Apologia Pro Vita Sua by Cardinal John Henry Newman, Post 7

This is the seventh post in a series of St. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. 

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here. 

Post #4 here. 

Post #5 here. 

Post # 6 here.  

  

Chapter 5:  Position of my Mind since 1845

Summary

In the final chapter, Newman, couched in his thoughts since his conversion, gives a vindication of the Catholic Church, an apologetic of the Catholic faith, and a final rationalization for his conversion.  Newman touches on some key doctrines: the Catholic Church’s acceptance and assimilation of science, the nature of the human condition as fallen but not wretched, and perhaps most importantly to Newman the Catholic Church’s claim as infallible authority.  Finally Newman makes clear, that even when he has difficulties accepting some of the Church’s positions or manners of devotion, his submission to the Church’s authority, a submission he sees as necessary of a world drifting into relativism.

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There really isn’t much to say about this chapter.  I think it provides some great passages of apologetics.  Let me quote a few.  Let’s start with the opening paragraphs of the chapter. 

 

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 variations 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 change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. 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.

Now bear in mind he is writing this in 1864, some nineteen years from his conversion.  He has been ordained a priest in the Catholic Church but he is still fifteen years away from being promoted to a Cardinal, a title he had no expectation of achieving.  So for all that time he has had no regrets and is totally at peace.  I love the simile in his final sentence, coming into port after a rough sea.  He goes on.

 

Nor had I any trouble about receiving those additional articles, which are not found in the Anglican Creed. Some of them I believed already, but not any one of them was a trial to me. I made a profession of them upon my reception with the greatest ease, and I have the same ease in believing them now. I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

And so he does not have any trouble with any of the Catholic doctrines.  Sure there are difficulties, just as there were difficulties in creeds shared by Catholics and Protestants.  There are difficulties in all matters of faith, that’s why it’s faith.  I love this wonderful quote: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”  Because one has difficulties to one with faith, it is a far cry from having doubts.

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So Newman addresses one of the most prominent of the Catholic difficulties, that of Transubstantiation.  The quote on Transubstantiation is from one paragraph but I’m going to break it apart to show the development of his thought. 

 

People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe?

It is interesting how he believed it immediately upon becoming Catholic.  Once the Church had “declared it to be part of original revelation” then if you accept Magisterial authority, then you just accept it.  Newman points out, yes it is difficult—impossible even—to imagine it, but belief is not understanding.  It is faith.  Side note: I find it strange how Protestants talk about justification by faith and yet when Jesus asks of you to have faith in His presence in the Eucharist they fail.  Every time one goes up for communion at Mass it is an act of faith that you are demonstrating when the priest says “Body of Christ” and you respond “amen.”  Amen literally means “it is so.”  Back to Newman’s paragraph.

 

Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of a believer in it of talents as eminent as Sir Thomas More, before he could bring himself to conceive that the Catholics of an enlightened age could resist "the overwhelming force of the argument against it." "Sir Thomas More," he says, "is one of the choice specimens of wisdom and virtue; and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith which stands that test, will stand any test." But for myself, I cannot indeed prove it, I cannot tell how it is; but I say, "Why should it not be? What's to hinder it? What do I know of substance or matter? just as much as the greatest philosophers, and that is nothing at all;"—so much is this the case, that there is a rising school of philosophy now, which considers phenomena to constitute the whole of our knowledge in physics.

By “Macaulay” I assume he is referring to the British historian and politician in Newman’s day, Thomas Babington Macaulay, who Newman says needed the witness of Thomas More for him to think Catholics truly believed it.  Newman goes on to say that he cannot prove Transubstantiation, but he responds, “Why should it not be?”  “What do I know of substance and matter?”  Material phenomena does not constitute all of reality.   He continues.

 

The Catholic doctrine leaves phenomena alone. It does not say that the phenomena go; on the contrary, it says that they remain; nor does it say that the same phenomena are in several places at once. It deals with what no one on earth knows any thing about, the material substances themselves. And, in like manner, of that majestic Article of the Anglican as well as of the Catholic Creed,—the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. What do I know of the Essence of the Divine Being? I know that my abstract idea of three is simply incompatible with my idea of one; but when I come to the question of concrete fact, I have no means of proving that there is not a sense in which one and three can equally be predicated of the Incommunicable God.

The Catholic Church, Newman argues, leaves the possibility of phenomena beyond the sense experience.  He compares the idea of Transubstantiation with the idea of the Trinity, which is accepted by most Protestants.  Similarly he asks, “What do I know of the Essence of the Divine Being?”  We can’t conceptualize the Trinity.  Why does one think that they can conceptualize Transubstantiation?  Newman is a master at argument.

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Newman brings his apologetics all the way back to justifying God’s existence.  I won’t go into the details of that, but he provides this magnificent sentence, which is set aside as a paragraph.  It is a single sentence and a paragraph.

 

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world,"—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.

To comprehend the sentence, start with the first phrase, “To consider the world in its length and breadth,” and then he provides a litany of historical facts and developments which have led to the present moment under the guiding hand of God, ending with the predicate “all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.”  So put those two halves together and you get: “To consider the world in its length and breadth… upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.”  William Faulkner would appreciate a sentence like that.

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This is an absolutely great quote on the fallen state of man and how we find ourselves in this universe:

 

Thus only should I be able to account for the contrast between the promise and the condition of [man’s] being. And so I argue about the world;—if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.

And yet Newman finds in the Catholic Church the proper perspective of man’s relationship with his creator.

 

In like manner she has ever put forth, with most energetic distinctness, those other great elementary truths, which either are an explanation of her mission or give a character to her work. She does not teach that human nature is irreclaimable, else wherefore should she be sent? not, that it is to be shattered and reversed, but to be extricated, purified, and restored; not, that it is a mere mass of hopeless evil, but that it has the promise upon it of great things, and even now, in its present state of disorder and excess, has a virtue and a praise proper to itself. But in the next place she knows and she preaches that such a restoration, as she aims at effecting in it, must be brought about, not simply through certain outward provisions of preaching and teaching, even though they be her own, but from an inward spiritual power or grace imparted directly from above, and of which she is the channel. She has it in charge to rescue human nature from its misery, but not simply by restoring it on its own level, but by lifting it up to a higher level than its own. She recognizes in it real moral excellence though degraded, but she cannot set it free from earth except by exalting it towards heaven. It was for this end that a renovating grace was put into her hands; and therefore from the nature of the gift, as well as from the reasonableness of the case, she goes on, as a further point, to insist, that all true conversion must begin with the first springs of thought, and to teach that each individual man must be in his own person one whole and perfect temple of God, while he is also one of the living stones which build up a visible religious community. And thus the distinctions between nature and grace, and between outward and inward religion, become two further articles in what I have called the preamble of her divine commission.

What I see in this passage is a conscious effort to contrast the Catholic Church from the Protestant conceptualization of human nature.  “She does not teach that human nature is irreclaimable, else wherefore should she be sent?”  This is in contrast to the Lutheran notion of total depravity.  Here is Newman in that paragraph: “She recognizes in it real moral excellence though degraded, but she cannot set it free from earth except by exalting it towards heaven,” and implied in there is the notion of man’s free will, which contrasts with the Calvinist (and implied in Luther) of a chosen elect and predestination.  Newman here captures the beauty of the Catholic Church’s understanding of humanity and her mission to elevate man.  Newman, writing here, has fully become Catholic.

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I’m not quite finished with Apologia.  One last defense of Catholic teaching that Newman takes on is Catholic Church authority and her stance on Papal infallibility.  First he presents a comparison between Protestantism and Catholicism and denies the oppressiveness of Church authority.

 

It is the custom with Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private Judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, 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 presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;—it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power,—into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.

What is implied in that paragraph is that the Church’s doctrinal pronouncements are based on a long discernment of reasoned between internal factions—between “willful intellects and wild passions”—that sometimes lasts centuries before reaching a conclusion.  It is not an impulsive pronouncement but a judgement made on the tradition and development doctrine.  Newman is writing Apologia and this argument in 1864, just ten years from one of the most controversial of the Catholic Church’s declaration of an infallible dogma.

 

We priests need not be hypocrites, though we be called upon to believe in the Immaculate Conception. To that large class of minds, who believe in Christianity after our manner,—in the particular temper, spirit, and light, (whatever word is used,) in which Catholics believe it,—there is no burden at all in holding that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without original sin; indeed, it is a simple fact to say, that Catholics have not come to believe it because it is defined, but that it was defined because they believed it.

And Newman goes on to say that it took eight centuries, and that it is rare for the Church to even make such dogmatic declarations.

 

Now the instance which I have been taking suggests another remark; the number of those (so called) new doctrines will not oppress us, if it takes eight centuries to promulgate even one of them. Such is about the length of time through which the preparation has been carried on for the definition of the Immaculate Conception. This of course is an extraordinary case; but it is difficult to say what is ordinary, considering how few are the formal occasions on which the voice of Infallibility has been solemnly lifted up. It is to the Pope in Ecumenical Council that we look, as to the normal seat of Infallibility: now there have been only eighteen such Councils since Christianity was,—an average of one to a century,—and of these Councils some passed no doctrinal decree at all, others were employed on only one, and many of them were concerned with only elementary points of the Creed.

Finally Newman leaves it completely unambiguous that he has converted to Catholicism with his whole heart and that he accepts all the doctrines and dogmas the Church has declared. 

 

And now, having thus described it, I profess my own absolute submission to its claim. I believe the whole revealed dogma as taught by the Apostles, as committed by the Apostles to the Church, and as declared by the Church to me. I receive it, as it is infallibly interpreted by the authority to whom it is thus committed, and (implicitly) as it shall be, in like manner, further interpreted by that same authority till the end of time. I submit, moreover, to the universally received traditions of the Church, in which lies the matter of those new dogmatic definitions which are from time to time made, and which in all times are the clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined. And I submit myself to those other decisions of the Holy See, theological or not, through the organs which it has itself appointed, which, waiving the question of their infallibility, on the lowest ground come to me with a claim to be accepted and obeyed. Also, I consider that, gradually and in the course of ages, Catholic inquiry has taken certain definite shapes, and has thrown itself into the form of a science, with a method and a phraseology of its own, under the intellectual handling of great minds, such as St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas; and I feel no temptation at all to break in pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us for these latter days.

It is interesting Newman uses the form of the word “submit” three times in that short paragraph.  It is a conscious effort to contrast himself from Martin Luther, who refused to submit himself to Church authority, and, if I may, contrast himself to Lucifer who refused to serve God.  What a fine book by a future saint. 

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Peej Comment:

I’m curious if Anglicanism was lacking in the regard of theology on the topic of human nature and sin.

My Reply:

Good question PEEJ. I can't say I know definitively but it wold not surprise me if Anglicanism did not have a dogmatic answer. Since Anglicanism can span from Low Church Puratanism to High Church Anglo-Catholic I can see them not having a position since a position would cause an internal dispute. But that is just speculation on my part.

Peej Comment:

Indeed, submission does come up frequently in this final chapter. I consider the virtue of “docility” or “openness to be taught” for Catholics. This can only come by true love of Christ and his body the Church. For docility is usually considered a negative thing in our culture, but for Christ it is not only acceptable but necessary.

My Reply:

Yes, "Blessed are the Meek, for They Will Inherit the Earth."