In 1874, three years before St. Francis de Sales was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman was asked to lend support to the cause by writing to Rome. He declined. In explaining his decision, he pointed out that while in “the Canonization indeed of Saints it is intelligible to appeal even to the popular voice, because sanctity can be apprehended,” it seemed to him that “none except the learned can judge of learned men, and none but . . . the Holy Father himself, can pronounce about Doctors.” And now Peter has spoken, and his 266th successor will soon proclaim Newman the 38th Doctor of the Universal Church.
This is a moment of rejoicing for all Christians and particularly English-speaking ones. We now have a doctor who not only speaks our language but is widely recognized as one of the finest prose writers. This is an extraordinary gift.
As Newman’s own words make clear, this proclamation is not about heroic sanctity but about eminent teaching. In the 485-page Positio Super Ecclesiae Doctoratu, the official “argument” or “case” for Newman to be declared a Doctor of the Church, printed for the cardinals and theological consultors last December, the key chapter (forty-four pages in length) comprises declarations on and references to Newman by popes, councils, dicasteries, commissions, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The bulk of papal declarations come from St. Paul VI, St. John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. And how fitting it is that in four successive pontificates, Newman should be declared venerable, blessed, saint, and now doctor.
In the longest chapter of the Positio, Newman’s eminent teaching is summarized under seventeen headings. These cover his seminal contributions on the development of doctrine, faith and reason, conscience, the Church Fathers, ecclesiology, scriptural inspiration, and Tradition, as well as contributions in more “practical” matters such as preaching, education, and spiritual direction. Others deal with current concerns such as ecumenism, the “new evangelization,” and the sensus fidei.
What are we to make of this dizzying array of insights, not to mention Newman’s vast literary legacy: some thirty-six volumes in his uniform edition, plus several posthumously published works, together with thirty-two fat volumes of letters and diaries? Is there any way of distilling his thought into a few neat categories? What particular message does St. John Henry have to share with our modern world?
Rather than single out any particular contribution, I would point out that key ideas such as conscience, development, education, and the rival claims of faith and reason weave in and out of all Newman’s writings. It is as if he views reality in myriad ways in seeking to piece together the jigsaw of creation (and its Creator). He views reality in a highly intuitive manner and excels at holding disparate truths together in creative tension. It could be said that his approach to discerning truth is both East and West, and that it draws on both the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition as well as the continental.
This amounts to a new way of viewing the world. It brings in the religious imagination, sacramental vision, the personal, subjective, relational, and existential, in contradistinction to approaches that privilege the objective, systematic, and the scholastic—and which thereby complement the thinking of, inter alia, the Angelic Doctor.
Let me sketch four ways in which this new view might prove fruitful. Firstly, Newman’s eminent teaching on education emphasizes the relational dimension of education, the role of the imagination, learning for its own sake, and gaining an integrative habit of mind and a “connected view,” all of which offer wonderful counters to corrosive and reductive trends in education that fail to account for the fullness of what it means to be human.
Secondly, in the world of patristics, Newman can bring the Church Fathers into conversation with the modern world, in this way enabling patristic scholarship to speak to Christians at large, just as he and his fellow Tractarians attempted to do in the 1830s and 1840s.
Thirdly, it is worth exploring what evangelization the “Newman way” means as part of his prophetic contribution to the twenty-first-century Church and its challenges. His genius for friendship is a key ingredient in this.
Fourthly, Newman’s view opens new horizons in the world of poetry, literature, film, and the arts in general. Seeing the world “the Newman way” would be energizing and uplifting. Minds and hearts could be formed along Newmanian lines and with a Newmanian ethos. People could be taught to think like Newman, to see the world through a Newmanian lens.
The modern world desperately needs an updating in its theological and philosophical thinking to contend with the secularizing influences brought about by modern thinkers—and in Newman’s thought, it finds a language and a guide for such a response.
