Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (54 page)

The moving tributes to St John and others at the end of the
Apologia
, acknowledge friendship as the link of greatest value ‘between my old life and my new’. St John embodied Newman’s connection with the affectionate companionship, the ‘daily solace and relief ’ of ‘true attachment’, learnt and treasured among his peer group as a young man in Oxford and carried into his life as a Catholic priest. Newman’s greatest gift to the daily lives of Roman Catholic priests may yet be a lesson in the scope for mature, intimate friendship within a life of priestly celibacy.

CHAPTER 20
‌‌

Newman’s legacy

‘The religious history of each individual’, he once said, ‘is as solitary and complete as the history of the world.’

J. H. NEWMAN SERMON, ‘STEADFASTNESS IN OLD PATHS’, 1830

A friend of the Oxford days, Mark Pattison, wrote to Newman in their latter years: ‘However remote my intellectual standpoint may now be from that which I may presume to be your own, I can still truly say that I have learnt more from you than from any one else with whom I have ever been in contact.’
¹
Newman, as I suggested at the outset of this narrative, was, and is, for his time, and for subsequent generations, one of those rare individuals who answers a variety of needs in the souls of many – however remote his own standpoint from theirs, or theirs from his. It is an appropriate juncture, then, to ask how Newman speaks today to all manner of Christians, peoples of different Faiths, and indeed no Faith at all.

Newman’s broadest lesson is contained in the narrative of his life, and points to a powerful basis for religious freedom and respect for all religions. Each, he believed, will find God in the act of searching. Life is a pilgrimage, every personal history unique. ‘The religious history of each individual’, he once said, ‘is as solitary and complete as the history of the world.’
²
Writing in 1850 of the ‘process by which a soul is led from falsehood to truth’, he asks:

Is
every
one born in a true system? is it not undeniable that, if there
be
a truth, the majority of men
have
to change?
Can
they change without doubt and inquiry? Do you think that those who have become Catholics, have done so to their own
gratification
? Was truth forced on them, or a change passionately and greedily sought for?
3

Having travelled through early scepticism, to Evangelicalism, to High Anglicanism, to Tractarianism, before finally coming to rest in the Catholic Church, Newman of all people recognised the responsibility of each individual to be a seeker after the truth: wherever it might lead. As he wrote in his poem ‘The Pilgrim’, of himself, he ‘kept safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim-lot’.
⁴
And this is a pilgrim who not only finds himself, early in the journey, wandering by night across rough terrain without roads, without maps, but climbing mountains.

We make progress, Newman wrote, ‘not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not

himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule’.
⁵
He warns against blind leaps of faith, or acquiescence in unquestioned authority. The ‘pledged pilgrim’ accepts nevertheless without question the universal reality of individual conscience, and freedom of the will. None is spared, he is saying, the promptings of the voice of conscience; we are moral agents with the capacity and the obligation to make moral choices. While he encountered from his youth intimations of a personal Moral Judge within the voice of conscience, he was nevertheless seeking a religious truth that had a reality beyond himself. He was utterly opposed to the modern tendency to relegate religion to the realms of the private, the purely subjective. From the Early Fathers he adopted the notion that ‘seeds of the Word’ were spread throughout the great religions of the world, with salvic potential for those who had not been exposed to Christianity; the same idea would surface in the Second Vatican Council.
6

The search for truth, he insisted, engages the whole person: ‘The heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination …’ And the power of imagination was for Newman dialectical, playing on polarities that were familiar in the poetry of the preceding generation. Coleridge had anticipated Newman’s dialectical ‘saying and unsaying’ in a vivid metaphor in the
Biographia Literaria
: like an insect caught in the eddies of a stream: ‘… the little animal
wins
its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary
fulcrum
for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.’
⁷
Again, in the
Dejection Ode
, Coleridge employs the metaphor of the polarities of a magnet to suggest the ‘polar forces’, opposites that are neither mutually exclusive, nor self-contradictory. This dynamic in the expression of thoughts and images of God and religion is described more prosaically, yet no less powerfully, by Newman:

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 adhere to 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 … approximating little by little, by saying and unsaying, to a positive result.
8

Following Bishop Joseph Butler, he counseled that ‘doubt is the condition of our nature, and that the merit of faith consists in making ventures’.
9

For the ‘pledged pilgrim’ there are moments of awakening, enlightenment. In the
Pillar of the Cloud
, the turning point is that moment of surrender to the light – ‘Lead kindly light’ – after the long, stagnant sterility of ‘pride ruled my will’. Yet how is one to justify the ways of a good and all-powerful God?

Newman’s ‘saying and unsaying to a positive result’ urges a remarkable mode of meditation based on evidence of the human condition and the possibility of God. It points to the obligation to journey, intellectually and imaginatively, back through the history of the writings, beliefs and rituals within our traditions; to explore the current claims and counter-claims of belief and unbelief in the light of our knowledge of good and evil through direct experience, and through our reading. As Newman puts it in a footnote to his translation of St Athanasius: ‘Here one image corrects another; and the accumulation of images is not, as is often thought, the restless and fruitless effect of the mind to
enter into the Mystery
, but is a
safeguard
against any one image, nay, any collection of images, being supposed
sufficient
.’
10

Newman’s vision, I believe, goes to the heart of the problem of our own time: how do we foster spirituality and the common good in a complex, pluralist contemporary society, largely literate, enjoying the advantages of science and technology, and composed of people of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures, languages, religions, and indeed those who do not profess a religion at all? And the diversity includes not only religion, but education, art, literature, and indeed the vehicle of diversity in a modern developed society: publishing and the media.

Do we create the good society by allowing individuals and groups of individuals to search and choose their own values and beliefs, obviously within the constraints of civil law and under the protection of a more or less secular government? Or do we believe that our values and beliefs are best imposed, and accepted unquestioningly, top down? The options illustrate the difference between pluralism and fundamentalism: Newman, for all his animosity towards liberalism in religion, clearly would have defended religious pluralism today, and opposed fundamentalism. Taking his life as an exemplar, Newman insists that we must be free to seek our values and beliefs, free to refuse uncritical acquiescence to impositions from family, class, education, and established religion. At the same time, the conviction that each individual encounters the divine presence in the voice of conscience, leads to a powerful theological basis for universal respect. And if this is no less than the grounding of Christian
agape
– unconditional universal love based on human exaltation – it acknowledges the context in which such love must be struggled and worked for: ‘Quarry the granite rock …’: the deep stain in our nature. He was convinced that our evident exaltation and fallenness fits entirely with the truth of Christianity. That same acknowledgment, moreover, matched by an individual’s right and duty to seek after truth, while respecting the life journeys of others, offers a resilient and robust condition for a flourishing pluralist society.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

In Newman’s day, as in ours today, science was seen as a formidable challenge to religious faith. The 1860s and 1870s, the years of the writing of the
Apologia
and the
Grammar of Assent
, were marked by a heated and noisy science-religion battle that reverberates to this day. While he attempted to distinguish between scientific and religious ways of knowing, he never saw them as inimical to each other. He thought deeply about science, respected scientific research, and attempted to keep abreast of the latest theories, while reflecting on the connections and distinctions between empirical method and faith. In the original fifth discourse of the
Idea of a University
he argues that there is nothing ‘singular’ or ‘special’ about theology which is not ‘partaken by other sciences in their measure’:

On the contrary, Theology is one branch of knowledge, and Secular Sciences are other branches. Theology is the highest indeed, and widest, but it does not interfere with the real freedom of any secular science in its own particular department.
11

Newman believed that science and revelation must coexist, for both came from the same author. Science and religion, however, occupy different areas of discourse, and just as science should not interfere outside its province, so the Church should not interfere with the conduct of science. Science, in other words, needs elbow room. On the creation debate, which, again, was as vexed in the second half of the nineteenth century as it is today, Newman believed that the precise details of the Biblical account, six days and so forth, have never ‘engaged the formal attention of the Church’; this being the case, ‘it is not at all probable that any discoveries ever should be made by physical inquiries incompatible at the same time with one and all of the senses which the letter admits, and which are still open’.
¹²
Which seems a deliberately prolix way of suggesting, without frightening the orthodoxy watchdogs, that expression of cosmological facts in Scripture should remain forever open to interpretation. In a letter to J. M. Capes, editor of the
Rambler
, on 14 November, 1850, he wrote a remarkably insightful single line on the ‘allowableness’, and the ‘advisableness’ of exploiting new scientific theories, or discoveries, to bolster religion. ‘We ought not to theorize the teaching of Moses, till philosophers have demonstrated their theories of physics. If “the Spirit of God” is gas in 1850, it may be electro-mag- netism in 1860.’
1
3
The same might well be said, for example, of the version of the Anthropic Principle which finds God in the gap suggested by the accumulation of numerical accidents discovered within the laws of physics and chem-istry that underpin a Universe hospitable to life.