Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (55 page)

On the question of the origin of species, Newman proved to be far less alarmed than his clerical peers. As early as 1840 he had commented on a familiar pre-

Darwinian version of evolution, which suggested the emergence of ‘man’s being originally of some brute nature, some vast mis-shapen lizard of the primeval period, which at length by the force of nature, from whatever secret causes, was exalted into a rational being, and gradually shaped its proportions and refined its properties by the influence of the rational principle which got possession of it’.
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He went on to remark that ‘such a theory is of course irreconcilable with the letter of the sacred text, to say no more’, thus displaying an admirable if laconic openness to the notion that evolution might be true.

A year on from the publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
we find Newman scoffing at Keble for suggesting that God had placed the fossils in the rocks so as create the impression of evolution. ‘There is as much want of simplicity in the idea of the creation of distinct species’, he wrote in a notebook in 1863, ‘as in that of the creation of trees in full growth, or of rocks with fossils in them. I mean that it is as strange that monkeys should be so like men, with no
historical
connection between them, as that there should be no course of facts by which fossil bones got into rocks.’ He went on to observe: ‘I will either go whole hog with Darwin, or, dispensing with time and history altogether, hold, not only the theory of distinct species but that also of the creation of fossil-bearing rocks.’
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Newman was not one to dispense with time and history.

Newman’s most remarkable commentary on the
Origin
, however, is to be found in a letter to a Canon John Walker of Scarborough in 1868, ten years on from Darwin’s publication of the theory. The Canon had sent Newman for inspection a critical review of Darwin’s theory by a ‘Graduate of the University of Cambridge’. Newman responded in the politest terms that the anonymous writer’s critique was muddled – that it lacked certain points ‘to be made good before it can cohere’. But then, to the point: ‘I do not fear the theory so much as he seems to do – and it seems to me that he is hard upon Darwin sometimes.’ There follows Newman’s own reading of the theory:

It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter. He first created matter and then he created laws for it – laws which should
construct
it into its present wonderful beauty, and accurate adjustment and harmony of parts
gradually
. We do not deny or circumscribe the Creator, because we hold he has created the self acting originating human mind, which has almost a creative gift; much less then do we deny or circumscribe His power, if we hold that He gave matter such laws as by their blind instrumentality moulded and constructed through innumerable ages the world as we see it.
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God’s gift of human creativity – the ‘originating human mind’ – does not limit the Creator; so why should we limit the Creator’s mode of creation? There is no necessary collision, he goes on, between such a theory of evolution, or as Newman puts it, ‘principle’ of development, ‘or’, he goes on, ‘what I have called

construction’, and ‘revealed truth’.
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There follows a meditation on God’s underpinning authorship of design in the world, without appealing to a worked out proposal for Intelligent Design familiar in evolutionary debates today:

As to the Divine
Design
, is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely mar-vellous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter millions of ages ago, which have surely and precisely worked out, in the long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed.
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The thought does not provide for an intervening, continuing, active process of ‘Intelligent Design’ on the part of God. He concludes with the reflection, ‘I do not see that “the
accidental
evolution of organic beings” is inconsistent with divine design – It is accidental to
us
, not to
God
.’ It would become a familiar refrain of Newman’s down the years. To his friend St George Mivart, the Catholic zoologist, he would write, ‘You must not suppose I have personally any great dislike or dread of his theory’. And to another: ‘I see nothing in the theory of evolution inconsistent with an Almighty God and protector.’
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NEWMAN AND CHRISTIANITY TODAY

Newman’s historic articulation of the fullness of Christianity is revealed in the entire story of his life. He and his fellow Tractarians had an enduring effect on the Church of England. After his death, some wrote that his influence over Anglicanism was greater than over his adopted Church. None then could have imagined his profound contribution to the renewal of the Catholic Church into the twenty-first century.

His influence begins with his manner of writing. His theological style, as we have seen, was literary, with a preference for the essay form, reacting to the promptings of occasions and circumstances, rather than an attempt at a systematic opus. His beautifully crafted sermons, replete with fresh theological insights, followed the Church’s year and its cycle of scriptural readings. He liked to describe himself as a ‘controversialist’ rather than a theologian. His literary imagination was alive with creative connections, his prose ever musical and elegant. His mode of writing was concrete, dialectical, interrogative: treading carefully, tentatively, towards a conclusion. By comparison, the Catholic theological treatises of his time, many of them surviving down the generations into the twentieth century, were unrelievedly deductive, dogmatic, abstract, ahis-torical. He brought freshness, readability, clear thinking, accessibility, to the discipline of theology.

The sources of his theology, a legacy from Anglicanism, were in Holy Scripture; but then he became a master of the writings of the Early Fathers and the history

of the early Church; he believed that tradition and Scripture were inseparable. He encouraged a historical approach to theology; he thought in terms of processes, development, as opposed to the timeless abstractions of neo-scholas- ticism. He employed the principle of development to rebut charges that Roman Catholicism had nurtured corruptions; the same notion would be invoked by future Catholic theologians to defend doctrines such as religious freedom. One can see the continuation of his influence in the works of the great French theologians of the mid-twentieth century – Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, M. D. Chenu – who turned to the early Fathers and to history, exerting a powerful influence on the renewals and
resourcement
of the Second Vatican Council.

Newman’s regard for the Virgin Mary was sober and constrained. Following the teaching of Ephesus, he accepted that Mary was the Mother of God, ‘The Second Eve’. He enthusiastically accepted Mary’s birth without original sin (the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in 1854). When Pius XII was preparing to define the dogma of the Assumption, supporting commentaries, citing Newman, were written by the theologian Dr Henry Francis Davis of Oscott College who was the first promoter of Newman’s cause for canonization. Newman, however, could not accept that Mary was the Mediatrix of All Graces, or a Co-Redemptrix, or that she was corporeally present in the Blessed Sacrament.

As we have seen, Newman insisted, often vehemently, that the role of the laity should be recognized, honoured, celebrated; that the laity was an indispensible part of the Church’s ‘faithful’ (‘the Church would look foolish without them’); the faithful gave back that crucial echo of authentic doctrine: the consensus. In his famous essay
On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine
, he accused the bishops of the fourth century of having failed in their duty to defend the Church’s orthodoxy: it was the faithful, embracing the laity, that saved the Church from error.

Newman criticized excessive clericalism, Roman centralization (ultramontanism), creeping infallibility, and the denial of the laity’s right to make a contribution to the intellectual life of the Church. While defending the Church’s teaching, and the necessity of nurturing an informed conscience, he nevertheless spoke boldly of the primacy of conscience over papal authority (‘I shall drink to the Pope if you please – still, to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards …’). He saw the Church as a communion, and he urged that Catholics, and all Christians, should work for unity.

All these features – historicity, patristics, development, ecumenism, conscience, moderate Marianism, the role of the laity, local discretion over Roman centralization – underpinned the renewals of the Second Vatican Council leading to Paul VI’s verdict that it was ‘Newman’s Council’. But the Council had its dissenters, resisters, at the very heart of the Curia. Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo,

one of those who represented the continuity of the Curia of Pius XII at the Council, commented that these ‘new ideas and tendencies’ were ‘not only exaggerated but even erroneous’.
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That resistance to the renewals of the Council, and hence to Newman’s influence, was never entirely broken, and it is arguable that the tide has been turning in recent decades with the promotion of the view that nothing of importance had been altered, or renewed, by Vatican II.

Will the beatification, and probable canonization of Newman, break this resistance? Will this honouring of Newman prove, as theologian Nicholas Lash hopes, ‘a powerful signal that the Church has not abdicated its dedication to the movement of renewal and reform that the Council so wholeheartedly initiated’?
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Those who share Lash’s perspective have urged that Newman should be named a Doctor of the Church in confirmation of the acceptance of his theology.

There is, of course, another possibility: that Newman’s elevation to the altar might signal the taming and enfeebling of his legacy by the resisters of Vatican II and of the fullness of his teaching. Newman’s habit of ‘saying and unsaying’ towards a conclusion makes him vulnerable to distortion (obviously by those on both sides of the Catholic divide). One can only hope that his unforgotten voice will continue to find its way home and into the hearts of all pilgrims of conscience for the benefit of the fullness of Christianity.

Epilogue
‌‌

Newman was aware that people thought him saintly, and he suspected that the Church might attempt to make him an official saint. In the time-honoured tradition of most figures who make it to sainthood, Newman assured his contemporaries, and posterity, that he was no saint; his reason: that he was a ‘literary’ man. It is likely that the request that his grave be filled with compost was to ensure that there would be no relics left to venerate. As it happens, Newman’s beatification was sanctioned with some difficulties and after half a century, despite an inflation in saint-making during the long reign of Pope John Paul II. While cults of sainthood developed around the relics of thousands of holy people from Christian antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, the saint-making process, as it is practised in the Catholic Church today, is relatively recent, dat-ing from the seventeenth century. Saints or Blesseds are traditionally deemed to have led exemplary lives. They provide the faithful with examples of how God wishes us to behave: not always an obvious notion since some behaved very oddly indeed by contemporary standards of holiness. Saint Simeon Stylites sat naked for thirty years on top of a pillar sixty feet high; the aerodynamic Joseph of Cupertino (patron saint of pilots, along with Our Lady of Loretto) used to fly up to the church rafters and scream when in ecstasy; Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque would routinely eat cheese, to which she was allergic, to bring on a vomiting fit. Benedict XVI recently promoted the life of Saint Jean Vianney, the Curé d’Ars, as an exemplar for today’s priests, although it is known that he beat himself with a metal scourge at night, and slept on the floor with a log for a pillow. John Paul II canonized and beatified a great many individuals, more apparently than all the previous popes put together from the time that the formal processes began in the reign of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644). The choices were invariably associated with his many trips around the world. He was criticized by Spanish socialists for proclaiming the holiness of large numbers of priests and nuns killed in the Spanish Civil War. Many non-Catholics also died at the hands of Franco and his army. John Paul angered liberal Catholics, moreover, for canonizing the founder of the traditionalist Spanish group, Opus Dei. Sensitivity to the political fall-out attendant on the proposed beatification of the war-