In fact, they adhered to what their son, John Henry Newman, was later to call ‘the national religion of England’: that is, ‘Bible religion’, consisting ‘not in rites or creeds, but mainly in having the Bible read in church, in the family, and in private’. He himself was ‘brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible’. Indeed, Newman knew a great deal of the Bible by heart, as I discovered when I first edited one of his works and found that many of the scriptural quotations did not exactly correspond with either the Authorized (King James) or the Douai version which was then the only Catholic translation. We know that when Newman as a Catholic priest was preaching at the Birmingham Oratory, which he founded, he used to take into the pulpit the Douai Bible so that he could be sure to quote from the only permissible Catholic version rather than by heart from the beautiful Authorized Version, so much of which he had committed to memory as a boy and a young man, but which in those pre-ecumenical days was forbidden to Catholics.

Now, I bid you recollect that he to whom these things were done was Almighty God.One of his most famous sermons, the last he ever preached as an Anglican, ‘The Parting of Friends’, consists almost entirely of quotations from the Bible as Newman bids his own poignant farewell to the Church of England by recalling the great farewells of the Old and New Testaments, particularly, of course, the night of the Last Supper when Jesus said goodbye to his disciples. As one might expect in those days before Vatican II when Catholics were not officially encouraged to read the Bible, Newman quotes from Scripture far less in his Catholic sermons than in his Anglican preaching. Much of the beauty of the sermons he preached from the pulpit of the university church in Oxford, St Mary the Virgin, where he was Vicar and where he followed Wesley as the most eloquent preacher ever produced by the Church of England, depends on the glorious prose of the Authorized Version, that masterpiece of the English Renaissance, which Newman quotes so freely. But the loss was not only aesthetic, it was spiritual as well, as the emotional impact of the prose is so overwhelming that the preacher frequently and for long periods simply free-wheels, as it were, on the strength of what becomes in fact an extended reading from Scripture.

The work of the Christian

Often Newman draws together passages from both Old and New Testaments into a veritable flood of biblical texts to drive home his point. Thus in the sermon ‘The Work of the Christian’, he wants to make his hearers realize as vividly as possible that the Christian faith demands a total, lifelong commitment to ‘Labour until the evening! Until the evening, not in the evening only of life, but serving God from our youth, and not waiting till our years fail us. Until the evening, not in the day-time only, lest we begin to run well, but fall away before our course is ended.’ The great test is whether one can persevere right to the end through the twilight of life, when the natural incentives to devotion are less compelling and strong. A beautiful lyrical passage follows the direct, conversational admonition, ‘the end is the proof of the matter’. It is by no means simply a literary effect, for the haunting cadences of the Authorized Version actually realize the loss of spiritual energy and enthusiasm that old age brings. Having warned against leaving religion to the end of one’s life, it is characteristic of Newman promptly to emphasize the opposite spiritual danger:

Think of this, all ye light-hearted, and consider whether with this thought you can read the last chapters of the four gospels without fear and tremblingThat evening will be the trial: when the heat, and fever, and noise of the noontide are over, and the light fades, and the prospect saddens, and shades lengthen, and the busy world is still, and ‘the door shall be shut in the streets, and the daughters of music shall be brought low, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond-tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail’, and ‘the pitcher shall be broken at the fountain, and the wheat broken at the cistern’, then, when it is ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’, and the Lord shall come, ‘who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the heart’, – then shall we ‘discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not’.

But dense scriptural quotation is not Newman’s invariable procedure. There is one very famous instance where a single, short quotation is used to devastating effect. The reason it is famous is because the historian James Anthony Froude recorded hearing Newman describe ‘closely some of the incidents of our Lord’s passion’; and then how he ‘paused’.

For a few moments there was a breathless silence. Then, in a low, clear voice, of which the faintest vibration was audible in the farthest corner of St Mary’s, he said, ‘Now, I bid you recollect that he to whom these things were done was Almighty God.’ It was as if an electric stroke had gone through the church, as if every person present understood for the first time the meaning of what he had all his life been saying. I suppose it was an epoch in the mental history of more than one of my Oxford contemporaries.

In fact, Froude was not quoting exactly from the relevant sermon, ‘The Incarnate Son, a Sufferer and Sacrifice’, where Newman offered this challenge to his hearers:

‘Think of this, all ye light-hearted, and consider whether with this thought you can read the last chapters of the four gospels without fear and trembling.

For instance, ‘When he had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, ‘Answerest thou the high priest so?’ The words must be said, though I hardly dare say them, – that officer lifted up his hand against God the Son. This is not a figurative way of speaking, or a rhetorical form of words, or a harsh, extreme, and unadvisable statement; it is a literal and simple truth, it is a great Catholic doctrine.’

A living word

Newman’s own professed aim as an Anglican preacher was ‘to make the text a living word to the benefit of our souls’. Familiar stories become fresh again as Newman breathes new life into them. Sometimes he does this by giving a completely different twist to a well-known text, as when he suggests that the son in the parable who promises his father to work in his vineyard but fails to keep his promise does so not because he is sincere, as we tend to assume, but rather the opposite: ‘He said, ‘I go, Sir,’ sincerely, from the feeling of the moment; but when the words were out of his mouth, then they were forgotten. It was like the wind blowing against a stream, which seems for a moment to change its course in consequence, but in fact flows down as before.’

‘a book does not speak; it is shut till it is opened’Or again, in his explanation of the parable of the prodigal son, Newman draws almost the opposite conclusion to what we would expect, namely, ‘that it is not the same thing in the end to obey or disobey…the Christian penitent is not placed on a footing with those who have consistently served God from the first’. Thus the father’s welcome of his younger son is not at all warmer than that of his elder son: ‘I do not make any outward display of kindness towards thee, for it is a thing to be taken for granted. We give praise and make profession to strangers, not to friends.’

Such an interpretation may strike us as paradoxical, but Newman loves the unexpected twist, as is shown strikingly by his frequent allusions to the paradox of the Old Testament prophet Balaam – ‘a man divinely favoured, visited, influenced, guided, protected, eminently honoured, illuminated, – a man possessed of an enlightened sense of duty, and of moral and religious acquirements, educated, high-minded, conscientious, honourable, firm; and yet on the side of God’s enemies, personally under God’s displeasure, and in the end…the direct instrument of Satan’. Newman also takes Balaam as ‘a most conspicuous instance of a double mind, or of hypocrisy’. Full of specious excuses, Balaam was not really set on obeying God but on serving his own worldly ends. ‘Such is the way in which the double-minded approach the Most High, – they have a something private, a hidden self at bottom. They look on themselves, as it were, as independent parties, treating with Almighty God as one of their fellows. Hence, so far from seeking God, they hardly like to be sought by him. They would rather keep their position and stand where they are, – on earth, and so make terms with God in heaven.’

Given that there are ‘in the estimation of the double-minded man two parties, God and self, it follows…that reasoning and argument is the mode in which he approaches his Saviour and Judge; and that for two reasons, – first, because he will not give himself up to God, but stands upon his rights and appeals to his notions of fitness: and next, because he has some secret misgiving after all that he is dishonest, or some consciousness that he may appear so to others; and therefore, he goes about to fortify his position, to explain his conduct, or to excuse himself’. This interesting and original analysis of hypocrisy or insincerity is then applied to the unprofitable servant in the parable who justified himself, to the argumentative Pharisees, to Adam and Eve so ‘ready with excuses’, and to others. It is similar to the treatment of the rich young man in the Gospel who ‘flattered himself that he was perfect in heart when he had a reserve in his obedience’, for, although in his superficial enthusiasm he had not really counted the cost, ‘his fault was not merely self-deception, but, in a measure, a reserved devotion’.

Early principles

After having been brought up as a Bible Christian without any strong sense of doctrine or sacraments, Newman then went through an intensely Evangelical phase from the age of fifteen to his early twenties, when for a short time he found himself ‘drifting in the direction of the Liberalism of the day’. An intensive study of the Fathers, he afterwards said, saved him from the liberal Protestant influences he encountered as a young fellow of Oriel College and eventually led him to Rome. Reading the Fathers showed Newman that the early Church did not use the Scriptures as Protestants did, but rather that the Church herself taught the faith, and only appealed to ‘Scripture in vindication of its own teaching’. Meanwhile, he himself became increasingly opposed to what he called the ‘ultra-Protestant principle’ of ‘private judgement’, the idea that ‘everyone may gain the true doctrines of the gospel for himself from the Bible’.

Not only does the Bible not speak for itself for it requires interpretation – ‘a book does not speak; it is shut till it is opened’ – but in fact it is ‘not one book’ but ‘a great number of writings, of various persons, living at different times, put together into one, and assuming its existing form as if casually and by accident’. To attempt to deduce ‘the true system of religion’ from such an unsystematic ‘collection’ would be like, Newman thought, trying ‘to make out the history of Rome from the extant letters of some of its great politicians, and from the fragments of ancient annals, histories, law, inscriptions, and medals’. The writers of the New Testament ‘did not sit down with a design to commit to paper all they had to say’ about the gospel; they wrote with more limited, specific purposes in mind. Indeed, they themselves acknowledge that they ‘did not in Scripture say out all they had to say’, but they actually refer to a ‘system’ of doctrine and worship which would have survived even if Scripture had been lost. Not surprisingly, then, the ‘doctrines of faith’ are in the Bible ‘only in an implicit shape’, requiring to be elicited by both Tradition and the Church.

One with the Fathers

Because of his strongly scriptural and patristic background Newman found himself in many ways in a very uncomfortable position in the Tridentine, Counter-Reformation Church of the nineteenth century, in which the extreme Ultramontane party became increasingly powerful. However, he came into his own in the twentieth century with the so-called ressourcement movement, or return to and retrieval of the scriptural and patristic sources, particularly in France, which led up to and made possible the Second Vatican Council. More recently, Pope John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church, with its heavily scriptural and patristic content, would have greatly delighted Newman as the authentic development of the Council.

We can quarrel with men, we cannot quarrel with a bookApart from theology, Newman came to believe as a Catholic that, in spite of the objectivity of the dogmatic and sacramental Catholicism which as a convert he embraced with great enthusiasm after the subjectivity and vagueness of Anglicanism, still that was only one side of the picture. One of the most disastrous effects of the Reformation had been the Catholic reaction to regard the reading of the Bible by lay people as practically leading to heresy. For without a familiarity with the Gospels, to say nothing of the Old and the rest of the New Testament, Catholics might be well catechized and sacramentalized but they often lacked the kind of personal relationship with Christ that came from knowing him in what St Justin Martyr called in his famous second-century description of the Mass ‘the memoirs of the apostles’. This lack, Newman believed, was the cause of much lapsation:

This is why we see such multitudes in France and Italy giving up religion altogether. They have not impressed upon their hearts the life of our Lord and Saviour as given us in the Evangelists. They believe merely with the intellect, not with the heart. Argument may overset a mere assent of the reason, but not a faith founded in a personal love for the Object of Faith. They quarrel with their priests, and then they give up the Church. We can quarrel with men, we cannot quarrel with a book.

This article was written by the Newman scholar Fr Ian Ker.