What makes a saint? At one level, it is just a fact: someone lived a holy life or died a martyr, and the Church has recognised that in a special way. At another level, sainthood has to be constructed: an effort must be made in the Church's members to internalise the significance of such a recognition, to put into effect the veneration, imitation, and intercession of these men and women which the Church commends to us. Most basically, that is done by talking about a saint: recalling their life, their sayings, their vision of things. This collection of papers, from a 2019 conference marking Newman's canonization, seeks to do as much for him, by reflecting on his capacity to be a teacher of holiness in the 21st century.
The contributions can be roughly divided into those that present Newman teaching holiness by his life, and those that present Newman teaching about holiness. Given that so much of Newman's activity was realised in the written word, the division may appear somewhat artificial. Those pieces that focus on Newman's life draw extensively on his written remains, while those which focus on Newman's teaching tend to stress its authenticity, as proceeding from lived experience and finding exemplification in his own person.
A short entry by Christopher Blum provides a model synthesis of the two perspectives by taking a sermon of Newman, ‘The Ventures of Faith’ (from the fourth volume of Plain and Parochial Sermons), situating it in biographical context, and using that context to explicate its contents. Newman delivered the sermon, Blum tells us, the day after he learned that his friend, Hurrell Froude, lay dying; Froude's death would almost certainly force Newman to make his own ‘venture of faith’ and step up to leadership of the movement afoot in Oxford. That Newman was aware of this is proved from a letter to his sister Jemima sent on the same day he preached the sermon. Blum's strategy at once showcases Newman's sincerity – the man lived by what he preached, he spoke in private as he did in public – and it illuminates the sermon's progression and import by means of concrete example. Such a model of commentary could be fruitfully applied at greater length in an ‘Introduction to’ or ‘Reader of’ Newman's sermons.
Elizabeth Huddleston presents Newman as a theoretician of holiness – not simply a doctor, rather a thinker. Her essay, the most challenging and conceptually sophisticated in the book, examines the close connection between Newman's account of conscience, and, broadly, the role of the imagination in Newman's thought. Together, she argues, these allowed Newman to account for the lifeworld of the saint, the saint's real intercourse with the invisible world. Huddleston's perspective conjures a dialogue between Newman and Kant. In the absence of any intuition of God, and the apparent failure of rationalist proofs of God's existence, Kant had declared God's existence unprovable, except as a necessary postulate of the moral life. Newman throughout his life was not just preoccupied with the rational justification of faith, but desired to articulate what a real faith consists of, a faith that is affectively and existentially engaged. Like Kant, he attends to the moral dimension of human experience; only, where Kant used moral experience simply as a different kind of material to produce another conceptual argument for the necessity of God's existence, Newman envisages conscience as itself a direct deliverance or intuition of God. At first, it is an intuition of God as judge; supplemented by Revelation, it becomes an intuition of God as a fitting object of our unreserved love. Newman, we might say, reworks a moral proof of the existence of God in a personalist direction, and so makes space for faith in revelation, by contrast with Kant's desire to confine religion within the bounds of reason alone.
Huddleston's essay is suggestive, and draws together several important strands in Newman's thought. To do justice to the theme, however, really would require more than her twenty-three pages. For instance, she draws attention to a correspondence in Newman's writings between our spiritual relationship to the ‘transcendent cosmology’ of the invisible world and the way in which our physical senses relate us to the external, visible world. The obvious but unanswered question is whether this correspondence is a (mere) literary, figurative device of Newman's œuvre, or whether he manages to substantiate it theologically. The tenor of Huddleston's overall argumentation points in the latter direction, but the point is not established on its own terms. This element of Newman's thinking might benefit from theological investigation alongside, say, Origen's ‘spiritual senses’, as well as investigation along the lines that Huddleston herself suggests in an allusion to Romantic overtones in some of Newman's writings.
Huddleston reads Newman in light of the reception and use of his thought by Wilfrid Ward, who was active in the generation following Newman's death and looked to Newman for guidance amidst the ‘Modernist’ crisis. Other contributors to this collection attempt to read Newman in the light of considerably later concerns. Ian Ker, in the volume's opening gambit, re-states in typically punchy fashion his contention that Newman should be seen as the great Doctor of Vatican II, the Church in the modern world, before Vatican II. A full statement of Ker's arguments is to be found in other works of his rather than here. His evidently global reading of Newman, however, is complemented by a somewhat selective reading of the Council. Further, his ready-made thesis does not quite address the theme of this book, Newman and the call to holiness: the Newman he portrays here seems to be significant only as a progenitor of ideas, and those not relevant to the question of holiness per se.
Another approach, adopted in part by two contributors (Edward Short and Ryan Marr), is to my mind even more unhelpful. These two authors attempt to tell us what Newman would say to the discussion in the Church in 2019 about the matter of communion for the divorced and re-married. Marr, it must be said, addresses the topic with considerably greater delicacy and respect for its complexity than Short. Nevertheless, the line of approach seems to me fundamentally misdirected. Neither author brings to light any reflection of Newman on the topic as such – I am not sure that he ever addressed it – and what citations they do bring forward are used simply to re-affirm familiar, entrenched positions. One leaves off reading their arguments none the wiser about the present-day dispute, and scarcely the wiser about the import of Newman's teaching in its own right.
Overall, the quality of this volume is quite varied: some pieces are very stimulating, others I think approach the theme from a misoriented angle. The same can be said of the quality of writing: in some cases, more editorial work would have been beneficial, better to adapt the (originally spoken, I presume) conference papers to written publication. Collected papers of this sort are marked by some intrinsic limitations: some very good papers suffer from being simply too short – one is left clamouring for more; while, taken together, the parts composing the whole do not leave one with a definitive or coherent vision, like one might expect from a monograph of a similar size by a single author. What does unite the pieces is an evidently shared enthusiasm for Newman and a desire to take to heart the significance of his canonization. The Epilogue is right to point out that Newman not only had a great capacity for friendship in his earthly life, but he continues to inspire it even now.
