ST JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

Full text of a paper given to the Dawson Centre, Hobart, Tasmania, by the Most Rev. Peter J. Elliott, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus, Melbourne

29 November, 2019

ST JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801 and he died in Birmingham in 1890. On October 19^th 2019, Pope Francis canonized him.

When he was young his prosperous family endured hard times, but John Henry’s father ensured that this brilliant son received a good basic education and he was able to enter Trinity College, Oxford when he was sixteen. Already he had passed into the first steps of his “pilgrim’s progress”, the journey of Christian faith.

He recounted his religious development in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, published in 1865. As an adolescent, after briefly toying with atheistic rationalism, he was drawn into the Evangelical stream of Anglicanism and a closer relationship with Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Saviour.  Yet he later affirmed that, from the age of fifteen, dogma was “the fundamental principle of my religion”

His spiritual guide was a Calvinistic Evangelical, Rev. Walter Mayers, but by the age of twenty-one Newman had moved away from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.  Yet he always carried with him a love of the Scriptures and incredible knowledge of them, evident later in his sermons, marvellous examples of Victorian prose, delivered with a silvery voice. He was a refined preacher, reading from his notes. In his Parochial and Plain Sermons we come across paragraphs that take up a whole page, punctuated meticulously to make sense, an art we have lost is this age of the “sound bite”.

At Trinity College, he failed an exam, a surprise to everyone, but this lapse was caused by emotional sensitivity. Fifty years ago in Oxford, I used to visit and assist Mrs Gullick, an old lady who was related to Newman. All she could remember was the family scandal that John had failed an exam! This did not impede an academic career, for he later became a fellow of Oriel College.

However, we must never forget that this Christian pilgrim was called to be a pastor. After he was ordained in 1824, John Henry became curate of the small Oxford parish of St Clement and devoted himself to the care of the people. In the two years he spent there he raised money for a new church, later built away from the noisy highway that crosses Magdalen Bridge.  He was remembered as a diligent Evangelical pastor. But John Henry was gradually moving beyond Evangelical views.

In Oriel College he found himself at the heart of a circle of friends later known as the Oxford Movement or Tractarians. The latter title was derived from “tracts” or booklets known as the Tracts for the Times that this circle wrote and published. These scholarly men were striving to revive Catholic continuity, beliefs and practices within the Church of England.

From 1833 they affirmed the apostolic identity of the Church of England and opposed an “Erastian” outlook, which regarded the Church as essentially a state department, the religious wing of the Establishment. John Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey were key figures in the Tractarian circle and later led the “Anglo Catholics”, but the greatest mind was Newman.

While their booklets were eagerly read in many vicarages, the Tractarians were bitterly opposed and rejected by the Protestant Establishment. At the same time, John Henry’s studies in the Eastern and Western Church Fathers were steadily leading him away from Anglicanism and towards the Catholic Church. This tendency reached a crisis point in Tract Ninety, where he attempted to reconcile the Protestant Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England with Catholic doctrine as taught by the Council of Trent. He was denounced and hounded, forced to resign his living, Saint Mary’s University Church and the little parish of Littlemore.

Our disappointed and bruised Christian pilgrim had entered a phase of his journey when he had to search his conscience, work out his bearings and reset the compass. But where was he going? Newman’s pilgrimage was at a decisive stage.

He retreated to a humble property at Littlemore where, with friends of similar views, he led a kind of monastic life. During this time of prayer and study, at the beginning of 1845 he started to write his critical work, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, where he set out a credible theory of how doctrine develops within the Church across the ages. But, by recognising and describing that process, he had come to see that the only Church where this happened and continues to happen is the Catholic Church.

He ceased to use the official government term “Roman Catholics” and now he wrote of the “Catholics”. That marked a massive emotional wrench and a struggle, for he did not want to become a Catholic. These inner struggles he later described in his autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, which also shows us the religious issues of the times, with wit and entertaining satire. But he had to surrender because the “stern monitor”, conscience, was calling. On October 9^th, 1845, Blessed Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist missionary priest, received John Henry into the Church with some close friends. He then went to Rome to study for the priesthood.

After ordination as a Catholic priest, Fr. Newman returned to England and set up the community of priests known as the Oratory of St Philip Neri in a house near Birmingham, significantly named Maryvale. The Oratorians then moved into Birmingham. They were eventually based in Edgbaston Road where they built up a busy parish, and developed their special charism of rich liturgy and fine music, with evangelistic preaching and attentive sacramental ministry.  The Irish poor flocked to them. In London, another convert, Fr. Wilfred Faber, set up the Brompton Oratory.

Before long, as a persuasive public champion of Catholicism, Fr Newman was guiding many converts to the Catholic Church. That only made him less welcome at Oxford, but the Irish Bishops invited him to found a Catholic University in Dublin and his essay The Idea of a University came out of that project.  Unfortunately, the project collapsed and a deeply disappointed John Henry bore the brunt of the failed enterprise, which years later was taken up by others.

In his sixties John Henry found he had lost favour in Rome, suspected over his alleged views on the teaching Church and then because he expressed caution over the wisdom of defining the dogma of papal infallibility, a project dear to the heart of Blessed Pius IX. Here he differed from a fellow convert, Cardinal Edward Manning and provoked the mischievous hostility of Mgr Talbot, an unbalanced English prelate who slandered him in Rome.

Newman accepted this teaching, once it was defined in 1870 by the First Vatican Council. But the dogma was denounced by Gladstone, who like so many at the time misinterpreted it as brute papal political power. When Newman tried to explain the subtlety of papal infallibility in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), he also declared that he would toast conscience before toasting the Pope.

Conscience was a central factor in own life and in his theology and philosophy. But conscience, he asserted, in his time had been superseded by a counterfeit, “the right of self-will”. How apposite are those words for us today.

His battered reputation was restored when the new Pope, Leo XIII, created him cardinal in 1879.  When he died in 1890, Cardinal Newman was respected throughout the English-speaking world, not only as a theologian and philosopher but as one of the finest writers of English prose, poetry and hymns. Most of his poems have dated, except for the gems that later became hymns.

Having set out his life’s journey, I concentrate on major themes in his daily life as a Christian pilgrim.

A Man of Faith and Prayer

His personal faith was simple, even emotive, and yet deeply intellectual, His book The Grammar of Assent explored the question of what is happening when we make an assent of faith, an assent to revealed truth, yet a personal assent to God.

The scriptural scholar who moved into Patristics, a study of the Church Fathers, had a firm belief in the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, both truths contested by the Arian heresy, an area where he was an expert. John Henry’s Christological faith in the Incarnation saw God the Son taking our flesh in terms of his work for us in the Redemption, as in the angels’ hymn from the Dream of Gerontius, Praise to the Holiest in the Height:

O loving wisdom of our God!

When all was sin and shame,

A second Adam to the fight

And to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood

Which did in Adam fail,

Should strive afresh against the foe,

Should strive and should prevail.

Therefore, he took sin, grace, salvation, judgement and damnation very seriously. This shaped a strong personal spirituality of the Christian’s combat with evil. As friends noted at Oriel College: daily self-discipline, rising early for prayer, when others at Oxford were sleeping after much drinking, abstemious, when others caroused.

However, he regarded asceticism not as his human effort, only the work of God’s grace. Not only in his life story, but in his theology and spirituality, he seems closer to the champion of grace, Saint Augustine, rather than the scholastics. When he studied in Rome scholastic theology was tired, dull and dry, but that was before the return to Saint Thomas Aquinas that developed later in the Nineteenth Century.

Therefore, there is a severe side to his gentle personality, not only severity, but a hatred and horror of sin.  He was chaste, celibate and virginal. Yet, as a pastor and confessor, he tried to tolerate human weakness in others, even as it puzzled and pained him.

Beginning as an Anglican, he focused on Christ present and at work in the Sacraments. His deep love of the Eucharist also comes out in the hymn Praise to the Holiest:

And that a higher gift than grace

Should flesh and blood refine,

His presence and his very self,

And essence all divine.

For a Christian there can be no “higher gift than grace”, so I take these words as referring to the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist. As priest and cardinal, John Henry spent hours before the tabernacle conversing with his beloved Saviour. The Mass was the centre of his daily spiritual routine, and he described the Mass as “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven”. We need to bear in mind that the Mass he celebrated was the traditional Latin rite as reformed after the Council of Trent, now called the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

His spirituality was also intensely Marian. Fr. Newman felt at home with the warm faith and popular Marian piety of his devoted parishioners, largely poor Irish folk, who prayed with him and who heard him preach tenderly on the Blessed Virgin at the Birmingham Oratory. He committed the new university in Dublin to the care of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, Sedes Sapientiae.

A Man Open to Change

While he was a socially conservative Tory, in his own life and outlook John Henry was never afraid of change.  His oft-quoted words come to mind: “To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine chapter 1, on ideas.

Some claim his theology of the development of Christian doctrine reflects Nineteenth Century faith in progress. But doctrinal development seems to be derived from St Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century. When Newman’s thesis is examined carefully, he never suggests that Divine Revelation in Scripture and Tradition idevelops. Yet religious liberals have distorted his theology of the development of doctrine into the error that Revelation itself changes and develops and is “ongoing”. But it is our understanding of Revelation that develops. Another area disputed in his day was evolution. Unlike his antagonist, Charles Kingsley, he had no problem with reconciling evolution with divine creation.

Today some want to present Newman as the proto-liberal Catholic. That is absurd. In 1832, at Palermo, he wrote a sharp poem against liberalism. In his Apologia and in his speech on becoming a Cardinal in 1878 he denounced its religious form. He also had little sympathy for liberalism as the prevailing ideological and political force in his century.  Yet he was “liberal minded” in the sense of being open, free from prejudices and seeing the best in people and he did not enjoy aggressive controversy.

His Love for People

Family and friends were always important in John Henry’s long life; he could walk alone yet he enjoyed human company. The conversion to Catholicism was a painful “parting of friends” yet, in the end, he found many new friends in the Church, and some became close friends, particularly his fellow Oratorian, Fr. Ambrose St John. At his request, he was buried in the same grave as Ambrose in the Oratorians’ cemetery at Rednal.

Gradually relationships were restored with various old Anglican friends, largely because they perceived his sincerity and charity and a commitment to conscience. Their photos adorn the wall of his cardinal’s oratory for they were always in the prayers of his Mass.

Much of his correspondence with relatives, friends and people seeking counsel has been published, so many letters covering a wide range of themes, some including spiritual direction or advice to great people and little people. Women and men were all treated with charity. He lived according to his motto Cor ad cor loquitur: Heart speaks to heart.

In spite of emerging differences over religion, he was devoted to his mother, who died in 1936. By becoming a Catholic in 1845, John Henry had renounced family ties. He tried to keep close to his surviving sisters. The youngest, Mary, had died at the age of nineteen, a trial to the whole family. But he was estranged from Harriet, who had no sympathy for Catholicism, and Jemima never understood conversion and conscience, so their relationship became distant. On the other hand, he agonised over his brothers, Charles who became a lonely sceptic and Frank, who finally repudiated Christianity. Yet he always kept contact with them, gently arguing, hoping to persuade. With fraternal patience he loved them still. He respected their choices in conscience, even as he regretted the paths they had taken.

His theology of the vital role of the laity in the Church had a strong influence on the Second Vatican Council. It was shaped by friendships and by pastoral experiences with parishioners in Oxford and Birmingham. The major source was his perceptive study of the early Christian centuries when, with a “sense of faith”, the lay faithful resisted the Arian heresy while bishops fussed and vacillated. He detested clericalism.

Whether with family and friends, or fellow Oratorians and their pupils, John  Henry, loved what is good, true and beautiful, especially music,  for he played the violin well, In company, he was witty and entertaining.

As an Anglican, Newman promoted the revival of gothic architecture but as a Catholic, he embraced Counter-Reformation culture and aesthetics. He recognised that classical and baroque architecture was better suited for Catholic liturgy; wider, spacious, well- lit churches, with everyone able to see the altar. He came to regard the zealous gothic architect, Augustus Welby Pugin as a “bigot” whose churches were more suited to medieval worship. The Oratorians’ “pagan” architecture was denounced by Pugin, an obsessive eccentric genius.

John Henry also loved animals; a dog, an old pony and a donkey were companions at the Oratorians’ country retreat at Rednal.  He abhorred cruelty to animals and, as a vicar he preached on the mystery of the lives of animals and their place in God’s creation, which we never fully understand.

Life Has Plan and Purpose

His sense of being a pilgrim on a journey of faith consoled him into old age and frailty. He firmly believed in Divine Providence, particularly as a “particular providence” for each one of us. His experience of a particular providence was expressed in his poem and hymn, Lead Kindly Light, amidst the encircling  gloom.

This Christian pilgrim may have speculated with apprehension about the future, but he never gave in to “the encircling gloom”. He understood time in terms of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. John Henry saw his own life as a journey with a plan and purpose, marked by God’s love, that “kindly light” guiding us at particular moments in our journey. After all, as he put it at the end of his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, “Life is short, eternity is long”.

This is why his attitude to the Blessed Virgin was one of filial confidence. He trusted in her as our sister walking with us, as our Mother helping and healing, keeping us with her Son, as the Morning Star guiding us safely home to Him, into eternal truth. His epitaph reflects this hope: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem: From shadows and images into the truth.

READING NEWMAN

Reading About Him

It is important first to get a picture of him as a Christian man, in his own  works: Apologia pro Vita Sua, an autobiographical account and Loss and Gain, his earlier autobiographical novel, perceptive and entertaining. Then read the experts:

Louis Bouyer, Newman, His Life and Spirituality.

Austin Cooper, OMI, John Henry Newman: A Developing Spirituality.

Joyce Sugg, John Henry Newman: Snapdragon in the Wall, short and readable

Edward Short, Newman and His Contemporaries and Newman and His Family, provide a detailed and interesting historical context.

Philip Boyce, Mary: The Virgin Mary in the Life and Writings of John Henry Newman, revealing his Marian faith and spirituality

Reading His Own Works

Parochial and Plain Sermons, eight volumes, Anglican, flowing Victorian prose, according to one’s taste.

The Arians of the Fourth Century and St. Athanasius, historical studies in the age of the Fathers with insights regarding the faith of the laity.

Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, well-argued historical theology.

Discourses to Mixed Congregations and Sermons on Various Occasions, a simpler style after he became a Catholic.

Difficulties of Anglicans, dated, but much is still relevant, easy to read.

The Idea of a University, a wise and open approach, relevant in our intolerant times.

A Grammar of Assent, not so easy to read, tight philosophical theology of faith.

Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, issues arising from Vatican I and papal infallibility.

Meditations and Devotions, beautiful and inspiring, a small posthumous book.

Many of his Letters were edited and published by Stephen Dessain, but there at least 50,000 of them and recently more have been released in the year of his canonization.

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem: From shadows and images into the truth.

Bishop Peter J. Elliott holds degrees in history from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Arts in theology from Oxford. He was ordained priest for Melbourne in 1973. After serving in parishes and as a bishop’s secretary, he gained a Doctorate in Sacred Theology at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, Rome. He worked for ten years as an official of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family. In 1997 he returned to Melbourne as Episcopal Vicar for Religious Education and became Director of the Institute in 2004. He was ordained Auxiliary Bishop in Melbourne in 2007. He retired as Auxiliary Bishop in October 2018 but remains Titular Bishop of Manaccenser. Bishop Elliott is a well-known speaker and author of books and articles on theology, marriage and the family, Church history, catechetics, liturgy, apologetics and demography. He was the Delegate of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference for the Personal Ordinariate for former Anglicans. His interests include classical music, writing, art, design, architecture and cats.