Juan R. Velez - Passion for Truth: The Life of John Henry Newman

I T is the hope of many that very soon we will be able to appreciate the irony of John Henry Newmans retort to the poor woman who made the mistake of calling him a saint: Saints are not literary men, he wrote, they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales. Literary men do indeed make saints and great leaders too, witness Augustine and Thomas More, but there is so much more to Newman than his own humble estimate. When Pope Benedict raised him to the altars in September, 2010, he extolled Blessed John Henry Newmans extraordinary intellectual contributions, but the focus of his praise was Newmans lifelong devotion to the priestly ministry as a pastor of souls. It is fitting that in the latest Newman momentand there are certainly more to comethe Victorian sage, the master of English prose, and the greatest of modern Catholic thinkers is associated with corporal works of mercy directed at the poor of the Birmingham slums.

The Holy Father, who as a young theologian, was deeply influenced by Newmans seminal thought on conscience, the role of the laity, and the development of doctrine, has the same problem we all have in getting hold of Newman: the sheer largeness as well as the special demands of the project. In the fearless pursuit of truth, Newmans preoccupation with wholeness, which he defined in contrast to theory, to the isms of the day, requires an intense and persistent inquiry rooted in history, doctrine, and the pressing demands of the world. Wholeness requires consistency, Newmans high ideal in life and thought, but therein lies a paradox for those who insist on traditional categories. Discussing the problem of the Newman biographer, Ian Ker points out that Newman may be called, without inconsistency, both conservative and liberal, progressive and traditional, cautious and radical, dogmatic yet practical, idealistic but realistic.

It is as a Catholic thinker, not as a theorist, that dubious hero of his time and ours, that Newmans grand mission comes into focus and his discourse becomes lucid. He attempts no less in his vast and varied canon than to understand what he called the Providential system of the world, whether approached through Church history, apologetics, or philosophy, not to mention poetry, fiction, and the device of satire, all of which tools were at his command; yet throughout he is rooted in here-and-now practical concernshe wrote only to calls, he tells uswhether moving the Tractarian argument, attacking the corrosive sources of liberal secularism, or moderating the extremes of Church parties. And always he is the shrewd and penetrating guide to the duties of daily Christian life.

I think of the whole magnificent skein of Newmans discourse spread over his long life as answering to his own argument in the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, where he reasons that real assent to religious truth, which we are bound by conscience to seek, according to our gifts, comes only through the accumulation of probabilities sufficient for certitude, so that the pursuit of truth, or the real as he preferred to call it, is instinct with faith. Newmans life, marked by holiness, is a compelling model of the steady, quiet progress of spiritual discernment beneath the stormy events of lifeand who in his age was more involved in controversy than Newman?where we mount up the heavenly ladder step by step, where transformation is like the unfolding leaves in spring.

Newman, himself among the greatest of autobiographers, is by needs better understood through his life story than a man of theory or system, but the depth and complexity of his life precludes the definitive biography. Each Newman biography adds some vital perspective, whether it is Wilfred Wards exposition of Newmans basic theology, Meriol Trevors invaluable picture of his daily life, or Father Kers attention to the shape and power of Newmans imagination, a neglected aspect of his genius. When I met Father Juan in 2005 at Mercer House, the Opus Dei residence in Princeton, we talked about, among other things, an article he had just finished, later incorporated in this biography, on Newmans near-fatal illness in Sicily as a young man. This episode brought about a great interior realization and determined Blessed John Henrys course in life. I was struck at the time and then again when I read the manuscript of Passion for Truth that Father Juans worthy pursuit as a biographer has been to search out what was essentially Catholic in the young Newman that moved him inexorably towards that most famous conversion many years later and to recognize that it was that same steady vision in the midst of turmoil, that unflinching cooperation with grace, that was soon to make Blessed John Henry Newman a passionate truth-seeker, the master architect of the Catholic Revival in England, and some day, God-willing, a Doctor of the Church.

DR. JOHN HULSMAN
Delray Beach, Florida
March 31, 2011

Dr. Hulsman is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Rider University and editor of The Rule of Our Warfare, John Henry Newman and the true Christian Life, A Reader.