Newman's kindly light still leads us on

J. Murray Elwood

John Henry Newman's life spanned the 19th century, 1801 to 1890. He was an Oxford scholar and theologian, and spent half his years as an Anglican and half as a Roman Catholic. Newman was the leading Anglican clergyman of his day and vicar of St. Marys, Oxford, when he dramatically converted to Rome. He was ordained a Catholic priest, died a cardinal of the church and became the most influential theologian of his generation. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the defining moment of Newman's long life - his entry into full communion. with the church of Rome, Oct. 9, 1845.

A friend of Victorian notables, including Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope and Prime Minister William Gladstone, Newman had a profound influence on many of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He was also a master of English prose and authored one of the best autobiographies in the language, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, two novels, a violin sonata, many poems, of which his "Dream of Gerontius" was set to music by Sir Edgar Elgar, and a hymn still sung by Sunday congregations, "Lead Kindly Light."

The effect of Newman's preaching, according to many contemporary witnesses, was extraordinary. Gladstone once compared his sermons at Oxford in the 1830s to Abelard's lectures at the University of Paris in the 13th century. Newman's homilies were so attractive, in fact, that one university dean, envious of Newman's influence, changed the Sunday dinner hour to discourage undergraduate attendance at Evensong; students then went without supper to hear Newman preach. These homilies, collectively called Parochial and Plain Sermons," are still in print.

In the 1830s many Oxford Anglicans, with a certain nostalgia for their spiritual past, were becoming curious about long-abandoned Catholic customs and liturgical practices. Some of Newman's own associates and students were visiting the newly opened chapel of a nearby Catholic college to hear plainchant and attend High Mass. Newman never participated, for in those days he was not attracted by Roman ways or worship.

In fact, his main criticism of the church of Rome at the time was its lack of holiness. "I see no marks of sanctity,' he wrote in a letter to a friend. "If they want to convert England" let them go barefoot into our manufacturing towns - let them preach to the people like St. Francis Xavier, let them be pelted and trampled on, and I will admit that they can do what we cannot. ... Let them use the proper arms of the church and they will prove that they are the church by using them."

Curiously, Some months before this letter was written, and unknown to Newman, an Italian priest by the name of Dominic Barberi had arrived in England as a missionary. Fr. Dominic had been moved aH his life by a strange longing to work for the conversion of England; he fulfilled, in his own person, the conditions laid down in Newman's letter. The Italian missionary, blissfully ignorant of the cultural differences between his homeland and this Protestant country, had begun his apostolate by walking through the streets of English industrial towns wearing his religious habit and sandals. He preached on street corners in broken English to everyone who would hear. Sometimes he was pelted with mud but, surprisingly, on other occasions people paused to listen.

Meanwhile, as a leader of the Oxford Movement, a program of renewal of the Church of England, Newman began, a serious study of the church of the early centuries. His purpose, at first, was to find in history support for the Church of England against encroachments by the state. By 1839, however, he was trying to develop a theological basis for the Anglican position between what he perceived to be the errors of Rome on the one hand, and the extremes of Protestantism, on the other.

There then came the moment, in the course of his studies; when Newman was struck by a historical similarity. It suddenly occurred to hun that an obscure fifth century sect, the Monophysites, had cut themselves off from Rome, the historical center of Christianity, in much the same way that the Church of England land was separated from Rome in the 19th century.

"My stronghold was antiquity," Newman wrote. Now here, in the middle of the fifth century, I found, so it seemed to me, Christendom of the 16th and 19th centuries reflected. I saw my face in that mirror and I was a Monophysite."

But was the face in the mirror a grace or a delusion? Newman always believed that fidelity to one's "kindly light," conscience, was a sure pathway to God, so he spent the Lent of 1840 in the nearby village parish of Littlemore visiting the sick, teaching catechism to children and undertaking a strict regimen of prayer and fasting to discern his future direction.

But his doubts persisted. "I am far more certain that England is in schism he wrote to a friend, John Keble, "than that the Roman additions to the primitive creed may hot be developments arising out of a keen and vivid realization of the New Testament revelation."

In 1843 Newman preached his last Anglican sermon, "The Parting of Friends," resigned his position at Oxford and, accompanied by several companions from the university, formed a small, quasi-monastic community at Little-more. He then began to write his seminal theological work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he attempted to identify the patterns by which Christian doctrine had evolved down through the years. In the course of his writing, Newman recognized that what had protected Christian belief from developing wrongly over the centuries was the see of Rome.

By 1845, nearly afl of Newman's companions had decided to enter the Catholic church. In early October, John Dalgairns, one of the members of the Littlemore community who had himself been recently received into the church by Barberi, went to Newman's study to tell him that the Italian priest would shortly be passing through Oxford. Newman put down his pen and answered softly, "When you see your friend, will you tell him that I wish him to receive me into the church of Christ?"

Fr. Dominic arrived at Littlemore in pouring rain late the same evening. The next day, Newman knelt on the stone floor beside his writing desk and was received into the Catholic church. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine is, thus, a uniquely ecumenical effort. Newman started writing as an Anglican, but completed his book as a Catholic.

One would expect, after Newman's long, patient search, after the years o doubt and questioning, that his entry into the church would be an emotionally overwhelming experience. Exactly the opposite seems to have been the case. Both of his letters written that day and the entries into his personal journal are strangely low-keyed. Down the righthand side of the journal for Oct. 9 are listed the letters written and received and then, in the lower left-hand corner, there is a small cross followed by the brief statement: "Admitted into the Cath. Ch. with Bowles and Stanton."

The personal cost of his final step was enormous, as he confided in a letter to his sister, Jemima: I am distressing all I love, unsettling all I have instructed or aided. I am going to those whom I do not know, and of whom I expect very little." Earlier, writing to his friend John Keble, Newman had described his approaching conversion by saying, "I am setting my face absolutely toward the wilderness."

From this perspective, Newman did not feel that either finding Christ or coming to the fullness of faith was a journey from the insecure to the secure, or from the tenuous to the safe, but actually the other way around. He understood the Christian life not so much in terms of emotional security and sensible consolations, but as the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews understands it, as a journey into the unknown,, a "venture of faith." Newman wrote:

"If, then, faith be the essence of a Christian life ... it follows that our duty lies in risking upon Christ's word what we have for what we have not; and doing so in a noble, generous way, not indeed rashly or lightly, still without knowing accurately what we are doing, not knowing either what we give up, nor again, what we shall gain; uncertain about our reward, uncertain about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon him, trusting in him to enable us to fulfill our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the future."

Many reasons might be offered to explain, after so many years, the continuing influence of the life and writings of Newman. He had an enormous capacity for friendship, and the people and events in his life could provide material for a dozen novels. Newman also brought to Catholic theology distinctively English emphases and attitudes, notably that obedience to the personal light of conscience, for a grave and sufficient reason, takes precedence over even external ecclesiastical authority.

He was also unwilling to see the pope turned into an oracle independent of the church. So it is understandable why a Vatican bureaucrat, in a letter to an English bishop, once characterized him as "the most dangerous man in all England." But a layman, meeting Newman when he was 53, wrote, "I found him most kind, ever so nice and full of fun."

In an ecumenical age, Newman is also a common bond and a promise of future union for those two communions, Anglican and Roman, whom he loved and to whom he once faithfully ministered. For thinking Protestants and Catholics, loyal to their own faith traditions and yet uncomfortable with both the easy certitudes of biblical fundamentalists and the casual tolerances of secular relativists, Newman serves as a model for the "thoughtful believer."

But Professor Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale has suggested a much more profound reason why Newman's spiritual journey continues to fascinate the contemporary believer. Not only is his life the extraordinary quest of one human being for integrity, mystery and meaning, but Newman's Apologia does at the end of the Christian era of European history what St. Augustine's Confessions did at its beginning.

If the Christian era, Pelikan observes, began in the fourth century with the conversion of Constantine, and if it ends somewhere in the 19th, say, with Darwin, then Newman's Apologia not only reflects the tensions by which his, generation was alienated from the Judeo-Christian heritage, but his intellectual insights suggest a path by which subsequent generations might reclaim a or richer sense of that same tradition.

In a corner of St. Mary's Church, Oxford, there is a Latin inscription carved in stone. The tablet describes how, some 700 years ago, John Duns Scotus had in once preached in that very church on the theme, "The Lord is My Light." Many centuries later, another Oxford scholar and convert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, would recall that day with a poem, "Duns Scotus's Oxford." His words could apply equally to Newman who during his days at Oxford modeled for contemporary Catholics an adult way of Christian belief:

... this air I gather and I release He lived on, these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace.

COPYRIGHT 1995 National Catholic Reporter
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