Section 19
12 Preaching
Denis
Robinson
Few preachers in the history of the Church, and even fewer from the nineteenth century have enjoyed as far-reaching and long-lasting a reputation as John Henry Newman. First as an Anglican pastor and then as a Roman Catholic priest, Newman’s sermons provided and continue to provide spiritual and enlightening reading more than 100 years after his death. Much of this is undoubtedly due to Newman’s great facility with language. Equally, however, this fame must be attributed to Newman’s unique method, the particularities of which are only becoming apparent in our time, in light of contemporary homiletic theory. Like many of his contemporaries, Newman published his sermons. The first volume of Parochial and Plain Sermons appeared in 1834.1 Additional volumes continued to be published and remained in print throughout Newman’s life. Newman also published other volumes of sermons and hundreds of his sermons remain unpublished in manuscript form in the archives of the Birmingham Oratory. Newman was a popular preacher, attracting great crowds to his Sunday sermons in St Mary’s University church in Oxford and later at Littlemore, and still later at the Oratory in Birmingham. Newman’s preaching struck a chord with his age, and any appreciation of his preaching must be seen in light of its original, nineteenth-century, British context.
This chapter will explore the preaching of Newman in three steps. First, we will provide a brief examination of the context of Newman’s preaching. Second, we will examine Newman’s preaching method. Finally, the meaning of Newman’s preaching will be considered in light of its ultimate purpose, the realization of the first principle of Christianity, the Incarnation of the Word of God.
The context of Newman’s preaching
Newman’s preaching has been described as ‘reactionary’,2 in that he used his various pulpits as a means to confront the crises in the Anglican Church of his time as he understood them. The stimulus for the emergence of the Oxford Movement, which was dedicated to the reassertion of the Catholic character of the Church of England, was political in character, namely, the question of whether or not the Church should be established.3 In its early phase, the movement (also called Tractarianism) was intended to be a populist one, in line with the power of the ordinary Christian in the early Church, ‘as exemplified in the history of St Ambrose’.4 Tracts were the natural way of initiating a popular movement and arousing the interest of the people. Preaching was another way. In both endeavours, Newman proved himself to be a master strategist.5 This was true even before the formal inauguration of the Movement. ‘Although the sermons between 1829 and 1831 are a defence of a beleaguered, established, visible Church against intellectual heterodoxy and “schismatic” Dissent, this is not to say that Newman was unequivocally upholding the “powers that be”.’6 Rather, Newman’s preaching during this period was directed against both those who would compromise the authority of the Church and those who espoused a utilitarian culture of ‘national apostasy’. Newman was as appalled by the ‘comfortable’ and popular forms of the Christianity of his day as he was by the secularized government’s attempts to overwhelm the authority of the bishops.7 He was also convinced that the same challenges that had plagued the early Church were still present in his own age. Nevertheless, he maintained an absolute confidence in the capacity of committed believers to understand and assimilate Christian truth. The full force of the Scriptures and the tradition of antiquity must be brought to bear upon the contemporary situation. In Newman’s estimation, although the ways of approaching the task of preaching may have altered over time, the core issues remained the same.
One of the important writings in the development of Newman’s preaching was J. B. Sumner’s Treatise on Apostolical Preaching.8 Sumner’s work grounds not only the aims of preaching, but its style and techniques in patristic sources.9 Some important themes in Sumner were to be of lasting influence on Newman’s attitude towards the task of preaching. The first was a positive image of the assembly.10 Sumner proposed that the preachers of the post-New Testament period had a more or less positive attitude towards their assemblies. They did not see the hearers of the sermon as merely passive, but as able to participate and make judgements on their own. The second theme was of the understanding of preaching as a theological task. For Newman, this translated into the positive injunction to presume a certain level of sophistication among the congregants and a growing conviction that preaching is a theological task in its own right, a kind of performative theology worked out in the midst of the people.
The character of Newman’s preaching
In line with his conviction that preaching involved an appeal to the intellect, Newman was suspicious of the Evangelical understanding of preaching as emotional persuasion. For Newman, ‘preaching was not the way to convert people, but to prepare them for conversion’.11 It was part of a delicate and complex task of formation. Newman identifies the three qualities of a good sermon in Chapter 6 of The Idea of a University. First, a sermon must exhibit a sense of earnestness. This earnestness is expressed in a definiteness of purpose. For Newman this earnestness is bound up with the character of the preacher. Invoking Aristotle, Newman insists that persuasiveness is a direct result of ‘personal traits of an ethical nature evident in the orator’.12 Secondly, the sermon ought to convey a particular goal or aim on the part of the preacher. ‘As a marksman aims at the target and its bull’s-eye, and at nothing else, so the preacher must have a definite point before him, which he has to hit.’13 Finally, the sermon must be adapted to the needs of the specific audiences. For Newman this was a matter of observing that ‘personal influence requires personal acquaintance, and the minute labour a discretionary rule’.14 While Newman recognized a certain commonality among hearers in light of their shared condition as ‘children of Adam’, he nevertheless insisted that audiences varied and that the preacher had a responsibility to know the hearers. This was especially true regarding the ethical imperative in the sermon:
A preacher should be quite sure that he understands the persons he is addressing before he ventures to aim at what he considers to be their ethical condition; for, if he mistakes, he will probably be doing harm rather than good. I have known consequences to occur very far from edifying, when strangers have fancied they knew an auditory when they did not, and have by implication imputed to them habits or motives which were not theirs.15
What was it like to hear Newman preach?16
Newman’s preaching at St Mary’s became legendary and many descriptions were written of it, the most famous being Matthew Arnold’s retrospective romantic evocation of ‘the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music, – subtle, sweet, mournful’.17
As an Anglican, Newman preached almost every Sunday from the time he was ordained until his retirement to Littlemore in 1843. ‘The church was full when Newman preached, thronged usually by not less than 500 or 600 graduates, besides other members of the congregation’.18 His sermons were characterized by their clarity. ‘Newman’s sermons are distinguished not for vague platitudes and pious aspirations, but for their utter concreteness and definiteness.’19 This is especially true of the imaginative way in which Newman handled his texts. He was almost calculating in the presentation of his images and the dependability of his structure. The sermons, in their attention to structure and the careful handling of language, had the quality of poetry. This might be seen as a concrete expression of Newman’s conviction that religion was primarily poetical.20
The structure of Newman’s sermons
Newman almost invariably structured his sermons in the same way. The expository section of every sermon presents a dilemma, a problem to be resolved in the context of the life of the Church. These dilemmas vary widely from sermon to sermon, but Newman was determined that they must be made in some way real to the hearers, that is to say, something that touched on their daily lives. Even a casual glance at the Parochial and Plain Sermons reveals the technique at work.
The first four sermons of the fifth volume are the Advent sermons of 1839, which used a common text, Isaiah 33:17, ‘Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold the land that is very far off’. The first sermon, ‘Worship, A Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, presents the dilemma in terms of the darkness of the season and the promise of the coming of Christ in light. Newman first draws this out in terms of the order of nature, and then in terms of an analogy with the human spirit. The question of the sermon becomes: How does one reconcile the despair that is a real aspect of human life and the hope of the Christian promise? In the second sermon, ‘Reverence, A Belief in God’s Presence’, Newman creates a dilemma between two types of people mistaken about God’s forgiveness. In the third sermon, ‘Unreal Words’, the dilemma is presented in terms of the shadows of former times and the bounty of the Christological age to come. In the fourth Advent sermon, ‘Shrinking from Christ’s Coming’, he juxtaposes anticipation and fear. This presentation of a dilemma in the form of two terms or two images was Newman’s starting-point.
In the second part of each sermon, he expands upon the basic dilemma using vivid word-pictures, which, although drawn from the biblical texts, are invariably set up to link the biblical discourse with the situation in the Church of Newman’s time. This was Newman’s opportunity to demonstrate that he knew his hearers, sometimes uncomfortably well. It is easy to imagine that when Newman was in his high ironic form, these sections of his sermons could have been most uncomfortable for the assembly.
In the third section of each sermon, Newman applies the impact of the dilemma to his hearers. What does this dilemma mean to us? How are the hearers to respond to these images and these dilemmas? For the most part, Newman left this question unresolved or used it as a starting-point for subsequent sermons in a series.
Approaching the sermons of Newman, one notices the number of rhetorical devices he employed. These devices were employed to lure the hearer into a kind of dialogue with the preacher. They have the power not only to engage the hearer but at times even to shock.
One of these devices was the use of binaries and ternaries, combinations of two or three ideas or images. Newman often places two or three terms together, drawing dramatic contrasts and inviting comparison, yet remaining rather vague as regards the way in which the terms actually fit together. In fact, almost all of Newman’s sermons deal with an underlying primordial binary, the connection between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’.21 Often in Newman’s sermons, these binaries and ternaries are introduced and are either left unresolved or are resolved only in the context of the introduction of a further confounding element. It remains the task of the hearers (or readers) to discover how these elements are connected. For example, in the Advent sermons mentioned above, Newman uses the binary or the ternary device more than 150 times. These varied uses allow for a range of possible outcomes in terms of the assembly of the elements.
A second device Newman frequently employed might be described as hypertextuality. In postmodern literary theory, a hypertext is one which derives from or is related to other texts (if only by means of subtle allusions). In Newman’s case, hypertextuality seems to be an appropriate term to describe his practice of employing a word in two different ways or choosing a word that has a variety of meanings and which might therefore lead his hearers down completely different paths. This technique is at play in Newman’s Advent sermons, where he employs images that are able to evoke a variety of responses and thereby expand the possible horizons of meaning for the hearer.
A third device was Newman’s use of paradigmatic moments and figures from history that would resonate with the contemporary context and serve to illustrate a sermon’s purpose. So, for example, Newman might mention the word ‘Arian’ or ‘Alexandrian’ in a sermon to refer to the past, though it is clear that the example invoked would also serve to conjure up associations for the congregation of Newman’s time. The historical allusion has contemporary implications. This was one of Newman’s most frequently employed devices and was useful not only in the sermons, but in his discursive writings as well.
A fourth device used by Newman was the persistent counsel of patience on the part of his hearers.22 Indeed, patience and the concomitant theme of constancy were significant motifs in Newman’s sermons. He counselled, ‘Nothing is more difficult than to be disciplined and regular in our religion’.23 Too much of religion, in Newman’s estimation, was governed by ‘fits and starts’, themselves the products of presumptuous fancy and emotionalism. The key to the correct appropriation of religious truth was patience and perseverance. Where these are present, religious truth has the opportunity to penetrate the mind and the heart. ‘Is not holiness the result of many patient, repeated efforts after obedience, gradually working on us, and first modifying and then changing our hearts?’24
A final and crucial device employed by Newman was one that cannot be observed on the basis of a reading of his sermons, namely, his frequent and purposeful use of pauses, ‘which sometimes lasted long enough to thrill his hearers to an almost unbearable degree’.25
Ker ascribes this practice to Newman’s ‘sheer intensity of thought’.26 It was certainly not an element introduced by Newman for mere effect. Newman was almost immune to the impact of the dramatic gesture. He was not interested in promoting the theatrical qualities of the preacher. He was consistently and doggedly interested in the impact of words on the hearer.27
This complicated series of devices contributed to what might be called the inductive dimension of Newman’s homiletic practice. The role of the preacher is to provide a whole range of images, each of them rich, real and varied and all of them together, at least initially, able to confound the hearer with their dizzying interplay of relationships. The preacher chooses the images carefully, drawing upon his pastoral knowledge of the community’s life. Newman’s own anxiety about his pastoral responsibilities testify to his concern in this regard.28 Having presented the various images, and drawing upon the devices discussed above, Newman employed the pause to give his hearers the opportunity to process the material before the introduction of the next element. This is the open ending. Reading Newman’s sermons, one is sometimes left with the sense that there is an element missing, an element that the hearers themselves must supply. Elsewhere, Newman employed the image of an inventory to discuss the way in which the Church deals with religious truths. ‘All is given to us in profusion; it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, select, harmonize, and complete.’29 This inductive methodology reflects Newman’s confidence in the ability of the assembly to manage and assimilate the images into a meaningful whole.30
Newman’s homiletic approach is an extension of his ideas about Scripture and revelation. Revelation, for Newman, was always perceived in light of its companion, Mystery. ‘Religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together.’31
Scripture, for Newman, involved the interplay between the known and the mysterious, the systematic and the unsystematic. This tension is indeed characteristic of the scriptural text.32 Revelation insinuates itself, as it were, in the space opened up by this tension. This necessitates a process of interpretation and reinterpretation, a ‘working out and through’ that is reminiscent of the methodology employed in the preaching of the patristic period. The goal of this preaching, like Newman’s own, was the disclosure of revealed truth. The nature of that truth is the subject of the following discussion.
The goal of the sermons: the inculcation of incarnational faith
All of Newman’s homiletic devices and methodology were directed to one central goal, the unveiling of the mystery of the Incarnation. For him, ‘the preacher’s aim was to present the person of Christ not in an “unreal way – as a mere idea or vision”, but as “Scripture has set Him before us in His actual sojourn on earth, in His gestures, words and deeds”’.33 Christ must be presented in the full paradox of his being, as at once God and man. The Incarnation is at the heart of the ongoing life of the Church. ‘Henceforth He is the one principle of life in all His servants, who are but His organs.’34
The issue of orthodox Christology was vitally significant for Newman. He had already dealt extensively with this topic in his first full-length writing, The Arians of the Fourth Century. In his historical treatment of the Arian crisis and the resulting Council of Nicaea, Newman drew distinct parallels between the theological controversies of the early Church and those of his own day. Newman’s concerns about the way in which the reality of Christ was preached in the Church was essentially a pastoral concern. He believed that a correct understanding of Christology was essential to the authentic practice of Christian faith. The sermons were a primary means of promoting this correct understanding.
Both the content of his sermons and the homiletic techniques he employed were designed to encourage the faithful appropriation of the paradoxical truth of the Incarnation. This was especially evident in his development of a number of themes, including the idea of the God-Man, the cross, the ‘hiddenness’ of Christ and, perhaps most memorably, the humiliation of the Son of God. His reflections on the latter constitute his most moving treatment of Christology. They are to be found in a sermon preached in 1835 and entitled ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’. In this sermon, Newman’s homiletic skills are most vividly displayed.
Newman employs all of the devices of homiletic rhetoric at his disposal to encourage his listeners to ‘realize’ the central principle of Christianity, namely, the truth of the Word made Flesh. In Newman’s vocabulary, the verb ‘to realize’ is almost a technical term denoting a personal grasp of the reality of a particular object or truth, a grasp so profound that it can move the believer to action. Newman begins his sermon by declaring that, ‘the chief mystery of our holy faith is the humiliation of the Son of God to temptation and suffering’.35 The terms of the argument are stated here in the first sentence. The mystery is invoked by an appeal to two seemingly contradictory terms: ‘humiliation’, with its evocation of earthliness, and ‘Son of God’, with its evocation of otherworldliness. Newman goes on to describe the Son’s humiliation as a mystery that is more overwhelming than that of the Trinity, by virtue of our familiarity with one of its terms. He is careful to note that it is not a greater mystery (for it is a mystery of the same type), but one that is in some sense more accessible to us. In this way, the mystery remains, but it is at the same time somewhat demystified. In the next section, Newman introduces a device that he will employ throughout the sermon, the use of the conjunction ‘but’ to indicate contrary motions.
When the mystery of the Trinity is set before us, we see indeed that it is quite beyond our reason; but, at the same time, it is no wonder that human language should be unable to convey, and human intellect to receive, truths relating to the incommunicable and infinite essence of Almighty God. But the mystery of the Incarnation relates, in part, to subjects more level with our reason; it lies not only in the manner how God and man is one Christ, but in the very fact that so it is. We think we know of God so much as this, that He is altogether separate from imperfection and infirmity; yet we are told that the Eternal Son has taken into Himself a creature’s nature, which henceforth became as much one with Him, as much belonged to Him, as the divine attributes and powers which He had ever had.36
The divine mystery eludes human language but it is nevertheless spoken of; the ‘mystery of the Incarnation’ is rendered accessible by the ‘very fact’ of it; that which is ‘altogether separate from imperfection and infirmity’ has ‘taken into Himself a creature’s nature’. The binaries are lined up to indicate the kind of disjunction with which the imagination must grapple if it is to do justice to this holy truth. It is on this disjunction that Newman will dwell in the sermon. The mystery of the Incarnation, its real sense, lies somewhere between what we know and what we do not know. Here is a statement of the essence of the nature of Christ. Christ, like the mystery in which he is inculcated, lies somewhere between what we know, that is, the sensible world of which we are a part, and the divine realm in which we do not take part, at least not yet. He is both between and within the human and the divine. It is the same with all human ‘knowledge’. What we know moves between the earth (‘a sentence caught up here, and an argument heard there’), and the horizon of the infinite (a knowledge ‘too excellent for us’). The event of Christ, like our minds, oscillates between a ‘certain time’, the here and now of ‘human flesh’, and the ‘everlasting’, the eternal ‘glory with the Father’. As Newman proceeds, binaries proliferate and are countered by others. In a replication of the action of the mind confronted by this overwhelming mystery, the progression of the argument becomes very nearly unchartable. The mystery of Christ is not something remote, but a movement that is being played out within us. The sermon has drawn us into that movement.
Newman not only displays the complexity of the engagement with the mystery, he revels in it. ‘And as the doctrine of our Lord’s humiliation is most mysterious, so the very surface of the narrative in which it is contained is mysterious also, as exciting wonder, and impressing upon us our real ignorance of the nature, manner, and causes of it.’37 Once again the epistemological reality replicates the Incarnation, and the one who contemplates the mystery is caught between the binaries of wonder, which is excited by the mysterious interchange, and our real ignorance. Here Newman hints at a point he will later drive home. The most grievous mistake that the enquirer can make regarding this mystery is to fail to admit the tension between wonder and ignorance. The most grievous mistake the preacher can make is to relax the tension. Those who reduce the Incarnation to one or the other of the terms are heretical, be they denizens of the fourth century or the nineteenth. ‘In consequence we are too often led, as a matter of necessity, in discoursing of His words and works, to distinguish between the Christ who lived on earth and the Son of God Most High, speaking of His human nature and His Divine nature so separately as not to feel or understand that God is man and man is God.’ The fruitless quest for the so-called historical Jesus in the nineteenth century was inspired by the relaxation of the tension between the Word and the Flesh. The truth about Christ, according to Newman, is to be found precisely in the willingness to sustain it. Drawing upon history to drive home his point, Newman says of those who dissolve the tension that they ‘begin by being Sabellians, that they go on to be Nestorians, and that they tend to be Ebionites and to deny Christ’s Divinity altogether’. Newman insists that orthodoxy is reducible to neither strictly rational categories nor to human passions. Indeed, ‘the so-called religion of the heart, without orthodoxy of doctrine, is but the warmth of a corpse, real for a time, but sure to fail’.38
In the next section of the sermon, Newman carries the discourse forward by introducing a series of questions that he does not answer. In fact he admits that ‘these and many other questions admit of no satisfactory solution’.39 The reality of Christ’s mystery lies in the paradox, that is, in the suspension of solutions in favour of further relational enquiry. The satisfaction of ‘knowing’ Christ comes in the mystery of connections, such as that between the binary of temptation and the Holy Spirit. Questions generate questions in Newman’s homiletic economy. One question leads to another. The question of Christ’s baptism leads, inexplicably, to his descent into Hell. None of the questions is answered. Instead, in Newman’s preaching, they have rather the cumulative effect of drawing the enquirer deeper into the mysterious relationship. Newman reveals his methodological focus: ‘I bring together these various questions in order to impress upon you our depth of ignorance on the entire subject under review’.40 However, Newman never implies that this dizzying process is without rewards. The preacher’s task is not to confound, but to inculcate the largeness, indeed the inexhaustibility of the Object. ‘Enlarge upon them we ought, even because they are few and partial, not slighting what is given us, because it is not all (like the servant who buried his lord’s talent), but giving it what increase we can.’41 The purpose of the ‘one or two partial notices’ that we have is to entice us more deeply into the relationship with the inexhaustible mystery of the God-man. The rational theologian or those who quest for the historical Jesus refuse the invitation to enlarge upon what paltry evidence ‘fact’ and ‘history’ give. Instead they manifest ‘the narrow spirit of that slothful servant at the present day, in which is strangely combined a profession of knowing everything with an assertion that there is nothing to know concerning the Incarnation’.42 Newman then states the terms of the mystery again:
Bearing in mind, then, that we know nothing truly about the manner or the ultimate ends of the humiliation of the Eternal Son, our Lord and Saviour, let us consider what that humiliation itself was.43
Newman then continues with a host of binaries and ternaries comparing and contrasting the two natures of Christ, and relating them again to the seemingly double action of the human mind that is both grounded in the present and looks forward to the future. The mystery is now set against the backdrop of history, as Newman moves between reflection on the patristic era and his own. In this way he connects the past with the present. Just as attitudes towards the Son of God can be transported across time, so can the living and inviting reality of Christ be meaningful then and now. It remains what it was precisely in the movement. Once again Newman mentions that his purpose is not to explain the mystery ‘but to facilitate your conception of Him who is the subject of it, to help you towards contemplating Him as God and man at once, as still the Son of God though He had assumed a nature short of His original perfection’.44 Newman uses the word ‘conception’ very deliberately, juxtaposing the actual conception of the Son of God, that is, the first instance of his humiliation, with our ‘conception’ of him. We know something of Christ, Newman is saying, but there is infinitely more to know and our lives must be spent in that knowing, just as the life of the Son of God was spent in ‘knowing’ the human condition. It is only when ‘we contemplate our Lord and Saviour, God and man, as a really existing being, external to our minds, as complete and entire in His personality as we show ourselves to be to each other, as one and the same in all His various and contrary attributes, “the same yesterday, today, and for ever”’, that we can be said to ‘realize that Object of faith, which is not a mere name on which titles and properties may be affixed without congruity and meaning, but has a personal existence and an identity distinct from everything else’.45 Not surprisingly, Newman concludes by asking still more questions:
In what true sense do we ‘know’ Him, if our idea of Him be not such as to take up and incorporate into itself the manifold attributes and offices which we ascribe to Him? What do we gain from words, however correct and abundant, if they end with themselves, instead of lighting up the image of the Incarnate Son in our hearts?46
The sermon ends with a prayer that restates the terms of the mystery. The ‘realization’ of what it means to call Christ the Son of God is unfolded in the combination of heart and intellect. His humiliation is relived in our homiletic rediscovery of him:
May God, even the Father, give us a heart and understanding to realize, as well as to confess that doctrine into which we were baptized, that His Only-begotten Son, our Lord, was conceived by the Holy Ghost, was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, and was buried, rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, from whence He shall come again, at the end of the world, to judge the quick and the dead.47
All of Newman’s preaching was centred on the mystery of the Incarnation. The key to his success as a preacher must, however, be sought in his own ‘realization’ of the truth of this mystery and his ability to draw others into it.
Notes
1. The first volume of the sermons appeared as Parochial Sermons in 1834 (London: Printed for J. G. F. & J. Rivington & J. H. Parker, Oxford, 1834). Volume ii came out the following year (London: Printed for J. G. F. & J. Rivington & J. H. Parker, Oxford, 1835); volume iii appeared in 1836 (London: Printed for J. G. F. & J. Rivington & J. H. Parker, Oxford, 1836), volume iv was first published in 1839 (London: Printed for J. G. F. & J. Rivington & J. H. Parker, Oxford, 1839), volume v in 1840 (London: Printed for J. G. F. & J. Rivington & J. H. Parker, Oxford, 1840) and volume vi in 1842 (London: Printed for J. G. F. & J. Rivington & J. H. Parker, Oxford, 1842). The individual volumes each went through numerous editions and were excerpted and recombined many times. The six volumes appeared as a set in 1843 and were reprinted together in 1848. The first collected edition titled Parochial and Plain Sermons came out in 1868 (London, Oxford and Cambridge: Rivington, 1868) in eight volumes. Fifteen subsequent editions or imprints of the various volumes appeared during Newman’s life. No modern critical edition has appeared.
2. Stephen Thomas, Newman and Heresy: The Anglican Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 27. Newman remarked that preaching was usually only tolerable ‘till it comes home’. See P.S., iv:299–300.
4. L.D., iv:418.
5. Ker, John Henry Newman, 81.
6. Thomas, Newman and Heresy, 33.
7. D.A., 10–13.
8. See Ker, John Henry Newman, 22.
9. Background material may be found in Christiane D’Haussy, ‘Panorama du sermon anglais au XIXe siècle’, Études Newmaniennes 17 (2001), 9–17.
10. Newman remarks in The Idea of a University that the task of preaching should not be undertaken without adequate knowledge of the congregation. See Idea, 418.
11. Ker, John Henry Newman, 113.
12. Idea, 408.
13. Idea, 407.
14. Campaign, 37.
15. Idea, 418.
16. Robert D. Middleton, ‘The Vicar of Saint Mary’s’, in G. Wheeler (ed.), Newman Centenary Essays (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1945), 127–38. Middleton provides an excellent selection of contemporary sources relating the experience of those who heard Newman preach in St Mary’s. Newman viewed preaching as a holistic exercise, that is, one that engaged the whole preacher and not just the intellect. See Newman, Idea, 413.
18. Middleton, ‘The Vicar of Saint Mary’s’, 130.
19. Ker, Achievement, 76.
20. ‘Revealed Religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact.’ See Ath., i:23.
21. Ker, Achievement, 79.
22. See Ramon Mas, ‘Parole et silence chez Newman’, Études Newmaniennes 10 (1994), 43–52. See also R. Michael Olson, ‘Newman’s Patient Mind’, The Newman Rambler 5 (2001), 13–17.
23. P.S., i:252.
24. P.S., i:11.
25. Archbishop Temple quoted in Middleton, ‘The Vicar of Saint Mary’s’, 131.
26. Ker, Achievement, 75.
27. D. M. Whalen, ‘John Henry Newman: The Rhetoric and the Real’, Nineteenth-Century Prose 8 (1991), 1–9.
28. For Newman’s various pastoral perspectives see Dermot Fenlon, ‘The Aristocracy of Talent and the Mystery of Newman’, Louvain Studies 15 (1990), 203–25.
29. V.M., i:23.
30. An excellent account of the inductive methodology in modern homiletic theory can be found in Fred B. Craddock, Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990).
31. Ess., i:41–2.
32. D.A., 125.
33. Ker, Achievement, 83. See P.S., iii:130–1.
34. Jfc., 196.
35. P.S., iii:157.
36. P.S., iii:157.
37. P.S., iii:159.
38. P.S., iii:159.
39. P.S., iii:160.
40. P.S., iii:160.
41. P.S., iii:161.
42. P.S., iii:159.
43. P.S., iii:161.
44. P.S., iii:166. Emphasis in the original.
45. P.S., iii:170. Emphasis added.
46. P.S., iii:171.
47. P.S., iii:173.
Further reading
Harrold, Charles F. John Henry Newman: An Expository and Critical Study of His Mind, Thought and Art. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1945, 318–51.
Ker, Ian. John Henry Newman: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 90–100.
Ker, Ian. The Achievement of John Henry Newman. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, 74–95.
Robinson, Denis. ‘The Mother of Wisdom: Exploring the Parabolic Imperative in the Early Works of John Henry Newman’, Louvain Studies 27 (2002), 153–70.