Finding John Henry Newman

It was written by George Herbert 1593-1632. We sang it, one of his favourite hymns. Boyie was slightly mentally challenged. His great love was singing in the choir at Hanover Methodist church. It was my mother’s church and his.

It struck me forcefully then and it has lingered in my mind ever since, that I was unlikely to hear this seventeenth century hymn, or indeed Newman’s “Praise to the Holiest in the height and in the depth be praise”, in my own Trini Catholic church. Prayerful, I would call them. “Dead”, others are more likely to call them. If I wish that kind of hymn, my best bet is the Anglican, or perhaps the Methodist churches, even if the hymns are written by Catholics.

John Henry Newman had been an Anglican Minister. There in the Anglican Church, he records that he considered the Church of Rome the Anti-Christ and responsible for the disunity which existed between Anglican and Catholic. It was there, within the Anglican Church, on a journey to Marseilles in France, that he wrote his “Lead Kindly Light”. The kindly light led him to the Catholic Church.

Perhaps it was Arlette who made me think of Newman. She was one of those school friends from St Joseph’s Convent who has departed life for that life that is forever. Arlette threw a party, said goodbye and left for the cloistered Benedictines at Stanbrook Abbey in England. She became Dame Teresa. There, at Stanbrook, the Benedictines retrieved, maintained, re-worked, the old Catholic hymns, poetry, ritual, so easily lost.

There was history. The Anglican Church, more than most, illustrated the tension between universality and the emerging Nation-State. This tension Newman lived and knew. We have not escaped it.

History and the Nineteenth Century

Newman remained an Englishman. It was, however, in the Church Fathers of the earliest centuries that Newman would find the answer to much of his questioning. His study of the ancient heresy of Arianism made him conscious of its reappearance. The importance that he would give to allegory and to symbolism, comes from his understanding of Biblical history. His understanding of Pagan religions as playing the “teaching role” played by the Law in Judaism was only the extension of his understanding of Christianity as mediated through Antiquity. Pagan Greece and Rome “prepared the way of the Lord.”

There are hints of this in Benedict XVI. Paganism was, for Newman, neither devil worship nor evil, as some Christians still claim. Pagans were in no way uncivilised. Nor had God condemned them to hell or to be unsaved. That smacked of a pre-destination that Newman refused.

This was Newsman writing in the nineteenth century — strange that we haven’t followed this through. The nineteenth century was the century of the fascination with finding in the East – read India or Tibet – a substitute for Jerusalem as the place of origins and the Garden of Eden.

It is also a time of Catholic Emancipation, a petition for which Newman duly signed each year. There was the emancipation of British slaves. And the nineteenth century was the foundation of the Trinidad and Tobago of today. My brother, Arlette, nationalism, the nineteenth century, reasons enough for John Henry Newman to fascinate me.

Conversion

John Henry Newman was born in 1801 to a wealthy family of bankers. He studied at Oxford, becoming a tutor and intellectual there. James Joyce, commenting on his writing, remarked that “nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome little English parson who afterwards became prince of the only true Church.” George Eliot, supposedly an atheist, memorised one of his sermons. His Apologia Pro Vita Sua, written after an insulting press article by Charles Kingsley, is rated the best autobiography in English and classed with St Augustine’s in Catholic literature.

He was the first Rector of what was the Catholic University of Dublin – now the University College of Dublin. Newman Centres around the world, from Europe to Kerala in India, are still Catholic chaplaincies at universities. Loved and hated, Newman remained a subject of controversy until his death of pneumonia in 1890.

At the age of fifteen, to quote his own words, “a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influence of a definite Creed and received into my intellect, impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured.” This question of dogma in Newman, would influence another theologian: Joseph Ratzinger, today’s Benedict XVI.

“I have changed in many things”, wrote Cardinal Newman, “in this, I have not. From the age of fifteen dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter the idea of any sort of religion: religion as a mere sentiment is to me a dream and a mockery...What I held in 1816, I held in 1833 and I hold in 1864. Please God I shall hold it to the end.”

Liberalism

It is this belief in dogma as the core of the teaching of the early Church, as transmitted by the Apostles, which launches John Henry Newman into a struggle against Liberalism. It is this which was at the heart of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church, of which he was one of the founders. This movement attempted to revive traditions that were being lost before the onslaught of Evangelicals and, above all, Liberals.

“Liberty of thought is in itself good”, he wrote in his explanation of Liberalism, “but it gives an opening to false liberty. Now, by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue… Liberalism, then, is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it…” This did not mean opening the door to any and wild beliefs, as his tract on ecclesiastical miracles illustrates.

In 1879, at the time that he was made a Cardinal, Newman took up Liberalism in religion. “Liberalism in religion,” he declared, “is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated for all are matters of opinion.

Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment, a taste; not an objective fact, nor miraculous, and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy…”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In 1879 it was called Liberalism in religion; today it is called Relativism. Indeed, we have heard the “All Gods same God”, “any religion same thing”, or “Well, that is your opinion. She has hers”, so often that it seems absurd and certainly impolite for us to question it. Cardinal John Henry Newman, did.