From the NINS "Newman Review": An Article comparing Newman's Anglican Sermons about Mary

Since on Friday, March 21, I'll be posting on another of Newman's Meditations and Devotions for our Son Rise Morning Show Lenten series, one particularly focused on the sympathy between Jesus and His Mother and how He "refused" that sympathy as He entered public ministry and His Passion, this article from the Newman Review is timely:

Robert M. Andrews is Senior Lecturer in Church History at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia, a member institute of the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is the author of Apologia Pro Beata Maria Virgine: John Henry Newman’s Defence of the Virgin Mary in Catholic Doctrine and Piety (London & Washington, DC: Academica Press, 2017; revised, 2025), writes about "Hidden Development: Mary’s Evolution in John Henry Newman’s Anglican Sermons":

Andrews examines how the text of “The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary: The Reverence Due to Her” changed as Newman's study of Marian doctrine developed, looking at the same passage in the 1835 text and in the 1840:

Whatever the edition, there is a reason why Newman’s Anglican sermons continue to be amongst the most enduring of his writings. For though they are Anglican sermons, they contain a theology that is not only insightful, but, with a handful of notable exceptions, mostly Catholic in terms of doctrine (indeed, Catholics probably comprise the largest group of readers of these sermons). Part of a broader pulpit ministry that arguably ranks as one of the most religiously affective of the nineteenth century, Newman’s Anglican Marian sermons—though few in number—are nonetheless striking. Take, for example, Newman’s remarkable statement regarding the holiness of Mary in the sermon under discussion. From the 1835 edition:

Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ? If to him that hath, more is given, and holiness and divine favour go together, (and this we are expressly told,) what must have been the angelic purity of her, whom the Creator Spirit condescended to overshadow with His miraculous presence? What must have been her gifts, who was chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God, the only one whom He was bound by nature to revere and look up to; the one appointed to train and educate Him, to instruct Him day by day, as He grew in wisdom and in stature? This contemplation runs to a higher subject, did we dare follow it; for what, think you, was the sanctity and grace of that human nature, of which God formed His sinless Son; knowing, as we do, “that what is born of the flesh, is flesh;” and that “none can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?”12

Then Andrews provides the same paragraph in the 1840 version:

Who can estimate the holiness and perfection of her, who was chosen to be the Mother of Christ? If to him that hath, more is given, and holiness and divine favour go together, (and this we are expressly told,) what must have been the transcendent purity of her, whom the Creator Spirit condescended to overshadow with His miraculous presence? What must have been her gifts, who was chosen to be the only near earthly relative of the Son of God, the only one whom He was bound by nature to revere and look up to; the one appointed to train and educate Him, to instruct Him day by day, as He grew in wisdom and in stature? This contemplation runs to a higher subject, did we dare follow it; for what, think you, was the sanctified state of that human nature, of which God formed his sinless Son; knowing, as we do, “that what is born of the flesh, is flesh;” and that “none can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?”13

Not only are both editions expressive of a high view of Mary’s holiness, the differences, though subtle, seem to signify development on Newman’s part in an increasingly Catholic direction—which we know was happening to Newman and the Oxford Movement during the period from around 1835 onward.14 They are as follows: (1) Newman changed “the angelic purity” of Mary (1835) to “the transcendent purity” (1840), and (2) he changed “the sanctity and grace of that human nature” (1835) to “the sanctified state of that human nature” (1840).

Please read the rest there.

To me this is interesting because the passage that I'll cite on Friday concerns how the Marriage Feast of Cana was the crucial event of the beginning of Jesus's public ministry on the way to His Passion, according to the Gospel of Saint John, and its effect on Mary after their separation--and if one compares Newman's Anglican commentary on this event in "The Lord's Last Supper and His First" from the Sermons on Subjects of the Day to his Catholic meditation one sees even greater development. Newman is freer in his contemplation of the mysteries of Mary's relationship to her Son, the Incarnate Son of God. Before, there was "an increasingly Catholic direction" in Newman's thought; then Newman may more sympathetically explore Mary's sorrows and her sacrifice in relationship to Our Lord's Life and Passion, the proper hierarchy of course.

More on our next Lenten meditation on Friday and next Monday, March 24, the day before the great Solemnity of the Annunciation.

And here's a link to Andrew's book, Apologia Pro Beata Maria Virgine: John Henry Newman’s Defence of the Virgin Mary in Catholic Doctrine and Piety.

Image Source (Public Domain): Leonardo's Annunciation, thought to be his earliest completed work (c. 1472–1475)!

Another Tractarian: Isaac Williams and Saint John Henry Newman

The Newman Review of the National Institute of Newman Studies highlights Saint John Henry Newman's Tractarian friendship with Isaac Williams. According to Lawrence Gregory:

The Rev. Isaac Williams (1802–1865) was a contemporary of John Henry Newman (1801–1890) at Trinity College, Oxford. The son of a Welsh lawyer, he was ordained a priest in Anglican Orders in 1829, serving first as curate at Windrush, Gloucestershire. Williams returned to Oxford in 1831 after being elected a Fellow and Tutor at Trinity and became the Dean of his College in 1833 and vice-president in 1841. From 1836 he also served as assistant curate to Newman at Littlemore.

He collaborated on the Lyra Apostolica and as a Tractarian and contributed Tract 80, “On Reserve in Communicating, Religious Knowledge,” which he concluded with Tract 87. Williams also wrote Tract 86 “Indications of a superintending Providence in the preservation of the Prayer-book and in the changes which it has undergone.”

The controversy about Tract 90 meant that Williams did not succeed John Keble as Professor of Poetry as expected. In 1842, he left St. Mary's in Oxford and Littlemore, married Caroline Champernowne and the couple moved to Bisley, Gloucestershire, where he worked as a curate to Thomas Keble, John's brother. Williams became very ill in 1846 and was not able to continue in parish work. He and his wife to moved to Stinchcombe, Gloucestershire, where his sister Jane and her husband, Sir George Prevost, another Tractarian, held the living. 

In John Henry Newman: The Liturgy and the Breviary, Their Influence on His Life as an Anglican (Sheed & Ward: 1992), Donald A. Withey suggests that Newman and Williams did not always agree--even though they were good friends and remained friends, even after Newman became a Catholic--on certain projects members of the Oxford Movement were undertaking. For example, in 1838, Samuel Wood and Robert Williams, two laymen, became interested in translating, printing, and selling the Roman [Catholic] Breviary. Richard Hurrell Froude had begun praying it and others in the Movement bought copies when they were on the Continent, etc. Wood and Robert Williams were financing the project with their own money, and were asking Newman, Isaac Williams, and others to translate hymns, etc. 

Opposition to the project, which kept starting and stopping, Withey says was largely aimed at Newman and "was led by Tom Keble, Isaac Williams, and George Prevost. Tom Keble and Newman disagreed about the significance of the reformers of the sixteenth century . . . " (p. 33) Isaac, Withey notes, "admired and enjoyed a close friendship with [Newman]. However, he also had a long-standing loyalty to the Kebles dating from his undergraduate days." Withey suggests that Isaac sided with Tom Keble "against Newman" -- who was also rather diffident about the project because of the cost and the care of omitting things that were just "too" Catholic--because of any "Romanizing influence". (p. 34)

Reading about these efforts to translate and print the four volumes of the Roman Breviary in Chapter Four, "The Breviary Translation Project - Phase One" reminded me of how delicately the Tractarians had to proceed in their overall project to demonstrate the Apostolic basis of the Church of England. They were always walking a fine line--one step too far and they would be accused of Popery and being secretly Papist while holding Church of England benefices, offices, and livings!

In the next chapter, "The Breviary Translation Project - Phases Two and Three", Withey describes Isaac Williams' reactions when E.B. Pusey took up the reins of the effort in 1843. At first Isaac seemed helpful and willing to let Pusey use his translations, but because "he was then moving away from his High Church convictions towards a Low Church stance"*, working with him became more difficult. He "vacillated considerably and awkwardly before making up his mind to allow the use of the manuscripts" (pp. 58-59) 

*[Note that Withey doesn't provide any evidence of Williams' change of mind in the book and I haven't researched that aspect at all. Also note: there is no good image of the cover of Withey's book which is out of print but available. Pages 168-169 in the Notes has some particularly interesting detail about how Latin was pronounced in England in Newman's time! Sister Florella, who taught me Latin at Kapaun-Mount Carmel High School always reminded us that there weren't any "tapes" of Romans speaking Latin in the Vatican archives!]

One reason Newman himself was reluctant to see the project completed was since he had obtained the late Richard Hurrell Froude's copy of the Roman Breviary in 1836, he had been praying it daily, and it was influencing him toward "Roman Catholic" piety and prayer. Even though he tried to skip certain prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints, it was becoming attractive to him. 

Isaac Williams and Newman maintained their friendship after Newman followed that attraction with assent and conversion in 1845. As Gregory notes in the Newman Review article:

The NINS Digital Collections contain 26 letters by Williams. Three are from the papers of Hurrell Froude, and 23 make up his surviving correspondence with Newman. The Newman letters begin in March 1841 at the time of the Tract 90 controversy and continue until May 1864, a few months before Williams’s death. Those from the 1840s cover discussions about the growing schism at Oxford, while those from the 1850s and 60s are of a more personal nature . . .

You may find links to articles about and works of Isaac Williams at Project Canterbury.

Image Credit (Public Domain): A portrait from the Welsh Portrait Collection at the National Library of Wales. Depicted person: Isaac Williams – Welsh writer

Some Notes on Newman's Developing View of The Church

From The Newman Review, Pablo Blanco (PhD '97, ThD '05), who teaches at the University of Navarra, writes about Newman's developing views of ecclesiology from 1825 to 1835:

 
This article follows Newman’s writings mainly with a systematic (thematic) methodology; it does not, however, ignore the historical, since we can best see Newman’s ecclesiology evolve within his historical context.[1] In his Evangelical years, the adolescent Newman distrusted “material elements,” including, of course, the visible church, but after his Anglican ordination, the (then) vicar of St. Clement’s began to preach on various aspects of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.”[2] The cumulative effect of the theological debates at Oxford, together with his pastoral experience and personal reflections, gradually led Newman to a more high church ecclesiological approach, especially on visibility, invisibility, and apostolicity of the church.

In a sermon delivered on 26 October 1835, entitled The Church Visible and Invisible, Newman affirmed that “the sight of the sins of Christians has led us to speak” of both dimensions (visible and invisible dimensions of the church), despite the fact that such expression has no biblical basis: “Scripture does not speak of two bodies, one visible, the other invisible.” This leads him to claim unity between the two, although conceptually and categorically we differentiate them: “we view it as, on the whole, but one in different aspects.” It is like differentiating between concave and convex. Thus, the church is “as Visible, because consisting (for instance) of clergy and laity—as Invisible, because resting for its life and strength upon unseen influences and gifts from Heaven.”[3] . . .

I found the article very interesting because I had delivered a presentation the annual Eighth Day Institute Florovsky-Newman Week this summer on "Newman’s “Religious Opinions” and Infant Baptism" which touched on this issue of ecclesiology: is the invisible Church made up of the elect who commune with baptized but unsaved Christians in their parish churches? or is the Visible Church made up of Baptized, regenerated Christians, each on their way to personal sanctification and salvation, some further along, some going backwards, but all of them part of the Church Jesus founded and promised to remain with forever? Is Baptism a Sacrament, infusing God's Grace into the Soul, or it just an ordinance, symbolic of a personal decision and commitment?

I looked at the years from 1816 to 1828, focused on the Church and Baptism. I referenced sermons from his diaconate service at St. Clement's and then those he preached as Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, consulting the Apologia pro Vita Sua and a book by Father James Tolhurst, The Church . . . A Communion in the Preaching and Thought of John Henry Newman. (I also discussed the different influences on Newman from Mayers to Scott and Whately and Hawkins from Calvinist to Anglican views.)

Father Blanco looks at the years from 1828 to 1835, and includes references to Newman's contributions to the Tracts of the Times.

The most important thing to note about this period of Newman's life, which he points out in his Apologia pro Vita Sua, is that he terms these developments in ecclesiology, soteriology, etc as "Religious Opinions". After his October 9, 1845 conversion he notes that does need these religious opinions, based on private judgment, anymore. The first four chapters repeat the term "Religious Opinions"; Chapter Five doesn't: "The Position of My Mind Since 1845" is the title and Newman explains the depths of his faith in Jesus and His Church and the ease, peace, contentment, lack of anxiety or doubt, and happiness he has felt since becoming a member of "the one, true fold of Christ":

FROM the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

Nor had I any trouble about receiving those additional articles, which are not found in the Anglican Creed. Some of them I believed already, but not any one of them was a trial to me. I made a profession of them upon my reception with the greatest ease, and I have the same ease in believing them now. I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

When our Lovers of Newman group gets together every month on the third Sunday, we usually reflect at least a little bit upon when he wrote the sermon and at what stage of his "religious opinions" he was in at that time. Then we focus on what he wrote, how he wrote it, and what we take from it as spiritual or moral inspiration and insight.

Lingard on Newman, Part Two

I've been waiting for this article since January of this year, when I wrote:

I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. . . .

I also commented that John Lingard's desire for conversions to the Catholic Church was not completely satisfied by those who converted: he mistrusted Newman and Faber, etc.

Shaun Blanchard's concluding article about Lingard's mistrust and dislike of Newman continues the same theme: rather contradictory but also rather ignorant. For example Blanchard notes that Lingard associated Newman with Faber too closely--he lumped the Oxford converts together without distinction or discrimination:

Lingard followed news of Newman and his conversion closely.[12] However, in addition to never really permitting Newman to shake his association with the Oxford Movement (a strike against him in Lingard’s eyes), the old Cisalpine also seems to have negatively associated Newman with Faber (whom he called “credulous”)[13] and with the burgeoning ultramontanism and Romanticism sweeping English Catholicism. Unfortunately, Lingard never recognized Newman as the profoundly unique thinker he was, nor as one who deftly eschewed the standard binaries and party lines of the age and of the church. Lingard even admitted, in 1845, to not having yet read Newman![14] . . .

The second reason for Lingard’s sense of alienation from those he called the “Newmanites” was more principled. When he bluntly admitted to John Walker in January of 1850 that he “didn’t like Newman” that reasons he cited are telling: “too much fancy or enthusiasm.”[20] While there is an element of taste here—Lingard was a man of the Catholic Enlightenment who naturally recoiled from Romanticism and Pugin’s neo-Gothic revival—there was also an important principle at stake.[21] For Lingard, and many of his generation, the theologically correct and pragmatically most effective way to engage Protestants was through stripping away superstitions, triumphalism, and any unnecessary accretions to the Old Faith. Protestants rightly resented all of these things. What remained could be grasped by Protestants of good will as the pure faith of their English ancestors and, indeed, of the early church.

We have to remember that Lingard died in 1851, just after the Restoration of the Hierarchy and just six (6) years after Newman's conversion--but for one who knows a little about Newman's devotional and even architectural proclivities, these comments are strange and seem unfair. If Lingard hadn't read of any Newman's writings in 1845, would he have read Loss and Gain, the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, or Anglican Difficulties (or followed the reports of the lectures) by 1850? 

He seems to have relied merely upon his impressions and prejudices, not upon any real research or sources.

Lingard had very particular goals in mind for any converts, and Blanchard again highlights Lingard's rather contradictory views of the converts coming out of the Oxford Movement:

There is a kind of paradox here, or at least a tension, because on one hand Lingard intimated that the new converts were not Catholic enough—or at least suspiciously attached to “false ideas they imbibed at Oxford”—but on the other hand they were resented for being too Catholic, in the sense of trying to assimilate their Catholicism too much to a foreign standard that was Roman, “Jesuitical,” or Italian.

In an odd way, Newman appears to great advantage in this article, because not knowing what Lingard had written about him, he expressed admiration of Lingard's methods and "comportment":

Newman, thankfully, seems to have been totally unaware that Lingard disliked him. At the death of Lingard’s close friend John Walker in 1873 (to whom Lingard confided so much of his disdain for “Newmanites”!). Newman wrote of his “greatest esteem” for Walker. Newman “looked at [Walker] with veneration as one of the few remaining priests who kept up the tradition of Dr. Lingard’s generation of Catholics.”[24] Seven years earlier, Newman had written to John Walker, thanking him for sending information on Lingard’s intra-Catholic controversies in the early 1830’s. In light of his later praise of Lingard, Newman presumably approved of his comportment. In Lingardian fashion, Newman went on in the same letter to caution against the merits of seeking out confrontation with Anglicans.[25] . . .

Blanchard hopes that Lingard might have learned to like Newman if he had lived longer:

Had he lived longer, or had he been fairer to Newman and actually engaged with his thought as an individual rather than a symbol, Lingard would have seen that the sensitive and brilliant Oxford convert was in fact preserving many of the concerns that Lingard himself held dear. We should keep in mind that in the years around Newman’s conversion, Lingard was an old man, suffering on and off from ill health. It is nevertheless unfortunate that Lingard did not engage with Newman’s ecclesiology in particular. He would have discovered a kindred spirit with nuanced and sophisticated views of the structures and offices of the church. Lingard would have also seen how much more he had in common with Newman than with the Mannings, Fabers, and Wards with which he lumped him together. . . .

In his first footnote to the article, Blanchard highlights an excellent source for a review of Father John Lingard's historical career and outlook for his future investigation, which I reviewed in 2010:

An informative chapter on Lingard from John Vidmar should be included in my review of the secondary literature on Lingard: Vidmar, English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation, 1585–1954 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 52–74.

By the way, it's available in paperback now!

Lingard on Newman in "The Newman Review"

Shaun Blanchard, Assistant Professor of Theology at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, tantalizes us in the opening paragraphs of an article in The Newman Review--and then promises more in a subsequent article--by quoting the Catholic historian Father John Lingard's opinion of the recent convert and Oratorian, Father John Henry Newman:

“I don’t like Newman,” wrote the famous English historian Fr. John Lingard in January 1850. The reasons the aged and ailing Catholic historian gave for his antipathy towards perhaps the most celebrated English convert of all time encapsulated the collision of old and new: “too much fancy or enthusiasm”[1] was Lingard’s gripe in a letter to his friend John Walker. The relative obscurity of Lingard today is surprising, since in his day (he died in 1851) he was “the best-known and most widely read English Catholic writer.”[2] Lingard’s “Victorian celebrity” was due primarily to ground-breaking historical works, but also significantly buttressed by his reputation as a formidable theo-political controversialist: both in intra-Catholic squabbles and in defense of his community against Protestant detractors.[3] The crowning achievement of a life of research, his eight-volume History of England (1819–1830) featured pioneering work with primary source material.[4] Lingard’s History was widely reviewed and debated. It was translated into many languages, went through multiple editions, and was even abridged for use as a school textbook in France. In the twentieth century, Hilaire Belloc added a final volume to bring the narrative from 1688 to the present; this version of Lingard’s History of England can still be found in old family libraries around the UK. Lingard can be counted as a kind of founding father of certain “revisionist” historical positions on English history advanced by scholars like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh. Long before Duffy’s classic The Stripping of the Altars (1992), Lingard’s work suggested a re-narration of the Whiggish and triumphalist national story vis-à-vis Catholicism.[5]

Lingard in fact had quite a lot of interesting things to say about Newman, dating from his growing awareness of the importance of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s until Newman’s conversion in 1845, when Lingard was in his mid-seventies. In a subsequent essay, I’ll explore Lingard’s take on Newman and on the great changes sweeping the English Catholic community at the end of his life (Lingard strongly associated Newman with many of these changes, and mostly bemoaned them). This essay, however, will introduce readers to Lingard, one of the major intellectual lights of the English Catholic community when Newman joined it in 1845 at Littlemore. . . .

Please read the rest there. I look forward to learning more about Lingard's reasons for not liking Newman in the promised subsequent article. Lingard seems to have been most particular about how Catholics practiced their faith, and the last sentence in this quotation seems most contradictory:

While his willingness to defend the Catholic community from outside critics had won him renown, he grew extremely critical of elements within English Catholicism that he found embarrassing, theologically suspect, or intellectually wanting. He dismissively mocked Italian priests who came to England to run retreats fueled by “enthusiasm,” and criticized the women who attended them (sometimes directly, by letter, as attendees included close friends). Lingard’s correspondence also reflects a stereotypical English mistrust of the French and the Irish. A man of the eighteenth century and the Catholic Enlightenment, he could barely contain his dislike of Gothic revival, Pugin’s work, and the Anglo-Catholic Tractarians. While ardently desiring the conversion of non-Catholics, especially socially prominent Anglicans, he distrusted the leading converts of the Oxford Movement like Frederick Faber and Newman. . . .