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‘To Live and Die Upon a Dogma’: Newman and Post/Modern Faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Gerard Loughlin
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Extract

Today, as in his own day, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) is a contested site, the name for different ways of being Catholic. Competing views of Catholicity still seek for legitimacy by appealing to the authority of Newman’s thought, of his intellect, and, not least, his Cardinal’s red hat, conferred on him by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. At the beginning of the last century, those known as Liberal Catholics or Catholic Modernists appealed to Newman as their patron saint. George Tyrrell (1861-1909) declared himself a ‘devout disciple of Newman’, and confessed to having been ‘brought into, and kept in, the Church by the influence of Cardinal Newman and of the mystical theology of the Fathers and of the Saints’. Today, however, it is not Catholic Modernism, but religious postmodernism that might be in want of Newman’s imprimatur.

Professor Terry Wright, for example, has recently suggested that Newman’s reading of the Bible offers a via media to postmodemity. For Newman recognised the ‘multiplicity of meanings’ to which a critical, open and historical reading of the Bible gives rise. ‘The All-wise, Allknowing God cannot speak without meaning many things at once’, Newman declared.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 84 , Issue 986 , April 2003 , pp. 179 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 For an account see Ian, Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.715-23Google Scholar.

2 Tyrrell to Wilfred Ward, 22 September 1898; quoted in Nicholas, Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p.85Google Scholar.

3 Tyrrell to Bishop Amigo of Southwark; quoted in Petre, M. D., The Life of George Tyrrell 1884-1909 (London: Edward Arnold, 1902), pp.342Google Scholar; and in Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’, p.228.

4 Wright, T. R., ‘Newman on the Bible: A Via Media to Postmodernity?’ In Newman and the Word, edited by Terrence, Merrigan and Ian, T. Ker (Louvain: Peeters Press, 2000), pp.211-49Google Scholar.

5 Wright, ‘Newman and the Bible’, pp.211-12.

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7 See Gerard, Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1996] 1999), pp. 120-32Google Scholar.

8 Wright, ‘Newman and the Bible’, pp.248-9.

9 William, J. Philbin, ‘The Essay on Development’, in A Tribute to Newman: Essays on Aspects of His Life and Thought, edited by Michael, Tierney (Dublin: Browne and Nolan Limited, 1945), 116-43 (p.138)Google Scholar.

10 Philbin, ‘The Essay on Development’, p.139.

11 Not, I think, ‘neo-orthodox’, as Wright suggests (‘Newman and the Bible’, p.222). since that might be thought to indicate a connection with the Reformed neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth. See further Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999).

12 According to John Milbank, William Warburton (1698-1779) had already outlined all the ‘analyses of Feuerbach, Marx and Freud concerning such phenomena as projection, displacement, alienation, reification and class conflict’. See John, Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p.59Google Scholar. A more famous progenitor is of course David Hume (1711-1776) and his Natural History of Religion (1757).

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15 Wilfred Ward, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman, 2 vols (London, 1897), II, p.581; quoted in Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’, p.83.

16 See John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875): ‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink – to the Pope if you please – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’

17 See Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’, p.176.

18 George Tyrrell, ‘The Mind of the Church’, The Month, 96 (1900): 125-42; see Sagovsky, ‘On God’s Side’, pp.110-115.

19 See Désiré Joseph Mercier, ‘Lettre Pastorale et Mandement et Carême’ (1908), translated in George, Tyrrell, Medievalism: A Reply to Cardinal Mercier (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908), 1-21 (pp.7-9)Google Scholar.

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21 In this and the following section I, like Newman in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (ch.4 sec.3), partly quote from one of my earlier works, where an extended discussion of postmodernism and postmodern theology can be found. See Loughlin, Telling God’s Story, pp.3-26, 29-33. See also Gerard Loughlin, ‘The Basis and Authority of Doctrine’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, edited by Colin Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.41-64.

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27 Eagleton, ‘Discourse and Discos’, p.4.

28 See Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (USA 2001) for the dream that even love can be manufactured and mass produced.

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32 Don, Cupitt, The Time Being (London: SCM Press, 1992), p. 117Google Scholar.

33 Cupitt, Time Being, p.64.

34 Arguably this is also the view of Thomas Aquinas (in De principiis naturae); but for Thomas, unlike Cupitt, being demands entry into language, and is this not a Kantian unknown or worse, the efflorescence of a Nietzschean void.

35 Cupitt, Time Being, p.56.

36 Cupitt, What is a Story?,(London: SCM Press, 1991), p.96.

37 Cupitt, What is a Story?, p.154.

38 Cupitt, Time Being, p.95.

39 Ludwig, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1952] 1958)Google Scholar, section 371.

40 H[arold] Fielding[- Hall], The Hearts of Men (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1901), p.313.

41 George, A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK, 1984), p.94Google Scholar. See also Bernard, Lonergan, De Deo Trino (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, partly translated by Conn, O’Donovan as The Way to Nicea (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976)Google Scholar; and Bernard, Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972). p.307Google Scholar.

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43 Fielding-Hall, Hearts, p.313.

44 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, p.118.

45 John, Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p.417Google Scholar.

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47 Cupitt, What is a Story?, p. 114.

48 See Graham, Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

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50 Tulloch, ‘Dr Newman’s Grammar of Assent’, pp.391-2.

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52 Newman, Grammar of Assent, pp.66-7.

53 Newman, Grammar of Assent, p.66