Section 10

Section 10 3 Revelation

Terrence Merrigan

The idea of revelation

The English word ‘revelation’ is derived from the Latin ‘revelare’ which means ‘to remove the veil’. The Latin is in turn a rendition of the Greek ‘apokalypsis’ that literally means an uncovering, a laying bare. The term revelation is not, strictly speaking, a religious term. It can be employed to denote any act of disclosure, of making known what was hitherto unknown or unseen. As such the idea of revelation belongs to the entire realm of human experience and is applicable to the whole field of human knowledge. The theological discussion of revelation as a distinctive and even unique source of knowledge is a fairly recent phenomenon, a response to the Enlightenment insistence that the only valid knowledge is that which conforms to the standards of modern empirical science.

It is important to keep the broader understanding of the term in mind when one considers John Henry Newman’s reflections on revelation. Newman was absolutely committed to the idea that the Christian religion contained truths that would not have been known had they not been disclosed by God in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But he was also prepared to countenance the idea of God’s universal self-disclosure, at least as a sort of (ongoing) preparation for the reception of the Gospel. It is here, in his reflections on what he called ‘natural religion’, that Newman’s broad understanding of the notion of revelation comes into its own. And it is here, too, that we must begin if we are to fully appreciate Newman’s presentation of the distinctiveness of specifically Christian revelation.

‘Natural religion’ and revelation

The experience of conscience

In his Philosophical Notebook (a collection of reflections and jottings which was only published in 1970), Newman ponders Descartes’s celebrated ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. He writes as follows: ‘Though it is not easy to give a list of those primary conditions of the mind which are involved in the fact of existence, yet it is obvious to name some of them. I include among them, not only memory, sensation, reasoning, but also conscience.’¹ So Newman can write that it is as legitimate to say ‘Sentio ergo sum’ (‘I feel, therefore I am’), or ‘Conscientiam habeo, ergo sum’ (‘I have a conscience, therefore I am’), as it is to say ‘Cogito, ergo sum’. In all these formulations, however, the linking ‘ergo’ is the product of a ‘post-factum’ analysis of what is originally ‘one complex act of intuition’, in which the ‘apprehension’ and the ‘judgment’ are simultaneous.²

According to Newman, conscience is characterized by two indivisible, but not indistinguishable, dimensions which he described as a ‘moral sense’ and a ‘sense of duty’. As a ‘moral sense’, conscience is manifest in the awareness that ‘there is a right and a wrong’, which is not, of course, the same as knowing, in a particular instance, what is right or wrong. As a ‘sense of duty’, conscience is manifest as a ‘keen sense of obligation and responsibility’, namely, to do good and avoid evil.³ Newman speaks of these two dimensions, respectively, as ‘a rule of right conduct’, and ‘a sanction of right conduct’.⁴ It is peculiar to conscience that it ‘has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions’. Indeed, in Newman’s view, conscience ‘is always emotional’. Hence, he sometimes speaks quite simply of ‘the feeling of conscience’ to describe its operation. Newman describes this feeling as ‘a certain keen sensibility, pleasant or painful – self-approval and hope, or compunction and fear’ which follows upon the performance of certain actions. For Newman, the feelings generated by conscience – or, more accurately, by our behaviour – are possessed of profound theological significance. As he expresses it:

Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being; we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction on breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and on the other hand it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit. ‘The wicked flees when no one pursueth’ [Proverbs, 28:1]; then why does he flee? Who is it that he sees in solitude, in darkness, in the hidden chambers of his heart? If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine.⁵

For Newman, then, religion or at least religious consciousness is a profoundly ethical affair. It is born out of the inevitable requirement – the necessity – to act. One might say, then, that the soul’s encounter with God in conscience is as much a question of volition as of sentiment – i.e., the emotions attendant on the performance of particular deeds – though it is, of course, the presence of these emotions which implies ‘a living object, towards which [conscience] is directed’.⁶ J. H. Walgrave says as much when he writes that while the apprehension of God by conscience is ‘spontaneous’, it remains a free act which ‘supposes’ a serious moral commitment, a willingness to obey the moral imperative, and a fundamental choice for generosity.⁷ The relationship between the soul and God which attention to conscience makes possible is not therefore merely a matter of present religious experience – it is, above all (to use another of Walgrave’s formulations) an ‘absolute religious goal’.⁸ And for Newman, this goal is only realizable in and through a sustained moral commitment made incarnate in the mundane routine of every day. As he explains:

Whether [the image of the Divine within us] grows brighter and stronger, or, on the other hand, is dimmed, distorted, or obliterated, depends on each of us individually . . . Men transgress their sense of duty, and gradually lose their sentiments of shame and fear, the natural supplements of transgression, which . . . are the witnesses of the Unseen Judge.⁹

For Newman, then, in the experience of conscience the subject apprehends not only itself, but itself as subject in relation to God. In other words, ‘Conscientiam habeo, ergo sum’ is also – and more or less simultaneously – ‘Conscientiam habeo, ergo Deus est’ (‘I have a conscience, therefore God exists’).¹⁰ This conviction explains Newman’s oft-cited remark that, for him, there were ‘two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’.¹¹ It accounts, too, for his declaration that ‘If I am asked why I believe in God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence (and of that fact I am quite sure) without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience’.¹²

Newman acknowledged that his claim on behalf of conscience, namely, that ‘it has a legitimate place among our mental acts’, or ‘that we have by nature a conscience’, constituted an unproved ‘assumption’, a ‘first principle’, the rejection of which made further discussion meaningless.¹³ He makes no apology for this. In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851) he declared that to think at all one must be possessed of at least some ‘opinions which are held without proof’, and these are rightly called ‘first principles’.

If you trace back your reasons for holding an opinion, you must stop somewhere; the process cannot go on forever; you must come at last to something you cannot prove, else life would be spent in inquiring and reasoning, our minds would be ever tossing to and fro, and there would be nothing to guide us. No man alive, but has some First Principles or other.¹⁴

Of course, for Newman the ‘inevitability’ of ‘first principles’ does not divest the individual of responsibility in regard to them. It is basic to Newman’s philosophical outlook that humanity is ‘emphatically self-made’, and charged with the task of ‘completing his inchoate and rudimental nature, and of developing his own perfection out of the living elements with which his mind began to be’.¹⁵ Where conscience is concerned, the implications of this principle are staggering. Not only is it one’s ‘sacred duty’ to acknowledge conscience’s legitimate place among those ‘living elements’ with which the mind begins (in accordance with ‘the law of our being’), the failure to do this prejudices, if it does not entirely pervert, the elaboration of a whole body of derivative principles. For Newman then, the task of thinking soundly is, from the outset, a moral, as well as a practical imperative, one to be fulfilled most ‘conscientiously’ in fidelity to our being.¹⁶

Conscience and the emergence of ‘natural religion’

For Newman, the apprehension of God in the phenomena of conscience is not the product of a rational analysis of our experience (though such an analysis might well, in his view, issue in a proof of God’s existence). It is instead an immediate, ‘existential’¹⁷ awareness – an instinct or intuition ¹⁸ – that we stand before One who is to us as a father, One in whose presence we feel a ‘tenderness almost tearful on going wrong, and a grateful cheerfulness when we go right’.¹⁹

There is no suggestion here of private revelation or of some sort of mystical encounter with God. God is present as the source of the phenomenon, and the person – most obviously the child – who has been secured from influences hostile to religion or moral behaviour, spontaneously apprehends Him in the sanction (and its attendant emotions) which accompanies his decisions.²⁰ Hence, conscience is described as the ‘voice’ of God, or more accurately as the ‘echo’ of God’s voice in us.²¹

As we have seen, Newman holds that the experience of conscience impresses on the mind a ‘picture’ or ‘image’ of God.

These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being . . . If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive.²²

It is precisely in view of its role in generating an ‘image’ of God in the minds of men and women that Newman describes conscience as the ‘creative principle of religion’. Religion here – or ‘natural religion’ as Newman preferred to call it – is that living relationship between the believer and a personal God which comes to expression in stories and myths (narrative), rituals and devotions (spirituality), and codes of conduct (ethics).²³

Newman displayed a remarkable appreciation for the religious traditions of paganism. In the Apologia, he records his discovery of the Alexandrian Church’s view that ‘pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were . . . a preparation for the Gospel’.²⁴ In the Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), he speaks of the ‘vague and uncertain family of religious truths, originally from God’, which permeate the ‘Dispensation of Paganism’.²⁵ Indeed, Newman goes so far as to affirm ‘the divinity of traditionary [i.e., pagan] religion’.²⁶ ‘All knowledge of religion’, he wrote, ‘is from [God], and not only that which the Bible has transmitted to us. There never was a time when God had not spoken to man, and told him to a certain extent his duty.’ Hence, Newman could write that, ‘Revelation, properly speaking, is an universal, not a local gift’.²⁷

Newman did not simply adopt the Alexandrian doctrine of the ‘economy of salvation’ with its attention to selected elements of pagan life. Instead he adapted it in the light of his own sensitivity to the demands of concrete history. Hence, Newman does not pay much attention to the doctrine of the Logos, which had served the Fathers in accounting for the wisdom of Greek philosophy, but turns instead to the actual practice of the ‘natural religion’ of paganism, since this was a more widespread phenomenon, more accessible to the great mass of non-Christians.²⁸ This is perfectly in keeping with his lifelong conviction that ‘the one great rule on which the Divine Dispensations with mankind have been and are conducted [is] that the visible world is the instrument, yet the veil, of the world invisible’.²⁹

This attention to concrete forms is reflected in Newman’s conviction that God uses the rites and customs of pagan religions to realize His salvific will. In the Idea of a University, he writes as follows:

He [God] introduces Himself, He all but concurs, according to His good pleasure, and in His selected season, in the issues of unbelief, superstition, and false worship, and He changes the character of acts by His over-ruling operation. He condescends though He gives no sanction, to the altars and shrines of imposture, and He makes His own fiat the substitute for its sorceries. He speaks amid the incantation of Balaam, raises Samuel’s spirit in the witch’s cavern, prophesies of the Messiah by the tongue of the Sibyl . . . and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever.³⁰

In a similar vein, Newman in 1832 observed that God ‘can sustain our immortality without the Christian sacraments as He sustained Abraham and the other saints of old time’.³¹ And, on another occasion, he reflected that, ‘As just men existed before Christ came, why not at a distance from the Church? For what the former is of time, so just men among the heathen is of space’.³² In a most remarkable declaration, he even goes so far as to reflect that, ‘it does not follow, because there is no Church but one, which has the Evangelical gifts and privileges to bestow, that therefore no one can be saved without the intervention of that one Church’.³³ The suggestion that God might indeed employ non-Christian forms of religious practice and association to work His salvific will is an idea that has only recently come to the fore in theological reflection.³⁴ While we cannot take this passage as proof that Newman thought in these terms, we must at least acknowledge that his reflections were not simply incompatible with this view. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the co-editor of the series within which Newman’s Arians of the Fourth Century appeared, objected to Newman’s defence of the principle that all religion comes from God.³⁵

Newman’s willingness to regard humanity’s concrete religious history as the expression of a genuine (if deficient) relationship to God is reflected in his acknowledgement that much of what is characteristic of Christianity has parallels in non-Christian thought and practice. ‘When Providence would make a Revelation’, Newman observes, ‘He does not begin anew, but uses the existing system . . . Thus the great characteristic of Revelation is addition, substitution.’³⁶ In line with this conviction, Newman notes that, a ‘great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth, is in its rudiments or in its separate parts to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine Kingdom is Judaic’, and so on. Upon discovering this fact, some theologians argue that since ‘these things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian’. Newman replies,

We, on the contrary, prefer to say, ‘these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen’. That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine . . . So far then from [the Church’s] creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world.³⁷

Whereas those who resist this view maintain that ‘Revelation was a single, entire, solitary act, or nearly so’, Newman maintains that ‘Divine teaching has been in fact . . . “at sundry times and in divers manners”, various, complex, progressive, and supplemental of itself’.³⁸

Newman’s discussion of ‘natural religion’ mixes historical and what we would now call phenomenological analysis. As history, Newman’s presentation is certainly not up to contemporary standards. The heart of his reflections, however, is not the history of religions, but the growth of religious consciousness. And on this point, Newman displays a remarkable sensitivity to the insights of modern psychology. He is, for example, well aware that the development of an ‘image’ of God is heavily dependent on all sorts of ‘external’ factors and circumstances:

How far this initial religious knowledge comes from without, and how far from within, how much is natural, how much implies a special divine aid which is above nature, we have no means of determining . . . Whether its elements, latent in the mind, would ever be elicited without extrinsic help is very doubtful.³⁹

Newman insists that the ‘image’ of God must be expanded, deepened and completed ‘by means of education, social intercourse, experience, and literature’.⁴⁰ At least initially, and this remains the case if one’s education and religious practice do not contribute to a ‘filling out’ of one’s emergent image of God, the individual experiences Him primarily as ‘Lawgiver’ and ‘Judge’.

However, while conscience reveals God primarily as a lawgiver, it also reveals Him as One who wills our happiness and has ordered creation accordingly. From the outset then, the individual looks to the divine lawgiver as to a benevolent ruler, who has one’s best interests at heart.⁴¹ Walgrave gives expression to this when he observes that, unlike Max Scheler or Albert Schweitzer and others, Newman does not reduce the experience of conscience to that of ‘bad conscience’. Instead, he views it as a dialectical relationship between ‘good’ and ‘bad’.⁴² This tensile experience issues in two major characteristics of ‘natural religion’, namely, prayer and hope, with the former serving as the vehicle par excellence for the expression of the latter.⁴³ The hope of which Newman speaks is perhaps best described as an irrepressible existential longing or perhaps even anticipation that the One who calls us to perfection will come to our aid:

One of the most important effects of Natural Religion on the mind, in preparation for Revealed, is the anticipation which it creates, that a Revelation will be given. That earnest desire of it, which religious minds cherish, leads the way to the expectation of it. Those who know nothing of the wounds of the soul, are not led to deal with the question, or to consider its circumstances; but when our attention is roused, then the more steadily we dwell upon it, the more probable does it seem that a revelation has been or will be given to us. This presentiment is founded on our sense, on the one hand, of the infinite goodness of God, and, on the other, of our own extreme misery and need – two doctrines which are the primary constituents of Natural Religion.⁴⁴

So it is that the expectation of a revelation, that is to say, of some initiative on the part of the divine, emerges, for Newman, as an ‘integral part of Natural Religion’.⁴⁵ The naturally religious person is, as it were, ‘on the lookout’ for God, and ascribes even the rites and ceremonies by means of which he seeks to appease the Deity to the latter’s revelatory activity.⁴⁶

All this being said, however, Newman was insistent that the dispensation of paganism could never satisfy the religious hunger (or disquiet) engendered by the experience of conscience. On a number of occasions throughout his life, he offered differing accounts of the reason for this failure. So, for example, he speaks of conscience’s lack of a sanction, beyond itself, for its elevated claims about the Moral Governor and Judge.⁴⁷ These are therefore prey to societal pressures and to the individual’s own inclination to abandon the moral ideal as impracticable.⁴⁸ In an early University sermon (and, it would seem, again in the Grammar), Newman maintains that it is, above all, the obscurity of the object of one’s religious instincts and aspirations, that is, the dearth of information about God’s ‘personality’, which saps one’s moral resolve and raises the spectre of the futility of the moral and religious enterprise.⁴⁹ In the Grammar and, to some extent, in the Parochial and Plain Sermons, and in The Arians of the Fourth Century it is the sense of one’s culpability and one’s inadequacy to the moral task which exposes natural religion’s inherent insufficiency.⁵⁰ In all three cases, Newman proposes that the only adequate complement to the essentially incomplete natural religion of man is ‘revealed’ religion, which is to say, ‘the doctrine taught in the Mosaic and Christian dispensation, and contained in the Holy Scriptures’, which does not supplant, but builds on, nature’s authentic teaching.⁵¹ That ‘religion’ is the subject of the following section.

Revelation and the Christian religion

The ‘idea’ of Christianity

Christianity, for Newman, is not the mere perfection of humanity’s natural religious instincts, though it does involve the perfection of all the authentic elements of natural religion. It is the introduction into history of something hitherto unknown. It is a revelation of God that would be unthinkable were it not already realized in the person of Jesus, and ‘re-presented in the Church by means of certain sacramental “extensions of the Incarnation”’.⁵² According to Newman, Christianity has provided us with a fuller vision of the divine person than conscience ever could. Great though our (potential) knowledge of God may be under natural religion, Newman reflects, it is but ‘twilight’ in comparison to ‘the fullness and exactness’ of ‘our mental image of the Divine Personality and Attributes’ furnished by ‘the light of Christianity’. Newman actually speaks of an ‘addition’ to our image of God, and maintains that it is ‘one main purpose’ of revealed religion to ‘give us a clear and sufficient object for our faith’. Indeed, ‘the Gospels . . . contain a manifestation of the Divine Nature, so special, as to make it appear from the contrast as if nothing were known of God, when they are unknown’.⁵³

Christianity is a ‘revelatio revelata’,

a definite message from God to man conveyed distinctly by His chosen instruments, and to be received as such a message; and therefore to be positively acknowledged, embraced, and maintained as true, on the ground of its being divine, not as true on intrinsic grounds, not as probably true, or partially true, but as absolutely certain knowledge . . . because it comes from Him who can neither deceive nor be deceived.⁵⁴

Christian faith is not simply the recognition of the suitability of certain doctrines to the human condition; nor does it emerge naturally out of the experience of conscience. It is instead a response to God’s unprecedented action in history in Jesus Christ.⁵⁵ Newman’s theology is radically incarnational. ‘All the providences of God centre’ in Christ, he wrote in the Grammar.⁵⁶ His salvific work ‘is the sole Meritorious Cause, the sole Source of spiritual blessing to our guilty race’,⁵⁷ and the Church, especially via its sacramental life, exists to render that blessing accessible to humanity.⁵⁸ As Ian Ker has pointed out, Newman did not hesitate to ally himself, as a Catholic, with the view of Duns Scotus, against Thomas Aquinas, that the Incarnation would have taken place even if humanity had never sinned.⁵⁹ The ‘various economies of salvation’ find their focus in the Christ-event. The Incarnation constitutes the unifying principle of salvation history in all its diversity.⁶⁰ Hence, Newman is quite insistent that faith in Christ and a share in the Church’s life are the ‘ordinary’ and most reliable way to salvation.⁶¹

It is, above all, the radically ‘historical’ character of Christian teaching, its rootedness in concrete facts and historical events which, according to Newman, accounts for its appeal to the beleaguered practitioner of natural religion.

Revelation meets us with simple and distinct facts and actions, not with painful inductions from existing phenomena, not with generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures, but with Jesus and the Resurrection . . . The life of Christ brings together and concentrates truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which wander idle and forlorn over the surface of the moral world, and often appear to diverge from each other.⁶²

‘The revealed facts are special and singular’,⁶³ though the ‘principles’ these facts display are manifest in natural religion as well. So, for example, ‘the doctrine of the Incarnation is a fact, and cannot be paralleled by anything in nature; the doctrine of Mediation is a principle, and is abundantly exemplified in its provisions’.⁶⁴ Revelation ‘conveys the “things” of heaven, unseen verities, divine manifestations, and them alone – not the ideas, the feelings, [or] the aspirations of its human instruments’.⁶⁵ Since it consists of ‘facts revealed to us [which] are not of this world, not of time, but of eternity . . . and essential in themselves’,⁶⁶ revelation is ‘objective truth’.⁶⁷ It exists ‘in itself, external to this or that particular mind’.⁶⁸

The ‘res revelata’ (‘things revealed’) are communicated through human signs, words, and events. These media are inadequate to the great truth of which they are the vehicles, but without them there would be no communication of the truth at all. ‘Such sentences as “the Word was God” . . . or the Word was made flesh . . . are not a mere letter which we may handle by the rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined, according to its measure in the believing mind.’⁶⁹ In short, ‘our ideas of Divine things are just co-extensive with the figures by which we express them’.⁷⁰

In the Incarnation of Christ, above all, ‘the revealed doctrine . . . takes its true shape, and receives an historical reality; and the Almighty is introduced into His own world at a certain time and in a definite way’, namely, ‘in the form and history of man’.⁷¹ For Newman, Christ is the perfect realization of the sacramental principle – in Him, God is visibly and tangibly active in history. ‘Surely His very presence was a Sacrament’, writes Newman. In Him, ‘God has made history to be doctrine’.⁷² The Incarnation is an unparalleled ‘theological-historical’ fact, that is to say, an historical event charged with theological significance.

Speaking of the Christian appropriation of God’s self-disclosure through the Incarnation, Newman observes that ‘the original instrument’ of conversion and the ‘principle of fellowship’ among the first Christians was the ‘Thought or Image of Christ’. Moreover, he argues, this ‘central Image’ continues to serve as the ‘vivifying idea both of the Christian body and of individuals in it’.⁷³ The ‘image’ or ‘idea’ of Christ (Newman uses these words interchangeably) is the principle of Christian fraternity. As Newman expresses it:

[Christ] is found, through His preachers, to have imprinted the Image or idea of Himself in the minds of His subjects individually; and that Image, apprehended and worshipped in individual minds, becomes a principle of association, and a real bond of those subjects one with another, who are thus united to the body by being united to that Image; and moreover that Image, which is their moral life, when they have been already converted, is also the original instrument of their conversion. It is the Image of Him who fulfils the one great need of human nature, the Healer of its wounds, the Physician of the soul, this Image it is which both creates faith, and then rewards it.⁷⁴

The Church and the idea of Christianity

The Christian ‘idea’, in its completeness, is the possession of the Church viewed in its entirety. It exists in the ‘mind of the Church’, as the correlate to the ‘fact of revelation’, in the fashion of the image or impression which the individual mind forms of material objects. Newman acknowledges that ‘religious impressions’ may be made on the mind by ‘supernatural’ operations on the part of the Divine, such as those presumably manifest in the process of ‘inspiration’, or by ‘illuminating grace’ at baptism. However, in keeping with his general principle that God usually acts ‘through, with, and beneath those physical, social, and moral laws, of which our experience informs us’,⁷⁵ Newman insists that the ‘secondary and intelligible’ means by which one receives the ‘impression of Divine Verities’, are, for instance, ‘the habitual and devout perusal of Scripture . . . the gradual influence of intercourse with those who are in themselves in possession of sacred ideas . . . the study of Dogmatic Theology . . . a continual round of devotion, or again, sometimes, in minds both fitly disposed and apprehensive, the almost instantaneous operation of a keen faith’.⁷⁶

The idea is not, properly speaking, the object of faith. It is, however, the means by which the object of faith is apprehended. In the words of Coulson, ‘an “idea” is not reality at its most real but an image of what acts upon us in the manner of objects of sense-perception’.⁷⁷ Christianity is at once possessed of, and possessed by, the ‘idea’ of the Incarnate Christ (Newman’s preferred focus for the appropriation of the mystery of Christ).⁷⁸ This ‘idea’ was communicated to the apostles ‘per modum unius’ in and through Jesus’s life, death and resurrection (though their knowledge of it was to a great extent implicit), and thereafter preserved, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, in the mind of the Church as a permanent and integral ‘idea’, ‘impression’, or ‘image’ (1843),⁷⁹ or as a ‘deep internal sense’ (1847),⁸⁰ or as a ‘real apprehension’ (1870).⁸¹

The ‘idea’ realizes itself in the Church’s life and history as the shared property of the whole body of the faithful and as the principle of their union. It is manifest in their communal life, the shared life of the pastors and the faithful (‘pastorum ac fidelium conspiratio’) – such that communal witness is the only truly adequate criterion for determining what belongs to the idea and what is foreign to it. Though this latter insight – in fact, the theory of reception – only found explicit expression in Newman’s Catholic works such as ‘On Consulting the Faithful’, and in his correspondence relative to Vatican I, it is implicit in the Essay on Development which, as Lord Acton observed, employs the ancient maxim that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’.⁸² Lash observes that ‘it is fundamental to [Newman’s] argument [in the Essay on Development] that the gospel is communicated to, and lives in, the church as a whole’,⁸³ and Coulson rightly observes that, for Newman, ‘Christ is not encountered directly or introspectively as an “alter ego”, but always through the Church as a public body”.⁸⁴

Nicholas Lash has argued that, in the final analysis, the dynamism and organizing power of the Christian idea is born of its foundation in the risen Christ, God’s living Word in history. It is this same rootedness in Christ which accounts for Newman’s tendency ‘to express the transcendence of the “idea” by hypostatizing, or personalizing it’.⁸⁵ The true ‘object’ of the Christian ‘idea’, then, is Christ Himself, the living Word of God who ‘exists underneath and before all of the expressions which Christians have invented to expound it’.⁸⁶ He is the ground, the source of coherence, and the continuing dynamic, of Christian life and reflection, in and through which He is now known and apprehended.

The idea of Christianity and the Church’s doctrinal tradition

The need to communicate the original apostolic experience, and the natural penchant of the mind for conceptualization and systematization (which is particularly evident in the case of heresies) entailed that attempts were quickly made to cast the grounding ‘idea’ in the form of meaningful propositions. In his fifteenth University sermon, Newman observed that,

the mind which is habituated to the thought of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, naturally turns . . . with a devout curiosity to the contemplation of the Object of its adoration, and begins to form statements concerning Him before it knows whither, or how far, it will be carried. One proposition necessarily leads to another, and a second to a third; then some limitation is required; and the combinations of these opposites occasion some fresh evolutions from the original idea, which indeed can never be said to be entirely exhausted. This process is its development, and results in a series, or rather body of dogmatic statements, till what was at first an impression on the Imagination become a system or creed in the Reason.⁸⁷

A dogmatic statement is, then, the fruit of the interaction between the imagination and the reason. In the words of John Coulson, these ‘are to each other as implicit to explicit, inarticulate to articulate, and pre-conceptual to conceptual. They modulate into each other, therefore, and may be said to share a common grammar.’ In view of this fact, as Coulson points out, Newman ‘does not press the distinction between assents to the primary forms of religious faith (expressed in metaphor, symbol, and story), and to the beliefs and doctrines derived from them’.⁸⁸

This explains why, in the Grammar of Assent, Newman argues that a religious truth-claim (such as, ‘The Son is God’) can be held ‘either as a theological truth, or as a religious fact or reality’. In the first instance, ‘the proposition is apprehended for the purposes of proof, analysis, comparison and the like intellectual exercises’. That is to say, it is regarded ‘as the expression of a notion’. In the second instance, the proposition is apprehended ‘for the purposes of devotion’. In this case, it is ‘the image of a reality’.⁸⁹ According to Newman, religion ‘lives and thrives in the contemplation’ of images. It is this which provides the believer with ‘motives for devotion and faithful obedience’. Precisely because it is ‘an image living within us’, precisely because it occupies ‘a place in the imagination and the heart’,⁹⁰ a dogmatic proposition, such as the claim that ‘the Son is God’, is able to ‘work a revolution in the mind’, to inflame the heart, and to shape our conduct.⁹¹

This is not – and need not – be the case where the same proposition is looked upon as the expression of a notion and subjected to critical scrutiny. Indeed, Newman observes that the application of the intellect to religious issues may well issue in a diminishment of lively faith. ‘In the religious world’, he observes, ‘no one seems to look for any great devotion or fervour in controversialists . . . theologians, and the like, it being taken for granted, rightly or wrongly, that such men are too intellectual to be spiritual, and are more occupied with the truth of doctrine than with its reality’.⁹²

That being said, however, Newman’s religious and theological ideal was a tensile or polar unity between both activities – ‘religion using theology, and theology using religion’.⁹³ It is against this background that we must understand Newman’s celebrated remark to the effect that, ‘From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery’.⁹⁴ Dogmas, Newman explains, are related to specific ‘facts’, to events in history and to realities which precede us and which call for an appropriate response. These ‘facts’ are the foundation and the object of any and every sentiment, thought, and action which might be characterized as authentically religious.

Despite his insistence on the necessity of dogma as a pointer towards the appropriate response to God’s revelatory deeds in history, Newman was profoundly aware of the limitations of every doctrinal formulation. As he explained:

No revelation can be complete and systematic, from the weakness of the human intellect. When nothing is revealed, nothing is known, and there is nothing to contemplate or marvel at; but when something is revealed, and only something for all cannot be, there are forthwith difficulties and perplexities. A Revelation is religious doctrine viewed on its illuminated side; a Mystery is the selfsame doctrine viewed on the side unilluminated. Thus Religious Truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, with forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines, and isolated masses. Revelation, in this way of considering it, is not a revealed ‘system’, but consists of a number of detached and incomplete truths belonging to a vast system unrevealed, of doctrines and injunctions mysteriously connected together; that is, connected by unknown media, and bearing upon unknown portions of the system.⁹⁵

Christian faith in revelation is therefore not reducible to the acknowledgement of a body of dogmatic propositions. Already in 1840, Newman had observed that, ‘No analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state of mind under which we believe or the subjects of belief, as they are presented to our thoughts’.⁹⁶ Writing in 1858, Newman had pondered Christianity’s ‘poetic’ and therefore ‘immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, [and] mysterious’ character. Poetry, Newman wrote, ‘does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, and love’.⁹⁷ Elsewhere, Newman observed that ‘Revealed Religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact’.⁹⁸

The Church requires both the poetical spirit (represented by St Benedict) and the scientific spirit (represented by St Dominic), as well as the spirit of pragmatism (exemplified in Ignatius of Loyola). ‘Imagination, Science, Prudence, are all good’, Newman declares, and the Church ‘has them all’. ‘Things incompatible in nature, coexist in her.’ ‘Her prose is poetical on the one hand, and philosophical on the other.’⁹⁹

The ideal which Newman espoused for the Church, as it seeks to appropriate the great gift of revelation, was the union of ‘clear heads and holy hearts’,¹⁰⁰ that is to say, the union of critical intellection and deeply held faith. This is what Newman had in mind when he spoke, in the Grammar, of ‘the theology of a religious imagination’.¹⁰¹ One of the fruits of the achievement of this ideal would be a profound sensitivity to the limitations of each and every articulation of the faith, whether by an individual theologian or by the Church in the exercise of its teaching authority.

In a letter to an agnostic correspondent, dated 29 April 1879, Newman wrote: ‘What then you say of mechanical science, I say emphatically of theology, viz. that it “makes progress by being always alive to its own fundamental uncertainties”’.¹⁰² The most stirring statement of this principle can be found in papers preparatory to the Grammar which date from 1863. There, reflecting on the poverty of our language when it is called upon to express the ‘real thing’¹⁰³ which is the object of Christian faith, Newman lays down what might be described as a ‘charter’ for the exercise of both the individual and the communal intellect. The essence of that charter is the willingness to live with the limitations that inevitably accompany the science of God, and, even more, to see in them some clue to God’s very being. Newman writes as follows:

From the nature of the case, all our language about Almighty God, so far as it is affirmative, is analogical and figurative. We can only speak of Him, whom we reason about but have not seen, in terms of our experience. When we reflect on Him and put into words our thoughts about Him, we are forced to transfer to a new meaning ready made words, which primarily belong to objects of time and place. We are aware, while we do so, that they are inadequate, but we have the alternative of doing so, or doing nothing at all. We can only remedy their insufficiency by confessing it. We can do no more than put ourselves on the guard as to our own proceeding, and protest against it, while we do . . . it. We can only set right one error of expression by another. By this method of antagonism we steady our minds, not so as to reach their object, but to point them in the right direction; as in an algebraical process we might add and subtract in series, approximating little by little, by saying and unsaying, to a positive result.¹⁰⁴

Revelation in human history

A great idea, such as the ‘idea’ of Christianity, does not unfold itself in the mind alone. ‘In proportion to its native vigour and subtlety’, it will ‘introduce itself into the framework and details of social life’, thereby realizing itself in a whole range of social forms, such as ethical codes, systems of government or thought, ritual practices, and so on.¹⁰⁵ These, in turn, shape the way in which the idea is manifest, influencing its development for better or worse as the case may be.¹⁰⁶ Christianity, Newman wrote, had first appeared ‘as a worship, springing up and spreading in the lower ranks of society . . . Then it seized upon the intellectual and cultivated class, and created a theology and schools of learning. Lastly it seated itself, as an ecclesiastical polity, among princes, and chose Rome for its centre.’¹⁰⁷

Christianity is, accordingly, a complex, comprehensive fact of history, and its invigorating ‘idea’ is subject to history’s permutations and convolutions.¹⁰⁸ This is indeed the case with any ‘philosophy [idea] or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has any wide or extended dominion’.¹⁰⁹ In the case of Christianity, however, the question of the impact of history on the ‘idea’ embodied therein is particularly acute, since the Churches allege – and justify their existence by an appeal to – a real and unbroken continuity between ‘the religion taught by Christ and His apostles’ and their own.

Newman struggled with the inescapable ambiguity of Christian revelation – namely, that while it is very much a matter of human words and their history, it is ultimately the history of the Word. He himself was not prepared ‘to abandon the tension between immutability and change, between the transcendent and the historical’, which this entailed.¹¹⁰ He was, therefore, obliged to provide an account of how revelation could be preserved in a changing world that was scarred by human sinfulness. Only by doing so could he justify the claim, made in the Essay on Development, that the whole ‘superstructure’ of Christian tradition (‘this body of thought . . . laboriously gained’) – is ‘the proper representative of one idea, being in substance what that idea meant from the first, its complete image as seen in a combination of diversified aspects, with the suggestions and corrections of many minds, and the illustration of many experiences’.¹¹¹ Newman poses the problem quite directly:

If Christianity be a social religion, as it certainly is, and if it be based on certain ideas acknowledged as divine, or a creed (which shall here be assumed) and if these ideas have various aspects, and make distinct impressions on different minds, and issue in consequence in a multiplicity of developments, true, or false, or mixed . . . what power will suffice to meet and to do justice to these conflicting conditions?¹¹²

Newman’s answer to his own question was the Church, understood as a community invested with authority. As an Anglican, Newman identified the Church’s authority primarily with its ‘rule of faith’ which he regarded as apostolic in origin. This ‘rule of faith’, succinctly expressed in the ‘Creed’, had been ‘committed and received from Bishop to Bishop’ (hence, Newman called it the ‘episcopal tradition’), and ‘expounded’ by so-called ‘prophets’ (or teachers) who ‘unfold and define its mysteries’ (these expositions constituted what Newman called ‘prophetical tradition’).¹¹³

In the course of writing his Essay on Development, however, Newman came to the conclusion that ‘tradition’ alone did not suffice to guarantee the transmission of the apostolic faith. There was, he claimed, also need for ‘a supreme authority ruling and reconciling individual judgments by a divine right and a recognised wisdom’,¹¹⁴ ‘an infallible expounder’ of Christian truth.¹¹⁵ As he puts it, ‘A revelation is not given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given’.¹¹⁶ In his Essay on Development, he observed that the perception of the need for such an authority can be antecedent to its identification, and has, in fact, called forth a variety of solutions.¹¹⁷ Newman, however, finds it self-evident that ‘if development must be, then, whereas Revelation is a heavenly gift, He who gave it virtually has not given it, unless He has also secured it from perversion and corruption’.¹¹⁸

Accordingly, Newman identifies as the very ‘essence’ of revealed religion ‘the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop’, and this as a ‘substitute’ for ‘the voice of conscience’ that is paramount in ‘natural religion’.¹¹⁹ One might venture to say that, for Newman, as far as Christianity is understood in relation to natural religion, the terms ‘revelation’ and ‘authority’ are interchangeable. He himself writes that ‘Revelation consists in . . . the substitution of the voice of a Lawgiver for the voice of conscience’.¹²⁰ The ‘subjective authority’ of the natural order has been replaced by an ‘objective’ authority in the revealed order – be it ‘the voice of Scripture, or of the Church, or of the Holy See’.¹²¹

In any case, natural religion itself is not subject-centred, if by this one means ‘ego-centred’. It is, from the outset, directed to the (generally fearsome) deity revealed in the experience of conscience. Moreover, precisely insofar as conscience ‘reaches forward to something beyond itself, and dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions’,¹²² it already involves what Erich Przywara describes as an ‘anticipation’ of the divine authority exercised by an authoritative Church.¹²³ It is in view of the sameness, as it were, in fundamental ‘orientation’ – i.e., towards an authority beyond self – that exists between natural and revealed religion, that Newman, fully cognizant of the absolutely unique and unmerited character of revelation, can write that both conscience and revelation ‘recognize and bear witness to each other’.¹²⁴

The guide of life, implanted in our nature, discriminating right from wrong, and investing right with authority and sway, is our Conscience, which Revelation does but enlighten, strengthen, and refine . . . Nature warrants without anticipating the Supernatural, and the Supernatural completes without superseding Nature.¹²⁵

Newman’s vision of the integral union between natural and revealed – i.e., dogmatic – religion leads Przywara to describe him, most aptly, as ‘the great synthesizer of interiority and the Church’.¹²⁶ In the same vein, Otto Karrer observed that, in Newman’s conception of things, the fruitful and life-giving tension between authority on the one hand, and personal thought and conscience on the other, is part of the whole system of religion.¹²⁷ Indeed, as Przywara observes, in Newman’s scheme, these two constitute ‘one living principle’ of revelation, revelation promised and initiated in conscience, and brought to completion in the doctrine of Christ which the Church proclaims.¹²⁸

Notes

1. P.N., ii:43. See also ii:31–3.

2. P.N., ii:71; see also ii:33, 43, 45, 63, 83.

3. G.A., 107; see also 105; P.N., ii:49.

4. G.A., 106.

5. G.A., 110.

6. G.A., 109.

7. J. H. Walgrave, ‘La preuve de l’existence de Dieu par la conscience morale et l’experience des valeurs’, in L’existence de Dieu, Cahiers de l’actualité religieuse, no. 16 (Paris: Casterman, 1961), 117.

8. J. H. Walgrave, Newman vandaag, Periodieke uitgave van het Geert Groote Genootschap, no. 698 (Marienburg- and Hertogenbosch, 1957), 25.

9. G.A., 116. See also U.S., 80–1.

10. P.N., ii:59: ‘[As] our consciousness [of thought] is a reflex act implying existence (I think, therefore, I am), so this sensation of conscience is the recognition of our obligation the notion of an external being obliging, I say this, not from any abstract argument from the force of the terms (e.g., “a law implies a lawgiver”) but the peculiarity of that feeling to which I give the name of Conscience’.

11. Apo., 4.

12. Apo., 198.

13. G.A., 105, 60.

14. Prepos., 279.

15. G.A., 349.

16. Prepos., 279: ‘From what I have said, it is plain that First Principles may be false or true; indeed, this is my very point, as you will presently see. Certainly they are not necessarily true; and again, certainly there are ways of unlearning them when they are false: moreover, as regards moral and religious First Principles which are false, of course a Catholic considers that no one holds them except by some fault of his own.’ These words date from 1851. By the time Newman came to write the Grammar of Assent (1870), he expressed himself much more cautiously regarding the problem of defectiveness in first principles, and recognized the possibility of inculpable error. See G.A., 241, 249, 259. The ‘decisiveness’ of Newman’s position in the 1851 lectures must be viewed in the light of the apologetic character of the lectures, and his status as a convert, that is to say, his concern not to seem to call into doubt traditional thinking.

17. J. H. Walgrave, ‘Conscience de soi et conscience de Dieu: Notes sur le “Cahier philosophique” de Newman’, Thomist 71 (1971), 377.

18. G.A., 46–7, 71–3. For a discussion of ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’ in Newman, see Father Zeno, Our Way to Certitude (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957), 95–7.

19. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols. (London: Rivington, 1868), ii:61.

20. G.A., 105–10. The sanction is ‘conveyed in the feelings which attend on right or wrong conduct’ (106).

21. G.A., 106–14.

22. G.A., 110 (emphasis added). For an extensive discussion of the nature and function of the imagination in Newman’s work, see Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs, 7 (Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 48–81, 177–8, 186–92; Merrigan, ‘The Image of the Word: John Henry Newman and John Hick on the Place of Christ in Christianity’, in T. Merrigan and Ian Ker (eds.), Newman and the Word (Louvain: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 1–47.

23. See, in this regard, G.A., 389; see also 55, 98–102, 119.

24. Apo., 27.

25. Ari., 80–2. See also Ess., ii:231–2, where Newman speaks of the ‘seeds of truth’ in ‘the philosophies and religions of men . . . though they are not directly divine’. See Ian Ker, ‘Newman and the Postconciliar Church’, in Stanley L. Jaki (ed.), Newman Today (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 124, who points out that Newman’s acknowledgement of elements of truth in paganism led him ‘to what was then the radical conclusion that the Christian apologist or missionary should, “after St Paul’s manner, seek some points in the existing superstitions as the basis of his own instructions, instead of indiscriminately condemning and discarding the whole assemblage of heathen opinions and practices”, thus “recovering and purifying, rather than reversing the essential principles of their belief”’. See Ari., 80–1, 84. Compare Newman’s remarks in this regard and Vatican II’s Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church (Ad Gentes), no. 9: ‘Whatever truth and grace are already to be found among peoples – a secret presence of God, so to speak – it [missionary activity] frees from evil infections and restores to Christ their source . . . accordingly, whatever good is found to be sown in the minds and hearts of human beings or in the particular rites and cultures of peoples, not only does not perish but is healed, elevated and perfected, to the glory of God, the confusion of the devil and the happiness of humankind’.

26. Ari., 79, 81. See Erwin Ender, ‘Heilsökonomie und Rechtfertigung: Zur Heilsfrage im Leben und Denken Newmans’, in H. Fries, W. Becker, et al. (eds.), Newman Studien (Heroldsberg bei Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1948– ), x:164 n. 32. As Ender points out, Newman in his later writings (V.M., i:248) does not speak of the ‘divinity of paganism’, but of the ‘doctrine . . . of the indirectly divine character of Paganism’, as opposed to ‘the exclusive divinity of the Mosaic theology’ (U.S., 164).

27. Ari., 79–80. See Francis McGrath, John Henry Newman: Universal Revelation (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1997), 42.

28. Ender, ‘Heilsökonomie und Rechtfertigung’, 155.

29. Ess., ii:192.

30. Idea, 65–6; Ari., 82; see Ender, ‘Heilsökonomie und Rechtfertigung’, 156.

31. P.S., i:275.

32. S.N., 328.

33. Diff., ii:335.

34. See Terrence Merrigan, ‘The Anthropology of Conversion: Newman and the Contemporary Theology of Religions’, in Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 117–44.

35. Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 52.

36. Ess., ii:194–5.

37. Ess., ii:231–2. See G.A., 386, where Newman claims that ‘Our Supreme Master might have imparted to us truths which nature cannot teach us, without telling us that He had imparted them, – as is actually the case now as regards heathen countries, into which portions of revealed truth overflow and penetrate, without their populations knowing whence those truths came’.

38. Ess., ii:233.

39. G.A., 115.

40. G.A., 116.

41. G.A., 113–14. See also Terrence Merrigan, ‘“One Momentous Doctrine which Enters into my Reasoning”: The Unitive Function of Newman’s Doctrine of Providence’, Downside Review 108 (1990), 254–81. Note that on p. 59 of the Grammar of Assent Newman places the ‘thought’ of ‘Divine Goodness’ before the thought of ‘future reward,’ or ‘eternal life’ as objects of real assent. See our discussion of this point in Terrence Merrigan, ‘“Numquam minus solus quam cum solus”: Newman’s First Conversion – Its Significance for His Life and Thought’, Downside Review 103 (1985), 99–116, at 106–7.

42. J. H. Walgrave, ‘Newman’s leer over het geweten’, in G. De Schrijver and J. J. Kelly (eds.), Selected Writings – Thematische Geschriften (Leuven: Peeters, 1982), 195.

43. G.A., 400–3.

44. G.A., 422–3. See also Dis., 277–9.

45. G.A., 403–5.

46. G.A., 404, 417–18.

47. Mir., 19–20; U.S., 26–7; O.S., 66; Idea, 515–16; L.D., xxvii:54–5; Diff., ii:253–4; D.A., 133; Ari., 80–1.

48. U.S., 23; Mir., 19; Diff., ii:253–4; Idea, 515–16; P.S., ii:103; H.S., iii:79–81.

49. U.S., 26–7; S.N., 302; G.A., 118.

50. G.A., 487; P.S., ii:155; Ari., 146; L.D., xxvii:55.

51. Ari., 79. See also U.S., 24, 115–18, 242–50; Ess., i:22; P.S., i:320–4; ii:18–19; Apo., 46. See also Merrigan, ‘One Momentous Doctrine’, 265–6.

52. E. R. Fairweather, ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Movement, Library of Protestant Thought, ed. J. Dillenberger et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 11.

53. G.A., 118.

54. G.A., 387 (emphasis added).

55. Ess., i:39.

56. G.A., 57.

57. P.S., ii:304.

58. See on this theme, Ian Ker, Healing the Wound of Humanity: The Spirituality of John Henry Newman (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1993), 60–7; see also Ender, ‘Heilsökonomie und Rechtfertigung’, 160–1.

59. Ian Ker, Newman on Being a Christian (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 41–2; see also Ker, Healing the Wound of Humanity, 27–8; Mix., 321–2, 358.

60. See Ender, ‘Heilsökonomie und Rechtfertigung’, 158–9.

61. See Ender, ‘Heilsökonomie und Rechtfertigung’, 160–3. Newman insists that the Roman Catholic Church is the only ‘religious body . . . in which is salvation’. (See L.D., xxvi:364; xxx:33–4; emphasis in original.) However, he also insists that the teaching, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, did not apply to people in invincible ignorance. See L.D., xxv:71. For a full discussion of Newman’s views and their relevance to contemporary theology of religions, see Merrigan, ‘The Anthropology of Conversion’, 117–44; Merrigan, ‘Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions in the Light of the Theology of John Henry Newman’, Irish Theological Quarterly 68 (2003), 343–56.

62. Mix., 347; U.S., 27 (emphasis in the original).

63. Dev., 84.

64. Dev., 85. See also U.S., 31; Ari., 134: ‘ The great doctrines of the faith . . . were facts, not opinions’. See also Diff., ii:86: ‘Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part, it tells us of persons and facts in simple words.’ See also D.A., 241.

65. Idea, 290.

66. Ess., i:69–70.

67. Ess., i:34.

68. Ess., i:134, 47; see also Dev., 55, 79.

69. U.S., 334.

70. U.S., 338; see D.A., 241–2.

71. Mix., 347; P.S., ii:155, 32, 39; iii:156.

72. P.S., ii:62, 227; iii:114–15.

73. G.A., 464.

74. G.A., 464.

75. Ess., ii:190, 192.

76. U.S., 333. See also T.P., i:138, 132–3; P.S., iii:160–1, 169; G.A., 118–19; Perrone, 409–10, 436–7.

77. John Coulson, Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 64.

78. See Nicholas Lash, Newman on Development: The Search for an Explanation in History (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), 140–1: ‘Although, in 1845, Newman insisted that the task of ascertaining the “leading idea,” as it has been called, of Christianity . . . is beyond us . . .,’ in 1878 he admitted the propriety, “for the convenience of arrangement,” of considering “the Incarnation the central truth of the gospel, and the source whence we are to draw out its principles” (Dev., 324).’ Lash observes that ‘in making explicit that centrality of the fact and doctrine of the incarnation which most deeply characterises his conception of Christianity, Newman was not, in 1878 reversing the judgement made, in 1845, concerning the impossibility of ascertaining the “leading idea” of Christianity’. Lash sees the later emphasis as, in part, the consequence of ‘apologetic considerations’ (i.e., the refusal of Liberalism) and as, in any case, consistent with Newman’s constant ‘theological conviction’. He notes that Newman speaks of the doctrine of the Incarnation as the ‘central’, not the ‘leading’ idea.

79. Dev., 316, 320, 321, 323, 327, 329, 330.

80. John Henry Newman, Roman Catholic Writings on Doctrinal Development, trans. and comm. James Gaffney (London: Sheed & Ward, 1997), 19: ‘Initially the word of God enters the mind of the Catholic world through the ears of faith. It penetrates that mind, recedes inside it, and remains hidden there, becoming a kind of deep internal sense. It is brought into play by the ministering and teaching Church.’

81. G.A., 22–30. For a discussion of the role of ‘real apprehension’ in the assent of faith, see Terrence Merrigan, ‘Newman on Faith in the Trinity,’ in Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (eds.), Newman and Faith, Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs, 31 (Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), 93–116, especially 96–9.

82. See, for example, G.A., 464–6, especially 466; Cons., 464–6. The quote from Acton is taken from his Lectures on the French Revolution, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Lawrence (London, 1932), 17, and is contained in Lash, Newman on Development, 134.

83. Lash, Newman on Development, 134 (emphasis added).

84. Coulson, Common Tradition, 64.

85. Nicholas Lash, Change in Focus (London: Sheed & Ward, 1973), 92; Newman on Development, 74–5, 48.

86. H. Francis Davis, ‘Newman and the Theology of the Living Word’, in Newman Studien, vi:171, 173.

87. U.S., 329.

88. John Coulson, Religion and Imagination: ‘In Aid of a Grammar of Assent’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 51.

89. G.A., 119.

90. G.A., 140.

91. G.A., 126.

92. G.A., 216. For a consideration of the polar character of Newman’s thought, see Terrence Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts.

93. V.M., i:xlvii. See Terrence Merrigan, ‘Newman’s Experience of God: An Interpretive Model’, Bijdragen 48 (1987), 444–64; Merrigan, ‘Newman on the Practice of Theology’, Louvain Studies 14 (1989), 260–84.

94. Apo., 49.

95. Ess., i:41–2.

96. U.S., 267.

97. H.S., ii:387.

98. Ess., i:23.

99. H.S., ii:369.

100. V.M., l:lxxv. See also 1:xlviii.

101. G.A., 117.

102. L.D., xxix:118.

103. T.P., i:98.

104. T.P., i:102 (emphasis added). For a reflection on the implications of this view for the relationship between the theologian and the Church, see Terrence Merrigan, ‘Newman and Theological Liberalism’, Theological Studies 66 (2005), 605–21.

105. Dev., 37.

106. Dev., 38–9, 92.

107. V. M., i:41; see also Dev., 77–8.

108. Dev., 39.

109. Dev., 29.

110. Lash, Newman on Development, 53.

111. See Dev., 36, 38 (emphasis added). In Dev., 36 Newman equates a ‘living idea’ with an ‘active principle’. Elsewhere in his writings (D.A., 379; G.A., 465–6; Jfc., 53, 198; P.S., ii:288; iv:170, 315; v:41, 93; vii:208–9; U.S., 29), he refers to the presence of Christ and His Spirit as the ‘principle’ of Christianity. See Lash, Newman on Development, 106–9. There are at least some grounds for thinking that ‘complete’ here (Dev., 38) means not so much ‘definitive’ as ‘adequate’. Seen in this light, the life of the contemporary Church can be regarded as an adequate ‘representative’ of the ‘idea’, just as the patristic Church was (and Newman clearly thought it was). In other words, it would seem that there is, in Newman, a tendency to see the Church, as ‘realization’ of the idea, in terms of a sort of ‘continuum’, that is to say, as ‘sufficient’ at any given moment.

112. Dev., 89.

113. V. M., i:249–50.

114. Dev., 89.

115. Dev., 90.

116. Dev., 89.

117. Dev., 31, 86, 87–8.

118. Dev., 92.

119. Dev., 86.

120. Dev., 86.

121. Dev., 86.

122. G.A., 107.

123. Erich Przywara, ‘Newman: Möglicher Heiliger und Kirchenlehrer der neuen Zeit?’ in Newman Studien, iii:31.

124. H.S., iii:79.

125. H.S., iii:79; see Diff., ii:252–3.

126. Przywara, ‘Newman: Möglicher Heiliger?’, iii:31.

127. Otto Karrer, ‘Die geistige Crise des Abendlandes nach Newman’, Newman Studien, i:276.

128. Przywara, ‘Newman: Möglicher Heiliger’, iii:31.