Catholic Thought discussion
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
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Chapter 1
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Also, he had a very keen sense of the material and immaterial. And then the realization at the age of 15 that he would live a single/celibate life. This is astounding. He was set apart from the beginning.
I hate to admit it b/c I know there is gold in this book, however it is really difficult to get into. It reads like a journal, a more of a personal record than something written for someone to internalize. Additionally all his influencers are exclusively male. Can that be? I will have to double back to check if he mentions Our Mother.Finding "home" at the Newman Society in college I read on mining for the gold I am sure is there somewhere.
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Now as to women in his life, he was a bachelor, a priest, and a cardinal and I think the sexes didn't mix as much in Victorian times. I don't think he would have had as much interaction with women as we might think coming from today's world. He does mention his mother in that first chapter.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
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Oh yeah, I meant to explain that in the Introduction because Kingsley is apparently the reason for the book. Unfortunately I got side tracked and forgot. Kingsley attacked Newman for his conversion, and this book was a response to the attack. It's there for those that are reading the 1864 version. For some reason Newman took it out of the 1865 version. I'm reading the 1865 version, so it was not in front of me. I'll try to explain it in the coming days.
In my reading I sometimes get stuck on a particular word or its usage. in this chapter I'm stuck on his discussion of justification, heaven and hell, where he attempts to distinguish between a person justified and a regenerate. His use of regenerate as a noun sent me to the Kindle dictionary, which defines it as a verb. My problem with that as a poetry nerd/exe English teacher it strikes me that "regenerate" rhymes with "degenerate." Kindle further includes Wikipedia and its many uses of the verb "regenerate" in various fields, such as science, literature, etc. but does not include religious association with the word, nor its use as a noun. Maybe I'm making too much of it, but I think it bears on a potential topic for discussion of his attempts to discern the difference between the Calvinist and the Catholic doctrines on one's readiness for salvation. Or not.
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I have the paperback Dover Thrift Edition, and it looks like they combined the two editions. There is a two-part preface, and in addition to the Apologia a 130 page appendix with all sorts of supporting material in the back.
Thank you, Kerstin! I think that's the direction I was heading for, but I think you nailed it. I don't think we often use "degenerate" as a verb, but we speak of a seriously unredeemed person as a degenerate.
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I found his initial religious conversion to be very important.
When I was fifteen, (in the autumn of 1816,) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond the conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, the Rev. Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford, who was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me, was the effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of the school of Calvin. One of the first books I read was a work of Romaine's; I neither recollect the title nor the contents, except one doctrine, which of course I do not include among those which I believe to have come from a divine source, viz. the doctrine of final perseverance. I received it at once, and believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious, (and of which I still am more certain than that I have hands and feet,) would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory. I have no consciousness that this belief had any tendency whatever to lead me to be careless about pleasing God. I retained it till the age of twenty-one, when it gradually faded away; but I believe that it had some influence on my opinions, in the direction of those childish imaginations which I have already mentioned, viz. in isolating me from the objects which surrounded me, in confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator;—for while I considered myself predestined to salvation, my mind did not dwell upon others, as fancying them simply passed over, not predestined to eternal death. I only thought of the mercy to myself.
In this one paragraph he takes us from fifteen years old to twenty-one, which are rather critical years in the formation of a person. It is interesting he had his religious experience at the age of fifteen, which I cannot relate to. At fifteen I had no inclination for religion. My “religious experience” would happen in my forties. Was it a different time, or was Newman differently inclined? Well, he was definitely differently inclined than me, but there are today lots of adolescents and young men who are inclined to the religious life. Otherwise we wouldn’t have priests. But it was a different age as well. The 19th century saw a resurgence of faith after the decline and persecution of the Enlightenment. In many ways it paralleled the Romantic era. Just think of William Wordsworth and how religious he became as he grew older. I’m thinking that faith was in the air, and a bright, intellectually inclined young man would absorb it.
What is most interesting in that quoted paragraph is that Newman’s conversion was of a Calvinist for of Protestantism. This was not the form of Protestantism of his parents. Newman doesn’t exactly tell us what form of Christianity were his parents, but the Vélez biography I quoted in the Introduction states that Newman had been brought up in a “conventional Anglican family that attended Sunday services in church and held morning and evening prayers at home” (p. 11). Now I would imagine that in 1816 or prior “conventional Anglicanism” was not High Church Anglo Catholic, but I would be pretty sure it wasn’t Low Church Evangelical. It probably had many of the attributes of Catholicism since Newman mentions his dependence on angels and crossing himself. The sending off of children to boarding schools—which English families of means seemed to do—can create a divergence in cultural foundations between the generations. Here we see that Newman until the age of twenty-one had adhered to an Evangelical Calvinism, of which pre-destination and God’s control of everything is paramount.
I remember when Newman was canonized and I brought it up on a discussion board that he had been a convert to Catholicism. A number of Evangelical Protestants didn’t think much of it given that many are now used to Anglicans converting to Catholicism. So I looked it up back then to find he had started out as an Evangelical. I pointed it out and was an interesting observation for them.
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There is one other principle, which I gained from Dr. Hawkins, more directly bearing upon Catholicism, than any that I have mentioned; and that is the doctrine of Tradition. When I was an Undergraduate, I heard him preach in the University Pulpit his celebrated sermon on the subject, and recollect how long it appeared to me, though he was at that time a very striking preacher; but, when I read it and studied it as his gift, it made a most serious impression upon me. He does not go one step, I think, beyond the high Anglican doctrine, nay he does not reach it; but he does his work thoroughly, and his view was in him original, and his subject was a novel one at the time. He lays down a proposition, self-evident as soon as stated, to those who have at all examined the structure of Scripture, viz. that the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church; for instance to the Catechism, and to the Creeds. He considers, that, after learning from them the doctrines of Christianity, the inquirer must verify them by Scripture.
What is interesting in what he says here is that one cannot develop doctrine from scripture alone but that doctrine came from the tradition of the apostles and was proven in scripture. And this makes a lot of sense. The Gospels are not a manual. They tell a story of events and sayings, but they do not put forth complete doctrine. You can “prove” lots of things by looking at a text, including contradictory things. The doctrine comes first, put out by the apostles and early church fathers, and then you go back to the story and show how to interpret the events in light of the doctrine. The tradition, in effect, shapes our understanding of the scriptures. I hope that makes sense. Pope Benedict XVI I believe has made the same observation.
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What binds us humans together is our stories and story-telling. We all have a story that is bound to our identity. Everything we convey are in essence stories. And the master story-teller is God, our Creator. He more than anyone knows how we are knit together and what moves us. Jesus's parables are the most powerful stories ever told. They penetrate to the very essence of who we are.
Back to Newman's insight. A doctrine then is an abstraction of the truth of what these Scripture stories convey.
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“the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, but only to prove it, and that, if we would learn doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church”
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The first of these was what may be called, in a large sense of the word, the Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen,—a doctrine, which embraces in its fulness, not only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe about Sacraments properly so called; but also the article of "the Communion of Saints;" and likewise the Mysteries of the faith. The connexion of this philosophy of religion with what is sometimes called "Berkeleyism" has been mentioned above; I knew little of Berkeley at this time except by name; nor have I ever studied him.
As you can see, Newman is clearly moving toward High Anglicanism here. The notion of sacraments as being material types of things unseen is exactly the Catholic understanding of the sacraments. As to the second principle, as I understand it, it rejects the notion that we come to belief not through a judgment of the “probability” of facts, which can lead to skepticism, but through faith and love.
I considered that Mr. Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it. In matters of religion, he seemed to say, it is not merely probability which makes us intellectually certain, but probability as it is put to account by faith and love. It is faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in itself. Faith and love are directed towards an Object; in the vision of that Object they live; it is that Object, received in faith and love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal conviction. Thus the argument from Probability, in the matter of religion, became an argument from Personality, which in fact is one form of the argument from Authority.
Hopefully I captured that correctly. I’m not sure if this is a more Catholic notion but there is a strain of Protestantism that is much more utilitarian and of the physical world. The very notion of the Eucharist being the true body of Christ defies the immediate common sense and relies on personal faith in something beyond the senses. I think this is what Newman is alluding to here.
If I am correct on the understanding of the second principle, then both principles point to a continuity between the physical world and the spiritual, which is I believe one of the main differences between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants I think have a much sharper division—even a barrier—between the physical and spiritual that sometimes it seems they tend toward the gnostic.
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Right on target. One could also say they live very much in a dis-enchanted world. Take prayer. They will do intercessory prayer for other individuals but engaging in intercessory prayer with Mary and the saints is anathema. Same goes for angels. The idea of a guardian angels is fine, but the hosts of fierce spiritual beings they are are not conceptualized. One could summarize (with apologies to St. Augustine), give me spirituality, but not too much.
One aspect I notice throughout Chapter 1 is Newman’s draw to the mystical and the fantastical. The fact that the material world is only the instrument for the supernatural in a sacramental way appeals to me. Newman believed this early in his childhood, which reminds me of Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”. I can definitely sense Newman’s influence on Chesterton and later the Inklings.I also detect a skepticism of Liberalism based on this lack of the mystical and its isolation of reason from faith.
Newman emphasizes how faith can bring reason beyond itself, which has been a common theme in the post-conciliar popes (JPII, Benedict, Francis).
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Manny wrote: "Oh Christine, he was big on the Blessed Mother but it may be when he was a Catholic convert or close to it. He's got sermons on the Marian dogmas.Now as to women in his life, he was a bachelor, a..."
Manny wrote: "Oh Christine, he was big on the Blessed Mother but it may be when he was a Catholic convert or close to it. He's got sermons on the Marian dogmas.
Now as to women in his life, he was a bachelor, a..."
Thank you Manny this is helpful; puts things in perspective and makes sense.
Kerstin wrote: "The purpose of this book is in response to the criticism of the Protestant clergyman Charles Kingsley, whom Newman says he never met in person. From that I surmise this is not a comprehensive autob..."Thank you Kerstin. This is also very helpful. I was struggling with what I interpreted as his vanity. Now I understand the reason for the book and now the content makes sense to me.
Madeleine wrote: "In my reading I sometimes get stuck on a particular word or its usage. in this chapter I'm stuck on his discussion of justification, heaven and hell, where he attempts to distinguish between a pers..."I found this too Madeliene. I am reading it on Kindle and am very thankful for the dictionary feature. I find he is using the second or even third definition of the word. Slows me down, however I enjoy the learning.
Manny wrote: "Newman throughout Chapter 1 lays down markers of Catholic doctrine that may not have been influential in this early period but would I think come to bear upon his conversion in the future. We see h..."I picked up on this as well Manny. I reread it a few times. It makes sense to me also however I wonder from where does Tradition come? The Jews? Moses?
Hi All,Obviously I am behind. I find this book very challenging. There is so much in each paragraph. I almost wish we were all in a room each reading a paragraph which in turn leads to open discussion. Just like we did in school!
I can say that I envy his lifestyle. I dream of the days when I can read, ponder, and have people over to discuss grand themes. The travel is attractive too. Does anyone still live like this I wonder? Will I be able to do this when I retire or will I be too tired from my current daily grind?
This group give me a taste of that lifestyle and for that I am grateful. :)
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That is a wonderful life of reading, contemplating, and writing. We only get a taste of it here. Unfortunately we all have other jobs and responsibilities. But I too am grateful for the little bit. :)
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Yes, he is very precise in his vocabulary and the usage of words changes over time. This certainly poses challenges for us who aren't as linguistically nimble. :-)
Summary
Newman divides his chapters by religious opinions to a certain age. In 1833 Newman would have been 32 years old, and he takes us through his adultescence, his university years, his ordination of Anglican clergyman, his assignment as parish vicar, and finally in 1833 a fateful trip on the Mediterranean where he spent time in the city of Rome. Newman mentions a number of people who were either influential to his development or important in his career. I won’t list them all but these I think were the most important: Thomas Scott, a historian, Joseph Milner, a Church historian, Dr. Whatley, professor at Oxford and future Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Hawkins, vicar at St. Mary’s and a curate at Oxford, John Keble, a fellow professor (I think) at Oxford and perhaps his best friend at the time, Hurrell Foude, a student at Oxford and someone who had a great admiration for the Church of Rome. In 1832 Newman took a trip to the Mediterranean with Froude where he encountered a number of Catholic devotions and practices.