Newman as a Volcanic Eruption

“Newman’s Response to the Anglican Bishops’ Charge of Fancifulness and Skepticism”^[1]

Follow Newman as he looks back on his decision “to ask for admission (as he describes it) into the one fold of Christ.” “During my course of reading in the summer of 1839, I began to look for some ground to supply a basis for my view of antiquity and catholicity. … The history of St. Leo showed me that the deliberate and eventual consent of the great body of the Church ratified a doctrinal decision as a part of revealed truth…. The Creeds tell us that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. I could not prove that the Anglican communion was an integral part of the one Church, on the grounds of its teaching being apostolic or catholic. I could not defend our separation from Rome and her faith without using arguments prejudicial to those great doctrines concerning our Lord, which are the very foundation of the Christian religion.  … I deliberately quit the old Anglican ground as untenable; though I did not do so all at once, but as I became more and more convinced of the state of the case. … I had no thought of leaving the Church of England because I felt some of my old objections against Rome as strongly as ever, I had no right, I had no leave, to act against my conscience. That was a higher rule than (writing about the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic) Notes of the Church.”^[2]

To the end of his life Newman was satisfied with his argument in Tract 90 (see my 21 February entry). He wrote: “Holiness as the true test of a Church was steadily kept in view in what I wrote in connection with Tract 90. … According to this theory, a religious body is part of the one, catholic and apostolic Church, if it has the succession and the creed of the apostles, with the note of holiness of life; and there is much in such a view to approve itself to the direct commonsense and practical habits of an Englishman. … I sunk my theory to a lower level … when the Bishops and the people of my Church, … actually rejected primitive Catholic doctrine, and tried to eject from their communion all who held it. This was the lower level on which I placed myself, and all who felt with me, at the end of 1841.”^[3]

Newman was faithful to the Anglo Catholic part of the Church of England. Rationalists and Evangelicals made up the other parts. “The Anglican theory was very distinctive. I admired it and took it on faith … my only worry … it was a paper system. … The liberals (rationalists) had beaten me in a fair field. …Submission to the Catholic Church could not have been earlier. … I did not possess certitude. In December 1844 I resolved to write on doctrinal development and if my convictions were not weaker, I would enter the Church of Rome. … On 3 April 1845, … (listen to his heart) accept this apology, my dear Church, and forgive me. As I say so, tears come into my eyes;—that arises from the accident of this time, when I am giving up so much I love. … I am this night (8 October 1845) expecting Father Dominic, the Passionist … He does not know my intention; but I mean to ask of him admission into the one fold of Christ…. ”^[4]

There you have Newman’s words, his character, his purpose and emphases! Do you find them illuminating? To what extent? Is Newman sufficient? Does he need to do more work? He chose certainty in making judgments which is not on the side of Lockean subjectivism. Newman worried about the process of downplaying the importance of having premises as constitutive to making judgments with certainty. A premise is a statement from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion. To Newman, a combination of evidence and antecedent probabilities leads to practical judgments.

Can we change our assents, our certainty, our views, our convictions? Newman’s answer is: “yes.” Certitude differs from certainty. Can we change our certitudes? Newman’s answer is “no.” Be careful of the trap. Certitudes are reflective and tightly held. To deny proof from certitudes is to give in to a process that is interminable. The consequences are disastrous. Locke (and Whately) require assents to be “certainty.” The dangerous impracticality is that a person could never be sure about all doctrines that are to be believed which, in effect, was the rationalists’ highjacking of certainty in England. Newman is not indiscriminate in regard to one’s certainties. He respects that one’s assents are one’s own business.

Why is this important for the future and living today in modernity? I separate from anyone or group who attempt to reconstruct the past for the present. Why? Newman is always looking to the future of faith and reason. The work of Christ is always going forward. John Locke turned towards religious epistemology and was brought up to the Aristotelian code of logic by R. Whately, an Oxford rationalist in whose charisma Newman was taken. Soon enough, Newman recognized the mischievous Cartesian-inspired game about proof. He broke from Whately, and his effective reply was a lifelong developing general and religious epistemology which I am attempting to synthesize. The Oxford Dictionary defines epistemology as “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.” An easy example: when asking about religion, how often do you hear: I “kind of” believe. “Kind of” is Lockean inspired. “Kind of” is not Newman. Consequences can be unfortunate for faith as every parent, teacher/preacher knows.

By now, it is clear why I am repeating the gravity of the confrontation with Lockean thought by the Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion (1736), for Newman’s originality. Butler rebutted Locke’s epistemology which had become more persuasive and aided a full-blown rationalist approach to knowledge, belief, opinion, prejudice and bigotry. Locke viewed simple faith as something barbarous and leading to violence. Locke was addressing the phenomenon of fanaticism that contributed to religious wars and violence in the 16th and 17th centuries. The problem for Newman at Oxford was that religion was being bled out because Locke’s epistemology amounted to saying that no one can fully believe in the Trinity, the Son of God as Savior and Redeemer, religious conviction and sin.

I return to the metaphor of an active volcano and rationalist rumblings that are amplified today. Newman is a “placeholder” for the future. The 21st century accords reasons for skepticism to creep back into a believer’s certitudes and certainties with social effects that are serious and produce anxiety. The active volcanic rumblings include Lockean epistemology that has no defense for faith or room for atheists. Lockean thought inundates the West and overplays reason while making fervently held conviction impossible. Future entries will unpack Newman’s vocabulary for making judgments or giving assent, including the illative sense.^[5] Pivotal is personal recognition of the existence of a Judge as lawgiver within conscience. The compelling authority of his Butler inspired explanation of the voice of God in conscience, which permeates his thought and makes it apposite and indispensable for the future, is freeing.

“After (almost) 30 years waiting, he (Fr. Dominic Barberi) was without his own act sent here.”^[6] On 8 October 1845, Newman requested “admission into the one fold of Christ.”

Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conv., Univ. of Notre Dame, Remembering Forward #4 eondrako@alumni.nd.edu

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^[1] Apo., ch 1, M. Svaglic, (Oxford, OUP, 1967), 23. After Tract 90 the Anglican Bishops charged Newman with both.
^[2] Apo., ch 4, M. Svaglic (1967), 138-139.
^[3] Apo., ch 4, 141-142.
^[4] Apo., ch 4, 193, 195, 205, 209.
^[5] L. Wittgenstein and B. Lonergan read The Grammar of Assent (1869-1870) and reacted to Newmanian thought.
^[6] Apo., ch 4, 211, M. Svaglic, (1967). Newman had written to a number of friends on 8 October 1845.

Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conventual
Research Fellow Pontifical Faculty of St. Bonaventure, Rome
Visiting Scholar, McGrath Institute for Church Life
University of Notre Dame
March 2, 2022

On February 22, 2022, the Franciscan Friars Conventual of Our Lady of the Angels Province elected the Very Rev. Michael Heine, OFM Conv. as Minister Provincial, effective May 25, 2022.

February 18, 2022: A few days after celebrating his 50th Birthday with the parishioners of St. Anthony of Padua Parish (Chicopee, MA), where he serves as pastor, Fr. Jacek Leszczyński, OFM Conv. became a US Citizen.

Congratulations!

Friar Ed attended the October 13, 2019 canonization of St. John Henry Newman, in Rome.

Newman as a Volcanic Eruption

“Called to be Judgers not Calculating Machines”

At a moment of erosion, drift and assimilation of the Church in and into a secular modernity, it is a fair question to ask why I study and write about John Henry Newman. He matters massively for Christianity and the Catholic Church! Born in London on 21 February 1801, we ask: is the impact of his life at Oxford, struggles with rationalism, leadership in reform of the Anglican Church and heart rending going over to Rome, long gone? Does his Idea of a University matter for Notre Dame students I meet? I am firmly convinced the answer is “yes,”  because Newman thought and taught in the wake of Aristotle to judge what a situation demands and not become a calculating machine. I do not intend to affirm this conviction of mine through a staged dialogue between Newman and myself. After all, you can read Newman independently. However, it is important for you to enter into dialogue with Newman, because you count far more than I do. In this venue, I have to be relatively brief with what I want to say. Second, in my somewhat formal analysis of Newman’s vast and complex writings which he has left us, my actual questioning may seem somewhat underdetermined, in order to prompt your questions and formulations. I have shown my hand—but you are free to disregard it . All that I will have imposed on you that may be helpful are three loci of questioning: scripture/theology, philosophy/phenomenology, and the relation between these fields.^[1]

I approach Newman “with” and “after” my Franciscan mentor,^[2] but not exclusively. He laid the groundwork for retrieval of the Franciscan School and other schools of thought, and the retrieval of scripture and theology, philosophy and phenomenology, according to the mind of Vatican II. Christianity is being assailed from without and hollowed out from within. What resources does the Church offer a person who is on the road to forming a conviction? Are they known? Are they beyond retrieval? Newman’s life is a lesson in the personal formation of conviction and judgment: “I cannot breathe with another man’s lungs,.” Knowledge is visible in Newman’s life as an Anglican resource, a Catholic resource, and how he aligns with Franciscan thought; a relation between forgetting and remembering forward as sanctioned by the Holy Spirit.

Normal religious believers have intuitions and arguments and draw from first principles. Like them, Newman needed consistency. A person can change his/her view on the expression of principles but not the principles themselves. Newman himself had to come to grips with this. He did not get a free pass. In February 1841, he wrote Tract 90, the last of the Tracts he began with Keble and Pusey as part of the Oxford (Tractarian) Movement. The Tracts aimed to advance arguments based on principles in order to remove ambiguities within the Church of England. Thirty-nine Articles^[3] were drawn up early in the reign of Elizabeth I to induce Roman Catholics to subscribe to them; and, the Anglican Church was a branch of the Catholic Church with its formularies to be interpreted with the Catholic Fathers and Ancient Bishops. Tract 90 gave expression to Newman’s belief that the Thirty-nine Articles that pertained to justification could be interpreted in a Catholic sense. Keble and Pusey upheld Tract 90. Up to the end of his life, Newman was satisfied with the substance of the argument in Tract 90. The exception was the reasoning in Article 31 on Scripture, the sacraments, original sin and justification. Newman opposed some Roman doctrines such as purgatory, indulgences, honors paid to images and relics, the invocation of the saints, and transubstantiation at the Mass, as irreconcilable with primitive Catholic doctrine. He thought that just as Rome had exaggerations in those directions, the Anglican Church had exaggerations in the direction of Protestantism. Newman agreed that there were practical and popular errors on both sides and tried to see how far the Thirty-nine Articles could be reconciled with the decrees of the Council of Trent. Tract 90 argued that both Anglicans and Catholics belong to one Church.

In 1841, several events revealed Newman’s deepest convictions which Locke ’s religious epistemology had all but sanctioned. Locke’s philosophy was gaining in Oxford. Protestant England reacted against Tract 90. At Oxford, the Board of Heads of Houses condemned Newman. The Bishop of Oxford objected to the Tract but joined the bishops in general, who would not insist on its withdrawal or condemn it. The Liberals (Rationalists) at Oxford and Evangelicals were shocked, because the Articles were considered the bulwark of Protestantism. Newman insisted that the Articles were to be interpreted according to a great principle, i.e., not according to the meaning of the writers, but (as far as the wording would permit) according to the sense of the Catholic Church. For three years the bishops wanted the matter silenced. Newman insisted that Tract 90 was not to be withdrawn or condemned, nor the Tracts be stopped and opinions that they inculcated. No doctrine or principle was conceded by the Tractarians.

In the fall of 1841, Newman thought: “it will be necessary to re-assert Tract 90; else, it will seem, after these Bishop’s charges, as if it were silenced, which it has not been, nor do I intend it should be. I wish to keep quiet, but if Bishops speak, I will speak too. If the view were silenced, I could not remain in the Church, nor could many others; and therefore, since it is not silenced, I shall take care to show that it isn’t.” ^[4] Newman’s courage is evident in defense of the Tracts and imputing blame for conversions to Rome on those who oppose the Anglican principles of theology and ecclesiastical polity which the Tracts contain. If the rulers in England were to speak against the Tracts or not at all, and were to fail “to suffer the principles contained in them,” either the members would give up the principles or give up the Church. Newman mournfully prophesied that, should such a scenario unfold, many secessions to the Church of Rome would follow.

In November 1841, Newman protested the efforts of the Prussian Court and Archbishop of Canterbury to establish a Bishopric in Jerusalem to embrace both Lutheran and Calvinistic bodies in a manner very different from the Tractarian School. Later he wrote: the Jerusalem Bishopric had been “one of the greatest mercies. It brought me to the beginning of the end.”^[5] “From the end of 1841, I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees.”^[6] In September, 1843, he preached “The Parting of Friends,” and stepped away from the Anglican priesthood for lay communion. In December 1844, he set out to resolve the question about how doctrines develop. By 8 October 1845, he had literally written himself into the Roman Church.

Newman’s general and religious epistemology to counter religious rationalism from c. 1830 has been all-but-overlooked. My aim is to recall Bishop Butler’s influence on Newman, supplemented by my own observations, as something very useful to the ongoing apologetic for Christianity which is now vested in the Catholic Church.^[7]

Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conv., Univ. of Notre Dame, Remembering Forward # 3 eondrako@alumni.nd.edu

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[1] Modeled on Cyril O’Regan’s analytic and pedagogic method at the Univ. of  Notre Dame’s theology department.
[2] Mentor is in homage to Rev. Dr. Peter Damian Mary Fehlner, OFM Conv. (1931-2018); mentors, to a longer list.
[3] The difficulty for Newman with Article 31 was on justification. Compare to the Decrees of the Council of Trent.
[4] Apo., ch 3, M. Svaglic, ed. (1967), 131.
[5] Apo., ch 3, M. Svaglic, ed. (1967), 131-136.
[6] Apo., ch 4, M. Svaglic, ed. (1967), 137.
[7] In 1825, Newman read Bishop J. Butler, Analogy of Religion (1736), which saved him from his rationalist foray.

Fr. Edward J. Ondrako, OFM Conventual
Research Fellow Pontifical Faculty of St. Bonaventure, Rome
Visiting Scholar, McGrath Institute for Church Life
University of Notre Dame
February 21, 2022