Newman's Vision of Faith

By Louis Bouyer

Fr. Louis Bouyer, CO., regarded as one of the premier theologians of this century, is a convert to Catholicism and a priest of the Oratory, as was John Henry Newman. He has dedicated much of his life to the study of Newman and his works. He is the author of more than forty books, a theological advisor at Vatican II, and a consultant on theology and ecumenism for the Holy See.

In this book, Bouyer shows how Newman's clear vision of the present and future problems confronting Christianity, and his convictions on how Christians must meet these challenges, made him a man ahead of his times, not well understood by his contemporaries. Newman, whose ideas anticipated many of the teachings of Vatican II, encouraged an openness to the world in order to better understand how to Christianize it, a rediscovery of the Fathers of the Church, a deeper understanding and firmer grasp of Scripture, and a greater emphasis on the valuable role of the laity in the Church.

quot;Newman's was a clear and profound realization of what is fundamental and permanent in Christianity—Christianity as a reality of life, divine and human, which by its very nature calls for constant development and renewal and which Newman was to discuss in his 'Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine' at the time of his conversion. It might seem that this conversion brought him into the Church on the eve of the Church's own disintegration. Let us rather say that he was called, without realizing it himself, to awaken within the Catholic Church of today what she needs in order to reveal herself again to the world as the one true Church which that world so badly needs, now as ever."
— Louis Bouyer, CO., from the Introduction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781681493534

Louis Bouyer

Louis Bouyer (1913–2004) was a member of the French Oratory and one of the most respected and versatile Catholic scholars and theologians of the twentieth century. A friend of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and a cofounder of the international review Communio, Bouyer was a former Lutheran minister who entered the Catholic Church in 1939. He became a leading figure in the Catholic biblical and liturgical movements of the twentieth century, was an influence on the Second Vatican Council, and became well known for his excellent books on history of Christian spirituality. In addition to his many writings, Bouyer lectured widely across Europe and America.

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NEWMAN’S VISION OF FAITH

NEWMAN’S

VISION OF FAITH

A Theology for Times of General Apostasy

BY

LOUIS BOUYER

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

I am greatly indebted to the friends who have read this book in manuscript form and have helped me to better its English, especially Dom Aelred Sillem, Abbot of Quarr (Isle of Wight) and my colleague at the St. Ignatius Institute, Dr. Erasmo Leiva.

Cover by Marcia Ryan

With ecclesiastical approval

© 1986 Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-0-89870-113-5 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-68149-353-4 (E)

Library of Congress catalogue number 86-81425

Printed in the United States of America

To the Right Reverend

Monsignor Cornelius J. Burns

Prelate of the House of the Pope

Pastor of Star of the Sea, San Francisco

the following volume is respectfully inscribed

with every feeling of esteem and attachment

and with a grateful remembrance

of many kindnesses received

(Easter 1984)

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Man before God

2 The Mystery of Faith

3 Deus Revelatus ut Absconditus

4 Our Life as Hidden with Christ in God

5 The Sacramental World: The Church

Conclusion: Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem

Appendix: A Key to Reading the Parochial and Plain Sermons

Notes

INTRODUCTION

It is not an exaggeration to say that Newman was little or not at all understood by his contemporaries. Not that there is anything obscure in either his language or his style. All his works are characterized rather by an unusual lucidity and clarity, even in his treatment of the most intricate problems, whether historical, philosophical or theological. The point is, precisely, that in the circumstances that then obtained, he saw the root of a future that others did not see or did not want to see.

Even more specifically, we may say that he was one of the very few who realized, in contrast to the optimism so common in the nineteenth century, that society was on the verge of a completely different epoch, one in which even the appearances of a Christian culture would disappear. We must here emphasize that such optimism was true not only of the large majority of Christians but equally of those who considered themselves already post-Christians, as we would say today. Typical was George Eliot (one of Newman’s favorite authors), persuaded as she was that nothing could be easier than to keep, and perhaps to purify, Christian ethics while dropping Christian dogma.

As is shown by his correspondence with Matthew Arnold, Newman rather sympathized with those who, like this son of the famous headmaster of Rugby, tried to persuade themselves that George Eliot’s goal could and should be hoped for; but he nonetheless felt how precarious such hope was. Let us recall the last lines of Dover Beach:

     The Sea of Faith

     Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

     Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

     But now I only hear

     Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

     Retreating, to the breath

     Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

     And naked shingles of the world.

Newman however did not stop at that. He not only had a full view of the situation—and therefore of the entirely new predicament in which the Church was soon to find herself—he saw, and no less clearly, what the Church, what Christians had to do in order to meet the challenge and that they should do it as quickly as possible. This last point, undoubtedly, is what made his teaching so unpalatable to many ecclesiastics (Catholic or otherwise) of his times, and maybe to a good number of them still today.

From the teaching of the last Council, nothing has been more willingly accepted, at least in words, than a necessary and far too belated openness to the world. Newman was no less insistent on the theme. Perhaps he was even more precise than Vatican II itself could be: he showed how openness means that we should not only know this world of ours exactly enough to understand and sympathize with it, to realize that even in its opposition to, or rejection of, Christianity there may be some genuine perception of actual defects in contemporary Christians and in some of the methods and conceptions of the Church’s leaders themselves; but, in addition, he felt no less strongly that such an urgently needed sympathy had to remain critical, in the best possible meaning of the word.

In other words, it could not just be a matter of letting oneself be carried along by the tide, even at the price of losing one’s grip on the essentials of Christianity. Far from it! That sympathy could be fruitful, for our fellowmen as for ourselves, only if it were accompanied by what has since been called a return to the sources. This implies, of course, that the sources must be rediscovered, not in a state of dead fixity, but rather one of unending creativity.

For Newman, such a return involved a renewed knowledge of those first builders of the Church, in the post-apostolic age, who have been called the Fathers of the Church because they achieved a constructive encounter of the gospel with a non-Christian world. This encounter was so very constructive that many people sooner or later came to think that the Fathers had made of the world as such an entirely Christian world; but so to think is a mistake refuted by a minimal firsthand knowledge of the Fathers: they could never conceive the illusion of a thoroughly christianized world.

Together with the rediscovery of the Fathers, the needed renewal had to come, Newman thought, through a closer contact with and a firmer grasp of Scripture, the document par excellence of authentic Christianity, as it had been traditionally accepted in the Church. And it goes without saying that Newman, long before becoming a Catholic, had been persuaded that the Bible was never to be divorced, in its use and its interpretation, from the living understanding of it to be found only in the one, true Church.

He went even much farther, on this point again, than what was the current teaching and practice in the Church of the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. As he would make crystal clear, it was not a matter of just having the Bible along with the tradition, but rather of living the Bible within the tradition. This is exactly what Vatican II was to teach in perhaps the deepest, and certainly the least read or studied, of its texts. There are not two independent sources, to be reconciled more or less happily; there is only one source, to be seen always as a living power, using complementary but inseparable means of expression.

In the same way Newman was to show that the tradition of the Church, keeping the Bible as its nucleus, has two aspects, neither of which may exist without the other. This he had seen already as an Anglican, and he was to maintain the principle and develop it more carefully still as a Catholic. For tradition, in its authenticity, is a matter neither of pure spontaneity in the expression of the truth emerging from the Christian life as it develops nor of an authority acting in independence, not to say ignorance, of the life of the whole Christian body. Tradition, as he saw it, proceeds from the constant interplay between what he called the prophetic and the episcopal tradition, not as being two traditions, but as a single one, which could not survive outside the constant cooperation of the pastors and their flocks, including all their members.

Now, such a vision of the Church implies a rediscovery of the very positive role of the laity. It does not diminish the importance of the leadership of the episcopal hierarchy but rather renews the Church’s own understanding of herself This vision could be seen as itself a counterpart of a revitalized vision of Christian truth, and it is far more the vision of the Fathers of the Church than of any later school of theologians. It sprang from the consideration of Christian belief as not just a belief in a series of propositions, each seen in abstraction from the whole; rather, it involved a reappraisal of Christianity as the great Mystery, a mystery of unity and life, of the organic unity of the true life: the life of God in Himself, seen, as the Fathers had seen it, as the source of life and charity in the Church, the life of the love of truth, of a truth which is the truth of love.

In other words, the definition of dogma by authority, and behind it all the work of authentic theology, had to be rediscovered, not as tending to dissipate the mysterious character of Christianity, but as preserving it from all kinds of alterations while exhibiting all its inexhaustible fecundity. This meant, for Newman, that the mystery of Christianity must never be pulverized into a mere congeries of mysteries, their fundamental unity dissolving into a disconnected multiplicity.

Rather, as the Fathers and the greatest of the schoolmen had recognized, the mystery of Christianity was simply the very mystery of Christ which itself opens out to us, through the Incarnation, the mystery of God in His Trinity. As a result we are introduced into this mystery’s transcendent reality. And therefore the mystery appears as being eventually the mystery of the Church in her unity: the union of all her members with Christ the Head, through the Spirit, so that all become adopted by and recapitulated into the Father Himself, seen as the sole source of all.

This organic view of the Church, including such a vital view of the Christian truth itself, had been developed by Newman at Oxford in his lectures on The Prophetical Office of the Church, which he was, at the end of his life, to reedit and complete in the Via Media. As to his view of the Christian faith itself, it finds its first fully articulate expression in The Arians of the Fourth Century (his first theological volume), and this will remain the soul of the whole argument of A Grammar of Assent, his last great production in the same field.

Newman had found this vision of the faith and the Church in the Greek Fathers, and he had seen it from the first as what Christians had to rediscover if they wanted to have once again a Christianity with a view of the world and the life of man within it that could prove competitive, that is, able to face the unbelief of an age which, for Newman, was to be the near future and, for us, has become our very real present.

Newman’s view of the Church is no less in evidence in his Lectures on Justification, a work which, as one of the greatest contemporary Anglican thinkers has said, provides the model for the only kind of ecumenism able to avoid the pitfalls of political compromise or unfruitful equivocations. For it is in that vision of the mystery, as conceived by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Colossians—Christ in us, the hope of glory—that Newman sees the possibility of reintegrating the salvation of man by faith alone (the core of Protestantism) within the body of Catholic tradition. Needless to say, we have here an understanding of the truth of Catholicism as the truth of wholeness as opposed to a deficient one-sidedness. For Newman, it had to be combined with an elucidation of what is decidedly positive and not just negative in the Protestant principle.

It is not surprising therefore if Newman, when studying in Rome for Catholic ordination, insisted that Catholic theologians could no longer drop Thomas Aquinas as merely a thinker of the past. The irony of the situation is that such a statement was seen by the teachers then in authority as evidence of his dubious orthodoxy. . . while it would remain a prejudice of later neo-Thomists that Newman, not being a Thomist in their restricted interpretation, could not be really sound! Both instances show that, as a genuine disciple of the Fathers, Newman had grasped the true mind of St. Thomas, and for that very reason he was ready to meet in the Fathers’ spirit the questions—whatever they might be—that other ages would raise.

Newman’s was a clear and profound realization of what is fundamental and permanent in Christianity—Christianity as a reality of life, divine and human, which by its very nature calls for constant development and renewal. And this Newman was to discuss not only at the time of his conversion in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, but even earlier and more in depth in the last of his Oxford University Sermons. But such a realization could not be reached, much less maintained, without a high level of culture. Soon after having been received into the Church, Newman came to see that it was hopeless then to persuade the authorities that the clergy needed culture more than ever. He tried at least to convince these authorities that in any case the laity, having to live in the world, could not dispense with such culture, especially to the degree to which they were to assume major responsibilities there.

The very fact that Newman at the same time insisted also that the laity were to receive the faith, not just passively, but intelligently and therefore actively, was decisive in making people in high places in the Church look at him with suspicion. (The essay On Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine was in this sense the complement to his Idea of a University.) However, it is here perhaps more than anywhere else that we see what makes Newman’s relevance today not only quite as great as in his own times but greater than ever.

But all these views, which Newman was to evolve through the course of his life and ministry, successively in the Anglican and in the Catholic Church, can be seen as it were, in their nascent state in his Parochial and Plain Sermons, preached in his church of Saint Mary the Virgin when he was becoming at Oxford the leading figure of the Catholic revival within the Church of England. There we see all his ideas subtly interwoven, but not in any kind of abstract speculation. Rather, they emerge, each finding its true place within an organic pattern, precisely as they are evoked by the unavoidable necessity that a genuine Christianity be lived in the midst of that incipient intellectual and moral chaos that was soon to become our own world.

It is in these Sermons that we shall try to witness the first emergence of Newman’s views and to see them progressively combined into that living wholeness which was to prove the irresistible impulse toward his conversion. It might seem that this conversion brought him into the Church on the eve of the Church’s own disintegration. Let us rather say that he was called, without realizing it himself, to awaken within the Catholic Church of today what she must rediscover in order to reveal herself again to the world as the one true Church which that world so badly needs, now as ever.

Chapter One

MAN BEFORE GOD

It can be said that in the Parochial and Plain Sermons we have all of Christian doctrine treated as a whole. Yet these sermons do not, for all that, pretend to constitute anything like a summa, for they do not aim at giving an articulated view of the Christian faith. This would imply an emphasis upon abstract speculation, reducing revelation—the divine Word ultimately made man—to technical concepts. Rather, as all sermons should do, they tend to keep intact both the freshness and the concreteness of the divine Word: to make it understood as a word of life. For it is addressed to us by the living God in order to make us live. In these sermons, therefore, it is not primarily the thinker but the priest, the man of God, who addresses us.

This means, first, that he speaks to us within the framework of the congregational worship of the Church to encourage us to realize fully what we do when we take part in this worship. He wants us to hear the Word of God there as it should be understood and accepted: not as the word of a professor, of a man teaching us what we do not yet know and are curious to learn, but as the voice of our Lord and Savior, who calls out to us in order to draw us away from the paths of sin and death, in order to bring us to the one way of life, in holiness.

Better still, through these sermons, we always sense the word of our Maker: of Him who made us after his own image and who intends to renew in us His likeness, which has become obscured and defaced. But not only does the divine Word, as expressed in the Sermons, tend to our salvation by restoring in us the divine image blurred by our infidelity: the preached word conveys to us the very expression of the eternal Word, God-made-man, who is the Son in whom God, as it were, projects Himself; and such a word aims at nothing less than calling to life within us the true sonship, the true life of our divine Model.

This, we may say, remains the unique focus of all these sermons of Newman: to make us realize what it means to be called children of God and to make us become such in fact in Christ.

What we have just expressed by combining the two phrases most characteristic of the teachings of St. John and St. Paul is what will give unity to Newman’s presentation of Christian doctrine: the unity of a unique experience into which all our life, individual and collective—the life of the individual Christian within the supremely interpersonal society which is the Christian Church—is to be taken up fully and fully renovated in and through authentic worship.

From that proceeds the intensely personal character of Newman’s preaching. It is never addressed to the intellect abstracted from our whole personality. It aims directly at that nucleus of our total being which the Bible calls the heart. Not that there could be anything sentimental or emotional in these sermons: it is one of their constant preoccupations to