The Marian Turn in John Henry Newman’s Thought

Overlooking the High Street, Oxford’s University Church of St Mary the Virgin boasts a porch which, for centuries, has welcomed worshipers through its doors. Completed in 1637, this Baroque South Porch symbolically extended the contact between Oxford’s ancient university Church with the city itself, further linking town and gown, the life of prayer with the life of the mind. With its braided columns, often described as “barley sugar,” the porch intentionally recalled the reputed design of Solomon’s temple and portico in Jerusalem—and, in this way, alludes to the university as the site of wisdom. It also, and more controversially, seemed to suggest the magnificent, similarly braided columns of Bernini’s baldacchino or canopy built over the bones of St Peter in the Vatican’s basilica.

The porch served not only to link town and gown but to support a vaulting statue of Our Lady, with the Christ Child in her arms. The “Virgin Porch,” as it is usually called, was built at a time when Oxford was the site of much debate and much violence over what counted as Christian orthodoxy in the British Isles. The statue of Mary the Virgin, somewhat miraculously, did not suffer the fate of most of her counterparts throughout the city. It was neither beheaded nor dethroned from its niche—although, to this day, it bears bullet holes shot by Cromwellian troopers passing through Oxford in 1642. The statue itself was described in 1641 as “very scandalous” and evidence of Popery by Puritans who opposed both Roman Catholic doctrine and the emerging Anglican Church.

This statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained a remarkably important sign of hope, as well as of lamentation, for recusant Catholics throughout the early days of the Reformation and well into the nineteenth century—when most of the remaining penalties against Catholics were lifted through a serious of emancipation acts. It also features markedly in the life of St John Henry Newman, in his personal life as well as in his writings, particularly his novel, Loss and Gain—the first work published following his conversion to Roman Catholicism on October 9, 1845. And, as he admits in his autobiography and elsewhere, the Marian presence at the University Church, where he had formerly served as Anglican vicar, gradually influenced his growing appreciation for the sacramental system and various, related doctrines, including Marian doctrines and the Doctrine of the Communion of the Saints.

The Doctrine of the Communion of the Saints led Newman to contend that the animating force of history is not power politics but, rather, intercessory prayer. His writings always hold a special affection, however, for the ways in which providence paradoxically manifests God’s plans for salvation history in hidden ways, in the lives of saints who lived on the margins of public life. Newman’s extended reflections on the value of the hidden life for history is fleshed out in many works, but especially Parochial and Plain Sermons (1868). For instance, in the sermon called the “Secretness and Suddenness of Divine Visitations,” he focuses on the degree to which history is renewed, and providence singularly communicated, through the lives of solitary saints and prophets, through those who withdraw from public life to seek out the still voice of God in order to understand their times: “it is but holy Daniel,” he says, “solitary among princes, or Elijah the recluse of Mount Carmel, who can . . . forecast the time of God’s providence among the nations.”[1]

As much as Newman shows his ardent affection for the saints of the Church as well as the Old Testament prophets, he makes it very clear that Mary, the Mother of God, not only parallels them, she far outstrips them. Mary is like “meek Moses,” he says, but, by virtue of her immaculate conception and fully attentive conscience, she “heard the word of God” and faithfully kept it, pondering it in her heart (Luke 11:28).[2] In his reflection on Mary’s status as “The Seat of Wisdom,” Newman explains at length the ways in which the Mother of God supersedes the status of all the Old Testament prophets, Moses included: “There was one, viz., Moses, to whom [God] . . . vouchsafed to speak face to face. . . . . This was the great privilege of the inspired Lawgiver of the Jews; but how much was it below that of Mary! Moses had the privilege only now and then, from time to time; but Mary for thirty continuous years saw and heard him, being all through that time face to face with him, and being able to ask him any questions which she wished explained.”[3]

As Newman increasingly devoured the writings of the Early Church Fathers, he discovered a pervasive Marian presence in their work, a presence which would become crucial to his understanding of the conscience as well as his idea of history. As he contends in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Mary is the Queen of all Saints, who helps guide the Communion of Saints, the Church of Christ in History, towards her Son: “A special office is assigned to St. Mary, that is, special as compared with all other Saints” but which, he hastens to stress,

is marked off with the utmost precision from that assigned to our Lord. Thus she is said to have been made the “arbitress of every effect coming from God’s mercy.” Because she is the Mother of God, the salvation of mankind is said to be given to her prayers. . . . “Merit is ascribed to Christ and prayer to St. Mary.” In a word, the whole may be expressed in the words, Unica spes mea Jesus, et post Jesum Virgo Maria. Amen.[4]

Elsewhere, Newman concludes that in “the history of our Lady” we discern the model of human obedience to providence throughout history. She is, therefore, “the beautiful gift of God, which outshines the fascinations of a bad world, and which no one ever sought in sincerity and was disappointed. She is the personal type and representative image,” Newman concludes, “of that spiritual life and renovation in grace, ‘without which no one shall see God’”; moreover, she is humanity’s especial protector who “brings [us] . . . forward in the narrow way, if [we] . . . live in the world.”[5] In his theology as well as his devotional writings (starting from his later Tractarian period), Mary is his key for understanding history as a dramatic account of conformity to, or rebellion against, the divine plan for the world’s salvation, a plan which first makes itself intuited or sensed in the voice of the conscience (which Newman called the “aboriginal vicar of Christ”).[6] The Mother of God’s quiet witness as the humble and holy reader of God’s plan for her life and, by extension, for history itself, is a striking, yet often implicit, insight of Newman’s.

Although Letter to Pusey (1864) is the only book-length work that he wrote, “ex professio,” on Marian dogma, Newman’s poetry, letters, personal devotions, and sermons are saturated by a Marian sensibility and sensitivity. It is difficult to read more than a few pages of Newman without finding a reference, whether explicit or hidden, to Mary, the Second Eve.[7] Given this, it is crucial that approaches to Newman’s thought offer a more sustained account of the place that Marian dogma plays in his understanding of the inner depth-dimensions of history. To date, treatments of Newman’s idea of history have tended to focus primarily (and, quite understandably) on his systematic and careful treatment of ecclesial history in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845/1878). If Newman’s Mariology is considered at all, it tends to be treated along explicitly historicist or biographical lines. However, it is crucial to think about Newman’s approach to Mary as devotional and personalist in its devotion—that is, as appreciative of the place that her very person and personhood has within history and, by extension, across salvation history more broadly.

For Newman, Mary was not just an important historical figure; she was, to borrow Jerome Bertram’s words, a fully-fledged person firmly “lodged in his heart,” inspiring and transforming his imagination, theological orientation, and philosophical concerns.[8] Her ways of behaving, her practice of pondering, the humble and magnanimous grammar or logic of her Magnificat profoundly shaped Newman’s life and thought—to the point where, in several sermons, he points to her as “the pattern” of philosophy and not just of devotion. For, in Mary, the human person’s capacity to seek out wisdom and to love wisdom is fully actualized, most fully realized in the person of her son, the Jesus of history who is also the Christ of God.

We see this throughout his writings over the course of his long life. For example, in his meditations on the Stations of the Cross, he writes that “to be devout is to be devoted” and Mary is the model of devotion par excellence, this side of the veil.[9] Mary’s quiet and steadfast pondering of God’s word—even on the via crucis—enriched Newman’s “theology of conscience,” which Ratzinger so admired, and also firmly directed him towards an understanding of history as a conduit of divine providence. This is because Mary, so attuned to the word of God, provides through her life the unrivalled example of a contingent and limited creature.

Newman’s growing devotion to Mary was not always straightforward or easy. As with all things in Newman’s life, it can be said that his appreciation for Mary’s central place in the life of the Church, for her special patronage of history itself, developed only gradually. In what follows, then, I will consider how Newman’s early, poetic interests in the relationship between holiness and hiddenness demonstrate how his heart already stirred after the Marian, even before he recognized (let alone fully accepted) the Mother of God’s central and distinctive importance within salvation history. In other words, I will consider the gradual, Marian turn in his thought. I will then consider how his assessment of Mary’s status as model of holiness and patroness of history comes from his deep readings of history, readings informed by the devotional examples of the Early Church Fathers which Newman then thoroughly absorbed as his own. In so doing, the essay proposes that we must follow a very specific path if we are to gain a fuller sense of Newman’s idea of history, and, alongside it, his theology of conscience. The path is as follows: ad Jesum per Mariam.

Hearts in Hiding: Turning towards Mariology

Awed by the hidden and flaunting beauties of Oxford alike, the young Newman turned his hand to writing poetry in earnest during his undergraduate years, even co-founding a periodical called The Undergraduate. One of his earliest student poems, “Solitude,” dates from the 1818 Michaelmas Term. In it the dreamy yet discerning Newman yokes together Romantic reverie with a remarkably mature and detached Christian piety, thereby serving as an early example of the kind of poetic sensibility that would later characterize Tractarian aesthetics (“Solitude” was written over a decade before the Oxford Movement emerged in any straightforward way). “There is in stillness oft a magic power,” the seventeen-year-old wrote, which “calms the breast” and “lower[s]” competing passions. It also serves as an “influence” through which “Diviner feelings” can “arise,” leading us to hear the inner or “heavenly love” which, he says, only finds description if we resort to musical analogies. Beauty is a “mystic sound” which “breathes such tones” only angels can sing, and which only solitary saints can hear this side of the veil.[10] Only solitary saints, the hidden hearts throughout history, can hear the music clearly. Variations of this poem’s central themes appear and reappear throughout Newman’s long life, in his writings and even in his approaches to pastoral ministry. It not only encapsulates his own inclination towards solitude; it also supplies a key to his understanding of the saints, providence, and history, an understanding which, as I have already noted, eventually constellated around the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Solitude,” then, nicely serves as an early germ of Newman’s later and expanded ideas on the role and value of the lives of the saints for our understanding of history. The solitary saint is never alone; he or she is in constant communion with God and participates in the renewal of the world through a life dependent on prayer, service, and quiet attunement to the nature of things. Newman’s persistent interest in the hidden life deepened throughout his Oxford days, playing a pivotal role in the quasi-monasticism he later lived in the Littlemore Community, and influencing his adaptations of Oratorian congregational life to an English context after he was clothed in the habit of St. Philip. Through these experiences of contemplative solitude within established communities, Newman’s views on the nature of the solitary expanded; his early depictions of the lyrical nature of solitude (as seen in his undergraduate poetry) become more fully agapic (or other-centred) and enriched through his eventual subscription to definite doctrines such as the Communion of the Saints and Marian dogma—all of which helped him discern how the solitary soul or poet must, within the Christian economy, confess dependence on God and help from other Christians.[11] (As he would preach in later life, “it is the one peculiarity of the Christian character to be dependent. . . . It is the Christian’s excellence to be diligent and watchful, to work and persevere, and yet to be in spirit dependent; to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission to do so; to be content to view himself in a subordinate place.”)[12] The feast of the annunciation was, to Newman’s mind, the historical event in which the efficacy of the “subordinate place” is on full display: the low is raised high, a young woman becomes the ark of the covenant regained, the person who, throughout all of history, exercised her freedom most fully in response to the highest call.

During his Tractarian period, Newman drew ever closer to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. Take, for instance, his initial involvement between 1843-1844 as an author and principal editor of the collaborative, Tractarian anthology, Lives of the English Saints, which aimed, as he put it, to carefully render the lives of the saints with fidelity, seeking to sketch the “historical” and “ethical character” of the holy persons treated.[13] Part of Newman’s intention in Lives was to show how holy persons within history showcase aspects of God’s provident and specific care for his creation in different times and contexts, according to the needs of diverse cultures and countries. (Lives focused exclusively on tracing glimpses of providence within the English historical context, but Newman’s insights into the specific operations of providence within England can be applied, with some adjustments, to other cases in other countries and times). Indications of Newman’s interest in exploring how points of doctrine help explain the operations of providence through history and across cultures abound. As just one more example, in his characteristically reserved, Tractarian poem “The Hidden Ones” (1829), later published in Verse on Various Occasions (1868), Newman celebrates the “secret heart[s]” of the unknown saints in whom “Christ rears his throne” so as to transform the world by revivifying “old history” and “bidding the slow heart dance, to prove her power / O’er self in its proud hour.”[14] Written as the Oxford Movement was taking shape and amassing more followers, the poem serves as a snapshot of Newman’s increasingly broadened out and metaphysical vision of history, a vision not unlike Blondel’s view that “real history is composed of human lives; and human life is metaphysics in act.”[15] Newman’s turn to Mariology confirms this. It showed Newman that solitude is always already communal in the Christian context; it is constituted by the soul’s communication with God and participation in the communion of saints through the liturgy and the life of the Church, which operates within and beyond history.

***

Newman’s Marian devotion began in earnest during his Anglican period, through the influence of his fellow Tractarians and dear friends, John Keble and Richard Hurrell Froude in particular. As we know, it was especially thanks to Keble’s wildly successful collection of devotional poems, The Christian Year (1827), that a revival of pre-Reformation, medieval devotions (Marian ones included) began to crop up in the popular art of the Victorian period. Newman praises The Christian Year in the Apologia, saying it imparted to him a definite sense of the key articles of doctrine (such as the Communion of Saints), the “sacramental system” of the Church, and the attendant mysteries of the faith, Marian devotion included.[16] Keble’s influence extended well beyond Newman’s admiration and the growing Tractarian set. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings, for instance, relied heavily on “Art Catholic” themes derived from emerging Tractarian poetry like Keble’s. Christina Rossetti, likewise, drew from Keble’s devotional prosody while significantly contributing to the early, pre-Raphaelite medieval, devotional aesthetic of the late 1840s and early 1850s. Rossetti even leant her face to various members of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, modelling for paintings which depicted the early years of Mary’s life and Christ’s life, too.

Although a greater cultural liberty was slowly afforded to artists who depicted Marian themes favorably, advancing Marian devotion, let alone Marian dogma, remained a contentious if not scandalous activity in mainstream Victorian culture and within the established Church of England. As we know, Newman himself admits in the Apologia and elsewhere that Marian doctrine was something of a stumbling block to him, too, and one which was only fully removed when he began to read the early Church Fathers in earnest. In their treatises, hymns, biblical exegesis, and spiritual reflections, Mary and her glories are a constant refrain.

Around the time that he was appointed vicar to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, Newman especially recalled how Froude’s Marian devotion enkindled in him a special love for the Mother of God. Recounting his personal ‘turn’ to Mary in the Apologia, Newman writes that Froude “had a high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity; and he considered the Blessed Virgin its great Pattern. . . . He fixed deep in me the idea of devotion to the Blessed Virgin.”[17] As a result, many of Newman’s University sermons in the early 1830s began to touch on aspects of the life of Mary and Marian dogma, even prior to the public “launching” of the Oxford Movement around 1833, onward.[18] On the Feast of the Annunciation in 1832, for example, Newman advanced a defence of the Immaculate Conception which was energetically rejected by most Anglicans of the time and about which even the Roman Catholic Church made no official pronouncements until Pope Bl. Pius IX officially affirmed the ancient doctrine of the Immaculate Virgin in his 1854 declaration, Ineffabilis Deus (which was confirmed by Mary, herself, in her apparitions to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858).

As Newman would point out to Edward Pusey, while the Church did not pronounce on the Immaculate Conception until the nineteenth century, it had been traditionally treasured as one of her prerogatives since “the doctrine of the [Church] Fathers from the earliest times.”[19] He elaborates on this fact in Discourse XVII of Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (1849), entitled “On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary.” Here, he foregrounds the inextricable relationship between the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Hypostatic Union, and the Glories of Mary. He writes that those Catholic doctrines concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly the Immaculate Conception and her status as the Second Eve, enjoy a special and fitting “harmony with the substance and main outlines of the doctrine of the Incarnation” because they explain how and why Mary uniquely enabled it and, throughout Church history, communicates it through her continual acts of intercession.[20] God chose to rely on the fiat of a young and obscure Nazarene woman in order to accomplish the entrance of Christ into history. It is through Mary’s status as Deipara (God’s Mother) that, as Newman puts it, “the historical reality” of salvation is actualized: as he puts it, through Mary, “the Almighty is introduced into his own world at a certain time and in a definite way. Dreams are broken and shadows depart; the Divine truth is no longer a poetic expression, or a devotional exaggeration, or a mystical economy, or a mythical representation.”[21] Or, to put it another way, drawing from CS Lewis, “myth became fact.”

In this, Newman shows that the historical events of the Annunciation and Incarnation together reveal the eschatological character—or, as it were, eschatological calling—of history itself. As importantly, he stresses that the life of Christ cannot be read as one myth among others, thereby implicitly critiquing the rising emphasis on historicism (to the strange exclusion of metaphysics) in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship and criticism. The Jesus of history is the Christ of God who entered fully into the mundane and ordinary experiences of human life to redeem them. Mary’s humble fiat, which allows the Incarnation to take place, firmly establishes Jesus’ historicity while also testifying to the metaphysical dimensions characterizing the Incarnation. Given this, Newman concludes that it is Mary’s perfect accord with her (unfallen) conscience (her immaculate heart, as it were), that makes her the greatest human witness to truth in history. Mary’s glories (the doctrines about her) are therefore fitting, Newman contends, drawing on the Patristic and Thomistic tradition of interpreting revealed truths according to the category of fittingness (which is adjacent to but distinct from the category of necessity). Newman justifies Mary’s glories and her role as hermeneutical key to history when he appeals to Christ’s own words in scriptural, post-resurrection accounts. Referring to the resurrected Christ’s encounter of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Newman explains that the Lord draws from the category of fittingness to explain the inner coherences between revealed truths. He “appeals to the fitness and congruity which existed between this otherwise surprising event [of the resurrection] and the other truths which had been revealed concerning the Divine purpose of saving the world.”[22]

The “great principle” of fittingness “which is exemplified so variously in the structure and history of Catholic doctrine . . . is brought before us,” Newman concludes, in the seasons of Marian feasts when we celebrate the woman who “was so singular and special, both in herself and her relations to him [Christ].”[23] Mary’s singularity lies in her perfect accord with the divine will, and her glories, Newman suggests, are God’s honoring of her obedience, an honoring which is in some instances prevenient: in the order of history, Mary is immaculately conceived before she makes her fiat.[24] This shows, in a hidden yet paradoxically manifest way, the metaphysical character of history; grace transforms persons and events within and beyond (sometimes, even despite) the chronological when divine providence deems it fitting.

Newman supplies further justification for the fittingness of Mary’s glories and, derivatively, her special value for history in his sermon, “The Reverence Due to the Virgin Mary,” which was dedicated to the feast of the Annunciation. Meditating at length on her canticle of praise (Luke 1: 46-55), he concludes that her greatest witness to providence in history is found in her desire to live only in so far as her soul “magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1: 46). Newman marvels how, through Mary’s fiat, God accomplishes the “promise which the world had been looking out for during thousands of years” and which guarantees that the “destinies of the world were to be reversed.”[25] He then insists that the Annunciation depends on its historicity for its significance—this cannot be mere myth, as he so frequently argues—and shows how the Visitation sheds further light on the Annunciation. He drives home this point by focusing on the example Mary sets for future generations through her Magnificat. Mary’s Magnificat, which she proclaims in the sight of her cousin Elizabeth, is a priceless treasure, Newman reminds his listeners, passed down over the course of history. He therefore recommended the Magnificat as a resource for anyone who wished to grow in prayer and to those who pray the Divine Office. He laments the thoughtlessness of those who “do not think of the meaning of those words which came from the most highly favored, awfully gifted of the children of men.”[26]

Newman concludes his sermon by underscoring the fact that the Magnificat, as a fruit of the Annunciation, not only confirms Mary “is doubtless to be accounted blessed and favored in herself” but also indicates the great “benefits she has done us” as a result of her free choice to become the Mother of God; generation after generation will now enjoy the fruits of the Incarnation.[27] Given this, he proposes humanity owes Mary a debt of gratitude. The daily rounds of life (our lived history) as well as the great sufferings and joys chronicled throughout time take on the shape and direction of definite hope and consolation because Mary assented to the divine will: “instead of sending his son from heaven, [God] . . . sent him forth as the Son of Mary, to show that all our sorrow and all our corruption can be blessed and changed by him. The very punishment of the fall, the very taint of birth-sin,” he concludes, “admits of a cure by the coming of Christ.”[28] In the quiet solitude of her heart, where Mary discerned the presence and will of God, Newman implies we find a model for history as well as our own place within it.

In Newman’s gloss on the scriptural accounts of the Annunciation and the Visitation, there exist unsurprising but nevertheless richly illuminating, conceptual sympathies between his Mariology and von Balthasar’s own. For instance, in Mary for Today, von Balthasar proposes that true humility is, in a profound sense, unconscious; it is the very mode or operation of being, and so Mary’s humble obedience made her the most singularly unconscious human of all time. This helps account, he proposes, for Mary’s ability to withstand the Angel Gabriel’s visitation, even as fear arises within her. Mary’s holy fear, Balthasar suggests, comes from reluctance to, as it were, enact a certain self-consciousness or self-consideration. She is troubled by the Angel’s message about her because she naturally does not think about herself:

When the girl is greeted as “Full of grace” by the angel she is afraid. It casts a light on her own essential nature that she had never reflected on. “Poverty of spirit” (or, what is the same, humility) is not some veritable virtue—capability, suitability, competence is something one can be conscious of—but the unconsidered awareness that everything that one is and has is God’s loan and gift and is only there to bring the giver into the spotlight. . . . It is only the sinner who twists himself back on to his or her ego: the person who is sinless (the only one there is) does not know this backward glance but looks steadfastly forward at what is good, and “no one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:1). It is precisely this lack of knowledge about her own sinlessness that makes Mary the “seat of wisdom.” Wisdom is not something one possesses but a radiant light from God. . . . Its light is given as their own to the poor and humble. . . . [This is why] Mary can only point to Jesus, just as Jesus can only point to the Father: “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (John 7:16).[29]

The fittingness of Mary’s glories come from her radical purity and poverty, as Balthasar shows us so persuasively, and which Christ proclaims in his adage, “blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11: 27-28). With the Patristic interpretation of this very passage as inspiration, Newman also often concluded that greater than her status as biological mother of Christ is Mary’s perfect obedience to the divine plan for salvation; her lack of self-regard given her complete turn to, her focus on, divine calling.[30] In all this, we see that, in his turn towards Mariology and Marian devotion, Newman discovered a deeply personal and metaphysical articulation of the inner-depth dimensions of history as sites for the unfolding of personal assent to the divine plan. As importantly, he apprehended how the solitude he romanticized in his undergraduate days was, as he had intuited even then, indicative of the deeper dimensions of the self. As he recounts in the Apologia, this deeper sense of the self is more fully known through the spiritual friendship enjoyed within the Communion of Saints and facilitated through the (often-hidden) intercession of God’s Mother. In the remaining section, I will consider the degree to which Newman’s literary approaches to Mariology offer us ways of thinking about the value of the historical for the devotional imagination and vice versa.

Mary and the “Providences of God towards His Church”

According to Newman, history is rarely understood, let alone correctly interpreted, without great care and contemplation over long periods of time. It would take a holy prophet, a saint close to God, a divinely inspired poet to discern the patterns of events and their significances in “real time,” as it were. However, he argues that it is nonetheless incumbent upon historians and especially theologians to seek to interpret the past in light of the present, to see how the known parts of history hang together and testify to the presence of God who operates within and beyond them. Writing for The British Critic in 1841, Newman laments the lack of a systematic, historical study of Church history in the Anglican Church. “Perhaps the greatest of wants under which our religious literature labors at this day is that of an ecclesiastical history,” he writes.[31] He argues that Christian doctrine and history uniquely inform each other, showing the “providences of God towards his Church.”[32] For Newman, history is to doctrine what the body is to the soul; the two are meant to be a unity and understood relationally. “Our view of doctrine affects our view of history,” he argues, “and our view of history our view of doctrine; and our view of doctrine the sense we put upon Scripture.”[33] After justifying the “associations” between history and faith, between lived experience and divine revelation, Newman considers what is involved in the challenge of interpreting the present in light of the past:

The history of the past ends in the present; and the present is our scene of trial; and to behave ourselves towards its various phenomena duly and religiously, we must understand them; and to understand them, we must have recourse to those past events which led to them. . . . It is the association [between past and present] which is everything; but to those who know not the true history of that to which the name [or event or idea] belongs, there are no associations with it [or them], or wrong ones.[34]

As he proceeds to assess how the study of history can serve theological concerns, Newman makes it clear that any such assessment should be primarily made for the sake of religious duty, to aid us in “behav[ing] ourselves.”[35]

This claim is brought to an even greater pitch in Development of Christian Doctrine (which Newman was completing when his essay was published by The British Critic). For, as we know, the overview of Church history Newman undertakes in Development helped confirm his decision to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 (the same year Development was published). This is just one indicative example of the seriousness with which Newman understood the effect of historical study on religious convictions and the devotional sensibility. Another example can be found in Newman’s fascination with, and defence of, Mariology in key sections of Development. In these sections, he shows how Mary’s role within salvation history is to help pilgrim souls better love and know her Son. In other words, one of Mary’s key roles in history is to help humanity behave better, see better, imagine better.

In his chapter on the “Office of St. Mary,” in which he says Mary’s “special prerogatives . . . are intimately involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation itself,” Newman quotes from St. Irenaeus’s declaration that Mary is the Second Eve. In so doing, he meditates on how Mary’s fiat is used by providence to begin to redress the wounds of history, caused by the fall in Genesis. According to Irenaeus, just as “Eve . . . was seduced by the Angel’s speech so as to flee God having transgressed his word, so also Mary by an Angel’s speech was evangelized so as to contain God, being obedient to his Word.”[36] Irenaeus extends the parallel even further: “And as one was seduced to flee God, so the other was persuaded to obey God, that the Virgin Mary might become the Advocate (Paraclete) of the Virgin Eve, that as mankind has been bound to death through a Virgin, through a Virgin it may be saved.”[37] Piling reference upon reference and authority upon authority, Newman draws from Irenaeus and other theologians (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, etc.) in order to further confirm Mary’s “high office” and her interventions in history to sustain the hopes and goodness of humanity under trial. He is clearly fascinated by Irenaeus’s description of Mary as an advocate, a paraclete for humanity throughout the unfolding drama of history. Additionally, Newman pulls from devotional accounts of Mary’s interventions in the early Church to further his cause. In this instance, his primary motivation is to instruct or educate, but an important derivative of his choice to appeal to devotional accounts is to show the value of the poetically imaginative within historical accounts of the life, nature, and scope of the Christian Church.

One such striking example of Newman’s use of poetic accounts in Development is his extensive assessment of a third-century record of a Marian apparition. He claims that mystic accounts of Marian apparitions can serve as cultural confirmations of “Mary’s interposition” in history.[38] While the evocative language of the record clearly strikes a chord with Newman, he analyzes the text systematically, too, defending the historicity of the vision. To justify his turn to a devotional text (as opposed to a theological treatise), Newman appeals to the authority and credibility of the story’s witnesses. In this instance, they are St. Gregory of Nyssa, “the historian” of the apparition, and Bishop Thaumaturgus (also known as Gregory the Miracle-Worker) of Neo-Caesarea (who is “the subject” of this mystical encounter).[39]

Tradition and ecclesial authority legitimize the historicity of the story, Newman concludes, as do the fruits of the apparition itself—namely, the clarification of the Trinitarian formula in the ante-Nicene period (100-325), which followed on from the Apostolic Age. However, in seeing Newman’s treatment of the account, it becomes clear that it is also important to him because a poetic approach to Church history can open up deeper affective appreciations, appreciations which cannot be so fully supplied by other means or through other modes.

It is worth quoting a series of passages and choice phrases from the apparition account as they illuminate Newman’s conviction that Mary is not only a divinely chosen and special instrument of divine providence throughout history. She also illumines understanding by appealing to reason as well as the heart. The account begins with Thaumaturgus “passing the night” in prayer when “one appeared, as if in human form, aged in appearance [and] . . . saintly.”[40] This venerable figure is Christ’s beloved apostle, St. John the Evangelist. John calms the frightened bishop, who is “amazed at the sight,” and filled with attending “perturbation.”[41] John assures the bishop with a “gentle voice,” saying he has appeared by “divine command . . . in order that the truth of the orthodox faith might be revealed to him.”[42] As John assures the bishop, filling him with “courage,” a still more sublime figure arrives on the scene. The bishop “cannot bear” the sight of the Mother of God and struggles to explain her in words so he settles on the inadequate description of a figure “in shape of a woman, but more than human.”[43] This figure turns out to be God’s Mother.

While gazing upon these two figures, the bishop overhears a theological discourse between them. It becomes evident that John is only able to pronounce the correct Trinitarian creed and formula once “the Mother of the Lord” has instructed him.[44] Here, Mary is the primary theologian and John her receptive student. As spouse of the Holy Spirit and Seat of Wisdom, she is the one who gives John the correct way to offer “a formulary, well-turned and complete” before both saints vanish from the bishop’s sight. The apparition ends and Thaumaturgus records the Trinitarian formula and incorporates it into his preaching, offering it, as Newman says, as a gift to “posterity, as an inheritance [of] heavenly teaching” which aids the doctrinal clarifications concerning the Trinity which were needed at the time. Pondering the elements of this account, Newman concludes by using the words of Gregory of Nyssa (the historian of this vision), saying that Mary is history’s paraclete, a “loving Mother with clients” throughout history.[45] Influenced by Gregory’s writings, and other early mystical poems, hymns, and treatises on the Mother of God, Newman came to see her according to her role in Thaumaturgus’s vision: history’s clearest icon of Christ’s redemption of humanity. “She will show you her Son, your God, and your all,” Newman would later preach.[46]

Mary’s status as patron of history is one which especially captured Newman’s devotional imagination, informing his philosophical and theological reflections on the place and value of hidden holiness in the outworking of providence through time. As discussed above, this is evident when Newman discusses articles of Christian doctrine. But just as importantly, his idea of history and aesthetics are also shaped by his belief that Marian doctrine held a special place in English history and English self-understanding. Although this Marian element in English culture was disturbed and displaced during the Reformation, Newman believed it needed to be re-established if Roman Catholics were to help pave the way for the Church’s fuller restoration in Victorian Britain.

In his seminal 1852 sermon, “The Second Spring,” delivered on the occasion of the restitution of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, Newman transposes verses from the Song of Solomon (Canticles 2: 10-12) as he petitions Mary to resume her patronage of his beloved country: “It is the time for thy Visitation. Arise, Mary, and go forth in thy strength into that north country, which once was thing own, and take possession of a land which knows thee note. Arise, Mother of God, and with thy thrilling voice, speak to those who labor with child, and are in pain, till the babe of grace leaps within them. Shine on us, dear Lady, with thy bright countenance.”[47] His desire for England’s return to true devotion to God’s Mother is earnestly expressed in his Letter to Pusey as well as the Marian hymns and devotions he wrote during decades of pastoral service as a Roman Catholic priest.

Of course, praying for the return of public Marian devotion to England’s shores is not unique to Newman. The Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom Newman received into the Church) also often turned to this theme in his poetry—as seen in the final lines of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in which he prays that Christ (whom he calls the “Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame”) will come “back, oh, upon English souls.”[48] However, few nineteenth-century Roman Catholic poets or theologians were as persistent as Newman in his belief that the revival of Marian devotion was crucial to the restoration of the religious sense in public life and, among other things, to a deeper understanding of the unfolding of providence throughout history and of the role that individual persons play within that very unfolding.

Rather than define history as the march of linear progression (the conceit of scientific positivism championed in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth), Newman understood it as the processual movement towards a deeper understanding of the action of God within and among his creation. And in stark contrast to the historical theories of power politics which shaped late modernity or the “modern humanism” which, as Henri de Lubac points out, so often relied upon claims of “resentment,” Newman offers a philosophy of history rooted in prayer and hiddenness, stemming from Christ’s humble and sometimes obscure redemptive work which Mary, as the Mother of God, uniquely supports and makes known throughout history—for the sake of her Son.[49]

Like Augustine, Newman held that history’s ultimate significance lies well beyond the rise and fall of civilizations. He discerned that the true heart of history beats within the relationship between each person and God, and in the extension of these private relations through a life of friendship and definite service. It is in searching the conscience that, according to Newman, the heart and mind are opened up to the transcendent horizons granted by divine revelation and made manifest, firstly, in Christ’s life and, secondarily, in the lives of the saints which he described as “the remanent fruit of largely-scattered grace” who are under the special protection of God’s Mother, history’s paraclete.[50]

EDITORIAL NOTE: You can listen to an interview with the author about this essay on the Church Life Today podcast.

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: Henry John Marian Newman's Thought Turn