ matters.23 Faith coexists with ‘doubts’: it may happen that one is ‘haunted by wandering doubts … [having] thoughts shoot across the mind about the reality of religion altogether, or of this or that particular doctrine of it, or about the correctness of one’s own faith, and the safety of one’s own state’.24 He insists, though, that, despite this, one can acknowledge that ‘it must be right to serve God; we have a voice within us answering to the injunction … of waiting on Him and keeping His way’.25 Newman maintains that one should attend to this ‘voice’ – one should try to live rightly – and that doing so will dispel ‘doubts’.
Let, then, every beginner make up his mind to suffer disquiet and perplexity … The more he makes up his mind manfully to bear doubt, struggle against it, and meekly to do God’s will all through it, the sooner this unsettled state of mind will cease, and order will rise out of confusion. … Go about your duty; mind little things as well as great. … To be dutiful and obedient in ordinary matters, to speak the truth, to be honest, to be sober, to keep from sinful words and thoughts, to be kind and forgiving, – and all this for our Saviour’s sake, – let us attempt these duties first. They even will be difficult – the least of them; still they are much easier than the solution of the doubts which harass us, and they will by degrees give us a practical knowledge of the Truth.26
Newman observes that ‘we shall gain light as to general doctrines by embodying them in those particular instances in which they become ordinary duties’:27 one gets a ‘light as to general doctrines’ by fulfilling the ‘duties’ which they mark out. Does one need the ‘general doctrines’ if one is to identify the ‘ordinary duties’ – such that one identifies the duties by applying the ‘general doctrines’ to the particulars of life? Could one identify the ‘ordinary duties’ with the (natural) ‘conscience’ alone (disregarding the ‘general doctrines’)? Newman maintains that, even when one is experiencing ‘doubts’ and ‘perplexity’, one should continue to act in accordance with the ‘ordinary duties’ implied by ‘general doctrines’, and that, in doing so, one will get ‘light’, by which one might make better sense of those ‘doctrines’: acting, rather than merely thinking, reflecting and so on, will give ‘light’. He does not determine whether conscience, alone, is to identify the acts one should carry out, and whether it is to move one to these acts, or whether faith is to move one (faith sufficient for one to act ‘for our Saviour’s sake’): it is the carrying out of the acts that is important. All of this would suggest that for Newman the ‘light’ of faith is present in, has ‘existence’ in, a certain form of practice: so long as one perseveres in the practice, one may have something of this ‘light’, even if one should be experiencing ‘doubts about the reality of religion altogether’; and one gets ‘light’ in those matters about which one may be experiencing ‘doubts’ – ‘light’ to dispel intellectual ‘perplexities’ and ‘difficulties’ – by persevering in the practice.
In ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, Newman observes that ‘a certain state of the heart and affections’ is needed ‘for entering heaven’ – ‘even supposing a man of unholy life were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there,’28 for being subject to ‘a moral malady which disorders the inward sight and taste’,29 ‘he would find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon’30 – and the ‘state of the heart and affections’ needed ‘for entering heaven’ is cultivated by ‘works’, ‘chiefly as they tend to produce or evidence this frame of mind’.
Good works … are required, not as if they had any thing of merit in them, not as if they could of themselves turn away God’s anger for our sins, or purchase heaven for us, but because they are the means, under God’s grace, of strengthening and showing forth that holy principle which God implants in the heart, and without which … we cannot see Him.31
The ‘holy principle’ by which ‘we … see’ God is, for Newman, the conscience: by living rightly, and ‘strengthening’ the conscience, one becomes ever more capable of apprehending goodness, and ever more capable of apprehending the supreme good, God. Newman seems, then, to identify the ‘principle’ by which the soul ‘sees’ God, in the beatific vision – the ‘principle’ of heavenly contemplation – with the conscience; or, at least, he associates the formation of the conscience, with the formation of a capacity for a contemplative ‘seeing’ of God.
To live in obedience to God is to form certain habits. Christian life involves a discipline, by which one is formed as a person. Prayer itself, Newman insists, is a habit. Newman devotes a couple of sermons, in the first volume of Parochial Sermons, to an account of why a discipline of prayer – prayer conducted at set times, according to set forms – is beneficial. ‘The power of prayer, being a habit, must be acquired, like all other habits, by practice.’32 Set prayers are ‘necessary … first as a means of making the mind sober, and the general temper more religious; secondly, as a means of exercising earnest faith’.33 Seemingly ‘small observances’ can make a difference to the ‘general temper’. ‘Such creatures are we, there is the most close and remarkable connexion between small observances and the permanence of our chief habits and practices … . Nothing is more difficult than to be disciplined and regular in our religion.’34 Newman insists, in sermon after sermon, on the importance of consistency: the spiritual life involves, and requires, the observance of a multitude of ‘small’ obligations. In ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, he observes that one attains to perfection by ‘the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful’.35 (He remarks that ‘your judgement of persons, and of events, and of actions, and of doctrines, and your spirit towards God and man, your faith in the high truths of the Gospel, and your knowledge of your duty, all depend in a strange way on this strict endeavour to observe the whole law, on this self-denial in those little things in which obedience is a self-denial’.36 ) This discipline is needed, he observes in ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, because ‘a complicated work’ is ‘before us, to unmake ourselves’37 (to ‘unmake’ that is, those ‘sinful’ habits that make ‘small duties … distasteful to us’).
One only needs to ‘unmake’ oneself if one has ‘made’ oneself wrongly – if one has formed the wrong habits. Most, as a matter of fact, do ‘make’ themselves wrongly; but this need not be so. In ‘God’s Commandments Not Grievous’, Newman observes that ‘did [one] but follow from infancy what [one knows] to be right’ – obeying God at a time of life when one does not have ‘bad habits to hinder the suggestions of … conscience’, when to ‘to obey requires an effort … but an effort like the bodily effort of the child’s rising from the ground’38 – then one would not experience any difficulty in observing the ‘commandments’ of God: one would ‘grow up to man’s estate … [with] duties at length attaining their full range, and [a] soul … completed in all its parts for the due performance of them’.39 While very few ‘grow’ in this way, there are some who ‘as children … served God on the whole’, who, despite sinning, ‘recovered lost ground … sought God and were accepted’, who ‘contrived with keen repentance, and strong disgust at sin, and earnest prayers, to make up for lost time, and keep pace with the course of God’s providence’, and who, accordingly, have ‘walked with God, not indeed step by step with Him; never before him, often loitering, stumbling, falling to sleep’.40 Those who have lived in this way ‘are witnesses of Christ to all men, as showing what man can become, and what all Christians ought to be’.41
Newman sets out ‘what all Christians ought to be’ in a sermon on ‘The Spiritual Mind’. He distinguishes between habits formed by ‘custom’, by a ‘passive imitation of those we fall in with’ – whereby one is shaped by ‘the manners of those with whom [one] lives, being acted upon by external impulses, apart from any right influence proceeding from the heart’ – and habits formed by ‘much and constant vigilance … much pain and trouble’: one can follow those one ‘falls in with’, or one can follow the ‘heart’, the conscience.42 The ‘pain and trouble’ is particularly needed when one has the wrong habits; but if, by ‘vigilance’, one continuously acts rightly, then one gradually forms a ‘Christian spirit’, ‘obedience’ itself becomes a ‘habit’, and one acts with ‘obedience’, even without exercising any particular ‘vigilance’.
A religious man, in proportion as obedience becomes more and more easy to him, will doubtless do his duty unconsciously. It will be natural to him to obey, and therefore he will do it naturally, i.e. without effort or deliberation. It is difficult things which we are obliged to think about before doing them. When we have mastered our hearts in any matter (it is true) we no more think of the duty while we obey, than we think how to walk when we walk, or by what rules to exercise any art which we have thoroughly acquired. Separate acts of faith aid us only while we are unstable. As we get strength, but one extended act of faith (so to call it) influences us all through the day, and our whole day is but one act of obedience also. Then there is no minute distribution of our faith among our particular deeds. Our will runs parallel to God’s will … . This is the noble manner of serving God, to do good without thinking about it, without any calculation or reasoning, from love of the good, and hatred of the evil, – though cautiously and with prayer and watching, yet so generously, that if we were suddenly asked why we so act, we could only reply ‘because it is our way,’ or ‘because Christ so acted;’ so spontaneously as not to know so much that we are doing right, as that we are not doing wrong; I mean, with more of instinctive fear of sinning, than of minute and careful appreciation of the degrees of our obedience. Hence it is that the best men are ever the most humble; as for other reasons, so especially because they are accustomed to be religious. They surprise others, but not themselves; they surprise others at their very calmness and freedom from thought about themselves. This is to have a great mind, to have within us that ‘princely heart of innocence’ of which David speaks. Common men see God at a distance; in their attempts to be religious they feebly guide themselves as by a distant light, and are obliged to calculate and search about for the path. But the long practised Christian, who, through God’s mercy, has brought God’s presence near to him, the elect of God, in whom the Blessed Spirit dwells, he does not look out of doors for the traces of God; he is moved by God dwelling in him, and needs not but act on instinct. I do not say there is any man altogether such, for this is an angelic life; but it is the state of mind to which vigorous prayer and watching tend.43
Christian ‘faith’ and ‘discipline’ are present, ‘instinctively’, so to speak, in the character of the ‘long practised Christian’. In ‘Religious Faith Rational’, Newman maintains that ‘if we but obey God strictly, in time (through his blessing) faith will become like sight; we shall have no more difficulty in finding what will please God than in moving our limbs or in understanding the conversation of our familiar friends’.44 To ‘obey God strictly’ is to acquire the capacity to register effortlessly ‘what will please God’.
Newman maintains, in ‘The Spiritual Mind’, that the ‘long practised Christian … is moved by God dwelling in him, and needs not but act on instinct’. ‘Instinct’ here suggests, at once, ‘inclination’ – a desire to do something – and a form of ‘insight’ or intuition – an intuitive awareness of what is to be done. If one takes ‘instinct’ to mean ‘inclination’, then this would suggest that the ‘spiritual’ have ‘inclinations’ that accord with ‘God’s will’. As the ‘spiritual’ have habitually acted rightly, so what they are inclined to do is ‘parallel to God’s will’: those acts that God would have them carry out, they are inclined to carry out. When Newman remarks that the ‘spiritual’ have a will that is ‘parallel to God’s will’, this suggests that they want the same things that God wants; but one may take it that they want those things, not simply ‘in themselves’, so to speak – rather, they want those things as they are things that God wants: their inclination to do certain things involves an awareness that it is ‘God’s will’ that they should do them. They are inclined to carry out ‘God’s will’, and they take their inclination or ‘instinct’ to do that which is ‘God’s will’ to be an expression of ‘God dwelling’ within. If one takes ‘instinct’ to mean ‘intuitive awareness’, then this would suggest that the ‘spiritual’ have an intuitive sense of ‘God’s will’, and need not ‘calculate’ to ascertain what is ‘God’s will’: those who are ‘spiritual’ know how to ‘please’ God, without having to engage in conscious ‘deliberation’ about it; the thinking, or insight, by which they recognize how to ‘please’ God is ‘unconscious’ – they have, by long ‘practice’, become adroit in recognizing what will ‘please’ God. The ‘unconscious’ character of the ‘obedience’ need not be taken to involve an ‘unconsciousness’, an obliviousness, of God. They are ‘practised’ in acting in accordance with ‘God’s will’, so, in each situation, they are swift to recognize which sort of acts would be in accord with ‘God’s will’, and which would not. Newman seems, generally, to be suggesting that, in the ‘instinct’ of the ‘long practised Christian’, there is an intuitive awareness of ‘God’s will’, and an inclination to carry it out. Newman might, moreover, be suggesting that inclinations involve, in themselves, a kind of (instinctive, ‘unconscious’) understanding: if one has a ‘love of the good’, one spontaneously wishes to realize the good, and that involves an understanding of the goodness of what one wishes to do (and of how it pleases God). Having a well-formed ‘instinct’ for what will ‘please’ God is inseparable from having a ‘will … parallel to God’s will’.
The disciplines of religion, for Newman, ‘vigorous prayer and watching’, ‘tend’ toward, and are realized in, a ‘state of mind’ or character. In ‘Religious Faith Rational’, Newman suggests that for those with this ‘state of mind’, understanding what will ‘please God’ is like ‘understanding the conversation of … familiar friends’. Would he suggest, in this, that the relationship that the ‘spiritual’ have with God is like a relationship of friendship? He suggests that the spiritual can recognize what will ‘please God’ as easily as they can understand ‘the conversation of … familiar friends’: he is not maintaining, in this, that the spiritual have a relationship to God that is like the relationships they have with their ‘familiar friends’, but rather, that they understand what will ‘please God’ as easily as they understand the ‘conversation’ of their friends. The contrast is concerned with different kinds of understanding – intuitive understanding, as against ‘calculation’. Yet, does an intuitive understanding of what will ‘please God’ itself require a relationship to God akin to friendship? Newman suggests that the God who, initially, is registered as ‘distant’, a ‘distant light’, is then registered as ‘dwelling’ within. Newman is not concerned, here, with emotional ‘distance’ – aloofness, as contrasted with intimacy – but with a ‘distance’ from ‘sight’, a ‘distance’ that makes something difficult to apprehend. Yet it would seem that, as the ‘spiritual’ apprehend God more clearly, so they apprehend God less as a ‘distant light’ and more as a person, a personal ‘presence’, with whom a personal relationship can be formed: God was related to as a ‘distant light’, but is now related to as a personal ‘Spirit’, ‘dwelling’ within. ‘Conversation’ is a way in which ‘friends’ are present to one another, and the pleasure which ‘friends’ take in conversation is, in part, a pleasure they take in the presence of one another. So, perhaps, for the ‘spiritual’, those ‘instincts’ or impulses (like conscience) which are registered as manifestations of the presence of ‘God dwelling’ within them are pleasing precisely as manifestations of the presence of God. The ‘instinct’ on which the ‘long practised Christian’ acts is an intuitive understanding of what will ‘please’ God. If one is a ‘long practised Christian’, one takes pleasure in carrying out those acts which, by ‘instinct’, one senses to be pleasing to God; and to take pleasure in pleasing another is something akin to friendship. The instinct for what will ‘please’ God itself arises from a certain familiarity with ‘God’s will’; by attending to ‘God’s will’, in situation after situation, one gets a sense for what that ‘will’ is ‘like’, and for what God is ‘like’, so to speak, and the more one has a sense of what God is like, who God is, the more one loves God. In manifesting His ‘will’, God manifests what He is ‘like’, and it is when God manifests what He is ‘like’ that He may be loved. What is more, those who live with a sense of ‘God’s will’, have a sense that God manifests His ‘will’ to them, and that, in manifesting His will to them, He is regarding them, taking notice of them: they have a sense that there is a reciprocity, a mutuality, in the relationship. (Many years later, in 1855, Newman preached on the ‘Love of God’, and, in the notes to that sermon, he observes that the love of God ‘is not merely looking at what does not notice us, as the Pantheists say. It is a friendship. Three things are necessary for friendship: (1) mutual love; (2) mutual consciousness and sympathy; (3) mutual intimacy – intercourse. Companions, walking with God, Luke xxiv [the road to Emmaus].’45 In the sense of God ‘dwelling within’, and manifesting His ‘will’, there is a sense of being taken ‘notice’ of by God. In the acquisition of those ‘instincts’, whereby ‘our will runs parallel to God’s will’, there is ‘sympathy’.)
Faith ‘tends’ toward, has its fulfilment in, a certain personal state, a ‘state of mind’, a way of being. There is a sense in which, for Newman, the personal state to which faith ‘tends’ is a state in which one is fully realized, integrated, substantive, as a person: other ways of being are marked by a certain emptiness, dividedness. In ‘Secret Faults’, Newman maintains that ‘systematic’ self-examination is a ‘necessary condition for understanding’ the ‘great Christian doctrines’, and, equally, a proper understanding of those ‘doctrines’ is associated with true self-knowledge.46 ‘Unless we have some just idea of our hearts and of sin, we can have no right idea of a Moral Governor, a Saviour or a Sanctifier, that is, in professing to believe in Them, we shall be using words without attaching distinct meaning to them. Thus self-knowledge is at the root of all real religious knowledge.’47 It is ‘in proportion as we search our hearts and understand our own nature, that we understand what is meant by an Infinite Governor and Judge’ and it is ‘in proportion as we comprehend the nature of disobedience and our actual sinfulness, that we feel what is the blessing of the removal of sin’: ‘when we have experienced what it is to read ourselves, we shall profit by the doctrines of the Church and the Bible.’48 Newman suggests that the recognition of sin, in oneself, is required if one is to appreciate what the judgment of God means – a judgment which apprehends that sin fully – and what salvation means – a salvation which involves the ‘removal’ of sin. What is more, the act by which one ‘reads’ oneself, recognizing sin in oneself, is the act of the conscience, and that act involves a sense of God, as the ‘Judge’: one tries to ‘read’ oneself, as the ‘Judge’ reads one. The God presented in the ‘great Christian doctrines’ is the ‘God [who] speaks to us … in our hearts’, and this ‘voice’ in ‘our hearts’ is the conscience, a ‘voice’ by which ‘we … read ourselves’.49 The ‘act’ of the conscience, then, involves a sense of God – a sense of God which accords with the ‘doctrines of the Church and Bible’ – and that act is an apprehension of the ‘heart’ as sinful, requiring transformation – which, equally, accords with the ‘doctrines of the Church and Bible’ about the state of the ‘heart’. When one tries to live an ‘obedient’ life, one will have many lapses, and one will become aware, through this, of how sinful one is; and the more one lives in ‘obedience’, the more one will form the ‘conscience’, getting an ever clearer apprehension of what ‘holiness’ is (and of the various ways in which one is without it).
Obedience to God’s commandments, which implies knowledge of sin and of holiness, and the desire and endeavour to please Him, this is the only practical interpreter of Scripture doctrine. Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally.50
From ‘obedience’ arises the ‘knowledge of sin and of holiness’ required for ‘self-knowledge’; and self-knowledge is required if one is to make sense of ‘Scripture doctrine’, even as ‘Scripture doctrine’ makes ‘us turn inward and search our hearts’. Newman observes that ‘without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally’: self-knowledge, he maintains, ‘is at the root of all real religious knowledge’; more than that, self-knowledge is needed if one is to have a ‘root’ in oneself ‘personally’ – if one has self-knowledge then one lives with, and from, a true notion of oneself, and one is not alienated from oneself. As self-knowledge is implicated with a certain way of life, with ‘obedience’ to God, and as one never achieves perfect ‘obedience’, so one never, in this life, attains to full self-knowledge.
Let a man persevere in prayer and watchfulness to the day of his death, yet he will never get to the bottom of his heart. Though he know more and more of himself as he becomes more conscientious and earnest, still the full manifestation of the secrets there lodged, is reserved for another world … Doubtless we must all endure that fierce and terrifying vision of our real selves, that last fiery trial of the soul before its acceptance.51
Newman reflects, in a number of sermons in the first volume of Parochial Sermons, on the fractured state of the self – the state in which one has no ‘root’ in oneself. In ‘Promising without Doing’ he reflects on the ‘depths and deceitfulness of the heart, which we do not really know’.52 The way in which one experiences oneself, at any particular moment, might involve all kinds of illusions. ‘We know generally’, Newman observes, ‘that it is our duty to serve God, and we resolve we will do so faithfully. We are sincere in thus generally desiring and purposing to be obedient, and we think we are in earnest; yet we go away, and presently, without any struggle of mind or apparent change of purpose, almost without knowing ourselves what we do – we go away and do the very contrary to the resolution we have expressed.53 He alludes to one of the parables of Christ, concerning one who declared ‘I go Sir’ but ‘went not’ – ‘Here there was no revolution of sentiment, nothing deliberate; he merely acted according to his habitual frame of mind; he did not go work, because it was contrary to his general character to work; only he did not know this. He said, “I go, Sir,” sincerely, from the feeling of the moment; but when the words were out of his mouth, then they were forgotten.’54 One forms a good ‘resolution’, moved by the ‘feeling of the moment’ – a genuinely good ‘feeling’ – but the ‘feeling of the moment’ is something other than an ‘habitual frame of mind’, and it is this ‘habitual frame of mind’ which will dispose one to act, or not to act, in the event. Newman maintains that one must be ‘ever … suspicious’ of oneself.55 Only ‘acts’ are an indication of how one is really disposed – ‘nothing but past acts are vouchers for future’ – but, even then, ‘we can never answer how we shall act under new circumstances’.56 One cannot be sure that one will act rightly in the future, in certain circumstances, even if one has acted rightly, in similar circumstances, in the past. ‘The best men are uncertain; they are great, and they are little again; they stand firm, and then fall … reminding us to call no one master on earth, but to look up to our sinless and perfect Lord.’57 It is doubtful, Newman suggests, whether one can ever truly know oneself, and one cannot, accordingly, ever rely on oneself: any image of oneself that one forms, is likely to be somewhat illusory. If one cannot rely on oneself, then one must rely on something other than, more than, oneself – on God.
We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and there, perhaps, we see a little; or, in our attempts to influence and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these circumstances it becomes our comfort to look up to God … . He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves. To those who have a right notion of their weakness, the thought of their Almighty Sanctifier and Guide is continually present. They believe in the necessity of a spiritual influence to change and strengthen them, not as a mere abstract doctrine, but as a practical and most consolatory truth, daily to be fulfilled in their warfare with sin and Satan.58
Newman would counsel self-mistrust. One should not regard whatever good one does as the expression, or realization, of a goodness one has in oneself: one should, rather, trust to a ‘spiritual influence’ that enables one to do what is good, and one should attribute whatever good one does to that ‘spiritual influence’. Without this ‘influence’, the self has no stability, no integrity – ‘He alone can uphold us’.59 One should not think that one can form oneself – that one can make oneself virtuous. ‘The management of our hearts is quite above us.’60 If one reflects on oneself, it should be only to take note of how one has erred, to remind oneself of how much one needs the ‘spiritual influence’ that sustains one. If one reflects on oneself, it should be only to repent, and to turn to God. One must ‘try’ oneself in small things, striving for consistency. By living in this way, one is gradually formed by the ‘spiritual influence’ of God; one acquires the ‘full character of a Christian’.61
One assumes, or professes, the ‘full character of a Christian’ when participating in the rites of the Church.
How much, for instance, do we profess when we say the Creed! and in the Collects we put on the full character of a Christian. We desire and seek the best gifts, and declare our strong purpose to serve God with our whole hearts. By doing this, we remind ourselves of our duty; and withal, we humble ourselves by the taunt (so to call it) of putting upon our dwindled and unhealthy forms those ample and glorious garments which befit the upright and full-grown believer.62
In ‘Profession without Hypocrisy’ Newman suggests that, if one lives rightly, one gradually ‘incorporates’ into oneself the ‘garments which befit the upright and full-grown believer’.
We profess to be Saints, to be guided by the highest principles, and to be ruled by the Spirit of God. We have long ago promised to believe and obey. It is also true that we cannot do these things aright; nay, even with God’s help (such is our sinful weakness), still we fall short of our duty. Nevertheless we must not cease to profess. We must not put off from us the wedding garment which Christ gave us in baptism. We may still rejoice in Him without being hypocrites, that is, if we labour day by day to make that wedding garment our own; to fix it on us and so incorporate it with our very selves, that death, which strips us of all things, may be unable to tear it from us, though as yet it be in great measure but an outward garb, covering our own nakedness.63
There is, Newman maintains, a ‘nakedness’, an emptiness, in the self; there are ‘recesses’ in oneself that one does not know about. One must, then, strive to act rightly, without being assured that one acts from genuine virtue, or faith, trusting that, in doing so, one will form in oneself the ‘temper’ of genuine virtue, or faith, becoming one for whom such acts are ‘natural’, one ‘moved by God dwelling’ within, who ‘needs not but act on instinct’. If one has formed this ‘temper’, then everything in oneself is in accord with the ‘profession’ of faith: there are no ‘recesses’ in oneself that are at odds with that ‘profession’; one is not divided against oneself; that profession, that faith, has its ‘root’ in who one is ‘personally’ – it is an expression of who one is. To be ‘moved by God dwelling’ within is to ‘root’ oneself in that which can ‘uphold’ one. When one has God ‘dwelling’ within, moving one, then one has a faith that has its ‘root’ in who one is ‘personally’, and who one is ‘personally’ has a ‘root’ in what is sure, in God.
In ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, Newman condemns a form of ‘religion’ that is a ‘mere civilization’, ‘based on self and the world’, a ‘religion’ degraded into ‘mere instrument of secular aims’.64 In ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, he observes that where ‘religion’ becomes ‘respectable’, widely accepted by the society in which one lives, then one can have worldly motives for professing ‘religion’ – since a ‘general character for religion’ promotes ‘temporal interests’ – and one can become uncertain of whether, in professing religion, and acting accordingly, one acts from faith or from ‘a desire of the world’s advantages’.65 ‘I am suspicious’, Newman remarks, ‘of any religion that is a people’s religion, or an age’s religion’.66 In ‘The Religion of the Day’, he attempts to characterize the ‘age’s religion’, and he suggests that the error of the ‘age’ consists in identifying certain qualities of mind – brought about by ‘education and civilization’ – with religion itself, with the Gospel.67 The ‘world’s religion’ has ‘taken the brighter side of the Gospel, – its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten’.68
As the reason is cultivated, the taste formed, the affections and sentiments refined, a general decency and grace will of course spread over the face of society, quite independently of the influence of Revelation. That beauty and delicacy of thought, which is so attractive in books, then extends to the conduct of life, to all we have, all we do, all we are. Our manners are courteous; we avoid giving pain or offence; our words become correct; our relative duties are carefully performed. Our sense of propriety shows itself even in our domestic arrangements, in the embellishments of our houses, in our amusements, and so also in our religious profession. Vice now becomes unseemly and hideous to the imagination, or, as it is sometimes familiarly said – ‘out of taste’. Thus elegance is gradually made the test and standard of virtue, which is no longer thought to possess an intrinsic claim on our hearts, or to exist, further than it leads to the quiet and comfort of others. Conscience is no longer recognized as an independent arbiter of actions, its authority is explained away; partly it is superseded in the minds of men by the so-called moral sense, which is regarded merely as the love of the beautiful; partly by the rule of expediency, which is forthwith substituted for it in the details of conduct. Now conscience is a stern, gloomy principle; it tells us of guilt and of prospective punishment. Accordingly, when its terrors disappear, then disappear also, in the creed of the day, those fearful images of Divine wrath with which the Scriptures abound. They are explained away. Every thing is bright and cheerful. Religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal, are the first of sins. Austerity is an absurdity; – even firmness is looked on with an unfriendly, suspicious eye. On the other hand, all open profligacy is discountenanced; drunkenness is accounted a disgrace; cursing and swearing are vulgarities.69
The ‘state of refinement’ which the ‘world’s religion’ identifies with true ‘religion’ is something ‘to which men might be brought, quite independent of religion, by the mere influence of education and civilization’.70 ‘Human society has a new framework, and fosters and developes a new character of mind,’ which has a merely ‘accidental’ resemblance to ‘the Christian’s obedience’.71 ‘Doubtless, peace of mind, a quiet conscience, and a cheerful countenance are the gift of the Gospel, and the sign of a Christian; but the same effects (or, rather, what appear to be the same) may arise from very different causes.’72
Newman maintains that, in the ‘world’s religion’, ‘Conscience’ is ‘superseded in the minds of men by the so-called moral sense, which is regarded merely as the love of the beautiful’.73 What is it exactly that supersedes ‘Conscience’? Newman characterizes it by what it is ‘called’ – the ‘so-called moral sense’ is ‘regarded’ as ‘the love of the beautiful’. It may be ‘called’ these things, but what, in fact, is it? Is it a vestige of the ‘Conscience’ (partially ‘explained away’) or is it the ‘love of the beautiful’, substituting itself for the conscience? Newman observes that ‘elegance is made the test and the standard of virtue, which is no longer thought to possess an intrinsic claim on our hearts, or to exist, further than it leads to the quiet and comfort of others’.74 The ‘world’s religion’, as characterized by Newman, seems to be a matter of making life in this world, life with others, harmonious: social harmony is what is most desirable, and one cultivates that in oneself which is involved in, or which makes for, social harmony – one cultivates gracefulness, sociability. A ‘beauty and delicacy of thought’ realized ‘in books … extends to the conduct of life’: the artistry involved in literature, in making ‘books’ extends to life, so that ‘the conduct of life’ is informed by an artistry that is a matter of presenting oneself in a pleasing manner to others, a matter of graceful performance, so that life with others, intercourse with others in ‘human society’, may be pleasing, characterized by ‘quiet and comfort’. Whatever is ‘stern’ or ‘gloomy’ does not make for social harmony, so it is a part of sociability to suppress what is ‘stern’, ‘gloomy’, inflexible in oneself – and the conscience is ‘stern’ and ‘gloomy’ (or perhaps it seems ‘stern’ and ‘gloomy’, and nothing else, when it is considered according to the ‘standard’ of ‘elegance’). The ‘world’s religion’ takes cognizance only of that in the self which is formed by the ‘world’ – by ‘education’, ‘civilization’, the ‘framework’ of society – and it accords worth only to that in the self which is involved in the forging of worldly harmony, ‘quiet and comfort’, and which is engaged in the life of ‘civilization’. This religion of ‘civilization’ is concerned with ‘human society’, ‘human’ communication, and such communication cannot but be partial, incomplete. The relationships one forms in ‘human society’ differ, in this regard, from the relationship one has with God, to whom everything in oneself is fully apparent (more so, even, than it is to oneself). To those before whom one appears in ‘human society’ one can present a performance that seems complete, adequate, ‘beautiful’ – but this performance does not require everything of oneself, and it does not manifest everything in oneself. For Newman, the aim of a religious life is that one attain to a state of harmony with God, and there is a beauty in this state (the beauty that is the glory of God), but when one aims at this beauty, one must recognize that there is much in oneself that is at odds with it, much that is out of harmony with God (a ‘gloomy’ truth), and one must persevere in ‘the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful’ (and they are ‘distasteful’ because one is out of harmony with God). In this ‘practice’ of ‘small duties’ one tries to live as if in the ‘sight’ of God, but one is not yet fit for this life. In ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, Newman asks, ‘Who is not displeased when a man attempts some great work which is above his powers? and is it an excuse for his miserable performance that the work is above him? We are bound to serve God with a perfect heart … and when we attempt it, necessary as is our endeavour, how miserable must it appear in the eyes of the Angels! how pitiful our exhibition of ourselves.’75 By contrast, in ‘human society’, only ‘open’ vices are apparent to those with whom one lives. (What is more, there are some sins which are consistent with ‘elegance’, or which do not interfere with the ‘quiet and comfort of others’.) In ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’, Newman maintains that the world seems beautiful only if one does not attend to certain aspects of it. He observes that ‘Scripture’ attends, particularly, to those aspects of the world that make a ‘painful picture’ – ‘it abounds in accounts of human distress and sufferings, of our miserable condition, of the vanity, unprofitableness, and trials of life’ – and this, not only because ‘this view is the ultimate true view of human life’ but because ‘it is a view which it concerns us much to know’. ‘If we are forewarned, we shall unlearn false notions of [the world’s] excellence, and be saved the disappointment which follows … the overthrow of vainly cherished hopes of lasting good upon earth.’76 ‘Human society’ does not take this view of itself. ‘Human tales and poems are full of pleasant sights and prospects; they make things better than they are, and pourtray a sort of imaginary perfection; but Scripture … seems to abstain even from what might be said in praise of human life as it is’, and, in this, it is ‘God’s warning voice’.77 If one would apprehend ‘human life’ in the here and now as beautiful, a certain selectiveness of attention is requisite – one must ‘make things better than they are’. The form of the ‘love of the beautiful’ associated with the ‘world’s religion’ seems, then, to make for an inattentiveness to certain things: it is concerned with what appears in, or to, ‘human society’ and it is concerned with making the appearance of ‘human society’ beautiful; it disregards whatever in ‘human life’ (or the ‘heart’) does not appear in, or to, ‘human society’; and it disregards that in ‘human life’ which cannot be worked up into a beautiful semblance. The ‘world’s religion’ would, then, treat ‘the beautiful’ in ‘human society’ as the aim of life. The more that ‘human society’ can be made to seem beautiful, and the more it can be made to seem capable of satisfying ‘hopes’ of ‘lasting good’, so it can seem more likely that concord in ‘human society’ is the proper aim of life. Genuine religion, however, presents ‘darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects’ – ‘deeper’, because it aims, not merely at a harmony with others in ‘human society’ (a harmony that can be realized without having to engage all that is ‘deepest’ in the self) but at a harmony with God.
2.
In an article on ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, written for the London Review in 1828, Newman maintained that ‘poetry’ is the ‘originality of right moral feeling’78 – one must have ‘right moral feeling’, one must be in a ‘right moral state’, if one is to have a ‘poetical mind’ – and he suggested that ‘Revealed Religion’ is ‘especially poetical’.79
Newman takes ‘poetry’ to consist in a certain kind of imagining. He observes that ‘there is an ambiguity in the word “poetry”, which is taken to signify both the gift itself, and the written composition which is the result of it … . [So] there is an apparent, but no real contradiction, in saying a poem may be partially poetical.’80 The ‘gift itself’ consists in ‘the imagination, revelling without object or meaning beyond its own exhibition’.81
‘Poetry’ is a kind of imagining. The activity that is ‘poetry’ – the ‘gift itself’ – cannot be controlled by a techne, a ‘science’ of making: where there is a techne, there is an understanding, possessed prior to the activity of making, by which the activity of making is controlled, but ‘poetry’ is itself the arising of a kind of understanding – it is the spontaneous activity of the ‘poetical mind’: it is a mistake to regard poetic ‘composition … as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, [rather] than as a free and unfettered effusion of genius’.82 Poetry, Newman maintains, is ‘modelled on no scientific principle’:83 it consists in having a certain kind of mind, a ‘poetical mind’, and there is no techne for having a certain kind of mind. Having remarked that, in a genuinely poetic ‘composition’, ‘the spirit of beauty breathes through every part of the composition’, Newman then suggests that, if one is to appreciate the ‘subtile and delicate … beauties’ of poetry, one must recognize that ‘a word has power to convey a world of information to the imagination, and to act as a spell on the feelings’.84 What is presented, in, or through, a ‘poetic … composition’, is a vision (a vision that is the ‘energizing’ of the ‘poetical mind’). That vision must be apprehended in a moment of intuition: one cannot attain to it bit by bit, having now this insight, now that, and putting these different insights together; one attains to this vision all at once, or not at all (though one might attain to it with more or less fullness). One can appreciate the ‘composition’, when one appreciates how the vision ‘breathes through every part’; it is when one appreciates how the vision is manifest, ‘through every part’, that one can appreciate the purport or function or ‘every part’ (and the beauty of the whole). The ‘parts’ cannot be appreciated, apart from the vision that ‘breathes through’ them; and no abstract account, no techne, can set out how the parts should be: what is needed, rather, is an insight into the vision which informs, which animates with a ‘world of information’, the particular ‘composition’.
‘Poetry’, Newman maintains, is an imagining of ‘perfection’.
Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal. Biography and history represent individual characters and actual facts; poetry, on the contrary, generalizing from the phenomenon of nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn, not after an existing pattern, but after a creation of the mind. Fidelity is the primary merit of biography and history; the essence of poetry is fiction. ‘Poesis nihil aliud est’, says Bacon, ‘quam historiae imitatio ad placitum’. It delineates that perfection which the imagination suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of Divine Providence actually tends … . It is then but the type and model of history or biography, if we may be allowed the comparison, bearing some resemblance to the abstract mathematical formulæ of physics, before they are modified by the contingencies of atmosphere and friction. Hence while it recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness of its views, it provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give … . The poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of beauty and perfection; these are its material of thought, its instrument and medium of observation – these colour each object to which it directs its view. It is called imaginative or creative, from the originality and independence of its modes of thinking, compared with the commonplace and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual. At the same time it feels a natural sympathy with everything great and splendid in the physical and moral world; and selecting such from the mass of common phenomena, incorporates them, as it were, into the substance of its own creations. From living thus in a world of its own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion, and refinement. Figure is its necessary medium of communication with man; for in the feebleness of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the absence of terms of abstract perfection, the adoption of metaphorical language is the only poor means allowed it for imparting to others its intense feelings. A metrical garb has, in all languages, been appropriated to poetry – it is but the outward development of the music and harmony within. The verse, far from being a restraint on the true poet, is the suitable index of his sense.85
Newman is using the terms ‘ideal’ and ‘perfect’ somewhat equivocally here. Poetry is, for Aristotle, a ‘representation of the ideal’ if one takes ‘ideal’ to mean ‘universal’. Aristotle maintains in the Poetics that poetry represents the universal: the ‘action’ or plot is an imitation of how things are, and it presents various characters acting on one another, and reacting to one another, and this shows ‘the kinds of things a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation’, such that poetry ‘describes … the kinds of thing that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are, in the circumstances, either probable or necessary’, thereby manifesting ‘universal truths’.86 This ‘representation’ of certain types of character, a representation informed by ideas, and not restricted by ‘existing patterns’ – by the ‘contingencies’ of actual experience – can make for a ‘perfect’ illustration of those types. Yet Newman seems concerned with an ‘ideal’ that is a kind of goodness, a perfection to which ‘the present system of Divine Providence actually tends’: a goodness that is an ‘ideal’ state of something, a perfect realization of a nature. He seems to be using the term ‘perfection’ in several senses. There is a ‘perfection’ that ideas have, as independent of all material limitation, transcending all particular instances (the ‘perfection’ of the ‘universal’ as such); and there is, related to this, a perfection that illustrations or ‘typical’ images have, as manifesting, or corresponding to, ideas. Then there is a perfection that realities have, which is a kind of fullness of being: things can have more or less perfection, in this sense, as realizing the possibilities of the kinds of things they are (corresponding to the possibilities of their ‘ideas’); and different kinds of things can have more or less perfection, as realizing the possibilities of being itself. Having suggested that ‘poetry’ is a matter of working from ideas of things (rather than ‘existing patterns’) to imagine perfect realizations of those things – surpassing what is presented by ‘the phenomenon of nature and life’ – Newman then suggests that ‘poetry’ is a matter of conceiving of things of a higher perfection than the things of ‘nature and life’ – things that can be conceived of only in ‘figures’: that is, he moves from considering a ‘perfection’ that ideas have, as transcending all particulars, to a ‘perfection’ that certain realities have, as transcending the ‘phenomenon of nature’, as being of a different kind to the realities manifest in the ‘phenomenon of nature’, the material world. The ‘independence’ of the ‘poetical mind’, Newman maintains, is an independence of ‘this world’: it is concerned with things transcending ‘this world’. In suggesting that this understanding of poetry is that of ‘Aristotle’ – who maintains that poetry is concerned with the ‘universal’ – Newman seems to confound the way in which universals transcend ‘this world’ of ‘phenomena’ with the way in which certain realities transcend ‘this world’ (as being of a different kind to the things of ‘this world’). (The reference to ‘eternal forms of beauty and perfection’ is more Platonic, or Neoplatonic, than Aristotelian.87 ) Newman contrasts ‘poetical’ thinking with ‘the commonplace and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual’ – but ‘conceptions’, applying to an infinity of particulars, are not ‘fettered down to the particular and individual’. Newman seems, rather, concerned with a contrast between ideas of the things of ‘this world’, material things, ‘fettered down to’ matter, individuated by matter, and encountered in ‘the phenomenon of nature’, and ideas of realities which are not material, and which cannot, accordingly, be encountered in ‘the phenomenon of nature’ (realities which, while ‘individual’, are not individuated by matter).
Newman would suggest that the creativity of ‘poetry’ is a creativity exercised by the ‘poetical mind’ on the stuff of ‘this world’, in conceiving, in imagining, that which is more ‘perfect’ than this world. The ‘poetical mind’ conceives of things of an ‘abstract perfection’, which can be conceived of only by making the things of this world into ‘figures’. The ‘ideal’ conceived by the ‘poetical mind’ ‘colours each object to which it directs its view’: the ‘poetical mind’ transfigures those ‘objects’ which it ‘views’. (Poetry, in this regard, is the visionary ‘imagining’, the visionary perception, of the ‘poetical mind’: it is an expression of the perception of the ‘poetical mind’, a rendering of how the world presents itself to such a mind;88 and for Newman the world presents itself, to such a mind, as manifesting, or as a means of manifesting, something higher than itself.) This imagining is animated by ‘right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give’: it is ‘right moral feeling’ that takes delight in imagining things more ‘perfect’ than the things of ‘this world’, and it is ‘right moral feeling’ which actuates the imagining of these things. Newman, then, would identify ‘poetry’ with a kind of visionary imagining: ‘Milton, Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth and Southey, may be considered, as far as their writings go, to approximate to this moral centre.’89
Revealed Religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact. While its disclosures have an originality in them to engage the intellect, they have a beauty to satisfy the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal forms of excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world – a world of overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and purest feelings. The peculiar grace of mind of the New Testament writers is as striking as the actual effect produced upon the hearts of those who have imbibed their spirit. At present we are not concerned with the practical, but the poetical nature of revealed truth. With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty, – we are bid to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a Divine meaning in every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are invested with unearthly brightness – no longer imperfect men, but beings taken into Divine favour, stamped with His seal, and in training for future happiness. It may be added, that the virtues peculiarly Christian are especially poetical – meekness, gentleness, compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional virtues; whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry – anger, indignation, emulation, martial spirit, and love of independence.90
To conceive of the ‘ideal forms of excellence’ that are the concern of ‘Revealed Religion’ is to exercise a certain creativity, making use of the stuff of experience, the stuff of ‘this world’, to conceive of a ‘new world … of overpowering interest’. To conceive of this ‘ideal’ is, equally, to experience ‘this world’, the world of everyday ‘events’, differently – to discern in it a ‘Divine meaning’, to ‘colour’ what is experienced with the ‘hues of faith’.
‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’ was written in 1828; The Christian Year, by John Keble, was published in 1827 – and Newman alludes to it in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’ as the work of a ‘gifted poet’. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) Newman would observe that The Christian Year ‘brought home’ to him the ‘doctrine’ of ‘the Sacramental system … the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen’. If ‘material phenomena’ are ‘types’ of ‘real things unseen’, then one can gain some understanding of ‘things unseen’ by making ‘figures’ from ‘material phenomena’. If ‘material phenomena’ are ‘instruments’ of ‘real things unseen’, then one can discern a ‘Divine meaning’ in ‘material phenomena’ – ‘colouring’ those ‘phenomena’ by relating them to the ‘Divine’. In The Christian Year – influenced, in this, by the poetry of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan – Keble repeatedly presents ‘material phenomena’ as ‘types’ or emblems of the ‘unseen’. In ‘Septuagesima Sunday’ he suggests that the ‘works of God, above, below, / Within us and around’ make up a ‘book’ of ‘heavenly truth’, and he presents a number of emblems of that ‘truth’ – ‘The glorious sky embracing all / Is like the Maker’s love’, ‘The saints above are stars in Heaven – / What are the saints on earth? / Like trees they stand whom God has given, / Our Eden’s happy birth’, with ‘Faith ... their fix’d unswerving root, / Hope their unfading flower.’
Two worlds are ours: ’tis only Sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within,
Plain as the sea and sky.91
‘Sin’ prevents one from discerning ‘plain’ the ‘mystic heaven and earth within’ (the holy have a clearer vision of this ‘mystic’ reality). If this ‘mystic heaven’ cannot be discerned plainly, directly – as ‘the sea and sky’ – it can, nevertheless, be ‘read’ in the various types presented by ‘the sea and sky’. If it takes holiness to have a ‘plain’ sight of the ‘mystic’, then, it takes a degree of holiness, perhaps, a right state of ‘heart’, to ‘read’ the types of the ‘mystic heaven and earth within’.
In The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman associates the ‘Allegorical Method’ – of expression, and of interpretation – with a kind of ‘poetical’ vision. He characterizes ‘allegorizing’ as ‘including in its meaning, not only the representation of truths, under a foreign, though analogous exterior, after the manner of our Lord’s parables, but the practice of generalizing facts into principles, of adumbrating greater truths under the image of lesser, of implying the consequences or the basis of doctrines in their correlatives, and altogether those instances of thinking, reasoning, and teaching, which depend upon the use of propositions which are abstruse, and of connexions which are obscure, and which, in the case of uninspired authors, we consider profound, or poetical, or enthusiastic, or illogical, according to our opinion of those by whom they are exhibited’.92 Of the use of an ‘allegorizing’ mode in the Scriptures, Newman suggests that this mode is ‘natural’ to the ‘expression of solemn thought and elevated emotion’.
It is … natural to consider t hat the Divine Wisdom used on the sublimest of all subjects, media, which we spontaneously select for the expression of solemn thought and elevated emotion; and had no especial regard to the practice in any particular country, which afforded but one instance of the operation of a general principle of our nature. When the mind is occupied by some vast and awful subject of contemplation, it is prompted to give utterance to its feelings in a figurative style; for ordinary words will not convey the admiration, nor literal words the reverence which possesses it; and when, dazzled at length with the great sight, it turns away for relief, it still catches in every new object which it encounters, glimpses of its former vision, and colours its whole range of thought with this one abiding association. If, however, others have preceded it in the privilege of such contemplations, a well-disciplined piety will lead it to adopt the images which they have invented, both from affection for what is familiar to it, and from a fear of using unsanctioned language on a sacred subject … . Certainly, the matter of Revelation suggests some such hypothetical explanation of the structure of the books which are its vehicle; in which the divinely-instructed imagination of the writers is ever glancing to and fro, connecting past things with future, illuminating God’s lower providences and man’s humblest services by allusions to the relations of the evangelical covenant, and then in turn suddenly leaving the latter to dwell upon those past dealings of God with man, which must not be forgotten merely because they have been excelled. No prophet ends his subject: his brethren after him renew, enlarge, transfigure, or reconstruct it; so that the Bible, though various in its parts, forms a whole, grounded on a few distinct doctrinal principles discernible throughout it; and is in consequence intelligible indeed in its general drift, but obscure in its text … . Above all other subjects, it need scarcely be said, the likeness of the promised Mediator is conspicuous throughout the sacred volume as in a picture: moving along the line of the history, in one or other of His destined offices, the dispenser of blessings in Joseph, the inspired interpreter of truth in Moses, the conqueror in Joshua, the active preacher in Samuel, the suffering combatant in David, and in Solomon the triumphant and glorious king … . Scripture assigns the same uses to this allegorical style, which were contemplated by the Fathers when they made it subservient to the Disciplina Arcani; viz. those of trying the earnestness and patience of inquirers, discriminating between the proud and the humble, and conveying instruction to believers, and that in the most permanently impressive manner, without the world’s sharing in the knowledge. Our Lord’s remarks on the design of his own parables, is a sufficient evidence of this intention.93
There is, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a sense that, in the presentation of the ‘subject of contemplation’, ‘figurative’ language is needed;94 there is, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a sense that this ‘vision’ affects the way one experiences the world – the ‘mind’ possessed by this vision ‘catches in every new object which it encounters, glimpses of its former vision, and colours its whole range of thought with this one abiding association’; and there is, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a sense that the vision ‘breathes through every part of the composition’ in which it is presented, such that everything – in ‘various’ ways – becomes a sign of one thing, one ‘vast and awful subject of contemplation’. The whole Bible presents a single vision of Christ – ‘the likeness of the promised Mediator is conspicuous throughout the sacred volume as in a picture’ – and to have the right vision of Christ is to be able to discern the various ‘likenesses’ of Christ, or references to Christ, ‘throughout the sacred volume’, even where they are ‘obscure’. Once again, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, there is a sense that, to have the vision, one must be in a ‘right moral state’: acknowledging that the ‘Allegorical Method’ of interpretation is liable to ‘abuse’ – the ‘sacred text’ might be ‘explained away by the heretic, and misquoted and perverted by weak and fanatical minds’ – Newman remarks that ‘it is impossible to draw a precise line between the use and abuse of allegorizing’ and he suggests that if one is to make a right ‘use’ of it, one must have a ‘gifted and disciplined mind’, an ‘exalted moral dignity’, a character of mind such ‘as to approach the position occupied by the inspired writers’.
So far as men use the language of the Bible (as is often done in poems and works of fiction) as the mere instrument of a cultivated fancy, to make their style attractive or impressive, so far, it is needless to say, they are guilty of a great irreverence towards its Divine Author. On the other hand, it is surely no extravagance to assert that there are minds so gifted and disciplined as to approach the position occupied by the inspired writers, and therefore able to apply their words with a fitness, and entitled to do so with a freedom, which is unintelligible to the dull or heartless criticism of inferior understandings. So far then as the Alexandrian Fathers partook of such a singular gift of grace (and Origen surely bears on him the tokens of some exalted moral dignity), not incited by a capricious and presumptuous imagination, but burning with that vigorous faith, which, seeing God in all things, does and suffers all for His sake, and, while filled with the contemplation of His supreme glory, still discharges each command in the exactness of its real meaning, in the same degree they stand not merely excused, but are placed immeasurably above the multitude of those who find it so easy to censure them.95
In an article for the British Critic in 1839, Newman contrasts the way Scripture is used and appropriated in ‘the present age’ with the ‘contemplative’ way in which it was used in ‘the age of the Fathers’; and he associates the ‘contemplative’ appropriation of the Scri ptures with an apprehension of the ‘whole’ – an apprehension of a ‘truth lying hid under the tenor of the text as a whole’. This apprehension is ‘subtle’, intuitive – not a matter of ‘build[ing] up a system’; it is ‘from the heart’, and it requires a ‘high moral state of mind’.
This age is a practical age: the age of the Fathers was more contemplative; their theology, consequently, had a deeper, more mystical, more subtle character about it, than we with our present habits of thought can readily enter into. We lay greater stress than they on proofs from definite verses of Scripture, or what are familiarly called texts, and we build up a system upon them; they rather recognized a certain truth lying hid under the tenor of the sacred text as a whole, and showing itself more or less in this verse or that as it might be. We look on the letter of Scripture more as a foundation, they as an organ of the truth … A certain high moral state of mind, which times of persecution alone create, may be necessary for a due exercise of mystical interpretation. To attempt it otherwise than from the heart, would be a profanation.96
He associates the ‘contemplative’ or ‘mystical’ attitude with poetry – as poetry involves a ‘character of mind’, which tends ‘to penetrate below the surface of things, and to draw men away from the material to the invisible world’.
This age … is more practical, the primitive more contemplative; that age adopted a mystical religion, ours a more literal. How, then, in our age are those wants and feelings of our common nature satisfied, which were formerly supplied by symbols, now that symbolical language and symbolical rites have almost perished? Were we disposed to theorize, we might perhaps say, that the taste for poetry of a religious kind has in modern times in a certain sense taken the place of the deep contemplative spirit of the early Church. At any rate it is a curious circumstance, considering how much our active and businesslike habits take us the other way, that the taste for poetry should have been developed so much more strongly amongst ourselves than it seems to have been in the earlier times of the Church; as if our character required such an element to counterbalance the firmer and more dominant properties in it … . It can hardly be doubted, that, in matter of fact, poetry has been cultivated and cherished in our later times by the Cavaliers and Tories in a peculiar way, and looked coldly on by Puritans and their modern representatives. In like manner, a Romanist writer observes of the ‘Christian Year,’ with a mixture of truth and error, that it is an attempt to collect and form into a crown the scattered jewels which the torrent of the sixteenth century has left to the English Church. Poetry then is our mysticism; and so far as any two characters of mind tend to penetrate below the surface of things, and to draw men away from the material to the invisible world, so far they may certainly be said to answer the same end; and that too a religious one.97
‘Poetry’, and the ‘mystical’ appropriation of the Scriptures, involve an intuition of the ‘whole’, a vision, by which a ‘truth lying hid’ is discerned. This intuition is ‘from the heart’ – it cannot be presented in any ‘system’ – and it proceeds from, or expresses, a ‘high moral state of mind’: one must be in harmony with the ‘whole’, attuned to it, if one is to have this vision of it.
3.
In Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman contrasts those who ‘use the language of the Bible (as is often done in poems and works of fiction) as the mere instrument of a cultivated fancy, to make their style attractive or impressive’, and those, with ‘gifted’ minds, who ‘apply’ the ‘words’ of ‘inspired writers’ with ‘fitness’ and ‘freedom’. In ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, Newman considers the state of ‘those who are in better circumstances’, who are ‘well educated’, who ‘go on respectably and happily, with the same general tastes and habits which they would have had if the Gospel had not been given them’, who are ‘polished in their manners, kind from natural disposition or a feeling of propriety’, and whose ‘religion is based upon self and the world, a mere civilization’; they take up ‘Christianity’ only ‘so far forth as it agrees with the carnal principles which govern them’ and ‘in no sense obey because it commands’; they subordinate ‘religion’ to principles alien to it; those principles dispose them toward certain ends, and they make ‘religion’ a means of obtaining that toward which they are already disposed.98
Sometimes … they adopt it into a certain refined elegance of sentiments and manners … . They love religious poetry and eloquent preaching. They desire to have their feelings roused and soothed, and to secure a variety and relief in that eternal subject which is unchangeable. They tire of its simplicity, and perhaps seek to keep up their interest in it by means of religious narratives, fictitious or embellished.99
Newman suggests, in this, that there may be an enjoyment of ‘religious narratives’ animated by ‘carnal principles’: there may be a form of ‘taste’ – deriving from ‘mere civilization’ – to which ‘religion’ may be subjected, becoming a means of satisfying that ‘taste’. More than that, though, in a sermon preached in 1831, on ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, Newman suggests that the enjoyment of ‘narratives’, of ‘literature’, involves certain ‘dangers’ in itself: it is not simply that ‘literature’ may involve, even when apparently religious, the rousing of feelings that are more ‘carnal’ than religious, but that even the rousing of ‘good’ feeling by ‘literature’ involves, in itself, certain ‘dangers’.
The danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right … . A romance or novel … [may] cont ain many good sentiments (I am taking the better sort of them): characters too are introduced, virtuous, noble, patient under suffering, and triumphing at length over misfortune. The great truths of religion are upheld … and our affections excited and interested in what is good and true. But it is all fiction; it does not exist out of a book which contains the beginning and end of it. We have nothing to do; we read, are affected, softened or roused, and that is all; we cool again, – nothing comes of it. Now observe the effect of this. God has made us feel in order that we may go on to act in consequence of feeling; if then we allow our feelings to be excited without acting upon them, we do mischief to the moral system within us, just as we might spoil a watch, or other piece of mechanism, by playing with the wheels of it. We weaken its springs, and they cease to act truly. Accordingly, when we have got into the habit of amusing ourselves with these works of fiction, we come at length to feel the excitement without the slightest thought or tendency to act upon it; and, since it is very difficult to begin any duty without some emotion or other (that is, to begin on mere principles of dry reasoning), a grave question arises, how, after destroying the connexion between feeling and acting, how shall we get ourselves to act when circumstances make it our duty to do so? … . We have read again and again, of the heroism of facing danger, and we have glowed with the thought of its nobleness. We have felt how great it is to bear pain, and submit to indignities, rather than wound our conscience; and all this, again and again, when we had no opportunity of carrying our good feelings into practice. Now, suppose at length we actually come into trial, and let us say, our feelings become roused, as often before, at the thought of boldly resisting temptations to cowardice, shall we therefore do our duty, quitting ourselves like men? rather, we are likely to talk loudly, and then run from the danger. Why? – rather let us ask, why not? what is to keep us from yielding? Because we feel aright? nay, we have again and again felt aright, and thought aright, without accustoming ourselves to act aright, and, though there was an original connexion in our minds between feeling and acting, there is none now; the wires within us, as they may be called, are loosened and powerless … . The refinement which literature gives, is that of thinking, feeling, knowing and speaking, right, not of acting right; and thus, while it makes the manners amiable, and the conversation decorous and agreeable, it has no tendency to make the conduct, the practice of the man virtuous.100
Newman suggests that the ‘feelings’ roused by ‘literature’ are, in themselves, feelings which have an ‘original connexion’ with ‘acting’ – that they are, in themselves, ordered to ‘acting’, so that, where they are roused, and there is ‘nothing to do’, there is something like a misuse, a denaturing, of those feelings. He seems to suggest that, when one is in the ‘habit of amusing’ oneself with ‘works of fiction’, one forms in oneself something like a ‘habit’ of inaction, a habit of not acting on certain feelings, so that one may ‘come at length to feel the excitement without the slightest thought or tendency to act upon it’: the ‘habit’ of inaction functions to separate the ‘feelings’ from the ‘tendency to act’ with which they were ‘original[ly]’ connected. Newman seems to be working, here, with an Aristotelian sense that virtuous feeling is feeling that disposes one to virtuous acts: feeling is virtuous to the extent that it disposes one to act rightly. In ‘literature’, Newman suggests, feeling that would dispose one to act rightly is roused, without there being any occasion to act, so that, if one is in the ‘habit of amusing’ oneself with ‘literature’, in the habit of rousing feeling in this way, one gets into the habit of not acting on the feeling that would dispose one to act rightly: the feeling is separated – by habit – from the ‘tendency to act’. For Aristotle, though, feeling is not connected to (or disconnected from) acting by ‘habit’; feelings, in themselves, constitute ‘tendencies to act’; on this view, it would not make sense to maintain that one has certain feelings, without having the ‘tendency to act’ that is associated with them; one does not get into the habit of acting on certain feelings rather than not acting on them – rather, one acquires habits that involve feeling certain things rather than others, and those feelings are, in themselves, ‘tendencies to act’ in certain ways. To have a ‘tendency to act’ in a certain way is not to be compelled to act in that way: one might have a ‘virtuous’ feeling, without that feeling ‘forcing [one] to practise what is right’.
When Newman observes that though ‘our feelings [may] become roused, as often before, at the thought of boldly resisting temptations to cowardice’, ‘[but] we … [may nevertheless] talk loudly, and then run from the danger’, this could be taken to show that ‘feelings’, in themselves, are not enough, that they may be roused ‘without forcing us to practise what is right’. Yet, is it the case that being courageous – having the feelings associated with being courageous – is a matter of becoming ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous? There is a distinction between being ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous and between being ‘roused’ to the feelings that dispose the courageous to act: it is not as if one could not be courageous, without being ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous (even if being ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous is not inconsistent with being courageous). Are the feelings roused by ‘literature’, moreover, the same as the feelings that are involved in ‘acting’, the feelings that are constitutive of virtue or of vice? Newman discusses feelings that one should ‘act upon’; and, in this, he seems to be concerned with feelings that incite one to a particular act, here and now. Feelings of this kind involve the perception of a present ‘duty’. Yet there is no such perception of a present ‘duty’, in the experience of literature, so it would seem that there is not, in such an experience, a rousing of feelings inciting one to act. (Though, if one is ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous, one does feel a wish to be like those who are courageous; one feels a wish to act as the courageous act – and there is, in this, a will to act in a certain way. It would seem, though, that there is more to courage, and to the ‘feelings’ involved in courage, than this.) It could be maintained, perhaps, that literature presents images of situations that involve duties, rousing the feelings that those situations, encountered in life, would rouse, or something like them: literature presents images of realities; and these realities would rouse feelings, in the virtuous, that should be acted on; and the images rouse these feelings, or something like them. Yet, against this, it could be maintained that feelings are constituted as what they are by their objects, as feelings involve an awareness of their objects, an awareness that is constitutive of those feelings: feelings roused by images differ, accordingly, from feelings roused by realities. The feelings on which one should act are feelings roused by realities; so the feelings on which one should act are not roused by ‘literature’ (and the ‘habit’ of enjoying literature does not make for a ‘habit’ of not acting on the feelings on which one should act). All of this is, perhaps, simply to say that ‘literature’ is not life. Newman observes that, in enjoying literature, ‘we have again and again felt aright, and thought aright, without accustoming ourselves to act aright’; for Aristotle, it is by acting aright, ‘accustoming [oneself] to act aright’, that one forms in oneself virtuous feelings: the feelings that arise from something other than ‘accustoming [oneself] to act aright’ are not, strictly, ‘virtuous’. It would seem odd, though, to maintain that the feelings involved in the experience of literature are something wholly other than the feelings involved in life – literature, after all, presents images of life. What one might be attracted to, in a representation of goodness, is precisely the goodness that is represented; and there is ‘right moral feeling’ in such an attraction to goodness. Newman would observe, it seems, that one can delight in the contemplation of virtue, without being wholly virtuous; and if one must have some ‘right moral feeling’ to delight in the contemplation of virtue, then this need not mean that to have such ‘feeling’ is to be, in fact, virtuous. Newman would take this to show that virtuous feeling can become ‘separated’ from virtuous acting; but one might, equally, take it to show that the virtuous feelings involved in the experience of ‘literature’ are not the only feelings involved in being virtuous – that they are not sufficient for being virtuous.
Newman claims, in ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, that the ‘feelings’ roused by ‘literature’ may be ‘separated’ from ‘acting’, but this is not, for him, something that distinguishes the ‘feelings’ roused by literature from other feelings: that is, he claims that ‘feelings’, generally, may be ‘separated’ from ‘acting’. The ‘dangers’ with which Newman is concerned relate to how ‘feeling’ may become separated from ‘acting’: Newman is concerned, that is, more with ‘feeling’, and its relation to ‘acting’, than with ‘literature’ per se; he is concerned with the ways in which ‘feeling’ can become an end in itself. So, having observed that ‘religious novels … do more harm than good’ as they ‘lead men to cultivate the religious affections separate from religious practice’, he then condemns ‘that entire religious system (miscalled religious) which makes Christian faith consist, not in the honest and plain practice of what is right, but in the luxury of excited religious feeling, in a mere meditating on our Blessed Lord, and dwelling as in a reverie on what He has done for us’ and he insists that ‘such indolent contemplation will no more sanctify a man in fact, than reading a poem or listening to a chant or psalm-tune’.101 There is, perhaps, a certain analogy here between ‘sentimentalism’ in literature, and the ‘system (miscalled religious)’ which Newman censures. Sentimentalism, in art, arises from the sense that certain feelings are noble, estimable, in themselves, so that the aim of art is taken to consist in the evocation of those feelings; attention is accorded, not to things in themselves, not to the imagining of those things, but to the feelings evoked by things; and the experience of art becomes a matter of having certain prized feelings, rather than of apprehending – in or through art – certain realities (and of conforming and attuning the feelings to those realities). On such a view, the feelings evoked by objects are taken to be of supreme importance, and the objects which evoke those feelings are taken to be of importance only as evoking those feelings, such that their importance is marked, attested, by the feelings they evoke. (In ‘Self-Contemplation’, a sermon preached in 1835, Newman condemned a form of (Evangelical) piety that made the ‘spiritual mind’ of supreme importance in the religious life, subordinating all religious discipline to the cultivation of this condition of ‘mind’, and identifying (in practice) this condition of mind with certain emotional experiences – so as to occasion a kind of religious sentimentalism, and a ‘luxury of excited religious feeling’. One should not, Newman insists, aim at cultivating certain feelings; one should, rather, aim at living rightly, at carrying out the ‘duties’ of the moment and, in doing so, one will form in oneself, over time, a ‘spiritual mind’.)
Is all contemplation ‘indolent’? ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’ was preached as part of a series of sermons, concerned with the relationship of ‘profession’ and ‘feeling’ to ‘practice’: in these sermons, Newman reflects on how one might ‘profess’ to be virtuous, and one might be sincere, or feel oneself to be sincere, in making this profession, and yet one might not be truly virtuous; one might be moved by the ‘feeling of the moment’ to make a certain ‘resolution’, but if one does not have the ‘habitual frame of mind’, the character, required to carry it out, then one will not carry it out; one might have good feelings, feelings that would seem to comport with a good character, without having a good character.102 ‘Feelings’ are, Newman insists, not enough: only ‘acts’ express, and form, the character. Just a couple of weeks after preaching on ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, Newman would preach on ‘Promising without Doing’, and would observe that ‘as far as we know any thing of the matter, justifying faith has no existence independent of its particular definite acts’.103 ‘Justifying faith’, Newman seems to suggest, is present, has ‘existence’, as informing, animating, motivating ‘particular definite acts’. Would this mean that it has no ‘existence’ in ‘contemplation’?
In ‘The Religion of the Day’, Newman suggests that ‘religion’ proper is something other than the ‘natural theology’, which consists in the contemplation of the order of the world, as a manifestation of the glory of God.
Religion, it has been well observed, is something relative to us; a system of commands and promises from God towards us. But how are we concerned with the sun, moon, and stars? or with the laws of the universe? how will they teach us our duty? how will they speak to sinners? They do not speak to sinners at all . They were created before Adam fell. They ‘declare the glory of God,’ but not His will. They are all perfect, all harmonious; but that brightness and excellence which they exhibit in their own creation, and the Divine benevolence therein seen, are of little moment to fallen man. We see nothing there of God’s wrath, of which the conscience of a sinner loudly speaks.104
This ‘natural theology’ can ‘make us forget our own hearts, which tell us of a God of justice and holiness, and … fix our attention merely on the God who made the heavens; who is our God indeed, but not God as manifested to us sinners, but as He shines forth to His Angels, and to His elect hereafter’.105 The ‘God … manifested to us sinners’ is manifested in a ‘system of commands and promises’: to apprehend God rightly, then, is to apprehend certain ‘commands’, to be presented with something that ought to be done. To contemplate what is ‘perfect’, ‘harmonious’, beautiful, is not to be presented with a ‘command’: the experience of beauty is an experience of completeness, satisfaction; where there is a ‘command’, there is an experience of tension – there is something to be done.
In ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’ Newman observes how ‘human tales and poems … make things better than they are, and pourtray a sort of imaginary perfection’.106 In ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, he suggests that ‘religious novels’ equally tend to ‘make things better than they are’. As such, they do not accord with the experience of ‘ordinary, everyday obedience’; they do not accord with the awareness that informs ‘everyday’ acts of religion (and it is in this awareness that faith ‘has existence’).
In books, everything is made beautiful in its way. Pictures are drawn of complete virtue; little is said about failures, and little or nothing of the drudgery of ordinary, everyday obedience, which is neither poetical nor interesting. True faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake, to bear petty annoyances, which we find written down in no book. In most books Christian conduct is made grand, elevated, and splendid; so that any one, who only knows of true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious, is sure to be offended at religion when he actually comes upon it, from the roughness and humbleness of his duties, and his necessary deficiencies in doing them. It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples’ feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation.107
‘Everyday’ Christian life involves ‘drudgery’, ‘numberless disagreeable things’. If one aims mostly at experiencing the kind of beauty presented by ‘books’, if one desires to realize this sort of beauty in the way one lives – just as, in the ‘world’s religion’, which Newman characterizes in ‘The Religion of the Day’, the ‘beauty and delicacy of thought, which is so attractive in books … extends to the conduct of life, to all we have, all we do, all we are’ – then one will be ‘offended’ at the ‘roughness and humbleness’ of the ‘duties’ of religion. This is so, Newman suggests, for those who know of ‘true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious’, those who ‘come upon’ religion, without having been brought up with it, or formed by it. What of those, however, who have been formed by it? In ‘God’s Commandments not Grievous’, Newman observes that, for one properly formed by religion – one who has lived in accordance with conscience and with faith, from youth onwards – obedience to God is far from ‘disagreeable’: obedience, in such a case, would be ‘easy’, ‘consisting, as it would, in no irksome ceremonies, no painful bodily discipline, but in the free-will offerings of the heart, of the heart which had been … trained to love what God and our conscience approve’.108 It is, then, ‘in proportion to the distance we have departed from Him’, by sinning, that obedience is ‘difficult’, ‘grievous’; and most are in this state.109 What, though, of the ‘long practised Christian’, who ‘is moved by God dwelling in him, and needs not but act on instinct’? Would the ‘things’ that such a person does ‘for Christ’s sake’ be experienced by that person as ‘petty annoyances’? Would not such a person – ‘moved by God dwelling’ within – be able to discern the relation of certain seemingly ‘petty’ acts to the will of God? If so, would those ‘petty’ acts be somehow transfigured – would they become, if not ‘grand, elevated, splendid’ in themselves, at least ‘coloured’ by that which is ‘splendid’, by the glory of God? In The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman characterizes those who have the vision of the whole – by which they can discern the ‘likeness’ of Christ through the Scriptures, ‘allegorizing’ rightly – as having ‘that vigorous faith, which, seeing God in all things, does and suffers all for His sake, and, while filled with the contemplation of His supreme glory, still discharges each command in the exactness of its real meaning’. They discharge ‘each command in the exactness of its real meaning’ – presumably fulfilling ‘numberless … petty’ duties. Newman suggests a certain contrast between their ‘contemplation’ of the ‘supreme glory’ of God, and their discharging of ‘each command’: ‘still’ could suggest that they might be at odds with one another – one ‘still’ happens, even though the other happens. Yet he observes that, as they discern ‘God in all things’, so they act always ‘for His sake’; and this suggests that, as they apprehend ‘all things’ in relation to God, so they apprehend ‘each command’ in relation to God – discerning the ‘supreme glory’ of God, the beauty of God, in the ‘command’.110
In a sermon on ‘ The State of Grace’, preached in 1836, Newman observes how there can be a form of religion that insists on ‘duties’ in a ‘dry and cold’ manner. Those who have a religion of this ‘character … do not discern and contemplate the next world. They are not on the alert to detect, patient in watching, keen-sighted in tracing the movements of God’s secret Providence. They do not feel they are in an immense unbounded system with a height above and a depth beneath. They think every thing is plain and easy, they have no difficulties in religion, they see no recondite and believe in no hidden meanings in Scripture, and discern no hints there sympathetic with guesses within them.’111 They do not discern intimations of some ‘secret’ reality, surpassing comprehension, in the ‘movements’ of the world, or in the text of ‘Scripture’. They regard the Gospel as ‘scarcely more than a law’ – and though it is a law, requiring obedience, it is more than this – and they take little ‘joy’ from it.112 What is lacking, in this view of Christianity, is a sense of ‘the great and high doctrines connected with the Church’: in the sacraments of the Church, ‘unspeakable, fathomless, illimitable, infinite, eternal blessings are poured into their very hearts’.113
Contemplate then thyself, not in thyself, but as thou art in the Eternal God. Fall down in astonishment at the glories which are around thee and in thee, poured to and fro in such a wonderful way that thou art (as it were) dissolved into the kingdom of God, as though thou hadst nought to do but to contemplate and feed upon that great vision … . All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel, sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine Majesty. All the necessary exactness of our obedience, the anxiety about failing, the pain of self-denial, the watchfulness, the zeal, the self-chastisements which are required of us, as little interfere with this vision of faith, as if they were practised by another, not by ourselves. We are two or three selves at once, in the wonderful structure of our minds, and can weep while we smile, and labour while we meditate.114
Newman presents ‘labour’ and ‘meditation’ as happening together, but he suggests that, when they happen together, so one divides into ‘two or three selves at once’.115 He observes that while there can be an obedience whereby the Gospel is regarded merely as a ‘law’, those who obey, with this sense of the Gospel, obey in ‘a certain dry, dull, heavy way, without spring, animation, life, vigour, and nobleness’, and if they are ‘possessed of sensitive, gentle, affectionate minds, they will be very likely to sink into despondency and fear’.116 The ‘vision of faith’, for Newman, confers ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, and nobleness’, a certain spontaneity, a ‘joy’. Newman presents this vision as being a kind of compensation for the ‘pain’ of obedience: ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, nobleness’ do not arise from, are not involved in, the obedience itself; they arise from something that coincides with the obedience – a ‘vision’ which is not ‘disturb[ed]’ by the ‘trouble’ of life. When the ‘law’ is present virtually as an ‘instinct’ (in the ‘angelic’ state of the ‘long practised Christian’) then there is, perhaps, in the obedience itself a ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, nobleness’; the ‘law’ is present in the ‘instincts’ that are the very ‘life’ of the self, instincts that manifest God ‘dwelling’ within; and, in that state, one is ‘(as it were) dissolved into the Kingdom of God’: attention to the ‘law’, to what one has ‘to do’, is not characterized by ‘anxiety’ or ‘watchfulness’, but by an ‘astonishment’ at the ‘Majesty’ which is manifest in, or through, the law – what one has ‘to do’ presents itself as a manifestation of that ‘Majesty’, so that one is moved to do it, in being moved by that ‘Majesty’. Until one is in that state, there is an experience of ‘vision’ which coexists with the ‘necessary exactness of our obedience’: an ‘exactness’, which may involve ‘pain’ and ‘anxiety’, is still ‘necessary’. If one can have this ‘vision’, while still experiencing ‘anxiety’ of this kind, then this would suggest that one need not be in an ‘angelic’ state – the state of the ‘long practised Christian’ – to have this vision. While one is striving toward ‘obedience’, with ‘anxiety’, one can have this vision. Since, while one is striving toward ‘obedience’, one attends not only to that which makes for ‘pain’ and ‘anxiety’ – one attends, equally, to the ‘glories’ of the ‘Kingdom of God’ – so ‘anxiety’ coexists, in this striving, with ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, and nobleness’. One is not enervated by the ‘anxiety’, even if one cannot but continue to have some anxiety: one gets a certain ‘animation’ from the vision, and it is this animation which enables one to persevere with the ‘necessary exactness’.
4.
In a sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’, preached in 1832, Newman maintains that there is a kind of ‘science’ that is involved in, or developed through, living rightly. He imagines the forming of the ‘moral character’ of a perfect teacher of ‘Truth’, suggesting that there is an insight into the ‘Truth’, and into the ‘science of morals’, that is ‘the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character’.117
We will suppose this Tea cher of the Truth so circumstanced as One alone among the sons of Adam has ever been, such a one as has never transgressed his sense of duty, but from his earliest childhood upwards has been only engaged in increasing and perfecting the light originally given him. In him the knowledge and power of acting rightly have kept pace with the enlargement of his duties, and his inward convictions of Truth with the successive temptations opening upon him from without to wander from it. Other men are surprised and overset by the sudden weight of circumstances against which they have not provided; or, losing step, they strain and discompose their faculties in the effort, even though successful, to recover themselves; or they attempt to discriminate for themselves between little and great breaches of the law of conscience … . Their conscience still speaks, but having been trifled with, it does not tell truly; it equivocates, or is irregular. Whereas in him who is faithful to his own divinely implanted nature, the faint light of Truth dawns continually brighter; the shadows which at first troubled it, the unreal shapes created by its own twilight-state, vanish; what was as uncertain as mere feeling, and could not be distinguished from a fancy except by the commanding urgency of its voice, becomes fixed and definite, and strengthening into principle, it at the same time developes into habit. 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 … . Concerning the body of opinions formed under these circumstances, – not accidental and superficial, the mere reflection of what goes on in the world, but the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character within … every part of what may be called this moral creed will be equally true and necessary; and (if, as we may reasonably suppose, the science of morals extends without limit into the details of thought and conduct) numberless particulars, which we are accustomed to account indifferent, may be in fact indifferent in no truer sense, than in physics there is really any such agent as chance; our ignorance being the sole cause of the seeming variableness on the one hand in the action of nature, on the other in the standard of faith and morals.118
Newman maintains that the more one acts rightly, according to the deliverances of the ‘conscience’, the more the conscience ‘tells truly’ – the more one has an insight into what is right, perceiving the good in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience. Newman would connect this perception to matters of ‘faith’: the fully developed perception of the good, in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, involves, he suggests, a fuller apprehension of the ‘standard of faith and morals’ – that is, he regards ‘faith’ and ‘morals’ as connected to a single ‘standard’. Moreover, the ‘Truth’ which, Newman suggests, is apprehended, through ‘acting rightly’, is the ‘Truth’ apprehended by faith – the ‘Truth’ which is ‘proclaimed’ in the ‘Christian dispensation’.
Newman connects the ‘seeming variableness’ of ‘the standard of faith and morals’ to ‘our ignorance’: he suggests that, for one without such ‘ignorance’, one who had perfect perception of the good in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, there would not be this ‘seeming variableness’. For Aristotle, the ‘standard’ of ‘law’ is ‘variable’ in the sense that ‘universal statements’ may have a certain incompleteness, with regard to the particular, and, as such, they have to be ‘corrected’ against that perception of the particular which is phronesis. Aristotle characterizes the ‘equity’ which supplements law – supplementing the ‘universal statements’ of the ‘law’ with an awareness of the ‘particular facts’, and adjusting the sentence that the ‘law’ would ordain, to a sentence more attuned to true justice – as a ‘variable’ standard: ‘When the thing is indefinite the rule also is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid, and so too the decree is adapted to the facts.’119 Aristotle insists, though, that ‘equity’ is not something other than ‘justice’. The law must consist of ‘universal statements’, and equity is ‘a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality’.120 As it is a ‘correction of law’ designed to ensure justice, equity is not something other than justice: it corresponds to the same ‘standard’, so to speak, as the law – namely, justice. There is, in equity, an insight into the ‘standard’ of justice, as pertinent to something here and now, which surpasses whatever might be presented in a ‘universal statement’. With regard to the ‘indifferent’, would Newman suggest that certain ‘particulars’ are ‘accounted indifferent’ when considered in general terms – as particulars of a certain kind – though they are not ‘accounted’ so, when considered in all their particularity? He suggests that those who have a fuller perception of the significance of these particulars – appreciating how they are not ‘indifferent’ – will form a ‘moral creed’, every part of which is ‘true and necessary’. Would this ‘moral creed’ consist of ‘universal statements’ that would be more adequate to the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, ‘statements’ that would not be in need of ‘correction’ against the ‘particulars’? Aristotle suggests that ‘universal statements’ regarding the ‘moral’ matters will always need ‘correction’ – that there cannot be a satisfactory ‘universal statement’, or set of universal statements, that will be adequate to all the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience: it is the universality of the ‘universal statement’ that makes ‘correction’ requisite. Would Newman suggest, by contrast, that the need for correction arises only where the ‘universal statement’ is not an adequate expression of the ‘standard of faith and morals’? This seems unlikely. If, though, there is something like a capacity to discern significance in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, then this capacity might well be involved in the forming of a ‘moral creed’. If so, those who have a more perfect capacity to discern the significance of these ‘numberless particulars’, will have a more perfect ‘moral creed’ – though the ‘moral creed’, as a set o f ‘universal statements’, would not be a perfect expression of everything ‘in’ that capacity. It would be this capacity, or understanding, or insight that would apprehend the ‘standard of faith and morals’; and, if so, then ‘science’ would probably not be the right term to use of this insight (it would certainly not be ‘science’ in an Aristotelian sense). Newman characterizes the development of the ‘conscience’ as the development of an ‘inward system’ – and this suggests, at once, a ‘system’ of thought (like a ‘moral creed’) and something more than that, as it is a ‘system’ that involves the development of ‘fresh and fresh faculties’, which are ‘brought into action’: it is a ‘system’ which is the interaction, and union, of these ‘faculties’. This is something more than a ‘system’ of ideas, interconnected in ways that can be articulated in ‘universal statements’: it is a ‘system’ comprising various ‘faculties’ for perception and for ‘action’; it is a ‘system’ at the core of who one is. Newman seems concerned, then, with a ‘moral creed’ that is connected to that ‘inward system’ which makes one who one is – which animates, and which is expressed in ‘numberless’ perceptions, and acts. The ‘inward system’ would seem to have more in it than any ‘moral creed’ – though there might well be a ‘moral creed’ that is the best approximation to this ‘inward system’.
Newman suggests that the rightly formed conscience apprehends the ‘standard of faith and morals’. He would connect the ‘inward system’, animating the right perception of the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, with ‘faith’.
Concerning the body of opinions formed under these circumstances, – not accidental and superficial, the mere reflection of what goes on in the world, but the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character within … every part of what may be called this moral creed will be equally true and necessary; and (if, as we may reasonably suppose, the science of morals extends without limit into the details of thought and conduct) numberless particulars, which we are accustomed to account indifferent, may be in fact indifferent in no truer sense, than in physics there is really any such agent as chance; our ignorance being the sole cause of the seeming variableness on the one hand in the action of nature, on the other in the standard of faith and morals. This is practically important to remember, even while it is granted that no exemplar of holiness has been exhibited to us, at once faultless yet minute; and again, that in all existing patterns, besides actual defects, there are also the idiosyncrasies and varieties of disposition, taste, and talents, nay of bodily organization, to modify the dictates of that inward light which is itself divine and unerring. It is important, I say, as restraining us from judging hastily of opinions and practices of good men into which we ourselves cannot enter; but which, for what we know, may be as necessary parts of the Truth, though too subtle for our dull perceptions, as those great and distinguishing features of it, which we, in common with the majority of sincere men, admit. And particularly will it preserve us from rash censures of the Primitive Church, which, in spite of the corruptions which disfigured it from the first, still in its collective holiness may be considered to make as near an approach to the pattern of Christ as fallen man ever will attain; being, in fact, a Revelation in some sort of that Blessed Spirit in a bodily shape, who was promised to us as a second Teacher of Truth after Christ’s departure, and became such upon a subject-matter far more diversified than that on which our Lord had revealed Himself before Him. For instance, for what we know, the Episcopal principle, or the practice of Infant Baptism, which is traceable to Apostolic times, though not clearly proved by the Scripture records, may be as necessary in the scheme of Christian truth as the doctrines of the Divine Unity, and of man’s responsibility, which in the artificial system are naturally placed as the basis of Religion, as being first in order of succession and time. And this, be it observed, will account for the omission in Scripture of express sanctions of these and similar principles and observances; provided, that is, the object of the Written Word be, not to unfold a system for our intellectual contemplation, but to secure the formation of a certain character.121
Newman suggests that ‘every part’ of the ‘moral creed’ of one with a rightly formed conscience may be ‘equally true and necessary’. He uses ‘necessary’ again, when observing that ‘for what we know, the Episcopal principle, or the practice of Infant Baptism, which is traceable to Apostolic times, though not clearly proved by the Scripture records, may be as necessary in the scheme of Christian truth as the doctrines of the Divine Unity, and of man’s responsibility’. ‘Necessary’, here, would seem to mean something like ‘logical’ necessity: the different ‘parts’ all proceed from, express, a single ‘scheme’, and, as such, they are all integrated with each other. Yet Newman does not suggest that to apprehend this ‘necessity’ is to make explicit inferences, from ‘universal statements’. He suggests the ‘artificial system’ – in which certain ‘doctrines’ are presented as the ‘basis of Religion’, a ‘basis’, presumably, from which other ‘doctrines’ may be inferred, in an orderly manner – is something that is adapted to ‘our dull perceptions’. Those who have less ‘dull perceptions’ do not need this ‘artificial’ assistance, but can ‘perceive’ what is ‘necessary’.
The ‘practice of infant Baptism’ and the ‘Episcopal principle’ are matters of ‘practice’, or of government. The ‘Truth’, in this regard, might be regarded as something comprising ways of acting, forms of ‘practice’, as well as certain beliefs: to have the ‘character’, corresponding to that ‘Truth’, the character that the ‘Written Word’ is designed to form, is to have an appreciation of those practices, acquired by participating in them.
Newman contrasts the ‘necessary’ with the ‘idiosyncrasies and varieties of disposition, taste, and talents, nay of bodily organization’ which ‘modify the dictates of that inward light which is itself divine and unerring’. Newman mentions these ‘idiosyncrasies’ when reflecting on how ‘no exemplar of holiness has been exhibited to us, at once faultless yet minute’ (Christ is, as an ‘exemplar … faultless’, but the exhibition of Christ, in the Gospels, is not ‘minute’, detailed). The ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is presented in ‘patterns’ – particular persons – in which it may be affected by ‘idiosyncrasies and varieties of disposition’. ‘Our dull perceptions’, when presented with the ‘light’ in these ‘patterns’, may not distinguish between what are ‘idiosyncrasies’, and what are ‘necessary parts of the Truth’: the ‘necessary’ expression of ‘the Truth’ may look like the ‘idiosyncrasy’ of a particular person. The perfect expression of the truth would be personal – it would be a perfect person: the ‘system’, animating the various expressions of the truth, would consist, not in a set of ‘universal statements’ elaborated by ‘artificial’ reasoning, but in the ‘inward system’ that is the life of a person. Newman suggests that the ‘Primitive Church’ might be regarded as the manifestation of a person – a ‘Revelation in some sort of that Blessed Spirit in a bodily shape, who was promised to us as a second Teacher of Truth after Christ’s departure’, the Holy Spirit.
Newman contrasts the insight that is a perception of ‘moral truth’ or the ‘scheme of Christian truth’ with the exercise of ‘reason’ and ‘intellect’ in ‘inferior men’ who have a ‘short-sighted perspicacity’.
It is plain, that the gifted individual whom we have imagined, will of all men be least able (as such) to defend his own views, inasmuch as he takes no external survey of himself. Things which are the most familiar to us, and easy in practice, require the most study, and give the most trouble in explaining; as, for instance, the number, combination, and succession of muscular movements by which we balance ourselves in walking, or utter our separate words; and this quite independently of the existence or non-existence of language suitable for describing them. The longer any one has persevered in the practice of virtue, the less likely is he to recollect how he began it; what were his difficulties on starting, and how surmounted; by what process one truth led to another; the less likely to elicit justly the real reasons latent in his mind for particular observances or opinions. He holds the whole assemblage of moral notions almost as so many collateral and self-evident facts. Hence it is that some of the most deeply-exercised and variously gifted Christians, when they proceed to write or speak upon Religion, either fail altogether, or cannot be understood except on an attentive study; and after all, perhaps, are illogical and unsystematic, assuming what their readers require proved, and seeming to mistake connexion or antecedence for causation, probability for evidence. And over such as these it is, that the minute intellect of inferior men has its moment of triumph, men who excel in a mere short-sighted perspicacity; not understanding that, even in the case of intellectual excellence, it is considered the highest of gifts to possess an intuitive knowledge of the beautiful in art, or the effective in action, without reasoning or investigating; that this, in fact, is genius; and that they who have a corresponding insight into moral truth (as far as they have it) have reached that especial perfection in the spiritual part of their nature, which is so rarely found and so greatly prized among the intellectual endowments of the soul.122
Newman likens the having of certain ‘views’, in a ‘gifted individual’, to the ‘muscular movements by which we balance ourselves in walking, or utter our separate words’ – these being capacities that do not require reflection, or conscious awareness, to be exercised, capacities through which one acts (capacities which are virtually a part of the self that acts). To reflect on such capacities is to reflect on that which is virtually a part of oneself: it is to take an ‘external survey’ of oneself. The ‘views’ of the ‘gifted individual’, on this analogy, are as capacities exercised without the need for reflection – something like a part of the mind of the ‘gifted individual’, involved in the ‘movement’ of the mind of that individual in making sense of things. Newman suggests that the forming of this ‘assemblage of moral notions’ involves a ‘process’ of ‘reasoning’ of a ‘latent’, implicit kind – a ‘reasoning’ not recognized explicitly by the one actuated by it – and he suggests, equally, that it involves a kind of insight or ‘intuition’ distinct from ‘reasoning’. Newman characterizes the ‘process’ of forming this ‘assemblage of moral notions’ as the acquisition of a certain competence. ‘The longer any one has persevered in the practice of virtue, the less likely is he to recollect how he began it; what were his difficulties on starting, and how surmounted; by what process one truth led to another; the less likely to elicit justly the real reasons latent in his mind for particular observances or opinions.’ The forming of ‘opinions’, the ‘process’ by which ‘one truth led to another’ is associated with, is an element in, the attainment of proficiency in a ‘practice’. Newman seems concerned, then, with ‘views’ that are a part of the spontaneous life of the mind. He suggests that it is difficult to represent this spontaneous interior life in a ‘systematic’ way, in orderly, logical arguments. The insights by which ‘deeply exercised’ Christians live, are not present in their minds in a ‘systematic’ way – they are not present in the manner in which they are present in formal ‘reasoning and investigation’.
When Newman suggests that the ‘gifted individual’ must take an ‘external survey of himself’, when ‘reasoning’ in justification of the ‘views’ which that ‘individual’ lives by, he suggests that those views are a part of the very self of that ‘individual’: that individual looks at ‘himself’, when presenting those views to others. Having suggested that there can be a moral understanding that is almost a part of the self of the one who has it, Newman then insists on the difficulty of presenting that self ‘in the abstract, in a book’. Newman maintains that the ‘influence’ of a ‘Teacher of the Truth’ is exerted mostly in the personal encounters, personal relationships, of that ‘Teacher’: ‘Truth’ is ‘upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men … who are at once the teachers and the patterns of it’.123 This is an effect of the ‘natural beauty and majesty of virtue, which is more or less felt by all but the most abandoned’.
I do not say virtue in the abstract, – virtue in a book. Men persuade themselves, with little difficulty, to scoff at principles, to ridicule books, to make sport of the names of good men; but they cannot bear their presence: it is holiness embodied in personal form, which they cannot steadily confront and bear down: so that the silent conduct of a conscientious man secures for him from beholders a feeling different in kind from any which is created by the mere versatile and garrulous Reason.124
Newman suggests that the ‘insight into moral truth’ of those who have an ‘intuitive’ sense of this ‘truth’, developed with the ‘practice of virtue’, and approximating to ‘genius’, might not admit of being presented in ‘words’.
May we not further venture to assert, not only that moral Truth will be least skilfully defended by those, as such, who are the genuine depositories of it, but that it cannot be adequately explained and defended in words at all? Its views and human language are incommensurable. For, after all, what is language but an artificial system adapted for particular purposes, which have been determined by our wants? And here, even at first sight, can we imagine that it has been framed with a view to ideas so refined, so foreign to the whole course of the world, as those which (as Scripture expresses it) ‘no man can learn’, but the select remnant who are ‘redeemed from the earth’, and in whose mouth ‘is found no guile’? [Rev. xiv.3, 5.] Nor is it this heavenly language alone which is without its intellectual counterpart. Moral character in itself, whether good or bad, as exhibited in thought and conduct, surely cannot be duly represented in words. We may, indeed, by an effort, reduce it in a certain degree to this arbitrary medium; but in its combined dimensions it is as impossible to write and read a man (so to express it), as to give literal depth to a painted tablet.125
Newman characterizes ‘language’ as ‘an artificial system adapted for particular purposes, which have been determined by our wants’: the language ‘determined’ by the ‘wants’ and ‘purposes’ that are common in the ‘course of the world’ is, accordingly, not an adequate means of presenting ‘ideas … foreign to the whole course of the world’. He maintains that the difficulty in ‘representing’ character, and the insights involved in having a certain character, is a matter of forming an ‘intellectual counterpart’ to a ‘heavenly language’. He likens the difficulty of presenting ‘moral Truth’ in ‘words’ to that of presenting ‘moral character’ in ‘words’ – it is ‘impossible to write and read a man’. The difficulty, Newman suggests, is that the understanding, which the ‘gifted individual’, the ‘teacher’, has to impart, is an understanding which that ‘individual’ has in being that ‘individual’. If one has that understanding, one can present it only in presenting oneself, as one is. One acquires that understanding from someone who has it, to the extent that one understands the one who has it; and one can acquire this understanding, only by becoming ‘like’ that ‘gifted individual’. The ‘gifted individual’ cannot, Newman suggests, ‘be translated (as it were), and circulated through the world, till he has made others like himself’.126 Newman insists, in this regard, that ‘we could scarcely in any situation be direct instruments of good to any besides those who personally know us’.127 If an ‘individual’ has an understanding that is involved in who that ‘individual’ is, then one can acquire that understanding only to the extent that one ‘personally knows’ that individual; one can ‘personally know’ such an individual only in forming a relationship of friendship and sympathy with that individual, and to form such a relationship is to become ‘like’ that individual: one is formed as a person by such friendships.
5.
For Newman, the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is something personal. The presence of that ‘light’ is in what makes a person who that person is: the manifestation of that ‘light’ is in acts of personal expression – and that manifestation may look like the ‘idiosyncratic’ gesture of an ‘individual’. To register the ‘light’ is to register it as present in a person, a ‘gifted individual’: in apprehending something of the ‘heart’ of that ‘individual’, one apprehends something of the ‘light’ which makes that ‘heart’ what it is; and to discern that ‘light’, one must have the kind of relationship with that ‘individual’ whereby one can discern something of the ‘heart’ of that individual. In ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, Newman observes that the ‘Truth’ is kept present in the world through personal relationships.
Those ordained in God’s Providence to be the salt of the earth, – to continue, in their turn, the succession of His witnesses, that heirs may never be wanting to the royal line though death sweeps away each successive generation of them to their rest and their reward … perhaps, by chance fell in with their destined father in the Truth, not at once discerning his real greatness … [and] by degrees they would discern more and more the traces of unearthly majesty about him [until] at length, with astonishment and fear, they would become aware that Christ’s presence was before them; and, in the words of Scripture, would glorify God in His servant; and all this while they themselves would be changing into that glorious Image which they gazed upon, and be in training to succeed him in its propagation.128
The ‘Image’ is Christ, the image of God the Father – ‘Christ’s presence’ is ‘before them’. The ‘Image’ is, equally, the ‘father in the Truth’, the person who is an image of Christ: the ‘propagation’ of the image of Christ is through persons who have become so conformed to Him, as to become images of Him; and in this ‘propagation’, Christ, the ‘Image’ of the Father, is really present. The term ‘Image’, here, suggests the difference between the ‘gifted individual’ and the divine – the ‘individual’ is an image of Christ, and an image is different from what it images – and it suggests, equally, the union between the ‘gifted individual’ and the divine – Christ the Son is the ‘Image’ of the Father (one is presented with that ‘Image’, in the ‘gifted individual’, owing to ‘Christ’s presence’ in that individual). When the Spirit ‘dwells’ within the ‘gifted individual’, the personhood of that individual is not somehow annulled, or replaced by that of the Spirit. To discern the presence of the ‘Image’ in a ‘gifted individual’ is not to discern something other than that ‘individual’: it is to discern that the ‘individual’ has ‘the spiritual mind’, that the ‘individual’ is holy. To apprehend the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is, then, to apprehend a person. To apprehend the ‘Truth’ is to apprehend a person, as embodying, living out, the ‘Truth’; and one can only apprehend a person aright if one is in a relationship with that person of a kind whereby one can discern something of the ‘heart’ of that person – namely, a relationship of friendship, of love; and to be in a relationship of friendship is to be changed by that relationship, to become ‘like’ the one with whom one has a friendship.
In ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, Newman maintains that the life of the Church is ‘a Revelation in some sort of that Blessed Spirit in a bodily shape’. In the various acts of the Church, something personal – the ‘Blessed Spirit’ – is manifest. How does the discernment of the personal presence of the ‘Spirit’, in the life of the Church, relate to the discernment of the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ in a ‘gifted individual’, animated by ‘Christ’s presence’? One discerns holiness, ‘the spiritual mind’, in such an ‘individual’; and Newman suggests that a ‘collective holiness’ can be discerned in the life of the Church. There is, Newman suggests, an ‘inward system’, in the ‘individual’, which characterizes that individual, and which constitutes (or is expressed in) the ‘moral creed’ of that individual. The various acts making up the life of the Church could be regarded as an expression of an ‘inward system’ that is the life of the ‘Blessed Spirit’. If so, then one might perceive – in the life of the Church – an expression, a ‘Revelation’, of the ‘Blessed Spirit’. Newman maintains that those who discern the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ in another person ‘by degrees … discern more and more the traces of unearthly majesty about him [until] at length, with astonishment and fear, they would become aware that Christ’s presence was before them’. The discernment of ‘traces of unearthly majesty’, here, resembles the ‘poetical’ or ‘mystical’ discernment of ‘hints … sympathetic with guesses within’, the intuition of ‘Divine meaning’, a meaning that cannot be comprehended. Preaching, in 1843, on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, Newman would remark that ‘there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate’, and he likens this to the experience of music, asking: Is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes?
Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter.129
The ‘living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes’ are something personal (or super-personal): they are ‘laws’ that are identical with the being of God. To discern the ‘divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate’, would be to discern the ‘living laws’ of a certain spirit in that ‘theology’ – to discern that ‘theology’ as the expression of an ‘inward system’, the presence of which can be ‘felt’, but not adequately ‘communicated’.
Notes
1 John Henry Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century [hereafter Arians] (1833; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 47.
2 Arians, 53.
3 Ibid., 42–3.
4 Ibid., 44.
5 Ibid., 45.
6 Ibid., 43.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 44.
9 John Henry Newman, ‘The Christian Mysteries’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; 1868; London, Longmans Green & Co., 1907), 203, 206.
10 See in particular ‘Self Denial, the Test of Religious Earnestness’, ‘Christian Manhood’, and ‘The Religion of the Day’.
11 ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 175.
12 ‘Times of Private Prayer’, in PPS i, 253.
13 ‘Religious Faith Rational’, in PPS i, 202.
14 Newman gives an account of the character of the ‘long practised Christian’, in ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in PPS i, 72–82.
15 ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 171, 172.
16 Ibid., 172.
17 ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in PPS i, 33.
18 ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, in PPS i, 230.
19 ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 22.
20 ‘The Religion of the Day’, in PPS i, 317.
21 ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in PPS i, 21.
22 ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, in PPS i, 90.
23 ‘Obedience, the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, in PPS i, 235.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 236.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 237.
28 ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 3.
29 Ibid., 7.
30 Ibid., 6.
31 Ibid., 8–9.
32 ‘Forms of Private Prayer’, in PPS i, 264 .
33 ‘Times of Private Prayer’, in PPS i, 251.
34 Ibid., 252.
35 ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, in PPS i, 67.
36 Ibid., 68.
37 ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, in PPS i, 89–90.
38 ‘God’s Commandments not Grievous’, in PPS i, 102.
39 Ibid., 103.
40 Ibid., 107.
41 Ibid.
42 ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in PPS i, 73, 75, 76.
43 ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in PPS i, 73–5.
44 ‘Religious Faith Rational’, in PPS i, 201.
45 John Henry Newman, Sermon Notes (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1913), 124.
46 ‘Secret Faults’, in PPS i, 41.
47 Ibid., 42.
48 Ibid., 43.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 54–5.
51 Ibid., 48.
52 ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 172.
53 Ibid., 165.
54 Ibid., 165–6.
55 Ibid., 174.
56 Ibid., 168, 169.
57 Ibid., 170.
58 Ibid., 173–4.
59 Ibid., 173.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 174–5.
62 Ibid.
63 ‘Profession without Hypocrisy’, in PPS i, 148–9 .
64 ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in PPS i, 30, 39.
65 ‘Self-Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, in PPS i, 60.
66 Ibid., 61.
67 ‘The Religion of the Day’, in PPS i, 313.
68 Ibid., 311.
69 Ibid., 311–12.
70 Ibid., 313.
71 Ibid., 314.
72 Ibid., 321.
73 Ibid., 312.
74 Ibid.
75 ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, in PPS i, 91–2.
76 ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’, in PPS i, 326, 328, 329.
77 Ibid., 327, 329.
78 ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in ECH i, 20.
79 ECH i, 23.
80 Ibid., 11.
81 Ibid., 4.
82 Ibid., 7.
83 Ibid., 3–4.
84 Ibid., 4, 8.
85 Ibid., 9–10.
86 Aristotle, Poetics, 10, in Aristotle / Horace / Longinus Classical Literary Criticism, trans. by T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 1965), 43–4.
87 The locus classicus for the Neoplatonic idea of artistic creativity as a copying of the ‘eternal forms of beauty’, and the beauty of the artwork as a kind of copy of the beauty of the artistic mind, is in Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8.1. ‘Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.’ ‘The artist goes back, after all, to that wisdom in nature which is embodied in himself, and this is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.’ Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen Mackenna (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 411, 416.
88 In this, Newman shows a ‘Romantic expressivist’ understanding of ‘poetry’, as a rendering of the visionary perceptions of a ‘poetical mind’. (See M. H Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) for an account of Romantic ‘expressivism’.) This ‘expressivism’ was, itself, a kind of appropriation of theological notions of the ‘sacramental’ – an ascription to the poetic ‘imagination’ of what had been attributed to the sacraments, as a medium disclosing ‘higher’ realities (and as conferring a grace). (See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971)). Newman suggests, in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, that if the ‘poetical’ is quasi-sacramental, then the sacramental must be ‘especially poetical’. The influence of Romantic ideas on Newman has been examined by Sidney John Coulson, in Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and in Religion and Imagination: ‘in Aid of a Grammar of Assent’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) and by Stephen Prickett Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
89 ECH i, 22.
90 Ibid., 23.
91 John Keble, ‘Septuagesima Sunday’, in The Christian Year (1827; Oxford and London: J. Parker and C. J. Rivington, 1829), 75–7.
92 Arians, 56.
93 Ibid., 57–9.
94 Once again, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, there is an uncertainty, or ambiguity, as to whether ‘figurative’ language is required, to present a ‘subject of contemplation’ different in kind from the realities which ‘ordinary words’ are fitted to present, or whether ‘figurative’ language is required, to express the feelings (the ‘reverence’, the ‘admiration’) which that ‘subject of contemplation’ elicits. (There is a sense that he would present ‘contemplation’ and ‘feeling’ as somehow involved in one another – having a ‘poetical mind’ involves having ‘right moral feeling’.)
95 Arians, 63–4.
96 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i], 286–7.
97 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 290–1.
98 ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in PPS i, 30–1.
99 Ibid., 31.
100 ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 371–3.
101 ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in PPS ii, 373.
102 ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 166.
103 Ibid., 172.
104 ‘The Religion of the Day’, in PPS i, 317–18.
105 Ibid., 318.
106 ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’, in PPS i, 327.
107 ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in PPS ii, 374.
108 ‘Gods Commandments not Grievous’, in PPS i, 104.
109 Ibid., 110.
110 Arians, 63–4.
111 ‘The State of Grace’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 140–1.
112 ‘The State of Grace’, in PPS iv, 144.
113 Ibid., 145.
114 Ibid., 146–7.
115 Ibid., 147.
116 Ibid., 144–5.
117 John Henry Newman, ‘Personal Influence the means of Propagating the Truth’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 81.
118 ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in OUS, 80–2.
119 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 99.
120 Aristotle, Ethics, 99.
121 ‘Personal Influence the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in OUS, 81–3.
122 Ibid., 83–4.
123 Ibid., 91–2.
124 Ibid., 92.
125 Ibid., 84–5.
126 Ibid., 87.
127 Ibid., 98.
128 Ibid., 95–6.
129 ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 346–7.