St. John Henry Newman and the Sacred Heart
Though his biographers have spoken both at considerable length and with great eloquence concerning Newman’s devotions and prayerfulness, and the great French Oratorian, Louis Bouyer, insisted for decades that this aspect of Newman’s life and thought was not one among others, but the atmosphere of all his work (not only his historical investigations into theologians and doctrines, but also his apologetic works and even polemical screeds), it cannot be said that we the general public have been paying a great deal of heed. Perhaps even less so when Newman was first being considered for and subsequently granted entry into the very special rank of doctor of the Church, shared by only thirty-eight others, including Saint Augustine, Aquinas, and Ignatius Loyola. The general view was that the reason why Newman was so elevated was because of the role he played in the nineteenth century, reducing to a puddle his overmatched opponents who insisted that faith is a tawdry thing, the Catholic Church an anachronism at best and a purblind and oppressive institution at worst, and who held out as the only good for the Christian believer his making peace with the modern secular world and thereby entering—if very belatedly—into a human shape that might be regarded as more or less rational (though second-class) and apposite in some limited respects for the challenges that he or she will have to face in the brave new world of liberty of thought, scientific and technological advancement, and an increase in our capacity to secure and maintain non-violent relations between classes, groups, and nations. Newman was a matter of fact not a little interested in popping the bubble of rationalist illusion which had come to stand for reality.
Now, it would make sense that what is now brought to the fore is not Newman’s personal holiness which has been attested to already and was the condition of his being declared a saint, but rather the excellence of his intellect, his sharpness in argument, and his manifold rhetorical gifts. For those Catholics who from time to time need an emotional lift—I include myself—there is the need to think of John Henry in heroic terms; perhaps with J.R.R. Tolkien imagine Newman after that great other wordsmith, the magician Gandalf who defeats at great cost the fiery but ill-defined monster, Balrog, who might be considered to be an image of the anti-Christian world into which we are inevitably drawn and which, if yielded to, consumes us. This may be all a bit rich, but there surely is something to it. I do not see any good reason entirely to deprive ourselves of such imaginings, as long as we do not lose the substance of Newman which was overall far more mundane and deliberate, but, of course, also far more substantial, far more admirable, and far more worthy of being followed.
Fortunately, Pope Francis, under whose pontificate the dossier concerning Newman’s elevation to doctor of the Church was vetted, clears away what might be fantastic in our portraiture of Newman. Indeed, Francis brings the Newman who is being elevated as doctor of the Church back into the orbit of those charisms that characterize the saint. In his fourth and final encyclical, Dilexit Nos, Francis reflects on the spirituality of the Sacred Heart in terms of how it illustrates who God is and how it speaks to who we are or who we become when our heart is joined to Christ’s heart. Francis makes clear in his encyclical that “heart” is not a particular faculty, but after the manner of the biblical authors, a human being in all her depth and richness opened up to God, other persons, and the world. Moreover, while this piety is, indeed, personal, it is also a witness to the actuality of love in a world not providing much evidence of it. This is a world in which reality is “liquid,” human beings essentially fungible. For human persons to be enmeshed in a “liquid” reality means human persons are in danger of being liquidated. This is the latest crisis of the modern age, perhaps nothing less than the death of man, many times announced, but rarely thought through. In the process of prosecuting his case, Pope Francis alludes to Newman’s famous phrase, cor ad cor loquitur, thereby suggesting to us that Newman can be inscribed in the history of devotion to the Sacred Heart that devolved through the seventeenth-century French Catholic devotional writers and mystics, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and Saint Claude de la Colombrière. Crucially, however, he is also asking us to question whether this devotion does not underwrite Newman’s intellectual endeavors and accounts for his passion of engaging a world that has seemed to drift aimlessly away from Christianity and become increasingly deracinated and vacuous, thereby setting the conditions for political and social arrangements far more obviously inhumane and vicious.
With this as background we can turn to Newman’s own writings, first his famous prayer that connects, as is often the case, Sacred Heart spirituality with the Eucharist and then with his explicit avowal of the Sacred Heart as a central symbol of God’s saving action in Christ.
O Sacred Heart of Jesus
Living and quickening source
Of divine love
You are my refuge and my sanctuary.
O my amiable Savior
Consume my heart
With that burning fire
With which your heart
Is ever inflamed.Pour down on my soul
These graces
Which flow from Your Love.
And let my heart be
So united with Yours
That our wills may be one
And mine in all things
Be conformed to Yours.
May your divine will
Be equally the standard
And rule of my desires
And all of my actions.
In the prayer the Sacred Heart is an image of divine love as it was in Saint Margaret Mary and Saint Claude de la Colombrière (who came to England around the time of Queen Mary) and in the French School of spirituality that exerted its power on both. Yet divine love is not love to be looked at. Divine love is divine action, divine action in the Church and in individual persons that calls for imitation. Divine love neither coerces nor destroys the integrity of the person; rather it connects or binds the Church and the individual person with God. As the Carmelites might say, speaking specifically to the individual, it establishes the “ligature” between the person and the God who forever exceeds the bond. Not only am I not erased by the divine love to which I am asked to respond and continually be open to, but my personhood is underwritten and elevated. In his devotional writings Newman is anxious to transpose what he thinks is a theological truth into a religious experience. The Sacred Heart of Jesus functions as something of an icon in that the pierced heart of Jesus seems to reverse our gaze and in a sense gaze at us. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a testament that God loves each as each, indeed, loves us intimately, relentlessly, tenderly, forgivingly, and with infinite patience. Above all the Sacred Heart of Jesus demonstrates a God who loves us utterly and unconditionally.
While it is true that devotion to the Sacred Heart might have been just the kind of Catholic piety for which Newman early in his life as an Anglican priest might have effected disdain, by the time he joined the Catholic Church in 1845 such aesthetic reservations had lost their point. Moreover, by the time Pope Pius IX declared a special feast-day of the Sacred Heart (1856), Newman’s acceptance had long been in the making, aided by the spread of this devotion in English Catholic circles in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, and the enthusiasm of those other great Catholic converts, such as Cardinal Manning, with whom Newman in his Catholic period otherwise had more than his fair share of disagreements.
It is not as if all we have of Newman’s admiration and avowal of the Sacred Heart is the above prayer, however beautiful and authentic it is. Newman wants to tell us more, indeed, feels he needs to tell us more. His most explicit treatment of the Sacred Heart occurs in a section in the posthumously published Meditations and Devotions (Part 3). In a passage that effortlessly links devotion and doctrine in precisely the way Bouyer thinks a Catholic should connect them, Newman is exultant:
O Sacred Heart of Jesus, I adore Thee in the oneness of the Personality of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Whatever belongs to the Person of Jesus, belongs to God, and is to be worshipped with that one and same worship which we pay to Jesus. . . . I worship Thee, O Heart of Jesus, as being Jesus himself, as being that eternal Word in human nature. . . . In worshipping Thee, I worship my Incarnate God.
This is the first of the three sections of meditation 16. Here Newman weds the devotion to the Sacred Heart with something like a Trinitarian mysticism. In any event, the devotion to the Sacred Heart is hardly theologically vacuous. It both supposes and highlights the second Person of the Son, thereby moving the register of the Trinity from the notional to the real—to use the language of Grammar of Assent. Translated: it delivers the Trinity from the realm of abstraction into the realm of religious experience which, if it receives its acme in mystics, is possible for the rest of us. In section 3 Newman explicitly makes the connection between the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Eucharist, suggesting that the piety of the Sacred Heart is not a highly individualistic piety in tension with the sacraments of the Church, but that it is the real symbol of the Christ whose presence gratuitously effects our redemption and leads us forward on the path of sanctification in which prayers and devotions have an honored place. Section 2 is quite literally the hinge. Newman personally addresses his God who is his savior, professes that he adores the Sacred Heart, and concludes in an affirmation that is quite stunning from a theological point of view. Speaking of the Sacred Heart, he writes:
It is the channel through which He has come to us . . . all Thy divine charity towards us. All thy incomprehensible compassion for us, as God and Man, as our Creator and our Redeemer and our Judge . . . in one inseparably mingled stream.
Newman seems to be saying that God is fundamentally defined as love and that this divine love is expressed in the Sacred Heart. But not only that: the Sacred Heart is the symbol (symbol), thus, a “gathering” or synthesis of all the ways God comes towards us. The symbol even more deeply suggests or reminds that the love that consumes us also sums up the God who fronts and confronts us in his aspects of creation, redemption, and judgment.
No date is given to the text, though some of the surrounding texts have 1856 as the date, perhaps merely coincidentally the year in which Pope Pius IX established the feast of the Sacred Heart. Pious IX, however, is not playing the role of innovator. Not alone is he preceded in his enthusiasm for the Sacred Heart by Pope Gregory XVI, but in a manner that would be pleasing to Newman who time and again comments on how the magisterium plays the role of validating the sensus fidelium, Pope Gregory’s affirmation of devotion to the Sacred Heart is no more than official recognition of a practice that had been embedded in the faithful for two centuries. If this meditation-devotion from Part 3 of Meditations and Devotions matters in itself, its place in the context of the other meditations is crucial. Part 3 as a whole has the title of “Meditations on Christian Doctrine.” The twenty-three meditations that make it up are quite a miscellany. It is not a little interesting that Newman prescribes a short visit to the Blessed Sacrament before meditation, and later just before he begins his meditation on the Sacred Heart (16), there is a meditation on the mass (15).
The meditations have as their goal the union of God and our souls (3), which as first step involves a looking away from our sinful selves to hope in the God who, if utterly transcendent, is our creator and redeemer (1, 2). This God (even as or especially as Trinity) is defined as love (10) and as holy, thus as the wholly other worthy of worship, which involves not a little of religious fear that has the complexion of awe (11). For those who are made nervous by slight changes in Newman’s thinking, what he writes here now a decade on from his shocking and embittering conversion that gave rise to cries of apostasy and treason, it is comforting to recall that Newman struck this note of worship earlier in his Anglican period, especially in Plain and Parochial Sermons. This is a point to which Bouyer particularly draws our attention, and which he thinks has been underestimated in our reception of Newman. In any event, one finds among the meditations reflections on the great events in Christ’s life, for example, Cross (5), Resurrection (6), the ascension (13), and Pentecost (14). In these events Christ is transparent with respect to God while himself having an inexhaustible depth (7). What is fascinating because unexpected is that the meditation on the Sacred Heart (16) is succeeded by five meditations on divine attributes, or perhaps better, divine perfections, since these attributes are not the results of intellectual inquiry, as was too often the case in the English rationalists against whom Newman had frequently argued, but aspects read off the history of grace that scripture narrates. True, Newman did suggest that the meditations are reflections on doctrinal subjects. Nonetheless, he did not specify precisely what he meant. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that he meant no more by it than those fundamental aspects of Christian faith that we might find in the Creed.
Broadly speaking, talk of divine attributes seems to be a kind of abstract cataloguing affair that has little to do with devotion and worship. In general, Newman did not have a great deal of patience for such philosophical exercises. He thought that they were parlor games for the idle and not religiously serious. Has Homer nodded? Is this an exception to Newman’s general pattern of thought that sets constraints on rationalistic inference from states of affairs in the world to God? Well, perhaps John Henry nods somewhere. Just not here. And no we are not dealing with an exception. Notice that actions and expressions of God that set the table are all indicated in scripture. So even before we look at what he says about particular divine attributes it is obvious that the “haughty” intellect is being contained and grounded in realities that are beyond the level of the mind.
Moreover, when we actually read these meditations we find that Newman is neither being irresponsibly curious, nor forgetting that the labels we put on God are simply shorthands for our experience of his utter difference and otherness and about his relation to us that invites us to have a relation with him. All of this is crystalized in his overflowing compassion towards us and our response to the offer of relation that is the end or goal of our lives. It is about our devotion to him, our worship of him, which involves a yielding to him. We find out who Newman is by exposing whom he admires. We know from The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) and The Development of Doctrine (1845) that Newman’s siding with Athanasius against the Arians has essentially to do with the fact that the Church has erstwhile worshipped Christ. This puts Arius and his followers in the wrong, since they are claiming that Christ is a kind of in-between a fully divine God, identified with the Father, and us mortals. The problem is that if Christ is less than fully divine our worship has at best not been perspicuous or perspicacious, and at worst a base error. It is neither: the simple believer who worshipped Christ got it theologically right; Arius and his epigones got it wrong.
Turning back to Devotion and Meditations, we see that in his meditation on the infinite perfection of God (17), the infinite knowledge of God (18), the providence of God (19), God as all in all (20), God the incommunicable perfection (21) that Newman brings out aspects of divine perfections that typical treatises on the divine attributes or perfections do not do. First off, for Newman the prime context of the discussion of God’s attributes and perfections is personal. One is not talking so much about God as with him and to him. As with Augustine you are addressing God as a Thou, but a Thou absolute, a Thou in no need of me and on whom I depend to be, to persist or continue to exist, especially to speak and finally to praise, for praise is speech that has found its proper point of reference. This God is, indeed, a reality of unfathomable depth (17, also 21) who for no reason brings not simply the world and humanity but me into existence, maintains a permanent relation with me, and enables a return to him. Newman reinforces the last point in his treatment of the infinite knowledge of God (17), and accentuates the point that in the last instance Christianity is about one’s personal relationship with God because God’s knowledge of each of us is particular rather than general and goes down to every hair on our head (19). God’s knowledge of the world and each of us in it is characterized by unsurpassable care and solicitude. Newman writes: “Thou art careful and tender to each of the beings that Thou has created, as if it were the only one in the world.” Each of us is screamingly breakable and vulnerable, and God accounts for this. Newman does not shy away from hyperbole precisely because he believes God’s love is hyperbolic. God attends to us as if we were the only existent in the world and lavishes care on us as if he had all the time in the world.
Tellingly, Newman goes on to say, again directly addressing God: “All thy acts of providence are acts of love” (19), even those that might seem to smack of God’s judgment (19). Though Newman himself suggests both before (Oxford University Sermons) and after (Grammar of Assent (Chs. 5 & 10), Meditations and Devotions), that the God of judgment is correlative to conscience, our reading of scripture unveils a merciful God whose real symbol is the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Without denying its operation, Newman seems to be relativizing divine judgment along two axes: the first is that revelation is superordinate to reason, so that in terms of figuration, if there is a lack of agreement, we are to go with revelation; the second is that Newman’s position here seems to repeat a reservation Newman expressed earlier in Lectures on Justification (1837) concerning the elevation of divine judgment in Protestantism. In this text from his Anglican period, Newman was mainly concerned with divine judgment as the arbitrary bestowal of righteousness to the individual to the neglect both of the sacraments of the Church and our spiritual growth founded in Christ and enabled by the Holy Spirit. Now, however, the issue is the picture of who God appears to be in his facing the world, whether dominantly that of judgment and wrath or mercy.
Newman insists that our belief in God cannot merely be notional; it should be actual and experiential. God impresses himself on you and I. Indeed, the impress is so overwhelming that we are brought to the state of confession, that is, simultaneously to confess God’s greatness and our own littleness, God’s holiness and our unworthiness (19). Thus, we are in a very real sense brought to our knees and find ourselves finally in the posture of worship. Thus before major Catholic theologians of the twentieth century such as de Lubac, Balthasar, and Bouyer we are dealing with a kneeling theology. Newman then anticipates these twentieth-century theological giants. Yet, Newman knows that a “kneeling” theology is constitutional of the Catholic tradition. This is the theological style of the Church Fathers and the Greeks Fathers especially, with respect to whom Newman is in awe. The devotion to the Sacred Heart is a devotion that assumes that theology is fundamentally connected with prayer and liturgy and that its stance towards the subject of theology, that is, God, is unstinting praise. In meditation 20 there is quite literally talk of God’s grandeur that will become a theme in G.M. Hopkins, in whose conversion Newman was instrumental. The words are necessary but forced out by fresh perception and ecstasy. Seeing this “grandeur” perfectly, that is, being struck and overwhelmed by the glory of God that surpasses all worldly beauty, is for the most famous Catholic convert of the nineteenth century nothing short our destiny:
But all . . . high and low, are but an atom compared with Thy grandeur, the height and depth, the glory, on which Thy saints are gazing in their contemplation of Thee. It is the occupation of eternity, ever new, inexhaustible, ineffably ecstatic, the stay and the blessedness of existence, thus to drink in and be dissolved in Thee (20).
One might say here that just as Newman has lulled us into a very relaxed state concerning our hope in beatitude, he does something subversive and challenging. It appears that beatitude does not consist in rest, but in a dynamism of falling ever more deeply in love with God. This is a point taken up by Erich Przywara, who translated Newman and made him a Catholic figure to be dealt with in German theology in the twentieth century. And while Przywara does not make an explicit connection between Newman and Augustine who is his other great love, it is interesting that when he feels obliged to hit upon the earliest theological source for this idea of our perpetual dynamism after God, he does not lift up the Greeks Fathers, but the Augustine of his sermons..
In this particular meditation, as in the others, Newman does not simply speak of worship, he performs it. The “I adore Thee” that opened his meditation on the Sacred Heart (16) is repeated in the immediately following meditation on the infinite perfection of God. The meditation opens with “I adore Thee, O my God, as the origin and source of all that is in the world.” In his meditation on the perfection that God is all in all (20) God is adored, after the manner of Augustine, as being sublimely beyond the world, even if marvelously immanent within it and thus a source of its beauty, grandeur, and salience: “Eternal, incomprehensible God, I believe, confess, and adore Thee, as being infinitely more wonderful, resourceful, and immense than the universe that I see.” And just in passing it is impossible to ignore what appears to be an Augustine citation in his final meditation (23): “Thou, O my God, art ever new, Thou art most ancient.” He completes the citation from the Confessions by drawing attention to the Eucharistic context of this affirmation by addressing God and naming the God who is gift: “Thou alone are food for eternity . . . inexhaustible . . .” Newman is pointing to a paradox. Precisely as enough or as more than enough, God draws us on in heaven as in our peregrination on earth toward him and towards whom we are meant to be.
Meditation 21 is on God’s incommunicable Perfection and thus the immense gulf that lies between God and the world and God and us. God is unfathomable mystery and infinite perfection, thus not in the scale of being of more or less, but outside it, and thus ungraspable by finite and sinful beings such as us. Meditation 22 concerns the converse, that is, the God communicated to us. Are these perfections distinct? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, insofar as, if our relation to God is to be one of worship, we have to possess a sense of God’s fathomless depth and unsurpassable fullness so as to rule out any hint of God needing the world or humanity, not to mention the cosmically insignificant particular that is me, usually dressed as an ego mired in its own bad habits, disordered desires, and raddled by sin. No, insofar as it is this same incommunicable and mysterious God who communicates and gives himself to all of us without reserve. Logically, or theologically, there is no sufficient reason for the world to be, for humanity to exist, for me to be here the light and shade of a life struggling with faith, hoping often against hope, and always merely starting or starting again to love. We can have nothing to say as to why God creates, sustains, and brings to perfection a world that has no call on God to be there. All of these actions operate in wisdom of the child’s replace: God did all these things “because.” “Because” is the wisdom that shatters our overbearing curiosity.
We will never be able to explain how the gulf is crossed between God and everything else that exists, how world and humanity and me appear on what otherwise would be an empty scene, and really not even that, and not even an empty repository of scenes, for even that is something that does not have to be. The gulf between God and the world and us is infinite, because even the language of gulf is an accommodation, since it is only in creating that a gulf appears between the world and God and humanity and God. Yet, allowing this concession, what is as mysterious as God’s unfathomable, incomprehensible perfection is that God crosses this gulf. The mystery shatters the syllogism, shakes off the slightest inkling of desert, and presses us to think that in creating a gulf God at the same time also creates a bridge between realities that strictly speaking are incommensurable, that is, without a common measure. Needless to say, Christ is the bridge, moreover, a bridge that does not exact the harrowing cost of justice.
Then the real point finally becomes clear. Each of us is asked to be put in the “I” position, as Augustine both advises and performs in the Confessions:
By Thee we cross the gulf that lies between Thee and me. The living God is life-giving. Thou art the Font and Center, as well as Seat, of all good. . . . And thus, remaining one and sole and infinitely removed from all things, in Thee they consist, of Thee they partake, and unto Thee, retaining their own individuality, they are absorbed.
The “I” position is ineluctable. Only “I”—that is each of us as the persons we are—desire, really know, and truly love God. Like many a mystic, Newman can suggest that in our most intimate experiences of God we seem to dissolve into him. Here, it seems, he wants to theologically clarify what he thinks the Catholic can legitimately say. The real “I,” the real “me,” the individual caught up in worship and adoration of God, cannot be erased. This experience of God as wholly other, as so sublimely Holy undoes me and does me, breaks me like Humpty Dumpty and puts me back together in a less breakable mode. This experience of God that yields this ancient and new me is what faith is in its depth, hope is in its height, and what love is in its unique object, but also in the atmosphere in which it bathes all things, and the horizon in and through which we come to know all things. We know things deep down in the way that Christ looks at things, and the way the Sacred Heart of Jesus intimates how we should receive things.
In his Oxford University Sermons (1828-1843), Newman had spoken to this irreducible yet porous and non-Cartesian “I” that modern philosophy was putting under considerable pressure; in his reflections in The Idea of a University (1854), he expounded on how an educational curriculum of a certain type can nourish and cultivate the intellect. Newman’s argument as to why the cultivating intellect is crucial for how Christians navigate the skeptical modern world is a contribution that is not lost in either the putting together of the dossier for Newman’s elevation as doctor of the Church and the vetting process that has ensued. It is by means of the cultivated intellect that Christians can censure the rationalists and debate with the skeptic. Yet, in the same text Newman also makes clear that the “I” that he most wants to upbuild is not the “I” that gains intellectual capacity and aptitude in and through the mastery of intellectual subjects, but the “I” that becomes more differentiated and unique as it comes through that other curriculum, that is, the curriculum of prayer, receiving the sacraments, reading scripture. Following this curriculum ensures that the “I” not only affirms God but loves God, not only admits that it is created, but existentially grasps its creatureliness, and enters into an adorative relationship with the God who creates, redeems, and above all sanctifies in and through his grace. This other curriculum does not make us operationally more intelligent than previously we have been, but more transparent with respect to the unity in Trinity of love. In short, Newman implies that there are two formations, one of the intellect, one of the person at root. The first, which is the task of the University, forms you in judgment, the second, which is the task of the Church, is to form and reform your desires and affections. God’s desire for you, Christ’s desire for you expressed in the Sacred Heart, is that you share in his life and the life of the Trinity which is a Trinity of love, that is, that you become a saint.
Newman writes a lot about saints. He reflects on saints in history, produces hagiographies, and intellectually engages the topic, especially in Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1848), where he speaks of different kinds of saints, saints untouched by passion or crisis (John the Beloved Disciple), saints defined by it (Paul, Ignatius). Our tastes may go in either direction. Whatever direction they lean in, however, the category mistake should be avoided that the saint is merely a moral example or a moral hero capable of extraordinary actions (supererogatory) that go far beyond common morality. Rather, in his view, the saint is the worshipping or doxological subject who has found her identity, her “I” in the ever glorious God.
It would be neglectful not to say something Newman being an Oratorian. His founding of Oratories in Birmingham and London is well-known, as are his prayers to the sixteenth-century founder of the Oratory, Saint Philip Neri. The charism of the order is lectio divina, reflection on theological and pastoral issues, and community worship focused on the Eucharist. Originally, the Oratory has nothing to do with the Sacred Heart. A century later in the French Oratory in the figure of Jean Etudes it has. Steeped in the spirituality of the so-called French School in which the worship of Christ was dominant and Mary elevated, Etudes grasped the Sacred Heart as the symbol of the glorious and merciful Christ who could not ignore our misery. Indeed, it is worth making the historical note that Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque supposed this spirituality, but personalized it and gave it a profound energy. As an Oratorian Newman reprised both the Italian and more French forms of the Oratory, the second laying a foundation for his own devotion to the Sacred Heart and his meditations on the glorious God who is supposed and manifested in devotion.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally delivered as a Saturdays With the Saints lecture, sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on October 11, 2024. Fr. Greg Haake, C.S.C. will deliver the next lecture in the series on November 8, 2025 at 10:30AM in the Andrews Auditorium of Geddes Hall.