John Henry Newman and the Imagination 9780567581662, 9780567659484, 9780567245618

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Personal Visions: The 1830s
Chapter 1: Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis
Chapter 2: Conscience and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’
Part II: The Vision of the Church: The 1830s and 1840s
Chapter 3: ‘A Work to Do in England’
Chapter 4: The ‘Impression’ of Christ
Chapter 5: The Pursuit of Truth
Part III: The Virtue of Faith and the Virtues of Civilization: The 1840s and 1850s
Chapter 6: The Virtue of Faith
Chapter 7: Faith and Civilization
Part IV: Real Visions: The 1860s and 1870s
Chapter 8: The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan intellect’
Chapter 9: Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem
Conclusion
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE IMAGINATION

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE IMAGINATION

Bernard Dive

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain in 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Bernard Dive, 2018 Marilyn Dunn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Portrait of Cardinal Newman (1801-90) (oil on canvas), Millais, John Everett (1829-96)/National Portrait Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dive, Bernard, author. Title: John Henry Newman and the imagination / by BernardDive. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Bloomsbury T&TClark, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017050127 (print) | LCCN 2018013686(ebook) | ISBN 9780567005885(ePUB) | ISBN 9780567245618 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780567581662 (hardback : alk.paper) | ISBN 9780567183736 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Newman, John Henry, 1801-1890. |Imagination–Religious aspects–Christianity. Classification: LCC BX4705.N5 (ebook) | LCC BX4705.N5 D582018 (print) | DDC 282.092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050127 ISBN: HB: 978-0-5675-8166-2 PB: 978-0-5676-9264-1 ePDF: 978-0-5672-4561-8 eBook: 978-0-5670-0588-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Melissa, Alexander and Matthew and To my parents and sister

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

INTRODUCTION

1 Part I PERSONAL VISIONS: THE 1830s

Chapter 1 FAITH, ‘PRACTICAL PERCEPTION’ AND PHRONESIS

25

Chapter 2 CONSCIENCE AND THE ‘LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL’

66

Part II THE VISION OF THE CHURCH: THE 1830s AND 1840s Chapter 3 ‘A WORK TO DO IN ENGLAND’

113

Chapter 4 THE ‘IMPRESSION’ OF CHRIST

139

Chapter 5 THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH

197

Part III THE VIRTUE OF FAITH AND THE VIRTUES OF CIVILIZATION: THE 1840s AND 1850s Chapter 6 THE VIRTUE OF FAITH

231

Chapter 7 FAITH AND CIVILIZATION

292

viii

Contents

Part IV REAL VISIONS: THE 1860s AND 1870s Chapter 8 THE IMAGINATION AND THE ‘METROPOLITAN INTELLECT’

357

Chapter 9 EX UMBRIS ET IMAGINIBUS IN VERITATEM

417

CONCLUSION

453

Select Bibliography Index

457 459

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Anyone who studies St John Henry Newman is indebted to the many excellent scholars who have written on him. For my part, I have gained greatly from the work of Ian Ker, Sheridan Gilley, James Pereiro, Eric Griffiths, Edward Short, Roderick Strange, Nicholas Lash, Frank M. Turner, Charles Stephen Dessain, Arthur Dwight Culler, David DeLaura, John Coulson, Stephen Prickett and Wilfrid Ward. I owe a lot to the advice and support of friends, who have read draft chapters; I would particularly like to thank Simon Dunitz, Josh Ireland, Dr Nicholas Austin S. J. (They are not to blame for whatever is amiss with this book: they did their best with me.) My thanks to the Birmingham Oratory, for permission to quote from the Letters and Diaries and the Oratory Papers of Newman, and to Oxford University Press, for permission to quote from the paper of S. F. Wood, on the origins and development of the Oxford Movement, first published in Ethos and the Oxford Movement, by James Pereiro. I am very grateful indeed to Robin Baird-Smith at Bloomsbury, for being willing to commission this book, and for his encouragement, to my editors at Bloomsbury, Anna Turton and Sarah Blake, for their (much exercised) patience, and their professionalism, and to my copyeditor, Divya Darshani Bardhan, for her skilful and attentive editing. I owe my parents thanks that cannot be measured, for a lifetime of support, kindness and wise advice. This book is dedicated to them. My wonderful wife, Melissa, has given me unstinting and unfailingly kind support throughout the writing of this book (despite all the bother that it has involved for her). I am extremely grateful to her for that (and for a million other things). This book is dedicated to her, and to our two boys, Alexander and Matthew, for the joy they all give me every day.

INTRODUCTION

1. For John Henry Newman, religion is ‘real’ when one can ‘believe as if ’ one sees, and this kind of belief involves, in his view, imagination. He asks, ‘Can I attain to any more vivid assent to the Being of a God, than that which is given merely to notions of the intellect? … Can I rise to … an imaginative apprehension of it? Can I believe as if I saw?’1 And he maintains that one can, in fact, have an ‘imaginative apprehension’ of God, and ‘enter with a personal knowledge into the circle of truths which make up that great thought’.2 The imagination, for Newman, animates religion; and Christianity has its life in an ‘image’ – Christ ‘departs [from the world] … but 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.’3 Christians, for Newman, have their ‘moral life’ in an ‘Image’. ‘That strange and painful feeling of unreality, which religious men experience from time to time, when nothing seems true, or good, or right, or profitable, when Faith seems a name, and duty a mockery, and all endeavours to do right, absurd and hopeless, and all things forlorn and dreary, as if religion were wiped out from the world, may … be the direct effect of the temporary obscuration of some master vision, which unconsciously supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace.’4 In his efforts, over the course of his life, to

1. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 102. 2. Grammar of Assent, 102. 3. Ibid., 464. 4. ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909).

2

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

understand religion, and faith, Newman reflected, again and again, in different ways, on this ‘master vision’, and its relation to the ‘spiritual life’. Newman took it that ‘the heart is commonly reached not through reason, but through the imagination’. Religion, as engaging, and transforming, the ‘heart’, involves ‘the imagination’: ‘man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal’; so religion ‘has ever been a message, or a history, or a vision’ and ‘no legislator or priest ever dreamed of educating our moral nature by science or by argument’ – ‘Christianity is a history supernatural, and almost scenic: it tells us what its Author is, by telling us what He has done.’5 While Newman contrasted this ‘vision’ with certain forms of ‘reason’, with ‘science’ or ‘argument’, he was, equally, inclined to regard this ‘vision’ as involving certain forms of ‘reason’. Much of his creativity, as a thinker, was spurred by his sense that ‘reason’, as a ‘living’ power, is something more than what is represented in ‘paper logic’, or in ‘explicit’ forms of logical ‘proof ’. He sought to characterize, and to legitimate, the reasoning that was the ‘spontaneous’ activity of the mind itself as it engages with ‘concrete’ reality in all its variety – a reasoning that, to be valid, need not be articulated in ‘verbal’, ‘explicit’ forms. Christianity, he maintained, was a ‘message’ addressed to ‘our moral nature’, a ‘message’ to be lived by. ‘Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.’6 Newman did not regard ‘faith’ as an arbitrary ‘assumption’, but he did regard it as ‘for action’, and he considered the ‘proofs’ involved in ‘action’ to be different in kind from those involved in ‘science’, or ‘philosophical or historical research’. His understanding of ‘faith’, as a ‘principle of conduct’, was informed by his understanding of the insight and perception involved in ‘action’ – and his understanding of the insight and perception involved in ‘action’ developed from his reflections on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, and the account Aristotle presents of the ‘phronesis’ or ‘practical wisdom’ of ‘the good man’. The ‘good man’, in forming a view on how to act, in a particular situation, does not merely make an ‘assumption’; yet the ‘reasoning’ involved in forming that view is not a matter of ‘science’, or deductive ‘proof ’, or elaborate ‘argument’: it is a ‘reasoning’ that requires a virtuous ‘heart’, and a perceptiveness formed by experience. Newman took up the Aristotelian account of phronesis, and developed it, in his own account of the ‘conscience’; and he maintained that the ‘conscience’ was ‘the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind’.7 The ‘conscience’, as Newman understood it, is concerned with the ‘concrete’. ‘Conscience is not a judgment upon any speculative truth, any abstract doctrine, but bears immediately on conduct, on something to be done or not done. “Conscience,” says St. Thomas, “is the practical judgment or dictate of reason, by which we judge what hic et nunc is to be done as being good, or to be avoided as

5. ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’, in Discussions and Arguments [hereafter DA] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 294, 296. 6. ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’, in DA, 295. 7. ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 18.

Introduction

3

evil.”’8 Thomas Aquinas takes ‘conscience’ to be an act of ‘judgement’, applying a knowledge of what is ‘good’ or ‘evil’ to something ‘here and now’, in determining what is ‘to be done’. The virtue of making good judgements, about good and evil – the virtue of having a well-formed conscience, a capacity to judge rightly as to what is good – is, for Aquinas, involved in ‘prudence’, or phronesis. Newman tends to use the term ‘conscience’ to designate not merely particular acts of judgement, but, in addition, the capacity for making those acts of judgement: the acquisition of ‘prudence’ or phronesis is, for Newman, a forming or ‘strengthening’ of ‘the conscience’ (‘the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become’).9 The judgements or ‘dictates’ of the conscience are concerned with ‘something to be done or not done’ – something ‘concrete’. In his account of phronesis, Aristotle maintains that phronesis involves ‘perception’, a kind of ‘intuitive reason’, which registers the significance of ‘particular’ realities; the apprehension of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, involved in this ‘perception’, surpasses, in certain respects, that which is involved in ‘universal statements’ or ‘generalizations’. As Newman observes, ‘The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them.’10 Something more of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is presented in, or via, the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis, than in ‘such jejune generalizations as treatises can give’. Newman, generally, was inclined to regard the ‘concrete’, ‘concrete matter’, as having a fullness of significance that no ‘jejune generalizations’ could compass; and he considered the ‘imagination’ to apprehend, to intuit, something of this fullness of significance in the ‘concrete’. The Christian revelation, Newman maintains, presents an ‘image’ of that which cannot be comprehended; to be a Christian is to live with a sense that one is ‘in an immense unbounded system with a height above and a depth beneath’ and this registering of an ‘immense unbounded system’, a meaning that cannot be fully apprehended, or articulated, is an act of the imagination.11 Newman observes that ‘the Christian lives … in the unseen; in a word, he lives in no small measure in the unknown’, such that it is a ‘duty’ for the Christian ‘to make the unknown known; to create within him an image of what is absent, and to realise by faith what he does not see’. If the ‘unknown’ is, in some sense, ‘known’ through such an ‘image’, it is not thereby made comprehensible. The imagination can, in an ‘image’, apprehend something of the ‘immense unbounded system’ of reality; it can apprehend a ‘world of information’ in such an image, but what it apprehends cannot be translated or transposed into a comprehensible ‘system’: the ‘immense unbounded system’ of

8. A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation (1875; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900), 256. 9. ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 18. 10. Grammar of Assent, 354. 11. ‘The State of Grace’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 140.

4

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

reality cannot be translated into the ‘bounded’ systems of the intellect. Newman would make, in this regard, a contrast between ‘poetry’ and ‘science’. Science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is (to use the familiar term), to master them, or to be superior to them … . As to the poetical, very different is the frame of mind which is necessary for its perception. It demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves. It implies that we understand them to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious; so that at best we are only forming conjectures about them, not conclusions, for the phenomena which they present admit of many explanations, and we cannot know the true one.12

In a letter, Newman once remarked that ‘when we ask for reasons, we rationalize – When we detach and isolate things, which we should connect, we are superstitious.’13 Newman only considered it mistaken to ‘ask for reasons’ when genuine ‘reasons’ were not to be had: ‘Rationalism is a certain abuse of Reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted’; it is ‘rationalism to accept the Revelation, and then to explain it away; to speak of it as the Word of God, and to treat it as the word of man … to frame some gratuitous hypothesis about [the “contents of Revelation”] and then to garble, gloss, and colour them, to trim, clip, pare away, and twist them, in order to bring them into conformity with the idea to which we have subjected them.’14 If, though, Newman considered it mistaken to ‘ask for reasons’, or to insist on them, where ‘reason’ is ‘unfitted’ to provide them, he equally considered it mistaken to ‘detach and isolate things, which we should connect’; if ‘poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system’, so, to experience this ‘delight’ might be to be indisposed to form a ‘system’ which would dispel it, even when ‘we should’ form such a ‘system’. Newman suggests that the mind, in being formed, starts from, and passes beyond, a ‘poetical’ stage – ‘the season of poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful, because it is new’ – a stage associated with ‘youth’, ‘because when we 12. ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in Historical Sketches ii [hereafter HS ii] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 386–7. 13. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al. [hereafter LD] (London: Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarendon, 1972–2008) v, 151. 14. ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 31, 32.

Introduction

5

first see things, we see them in a “gay confusion,” which is a principal element of the poetical. As time goes on, and we number and sort and measure things – as we gain views – we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.’15 If one ought to ‘advance towards philosophy and truth’, then one ought, equally, to ‘recede from poetry’. Whether one should ‘recede from poetry’, though, in relation to the ‘things’ about which one forms ‘views’, might relate to whether or not one can ‘number and sort and measure’ those ‘things’. There might be some things, some realities, that one cannot ‘master’, and a proper apprehension of those things might involve the awareness that one cannot ‘master’ them; if poetry ‘demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet’ and ‘that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves’, then ‘poetry’ would seem to be (inevitably) involved in the apprehension of a reality that is, in truth, ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’ (even when something of that reality might be manifest via a revelation). Newman could maintain that ‘the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets’, ‘rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence or commune with themselves’.16 The Church combines ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’. ‘Imagination, Science, Prudence, all are good, and she has them all. Things incompatible in nature, coexist in her; her prose is poetical on the one hand, and philosophical on the other.’17 Newman maintains that only ‘in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special manner, knowledge’, yet it is a ‘knowledge’ that does not involve a ‘mastery’ of that which is the object of knowledge: ‘Religious Truth … 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.’18 The Christian ‘vision of faith’ involves, then, an imagining of that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’; Newman himself suggested that the imaginings of the first generation of the Romantic poets ‘prepare[d] men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth’, ‘stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas’.19 To have the Christian ‘vision of faith’ is to have a sense of ‘this world’ as presenting a ‘veil’, through which there can be ‘glimpses’ of a higher reality. A thick black veil is spread between this world and the next. We mortal men range up and down it, to and fro, and see nothing. There is no access through 15. Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17. 16. ‘John Keble’, in Essays, Critical and Historical ii (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1907), 442–3. 17. ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 369. 18. ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in ECH i, 41–2. 19. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 268.

6

John Henry Newman and the Imagination it into the next world. In the Gospel this veil is not removed; it remains, but every now and then marvellous disclosures are made to us of what is behind it. At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face.20

The ‘Form which we shall hereafter see face to face’ is seen, in the here and now, ‘through a glass darkly’: such ‘dark’ apprehension is as much ‘poetical’ as it is ‘philosophical’.

2. Newman lived a life marked by a commitment to ‘Religious Truth’ above all else. He would, at the age of forty-four, abandon the Church of England – the Church in which he had been brought up, in which he had become a priest, the Church which he had, in all his literary labours, sought to defend, and to strengthen – and, he would, in this, abandon a form of life in which he had been settled for many years – as an Oxford fellow, a clergyman, living among friends, engaged in work to which he was eminently fitted by his talents and inclinations – to become a Catholic. He knew hardly any Catholics; he had little sympathy with what he had experienced of the culture of English Catholicism; in converting, he would act against almost all of his sympathies. He would do this because he had come to the view, after long deliberation, that the fullness of ‘Religious Truth’ was in the Catholic Church. He would then begin life again. On converting to Catholicism, having determined that he ought to become a priest, he would undertake, in Rome, the elementary training required of all candidates for the priesthood. As he would later observe, ‘A convert comes to learn, and not to pick and choose … . He comes to Catholicism as to a living system, with a living teaching … . And thus surrendering himself to the influences of his new religion, and not risking the loss of revealed truth altogether by attempting by a private rule to discriminate every moment its substance from its accidents, he is gradually so indoctrinated in Catholicism, as at length to have a right to speak as well as to hear.’21 Newman was brought up in the Church of England; he had, as a child, a ‘perfect knowledge’ of the ‘Catechism’, and was taught ‘to take great delight in reading the Bible’, but he had – he claimed in his Apologia pro Vita Sua – ‘no formed religious convictions till [he] was fifteen’:22 he was brought up in a conventional, moderate Anglicanism, characterized by an insistence on right conduct, and by ‘having the

20. ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 10. 21. A Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D., on Occasion of His Eirenicon (1865; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1900), 19. 22. Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua: The Two Editions of 1864 and 1865, ed. by Wilfrid Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 105.

Introduction

7

Bible read in Church, in the family, and in private’;23 he would later observe that ‘what Scripture especially illustrates from its first page to its last, is God’s Providence’.24 The ‘religious convictions’ Newman formed at the age of fifteen were those of Evangelical Calvinism. His conversion to an Evangelical form of Christianity coincided with an experience of great uncertainty and disruption in his home life: the bank of his father, Ramsbottom, Newman & Co, crashed, in the period of economic instability after the Napoleonic wars. The conversion of Newman to Evangelical Calvinism did not entail any severance with the Church of England – it was a conversion to a particular form of Anglican piety. (Once he had acquired more Catholic views, in the 1830s, Newman would come to regard Evangelical Calvinism as scarcely consistent with Anglicanism – though he retained a genuine regard for Evangelicals, and he considered that Evangelicalism was attractive to those Anglicans who desiderated something spiritually richer than what was presented to them in a typical parish.) At around the same time, Newman observed in his Apologia that a ‘deep imagination … took possession of ’ him – an ‘imagination’ not entirely in harmony with his Evangelical convictions – namely, that it was ‘the will of God that [he] should lead a single life’.25 Newman attended Trinity College, Oxford, and, despite performing poorly in his final examinations, secured in 1822 a fellowship at Oriel College, at that time a centre for intellectual ability at Oxford. He became a protégé of Richard Whateley, one of the main figures in the circle of the Oriel ‘Noetics’, a group committed to moderate reform, and to moderate freethinking (within the limits of Anglican orthodoxy). Newman would take orders as a deacon in 1824, and would become a priest, and curate of St Clement’s Church, Oxford, in 1825. He received support and advice, in his first efforts at pastoral work, from Edward Hawkins; the influence of Hawkins, and the experience of parochial work, induced him, as he observed in his Apologia, to ‘give up [his] remaining Calvinism, and to receive the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration’.26 During this period, Newman was much influenced by Richard Whateley; in his Apologia, he would remark that Whateley ‘emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason’.27 At the time when Newman was most closely associated with him, Whateley was engaged in an attempt to revive Aristotelian logic and rhetoric (Newman assisted him in preparing for publication his Elements of Logic). If Newman acknowledged that Whateley ‘taught me to think’, he would, equally, observe in his Apologia that ‘his influence on me in a higher respect than intellectual advance, (I will not say through his fault,) had not been satisfactory’; Newman confessed that, in 1827, he ‘was beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral; [he] was drifting in the direction of liberalism’ – but that he was ‘rudely awakened from [his] dream at the end of 1827 by two great blows – illness and bereavement’ – the

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Grammar of Assent, 56. Ibid., 57. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 110–1. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 114.

8

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘illness’ being a near nervous breakdown, brought on by overwork, and the ‘bereavement’ being the loss of his youngest sister, Mary, who died in January, 1828.28 His ‘drifting in the direction of liberalism’, such as it was, may have been owing as much to the influence of another of his Oriel colleagues – Blanco White, for whom he had a high regard – as it was to the influence of Whateley. In 1836, Newman would write a tract against ‘The Introduction of Rationalist Principles into Revealed Religion’ which was, among other things, a response to a work by White, Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy (1835), which White wrote after leaving the Anglican Church to become a Unitarian; and, in that tract, Newman observes that the ‘spirit’ of ‘Rationalism’, ‘like an infection of the air … has perchance ere now, in some degree, not perhaps as regards the high doctrines of the Gospel, but in some way or other, breathed upon those who, at the present crisis of things, feel themselves called upon solemnly to resist it. The books of the day are so full of its evil doctrine in a modified shape, if not in its grosser forms, – the principles (I may say) of the nation are so instinct with it or based on it, – that the best perhaps that can be said of any of us, or at most of all but a few, is, that they have escaped from it, “so as by fire,” and that the loudness of their warning is but a consequence of past danger, terror, and flight.’29 His escape ‘as by fire’ from the ‘liberalism’ towards which, he later felt, he had been drifting, was owing, more than anything else, to the influence of two other Oriel colleagues, Hurrell Froude and John Keble. It was connected, moreover, to his researches into the writings of the Church Fathers. In his Apologia Newman observed that in the mid-1820s a certain ‘disdain for antiquity had been growing on’ him; but in 1828, he began a course of reading in the Church Fathers. His knowledge of the early Church would become more intensive when he undertook, in the early 1830s, to investigate the early councils of the Church (with this resulting in his first book, Arians of the Fourth Century (1834)). What gave these researches their point, and focus, was the idea that the Church of England was the legitimate successor of the early Church; it was, as Newman observed in his Apologia, the ‘local presence and organ’ of the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’.30 Newman maintained in his Apologia that he had developed a sense of the Church, as a body independent of the state, and a means or conduit of certain graces, prior to the time he had become acquainted with Froude and Keble. He had been influenced by Hawkins to accept the doctrine of ‘Baptismal Regeneration’, and to recognize ‘Tradition’ as the primary means of teaching Christian doctrine; he had been influenced by Whateley to form an ‘anti-Erastian’ understanding of the Church, recognizing its independence of the state; and he was taught by ‘the Rev. William James, then Fellow of Oriel … [in] about the year 1823 … the doctrine of Apostolical Succession, in the course of a walk … round Christ Church meadow’.31

28. Ibid., 115, 116–17. 29. ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in ECH i, 91–2. 30. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 132. 31. Ibid., 113.

Introduction

9

Newman does not, in the Apologia, attempt to trace everything that he owed to the influence of Keble – though he maintains that Keble was the ‘true and primary author’ of ‘that movement afterwards called Tractarian’, the movement to which Newman would devote his energies over the course of the 1830s – but he does reflect on ‘the effect [on him] of [the] religious teaching’ in The Christian Year by Keble, a volume of poetry published in 1827, which, according to Newman ‘woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school, long unknown in England’.32 The Christian Year, Newman claims in the Apologia, ‘brought home’ to him two ‘intellectual principles’, which he had already encountered in The Analogy of Religion by Joseph Butler, but which were ‘recast in the creative mind of [his] new master’: the principle that ‘material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen’ – a principle informing the ‘sacramental system’, and a ‘sacramental’ sense of reality; and the principle – derived from the view of Butler that ‘probability is the guide of life’ – that ‘the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, [is owing] not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it’.33 The reflections of Keble on ‘probabilities’, and on the ‘living power’ of the mind – in registering those ‘probabilities’ – were informed by his understanding of the Aristotelian notion of ethos; Keble took ethos to be pertinent not only to how one acts, but to what one believes.34 Newman was preoccupied, all his life, with the question of how ethos relates to ‘Religious Truth’ (and there is a sense in which his turn from Whateley to Keble was a turn from an Aristotelianism in which ‘logic’ was regarded as having primacy – inspired by the Aristotle who, according to Newman, took ‘logic’ to be an ‘instrumental art’, an ‘art’ of thinking so as to ascertain the truth – to an Aristotelianism in which ‘practical wisdom’ was regarded as having primacy – inspired by the Aristotle who analysed the ‘practical wisdom’ of the ‘good man’ in the Nicomachean Ethics, and who, rather than regarding ‘logic’ as a ‘technical art’ for ascertaining all truth, maintained that ‘it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; [as] it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs’).35 If Newman took up certain

32. Ibid., 119, 120. 33. Ibid., 120, 121. 34. James Pereiro, in Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) has shown how Keble, in a number of sermons of the 1820s, connected ethos not merely with conduct, but with belief. 35. Newman declares in The Grammar of Assent, ‘in spite of Aristotle, I will not allow that genuine reasoning is an instrumental art’. Grammar of Assent, 338. He equally observes that ‘as to the intellectual position from which I have contemplated the subject, Aristotle has been my master’. ‘There is only one Religion in the world which tends to fulfil the aspirations, needs, and foreshadowings of natural faith and devotion. It may be said, perhaps, that, educated in Christianity, I merely judge of it by its own principles; but this is not the fact. For, in the first place, I have taken my idea of what a revelation must be, in good

10

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘principles’ from Keble, he took, more than that, a certain ‘music’ from him – or, rather, Keble made him aware of a certain ‘music’ in the forms of life, and worship, of the English Church, such that he could discern in them something of the life, and worship, of the primitive Church. He would, later, regard this vision as a mere ‘dream’. If [the “National Establishment”] were in deed and not only in name a Church, then indeed we may feel interest in it, and reverence towards it, and affection for it, as men have fallen in love with pictures, or knights in romance do battle for high dames whom they have never seen. Thus it is that students of the Fathers, antiquaries, and poets, begin by assuming that the body to which they belong is that of which they read in times past, and then proceed to decorate it with that majesty and beauty of which history tells, or which their genius creates … . But at length, either the force of circumstances or some unexpected accident dissipates it; and, as in fairy tales, the magic castle vanishes when the spell is broken, and nothing is seen but the wild heath, the barren rock, and the forlorn sheep-walk, so is it with us as regards the Church of England.36

In an essay on the poetry of Keble, written a year after his conversion to Catholicism, Newman claims that Keble ‘did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical … . His happy magic made the Anglican Church seem what Catholicism was and is. The established system found to its surprise that it had been all its life talking not prose, but poetry … . His poems became a sort of comment upon its formularies and ordinances, and almost elevated them into the dignity of a religious system. It kindled hearts towards his Church; it gave a something for the gentle and forlorn to cling to; and it raised up advocates for it among those, who otherwise, if God and their good Angel had suffered it, might have wandered away into some sort of philosophy, and acknowledged no Church at all.’37 The Oxford movement, to which Newman devoted himself throughout the 1830s, was animated by the belief that the Church of England was the ‘local presence and organ’ of the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’ – the Church established by Christ, and sustained, by the ‘Apostolic succession’, a succession of validly ordained Bishops, to be the appointed channel and means of grace in England. The English Church was this, in the view of Newman and his fellow ‘Tractarians’ or it ‘was nothing’; and it was this, whether its members were inclined to recognize

measure, from the actual religions of the world; and as to its ethics, the ideas with which I come to it are derived not simply from the Gospel, but prior to it from heathen moralists, whom Fathers of the Church and Ecclesiastical writers have imitated or sanctioned; and as to the intellectual position from which I have contemplated the subject, Aristotle has been my master.’ Grammar of Assent, 430. 36. John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching i [hereafter Diff i] (1850; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 5–6. 37. ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 442–5.

Introduction

11

it as such or not.38 As the English Church was the ‘local presence’ of the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’, so, everything which historical research could show to be a part of the ‘Catholic and Apostolic’ faith, delivered to the Apostles – and historical research could determine this by ascertaining the universal traditions of the early Church – was a part of the faith which the English Church should profess. The English Church – which, according to Newman, had been, since the Reformation, subjected to the state, and domineered over by ‘Protestant’ factions  – was in need of a ‘second Reformation’, by which it would recover its original ‘Catholic and Apostolic’ identity.39 The English Church took a ‘middle way’, a via media, in between the extremes of Rome (which vitiated the original, primitive Catholic faith, by presenting ‘upstart’ doctrines as a part of that faith) and Geneva. Newman, and those who participated with him in the ‘movement’, received the name of ‘Tractarians’ from the Tracts for the Times which they began publishing from 1833, tracts – often polemical in tone – which sought to promote ‘Apostolical’ principles. Yet the contribution of Newman to the movement consisted not simply in his controversial writing, but in his personal influence on those who encountered him in Oxford. In his preaching at St Mary’s, Oxford, he set out a vision of Christian perfection as something to be realized by carrying out, with ‘consistency’, and self-denial, the ordinary duties of each day. Newman felt that the ‘tokens’ which would show the English Church to be the ‘local presence’ of the ‘Catholic and Apostolic’ Church would become clearly ‘visible’, not through controversy or polemics (though Newman was certainly not averse to engaging in controversy, where he felt it necessary to do so) but through the efforts of those of its members who sought, sustained by the sacraments of that Church, to realize the ‘doctrine of [its] Services’, to realize an everyday holiness.40 The vision of the English Church as the successor, in England, to the primitive Church, or as ‘Catholic and Reformed’ was not, in itself, novel. What was novel, in the approach taken by Newman, and those who thought like him, was a willingness to promote devotional practices which were widely regarded as ‘Popish’ (such as fasting), a willingness to promote ideas of the nature and function of the priesthood, which were widely regarded as ‘Popish’, and a willingness to decry forms of ‘Protestantism’ (or ‘ultra Protestantism’, as Newman came to call it), which were widely regarded as consonant with Anglicanism; indeed, the Tractarians could seem to present the spectacle of a coterie, assuming – as legitimated by a theory of the English Church which was not in the least widely received – the authority to define the identity of that Church. For Newman himself, matters came to a crisis over Tract 90 in 1841, in which he sought to show how the 39 Articles, to which all clergymen in the English Church were required to subscribe – articles which were regarded by many as bulwark of the Church against Popery – could be interpreted in a sense

38. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 132. 39. Ibid. 40. ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in The Via Media of the Anglican Church i (1837; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 263.

12

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

which Newman regarded as ‘Catholic’, but which seemed, to those of more ‘ultra Protestant’ inclinations, merely ‘Popish’. For Newman, the reception of Tract 90 was one among many indications that the Church to which he belonged was not the ‘Catholic’ institution he had taken it to be. Yet if Tract 90 showed clearly, to some, that Newman ought to make his way, forthwith, to Rome, matters were less clear to Newman himself. That England was, in certain respects, in the wrong did not mean that Rome was in the right. Newman had, from 1839, it was true, felt from time to time a ‘dreadful misgiving’ that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’, but he had certain ‘difficulties’ with regard to Roman teaching (he felt that it involved unwarranted additions to the teaching of the primitive Church) and he had certain ‘difficulties’ with regard to Roman devotional practice (he felt that it involved an idolatrous attitude towards Mary and the Saints) and he needed to resolve these. In 1845 he would set to work on his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in which he set out a theory of doctrinal development – explaining how the primitive creeds of early Christianity might expand into the fuller creed of Pope Pius IV – and an account of certain ‘tests’ for distinguishing authentic developments from corruptions – by which certain ‘Roman’ doctrines might be shown to be genuine expressions of the original ‘deposit’ of Christianity. Before he had finished the Essay, in the autumn of 1845, he was received into the Catholic Church. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman suggests that the ‘history of religious opinions’ ends with his reception into the church. From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no changes to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment. I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.41

While he might have been ‘in perfect peace and contentment’, with regard to the ‘religious opinions’ he accepted on becoming a Catholic, his life was not without its frustrations and difficulties. None of his undertakings seemed, quite, to prosper. He was accused, and found guilty (quite unjustly) of libel. His efforts to establish a Catholic University in Ireland were unavailing. The proposal that he should oversee a new translation of the Bible into English came to nothing. His brief tenure as editor of the liberal Catholic journal the Rambler (a post he took up unwillingly) got him into difficulties, when an article of his on ‘Consulting the

41. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 331.

Introduction

13

Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ was delated to Rome. He encountered suspicion and misunderstanding on the part of some of his fellow Catholics. He was at odds with the ‘ultramontane’ party in the church, which conceived of the authority of the Pope in ways which Newman considered excessive (though he did not, for his part, have any difficulty in accepting the definition of papal infallibility promulgated at the first Vatican Council). (The very chapter, in the Apologia, in which he declared that he had, since becoming a Catholic, been in ‘perfect peace and contentment’, involved an attempt to counter an ‘ultramontane’ vision of the life of the church, as a matter of submission to the highest authority, with a vision of the life of the church as ‘an arena’ for a ‘never dying duel’ between ‘Authority’ and ‘Private Judgement’, such that ‘as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but it presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide’.42 His own ‘perfect peace and contentment’ did not preclude him from engaging in certain intellectual ‘duels’, and, indeed, as he acknowledges, it was a ‘peace’ that was quite consistent with rigorous ‘thinking on theological subjects’.) At a time when Newman was in a state of considerable despondency, he was alerted to a passage in an article, in Macmillan’s Magazine: ‘Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole, ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage.’ On writing a letter of protest to the publishers, at the ‘grave and gratuitous slander’, Newman learned that the writer of the article was Charles Kingsley; and, after an exchange of letters between Newman and Kingsley (which Newman published, with some satirical reflections on the letters of Kingsley), Kingsley wrote a pamphlet assailing the honesty and integrity of Newman. In response, Newman wrote a masterpiece, his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), explaining his own changes of ‘religious opinion’, vindicating his own honesty and attempting, thereby, to show that Catholic beliefs could be honestly entertained. From that time, his reputation, in the Protestant world at least, was much restored, and some of his old friendships – which had been broken when he converted to Rome – were revived. Becoming a Catholic may have meant intellectual ‘peace and contentment’ for Newman, but it did not mean emotional ‘peace’. Yet, after all, it did mean the creation of a ‘home’. Shortly after his conversion, Newman established an Oratory in England. From the Oratory in Birmingham, Newman sent Frederick Faber to establish an Oratory in London. While relations between the two Oratories were not always harmonious, Newman did create, with others, in the Oratory in Birmingham, which was his ‘nido’ or

42. Ibid., 343. Ian Ker calls attention to this dimension of the rhetoric of this chapter in the Apologia in his John Henry Newman: A Biography (1988; Oxford: Clarendon, 2009) – see especially, 533–59.

14

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘nest’, a home. He understood the creation of such a ‘home’ to be of the essence of the Oratorian vocation – in which the members of the Oratorian congregation were bound together, not by formal vows, but by charity, by obedience to one another, by a common commitment to the creation of a ‘home’. The Congregation is to be the home of the Oratorian … . The Congregation, according to St Philip’s institution, is never to be so large that the members do not know each other. They are to be ‘bound together by that bond of love, which daily intercourse creates, and thereby all are to know the ways of each, and feel a reference for the “countenances of familiar friends.”’ Familiar faces, exciting reverence, daily intercourse, knowledge of each other’s ways, mutual love, what is this but a description of home?43

The ‘harmony’ of this ‘home’ was to be maintained, not by ‘vows’, but by something like ‘tact’. ‘It is the common sense, the delicacy, the sharp observation, the tact of each which keeps the whole in harmony. It is a living principle, call it (in human language) judgment or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception, which takes the place of formal enactment.’44 His mode of life, his vocation, made the importance of this ‘living principle’ peculiarly apparent. As a thinker, he, equally, sought to make the office of this ‘living principle’ apparent, and to secure a proper estimation of ‘judgement or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception’: he maintained that ‘formal enactments’, ‘rules’ – whether in life, or in thought – cannot do that which only ‘judgement’ or ‘moral perception’ can do. His last major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, was an attempt to characterize, and to set out the function of, such ‘judgement’ or ‘perception’, as involved in the apprehension of ‘truth’, and the attainment of ‘certitude’. If Newman experienced various trials as a Catholic, he would, eventually, experience a certain vindication, when in 1879 he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, and permitted to remain in residence at the Oratory in Birmingham, where he would live out his remaining years.

3. Newman did not set out a definition of ‘the imagination’. He tended to contrast the ‘imagination’ with ‘reason’, though he tended, equally, to use the term ‘reason’ in different ways. He took the ‘ordinary’ use of the term ‘reason’ to designate one form of ‘reason’ – namely ‘explicit reason’, the ‘reason’ that was articulated in ‘verbal reasoning’ and argument – but he did not (certainly, not from the late 1830s) regard such ‘conscious reasoning’ as the only form of ‘reason’. He tended to

43. ‘Newman’s Oratory Papers No. 5’, in Newman the Oratorian, ed. by Placid Murray O.S.B. (1968; Leominster: Gracewing, 2004), 192 44. ‘Newman’s Oratory Papers No. 6’, in Newman the Oratorian, 208.

Introduction

15

associate ‘imagination’ with the apprehension of the ‘concrete’. In his Grammar of Assent, he associated ‘real apprehension’, the apprehension of ‘real’ things – which, he observed, are ‘concrete’, ‘unit and individual’ – with the ‘imagination’. Newman tended, moreover, to associate ‘imagination’ or ‘imaginative apprehension’ with ‘feeling’: imaginative apprehension, for Newman, elicits feeling, rouses the ‘affections’. As early as 1828, Newman was attempting to make sense of the relationship between the ‘intellect’ and the ‘moral feelings’. In a letter to Blanco White, he reflects on how the unique ‘course’ of ‘each mind’, ‘actuated’ by ‘ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings’, can scarcely be represented in ‘words’, which are ‘a certain medium of communication between mind and mind – yet only to a certain extent’. We cannot gauge and measure by any common rule the varieties of thought and opinion. We all look at things with our own eyes – and invest the whole face of nature with colours of our own. – Each mind pursues its own course and is actuated in that course by ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings. It would be comparatively easy to enumerate the various external impulses which determine the capricious motions of a floating feather or web, and to express in algebraical formula the line it describes – so mysterious are the paths of thought. Nay I might even be tempted to say that on no single point do any two individuals agree – no single object do their minds view from the same spot and in the same light. And this will of course hold good in religious matters – Necessary as it is, that we should all hold the same truths (as we should be saved), still each of them holds them in his own way; and he differs from his nearest and most loved friends either in the relative importance he gives to them, or in the connected view he takes of them, or in his perception of the particular consequences resulting from them. – Accordingly I trust I shall be very slow to quarrel with persons differing from me in matters of opinion. For words are not feelings – nor is intellect ethos. Intellect seems to be but the attendant and servant of right moral feeling and this [sic] own weak and dark state of being, defending it when attacked, accounting for it, and explaining it in a poor way to others. It supplies a certain medium of communication between mind and mind – yet only to a certain extent – and when we think we can detect honest principle, purity of heart, and a single eye, it is irrational to delay the recognition of these real excellences till we have settled subordinate points, to exalt what are but means to an end, and make expressed opinions and formal statements an objection to our believing in the existence of moral feelings in others which by the exercise of common sense we may actually see. – I have Froude’s authority for lowering the intellectual powers into handmaids of our moral nature. But I doubt whether he or Wilberforce will think it safe to proceed to the lengths to which I expatiate. – For instance, it never occurs to me to measure the degree of a Socinian’s error by the deficiency of his creed under the accuracy of the Athanasian – yet this is a common practice … . Let me then challenge W. or F. to give us some account of the connexion (how far)

16

John Henry Newman and the Imagination of speculative error with bad ethos – e.g. in what a consistent Socinian is a worse man than an orthodox believer. I think him to be worse, but I wish my mind clear on the subject, which it is not at present.45

Newman acknowledges that he wishes his ‘mind clear on the subject, which it is not at present’. He is concerned with how differences of ‘opinion’ in religion can, and must, coexist with agreement on the ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold … (as we would be saved)’; and he would connect ‘speculative error’ – with regard to those ‘truths’ – with ‘bad ethos’ (though he wishes for ‘some account of the connexion’ of ‘speculative error with bad ethos’). If there is such a ‘connexion’, then a ‘Socinian’ – denying certain of those ‘truths’, relating to the Trinity – must be ‘a worse man than an orthodox believer’. Newman wishes to distinguish between important and unimportant differences of ‘opinion’, and to relate this to the difference between ‘intellect’ and ‘ethos’. ‘Intellect’ is of less moment than ‘ethos’; differences in ‘matters of opinion’ are of less moment than differences with respect to those ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold’; and there is a ‘connexion’ between ‘ethos’ and the acceptance of those ‘truths’ which ‘we should all hold’. Newman presents a contrast between what can be expressed in ‘words’ and what cannot, and a contrast between what is, or can be, ‘common’, between ‘mind and mind’, and what is not, and cannot be, ‘common’. What can be represented in ‘words’, in ‘formal statements’, is only a part of the life of the mind; it is the whole life or ‘course’ of the mind that ‘actuates’ the forming of ‘opinions’; and as ‘words’ cannot represent all that makes for the forming of ‘opinions’, they cannot wholly determine the forming of ‘opinions’. Argumentation in ‘words’ (‘intellect’) is supplementary to, ancillary to (an ‘attendant and servant’ of), the activity or ‘course’ of the ‘mind’ that makes for the forming of opinions: it is a part of the whole that is the living ‘course’ of the mind. If what is ‘expressed’ in ‘words’ is only a part (an ancillary or ‘attendant’ part) of the life of the mind, then those who disagree, who ‘quarrel’ might have differences arising from that which cannot be expressed in ‘words’, differences which could not be made apparent, or resolved, in ‘words’. Then again, those who quarrel over ‘matters of opinion’ might have more in common than they could make apparent in ‘words’, and the recognition, by each, of what they had in common, would require, not ‘words’, but a certain perceptiveness, intuition, ‘common sense’. It requires this ‘sense’, it would seem, to determine when ‘quarrelling’ is unnecessary, or when it is unable to resolve matters. It is this ‘common sense’ that registers ‘moral feelings in others’: the proper ‘measure’ of these feelings does not consist in their ‘expressed opinions and formal statements’. It takes a ‘sense’ associated with a ‘good’ ethos, perhaps, to distinguish between those ‘speculative’ differences that are of little importance – mere ‘matters of opinion’ – and those that manifest ‘bad ethos’. If ‘Socinian’ opinions must derive from a ‘bad ethos’, but if one should

45. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al. [hereafter LD] (London: Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarendon, 1972–2008), ii, 60.

Introduction

17

not simply infer the ‘moral feelings’ of others from their ‘expressed opinions’ – so that one should not simply ‘measure’ the ‘moral feelings’ of a ‘Socinian’ from ‘the deficiency of his creed’ – then there should be something in a ‘consistent Socinian’, other than ‘expressed opinions’ that manifests a ‘deficiency’ of ‘moral feelings’; but what is it? What are the ‘moral feelings’ that a rightly formed ‘sense’ could ‘detect’ in a ‘consistent Socinian’ which would arise from ‘bad ethos’, and which would actuate ‘speculative error’? ‘In what [is] a consistent Socinian … a worse man’? (A ‘Socinian’ in whom one could detect some good ‘feelings’ would, presumably, not be wholly ‘consistent’, and might, in having those ‘good feelings’, be tending towards ‘truth’.) Just a few months after writing to Blanco White, about the contrast between ‘words’ or the ‘common rule’ and the ‘ten thousand indescribable incommunicable feelings and imaginings’ making up the ‘course’ of ‘each mind’, by which ‘each mind’ invests ‘the whole face of nature with colours of [its] own’, Newman would write an article for White, who was then the editor of the London Review, on ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in which he would maintain that the ‘poetical mind’, ‘full of the eternal forms of beauty and perfection … colour[s] each object to which it directs its view’, creating a ‘world of its own’; poetry, he insists, is the ‘originality of right moral feeling’ such that ‘a right moral state of heart is the formal and scientific condition of a poetical mind’; and he contrasts this understanding of poetry as the ‘effusion’ of a ‘poetical mind’, in a ‘right moral state’, with an understanding of poetry that would take it to be something that might be ‘modelled on ... scientific principle’, or that would take it to be a form of ‘workmanship’ which might be conducted according to certain general rules: Newman associates poetry with the ‘spontaneous’ life, or ‘energizing’ of the mind – as contrasted with a thinking in, or by ‘rule’ – and he suggests that a good ‘ethos’ is the ‘condition’ for having a ‘poetical’ apprehension of the world; what is more, he maintains that ‘Revealed Religion’ is ‘especially poetical’ – ‘with Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty.’46 A few years later, in 1834, in Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman contrasts the ‘implicit acknowledgement’ of the ‘Blessed Trinity’, in the ‘faith of uneducated men’, with an acknowledgement ‘conceived in those precise statements which presuppose the action of the mind on its own sentiments and notions’; the ‘implicit acknowledgement’ would, then, involve ‘sentiments and notions’ which had not been made, by the ‘action of the mind’ on itself, explicit. These sentiments and notions would arise from the spontaneous ‘energizing’ of the mind. ‘Moral feelings do not directly contemplate and realize to themselves the objects which excite them. A heathen in obeying his conscience, implicitly worships Him of whom he has never distinctly heard. Again, a child feels not the less affectionate reverence towards his parents, because he cannot discriminate in words, nay, or

46. ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 3–4, 7, 10, 20, 21, 23.

18

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in idea, between them and others.’47 There might be, it would seem, a recognition of certain ‘objects’, in the ‘moral feelings’ evoked by those objects, without that recognition being articulated in ‘precise statements’: those ‘moral feelings’ involve, in some way, an apprehension of those ‘objects’. In a sermon on ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, preached in 1840, Newman associates ‘implicit reason’ with all, making up the life or ‘course’ of the mind, which is not represented in ‘words’. ‘Implicit reason’ is the spontaneous activity of the mind; ‘explicit reason’ is an ‘analysis’, in ‘words’, of that activity. There is always more in the life of the mind than can be made fully ‘explicit’, for ‘no analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately’ all that is involved in the life of the mind. Where, in 1828, he had conceived of this contrast in terms of a distinction between ‘feelings and imaginings’, and ‘intellect’, in 1840 he conceives of it in terms of a distinction between different kinds of ‘reason’ – ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’. 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. The end proposed is that of delineating, or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider what it is to portray duly in form and colour things material, and we shall surely understand the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of representing the outline and character, the hues and shades, in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind, or of giving it that substance and that exactness in detail in which consists its likeness to the original, or of sufficiently marking those minute differences which attach to the same general state of mind or tone of thought as found in this or that individual respectively. It is probable that a given opinion, as held by several individuals, even when of the most congenial views, is as distinct from itself as are their faces. Now how minute is the defect in imitation which hinders the likeness of a portrait from being successful! How easy is it to recognize who is intended by it, without allowing that really he is represented! Is it not hopeless, then, to expect that the most diligent and anxious investigation can end in more than in giving some very rude description of the living mind, and its feelings, thoughts, and reasonings?48

If an ‘analysis’ in ‘words’ cannot represent an ‘intellectual view’ as it ‘really exists in the mind’, then how should ‘words’ be used, and how should they be taken? Newman maintains that almost all the ‘reasons formally adduced in moral inquiries, are rather specimens and symbols of the real grounds, than those grounds themselves.’ They do but approximate to a representation of the general character of the proof which the writer wishes to convey to another’s mind … . They are hints towards, and samples of, the true reasoning, and demand an active, ready, candid, and docile mind, which can throw itself into what is said, neglect verbal difficulties, and pursue and carry out principles. This is the true office of a writer, to excite 47. Arians of the Fourth Century (1833; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 143–4. 48. ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, in OUS, 267–8.

Introduction

19

and direct trains of thought; and this, on the other hand, is the too common practice of readers, to expect every thing to be done for them, – to refuse to think, – to criticize the letter, instead of reaching forwards towards the sense, – and to account every argument as unsound which is illogically worded.49

Newman would maintain much the same thing, almost thirty years later, in his last major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. It will be our wisdom to avail ourselves of language, as far as it will go, but to aim mainly by means of it to stimulate, in those to whom we address ourselves, a mode of thinking and trains of thought similar to our own, leading them on by their own independent action, not by any syllogistic compulsion. Hence it is that an intellectual school will always have something of an esoteric character; for it is an assemblage of minds that think; their bond is unity of thought, and their words become a sort of tessera, not expressing thought, but symbolizing it.50

In the Grammar of Assent, Newman connects the ‘imagination’ with that which is ‘personal’ – as contrasted with that which is ‘common’ – in the life of the mind, as he associates the ‘imagination’ with ‘real assents’, assents involving the apprehension of images, or ‘imaginative apprehension’, and these, he maintains, are of a ‘personal character’. [Real assents] are of a personal character, each individual having his own, and being known by them. It is otherwise with notions; notional apprehension is in itself an ordinary act of our common nature. All of us have the power of abstraction, and can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions; and thus to co-operate in the establishment of a common measure between mind and mind. And, though for one and all of us to assent to the notions which we thus apprehend in common, is a further step, as requiring the adoption of a common stand-point of principle and judgment, yet this too depends in good measure on certain logical processes of thought, with which we are all familiar, and on facts which we all take for granted. But we cannot make sure, for ourselves or others, of real apprehension and assent, because we have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special. They depend on personal experience; and the experience of one man is not the experience of another. Real assent, then, as the experience which it presupposes, is proper to the individual, and, as such, thwarts rather than promotes the intercourse of man with man. It shuts itself up, as it were, in its own home, or at least it is its own witness and its own standard; and, as in the instances above given, it cannot be reckoned on, anticipated, accounted for, inasmuch as it is the accident of this man or that … . An abstraction can be made

49. Ibid., 276. 50. Grammar of Assent, 309.

20

John Henry Newman and the Imagination at will, and may be the work of a moment; but the moral experiences which perpetuate themselves in images, must be sought after in order to be found, and encouraged and cultivated in order to be appropriated.51

The ‘images’ involved in ‘real assents’ derive from ‘moral experiences’, and ‘real’ apprehension ‘excites and stimulates the affections and passions, by bringing facts home to them as motive causes’.52 As, then, ‘real apprehension’ involves images, which derive from the ‘moral experiences’ that form the self, and as it elicits the ‘affections and passions’, which are ‘motive powers’ of conduct, such that ‘the imagination may be said in some sense to be of a practical nature, inasmuch as it leads to practice indirectly by the action of its object upon the affections’ (in those for whom that object is in some way ‘congenial’) so, ‘real apprehension’ would seem to be connected to ‘moral feeling’ and to ‘ethos’.53 ‘Real assents’, moreover, create union, harmony, ‘political’ community ‘between man and man’: they ‘kindle sympathies between man and man, and knit together the innumerable units which constitute a race and a nation. They become the principle of its political existence; they impart to it homogeneity of thought and fellowship of purpose.’54 Newman was preoccupied, all his life, with the relationships between ‘imagination’, ‘reason’, ‘moral feeling’, ‘ethos’ and the ‘personal’. Over the course of his life, he would consider these relationships in a number of ways, and in connection with a variety of questions: the way he reflected on this relationship in the 1830s – when he was preoccupied with questions about the relationship between ‘faith’ and right ‘conduct’ – differed from the way he reflected on this relationship in the late 1840s and 1850s – when he was preoccupied with the relationship between ‘divine faith’, the ‘vision of the Unseen’ and ‘reason’. In his letter to White, he makes the jocular remark that ‘I have Froude’s authority for lowering the intellectual powers into handmaids of our moral nature’; Froude, in this, was a representative of the ‘authority’ of Keble. Newman took up from Keble the idea that ‘ethos’, as conceived of by Aristotle, was connected to right belief, but, as he observed in his Apologia, he ‘tried to complete [the ideas of Keble] by considerations of [his] own’.55 During the 1830s Newman sought to understand the relationship between faith, the conscience and the visionary imagination (this is discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). He maintained that genuine faith was a ‘principle of conduct’, that it involved an apprehension of the ‘commands’ of God – and that, in this, it was connected to the development of the conscience – and yet he recognized, equally, that faith was an enrapturing ‘vision’. To live a life animated by ‘faith’ was to experience the world in a manner transfigured by, ‘coloured’ by a ‘vision’, and to be ‘in astonishment at the glories which are around

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Ibid., 83–4, 87. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 89. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 122.

Introduction

21

thee and in thee … as though thou hadst nought to do but to contemplate and feed upon that great vision’, and it was, equally, to be presented with the ‘commands’ of God, requiring an ‘obedience’ characterized by ‘anxiety about failing’ ‘the pain of self-denial’, and the undergoing of ‘petty annoyances’, for ‘true faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake’. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman suggests that the vision that animated his endeavours for the English Church, over the course of the 1830s, is ‘brought out’ in the ‘series of compositions’ in Lyra Apostolica (discussed in Chapter 3); it was a vision of a strife between the world and the Church, with the ‘watch-flame’ of the Church being kept by ‘the few’. These ‘few’ are envisaged, in Lyra Apostolica, as isolated figures, in combat with the ‘haughty world’ – so isolated, that there is little sense of any community, or communion, which unites and sustains them. The ‘few’, ‘world-fretted’, are in the ‘deserts’, ‘cast forth’ from the world; and there is little sense of ‘this fair English land’ as affording a ‘visible’ place, a dwelling, for that which is holy. Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s, Newman reflected on the way in which the Church was ‘a visible home and memorial of Truth’ (this is discussed in Chapter 4): the Church was, according to the Scriptures, to be a manifestation of Christ, of the Truth; and yet the Church, at the present time, was, he felt, ‘under eclipse’ – ‘The outward notes of the Church are partly gone from us, and partly going.’ The Church, Newman maintained, was a ‘light to the world’, when it was animated by the image of Christ, apprehended by ‘a Faith vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian’. In the 1830s, Newman envisaged the original ‘Tradition’, the expression, and the means of imparting, this ‘Faith’, as ‘impaired’, existing in various traces or ‘memorials’ (though one might tend towards this ‘Faith’ by striving to assimilate these various traces of the ‘Tradition’). In the 1840s, he came to regard this ‘Faith’ as still present in the world, still occasioning expressions of itself, and as subsisting in the Roman Catholic Church. The novel Loss and Gain (1848), (discussed in Chapter 5) was, in part, about how aspirations towards a ‘Faith’ of this kind were not satisfied by the Church of England. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Newman reflected on Catholic teaching with regard to ‘divine faith’, and sought to characterize the virtue of faith, as understood, and practiced, by Catholics – as a ‘vision of the Unseen’ that was virtually a ‘spiritual sight’ (these reflections are discussed in Chapter 6). During the 1850s, as he engaged in a work of ‘faith’ and ‘civilization’, attempting to establish a Catholic University in Dublin, Newman reflected – in The Idea of a University (1852), and in Callista (1855) – on the relationship between ‘faith’ and the cultivation of the intellect that he considered to be of the essence of ‘civilization’, and on how the ‘religion of civilization’ did not express, or satisfy, what was ‘deepest’ in the ‘heart’ (these reflections are discussed in Chapter 7). In the 1860s, in response to the ‘grave and gratuitous slander’ of Kingsley, as to his own honesty, and integrity, Newman sought, in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, to give an account of the ‘history’ of his ‘religious opinions’, and in relating that ‘history’ (discussed in Chapter 8), he intimates the ways in which his imagination ‘actuated’ the development of his ‘opinions’: ‘for myself, it was not logic that carried me on … It is the concrete being that reasons … the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it.’

22

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

He observes, in the Apologia, that while he sought, in relation to the religious questions which exercised him, ‘to be guided, not by [his] imagination, but by [his] reason’, he, equally (as a matter of ‘rational’ conviction) regarded the world as a ‘symbol’ of the ‘heavenly facts which fill eternity’, so that he was disposed to consider the (visionary) apprehension of the symbolic, in experience, a means to truth; Newman suggests, moreover, with regard to his own religious development, that his ‘imagination’ intuited certain truths, before his ‘reason’ recognized them. He intimates, in the Apologia, that, alongside the ‘intelligible processes of thought’, by which his ‘religious opinions’ developed, there were ‘day-gleam[s]’ of visionary insight, such that his religious development was a matter, not merely of the forming of ‘opinions’, through ‘intelligible processes of thought’, but of the forming of a vision; less than a year after writing the Apologia, he would present, in The Dream of Gerontius, the vision of a soul, after death, moving towards a ‘sight’ of the divine, through a ‘world of signs and types’, ‘dreams that are true, yet enigmatical’ – a vision that itself presented, in ‘symbols’, in ‘signs and types’, something of the ‘heavenly facts which fill eternity’. A few years later, in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (discussed in Chapter 9), he attempted to set out his developed reflections on the ‘reasoning’ of the ‘concrete being’, the ‘whole man’, in encountering the ‘concrete’ realities of experience: he maintained that the apprehension of the truth, in ‘concrete matter’, involved a judgement which was inalienably personal (which could not be conducted by ‘rule’) and which involved ‘imaginative apprehension’; he maintained that Christianity had its ‘moral life’ in an ‘Image’ of Christ, an ‘Image’ which ‘creates faith’.

Part I P ERSONAL V ISIONS: T HE 1830s

Chapter 1 FAITH, ‘PRACTICAL PERCEPTION’ AND PHRONESIS

Over the course of the 1830s, Newman developed an account of ‘faith’ as something ‘practical’ – a ‘practical perception of the unseen’. He was countering, in this, an understanding of faith that, in his view, made it too much a matter of mere ‘feeling’. Faith, he maintained, involves a distinctive kind of insight. In his efforts to characterize this insight, he worked with, and from, Aristotelian notions of ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis – the insight involved in living rightly.

1. In an article for the British Critic in 1839 on the ‘existing state of parties in the [English] Church’, Newman observed that ‘there has been for some years, from whatever cause, a growing tendency towards the character of mind and feeling of which Catholic doctrines are the just expression’. This manifested itself long before men entered into the truth intellectually, or knew what they ought to believe, and what they ought not; and what the practical duties were, to which a matured knowledge would lead them. During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised up in the North, [Scott] who, whatever were his defects, has contributed by his works, in prose and verse, to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth. The general need of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere, may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he re-acted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles … . And while history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was under formation in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made

26

John Henry Newman and the Imagination trial of his age, and found it respond to him, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth. It has indeed been only since the death of Coleridge that these results of his writings have fully shown themselves; but they were very evident when they were once seen, and discovered the tendencies which had been working in his mind from the first. Two living poets may be added, (Southey and Wordsworth) one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the same direction.1

Newman discerns, in the thought of the time, a movement toward the ‘true principles of the Church’, toward ‘Catholic truth’, and he discerns, in the ‘visions’ of Scott, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, something of the ‘spirit’ that characterizes that movement.2 Of this movement, or this ‘reaction to the true principles of the Church’, Newman remarks that it is ‘is within us, rising up in the heart where it was least expected, and working its way, though not in secret, yet so subtly and impalpably, as hardly to admit of precaution or encounter, on any ordinary human rules of opposition’, and that it is ‘a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and incapable of being grasped, as being the result of causes far deeper than political or other visible agencies, – the spiritual awakening of spiritual wants’. This state of ‘spiritual awakening’ is a state of ‘character’; and, if the ‘reaction to the true principles of the Church’ is an expression of this ‘spiritual awakening’, so this ‘reaction’ is an ‘expression’ of ‘character’. Newman characterizes the ‘visions’ of the first generation of the Romantic poets as ‘indications’ of a ‘spirit’: the visions are, in some sense, an ‘expression’ of this ‘spirit’. Newman, likewise, characterizes certain ‘Catholic doctrines’ as an ‘expression’ – an ‘expression’ of a ‘character of mind and feeling’. Newman suggests that in having certain ‘visions’, the Romantic poets were actuated by a ‘spirit’ that they did not fully comprehend. More than that, he suggests that this ‘spirit’ – as something ‘unapproachable and incapable of being grasped’ – might not be comprehensible. He suggests that the ‘ideas’, present (‘silently’, implicitly) in the ‘visions’ of the Romantic poets, were brought out explicitly when ‘men entered into the truth intellectually, or knew what they ought to believe’: the meaning of those ‘visions’ is made explicit in the ‘Catholic doctrines’; the ‘Catholic doctrines’ are the interpretation, the explanation, of the ‘visions’, and of the ‘spirit’ of which the ‘visions’ are an expression. Yet if the ‘spirit’ is ‘incapable of being grasped’, then this

1. John Henry Newman, ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical [hereafter referred to as ECH i] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 268–9. 2. The influence of Romantic ideas on Newman has been examined by Sidney John Coulson, in Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and in Religion and Imagination: ‘in Aid of a Grammar of Assent’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) and by Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

27

would suggest it is not fully ‘grasped’ even in the ‘Catholic doctrines’: there cannot be a perfect comprehension of that which is ‘unapproachable’, ‘incapable of being grasped’. The ‘doctrines’ are, Newman maintains, the ‘expression’ of a ‘character of mind and feeling’. Is the ‘spirit’ itself to be identified with this ‘character of mind and feeling’, or is it something more than that? Newman maintains that the ‘opinions’ associated with the ‘present movement’ are ‘one and all in their degree the organs of One Sentiment, which has risen up simultaneous in many places very mysteriously’. It may be frankly confessed that an excitement of the feelings, of whatever kind, has much to do with what is taking place, and perhaps will have still more, – and so again has the influence of authority, respect for character, and the like; so has sentiment, imagination, or fancy; and lastly … so has discussion, argument, investigation. But neither one, nor all of them together have been the real operating cause; rather they had been the means only, through which that cause has acted. Men who feel in themselves a moral need, which certain doctrines supply, may be right or wrong in their feeling, as the case may be; and the doctrines may supply it more or less genuinely; but anyhow they embrace the doctrines because they need them; and if they give tokens of being moved by argument, or feeling, or fancy, or by sympathetic excitement, or by influence and authority, it is merely that they are moved through these means, not by them. Minds contented with what they are and what they have, easily resist solicitations whether of imagination or argument; but they who wish for things which they have not, start and look about them with beating hearts and troubled eyes, when a whisper, from whatever source, tells them that their yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them. Such feelings, if of earth, are merely enthusiastic, and often argue impatience and want of discipline: – thus youths of high spirit indulge ambitious views, or allow themselves in other ways to idolize the creature; but when those feelings are true and right, they are the motions of a divine love, and the disposition to confide which they involve, whithersoever tending, is of the nature of faith. As to what are earthly, what heavenly feelings, and who is to discriminate between them, this is quite another question, on which men of different sentiments will decide differently. All we insist on is, that religious opinion in general is the result of something deeper than mere caprice or than syllogistic conviction, and more enduring than excitement or passion. … in a given case, argument, novelty, influence of others, imaginative beauty, these and the like appeals which address themselves to the mind from without, are but touchstones or tests, bringing out the hidden dispositions of one man, not of another. They are but the occasions, not the causes, of a man’s changing his mind, and any other view of them is a very shallow one. But at the same time we have no intention of disputing that, besides this moral orthodoxy, as it may be called, there are a great number of persons of unformed characters and opinions, who have not definite basis enough within them, good or bad, to respond to or revolt from the real substance of the various phantasiae offered to them; and they certainly are arrested and accidentally persuaded one way

28

John Henry Newman and the Imagination or the other by those visible exhibitions, which to the former class of minds are but means and channels of something deeper. As some men are converted or repulsed by the hidden sympathy or antipathy of their hearts toward the objects presented to them, many more, being incapable of either, are what is called ‘convinced,’ that is by argument, or ‘taken,’ that is by mere fancy, or ‘persuaded,’ that is by mere external influence. Such persons, while they remain in this state, without root in themselves, are ever liable to be ‘convinced,’ ‘taken,’ or ‘persuaded’ back again, and then they are rightly called inconsistent; though very often, nay in a measure always, in spite of the superficial character of such alternations, their hearts are unconsciously operated upon, for good or bad, by that doctrine, which they at first took up, not from its congeniality to their own minds, but from the shape in which it addresses them. And again some are called inconsistent by the world, whose changes are really owing to the keenness of their cravings after true spiritual nourishment. Persons thus earnestly on the look-out for something higher in the way of religion, than they at present possess, naturally close at once with whatever promises best. Then as their tone of mind rises, they become dissatisfied with their first choice; and on something better offering itself, quit it; not of course from light or capricious motives, but from the ordinary development of their own character and perceptions … . In spite of the extravagances, misapprehensions, and inconsistencies … in men both on the right and on the wrong side of ecclesiastical questions, there will after all be a general coincidence between a certain set of opinions and a certain character. The one will attend upon the other, and be a sort of type of it, correct in the main, though not to be depended on in every particular case. It is surely reasonable to judge in this way. We expect of a person who has adopted a set of opinions, whatever it may be, a character and tone of mind to correspond; and if we fail to see it in him, we note down the inconsistency.3

Newman maintains that certain ‘doctrines’ may ‘supply’ a ‘moral need’, and that the doctrines may be assented to as satisfying that need. ‘Men who feel in themselves a moral need, which certain doctrines supply … embrace the doctrines because they need them.’ He suggests that those who ‘embrace’ the ‘doctrines’ might well be unaware of how ‘they need them’. He envisages a situation in which those who ‘embrace’ the doctrines ‘give tokens of being moved by argument, or feeling, or fancy, or by sympathetic excitement, or by influence and authority’. This state of ‘being moved by argument, or feeling, or fancy, or by sympathetic excitement, or by influence and authority’ involves an awareness of the arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities in question: the awareness of the one who is moved is taken up with those arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities. Newman maintains that those who are moved in this way may be ‘moved through these means, not by them’, that the true ‘cause’ may consist in the ‘hidden dispositions’ of those who are moved in this way. They attend to these ‘means’, and are thereby ‘moved

3. ECH i, 274–7.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

29

through’ them; and, in attending to the ‘means’, they are not attending to how they are moved by them, or to that which is acting ‘through’ those ‘means’. The ‘hidden dispositions’ consist, one may take it, in certain desires, related to ‘moral need’: they consist in ‘the hidden sympathy or antipathy of [the] hearts [of those who have these dispositions] toward the objects presented to them’. The various arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities may, in this regard, be considered as  means through which certain ‘objects’ are ‘presented’. The ‘moral need’ is concerned with those ‘objects’ in themselves, and it consists in an attraction to, or aversion to, those objects. Newman comments on how some might ‘respond to or revolt from the real substance of the various phantasiae offered to them’; the arguments, feelings, fancies and authorities seem, in this regard, to be as phantasiae, and the ‘moral need’ relates to ‘real substance’ of what is manifested in or through these phantasiae. One might, then, have an imperfect awareness of that ‘real substance’, in responding to these phantasiae, and yet it is to that ‘real substance’ that one is responding, if one has the right ‘dispositions’. What, then, of the ‘supply’ of ‘moral need’, in or through certain ‘doctrines’? How might a ‘moral need’ be ‘supplied’ by certain doctrines? Newman makes a couple of remarks on the ‘supply’ of ‘moral need’: ‘minds contented with what they are and what they have, easily resist solicitations whether of imagination or argument; but they who wish for things which they have not, start and look about them with beating hearts and troubled eyes, when a whisper, from whatever source, tells them that their yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them’; ‘persons thus earnestly on the look-out for something higher in the way of religion, than they at present possess, naturally close at once with whatever promises best’ but ‘as their tone of mind rises, they become dissatisfied with their first choice; and on something better offering itself, quit it … from the ordinary development of their own character and perceptions’. He contrasts the state of discontent and unsettlement of those animated by ‘heavenly feelings’, who have the right ‘dispositions’, with that of ‘youths of high spirit [who] indulge ambitious views, or allow themselves in other ways to idolize the creature’. If, then, to have ‘heavenly feelings’ is not to ‘idolize the creature’, it is to desire, and to aim at, God: it is to desire the righteousness whereby one desires God above all else, a righteousness that is itself a participation in the righteousness of God. One desires the righteousness to desire God above all else – which is a ‘need’ to attain to a certain ‘moral’ state (‘minds’ animated with this desire are not ‘contented’ with ‘what they are’) – and one desires communion with God (‘minds’ animated with this desire are not ‘contented’ with ‘what they have’). One must have ‘yearnings’ toward this state, if one is to be moved by a ‘whisper, from whatever source’ that these ‘yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them’. ‘Catholic doctrines’ are, among other things, about the ‘supply’ of a ‘moral need’: they concern how it is to be ‘supplied’; they suggest how one should act, to ‘supply’ it. The ‘doctrines’ present a way of attaining to a certain good – communion with God – and one will be disposed to attend to them, to consider ‘embrac[ing]’ them, if the good, to which they present a way of attaining, is something which one desires. Newman suggests that there is a ‘spiritual nourishment’ in the ‘embrac[ing]’ of the

30

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

doctrines. Could an assent to those ‘doctrines’ be itself involved in a certain ‘moral’ or spiritual state, such that one comes to think differently, and becomes in certain respects a different sort of person, if one assents to them? If so, and if the ‘moral need’ with which Newman is concerned involves becoming that sort of person, then there is a certain ‘supply’ of that ‘need’ in the very act of assenting to those ‘doctrines’. Newman maintains that ‘there will … be a general coincidence between a certain set of opinions and a certain character [even if there may be exceptions in particular cases] … . We expect of a person who has adopted a set of opinions, whatever it may be, a character and tone of mind to correspond.’ If there is a ‘coincidence’ or a ‘correspondence’ between ‘a certain set of opinions and a certain character’, then it could be that the acquisition of those ‘opinions’ is involved in attaining to that ‘character’, and that a certain ‘moral need’ – a ‘need’ concerning what is required if one is to attain to a ‘certain character’ – is ‘suppl[ied]’ in the acquisition of those ‘opinions’. Newman claims that ‘Catholic doctrines are the just expression’ of a certain ‘character of mind and feeling’. If the ‘doctrines’ are to be an ‘expression’ of the ‘character of mind and feeling’, then this suggests that the ‘character of mind and feeling’ can be present without the ‘doctrines’: something must be present, if it is to be ‘expressed’. Newman suggests, equally, that the ‘doctrines’ are themselves involved in that ‘character of mind and feeling’. To have a ‘character of mind and feeling’ is to aim at certain things, to be disposed toward certain ends, teloi. This state involves some awareness of those ends. The awareness of those ends might be set out in certain ‘doctrines’; and the doctrines would, as such, manifest an awareness involved in a certain state of character. Yet to aim at certain things – to have a character in which such aims are predominant – is not necessarily to have a full, perfect apprehension of those things: the apprehension requisite for, sufficient for, such a character might be imperfect, and might, as such, admit of becoming fuller. One might, then, have the ‘character of mind and feeling’ that consists in aiming at certain things, without clearly apprehending them; one might get a fuller apprehension of them from ‘Catholic doctrines’; and the acceptance of those ‘doctrines’ might then affect how one aimed at those things: a fuller apprehension of certain ends would be implicated with a stronger desire for, a surer movement toward, those ends. If the insight, associated with the ‘doctrines’, were to be involved in this way in a certain ‘character of mind and feeling’, then the ‘expression’ here – whereby the state of ‘character’ is taken to be ‘expressed’ in certain ‘doctrines’ – would be a matter of the coming into being, the realization, of that ‘character of mind and feeling’: the act of accepting those ‘doctrines’ would be involved in the realization of that ‘character’. That character might be present, in an inchoate form, before the acceptance of those ‘doctrines’, and would become more fully realized, more fully developed, with the acceptance of those doctrines. Newman maintains that the ‘spirit’, which is being expressed in the ‘reaction to the true principles of the Church’, a reaction taking place in the intellectual life of England, and having its clearest expression in the Oxford Movement, is something ‘within us, rising up in the heart where it was least expected, and working its way’ and that it is ‘a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

31

incapable of being grasped’. This sense that it is ‘a something one and entire, a whole’ would suggest that everything associated with the manifestation or expression of that ‘spirit’ might be regarded as proceeding from that ‘whole’, as originating in it, and as realizing it. In his Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (1838), Newman set out an account of the ‘indwelling’ of the Holy Spirit, the ‘indwelling in us of God the Father and the Word Incarnate through the Holy Ghost’. To have ‘righteousness’, to live in a righteous manner, it is necessary to have the ‘gift’ of the Holy Spirit – it is necessary that the Holy Spirit be present, as ‘indwelling’ in the ‘heart’ – such that the acts which manifest ‘righteousness’, manifest, equally, the presence, and the ‘indwelling’ of the Holy Spirit: they are an expression of the Holy Spirit. The various acts of ‘righteousness’ that manifest, or attest to, the presence of the Spirit, are not a realization, a coming into being, of that Spirit itself (for that Spirit is always fully in being); but there is a sense in which the Spirit is more fully present in those who attain to a more perfect righteousness. There can be a greater or lesser realization of the Spirit – and of the ‘character’ that is an ‘expression’ of the ‘Spirit’ – in the acts of those who are animated by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is, evidently, ‘a something one and entire, a whole wherever it is, unapproachable and incapable of being grasped’: it is manifest in various ways, but those various manifestations ultimately attest to the presence of ‘something one and entire’, complete in itself.

2. Newman claims that ‘there will … be a general coincidence between a certain set of opinions and a certain character [even if there may be exceptions in particular cases] … . We expect of a person who has adopted a set of opinions, whatever it may be, a character and tone of mind to correspond.’ A locus classicus, to which Newman may well be referring here, is the passage from the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle claims that the true ‘object of wish’ – the true ‘good’ – is that which is the ‘object of wish’ of ‘the good man’. Are we to say that … that which is in truth an object of wish [the object which should be truly wished for, or desired] is an object of wish to the good man, while any chance thing may be so the bad man, as in the case of bodies also the things that are in truth wholesome are wholesome for bodies which are in good condition, while for those that are diseased other things are wholesome – or bitter or sweet or hot or heavy, and so on; since the good man judges each class of things rightly, and in each the truth appears to him? For each state of character has its own ideas of the noble and the pleasant, and perhaps the good man differs from others most by seeing the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them.4

4. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 45.

32

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman was closely acquainted with the Ethics: it was central to the Oxford curriculum; and his mentor, Richard Whateley, had, in the 1820s, promoted a recovery of Aristotelian ideas (above all, Aristotelian logic and rhetoric). Newman had helped Whateley to prepare his Elements of Logic for publication in 1826. John Keble, with whom Newman became acquainted in the late 1820s, accorded the Ethics particularly high importance, and had suggested, in a number of sermons preached in the 1820s, that ethos was connected, not simply to acting, but to thinking – to the formation of beliefs. In an account of the origins of the Oxford Movement, written by S. F. Wood in the 1840s, which Wood showed to Newman and Pusey, and which they corrected, it is suggested that the Ethics of Aristotle formed the foundation for the system of theological education developed by Keble and the other Tractarians. The Ethics of Aristotle … long a text book in the University, became in the hands of more than one College Lecturer the ground work of a very instructive course of Ethical study. Not that this course was either very extensive or scientific, but it led to much useful reflexion on the formation of moral habits, on their influence on opinions and such like practical points. Bishop Butler’s great work The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature was also studied; much more for the sake of the poignant suggestions it incidentally contains on the points just named, than as an argumentative defence of Religion. … To minds thus engaged the Religious teaching of the day naturally became unsatisfactory; they found it wanting in practical reality, in any discrimination of character or insight into motives and principles of action. Indeed, it was probably this which led them to make so religious a use of a Heathen treatise on morals, to dwell so largely on its details, and to make it as it were the groundwork of an education bearing to a great degree a Theological aspect. They imployed this indirect means for the inculcation of that which found no place in the explicit system.5

The sixth book of the Ethics, with its account of ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis, the understanding that informs the conduct of ‘the good man’, explicates the claim that ‘the good man … [sees] the truth in each class of things, being as it were the norm and measure of them’: one must, Aristotle maintains, be virtuous if one is to have phronesis, and to ‘see’ the ‘truth’ with which phronesis is concerned, the ‘truth’ of how one should act, here and now; but Aristotle maintains, equally, that one must have phronesis if one is to be virtuous. ‘It is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue.’ That ‘practical wisdom’ and ‘virtue’, understanding and desire, are implicated in this way could suggest that they are aspects of something ‘one and entire’, namely ‘the good man’: the different aspects of ‘the good man’ – whether pertaining to

5. Quoted in James Pereiro, in Ethos and the Oxford Movement: At the Heart of Tractarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 253.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

33

understanding, or desire – must be realized together, not in isolation, if they are to be realized at all; the states of understanding and desire involved in being ‘good’, virtuous, are expressions of the whole person, something ‘one and entire’, a ‘whole’, and the whole person is manifest in them. In the sixth book of the Ethics, Aristotle characterizes phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ as concerned mostly with ‘means’ – it is a kind of deliberation, concerned with identifying the appropriate ‘means’ to various good ends: to be virtuous is to desire certain good ends, and to have phronesis is to deliberate well about how to attain them. Yet one cannot desire good ends if one does not apprehend those ends, so the apprehension of those ends would itself seem to be involved in phronesis. Excellence in deliberation in the unqualified sense, then, is that which succeeds with reference to what is the end in the unqualified sense … . Excellence in deliberation will be correctness with regard to what conduces to the end which practical wisdom apprehends truly.6

Is Aristotle claiming here that ‘practical wisdom’ apprehends ‘truly’ what ‘conduces to the end’ or that it apprehends truly ‘the end’ itself? Aristotle, generally, associates the apprehension of the ‘ends’ with the ‘moral’ virtues, ordered to those ends, and he associates the apprehension of what ‘conduces’ to those ends with phronesis. Yet he, equally, maintains that the virtues require, and involve, phronesis, which is ‘correct reason’ (and it is ‘reason’, one would think, which apprehends the ‘end’). What is more, one cannot deliberate about ‘means’ without considering the ‘ends’ that are to be realized through those ‘means’. That is, the apprehension of the ‘end’ would seem to be involved in ‘practical wisdom’, phronesis; and ‘virtue’ itself – as a matter of being rightly disposed toward the ‘end’ – would seem to require such an apprehension. The ‘true apprehension’ of the end, equally, requires virtue. [The] eye of the soul acquires its formed state not without the aid of virtue, as has been said and is plain; for the syllogisms which deal with acts to be done are things which involve a starting-point, namely ‘since the end, i.e. what is best, is of such and such a nature’ … and this is not evident except to the good man; for wickedness perverts us and causes us to be deceived about the starting-points of action.7

Aristotle distinguishes between two parts of the ‘soul’, one of which ‘grasps a rule or rational principle’ – as the power of thinking or ‘reason’ itself – the other of which ‘is irrational’. He maintains that the ‘virtues’ are states of the ‘irrational’ part, comprising various states of desire with respect to the ‘ends’. If these states of desire are not, in themselves, ‘rational’, they are nevertheless responsive to ‘reason’.

6. Aristotle, Ethics, 114. 7. Ibid., 116.

34

John Henry Newman and the Imagination The appetitive and in general the desiring element in a sense shares in [the ‘rational principle’], in so far as it listens to and obeys it; this is the sense in which we speak of ‘taking account’ of one’s father or one’s friends, not that in which we speak of ‘accounting’ for a mathematical property. That the irrational element is in some sense persuaded by a rational principle is indicated also by the giving of advice and by all reproof and exhortation. And if this element also must be said to have a rational principle, that which has a rational principle (as well as that which has not) will be twofold, one subdivision having it in the strict sense and in itself, and the other having a tendency to obey as one does one’s father.8

This could suggest that the ‘desiring element’ of the ‘soul’ somehow responds to what is presented by ‘reason’ (to what ‘practical wisdom’, phronesis presents, in a ‘true apprehension’ of the ‘end’). Aristotle maintains that such a responsiveness, in the ‘desiring element’ of the ‘soul’, is developed by living in a certain way: it is developed by habituation, by carrying out the acts that ‘correct reason’ ordains – such that, the more one carries out such actions, the more one forms a propensity to carry out those actions; they become what one truly wants to do. One does not form oneself deliberately: one is formed, as a child, before one has acquired ‘reason’, by the kind of upbringing one has. One is initiated into the ‘good life’ by being induced to carry out the actions that befit that life – initially without understanding – and in carrying out those actions, one acquires an appreciation of why they are worthwhile (developing a ‘true apprehension’ of the ‘end’) and one develops an inclination, a desire, to do them. There is, one might suggest, a ‘rational principle’ informing such an initiation into the ‘good life’ – in that those responsible for bringing up children are aware of what they are doing, and what they are aiming at; but this ‘rational principle’ is not fully possessed, initially, by those being initiated into that way of life. Those being initiated acquire that ‘rational principle’ by going through that initiation. Aristotle maintains that ‘virtue’ proper – as a matter of being disposed toward certain ends, as apprehending ‘truly’ those ends – involves phronesis. In the moral part there are two types, natural virtue and virtue in the strict sense, and of these the latter involves practical wisdom. … For it is not merely the state in accordance with correct reason, but the state that implies the presence of correct reason, that is virtue; and practical wisdom is correct reason about such matters.9

The ‘end’ of virtuous conduct is virtue itself: the ‘end’ consists in virtuous acts, and acts are particular, and it is phronesis, or, rather, the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis, which assesses the particular. Aristotle contrasts this ‘perception’ with ‘science’. Where ‘science’ is concerned with the ‘universal’, ‘perception’ is concerned with the ‘ultimate particular’; and the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis is ‘akin to

8. Ibid., 21. 9. Ibid., 116–17.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

35

that by which we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle’.10 Where ‘science’ might be concerned with the ‘universal’ qualities of the ‘triangle’, with triangularity as such, ‘perception’ is concerned with identifying that this ‘before us is a triangle’. To recognize that this ‘before us is a triangle’ is to assign ‘this before us’ to a kind, and it is, accordingly, to have some notion, however rudimentary, of the kind. One cannot, what is more, develop an understanding of the universal qualities of this kind, of triangularity, if one cannot identify this ‘before us’ as a triangle. One can recognize that this ‘before us’ is a triangle without having the ‘science’ by which one understands triangularity as such. The ‘science’, presumably, would involve a development of the understanding of ‘triangularity’ involved in the capacity to recognize that this ‘before us’ is a triangle. Aristotle claims that perception is a kind of ‘intuitive reason’ which apprehends the ‘terms’ of an ‘argument’. The intuitive reason which is presupposed by demonstrations grasps the unchangeable and first terms, while the intuitive reason involved in practical reasonings [perception] grasps the last and variable fact, that is, the minor premiss. For these variable facts are the starting-points for the apprehension of the end, since the universals are reached from the particulars; of these therefore we must have perception, and this perception is intuitive reason.11

For Aristotle, ideas are formed by abstraction from ‘particulars’ such that, in identifying the forms of the ‘particulars’ one experiences, one abstracts from what is merely particular about them. He does not regard all ‘moral’ understanding as being concerned with an idea of ‘the good’, with a ‘universal’, ‘goodness’; rather, he characterizes the virtues that make for a good way of living, and he suggests that these virtues involve, or that they are connected to, a distinctive kind of understanding, phronesis. It could be, though, that the ‘universals’ with which he is concerned, in discussing ‘perception’, are ‘universals’ relating to the virtues – ideas of courage, temperance, justice and the like. If so, though, Aristotle is insistent that ‘moral’ understanding does not attain to the kind of ‘universals’ involved in ‘science’: one can attain to certain generalizations, but these admit of exceptions. He maintains that while virtuous activity consists in a ‘mean’ between extremes – as courage, for instance, is a ‘mean’ between cowardice and rashness – that ‘mean’, in any particular situation, can be determined only by considering all the (morally salient) features of that situation, such that the recognition of the ‘mean’, in any particular situation, requires ‘perception’: it is ‘perception’ that determines that such and such an act, in such and such a situation, would be just, identifying what ‘justice’ means in such and such a situation. ‘Up to what point and to what extent a man must deviate before he becomes blameworthy it is not easy to determine by reasoning, any more than anything else that is perceived by the senses; such things

10. Ibid., 110. 11. Ibid., 113–14.

36

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

depend on particular facts, and the decision rests with perception.’12 One might be able to formulate generalizations about ‘justice’, but these are not sufficient for determining whether this act, here and now, would be just. Aristotle maintains that there is this surpassing of the ‘universal’ in ‘equity’: he observes that ‘equity’ supplements the ‘universal statements’ of the ‘law’ with an awareness of the ‘particular facts’, adjusting the sentence that the ‘law’ would ordain to a sentence more attuned to true justice, such that it is ‘a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality’.13 So, too, perception might ‘correct’ certain ‘universal statements’ about virtue; and if perception is to ‘correct’ such ‘statements’, it must involve an insight that surpasses them. Aristotle likens the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis to ‘that by which we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle’, but what is apprehended by this ‘perception’ – particular acts, in relation to particular situations – is something rather more complex than a ‘particular figure’, such as a ‘triangle’: a situation might have various morally significant features, and an assessment of that situation, to be adequate, would need to take cognizance of all of them. To register the significance of those features, even taken singly, it might be necessary to have a matured appreciation of the subtleties of how things are – an appreciation that is not a matter of having, and applying, simple concepts (like ‘triangle’).14 Aristotle observes that one must be experienced to have such insight, that ‘young men’ are, accordingly, not capable of it. ‘Young men have no conviction about [“first principles” that “come from experience”] but merely use the proper language.’15 This assessment is ‘intuitive’: it is intuitive as a perception of a whole situation, the significance of which can be appreciated only when it is considered as a whole

12. Ibid., 36–7. 13. Ibid., 99. 14. Joseph Dunne discusses the complexity of what the ‘perception’ involved in phronesis might register in Back to the Rough Ground – in which he attempts to show how the Aristotelian notion of phronesis has been central to the thought of several modern philosophers – Newman, R. G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas. Looking at how these philosophers have developed the Aristotelian account of phronesis, Dunne then interrogates the various texts in which Aristotle discusses it, considering whether the Aristotelian account might afford notions that offer a way through some of the difficulties encountered by modern philosophy (which relate, Dunne suggests, to an overprivileging of techne, the systematic, ‘scientific’ understanding that is the counterpart to phronesis). Regarding the complexity of ‘perception’, or phronesisnous, Dunne suggests that this perception is ‘usually not about objects, but about actions, motivations, gestures, expressions, events, or situations that are involved in a flux; and it may be that only with the phronetic insight itself is a particular pattern made to stand out in a way that escape notice before the occurrence of such insight’. Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgement and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 304. 15. Aristotle, Ethics, 110.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

37

(and this perception of the whole is intuitive); it is intuitive as a spontaneous, swift perception – in acting, one might have but a moment to make an assessment that could inform how one acts. Aristotle maintains that it is ‘perception’ that identifies the ‘mean’, identifies what it is to be just, courageous, or the like, in particular situations: one does not recognize this by making ‘deductions’ from ‘universal’ notions of justice, courage, or the like. The insight involved in such ‘perception’ accordingly surpasses that which is involved in generalizations about justice, courage, or the like; and the best insight that one has into justice, courage, or the like, is an insight that one has in perception, in addressing oneself to a situation here and now, in living. Aristotle remarks that the ‘universals are reached from the particulars’, but it would seem that the best insight one has into the ‘universals’ pertinent to virtue, is in living, ‘reaching towards’ them in particular acts of perception. One does not simply apply ‘universals’ that one comprehends fully before applying them: there is an accession of understanding in the perception that is a ‘reaching towards’ the ‘universal’. And one is always in the position of ‘reaching towards’ the ‘universal’, always obliged to make sense of something here and now, as one is always in the midst of living. What is more, phronesis itself is not merely something that assesses ‘the good’, or ‘the good life’, but it is something that is involved in, and constitutive of, the good life. It is, Aristotle insists, ‘practical’, involved in practice, and expressed in particular acts. ‘Practical wisdom [is not] concerned with universals only – it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars.’16 An action is constituted, in part, as the action it is, by the intention with which it is carried out: to be virtuous is to want to do virtuous actions, because they are virtuous; the apprehension of the virtuousness of those actions (phronesis, perception) is, then, involved in those actions, as something making them virtuous. ‘To be good’, Aristotle maintains, ‘one must be in a certain state when one does the acts, i.e., one must do them as a result of choice and for the sake of the acts themselves’17 and phronesis is involved in ‘choice’, which Aristotle characterizes as ‘either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire’: it is the ‘ratiocinative’ part of it.18 This would suggest that phronesis is involved in a good form of life, as one of the things making that life good. This is not to claim that virtuous acts are made virtuous solely through the intention with which they are carried out: that intention, after all, involves registering those features of particular acts that make them good. Yet, if the intention with which an act is carried out is involved in, necessary to, its goodness, then the act is as it is, as the expression of that intention; what one intends to do, is connected to what one perceives as good, what one understands to be good; and, evidently, a virtuous intention is informed by the insights of phronesis. To be a good person is to be actuated by those insights that proceed from phronesis. There is a certain convergence between who one is, and the insight that is phronesis: it is the understanding that the ‘good man’ has

16. Ibid., 109. 17. Ibid., 115. 18. Ibid., 104.

38

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in being who he is, or the understanding that makes him who he is. As it is an understanding involved in being a certain sort of person, so it is the person, ‘the good man’, who is ‘the norm and measure’. Newman maintains, in his 1839 article on the ‘existing state of parties in the [English] Church’, that ‘Catholic doctrines’ are the ‘just expression’ of a certain ‘character of mind and feeling’. He suggests that the ‘embrace’ of those ‘doctrines’ may be attendant on ‘the ordinary development of … character and perceptions’: in ‘religious opinion’, certain ‘dispositions’ may be at work, in the ‘hidden sympathy or antipathy’ of the ‘heart’ toward the ‘objects presented’ to it (through various means) such that there is a kind of ‘moral orthodoxy’ – something like a ‘moral’ state, a set of ‘dispositions’, which ‘corresponds’ with ‘Catholic doctrines’. These ‘doctrines’, then, like phronesis, require certain ‘dispositions’: as the ‘eye of the soul [in phronesis] acquires its formed state not without the aid of virtue’, so it seems that the acceptance of ‘Catholic doctrines’ – and the understanding associated with the acceptance of those ‘doctrines’ – requires a ‘development of … character and perceptions’, and a certain state of ‘heart’. As phronesis does not only require virtuous dispositions, but is required for such dispositions – as the ‘eye of the soul’ must discern the ‘end’, if that end is to be virtuously desired – so too, perhaps, the ‘Catholic doctrines’ are involved in a certain type of character. Aristotle maintains that phronesis is concerned with the ‘human’ good, with the life of the polis. He distinguishes it, as such, from ‘contemplation’, which is concerned with what is ‘divine’, with what is more than ‘human’: ‘contemplation’ is the activity of that which is most ‘divine’ in the soul. He contrasts the variable, multiform ‘human’ good, with which phronesis is concerned, and the changeless ‘divine’, with which the life of ‘contemplation’ is concerned.19 Aristotle makes a distinction between the ‘human’ and the ‘divine’, which relates to the distinction between phronesis – and the ‘perception’ involved in it – and contemplation. In Christianity, though, there is the ‘doctrine’ of the God-man, Christ. Does not this doctrine involve a way of conceiving of the distinction between the ‘human’ and

19. ‘If reason is divine … in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything and this would seem actually to be each man, since it is the authoritative and better part of him … . We assume the gods to be above all other being blessed and happy, but what sort of actions must be assign to them? … . If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, everyone supposes they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of god, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative, and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.’ Ethics, 195, 197

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

39

the ‘divine’ that is different from, or that supersedes, the way in which Aristotle conceives of this distinction? If God is incarnate in Christ, the ‘divine’ fully present in the ‘human’, then the kind of ‘perception’ by which one apprehends the ‘human’ becomes pertinent to the apprehension of the ‘divine’. Christ, as ‘human’, is perfectly virtuous, and to perceive the ‘humanity’ of Christ aright is to register His virtue. Aristotle suggests that there are forms of phronesis – ‘understanding’, sunesis, and ‘judgement’, gnome – by which one apprehends phronesis in others, registering the virtuousness of the acts of others: these forms of insight involve a sympathetic recognition of what animates others.20 If the recognition of the ‘divine’ in Christ requires a recognition of his ‘human’ qualities, his virtuousness, then it would seem that these forms of phronesis – namely, ‘understanding’, sunesis, and ‘judgement’, gnome – are involved in the recognition of the ‘divine’ in Christ. If God is sheer goodness, goodness itself, then how might the perception of goodness, involved in phronesis, relate to the apprehension of the ‘divine’? If the goodness of God is analogous to the goodness which phronesis apprehends, then what one apprehends, in registering the ‘human’ virtue of Christ, is something analogous to what one apprehends, in registering the divine in Christ. To perceive the humanity of Christ aright, as wholly good, a right state of ‘conscience’ is needed, and what is perceived, when the goodness of Christ is registered, is something analogous to the ‘divine’. In a sermon preached in 1831 on ‘The Usurpations of Reason’, Newman suggests that ‘the moral sense’, or ‘moral perception’, is involved in the apprehension of the ‘truths’ of revelation: he reflects on the error of making use of ‘reason’ – or certain forms of reason – in ‘attempting to judge of those truths which are subjected to another part of our nature, the moral sense’, or to resolve ‘questions … which are addressed to the cultivated moral perception, or, what is sometimes improperly termed, “feeling”; – improperly, because feeling comes and goes, and, having no root in our nature, speaks with no divine authority; but the moral perception, though varying in the mass of men, is fixed in each individual, and is an original element within us’.21 It ‘is as little strange that the mind, which has only exercised itself on matters of literature or science, and never submitted itself to the influence of divine perceptions, should be unequal to the contemplation of a moral revelation, as that it should not perform the office of the senses’.22 That is, Newman suggests that the ‘contemplation’ of the ‘revelation’ – the proper awareness of it – is a matter of ‘moral perception’, or ‘divine perceptions’; and this ‘perception’, one may take it, is like that involved in phronesis – a ‘perception’, involved in ‘conscience’ (an ‘original element within us’), that something particular, here and now, is good. Newman suggests that it is this ‘perception’ which apprehends, which ‘contemplates’, the good, and which, as such, ‘contemplates’ the ‘revelation’.

20. Aristotle, Ethics, 112–13. 21. Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (London: Longmans, Greene & Co., 1909), 59–60. 22. OUS, 61.

40

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman characterizes the revelation as itself a ‘moral revelation’, which would suggest that a capacity to recognize what is ‘moral’ is required for the ‘contemplation’ of the revelation: one is ‘unequal’ to such ‘contemplation’ otherwise – one cannot ‘perceive’ the ‘revelation’. The revelation presents, however, something more than what is ‘contemplated’ by ‘moral perception’: the goodness of God is something more than ‘human’ goodness. How should the phrase ‘divine perceptions’, which Newman uses, be understood? Can there be, in the right perception of Christ, something like a ‘perception’ of the divine itself? Aristotle suggests that the perception of virtue is itself an expression of virtue, and is involved in a virtuous life: the ‘good man’ apprehends the good, here and now, in being good. Christian ‘faith’ is – according to Christian doctrine – a gift of God, and is an expression of the ‘indwelling’ of the Holy Spirit. As phronesis involves a perception of virtue that is an expression of a virtuous life, so faith, perhaps, involves a perception of the divine that is an expression of a divine life, the life of the Holy Spirit: the perception of the divine in Christ would, then, be an expression of the spirit of Christ, a manifestation of the working of the Holy Spirit. Does it make sense, though, to characterize ‘faith’ as a kind of ‘perception’? If ‘perception’ is taken to be a kind of ‘sight’, then ‘perception’ would seem to be contrary to ‘faith’: if faith is the ‘evidence of things not seen’, if it is concerned with what is not ‘seen’, so it would seem to be something quite other than ‘perception’. ‘Faith’ is not ‘sight’: one has faith because ‘sight’, in the here and now – in statu viatoris – is not possible; a ‘sight’ of the ‘divine’ is not for the here and now, but for the hereafter. Could there, however, be a ‘perception’, or something like perception, which is not ‘sight’, and which does not supersede faith? Newman could characterize faith as a kind of ‘perception’. In a sermon, preached in 1830, on ‘Faith and Obedience’, Newman suggests that faith is a ‘practical perception of the unseen’. What is meant by faith? it is to feel in good earnest that we are creatures of God; it is a practical perception of the unseen world; it is to understand that this world is not enough for our happiness, to look beyond it on toward God, to realize His presence, to wait upon Him, to endeavour to learn and to do His will, and to seek our good from Him. It is not a mere temporary strong act or impetuous feeling of the mind, an impression or a view coming upon it, but it is a habit, a state of mind, lasting and consistent. To have faith in God is to surrender one’sself to God, humbly to put one’s interests, or to wish to be allowed to put them into His hands who is the Sovereign Giver of all good … . What is obedience? it is the obvious mode, suggested by nature, of a creature’s conducting himself in God’s sight, who fears Him as his Maker, and knows that, as a sinner, he has especial cause for fearing him. Under such circumstances he ‘will do what he can’ to please Him, as the woman whom our Lord commended. He will look every way to see how it is possible to approve himself to Him, and will rejoice to find any service which may stand as a sort of proof that He is in earnest. And he will find nothing better as an offering, or as an evidence, than obedience to that Holy Law, which conscience tells him has been given us by God Himself; that is,

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

41

he will be diligent in doing all his duty as far as he knows it and can do it. – Thus as is evident, the two states of mind are altogether one and the same: it is quite indifferent whether we say a man seeks God in faith, or say he seeks Him by obedience; and whereas Almighty God has graciously declared He will receive and bless all that seek Him, it is quite indifferent whether we say, He accepts those who believe, or those who obey. To believe is to look beyond this world to God, and to obey is to look beyond this world to God; to believe is of the heart, and to obey is of the heart; to believe is not a solitary act, but a consistent habit of trust; and to obey is not a solitary act, but a consistent habit of doing our duty in all things. I do not say that faith and obedience do not stand for separate ideas in our minds, but they stand for nothing more; they are not divided one from the other in fact. They are but one thing viewed differently.23

‘Faith’ and ‘obedience’ are, Newman maintains, different aspects of ‘one and the same general character of mind’ or ‘temper of mind’, such that ‘to believe and to obey be but different characteristics of one and the same state of mind’.24 Those who have this ‘character of mind’ seek their good – something that is an eminently ‘practical’ matter – solely in God, and Newman suggests that this involves a certain ‘surrender’: one does not aim to procure the good by exerting whatever powers one has in oneself, but by relying on God, so that ‘to have faith in God is to surrender one’s self to God, humbly to put one’s interests, or to wish to be allowed to put them into His hands who is the Sovereign Giver of all good’.25 ‘Obedience’ is an attempt to ‘please’ God – to show one is in ‘earnest’ by acting in accordance with the ‘Holy Law’ of God, discerned by the ‘conscience’ – and this attempt to ‘please’ God is informed by a sense that ‘one’s interests’ are best secured by God. ‘The only way of salvation open to us is the surrender of ourselves to our Maker in all things – supreme devotion, resignation of our will, the turning with all our heart to God; and this state of mind is ascribed in Scripture sometimes to the believing, sometimes to the obedient … and it is no matter to which it is ascribed.’26 With respect to the ‘surrender’ of ‘interests’ – this might mean that one does not merely regard God as acting to secure ‘interests’ one already is aiming at; it might, rather, mean that one submits to the ‘commands’ of God, trusting that these commands proceed from a regard for ‘one’s interests’, even if one cannot fully appreciate how they make for those ‘interests’, and even if one cannot fully appreciate what those true ‘interests’ are. One surrenders ‘one’s self ’ in this, or, at least, one surrenders the self-possession involved in the claim to identify ‘one’s interests’, and to identify the means of realizing them: in this, there is a ‘resignation of the will’. One surrenders the ‘self ’ that one is aware of, so to speak, and the interests associated with this

23. John Henry Newman, ‘Faith and Obedience’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iii [hereafter PPS iii] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 79–81. 24. PPS iii, 87. 25. Ibid., 80. 26. Ibid., 82–3.

42

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘self ’, and recognizes that it is God who apprehends the truth about ‘one’s self ’ and ‘one’s interests’, and that the ‘commands’ of God proceed from a care for ‘one’s [true] interests’. One recognizes, further, that the ultimate ‘interest’ one has is an ‘interest’ in God. One recognizes that this ‘interest’ in God it is an interest in ‘being with’, communing with, God, an interest that is attained when one accords with the will of God – when one lives in accordance with that will, as manifest in ‘God’s holy Law’, forming oneself and acquiring certain virtues so that what one desires is in accordance with that ‘holy Law’. Newman characterizes ‘faith’ as connected to the effort to ‘seek our good’, or ‘our happiness’: it is connected to those things with which ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis is concerned – to the striving for ‘happiness’, the striving for ‘our good’. It is an attitude of ‘surrender’, connected to the awareness that ‘our good’, ‘our happiness’, proceeds from the ‘Sovereign Giver of all good’. Newman suggests that the ‘surrender’ coincides with the perception of God as the ‘Sovereign Giver of all good’. That is, to have a right ‘perception’ of the ‘unseen’, of God, is to ‘surrender’ – to recognize that there is no ‘good’ to be attained, apart from God – and this ‘surrender’ is ‘practical’, in that it informs how one lives: it is an attitude, a settled ‘state’, which animates how one lives. As, then, phronesis is ‘practical’, involving a ‘perception’ of the good that is ordered toward, and expressed in, a way of living, so ‘faith’ is ‘practical’, such that the recognition that ‘all good’ proceeds from God, the ‘surrender’ to God, informs a way of living. By obedience is meant obedience, not to the world, but to God – and habitually to obey God, is to be constant in looking on to God – and to look on to Almighty God, is to have faith; so that to ‘live by faith,’ or ‘walk by faith’ (according to the Scripture phrases), that is, to have a habit of faith, and to be obedient, are one and the same general character of mind.27

Newman suggests that the ‘character of mind’, of which ‘faith’ and ‘obedience’ are aspects, is animated by a ‘looking on to God’. ‘Looking on’ here suggests ‘looking’ for, hoping for, a certain good, and it suggests ‘looking’ for direction, or ‘commands’: ‘God’s commands are promises, and His promises commands to a heart devoted to Him.’28 The experience of those who have recognized ‘all good’ to proceed from God, who have recognized that ‘this world is not enough for our happiness’, who ‘look beyond’ the world to God, is different from those who do not ‘look beyond’ the world to God. This ‘looking beyond’ the world concerns the ‘end’ one aims at, in what one does, and it concerns what one expects to accomplish, in what one does: one aims at God, and one recognizes that one cannot attain to God of oneself, one requires something ‘beyond’ oneself – one requires God to ‘give’ freely, one requires grace, if one is to attain to communion with God. One ‘looks on’ to God, moreover, to ascertain what one should do – one looks for the

27. Ibid., 81. 28. Ibid., 85.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

43

‘commands’ that are to determine what one is to do. To ‘look beyond’ the world is, then, to experience the world, and oneself, in a certain way; and this experience of the world involves a certain ‘perception’ of things, moment to moment, as related to the ‘unseen’. Newman suggests that, in this account of faith and obedience, he is characterizing ‘the temper of mind which has, in every age, been acceptable to Almighty God’.29 In the old dispensation, ‘Abraham found favour in God’s sight, because he gave himself up to Him: this is faith or obedience, whichever we please to call it.’30 Newman observes that ‘in every age “the righteous shall live by faith.” And it is remarkable that these words of the prophet Habakkuk, which St. Paul quotes three several times, to show the identity of true religion under all dispensations, do also represent it under these very two characteristics, Righteousness and Faith.’31 If, for Newman, this ‘temper of mind’ is not uniquely associated with a response to Christ – if it is not created with the revelation of Christ, as a response to Christ in particular – it seems, nevertheless, to be a ‘temper’ that animates a right perception of Christ, a right response to Christ. The ‘practical perception of the unseen’ would, then, seem to be a matter of ‘look[ing] beyond’ the ‘world’, and of relating the ‘world’, as one experiences it, to what is ‘beyond’ it, so that the way one lives is animated by this ‘perception’ of the ‘unseen’. The ‘perception’ is ‘practical’ as it moves one to ‘practice’ – it moves one to live in a certain way. In a sermon on ‘Faith without Sight’, preached in 1834, Newman associates this ‘look[ing]’ beyond the ‘world’, and the ‘self ’, not with ‘faith’ but with ‘conscience’: he suggests that in the apprehension of the ‘rule of conscience’, there is an intimation of that ‘rule’ as proceeding from ‘a superior’, and in the submission to that ‘rule’, there is a submission to that ‘superior’. Every religious mind, under every dispensation of Providence, will be in the habit of looking out of and beyond self, as regards all matters connected with its highest good. For a man of religious mind is he who attends to the rule of conscience, which is born with him, which he did not make for himself, and to which he feels bound in duty to submit. And conscience immediately directs his thoughts to some Being exterior to himself, who gave it, and who evidently is superior to him; for a law implies a lawgiver, and a command implies a superior. Thus a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him; and while he rules his heart and conduct by his inward sense of right and wrong, not by the maxims of the external world, still that inward sense does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him. He looks forth into the world to seek Him who is not of the world, to find behind the shadows and deceits of this shifting scene of time and sense, Him whose Word is eternal, and whose Presence is spiritual. He looks out of himself for that Living Word to which he

29. Ibid., 86. 30. Ibid., 85. 31. Ibid., 86.

44

John Henry Newman and the Imagination may attribute what has echoed in his heart; and being sure that it is to be found somewhere, he is predisposed to find it.32

One who ‘attends to the rule of conscience’ is, then, ‘thrown out of himself ’, ‘looks out of himself for that Living Word to which we may attribute what has echoed in his heart’, and is accordingly ‘predisposed’ to accept a revelation of that ‘Word’. What is more, ‘everyone who tries to do God’s will, is sure to find he cannot do it perfectly’. He will feel himself to be full of imperfection and sin; and the more he succeeds in regulating his heart, the more he will discern its original bitterness and guilt. Here is an additional cause of a religious man’s looking out of himself. He knows the evil of his nature, and forebodes God’s wrath … and, in consequence, seeks about for some means of propitiating his Maker, for some token, if so be, of God’s relenting. He cannot stay at home; he cannot rest in himself; he wanders about from very anxiety; he needs some one to speak peace to his soul. Should a man come to him professing to be a messenger from heaven, he is at once arrested and listens; and, whether such profession be actually true or false, yet his first desire is that it may be true.33

Those who experience the world in this way will have the ‘practical wisdom’ to recognize the significance of the revelation. They will be preoccupied with certain ‘practical’ concerns, and will recognize that the revelation pertains to those concerns: they will recognize that it is ‘practical’ and ‘momentous’, that it pertains to something they care about. Those who accept the revelation with such ‘practical wisdom’ will treat the revelation, once accepted, with the same ‘practical wisdom’. [This] blessed temper of mind … does not stipulate that the text of Scripture should admit of rigid and laboured proofs of its doctrines; it has the practical wisdom to consider that the Word of God must have mainly one, and one only sense, and to try, as well as may be, to find out what that sense is, whether the evidence of it be great or little, and not to quarrel with it if it is not overpowering. It keeps steadily in view that Christ speaks in Scripture, and receives His words as if it heard them, as if some superior and friend spoke them, one whom it wished to please; not as if it were engaged upon the dead letter of a document, which admitted of rude handling, of criticism and exception.34

It is ‘practical wisdom’, Newman suggests, to treat the ‘words’ of Scripture as the ‘words’ of a particular person, Christ – taking those words to manifest the presence of that person. To have such wisdom is to ‘keep steadily in view’ the 32. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plan Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 17–18. 33. PPS ii, 20. 34. Ibid., 22–3.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

45

reality of whatever situation one is in; and the reality of the situation one is in, when presented with the ‘words’ of Scripture, is that one is being presented with the ‘words’ of Christ – ‘Christ speaks’. Newman associates the capacity to relate to another person, the awareness of another person, with ‘practical wisdom’. The account Aristotle gives of phronesis (and of ‘understanding’ and ‘judgement’) suggests that, in living, it is with ‘practical wisdom’ that one appraises others, and determines how one should comport oneself toward them. This ‘wisdom’ is involved in how one relates to others, animating the relationships one forms: friendship requires this sort of wisdom. Newman suggests that this ‘wisdom’ should inform the way one treats the ‘words’ of Scripture – as ‘words’ by which a relationship with a ‘superior and friend’, Christ, is established and maintained: such wisdom ‘receives His words as if it heard them’. If, though, it is ‘practical wisdom’ that registers what another person is like, this is something different from registering that another person is present. (Then again, if one has, in the aspect of ‘practical wisdom’ that is ‘conscience’, certain intimations of a ‘superior’, and a sense of that ‘superior’, then might not that sense enable one to recognize the presence of that ‘superior’ in the ‘words’ of Scripture? If one has ‘heard’ the ‘echo’ of the ‘Living Word’ in the ‘conscience’, then perhaps one is disposed to recognize the ‘Living Word’ itself, when it presents itself. If the intimations of a ‘superior’ in the ‘conscience’ are marked by a sense of what the ‘superior’ is like, so perhaps the presence of that ‘superior’ can be discerned in the ‘words’ of Scripture.) Those who ‘prefer this world to the leadings of God’s Spirit within them, soon lose their perception of the latter, and lean upon the world as a god’. Having no presentiment of any Invisible Guide, who has a claim to be followed in matters of conduct, they consider nothing to have a substance but what meets their senses, are contented with this, and draw their rules of life from it. They truly are in no danger of being superstitious or credulous; for they feel no antecedent desire or persuasion that God may have made a revelation of Himself in the world; and when they hear of events supernatural, they come to the examination of them as calmly and dispassionately as if they were judges in a court of law, or inquiring into points of science. They acknowledge no especial interest in the question proposed to them; and they find it no effort to use their intellect upon it as rigidly as if it were some external instrument which could not be swayed.35

It is the effort to ‘attend to the rule of conscience’, and to live according to that ‘rule’, which makes the question of whether God has ‘made a revelation of Himself in the world’ a matter of ‘especial interest’ and of ‘practical’ moment. In any matter so momentous and practical as the welfare of the soul, a wise man will not wait for the fullest evidence before he acts; and will show his caution, not in remaining uninfluenced by the existing report of a divine message, but by 35. Ibid., 19–20.

46

John Henry Newman and the Imagination obeying it though it might be more clearly attested. If it is but fairly probable that rejection of the Gospel will involve his eternal ruin, it is safest and wisest to act as if it were certain. On the other hand, when a man does not make the truth of Christianity a practical concern, but a mere matter of philosophical or historical research, he will feel himself at leisure (and reasonably on his own grounds) to find fault with the evidence. When we inquire into a point of history, or investigate an opinion of science, we do demand decisive evidence; we consider it allowable to wait till we obtain it, to remain undecided; in a word, to be sceptical. If religion be not a practical matter, it is right and philosophical in us to be sceptics … . Those whose hearts are not ‘tender’ (2 Kgs xxii.19) as Scripture expresses it – that is, who have not a vivid perception of the Divine Voice within them, and of the necessity of His existence from whom it issues, – do not feel Christianity as a practical matter, and let it pass accordingly. They are accustomed to say that death will soon come upon them, and solve the great secret for them without their trouble, – that is, they wait for sight: not understanding, or being able to be made to comprehend, that their solving this great problem without sight is the very end and business of their mortal life: according to St. Paul’s decision, that faith is ‘the substance,’ or the realizing, ‘of things hoped for,’ ‘the evidence,’ or the making trial of, the acting on, the belief of ‘things not seen’ (Heb. xi.1). What the Apostle says of Abraham is a description of all true faith; it goes out not knowing whither it goes. It does not crave or bargain to see the end of the journey … . It is persuaded that it has quite enough light to walk by, far more than sinful man has a right to expect, if it sees one step in advance; and it leaves all knowledge of the country over which it is journeying, to Him who calls it on.36

Newman suggests that the attitude one takes to the ‘evidence’ for a revelation is connected to whether or not one regards the matters which that revelation concerns as ‘practical and momentous’; and one will regard those matters as ‘practical and momentous’ if one is trying to ‘attend to the rule of conscience’, ‘looking out of oneself ’ for ‘that Living Word’ to which one ‘may attribute’ the ‘voice’ of conscience, and ‘looking out of oneself ’ for indications of ‘God’s relenting’ at the ‘guilt’ one has incurred by not living up to that ‘rule’. In this, Newman suggests that one must have acquired some ‘practical wisdom’ (by living in a certain way, attentive to the conscience), if one is to recognize that the acceptance of a revelation is a matter for ‘practical wisdom’ – if this acceptance is to present itself as a ‘practical’ question, as something of ‘practical’ moment, such that one can ‘feel Christianity as a practical matter’. Newman observes that there is a difference between the treatment of ‘evidence’ by ‘practical wisdom’, and the treatment of ‘evidence’ by more theoretical kinds of ‘research’, such as ‘philosophical or historical research’: when it is a question of how one is to act, here and now, of how one is to live, then one does not address oneself to the question in such a way as to ‘remain undecided’ until the ‘evidence’

36. Ibid., 21–2.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

47

is perfectly ‘decisive’ one way or the other. The kinds of proof acknowledged by ‘practical wisdom’ differ from those required in ‘philosophical or historical research’: such wisdom can take account of what is ‘but fairly probable’.37 Newman observes that a ‘wise man’ will take the view that if ‘it is but fairly probable that rejection of the Gospel will involve his eternal ruin, it is safest and wisest to act as if it were certain’. To ‘act as if ’ the Gospel ‘were certain’ could be, in truth, to ‘act as if ’ one were certain of it, ‘as if ’ one believed it (rather than, simply, to be certain of it, to believe it). Newman associates ‘rejection of the Gospel’ here, with how one ‘acts’. If the ‘Gospel’ is primarily a ‘light to walk by’ – if it is primarily a form of ‘practical wisdom’ – then to accept the Gospel is to take it as a ‘light to walk by’, to act on it. Newman is concerned with how one develops the ‘practical wisdom’ to recognize that ‘religion’ is a matter referred to ‘practical wisdom’ – the ‘wisdom’ to recognize and to feel that the concerns of ‘religion’ are ‘momentous and practical’. This is not simply a matter of making a right reckoning among ‘interests’; it is a matter of recognizing what is of ‘especial interest’, of identifying what is, and what is not, an ‘interest’. What is more, Newman is concerned with how the ‘revelation’ itself becomes, in being recognized as practical wisdom, something that is ‘acted on’. ‘Practical wisdom’ or phronesis is not a perfect knowledge – satisfying the ‘demand’ for ‘decisive evidence’ – but an insight into a particular situation, in which one is obliged to act one way or another: it is concerned with ‘one step in advance’. Faith, Newman suggests, is equally concerned with the next ‘step’, and does not ‘crave or bargain to see the end of the journey’ if it has ‘enough light to walk by’. ‘Practical wisdom’ is concerned, to some extent, with the ‘end of the journey’, assessing the present situation in relation to the ‘end’, but it need not involve a perfectly clear apprehension of the ‘end’; it requires an insight into the ‘end’ sufficient for the ‘next step’. Faith, Newman suggests, affords an insight into the ‘end’ – into God – which supplements the insights of the ‘conscience’ (and the insights of the ‘conscience’ are themselves the ‘leadings of God’s Spirit within’). Yet, if faith presents the ‘Living Word’, the ‘echo’ of which is in the ‘conscience’, it does not present a perfect ‘sight’ of the ultimate ‘end’. Faith affords ‘light to walk by’, a ‘light’ which is sufficient for the ‘practical’ requirements of ‘walking’, of living.

37. Joseph Butler, who influenced Newman greatly, maintained, in his Analogy of Religion (1736) that ‘religion’ is a matter for ‘prudence’. ‘In questions of difficulty, or such as are thought so, where more satisfactory evidence cannot be had, or is not seen; if the result of examination be, that there appears upon the whole, any the lowest presumption on one side, and none on the other, or a greater presumption on one side, though in the lowest degree greater; this determines the question, even in matters of speculation; and in matters of practice, will lay us under an absolute and formal obligation, in point of prudence and of interest, to act upon that presumption or low probability … . For surely a man is as really bound in prudence to do what upon the whole appears … to be for his happiness, as what he certainly knows to be so. Nay further, in questions of great consequence, a reasonable man will think it concerns him to remark lower probabilities and presumptions than these.’

48

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Commenting on the claim that faith is ‘the evidence of things not seen’, Newman glosses the term ‘evidence’ with the remark that it is the ‘making trial of, the acting on, the belief of “things not seen”’. He glosses ‘evidence’ here with ‘making trial of ’. While it seems natural to think of a ‘trial’ as involving the use of ‘evidence’ – one might refer to ‘evidence’, in testing the truth of certain assertions – or it seems natural to think of some ‘trials’ as yielding evidence – one might carry out certain ‘trials’ or tests, the upshot of which would be ‘evidence’ for the truth of an assertion – it seems less natural to equate ‘evidence’ with the act of ‘trial’ itself. Newman seems to be presenting a contrast, here, between different kinds of ‘trial’ – that involved in ‘philosophical or historical research’ or in ‘science’, and that involved in ‘practical wisdom’. The sort of ‘evidence’ that ‘practical wisdom’ requires, in determining how to act, is different from the sort of ‘evidence’ required by ‘philosophical or historical research’, in determining what seems true. To recognize that what is presented in ‘religion’ is something ‘practical’, one must live in such a way that the matters with which religion is concerned seem of ‘especial interest’ – corresponding with what one takes to be of ‘practical’ moment. To recognize that what is presented in ‘religion’ is ‘practical’, that religion is presenting ‘practical wisdom’, is to recognize that, as ‘practical wisdom’, ‘religion’ is ordered toward ‘acting’, and it is to recognize what sort of ‘light’ or ‘evidence’ one should require in ‘acting’ on that ‘wisdom’: the ‘light’ one requires in acting, the ‘light’ that is ‘enough to walk by’, is not the ‘decisive evidence’ one requires in matters of ‘science’. That one apprehends ‘religion’ in this way, as ‘practical wisdom’, is shown by whether one acts on it: that is, it takes a certain kind of ‘practical wisdom’ to recognize that ‘religion’ is ‘practical wisdom’, and, since such ‘wisdom’ is for acting on (phronesis – Aristotle observes – is ‘practical’, is present only where it is acted on) so to recognize that ‘religion’ is ‘practical wisdom’ is to act on it. One takes it as a ‘light’ to ‘walk by’. The ‘light’ by which religion is ‘tried’ – the light of ‘practical wisdom’ – is itself ‘practical’, is itself acted on, so the ‘trial’ is implicated with ‘acting’. If one lives rightly, attending to the ‘conscience’, one will recognize ‘religion’ to be relevant to the concerns that one already has; it will present itself as akin to the considerations that already actuate one, in living, and it will affect one in the way that those considerations affect one – that is, it will move one to act. There is, then, a kind of ‘trial’ whereby one recognizes ‘religion’ as ‘practical wisdom’. As ‘religion’ is ‘practical’, expressed in acts, so one cannot simply ‘let it pass’: if one ‘lets it pass’, then one is, in fact, adopting a ‘practical’ attitude at odds with that of ‘religion’ – ‘to say [as “sceptics” do] that death will soon come upon them, and solve the great secret for them without their trouble’ is to have the sort of ‘practical’ attitude that does not ‘feel [religion] as a practical matter’. The observation that one ‘makes trial’ of a ‘belief ’ in ‘acting on’ it suggests, furthermore, that when one acts on a belief, one puts it to the test; it suggests that, by acting on a belief, one acquires ‘evidence’ as to the truth of that belief. In what sense, though, might the ‘practical wisdom’ one acts on, be put to the test in being acted on? Such ‘wisdom’ is not a kind of hypothesis, which one might test by experiments. ‘Practical wisdom’ or phronesis would seem, rather, to be that by which one ‘tests’ whether particular acts are

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

49

virtuous or not (and, conversely, the test of whether one has ‘practical wisdom’ is whether one acts virtuously or not). ‘Practical wisdom’ is, though, something that develops through experience: the more one acts rightly, the more ‘practical wisdom’ one develops. So the more one acts rightly, the more one acquires the ‘wisdom’ to ‘test’ whether or not certain acts are right. In his British Critic article on the ‘existing state of parties in the [English] Church’, Newman observes that ‘changes’ in religion may arise from an ‘ordinary development of … character and opinions’: those who are ‘earnestly on the look-out for something higher in the way of religion, than they at present possess, naturally close at once with whatever promises best … [but] as their tone of mind rises, they become dissatisfied with their first choice; and on something better offering itself, quit it; not of course from light or capricious motives, but from the ordinary development of their own character and perceptions’. This might suggest that those who recognize in ‘religion’ genuine ‘practical wisdom’, and act on it, acquire – if it truly is ‘wisdom’ – a greater ‘practical wisdom’ by so acting – ‘their tone of mind rises’ – so they are better fitted to discern what is ‘practical wisdom’ and what is not, and to confirm whether ‘religion’ is ‘practical wisdom’. In a sermon preached on ‘Saving Knowledge’, about a month after the sermon on ‘Faith without Sight’, Newman maintained that ‘Obedience is the test of Faith’. To know God is life eternal, and to believe in the Gospel manifestation of Him is to know Him; but how are we to ‘know that we know Him?’ How are we to be sure that we are not mistaking some dream of our own for the true and clear Vision? How can we tell we are not like gazers upon a distant prospect through a misty atmosphere, who mistake one object for another? … St. John says, ‘Hereby do we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.’ Obedience is the test of Faith.38

Newman observes that ‘deeds of obedience are an intelligible evidence, nay, the sole evidence possible, and, on the whole, a satisfactory evidence of the reality of our faith’.39 The phrase ‘reality of our faith’ is somewhat ambiguous: it could be taken to mean ‘a faith that is genuine’, a ‘real, authentic faith’; it could, equally, suggest ‘a faith in what is real’, a ‘belief accorded to what is real, true, rather than illusory’. ‘Deeds’ can evidently be a ‘test’ of whether one really has faith – ‘acting on’ a belief is a mark of really having that belief, a mark of being committed to that belief. Are they equally a ‘test’ that what is believed is a ‘reality’, that the belief is warranted? Newman precedes his account of how ‘Obedience is the test of Faith’ with an account of ‘Gospel faith’, setting out how such faith differs from the ‘faith of heathens’. To know God and Christ, in Scripture language, seems to mean to live under the conviction of His presence, who is to our bodily eyes unseen. It is, in 38. John Henry Newman, ‘Saving Knowledge’, in PPS ii, 153. 39. PPS ii, 157.

50

John Henry Newman and the Imagination fact, to have faith, according to St. Paul’s account of faith, as the substance and evidence of what is invisible. It is faith, but not faith such as a Heathen might have, but Gospel faith; for only in the Gospel has God so revealed Himself, as to allow of that kind of faith which may be called, in a special manner, knowledge. The faith of Heathens was blind; it was more or less a moving forward in the darkness, with hand and foot … . But the Gospel is a manifestation, and therefore addressed to the eyes of our mind. Faith is the same principle as before, but with the opportunity of acting through a more certain and satisfactory sense. We recognise objects by the eye at once; but not by the touch. We know them when we see them, but scarcely till then. Hence it is, that the New Testament says so much on the subject of spiritual knowledge … It is plain what is the object of spiritual sight which is vouchsafed us in the Gospel – ‘God manifest in the Flesh’. He who was before unseen has shown Himself in Christ; not merely displayed His glory, as (for instance) in what is called a providence, or visitation, or in miracles, or in the actions and character of inspired men, but really He Himself has come upon earth, and has been seen of men in human form. In the same kind of sense, in which we should say we saw a servant of His, Apostle or Prophet, though we could not see his soul, so man has seen the Invisible God; and we have the history of His sojourn among His creatures in the Gospels.40

Newman presents ‘deeds of obedience’ as a ‘test’ whereby ‘we know that we know Him’, getting assurance that ‘we are not mistaking some dream of our own for the true and clear Vision’, not mistaking ‘one object for another’.41 Are these ‘deeds’, though, a test that the ‘object’ of ‘vision’ is Jesus Christ, as he appeared in ‘history’, rather than some other, imaginary ‘object’, or are they a test that, in Jesus Christ, God is ‘manifest’? If the ‘faith of the Heathens’ is accorded to whatever of God is manifest to the ‘conscience’ – if it is a matter of striving toward the good, as discerned ‘through a misty atmosphere’ by the conscience – and if Christ is a manifestation of God, then Christ should be a manifestation of that ‘object’ which is imperfectly discerned by the conscience – the ‘Living Word [which] has echoed in [the] heart’. One should be able to live by the ‘vision’ of Christ, in the way that ‘Heathens’ live by the intimations of the conscience; one should be able to make Christ the ‘object’ of all efforts to realize the good; and, if Christ manifests supreme goodness, then efforts to realize the good, informed by the ‘vision’ of Christ, should surpass efforts informed only by the ‘conscience’, ‘moving forward in the darkness’. The more ‘practical wisdom’ one has, the more one acts rightly, and the more one acts rightly, the more ‘practical wisdom’ one acquires. If Christ is a ‘manifestation’ of the good that ‘conscience’ or ‘practical wisdom’ discerns ‘in the darkness’, then to have a ‘spiritual sight’ of Christ is to have a better ‘sight’ of the good. To have this ‘sight’ of Christ is to act rightly (in

40. Ibid., 152–3. 41. Ibid., 153.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

51

that it is ‘practical wisdom’, a ‘sight’ of the good, and such wisdom is ‘practical’, is acted on) and to act in a way informed by this ‘sight’, is to acquire a better ‘sight’ of Christ. This ‘sight’, Newman maintains, is something to ‘direct’ oneself by. ‘To be consistent, to “walk in all the ordinances of the Lord blameless,” is [for the one with faith] his one business; still, all along looking reverently towards the Great Object of faith, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Three Persons, One God, and the Son Incarnate for our salvation. Certainly he will have enough to direct his course by, with God in his eye, and his work in his hand.’42 ‘Deeds’ would not be an ‘evidence’ of ‘faith’ unless ‘faith’ were, of itself, something expressed in ‘deeds’, a kind of ‘practical wisdom’; and, as ‘practical wisdom’ develops by being acted on – such that, in acquiring more ‘practical wisdom’ by acting rightly, one acquires a greater assurance that one is acting rightly – so in taking the ‘Vision’ of Christ as something to act on, to ‘direct’ oneself by, one acquires a greater perception of the good, and of Christ, and a greater assurance that this ‘Vision’ is genuine. The one who lives ‘with God in his eye, and his work in his hand’, ‘looking reverently towards the Great Object of faith’, ‘directs’ his ‘work’ by the sight of that ‘Great Object’: he discerns ‘enough’ of that ‘Great Object’ as is required for ‘one step in advance’, enough to register what ‘step’ would be consistent with, and harmonize with, that ‘Great Object’. That ‘work’ consists of a number of particular acts, and in the appreciation of each particular act, there is an insight into the ‘Great Object’, as pertinent to each act. Aristotle contrasts the ‘perception’, concerned with the ‘ultimate particular fact’, with the apprehension of the ‘universal’, and with ‘universal statements’, and he suggests that ‘perception’ involves an insight into the good – as pertinent to how one should act, here and now – which surpasses whatever can be presented in ‘general propositions’. With this perception, one does not have a clear, direct ‘sight’ of the ‘end’: one registers a certain significance in ‘this’, here and now – registering, say, that ‘this’ act is consistent with the ‘end’, registering that ‘this’ act befits, or is in accordance with, the good life, and is, as such, a moment in the realization of such a life. So too, perhaps, the one who lives ‘with God in his eye, and his work in his hand’, ‘looking reverently towards the Great Object of faith’, discerns, in that ‘work’, something of the ‘Great Object of faith’ surpassing whatever can be presented in ‘general propositions’: there is an insight into the ‘Object of faith’ in discerning the significance of ‘this’, here and now, as harmonizing with that ‘Object’, which can be had only in discerning the significance of ‘this’, here and now. This could be so, if something of that ‘Object’ is manifest in the significance of ‘this’ act, here and now, if there is an appreciation of some aspect of that ‘Object’ in the appreciation of the significance of ‘this’ act, here and now – if something of the Holy Spirit is expressed in the life of each one who lives ‘with God in his eye, and his work in his hand’, and if what is expressed of the Holy Spirit is expressed in that which makes that life unique.

42. Ibid., 159.

52

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

3. Newman maintains that to attend to the ‘conscience’ is to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself. Aristotle does not suggest, in his account of phronesis, that to have phronesis is to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself. For Aristotle, the supreme end, with which phronesis is concerned, is happiness, and happiness consists in the full realization of whatever powers one has. The aim, then, would seem to be the realization of the self, rather than something ‘beyond’ the self. One might take the ‘end’ here to be the realization of ‘nature’: for Aristotle, to have a certain nature is to have certain ‘ends’, intrinsic to that nature. The having of these ‘ends’ is not, for Aristotle, something that requires explanation, by reference to God: to have a nature just is to have certain ends. To consult whatever nature one has, in acting, is not, then, to be referred to God (as, say, the ‘maker’ of nature). Aristotle suggests that the apprehension of what ‘nature’ requires, of how one should act, moment to moment, is itself a realization of ‘nature’: that apprehension is itself a virtuous activity. Newman maintains, in his account of why to ‘attend’ to the ‘rule’ of conscience is to be ‘in the habit of looking out of and beyond self ’, that ‘conscience immediately directs’ one to ‘some Being exterior’ to oneself, ‘who gave it’; and he characterizes ‘conscience’, here, as an awareness of a ‘command’ or a ‘law’: one who attends to the ‘rule’ of ‘conscience’ attends to a ‘rule’ which is ‘born with him, which he did not make for himself, and to which he feels bound in duty to submit’. Newman does not derive from ‘nature’ the ‘law’ or the ‘command’ which the conscience discerns – he does not envisage it as a ‘law’ derived, ultimately, from an obligation to realize a ‘nature’ (albeit a nature ‘made’ by God). He does characterize conscience as something one is ‘born with’; he suggests that there is an innate, natural capacity to apprehend the ‘law’, but he does not suggest that the ‘law’ itself, in its substance or content, derives from ‘nature’, from an obligation to realize whatever nature one has. He suggests that there is, in the apprehension of the authoritativeness of the ‘law’, an apprehension of God. The ‘rule’ or ‘law’ of ‘conscience’ has authority as a ‘law’ given by God, and to register that authority is to register – albeit imperfectly – the ‘lawgiver’. When Newman maintains that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself, by the conscience, he suggests that, in apprehending the ‘commands’ of the conscience, one becomes aware of ‘some Being exterior’ to oneself, whose ‘commands’ they are. In the conscience, in a capacity of the self, something other than the self is manifest – in this interior ‘voice’, a ‘Voice’ other than the self ‘speaks within’: ‘a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him … he looks out of himself for that Living Word to which he may attribute what has echoed in his heart’; the ‘inward sense [of the conscience] does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him’. This sense that, in what is ‘inward’, innermost in the self, there is a mark of ‘some Being exterior’ to the self, transcending the self, is Augustinian rather than Aristotelian. For Augustine, ‘the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

53

it is not itself the nature of truth’:43 when one reflects on oneself, considering the activity by which one makes sense of things, one encounters certain truths or principles of ‘wisdom’, standards by which one understands and judges things – such as the truth that one ought to be just, the truth that the eternal is superior to the temporal and so on – and ‘knowing simply that these truths are so one does not examine them with a view to their correction but rejoices to have discovered them … [and] we pass judgement on our minds in accordance with truth as a standard, while we cannot in any way pass judgement on truth’.44 These are truths that make the mind – truths by which one thinks, by which ‘we pass judgement on our minds’: they are truths which subsist in God, and which, as present within the soul, attest to God. One looks inward, and what one encounters, as innermost in oneself, is a ‘light’ that is of God. ‘What is the light which shines right through me and strikes my heart without hurting? It fills me with terror and burning love; with terror inasmuch as I am utterly other than it, with burning love in that I am akin to it. Wisdom, wisdom it is which shines right through me.’45 In thinking – in the thinking by which one possesses oneself – one depends on a ‘wisdom’ which is of God. One exists in a manner such that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself: that by which one possesses oneself – ‘wisdom’ – is something ‘out’ of oneself (‘the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth’). When one recognizes that one exists in this way, that one is sustained by a ‘light’ that is something ‘out’ of oneself, one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself in reverence, ‘terror’ and ‘love’: one reveres the ‘wisdom’ that ‘shines right through’ one, recognizing how much one owes – how one owes what one

43. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), (IV.xv.25) 44. Quoted in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 133. Taylor observes that ‘there is a certain family of “proofs” of the existence of God whose basic form is typically Augustinian. The demarche which is common to them all is something like this: my experience of my own thinking puts me in contact with a perfection, which at one and the same time shows itself to be an essential condition of that thinking and also to be far beyond my own finite scope and powers to attain. There must then be a higher being on which all this depends, i.e., God.’ Sources of the Self, 140. In A Secular Age (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2007) Taylor remarks on a contrast, which emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between an ideal of ‘human flourishing’ (associated variously with certain forms of Christianity, with Deism, and with ‘exclusive’ humanism – a humanism that ‘excludes’ God in conceiving of the capacities, and aims, of human life) and more ‘transformative’ ideals: where the idea of ‘human flourishing’ makes such ‘flourishing’ the ultimate aim of human life (an aim that might, or might not, be conceived of as something sanctioned by God), the ‘transformative’ ideal envisages the aim of human life as consisting in something ‘beyond’, transcendent of, human ‘flourishing’. In his account of the conscience, Newman attempts to discern in the conscience something like a ‘pull’ or a ‘summons’ beyond this-worldly human ‘flourishing’. 45. Augustine, Confessions (XI.ix.11).

54

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

is – to this ‘wisdom’. Augustine maintains that, in reflecting on how one thinks, one recognizes that in the activity of thinking one is sustained by a ‘wisdom’ which transcends the self: at the centre of the self, is something more than the self; in the acts of the self, something more than the self – a ‘wisdom’ that is ‘other than’ the self and ‘akin to’ it – is manifest. When Newman observes that ‘a man is at once thrown out of himself ’ by the conscience, he maintains that the ‘inward sense [of the conscience] does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him’: the insight, or ‘Word’, of the conscience, is experienced as something ‘put’ there by another, ‘some Being exterior’ to the self. Why is this so? It could be that Newman, like Augustine, would discern in a certain ‘judgement’ the presence of a ‘wisdom’ transcending the self: the conscience is a certain judgment on the self, and while, with the conscience, ‘we pass judgement’ on the self, ‘we cannot in any way pass judgement’ on the conscience. What is more, the judgment of the conscience concerns a certain necessity, to which one is subject: it is the recognition that it is necessary, obligatory, that one do such and such. The necessity associated with the ‘truths of wisdom’ is somewhat different: it is a matter of what one is obliged to think – one is compelled to take certain things to be true. In each case, though, one experiences oneself as subject to necessity, and this necessity is constitutive of the self, in certain respects: taking the ‘truths of wisdom’ to be true is a fulfilment of the power of thinking; acting in accordance with the ‘commands’ of the conscience is a fulfilment of the self – one fully realizes the self by so acting. One is sustained as what, or who, one is, by this necessity, deriving from ‘some Being exterior’ to oneself, so that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself, in being sustained by something ‘out’ of oneself. In a sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, preached in 1830, Newman identifies certain faults in the ‘moral character’ formed by the ‘school’ of Aristotle, and he relates the defects of this ‘school’ to a primary defect of ‘Natural Religion’ – that it ‘gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’.46 ‘Natural Religion’, Newman maintains, is imperfect as it does not conceive of the ‘moral’ life as a matter of a relationship to a divine ‘Person’ or ‘Agent’. The philosopher aspires towards a divine principle; the Christian, towards a Divine Agent. Now, dedication of our energies to the service of a person is the occasion of the highest and most noble virtues, disinterested attachment, selfdevotion, loyalty; habitual humility, moreover, from the knowledge that there must ever be one that is above us. On the other hand, in whatever degree we approximate towards a mere standard of excellence, we do not really advance towards it, but bring it to us; the excellence we venerate becomes part of

46. John Henry Newman, ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 22.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

55

ourselves – we become a god to ourselves. This was one especial consequence of the pantheistic system of the Stoics, the later Pythagoreans, and other philosophers; in proportion as they drank into the spirit of eternal purity, they became divine in their own estimation; they contrasted themselves with those who were below them, knowing no being above them by whom they could measure their proficiency. Thus they began by being humble, and, as they advanced, humility and faith wore away from their character. This is strikingly illustrated in Aristotle’s description of a perfectly virtuous man. An incidental and unstudied greatness of mind is said by him to mark the highest moral excellence, and truly; but the genuine nobleness of the virtuous mind, as shown in a superiority to common temptations, forbearance, generosity, self-respect, calm high-minded composure, is deformed by an arrogant contempt of others, a disregard of their feelings, and a harshness and repulsiveness of external manner. That is, the philosopher saw clearly the tendencies of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature; but when he attempted to delineate the ultimate complete consistent image of the virtuous man, how could he be expected to do this great thing, who had never seen Angel or Prophet, much less the Son of God manifested in the flesh? … [In Scripture, by contrast] not only is all moral excellence expressly referred to the Supreme God, but even the principle of good, when implanted and progressively realized in our hearts, is still continually revealed to us as a Person, as if to mark strongly that it is not our own, and must lead us to no preposterous self-adoration. For instance, we read of Christ being formed in us – dwelling in the heart – of the Holy Spirit making us His temple.47

Aristotle does not maintain that to be ‘virtuous’ is to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself, or that to have a right conscience is to be ‘thrown out of oneself ’, because, Newman suggests, he does not conceive of the moral life as a matter of aspiring to a ‘divine Agent’, ‘ever … above us’. The philosophers of ‘Natural Religion’ generally, conceive of the moral life as a matter of ‘aspir[ing] to a divine principle’, rather than a ‘divine Agent’, and such a ‘principle’ can be regarded as something that one might assimilate to oneself, ‘bring to’ oneself. Such a principle ‘was not an object of worship, inasmuch as each intelligent being was, in a certain sense, himself a portion of it’: that which is highest is something of which the self is ‘a portion’ – it does not wholly transcend the self.48 The ‘preposterous self-adoration’ that can be generated by such an understanding of the ‘divine’ is apparent in ‘Aristotle’s description of a perfectly virtuous man’, the exemplar of ‘greatness of mind’ – the character of whom is ‘deformed by an arrogant contempt of others, a disregard of their feelings, and a harshness and repulsiveness of external manner’. Does Aristotle conceive of the life of virtue as a matter of ‘aspir[ing] to a divine principle’? Aristotle makes a person, not a ‘principle’ – ‘the good man’ – the ‘norm’ and ‘measure’ of virtue. This

47. OUS, 28–9. 48. Ibid., 22.

56

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘measure’ is, though, evidently something that one might ‘bring to’ oneself, and realize in oneself, and ‘the excellence we venerate [might] become part of ourselves’, so that, to take ‘the good man’ as the ‘measure’ is to be liable to ‘self-adoration’. When Newman refers to ‘Aristotle’s description of the perfectly virtuous man’, he seems to be referring to the account of the ‘great-souled man’, in Book 4 of the Ethics. With regard to the ‘great-souled man’, Aristotle observes that if the pride, associated with such ‘greatness of mind’, is to be a virtue, then it must be justified, and if it is to be justified, then it must be a pride in what is truly worthwhile, in virtue; so, ‘greatness of soul’ is only a virtue, if one is truly virtuous – it is difficult to truly be ‘great-souled’, ‘for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character’. Aristotle does consider pride (if justified) to be a virtue, and he takes ‘greatness of soul’ to require virtue. Aristotle characterizes the ‘great-souled man’ as primarily concerned with honour: the ‘great-souled man’ is self-regarding and self-sufficient in the sense that he lives to fulfil an idea of himself, as honourable, and desires honour from himself above all, since only honours received from the great and honourable are worth anything (hence a certain ‘arrogant contempt’ and ‘disregard’ of others). (One might question, incidentally, whether the ‘greatsouled man’ truly illustrates the ‘system’ of Aristotle: after all, the ‘great-souled man’ aims primarily at honour, and at virtue as something honourable, but honour is something secondary, and not the true ‘object of wish’ itself. The ‘good man’ aims at virtue, but to aim at virtue is not to aim at honour, even if one aims to acquire honour by being virtuous. Yet Aristotle does not address this difficulty.) It is evident, though, that Aristotle does not regard virtue as a matter of being ‘thrown out’ of oneself, aware of oneself as dependent on, and sustained by, a ‘Being exterior’ to the self. For Aristotle, as one must be virtuous to have phronesis and to perceive the good, so to have phronesis is to perceive a good that one realizes in being oneself (that is, virtuous): the imperative that ‘the good man’ apprehends is, in a sense, that of his own being. Aristotle does not identify the good, ‘realized in our hearts’, with a ‘Person’ other than the self. Newman acknowledges that Aristotle ‘saw clearly the tendencies of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature’; he suggests that his mistake was in not identifying the ‘perfection of our nature’ with the presence of a divine ‘Person’, this ‘perfection of our nature’ being a state that involves an awareness of that presence, and an attendant ‘humility and faith’. Newman suggests that Aristotle could not ‘delineate the ultimate complete consistent image of the virtuous man’ because he ‘had never seen Angel or Prophet, much less the Son of God manifested in the flesh’ – he had never been presented with that ‘perfection’ as realized in particular persons. Newman retains, from the Aristotelian scheme, a sense that the ‘measure’ consists in a person rather than a generalized ‘principle’ (for Aristotle, it is ‘the good man’, for Christianity, ‘the Son of God manifested in the flesh’). Newman, equally, retains from the Aristotelian scheme a sense that the ‘realizing’ of goodness, in particular acts, is primary: in Christianity, a way of being good, which Aristotle ‘had never seen’, came into being, initiating a more complete understanding of goodness, an understanding of goodness that was the completion of, the ‘Natural’ (and Aristotelian) understanding of ‘the tendencies

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

57

of the moral system, the constitution of the human soul, and the ways leading to the perfection of our nature’. A year after preaching on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, Newman preached on ‘Christian Nobleness’, and on the ‘greatness of mind’ cultivated by Christianity, observing how the ‘greatness of mind … which in other religious systems degenerates into pride, is in the Gospel compatible – nay, rather intimately connected – with the deepest humility’.49 The sermon seems to be an attempt to show how the characteristics of the ‘great-souled man’ of Aristotle are present, in the character formed by ‘the Gospel’, in a perfected form, not ‘deformed’ by certain attendant vices. Newman suggests that the awareness, on the part of the Christian, of the gift of the indwelling Spirit, occasions a certain ‘negligence about the world’ – ‘such a doctrine … will exceedingly raise the Christian above himself, and … will make him feel all things of earth as little, and of small interest or account, and will preserve him from the agitations of mind which they naturally occasion’.50 He will be calm and collected under all circumstances; he will make light of injuries, and forget them from mere contempt of them. He will be undaunted, as fearing God more than man; he will be firm in faith and consistent … not impatient, as one who has no self-will; not soon disappointed, who has no hopes; not anxious, who has no fears; nor dazzled, who has no ambition; nor open to bribes, who has no desires.51

The awareness that the presence of the Spirit is a ‘gift’, however, occasions ‘humility’ – ‘The self-respect of the Christian is no personal and selfish feeling, but rather a principle of loyal devotion and reverence towards that Divine Master who condescends to visit him.’52 What is more, the awareness that the presence of the Spirit is a ‘gift’ occasions a certain anxiety: if one is presumptuous, or if one considers oneself to have a title to the gift, then God might take it back – ‘How know they but He, by whom their souls live, will withdraw that life – nay, will to a certainty withdraw it – if they take that glory to themselves which is His?’53 Newman suggests, then, that the ‘nobleness’ cultivated by Christianity matches, and surpasses, the ‘greatness of mind’ celebrated by Aristotle. In his sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, Newman maintains that the main defect of natural religion is that it ‘gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’. What Newman means by ‘personality’ here is somewhat ambiguous: ‘personality’ could mean ‘personhood’, ‘the quality or fact of being a person’, or it could mean

49. John Henry Newman, ‘Christian Nobleness’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day [hereafter SSD] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 146–7. 50. SSD, 144. 51. Ibid., 146. 52. Ibid., 148. 53. Ibid., 147.

58

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘character’, or ‘the assemblage of qualities or characteristics which makes a person a distinctive individual’. When setting out certain defects in the ‘moral character’ formed by the ‘school’ of Aristotle, and the ‘philosophers’ generally – above all, a certain pride and self-sufficiency – Newman relates these to a tendency to conceive of the ‘moral’ life as a matter of ‘aspir[ing] to a divine principle’ rather than a divine ‘Agent’ or ‘Person’. It would seem, then, that, for Newman, it is when God is conceived of as a ‘Person’ that one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself. The distinction between person and person, Newman suggests, is more impenetrable than that between a person and a ‘principle’: it is when the good is conceived of as a ‘Person’, that one recognizes that ‘there must ever be one that is above us’; a ‘principle’ is something that one might ‘bring to’ oneself, assimilate into oneself. If, for Newman, the main defect of the philosophy that proceeds from ‘Natural Religion’ is that it does not involve a definite sense of God as an ‘Agent’ or ‘Person’, then this would suggest that, when Newman maintains that natural religion ‘gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, what he means by ‘personality’, here, is personhood. He claims that ‘though Heathen Philosophy knew so much of the moral system of the world, as to see the duties and prospects of man in the same direction in which Revelation places them, this knowledge did not preclude a belief in fatalism, which might, of course, consist in unchangeable moral laws, as well as physical’.54 He then acknowledges that ‘though Philosophy acknowledged an intelligent, wise, and beneficent Principle of nature, still this too was, in fact, only equivalent to the belief in a pervading Soul of the Universe, which consulted for its own good, and directed its own movements, by instincts similar to those by which the animal world is guided; but which, strictly speaking, was not an object of worship, inasmuch as each intelligent being was, in a certain sense, himself a portion of it’.55 It would seem that an ‘intelligent, wise, and beneficient Principle’ must be something ‘personal’ – intelligence and wisdom are personal qualities. Yet Newman maintains that these qualities are attributed, by ‘Philosophy’, to something conceived of as a ‘Soul of the Universe’ animated ‘by instincts similar to those by which the animal world is guided’ – that is, by ‘instincts’ of a lessthan-personal kind. Newman then suggests that, for ‘Philosophy’, ‘each intelligent being’ is a ‘portion’ of this ‘Soul’: the intelligence of ‘each intelligent being’ is a kind of participation in this ‘Soul’, which becomes a kind of cosmic logos, but not something altogether other than the self, and not, certainly, a distinct ‘Person’, encountered by the self. Newman suggests that natural religion does not present God as a ‘Person’ or ‘Agent’ – which would suggest that the ‘Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, concerning which natural religion ‘gives little or no information’ is the personhood, the personal existence, of God. Yet he maintains, equally, that the deficiency of natural relation is in its presentation of the ‘personal character’ of God, and if ‘natural religion’

54. ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 22. 55. OUS, 22.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

59

presents God as having a ‘personal character’ – even if it presents that ‘character’ very imperfectly – then this would suggest that it envisages God as personal – such that the ‘Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, concerning which natural religion ‘gives little or no information’ would, then, be the ‘character’, rather than the personhood, or personal existence, of God. Newman observes that Natural Religion presents ‘no tangible history of the Deity, no points of His personal character (if we may so speak without irreverence)’ and accordingly wants ‘that most efficient incentive to all action, a starting or rallying point – an object on which the affections could be placed, and the energies concentrated’.56 How, then, should the beauty of virtue move the heart, while it was an abstraction? … . It did but witness against those who disobeyed, while they acknowledged It; and who, seemingly conscious where their need lay, made every effort to embody It in the attributes of individuality, embellishing their ‘Logos,’ as they called It, with figurative actions, and worshipping It as the personal development of the infinite Unknown. [Yet the attempt to] … attribute a personal character and a history to the Divinity [by ‘Heathen Religion’] … failed, as degrading His invisible majesty by unworthy, multiplied and inconsistent images, and as shattering the moral scheme of the world into partial and discordant systems … . The God of philosophy was infinitely great, but an abstraction; the God of paganism was intelligible, but degraded by human conceptions … . [whereas in Revealed Religion] 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. It collects the scattered rays of light, which, in the first days of creation, were poured over the whole face of nature, into certain intelligible centres, in the firmament of the heaven, to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. Our Saviour has in Scripture all those abstract titles of moral excellence bestowed upon Him which philosophers have invented. He is the Word, the Light, the Life, the Truth, Wisdom, the Divine Glory.57

While Newman treats of ‘Heathen Philosophy’, in most of this sermon, as almost an aspect of ‘Natural Religion’, he makes a distinction, here, between the ‘God of philosophy’ (associated with ‘abstraction’) and the ‘God of paganism’, associated with the attempt to ‘attribute a personal character and a history to the Divinity’ (in images, in stories). If the various ‘conceptions’ of the ‘personal character’ of the ‘Divinity’ developed within ‘paganism’ shattered ‘the moral scheme of the world into partial and discordant systems’, this would suggest that each attempt to conceive of the ‘personal character’ of the ‘Divinity’ involved a ‘moral … system’: to attribute a certain ‘character’ to the ‘Divinity’ is to accord that ‘character’, and the ‘moral’ characteristics central to it, supreme ‘excellence’. Newman seems to

56. Ibid., 23. 57. Ibid., 23–8.

60

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

be suggesting that no ‘system’ was developed which accorded proper recognition to all the forms of moral ‘excellence’ recognized by the conscience, harmonizing and unifying them into a single ‘scheme’: to insist on one sort of ‘character’ as preeminent, was to neglect to recognize the worth of another sort of character, and the ‘moral’ qualities associated with it. It is only in the example, and image, of Christ that the ultimate ‘truths concerning the chief good and the laws of our being, which … often appear to diverge from each other’ are harmonized. This would suggest, then, that ‘paganism’ could not ‘give information’ on the ‘Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, as it could not conceive of a personality, a character, which combined all the various excellences registered by the conscience (and the personality of the ‘Deity’ would have to be a combination of those excellences). The attempt, with respect to the ‘God of paganism’, to ‘attribute a personal character’ to the ‘Deity’, was unsuccessful. The making of that attempt would seem, though, to attest to a sense that it is not inappropriate to conceive of God as having a ‘character’ – it would seem to attest to a sense of God as ‘personal’. Yet Newman refers to the ‘Logos’, to which ‘Heathen Religion’ sought to ‘attribute a personal character’, as an ‘It’. The ‘actions’ associated with it, in the ‘images’ of ‘Heathen Religion’, are ‘figurative actions’. Newman seems to suggest that these ‘images’ were a presentation, in ‘personal’ terms, of that which was not taken, in itself, to be personal. What is a ‘personal development of the infinite unknown’? Is it an ‘unfolding’, in a ‘personal’ mode, of something that is other than personal? Is it an expression of that, in the ‘infinite unknown’, which can be expressed in ‘personal’ terms (while the full reality, as it is in itself, is still ‘unknown’)? Newman seems uncertain, then, as to whether the efforts to ‘attribute a personal character’ to the ‘Deity’, in the ‘images’ of ‘paganism’, involved a sense that the Deity was, in truth, personal. Newman suggests that there was, in Christ, not simply a revelation of the personhood of God, but a revelation of the ‘personal character’ of God. Newman might maintain, perhaps, that one cannot have a definite sense of the personhood of God, without having some sense of the ‘personal character’ of God: to be a person is to have a ‘personal character’, so one cannot properly envisage God as a person, without ‘attributing’ some sort of character to Him. Yet he seems, equally, uncertain of how much the attempt, in ‘paganism’, to ‘attribute a personal character’ to the ‘Logos’, involved a definite sense of the personhood of God. The ‘personal character’ of Christ, Newman maintains, was not simply one sort of ‘character’ among others: that ‘character’ was a kind of ‘moral’ revelation in itself – it manifested the ‘moral scheme of the world’, as something cohesive. If this ‘moral scheme’ is cohesive, unified, then it need not be regarded as something alien to the ‘One’, or the ‘Logos’ – as something pertaining only to the order of appearances, distinct from the ‘One’. When the sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’ was republished in 1871, Newman commented, in a note, on his remark that ‘Natural Religion … gives little or no information respecting what may be called [the] Personality’ of the ‘Deity’, that ‘this seems to me too strongly said, and inconsistent with what is said infra, vi. 10. Vide Essay on Assent, v. i.’. The reference ‘infra, vi. 10’, is to the claim, in a sermon ‘On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance’ (1832), that ‘the very authoritativeness with which conscience

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

61

dictates to us’ involves ‘the notion of duty to an Unseen Governor’, ‘a notion which suggests to the mind that there is, in truth, some object more “desirable in its own nature” than “the general happiness” of mankind – viz. the approbation of our Maker’.58 Newman maintains here that the ‘dictates’ of ‘conscience’ involve a sense of One who ‘dictates’, an ‘Unseen Governor’. He suggests, then, in his note on the sermon, that the claim that ‘Natural Religion’ involves no sense of the ‘Personality’ of God is at odds with the claim that conscience ‘involves the notion’ of an ‘Unseen Governor’. The awareness of an ‘Unseen Governor’ is not, it would seem, an awareness of the ‘personal character’ of that ‘Governor’; it would seem, rather, to be an awareness merely of the ‘Deity’ as personal, as having personhood. By 1832, then, Newman was inclined to regard the conscience as involving a sense of an ‘Unseen Governor’, whose ‘approbation’ might be sought: the conscience involves a sense of an ‘Unseen’ person. In 1830, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he characterizes natural religion as developing from the conscience, yet he suggests that natural religion is deficient with regard to its sense of the personhood of God. How, then, does he characterize the conscience, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’? Conscience is the essential principle and sanction of Religion in the mind. Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power. And since the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become, and the standard of excellence is ever outstripping, while it guides, our obedience, a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of the unapproachable nature as well as the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation. Here, then, at once, we have the elements of a religious system; for what is Religion but the system of relations existing between us and a Supreme Power, claiming our habitual obedience: ‘the blessed and only Potentate, who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen or can see’? … . Conscience implies a difference in the nature of actions, the power of acting in this way or that as we please, and an obligation of acting in one particular way in preference to all others; and since the more our moral nature is improved, the greater inward power of improvement it seems to possess, a view is laid upon to us both of the capacities and prospects of man, and the awful importance of that work which the law of his being lays upon him … [a view] of a future life, and of a judgement … . Since the inward law of Conscience brings with it no proof of its truth, and commands attention to it on its own authority, all obedience to it is of the nature of Faith; and habitual obedience implies the direct exercise

58. John Henry Newman, ‘On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 105–6.

62

John Henry Newman and the Imagination of a clear and vigorous faith in the truth of its suggestions, triumphing over opposition both from within and without; quieting the murmurs of Reason, perplexed with the disorders of the present scheme of things, and subduing the appetites, clamorous for good which promises an immediate and keen gratification … . Conscience is thus ever the sanction of Natural Religion, [and] it is, when improved, the rule of Morals also … [but] it is, as such, essentially religious … which is implied in the remorse and vague apprehension of evil which the transgression of Conscience occasions.59

If the ‘object’ of the conscience is ‘the blessed and only Potentate, who only hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable’, then would this not suggest that this ‘object’ is something personal? A ‘Potentate’ is, evidently, personal. When Newman refers to the ‘blessed and only Potentate’, however, he is quoting from the Scriptures – he is presenting how ‘Revealed Religion’ understands the object of the conscience. While Newman would evidently maintain that the ‘something’ which the conscience apprehends is, in truth, God, would he maintain, here, that this ‘something’ is apprehended, by the ‘natural’ conscience, as God – as a personal God? Newman associates the ‘essentially religious’ aspect of the conscience with certain emotions – with the ‘remorse and vague apprehension of evil which the transgression of Conscience occasions’. He would, later, maintain that these emotions imply an ‘object’ of a personal nature: in his Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) he observes that conscience ‘is something more than a moral sense … it is always emotional’. It always implies what that sense only sometimes implies … it always involves the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed. 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.60

In ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he suggests that ‘affections’ of this kind make the conscience ‘essentially religious’ – and he distinguishes the conscience, as such, from the ‘rule of morals’ – but he does not maintain, with any definiteness, that these emotions involve a sense of a ‘living object’, a ‘person’. In ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he suggests that the understanding of ‘the moral system of the world’, attained by ‘Heathen Philosophy’, ‘did not preclude a belief in fatalism, which might, of course, consist in unchangeable moral laws, as well as physical’. The ‘remorse and vague apprehension of evil’, which he identifies as ‘essential’ to the conscience, might,

59. OUS, 18–20. 60. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 109.

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

63

then, be taken to be an ‘apprehension’ of an ‘evil’, a retribution, attendant on the operation of ‘unchangeable moral laws’. (Feeling ‘remorse’ – feeling a desire not to have done something – is different, in this regard, from feeling ‘ashamed’: ‘shame’ can be taken to imply the consciousness of another person ‘before whom we are ashamed’, in a way that ‘remorse’ does not.) More generally, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, Newman characterizes the ‘object’ of the conscience in terms that are not quite personal: it is a ‘something exterior’, a ‘That, whatever it is’, a ‘Supreme Power’, a ‘standard of excellence’. While Newman suggests that conscience apprehends a ‘something exterior’, to which the self is subject, this ‘something’ could be identified with a ‘standard’ or ‘law’: it is not necessarily the personal God of revealed religion. He does observe that conscience ‘implies a relation’ to ‘an excellence which it does not possess’; and this would suggest that the ‘something’ apprehended by the conscience ‘has’ excellence, that it has the excellence designated by the ‘standard’. Could there be a somewhat Platonic understanding of universals here – a sense that there is a Form of goodness that ‘has’ (to the utmost) goodness? Newman observes that the more one ‘follows’ the ‘standard of excellence’, the more clearly one apprehends it (just as, for Aristotle, the clear apprehension of the good is part of the goodness of the good man): seeing the good is involved in being good, and being good is involved in the seeing of the good. This could suggest that the idea of an ultimate ‘tribunal’, wherein there would be a perfect apprehension, and application, of the ‘standard of excellence’, involves the idea of a perfect being, who would apprehend that standard perfectly: the idea of the ‘standard of excellence’, of the ultimate ‘tribunal’, involves the idea of a being that has that excellence, as the ‘standard’ is present in, or to, the apprehension of a being who perfectly realizes that standard. Then again, when Newman remarks that the conscience has a ‘relation’ to an ‘excellence it does not possess’, this might mean, simply, that when one contemplates moral ‘excellence’ – in reference to the ‘standard’ – one is aware of the ways in which one does not ‘possess’ it. If, then, the conscience does not, of itself, apprehend the ‘something’ that it ‘contemplates’ as a person, a personal God, then this ‘something’ might be taken for a ‘principle’ rather than an ‘Agent’: it might be consistent with the experience of the ‘natural’ conscience to interpret it in this way. Newman observes that, prior to the revelation, ‘though Conscience seemed to point in a certain direction as a witness for the real moral locality (so to speak,) of the unseen God, yet, as it cannot prove its own authority, it afforded no argument for a Governor and Judge, distinct from the moral system itself, to those who disputed its informations’.61 Newman observes that the conscience ‘afforded no argument for a Governor and Judge, distinct from the moral system itself, to those who disputed its informations’; and one might take ‘distinct from the moral system’ to qualify ‘argument’ or one might take it to qualify ‘Governor and Judge’. If one were to take ‘distinct from the moral system’ to qualify ‘Governor and Judge’, then one would be construing the sentence to mean that the ‘conscience’ did not attest to a (personal) ‘Governor and Judge’ distinct from the (impersonal) ‘moral system

61. ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in OUS, 23.

64

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

itself ’, in a manner that could not be ‘disputed’. If one were to take ‘distinct from the moral system’ to qualify ‘argument’, then one would be construing the sentence to mean that the ‘argument’ for God, presented by the conscience, was only convincing for those who accepted the ‘informations’ of the conscience, and ‘the moral system’. Newman observes that ‘Conscience seemed to point in a certain direction as a witness for the real moral locality (so to speak,) of the unseen God’; the notion of a ‘real moral locality’ is far from clear; and there seems to be a difference between ‘pointing’, attesting, to a ‘moral locality’, and ‘pointing’ (simply) to ‘the unseen God’: Newman seems to hesitate about whether the (natural) ‘Conscience’ attests to God. Newman maintains that while conscience does involve a sense of a ‘something exterior’, which is ‘superior’ to the self, nevertheless, if this ‘something’ is taken to be a ‘principle’ – as the ‘philosophers’ take it – rather than a personal God, then this understanding of it does not ‘throw’ one out of oneself. If, to be ‘thrown out’ of oneself by the conscience, one must be aware that the ‘object’ presented by the conscience is not simply something ‘superior’ to oneself, but a ‘Person’, and if the experience of the conscience involves an awareness of a ‘something exterior … superior’ to the self, but not necessarily an awareness that this ‘something’ is a ‘Person’ or ‘Agent’, then one is not ‘thrown out’ of oneself by the conscience. Newman observes that as ‘the inward law of Conscience brings with it no proof of its truth, and commands attention to it on its own authority, all obedience to it is of the nature of Faith’. How does this ‘faith’, involved in ‘obedience’ to the conscience, relate to the faith that is a response to the revelation of God? The faith that is a response to the revelation is a faith, ultimately, in a person – a faith in Christ, and in a personal God. Newman characterizes the ‘faith’ involved in obedience to the conscience as, in part, a matter of trusting where one does not have ‘proof ’: one has faith that the ‘inward law’ of the conscience is ‘truth’, in the absence of ‘proof ’ that it is so. Newman might regard the ‘law’, the principles, apprehended by the conscience as first principles: principles which do not admit of being proved – principles which one thinks with, and recurs to, in proving other things. If these are not self-evident, then they must be simply assumed – taken on faith – or rejected. More than this, though, Newman suggests that the ‘attention’ accorded to this ‘inward law’ involves a recognition of ‘authority’: there is something about the ‘inward law’, an ‘authority’ apparent in it, that ‘commands attention’. Newman observes that ‘the more closely this inward monitor is respected and followed, the clearer, the more exalted, and the more varied its dictates become … [so that] a moral conviction is thus at length obtained of … the supreme authority of That, whatever it is, which is the object of the mind’s contemplation’. How does the ‘inward monitor’, here, relate to ‘the object of the mind’s contemplation’? Newman could be suggesting that in the ‘dictates’ of this ‘inward monitor’, presenting particular things as good – presenting particular acts as obligatory – there is a sustained ‘contemplation’ of goodness in itself: there is an awareness of goodness in all the deliverances of this ‘inward monitor’. What one ‘obeys’, when one acts in accordance with the conscience, is this goodness, which is something ‘exterior’ to, something transcending, the self. This ‘something exterior’ becomes present to the self via the conscience, so that the conscience is, in a sense, the presence of this

1. Faith, ‘Practical Perception’ and Phronesis

65

‘something’ in the self – the conscience is that whereby it ‘speaks within’. Would Newman maintain that the ‘inward monitor’ is experienced as an expression of ‘something exterior’ – so that this ‘inward’ activity is the expression of something ‘out of ’ the self? Newman can suggest that the ‘dictates’ of the conscience have a certain ‘authority’ that is the authority of something other than the self (not simply of, say, a higher aspect of the self); and yet he can suggest that this ‘something’ might be taken to be a ‘Principle of nature’, which is ‘not an object of worship, inasmuch as each intelligent being [is], in a certain sense, himself a portion of it’. For Newman, then, it seems that, even if the conscience is experienced as the expression of something ‘out of ’ the self, one is not ‘thrown’ out of oneself unless this ‘something’ is recognized to be a ‘Person’. In 1831, in ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he suggests that to register this ‘something exterior’ need not be to recognize that it is a ‘Person’; in 1834, in ‘Faith without Sight’, he suggests that the conscience is experienced as the ‘Voice’ of another who ‘speaks within’, or as the ‘echo’ of that ‘Voice’. Newman suggests that, in the acts of the ‘inward monitor’ of the conscience, there is an ‘object of the mind’s contemplation’: there is a kind of ‘contemplation’ associated with the conscience. He characterizes faith as a ‘practical perception of the unseen’. Faith, for Newman, is, like the conscience, like phronesis, ‘practical’ – it animates a kind of practice, and a kind of life. How, though, does this ‘practical perception of the unseen’ relate to a ‘perception of the unseen’, a ‘contemplation’, that is less evidently ‘practical’?

Chapter 2 CONSCIENCE, AND THE ‘LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL’

1. In the first volume of his Parochial Sermons (1834) Newman presents a vision of the spiritual life as a life of ‘obedience’. Spiritual ‘perfection’ is only to be realized if one lives in ‘obedience’ to the intuitions of the ‘conscience’ and the ‘precepts’ of ‘the Church and the Bible’. In The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833), published a year previously, in which he had set out his view of the life of the early Church, he observed that the Church had exercised a certain reserve – a discipline arcani, or ‘discipline of the secret’ – in presenting its doctrines to those unacquainted with them, being animated, in this, by a ‘truly charitable consideration for those  … addressed, who were likely to be perplexed, not converted, by the sudden exhibition of the whole evangelical scheme’: it would not have been ‘charitable’ to present to the ‘unbelieving or unstable’ that which they were not yet fitted to appreciate or to understand.1 The Church distinguished between ‘elementary’ or ‘exoteric’ teaching and more ‘esoteric’ teaching; the ‘elementary’ teaching was true, but not complete. ‘The elementary information given to the heathen or catechumen was in no sense undone by the subsequent secret teaching, which was in fact but the filling up of a bare but correct outline.’2 The ‘example of the inspired writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was [the main] authority [cited to justify] making a broad distinction between the doctrines suitable to the state of the weak and ignorant, and those which are the peculiar property of a baptized and regenerate Christian’.3 The ‘secret teaching’, then, was imparted to the ‘baptized’, and to those who evinced ‘habitual piety’ and ‘religious proficiency’ – and, indeed, to be baptized, one had to undergo a ‘season of preparation’, lasting two or three years, in which one was formed in ‘piety’ and ‘religious proficiency’.4 That is, the state of understanding, which one had to attain before being fit to

1. John Henry Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century [hereafter Arians] (1833; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 47. 2. Arians, 53. 3. Ibid., 42–3. 4. Ibid., 44.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

67

appreciate the ‘Christian mysteries’ – ‘the exact and fully developed doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and still more, the doctrine of the Atonement’5 – was a ‘moral’ state, formed by right ‘practice’, involving a participation in the sacraments: one had to form in oneself the requisite ‘moral discernment’.6 The ‘elementary’ doctrines, Newman observes, were concerned with ‘repentance, faith in God, the doctrinal meaning of the rite of baptism, confirmation as the channel of miraculous gifts, the future resurrection, and the final separation of good and bad’;7 it was necessary to proceed ‘from the most simple principles of Natural Religion, to the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel, from moral truths to the Christian mysteries’.8 The doctrines which Newman identifies, in The Arians of the Fourth Century, as making up the ‘elementary’ teaching are the doctrines to which the greater part of the first volume of his Parochial Sermons is devoted. Only a couple of the sermons are concerned with the ‘esoteric’ doctrines and one of these – ‘The Christian Mysteries’ – aims less to present an ‘exact and fully developed’ account of them than to present a defence of ‘mystery’ in general, and an account of ‘Christian knowledge’ as ordered to ‘good works’: ‘Christian knowledge’, Newman insists in ‘The Christian Mysteries’, is ‘practical knowledge’, ‘the grace promised us is given, not that we may know more, but that we may do better’.9 In this, Newman might be regarded as treating the wider public, to whom the volume was presented, like catechumens; and indeed he maintains, in several sermons in that volume, that the ‘religion of the day’, though nominally Christian, was in certain respects a substitution of a ‘dream’ for ‘real’ Christianity – many, in his view, had not had the true ‘elements’ of Christianity presented to them.10 More than that, though, for Newman, the ‘elementary’ doctrines – of ‘repentance and pardon, of the necessity of good works’ – are pertinent to those who need to repent, those who have not attained to a ‘habitual piety’ – and most are, inevitably, in this state. ‘Alas! to be alive as a Christian, is nothing better than to struggle against sin, to disobey and repent.’11 For Newman, the disciplina arcani observed by the early Church involved a sense that if one was to attain a right appreciation of the ‘peculiar doctrines of the Gospel’, one had to attain a certain ‘moral’ state, and a ‘proficiency’ in a form of ‘practice’. In the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, he presents a vision of Christianity as, above all, a kind of practice characterized by ‘obedience’ to God.

5. Ibid., 45. 6. Ibid., 43. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 44. 9. John Henry Newman, ‘The Christian Mysteries’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; 1868; London, Longmans Green & Co., 1907), 203, 206. 10. See in particular ‘Self Denial, the Test of Religious Earnestness’, ‘Christian Manhood’, and ‘The Religion of the Day’. 11. ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 175.

68

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘Spiritual life is obedience to a Lawgiver, not a mere feeling or taste.’12 Through this ‘obedience to a Lawgiver’, one becomes a certain sort of person, one becomes holy. In ‘Religious Faith Rational’, Newman maintains that if one obeys ‘God’s voice’ in the ‘heart’ then ‘faith’ will become ‘like sight’ – ‘we shall have no … difficulty in finding what will please God’: he identifies the office of ‘faith’, here, with ‘finding what will please God’; ‘faith’, like the conscience, is concerned with how one should act.13 In the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, generally, he presents ‘faith’ as intimately connected with the ‘conscience’. As the conscience, the ‘law of God written in our hearts’, apprehends a ‘Lawgiver’, so faith apprehends that ‘Lawgiver’ more clearly; as the conscience is ‘strengthened’ the more one lives in accordance with it (such that one has an ever clearer apprehension of the good), so faith becomes ‘like sight’ the more one lives in accordance with it; as one must be virtuous to have a ‘vigorous’ conscience – the conscience is ‘strengthened’ the more it is obeyed, and in obeying it one forms oneself as a person, becoming virtuous – so one must be holy, one must have a ‘spiritual mind’, to have a ‘vigorous’ faith: there is a sense in which Newman would regard everything in ‘religion’ as ‘tending’ to form a certain character, and in which he would regard everything in ‘religion’ as present, so to speak, in the character of the ‘long practised Christian’.14 In sermon after sermon in the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, Newman insists on one thing – that ‘faith’ is to be ‘acted on’, that it is a matter of ‘acts’, above all, rather than ‘thoughts’ or ‘feelings’. In ‘Promising without Doing’, Newman maintains that ‘as far as we know any thing of the matter, justifying faith has no existence independent of its particular definite acts’, and he makes it plain that by these ‘particular definite acts’ he means ‘deed[s] of obedience’.15 ‘Faith’, he suggests, ‘may be described as the temper under which men obey; the humble and earnest desire to please Christ which causes and attends on actual services.’16 In ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, he characterizes ‘faith’ as a ‘principle of conduct’.17 In ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, he maintains that ‘religion’ is the ‘science of living well’.18 For Newman, this ‘science’ is present, above all, in the ‘conscience’: to have a rightly formed conscience is to have an apprehension of the good, enabling one to ‘live well’. In ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, he suggests that ‘Scripture’ completes, and perfects, this apprehension of the good: ‘The law of God written on our hearts bids us serve him, and partly tells us how to serve Him, and Scripture completes the precepts which nature

12. ‘Times of Private Prayer’, in PPS i, 253. 13. ‘Religious Faith Rational’, in PPS i, 202. 14. Newman gives an account of the character of the ‘long practised Christian’, in ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in PPS i, 72–82. 15. ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 171, 172. 16. Ibid., 172. 17. ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in PPS i, 33. 18. ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, in PPS i, 230.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

69

began.’19 One can only recognize that ‘Scripture completes the precepts’ of the conscience if one already recognizes the ‘precepts’ of the conscience. In ‘The Religion of the Day’, Newman observes that ‘religion’ is a ‘system of commands and promises from God towards us’:20 ‘religion’ involves the apprehension of certain ‘commands’, and it consists in a life that is a response to those ‘commands’. Newman characterizes the ‘conscience’, equally, as ‘commanding’ certain things – it ‘bids us’ do this, and not that. The ‘conscience’ registers the ‘law of God written in our hearts’,21 presented in certain ‘commands’, concerned with particular acts; and ‘faith’ registers ‘commands and promises from God towards us’; the conscience is most fully formed when the ‘commands’ it registers are acted upon, and faith is most fully realized when the ‘commands’ it registers are acted upon. Faith, for Newman, figures almost as the awareness of certain ‘precepts’ as the precepts of God: that a precept is of God, is a motive for obeying it; so to have faith, to recognize fully that a precept is of God, is to be motivated to obey that precept – faith has ‘existence’ in ‘its particular definite acts’, in animating those acts. In ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, he observes that a ‘vigorous and clearsighted faith … would enable us accurately to discern and closely to follow the way of life’.22 Faith ‘discerns’ the ‘way of life’ – like the ‘conscience’, it discerns the acts that are involved in ‘living well’. To discern these acts ‘accurately’, is to be enabled to ‘closely … follow the way of life’ – one must discern the way, if one is to ‘follow’ it. ‘Faith’ for Newman, it would seem, is an awareness with which one acts, in obedience to God the ‘Lawgiver’: it animates ‘particular definite acts’. Faith is a ‘practical knowledge’ in that it enables one ‘accurately to discern and closely to follow the way of life’ – it relates to practice, identifying certain ‘acts’ as right – and it is a ‘practical knowledge’ in that it is present in, it has ‘existence’ in, practice – informing, motivating and informed by, ‘particular definite acts’. In ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, Newman suggests that there can be a kind of ‘faith’ that is present even when one experiences ‘doubts about the reality of religion altogether’, a faith that is present when one strives to be ‘dutiful’ in ‘ordinary’ matters.23 Faith coexists with ‘doubts’: it may happen that one is ‘haunted by wandering doubts … [having] thoughts shoot across the mind about the reality of religion altogether, or of this or that particular doctrine of it, or about the correctness of one’s own faith, and the safety of one’s own state’.24 He insists, though, that, despite this, one can acknowledge that ‘it must be right to serve God; we have a voice within us answering to the injunction … of waiting

19. ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 22. 20. ‘The Religion of the Day’, in PPS i, 317. 21. ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in PPS i, 21. 22. ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, in PPS i, 90. 23. ‘Obedience, the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’, in PPS i, 235. 24. Ibid.

70

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

on Him and keeping His way’.25 Newman maintains that one should attend to this ‘voice’ – one should try to live rightly – and that doing so will dispel ‘doubts’. Let, then, every beginner make up his mind to suffer disquiet and perplexity … The more he makes up his mind manfully to bear doubt, struggle against it, and meekly to do God’s will all through it, the sooner this unsettled state of mind will cease, and order will rise out of confusion. … Go about your duty; mind little things as well as great. … To be dutiful and obedient in ordinary matters, to speak the truth, to be honest, to be sober, to keep from sinful words and thoughts, to be kind and forgiving, – and all this for our Saviour’s sake, – let us attempt these duties first. They even will be difficult – the least of them; still they are much easier than the solution of the doubts which harass us, and they will by degrees give us a practical knowledge of the Truth.26

Newman observes that ‘we shall gain light as to general doctrines by embodying them in those particular instances in which they become ordinary duties’:27 one gets a ‘light as to general doctrines’ by fulfilling the ‘duties’ which they mark out. Does one need the ‘general doctrines’ if one is to identify the ‘ordinary duties’ – such that one identifies the duties by applying the ‘general doctrines’ to the particulars of life? Could one identify the ‘ordinary duties’ with the (natural) ‘conscience’ alone (disregarding the ‘general doctrines’)? Newman maintains that, even when one is experiencing ‘doubts’ and ‘perplexity’, one should continue to act in accordance with the ‘ordinary duties’ implied by ‘general doctrines’, and that, in doing so, one will get ‘light’, by which one might make better sense of those ‘doctrines’: acting, rather than merely thinking, reflecting and so on, will give ‘light’. He does not determine whether conscience, alone, is to identify the acts one should carry out, and whether it is to move one to these acts, or whether faith is to move one (faith sufficient for one to act ‘for our Saviour’s sake’): it is the carrying out of the acts that is important. All of this would suggest that for Newman the ‘light’ of faith is present in, has ‘existence’ in, a certain form of practice: so long as one perseveres in the practice, one may have something of this ‘light’, even if one should be experiencing ‘doubts about the reality of religion altogether’; and one gets ‘light’ in those matters about which one may be experiencing ‘doubts’ – ‘light’ to dispel intellectual ‘perplexities’ and ‘difficulties’ – by persevering in the practice. In ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, Newman observes that ‘a certain state of the heart and affections’ is needed ‘for entering heaven’ – ‘even supposing a man of unholy life were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there,’28 for being subject to ‘a moral malady which disorders the inward sight and taste’,29 ‘he would 25. Ibid., 236. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 237. 28. ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 3. 29. Ibid., 7.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

71

find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon’30 – and the ‘state of the heart and affections’ needed ‘for entering heaven’ is cultivated by ‘works’, ‘chiefly as they tend to produce or evidence this frame of mind’. Good works … are required, not as if they had any thing of merit in them, not as if they could of themselves turn away God’s anger for our sins, or purchase heaven for us, but because they are the means, under God’s grace, of strengthening and showing forth that holy principle which God implants in the heart, and without which … we cannot see Him.31

The ‘holy principle’ by which ‘we … see’ God is, for Newman, the conscience: by living rightly, and ‘strengthening’ the conscience, one becomes ever more capable of apprehending goodness, and ever more capable of apprehending the supreme good, God. Newman seems, then, to identify the ‘principle’ by which the soul ‘sees’ God, in the beatific vision – the ‘principle’ of heavenly contemplation – with the conscience; or, at least, he associates the formation of the conscience, with the formation of a capacity for a contemplative ‘seeing’ of God. To live in obedience to God is to form certain habits. Christian life involves a discipline, by which one is formed as a person. Prayer itself, Newman insists, is a habit. Newman devotes a couple of sermons, in the first volume of Parochial Sermons, to an account of why a discipline of prayer – prayer conducted at set times, according to set forms – is beneficial. ‘The power of prayer, being a habit, must be acquired, like all other habits, by practice.’32 Set prayers are ‘necessary … first as a means of making the mind sober, and the general temper more religious; secondly, as a means of exercising earnest faith’.33 Seemingly ‘small observances’ can make a difference to the ‘general temper’. ‘Such creatures are we, there is the most close and remarkable connexion between small observances and the permanence of our chief habits and practices … . Nothing is more difficult than to be disciplined and regular in our religion.’34 Newman insists, in sermon after sermon, on the importance of consistency: the spiritual life involves, and requires, the observance of a multitude of ‘small’ obligations. In ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, he observes that one attains to perfection by ‘the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful’.35 (He remarks that ‘your judgement of persons, and of events, and of actions, and of doctrines, and your spirit towards God and man, your faith in the high truths of the Gospel, and your knowledge of your duty, all depend in a strange way on this strict endeavour to observe the whole 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 8–9. ‘Forms of Private Prayer’, in PPS i, 264. ‘Times of Private Prayer’, in PPS i, 251. Ibid., 252. ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, in PPS i, 67.

72

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

law, on this self-denial in those little things in which obedience is a self-denial’.36) This discipline is needed, he observes in ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, because ‘a complicated work’ is ‘before us, to unmake ourselves’37 (to ‘unmake’ that is, those ‘sinful’ habits that make ‘small duties … distasteful to us’). One only needs to ‘unmake’ oneself if one has ‘made’ oneself wrongly – if one has formed the wrong habits. Most, as a matter of fact, do ‘make’ themselves wrongly; but this need not be so. In ‘God’s Commandments Not Grievous’, Newman observes that ‘did [one] but follow from infancy what [one knows] to be right’ – obeying God at a time of life when one does not have ‘bad habits to hinder the suggestions of … conscience’, when to ‘to obey requires an effort … but an effort like the bodily effort of the child’s rising from the ground’38 – then one would not experience any difficulty in observing the ‘commandments’ of God: one would ‘grow up to man’s estate … [with] duties at length attaining their full range, and [a] soul … completed in all its parts for the due performance of them’.39 While very few ‘grow’ in this way, there are some who ‘as children … served God on the whole’, who, despite sinning, ‘recovered lost ground … sought God and were accepted’, who ‘contrived with keen repentance, and strong disgust at sin, and earnest prayers, to make up for lost time, and keep pace with the course of God’s providence’, and who, accordingly, have ‘walked with God, not indeed step by step with Him; never before him, often loitering, stumbling, falling to sleep’.40 Those who have lived in this way ‘are witnesses of Christ to all men, as showing what man can become, and what all Christians ought to be’.41 Newman sets out ‘what all Christians ought to be’ in a sermon on ‘The Spiritual Mind’. He distinguishes between habits formed by ‘custom’, by a ‘passive imitation of those we fall in with’ – whereby one is shaped by ‘the manners of those with whom [one] lives, being acted upon by external impulses, apart from any right influence proceeding from the heart’ – and habits formed by ‘much and constant vigilance … much pain and trouble’: one can follow those one ‘falls in with’, or one can follow the ‘heart’, the conscience.42 The ‘pain and trouble’ is particularly needed when one has the wrong habits; but if, by ‘vigilance’, one continuously acts rightly, then one gradually forms a ‘Christian spirit’, ‘obedience’ itself becomes a ‘habit’, and one acts with ‘obedience’, even without exercising any particular ‘vigilance’. A religious man, in proportion as obedience becomes more and more easy to him, will doubtless do his duty unconsciously. It will be natural to him to obey, and therefore he will do it naturally, i.e. without effort or deliberation. It is difficult things which we are obliged to think about before doing them. When 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Ibid., 68. ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, in PPS i, 89–90. ‘God’s Commandments not Grievous’, in PPS i, 102. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 107. Ibid. ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in PPS i, 73, 75, 76.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

73

we have mastered our hearts in any matter (it is true) we no more think of the duty while we obey, than we think how to walk when we walk, or by what rules to exercise any art which we have thoroughly acquired. Separate acts of faith aid us only while we are unstable. As we get strength, but one extended act of faith (so to call it) influences us all through the day, and our whole day is but one act of obedience also. Then there is no minute distribution of our faith among our particular deeds. Our will runs parallel to God’s will … . This is the noble manner of serving God, to do good without thinking about it, without any calculation or reasoning, from love of the good, and hatred of the evil, – though cautiously and with prayer and watching, yet so generously, that if we were suddenly asked why we so act, we could only reply ‘because it is our way,’ or ‘because Christ so acted;’ so spontaneously as not to know so much that we are doing right, as that we are not doing wrong; I mean, with more of instinctive fear of sinning, than of minute and careful appreciation of the degrees of our obedience. Hence it is that the best men are ever the most humble; as for other reasons, so especially because they are accustomed to be religious. They surprise others, but not themselves; they surprise others at their very calmness and freedom from thought about themselves. This is to have a great mind, to have within us that ‘princely heart of innocence’ of which David speaks. Common men see God at a distance; in their attempts to be religious they feebly guide themselves as by a distant light, and are obliged to calculate and search about for the path. But the long practised Christian, who, through God’s mercy, has brought God’s presence near to him, the elect of God, in whom the Blessed Spirit dwells, he does not look out of doors for the traces of God; he is moved by God dwelling in him, and needs not but act on instinct. I do not say there is any man altogether such, for this is an angelic life; but it is the state of mind to which vigorous prayer and watching tend.43

Christian ‘faith’ and ‘discipline’ are present, ‘instinctively’, so to speak, in the character of the ‘long practised Christian’. In ‘Religious Faith Rational’, Newman maintains that ‘if we but obey God strictly, in time (through his blessing) faith will become like sight; we shall have no more difficulty in finding what will please God than in moving our limbs or in understanding the conversation of our familiar friends’.44 To ‘obey God strictly’ is to acquire the capacity to register effortlessly ‘what will please God’. Newman maintains, in ‘The Spiritual Mind’, that the ‘long practised Christian … is moved by God dwelling in him, and needs not but act on instinct’. ‘Instinct’ here suggests, at once, ‘inclination’ – a desire to do something – and a form of ‘insight’ or intuition – an intuitive awareness of what is to be done. If one takes ‘instinct’ to mean ‘inclination’, then this would suggest that the ‘spiritual’ have ‘inclinations’ that accord with ‘God’s will’. As the ‘spiritual’ have habitually acted rightly, so what they are inclined to do is ‘parallel to God’s will’: those acts that God would have them carry out, they are inclined to carry out. When Newman remarks that the ‘spiritual’ 43. ‘The Spiritual Mind’, in PPS i, 73–5. 44. ‘Religious Faith Rational’, in PPS i, 201.

74

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

have a will that is ‘parallel to God’s will’, this suggests that they want the same things that God wants; but one may take it that they want those things, not simply ‘in themselves’, so to speak – rather, they want those things as they are things that God wants: their inclination to do certain things involves an awareness that it is ‘God’s will’ that they should do them. They are inclined to carry out ‘God’s will’, and they take their inclination or ‘instinct’ to do that which is ‘God’s will’ to be an expression of ‘God dwelling’ within. If one takes ‘instinct’ to mean ‘intuitive awareness’, then this would suggest that the ‘spiritual’ have an intuitive sense of ‘God’s will’, and need not ‘calculate’ to ascertain what is ‘God’s will’: those who are ‘spiritual’ know how to ‘please’ God, without having to engage in conscious ‘deliberation’ about it; the thinking, or insight, by which they recognize how to ‘please’ God is ‘unconscious’ – they have, by long ‘practice’, become adroit in recognizing what will ‘please’ God. The ‘unconscious’ character of the ‘obedience’ need not be taken to involve an ‘unconsciousness’, an obliviousness, of God. They are ‘practised’ in acting in accordance with ‘God’s will’, so, in each situation, they are swift to recognize which sort of acts would be in accord with ‘God’s will’, and which would not. Newman seems, generally, to be suggesting that, in the ‘instinct’ of the ‘long practised Christian’, there is an intuitive awareness of ‘God’s will’, and an inclination to carry it out. Newman might, moreover, be suggesting that inclinations involve, in themselves, a kind of (instinctive, ‘unconscious’) understanding: if one has a ‘love of the good’, one spontaneously wishes to realize the good, and that involves an understanding of the goodness of what one wishes to do (and of how it pleases God). Having a well-formed ‘instinct’ for what will ‘please’ God is inseparable from having a ‘will … parallel to God’s will’. The disciplines of religion, for Newman, ‘vigorous prayer and watching’, ‘tend’ toward, and are realized in, a ‘state of mind’ or character. In ‘Religious Faith Rational’, Newman suggests that for those with this ‘state of mind’, understanding what will ‘please God’ is like ‘understanding the conversation of … familiar friends’. Would he suggest, in this, that the relationship that the ‘spiritual’ have with God is like a relationship of friendship? He suggests that the spiritual can recognize what will ‘please God’ as easily as they can understand ‘the conversation of … familiar friends’: he is not maintaining, in this, that the spiritual have a relationship to God that is like the relationships they have with their ‘familiar friends’, but rather, that they understand what will ‘please God’ as easily as they understand the ‘conversation’ of their friends. The contrast is concerned with different kinds of understanding – intuitive understanding, as against ‘calculation’. Yet, does an intuitive understanding of what will ‘please God’ itself require a relationship to God akin to friendship? Newman suggests that the God who, initially, is registered as ‘distant’, a ‘distant light’, is then registered as ‘dwelling’ within. Newman is not concerned, here, with emotional ‘distance’ – aloofness, as contrasted with intimacy – but with a ‘distance’ from ‘sight’, a ‘distance’ that makes something difficult to apprehend. Yet it would seem that, as the ‘spiritual’ apprehend God more clearly, so they apprehend God less as a ‘distant light’ and more as a person, a personal ‘presence’, with whom a personal relationship can be formed: God was related to as a ‘distant light’, but is now related to as a personal ‘Spirit’, ‘dwelling’ within. ‘Conversation’ is a way in which ‘friends’

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

75

are present to one another, and the pleasure which ‘friends’ take in conversation is, in part, a pleasure they take in the presence of one another. So, perhaps, for the ‘spiritual’, those ‘instincts’ or impulses (like conscience) which are registered as manifestations of the presence of ‘God dwelling’ within them are pleasing precisely as manifestations of the presence of God. The ‘instinct’ on which the ‘long practised Christian’ acts is an intuitive understanding of what will ‘please’ God. If one is a ‘long practised Christian’, one takes pleasure in carrying out those acts which, by ‘instinct’, one senses to be pleasing to God; and to take pleasure in pleasing another is something akin to friendship. The instinct for what will ‘please’ God itself arises from a certain familiarity with ‘God’s will’; by attending to ‘God’s will’, in situation after situation, one gets a sense for what that ‘will’ is ‘like’, and for what God is ‘like’, so to speak, and the more one has a sense of what God is like, who God is, the more one loves God. In manifesting His ‘will’, God manifests what He is ‘like’, and it is when God manifests what He is ‘like’ that He may be loved. What is more, those who live with a sense of ‘God’s will’, have a sense that God manifests His ‘will’ to them, and that, in manifesting His will to them, He is regarding them, taking notice of them: they have a sense that there is a reciprocity, a mutuality, in the relationship. (Many years later, in 1855, Newman preached on the ‘Love of God’, and, in the notes to that sermon, he observes that the love of God ‘is not merely looking at what does not notice us, as the Pantheists say. It is a friendship. Three things are necessary for friendship: (1) mutual love; (2) mutual consciousness and sympathy; (3) mutual intimacy – intercourse. Companions, walking with God, Luke xxiv [the road to Emmaus].’45 In the sense of God ‘dwelling within’, and manifesting His ‘will’, there is a sense of being taken ‘notice’ of by God. In the acquisition of those ‘instincts’, whereby ‘our will runs parallel to God’s will’, there is ‘sympathy’.) Faith ‘tends’ toward, has its fulfilment in, a certain personal state, a ‘state of mind’, a way of being. There is a sense in which, for Newman, the personal state to which faith ‘tends’ is a state in which one is fully realized, integrated, substantive, as a person: other ways of being are marked by a certain emptiness, dividedness. In ‘Secret Faults’, Newman maintains that ‘systematic’ self-examination is a ‘necessary condition for understanding’ the ‘great Christian doctrines’, and, equally, a proper understanding of those ‘doctrines’ is associated with true self-knowledge.46 ‘Unless we have some just idea of our hearts and of sin, we can have no right idea of a Moral Governor, a Saviour or a Sanctifier, that is, in professing to believe in Them, we shall be using words without attaching distinct meaning to them. Thus self-knowledge is at the root of all real religious knowledge.’47 It is ‘in proportion as we search our hearts and understand our own nature, that we understand what is meant by an Infinite Governor and Judge’ and it is ‘in proportion as we comprehend the nature of disobedience and our actual sinfulness, that we feel what is the blessing of the removal of sin’: ‘when we have experienced what it is

45. John Henry Newman, Sermon Notes (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1913), 124. 46. ‘Secret Faults’, in PPS i, 41. 47. Ibid., 42.

76

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

to read ourselves, we shall profit by the doctrines of the Church and the Bible.’48 Newman suggests that the recognition of sin, in oneself, is required if one is to appreciate what the judgment of God means – a judgment which apprehends that sin fully – and what salvation means – a salvation which involves the ‘removal’ of sin. What is more, the act by which one ‘reads’ oneself, recognizing sin in oneself, is the act of the conscience, and that act involves a sense of God, as the ‘Judge’: one tries to ‘read’ oneself, as the ‘Judge’ reads one. The God presented in the ‘great Christian doctrines’ is the ‘God [who] speaks to us … in our hearts’, and this ‘voice’ in ‘our hearts’ is the conscience, a ‘voice’ by which ‘we … read ourselves’.49 The ‘act’ of the conscience, then, involves a sense of God – a sense of God which accords with the ‘doctrines of the Church and Bible’ – and that act is an apprehension of the ‘heart’ as sinful, requiring transformation – which, equally, accords with the ‘doctrines of the Church and Bible’ about the state of the ‘heart’. When one tries to live an ‘obedient’ life, one will have many lapses, and one will become aware, through this, of how sinful one is; and the more one lives in ‘obedience’, the more one will form the ‘conscience’, getting an ever clearer apprehension of what ‘holiness’ is (and of the various ways in which one is without it). Obedience to God’s commandments, which implies knowledge of sin and of holiness, and the desire and endeavour to please Him, this is the only practical interpreter of Scripture doctrine. Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally.50

From ‘obedience’ arises the ‘knowledge of sin and of holiness’ required for ‘selfknowledge’; and self-knowledge is required if one is to make sense of ‘Scripture doctrine’, even as ‘Scripture doctrine’ makes ‘us turn inward and search our hearts’. Newman observes that ‘without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally’: self-knowledge, he maintains, ‘is at the root of all real religious knowledge’; more than that, self-knowledge is needed if one is to have a ‘root’ in oneself ‘personally’ – if one has self-knowledge then one lives with, and from, a true notion of oneself, and one is not alienated from oneself. As self-knowledge is implicated with a certain way of life, with ‘obedience’ to God, and as one never achieves perfect ‘obedience’, so one never, in this life, attains to full self-knowledge. Let a man persevere in prayer and watchfulness to the day of his death, yet he will never get to the bottom of his heart. Though he know more and more of himself as he becomes more conscientious and earnest, still the full manifestation of the secrets there lodged, is reserved for another world … Doubtless we must all endure that fierce and terrifying vision of our real selves, that last fiery trial of the soul before its acceptance.51 48. 49. 50. 51.

Ibid., 43. Ibid. Ibid., 54–5. Ibid., 48.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

77

Newman reflects, in a number of sermons in the first volume of Parochial Sermons, on the fractured state of the self – the state in which one has no ‘root’ in oneself. In ‘Promising without Doing’ he reflects on the ‘depths and deceitfulness of the heart, which we do not really know’.52 The way in which one experiences oneself, at any particular moment, might involve all kinds of illusions. ‘We know generally’, Newman observes, ‘that it is our duty to serve God, and we resolve we will do so faithfully. We are sincere in thus generally desiring and purposing to be obedient, and we think we are in earnest; yet we go away, and presently, without any struggle of mind or apparent change of purpose, almost without knowing ourselves what we do – we go away and do the very contrary to the resolution we have expressed.53 He alludes to one of the parables of Christ, concerning one who declared ‘I go Sir’ but ‘went not’ – ‘Here there was no revolution of sentiment, nothing deliberate; he merely acted according to his habitual frame of mind; he did not go work, because it was contrary to his general character to work; only he did not know this. He said, “I go, Sir,” sincerely, from the feeling of the moment; but when the words were out of his mouth, then they were forgotten.’54 One forms a good ‘resolution’, moved by the ‘feeling of the moment’ – a genuinely good ‘feeling’ – but the ‘feeling of the moment’ is something other than an ‘habitual frame of mind’, and it is this ‘habitual frame of mind’ which will dispose one to act, or not to act, in the event. Newman maintains that one must be ‘ever … suspicious’ of oneself.55 Only ‘acts’ are an indication of how one is really disposed – ‘nothing but past acts are vouchers for future’ – but, even then, ‘we can never answer how we shall act under new circumstances’.56 One cannot be sure that one will act rightly in the future, in certain circumstances, even if one has acted rightly, in similar circumstances, in the past. ‘The best men are uncertain; they are great, and they are little again; they stand firm, and then fall … reminding us to call no one master on earth, but to look up to our sinless and perfect Lord.’57 It is doubtful, Newman suggests, whether one can ever truly know oneself, and one cannot, accordingly, ever rely on oneself: any image of oneself that one forms, is likely to be somewhat illusory. If one cannot rely on oneself, then one must rely on something other than, more than, oneself – on God. We are in the dark about ourselves. When we act, we are groping in the dark, and may meet with a fall any moment. Here and there, perhaps, we see a little; or, in our attempts to influence and move our minds, we are making experiments (as it were) with some delicate and dangerous instrument, which works we do not know how, and may produce unexpected and disastrous effects. The management of our hearts is quite above us. Under these circumstances it becomes our comfort

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 172. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 165–6. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 168, 169. Ibid., 170.

78

John Henry Newman and the Imagination to look up to God … . He knoweth whereof we are made, and He alone can uphold us. He sees with most appalling distinctness all our sins, all the windings and recesses of evil within us; yet it is our only comfort to know this, and to trust Him for help against ourselves. To those who have a right notion of their weakness, the thought of their Almighty Sanctifier and Guide is continually present. They believe in the necessity of a spiritual influence to change and strengthen them, not as a mere abstract doctrine, but as a practical and most consolatory truth, daily to be fulfilled in their warfare with sin and Satan.58

Newman would counsel self-mistrust. One should not regard whatever good one does as the expression, or realization, of a goodness one has in oneself: one should, rather, trust to a ‘spiritual influence’ that enables one to do what is good, and one should attribute whatever good one does to that ‘spiritual influence’. Without this ‘influence’, the self has no stability, no integrity – ‘He alone can uphold us’.59 One should not think that one can form oneself – that one can make oneself virtuous. ‘The management of our hearts is quite above us.’60 If one reflects on oneself, it should be only to take note of how one has erred, to remind oneself of how much one needs the ‘spiritual influence’ that sustains one. If one reflects on oneself, it should be only to repent, and to turn to God. One must ‘try’ oneself in small things, striving for consistency. By living in this way, one is gradually formed by the ‘spiritual influence’ of God; one acquires the ‘full character of a Christian’.61 One assumes, or professes, the ‘full character of a Christian’ when participating in the rites of the Church. How much, for instance, do we profess when we say the Creed! and in the Collects we put on the full character of a Christian. We desire and seek the best gifts, and declare our strong purpose to serve God with our whole hearts. By doing this, we remind ourselves of our duty; and withal, we humble ourselves by the taunt (so to call it) of putting upon our dwindled and unhealthy forms those ample and glorious garments which befit the upright and full-grown believer.62

In ‘Profession without Hypocrisy’ Newman suggests that, if one lives rightly, one gradually ‘incorporates’ into oneself the ‘garments which befit the upright and fullgrown believer’. We profess to be Saints, to be guided by the highest principles, and to be ruled by the Spirit of God. We have long ago promised to believe and obey. It is also true that we cannot do these things aright; nay, even with God’s help (such is our sinful weakness), still we fall short of our duty. Nevertheless we must not cease

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Ibid., 173–4. Ibid., 173. Ibid. Ibid., 174–5. Ibid.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

79

to profess. We must not put off from us the wedding garment which Christ gave us in baptism. We may still rejoice in Him without being hypocrites, that is, if we labour day by day to make that wedding garment our own; to fix it on us and so incorporate it with our very selves, that death, which strips us of all things, may be unable to tear it from us, though as yet it be in great measure but an outward garb, covering our own nakedness.63

There is, Newman maintains, a ‘nakedness’, an emptiness, in the self; there are ‘recesses’ in oneself that one does not know about. One must, then, strive to act rightly, without being assured that one acts from genuine virtue, or faith, trusting that, in doing so, one will form in oneself the ‘temper’ of genuine virtue, or faith, becoming one for whom such acts are ‘natural’, one ‘moved by God dwelling’ within, who ‘needs not but act on instinct’. If one has formed this ‘temper’, then everything in oneself is in accord with the ‘profession’ of faith: there are no ‘recesses’ in oneself that are at odds with that ‘profession’; one is not divided against oneself; that profession, that faith, has its ‘root’ in who one is ‘personally’ – it is an expression of who one is. To be ‘moved by God dwelling’ within is to ‘root’ oneself in that which can ‘uphold’ one. When one has God ‘dwelling’ within, moving one, then one has a faith that has its ‘root’ in who one is ‘personally’, and who one is ‘personally’ has a ‘root’ in what is sure, in God. In ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, Newman condemns a form of ‘religion’ that is a ‘mere civilization’, ‘based on self and the world’, a ‘religion’ degraded into ‘mere instrument of secular aims’.64 In ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, he observes that where ‘religion’ becomes ‘respectable’, widely accepted by the society in which one lives, then one can have worldly motives for professing ‘religion’ – since a ‘general character for religion’ promotes ‘temporal interests’ – and one can become uncertain of whether, in professing religion, and acting accordingly, one acts from faith or from ‘a desire of the world’s advantages’.65 ‘I am suspicious’, Newman remarks, ‘of any religion that is a people’s religion, or an age’s religion’.66 In ‘The Religion of the Day’, he attempts to characterize the ‘age’s religion’, and he suggests that the error of the ‘age’ consists in identifying certain qualities of mind – brought about by ‘education and civilization’ – with religion itself, with the Gospel.67 The ‘world’s religion’ has ‘taken the brighter side of the Gospel, – its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten’.68 As the reason is cultivated, the taste formed, the affections and sentiments refined, a general decency and grace will of course spread over the face of society, quite independently of the influence of Revelation. That beauty and delicacy of 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

‘Profession without Hypocrisy’, in PPS i, 148–9. ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in PPS i, 30, 39. ‘Self-Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’, in PPS i, 60. Ibid., 61. ‘The Religion of the Day’, in PPS i, 313. Ibid., 311.

80

John Henry Newman and the Imagination thought, which is so attractive in books, then extends to the conduct of life, to all we have, all we do, all we are. Our manners are courteous; we avoid giving pain or offence; our words become correct; our relative duties are carefully performed. Our sense of propriety shows itself even in our domestic arrangements, in the embellishments of our houses, in our amusements, and so also in our religious profession. Vice now becomes unseemly and hideous to the imagination, or, as it is sometimes familiarly said – ‘out of taste’. Thus elegance is gradually made the test and standard of virtue, which is no longer thought to possess an intrinsic claim on our hearts, or to exist, further than it leads to the quiet and comfort of others. Conscience is no longer recognized as an independent arbiter of actions, its authority is explained away; partly it is superseded in the minds of men by the so-called moral sense, which is regarded merely as the love of the beautiful; partly by the rule of expediency, which is forthwith substituted for it in the details of conduct. Now conscience is a stern, gloomy principle; it tells us of guilt and of prospective punishment. Accordingly, when its terrors disappear, then disappear also, in the creed of the day, those fearful images of Divine wrath with which the Scriptures abound. They are explained away. Every thing is bright and cheerful. Religion is pleasant and easy; benevolence is the chief virtue; intolerance, bigotry, excess of zeal, are the first of sins. Austerity is an absurdity; – even firmness is looked on with an unfriendly, suspicious eye. On the other hand, all open profligacy is discountenanced; drunkenness is accounted a disgrace; cursing and swearing are vulgarities.69

The ‘state of refinement’ which the ‘world’s religion’ identifies with true ‘religion’ is something ‘to which men might be brought, quite independent of religion, by the mere influence of education and civilization’.70 ‘Human society has a new framework, and fosters and developes a new character of mind,’ which has a merely ‘accidental’ resemblance to ‘the Christian’s obedience’.71 ‘Doubtless, peace of mind, a quiet conscience, and a cheerful countenance are the gift of the Gospel, and the sign of a Christian; but the same effects (or, rather, what appear to be the same) may arise from very different causes.’72 Newman maintains that, in the ‘world’s religion’, ‘Conscience’ is ‘superseded in the minds of men by the so-called moral sense, which is regarded merely as the love of the beautiful’.73 What is it exactly that supersedes ‘Conscience’? Newman characterizes it by what it is ‘called’ – the ‘so-called moral sense’ is ‘regarded’ as ‘the love of the beautiful’. It may be ‘called’ these things, but what, in fact, is it? Is it a vestige of the ‘Conscience’ (partially ‘explained away’) or is it the ‘love of the beautiful’, substituting itself for the conscience? Newman observes that ‘elegance is made the test and the standard of virtue, which is no longer thought to possess 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Ibid., 311–12. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 314. Ibid., 321. Ibid., 312.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

81

an intrinsic claim on our hearts, or to exist, further than it leads to the quiet and comfort of others’.74 The ‘world’s religion’, as characterized by Newman, seems to be a matter of making life in this world, life with others, harmonious: social harmony is what is most desirable, and one cultivates that in oneself which is involved in, or which makes for, social harmony – one cultivates gracefulness, sociability. A ‘beauty and delicacy of thought’ realized ‘in books … extends to the conduct of life’: the artistry involved in literature, in making ‘books’ extends to life, so that ‘the conduct of life’ is informed by an artistry that is a matter of presenting oneself in a pleasing manner to others, a matter of graceful performance, so that life with others, intercourse with others in ‘human society’, may be pleasing, characterized by ‘quiet and comfort’. Whatever is ‘stern’ or ‘gloomy’ does not make for social harmony, so it is a part of sociability to suppress what is ‘stern’, ‘gloomy’, inflexible in oneself – and the conscience is ‘stern’ and ‘gloomy’ (or perhaps it seems ‘stern’ and ‘gloomy’, and nothing else, when it is considered according to the ‘standard’ of ‘elegance’). The ‘world’s religion’ takes cognizance only of that in the self which is formed by the ‘world’ – by ‘education’, ‘civilization’, the ‘framework’ of society – and it accords worth only to that in the self which is involved in the forging of worldly harmony, ‘quiet and comfort’, and which is engaged in the life of ‘civilization’. This religion of ‘civilization’ is concerned with ‘human society’, ‘human’ communication, and such communication cannot but be partial, incomplete. The relationships one forms in ‘human society’ differ, in this regard, from the relationship one has with God, to whom everything in oneself is fully apparent (more so, even, than it is to oneself). To those before whom one appears in ‘human society’ one can present a performance that seems complete, adequate, ‘beautiful’ – but this performance does not require everything of oneself, and it does not manifest everything in oneself. For Newman, the aim of a religious life is that one attain to a state of harmony with God, and there is a beauty in this state (the beauty that is the glory of God), but when one aims at this beauty, one must recognize that there is much in oneself that is at odds with it, much that is out of harmony with God (a ‘gloomy’ truth), and one must persevere in ‘the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful’ (and they are ‘distasteful’ because one is out of harmony with God). In this ‘practice’ of ‘small duties’ one tries to live as if in the ‘sight’ of God, but one is not yet fit for this life. In ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, Newman asks, ‘Who is not displeased when a man attempts some great work which is above his powers? and is it an excuse for his miserable performance that the work is above him? We are bound to serve God with a perfect heart … and when we attempt it, necessary as is our endeavour, how miserable must it appear in the eyes of the Angels! how pitiful our exhibition of ourselves.’75 By contrast, in ‘human society’, only ‘open’ vices are apparent to those with whom one lives. (What is more, there are some sins which are consistent with ‘elegance’, or which do not interfere with the ‘quiet and comfort of others’.) In ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’, Newman maintains that the world seems beautiful only if one does not attend to certain 74. Ibid. 75. ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’, in PPS i, 91–2.

82

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

aspects of it. He observes that ‘Scripture’ attends, particularly, to those aspects of the world that make a ‘painful picture’ – ‘it abounds in accounts of human distress and sufferings, of our miserable condition, of the vanity, unprofitableness, and trials of life’ – and this, not only because ‘this view is the ultimate true view of human life’ but because ‘it is a view which it concerns us much to know’. ‘If we are forewarned, we shall unlearn false notions of [the world’s] excellence, and be saved the disappointment which follows … the overthrow of vainly cherished hopes of lasting good upon earth.’76 ‘Human society’ does not take this view of itself. ‘Human tales and poems are full of pleasant sights and prospects; they make things better than they are, and pourtray a sort of imaginary perfection; but Scripture … seems to abstain even from what might be said in praise of human life as it is’, and, in this, it is ‘God’s warning voice’.77 If one would apprehend ‘human life’ in the here and now as beautiful, a certain selectiveness of attention is requisite – one must ‘make things better than they are’. The form of the ‘love of the beautiful’ associated with the ‘world’s religion’ seems, then, to make for an inattentiveness to certain things: it is concerned with what appears in, or to, ‘human society’ and it is concerned with making the appearance of ‘human society’ beautiful; it disregards whatever in ‘human life’ (or the ‘heart’) does not appear in, or to, ‘human society’; and it disregards that in ‘human life’ which cannot be worked up into a beautiful semblance. The ‘world’s religion’ would, then, treat ‘the beautiful’ in ‘human society’ as the aim of life. The more that ‘human society’ can be made to seem beautiful, and the more it can be made to seem capable of satisfying ‘hopes’ of ‘lasting good’, so it can seem more likely that concord in ‘human society’ is the proper aim of life. Genuine religion, however, presents ‘darker, deeper views of man’s condition and prospects’ – ‘deeper’, because it aims, not merely at a harmony with others in ‘human society’ (a harmony that can be realized without having to engage all that is ‘deepest’ in the self) but at a harmony with God.

2. In an article on ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, written for the London Review in 1828, Newman maintained that ‘poetry’ is the ‘originality of right moral feeling’78 – one must have ‘right moral feeling’, one must be in a ‘right moral state’, if one is to have a ‘poetical mind’ – and he suggested that ‘Revealed Religion’ is ‘especially poetical’.79 Newman takes ‘poetry’ to consist in a certain kind of imagining. He observes that ‘there is an ambiguity in the word “poetry”, which is taken to signify both the gift itself, and the written composition which is the result of it … . [So] there is an

76. 77. 78. 79.

‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’, in PPS i, 326, 328, 329. Ibid., 327, 329. ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in ECH i, 20. ECH i, 23.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

83

apparent, but no real contradiction, in saying a poem may be partially poetical.’80 The ‘gift itself ’ consists in ‘the imagination, revelling without object or meaning beyond its own exhibition’.81 ‘Poetry’ is a kind of imagining. The activity that is ‘poetry’ – the ‘gift itself ’ – cannot be controlled by a techne, a ‘science’ of making: where there is a techne, there is an understanding, possessed prior to the activity of making, by which the activity of making is controlled, but ‘poetry’ is itself the arising of a kind of understanding – it is the spontaneous activity of the ‘poetical mind’: it is a mistake to regard poetic ‘composition … as an exhibition of ingenious workmanship, [rather] than as a free and unfettered effusion of genius’.82 Poetry, Newman maintains, is ‘modelled on no scientific principle’:83 it consists in having a certain kind of mind, a ‘poetical mind’, and there is no techne for having a certain kind of mind. Having remarked that, in a genuinely poetic ‘composition’, ‘the spirit of beauty breathes through every part of the composition’, Newman then suggests that, if one is to appreciate the ‘subtile and delicate … beauties’ of poetry, one must recognize that ‘a word has power to convey a world of information to the imagination, and to act as a spell on the feelings’.84 What is presented, in, or through, a ‘poetic … composition’, is a vision (a vision that is the ‘energizing’ of the ‘poetical mind’). That vision must be apprehended in a moment of intuition: one cannot attain to it bit by bit, having now this insight, now that, and putting these different insights together; one attains to this vision all at once, or not at all (though one might attain to it with more or less fullness). One can appreciate the ‘composition’, when one appreciates how the vision ‘breathes through every part’; it is when one appreciates how the vision is manifest, ‘through every part’, that one can appreciate the purport or function or ‘every part’ (and the beauty of the whole). The ‘parts’ cannot be appreciated, apart from the vision that ‘breathes through’ them; and no abstract account, no techne, can set out how the parts should be: what is needed, rather, is an insight into the vision which informs, which animates with a ‘world of information’, the particular ‘composition’. ‘Poetry’, Newman maintains, is an imagining of ‘perfection’. Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal. Biography and history represent individual characters and actual facts; poetry, on the contrary, generalizing from the phenomenon of nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn, not after an existing pattern, but after a creation of the mind. Fidelity is the primary merit of biography and history; the essence of poetry is fiction. ‘Poesis nihil aliud est’, says Bacon, ‘quam historiae imitatio ad placitum’. It delineates that perfection which the imagination suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of Divine Providence actually tends … . It is then but the type and model of history or biography, if we may be allowed the comparison, bearing some 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 4, 8.

84

John Henry Newman and the Imagination resemblance to the abstract mathematical formulæ of physics, before they are modified by the contingencies of atmosphere and friction. Hence while it recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness of its views, it provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give … . The poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of beauty and perfection; these are its material of thought, its instrument and medium of observation – these colour each object to which it directs its view. It is called imaginative or creative, from the originality and independence of its modes of thinking, compared with the commonplace and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual. At the same time it feels a natural sympathy with everything great and splendid in the physical and moral world; and selecting such from the mass of common phenomena, incorporates them, as it were, into the substance of its own creations. From living thus in a world of its own, it speaks the language of dignity, emotion, and refinement. Figure is its necessary medium of communication with man; for in the feebleness of ordinary words to express its ideas, and in the absence of terms of abstract perfection, the adoption of metaphorical language is the only poor means allowed it for imparting to others its intense feelings. A metrical garb has, in all languages, been appropriated to poetry – it is but the outward development of the music and harmony within. The verse, far from being a restraint on the true poet, is the suitable index of his sense.85

Newman is using the terms ‘ideal’ and ‘perfect’ somewhat equivocally here. Poetry is, for Aristotle, a ‘representation of the ideal’ if one takes ‘ideal’ to mean ‘universal’. Aristotle maintains in the Poetics that poetry represents the universal: the ‘action’ or plot is an imitation of how things are, and it presents various characters acting on one another, and reacting to one another, and this shows ‘the kinds of things a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation’, such that poetry ‘describes … the kinds of thing that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are, in the circumstances, either probable or necessary’, thereby manifesting ‘universal truths’.86 This ‘representation’ of certain types of character, a representation informed by ideas, and not restricted by ‘existing patterns’ – by the ‘contingencies’ of actual experience – can make for a ‘perfect’ illustration of those types. Yet Newman seems concerned with an ‘ideal’ that is a kind of goodness, a perfection to which ‘the present system of Divine Providence actually tends’: a goodness that is an ‘ideal’ state of something, a perfect realization of a nature. He seems to be using the term ‘perfection’ in several senses. There is a ‘perfection’ that ideas have, as independent of all material limitation, transcending all particular instances (the ‘perfection’ of the ‘universal’ as such); and there is, related to this, a perfection that illustrations or ‘typical’ images have, as manifesting, or corresponding to, ideas. Then there is a 85. Ibid., 9–10. 86. Aristotle, Poetics, 10, in Aristotle / Horace / Longinus Classical Literary Criticism, trans. by T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 1965), 43–4.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

85

perfection that realities have, which is a kind of fullness of being: things can have more or less perfection, in this sense, as realizing the possibilities of the kinds of things they are (corresponding to the possibilities of their ‘ideas’); and different kinds of things can have more or less perfection, as realizing the possibilities of being itself. Having suggested that ‘poetry’ is a matter of working from ideas of things (rather than ‘existing patterns’) to imagine perfect realizations of those things – surpassing what is presented by ‘the phenomenon of nature and life’ – Newman then suggests that ‘poetry’ is a matter of conceiving of things of a higher perfection than the things of ‘nature and life’ – things that can be conceived of only in ‘figures’: that is, he moves from considering a ‘perfection’ that ideas have, as transcending all particulars, to a ‘perfection’ that certain realities have, as transcending the ‘phenomenon of nature’, as being of a different kind to the realities manifest in the ‘phenomenon of nature’, the material world. The ‘independence’ of the ‘poetical mind’, Newman maintains, is an independence of ‘this world’: it is concerned with things transcending ‘this world’. In suggesting that this understanding of poetry is that of ‘Aristotle’ – who maintains that poetry is concerned with the ‘universal’ – Newman seems to confound the way in which universals transcend ‘this world’ of ‘phenomena’ with the way in which certain realities transcend ‘this world’ (as being of a different kind to the things of ‘this world’). (The reference to ‘eternal forms of beauty and perfection’ is more Platonic, or Neoplatonic, than Aristotelian.87) Newman contrasts ‘poetical’ thinking with ‘the commonplace and matter-of-fact conceptions of ordinary minds, which are fettered down to the particular and individual’ – but ‘conceptions’, applying to an infinity of particulars, are not ‘fettered down to the particular and individual’. Newman seems, rather, concerned with a contrast between ideas of the things of ‘this world’, material things, ‘fettered down to’ matter, individuated by matter, and encountered in ‘the phenomenon of nature’, and ideas of realities which are not material, and which cannot, accordingly, be encountered in ‘the phenomenon of nature’ (realities which, while ‘individual’, are not individuated by matter).

87. The locus classicus for the Neoplatonic idea of artistic creativity as a copying of the ‘eternal forms of beauty’, and the beauty of the artwork as a kind of copy of the beauty of the artistic mind, is in Plotinus, The Enneads, V.8.1. ‘Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.’ ‘The artist goes back, after all, to that wisdom in nature which is embodied in himself, and this is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.’ Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. by Stephen Mackenna (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 411, 416.

86

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman would suggest that the creativity of ‘poetry’ is a creativity exercised by the ‘poetical mind’ on the stuff of ‘this world’, in conceiving, in imagining, that which is more ‘perfect’ than this world. The ‘poetical mind’ conceives of things of an ‘abstract perfection’, which can be conceived of only by making the things of this world into ‘figures’. The ‘ideal’ conceived by the ‘poetical mind’ ‘colours each object to which it directs its view’: the ‘poetical mind’ transfigures those ‘objects’ which it ‘views’. (Poetry, in this regard, is the visionary ‘imagining’, the visionary perception, of the ‘poetical mind’: it is an expression of the perception of the ‘poetical mind’, a rendering of how the world presents itself to such a mind;88 and for Newman the world presents itself, to such a mind, as manifesting, or as a means of manifesting, something higher than itself.) This imagining is animated by ‘right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give’: it is ‘right moral feeling’ that takes delight in imagining things more ‘perfect’ than the things of ‘this world’, and it is ‘right moral feeling’ which actuates the imagining of these things. Newman, then, would identify ‘poetry’ with a kind of visionary imagining: ‘Milton, Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth and Southey, may be considered, as far as their writings go, to approximate to this moral centre.’89 Revealed Religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact. While its disclosures have an originality in them to engage the intellect, they have a beauty to satisfy the moral nature. It presents us with those ideal forms of excellence in which a poetical mind delights, and with which all grace and harmony are associated. It brings us into a new world – a world of overpowering interest, of the sublimest views, and the tenderest and purest feelings. The peculiar grace of mind of the New Testament writers is as striking as the actual effect produced upon the hearts of those who have imbibed their spirit. At present we are not concerned with the practical, but the poetical nature of revealed truth. With

88. In this, Newman shows a ‘Romantic expressivist’ understanding of ‘poetry’, as a rendering of the visionary perceptions of a ‘poetical mind’. (See M. H Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) for an account of Romantic ‘expressivism’.) This ‘expressivism’ was, itself, a kind of appropriation of theological notions of the ‘sacramental’ – an ascription to the poetic ‘imagination’ of what had been attributed to the sacraments, as a medium disclosing ‘higher’ realities (and as conferring a grace). (See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971)). Newman suggests, in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, that if the ‘poetical’ is quasi-sacramental, then the sacramental must be ‘especially poetical’. The influence of Romantic ideas on Newman has been examined by Sidney John Coulson, in Newman and the Common Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and in Religion and Imagination: ‘in Aid of a Grammar of Assent’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) and by Stephen Prickett Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 89. ECH i, 22.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

87

Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty, – we are bid to colour all things with hues of faith, to see a Divine meaning in every event, and a superhuman tendency. Even our friends around are invested with unearthly brightness – no longer imperfect men, but beings taken into Divine favour, stamped with His seal, and in training for future happiness. It may be added, that the virtues peculiarly Christian are especially poetical – meekness, gentleness, compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional virtues; whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry – anger, indignation, emulation, martial spirit, and love of independence.90

To conceive of the ‘ideal forms of excellence’ that are the concern of ‘Revealed Religion’ is to exercise a certain creativity, making use of the stuff of experience, the stuff of ‘this world’, to conceive of a ‘new world … of overpowering interest’. To conceive of this ‘ideal’ is, equally, to experience ‘this world’, the world of everyday ‘events’, differently – to discern in it a ‘Divine meaning’, to ‘colour’ what is experienced with the ‘hues of faith’. ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’ was written in 1828; The Christian Year, by John Keble, was published in 1827 – and Newman alludes to it in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’ as the work of a ‘gifted poet’. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) Newman would observe that The Christian Year ‘brought home’ to him the ‘doctrine’ of ‘the Sacramental system … the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen’. If ‘material phenomena’ are ‘types’ of ‘real things unseen’, then one can gain some understanding of ‘things unseen’ by making ‘figures’ from ‘material phenomena’. If ‘material phenomena’ are ‘instruments’ of ‘real things unseen’, then one can discern a ‘Divine meaning’ in ‘material phenomena’ – ‘colouring’ those ‘phenomena’ by relating them to the ‘Divine’. In The Christian Year – influenced, in this, by the poetry of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan – Keble repeatedly presents ‘material phenomena’ as ‘types’ or emblems of the ‘unseen’. In ‘Septuagesima Sunday’ he suggests that the ‘works of God, above, below, / Within us and around’ make up a ‘book’ of ‘heavenly truth’, and he presents a number of emblems of that ‘truth’ – ‘The glorious sky embracing all / Is like the Maker’s love’, ‘The saints above are stars in Heaven – / What are the saints on earth? / Like trees they stand whom God has given, / Our Eden’s happy birth’, with ‘Faith ... their fix’d unswerving root, / Hope their unfading flower.’ Two worlds are ours: ’tis only Sin Forbids us to descry The mystic heaven and earth within, Plain as the sea and sky.91

90. Ibid., 23. 91. John Keble, ‘Septuagesima Sunday’, in The Christian Year (1827; Oxford and London: J. Parker and C. J. Rivington, 1829), 75–7.

88

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘Sin’ prevents one from discerning ‘plain’ the ‘mystic heaven and earth within’ (the holy have a clearer vision of this ‘mystic’ reality). If this ‘mystic heaven’ cannot be discerned plainly, directly – as ‘the sea and sky’ – it can, nevertheless, be ‘read’ in the various types presented by ‘the sea and sky’. If it takes holiness to have a ‘plain’ sight of the ‘mystic’, then, it takes a degree of holiness, perhaps, a right state of ‘heart’, to ‘read’ the types of the ‘mystic heaven and earth within’. In The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman associates the ‘Allegorical Method’ – of expression, and of interpretation – with a kind of ‘poetical’ vision. He characterizes ‘allegorizing’ as ‘including in its meaning, not only the representation of truths, under a foreign, though analogous exterior, after the manner of our Lord’s parables, but the practice of generalizing facts into principles, of adumbrating greater truths under the image of lesser, of implying the consequences or the basis of doctrines in their correlatives, and altogether those instances of thinking, reasoning, and teaching, which depend upon the use of propositions which are abstruse, and of connexions which are obscure, and which, in the case of uninspired authors, we consider profound, or poetical, or enthusiastic, or illogical, according to our opinion of those by whom they are exhibited’.92 Of the use of an ‘allegorizing’ mode in the Scriptures, Newman suggests that this mode is ‘natural’ to the ‘expression of solemn thought and elevated emotion’. It is … natural to consider that the Divine Wisdom used on the sublimest of all subjects, media, which we spontaneously select for the expression of solemn thought and elevated emotion; and had no especial regard to the practice in any particular country, which afforded but one instance of the operation of a general principle of our nature. When the mind is occupied by some vast and awful subject of contemplation, it is prompted to give utterance to its feelings in a figurative style; for ordinary words will not convey the admiration, nor literal words the reverence which possesses it; and when, dazzled at length with the great sight, it turns away for relief, it still catches in every new object which it encounters, glimpses of its former vision, and colours its whole range of thought with this one abiding association. If, however, others have preceded it in the privilege of such contemplations, a well-disciplined piety will lead it to adopt the images which they have invented, both from affection for what is familiar to it, and from a fear of using unsanctioned language on a sacred subject … . Certainly, the matter of Revelation suggests some such hypothetical explanation of the structure of the books which are its vehicle; in which the divinelyinstructed imagination of the writers is ever glancing to and fro, connecting past things with future, illuminating God’s lower providences and man’s humblest services by allusions to the relations of the evangelical covenant, and then in turn suddenly leaving the latter to dwell upon those past dealings of God with man, which must not be forgotten merely because they have been excelled. No prophet ends his subject: his brethren after him renew, enlarge, transfigure,

92. Arians, 56.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

89

or reconstruct it; so that the Bible, though various in its parts, forms a whole, grounded on a few distinct doctrinal principles discernible throughout it; and is in consequence intelligible indeed in its general drift, but obscure in its text … . Above all other subjects, it need scarcely be said, the likeness of the promised Mediator is conspicuous throughout the sacred volume as in a picture: moving along the line of the history, in one or other of His destined offices, the dispenser of blessings in Joseph, the inspired interpreter of truth in Moses, the conqueror in Joshua, the active preacher in Samuel, the suffering combatant in David, and in Solomon the triumphant and glorious king … . Scripture assigns the same uses to this allegorical style, which were contemplated by the Fathers when they made it subservient to the Disciplina Arcani; viz. those of trying the earnestness and patience of inquirers, discriminating between the proud and the humble, and conveying instruction to believers, and that in the most permanently impressive manner, without the world’s sharing in the knowledge. Our Lord’s remarks on the design of his own parables, is a sufficient evidence of this intention.93

There is, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a sense that, in the presentation of the ‘subject of contemplation’, ‘figurative’ language is needed;94 there is, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a sense that this ‘vision’ affects the way one experiences the world – the ‘mind’ possessed by this vision ‘catches in every new object which it encounters, glimpses of its former vision, and colours its whole range of thought with this one abiding association’; and there is, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a sense that the vision ‘breathes through every part of the composition’ in which it is presented, such that everything – in ‘various’ ways – becomes a sign of one thing, one ‘vast and awful subject of contemplation’. The whole Bible presents a single vision of Christ – ‘the likeness of the promised Mediator is conspicuous throughout the sacred volume as in a picture’ – and to have the right vision of Christ is to be able to discern the various ‘likenesses’ of Christ, or references to Christ, ‘throughout the sacred volume’, even where they are ‘obscure’. Once again, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, there is a sense that, to have the vision, one must be in a ‘right moral state’: acknowledging that the ‘Allegorical Method’ of interpretation is liable to ‘abuse’ – the ‘sacred text’ might be ‘explained away by the heretic, and misquoted and perverted by weak and fanatical minds’ – Newman remarks that ‘it is impossible to draw a precise line between the use and abuse of allegorizing’ and he suggests that if one is to

93. Ibid., 57–9. 94. Once again, as in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, there is an uncertainty, or ambiguity, as to whether ‘figurative’ language is required, to present a ‘subject of contemplation’ different in kind from the realities which ‘ordinary words’ are fitted to present, or whether ‘figurative’ language is required, to express the feelings (the ‘reverence’, the ‘admiration’) which that ‘subject of contemplation’ elicits. (There is a sense that he would present ‘contemplation’ and ‘feeling’ as somehow involved in one another – having a ‘poetical mind’ involves having ‘right moral feeling’.)

90

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

make a right ‘use’ of it, one must have a ‘gifted and disciplined mind’, an ‘exalted moral dignity’, a character of mind such ‘as to approach the position occupied by the inspired writers’. So far as men use the language of the Bible (as is often done in poems and works of fiction) as the mere instrument of a cultivated fancy, to make their style attractive or impressive, so far, it is needless to say, they are guilty of a great irreverence towards its Divine Author. On the other hand, it is surely no extravagance to assert that there are minds so gifted and disciplined as to approach the position occupied by the inspired writers, and therefore able to apply their words with a fitness, and entitled to do so with a freedom, which is unintelligible to the dull or heartless criticism of inferior understandings. So far then as the Alexandrian Fathers partook of such a singular gift of grace (and Origen surely bears on him the tokens of some exalted moral dignity), not incited by a capricious and presumptuous imagination, but burning with that vigorous faith, which, seeing God in all things, does and suffers all for His sake, and, while filled with the contemplation of His supreme glory, still discharges each command in the exactness of its real meaning, in the same degree they stand not merely excused, but are placed immeasurably above the multitude of those who find it so easy to censure them.95

In an article for the British Critic in 1839, Newman contrasts the way Scripture is used and appropriated in ‘the present age’ with the ‘contemplative’ way in which it was used in ‘the age of the Fathers’; and he associates the ‘contemplative’ appropriation of the Scriptures with an apprehension of the ‘whole’ – an apprehension of a ‘truth lying hid under the tenor of the text as a whole’. This apprehension is ‘subtle’, intuitive – not a matter of ‘build[ing] up a system’; it is ‘from the heart’, and it requires a ‘high moral state of mind’. This age is a practical age: the age of the Fathers was more contemplative; their theology, consequently, had a deeper, more mystical, more subtle character about it, than we with our present habits of thought can readily enter into. We lay greater stress than they on proofs from definite verses of Scripture, or what are familiarly called texts, and we build up a system upon them; they rather recognized a certain truth lying hid under the tenor of the sacred text as a whole, and showing itself more or less in this verse or that as it might be. We look on the letter of Scripture more as a foundation, they as an organ of the truth … A certain high moral state of mind, which times of persecution alone create, may be necessary for a due exercise of mystical interpretation. To attempt it otherwise than from the heart, would be a profanation.96

95. Arians, 63–4. 96. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i], 286–7.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

91

He associates the ‘contemplative’ or ‘mystical’ attitude with poetry – as poetry involves a ‘character of mind’, which tends ‘to penetrate below the surface of things, and to draw men away from the material to the invisible world’. This age … is more practical, the primitive more contemplative; that age adopted a mystical religion, ours a more literal. How, then, in our age are those wants and feelings of our common nature satisfied, which were formerly supplied by symbols, now that symbolical language and symbolical rites have almost perished? Were we disposed to theorize, we might perhaps say, that the taste for poetry of a religious kind has in modern times in a certain sense taken the place of the deep contemplative spirit of the early Church. At any rate it is a curious circumstance, considering how much our active and businesslike habits take us the other way, that the taste for poetry should have been developed so much more strongly amongst ourselves than it seems to have been in the earlier times of the Church; as if our character required such an element to counterbalance the firmer and more dominant properties in it … . It can hardly be doubted, that, in matter of fact, poetry has been cultivated and cherished in our later times by the Cavaliers and Tories in a peculiar way, and looked coldly on by Puritans and their modern representatives. In like manner, a Romanist writer observes of the ‘Christian Year,’ with a mixture of truth and error, that it is an attempt to collect and form into a crown the scattered jewels which the torrent of the sixteenth century has left to the English Church. Poetry then is our mysticism; and so far as any two characters of mind tend to penetrate below the surface of things, and to draw men away from the material to the invisible world, so far they may certainly be said to answer the same end; and that too a religious one.97

‘Poetry’, and the ‘mystical’ appropriation of the Scriptures, involve an intuition of the ‘whole’, a vision, by which a ‘truth lying hid’ is discerned. This intuition is ‘from the heart’ – it cannot be presented in any ‘system’ – and it proceeds from, or expresses, a ‘high moral state of mind’: one must be in harmony with the ‘whole’, attuned to it, if one is to have this vision of it.

3. In Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman contrasts those who ‘use the language of the Bible (as is often done in poems and works of fiction) as the mere instrument of a cultivated fancy, to make their style attractive or impressive’, and those, with ‘gifted’ minds, who ‘apply’ the ‘words’ of ‘inspired writers’ with ‘fitness’ and ‘freedom’. In ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in the first volume of the Parochial Sermons, Newman considers the state of ‘those who are in better circumstances’, who are ‘well educated’, who ‘go on respectably and happily, with

97. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 290–1.

92

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the same general tastes and habits which they would have had if the Gospel had not been given them’, who are ‘polished in their manners, kind from natural disposition or a feeling of propriety’, and whose ‘religion is based upon self and the world, a mere civilization’; they take up ‘Christianity’ only ‘so far forth as it agrees with the carnal principles which govern them’ and ‘in no sense obey because it commands’; they subordinate ‘religion’ to principles alien to it; those principles dispose them toward certain ends, and they make ‘religion’ a means of obtaining that toward which they are already disposed.98 Sometimes … they adopt it into a certain refined elegance of sentiments and manners … . They love religious poetry and eloquent preaching. They desire to have their feelings roused and soothed, and to secure a variety and relief in that eternal subject which is unchangeable. They tire of its simplicity, and perhaps seek to keep up their interest in it by means of religious narratives, fictitious or embellished.99

Newman suggests, in this, that there may be an enjoyment of ‘religious narratives’ animated by ‘carnal principles’: there may be a form of ‘taste’ – deriving from ‘mere civilization’ – to which ‘religion’ may be subjected, becoming a means of satisfying that ‘taste’. More than that, though, in a sermon preached in 1831, on ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, Newman suggests that the enjoyment of ‘narratives’, of ‘literature’, involves certain ‘dangers’ in itself: it is not simply that ‘literature’ may involve, even when apparently religious, the rousing of feelings that are more ‘carnal’ than religious, but that even the rousing of ‘good’ feeling by ‘literature’ involves, in itself, certain ‘dangers’. The danger of an elegant and polite education is, that it separates feeling and acting; it teaches us to think, speak, and be affected aright, without forcing us to practise what is right … . A romance or novel … [may] contain many good sentiments (I am taking the better sort of them): characters too are introduced, virtuous, noble, patient under suffering, and triumphing at length over misfortune. The great truths of religion are upheld … and our affections excited and interested in what is good and true. But it is all fiction; it does not exist out of a book which contains the beginning and end of it. We have nothing to do; we read, are affected, softened or roused, and that is all; we cool again, – nothing comes of it. Now observe the effect of this. God has made us feel in order that we may go on to act in consequence of feeling; if then we allow our feelings to be excited without acting upon them, we do mischief to the moral system within us, just as we might spoil a watch, or other piece of mechanism, by playing with the wheels of it. We weaken its springs, and they cease to act truly. Accordingly, when we have got into the habit of amusing ourselves with these works of

98. ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’, in PPS i, 30–1. 99. Ibid., 31.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

93

fiction, we come at length to feel the excitement without the slightest thought or tendency to act upon it; and, since it is very difficult to begin any duty without some emotion or other (that is, to begin on mere principles of dry reasoning), a grave question arises, how, after destroying the connexion between feeling and acting, how shall we get ourselves to act when circumstances make it our duty to do so? … . We have read again and again, of the heroism of facing danger, and we have glowed with the thought of its nobleness. We have felt how great it is to bear pain, and submit to indignities, rather than wound our conscience; and all this, again and again, when we had no opportunity of carrying our good feelings into practice. Now, suppose at length we actually come into trial, and let us say, our feelings become roused, as often before, at the thought of boldly resisting temptations to cowardice, shall we therefore do our duty, quitting ourselves like men? rather, we are likely to talk loudly, and then run from the danger. Why? – rather let us ask, why not? what is to keep us from yielding? Because we feel aright? nay, we have again and again felt aright, and thought aright, without accustoming ourselves to act aright, and, though there was an original connexion in our minds between feeling and acting, there is none now; the wires within us, as they may be called, are loosened and powerless … . The refinement which literature gives, is that of thinking, feeling, knowing and speaking, right, not of acting right; and thus, while it makes the manners amiable, and the conversation decorous and agreeable, it has no tendency to make the conduct, the practice of the man virtuous.100

Newman suggests that the ‘feelings’ roused by ‘literature’ are, in themselves, feelings which have an ‘original connexion’ with ‘acting’ – that they are, in themselves, ordered to ‘acting’, so that, where they are roused, and there is ‘nothing to do’, there is something like a misuse, a denaturing, of those feelings. He seems to suggest that, when one is in the ‘habit of amusing’ oneself with ‘works of fiction’, one forms in oneself something like a ‘habit’ of inaction, a habit of not acting on certain feelings, so that one may ‘come at length to feel the excitement without the slightest thought or tendency to act upon it’: the ‘habit’ of inaction functions to separate the ‘feelings’ from the ‘tendency to act’ with which they were ‘original[ly]’ connected. Newman seems to be working, here, with an Aristotelian sense that virtuous feeling is feeling that disposes one to virtuous acts: feeling is virtuous to the extent that it disposes one to act rightly. In ‘literature’, Newman suggests, feeling that would dispose one to act rightly is roused, without there being any occasion to act, so that, if one is in the ‘habit of amusing’ oneself with ‘literature’, in the habit of rousing feeling in this way, one gets into the habit of not acting on the feeling that would dispose one to act rightly: the feeling is separated – by habit – from the ‘tendency to act’. For Aristotle, though, feeling is not connected to (or disconnected from) acting by ‘habit’; feelings, in themselves, constitute ‘tendencies

100. ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 371–3.

94

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

to act’; on this view, it would not make sense to maintain that one has certain feelings, without having the ‘tendency to act’ that is associated with them; one does not get into the habit of acting on certain feelings rather than not acting on them – rather, one acquires habits that involve feeling certain things rather than others, and those feelings are, in themselves, ‘tendencies to act’ in certain ways. To have a ‘tendency to act’ in a certain way is not to be compelled to act in that way: one might have a ‘virtuous’ feeling, without that feeling ‘forcing [one] to practise what is right’. When Newman observes that though ‘our feelings [may] become roused, as often before, at the thought of boldly resisting temptations to cowardice’, ‘[but] we … [may nevertheless] talk loudly, and then run from the danger’, this could be taken to show that ‘feelings’, in themselves, are not enough, that they may be roused ‘without forcing us to practise what is right’. Yet, is it the case that being courageous – having the feelings associated with being courageous – is a matter of becoming ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous? There is a distinction between being ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous and between being ‘roused’ to the feelings that dispose the courageous to act: it is not as if one could not be courageous, without being ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous (even if being ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous is not inconsistent with being courageous). Are the feelings roused by ‘literature’, moreover, the same as the feelings that are involved in ‘acting’, the feelings that are constitutive of virtue or of vice? Newman discusses feelings that one should ‘act upon’; and, in this, he seems to be concerned with feelings that incite one to a particular act, here and now. Feelings of this kind involve the perception of a present ‘duty’. Yet there is no such perception of a present ‘duty’, in the experience of literature, so it would seem that there is not, in such an experience, a rousing of feelings inciting one to act. (Though, if one is ‘roused … at the thought’ of being courageous, one does feel a wish to be like those who are courageous; one feels a wish to act as the courageous act – and there is, in this, a will to act in a certain way. It would seem, though, that there is more to courage, and to the ‘feelings’ involved in courage, than this.) It could be maintained, perhaps, that literature presents images of situations that involve duties, rousing the feelings that those situations, encountered in life, would rouse, or something like them: literature presents images of realities; and these realities would rouse feelings, in the virtuous, that should be acted on; and the images rouse these feelings, or something like them. Yet, against this, it could be maintained that feelings are constituted as what they are by their objects, as feelings involve an awareness of their objects, an awareness that is constitutive of those feelings: feelings roused by images differ, accordingly, from feelings roused by realities. The feelings on which one should act are feelings roused by realities; so the feelings on which one should act are not roused by ‘literature’ (and the ‘habit’ of enjoying literature does not make for a ‘habit’ of not acting on the feelings on which one should act). All of this is, perhaps, simply to say that ‘literature’ is not life. Newman observes that, in enjoying literature, ‘we have again and again felt aright, and thought aright, without accustoming ourselves to act aright’; for Aristotle, it is by acting aright, ‘accustoming [oneself] to act aright’, that one forms in oneself

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

95

virtuous feelings: the feelings that arise from something other than ‘accustoming [oneself] to act aright’ are not, strictly, ‘virtuous’. It would seem odd, though, to maintain that the feelings involved in the experience of literature are something wholly other than the feelings involved in life – literature, after all, presents images of life. What one might be attracted to, in a representation of goodness, is precisely the goodness that is represented; and there is ‘right moral feeling’ in such an attraction to goodness. Newman would observe, it seems, that one can delight in the contemplation of virtue, without being wholly virtuous; and if one must have some ‘right moral feeling’ to delight in the contemplation of virtue, then this need not mean that to have such ‘feeling’ is to be, in fact, virtuous. Newman would take this to show that virtuous feeling can become ‘separated’ from virtuous acting; but one might, equally, take it to show that the virtuous feelings involved in the experience of ‘literature’ are not the only feelings involved in being virtuous – that they are not sufficient for being virtuous. Newman claims, in ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, that the ‘feelings’ roused by ‘literature’ may be ‘separated’ from ‘acting’, but this is not, for him, something that distinguishes the ‘feelings’ roused by literature from other feelings: that is, he claims that ‘feelings’, generally, may be ‘separated’ from ‘acting’. The ‘dangers’ with which Newman is concerned relate to how ‘feeling’ may become separated from ‘acting’: Newman is concerned, that is, more with ‘feeling’, and its relation to ‘acting’, than with ‘literature’ per se; he is concerned with the ways in which ‘feeling’ can become an end in itself. So, having observed that ‘religious novels … do more harm than good’ as they ‘lead men to cultivate the religious affections separate from religious practice’, he then condemns ‘that entire religious system (miscalled religious) which makes Christian faith consist, not in the honest and plain practice of what is right, but in the luxury of excited religious feeling, in a mere meditating on our Blessed Lord, and dwelling as in a reverie on what He has done for us’ and he insists that ‘such indolent contemplation will no more sanctify a man in fact, than reading a poem or listening to a chant or psalm-tune’.101 There is, perhaps, a certain analogy here between ‘sentimentalism’ in literature, and the ‘system (miscalled religious)’ which Newman censures. Sentimentalism, in art, arises from the sense that certain feelings are noble, estimable, in themselves, so that the aim of art is taken to consist in the evocation of those feelings; attention is accorded, not to things in themselves, not to the imagining of those things, but to the feelings evoked by things; and the experience of art becomes a matter of having certain prized feelings, rather than of apprehending – in or through art – certain realities (and of conforming and attuning the feelings to those realities). On such a view, the feelings evoked by objects are taken to be of supreme importance, and the objects which evoke those feelings are taken to be of importance only as evoking  those feelings, such that their importance is marked, attested, by the feelings they evoke. (In ‘Self-Contemplation’, a sermon preached in 1835, Newman condemned a form of (Evangelical) piety that made the ‘spiritual mind’

101. ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in PPS ii, 373.

96

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

of supreme importance in the religious life, subordinating all religious discipline to the cultivation of this condition of ‘mind’, and identifying (in practice) this condition of mind with certain emotional experiences – so as to occasion a kind of religious sentimentalism, and a ‘luxury of excited religious feeling’. One should not, Newman insists, aim at cultivating certain feelings; one should, rather, aim at living rightly, at carrying out the ‘duties’ of the moment and, in doing so, one will form in oneself, over time, a ‘spiritual mind’.) Is all contemplation ‘indolent’? ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’ was preached as part of a series of sermons, concerned with the relationship of ‘profession’ and ‘feeling’ to ‘practice’: in these sermons, Newman reflects on how one might ‘profess’ to be virtuous, and one might be sincere, or feel oneself to be sincere, in making this profession, and yet one might not be truly virtuous; one might be moved by the ‘feeling of the moment’ to make a certain ‘resolution’, but if one does not have the ‘habitual frame of mind’, the character, required to carry it out, then one will not carry it out; one might have good feelings, feelings that would seem to comport with a good character, without having a good character.102 ‘Feelings’ are, Newman insists, not enough: only ‘acts’ express, and form, the character. Just a couple of weeks after preaching on ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, Newman would preach on ‘Promising without Doing’, and would observe that ‘as far as we know any thing of the matter, justifying faith has no existence independent of its particular definite acts’.103 ‘Justifying faith’, Newman seems to suggest, is present, has ‘existence’, as informing, animating, motivating ‘particular definite acts’. Would this mean that it has no ‘existence’ in ‘contemplation’? In ‘The Religion of the Day’, Newman suggests that ‘religion’ proper is something other than the ‘natural theology’, which consists in the contemplation of the order of the world, as a manifestation of the glory of God. Religion, it has been well observed, is something relative to us; a system of commands and promises from God towards us. But how are we concerned with the sun, moon, and stars? or with the laws of the universe? how will they teach us our duty? how will they speak to sinners? They do not speak to sinners at all. They were created before Adam fell. They ‘declare the glory of God,’ but not His will. They are all perfect, all harmonious; but that brightness and excellence which they exhibit in their own creation, and the Divine benevolence therein seen, are of little moment to fallen man. We see nothing there of God’s wrath, of which the conscience of a sinner loudly speaks.104

This ‘natural theology’ can ‘make us forget our own hearts, which tell us of a God of justice and holiness, and … fix our attention merely on the God who made the heavens; who is our God indeed, but not God as manifested to us sinners, but as

102. ‘Promising without Doing’, in PPS i, 166. 103. Ibid., 172. 104. ‘The Religion of the Day’, in PPS i, 317–18.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

97

He shines forth to His Angels, and to His elect hereafter’.105 The ‘God … manifested to us sinners’ is manifested in a ‘system of commands and promises’: to apprehend God rightly, then, is to apprehend certain ‘commands’, to be presented with something that ought to be done. To contemplate what is ‘perfect’, ‘harmonious’, beautiful, is not to be presented with a ‘command’: the experience of beauty is an experience of completeness, satisfaction; where there is a ‘command’, there is an experience of tension – there is something to be done. In ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’ Newman observes how ‘human tales and poems … make things better than they are, and pourtray a sort of imaginary perfection’.106 In ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, he suggests that ‘religious novels’ equally tend to ‘make things better than they are’. As such, they do not accord with the experience of ‘ordinary, everyday obedience’; they do not accord with the awareness that informs ‘everyday’ acts of religion (and it is in this awareness that faith ‘has existence’). In books, everything is made beautiful in its way. Pictures are drawn of complete virtue; little is said about failures, and little or nothing of the drudgery of ordinary, everyday obedience, which is neither poetical nor interesting. True faith teaches us to do numberless disagreeable things for Christ’s sake, to bear petty annoyances, which we find written down in no book. In most books Christian conduct is made grand, elevated, and splendid; so that any one, who only knows of true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious, is sure to be offended at religion when he actually comes upon it, from the roughness and humbleness of his duties, and his necessary deficiencies in doing them. It is beautiful in a picture to wash the disciples’ feet; but the sands of the real desert have no lustre in them to compensate for the servile nature of the occupation.107

‘Everyday’ Christian life involves ‘drudgery’, ‘numberless disagreeable things’. If one aims mostly at experiencing the kind of beauty presented by ‘books’, if one desires to realize this sort of beauty in the way one lives – just as, in the ‘world’s religion’, which Newman characterizes in ‘The Religion of the Day’, the ‘beauty and delicacy of thought, which is so attractive in books … extends to the conduct of life, to all we have, all we do, all we are’ – then one will be ‘offended’ at the ‘roughness and humbleness’ of the ‘duties’ of religion. This is so, Newman suggests, for those who know of ‘true religion from books, and not from actual endeavours to be religious’, those who ‘come upon’ religion, without having been brought up with it, or formed by it. What of those, however, who have been formed by it? In ‘God’s Commandments not Grievous’, Newman observes that, for one properly formed by religion – one who has lived in accordance with

105. Ibid., 318. 106. ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’, in PPS i, 327. 107. ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in PPS ii, 374.

98

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

conscience and with faith, from youth onwards – obedience to God is far from ‘disagreeable’: obedience, in such a case, would be ‘easy’, ‘consisting, as it would, in no irksome ceremonies, no painful bodily discipline, but in the free-will offerings of the heart, of the heart which had been … trained to love what God and our conscience approve’.108 It is, then, ‘in proportion to the distance we have departed from Him’, by sinning, that obedience is ‘difficult’, ‘grievous’; and most are in this state.109 What, though, of the ‘long practised Christian’, who ‘is moved by God dwelling in him, and needs not but act on instinct’? Would the ‘things’ that such a person does ‘for Christ’s sake’ be experienced by that person as ‘petty annoyances’? Would not such a person – ‘moved by God dwelling’ within – be able to discern the relation of certain seemingly ‘petty’ acts to the will of God? If so, would those ‘petty’ acts be somehow transfigured – would they become, if not ‘grand, elevated, splendid’ in themselves, at least ‘coloured’ by that which is ‘splendid’, by the glory of God? In The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman characterizes those who have the vision of the whole – by which they can discern the ‘likeness’ of Christ through the Scriptures, ‘allegorizing’ rightly – as having ‘that vigorous faith, which, seeing God in all things, does and suffers all for His sake, and, while filled with the contemplation of His supreme glory, still discharges each command in the exactness of its real meaning’. They discharge ‘each command in the exactness of its real meaning’ – presumably fulfilling ‘numberless … petty’ duties. Newman suggests a certain contrast between their ‘contemplation’ of the ‘supreme glory’ of God, and their discharging of ‘each command’: ‘still’ could suggest that they might be at odds with one another – one ‘still’ happens, even though the other happens. Yet he observes that, as they discern ‘God in all things’, so they act always ‘for His sake’; and this suggests that, as they apprehend ‘all things’ in relation to God, so they apprehend ‘each command’ in relation to God – discerning the ‘supreme glory’ of God, the beauty of God, in the ‘command’.110 In a sermon on ‘The State of Grace’, preached in 1836, Newman observes how there can be a form of religion that insists on ‘duties’ in a ‘dry and cold’ manner. Those who have a religion of this ‘character … do not discern and contemplate the next world. They are not on the alert to detect, patient in watching, keen-sighted in tracing the movements of God’s secret Providence. They do not feel they are in an immense unbounded system with a height above and a depth beneath. They think every thing is plain and easy, they have no difficulties in religion, they see no recondite and believe in no hidden meanings in Scripture, and discern no hints there sympathetic with guesses within them.’111 They do not discern intimations of some ‘secret’ reality, surpassing comprehension, in the ‘movements’ of the

108. ‘Gods Commandments not Grievous’, in PPS i, 104. 109. Ibid., 110. 110. Arians, 63–4. 111. ‘The State of Grace’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 140–1.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

99

world, or in the text of ‘Scripture’. They regard the Gospel as ‘scarcely more than a law’ – and though it is a law, requiring obedience, it is more than this – and they take little ‘joy’ from it.112 What is lacking, in this view of Christianity, is a sense of ‘the great and high doctrines connected with the Church’: in the sacraments of the Church, ‘unspeakable, fathomless, illimitable, infinite, eternal blessings are poured into their very hearts’.113 Contemplate then thyself, not in thyself, but as thou art in the Eternal God. Fall down in astonishment at the glories which are around thee and in thee, poured to and fro in such a wonderful way that thou art (as it were) dissolved into the kingdom of God, as though thou hadst nought to do but to contemplate and feed upon that great vision … . All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel, sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine Majesty. All the necessary exactness of our obedience, the anxiety about failing, the pain of self-denial, the watchfulness, the zeal, the self-chastisements which are required of us, as little interfere with this vision of faith, as if they were practised by another, not by ourselves. We are two or three selves at once, in the wonderful structure of our minds, and can weep while we smile, and labour while we meditate.114

Newman presents ‘labour’ and ‘meditation’ as happening together, but he suggests that, when they happen together, so one divides into ‘two or three selves at once’.115 He observes that while there can be an obedience whereby the Gospel is regarded merely as a ‘law’, those who obey, with this sense of the Gospel, obey in ‘a certain dry, dull, heavy way, without spring, animation, life, vigour, and nobleness’, and if they are ‘possessed of sensitive, gentle, affectionate minds, they will be very likely to sink into despondency and fear’.116 The ‘vision of faith’, for Newman, confers ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, and nobleness’, a certain spontaneity, a ‘joy’. Newman presents this vision as being a kind of compensation for the ‘pain’ of obedience: ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, nobleness’ do not arise from, are not involved in, the obedience itself; they arise from something that coincides with the obedience – a ‘vision’ which is not ‘disturb[ed]’ by the ‘trouble’ of life. When the ‘law’ is present virtually as an ‘instinct’ (in the ‘angelic’ state of the ‘long practised Christian’) then there is, perhaps, in the obedience itself a ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, nobleness’; the ‘law’ is present in the ‘instincts’ that are the very ‘life’ of the self, instincts that manifest God ‘dwelling’ within; and, in that state, one is ‘(as it were) dissolved into the Kingdom of God’: attention to the ‘law’, to what one has

112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

‘The State of Grace’, in PPS iv, 144. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 146–7. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 144–5.

100

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘to do’, is not characterized by ‘anxiety’ or ‘watchfulness’, but by an ‘astonishment’ at the ‘Majesty’ which is manifest in, or through, the law – what one has ‘to do’ presents itself as a manifestation of that ‘Majesty’, so that one is moved to do it, in being moved by that ‘Majesty’. Until one is in that state, there is an experience of ‘vision’ which coexists with the ‘necessary exactness of our obedience’: an ‘exactness’, which may involve ‘pain’ and ‘anxiety’, is still ‘necessary’. If one can have this ‘vision’, while still experiencing ‘anxiety’ of this kind, then this would suggest that one need not be in an ‘angelic’ state – the state of the ‘long practised Christian’ – to have this vision. While one is striving toward ‘obedience’, with ‘anxiety’, one can have this vision. Since, while one is striving toward ‘obedience’, one attends not only to that which makes for ‘pain’ and ‘anxiety’ – one attends, equally, to the ‘glories’ of the ‘Kingdom of God’ – so ‘anxiety’ coexists, in this striving, with ‘spring, animation, life, vigour, and nobleness’. One is not enervated by the ‘anxiety’, even if one cannot but continue to have some anxiety: one gets a certain ‘animation’ from the vision, and it is this animation which enables one to persevere with the ‘necessary exactness’.

4. In a sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’, preached in 1832, Newman maintains that there is a kind of ‘science’ that is involved in, or developed through, living rightly. He imagines the forming of the ‘moral character’ of a perfect teacher of ‘Truth’, suggesting that there is an insight into the ‘Truth’, and into the ‘science of morals’, that is ‘the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character’.117 We will suppose this Teacher of the Truth so circumstanced as One alone among the sons of Adam has ever been, such a one as has never transgressed his sense of duty, but from his earliest childhood upwards has been only engaged in increasing and perfecting the light originally given him. In him the knowledge and power of acting rightly have kept pace with the enlargement of his duties, and his inward convictions of Truth with the successive temptations opening upon him from without to wander from it. Other men are surprised and overset by the sudden weight of circumstances against which they have not provided; or, losing step, they strain and discompose their faculties in the effort, even though successful, to recover themselves; or they attempt to discriminate for themselves between little and great breaches of the law of conscience … . Their conscience still speaks, but having been trifled with, it does not tell truly; it equivocates, or is irregular. Whereas in him who is faithful to his own

117. John Henry Newman, ‘Personal Influence the means of Propagating the Truth’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 81.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

101

divinely implanted nature, the faint light of Truth dawns continually brighter; the shadows which at first troubled it, the unreal shapes created by its own twilight-state, vanish; what was as uncertain as mere feeling, and could not be distinguished from a fancy except by the commanding urgency of its voice, becomes fixed and definite, and strengthening into principle, it at the same time developes into habit. As fresh and fresh duties arise, or fresh and fresh faculties are brought into action, they are at once absorbed into the existing inward system, and take their appropriate place in it … . Concerning the body of opinions formed under these circumstances, – not accidental and superficial, the mere reflection of what goes on in the world, but the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character within … every part of what may be called this moral creed will be equally true and necessary; and (if, as we may reasonably suppose, the science of morals extends without limit into the details of thought and conduct) numberless particulars, which we are accustomed to account indifferent, may be in fact indifferent in no truer sense, than in physics there is really any such agent as chance; our ignorance being the sole cause of the seeming variableness on the one hand in the action of nature, on the other in the standard of faith and morals.118

Newman maintains that the more one acts rightly, according to the deliverances of the ‘conscience’, the more the conscience ‘tells truly’ – the more one has an insight into what is right, perceiving the good in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience. Newman would connect this perception to matters of ‘faith’: the fully developed perception of the good, in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, involves, he suggests, a fuller apprehension of the ‘standard of faith and morals’ – that is, he regards ‘faith’ and ‘morals’ as connected to a single ‘standard’. Moreover, the ‘Truth’ which, Newman suggests, is apprehended, through ‘acting rightly’, is the ‘Truth’ apprehended by faith – the ‘Truth’ which is ‘proclaimed’ in the ‘Christian dispensation’. Newman connects the ‘seeming variableness’ of ‘the standard of faith and morals’ to ‘our ignorance’: he suggests that, for one without such ‘ignorance’, one who had perfect perception of the good in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, there would not be this ‘seeming variableness’. For Aristotle, the ‘standard’ of ‘law’ is ‘variable’ in the sense that ‘universal statements’ may have a certain incompleteness, with regard to the particular, and, as such, they have to be ‘corrected’ against that perception of the particular which is phronesis. Aristotle characterizes the ‘equity’ which supplements law – supplementing the ‘universal statements’ of the ‘law’ with an awareness of the ‘particular facts’, and adjusting the sentence that the ‘law’ would ordain, to a sentence more attuned to true justice – as a ‘variable’ standard: ‘When the thing is indefinite the rule also is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid,

118. ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in OUS, 80–2.

102

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

and so too the decree is adapted to the facts.’119 Aristotle insists, though, that ‘equity’ is not something other than ‘justice’. The law must consist of ‘universal statements’, and equity is ‘a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality’.120 As it is a ‘correction of law’ designed to ensure justice, equity is not something other than justice: it corresponds to the same ‘standard’, so to speak, as the law – namely, justice. There is, in equity, an insight into the ‘standard’ of justice, as pertinent to something here and now, which surpasses whatever might be presented in a ‘universal statement’. With regard to the ‘indifferent’, would Newman suggest that certain ‘particulars’ are ‘accounted indifferent’ when considered in general terms – as particulars of a certain kind – though they are not ‘accounted’ so, when considered in all their particularity? He suggests that those who have a fuller perception of the significance of these particulars – appreciating how they are not ‘indifferent’ – will form a ‘moral creed’, every part of which is ‘true and necessary’. Would this ‘moral creed’ consist of ‘universal statements’ that would be more adequate to the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, ‘statements’ that would not be in need of ‘correction’ against the ‘particulars’? Aristotle suggests that ‘universal statements’ regarding the ‘moral’ matters will always need ‘correction’ – that there cannot be a satisfactory ‘universal statement’, or set of universal statements, that will be adequate to all the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience: it is the universality of the ‘universal statement’ that makes ‘correction’ requisite. Would Newman suggest, by contrast, that the need for correction arises only where the ‘universal statement’ is not an adequate expression of the ‘standard of faith and morals’? This seems unlikely. If, though, there is something like a capacity to discern significance in the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, then this capacity might well be involved in the forming of a ‘moral creed’. If so, those who have a more perfect capacity to discern the significance of these ‘numberless particulars’, will have a more perfect ‘moral creed’ – though the ‘moral creed’, as a set of ‘universal statements’, would not be a perfect expression of everything ‘in’ that capacity. It would be this capacity, or understanding, or insight that would apprehend the ‘standard of faith and morals’; and, if so, then ‘science’ would probably not be the right term to use of this insight (it would certainly not be ‘science’ in an Aristotelian sense). Newman characterizes the development of the ‘conscience’ as the development of an ‘inward system’ – and this suggests, at once, a ‘system’ of thought (like a ‘moral creed’) and something more than that, as it is a ‘system’ that involves the development of ‘fresh and fresh faculties’, which are ‘brought into action’: it is a ‘system’ which is the interaction, and union, of these ‘faculties’. This is something more than a ‘system’ of ideas, interconnected in ways that can be articulated in ‘universal statements’: it is a ‘system’ comprising various ‘faculties’ for perception and for ‘action’; it is a ‘system’ at the core of who one is. Newman seems concerned, then, with a ‘moral creed’ that is connected to that ‘inward system’ which makes one who one is – which animates, and which is expressed in ‘numberless’ perceptions, and acts. The ‘inward system’ would

119. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 99. 120. Aristotle, Ethics, 99.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

103

seem to have more in it than any ‘moral creed’ – though there might well be a ‘moral creed’ that is the best approximation to this ‘inward system’. Newman suggests that the rightly formed conscience apprehends the ‘standard of faith and morals’. He would connect the ‘inward system’, animating the right perception of the ‘numberless particulars’ of experience, with ‘faith’. Concerning the body of opinions formed under these circumstances, – not accidental and superficial, the mere reflection of what goes on in the world, but the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character within … every part of what may be called this moral creed will be equally true and necessary; and (if, as we may reasonably suppose, the science of morals extends without limit into the details of thought and conduct) numberless particulars, which we are accustomed to account indifferent, may be in fact indifferent in no truer sense, than in physics there is really any such agent as chance; our ignorance being the sole cause of the seeming variableness on the one hand in the action of nature, on the other in the standard of faith and morals. This is practically important to remember, even while it is granted that no exemplar of holiness has been exhibited to us, at once faultless yet minute; and again, that in all existing patterns, besides actual defects, there are also the idiosyncrasies and varieties of disposition, taste, and talents, nay of bodily organization, to modify the dictates of that inward light which is itself divine and unerring. It is important, I say, as restraining us from judging hastily of opinions and practices of good men into which we ourselves cannot enter; but which, for what we know, may be as necessary parts of the Truth, though too subtle for our dull perceptions, as those great and distinguishing features of it, which we, in common with the majority of sincere men, admit. And particularly will it preserve us from rash censures of the Primitive Church, which, in spite of the corruptions which disfigured it from the first, still in its collective holiness may be considered to make as near an approach to the pattern of Christ as fallen man ever will attain; being, in fact, a Revelation in some sort of that Blessed Spirit in a bodily shape, who was promised to us as a second Teacher of Truth after Christ’s departure, and became such upon a subject-matter far more diversified than that on which our Lord had revealed Himself before Him. For instance, for what we know, the Episcopal principle, or the practice of Infant Baptism, which is traceable to Apostolic times, though not clearly proved by the Scripture records, may be as necessary in the scheme of Christian truth as the doctrines of the Divine Unity, and of man’s responsibility, which in the artificial system are naturally placed as the basis of Religion, as being first in order of succession and time. And this, be it observed, will account for the omission in Scripture of express sanctions of these and similar principles and observances; provided, that is, the object of the Written Word be, not to unfold a system for our intellectual contemplation, but to secure the formation of a certain character.121

121. ‘Personal Influence the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in OUS, 81–3.

104

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman suggests that ‘every part’ of the ‘moral creed’ of one with a rightly formed conscience may be ‘equally true and necessary’. He uses ‘necessary’ again, when observing that ‘for what we know, the Episcopal principle, or the practice of Infant Baptism, which is traceable to Apostolic times, though not clearly proved by the Scripture records, may be as necessary in the scheme of Christian truth as the doctrines of the Divine Unity, and of man’s responsibility’. ‘Necessary’, here, would seem to mean something like ‘logical’ necessity: the different ‘parts’ all proceed from, express, a single ‘scheme’, and, as such, they are all integrated with each other. Yet Newman does not suggest that to apprehend this ‘necessity’ is to make explicit inferences, from ‘universal statements’. He suggests the ‘artificial system’ – in which certain ‘doctrines’ are presented as the ‘basis of Religion’, a ‘basis’, presumably, from which other ‘doctrines’ may be inferred, in an orderly manner – is something that is adapted to ‘our dull perceptions’. Those who have less ‘dull perceptions’ do not need this ‘artificial’ assistance, but can ‘perceive’ what is ‘necessary’. The ‘practice of infant Baptism’ and the ‘Episcopal principle’ are matters of ‘practice’, or of government. The ‘Truth’, in this regard, might be regarded as something comprising ways of acting, forms of ‘practice’, as well as certain beliefs: to have the ‘character’, corresponding to that ‘Truth’, the character that the ‘Written Word’ is designed to form, is to have an appreciation of those practices, acquired by participating in them. Newman contrasts the ‘necessary’ with the ‘idiosyncrasies and varieties of disposition, taste, and talents, nay of bodily organization’ which ‘modify the dictates of that inward light which is itself divine and unerring’. Newman mentions these ‘idiosyncrasies’ when reflecting on how ‘no exemplar of holiness has been exhibited to us, at once faultless yet minute’ (Christ is, as an ‘exemplar … faultless’, but the exhibition of Christ, in the Gospels, is not ‘minute’, detailed). The ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is presented in ‘patterns’ – particular persons – in which it may be affected by ‘idiosyncrasies and varieties of disposition’. ‘Our dull perceptions’, when presented with the ‘light’ in these ‘patterns’, may not distinguish between what are ‘idiosyncrasies’, and what are ‘necessary parts of the Truth’: the ‘necessary’ expression of ‘the Truth’ may look like the ‘idiosyncrasy’ of a particular person. The perfect expression of the truth would be personal – it would be a perfect person: the ‘system’, animating the various expressions of the truth, would consist, not in a set of ‘universal statements’ elaborated by ‘artificial’ reasoning, but in the ‘inward system’ that is the life of a person. Newman suggests that the ‘Primitive Church’ might be regarded as the manifestation of a person – a ‘Revelation in some sort of that Blessed Spirit in a bodily shape, who was promised to us as a second Teacher of Truth after Christ’s departure’, the Holy Spirit. Newman contrasts the insight that is a perception of ‘moral truth’ or the ‘scheme of Christian truth’ with the exercise of ‘reason’ and ‘intellect’ in ‘inferior men’ who have a ‘short-sighted perspicacity’. It is plain, that the gifted individual whom we have imagined, will of all men be least able (as such) to defend his own views, inasmuch as he takes no external survey of himself. Things which are the most familiar to us, and easy

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

105

in practice, require the most study, and give the most trouble in explaining; as, for instance, the number, combination, and succession of muscular movements by which we balance ourselves in walking, or utter our separate words; and this quite independently of the existence or non-existence of language suitable for describing them. The longer any one has persevered in the practice of virtue, the less likely is he to recollect how he began it; what were his difficulties on starting, and how surmounted; by what process one truth led to another; the less likely to elicit justly the real reasons latent in his mind for particular observances or opinions. He holds the whole assemblage of moral notions almost as so many collateral and self-evident facts. Hence it is that some of the most deeplyexercised and variously gifted Christians, when they proceed to write or speak upon Religion, either fail altogether, or cannot be understood except on an attentive study; and after all, perhaps, are illogical and unsystematic, assuming what their readers require proved, and seeming to mistake connexion or antecedence for causation, probability for evidence. And over such as these it is, that the minute intellect of inferior men has its moment of triumph, men who excel in a mere short-sighted perspicacity; not understanding that, even in the case of intellectual excellence, it is considered the highest of gifts to possess an intuitive knowledge of the beautiful in art, or the effective in action, without reasoning or investigating; that this, in fact, is genius; and that they who have a corresponding insight into moral truth (as far as they have it) have reached that especial perfection in the spiritual part of their nature, which is so rarely found and so greatly prized among the intellectual endowments of the soul.122

Newman likens the having of certain ‘views’, in a ‘gifted individual’, to the ‘muscular movements by which we balance ourselves in walking, or utter our separate words’ – these being capacities that do not require reflection, or conscious awareness, to be exercised, capacities through which one acts (capacities which are virtually a part of the self that acts). To reflect on such capacities is to reflect on that which is virtually a part of oneself: it is to take an ‘external survey’ of oneself. The ‘views’ of the ‘gifted individual’, on this analogy, are as capacities exercised without the need for reflection – something like a part of the mind of the ‘gifted individual’, involved in the ‘movement’ of the mind of that individual in making sense of things. Newman suggests that the forming of this ‘assemblage of moral notions’ involves a ‘process’ of ‘reasoning’ of a ‘latent’, implicit kind – a ‘reasoning’ not recognized explicitly by the one actuated by it – and he suggests, equally, that it involves a kind of insight or ‘intuition’ distinct from ‘reasoning’. Newman characterizes the ‘process’ of forming this ‘assemblage of moral notions’ as the acquisition of a certain competence. ‘The longer any one has persevered in the practice of virtue, the less likely is he to recollect how he began it; what were his difficulties on starting, and how surmounted; by what process one truth led to another; the less likely to elicit justly the real reasons latent in his mind

122. Ibid., 83–4.

106

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

for particular observances or opinions.’ The forming of ‘opinions’, the ‘process’ by which ‘one truth led to another’ is associated with, is an element in, the attainment of proficiency in a ‘practice’. Newman seems concerned, then, with ‘views’ that are a part of the spontaneous life of the mind. He suggests that it is difficult to represent this spontaneous interior life in a ‘systematic’ way, in orderly, logical arguments. The insights by which ‘deeply exercised’ Christians live, are not present in their minds in a ‘systematic’ way – they are not present in the manner in which they are present in formal ‘reasoning and investigation’. When Newman suggests that the ‘gifted individual’ must take an ‘external survey of himself ’, when ‘reasoning’ in justification of the ‘views’ which that ‘individual’ lives by, he suggests that those views are a part of the very self of that ‘individual’: that individual looks at ‘himself ’, when presenting those views to others. Having suggested that there can be a moral understanding that is almost a part of the self of the one who has it, Newman then insists on the difficulty of presenting that self ‘in the abstract, in a book’. Newman maintains that the ‘influence’ of a ‘Teacher of the Truth’ is exerted mostly in the personal encounters, personal relationships, of that ‘Teacher’: ‘Truth’ is ‘upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by argument, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence of such men … who are at once the teachers and the patterns of it’.123 This is an effect of the ‘natural beauty and majesty of virtue, which is more or less felt by all but the most abandoned’. I do not say virtue in the abstract, – virtue in a book. Men persuade themselves, with little difficulty, to scoff at principles, to ridicule books, to make sport of the names of good men; but they cannot bear their presence: it is holiness embodied in personal form, which they cannot steadily confront and bear down: so that the silent conduct of a conscientious man secures for him from beholders a feeling different in kind from any which is created by the mere versatile and garrulous Reason.124

Newman suggests that the ‘insight into moral truth’ of those who have an ‘intuitive’ sense of this ‘truth’, developed with the ‘practice of virtue’, and approximating to ‘genius’, might not admit of being presented in ‘words’. May we not further venture to assert, not only that moral Truth will be least skilfully defended by those, as such, who are the genuine depositories of it, but that it cannot be adequately explained and defended in words at all? Its views and human language are incommensurable. For, after all, what is language but an artificial system adapted for particular purposes, which have been determined by our wants? And here, even at first sight, can we imagine that it has been framed with a view to ideas so refined, so foreign to the whole course

123. Ibid., 91–2. 124. Ibid., 92.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

107

of the world, as those which (as Scripture expresses it) ‘no man can learn’, but the select remnant who are ‘redeemed from the earth’, and in whose mouth ‘is found no guile’? [Rev. xiv.3, 5.] Nor is it this heavenly language alone which is without its intellectual counterpart. Moral character in itself, whether good or bad, as exhibited in thought and conduct, surely cannot be duly represented in words. We may, indeed, by an effort, reduce it in a certain degree to this arbitrary medium; but in its combined dimensions it is as impossible to write and read a man (so to express it), as to give literal depth to a painted tablet.125

Newman characterizes ‘language’ as ‘an artificial system adapted for particular purposes, which have been determined by our wants’: the language ‘determined’ by the ‘wants’ and ‘purposes’ that are common in the ‘course of the world’ is, accordingly, not an adequate means of presenting ‘ideas … foreign to the whole course of the world’. He maintains that the difficulty in ‘representing’ character, and the insights involved in having a certain character, is a matter of forming an ‘intellectual counterpart’ to a ‘heavenly language’. He likens the difficulty of presenting ‘moral Truth’ in ‘words’ to that of presenting ‘moral character’ in ‘words’ – it is ‘impossible to write and read a man’. The difficulty, Newman suggests, is that the understanding, which the ‘gifted individual’, the ‘teacher’, has to impart, is an understanding which that ‘individual’ has in being that ‘individual’. If one has that understanding, one can present it only in presenting oneself, as one is. One acquires that understanding from someone who has it, to the extent that one understands the one who has it; and one can acquire this understanding, only by becoming ‘like’ that ‘gifted individual’. The ‘gifted individual’ cannot, Newman suggests, ‘be translated (as it were), and circulated through the world, till he has made others like himself ’.126 Newman insists, in this regard, that ‘we could scarcely in any situation be direct instruments of good to any besides those who personally know us’.127 If an ‘individual’ has an understanding that is involved in who that ‘individual’ is, then one can acquire that understanding only to the extent that one ‘personally knows’ that individual; one can ‘personally know’ such an individual only in forming a relationship of friendship and sympathy with that individual, and to form such a relationship is to become ‘like’ that individual: one is formed as a person by such friendships.

5. For Newman, the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is something personal. The presence of that ‘light’ is in what makes a person who that person is: the manifestation of that ‘light’ is in acts of personal expression – and that manifestation may look like the

125. Ibid., 84–5. 126. Ibid., 87. 127. Ibid., 98.

108

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘idiosyncratic’ gesture of an ‘individual’. To register the ‘light’ is to register it as present in a person, a ‘gifted individual’: in apprehending something of the ‘heart’ of that ‘individual’, one apprehends something of the ‘light’ which makes that ‘heart’ what it is; and to discern that ‘light’, one must have the kind of relationship with that ‘individual’ whereby one can discern something of the ‘heart’ of that individual. In ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, Newman observes that the ‘Truth’ is kept present in the world through personal relationships. Those ordained in God’s Providence to be the salt of the earth, – to continue, in their turn, the succession of His witnesses, that heirs may never be wanting to the royal line though death sweeps away each successive generation of them to their rest and their reward … perhaps, by chance fell in with their destined father in the Truth, not at once discerning his real greatness … [and] by degrees they would discern more and more the traces of unearthly majesty about him [until] at length, with astonishment and fear, they would become aware that Christ’s presence was before them; and, in the words of Scripture, would glorify God in His servant; and all this while they themselves would be changing into that glorious Image which they gazed upon, and be in training to succeed him in its propagation.128

The ‘Image’ is Christ, the image of God the Father – ‘Christ’s presence’ is ‘before them’. The ‘Image’ is, equally, the ‘father in the Truth’, the person who is an image of Christ: the ‘propagation’ of the image of Christ is through persons who have become so conformed to Him, as to become images of Him; and in this ‘propagation’, Christ, the ‘Image’ of the Father, is really present. The term ‘Image’, here, suggests the difference between the ‘gifted individual’ and the divine – the ‘individual’ is an image of Christ, and an image is different from what it images – and it suggests, equally, the union between the ‘gifted individual’ and the divine – Christ the Son is the ‘Image’ of the Father (one is presented with that ‘Image’, in the ‘gifted individual’, owing to ‘Christ’s presence’ in that individual). When the Spirit ‘dwells’ within the ‘gifted individual’, the personhood of that individual is not somehow annulled, or replaced by that of the Spirit. To discern the presence of the ‘Image’ in a ‘gifted individual’ is not to discern something other than that ‘individual’: it is to discern that the ‘individual’ has ‘the spiritual mind’, that the ‘individual’ is holy. To apprehend the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is, then, to apprehend a person. To apprehend the ‘Truth’ is to apprehend a person, as embodying, living out, the ‘Truth’; and one can only apprehend a person aright if one is in a relationship with that person of a kind whereby one can discern something of the ‘heart’ of that person – namely, a relationship of friendship, of love; and to be in a relationship of friendship is to be changed by that relationship, to become ‘like’ the one with whom one has a friendship. In ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, Newman maintains that the life of the Church is ‘a Revelation in some sort of that Blessed Spirit in a

128. Ibid., 95–6.

2. Conscience, and the ‘Love of the Beautiful’

109

bodily shape’. In the various acts of the Church, something personal – the ‘Blessed Spirit’ – is manifest. How does the discernment of the personal presence of the ‘Spirit’, in the life of the Church, relate to the discernment of the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ in a ‘gifted individual’, animated by ‘Christ’s presence’? One discerns holiness, ‘the spiritual mind’, in such an ‘individual’; and Newman suggests that a ‘collective holiness’ can be discerned in the life of the Church. There is, Newman suggests, an ‘inward system’, in the ‘individual’, which characterizes that individual, and which constitutes (or is expressed in) the ‘moral creed’ of that individual. The various acts making up the life of the Church could be regarded as an expression of an ‘inward system’ that is the life of the ‘Blessed Spirit’. If so, then one might perceive – in the life of the Church – an expression, a ‘Revelation’, of the ‘Blessed Spirit’. Newman maintains that those who discern the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ in another person ‘by degrees … discern more and more the traces of unearthly majesty about him [until] at length, with astonishment and fear, they would become aware that Christ’s presence was before them’. The discernment of ‘traces of unearthly majesty’, here, resembles the ‘poetical’ or ‘mystical’ discernment of ‘hints … sympathetic with guesses within’, the intuition of ‘Divine meaning’, a meaning that cannot be comprehended. Preaching, in 1843, on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, Newman would remark that ‘there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate’, and he likens this to the experience of music, asking: Is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter.129

The ‘living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes’ are something personal (or super-personal): they are ‘laws’ that are identical with the being of God. To discern the ‘divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate’, would be to discern the ‘living laws’ of a certain spirit in that ‘theology’ – to discern that ‘theology’ as the expression of an ‘inward system’, the presence of which can be ‘felt’, but not adequately ‘communicated’.

129. ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 346–7.

Part II T HE V ISION O F T HE C HURCH: T HE 1830s A ND 1840s

Chapter 3 ‘A WORK TO DO IN ENGLAND’

1. Newman wrote most of the poetry he would write in his life during the winter of 1832, and the spring and summer of 1833, while touring the Mediterranean. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, he reflects on how, during that tour, he became convinced he had a ‘mission’, a ‘work to do in England’, with this conviction rousing in him ‘vehement feelings’. His sense of ‘mission’ was connected to his recollections of ‘Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba’ – a poem, set in a world created from the materials of Islamic myth, about a young man called by God to fight evil: ‘Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba, for which I had an immense liking, came forcibly to my mind. I began to think that I had a mission.’ It was on this ‘expedition that [the] Verses which are in the Lyra Apostolica were written’. ‘The strangeness of foreign life threw me back into myself.’1 He would form a ‘vision’ that would suggest the ‘object’ of his efforts over the next decade. The ‘vision’ animating the poetry of Lyra Apostolica is a vision of strife – strife between the Church, and the world. The Church in England must be restored. It is in a state of decline. Where, in former times, the Church had been sustained by the nation, and accorded worldly power, it is now being rejected and opposed by the nation. The Church must, then, be restored, but that restoration will not, in itself, be a matter of reassuming worldly power: it will, rather, be a resumption of the proper work of the Church – a work that involves confronting the world. Those who undertake this work will be the ‘few’, but the ‘might of Truth’ has ever been ‘lodged in the few’, its ‘watch-flame’ has ever been ‘rear’d on lone heights’.2 The Church that is to be restored is the Church of England – a church established by the nation. Yet the Church is envisaged as something contrary to the world – a ‘pilgrim’ in the world. The life of the Church is a ‘hid’ life, possessed by the ‘few’ – ‘Christ rears His throne within the secret heart / From the haughty world apart.’3 1. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. by Wilfrid Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 135, 133. 2. ‘The Course of Truth’, in Lyra Apostolica (Derby: Henry Mozley and Sons, and J. G. and F. Rivington, 1836). All quotations from Lyra Apostolica are taken from this edition. 3. ‘Hidden Saints’, in Lyra Apostolica.

114

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

There is, in Lyra Apostolica, a near apocalyptic sense of a conflict between the ‘haughty world’ and the Church. Newman would maintain, in a series of sermons preached in Advent, a few years later, that to recognize this conflict is to recognize the ‘place’ of the Church in the world. What we want, is to understand that we are in the place in which the early Christians were, with the same covenant, ministry, sacraments, and duties; – to realize a state of things long past away; – to feel that we are in a sinful world, a world lying in wickedness; to discern our position in it, that we are witnesses in it, that reproach and suffering are our portion, – so that we must not ‘think it strange’ if they come upon us, but a kind of gracious exception if they do not; to have our hearts awake, as if we had seen Christ and His Apostles, and seen their miracles, – awake to the hope and waiting of His second coming, looking out for it, nay, desiring to see the tokens of it; thinking often and much of the judgment to come, dwelling on and adequately entering into the thought, that we individually shall be judged.4

The vision of a conflict between the Church and the world, in Lyra Apostolica, involves a sense that the Church is not an earthly institution: it is, rather, an institution established by Christ – subject, as such, to no earthly authorities – an institution which, in its sacraments, is instinct with the power of Christ. While most of the poems in Lyra Apostolica were by Newman, there were a number of other contributors, chief among them John Keble; Lyra Apostolica can be regarded as the work of a ‘party’. The poems collected in Lyra Apostolica were published initially in the British Magazine, and when Newman first proposed to Hugh Rose a ‘poetry department’ for the British Magazine he suggested that the ‘object’ of the poetry should be ‘to bring out certain truths and facts, moral, ecclesiastical, and religious, simply and forcibly, with greater freedom, and clearness than in the Christian Year’.5 The differences between The Christian Year and Lyra Apostolica are more striking than the similarities. Lyra Apostolica, unlike The Christian Year, is mostly concerned with the conflict between the Church and the world: it presents an account of the wider world, in which the Church exists, and it characterizes the Church as in a state of antagonism with various forces in that wider world. The Christian Year, by contrast, is mostly concerned with life within the Church; it consists, for the most part, of meditations – on Scriptural passages, connected to the liturgical cycle. For Keble, in The Christian Year, to meditate – discerning the divine, in or through the events of life – is to attain to a state of patience, receptiveness, and resignation; it is to be consoled; it is to be purged of agitation, disquiet. In Lyra Apostolica, by contrast, the spiritual

4. John Henry Newman, ‘The Patristical Idea of Antichrist’, in Discussions and Arguments (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 75–6. 5. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. C. S. Dessain et al. [hereafter LD] (London: Nelson, 1961–72; Oxford: Clarenon, 1972–2008), iii, 120.

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

115

life is taken to involve conflict – in, and with, the world: in ‘The Zeal of Jehu’, Newman recognizes an obligation to ‘wax fierce / In the cause of the Lord.’ In ‘Love of Quiet’, after asking ‘Why should our fair-eyed Mother e’er engage / In the world’s course and on a troubled stage / From which her very call is a release?’ he then insists – ‘rough is the holy hand; / Runs not the Word of Truth through every land, / A sword to sever, and a fire to burn?’ Newman insists that the Christian life is not a life of ‘release’ from the ‘troubled stage’ of the ‘world’ – a life of meditation, in a ‘garden’, ‘in meekness and in love … waiting for the blissful realms above’ – but a life of toil. In ‘The Prospects of the Church’, Newman maintains that the life of the ‘Christian warrior’ – striving to ‘rid’ the Church ‘of her present chain’ – is a ‘work of grace’ which will never be completed – ‘Christ only, of God’s messengers to man / Finished the work of grace which he began.’ List, Christian warrior! thou, whose soul is fain To rid thy Mother of her present chain; – Christ will unloose His Church; yea, even now Begins the work, and thou Shalt spend it in thy strength, but, ere He save, Thy lot shall be the grave.

In ‘Scattered Sheep’, addressing the Dissenters – ‘Poor wanderers’ – Newman declares that ‘Christ’s Church … now shall lift her from the dust, / And reign as in her youth’. How, though, will the Church ‘lift her from the dust’, and what should the ‘Christian warrior’ do, to make this happen? What would the ‘reign’ of the Church be like – what sort of power would be exercised in that ‘reign’?

2. If the contributors to Lyra Apostolica maintained that the Church owes its existence to no earthly state, this was connected to a sense, on their part, that the British state was becoming inimical to the Church. As the life of the nation was something other than the life of the Church, conflict between the nation and the Church was not surprising (even if such conflict was not inevitable). For the contributors to Lyra Apostolica, it seemed that the nation, the state, was coming to regard itself as wholly independent of the Church, and supreme, and that it was subjecting the Church to itself, regarding the Church as merely an aspect of itself. In the late 1820s, various laws which prevented Dissenters and Catholics from taking part in the British government had been repealed. The state was not comprehended, so to speak, by the church. Yet the state still presumed to legislate for the church – it purported, in this, to comprehend the church. In the early 1830s, the Whig government sought to initiate reforms of the established church – and in the Church Temporalities Act of 1833, it instituted certain reforms in the Irish church (reducing the number of bishoprics in Ireland, and altering the ways in which the Irish church was supported – abolishing the church rate, by which the Catholic population of

116

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Ireland was obliged to support an alien institution). For the contributors of the Lyra Apostolica this ‘spoliation bill’ was ‘sacrilege’ – an attempt on the part of the secular power to subject the church to itself. In ‘National Property’, John William Bowden suggested that the way the English nation was acting was as if Israel were to take that which had been consecrated to the worship of God, and bestow it on the worship of Baal – ‘What kings have given, kings again may claim. / Then onward! To the Temple! In the name / Of David’s line, of Judah’s kingly throne, / Tear down th’inlaying gold of Solomon … Speak ye of rights? What right, in reason’s eye, / Outweigh’s the sanction of a nation’s nod? / Who shall condemn a people?’ The ultimate ‘sanction’ (having the authority of the ‘nod’ of Zeus) consisted in the will of the ‘people’. (The hostility to the authority of the church was, Bowden suggests, only one form of a hostility to any sort of established authority, which relied for its legitimacy on something other than ‘a nation’s nod’.) In ‘National Degradation’, Bowden maintained that those who should be ‘faithful guard[s], before Thy vineyard’s gate’ had ‘bid the forest boar / Uproot thy cherished vine on green Ierne’s shore’. The attempt to subject the church to the secular power proceeded – the contributors to Lyra Apostolica suggested – from a sense that the church was to be used as an instrument of the state, securing certain social goods: it proceeded from an attitude that made such worldly goods supreme. In ‘Liberalism’, Newman accused ‘men of presumptuous heart’ of recognizing that the ‘Word refines all natures rude,  /  And tames the stirrings of the multitude’ (securing social order) but of neglecting to recognize ‘zeal and quick-eyed sanctity / And the dread depths of grace’, so that such men ‘halve the Truth’, and ‘in heart, / At best, are doubters whether it be true.’ There was, in the nation at large, a decline of true faith (what John Keble would term, in a sermon that Newman considered to be the inauguration of the Oxford Movement, a ‘national apostasy’). This decline of faith, this lack of awareness of what the church offered – grace, communion with God – attested to a failure, on the part of the church, to present its true nature to the nation, to undertake its proper work. Many years later, in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), Newman maintained that the ‘first principle’ of the ‘movement of 1833’ was ‘ecclesiastical liberty; the doctrine which it especially opposed was in ecclesiastical language, the heresy of Erastus’ – the heresy that the church was subject to the state, that it was a part of the state. The writers of the Apostolical party of 1833 were earnest and copious in their enforcement of the high doctrines of the faith, of dogmatism, of the sacramental principle, of the sacraments (as far as the Anglican Prayer Book admitted them), of ceremonial observances, of practical duties, and of the counsels of perfection; but, considering all those great articles of teaching to be protected and guaranteed by the independence of the Church, and in that way alone, they viewed sanctity, and sacramental grace, and dogmatic fidelity, merely as subordinate to the mystical body of Christ, and made them minister to her sovereignty, that she might in turn protect them in their prerogatives. Dogma would be maintained, sacraments would be administered, religious perfection would be venerated and attempted, if the Church were supreme in her spiritual

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

117

power … . Erastianism, then, was the one heresy which practically cut at the root of all revealed truth … . The whole system of revealed truth was … to be carried out upon the anti-Erastian or Apostolical basis.6

The contributors to Lyra Apostolica were concerned with a spirit, an attitude, alien to the church – with a way of thinking that could not recognize the distinctiveness of the life of the church, the supernatural quality of that life. They regarded that spirit as working not just overtly against the church, but as working covertly within it (in ‘Liberalism’, Newman asks ‘what if it extends / O’er our own camp, and rules amid our friends?’). If they felt that the prevalent hostility to the church might result in the disestablishment of the church, and if they could regard such disestablishment as, in itself, sacrilegious, they could, equally, regard it as, potentially, beneficial: by being separated from the state, the church might be induced to recognize its true nature. In ‘Sacred Places’, Newman observes that as ‘Christ’s Church was holiest in her youthful days / Ere the world on her smiled; / So now, an outcast she would pour her rays / More keen and undefiled’, and he suggests that while churchmen should ‘shrink to share / The curse of breaking down’ (disestablishing the church), and should ‘toil in [their] old place to stand’, nevertheless they could ‘calmly’ await ‘the spoiler’s hand’. The situation of the late 1820s and early 1830s – the sense, felt by some English churchmen, that their church might forfeit its legal privileges – occasioned a certain clarification for those churchmen – an attempt to understand the true nature of the church to which they belonged, and an inclination to regard it as deriving its existence from something other than the state. In the very first of the Tracts for the Times, Newman asked the English clergy, ‘should the Government and Country so far forget their GOD as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks?’ Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must CHRIST’S Ministers depend? Is not this a serious practical question?

The ‘practical question’ is not so much, or not merely, the question of how one is to live, if one is without ‘temporal … substance’ – it is the question of how one is to claim ‘respect and attention’; and this ‘respect and attention’ is a means to an end, a means of accomplishing the true ‘office’ of ‘Christ’s Ministers’. Look at the Dissenters on all sides of you, and you will see at once that their Ministers, depending simply upon the people, become the creatures of the people. Are you content that this should be your case? Alas! can a greater evil befall Christians, than for their teachers to be guided by them, instead of guiding? How

6. Diff i, 101–2.

118

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

can we ‘hold fast the form of sound words,’ and ‘keep that which is committed to our trust,’ if our influence is to depend simply on our popularity? Is it not our very office to oppose the world? Can we then allow ourselves to court it?

If the ‘office’ of the Church is to ‘oppose the world’, then is it not likely that the ‘Government and Country’ are always susceptible of becoming hostile to the Church? As the ‘office’ of the Church is to ‘oppose the world’, so the Church does not derive its being from the world. We have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built, – our APOSTOLICAL DESCENT. We have been born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of GOD … . If you have the Spirit of the Apostles on you, surely this is a great gift. ‘Stir up the gift of GOD which is in you.’ Make much of it. Show your value of it. Keep it before your minds as an honourable badge, far higher than that secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank, which gives you a hearing with the many. Tell them of your gift. The times will soon drive you to do this, if you mean to be still any thing. But wait not for the times. Do not be compelled, by the world’s forsaking you, to recur as if unwillingly to the high source of your authority. Speak out now, before you are forced, both as glorying in your privilege, and to ensure your rightful honour from your people.

Newman presents this ‘rightful honour’ as a means to an end – a means of discharging a ‘trust’.7 How much, though, might the ‘respect and attention’ connected to ‘birth … education … wealth … connections’ have truly functioned as a means to an end that consists in ‘oppos[ing] the world’? Are those who revere 7. This ‘rightful honour’, it has been suggested, may have been more than that, for Newman and other likeminded churchmen – it may have been more like the end itself, sought in compensation for a loss of ‘secular respectability … or rank’. See Frank. M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge of Evangelical Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), particularly 168–80. Turner’s work is the strongest, in recent times, of those which present the ‘case against’ Newman. (Worthy predecessors include Oxford Apostles by Geoffrey Faber and Apologia pro Charles Kingsley by P. J. Fitzpatrick; and A. N. Wilson presents a spirited case against Newman – as a dreamer, disengaging from the realities of Victorian England, in an attempt to live in an imaginary ‘primitive’ church – in The Victorians.) Turner presents the Oxford Movement, and the experiences of Newman – experiences which led him to become a ‘cultural apostate’ – as the effect of various sociological and psychological imperatives. Beneath the speciously ‘universal’ rhetoric of Newman, Turner maintains, certain personal drives were at work: an aversion from domesticity, and an inclination toward a life of companionship with men; a drive toward status; a drive toward penance (involved with a certain denigration of, or even hatred for, the body). In this way of interpreting Newman, things which Newman himself declared to be means (for instance, the ‘honour’ accorded the priesthood) are deemed to be, in fact, the ‘ends’ aimed at (with Newman being unaware of this).

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

119

‘secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank’ disposed to revere those who announce themselves to be the successors of the Apostles? How does convention, ‘respectability’, and the like, relate to the proper ‘honour’ of the Church? How does the life of the ‘nation’ relate to the life of the Church?

3. Lyra Apostolica begins with ‘Home’, a sequence of poems by Newman. The first of the ‘Home’ sequence, ‘Family Affections’, is about a distinctive ‘English’ culture of home life. Where’er I roam in this fair English land, The vision of a temple meets my eyes: Modest without; within, all glorious rise Its love enclustered columns, and expand Their slender arms. Like olive-plants they stand, Each answering each, in home’s soft sympathies, Sisters and brothers. At the Altar sighs Parental fondness, and with anxious hand Tenders its offering of young vows and prayers. The same and not the same, go where I will, The vision beams! ten thousand shrines, all one. Dear fertile soil! what foreign culture bears Such fruit? And I through distant climes may run My weary round, yet miss thy likeness still.

Newman is concerned with the culture of ‘home’ life, and its ‘soft sympathies’, as something distinctively ‘English’, and precious in itself, a ‘fruit’ of a ‘fertile soil’, and, equally, he seems to be concerned with this culture as involving religious education – ‘Parental fondness … Tenders its offering of young vows and prayers’: parents, out of love for their children, educate them in the faith, so that the ‘fondness’ of parents, for their children – actuating them to instruct their children in the faith, out of an ‘anxious’ concern for their welfare – issues in an ‘offering’ of the ‘vows and prayers’ of those children (‘tenders’ here has the primary sense of ‘presents for acceptance’, but it suggests, too, the ‘tenderness’ of parents for their children, a tenderness inducing them to instruct them in the faith, to tend to their children, to instruct them with tenderness). If home life is connected to the life of religion, it is, equally, a feature of a wider, ‘English’ culture – the culture of ‘this fair English land’: there are ‘ten thousand shrines, all one’, across this ‘land’, ‘go where I will’. This appreciation for home life is, he suggests, distinctively English; it is one of the features of English culture that he will ‘miss’ when in ‘distant climes’: to be with others who share that appreciation, is to be, in a sense, at home with them – his sharing of this appreciation is one of the things that makes him at home in English culture; and this common public culture is constituted by common private experiences, such

120

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

that this public culture – with the ‘Altar’ of the English church at its centre – is itself animated by something like ‘home’s soft sympathies’. Newman begins the poem by presenting the home as a ‘temple’; this occasions the expectation that he is to proceed by presenting a kind of emblem – the features of the ‘temple’ are to emblematize features of ‘home’ life. With an emblematic image, one would expect each feature of the image to emblematize something of what is being emblematized. What, though, of the image of the ‘Altar’? Is it an ‘Altar’ in an emblematic temple, or is it the ‘Altar’ of the true ‘temple’, where actual religious worship happens, and true ‘vows and prayers’ are offered? If the image of a temple were to be used consistently as an emblem, then all the images of worship would refer, not to actual religious worship, but to something else – to that which is ‘like’ worship, in whatever it is that is being emblematized. The ‘columns’ could be the love of ‘sisters and brothers’, for instance, and the ‘Altar’ (the centre, or animating principle) ‘parental fondness’. Is the home ‘like’ a ‘shrine’ – devoted to ‘home’s soft sympathies’ – or is it an actual ‘shrine’, a place where actual worship is offered? How do ‘home’s soft sympathies’ relate to religious worship (to that worship which involves a sense that there is no true ‘home’ in this world)? In ‘Autumn’, Newman contrasts those, ‘self-trusting’, who a ‘household Baal rear’, with those who seek the ‘Tree of Life’, the truths of the ‘faith’. Now is the Autumn of the Tree of Life; Its leaves are shed upon the unthankful earth, Which lets them whirl, a prey to the winds’ strife, Heartless to store them for the months of death. Men close the door, and dress the cheerful hearth, Self-trusting still; and in his comely gear, Of precept and of rite, a household Baal rear. But I will out amid the sleet, and view Each shrivelling stalk and silent-fading leaf; Truth after truth, of choicest scent and hue, Fades, and in fading stirs the Angel’s grief, Unanswered here; for she, once pattern chief Of faith, my Country, now gross-hearted grown, Waits but to burn the stem before her idol’s throne.

To seek the ‘leaves’ of the ‘Tree of Life’, ‘truth after truth’, is to go ‘out amid the sleet’, to leave the ‘cheerful hearth’. Could not ‘home’s soft sympathies’ become an object of worship in themselves, such that the ‘Altar’ of the home involves a worship of the home itself, a ‘self-trusting’ worship of a ‘household Baal’? The second poem in the ‘Home’ sequence, ‘Wanderings’, is concerned with leaving home, and with a diminishment of ‘home’s soft sympathies’. Ere yet I left home’s youthful shrine, My heart and hope were stored Where first I caught the rays divine And drank the Eternal Word.

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

121

I went afar; the world unrolled Her many-pictured page; I stored the marvels which she told, And trusted to her gage. Her pleasures quaff ’d, I sought awhile The scenes I prized before: But parent’s praise, and sister’s smile Stirred my cold heart no more. So ever sear, so ever cloy Earth’s favours as they fade, Since Adam lost for one fierce joy His Eden’s sacred shade.

He suggests that, having ‘quaff ’d’ the ‘pleasures’ of the world, he has lost his appreciation for the different pleasures of ‘home’. He has lost what was, to him, an ‘Eden’. It is his experience of the world that ‘cloys’, making his heart ‘cold’: having experienced the ‘fierce joy[s]’ of the world, he has lost his taste for the milder joys of home. There is a move from innocence to experience, which is a kind of ‘fall’: that is, there is a parallel between leaving home, and leaving Eden – and what makes him unapt for the pleasures of home (his experience of the ‘pleasures’ of the world) is itself a kind of ‘fall’ – he mistakenly ‘trusted’ to the world. He observes that his ‘heart and hope were stored / Where first I caught the rays divine / And drank the Eternal Word’. Home life, for him, involved religious instruction; home was a ‘shrine’. While, though, it is his experience of the world that ‘cloys’, what has ‘faded’ in him is his pleasure in home life, and if ‘Earth’s favours … fade’, then this would suggest that his home life was itself one of ‘earth’s favours’. That is, his home life is shown to be – once his pleasure in it ‘cloys’ – one of ‘earth’s favours’. His earthly home is not, after all, ‘Eden’s sacred shade’: like the ‘world’, it is a part of a fallen creation. (This itself might be regarded as a rather ‘cold heart[ed]’ way of regarding ‘parent’s praise and sister’s smile’.) He suggests that he loved his home for the ‘Eternal Word’ that he encountered there, and his ‘heart and hope were stored’ at his home, as it was the place where he ‘first … caught the rays divine’. He does not maintain that his loss of ‘heart’ for the pleasures of home life, for ‘parent’s praise and sister’s smile’, involves a loss of ‘heart’ for the ‘rays divine’ or ‘Eternal Word’. He implies that his turning to the ‘world’ was a (sinful) turning away from the ‘Eternal Word’ – struck by the ‘marvels’ of the world, he ‘trusted’ to the ‘gage’ of the world (rather than trusting only God). Having turned to the world, though, and its pleasures, his taste for all ‘earthly’ pleasures eventually ‘cloys’ – and his taste for ‘home’ life as well; and if a pleasure in home life is shown, in this, to be an ‘earthly favour’, then a turning from ‘earthly’ pleasures will not involve merely a turning back to the pleasures of home. There can be no going back to how things were before (and, in this, his loss of home is, again, parallel to the loss of Eden). If, though, his love of home was occasioned by his encountering the ‘Eternal Word’ there – if his ‘heart and hope were stored’ at his home, as it was the place where he

122

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘first … caught the rays divine’ – then, would not a turning to the ‘Eternal Word’, a turning away from the ‘world’, be a recovery of what he truly loved in his home life? His true home is in the ‘Eternal Word’. ‘Distance’, the next poem in the ‘Home’ sequence, is about leaving his earthly home – leaving his earthly life, on ‘Death’s unaverted day’ – and making his abode with the ‘Eternal Word’. My home is now a thousand miles away; Yet in my thoughts its every image fair Rises as keen, as I still lingered there, And, turning me, could all I loved survey. And so upon Death’s unaverted day, As I speed upward, I shall on me bear, And in no breathless whirl, the things that were, And duties given, and ends I did obey. And, when at length I reach the Throne of Power, Ah! still unscared, I shall in fulness see The vision of my past innumerous deeds, My deep heart-courses, and their motive-seeds, So to gaze on till the red dooming hour. Lord! in that strait, the Judge! remember me!

Though his ‘home is now a thousand miles away’, it is still, in memory, present to him. So, at his death, when he ‘speed[s] upward’, his life will be present to him. He will ‘bear … the things that were’, not simply in memory, but in who he is – for the ‘duties given, and ends I did obey’ will have made him who he is. He will, on that ‘day’, still be the person he is – he will be the person he has become, by living through ‘the things that were’. As he will still be the person he is – as he will continue in his own, unique being – so his experience then will resemble his experience now: his experience of remembering, on that ‘day’, will resemble his experience of remembering now. Yet there will be a difference – he ‘shall in fulness see’ the ‘vision’ of his ‘past innumerous deeds’, his ‘deep heart-courses, and their motive seeds’. He associates his experience of remembering, now, with a kind of power: he overcomes distance (‘turning me, could all I loved survey’) and he overcomes time (‘as I still lingered there’). His remembering is associated with a kind of self-possession. If, on ‘Death’s unaverted day’, he will remember with greater ‘fulness’, then there is a sense in which this will involve an accession of power, a greater self-possession.8 Yet, if he does not discern, in ‘fulness’, now, his 8. ‘Distance’ is comparable, in this respect, with a passage in the Dream of Gerontius, when the soul of Gerontius first wakes from the ‘sleep’ of earthly life. ‘I went to sleep; and now I am refreshed. / A strange refreshment: for I feel in me / An inexpressive lightness, and a sense / Of freedom, as I were at length myself, / And ne’er had been before. How still it is! / I hear no more the busy beat of time, / No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse; / Nor does one moment differ from the next.’ Dream of Gerontius, ll.171–8.

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

123

own ‘deep heart-courses’, then how much does he know his own ‘heart’, how much does he know himself? If it will be comforting, reassuring, to think of the ‘ends I did obey’, how will it be to remember the ‘ends’ he did not ‘obey’? How will it be to ‘gaze’ on ‘heart-courses’, inward impulses, of which he was not aware? He is, in a sense, at home with a certain sense of himself, sustained by a certain way of remembering ‘the things that were’, the things he has done, and the things he has experienced (and this way of remembering is itself something he is at home with, and a part of who he is). He suggests, though, that his sense of himself may be delusive. When, ‘upon Death’s unaverted day’, he remembers ‘in fulness’ his ‘past innumerous deeds’, he will see something different from what he sees now when he ‘surveys’ his life. He then turns away from himself – he cannot rely on himself – and he turns to God: ‘Lord! in that strait, the Judge! remember me!’ ‘Distance’ is structured as a series of statements or phrases connected by ‘And’ – each new sentence begins with ‘And’ – and many of the phrases within the sentences are connected by ‘and’. An ‘and’, in recital, calls for a half breath, not a full breath, not a full pause, as it indicates something more to be said, a certain incompleteness: a series of ‘ands’ makes for a kind of breathlessness, and a sense of unrelenting onward movement. When he moves ‘upward’ on ‘Death’s unaverted day’, in ‘no breathless whirl’, he will have no more breaths to breathe: he will no longer experience breathlessness; he will move beyond the constraints of his earthly existence; he will remember things in ‘fulness’; the ‘innumerous’ things of his memory will present themselves, and he will have unlimited time, so to speak, in which to remember – unlike now, where he can allot only a little time to remembering, since he must act, he must live his life, and can scarcely take a ‘breath’ to reflect on things. To experience breathlessness now is to experience a constraint that will no longer be present on ‘Death’s … day’. When he characterizes his remembering, now, as presenting his ‘home’, as if ‘I still lingered there’, and ‘could all I loved survey’ – he associates remembering with ‘lingering’, with staying put, overcoming the onward movement of time, a movement that can involve the loss of much that is ‘loved’. Yet ‘Death’s … day’ is ‘unaverted’ – cannot be averted: remembering cannot overcome time. There is a contrast between the ‘whirl’ of life now, and the time to ‘gaze’ he will have on ‘Death’s unaverted day’. There is a tension between a sense that ‘Death’s … day’ involves a kind of enhancement of the self – a sense that the self attains to a kind of ‘fulness’ and integrity unattainable in life, a fullness in the powers by which the self possesses itself – and a sense that ‘Death’s … day’ involves a kind of loss of the self, a sense that the self will become, on this ‘day’, something quite other, in certain respects, to what it now is (the self one would hold on to is shown to be something illusory) and this loss of the self one would hold on to, the self one is ‘at home’ with, is something that cannot be ‘averted’. The structuring of the sonnet, as a series of statements connected by ‘And’, makes for an effect of unrelenting, onward movement, but this movement is interrupted by a couple of interjected phrases – ‘Ah! still unscared’, and ‘the Judge!’. These phrases register anxiety, a resistance to the ‘upward’ movement toward the ‘red dooming hour’. He fears ‘the Judge’. What will be judged will be the ‘vision’ which he will himself ‘gaze’ on – his ‘innumerous deeds’ and ‘deep heart-courses’.

124

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

What the ‘Judge’ will see will be what he then, in ‘fulness’, remembers. He appeals, from the ‘Judge’, to his ‘Lord’, asking his Lord to ‘remember’ him – ‘remember me’ here meaning ‘do not abandon me’. His ‘Lord’ and his ‘Judge’ are the same person – Christ. In the ‘vision’ of his ‘innumerous deeds’ and ‘deep heart-courses’, he will see himself as ‘the Judge’, sees him: this ‘vision’ will be a manifestation of the ‘memory’ of God, so to speak. He will be condemned, unless Christ ‘remembers’ him – unless Christ is with him, such that ‘the Judge’ sees him ‘in’ Christ. He hopes, then, that the memory, not of the ‘Judge’, but of his ‘Lord’ – the ‘remembering’ that is the mercy of God in Christ – will determine his final state: one kind of ‘remembering’ will save him from another. In ‘A Foreign Land’, the next poem in the ‘Home’ sequence, Newman addresses ‘Britons! now so brave and high’, asking ‘How will you weep the day / When Christ in judgement passes by / And calls his Bride away’, and observing ‘Your Christmas then will lose its mirth / Your Easter lose its bloom: – / Abroad, a scene of strife and dearth / Within, a cheerless home.’ The difference between the Church, the ‘Bride’, and the nation – ‘Britons’ – is presented starkly; there is a suggestion that national prosperity, and pride – ‘Britons’ now are ‘brave and high’ – might be connected to the ‘call[ing] away’ of the Church; and yet the presence of the ‘Bride’ is connected to national prosperity, to ‘mirth’ and ‘cheer’ at ‘home’. In the last poem of the ‘Home’ sequence, ‘Return’, ‘home’ is, and is not, identified with the presence of the ‘Bride’. Banished the House of sacred rest, Amid a thoughtless throng, At length I heard its Creed confessed, And knelt the Saints among. Artless his strain and unadorned, Who spoke CHRIST’s message there; But what at home I might have scorned, Now charmed my famished ear. LORD, grant me this abiding grace, Thy Word and Sons to know; To pierce the veil on Moses’ face, Although his speech be slow.

The ‘Home’ sequence is about travelling from home, and returning: in the first poem, ‘Family Affections’, he anticipates how ‘through distant climes’ he will ‘run’ his ‘weary round’; in ‘A Foreign Land’, he is in ‘distant climes’, unable to keep his ‘Christmas feast / In its due festive show’; in ‘Return’, he is ‘Banished the House of sacred rest / Amidst a thoughtless throng’, and is still not ‘at home’. That he is not ‘at home’ is not clear, initially, in ‘Return’ – not until he observes how ‘what at home I might have scorned, / Now charmed my famished ear.’ There is a sense, then, that the return from ‘banish[ment]’ is a return to the ‘House of sacred rest’ – and, in this, there is a certain identification of that ‘House’, the church, with home. Some of his ‘famished’ appreciation of the ‘House of sacred rest’ could be owing to his missing

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

125

his ‘home’: participation in the liturgy, in the ‘House of sacred rest’, is a part of his ‘home’ life, involved in the customs, and habits, that make up that life, so to take part in the liturgy, while ‘banished’ from ‘home’, is to experience something of the ‘home’ life that he misses. Yet, if it is so that ‘what at home I might have scorned / Now charmed my famished ear’, if that which ‘at home’ he ‘might have scorned’ is something of great worth – the presentation of ‘CHRIST’s message’ – then would this not suggest that the way he looks at things, while ‘at home’, is somewhat faulty? He suggests that he would have ‘scorned’ the ‘artless … strain’ of the preacher. Would he, in this, have been overly concerned with matters of ‘art’? If, in the way of life with which he is ‘at home’, the ‘message’ of Christianity is connected with various customs, conventions, and the like, has his experience of the ‘message’, while ‘at home’, become too much a matter of convention, or custom? He would ‘scorn’ an ‘artless’ kind of preaching ‘at home’, perhaps, as he is accustomed to artful preaching. Yet does this distinction between ‘artless’ and skilled preaching itself involve a deficient way of responding to ‘CHRIST’s message’ – an excessive concern with the incidental?

4. The ‘Home’ sequence is concerned with the relationship between the customs, or culture, of ‘this fair English land’, and the life of the Church: the customs and the culture of ‘this fair English land’ are implicated with the life of the Church, but that life is something other than, something more than, those customs, or that culture. What of Lyra Apostolica, as a contribution to the culture of ‘this fair English land’? What did Newman understand himself to be doing, in writing these poems? In a letter to Frederic Rogers, written in early 1833, while the poems making up Lyra Apostolica were being composed, Newman remarked that one ‘may write useful lines (useful to others) without being a poet’, and that ‘ten thousand obvious ideas become impressive when put into metrical shape; and many of them we should not dare to utter except metrically, for thus the responsibility is, as it were, shoved off of oneself, and one speaks [as if in play] though serious’.9 One may, ‘metrically’, ‘utter’ certain ‘ideas’ that one ‘should not dare to utter except metrically’ – as the ‘metrical shape’ is such that the utterance will be taken to be a kind of pretence, or ‘play’ (even if this is not so). In a sermon on ‘Unreal Words’ preached in 1839, Newman would maintain that ‘literature is almost in its essence unreal’, for it is a ‘saying without doing’, such that when a ‘man of literature … proceeds forward into action, he is thought to lose his position … becoming a politician or partisan’;10 in this, Newman seems to be suggesting that, in ‘literature’, what is aimed at is simply the ‘saying’, and this is not taken to involve

9. LD iii, 236. 10. ‘Unreal Words’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 42.

126

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

a commitment to what is said, a commitment that would involve ‘doing’ certain things. Would Newman suggest, though, in his letter to Rogers, that while ‘one speaks [as if in play] though serious’, there are some who might discern that one is ‘serious’, though one ‘speaks [as if in play]’ – there are some who might discern the ‘serious’ intent, namely, those who themselves take the ‘ideas’ of which ‘one speaks’ seriously, living by them, or fitting themselves, by the way they live, to appreciate them. There is a kind of reserve in this: ‘one speaks’ in a way that will be understood by those with whom one shares certain principles and attitudes; others will take it that one ‘speaks’ only in ‘play’. The ‘lines’ will be ‘useful’ to those who recognize the ‘serious’ intent: they will recognize that there are others who think as they do, who share certain ‘ideas’ with them (and they will be fortified in their commitment to those ideas). How ‘serious’, though, is Newman about poetry itself? He characterizes poetry as a matter of putting ‘ideas’ into a ‘metrical shape’ (conferring ‘impressiveness’ on the ideas so presented). Does he show, in this, much of a sense of the significance of the ‘shape’? The ‘shape’, in many of the poems in Lyra Apostolica, is often realized, or ‘impressed’, through the use of a conventional ‘poetising’ diction; and this shows a certain inattentiveness to that ‘shape’, and its significance (if not to the ‘ideas’ that have been ‘put into metrical shape’). With regard to the ‘ideas’ in Lyra Apostolica, Newman suggests, in his letter to Rogers, that his ‘lines’ might be ‘useful to others’ in making certain ‘ideas’ impressive – and, in this regard, the poetry of Lyra Apostolica aims to present, to impart, a certain idea of the Church. Newman suggests, though, in several poems in Lyra Apostolica, that a right sense of the Church is formed, not by taking in ‘ideas’ – however ‘impressive’ the presentation of those ideas – but by forming relationships with those who are actuated by the ‘light’ present in the Church: in Lyra Apostolica – as in his sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’ – Newman suggests that the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ is transmitted through personal relationships, personal encounters. In ‘The Course of Truth’, Newman observes how Christ did not present ‘His secret’ to ‘the multitude’, or to the powerful (to ‘Tetrach’s eye’), or to the accomplished (Christ disdained ‘the world’s winning grace, or proofs from learned school’) but, instead, ‘He told / His secret to a few of meanest mould; / They in their turn imparted / The gift to men pure-hearted’; and now ‘Truth’ is ‘Reared on lone heights, and rare’, ‘And the mad world sees the wide-circling blaze, / Vain-searching whence it streams, and how to quench its rays.’ There is a tension, here, between a sense of the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ as being something ‘secret’ – apparent only to the ‘pure-hearted’ – and a sense that it is a ‘blaze’ apparent to all the ‘world’ (even if the world cannot discern ‘whence it streams’): Newman would suggest that while the Church is apparent to all, as an established institution, nevertheless its true life is something ‘secret’. In a sermon on the ‘Witnesses of the Resurrection’, preached in 1830, Newman had observed that the witnesses to the Resurrection, who were charged with presenting the truth of Christ to the world, were few, as ‘the real object of His rising again [was] the propagation of His Gospel through the world by means of His own intimate friends and followers’, and ‘this preference of the few to the many seems to have been necessary from the nature of man, since all great works are effected, not

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

127

by a multitude, but by the deep-seated resolution of a few; – nay, necessary too from man’s depravity, for, alas! popular favour is hardly to be expected for the cause of Truth’.11 What is more, ‘a few were selected, because only a few could (humanly speaking) be made instruments …. To be witnesses of His resurrection it was requisite to have known our Lord intimately before His death. This was the case with the Apostles; but this was not enough. It was necessary they should be certain it was He Himself, the very same whom they before knew.’12 Newman suggests that this ‘intimate’ knowledge of Christ, on the part of the Apostle, was needed, if they were to certify that Christ, resurrected, was ‘the very same whom they before knew’; and he suggests, further, that, in their intimate relationship with Christ, the Apostles were formed by Him – ‘He formed them unto Himself, that they might show forth His praise.’13 This ‘show[ing] forth His praise’ could be taken to be a matter of showing forth His proper glory. That is, Christ ‘formed them’ in such a way that they could apprehend him rightly: their relationship with Him formed them in such a way that they could perceive Him rightly. To perceive Him rightly, it was necessary to have a certain sort of character, and Christ ‘formed’ this character, in those who were to ‘witness’ to Him, ‘that they might show forth His praise’. What is more, this character in His witnesses, was itself an expression of His influence, and presence; so that something of that presence, and its nature, was shown forth in those ‘formed’ by Christ. Newman then maintains that ‘we too, though we are not witnesses of Christ’s actual resurrection, are so spiritually’. He who obeys God conscientiously, and lives holily, forces all about him to believe and tremble before the unseen power of Christ. To the world indeed at large he witnesses not; for few can see him near enough to be moved by his manner of living. But to his neighbors he manifests the Truth in proportion to their knowledge of him; and some of them, through God’s blessing, catch the holy flame, cherish it, and in their turn transmit it. And thus in a dark world Truth still makes way in spite of the darkness, passing from hand to hand. And thus it keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations, the multitude of which are ignorant, the while, on what it rests, how it came there, how it keeps its ground; and despising it, think it easy to dislodge it. But ‘the Lord reigneth.’14

Newman suggests, here – as in ‘The Course of Truth’ – that the ‘holy flame’ of ‘Truth’ is maintained in the world by the witness of those who live ‘holily’; and he suggests that it is by the influence of those who live ‘holily’ that the truth ‘keeps

11. ‘Witnesses of the Resurrection’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; 1868; London, Longmans Green & Co., 1907), 290. 12. ‘Witnesses of the Resurrection’, in PPS i, 286. 13. Ibid., 287. 14. Ibid., 292–3.

128

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations’. (The public ‘blaze’, the established institution, is, then, connected to the ‘secret’ light) In ‘The Course of Truth’, he suggests that the ‘blaze’ of the light of ‘Truth’ is apparent to the ‘mad world’ (presumably when it is ‘acknowledged as the creed of nations’ – when the church is established) but the world cannot discern ‘whence it streams’. How much, though, could poetry ‘transmit’ the kind of ‘light’ that is transmitted ‘from hand to hand’, through ‘near’ relationships – particularly if, as Newman suggests in his letter to Rogers, poetic utterances are taken to be a kind of ‘play’, and ‘the responsibility is, as it were, shoved off of oneself ’? There are several poems by Newman in Lyra Apostolica about ‘personal influence’, and about the difficulty of being ‘near enough’ to another person, to discern holiness in that person. ‘St Paul’ presents a contrast between imagining holiness (a holiness that ‘fancy strives to paint’) and encountering real holiness. I dreamed that, with a passionate complaint, I wished me born amid God’s deeds of might; And envied those who saw the presence bright Of gifted Prophet and strong-hearted Saint, Whom my heart loves, and fancy strives to paint. I turned, when straight a stranger met my sight, Came as my guest, and did awhile unite His lot with mine, and lived without restraint. Courteous he was, and grave, – so meek in mien, It seemed untrue, or told a purpose weak; Yet in the mood, he could with aptness speak, Or with stern force, or show of feelings keen, Marking deep craft, methought, or hidden pride: Then came a voice – ‘St Paul is at thy side!’

‘St Paul’ is about how ‘fancy’ is not adequate to reality: while his ‘fancy strives to paint’ the saints, and his ‘heart loves’ what his ‘fancy’ presents, he is unprepared to recognize a saint at his ‘side’ when he is presented with one. ‘St Paul’ is, equally, an attempt to ‘paint’ in ‘fancy’ St Paul – to imagine what it would be like to encounter him. Newman presents himself as being puzzled by his ‘guest’: the characteristics of his ‘guest’, at once ‘meek’ and ‘stern’, seem almost contradictory, so that there seems to be something ‘untrue’ about him; he suspects him of ‘craft’ or ‘hidden pride’. Yet his ‘guest’ is St Paul. There is something self-chastening in this: he would be better, perhaps, at recognizing the virtue, the holiness, of his ‘guest’ if he were himself more virtuous. He maintains that his ‘heart loves’ the saints, whom his ‘fancy strives to paint’. As, though, he does not recognize the reality of holiness, when presented with it, then is it really holiness which his ‘heart loves’, or is what his ‘heart loves’, in truth, a kind of simulacrum of holiness, which his ‘fancy … paint[s]’? The narration of events – the recounting of how a ‘stranger’ appeared, the recounting of how a voice ‘came’ – is not in harmony with the ‘metrical shape’: the mentioning of the ‘stranger’ happens, not at one of the natural breaks in the

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

129

pattern, at the beginning of an octet, but halfway through the second octet; the ‘voice’ is mentioned halfway through the final couplet. In the discord between the order of the ‘metrical shape’, and the order of the narration, there is a miming of the discord between ‘fancy’ – the pattern which ‘fancy strives’ to create – and reality. The discord is, equally, an effect of art, ‘fancy’. If there is, in ‘St Paul’, a certain chastening of the ‘fancy’ or imagination, this chastening is itself effected by the imagination – by an attempt to imagine what it would be like to encounter St Paul. The encounter with the ‘stranger’, with an unexpected reality, is presented as something that is ‘dreamed’: a ‘dream’, an activity of the imagination, chastens the ‘fancy’. Newman, some years later, would describe ‘St Paul’s epistles’ as ‘literature in a real and true sense, as personal, as rich in reflection and emotion, as Demosthenes or Euripides’, such that ‘without ceasing to be revelations of objective truth, they are expressions of the subjective notwithstanding’.15 Taking those ‘epistles’ as ‘expressions of the subjective’ – expressions of character – they manifest, variously, ‘stern force’, ‘feelings keen’, gravity, meekness: the portrait Newman presents in ‘Saint Paul’, is a portrait taken, so to speak, from the writings of Saint Paul. There is evidently an effort of ‘fancy’ involved in taking this portrait from the writings of Saint Paul – making use of those writings to imagine what it would be like to be presented, in the here and now, with Saint Paul. Newman presents himself, in ‘St Paul’, as wishing to be in the ‘presence bright’ of a ‘strong hearted saint’, whom his ‘fancy strives to paint’, and then not recognizing (or liking) that ‘presence’, when unexpectedly presented with it. Could the very ‘striv[ing]’ of his ‘fancy’ – wishing to encounter a holiness which he envisages as something of another time, another age – be connected to his imperceptiveness, when presented with holiness, in the here and now? To be wishing oneself elsewhere, to be ‘striving’ to imagine a holiness that is thought of as being elsewhere, is, it would seem, to be less than fully attentive to the here and now. In its self-correcting movement – above all, in representing the self-correction in a ‘voice’, heard unexpectedly, perhaps a divine ‘voice’ – ‘St Paul’ is reminiscent of the poetry of George Herbert. There is frequently, in the poetry of Herbert, a self-correcting or self-purifying movement. One of the more Herbert-like poems in Lyra Apostolica is ‘Restlessness’, by Newman, in which, realizing that his past efforts to ‘buy [his] interest’ with God with ‘scourge and penance’ or ‘gift of cost’ were merely forms of ‘artifice’ which ‘heaven’s peace would antedate’ (false ways of assuring himself of his own salvation) he then hears a voice which urges him to ‘deny’ his ‘own fears and wait the end’, and he resolves to ‘learn to kneel before the Omniscient Ray’. The art of Herbert, often enough, aims at exposing the ‘artifice’ associated with certain ways of relating to God (in ways of addressing God, or of conceiving of Him) – undoing the ‘artifice’ that the truth of how one is related to God may become apparent. God, for Herbert, is always greater than any images one might form of him; and one cannot ‘buy’ an ‘interest’ with God, because one can give God nothing, and God gives one

15. John Henry Newman, ‘Literature’, in The Idea of a University (1852; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 290.

130

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

everything. ‘St Paul’ is an attempt to realize, to imagine, what it might be like to encounter a holy person and, in this, to purify the imagination, clearing away that, in the ‘fancy’, which might make one less apt to recognize holiness, when presented with it. ‘St Paul’ is, moreover, an attempt to realize the fact that the history of the Church is a history of particular persons, ‘gifted individuals’. In a sermon, which he preached many years after writing ‘St Paul’, Newman remarked, ‘I can fancy a man magisterially expounding St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians or to the Ephesians, who would be better content with the writer’s absence than his sudden re-appearance among us.’16 To ‘magisterially’ expound the writings of St Paul might be to treat those writings as a means of sanctioning, promoting, illustrating a particular theological system; and, where the writings of St Paul are so treated, the name of St Paul can become something like a mere label, affixed to a system of ideas. ‘St Paul’ attempts to imagine the particular ‘gifted individual’ from whom those writings came, the individual ‘whence’ the ‘light’, apparent in those writings, ‘streams’. Those who ‘magisterially’ expound the writings of St Paul are, ultimately, seeking the ‘light’ that is present in them – the ‘light’ of the revelation, regarding which St Paul is an authoritative exponent. That ‘light’, as present in St Paul, was not there in a form that could be set out fully in a number of ‘propositions’: it was a vision, which animated his mind, and which made him who he was. In his account of Christian tradition, in Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), Newman characterized tradition as ‘the Church’s unconscious habit of opinion and sentiment, which she reflects upon, masters, and expresses according to the emergency’, such that to ask for a ‘complete collection’ of the traditions of the Church, in a ‘set of propositions’, is to ask for the impossible. ‘As well might we ask for a complete catalogue of a man’s tastes and thoughts on a given subject. Tradition in its fullness is necessarily unwritten … and it cannot be circumscribed any more than a man’s countenance and manner can be conveyed to strangers in any set of propositions.’17 Newman imagines, in ‘St Paul’, how an Apostle, encountered as a ‘stranger’, in the ordinary course of things, might not have a particularly ‘impressive’ appearance: ‘God’s deeds of might’ need not have an ‘uncommon or striking’ appearance. Preaching, in 1831, on the ‘Secrecy and Suddenness of Divine Visitations’, and reflecting on the occasion when Christ was first presented, as a child, in the Temple, Newman observes how this moment was the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy – ‘the Lord whom you seek shall come suddenly to his Temple’ – and yet there was nothing ‘great or impressive’ about how this happened. A little child is brought to the Temple, as all first-born children were brought. There is nothing here uncommon or striking, so far. His parents are with him,

16. John Henry Newman, ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, in Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 200. 17. ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in Via Media i [hereafter VM i], (1837; 1877; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 32.

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

131

poor people, bringing the offering of pigeons or doves, for the purification of the mother. They are met in the Temple by an old man, who takes the child in his arms, offers a thanksgiving to God, and blesses the parents; and next are joined by a woman of a great age, a widow of eighty-four years, who had exceeded the time of useful service, and seemed to be but a fit prey for death. She gives thanks also, and speaks concerning the child to other persons who are present. Then all retire.18

The phrase ‘then all retire’ – reminiscent of a stage direction – calls attention to how ‘undramatic’ the scene is. Yet the ‘thanksgiving’ of the ‘old man, who takes the child in his arms’, the Nunc dimittis of Simeon, would become a part of the daily liturgy of the Church – in the English Church, it formed part of Evensong: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word. / For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, / Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; / To be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.’ The ‘salvation’ which Simeon apprehends, when he ‘takes the child in his arms’, is not ‘before the face of all people’, but is something almost ‘secret’. Yet the prophecy of Simeon, the Nunc dimittis, will become a part of the liturgy, with his words being recited ‘before the face of all people’; he declares that the ‘child in his arms’ will be the ‘glory’ of ‘Israel’, and a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’, and there is a kind of fulfilment of this, when his declaration is recited in a liturgy performed ‘before the face of all people’, in which God is glorified in, and through, that child. There is, once again, a sense that ‘Truth’ is ‘secret’, and that its ‘wide-circling blaze’ is apparent to the ‘world’, which cannot ascertain ‘whence it streams’. To recognize ‘whence it streams’ is to recognize it as present in that which seems to have ‘nothing … uncommon or striking’ about it. That which seems to have nothing ‘uncommon’ about it, may nevertheless, be an expression of ‘God’s deeds’. In the ‘Revival of the Priesthood’, Newman presents an image of the ‘priest’, which differs markedly from images of the Anglican priest as having ‘secular respectability, or cultivation, or polish, or learning, or rank’ – as having a role, and function, within society. Newman attempts to envisage, beneath the worldly exterior, that which is other-worldly; he attempts to envisage the priest as ‘cast … forth’ from the world. Say, who is he, in deserts seen; Or at the twilight hour? Of garb austere, and dauntless mien, Measured in speech, in purpose keen, Calm, as in heaven he had been, Yet blithe when perils lower.

18. ‘The Secrecy and Suddenness of Divine Visitations’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 109.

132

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

My holy Mother made reply, ‘Dear Child, it is my Priest. The world has cast me forth, and I Dwell with wild earth and gusty sky; He bears to men my mandates high, And works my sage behest. Another day, dear child, and thou Shalt join his sacred band. Ah! well I deem, thou shrinkest now From urgent rule and severing vow; Gay hopes flit round, and light thy brow: – Time hath a taming hand!’

Newman once asked, in an essay on St Ambrose published in 1833 – ‘might not St. Ambrose and his brethren have as reasonably disbelieved the possible existence of parsonages and pony carriages in the nineteenth century, as we the existence of martyrs and miracles in the primitive age?’19 He then suggested ‘perhaps miracles and martyrs go together’. However that may be, it would seem that ‘parsonages and pony carriages’ and ‘martyrs’ do not ‘go together’; and ‘personages and pony carriages’ and ‘urgent rule and severing vow’, equally, do not seem to ‘go together’. In the first of the Tracts for the Times, Newman declared ‘we could not wish [our Bishops] a more blessed termination of their course, than the spoiling of their goods, and martyrdom’. In ‘The Revival of the Priesthood’, Newman envisages the ‘sacred band’ of the English clergy – a ‘band’ which, at that time, was associated with ‘parsonages and pony carriages’ – as ‘dwell[ing] with wild earth and gusty sky’. Newman envisages the Church in England as in a state in which ‘the world’ has ‘cast’ it ‘forth’, ‘spoiling’ its ‘goods’; and he suggests that this might make for a purification, a ‘revival’ of its proper nature and function; it might, in such circumstances, encounter the world from without, ‘bear[ing] to men … mandates high’ (without being entangled, compromised, by worldly commitments). The landscape in which Newman places his ‘mother’, the Church, is featureless, elemental – ‘wild earth and gusty sky’. This setting might, for Newman, be symbolic of a kind of restoration of what is elemental, a purification. Yet the featurelessness of the landscape cannot but suggest, equally, a certain blankness, or vacuity. What would the purified Church in England be like, and how would it act in the here and now – in the England where Newman had his ‘work to do’? The featureless landscape in ‘The Revival of the Priesthood’ seems to have little to do with the ‘fertile soil’ of ‘this fair English land’. If the landscape were more evidently ‘English’, would images of ‘parsonages and pony carriages’ obtrude, images which could not be set, without incongruity, alongside images of ‘garb austere and dauntless mien’, ‘urgent rule and severing vow’? The priest, with ‘dauntless mien’, ‘Calm, as 19. John Henry Newman, ‘Primitive Christianity’, in Historical Sketches i (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 365.

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

133

in heaven he had been / Yet blithe when perils lower’ – possessed of fortitude, a certain indifference to ‘perils’, and what Newman would characterize as the ‘chivalrous spirit’20 of the martyrs (and perhaps something of the ‘spirit’ of the Romantic outsider-hero) – is not a figure belonging to the world of ‘parsonages and pony carriages’; the priest is ‘in deserts seen’, on ‘wild earth’, not cultivated ‘earth’. How, then, do the figures in this landscape – ‘mother’ Church, the priest – relate to, and act on, places of cultivated ‘earth’, places of dwelling? How do these figures relate to the culture, the customs, of ‘this fair English land’? If the Church acts upon this culture from without – presenting ‘mandates high’ that have their origin, ultimately, in that which transcends any culture – can it not, nevertheless, have some kind of place within, or expression within, that culture? Is there some kind of antagonism between the Church and civilization or culture, cultivated ‘earth’? Is the Church fully itself only in the ‘wild’? By imagining a Church that exists in ‘deserts’, Newman could be trying to suggest not that the Church is somehow at odds with culture, but that it has within it a life that is something more than the life of a culture: while certain forms of culture can harmonize with, or even be instruments of, the life of the Church, that life is, nevertheless, something more than the life of those forms of culture; the Church can endure in ‘deserts’, without being sustained by civilization. For the most part, though, the poems by Newman in Lyra Apostolica do not envisage ways in which the life of the Church, the life of the Spirit, might be present and active within that which is communal, customary, or distinctively ‘English’. Most of his poems are concerned with isolated, prophetic figures. Figures such as Moses or David – who created, or consolidated, political orders – are considered, not so much in their public as in their private qualities. In a poem on ‘The Call of David’ (included, not in the first, but in the second edition of Lyra Apostolica) Newman imagines the ‘Angels’ of David, ‘circling round’ him, at the moment of his anointing for the kingship by Samuel, contemplating the ‘road’ he will take in his life – in which his ‘Loftiest aims [will be] by earth defiled’ – and reflecting that those public acts which confer ‘fame’ are of little moment: the angels declare that ‘we take thee in thy blindness / And harass thee in kindness; / Little chary of thy fame, – / Dust unborn may bless or blame, – / But we mould thee for the root / Of man’s promised healing fruit, / And we mould thee hence to rise, / As our brother to the skies.’ The earthly exploits of David – the ‘praise’ he will ‘attain’ in ‘royal court and battle plain’, as a great king – matter little: what is of importance about him is that he is the ‘root’ of Christ, and that he has an immortal soul, making him ‘brother’ to the ‘Angels’. In ‘Melchizedek’, Newman contemplates those who ‘feel their loneliness’, who are in a state in which they are ‘fatherless, homeless, reft of age and place’, detached from an earthly life which they apprehend as a mere ‘veil’. Melchizedek, king of Salem, is a figure who appears briefly in Genesis, 14 – he ‘brings forth bread and wine’ and blesses Abraham. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, he is described as ‘without

20. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 481.

134

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually’. The priesthood of Melchizedek is treated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as a type of the priesthood of Christ; though Christ was not of the ‘highborn Hebrew line’, the Levites, he was, nevertheless, a priest; that there can be a priesthood of this kind is shown by Melchizedek, who was a priest, and who blessed Abraham, before the ‘highborn Hebrew line’ had been established. The relationship of Melchizedek to the ‘highborn Hebrew line’ – whereby Melchizedek seems in some way prior, and superior – figures that of Christ. (The priesthood of the ‘highborn Hebrew line’, unlike that of Melchizedek, was restricted to the Levites, descendents of Levi, son of Jacob: the conferral of priesthood was determined by, and subordinate to, familial ‘descent’.) Newman suggests, in ‘Melchizedek’, that those who ‘feel their loneliness’ in a ‘blest’ way experience a certain detachment from ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘descent’ – a detachment from life within the order of the family, and the order of the community – and a participation in that which has ‘neither beginning of days nor end of life’. Thrice blest are they who feel their loneliness; To whom nor voice of friend nor pleasant scene Brings that on which the saddened heart can lean; Yea, the rich earth, garbed in its daintiest dress Of light and joy, doth but the more oppress, Claiming responsive smiles and rapture high: Till, sick at heart, beyond the veil they fly, Seeking His presence, who alone can bless. Such in strange days, the weapons of Heaven’s grace; When passing by the highborn Hebrew line He forms the vessel of his vast design; Fatherless, homeless, reft of age and place, Severed from earth, and careless of its wreck, Born through long woe His rare Melchizedek.

Newman suggests that to be a ‘Melchizedek’ is to be in a certain state of mind or spirit, a state of mind ‘born through long woe’; to be in this state of mind is to be ‘homeless’, ‘reft of age and place’, and this state of mind arises from a certain experience of the world, from a sense of being unable to ‘lean’ on anything in this world. This sense of being unable to ‘lean’ on anything in this world, involves the apprehension that nothing in this world wholly satisfies the soul: nothing in this world – ‘nor voice of friend, nor pleasant scene’ – is something that the soul can love completely, such that all its capacities for love are expressed, realized, satisfied. What the soul requires is a relationship of mutual love with God – who is changeless, and to whom everything in the soul is ‘open’. In a sermon on ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’, preached in 1839, Newman maintains that ‘the happiness of the soul consists in the exercise of the affections’, involved in a relationship of mutual love with another person,

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

135

but ‘our hearts require something more permanent and uniform than man can be’; ‘none but the presence of our Maker can enter us; for to none besides can the whole heart in all its thoughts and feelings be unlocked and subjected’; ‘even our nearest friends enter into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us only at times; whereas the consciousness of a perfect and enduring Presence, and it alone, keeps the heart open’. It is only in a relationship with God that there can be an exercise of the ‘affections’ in a relationship of mutual love that is ‘permanent’, and entirely without reserve. In a sermon on ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, which Newman preached in 1833, only a few months after writing ‘Melchizedek’, he maintains that ‘to understand that we have souls, is to feel our separation from things visible, our independence of them, our distinct existence in ourselves, our individuality, our power of acting for ourselves this way or that way, our accountableness for what we do’, and this appreciation of ‘our separation from things visible’ involves an awareness of ‘the nothingness of this world’. A ‘child’ is, at first, in a state in which ‘this outward world prevails’: ‘we look off from self to the things around us, and forget ourselves in them.’ But then God ‘visits us’. When He visits us, then in a little while there is a stirring within us. The unprofitableness and feebleness of the things of this world are forced upon our minds; they promise but cannot perform, they disappoint us. Or, if they do perform what they promise, still (so it is) they do not satisfy us. We still crave for something, we do not well know what; but we are sure it is something which the world has not given us. And then its changes are so many, so sudden, so silent, so continual. It never leaves changing; it goes on to change, till we are quite sick at heart: – then it is that our reliance on it is broken. It is plain we cannot continue to depend upon it, unless we keep pace with it, and go on changing too; but this we cannot do. We feel that, while it changes, we are one and the same; and thus, under God’s blessing, we come to have some glimpse of the meaning of our independence of things temporal, and our immortality. And should it so happen that misfortunes come upon us, (as they often do,) then still more are we led to understand the nothingness of this world; then still more are we led to distrust it, and are weaned from the love of it, till at length it floats before our eyes merely as some idle veil, which, notwithstanding its many tints, cannot hide the view of what is beyond it; – and we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it.21

This state involves a certain detachment even from ‘voice of friend’: ‘As to those others nearer to us, who are not to be classed with the vain world, I mean our friends and relations, whom we are right in loving, these, too, after all, are nothing to us here. They cannot really help or profit us; we see them, and they act upon

21. ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in PPS i, 19–20.

136

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

us, only (as it were) at a distance, through the medium of sense; they cannot get at our souls.’22 In the poems by Newman in Lyra Apostolica, earthly relationships, earthly friendships, are presented as fragile and uncertain. In ‘David and Jonathan’, reflecting on how David had experienced great ‘woe’ when his friend, Jonathan, had died, Newman observes that ‘had he lived, before thy throne to stand, / Thy spirit keen and high. / Sure it had snapped in twain love’s slender band, / So dear in memory; / Paul’s strife unblest its serious lesson gives, / He bides with us who dies, he is but lost who lives.’ In ‘Prosperity’, Newman reflects on the transience of all earthly goods, friendship included. And when thine eye surveys, With fond adoring gaze, And yearning heart, thy friend, Love to its grave doth tend. All gifts below, save Truth, but grow Towards an end.

While Newman presents life with others, in Lyra Apostolica, as unsatisfactory, he presents a solitary life as inconsistent with the state of the ‘Christian warrior’. The desire for repose, for seclusion, is to be resisted; the desire for solitude is to be resisted. In ‘The Desert’, he observes that ‘Adam e’en, before his sin, / His God a helpmeet found; / Blest with an Angel’s heart within, / Paul wrought with friends around.’ Lone saints of old! of purpose high, On Syria’s sands, ye claim ’Mid heathen rage our sympathy, In peace ye force our blame.

The ‘lone saints of old’, the anchorites, were justified in retreating from the world to escape persecution by ‘heathen rage’; but such a retreat is not justified in a time of ‘peace’. In ‘Jeremiah’, Newman maintains that the ‘peaceful prophet’ Jeremiah ‘erred’ in desiring to be removed from a ‘troubled life’, from the ‘sacred strife’ of encountering ‘man’s wrath’, and ‘school[ing] his pride’. ‘O place me in some silent vale, Where groves and flowers abound; Nor eyes that grudge, nor tongues that rail, Vex the truth-haunted ground!’ If his meek spirit erred, opprest That God denied repose, What sin is ours, to whom Heaven’s rest Is pledged, to heal earth’s woes? 22. Ibid., 20–1.

3. ‘A Work to do in England’

137

‘Earth’, in Lyra Apostolica, is generally presented as a place of ‘strife’, with ‘peace’ being something deferred till ‘Heaven’s rest’. Peace in this life, Newman suggests in ‘The Haven’, is a ‘rare guest’. Whence is this awe, by stillness spread O’er the world-fretted soul? Wave reared on wave its boastful head, While my keen bark, by breezes sped, Dashed fiercely through the ocean bed, And chafed towards its goal. But now there reigns so deep a rest, That I could almost weep. Sinner! thou hast in this rare guest Of Adam’s peace a figure blest; ’Tis Eden seen, but not possessed, Which cherub-flames still keep.

In this life, the soul is ‘world-fretted’; and to be a ‘Christian warrior’ is in to be a state of ‘strife’, encountering ‘man’s wrath’ and ‘pride’. Newman insisted, all his life, that only in communion with God could the ‘heart’ be fully ‘opened’: the deepest of all desires, for him, was the desire for communion with God. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua he observed that he could not countenance becoming a Catholic until he recognized that ‘the Catholic Church allows no image of any sort, material or immaterial, no dogmatic symbol, no rite, no sacrament, no Saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, to come between the soul and its Creator. It is face to face, “solus cum solo”, in all matters between man and his God. He alone creates; He alone has redeemed; before His awful eyes we go in death; in the vision of Him is our eternal beatitude.’23 Yet, on becoming a Catholic, he equally had a sense of the Church as a place in which Christ is not ‘at a distance … we are surrounded by an atmosphere and are in a medium through which his warmth and light flow in upon us on every side’.24 In Lyra Apostolica Newman does not present the Church as a place in which this ‘atmosphere’ can be encountered, or in which this ‘light’ is manifest; he is concerned, rather, with the Church as countering the world, and with the ‘Christian warrior’ as engaged in ‘sacred strife’ with the ‘pride’ of the world. In Lyra Apostolica he presents images of isolated, prophetic figures, engaging in ‘sacred strife’; but he does not present definite images of a Church, or communion, which sustains them, and he does not present definite images of how they might act within the Church (as against how they might act, in encountering the ‘haughty world’). In ‘The Cross of Christ’, declaring how ‘whene’er across this sinful flesh of mine / I draw the Holy Sign, / All good thoughts stir within me’, he imagines certain effects of this action, and 23. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 288. 24. LD xii, 224.

138

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the ‘good thoughts’ it ‘stir[s]’ – perhaps ‘hateful spirits around … wail their overthrow’, and perhaps ‘on far heathen ground / Some lonely Saint hails the fresh odour, though / Its source he cannot know’. He imagines, here, a kind of spiritual communion between Christians, but it is something that cannot be discerned; those who participate in it ‘cannot know’ how they affect one another. In a sermon on the ‘Ceremonies of the Church’, preached in 1831, a couple of years before he wrote the poems in Lyra Apostolica, Newman observed that there is no such thing as abstract religion. Scripture gives the spirit, and the Church the body, to our worship; and we may as well expect that the spirits of men might be seen by us without the intervention of their bodies, as suppose that the Object of faith can be realized in a world of sense and excitement, without the instrumentality of an outward form to arrest and fix attention, to stimulate the careless, and to encourage the desponding … . Granting that the forms are not immediately from God, still long use has made them divine to us; for the spirit of religion has so penetrated and quickened them, that to destroy them is, in respect to the multitude of men, to unsettle and dislodge the religious principle itself … . How intimately great and little matters are connected together in all cases.25

Newman is concerned, in this, with the established, set forms of prayer and worship; but it pertains to all customs, conventions, cultural forms which the ‘spirit of religion has … penetrated and quickened’. In Lyra Apostolica, Newman presents almost an ‘abstract’ Church, a Church without a ‘body’ – in a featureless landscape of ‘wild earth and gusty sky’, and he seems to have difficulty in discerning, in the cultural forms of ‘this fair English land’, something more than what is earthly, the ‘spirit of religion’.

25. ‘Ceremonies of the Church’, in PPS ii, 75.

Chapter 4 THE ‘IMPRESSION’ OF CHRIST

1. Newman maintains that the ‘light’ of ‘Truth’ emanates through ‘personal influence’, personal relationships. ‘Thus in a dark world Truth still makes way in spite of the darkness, passing from hand to hand. And thus it keeps its station in high places, acknowledged as the creed of nations.’ It is through personal influence, Newman suggests, that the Church ‘makes its way’ in the world – its ‘creed’ coming to be ‘acknowledged as the creed of nations’: the life of the Church involves this ‘passing from hand to hand’ of the ‘Truth’. Yet in an essay on St Ambrose, written for the British Critic in 1833, Newman distinguishes between how truth is manifested ‘from saint to saint’, and how it is manifested by the Church, ‘that peculiar institution which Christ set up as a visible home and memorial of Truth’. Truth … will always support itself in the world by its native vigour; it will never die while heaven and earth last, but be handed down from saint to saint until the end of all things. But this was the case before our Lord came, and is still the case, as we may humbly trust, in heathen countries. … The Church, that peculiar institution which Christ set up as a visible home and memorial of Truth … as being in this world, must be manifested by means of this world. … Hitherto the English Church has depended on the State.1

Newman contrasts the conveying of the truth ‘from saint to saint’ with the conveying of the truth by the Church, as an ‘institution’, a ‘visible home and memorial’ of the truth: he contrasts the way ‘truth’ is present in personal relationships with how it is present in the ‘institution’ of the Church. When he considers how the Church is ‘manifested’, however, he looks to the worldly ‘means’ – external to the being of the Church itself – by which it is ‘manifested’. He suggests that until recently in England ‘the State’, the ‘regal and aristocratical power’, has been the ‘instrument’

1. ‘Primitive Christianity’, in Historical Sketches i [hereafter HS i] (1872; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 339–40.

140

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

of the Church, the ‘means’ by which it has been ‘manifested’.2 While the Church, in England, has made use of the ‘regal and aristocratical power’, this power is, in itself, merely an ‘instrument’; at the time of St Ambrose, the Church made use of the ‘popular’ power – it was ‘supported by a popular movement’ in its conflict with the ‘State’, but though it was strengthened by ‘a popular movement’, it was not in ‘subserviency’ to that ‘movement’.3 The Church is something other than its ‘instruments’ – something other than the ‘powers’, whether ‘regal’ or ‘popular’, that ‘support’ it. These ‘powers’, however, are connected to the way in which the Church is ‘manifested’, to its presence as a power in the world. What, then, is proper to the Church, as distinct from its ‘instruments’, as a ‘visible’ power, or presence, in the world? If the Church is a ‘visible home and memorial of Truth’, why should it need an ‘instrument’ or ‘means’, other than itself, to be ‘manifested’? Why, if it is of its nature to be ‘visible’, should it need something other than itself to be ‘manifested’? In a sermon on the ‘Outward and Inward Notes of the Church’, preached in 1841, Newman maintains that, in the prophecies of Scripture, it is ‘laid down’ that the Church is to have a ‘manifest royalty’, which is to be the ‘evidence of her mission’. If there be a distinction of the Gospel plainly laid down in Scripture, it is that it is a social religion, and addresses individuals as parts of a whole. And, being social, it must have all things in common, and its evidences and tokens in the number. And, further, if it is social, it must be a public religion, ‘a city set upon a hill;’ and its evidences will be in a measure public. Nay, further, its great note, as announced by the Prophets, is not only that it is social, that it is public, but that it is both social and public in the very highest sense, because it is Catholic, universal every where; and this note is insisted on as something special in itself, of a nature to dazzle and subdue the mind, like a miracle, or like the sun’s light in the heavens. It was to be the characteristic gift of the Christian Church, that she herself was to be a great public evidence of her mission, that she was to be her own evidence. Her very look, her bearing, her voice, were to be her credentials. As Adam had sovereignty over brute animals on his creation, or as the second Adam, her Lord and Maker, ‘spake as one having authority, and not as the Scribes,’ so she was to win or to awe the souls of men generally; not this one or that, but all, though variously, by the manifest royalty of her very presence. She received this gift from her Lord in the beginning – to claim and command obedience when she spoke, because she spoke; and that not from any thing special in the mind of the hearer, but from the voice and tone of the speaker.4

If to encounter a holy person is gradually to ‘become aware that Christ’s presence’ is ‘before’ one, and to be changed ‘into that glorious Image’ which one ‘gazes’ upon, to encounter the Church is to be presented with a ‘manifest royalty’, in the ‘very look 2. ‘Primitive Christianity’, in HS i, 340. 3. Ibid., 348, 349. 4. ‘Outward and Inward Notes of the Day’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day [hereafter SSD] (1843; 1869; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1902), 325–6.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

141

[of the Church], her bearing, her voice’, such as ‘to claim and command obedience’. Yet Newman mentions this ‘gift’ of the Church – a presence ‘of a nature to dazzle and subdue the mind, like a miracle, or like the sun’s light in the heavens’ – only to observe that there are ‘ages’ where the ‘outward glory’ of the Church is ‘obscured’: at the present time, ‘the outward notes of the Church are partly gone from us, and partly going’; the ‘Church of God is under eclipse among us. Where is our unity, for which Christ prayed? where our charity, which He enjoined? where the faith once delivered, when each has his own doctrine? where our visibility, which was to be a light to the world? where that awful worship, which struck fear into every soul?’5 Had the ‘voice’ of the Church lost the ‘tone’ by which it could ‘claim and command obedience’?

2. In Tract 73, ‘On the Introduction of Rationalist Principles into Revealed Religion’, written in 1836, Newman contrasted a ‘Catholic’ with a ‘rationalist’ attitude toward revelation: the ‘rationalist’, he maintained, subordinates revelation to the self. The Rationalist makes himself his own centre, not his Maker; he does not go to God, but he implies that God must come to him. And this, it is to be feared, is the spirit in which multitudes of us act at the present day. Instead of looking out of ourselves, and trying to catch glimpses of God’s workings, from any quarter, – throwing ourselves forward upon Him and waiting on Him, we sit at home bringing everything to ourselves, enthroning ourselves in our own views, and refusing to believe anything that does not force itself upon us as true. Our private judgment is made everything to us, – is contemplated, recognized, and consulted as the arbiter of all questions, and as independent of everything external to us. Nothing is considered to have an existence except so far forth as our minds discern it. The notion of half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, surmises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood, of isolated facts in the great scheme of Providence, in a word, the idea of Mystery, is discarded.6

To ‘rationalize’ is ‘to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought’.7 The ‘rationalist’ insists that the ‘doctrines’ presented

5. ‘Outward and Inward Notes of the Day’, in SSD, 335. 6. ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 33–4. 7. ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in ECH i, 31.

142

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in the revelation should be comprehensible, subjecting them to the intellect; and to make the revelation comprehensible, the ‘rationalist’ construes it as a ‘system or scheme’. Rationalism ‘considers faith to consist rather in the knowledge of a system or scheme, than of an agent’.8 It is concerned, not so much with the Divine Being, as with His work … therefore, true Christianity consists, not in ‘submitting in all things to God’s authority,’ His written Word, whether it be obscure or not, but in understanding His acts. I must understand a scheme, if the Gospel is to do me any good; and such a scheme is the scheme of salvation. Such is the object of faith, the history of a series of divine actions, and nothing more; nothing more, for everything else is obscure; but this is clear, simple, compact. To preach this, is to preach the Gospel.9

The ‘object of faith’ is not an ‘agent’ – whose ‘Being’ is ultimately incomprehensible – but a ‘history’. The ‘Rationalist makes himself his own centre’, by identifying the revelation with something that can be clearly apprehended, subjected to the understanding – a ‘history’ that is ‘clear, simple, compact’; and he ‘makes himself his own centre’ in another way, by taking the aim or end of the revelation to consist in the ‘experienced effects’, which attend on the apprehension of the ‘history’ presented in that revelation. The popular theology … is as follows: that the Atonement is the chief doctrine of the Gospel; again, that it is chiefly to be regarded, not as a wonder in heaven, and in its relation to the attributes of God and to the unseen world, but in its experienced effects on our minds, in the change it effects when it is believed.10

The Gospel is taken to be ordered to certain ‘experienced effects’, attendant on belief in it; the Gospel is, accordingly, identified with that which, when ‘believed’, conduces to those ‘effects’. To [the doctrine of the Atonement, and its “experienced effects”], as if to the point of sight in a picture, all the portions of the Gospel system are directed and made to converge; as if this doctrine were so fully understood, that it might fearlessly be used to regulate, adjust, correct, complete, everything else. Thus, the doctrine of the Incarnation is viewed as necessary and important to the Gospel, because it gives virtue to the Atonement; of the Trinity, because it includes the revelation, not only of the Redeemer, but also of the Sanctifier, by whose aid and influence the Gospel message is to be blessed to us.11

8. 9. 10. 11.

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 47. Ibid.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

143

In a sermon on ‘The Christian Mysteries’, preached in 1829, Newman maintains that the ‘illumination’ imparted in the revelation is ‘not a light accorded to the reason, the gifts of the intellect’, but ‘practical and useful knowledge’ – ‘The grace promised us is given, not that we may know more, but that we may do better.’12 Would Newman claim, in this, to understand why the revelation ‘is given’, to assign it an aim or end, by which it may be comprehended? He does not, certainly, suggest that the aim consists in its ‘experienced effects’, ‘the change it effects when believed’, but he does suggest that the revelation has an aim or end – namely, ‘that we may do better’. He does not, though, maintain that this is the sole aim or end of the revelation; and he does not suggest that one can determine what is, or is not, a part of the revelation, according to whether it conduces to this end. Newman mentions this aim of revelation – ‘that we may do better’ – precisely to counter those who maintain that Christianity is ‘what they term, a “rational religion” … [and] that no doctrine which was mysterious, i.e. too deep for human reason, or inconsistent with their self-devised notions, could be contained in Scripture’: that is, he suggests that the aim of revelation consists in something moral or spiritual – ‘that we may do better’ – rather than something intellectual – comprehension, the ‘gifts of the intellect’.13 The understanding with which one acts – in ‘doing better’ – might, in certain respects, be ‘deep[er]’ than ‘reason’: ‘mysterious’ notions might be pertinent to acting; they might form a part of the awareness with which one acts. To maintain this, Newman would indicate how the ‘Christian mysteries’ are pertinent to ‘doing better’. He discusses the ‘practical effect’ of certain Christian doctrines: of the doctrine of the Incarnation, he observes ‘we are saved by the death of Christ; but who is Christ? Christ is the Very Son of God, Begotten of God and One with God from everlasting, God incarnate [and this] … is our inexpressible comfort, and a most sanctifying truth if we receive it rightly’; of the doctrine of the Trinity, he observes: ‘If our Redeemer were not God, and our Sanctifier were not God, how great would have been our danger of preferring creatures to the Creator! What a source of light, freedom, and comfort is it, to know we cannot love Them too much, or humble ourselves before Them too reverently, for both Son and Spirit are separately God! Such is the practical effect of the doctrine.’14 The doctrines sanction worship; they are a ‘source of light, freedom, and comfort’. Newman maintains, in ‘The Christian Mysteries’, that a ‘doctrine’ that is not fully comprehensible, may nevertheless have a salutary ‘practical effect’. In this, he would counter any attempt to subject the revelation to ‘human reason’. What he does not do, is attempt to determine whether a ‘doctrine’ is or is not a part of the revelation, according to whether it has a certain ‘practical effect’. What is more, he does not identify the ‘practical effect’ of a doctrine with certain ‘experienced effects’, attendant on belief in it; he seems, rather, to consider how certain doctrines

12. ‘The Christian Mysteries’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons i [hereafter PPS i] (1834; 1868; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1907), 203, 208. 13. ‘The Christian Mysteries’, in PPS i, 203, 205. 14. Ibid., 209, 210.

144

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

have ‘practical’ implications – they are to be acted on. In Tract 73, he maintains that a form of ‘rationalism’, in the ‘popular theology of the day’, would make the ‘experienced effects’ of a belief in certain doctrines the rationale for the ‘publishing’ of those doctrines: the Gospel is to be understood as an instrument for producing those ‘effects’, and whatever does not produce them, is not a part of the Gospel. It is Rationalism to accept the Revelation, and then to explain it away; to speak of it as the Word of God, and to treat it as the word of man; to refuse to let it speak for itself; to claim to be told the why and the how of God’s dealings with us, as therein described, and to assign to Him a motive and a scope of our own; to stumble at the partial knowledge which He may give us of them; to put aside what is obscure, as if it had not been said at all; to accept one half of what has been told us, and not the other half; to assume that the contents of Revelation are also its proof; to frame some gratuitous hypothesis about them, and then to garble, gloss, and colour them, to trim, clip, pare away, and twist them, in order to bring them into conformity with the idea to which we have subjected them.15

If the ‘Rationalist’ subordinates the revelation to the self – an attitude which ‘leads’ to a ‘narrow and egoistic temper’ – the ‘Catholic’, by contrast, believes in an ‘Objective Truth’, transcending the self: the ‘Catholic temper’ involves ‘throwing ourselves forward upon Him and waiting on Him’.16 By Objective Truth is meant the Religious System considered as existing in itself, external to this or that particular mind: by Subjective, is meant that which each mind receives in particular, and considers to be such. To believe in Objective Truth is to throw ourselves forward upon that which we have but partially mastered or made subjective; to embrace, maintain, and use general propositions which are larger than our own capacity, of which we cannot see the bottom, which we cannot follow out into their multiform details; to come before and bow before the import of such propositions, as if we were contemplating what is real and independent of human judgment. Such a belief, implicit, and symbolized as it is in the use of creeds, seems to the Rationalist superstitious and unmeaning, and he consequently confines Faith to the province of Subjective Truth, or to the reception of doctrine, as, and so far as, it is met and apprehended by the mind, which will be differently, as he considers, in different persons, in the shape of orthodoxy in one, heterodoxy in another … Rationalism takes the words of Scripture as signs of Ideas; Faith, of Things or Realities … No revelation can be complete and systematic, from the weakness of the human intellect; so far as it is not such, it is mysterious. 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

15. Ibid., 32. 16. Ibid., 34.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

145

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.17

When Newman contrasts the ‘Religious System … as existing in itself, external to this or that particular mind’ with ‘that which each mind receives in particular’, the ‘System’, here, might be taken to be a system of ideas – having its own integrity. Such a system can be distinguished from what ‘this or that particular mind’ takes in, from how it is understood in ‘this or that particular mind’. Such a system is not independent of ‘mind’, per se, but it is something with its own coherence, its own integrity, and it is, as such, something more than what ‘this or that particular mind’ takes in. Yet Newman then observes that, to recognize ‘Objective Truth’ is to ‘bow before the import of such propositions, as if we were contemplating what is real and independent of human judgement’. The ‘Religious System’, in this regard, would seem to consist of certain realities, which ‘human judgement’ cannot fully comprehend. The ‘general propositions’ of doctrine are such that ‘we cannot see the bottom’ of them. ‘Faith’ takes the ‘words of Scripture’ to be concerned with ‘Things or Realities’, not merely ‘Ideas’. If they were concerned with ‘Ideas’, then they would be such that ‘we [could] see the bottom of them’. Newman suggests that revelation consists of ‘incomplete truths belonging to a vast system unrevealed’. The ‘truths’ are ‘incomplete’, presumably, in that the ‘vast system’ to which they ‘belong’ is not fully ‘revealed’ by them; each ‘truth’ manifests only a part of that ‘system’. Newman suggests that to ‘see the bottom’ of the ‘general propositions’ of doctrine would be to discern the ‘vast system’: to apprehend fully the ‘import’ of the ‘general propositions’ of the revelation would be to apprehend the ‘vast system’, with which those ‘propositions’ are concerned. Newman distinguishes between the ‘Dispensation’ and the ‘Revelation’. In ‘rationalist’ theology, the ‘Dispensation, in its length, depth, and height, is practically identified with its Revelation, or rather its necessarily superficial Manifestation’.18 Yet there is more in the ‘Dispensation’ – in the acts of God in, or toward, the world – than is manifest in the ‘Revelation’. According to the doctrine of the ‘Atonement’, in Catholic theology, the death of Christ had a ‘real virtue … as an expiation for sin’, a ‘real connexion’ to ‘God’s forgiveness of our sins’.19 The nature of that ‘connexion’, however – the ‘system’ within which that ‘connexion’ obtains – is not

17. Ibid., 34–5, 41–2. 18. Ibid., 48. 19. Ibid.

146

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

revealed: the ‘connexion’ is there, in the ‘Dispensation’, but its nature is not made fully manifest, or explained, in the ‘Revelation’. With regard to ‘the Atonement – why it was necessary, how it operates, is a Mystery; that is, the heavenly truth which is revealed, extends on each side of it into an unknown world’.20 For a ‘popular theology’, concerned only with what is ‘manifest’ in the ‘Revelation’ – and only to the extent that what is ‘manifest’ has, in being apprehended, certain ‘effects’ – ‘the reality of the Atonement, in itself, is [not] formally denied, but it is cast in the background, except so far as it can be discovered to be influential, viz., to show God’s hatred of sin, the love of Christ, and the like; and there is an evident tendency to consider it as a mere Manifestation of the love of Christ, to the denial of all real virtue in it as an expiation for sin.’21 In the ‘Revelation’, then, ‘the heavenly truth which is revealed, extends on each side … into an unknown world’. The ‘heavenly truth’ that is revealed would be unknown, were it not revealed; and, since the revelation presents something of ‘heavenly truth’, but not all of it, ‘we should be very reverent in dealing with Revealed Truth … . We should avoid all rash theorizing and systematizing as relates to it … [and] we should religiously adhere to the form of words and the ordinances under which it comes to us, through which it is revealed to us, and apart from which the Revelation does not exist, there being nothing else given us by which to ascertain or enter into it.’22 That one cannot discern a ‘system’, need not mean that there is no ‘system’ – it is not true that ‘nothing … [has] existence except so far forth as our minds discern it’. As all realities are unified, in themselves, so it might be that all the true propositions that can be stated about a certain reality can, ultimately, be brought into a unity, a system; but to be presented with true propositions about a reality is not to be presented with the ‘system’ according to which those propositions can be brought into a harmony, or unity. Newman maintains that ‘Revelation …considered as a Mystery … is a doctrine enunciated by inspiration, in human language, as the only possible medium of it, and suitably, according to the capacity of language; a doctrine lying hid in language, to be received in that language from the first by every mind, whatever be its separate power of understanding it; entered into more or less by this or that mind, as it may be; and admitting of being apprehended more and more perfectly according to the diligence of this mind and that’ such that ‘it is one and the same, independent and real, of depth unfathomable, and illimitable in its extent’.23 Newman maintains that ‘the most profound human philosophy’ is inclined to regard ‘Revelation as a collection of fragments of a great scheme’.24 He quotes from The Analogy of Religion, where Joseph Butler insists that ‘Christianity is a particular scheme under [the] general plan of Providence, and a part of it, conducive to its

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Ibid., 45. Ibid, 48. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 51.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

147

completion, with regard to mankind; consisting itself also of various parts and a mysterious economy … [and] this system or scheme of things is but imperfectly comprehended by us’.25 The ‘Religious System’, in this regard, is a part of a ‘scheme of things … but imperfectly comprehended by us’. When Newman observes that the ‘doctrine’ of ‘Revelation’, considered ‘as a Mystery’, is ‘of depth unfathomable’, the ‘depth unfathomable’ would seem to be the ‘depth’ of the ‘unknown world’, the ‘unilluminated’ aspects of the ‘Dispensation’, which are, so to speak, intimated by the revealed aspects of the ‘Dispensation’. Of this doctrine ‘lying hid in language’, he observes that it is ‘entered into more or less by this or that mind … [and that it admits of] being apprehended more and more perfectly according to the diligence of this mind and that’.26 This would suggest that there is a development in understanding – but can there be a development toward a fuller apprehension of the ‘unilluminated’, ‘unknown world’? Newman suggests that to recognize ‘Mystery’ in ‘Religious Truth’, is to recognize that the ‘propositions’ that ‘belong’ to the ‘Revelation’ manifest a single reality, something ‘one and the same, independent and real, of depth unfathomable, and illimitable in its extent’. There is ‘Mystery’ because the principle, according to which those various ‘propositions’ are unified, cannot be ‘discerned’ or articulated. Right reason and faith combine to lead us, instead of measuring a divine revelation by human standards, or systematizing, except so far as it does so itself, to take what is given as we find it, to use it and be content. For instance, Scripture says that Christ died for sinners; that He rose for our justification, that He went that the Spirit might come; so far we may systematize. Such and suchlike portions of a scheme are revealed, and we may use them, but no farther. On the other hand, the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity is a mere juxtaposition of separate truths, which to our minds involves inconsistency, when viewed together; nothing more being attempted by theologians, for nothing more is told us. Arrange and contrast them we may and do; systematize (that is, reduce them into an intelligible dependence on each other, or harmony with each other) we may not; unless indeed any such oversight of Revelation, such right of subjecting it to our understandings, is committed to us by Revelation itself.27

To recognize that the ‘separate truths’, set out in the ‘doctrine of the Trinity’, involve ‘inconsistency’, is to recognize that they concern ‘one and the same’ reality; to accept that, despite the ‘inconsistency’, these ‘separate’ propositions are nevertheless ‘truths’, is to recognize that the reality they concern is not fully ‘intelligible’. The awareness that this reality is a ‘Mystery’ affects how one takes the ‘inconsistency’. One will not attempt to ‘systematize’ – giving the ‘separate’ propositions an ‘import’ that would abolish the ‘inconsistency’. More than that, though, could there perhaps be a sense

25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 41. 27. Ibid., 52–3.

148

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

of the reality, the ‘Mystery’, that is ‘lying hid’ in these ‘separate truths’? In taking those ‘separate truths’ to concern ‘one and the same’ thing, does one form a sense of that thing, that reality? One cannot combine the separate truths into a system, but one combines them in another way, by taking them all to refer to a single ‘object of faith’: they might contribute, taken together, to the forming of a sense of that ‘object’. The awareness that there is a ‘Mystery’ makes one refrain from ‘systematizing’: one takes in ‘separate truths’, and, while one is conscious that one cannot combine them in a ‘system’, one is equally conscious that they concern something ‘one and the same’. One does not combine them in a ‘system’, but one combines them, in another way, in taking them to present aspects of something ‘one and the same’; and one forms, perhaps, a sense of this ‘something’, in taking in these various ‘truths’ – a sense of this ‘something’ which cannot be translated into a ‘system’ of notions, a sense of it that is ‘entered into more or less by this or that mind’. Newman maintains that ‘by Objective Truth is meant the Religious System considered as existing in itself, external to this or that particular mind’ and that ‘to believe in Objective Truth is to throw ourselves forward upon that which we have but partially mastered or made subjective’; ‘such a belief ’, he suggests, is ‘implicit, and symbolized … in the use of creeds’. He does not maintain, simply, that ‘Objective Truth’ is presented in the Creed, but that the ‘belief ’ in ‘Objective Truth’ is ‘symbolized’ in the ‘use of creeds’: the Creed is ‘external’ to ‘this or that particular mind’ in the way that ‘Objective Truth’ is. What is presented in the Creed is not a full and adequate manifestation of the ‘system’ of the whole Dispensation: a full and adequate knowledge of that ‘system’ is possessed by God alone. In Arians of the Fourth Century (1834), Newman observes that the Scriptures contain certain ‘economies’ – certain representations of the ‘actions’ of God – which are ‘condescensions to the infirmity and peculiarity of our minds, shadowy representations of realities which are incomprehensible to creatures such as ourselves’, representations ‘of greater truths untold, the best practical communication of them which our minds in their present state will admit’; but he insists that ‘whatever is told us from heaven, is true in so full and substantial a sense, that no possible mistake can arise practically from following it’ and that ‘on the other hand, that the greatest risk will result from attempting to be wiser than God has made us, and to outstep in the least degree the circle which is prescribed as the limit of our range’.28 (‘Following it’, here, suggests at once ‘acting in accordance with it’, and ‘following out its implications, thinking with and from it’.) While the Church does not claim to possess a full knowledge of the ‘Dispensation’, nevertheless it does present, in its ‘creeds’, a truth which purports to be ‘Objective’. In Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman observed that the Church formulated its creeds, and set out its definitions of doctrine, at a time when certain of its doctrines had been misunderstood, or denied. The act of defining certain

28. John Henry Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century [hereafter Arians] (1833; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 75, 76.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

149

doctrines – an act of ‘sovereignty’, manifesting the ‘look’, ‘bearing’, ‘voice’ of the Church – involves a claim to some kind of ‘mastery’. The systematic doctrine of the Trinity may be considered as the shadow, projected for the contemplation of the intellect, of the Object of scripturallyinformed piety: a representation, economical; necessarily imperfect, as being exhibited in a foreign medium, and therefore involving apparent inconsistencies or mysteries … brought forward at a time when, reason being disproportionately developed, and aiming at sovereignty in the province of religion, its presence became necessary to expel an usurping idol from the house of God.29

To ‘expel’ the ‘idol’ of a false notion of the ‘Object’ of ‘piety’, the Church must claim to be able to distinguish between correct and incorrect intellectual ‘representations’ of that ‘Object’ – even if correct ‘representations’ cannot but be ‘economical’ and ‘necessarily imperfect’. A year after writing Tract 73, ‘On the Introduction of Rationalist Principles into Revealed Religion’, Newman published his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837), in which he accused the ‘church of Rome’ of a kind of ‘systematizing’, and maintained that this systematizing was connected to the ‘Roman’ claim to ‘infallibility’. According to its theory, the Church [of Rome] professes to know only what the Apostles knew, to have received just what they delivered, neither more nor less. But in fact, she is obliged to profess a complete knowledge of the whole Dispensation, such as the Apostles had not. Unless we know the whole of any subject we must have difficulties somewhere or other; and where they are left, there we cannot possess infallible knowledge. To know some things in any subject infallibly, implies that we know all things. Or, to put the matter more clearly, where there is knowledge of only portions of a system, one of those portions will be more plain and certain to us than another, and can be spoken of more confidently; thus the clearness of our view will vary with those portions, but there are no degrees in Infallibility. Now partial and incomplete knowledge must surely be an inseparable attendant on a theology, which reveals the wonders of heaven. The human mind cannot measure the things of the Spirit. Christianity is a supernatural gift, originating and living in the unseen world and only extending into this. It is a vast scheme running out into width and breadth, encompassing us round about, not embraced by us. No one can see the form of a building but those who are external to it. We are within the Divine Dispensation; we cannot take it in with the eye, ascertain its proportions, pursue its lines, foretell their directions and coincidences, or ascertain their limits. We see enough for practice, but not even as much as this with an equal degree of clearness; but one part more clearly than another. These detached portions of

29. Arians, 145.

150

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

a complicated system necessarily vary in the precision and definiteness with which they come to the mind. That which is set before it in many of its relations is more fully understood and grasped than that which is only just revealed. When the mind knows a certain part of a system, it cannot ascertain the limits of its knowledge; as the eye when fixed on any object cannot determine how much it indirectly sees all around it. Surely the Apostles themselves, though infallibly sure of the greater truths, could not determine the limits of their infallibility. To know the lesser truths as they knew the main ones, had been to open a fresh field of knowledge beyond, in the way of deduction and implication. It would have been like moving the eye to a new object, which brings it into a new range of vision. Thus, I say, to know all that is revealed with equal clearness, implies that there is nothing not revealed. Agreeably with this anticipation, the Church of Rome is in fact led on to profess to know not only infallibly but completely. She begins by claiming the power of infallibly determining throughout the range of the Apostles’ knowledge, of accurate delineation in all such lesser matters as they would not be able to realize to themselves as certain, of rendering equally vivid all those marvellous traces of things invisible, which in the first inspired teachers would gradually melt from distinctness in their outlines into dim distance or into minute intricacy of detail. And, in consequence, she is led on from the profession of uniform precision to that of universal knowledge.30

In 1877, Newman, who had by then accepted the ‘Roman’ claim to infallibility, added a note to his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, asking, ‘What has infallibility to do with systematizing? Scripture is infallible, but it does not systematize.’31 The connection between ‘infallibility’ and ‘systematizing’, for Newman in 1837, would seem to consist in his sense that ‘to know some things in any subject infallibly, implies that we know all things’, for ‘unless we know the whole of any subject we must have difficulties somewhere or other’; and ‘to know all that is revealed with equal clearness, implies that there is nothing not revealed’. Newman, in 1837, equates knowing ‘infallibly’ with knowing fully, comprehending fully, apprehending with utter ‘clearness’. Roman theology … professes to be a complete theology. It arranges, adjusts, explains, exhausts every part of the Divine Economy. It may be said to leave no region unexplored, no heights unattempted, rounding off its doctrines with a neatness and finish which are destructive of many of the most noble and most salutary exercises of mind in the individual Christian. That feeling of awe which the mysteriousness of the Gospel should excite, fades away under this fictitious illumination which is poured over the entire Dispensation. Criticism, we know, is commonly considered fatal to poetical fervour and imagination; and in like manner this technical religion destroys the delicacy and reverence of the

30. ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in VM i, 89–91. 31. VM i, 98n.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

151

Christian mind. So little has actually been revealed to us in a systematic way, that the genuine science of theology carried to its furthest limits, has no tendency to foster a spirit of rationalism. But Rome would classify and number all things, she would settle every sort of question, as if resolved to detect and compass by human reason what runs out into the next world or is lost in this.32

Of the claim that ‘Roman theology … professes to be a complete theology’, Newman would remark, in 1877, that ‘here [there is] a confusion between the Church and her Schools. Her infallible voice is seldom exercised, and comparatively few dogmas have been promulgated to be accepted de fide. But the subtle and curious intellect of her theologians has investigated and determined innumerable questions, not with infallible accuracy, but each in his own way, and often in opposition to each other, still with incalculable advantage to religion.’33 The ‘voice’ of the Church is something other than ‘Roman theology’, the theology of the ‘Schools’. In 1877, Newman observes that the ‘infallible voice’ of the Church has not enunciated anything like a ‘complete’ account of the ‘Dispensation’. (What is more, that theologians have attempted to determine ‘innumerable questions’ need not mean that they have claimed to possess a full comprehension of the ‘Dispensation’. One might resolve ‘innumerable questions’, without claiming to resolve all questions.) In 1837, he maintains that, to have an ‘infallible’ authority, one must have a ‘complete’ knowledge, so ‘Rome’ accordingly professes to present a ‘complete theology’, to show that it has such a ‘complete’ knowledge; in 1877 he denies that ‘Rome’ professes to present a ‘complete theology’ – and if ‘Rome’ does not feel impelled, by its claim to infallibility, to profess a ‘complete theology’ (as manifesting a complete knowledge of the ‘Dispensation’) then it would seem ‘Rome’ does not take it that its claim to infallibility is a claim to a complete knowledge of the ‘Dispensation’. Newman insists, in 1877, that it is ‘not axiomatic, just the contrary, that to be infallible in what is revealed implies a profession of knowing what to the Apostles was not revealed’. Newman presents an analogy between ‘poetical fervour and imagination’ and ‘the reverence of the Christian mind’: ‘criticism’ is to ‘poetical fervour and imagination’ as the ‘technical religion’ of Rome is to the ‘delicacy and reverence of the Christian mind’; and this ‘technical religion’ is quite different from ‘the genuine science of theology’. This ‘genuine science’, presumably, is a matter of reflecting on what ‘has been revealed to us’, and a proper understanding of what has been revealed involves an appreciation that it cannot be fully comprehended in a ‘systematic’ manner: the ‘poetical’ consists in an awareness of that which surpasses comprehension; to construe ‘what has been revealed’ in a ‘poetical’ manner, with proper ‘reverence’, is to register that it is an ‘incomplete’ manifestation of that which cannot be manifested fully, of that which can be represented only in a ‘necessarily imperfect’ manner, ‘as being exhibited in a foreign medium’. To construe the representation as ‘necessarily imperfect’ is to have a sense of what is being represented, the ‘Object of … piety’ as

32. Ibid., 91–2. 33. Ibid., 90n.

152

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

surpassing all representation, and it is ‘the Christian mind’ which has a sense of that ‘Object’, a sense that is akin to ‘poetical … imagination’. When all the representations of the ‘Object’ of faith are taken to be imperfect, and are experienced as having a ‘depth’ that is ‘unfathomable’, then they are construed in a ‘poetical’ manner. Newman maintains, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church that the ‘Roman’ doctrine of the infallibility of the Church is ‘made to rest upon the notion, that any degree of doubt about religious truth is incompatible with faith, and that an external infallible assurance is necessary to exclude doubt’.34 ‘Proof,’ or certainty of the things believed, is secured upon two conditions; if there be a God, ‘who cannot lie,’ as the source of Revelation, and if the Church be infallible to convey it. Otherwise, it is urged, what is called faith is merely opinion, as being but partial or probable knowledge. To this statement it is sufficient to reply here, that according to English principles, religious faith has all it needs in having only the former of these two secured to it, in knowing that God is our Creator and Preserver, and that He may, if it so happen, have spoken. This indeed is its trial and its praise, so to hang upon the thought of Him and desire Him as not to wait till it knows for certain from infallible informants whether or no He has spoken, but to act in the way which seems on the whole most likely to please Him. If we are asked, how Faith differs from Opinion, we reply, in its considering His being, governance, and will as a matter of personal interest and importance to us, not in the degree of light or darkness under which it perceives the truth concerning them. When we are not personally concerned, even the highest evidence does not move us; when we are concerned, the very slightest is enough. Though we knew for certain that the planet Jupiter were in flames, we should go on as usual; whereas even the confused cry of fire at night rouses us from our beds. Action is the criterion of true faith, as determining accurately whether we connect the thought of God with the thought of ourselves, whether we love Him, or regard Him otherwise than we regard the existence of the solar system. And as well might we say, that the man who acts upon a letter from a friend does not believe his friend, because he is not infallibly sure the letter is not forged, as deny that such men have real faith as hear the Church and obey, though they have no assurance that in reporting God’s words, she cannot err. Nay, doubt in some way or measure may even be said to be implied in a Christian’s faith. Not that infallible certainty would take away all trial of our hearts, and force us to obey, nor again as if nothing were clearly told us by Revelation, for much is; but that the greater the uncertainty, the fuller exercise there is of our earnestness in seeking the truth, and of our moral sagacity in tracing and finding it. As reasonably then might fear, despondency, dulness of mind, or heaviness of spirit be judged inconsistent with faith as doubt. Imperfection of every kind, moral and natural, is a trial or temptation, and is met by striving and acting against it.35

34. Ibid., 85–6. 35. Ibid., 86–7.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

153

In the copious notes which Newman made on this passage in 1877, he focused on the question of ‘proof ’, and belief. Of the remark ‘the greater the uncertainty, the fuller exercise there is of our earnestness in seeking the truth’, he remarked that the ‘uncertainty’ here is an ‘uncertainty of evidence’.36 He distinguishes, in 1877, between ‘uncertainty of evidence’, or incompleteness in ‘evidence’, and ‘uncertainty’ as a state of mind: one might come to be certain of something, even if the evidence one has, in proof of that thing, is, in itself, not irresistible; and one might be entitled to take incomplete evidence as sufficient for belief, in matters where complete evidence is unobtainable. ‘There is always in concrete matters incompleteness in the evidence of a fact, even when there is enough for faith.’37 What matters is the judgment, whereby one determines that the ‘evidence’, though characterized by the ‘incompleteness’ which is inevitable in ‘concrete matters’, is ‘enough’. What Newman does not remark on, in 1877, is how in 1837 he seems not to distinguish between doubt about ‘whether’ God ‘has spoken’ and doubt about ‘what’ God has spoken. When he first mentions the ‘infallibility’ of the Church, he suggests that it is a matter of the Church being ‘infallible to convey’ what God – as the ‘source’ of revelation – has ‘spoken’. He then remarks that those with genuine faith need not know ‘for certain from infallible informants whether or no He has spoken’. He initially remarks that, according to ‘Rome’, ‘proof ’, in matters relating to the revelation, is ‘secured upon two conditions; if there be a God, “who cannot lie,” as the source of Revelation, and if the Church be infallible to convey it’; he then observes that ‘according to English principles, religious faith has all it needs in having only the former of these two secured to it’; but he then describes ‘the former’ of these ‘conditions’ not as a belief that ‘God … [is] the source of Revelation’, but as a belief that ‘God is our Creator and Preserver, and that He may, if it so happen, have spoken’. He then maintains that there may be ‘real faith’ in those who ‘hear the Church and obey, though they have no assurance that in reporting God’s words, she cannot err’ – though the question, in this case, is not so much whether God ‘may … have spoken’, as whether a certain ‘report’ of ‘God’s words’ is true to what God has ‘spoken’. One may believe that God ‘has spoken’ (and not simply believe that God ‘may’ have spoken) and yet one may be uncertain about whether the Church is ‘reporting God’s words’ accurately: one may believe that there has been a revelation, but may be uncertain that ‘this’ – which one is being presented with by a particular church – is the genuine revelation. Newman is reflecting on a situation in which one is presented with what purports to be the ‘word’ of God, a situation in which two questions arise together: the question of whether God ‘has spoken’, and the question of whether God has spoken these ‘words’ in particular. The question of whether God ‘has spoken’ arises in relation to particular ‘words’, which, it is claimed, are the words of God. There is a particular situation, in which a particular response, or decision, is required. The reasoning involved in determining on a response, in a particular

36. Ibid., 87n. 37. Ibid., 88n.

154

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

situation, is ‘practical’. Newman maintains that ‘action is the criterion of true faith’. What makes the difference between ‘Faith’ and ‘Opinion’, Newman maintains, is ‘personal interest’ – ‘When we are not personally concerned, even the highest evidence does not move us; when we are concerned, the very slightest is enough.’ In his sermon, ‘Faith without Sight’, preached in 1834, Newman had contrasted those who ‘make the truth of Christianity a practical concern’, with those who treat Christianity as if ‘a mere matter of philosophical or historical research’.38 It takes a certain ‘practical’ wisdom to recognize that the matters with which ‘Revelation’ is concerned are matters of ‘personal interest’. In any matter so momentous and practical as the welfare of the soul, a wise man will not wait for the fullest evidence before he acts; and will show his caution, not in remaining uninfluenced by the existing report of a divine message, but by obeying it though it might be more clearly attested … It is safest and wisest to act as if it were certain.39

It takes practical wisdom to recognize that the matters with which ‘Revelation’ is concerned are of ‘personal interest’. It takes practical wisdom to recognize how it is ‘safest and wisest to act’. It, equally, takes practical wisdom to recognize that what is presented in the ‘Revelation’ is a form of practical wisdom – to be acted on. What is more, if one has lived in accordance with true practical wisdom – in accordance with the insights of the ‘conscience’ – then one will have a ‘presentiment of an Invisible Guide’, and one will feel an ‘antecedent desire or persuasion that God may have made a revelation of Himself in the world’: one will, when presented with a purported ‘revelation’, be disposed to believe that the revelation is genuine. To recognize that it might be ‘safest and wisest’ to act in accordance with revelation, is to believe that God ‘may … have spoken’: it is to take the view that since the revelation might be genuine, to act ‘as if ’ it were true is ‘safest’. To recognize that what is presented in the revelation is ‘practical wisdom’ – that it is ‘wisest’ to act in accordance with it – is to recognize a certain wisdom in it and to act accordingly; but to recognize the ‘practical wisdom’ in the revelation for what it is, and to act accordingly, need not be to recognize that wisdom as divine. To recognize that what is presented in the revelation is the consummation of ‘practical wisdom’ – surpassing all other wisdom – and to have the ‘interest’ in ‘the good’ which disposes one to feel an ‘antecedent desire or persuasion that God may have made a revelation of Himself in the world’ – this is to be disposed, in ‘reason’, and in ‘will’, to believe that what purports to be the revelation is genuine. All of these attitudes require, and involve, a certain ‘practical wisdom’, and all of these attitudes are consistent with ‘acting’ in accordance with the ‘wisdom’ of the faith; yet they are, evidently, different, and ‘action’ is not a ‘criterion’ for distinguishing between them.

38. ‘Faith without Sight’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii], (1835; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 21. 39. ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 21.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

155

In his 1877 notes on his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman makes a distinction between acting on ‘real certitude’ and acting on ‘practical certitude’; and he relates this to the difference between acting on a ‘confused cry of fire at night’ – as the ‘safest’ course, however unlikely it may seem that there is a ‘fire’ – and acting on a ‘letter from a friend’. I don’t believe the cry of fire; I do believe my friend’s letter. Here there is a confusion between dimness in faith and a sense of dimness in the evidence on which it is grounded. Evidence is always incomplete, but sometimes it is sufficient for real certitude (as regards my friend), sometimes only for what is called practical certitude, i.e. for what is prudent in action, (as regards the cry of fire.)40

To act ‘as if ’ a purported revelation were true, as the ‘safest’ course (for God ‘may … have spoken’) would, then, be to act with ‘practical certitude’. Newman brings out, in these notes, the difference between acting as if a revelation were true – as the ‘safest’ course – and acting on the belief that a revelation is true. Newman, in 1837, seems to take it that the recognition of ‘uncertainty’ or incompleteness in the ‘evidence’ is inconsistent with ‘certitude’ (as a state of mind) with regard to that which the ‘evidence’ shows. He does not characterize faith as involving ‘certitude’: its ‘criterion’ is ‘action’. To ‘hear the Church and obey’ is enough, even if one is in some doubt as to whether that the ‘words’ presented by the Church are ‘God’s words’ (and even if one feels that while God ‘may … have spoken’, there is some doubtfulness as to whether He really has).

3. In the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman aims to set out an ‘English’ understanding of the authority, and the function, of the Church. He presents the English Church as taking a via media, between the ‘Protestant sectary’ – who maintains that Scripture, alone, is the sole ‘rule’ of faith, and the sole means of acquiring the faith – and the ‘controversialist of Rome’ – who maintains that Scripture is not an adequate ‘rule’ of faith, but needs to be supplemented by ‘Tradition’. Newman, as an Anglican, acknowledges ‘Tradition’, which has authority as deriving from the Apostles, but he maintains that there are not any doctrines in the ‘Tradition’ which are not, equally, ‘in’ the Scriptures. The Creed can be proved from the Scriptures. As the Creed, however, presents the dogmas of the faith with greater perspicuity than the Scriptures, so it is a ‘key’ to the interpretation of the Scriptures (the ‘Creed confronts Scripture, and seems to say to us, “Search the Scriptures, for they testify of Me”’).41 To have this ‘key’, to be acquainted with

40. VM i, 87n. 41. Ibid., 166.

156

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the Creed, is to be able to recognize that the faith articulated in the Creed is the faith animating the Scriptures. One must be taught the faith before one can discern it rightly in the Scriptures: while it might be true, ‘as an abstract proposition that a Christian may gain the whole truth from the Scriptures’, nevertheless ‘the chances are very seriously against a given individual’, for ‘the qualifications for rightly apprehending it [in the Scriptures, without being already acquainted with the Creed] are so rare and high’.42 Just as the Creed is an adequate expression of the faith animating the Scriptures, so it is an adequate expression of the faith animating the Tradition derived from the Apostles. To ascertain what this faith was, one must consult the records of ‘Antiquity’. ‘Whatever doctrine the primitive ages unanimously attest, whether by consent of Fathers, or by Councils, or by the events of history, or by controversies, or in whatever way, whatever may fairly and reasonably be considered to be the universal belief of those ages, is to be received as coming from the Apostles.’43 The ‘principle’ invoked here, ‘which we act on daily’ is ‘that what many independent and competent witnesses guarantee, is true’.44 Newman maintains that ‘when the controversialist of Rome appeals to Antiquity as our great teacher, we accept his appeal, but we deny that his special doctrines are to be found in Antiquity … any more than they are in the Bible; and we maintain that his professed Tradition is not really such, that it is a Tradition of men, that it is not continuous, that it stops short of the Apostles.’45 The records of Antiquity, and the works of the Fathers of the Church, are to be taken as ‘witnesses’ to Tradition; and they can ‘witness’ to Tradition when interpreted according to the ‘Rule’ of St Vincent – the ‘Rule’ that the original Tradition is manifest in what has been taught always, and everywhere, and by all. The original Tradition has its adequate and definitive expression in the Creed; the knowledge of ‘Truth’, acquired from the Creed, is sufficient for resolving all questions pertaining to the faith. For Newman, then, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, one attains to the Truth by assimilating the Creed, and one assimilates the Creed by participating in the life of the Church to which one belongs. The Creed can be ‘proved’ from Scripture (though it is, equally, a ‘key’ for interpreting Scripture): that various interpretations of Scripture exist does not mean that there is not a correct interpretation; it means that the Scriptures are difficult to interpret (and that they are not infrequently misinterpreted); yet, if one is acquainted with the Creed, one can recognize that the faith articulated in the Creed is the faith animating the Scriptures. The Creed can, equally, be ‘proved’ from Antiquity, in the sense that the records of Antiquity attest to the original Tradition, derived from the Apostles, and show that the faith articulated in the Creed is the faith which animated the original Tradition. Newman maintains that the controversy between the church of England and the church of Rome is concerned with ‘Antiquity’. The ‘Romanist’ declares certain

42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 50. Ibid. Ibid., 37.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

157

doctrines to be a part of the saving faith. The Anglican maintains that, if they were a part of the saving faith, they would be attested by the records of Antiquity, as interpreted by the ‘Rule’ of St Vincent: there would be indications, in the records of Antiquity, of those doctrines having been taught always, and everywhere, and by all, as ‘saving’. The Anglican maintains that, as the records of Antiquity do not attest, in this way, to those doctrines, so they are not to be considered a part of the ‘saving’ faith: the ‘Romanist’ adds to, misrepresents – and thereby corrupts – the faith.

4. In the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman maintains that the Church is ‘indefectible’ in doctrine. He insists, though, that the ‘Romanist’ is mistaken, in appealing to the ‘voice’ of the ‘existing Church’, to determine what is, and what is not, a part of the ‘saving’ faith. Newman acknowledges that the ‘Romanists’ have a correct notion of Tradition, but that they use this notion incorrectly, in justifying their ‘perversions’ of doctrine. The ‘Romanists’ take Tradition to consist in ‘the whole system of faith and ordinances which they have received from the generation before them, and that generation again from the generation before itself ’.46 This is not something that can be ‘reduced to writing’. ‘No one you fall in with on the highway, can tell you all his mind at once; much less could the Apostles, possessed as they were of great and supernatural truths, and busied in the propagation of the Church, digest in one Epistle or Treatise a systematic view of the Revelation made to them’, and, in any case, ‘we may grant, that they did not do so; there being confessedly little of system or completeness in any portion of the New Testament’.47 [Tradition] is latent, but it lives. It is silent, like the rapids of a river, before the rocks intercept it. It is the Church’s unconscious habit of opinion and sentiment; which she reflects upon, masters, and expresses, according to the emergency. We see then the mistake of asking for a complete collection of the Roman Traditions; as well might we ask for a full catalogue of a man’s tastes and thoughts on a given subject. Tradition in its fulness is necessarily unwritten; it is the mode in which a society has felt or acted during a certain period, and it cannot be circumscribed any more than a man’s countenance and manner can be conveyed to strangers in any set of propositions.48

This ‘Tradition’ may be ‘viewed as latent in the Church’s teaching, or as passing into writing and being fixed in the decrees of the Councils or amid the works of the

46. Ibid., 30. 47. Ibid., 31, 32. 48. Ibid., 32.

158

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

ancient Fathers’.49 Newman maintains, though, that the ‘Roman controversialist’ must ‘show, not merely that there was such a living and operative Tradition, and that it has lasted to this day, but that their own characteristic doctrines are parts of it’. He insists that one cannot, now, in determining the faith, appeal to ‘the existing as well as … the ancient Church … [as] Christendom now differs from itself in all points except those in which it is already known to have agreed of old’.50 He suggests, that is, that the genuine Tradition has not ‘lasted to this day’. Newman maintains that the Church is ‘indefectible’ in ‘doctrine’ – God has promised that the Church will ever impart the saving faith. Not only is the Church Catholic bound to teach the Truth, but she is ever divinely guided to teach it; her witness of the Christian Faith is a matter of promise as well as of duty; her discernment of it is secured by a heavenly as well as by a human rule. She is indefectible in it, and therefore not only has authority to enforce, but is of authority in declaring it.51

With regard to this ‘promise’, and the attendant ‘authority’ of the Church, he observes that while the ‘promise’ has been fulfilled, it has not been fulfilled to the extent that it might have been (owing to the ‘misconduct’ of the ‘members’ of the Church, which ‘may have forfeited for [the Church] in a measure her original privileges’).52 The ‘promise … is satisfied in what we see fulfilled at this day, viz. in the whole Church in all its branches having ever maintained the faith in its essential outlines’.53 The doctrines on which the ‘branches’ of the Church – England, Rome, and Greece – agree, constitute ‘that fundamental Faith [the] continuance [of which] is promised to the end of the world’.54 That there are ‘branches’ of the Church, that the Church is not wholly unified, is itself why the ‘promise’ is not fulfilled as it might have been, why the Church is not as God ‘intended’ it to be: ‘The Christian Church was intended to come on earth in the power and spirit of Christ Himself, her Lord and Defender … . She was to manifest Him mystically before the eyes and in the souls of men who is on the right hand of God … . Her glory was to be like that of heaven, though invisible, her reign eternal, and her kingdom universal.’55 In the New Testament … the promises made to her actually did depend more or less upon a condition which now for many centuries she has broken. This condition is Unity, which is made by Christ and His Apostles, as it were, the

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Ibid. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 198. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 197.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

159

sacramental channel through which all the gifts of the Spirit, and among them purity of doctrine, are secured to the Church … A visible unity, a unity such as the world could recognize, whatever depths it has besides, is made the token, or the condition, as we view it, of that glory in which the Church was to be clad.56

As an Anglican, Newman felt it necessary to maintain that the Catholic Church consisted of several ‘branches’ – it was as a ‘branch’ that the English Church could be considered a part, or ‘organ’, of the Catholic Church. There could be a fracturing of the Church into ‘branches’, without this making for a complete destruction of ‘Unity’: the Church is ‘no longer one in the fullest sense’, but ‘since the duty of unity admits of fuller or scantier fulfilment, it does not follow, though it has been broken in its highest sense, that therefore it is altogether lost, and its privileges with it; or again, that it would be lost in the same sense by every kind of infringement, or is actually lost in the same degree in every place’.57 The Church, then, still exists, as ‘one’ – so the divine ‘promise’ of ‘indefectibility’ in ‘doctrine’ still obtains – but, as it is ‘no longer one in the fullest sense’, there has not been the ‘fullest’ realization of the divine ‘promises’ – a Church with a ‘glory … like that of heaven’. Newman would attempt to set out the ‘sense’ in which the Church, despite its fracturing into ‘branches’, could still be regarded as ‘one’, in an essay on ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’ for the British Critic in 1841. With regard to the Anglican Church, he asks, ‘the Church being “one body,” how can we, estranged as we are from every part of it except our own dependencies, unrecognized and without intercommunion, maintain our right to be considered part of that body?’58 He then maintains that ‘the Anglican view … of the Church has ever been this, that its separate portions need not be united together, for their essential completeness, except by the tie of descent from one original’: the ‘one Church’ is present, in its entirety, in each ‘portion’, each Bishopric, provided that Bishopric has a ‘tie of descent’ to the Apostles – ‘each diocese is a perfect independent Church, sufficient for itself ’; if a Bishopric has Apostolical ‘descent’ – if it proceeds from the Apostolical succession – then the ‘one Church’ is realized in it.59 ‘Intercommunion is a duty as other duties, but is not the tenure or instrument of the communion between the unseen word and this … not necessary in order to the conveyance of grace.’60 Newman maintains, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, that the ‘promise [of indefectibility] … is satisfied in what we see fulfilled at this day, viz. in the whole Church in all its branches having ever maintained the faith in

56. Ibid., 199. 57. Ibid., 202. 58. ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical ii [hereafter ECH ii] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 16. 59. ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, in ECH ii, 18, 20. 60. Ibid., 24.

160

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

its essential outlines’.61 He then suggests that the ‘essential outlines’ of the faith, the ‘original deposit’, can be ascertained by consulting ‘what that common faith is, which [the Church] now holds everywhere as the original deposit’. ‘We shall find what is commonly called the Creed, to be that in which all branches of the Church agree; and, therefore, that the fundamental or essential doctrines are those which are contained in the Creed.’62 (He does not claim that this is the only way of determining the ‘original deposit’: one can, equally, consult the records of ‘Antiquity’, to ascertain what has been professed always, everywhere, and by all.) He maintains that the Fathers of the Church witness to the view that the Creed, professed on Baptism, was considered ‘the rule of teaching subsequently to admission’.63 (Anything supplemental to the Creed cannot be regarded as a part of the saving faith; but ‘Rome’ teaches doctrines, not in the Creed, which it declares to be a part of the faith.) With regard to the formulation of the Creed, by the early Church, Newman observes that the Creed was the expression of a ‘Faith’ that was present ‘in the minds and mouths of all Christians’.64 The ‘sense’ of the Creed was present – before it was set out in the ‘words’ of the Creed – in the ‘minds’ of ‘Christians’. The words of the Creed were not inspired; they were only valuable as expressing a certain sense, and if they were found deficient in expressing that sense, there was as little interference with things sacred, as little real change, in correcting or supplying what was needful, as in completing the lines of a chart or map by the original. That original was the one universally received Faith, which was in the minds and mouths of all Christians without variation or ambiguity. When the early Christians used the words ‘Son of God,’ they did not use a dead letter; they knew what they meant by it, and they one and all had the same meaning.65

The ‘Faith’, expressed in the Creed, present as a ‘sense’ in the ‘minds’ of ‘Christians’, was there in ‘the Church’s unconscious habit of opinion and sentiment, which she reflects upon, masters, and expresses, according to the emergency’:66 the ‘Faith’ was present in the tradition of the Church. That ‘traditionary teaching’ has, however, been ‘impaired’. An explanation of the original wording [of the Creed] might be made, I conceive, even now, if the whole of Christendom agreed together in the explanation, and in such explanation conveying the uniform sense of the Church Catholic, and

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

VM i, 197. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 225–6. Ibid., 32.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

161

in its expediency. At the same time the Church necessarily has less power over the Creed now than anciently; for at first it was but a form of sound words, subservient to a Faith vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian, and so of secondary value; but now that the living power of truth has declined, it is a witness of the primitive, instead of being a mere summary of an existing Faith. Since traditionary teaching has been impaired, it has become almost sacred from being the chief remains left us of apostolical truth; as the likeness of a friend, however incomplete in itself, is cherished as the best memorial of him, when he has been taken from us.67

Newman maintains that ‘traditionary teaching has been impaired’, but such ‘traditionary teaching’ still continues in one form: there is still a ‘habit of opinion and sentiment’ in the Church. Newman makes a distinction, in this regard, between ‘Episcopal’ tradition, and ‘Prophetical’ tradition. The Creed is a collection of definite articles set apart from the first, passing from hand to hand, rehearsed and confessed at Baptism, committed and received from Bishop to Bishop, forced upon the attention of each Christian, and thus demanding and securing due explanation of its meaning. It is received on what may fitly be called, if it must have a distinctive name, Episcopal Tradition. … A Tradition, thus formally and statedly enunciated and delivered from hand to hand, is of the nature of a written document, and has an evidence of its Apostolical origin the same in kind with that adducible for the Scriptures. … Besides this, there is what may be called Prophetical Tradition. Almighty God placed in His Church first Apostles, or Bishops, secondarily Prophets. Apostles rule and preach, Prophets expound. Prophets or Doctors are the interpreters of the revelation; they unfold and define its mysteries, they illuminate its documents, they harmonize its contents, they apply its promises. Their teaching is a vast system, not to be comprised in a few sentences, not to be embodied in one code or treatise, but consisting of a certain body of Truth, pervading the Church like an atmosphere, irregular in its shape from its very profusion and exuberance; at times separable only in idea from Episcopal Tradition, yet at times melting away into legend and fable; partly written, partly unwritten, partly the interpretation, partly the supplement of Scripture, partly preserved in intellectual expressions, partly latent in the spirit and temper of Christians; poured to and fro in closets and upon the housetops, in liturgies, in controversial works, in obscure fragments, in sermons, in popular prejudices, in local customs. This I call Prophetical Tradition, existing primarily in the bosom of the Church itself, and recorded in such measure as Providence has determined in the writings of eminent men. This is obviously of a very different kind from the Episcopal Tradition, yet in its first origin it is equally Apostolical, and, viewed as a whole, equally claims our zealous maintenance. ‘Keep that which is committed

67. Ibid., 232.

162

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

to thy charge,’ is St. Paul’s injunction to Timothy, and for this reason, because from its vastness and indefiniteness it is especially exposed to corruption, if the Church fails in vigilance. This is that body of teaching which is offered to all Christians even at the present day, though in various forms and measures of truth, in different parts of Christendom, partly being a comment, partly an addition upon the articles of the Creed … . For a time the whole Church agreed together in giving one and the same account of this Tradition; but in course of years, love waxing cold and schisms abounding, her various branches developed portions of it for themselves, out of the existing mass, and, according to the accidental influences which prevailed at the time, did the work well or ill, rudely or accurately.68

With regard to the form of ‘Prophetical Tradition’ which one is ‘offered’, and into which one is initiated – by participating in the life of the ‘branch’ of the Church to which one belongs – Newman maintains that one ‘must either believe or silently acquiesce in the whole of it’.69 Newman associates the ‘Prophetical Tradition’ with the interpretation of the ‘revelation’ – ‘Prophets and Doctors … unfold and define its mysteries, they illuminate its documents.’ ‘Episcopal Tradition’ is manifest in certain ‘definite articles’, which, as ‘forced upon the attention of each Christian’, demand ‘due explanation of its meaning’. Newman would suggest, it seems, that this ‘due explanation’ is involved in ‘Episcopal Tradition’; yet ‘Prophetical Tradition’ is itself an ongoing ‘body of teaching’ which is ‘partly a comment, partly an addition upon the articles of the Creed’: ‘comment’ on the Creed is a feature of ‘Prophetical Tradition’. When is ‘explanation’ or ‘comment’ on the Creed ‘Episcopal’, and when is it ‘Prophetical’? Newman acknowledges that the ‘Prophetical Tradition’ is ‘at times separable only in idea from Episcopal Tradition’. The ‘body of teaching’, ‘partly latent in the spirit and temper of Christians’ that is the ‘Prophetical Tradition’, would seem to constitute something like the sense of the ‘revelation’ in the ‘minds’ of Christians: it would seem to be a matter of the way in which the Church, at the present time, understands, reflects on, and assimilates the revelation. While the Church may have formulated ‘definite articles’ of faith – as an expression of ‘Episcopal Tradition’, and the obligation of the ‘Apostles, or Bishops’, to preserve and to transmit the faith – it would seem that the formulation of these ‘articles’ must have engaged the efforts of ‘Prophets and Doctors’, ‘unfold[ing] and defin[ing]’ the ‘mysteries’ of the ‘revelation’: the ‘articles’ were, after all, an expression of ‘a Faith vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian’. In Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman suggests that the ‘doctrine of the Trinity’ is a ‘representation’, in the ‘foreign medium’ of ‘words’ and ‘ideas’, of a certain awareness of the ‘Object of faith’ – an awareness that is different from its ‘representation’ in ‘words’ and ‘ideas’, an awareness which does not consist in

68. Ibid., 249–52. 69. Ibid., 254.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

163

such ‘words’ and ‘ideas’ but which is, rather, a matter of ‘moral feelings’. That is, Newman suggests that the awareness of the ‘Object of faith’ was – before being set out in the ‘doctrine of the Trinity’ – ‘latent in the spirit and temper of Christians’. Moral feelings do not directly contemplate and realize to themselves the objects which excite them. A heathen in obeying his conscience, implicitly worships Him of whom he has never distinctly heard. Again, a child feels not the less affectionate reverence towards his parents, because he cannot discriminate in words, nay, or in idea, between them and others … . As the mind is cultivated and expanded, it cannot refrain from the attempt to analyze the vision which influences the heart, and the Object in which that vision centres; nor does it stop till it has, in some sort, succeeded in expressing in words, what has all along been a principle both of its affections and of its obedience. But here the parallel ceases; the Object of religious veneration being unseen, and dissimilar from all that is seen, reason can but represent it in the medium of those ideas which the experience of life affords … and unless these ideas, however inadequate, be correctly applied to it, they react upon the affections, and deprave the religious principle … . Thus the systematic doctrine of the Trinity may be considered as the shadow, projected for the contemplation of the intellect, of the Object of scripturally-informed piety: a representation, economical; necessarily imperfect, as being exhibited in a foreign medium, and therefore involving apparent inconsistencies or mysteries; given to the Church by tradition contemporaneously with those apostolic writings, which are addressed more directly to the heart; kept in the background in the infancy of Christianity, when faith and obedience were vigorous, and brought forward at a time when, reason being disproportionately developed, and aiming at sovereignty in the province of religion, its presence became necessary to expel an usurping idol from the house of God.70

Newman characterizes the ‘Object of religious veneration’ as the ‘Object of Scripturally-informed piety’ – and this might suggest the sense of that ‘Object’ present in the early Church was derived from the Scriptures – but he then remarks that the ‘doctrine of the Trinity’ was ‘given to the Church contemporaneously with those apostolic writings’: that is, the ‘doctrine’, and the ‘Scriptures’, emerge from, are ‘given’ by, ‘tradition’; and this would suggest that the awareness of the ‘Object’ is there in the ‘tradition’ itself, that it is itself what animates the tradition – the ‘spirit and temper of Christians’ being informed by an awareness of that ‘Object’. Newman maintains that the ‘systematic doctrine of the Trinity’ is a ‘representation’ of the ‘Object’ of faith, the ‘Object’ of the ‘vision which influences the heart’, a representation that is ‘necessarily imperfect, as being exhibited in a foreign medium’. There are at least a couple of ways in which the ‘medium’ – of ‘words’, of ‘ideas which the experience of life affords’ – is ‘foreign’ to what is

70. Arians, 143–5.

164

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

represented: the ‘ideas’, which arise from, and pertain to, the ‘experience of life’, are inadequate to an ‘Object’ which transcends anything presented by the ‘experience of life’ – ideas which designate this-worldly objects cannot but be inadequate to an other-worldly ‘Object’ (so that ‘apparent inconsistencies, or mysteries’ arise, when this-worldly ideas are used to characterize an other-worldly ‘Object’); moreover, those ‘ideas’ and ‘words’ are ‘foreign’ to the ‘vision which influences the heart’, which is present in a form that is distinct from those ‘ideas’ and ‘words’, and does not consist in them. In a sermon on ‘The Incarnation’, preached in 1834, Newman reflects on the brevity and simplicity with which ‘the favoured Apostle and Evangelist’, St John, ‘announces’ in his Gospel the ‘Sacred Mystery’ of the Incarnation – ‘the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’. Thus briefly and simply does he speak as if fearing he should fail in fitting reverence. If any there was who might seem to have permission to indulge in words on this subject, it was the beloved disciple, who had heard and seen, and looked upon, and handled the Word of Life; yet, in proportion to the height of his privilege, was his discernment of the infinite distance between him and his Creator. Such too was the temper of the Holy Angels, when the Father ‘brought in the First-begotten into the world:’ [Heb. i. 6.] they straightway worshipped Him. And such was the feeling of awe and love mingled together, which remained for a while in the Church after Angels had announced His coming, and Evangelists had recorded His sojourn here, and His departure … . In the Church there was light and peace, fear, joy, and holy meditation. Lawless doubtings, importunate inquirings, confident reasonings were not.71

Newman contrasts the attitude of ‘worship’, ‘the feeling of awe and love mingled together’, with the inclination to ‘indulge in words’, in ‘doubtings … inquirings … reasonings’. The apprehension of Christ by ‘the favoured Apostle’, ‘who had heard and seen, and looked upon, and handled the Word of Life’, did not require, or involve, ‘words’: there is an apprehension of the ‘Word of Life’ that is prior to, that informs any ‘statements’ that might be made about it. Newman suggests that the ‘declarations’ of the ‘Creeds’ were needed to counter misconceptions arising from ‘doubtings … inquirings … reasonings’: the apprehension of ‘the Word of Life’, on the part of ‘the first generations of the Church’, did not consist in those ‘declarations’. For later generations of the Church, however, those ‘declarations’ may contribute to the forming of an ‘image’ of Christ. He who had seen the Lord Jesus with a pure mind, attending Him from the Lake of Gennesareth to Calvary, and from the Sepulchre to Mount Olivet, where He left this scene of His humiliation; he who had been put in charge with His Virgin Mother, and heard from her what she alone could tell of the Mystery to which

71. ‘The Incarnation’, in PPS ii, 26–7.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

165

she had ministered; and they who had heard it from his mouth, and those again whom these had taught, the first generations of the Church, needed no explicit declarations concerning His Sacred Person. Sight and hearing superseded the multitude of words; faith dispensed with the aid of lengthened Creeds and Confessions. There was silence. ‘The Word was made flesh;’ ‘I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;’ sentences such as these conveyed everything, yet were officious in nothing. But when the light of His advent faded, and love waxed cold, then there was an opening for objection and discussion, and a difficulty in answering. Then misconceptions had to be explained, doubts allayed, questions set at rest, innovators silenced. Christians were forced to speak against their will, lest heretics should speak instead of them. Such is the difference between our own state and that of the early Church … . We are obliged to speak more at length in the Creeds and in our teaching, to meet the perverse ingenuity of those who, when the Apostles were removed, could with impunity insult and misinterpret the letter of their writings. … Another reason of these statements is as follows: time having proceeded, and the true traditions of our Lord’s ministry being lost to us, the Object of our faith is but faintly reflected on our minds, compared with the vivid picture which His presence impressed upon the early Christians. True is it the Gospels will do very much by way of realizing for us the incarnation of the Son of God, if studied in faith and love. But the Creeds are an additional help this way. The declarations made in them, the distinctions, cautions, and the like, supported and illuminated by Scripture, draw down, as it were, from heaven, the image of Him who is on God’s right hand, preserve us from an indolent use of words without apprehending them, and rouse in us those mingled feelings of fear and confidence, affection and devotion towards Him, which are implied in the belief of a personal advent of God in our nature, and which were originally derived to the Church from the very sight of Him. … These statements – such, for instance, as occur in the Te Deum and Athanasian Creed – are especially suitable in divine worship, inasmuch as they kindle and elevate the religious affections. They are hymns of praise and thanksgiving; they give glory to God as revealed in the Gospel.72

Newman juxtaposes ‘the belief of a personal advent of God in our nature’ and the ‘very sight’ of Christ. The ‘belief of a personal advent of God in our nature’ would seem to be a matter of ideas, and the ‘very sight’ of Christ, a matter of experiences, encounters with a particular person. Newman suggests that the ‘belief ’ and the ‘sight’ evoke the same feelings. He observes that something of the memory of the encounter with Christ, the experience of a particular person, was transmitted to the ‘first generations of the Church’. How did the ‘sentences’, used by the earliest ‘generations of the Church’ – ‘The Word was made flesh’, or ‘I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord’ – relate to the experience of Christ, or the ‘vivid picture which his presence impressed’ on the memory? Did they ‘convey

72. Ibid., 27–9.

166

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

everything’ because they were accompanied with a ‘vivid picture’ of Christ? Did those ‘sentences’ add anything to that ‘vivid picture’ – an understanding of the ‘picture’ not ‘conveyed’ by the ‘picture’ alone? The ‘picture’ was a picture of the life of a person who, undertaking a teaching ministry, made various declarations about his own role and identity; the ‘sentences’ were statements made about the role and identity of that person, by those who had a ‘vivid picture’ of him. The ‘picture’ of Christ formed by those, such as the ‘favoured Apostle and Evangelist’, who had been personally acquainted with Christ, was a ‘picture’ that was formed in, and through, a personal relationship. With regard to Christians at the present time, Newman observes that ‘mingled feelings of fear and confidence, affection and devotion towards Him [who is on God’s right hand] … are implied in the belief of a personal advent of God in our nature’; and this would seem to suggest that the mere idea of a ‘personal advent of God in our nature’ implies, and elicits, certain ‘feelings’. Yet Newman, equally, suggests that the Creed is ‘illuminated by Scripture’: ‘The Gospels will do very much by way of realizing for us the incarnation of the Son of God, if studied in faith and love.’ He associates a proper ‘apprehending’ of the ‘sentences’ of the Creed with the forming of an ‘image’ of Christ – such an ‘apprehending’ can ‘draw down, as it were, from heaven, the image of Him who is on God’s right hand’. The Creed is not encountered and ‘apprehended’ in isolation, but in conjunction with the ‘picture’ of Christ presented in the Scriptures. What is more, Newman suggests that a right ‘apprehending’ of the Creed makes for – is oriented toward – the forming of an ‘image’ of Christ. He would suggest, it seems, that all that is set out in various ‘sentences’ of doctrine, about Christ, and in the Scriptures, is present in the ‘image’, ‘picture’, ‘sight’ of Christ – an image that was ‘impressed upon the early Christians’ by his ‘presence’, by their experience of him. The Creed is an ‘unfold[ing]’ of meanings present in that ‘image’. In a sermon preached in 1839, on ‘Unreal Words’, Newman maintains that ‘our professions, our creeds, our prayers, our dealings, our conversation, our arguments, our teaching must henceforth be sincere, or, to use an expressive word, must be real … . And yet it need scarcely be said, nothing is so rare as honesty and singleness of mind; so much so, that a person who is really honest, is already perfect.’73 He observes that ‘profession’ may be ‘unreal’, when individuals use certain words without fully apprehending their meaning – without a ‘real apprehension of the matters … discussed’ – going instead by ‘general principles … fancy, or by deduction and argument’, and becoming ‘theoretical and unreal’.74 It may, as such, be more a ‘misfortune’ than a ‘sin’ to be ‘unreal’ in this way – ‘It takes a long time really to feel and understand things as they are; we learn to do so only gradually.’75 Since ‘words’ can be ‘unreal’, though, an expression which, in one

73. John Henry Newman, ‘Unreal Words’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; 1869; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 30–1. 74. ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 35. 75. Ibid., 43.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

167

person, may be the ‘spontaneous and exuberant fruit’ of the ‘heart’ is, in another person, ‘hollowness’. The whole system of the Church, its discipline and ritual, are all in their origin the spontaneous and exuberant fruit of the real principle of spiritual religion in the hearts of its members. The invisible Church has developed itself into the Church visible, and its outward rites and forms are nourished and animated by the living power which dwells within it. Thus every part of it is real, down to the minutest details. But when the seductions of the world and the lusts of the flesh have eaten out this divine inward life, what is the outward Church but a hollowness and a mockery, like the whited sepulchres of which our Lord speaks, a memorial of what was and is not? and though we trust that the Church is nowhere thus utterly deserted by the Spirit of truth, at least according to God’s ordinary providence, yet may we not say that in proportion as it approaches to this state of deadness, the grace of its ordinances, though not forfeited, at least flows in but a scanty or uncertain stream?76

A ‘real apprehension’ of things, is something that ‘we learn … only gradually’. The mere fact of our saying more than we feel is not necessarily sinful. … We ever promise things greater than we master, and we wait on God to enable us to perform them. Our promising involves a prayer for light and strength. And so again we all say the Creed, but who comprehends it fully? All we can hope is, that we are in the way to understand it; that we partly understand it; that we desire, pray, and strive to understand it more and more. Our Creed becomes a sort of prayer … . Be in earnest, and you will speak of religion where, and when, and how you should; aim at things, and your words will be right without aiming. There are ten thousand ways of looking at this world, but only one right way. The man of pleasure has his way, the man of gain his, and the man of intellect his. Poor men and rich men, governors and governed, prosperous and discontented, learned and unlearned, each has his own way of looking at the things which come before him, and each has a wrong way. There is but one right way; it is the way in which God looks at the world. Aim at looking at it in God’s way. Aim at seeing things as God sees them. Aim at forming judgments about persons, events, ranks, fortunes, changes, objects, such as God forms. Aim at looking at this life as God looks at it. Aim at looking at the life to come, and the world unseen, as God does … . It is not an easy thing to learn that new language which Christ has brought us. He has interpreted all things for us in a new way; He has brought us a religion which sheds a new light on all that happens. Try to learn this language. Do not get it by rote, or speak it as a thing of course. Try to understand what you say. Time is short, eternity is long; God is great, man is weak; he stands between heaven and hell; Christ is his Saviour; Christ has suffered for him. The

76. Ibid., 41–2.

168

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Holy Ghost sanctifies him; repentance purifies him, faith justifies, works save. These are solemn truths, which need not be actually spoken, except in the way of creed or of teaching; but which must be laid up in the heart. That a thing is true, is no reason that it should be said, but that it should be done; that it should be acted upon; that it should be made our own inwardly.77

The contrast Newman presents between that which is got ‘by rote’ and that which is ‘made our own inwardly’, ‘laid up in the heart’, resembles the contrast Aristotle presents between those who apprehend the good, and act accordingly, and those – the ‘incontinent’ – who seem to apprehend the good, but do not act accordingly. The fact that men use the language that flows from knowledge proves nothing … those who have just begun to learn a science can string together its phrases but do not yet know it; for it has to become part of themselves, and that takes time; so that we must suppose that the use of language by men in an incontinent state means no more than its utterance by actors on the stage.78

Aristotle would suggest that, though the ‘incontinent’ seem to have the same knowledge of the good as the virtuous, there is a difference between their ‘knowledge’ – their ‘use [of] the language that flows from knowledge’ – and that of the virtuous: it is not ‘part of themselves’; they do not apprehend the good in the same way as the virtuous; they do not have – to use the phrase Newman uses – a ‘real apprehension’ of it. Aristotle suggests that the ‘language that flows from [the] knowledge’ of the good should ‘become part’ of oneself; Newman suggests that the ‘new language which Christ has brought us’ should be ‘made our own inwardly’. It is ‘made our own’ by being acted on, and when it is ‘made our own’ it is expressed in those actions in which that which is ‘our own’ is manifest – in those actions that express, that realize the self. Newman remarks, ‘That a thing is true, is no reason that it should be said, but that it should be done; that it should be acted upon; that it should be made our own inwardly.’ He presents three parallel clauses ‘that … that … that’, and, as the first two concern ‘acting’ – ‘it should be done’, ‘it should be acted upon’ – and have, broadly, similar meanings, this creates the expectation that the third clause will, equally, have a similar meaning. While the third clause, ‘it should be made our own inwardly’, does not have the same meaning as the others, the parallelism that has been established suggests that it, like the clauses with which it is parallel, is concerned with ‘acting’ – suggesting that to ‘act upon’ a truth is to ‘make it our own’, and vice versa. It need not, though, be taken to be concerned only with ‘acting’: it might be taken to be concerned with contemplation. If truths are ‘made our own’ in acting, they may be equally ‘made our own inwardly’ in contemplation. Newman is concerned, in any case,

77. Ibid., 43–5. 78. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 123.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

169

not with a contrast between ‘acting’ and contemplation, but with a contrast between different uses of ‘words’: there can be a use of the ‘words’ of faith which is ‘unreal’, which does not involve a genuine understanding of the import of those ‘words’; one must, rather, ‘try to understand’; the effort to understand will involve ‘acting’; and if one does ‘understand’ – if one has ‘laid up in the heart’ the ‘solemn truths’ of the faith – one will act accordingly; one will be disposed to do certain things – rather than merely to ‘speak’ about what one understands. This is not to claim, though, that a ‘real apprehension’ of the ‘solemn truths’ of faith cannot be shown in how one might ‘speak of religion’; it is to claim that if one has such a ‘real apprehension’, ‘speak[ing] of religion’ will not be an end in itself – ‘aim at things, and your words will be right without aiming’. Newman contrasts this way of ‘speaking’ with ‘literature’ – which he characterizes as ‘the exhibition of thought disjoined from practice’, thought ‘in abstraction from the actual affairs of life’, such that ‘mere literary men are able to say strong things against the opinions of their age, whether religious or political, without offence; because … they are not expected to go forward to act upon them’.79 In ‘literature’, he suggests, ‘speaking’ itself, ‘the exhibition of thought’, is the ‘aim’. Newman is concerned, then, with a contrast between those who ‘aim at things’, and those who aim merely at ‘words’. With regard to the recitation of the Creed, Newman observes that this recitation is a ‘kind of prayer’ for understanding – ‘We desire, pray, and strive to understand it more and more.’80 The ‘real apprehension’, toward which one ‘strives’, is an apprehension that is connected to the recognition, not that something is to be ‘said’, but that something is to be ‘done’. The ‘real apprehension’, with which Newman is concerned in his sermon on ‘Unreal Words’, seems to be much the same as the proper ‘apprehending’ of the ‘words’ of the Creed, with which he is concerned in his sermon on ‘The Incarnation’ – an ‘apprehending’ which he associates with ‘draw[ing] down as it were, from heaven, the image of Him who is on God’s right hand’, in a way that ‘rouse[s] in us those mingled feelings of fear and confidence, affection and devotion towards Him … which were originally derived to the Church from the very sight of Him’. In ‘The Incarnation’, Newman suggests that the effort toward a right ‘apprehending’ of the ‘words’ of the Creed, involving the forming of an ‘image’ of Christ, is an effort toward forming something like the ‘vivid picture’ of Christ which ‘the early Christians’ had: the effort is required, as ‘the Object of our faith is but faintly reflected on our minds, compared with the vivid picture which His presence impressed upon the early Christians’; ‘the true traditions of our Lord’s ministry … [are] lost to us’. In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman observes that ‘the Church necessarily has less power over the Creed now than anciently; for at first it was but a form of sound words, subservient to a Faith vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian, and so of

79. ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 42. 80. Ibid., 43.

170

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

secondary value; but now … traditionary teaching has been impaired’.81 There is, still, ‘traditionary teaching’ in the Church – ‘a certain body of Truth, pervading the Church like an atmosphere, irregular in its shape from its very profusion and exuberance’ – yet this ‘teaching’, ‘Prophetical Tradition’, does not have the authority of the ‘Faith’ that ‘anciently’ was ‘vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian’. The Prophetical Tradition developed out of the original Tradition of the Church – which was present when ‘the whole Church agreed together in giving one and the same account of this Tradition’ – but the original Tradition took various forms in the different ‘branches’ of the Church, from the time when ‘love waxing cold and schisms abounding, her various branches developed portions of it for themselves, out of the existing mass, and, according to the accidental influences which prevailed at the time, did the work well or ill, rudely or accurately’.82 Newman suggests a certain connection between the fracturing of the Church into ‘branches’, and the ‘Object of faith’ becoming more ‘faintly reflected in [the] minds’ of Christians: the fracturing of the Church occurred when ‘love’ became ‘cold’; the ‘vivid picture’ of the ‘Object of faith’ elicits ‘light and peace, fear, joy, and holy meditation’. The ‘voice’ of the Church has full authority, when the Church is animated by a ‘love’ (and hence, a unity) that manifests the presence, in the life of the Church, of a ‘vivid picture’ of the ‘Object of faith’.

5. How should one respond to the ‘voice’ of the Church at the present time, when ‘love’ is ‘cold’? In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman maintains that one ‘must either believe or silently acquiesce in the whole’ of the ‘Prophetical Tradition’, which is ‘offered’ to one in the ‘branch’ of the Church to which one belongs. Why, though, should one do so, if ‘traditionary teaching has been impaired’? Newman presents the ‘voice’ of ‘the existing Church’ as one of the ‘means’ by which one can make a ‘choice’ or ‘judgement’ as to what to believe. ‘The internal means of judging are common sense, natural perception of right and wrong, the sympathy of the affections, exercises of the imagination, reason, and the like. The external are such as Scripture, the existing Church, Tradition, Catholicity, Learning, Antiquity, and the National Faith.’83 Newman suggests that these various ‘means’ or ‘informants’ interact, to form the ‘judgement’: that is, they are not simply subject to the ‘judgement’ – they form the ‘judgement’, making it what it is. Our parents and teachers are our first informants concerning the next world; and they elicit and cherish the innate sense of right and wrong which acts as a

81. VM i, 232. 82. Ibid., 251–2. 83. Ibid., 132.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

171

guide co-ordinately with them. By degrees they resign their place to the religious communion, or Church, in which we find ourselves, while the inward habits of truth and holiness which the moral sense has begun to form, react upon that inward monitor, enlarge its range, and make its dictates articulate, decisive, and various. Meantime the Scriptures have been added as fresh informants, bearing witness to the Church and to the moral sense, and interpreted by them both. Last of all, where there is time and opportunity for research into times past and present, Christian Antiquity, and Christendom, as it at present exists, become additional informants, giving substance and shape to much that before existed in our minds only in outline and shadow.84

Newman observes that it can be ‘difficult to combine’ these different ‘informants’ – sometimes they seem to contradict one another, as ‘the lights they furnish, coming from various quarters, cast separate shadows, and partially intercept each other’, so one is obliged ‘to choose what is best and safest’.85 They form the mind but the mind must, equally, act to ‘combine’ and to harmonize them. In his account of the ‘means’ by which ‘the judgement’ is formed – with the ‘voice’ of the Church being one of these ‘means’ – Newman is concerned with a process of education. He suggests that if one is to acquire a formed ‘judgement’, if one is to be educated, one must begin by taking certain things on trust: ‘I would … maintain … that, under whatever system a man finds himself, he is bound to accept it as if infallible, and to act upon it in a confiding spirit, till he finds a better, or in course of time has cause to suspect it.’86 Over time, ‘as the mind expands’, one will reflect on the ‘system’ in which one ‘finds’ oneself; and one will reflect on this ‘system’ spontaneously, and somewhat unconsciously. ‘Too many men suppose that their investigation ought to be attended with a consciousness of their making it; as if it was scarcely pleasing to God unless they all along reflect upon it, tell the world of it, boast of it as a right, and sanctify it as a principle’;87 and it is ‘popularly conceived that to maintain the right of Private Judgment, is to hold that no one has an enlightened faith who has not, as a point of duty, discussed the grounds of it and made up his mind for himself ’.88 Yet ‘one must begin religion by faith, not by controversy’,89 and it is a mistake to think that there is only judgment where ‘investigation [is] … attended with a consciousness’ of itself, where the ‘grounds’ of judgment are explicitly ‘discussed’. To be presented with the ‘system of the Church and of Antiquity’, and to receive it in a ‘confiding spirit’, is to begin a process of education, forming the ‘judgement’. This process of education continues as one investigates the Scriptures, ‘verifying’

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Ibid. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 135. Ibid.

172

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the ‘system of the Church and of Antiquity’ by them, and interpreting them by that ‘system’. ‘No harm can come from putting the Scripture into the hands of the laity, allowing them, if they will, to verify by it, as far as it extends, the doctrines they have been taught already.’90 As the ‘system of the Church and of Antiquity’ is the proper articulation of the vision animating the Scriptures, so to be initiated into that ‘system’ is to be initiated into the vision by which the Scriptures can be interpreted; and, if one interprets the Scriptures in the right way, one can recognize that the ‘system of the Church and of Antiquity’ is the proper articulation of the vision animating the Scriptures. ‘The Church, speaking out that Truth, as committed to her, would cause a corresponding vibration in Holy Scripture, such as no other notes, however loudly sounded, can draw from it.’91 To harmonize the various ‘informants’ is to register the ‘vibration’ of the ‘Truth’. If, in England, the ‘Scripture … [in] the hands of the laity’ has been interpreted in various, discordant ways, this is ‘because the Anglican Church has never had the opportunity of supplying her aid which is the divinely provided complement of Scripture reading; because her voice has been feeble, her motions impeded, and the means withheld from her of impressing upon the population her own doctrine; because the Reformation was set up in disunion, and theories more Protestant than hers have, from the first, spoken with her, and blended with, and sometimes drowned her voice’.92 Newman suggests, then, that the Church should claim ‘the obedience of its members in the first instance, though laying itself open afterwards to their judgment, according to their respective capabilities for judging, claiming for itself that they make a generous and unsuspicious trial of it before objecting to it’.93 The Scriptures are such that their meaning is not patent – they are ‘deep’, often oblique. ‘[The meaning of Scripture] is not so distinct and prominent, as to force itself upon the minds of the many against their various prejudices.’94 ‘Scripture reading’ – in any ‘system’ of Christian belief – is always informed by certain preconceptions: in ‘Scripture reading’ one cannot but start with some view of ‘doctrine’, of the meaning of Scripture, and this view will inform the way in which one interprets Scripture. This does not ‘prove that all prejudice is wrong; but that some particular prejudices are not true; and that, since it is impossible to be without some or other, it is expedient to impress the mind with that which is true; that is, with the faith taught by the Church Catholic, and ascertainable as matter of fact beyond the influence of prejudice’.95 Newman maintains that, if one were ‘beyond the influence of prejudice’ then one would be able to discern the meaning of the Scriptures – confirming that the ‘faith taught by the Church Catholic’ corresponds

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

Ibid., 139. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 140. Ibid. Ibid., 151. Ibid.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

173

to the ‘one and only sense of Scripture’.96 Yet ‘the many’ cannot be ‘beyond the influence of prejudice’. The qualifications for rightly apprehending it are so rare and high, that a prudent man, to say nothing of piety, will not risk his salvation on the chance of his having them; but will read it with the aid of those subsidiary guides which ever have been supplied as if to meet our need. I would not deny as an abstract proposition that a Christian may gain the whole truth from the Scriptures, but would maintain that the chances are very seriously against a given individual. I would not deny, rather I maintain that a religious, wise, and intellectually gifted man will succeed: but who answers to this description but the collective Church?97

Even if one were to acquire the ‘qualifications for rightly apprehending’ the sense of the Scriptures, one would have to undergo some kind of education first – and in this, one would have to start in a ‘confiding spirit’, taking something or other on trust. Newman observes that he would not ‘deny that individuals, whether from height of holiness, clearness of intellectual vision, or the immediate power of the Holy Ghost, have been and are able to penetrate through the sacred text into some portions of the divine system beyond, without external help from tradition, authority of doctors, and theology; though since that help has ever been given, as to the Church, so to the individual, it is difficult to prove that the individual has performed what the Church has never attempted’.98 The perfect ‘abstract’ Christian – making sense of the Scriptures ‘without external help’ – has never existed, for ‘help has ever been given’.99 Newman envisages the ‘voice’ of the Church as ‘impressing’ on the minds of its members a certain ‘system’, forming their preconceptions. Such preconceptions must be formed, in any process of education; and if the Church does not form the preconceptions of its members, they will, in any event, form preconceptions of some kind or another: if the voice of the Church is ‘feeble’, then other voices will be hearkened to. With regard to the authority of the voice of the ‘existing Church’, the most that Newman claims for it, in his account of the ‘means’ of ‘judgement’, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, is that ‘when the present Church speaks contrary to our private notions, and Antiquity is silent, or its decisions unknown to us, it is pious to sacrifice our own opinion to that of the Church’, and ‘if, in spite of our efforts to agree with the Church, we still differ from it, Antiquity being silent, we must avoid causing any disturbance’.100 (The qualification here – ‘Antiquity being silent’ – would suggest that, when Antiquity is not ‘silent’, then one is entitled to make a ‘disturbance’.)

96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

Ibid., 149. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 158–9. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 135.

174

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

One accords the ‘voice’ of the Church a certain trust, acquiring certain ‘preconceptions’ which form the ‘judgement’, and which are, to some extent, confirmed as the ‘judgement’ develops. Once one has a formed judgment, once one can judge for oneself in those matters concerning which, initially, one had to trust the ‘voice’ of the Church, then what sort of relation does one have to the ‘voice’ of the Church? Has one formed in oneself the understanding (or the ‘real apprehension’) which the ‘voice’ of the Church expresses, such that one no longer needs to trust in the ‘voice’ of the Church?

6. In the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman characterizes the ‘voice’ of the ‘existing Church’ as a ‘means’ of forming the judgment. He acknowledges, though, that while English Church should use its ‘voice’, to form the attitudes of its members, it does not, in fact, do so. ‘One chief cause of sects among us is, that the Church’s voice is not heard clearly and forcibly; she does not exercise her own right of interpreting Scripture; she does not arbitrate, decide, condemn; she does not answer the call which human nature makes upon her.’101 In his essay for the British Critic on ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, he reflects upon which ‘notes’ (public signs) of being the true Church, the Anglican Church may claim. ‘The English Church … has the note of possession, the note of freedom from party titles; the note of life, a tough life and a vigorous; she has ancient descent, unbroken continuance, agreement in doctrine with the ancient Church. Those [notes] … which she certainly has not, are intercommunion with Christendom, the glory of miracles, and the prophetical light.’102 Newman observes, in 1840, that the Anglican Church does not have ‘the prophetical light’: it does not have a ‘prophetical’ voice. In 1837, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman acknowledges that the account he gives of the English Church – as a ‘manifestation’ of the universal Church – might be regarded by some as ‘but a theory; a mere shadowy, baseless, ingenious theory, since the division of the East and West, and still more so since the great schism of the North and South’.103 ‘You speak’, it may be urged against me, ‘of the Church Catholic, of the Church’s teaching, and of obedience to the Church. What is meant by the Church Catholic at this day? where is she? what are her local instruments and organs? how does she speak? when and where does she teach, forbid, command, censure? how can she be said to utter one and the same doctrine everywhere, when we are at war with all the rest of Christendom, and not at peace at home? In the Primitive Church

101. Ibid., 141. 102. ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, in ECH ii, 58–9. 103. VM i, 260–1.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

175

there was no difficulty, and no mistaking; then all Christians everywhere spoke one and the same doctrine, and if any novelty arose, it was at once denounced and stifled. The case indeed, is the same now with the Roman Church; but for Anglo-Catholics so to speak, is to use words without meaning, to dream of a state of things long past away from this Protestant land. The Church is now but a mere abstract word; it stands for a generalized idea, it is not the name of any one thing really existing; which if it ever was, yet ceased to be, when Christians divided from each other, centuries upon centuries ago. Rome and Greece, at enmity with each other, both refuse communion to England, and anathematize her faith. Again, in the English Church by itself may be found differences as great as those which separate it from Greece or Rome … Where, then, in the English Church is that one eternal voice of Truth, that one witness issuing from the Apostles’ times, and conversant with all doctrine, the expounder of the Creed, the interpreter of Scripture, and the instructor of the people of God?’104

Newman observes that the ‘difficulty of applying’ the means to discern the will of God, ‘will be a test whether we earnestly desire to do His will or not’. Newman maintains that faith itself cannot but involve difficulties: ‘doubt in some way or measure may even be said to be implied in a Christian’s faith’, such that ‘the greater the uncertainty, the fuller exercise there is of our earnestness in seeking the truth, and of our moral sagacity in tracing and finding it’.105 One must ‘consult what is most likely to please Him’.106 As God does not manifest His will with a clearness that dispels all ‘doubt’, so the Church is not manifest with a clearness that dispels all uncertainty. Newman insists, though, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church that it is in the ‘Prayer Book’, above all, that the Church is ‘visible’ in England. With regard to the ‘prophetical light’, ‘the Prayer Book is a practical guide into the sense of Scripture for all teachable minds’. In spite of differences within or without, our own branch may surely be considered as to us the voice of her who has been in the world ever one and the same since Christ came. Surely, she comes up to the theory; she professes to be the Catholic Church, and to transmit that one ancient Catholic Faith, and she does transmit it simply and intelligibly. Not the most unlettered of her members can miss her meaning. She speaks in her formularies and services. The Daily Prayer, the Occasional Offices, the Order of the Sacraments, the Ordination Services, present one and the same strong, plain, edifying language to rich and poor, learned and unlearned; and that, not as the invention of this Reformer or that, but as the witness of all Saints from the beginning … . There is no mistaking then in this day in England, where the Church Catholic is, and what her teaching. To follow her is to follow the Prayer-Book, instead of

104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 87. 106. Ibid., 86.

176

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

following preachers, who are but individuals. Its words are not the accidental out-pouring of this or that age or country, but the joint and accordant testimony of that innumerable company of Saints, whom we are bound to follow. They are the accents of the Church Catholic and Apostolic as she manifests herself in England. Surely, if we did but proceed on the great principle above described, of acting towards duties which we cannot fulfil exactly, did we take what is given us, and use it not grudgingly, nor of necessity, but with a cheerful obedience, did we receive the Creed as our Gospel, embrace and act upon the doctrine of our Services, and, if anywhere we differed, differ in silence, we should of ourselves without effort revive all those visible tokens of the Church’s sovereignty, the want of which is our present excuse for disobedience. Surely, ‘the kingdom of God is within us;’ we have but to recognize the Church in faith, and it rises before our eyes.107

If the members of the English Church trusted the Church more – ‘recogniz[ing] the Church in faith’ – its ‘visible tokens of sovereignty’ would ‘revive’. If, though, one must ‘recognize the Church in faith’, then the Church, as a ‘visible’ presence, in itself, is not such as to inspire or move faith; the Church, in England, does not, then, seem to have the ‘gift’ of being ‘herself … a great public evidence of her mission’, such that ‘she [is] … her own evidence’, her ‘very look, her bearing, her voice’ being ‘her credentials’. Newman maintains that one must act ‘towards duties which we cannot fulfil exactly’. He is concerned, in this, with the ‘duty’ of ‘obedience’ to the Church: those who recognize such a ‘duty’, and who are disposed to act ‘towards’ it, will recognize ‘where’ the Church is, ‘how’ it ‘speak[s]’. Those who ‘are really bent on serving God as well as they can … [consulting] what is most likely to please Him’ and who recognize ‘what kind of obedience God requires of us, viz. such as we can pay, not the alternative of the highest conceivable obedience, or none at all, of the very letter, or not of the spirit’, those who are well disposed in this way, will not cavil at the want of ‘visible tokens’ of ‘sovereignty’ in the English Church; they will not make its want of apparent ‘sovereignty’ an ‘excuse for disobedience’. When, though, Newman suggests that ‘embrac[ing] and act[ing] on’ the ‘doctrine of [the] Services’ is a matter of observing the ‘principle … of acting towards duties which we cannot fulfil exactly’, does this mean that acting on the ‘doctrine of [the] Services’ is an approximation ‘towards’ acting in obedience to the ‘voice’ of the Church (as the expression of a present, living authority)? One of the difficulties involved in acting ‘towards’ a duty, is in determining whether such and such an act would be in accordance with that duty; and if one is truly trying to fulfil that duty, one will do what seems ‘most likely’ to be in accordance with it, what seems to be in the ‘spirit’ of that duty, rather than doing nothing. If there is a ‘duty’ of obeying ‘the Church’, then there is a question about whether that means obeying ‘this’ Church (whether the English Church is the true Church), and there is a question about whether ‘this’

107. Ibid., 262–3.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

177

Church requires one to do ‘this’ (whether the English Church uses its ‘voice’ to make clear what one should do, whether it presents one with something to ‘obey’). Newman maintains that the English Church, in its ‘Services’, presents itself as the ‘Church Catholic’, and it presents ‘doctrine’ to ‘embrace and act on’ (although those who accept the ‘doctrine’ presented in the ‘Services’ might legitimately ‘differ’ as to its implications, and as to how it is to be acted on – the ‘letter’ of what is required is not set out precisely): if one wants to register the ‘accents of the Church Catholic and Apostolic’, then one can register them in the ‘Services’ of the English Church; to ‘embrace and act on’ what is presented in these ‘Services’ is to approximate ‘towards’ an obedience to the ‘Church Catholic and Apostolic’. If, though, this is only an approximation toward the ‘highest conceivable obedience’, is this because acting on the ‘doctrine’ of the ‘Services’ is an approximation toward acting on the ‘voice’ of the Church, since the ‘Services’ are the closest approximation in the English Church, faute de mieux, to a ‘voice’ of the Church? Is it because that ‘doctrine’ is not altogether definite enough to present one with something – in the situations of day to day life – to ‘obey’? Newman seems to suggest that if one is trying to register the ‘voice’ of the Church, then one is presented, in the ‘Services’ of the English Church, with an approximation to that ‘voice’, which one can obey: the practical question, for Newman, is whether one is presented with something one can obey ‘as’ the ‘voice’ of the Church. Newman maintains that the ‘obedience’ required is a matter of thinking it ‘likely’ enough that one is being presented with the ‘voice’ of the Church, in the ‘doctrine’ of the ‘Services’, for one to ‘embrace and act on’ that doctrine (to act in a way that seems to be in accord with that doctrine). Acting in a way that seems likely to be in accord with what seems likely to be the ‘voice’ of the Church is not quite the same, however, as simple ‘obedience’ to the ‘voice’ of the Church. Newman maintains that, if the members of the English Church trusted the Church more, its ‘visible tokens’ would ‘revive’ – it would look more like the Church prophesied in the Scriptures. He maintains, moreover, that the Church is always recognized by ‘faith’, by a faith that ‘assimilates to itself all that is around us’, interpreting what is presented to ‘sight’ so as to discern the marks of the Church. Without some portion of that Divine Philosophy which bids us consider ‘the kingdom of God’ to be ‘within us,’ and which, by prayer and meditation, by acting on what is told us, and by anticipating sight, developes outwardly its own views and principles, and thus assimilates to itself all that is around us, – not only the Church in this age and country, but the Church Catholic anywhere, or at any time, Primitive, Roman, or Reformed, is but a name, used indeed as the incentive to action, but without local habitation, or visible tokens, ‘here or there,’ ‘in the secret chambers,’ or ‘in the desert’. After all, the Church is ever invisible in its day, and faith only apprehends it.108

108. Ibid., 331–2.

178

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

One must have faith in the Church, interpreting its appearances in faith, before those appearances look like ‘visible tokens’ of the Church. (Of this claim, Newman remarked, in 1877 – ‘After all then the Church of God is, what Protestants have ever considered it, invisible.’)109 The remarks Newman makes, in 1837, on how ‘faith only apprehends’ the Church, fit with his understanding of how ‘certainty’ relates to ‘evidence’. That is, he suggests, in 1837, that faith – which arises when one is ‘personally concerned’ with a certain matter – will take imperfect, uncertain evidence as sufficient to act on, consulting what is ‘best and safest’ (though this ‘faith’ can coexist with a ‘doubt’ which recognizes the uncertainty of the evidence). Later, he would insist that ‘certainty’ – as an attitude of mind – may be warranted, where the evidence is not such as to impel certainty, and he would insist that such certainty is a matter of ‘reason’, not ‘faith’. In 1837, he regarded ‘faith’ as involved in acting on ‘uncertain’ evidence. Later on, he would maintain that ‘incomplete’ evidence might be sufficient to warrant ‘certainty’: one might have sufficient evidence – albeit not irresistible evidence – to be certain that the Church was the ‘oracle’ of God (recognizing thereby that one ought to have faith in the ‘word’ of the Church). To deem it ‘safest’ to take something – the ‘doctrine’ presented in the ‘Services’ – as the ‘word’ of the Church, and to take that as ‘safest’ to act on – this is not, for the later Newman, ‘faith’ (which he took to be an unreserved assent to the ‘word’ of God, proposed by the Church as the ‘messenger’ of God). When Newman took the view that ‘reason’ might warrant certainty, as to the ‘tokens’ of the Church, he was, of course, concerned with the ‘tokens’, not of England, but of Rome; and he considered Rome to have tokens of being the true Church which England did not have (though he felt that ‘prejudice’ might obscure these tokens for some).110 His later reflections about the ‘tokens’ of the Church did not only involve an understanding of the relationship between ‘evidence’ and certainty which differed from his earlier understanding; those reflections were concerned with different ‘tokens’, and a different Church. Yet he did not consider the ‘evidence’ which those ‘tokens’ comprised to be of a kind that ‘compelled’ recognition; and where, earlier, he had regarded ‘faith’ as overcoming the incompleteness of the evidence (a faith that was, at the least, a matter of acting as if what the evidence almost showed were true), he would later regard a kind of ‘judgement’ as overcoming the incompleteness of the evidence – a judgment which could recognize that the evidence, though incomplete, was sufficient. In his essay on ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’ for the British Critic, Newman maintained that ‘much as Roman Catholics may denounce us at present

109. Ibid., 332n. 110. Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851) is, among other things, concerned with the question of why the notes of the Catholic Church are not widely recognized; and it answers that question by presenting a satirical diagnosis of the prejudices which obscure those notes, an account of a ‘Protestant tradition’, originating in the sixteenth century, which presents distorted images of the Catholic Church.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

179

as schismatical, they could not resist us, if the Anglican communion had … one Note of the Church upon it … – sanctity’. In vain would a few controversialists taunt us … . The hearts of their own people would be with us; we should have an argument more intelligible than any which the schools could furnish, could we appeal to this living evidence of truth, in our bishops, our chapters, our clergy, our divines, our laity, causing men to glorify our Father which is in heaven. We should not be unwilling to place the matter on this issue … . Unless our system really has a power in it, making us neglectful of wealth, neglectful of station, neglectful of ease, munificent, austere, reverent, childlike, unless it is able to bring our passions into order, to make us pure, to make us meek, to rule our intellect, to give government of speech, to inspire firmness, to destroy self, we do not deserve to be acknowledged as a Church.111

The sanctity of the members of the English Church will be, itself, a public ‘Note’ of the Church – a mark that the Spirit truly animates it. How much, though, could such ‘sanctity’ be a public ‘Note’, if one can discern ‘sanctity’ in others only when one is closely acquainted with them – if, as Newman maintains in ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’, ‘we could scarcely [be] in any situation be direct instruments of good to any besides those who personally know us, who ever must form a small circle’.112 In ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, a sermon preached in 1836, he acknowledges that the ‘sanctity’ of some can become apparent, and widely known, after their death. ‘When envy and anger have died away, and men talk together about them, and compare what each knows, their good and holy deeds are added up; and while they evidence their fruitfulness, also clear up or vindicate their motives, and strike the mind of survivors with astonishment and fear; and the Church honours them.’113 In honouring the saints, the Church shows what it is for, what it aims at. ‘After death, their excellence perhaps gets abroad; and then they become a witness, a specimen of what the Gospel can do, and a sample and a pledge of all those other high creations of God, His saints in full number, who die and are never known.’114 If the English Church were to recognize its saints, then these saints would be a ‘Note’ of its being a true Church, mediating grace, accomplishing what only ‘the Gospel can do’. In ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, though, Newman seems to be concerned less with a public recognition of certain saints, ‘after their death’ – as a mark or expression of the ‘sanctity’ of the Church in which they lived their lives – than with

111. ‘Catholicity of the Anglican Church’, in ECH ii, 70. 112. John Henry Newman, ‘Personal Influence the means of Propagating the Truth’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 97–8. 113. ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; 1869; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 158. 114. ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, in PPS iv, 157.

180

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

a ‘living evidence of truth, in our bishops, our chapters, our clergy, our divines, our laity’ – with a sanctity that is apparent in the ‘living’. An impression of the sanctity of ‘bishops … clergy … divines … laity’ is to be formed, from encountering them in the here and now. If the members of the English Church have the faith required to discern its ‘tokens’, and to ‘act on what is told’ them, so they will, in their own ‘sanctity’, makes those ‘tokens’ apparent to others, for that ‘sanctity’ will be itself a ‘token’, a ‘Note’, of the Church. In a series of sermons preached in Advent 1841, Newman suggested that there might be ‘Inward Notes’ of the Church – ‘Notes’ which the members of the Church might register, by reflecting on their own ‘inward’ experiences. In a sermon on the ‘Invisible Presence of Christ’, he observes that the Church was first established by ‘an inward power’, ‘by an inward and secret presence; by outward instruments, indeed, but with effects far higher than those instruments, and really by God’s own agency’.115 The first Christians were not presented with a Church that had ‘visible tokens’ of ‘sovereignty’. Those who were moved to become Christians, ‘one and all, spoke one language, not learning it one from the other, but taught by Him the Song of the Lamb; or if in one sense by man’s teaching too, yet catching and mastering it supernaturally, almost before the words were spoken’ – so that, ‘upon the first voice of the preacher, upon a hint, upon a mere whisper in the air, a deep response came from many lips’.116 How did this happen? Man is not sufficient for his own happiness; he is not happy except the Presence of God be with him. When he was created, God breathed into him that supernatural life of the Spirit which is his true happiness: and when he fell, he lost the divine gift, and with it his happiness also. Ever since he has been unhappy; ever since he has a void within him which needs filling, and he knows not how to fill it … and the Gospel supplies it.117

The ‘inward influence’ is ‘really the keen, vivid, constraining glance of Christ’s countenance’.118 The current age ‘is an age in which the outward signs of Christ’s Presence have well nigh deserted us’, yet these are ‘for beginners’, who ‘may thus be led on by such experience of His grace, to discern those holier and better notes’ that are ‘personal and private’.119 (So, for instance, the recognition that the ‘Gospel supplies’ that which ‘fills’ the ‘void within’ would involve a ‘personal and private’ experience – an experience of how the ‘void within’ oneself had been ‘filled’.) With regard to these ‘notes’, Newman suggests that one might discern them in recognizing whether one has ‘gained any good thing, not merely in, but through

115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

‘Invisible Presence of Christ’, in SSD, 310. Ibid., 310–1. Ibid., 312. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 318.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

181

[the] Church’ – if, for instance, ‘your soul has been, as it were, transfigured within you, when you came to the Most Holy Sacrament’.120 In ‘Outward and Inward Notes of the Church’, Newman insists that ‘religion is a personal, private, and individual matter, that it consists in a communion between God and the soul, and that its true evidences belong to the soul that believes, are its property, and not something common to it and the whole world. God vouchsafes to speak to us one by one, to manifest Himself to us one by one, to lead us forward one by one; He gives us something to rely upon which others do not experience, which we cannot convey to others, which we can but use for ourselves.’121 Yet the Scriptural prophecies declare that the Church was to be ‘both social and public in the very highest sense, because it is Catholic, universal every where’, such that ‘she herself was to be a great public evidence of her mission … she was to be her own evidence’ in ‘her very look, her bearing, her voice’ – ‘and that not from any thing special in the mind of the hearer, but from the voice and tone of the speaker’.122 Newman maintains, though, ‘that the public notes of the Church, which are the common property of all men, are rather a sign to unbelievers than to the faithful, and to the world than to Christians; and a sign to members of the Church in proportion as they are without, and till they gain those truer and more precious tokens, to which the external notes lead, and by which they are practically superseded’.123 ‘Before [a man] partakes those Sacraments, he will be attracted to the Church by her public notes; but when he once has tasted the good word, and in proportion as he is partaker of it, that word itself in its inward power, in its power upon himself, will keep him firm in his allegiance to her.’124 In ‘Grounds for Steadfastness in our Religious Profession’, Newman attempts to indicate something of what the experience of the ‘inward power’ of the ‘word’ of God is like, and what it involves. The very fact of a religion taking root within us, is a proof, so far, that it is true. If it were not true, it would not take root. Religious men have, in their own religiousness, an evidence of the truth of their religion. That religion is true which has power, and so far as it has power; nothing but what is divine can renew the heart. And this is the secret reason why religious men believe, whether they are adequately conscious of it or no, whether they can put it into words or no; viz. their past experience that the doctrine which they hold is a reality in their minds, not a mere opinion, and has come to them, ‘not in word, but in power’.125

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

Ibid., 322. ‘Outward and Inward Notes of the Church’, in SSD, 325. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 334–5. ‘Grounds for Steadfastness in our Religious Profession’, in SSD, 345–6.

182

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

An experience of a ‘renewal’ of the ‘heart’ is an evidence of the ‘power’ of religion. Newman suggests that ‘religious men’ experience the ‘doctrine which they hold’ as having a certain ‘power’ to change the ‘heart’, and their experience of this ‘power’ makes them ‘hold’ the doctrine with more assurance. If they take it that ‘nothing but what is divine can renew the heart’, and they experience such a renewal, in accepting certain ‘doctrine’, then they will take it that the doctrine is ‘divine’. (This interpretation of their experience requires a principle, of course, that is itself ‘religious’: the principle that ‘nothing but what is divine can renew the heart’. If this principle were to be considered one of the ‘doctrines’ which ‘religious men … hold’, then it would seem that ‘religious men’ make sense of the effects of their acceptance of certain doctrines – or even attribute certain effects to their acceptance of those doctrines – in accordance with those doctrines, using those doctrines to make sense of their experiences; and, if so, the effects do not constitute a ‘proof ’ that is distinct from, or independent of, belief in those doctrines. It is, equally, true that, were there not this ‘renewal’ of ‘heart’, were this renewal not a ‘reality’, then there would be nothing to interpret.) A man’s real reason for attachment to his own religious communion, why he believes it to be true, why he is eager in its defence, why he feels indignant at being invited to abandon it, is not any series of historical or philosophical arguments, not any thing merely beautiful in its system, or supernatural, but what it has done for him and others; his confidence in it as a means by which men may be brought nearer to God, and may become better and happier.126

It is the experience of becoming ‘better and happier’ that ‘attaches’ a ‘religious man’ to ‘his own religious communion’; and, as he is ‘religious’, he attributes his becoming ‘better and happier’ to the influence of God – and, accordingly, he discerns the influence of God in ‘his own religious communion’. A religious man is conscious that God has been with him, and given him whatever he has of good within him … . He has a conviction, which nothing can shake, that without the aid of his Lord and Saviour, he can do nothing aright … . A religious man would feel it little less than sacrilege, and almost blasphemy, to impute the improvement in his heart and conduct, in his moral being, with which he has been favoured in a certain sufficient period, to outward or merely natural causes. He will be unable to force himself to do so: that is to say, he has a conviction, which it is a point of religion with him not to doubt, which it is a sin to deny, that God has been with him.127

As to where one might discern indications of God being ‘with’ one, Newman observes that ‘a religious man may be expected to have experience more or less

126. Ibid., 347. 127. Ibid., 348–50.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

183

of wonderful providences, which he cannot speak about to others’, or of ‘answers to prayer’, or of ‘the awful sacredness of our Sacraments and other Ordinances’, or of ‘the manifestation of Christ which often attends on death-beds for the benefit of survivors’, or of ‘evidences of sanctity in the living, which we are from time to time vouchsafed’.128 Newman insists that, if one is to look to such ‘notes’, one cannot simply ‘consult the fluctuations of [one’s mind] in the passing hour, for information concerning God’s will’: rather, it is ‘when we look back on the course of our whole lives … [when we] look for … proof of improvement in our heart and life, and not mere comfort or transport … [and when we] look for plain external facts, however private and secret, not for mere emotions’, that this attempt to ‘determine whether or not God is with us’ is rightly conducted.129 Newman then observes that to ‘judge of doctrines [by “their fruits”] … is presumptuous, because these are divine revelations, and are commonly mysteries, and are to be received on faith, whatever comes of them’, but ‘it is otherwise with religious bodies; they are to be tested and judged of by their visible effects … and if the outward notes of the Church are thus matter for our judgment, surely its inward power may be religiously inquired into also’.130 Of these Advent sermons on the ‘Inward Notes’ of the Church, Newman would later remark, in his lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), that while it is true that ‘the notes of the Church, as they are called, are chiefly intended, as this writer says, as guides and directions into the truth, for those who are as yet external to it, and that those who are within it have prima facie evidences of another and more personal kind’, the ‘inward notes’ mentioned in the Advent sermons do not suffice to show that the English Church is a ‘branch’ of the Catholic Church.131 It may be true that ‘you have the clear evidence of the influences of grace in your hearts, by its effects sensible at the moment or permanent in the event’, but ‘grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation’.132 With regard to ‘ordinances of religion’, ‘grace is given ex opere operato [from the work worked] when, the proper dispositions being supposed in the recipient, it is given through the ordinance itself; it is given ex opere operantis [from the work of the doer] when, whether there be outward sign or no, the inward energetic act of the recipient is the instrument of it’ – and this ‘inward energetic act of the recipient’ of the rites of the English Church, rather than a ‘power’ inhering in those rites themselves, may make them instruments of grace for ‘the recipient’.133 That one might be sensible of ‘influences’ of grace, when participating in certain rites, need not, then, show those

128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

Ibid., 351, 352, 353, 355. Ibid., 355, 357. Ibid., 359–60. Diff i, 79. Diff i, 80, 83. Ibid., 85.

184

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

rites to be genuine sacraments (with the ‘religious communion’, in which those rites are observed, being thereby shown to be the true Church). In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) Newman remarked, of the publication of his Advent sermons on the ‘Inward Notes’, that his ‘friends of the moderate Apostolical party’ were ‘surprised and offended at a line of argument … which threw the whole controversy into confusion, stultified my former principles, and substituted, as they would consider, a sort of methodistic self-contemplation, especially abhorrent both to my nature and to my past professions, for the plain and honest tokens, as they were commonly received, of a divine mission in the Anglican Church’.134 If one would make certain experiences, attendant on participating in the sacraments, a kind of ‘note’ of the ‘reality’ of those sacraments, then one might make those experiences, rather than the sacraments themselves, the ‘signs’ of grace (and, then, one might set out to cultivate those experiences, one might aim at them, lapsing into mere ‘self contemplation’).

7. Newman maintained, during the 1830s, that the ‘visible tokens’ of the early Church arose from, and manifested, a faith that was ‘vividly and accurately engraven on the heart of every Christian’, a faith that was the vision of an ‘Object’. He maintained, equally, that this faith – which animated the original ‘Apostolical Tradition’ of the Church – was no longer present in the world in its original form: the breaking apart of the Church (into different ‘branches’) was at once cause and effect of the dwindling of this faith. There were, at the present time, various ‘memorials’ or traces of this original faith: there were articulations of this faith, in the Scriptures, and the Creed, and there was a living tradition, ‘Prophetical Tradition’, which was a continuation of the original Apostolical Tradition – though in a somewhat ‘impaired’ form – and which was an interpretation of the ‘memorials’ of Apostolical Tradition – the Scriptures and the Creed. Christians at the present time, Newman suggests, are presented with ‘means’ of forming a faith akin to that of the first Christians. By participating in the life of the Church, one may tend toward a ‘real apprehension’ of the ‘Object’ of faith – a ‘real apprehension’ which is something like an approximation to, or reconstruction of, the pristine faith that was ‘engraven on the hearts’ of the first Christians (the ‘vivid picture which [the] presence [of Christ] impressed upon the early Christians’). As one moves toward this ‘real apprehension’, one will live with ‘doubts’, uncertainties, and the like. Newman thinks of this ‘real apprehension’ as something one forms for oneself, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, by trusting the Church to which one belongs – forming certain ‘preconceptions’ – and by living in accordance with the ‘precepts’ of faith (and the conscience), ‘try[ing] to understand’ by acting 134. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1865; London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 254.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

185

on, by living out, those ‘precepts’. One who attains to such a ‘real apprehension’ discerns the meaning of the various forms of the Church – the ‘Object’ which they reveal – and makes that meaning apparent to others – not least by living in a way that is informed by it – conveying the ‘spirit’ of that ‘real apprehension’ to others. When the members of the Church live in this way, moved by a ‘real apprehension’ of Christ, the spirit that, at the first, ‘nourished and animated’ the ‘whole system of the Church, its discipline and ritual’, with a ‘spontaneous and exuberant’ vivacity, re-animates that ‘system’, so that its life, its ‘reality’, becomes manifest. Does Newman tend, in this, to make the ‘whole system of the Church’ a ‘means’ to something ‘inward’ (a ‘real apprehension’ which is, in a sense, the realization, or counterpart, of that ‘system’)? Newman characterizes the Creed as the articulation of a ‘faith’ that was, in the early Church, present in the ‘heart’. No articulation can, however, be adequate to all that is in the ‘heart’ (‘tradition in its fulness is necessarily unwritten; it is the mode in which a society has felt or acted during a certain period, and it cannot be circumscribed’). The original ‘Apostolical’ Tradition was expressed in various articulations of itself; and that original Tradition would have informed how those articulations of itself were received or interpreted: the original Tradition was the ‘Church’s unconscious habit of opinion and sentiment’, which the Church had, in part, ‘reflect[ed] upon, master[ed], and express[ed], according to the emergency’, and in those expressions, the Tradition would have recognized itself, so to speak. If those expressions were ‘necessarily’ incomplete articulations of that which ‘in its fulness is necessarily unwritten’ – parts of a whole, so to speak – then how much would a right construal of their meaning require a sense of the whole, ‘necessarily unwritten’, which animated them, or from which they emanated? How much might one need to have the ‘habit of opinion and sentiment’ animating the Tradition to interpret aright those expressions? Would not the understanding of these ‘expressions’ by the Church, at the present time, be a form of ‘Prophetical Tradition’, and if ‘Prophetical Tradition’ is ‘impaired’, would not the understanding of these ‘expressions’ by the Church, at the present time, be likewise ‘impaired’? In a sermon on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, which Newman preached in 1843, he maintains that ‘creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express, and which alone is substantive’. The Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another … not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as being itself enlightened and (as if) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all.135

135. ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 331, 334.

186

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

If ‘Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express’, and if that ‘one idea’ is present in a ‘habit of opinion and sentiment’, in a Tradition deriving from an original ‘sacred impression’, then it would seem that one can only have a ‘real apprehension’ of what the ‘Creeds and dogmas’ convey, if one has been initiated into the Tradition. If the ‘true traditions’ are now ‘lost to us’, and if the ‘Creeds and dogmas live’ in the ‘one idea’ animating those traditions, then can those ‘Creeds and dogmas’ be properly understood? Has the ‘warrant’ to interpret those ‘Creeds and dogmas’ been ‘lost’, with the ‘loss’ of the ‘true traditions’ in which those ‘Creeds and dogmas live’? If, by contrast, those ‘true traditions’ are not ‘lost to us’, then there is still, in the world, a faith ‘vividly and accurately engraven on the heart’, in which the ‘one idea’, the ‘sacred impression’, is present: the ‘sacred impression’ from which the ‘Creeds and dogmas’ arose is still present. The Creed is, in relation to the ‘sacred impression’, a ‘form of sound words, subservient to’ the ‘sacred impression’ itself; if the Creed is not an exhaustive expression of all that is in the ‘sacred impression’, then there may be further expressions of that ‘impression’ – expressions not confined to what is expressed in the Creed (or in ‘Antiquity’).

8. In the sermon on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, (1843) Newman envisages the doctrines of the Church as expressions of a primordial ‘impression’, or vision. Reflecting on the history of ‘dogma’, he remarks on how ‘in the course of time the whole mind of the world, as I may say, was absorbed into the philosophy of the Cross, as the element in which it lived, and the form upon which it was moulded’, and on how the ‘world has been moved in consequence of it, populations excited, leagues and alliances formed, kingdoms lost and won’, with ‘a large fabric of divinity [being, at length] reared, irregular in its structure, and diverse in its style, as beseemed the slow growth of centuries … but still, on the whole, the development of an idea, and like itself, and unlike anything else, its most widely-separated parts having relations with each other, and betokening a common origin’ – with all this ‘world of thought’ being ‘the expansion of a few words, uttered, as if casually, by the fishermen of Galilee’.136 The fecundity of ‘the Gospel’, as stimulating thought, is a mark of its ‘reality’ – its ‘half sentences, its overflowings of language, admit of development; they have a life in them which shows itself in progress; a truth, which has the token of consistency; a reality, which is fruitful in resources; a depth, which extends into mystery: for they are representations of what is actual, and has a definite location and necessary bearings and a meaning in the great system of things’.137 How should the relationship between ‘Faith and Dogmatic Confession’ be understood?

136. Ibid., 315, 316, 317. 137. Ibid., 318.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

187

Theological dogmas are propositions expressive of the judgments which the mind forms, or the impressions which it receives, of Revealed Truth. Revelation sets before it certain supernatural facts and actions, beings, and principles; these make a certain impression or image upon it; and this impression spontaneously, or even necessarily, becomes the subject of reflection on the part of the mind itself, which proceeds to investigate it, and to draw it forth in successive and distinct sentences.138

The ‘impression or image’, which is the ‘inward idea of divine truth’, need not be made ‘explicit’, if it is to be possessed; and, more than that, ‘there is good reason for saying that the impression made upon the mind need not even be recognized by the parties possessing it’ – it ‘is no proof that persons are not possessed, because they are not conscious, of an idea’.139 Critical disquisitions are often written about the idea which this or that poet might have in his mind in certain of his compositions and characters; and we call such analysis the philosophy of poetry, not implying thereby of necessity that the author wrote upon a theory in his actual delineation, or knew what he was doing; but that, in matter of fact, he was possessed, ruled, guided by an unconscious idea. Moreover, it is a question whether that strange and painful feeling of unreality, which religious men experience from time to time, when nothing seems true, or good, or right, or profitable, when Faith seems a name, and duty a mockery, and all endeavors to do right, absurd and hopeless, and all things forlorn and dreary, as if religion were wiped out from the world, may not be the direct effect of the temporary obscuration of some master vision, which unconsciously supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace.140

If there may be an ‘inward knowledge’ without ‘explicit confession’, if an ‘impression’ may be present, without being ‘explicitly’ reflected on, then the ‘absence, or partial absence, or incompleteness of dogmatic statements is no proof of the absence of impressions or implicit judgments, in the mind of the Church. Even centuries might pass without the formal expression of a truth, which had been all along the secret life of millions of faithful souls.’141 The ‘impression’ is present, in the ‘soul’, prior to its ‘formal expression’, which articulates an aspect of what is there in the ‘impression’. If an ‘impression’ or ‘idea’ can be ‘latent’ in this way, it is not ‘wonderful’ that it should be ‘difficult to elicit and define’, and it is, equally, unsurprising that there can be a difficulty in recognizing ‘dogmatic statements … even when attained, as the true representation of our meaning’.142

138. 139. 140. 141. 142.

Ibid., 320. Ibid., 321. Ibid., 321–2. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 323, 325.

188

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

This difficulty in eliciting the ‘implicit’ is not confined to theology – ‘principles of philosophy, physics, ethics, politics, taste, admit both of implicit reception and explicit statement; why should not the ideas, which are the secret life of the Christian, be recognized also as fixed and definite in themselves, and as capable of scientific analysis?’143 If ‘Almighty God is ever one and the same, and is revealed to us as one and the same, the true inward impression of Him, made on the recipient of the revelation, must be one and the same; and, since human nature proceeds upon fixed laws, the statement of that impression must be one and the same, so that we may as well say that there are two Gods as two Creeds’.144 When efforts are made to reflect on this ‘impression’, ‘one proposition necessarily leads to another, and a second to a third’, so that there are ‘fresh evolutions from the original idea, which indeed can never be said to be entirely exhausted’, until ‘what was at first an impression on the Imagination has become a system or creed in the Reason’ – this ‘process’ being the ‘development’ of the original ‘impression’ or ‘idea’.145 It is more ‘surprising that the Creeds are so short’ than that ‘they need a comment’.146 As God is one, so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one; it is not a thing of parts; it is not a system; nor is it any thing imperfect, and needing a counterpart. It is the vision of an object. When we pray, we pray, not to an assemblage of notions, or to a creed, but to One Individual Being; and when we speak of Him we speak of a Person, not of a Law or a Manifestation. This being the case, all our attempts to delineate our impression of Him go to bring out one idea, not two or three or four; not a philosophy, but an individual idea in its separate aspects … . The ideas which we are granted of Divine Objects under the Gospel, from the nature of the case and because they are ideas, answer to the Originals so far as this, that they are whole, indivisible, substantial, and may be called real, as being images of what is real … . Religious men, according to their measure, have an idea or vision of the Blessed Trinity in Unity, of the Son Incarnate and of His Presence, not as a number of qualities, attributes, and actions, not as the subject of a number of propositions, but as one, and individual, and independent of words, as an impression conveyed through the senses … As definitions are not intended to go beyond their subject, but to be adequate to it, so the dogmatic statements of the Divine Nature used in our confessions, however multiplied, cannot say more than is implied in the original idea, considered in its completeness, without the risk of heresy. Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea which they are designed to express, and which alone is substantive; and are necessary only because the human mind cannot reflect upon it, except piecemeal, cannot use it in its oneness and entireness, nor without resolving it into a series of aspects and relations. And in matter of

143. 144. 145. 146.

Ibid., 327–8. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 329. Ibid., 327.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

189

fact these expressions are never equivalent to it; we are able, indeed, to define the creations of our own minds, for they are what we make them and nothing else; but it were as easy to create what is real as to define it; and thus the Catholic dogmas are, after all, but symbols of a Divine fact, which, far from being compassed by those very propositions, would not be exhausted, nor fathomed, by a thousand … . Though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another, this it has ever done, and always must do, not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as being itself enlightened and (as if) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all … . This will account both for the mode of arguing from particular texts or single words of Scripture, practised by the early Fathers, and for their fearless decision in practising it ; for the great Object of Faith on which they lived both enabled them to appropriate to itself particular passages of Scripture, and became to them a safeguard against heretical deductions from them. Also, it will account for the charge of weak reasoning, commonly brought against those Fathers; for never do we seem so illogical to others as when we are arguing under the continual influence of impressions to which they are insensible.147

The ‘impression’ is that by which one understands the ‘dogmatic statements’, setting out the ‘Object of Faith’ – it is that in which they ‘live’, in which they have ‘meaning’. How – since no ‘faculties have been given us, as far as we know, for realizing the Objects of Faith’ – does one acquire the ‘impression’? [The] means by which we receive the impression of Divine Verities, are, for instance, the habitual and devout perusal of Scripture, which gradually acts upon the mind; again, the gradual influence of intercourse with those who are in themselves in possession of the sacred ideas; again, the study of Dogmatic Theology … ; again, a continual round of devotion; or again, sometimes, in minds both fitly disposed and apprehensive, the almost instantaneous operation of a keen faith … . No one defines a material object by way of conveying to us what we know so much better by the senses, but we form creeds as a chief mode of perpetuating the impression.148

How, though, could ‘anything of this world convey ideas which are beyond and above this world? How can teaching and intercourse, how can human words, how can earthly images, convey to the mind an idea of the Invisible?’149 What if, in truth, ‘there is no such inward view of these doctrines, distinct from the dogmatic language used to express them’, so that the ‘metaphors by which they are signified are not mere symbols of ideas which exist independently of them, but their 147. Ibid., 330–2, 334–5. 148. Ibid., 333. 149. Ibid., 338.

190

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

meaning is coincident and identical with the ideas’ and ‘when we draw inferences from those figures, we are not illustrating one existing idea, but drawing mere logical inferences’. ‘These ideas about heavenly things, we learn … from words, yet (it seems) we are to say what we, without words, conceive of them, as if words could convey what they do not contain.’150 The various terms and figures which are used in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity or of the Incarnation, surely may by their combination create ideas which will be altogether new, though they are still of an earthly character … . There may be a certain correspondence between the idea, though earthly, and its heavenly archetype, such, that that idea belongs to the archetype, in a sense in which no other earthly idea belongs to it, as being the nearest approach to it which our present state allows. Indeed Scripture itself intimates the earthly nature of our present ideas of Sacred Objects, when it speaks of our now ‘seeing in a glass darkly … but then face to face’; and it has ever been the doctrine of divines that the Beatific Vision, or true sight of Almighty God, is reserved for the world to come. Meanwhile we are allowed such an approximation to the truth as earthly images and figures may supply to us … . Not even the Catholic reasonings and conclusions, as contained in Confessions, and most thoroughly received by us, are worthy of the Divine Verities which they represent, but are the truth only in as full a measure as our minds can admit it; the truth as far as they go, and under the conditions of thought which human feebleness imposes.151

The ‘terms’ which convey the ‘impression’ or ‘image’, do so by conveying something more than their usual sense, becoming ‘figures’; and a ‘combination’ of ‘figures’ must be used, if that ‘image’ is to be conveyed. The various ‘figures’, taken together, convey a whole. The ‘figures’ are elements, in a sense, belonging to a whole; the whole has a significance which surpasses that of any of its parts, taken by themselves; and it is when the whole is apprehended that the import of the ‘figures’ is registered: the figures ‘live in the one idea which they are designed to express, and which alone is substantive’. That apprehension of the whole is attained, Newman suggests, by participating in the life of the Church – a life which is an expression of the ‘image’ – by ‘habitual and devout perusal of Scripture … intercourse with those who are in themselves in possession of the sacred ideas … a continual round of devotion … [or] the almost instantaneous operation of a keen faith’. The significance, the ‘image’, apprehended in this way is, itself, ‘of an earthly character’; but there ‘may be a certain correspondence between the idea, though earthly, and its heavenly archetype, such that that idea belongs to the archetype, in a sense in which no other earthly idea belongs to it’. To apprehend the ‘earthly’ idea, or image, is not to apprehend the ‘heavenly archetype’. It is not to apprehend, or to comprehend, the order of the ‘Dispensation’, as Newman put it in Tract 73. The contrast Newman presents,

150. Ibid., 338, 339. 151. Ibid., 339–40, 350.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

191

between ‘Revelation’ and ‘Mystery’, in Tract 73, concerns how ‘Revelation  … consists of a number of detached and incomplete truths belonging to a vast system unrevealed, of doctrines and injunctions … connected by unknown media, and bearing upon unknown portions of the system’, with ‘Mystery’ consisting in the ‘unknown portions’. Revelation, considered as a ‘Mystery’, is ‘a doctrine lying hid in language, to be received in that language from the first by every mind, whatever be its separate power of understanding it … and admitting of being apprehended more and more perfectly according to the diligence of this mind and that’. In his sermon on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, he suggests that something of what is not presented in the explicit ‘doctrines and injunctions’ may be present in an implicit ‘image’ or ‘impression’: it is in this image that the doctrines are ‘connected’, as aspects of that ‘image’; and it is this that is ‘lying hid in language’. Yet this image is not a ‘system’ – not an explicit, comprehensible system of ‘doctrine’. What is more, this ‘image’ or ‘impression’ does not constitute a full insight into the ‘system’ of reality, into the ‘Dispensation’. It is not the ‘heavenly archetype’, in relation to which the ‘Dispensation’ could be fully comprehended. To have that ‘image’ is not, for instance, to comprehend how, or why, the death of Christ had a ‘real virtue … as an expiation for sin’, a ‘real connexion’ to ‘God’s forgiveness’, but it is to have a sense of that ‘connexion’ as an element within a unitary ‘idea or vision of the Blessed Trinity in Unity, of the Son Incarnate and of His Presence’. The account of how the various ‘figures’, in ‘combination’, convey a unitary sense – so that they ‘live in the one idea which they are designed to express’ – recalls the account of the ‘poetical mind’, in ‘Poetry with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, a ‘mind’ which uses ‘figure’ as its ‘necessary medium of communication’, in conveying a vision of a ‘perfection’ that transcends ‘this world’, and which, creating these ‘figures’, imparts a ‘world of information’ to the ‘imagination’: the ‘imagination’, through ‘figures’, apprehends a vision of ‘perfection’.152 It recalls the account of ‘the divinely-instructed imagination of the writers’ of the Bible in Arians of the Fourth Century, an imagination which ‘occupied by some vast and awful subject of contemplation’ cannot but ‘give utterance to its feelings in a figurative style’, and which, at work throughout the Bible, makes the Bible ‘a whole, grounded on a few distinct doctrinal principles discernible throughout it’, manifesting that ‘vast and awful subject of contemplation’, in which the ‘likeness of the promised Mediator is conspicuous throughout … as in a picture’.153 It recalls the account of the ‘mystic’ or ‘contemplative’ interpretation of the Bible by the Fathers of the Church, in the essay on ‘The State of Religious Parties’ for the British Critic, who ‘recognized a certain truth lying hid under the tenor of the sacred text as a whole … showing itself more or less in this verse or that as it might be’, a form of interpretation involving a ‘character of mind’ akin to that involved in ‘poetry’, animated by a ‘high moral state’.154

152. ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in ECH i, 9–10. 153. Arians, 59. 154. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 286–7, 291.

192

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

To apprehend the ‘vision’, Newman maintains, is to be in a ‘high moral state’. In his sermon on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, he observes that to have an ‘impression of this intimate kind’ of the ‘Divine fact’ of which ‘the Catholic dogmas are … but symbols’ is to have what is called, in the Scriptures, ‘knowledge’. ‘Knowledge is the possession of those living ideas of sacred things, from which alone change of heart or conduct can proceed. This awful vision is what Scripture seems to designate by the phrases “Christ in us,” “Christ dwelling in us by faith,” “Christ formed in us,” and “Christ manifesting Himself unto us”.’155 These ‘living ideas of sacred things’ are, in themselves, a ‘manifesting’ of the supreme good – of that concerning which the conscience has, in its various ‘dictates’, certain intimations: the ‘awful vision’, ‘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’ (as Newman put it, in his sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, in 1830). If one is to apprehend these ‘living ideas of sacred things’, one must have a ‘living’ conscience; and the right apprehension of these ‘living ideas’ is implicated with something like a revivification of the conscience, a ‘change of heart or conduct’. The ‘informations’ of the ‘conscience’, or the perceptions involved in phronesis, are insights into particular, here and now realities, registering that ‘this’, here and now, is good, or ‘to be done’. These insights register something about the good which surpasses what could be presented in ‘universal statements’ (and it is in this way that these insights can ‘correct’ such ‘universal statements’). To have a right ‘perception’ of the particular, and its goodness, is to apprehend more than can be set out in a ‘universal statement’, pertaining to goodness. In a similar way, to have the ‘impression’ or ‘image’ of the ‘Object of faith’, is to apprehend more than can be set out in the ‘dogmatic statements’ which are ‘but symbols of a Divine fact’ (and which have that ‘sacred impression’ as a ‘regulating principle’). The apprehension of the ‘sacred impression’ is, to the ‘dogmatic statements’, as the perception of the particular good is, to ‘universal statements’ of the good. The ‘sacred impression’ is an ‘idea’ of an ‘earthly character’. It is a kind of transposition, into an ‘earthly’ idea, or image, of a ‘heavenly archetype’: it has a ‘certain correspondence’ to that archetype, and ‘belongs to the archetype, in a sense in which no other earthly idea belongs to it’: something of the ‘heavenly archetype’ is discerned in the ‘earthly’ idea; something of the meaning in that ‘archetype’, though not the fullness of that meaning, is registered in, or through, the ‘earthly’ idea. The ‘dogmatic statements’ are such that they ‘belong’ to the ‘impression’, and the ‘impression’, in turn, ‘belongs’ to the ‘heavenly archetype’. There is a parallel, here, perhaps, with how particular ‘perceptions’ of the good – in here and now particulars – ‘belong’, in a sense, to an ‘archetype’ of ‘the good in itself ’, or the ‘universal’ good in itself. The perceptions of the conscience – perceptions of here and now particulars – involve a ‘reach[ing] towards’ a ‘universal’, which is never fully

155. ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 332.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

193

manifest in, or to, those perceptions. The apprehension of the ‘earthly’ image, the ‘sacred impression’, involves a ‘reach[ing] towards’ a ‘heavenly archetype’, which can never be fully expressed in that image. As the particular perceptions of the conscience involve the fullest manifestation of ‘the good’, so the apprehension of the ‘sacred impression’ involves the fullest manifestation of the ‘heavenly archetype’. In the ‘sacred impression’, a fullness of meaning, exceeding comprehension, is discerned in, or through, an ‘earthly’ form. That fullness of meaning – the ‘archetype’ itself – is not apprehended directly, or comprehended. The ‘sacred impression’ has a meaning that surpasses the ‘dogmatic statements’ that are made about it; and the apprehension of that meaning is an apprehension of some, though not all, of the meaning of the ‘heavenly archetype’ – such that, as the ‘sacred impression’ surpasses the ‘dogmatic statements’, so the ‘heavenly archetype’ surpasses (infinitely) the ‘sacred impression’. The perceptions of the conscience, perceptions involving partial, inchoate intuitions of ‘the good’ in itself, are ordered toward, or fulfilled in, the perception of the ‘sacred impression’, the ‘image’, which ‘brings together and concentrates’ all of the ‘truths’, all of the insights, that are present in those perceptions. (The conscience, the ‘heart’, ‘lives’ most intensely in the right apprehension of that ‘image’.) The perception that recognizes the good, in the particular, recognizes, in the ‘sacred’ image – in Christ – the fullest realization of the good. There is more in that recognition, in that apprehension of Christ, than can be expressed in ‘dogmatic statements’; and that recognition involves a sense that there is more, in Christ, than can be compassed.

10. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Newman quotes from his sermon on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, observing that the process set out in that sermon – whereby ‘an impression on the Imagination … [becomes] a system or creed in the reason’ – is a process of ‘metaphysical’ development – ‘a mere analysis of the idea contemplated … [terminating] and terminate in its exact and complete delineation’. The ‘metaphysical’ development of an ‘idea’ is, Newman suggests, one of several forms of development, some of the others being ‘political’, ‘logical’, ‘historical’, ‘moral’ – and these others might be involved in the development of ‘doctrine’: as an instance of ‘moral’ development, Newman refers to how ‘the doctrine of the beatification of the Saints has been developed, into their Cultus’; as an instance of ‘logical’ development, Newman refers to ‘the adoption of the word theotokos at Ephesus as a test of orthodoxy’; and as an instance of ‘historical’ development, Newman refers to how ‘saints are canonized in the Church, long after they have entered into their rest’. Where, in the sermon, Newman had referred variously to that which animates and informs the process of development as an ‘idea’, or ‘image’, or ‘impression’, in the Essay, he refers to it, almost exclusively, as an ‘idea’; he tends to use ‘impression’ to characterize the ‘aspects’ of the ‘idea’, the different ways in which it presents itself to, or is apprehended by, different minds; he tends to use ‘imagination’ to refer to ‘surmises’ or ‘suppositions’,

194

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

which may or may not correspond to realities (as when he remarks – of the ‘ideas’ which undergo, and animate, various developments, the ‘ideas’ that are ‘principles of conduct, or … views of life and the world’, ‘habitual judgements’ ‘firmly fixed in the mind’ – that ‘some are real, that is, represent facts existing; and others are mere imaginations, and stand for nothing external to themselves’). The Essay, though, is consistent with the sermon, in envisaging the various ‘doctrines’ of Christianity as, ultimately, expressions of something unitary, a single ‘idea’, which is brought out, and manifested (in its various ‘aspects’) in these doctrines. In the sermon, Newman suggests that the doctrines of Christianity ‘live in the one idea which they are designed to express’, a ‘sacred impression’ which is the ‘regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning [by which the doctrines are articulated] and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all’. This might be taken to mean that those in whom the idea ‘lives’ can recognize the ‘reasoning’ to be an adequate expression of the idea – they can, as it were, compare the expression of the idea, in the ‘reasoning’, to the idea itself. Yet it might, equally, be taken to mean those who carry out the ‘reasoning’, through which the doctrines are articulated, do so as impelled by an ‘idea’, which ‘lives’ in them, but which they cannot contemplate in itself, in its entirely: the idea ‘lives’ in them – which is how they can register various aspects of it – but their awareness is taken up with those aspects. The ‘reasoning’ proceeds from, and is informed by, a perception of an aspect of the ‘sacred impression’, in which something of its meaning is registered. The ‘sacred impression’ is present in those who perceive aspects of it; their perception of aspects of it is an expression of the ‘life’ of the idea, as it manifests itself in them and to them; but to perceive aspects of it, is not to perceive the whole, in its entirety. Newman does not claim, in the Essay, to be able to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ developments, by apprehending the ‘idea’ of which they are developments: he does not claim to have the vision of the ‘whole’, such that he can discern what proceeds from, or belongs to, that whole, and what does not. He maintains, rather, that ‘doctrines’ that are ‘developments’ have certain characteristics, and that, to the extent that a doctrine seems to have those characteristics, so it might be regarded as a true development, rather than a ‘corruption’. The ‘tests’ that he proposes, for distinguishing true from false developments, are ‘tests’ that might be applied ‘from without’, so to speak: one need not ascertain how a particular doctrine fits, within the total vision that is the ‘idea’, if one is to identify, in that doctrine, certain of the characteristics which the ‘tests’ concern. He proposes seven ‘tests’: ‘preservation of the idea’, or preservation of ‘type’;156 ‘continuity of principles’; ‘power of assimilation’; ‘early anticipation’; ‘logical sequence’; ‘preservative addition’; ‘chronic continuance’. (One might, then, recognize that a particular doctrine has a ‘logical’ coherence with others,

156. He acknowledges that this test ‘implies an insight into the essential idea in which a system of thought is set up, which often cannot be possessed, and, if attempted, will lead to mere theorizing’, and in applying this ‘test’ to Christianity, he considers the testimony of the ‘world’ – in different periods – about Christianity, the general impression and ‘figure’ presented by Christianity to the world – considering Christianity as it appeared ‘from without’.

4. The ‘Impression’ of Christ

195

or one might observe that a particular doctrine has had a certain ‘continuance’ through time, or one might notice that later, authoritative, statements of that doctrine, on the part of the Church, were anticipated by earlier, more indistinct statements of it, in the writings of Christians, and so on, without claiming to apprehend, in its fullness, the ‘idea’ from which all of the doctrines proceed.) If, though, all of the various doctrines are expressions of a unitary ‘idea’, then to accept these doctrines, is to assimilate something of that ‘idea’, and the more one assimilates of that ‘idea’, the more one will apprehend those various doctrines in a manner that is animated by, that ‘lives’ in, that idea. One might, to the extent that one assimilates more of the ‘idea’, acquire an instinctive sense of which doctrines accord with it, or express it, and which do not. (In his essay ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, he would suggest that the ‘people of God’, without having any particular theological expertise, might have a ‘sort of instinct, or phronema’ for what is, and what is not, a proper expression of the faith.) Newman suggests that, as the ‘idea’ animating Christianity develops, as it has various expressions over time, and as corruptions of that idea emerge alongside authentic developments, so it becomes necessary to distinguish between true developments, and corruptions. ‘Considering that Christians, from the nature of the case, live under the bias of the doctrines, and in the very midst of the facts, and during the process of the controversies, which are to be the subject of criticism, since they are exposed to the prejudices of birth, education, locality, personal attachment, and party, it can hardly be maintained that in matter of fact a true development carries with it always its own certainty even to the learned, or that history, past or present, is secure from the possibility of a variety of interpretations.’157 Newman suggests that the authority of the Church, and of the magisterium, is a (divinely ordained) means of distinguishing true developments from corruptions – an ‘authority is necessary to impart decision to what is vague and confidence to what is empirical, to ratify the successive steps of so elaborate a process, and to secure the validity of inferences which are to be made the premisses of more remote investigations’.158 The emergence of the authority of the magisterium is itself a development – or, at least, the recognition, and exercise, of that authority is a development. Newman, equally, characterizes that magisterium as ‘external’ to the developments which it ratifies (though precisely how it is ‘external’ to them, he does not make altogether clear). ‘While, then, on the one hand, it is probable that some means will be granted for ascertaining the legitimate and true developments of Revelation, it appears, on the other, that these means must of necessity be external to the developments themselves.’159 Newman likens the ‘voice’ of this authority to the ‘voice’ of conscience. The supremacy of conscience is the essence of natural religion; the supremacy of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of revealed; and when such external authority is taken away, the mind falls back again upon that

157. Essay on Development, (London: James Toovey, 1845), 115. 158. Ibid., 117. 159. Ibid.

196

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

inward guide which it possessed even before Revelation was vouchsafed. Thus, what conscience is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or of the Church, or of the Holy See, as we may determine it, in the system of Revelation.160

If one takes it that the authoritative ‘voice’ in the ‘system of Revelation’ – however ‘we may determine it’ – is ‘external’ to the ‘process of the controversies’, in which developments occur, then one takes that ‘voice’ to be, in effect, the ‘voice’ of the ‘sacred impression’: the exercise of ‘infallibility’ would not, then, involve a claim to a ‘complete’ knowledge of the ‘Dispensation’, or the ‘heavenly archetype’; it would involve a claim to a certain competence in expressing, or manifesting, the ‘sacred impression’ animating the Church. In claiming infallibility, the Church ‘merely acts out what she says she is’, as Newman observes in Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850). Her precision and peremptoriness, all that is laid to her charge as intolerance and exclusiveness, her claim entirely to understand and to be able to deal with her own deposit and her own functions; her claim to reveal the unknown and to communicate the invisible, is, in the eye of reason (so far from being an objection to her coming from above), the very tenure of her high mission – just what would be sure to characterise her if she had received such a mission. She cannot be conceived without her message and her gifts. She is the organ and oracle, and nothing else, of a supernatural doctrine, which is independent of individuals, given to her once for all, coming down from the first ages, and so deeply and intimately embosomed in her, that it cannot be clean torn out of her, even if you should try; which gradually and majestically comes forth into dogmatic shape, as time goes on and need requires, still by no private judgment, but at the will of its Giver, and by the infallible elaboration of the whole body; – and which is simply necessary for the salvation of every one of us. It is not a philosophy, or literature, cognisable and attainable at once by those who cast their eyes that way; but it is a sacred deposit and tradition, a mystery or secret, as Scripture calls it, sufficient to arrest and occupy the whole intellect, and unlike anything else.161

By the mid-1840s, Newman felt he could discern, in the ‘precision and peremptoriness’ of the Roman Catholic Church, a resemblance to the Church, promised in the Scriptures, whose ‘look … bearing … voice, were to be her credentials’, and he took ‘the manifest royalty of her very presence’ to be a kind of image of the ‘sacred impression’ within her, an impression ‘so deeply and intimately embosomed in her, that it cannot be clean torn out of her, even if you should try’.

160. Ibid., 124. 161. Diff i, 217–18.

Chapter 5 THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH

1. The first book that Newman wrote, after becoming a Catholic, was a novel. Loss and Gain (1848) tells the story of the education of a young man, Charles Reding, who, after experiencing the ‘religious phenomenon’ of Oxford in the 1840s, converts to Catholicism: the conversion is, at once, a result, a fulfilment of that education, and a repudiation of that education, or, at least, a repudiation of certain aspects of it. Of his own conversion, Newman would remark ‘Oxford made us Catholics’. In Loss and Gain, Newman shows a ‘course of thought and state of mind’ which ‘issues in [the] conviction’ of the ‘Divine origin’ of the ‘Catholic religion’, and that ‘course of thought’ arises from the experience of Oxford life – from encounters with the advocates of various religious ‘views’, and from attempts to make sense of those encounters.1 Reding is moved to become a Catholic by his experience of Oxford – not by any experiences of Catholic institutions. Yet his response to his experience involves a certain ‘mystery’: what Reding makes of his experiences is not simply determined by those experiences; there is a freedom in the way he makes sense of his experiences, and in that freedom, there is a ‘mystery’. In the ‘Advertisement’ to the sixth edition of Loss and Gain, Newman remarked that he wrote the novel in response to a ‘tale directed against the Oxford converts to the Catholic Faith’ – From Oxford to Rome, by Elizabeth Harris (1847) – which was ‘as wantonly and preposterously fanciful, as [it was] injurious to those whose motives and actions it professed to represent’, a tale to which he felt the suitable response was ‘the publication of a second tale; drawn up with a stricter regard to truth and probability, and with at least some personal knowledge of Oxford, and some perception of the various aspects of the religious phenomenon, which the work in question handled so rudely and so unskilfully’, ‘dissipating the fog of pomposity and solemn pretence, which its writer had thrown around the personages introduced into it, by showing, as in a specimen, that those who were smitten with love of the Catholic Church, were nevertheless as able to write

1. John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2

198

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

common-sense prose as other men’.2 Newman was concerned, that is, with the meaning accorded to the ‘religious phenomenon’ at Oxford; he would show that a ‘love of the Catholic Church’ could be quite consistent with ‘common sense’ (a ‘common sense’ swift to detect and to reject ‘pomposity and solemn pretence’). Newman would, moreover, show that one might be converted to Catholicism by a ‘course of thought’ involving the opinions that he had himself professed over the previous decade and a half: if those opinions could be shown to conduce to a conversion, then those opinions could be taken to account for such a conversion – one need not look elsewhere, for other influences, to account for it. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), Newman mentions a ‘general feeling’, a ‘prepossession’ against him, after his conversion, that he had been, when an Anglican, a secret ‘Romanist’, who had concealed his ‘Romanist’ designs – a ‘general feeling that I was for years where I had no right to be; that I was a “Romanist” in Protestant livery and service; that I was doing the work of a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment, and knew it, or ought to have known it’.3 His ‘apparent indecision’ on certain matters, when ‘in Protestant livery’, was itself taken to be a mark of dishonesty. If [the members of the movement] were inspired by Roman theologians, (and this was taken for granted,) why did they not speak out at once? Why did they keep the world in such suspense and anxiety as to what was coming next, and what was to be the upshot of the whole? Why this reticence, and halfspeaking, and apparent indecision? It was plain that the plan of operations had been carefully mapped out from the first, and that these men were cautiously advancing towards its accomplishment, as far as was safe at the moment.4

If he ‘were inspired by Roman theologians’, and had a ‘plan of operations’, then his public professions – his various arguments, in defence of the English Church – were a ‘pretence’, a way of inveigling the unwary into accepting ‘Roman’ ideas. (This view of the writings of Newman was, of course, likely to counter any influence they might have, and Newman, on his conversion, hoped that his writings might continue to exert an influence on Anglicans.) The difference between the claim that he was a ‘Romanist’ and ‘knew it’, and the claim that he was a Romanist and ‘ought to have known it’, concerns whether he was dishonest, or whether he merely lacked ‘common sense’. In his Apologia, he aims to show that he was not dishonest (he observes at one point that ‘I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense or of any thing else: I am but vindicating myself from the charge of dishonesty’).5 In Loss and Gain, he would show, in Reding, how one, with no particular attachment to a religious ‘party’, exposed to the ‘religious

2. 3. 4. 5.

Loss and Gain, 3. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 95. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 131.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

199

phenomenon’ of Oxford, encountering ideas that were ‘in the air’, reflecting with ‘common sense’ (rather than any particular theological expertise) on those ideas, might be moved to convert to Catholicism. He would account, moreover, for how one, so moved, might seem somewhat ‘close’, or less than frank (rousing others to suspect concealed, discreditable motives): the motives of one, so moved, might be incomprehensible to others, should they be disposed to ‘view’ things differently; and, after all, there is a certain ‘mystery’ about such a conversion – the mystery of how grace moves the will. The ‘mystery’ of the soul – its ‘secret’, as something ‘out of sight’ to others, as something apparent only to the ‘sight’ of God – is reflected on at the very beginning of Loss and Gain. Charles Reding was the only son of a clergyman, who was in possession of a valuable benefice in a midland county. His father intended him for orders and sent him at a proper age to a public school. He had long revolved in his mind the respective advantages and disadvantages of public and private education, and had decided in favour of the former. ‘Seclusion,’ he said, ‘is no security for virtue. There is no telling what is in a boy’s heart; he may look as open and happy as usual, and be as kind and attentive, when there is a great deal wrong going on within. The heart is a secret with its Maker; no one on earth can hope to get at it or to touch it. I have a cure of souls; what do I really know of my parishioners? Nothing; their hearts are sealed books to me. And this dear boy, he comes close to me; he throws his arms round me, but his soul is as much out of my sight as if he were at the antipodes. I am not accusing him of reserve, dear fellow; his very love and reverence for me keep him in a sort of charmed solitude. I cannot expect to get at the bottom of him. “Each in his hidden sphere of bliss or woe, Our hermit spirits dwell.” It is our lot here below. No one on earth can know Charles’s secret thoughts. Did I guard him here at home ever so well, yet, in due time, it would be found that a serpent had crept into the heart of his innocence. Boys do not fully know what is good and what is evil; they do wrong things at first almost innocently. Novelty hides vice from them; there is no one to warn them or give them rules; and they become slaves of sin, while they are learning what sin is. They go to the university, and suddenly plunge into excesses, the greater in proportion to their inexperience. And, besides all this, I am not equal to the task of forming so active and inquisitive a mind as his. He already asks questions which I know not how to answer. So he shall go to a public school. There he will get discipline at least, even if he has more of trial; at least he will gain habits of self-command, manliness, and circumspection; he will learn to use his eyes, and will find materials to use them upon; and thus will be gradually trained for the liberty which, any how, he must have when he goes to college.’6 6. Loss and Gain, 5–6.

200

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Loss and Gain shows the education of Charles Reding, as he ‘learn[s] to use his eyes’ on the ‘religious phenomenon’ of Oxford (with Reding ‘reading’, making sense of, his experiences). It consists, for the most part, of portrayals, not of ‘Charles’s secret thoughts’, but of his encounters with others, his conversations with others (together with some of his reflections on those encounters and conversations). Consisting for the most part of scenes of dialogue, debate, and conversation, it looks at how such conversation affects those who take part in it, at how it relates to the formation of those who take part in it: it is a bildungsroman, in being concerned, primarily, with the education, the formation, of one central character  – Reding himself (though Reding is not the only character to develop – his development is counterposed with that of some of his friends). If it is concerned, for the most part, with conversation, the ‘pursuit of truth’, the life of the intellect, it intimates, nevertheless, the presence of that, in the soul, or ‘heart’, which is other than, more primary than, the life of the intellect. It intimates the presence of that, within the ‘heart’ of Reding, which is other than, more important than, that part of him that is engaged in conversations, arguments, and the like. At one point, it is observed that the ‘religious views’ of Reding were ‘progressing, unknown to himself ’. Here was Charles with his thoughts turned away from religious controversy for two years, yet with his religious views progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time. It could not have been otherwise, if he was to live a religious life at all. If he was to worship and obey his Creator, intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments must accompany that worship and obedience. He might not realise his own belief till questions had been put to him; but then a single discussion with a friend … would bring out what he really did hold to his own apprehension.7

Scarcely anything of the ‘worship, and obedience’ of Reding, the spiritual life of Reding, up to the time of his conversion, is portrayed in Loss and Gain. Newman suggests that this ‘worship’ is something other than the ‘conclusions, and judgments’ of the intellect and yet that such ‘conclusions, and judgements, must accompany’ it. When the father of Charles Reding observes that ‘his soul is as much out of my sight, as if he were at the antipodes’, quoting from The Christian Year – ‘Each in his hidden sphere or bliss or woe / Our hermit spirits dwell’ – he expresses a view with which Newman was in agreement. In a sermon on ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, preached in 1833, Newman maintains that ‘to feel that we have souls, is to feel our separation from things visible’, so that ‘we begin, by degrees, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe, our own soul, and the God who made it’.8 Our friends and relations, whom we are right in loving, these, too, after all, are nothing to us here. They cannot really help or profit us; we see them, and they act 7. Ibid., 142. 8. ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in PPS i, 20.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

201

upon us, only (as it were) at a distance, through the medium of sense; they cannot get at our souls; they cannot enter into our thoughts, or really be companions to us. In the next world it will, through God’s mercy, be otherwise; but here we enjoy, not their presence, but the anticipation of what one day shall be; so that, after all, they vanish before the clear vision we have, first, of our own existence, next of the presence of the great God in us, and over us, as our Governor and Judge, who dwells in us by our conscience, which is His representative.9

Newman would have agreed with the father of Reding, as to how ‘the heart is a secret with its Maker’. He would, equally, have sympathized with the reflection, ‘What do I really know of my parishioners? Nothing; their hearts are sealed books to me.’ For Newman, and for others, this was a matter for complaint – and it was felt to be owing, in part, to a lack of ecclesiastical ‘discipline’. The father of Reding, however, would seem to regard it as something inevitable. How much might his views, as ‘a clergyman … in possession of a valuable benefice’, be connected to some of the defects of that ecclesiastical discipline? His reflections on the education of Charles show prudence, but, then, do they involve too much of an acquiescence in the way things are ‘here below’? He remarks ‘Did I guard him here at home ever so well, yet, in due time, it would be found that a serpent had crept into the heart of his innocence. Boys do not fully know what is good and what is evil; they do wrong things at first almost innocently. Novelty hides vice from them; there is no one to warn them or give them rules.’10 Might he not, himself, be one who could ‘warn’ his son, or ‘give … rules’ to him? Then again, he is recognizing that he cannot be always there to ‘warn’ or ‘give … rules’ to his son, in the various situations which his son will encounter in life – situations in which, for the inexperienced, ‘novelty hides vice’; indeed, his son could not acquire any ‘self-command’, any independence, without making sense of such situations for himself: one must have some liberty, if one is to be ‘trained for … liberty’. What is more, the experience of Reding, at his public school, is, with respect to his religious formation, beneficial: he ‘had the good fortune to fall into the hands of an excellent tutor, who, while he instructed him in the old Church-of-England principles of Mant and Doyley, gave his mind a religious impression, which secured him against the allurements of bad company, whether at the school itself, or afterwards at Oxford’.11 Should, though, the forming of such a ‘religious impression’ be left to ‘fortune’? In a sermon preached in 1856, at the University Church in Dublin, on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, Newman observes that though, in the present state of things, intellect and conscience are cultivated separately, forming separate ‘kingdoms’ within the soul, he would have teachers, at the University, exercise a pastoral ‘office’. Is it not one part of our especial office to receive those from the hands of father and mother, whom father and mother can keep no longer? Thus, while professing 9. Ibid., 21. 10. Loss and Gain, 5. 11. Ibid., 6.

202

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

all sciences, and speaking by the mouths of philosophers and sages, a University delights in the well-known appellation of “Alma Mater” … able to confute and put right those who would set knowledge against itself, and would make truth contradict truth, and would persuade the world that, to be religious, you must be ignorant, and to be intellectual, you must be unbelieving.12

‘In the case of the young, whose education lasts a few years, where the intellect is, there is the influence. Their literary, their scientific teachers, really have the forming of them … . Youths need a masculine religion, if it is to carry captive their restless imaginations, and their wild intellects, as well as to touch their susceptible hearts.’13 From as early as the 1820s, Newman had entertained the aspiration to combine, in the ‘office’ of university teachers, a responsibility for forming the ‘intellect’ with a responsibility for forming the conscience; as a tutor at Oriel, he had tried to establish a new approach to tutoring, developing it into more of a ‘pastoral’ office, but his proposed reforms had not been accepted by the Master of Oriel. While he might well have agreed with the father of Reding, as to the need for the ‘active and inquisitive’ minds of the young to be formed, not by their parents, but those best fitted to ‘answer’ their questions, he might have considered the father of Reding to be aspiring for too little, in hoping that his son might acquire merely ‘habits of self-command, manliness, and circumspection’. Reding himself, expresses a sense that he requires  – and is not getting  – ‘practical direction’ in religious matters. Talking with a friend, about the advice given him by a tutor, to avoid extremes in all things, to aim always at a ‘mean’, he remarks, ‘I … got nothing definite from him.’ He did not say, ‘This is true, that is false’; but ‘Be true, be true, be good, be good, don’t go too far, keep in the mean, have your eyes about you, eschew parties, follow our divines, all of them’; – all which was but putting salt on the bird’s tail. I want some practical direction, not abstract truths … . I don’t understand having duties put on me which are too much for me. I don’t understand, I dislike, having a will of my own, when I have not the means to use it justly. In such a case, to tell me to act of myself, is like Pharaoh setting the Israelites to make bricks without straw. Setting me to inquire, to judge, to decide, forsooth! it’s absurd; who has taught me?14

Reding feels he is too much left to himself  – his ‘spirit’ is, in a sense, made a ‘hermit’, and he is asked ‘to act of [him]self ’. When, later, he feels sympathy for a friend, Willis, who has become a Catholic, he feels that he is taken out of his isolation – he is ‘no longer alone in the world’. He walks home at night, alongside

12. ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions [hereafter SPVO] (1874; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 4–5. 13. ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in SPVO, 14. 14. Loss and Gain, 86.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

203

Willis, and when it is time for them to take their separate ways, Willis bids him farewell, declaring, ‘“who knows when I may see you next, and where? may it be in the courts of the true Jerusalem, the Queen of Saints, the Holy Roman Church, the Mother of us all!” He drew Charles to him and kissed his cheek, and was gone before Charles had time to say a word.’15 Yet Charles could not have spoken had he had ever so much opportunity. He set off at a brisk pace, cutting down with his stick the twigs and brambles which the pale twilight discovered in his path. It seemed as if the kiss of his friend had conveyed into his own soul the enthusiasm which his words had betokened. He felt himself possessed, he knew not how, by a high superhuman power, which seemed able to push through mountains, and to walk the sea. With winter around him, he felt within like the springtide, when all is new and bright. He perceived that he had found, what indeed he had never sought, because he had never known what it was, but what he had ever wanted  – a soul sympathetic with his own. He felt he was no longer alone in the world, though he was losing that true congenial mind the very moment he had found him. Was this, he asked himself, the communion of Saints?16

What might Reding mean by ‘the communion of Saints’? In a sermon preached in 1837 on ‘The Communion of Saints’, Newman maintains that this ‘communion’ consists in the presence of Christ in the members of the Church – so that they are ‘one and all the births and manifestations of one and the same unseen spiritual principle or power, “living stones,” internally connected, as branches from a tree, not as the parts of a heap’, such that the ‘divine and adorable Form [of Christ], which the Apostles saw and handled, after ascending into heaven became a principle of life, a secret origin of existence to all who believe, through the gracious ministration of the Holy Ghost’.17 The Church is the ‘body’ of Christ, animated by the life of Christ. ‘From the day of Pentecost to this hour there has been in the Church but One Holy One, the King of kings, and Lord of lords Himself, who is in all believers, and through whom they are what they are; their separate persons being but as separate developments, vessels, instruments, and works of Him

15. Ibid., 229. 16. Ibid. (A sardonic response to the question of Reding – ‘Was this … the communion of Saints?’ – would be – ‘No, this is youthful enthusiasm, tinged, possibly, with unconscious homoerotic feeling.’ Newman himself, in his 1839 British Critic article on the ‘state of parties in the English Church’, reflecting on the ‘excitement of the feelings’ associated with the Oxford movement, would observe, ‘as to what are earthly, what heavenly feelings, and who is to discriminate between them, this is quite another question, on which men of different sentiments will decide differently’.) 17. ‘The Communion of Saints’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1839; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 170.

204

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

who is invisible.’18 The ‘Ministry and Sacraments, the bodily presence of Bishop and people, are given us as keys and spells, by which we bring ourselves into the presence of the great company of Saints; they are as much as this, but they are no more; they are not identical with that company’.19 In a sermon preached later in the same year, on ‘The Church a Home for the Lonely’, Newman characterizes the Church as ‘a secret home, for faith and love to enjoy, wherever found, in spite of the world around us’.20 ‘Though thou art in a body of flesh, a member of this world, thou hast but to kneel down reverently in prayer, and thou art at once in the society of Saints and Angels.’21 In a sermon preached a few years earlier, in 1834, on ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, Newman observes that those who ‘surrender [their] hearts to Christ and obey God’ are ‘the few’, that ‘they are sprinkled up and down the world … [and] are separated the one from the other’, and that ‘they do not even know each other’, or themselves (‘they do not dare take to themselves the future titles of God’s elect, though they be really reserved for them’), or, ‘even when they know each other (as far as man can know man), still … they may not form an exclusive communion together’.22 The ‘elect’ are ‘scattered about amid the leaves of that Mystical Vine which is seen, and receive their nurture from its trunk and branches’. They live on its Sacraments and its Ministry; they gain light and salvation from its rites and ordinances; they communicate with each other through it; they obey its rulers; they walk together with its members; they do not dare to judge of this man or that man, on their right hand or their left, whether or not he is absolutely of the number of those who shall be saved; they accept all as their brethren in Christ, as partakers of the same general promises.23

Their communion with one another is, then, imperfect; and they are, for the most part, solitary in the world. Do they get any ‘consolation’ from ‘the Church which they see’ – ‘some sensible stay, a vision of Heaven, of peace amid purity, antagonist to the world that now is’?24 Newman maintains that ‘the Church which they see’, despite the ‘suffocation’ of a ‘worldly atmosphere’, nevertheless manifests the ‘light’ of the ‘Spirit’ – ‘viewed at a little distance, its whole surface will be illuminated, though the light really streams from apertures which might be numbered’.25 There is, moreover, consolation in ‘the records of those who lived and died by faith in the old time’, the Scriptures: faith ‘recounts the list of faithful servants of God … and 18. ‘The Communion of Saints’, in PPS iv, 170. 19. Ibid., 176. 20. ‘The Church a Home for the Lonely’, in PPS iv, 190. 21. Ibid., 198. 22. ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iii [hereafter PPS iii] (1836; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 238, 239, 240. 23. ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’, in PPS iii, 241. 24. Ibid., 243. 25. Ibid.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

205

no longer feels sad as if it were alone … [and] by degrees [the faithful Christian] learns to have them as familiar images before his mind, to unite his cause with theirs’.26 ‘What a world of sympathy and comfort is thus opened to us in the Communion of Saints! … Are we young, and in temptation or trial? we cannot be in worse circumstances than Joseph. Are we in sickness? Job will surpass us in sufferings as in patience.’ Last of all, ‘What is [the] Church but a pledge and proof of God’s never-dying love and power from age to age? He set it up in mercy to mankind, and its presence among us is a proof that in spite of our sins He has not yet forsaken us … . He said, He would be with His Church: He has continued it alive to this day. He has continued the line of His Apostles onwards through every age and all troubles and perils of the world.’27 To participate in the liturgy, is to ‘elicit and realize the invisible’ – the ‘very disposition of the [church] building, the subdued light, the aisles, the Altar, with its pious adornments, are figures of things unseen, and stimulate our fainting faith’.28 These things are, however, compensations, for a life that is, in many respects, solitary. Newman felt that the ‘elect’ might have ‘glimpses’ of one another, in this life, but these ‘glimpses’ would be brief, uncertain. ‘God alone sees the heart; now and then, as they walk their way, they see glimpses of God’s work in others; they take hold of them awhile in the dark, but soon lose them; they hear their voices, but cannot find them … . Among those with whom their lot is cast, whom they see continually, one or two, perhaps, are given them to rejoice in.’29 When Reding feels that, in his friendship with his Catholic friend, Willis, he is encountering a ‘soul sympathetic with his own’, and wonders whether he is experiencing something of the ‘communion of Saints’, he then reflects – ‘how could it be, when he was in one communion and Willis in another?’30 Prior to his asking this question, however, it has been observed, of his ‘progress’ toward Catholicism, that ‘he could not escape the destiny of being one of the elect of God’: ‘What a mystery is the soul of man! Here was Charles, busy with Aristotle and Euripides, Thucydides and Lucretius, yet all the while growing towards the Church … . He could not escape the destiny of being one of the elect of God … . He could not ultimately escape his destiny of becoming a Catholic.’31 In the phrasing, here, the ‘destiny of being one of the elect of God’ is paralleled with the ‘destiny of becoming a Catholic’. The sense that is being accorded to the term ‘elect’, here, is perhaps somewhat ambiguous: in one way of taking the term, the ‘elect’ are those who are in the Church Militant, those who, in being baptized, have been ‘called out’, chosen by God (as early as 1832, Newman could use the term ‘elect’ in this sense – remarking, in a sermon on ‘Divine Decrees’, that, in the Christian covenant, God

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 243, 245. Ibid., 245–6, 247–8. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 240. Loss and Gain, 229. Ibid., 145.

206

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

is presented as ‘predestining to glory, characters not persons, pledging the gift of perseverance not to individuals, but to a body of which the separate members might change’, so that ‘Christian Election is … conditional’ and ‘souls chosen for eternal life might fall away’);32 in another way of taking the term, the ‘elect’ are those in the Church Triumphant, who do not ‘fall away’ (and Newman could use the term in this sense – claiming, in a sermon preached in 1836, on ‘The Visible Church for the sake of the Elect’, that in ‘Christian states … human nature remains what it was, though it has been baptized’, that an ‘an ordinary religious man’ is usually one who ‘seldom thinks of the Day of Judgment, seldom thinks of sins past, says few prayers, cares little for the Church, has no zeal for God’s truth, spends his money on himself ’ and ‘such is not one of God’s elect’, for ‘the latter is more than just, temperate, and kind; he has a devoted love of God, high faith, holy hope, ever-flowing charity, a noble self-command, a strict conscientiousness, humility never absent, gentleness in speech, simplicity, modesty, and unaffectedness, an unconsciousness of what his endowments are, and what they make him in God’s sight’ – the elect, in this sense, consisting of ‘a certain number of souls in the world, known to God, unknown to us, who will obey the Truth when offered to them, whatever be the mysterious reason that they do and others do not’.)33 If Newman is using the term ‘elect’ to mean, in effect, the members of the Church Militant, then the term ‘elect’ has, here, the same reference as ‘Catholic’ – the parallelism of the ‘destiny of being one of the elect’ and the ‘destiny of becoming a Catholic’ accords with an equivalence in reference: to be ‘elect’, in this sense, is to be a Catholic. If Newman is using the term ‘elect’ to mean, in effect, the saints, then he could be suggesting that, as Reding is one of the ‘elect’, so he becomes a Catholic: he is one of those ‘who will obey the Truth when offered’, so he accepts the Truth, ‘offered’ by the Church; ‘becoming a Catholic’, the ordinary means of salvation, is instrumental to his becoming a saint, and it is his ‘destiny’ to become a saint. (Newman did not maintain that only members of the Catholic Church received grace: in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), he observes that ‘grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation’, but he insists, equally, that ‘the grace given them is intended ultimately to bring them into the Church, and if it is not tending to do so, it will not ultimately profit them’.)34 In the parallelism of ‘elect’ and ‘Catholic’, then, Newman associates (without quite identifying) the visible life of the Church, with the invisible life of the Spirit. The scene in which Willis parts from Reding, in the ‘pale twilight’, seems very much a symbol of the kind of insight which Newman takes the ‘elect’ to have into one another – ‘They see glimpses of God’s work in others; they take hold of them awhile in the dark,

32. ‘Divine Decrees’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 123, 124. 33. ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’, in PPS iv, 153, 155, 158–9. 34. Diff i, 85, 86.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

207

but soon lose them; they hear their voices, but cannot find them.’ The scene in which Reding senses, in Willis, a ‘soul sympathetic to his own’, is prefigured by a scene, which takes place, again, when Reding is walking home at night (after an evening party in which he and his friends have, among other things, been discussing Willis, and the likelihood of his returning to the Anglican Church) in which Reding encounters a ‘penitent’, before ‘a tall wooden Cross, which, in better days, had been a religious emblem, but had served in latter times to mark the boundary between two contiguous parishes’. It was bright moonlight; and … he bounded over the stile at the side of the road, and was at once buried in the shade of the copse along which his path lay. Soon he came in sight of a tall wooden Cross, which, in better days, had been a religious emblem, but had served in latter times to mark the boundary between two contiguous parishes. The moon was behind him, and the sacred symbol rose awfully in the pale sky, overhanging a pool, which was still venerated in the neighborhood for its reported miraculous virtue. Charles, to his surprise, saw distinctly a man kneeling on the little mound out of which the Cross grew; nay, heard him, for his shoulders were bare, and he was using the discipline upon them, while he repeated what appeared to be some form of devotion. Charles stopped, unwilling to interrupt, yet not knowing how to pass; but the stranger had caught the sound of feet, and in a few seconds vanished from his view. He was overcome with a sudden emotion, which he could not control. ‘O happy times,’ he cried, ‘when faith was one! O blessed penitent, whoever you are, who know what to believe, and how to gain pardon, and can begin where others end! Here am I, in my twenty-third year, uncertain about everything, because I have nothing to trust.’ He drew near to the Cross, took off his hat, knelt down and kissed the wood, and prayed awhile that whatever might be the consequences, whatever the trial, whatever the loss, he might have grace to follow whithersoever God should call him. He then rose and turned to the cold well; he took some water in his palm and drank it. He felt as if he could have prayed to the Saint who owned that pool – St. Thomas the Martyr, he believed – to plead for him, and to aid him in his search after the true faith; but something whispered, ‘It is wrong’; and he checked the wish. So, regaining his hat, he passed away, and pursued his homeward path at a brisk pace.35

When Reding arrives home, he finds an ‘anonymous paper’ has been left for him, consisting of a series of questions, mostly about the nature of the Church – beginning with ‘What is meant by the One Church, of which the Creed speaks?’ Wondering who might have left it for him, ‘his mind glanced to the person whom he had seen under the Cross; perhaps it glanced further’.36 On looking it over, he reflects, ‘it’s well written – better than Willis could write; it’s not Willis’s. There’s

35. Loss and Gain, 201. 36. Ibid., 202.

208

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

something about that Willis I don’t understand.’37 Reding decides that the ‘paper’ was not left by Willis – it is ‘better than Willis could write’ – but then he has not seen Willis for some time; perhaps Willis, since Reding saw him last, has acquired greater wisdom, greater insight. If one takes it that it is Willis who Reding saw ‘under the Cross’, and Willis who left the ‘paper’, then the relationship of Reding to Willis, at this moment, is analogous to the relationship which, according to Newman, the elect have to one another – ‘They take hold of them awhile in the dark, but soon lose them; they hear their voices, but cannot find them.’ At the close of Loss and Gain, Reding and Willis meet once again. Reding has ‘been admitted into the communion of the Catholic Church about an hour since’, at a Passionist convent; Willis has become a Passionist priest, taking the religious name Aloysius. A good God overrules all things [said Father Aloysius]. But I must away. Do you recollect my last words when we parted in Devonshire? I have thought of them often since; they were too true then. I said, ‘Our ways divide’. They are different still, yet they are the same. Whether we shall meet again here below, who knows? but there will be a meeting ere long before the Throne of God, and under the shadow of His Blessed Mother and all Saints. ‘Deus manifeste veniet, Deus noster, et non silebit.’Reding took Father Aloysius’s hand and kissed it; as he sank on his knees the young priest made the sign of blessing over him. Then he vanished through the door of the sacristy; and the new convert sought his temporary cell, so happy in the Present, that he had no thoughts either for the Past or the Future.38

Reding and Willis, then, will not experience friendship, companionship, in their life in the Church. Becoming a Catholic will not mean, for Reding, experiencing the companionship of a ‘mind congenial’ to his own: the invisible ‘communion’ will not become fully visible, will not be manifest in a visible form. Willis, quoting from Psalm 49, anticipates a time when ‘God shall come manifestly: our God shall come, and shall not keep silence’. The overcoming of solitude, isolation, is associated with ‘God coming manifestly’. The scene in which Reding encounters the ‘penitent’ by the Cross, and the scene in which, after the ‘kiss of his friend’, Willis, Reding experiences what seems a ‘high superhuman power’ – these scenes differ, markedly, in style, in mood, from the rest of Loss and Gain. They do not entirely depart from realism; but the scenes are more symbolic than they are realistic – the ‘sacred symbol’ of ‘the moon’ casts its light, turning all that happens into a ‘symbol’. They are scenes, moreover, in which Reding is induced to recognize his own sympathies – his inclination toward ‘Rome’ (rather than merely his uncertainty, and his dissatisfaction with his present circumstances). His latent affinity to Catholicism – to that which, in the world of

37. Ibid., 204. 38. Ibid., 297.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

209

Oxford, is suppressed – emerges; an instinct of his ‘heart’ becomes apparent. There is a suggestion, moreover, that it is in Catholicism, and only there, that certain instincts of the ‘heart’, of the ‘hermit spirit’, are properly recognized, and expressed: there, that something of the inmost life of the ‘soul’ is expressed, and satisfied. In the year after being received into the Catholic Church, reviewing a new volume of poetry by Keble, Lyra Innocentium, Newman observes that, in The Christian Year, Keble ‘did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical’. Newman then claims that ‘poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets’. What is the Catholic Church, viewed in her human aspect, but a discipline of the affections and passions? What are her ordinances and practices but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a ‘cleansing’, as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul? She is the poet of her children; full of music to soothe the sad and control the wayward, – wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence or commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth.39

Certain instincts, or feelings, ‘which will not bear words’, present in ‘dream[s] of childhood, or aspiration[s] of youth’, have their fulfilment in the life, and the worship, of the Catholic Church. Something of the inmost life of the ‘heart’, ‘which will not bear words’, has, there, its proper expression. Newman maintained, equally, that it is in Catholicism, above all, that the inmost life of the ‘heart’, the life of the soul, is properly recognized. In his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850), Newman attests to an insight, about the Church, ‘which has been forced on me, as a matter of fact and experience, most powerfully ever since I was a Catholic, as it must be forced on every one who is in the communion of the Church’ – the insight that the Church ‘contemplates, not the whole, but the parts; not a nation, but the men who form it; not society in the first place, but in the second place, and in the first place individuals; it looks beyond the outward act, on and into the thought, the motive, the intention, and the will’. [The] mighty world-wide Church, like her Divine Author, regards, consults for, labours for the individual soul; she looks at the souls for whom Christ died, and who are made over to her; and her one object, for which everything is sacrificed – appearances, reputation, worldly triumph – is to acquit herself well of this most awful responsibility … . The Church overlooks everything in comparison of the immortal soul.40 39. ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 442–3. 40. Difficulties felt by Anglicans, 233, 236–7.

210

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

The Church ‘consults for’ the ‘soul’ – and Reding is aware of his own soul. Early on in Loss and Gain, Reding admits to his sister Mary, with whom he is close, that ‘we are so blest that I am sometimes quite frightened … there’s one text which has ever dwelt on my mind, “Rejoice with trembling”. I can’t take full unrestrained pleasure in anything … . It may be a selfish prudence, for what I know; but I am sure that, did I give my heart to any creature, I should be withdrawing it from God.’41 Mary replies, ‘Whatever we lose, no change can affect us as a family. While we are we, we are to each other what nothing external can be to us, whether as given or as taken away’, but Reding observes, ‘Everything is so uncertain here below.’42 When Mary insists, ‘We are sure of each other,’ Reding kisses her, but replies, ‘It seems presumptuous to say so. David and Jonathan were parted; St. Paul and St. Barnabas.’ Seeing that Mary has become upset, he declares, ‘Oh, what an ass I am … for thus teasing you about nothing; no, I only mean that there is One only who cannot die, who never changes, only One. It can’t be wrong to remember this.’43 If Reding feels that to give his ‘heart to any creature’ would be to ‘withdraw it’ (idolatrously) from God, then does this, itself, create a kind of inhibition, a reserve, in his relationships with others  – so that, ‘withdrawing’ himself from others, he experiences all relationships with others as imperfect, unsatisfactory (feeling that they ‘act upon us … at a distance’, and ‘cannot get at our souls’ or ‘enter into our thoughts, or really be companions to us’), and, experiencing his relationships with others in this way, he feels that only in his relationship with God there can be a full communion? There is, evidently, a difference between a ‘distance’ from others that arises from a kind of inhibition, and a ‘distance’ that is inescapable, inevitable, arising from the imperfect character of all communication in this world, all communication ‘through the medium of sense’. Newman would have it that ‘earthly’ communication is, inevitably, imperfect: in a sermon preached in 1839 on ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’, he maintains that ‘none but the presence of our Maker can enter us; for to none besides can the whole heart in all its thoughts and feelings be unlocked and subjected’; it ‘is this feeling of simple and absolute confidence and communion, which soothes and satisfies those to whom it is vouchsafed. We know that even our nearest friends enter into us but partially, and hold intercourse with us only at times; whereas the consciousness of a perfect and enduring Presence, and it alone, keeps the heart open.’44 In Loss and Gain, it is observed, at one point, that Reding has ‘an habitual sense of the Divine Presence; a sense which, of course, did not insure uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there it was – the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him’ such that ‘he felt himself to be God’s creature, and responsible to

41. Loss and Gain, 74. 42. Ibid., 74, 75. 43. Ibid., 75. 44. ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 318.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

211

Him – God’s possession, not his own’.45 It is, perhaps, by contrast with this ‘sense of the Divine Presence’, that Reding feels all other ‘intercourse’ to be imperfect. He ends his discussion with Mary, by quoting some lines of Cowper, on how God is the ‘centre’ and ‘point of rest’ of ‘all minds’. Thou art the source and centre of all minds, Their only point of rest, Eternal Word. From Thee departing, they are lost, and rove At random, without honour, hope, or peace. From Thee is all that soothes the life of man.46

Not long after Reding has this conversation with Mary, about how ‘there is One only who cannot die, who never changes, only One’, his father dies. Reding has been experiencing certain doubts about the English Church, after attending a lecture on the 39 Articles, but, on the death of his father, he feels all these doubts to be ‘shams’, unreal. It was the first great grief poor Charles had ever had, and he felt it to be real. How did the small anxieties which had of late teased him vanish before this tangible calamity! He then understood the difference between what was real and what was not. All the doubts, inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on theological subjects, seemed like so many shams, which flitted before him in sun-bright hours, but had no root in his inward nature, and fell from him, like the helpless December leaves, in the hour of his affliction. He felt now where his heart and his life lay. His birth, his parentage, his education, his home, were great realities; to these his being was united; out of these he grew. He felt he must be what providence had made him. What is called the pursuit of truth seemed an idle dream. He had great tangible duties to his father’s memory, to his mother and sisters, to his position; he felt sick of all theories as if they had taken him in, and he secretly resolved never more to have anything to do with them. Let the world go on as it might, happen what would to others, his own place and his own path were clear. He would go back to Oxford, attend steadily to his books, put aside all distractions, avoid bye-paths, and do his best to acquit himself well in the schools. The Church of England as it was, its Articles, bishops, preachers, professors, had sufficed for much better persons than he was; they were good enough for him. He could not do better than imitate the life and death of his beloved father; quiet years in the country at a distance from all excitements, a round of pious, useful works among the poor, the care of a village school, and at length the death of the righteous.47

45. Loss and Gain, 161. 46. Ibid., 75. 47. Ibid., 112.

212

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman suggests that this encounter with the ‘real’ is, in itself, beneficial. Reding, thenceforth, understands the difference between what is ‘real’, and what is not. ‘A leaf had been turned over in his life; he could not be what he had been. People come to man’s estate at very different ages … . Charles had left Oxford a clever unformed youth; he returned a man.’48 Reding turns away, at this time, from the ‘doubts, inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on theological subjects’; but, while ‘his thoughts [are] turned away from religious controversy for two years’, nevertheless, ‘his religious views [are] progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time’, though this ‘progress’ in his ‘views’ proceeds, not merely from ‘inquiries, surmises, views’, but from something rather more ‘real’  – from his efforts to ‘to worship and obey his Creator’ (‘intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments must accompany that worship and obedience’). His turning away, for a time, from explicit, systematic ‘inquiries … on theological subjects’, means that his ‘progress’ in ‘religious views’ is informed, not by mere ratiocination, but by ‘worship, and obedience’ (by his ‘real’ spiritual life). Yet, while there is piety and humility in the sense Reding has that ‘his birth, his parentage, his education, his home, were great realities; to these his being was united; out of these he grew’, and there is piety and humility in his sense that the ‘Church of England as it was … had sufficed for much better persons than he was … [it was] good enough for him’, nevertheless, his reaction against all mere ‘theories’ involves something like a tendency toward scepticism, or an acquiescence in uncertainty – a rejection of ‘the pursuit of truth’ as an ‘idle dream’. In the period prior to his conversion to Catholicism, Newman engaged in a correspondence with Keble, in which he set out some of the considerations that were moving him toward ‘Rome’. Less than a week before he was received into the Catholic Church, Newman got a letter from Keble, in which Keble commented on how some of his doubts and anxieties were quieted when he witnessed the peaceful deaths of members of the Church of England (his brother, Tom, was dying at that time, his life ‘hanging by a thread’). At such times one seems in a way to see deeper into realities, and I must own to you that the impression on my own mind of the reality of things I have been brought up among, and of its being my own fault, not theirs, whereinsoever I am found wanting, – this impression seems to deepen in me as Death draws nearer, and I find it harder and harder to imagine that persons such as I have seen and heard of lately should be permitted to live and die deceiving themselves in such a point, as whether they are aliens to the graces of God’s Sacraments or no.49

‘It is very mysterious, very bewildering indeed; but, being so, one’s duty seems clearly pointed out: to abide where one is, till some call comes upon one. If this

48. Ibid., 113. 49. LD x, 474. Quoted in Edward Short, Newman and his Contemporaries (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 60.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

213

were merely my own reason or feeling, I should mistrust it altogether, knowing, alas! that I am far indeed from the person to whom guidance is promised, but when I see the faith of others, such as I know them to be, and so very near to me as God has set them, I am sure that it would be a kind of impiety to dream of separating myself from them.’50 Newman and Keble differed in their interpretation of the Butlerian principle the ‘probability is the guide of life’, and the ‘guide’ of religion:51 Newman felt that, while arguments for religious belief might be only, in themselves, ‘probable’, one might nevertheless be justified, by a cumulation of ‘probable’ arguments, in becoming certain about such matters – certitude (as a ‘habit of mind’) might arise, legitimately, from ‘concurring and converging probabilities’; Keble felt that, as arguments for religious belief are only, in themselves, probable, rather than demonstrative, one cannot attain to certainty in religious matters, so that faith is an abiding in uncertainty – and he could maintain that a ‘rightly disposed and considerate person … would rather be startled and rendered suspicious by arguments and statements which sound entirely satisfactory’, since ‘if the whole Kingdom of God be in the decayed condition, which so many appearances indicate; how dare any individual among us seek great things for himself, either in the way of certainty or sensible comfort?’ Keble would associate uncertainty, in this regard, with a proper humility; he could suggest that a ‘longing after abstract perfection’ might involve a certain pride; and he suggested that ‘the mark of the Cross seems rather to belong to those who struggle on in a decayed and perhaps still decaying Church, bearing their burden as they may, than those who allow their imaginations to dwell on fancied improvements and blessings to be obtained on possible changes of communion’. In his correspondence with Newman, prior to his conversion, Keble asked Newman to consider whether he might have a ‘tendency’ to a ‘certain restlessness, a longing after something more, analogous perhaps to an exquisite ear in music, which would keep you, I should think, in spite of yourself, intellectually and morally dissatisfied, wherever you were’.52 One might become ‘dissatisfied’ with the church one is in, imagining ‘something more’ might be had elsewhere, yet this might be ‘fanciful’: things, elsewhere, might be no better, if not worse (‘the whole Church might be so lowered by sin, as to hinder one’s finding on earth anything which seems really to answer to the Church of the Scriptures’). What one is ‘dissatisfied’ with might be, in fact, simply ‘reality’: one might be pursuing that which is only imaginary, owing to an ‘exquisite’ perception of an imaginary ‘perfection’ – a ‘perfect’ Church, manifest in such a way as to justify a ‘perfect’ assurance as to its claims. Keble asks, then, whether there might be a refusal of ‘realities’, in the dissatisfaction of Newman with the Anglican Church: a refusal of the reality of uncertainty; a refusal of the reality that ‘perfection’, in this world, is not to be had. If one feels ‘dissatisfied’ with

50. LD x, 474. 51. See Edward Short, Newman and his Contemporaries (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 51–2. 52. Quoted in Edward Short, Newman and his Contemporaries, 55.

214

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

oneself, where one is, if one feels one might realize ‘great things’ elsewhere – that one might attain to spiritual ‘perfection’ elsewhere – then one must recognize that one is ‘wanting’, spiritually – otherwise, one would not be aspiring for ‘more’ – and if one is ‘wanting’, imperfect, spiritually, then perhaps one should be hesitant to judge the ‘realities’ one is ‘among’ (if one is ‘wanting’, how could one be a good judge?), and perhaps one is ‘wanting’, not because those ‘realities’ are at fault, but because one is at fault oneself: one could, perhaps, have got more from those ‘realities’, if one were better ‘disposed’ (‘I must own to you that the impression on my own mind of the reality of things I have been brought up among, and of its being my own fault, not theirs, whereinsoever I am found wanting’). The view of Keble, then, corresponds to that of Reding: that ‘what is called the pursuit of truth’ might be ‘an idle dream’ (a ‘dream’ of ‘perfection’, of a certainty, which is not to be had) and that one must ‘be what providence had made’ one (one must ‘bear’ being uncertain, as a part of what ‘providence’ has made one to be, and one must acknowledge oneself to be a part of, and subject to, what one has ‘been brought up among’, not putting oneself ‘above’ it, so to speak, by assessing it according to a ‘fanciful’ notion of perfection). Is this, however, to abdicate a certain responsibility for oneself? Reding reflects that his ‘birth, his parentage, his education, his home, were great realities; to these his being was united; out of these he grew’.53 While the ‘being’ of Reding may be ‘united’ to the ‘great realities’ of ‘birth’, ‘parentage’, ‘home’, it is not wholly subsumed by them. Reding feels himself to be ‘God’s posession, not his own’ – not the ‘possession’ of his ‘birth, his parentage, his education, his home’. If he is moved by a ‘longing after something more’, could not this ‘longing’ be regarded as something, in itself, good: in an essay written in 1839, Newman observes of those ‘who wish for things which they have not, start and look about them with beating hearts and troubled eyes, when a whisper, from whatever source, tells them that their yearnings perchance may find somewhat to satisfy them’, that such ‘feelings, if of earth, are merely enthusiastic, and often argue impatience and want of discipline’ but ‘when those feelings are true and right, they

53. In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849) Newman maintains that ‘members’ of the ‘Established religion … ground their duty of continuance in their communion, not on faith in it, but on attachment to it, which is a very different thing; utterly different, for there are very many reasons why they should feel a very great liking for the religion in which they have been brought up. Its portions of Catholic teaching, its “decency and order,” the pure and beautiful English of its prayers, its literature, the piety found among its members, the influence of superiors and friends, its historical associations, its domestic character, the charm of a country life, the remembrance of past years, – there is all this and much more to attach the mind to the national worship. But attachment is not trust, nor is to obey the same as to look up to, and to rely upon; nor do I think that any thoughtful or educated man can simply believe or confide in the word of the Established Church. I never met any such person who did, or said he did, and I do not think that such a person is possible.’ ‘Faith and Doubt’, in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 230–1.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

215

are the motions of a divine love, and the disposition to confide which they involve, whithersoever tending, is of the nature of faith’.54 He then acknowledges that ‘as to what are earthly, what heavenly feelings, and who is to discriminate between them, this is quite another question, on which men of different sentiments will decide differently’.55 With regard to the sense Reding has that ‘he must be what providence had made him’, he will eventually take it that ‘providence’ has ‘made him’ convinced of the truth of Catholicism, that his belief, in this matter, is a ‘part of ’ himself. I said, ‘Perhaps I am in a dream. Oh, that I could pinch myself and awake!’ You know what stress I laid on my change of feeling upon my dear father’s death; what I thought to be convictions before, vanished then like a cloud. I have said to myself, ‘Perhaps these will vanish too’. But no; ‘the clouds return after the rain’; they come again and again, heavier than ever. It is a conviction rooted in me; it endures against the prospect of loss of mother and sisters … . No, by this time I have proved that it is a real conviction. My belief in the Church of Rome is part of myself: I cannot act against it without acting against God … . All reason comes from God; our grounds must at best be imperfect; but if they appear to be sufficient after prayer, diligent search, obedience, waiting, and, in short, doing our part, they are His voice calling us on. He it is, in that case, who makes them seem convincing to us. I am in His hands.56

The ‘conviction’ is ‘part of ’ himself, and yet it is, equally, a ‘calling’ from what is more than the self; to ‘act against it’ is to act against God: it is ‘His voice calling’.

2. What is it that makes Reding ‘intellectually and morally dissatisfied’ with the ‘realities’ he has ‘been brought up among’? What is his ‘intellectual’ progress? When he first arrives at Oxford, Reding abides by the ‘maxim’ that ‘we must measure people by what they are, and not by what they are not’ and he has ‘a great notion of loving every one – of looking kindly on every one’: he does not have a definite ‘view’ of religious matters; he is ‘in the season of poetry … because when we first see things, we see them in a “gay confusion,” which is a principal element of the poetical’, and he has not yet begun to ‘number and sort and measure things’, ‘advanc[ing] towards philosophy and truth, but … reced[ing] from poetry’.57 As one should look ‘kindly on every one’, he feels, so one should not concern oneself

54. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in Essays, Critical and Historical i [hereafter ECH i] (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 275. 55. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 275. 56. Loss and Gain, 236–7. 57. Ibid., 16–17.

216

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

overmuch with any apparent defects in their beliefs, with ‘what they are not’. His attitude changes, in this regard, owing, in part, to the influence of his friend, Sheffield, who scorns ‘shams’ – expressions or forms that are separated from ‘real’ meanings or functions  – and who insists that ‘we must … have a standard of things, else one good thing is as good as another’.58 (Much of the satire of Loss and Gain is concerned, in this regard, with ‘shams’, with various kinds of unreality – with those who are attracted to certain professions, without having sufficient sense of the meaning of those professions, and their relation to reality.)59 Reding and Sheffield contrast with one another, in their ways of thinking: Sheffield ‘easily picked up opinions and facts, especially on controversies of the day, without laying anything very much to heart’ and, being ‘ready, clear-sighted, unembarrassed, and somewhat forward’, he ‘was not satisfied intellectually with things as they are … was critical, impatient to reduce things to system, pushed principles too far, was fond of argument, partly from pleasure in the exercise, partly because he was perplexed, though he did not lay anything very much to heart’,60 whereas Reding ‘understood more deeply than Sheffield, and held more practically, what he had once received’, and ‘was gentle and affectionate, and easily led by others, except when duty clearly interfered’.61 Reding ‘[holds] more practically’ – his thinking is implicated with his ‘practical’ existence, and with his ‘practical’ wisdom. Sheffield thinks in a way that involves his ‘heart’ less – he is concerned more with ‘reduc[ing] things to system’, and is ‘fond of argument’, for itself: ratiocination is more of an end in itself for him, and a ‘pleasure’ in itself; it is somewhat detached from his ‘practical’ existence (he does not ‘lay anything very much to heart’).62 The restlessness of Sheffield is a kind of stimulus to Reding  – inducing him to recognize inconsistencies, absurdities, and the like, in the various religious ‘systems’ which they encounter. The disdain of Sheffield for ‘shams’ makes an ‘impression’ on Reding. He felt that there was truth in [this attitude] at bottom, and a truth new to him. He was not a person to let a truth sleep in his mind; though it did not vegetate very quickly, it was sure ultimately to be pursued into its consequences, and to affect his existing opinions. In the instance before us, he saw Sheffield’s principle was more or less antagonistic to his own favourite maxim, that it was a duty to be pleased with every one. Contradictions could not both be real: when an affirmative was true, a negative was false. All doctrines could not be equally sound: there was a right and a wrong. The theory of dogmatic truth, as opposed to latitudinarianism (he did not know their names or their history, or suspect

58. Ibid., 9. 59. Ian Ker has brought out well this aspect of the satire of Loss and Gain in ‘Newman the Satirist’, in Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. by Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1–20. 60. Loss and Gain, 7, 17. 61. Ibid., 7. 62. Ibid., 17.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

217

what was going on within him), had in the course of these his first terms, gradually begun to energise in his mind.63

While Reding ‘had been accustomed … to fix his mind on persons, not on opinions, and to determine to like what was good in every one … [he comes ] to perceive that, to say the least, it was not respectable in any great question to hold false opinions’.64 In his first terms at Oxford, Reding encounters various views inimical to ‘dogmatic truth’. He encounters Bateman, who has ‘much good and much cleverness in him’, but not enough ‘common sense’, who is much taken with Tractarian theory, but who has, in his efforts to apply it, not enough awareness of realities, of the circumstances in which he would apply it, perpetrating various absurdities (he would – according to Sheffield – ‘top’ the ‘existing reality’ of the English Church, which ‘abjures Catholicism’, with ‘a filagree-work of screens, dorsals, pastoral staffs, croziers, mitres, and the like’).65 He encounters a young Evangelical, Freeborn, who maintains that ‘theology [is] itself a mistake, as substituting, as he considered, worthless intellectual notions for the vital truths of religion … for … faith, that is firm belief that God had forgiven you, was the one thing needful; that where that one thing was present, everything else was superfluous … [and] where true faith was present, a person might be anything in profession; an Arminian, a Calvinist, an Episcopalian, a Presbyterian, a Swedenborgian – nay, a Unitarian – he would go further … a Papist, yet be in a state of salvation.’66 White, an acquaintance of Bateman, who is taken with all things Catholic, advocates a different kind of rejection of ‘reason’, insisting that ‘it would be a dull world … if men went by reason: they may think they do, but they don’t. Really, they are led by their feelings, their affections, by the sense of the beautiful, and the good, and the holy. Religion is the beautiful; the clouds, sun, and sky, the fields and the woods, are religion … . We have no life or poetry in the Church of England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful.’67 White delights in Catholic ‘worship’ as a spectacle. He does not, in the event, become a Catholic: this pleasure in forms, in ‘the beautiful’, does not conduce, in the event, to a commitment to the ‘dogmatic truth’ animating the forms of Catholic worship. Freeborn, and White, in different ways, reject ‘intellectual notions’. Reding speaks with a friend of his father, Mr Malcolm, who takes the view that ‘theology’ is simply the ‘newest, latest fashion’ – ‘this is a place of fashions’, ‘there always is division, always rivalry’.68 He attends a sermon by Dr Brownside, who maintains that ‘there was no truth or falsehood in the received dogmas in theology; that they were modes … personal, national, or periodic, in which the intellect reasoned upon the great truths of religion’ and ‘that the fault 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Ibid., 26–7. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 18, 39, 191. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 24, 25.

218

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

lay, not in holding them, but in insisting on them, which was like insisting on a Hindoo dressing like a Fin’, so that the ‘Anglican formularies’ were ‘our mode of expressing everlasting truths, which might be as well expressed in other ways’, that ‘though the Athanasian Creed was good for us, it did not follow that it was good for our neighbours; rather, that what seemed the very reverse might suit others better, might be their mode of expressing the same truths’.69 Reding takes it that this means ‘every one is what Sheffield calls a sham, more or less … [and while] we can’t do without some outward form of belief; one is not truer than another; that is, all are equally true’ – but he takes it that this is ‘impossible’. ‘It is as true [then] that our Lord is a mere man, as that He is God. He could not possibly mean this; what did he mean?’70 Reflecting on the views of Dr Brownside, Reding discerns a likeness between those views, and the opinions of the Evangelical Freeborn, with his distrust of ‘theology’, his insistence that ‘where true faith was present, a person might be anything in profession’.71 Reding asks a junior tutor, Mr Vincent, whether ‘Dr. Brownside was considered a safe divine to follow’.72 Vincent aspires to a perfect ‘mean’, avoiding ‘parties’, forming his own views, but ‘to obtain [this mean], thought it enough to flee from extremes, without having any very definite mean to flee to’, and who has ‘not clearness of intellect enough to pursue a truth to its limits, nor boldness enough to hold it in its simplicity’, expatiating on truisms, ‘converting pompous nothings into oracles’.73 To the question of Reding, as to whether Dr Brownside is a ‘safe divine to follow’, Vincent replies that Reding should ‘accept the good which his sermons offer, without committing yourself to the bad’.74 To this, Reding observes that ‘he had to learn before he could judge; and that he wished very much to know … what the true Church-of-England doctrine was on a number of points which perplexed him’.75 Reding learns that a friend of his, Willis, has become a Catholic. He meets Willis in London, ‘in company with a person apparently two or three years older’, Morley, who has ‘ever been a Catholic’, and who declares that ‘the Catholic faith is one, and that no other Church has faith. The Church of England has no faith. You, my dear sir, have no faith.’76 Willis asks Reding, ‘Have you faith in your Church?’ and then insists, ‘I know you well enough to know you have not.’77 Reding replies, ‘Do you mean I have no worship? and does not worship presuppose faith? I have much to learn, I am conscious; but I wish to learn it from the Church under whose shadow

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Ibid., 51, 52. Ibid., 52–3. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 60. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

219

my lot is cast, and with whom I am content.’78 Willis takes the admission, by Reding, that he wishes ‘to learn’, as an admission that he ‘has no faith’ – ‘He confesses … that he has no faith; he confesses that he is in doubt’ – and urges him to convert forthwith.79 Reding replies, again, that he has ‘no doubt that he was in the place where Providence wished him to be; but, even if he had … he should certainly think that Christ called him in the way and method of careful examination – that prudence was the divinely appointed means of coming at the truth’.80 Willis retorts – ‘Such prudence as St. Thomas’s, I suppose, when he determined to see before believing.’81 Morley then suggests – ‘with a great ignorance of Protestants or how they were to be treated’ – that Reding might be experiencing a struggle between ‘conviction and motives of this world’.82 Reding is not moved by the importunacy of Willis and Morley. Afterwards, musing that ‘he had let out his secret state of mind’, Reding then reflects that ‘he had nothing to let out. He had indeed implied that he was inquiring after religious truth; but every Protestant inquires … . This was the very difference between Protestants and Catholics. Catholics begin with faith; Protestants with inquiry … . He wished this had but struck him during the conversation, but it was a relief that it struck him now; it reconciled him to his position.83 If Willis and Morley do not move Reding to consider converting, they do make him aware that he is ‘inquiring’.

Reding is disposed to think that there is such a thing as ‘dogmatic truth’; and he wishes to ‘learn it from the Church under whose shadow [his] lot is cast’. He is disappointed, though, in his wish to ascertain ‘what the true Church-ofEngland doctrine’ is, when he attends some lectures on the thirty-nine Articles. The lectures concern the history of the formulation of the Articles, and Reding comes to perceive that ‘the profession of faith contained in the Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there be such a thing as accident’, so that ‘this historical fact did but clench the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of saying what the faith of the English Church was’.84 With regard to the interpretation of the Articles, ‘there was an imposing weight of external testimony in favour of opposite interpretations’.85 Reding does not reveal his perplexities to Sheffield (he ‘had a strong anticipation that this would have been making matters worse’) but, instead, asks Bateman how he could ‘sign’ the Articles,

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid., 81–2. Ibid., 82–3. Ibid., 89–90. Ibid., 90.

220

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

not on faith, but ‘on reason’ when ‘they were unintelligible’ – ‘how could he prove what he could not construe?’86 Bateman recommends the view which Newman had himself set out in Tract 90 – the view that, as there is no unanimity in ‘the collective voice of Bishops, Deans, Professors’ in the English Church, nor in the intention of ‘the writers themselves of the Articles’, nor in ‘the Convocations which ratified them’ (which were ‘of different sentiments’), and as ‘the Anglican Church’ is ‘a part of the one Church Catholic’, so the Articles are to be interpreted as an expression of the ‘Catholic Creed’, ‘the whole Catholic Creed, the acknowledged doctrine of the Fathers, of St. Ignatius, St. Cyprian, St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, is the form, is the one true sense and interpretation of the Articles’.87 Yet Bateman is obliged to acknowledge that this is not a ‘received view’; and Reding observes that ‘I don’t see but it might have done, had it been tolerably sanctioned; but you have no sanction to show me. It is, as it stands, a mere theory struck out by individuals. Our Church might have adopted this mode of interpreting the Articles; but from what you tell me, it certainly has not done so.’88 Reding, then, is left feeling that, while he would ascertain ‘dogmatic truth’, his church does not present him with any ‘acknowledged doctrine’.89 After his father dies, Reding resolves not to think about the ‘doubts, inquiries, surmises, views, which had of late haunted him on theological subjects’ – all of which ‘seemed like so many shams’. A year and a half passes, but though Reding has ‘his thoughts turned away from religious controversy for two years’ nevertheless, ‘his religious views [are] progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time’: ‘a single discussion with a friend … would bring out what he really did hold to his own apprehension’.90 One such discussion occurs when Reding converses with his tutor, Carlton, about the ideal of celibacy. He remarks that since he was ‘a boy at school’ he has ‘fancied that I should never marry. Not that the feeling has never intermitted, but it is the habit of my mind. My general thoughts run in that one way, that I shall never marry. If I did, I should dread Thalaba’s punishment.’91 (In Thalaba, the wife of Thalaba is taken from him on his wedding night. Reding expresses, in this, the fear, which he mentions to his sister, Mary, that ‘did I give my heart to any creature, I should be withdrawing it from God’  – incurring ‘punishment’.) Carlton observes that ‘you are making a great blunder if you are for introducing celibacy into the Anglican Church … the whole genius, structure, working of our Church goes the other way’.92 The conversation turns to the question of whether the spiritual, supernatural life might involve a renunciation of certain natural goods: Carlton maintains that ‘I have been accustomed to

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 142. Ibid., 136. Ibid.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

221

consider Christianity as the perfection of man as a whole, body, soul, and spirit … . Spirit, or the principle of religious faith and obedience, should be the master principle, the hegemonicon. To this both intellect and body are subservient; but as this supremacy does not imply the ill-usage, the bondage of the intellect, neither does it of the body; both should be well treated’; Reding responds, ‘what is faith but the submission of the intellect? and as “every high thought is brought into captivity,” so are we expressly told to bring the body into subjection too. They are both well treated, when they are treated so as to be made fit instruments of the sovereign principle … . Perhaps our highest perfection here is penance.’93 Reding sets out, it is observed, ‘what really were the Catholic doctrines and usages of penance, purgatory, councils of perfection, mortification of self, and clerical celibacy’, though he has not ‘given names to these opinions’.94 There is that, in the ‘Catholic doctrines’, which corresponds to opinions arising, in Reding, with ‘the growth of the mind’. (Newman comments on this – ‘we see what is meant when a person says that the Catholic system comes home to his mind, fulfils his ideas of religion, satisfies his sympathies, and the like; and thereupon becomes a Catholic … the person in question does not, strictly speaking, judge of the external system presented to him by his private ideas, but he brings in the dicta of that system to confirm and to justify certain private judgments and personal feelings and habits already existing … the mighty Creed … justifies his thoughts, explains his feelings … . Then he submits himself to the Catholic Church, not by a process of criticism, but as a pupil to a teacher.’95 The ‘Creed’ is not justified by ‘private judgements and personal feelings’  – rather, it ‘justifies’ and ‘explains’ them. It makes sense of those ‘judgements’ and ‘feelings’; and to have those feelings is to wish to make sense of them.) Others, accordingly, detect in Reding ‘the presence of something … very unlike the Church of England … something which had a body in it … which had much behind it which made itself felt’.96 Meanwhile, Sheffield mentions in conversation with Reding that he considers ‘belief in the Athanasian Creed’  – which affirms the doctrine of the Trinity  – to be a mere ‘party opinion’. Reflecting on the ‘hollowness of it all’, the ‘hollowness’  – so he thinks – of much profession in the Church of England, Sheffield declares ‘surely one has no need to believe what so many people either disbelieve or disregard’.97 Reding mentions to Carlton his difficulty in subscribing to the Articles, and when Carlton suggests that he should ‘act as if [the English Church] were infallible, from a sense of duty’, Reding replies, ‘If I am to make a Church infallible … if I must give up private judgment, if I must act on faith, there is a Church which has a greater claim on us all than the Church of England.’98 When Carlton asks him,

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Ibid., 139–40, 142. Ibid., 142–3. Ibid., 143. Ibid. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 155.

222

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘where did you get these notions?’ Reding replies ‘somebody has said that they were in the air. I have talked to no one, except one or two arguments I had with different persons in my first year. I have driven the subject from me; but when I once begin, you see it will out.’99 (The ‘somebody’ who ‘has said that they were in the air’ might be Newman himself, who had declared, in his 1839 article on ‘The State of Religious Parties’ for the British Critic, that the spirit of the ‘movement’ was ‘in the air’, ‘unapproachable and incapable of being grasped, as being the result of causes far deeper than political or other visible agencies – the spiritual awakening of spiritual wants’.)100 Though Reding avoids controversy, or any ostentatious gestures – and though he has no intention of leaving the English Church  – his unsettled state is not unnoticed: he is called before the vice-principal, questioned about his religious opinions, and, when Reding gives an answer to a question about the intercession of saints that displeases the vice-principal, he is sent down (‘your mind has been perverted  – I fear I must use a stronger term, debauched  – by the sophistries and jesuistries which unhappily have found entrance among us’).101 While he is staying with his family, he spends time with Bateman, ‘lately appointed curate of a neighbouring parish’, who introduces him to his friend, Campbell, who has ‘the same religious sentiments on the whole as Bateman’.102 Campbell maintains that ‘a belief … that there is something bad, corrupt, perilous in the Church of Rome – that there is a spirit of Antichrist living in her, energising in her, and ruling her – is necessary to a man’s being a good Anglican’. You must believe this, or you ought to go to Rome … . Without this strong repulsion you will not withstand the great claims, the overcoming attractions, of the Church of Rome. She is our mother – oh, that word “mother”! – a mighty mother! She opens her arms … . Why don’t I rush into her arms? Because I feel that she is ruled by a spirit which is not she.103

Bateman, Campbell, and Reding discuss Willis, and certain rumours that, disappointed with Rome, he will be returning to the English Church. On his way home from his conversation with Bateman and Campbell, Reding encounters a ‘penitent’ by a ‘wooden Cross’, who vanishes at his approach, and he is moved to pray that ‘whatever the trial, whatever the loss, he might have grace to follow whithersoever God should call him’.104 A short time afterwards, Bateman invites Willis to dinner, with the aim of persuading him to return to the English Church – during which Bateman and Campbell disagree on the question of whether the

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Ibid., 155–6. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 272. Loss and Gain, 168. Ibid., 185, 191. Ibid., 193–4. Ibid., 201.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

223

‘rubrics’ in the Prayer Book are now ‘binding’, and on the question of whether the ‘branches of the Church are divided’ (making Bateman fret, inwardly, on what ‘a bad impression it must make on Willis; I saw it did; he could hardly keep from smiling; but Campbell has no tact at all’).105 Bateman invites Willis to dinner again. Bateman maintains that Willis must have been ‘shocked’ at the ‘corruptions in worship’, which he will have encountered in Catholicism – Willis replies, ‘If I come to the Church with faith in her, whatever I see there, even if it surprises me, is but a trial of my faith.’106 Bateman then insists that ‘it is quite impossible that the worship paid by Roman Catholics to the Blessed Mary should not interfere with the supreme adoration due to the Creator alone’ – Willis replies that ‘you are judging à priori; you know nothing of the state of the case from experience, but you say, “It must be; it can’t be otherwise” [whereas] … a Catholic, who acts, and does not speculate, feels the truth of the contrary’.107 When Bateman, finally, asks, ‘what keeps you?’ ‘how can you justify the Mass, as it is performed abroad; how can it be called a “reasonable service” when all parties conspire to gabble it over as if it mattered not a jot who attended to it, or even understood it?’108 Willis declares, ‘Ah, that faith should be necessary in such a matter, and that what is so natural and becoming under the circumstances, should have need of an explanation!’ – but he then offers an ‘explanation’ of the Mass.109 It is not a mere form of words, – it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the scope, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher, of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go; for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon; as when it was said in the beginning: ‘What thou doest, do quickly.’ Quickly they pass; for the Lord Jesus goes with them, as He passed along the lake in the days of His flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. Quickly they pass; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, so is the coming of the Son of Man. Quickly they pass; for they are as the words of Moses, when the Lord came down in the cloud, calling on the Name of the Lord as He passed by, ‘the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth’. And as Moses

105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

Ibid., 207, 211, 213. Ibid., 216, 217. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 226.

224

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

on the mountain, so we too ‘make haste and bow our heads to the earth, and adore’. So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, ‘waiting for the moving of the water’. Each in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers, separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation;  – not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but, like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God’s priest, supporting him, yet guided by him. There are little children there, and old men, and simple labourers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for Mass, priests making their thanksgiving; there are innocent maidens, and there are penitent sinners; but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the great Action is the measure and scope of it.110

Bateman and Reding are moved by this ‘burst of enthusiasm’. On parting from Willis, on his way home, Reding feels ‘possessed, he knew not how, by a high superhuman power, which seemed able to push through mountains, and to walk the sea’.111 As he walks home, he starts saying to himself, ‘half unconsciously’, ‘O mighty mother’. ‘O mighty Mother! I come, O mighty Mother! I come; but I am far from home. Spare me a little; I come with what speed I may, but I am slow of foot, and not as others, O mighty Mother!’ By the time he had walked two miles in this excitement, bodily and mental, he felt himself, as was not wonderful, considerably exhausted. He slackened his pace, and gradually came to himself, but still he went on, as if mechanically, ‘O mighty Mother!’ Suddenly he cried, ‘Hallo! where did I get these words? Willis did not use them. Well, I must be on my guard against these wild ways. Any one can be an enthusiast; enthusiasm is not truth … O mighty Mother! … Alas, I know where my heart is! but I must go by reason … . O mighty Mother!’112

Willis, on parting from Reding, had described the ‘Roman church’ as ‘the Mother of us all’, but the phrase ‘mighty Mother’ is a phrase Reding has taken, not from Willis, but from Campbell, who had maintained that one can recognize Rome to be a ‘mighty Mother’, while nevertheless feeling that there is a ‘spirit of Antichrist living in her’. (A half recollection of this admonition may be what moves Reding to ‘guard against’ too much ‘enthusiasm’, and to resolve to ‘go by reason’.) Returning to Oxford, Reding presents himself for his examinations, but, owing to his scruples about subscribing to the thirty-nine Articles, defers taking his degree. Carlton

110. Ibid., 226–7. 111. Ibid., 229. 112. Ibid.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

225

advises him to start ‘reading with some clergyman in the country; thus he would at once be preparing for orders, and clearing his mind on the points which at present troubled him; besides, he might thus have some opportunity for parochial duty, which would have a tranquillising and sobering effect on his mind’.113 Reding stays with Campbell; just over two years pass; but his conviction that Rome is the true church strengthens. Despite the opposition of his family, and friends (Campbell tells Reding that he fears that ‘if you take this step, you will find yourself in the hands of a Circe, who will change you, make a brute of you’) Reding resolves to be received into the Church of Rome.114 He makes a final visit to Oxford, to bid his former tutor, Carlton, farewell. Reding tells Carlton that he has attained to his conviction ‘with great deliberation’ that it has ‘remained on [his] mind as a mere intellectual conclusion for a year or two’, and that he is now to ‘change it into a practical resolve’.115 His reading has convinced him that he ‘going to a Church which … is nearer the Apostolic Church than any existing one; which is the continuation of the Apostolic Church, if it has been continued at all. And seeing it to be like the Apostolic Church, I believe it to be the same. Reason has gone first, faith is to follow.’116 He declares that God ‘calls’ him. Carlton rejoins that this is ‘dissenting language’; Reding insists it is ‘Scripture language’; and then Carlton observes that ‘people don’t in Scripture say “I’m called”; the calling was an act from without, the act of others, not an inward feeling.’117 When Reding asks, ‘How is a person to get at truth, now, when there can be no simple outward call?’ Carlton remarks that this is ‘pretty good intimation … that we are to remain where Providence has placed us’.118 Reding then asks whether ‘members of the Church of England [are] to seek the truth, or have they it given them from the first’, and when Carlton replies that they are ‘to seek’, Reding declares that ‘they tell us to seek, they give us rules for seeking, they make us exert our private judgment; but directly we come to any conclusion but theirs, they turn round and talk to us of our “providential position”’.119 He then asks, ‘do you think that members of the English Church do seek it in that way which Scripture enjoins upon all seekers?’ I don’t believe the bulk of the English clergy, the bulk of Oxford residents, Heads of houses, Fellows of Colleges (with all their good points, which I am not the man to deny), have ever sought the truth. They have taken what they found, and have used no private judgment at all … they have never sought, they have never judged; they are where they are, not because it is true, but because they

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

Ibid., 231–2. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 253. Ibid. Ibid.

226

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

find themselves there, because it is their “providential position” and a pleasant one into the bargain.120

Reding is troubled after his conversation with Carlton – not least because he feels he may have become ‘excited’. He began to question whether he really had evidence enough for the step he was taking, and the temptation assailed him that he was giving up this world without gaining the next. Carlton evidently thought him excited; what if it were true? Perhaps his convictions were, after all, a dream; what did they rest upon? He tried to recall his best arguments, and could not. Was there, after all, any such thing as truth? … . Better men than he had lived and died in the English Church. And then what if, as Campbell had said, all his so-called convictions were to vanish just as he entered the Roman pale, as they had done on his father’s death?121

He reflects, though, that ‘the deliberate conclusions of years ought not to be set aside by the troubled thoughts of an hour’ and, for the moment, he puts ‘the whole subject from him’.122 Taking a train to London, he encounters a Catholic priest, and begins conversing with him about faith. The priest observes that ‘either we believed the whole revealed message, or really we believed no part of it; that we ought to believe what the Church proposed to us on the word of the Church’.123 A Unitarian, then, disregarding those parts of Scripture which intimate the divine nature of Christ, does not receive ‘as God’s word that which he professes to receive, when he passes over and gets rid of so much that is in that word’.124 Reding acknowledges that, in such a case, ‘his ultimate standard of truth is not the Scripture, but, unconsciously to himself, some view of things in his mind which is to him the measure of Scripture’.125 The priest insists that Anglicans equally ‘pass over’ parts of Scripture – ‘such passages as “the Church the pillar and ground of the truth”; or, “whosesoever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven”’.126 Reding observes that ‘in fact, we do not profess to have faith in the mere text of Scripture … . The Anglican doctrine is to interpret Scripture by the Church; therefore we have faith, like Catholics, not in Scripture simply, but in the whole word committed to the Church, of which Scripture is a part.’127 The priest replies, ‘Where, is that “word” of the Church which the persons you speak of believe in? and when do they exercise their belief? Is it not an undeniable fact, that, so far from all Anglican clergymen

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Ibid., 253–4. Ibid., 258. Ibid. Ibid., 261. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

5. The Pursuit of Truth

227

agreeing together in faith, what the first says, the second will unsay? so that an Anglican cannot, if he would, have faith in them, and necessarily, though he would not, chooses between them.’128 Reding then asks, ‘Is there evidence enough for faith?’129 The priest remarks, ‘If there is evidence enough to believe Scripture, and we see that there is … [then] there is more than enough to believe the Church. The evidence is not in fault; all it requires is to be brought home or applied to the mind; if belief does not then follow, the fault lies with the will … . There is quite evidence enough for a moral conviction that the Catholic or Roman Church, and none other, is the voice of God.’130 The ‘light’ of this ‘moral conviction’ is the clearest ‘light’ one can have, before joining the Church. Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an act of the will, and at the dictate of reason and prudence, embrace the truth, when nature, like a coward, shrinks. You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it. You approach the Church in the way of reason, you enter into it in the light of the Spirit.131 Nothing will stand in place of [faith]; not a sense of the beauty of Catholicism, or of its awfulness, or of its antiquity; not an appreciation of the sympathy which it shows towards sinners; not an admiration of the Martyrs and early Fathers, and a delight in their writings. Individuals may display a touching gentleness, or a conscientiousness which demands our reverence; still, till they have faith, they have not the foundation, and their superstructure will fall. They will not be blessed, they will effect nothing in religious matters, till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever it be; till they go out of themselves; till they cease to make something within them their standard; till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient, indeed, but incomplete. And when they shall recognise this defect in themselves, and try to remedy it, then they will recognise much more; – they will be on the road very shortly to be Catholics.132

At this, Reding feels ‘restored to himself ’.133 Arriving in London, he rents a room at a bookshop, to prepare himself for being received into the Church, but is troubled by numerous visitors – most of them sectarians of one sort or another, who, hearing about his intention to leave the Anglican Church, wish to convert him to their own opinions. His final visitor, Mr Malcolm, an old family friend, declares him a ‘foolish boy’ – ‘You must have your hobby; it might have been a worse.’134 After this, Reding

128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

Ibid. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 264–5. Ibid., 265. Ibid. Ibid., 289.

228

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

decides to stay at a Passionist convent, where he attends a Mass – apprehending, in ‘the Blessed Sacrament … the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world’.135 He meets with one of the priests at the convent, and declares his wish to be received into the Church.

3. Reding comes to the view that the English Church does not require of him his faith; it does not require of him an allegiance to something more than himself, or more than the society to which he belongs. The priest with whom he speaks on the train to London tells him that, in making an act of faith, he must ‘go out’ of himself, and take something other than what is ‘within’ him as his ‘standard’. His going ‘out’ of himself does not involve, however, a negation of all that he is, or a subjection to something wholly alien. His ‘moral conviction’ that Rome is the true Church has emerged out of his efforts to ‘go by reason’; his enquiries into the history of the Church have issued in a sense that Rome is the ‘continuation’ of the ‘Apostolic’ Church. What is more, he senses there is something ‘congenial’ to him in ‘the Catholic system’; the ‘progress’ of his views – actuated by his devotional life, the ‘intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments [which] accompany [his] worship and obedience’ – is such that the ‘dicta’ of the Catholic system ‘confirm and … justify … [his] private judgments and personal feelings and habits’. If he must ‘go out’ of himself  – and take a ‘standard’ other than himself, or his own judgment – this will not involve a negation of all that he is; there is a sense, rather, that the accord of ‘the Catholic system’ with his ‘private judgments and personal feelings and habits’ is such that there is a fulfilment, a realization, of those ‘feelings and habits’, in his acceptance of that ‘system’. What is more, he declares that ‘my belief in the Church of Rome is part of myself: I cannot act against it without acting against God’. His belief is ‘part of ’ himself, and it is, equally, the ‘voice [of God] calling’: it is ultimately God who makes certain ‘grounds’ for belief ‘seem convincing’, who forms the ‘reason’ of the one who feels those ‘grounds’ to be ‘convincing’. He must take a ‘standard’ other than what is ‘within’ him, but what is within him is, equally, the ‘voice’ of another, the ‘voice’ of God, and if he must ‘go out’ of himself, to take a ‘standard’ which is other than what is ‘within’ him, that ‘standard’ is not alien to what is innermost in him.

135. Ibid., 294.

Part III T HE V IRTUE O F F AITH A ND T HE V IRTUES O F C IVILIZATION: T HE 1840s A ND 1850s

Chapter 6 THE VIRTUE OF FAITH

1. In Loss and Gain, a Catholic priest declares, ‘Englishmen have many gifts. Faith they have not.’1 In the Discourse on ‘Faith and Private Judgement’ in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849), Newman observes that ‘when we consider the beauty, the majesty, the completeness, the resources, the consolations, of the Catholic religion, it may strike us with wonder … that it does not convert the multitude of those who come in its way’ and he insists that ‘men do not become Catholics, because they have not faith’ – not ‘that men do not believe the Catholic Church because they do not believe it’ – but, rather, that they are deficient in the ‘faith’ that is a kind of ‘virtue’.2 Faith is a state of mind, it is a particular mode of thinking and acting, which is exercised, always indeed towards God, but in very various ways … . The multitude of men in this country have not this habit or character of mind. We could conceive, for instance, their believing in their own religions; this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed; but they do not believe even their own religions; they do not believe in any thing at all. It is a definite defect in their minds: as we might say that a person had not the virtue of meekness, or of liberality, or of prudence, quite independently of this or that exercise of the virtue, so there is such a virtue as faith, and there is such a defect as the absence of it. Now I mean to say that the great mass of men in this country have not this particular virtue called faith, have not this virtue at all. As a man might be without eyes or without hands, so they are without faith; it is a distinct want or fault in their soul; and what I say is, that, since they have not this faculty of believing, no wonder they do not embrace that, which cannot really be embraced without it. They do not believe any thing at all in any true sense; and therefore they do not believe the Church in particular.3

1. Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 265. 2. ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, in DMC, 192, 193. 3. Ibid., 193–4.

232

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman observes that what he means by ‘faith’ is an assent to a ‘doctrine’ as proceeding from God. What is faith? It is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God … . He who believes that God is true, and that this is His word, which He has committed to man, has no doubt at all. He is as certain that the doctrine taught is true, as that God is true; and he is certain, because God is true, because God has spoken, not because he sees its truth or can prove its truth. That is, faith has two peculiarities; – it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with eye, or sees with the reason, but because it is told by one who comes from God … . This is what faith was in the time of the Apostles … . They preached to the world that Christ was the Son of God, that He was born of a Virgin, that He had ascended on high, that He would come again to judge all, the living and the dead. Could the world see all this? could it prove it? how then were men to receive it? why did so many embrace it? on the word of the Apostles, who were, as their powers showed, messengers from God. They were to submit their reason to a living authority.4

He contrasts this submission ‘to a living authority’, with a submission to ‘a book’: there is little of genuine submission if one is ‘to take a book, such as Scripture, and to use it as you please, to master it, that is, to make yourself the master of it, to interpret it for yourself, and to admit just what you choose to see in it, and nothing more’.5 There is ‘an essential difference between the act of submitting to a living oracle and to his book; in the former case there is no appeal from the speaker, in the latter the final decision remains with the reader’.6 The belief professed by some in Scripture, as the word of God, may be ‘nothing better than a prejudice or inveterate feeling impressed on them when they were children. A proof of it is this; that, while they profess to be so shocked at Catholic miracles … they have no difficulty at all about Scripture narratives, which are quite as difficult to the reason.’7 Genuine faith is inconsistent with ‘doubt’. ‘If men believed now, as they did in the times of the Apostles, they could not doubt nor change. No one can doubt whether a word spoken by God is to be believed; of course it is; whereas any one, who is modest and humble, may easily be brought to doubt of his own inferences and deductions.’8 ‘Men … now’ are inclined to think that the ‘state of

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Ibid., 194–6. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 201.

6. The Virtue of Faith

233

mind’ involved in recognizing the ‘claim’ of the Catholic Church, ‘the disposition to accept without reserve or question, is slavish’.9 It goes against them to believe her doctrine, not so much from want of evidence that she is from God, as because, if so, they shall have to submit their minds to living men, who have not their own cultivation or depth of intellect, and because they must receive a number of doctrines, whether they will or no, which are strange to their imagination and difficult to their reason.10

They ‘may acknowledge that the Catholic religion is noble and majestic: they may be struck with its wisdom, they may admire its adaptation to human nature, they may be penetrated by its tender and winning conduct, they may be awed by its consistency. But to commit themselves to it, that is another matter.’11 While ‘reason’ might enable one to recognize that one should ‘commit’ oneself in this way, nevertheless, ‘reason’ does not ‘force the will’, and a commitment of this kind is an act of the will. ‘The two things are quite distinct from each other, seeing you ought to believe, and believing; reason, if left to itself, would bring you to the conclusion that you had sufficient grounds for believing, but belief is the gift of grace.’12 In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, Newman reflects on the distinction between ‘seeing you ought to believe, and believing’. Faith is the gift of God, and not a mere act of our own, which we are free to exert when we will. It is quite distinct from an exercise of reason, though it follows upon it. I may feel the force of the argument for the divine origin of the church; I may see that I ought to believe; and yet I may be unable to believe. This is no imaginary case; there is many a man who has ground enough to believe, who wishes to believe, but who cannot believe. It is always indeed his own fault, for God gives grace to all who ask for it, and use it, but still such is the fact, that conviction is not faith. Take the parallel case of obedience; many a man knows he ought to obey God, and does not and cannot, – through his own fault indeed, but still he cannot; for through grace alone can he obey. Now faith is not a mere conviction in reason, it is a firm assent, it is a clear certainty greater than any other certainty; and this is wrought in the mind by the grace of God, and by it alone. As then men may be convinced, and not act according to their conviction, so may they be convinced, and not believe according to their conviction. They may confess that the argument is against them, that they have nothing to say for themselves, and that to believe is to be happy; and yet after all, they avow they cannot believe, they do not know why, but they cannot; they acquiesce

9. 10. 11. 12.

Ibid., 202. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 211.

234

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in unbelief, and they turn away from God and His Church. Their reason is convinced, and their doubts are moral ones, arising from an act of the will. In a word, the arguments for religion do not compel any one to believe, just as arguments for good conduct do not compel any one to obey. Obedience is the consequence of willing to obey, and faith is the consequence of willing to believe; we may see what is right, whether in matters of faith or obedience, of ourselves, but we cannot will what is right without the grace of God. Here is the difference between other exercises of reason, and arguments for the truth of religion. It requires no act of faith to assent to the truth that two and two make four; we cannot help assenting to it; and hence there is no merit in assenting to it; but there is merit in believing that the Church is from God; for though there are abundant reasons to prove it to us, yet we can, without an absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion; we may complain that it is not clearer, we may suspend our assent, we may doubt about it, if we will, and grace alone can turn a bad will into a good one.13

There is a difference, Newman maintains, between recognizing the force of an ‘argument’, and believing the proposition that the argument proves. To recognize the force of an argument is to recognize that one ‘ought’ to believe something, but it is not to be compelled to believe it: where an ‘ought’ is recognized, then an ‘act of the will’ is required. It is when ‘we can, without absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion’ that the ‘will’ is pertinent to belief: ‘we cannot help assenting’ to some arguments, or propositions. The sort of argument that moves one to recognize that one ‘ought’ to believe, is of a kind where one can, ‘without absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion’. That one can ‘quarrel with the conclusion’ depends on the nature of the argument; that one opts to ‘quarrel with the conclusion’ depends on the will. Newman envisages a case where ‘men may be convinced, and not believe according to their conviction’: being ‘convinced’ means ‘they … confess that the argument is against them, that they have nothing to say for themselves’; it means they recognize the strength of an ‘argument’, and they acknowledge they cannot counter it; yet to recognize the strength of an argument, is not, thereby, to believe what the argument shows – ‘After all, they avow they cannot believe, they do not know why, but they cannot.’ If one ‘cannot’ believe, and this is owing to the ‘will’, then the ‘will’ is not something over which one has power – it is something which determines what one ‘can’ and ‘cannot’ do: it is, before one acts, already disposed in a certain way – its disposition determined, perhaps, by how one has lived hitherto; but, however that may be, it is a will which is not something over which one has power, and Newman maintains that it is ‘grace’ which disposes it; ‘grace alone can turn a bad will into a good one.’ Those who look for counter-arguments, when ‘the argument is against them’, and ‘quarrel with the conclusion’, do so because they are unwilling to accept that conclusion. Newman does not attempt to characterize how the will is involved

13. ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 224–5.

6. The Virtue of Faith

235

in maintaining certain beliefs; he maintains, merely, that it is involved. One is not passive, with respect to what one believes; those beliefs are not a mere reflex of whatever arguments one has been presented with; they are not a mere reflex of whatever arguments one has formed for oneself. In the experience of ‘looking’ for arguments, of resisting the ‘conclusion’ to arguments one recognizes to be ‘against’ one, of feeling that one ‘cannot believe’ certain things  – that it is impossible to believe them – there is an experience of something at work other than ‘argument’ or ‘reason’ itself: the disposition of the will is making itself felt. Conviction is a state of mind, and it is something beyond and distinct from the mere arguments of which it is the result; it does not vary with their strength or their number. Arguments lead to a conclusion, and when the arguments are stronger, the conclusion is clearer; but conviction may be felt as strongly in consequence of a clear conclusion as of one which is clearer. A man may be so sure upon six reasons, that he does not need a seventh, nor would feel surer if he had it. And so as regards the Catholic Church: men are convinced in very various ways, what convinces one, does not convince another; but this is an accident; the time comes any how, sooner or later, when a man ought to be convinced, and is convinced, and then he is bound not to wait for any more arguments, though they are producible. He will be in a condition to refuse more arguments, and will perhaps own that he has heard enough; he does not wish to read or think more, his mind is quite made up. Then it is his duty to join the Church at once; he must not delay; let him be cautious in counsel, but prompt in execution.14

One may, by reasoning, acquire the conviction that the ‘Church is from God’. The ‘time comes … when a man ought to be convinced, and is convinced’. One ‘ought to be convinced’ when one has good ‘reasons’ for being so; and one ‘is convinced’ when one recognizes that one ought to believe what those ‘reasons’ show. When one has a ‘mind [that] is quite made up’, one recognizes that one has a ‘duty to join the Church’. To recognize this ‘duty’ is to recognize that one ought to believe the Church. To recognize that one ought to believe the Church is not, in itself, to believe the Church. To ‘join the Church’ is to be granted the ‘grace’ by which one believes: when one is in the church, one is in a state in which one believes. One does not have the power to put oneself into such a state: if one were to wish to be in such a state, that act of wishing would be an expression of the state one would already be in; it could not determine that state – that state would determine it. If one is in a state in which one feels that one ‘cannot believe’, one cannot change this by wishing things were otherwise. Newman is not, then, maintaining that one can simply ‘choose’ to believe (arbitrarily). If, though, one recognizes that the state one is in, in which one ‘cannot believe’, might involve a ‘bad will’, one can strive to form in oneself a ‘good one’, by acting in accordance with the ‘light’ of the conscience (and one is, in any case, obliged to act in accordance with that ‘light’). What one thinks of as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, in this regard, will relate to what one believes, and what 14. Ibid., 234–5.

236

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

one believes will relate to whether or not one has a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ will; while one cannot simply ascertain, by introspection or the like, what sort of disposition of will one has, one can, at the least, strive to form in oneself a ‘good will’ by doing what seems to one to be right. In his remarks on how a ‘man may be so sure upon six reasons, that he does not need a seventh’ Newman is counselling those who might be inclined to refrain from ‘join[ing] the Church’ until settling fully all the arguments for and against doing so: argument in this matter, he suggests, can be interminable; it is not, in any case, independent of the ‘will’; one might have ‘reasons’ enough to act on, even if it might be possible to ‘quarrel’ with those reasons ‘without absurdity’ – and if one has ‘reasons’ enough, one should act on them. ‘Grace’ can, Newman maintains in his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’, be ‘mistaken for nature, and nature mistaken for grace’. They may easily be mistaken for each other, because … the difference is in a great measure an inward, and therefore a secret one. Grace is lodged in the heart; it purifies the thoughts and motives, it raises the soul to God, it sanctifies the body, it corrects and exalts human nature in regard to those sins of which men are ashamed, and which they do not display. But in outward show, in single actions, in word, in profession, in teaching, in the social and political virtues, in striking and heroical exploits, on the public transitory scene of things, nature may counterfeit grace, nay even to the deception of him in whom the counterfeit occurs. Recollect that it is by nature, not by grace, that man has the gifts of reason and conscience; and reason and conscience will lead him to discover, and in a measure pursue, objects which are, properly speaking, supernatural and divine. The natural reason is able, from the things which are seen, from the voice of tradition, from the existence of the soul, and from the necessity of the case, to infer the existence of God. The natural heart can burst forth by fits and starts into emotions of love towards Him; the natural imagination can depict the beauty and glory of His attributes; the natural conscience may ascertain and put in order the truths of the great moral law, nay even to the condemnation of that concupiscence, which it is too weak to subdue, and is persuaded to tolerate. The natural will can do many things really good and praiseworthy; nay, in particular cases, or at particular seasons, when temptation is away, it may seem to have a strength which it has not, and to be imitating the austerity and purity of a Saint.15

Newman acknowledges that ‘grace is over all the earth; if it comes to good effect and bears fruit in the hearts of the unbaptized, [God] will reward it’.16 Yet he observes, in addition, that ‘we can only judge of what we see, and can only admire what is good, without having any means of determining the real moral condition of those who display it’.17 What ‘we see’ of others may not manifest their ‘real moral 15. ‘Nature and Grace’, in DMC, 151–2. 16. Ibid., 153. 17. Ibid.

6. The Virtue of Faith

237

condition’: it does not, at any rate, manifest the ‘hearts’ of others fully, and grace is ‘lodged in the heart’. Many are the tales and poems written now-a-days, expressing high and beautiful sentiments; I dare say some of you, my brethren, have fallen in with them, and perhaps you have thought to yourselves, that he must be a man of deep religious feeling and high religious profession, who could write so well. Is it so in fact, my brethren? it is not so; why? because after all it is but poetry, not religion; it is human nature exerting the powers of imagination and reason, which it has, till it seems to have that which it has not. There are, you know, in the animal world various creatures, which are able to imitate the voice of man; nature in like manner is a mockery of grace. The truth is, the natural man sees this or that principle to be good or true from the light of conscience; and then, since he has the power of reasoning, he knows that, if this be true, many other things are true likewise; and then, having the power of imagination, he pictures to himself those other things as true, though he does not really understand them. And then he brings what he has read and gained from others, who have had grace, to his aid, and completes his sketch; and then he throws his feelings and his heart into it, meditates on it, and kindles in himself a sort of enthusiasm, and thus he is able to write beautifully and touchingly about what to others may be a reality, but to him is nothing more than a fiction. Thus some can write about the early Martyrs, and others describe some great Saint of the middle ages, not exactly as a Catholic, but as if they had a piety and a seriousness, to which they are strangers. So too actors on a stage can excite themselves till they think they are the persons they represent … So it is, I say, with a number of authors in verse and prose; readers are deceived by their fine writing; they not only praise this or that sentiment, or argument, or description, in what they read, which happens to be true, but they put faith in the writer … A preacher or speaker, who is in a state of nature, or has fallen from grace, is able to say many things to touch the heart of a sinner or strike his conscience, whether from his natural powers, or from what he has read in books; and the latter forthwith takes him for his prophet and guide, on the warrant of these accidental truths which it required no supernatural gifts to enforce.18

Newman is concerned with how one might in ‘writing’  – ‘expressing high and beautiful sentiments’  – create the impression of having a certain character, this impression being, ultimately, a ‘fiction’. In ‘writing’ of sanctity, in creating a ‘sketch’ of a ‘Saint’, one evinces a certain knowledge of what sanctity is, and a certain attitude toward sanctity. What qualities of character are required if one is to have such a knowledge of sanctity? Can only those who have some sanctity of character themselves, or, at least, who have ‘piety and seriousness’, truly apprehend sanctity, so as to conceive of, and to appreciate the character of a ‘Saint’? Newman reflects,

18. Ibid., 156–8.

238

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in this, on two different, but related things: on an exertion of the ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ to ‘picture’ the character of a ‘Saint’; and on an exertion of the ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ to feel (and display) a ‘sort of enthusiasm’ toward the character of a ‘Saint’ (showing ‘sentiments’ comporting with, or expressing, a character marked by ‘piety and seriousness’). He maintains that the ‘natural man’ can recognize a ‘principle’ to be true ‘from the light of conscience’, and make inferences from that ‘principle’, recognizing ‘other things’ to be ‘true likewise’, and then ‘picture’ those other things ‘as true’, ‘though he does not really understand them’; and he can, moreover, make use of what ‘he has read and gained from others, who have had grace’; and, doing this, the ‘natural man’ can make a ‘sketch’, for which he feels a ‘sort of enthusiasm’  – and ‘thus … can write about the early Martyrs … [or] some great Saint’. These exercises of ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’ are concerned with forming a ‘sketch’ of a holy character, a ‘Saint’. The ‘natural man’ reasons from a ‘principle’ recognized by the ‘light of conscience’ to ‘other things’ (implied by the principle) and then ‘pictures … as true’ those ‘other things’: if it is a ‘principle’ that certain acts are good, then this implies that other acts are, likewise, good; if a ‘Saint’ lives out what the ‘conscience’ ordains, then one may ‘picture’ how a Saint lives, by thinking out the various things that the ‘conscience’ ordains, reasoning from a ‘principle’ that one recognizes ‘in the light of conscience’. Newman suggests that one who thinks out, by reasoning from a ‘principle’, a ‘sketch’ of what perfect goodness would be like, can ‘picture … as true’ certain good acts ‘though he does not really understand them’. What sort of ‘understanding’ is it by which one can ‘really understand them’? Would it be the understanding involved in carrying out those acts? Would that understanding be, ultimately, a form of the ‘light of conscience’? If so, this would suggest that those acts can be properly understood only in the ‘light of conscience’, when that ‘light’ is properly developed (through a life lived in accordance with that ‘light’). That is, Newman seems to be contrasting different kinds of ‘understanding’  – an understanding from without (by ‘reasoning’ and ‘imagination’) and an understanding from within (by something like connaturality). Newman had presented a contrast between ‘reasoning’ and ‘conscience’ as early as 1831, in a sermon on ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’. Newman observes in that sermon that ‘morals may be cultivated as a science; it furnishes a subject-matter on which reason may exercise itself to any extent whatever, with little more than the mere external assistance of conscience and Scripture’.19 The ‘exercise’ of ‘reason’ involved in the ‘science’ is something ‘external’ to ‘conscience and Scripture’. ‘The [ancient] Roman moralists write as admirably, as if they were moral men.’20 The understanding of the ‘science’ of ‘morals’ is something other than the understanding of goodness involved in being ‘moral’ (though one can, by ‘reasoning’, acquire enough of an understanding of

19. John Henry Newman, ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1909), 40 20. ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’, in OUS, 41.

6. The Virtue of Faith

239

the ‘science’ of ‘morals’ to appreciate how those who are ‘moral’ would act). In his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’ he envisages a ‘reasoning’ of this kind – a making of inferences from a ‘principle’ apprehended by the ‘light of conscience’ – being used to form a ‘sketch’ of ‘a Saint’. A Saint, it would seem, is moved not simply by the ‘light of conscience’, however, but by the ‘light’ of ‘faith’. How much, then, could one get an understanding of the ‘principles’ moving a ‘Saint’, by reasoning from a ‘principle’ apprehended by the ‘light of conscience’? In his Discourse on ‘Saintliness, the Standard of Christian Principle’, in Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman suggests that the ‘light’ of faith, rather than superseding the ‘light’ of conscience, ‘sustains’ that ‘natural’ light: ‘Conscience … cannot perform [its “office”] adequately without external assistance; it needs to be regulated and sustained. Left to itself, though it tells truly at first, it soon becomes wavering, ambiguous, and false; it needs good teachers and good examples to keep it up to the mark and line of duty … the natural inward light grows dim … [when] the Light, which lightens every one born into the world, is removed out of sight.’21 To reason, then, from a ‘principle’ recognized by the ‘natural … light of conscience’, could be to get some sense of how ‘the Saint’ – animated by a ‘sight’ of the ‘Light, which lightens every one’ – would act. Newman observes, moreover, that a ‘natural man’, making a ‘sketch’ of a Saint, could ‘bring what he has read and gained from others, who have had grace, to his aid’, reasoning from ‘what he has read’ about the ‘principles’ of faith, to ascertain what acts would be ordained by those principles. The contrast, then, between a ‘pious’ understanding and a merely ‘literary’ understanding, seems to be between a ‘seeing with’ certain principles, so to speak, such that those principles are constitutive of the mind that ‘sees with’ them, and a reasoning that is ‘external’ to those principles, which takes those principles as a ‘subject-matter on which reason may exercise itself to any extent whatever’. Newman maintains, in his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’ that one who ‘pictures’ perfect goodness, through the use of ‘reasoning’ and ‘imagination’, can ‘write beautifully and touchingly about what to others may be a reality, but to him is nothing more than a fiction’. What exactly is it that is ‘a fiction’ to the ‘natural man’? Is it that the ‘natural man’ has no experience, in himself, of sanctity as ‘a reality’, and so can only imagine it, or is it that the ‘natural man’ regards sanctity itself as a ‘fiction’? Newman likens how the ‘natural man’ imagines ‘a Saint’, with apparent ‘piety and seriousness’, to how ‘actors on a stage can excite themselves till they think they are the persons they represent’. Though actors, may, while ‘on the stage’ in some sense ‘think they are the persons they represent’, they are, equally, conscious that they are not those persons – they are aware that they are creating a representation, a ‘fiction’. How is the writer, imagining a ‘Saint’, like these actors? The writer seems to exhibit a certain character (‘piety and seriousness’) in imagining, and appreciating, a character (that of a ‘Saint’); the writer exhibits this character in writing ‘beautifully and touchingly about what to others may be

21. ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’, in DMC, 83–4.

240

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

a reality, but to him is nothing more than a fiction’: that is, the writer seems to manifest the sort of character possessed by those for whom sanctity is ‘a reality’. Newman seems to suggest that there is a way of apprehending sanctity, or that there is a kind of insight into sanctity, that comports with a certain kind of character: to be one of those for whom sanctity is a ‘reality’, is to have ‘piety and seriousness’. The writer, Newman maintains, is like those ‘actors on the stage’ who, imagining certain ‘persons’, ‘think they are the persons they represent’. When they ‘think they are the persons they represent’, they are in a state of mind in which certain things are envisaged ‘as if ’ real. What is significant, here, is the act of ‘taking something as if real’. The writer, imagining the ‘Saint’, treats the ‘Saint’ (or sanctity) ‘as if ’ real; and, in an act of imaginative identification – envisaging the thoughts, feelings, acts of the Saint, in forming a ‘sketch’ of the Saint – treats ‘as if ’ real those things which the Saint regards as real. The act of treating something ‘as if ’ real resembles, while being quite distinct from, the act of regarding that thing as a ‘reality’. Newman suggests that the writer, in imagining a certain character, treats ‘as if ’ real things which are, for those who have a certain character, simply ‘a reality’. To have a certain character is to have a certain sense of reality; but to have a certain sense of reality is not always to be ‘moved … to act upon’ that sense. Newman maintains, in his Discourse on ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’, that the ‘awakened soul’, when ‘it has heard and has faith in the word of God’, undergoes ‘a change in its views and estimation of things’ (a change which is not necessarily a ‘moral conversion’, a change which is not necessarily a matter of being ‘moved … to act upon the sights it sees’), perceiving that ‘saintliness and all its attendants … are the high and precious things’: those who undergo this change ‘have the idea of a Saint’ such that while they ‘may not do what is right and good … they know what is true … . They have a standard for their principles of conduct, and it is the image of Saints which forms it for them.’22 Newman likens this perception of the ‘idea of a Saint’ to the sight of Christ transfigured on Mount Tabor, when the ‘holy Apostles’, experiencing a ‘glimpse of heaven’, were ‘introduced into a new range of ideas, into a new sphere of contemplation’.23 In his Discourse on ‘Nature and Grace’, Newman would contrast this perception of ‘the image of Saints’, as a ‘reality’, a perception that is of ‘grace’, and associated with ‘faith’ – constituting a ‘standard’, by which a ‘new sphere of contemplation’ is ‘introduced’ – with the imagining of ‘a Saint’ by the ‘natural man’. In his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, Newman maintains that the perception of ‘things spiritual’ which ‘grace’ gives is virtually a kind of ‘sight’: ‘One of the defects which man incurred on the fall, was ignorance, or spiritual blindness; and one of the gifts received on his restoration is a perception of things spiritual; so that, before he is brought under the grace of Christ, he can but inquire, reason, argue, and conclude, about religious truth; but afterwards he sees it.’24

22. Ibid., 93–4. 23. Ibid., 93. 24. ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 169–70.

6. The Virtue of Faith

241

2. Newman maintains, in his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, that ‘grace’ is not so much the ‘eye’ by which one perceives as it is the ‘light’ by which objects are made perceptible. You ask, what it is you need, besides eyes, in order to see the truths of revelation: I will tell you at once; you need light. Not the keenest eyes can see in the dark. Now, though your mind be the eye, the grace of God is the light; and you will as easily exercise your eyes in this sensible world without the sun, as will be able to exercise your mind in the spiritual world without a parallel gift from without. Now you are born under a privation of this blessed spiritual light; and, while it remains, you will not, cannot, really see God. I do not say you will have no thought at all about God, nor be able to talk about Him. True, but you will not be able to do more than reason about Him. Your thoughts and your words will not get beyond a mere reasoning. I grant then what you claim; you claim to be able by your mental powers to reason about God: doubtless you can, but to infer a thing is not to see it in respect to the physical world, nor is it in the spiritual.25

Newman contrasts the way in which a ‘Catholic sees … Catholic truths’ with various other ways in which those truths may be apprehended. There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world; it comes down by tradition from age to age; it is carried forward by preaching and profession from one generation to another, and is poured about into all quarters of the world. It is found in fulness and purity in the Church alone, but portions of it, larger or smaller, escape far and wide, and penetrate into places which have never been illuminated by divine grace. Now men may take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them; these fragments of revelation, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, or the Atonement, are the religion which they have been taught in their childhood; and therefore they retain them, and profess them, and repeat them, without really seeing them, as the Catholic sees them, but as receiving them merely by word of mouth, from imitation of others … . Then again Catholic truths and rites are so beautiful, so great, so consolatory, that they draw one on to love and admire them with a natural love, as a prospect might draw them on, or a skilful piece of mechanism. Hence men of lively imagination profess this doctrine or that, or adopt this or that ceremony or usage, for their very beauty-sake, not asking themselves whether they are true, and having no real perception or mental hold of them … . And moreover the Catholic Creed, as coming from God, is so harmonious, so consistent with itself, holds together so perfectly, so corresponds part to part, that an acute mind, knowing one portion of it, would often infer another portion, merely as a matter of just reasoning. Thus a correct thinker might be sure, that, if God is infinite and man finite, there must be mysteries in religion. It is not that he really feels the mysteriousness of 25. Ibid., 171.

242

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

religion, but he infers it; he is led to it as a matter of necessity, and, from mere clearness of mind and love of consistency, he maintains it. Again, a man may say, ‘Since this or that doctrine has so much evidence in its favour, of course I must accept it;’ he has no real sight or direct perception of it, but he takes up the profession of it, because he feels it would be absurd, under the conditions with which he starts, to do otherwise. He does no more than load himself with a form of words, instead of contemplating, with the eye of the soul, God Himself, the Source of all truth, and this doctrine as proceeding from His mouth … . In these cases reason becomes the handmaid of faith: still it is not faith; it does not rise above an intellectual view or notion; it affirms, not as grasping the truth, not as seeing, but as ‘being of opinion’, as ‘judging’, as ‘coming to a conclusion’.26

Newman contrasts a ‘professing’ of a truth, with a ‘seeing’ of that truth. There are those who ‘profess … and repeat … without really seeing … from imitation of others’; there are those who ‘profess this doctrine or that … for their very beautysake, not asking themselves whether they are true, and having no real perception or mental hold of them’; there are those who recognize the ‘evidence’ in ‘favour’ of a doctrine, and who, from ‘love of consistency’, profess it, as recognizing ‘it would be absurd, under the conditions … to do otherwise’. In all these cases, something other than the ‘doctrine’ itself is contemplated, as an object – whether ‘others’ who are imitated, or ‘beauty’, or logical ‘consistency’. The ‘Catholic’, by contrast, ‘sees’ certain doctrines, or has ‘real perception or mental hold of them’, or contemplates ‘with the eye of the soul, God Himself, the Source of all truth, and [these doctrines] as proceeding from His mouth’.27 Newman maintains that the Catholic, apprehending certain objects as ‘a reality’, has something like a ‘spiritual sight’ of those objects. It was this kind of ‘spiritual sight’ which made the Martyrs ‘what they were’. ‘No one is a Martyr for a conclusion, no one is a Martyr for an opinion; it is faith that makes Martyrs. He who knows and loves the things of God has not power to deny them … . The Martyrs saw, and how could they but speak what they had seen?’28 Though some, by reasoning, get to the ‘conclusion … that the Catholic Church comes from God … [and] do not doubt [this conclusion] in their reason at all … they cannot rule their mind to grasp and keep hold of this truth.’29 Newman maintains that ‘it is the office of grace to clear up gloom and haziness, to steady that fitful vision, to perfect reason by faith, and to convert a logical conclusion into an object of intellectual sight’.30 One may get to certain ‘conclusions’ by ‘reason’, but the ‘sight’ of these conclusions requires (or is) ‘faith’.

26. Ibid., 174–6. 27. Ibid., 175. 28. Ibid., 181. 29. Ibid., 187. The first edition had, instead of ‘they cannot rule their mind’, ‘their mind is too feeble and dull to grasp and keep hold of this truth’. 30. ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 187.

6. The Virtue of Faith

243

Human reason … is the way to faith; its conclusions are often the very objects of faith. It precedes faith, when souls are converted to the Catholic Church; and it is the instrument which the Church herself is guided to make use of, when she is called upon to put forth those definitions of doctrine, in which, according to the promise and power of her Lord and Saviour, she is infallible; but still reason is one thing and faith is another, and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.31

Newman maintains that faith ‘convert[s]’ a ‘conclusion’ to an ‘object of intellectual sight’; one might take this to mean that faith is itself the ‘intellectual sight’, or that it is the means to the ‘intellectual sight’. One might regard this ‘sight’ as a kind of ‘looking with’ the ‘doctrines’ of the Church – a ‘perception’ of that which is revealed by those ‘doctrines’. In his Discourse on ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’, Newman associates having the ‘idea of a Saint’, as a ‘standard for … principles of conduct’, with having an ‘image of Saints’. Indeed, he maintains that the ‘image … makes’ the ‘standard’: he associates having objects of ‘intellectual sight’ with having ‘images’ of those objects. In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, he suggests that one who worships ‘with a caveat’, that ‘he would not answer for himself that some argument might not come to light, which he had never heard before, which would make it a grave moral duty in him to suspend his judgment and his devotion’ is, in truth, ‘worshipping his own mind, his own dear self, and not God’, such that ‘his idea of God was a mere accidental form which his thoughts took at this time or that, – for a long period or a short one, as the case might be, – not an image of the great External Object, but a passing sentiment or imagination which meant nothing at all’.32 To have something beyond the ‘self ’ as an ‘object’, in ‘devotion’, is to have ‘an image of the great External Object’, as distinct from a ‘passing sentiment or imagination’. In his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans (1850), Newman maintains that Protestants misunderstand the religious ‘aspect of Catholic countries’, as they do not appreciate that faith, for Catholics, is a kind of ‘sight’ (rather than ‘love’ or ‘obedience’) and they do not appreciate that faith is a kind of ‘sight’, rather than ‘love’ or ‘obedience’, because they do not have a faith of this kind.33 In ‘Catholic countries’, Newman acknowledges, a ‘definite character’ is apparent in the ‘nation’, marked by ‘the combined and contrary faults of profaneness and superstition’, such that the ‘most sacred feelings, the most august doctrines, are glibly enunciated in the shape of some short and smart theological formula; purgatory, hell, and the evil spirit, are a sort of household words upon their tongue; the most solemn duties, such as confession, or saying office, whether as spoken of or as performed, have a business like air and a mechanical action about them, quite inconsistent

31. Ibid., 187–8. 32. ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 220. 33. Diff i, 268, 269, 272, 288.

244

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

with their real nature’.34 Newman acknowledges that this ‘character’ exists, but he maintains that it is ‘the very phenomenon, which must necessarily result from a revelation of divine truth falling upon the human mind in its existing state of ignorance and moral feebleness’.35 He maintains that the Catholic understanding of what faith is – the idea that faith can exist apart from ‘love’ – better accounts for the ‘phenomenon’ presented by ‘Catholic countries’, ‘a confused and motley scene … good and evil mingled together in all conceivable measures of combination and varieties of result’ than the Protestant understanding of faith.36 Protestants, then, consider that faith and love are inseparable; where there is faith, there, they think, are love and obedience; and in proportion to the strength and degree of the former, are the strength and degree of the latter. They do not think the inconsistency possible of really believing without obeying; and, where they see disobedience, they cannot imagine there the existence of real faith. Catholics, on the other hand, hold that faith and love, faith and obedience, faith and works, are simply separable, and ordinarily separated, in fact; that faith does not imply love, obedience, or works; that the firmest faith, so as to move mountains, may exist without love, – that is, real faith, as really faith in the strict sense of the word as the faith of a martyr or a doctor. In other words, when Catholics speak of faith they are contemplating the existence of a gift which Protestantism does not even imagine. Faith is a spiritual sight of the unseen; and since in matter of fact Protestantism does not impart this sight, does not see the unseen, has no experience of this habit, this act of the mind – therefore, since it retains the word ‘faith’, it is obliged to find some other meaning for it; and its common, perhaps its commonest, idea is, that faith is substantially the same as obedience; at least, that it is the impulse, the motive of obedience, or the fervor and heartiness which attend good works. In a word, faith is hope or it is love, or it is a mixture of the two. Protestants define or determine faith, not by its nature or essence, but by its effects. When it succeeds in producing good works, they call it real faith; when it does not, they call it counterfeit.37

Faith, for Newman, is a ‘spiritual sight of the unseen’; and he maintains that the ‘nearest parallel’ to ‘faith’, as a ‘spiritual sight of the unseen’, is the ‘moral sense’. Faith, in a Catholic’s creed, is a certainty of things not seen, but revealed; a certainty, preceded indeed in many cases by particular exercises of the intellect, as conditions, by reflection, prayer, study, argument, or the like, and ordinarily 34. Ibid., 266. 35. Ibid., 268. 36. Ibid., 275. 37. Ibid. In the first edition of Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, having observed that Protestantism ‘does not see the unseen’, that ‘this habit, this act of the mind is foreign to it’, Newman remarks that it ‘does not contemplate faith in its Catholic sense; for it has been taught by flesh and blood, not by grace’ (Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (London: Burns & Lambert, 1850), 223). Newman excised this remark from later editions.

6. The Virtue of Faith

245

by the instrumental sacrament of Baptism, but caused directly by a supernatural influence on the mind from above. Thus it is a spiritual sight; and the nearest parallel by which it can be illustrated is the moral sense. As nature has impressed upon our minds a faculty of recognizing certain moral truths, when they are presented to us from without, so that we are quite sure that veracity, for instance, benevolence, and purity, are right and good, and that their contraries involve guilt, in a somewhat similar way, grace impresses upon us inwardly that revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye; similarly, yet more vividly and distinctly, because the moral perception consists in sentiments, but the grace of faith carries the mind on to objects. This certainty, or spiritual sight, which is included in the idea of faith, is, according to Catholic teaching, perfectly distinct in its own nature from the desire, intention, and power of acting agreeably to it.38

Newman likens ‘grace’ to the ‘moral sense’: the ‘moral sense’ is to certain ‘moral truths … presented to us from without’, as grace is to the ‘revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’; the ‘moral sense’ recognizes the ‘moral truths … presented to us from without’, and grace ‘impresses upon us inwardly the revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’. How much, though, can the ‘moral truths’ which the ‘moral sense’ recognizes be regarded as something ‘from without’? If there is a ‘moral sense’, then this would seem to be a capacity for understanding, and recognizing, what is good. The ‘truths’ that the ‘moral sense’ recognizes could be taken, then, to be deliverances of the ‘moral sense’, expressions of the understanding of goodness involved in the ‘moral sense’, such that they originate from within – with the ‘moral sense’ recognizing those truths, when ‘presented’ with them, as its own, so to speak. The truths presented in the ‘revelation’, however, are not truths for which the mind has a native ‘sense’. It seems, though, that Newman is concerned primarily with the effect of the ‘moral sense’ in making one ‘quite sure’. As the ‘moral sense’ makes one ‘quite sure’ of certain ‘truths’, so grace makes one certain of the truths presented in ‘that revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’. He maintains that grace ‘impresses upon us inwardly that revelation’. The ‘impressing’ here may be taken to be a ‘making certain’ of something: grace ‘impresses upon us’ the truth of ‘that revelation’. The ‘sight’ of the objects revealed by ‘that revelation’, the objects of faith, is not, then, a direct perception of them (as if, by ‘grace’, one acquired new faculties of perception, susceptible of receiving impressions of those objects). What is ‘impresse[d] upon us’ is the ‘revelation which comes to us sensibly by the ear or eye’: the objects revealed by that revelation do not ‘impress’ themselves directly, on some faculty for receiving that impression (by which the ‘impressing’ is registered). The revelation, which is something ‘sensible’ to ‘ear and eye’, presented to the ordinary faculties of perception, is the sole means of acquiring any insight into the objects which it reveals. To believe that revelation, to make a ‘firm assent’ to it, is to regard the

38. Diff i, 270–1.

246

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

objects revealed by it as realities, to attend to them as objects of ‘intellectual sight’, of which one is certain. Newman contrasts the ‘perception’ of the ‘moral sense’ with the ‘grace of faith’ – ‘the moral perception consists in sentiments, but the grace of faith carries the mind on to objects’. What does Newman mean by the remark that the ‘moral perception consists in sentiments’? It seems to mean that one recognizes certain ‘moral truths’ – ‘that veracity, for instance, benevolence, and purity, are right and good’  – by the ‘sentiments’ one feels toward acts of ‘veracity … benevolence, and purity’ when presented with them, ‘sentiments’ of approval, admiration, and the like. What, though, does Newman mean by the claim that ‘the grace of faith carries the mind on to objects’? Could this mean that one has certain ‘objects’ of ‘intellectual sight’ only if one believes the ‘revelation which comes to us sensibly’? The only way in which those objects could be ‘presented’ to one is through that revelation, for the ‘mind’ has no other way of registering them. The ‘moral sense’ responds to objects, once it has them ‘presented’ to it, whereas the ‘grace of faith’ is what makes one ‘have’ certain objects: it is what makes them present to the mind, as ‘objects’ of ‘intellectual sight’ or ‘spiritual sight’. This ‘certainty, or spiritual sight’, Newman maintains, is something quite distinct from the ‘desire, intention, and power of acting agreeably to it’. In ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’, Newman reflects on the ‘change’ that is experienced by those who ‘first begin to see with the eyes of the soul, with the intuition which grace gives, Jesus the Sun of Justice, and the heaven of Angels and Archangels in which He dwells; and the bright Morning Star, which is the Blessed Mary; and the continual floods of light falling and striking against the earth, and transformed, as they fall, into an infinity of hues, which are the Saints’.39 Newman likens this ‘intuition’ to the ‘sight’ of the transfigured Christ, granted to the ‘favoured disciples’: ‘Such was the surprise, such the transport, which came upon the favoured disciples, whom, on one occasion, our Lord took up with Him to the mountain’s top. He left the sick world, the tormented restless multitude, at its foot, and He took them up, and was transfigured before them.’40 Newman maintains in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans that in the ‘motley scene’, which is the ‘aspect of Catholic countries’, there is evident, in the ‘populace’, a ‘clear intellectual apprehension of the truth’, despite a certain ‘moral confusion’. Catholic truths are present to the minds of the populace as ‘facts which all men … take for granted’. Just as in England, the whole community, whatever the moral state of individuals, knows about railroads and electric telegraphs; and about the Court, and men in power, and proceedings in Parliament; and about religious controversies, and about foreign affairs, and about all that is going on around and beyond them: so, in a Catholic country, the ideas of heaven and hell, Christ and the evil spirit, saints, angels, souls in purgatory, grace, the blessed Sacrament, the sacrifice of

39. ‘Saintliness, the Standard of Christian Principle’, in DMC, 92. 40. Ibid., 92–3.

6. The Virtue of Faith

247

the Mass, absolution, indulgences, the virtue of relics, of holy images, of holy water, and of other holy things, are facts, by good and bad, by young and old, by rich and poor, to be taken for granted.41

There is, in a ‘Catholic country’, a picture of the world, common to all, comprised of ‘facts attested by each to all, and by all to each, common property, primary points of thought, and landmarks, as it were, upon the territory of knowledge’ – ‘the great invisible subjects … possess their imagination’.42 Newman considers various scenes that one might be presented with in a Catholic town, making up the ‘spectacle of supernatural faith acting upon the multitudinous mind of a people’, one such scene being a ‘pageant’, staged by the ‘incorporated trades’ of a town. He suggests that while such a ‘pageant’ might appear ‘profane’ to some – as treating heavenly realities in too earthly a fashion – it is not so to those who ‘have a vision within, which … takes up into itself, the external pageant’. You go forward, and you find preparations proceeding for a great pageant or mystery; it is a high festival, and the incorporated trades have each undertaken their special religious celebration. The plumbers and glaziers are to play the Creation; the barbers the Call of Abraham; and at night is to be the grandest performance of all, the Resurrection and Last Judgment, played by the carpenters, masons, and blacksmiths. Heaven and hell are represented – saints, devils, and living men; and the chef d’oeuvre of the exhibition is the display of fireworks to be let off as the finale. ‘How unutterably profane!’ … you cry. Yes, profane to you, my dear brother – profane to a population which only half believes; not profane to those who, however coarse-minded, however sinful, believe wholly, who, one and all, have a vision within, which corresponds with what they see, which resolves itself into, or rather takes up into itself, the external pageant, whatever be the moral condition of each individual composing the mass. They gaze, and, in drinking in the exhibition with their eyes, they are making one continuous and intense act of faith.43

Those who ‘gaze’ at the ‘external pageant’ believe in the realities represented in it, and, as they contemplate those realities in gazing at the ‘pageant’ – this ‘sight’ or

41. Diff i, 276. 42. Ibid., 276–7, 282. 43. Ibid., 287. The first edition of Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans did not include the phrase ‘however coarse-minded, however sinful’. The original version had a simple contrast between ‘a population which half believes’, and those ‘who believe wholly’. That he added the qualification about those who ‘believe wholly’ (making them those ‘who, however coarse-minded, however sinful, believe wholly’) could suggest that he wished to avoid suggesting that to ‘believe wholly’ is invariably to believe in this particular way: the pageant is a somewhat ‘coarse-minded’ expression of faith; a faith that ‘believes wholly’ need not be expressed in this way; such an expression of faith is not the ‘ideal’ expression of it.

248

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘vision’ of those realities being itself faith – so their experience of the pageant differs from that of those who only ‘half believe’. With regard to the relation between the ‘vision’ and the ‘external pageant’, Newman observes that the vision ‘corresponds with’ the pageant, that it ‘resolves itself into’ the pageant, and that it ‘takes up into itself ’ the pageant. While the phrase ‘resolves itself into’ suggests that the pageant is an interpretation of the vision  – such that it sets out, and makes visible, the elements of that vision, showing what it consists of  – the phrase ‘takes up into itself ’ suggests that the vision interprets the pageant – such that it construes the pageant as presenting signs of the objects that it contemplates (‘colour[ing] … [the] object to which it directs its view’, ‘incorporat[ing] … [it] into the substance of its own creations’ – to use some of the phrases Newman used of the ‘poetical mind’ in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’). Newman suggests that, as those who ‘gaze’ on the pageant have the things represented in it as objects of intellectual ‘sight’, and are certain that those things are realities, so they are not disconcerted when they have those realities presented to ‘their eyes’: such a presentation ‘corresponds’ with how those realities are present to their ‘intellectual sight’; it is not at odds with their sense of the presence of those realities, as external to them, impressing themselves on them; the ‘positiveness’ of the presentation is not felt by them to be unsuitable  – they do not feel those realities should be presented in an indistinct, indefinite manner, for they are not present in such a manner to faith. Newman maintains, equally, that they are conscious less of the pageant as an ‘external’, sensible thing, than of the ‘vision within’: they are not affected by the incidental defects in the form of the pageant, for the ‘vision within’ is independent of such ‘externals’, and is not something that might be injured by them. Newman contrasts this attitude with the attitude involved in ‘Protestant’ devotion. They have no certainty of the doctrines they profess, they do but feel that they ought to believe them, and they try to believe them, and they nurse the offspring of their reason, as a sickly child, bringing it out of doors only on fine days. They feel very clear and quite satisfied, while they are very still; but if they turn about their head, or change their posture ever so little, the vision of the Unseen, like a mirage, is gone from them. So they keep the exhibition of their faith for high days and great occasions, when it comes forth with sufficient pomp and gravity of language, and ceremonial of manner. Truths slowly totter out with Scripture texts at their elbow, as unable to walk alone. Moreover Protestants know, if such and such things be true, what ought to be the voice, the tone, the gesture, and the carriage attendant upon them; thus reason, which is the substance of their faith, supplies the rubrics, as I may call them, of their behaviour. This, some of you, my brethren, call reverence; though, I am obliged to say, it is … a mannerism.44

The ‘vision of the Unseen’, for ‘Protestants’, is sustained by various things external to it – whether ‘reason’, or ‘ceremonial’, or ‘Scripture texts’. The ‘substance’ of this

44. Diff i, 289–90.

6. The Virtue of Faith

249

‘vision’ is ‘reason’: those who have this attitude are induced, by ‘reason’, to ‘feel they ought to believe’, and they ‘try to believe’ – and their ‘vision’ is sustained by their awareness of their reasons for belief, so that if they ‘are very still’, attending to those reasons, they ‘feel very clear and quite satisfied’ – and they know ‘what ought to be the voice, the tone, the gesture and the carriage attendant upon’ belief in certain things. They are attending to various ‘oughts’ – to what they ‘ought’ to believe, and to how believers ‘ought’ to act – and they are attending to their own efforts to fulfil these ‘oughts’, instead of simply attending to the ‘objects’ of faith. Newman professes, in setting out an account of ‘faith’ in his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans, to be presenting the ‘Catholic teaching on the subject of faith’. How much might Newman himself be suspected  – in his account of ‘Catholic countries’, and of the ‘vision within’, animating Catholics – of setting out what ‘ought’ to be the case, according to ‘Catholic teaching’? He is maintaining, with regard to ‘Catholic teaching on the subject of faith’, that considered ‘as an hypothesis’, it can ‘serve and suffice to solve the difficulty which is created in [the] minds [of Protestants] by the aspect of Catholic countries’: ‘Walk forward, then, into the Catholic Church, and the difficulty, like a phantom, will, as a matter of necessity, disappear.’45 To become a Catholic is to accept the ‘Catholic teaching’ that faith is a kind of ‘spiritual sight’, and that it is distinct from ‘obedience’; to accept that faith is like this, is to overcome the ‘difficulty’ presented by ‘the aspect of Catholic countries’. On becoming a Catholic, one accepts the ‘teaching’ that faith is like this; but, more than that, will one not know, from experience, that faith is like this, for will one not have this sort of faith oneself – a faith for which ‘the invisible mysteries of faith ever stand out, as if in bodily shape, before … [the] mental gaze’?46 Newman himself, on becoming a Catholic, felt that he experienced in himself, and that he detected in his fellow Catholics, a faith of this kind. It was, he declared in a letter to a friend, a ‘real religion, not a mere opinion such, that you have no confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too, but an external objective substantive creed and worship’.47 In his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans he maintains that ‘among a Protestant people … private judgment does but create opinions, and nothing more; and these opinions are peculiar to each individual, and different from those of any one else’, and this ‘leads men to keep their feelings to themselves, because the avowal of them only causes in others irritation or ridicule’: those who hold such opinions experience them as private or ‘peculiar’ to themselves.48 When Newman maintains that Catholicism is ‘external objective substantive’, and that it involves a ‘confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too’, the phrase ‘external objective substantive’ can be interpreted in a couple of ways: the phrase could mean that it is ‘external objective

45. Ibid., 272. 46. Ibid., 288. 47. LD, xii, 168. Quoted in Ian Ker, ‘Newman’s Post-Conversion Discovery of Catholicism’, in Ian Ker, ed., Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 44. 48. Diff i, 289.

250

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

substantive’ in that ‘your next door neighbour holds it too’ – it is shared with others, it is not merely ‘private’ or ‘peculiar’ to oneself, and it is a ‘real religion’ involving a ‘creed’ and ‘worship’ which is not something one has created oneself, but which is ‘external’ to oneself; the phrase could, equally, mean that as it is ‘external objective substantive’, as it is an apprehension of what is ‘real’, one can have ‘confidence that [one’s] next door neighbour holds it too’  – for when one apprehends what is ‘real’, one has ‘confidence’ that others will apprehend it as well. If the faith of the ‘Protestant’, as Newman characterizes it, involves an excessive attention to what one ‘ought’ to believe – an excessive contemplation of oneself as judging, of ‘private judgement’, and of the arguments that set out what one ‘ought’ to believe – could the faith of the ‘Catholic’, as Newman characterizes it, involve an excessive attention to what others believe, a consciousness of believing as ‘your next door neighbour’ believes? If Protestants identify their faith with what is ‘private’, might Catholics identify their faith with what is ‘public’ or ‘common’ (according it a kind of belief which is a matter of identifying oneself with others – and which requires a sense of the presence of others – in ‘ceremonial’, in social experiences, and the like – if it is to be felt)? Newman insists that a sense of the ‘soul’, in its individuality, in its uniqueness, is central to Catholicism  – that ‘the Church … contemplates … not society in the first place, but in the second place, and in the first place individuals’, that it ‘overlooks everything in comparison of the immortal soul’: this ‘supernatural sight and supernatural aim’ is at the centre of Catholicism, so that one cannot make sense of it, if one does not have this sense of the ‘immortal soul’ (and one gets this sense of the soul from having a sense of oneself as ‘individual’, distinct from the ‘world’).49 In Catholicism that which is innermost in the self is recognized, and that which is innermost in the self is engaged in a ‘real … worship’ which expresses it, and sustains it. When Newman maintains that Catholicism is a ‘real religion, not a mere opinion such, that you have no confidence that your next door neighbour holds it too, but an external objective substantive creed and worship’, he can be taken to mean that it is not felt, by those who profess it, to be a mere ‘private … opinion’, the ‘offspring’ of ‘private judgement’, but to be an apprehension of what is ‘real’: to feel that what one professes is a ‘private … opinion’ is to contemplate oneself, as forming that opinion; to feel that what one professes is ‘objective’ is to contemplate what is ‘external’ to oneself. For Newman himself, his sense of the ‘reality’ of Catholicism, on joining the Catholic church, was connected to his experience of the Mass, and of Eucharistic devotion: in the tabernacle of every church, was the sacrament, in which Christ was present.50 With regard to this ‘Divine Presence’, Newman declared, ‘I never knew what worship

49. Ibid., 236, 237. 50. Ian Ker has stressed the importance for Newman of his ‘discovery’ of Eucharistic devotion in his first years as a Catholic, and how this informed his sense that ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Catholicism’ were quite different ‘religions’. See Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Catholic Revival in English Literature: 1845–1961 (Leominster: Gracewing, 2003) and ‘Newman’s Post-Conversion

6. The Virtue of Faith

251

was, as an objective fact, till I entered the Catholic Church.’51 If the contemplation of the Eucharist involves a sense of the presence of Christ, participation in the sacraments, generally, involves a sense of being in an ‘atmosphere’ pervaded with that presence: ‘The Atonement of Christ is not a thing at a distance … We are surrounded by an atmosphere and are in a medium through which his warmth and light flow in upon us on every side.’52 This sense of the presence of Christ, as a ‘medium’ in which one participates, informs the sense one has of ‘[one’s] next door neighbour’, as participating in that ‘medium’. One participates in a ‘divine presence’, and the sense one has of that ‘presence’ is not experienced as an ‘opinion’ one has evolved by a ‘private judgement’ that is ‘peculiar’ to oneself; one’s ‘neighbour’ participates, equally, in that ‘divine presence’, and, as one does not regard the sense one has of that presence as a matter of ‘private judgement’, ‘peculiar’ to oneself, so one regards one’s ‘neighbour’ as having a similar sense of that presence – a sense which is expressed in an ‘external objective substantive creed and worship’. Newman maintains in his Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, that ‘Protestants’ do ‘not believe even their own religions; they do not believe in any thing at all’, for they do not ‘submit their reason to a living authority’. He maintains that Catholics, having faith in the deliverances of a ‘living authority’, the church, and being certain of what is proposed for belief by that ‘authority’, contemplate the ‘objects’ of belief with a ‘spiritual sight’. How much, for Newman, did becoming a Catholic involve a repudiation of his former views about ‘faith’?

3. One of the claims Newman makes about the faith of ‘Protestants’, in his Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, and his lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans, is that the ‘substance’ of this faith is, in truth, ‘reason’. In a number of sermons, preached in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and published in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (1843) Newman sought to set out the relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, maintaining that while ‘faith’ differs from ‘what is commonly understood’ by ‘reason’, it is nevertheless a legitimate ‘instrument of knowledge and action’ and, indeed, a form of ‘reasoning’ itself. In ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’, preached in 1839, he aims to counter the view that ‘Faith is but a moral quality, dependent upon Reason, – that Reason judges both of the evidence on which Scripture is to be received, and of the meaning of Scripture; and then Faith follows or not, according to the state of the heart; that we make up our minds by Reason without Faith, and then we proceed to adore and to obey by Faith apart from Reason; that, though Faith rests

Discovery of Catholicism’, in Ian Ker, ed., Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 37–58. 51. LD xi, 252–3. 52. Ibid., 224.

252

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

on testimony, not on reasonings, yet that testimony, in its turn, depends on Reason for the proof of its pretensions, so that Reason is an indispensable preliminary’.53 He would maintain that faith is distinct from ‘reason’, without suggesting, as ‘enthusiasts [do] … that faculties altogether new are implanted in our minds, and that perceptibly, by the grace of the Gospel; faculties which, of course, are known to those who have them without proof; and, to those who have them not, cannot be made known by any’.54 He grants that ‘Reason has a power of analysis and criticism in all opinion and conduct, and that nothing is true or right but what may be justified, and, in a certain sense, proved by it, and [that it is] undeniable, in consequence, that, unless the doctrines received by Faith are approvable by Reason, they have no claim to be regarded as true’ but he denies that it ‘follow[s] that Faith is actually grounded on Reason in the believing mind itself; unless, indeed, to take a parallel case, a judge can be called the origin, as well as the justifier, of the innocence or truth of those who are brought before him’.55 A judge does not make men honest, but acquits and vindicates them: in like manner, Reason need not be the origin of Faith, as Faith exists in the very persons believing, though it does test and verify it. This, then, is one confusion, which must be cleared up … the assumption that Reason must be the inward principle of action in religious inquiries or conduct in the case of this or that individual, because, like a spectator, it acknowledges and concurs in what goes on; – the mistake of a critical for a creative power … . No one will say that Conscience is against Reason, or that its dictates cannot be thrown into an argumentative form; yet who will, therefore, maintain that it is not an original principle, but must depend, before it acts, upon some previous processes of Reason? Reason analyzes the grounds and motives of action: a reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself. As, then, Conscience is a simple element in our nature, yet its operations admit of being surveyed and scrutinized by Reason; so may Faith be cognizable, and its acts be justified, by Reason, without therefore being, in matter of fact, dependent upon it.56

A ‘reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself ’. The ‘motive itself ’ is an insight or perception (of the ‘Conscience’); a ‘reason’ (on this account) emerges through an act of reflection on the ‘motive’ whereby the insight or perception involved in it is identified. The ‘motive’ is the state of awareness that animates, or that is involved in, ‘action’. That this state of awareness does not involve reflection, or an ‘argumentative form’, need not mean that it should be contrary to the awareness

53. ‘Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 182. 54. ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in OUS, 182. 55. Ibid., 182–3. 56. Ibid., 183.

6. The Virtue of Faith

253

of things attained by reflection and argument  – it need not mean that what is perceived, or accepted, in one form of awareness should be contrary to what is perceived, or accepted, in the other form of awareness. Newman observes that on the ‘popular view’, the ‘contrast that would be made’ between faith and reason is that ‘Reason requires strong evidence before it assents, and Faith is content with weaker evidence’, and he asks, ‘If this be so, how is it conformable to Reason to accept evidence less than Reason requires?’57 Faith … does not demand evidence so strong as is necessary for what is commonly considered a rational conviction, or belief on the ground of Reason; and why? For this reason, because it is mainly swayed by antecedent considerations. In this way it is, that the two principles are opposed to one another: Faith is influenced by previous notices, prepossessions, and (in a good sense of the word) prejudices; but Reason, by direct and definite proof. The mind that believes is acted upon by its own hopes, fears, and existing opinions; whereas it is supposed to reason severely, when it rejects antecedent proof of a fact, – rejects everything but the actual evidence producible in its favour … . Faith is a principle of action, and action does not allow time for minute and finished investigations. We may (if we will) think that such investigations are of high value; though, in truth, they have a tendency to blunt the practical energy of the mind, while they improve its scientific exactness; but, whatever be their character and consequences, they do not answer the needs of daily life … Faith, then, as being a principle for the multitude and for conduct, is influenced … less by evidence, more by previouslyentertained principles, views, and wishes. This is the case with all Faith, and not merely religious.58

Newman observes that ‘the mind that believes is acted upon by its own hopes, fears, and existing opinions’. What is the ‘act’ of these ‘hopes, fears, and existing opinions’, these ‘antecedent considerations’? Newman maintains that faith is a ‘principle of action, and action does not allow time for minute and finished investigations’. There are, though, ‘investigations’, relating to the ‘needs of daily life’, that constitute, or that terminate in, a ‘principle of action’ (the ‘investigations’ of ‘practical wisdom’, phronesis). One might think of these ‘investigations’  – which would engage ‘previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes’  – as terminating in a ‘principle … for conduct’  – an insight (of phronesis) on which one acts: the mind that determines how to act, the mind that chooses, is itself ‘acted upon by its own hopes, fears, and existing opinions’, and these are involved in the deliberation that is phronesis. With faith, it would seem that the decision in question is not how to act, but whether to believe. Yet what is believed is, itself, pertinent to, and so a ‘principle’ for, ‘conduct’.

57. Ibid., 187. 58. Ibid., 187–8.

254

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman maintains that the ‘previously-entertained principles, views, and wishes’, in accordance with which – ‘by a law of our nature, and whether they are in the particular case reasonable or not’ – the ‘evidence’ for religion is interpreted, will vary according to the character of those who entertain those ‘principles, views, and wishes’.59 Since probabilities have no definite ascertained value, and are reducible to no scientific standard, what are such to each individual, depends on his moral temperament. A good and a bad man will think very different things probable. In the judgment of a rightly disposed mind, objects are desirable and attainable which irreligious men will consider to be but fancies. Such a correct moral judgment and view of things is the very medium in which the argument for Christianity has its constraining influence; a faint proof under circumstances being more availing than a strong one, apart from those circumstances … . It is plain … why our great divines, Bull and Taylor, not to mention others, have maintained that justifying faith is fides formata charitate, or in St. Paul’s words, [‘faith working by love’]. For as that faith, which is not moral, but depends upon evidence, is fides formata ratione – dead faith, which an infidel may have; so that which justifies or is acceptable in God’s sight, lives in, and from, a desire after those things which it accepts and confesses.60

Newman maintains that the character of those who consider certain ‘things probable’, such that they are predisposed to accept the revelation, is animated by ‘love of the great Object of Faith, watchful attention to Him, readiness to believe Him near, easiness to believe Him interposing in human affairs, fear of the risk of slighting or missing what may really come from Him’, and he observes that ‘these are feelings not natural to fallen man, and they come only of supernatural grace; and these are the feelings which make us think evidence sufficient, which falls short of a proof in itself ’.61 If one thinks of God as ‘near’, and likely to reveal Himself – and this way of thinking of God is implicated, Newman suggests, with a certain ‘love’ of God – then one will, when presented with something that purports to be a revelation from God, respond differently from those who do not feel this ‘love’ of God. Newman elaborated on this in a sermon he preached a week later, on ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’, observing that a ‘love’ for the ‘message’ of the revelation can actuate belief in that ‘message’: ‘The Word of Life is offered to a man; and, on its being offered, he has Faith in it. Why?’ On these two grounds, – the word of its human messenger, and the likelihood of the message. And why does he feel the message to be probable? Because he has a love for it, his love being strong, though the testimony is weak. He has

59. Ibid., 190. 60. Ibid., 191, 193. 61. Ibid., 193.

6. The Virtue of Faith

255

a keen sense of the intrinsic excellence of the message, of its desirableness, of its likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any, of the need of a Revelation, and its probability. Thus Faith is the reasoning of a religious mind, or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart, which acts upon presumptions rather than evidence.62

To support the claim that ‘Faith is the reasoning of a religious mind’, Newman characterizes ‘reason’ as ‘a faculty of proceeding from things that are perceived [by the senses] to things which are not; the existence of which it certifies to us on the hypothesis of something else being known to exist, in other words, being assumed to be true … . Its exercise lies in asserting one thing, because of some other thing; and, when its exercise is conducted rightly, it leads to knowledge; when wrongly, to apparent knowledge, to opinion, and error.’63 Faith, Newman maintains, is ‘an acceptance of things as real, which the senses do not convey, upon certain previous grounds; it is an instrument of indirect knowledge concerning things external to us’. With regard to such ‘reasoning’, Newman observes that ‘men advance forward on grounds which they do not, or cannot produce, or if they could, yet could not prove to be true, on latent or antecedent grounds which they take for granted’, that ‘there must ever be something assumed ultimately which is incapable of proof ’, and that the ‘greater achievements of the Reason’ often involve ‘ways of thought so recondite and intricate that the mass of men are obliged to take them on trust, till the event or other evidence confirms them’, ‘ways of thought’ which would not ‘show to advantage’ if ‘thrown into the technical forms which the science of argument requires’.64 Faith, Newman maintains, is a ‘reasoning’ of this kind: it ‘is a process of the Reason, in which so much of the grounds of inference cannot be exhibited, so much lies in the character of the mind itself, in its general view of things, its estimate of the probable and the improbable, its impressions concerning God’s will, and its anticipations derived from its own inbred wishes, that it will ever seem to the world irrational and despicable, – till, that is, the event confirms it’.65 In ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, Newman maintains that, as faith consists ‘of certain exercises of Reason which proceed mainly on presumption’, such that it ‘begins with its own previous knowledge and opinions, advances and decides upon antecedent probabilities, that is, on grounds which do not reach so far as to touch precisely the desired conclusion, though they tend towards it, and may come very near it’ – whereby most of those who have faith do so ‘not on an examination of evidence, but from a spontaneous movement of their hearts towards it … [and] go out of themselves to meet Him who is unseen …

62. 63. 64. 65.

‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’, in OUS, 202–3. Ibid., 203, 206. Ibid., 212–13, 216, 217. Ibid., 218.

256

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

discern[ing] Him in such symbols of Him as they find ready provided for them’ – so it is a ‘test of a man’s heart’.66 Faith is a test of a man’s heart … [as] it shows what he thinks likely to be … and what he thinks likely, depends surely on nothing else than the general state of his mind, the state of his convictions, feelings, tastes, and wishes. A fact is asserted, and is thereby proposed to the acceptance or rejection of those who hear it. Each hearer will have his own view concerning it, prior to the evidence; this view will result from the character of his mind; nor commonly will it be reversed by any ordinary variation in the evidence. If he is indisposed to believe, he will explain away very strong evidence; if he is disposed, he will accept very weak evidence … . Most men must and do decide by the principles of thought and conduct which are habitual to them; that is, the antecedent judgment, with which a man approaches the subject of religion, not only acts as a bearing this way or that, – as causing him to go out to meet the evidence in a greater or less degree, and nothing more, – but, further, it practically colours the evidence, even in a case in which he has recourse to evidence, and interprets it for him.67

What prevents faith from ‘from running (as it were) to seed, and becoming superstition or fanaticism’, is a ‘right state of heart’: ‘this it is that gives it birth; it also disciplines it’, preventing it from becoming ‘bigotry, credulity or fantaticism’; it is ‘Love which forms it out of the rude chaos into an image of Christ; or, in scholastic language, justifying Faith, whether in Pagan, Jew, or Christian, is fides formata charitate’.68 ‘The divinely enlightened mind sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts Him, or believes, from loving Him.’69 The ‘divinely enlightened mind’ recognizes in Christ the ‘Object correlative of its own affections’ – ‘affections’ which are ‘affections’ for God (which are ordered to God, as their proper object). Newman might be suggesting, in this, that the ‘divinely enlightened mind’ recognizes, in the ‘affections’ roused by Christ, what sort of ‘Object’ Christ is, for those ‘affections’ are ‘correlative’ to a certain ‘Object’ – namely, God. Newman might be suggesting, equally, that if one has a ‘divinely enlightened mind’, one has – prior to any encounter one might have with Christ – a sense of God, of a divine ‘Object’, and that, if one has such a sense of the divine ‘Object’ one will be disposed to accept the revelation which presents Christ, for what is presented in that revelation accords with the sense of the divine ‘Object’ that one already has. If one feels ‘love and worship’ for Christ, one will trust Christ – such trust being an expression of ‘love and worship’; to recognize that Christ is the ‘Object correlative’ of such ‘love and worship’ – that Christ is a fit object of such ‘love and worship’  – is to sense that Christ merits

66. 67. 68. 69.

‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, in OUS, 223–4, 225, 226. Ibid., 226–7. Ibid., 233–4. Ibid., 236.

6. The Virtue of Faith

257

trust. Newman suggests that to encounter the revelation which presents Christ is to encounter the presence of Christ as informing that revelation: to be presented with the revelation is to encounter certain ‘symbols’ of the presence of Christ, so that trusting the revelation is implicated with trusting Christ. Newman maintains that a ‘good man and a bad man will think very different things probable’. What one thinks ‘probable’ is a function of the ‘presumptions’ one has about the nature of things, about how things tend to happen. As a ‘good man and a bad man will think very different things probable’, so there are ‘holy, devout, and enlightened presumptions’; and the revelation will seem more probable, to those who are ‘holy, devout, and enlightened’, as it accords with their ‘presumptions’ – it fits with their sense of what might be, of what is likely. Right Faith is the faith of a right mind. Faith is an intellectual act; right Faith is an intellectual act, done in a certain moral disposition. Faith is an act of Reason, viz. a reasoning upon presumptions; right Faith is a reasoning upon holy, devout, and enlightened presumptions. Faith ventures and hazards; right Faith ventures and hazards deliberately, seriously, soberly, piously, and humbly, counting the cost and delighting in the sacrifice. As far as, and wherever Love is wanting, so far, and there, Faith runs into excess or is perverted. The grounds of Faith, when animated by the spirit of love and purity, are such as these: – that a Revelation is very needful for man; that it is earnestly to be hoped for from a merciful God; that it is to be expected; nay, that of the two it is more probable that what professes to be a Revelation should be or should contain a Revelation, than that there should be no Revelation at all; that, if Almighty God interposes in human affairs, His interposition will not be in opposition to His known attributes, or to His dealings in the world, or to certain previous revelations of His will; that it will be in a way worthy of Him; that it is likely to bear plain indications of His hand; that it will be for great ends, specified or signified; and moreover, that such and such ends are in their nature great, such and such a message important, such and such means worthy, such and such circumstances congruous. I consider that under the guidance of such anticipations and calculations as these, which Faith – not mere Faith, but Faith working by Love – suggests, the honest mind may, under ordinary circumstances, be led, and practically is led, into an acceptable, enlightened, and saving apprehension of Divine Truth without that formal intimacy and satisfaction with the special evidence existing for the facts believed, which is commonly called Reasoning, or the use of Reason, and which results in knowledge.70

Newman observes that when St Paul preached the Gospel, he appealed to the ‘enlightened presumptions’ of those he encountered, ‘he appealed to that whole body of opinion, affection, and desire, which made up, in each man, his moral

70. Ibid., 239–40.

258

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

self … which, if it was what it should be, would respond to the Apostle’s doctrine, as the strings of one instrument vibrate with another’.71 He taught men, not only that Almighty God was, and was everywhere, but that He had certain moral attributes; that He was just, true, holy, and merciful; that His representative was in their hearts; that He already dwelt in them as a lawgiver and a judge, by a sense of right and a conscience of sin; and that what he himself was then bringing them fulfilled what was thus begun in them by nature, by tokens so like the truth, as to constrain all who loved God under the Religion of Nature to believe in Him as revealed in the Gospel.72

In ‘The Nature of Faith in relation to Reason’, Newman maintains that the ‘reasoning of a religious mind, or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart . . . acts upon presumptions rather than evidence’; in ‘Love the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, he considers the relationship between a ‘right or renewed heart’, and certain ‘presumptions’ or presentiments, which are involved in such a state of ‘heart’; in ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’ (preached in 1840), he considers the mode in which such ‘presumptions’ may be operative  – he considers how ‘reasoning’ is not identical with ‘explicit’ argumentation, but is itself a ‘living spontaneous energy within us’, a ‘faculty … of ascertaining one thing by means of another’, which need not take the form of ‘explicit’ argumentation if it is to be present, and active.73 If ‘reasoning’ is to take the form of ‘explicit’ argumentation, the mind must reflect on itself, on its own ‘reasonings’, and articulate them; and the reasonings must have already occurred, if they are to be reflected on and articulated. The mind may, moreover, reflect on the form taken by its reasonings, identifying the ‘main principles on which they are conducted’ (as in ‘the analysis of the reasoning process … [in] the well-known science for which we are indebted to Aristotle’); but those principles must have been already acted on – in the spontaneous activity of reasoning – before an ‘analysis’ of them could be carried out: the activity, the reasoning, in which they were acted on, was not informed by a conscious awareness of them.74 The ‘analysis’ of the reasoning involved in ‘faith’, is not that reasoning itself; yet ‘the mind may be allowably, nay, religiously engaged, in reflecting upon its own Faith; investigating the grounds and the Object of it, bringing it out into words, whether to defend, or recommend, or teach it to others’.75 Nothing would be more theoretical and unreal than to suppose that true Faith cannot exist except when moulded upon a Creed, and based upon Evidence; yet nothing would indicate a more shallow philosophy than to say it ought carefully

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Ibid., 248. Ibid., 248–9. ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, in OUS, 256, 257. Ibid., 257, 258. Ibid., 253.

6. The Virtue of Faith

259

to be disjoined from dogmatic and argumentative statements. To assert the latter is to discard the science of theology from the service of Religion; to assert the former, is to maintain that every child, every peasant, must be a theologian. Faith cannot exist without grounds and without an object; but it does not follow that all who have faith should recognize, and be able to state what they believe, and why. Nor, on the other hand, because it is not identical with its grounds, and its object, does it therefore cease to be true Faith, on its recognizing them.76

Newman suggests that the ‘reasoning’ that is a ‘living spontaneous energy’, present before it is reflected on, could be termed ‘implicit’ reason. All men reason, for to reason is nothing more than to gain truth from former truth, without the intervention of sense, to which brutes are limited; but all men do not reflect upon their own reasonings, much less reflect truly and accurately, so as to do justice to their own meaning; but only in proportion to their abilities and attainments. In other words, all men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason. We may denote, then, these two exercises of mind as reasoning and arguing, or as conscious and unconscious reasoning, or as Implicit Reason and Explicit Reason. And to the latter belong the words, science, method, development, analysis, criticism, proof, system, principles, rules, laws, and others of a like nature.77

As ‘implicit reason’ and ‘explicit reason’ are distinct, so it is mistaken to maintain that ‘faith’ must be ‘founded on’ explicit argument, or to maintain that faith is unreasonable if it is not sustained by explicit argument. What is more, it may be difficult to set out in ‘explicit’ form all that is ‘implicit’ in the mind that has faith. 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. The end proposed is that of delineating, or, as it were, painting what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider what it is to portray duly in form and colour things material, and we shall surely understand the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of representing the outline and character, the hues and shades, in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind, or of giving it that substance and that exactness in detail in which consists its likeness to the original, or of sufficiently marking those minute differences which attach to the same general state of mind or tone of thought as found in this or that individual respectively. It is probable that a given opinion, as held by several individuals, even when of the most congenial views, is as distinct from itself as are their faces. Now how minute is the defect in imitation which hinders the likeness of a portrait from being successful! How easy is it to recognize who is intended by it,

76. Ibid., 253–4. 77. Ibid., 258–9.

260

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

without allowing that really he is represented! Is it not hopeless, then, to expect that the most diligent and anxious investigation can end in more than in giving some very rude description of the living mind, and its feelings, thoughts, and reasonings? And if it be difficult to analyze fully any state, or frame, or opinion of our own minds, is it a less difficulty to delineate, as Theology professes to do, the works, dealings, providences, attributes, or nature of Almighty God?78

An imperfect ‘representation’, in explicit form, of what is implicit in the mind, may become virtually a misrepresentation. The ‘science of controversy … [when] it professes to have done much’ may ‘lead the student to mistake what are but secondary points in debate, as if they were the most essential’. Who shall analyze the assemblage of opinions in this or that mind, which occasions it almost instinctively to reject or to accept … [certain] positions? Far be it from me to seem to insinuate that they are but opinions, neither true nor false, and approving themselves or not, according to the humour or prejudice of the individual: so far from it, that I would maintain that the recondite reasons which lead each person to take or decline them, are just the most important portion of the considerations on which his conviction depends.79

If ‘the proof of Christianity, or the Scripture proof of its doctrines, [should] be of this subtle nature, of course it cannot be exhibited to advantage in argument’.80 To rely solely on what can be ‘exhibited … in argument’ is, then, of itself, to disregard certain aspects of the ‘proof of Christianity’. In the Oxford University Sermons, Newman suggests that those who are moved to believe the revelation do so, as moved by its correspondence to their ‘presumptions’, their sense of what is ‘likely’ – ‘presumptions’ that might be too numerous and subtle for them to set out ‘explicitly’ – and he suggests that their ‘presumptions’ relate to their ‘character’, such that there are ‘holy, devout, and enlightened’ presumptions. Is this to regard ‘faith’ as a form of ‘reason’, or ‘private judgement’ – a ‘reason’ that is implicit, and actuated by various ‘presumptions’? What is more, he suggests that those who are moved to believe the revelation do so, as recognizing ‘the intrinsic excellence of the message … its desirableness’, and as moved by a love for the ‘Object’ revealed by it: ‘We believe, because we love.’ Is this to maintain that ‘faith and love are inseparable’, such that ‘where there is faith, there … is love and obedience’?

4. In 1856, Newman preached on ‘Dispositions for Faith’, reworking an earlier sermon, from 1834, on ‘Faith without Sight’. Comparison of the two sermons 78. Ibid., 267–8. 79. Ibid., 272. 80. Ibid., 275.

6. The Virtue of Faith

261

shows something of how Newman, on becoming a Catholic, adjusted some of his earlier ideas about ‘faith’ and ‘reason’. In both of the sermons Newman maintains that a proper receptivity to the revelation arises from ‘attending’ or ‘listening’ to the conscience. In the earlier sermon, Newman characterizes this state as something involving a ‘believing temper’, a ‘readiness to believe’; in the later sermon, he characterizes this state as something marked by ‘easiness of belief ’ and as something involving ‘good dispositions’ – ‘With good dispositions faith is easy … without good dispositions, faith is not easy.’ Newman characterizes in a similar way in each of the sermons the elements of the attitude that he takes to arise from a proper attentiveness to the conscience. The ‘voice’ of the conscience presents one with certain authoritative ‘dictates’, which ‘command’ one. One does not experience these ‘dictates’ as something one has created for oneself – they seem to have an ‘exterior’ origin. One experiences oneself as subject to these ‘dictates’ – they seem to have their origin in a ‘superior’. One is simply presented with ‘commands’, and in the experience of being ‘commanded’, there is an intimation of One, other than the self, who commands, One who commands as superior to the self. From the experience of the conscience, one is ‘thrown out’ of oneself – one becomes aware of the presence of God (‘exterior’ and ‘superior’ to oneself) whose ‘voice’ is manifest in the ‘dictates’ of the conscience. From the sense of the presence of God, arising from the experience of the conscience, there arises a desire to encounter God, and an inclination to ‘look’ for God. What is more, from the experience of the conscience, there arises an awareness of sin, and a desire for ‘deliverance’ from sin: those who attend to their consciences are aware of their own sinfulness, and of their inability to overcome, by themselves, their own sinfulness. Those who have this attitude – those who ‘look’ for God, and who aspire to transcend themselves – will, when presented with something that purports to be a revelation, respond differently from those who do not have this attitude. Those who ‘look’ for God will address the question of whether there is a revelation as a ‘practical concern’, as a matter of ‘personal interest’. As this alertness of ‘conscience’ affects the way in those who have this ‘sensitiveness’ take the ‘evidence’ for the revelation, so, for those who accept the revelation, it is the ‘safeguard and nutriment’ of their commitment. The two sermons, then, characterize the attitude that makes for faith, or for commitment to ‘the Gospel’, in similar ways. Newman summaries the ‘dispositions … leading to faith’, in 1856, as ‘first … belief in God, as our Teacher, Governor, and Judge; and … second … the earnest desire that He would reveal Himself, and an eager lookingout for the chance of His doing so’. While each sermons is concerned with a contrast of ‘tempers’, the 1834 sermon associates the ‘sceptic[al]’ temper with ‘reason’ (or with what in ‘ordinary language’ is termed ‘reason’) while the 1856 sermon does not. In 1834 Newman observes that ‘in our ordinary language we speak of religion being built upon faith, not upon reason; on the other hand, it is as common for those who scoff at religion to object this very doctrine against us; as if, in so saying, we had almost admitted that Christianity was not true’. His use of the phrase ‘ordinary language’ suggests a certain hesitation: what ‘ordinary language’ terms ‘reason’ may not be the only

262

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

form of ‘reason’. In 1834, Newman had not yet set out an account of ‘implicit reason’, devising a ‘language’ of his own to set against ‘ordinary language’: according to the contrast Newman would later establish, between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit reason’, that which ‘ordinary language’ terms ‘reason’ is only one form of reason – namely, ‘explicit reason’. Yet since, in his 1834 sermon, he calls attention to the ‘ordinary’ characterization of ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ – since he calls attention to the naming of these things, to how these things are ‘commonly … called’ by certain names – he suggests that this is not the only way of characterizing them: he puts the ‘ordinary’ terms in question (without proposing alternative terms). In 1834, he associates the ‘sceptical’ temper with certain virtues, and the ‘religious’ temper with certain vices. Those who are not predisposed to think a revelation likely ‘are in no danger of being superstitious or credulous’. When they hear of events supernatural, they come to the examination of them as calmly and dispassionately as if they were judges in a court of law, or inquiring into points of science. They acknowledge no especial interest in the question proposed to them; and they find it no effort to use their intellect upon it as rigidly as if it were some external instrument which could not be swayed. Here then we see two opposite characters of mind, the one credulous (as it would be commonly called), the latter candid, well-judging, and sagacious.81

If Newman observes that certain virtues may be ascribed to the sceptical temper (it is ‘candid, well-judging, and sagacious’, calm and dispassionate, not ‘swayed’) he, equally, questions the ascription of these virtues – calling attention to how certain ‘characters of mind’ are ‘commonly called’ certain things. Those who are taken to be ‘candid, well-judging, and sagacious’ are those who, in fact, ‘prefer this world to the leadings of God’s Spirit within them, soon lose their perception of the latter, and lean upon the world as a god’; they are those who, having ‘no presentiment of any Invisible Guide, who has a claim to be followed in matters of conduct … consider nothing to have a substance but what meets their senses, are contented with this, and draw their rules of life from it’.82 He suggests that what may be ‘called’ conscientiousness in ‘judging’ may, in fact, arise from an insensitiveness to the conscience, and its intimations of an ‘Invisible Guide’. He is, in this, subverting an established rhetoric (an eighteenth-century rhetoric in which certain states of mind are identified with ‘reason’, good judgment, good sense), indicating that it involves paradiastole, the characterizing of a vice as a virtue. He observes that the sceptical ‘find it no effort to use their intellect upon [the question of whether there has been a revelation] as rigidly as if it were some external instrument which could not be swayed’.83 He suggests, in this, that the notion of a universal,

81. ‘Faith without Sight’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 19–20. 82. ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 19. 83. Ibid., 20.

6. The Virtue of Faith

263

impartial ‘reason’, is associated with a particular use of the ‘intellect’  – a use in which it is treated as if an ‘external instrument’. As the ‘intellect’ is not an ‘external instrument’, then there is something like a denaturing of the intellect in this ‘use’ of it; as the ‘intellect’ is not ‘external’, but internal, as it is involved in the self, so there is a sense that to treat it as if ‘external’, is to be alienated from oneself. If Newman, then, resists the characterization of the disengaged ‘intellect’ as ‘well judging’, he, nevertheless, acknowledges that the engaged ‘intellect’, animated by ‘concerns’ and ‘presentiments’ arising from attentiveness to the conscience, may ‘mistake error for truth’, in thinking a purported revelation to be genuine, when it is not so. He looks out of himself for that Living Word to which he may attribute what has echoed in his heart; and being sure that it is to be found somewhere, he is predisposed to find it, and often thinks he has found it when he has not. Hence, if truth is not at hand, he is apt to mistake error for truth, to consider as the presence and especial work of God what is not so; and thinking anything preferable to scepticism, he becomes (what is sometimes imputed to him by way of reproach) superstitious.84

Newman, once again, seems to question the way in which a certain quality or character is ascribed or ‘imputed’: he questions whether being ‘superstitious’ (in certain circumstances) is truly matter of ‘reproach’. Yet he does, nevertheless, characterize this as a matter of mistaking ‘error for truth’, and of ‘becom[ing]  … superstitious’. In 1856, Newman does not address whether the ‘dispositions’ with which he is concerned might make for ‘becom[ing] … superstitious’. He acknowledges that one who is predisposed to accept a revelation will, on being presented with the ‘news … that a message has been received from the unseen world’, ‘be under a strong temptation to believe it, if he can, on very little evidence, or on none at all’;85 and the pejorative resonance of ‘temptation’ suggests that to ‘believe’ in this way is not altogether right; it is certainly not to observe the proper standards of intellectual enquiry (but then those are not the only standards that obtain in life). In 1834 and 1856, Newman quotes passages from the Gospels, wherein Christ praises the ‘faith’ of some of those He encounters – the ‘blessedness of a mind that believes readily’ (1834), the ‘easiness of belief ’ (1856). Of these passages, Newman observes, in 1834, that ‘faith holds among the evidences of a religious mind’ a ‘peculiar place’, and that ‘in our ordinary language we speak of religion being built upon faith, not upon reason’;86 but in 1856 he insist that ‘these passages cannot

84. Ibid., 18. 85. ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions [hereafter OS] (1857; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 69. 86. ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 17.

264

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

mean that faith is against reason, or that reason does not ordinarily precede faith, for this is a doctrine quite contrary to Revelation’.87 I think I shall not be wrong in understanding them thus,  – that with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of them.88

Newman, in 1856, associates the ‘good dispositions’ of those for whom ‘faith is easy’ with ‘good will’, the ‘good will’ adverted to in ‘the glorious hymn of the Angels upon Christmas night’. They sang, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will’. By ‘good will’, is meant ‘good disposition’; the peace of the Gospel, the full gifts of the knowledge, and of the power, and of the consolation of Christian Redemption, were to be the reward of men of good dispositions. They were the men to whom the Infant Saviour came; they were those in whom His grace would find its fruit and recompense; they were those, who, by congruous merit, would be led on, as the Evangelist says, to ‘believe in His Name’.89

The ‘congruous merit’ that God rewards is not a ‘merit’ that obliges Him to give that reward. He is not obliged or compelled to reward those who have this ‘good will’, with the gift of ‘faith’, but He does so, out of love and mercy. There is nothing that necessitates ‘faith’ arising from ‘good dispositions’: it is the free gift of God. As Newman refuses to contrast ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ in 1856 – ‘this is a doctrine quite contrary to Revelation’  – so he refuses to engage with the rhetoric that associates ‘sceptical’ attitudes with ‘reason’. In 1834, he subverts the rhetoric by which ‘sceptical’ attitudes are characterized as more ‘rational’; in 1856, he does not mention this rhetoric. In 1856, he simply contrasts those with ‘good dispositions’, and those without such dispositions; and where, in 1834, he had observed that those of a ‘sceptical’ temper ‘use their intellect … rigidly’, and ‘come to the examination’ of the evidence ‘calmly and dispassionately’ – suggesting that they think about the ‘question’ with a certain rigour – in 1856, he suggests that those with such a temper scarcely think about the ‘question’ at all: The one [disposed to take a “personal interest” in the question of whether there has been a revelation] is active, and the other passive, when Christ is preached

87. ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 63. 88. Ibid., 63. 89. Ibid.

6. The Virtue of Faith

265

as the Saviour of the world. The one goes to meet the truth; the other thinks that the Truth ought to come to him. The one examines into the proof that God has spoken; the other waits till this is proved to him.90

In 1834, he suggested that if one is sceptical, one will use the intellect like ‘an external instrument’; in 1856, he suggests that if one has no ‘personal interest’ in the question of whether there has been a revelation, one will be ‘passive’, not engaging with ‘the proof ’, but ‘waiting’ for it, waiting for an external initiative. To be without ‘those dispositions at all which lead to faith’ is to be ‘passive’ in relation to the question of whether there has been a revelation; one without such dispositions ‘feels no personal interest in [the question]; he thinks it not his own concern, but (if I may so say) God Almighty’s concern. He does not care to make the most of his knowledge; he does not put things together; he does not add up his facts and cumulate his arguments; he leaves all this to be done for him by Him who speaks to him; and if he is to have any trouble in the matter, then he is willing to dismiss it altogether.’91 The way in which Newman characterizes the response of those with a ‘believing temper’ to the ‘news’ of a revelation in 1834 differs from how he characterizes the response of those with ‘good dispositions’ to that ‘news’ in 1856. In 1834, he suggests that those with a ‘believing temper’ are moved, by their encounter with the revelation, to live in accordance with it. In 1856, he suggests that those with ‘good dispositions’ are moved, by their encounter with the revelation, to ‘enquire’, to ascertain whether it is genuine. In 1834, he maintains that ‘a religious mind … will … welcome and gladly commit itself to the hand of God, when allowed to discern it in the Gospel. Such is faith as it exists in the multitude of those who believe, arising from their sense of the presence of God, originally certified to them by the inward voice of conscience’.92 He who is religious will believe more and reason less than the irreligious; that is, if a man’s acting upon a message is the measure of his believing it, as the common sense of the world will determine. For in any matter so momentous and practical as the welfare of the soul, a wise man will not wait for the fullest evidence before he acts; and will show his caution, not in remaining uninfluenced by the existing report of a divine message, but by obeying it though it might be more clearly attested.93

The response to the encounter with the Gospel is a matter of ‘acting’, ‘obeying’, and Newman suggests that acting ‘is the measure’ of belief. Faith is a matter of having ‘light to walk by’, and is concerned with ‘see[ing] one step in advance’, with having enough ‘light’ for the next ‘step’, the next act. In 1856, Newman suggests that the one with ‘due religious dispositions’, when presented with the Gospel, will

90. 91. 92. 93.

Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 70. ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 19. Ibid., 21.

266

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘be under a strong temptation to believe it, if he can, on very little evidence, or on none at all’ but ‘at all events he will set about inquiring what its evidence is, and will do his best to find it all out, whether it be more or less’.94 The response of the one with the right ‘dispositions’ is not to ‘obey’ or to ‘act’ but to ‘inquire’. Newman insists that ‘to be easy in believing is nothing more or less than to have been ready to inquire; to be hard of belief is nothing else but to have been loth and reluctant to inquire. Those whose faith [Christ] praised had no stronger evidence than those whose unbelief He condemned; but they had used their eyes, used their reason, exerted their minds, and persevered in inquiry till they found.’95 He observes that the fault of St Thomas – who declared he would not believe the report of the resurrection, until he saw Christ, and felt ‘in His hands the print of the nails, and put [his] finger into the place of the nails, and put [his] hand into His side’ – was in ‘in thinking he had a right to be fastidious, and to pick and choose by what arguments he would be convinced, instead of asking himself whether he had not enough to convince him already; just as if, forsooth, it were a great matter to his Lord that he should believe, and no matter at all to himself ’.96 The rightly disposed undertake a form of enquiry in which they ‘exert their minds’, ‘put things together’, ‘add up … facts and cumulate … arguments’, and ask themselves if they have ‘enough to convince’ them, in this accumulation of insights, ‘facts’, ‘arguments’. As they ‘exert their minds’ so, it would seem, they must avail themselves of their ‘presentiments’, ‘presumptions’  – their ‘implicit reason’ and their sense of what is ‘likely’. What each person ‘puts … together’ will vary – ‘is there not more than one way of arriving at faith in Christ? are there not a hundred proofs, distinct from each other, and all good ones?’ What each person ‘puts together’ will be a cluster of insights, ‘facts’, interpretations, arguments, and the like; and this will ultimately make up something like an impression of the ‘revelation’ – it will be the way in which the particular ‘revelation’ impresses itself upon, or manifests itself to, their apprehension. The question of whether this impression is ‘enough to convince’ is – as concerned with something particular, namely, the particular revelation itself  – not a question that can be resolved by generalizations, by abstract rules: it is a matter for the good sense, the judgment, of each person. (The kind of ‘intellect’, the kind of thinking, that is akin to an ‘external instrument’ is not adequate to such a problem.) Newman, in 1834, associated ‘reason’ with a certain ‘use’ of the ‘intellect’ (even if he was inclined to suggest that such a ‘use’ of the ‘intellect’ was not invariably appropriate); his strictures, in 1856, on those who are ‘fastidious’, who determine ‘to be convinced in one particular way’, apply to those who insist on only one form of ‘reason’  – ‘explicit’, ‘rigid’ reason – as ‘enough to convince’. To be ‘ready to inquire’ is to be ‘ready’ to make use of whatever insights one has, whatever ‘proofs’ present themselves, whatever forms of ‘reason’ seem useful and pertinent (whether ‘implicit’ or ‘explicit’); it is to

94. ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 69. 95. Ibid., 70. 96. Ibid., 72.

6. The Virtue of Faith

267

be more ‘reasonable’ than those who are ‘loth to inquire’, or who determine ‘to be convinced in one particular way’, since those who determine ‘to be convinced in one particular way’ arbitrarily restrict what is to count as ‘reason’. What is more, those who are ‘fastidious’ do not have the ‘reasonableness’ to recognize their own situation, to recognize that what is in question is their ‘concern’ (rather than ‘God Almighty’s concern’), and that it behoves them to ‘exert their minds’, and make use of whatever insights they can use, in resolving the question. Newman in 1834 and in 1856 maintains that the ‘dispositions’ that make for faith arise from an attentiveness to the ‘conscience’, from a sense of the presence of God, and that they involve ‘looking out’ for God. Yet he characterizes these ‘dispositions’, and the desires associated with them, slightly differently, in each case. In 1834 he observes that ‘a man is at once thrown out of himself, by the very Voice which speaks within him’ and ‘that inward sense does not allow him to rest in itself, but sends him forth again from home to seek abroad for Him who has put His Word in him’ – ‘He looks out of himself for that Living Word to which he may attribute what has echoed in his heart.’97 The sense of the presence of the ‘Living Word’ actuates a desire to encounter that ‘Word’. In 1856, he observes, in much the same way, that the ‘existence [of the “voice” of the conscience] throws us out of ourselves, and beyond ourselves, to go and seek for Him in the height and depth, whose Voice it is’.98 He characterizes this ‘seek[ing]’, however, not as a movement toward God but merely as a ‘disposition’ to ‘believe in His existence, not because others say it, not in the word of man merely, but with a personal apprehension of its truth’.99 He then goes on to observe that the desire to ‘seek for Him’ is related to a sense of the inadequacy of the ‘guidance’ of the conscience, which ‘does not do enough’ with regard to determining how one should live. ‘In spite of all that this Voice does for them, it does not do enough, as they most keenly and sorrowfully feel.’100 They find it most difficult to separate what it really says, taken by itself, from what their own passion or pride, self-love or self-will, mingles with it. Many is the time when they cannot tell how much that true inward Guide commands, and how much comes from a mere earthly source. So that the gift of conscience raises a desire for what it does not itself fully supply. It inspires in them the idea of authoritative guidance, of a divine law; and the desire of possessing it in its fulness, not in mere fragmentary portions or indirect suggestion. It creates in them a thirst, an impatience, for the knowledge of that Unseen Lord, and Governor, and Judge, who as yet speaks to them only secretly, who whispers in their hearts, who tells them something, but not nearly so much as they wish and as they need.101

97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 19. ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 65. Ibid., 65–6. Ibid., 66. Ibid.

268

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Those who attend to the conscience have a sense that the conscience ‘does not do enough’: they ‘hope that He will teach them more, and so are on the look-out for His teaching’.102 Newman characterizes the desires, attendant on the consciousness of ‘sin’ differently in 1834 and in 1856. In 1834 he remarks that one who ‘knows the evil of his nature, and forebodes God’s wrath as its consequence … fears; and, in consequence, seeks about for some means of propitiating his Maker, for some token, if so be, of God’s relenting … he wanders about from very anxiety; he needs some one to speak peace to his soul’.103 In 1856, he observes that one who attends to the ‘voice’ of the conscience, acquiring a ‘more delicate’ awareness of ‘transgression’, understanding ‘more and more how many things he has to be forgiven’, ‘also understands more and more clearly that the voice of conscience has nothing gentle, nothing of mercy in its tone’.104 It suggests to him a future judgment; it does not tell him how he can avoid it. Moreover it does not tell him how he is to get better; he feels himself very sinful at the best; he feels himself in bondage to a tyranny which, alas! he loves too well, even while he hates it. And thus he is in great anguish, and cries out in the Apostle’s words, ‘Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!’105

In 1834, he maintains that the desire, occasioned by the consciousness of sin, is a desire ‘of God’s relenting’ – a desire for forgiveness; in 1856, he maintains that the desire, occasioned by the consciousness of sin, is a desire ‘to get better’, to be delivered ‘from the body of this death’ – a desire for sanctification, or the ‘new life’. In 1834 and in 1856, Newman considers how the dispositions that ‘lead’ to faith become, once faith has arisen, dispositions that ‘extend’ themselves into faith (1834) or that function as a ‘safeguard’ to faith (1856). In 1834, he observes that ‘faith … does not stipulate that the text of Scripture should admit of rigid and laboured proofs of its doctrines; it has the practical wisdom to consider that the Word of God must have mainly one, and one only sense … [and keeping] steadily in view that Christ speaks in Scripture, [it] receives His words as if it heard them, as if some superior and friend spoke them’. Towards every institution of Christ, His Church, His Sacraments, and His Ministers, it acts not as a disputer of this world, but as the disciple of Him who appointed them … [and] it rests contented with the revelation made to it; it has ‘found the Messias,’ and that is enough. The very principle of its former restlessness now keeps it from wandering.106 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

Ibid., 67. ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 20. ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 67. Ibid. ‘Faith without Sight’, in PPS ii, 23.

6. The Virtue of Faith

269

In 1856, Newman maintains that ‘that same sensitiveness and delicacy of conscience, which is the due disposition for faith, is also its safeguard and its nutriment, when it is at length possessed. It feeds the flame of faith, and makes it burn brightly.’ Catholics go into the world; they mix with men of all religions; they hear all manner of sophistical objections made to the Church, her doctrines, and her rules. What is practically to keep them steadfast in the faith, but their intimate perception of their need of it? what is to bring them to the sacrament of penance, but their sorrow and their detestation of sin? what is to bring them to communion, but a thirst for the Living and True God? what is to be their protection against the aberrations of the intellect, but the deep convictions and eager aspirations of the heart?107

One will only go to the ‘sacrament of penance’, if one believes that this sacrament expunges sin; and one will only go to ‘communion’, if one believes that the ‘Living and True God’ is present in the sacrament; so one must have faith, if one is to be moved by the ‘aspirations of the heart’ to receive these sacraments. Yet it is these ‘aspirations’ that move one to do so. The ‘perception of … need’ which moves one to ‘look out’ for a revelation, then moves one – when one has accepted a revelation – to make use of what, according to that revelation, satisfies that ‘need’. (This ‘perception of … need’ is evidently not ‘love’ or ‘charity’, though it may coexist with it; and the gratitude, occasioned by the satisfaction of ‘need’ may develop into ‘love’.) Newman takes care, in 1856, to make clear that the influence of these ‘dispositions’, in ‘leading’ to faith, is in no way inconsistent with the supremacy of grace, in creating faith. ‘I shall not of course be forgetting that faith, as I have already said, is a supernatural work, and the fruit of divine grace; I only shall be calling your attention to what must be your own part in the process.’108 He characterizes these ‘dispositions’ as ‘necessary for faith’; to be ‘necessary’ is not to be sufficient; and ‘faith’ may have certain conditions, but be, nevertheless, a gift and a ‘supernatural work’. What is more, Newman maintains that God ‘creates’ the ‘dispositions’. The Holy Baptist was sent before our Lord to prepare His way; that is, to be His instrument in rousing, warning, humbling, and inflaming the hearts of men, so that, when He came, they might believe in Him. He Himself is the Author and Finisher of that Faith, of which He is also the Object; but, ordinarily, He does not implant it in us suddenly, but He first creates certain dispositions, and these He carries on to faith as their reward.109

The ‘reward’ is for ‘congruous merit’: God is not obliged to create faith in those with the ‘necessary’ dispositions.

107. ‘Dispositions for Faith’, in OS, 73–4. 108. Ibid., 61. 109. Ibid., 60.

270

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

5. When Newman republished his Oxford University Sermons in 1871, he added a Preface, outlining what he considered to be the main claims made in those sermons. He observes that the sermons present a notion of faith as ‘properly an assent, and an assent without doubt, or a certitude’ (adducing ‘Faith is an acceptance of things as real’ from the ninth sermon, ‘Faith simply accepts testimony’ from the tenth, ‘Faith is not identical with its grounds and its object’, from the thirteenth’, and ‘Faith starts with probabilities, yet it ends in peremptory statements; it believes an informant amid doubt, yet accepts his information without doubt’, from the fourteenth). He then observes that ‘since, in accepting a conclusion, there is a virtual recognition of its premisses, an act of Faith may be said (improperly) to include in it the reasoning process which is its antecedent, and to be in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason; and thus is co-ordinate, and in contrast, with … explicit, evidential, and secular Reason’.110 It seems, then, that in 1871, Newman regarded the sermons as giving an accurate account of the ‘reasoning process’ which is the ‘antecedent’ of faith and he characterized that process as something that might ‘be said (improperly)’ to be ‘included’ in faith. He would distinguish the act of faith, as an act of ‘assent’, from the ‘reasoning’ which is ‘its antecedent’. The ‘reasoning’ that is ‘antecedent’ to faith is not ‘properly’, strictly, ‘included’ in it. He observes that ‘in accepting a conclusion, there is a virtual recognition of its premisses’; he does not maintain that the ‘recognition’ or acceptance of certain ‘premisses’ impels the ‘acceptance’ of a ‘conclusion’; he suggests that the ‘recognition’ of the ‘premisses’ is a ‘virtual’ concomitant of an act of assent – as if the premisses are recognized ‘in’ the assent, or accepted in the act of accepting the ‘conclusion’. In a note added to the Oxford University Sermons in 1871, Newman reflects on the relationship between ‘moral temper’ and ‘argumentative exercises’, observing that ‘the intellectual principles on which the conclusions are drawn, to which Faith assents, are the consequents of a certain ethical temper, as their sine qua non condition’.111 If the ‘intellectual principles’ are the ‘consequents of a certain ethical temper’, and if that ‘ethical temper’ is ‘their sine qua non condition’, then it would seem that this ‘temper’ is in some sense ‘prior’ to those ‘principles’. Newman makes, equally, a distinction between the ‘drawing’ of ‘conclusions’ – on certain ‘intellectual principles’ – and the ‘assent’ of faith. ‘Faith assents’ to certain ‘conclusions’; but it is not itself the ‘drawing’ of those conclusions. That assent, it would seem, is something more than a ‘drawing’ of ‘conclusions’. Does ‘Faith assent’ on the ‘intellectual principles’ that arise from ‘a certain ethical temper’, or does it assent on another ‘principle’? In Loss and Gain, the priest with whom Reding converses on the train to London observes that ‘there is quite evidence enough for a moral conviction that the Catholic

110. OUS, xvi. 111. ‘Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in OUS, 179n.

6. The Virtue of Faith

271

or Roman Church, and none other, is the voice of God’.112 When Reding asks, ‘Do you mean … that before conversion [a man] can attain to a present abiding actual conviction of this truth?’ The priest replies, ‘I do not know … but, at least, he may have habitual moral certainty; I mean, a conviction, and one only, steady, without rival conviction, or even reasonable doubt, present to him when he is most composed and in his hours of solitude, and flashing on him from time to time, as through clouds, when he is in the world; – a conviction to this effect, “The Roman Catholic Church is the one only voice of God, the one only way of salvation”’; and the priest adds, ‘He will not have, he cannot expect, clearer light before conversion.’113 Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an act of the will, and at the dictate of reason and prudence, embrace the truth, when nature, like a coward, shrinks. You must make a venture; faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it. You approach the Church in the way of reason, you enter into it in the light of the Spirit.114

When the priest remarks ‘faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic’ and a ‘gift after it’, how should this be understood? In a sermon preached in 1836, on ‘The Ventures of Faith’, Newman observes that ‘our duty as Christians lies in this, in making ventures for eternal life without the absolute certainty of success … . No one among us knows for certain that he himself will persevere; yet every one among us, to give himself even a chance of success at all, must make a venture.’115 Faith is ‘in its very essence the making present what is unseen; the acting upon the mere prospect of it, as if it really were possessed; the venturing upon it, the staking present ease, happiness, or other good, upon the chance of the future’.116 He observes that Abraham ‘went out, not knowing whither he went’, that St Paul declared that ‘if the dead are not raised, we have indeed made a most signal miscalculation in the choice of life, and are altogether at fault’, that St Peter made an ‘offer of service’ to Christ, not fully understanding what would be involved in abiding by it, that Christ insists on the need of ‘forsaking all’ else but Him – ‘We give up our all to Him; and He is to claim this or that, or grant us somewhat of it for a season, according to His good pleasure.’117 Newman maintains that ‘if faith be the essence of a Christian life, and if it be what I have now described, it follows that our duty lies in risking upon Christ’s word what we have, for what we have not … uncertain about our reward, uncertain about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to fulfil His promise, trusting in Him to enable us to fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the 112. Loss and Gain, 264. 113. Ibid., 264. 114. Ibid., 264–5. 115. ‘The Ventures of Faith’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1839; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 296. 116. ‘The Ventures of Faith’, in PPS iv, 297 117. Ibid., 297–9.

272

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

future’.118 There are, in a sense, two ‘ventures’: one ventures ‘upon Christ’s word’, his ‘promise’, that if one should ‘give up … all to Him’, one will attain to a ‘reward’; and one ventures that one will be able to persevere in living in this way, so as to attain to this ‘reward’. The two ventures are connected: as one trusts that Christ will ‘fulfil His promise’ – requiting the ‘sacrifice’ one makes for Him – so one trusts that He will ‘enable’ one to ‘fulfil’ the ‘vows’ made to Him. While the two ventures are connected, however, and while they each involve an uncertainty as to the future, they are, nevertheless, distinct: one ‘venture’ relates to an uncertainty about the nature of reality (about whether reality is such, Christ is such, that to act in a certain way, is to obtain a ‘reward’); the other ‘venture’ relates to an uncertainty about the self (about whether one can persevere in a mode of life). In ‘The Ventures of Faith’, then, Newman suggests that the ‘venture’ of faith consists in living in a certain way, while uncertain of the future – uncertain of whether living in this way will make for a ‘reward’, and uncertain of whether one will be able to persevere in living this way. To ‘believe’, for Newman at this stage, in 1836, is to act on the belief. One could act, in faith, while nevertheless being in some uncertainty. On becoming a Catholic, Newman certainly did not think that one could be certain that one would persevere in righteousness;119 but he did think that one could attain to ‘certainty’ in faith – one could be certain that Christ would ‘fulfil His promise’ (if one were to live in accordance with His ‘word’). The priest, in Loss and Gain, declares that ‘faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic’ and a ‘gift after it’. The priest maintains that one may have a ‘conviction’, ‘before conversion’ that the ‘Catholic or Roman Church … is the voice of God’, and that this conviction may amount to an ‘habitual moral certainty’. An ‘habitual moral certainty’ is not an absolute certainty; so to act on such a ‘moral certainty’ is to make a ‘venture’ (for such an act may involve some uncertainty). When the priest declares that ‘faith is a venture before a man is a Catholic’, then, he might be suggesting that the ‘venture’ is in acting on the ‘habitual moral certainty’ that the church is of God  – namely, in joining the church, and making an act of faith in what the church presents as the ‘word’ of God. When one has become a Catholic, faith, sustained by grace, is a ‘gift’. Where, in ‘The Ventures of Faith’, the ‘ventures’ are the acts that proceed from faith (Newman suggests that, where there are the acts, there is ‘faith’) in Loss and Gain, the ‘venture’ seems to be in the initial ‘act’ of joining the church (a ‘venture’ made on a view that is a ‘moral certainty’, but not an absolute certainty). In ‘The Ventures of Faith’, the ‘ventures’ are the acts that proceed from faith, and, if a venture is an act that is carried out in some uncertainty, then this would suggest that faith involves some uncertainty.

118. Ibid., 299. 119. In a Discourse on ‘Perseverance in Grace’, he observes that ‘we cannot know [that we will persevere] till the end; all we know is, that God has helped us hitherto, and we trust He will help us still. But yet the experience of what He has already done is no proof that He will do more; our present religiousness need not be the consequence of the gift of perseverance as bestowed upon us; it may have been intended merely to prompt and enable us to pray earnestly and continually for that gift.’

6. The Virtue of Faith

273

The priest, in Loss and Gain, maintains that that ‘[men] will not be blessed, they will effect nothing in religious matters, till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever it be; till they go out of themselves; till they cease to make something within them their standard; till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient, indeed, but incomplete’.120 The priest seems to distinguish between a ‘moral certainty’ that the ‘Church … is the voice of God’, and ‘an act of unreserved faith in the word of God’. The priest maintains that those who make an act of faith ‘go out of themselves … [and] cease to make something within them their standard’. There is a difference between having a ‘conviction’ that the ‘Church … is the voice of God’, on the ‘ground’ of various ‘reasonings’ – in which those reasonings are ‘something within’, a ‘standard’ by which a judgment is formed – and making an ‘act of unreserved faith in the word of God’, in which the ‘word’ is believed ‘as’ the word of God, the ‘standard’ being the truth of God. In his Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman maintains that faith ‘is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie’ and ‘since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says … as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God’.121 This account of faith corresponds to that of Thomas Aquinas, who maintains that ‘faith … does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God’, and it ‘bases itself on the divine Truth as on its means’.122 Those who have a belief that ‘bases itself on the divine Truth as on its means’ would seem to ‘go out of themselves’ and ‘cease to make something within them their standard’: they take as ‘their standard’ something other than what is ‘within them’ – namely, ‘the divine Truth’ itself. To believe what is proposed by the church ‘because it is revealed by God’ is to treat the church ‘as’ the ‘voice of God’ (and to ‘base’ belief ‘on the divine Truth as on its means’). Newman observes that ‘there is merit in believing that the Church is from God; for though there are abundant reasons to prove it to us, yet we can, without an absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion; we may complain that it is not clearer, we may suspend our assent, we may doubt about it, if we will, and grace alone can turn a bad will into a good one’.123 How does Aquinas relate the ‘assent’ of faith (and the ‘merit’ of faith) to the ‘act’ of the will? He observes that, as faith is not ‘moved to assent by its very object, which is known either by itself (as in the case of first principles, which are held by the habit of understanding), or through something else already known (as in the case of conclusions which are held by the habit of science)’, so ‘the intellect [in an act of faith] assents to something, not through being sufficiently moved to this act by its proper object, but through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side

120. Loss and Gain, 265. 121. ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, in DMC, 194. 122. S.T. II-II Q1. A1. co. (The translation used is that of the English Dominican translation of 1947, as amended by Anton C. Pegis, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945).) 123. ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 224.

274

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

rather than to the other’.124 ‘To believe’, then, is an ‘an act of the intellect, in so far as the will moves it to assent’: with regard to the ‘intellect’, ‘the formal aspect of the object … the medium because of which we assent to such and such a point of faith’, is the ‘First Truth’, so an ‘an act of faith is to believe God, since … the formal object of faith is the First Truth, to Which man gives his adhesion, so as to assent for Its sake to whatever he believes’; with regard to the ‘will’, an ‘an act of faith is to believe in God’, since ‘the First Truth is referred to the will, through having the nature of an end’.125 As the will is involved in faith, so faith is ‘meritorious’. Our actions are meritorious in so far as they proceed from free choice moved with grace by God. Therefore every human act proceeding from free choice, if it be referred to God, can be meritorious. Now the act of believing is an act of the intellect assenting to divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God, so that it is subject to free choice in relation to God; and consequently the act of faith can be meritorious.126

The act of faith is the start of a movement toward a ‘beatitude’ that consists in the ‘vision’ of God: ‘To this vision man cannot attain unless he be taught by God,’ and as ‘every one who learns … must needs believe, in order that he may acquire science in a perfect degree’, so, in the spiritual life, which is a movement toward ‘vision’, perfect knowledge, ‘in order that a man arrive at the perfect vision of heavenly happiness, he must first of all believe God, as a disciple believes the master who is teaching him’. The ‘free choice’, here, would seem to be a choice to ‘believe God’  – for the mind is not ‘sufficiently moved’ to believe what God ‘teaches’ by apprehending it for itself. When Newman remarks that ‘there is merit in believing that the Church is from God’, he seems to be suggesting that the arguments that would show the Church to be ‘from God’ do not, of themselves, compel belief (‘we can, without an absurdity, quarrel with the conclusion’ [that the ‘Church is from God’]); so something more than those arguments – namely a ‘good’ will – is required if one is to believe that the Church is from God, and ‘there is merit’ in a good will. Aquinas observes that in faith there is ‘free choice’ since the intellect, in believing, is not ‘moved to assent by its very object’: its ‘object’ is not evident to the intellect in such a way that the intellect is compelled to believe. Aquinas relates the ‘merit’ of faith to its being ‘subject to free choice in relation to God’: in ‘divine’ faith, one simply believes God  – the ‘formal object of faith is the First Truth’  – such that God is the object of the act of belief; one believes what God ‘teaches’, though one cannot ‘see’ for oneself what God teaches. Newman maintains that faith consists in assenting to that which God ‘says’ is true, and ‘since God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what

124. S.T. II-II Q1. A4. co. 125. S.T. II-II Q2. A2. co. 126. S.T. II-II Q2. A9. co.

6. The Virtue of Faith

275

man says … as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God’. Believing that ‘the Church is from God’ is involved in believing that God ‘teaches’ one ‘by the voice of His messengers’, and one must believe that one is presented with the ‘voice’ of God in ‘the voice of His messengers’, if one is to take the ‘divine Truth’ as a ‘means’ or ‘basis’ for believing what one is ‘taught’. One cannot ‘believe God’, if one does not take something to be the ‘voice’ of God; and one must recognize the Church to be a ‘messenger’, if one is to take ‘what man says’ as the ‘voice’ of God. Believing that ‘the Church is from God’ is, then, involved in the act of believing God through the medium of the Church (an act which is ‘meritorious’). ‘Believing that the Church is from God’ is something with ‘merit’ when it is something that animates the act of believing the ‘word’ of the Church as the word of God. One can only believe ‘what God teaches’, if one believes ‘that God teaches’: one can only believe something as the teaching of God if one apprehends it as the teaching of God. The apprehension ‘that God teaches’ is the ‘formal object’, the ‘means’, which is involved in believing what God teaches. There need not be, though, distinct ‘acts’ of believing ‘that God teaches’ and believing ‘what God teaches’; rather, ‘believing a teaching as the teaching of God’ could be considered a single act, in which a belief in what God teaches is sustained, motivated, by the belief that God, the First Truth, teaches. The belief ‘that God teaches, and God is Truth’ is, in ‘divine faith’, present as the motive for an act (of believing what is taught). (In this regard, it is present in the way the insights of phronesis are present in the virtuous acts that proceed from, or are informed by, phronesis.) The belief ‘that God teaches’ – that ‘this is a genuine revelation’ – is not itself the ‘motive’ or ‘formal object’ for the belief ‘that God teaches’; otherwise, there would be an infinite regress (one believes that God teaches because God teaches that He teaches, and so on). The belief ‘that God teaches, and God is Truth’ is the motive for the belief in ‘what God teaches’. A ‘motive’, generally, is ‘that because of which’ one acts in a certain way. There is the ‘thing itself ’, because of which one acts (a certain reality, or situation) and there is the apprehension of the ‘thing itself ’, which makes it present to, or in, the will. The ‘thing itself ’, because of which one believes God, is the truth of God, and so this truth, itself, is present as the motive for believing what God teaches (‘the formal object of faith is the First Truth, to Which man gives his adhesion, so as to assent for Its sake to whatever he believes’). This ‘First Truth’ cannot be apprehended, in itself. What is apprehended is the revelation. The ‘First Truth’ is present as a motive, in the will, when the revelation is believed as ‘what God teaches’, because ‘God, who is Truth, teaches’ it. As belief in the proposition ‘that God teaches’ cannot have as its motive the belief ‘that God teaches’, it would seem that it needs to be established by ‘reason’. (In an essay on ‘The Benedictine Schools’, Newman observes that ‘it is self-evident, that we should not know what was revelation and what was not, unless we used our reason to decide the point’.127) ‘Be convinced in your reason’, Newman observes, ‘that the Catholic Church is a

127. ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in Historical Sketches ii (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906), 483.

276

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

teacher sent to you from God, and it is enough.’128 If such conviction is ‘enough’, it is also, it would seem, necessary. ‘If you are half convinced, pray for a full conviction, and wait till you have it.’129 To be ‘convinced in … reason’ – or, at least, to ‘feel the force of the argument for the divine origin of the Church’, so as to recognize what ‘reason’ establishes with regard to this ‘divine origin’  – is not in itself, however, to have that conviction present as a motive in the will. Newman maintains that ‘faith is the consequence of willing to believe; we may see what is right, whether in matters of faith or obedience, of ourselves, but we cannot will what is right without the grace of God’.130 It is when the conviction is ‘in’ the will, animating the will – as the insights of phronesis, a kind of ‘ratiocinative desire’, animate the virtuous acts that are informed by phronesis – that the will is ‘moved’ by the ‘First Truth’ itself. It requires a certain ‘good will’ to become ‘convinced’ that the Church is ‘of God’ – to be moved by the arguments that would establish this – as these arguments are not irresistible, and do not compel assent. That ‘conviction’, in turn, is present as a motive in the act of faith, motivating an assent to what the Church proposes as ‘of God’. In the act of faith, one simply ‘believes God, as God is Truth’. The will to ‘believe God, as God is Truth’ must be, it seems, different from the will that disposes one to accept the arguments proving the ‘Divine origin’ of the church: those arguments are not construed, themselves, as the ‘word’ of God, such that, in accepting them, the will to ‘believe God, as God is Truth’ need be involved. Could, though, the will to ‘believe God, as God is Truth’ be present, in any way, prior to any apprehension of something as the ‘word’ or ‘voice’ of God? If it could, then one might maintain that this will, in itself, is somehow at work, disposing one to accept the ‘conclusion’ of the arguments that would show the Church to be ‘of God’: that is, if one is indisposed to ‘believe God’, tout court, then one might be indisposed to recognize something as the ‘voice’ of God, requiring belief; if one is indisposed to fulfil a ‘claim’ on oneself, then one might be indisposed to recognize something that presents that ‘claim’ for what it is (and the arguments that would show the Church to be ‘of God’ would show that there is something that presents one with the ‘claim’ to ‘believe God’). If, then, the disposition to ‘believe God, the will to ‘believe God’, might be present, prior to any occasion for its exercise, then it might make one apt to recognize the ‘word’ of God, when presented with it. (It might even, perhaps, incline one to take something ‘as’ the ‘word’ of God that is not, in truth, the word of God: as one would ‘believe God’, so one would have an occasion for ‘believing God’, which might incline one to believe – too hastily – that one is being presented with such an occasion.) If the will to ‘believe God’ might be present, prior to any occasion for its exercise, then the will to ‘believe God’ might, then, be present in those who do not yet accept any particular ‘word’ as the ‘word’ of God (with its presence being, nevertheless, owing to ‘grace’ – God imparting that willingness to ‘believe God’).

128. ‘Faith and Doubt’, in DMC, 233. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., 225.

6. The Virtue of Faith

277

In his sermon on ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, Newman observes, ‘It is the new life, and not the natural reason, which leads the soul to Christ. Does a child trust his parents because he has proved to himself that they are such and that they are able and desirous to do him good, or from the instinct of affection? We believe because we love?’131 In 1871, he commented on this in a note, ‘This means, not love precisely, but the virtue of religiousness, under which may be said to fall the pia affectio or voluntas credendi.’132 The note indicates the sense in which, as a Catholic, he is willing to maintain that ‘we believe because we love’: there is a disposition of the will, involved in belief, but it is ‘not love precisely’, not charity, but a ‘willingness to believe’, a good will. Newman suggests that the ‘voluntas credendi’, the willingness to believe, comes ‘under’ the ‘virtue of religiousness’. The ‘virtue of religiousness’, unlike faith, is not ‘theological’, because it does not have God as its ‘formal object’. The ‘virtue of religiousness’ is a disposition to give God what is due to Him: it is to be moved by ‘justice’ (what is due), rather than by God Himself. In a note in the 1871 edition of Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, Newman remarks that ‘Catholics hold that, whereas faith, as a disposing condition, is prior to justification, love or charitas is posterior to it. It is a pia affectio and a bona voluntas, not charitas, which precedes faith.’133 If this ‘bona voluntas’ is analogous to the ‘trust’ a ‘child’ has for its parents, then it would seem to be the ‘will to believe’ that ‘commands’ the intellect to assent to the word of God. If this ‘bona voluntas … precedes faith’, then it would seem that it is present, and formed, prior to the act of faith itself: if one might ‘see’ that one ‘ought to believe; and yet … be unable to believe’, so, perhaps, one might be able to believe, but not yet ‘see’ that one ‘ought to believe’. Faith, Aquinas maintains, is an act of the intellect, but it involves the will: If the act of faith is to be perfect, there needs to be a habit in the will as well as in the intellect: even as there needs to be the habit of prudence in the reason, besides the habit of temperance in the concupiscible part, in order that the act of that part be perfect. Now to believe is immediately an act of the intellect, because the object of that act is the true, which pertains properly to the intellect. Consequently faith, which is the proper principle of that act, must needs reside in the intellect.134

That is – faith is ‘in the intellect’, as ‘temperance’ is in the ‘concupiscible part’, but as ‘temperance’ requires phronesis, so faith requires a ‘habit in the will’. Aquinas maintains that ‘charity’ is the ‘form’ of faith, that charity perfects faith.

131. ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, in OUS, 235–6. 132. Ibid., 236n. 133. Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification, (1838; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 236n. 134. S.T. II-II Q4. A2. co.

278

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

The act of faith is directed to the object of the will, i.e., the good, as to its end; and this good which is the end of faith, viz. The divine Good, is the proper object of charity. Therefore charity is called the form of faith, in so far as the act of faith is perfected and formed by charity.135

There can, however, be ‘formless faith’, Aquinas maintains, which is the ‘same habit’ as ‘formed faith’; but formless faith is ‘not a virtue’. Though the act of formless faith is duly perfect on the part of the intellect, it has not its due perfection on the part of the will [namely, charity]. So, too, if temperance be in the concupiscible part without prudence being in the rational part, temperance is not a virtue because the act of temperance requires both an act of reason, and an act of the concupiscible part; even as the act of faith requires an act of the will, and an act of the intellect.136

If, though, ‘formless faith’ is without the requisite ‘perfection on the part of the will’, but faith, in itself, requires an ‘act of the will’, then how can there be such a thing as ‘formless faith’ at all? Aquinas observes that, while faith is ‘formed’ by charity, it must, equally, precede charity: there can only be an act of will, if that act has an object, and the object of an act of will is apprehended by the intellect; faith apprehends the ‘last end’, which is the object of charity; so there cannot be ‘charity’ without the apprehension of the ‘last end’ in faith. Essentially faith precedes all other virtues. For since the end is the principle in matters of action … the theological virtues, the object of which is the last end, must needs precede all the others. Now the last end must of necessity be present in the intellect before it is present in the will, since the will has no inclination for anything except in so far as it is apprehended by the intellect. Hence, since the last end is present in the will by hope and charity, and in the intellect, by faith, the first of all the virtues must, of necessity, be faith, because natural knowledge cannot reach God as the object of heavenly beatitude, which is the aspect under which hope and charity tend towards Him.137

Aquinas considers the objection that since ‘in the act of faith, the act of the will, which is perfected by charity, precedes the act of the intellect, which is perfected by faith, as the cause which precedes its effect’ so it must be the case that ‘charity precedes faith’;138 he counters this objection by observing that ‘some act of the will is required before faith, but not an act of the will quickened by charity. This latter act presupposes faith, because the will cannot tend to God with perfect love

135. 136. 137. 138.

S.T. II-II Q4. A3. co. S.T. II-II Q4. A5. co S.T. II-II Q4. A7. co. S.T. II-II Q4. A7. arg 5.

6. The Virtue of Faith

279

unless the intellect possesses a right faith about Him.’139 ‘Some act of the will’, then, is required for faith, but it need not be ‘an act of the will quickened by charity’. Aquinas maintains that ‘faith which is a gift of grace, inclines man to believe by giving him a certain affection for the good even when that faith is formless.’140 Faith can be animated, sustained, elicited by a ‘certain affection for the good’ (‘aliquem affectum boni’) even when it is not animated by ‘charity’. Faith – whether ‘formed’ or ‘formless’ – assents to what it assents to, on the authority of God. One might, then, recognize it to be good to assent to what God reveals – and one might have sufficient ‘affection for the good’ to assent to what God reveals  – without necessarily having the ‘love of God’ that is charity. Aquinas insists that the ‘internal cause’ of faith, ‘which moves man inwardly to assent to what belongs to faith’, must not be conceived of in a ‘Pelagian’ manner. The Pelagians held that this cause was nothing else than man’s free choice, and consequently they said that the beginning of faith is from our selves inasmuch as, namely, it is in our power to be ready to assent to the things which are of faith, but that the consummation of faith is from God, Who proposes to us the things we have to believe. But this is false, for since by assenting to what belongs to faith, man is raised above his nature, this must needs come to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God. Therefore faith, as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace’141

Faith has as its ‘formal object’, God Himself: the ‘formal object’, in the act of faith, the ‘medium because of which we assent’, is God; ‘an act of faith is to believe God, since … the formal object of faith is the First Truth, to Which man gives his adhesion, so as to assent for Its sake to whatever he believes’. The ‘First Truth’ is that ‘by which’ one believes, ‘the medium because of which’ one believes. One assents ‘because God is Truth’, and so the truth of God moves one ‘inwardly’ to assent. Aquinas would counter the ‘Pelagian’ view that ‘it is in our power to be ready to assent to the things which are of faith’, such that while God ‘proposes to us the things we have to believe’, it is ‘in our power’ to be disposed to assent to them: on this account, God acts in ‘proposing’ the ‘things we have to believe’, and the response to this is ‘in our power’, is ‘our’ act. Aquinas would insist that the response to what God ‘proposes’ is itself ‘moved’ by God; he maintains that, as the truth of God is the ‘formal object’, the ‘medium because of which we assent’ – as that truth motivates the assent – so it is not ‘external’ to that act.

139. S.T. II-II Q4. A7. ad 5. 140. S.T. II-II Q5. A2. ad 2. 141. S.T. II-II Q6. A1. co.

280

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

6. God ‘proposes to us … things we have to believe’ in the revelation, and those things are concerned with God. God reveals Himself, so that, to have faith in the self-revelation of God, is to be presented with what God has revealed of Himself, to contemplate God as revealed by His ‘word’, to contemplate the ‘image’ of God. To contemplate the ‘image’ of God presented in the revelation, taking that image to be true, because ‘from God’ (via a ‘messenger’ of God, of one kind or another) is, then, to have faith. Newman observes that ‘there is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world; it comes down by tradition from age to age; it is carried forward by preaching and profession from one generation to another, and is poured about into all quarters of the world’;142 to encounter the traces of this ‘body’, is to be capable of forming something of the image of God, in which ‘Catholic truth’ consists; to encounter some of these traces is to be capable of forming just so much of the ‘image’ of God, as those traces present, or contain; and if one takes the traces which one encounters to be ‘from God’, requiring belief precisely because they are ‘from God’, then one can have a divine faith, animated by the image of God one has formed from the traces of ‘Catholic truth’ one has encountered. Faith can, then, be an un-self-conscious ‘seeing’ or contemplation of an image of the ‘Unseen’, taken to be a manifestation of God (and it is a ‘vision’ of this kind which Newman attributes to ‘Catholics’, in the late 1840s and early 1850s – even those Catholics who are without ‘love’). The ‘word’ one believes, in the act of faith, is a ‘word’ that shows God to be ‘like such and such’. The act of faith, then, involves not only ‘believing God’, but believing ‘that God is such and such’ or ‘like such and such’; and what one believes about God – in accepting the ‘image’ of God presented in the ‘word’ one takes to be ‘from God’ – must be consistent with the act of believing Him: that is, the image of God which one accepts, in accepting the ‘word’ of God, must show God as having qualities consistent with being the ‘First Truth’. With regard to the ‘motives for belief ’ that are present in ‘reason’, it would seem that, since the ‘word’ of God, which one is invited to believe, is a word which shows God to be ‘such and such’ or ‘like such and such’, so one is – to the extent that one is inclined to think that God is ‘like such and such’ – inclined to credit that ‘word’. What God reveals, in the revelation, is His very self: He shows Himself to be ‘such and such’; He presents an ‘image’ of Himself. The revelation, then, presents an image of the One whom one is believing, when one believes the revelation. One ‘believes God’, in accepting the revelation, and the revelation presents one with an image of whom it is that one is believing. In believing the revelation, one believes ‘the God who reveals Himself to be such and such’ in that revelation. One might observe that God ‘reveals Himself to be such and such’ not simply in the content of the revelation, but in the manner of the revelation: that God reveals Himself at

142. ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 174.

6. The Virtue of Faith

281

all, is an act of mercy (God showing Himself, thereby, to be merciful). God reveals Himself in an act that is analogous to an act of personal expression, in an utterance of His ‘voice’; and, as there is, in the apprehension of the ‘voice’, and manner, of another person, an apprehension of something of the spirit, the character, of that person, so there is, perhaps, something analogous to this in the apprehension of the ‘voice’ of God, and this might involve a registering of something like a quality of ‘truthfulness’. (Newman was willing to maintain, in this regard, that ‘there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate’; and if it is possible to ‘feel’ a certain ‘divinity’ in the ‘theology of the Church’, then perhaps, all the more, it is possible to ‘feel’ a certain ‘divinity’ in the revelation itself, presented by the Church.) In Christianity, the primary ‘image’ of God is Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos incarnate, the self-expression of God. In an article on ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, published in 1866, Newman observes that in Christ, ‘the motivum credibililatis, the objectum materiale, and the formale’ coincide. He reflects, in the article, upon how the authority of the Scriptures could be established  – against sceptical challenges to that authority  – and he considers whether the Scriptures might derive a certain authority from what they present  – the image of Christ. The image is of a ‘Teacher sui generis, distinct, consistent and original’: it seems such that it could not have been simply imagined; it has about it a quality of reality, of ‘fact’. What is more, as ‘the qualities with which He is invested’ in that image ‘are incompatible with what it is reasonable or possible to ascribe to human nature viewed simply in itself ’, so the image seems to ‘record’ not simply a ‘fact’ but ‘a superhuman fact’. ‘The representation in question is there, and forces upon the mind a conviction that it records a fact, and a superhuman fact, just as the reflection of an object in a stream remains in its general form, however rapid the current, and however many the ripples, and is a sure warrant to us of the presence of the object on the bank, though that object be out of sight.’ [There are those who, in defending Christianity, would urge the] contemplation of our Lord’s character, as it is recorded by the Evangelists, as carrying with it its own evidence, dispensing with extrinsic proof, and claiming authoritatively by itself the faith and devotion of all to whom it is presented. Such an argument, of course, is as old as Christianity itself; the young man in the Gospel calls our Lord ‘Good Master’, and St. Peter introduces Him to the first Gentile converts as one who ‘went about doing good’; and in these last times we can refer to the testimony even of unbelievers in behalf of an argument which is as simple as it is constraining. ‘Si la vie et la mort de Socrate sont d’un sage’, says Rousseau, ‘la vie et la mort de Jésus sont d’un Dieu’. And he clenches the argument by observing, that were the picture a mere conception of the sacred writers, ‘l’inventeur en serait plus étonnant que le héros’. The force of this argument lies in its directness; it comes to the point at once, and concentrates in itself evidence, doctrine, and devotion. In theological language, it is the motivum credibililatis, the objectum materiale, and the formale, all in one; it unites human reason and supernatural

282

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

faith in one complex act; and it comes home to all men, educated and ignorant, young and old. And it is the point to which, after all and in fact, all religious minds tend, and in which they ultimately rest, even if they do not start from it. Without an intimate apprehension of the personal character of our Saviour, what professes to be faith is little more than an act of ratiocination. If faith is to live, it must love; it must lovingly live in the Author of faith as a true and living Being, in Deo vivo et vero; according to the saying of the Samaritans to their townswoman: ‘We now believe, not for thy saying, for we ourselves have heard Him.’ Many doctrines may be held implicitly; but to see Him as if intuitively is the very promise and gift of Him who is the object of the intuition. We are constrained to believe when it is He that speaks to us about Himself.143

If Christ is the self-expression of God, then the ‘representation’ which presents Christ is a representation of the self-expression of God. To apprehend Christ through that ‘representation’, as the self-expression of God, is to be presented, via that ‘representation’, with the self-expression of God – as a ‘word’ demanding ‘divine faith’. A ‘word’ is presented, through the representation of Christ, in which God ‘speaks to us about Himself ’. Such a response to the ‘representation’ of Christ ‘unites human reason and supernatural faith in one complex act’  – the ‘human reason’ that registers the ‘superhuman’ in Christ, and the ‘supernatural faith’ which responds to the self-expression of God, mediated by that ‘representation’. (The way in which, in or through the representation of Christ, the ‘speech’ of God is registered, is perhaps analogous to the way in which, in or through a text, a ‘voice’ is registered – and, in that ‘voice’, something of the character, and something of the personal presence, of the one whose ‘voice’ it is. The word that is apprehended as presenting the ‘voice’ of God is a word that puts one into the presence of God: it is a word that is sacramental.) If Christ is the self-expression of God, and something of the ‘speech’ of God can be registered, in or through ‘representations’ of Christ, then those who are presented with representations of Christ can register, and respond to, the ‘speech’ of God, as mediated by those representations; they can respond in faith to the ‘speech’ of God, when presented with the image of Christ. These representations of Christ are not encountered only by members of the Catholic Church; as Newman observes, in his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, ‘There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world; it comes down by tradition from age to age; it is carried forward by preaching and profession from one generation to another, and is poured about into all quarters of the world.’ He maintains that ‘men take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them’, and this ‘without really seeing them, as the Catholic sees them, but as receiving them merely by word of mouth, from imitation of others’.144 That some ‘men … profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them’ need

143. ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, in Discussions and Arguments [hereafter DA] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 366–7. 144. ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 174–6.

6. The Virtue of Faith

283

not, surely, mean that all who ‘profess’ these ‘truths’ do so in this way. Could not some of those who encounter these ‘truths’ register them as manifesting the selfexpression of God (even if there are other truths which they do not ‘see’)? Would Newman maintain that one can only ‘see’ the truths of the revelation, when one sees them as parts of the whole which is conveyed by the revelation, parts of the overall ‘image’ or ‘impression’? In the Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’, he claims that what looks like ‘Catholic’ profession, need not be a manifestation of genuine Catholic faith. Could there not, though, be something akin to Catholic faith in those who receive these ‘scattered truths’, if they receive them as ‘from God’, and register in them, or through them, the self-expression of God? In his Discourse on ‘Faith and Doubt’, when he observes that ‘the multitude of men in this country have not this habit or character of mind’, he is observing what, in his view, is the case – not what must be the case. There is a ‘habit or character of mind’ which ‘men in this country’ do not have: ‘We could conceive, for instance, their believing in their own religions; this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed; but they do not believe even their own religions.’ It does not seem to be a necessity that they should not believe ‘their own religions’; and, if they were to do so, ‘this would be faith, though a faith improperly directed’. If they were to exercise faith in the ‘scattered truths’ presented to them, through ‘their own religions’, as ‘truths’ revealed by God, then this would be something very like ‘divine faith’. In Loss and Gain, in the conversation Reding has with a priest on the train to London, Reding declares that there are ‘a good many persons’ in the Church of England ‘who, from knowledge of the Gospels, have an absolute conviction and an intimate sense of the reality of the sacred facts contained in them, which, whether you call it faith or not, is powerful enough to colour their whole being with its influence, and rules their heart and conduct as well as their imagination’.145 The priest observes that if ‘these persons believe and practise all that is brought home to them as being in Scripture’ then ‘perhaps they may be practising the virtue of faith; if there are passages in it to which they are insensible, as about the sacraments, penance, and extreme unction, or about the See of Peter, I should in charity think that these passages had never been brought home or applied to their minds and consciences – just as a Pope’s Bull may be for a time unknown in a distant part of the Church. They may be in involuntary ignorance.’146 (Newman adds, in a note, a quotation from John De Lugo, a seventeenth-century Jesuit theologian, to the effect that those who are in ‘invincible error’, as to certain articles of faith, while believing others with ‘supernatural faith’, can go on to make an act of contrition that is ‘saving’.147 That is, De Lugo recognizes that ‘supernatural faith’ can exist in those who are not

145. Loss and Gain, 262. 146. Ibid., 262–3. 147. The quotation from John De Lugo is: ‘Errantes invincibiliter circa aliquos articulos, et credentes alios, non sun formaliter haeretici, sed habent fidem supernaturalem, qua credunt veros articulos, atque adea ex ea possunt procedere actus perfectae contritionis, quibus justificentur et salventur.’ Loss and Gain, 262n.

284

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Catholics.) Newman maintains that as the Christian faith is a whole, a unity, so the ‘scattered truths’ of Christianity fit together within a whole, and those ‘truths’ tend, as such, to coalesce; if one believes some of those ‘scattered truths’, so one tends toward believing that in which they are all united – namely, the faith professed by the Catholic Church. In his article on ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, Newman maintains that the ‘argument’ for the ‘divinity’ of Christianity from the ‘character’ of Christ, as represented in the Gospels, is ‘an argument for the divinity not only of Christ’s mission, but of that of His Church also’. One is presented, in that ‘representation’, not simply with Christ, but with the church (as instituted by Christ), and with a notion of the church as something instinct with the presence of Christ. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand’. What was meant by the kingdom of God? … . At the first formation of the nation and state of the Israelites, the Almighty had been their King; when a line of earthly kings was introduced, then God spoke by the prophets. The existence of the theocracy was the very constitution and boast of Israel … . Moreover, the Gospel proclamation ran, ‘Poenitentiam agite; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’: here again was another and recognized token of a theophany; for the mission of a prophet, as we have said above, was commonly a call to reformation and expiation of sin … . There was this peculiarity in (the) mission (of Christ), that He came, not only as one of the prophets in the kingdom of God, but as the King Himself of that kingdom … . He is, then, a King, as well as a Prophet … . In what, then, did He consider His royalty to consist? … . In truth, He passed by the lesser powers of royalty to claim the higher. He claimed certain divine and transcendent functions of the original theocracy, which had been in abeyance since that theocracy had been infringed … . God had created, first the people, next the state, which He deigned to govern … . These two incommunicable attributes of divine royalty, as exemplified in the history of the Israelites, are the very two which our Lord assumed. He was the Maker and the Lawgiver of His subjects … . To these two claims He added a third: first, He chooses the subjects of His kingdom; next, He gives them a law; but thirdly, He judges them … . We shall mention one further function of the new King and His new kingdom: its benefits are even bound up with the maintenance of this law of political unity … . But cui bono is a visible kingdom, when the great end of our Lord’s ministry is moral advancement and preparation for a future state? … . The Christian law is political, as certainly as it is moral. Why is this? It arises out of the intimate relation between Him and His subjects, which, in bringing them all to Him as their common Father, necessarily brings them to each other. Our Lord says, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am in the midst of them.’ Fellowship between His followers is made a distinct object and duty, because it is a means, according to the provisions of His system, by which in some special way they are brought near to Him. This is declared, still more strikingly than in the text we have just quoted, in the parable of the Vine and its Branches, and in that (if it is to be called a parable) of the Bread of Life. The almighty King of Israel was ever, indeed, invisibly present in the glory above the

6. The Virtue of Faith

285

Ark, but He did not manifest Himself there or anywhere else as a present cause of spiritual strength to His people; but the new King is not only ever present, but to every one of His subjects individually is He a first element and perennial source of life. He is not only the head of His kingdom, but also its animating principle and its centre of power.148

To apprehend the Church rightly is to apprehend it as having Christ as ‘its animating principle and its centre of power’. The Church is not something wholly distinct from, separate from, Christ; so a full apprehension of Christ involves an apprehension of the Church (and vice versa). To apprehend the ‘scattered’ traces of Christ in the world is to tend toward an apprehension of the Church as manifesting Christ.

7. In his Oxford University Sermons, Newman maintains that the ‘reason’, by which the revelation is recognized as a revelation, is more ‘implicit’ than ‘explicit’; and he maintains that this ‘implicit reason’ is inseparable from the ‘moral self ’. If, at the time he first preached the sermons, he regarded the ‘moral’ spirit animating ‘implicit reason’ as ‘love’ or ‘charity’, he would later maintain that this ‘spirit’ is ‘good will’ rather than ‘charity’. In the Oxford University Sermons, Newman maintains that ‘the Gospel’ is encountered ‘through’, or with, this ‘antecedent’, and ‘implicit’ understanding. When St Paul preached the Gospel, ‘He appealed to that whole body of opinion, affection, and desire, which made up, in each man, his moral self … which, if it was what it should be, would respond to the Apostle’s doctrine, as the strings of one instrument vibrate with another.’ Newman suggests that the ‘body of opinion, affection, and desire’ which makes up ‘in each man, his moral self ’, the understanding of goodness involved in that ‘moral self ’, conduces to the recognition that a certain revelation is genuine. ‘Why does he feel the message to be probable? … . He has a keen sense of the intrinsic excellence of the message, of its desirableness, of its likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any, of the need of a Revelation, and its probability.’ The ‘reasoning’ by which the ‘conviction’ is formed that ‘this is the revelation’ is a matter, not merely of ‘explicit’ argumentation (though it may involve such argumentation, and is consistent with it) but of the understanding involved in experience, the understanding acquired through responding to the multifarious ‘needs of daily life’. ‘All men have a reason, but not all men can give a reason’: the ‘reason’, here, is inseparable from the ‘moral self ’. The forming of a ‘moral self ’, animated by ‘presumptions’ disposing one to recognize the revelation, could be taken to involve the forming of a ‘good will’, a will disposed to ‘believe God’ when presented with what is taken to be a revelation. All of this is consistent with the notion of ‘divine faith’, which Newman set out in the late 1840s and early 1850s. If one were to maintain

148. ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, in DA, 374–9.

286

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

that a ‘good will’ is a condition for faith, and that a recognition of the genuineness of the revelation is a condition for faith, then one could maintain that, in the Oxford University Sermons, Newman suggests that the conditions for faith – in the ‘reason’, and in the ‘will’ – arise together, and are connate. (That these conditions are present, however, need not mean that faith is present.) In an address to those ‘as yet external’ to the church, in Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, Newman takes it that those ‘external’ to the church might be animated by ‘anticipations’ of a revelation; and he invokes the ‘presumptions’ that, in ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, he had characterized as ‘holy, devout, and enlightened presumptions’ (‘that a Revelation is very needful for man; that it is earnestly to be hoped for from a merciful God; that it is to be expected … that it will be in a way worthy of Him … that such and such ends are in their nature great, such and such a message important, such and such means worthy, such and such circumstances congruous’). The simple question to be decided is one of fact, has a revelation been given? … . It comes to you recommended and urged upon you by the most favourable anticipations of reason … . He has always addressed you circuitously, by your inward sense, by the received opinion, by the events of life, by vague traditions, by dim histories; but as if of set purpose, and by an evident law, He never actually appears to your longing eyes or your weary heart, He never confronts you with Himself. What can be meant by all this? a spiritual being abandoned by its Creator! there must doubtless be some awful and all-wise reason for it; still a sore trial it is; so sore surely, that you must gladly hail the news of His interference to remove or to diminish it. The news then of a revelation, far from suspicious, is borne in upon our hearts by the strongest presumptions of reason in its behalf. It is hard to believe that it is not given, as indeed the conduct of mankind has ever shown. You cannot help expecting it from the hands of the All-merciful, unworthy as you feel yourselves of it. It is not that you can claim it, but that He inspires hope of it; it is not you that are worthy of the gift, but the gift which is worthy of your Creator. It is so urgently probable, that little evidence is required for it, even though but little were given. Evidence that God has spoken you must have, else were you a prey to impostures; but its extreme likelihood allows you, were it necessary, to dispense with all proof that is not barely sufficient for your purpose. The very fact, I say, that there is a Creator, and a hidden one, powerfully bears you on and sets you down at the very threshold of revelation, and leaves you there looking up earnestly for divine tokens, that a revelation has been made. Do you go with me as far as this, that a revelation is probable? well then, a second remark, and I have done. It is this, the teaching of the Church manifestly is that revelation.149

On becoming a Catholic, then, Newman considered his account, in the Oxford University Sermons, of the ‘anticipations of reason’, as applicable to the situation of those ‘external to the Church’. That one has faith, though, does not mean that one 149. ‘Mysteries of Nature and Grace’, in DMC, 276–7.

6. The Virtue of Faith

287

ceases to ‘reason’, or that one ceases to be moved by ‘reason’. In his Preface to the 1871 edition of the Oxford University Sermons, Newman observes that ‘since, in accepting a conclusion, there is a virtual recognition of its premisses, an act of Faith may be said (improperly) to include in it the reasoning process which is its antecedent, and to be in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason; and thus is co-ordinate, and in contrast, with … explicit, evidential, and secular Reason’. If the assent of ‘Faith’ is not simply a matter of accepting a ‘conclusion’, as inferred from certain ‘premisses’, but is, rather, a matter of believing God, and accepting a ‘word’ which is taken to be ‘from God’, nevertheless, there is, in that assent, a ‘virtual recognition’ of any (rightly conducted) ‘reasoning process’ undertaken, as an ‘antecedent’ to faith, showing that the ‘word’ assented to, is ‘from God’. Faith is ‘in a certain aspect an exercise of Reason’; the ‘reasoning’ by which one recognizes that a revelation is ‘from God’ is, in a sense, ‘included’ in faith. What is more, faith involves an acceptance of various propositions, and there is in the ‘assent’ of faith a ‘virtual recognition’ of ‘exercises of reason’ implied by, or consistent with, those propositions. The propositions to which ‘Faith assents’ are consistent with some ‘premisses’, and not with others. In a sermon on ‘The Usurpations of Reason’ in the Oxford University Sermons, Newman remarks that ‘unlearned Faith, establishing itself by its own inherent strength, ruled the Reason as far as its own interests were concerned, and from that time has employed it in the Church, first as a captive, then as a servant; not as an equal, and in nowise (far from it) as a patron’.150 In a note added in 1871 he observes, of this, that ‘unlearned Faith was strong enough, in matters relating to its own province, to compel the reasoning faculty, as was just, to use as its premisses in that province the truths of Natural Religion’.151 Newman shows, in his note, a wish to make clear that that ‘unlearned faith’ did not obtrude itself beyond its own ‘province’: it did not impose ‘conclusions’ on the ‘reasoning faculty’ which that faculty could not support or demonstrate; rather, it required the ‘reasoning faculty’ to use, in the ‘province’ of faith, ‘premisses’ of a kind which the ‘reasoning faculty’ could, of itself, recognize and condone – the ‘truths of Natural Religion’. ‘Unlearned faith’ might, in this, have provided a stimulus to ‘reasoning’ – eliciting forms of reasoning consistent with ‘faith’. Newman recognizes, moreover, that there is a ‘reasoning from’ the ‘premisses’ of faith; in his Discourse on ‘Illuminating Grace’ he acknowledges that ‘reason’ is ‘the instrument which the Church herself is guided to make use of, when she is called upon to put forth … definitions of doctrine’.152 (He suggests that the Church ‘is guided to make use of ’ reason, rather than that it is ‘compelled’ to make use of it, for want of anything else to use: the use of ‘reason’ is subject to a higher ‘guidance’, a higher sanction, rather than being self-legitimating. This ‘use’ of ‘reason’ is, in any case, legitimate.) If Newman could not, as a Catholic, regard ‘faith’ as merely a form of ‘reasoning’ – ‘faith’ was distinct from ‘reason’ – he could acknowledge that it was ‘in a certain

150. The Usurpations of Reason in OUS, 58. 151. Ibid., 58n. 152. ‘Illuminating Grace’, in DMC, 187.

288

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

aspect an exercise of Reason’; the reasoning, ‘antecedent’ to faith, by which a certain ‘word’ is recognized as the ‘word’ of God, is in a sense ‘included’ in the act of faith, even if faith, assenting to that ‘word’ as the word of God, has as the ‘principle’ of its assent the ‘truth of God’, the ‘First Truth’. Newman could, moreover, as a Catholic, accept the account, in the Oxford University Sermons, of the kind of ‘reason’ that might be the ‘antecedent’ of faith  – ‘implicit reason’, animating, and implicated with, the ‘moral self ’. He did not, however, regard this ‘reason’ as itself animated by ‘love’ or ‘charity’. As an Anglican, he had maintained that faith ‘may be described as the temper under which men obey; the humble and earnest desire to please Christ which causes and attends on actual services’. ‘To believe and to obey [are] but different characteristics of one and the same state of mind.’ He claimed that faith is a ‘principle of conduct’: there is no faith, unless there are the acts which accord with, which proceed from, faith. In his Oxford University Sermons, he suggests that the ‘reason’ by which the revelation is recognized as genuine, is a ‘reason’ implicated with the ‘moral self ’. If it is the ‘moral self ’ that recognizes the revelation, this might suggest that the revelation, when recognized, itself becomes a part of the ‘moral self ’, animating the ‘moral self ’: it is apprehended, and then appropriated, by the ‘wisdom’ constituting the ‘moral self ’. If ‘action is the criterion of true faith’, and action is an expression of the ‘moral self ’, then it would seem that there is ‘true faith’ when that ‘faith’ has become a part of the ‘moral self ’. As a Catholic, Newman maintained that faith – though something requiring ‘good will’  – was ‘perfectly distinct in its own nature from the desire, intention, and power of acting agreeably to it’. In his Discourse on ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’, Newman maintains that one might have an ‘awakened soul’, animated by the ‘idea of a Saint’, and be, nevertheless, ‘worldly minded’. The awakened soul is witness [to a sharp contrast] between the objects of its admiration and pursuit in its natural state, and those which burst upon it when it has entered into communion with the Church Invisible, when it has come ‘to mount Sion … and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Testament’. From that day it has begun a new life: I am not speaking of any moral conversion which takes place in it; whether or not it is moved, (as surely we believe it will be) to act upon the sights which it sees, yet consider only what a change in its views and estimation of things there will be, directly it has heard and has faith in the word of God … . Worldly-minded men, however rich, if they are Catholics, cannot, till they utterly lose their faith, be the same as those who are external to the Church; they have an instinctive veneration for those who have the traces of heaven upon them, and they praise what they do not imitate. They have an idea before them, which Protestants have not; they have the idea of a Saint.153

The parenthesis – ‘surely we believe it will be’ – suggests that it is ‘natural to suppose’ that the ‘soul’ will be ‘moved’ by the ‘sights’ presented by faith. Yet Newman

153. ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’, in DMC, 93–5.

6. The Virtue of Faith

289

acknowledges that there can be ‘worldly-minded’ Catholics, who ‘praise what they do not imitate’. In ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’, he observes that ‘Catholics are both deeper and shallower than Protestants’, and that the ‘shallower’ Catholics, who ‘live to the world and to the flesh’, have a ‘certainty about religious truth, however firm and unclouded, [which] is but shallow in its character, and flippant in its manifestations’. In Tract 85 (1838), reflecting on how, to the question of Christ, ‘will you also go away?’ St Peter responded ‘Lord, to whom should we go?’ Newman observes that Peter ‘had within him ideas of greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity – he had a love of them – he had an instinctive hope and longing after their possession’ and that this ‘love’ was a ‘parent’ of his ‘faith’. Nothing could convince him that this unknown good was a dream. Divine life, eternal life was the object which is soul, as far as it had learned to realize and express its wishes, supremely longed for. In Christ he had found what he wanted … . Christ’s ways might be dark, His words often perplexing, but still he found in Him what he found nowhere else – amid difficulties, a realization of his inward longings. ‘Thou hast the words of eternal life’ … . Love is the parent of faith. We believe in things we see not from love of them: if we did not love, we should not believe. Faith is reliance on the word of another; the word of another is in itself a faint evidence compared with that of sight or reason. It is influential only when we cannot do without it. We cannot do without it when it is our informant about things which we cannot do without. Things we cannot do without, are things which we desire. They who feel they cannot do without the next world, go by faith (not that sight would not be better) but because they have no other means of knowledge to go by. ‘To whom shall they go?’ If they will not believe the word preached to them, what other access have they to the next world.154

Newman suggests, here, that the ‘faith’ is credible to those who desire that what is presented by the ‘word’ of faith should be true (and he suggests that the desire is virtuous, in being a desire for ‘greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’): one accepts ‘faith’ as an ‘informant’, because one desires that what the ‘informant’ presents to one, should be so. Is this, ultimately, simply a matter of believing an ‘informant’, because one wants what that ‘informant’ tells one to be true? This seems to be something different from believing an ‘informant’ because one takes that ‘informant’ to know the truth, and to be veracious – it would seem to be something different from the attitude involved in ‘divine faith’. To be moved to ‘faith’ by a desire for ‘divine life, eternal life’, is evidently, not to be moved by the ‘truth of God’; yet a desire of this kind might be considered one of the ‘good dispositions’, making for faith. Since ‘divine life, eternal life’, according to Christian teaching, is life in communion with Christ, so the desire for ‘divine life’ might be taken to involve something like a desire for Christ. Once he had become a Catholic, Newman

154. ‘Holy Scripture in its Relation to the Catholic Creed’, in DA, 250, 252.

290

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

may have considered such a desire as having its proper function in actuating the ‘enquiry’ of ‘reason’ that is the ‘antecedent’ to faith, rather than determining the result of that ‘enquiry’. The desire to ‘believe God’, simply, which is involved in the ‘good will’ that disposes one to ‘divine faith’, is different from the desire for ‘the next world’ as implicated with ‘greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’ (as making for an inclination to credit an ‘informant’ about the ‘next world’) but these different desires are not incongruous, inconsistent with one another. One who has a desire for ‘the next world’, as implicated with ‘ideas of greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’, is disposed, when presented with the revelation, to recognize ‘the intrinsic excellence of the message … its desirableness … its likeness to what it seems to him Divine Goodness would vouchsafe did He vouchsafe any … the need of a Revelation, and its probability’. Yet to recognize the ‘need of a Revelation’ in this way is not, in itself, to have faith. In ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’, Newman maintains that the love of God actuates faith, because that love discerns in Christ its proper object: ‘The divinely enlightened mind sees in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of its own affections; and it trusts Him, or believes, from loving Him.’ Those who believe, Newman maintains, do so ‘not on an examination of evidence, but from a spontaneous movement of their hearts towards it … [and] go out of themselves to meet Him who is unseen … discern[ing] Him in such symbols of Him as they find ready provided for them’. Faith, Newman maintains, is a response to a person. A desire for the presence of ‘Him who is unseen’ moves some (rightly or wrongly, as the case may be) to discern ‘Him in … symbols of Him’ – to discern certain things as ‘symbols of Him’, instinct with His presence. The desire for His presence makes for an inclination to discern marks or ‘symbols’ of that presence. There is a ‘desire to love and worship’ that precedes, in a sense, an encounter with the ‘Object’ of that desire; and Newman seems to be suggesting, here, that the capacity to ‘love and worship’ aspires to realize itself, to have an ‘Object correlative’ of itself, that it may be fully realized. Newman certainly did not, on becoming a Catholic, deny that there could be, prior to conversion, aspirations toward the ‘love’ of God. In Callista (1855), a novel set in the third century, Newman attributes to a pagan Greek character  – who reflects on ‘religion’, having conversed with Christians about it – the recognition that ‘religion was the soul’s response to a God who had taken notice of the soul. It was loving intercourse, or it was a name’; and this character recognizes in the Christian teaching that ‘Christianity … consist[s] in intimate Divine Presence in the heart … the friendship or mutual love of person with person’ a ‘teaching which already was so urgently demanded both by [the] reason and [the] heart’. There is, here, an aspiration not simply to ‘love and worship’ but to experience the ‘mutual love of person and person’, the ‘mutual love’ of God and ‘the soul’. To recognize such an aspiration in oneself, however, is not (yet) to have faith. What of the experience of ‘the divinely enlightened mind’, which ‘see[ing] in Christ the very Object whom it desires to love and worship, – the Object correlative of its own affections … trusts Him, or believes, from loving Him’? What is it to ‘see in Christ the very Object whom [one] desires to love and worship, – the Object

6. The Virtue of Faith

291

correlative of [one’s] own affections’? What does ‘correlative’ mean here? One might take it to mean that one has a capacity for experiencing certain ‘affections’, and that one recognizes ‘in Christ’, an object adequate to those affections, an object in relation to whom those affections can be fully expressed. One might, equally, take it to mean that one recognizes that certain ‘affections’ are a fitting response to Christ, that Christ merits them, and that these ‘affections’ are, equally, ‘correlative’ to God. If there are ‘affections’ that are, in a sense, ‘divine’ affections – affections ordered, in themselves, to God – then could those affections be a means of recognizing what is of God? To feel ‘affections’ that are ‘correlative’ of a divine ‘Object’ could be to recognize  – in, or through those ‘affections’  – the presence of a divine ‘Object’: to feel those ‘affections’ for Christ, could be to recognize in Christ such an ‘Object’. In this ‘intimate apprehension of the personal character of our Saviour’ there is something like an apprehension, in Christ, of ‘the motivum credibililatis, the objectum materiale, and the formale, all in one’, in a manner that ‘unites human reason and supernatural faith in one complex act’. The ‘affections’ felt for Christ, if taken as a mark of the presence of a divine ‘Object’, would be a ‘motive of credibility’, a sign of the presence of something divine. Newman would maintain that the contemplation of Christ, as presented in the Gospels, as the ‘material object’ and ‘formal object’ of faith, and as the ‘very food of our devotion’, was the ‘very life of personal religion among Catholics’. It is the character and conduct of our Lord, His words, His deeds, His sufferings, His work, which are the very food of our devotion and rule of our life … . As the Psalms have ever been the manual of our prayer, so have the Gospels been the subject-matter of our meditation … . What Catholics, what Church doctors, as well as Apostles, have ever lived on, is not any number of theological canons or decrees, but, we repeat, the Christ Himself, as He is represented in concrete existence in the Gospels … and after all is there not That in all Catholic churches which goes beyond any written devotion, whatever its force or its pathos? Do we not believe in a Presence in the sacred Tabernacle, not as a form of words, or as a notion, but as an Object as real as we are real?

Wherever ‘the Christ Himself ’ is ‘represented in concrete existence’, and is recognized as ‘real’, and as divine, there, something of ‘divine faith’ may be present. All the ‘instinctive … longings’ making up the ‘moral self ’, the ‘instinctive’ sense of the divine, and of ‘greatness and goodness, holiness and eternity’, are involved in the apprehension of Christ as the ‘voice’, and self-expression, of God; and where the ‘voice’ of God is recognized, in the ‘image’ of Christ, then it can be believed ‘as’ the voice of God, believed ‘because God is true’.

Chapter 7 FAITH AND CIVILIZATION

1. Over the course of the 1850s, Newman reflected, in a number of works, on the relationship between ‘civilization’, ‘barbarism’, and faith. Newman was, at this time, engaged in a work of ‘civilization’ and ‘faith’ – in an attempt to establish a Catholic University in Ireland – and to engage in this work was to be presented with the task of establishing the proper relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘civilization’. How could the ‘intellect … range with the utmost freedom’ and ‘religion … enjoy an equal freedom’?

2. In his ‘Discourses’ on University teaching, in The Idea of a University (1852) Newman maintains that a University exists to teach all forms of knowledge, with the aim of imparting to those taught, a certain character of mind – ‘Philosophy’, or wisdom. This character of mind, ‘intellectual culture’, is a kind of ‘intellectual proficiency or perfection’ – a state of the intellect analogous to ‘“health” … [in] the animal frame, and “virtue” … [in] our moral nature’.1 It is the function of the intellect to ‘reach out towards truth, and grasp it’. The cultivation of the intellect is an end in itself, for the perfection of the intellect – like the perfection of any aspect of ‘nature’ – is an end in itself.2 Newman insists that a university, if it is to be worthy of the name, must teach all forms of knowledge: nothing must be omitted. Every science, or form of knowledge, is concerned with an ‘aspect’ of reality. ‘All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact, and this of course resolves itself into an indefinite number of particular facts, which,

1. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Defined and Illustrated (1852; 1858; 1873; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 124, 125. 2. Idea of a University, 126.

7. Faith and Civilization

293

as being portions of a whole, have countless relations of every kind, one towards another.’3 In the apprehension of ‘all that exists’, the ‘human mind cannot take in this whole vast fact at a single glance’, but views it ‘it under different aspects, by way of making progress towards mastering the whole’ and these ‘various partial views or abstractions, by means of which the mind looks out upon its object, are called sciences, and embrace respectively larger or smaller portions of the field of knowledge’  – with different sciences sometimes being concerned with the same part of reality, but ‘viewing’ it in different ways, according to different principles, and sometimes being concerned with quite different parts of reality.4 These ‘sciences’ or aspects ‘have far more to do with the relations of things than with things themselves’: they ‘tell us what things are, only or principally by telling us their relations, or assigning predicates to subjects; and therefore they never tell us all that can be said about a thing, even when they tell something, nor do they bring it before us, as the senses do’; so ‘it is not every science which equally, nor any one which fully, enlightens the mind in the knowledge of things, as they are, or brings home to it the external object on which it wishes to gaze’.5 To take ‘man himself as our object of contemplation’, ‘we may view him in relation to the material elements of his body, or to his mental constitution, or to his household and family, or to the community in which he lives, or to the Being who made him; and in consequence we treat of him respectively as physiologists, or as moral philosophers, or as writers of economics, or of politics, or as theologians’ and ‘when we think of him in all these relations together, or as the subject at once of all the sciences I have named, then we may be said to reach unto and rest in the idea of man as an object or external fact, similar to that which the eye takes of his outward form’.6 As then ‘sciences are the results of mental processes about one and the same subject-matter, viewed under its various aspects, and are true results, as far as they go, yet at the same time separate and partial, it follows that on the one hand they need external assistance, one by one, by reason of their incompleteness, and on the other that they are able to afford it to each other, by reason, first, of their independence in themselves, and then of their connexion in their subject-matter.’7 Taken ‘altogether, they approximate to a representation or subjective reflection of the objective truth, as nearly as is possible to the human mind, which advances towards the accurate apprehension of that object, in proportion to the number of sciences which it has mastered; and which, when certain sciences are away, in such a case has but a defective apprehension, in proportion to the value of the sciences which are thus wanting, and the importance of the field on which they are employed’.8 The different sciences ‘correct’ one another – the ‘several conclusions’ of different sciences ‘do not represent whole and substantive things, but views, 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 45, 46. Ibid., 46, 47. Ibid., 47–8. Ibid., 47. Ibid.

294

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

true, so far as they go; and in order to ascertain how far they do go, that is, how far they correspond to the object to which they belong, we must compare them with the views taken of that object by other sciences’.9 The limits of each science, with regard to its application to the world, are made apparent by other sciences. Where a certain science is omitted, then the other sciences are prone to extend themselves beyond their proper limits – beyond the limits that would have been made apparent by the science that has been omitted; and where this happens, it makes for a ‘knowledge’ that is ‘unreal’; it makes for a ‘deciding on facts by means of theories’.10 One who is versed in a particular science, but who disregards the others, is at risk of ‘making his particular craft usurp and occupy the universe’.11 These considerations are relevant to all the sciences; but Newman mentions them while insisting that theology – ‘the Science of God, or the truths we know about God put into system’ – should not be omitted from the sciences taught at a university.12 (The ‘theology’ with which he is concerned is not so much the theology that arises from the Christian revelation, as it is the ‘natural’ theology, which ‘the idea of God embodies’ – the idea of God as the creator of all things, transcending the world, simple, and infinite, possessing all perfections.)13 As the God apprehended in this science is the origin of ‘all that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material’, so this science is pertinent to a number of other sciences, and Newman asks – ‘Can we drop it out of the circle of knowledge, without allowing, either that that circle is thereby mutilated, or on the other hand, that Theology is really no science?’14 Newman observes that ‘when we think of [man] in all these relations [described by the sciences that concern him] together, or as the subject at once of all the sciences I have named, then we may be said to reach unto and rest in the idea of man as an object or external fact, similar to that which the eye takes of his outward form’.15 Newman suggests that what one is thinking of, when one thinks of ‘man’ as ‘the subject at once of all the sciences’ that concern him, and ‘in all these relations’, is the ‘idea’ of ‘man’. To think of ‘man’ ‘in’ his ‘relations’, is to think of him ‘with’ the various sciences that concern him; while to think of him ‘as the subject’ of the sciences that concern him, is not necessarily to think ‘with’, or to make use of, those sciences: it is to be aware of ‘man’ as something like the referent of various sciences. Newman suggests that the sciences ‘correct’ one another, and that to be aware of the limits of those sciences, one must ‘compare them’ with one another, comparing the view of an ‘object’ taken by one science,

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 66, 67. Ibid., 48.

7. Faith and Civilization

295

with ‘the views taken of that object by other sciences’. That one can think of ‘man’, however, as the ‘subject’ of various sciences, in a manner that does not seem to involve thinking of him ‘with’ any particular science, might indicate that one can be aware of the limits of a particular science – one can be aware of the difference between the ‘view’ it presents of the object, and the object itself – without having to compare it to other sciences. There might be something like a ‘common sense’ understanding of ‘man’, or notion of ‘man’, with which the ‘views’ of different sciences could be compared. Yet it could well be the case that the tendency of a particular ‘view’ to ‘usurp’ reality is restrained more by its encountering other ‘views’ than by anything else. The ‘common sense’ understanding of a particular object might, itself, comprise some of the same ‘aspects’ as those elaborated in the ‘sciences’ pertaining to that object, though in a rudimentary, undeveloped form – in a form less fit to resist the encroachments of a ‘science’ exceeding its proper limits. There is, Newman maintains, a kind of understanding, insight, or wisdom  – which he terms ‘Philosophy’, or ‘philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, or illumination’, or ‘the perfection or virtue of the intellect’ – which arises out of reflection on the various sciences, on how they are coordinated with one another, and on their limits and mutual relations.16 ‘Philosophy’ involves an awareness of the relations that the various sciences have to one another, of how they complement one another. Rephrasing a sermon, on ‘Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, which he had preached in 1841, Newman maintains that the ‘enlargement’ of the ‘mind’ consists, not simply in the acquisition of ideas, or of sciences, but in ‘the action of a formative power, reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquirements’, in ‘a making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own, or, to use a familiar word … a digestion of what we receive, into the substance of our previous state of thought’, so that this ‘substance’ has a certain unity, and the mind ‘takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, far and near, and … has an insight into the influence of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, and no centre’.17 True ‘enlargement of mind’, then, is ‘the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence’, and when ‘possessed of this real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part’.18 This ‘enlargement of mind’ or ‘illumination’ consists in having something like a unified perspective on ‘the extended subjectmatter of Knowledge’.19 It would, as such, ‘communicate the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, every where pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving them

16. 17. 18. 19.

Ibid., 125. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 136, 137. Ibid., 137.

296

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

one definite meaning’.20 Newman does not remark on whether this ‘illumination’ or ‘architectonic’ knowledge, this ‘universal system’, could be expressed, or represented, in a set of propositions, a particular philosophical system – whether this sense of the ‘whole’, of a ‘meaning’ that is ‘every where pervading and penetrating’ certain ‘parts’ (that constitute separate ‘sciences’) can be expressed, or represented.21 He is concerned, though, with university teaching, as aiming to impart something of this ‘Philosophy’. Since the students at a university cannot be expected to master all the various ‘sciences’ which will be taught there, then how might this ‘Philosophy’ be imparted to them? Newman suggests that one tends toward ‘Philosophy’ when one starts to reflect on whatever knowledge one has acquired. ‘If we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level; we must generalize, we must reduce to method, we must have a grasp of principles, and group and shape our acquisitions by means of them.’22 To acquire a sense of ‘method’ is to acquire a sense of the possibilities, and limits, of a science, and a sense of its relations to other sciences  – to sciences animated by different ‘principles’. A university brings together students who have different kinds of knowledge, and different views of life, and in their ‘conversation’ with one another, they acquire from one another different ‘ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting, day by day’ – with these various accessions of ‘matter of thought’ eliciting an effort to reflect on, to harmonize, this ‘matter’. ‘There is much to generalize, much to adjust, much to eliminate, there are inter-relations to be defined, and conventional rules to be established, in the process, by which the whole assemblage is moulded together, and gains one tone and one character.’23 The ‘youthful community’ will generate, of itself, a ‘living teaching’, ‘a self-perpetuating tradition’, which ‘imbues and forms, more or less, and one by one, every individual who is successively brought under its shadow’.24 The  ‘conversation’ of those present at a university involves, and generates, a common intellectual life, and this common intellectual life is a harmonizing, an ordering, of different ‘ideas and views’, different ‘principles’; and there is in this common intellectual life, something of the ‘Philosophy’ which harmonizes

20. Ibid. 21. Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, with regard to the kind of ‘tasks’ set for the discipline of philosophy by Newman in The Idea of a University, that ‘the arguments that direct us toward the truth … will be, if Newman’s conclusions in The Idea of a University are correct, arguments that enable us to integrate our theological understanding of the created universe with the understanding of each of the different aspects of that universe that is afforded by the enquiries of each of the secular disciplines’. See Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward/Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 150. 22. Idea of a University, 139. 23. Ibid., 146, 147. 24. Ibid., 147.

7. Faith and Civilization

297

different ‘principles’ and ‘ideas and views’ within a ‘universal system’. As with the ‘youthful community’, so with the professors. ‘An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation’, and, in this, they ‘learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other.’25 What is ‘created’, through this conversation, is an ‘intellectual tradition’, a ‘pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude’, and this ‘intellectual tradition … guides [the student] in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses’, so that he ‘apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts’.26 ‘Philosophy’ is there, then, in the ‘conversation’ that is the common life of a university, and to participate in that common life is to be ‘imbued’ with something of that ‘Philosophy’. Newman suggests, accordingly, that if a university is to be ‘Catholic’, it is not enough that ‘theology’  – even of the most correct kind  – be included among the subjects studied there, but, rather, individuals ‘imbued’ with Catholicism must take part in the ‘living’ conversation that is the life of the university. He reflects, in this regard, on the ‘mission’ of St Philip Neri, who ‘preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt’, and who did so ‘by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation’.27 That is, in a properly ‘Catholic’ university, the ‘conversation’, the ‘intellectual tradition’, that is the life of the university, would have a ‘Catholic’ character: the ‘stream’ of that ‘intellectual tradition’ would be animated, ‘direct[ed]’, by a ‘living’ Catholic spirit. The ‘intellectual tradition’ is present, realized, in the ‘conversation’ of those who participate in the life of the university; and those who take part in that ‘conversation’ bring to it, not simply their ‘learning’, but all that they are – their ‘devotion’, as well as ‘their … sciences’. In a sermon on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, preached in 1856, in which he sets out what he would wish a Catholic university to be, Newman remarks that ‘I wish the same spots and the same individuals to be at once oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion’, so that there are not ‘two independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and only accidentally brought together’, but, rather, ‘the same roof [should] … contain both the intellectual and moral discipline’.28 In this regard, ‘devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion’.29 ‘Science’ and ‘devotion’,

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Ibid., 101. Ibid. Ibid., 235, 236. ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in SPVO, 13. Ibid.

298

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in this regard, might be aspects of a single character, and a single ‘intellectual tradition’; and, in this tradition, there need be no stultification of ‘science’ or ‘devotion’ – ‘I wish the intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion to enjoy an equal freedom.’30 The ‘conversation’ which this ‘tradition’ animates, and in which it is realized, would involve the ‘intellectual and moral’ in a certain unity. In The Idea of a University, Newman insists that true religion is consistent with the highest ‘perfection’ of the intellect – grace ‘perfects’ nature. ‘We attain to heaven by using this world well, though it is to pass away; we perfect our nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature, and directing it towards aims higher than its own.’31 While grace is ‘higher’ than ‘nature’, and has ‘aims higher’ than nature, nevertheless, the pursuit of those aims is not an ‘undoing’ of nature: what is proper to ‘nature’, and its perfection, is consistent with, in harmony with, grace. The ‘conversation’ that is the ‘intellectual tradition’ of a university, is not stultified, when the ‘principles’ and ‘devotion’ of religion are involved in it. The ‘principles’ and ‘ideas and views’ of the different ‘sciences’, in all their integrity, can be expressed, ‘consult[ed]’, ‘adjust[ed]’, in the ‘conversation’ that constitutes an ‘intellectual tradition’, when that tradition has a character that is Catholic. In The Rise and Progress of Universities (1856), a series of essays published between 1854 and 1856 for the Catholic University Gazette, Newman insists that ‘conversation’, personal contact, is necessary for the imparting of knowledge: books do not suffice. For genuine education, ‘the ancient method’ must be adopted, the method of ‘oral instruction, of present communication between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of a disciple’. If we wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we must consult the living man and listen to his living voice … no books can get through the number of minute questions which it is possible to ask on any extended subject, or can hit upon the very difficulties which are severally felt by each reader in succession … [and] no book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation.32

With regard to ‘any study’, ‘the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already’.33 This is the case, equally, for ‘religious teaching’.

30. Ibid. 31. Idea of a University, 123. 32. ‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’, in Historical Sketches iii [hereafter HS iii] (1872; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 8–9. 33. ‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’, in HS iii, 9.

7. Faith and Civilization

299

Its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all education, the personal presence of a teacher, or, in theological language, Oral Tradition … Truth, a subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured into the mind of the scholar by his eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and reason; it is poured into his mind and is sealed up there in perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it, by questioning and requestioning, by correcting and explaining.34

Newman maintains that the ‘essence’ of a university consists in this relationship – in Professors, who possess knowledge, imparting it to their ‘scholars’; and he maintains that, where there is this relationship, then there is  – in however rudimentary a form – a university. Something more than a ‘Professorial system’, however, is needed for the integrity, or well-being, of a university. A Professor, who has many ‘scholars’, will not be able to form a close relationship with any of them; so that they may be very much left to themselves, as far as any sort of discipline – scholastic, or moral – is concerned. There arises, accordingly, a ‘system of Colleges, and College Tutors’, to maintain order and discipline. A College, Newman observes, is ‘a place of residence for the University student, who would there find himself under the guidance and instruction of Superiors and Tutors, bound to attend to his personal interests, moral and intellectual’.35 Regularity, rule, respect for others, the eye of friends and acquaintances, the absence from temptation, external restraints generally, are of first importance in protecting us against ourselves. When a boy leaves his home, when a peasant leaves his country, his faith and morals are in great danger, both because he is in the world, and also because he is among strangers. The remedy, then, of the perils which a University presents to the student, is to create within it homes, ‘altera Trojae Pergama’, such as those, or better than those, which he has left behind. Small communities must be set up within its precincts, where his better thoughts will find countenance, and his good resolutions support; where his waywardness will be restrained, his heedlessness forewarned, and his prospective deviations anticipated. Here, too, his diligence will be steadily stimulated; he will be kept up to his aim; his progress will be ascertained, and his week’s work, like a labourer’s, measured. It is not easy for a young man to determine for himself whether he has mastered what he has been taught; a careful catechetical training, and a jealous scrutiny into his power of expressing himself and of turning his knowledge to account, will be necessary, if he is really to profit from the able Professors whom he is attending; and all this he will gain from the College Tutor.36

34. Ibid., 14. 35. Ibid., 182. 36. Ibid., 189–90.

300

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman maintains that ‘Colleges are the direct and special instruments, which the Church uses in a University, for the attainment of her sacred objects’.37 The College Tutor is to attend to the ‘personal interests, moral and intellectual’ of the students.38 The Colleges are ‘instruments’ of ‘moral and intellectual’ discipline, imposing certain ‘external restraints’, and as such they are the ‘direct … instruments, which the Church uses’; such ‘discipline’ may be ordered toward the realization of the ‘sacred objects’ of the Church. The Colleges are not, however, the only ‘instruments’ of the Church in a university. If the personal relationship of the Tutor to the student is a relationship of ‘discipline’ – a quasi-parental relationship – the personal relationship of the Professor or ‘Master’ to the student is a relationship of ‘influence’ – a relationship more like friendship, involving ‘intellectual isonomy’. Newman maintains that ‘influence’ was the ideal of Athens. ‘The Athenians felt that a democracy was but the political expression of an intellectual isonomy, and, when they had obtained it, and taken the Beautiful for their Sovereign, instead of king or tyrant, they came forth as the civilizers, not of Greece only, but of the European world.’39 This ideal was not realized in the life of Athens – ‘their literature, as it has come down to us, is no sample or measure of their actual mode of living’ – but while ‘her great orators have put to her credit a beautiful idea, which … [was] not really fulfilled in her’, that idea ‘has literally and unequivocally been realized within the territory of Christianity’ – namely, in the Congregation of the Oratory.40 As ‘it was the method of Influence’, rather than ‘System’ or ‘Law’, that was the life of the schools of Athens – ‘it was the absence of rule, it was the action of personality, the intercourse of soul with soul, the play of mind upon mind, it was an admirable spontaneous force, which kept the schools of Athens going’ – so the Congregation of the Oratory ‘proceeds from one … who has placed the noblest aims before his children, yet withal the freest course; who always drew them to their duty, instead of commanding, and brought them on to perform before they had yet promised … who in his humility had no intention of forming any Congregation at all, but had formed it before he knew of it, from the beauty and the fascination of his own saintliness; and then, when he was obliged to recognize it and put it into shape, shrank from the severity of the Regular, would have nothing to say to vows, and forbade propagation and dominion; whose houses stand, like Greek colonies, independent of each other and complete in themselves; whose subjects in those several houses are allowed, like Athenian citizens, freely to cultivate their respective gifts and to follow out their own mission; whose one rule is Love, and whose own weapon Influence’.41 Newman suggests, with regard to his own role in the ‘agitation’ for the ‘establishment of a great University’, that the ‘traditions’ of Oratory might fit him for ‘introducing the great idea into men’s minds’ and ‘bringing many intellects

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Ibid., 183. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 85, 86. Ibid., 88.

7. Faith and Civilization

301

to work together for it, and of teaching them to understand each other, and bear with each other, and go on together, not so much by rule, as by mutual kind feeling and a common devotion’.42 The university begins, Newman suggests, in an ‘idea’, and in the encounter of ‘many intellects’, with a ‘common devotion’ to truth. And once a university has become established, its life consists in conversation. In this conversation, there is the forming of a ‘Philosophy’, as ‘many intellects’ are brought ‘to understand each other’: in such understanding there is a kind of coordination of the principles of the sciences, possessed by those ‘intellects’. Those who participate in the conversation acquire, in some measure, something of the ‘Philosophy’ that animates, or that is the substance of, the conversation. ‘Philosophy’ is formed, and acquired, in relationships between persons, in conversation; and it is in such conversation that personal ‘influence’ is exerted. In The Idea of a University, Newman maintains that St Philip Neri became the Apostle of Rome ‘by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation’.43 In conversation, the influence of ‘personal character’ is exerted, and the conversation itself has a kind of character, expressing and forming the characters of those who take part in it. The conversation that is the life of a university can be a medium for the ‘eloquence of personal character’, and that ‘eloquence’ can, in turn, affect the character of that conversation: it can become an ‘instrument’ of Christianity; it can have a Christian life or quality.

3. The ‘Philosophy’, the ‘intellectual culture’, that is the aim of university teaching, is present in a form that is ‘social’, in a ‘conversation’ that is a ‘tradition’. Newman maintains in The Idea of a University that, while the aim of university teaching is the perfection of the intellect, as an ‘end’ in itself, this perfection has a certain ‘utility’ for ‘society’, in that the ‘training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society’: the ‘practical end’ of a university consists in ‘training good members of society’; its ‘art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world’.44 A university training ‘aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life’.45 The intellectual ‘life’ created by a university, animates, and is intimately connected to, the life of ‘society’.

42. 43. 44. 45.

Ibid., 89. Idea of a University, 236. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 177–8.

302

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman maintains that the ‘common possession’ that constitutes ‘civilization’, as distinct from ‘barbarism’, consists in ‘intellect’. In his Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe, delivered in 1853, he proposes a definition of ‘civilization’ itself as ‘a state of mental cultivation and discipline’.46 States may be broadly divided into barbarous and civilized; their common possession, or life, is some object either of sense or of imagination; and their bane and destruction is either external or internal. … Barbarous states live in a common imagination, and are destroyed from without; whereas civilized states live in some common object of sense, and are destroyed from within … . By objects of imagination, I mean such as religion, true or false (for there are not only false imaginations but true), divine mission of a sovereign or of a dynasty, and historical fame; and by objects of sense, such as secular interests, country, home, protection of person and property … . But what is meant by the words barbarous and civilized as applied to political bodies? … By ‘barbarism’, then, I suppose, in itself is meant a state of nature; and by ‘civilization’, a state of mental cultivation and discipline … . Civilization is that state to which man’s nature points and tends; it is the systematic use, improvement, and combination of those faculties which are his characteristic; and, viewed in its idea, it is the perfection, the happiness of our mortal state. It is the development of art out of nature, and of self-government out of passion, and of certainty out of opinion, and of faith out of reason. It is the due disposition of the various powers of the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the inferior, and the union of all into one whole. Aims, rules, views, habits, projects; prudence, foresight, observation, inquiry, invention, resource, resolution, perseverance, are its characteristics. Justice, benevolence, expedience, propriety, religion, are its recognized, its motive principles. Supernatural truth is its sovereign law. Such is it in its true idea, synonymous with Christianity; and, not only in idea, but in matter of fact also, is Christianity ever civilization, as far as its influence prevails; but, unhappily, in matter of fact, civilization is not necessarily Christianity … . It is possible – without the cultivation of its spiritual part, which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow of operation, nay, even with an actual contempt of faith and devotion, in comparison of objects tangible and present, – possible it is, I say, to combine in some sort the other faculties of man into one, and to progress forward, with the substitution of natural religion for faith, and a refined expediency or propriety for true morality … . And this is, in fact, what is commonly understood by civilization, and it is the sense in which the word must be used here; not that perfection which nature aims at, and requires, and cannot of itself reach; but a second-rate perfection of nature, being what it is, and remaining what it is, without any supernatural principle, only with its powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully

46. ‘Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe’, in Historical Sketches i [hereafter HS i] (1872; London, Longmans Green & Co., 1908), 163

7. Faith and Civilization

303

exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control. Such was it, in its higher excellences, in heathen Greece and Rome, where the perception of moral principles, possessed by the cultivated and accomplished intellect, by the mind of Plato or Isocrates, of Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, or Antoninus, rivalled in outward pretensions the inspired teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Such is it at the present day, not only in its reception of the elements of religion and morals (when Christianity is in the midst of it as an inexhaustible storehouse for natural reason to borrow from), but especially in a province peculiar to these times, viz., in science and art, in physics, in politics, in economics, and mechanics. And great as are its attainments at present, still, as I have said, we are far from being able to discern, even in the distance, the limit of its advancement and of its perfectibility.47

Newman associates the cultivation of ‘reason’  – associated with ‘civilization’  – with the making of objects of ‘sense’ the ‘common possession, or life’, of a state. Why is it that ‘ratiocination’ should be ‘hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense’? Newman maintains that while ‘a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible, and fix upon the mind by pure reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a bodily form’, nevertheless, ‘taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove the point from which his reasoning starts’, and, in this attempt to identify ‘the point from which his reasoning starts’, ‘he [will not] be satisfied till he ultimately reaches those [first principles] which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself ’.48 As a result, ‘civilized states ever tend to substitute objects of sense for objects of imagination, as the basis of their existence’.49 In illustration of this, Newman observes that ‘the Pope’s political power was greater when Europe was semibarbarous’.50 Newman suggests, then, that there can be a ‘second-rate perfection of nature’ in a ‘civilization’ which has its ‘basis’ in ‘objects of sense’. There can, however, be other ‘objects’, discerned by the ‘spiritual part’ – the part ‘which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow of operation’ – and the perfection of the ‘intellect’ can consist in the forming of a ‘system of theology’ from the contemplation of these ‘objects’, from ‘principles impalpable and invisible’. Would Newman maintain that these ‘objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension’ are ‘objects of imagination’ (for ‘there are not only false imaginations but true’)? The contrast between ‘sense’ and ‘imagination’, here, would suggest a contrast between what can be experienced (with experience involving a kind of ‘handling and mastery’) and what can only be imagined (as what is ‘invisible’

47. 48. 49. 50.

‘Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe’, in HS i, 163–6. Ibid., 170. Ibid. Ibid.

304

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

cannot be experienced). Newman associates ‘objects of sense’ with ‘civilization’, and ‘objects of imagination’ with ‘barbarism’. Yet he connects Christianity – which, owing to the association between ‘religion’ and ‘true … imaginations’, might seem to be centred on ‘objects of imagination’  – with ‘civilization’, maintaining that ‘Christianity [is] ever civilization, as far as its influence prevails’.51 He suggests that ‘man as he is’, when engaged in ‘ratiocination’, is more ‘satisfied’ with starting ‘points’ for that ratiocination that are ‘as much within his own handling and mastery as the reasoning apparatus itself ’ – with ‘objects of sense’, things that can be experienced. While there can be a cultivation of the intellect – and this cultivation is ‘civilization’ itself – which takes ‘objects of imagination’ for its starting ‘points’ – and Newman instances ‘St. Thomas [who] can draw out a whole system of theology from principles impalpable and invisible’ – this, for ‘man as he is’, is more arduous, and less ‘satisfying’, than a ‘ratiocination’, a cultivation of the intellect, which ‘starts’ from ‘objects of sense’. (Newman associates the ‘satisfaction’, here, with a kind of ‘mastery’ – an assertion of the self, or an absorption of something into the self.) Where, then, the ‘reason’ is cultivated, the arduousness of reasoning from ‘objects of imagination’ is felt; and, as that which is arduous tends to be neglected, so this reasoning from ‘objects of imagination’ tends to be neglected: there arises an inclination to disregard such ‘objects of imagination’ altogether, as a ‘basis’ for thought. Where the ‘reason’ is not cultivated – as in a state of ‘barbarism’ – and the arduousness of reasoning from ‘objects of imagination’ is not felt, then there is less of an inclination to disregard ‘objects of imagination’ – and those objects are, accordingly, more potent in the ‘life’ of the community. (Hence, ‘the Pope’s political power was greater when Europe was semi-barbarous’.) If ‘civilization’, in itself, ‘is the due disposition of the various powers of the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the inferior, and the union of all into one whole’, then a ‘second rate perfection’ would seem to be a ‘union’ of these ‘powers’ on a ‘basis’ that consists in ‘objects of sense’. ‘Barbarism’ is animated by certain ‘objects of imagination’, but in barbarism the ‘powers’ of the soul are not brought into ‘union’. In ‘Christianity’ which is ‘synonymous’ with civilization ‘in its true idea’, the ‘powers of the soul’ are brought into ‘union’, in subordination to the insights of the ‘spiritual part’, which apprehends ‘objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension’ – and these ‘objects’ would seem to be ‘objects of imagination’. The ‘spiritual part’, here, might, of course, be something altogether different from ‘sense’, ‘imagination’, and ‘reason’; or it might involve all those ‘powers’, in subordination to a ‘supernatural principle’. One might envisage a scheme where ‘barbarism’ is associated with ‘imagination’, ‘civilization’ with ‘reason’, and ‘Christianity’ with ‘spirit’. Yet Newman proposes a scheme where ‘barbarism’ is associated with ‘objects of imagination’, and ‘civilization’ with ‘objects of sense’. The ‘civilization’ which Newman envisages as ‘based’ on ‘objects of sense’ is, it seems, the civilization created by ‘man as he is’ – in which ‘objects tangible and present’ are preferred to the objects of ‘faith and devotion’ – and this is something ‘second-rate’: omitting

51. Ibid., 165.

7. Faith and Civilization

305

the ‘spiritual part’, it ‘combine[s] in some sort the other faculties of man into one’. If the contrast between ‘objects of sense’ and ‘objects of imagination’ is a contrast between what can be experienced, and what can only be imagined, then it would seem that a ‘civilization’ higher than that created by ‘man as he is’, would have as its ‘basis’ the objects of ‘faith and devotion’, which, it would seem, Newman takes to be objects of imagination. Of the ‘second-rate perfection’, realized in ‘heathen Greece and Rome’, Newman observes that it is a perfection of ‘nature’ without ‘supernatural principle’, but with ‘its powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control’.52 This ‘second-rate’ civilization does not, then, involve a suppression of ‘imagination’ altogether – the imagination is ‘fully exercised’. It does not, though, have its ‘basis’ in those objects of imagination that inform ‘faith and devotion’. The imagination is ‘exercised’, but is not involved in the ‘basis’. The ‘union’ in the ‘powers’ of the soul, realized in a ‘second-rate’ form of civilization, is a ‘union’ that is ‘second-rate’ because it restricts, or suppresses, certain of those ‘powers’.

4. Newman examines how the ‘cultivation’ of the ‘reason’ might make for a ‘second-rate’ union of the powers of the soul, a union whereby the ‘educated mind’, disregarding true religion, makes a ‘religion for itself ’, in his Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’ in The Idea of a University. The ‘Discourse’ is, in many ways, an elaboration of ideas which Newman had articulated many years previously, in a sermon on ‘The Religion of the Day’, preached in 1832, in which he maintained that in ‘the world’s religion’, a state of character, formed by ‘the mere influence of education and civilization’, is identified with ‘religion’ itself. In the Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, he maintains that the ‘philosophy’ which arises from the cultivation of the intellect is concerned more with ‘moral and social teaching’ than with matters of faith (‘where the country is Catholic, the educated mind takes its articles for granted, by a sort of implicit faith; where it is not, it simply ignores them’).53 The cultivation of the intellect can, he suggest, confer a genuine moral ‘benefit’, providing a ‘rescue from that fearful subjection to sense which is [the] ordinary state’ of ‘nature’, so that, while this cultivation does not ‘supply religious motives’, and ‘is not the cause or proper antecedent of any thing supernatural’, it is, nevertheless, something that ‘does a work, at least materially good … [expelling] the excitements of sense by the introduction of those of the intellect’.54 What is more, ‘knowledge, the discipline by which it is gained, and the tastes which it forms, have a natural tendency to refine the mind, and to give it an indisposition, simply natural, yet real, nay, more than this, a disgust and

52. Ibid., 166. 53. Idea of a University, 182–3. 54. Ibid., 184, 185–6.

306

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

abhorrence, towards excesses and enormities of evil’.55 The ‘scorn and hatred which a cultivated mind feels for vice’ may, however, involve a kind of self-regard, which is quite different from anything ‘really religious’. Conscience … is implanted in the breast by nature, but it inflicts upon us fear as well as shame; when the mind is simply angry with itself and nothing more, surely the true import of the voice of nature and the depth of its intimations have been forgotten, and a false philosophy has misinterpreted emotions which ought to lead to God. Fear implies the transgression of a law, and a law implies a lawgiver and judge; but the tendency of intellectual culture is to swallow up the fear in the self-reproach, and self-reproach is directed and limited to our mere sense of what is fitting and becoming. Fear carries us out of ourselves, whereas shame may act upon us only within the round of our own thoughts. Such, I say, is the danger which awaits a civilized age … . Conscience tends to become what is called a moral sense; the command of duty is a sort of taste; sin is not an offence against God, but against human nature … . We find … men possessed of many virtues, but proud, bashful, fastidious, and reserved. Why is this? it is because they think and act as if there were really nothing objective in their religion; it is because conscience to them is not the word of a lawgiver, as it ought to be, but the dictate of their own minds and nothing more; it is because they do not look out of themselves, because they do not look through and beyond their own minds to their Maker, but are engrossed in notions of what is due to themselves, to their own dignity and their own consistency. Their conscience has become a mere self-respect. Instead of doing one thing and then another, as each is called for, in faith and obedience, careless of what may be called the keeping of deed with deed, and leaving Him who gives the command to blend the portions of their conduct into a whole, their one object, however unconscious to themselves, is to paint a smooth and perfect surface, and to be able to say to themselves that they have done their duty. When they do wrong, they feel, not contrition, of which God is the object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation. They call themselves fools, not sinners; they are angry and impatient, not humble. They shut themselves up in themselves; it is misery to them to think or to speak of their own feelings; it is misery to suppose that others see them, and their shyness and sensitiveness often become morbid. As to confession, which is so natural to the Catholic, to them it is impossible; unless indeed, in cases where they have been guilty, an apology is due to their own character, is expected of them, and will be satisfactory to look back upon. They are victims of an intense self-contemplation.56

There is a contrast, here, between different ‘looks’, different gazes. Those who ‘shut themselves up in themselves’ do not acknowledge the presence of any gaze other

55. Ibid., 187. 56. Ibid., 191–2.

7. Faith and Civilization

307

than their own. They wish that their own gaze should have the ‘mastery’, so to speak (‘it is a misery to suppose others see them’). They ‘do not look through and beyond their own minds’ – toward a ‘look’, a gaze, that is other than their own – that of God. They would envisage themselves as an object that ‘their own minds’ can fully compass, for they would not recognize anything that ‘their own minds’ cannot compass, anything that resists the dominion of ‘their own minds’: they aim to realize ‘consistency’ in their conduct, ensuring the ‘keeping of deed with deed’ by regulating their acts according to an idea of themselves. They would – as realizing a certain idea of themselves, with ‘consistency’, and with a sense of ‘what is due’ to themselves – determine themselves by such an idea, making that idea supreme: they sustain a sense of the supremacy of ‘their own minds’ to the extent that they can ‘blend the portions of their conduct into a whole’, a ‘whole’ that conforms to an idea possessed by ‘their own minds’. When they deviate, in their conduct, from that idea, ‘when they do wrong’, they feel ‘not contrition, of which God is the object, but remorse, and a sense of degradation’ and they ‘call themselves fools, not sinners; they are angry and impatient, not humble’. If they ‘call themselves fools’, then they take their fault to consist in something like an infirmity of intellect – they have not regulated their conduct by ‘their own minds’. If they are ‘angry and impatient’, it is in encountering a certain resistance, which they would overcome: they experience themselves as something like refractory material (to be ordered by an idea). Newman contrasts this attitude with the attitude of those who ‘look through and beyond their own minds to their Maker’, who do ‘one thing and then another, as each is called for, in faith and obedience, careless of what may be called the keeping of deed with deed, and leaving Him who gives the command to blend the portions of their conduct into a whole’ – who, in effect, regard the wisdom by which their lives are regulated as something possessed by ‘their Maker’ rather than by themselves. They do not purport to possess an idea of themselves that is adequate to all that they are, and that is, as such, apt to regulate ‘their conduct’: they do not aim to make themselves, to create themselves in accordance with an idea of ‘their own minds’. The contrast between those who would regard ‘their own minds’ as supreme – who aim to live so as to realize ideas of themselves, making their own ideas supreme – and those who would live in ‘faith and obedience’, from moment to moment, relates to a contrast, on which Newman had long been reflecting, between a moral thinking that is the forming of a ‘system’ of thought – through a reasoning that has ‘external assistance’ from ‘conscience and Scripture’ – and a ‘moral science’ that is implicated in living, and that is ‘the natural and almost spontaneous result of the formed and finished character’. In a sermon on ‘Evangelical Sanctity, the Completion of Natural Virtue’, preached in 1831, Newman observes that ‘morals may be cultivated as a science; it furnishes a subject-matter on which reason may exercise itself to any extent whatever, with little more than the mere external assistance of conscience and Scripture. And, when drawn out into system, such a moral teaching will attract general admiration from its beauty and refinement; and from its evident expediency will be adopted as a directory (so to say) of conduct, whenever it does not occasion any great inconvenience, or interfere with any strong passion or

308

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

urgent interest.’57 ‘Conscience and Scripture’, in this form of moral ‘science’, afford ‘external assistance’ to the ‘exercise’ of ‘reason’. The ‘reason’ by which the ‘system’ is formed is something ‘external’ to ‘Conscience’. (The ‘assistance’ of ‘Conscience and Scripture’, in this regard, might be taken to consist in ‘Conscience’ supplying certain premises, from which various inferences are made  – by the ‘exercise’ of ‘reason’ – in forming a ‘system’.) To ‘reason’ so as to form a moral ‘system’, is not to be virtuous. To be attracted to the ‘beauty’ of the ‘system’ is not to be virtuous: the ‘system’, or ‘directory’, attracts for its ‘beauty’, ‘expediency’, and the like, but virtue has something other than this sort of ‘beauty’ or ‘expediency’ as its proper object. (Newman observes, in this regard, that ‘the Roman moralists write as admirably, as if they were moral men’.)58 In ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’, preached in 1832, Newman sets out to characterize a different sort of moral ‘system’ or ‘light’  – the moral ‘light’ acquired by those who live so as to be ever ‘engaged in increasing and perfecting the light originally given’, acting rightly from moment to moment. ‘As fresh and fresh duties arise, or fresh and fresh faculties are brought into action, they are at once absorbed into the existing inward system, and take their appropriate place in it.’59 The forming of the ‘inward system’ occurs as ‘duties arise’ – that is, by ‘doing one thing and then another, as each is called for, in faith and obedience’. The ‘inward system’ is not a system of propositions, a logical system: it is something more than that – something personal, something present in a kind of life.60 The ‘light’ here is something other than the ‘exercise’ of the ‘reason’ in argument (though it is quite consistent with such an ‘exercise’ of the ‘reason’). In a sermon on ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, preached in 1838, Newman contrasts the ‘true Christian’ with the ‘double-minded’, maintaining that those who are ‘double-minded’ would make ‘self ’ the ‘king and judge’: they recur to ‘abstract principle’ in ordering their lives, that they might make such ‘principle’ supreme, instead of God, ‘treat[ing] with’ God as ‘independent parties’.61 They ‘shut themselves up in themselves’. They would make their own consciousness, their own awareness of themselves, supreme. They would, as such, resist a sense that there is a ‘look’, a gaze, which apprehends more of the truth about themselves, than they do. They would judge themselves: they would take their own ‘notions of fitness’ to be adequate to judge themselves by;62 and they would take their apprehension of themselves to be adequate  – thinking that they apprehend enough of the truth about themselves, enough of the truth to which such ‘notions of fitness’ would be applied, as to be able to form a right judgment.

57. ‘Evangelical Sanctity the Completion of Natural Virtue’, in OUS, 40–1. 58. Ibid., 41. 59. ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, in OUS, 80, 81. 60. For a full analysis of the sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth’, see Chapter 2, above. 61. ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons v [hereafter PPS v] (1840; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 230. 62. ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, in PPS v, 230.

7. Faith and Civilization

309

A true Christian, or one who is in a state of acceptance with God, is he, who, in such sense, has faith in Him, as to live in the thought that He is present with him – present not externally, not in nature merely, or in providence, but in his innermost heart, or in his conscience. A man is justified whose conscience is illuminated by God, so that he habitually realizes that all his thoughts, all the first springs of his moral life, all his motives and his wishes, are open to Almighty God. Not as if he was not aware that there is very much in him impure and corrupt, but he wishes that all that is in him should be bare to God. He believes that it is so, and he even joys to think that it is so, in spite of his fear and shame at its being so. He alone admits Christ into the shrine of his heart; whereas others wish in some way or other, to be by themselves, to have a home, a chamber, a tribunal, a throne, a self where God is not, – a home within them which is not a temple, a chamber which is not a confessional, a tribunal without a judge, a throne without a king;  – that self may be king and judge; and that the Creator may rather be dealt with and approached as though a second party, instead of His being that true and better self of which self itself should be but an instrument and minister … . The true Christian … enthrones the Son of God in his conscience, refers to Him as a sovereign authority, and uses no reasoning with Him. He does not reason, but he says, ‘Thou, God, seest me.’ He feels that God is too near him to allow of argument, self-defence, excuse, or objection. He appeals in matters of duty, not to his own reason, but to God Himself whom with the eyes of faith he sees, and whom he makes the Judge; not to any fancied fitness, or any preconceived notion, or any abstract principle, or any tangible experience … . The merely professing Christian, or, in Scripture language, … the hypocrite [is one of those] who have two ends which they pursue, religion and the world; and hence St. James calls them ‘double-minded’. … A doubleminded man … as having two ends in view, dare not come to God, lest he should be discovered … . Adam hid himself among the trees of the garden. It was not simple dread of God, but dread joined to an unwillingness to be restored to God. He had a secret in his heart which he kept from God. He felt towards God – as it would seem, or at least his descendants so feel  – as one man often feels towards another in the intercourse of life … . The double-minded approach the Most High … [with] a something private, a hidden self at bottom. They look on themselves, as it were, as independent parties, treating with Almighty God as one of their fellows. Hence, so far from seeking God, they hardly like to be sought by Him. They would rather keep their position and stand where they are – on earth, and so make terms with God in heaven … This being the case, there being in the estimation of the double-minded man two parties, God and self, it follows (as I have said), that reasoning and argument is the mode in which he approaches his Saviour and Judge; and that for two reasons, – first, because he will not give himself up to God, but stands upon his rights and appeals to his notions of fitness: and next, because he has some secret misgiving after all that he is dishonest, or some consciousness that he may appear so to others;

310

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

and therefore, he goes about to fortify his position, to explain his conduct, or to excuse himself.63

One who is aware of the ‘presence’, the gaze, of God, is aware that ‘all his thoughts, all the first springs of his moral life, all his motives and his wishes, are open to Almighty God’: he is aware of his own consciousness, in its ‘first springs’, as an object of the ‘look’ of God; he is aware of the finitude of his consciousness; and he is aware of his consciousness as subject to a judgment other than his own – his judgment is itself to be (rightly) judged. He cannot make the ‘first springs’ of his consciousness an object of consciousness, for his consciousness is what these ‘first springs’ issue in: consciousness cannot observe the ‘springs’ from which it issues (for once there is consciousness, the issuing from the ‘springs’ is past, and can no longer be observed). If the ‘first springs’ of consciousness are of a ‘moral’ quality, then there are ‘moral’ features of oneself of which one cannot be aware. The ‘perception’ involved in phronesis would seem to be a form of insight that is of the ‘first springs’ of consciousness. Such ‘perception’ is a spontaneous, primordial interpretation of a particular, here and now situation. It is, moreover, implicated with ‘moral’ virtue, as requiring virtuous dispositions. It is a primary form of awareness, issuing from the ‘first springs’ of consciousness, and it is implicated with ‘moral’ character. The ‘first springs of the moral’ life – ‘first springs’ that consist in spontaneous ‘wishes’, impulses, and the like – are not something of which one is always aware. Those who would make their own awareness, their own consciousness, ‘king and judge’, might, accordingly, be disposed to disregard those ‘first springs’. If one feels ‘towards God … as one man often feels towards another in the intercourse of life’ – if one thinks of oneself as subject to a judgment that is like the judgment of those one encounters ‘in the intercourse of life’ – then what seems subject to judgment in oneself is that which is manifest to others ‘in the intercourse of life’ (not the ‘first springs’ of consciousness in oneself). Those who would ‘treat’ God, as if ‘one of their fellows’ – one of those they encounter ‘in the intercourse of life’ – are inclined to identify their ‘moral’ self with those aspects of themselves that are apparent to ‘their fellows’. They have a clearer apprehension of those aspects of themselves – of their outward conduct, their social guises – and a greater control of those aspects of themselves, than of the ‘first springs of the moral life’; if they take it that only those aspects of themselves have ‘moral’ significance – if they take the ‘moral’ truth about themselves to consist in those more ‘outward’ aspects of themselves – then this reinforces their sense of their own capacity to ‘judge’ and to create themselves. If one looks at oneself in this way, then one identifies the self (or the ‘moral’ self) with a persona. One regards the part of oneself which contemplates that persona as ‘private’, ‘hidden’, exempt from judgment (exempt, in a sense, from finitude). In his account of the attitude of self-regard to which the ‘cultivated mind’ is prone, in the Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, Newman remarks

63. Ibid., 226–30.

7. Faith and Civilization

311

that those who succumb to such self-regard have as ‘their one object, however unconscious to themselves … to paint a smooth and perfect surface, and to be able to say to themselves that they have done their duty’.64 By ‘a smooth and perfect surface’, here, Newman might mean something like an adroit social performance, a ‘surface’ apparent to others in the ‘intercourse of life’. He might, then again, mean a ‘surface’ that consists in those aspects of the self that one apprehends clearly, over which one seems to exercise control – something like the more ‘superficial’ aspects of the self. In the Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, Newman maintains that the ‘moral’ attitude of the ‘cultivated mind’ can become a mere concern with appearances. The heresy, as it may be called, of which I speak, is the substitution of a moral sense or taste for conscience in the true meaning of the word; now this error  … is especially congenial to men of an imaginative and poetical cast of mind, who will readily accept the notion that virtue is nothing more than the graceful in conduct. Such persons, far from tolerating fear, as a principle, in their apprehension of religious and moral truth, will not be slow to call it simply gloom and superstition. Rather a philosopher’s, a gentleman’s religion, is of a liberal and generous character; it is based upon honour; vice is evil, because it is unworthy, despicable, and odious. This was the quarrel of the ancient heathen with Christianity, that, instead of simply fixing the mind on the fair and the pleasant, it intermingled other ideas with them of a sad and painful nature … . The notion of an All-perfect, Ever-present God, in whose sight we are less than atoms, and who, while He deigns to visit us, can punish as well as bless, was abhorrent to them; they made their own minds their sanctuary, their own ideas their oracle, and conscience in morals was but parallel to genius in art, and wisdom in philosophy.65

The ‘fear’ associated with Christianity, and with the ‘conscience’, is, in itself, contrary to the ‘fair and the pleasant’ – it is ‘painful’, and it is ungraceful – and it constitutes an ‘unworthy’ motive for right conduct. One should, rather, be moved to be virtuous by a love of the beauty of virtue; and it is something like a ‘moral sense, or taste’ which registers the beauty of virtue. ‘Fear’ involves a sense of the limits of the self, the vulnerability of the self; and it is not ‘liberal’ to be moved by something external to the self. It is more beautiful to be moved by a sense of the beautiful – in this, one acts in a beautiful way, moved by a ‘taste’ for the beautiful: one makes the beautiful supreme – one makes it the ultimate truth about oneself. Newman intimates, though, that this concern for the beautiful is a concern for a beauty of a rather outward kind: a ‘gentleman’s religion’ is ‘based upon honour’, and ‘honour’,

64. Idea of a University, 192. 65. Ibid., 193.

312

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

ultimately, is a matter of the regard of others; it identifies ‘virtue’ with ‘the graceful in conduct’ (not with the ‘first springs’ of the ‘moral life’, ‘motives’ and ‘wishes’). Newman takes the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury to be illustrative of a ‘gentleman’s religion’. For Shaftesbury, ‘Christianity is the enemy of moral virtue, as influencing the mind by fear of God, not by love of good. The motives then of hope and fear being, to say the least, put far into the background, and nothing being morally good but what springs simply or mainly from a love of virtue for its own sake, this love-inspiring quality in virtue is its beauty.’66 Newman quotes the declaration of Shaftesbury, that ‘most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth; for all beauty is truth’, and he observes that ‘virtue being only one kind of beauty, the principle which determines what is virtuous is, not conscience, but taste’; so, Newman takes it, ‘Conscience, which intimates a Lawgiver, being superseded by a moral taste or sentiment, which has no sanction beyond the constitution of our nature, it follows that our great rule is to contemplate ourselves, if we would gain a standard of life and morals.’67 Newman quotes the claim of Shaftesbury that the ‘imaginary saint or mystic’ is not ‘capable of this entertainment’ – not capable of a clear insight into himself – for ‘instead of looking narrowly into his own nature and mind, that he may be no longer a mystery to himself, he is taken up with the contemplation of other mysterious natures, which he never can explain or comprehend’.68 Of the claims made by this ‘Religion of

66. Ibid., 197. 67. Ibid., 198, 199–200. 68. Ibid., 200. The quarrel of Newman with Shaftesbury is, in certain respects, parallel to the quarrel of Pascal with Montaigne. (Montaigne maintained that one should contemplate oneself, recognizing all that is ‘human’, particular, concrete, finite about oneself, so that one might accept, and work with, all that is ‘human’, particular, concrete, finite about oneself. In living, one should work with the knowledge one derives from an honest enquiry into oneself, as one is, rather than working from visionary ideals. See M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays (London: Duckworth, 1983).) Newman discusses the quarrel of Pascal and Montaigne, as an instance of how radically different systems of thought can arise from differences of principle deriving from moral temperament, in Chapter 8, Section 2, of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. ‘Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth and error, but that anything is truth to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being; and that in consequence that perception of its first principles which is natural to us is enfeebled, obstructed, perverted, by allurements of sense and the supremacy of self, and, on the other hand, quickened by aspirations after the supernatural; so that at length two characters of mind are brought out into shape, and two standards and systems of thought, – each logical, when analyzed, yet contradictory of each other, and only not antagonistic because they have no common ground on which they can conflict?’ An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans Green & Co., 1903), 311–2. Newman seems to be more sympathetic to Pascal (and his interpretation of Montaigne is perhaps influenced

7. Faith and Civilization

313

Philosophy’, Newman observes that they ‘are exhibitions of truth under one aspect, and therefore insufficient; conscience is most certainly a moral sense, but it is more; vice again, is a deformity, but it is worse’.69 Newman maintains that this ‘Religion’ ultimately consists in a ‘doctrine which makes virtue a mere point of good taste, and vice vulgar and ungentlemanlike’.70 Such a doctrine is essentially superficial, and such will be its effects. It has no better measure of right and wrong than that of visible beauty and tangible fitness. Conscience indeed inflicts an acute pang, but that pang, forsooth, is irrational, and to reverence it is an illiberal superstition. But, if we will make light of what is deepest within us, nothing is left but to pay homage to what is more upon the surface. To seem becomes to be; what looks fair will be good, what causes offence will be evil; virtue will be what pleases, vice what pains. As well may we measure virtue by utility as by such a rule … . The splendours of a court, and the charms of good society, wit, imagination, taste, and high breeding, the prestige of rank, and the resources of wealth, [can become] a screen, an instrument, and an apology for vice and irreligion. And thus at length we find, surprising as the change may be, that that very refinement of Intellectualism, which began by repelling sensuality, ends by excusing it … From this shallowness of philosophical Religion it comes to pass that its disciples seem able to fulfil certain precepts of Christianity more readily and exactly than Christians themselves. St. Paul, as I have said, gives us a pattern of evangelical perfection; he draws the Christian character in its most graceful form, and its most beautiful hues. He discourses of that charity which is patient and meek, humble and single-minded, disinterested, contented, and persevering. He tells us to prefer each the other before himself, to give way to each other, to abstain from rude words and evil speech, to avoid self-conceit, to be calm and grave, to be cheerful and happy, to observe peace with all men, truth and justice, courtesy and gentleness, all that is modest, amiable, virtuous, and of good repute. Such is St. Paul’s exemplar of the Christian in his external relations; and, I repeat, the school of the world seems to send out living copies of this typical excellence with greater success than the Church. At this day the ‘gentleman’ is the creation, not of Christianity, but of civilization. But the reason is obvious. The world is content with setting right the surface of things; the Church aims at regenerating the very depths of the heart. She ever begins with the beginning;

by how Pascal interprets him). If, though Montaigne is something of a sceptic, Pascal is something of a rigorist. Montaigne developed a form of lay spirituality – the spirituality of a ‘Christian gentleman’ – and he was esteemed by St Francis de Sales. (The unaffected, moderate spirituality of Montaigne is not altogether remote from the ideal of the Christian ‘gentleman’ developed by Newman.) Newman suggests that there is ‘no common ground’ between the ‘systems of thought’ represented by Montaigne and Pascal respectively, but there is a sense in which certain aspects of these ‘systems’ coexist in his own thought. 69. Idea of a University, 200. 70. Ibid., 201.

314

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

and, as regards the multitude of her children, is never able to get beyond the beginning, but is continually employed in laying the foundation. She is engaged with what is essential, as previous and as introductory to the ornamental and the attractive. She is curing men and keeping them clear of mortal sin; she is ‘treating of justice and chastity, and the judgment to come’: she is insisting on faith and hope, and devotion, and honesty, and the elements of charity; and has so much to do with precept, that she almost leaves it to inspirations from Heaven to suggest what is of counsel and perfection. She aims at what is necessary rather than at what is desirable. She is for the many as well as for the few. She is putting souls in the way of salvation, that they may then be in a condition, if they shall be called upon, to aspire to the heroic, and to attain the full proportions, as well as the rudiments, of the beautiful.71

Is Newman right to maintain that the ‘doctrine’ of Shaftesbury issues in the view that the ‘measure of right and wrong’ is ‘visible beauty and tangible fitness’? Shaftesbury maintains that the ‘moral sense’ is a kind of ‘taste’, and that it registers ‘beauty’, but this ‘taste’ would seem to have as its object, not mere ‘visible beauty’, but certain ‘interior’ qualities – qualities of character. Newman observes, though, that the ‘Religion of Philosophy’ involves a certain disregard of the ‘conscience’, or, at least, of certain aspects of the ‘conscience’ – taking the ‘acute pang’ of the conscience, to be ‘irrational’ and ‘illiberal’. To be moved by ‘fear’ – rather than by an attraction to the ‘beauty’ of virtue – is, on this view, ‘servile’, ‘illiberal’. Newman would have it, though, that this ‘fear’ is not simply a regard to ‘rewards’ or ‘punishments’: it is connected to an awareness of oneself as finite, and as subject to the ‘look’ of an infinite ‘Maker’; it is connected to a sense that one is subject to a just judgment that is other than, and that transcends, whatever judgment one might form of oneself; it is connected to an awareness of a ‘look’ that discerns the ‘depths of the heart’, such that the ‘sense’ of that ‘look’ instigates, or is implicated with, an awareness of those ‘depths’. In his sermon on ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, Newman asks, ‘Are you living in this conviction of His Presence, and have you this special witness that that Presence is really set up within you unto your salvation, viz. that you live in the sense of it? Do you believe, and act on the belief, that His light penetrates and shines through your heart, as the sun’s beams through a room?’72 The ‘sense’ of this ‘light’ is connected to a sense that there is that, in the ‘heart’, which ‘we see … not’ – to an awareness of the ‘depths’ of the ‘heart’. You know how things look when the sun’s beams are on it, – the very air then appears full of impurities, which, before it came out, were not seen. So is it with our souls. We are full of stains and corruptions, we see them not, they are like the air before the sun shines; but though we see them not, God sees them: He

71. Ibid., 201–4. 72. ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’, in PPS v, 235.

7. Faith and Civilization

315

pervades us as the sunbeam. Our souls, in His view, are full of things which offend, things which must be repented of, forgiven, and put away … . If we are conscious of nothing, still let us not boast in ourselves or justify ourselves, but feel that ‘He who judgeth us is the Lord’. In all circumstances, of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, let us aim at having Him in our inmost heart; let us have no secret apart from Him. Let us acknowledge Him as enthroned within us at the very springs of thought and affection. Let us submit ourselves to His guidance and sovereign direction; let us come to Him that He may forgive us, cleanse us, change us, guide us, and save us.73

The ‘look’ which apprehends the ‘beauty’ of ‘virtue’ is something other – something more ‘shallow’  – than the divine ‘look’ which apprehends the ‘inmost heart’. The ‘pang’ of conscience is connected to an awareness of that divine ‘look’, and to an awareness of what that ‘look’ apprehends  – the ‘depths of the heart’. The Church, aware of those ‘depths’, aware of the ‘essential’, is ‘continually employed in laying the foundation … [and] engaged with what is essential, as previous and as introductory to the ornamental and the attractive’.74 Shaftesbury maintains that one should look ‘narrowly’ at oneself, that one ‘may be no longer a mystery to’ oneself. What if, though, there is something mysterious in oneself – what if there is that which ‘we see … not’? If there is, then a look that makes one ‘no longer a mystery to’ oneself, is a look that is not registering what is there. With regard to the virtues that are taken to be ‘beautiful’ – the ‘graceful’, the ‘ornamental and the attractive’ – Newman suggests that the ‘grace’ here is in what is apparent to ‘our fellows’ in the ‘intercourse of life’, in what is ‘winning’, in what makes for social harmony. There is, moreover, ‘grace’ or beauty in such harmonious relationships themselves. The ‘beauty’ of ‘conduct’ makes for harmony with others, and it consists in acts that make for such harmony – acts that aim at ‘what pleases’, and that eschew ‘what pains’ – and this harmony with others is itself beautiful. In his Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe, Newman suggests that there can be a kind of ‘union’ of the ‘powers’ of the soul, a kind of ‘civilization’, that is ‘second-rate’; and it is ‘second-rate’ as it restricts certain of those ‘powers’ – the ‘spiritual part’ of the soul. In his Discourse on ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religion’, he suggests that the ‘Religion of Philosophy’ involves, equally, a certain suppression of the ‘spiritual part’: it involves a suppression of that ‘part’ of oneself that has a ‘sense’ of the look, the gaze, of God; and it is, accordingly, not concerned with the self as apprehended by the gaze of God – with the ‘first springs’ of the ‘moral life’, the innermost ‘springs’ of the self – but with the self as apprehended by a gaze akin to the gaze of those one encounters in the ‘intercourse of life’, the gaze of ‘society’. To realize a certain union, grace, harmony, in the self (or the aspect of the self) that is apprehended by the gaze of ‘society’ is merely to ‘paint a smooth and perfect surface’.

73. Ibid., 235–6. 74. Idea of a University, 203.

316

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

5. In Callista (1855), a novel in which Newman sought to ‘imagine and express, from a Catholic point of view, the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens’ in the third century, Newman is concerned, among other things, with the insufficiency of the ‘Religion of Philosophy’ – with how it cannot satisfy the soul. The epigraph of Callista is taken from ‘The Association of Ideas’ by Aubrey De Vere: ‘Vainly strives the soul to mingle / With a being of our kind / … For the deepest still is single. / … Mortal: love that Holy One, / Or dwell for aye alone.’ There is that in the soul which cannot be expressed in the ‘intercourse of life’, with ‘being[s] of our kind’: if one does not form a relationship with God, if one does not ‘love that Holy One’, then one is left to oneself, one is enclosed in oneself, and must ‘dwell for aye alone’. Callista is set in North Africa, in Sicca, a town subject to the Roman imperium  – a town in which Christians are few, and scattered, and in which various forms of paganism are dominant. In these circumstances, the profession of Christianity makes for an alienation from others. Agellius, a young Christian, chafes at his solitude. He has befriended two young Greeks, Aristo and Callista, brother and sister, sculptors, employed by his pagan uncle Jucundus, who has a business selling statues and ceremonial objects connected to various pagan rites. Callista is beautiful, accomplished, eminently civilized; she feels, however, a ‘weariness in all things’, is conscious of the evanescence of all that is worldly, and of the ‘ever-splashing oar / Of Charon, ferryman of souls’.75 She loves the ‘beautiful, divine light’, the ‘fair, bright-haired God’ Apollo: ‘Thou art my worship, if Callista worships aught: but somehow I worship nothing now.’76 To her brother, she remarks, ‘One might do worse than be a Christian … . If all is true that I have heard of them … I mean … if I were a Christian, life would be more bearable.’77 Aside from Agellius, she has only known one other Christian – a slave, Chione, who ‘cared for nothing, yet was not morose or peevish or hardhearted’.78 Jucundus, realizing that Agellius is attracted to Callista, encourages Agellius to propose marriage to her, hoping to detach Agellius from his allegiance to Christianity. Agellius hopes (or wishes to believe) that the sympathy between himself and Callista shows that she might have an inclination toward Christianity. He proposes to her, declaring, ‘what I have experienced ever since I first heard you converse, [is] that there is between you and me a unity of thought so strange that

75. Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (1855; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 17 76. Callista, 118. 77. Ibid., 121. 78. Ibid., 126.

7. Faith and Civilization

317

I should have deemed it could not have been, before I found it actually to exist, between any two persons whatever.’79 There is an unaccountable correspondence in the views we take of things, in our impressions, in the line in which our minds move, and the issues to which they come, in our judgment of what is great and little, and the manner in which objects affect our feelings … . I find between you and me one language. Is it wonderful that, in proportion to my astonishment, I am led to refer it to one cause, and think that one Master Hand must have engraven those lines on the soul of each of us? Is it wonderful that I should fancy that He who has made us alike has made us for each other, and that the very same persuasives by which I bring you to cast your eyes on me, may draw you also to cast yourself in adoration at the feet of my Master?80

Callista rebuffs him: ‘Your Master! who is your Master? what know I of your Master? what have you ever told me of your Master?’81 If, as you imply, my wants and aspirations are the same as yours, what have you done towards satisfying them? what have you done for that Master towards whom you now propose to lead me? No! … you have watched those wants and aspirations for yourself, not for Him; you have taken interest in them, you have cherished them, as if you were the author, you the object of them. You profess to believe in One True God, and to reject every other; and now you are implying that the Hand, the Shadow of that God is on my mind and heart. Who is this God? where? how? in what? O Agellius, you have stood in the way of Him, ready to speak for yourself, using Him as a means to an end.82

When Agellius asks, ‘Do you really wish to be taught who the true God is?’ she responds, ‘I have no such wish. I could not be of your religion.’ Ye Gods! how have I been deceived! I thought every Christian was like Chione. I thought there could not be a cold Christian. Chione spoke as if a Christian’s first thoughts were goodwill to others; as if his state were of such blessedness, that his dearest heart’s wish was to bring others into it. Here is a man who, so far from feeling himself blest, thinks I can bless him! … As for any blessedness he has to show me, why, since he does not feel any himself, no wonder he has none to give away. I thought a Christian was superior to time and place; but all is hollow … . Time was I might have been led to worship you, Agellius; you have hindered it by worshipping me … . There was one thing which I thought

79. 80. 81. 82.

Ibid., 127–8. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 128–9. Ibid., 129.

318

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

you could have given me, better than anything else; but it is a shadow. You have nothing to give. You have thrown me back upon my dreary, dismal self, and the deep wounds of my memory.83

Agellius wishes that Callista might become a Christian; he wishes that he might marry her; and there is a sense that he wishes that she might become a Christian, that he might marry her: his aim is to be close to Callista. This closeness, this communion, is, for him, the aim or end. Yet the communion that obtains between Christians exists only where something ‘superior’ to itself, ‘superior to time and place’, is made the ultimate aim or end. Callista is conscious of a wish to transcend herself, her ‘dreary, dismal self ’; if Agellius thinks she can ‘bless him’, if he desires her, then  – so she thinks  – his religion cannot present him with any ‘blessing’ superior to her; and, if this is so, then that religion cannot present her with anything superior to her ‘dreary, dismal self ’. She feels, moreover, that there is a sense in which he is treating her as a ‘means’ – as a means of assuaging something lacking in ‘himself ’; and, in this, he is deficient in a true ‘goodwill’ to her. Agellius, on leaving Callista, falls ill with a fever; he is tended in his cottage, on the outskirts of Sicca, by a guest, a priest, Caecilius (St Cyprian), who is in flight from Carthage, where Christians are suffering persecution.84 An imperial decree is promulgated, requiring Christians to perform an act of worship to the emperor, that they might show their loyalty to the state. The authorities at Sicca are not prompt to act on it; Christians are few, and some are well connected. In the meantime, an infestation of locusts, and then a famine and a pestilence, brings unrest to Sicca; the people riot, and, in their rage, take up the cry ‘Christians to the lions’.

83. Ibid., 130–2. 84. There are a number of influences on Callista: the general form and style owes much to Walter Scott (whose novels Newman had read, with keen pleasure, for many years); certain aspects of the riot scenes owe something to Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens; and I Promessi Sposi by Alessando Manzoni is another important influence. The portrait of St Cyprian, and of the relationship of St Cyprian to Agellius and Callista, owes much to the portrait of Fra Cristoforo (like St Cyprian, a reformed ‘man of the world’) – a portrait that moved Newman deeply when he first read I Promessi Sposi in 1837. There is a sense in which the basic plot of Callista is a reversal of that of I Promessi Sposi: in I Promessi Sposi, a young couple, Renzo and Lucia, wishing to get married, encounter innumerable difficulties, which they eventually overcome (the last of these difficulties being the scruples of Lucia as to whether a vow of celibacy which she had made, somewhat impetuously, while in danger, prohibits her from getting maried – scruples which Fra Cristoforo enables her to overcome, by pointing out that her ‘promise’ to Renzo was prior to her ‘promise’ to embrace celibacy, and could not be annulled by the later promise); Callista begins with an offer of marriage that is refused, and shows the movement of Agellius and Callista – a movement connected (providentially) to their relationship with St Cyprian  – toward celibacy and martyrdom.

7. Faith and Civilization

319

Callista, fearing for the safety of Agellius, goes to his cottage to warn him of his peril, and there she encounters Caecilius. Realizing that he is a Christian, she tells him that she could never become a Christian – ‘Its maxims are too beautiful to be realized; and then on the other hand, its dogmas are too dismal, too shocking, too odious to be believed.’85 She insists that she could never believe in ‘an eternal Tartarus’. In response, he asks her, ‘Are you happy?’ She replies that she is not. Perhaps you have been growing in unhappiness for years; is it so? you assent. You have a heavy burden at your heart, you don’t well know what. And the chance is, that you will grow in unhappiness for the next ten years to come. You will be more and more unhappy the longer you live. Did you live till you were an old woman, you would not know how to bear your existence … . Every day adds to your burden. This is a law of your present being, somewhat more certain than the assertion which you just now so confidently made, the impossibility of your believing in that law. You cannot refuse to accept what is not an opinion, but a fact. I say this burden which I speak of is not simply a dogma of our creed, it is an undeniable fact of nature. You cannot change it by wishing … if you lived five hundred years on earth, you would but have a heavier load on you as time went on. But you will not live, you will die. Perhaps you will tell me that you will then cease to be. I don’t believe you think so. I may take for granted that you think with me, and with the multitude of men, that you will still live, that you will still be you. You will still be the same being, but deprived of those outward stays and reliefs and solaces, which, such as they are, you now enjoy. You will be yourself, shut up in yourself. I have heard that people go mad at length when placed in solitary confinement. If, then, on passing hence, you are cut off from what you had here, and have only the company of yourself, I think your burden will be, so far, greater, not less than it is now … . Supposing you were among those whom you actually did not love; supposing you did not like them, nor their occupations, and could not understand their aims; suppose there be, as Christians say, one Almighty God, and you did not like Him, and had no taste for thinking of Him, and no interest in what He was and what He did; and supposing you found that there was nothing else anywhere but He, whom you did not love and whom you wished away: would you not be still more wretched?86

Caecilius sets out the view which Newman had set out in one of his early sermons, preached in 1826, ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, on ‘the loneliness of a man of earthly dispositions and tastes, thrust into the society of saints and angels’. ‘How forlorn would he wander through the courts of heaven! He would find no one like himself; he would see in every direction the marks of God’s holiness, and these would make him shudder’; ‘even supposing a man of unholy life

85. Callista, 216. 86. Ibid., 217–20.

320

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

were suffered to enter heaven, he would not be happy there’.87 Caecilius considers, moreover, not merely the ‘loneliness’ that consists in being among others with different ‘dispositions and tastes’, he considers the ‘loneliness’ that is inseparable from the ‘burden’ of selfhood: simply to be ‘yourself, shut up in yourself ’, would be a ‘Tartarus’. Caecilius insists that only Christianity fulfils the desire for happiness, for Christianity fulfils the need of the soul to transcend itself, in the love of an ‘Object’ truly worthy of unreserved love. If all your thoughts go one way; if you have needs, desires, aims, aspirations, all of which demand an Object, and imply, by their very existence, that such an Object does exist also; and if nothing here does satisfy them, and if there be a message which professes to come from that Object, of whom you already have the presentiment, and to teach you about Him, and to bring the remedy you crave; and if those who try that remedy say with one voice that the remedy answers; are you not bound … at least to look that way, to inquire into what you hear about it, and to ask for His help, if He be, to enable you to believe in Him? … We have no love for Him who alone lasts. We love those things which do not last, but come to an end. Things being thus, He whom we ought to love has determined to win us back to Him. With this object He has come into His own world, in the form of one of us men. And in that human form He opens His arms and woos us to return to Him, our Maker. This is our Worship, this is our Love.88

Callista declares, at this, that ‘it is our own notion of the First and only Fair, yet embodied in a substance, yet dissolving again into a sort of imagination … . It is beyond me.’89 When Caecilius urges her to ‘leave the creature for the Creator’, she replies ‘I am a tree which will not bear transplanting … . The pride of mind, the revel of the intellect, the voice and eyes of genius, and the fond beating heart, I cannot do without them. I cannot do without what you, Christian, call sin.’90 When he asks, ‘Am not I too a brand plucked out of the fire?’, she replies, ‘So after all, priest … you are but a man like others; a frail, guilty person like myself. I can find plenty of persons who do as I do; I want some one who does not; I want some one to worship.’91 They are interrupted by the arrival of a mob from Sicca; before Caecilius flees, he gives Callista a parchment, the Gospel of Luke. Callista is mistaken for a Christian, seized by the mob, and is then imprisoned by the city authorities. Reflecting, in solitude, she realizes ‘to her surprise, [that] the more she thought over what she heard of Christianity, the more she was drawn to it, and the more it approved itself to her whole soul, and the more it seemed to respond to all her needs and aspirations, and the more intimate was her

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’, in PPS i, 7, 7–8, 3. Callista, 220–1. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 223, 224.

7. Faith and Civilization

321

presentiment that it was true’.92 It ‘seemed (unlike the mythology or the philosophy of her country, or the political religion of Rome) to have an external reality and substance, which deprived objections to it of their power’.93 She had long given up any belief in the religion of her country. As to philosophy, it dwelt only in conjecture and opinion; whereas the very essence of religion was, as she felt, a recognition of the worshippers on the part of the Object of it. Religion could not be without hope. To worship a being who did not speak to us, recognise us, love us, was not religion. It might be a duty, it might be a merit; but her instinctive notion of religion was the soul’s response to a God who had taken notice of the soul. It was loving intercourse, or it was a name. Now the three witnesses who had addressed her about Christianity had each of them made it to consist in the intimate Divine Presence in the heart. It was the friendship or mutual love of person with person. Here was the very teaching which already was so urgently demanded both by her reason and her heart, which she found nowhere else; which she found existing one and the same in a female slave, in a country youth, in a learned priest.94

Recalling the Christians she has known, she recognizes in them ‘a simplicity, a truthfulness, a decision, an elevation, a calmness, and a sanctity to which she was a stranger, which spoke to her heart and absolutely overcame her’.95 She cannot consider herself a Christian, yet, called before the magistrate, she cannot carry out the act of worship – to the emperor, and Rome – required of her: ‘I cannot! I dare not!’96 While she is in prison, her brother, Aristo, brings a philosopher, Polemo, to talk with her. Polemo urges her to consider that ‘older religions than yours, more intellectual, more beautiful religions, which have had a position, and a history, and a political influence, have come to nought; and shall you prevail, you, a congeries, a hotch-potch of the leavings, and scraps, and broken meat of the great peoples of the East and West? Blush, blush, Grecian Callista … a lady of high character, of brilliant accomplishments, to be the associate of the outcasts of society!’97 She asks Polemo if he believes in God – to which he responds that he believes in ‘one eternal, self-existing something’ – and she declares that ‘I feel that God within my heart’.98 I feel myself in His presence. He says to me, ‘Do this: don’t do that’. You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as is to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Ibid., 292. Ibid. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 294. Ibid., 301–2. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 314.

322

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of its divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness – just like that which I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend. So you see, Polemo, I believe in what is more than a mere ‘something’. I believe in what is more real to me than sun, moon, stars, and the fair earth, and the voice of friends. You will say, Who is He? Has He ever told you anything about Himself? Alas! no! – the more’s the pity! But I will not give up what I have, because I have not more. An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear … . Shall I … worship any but Him? Shall I say that He whom I see not, whom I seek, is our Jupiter, or Caesar, or the goddess Rome? They are none of them images of this inward guide of mine. I sacrifice to Him alone … . O that I could find Him! … On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him not.99

Callista has attained to the pitch of ‘natural religion’ – recognizing, in the ‘dictates’ of the conscience, the ‘echo of a person’. She has not yet been presented with an ‘image’ of that person. When, eventually, she reads the Gospel, she encounters that ‘image’. When she had once taken it up, she did not lay it down. Even at other times she would have prized it, but now, when she was so desolate and lonely, it was simply a gift from an unseen world. It opened a view of a new state and community of beings, which only seemed too beautiful to be possible. But not into a new state of things alone, but into the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection. Here was that to which her intellect tended, though that intellect could not frame it. It could approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate. Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard, whose Person she was seeking for … . That image sank deep into her; she felt it to be a reality. She said to herself, ‘This is no poet’s dream; it is the delineation of a real individual. There is too much truth and nature, and life and exactness about it, to be anything else’. Yet she shrank from it; it made her feel her own difference from it, and a feeling of humiliation came upon her mind, such as she never had had before … . O what a new world of thought she had entered! it occupied her mind from its very novelty. Everything looked dull and dim by the side of it … . She saw that there was a higher beauty than that which the order and harmony of the natural world revealed, and a deeper peace and calm than that which the exercise, whether of the intellect or of the purest human affection, can supply … . Thus, by degrees, Callista came to walk by a new philosophy; and had ideas, and principles, and a sense of relations and aims, and a susceptibility of arguments, to which before she

99. Ibid., 314–5.

7. Faith and Civilization

323

was an utter stranger. Life and death, action and suffering, fortunes and abilities, all had now a new meaning and application. As the skies speak differently to the philosopher and the peasant, as a book of poems to the imaginative and to the cold and narrow intellect, so now she saw her being, her history, her present condition, her future, in a new light, which no one else could share with her. But the ruling sovereign thought of the whole was He, who exemplified all this wonderful philosophy in Himself.100

She is visited secretly by Caecilius in prison, and asks for baptism. ‘There is but One to love in the whole world, and I wish to love him. I surrender myself to Him, if He will take me; and He shall teach me about Himself.’101 Called before the magistrate again, she again refuses to carry out the act of worship required of her – ‘I worship my true Love, who is the Only True; and He is the Son of God, and I know none but Him’ – and she suffers martyrdom.102

6. What moves Callista to become a Christian is a desire for a full and perfect communion, a perfect ‘friendship or mutual love of person with person’. She feels her ‘dreary, dismal self ’ to be a ‘burden’ – she is ‘shut up’ in herself, and she would transcend herself. She experiences her selfhood as a kind of obstacle to the ‘intimate presence’ of the other to her ‘heart’, or the ‘intimate presence’ of her ‘heart’ to the other. She can transcend this ‘burden’ only in a ‘loving intercourse’ with one who can discern her ‘heart’ perfectly. The God, in whose ‘presence’ she feels she is, can discern her ‘heart’ in this way; yet if she is to commune with this God, He must manifest Himself to her. She feels that she has, in her experience of the ‘dictates’, of the ‘voice’ of the conscience, a sense of the ‘presence’ of God – as the ‘One’ from whom, ‘ultimately’, that ‘voice’ proceeds. The conscience itself is a ‘voice’, or the ‘echo’ of a ‘voice’. The God, whose presence she senses, in or through the ‘voice’ of her conscience, is ‘more real to [her] than sun, moon, stars, and the fair earth, and the voice of friends’. At the core of herself, in her ‘heart’, there is this ‘voice’, or this ‘echo’ of a ‘voice’; there is no part of herself that is ‘shut up’ from it. Yet to encounter an ‘echo’ is not to encounter the source of that echo: her conscience makes her aware of the presence of God, but she feels she cannot ‘touch Him’ (‘O that I could find Him! … On the right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him not’). Her ‘instinctive notion of religion was the soul’s response to a God who had taken notice of the soul’. Callista feels that the ‘Person’ from whom the ‘voice’ of conscience ‘ultimately’ proceeds has never ‘told [her] anything about Himself ’. She would have this ‘Person’ tell her ‘about Himself ’, present Himself

100. Ibid., 325–8. 101. Ibid., 347. 102. Ibid., 361.

324

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

to her. Only when this ‘Person’ presents Himself to her, will she feel she has been ‘taken notice of ’. When Callista is presented with the ‘image’ at the centre of the Gospels, she feels that this image corresponds to her sense of the ‘person speaking’ to her, in, or through, her conscience: ‘Here was He who spoke to her in her conscience; whose Voice she heard, whose Person she was seeking for.’ In, or through, that image, that ‘Person’ presents Himself. She can recognize that this is the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her in her conscience’. She recognizes that this ‘image’ is not simply a creation of the ‘intellect’: it has not been created out of the sense of this ‘Person’ involved in the experience of the conscience; her ‘intellect could not frame it’ – ‘It could approve and acknowledge, when set before it, what it could not originate.’ Encountering that ‘image’, she is put ‘into the presence of One who was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection’. It surpasses her own sense of ‘ideal perfection’; it surpasses what she could ‘frame’ or create. She takes it that it surpasses what any ‘intellect’ could ‘frame’ or create: ‘this is no poet’s dream; it is the delineation of a real individual’; it has the quality of what is ‘real’, external to the ‘intellect’, rather than what is ‘ideal’. From her encounter with the ‘image’ at the centre of the Gospels, she gets a sense that in or through this image, the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her’ in her conscience is presenting Himself to her. She is encountering something external to herself, and is not ‘shut up’ in herself. She identifies the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her in her conscience’, with the ‘real individual’, manifest in or through the ‘image’ presented in the Gospels; that ‘Person’ is revealed in that ‘image’. The ‘image’, then, originates in a reality, a ‘Person’, external to her, such that the ‘image’ attests to the presence, the reality, of that ‘Person’. That ‘Person’ is, equally, present in, or to, her ‘conscience’ – in what is innermost in herself. The ‘image’, as attesting to the presence, the reality, of a ‘Person’ external to her, attests to an act of self-revelation on the part of that ‘Person’. The presence of that image to her is something that emanates from an act of self-revelation on the part of that ‘Person’; and, in that image, that ‘Person’ presents Himself to her. That act of selfrevelation is itself a kind of ‘taking notice’. Callista ‘enters a new world of thought’, in responding to the ‘image’ presented in the Gospels. The transition to a ‘new world of thought’ is not simply a matter of taking in certain ideas; it involves a reorientation of her perspective on everything. ‘As the skies speak differently to the philosopher and the peasant, as a book of poems to the imaginative and to the cold and narrow intellect, so now she saw her being, her history, her present condition, her future, in a new light, which no one else could share with her.’103 It is a change in the ‘light’ in which she ‘sees’ things; it is a change in the way in which she makes sense of things; it is a change in the way in which things ‘speak’ to her. It is a transformation in the way in which the world presents itself to her, and in the way in which she orients herself in the world. The ‘light’, or the source of the ‘light’, which makes this ‘new world of thought’ appear for Callista, is a person. ‘The ruling sovereign thought of the

103. Ibid., 328.

7. Faith and Civilization

325

whole was He, who exemplified all this wonderful philosophy in Himself.’104 The ‘philosophy’ is somehow inseparable from the person of Christ: it is not simply that He presents or illustrates this ‘philosophy’ or this ‘meaning’, but that it is somehow identified with Him. There is a ‘meaning’, a ‘light’, that is identified with Him, in all His particularity as a ‘real individual’. The ‘light’, then, is manifest to Callista, through her apprehension of that ‘real individual’; and this apprehension, for her, involves a relationship with that individual, where she is ‘taken notice of ’: the ‘light’ is manifest to Callista through a relationship, from which nothing in herself is ‘shut up’. When she asks to be baptized, she declares, ‘He shall teach me about Himself.’105 As a particular ‘individual’ is the ‘ruling sovereign thought’ of the ‘world of thought’ which Callista ‘enters’, that ‘world of thought’ is, ultimately, an expression of that ‘individual’. That ‘world of thought’ manifests a person, and it is somehow instinct with the presence of that person. As that ‘world of thought’, in Callista, is instinct with the presence of the ‘Person’ of Christ, so to ‘enter’ that ‘world of thought’ is to ‘enter’ into the presence of Christ, and to form a relationship with Christ. Newman observes that the ‘new light’ Callista has is something ‘which no one else could share with her’. It is a ‘light’ that is there in a relationship engaging her innermost self. It affects the way in which she makes sense of the world; it affects the ‘first springs’ of her consciousness of things.

7. When Callista is visited by the philosopher Polemo, he urges her to recall her proper self-respect, as a Greek, and as a civilized person of ‘brilliant accomplishments’, and to abandon a religion that makes her the ‘associate of the outcasts of society’, a religion that is ‘a hotch-potch of the leavings, and scraps, and broken meat of the great peoples of the East and West’.106 Polemo calls on Callista, as one of the ‘natives of Greece’ – between whom there is a ‘secret sympathy’, as ‘Greeks are what none but they can be’ – to recognize that the current state of civilization, the civilized world, as subject to the dominion of Rome, ‘will be for ever, because it is a whole’; and yet the Romans, unlike the Christians, ‘the upstarts and vagabonds of yesterday’, did not, in establishing their empire, ‘denounce all other rites’ – they ‘left them as they were’.107 The way in which Rome acts – with regard to religion – is an expression of true civilization, for Rome is the supreme, the ultimate civilization; Christianity acts in a manner contrary to the way in which Rome acts – and as such it is contrary to civilization, making Christians the ‘outcasts of society’. As Rome, the supreme civilization, is obliged to permit a diversity of religions – as it, in effect, ‘leaves’ religion, as something

104. 105. 106. 107.

Ibid., 328. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 313. Ibid., 309, 311, 312, 313.

326

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

external to its unity – so religion cannot be a ‘basis’ for civilization: ‘unity’ is to be realized on other grounds; and to aim at ‘unity’ in, or through, religion, is to aim at something chimerical, contrary to the only ‘unity’ that can be realized, the unity of civilization. Polemo, then, urges Callista to reconcile herself to ‘civilization’, to a ‘unity’ realized on a basis other than ‘religion’. In The Rise and Progress of Universities (1856), Newman maintains that ‘Society’ tends to substitute ‘law’, or ‘expediency’ or the ‘sense of beauty’ for the ‘conscience’ (and he observes that the Athenians tended to make the sense of beauty supreme). 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. Coming from one and the same Author, these internal and external monitors of course recognize and bear witness to each other; Nature warrants without anticipating the Supernatural, and the Supernatural completes without superseding Nature. Such is the divine order of things; but man, – not being divine, nor over partial to so stern a reprover within his breast, yet seeing too the necessity of some rule or other, some common standard of conduct, if Society is to be kept together, and the children of Adam to be saved from setting up each for himself with every one else his foe, – as soon as he has secured for himself some little cultivation of intellect, looks about him how he can manage to dispense with Conscience, and find some other principle to do its work. The most plausible and obvious and ordinary of these expedients, is the Law of the State, human law; the more plausible and ordinary, because it really comes to us with a divine sanction, and necessarily has a place in every society or community of men … . Another substitute for Conscience is the rule of Expediency: Conscience is pronounced superannuated and retires on a pension, whenever a people is so far advanced in illumination, as to perceive that right and wrong can to a certain extent be measured and determined by the useful on the one hand, and by the hurtful on the other … . Another substitute of a more refined character is, the principle of Beauty: – it is maintained that the Beautiful and the Virtuous mean the same thing, and are convertible terms. Accordingly Conscience is found out to be but slavish; and a fine taste, an exquisite sense of the decorous, the graceful, and the appropriate, this is to be our true guide for ordering our mind and our conduct, and bringing the whole man into shape. These are great sophisms, it is plain; for, true though it be, that virtue is always expedient, always fair, it does not therefore follow that every thing which is expedient, and every thing which is fair, is virtuous … There are these three principles of conduct, which may be plausibly made use of in order to dispense with Conscience; viz., Law, Expedience, and Propriety; and (at length to come to our point) the Athenians chose the last of them, as became so exquisite a people, and professed to practise virtue on no inferior considerations but simply because it was so praiseworthy, so noble, and so fair. Not that they discarded Law, not that they had not an eye to their interest; but they boasted that ‘grasshoppers’ like them, old of race and pure of blood, could be influenced

7. Faith and Civilization

327

in their conduct by nothing short of a fine and delicate taste, a sense of honour, and an elevated, aspiring spirit. Their model man, like the pattern of chivalry, was a gentleman [kalokaigathos].108

‘Society’ is ‘kept together’, unity is maintained, and, with it, some degree of communion between the members of society, by means of a ‘principle’ other than ‘Conscience’  – whether that principle be ‘law’ or ‘influence’  – a ‘principle’ which, when used, affords a means by which society can ‘manage to dispense with Conscience’. Callista feels that, in her relationship with Christ, she experiences a communion from which nothing in her ‘heart’, or her self, is ‘shut up’: it is, as such, something ‘deeper’, more ‘real’, than the kinds of communion, or relationship, she experiences in ‘Society’. In this communion, she experiences ‘a deeper peace and calm than that which the exercise, whether of the intellect or of the purest human affection, can supply’ – with this kind of ‘exercise’ of the ‘intellect’, or of ‘affection’, being, it would seem, a feature of the more ‘refined’ forms of ‘Society’.109 Callista is moved to convert by recognizing, when presented with an ‘image’ of Christ, that ‘here was He who spoke to her in her conscience’.110 Yet she is not moved solely by this ‘inward’ experience – she is moved, equally, by her experience of the Christians she has encountered. It is not simply that the ‘wonderful unity of sentiment and belief in persons so dissimilar from each other’ seems to attest to the ‘external reality and substance’ of ‘the doctrine which they were so unanimous in teaching’; it is that they have certain qualities which ‘[speak] to her heart’ – ‘a simplicity, a truthfulness, a decision, an elevation, a calmness, and a sanctity to which she [is] a stranger’.111 To have ‘simplicity’ or ‘truthfulness’ is to show oneself as one is. The Christians whom Callista has met are ‘real’: their professions correspond to who they are. In a sermon on ‘Unreal Words’, preached in 1839, Newman declares that ‘nothing is so rare as honesty and singleness of mind; so much so, that a person who is really honest, is already perfect’; ‘St. Paul says of himself and his fellow-labourers, that they were true because Christ is true.’112 Where a person has ‘honesty’, ‘truthfulness’, then the truth of that person animates the relationships which that person forms with others. Those relationships, and the ‘Society’ that develops in, and from them, are animated by truth. While Callista senses a ‘truthfulness’ in the Christians whom she encounters, they are, nevertheless, somewhat reserved with her. Some of the reserve of the Christians may be accounted for in relation to the odium attaching to the profession of Christianity in a world dominated by paganism  – in such circumstances,

108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’, in HS iii, 79–81. Callista, 327. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 292, 293, 294. ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 31.

328

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Christians need to be cautious, they need to protect themselves. (When Callista first meets Caecilius, and takes him at once for a Christian, he remarks ‘if I am a Christian … who are you that are so careful of us?’ – he does not simply avow himself a Christian). Some of the reserve of the Christians may, moreover, be accounted for in relation to the disciplina arcani, a sense on the part of the Christians whom Callista questions about Christianity, that they must accommodate their answers to her capacity to understand them, that they must convey to her no more than what she is fitted to understand, lest they mislead her. (The case of Agellius is, perhaps, different again. Callista declares to him ‘what have you ever told me of your Master? … . If, as you imply, my wants and aspirations are the same as yours, what have you done towards satisfying them? … you have watched those wants and aspirations for yourself, not for Him.’113 He has ‘watched’ them as a ‘means’ by which a sympathy, an intimacy, between himself and Callista might be established.) Callista perceives, at any rate, that the Christians she has encountered have certain qualities of character – including ‘simplicity’ and ‘truthfulness’ – to which she is ‘a stranger’: they have something in common, a common ethos. In his ‘Advertisement’ Newman remarks that Callista is about ‘the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and heathens’ in the third century. In 1843, Newman preached two sermons on the Christian ‘character’, as portrayed in the Scriptures, ‘The Apostolical Christian’ and ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ – reflecting on what the early Christians ‘looked like outwardly’, to those around them, and on what the ‘children of men’ made of them.114 The sermons are about the encounter of two different societies – the ‘city of God’, and the ‘city of man’. In ‘The Apostolical Christian’, Newman observes that the ‘first great and obvious characteristic of a Bible Christian’ – that is, a Christian as portrayed in the Bible – is ‘to be without worldly ties or objects, to be living in this world, but not for this world. St. Paul says, “our conversation is in heaven,” [Phil. iii.20.] or in other words, heaven is our city’; so ‘he surely is a primitive Christian, and he only, who has no aim of this world, who has no wish to be other in this world than he is; whose thoughts and aims have relation to the unseen, the future world; who has lost his taste for this world, sweet and bitter being the same to him’.115 A Christian, anticipating a more perfect union with Christ, is engaged in ‘watching’ – waiting for Christ  – and in ‘prayer’  – ‘conversation’ with Christ.116 For the ‘Apostolical’ Christian, ‘there was no barrier, no cloud, no earthly object, interposed between the soul … and its Saviour and Redeemer. Christ was in his heart, and therefore all that came from his heart, his thoughts, words, and actions, savoured of Christ. The Lord was his light, and therefore he shone with the illumination.’117

113. Callista, 129. 114. ‘The Apostolical Christian’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day [hereafter SSD] (1843; 1869; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902), 282. 115. ‘The Apostolical Christian’, in SSD, 278, 279. 116. Ibid., 279, 282. 117. Ibid., 281.

7. Faith and Civilization

329

Newman attempts to characterize what ‘Christians … in that early time, looked like outwardly, who were citizens of heaven within’.118 He maintains that they ‘were a simple, innocent, grave, humble, patient, meek, and loving body, without earthly advantages or worldly influence’; and in illustration of this, he cites Acts, ch. 4 – ‘the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common’ – observing that ‘such was the natural consequence of a deep conviction of the nothingness of this world, and the all-importance of the other’ for ‘those who understood that they were “fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God,” could not but show it in their actions’, and could not go ‘on eating, and drinking, and conversing like children of men’.119 Newman does not stress the radical unity, the radical community, that obtained among the early Christians; rather, he stresses the difference of those early Christians from the ‘children of men’: their use of the things of this world, he suggests, reflects a sense of the ‘nothingness’ of those things, rather than a sense of the need for those things to be ‘common’. (This would suggest that one makes things ‘common’ if one regards them as being of little moment; yet might one not make things ‘common’ out of a high regard for, a charitable devotion to, those with whom one has those things in common?) He observes that such a mode of life shows a disregard for making provision for the future  – a detachment from worldly ‘riches’, from that which makes for worldly security. Of the ‘Our Father’, he remarks that it presents a ‘view of the Christian’ as living with ‘evil round about him, enemies and persecutors in his path, temptation in prospect, help for the day, sin to be expiated, God’s will in his heart, God’s Name on his lips, God’s kingdom in his hopes’.120 In his sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman observes that the ‘innocence’ or ‘simplicity’ of the early Christians prompted the ‘world’ about them to suspect them of ‘craft’ or duplicity. Innocence, or harmlessness, is … simplicity in act, purity in motive, honesty in aim; acting conscientiously and religiously, according to the matter in hand, without caring for consequences or appearances; doing what appears one’s duty, and being obedient for obedience’ sake, and leaving the event to God. This is to be innocent as the dove; yet this conduct is the truest wisdom; and this conduct accordingly has pre-eminently the appearance of craft.121

Callista recognizes the ‘simplicity’ of the Christians she encounters for what it is – she recognizes in them ‘a simplicity, a truthfulness, a decision, an elevation, a calmness, and a sanctity to which she [is] a stranger’.122 She is not, then, such ‘a

118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

Ibid., 282. Ibid. Ibid., 289. ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 299. Callista, 292, 293, 294.

330

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

stranger’ from this state of mind as to be incapable of recognizing it; she does not mistake it for something else, take it for ‘craft’ or the like. Yet she feels, nevertheless, a ‘stranger’ from this state of mind, and, in some sense, from those who have it. During her time in prison, prior to her conversion, she ‘has not yet a peace within her. Her peace is the stillness of the room in which she is imprisoned … she has no stay whereon to lean.’123 Her ‘brother comes to her: he affects to forget her perverseness or delusion. He comes to her with a smile, and throws his arms around her; and Callista repels, from some indescribable feeling, his ardent caress, as if she were no longer his.’124 Callista has tended to acquiesce in his wishes, to show an ‘amiable unresisting submission’ – to be whatever has been expected of her.125 Her brother is affecting ‘to forget her perverseness’ – refusing to relate to her as she truly is; he sets out, in this, the terms on which he will relate to her, the terms, in a sense, on which she will exist for him.126 In her withdrawal from him, she ‘repels’ these terms: she is not simply ‘his’. She is, at this moment, withdrawing from ‘Society’ – she is refusing to conform to the expectations of a society which she apprehends as false – but she does not have a ‘stay whereon to lean’. Called before the court, and required to ‘sacrifice to the genius of the Emperor’, she feels, for a moment ‘abandoned’ – ‘I have no god. What can I do? I am abandoned; why should I not do it?’ – and she takes up the incense, but then, at the last moment, ‘she looked up to heaven and started, and threw it away. “I cannot! I dare not!”’127 Her brother declares that she is ‘mad’ – and makes this a part of his legal defence of her: he proposes that she should be left to herself, and left to ‘get right’, to be ‘restored to the gods and to me’.128 Callista feels she cannot carry out an act of ‘worship’ to ‘the genius of the emperor’, because she does not, in truth, worship the genius of the emperor – to do so would violate the truth of her ‘conscience’; those who urge her to do so, do not require her to worship the emperor in truth – rather, they construe the action of ‘sacrifice’ as a demonstration of loyalty to a ‘civilization’, an order, which has a ‘unity’ that is not based on religion (Polemo reminds her that the Romans, in establishing their empire, did not ‘denounce all other rites’, but ‘left them as they were’); what is required of her is that she play a particular role, in a ritual, to show her willingness to play that role, and to show her submission to the authority that appoints that role; in this, it is made plain to her, she is not taken to be professing to believe in the truth of that role (she is not professing that she ‘means’ what she does, so to speak). She almost falters, in this, as she feels ‘abandoned’; but, in the event, she ‘dare not’ disregard her conscience. The expectation of her brother, though, that she will ‘get right’ in time, and be ‘restored to the gods’ is, perhaps, shrewd. How long could such a resistance be maintained?

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

Ibid., 295. Ibid., 295–6. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 295. Ibid., 301–2. Ibid., 302.

7. Faith and Civilization

331

What enables Callista to persevere, in the end, is the sense of communion with Christ that she has after being baptised – ‘He will come to me.’129 She is no longer ‘abandoned’ to herself, but belongs to another ‘Society’. Callista observes a ‘truthfulness’ and ‘simplicity’ in the Christians she encounters: they live in a way that is in accord with what is within them; they are as they appear. They are in a relationship, a communion with Christ, that is such that the truth within them – the truth with which the ‘voice’ of the conscience is concerned – is not ‘shut up’ from Christ but is loved by Christ. ‘The Infinite, had loved the soul of man so much … that He had come upon earth in the form of a man, and in that form had gone through sufferings, in order to unite all souls to Him.’130 They are of a ‘city’ – ‘heaven’ – that is other than the city of ‘Rome’; and in the ‘conversation’ that is the life of ‘heaven’, nothing within them is ‘shut up’. The Christians that Callista encounters have a certain ‘simplicity’ or integrity. They are not designing  – and this may be due, in part, to their not having ‘aim[s] of this world’, which might be procured through such designs. More than this, though, they are ‘citizens of heaven’: in the ‘conversation’ of ‘heaven’ they have a ‘stay whereon to lean’, and their identity, their selfhood, is not dependent on (or vulnerable to) the ‘conversation’ of the earthly ‘city’. Nothing within them is ‘shut up’ from the ‘conversation’ of ‘heaven’. The ‘conversation’ of ‘heaven’, unlike the conversation of the earthly ‘city’, engages, involves, all of the self, and it forms the self wholly, making for perfect integrity and ‘simplicity’.

8. Callista is a person of ‘brilliant accomplishments’. Polemo takes it that such ‘accomplishments’ are inconsistent with the profession of Christianity: she is eminently civilized, yet she would join herself to the ‘outcasts of society’. Her profession of Christianity does, as a matter of fact, involve a renunciation of everything else – even her own life. Caecilius observes a marked change in her, after her conversion. When he first encounters her, he is struck by the ‘charm’ of her face – ‘its charm was a noble and majestic calm … the calm of Greek sculpture; it imaged a soul nourished upon the visions of genius, and subdued and attuned by the power of a strong will. There was no appearance of timidity in her manner; very little of modesty.’131 When he sees her again, after her imprisonment, and after her encounter with the ‘image’ of Christ in the Gospel, an encounter which moves her to ask for baptism, ‘he could hardly keep from tears, of pain, or of joy, or of both, when he saw the great change which trial had wrought in her’. What touched him most was the utter disappearance of that majesty of mien, which once was hers, a gift, so beautiful, so unsuitable to fallen man. There was

129. Ibid., 361. 130. Ibid., 293–4. 131. Ibid., 213.

332

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

instead of it a frank humility, a simplicity without concealment, an unresisting meekness, which seemed as if it would enable her, if trampled on, to smile and to kiss the feet that insulted her. She had lost every vestige of what the world worships under the titles of proper pride and self-respect. Callista was now living, not in the thought of herself, but of Another.132

There are, in Callista, scenes of cruelty, of violence, of suffering; and these scenes reveal the chaos, the horror, of the order of things which opposes the ‘city’ of ‘heaven’. Callista herself – on turning from this order – is subjected to a violence that is an expression of it. After she is dead, her body is left on the ground, guarded by Roman soldiers: ‘Her features have reassumed their former majesty, but with an expression of childlike innocence and heavenly peace.’133 A group of Christians arrive  – Agellius among them  – to take her for burial, and the soldiers protect them from the throng. Agellius, his ‘heart … torn’, contemplates her ‘senseless, motionless, broken frame’. It was in the pride of her earthly beauty, and the full vigour and elevation of her mind, that he last had seen her. It seemed an age since that morning, as if a chasm ran between the now and the then, when she so fascinated him with her presence, and so majestically rebuked him for bowing to that fascination. Yet on his memory every incident of that interview was fixed, and was indelible. O why should the great Creator shatter one of His most admirable works! If the order of the sun and stars is adorable, if the laws by which earth and sea are kept together mark the Hand of supreme Wisdom and Power, how much nobler perfection of beauty is manifested in man! And of human nature itself here was the supereminent crown, a soul full of gifts, full of greatness, full of intellect, placed in an outward form, equally surpassing in its kind, and still more surpassingly excellent from its intimate union and subordination to the soul, so as almost to be its simple expression; yet this choicest, rarest specimen of Almighty skill, the Almighty had pitilessly shattered, in order that it might inherit a higher, an eternal perfection. O mystery of mysteries, that heaven should not be possibly obtained without such grinding down and breaking up of our original nature! O mysterious, that principle in us, whatever it is, and however it came there, which is so antagonistic to God, which has so spoilt what seems so good, that all must be undone, and must begin anew! ‘An enemy hath done this;’ and, knowing as much as this, and no more, we must leave the awful mystery to that day when all things shall be made light.134

Agellius is concerned, here, with the ‘mystery’ of death. What has been ‘shattered’, in Callista, is the ‘intimate union’ of the body and the soul. Why ‘death’ is

132. Ibid., 345. 133. Ibid., 372. 134. Ibid., 374–5.

7. Faith and Civilization

333

necessary  – why there should be an ‘undoing’ of what has been created, that it might be created anew, in a ‘higher’ form – is a ‘mystery’. He acknowledges that ‘an enemy hath done this’ – the ‘grinding down and breaking up’ is exerted against that ‘which is so antagonistic to God’, which has insinuated itself into that which ‘seems so good’. He is concerned, then, with the violence of death itself, a violence which Callista would have undergone, even if she had lived the most peaceful of lives. Yet it so happens that Callista has suffered a violent death; she has been subjected to violence. Agellius reflects on the violence of death. He characterizes death as a ‘grinding down and breaking up’. Does this suggest a connection between the violence of death  – the act of God  – with the violence to which Callista has been subjected? Does this associate the act of God with the cruelty to which Callista has been subjected? If the sufferings which Callista undergoes are in some sense ‘purgatorial’, an expression of the retributive justice of God, and yet those sufferings are, equally, an expression of the violence of an order – the earthly ‘city’ – which rejects God, then what is the relationship between the ‘act’ of God and the act of the godless world, with regard to those sufferings? How does her undergoing of these sufferings relate to the loss of her ‘majesty’? Is the ‘majesty’ of God somehow inimical to the ‘majesty’ of Callista (so that the majesty of Callista invites a kind of nemesis  – like that envisaged in the ‘pagan’ scheme of things, where Fate, or the affronted gods, subdue human pride by inflicting sufferings)? Before she undergoes any of her sufferings, Callista undergoes a change in which her ‘majesty of mien’ – expressive of ‘a soul nourished upon the visions of genius, and subdued and attuned by the power of a strong will’, a soul that has been ‘subdued and attuned’ by the sense of beauty – is replaced with a ‘frank humility, a simplicity without concealment, an unresisting meekness’ – expressive of a soul that has abjured ‘what the world worships under the titles of proper pride and selfrespect’. Callista, in her ‘majesty’, had a ‘soul’ that was in some sense the creation of ‘visions of genius’ and of the ‘will’. (The ‘visions’ could be taken to be something like the common property of ‘Greek’ culture, or civilization – the ‘visions’ which were the ‘poet’s dream’  – or they could be taken to be the ‘visions’ of Callista herself, forming visions, in ‘her most imaginative moments’ of ‘ideal perfection’.) In her ‘majesty’, she has a kind of mastery over herself: she has created herself, through the ‘power of a strong will’, from the ‘visions’ which she has formed, or received. When she begins to live ‘in the thought of Another’, she abandons this self-mastery, or self-possession. The rapture that takes her out of herself involves nothing violent, only ‘mutual love’. The violence to which Callista is subjected, by ‘Rome’, is exerted with the aim of making her abandon herself, or her ‘conscience’. That violence is taken, however, by Callista, as a way of communing with the ‘Person’ who ‘spoke to her in her conscience’, a ‘Person’ who suffered for her – it is, for her, a way of participating in the sufferings of that ‘Person’, and of having a fuller communion with that ‘Person’: ‘He has been there before me, and He will come to me there.’135 When she is told that her god will ‘leave’ her, in her suffering,

135. Ibid., 361.

334

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

she replies, ‘He loves me the more.’136 The violence which she undergoes is not, then, experienced by her as separating her from Christ. The relationship of Christ to that violence – as Callista understands it – is not that He inflicts it, but that ‘He has been there’, enduring it, and that He will be there, with those who endure it. Callista undergoes a change in which she abandons a ‘majesty’, a self-mastery, that consists in her cultivation of her ‘soul’, as ‘nourished’ by ‘visions of genius’: she has formed her soul, by her own ‘will’, according to her vision of ‘ideal perfection’. She abandons this state of self-mastery  – a realization of the Athenian ideal of a self formed by ‘a fine and delicate taste, a sense of honour, and an elevated, aspiring spirit’ – to live ‘in the thought of Another’. Should this be taken to show that the cultivation of the self, associated with ‘civilization’, is inconsistent with Christianity? In a sermon on ‘The State of Innocence’, preached in 1838, Newman asks, ‘what … is intellect itself, as exercised in the world, but a fruit of the fall … and only not incompatible with the regenerate mind?’137 The ‘exercises and developments’ of ‘the powers of mind by which … the structure of society is kept together’ would not have taken the forms they take, indeed, ‘would not have been [at all] but for sin’.138 They are good, as countering ‘the effects of the fall’, and they take the form they have as encountering those ‘effects’.139 Yet they are marked by the circumstances in which they arise, and, as such, they are ‘probably far from the highest which our mind is capable of ’.140 What is more, while they may be ‘in themselves excellent’, they can ‘subserve sin’: since the fall, ‘passion and reason have abandoned their due place in man’s nature, which is one of subordination, and conspired together against the Divine light within him, which is his proper guide’.141 They take form as encountering the ‘effects of the fall’, and those ‘effects’, as constituting the situation in which they develop, limit, restrict, and mark the ways in which they develop. They can, moreover, take a form that is itself one of the ‘effects’ of the fall: they can usurp the ‘Divine light’ (the conscience). They are good as countering disorder (though as they can do more than counter disorder, the use of them to counter disorder might involve a neglect of some of their ‘higher’ uses) – yet they can themselves become disordered, when they are made supreme, and not subjected to a higher ‘light’. In his sermon on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’ preached in 1856, Newman suggests that the ‘fall’ involved a separation of the ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ aspects of the soul. It was not so in the beginning; not that our nature is essentially different from what it was when first created; but that the Creator, upon its creation, raised it above itself by a supernatural grace, which blended together all its faculties,

136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

Ibid., 362. ‘The State of Innocence’, in PPS v, 112. Ibid., 113, 114. Ibid., 113. Ibid. Ibid., 114.

7. Faith and Civilization

335

and made them conspire into one whole, and act in common towards one end … [but] it is otherwise now; so much the worse for us; – the grace is gone; the soul cannot hold together; it falls to pieces; its elements strive with each other.142

There are different ‘dominions … in the soul’, so that ‘you find in one man, or one set of man, the reign’ of different powers – whether ‘passion, or appetite’, or ‘brute strength and material resources’, or ‘intellect’, or ‘the more excellent reign of virtue’, and these are ‘all severally embodied on a grand scale, in large establishments and centres’.143 One cannot but ‘choose’ between them for one ‘cannot help thinking, speaking, and acting; and to think, speak, and act, is to choose’.144 With regard to choosing between ‘intellect’ and ‘conscience’, Callista is captivated by an ‘image’ that she feels to be quite different from the ‘visions of genius’, from any ‘poet’s dream’, from ‘anything that she had, in her most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection’, and in, or through, this ‘image’ she apprehends, ‘He who spoke to her in her conscience.’ What she is converted from is not so much ‘intellect’ per se, as it is the ‘proper pride’ that would take ‘intellect’, the ‘visions of genius’, and ‘will’ to be sufficient (and supreme) in forming the ‘soul’. Callista, on being converted, acquires a ‘new philosophy’, a new ‘light’, such that ‘all had a new meaning’; and the ‘ruling sovereign thought of the whole was He, who exemplified all this wonderful philosophy in Himself ’. One might anticipate that, given opportunity, she might, through the ‘exercises and developments’ of her ‘intellect’, elaborate something of this ‘wonderful philosophy’, relating it to, and subsuming within it, the ‘visions of genius’  – yet she is not given such an opportunity. In his sermon on ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, Newman observes that, as ‘conscience’ and ‘intellect’ have, in fact, formed distinct ‘dominions’, ‘it comes to be taken for granted that they cannot be united; and it is commonly thought, because some men follow duty, others pleasure, others glory, and others intellect, therefore that one of these things excludes the other; that duty cannot be pleasant, that virtue cannot be intellectual, that goodness cannot be great, that conscientiousness cannot be heroic’ but he insists that while ‘the fact is often so … there is a separation … I deny its necessity’.145 In ‘Christianity and Letters’, an essay included in The Idea of a University, Newman observes that while ‘Christianity’ and ‘civilization’ are distinct ‘systems’, operating according to different principles, nevertheless ‘Christianity waited till the orbis terrarum attained its most perfect form before it appeared; and it soon coalesced, and has ever since co-operated, and often seemed identical, with the Civilization which is its companion’; and he maintains that this ‘coalescence’ of Christianity and civilization is maintained, in fact, in the traditions of Rome: ‘The grace stored in Jerusalem, and the gifts which radiate from Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome. This is true as a

142. 143. 144. 145.

‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’, in SPVO, 6. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 7–8.

336

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

matter of history. Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning; she has perpetuated and dispensed the traditions of Moses and David in the supernatural order, and of Homer and Aristotle in the natural. To separate those distinct teachings, human and divine, which meet in Rome, is to retrograde.’146

9. In a couple of essays, on ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, and ‘The Benedictine Schools’, published in the Atlantis in 1858 and 1859, Newman set out a vision of how Christian ‘education’, and ‘Christian civilization’ had developed, from antiquity to the present. He suggests that Christian civilization has had three phases, each one associated with a ‘Patriarch’, who founded a religious order, characterized by different virtues: ‘St. Benedict has had the training of the ancient intellect, St. Dominic of the medieval; and St. Ignatius of the modern.’147 Newman associates a different ‘discriminating badge’ with each: ‘To [St Benedict] let me assign, for his discriminating badge, the element of Poetry; to St. Dominic, the Scientific element; and to St. Ignatius, the Practical.’148 These phases of Christian civilization did not supersede one another – ‘What the Catholic Church once has had, she never has lost.’149 ‘Imagination, Science, Prudence, all are good, and she has them all. Things incompatible in nature, coexist in her; her prose is poetical on the one hand, and philosophical on the other.’150 With regard to the Benedictines, Newman maintains that the Benedictine vocation was ‘flight from the world, and nothing else’ – ‘flight’ from a civilized order that was ‘old, decayed, and moribund’, from a ‘society’ that was ‘in a slow fever of consumption’ – and it was this that made ‘the monastic state the most poetical of religious disciplines’, for it ‘was a return to that primitive age of the world, of which poets have so often sung, the simple life of Arcadia or the reign of Saturn, when fraud and violence were unknown’.151 ‘Nature for art, the wide earth and the majestic heavens for the crowded city, the subdued and docile beasts of the field for the wild passions and rivalries of social life, tranquillity for ambition and care, divine meditation for the exploits of the intellect, the Creator for the creature, such was the normal condition of the monk.’152 Yet, in this ‘flight’ from the civilized world, the monks preserved the elements of civilization, and ‘helped to create’ a ‘new world’: ‘By degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city. Roads and bridges connected it with other abbeys and cities, which had similarly grown up;

146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

Idea of a University, 265. ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 366. Ibid., 366. Ibid., 368. Ibid., 369. Ibid., 374, 375, 385. Ibid., 385.

7. Faith and Civilization

337

and what the haughty Alaric or fierce Attila had broken to pieces, these patient meditative men had brought together and made to live again.’153 They had sought, in the lonely wood or the silent mountain top, the fair uncorrupted form of nature, which spoke only of the Creator. They had retired into deserts, where they could have no enemies but such as fast and prayer could subdue. They had gone where the face of man was not, except as seen in pale, ascetic apparitions like themselves. They had secured some refuge, whence they might look round at the sick world in the distance, and see it die. But, when that last hour came, it did but frustrate all their hopes, for, instead of an old world at a distance, they found they had a young world close to them. The old order of things died, sure enough; but then a new order took its place, and they themselves, by no will or expectation of their own, were in no small measure its very life. The lonely Benedictine rose from his knees and found himself a city. This was the case, not merely here or there, but everywhere; Europe was new mapped, and the monks were the principle of mapping. They had grown into large communities, into abbeys, into corporations with civil privileges, into land-holders with tenants, serfs, and baronial neighbours; they had become centres of population, the schools of the most cherished truths, the shrines of the most sacred confidences. They found themselves priests, rulers, legislators, feudal lords, royal counsellors, missionary preachers, controversialists.154

That the ‘lonely Benedictine’ should become ‘in no small measure’ the ‘very life’ of a civilization, might seem inconsistent with the Benedictine ‘vocation’, a ‘vocation’ that involved the renunciation of the ‘world’, and Newman acknowledges that the ‘monastic bodies’ were obliged, in undertaking certain ‘functions’, ‘to come to a compromise with the age … [while] reserving their fidelity to St. Benedict’; in response to this ‘compromise’,155 ‘there were holy men who were but impelled into a reaction of the most rigid asceticism by this semblance of a reconciliation between their brethren and the world’ – such as St Romuald or St Bruno; yet those who undertook the ‘work’ of civilization were, nevertheless, ‘specimens of fidelity to their founder … impress[ing] the Benedictine type of sanctity upon their literary or political undertakings’ – and while neither ‘the functions of an Apostle, nor of a schoolmaster, are much akin to those of a monk; nevertheless, in a given individual, they may be reconciled, or the one merged in the other’.156 Newman maintains that the ‘discriminating badge’ of the Benedictine vocation was ‘the element of poetry’, and he associates this ‘element’ with a certain state of the ‘intellect’. The first monks sought ‘flight from the world, and nothing else’.

153. 154. 155. 156.

Ibid., 410. ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in HS ii. Ibid., 443–4. Ibid., 449–50.

338

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

The troubled, jaded, weary heart, the stricken, laden conscience, sought a life free from corruption in its daily work, free from distraction in its daily worship; and it sought employments as contrary as possible to the world’s employments, – employments, the end of which would be in themselves, in which each day, each hour, would have its own completeness; – no elaborate undertakings, no difficult aims, no anxious ventures, no uncertainties to make the heart beat, or the temples throb, no painful combination of efforts, no extended plan of operations, no multiplicity of details, no deep calculations, no sustained machinations, no suspense, no vicissitudes, no moments of crisis or catastrophe; – nor again any subtle investigations, nor perplexities of proof, nor conflicts of rival intellects, to agitate, harass, depress, stimulate, weary, or intoxicate the soul.157

Monachism involved ‘as regards the secular life and all that it implies, emphatically a negation, or, to use another word, a mortification; a mortification of sense, and a mortification of reason’.158 This ‘mortification of reason’ was not simply a rejection of ‘reason’ – it was, rather, a rejection of certain ‘exercises of the reason’, associated with the ‘cultivated’ intellect. They denied themselves … the various and manifold exercises of the reason; and on this account, because such exercises were excitements. When the reason is cultivated, it at once begins to combine, to centralize, to look forward, to look back, to view things as a whole, whether for speculation or for action; it practises synthesis and analysis, it discovers, it invents. To these exercises of the intellect is opposed simplicity, which is the state of mind which does not combine, does not deal with premisses and conclusions, does not recognize means and their end, but lets each work, each place, each occurrence stand by itself,  – which acts towards each as it comes before it, without a thought of anything else. This simplicity is the temper of children, and it is the temper of monks. This was their mortification of the intellect; every man who lives, must live by reason, as every one must live by sense; but, as it is possible to be content with the bare necessities of animal life, so is it possible to confine ourselves to the bare ordinary use of reason, without caring to improve it or make the most of it. These monks held both sense and reason to be the gifts of heaven, but they used each of them as little as they could help, reserving their full time and their whole selves for devotion; – for, if reason is better than sense, so devotion they thought to be better than either; and, as even a heathen might deny himself the innocent indulgences of sense in order to give his time to the cultivation of the reason, so did the monks give up reason, as well as sense, that they might consecrate themselves to divine meditation.159

157. The Mission of, St. Benedict, 375. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 375–6.

7. Faith and Civilization

339

The monks renounced that form of reason which is exercised ‘to combine, to centralize, to look forward, to look back, to view things as a whole’  – to master things  – and it was this that made their ‘vocation’, and their state of ‘intellect’, ‘poetical’.160 Poetry … is always the antagonist to science. As science makes progress in any subject-matter, poetry recedes from it. The two cannot stand together; they belong respectively to two modes of viewing things, which are contradictory of each other. Reason investigates, analyzes, numbers, weighs, measures, ascertains, locates, the objects of its contemplation, and thus gains a scientific knowledge of them. Science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system. The aim of science is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them; that is (to use the familiar term), to master them, or to be superior to them. Its success lies in being able to draw a line round them, and to tell where each of them is to be found within that circumference, and how each lies relatively to all the rest. Its mission is to destroy ignorance, doubt, surmise, suspense, illusions, fears, deceits, according to the ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ of the Poet, whose whole passage, by the way, may be taken as drawing out the contrast between the poetical and the scientific. But as to the poetical, very different is the frame of mind which is necessary for its perception. It demands, as its primary condition, that we should not put ourselves above the objects in which it resides, but at their feet; that we should feel them to be above and beyond us, that we should look up to them, and that, instead of fancying that we can comprehend them, we should take for granted that we are surrounded and comprehended by them ourselves. It implies that we understand them to be vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious; so that at best we are only forming conjectures about them, not conclusions, for the phenomena which they present admit of many explanations, and we cannot know the true one. Poetry does not address the reason, but the imagination and affections; it leads to admiration, enthusiasm, devotion, love. The vague, the uncertain, the irregular, the sudden, are among its attributes or sources. Hence it is that a child’s mind is so full of poetry, because he knows so little; and an old man of the world so devoid of poetry, because his experience of facts is so wide. Hence it is that nature is commonly more poetical than art, in spite of Lord Byron, because it is less comprehensible and less patient of definitions; history more poetical than philosophy; the savage than the citizen; the knight-errant than the brigadier-general; the winding bridle-path than the straight railroad; the sailing vessel than the steamer; the ruin than the spruce suburban box; the Turkish robe or Spanish doublet than the French dress coat.161

160. Ibid. 161. Ibid., 386–8.

340

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman maintains that there is a ‘Virgilian’ quality to the life of the monk. ‘Would that Christianity had a Virgil to describe the old monks at their rural labours … How could he have illustrated that wonderful union, of prayer, penance, toil, and literary work, the true “otium cum dignitate,” a fruitful leisure and a meek-hearted dignity, which is exemplified in the Benedictine!’162 Repose, intellectual and moral, is that quality of country life which [Virgil] selects for his praises; and effort, and bustle, and excitement is that quality of a town life which he abhors. Herein then, according to Virgil, lies the poetry of St. Benedict, in the ‘secura quies et nescia fallere vita’, in the absence of anxiety and fretfulness, of schemes and scheming, of hopes and fears, of doubts and disappointments. Such a life,  – living for the day without solicitude for the morrow, without plans or objects, even holy ones, here below; working, not (so to say) by the piece, but as hired by the hour; sowing the ground with the certainty, according to the promise, of reaping; reading or writing this present week without the consequent necessity of reading or writing during the next; dwelling among one’s own people without distant ties; taking each new day as a whole in itself, an addition, not a complement, to the past; and doing works which cannot be cut short, for they are complete in every portion of them, – such a life may be called emphatically Virgilian. They, on the contrary, whose duty lies in what may be called undertakings, in science and system, in sustained efforts of the intellect or elaborate processes of action, – apologists, controversialists, disputants in the schools, professors in the chair, teachers in the pulpit, rulers in the Church, – have a noble and meritorious mission, but not so poetical a one.163

The monk did not have a ‘duty’ in ‘undertakings’. ‘To the monk heaven was next door; he formed no plans, he had no cares.’164 The monk proposed to himself no great or systematic work, beyond that of saving his soul. What he did more than this was the accident of the hour, spontaneous acts of piety, the sparks of mercy or beneficence, struck off in the heat, as it were, of his solemn religious toil, and done and over almost as soon as they began to be. If today he cut down a tree, or relieved the famishing, or visited the sick, or taught the ignorant, or transcribed a page of Scripture, this was a good in itself, though nothing was added to it tomorrow. He cared little for knowledge, even theological, or for success, even though it was religious. It is the character of such a man to be contented, resigned, patient, and incurious; to create or originate nothing; to live by tradition. He does not analyze, he marvels; his intellect attempts no comprehension of this multiform world, but on the contrary, it is hemmed in, and shut up within it. It recognizes but one cause in

162. Ibid., 408. 163. Ibid., 409. 164. Ibid., 426.

7. Faith and Civilization

341

nature and in human affairs, and that is the First and Supreme; and why things happen day by day in this way, and not in that, it refers immediately to His will. It loves the country, because it is His work; but ‘man made the town’, and he and his works are evil.165

If, then, the Benedictines renewed, and restored ‘the town’, they did not aim at doing so, as a ‘systematic work’. [St Benedict] found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way, not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time or by any rare specific or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often, till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration, rather than a visitation, correction, or conversion. The new world which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes, and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully deciphered and copied and re-copied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one that ‘contended, or cried out’, or drew attention to what was going on; but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city.166

While the Benedictines preserved the ‘elements’ of civilization, and created ‘school[s] of learning’, their learning did not involve ‘sustained efforts of the intellect’; it involved ‘nothing of original research, nothing of brilliant or imposing result’.167 They transcribed manuscripts  – above all, those of the Scriptures, and the Fathers. They collected and arranged passages from the Fathers, commenting on the text of the Scriptures. They established schools, though these were, for the most part, schools for boys, up to the age of fourteen, concerned with elementary studies, principally ‘Grammar’ – which involved ‘such an acquaintance with the literature of a language as is implied in the power of original composition and the viva voce use of it’.168 For ‘for those who wished to proceed further than the studies of their boyhood, seats of higher education had been founded by Charlemagne in the principal cities of his Empire, under the name of public schools, which may be considered the shadow, and even the nucleus of the Universities which arose in a subsequent age’; but in these public schools ‘it is scarcely to be supposed that, in any science whatever, except Grammar, they professed to impart more than

165. 166. 167. 168.

‘The Benedictine Schools’, in HS ii, 452. ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 410. Ibid., 409, 418. ‘The Benedictine Schools’, in HS ii, 460.

342

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the elements’.169 Where the Dominicans would make the ‘Latin tongue minister to scientific uses, for which it was never intended’, the Benedictines had ‘the praise of being familiar with the ancient language itself ’.170 The Benedictine adhered to what was received, what was prescribed, and took up ‘the old books and subjects which he found ready to his hand in the pagan schools, as far as he could religiously do so, rather than to venture on any experiments or system of his own’.171 But if ‘he adopted the Latin writers from his love of prescription, because he found them in possession … there were in fact no writings, after Scripture, more congenial, from their fresh and natural beauty and their freedom from intellectualism, to the monastic temperament’.172 The theology of the Benedictine ‘was a loving study and exposition of Holy Scripture, according to the teaching of the Fathers’.173 [The Benedictine] compared, emendated, and transcribed the text of Scripture; next he transcribed the Fathers who directly or indirectly commented on it; then he attached to its successive portions such passages from the Fathers as illustrated them; then he fused those catenated passages into one homogeneous comment of his own: and there he stopped. He seldom added anything original. In such a task the skill would lie in the happy management and condensation of materials brought together from very various quarters, and here he would find the advantage of the literary habits gained in his early education … . [Benedictine theology] was a loyal adherence to the teaching of the past, a faithful inculcation of it, an anxious transmission of it to the next generation. In this respect it differed from the theology of the times before and after them. Patristic and scholastic theology each involved a creative action of the intellect … . There is no greater mistake, surely, than to suppose that a revealed truth precludes originality in the treatment of it. The contrary is acknowledged in the case of secular subjects, in which it is the very triumph of originality, not to invent or discover what is not already known, but to make old things read as if they were new, from the novelty of aspect in which they are placed. This faculty of investing with associations, of applying to particular purposes, of deducing consequences, of impressing upon the imagination, is creative; and though false associations, applications, deductions, and impressions are often made, and were made by some theologians of the early Church, such as Origen and Tertullian, this does but prove that originality is not co-extensive with truth. And so in like manner as to Scripture; to enter into the mind of the sacred author, to follow his train of thought, to bring together to one focus the lights which various parts of Scripture throw upon his text, and to give adequate expression to the thoughts

169. 170. 171. 172. 173.

Ibid., 460. Ibid., 470. Ibid., 454. Ibid. Ibid., 475.

7. Faith and Civilization

343

thus evolved, in other words, the breadth of view, the depth, or the richness, which we recognize in certain early [Patristic] expositions, is a creation. Nor is it an inferior faculty to discriminate, rescue, and adjust the truth, which a fierce controversy threatens to tear in pieces, at a time when the ecclesiastical atmosphere is thick with the dust of the conflict, when all parties are more or less in the wrong, and the public mind has become so bewildered as not to be able to say what it does or what it does not hold, or even what it held before the strife of ideas began. In such circumstances, to speak the word evoking order and peace, and to restore the multitude of men to themselves and to each other, by a reassertion of what is old with a luminousness of explanation which is new, is a gift inferior only to that of revelation itself.174

The creativity which Newman associates with Patristic and scholastic theology is a creativity in the presentation of ‘old things’ – a matter of discerning a ‘novelty of aspect’ in ‘old things’  – rather than a creativity by which that which is ‘not already known’ is discovered. A creativity of this kind is required in ‘controversy’, to ‘rescue, and adjust the truth’ by a ‘reassertion of what is old with a luminousness of explanation which is new’. This creativity involves more than an adherence to what is ‘prescribed’ or received; it involves a ‘breadth of view’, in which what is ‘prescribed’ or received can be apprehended in a new ‘aspect’. With regard to how the Benedictines conducted themselves, in the controversies of their times, Newman maintains that ‘in proportion as these matters were in substance already decided by the Fathers, they acquitted themselves well in the controversy, and in proportion as these matters demanded some original explanations, the monastic disputants were less successful’.175 Newman maintains that the Benedictine vocation is ‘poetical’, and that it is, as such, contrary to ‘science’; where ‘science results in system, which is complex unity; poetry delights in the indefinite and various as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system’.176 When the Benedictine ‘turned to Scripture … there supernatural truths stand forth as the trees and flowers of Eden, in a divine disorder, as some awful intricate garden or paradise, which he enjoyed the more because he could not catalogue its wonders’.177 For one who ‘delights in the indefinite and various, as contrasted with unity, and in the simple as contrasted with system’, the ‘truths’ of the Scriptures are not to be reduced to system, or ‘catalogue[d]’: they are to be ‘enjoyed’, as they are presented, in their ‘divine disorder’; they are to be taken one by one, not related to one another, and reduced to ‘system’. In his sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman suggested that ‘innocence’ can sometimes be mistaken for ‘wisdom’ or even ‘craft’, because innocence can be

174. 175. 176. 177.

Ibid., 476, 477. Ibid., 478. ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, in HS ii, 386. Ibid., 427.

344

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

effective – it can make for results that look like the results of foresight, calculation, and design. He characterizes innocence as ‘simplicity in act, purity in motive, honesty in aim; acting conscientiously and religiously, according to the matter in hand, without caring for consequences or appearances; doing what appears one’s duty, and being obedient for obedience’ sake, and leaving the event to God’.178 Those who surrender themselves to Christ in implicit faith are graciously taken into His service; and, ‘as men under authority’, they do great things without knowing it, by the Wisdom of their Divine Master. They act on conscience, perhaps in despondency, and without foresight; but what is obedience in them, has a purpose with God, and they are successful, when they do but mean to be dutiful. But what duplicity does the world think it, to speak of conscience, or honour, or propriety, or delicacy, or to give other tokens of personal motives, when the event seems to show that a calculation of results has been the actuating principle at bottom! It is God who designs, but His servants seem designing; and that the more, should it so happen that they really do themselves catch glimpses of their own position in His providential course. For then what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason, and they are able to recognize the expedience of obedience … [But] why must His human instruments set out with a purpose, because they accomplish one? … Men do not like to hear of the interposition of Providence in the affairs of the world; and they invidiously ascribe ability and skill to His agents, to escape the thought of an Infinite Wisdom and an Almighty Power. They will be unjust to their brethren, that they may not be just to Him; they will be wanton in their imputations, rather than humble themselves to a confession.179

Newman suggests, then, that the ‘Wisdom’, informing the acts of ‘those who surrender themselves to Christ in implicit faith’ and ‘do great things without knowing it’ is ‘the Wisdom of their Divine Master’: what they do, out of ‘obedience’, without regard to any particular effect, is, as it happens, effectual, but ‘it is God who designs’. (In much this way, the Benedictines ‘helped to create’ a ‘new world’, a ‘new’ civilization, without in any way ‘designing’ to do so.) Newman, equally, observes that some Christians might ‘catch glimpses of their own position in His providential course’: they might discern something of the ‘Wisdom’, which has appointed their duties, and they might discern the ‘expedience’ of what they are required to do. When they do so, ‘what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason, and they are able to recognize the expedience of obedience’. In a later comment on the sermon, in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman remarks, ‘I suggested that shrewd ecclesiastics, who knew very well that there was neither magic nor craft in the matter, and, from their intimate acquaintance with what actually went on within the Church, discerned what were the real causes of its

178. ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 299. 179. Ibid., 305–7.

7. Faith and Civilization

345

success, were of course under the temptation of substituting reason for conscience, and, instead of simply obeying the command, were led to do good that good might come, that is, to act in order to their success, and not from a motive of faith.’ Some, I said, did yield to the temptation more or less, and their motives became mixed; and in this way the world in a more subtle shape has got into the Church; and hence it has come to pass, that, looking at its history from first to last, we cannot possibly draw the line between good and evil there, and say either that every thing is to be defended, or some things to be condemned. I expressed the difficulty, which I supposed to be inherent in the Church, in the following words. I said, ‘Priestcraft has ever been considered the badge, and its imputation is a kind of Note of the Church; and in part indeed truly, because the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted Christians to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless; but partly, nay, for the most part, not truly, but slanderously, and merely because the world called their wisdom craft, when it was found to be a match for its own numbers and power.’180

His reflections about those who have been ‘tempted … to the abuse … of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless’ are at the beginning of the sermon, and his reflections about those who were ‘able to recognize the expedience of obedience’ are at the end; and he does not suggest that those who are ‘able to recognize the expedience of obedience’ are ‘under the temptation of substituting reason for conscience’ – he observes, rather, that ‘what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason’, that the motives of ‘conscience’ and ‘reason’ coincide. To substitute ‘reason for conscience’, to be obedient out of a regard for ‘expedience’ would, certainly, be an ‘abuse … of Christian wisdom’; but it is not at all clear that this was the sort of ‘abuse’ that Newman was thinking of, when he remarked that ‘the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted Christians to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless’; and it is not at all clear that, in his account of those who ‘recognize the expedience of obedience’, he was regarding this as something liable to ‘abuse’, as something presenting the ‘temptation of substituting reason for conscience’. In the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman maintains, at any rate, that those who recognize ‘the expedience of obedience’ can be in a state in which ‘what they do from the heart, approves itself to their reason’: that ‘their reason’ approves what ‘they do’, need not mean that what they do is any the less ‘from the heart’. The ‘wisdom’ with which Newman is concerned in ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ is wisdom of a ‘political’ kind – a wisdom that recognizes what is ‘expedient’, or effective, in conduct. In the Idea of a University, characterizing the ‘Philosophy’ that, he maintains, a university should aim to cultivate in its members, he quotes

180. Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864; London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 386.

346

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

extensively from an earlier sermon of his on ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry’, which is concerned with a ‘wisdom’ that arises from reflection on ‘faith’. What the forms of ‘wisdom’ considered in ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, and ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry’ have in common, is that they are forms of awareness that arise from reflection on more spontaneous forms of awareness: they arise from the ‘action of the mind’ on itself. Newman observes that ‘faith’ and ‘wisdom’ are ‘distinct, even opposite gifts’. Wisdom belongs to the perfect, and more especially to preachers of the Gospel; and Faith is the elementary grace which is required of all, especially of hearers … . Faith being an exercise of the Reason, so spontaneous, unconscious, and unargumentative, as to seem at first sight even to be a moral act, and Wisdom being that orderly and mature development of thought, which in earthly language goes by the name of science and philosophy.181

As ‘Philosophy’ is ‘Reason exercised on … the Knowledge not merely of things in general, but of things in their relations to one another’, such that ‘instead of discovering, it does but analyze’, and as it involves ‘the power of referring every thing to its true place in the universal system’, such that it ‘never views any part of the extended subject-matter of knowledge, without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the associations which spring from this recollection’, so ‘Wisdom’ is ‘Reason’ exercised on the ‘knowledge’ involved in faith.182 ‘Wisdom is the clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God; and though there is none who has it in its fulness but He who “searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of ” the Creator, yet “by that Spirit” they are, in a measure, “revealed unto us.”’183 Where ‘faith … acts promptly and boldly on the occasion, on slender evidence, as if guessing and reaching forward to the truth, amid darkness or confusion’, ‘wisdom’ involves a ‘vision’ of ‘the whole course’ of things.184 The idea of ‘faith’ which Newman is working with here, would seem to connect ‘faith’ with ‘practical wisdom’ or phronesis: it seems to be an insight sufficient for an ‘occasion’ in which one must ‘act’. Newman observes that ‘though Faith be a presumption of facts under defective knowledge, yet, be it observed, it is altogether a practical principle’. It judges and decides because it cannot help doing so, for the sake of the man himself, who exercises it  – not in the way of opinion, not as aiming at mere abstract truth, not as teaching some theory or view. It is the act of a mind feeling that it is its duty any how, under its particular circumstances, to judge and to act,

181. 182. 183. 184.

‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, in OUS, 279. Ibid., 291–2. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 292–3.

7. Faith and Civilization

347

whether its light be greater or less, and wishing to make the most of that light and acting for the best.185

(As phronesis involves an insight sufficient for the ‘occasion’, for the requirements of acting on that ‘occasion’, so ‘faith’ involves an insight sufficient for the occasion. The insight of phronesis is sufficient for an ‘occasion’ as it is, in part, an insight into a particular occasion or situation – it is concerned with ‘this’ situation, here and now. Newman contrasts a faith which ‘acts promptly and boldly on the occasion’ with a ‘wisdom’ which involves an insight or ‘comprehension’ not limited to, or concerned solely with, a particular ‘occasion’, but encompassing ‘the whole course, the whole work of God’.) As a virtual ‘presumption’, ‘exercised under a sense of personal responsibility’, in relation to a ‘duty’ to ‘judge and to act’ in ‘particular circumstances’, the ‘knowledge’ involved in faith is ‘not insufficient for the purpose’ for which it is used. ‘It is when our presumptions take a wide range, when they affect to be systematical and philosophical, when they are indulged in matters of speculation, not of conduct, not in reference to self, but to others, then it is that they deserve the name of bigotry and dogmatism.’186 Faith differs from ‘bigotry’ (though it ‘may be mixed with Bigotry in matter of fact in this instance or that’) in that, where ‘Bigotry professes to understand what it maintains, though it does not’ and ‘it argues and infers … disowns Faith, and makes a show of Reason instead of it’, faith ‘proposes instead simple obedience to a revealed command’.187 Its disciples represent that they are neither statesmen nor philosophers; that they are not developing principles or evolving systems; that their ultimate end is not persuasion, popularity, or success; that they are but doing God’s will, and desiring His glory. They profess a sincere belief that certain views which engage their minds come from God; that they know well that they are beyond them; that they are not able to enter into them, or to apply them as others may do; that, understanding them but partially themselves, they are not sanguine about impressing them on others; that a divine blessing alone can carry them forward; that they look for that blessing; that they feel that God will maintain His own cause; that that belongs to Him, not to them.188

They are like the ‘innocent’, as characterized in the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, who ‘surrender themselves to Christ in implicit faith … and, “as men under authority,” … do great things without knowing it, by the Wisdom of their Divine Master’. Those who have faith, Newman maintains in ‘Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, do not profess fully to understand the ‘views which engage their minds’ or to ‘apply them as others may do’ – others who have

185. 186. 187. 188.

Ibid., 298. Ibid., 299. Ibid., 300–1. Ibid., 301.

348

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘the comprehensive faculty which resolves all things into their true principles, and connects them in one system’, so as to ‘apply or dispense the Truth in a change of circumstances’ – yet, in another respect, those who have faith continually apply it to various ‘matter[s] at hand’: faith ‘is an isolated act of Reason upon any matter in hand, as it comes; yet on this very account it has as wide a range as Wisdom’, such that there ‘is no subject which Faith working by Love may not include in its province, on which it may not have a judgment, and to which it may not do justice, though it views each point by itself, and not as portions of a whole’. These particular ‘judgements’, concerned with particular cases, each taken ‘by itself ’, might be regarded as applications of ‘views’ present more in an ‘implicit’ than an ‘explicit’ form; and, in these various applications of those ‘views’, more and more of what is ‘in’ those views becomes manifest. The ‘bigoted, by contrast, have an ‘explicit’ view, and ‘profess … to understand the subjects which they take up and the principles which they apply to them’; they ‘expect to be able to argue others into a belief of them, and are impatient when they cannot’ and they ‘consider that the premisses with which they start just prove the conclusions which they draw, and nothing else’, such that they ‘think that their own views are exactly fitted to solve all the facts which are to be accounted for, to satisfy all objections, and to moderate and arbitrate between all parties’.189 Those with ‘faith’ do not profess to ‘understand’ the ‘principles which they apply’; they do not profess to have acquired those principles by ‘argument’; but they have implicit ‘views’ or ‘principles’, by which they ‘judge’ rightly of particular cases, each taken ‘by itself ’. Those who are ‘bigoted’ take it that they do fully ‘understand’ the ‘principles which they apply’, that they have made those ‘principles’ fully explicit to themselves, and that they have acquired them by explicit argument: they take incomplete, inadequate ‘explicit’ views to be adequate to ‘all the facts’ they are presented with, imposing those views on those ‘facts’ (for there can be nothing in those ‘facts’ which they do not already ‘understand’); they are not responsive, or receptive, when presented with reality (such responsiveness may be a matter of intuiting certain meanings in things, without being able to set out precisely what those meanings are). Newman suggests that ‘wisdom’, by contrast, develops out of ‘faith’  – ‘Wisdom is the last gift of the Spirit, and Faith the first’. How much, though, can ‘wisdom’ – the ‘clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God’ – ever be attained? Newman himself acknowledges that ‘there is none who has it in its fulness but He who “searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of ” the Creator’ – namely, Christ – but he suggests that some have attained to a degree of this ‘wisdom’. When reflecting on ‘philosophy’, as the exercise of reason on ‘the vast field of Knowledge, not in conjecturing unknown truths, but in comparing, adjusting, connecting, explaining facts and doctrines ascertained’, he observes, that such was ‘the reason of those ancient Catholic Divines, nay, in their measure, of those illustrious thinkers of the middle ages, who have treated of the Christian Faith on system, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas’. One may take it that Newman

189. Ibid., 305–6.

7. Faith and Civilization

349

would have regarded the understanding of the ‘Christian Faith’, on the part of these ‘illustrious thinkers’, as having developed in, and out of, lives characterized by an obedience that was ‘from the heart’, and, perhaps, as arising, in part, from their reflections on what was in ‘the heart’; he does not, though, attempt to set out precisely how ‘faith’ develops into ‘wisdom’. Newman had meant, after writing the essays on ‘The Mission of St Benedict’ and ‘The Benedictine Schools’, to write an essay on one of the other ‘Patriarchs’ of ‘Christian civilization’, St Dominic. Something of his understanding of the Dominican ideal is shown in a sermon on ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’, preached in 1850, in which he claims that ‘it was the magnificent aim of the children of St. Dominic to form the whole matter of human knowledge into one harmonious system, to secure the alliance between religion and philosophy, and to train men to the use of the gifts of nature in the sunlight of divine grace and revealed truth. It required the dissolution and reconstruction of society to give an opportunity for so great a thought; and accordingly, the Order of Preachers flourished after the old Empire had passed away, and the chaos which followed on it had resulted in the creation of a new world.’190 The ‘aim’ was that of ‘subduing this various, multiform, many-coloured world to the unity of divine service’.191 In his essay on ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, he associates the Dominican vocation with ‘science’. Discussing the ‘poetical’ character of the Benedictine vocation, he contrasts ‘poetry’ with ‘science’, maintaining that where science ‘results in system’, and that its aim ‘is to get a hold of things, to grasp them, to handle them, to comprehend them … to master them, or to be superior to them’, such that the scientific ‘frame of mind’ is in the perception of that which is understood, ‘mastered’, the ‘poetical … frame of mind’ is in the perception of that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’, that which cannot be mastered. If this is so, though, how can the thought of an ‘illustrious’ Dominican such as Thomas Aquinas – one of those ‘who have treated of the Christian Faith on system’  – be characterized as ‘science’, since that ‘Faith’ is concerned with that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’? In ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and Bigotry’, he suggests that, through reflection on a faith that is understood, more and more, by being lived out, and ‘applied’ in the various occasions of life, one might tend toward an apprehension of the ‘whole course, the whole work of God’ (though a perfect comprehension of this ‘work’ is had only by ‘He who “searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of ” the Creator’). Such ‘wisdom’, or ‘philosophy’, is a matter of discerning ‘connections’ between truths presented by ‘revealed command’, of making explicit something of what is implicitly understood, when those truths are applied in the various ‘occasions’ of life. (Would Newman take it that one must acquire an implicit understanding of those truths, by applying them to the various ‘occasions’ of life, before one can evolve a more explicit understanding of them?) To discern certain ‘connections’ of this kind, to register

190. ‘The Mission of St Philip – Part 2’, in SPVO, 221. 191. Ibid., 222.

350

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

something, though not all, of the ‘system’ by which one truth is related to another, is not to have a full comprehension of that which those various truths concern. Newman maintains that the ‘prose [of the Catholic Church] is poetical on the one hand, and philosophical on the other’. Some years earlier, he would observe that ‘such poets as are born under her shadow, she takes into her service … . She can even make schoolmen of them, as she made St. Thomas, till logic becomes poetical.’192 The ‘logic’, the ‘system’ of St Thomas does not negate the ‘poetical’. In ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’, Newman characterizes the Dominican ‘aim’ as the ‘aim of subduing this various, multiform, many-coloured world to the unity of divine service’: it is the ‘many-coloured world’, rather than the revelation, that is to be ‘subdued’ (mastered); and it is to be subdued to the ‘unity of divine service’ – related to, and subordinated to, the revelation. With regard to the modern world – the world in which Newman would himself be attempting to contribute, through his oversight of the Catholic University of Dublin, to the making of a ‘Christian civilization’  – Newman suggests, in ‘The Mission of St  Benedict’, that ‘St. Ignatius [has had the training] of the modern [intellect]’, maintaining that the ‘modern’ period ‘dates from the Reformation, when that peculiar movement of mind commenced, the issue of which is still to come’.193 Newman associates St  Benedict with ‘poetry’, St Dominic with ‘science’, and St Ignatius with ‘prudence’. By common consent, the palm of religious Prudence, in the Aristotelic sense of that comprehensive word, belongs to the School of Religion of which St. Ignatius is the Founder. That great Society is the classical seat and fountain (that is, in religious thought and the conduct of life, for of ecclesiastical politics I speak not), the school and pattern of discretion, practical sense, and wise government. Sublimer conceptions or more profound speculations may have been created or elaborated elsewhere; but, whether we consider the illustrious Body in its own constitution, or in its rules for instruction and direction, we see that it is its very genius to prefer this most excellent prudence to every other gift, and to think little both of poetry and of science, unless they happen to be useful. It is true that, in the long catalogue of its members, there are to be found the names of the most consummate theologians, and of scholars the most elegant and accomplished; but we are speaking here, not of individuals, but of the body itself. It is plain that the body is not over-jealous about its theological traditions, or it certainly would not suffer Suarez to controvert with Molina, Viva with Vasquez, Passaglia with Petavius, and Faure with Suarez, de Lugo, and Valentia. In this intellectual freedom its members justly glory; inasmuch as they have set their affections, not on the opinions of the Schools, but on the souls of men. And it is the same charitable motive which makes them give up the poetry of life, the poetry of ceremonies, – of the cowl, the cloister, and the choir, – content

192. ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 443. 193. ‘The Mission of Saint Benedict’, in HS ii, 366.

7. Faith and Civilization

351

with the most prosaic architecture, if it be but convenient, and the most prosaic neighbourhood, if it be but populous.194

In his account of the ‘prudence’ of the Jesuits, Newman focuses very much on that aspect of ‘prudence’ which is concerned with utility, with the ‘useful’, with ‘means’ that are separable from ends (with, in truth, only an aspect of the ‘Aristotelic sense’ of that ‘comprehensive word’), though he characterizes this ‘religious prudence’ as animated by a ‘charitable motive’, by a solicitude for ‘the souls of men’.195 He suggests that the concern of the Jesuits with the ‘useful’ is such that they are disposed to ‘think little both of poetry and of science, unless they happen to be useful’. How much is such a subordination of ‘poetry’ and ‘science’ to the ‘useful’ consistent with the ideal of education set out in The Idea of a University, as a means toward a cultivation of mind that is an end in itself? Newman, certainly, would not regard such a cultivation of mind as an ultimate end; he would not regard such a cultivation of mind as something of more moment than the salvation of the ‘souls of men’; and there would not be any inconsistency in regarding such cultivation of mind as, in one respect, an end, and, in another, as a means, subordinate to a higher end – in deeming cultivation of mind, in certain respects, ‘useful’. Yet, while Newman, in ‘The Mission of St Benedict’, associates ‘Ignatius’ with the ‘modern’ phase of ‘Christian civilization’, he suggests, in The Rise and Progress of Universities, with regard to his own involvement, as a ‘son of St Philip’, an Oratorian, in ‘the preparatory movements of the establishment of a great University’, ‘that there is a providential fitness discernible in the circumstance of the traditions of that Congregation [of the Oratory] flowing in upon the first agitation of [the] design; and, though to frame, to organize, and to consolidate, be the imperial gift of St. Dominic or St. Ignatius, and beyond his range, yet a son of St. Philip Neri may aspire without presumption to the preliminary task of breaking the ground and clearing the foundations of the Future, of introducing the great idea into men’s minds, and making them understand it, and love it, and have hope in it, and have faith in it, and show zeal for it; – of bringing many intellects to work together for it, and of teaching them to understand each other, and bear with each other, and go on together, not so much by rule, as by mutual kind feeling and a common devotion’. Newman understood the Oratorian vocation to consist in the creation of community – a community sustained, not by ‘vows’ or by discipline, but by mutual understanding, influence and, ultimately, charity. Everyone [in such a community] seems to be acting at his own discretion – he acts from himself – the laws on which the community moves are not external but within  – it is selfmoved. As is commonly observed, the Superior is never to say ‘I command’ but always ‘I wish’; and it is recorded even of St Philip

194. Ibid., 369–70. 195. Newman can be suspected, perhaps, of giving one part of the ‘Aristotelic sense’ of ‘prudence’ to the Jesuits, that he might reserve another part for the Oratorians.

352

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

that he never used the words ‘I command’ but once. It is the common sense, the delicacy, the sharp observation, the tact of each which keeps the whole in harmony. It is a living principle, call it (in human language) judgement or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception, which takes the place of formal enactment … . An Oratorian … is in great measure a law to himself, and is almost the reverse so far of a regular, for instance a Jesuit. A Jesuit has a rule to fall back upon. When he wants to know how to act, he recurs to it. He keeps it before him, and therefore may be almost content with an external view of others, with whom he has to act  – He views them in the light of the rule, he measures them by the rule, he only knows them in the rule. The rule is to settle all disputes and difficulties between him and them – and obedience to a Superior is to complete whatever the rule may leave vague or obscure. Far different is the duty of an Oratorian: his rule does little for him – his community life is not determined by the rule; it will not remain in its perfection by a mere observance of it … . The course of things, to run smooth, is committed to the keeping of each member. Each in his place must stand with his eyes about him, and work independently of others, though in cooperation with them. Each is to be bound to each by a personal attachment; each must throw himself into the minds of the rest, and try to understand them, to consult for them, to take their hints, and to please them.196

Newman understood the ‘arts’ by which such community could be created, and sustained, to be arts of ‘social life’ (of a kind acquired in the sort of education that, through the cultivation of the intellect, forms ‘the gentleman’). The first Oratorians were by birth and education gentlemen; and such in a good measure they remain down to this day … . It does not follow, because refinement is worthless without saintliness, that it is needless and useless with it. It may set off and recommend an interior holiness, just as the gift of eloquence sets of logical argument … . I suppose it may be said that true refinement of thought, word, and manners is the natural result of Christian holiness, and the necessary result when it is carried out into its full and ultimate effect. But so it is that few are able, so to carry it out; nay, though Christian excellence is abstractedly most refined, most amiable, most winning, yet from various circumstances it need not be so, or it may not possibly be so, in the case of individuals, nay of individual Saints … . Hence it is that mere secular training, gentle nurture, good society, classical education, are of special benefit to the Christian, first as at least excluding their contraries, habits of rusticity or oddness or affectation and thus protecting and giving room for the unimpeded development of the saintly character in all its parts, as concurring in that development, encouraging and completing it, and lastly, when there is after all from some fault or other a deficient development,

196. John Henry Newman, Newman the Oratorian, ed. by Placid Murray O.S.B. (1968; Leominster: Gracewing, 2004), 208–9.

7. Faith and Civilization

353

at least simulating it, and supplying from inferior principles and by secular instruments that refinement which ought to follow, and often does follow even in the humblest and least education, from Christian faith and love … . It is not wonderful, if this external polish and refinement, which is so valueless in itself morally, yet so useful as a sort of rhetoric in conduct, nay and valuable too, so far as it is a symptom and the product of Christian excellence within, should have been one of the means by which the Oratory acted in the reformation of both clergy and laity at the time of its establishment.197

Newman maintains, in The Idea of a University, that the ‘Philosophy’ that is the end of a university education, animates, and is acquired through, the ‘conversation’ that makes up the life of a university: it is, in a sense, the spirit of that conversation, or it is present in that conversation, or it is what that conversation is tending toward. That conversation, Newman suggests, might be imbued with a Christian ‘spirit’ and character, and might be, as such, a means of imparting that Christian spirit to those involved in that conversation – as St Philip became an ‘Apostle of Rome’ by the ‘convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation’.198 Newman suggests that, in the ‘conversation’ making up the life of the university – a conversation ‘bringing many intellects [possessed of different forms of knowledge, different scientific principles] to work together [and] to understand each other, and bear with each other, and go on together, not so much by rule, as by mutual kind feeling and a common devotion’  – there might be a concord, a mutual adjustment, of the ‘principles’ of the different forms of knowledge, possessed by those participating in the conversation. Newman remarked of St Philip that ‘as from St. Dominic he gained the end he was to pursue [namely, the “aim of subduing this various, multiform, many-coloured world to the unity of divine service”] so from St. Benedict he learned how to pursue it’.199 In the mid nineteenth century, various new sciences were emerging, with their scope, and their relation to one another, not being altogether clear, such that no explicit philosophical ‘system’ might, at that time, have seemed sufficient, for ordering, and for presenting an overall view, of those different sciences (or ‘subduing … [them] to the unity of divine service’). In a ‘living’ conversation, though, a conversation sustained by ‘mutual kind feeling’ – even mutual charity – in which the ‘intellect’ could ‘range with the utmost freedom’, and all the principles of the ‘sciences’ could be expressed, a form of ‘Philosophy’, presenting ‘the word evoking order and peace’ might, perhaps, emerge.

197. Newman the Oratorian, 189–90. 198. Idea, 236. 199. ‘The Mission of St Philip – Part 2’, in SPVO, 224.

Part IV R EAL V ISIONS: T HE 1860s A ND 1870s

Chapter 8 THE IMAGINATION AND THE ‘METROPOLITAN INTELLECT’

Newman wrote his Apologia pro Vita Sua to defend himself from the charge of ‘Untruthfulness’. Charles Kingsley, in a review in Macmillan’s Magazine, had claimed that ‘truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy. Father Newman informs us that it need not, and on the whole, ought not to be; that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage.’1 Newman – not, initially, realizing that Kingsley was the author of the review – wrote a letter of protest to the publishers of Macmillan’s Magazine, to ‘draw the attention’ of the publishers ‘to a grave and gratuitous slander’.2 Kingsley then wrote to Newman, declaring himself the author of the review, and claiming that the ‘document’ to which he ‘expressly referred’ – in justifying his claim that Newman did not consider ‘truth, for its own sake’ a ‘virtue’  – was the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1844).3 After an exchange of letters between Kingsley and Newman, Kingsley offered to write a letter of retraction, a letter which Newman considered unsatisfactory: Kingsley remarked, in the letter, that ‘Dr Newman has … expressed in the strongest terms, his denial of the meaning which I have put upon his words’; Newman considered that this implied that ‘I have set before Dr Newman, as he challenged me to do, extracts from his writings, and he has affixed to them what he conceives to be their legitimate sense’.4 Newman then published the correspondence between himself and Kingsley, adding a satirical commentary on it. (‘“Well,” says Mr. Kingsley, “if you are quite sure you did not say it, I’ll take your word for it; I really will.” My

1. Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua: The Two Editions of 1864 and 1865, ed. by Wilfrid Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 6. (In this edition the texts of the 1864 and 1865 editions of the Apologia are presented simultaneously. In quotations here from this edition, the text of the 1864 edition has been used, unless otherwise indicated.) 2. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 7. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Ibid., 16.

358

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

word! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my word that happened to be on trial. The word of a Professor of lying, that he does not lie!’)5 Kingsley was provoked into writing a pamphlet, What, then, Does Dr Newman Mean? in which he sought to defend the claim that Newman was not committed to ‘truth, for its own sake’. He censures the sermons on ‘The Apostolical Christian’ and ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, as ‘most dangerous and misleading’ (and as warranting his claim that, according to Newman, ‘cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world which marries and is given in marriage’).6 In the sermon on ‘The Apostolical Christian’, Newman suggests that ‘the humble monk and the holy nun, and other regulars, as they are called, [are] Christians after the very pattern given us in Scripture’.7 In the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman attempts to account for the ‘suspicion’ with which the early Christians were regarded by ‘the world’, by suggesting that the ‘world’ could not understand the effectiveness of Christian virtue: the early Christians seemed to have certain virtues which – in the judgement of ‘the world’ – were very unlikely to make for effectiveness; as the early Christians were, nevertheless, a ‘match’ for the world, ‘the world’ took it that there was something more to them than was apparent – these virtues could not account for their successes, so their appearance of having these virtues was mere dissimulation, ‘craft’; yet ‘innocence, simplicity, implicit obedience to God, tranquillity of mind, contentment, these and the like virtues are in themselves a sort of wisdom; I mean, they produce the same results as wisdom, because God works for those who do not work for themselves; and thus they especially incur the charge of craft at the hands of the world, because they pretend to so little, yet effect so much’.8 Newman asks, ‘What … though we grant that sacramental confession and the celibacy of the clergy do tend to consolidate the body politic in the relation of rulers and subjects, or, in other words, to aggrandise the priesthood? For how can the Church be one body without such relation?’9 Newman was an Anglican when he preached these sermons; he considered that monasticism, and ‘celibacy’ were traditional Christian forms of life that could be revived within the Anglican Church; he considered that ‘sacramental confession’ was still recognized (in principle, if not always in practice) by the Anglican Church; he suggests, in this sermon, that there is a certain analogy between the mistrust of such things – as occasioning ‘priestcraft’ – and a ‘worldly’ mistrust of Christian virtue. Priestcraft has ever been considered the badge, and its imputation is a kind of note of the Church; and in part, indeed, truly, because the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness, has sometimes tempted Christians

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 28. ‘The Apostolical Christian’, in SSD, 290–1. ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 298–9. Ibid., 306.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

359

to the abuse, instead of the use of Christian wisdom, to be wise without being harmless; but partly – nay, for the most part – not truly, but slanderously, and merely because the world called their wisdom craft, when it was found to be a match for its own numbers and power.10

Newman acknowledges, then, that ‘priestcraft’  – the ‘abuse … of Christian wisdom’ – may well have occurred, in some cases, when Christians were ‘tempted’ to it by ‘the presence of powerful enemies, and the sense of their own weakness’; but he maintains, equally, that many of the accusations of ‘priestcraft’ made by ‘the world’ were ‘slanderous’, arising from an incomprehension, on the part of the ‘world’, of how Christians might be ‘a match for its own numbers and power’ when they seemed – to appearance at least – to be destitute of anything that the ‘world’ could recognize as making for power. Newman, then, sets out a scheme of interpretation: accusations of ‘priestcraft’ – through history, and at the present time  – might arise from a ‘worldly’ incomprehension of the effectiveness of ‘innocence’, or Christian virtue. (Hence, one may take it, the characterization of such things as ‘celibacy’ or monasticism or ‘sacramental confession’ as implicated with ‘priestcraft’ might not be justified; the revival of such things, in the Anglican Church, need not be regarded as a revival of ‘priestcraft’.) Kingsley maintains that the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ is a ‘Romish’ sermon. He claims that ‘the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men’ was to make them ‘think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations’, or to make them ‘consider the same chicanery allowed to them which they found practised but too often by the Mediaeval Church’. The natural result of the sermon on the minds of his disciples would be, to make them suspect that truth was not a virtue for its own sake, but only for the sake of the spread of “catholic opinions,” and the “salvation of their own souls;” and that cunning was the weapon which Heaven had allowed to them to defend themselves against the persecuting Protestant public.11

Newman maintains that many of the accusations of ‘craft’, made against Christians, might well have been ‘slanderous’; Kingsley maintains that the ‘natural result’ of this, on ‘fanatic and hot-headed young man’, was to make them think certain forms of craft might be permissible. Kingsley takes it that, in maintaining that some of the accusations of ‘priestcraft’ made against the Church were ‘slanderous’, Newman licensed ‘hot-headed young men’ to think that certain instances of ‘chicanery … practised … by the Medieval Church’, recorded in history, and widely regarded as ‘priestcraft’, were not, in fact, priestcraft: the stigmatizing of such behaviour as

10. Ibid., 298. 11. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 34.

360

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘priestcraft’ was a misunderstanding, a mark of ‘worldly’ incomprehension. If to act in such a way was not priestcraft, then one might act in such a way without being culpable – ‘becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations’. Kingsley maintains that Newman is ‘denying or explaining away the existence of that priestcraft which is a notorious fact to every honest student of history; and justifying (as far as I can understand him) [the] doubledealing … [of] prelates, in the middle age’.12 Kingsley presents a dialogue between Newman and ‘the world’. If he told the world, as he virtually does in this sermon, ‘I know that my conduct looks like cunning; but it is only the ‘arts’ of the defenceless’: what wonder if the world answered, ‘No. It is what it seems. That is just what we call cunning; a habit of mind which, once indulged, is certain to go on from bad to worse, till the man becomes – like too many of the mediaeval clergy who indulged in it – utterly untrustworthy.13

Kingsley suggests that those who consider ‘truth’ to be a ‘virtue … only for the sake of the spread of “catholic opinions”’, identify those opinions (alone) with truth, and consider that anything that makes for the ‘spread’ of those opinions is consistent with truth. (There is, in this, a suggestion, as well, that for those with this attitude, it is only those with ‘catholic opinions’ who have understanding, and it is, therefore, only the judgment of those with ‘catholic opinions’ which should be regarded or solicited: there is the community of those with ‘catholic opinions’, the community of ‘truth’, with whom truthfulness is to be observed, and there is the community of those without such opinions, with whom rhetorical strategems and ‘chicanery’ are permissible.) Kingsley asks, ‘how was I to know that the preacher … was utterly blind to the broad meaning and the plain practical result of a sermon like this, delivered before fanatic and hot-headed young men … [and] that he did not foresee that they would think that they obeyed him, by becoming affected, artificial, sly, shifty, ready for concealments and equivocations?’ Newman would retort to this – ‘How should he know! What! I suppose that we are to think every man a knave till he is proved not to be such. Know! had he no friend to tell him whether I was “affected” or “artificial” myself? … ‘How should he know’ that I was not sly, smooth, artificial, non-natural! he should know by that common manly frankness, if he had it, by which we put confidence in others, till they are proved to have forfeited it; he should know it by my own words in that very Sermon, in which I say it is best to be natural, and that reserve is at best but an unpleasant necessity.14

12. Ibid., 33. 13. Ibid., 35. 14. Ibid., 390–1.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

361

The way in which one gets a sense of the truthfulness of another person is by encountering that person oneself; and if one is to encounter that person properly, then one must have a certain ‘frankness’, whereby one ‘puts confidence’ in that person. The vision of Newman as an ‘equivocator’, whose ‘use of words’ is designing, untrustworthy, dissipates ‘confidence’ in any ‘words’ Newman might use to defend himself. Newman suggests that Kingsley himself, in taking (or feigning to take) such an attitude of suspicion, is taking an attitude at odds with ‘frankness’: if one has ‘common manly frankness’, then one is disposed to have ‘confidence’ in others. Kingsley presents Newman as intellectually corrupt. He suggests that Newman, licensing the use of any means of promoting ‘catholic opinions’ (any sort of argument, however sophistical), and taking this to be, ultimately, consistent with ‘truth’ (for whatever makes for ‘catholic opinions’ must be consistent with truth) thereby corrupted his own sense of what constitutes a proper means of attaining to the truth. In carrying out ‘tours de force’ of argument, and interpretation, with ‘that subtle brain of his’, Newman ‘would either destroy his own sense of honesty – i.e. conscious truthfulness – and become a dishonest person; or he would destroy his common sense – i.e. unconscious truthfulness, and become the slave and puppet seemingly of his own logic, really of his own fancy, ready to believe anything, however preposterous, into which he could, for the moment, argue himself ’.15 Kingsley then declares that he is ‘in doubt and fear, as much as an honest man can be, concerning every word Dr. Newman may write. How can I tell that I shall not be the dupe of some cunning equivocation, of one of the three kinds laid down as permissible by the blessed St. Alfonso da Liguori and his pupils?’ Newman observes that Kingsley ‘desires to impress upon the public mind the conviction that I am a crafty, scheming man, simply untrustworthy; that, in becoming a Catholic, I have just found my right place; that I do but justify and am properly interpreted by the common English notion of Roman casuists and confessors; that I was secretly a Catholic when I was openly professing to be a clergyman of the Established Church; that so far from bringing, by means of my conversion, when at length it openly took place, any strength to the Catholic cause, I am really a burden to it – an additional evidence of the fact, that to be a pure, german, genuine Catholic, a man must be either a knave or a fool’.16 Newman observes that if ‘I demonstrate that I am not a knave, he may exclaim, “Oh, but you are a fool!” and when I demonstrate that I am not a fool, he may turn round and retort, “Well, then, you are a knave.”’17 Kingsley suggests, in fact, that he is a ‘knave’ and ‘fool’ together – that he is a ‘fool’ who has become such through a knavery whereby he has corrupted his own intellect: ‘His simpleton is one who has become such, in judgment for his having once been a knave. His simpleton is not a born fool, but a self-made idiot, one who has drugged and abused himself into

15. Ibid., 37. 16. Ibid., 71. 17. Ibid., 72.

362

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

a shameless depravity.’18 More than that, though, Newman maintains, Kingsley – in professing to fear that he might be the ‘dupe of some cunning equivocation’ – ‘has attempted (as I may call it) to poison the wells’: he has attempted ‘to infuse into the imaginations of my readers, suspicion and mistrust of every thing that I may say in reply to him’.19 Could a ‘fool’ perpetrate an ‘equivocation’? A ‘selfmade’ fool might do so, perhaps. One who has corrupted his sense of truth, by arguing dishonestly – by consulting his sense of what is rhetorically effective, in forging arguments, rather than his sense of what is true – might persist in arguing dishonestly on habit. To be in the habit of deceitfulness is to vitiate the ‘reason’ by which one might recognize that deceitfulness for what it is, the ‘reason’ by which one might reflect on oneself, recognize faults in oneself, and resolve to amend oneself. There is, in this corruption of the ‘reason’, a kind of dissolution of the self; if Newman presents the appearance of having a coherent self, an appearance of integrity, this is merely an appearance created by his mastery of rhetoric. There is a story of a sane person being by mistake shut up in the wards of a Lunatic Asylum, and that, when he pleaded his cause to some strangers visiting the establishment, the only remark he elicited in answer was, “How naturally he talks! you would think he was in his senses.” … . If Mr. Kingsley is able thus to practise upon my readers, the more I succeed, the less will be my success. If I am natural, he will tell them, “Ars est celare artem;” if I am convincing, he will suggest that I am an able logician; if I show warmth, I am acting the indignant innocent; if I am calm, I am thereby detected as a smooth hypocrite; if I clear up difficulties, I am too plausible and perfect to be true. The more triumphant are my statements, the more certain will be my defeat.20

In his review in Macmillan’s Magazine, Kingsley had attacked Newman in the course of an attack on ‘the religion of Rome’: he maintained that ‘Roman religion had, for some time past, [at the time of the Reformation] been making men not better men, but worse’, and its ‘demoralization’ of ‘Europe’ had been ‘brought on … by the dogma that the Pope of Rome had the power of creating right and wrong; that not only truth and falsehood, but morality and immorality, depended on his setting his seal to a bit of parchment’.21 Truth was ascertained by the Pope ‘setting his seal to a bit of parchment’. The inner sense of truth, the consciousness that something was true – the inner testimony of the mind to truth – was to be subordinated to the declarations of the Pope. Kingsley maintains accordingly that ‘Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy’: the ‘seal’ of the Pope – not the inner sense of truth – was the rule of the ‘Roman clergy’; for these ‘clergy’, anything that promoted the acceptance of the declarations of the

18. 19. 20. 21.

Ibid. Ibid., 80–1. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 5.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

363

Pope – any sort of rhetoric, or ‘chicanery’ – was in conformity with truth; every statement was to be considered, not ‘for its own sake’, as having truth (and worth) in itself, but in relation to the declarations of the Pope  – as an instrument for promoting assent to those declarations. Kingsley presents Newman, then, as an instance of a type, or a class; Newman suggests, accordingly, that in defending himself, he is, equally, defending the ‘Roman clergy’. In a letter to Alexander Macmillan, who had interposed between Newman and Kingsley, Newman observes that ‘I suppose, in truth, there is nothing at all, however base, up to the high mark of Titus Oates, which a Catholic may not expect to be believed of him by Protestants, however honourable and hard-headed’.22 Newman suggests that Kingsley makes use of a certain notion of ‘Catholics’, as Antichristian, which is sustained by tradition in England. He had reflected on this tradition in The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), observing that it arouses a suspicion of Catholics which makes it difficult  – for those possessed by this suspicion – to apprehend Catholics, when encountered, as they are. For Catholics, in these circumstances, it is as if they live in a ‘vast enchanted palace’.23 When ‘the Prejudiced Man’ encounters individuals, once Protestant, who have converted to Catholicism, he ‘simply forgets that Protestants they ever were. They cease to have antecedents; they cease to have any character, any history to which they may appeal: they merge in the great fog, in which to his eyes every thing Catholic is enveloped; they are dwellers in the land of romance and fable; and if he dimly contemplates them plunging and floundering amid the gloom, it is as griffins, wiverns, salamanders, the spawn of Popery, such as are said to sport in the depths of the sea or to range amid the sands of Africa … he has no duties to their names.24

The ‘Prejudiced Man’ apprehends, not a person, but a figment; the person, with a ‘name’, is replaced with a chimera. In the Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman observes that his exchange with Kingsley has made him appreciate that ‘I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes.’25 In The Present Position of Catholics in England, Newman insists that Catholics must counter the suspicions entertained about them by presenting themselves as they are. ‘They must be made to know us as we are; they must be made to know

22. Ibid., 10. 23. Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 82. 24. Present Position of Catholics in England, 245. 25. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 99.

364

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

our religion as it is, not as they fancy it; they must be made to look at us, and they are overcome.’ Protestantism is fierce, because it does not know you; ignorance is its strength; error is its life. Therefore bring yourselves before it, press yourselves upon it, force yourselves into notice against its will. Oblige men to know you; persuade them, importune them, shame them into knowing you. Make it so clear what you are, that they cannot affect not to see you, nor refuse to justify you.26

He observes, though, that Catholics should aim at affecting, not ‘metropolitan’ opinion, but ‘local’ opinion: they can affect ‘local’ opinion, because such opinion arises from ‘personal knowledge’, from personal acquaintance; but this is not the case with ‘metropolitan’ opinion. The great metropolitan intellect cannot be reached by us, and for this simple reason, because you cannot confront it, you cannot make it know you. I said your victory was to be in forcing upon others a personal knowledge of you, by your standing before your enemies face to face. But what face has a metropolitan journal? How are you to get at it? how are you to look into it? whom are you to look at? who is to look at you? No one is known in London; it is the realm of the incognito and the anonymous; it is not a place, it is a region or a state. There is no such thing as local opinion in the metropolis; mutual personal knowledge, there is none; neighbourhood, good fame, bad repute, there is none; no house knows the next door. You cannot make an impression on such an ocean of units; it has no disposition, no connexion of parts. The great instrument of propagating moral truth is personal knowledge. A man finds himself in a definite place; he grows up in it and into it; he draws persons around him; they know him, he knows them; thus it is that ideas are born which are to live, that works begin which are to last. It is this personal knowledge of each other which is true public opinion; local opinion is real public opinion; but there is not, there cannot be, such in London. How is a man to show what he is, when he is but a grain of sand out of a mass, without relations to others, without a place, without antecedents, without individuality? … . And this impersonality, as it may be called, pervades the whole metropolitan system. A man, not known, writes a leading article against what?  – things? no; but ideas. He writes against Catholicism: what is Catholicism? can you touch it? point at it? no; it is an idea before his mind. He clothes it with certain attributes, and forthwith it goes all over the country that a certain idea or vision, called Catholicism, has certain other ideas, bad ones, connected with it. You see, it is all a matter of ideas, and abstractions, and conceptions. Well, this leading article goes on to speak of certain individual Catholic priests; still, does it see them? point at them? no, it does but give their names; it is a matter, not of persons, but of names; and those names, sure enough,

26. Present Position of Catholics in England, 372.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

365

go over the whole country and empire as the names of rogues, or of liars, or of tyrants, as the case may be; while they themselves, the owners of them, in their own persons are not at all the worse for it, but eat, sleep, pray, and do their work, as freely and as easily as before. London cannot touch them, for words hurt no one; words cannot hurt us till – till when? till they are taken up, believed, in the very place where we individually dwell.27

In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman sought to defend his ‘name’, by presenting his ‘face’ to ‘metropolitan’ opinion. He sets out to defend his own ‘truthfulness’. (Kingsley had suggested more than this  – that he was not only deceitful, but corrupted in his ‘reason’, so as to be scarcely capable of truthfulness; but Kingsley had, equally, suggested that this corruption had arisen from habitual untruthfulness, licensed by vitiated notions of truth.) Newman maintains that Kingsley  – in characterizing him as deceitful and dishonest  – appeals to an ‘impression’ which had been entertained about him by ‘large classes of men’  – namely, that he was a ‘conscious Roman Catholic’ while still a clergyman in the Church of England, and that he had exploited his position of trust, as a clergyman in the Church of England, to do ‘the work of a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment’. There has been a general feeling that I was for years where I had no right to be; that I was a ‘Romanist’ in Protestant livery and service; that I was doing the work of a hostile Church in the bosom of the English Establishment, and knew it, or ought to have known it … . Many of the doctrines which I professed were popularly and generally known as badges of the Roman Church, as distinguished from the faith of the Reformation. Next, how could I have come by them? … Beyond a doubt, I was advocating certain doctrines, not by accident, but on an understanding with ecclesiastics of the old religion … . Indignation arose at the knavery of a conspiracy such as this:  – and it became of course all the greater, in consequence of its being the received belief of the public at large, that craft and intrigue, such as they fancied they beheld with their own eyes, were the very instruments to which the Catholic Church has in these last centuries been indebted for her maintenance and extension … . There was another circumstance still, which increased the irritation and aversion felt by the large classes, of whom I have been speaking, as regards the preachers of doctrines, so new to them and so unpalatable; and that was, that they developed them in so measured a way. If they were inspired by Roman theologians, (and this was taken for granted,) why did they not speak out at once? Why did they keep the world in such suspense and anxiety as to what was coming next, and what was to be the upshot of the whole? Why this reticence, and half-speaking, and apparent indecision? It was plain that the plan of operations had been carefully mapped out from the first, and that these men were cautiously advancing towards its

27. Ibid., 380–2.

366

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

accomplishment, as far as was safe at the moment; that their aim and their hope was to carry off a large body with them of the young and the ignorant; that they meant gradually to leaven the minds of the rising generation, and to open the gate of that city, of which they were the sworn defenders, to the enemy who lay in ambush outside of it.28

As his ‘doctrines’ were considered to be ‘badges of the Roman Church’, so his promulgation of those doctrines was regarded with the suspicion with which the ‘Roman Church’ was regarded – as an act of ‘craft and intrigue’. ‘When after all, after my arguments and denunciations of former years, at length I did leave the Anglican Church for the Roman, then they said to each other, “It is just as we said: I told you so.”’29 Newman observes that Kingsley asks about his ‘meaning’ – ‘What does Dr Newman mean?’ ‘He asks what I mean; not about my words, not about my arguments, not about my actions, as his ultimate point, but about that living intelligence, by which I write, and argue, and act.’30 To answer Kingsley, he will have to show something of ‘that living intelligence’. I will draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind … I must show, – what is the very truth, – that the doctrines which I held, and have held for so many years, have been taught me (speaking humanly) partly by the suggestions of Protestant friends, partly by the teaching of books, and partly by the action of my own mind.31

He would show that his writings, of that period, were not ‘inspired by Roman theologians’, and that he had not been aiming to ‘leaven the minds of the rising generation’ with ‘Roman’ ideas. Those writings were not duplicitous; they were, rather, expressions of his ‘living intelligence’. If those writings are construed as duplicitous, then they are not construed as expressions of ‘living intelligence’: the ‘living intelligence’ expressed in them is obscured (replaced with a ‘phantom’, which ‘gibbers’). If, though, they are construed as expressions of ‘living intelligence’, then they can be (or rather, they demand to be) engaged with as such (and they might, as such, exert the influence that ‘living intelligence’ can exert – and they might be instrumental in moving others toward Rome). Newman observes, at one point, that the Tracts he wrote as an Anglican, were written on ‘the principle of personality’ – as ‘expressions’ of personal opinion.32 Whatever effectiveness those Tracts might have, at the present time, requires that they be construed as expressions, to some extent, of ‘personality’: in defending his name, his reputation, Newman is resisting the nullification, of his writings. If all his writings are construed as duplicitous – as

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Apologia pro Vita Sua, 95–6. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 99–100. Ibid., 143.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

367

expressions of the ‘word’ of a ‘Professor of lying’  – then the ‘living intelligence’ expressed in them is obscured – and he cannot present himself (his ‘living’ self) to ‘metropolitan’ opinion in, or through, his writings. The first couple of pamphlets which Newman wrote, in response to Kingsley, Mr Kingsley’s Method of Disputation, and True Mode of Meeting Mr Kingsley, are, for the most part, an account of the rhetorical techniques which Kingsley had used against him. Kingsley accuses him of being a mere rhetorician, corrupt and dishonest, and in response, he analyses the rhetoric of Kingsley  – noting that he has made some illegitimate rhetorical moves (his ‘mode of arguing’ is ‘dishonest’).33 In this analysis, Newman does not merely show that Kingsley is a rhetorician; he shows that he is a rhetorician as well: Newman shows his own ‘living’ rhetorical ‘intelligence’ and understanding, in identifying the rhetorical moves of Kingsley. By portraying Newman as an arch-sophist, Kingsley suggests that there is ‘always something put out of sight or hidden in [his] sleeve’.34 Newman puts his rhetorical ‘intelligence’ into ‘sight’ (it is not ‘hidden in [his] sleeve’). He observes that ‘controversies should be decided by the reason’ rather than by an ‘appeal to the misgivings of the public mind and to its dislikings’ but he does not repudiate rhetorical skill, per se.35 He puts into ‘sight’ his own reflections on what sort of rhetorical moves he will need to make, in his own defence: as Kingsley has a single ‘positive idea to illuminate his whole matter, and to stamp it with a form, and to quicken it with an interpretation’ – namely, that Newman is a ‘liar’ – so Newman himself must have ‘a corresponding antagonist unity in [his] defence’; as Kingsley has availed himself of ‘the bias of the court … [and] that prepossession against me, which takes it for granted that, when my reasoning is convincing it is only ingenious, and that when my statements are unanswerable, there is always something put out of sight or hidden in my sleeve’, so Newman himself ‘must break through this barrier of prejudice’.36 The precepts of rhetorical art suggest, in his case, that honesty is the best ‘policy’. Newman shows in these pamphlets his rhetorical ‘intelligence’ in his analysis of the rhetoric of Kingsley and of what sort of rhetorical moves he might make in response; and he shows, equally, intense feeling – he shows indignation at the aspersions cast on him, and at the illegitimate means used in casting those aspersions. This show of indignation was itself a rhetorical move (even if the indignation was truly felt). In a letter to John Duke Coleridge, written in October 1864, after the Apologia was completed, he observed that I felt that, unless I wrote with the keen feeling which I really had, though it is ordinarily one’s duty not to show it, people would not believe me; they would say that my book was written for me, or corrected by revisers, or that I was not in earnest, but exerting myself in an intellectual fence. So that I might as well not write at all, if I didn’t give out, as my thought, so my feelings.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., 71. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 97, 98.

368

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

What is more, ‘if I was making a manifestation, as I professed to do, I should not be doing this fully and consistently, if I did not manifest the deep sense, which possessed me, of that injustice which lay at the root of those charges, of which Mr Kingsley was the accidental spokesman’. It was, moreover, ‘some excuse to myself, and some apology to the world for [this manifestation], to bring out forcibly the gravity of the provocation which I had received, and the indignation which it was adapted to rouse in me’. The show of indignation had a rhetorical function; it was, equally, genuine; and his claim to be ‘manifesting’ himself, required that he manifest ‘as [his] thought, so [his] feelings’. The Apologia was published in weekly instalments. The autobiographical part of the work consists of four parts  – covering the period up to 1833, then from 1833–39, then from 1839–41, then from 1841–45  – succeeded by a ‘General Answer to Mr Kingsley’  – covering the period from 1845 to the present, and aiming to counter ‘the suspicion with which so many Protestants start, in forming their judgment of Catholics, viz. that our Creed is actually set up in inevitable superstition and hypocrisy, as the original sin of Catholicism’.37 While the structure is chronological, each part is concerned with different topics, so chronology is not strictly observed – as when he reflects on his essay on ecclesiastical miracles (published in 1843) in the first part, or when he reflects on Tract 90 (published in 1841) in the second part. The first part considers some of the core principles involved in his understanding of ‘religion’ generally (in particular, his ‘sacramental’ or ‘economical’ sense of reality, and his sense of the function of ‘probable’ argument, in making for religious belief). The second part considers his efforts to ‘bring out in a substantive form, a living Church of England in a position proper to herself, and founded on distinct principles’  – it considers his formulation of a ‘theory’ setting out a ‘position proper’ to the Church of England, and the way in which he conducted himself ‘as earnestly preaching it and influencing others towards it’.38 The third part considers how he came to recognize certain difficulties in his ‘theory’ of the Church of England. The fourth part considers how he sought to resolve his intellectual confusion, and how he conducted himself, while in this state of confusion. Newman maintains that the change in his ‘religious opinions’, with regard to Rome, was not a matter of ‘paper logic’, not a matter of ‘abstract’ argumentation. As an account of the ‘history’ of the ‘opinions’ of Newman, the Apologia is concerned less with showing how Newman was actuated to have those ‘opinions’ (with showing all the considerations that moved him, at the time, to form those opinions) than with what those ‘opinions’ were, and how he was ‘taught’ them (whether ‘by the suggestions of Protestant friends … by the teaching of books … [or] by the action of my own mind’). It characterizes the ‘history’ of his mind, the forming of his opinions, mostly as a cumulative process: the move to Rome is not a rupture, a repudiation of all his previous beliefs. Newman observes, in this

37. Ibid., 333. 38. Ibid., 171.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

369

regard, that ‘divine faith’ began in him with his ‘inward conversion’ at the age of fifteen to a form of Evangelical Christianity – an ‘inward conversion … of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet’ – when he ‘received into [his] intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured’.39 (‘While I am now as clear in my acceptance of the principle of dogma, as I was in 1833 and 1816, so again I am now as firm in my belief of a visible Church, of the authority of Bishops, of the grace of the sacraments, of the religious worth of works of penance, as I was in 1833. I have added Articles to my Creed; but the old ones, which I then held with a divine faith, remain.’)40 His change of view, with regard to Rome, was not merely a matter of being moved by ‘logic’, by argumentation: it involved a tension between his ‘imagination’, ‘feelings’, and ‘reason’. Of his attempts to resolve his difficulties in relation to Rome, Newman observes that ‘I had a great dislike of paper logic’, not least ‘because there is great difference between a conclusion in the abstract and a conclusion in the concrete, and because a conclusion may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle’.41 For myself, it was not logic that carried me on; as well might one say that the quicksilver in the barometer changes the weather. It is the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years, and I find my mind in a new place; how? the whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. All the logic in the world would not have made me move faster towards Rome than I did.42

How could one show, on ‘paper’, all the considerations by which ‘the whole man moves’? One is not aware of all the ‘reasons’ actuating ‘the concrete being’; one is not aware of all the reasons that move one to believe what one believes; and if one is not aware of these ‘reasons’, how could one put them on ‘paper’? What is more, they are ‘reasons’ that are concerned with the ‘concrete’, and ‘a conclusion [“in the concrete”] may be modified in fact by a conclusion from some opposite principle’: a great number of ‘principles’ might be pertinent to a single ‘concrete’ reality, and one of the difficulties involved in reasoning about such a reality, is in determining which ‘principles’ are pertinent to it (and this cannot be ascertained merely by ‘abstract’ reasoning, or by ‘all the logic in the world’ – it is something that is ascertained through some sort of encounter with that ‘concrete’ reality). With regard to the move to ‘Rome’, that move involved an encounter between the ‘concrete being’, the ‘whole man’ of Newman himself, and the ‘concrete’ reality of the Roman Catholic Church (though his ‘personal’ acquaintance with Catholics was negligible): there is more, in the ‘concrete being’ of Newman himself, in the reasoning of the ‘whole man’, than can be

39. 40. 41. 42.

Ibid., 108. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 264.

370

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

represented in ‘paper logic’; and there is more, in the ‘concrete’ reality of Rome – a reality animated by the Holy Spirit – than any ‘logic’, or any ‘reasoning’, can comprehend. Kingsley accuses Newman of having ‘always something put out of sight’, in his writing; he asks about his ‘meaning’ – about the ‘living intelligence, by which’ he writes, and argues, and acts; but for Newman himself, the ‘living intelligence’ involves a fullness of ‘meaning’ that cannot be fully ‘put’ into ‘sight’, or adequately presented; and his forming of ‘impressions of dogma’ involves an encounter with a ‘meaning’ that is, in itself, illimitable, inexhaustible: ‘Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal.’43 In the sermon on ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, Newman suggested that ‘Religious men are a mystery to [the world]; and, being a mystery, they will be called by the world, in mere self-defence, mysterious, dark, subtle, designing … . All the reasons which religious men allege, seem to the world unreal, and all the feelings fantastical and strained; and this strengthens it in its idea that it has not fathomed them, and that there is some secret to be found out … and there is a secret; but it is the power of Divine grace, their state of heart, which is the secret; not their motives or their ends, which the world is told to the full.’44 How could a ‘religious … state of heart’ be represented, to the ‘metropolitan’ world? Newman sets out his principles, in the first autobiographical part of the Apologia, in a succinct, almost abrupt manner. He quotes from a paper of his own, which he wrote in the early 1820s, setting out his recollections of his ‘school days’: ‘“I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans … I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world ... I was very superstitious, and for some time previous to my [Evangelical] conversion ... used constantly to cross myself on going into the dark.”’45 He adds, to this, no comment or explanation. He observes that in the early 1840s he recognized that since ‘there had been already great miracles, as those of Scripture, as the Resurrection, [this] was a fact establishing the principle that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by their Divine Author; and since what had happened once might happen again, a certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached to the idea, taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later times.’46 He reflects on how he was moved by ‘the philosophy of Clement and Origen’, which was ‘based on the mystical or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various Economies or Dispensations of the Eternal’, and which ‘came like

43. 44. 45. 46.

Ibid., 128–9. ‘Wisdom and Innocence’, in SSD, 300–1. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 105–6. Ibid., 123.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

371

music to my inward ear, as if the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage them, I had cherished so long’ – a philosophy according to which ‘Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity’.47 He notes that ‘it was to the Alexandrian school and to the early Church that I owe in particular what I definitely held about the Angels. I viewed them, not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of Scripture, but as carrying on, as Scripture also implies, the Economy of the Visible World. I considered them as the real causes of motion, light, and life, and of those elementary principles of the physical universe, which, when offered in their developments to our senses, suggest to us the notion of cause and effect, and of what are called the laws of nature.’48 He observes that he even ‘considered there was a middle race [of angelic beings] neither in heaven, nor in hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. They gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes of men.’49 Newman reflects on how these disclosures  – about his speculations on the ‘heavenly facts which fill eternity’ – will be taken by ‘many men’. I am aware that what I have been saying will, with many men, be doing credit to my imagination at the expense of my judgment – ‘Hippoclides doesn’t care;’ I am not setting myself up as a pattern of good sense or of any thing else: I am but vindicating myself from the charge of dishonesty.50

It was a truism of the art of rhetoric that one should cultivate ethos as a means of persuasion: one would be more persuasive, if those whom one sought to persuade considered one to have a good character  – to have ‘good sense’, and a good will. Richard Whateley observed, in his Elements of Rhetoric, that to cultivate a reputation for ‘good sense’, one needed to express ‘sentiments’ that accorded with what seemed like ‘good sense’ to those to whom one addressed oneself. When it is said that good Sense, good Principle, and Good-will, constitute the character which the speaker ought to establish of himself, it is to be remembered that every one of these is to be considered in reference to the opinions and habits of the audience … . In proportion as the speaker manifests his dissent from the opinions and principles of his audience, so far, he runs the risk at least of impairing their estimation of his judgement.51

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Ibid., 127–9. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 129–30. Ibid., 131. Richard Whateley, Elements of Rhetoric (Oxford: John Parker, 1828), 150.

372

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

The phrase ‘Hippoclides doesn’t care’ refers to a story in Herodotus, about an Athenian nobleman, Hippocleides, who – attending a dinner party at the house of Cleisthenes, whose daughter he wished to marry – became drunk, stood on his head, and kicked his legs in time to the music; when Cleisthenes told him that he had ‘danced away his marriage’, he replied ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’. Newman is showing that he is well aware that he is differing from the ‘opinions and principles of his audience’. His ‘audience’ might be saying ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’, when presented with the spectacle of Newman, behaving as one intoxicated with ‘imagination’, or Newman himself might be saying ‘Hippocleides doesn’t care’, when confronted with the disapproval of his ‘audience’. Newman acknowledges, then, that he is giving the appearance of not ‘caring’; that he is aware of this appearance, suggests that he is not presenting this appearance undesignedly. There is, perhaps, a show of parrhesia – of bold frankness – in the way in which he describes his ideas, and principles – with precision, brevity, and with little effort to show why they seemed plausible to him (or to make them seem plausible to others); and as he does not seem to be soliciting the agreement of others, so he does not seem solicitous of, or to have designs on, the good opinion of others. There is, equally, very little that is ‘fanciful’ in the way he sets out these ideas and principles. (One exception to this, is in his account of the ‘philosophy of Clement and Origin’, but, there, he is setting out the ‘philosophy’ of others; and he is giving an account of how it affected him (‘like music to my inward ear’), and he observes that his sense of it involved something of the ‘zeal and freshness’ and the ‘partiality of a neophyte’.) In the 1865 edition of the Apologia, Newman replaced ‘I am but vindicating myself from the charge of dishonesty’ with ‘I am but giving a history of my opinions, and that, with the view of showing that I have come by them through intelligible processes of thought and honest external means’.52 An ‘intelligible’ process of thought may, indeed, be a process of thought quite at odds with ‘good sense’; but the more he can show that his opinions ‘come’ from ‘intelligible processes of thought’, the less they seem to be actuated by mere ‘fancy’. The terse style, then, is far from ‘fanciful’, and his use of it conveys the impression that his ‘reason’ is not oppressed by his ‘fancy’. The terse style seems, moreover, to involve an eschewal of rhetorical ‘art’. Newman seems to be observing, in this regard, another of the rhetorical maxims of Whateley. Of intellectual qualifications, there is one which, it is evident, should not only not be blazoned forth, but should in a great measure be concealed, or kept out of sight; viz. Rhetorical skill; whatever is attributed to the Eloquence of the speaker is so much deducted from the strength of his cause … The Orator attains his End the better the less he is regarded as an Orator; if he can make the hearers believe that he is not only a stranger to all unfair artifice, but even destitute of all Persuasive skill whatever, he will persuade them the more effectually, and if

52. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 131.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

373

there ever could be an absolutely perfect Orator, no one would, at the time at least, discover that he was so.53

Newman makes use of a terse, spare style, in presenting principles that might seem to do ‘credit to [his] imagination at the expense of [his] judgement’. In his use of this style (eschewing ‘Eloquence’) and in his avowal of that which does not seem to his ‘credit’, he creates an impression of frankness, candour. In his use of this style (eschewing ‘fancy’) he shows that his ‘judgement’, his capacity for clear, ‘intelligible’ thought, is not impaired, is not the ‘slave’ and ‘puppet’ of his imagination. Newman does not make use of a ‘poetical’ register, in presenting these principles; yet these principles, nevertheless, suggest that what the ‘poetical’ imagination apprehends – in impressions that are ‘like music to [the] inward ear’  – might be truth: if the world is a ‘symbol’ of ‘heavenly facts’, then vision is a means to truth. He is concerned, in the first part of the Apologia, with two main principles: the principle that ‘probability is the guide of life’ (the ‘certitude which we were able to possess, whether as to the truths of natural theology, or as to the fact of a revelation, [is] the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities, and that, both according to the constitution of the human mind and the will of its Maker’);54 and the principle that there is ‘an analogy between the separate works of God [which] leads to the conclusion that the system which is of less importance is economically or sacramentally connected with the more momentous system, and of this conclusion the theory, …[of] the unreality of material phenomena, is an ultimate resolution’.55 As assessments of ‘probability’ are very much a matter of ‘implicit’ reasoning, so the notion that ‘probability is the guide of life’, and of religious belief, is connected to the sense that there is more, in the ‘living intelligence’, in the apprehension that actuates religious ‘opinion’, than can be represented in ‘paper logic’. These considerations, taken together, suggest that the fullest insight into the ‘system’ of reality might be in visions – whereby ‘material phenomena’ are made into ‘figures’ and ‘types’ of ‘more momentous’ realities. There is more, in visionary apprehension or perception, than can be represented in ‘paper logic’; and there is more in reality than any sort of apprehension or perception – visionary or otherwise – can apprehend. ‘Those two principles of my teaching … have led to a charge against me both of fancifulness and of scepticism.’56 If these ‘two principles’ suggest that ‘vision’ can be a means to truth, then this would suggest Newman, in accepting these principles, would be willing to accord his own experiences of ‘vision’ a certain credit, so that those experiences would have some influence on his ‘opinions’, and would have a part in the ‘history’ of his opinions.

53. 54. 55. 56.

Richard Whateley, Rhetoric, 154–5 Apologia pro Vita Sua, 122. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 114.

374

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

2. Newman suggests, in the Apologia, that his understanding of his own life, his ‘work’, his ‘mission’, was, in 1833, animated by a ‘vision’. We set out [on the tour of the south of Europe] in December, 1832. It was during this expedition that my Verses which are in the Lyra Apostolica were written; – a few indeed before it, but not more than one or two of them after it. Exchanging, as I was, definite Tutorial labours, and the literary quiet and pleasant friendships of the last six years, for foreign countries and an unknown future, I naturally was led to think that some inward changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon me. At Whitchurch, while waiting for the down mail to Falmouth, I wrote the verses about my Guardian Angel, which begin with these words: ‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?’ and go on to speak of ‘the vision’ which haunted me: – that vision is more or less brought out in the whole series of these compositions … . Especially when I was left by myself, the thought came upon me that deliverance is wrought, not by the many but by the few, not by bodies but by persons. Now it was, I think, that I repeated to myself the words, which had ever been dear to me from my school days, ‘Exoriare aliquis!’ – now too, that Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba, for which I had an immense liking, came forcibly to my mind. I began to think that I had a mission. There are sentences of my letters to my friends to this effect, if they are not destroyed. When we took leave of Monsignore Wiseman, he had courteously expressed a wish that we might make a second visit to Rome; I said with great gravity, ‘We have a work to do in England.’ I went down at once to Sicily, and the presentiment grew stronger. I struck into the middle of the island, and fell ill of a fever at Leonforte. My servant thought that I was dying, and begged for my last directions. I gave them, as he wished; but I said, ‘I shall not die.’ I repeated, ‘I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light.’ I never have been able to make out at all what I meant … . I was aching to get home; yet for want of a vessel I was kept at Palermo for three weeks. I began to visit the Churches, and they calmed my impatience, though I did not attend any services. I knew nothing of the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament there. At last I got off in an orange boat, bound for Marseilles. We were becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio. Then it was that I wrote the lines, ‘Lead, kindly light’, which have since become well known. I was writing verses the whole time of my passage. At length I got to Marseilles, and set off for England. The fatigue of travelling was too much for me, and I was laid up for several days at Lyons. At last I got off again and did not stop night or day till I reached England, and my mother’s house. My brother had arrived from Persia only a few hours before. This was on the Tuesday. The following Sunday, July 14th, Mr. Keble preached the Assize Sermon in the University Pulpit. It was published under the title of ‘National Apostasy’. I have ever considered and kept the day, as the start of the religious movement of 1833.57 57. Ibid., 133–6.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

375

The ‘verses’ which ‘speak of “the vision” which haunted me’ are the verses on ‘Guardian Angels’ in Lyra Apostolica. Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend, His footprints, and his vesture-skirts of light, Who, as I talk with men, conforms aright Their sympathetic words, or deeds that blend With my hid thought; – or stoops him to attend My doubtful-pleading grief; – or blunts the might Of ill I see not; – or in dreams of night Figures the scope in which what is will end? Were I Christ’s own, then fitly might I call That vision real; for to the thoughtful mind That walks with Him, He half unveils His face; But when on common men such shadows fall, These dare not make their own the gifts they find, Yet, not all hopeless, eye His boundless grace.58

In the Apologia he suggests that the ‘vision’, mentioned in ‘Guardian Angels’, is a vision ‘brought out’ in the ‘series of compositions’ making up Lyra Apostolica; and he connects this ‘vision’ to the expectation ‘that some inward changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon’ him. Then he observes that the forming of his sense of ‘mission’ involved recollections of ‘Southey’s beautiful poem of Thalaba’: he was thinking of himself, his ‘mission’, his ‘work’, in a way informed by ‘poetical’, visionary images. He fell ill of a fever, and though others thought he was dying, he declared, ‘I shall not die, for I have not sinned against light, I have not sinned against light’ – and of this he observes, ‘I have never been able to make out at all what I meant.’ Did he have, in his delirium, some insight that he cannot ‘make out’, and cannot represent, or can he not ‘make out’ what he ‘meant’ because there was nothing to ‘make out’ (perhaps his preoccupation, in delirium, with ‘light’, merely shows how much his sense of having a prophetic ‘mission’ was ‘haunting’ his thoughts)? He parallels his experience of having visions of a ‘mission’, with his experience of delirium; in each state, he makes certain quasi-prophetic utterances (‘we have a work to do’, ‘I shall not die’) which mean more, perhaps, than he understands. He does not attempt to characterize what the ‘vision’ that ‘haunted’ him was like  – he refers only to the ‘series of compositions’ in Lyra Apostolica, as setting out that vision. ‘That vision’ is, equally,

58. John Henry Newman, ‘Guardian Angels’, Lyra Apostolica (Derby: Henry Mozley and Sons and J. G. and F. Rivington, 1836), 33. The version considered here is that which was published in the first edition of Lyra Apostolica, though a couple of other versions, with minor variants, exist – one of which is included in a letter Newman wrote to his mother in December 1832, the other of which is included in Verses on Various Occasions, published in 1867.

376

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

not ‘brought out’ in ‘Guardian Angels’: it is referred to; but nothing definite is revealed as to what ‘that vision’ is about, or what it is like. Of the circumstances in which he composed these ‘verses’, Newman remarks, ‘Exchanging, as I was, definite Tutorial labours, and the literary quiet and pleasant friendships of the last six years, for foreign countries and an unknown future, I naturally was led to think that some inward changes, as well as some larger course of action, was coming upon me. At Whitchurch, while waiting for the down mail to Falmouth, I wrote the verses about my Guardian Angel, which begin with these words: “Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?”’59 He suggests that the mood in which he expected that some ‘inward changes, as well as some larger course of action’ were ‘coming upon’ him, was to some extent a ‘natural’ effect of his circumstances. He was ‘naturally led’ to expect ‘inward changes’ and a ‘larger course of action’ (‘naturally’ here suggests a commonsensical way of understanding the ‘inward’ effect of outward circumstances); and, on his travels, the ‘strangeness of foreign life threw [him] back into’ himself ’ – making him meditate on his ‘vision’. Certain circumstances ‘naturally’, he suggests, have certain effects on how one thinks. Were his circumstances, at that time, really such as to make him ‘naturally’ expect that a ‘larger course of action’ was ‘coming upon’ him? He had just finished a book; he no longer had any duties as a tutor (indeed he had, in effect, been removed from his tutorial duties). Were these circumstances such as to make it ‘natural’ to expect a ‘larger course of action’? (This is, as a matter of fact – to judge from his letters – how he did feel at the time.) If his ‘presentiment’ of a ‘mission’ was not a ‘natural’ effect of his circumstances, what was it an effect of? How, more generally, does that which is ‘inward’ relate to outward circumstances? The ‘verses’ on his ‘Guardian Angel’ suggest that he is in relation, not simply to what is outward, perceptible, but to ‘unearthly’ realities which impinge on him in ways that he cannot quite make out. There is an incongruity between the circumstances in which he ‘wrote the verses’ on his ‘Guardian Angel’ – the circumstances of contemporary England, of the ‘down mail to Falmouth’ – and the matter of the ‘verses’ themselves: it was far from usual or ‘natural’, in the England of 1832, for young clergymen of the Church of England to contemplate ‘Guardian Angels’, as Newman was well aware: his circumstances were not such as ‘naturally led’ to thoughts of angels. (Preaching on angels in 1831, in a sermon on ‘The Powers of Nature’, he remarked that ‘we are not accustomed to such thoughts’, to thoughts of ‘unearthly’ presences – ‘the sin of what is called an educated age, such as our own … [is] to account slightly of [the angels], or not at all; to ascribe all we see around us, not to their agency but to certain assumed laws of nature’ – and he claimed that this ‘is likely to be our sin, in proportion as we are initiated into the learning of this world’.)60 How does the ‘inward’ vision relate to outward circumstances or influences? How is the ‘inward’ vision formed? In the first part of ‘Guardian Angels’, Newman

59. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 133. 60. John Henry Newman, ‘The Powers of Nature’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons ii [hereafter PPS ii] (1835; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 358.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

377

reflects on how an ‘unearthly Friend’ might affect his ‘inward’ life. He is affected, in ‘talk with men’, by ‘sympathetic words’, and by ‘deeds that blend’ with his ‘hid thought’. The ‘sympathetic words’ of ‘men’, or ‘deeds that blend’ with his ‘hid thought’ seem to be ‘words’ or ‘deeds’ with which he feels sympathy, with which he concurs, which accordingly ‘blend with’ his ‘thought’ – affecting, and becoming part of, his ‘thought’, his understanding of the world. Newman suggests that the ‘unearthly Friend’ might ‘conform aright’ these ‘words’ and ‘deeds’  – which would suggest that the ‘Friend’ ensures that he is presented with ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ that affect his ‘hid thought’ in the ‘right’ way, forming his mind ‘aright’ (and, perhaps, it might suggest that the ‘Friend’ ensures that these ‘words’ and ‘deeds’ are conformed to his ‘hid thought’, adapted to his understanding, in such a way that they are ‘sympathetic’ to him, and are such that they can ‘blend’ with his thought). It is not at all clear how he would take the agency of this ‘Friend’ to relate to the agency of the ‘men’ who say these ‘words’ and do these ‘deeds’. (Is there a sense here of something like ‘angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world’?) Then again, the ‘unearthly Friend’ might be acting, not on, or through, the ‘men’ with whom Newman ‘talks’, but on Newman himself  – causing him to feel a certain ‘sympathy’ with certain ‘words’ and ‘deeds’, disposing him to concur with them. (What Newman considers ‘sympathetic’ will be determined, presumably, by his character. How, though, the agency of the ‘Friend’ might be involved in his responses of ‘sympathy’, and how this agency relates to all else that is involved in his responses of ‘sympathy’, is not clear.) Newman suggests that the ‘unearthly Friend’ might form in him ‘dreams of night’ – acting in some way on his imagination  – ‘dreams’ which figure ‘the scope in which what is will end’. These ‘dreams’, which are concerned with the ‘scope in which what is will end’, the final end, the telos, toward which the present state of things tends, resemble the ‘poetical’ visions that Newman reflects on in ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, the visions that ‘delineate that perfection which the imagination suggests … to which as a limit the present system of Divine Providence actually tends’.61 Newman seems to be suggesting that his ‘unearthly Friend’ might be forming his mind, his ‘hid thought’, in ways that he ‘sees not’, and that the imparting of ‘dreams’, visions, might be one of the means by which that ‘Friend’ forms his mind. How might the question ‘Are these the tracks of some unearthly Friend?’ relate, then, to the question of whether a certain ‘vision’ is ‘real’? Is he asking whether he can discern ‘unearthly’ influences, in certain of his experiences, such that he could determine whether a particular ‘vision’ is itself marked by those influences, whether it has on it traces or ‘tracks’ of ‘unearthly’ influences (and so is ‘real’, trustworthy)? He seems to envisage ‘unearthly’ influences as being exerted to form his ‘hid thought’, his mind, to ‘conform’ it to the truth; and, in this regard, a ‘vision’ might be a means of forming his mind, and of manifesting something of the truth, something ‘real’.

61. ‘Poetry, with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, in ECH i, 9.

378

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman contrasts ‘Christ’s own’ and ‘common men’. The contrast is not that where ‘Christ’s own’ have visions, ‘common men’ do not (for ‘such shadows fall’ on ‘common men’). The contrast is that where ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly … call’ a ‘vision’ of this kind ‘real’, ‘common men … dare not make their own the gifts they find’. Again, though, this contrast is not straightforward: it is not that where ‘common men … dare not make their own the gifts they find’, ‘Christ’s own’ do; rather, ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly call’ their visions ‘real’. The juxtaposition of how Christ’s own ‘fitly … call’ a ‘vision real’, and of how ‘common men … dare not make their own the gifts they find’, suggests a certain connection between ‘calling’ a vision ‘real’, and making it ‘[one’s] own’. A vision is a ‘gift’; it is beneficial; and it is beneficial when one makes it ‘[one’s] own’. One makes it ‘[one’s] own’ when one ‘calls’ it ‘real’ – and this might mean that one takes it to present certain realities (such that it shows what is ‘real’), or it might mean that one recognizes it to be a ‘real’, authentic, vision, in that it has an ‘unearthly’ rather than an earthly origin (such that it is trustworthy): the difference, here, is in whether one is concerned with what the vision presents – with whether or not it seems to present realities – or whether one is concerned with the provenance of that vision – with whether or not it has marks or ‘tracks’ on it of an ‘unearthly’ provenance. Either way, if one takes the vision to be ‘real’, then one assents to the account of reality that it presents; and if one assents to that account of reality, then it contributes to the forming of whatever overall sense of reality one has – it forms the ‘hid thought’ by which one makes sense of the world, by which one assesses what is, and is not, ‘probable’. That sense of reality is what is most ‘[one’s] own’, what is innermost in oneself. If one makes a vision ‘[one’s] own’, then one takes it in, one makes it a part of oneself, one lets it inform the way in which one views the world. If one assimilates a vision, in this way, it will inform how one acts, how one ‘walks’ in the world. When Newman presents the contrast between ‘Christ’s own’ and ‘common men’, he might be intimating that he is himself a ‘common man’. (‘While Christ’s own might fitly call their visions real, it is not for common men for myself to do so  – though I am not “all hopeless” that I might have had something like a vision, as God sends “such shadows” even to such as myself.’) He might be suggesting that one might take up an attitude of half belief, that is not ‘all hopeless’, and that is not without some salutary effect. Then again, one need not interpret the contrast in this way: he does not commit himself to a decision as to what to ‘call’ his own vision. He might, after all – after these reflections – take his vision to be ‘real’. Why is it that ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly call’ a ‘vision’ – of the kind that is being reflected on – ‘real’? It is because to ‘the thoughtful mind / That walks with Him, he half unveils His face’.62 What does this mean, though? If one takes it that Christ ‘half unveils His face’ by imparting a ‘vision’ of His ‘face’ – if one takes ‘half unveils

62. The first version of ‘Guardian Angels’ – included in a letter from Newman to his mother – had ‘waits on’ instead of ‘walks with’. ‘Wait on’ might suggest more of passivity than ‘walks with’: one can ‘wait on’ someone without being particularly active, without

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

379

His face’ to mean ‘imparts “that vision”’ – then this would suggest that ‘Christ’s own’ may fitly take their visions to be real, because Christ imparts visions to those who are His ‘own’, and ‘Christ’s own’ know this: ‘Christ’s own’ are among those who are likely to have visions, so they know that any visions they have are likely to be ‘real’. (The difficulty with this, is that Newman suggests that it is not only ‘Christ’s own’ who have visions – ‘such shadows’ can ‘fall’ on ‘common men’. What is more, would ‘Christ’s own’ always be aware of being ‘Christ’s own’, such that, in knowing themselves to be ‘Christ’s own’, and likely to have ‘real’ visions, they might have confidence that their visions were ‘real’?) One might, equally, take the ‘half unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ to be something different from ‘that vision’. It might be a manifestation of Christ, making ‘Christ’s own’ fit to distinguish ‘real’ from unreal visions  – forming in them a sense of the ‘unearthly’, and making them fit to distinguish what is genuinely ‘unearthly’ from what is not. What might this manifestation of Christ (distinct from ‘that vision’) be? To ‘walk with’ Christ involves living in reference to an idea or image of Christ: the idea of Christ animates the way one lives, if one would live in accordance with the will of Christ, or live a Christ-like life. As the virtuous, who attend, in their ‘walk’, to the conscience, to the intimations of goodness presented by the conscience, form an ever clearer apprehension of goodness, so perhaps ‘Christ’s own’, who ‘walk’ with Christ, who attend to Christ as they act, day by day, form an ever clearer apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ. The ‘unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ might, then, consist in the forming of an ever clearer apprehension of Christ, through the living of a life animated by an awareness of Christ. That ‘unveil[ing]’ is, equally, a free, gratuitous act on the part of Christ: it is Christ Himself who ‘half unveils His face’. Christ only ‘half unveils His face’ to those who ‘walk with’ Him. If it is Christ who ‘half unveils His face’ – if the initiative of Christ is supreme in this – it might, equally, be the case that He makes use of the (ordinary) development of awareness, involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ him – the development of an awareness that animates a life of ‘walk[ing] with’ Him – as a means of half unveiling ‘His face’: the unveiling might be ‘in’ this ordinary formation of the mind, as disposed by Christ (a formation of the mind that is distinct from the experiencing of a ‘vision’). (The agency of Christ, in this regard, does not compete with ‘nature’: Christ can act in, or through, ‘nature’, disposing it with utter freedom. As Newman observes, in a British Critic article on ‘Milman’s View of Christianity’, since ‘there is a particular Providence, so of necessity that Providence is secretly concurring and co-operating with that system which meets the eye … . This is the one great rule on which the Divine Dispensations with mankind have been and are conducted, that the visible world is the instrument, yet the veil, of the world invisible,  – the veil, yet still partially the symbol and index: so that all that exists or happens visibly, conceals and yet suggests, and above all subserves, a system of persons, facts, and events

being called on to act, whereas ‘walking’ is a form of activity; but ‘wait on’, equally, implies ‘service’, which involves various kinds of activity.

380

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

beyond itself.’63) Then again, the development of awareness – the development of an apprehension of Christ – involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, might itself be characterized as ‘visionary’: to ‘walk with’ Christ is to live a life that is animated by a vision, an image, of Christ, and that vision, or image, develops, becomes clearer, the more that it is lived from. This would suggest, again, that such an experience of the ‘unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ might itself be ‘that vision’, and that the ‘vision’ would be in continuity with, or would be an expression of, the ordinary development of the imagination: Christ ‘half unveils His face’ in or through the acts of the imagination, acts which arise from a life of devotion to Christ, and ‘that vision’ consists in these acts of the imagination. When ‘Christ’s own’ call a ‘vision … real’, this might not be so much a matter of reflecting (selfconsciously) on that vision, as a kind of object – attempting to discern the ‘tracks’ or traces of the ‘unearthly’ on it  – as it might be a matter of considering the meaning of the vision, its account of the ‘real’, and of recognizing, or of being disposed to recognize, that account as true: in calling a vision ‘real’, they take in, and assent to, its meaning, so that it contributes to their overall vision of what is ‘real’, and they ‘make [it] their own’. One who is ‘Christ’s own’ may ‘fitly’ do this, as one who is ‘Christ’s own’, who has ‘walk[ed] with’ Christ, has an imagination that is disposed toward the ‘real’, an imagination that has been informed by the image, the vision, of Christ. The forming of the ‘visionary’ imagination, here, might, again, be analogous to the forming of the conscience: as the conscience  – the more it is attended to, and acted on – becomes clearer, and its ‘informations’ more convincing, as the ‘dictates’ of the conscience become clearer, more authoritative, more definite, the more they are attended to  – ‘the faint light of Truth dawns continually brighter’ and ‘the shadows which at first troubled it, the unreal shapes created by its own twilight-state, vanish’, so that the ‘light’ becomes ‘fixed and definite, and strengthening into principle, it at the same time develops into habit’ – so the ‘vision’ of Christ, involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ Him, becomes clearer, more certain, the more it is acted on; and one who habitually acts in accordance with this ‘vision’, becomes more ‘fit’ to ‘call’ this vision ‘real’ – acquiring an ever more assured sense of which visionary intuitions manifest the ‘face’ of Christ. (The instinctive recognition of a vision as ‘real’ might be akin to the ‘sympathetic’ response to the ‘words’ of ‘men’, by which those words ‘blend’ with the ‘thought’ of the one who is ‘sympathetic’ to them. The instinctive judgment involved in this would be a judgment formed by experience  – by the experience of ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ  – and it might not, as such, be a judgment that could be properly represented, and justified, in ‘common’ terms.) The three possibilities here, then, are: ‘Christ’s own’ know they are likely to have visions, and so, knowing this, they can ‘fitly’ take whatever visions they have to be ‘real’; ‘Christ’s own’ have, in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, an apprehension of the ‘face’ of the Christ, by which they are ‘fit’ to distinguish ‘real’ from unreal visions (they assess their visions in relation to this apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ); ‘Christ’s own’, have, in ‘walk[ing] with’

63. ‘Milman’s View of Christianity’, in ECH ii, 192.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

381

Christ, an apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ, and this apprehension is itself their ‘vision’, and they take it as ‘real’ without being particularly self-conscious about it – what they experience is an ever clearer apprehension of the ‘face’ of Christ, as they ‘walk with’ Him. In ‘Guardian Angels’, it is evident, at any rate, that Newman would connect ‘vision’ with the formation of the mind – he would regard visions as ‘gifts’ that one can ‘make [one’s] own’ – and he would connect salutary ‘vision’ with a certain ‘walk’ or way of living. One may take it that it is not possible to ‘walk with’ Christ, without some kind of apprehension, or vision, of Christ, and this would suggest that the ‘vision’ Christ imparts of ‘His face’ would be pertinent to, and would affect, the way in which the one who has that vision ‘walks’: it would be a vision one could ‘walk with’, or live from. Newman would not regard any ‘real’ vision, of the kind with which he is concerned in ‘Guardian Angels’, a personal or private vision, as comparable, in authority or importance, to the ‘vision of faith’, animating the life of the Church. A personal vision might, in this regard, be something like a supplement to the ‘vision of faith’; if a vision of this kind is something that emerges from the imaginative sense of Christ involved in ‘walk[ing] with’ Him, it might be something developed out of the ‘vision of faith’ animating the life of the Church, in an application of the ‘vision of faith’ to matters of everyday life. One forms a ‘vision’ of Christ for oneself, so to speak, in living a life animated by the ‘image’ of Christ one acquires from the Church; and this ‘vision’ will be determined by the character of the life that one lives (it will be an expression of that life, even as that life will be an expression of that vision). In a ‘Legend of St Gunleus’ (one of the Lives of the English Saints, which was published anonymously, but which was attributed to Newman by R. H. Hutton), Newman observes that the ‘Christian lives in the past and in the future, and in the unseen; in a word, he lives in no small measure in the unknown. And it is one of his duties, and a part of his work, to make the unknown known; to create within him an image of what is absent, and to realise by faith what he does not see.’ It is ‘Meditation which does for the Christian what Investigation does for the children of men’, and such meditation – ‘the way of the divinely illuminated mind’ – is an exercise of the imagination: ‘If we would meditate on any passage of the gospel history, we must insert details indefinitely many, in order to meditate at all; we must fancy motives, feelings, meanings, words, acts, as our connecting links between fact and fact as recorded.’ If such an exercise of ‘fancy’ is involved in an attempt to make sense of a ‘passage of the gospel history’, to ascertain the ‘links between fact and fact’, so there must be such an exercise of ‘fancy’ in the attempt to apply that ‘history’, and the image of Christ presented in that ‘history’, to the circumstances of everyday life, in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ. (In a sermon on ‘Unreal Words’, Newman suggests that to make the ‘solemn truths’ of the faith ‘our own’ is to ‘act upon’ them: such truths ‘should be acted upon … should be made our own inwardly’.)64 One might regard the various acts, making up a life that is a matter of ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, as contributing, bit by bit, to the forming of a

64. ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 45.

382

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘vision’ of the ‘face’ of Christ: that personal ‘vision’ arises from a life that consists in ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, and, once it is formed, it animates that life – those who form such a ‘vision’ act in accordance with it. If one is to ‘walk with’ Christ, then it might be that one cannot but form a personal ‘vision’ of the ‘face’ of Christ. As a holy life is a movement toward the beatific vision – the full ‘unveil[ing]’ of the ‘face’ of Christ – so that life involves the forming of a personal vision of Christ; and perhaps this forming of a personal vision of Christ is a kind of ‘preparation’ for the beatific vision. In a sermon on ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, preached in 1838, Newman maintains that participation in the liturgical life of the Church  – participation in prayer, and in the sacraments  – is a ‘preparation’ for ‘personal intercourse [with] the Creator’ – ‘He will look on us, while we look on Him’: ‘we are destined to come before Him; nay, and to come before Him in judgment; and that on our first meeting; and that suddenly.’65 For those who must endure such an encounter, ‘direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him’.66 For those who live under the Gospel Covenant, ‘we have a sight of God … [but] Christ does not visibly show Himself. He has put a veil on, and He sits among us silently and secretly. When we approach Him, we know it only by faith; and when He manifests Himself to us, it is without our being able to realize to ourselves that manifestation.’67 A thick black veil is spread between this world and the next. We mortal men range up and down it, to and fro, and see nothing. There is no access through it into the next world. In the Gospel this veil is not removed; it remains, but every now and then marvellous disclosures are made to us of what is behind it. At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face. We approach, and in spite of the darkness, our hands, or our head, or our brow, or our lips become, as it were, sensible of the contact of something more than earthly. We know not where we are, but we have been bathing in water, and a voice tells us that it is blood. Or we have a mark signed upon our foreheads, and it spake of Calvary. Or we recollect a hand laid upon our heads, and surely it had the print of nails in it, and resembled His who with a touch gave sight to the blind and raised the dead. Or we have been eating and drinking; and it was not a dream surely, that One fed us from His wounded side, and renewed our nature by the heavenly meat He gave. Thus in many ways He, who is Judge to us, prepares us to be judged.68

65. 66. 67. 68.

‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, in PPS v, 4, 3. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 10–11.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

383

Newman associates certain ‘marvellous disclosures’ of a ‘Form’ that is ‘behind’ the ‘veil’ with the sacraments: baptism (‘we have been bathing in water’, ‘a mark signed on our foreheads’); ordination or confirmation (‘a hand laid upon our heads’); the Eucharist (‘eating and drinking’). He describes participation in the sacraments in a dream-like, phantamagoric way – ‘we know not where we are’, ‘it was not a dream, surely’. In this, he is making use of the symbolism of the rites themselves: he is calling attention to the symbolic mode of the rites. Participation in the sacraments is, evidently, something different from the forming of a personal ‘vision’ of the ‘face’ of Christ. The sacraments have an authority – as instituted by Christ, and as mediating the presence of Christ – which no personal ‘vision’ could have. The sacraments, equally, make ‘marvellous disclosures’, pertinent to how one is to live. If one would live in accordance with these ‘disclosures’, then one must ‘apply’ them, in some sense, in living: one must regard these ‘disclosures’ as revealing something like the ultimate reality within which, or in relation to which, one lives, and one must attempt to discern that reality in, or through, the situations in which one acts, applying those ‘disclosures’ to the here and now; and this ‘application’ of the ‘disclosures’ must involve a use of the symbolic ‘language’ in which those ‘disclosures’ are made: one acts in reference to that, which one can conceive of only by making ‘types’ and ‘figures’ from the stuff of experience, so that those ‘types’ and ‘figures’ inform, and determine the meaning of, how one acts. One makes symbols of the things encountered in experience, apprehending through these symbols the reality in relation to which one acts. (As Newman observes, in ‘Unreal Words’, ‘It is not an easy thing to learn that new language which Christ has brought us. He has interpreted all things for us in a new way; He has brought us a religion which sheds a new light on all that happens. Try to learn this language. … That a thing is true, is no reason that it should be said, but that it should be done.’)69 In ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’, a sermon preached in 1836, Newman maintains that ‘to those who live by faith, every thing they see speaks of [the] future world. The very glories of nature, the sun, moon, and stars, and the richness and the beauty of the earth, are as types and figures witnessing and teaching the invisible things of God. All that we see is destined one day to burst forth into a heavenly bloom, and to be transfigured into immortal glory. Heaven at present is out of sight, but in due time, as snow melts and discovers what it lay upon, so will this visible creation fade away before those greater splendours which are behind it, and on which at present it depends … Above and below, the clouds of the air, the trees of the field, the waters of the great deep will be found impregnated with the forms of everlasting spirits, the servants of God which do His pleasure.70

69. ‘Unreal Words’, in PPS v, 45. 70. ‘The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iv [hereafter PPS iv] (1838; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 223–4.

384

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

One should, Newman maintains, regard this life as ‘a sort of dream, as detached and as different from our real eternal existence as a dream differs from waking’, ‘a kind of shadow without substance, a scene set before us, in which we seem to be, and in which it is our duty to act just as if all we saw had a truth and reality, because all that meets us influences us and our destiny’.71 The soul ‘submits itself to things of time so far as to be brought to perfection by them, that, when the veil is withdrawn, and it sees itself to be, where it ever has been, in God’s Kingdom, it may be found worthy to enjoy it’.72 ‘Our present state … is precious as revealing to us, amid shadows and figures, the existence and attributes of Almighty God and His elect people. … The one desire which should move us should be, first of all, that of seeing Him face to face, who is now hid from us; and next of enjoying eternal and direct communion, in and through Him, with our friends around us, whom at present we know only through the medium of sense, by precarious and partial channels, which give us little insight into their hearts.’73 When ‘the veil is withdrawn’, then, the ‘real … existence’ that will be revealed will be the ‘existence’ of spirits, in ‘immortal glory’ – whether that be the (angelic) ‘everlasting spirits’, by whose ‘forms’ the things of the natural world are ‘impregnated’, or the spirits of ‘our friends around us’; but, in the present state of things, the ‘veil’ is not ‘withdrawn’. The acts, and the ‘tracks’ of the ‘everlasting spirits’, are not perceptible. To live with a sense of this ‘future world’  – the ‘future world’ where one ‘ever has been’ – is to become ‘worthy to enjoy it’. In a sermon on the ‘Moral Effects of Communion with God’, preached in 1837, Newman maintains that ‘prayer, praise, thanksgiving, contemplation’ are the ‘mode of [the Christian’s] intercourse with the next world’, by which ‘our own tastes, likings, motives, and habits’ are made fit for that world: ‘as consciousness tells us what they are, reason tells us whether they are such as become, or correspond with, that heavenly world into which we have been translated’; ‘the man who has not accustomed himself to the language of heaven will be no fit inhabitant of it when, in the Last Day, it is perceptibly revealed’.74 A habit of prayer … has what may be called a natural effect, in spiritualizing and elevating the soul. A man is no longer what we was before; gradually, imperceptibly to himself, he has imbibed a new set of ideas, and become imbued with fresh principles. He is as one coming from king’s courts, with a grace, a delicacy, a dignity, a propriety, a justness of thought and taste, a clearness and firmness of principle, all his own … As speech is the organ of human society, and the means of human civilization, so is prayer the instrument of divine fellowship and divine training.75

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

‘The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life’, in PPS iv, 221–2. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 222–3. ‘Moral Effects of Communion with God’, in PPS iv, 228, 229. Ibid., 230–1.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

385

In a sermon on ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’, preached in 1835 Newman suggests that it might be possible to be ‘impressed’ by the presence of God in some way, without having the ‘power of reflection’ on this impression – the impression being in some sense an ‘unconscious’ apprehension or ‘seeing’ of the presence of God. Who can say that all of us, or at least all who are living in the faith of Christ, have not some strange but unconscious life in God’s presence all the while we are here, seeing what we do not know we see, impressed yet without power of reflection, and this, without having a double self in consequence, and with an increase to us, not a diminution, of the practical reality of our earthly sojourn and probation? Are there not men before now who, like Elisha, when his spirit followed Gehazi, or St. Peter, when he announced the coming of Sapphira’s bearers, or St. Paul, when his presence went before him to Corinth, seem to range beyond themselves, even while in the flesh? Who knows where he is ‘in visions of the night’?76

Newman is concerned, in this, with ‘where’ the soul is. The soul is connected to the body, and it animates the body, but as it has a mode of existence different from that of the body – it is immaterial, while the body is material – so it might not have those limitations – with regard to location in space – which the body has, in its materiality. He relates this question, though – as to ‘where’ the soul is – to the question of what the soul ‘sees’: as sensory perception involves the presence of the thing sensed to the senses, whereby it makes an impression on the senses – such that the presence of one thing to another involves an ‘impressing’ of that thing on the other – so, perhaps, the soul in ‘God’s presence’ is somehow ‘impressed’ by that presence; but where impressions on the senses involve a consciousness of those impressions, and a ‘power of reflection’ on them, impressions on the soul, or on whatever part of the soul is in ‘God’s presence’, do not involve this consciousness. If such impressions of ‘God’s presence’ might occur, and if they are ‘unconscious’, how might they relate to, and affect, what is conscious – how might they affect the conscious life of the mind, involving sensory perception, ‘reason’, faith, and the like? Newman does not speculate about this; and his reflections on the ‘strange but unconscious life in God’s presence [we might have] all the while we are here’ are, themselves, a digression – the main function of which is to call attention to how little is known, or understood, about the ‘life’, presence, and powers of the soul; he does not make any definite claims in relation to these speculations. Yet his question, ‘who knows where he is “in visions of the night”?’, suggests that there might be a connection between these speculations about the ‘unconscious life’ of the soul, and the speculations about ‘unearthly’ influences

76. ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons iii [hereafter PPS iii] (1836; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 168.

386

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

in ‘Guardian Angels’  – occasioning ‘dreams of night’ presenting visions of ‘the scope in which what is will end’, or occasioning ‘that vision’. Could those ‘dreams’ be ‘impressions’ of the ‘unearthly’, or could they derive from, and reveal something about, such impressions? Could those who have such impressions be affected  – in some imperceptible, unknowable way – in their sense of what is ‘real’, so that ‘Christ’s own’ (‘who are living in the faith of Christ’) have a sense of what is ‘real’ that disposes them to recognize what is ‘real’ in ‘dreams’ or ‘visions’? Imaginative ‘vision’ can be experienced as a sheer ‘gift’. While one can choose to imagine something, or to stop imagining something, just as one can choose to think about something, or to stop thinking about something, one can, equally, have the experience of thoughts, and imaginings, simply occurring to one – seeming to occur of themselves, as ‘gifts’. When a vision is experienced as something that spontaneously occurs, as if of itself, it is experienced as something emerging into consciousness from ‘elsewhere’, even as it is experienced as something subject in certain respects to consciousness (in that one can choose to dismiss it from consciousness, or one can choose to attend to it, to contemplate it). The ‘elsewhere’, whence the vision emerges, might be taken to be something inward, interior to the self (though not accessible to consciousness); but as this ‘elsewhere’ is not accessible to consciousness, nothing can be known about it by introspection. In asking, in ‘Guardian Angels’, about the provenance of ‘dreams’ and visions, wondering whether an ‘unearthly Friend’ might be inspiring certain visions so as to present, in ‘figures’, certain truths, Newman seems to be wondering whether the ‘elsewhere’, from which visions emerge, might be itself ‘unearthly’. To ‘call’ a vision ‘real’ is not necessarily to make any particular claims about the ‘unearthly’ provenance of that vision: it might be simply to recognize that the vision presents something one takes to be ‘real’ or true – to recognize that something ‘real’ is manifest in it or through it. So to ‘call’ a vision ‘real’ is not necessarily to take it that it has an ‘unearthly’ origin (and it is certainly not to claim that one can tell that it has an ‘unearthly’ origin). If, though, one were to ‘call’ a vision ‘real’, to have an impression that it presents certain insights into the ‘real’, so one might be willing to countenance the possibility of its having an ‘unearthly’ provenance – one might be willing to regard the unknowable ‘elsewhere’, from which the vision has emerged, as ‘unearthly’. One need not, though, be assured that a vision is ‘unearthly’, if one is to recognize truth in it, and to act on it. If one lives with, or from a vision of this kind, one does not thereby transcend all that is ‘earthly’: the ‘drudgery of ordinary, everyday obedience’ (as Newman puts it, in ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’) is not transformed into something else;77 but (as Newman maintains in ‘The State of Grace’) ‘the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel, sorrow, pain, care, bereavement, these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes upon the Divine Majesty’.78 When Newman refers to ‘Guardian Angels’, in his Apologia, he suggests that the poem is about his own visionary experience (about the vision which ‘haunted’

77. ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’, in PPS ii, 374. 78. ‘The State of Grace’, in PPS iv, 146–7.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

387

him). He was, in 1833, ‘haunted’ by a certain vision, and ‘began to think’ that he ‘had a mission’. As his return to England was delayed, he felt ‘impatience’; he was ‘aching to get home’. He relates this experience of ‘impatience’ to another of his poems, ‘Lead Kindly Light’, which he wrote while ‘becalmed a whole week in the Straits of Bonifacio’. Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene, – one step enough for me. I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou Shouldst lead me on. I loved to choose and see my path; but now, Lead Thou me on! I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, Pride ruled my will: remember not past years. So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on, O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till The night is gone; And with the morn those Angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.79

In ‘Guardian Angels’, he suggests that the hesitation, as to whether one might ‘dare’ to ‘make [one’s] own’ certain ‘unearthly’ gifts – calling a vision ‘real’ – is something that characterizes ‘common men’: it is ‘common men’ who do not ‘dare’ to recognize visions for what they are. ‘Christ’s own’, by contrast, seem less hampered by such hesitations, inhibitions, and so on. If one takes it that Newman would identify himself with ‘common men’ (‘it is not for common men such as myself to dare to call a vision real’) – though one need not interpret ‘Guardian Angels’ in this way – then the contrast between ‘common men’ and ‘Christ’s own’ might involve a certain self-rebuke, and a certain impatience at his own limitations: if he were more like ‘Christ’s own’, perhaps, then he would not respond with such uncertainty, such hesitation, to a vision. ‘Lead Kindly Light’, by contrast, involves a certain acceptance of his own limitations, a sense that he might be ‘blest’ in them: ‘I do not ask to see / The distant scene, – one step enough for me.’ He cannot ‘see’ everything, but he can see ‘enough’. Newman suggests, in ‘Lead kindly Light’, that chafing at his limitations, with regard to what he can ‘see’ and what he cannot see, might involve a desire for

79. ‘Light in the Darkness’, in Lyra Apostolica, 28.

388

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

mastery and independence that is connected with ‘pride’. In the first stanza, he asks to be led; in the second, he observes that, in the past, he ‘loved to choose and see [his] path’, ‘Pride ruled [his] will’: the desire to ‘choose and see’ the ‘path’ is, he suggests, connected to ‘pride’ – to a desire for mastery (a desire not to rely on another). A contrast is established, between different kinds of light: there is the ‘Kindly light’, which orients him in the ‘encircling gloom’; and there is the light of ‘garish day’. This contrast of kinds of ‘light’ suggests a contrast between kinds of seeing  – between the ‘seeing’ that is the perception of the sensible world (and perhaps the mastery of the sensible world, by the intellect) and the seeing that is an apprehension of a higher, spiritual world: the ‘Kindly light’, by which he orients himself, is a ‘light’ by which he ascertains the next ‘step’, a light by which he recognizes how he should act, in the here and now, how he should live, and it is, as such, a ‘light’ concerned with spiritual realities, a ‘light’ of moral understanding. According to the imagery used – the imagery of ‘garish day’ and of ‘night’ – the ‘Kindly light’ would not be perceptible, in the light of ‘garish day’ (as lesser lights are concealed by daylight): it is not perceptible, perhaps, amid worldly distractions – not perceptible to those who attend overmuch to the world, and to the worldly realities they can ‘see’ and master. ‘Lead Kindly light’ was included, in Lyra Apostolica, in a section entitled ‘Faith’: the ‘Kindly light’ would seem to be the ‘light’ of conscience, and the ‘light’ of faith – the faith that is a ‘practical perception of the unseen’ (involving ‘enough’ of a perception of the ‘unseen’, to enable the next ‘step’ to be discerned). If the ‘Kindly light’ is visible only in the ‘gloom’, then the ‘gloom’ itself is, in a sense, ‘Kindly’: the ‘gloom’ (which is a kind of restriction on his ‘sight’) itself makes something – the ‘Kindly light’ – perceptible (even while the ‘gloom’ makes the passage ‘o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent’ more perilous). The ‘gloom’, the darkness, then, is not mere privation or restriction: it makes the ‘Kindly light’ more perceptible. What is more, the ‘gloom’ makes him more attentive to his ‘step’: he attends to the next ‘step’, not the ‘distant scene’, and this is ‘enough’ (and this might well be the best way to traverse ‘moor and fen’, ‘crag and torrent’ – excessive confidence would be unwise). The metrical pattern of ‘Lead Kindly Light’ involves an alternation of long and short lines – the longer lines in iambic pentameter, the shorter lines consisting of just two ‘feet’, a spondee, then iambus. In the first stanza, there is a pause, in each line, after the first four syllables; the pattern of the short line ‘Lead thou me on’ is carried over, reiterated, in the longer lines; so there is a sense of constrained (careful) movement: the short lines – ‘Lead thou me on’ – determine the pattern (or ‘keep’ the ‘feet’) of the longer lines. The last two lines make use of a heavy assonance, chiming with the rhyme words (‘keep’, ‘feet’, ‘see’, ‘scene’, ‘me’): the repertoire of sounds is limited. The desire to be ‘led’ is, in part, a desire to have certain limitations put on what one might ‘choose’. He declares that a limited perception  – limited to what is required for the next ‘step’ – is ‘enough’. Where the first rhyme of the stanza – ‘gloom’ paired with ‘home’  – was a half rhyme, in the last two lines, there is an abundance of rhyme – suggesting, perhaps, a return of harmony – a harmony between himself and his circumstances, an acceptance of his circumstances (and the limitations they involve). (This metrical pattern of a heavy pause after the first four syllables

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

389

is broken in the second stanza – corresponding, perhaps, to his errant movement when he ‘loved to chose’ his ‘path’ – only to return in the last line of that stanza – ‘Pride ruled my will’, the stress pattern of which matches the stress pattern of the recurring short line, ‘Lead thou me on.’ And there is, again, in the third stanza, a more unconstrained metrical movement  – and the sense of unconstrained movement is enhanced by the use of enjambment in the first line, and the rhyming of the last word of the first line – ‘still’ – with the first word of the second – ‘will’. He has confidence in the ‘power’ that has ‘blest’ him – moving more freely, in his confidence; he has more assurance that he will be able to make the journey, that he will be able to pass ‘o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent’, unhindered, until ‘the night is gone’.) If the contrast between ‘garish day’ and the ‘Kindly light’ suggests a contrast between different kinds of seeing, it suggests, equally, a contrast between past and present: the ‘garish day’ is in the past, and it is now ‘night’, but he still has a journey to make, and he must pass over ‘moor and fen’, ‘crag and torrent’, to get to his destination; there is a sense that he has lost time – he did not use the ‘garish day’ well; but he is now on his way, and he is being led toward where he needs to get to; and he expects a ‘morn’, where he will encounter ‘those Angel faces … / Which I have loved long since, and lost a while’. If the ‘garish day’ and ‘night’ suggest earthly time, the ‘morn’ suggests eternity: the ‘Kindly light’ is, it seems, a ‘light’ cast from somewhere ‘unearthly’; it is a light other than the light of the sun, dividing earthly times; it is a ‘light’ that is, perhaps, the first glimmering of a ‘morn’ that is outside time. What he encounters in the ‘morn’ will be something familiar  – something ‘loved long since and lost a while’. There is only one rhyme word in ‘Lead kindly light’ on which there is a half rhyme, rather than a full rhyme – ‘home’ (rhymed with ‘gloom’). When ‘home’ occurs, the withholding of a full rhyme suggests a withholding of closure; the rhyme does not come ‘home’, so to speak; and he is, after all, ‘far from home’, in the ‘gloom’: the homecoming is deferred, until the ‘morn’. This homecoming is, equally, an encounter with ‘Angel faces’. Why are these ‘Angel faces’ familiar – faces ‘loved long since and lost awhile’? Has his soul existed (as a Platonist might maintain) prior to his life in time, so that he has seen these ‘faces’ before, in his existence prior to his earthly life? Are these ‘Angel faces’ the faces of those he has ‘loved’ and ‘lost’ in life – friends, family members – the faces of those who, now glorified, are as ‘Angels’? Are these ‘Angel faces’ a kind of symbol for a ‘lost’ vision (a vision of the ‘unseen’ entertained in childhood, before the ‘shades of the prison house’ closed ‘upon the growing boy’)? What is most important, perhaps, is the sense that the encounter with the ‘Angel faces’ – the encounter, in ‘our real eternal existence’, with the ‘everlasting spirits’ (as Newman puts it, in ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’) is something that will occur, but not yet. The contrast between ‘long since’ and ‘awhile’ suggests different ways of experiencing time (different ways of experiencing the deferral of the encounter with the ‘Angel faces’): that which lasts ‘long’, in time, is – when compared to eternity – but ‘awhile’; that which was lost ‘long since’ has, then, been lost for but ‘awhile’; and as everything in time – when considered in the ‘morn’, in eternity – will seem to have taken but ‘awhile’ – so perhaps to anticipate the ‘morn’ is to make everything in time, here and

390

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

now, feel less ‘long’. That everything earthly, everything in time, is for but ‘awhile’, means that everything earthly is limited, ephemeral, fragile – to live is to suffer loss. That everything earthly, everything in time, is for but ‘awhile’ means, equally, that eternity is not ‘long’ deferred. In ‘Guardian Angels’, there is a sense that to act from a ‘vision’, one must ‘dare’ to transcend what is ‘common’ – one must move beyond the limitations of ‘common men’. The end of ‘Guardian Angels’ is ambiguous. It presents a contrast between ‘Christ’s own’ and ‘common men’ (who ‘dare not make their own the gifts they find’); one might take the remarks about ‘common men’ to imply ‘common men such as myself ’ – and if one takes these remarks in this way, then ‘Guardian Angels’ end with an expression of ‘not all hopeless’ resignation (he ‘eye[s]’ wistfully the ‘boundless grace’ of God); one need not, though, take the remarks about ‘common men’ to imply ‘common men such as myself ’ – and if one takes these remarks in this way, then ‘Guardian Angels’ ends in suspense; he might still ‘call’ his vision ‘real’, accept it as a ‘gift’, and be transformed by it  – but this act is yet to occur. In ‘Lead Kindly Light’, there is a sense that the ultimate vision, the ‘morn’, is yet to occur, but there is, equally, an assurance that the ‘Kindly light’, discernible in the here and now, is from God and that it is ‘enough’. He does not question whether the ‘Kindly light’ is of God (whether the ‘vision’ of things he has, in that ‘light’, is ‘real’). He does not ‘ask to see’ more. Since he would be led, and since to be led is to accept certain restrictions on how one moves – it is not to ‘choose … [one’s] path’ – so, perhaps, the restrictions on what he can ‘see’ are related to his being led (one cannot ‘choose and see [one’s] path’ if one cannot ‘see’ a number of different ‘paths’): the restrictions on what he can ‘see’ limit his options for the next ‘step’; and so these restrictions might be there to ensure that he takes the next ‘step’ rightly; he can accept those restrictions with patience, and even trust that they might be a means by which he is ‘blest’. In the Apologia, Newman acknowledges that he accepted certain principles, according to which visions might be accorded some credit, as a means to truth. He intimates, in the first autobiographical part of the Apologia, that he was ‘haunted’ by a vision  – making him feel he had a ‘work to do’, a ‘mission’. He does not attempt to represent this vision, however – alluding, instead, to the ‘verses’ in Lyra Apostolica, and suggesting that the vision is ‘brought out’ there: he acknowledges, without attempting to represent, his visionary experience; and the poem to which he refers, ‘Guardian Angels’, likewise, does not represent the ‘vision’ with which it is concerned. Newman does not, for the most part, advert to, or attempt to represent, his experiences of vision in the Apologia, but there are a couple of exceptions – relating to his apprehension of the Church. Just before giving his account of his Mediterranean travels, in which he developed a sense of having a ‘mission’ in ‘England’, Newman gives an account of his attitude toward the Church of England, and how it was affected by his researches into the history of the early Church. With the Establishment … divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I recognized the movement

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

391

of my Spiritual Mother. ‘Incessu patuit Dea.’ The self-conquest of her Ascetics, the patience of her Martyrs, the irresistible determination of her Bishops, the joyous swing of her advance, both exalted and abashed me. I said to myself, ‘Look on this picture and on that;’ I felt affection for my own Church, but not tenderness; I felt dismay at her prospects, anger and scorn at her do-nothing perplexity. I thought that if Liberalism once got a footing within her, it was sure of the victory in the event. I saw that Reformation principles were powerless to rescue her. As to leaving her, the thought never crossed my imagination; still I ever kept before me that there was something greater than the Established Church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and organ. She was nothing, unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation.80

The first quotation – ‘Incessu patuit Dea’, ‘the true goddess was revealed in her step’ – is taken from the Aeneid, from the scene in which Aeneas, having spoken with his mother, Venus, without realizing who she was, suddenly – as she turns and leaves him  – recognizes her: it is a moment of visionary rapture, and of longing (for the goddess is recognized at the moment of her disappearance); Aeneas cries out, ‘Quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis / ludis imaginibus? Cur dextrae iungere dextram / non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?’ (in the translation of Dryden  – ‘Unkind and cruel! to deceive your son / In borrow’d shapes, and his embrace to shun; / Never to bless my sight, but thus unknown; / And still to speak in accents not your own.’) Aeneas desires a ‘true’ exchange of ‘voices’ – not false images. The second quotation ‘Look on this picture, and on that’, is taken from Hamlet – from the scene in which Hamlet urges his mother, Gertrude, to compare her first husband with her second. Her first husband was the father of Hamlet; her second husband – his brother – had killed her first (unbeknownst to her) so that he might usurp the throne. When Hamlet confronts his mother, he would ‘set up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you’ – asking her how she could ‘leave’ a ‘fair mountain’ (her first husband) to ‘batten on a moor’ (taking up with her second).81 When Newman quotes, ‘Look on this picture, and on that’ in the Apologia, he is alluding to a contrast between a true, rightful king, and a usurper. Is the English Church the usurper, which has taken power from the rightful king?82 Is the English Church (like Gertrude) ‘wed’ to a usurper (the state) – having forgotten its true

80. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 133. 81. Hamlet, 3.4. ll.19–20, ll.65–6. 82. Newman likens the English Church to a ‘usurper’ in Difficulties of Anglicans, (mis) quoting from ‘The Bard’ by Thomas Gray. The original has ‘spare the meek usurper’s holy head’; Newman quotes it as ‘spare the meek usurper’s hoary head’ (taking the epithet ‘holy’ from the ‘usurper’). See Lectures on Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 3.

392

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘husband’ (Christ). The Church is often imaged as a ‘mother’; and the contrast of the quotation from the Aeneid with the quotation from Hamlet suggests a contrast between two ‘mothers’, two Churches  – one divine, the other, allied to a usurper. When Newman counterposes the scene from the Aeneid with the scene from Hamlet, he is contrasting a scene of rapture, longing, hope (Venus has told Aeneas that he is not ‘unbelov’d of heaven’, and has urged him to ‘have courage’ – she is urging him toward his destiny, Rome) with a scene of grief, fury, disgust, confusion. Hamlet, during his confrontation with Gertrude, experiences a vision of his own – he sees the ghost of his father – but Gertrude cannot see the ghost, and thinks he is ‘mad’  – ‘This is the very coinage of your brain, / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very cunning in.’83 Hamlet has himself experienced certain doubts about the trustworthiness of his visions – ‘The spirit that I have seen [which seemed to be the ghost of my father] / May be the devil, and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy – / As he is very potent with such spirits  – / Abuses me to damn me.’84 The world of Hamlet is a world of uncertainty, confusion, deception, intrigue, corruption. The contrast between the scene from the Aeneid and the scene from Hamlet is a contrast between an encounter with a ‘divine’ mother, and an encounter with earthly, frail mother (who needs – as Hamlet thinks – to be ‘dealt with strongly’ lest ‘she … be lost’). In the Aeneid, the vision is a manifestation of a ‘divine’ reality – Venus appears, at first, as a ‘Spartan’ maid, and her divinity is apparent only as she turns and leaves (the ‘falsis ludis imaginibus’, or ‘borrow’d shapes’, are the appearances that suggest something merely everyday  – an ordinary woman  – is present): something higher, more glorious than the everyday is present, concealed by everyday appearances; the truth of this higher reality  – when it manifests itself – is unquestionable. In Hamlet, the vision of the ghost is, equally, a vision of reality – the ghost reveals the truth; but the experience of the vision involves uncertainty – vision and ‘ecstasy’ are associated with ‘melancholy’, with delusion (‘the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape’); and the vision reveals, not a blessedness concealed by everyday appearances, but a wickedness concealed by everyday appearances  – it shows that everyday appearances (those of the Danish court) conceal ‘corruption, mining all within’ which ‘infects unseen’. If Newman is like Aeneas in experiencing  – in his visionary apprehension of the early Church – an intimation of something ‘unearthly’ (and an intimation, perhaps, of his destiny, as one ‘called’ toward Rome); he is, equally, like Hamlet, in his experience of doubts, hesitations, uncertainty, anxiety: when he first suspects that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’, he feels ‘on consideration a positive doubt  … whether the suggestion did not come from below’.85 Has the devil assumed ‘a pleasing shape’?

83. Hamlet, 3.4. ll.128–30. 84. Hamlet, 2.2. ll.600–5. 85. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 215.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

393

Newman experiences another vision  – ‘the heavens … opened and closed up again’  – or at least a ‘vivid impression upon [his] imagination’, when, on encountering certain ‘palmary words of St Augustine’, he feels the suspicion that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’.86 In the summer of 1839, Newman was researching the ‘history of the Monophysites’, when he became ‘seriously alarmed’. My stronghold [in defending the Anglican via media, against Rome] was Antiquity; now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, as it seemed to me, Christendom of the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite. The Church of the Via Media was in the position of the Oriental communion, Rome was, where she now is; and the Protestants were the Eutychians.87

While in this state of ‘alarm’, he was presented, by a friend, with an article by a Catholic Bishop, Nicholas Wiseman, arguing against the ‘Anglican Claim’, and comparing Anglicans to the Donatists (North African heretics of the fourth century). Newman did not consider the comparison between Anglicans and Donatists just, but his friend pointed out a phrase from St Augustine, quoted in the article – ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’ – and this phrase made a ‘vivid impression upon [his] imagination’.88 My friend, an anxiously religious man, now, as then, very dear to me, a Protestant still, pointed out the palmary words of St. Augustine, which were contained in one of the extracts made in the Review, and which had escaped my observation. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum.’ He repeated these words again and again, and, when he was gone, they kept ringing in my ears. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum;’ … . They gave a cogency to the Article, which had escaped me at first. They decided ecclesiastical questions on a simpler rule than that of Antiquity; nay, St. Augustine was one of the prime oracles of Antiquity; here then Antiquity was deciding against itself. What a light was hereby thrown upon every controversy in the Church! … The deliberate judgment, in which the whole Church at length rests and acquiesces, is an infallible prescription and a final sentence against such portions of it as protest and secede. Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St. Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. To take a familiar instance, they were like the ‘Turn again Whittington’ of the chime; or, to take a more serious one, they were like the ‘Tolle, lege,  – Tolle, lege,’ of the child, which converted St. Augustine himself. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum!’ By those great words of the ancient Father, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely

86. Ibid., 213. 87. Ibid., 210–11. 88. Ibid., 212, 213.

394

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

pulverized … . After a while, I got calm, and at length the vivid impression upon my imagination faded away … . I had to determine its logical value, and its bearing upon my duty. Meanwhile, so far as this was certain, – I had seen the shadow of a hand upon the wall. It was clear that I had a good deal to learn on the question of the Churches, and that perhaps some new light was coming upon me. He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had never seen it. The heavens had opened and closed again. The thought for the moment had been, ‘The Church of Rome will be found right after all;’ and then it had vanished. My old convictions remained as before.89

The ‘palmary words’ of St Augustine, ‘ringing’ in the ‘ears’ of Newman, seem to have in themselves a mysterious life, and force. The ‘words’ of Newman himself, here, seem to take on their own life: the ‘ringing’ in the ‘ears’ of Newman becomes the (literal) ‘chime’ of the bells, heard by Dick Whittington, and these tolling bells become ‘tolle lege’; and there is a kind of re-enactment of the ‘ringing’ in the repetition of the ‘words’ of St Augustine, ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’. What the ‘imagination’ of Newman registers, here, is a view of the Church, and its ‘judgement’ – a view according to which a ‘sentence’ must be passed against the Anglican Church, as a ‘portion’ of the universal Church that ‘protest[s] and secede[s]’. The ‘imagination’ apprehends a ‘light’ that illuminates ‘every controversy in the Church’; and this ‘light’ is a matter of having a certain apprehension of the Church of Rome, as the orbis terrarum, as the true exponent of the ‘universal’, the Catholic. In the scene in the Confessions, in which Augustine hears the words ‘tolle lege’, ‘take and read’, Augustine is sitting in a garden, contrite at his sins, but feeling incapable of abandoning them, incapable of taking up a more ascetic form of life – ‘I felt [my sins] were my tyrants’; in this state, he ‘heard a voice, as if from a house near me, of a boy or girl chanting forth again and again, “take up and read, take up and read!”’; and he ‘began intently to think whether boys used them in any game, but could not recollect that [he] had ever heard them’. I left weeping and rose up, considering it a divine intimation to open the Scriptures and read what first presented itself. I had heard that Antony had come in during the reading of the Gospel, and had taken to himself the admonition, ‘Go, sell all that thou hast’, etc., and had turned to Thee at once, in consequence of that oracle. I had left St. Paul’s volume where Alypius was sitting, when I rose thence. I returned thither, seized it, opened, and read in silence the following passage, which first met my eyes, ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences’. I had neither desire nor need to read farther. As I finished the sentence, as though the light of peace had been poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt dispersed. Thus hast Thou converted me to Thee, so as no longer to seek either for wife or other hope

89. Ibid., 212–4.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

395

of this world, standing fast in that rule of faith in which Thou so many years before hadst revealed me to my mother.90

Augustine registers a ‘divine intimation’ in the ‘chanting’ he hears; he takes up the Scriptures, reads ‘put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh’, and takes the verse as something addressed to him, personally – as the utterance of a ‘divine’ voice, addressing him, calling him to an ascetic ‘rule’ of life – and ‘all the shadows of doubt dispersed’. Augustine opts to ‘take and read’ the Scriptures in this way, while recalling how St Antony ‘had taken to himself the admonition [in the Gospel] “Go, sell all that thou hast”’; he is imitating St Antony. There are, then, a number of things that coincide, making for an impression of a ‘divine’ significance: that Augustine is in a contrite mood, ‘weeping’; that he hears the ‘voice of a boy or girl … chanting’, eliciting a sense of ‘divine intimation’; that he recalls the example of St Antony, and decides to ‘take and read’ the Scriptures; that the Scriptures are nearby; that he alights on a passage of the Scriptures pertinent to his personal difficulties. Augustine sets out the combination of circumstances which make for an impression of ‘divine’ meaning; if this impression is an effect of these circumstances, these circumstances are, in turn, for Augustine, disposed by Providence; what is more, Augustine wonders whether the phrase he hears – ‘tolle, lege’ was ‘used … in any game’, and he is unable to ‘recollect that [he] had ever heard them’; he expresses some uncertainty as to where the ‘voice’ he hears comes from – the ‘voice’ is ‘quasi pueri an puellae, nescio’, ‘as if that of a boy or of a girl, I do not know’ – with ‘as if ’ and ‘I do not know’ suggesting that it might have been either, or that it might have been neither – it might have been an unearthly ‘voice’. There are several scenes, in the Confessions, in which individuals ‘take to’ themselves certain statements, changing their lives, in ways that were not foreseen or intended by those who had made those statements: there is a moment when Monica, the mother of Augustine, takes a spiteful reproach from a servant as an occasion for self-amendment; there is a moment when the friend of Augustine, Alypius – who has started to attend the games in the circus – takes a diatribe of Augustine against the games as a rebuke aimed at himself, and then ceases to attend them. When particular persons ‘take to themselves’ certain statements – so as to be changed by how they ‘take’ those statements – their responses are a function of their personal circumstances, and condition. (Newman, from his studies of the ‘Monophysite controversy’ is disposed to receive an ‘impression’ from the phrase ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’; the article which contains the phrase is shown to him by an ‘anxiously religious’ friend; where Newman is, ultimately, converted by the ‘impression’ which he receives, his friend is ‘a Protestant still’.) In the Confessions, those who ‘turn’ toward holiness, in taking to themselves certain statements, are disposed by their circumstances, and condition, to register, in these

90. The translation used here is that used by Newman in his account of the ‘Conversion of St Augustine’, in The Church of the Fathers. (The passage quoted is in Historical Sketches, ii, 157). In a note in the ‘Conversion of St Augustine’, Newman observes that ‘most of [the] translations are from the Oxford edition of 1838’ – the translation of E. B. Pusey.

396

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

statements, an ‘intimation’ that they should amend something about themselves, and as the registering of such an ‘intimation’ is a means toward moral and spiritual purification, so the Spirit is at work in the registering of such an ‘intimation’: one is registering the ‘voice’ of the Spirit, when one attends to a ‘call’ to holiness. At the beginning of the last book of the Confessions, Augustine addresses God, declaring that God has called him with ‘voices of many kinds’ (‘multimodis vocibus’); and there is a sense that, in making sense of his own past – in the autobiographical account, making up the first nine books – he is registering the ‘voices of many kinds’ by which God has been ‘calling’ him. He is registering the ‘word’ that God has been presenting to him (and through him) in his life; and in registering this ‘word’, he registers what his life has really meant (and, as he recognizes what is life has really meant, so he can perceive his life rightly, and present a true account of it). When Newman refers to ‘tolle lege’, in the Apologia, he is referring to an experience of ‘divine intimation’ – certain ‘words’ are experienced as having an authority that seems almost ‘divine’. He likens his experience to the more ‘familiar instance’ of Dick Whittington (‘turn again Whittington’). The comic contrast of the lower (Whittington) with the higher (Augustine) suggests that Newman would avoid giving the impression of being selfimportant, or self-aggrandizing (‘familiar’ comparisons are as apt as ‘more serious’ comparisons); yet ‘turn again’ is a translation of convertere – the image of Whittington, turning again, is an image of conversion. Newman likens his experience to seeing a ghost – ‘He who has seen a ghost, cannot be as if he had never seen it.’ There is, again, in this, an allusion to ‘familiar’, popular tales. Yet there is, equally, perhaps, a recollection of the ghost which haunted Hamlet  – to which Hamlet responded with such uncertainty, and anxiety (comparable to the indecision and anxiety of Newman himself, in response to his own ‘ghost’). (The ghost in Hamlet, incidentally, is a very ‘Catholic’ ghost: it declares that it must spend time in Purgatory – that it is ‘for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’.91 Appearing on the Elizabethan stage, the ghost would have seemed a revenant from an older world, a world of traditional Catholic piety, which was at that time being suppressed. Newman would have been sensitive to these resonances.) Where the ‘doubts’ of Augustine ‘disperse’, after his experience of vision – ‘the light of peace had been poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt dispersed’ – Newman does not, on receiving his ‘vivid impression’, experience the ‘light of peace’. The perception that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’ was, for Newman – committed as he was, to the Anglican via media – a ‘dreadful misgiving’. How, on becoming ‘calm again’, was he to make sense of his ‘new thoughts’? First, I will say, whatever comes of saying it, for I leave inferences to others, that for years I must have had something of an habitual notion, though it was latent, and had never led me to distrust my own convictions, that my mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other I was on journey. During the same passage across the Mediterranean in which I wrote ‘Lead kindly 91. Hamlet, 1.5., ll.11–13.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

397

light,’ I also wrote the verses, which are found in the Lyra under the head of ‘Providences,’ beginning, ‘When I look back.’ This was in 1833 … But, whatever this presentiment be worth, it was no protection against the dismay and disgust, which I felt, in consequence of the dreadful misgiving, of which I have been relating the history. The one question was, what was I to do? I had to make up my mind for myself, and others could not help me. I determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason. And this I said over and over again in the years which followed, both in conversation and in private letters. Had it not been for this severe resolve, I should have been a Catholic sooner than I was. Moreover, I felt on consideration a positive doubt, on the other hand, whether the suggestion did not come from below. Then I said to myself, Time alone can solve that question. It was my business to go on as usual, to obey those convictions to which I had so long surrendered myself, which still had possession of me, and on which my new thoughts had no direct bearing. That new conception of things should only so far influence me, as it had a logical claim to do so. If it came from above, it would come again, – so I trusted, – and with more definite outlines.92

Newman observes that he ‘determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason’. This was not simply a matter of setting ‘reason’ against ‘imagination’, but of determining the ‘logical force’ of a certain imaginative ‘impression’. His impression that ‘the Church of Rome will be found right after all’ coexisted in him with the impression that the Church of Rome was corrupt. The impression that the ‘Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John’ had been formed in him at a young age, and it abided in him as a ‘stain’ on his imagination (his ‘imagination was stained by the effects of [the] doctrine up to the year 1843’ – it ‘remained upon [him] as a sort of false conscience’): he ‘thought the essence of [the] offence [of the Catholic Church] to consist in the honours which she paid to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints’.93 Even while his ‘imagination was stained’ by the idea that Rome was Antichristian, he had formed other impressions of Roman Catholicism, from his witnessing – on his travels to the south of Europe – scenes of Catholic worship, which ‘impressed’ his ‘imagination’ and ‘touched’ his ‘heart’. When I was abroad, the sight of so many great places, venerable shrines, and noble churches, much impressed my imagination. And my heart was touched also. Making an expedition on foot across some wild country in Sicily, at six in the morning I came upon a small church; I heard voices, and I looked in. It was crowded, and the congregation was singing. Of course it was the Mass, though I did not know it at the time. And, in my weary days at Palermo, I was not ungrateful for the comfort which I had received in frequenting the Churches, nor did I ever forget it. Then, again, her zealous maintenance of the doctrine and the rule of celibacy, which I recognized as Apostolic, and her faithful agreement 92. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 214–5. 93. Ibid., 110, 154.

398

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

with Antiquity in so many points besides, which were dear to me, was an argument as well as a plea in favour of the great Church of Rome. Thus I learned to have tender feelings toward her; but still my reason was not affected at all. My judgment was against her, when viewed as an institution.94

The imagination of Newman, then, was marked by contradictory ‘impressions’ of Rome. He ‘determined to be guided, not by … imagination, but by … reason’; but there is a sense in which his efforts to make use of his ‘reason’ were instigated by his imagination: it is his imagination which registers a certain pattern in the history of the Church (‘I saw my face in that mirror, and I was a Monophysite’); and it is his imagination which registers a significance in a single phrase from St Augustine – ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’ – by which his theory of the via media is ‘pulverized’ – registering this significance before his ‘reason’ fully ascertains the ‘logical claim’ of his ‘new conception’. There is a tension in him between a visionary imagination, which apprehends ‘the goddess’ – ‘Incessu patuit Dea’ – and a ‘stained’ imagination, which acts as a ‘false conscience’ (making for Hamlet-like suspicion, anxiety, indecision). His imagination seems to register the truth before his ‘reason’, and it instigates the enquiries which his ‘reason’ undertakes. When reflecting on how he responded to his visionary ‘impression’ that the Catholic Church might be ‘right after all’, Newman attempts to characterize his general state of mind at the time he received that impression, and how he was disposed to respond to such an impression; he suggests that something of his state of mind is apparent in certain ‘verses’ he had written in 1833 which, in his view, show that he ‘must have had something of an habitual notion’, which was ‘latent’ and which did not make him ‘distrust [his] own convictions’, that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other [he] was on journey’. When I look back upon my former race, Seasons I see, at which the Inward Ray, More brightly burned, or guided some new way; Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space Given for my eye to range, and feet to trace, And next I mark, ‘twas trial did convey, Or grief, or pain, or strange eventful day, To my tormented soul such larger grace. So now, whene’er, in journeying on, I feel The shadow of the Providential Hand, Deep breathless stirrings shoot across my breast, Searching to know what He will now reveal, What sin uncloak, what stricter rule command, And girding me to work His full behest.95

94. Ibid., 154–5. 95. ‘Discipline’, in Lyra Apostolica, 35.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

399

The poem, called ‘Discipline’ in Lyra Apostolica, is included in a section ‘under the head of “Providences”’, together with ‘Guardian Angels’. ‘Discipline’ and ‘Guardian Angels’ are concerned, in different ways, with how the mind – the ‘Inward Ray’ – is formed by ‘unearthly’ influences, working in or through the imagination, and through various experiences (whether ‘trial’, or ‘talk with men’): the mind is being formed, continually, by a variety of influences that it cannot master, or register; and these influences  – Newman would suggest  – are subject to ‘Providence’, to ‘unearthly’ ordering. One cannot but be formed by influences that one cannot fully ascertain or master; but if one takes it that these influences are subject to Providence, then one can entrust oneself to them (even if one cannot discern the ‘tracks’ of Providence for oneself). One must, in any case, trust the ‘Inward Ray’ – one has no other ‘Ray’ to judge things by – but if one takes it that one is being formed by Providence, that the ‘Inward Ray’ is being formed by Providence, then one can have more confidence that there is truth in what one senses to be true, in what one intuits as true. One can, perhaps, have more confidence in some of the instinctive acts of the mind – in intuitions, momentary insights, visions. In the other poem in the ‘Providences’ section, ‘Warnings’, Newman asks ‘Can science bear us / To the hid springs / Of human things? / Why may not dream, / Or thought’s day-gleam, / Startle, yet cheer us?’96 He seems in this to be suggesting that, as ‘science’ cannot register the ‘hid springs’ of the mind, so it cannot claim to master, and to determine the truth of, all the acts of the mind; ‘dream’, or ‘thought’s day-gleam’, momentary intuitions, reveries, and so on, might present certain truths (which ‘science’ cannot compass); and if ‘dream’ or ‘thought’s daygleam’ were to have their ‘springs’ in unearthly forces, or in an encounter with unearthly realities, then they might reveal unearthly truths – and so, might ‘cheer us’. Newman observes that ‘Discipline’ shows that he had a sense his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other [he] was on a journey’. He observes that he wrote ‘Discipline’ at about the same time as ‘Lead kindly light’  – and each of these poems make use of ‘journey’ imagery. In ‘Discipline’ and ‘Lead kindly light’, ‘truth’ and ‘light’ illuminate a ‘scene’, through which he ‘journeys’. In ‘Discipline’, ‘Truth’ is likened to a ‘scene’; when the ‘inward Ray’ burns ‘more brightly’, ‘Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space [is] / Given for my eye to range, and feet to trace’: he is given a clearer view of the ‘scene’. In ‘Lead kindly light’, while he does not ‘ask to see’ the ‘distant scene’, he recognizes that he has enough ‘light’ to travel by. Newman suggests, in the Apologia, that ‘Discipline’ shows that he must have had a sense that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest’ (and he relates this to his not having ‘found’ his ‘ultimate rest’ in Catholicism). There is certainly, in ‘Discipline’, an expectation that God might ‘now reveal’ to him something new; but the revelation that he is expecting seems to be concerned, not with anything pertinent to the differences between the churches, but with the ‘rule’ of morality: he waits to discover what ‘sin [God will] uncloak, what stricter rule command’. ‘Discipline’ is concerned with the development of

96. ‘Warnings’, in Lyra Apostolica, 34.

400

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the conscience (understood as the ‘voice’ of God) – rather than with any sort of development in the perception of matters of doctrine. Newman certainly  – at the time he wrote ‘Discipline’  – took the development of the conscience to be connected to the development of a clearer perception of matters of doctrine,97 yet, to expect – as in ‘Discipline’ – a certain development in moral perception, is not, in itself, to expect a development in the perception of matters of doctrine (such as to make for a different view of such matters). By the time he wrote the Apologia, though, Newman seem to have felt that his expectation, in 1833, that God ‘will now reveal’ something new to him – an expectation that, at the time, he took to be concerned with a fuller revelation of the ‘rule’ of morality  – was, in fact, an inchoate awareness that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest’, with regard to matters of doctrine. That is, he regards his imagination as intuiting a certain truth about himself, and his ‘journey’, of which he had not yet become fully conscious. In the Apologia, Newman refers, briefly, to several of his poems, ‘Guardian Angels’, ‘Lead kindly light’, and ‘Discipline’  – all of which are concerned, in different ways, with ‘vision’, or the ‘Inward Ray’, all of which involve, in different ways, attempts to make out what ‘vision’ might reveal about the ‘real’, and all of which involve a sense that ‘vision’ is connected to ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, and to the requirements of ‘the journey’ toward Christ. He observes that the poems express, or are related to, some of his intuitions about his own ‘journey’: he relates ‘Guardian Angels’ to his sense that ‘inward changes, as well as some larger course of action’ were ‘coming upon’ him; he suggests that ‘Discipline’ expresses his sense that his ‘mind had not found its ultimate rest’. Newman evidently looked over some of the poetry in Lyra Apostolica, at the time he wrote his Apologia, giving particular attention to the poems in the ‘Providences’ section: reflecting on the pattern of his life, its ordering under Providence, in writing his Apologia, he may well have looked back at some of his poems about Providence to ascertain from them whether he had any intimations of where Providence was taking him, or whether he had any ‘visionary’ insights which, at that time, his ‘reason’ had not yet recognized; he may have considered his own poems  – arising from certain experiences of ‘vision’ – to have involved insights that exceeded in certain ways the insights of his ‘reason’ – for if, after all, ‘Holy Church in her sacraments and

97. In his 1830 sermon on ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’, he characterizes the Christian revelation as manifesting the ‘moral scheme of the world’, with the image of Christ ‘concentrat[ing] 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’; in his 1831 sermon on ‘The Usurpations of Reason’, he maintains that the ‘contemplation’ of the ‘revelation’ – the proper awareness of it – is a matter of ‘moral perception’, or ‘divine perceptions’, and he characterizes the ‘revelation’ itself as a ‘moral revelation’; in his 1832 sermon on ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’, he maintains that ‘acting rightly’ is implicated with the development of a clearer perception of ‘the standard of faith and morals’  – suggesting that ‘faith’ and ‘morals’ are subject to a single ‘standard’.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

401

her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity’, then his sense of ‘those heavenly facts’, acquired by ‘walk[ing] with’ Christ, may have become ‘conform[ed] aright’ to ‘Holy Church’, before his ‘reason’. In one of the first things he wrote, after becoming a Catholic, an article on the poetry of John Keble, he declared that ‘poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets … . Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth.’98 In the Apologia, he suggests, in his account of his response to the ‘palmary words’ of St Augustine – ‘securus judicat orbis terrarum’ – that his ‘imagination’, in certain respects, apprehended more than his ‘reason’; he resolved ‘to be guided, not by [his] imagination, but by [his] reason’, but ‘had it not been for this severe resolve, [he] should have been a Catholic sooner than [he] was’.99 He does not suggest, in this, that he was mistaken in resolving to be ‘guided’ by his ‘reason’ rather than by his ‘imagination’; but he suggests that his ‘imagination’ was swifter than his ‘reason’ in apprehending the truth. Newman refers, then, in the Apologia, to several poems that are concerned with his visionary imagination; and he suggests that this visionary imagination was involved  – not without, or against, ‘reason’  – in his move toward ‘Rome’. He acknowledges, then, that his ‘visionary’ imagination was involved in his conversion; but he does not reveal much about it, to the ‘metropolitan intellect’, the metropolitan ‘audience’ of the Apologia. He acknowledges his visionary experience, but it is, in certain respects, ‘hid’: he mentions certain of his poems, concerned with ‘vision’, with moments when the ‘Inward Ray / More brightly burned, or guided some new way’, but these poems themselves do not represent the ‘visions’ with which they are concerned, or attempt to convey what those visions conveyed. That the visions are not revealed, is itself evocative: it evokes a sense that the visions were such that they could not be revealed, that they were suffused with a fullness of meaning that could not be transposed into, or rendered in, the ‘human language’ that Newman characterizes as ‘incommensurable’ with ‘moral Truth’; it evokes a sense that they had more in them than ‘human language’ could convey. Newman could be suggesting, then, that, in his experience of these visions, his own ‘Inward Ray’ had apprehended a fullness of meaning that ‘human language’ could not convey – an ‘Inward Ray’ comprising a sense or intuition too ‘inward’, too personal, to express in ‘human language’ (or in the ‘language’ marked by the ‘impersonality … [which] pervades the whole metropolitan system’). In his sermon, preached in 1836, on ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’, Newman would remark that ‘the one desire which should move us should be, first of all, that of seeing Him face to face, who is now hid from us; and next of enjoying eternal and direct communion, in and through Him, with

98. ‘John Keble’, in ECH ii, 442–3. 99. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 215.

402

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

our friends around us, whom at present we know only through the medium of sense, by precarious and partial channels, which give us little insight into their hearts’.100 Will it be that the ‘medium of sense’ will no longer be required, or used, in the eschaton, or will that ‘medium’ be transfigured, such that spirit will be perfectly expressed in it, fully apparent? If the final state of the creation involves a transfiguration of matter in this way, then the ‘scope in which what is will end’, will be a state in which the ‘heart’ will have ‘channels’ for its expression that will be wholly adequate, so that there can be a ‘direct communion’ with ‘friends’, nothing in the ‘heart’ being incommunicable. As one will be capable of ‘direct communion’ with others, so one will no longer be opaque to oneself: the ‘heart’ will be fully manifest. In ‘Guardian Angels’, Newman wonders whether, in certain of his ‘dreams of night’, an ‘unearthly Friend … . Figures the scope in which what is will end’: perhaps these ‘figures’, as a mode of ‘communion’, are, to what is figured – ‘the scope in which what is will end’, in which there will be a ‘communion’ in and through Christ – as ‘human language’, or even ‘poetical’ language (wherein a ‘spirit of beauty breathes through every part of the composition’, and ‘every part of the composition’ is suffused with meaning) is to these ‘figures’; perhaps there is a kind of hierarchy in the ‘channels’ of ‘communion’  – from ‘human language’, to unearthly ‘dreams’, to the ‘communion, in and through’ Christ, in the eschaton, when Christ Himself will be the means of ‘communion’. Just a few months after writing his Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman wrote The Dream of Gerontius – experiencing the impulse to write it as a kind of ‘gift’, being moved to write by ‘a sudden impulse’, and completing it in a few weeks – a poem that represents the ‘journey’ of a soul, after death, toward the vision of the ‘face’ of Christ. The soul of Gerontius is ‘borne forward’ by its Guardian Angel, and, on becoming aware of the presence of the Angel, Gerontius addresses it. I would have nothing but to speak with thee For speaking’s sake. I wish to hold with thee Conscious communion.101

When Gerontius asks how it is that he seems to ‘hear’ the ‘personal intonation’ of the Angel, the Angel replies: Nor touch, nor taste, nor hearing hast thou now; Thou livest in a world of signs and types, The presentations of most holy truths, Living and strong, which now encompass thee. A disembodied soul, thou hast by right No converse with aught else beside thyself;

100. ‘The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life’, 223. 101. The Dream of Gerontius (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1917), ll.324–6.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

403

But, lest so stern a solitude should load And break thy being, in mercy are vouchsafed Some lower measures of perception, Which seem to thee as though through channels brought, Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which are gone. And thou art wrapped and swathed around in dreams, Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical; For the belongings of thy present state, Save through such symbols, come not home to thee … So will it be, until the joyous day Of resurrection, when thou wilt regain All thou hast lost, new-made and glorified. How, even now, the consummated Saints See God in heaven, I may not explicate.102

In The Dream of Gerontius, Newman imagines a fulfilment of the desire which animates ‘Guardian Angels’  – the desire for ‘conscious communion’ with an ‘unearthly Friend’. As this ‘communion’ surpasses anything experienced in this life, so it will itself be surpassed by the communion that will be experienced on the ‘joyous day / Of resurrection’, when the ‘channels’ of communication will be ‘new-made and glorified’.103 The soul of Gerontius is in an intermediate state; and that state has a certain continuity with his earthly experience: if the soul, in this life, might have ‘dreams’, in which unearthly realities are presented in ‘figures’, so the soul, in the intermediate state, is made aware of its ‘present state’ by ‘dreams that are true, yet enigmatical’, ‘signs and types’, ‘symbols’. (The verse that represents the experiences of Gerontius, is itself presented as a transposition or translation of a ‘language’ of ‘dreams’, ‘symbols’, and the like.) In the Apologia, exhibiting himself to the ‘metropolitan intellect’, Newman acknowledges that he accepted the ‘principle’ that ‘material phenomena’ present ‘signs’ and ‘types’ of ‘heavenly facts’, and he acknowledges that certain ‘impressions’ on his ‘imagination’ were conducive to his conversion to Catholicism (in a way that did not conflict with his ‘severe resolve’ to be ‘guided’ by ‘reason’)  – but he does not reveal much about his own experiences of ‘vision’. Shortly after writing the Apologia – having vindicated his ‘honesty’ to the ‘metropolitan intellect’, and having shown that he had attained to his religious views by ‘intelligible processes of thought’, not by a sophistry that made his ‘intellect’ the ‘slave’ and ‘puppet’ of his ‘fancy’ – he then presented to the ‘metropolitan intellect’ an expression of his ‘fancy’ – a vision or ‘dream’, concerned with Purgatory, with matters of Catholic belief which the ‘metropolitan intellect’ of England was disposed to consider merely ‘fanciful’. Having reflected on his life, in the Apologia, he reflected on the next life, in the

102. Dream of Gerontius, ll.532–66. 103. Ibid., ll.562–4.

404

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Dream. Having presented, in the Apologia, something of his ‘living intelligence’, and the ‘position of [his] mind’, as a Catholic, with regard to various matters, Newman then presented, in the Dream, something of his ‘living’ imagination; and, in the portrayal of the soul of Gerontius, he presented an image of what is ‘innermost’ in the self – of that which abides, when all ‘conscious communion’ with the ‘metropolitan intellect’ has ceased.

3. When Newman was an Anglican, he considered the ‘Roman’ doctrine of Purgatory to be one of the doctrines which resulted from ‘Romanist’ corruption, presenting an obstacle to reunion between Rome and England (unless Rome was willing to ‘retract’). He observes, in the Apologia, how he ‘had seen the pictures of souls in flames in the streets of Naples’, and how he regarded such ‘pictures’, the expression of ‘popular beliefs and practices’, as manifestations of a corruption that the ‘decrees’ of Rome – in the Council of Trent, for instance – did not enforce, but which Rome, in ‘her ordinary teaching’, permitted: ‘I saw that the controversy lay between the book theology of Anglicanism on the one side, and the living system of what I called Roman corruption on the other.’104 In Tract 79 (1836) Newman maintains that the ‘Roman’ doctrine of ‘Purgatory’ is not properly ‘Catholic’, as it is not supported by ‘Antiquity’, by a consensus of ancient writers, attesting to the doctrine as something received from Apostolic Tradition. Newman suggests, in Tract 79, that the popular ‘corruption’, associated with the doctrine, might be regarded as the (inevitable) expression of the ‘decrees’ of the Roman Church, and as thereby revealing the error involved in the decrees. While the Council of Trent may have declared merely that there was such a place, or state, as Purgatory, ‘and that souls there detained are aided by the suffrages of the living, and above all by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar’, the catechism of that Council referred to the ‘fire’ of Purgatory, and Bellarmine  – one of the main authorities of the Tridentine Church – referred to the ‘prison’ of Purgatory. (And from the images of the ‘fire’, and the ‘prison’, there arises the ‘pictures of souls in flames on the streets of Naples’.) The pictures of Purgatory so commonly seen in countries in communion with Rome, the existence of Purgatorian societies, the means of subsistence accruing to the clergy from belief in it, afford a strange contrast to the simple wording and apparent innocence of the decree by which it is made an article of faith. It is the contrast between a drug in its lifeless seed, and the same developed, thriving, and rankly luxuriant in the actual plant.105

104. Ibid., 202, 203. 105. Tract 79: On Purgatory (London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1840), 3.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

405

Newman observes, in Tract 79, that ‘popular stories of apparitions witnessing’ to Purgatory were involved in the ‘introduc[tion]’ of belief in it. The argumentative ground, on which the belief in Purgatory was actually introduced, would seem to lie in the popular stories of apparitions witnessing to it. Not that it rose in consequence of them historically, or that morally it was founded in them; only that when persons came to ask themselves why they received it, this was the ultimate ground of evidence on which the mind fell back; viz. the evidence of miracles, not of Scripture, or of the Fathers.106

If Newman maintains in Tract 79 that ‘popular stories of apparitions’ were the ‘argumentative ground’ for the doctrine of Purgatory, he maintains, equally, that it was not ‘founded’ ‘morally’ or ‘historically’ on them. With regard to the ‘historical’ origins of the doctrine, Newman quotes, in Tract 79, from his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church. How Almighty God will deal with the mass of Christians, who are neither very bad nor very good, is a problem with which we are not concerned, and which it is our wisdom, and may be our duty, to put from our thoughts. But when it has once forced itself upon the mind, we are led in self-defence, with a view of keeping our selves from dwelling unhealthily on particular cases, which come under our experience and perplex us, to imagine modes, not by which God does (for that would be presumptuous to conjecture), but by which He may solve the difficulty. Most men, to our apprehensions, are too unformed in religious habits either for heaven or for hell, yet there is no middle state when Christ comes in judgment. In consequence it is obvious to have recourse to the interval before His coming, as a time during which this incompleteness might be remedied; as a season, not of changing the spiritual bent and character of the soul departed, whatever that be, for probation ends with mortal life, but of developing it in a more determinate form, whether of good or of evil … . Various suppositions have, accordingly, been made, as pure suppositions, as mere specimens of the capabilities (if one may so speak) of the Divine Dispensation, as efforts of the mind reaching forward and venturing beyond its depth into the abyss of the Divine Counsels. If one supposition could be produced, sufficient to solve the problem, ten thousand others are conceivable, unless indeed the resources of God’s Providence are exactly commensurate with man’s discernment of them. Religious men, amid these searchings of heart, have naturally gone to Scripture for relief; to see if the inspired word anywhere gave them any clue for their inquiries. And from what was there found, and from the speculations of reason upon it, various notions have been hazarded at different times; for instance, that there is a certain momentary ordeal to

106. Tract 79, 14.

406

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

be undergone by all men after this life, more or less severe according to their spiritual state; or that certain gross sins in good men will be thus visited, or their lighter failings and habitual imperfections; or that the very sight of Divine Perfection in the invisible world will be in itself a pain, while it constitutes the purification of the imperfect but believing soul; or that, happiness admitting of various degrees of intensity, penitents late in life may sink forever into a state, blissful as far as it goes, but more or less approaching to unconsciousness; and infants dying after baptism may be as gems paving the courts of heaven, or as the living wheels of the Prophet’s vision; while matured Saints may excel in capacity of bliss, as well as in dignity, the highest Archangels. Such speculations are dangerous when indulged; the event proves it; from some of them, in fact, seems to have resulted the doctrine of Purgatory. Now the texts to which the minds of the early Christians seem to have been principally drawn, and from which they ventured to argue in behalf of these vague notions, were these two: ‘The fire shall try every man’s work’, &c, and ‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire’. These texts, with which many more were found to accord, directed their thoughts one way, as making mention of ‘fire’, whatever was meant by the word, as the instrument of trial and purification; and that, at some time between the present time and the Judgment, or at the Judgment … . That this is the origin of the notion of a Purgatorial fire, I gather from these circumstances: first, that they do frequently insist on the texts in question; next, that they do not agree in the particular sense they put upon them. That they quote them shows that they rest upon them; that they vary in explaining them; that they had no Catholic sense to guide them. Nothing can be clearer, if these facts be so, than that the doctrine of the Purgatorial fire in all its senses, as far as it was more than a surmise, and was rested on argument, was the result of private judgment exerted, in defect of tradition, upon the text of Scripture … . As the doctrine, thus suggested by certain striking texts, grew in popularity and definiteness, and verged towards its present Roman form, it seemed a key to many others. … Moreover, there were … texts of obscure and indeterminate bearing, which seemed on this hypothesis to receive a profitable meaning; such as our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing;’ and St. John’s expression in the Apocalypse, that ‘no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book’.107

In Tract 79, Newman observes, of the ‘speculations’ from which ‘the doctrine of Purgatory’ emerged, that ‘the safeguard of Catholic Tradition … keeps us from immoderate speculation upon Scripture, or a vain indulgence of the imagination, by authoritatively declaring the contents and the limits of the Creed necessary

107. ‘Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church’, in The Via Media of the Anglican Church i [hereafter VM i] (1837; 1877; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), 174–9

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

407

to salvation and profitable to ourselves’.108 By the time he wrote his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, however, Newman conceived of these ‘speculations’ rather differently. He quotes the same passage from his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, and observes that where he had once considered ‘the growth of the doctrine as an instance of the action of private judgment … . I should now call it an instance of the mind of the Church working out dogmatic truths from implicit feelings under secret supernatural guidance.’109 Of the doctrines of ‘Penance as the complement of Baptism, and of Purgatory as the explanation of the Intermediate State’, Newman observes, in his Essay on Development, that these doctrines emerged ‘when the nations were converted and offences abounded … [and] the Church came out to view, on the one hand as an establishment, on the other as a remedial system’: when ‘offences abounded’, some account of the ‘remedial system’ for post-baptismal sin was required; and this account was developed from certain Scriptural texts which, in the earliest period of the Church, when ‘offences’ after baptism were rarer, were ‘of inferior account’, but which became of greater moment ‘when the nations were converted and offences abounded’.110 Newman even observes that ‘in whatever sense the need and its supply are a proof of design in the visible creation, in the same do the gaps, if the word may be used, which occur in the structure of the original creed of the Church [with regard to the remedies for post-baptismal sin] make it probable that those developments, which grow out of the truths which lie around them, were intended to complete it’.111 In the 1878 edition of the Essay on Development, Newman retained the quotation from his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (excising some of the remarks about the ‘dangerous’ character of the ‘speculations’ which were involved in the ‘growth’ of the doctrine), and he added the remark – ‘When then an answer had to be made to the question, how is post-baptismal sin to be remitted, there was an abundance of passages in Scripture to make easy to the faith of the inquirer the definitive decision of the Church.’112 He presents reflection on, or inquiry into, the Scriptures, as something attendant on ‘the definitive decision of the Church’. He does not, in this, deny that the ‘definitive decision’ may have been informed, in certain ways, by inquiries into the Scriptures, but he does not present that ‘decision’ as a mere ‘result’ of those inquiries. In the 1877 edition of the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman added a couple of notes to his account of the ‘growth’ of the doctrine of Purgatory – observing that this account concerns ‘an instance of the process of its development’; of the remark that the doctrine was ‘the result of private judgement’,

108. Tract 79, 32. 109. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1846), 417. 110. Essay on Development, 101. 111. Ibid., 101–2. 112. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 393.

408

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

he observes, in a note, that ‘in proportion as the Church took up and recognized the doctrine, it ceased to be “the result of private judgment”’. In certain ‘private’ enquiries, there was, he maintained in his Essay on Development, an expression of ‘the mind of the Church working out dogmatic truths from implicit feelings under secret supernatural guidance’: in his Essay on Development, Newman maintains that the ‘process’ of the development of an idea ‘is carried on through individuals and bodies of men; it employs their minds as instruments, and depends upon them while it uses them’.113 In his 1878 edition of the Essay on Development, he suggests that, once that ‘definitive decision’ of the Church about the doctrine had been made, the inquiries that identified, in certain Scriptural texts, indications of the doctrine of Purgatory, were ‘easy’. In Tract 79, he observes that the Scriptural texts, adduced in support of the doctrine, are of ‘little cogency critically’, but that they have ‘influence’ because ‘the doctrine of Purgatory professes to interpret texts which God’s word has left in obscurity’; yet ‘whatever be the joint force of such arguments from Scripture, in favour of the doctrine, it vanishes surely, at once and altogether, before one single clear text, such as the following: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours.”’114 In his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Newman recurs several times to the doctrine of Purgatory, as an instance of various sorts of ‘Romanist’ error: it involves a ‘neglect’ of ‘antiquity’; it proceeds from an excessive theological systematization, in which a ‘fictitious illumination … is poured over the entire Dispensation’, and a ‘technical religion’ is created ‘which destroys the delicacy and reverence of the Christian mind’ (in a manner comparable to the way in which ‘criticism’ extinguishes ‘poetical fervour and imagination’); and it involves an ‘abuse’ of ‘private judgement’ – in which the results of speculations on the Scriptures are treated as authoritative, as matters of revealed doctrine, though they do not have the sanction of ‘Tradition’.115 On becoming a Catholic, Newman regarded the doctrine of Purgatory as a doctrine that had developed out of meditation on the Creed (a doctrine ‘grow[ing] out of the truths which lie around’ it in the Creed), and out of meditation on the Scriptures, with these ‘speculations’ being animated by ‘implicit feelings under secret supernatural guidance’; and it was a doctrine that had developed in response to the circumstances of the Church ‘when the nations were converted and offences abounded’, so as to make the question of how post-baptismal sin was to be ‘remedied’ a question requiring urgent resolution. As an Anglican, Newman had observed that the doctrine was ‘introduced’ on the ‘argumentative ground’ of ‘stories of apparitions witnessing to it’ – on ‘the evidence of miracles’. Of these apparitions, Newman remarks, in his Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, that ‘the appeal to these seems to have come after the belief in it, when

113. Essay on Development, 37. 114. Tract 79, 19. 115. VM i, 91.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

409

people felt that some clear sanction was necessary, as a substitute for Tradition’.116 Newman did not, as a Catholic, comment on these ‘stories’ of ‘apparitions’, relating to Purgatory. He was willing to grant that miracles could occur in the Church after the time of the Apostles; and he may have considered some of these ‘stories’ genuine. If, though, he regarded many of these stories as legendary, he could, nevertheless, have regarded them as an indication of the ‘mind of the Church’ – as imaginative visions, animated by the ‘implicit feeling’ that was involved in the formation of the doctrine of Purgatory: the ‘feeling’ that, ‘under secret supernatural guidance’, animated the meditations on the Creed and on Scripture by which the doctrine was formed or apprehended, may have, equally, animated certain experiences of imaginative ‘vision’. The creativity exercised by Newman himself, in The Dream of Gerontius, might itself be regarded as an expression of a certain ‘implicit feeling’, present in the ‘mind’ of the ‘Church’, serving to illuminate certain aspects of the doctrine of Purgatory: his own vision would then be animated by an ‘implicit feeling’ accordant with (or even identical to) the ‘implicit feeling’ which informed the development of that doctrine (an ‘implicit feeling’ partially but not fully expressed in that doctrine). As an Anglican, Newman had felt that the doctrine of Purgatory presented certain difficulties; the vision of Purgatory, in The Dream of Gerontius, shows that the doctrine of Purgatory does not present the difficulties which, as an Anglican, Newman had felt it to present. As an Anglican, Newman had regarded the doctrine as implicated with a ‘technical religion’, created by excessive systematization, inimical to ‘delicacy and reverence’, overly ‘familiar with mysteries’  – as ‘criticism’ is inimical to ‘poetical fervour and imagination’. In The Dream of Gerontius, he presents a ‘poetical’ vision. The representation of Purgatory, in The Dream of Gerontius, presents nothing to the sense of ‘sight’. Gerontius is ‘sight-bereft’; and, as Gerontius reflects on how he is ‘sight-bereft’, deprived of that ‘princely sense / Which binds ideas in one, and makes them live’ – he suggests that to be deprived of that ‘sense’, is to be deprived of a capacity to bind ‘ideas in one’, to form a system, to master things.117 In a note in the 1871 edition of the Oxford University Sermons, Newman remarks that the ‘senses convey to the mind “substantial truth,” in so far as they bring home to as that certain things are, and in confuso what they are’. But has a man born blind, by means of hearing, smelling, taste, and touch, such an idea of physical nature, as may be called substantially true, or, on the contrary, an idea which at best is but the shadow of the truth? for, in whichever respect, whether as in substance or by a shadow, the blind man knows the objects of sight, in the same are those things, in ‘which eye has not

116. Ibid., 177n. 117. Dream of Gerontius, l.528, ll.531–2.

410

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

seen, nor ear heard’, apprehended by us now, ‘in a glass darkly’, per speculum, in aenigmate.118

The ‘heavenly facts’ with which the Dream of Gerontius is concerned, are presented as experienced by one who is ‘blind’ to them; and, what is more, it is suggested that the ‘sense’ experience of Gerontius, is itself different from earthly sense experience (he ‘hear[s] a singing’ but ‘cannot of that music rightly say’ whether he ‘hear[s], or touch[es], or taste[s] the tones’).119 The poem makes use of images of earthly experience, in representing unearthly experience, while equally insisting that all such images are inadequate to unearthly experience; it does not make what it represents ‘familiar’ to the imagination. Newman exercises a certain freedom, in the way he imagines Purgatory in the Dream, and in this he shows that the ‘decrees’ of Rome, with regard to the doctrine, do not constrain the intellect and the imagination, but, rather, stimulate the intellect and the imagination. In the last part of the Apologia, he had maintained that the infallible authority of the Church was not inconsistent with ‘Reason’ and ‘private judgement’: ‘every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, from within and without, and provokes again a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but it presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide’; the ‘object’ of the gift of Infallibility is ‘not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance’.120 In his imagining of Purgatory in the Dream, Newman shows a certain ‘freedom or vigour’ of ‘thought’: what he presents is something quite other than the ‘pictures of souls in flames on the streets of Naples’. In Tract 79, Newman had maintained that the Roman doctrine of Purgatory was inconsistent with such Scriptural texts as ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth; yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours’; he cited passages from the Fathers ‘in favour of the peace and rest of the intermediate state to true believers’; and he alluded to the view of the Greeks, at the Council of Florence, to the effect that the ‘Intermediate State’ is characterized by ‘substantial blessedness’, where the ‘souls of all saints’ were present, not only those who still had to undergo a certain purification.121 He maintained, that is, that the Roman doctrine of Purgatory was inconsistent with a sense that the ‘Intermediate State’ was a state of ‘rest’, of ‘blessedness’, and the like. In the Dream, when the soul of Gerontius is first aware of its ‘severance’ from earthly existence, it is conscious

118. 119. 120. 121.

‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 349n. Dream of Gerontius, ll.234–5. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 344. Tract 79, 19, 42, 61.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

411

of a ‘deep rest, so soothing and so sweet’ that nevertheless ‘hath something too of sternness and of pain / For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring / By a strange introversion, and perforce / I now begin to feed upon myself ’.122 ‘Deep rest’ is not inconsistent with ‘sternness’ and ‘pain’; and, indeed, the ‘rest’ that is a ‘severance’ from all earthly existence involves, of itself, the ‘pain’ of solitude – a ‘pain’ that, in the case of Gerontius, is assuaged by the presence of his Guardian Angel, and by the ‘measures of perception’ he is accorded ‘lest so stern a solitude should load / And break [his] being’.123 After Gerontius has a ‘sight’ of Christ, and is ‘scorched, and shrivelled’ by the ‘sanctity’ of Christ, he asks to be taken away to the ‘lowest deep’ where, ‘motionless and happy in [his] pain’, he will ‘sing [his] absent Lord and Love’: he will be simultaneously ‘motionless’ (at rest), ‘happy’ (in a state of ‘substantial blessedness’) and ‘in pain’.124 At the close of the poem, the soul of Gerontius is ‘lower[ed]’ into ‘penal waters’ – ‘waters’ that are ‘penal’, but which nevertheless are a place of rest, and healing, in which ‘Angels … Shall tend, and nurse, and lull’ him.125 The Dream of Gerontius is takes place in an ‘immaterial world’, in which that which is ‘immaterial’ – the soul, the spirit – is manifest. On his first waking from the ‘sleep’ of life, Gerontius declares ‘I feel in me / An inexpressive lightness, and a sense / Of freedom, as I were at length myself, / And ne’er had been before’;126 and there is a sense in which his experiences, after death, manifest, and reveal, various aspects of his ‘self ’. The Angel suggests that purgatory itself, or the ‘veriest purgatory’, consists in a state of the soul, in the experience of a tension between contradictory desires – the desire to be in the presence of Christ, and the desire to ‘hide’ from that presence. There is a pleading in his pensive eyes Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee. And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself; for, though Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinned, As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire To slink away, and hide thee from His sight And yet wilt have a longing aye to dwell Within the beauty of his countenance, And these two pains, so counter and so keen, – The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not; The shame of self at thought of seeing Him, – Will be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory.127

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Dream of Gerontius, ll.189–93. Ibid., ll.539–41. Ibid., l.856, l.860, l.864, l.872. Ibid., ll.898–9, ll.905–6. Ibid., ll.172–5. Ibid., ll.736–47.

412

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

The soul of Gerontius, throughout most of The Dream, is not ‘self-moving, but borne forward’, held ‘fast’ within the ‘ample palm’ of his Guardian Angel.128 Yet, when Gerontius asks what hinders him from ‘going to’ his ‘Lord’, the Angel replies that he is not hindered, but with ‘extremest speed’ is ‘hurrying to the just and holy Judge’;129 the sense he has of delay, of time passing, is created by his own ‘living thought’ – for ‘in th’immaterial world’, ‘intervals in their succession’ are ‘measured by the living thought alone’.130 So, the impression of delay (and constraint) seems itself to be a creation, in some sense, of the ‘living thought’ of Gerontius himself. ‘It is thy very energy of thought / Which keeps thee from thy God.’131 What happens ‘to’ Gerontius is, equally, something that happens ‘within’ Gerontius. If time is ‘measured by … living thought’, so must movement be. The ‘movement’ of the soul of Gerontius, towards and into the ‘Hall of Judgement’, passing by different spirits – demons, and angels – is a movement of ‘living thought’, in which he encounters the spirits around him as he takes in or apprehends them, so that the ‘movement’ corresponds to a development in his capacity to take things in: the more he can take things in, the more things ‘show up’ for him, so to speak, present themselves to him; it is the movement, the change, in ‘living thought’, the change in apprehension, which makes for the encounter with the spiritual realities (and this movement tends towards an encounter with, a ‘sight’ of, Christ Himself). ‘Movement towards’ something, would, then, correspond with the ‘taking in’ of that thing, so to speak (and this ‘taking in’ would involve the development of a capacity to take in, to apprehend, that thing). The realities which Gerontius encounters are really there; and in his experiences of them, they really impinge on him; but they are, equally, there for him, only as he acquires the capacity, in his ‘energy of thought’, to register them. The ‘movement’ of the soul of Gerontius, then, is an expression of an internal ‘energy of thought’. Yet Gerontius is moved by others  – above all by his Guardian Angel, by whom he is ‘borne forward’. What is more, his ‘perception’ of the spiritual realities by which he is encompassed is something that is ‘vouchsafed’ to him, not something that he accomplishes by his own powers. The soul of Gerontius, of itself, has ‘by right / No converse with aught else besides’ itself; but as the ‘load’ of such ‘solitude’ is too much for it, it is ‘in mercy vouchsafed’ some ‘lower measures of perception’: its ‘perception’ of what is external to it, is ‘vouchsafed’ to it. It is accorded certain ‘measures of perception’ in ‘mercy’, as it cannot bear the ‘load’ of ‘severance’ from all else; it is accorded ‘means of converse’ that correspond with what it is capable of, with what it can bear. There is a sense, in this, that the experiences of the soul of Gerontius, are accommodated to the capacities (and limitations) of that soul. If divine ‘mercy’ accords perceptions to the soul of Gerontius, according to the capacities of that soul, then changes in those perceptions – admitting different aspects of the spiritual reality, with which

128. 129. 130. 131.

Ibid., l.232, l.226. Ibid., ll.338–9. Ibid., 356–7. Ibid., 367–8.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

413

Gerontius is encompassed – must accord with changes in the capacities of the soul of Gerontius: what it is given to Gerontius to perceive, is given according to his capacity. The ‘movement’ experienced by the soul of Gerontius involves, then, a ‘movement’ in ‘energy of thought’, a movement that is a development, an increase, in ‘perception’. That movement can, equally, be taken as an expression of desire. The soul of Gerontius, throughout, is ‘borne forward’ by a Guardian Angel, but there is one moment, in the poem – when the soul of Gerontius is brought into the ‘veiled presence’ of God – in which it seems to move itself: having ‘darted’ from the ‘hold’ of his Guardian Angel’, ‘with the intemperate energy of love’, it ‘Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel’; the movement corresponds to an inner ‘energy of love’.132 Yet, having been ‘scorched’ by the ‘keen sanctity’ of God, the soul is ‘passive and still’, and is carried by his Guardian Angels to the ‘waters’, where it will await ‘the truth of everlasting day’.133 There is not a sense, in this, that the soul of Gerontius moves itself, out of ‘shame of self ’, from the ‘countenance’ of God; yet Gerontius, equally, asks to be taken from that ‘countenance’ – ‘Take me away, and in the lowest deep / There let me be.’134 The soul of Gerontius is ‘vouchsafed’ certain perceptions, and experiences, in ‘mercy’, according to its capacity to take in, and endure, the ‘load’ of those experiences. The ‘succession’ in those experiences is correlative to a ‘succession’, a development, in the capacities, the ‘energy of thought’, of the soul of Gerontius; and those experiences are ordained, in ‘mercy’, to make for an increase, a development, in those capacities. As the ‘Inward Ray / More brightly’ burns (as Newman puts it in ‘Discipline’) so ‘Truth, in its wealthier scene and nobler space’ is ‘Given, for [his] eye to range, and feet to trace’; and this ‘larger grace’ involves ‘grief, or pain’.135 The ultimate vision, the unveiling of ‘the face of the Incarnate God’, affects the soul with a ‘keen and subtle pain’, and yet the memory of that vision is a ‘sovereign febrifuge to heal the wound’, even as it ‘will the wound provoke’.136 According to the notion of the ‘Economy of the Visible World’, which Newman took from the Greek Fathers, what one experiences of reality, in this life, is something ‘vouchsafed’ to one, according to whatever capacity one has to take in, and to benefit from, what one is ‘vouchsafed’: the experiences one has of the realities of the ‘Visible World’ are a means of forming the soul, that it might be made capable of apprehending (and existing among) higher realities; one has intimations of those higher realities, in the here and now, in the ‘types’ and ‘figures’ of the ‘Visible World’; those higher realities are behind the ‘veil’ of ‘Visible World’, because one does not yet have the capacity to ‘bear’ the unveiling of them. The realities of the ‘invisible world’ are most fully manifest, in this life, in the sacraments of the Church (which are, nevertheless, merely ‘symbols’ of ‘heavenly facts’). For those who participate in the liturgical life

132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

Ibid., ll.850–2. Ibid., l.856, l.852, l.857, l.875. Ibid., ll.860–1. ‘Discipline’, in Lyra Apostolica, ll.2–3, ll.4–5, ll.7–8. Dream of Gerontius, ll.719–22.

414

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

of the Church, ‘direct intercourse with God on their part now, prayer and the like, may be necessary to their meeting Him suitably hereafter: and direct intercourse on His part with them, or what we call sacramental communion, may be necessary in some incomprehensible way, even for preparing their very nature to bear the sight of Him’.137 What happens to the soul of Gerontius, in the ‘intermediate state’, the movement toward Purgatory, is a continuation, an intensification, of what happens to every soul, in this life, with the intensification of the ‘Inward Ray’ which makes use of ‘reason’, as an instrument, but which is something more than ‘reason’, and which ascertains, as if intuitively, the ‘presentation of most holy truths’ in, and through, the deliverances of ‘reason’ and imagination. In a sermon on ‘The Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus’, Newman remarks that ‘our Saviour’s words are not of a nature to be heard once and no more; but … to understand them we must feed upon them, and live in them, as if by little and little growing into their meaning’.138 A mind that grows ‘into their meaning’ acquires a sense of the divinity of that ‘meaning’. When we contemplate Christ as manifested in the Gospels, the Christ who exists therein, external to our own imaginings, and is as really a living being, and sojourned on earth as truly as any of us, then we shall at length believe in Him with a conviction, a confidence, and an entireness, which can no more be annihilated than the belief in our senses. It is impossible for a Christian mind to meditate on the Gospels, without feeling, beyond all manner of doubt, that He who is the subject of them is God.139

As the mind ‘grows’ into the ‘meaning’ of the Gospels, it apprehends a ‘holy truth’ in, or through, the image of Christ ‘manifested’ in them. Gerontius encounters the reality of Purgatory in, or through, a ‘world of signs and types’; he experiences Purgatory as a ‘world of signs and types’. For Newman, the reality of Purgatory, as attested by the doctrine of the Church, was itself registered by ‘the mind of the Church’, in or through the various ‘signs’ of the Scriptures – as a part of the process of assimilating the unitary ‘truth lying hid under the tenor of the sacred text as a whole, and showing itself more or less in this verse or that as it might be’.140 As Gerontius is presented with various ‘signs and types’ of reality, ‘signs’ that are ‘in mercy’ correlative to the intensification of his ‘Inward Ray’ – such that he apprehends more, the more he has the ‘inward energy’ to apprehend it – so, perhaps, those of the early Christians, whose ‘Inward Ray’ burned ‘brightly’, had a fuller apprehension of what was ‘lying hid’ in the ‘signs and types’ of Scripture. ‘There are’, Newman maintains in Arians of the Fourth Century, ‘minds so gifted and disciplined as to approach the position occupied by the inspired writers, and

137. 138. 139. 140.

‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’, in PPS v, 7. ‘The Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus’, in PPS iii, 130. Ibid., 131. ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’, in ECH i, 286.

8. The Imagination and the ‘Metropolitan Intellect’

415

therefore able to apply their words with a fitness, and entitled to do so with a freedom, which is unintelligible to the dull or heartless criticism of inferior understandings.’141 Gerontius apprehends more of the ‘truths’ of Purgatory, in ‘signs and types’, as his ‘Inward Ray’ intensifies, tending toward ‘sight’, and the intensification of that ‘Inward Ray’ involves a kind of ‘happy … pain’; the intensification of the ‘Inward Ray’ is a movement, in ‘energy of thought’, towards a ‘sight’ of Christ that is, in itself, purgatorial, such that the intensification of that ‘Inward Ray’ seems to involve, in itself, a (purgatorial) ‘happy … pain’; perhaps the ‘gifted’ souls in the early Church that registered via the Scriptures the reality of Purgatory, did so as sensing something of the reality of Purgatory, in inchoate form, within themselves, in the intensification of the ‘Inward Ray’. ‘All the Christian ideas’, Newman observes in the Apologia, ‘were magnified in the Church of Rome, as time went on … . The whole scene of pale, faint, distant Apostolic Christianity is seen in Rome, as through a telescope or magnifier.’142 The ‘waters’ of Purgatory, in the vision of Newman, might be regarded as a ‘magnified’ presentation of the waters of Baptism (the ‘waters’ of Purgatory and Baptism, equally, purge sin). The ‘Angel of the Agony’ – the angel that was present with Christ in His agony in the garden of Gethsemane – pleads for the souls in Purgatory. The ‘Angel of the Agony’ comforted Christ in Gethsemane when, in His holiness, He suffered on encountering sin; that ‘Angel’, in Purgatory, comforts the souls who, in their sinfulness, suffer on encountering the ‘sanctity’ of Christ: Gethsemane becomes a ‘type’, of sorts, of the ‘agony’ involved in the encounter between sin and holiness (and so, a ‘sign’ revealing something of the reality of Purgatory); the scene of Gethsemane is ‘magnified’ in the vision of Purgatory. The representation of the ascent of the soul of Gerontius is counterposed, in the Dream, with a representation – in the songs of the ‘Angelicals’ – of the ascent of ‘man’, the ‘recreant’, who ‘lost his heritage of heaven / And fellowship with light’, after the ‘fall’, when ‘taught by Angel-vistings, / At length he sought his God’, and was redeemed by the ‘second Adam’, who ‘The double agony in man / For man [would] undergo’, ‘in the garden secretly, / And on the cross on high’: there is, in death and in Purgatory, a kind of recapitulation of the movement of redemption, a participation in the ‘double agony’ of Christ.143 In the Dream of Gerontius, Newman attempts to combine various stray insights, or intuitions about Purgatory, present in the works of the Fathers, insights which he had, at one time, taken to contradict each other. Some of the materials for his vision in the Dream of Gerontius are present in Tract 79: the idea that ‘the very sight of Divine Perfection in the invisible world will be in itself a pain, while it constitutes the purification of the imperfect but believing soul’; the idea that ‘penitents late in life may sink forever into a state, blissful as far as it

141. Arians of the Fourth Century (1833; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 63. 142. Apologia pro Vita Sua, 289. 143. Dream of Gerontius, 643, 644–5, 807, 819–20, 821–2.

416

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

goes, but more or less approaching to unconsciousness’; the idea – taken from St Gregory – that the ‘pains of Purgatory’ consist in the ‘pangs and shudderings of intellectual natures, when their Judge was approaching, and disclosing themselves in a supernatural agony’.144 Newman adheres closely to the Catholic ‘decrees’ about Purgatory, and makes use of images present in authoritative texts (the ‘fire’, mentioned in the Catechism, is suggested in the way the soul of Gerontius is ‘scorched, and shrivelled’, and the ‘prison’ mentioned by Bellarmine, becomes the ‘golden prison’, the ‘gates’ of which make ‘sweet music, as each fold revolves / Upon its ready hinge’).145 His own imagining of Purgatory can be regarded as an attempt to apprehend, by meditation, a ‘truth lying hid under’ various ‘signs’, various texts, forming from those ‘signs’ and texts a ‘whole’ that is a unitary vision. He engages, in this, in the kind of meditation that he characterizes as ‘mystical’ – the meditation that is the activity of the ‘Inward Ray’, in its apprehension of the ‘whole’ that is manifest in the ‘holy truths’ of the revelation. To present a personal vision to others, for Newman, is to present what is innermost in oneself, and it is to engage that which is innermost in those to whom one presents the vision – eliciting in them certain intuitions of the ‘holy truths’ beneath the ‘veil’ of that vision: it is ‘heart speaking to heart’.

144. Tract 79, 30, 47. 145. Dream of Gerontius, 876–8.

Chapter 9 EX UMBRIS ET IMAGINIBUS IN VERITATEM

1. In An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) Newman sought to clarify, and to sum up, thoughts that he had been developing for most of his life (thoughts which, until he wrote the Grammar of Assent, he had articulated most fully in his Oxford University Sermons). What is stressed in the Grammar of Assent, more than in the Oxford University Sermons, is the importance of the imagination in the spiritual life: the Grammar of Assent is, in many respects, a vindication of the religious imagination.

2. The Grammar of Assent is in two parts. The first part is concerned with the relationship between ‘assent’ and ‘apprehension’; the second part, with the relationship between ‘assent’ and ‘inference’. It is concerned with ‘assent’ in relation to ‘concrete matter’ – it ‘treat[s] of propositions only in their bearing upon concrete matter’ – and it is concerned with ‘Inference, in its relation to Assent, and only such inference as is not demonstration’.1 One can only assent to a proposition if one ‘apprehends’ its meaning, so apprehension is involved in assent; and Newman suggests that there are two kinds of apprehension – ‘notional’ and ‘real’. ‘Notional’ apprehension is the apprehension of abstractions, ideas; ‘real’ apprehension is the apprehension of things, or images of them (in early drafts of the Grammar of Assent, Newman used the term ‘imaginative’ instead of ‘real’, in characterizing the apprehension of ‘concrete’ things).2 Assent, then, involves apprehension, and this apprehension can be ‘notional’ or ‘real’. Assent, moreover, is related to ‘inference’: one assents (or one should assent) to what one has ‘reason’ to consider true. 1. An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 7. 2. See Introduction to An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. by Ian Ker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).

418

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

‘Inference’ itself, Newman maintains, is ‘conditional’, in the sense that one infers something, one concludes something, on the ‘condition’ of certain premises (‘if A and B, then C’ – ‘A’ and ‘B’ are the conditions for the inference ‘C’, and to infer ‘C’ is to derive it from its conditions ‘A’ and ‘B’). Assent, by contrast, is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Inference, Newman maintains, is the proper ‘antecedent’ to assent. One should attempt to ‘prove’ what one assents to. Assent, though, is distinct from inference. There are, with regard to ‘concrete matter’, ‘degrees’ of inference – degrees in the ‘proof ’, in the strength of argumentation, for a proposition  – but there are no degrees of assent, which is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, a matter of taking something to be true; there are no degrees of truth.3 One might, by various arguments, recognize that one should take a certain proposition to be true; the act of assenting to that proposition is, in itself, distinct from the argumentation by which one recognizes that one ought to assent to it. As, in argumentation about ‘concrete matter’, there is only ‘such inference as is not demonstration’, as there is only an accumulation of probable arguments, a certain judgment is required, to determine whether or not a particular accumulation of probable arguments, relating to a particular case, is sufficient for one to assent to what those arguments would establish. This judgment is not something that can be determined by any ‘rule’; it is a personal acquirement. The Grammar of Assent, then, is concerned with ‘imagination’ in a couple of respects: as involved in a certain kind of ‘apprehension’, ‘real apprehension’; and as involved in ‘ratiocination’ about ‘concrete matter’  – since such ‘ratiocination’ involves apprehending different ‘aspects’ of something ‘concrete’, and it is from the image of that ‘concrete’ reality that various ‘aspects’ are abstracted (‘the fuller is the mind’s hold upon things or what it considers such, the more fertile is it in its aspects of them’).4 When Newman contrasts ‘notional’ and ‘real’ apprehension, he suggests that ‘notional’ apprehension is concerned with ideas, abstracted from the things that are experienced, and ‘real’ apprehension with images, retained from the things that are experienced. ‘All things in the exterior world are unit and individual, and are nothing else; but the mind not only contemplates those unit realities, as they exist, but has the gift, by an act of creation, of bringing before it abstractions and generalizations, which have no existence, no counterpart, out of it.’5 The ‘abstractions and generalizations’ which ‘have no existence, no counterpart, out of ’ the mind, are concerned with aspects of the ‘unit and individual’ things presented in experience. It is these ‘unit and individual’ things that have ‘existence’, properly; and these things are present in, or to, the imagination. An apprehension of things … remains on our minds by means of the faculty of memory. Memory consists in a present imagination of things that are past; memory retains the impressions and likenesses of what they were when before 3. Newman aims to counter the view of John Locke, that there may be ‘degrees of assent’, in Grammar of Assent, 159–88. 4. Grammar of Assent, 34. 5. Ibid., 9.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

419

us; and when we make use of the proposition which refers to them, it supplies us with objects by which to interpret it. They are things still, as being the reflections of things in a mental mirror.6

A particular proposition may have a ‘notional’ or a ‘real’ ‘interpretation’: the one who interprets that proposition may apprehend ‘notions’ or ‘images’, when interpreting it. A schoolboy may perfectly apprehend, and construe with spirit, the poet’s words, “Dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita Virgine Pontifex;”7 he has seen steep hills, flights of steps, and processions; he knows what enforced silence is; also he knows all about the Pontifex Maximus, and the Vestal Virgins; he has an abstract hold upon every word of the description, yet without the words therefore bringing before him at all the living image which they would light up in the mind of a contemporary of the poet, who had seen the fact described, or of a modern historian who had duly informed himself in the religious phenomena, and by meditation had realized the Roman ceremonial, of the age of Augustus.8

The ‘contemporary of the poet’ and the ‘modern historian’ contemplate a ‘living image’, a ‘concrete unit’; and it affects them as a ‘reality’ would, for it is akin to, or the ‘counterpart’ of, the ‘reflections of things in a mental mirror’ that are present in ‘memory’, the ‘reflections’ that make the ‘things still’ present that were once experienced. Newman maintains that ‘of these two modes of apprehending propositions, notional and real, real is the stronger; I mean by stronger the more vivid and forcible. It is so to be accounted for the very reason that it is concerned with what is either real or is taken for real; for intellectual ideas cannot compete in effectiveness with the experience of concrete facts … . Not that real apprehension, as such, impels to action, any more than notional; but it excites and stimulates the affections and passions, by bringing facts home to them as motive causes.9

Images excite ‘the affections and passions’, and the affections and passions motivate acts. Images do not, of themselves, ‘impel to action’: it is the ‘affections’ that make one tend toward acting in certain ways; and whether certain ‘affections’ are excited in one, by an image, relates to whether one has a certain character – whether one has the sort of character to be affected by such an image. It is not imagination that causes action; but hope and fear, likes and dislikes, appetite, passion, affection, the stirrings of selfishness and self-love. What imagination does for us is to find a means of stimulating those motive powers; 6. 7. 8. 9.

Ibid., 23. ‘While a priest shall climb the Capitoline with a silent maiden.’ Grammar of Assent, 10. Ibid., 11–12.

420

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

and it does so by providing a supply of objects strong enough to stimulate them. The thought of honour, glory, duty, self-aggrandisement, gain, or on the other hand of Divine Goodness, future reward, eternal life, perseveringly dwelt upon, leads us along a course of action corresponding to itself, but only in case there be that in our minds which is congenial to it. However, when there is that preparation of mind, the thought does lead to the act. Hence it is that the fact of a proposition being accepted with a real assent is accidentally an earnest of that proposition being carried out in conduct, and the imagination may be said in some sense to be of a practical nature, inasmuch as it leads to practice indirectly by the action of its object upon the affections.10

If one has that in oneself ‘which is congenial’ to a certain end which one imagines, then the imagining of that end will excite the ‘motive powers’ of the passions and affections; and to have that in oneself ‘which is congenial’ to a certain end, is to have a certain sort of temperament. (To maintain that the passions and affections are ‘motive powers’ in this way, is not to maintain that to experience certain passions and affections is to be ‘impelled’ to act in accordance with them.) Images, then, excite emotion; and this might suggest that, where there is emotion, there is an image. When discussing how particular propositions might, in themselves, admit of ‘notional’ or ‘real’ apprehension, Newman observes that ‘“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,”11 is a mere commonplace, a terse expression of abstractions in the mind of the poet himself, if Philippi is to be the index of his patriotism, whereas it would be the record of experiences, a sovereign dogma, a grand aspiration, inflaming the imagination, piercing the heart, of a Wallace or a Tell.’12 In the case of the phrase ‘dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita Virgine Pontifex’, the ‘living image’ which the phrase might evoke would be visual, something presented to the senses – a particular scene in the ‘Roman ceremonial’. The ‘living image’ associated with ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ would not seem to be something presented to the senses, in the same way. What image would the phrase ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ evoke in the ‘imagination’ of a ‘Wallace or a Tell’? Newman suggests that the phrase, for ‘a Wallace or a Tell’, would be ‘the record of experiences, a sovereign dogma, a grand aspiration, piercing the heart’. The main difference between Horace, and ‘a Wallace or a Tell’, is that Horace does not act on the maxim, ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’, and Wallace and Tell do. Would Newman suggest, here, that the difference arises from Horace having merely ‘abstractions’, and Wallace and Tell, images? If so, what are the images that Wallace and Tell have, which Horace does not have? Wallace and Tell certainly would seem to have, or to be moved by, sentiments, in accordance with that maxim, while Horace does not have, or is not moved by, those sentiments. If, as Newman suggests, it is images that excite sentiments, then Wallace and Tell, in having

10. Ibid., 82–3. 11. ‘It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland.’ 12. Grammar of Assent, 10.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

421

certain sentiments, would seem to have the images that excite them. Is Newman assuming that they have the images, because they have the sentiments? He observes that the maxim would be, for Wallace and Tell, a ‘record of experiences’. Yet they have had those experiences because they have been moved by the sentiments expressed in the maxim; so the maxim would have been a ‘sovereign dogma’ for them, before they had those experiences. Certainly, after they had gone through those experiences, the memory, the ‘record’ of those experiences, would make the maxim more affecting; a Wallace and a Tell understand, from experience, what it means to live pro patria, and to be willing to die pro patria, so that ‘images’ derived from their experience would be (after they had gone through the experiences, to which their ‘patriotism’ moved them) involved in their response to the maxim. What, though, of the ‘patriotism’ that moved them to have those experiences? Were they formed, by the ‘experiences’ of their upbringing, to have ‘patriotic’ characters, such that the ‘record’, the impress, of these experiences, was what made patriotism a ‘sovereign dogma’ for them? Newman could be suggesting that there is a way of living, involving certain ‘experiences’, which corresponds to the maxim ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’; to live in that way, is to understand, from experience, the ‘reality’ of what it is pro patria mori; and those who understand the ‘reality’ would assent to the maxim in a different way to those who understand only by ‘abstractions’. Wallace and Tell were moved, by patriotism, to carry out certain acts, and to have certain experiences. Those experiences would have informed their understanding of what ‘patriotism’ means. Before they had those experiences, they were, nevertheless, sufficiently patriotic as to be moved to act pro patria. This patriotism could, equally, have been a ‘record’ of certain ‘experiences’ – experiences involved in their upbringing: they may have been brought up to have a certain understanding of what their patria was; they may have had, from their upbringing, certain images or experiences with which to ‘interpret’ the term ‘patria’ – such that it meant something to them that ‘inflamed’ their ‘imagination’, that inspired their devotion. They had an understanding of what it is pro patria mori that was involved in who they were. They had, in the ‘real’ stuff of who they were – in the ‘images’ derived from the experiences that had formed them – that with which to ‘interpret’ the maxim. (Newman would seem, here, to associate ‘real apprehension’, or the ‘image’ that is apprehended, with something like ‘connatural knowledge’ – the knowledge of a certain state of character, or a certain kind of goodness, involved in having that kind of character, or that kind of goodness.) Newman observes that the mind can retain ‘images’ not simply of the things of sense experience, but of its own ‘acts’. The memories of ‘our past mental acts of any kind’ are memories of ‘things’, and so may involve ‘real’ apprehension. The apprehension which we have of our past mental acts of any kind, of hope, inquiry, effort, triumph, disappointment, suspicion, hatred, and a hundred others, is an apprehension of the memory of those definite acts, and therefore an apprehension of things … . Such an apprehension again is elicited by propositions embodying the notices of our history, of our pursuits and their results, of our friends, of our bereavements, of our illnesses, of our fortunes, which remain

422

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

imprinted upon our memory as sharply and deeply as is any recollection of sight. Nay, and such recollections may have in them an individuality and completeness which outlives the impressions made by sensible objects. The memory of countenances and of places in times past may fade away from the mind; but the vivid image of certain anxieties or deliverances never.13

One can understand certain emotions, or states of mind, from having experienced those emotions, or states of mind. One can, equally, have difficulty in understanding emotions, or states of mind, that one has never experienced. As regards the affections and passions of our nature, they are sui generis respectively, and incommensurable, and must be severally experienced in order to be apprehended really. I can understand the rabbia of a native of Southern Europe, if I am of a passionate temper myself; and the taste for speculation or betting found in great traders or on the turf, if I am fond of enterprise or games of chance; but on the other hand, not all the possible descriptions of headlong love will make me comprehend the delirium, if I never have had a fit of it; nor will ever so many sermons about the inward satisfaction of strict conscientiousness create in my mind the image of a virtuous action and its attendant sentiments, if I have been brought up to lie, thieve and indulge my appetites. Thus we meet with men of the world who cannot enter into the very idea of devotion, and think, for instance, that, from the nature of the case, a life of religious seclusion must be either one of unutterable dreariness or abandoned sensuality, because they know of no exercise of the affections but what is merely human; and with others again, who, living in the home of their own selfishness, ridicule as something fanatical and pitiable the self-sacrifices of generous high-mindedness and chivalrous honour. They cannot create images of these things, any more than children on the contrary can of vice, when they ask whereabouts and who the bad men are; for they have no personal memories, and have to content themselves with notions drawn from books or from what others tell them.14

Newman seems to understand by ‘image’ not so much a particular, sensible form, present in the ‘imagination’, as a memory of something experienced – the presence of an experienced reality (‘unit and individual’) in, or to, the ‘memory’. Anything experienced may become an ‘image’. Who is able to infuse into me, or how shall I imbibe, a sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Virgil, if I have not read their writings? or how shall I gain a shadow of a perception of the wit or the grace ascribed to the conversation of the French salons, being myself an untravelled John Bull?15 13. Ibid., 25. 14. Ibid., 29–30. 15. Ibid., 29.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

423

The ‘sense of the peculiarities of the style of Cicero or Virgil’ involves an image derived from the experience of ‘their writings’; that experience involves an encounter with the thoughts of Cicero and Virgil – it involves a perception of the habits of thought of Cicero and Virgil, and a perception of how those habits of thought are characteristic of them. The ‘image’ here – the image of the ‘style of Cicero or Virgil’ – is not something that is contrasted with ‘thought’; for a sense of the ‘style of Cicero or Virgil’ involves a sense of the thought of Cicero or Virgil.16 ‘Imagination’ is not, then, in simple contrast to ‘intellect’ or ‘understanding’. There may be things that one understands only in, or through, having certain experiences of them; the trace of an experience, in or to the ‘memory’ or ‘imagination’, is that whereby one understands. One may have experiences of that which is spiritual or intellectual, experiences of persons, and those experiences are retained as ‘images’. Newman associates ‘images’ with understanding in his account of how proficiency, in a particular form of knowledge, may be connected with having an ‘image’ of that with which that form of knowledge is concerned. It will sometimes happen, that those who acquitted themselves but poorly in class, when they come into the action of life, and engage in some particular work, which they have already been learning in its theory and with little promise of proficiency, are suddenly found to have what is called an eye for that work – an eye for trade matters, or for engineering, or a special taste for literature – which no one expected from them at school, while they were engaged on notions. Minds of this stamp not only know the received rules of their profession, but enter into them, and even anticipate them, or dispense with them, or substitute

16. In an essay on ‘Literature’ published in The Idea of a University, Newman maintains that ‘thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinking out into language.’ The ‘man of genius … subjects [language] to his own purposes, and moulds it according to his own peculiarities’ so that ‘throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, aspirations, which pass within him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect, does he image forth, to all does he give utterance, in a corresponding language, which is as multiform as this inward mental action itself and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow: so that we might as well say that one man’s shadow is another’s as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself.’ The ‘thought and feeling’ of the ‘man of genius’ are ‘personal, and so his language is personal’. The Idea of a University (1852; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 276–7. For Newman, the ‘sense of the peculiarities’ of a ‘style’ involves an apprehension of the ‘personality’ that is manifest in that ‘style’.

424

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

other rules instead. And when new questions are opened, and arguments are drawn up on one side and the other in long array, they with a natural ease and promptness form their views and give their decision, as if they had no need to reason, from their clear apprehension of the lie and issue of the whole matter in dispute, as if it were drawn out in a map before them. These are the reformers, systematizers, inventors, in various departments of thought, speculative and practical; in education, in administration, in social and political matters, in science. Such men indeed are far from infallible; however great their powers, they sometimes fall into great errors, in their own special department, while second-rate men who go by rule come to sound and safe conclusions. Images need not be true.17

Those who can dispense with ‘received rules’ in this way, do so by consulting an image, which is as if a ‘map’ of a certain ‘matter’, with which those ‘rules’ are concerned. A certain reality is presented in or through that image; something of that reality is understood, or apprehended, in or through that image  – so that to have that image is to have a sense of that reality, an ‘eye’ for it. The image is that in which, or through which, certain realities are (or seem to be) present to the mind. If the ‘rules’ of a ‘profession’ are derived by ‘abstraction’ from certain realities, so, to have a sense of those realities, is to be able to ‘enter into’ those rules more fully, ‘or substitute other rules instead’, ‘other rules’ derived from that sense of those realities. Those ‘other rules’ would, presumably, be ‘abstractions’; but the capacity to form those abstractions requires a sense of the reality, from which the abstractions are made; those ‘abstractions’ are a matter of apprehending, isolating, certain aspects of that reality, and the apprehension of that reality must, it would seem, precede the apprehension of an aspect of it. Newman observes, in this regard, that ‘real apprehension has … precedence [over notional apprehension], as being the scope and end and the test of notional; and the fuller is the mind’s hold upon things or what it considers such, the more fertile is it in its aspects of them, and the more practical in its definitions’.18 The origin of the ‘aspects’ is in the ‘mind’s hold upon things’. There is a sense, then, that it is in ‘real apprehension’, in imagination, that things are present to the mind, in such a way that they can be thought about. The images present in the mind are, Newman maintains, images of things, and they are ‘things still, as being the reflections of things in a mental mirror’.19 Contrasting ‘real’ and ‘notional’ apprehension, Newman observes that the ‘informations of sense and sensation are the initial basis of both of them; but in the one we take hold of objects from within them, and in the other we view them from outside of them; we perpetuate them as images in the one case, we transform them into notions in the other’.20 If ‘we take hold of objects from within them’, in

17. 18. 19. 20.

Grammar of Assent, 75–6. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 34.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

425

‘real’ apprehension, then this would suggest that to have a ‘real apprehension’ of an object is to be ‘within’ that object, in some way: one does not merely contemplate it from ‘without’; one has a sense of it that involves a kind of participation in it, a matter of being ‘within’ it. Newman maintains that ‘the fuller is the mind’s hold upon things … the more fertile is it in its aspects of them’; that ‘fertility’, whereby the mind forms ‘abstractions’, by which it considers ‘aspects’ of ‘things’, would seem to originate in the mind being ‘within’ things, in some way. Newman suggests that the ‘image’ involved in ‘real apprehension’ is the trace of experience, abiding in the mind. The various experiences one has had, have involved various encounters with various realities; and these realities, through these encounters, are present ‘within’ the mind. When one has experienced something, then that thing is present to one, in memory (as a ‘reflection’ in a ‘mental mirror’) when one thinks about it; and one can ‘test’ statements about that thing against the ‘reflection’ of it that one has acquired from experience. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical common-places, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.21

Newman observes, with regard to Virgil, that ‘his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, [give] utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time’.22 To have had that experience – of ‘pain and weariness, yet hope of better things’ – is to have an understanding of the ‘utterance’ of Virgil which cannot be had by those who have not had that experience. What the experience of the world effects for the illustration of classical authors, that office the religious sense, carefully cultivated, fulfils toward Holy Scripture. To the devout and spiritual, the Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions. And, again, to the disconsolate, the tempted, the perplexed, the suffering, there comes, by means of their very trials, an enlargement of thought, which enables them to see in it what they never saw before. Henceforth there is to them a reality in its teachings, which they recognize as an argument, and the

21. Ibid., 78. 22. Ibid., 78–9.

426

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

best of arguments, for its divine origin. Hence the practice of meditation on the Sacred Text; so highly thought of by Catholics.23

If one has experienced something of the reality with which Scripture is concerned, then one can recognize a ‘reality in [the] teachings’ of Scripture, which is ‘an argument, and the best of arguments, for its divine origin’. To experience that reality, the ‘religious sense’ must be ‘carefully cultivated’, and for Newman this ‘religious sense’ is associated with the ‘conscience’. When one has cultivated the conscience and the ‘religious sense’, one can perceive certain realities; and one can recognize that the ‘Sacred Text’ is concerned with those realities, and that there is a ‘reality in its teachings’. Newman characterizes ‘real’ apprehension as the ‘scope and end and test’ of notional; and, in this, he seems to be suggesting that experience is the ‘test’ of theory. With regard to the ‘religious sense’, one needs to have this ‘sense’ if one is to have certain experiences – if certain realities are to be perceptible; and the ‘cultivation’ of that sense is itself something that happens in, or through, experience – to act in accordance with the conscience, and to have the experiences attendant on such a way of acting, is itself to form the conscience, and its capacities for apprehension. (Experience ‘enlarges’ the capacity for experience.) To be experienced in certain matters, is to have a ‘real apprehension’ of those matters, to have ‘images’ of them, against which one can ‘test’ statements about them, and by which one can ‘interpret’ those statements (so that one might be affected by them, as by the realities with which they concern, if one has had experience of those realities, and they can ‘excite’ certain ‘affections’ that are ‘motive powers’ of action). ‘Real apprehension’, Newman maintains, is a ‘test’ of ‘notional’; yet he equally insists that ‘images need not be true’: the image, contemplated in a particular act of ‘real apprehension’, might not correspond to reality. The fact of the distinctness of the images, which are required for real assent, is no warrant for the existence of the objects which those images represent. A proposition, be it ever so keenly apprehended, may be true or may be false. If we simply put aside all inferential information, such as is derived from testimony, from general belief, from the concurrence of the senses, from common sense, or otherwise, we have no right to consider that we have apprehended a truth, merely because of the strength of our mental impression of it. Hence the proverb, ‘Fronti nulla fides.’ An image, with the characters of perfect veracity and faithfulness, may be ever so distinct and eloquent an object presented before the mind (or, as it is sometimes called, an ‘objectum internum,’ or a ‘subject-object’); but, nevertheless, there may be no external reality in the case, corresponding to it, in spite of its impressiveness. One of the most remarkable instances of this fallacious impressiveness is the illusion which possesses the minds of able

23. Ibid., 79.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

427

men, those especially who are exercised in physical investigations, in favour of the inviolability of the laws of nature. Philosophers of the school of Hume discard the very supposition of miracles, and scornfully refuse to hear evidence in their behalf in given instances, from their intimate experience of physical order and of the ever-recurring connexion of antecedent and consequent. Their imagination usurps the functions of reason; and they cannot bring themselves even to entertain as a hypothesis (and this is all that they are asked to do) a thought contrary to that vivid impression of which they are the victims, that the uniformity of nature, which they witness hour by hour, is equivalent to a necessary, inviolable law … . When I assent to a proposition, I ought to have some more legitimate reason for doing so, than the brilliancy of the image of which that proposition is the expression. That I have no experience of a thing happening except in one way, is a cause of the intensity of my assent, if I assent, but not a reason for my assenting. In saying this, I am not disposed to deny the presence in some men of an idiosyncratic sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions which common men cannot see, and is secured from the peril of confusing truth with make-belief; but this is genius, and beyond rule. I grant too, of course, that accidentally impressiveness does in matter of fact … constitute the motive principle of belief; for the mind is ever exposed to the danger of being carried away by the liveliness of its conceptions, to the sacrifice of good sense and conscientious caution, and the greater and the more rare are its gifts, the greater is the risk of swerving from the line of reason and duty; but here I am not speaking of transgressions of rule any more than of exceptions to it, but of the normal constitution of our minds, and of the natural and rightful effect of acts of the imagination upon us, and this is, not to create assent, but to intensify it.24

The mind can create images: ‘We are able by an inventive faculty, or, as I may call it, the faculty of composition, to follow the descriptions of things which have never come before us, and to form, out of such passive impressions as experience has heretofore left on our minds, new images, which, though mental creations, are in no sense abstractions, and though ideal, are not notional … [but] are concrete units in the minds both of the party describing and the party informed of them.’25 Newman observes, though, that the ‘faculty of composition’ is mostly restricted to the ‘sense of sight’; it is, for instance, very ‘difficult … to create or to apprehend by description images of mental facts, of which we have no direct experience.’26 That the mind can create images means, nevertheless, that ‘an image, with the characters of perfect veracity and faithfulness, may be ever so distinct and eloquent an object presented before the mind … [when there is] no external reality in the

24. Ibid., 79–82. 25. Ibid., 27. 26. Ibid., 28.

428

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

case, corresponding to it, in spite of its impressiveness’.27 Newman suggests that the ‘illusion’ of ‘the inviolability of the laws of nature’ arises from the distinctness of the ‘image’ of those ‘laws’, formed by experience; but, ‘that I have no experience of a thing happening except in one way, is … not a reason for my assenting’.28 Newman seems to be suggesting that those who maintain the ‘inviolability’ of the ‘laws of nature’ would maintain that the ‘image’ they have, of those ‘laws’, is the ultimate truth of the matter; ‘they cannot bring themselves even to entertain as a hypothesis (and this is all that they are asked to do) a thought contrary to that vivid impression of which they are the victims, that the uniformity of nature, which they witness hour by hour, is equivalent to a necessary, inviolable law’.29 They take ‘uniformity’ in the image, to be ‘equivalent’ to necessity; and so they confound something which can only be conceived of – necessity – with something that can be experienced, or presented in an ‘image’  – ‘uniformity’, regularity. The issue here, though, is not so much that they have an ‘image’ that does not correspond to an ‘external reality’; it is that they take something that can be presented in an image – ‘uniformity’ – for something that cannot – necessity. That they do this, Newman maintains, is owing to the distinctness of the ‘image’ that they have: the distinctness of the image makes for an inclination to treat the image as ultimate, and to discern in it ‘necessity’. Newman observes that the ‘distinctness’ of an image, involved in a ‘real’ apprehension, is not, in itself, a proper ‘reason’ for assent to what that apprehension presents. What, then, of his suggestion that, as the ‘devout and spiritual’ recognize that ‘the Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions’, so they recognize that there is ‘a reality in its teachings, which … [is] an argument, and the best of arguments, for its divine origin’? Newman maintains that ‘we have no right to consider that we have apprehended a truth, merely because of the strength of our mental impression of it’ if ‘we simply put aside all inferential information, such as is derived from testimony, from general belief, from the concurrence of the senses, from common sense, or otherwise’.30 Do those who recognize a ‘reality’ in the ‘teachings’ of the ‘Divine Word’ do so, without regard to ‘inferential information’? There might be, Newman suggests, a registering of ‘inferential information’ in, or through, images: there can be ‘in some men … an idiosyncratic sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions which common men cannot see, and is secured from the peril of confusing truth with make-belief; but this is genius, and beyond rule’.31 Would Newman maintain that the ‘devout and spiritual’ have something akin to this ‘genius’, whereby they can discern ‘reasons’ in the ‘impressions’ they form of what is presented by the ‘Divine Word’? He does not, in any case, maintain that they disregard ‘inferential information’; they recognize,

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81–2.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

429

rather, that the ‘Divine Word speaks of things, not merely of notions’  – that it expresses an ‘apprehension’ that has an acquaintance with certain ‘things’. If those ‘things’ are things that the ‘devout and spiritual’ register, then the ‘devout and spiritual’ will consult their own experience, the ‘testimony’ of their own experience, in ascertaining the ‘reality’ of the ‘teachings’ presented in the ‘Divine Word’. The acquaintance of the ‘devout and spiritual’ with those ‘things’, might enable them, with an ‘idiosyncratic sagacity’, to discern marks of truth, in the images of those ‘things’ presented in the ‘Divine Word’. Could they, moreover, discern these marks of truth or ‘reality’, in images of ‘things’ that they have not, perhaps could not have, experienced for themselves? If an acquaintance with these ‘things’ seems such that only a ‘divine’ apprehension could have it, and if the ‘Divine Word’ seems to manifest, to proceed from, a ‘real’ acquaintance with these things (to those who have the ‘sagacity’ to detect what a ‘real’ acquaintance looks like) then the ‘Divine Word’ would seem to express a ‘divine’ apprehension, and to have on it the marks of a ‘divine origin’. (Newman observes that the sense of what is ‘beyond human nature’, and so ‘supernatural’, involves a ‘standard’ at which ‘the powers of nature are placed’, and that different individuals will ‘place’ this standard in different ways, ‘according to [their] respective dispositions, opinions, and experiences’.)32 Newman observes that there is a ‘sagacity, which really and rightly sees reasons in impressions’. The apprehension of an ‘image’ can involve the apprehension of ‘reasons in’ that image, and these ‘reasons’, these inferences, can make for the ‘proof ’ of a proposition. There can be a thinking, an inferring, that occurs in, or through, the contemplation of ‘images’; and it is this thinking which discerns ‘reasons in’ the ‘impressions’ derived from experience. Newman maintains that ‘real assents’ are ‘of a personal character’, as they involve images derived from experiences which are particular to those who have them – and ‘such accidents are the characteristics of persons’. One cannot make a ‘real assent’ to a certain ‘point’  – even if one is convinced, through ‘notional’ argument, of that ‘point’ – unless one has had the experiences required for such a ‘real assent’. ‘We have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special … [and] depend on personal experience.’33 That one has the experiences, required for a ‘real assent’ to a certain ‘point’, is not something one can ‘secure’, not something that one can make happen. [Real assents] are of a personal character, each individual having his own, and being known by them. It is otherwise with notions; notional apprehension is in itself an ordinary act of our common nature. All of us have the power of abstraction, and can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions; and thus to co-operate in the establishment of a common measure between mind and mind. And, though for one and all of us to assent to the notions which we thus apprehend in common, is a further step, as requiring

32. Ibid., 310. 33. Ibid., 83.

430

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

the adoption of a common stand-point of principle and judgment, yet this too depends in good measure on certain logical processes of thought, with which we are all familiar, and on facts which we all take for granted. But we cannot make sure, for ourselves or others, of real apprehension and assent, because we have to secure first the images which are their objects, and these are often peculiar and special. They depend on personal experience; and the experience of one man is not the experience of another. Real assent, then, as the experience which it presupposes, is proper to the individual, and, as such, thwarts rather than promotes the intercourse of man with man … . That this or that person should have the particular experiences necessary for real assent on any point, that the Deist should become a Theist, the Erastian a Catholic, the Protectionist a Freetrader, the Conservative a Legitimist, the high Tory an out-and-out Democrat, are facts, each of which may be the result of a multitude of coincidences in one and the same individual, coincidences which we have no means of determining, and which, therefore, we may call accidents. For – There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will. Such accidents are the characteristics of persons, as differentiae and properties are the characteristics of species or natures.34

If ‘all of us … can be taught either to make or to enter into the same abstractions’, then ‘all of us’ can assent to any ‘abstraction’ – there is no ‘abstraction’, no ‘notional assent’, that is impossible to any ‘of us’. To make a ‘real assent’ to a certain ‘point’, however, one must have had the experiences required for such an assent. If one has the requisite experiences, having assented ‘notionally’ to a certain ‘point’, one might then assent ‘really’ to it; one might convert a ‘notional’ to a ‘real’ assent. When Newman considers the changes made by ‘particular experiences’, however, he does not instance changes from ‘notional’ to ‘real’ assent: he instances changes in the substance of belief, not in its ‘apprehension’ – the ‘Deist’ becoming a ‘Theist’, the ‘Erastian’ a ‘Catholic’, and so on. Would he suggest, in this, that one cannot be a ‘Catholic’, say, without making certain ‘real assents’, so that if one cannot make those ‘real assents’, one cannot be a Catholic? If so, one cannot change from being an ‘Erastian’ to being a ‘Catholic’, without having had the experiences that would enable one to make a ‘real assent’ to Catholicism. (Becoming a Catholic would, then, involve what ‘we may call accidents’, though if a ‘Divinity shapes our ends’, then these ‘accidents’ are appointed by Providence. The sense that, through the ‘accidents’ appointed by Providence, a ‘Divinity shapes our’ minds, is present in ‘Discipline’, in Lyra Apostolica – in which he suggests that the ‘Inward Ray’ is formed by ‘trial’, ‘grief ’, ‘pain’, ‘or strange eventful day’, to discern ‘truth in its wealthier scene, and nobler space’.) Would Newman suggest, moreover, that the experiences, required for a ‘real assent’ to Catholicism, are, equally, a motive for making that

34. Ibid., 83–5.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

431

assent? Would he suggest that those experiences have a significance that is such that, rightly construed, they present ‘reasons’ for Catholicism? When Newman reflects on the ‘experiences’ that might make for a ‘real and personal belief ’ in the ‘Divinity’ of Christ, he characterizes those experiences as ‘disposing causes’. In this day the belief of so many thousands in [the] Divinity [of Christ], is not therefore notional, because it is common, but may be a real and personal belief, being produced in different individual minds by various experiences and disposing causes, variously combined; such as a warm or strong imagination, great sensibility, compunction and horror at sin, frequenting the Mass and other rites of the Church, meditating on the contents of the Gospels, familiarity with hymns and religious poems, dwelling on the Evidences, parental example and instruction, religious friends, strange providences, powerful preaching. In each case the image in the mind, with the experiences out of which it is formed, would be a personal result; and, though the same in all, would in each case be so idiosyncratic in its circumstances, that it would stand by itself, a special formation, unconnected with any law; though at the same time it would necessarily be a principle of sympathy and a bond of intercourse between those whose minds had been thus variously wrought into a common assent, far stronger than could follow upon any multitude of mere notions which they unanimously held. And even when that assent is not the result of concurrent causes, if such a case is possible, but has one single origin, as the study of Scripture, careful teaching, or a religious temper, still its presence argues a special history, and a personal formation, which an abstraction does not. For an abstraction can be made at will, and may be the work of a moment; but the moral experiences which perpetuate themselves in images, must be sought after in order to be found, and encouraged and cultivated in order to be appropriated.35

These experiences would seem to be ‘disposing causes’, not simply as presenting the ‘images’ required for a ‘real assent’, but motives for the assent itself; Newman suggests that the mind is ‘wrought into’ an assent, through these experiences. One of the main claims that Newman makes in the Grammar of Assent is that ‘verbal reasoning’ does not present, fully, all that happens in the mind, when the mind is moved, by ‘ratiocination’, to assent to a certain ‘point’, pertaining to ‘concrete matter’. There is an ‘organon more delicate, versatile, and elastic than verbal argumentation’, which is the ‘living’ activity of the mind itself in ‘ratiocination’, and this ‘ratiocination’ cannot be fully presented in ‘verbal argumentation’; it is this ‘organon’ that is required ‘for genuine proof in concrete matter’.36 His concern with ‘genuine proof in concrete matter’ relates to his sense that, in ‘concrete matter’, the only kind of ‘verbal’ proof that can be formed for a particular ‘point’ is a probable, not a demonstrative, proof. He would resist the idea – which he associates with

35. Ibid., 86–7. 36. Ibid., 271.

432

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

John Locke – that one should assent to a proposition in proportion to the degree of proof one has for that proposition. He maintains that the idea that there can be ‘degrees of assent’ is mistaken  – assent is a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and there are, in fact, no ‘degrees’ in it. If, though, one should assent to a proposition only in accordance with the degree of proof one has for it, then would this not mean that one should not assent to any proposition, unless one has ‘demonstrative’ proof for it? Newman maintains that while ‘verbal reasoning’ can ‘only conclude probabilities … because its premisses are assumed, not proved, and … because its conclusions are abstract, and not concrete’, ‘verbal reasoning’ does not ‘represent adequately the sum-total of considerations by which an individual mind is determined in its judgment of things’  – ‘Thought is too keen and manifold, its sources are too remote and hidden, its path too personal, delicate, and circuitous, its subject-matter too various and intricate, to admit of the trammels of any language, of whatever subtlety and of whatever compass.’37 There is more, in the ‘delicate … circuitous … various and intricate’ activity of the mind, than can be presented in ‘the trammels’ of language. Newman does not maintain that this instinctive, ‘informal’ or ‘natural’ ratiocination attains to something more than ‘probabilities’; but he maintains that ‘certitude’ can be legitimately attained by an ‘accumulation of various probabilities’, and that ‘from probabilities we may construct legitimate proof, sufficient for certitude’; and the ‘various and intricate’ activity of the mind, might involve an apprehension of more ‘probabilities’ than can be set out in ‘verbal reasoning’.38 What is more, Newman insists that a certain ‘judgement’ is required, to determine when one has enough – in the way of an ‘accumulation of various probabilities’  – to make for a ‘legitimate proof, sufficient for certitude’, and this judgment is a matter of ‘living personal reasoning’ and ‘good sense’: ‘What logic cannot do, my own living personal reasoning, my good sense, which is the healthy condition of such personal reasoning, but which cannot adequately express itself in words, does for me.’39 This ‘good sense’, with respect to ‘reasoning’ – determining when a particular set of ‘probabilities’, making for a ‘point’, is such that one ought to assent to that ‘point’ – Newman terms the ‘illative sense’. It is this ‘sense’ that determines whether one has ‘proof, sufficient for certitude’: ‘great as are the services of language in enabling us to extend the compass of our inferences, to test their validity, and to communicate them to others, still the mind itself is more versatile and vigorous than any of its works, of which language is one, and it is only under its penetrating and subtle action that the margin disappears, which I have described as intervening between verbal argumentation and conclusions in the concrete’, and it is the ‘mind itself ’ that ‘determines what science cannot determine, the limit of converging probabilities and the reasons sufficient for a proof ’.40

37. 38. 39. 40.

Ibid., 268, 284. Ibid., 411. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 360, 411.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

433

Newman likens the ‘illative sense’, the ‘controlling principle in inferences’, to phronesis. How does the mind fulfil its function of supreme direction and control, in matters of duty, social intercourse, and taste? In all of these separate actions of the intellect, the individual is supreme, and responsible to himself, nay, under circumstances, may be justified in opposing himself to the judgment of the whole world; though he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as they go, and is in consequence bound to use them. As regards moral duty, the subject is fully considered in the well-known ethical treatises of Aristotle. He calls the faculty which guides the mind in matters of conduct, by the name of phronesis, or judgment. This is the directing, controlling, and determining principle in such matters, personal and social. What it is to be virtuous, how we are to gain the just idea and standard of virtue, how we are to approximate in practice to our own standard, what is right and wrong in a particular case, for the answers in fulness and accuracy to these and similar questions, the philosopher refers us to no code of laws, to no moral treatise, because no science of life, applicable to the case of an individual, has been or can be written. Such is Aristotle’s doctrine, and it is undoubtedly true. An ethical system may supply laws, general rules, guiding principles, a number of examples, suggestions, landmarks, limitations, cautions, distinctions, solutions of critical or anxious difficulties; but who is to apply them to a particular case? whither can we go, except to the living intellect, our own, or another’s? What is written is too vague, too negative for our need. It bids us avoid extremes; but it cannot ascertain for us, according to our personal need, the golden mean. The authoritative oracle, which is to decide our path, is something more searching and manifold than such jejune generalizations as treatises can give, which are most distinct and clear when we least need them. It is seated in the mind of the individual, who is thus his own law, his own teacher, and his own judge in those special cases of duty which are personal to him. It comes of an acquired habit, though it has its first origin in nature itself, and it is formed and matured by practice and experience; and it manifests itself, not in any breadth of view, any philosophical comprehension of the mutual relations of duty toward duty, or any consistency in its teachings, but it is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now, by this given person, under these given circumstances … . State or public law is inflexible, but this mental rule is not only minute and particular, but has an elasticity, which, in its application to individual cases, is, as I have said, not studious to maintain the appearance of consistency. In old times the mason’s rule which was in use at Lesbos was, according to Aristotle, not of wood or iron, but of lead, so as to allow of its adjustment to the uneven surface of the stones brought together for the work. By such the philosopher illustrates the nature of equity in contrast with law, and such is that phronesis, from which the science of morals forms its rules, and receives its complement … . Though truth is ever one and the same, and the assent of certitude is immutable, still the reasonings which carry us on to truth and certitude are many and distinct, and vary with the inquirer; and

434

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

it is not with assent, but with the controlling principle in inferences that I am comparing phronesis. It is with this drift that I observe that the rule of conduct for one man is not always the rule for another, though the rule is always one and the same in the abstract, and in its principle and scope. To learn his own duty in his own case, each individual must have recourse to his own rule; and if his rule is not sufficiently developed in his intellect for his need, then he goes to some other living, present authority, to supply it for him, not to the dead letter of a treatise or a code. A living, present authority, himself or another, is his immediate guide in matters of a personal, social, or political character. In buying and selling, in contracts, in his treatment of others, in giving and receiving, in thinking, speaking, doing, and working, in toil, in danger, in his recreations and pleasures, every one of his acts, to be praiseworthy, must be in accordance with this practical sense. Thus it is, and not by science, that he perfects the virtues of justice, self-command, magnanimity, generosity, gentleness, and all others. Phronesis is the regulating principle of every one of them.41

As phronesis is to the general ‘rules’ of an ‘ethical system’  – the origin and ‘complement’ of those ‘rules’  – so the ‘illative sense’ is to the general ‘rules’ of ‘verbal reasoning’ or ‘logic’. As phronesis goes beyond the general ‘rules’, to ascertain a ‘rule’ that is ‘minute’ enough for the particular case – ascertaining the good, in the particular case – so the ‘illative sense’ goes beyond the general ‘rules’ of ‘verbal reasoning’ to ascertain, and to determine the worth of, the ‘reasonings which carry us on to truth’ in different ‘matters’. As phronesis is the ‘rule’, with which particular acts must be in ‘accordance’, to be ‘praiseworthy’, so the ‘illative sense’ is the ‘controlling principle in inferences’, in accordance with which those inferences are conducted (it ‘is a rule to itself ’, it ‘appeals to no judgment beyond its own’ and it ‘attends upon the whole course of thought from antecedents to consequents, with a minute diligence and unwearied presence, which is impossible to a cumbrous apparatus of verbal reasoning’). As phronesis animates right acting – and is the principle by which the right act is ascertained, in the particular ‘case’ – so the ‘illative sense’ animates right ‘ratiocination’, ratiocination that attains to truth: ‘the validity of proof is determined, not by any scientific test, but by the illative sense’; ‘the sole and final judgment on the validity of an inference in concrete matter is committed to the personal action of the ratiocinative faculty, the perfection or virtue of which I have called the Illative Sense, a use of the word “sense” parallel to our use of it in “good sense,” “common sense,” a “sense of beauty”.’42 (By ‘validity’ here, Newman means something more than ‘logical’ validity – whereby the premises of an argument entail the conclusion; he means an assessment of whether an argument (or assemblage of arguments) is sufficient to establish the truth of a proposition, such that one recognizes, in making this assessment, that one should assent to that proposition: the ‘ratiocinative mind

41. Ibid., 353–6. 42. Ibid., 345.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

435

itself ’, the illative sense, ‘determines what science cannot determine, the limit of converging probabilities and the reasons sufficient for a proof ’.) Phronesis is not simply analogous to the ‘illative sense’; phronesis might, perhaps, be regarded as a particular form of the ‘illative sense’  – as it is a kind of judgment, pertaining to the ‘concrete’, concerning which general ‘rules’ (such as might be set out in ‘verbal reasoning’) are not sufficient. Newman observes, in a note, that ‘though Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, speaks of [phronesis] as the virtue of the [doxastikon] generally, and as being concerned generally with contingent matter (vi. 4), or what I have called the concrete, and of its function being, as regards that matter, [aletheuein toi kataphanai e apophanai] (ibid. 3), he does not treat of it in that work in its general relation to truth and the affirmation of truth, but only as it bears upon [ta prakta]’.43 ‘Doxastikon’ means ‘the faculty of forming opinions’, and ‘aletheuein toi kataphanai e apophanai’, ‘the unveiling of truth by way of affirmation and denial’.44 That is, Newman observes that while Aristotle recognizes that phronesis is a virtue of the faculty of forming opinions, and that its function is to ‘unveil’ truth, but he does not consider it ‘in its general relation to truth and the affirmation of truth’, but only in relation to ‘things to be done’. Newman suggests that Aristotle acknowledges, in his account of phronesis, that there is such a thing as a ‘virtue’ of the faculty of forming opinions, with regard to ‘concrete matter’, and that this virtue is ordered toward the ‘unveiling’ of truth; and this ‘virtue’ is what Newman is concerned with in his account of the ‘illative sense’. Aristotle, in his account of phronesis, is concerned with this virtue only with regard to the ‘unveiling’, the recognition, of ‘things to be done’ (ta prakta); but Newman is concerned with this virtue with regard to the ‘unveiling’ of truth, in ‘concrete matter’, generally – ‘in its general relation to truth’. There is a virtue of getting to the truth, a virtue of the ‘living mind’; and while phronesis is the exercise of that virtue, with respect to ‘things to be done’, the exercise of that virtue is not restricted to the discernment of ‘things to be done’ – it can be involved in the discernment of other kinds of truth with respect to ‘the concrete’. Where phronesis animates different ‘virtues’, virtuous acts, the ‘illative sense’ animates forms of knowledge or insight. Newman observes, in this regard, that there is not simply one form of phronesis; there are different kinds of phronesis, which animate different virtues: ‘There are as many kinds of phronesis as there are virtues: for the judgment, good sense, or tact which is conspicuous in a man’s conduct in one subject-matter, is not necessarily traceable in another.’45 (In this, Newman differs from Aristotle, who is inclined to regard ‘phronesis

43. Ibid., 353n. 44. The passage of the Ethics from which Newman quotes is translated by David Ross: ‘Let it be assumed that the states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth by way of affirmation or denial are five in number, i.e., art, scientific knowledge, practical wisdom, philosophic wisdom, intuitive reason; we do not include judgement and opinion because in these we may be mistaken.’ 45. Grammar of Assent, 356–7.

436

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

as a general faculty, directing and perfecting all the virtues at once’.) Just as, Newman suggests, there are different kinds of phronesis, pertaining to different forms of virtue, different spheres of activity, so there may be different kinds of ‘illative sense’ for ‘determining’ different ‘sort[s] of truth’, kinds of ‘illative sense’ that are adapted to the different ‘matters’ in which different sorts of truth are to be discerned. [In] the various callings and professions which give scope to the exercise of great talents … these talents also are matured, not by mere rule, but by personal skill and sagacity. They are as diverse as pleading and cross-examining, conducting a debate in Parliament, swaying a public meeting, and commanding an army; and here, too, I observe that, though the directing principle in each case is called by the same name, – sagacity, skill, tact, or prudence, – still there is no one ruling faculty leading to eminence in all these various lines of action in common, but men will excel in one of them, without any talent for the rest … In the case of the Fine Arts … though true and scientific rules may be given, no one would therefore deny that Phidias or Rafael had a far more subtle standard of taste and a more versatile power of embodying it in his works, than any which he could communicate to others in even a series of treatises. And here again genius is indissolubly united to one definite subject-matter; a poet is not therefore a painter, or an architect a musical composer … Again, as regards the useful arts and personal accomplishments, we use the same word ‘skill’, but proficiency in engineering or in ship-building, or again in engraving, or again in singing, in playing instruments, in acting, or in gymnastic exercises, is as simply one with its particular subject-matter, as the human soul with its particular body, and is, in its own department, a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science … . [It is natural, then, to ask why ratiocination should be] held to be commensurate with logical science; and why logic is made an instrumental art sufficient for determining every sort of truth, while no one would dream of making any one formula, however generalized, a working rule at once for poetry, the art of medicine, and political warfare?46

The ‘working rule’ for getting to ‘truth’, in a particular matter, may involve a ‘more subtle standard’ than admits of being articulated fully in ‘any one formula’. (As phronesis is a ‘rule’, consisting of the insight by which ‘this’ act is determined to be the right act, in ‘this’ particular ‘case’, so ‘poetry’ or ‘the art of medicine’ involve insights that ‘this’ is the right act – the right word to use, the right treatment to be administered – and these insights are the ‘rule’ of the activities that proceed from those ‘arts’; these insights are a kind of ‘reason’, but do not admit of being set out in a ‘formula’.) The discernment of the way of ‘determining’ the truth, in a particular ‘concrete matter’, would seem, for Newman, to involve an acquaintance with that ‘matter’, an acquaintance involving more than the apprehension of ‘abstractions’

46. Ibid., 357–8.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

437

about it. Newman observes that ‘proficiency’ in an art ‘is as simply one with its particular subject-matter, as the human soul with its particular body, and is, in its own department, a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science’;47 so, a ‘proficiency’ in getting to the truth about a ‘concrete matter’, would involve a certain conformity or adaptation of the mind to that ‘matter’: to have mastery in knowing about one aspect of reality, is not to have mastery in knowing about another. The ‘ratiocinative faculty, then, as found in individuals, is not a general instrument of knowledge, but has its province, or is what may be called departmental. It is not so much one faculty, as a collection of similar or analogous faculties under one name, there being really as many faculties as there are distinct subject-matters, though in the same person some of them may, if it so happen, be united.’48 That a special preparation of mind is required for each separate department of inquiry and discussion (excepting, of course, that of abstract science) is strongly insisted upon in well-known passages of the Nicomachean ethics. Speaking of the variations which are found in the logical perfection of proof in various subject-matters, Aristotle says, ‘A well-educated man will expect exactness in every class of subject, according as the nature of the thing admits; for it is much the same mistake to put up with a mathematician using probabilities, and to require demonstration of an orator. Each man judges skillfully in those things about which he is well-informed; it is of these that he is a good judge; viz. he, in each subject-matter, is a judge, who is well-educated in that subject-matter, and he is in an absolute sense a judge, who is in all of them well-educated.’49

A mastery of a certain ‘subject’ is a personal endowment, acquired by experience, by practice, and it involves a ‘mental insight into truth’ which is particular to the ‘subject’ itself. Instead of trusting logical science, we must trust persons, namely, those who by long acquaintance with their subject have a right to judge. And if we wish ourselves to share in their convictions and the grounds of them, we must follow their history, and learn as they have learned. We must take up their particular subject as they took it up, beginning at the beginning, give ourselves to it, depend on practice and experience more than on reasoning, and thus gain that mental insight into truth, whatever its subject-matter may be, which our masters have gained before us. By following this course, we may make ourselves of their number, and then we rightly lean upon ourselves, directing ourselves by our own moral or intellectual judgment, not by our skill in argumentation.50

47. 48. 49. 50.

Ibid., 358. Ibid., 339. Ibid., 414. Ibid., 342.

438

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

A ‘mental insight into truth’, with regard to a particular, ‘subject-matter’, is much more a matter of ‘practice and experience’ than of ‘skill in argumentation’. If the ways of thinking by which ‘truth’ is attained, in a ‘subject-matter’, are in certain respects particular to that ‘subject-matter’, then they can only be acquired by ‘practice’ in those ways of thinking. The ‘experience’ required would seem, moreover, to be an ‘experience’ of the reality with which that ‘department’ of knowledge is concerned, an experience involving the acquisition of ‘images’ of that reality. In his sermon on ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’, preached in 1839, Newman presented a contrast between ‘reason’ and the ‘grounds and motives of action’ – ‘reason analyzes the grounds and motives of action: a reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself ’.51 The ‘grounds and motives’ of action would, however, involve ratiocination, a ‘mental insight into truth’ (the ‘unveiling’ of the truth pertaining to ‘things to be done’ associated with phronesis), though this ratiocination need not take ‘explicit’ form  – it need not be presented in the form of ‘verbal reasoning’. In his sermon on ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, preached in 1840, Newman distinguished between ‘conscious and unconscious reasoning’, suggesting that ‘unconscious reasoning’ was a ‘living spontaneous energy’ in the mind. If ‘unconscious reasoning’ can be made ‘conscious’, and set out in ‘an analysis’, then it would seem that it is not different, in kind, from ‘conscious … reasoning’: its form, and character, is of one kind with ‘conscious’ reasoning.52 Yet Newman maintains that there is more in the mind, in its ‘implicit’ or ‘unconscious’ reasoning, than can be made fully explicit: this ‘implicit’ reasoning is too ‘subtle’ and various, to transpose fully (‘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’). In the Grammar of Assent, Newman observes  – ‘As we cannot see ourselves, so we cannot well see intellectual motives which are so intimately ours, and which spring up from the very constitution of our minds.’53 Of the great fundamental truths of religion, natural and revealed, and as regards the mass of religious men: these truths, doubtless, may be proved and defended by an array of invincible logical arguments, but such is not commonly the method in which those same logical arguments make their way into our minds. The grounds, on which we hold the divine origin of the Church, and the previous truths which are taught us by nature – the being of a God, and the immortality of the soul – are felt by most men to be recondite and impalpable, in proportion to their depth and reality. As we cannot see ourselves, so we cannot well see intellectual motives which are so intimately ours, and which spring up from the very constitution of our minds; and while we refuse to admit the notion

51. ‘Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind’, in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford [hereafter OUS] (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 183. 52. ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, in OUS, 259. 53. Grammar of Assent, 336.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

439

that religion has not irrefragable arguments in its behalf, still the attempts to argue, on the part of an individual hic et nunc, will sometimes only confuse his apprehension of sacred objects, and subtracts from his devotion quite as much as it adds to his knowledge.54

When Newman observes that the ‘truths of religion’ may be ‘proved and defended by an array of invincible logical arguments’ but that this ‘is not commonly the method in which those same logical arguments make their way into our minds’ does he mean that the ‘method’ by which their ‘arguments make their way into our minds’ is a form of ‘implicit’ reasoning? If so, would he suggest that this ‘implicit’ reasoning is, ultimately, the ‘same’ as those ‘logical arguments’, but that it differs from them in being implicit, rather than explicit? One who is moved by those arguments, in their ‘implicit’ form, may be ‘confuse[d]’ by ‘attempts to argue’  – may not be able to carry out, or to recognize, an ‘analysis’, in explicit form, of those arguments. That one who is moved by those arguments might not be able to recognize an ‘analysis’ of them, would not mean, though, that the ‘analysis’ was not an accurate and adequate representation of those arguments. Newman would not, presumably, maintain that to have certain ‘reasons’ in the mind, in ‘implicit’ form, is to be incapable of making those reasons ‘explicit’, in an ‘analysis’ of them; otherwise, no such ‘analysis’ would be possible. It could be, though, that he would maintain that however much one might set out in explicit form all the implicit ‘reasoning’ that moves one to believe what one believes, there is always more to set out; however much one might set out, in ‘explicit’ form, the reasoning that moves one to believe what one believes, there is always more that is ‘implicit’. More than that, though, his remark that ‘we cannot see ourselves’, ‘we cannot well see intellectual motives … which spring up from the very constitution of our minds’, suggests that there might be ‘intellectual motives’ which, as part of the ‘constitution of our minds’, ‘cannot’ be reflected on, because they are part of the ‘constitution’ of the mind that reflects – they constitute the ‘view’ that the mind has of things (and even of itself). Newman observes that ‘the aspect under which we view things is often intensely personal; nay, even awfully so, considering that, from the nature of the case, it does not bring home its idiosyncrasy either to ourselves or to others. Each of us looks at the world in his own way, and does not know that perhaps it is characteristically his own.’55 That ‘each of us … does not know that perhaps [his way of looking at the world] is characteristically his own’ need not mean that ‘each of us’ cannot, of necessity, know what is ‘his own’, cannot characterize those ‘motives’, assumptions, ideas, that are involved in the ‘constitution’ of his mind. Newman does not, in fact, maintain that what is ‘implicit’, in this regard, cannot, of necessity, become ‘explicit’; he suggests, rather, that so much in the ‘constitution’ and activity of the mind is ‘implicit’, that, as a practical matter, there is too much for an ‘analysis’ of all of it.

54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 373.

440

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

Newman suggests that many forms of ‘implicit’ reasoning  – those which he characterizes as forms of ‘natural inference’, which involve reasoning ‘not from propositions to propositions, but from things to things, from concrete to concrete, from wholes to wholes’  – are a matter of thinking with, or through, images, discerning significance in the ‘concrete’.56 A peasant who is weather-wise may yet be simply unable to assign intelligible reasons why he thinks it will be fine tomorrow; and if he attempts to do so, he may give reasons wide of the mark; but that will not weaken his own confidence in his prediction. His mind does not proceed step by step, but he feels all at once and together the force of various combined phenomena, though he is not conscious of them. Again, there are physicians who excel in the diagnosis of complaints; though it does not follow from this, that they could defend their decision in a particular case against a brother physician who disputed it. They are guided by natural acuteness and varied experience; they have their own idiosyncratic modes of observing, generalizing, and concluding; when questioned, they can but rest on their own authority, or appeal to the future event. In a popular novel, a lawyer is introduced, who ‘would know, almost by instinct, whether an accused person was or was not guilty; and he had already perceived by instinct’ that the heroine was guilty. ‘I’ve no doubt she’s a clever woman’, he said, and at once named an attorney practising at the Old Bailey. So, again, experts and detectives, when employed to investigate mysteries, in cases whether of the civil or criminal law, discern and follow out indications which promise solution with a sagacity incomprehensible to ordinary men. A parallel gift is the intuitive perception of character possessed by certain men, while others are as destitute of it, as others again are of an ear for music. What common measure is there between the judgments of those who have this intuition, and those who have not? What but the event can settle any difference of opinion which occurs in their estimation of a third person? These are instances of a natural capacity, or of nature improved by practice and habit, enabling the mind to pass promptly from one set of facts to another, not only, I say, without conscious media, but without conscious antecedents.57

These forms of ‘reasoning’ involve the apprehension of a certain significance in ‘various combined phenomena’, in a kind of ‘intuitive perception’; and Newman suggests that this registering of significance, in the concrete, involves a kind of ‘abstraction’, which is a ‘power of looking at things in some particular aspect’. What is called reasoning is often only a peculiar and personal mode of abstraction, and so far, like memory, may be said to exist without antecedents. It is a power of looking at things in some particular aspect, and of determining

56. Ibid., 330. 57. Ibid., 332–3.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

441

their internal and external relations thereby. And according to the subtlety and versatility of their gift, are men able to read what comes before them justly, variously, and fruitfully. Hence, too, it is, that in our intercourse with others, in business and family matters, in social and political transactions, a word or an act on the part of another is sometimes a sudden revelation; light breaks in upon us, and our whole judgment of a course of events, or of an undertaking, is changed. We determine correctly or otherwise, as it may be; but in either case, it is by a sense proper to ourselves, for another may see the objects which we are thus using, and give them quite a different interpretation, inasmuch as he abstracts another set of general notions from those same phenomena which present themselves to us also.58

One person apprehends ‘aspects’ of ‘phenomena’ that are different from those apprehended by another person, with each person abstracting differently. The aspect must be there, in the phenomenon, if it is to be apprehended; but the ‘variety’ of ways in which abstractions can be made is delimited, it would seem, mainly by the ‘versatility’ of the mind that abstracts. The kind of ‘abstraction’ with which Newman is concerned, here, is akin to that involved in the ‘perception’ that is a part of phronesis – the ‘intuitive reason’ by which, according to Aristotle, ‘we perceive that the particular figure before us is a triangle’.59 This ‘abstraction’, or perception, with regard to ‘our intercourse with others, in business and family matters, in social and political transactions’, or the like – the particular situations of day to day life – is a matter of registering what a particular, multifaceted ‘concrete’ reality means, what significance it has. Newman characterizes it as ‘the power of looking at things in some particular aspect’; the isolation of that aspect, and the registering of its meaning, is itself the ‘abstraction’. Newman maintains that there are ‘really as many faculties [of ratiocination] as there are distinct subject-matters’; the faculty of ‘looking’ in a certain way, at a certain ‘subject-matter’, is conformed to that particular subject-matter. Newman maintains, further, that ‘proficiency’ in an art ‘is as simply one with its particular subject-matter, as the human soul with its particular body, and is, in its own department, a sort of instinct or inspiration, not an obedience to external rules of criticism or of science’. How should this relationship of the mode of ‘ratiocination’ with the ‘subject-matter’, a relationship in which it is ‘one with its particular subject-matter’, be understood? The ‘subjectmatter’, the ‘concrete’ reality, is thought about, and understood, through that mode of ‘ratiocination’; and it is in some sense present – to be thought about, and understood  – in an ‘image’ (which is not merely a sensible form, but a kind of trace of the object, of the reality). Newman maintains that in ‘real’ or imaginative apprehension ‘we take hold of objects from within them, and … we perpetuate them as images’: the ‘image’ is connected with an act of the mind in which ‘we

58. Ibid., 337–8. 59. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by David Ross (1980; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 110.

442

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

take hold of objects from within them’; and this act of getting ‘within’ objects, would seem to be an act in which the mind is in some way ‘one’ with them. When Newman discusses the ‘departments’ of ‘ratiocination’, he suggests that the different modes of ratiocination vary with their subject-matters, and that each is ‘one with its particular subject-matter’, and this adaptation of the mind to a ‘subject-matter’ or object, such that it has a sense of how to ‘reason’ about it, how to think about it so as to attain to truth, is ‘a sort of instinct or inspiration’; this ‘instinct’ of how to think about an object, would seem to involve a sense of that object which is somehow prior to the ‘ratiocination’ about it, since it informs and orients that ratiocination; and this ‘instinct’ would seem, then, to be connected with the act of having a ‘hold’ of an object, ‘from within’, with having an ‘image’ of it. Newman maintains that the mind is more ‘fertile’ in ‘its aspects’ of objects, the ‘fuller’ its ‘hold’ on them, in images. He associates the manifestation of ‘aspects’ of an object with an act of ‘abstraction’ that is a ‘power of looking at things in some particular aspect’. Using the metaphor of ‘looking’, one might take it that the ‘fuller’, the more complete the ‘image’ one has, of some object, the more ‘aspects’ of that object can be presented in that image: one has more to ‘look’ at, and can ‘look’ at it in different ways, registering different ‘aspects’. Using the metaphor of ‘fertility’, one might take it that when as mind is ‘fertile’ in ‘aspects’, the ‘fuller’ its images of things, so the mind is somehow impregnated by those images – the ‘fertility’ of the mind is a kind of conceiving, brought about by objects via images (the intelligibility of the objects, giving rise to the conceptions). On either account, the creativity of the mind, in forming abstractions, is conditioned by the ‘fullness’ of the image. Newman suggest that ideas bring out ‘aspects’ of images. He suggests, equally, that generalized ideas of things arise from an activity of comparing and contrasting things, in which ‘we regard things, not as they are in themselves, but mainly as they stand in relation to each other’ and ‘we cannot look at any one thing without keeping our eyes on a multitude of other things besides. ‘Man’ is no longer what he really is, an individual presented to us by our senses, but as we read him in the light of those comparisons and contrasts which we have made him suggest to us. He is attenuated into an aspect, or relegated to his place in a classification … . He is made the logarithm of his true self, and in that shape is worked with the ease and satisfaction of logarithms.60

When the mind attends to a notion, it attends to only a part of what is there in an ‘individual’ thing. The meaning that inheres in things, is not transferred, in its fullness, into the notions that the mind creates from things. It is plain what a different sense language will bear in this system of intellectual notions from what it has when it is the representative of things: and such a use of it is not only the very foundation of all science, but may be, and is, carried

60. Grammar of Assent, 31.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

443

out in literature and in the ordinary intercourse of man with man. And thus it comes to pass that individual propositions about the concrete almost cease to be, and are diluted or starved into abstract notions. The events of history and the characters who figure in it lose their individuality. States and governments, society and its component parts, cities, nations, even the physical face of the country, things past, and things contemporary, all that fulness of meaning which I have described as accruing to language from experience, now that experience is absent, necessarily becomes to the multitude of men nothing but a heap of notions, little more intelligible than the beauties of a prospect to the shortsighted, or the music of a great master to a listener who has no ear.61

Newman maintains that there can be a ‘real apprehension’ of religious dogmas. A ‘dogma is a proposition; it stands for a notion or for a thing; and to believe it is to give the assent of the mind to it, as it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real assent to it is an act of religion; to give a notional, is a theological act. It is discerned, rested in, and appropriated as a reality, by the religious imagination; it is held as a truth, by the theological intellect.’62 Newman takes it that the ‘image’, involved in the belief in one God, is present in the ‘conscience’. With regard to the belief in the Trinity, Newman maintains that the doctrine of the Trinity consists of a ‘number of propositions’ – such as ‘the Father is the One Eternal Personal God’, ‘the Son is the One Eternal Personal God’, ‘the Father is not the Son’, and so on – and these, when combined in a ‘complex whole’, constitute a ‘mystery’, as there is an ‘apparent contrareity’ in them; but the ‘complex whole’ is a ‘notional object’, and ‘when presented to religious minds, it is received by them notionally’.63 ‘Real apprehension’, with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, is in the apprehension of the ‘propositions’, of which the ‘complex whole’ consists, taken ‘one by one’. ‘It is possible for the mind to hold a number of propositions either in their combination as one whole, or one by one; one by one, with an intelligent perception indeed of all, and of the general direction of each towards the rest, yet of each separately from the rest, for its own sake only, and not in connexion and one with the rest’; ‘The dogma of the Holy Trinity, as a complex whole, or as a mystery, is not the formal object of religious apprehension and assent; but as it is a number of propositions, taken one by one.’64 (Newman suggests, in this, that ‘real assents’ take propositions ‘one by one’, attending to each proposition for itself, ‘for its own sake’, and not attending to how it relates to other propositions, or to whether it is consistent with other propositions. These ‘real assents’ seem to be parallel to the perceptions involved in phronesis, perceptions that are concerned only with the good, ‘here and now’, in ‘this’ particular situation; the capacity for these perceptions ‘manifests itself, not in any breadth of view, any philosophical comprehension of the mutual

61. 62. 63. 64.

Ibid., 31–2. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 130, 131. Ibid., 129.

444

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

relations of duty toward duty, or any consistency in its teachings, but it is a capacity sufficient for the occasion, deciding what ought to be done here and now, by this given person, under these given circumstances’.) The different propositions, making up the doctrine of the Trinity, can be imaged separately, but not together; but Newman maintains that this is equally the case for ‘all such real apprehension as is possible to us, of God and His Attributes’. ‘Our image of Him never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each … . We know one truth about Him, and another truth,  – but we cannot image both of them together; we cannot bring them before us by one act of the mind; we drop the one while we turn to take up the other.’65 Many years earlier, in Tract 73, he had maintained that to aim at unifying the ‘truths’ making up the doctrine of the Trinity ‘by one act of the mind’ would be to aim at ‘systematizing’ – at forming a ‘system’, in the intellect, by which the separate ‘truths’ might be ‘reduce[d] … into an intelligible dependence on each other, or harmony with each other’;66 where, in Tract 73, he had suggested that a single ‘system’ was unattainable, in the Grammar of Assent, he suggests that a single ‘image’ is unattainable. The image that can be formed of God ‘never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each’. Newman associates the apprehension of an ‘aspect’ of an image, in the Grammar of Assent, with ‘abstraction’. If, then, one can apprehend only ‘partial aspects’ of God  – and to contemplate an aspect, is to contemplate a part of an ‘image’  – one cannot apprehend the whole, the unitary image, to which those ‘aspects’ belong. Newman characterizes those aspects as ‘independent each of each’, but if they are ‘independent’, then in what sense are they ‘aspects’ of one thing, a single ‘image’? If the ‘aspects’ are taken to be ‘abstractions’, then to maintain that those abstractions cannot but be ‘independent each of each’, is to maintain that they cannot be brought into a unity; where in Tract 73, Newman had characterized that unity as a ‘system’, in the Grammar of Assent, he characterizes it as an ‘image’. What is it that unifies different abstractions, bringing them into an ‘intelligible dependence’ on one another? Would the apprehension of that ‘intelligible dependence’ consist in a comprehension of the intelligibility of the reality which those abstractions concern? Whatever sort of apprehension it might be that unifies a set of ‘abstractions’ in this way, Newman, in the Grammar of Assent, associates it with the apprehension of a unitary ‘image’. Newman maintains that the ‘conscience’, the principle of ‘natural religion’, ‘presents’ an image of God. Newman observes that the ‘feeling of conscience’ is ‘twofold: – it is a moral sense, and a sense of duty; a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate’.67 As a ‘judgement of the reason’, it provides ‘the elements

65. Ibid., 131. 66. ‘On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Revealed Religion’, in Essays, Critical and Historical ii [hereafter ECH ii] (1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), 53. 67. Grammar of Assent, 105.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

445

of morals, such as may be developed by the intellect into an ethical code’.68 As a ‘magisterial dictate’, it involves a sense of being ‘commanded’, such that ‘conscience is ever forcing on us by threats and by promises that we must follow the right and avoid the wrong’.69 The conscience is concerned ‘with self alone and one’s own actions, and with others only indirectly and as if in association with self ’ and it ‘dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions, as is evidenced in that keen sense of obligation and responsibility which informs them’.70 What distinguishes ‘conscience’ from other ‘intellectual senses’ is that it involves certain ‘emotions’. [The] various perturbations of mind which are characteristic of a bad conscience, and may be very considerable,  – self-reproach, poignant shame, haunting remorse, chill dismay at the prospect of the future, – and their contraries, when the conscience is good, as real though less forcible, self-approval, inward peace, lightness of heart, and the like, – these emotions constitute a specific difference between conscience and our other intellectual senses, – common sense, good sense, sense of expedience, taste, sense of honour, and the like, – as indeed they would also constitute between conscience and the moral sense, supposing these two were not aspects of one and the same feeling, exercised upon one and the same subject-matter.71

Newman maintains that it is the emotions, involved in the experience of conscience, that show conscience to involve an ‘image’, an image of a person. 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 … . 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,

68. 69. 70. 71.

Ibid., 106. Ibid. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 108.

446

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion, as the Moral Sense is the principle of ethics.72

Newman maintains that ‘from the perceptive power which identifies the intimations of conscience with the reverberations or echoes (so to say) of an external admonition, we proceed on to the notion of a Supreme Ruler and Judge, and then again we image Him and His attributes in those recurring intimations, out of which, as mental phenomena, our recognition of His existence was originally gained’, and ‘the notices, which He indirectly gives us through our conscience, of His own nature are such as to make us understand that He is like Himself and like nothing else’.73 Newman reflects on how the ‘notices’ of the conscience may constitute an ‘image’ of God when considering a ‘child’s image of God’, the kind of image of God that a child might form: if God is taken to be the provenance of certain commands, registered in the ‘notices’ of the conscience, which are commands to do what is good, so God, as commanding what is good, is Himself good, and, indeed, God possesses all the goodness that is manifest in the various ‘shapes’ of goodness, which are commanded by Him. The child forms ‘an image of the good God, good in Himself, good relatively to the child, with whatever incompleteness; an image, before it has been reflected on, and before it is recognized by him as a notion’.74 [The] image brought before his mental vision is the image of One who by implicit threat and promise commands certain things which he, the same child coincidently, by the same act of his mind, approves; which receive the adhesion of his moral sense and judgment, as right and good. It is the image of One who is good, inasmuch as enjoining and enforcing what is right and good, and who, in consequence, not only excites in the child hope and fear,  – nay (it may be added), gratitude towards Him, as giving a law and maintaining it by reward and punishment, – but kindles in him love towards Him, as giving him a good law, and, therefore as being good Himself, for it is the property of goodness to kindle love, or rather the very object of love is goodness; and all those distinct elements of the moral law, which the typical child, whom I am supposing, more or less consciously loves and approves, – truth, purity, justice, kindness, and the like, – are but shapes and aspects of goodness. And having in his degree a sensibility towards them all, for the sake of them all he is moved to love the Lawgiver, who enjoins them upon him. And, as he can contemplate these qualities and their manifestations under the common name of goodness, he is prepared to think of them as indivisible, correlative, supplementary of each other in one and the same Personality, so that there is no aspect of goodness which God is not;

72. Ibid., 109–10. 73. Ibid., 104. 74. Ibid., 115.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

447

and that the more, because the notion of a perfection embracing all possible excellences, both moral and intellectual, is especially congenial to the mind, and there are in fact intellectual attributes, as well as moral, included in the child’s image of God, as above represented.75

The image of God, formed by a child, ‘as time goes on … admits of being strengthened and improved’ and ‘whether it grows brighter and stronger, or, on the other hand, is dimmed, distorted, or obliterated, depends on each of us individually, and on his circumstances’: ‘men transgress their sense of duty, and gradually lose those sentiments of shame and fear, the natural supplements of transgression, which, as I have said, are the witnesses of the Unseen Judge’; but ‘to a mind … carefully formed upon the basis of its natural conscience, the world, both of nature and of man, does but give back a reflection of those truths about the One Living God, which have been familiar to it from childhood’.76 The ‘theology of a religious imagination’ is animated by the conscience. Conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits of personal religion. When men begin all their works with the thought of God, acting for His sake, and to fulfil His will, when they ask His blessing on themselves and their life, pray to Him for the objects they desire, and see Him in the event, whether it be according to their prayers or not, they will find everything that happens tend to confirm them in the truths about Him which live in their imagination, varied and unearthly as those truths may be. Then they are brought into His presence as that of a Living Person, and are able to hold converse with Him, and that with a directness and simplicity, with a confidence and intimacy, mutatis mutandis, which we use towards an earthly superior; so that it is doubtful whether we realize the company of our fellow-men with greater keenness than these favoured minds are able to contemplate and adore the Unseen, Incomprehensible Creator.77

Those who have ‘favoured minds’ of this kind, ‘see Him in the event’, interpreting ‘everything that happens’ in relation to the ‘truths about Him which live in their imagination’, and they thereby ‘confirm’ those truths. A ‘religious imagination’ forms a ‘theology’ in which it ‘interprets what it sees around it by [its] previous inward teaching, as the true key of that maze of vast complicated disorder; and thus it gains a more and more consistent and luminous vision of God from the most unpromising materials’.78 A ‘religious imagination’ of this kind ‘is able to pronounce by anticipation, what it takes a long argument to prove – that good is the rule, and evil the exception’, and it is ‘able to assume that, uniform as are the

75. 76. 77. 78.

Ibid., 113–14. Ibid., 115–16. Ibid., 117–18. Ibid., 117.

448

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

laws of nature, they are consistent with a particular Providence’.79 The ‘theology’, here, is a matter of interpreting the ‘unpromising materials’ of worldly experience, so as to recognize that the uniformity and ‘law’ apparent in the ‘course of things’ is not inconsistent with the ‘present agency of the Creator’, and that the ‘particular issues’ that arise from that ‘agency’ are not inconsistent with the goodness of God. Newman maintains that the ‘image’ of God, present in the conscience, can inform the insight that the ‘Attributes’ of God, as He is in Himself, ‘imply one another’, ‘the denial of one [being] the denial of the rest’. To show that the attributes of God – infinity, goodness, wisdom, and so on – ‘imply one another’ is, it would seem, to trace a series of ‘argumentative links’, showing that one ‘Attribute’ implies another, and that another, and so on, such that there is a ‘logical necessity’ connecting them, an ‘inevitable correlation’ – it is to present a ‘demonstration’ to the effect that ‘“God is wise, if He is eternal; He is good, if He is wise; He is just, if He is good”’, and so on. Newman maintains, though, that ‘such a method, used by a Theist in controversy against men who are unprepared personally for the question, will but issue in his retreat along a series of major propositions, farther and farther back’.80 To feel the true force of an argument like this, we must not confine ourselves to abstractions, and merely compare notion with notion, but we must contemplate the God of our conscience as a Living Being, as one Object and Reality, under the aspect of this or that attribute. We must patiently rest in the thought of the Eternal, Omnipresent, and All-knowing, rather than of Eternity, Omnipresence, and Omniscience; and we must not hurry on and force a series of deductions, which, if they are to be realized, must distil like dew into our minds, and form themselves spontaneously there, by a calm contemplation and gradual understanding of their premisses. Ordinarily speaking, such deductions do not flow forth, except according as the Image, presented to us through conscience, on which they depend, is cherished within us with the sentiments which, supposing it be, as we know it is the truth, it necessarily claims of us, and is seen reflected, by the habit of our intellect, in the appointments and the events of the external world. And, in their manifestation to our inward sense, they are analogous to the knowledge which we at length attain of the details of a landscape, after we have selected the right stand-point, and have learned to accommodate the pupil of our eye to the varying focus necessary for seeing them; have accustomed it to the glare of light, have mentally grouped or discriminated lines and shadows and given them their due meaning, and have mastered the perspective of the whole. Or they may be compared to a landscape as drawn by the pencil (unless the illustration seem forced), in which by the skill of the artist, amid the bold outlines of trees and rocks, when the eye has learned to take in their reverse aspects, the forms or faces of historical personages are discernible, which we catch and lose again, and then recover, and which some who look on with us are never able to catch at all.81 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 314. 81. Ibid., 314–15.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

449

When Newman suggests that those who are ‘personally unprepared’ for an argument that would show, in a ‘series of deductions’, how the attributes of God ‘imply’ one another, he observes that they do not ‘feel the force’ of that argument. If feeling ‘the force’ of an argument is a matter of ‘being persuaded’ by it, and if those who are ‘personally unprepared’ for the argument that would show the attributes of God to imply one another are ‘unprepared’ because they do not have the requisite ‘images’, then this would suggest that the images are connected to what makes the argument persuasive. That which makes an argument persuasive, though, could be regarded as a matter of ‘rhetoric’ rather than ‘logic’, with ‘rhetoric’ being understood to consist in the presentation of an argument, in an effective manner, rather than in the forming of the ‘substance’ of an argument; ‘rhetoric’, so understood, is concerned with apprehending, and devising, the various forms the presentation of an argument can take, and ‘logic’, with apprehending, and constructing, the ‘substance’ of an argument. Newman seems, however, to associate the ‘contemplation’ of the image – the image of God, present in the conscience – with a kind of ‘understanding’. Discussion of the ‘Attributes’ of God with those who are ‘personally unprepared’, ‘will but issue in [a] retreat along a series of major propositions, farther and farther back’, because they do not understand certain ‘premises’; the ‘series of deductions’ about the ‘Attributes’ of God, ‘to be realized, must distil like dew into our minds, and form themselves spontaneously there, by a calm contemplation and gradual understanding of their premisses’. Newman associates the ‘gradual’ attainment of ‘understanding’ with a contemplation of God ‘as one Object and Reality, under the aspect of this or that attribute’. The ‘deductions’ constituting the argument that the ‘Attributes’ of God are in an inevitable correlation ‘depend’, Newman maintains, on an ‘Image, presented to us through conscience’. What seems to ‘depend’ on this ‘Image’ is the understanding of the ‘premises’ involved in those ‘deductions’, and the forming of the ‘deductions’ themselves (which ‘distil like dew’, and form themselves ‘spontaneously’, as the ‘Image’ is contemplated). Newman suggests that the understanding of the ‘Attributes’ of God is a matter of contemplating ‘aspects’ of a single ‘Image, presented to us through conscience’; he maintains, equally, that ‘our image of Him never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each … . We know one truth about Him, and another truth,  – but we cannot image both of them together; we cannot bring them before us by one act of the mind; we drop the one while we turn to take up the other.’ It might be, perhaps, that, while there is a single ‘Image’, it can be apprehended only in ‘partial aspects’; these aspects are ‘independent each of each’; but, if this is so, how does one know that these aspects are all aspects of one thing, a ‘single Image, presented to us through conscience’? If one apprehends an ‘aspect’ of something, one is, presumably, aware that what one apprehends an aspect, and that it is an aspect of something: in being aware that what one apprehends is an aspect of something, one is aware of the thing of which it is an aspect. One might, in the apprehension of the ‘aspect’, be attending only to that aspect; but one is aware that it is an aspect, that it is an aspect of something. What one apprehends of that thing, might be only the ‘aspects’ it presents; and it might be that one cannot

450

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

apprehend those aspects all at once, together, in one ‘act’; but while each act of apprehension might be ‘independent’ of the others – in the sense that one act is not a condition for another, and none of the acts are implicated with the others – those acts are not ‘independent’ of what they apprehend, the ‘Image’. In being aware that all the aspects one apprehends, are aspects of an ‘Image’, one is aware that they belong to a unity, that of the ‘Image’, even if one cannot apprehend that unity, or apprehend that ‘Image’ as a whole. Newman suggests, then, that the ‘Attributes’ of God are registered as aspects of an ‘Image’, in a manner that is ‘analogous to the knowledge which we at length attain of the details of a landscape, after we have selected the right stand-point … and have mastered the perspective of the whole’, or analogous to the perception of ‘a landscape as drawn by the pencil … in which by the skill of the artist, amid the bold outlines of trees and rocks, when the eye has learned to take in their reverse aspects, the forms or faces of historical personages are discernible, which we catch and lose again, and then recover, and which some who look on with us are never able to catch at all’.82 The different aspects cannot be apprehended simultaneously; but in apprehending them, one is aware that they are aspects of the same image. (In these cases, though, there is a sensible unity  – the ‘landscape’  – which can be apprehended as a unity (even if it is not apprehended as such when its ‘details’ or its ‘reverse aspects’ are being apprehended); if the ‘Image’ of God in the conscience is, in certain respects, analogous to this sensible unity, it is, equally, different from it; yet Newman does not reflect on the ways in which the ‘Image’ of God is analogous to, and the ways in which it is not analogous to, such a sensible unity.) With regard to the ‘Attributes’ of God, Newman would suggest that these ‘Attributes’ are apprehended, not through the various arguments, in which the notion of God is developed (as, say, ‘pure act’) but in the apprehension of aspects of an ‘Image’, in which they are all somehow presented; and the unity of these attributes is registered in the apprehension of them as aspects of a single ‘Image’. This would suggest, more generally, that Newman is inclined to think of meaning, and intelligibility, as inhering in images. Newman insists that the ‘propositions’ of theology ‘may and must be used, and can easily be used, as the expression of facts, not notions’, and ‘as ascertaining and making clear for us the truths on which the religious imagination has to rest’.83 It is when the ‘religious imagination’ is active, that the doctrines of religion are taken as ‘the expression of facts’. He insists, equally, that ‘in religion the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason’. Knowledge must ever precede the exercise of the affections. We feel gratitude and love, we feel indignation and dislike, when we have the informations actually put before us which are to kindle those several emotions. We love our parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents; we must know concerning God,

82. Ibid., 315. 83. Ibid., 120.

9. Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

451

before we can feel love, fear, hope, or trust towards Him. Devotion must have its objects; those objects, as being supernatural, when not represented to our senses by material symbols, must be set before the mind in propositions. The formula, which embodies a dogma for the theologian, readily suggests an object for the worshipper. It seems a truism to say, yet it is all that I have been saying, that in religion the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason. Theology may stand as a substantive science, though it be without the life of religion; but religion cannot maintain its ground at all without theology. Sentiment, whether imaginative or emotional, falls back upon the intellect for its stay, when sense cannot be called into exercise; and it is in this way that devotion falls back upon dogma.84

To maintain that ‘the imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason’ is not to maintain that they should be under the control of ‘explicit’ reason. If the ‘formula, which embodies a dogma for the theologian, readily suggests an object for the worshipper’, this might well be because ‘the worshipper’ already contemplates, as an ‘aspect’ of an ‘Image’ of God, that which the ‘theologian’ articulates in a ‘dogma’. Newman observes that ‘we love our parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents’, but this knowledge need not take an elaborated ‘notional’ form (involving, say, the articulation of a definition of what a ‘parent’ is). Many years earlier, in The Arians of the Fourth Century, Newman had maintained ‘a child feels not the less affectionate reverence towards his parents, because he cannot discriminate in words, nay, or in idea, between them and others’;85 in the Grammar of Assent, he insists that, if a child is to love ‘his parents’, as such, he must have some ‘idea’ by which they are discriminated from others; but that idea, presumably, need not take a very elaborated form: it is the idea that animates the virtue of filial piety; it is the perception (belonging, as such, to a rudimentary form of phronesis) by which ‘these’ persons ‘here and now’, are loved and respected as ‘my parents’. In a similar way, the ‘intellect’ that, ‘in religion’, animates and controls the ‘imagination and affections’, might be the intellect that apprehends the ‘numberless partial aspects’ of the ‘Image’ of God, presented in the revelation; It is from this ‘Image’ that a ‘world of thought’ arises,86 and it is this ‘Image’ that is ‘the scope and end and the test’ of that ‘world of thought’. The central ‘Image’ of God, in Christianity, is the ‘Image’ of a person, the image of Christ; and in, or through, the encounter with that ‘Image’, there is an encounter with that person. [Christ] departs [from the world] … but 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

84. Ibid., 120–1. 85. Arians of the Fourth Century (1833; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), 143–4. 86. ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, in OUS, 317.

452

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

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.87

The ‘wounds’ which Christ heals are wounds which the conscience, if rightly formed, recognizes: they are the wounds of sin, healed by the wounds of love. The conscience must be sufficiently well formed to be aware of these ‘wounds’, if Christ is to be recognized as a ‘Healer’; and when Christ is recognized as such, then the ‘Image’, in or through which He is apprehended, becomes itself the ‘moral life’ of the ‘soul’: the ‘Image’ becomes the ‘life’ of the conscience – by which the ‘wounds’ of the soul are recognized – and it sustains the ‘life’ by which those ‘wounds’ are healed, by which those who apprehend Christ, through the Spirit, live rightly. Newman suggests that the ‘theology of a religious imagination’ is animated by the conscience. Those who ‘begin their works with the thought of God, acting for His sake’, will have experiences that ‘tend to confirm them in the truths about Him which live in their imagination, varied and unearthly as those truths may be’, and they are ‘brought into His presence as that of a Living Person’, so that ‘it is doubtful whether we realize the company of our fellow-men with greater keenness than these favoured minds are able to contemplate and adore the Unseen, Incomprehensible Creator.’ Those who have this sense of God can ‘contemplate the God of [their] conscience as a Living Being, as one Object and Reality, under the aspect of this or that attribute’, such that their understanding of the attributes of God is implicated with their apprehension of the ‘image’ of God in their conscience. A right understanding of God can be articulated in the ‘substantive science’ of theology; it can, equally, be present in the ‘contemplation’ of an ‘image’ in the conscience: the right ‘reason’, that should ‘control’ the ‘imagination and affections’, can be present in the ‘contemplation’ of an ‘image’ in the conscience. Those ‘favoured minds’ who act for the ‘sake’ of God, who act rightly, develop an understanding of goodness that fits them to appreciate the goodness of Christ; and, more than that, those who live in this way develop a sense of the ‘presence’ of God as ‘a Living Person’, such that they become fit to discern, in Christ, something of that ‘presence’. There is an apprehension of Christ that, in a sense, ‘creates faith’. The understanding that these ‘favoured minds’ have involves an awareness of ‘varied and unearthly’ truths – such as are articulated in the ‘substantive science’ of ‘theology’ – and the awareness of these truths is involved in a relationship with a ‘Living Person’, mediated by an ‘Image’: it is an understanding that animates a personal relationship, an understanding that is of the ‘heart’. A right response to the ‘Image’ of Christ encompasses ‘worlds of thought’.

87. Grammar of Assent, 464.

CONCLUSION

Karl Rahner once called attention to an ‘unnamed virtue’. The need for the virtue in question arises from ‘discrepancy that occurs … frequently’ – ‘that between how the rational and reflective reasons for a moral attitude are problematic and insecure, on the one hand, and how a decision made in freedom is absolute’, so that ‘very often the ethical reflection that comes before the act itself cannot deliver the definiteness and unquestionable sureness with which, willy-nilly, one is then acting in the action itself ’. To resolve the tension, one might become ‘sceptical and relativist, and write off the significance of the ethical reflection that happens before the action, on the ground that, seeing that it cannot deliver the absolute definiteness that inevitably marks the action, nothing depends on it’, or one might ‘deny the validity … of these problems’, taking up an ‘ideological fanaticism’ which would maintain that ‘the rational and conscious argument for our own decision is in every respect absolutely illuminating’. Sceptical relativism that thinks it can dispense itself from making a decision, and ideological fanaticism that wants to derive the absolute nature of a decision in freedom from an absoluteness in rational reflection of a kind that just does not exist – these are the two false conclusions that people can very easily draw from the irresoluble difference that exists between a reflection that will always involve problems and a decision that will always be once and for all, the difference between theory and practice.

If one takes the ‘middle ground’, however, ‘one takes seriously prior reflection about whether a decision is legitimate, and yet one does not demand more from this reflection than it can give’, and yet ‘the problems do not stop us having the courage to make calm, courageous decisions’, in a manner informed by a proper sense of ‘what human beings are … neither Gods of absolute, comprehensive security and clarity; nor … beings of empty whim … . They have contours that are to be respected, even though these do not have the brilliance of the divine and self-evident.’ There is no ‘simple and obvious and indisputable principle that can justify’ this virtue, ‘when it comes to applying’ it in practice; it is a kind of ‘wisdom that knows how to make the best of things’. ‘You can lump the virtue we are trying to find here in with prudence, or perhaps with wisdom. But is a “lumping in”, of the kind that makes something specific get lost in something general.’1 1. Karl Rahner, ‘Plea for an Unnamed Virtue’, in Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings, ed. by Philip Endean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 183–7.

454

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

One way of understanding John Henry Newman, as a thinker, is that he is concerned with the ‘contours that are to be respected’ in the life of the mind. Reflection, ‘theory’, in most matters, and in almost all matters of importance, cannot realize that ‘brilliance of the divine and self-evident’ to which it aspires. That need not mean that it does not attain to anything. If one cannot attain to the ‘divine and self-evident’, while being, nevertheless, obliged to act, to decide, so one must make the best of whatever insight one has. One has an obligation to ‘make the best’ of whatever insight one has, and that insight might, in a particular case, oblige one to believe something. That act of belief, in itself, as marked by ‘absolute definiteness’, requires something like ‘courage’, since the reflection, and deliberation, informing it, does not itself have ‘absolute, comprehensive security and clarity’. That there is not ‘absolute … clarity’ in the reflection that informs the act of belief does not mean that the act of belief is an act of arbitrary, irresponsible ‘whim’; rather, the freedom that arises, when there is not an ‘absolute … clarity’, compelling the act of belief, implies a certain responsibility: to recognize this freedom, is to recognize the responsibility, and it requires something like courage to live with the awareness of this responsibility. Newman observes that the awareness of freedom, and responsibility, can itself be ‘burdensome’, and the ‘burden’ can make for an inclination to deny that one has responsibility for oneself. So fearful and burdensome is this almost divine attribute of our nature that, when we consider it attentively, it requires a strong faith in the wisdom and love of our Maker, not to start sinfully from His gift; and at the mere prospect, not the memory of our weakness, to attempt to transfer it from ourselves to the agents, animate and inanimate, by which we are surrounded, and to lose our immortality under the shadows of the visible world. And much more, when the sense of guilt comes upon us, do we feel the temptation of ridding ourselves of the conviction of our own responsibility.2

If there is a ‘temptation’ to deny that one has freedom in acting, ‘to transfer it from [oneself] to the agents, animate and inanimate, by which [one is] surrounded’ – to envisage these agents, rather than oneself, as the true causes of how one acts  – so there is a ‘temptation’ to deny that one has a certain freedom with respect to what one believes, to ‘transfer’ it to the ‘paper logic’ arguments ‘by which [one is] surrounded’. Such arguments are not to be disregarded (with a kind of ‘sceptical relativism’) but what one must ultimately consult, if one would make a responsible decision as to what to believe, is oneself: one forms, over time, by making conscientious judgements, a sense of truth, or a capacity for judgement; and one must consult this sense of truth, since one has a responsibility to make

2. ‘Human Responsibility, as Independent of Circumstances’, in Fifteen Sermons preached before the University of Oxford (1843; 1871; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 139–40.

Conclusion

455

the best judgements one can. One must recognize and accept the imperfection, the finitude, of the ‘light’ by which one judges, if one is to be truthful with oneself. One must recognize the ‘light’ by which one judges for what it is – finite, imperfect – and one must ‘make the best’ of it. The ‘unnamed virtue’, with which Rahner is concerned, seems to be a virtue of recognizing, honestly, the limitations of the ‘reflection’ one must judge by, and act on, without making those limitations a pretext for abdicating the responsibility one has for making the best judgements one can, so as to act in a manner informed by the truth. ‘That is to be accounted a normal operation of our nature’, Newman observes, ‘which men in general do actually instance. That is a law of our minds, which is exemplified in action on a large scale, whether a priori it ought to be a law or no.’3 It is, in this regard, ‘a law of our minds’ to be obliged to make judgements, without ‘absolute, comprehensive security and clarity’. As we use the (so called) elements without first criticizing what we have no command over, so is it much more unmeaning in us to criticize or find fault with our own nature, which is nothing else than we ourselves, instead of using it according to the use of which it ordinarily admits … . If I may not assume that I exist, and in a particular way, that is, with a particular mental constitution, I have nothing to speculate about, and had better let speculation alone. Such as I am, it is my all; this is my essential stand-point, and must be taken for granted; otherwise, thought is but an idle amusement, not worth the trouble. There is no medium between using my faculties, as I have them, and flinging myself upon the external world according to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upon the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that I am … . If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use. My only business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put it to use.4

Newman does not invoke an ‘a priori’ ideal, in ascertaining the ‘law of our minds’, or identifying the ‘normal operation[s] of our nature’, but he does invoke, implicitly a norm, a sense of the proper mean, and that sense of the proper mean is connected with the ‘unnamed virtue’ of ‘making the best’ of whatever insight one has. The reflections of Newman on ‘what I am’ are connected with his efforts to ‘put … to use’ his ‘faculties’ in the proper way; they are connected with his efforts toward a ‘practice’ of good judgement: that practice – involving an awareness of freedom, of responsibility, of the need to ‘make the best’ of whatever ‘light’ one has, even if it does not have the ‘brilliance of the divine and self evident’ – involves a certain confrontation with ‘what I am’. The reflections of Newman on the ‘contours’ of the life of the mind – ‘contours’ deriving from its finiteness – are not animated

3. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, (1870; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 344. 4. Grammar of Assent, 346–7.

456

John Henry Newman and the Imagination

by a spirit of resignation to ‘limits’, but an aspiration toward a proper ‘use’ of the mind, a use in which those ‘contours’ are ‘respected’. The imagination, for Newman, is connected to the limits, the ‘contours’, of the ‘concrete being that reasons’, the ‘whole man’; he associates the imagination with the apprehension of the ‘concrete’, the particular. Yet he suggests, equally, that in the apprehension of the ‘concrete’, there can be an intuition of meanings that the ‘reason’ cannot articulate. Persons are encountered in the ‘concrete’, in their ‘concrete being’; and it is in the apprehension of the ‘concrete’ that there is ‘the common sense, the delicacy, the sharp observation, the tact’ by which others are understood, sympathized with, consulted for; it is in the apprehension of the ‘concrete’ that there is the ‘living principle, call it (in human language) judgement or wisdom or discretion or sense of propriety or moral perception’ which creates community, and which even subserves charity. What is more, it is the imagination which encounters, and which makes present to thought, that which is ‘vast, immeasurable, impenetrable, inscrutable, mysterious’; it is the imagination that makes present to the mind that which ‘explicit reason’ cannot ‘draw a line around’, so that the mind can move outside the ‘circumference’ of its own, finite thinking – to get, through the ‘signs and types’ making up this world, a ‘glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face’.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Aquino, F. D., Communities of Informed Judgement: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004). Cornwell, J., Newman’s Unquiet Grave (London: Continuum, 2011). Coulson, S. J., Newman and the Common Tradition: A Study in Language of Church and Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). Coulson, S. J., Religion and Imagination: “In Aid of a Grammar of Assent” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). De Laura, D. J., Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold and Pater (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969). Dessain, S., John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Dessain, S., Newman’s Spiritual Themes (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1977). Faber, G., Oxford Apostles: A Character Study of the Oxford Movement (London: Faber & Faber, 1933). Gilley, S., Newman and His Age (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990). Griffiths, E., “Newman’s Leading,” in Erskine Hill, H. and McCabe, R., eds. Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Griffiths, E., The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Hutton, R. H., Cardinal Newman (London: Methuen & Co, 1891). Ker, I., The Achievement of John Henry Newman (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). Ker, I., John Henry Newman, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Ker, I., Newman After a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Ker, I., Newman and Conversion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). Ker, I., Newman and the Fullness of Christianity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). Ker, I., Newman on Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Lash, Nicholas, Newman on Development: The Search for an Explanation in History (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975). Merrigan, T. and Ker, I., The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Newman, J., The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986). Nicholls, D. and Kerr, F. eds., John Henry Newman: Reason, Rhetoric and Romanticism (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1991). Prickett, S., Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Prickett, S., Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Short, E., Newman and His Contemporaries (London Bloomsbury, 2011). Short, E., Newman and His Family (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

458

Select Bibliography

Strange, R., John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2008). Strange, R., Newman and the Gospel of Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Turner, F. M., John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002). Ward, W., Last Lectures (London: Longmans, 1918). Ward, W., The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman (London: Longmans, 1912).

INDEX Aeneid 391–2 The Analogy of Religion (Butler) 9, 146 Anglican Church 8, 10, 159, 172, 174, 184, 207, 213, 220, 227, 358–9, 366, 394 Anglicanism 6–7, 11, 250 n.50, 404 Anglicans 7, 198, 226, 393 Apologia pro Vita Sua (Newman) 6–9, 12–13, 20–2, 87, 113, 137, 184, 198, 344, 357, 363, 365, 367–75, 386, 390–1, 396, 399–404, 410, 415 ‘The Apostolical Christian’ (Newman) 328, 358 Apostolical Succession, doctrine of 8, 159 Apostolical Tradition 184 Apostolic Christianity 415, see also Christianity Apostolic Church 225 Aquinas, Thomas 3, 273–4, 277–9, 348–9 arguments conviction and 235 explicit reason and 14, 18, 259 force or strength of 234 ‘intuitive reason’ and 35 ‘paper logic’ 454 for religious belief 213 verbal 16, 431–2 Arians of the Fourth Century (Newman) 8, 17, 66–7, 88, 91, 98, 148, 162, 191, 414, 451 Aristotle ethos 9, 15–17, 20, 32, 328, 371 The Nicomachean Ethics 2, 9, 31–3, 435 ‘phronesis’ 2–3, 25–65, 101, 192, 253, 275–7, 310, 346–7, 433–8, 441, 443, 451 art logic as an 9, 9 n.35 rhetoric 367, 371–72 ‘sentimentalism’ in 95 techne 36 n.14, 83,

‘The Association of Ideas’ (De Vere) Athanasian Creed 218 Athens 300, 326, 335 Atlantis 336 Atonement 67, 145–6, 251

316

Baptismal Regeneration 7–8 barbarism 292, 302, 304 ‘The Benedictine Schools’ (Newman) 275, 336, 349 Benedictine vocation 336–7, 343, 349 Bible 6–7, 12, 76, 89–91, 156, 191, 328 Bowden, John William 116 British Critic 25, 49, 90, 139, 159, 174, 178, 191, 203 n.16, 222, 379 British Magazine 114 Butler, Joseph 9, 47 n.37, 146 Callista (Newman) 21, 290, 316–35 Calvinism 7 ‘Catechism’ 6, 404, 416 Catholic Christendom 13, 410 Catholic Church branches of 159 conviction and 235 English Church a branch of 159, 220 English Church not a branch of 228 fullness of ‘Religious Truth’ and 6 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England and 178 n.110 Newman’s conversion to 6, 12, 196, 396–7, 401 poetry and 209 ‘Protestant tradition’ and caricatures of 178 n.110 Catholicism ‘Anglicanism’ and 250 n.50 as according supreme value to the individual soul 209, 250 as present in English Church 159, 220

460

Index

as present in its fullness in the Roman Church 21, 196, 397–8 as ‘external objective substantive’ 249 Oxford and 197 ‘The Catholicity of the Anglican Church’ (Newman) 174 Catholics 6, 13, 21, 115 Church Temporalities Act of 1833 and 115 faith and 21, 226, 231, 243–4, 249–51, 277, 280 regarded as ‘Antichristian’ 363 ‘worldly-minded’ 289 Catholic University in Ireland 12, 21, 292, 350 Catholic University Gazette 298 Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (Newman) 116, 183, 196, 206, 209, 243 Christ ‘impression’ of 139–96 manifestation of God 50 ‘manifestation’ of the good 50 manifestation of the ‘personal character’ of God 60 perception of human qualities of 39 ‘propagation’ of the image of 108 recognition of the divine in 39–40 representations of 282–5 Christian civilization 335–6, 349–51 Christian education 336 Christianity 1–2 Apostolic 415 and civilization 335–6, 349–51 ‘development’ of 12, 186–96 Evangelical 7, 95–6, 369 ‘fear’ involved in 311 ‘greatness of mind’ and ‘nobleness’ cultivated by 57 ‘The Christian Mysteries’ (Newman) 67, 143 Christians 1, 17, 72, 105–6, 138, 160–6, 169–70, 180–1, 184, 195, 271, 290, 316, 318, 321, 325, 327–32, 344, 358–9, 414 Christian wisdom 345, 359 The Christian Year (Keble) 9, 87, 114, 200, 209 Church Fathers 8

Church of England 6–8, 10, 21, 113, 156, 201, 209, 212, 217–21, 225, 283, 365, 368, 376, 390 Church Temporalities Act of 1833 115 Cicero 422–3 civilization 302 ancient Rome and 325–6 Christianity and 335–6, 349–51 Church and 133 definition of 302 faith and 292–353 Greek 333 ‘objects of sense’ and 304 religion of 21, 81, 326 ‘second-rate’ form of 305 Coleridge, John Duke 26, 367 ‘The Communion of Saints’ (Newman) 203 Confessions (Augustine) 394–6 conscience 2, 66–109 Aquinas on 3 ‘essentially religious’ 62 Holy Law and 40–41 inward law of 64–5 and phronesis 2–3 Council of Trent 404 Cowper, William 86, 211 Creed 156 da Liguori, St. Alfonso 361 ‘The Danger of Accomplishments’ (Newman) 92, 95–7, 386 De Lugo, John 283 desire 29–34, 37, 63, 68, 73, 136–7, 154, 175, 246, 257, 267–8, 276, 285, 288–90, 403 De Vere, Aubrey 316 ‘Discipline’ (Newman) 399 Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (Newman) 231, 251 ‘Dispensation’ (Newman) 145 ‘Dispositions for Faith’ (Newman) 260 Dissenters 115, 117 divine life 40, 289 Divine Unity, doctrine of 103–4 Donatists 393 The Dream of Gerontius (Newman) 22, 122 n.8, 402–3, 409–11, 415

Index Elements of Logic (Whateley) 7, 32 Elements of Rhetoric (Whateley) 371 English Church see Church of England An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Newman) 9 n.35, 14–15, 19, 22, 62, 312 n.68, 417, 431, 438, 444, 451 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Newman) 12, 193, 407 Established Church 115, 361, 391 eternal life 271 Ethics (Aristotle) 2, 9, 312–3, 435 ethos 9, 15–17, 20, 32, 328, 371 Evangelical Christianity 7, 95–6, 369, see also Christianity ‘Evangelical Sanctity, the Completion of Natural Virtue’ 238, 307 ‘explicit reason’ 14, 18, 259, 262, 451, 456 Faber, Frederick 13 faith 273–9 Catholics and 21, 226, 231, 243–4, 249–51, 277, 280 civilization and 292–353 formless 278 Protestants and 243–4, 283–4, 369 supernatural 247, 282–3, 291 ‘Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind’ (Newman) 251, 438 ‘Faith without Sight’ (Newman) 260 fatalism 58, 62, 454 Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (Newman) 251 figurative language 89, 89 n.94, see also language First Vatican Council 13 ‘A Foreign Land’ 124 forgiveness 268 ‘formless faith’ 278 From Oxford to Rome (Harris) 197 Froude, Hurrell 8, 15, 20 ‘gifted individual’ 105–9, 130 ‘God’s Commandments Not Grievous’ (Newman) 72, 97 ‘The Greatness and the Littleness of Human Life’ (Newman) 383, 389, 401 Greece

158, 300, 305, 325, 410

461

‘Grounds for Steadfastness in our Religious Profession’ (Newman) 181 ‘Guardian Angels’ (Newman) 375–6, 381, 385–7, 390, 399–403 Hamlet 391–2, 396 Harris, Elizabeth 197 Hawkins, Edward 7–8 ‘heathen’ philosophy 58–9, 62 heavenly language 107, see also language Herbert, George 87, 129 ‘Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness’ (Newman) 70, 319 Holy Spirit 31, 40, 51, 104, 173, 184, 370 Homer 336 Horace 420 human language 401–2, 456, see also language ‘The Humiliation of the Eternal Son’ (Newman) 385 Hutton, R. H. 381 The Idea of a University (Newman) 21, 292, 296 n.21, 298, 301, 305, 335, 345, 351, 353, 423 n.16 ‘imaginative apprehension’ 1, 15, 19, 22, 441 imaginative ‘vision’ 386, 409 ‘The Immortality of the Soul’ 68, 135, 200 ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’ (Newman) 18, 258, 438 ‘implicit reason’ 259, 373, 438–40 Incarnation 67, 143, 165–6 ‘The Incarnation’ 164 ‘The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion, Respectively’ (Newman) 54, 57, 60–3, 65, 192, 400 n.97 ‘Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training’ (Newman) 201–2, 297, 334–5 ‘intellectual isonomy’ 300 ‘intellectual senses’ 445 ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’ (Newman) 281, 284, 289 Jesus Christ, see Christ Keble, John 8–10, 20, 32, 87, 114, 116, 209, 212–14, 401 Kingsley, Charles 13, 21, 357–70

462 ‘Knowledge of God’s Will without Obedience’ (Newman) 68, 79, 91 language 107 as an artificial system 107 figurative 89, 89 n.94 heavenly 107 human 401–2, 456 metaphorical 84 ordinary 261–3 poetical 402 scholastic 256 ‘Lead Kindly Light’ 374, 387–90, 399, 400 Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (Newman) 31, 277 Lectures on the History of the Turks, in relation to Europe (Newman) 302, 315 Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (Newman) 130, 149–50, 152, 155–9, 169–70, 173–5, 405–9 literature artistry involved in 81 moral feelings roused by 93–5 ‘sentimentalism’ in 95 Lives of the English Saints 381 Locke, John 432 London Review 17, 82 Lord Shaftesbury 312 Loss and Gain (Newman) 21, 197–200, 208, 210, 216, 231, 270, 272–3, 283 ‘Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition’ (Newman) 255–8, 277 ‘Love of Quiet’ (Newman) 115 Lyra Apostolica 21, 113–14, 113–19, 125–9, 133, 136–8, 374–5, 388, 390, 400, 430 Macmillan, Alexander 363 Macmillan’s Magazine 13, 357, 362 Mediaeval Church 359 metaphorical language 84, see also language ‘Milman’s View of Christianity’ (Newman) 379 Milton, John 86

Index ‘The Mission of St Benedict’ (Newman) 336, 349–51 ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’ (Newman) 349–50 Montaigne 312 n.68 ‘moral creed’ 101–4, 109 ‘Moral Effects of Communion with God’ (Newman) 384 ‘moral self ’ 285, 288, 291, 310 ‘moral sense’ 245 Mr Kingsley’s Method of Disputation (Newman) 367 Napoleonic wars 7 ‘National Degradation’ (Bowden) 116 ‘National Property’ (Bowden) 116 Natural Religion 54–5, 57–61, 67, 287, 302, 322, 444 ‘natural theology’ 96, 294, 373 ‘The Nature of Faith in Relation to Reason’ (Newman) 254, 258 New Testament 157 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 2, 9, 31–3, 435 Nunc dimittis 131 ‘Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity’ (Newman) 68, 69 Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy (White) 8 ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’ (Newman) 195 ‘On the Introduction of Rationalist Principles into Revealed Religion’ (Newman) 8, 141, 149 orbis terrarum 335, 393–4 Order of Preachers 349 ordinary language 261–3, see also language Oriel ‘Noetics’ 7 ‘Outward and Inward Notes of the Church’ (Newman) 140 Oxford 197 Oxford Movement 10, 30, 32, 116, 118 n.7, 203 n.16 Oxford University Sermons (Newman) 260 paganism 59–60, 183, 206, 316, 327 Parochial Sermons (Newman) 66–8, 71, 77, 91

Index Pascal 312 n.68 ‘Personal Influence, the means of Propagating the Truth’ (Newman) 100, 108, 126, 179, 308, 400, 400 n.97 philosophy 295–7, 301, 346, 348, 353 and Christ 335 as the intellectual life of a university 296–7, 353 religion of 312–5 ‘phronesis’ 2–3, 25–65, 101, 192, 253, 275–7, 310, 346–7, 433–8, 441, 443, 451, see also practical wisdom poetical language 402, see also language poetry 4, 82–6, 91, 339 vs. science 4, 339 Pope Leo XIII 14 Pope Pius IV 12 ‘The Powers of Nature’ (Newman) 376 practical wisdom 2, 9, 25, 32–7, 42, 44–51, 154, 216, 253, 268, 346, see also phronesis ‘Prejudiced Man’ 363 The Present Position of Catholics in England (Newman) 363 Private Judgment 171 ‘Profession without Hypocrisy’ (Newman) 78 ‘Promising without Doing’ (Newman) 68, 77, 96 Prophetical Tradition 184 ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’ (Newman) 25–31, 90–1, 191, 222 Protestant notions of faith 244 Rahner, Karl 453, 455 Rambler 12 Ramsbottom, Newman & Co 7 Rationalism 4, 8, 142, 144 reason explicit 14, 18, 259, 262, 451, 456 implicit 259, 373, 438–40 Reformation 11, 172, 350, 362 religion 1–2 disciplines of 74 as matter for prudence 47 n.37 natural 57–61, 444 ordinances of 183 practical wisdom and 47–49

463

probability as guide of 213 professing 79 rational 143 as science of living well 68 ‘The Religion of the Day’ (Newman) 69, 79, 96–7, 305 religious absolutism 13, 410 religious dogmas 443 ‘Religious Faith Rational’ (Newman) 68, 73–4 religious novels 92 religious sentimentalism 96 religious truth 5–6, 9, 107–9, 152, 240, 289 ‘Restlessness’ (Newman) 129 The Rise and Progress of Universities (Newman) 298, 326, 351 Rogers, Frederic 125–6, 128 Roman Catholic Church 21, 196, 271, 369, 224, 227, 271–2, 366, 397, 404 Roman Catholics 178, 223 ‘Roman’ doctrine of Purgatory 404 Romans 325, 330 Romantic poets 5, 26 Saint Augustine 52, 54, 348, 393–6, 395 n.90, 398, 401 ‘Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle’ (Newman) 239–40, 243, 246, 288 ‘Scattered Sheep’ (Newman) 115 scholastic language 256, see also language science 292–5 ‘philosophy’ and 295–6 poetry vs. 4, 339 Scott, Walter 25–6, 318 n.84 ‘Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow’ (Newman) 81, 97 ‘second Reformation’ 11, 391 ‘Secret Faults’ (Newman) 75 ‘Self Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness’ (Newman) 71, 79 sentimentalism in art 95 in literature 95 religious 96 ‘Septuagesima Sunday’ (Keble) 87 Sermons on Subjects of the Day (Newman) 357

464 ‘Sincerity and Hypocrisy’ (Newman) 308, 314 ‘Sins of Ignorance and Weakness’ (Newman) 69, 72, 81 Southey, Robert 26, 86, 113, 374–5 Spenser, Edmund 86 ‘The State of Grace’ (Newman) 98, 386 ‘The State of Innocence’ (Newman) 334 ‘The State of Religious Parties’ (Newman) see also ‘Prospects of the Anglican Church’ 25–31, 90–1, 191, 222 St Philip Neri 297 supernatural faith 247, 282–3, 291 ‘The Tears of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus’ (Newman) 414 ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’ (Newman) 109, 185–6, 191–3 ‘The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul’ (Newman) 210 Thirty-nine Articles 11, 219–20 Tract 79 (Newman) 404–5, 408–10, 415 Tract 85 (Newman) 289 Tract 90 (Newman) 11–12, 220, 368 ‘Tractarians’ 9–11, 32 Tracts for the Times 11, 117, 132 traditionary teaching 161 Tridentine Church 404 Trinity 16, 67, 142–3, 147, 149, 162–3, 188, 221, 281, 443–4 Trinity College, Oxford 7

Index True Mode of Meeting Mr Kingsley (Newman) 367 ‘Unreal Words’ (Newman) 125, 166, 169, 327, 381, 383 ‘The Usurpations of Reason’ (Newman) 39, 287, 400 n.97 Vaughan, Henry 87 ‘The Ventures of Faith’ (Newman) 271 Virgil 340, 422–3, 425 ‘virtue of religiousness’ 277 ‘The Visible Church an Encouragement to Faith’ (Newman) 204 ‘The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect’ (Newman) 179 ‘voluntas credendi’ 277 What, then, Does Dr Newman Mean? (Kingsley) 358–63 Whateley, Richard 7–9, 32, 371–2 White, Blanco 8, 15 ‘Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry’ (Newman) 346–50 ‘Wisdom and Innocence’ (Newman) 328–9, 343, 345–7, 357–9, 370 Wiseman, Nicholas 374, 393 Wood, S. F. 32 Wordsworth, William 26, 86 ‘Worship, a Preparation for Christ’s Coming’ (Newman) 382 ‘The Zeal of Jehu’ (Newman) 115